Richard Gordon - THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

'Traitors? Jews, Slavs and Czechs? And a lot of other defenceless men, women and children who did nothing wrong except to be themselves?'

Greenparish's expression indicated forbearance of my tediousness. 'Essentially, yes. In the framework of Nazi doctrines. One must be clear-headed about this, Elgar. The Nazis in their private dealings could be as clean-living, as honest, as decent, as religious as the rest of us. Your Nazi mind was terribly shuttered. They performed what we regard as utterly ghastly deeds, because they saw them as perfectly natural, and even essential, under the Nazi Darwinism of survival of the strongest. The fact that it was an insane doctrine is surely beside the point? It was the only one they knew. And of course, the lurid light of war does rather tend to encourage human excesses.'

'What about the still small voice of conscience?'

'Conscience? Does it exist, in the popular sense? I am strongly inclined to the Freudian view of conscience.' Pudgy finger-tips together, he leant back on the comfortable if worn upholstery of our first-class _wagon lit_ dining car in the immense self-satisfaction of specialized knowledge. 'Freud explains conscience in terms of the super-ego, equating it with the judgements passed down to the child from the parents. But the all-pervading Nazis were of course the parents. The German people were their docile children. Particularly, of course, the younger ones, who did most of the damage. I'm sure you must agree? Human morals are not bestowed by God-about whom Freud is equally interesting. And human behaviour is by and large instilled by the methods of conditioning.'

'You mean, we learn to distinguish right from wrong as Pavlov's dog learned to salivate at the sound of its dinner-bell?'

'Fundamentally, yes,' he said with crushing assurance.

I was beginning to dislike Greenparish. We had first met less than twelve hours previously, on the departure platform of Liverpool Street Station. He had stuck out his hand and said, 'I'm Greenparish.' He was about my age, short, stout and balding, standing amid a cluster of suitcases, bags and boxes. We both wore battledress, without badges of rank. I had a red FIAT flash on my shoulders, which seemed to set me above the Red Cross but below War Correspondents. Greenparish's job was denazification. ('Dreadful word,' he would say with a shudder.) He was a psychologist who had written books and articles about the Nazi mentality from the snugness of a Cambridge college. The only Nazis he had met in his life had been sitting safely behind British barbed wire.

I made my second arrival in Germany on the Monday of August 6 in the summer of 1945. Everyone was wondering how to clean up the abattoir of Europe, while the sun warmed our delusions of permanent peace and promptly returning prosperity. The war had ended in Germany with a whimper, in Japan with a bang. A tribunal was to sit in Nьrnberg to try the important Nazis, whose photographs as shabby and sagging men I could still hardly believe in the newspapers. Only Hitler's joke, Franz von Papen, achieved any style, with a Tyrolean hat and a wry smile under the eyes of a steel-helmeted American military policeman.

Holland was flooded. Germany was flat. Large towns had vast open spaces with no wall higher than a man, small ones had disappeared altogether. People lived in the rubble like maggots in a corpse. Fraternization with Germans, just speaking to them, was strictly forbidden us. Even the objective Nazi Albert Speer thought this inhuman conduct in any victor. But the concentration camps had been overrun, and if Hans Frank, Hitler's Governor-General of Poland, was to write before _he _was hanged, 'A thousand years shall pass and this guilt of Germany will not have been erased,' there would have been nobody that summer to disagree with him.

We reached Cologne after nightfall. I had heard that the Cathedral survived, and saw excitedly the twin spires soaring against the sky. Greenparish fussed over his luggage. 'Surely there's somewhere one can get a meal?' he kept complaining, searching the ruined Hauptbahnhof. We had been given bully beef sandwiches and tea on the train. 'After all, the Army is responsible for us, and I don't see why I should be subjected to the inconvenience of hunger.'

We set off in a jeep driven by a British corporal, making a long detour to cross the Rhine. Cologne in the darkness of its bumpy, bomb-cracked cobbles seemed in reasonable shape, and only when returning in daylight I found it a skeleton, every building roofless and gutted. The autobahn took us past the Bayer pharmaceutical works at Leverkusen, once with the huge blue advertisement which I had noticed from Jeff Beckerman's Cord. The factory was intact, spared by the Allied guns after Field Marshal Model changed his mind about using it in the final scramble as an artillery base.

'You gents got any cigarettes?' the corporal asked cheerfully over his shoulder.

'Neither of us smokes,' replied Greenparish coldly.

'You'll be entitled to a ration, or you can scrounge some. Fags is gold-dust in Germany. You can get anything for them. Listen, Governor-' The expert on the Nazi mind winced. 'You can get anything at all,' the corporal insisted. 'A bike, the family wireless, a grand piano.'

'I have no necessity for such luxuries,' said Greenparish.

'Length of cloth for the wife, bottle of schnapps, nice suite of furniture.' He drove single-handed, lighting one of his own inestimable valuables. 'You can get a Frдulein for ten Woodbines.'

'I do not indulge myself with young women,' Greenparish told him severely.

'Well, her mother then, if you prefer it,' the corporal returned accommodatingly. 'Best keep your heads down, gents. The ferries sometimes has the habit of stretching a steel cable across the autobahn. It's their Resistance Movement, what they calls the Werewolves. Though I don't think it adds up to much. A lot of them is as glad to be rid of Hitler as we are. Still, a wire would make a nasty mess of your haircut, wouldn't it?'

Greenparish glared at me uneasily.

We approached Wuppertal from the Dьsseldorf road. The streets were unlit and shattered, and I recognized nothing. But as we turned right, my excitement burst out with the cry, 'Why, it's the Zoo!'

'I reckon they've eaten all the animals,' said the driver, jumping out as we were halted by a sentry.

'That fellow's not very respectful,' complained Greenparish.

'He probably fought his way here from Normandy. We're only useless civilians.'

'I really don't understand why I should do without my dinner. After all, the war is over.'

I discovered the next morning that Wuppertal too was mostly demolished. The brewery had gone. The final air-raids had created a hurricane of fire which had boiled the tar from the streets. Like other embattled towns, parts of it were almost untouched. The Allied Armies had commandeered the entire fashionable area where twelve years before I lodged-furniture, paintings, grand pianos and all-simply evicting the inhabitants. We messed with the British Army, in a stone-built mansion which I faintly remembered. It had later belonged to the rich owner of an 'aryanized' textile works, everywhere now scratched by boots, filled with the sound of American Forces Network from Munich and somebody always playing ping-pong.

I went eagerly in search of the Dieffenbachs, but their house was one of the unlucky ones, blank eyed, burnt out, dead. I stood wondering sombrely what had happened to the family. Then I noticed the centipede's legs astride the river Wupper, and one of the familiar cars sailing peacefully beneath them. Having survived the Kaiser, the Schwebebahn had outlasted Hitler. I thought that Greenparish might be able to draw some parallel with German politics and German technology.

The first man it was my duty to interrogate was Gerhard Domagk.