Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

‘Yes, I can see how that might have played out,’ said Von Gersdorff. ‘But look, suppose someone looks into this man’s death? What then?’

‘Suppose you let me worry about that.’

We walked back to his car and then returned to Krasny Bor. The road took us past Katyn Wood, now floodlit and heavily guarded to prevent looting, although the guards didn’t seem to have deterred local citizens and off-duty German soldiers: during the day, the wood was visited by a host of sightseers who came to watch the exhumations from behind a protective cordon, as Von Kluge had refused to forbid them access to the site.

‘How’s the dig going?’ he asked.

‘Not so good,’ I said. ‘Many of the men we’ve dug up so far turn out to be German-speaking Poles. Volksdeutsche officers from the western side of the river Oder, which is your neck of the woods, isn’t it?’

‘Silesian Poles, you say?’

‘That’s right. Same as you might have been if your family had been rich a little further east. I’m a little concerned that this might not play well with the Polish delegation when they arrive here the day after tomorrow. It might look as though we only give a damn about them because they’re Volksdeutsche . As if we might not give a damn at all if they were a hundred per cent Polack.’

‘Yes, I can see how that might be awkward.’

‘And it certainly hasn’t helped things that someone in Berlin let out that these men were the same men who had been kept by the Soviets in two camps: Starobelsk and Kozelsk. Twelve thousand of them. Now I’m pretty certain that give or take a few hundred, there are only four thousand men buried in Katyn Wood. There’s not a single man we’ve found who was at Starobelsk.’

Von Gersdorff shook his head. ‘Yes, I heard about that from Professor Buhtz.’

‘That man’s full of good news. He’s yet to find a single Polish officer who was shot with a Russian weapon.’

‘There’s more bad news, I’m afraid. I got a teletype from the Tirpitzufer, in Berlin. The Abwehr has warned me that we can expect a visitor at Katyn Wood tomorrow, although I must say he’s hardly a distinguished one. Anything but.’

‘Oh? Who’s that?’

‘You won’t like this one bit.’

‘You know something, colonel? I’m getting used to that.’

Thursday, April 8th 1943

During the late summer of 1941 I’d heard a strong rumour around the Alex about an atrocity that a police battalion was supposed to have committed at a place called Babi Yar, near Kiev. But it was only a rumour and – at the time – easily discounted, because even then being a policeman was supposed to mean that you weren’t a criminal. It’s odd how quickly these things change. By the spring of 1943 I had enough experience of the Nazis to know that with them the worse a rumour sounded the more likely it was to be true. Besides, I’d already seen something of what had happened in Minsk, and that was bad enough – I was still haunted by the memory of what I’d witnessed there – but no one in Berlin ever employed the same hushed tones of horror to talk about Minsk as they used when they mentioned Babi Yar. All I knew for sure was that as many as thirty-five thousand Jewish men, women and children had been shot in a ravine during the course of one September weekend, and that the officer commanding that operation – Colonel Paul Blobel – was now standing beside me in Katyn Wood.

I guessed Blobel was about fifty, although he looked much older. The shadows under his eyes were full of a darkness that was much more than skin-deep. He was bald, with a narrow thin mouth and a long nose. It was probably my imagination, but there was something of the night about Blobel, and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the fingers and nails of the hands he held tightly behind his back had been as long as the legs of his black boots. He wore his black SD coat buttoned up to the neck like a bus conductor in winter, but he looked for all the world as if he’d been a visitor from the very pit next to which we were standing.

‘You must be Captain Gunther,’ he said to me, in an accent that might have been from Berlin and which reminded me that among the many things a man can have for breakfast, a few of them come out of a tall bottle.

I nodded.

‘Here is a letter of introduction,’ he said with a lisping, rodent-like earnestness, showing me a neatly typed letter. ‘I would ask you to pay particular attention to the signature at the bottom of the page.’

I glanced over the contents, which were headed ‘Operation 1005’ and requested that ‘every cooperation should be afforded the bearer in the execution of his top-secret orders’. I also noted the signature; it was hard not to look at it several times, just to make sure, and then to fold it very carefully indeed before handing it back, gingerly, almost as if the paper was impregnated with sulphur and might burst into flame at any moment. The letter had been signed by the Gestapo chief himself, Heinrich Muller.

‘Like I was sitting at the front of the class,’ I said.

‘Gruppenfuhrer Muller has entrusted me with a most delicate task,’ he said.

‘Well, that makes a change.’

‘Yes.’ He smiled thinly. ‘It does, doesn’t it?’

I certainly had no inclination to spend any time in the company of such a man as this. The easy thing would have been to have told him to get lost; and after all, Blobel’s being there – and, moreover, wearing his SD colonel’s uniform – was contrary to everything I had agreed to with Reich minister Goebbels. But because I wanted this man gone from Katyn Wood as soon as possible I was resolved to answer his questions and cooperate with his mission – in so far as I was able. The last thing I wanted was Blobel causing trouble at Gestapo headquarters and Blobel bringing the full authority of Muller down on our heads because I or someone else had obstructed him, and, worst of all, Blobel still there the next day when the Polish delegation arrived in Smolensk.

He seemed to relax a little after my poor joke, and out of his pocket came a corrugated steel hip flask that was almost as big as a soldier’s gas-mask can. He unscrewed the cap and offered the flask to me. As a homicide detective, I’d made it a rule never to drink with my clients, but it had been a long time since I’d been able to keep up that standard. Besides it was good schnapps, and a large bite helped to dull the effect on my spirits of the company I was keeping, not to mention the business of exhuming four thousand murder victims. The stink of human decay was ever present, and I was never near the main grave for very long before I lit a cigarette or covered my nose and mouth with a cologne-soaked handkerchief.

‘How can I be of assistance to you, colonel?’

‘May I speak frankly?’

I glanced back at the scene in front of us: dozens of Russian POWS were busy digging in what was now known as ‘Grave Number One’ – an L-shaped trench that was twenty-eight metres long and sixteen wide. About two hundred and fifty bodies lay on the top row, but we’d estimated that as many as a thousand more corpses lay immediately underneath these. Now that the ground had thawed, the digging was easy enough; the hard part was to remove the bodies in one piece, and great care had to be taken when transferring a corpse from the grave to a stretcher, with as many as four men at once having to do the lifting.

‘I don’t think they’ll mind,’ I said.

‘No, perhaps not. Well then, as you probably know, about eighteen months ago – as part of Operation Barbarossa – certain police actions occurred throughout the Ukraine and Western Russia. Thousands of indigenous Jews were – shall we say, permanently resettled?’