The One From the Other (15 page)

“Whatever happened to Emil Becker?” he asked. “Remember him?”

“The Amis hanged him in Vienna about two years ago.”

“War crimes?”

“No. But as it happens, if they’d looked they’d have certainly found evidence of some war crimes.”

Korsch shook his head. “We’ve all got some kind of dirty mark on our faces, if you look closely enough.”

I shrugged. I hadn’t asked what Korsch had done during the war. I only knew that he’d come out of the war as a Kriminalinspektor in the RSHA, which meant he’d had something to do with the Gestapo. There seemed no point in spoiling a perfectly affable lunch by asking him about all that now. Nor did he exhibit any curiosity about what I had done.

“So what was it?” he asked. “What did they hang him for?”

“For murdering an American officer,” I said. “I heard he was heavily involved in the black market.”

“That much I can believe,” he said. “That he was into the black market.” Korsch raised a glass of wine. “Here’s to him, anyway.”

“Yes,” I said, picking up my glass. “Here’s to Emil. The poor bastard.” I drained the glass. “As a matter of curiosity, how is it that a bull like you turns into a journalist, anyway?”

“I got out of Berlin just before the blockade,” he said. “Had a tip from an Ivan who owed me a favor. So I came down here. And got offered a job as a crime correspondent. The hours are much the same, but the pay is a lot better. I’ve learned English. Got myself a wife and son. Nice house in Nymphenburg.” He shook his head. “Berlin is finished. It’s only a matter of time before the Ivans take it over. The war seems like a thousand years ago, quite frankly. And if you don’t mind my saying so, all this war crimes stuff, soon it won’t matter a damn. Any of it. Not when the amnesty kicks in. That’s what everyone wants now, isn’t it?”

I nodded. Who was I to argue with what everyone wanted?

TWELVE

I drove west out of Munich, toward the medieval town of Landsberg. With its town hall, Bavarian Gothic gate, and famous fortress, it was a historic place, and largely undamaged because, during the war, Allied bombers had given it a wide berth, to avoid killing thousands of foreign workers and Jews held in as many as thirty-one concentration camps in the surrounding area. After the war these same camps had been used by the Americans to take care of displaced persons. The largest of these was still in existence with over a thousand Jewish DPs. Although it was much smaller than Munich and Nuremberg, the Nazi Party had considered Landsberg one of the three most significant towns in Germany. Before the war it had been a place of pilgrimage for German youth. Not for the architecture or religious reasons, unless you counted Nazism as a kind of religion, but because people were intent on seeing the cell in Landsberg where Adolf Hitler, imprisoned there for almost a year after the abortive Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, had written
Mein Kampf.
By all accounts Hitler had been very comfortable in Landsberg Prison. Built in 1910, within the walls of the medieval fortress, the prison had been one of the most modern in Germany, and Hitler seems to have been treated more like an honored guest than some dangerous revolutionary. The authorities had afforded him every opportunity to meet with friends and to write his book. Without his time in Landsberg, the world might never have heard of Hitler.

In 1946, the Americans had renamed Landsberg Prison War Criminal Prison Number One and, after Spandau in Berlin, it was the most important penal facility in Germany, with over one thousand war criminals from the Dachau trials, almost a hundred from the Nuremberg trials, and more than a dozen from the trials of Japanese POWs in Shanghai. Over two hundred war criminals had been hanged at WCP1 and many of their bodies were buried nearby in the cemetery of Spottingen Chapel.

It wasn’t easy getting into Landsberg to see Fritz Gebauer. I’d had to telephone Erich Kaufmann and eat a couple of spoonfuls of humble pie in order to persuade him to contact Gebauer’s lawyers and persuade them that I could be trusted.

“Oh, I think we can rely on you, Herr Gunther,” Kaufmann had said. “That was a good job you did for Baron von Starnberg.”

“What little I did I got paid for,” I said. “And handsomely, too.”

“You can take a certain amount of satisfaction in a job well done, can’t you?”

“A certain amount, sometimes, yes,” I said. “Not too much on this one, though. Not as much as I got from working your case.”

“Proving the unreliability of PFC Ivanov? I’d have thought that being an ex-SS man yourself, you would be keen to see your old comrades out of prison.”

This was the cue I had been waiting for. “It’s true,” I had told him, bowdlerizing the lecture he had given me in his office. “I was in the SS. But that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in justice, Herr Doktor. Men who have murdered women and children deserve to be in prison. People need to know that doing wrong will be punished. That’s my idea of a healthy Germany.”

