Philip Kerr - Field Grey

'That's very generous of you,' I said. 'But I'm tired of fighting. And frankly, I can't see this Cold War of yours being any more worthwhile than the last two I took part in.'

'I'd say it could end up being the most crucial war of all,' said Bow Tie. 'Especially if it gets any warmer.'

I shook my head. 'You guys make me laugh. The people you want to work for you, do you always treat them like this?'

'Like what?'

'My mistake. The other day, when I was handcuffed with a hood over my head, I formed the distinct impression you didn't like my face.'

'That was then.'

'You don't see us ill-treating you now, do you?'

'Hell, Gunther, you've got the best fucking room in the place. Cigarettes, brandy. Tell us what else you need and we'll see if we can get it for you.'

'They don't sell what I want in the Army PX.'

'And what's that?'

I shook my head and lit a cigarette. 'Nothing. It doesn't matter.'

'We're your friends, Gunther.'

'With American friends, who needs enemies?' I pulled a face. 'Look, gentlemen, I've had American friends before. In Vienna. And there was something about the experience I didn't like. Even so, I knew their names. And mostly this is a given with the people who claim to be my friends.'

'You're taking this way too personally, Gunther.'

'Nothing's been broken that can't be fixed. We can do this. I'm Mister Scheuer and this is Mister Frei. Like we said before, we work for the CIA. At a place called Pullach. You know Pullach?'

'Sure,' I said. 'It's the American part of Munich. Where you kennel all of the tame German shepherds who look after the flock for you in this part of the world. General Gehlen and his pals.'

'Unfortunately those dogs are not coming to heel, the way they used to,' said Scheuer. He was the one with the pipe. 'We suspect Gehlen made a private deal with Chancellor Adenauer and that the Germans are about to run their own show from now on.'

'Very ungrateful,' said Frei. 'After all we did for them.'

'Gehlen's new intelligence outfit – the GVL – is mostly exSS. Gestapo, Abwehr. Some very nasty people. Much worse than you. And it's probably riddled with Russian spies.'

'I could have told you that seven years ago, in Vienna,' I said. 'In fact, I think I did.'

'So it looks like we're going to have to start again from scratch. And that means we're going to have to be rather more certain of the kind of people we recruit. Which is why we were so rough on you from the start. We wanted to make quite sure of who and what you are. The last thing we want working for us this time is a bunch of die-hard Nazis.'

'Imagine how we felt when we discovered that the GVL was helping to train Egyptians and Syrians for a war with the state of Israel. With the Jews, Gunther. Talk about history repeating itself. I would think a man like you, someone who wasn't ever anti-Semitic himself, might want to do something about that. Israel is our friend.'

'You've got to ask yourself a question, Bernie. Do you really want to stay here and let those two jokers from the OCCWC, Silverman and Earp, decide your fate?'

'I thought you said they cleared me.'

'Oh, they did. Since when the French have put in a request for your extradition to Paris. And you know what the French are like.'

'The French haven't got anything on me.'

"That's not what they think,' said Scheuer. 'That's not what they think at all.'

'You have to hand it to the French,' said Frei. 'Their capacity for hypocrisy is nothing short of breathtaking. France was a fascist country during the war. Even more so than Italy or Spain. But even now they like to portray themselves as victims. To hold others responsible for their crimes and misdemeanours. Others like you, perhaps. Right now there's a big trial under way in Paris. Your old friend Helmut Knochen. And Carl Oberg. It's quite the cause celebre. Really. It's in all the newspapers, every day.'

'I don't see what that has to do with me,' I said. 'Those people, Knochen and Oberg, they were big fish. I was just a minnow. I never even met Oberg. So, what the Hell's all this about?'

'The Brits tried Knochen in 1947. In Wuppertal. They found him guilty of the murders of some British parachutists and sentenced him to death. But the sentence was commuted and now the French want their kilo of flesh. They're looking for scapegoats, Gunther. Someone to blame. And of course, so is Knochen. Which apparently is how your name came up. He made a statement to the French Surete that it was you who murdered all those prisoners from Gurs

on the road to Lourdes, in 1940.'

'Me? There must be some mistake.'

'Oh, sure,' said Frei. 'I think there has been a mistake. But that's not going to stop the French. They've made a formal application for your extradition to Paris. Perhaps you would care to read Knochen's statement?'

He reached into his jacket pocket and fished out several folded sheets of paper which he handed to me. Then he and Scheuer stood up and moved towards the cell door.

'You read that over and then decide whether working for Uncle Sam is such a bad thing after all.'

Helmut Knochen, interviewed March 1954

My name is Helmut Knochen. I was the senior commander of the security police in Paris during the Nazi occupation of France between 1940 and 1944. My jurisdiction extended from Northern France to Belgium. Until the appointment of Carl Oberg as supreme leader of the SS and the German police in France I had full responsibility for keeping order and upholding the rule of law. As a policeman I tried to ensure that relations between the French and the Germans were without friction and that the proper administration of justice was unhindered by the occupation. This was not always easy. I was not always made privy to senior policy decisions. And the most profound tragedy of my life has been the fact that, in an indirect way, and without being aware of it, I was involved in the persecution of the Jews of France. At no point did I know or even suspect that Jews deported to the East were to be exterminated. If I had known this I should never have gone along with their deportation. Let me say that the greatest crime in history was the systematic murder of Jews by Adolf Hitler.

Of course there were many other crimes inflicted upon the French people and I always saw my job as being to help restrain some of my colleagues from acting with excessive zeal, not least because I was always fearful of the impact of heavy-handed policing on French public opinion, and on those Vichy officials whose willing collaboration was needed in all security matters. I was always reluctant to provoke an embarrassing confrontation. For example, in September 1942 I thwarted an early attempt to round-up prominent French Jews in Paris. There were other occasions when this happened but that was the largest I think, involving as many as five thousand Jews. This often brought me into conflict with Heinz Rothke, who was chief of the Gestapo's Jewish office in France.

But my relationship with other fanatical elements in the SS and SD was no less fractious and difficult. Frequently I had to censure those officers who, arriving from Berlin, believed that the SD uniform permitted them to deal summarily with the French. I remember one junior officer from Berlin, Hauptsturmfuhrer Bernhard Gunther, who in the summer of 1940 was dispatched to the refugee camps at Gurs and Le Vernet in order to arrest a number of French and German communists and bring them back to Paris for questioning. But instead this officer ordered the men to be shot at the side of a French country road. When I heard about this I was shocked; then furious. When he subsequently murdered another German officer, Hauptsturmfuhrer Gunther was sent back to Berlin.

Helmut Knochen, interviewed April 1954

My name is Helmut Knochen and I have been asked to make a statement concerning information I gave regarding another German officer, Captain Bernhard Gunther, in a previous statement.