Philip Kerr - A Man Without Breath

And when, standing in front of her wooden door, we turned expectantly towards each other, the trees at Krasny Bor held their silvery breath and the darkness discreetly closed its black eyes so that nothing might prevent this final coming together. But like a conductor trying to settle his orchestra for a long, silent moment, I just held her and looked at the perfect oval of her face in anticipation of the moment when I might inhale the sweet breath in her mouth and taste the subtler heaven in her lips. Then I kissed her. At the brush of my mouth on hers I heard bees in my ears and felt a leap in my chest as strong as if the damper mechanism had been lifted on a grand piano and every string had sounded at once, and my apotheosis was complete.

‘Are you coming in, Bernhard Gunther?’ she asked.

‘I think I am,’ I said.

‘You know something Bernie? You ought to be a gambler, luck like yours.’

Wednesday, April 28th 1943

I had to hand it to Goebbels; the minister had chosen his Katyn public relations officer carefully. Lieutenant Gregor Sloventzik wasn’t even a member of the Party. Moreover he seemed to be extremely good at what he did – a real Edward Bernays, a man who understood the science of ballyhoo extremely well. I thought I’d never met a man who was better at handling people – everyone from the field marshal to Boris Bazilevsky, the deputy mayor of Smolensk.

Sloventzik was a reserve army officer who’d worked as a journalist on the Wiener Zeitung before the war, which was how he knew the people at the ministry. The first state secretary in the ministry, Otto Dietrich, and Arthur Seyss-Inquart, the Austrian-born Reichskommissar for the Occupied Netherlands, were both reputed to be his close personal friends. Smooth and personable, Sloventzik was in his early forties, with an easy smile and impeccable manners. He was tall, with longish hair and a hawk-face, and with his dark complexion he was no one’s idea of a Nazi. He wore a tailored lieutenant’s army uniform as if it had been a colonel’s, and under his right arm he was forever carrying a large ring file that held pages of key facts and figures about what had been discovered concerning the bodies in the mass grave at Katyn Wood. His efficiency and diplomatic skills were only exceeded by his great facility with languages; but his powers of diplomacy came crashing down to earth when, a matter of hours before the arrival of the international commission representatives, the Polish Red Cross decided that Sloventzik had grievously insulted the whole Polish nation and hence it was now considering returning immediately to Poland.

Count Casimir Skarzynski, the secretary general of the Polish Red Cross, with whom I had formed a closer acquaintance – I wouldn’t have called it a friendship, exactly – and Archdeacon Jasinski came to my hut at Krasny Bor where, much to the irritation of Field Marshal von Kluge, they were staying, and explained the problem.

‘I don’t really know who and what you are, Herr Gunther,’ the count said carefully. ‘And I don’t really care. But-’

‘I told you before, sir. I’m from the German War Crimes Bureau in Berlin. Before the war I was a humble policeman. A homicide detective. There used to be a law against that sort of thing, you know. When people killed other people, we put them in prison. Of course, that was before the war. Anyway, until you arrived Judge Conrad and I were, at the invitation of the Wehrmacht, the investigating officers here in Katyn.’

He nodded. ‘Yes. So you say.’

I shrugged. ‘Why don’t you tell me how Lieutenant Sloventzik has insulted your nation and I’ll see what I can do to put that right?’

The count removed a brown Homburg hat from his head and wiped his high forehead. He was a very tall, distinguished, grey-haired man of about sixty and wore a three-piece tweed suit that already looked too warm for comfort. It seemed like only yesterday that Smolensk had been too cold for comfort.

The archdeacon, more than a head shorter, wore a plain black suit and a biretta. He took off his glasses and shook his skull-like head. ‘I’m not sure this can be fixed,’ he said. ‘Sloventzik is being unusually obdurate. On two separate matters.’

‘That doesn’t sound like him at all,’ I said. ‘He always seems so unfeasibly reasonable.’

The count sighed. ‘Not this time,’ he said.

‘Sloventzik has repeatedly informed us that our report should list twelve thousand bodies in Katyn Wood,’ said the archdeacon. ‘That is the figure provided by the German ministry of propaganda in its radio broadcasts. Our own information however – from the Polish government in London – suggests a figure of less than half as many. But Sloventzik is quite adamant about this and has suggested that were he to disagree with your own government’s figures, it might cost him his head. I’m afraid this has caused several members of our party to ask questions about our own safety.’

‘You see,’ added the count, ‘one or two members of the Polish Red Cross have friends or relations who have suffered at the hands of the Gestapo, or who were even beheaded in German prisons in Warsaw and Krakow.’

‘I can see your point,’ I said. ‘Look, I’m sure I can sort this out, gentlemen. I’ll speak to Berlin and have this matter clarified today. In the meantime I can assure you that regarding the security of all the members of the Polish Red Cross there is absolutely no cause for concern. And you have my apologies for whatever alarm you’ve encountered here today. I might add that Lieutenant Sloventzik has been working extremely hard ahead of the arrival of the international commission to make sure that everything runs smoothly. You’ll appreciate that his only concern has been to make sure that this bestial crime is properly investigated. Frankly, gentlemen, I think he’s been working too hard. I know I have.’

‘Yes that is possible,’ admitted the count. ‘He is most diligent in many respects. There is however another matter, and that is the issue of the Volksdeutsche . Poles born in Poland for whom German and not Polish is their first language. Poles who before the Great War were East Prussians. Ethnic Germans .’

‘Yes, I know what they are,’ I said, patiently. ‘But what have ethnic Germans to do with any of this?’

‘Many of the bodies that have been found so far were Polish officers of German origin,’ explained the count.

‘Look, I’m sorry gentlemen,’ I said, ‘but these officers are dead, and I don’t see that it matters very much now where they came from if they were butchered by the Russians.’

‘It matters,’ explained the archdeacon stiffly, ‘because Sloventzik has ordered a separation between those Polish officers who are discovered to be Volksdeutsche in origin and those who are not. The lieutenant proposes that the Silesian ethnic Germans receive separate burial. It’s almost as if the rest of the Poles are to be treated as second-class citizens because they are ethnic Slavs.’

‘The Slavs who have been exhumed are not to be given coffins,’ said the count.

‘Well, he’s only a lieutenant. As his superior officer it’s a very simple matter for me to countermand that order. I tell him to do something and he salutes and says “Yes sir”.’

‘You might reasonably think so,’ said the count. ‘Especially in a German army that prides itself on obeying orders. However it’s our belief that Sloventzik’s been put up to this by Field Marshal von Kluge, who as I’m sure you know is a Silesian German himself. From Posen. And has no love for ethnic Poles like us.’

This was more complicated; it wasn’t just Von Kluge who, like the late Paul von Hindenburg, was a Silesian German, it was Colonel von Gersdorff and, to my knowledge, several other senior officers at Army Group Centre, many of them proud Prussian aristocrats who had narrowly escaped becoming Poles because of the treaty of Versailles.