“Lots of people would say that many of these men were POWs who were only doing their duty, Herr Gunther.”

“I know. I’m perverse that way. Contrarian.”

“That sounds unhealthy.”

“It could be,” I said. “On the other hand, it’s easy to ignore someone like me. Even when I’m right. But it’s not so easy to ignore Bishop Neuhausler. Even when he’s wrong. Imagine the hurt to my job satisfaction when I read what he had to say about the Red Jackets in the newspapers. It was like no one had told him that Ivanov was a chiseler and a thief with an ax to grind.”

“Neuhausler is the creature of people much more unscrupulous than myself, Herr Gunther,” said Kaufmann. “I hope you can appreciate that I had nothing to do with that.”

“I’m doing my best.”

“People like Rudolf Aschenauer, for one.”

I had heard this name before. Aschenauer was the Nuremberg attorney and legal adviser to nearly seven hundred Landsberg prisoners, including the infamous Otto Ohlendorf, and a member of the right-wing German Party.

“As a matter of fact,” said Kaufmann, “I’ll have to speak to Aschenauer to get you into Landsberg, to see Gebauer. He is Gebauer’s lawyer. He was the lawyer for all of the accused of the Malmedy massacre.”

“Gebauer’s one of them?”

“That’s why we want him out of an American prison,” said Kaufmann. “I’m sure you can imagine why.”

“Yes,” I said. “In this particular instance I probably can.”

I parked my car and walked up the castle esplanade to the gatehouse of the fortress, where I showed my papers and a letter from Aschenauer’s office to the black American GI on duty. While I waited for him to find my name on his clipboard, listing the day’s visitors, I smiled amiably and tried to practice my English.

“It is a nice day, yes?”

“Fuck off, kraut.”

I kept on smiling. I wasn’t exactly sure what he had said but his expression told me he wasn’t inclined to be friendly. After he had found my name on his list, he tossed my papers back at me and pointed to a white, four-story building with a mansard roof made of red tiles. From a distance it looked almost like a school. Up close, it looked exactly what it was: a prison. Inside was no different. All prisons smell of the same things. Cheap food, cigarettes, sweat, urine, boredom, and despair. Another stone-faced military policeman escorted me to a room with a view of the Lech Valley. It looked lush and green and full of the last days of summer. It was a terrible day to be in prison, assuming there’s such a thing as a good day to be in prison. I sat down on a cheap chair at a cheap table and dragged a cheap ashtray toward me. Then the American went out, locking the door behind him, which gave me a nice warm glow in the pit of my stomach. And I imagined what it must have been like to be one of the Malmedy Unit, in WCP1.

Malmedy was the place in Belgium’s Ardennes Forest where, during the winter of 1944, at the Battle of the Bulge, eighty-four prisoners of war had been massacred by a Waffen-SS unit. American POWs. The entire SS unit—seventy-five of them, anyway—were now in Landsberg, serving long terms of imprisonment. A lot of the men had my sympathy. It’s not always possible to take a lot of men prisoner in the middle of a battle. And if you let a man go, there’s always the chance that, later on, you might find yourself fighting him again. War wasn’t some game played by gentlemen, where paroles were given and honored. Not the war we had fought. And inasmuch as these particular SS men had been fighting one of the most brutal battles of the Second World War, it hardly made sense to charge them with war crimes. To that extent Kaufmann was right. But I wasn’t sure if my sympathy extended to Fritz Gebauer. Prior to his front-line service with the Waffen-SS, Obersturmbannführer Gebauer had been the commandant of Lemberg-Janowska. At some stage he must have volunteered to fight on the western front, which required a certain amount of courage—perhaps even a certain amount of distaste for his job at the labor camp.

The key scraped in the lock and the metal door opened. I turned around to see a strikingly good-looking man in his late thirties enter the room. Tall and broad-shouldered, Fritz Gebauer had a vaguely aristocratic bearing and, somehow, managed to make his prisoner’s red jacket look more like a smoking jacket. He bowed slightly before sitting down opposite me.

“Thanks for agreeing to this meeting,” I said, placing a packet of Lucky Strikes and some matches on the table between us. “Smoke?”

Gebauer glanced around at the soldier who remained with us. “Is it permitted?” he asked, in English.

The soldier nodded, and Gebauer took a nail from the packet and smoked it gratefully.

“Where are you from?” asked Gebauer.

“I live in Munich,” I said. “But I was born in Berlin. I lived there until a couple of years ago.”

“Me, too,” he said. “I’ve asked to be moved to a prison in Berlin, so that my wife can visit me, but that doesn’t appear to be possible.” He shrugged. “But what do they care? The Amis. We’re scum to them. Not soldiers at all. Murderers, that’s what we are. It’s fair to say that there are some murderers among us. The Jew killers. I never much cared for that kind of thing myself. I myself was on the western front, where Jew killing was of little importance.”

“Malmedy, wasn’t it?” I said, lighting one for myself. “In the Ardennes.”

“That’s right,” he said. “It was a desperate fight. Our backs were really against the wall. It was all we could do to look after ourselves, let alone a hundred surrendering Amis.” He inhaled deeply and looked up at the green ceiling. Someone had done a good job of matching the paint on the walls and the floor. “Of course, it doesn’t matter to the Amis that we had no facilities for taking prisoners. And no one thinks for a minute to suggest that the men who surrendered were cowards. We wouldn’t have surrendered. Not a chance. That’s what the SS was all about, wasn’t it? Loyalty is my honor, wasn’t it? Not self-preservation.” He took a hit on the cigarette. “Aschenauer says you were SS yourself. So you would understand what I’m talking about.”

I glanced at our American guard, uncomfortably. I hardly wanted to talk about having been in the SS in front of an American MP. “I really wouldn’t like to say,” I said.

“You can speak quite freely in front of him,” said Gebauer. “He doesn’t speak a word of German. Few of the Amis in here do. Even the officers are too lazy to learn. From time to time you get the odd intelligence officer who speaks German. But mostly they don’t see the point of it.”

“I think they feel that it would demean their victory to learn our language,” I said.

“Yes, that might be true,” said Gebauer. “They’re worse than the French in that respect. But my English is improving all the time.”

“Mine, too,” I said. “It’s a sort of mongrel language, isn’t it?”

“Hardly surprising when you see the miscegenation that’s gone on,” he said. “I’ve never seen such a racially diverse people.” He shook his head wearily. “The Amis are a curious lot. In some ways, of course, they’re quite admirable. But in others, they’re completely stupid. Take this place. Landsberg. To put us here, of all places. Where the Führer wrote his great book. There’s not one of us who doesn’t take a certain amount of comfort in that. I myself came here before the war to look at his cell. They’ve removed the bronze plaque that was placed on the Führer’s cell door, of course. But we all know exactly where it is. In the same way that a Muslim knows the direction of Mecca. It’s something that helps to sustain us. To keep up our spirits.”

“I was on the Russian front myself,” I said. I was showing him some credentials. It didn’t seem appropriate to mention my sometime service with the German War Crimes Bureau, in Berlin. Where we had investigated German atrocities as well as Russian ones. “I was an intelligence officer, with General Schorner’s army. But before the war, I was a policeman, at the Alex.”

“I know it well,” he said, smiling. “Before the war I was a lawyer, in Wilmersdorf. I used to go to the Alex now and then to interview some rogue or other. How I wish I was back there now.”

“Before you joined the Waffen-SS,” I said, “you went to a labor camp. Lemberg-Janowska.”

“That’s right,” he said. “With the DAW. The German Armament Works.”

“It’s your time there that I wanted to ask you about.”

For a moment his face wrinkled with disgust as he recalled it. “It was a forced labor camp constructed around three factories in Lvov. The camp was named after the factory address: 133 Janowska Street. I went there in May 1942, to take command of the factories. Someone else was in charge of the residential camp where the Jews lived. And things were pretty bad there, I believe. But my responsibility was the factory only. This meant that there was a certain amount of friction between myself and the other commander, as to who was really in charge. Strictly speaking, it ought to have been me. At the time, I was a first lieutenant and the other fellow was a second lieutenant. However, it so happened his uncle was SS Major General Friedrich Katzmann, the police chief of Galicia and a very powerful man. He was part of the reason why I left Janowska. Wilhaus—that was the other commander’s name—he hated me. Jealous, I suppose. Wanted control of everything. And he’d have done anything to get rid of me. It was only a matter of time before he made his move. Framed me for something I hadn’t done. So I decided to get out while I could. And, after all, there was nothing worth staying for. That was the other reason. The place was ghastly. Really ghastly. And I didn’t think I could stay there and serve with any honor to myself. So I applied to join the Waffen-SS, and the rest you know.” He helped himself to another one of my cigarettes.