A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9) by Philip Kerr
CHAPTER 12
Monday, March 22nd 1943
It was his right leg. The minister limped into his office in the Leopold Palace at speed, and if the carpet hadn’t been so thick and the distance between the huge door and his desk hadn’t been quite so vast we might not have noticed the shiny special shoe and the even shinier metal brace. Well, almost. We were looking out for it, of course: there were so many jokes told about Joey’s cloven hoof that it was even more notorious than he was – almost a Berlin tourist attraction – and the judge and I kept a close eye on his club foot just so we could say that we’d seen it, in just the same way you wanted to be able to say you’d seen Lotte the bear in the pit at Köllnischer Park, or Anita Berber at the Heaven and Hell Club.
As Goebbels limped into the room the judge and I stood up and saluted in the customary way and he flapped a delicate little hand back over his shoulder in imitation of the way the leader did it – as if swatting an irritating mosquito, or dismissing some sycophant, of which there seemed to be a plentiful supply in the Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda. I suppose it was just that kind of place: before the ministry took over the building in 1933 the palace had been the residence of the Hohenzollerns, the royal family of Prussia, which had employed more than a few sycophants itself.
Goebbels was all smiles and apologies for keeping us waiting. It made a nice change from the kind of hate that was usually heard spilling out of his narrow mouth.
‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, please forgive me,’ he said in a deeply resonant voice that belied his dwarfish stature. ‘I’ve been on the telephone complaining to the High Command about the situation we found at Kharkov. Field Marshal von Bock had reported that all German supplies would be destroyed rather than left behind for the enemy; but when Field Marshal von Manstein took the city again he discovered large quantities of our supplies still undestroyed. Can you believe it? Of course von Bock blames Paulus, and now that Paulus is conveniently a prisoner of the Bolsheviks, who is there to contradict him? I know some of these people are your friends, Judge, but really, it beggars belief. It’s hard enough to win a war without being lied to by people on your own side. The Wehrmacht really needs to be combed out. Did you know that the generals are demanding rations for thirteen million soldiers when there are only nine million Germans under arms? I tell you the leader ought to take the severest action against someone.’
Goebbels sat down behind his desk and almost vanished until he leaned forward on his chair. I was tempted to go and fetch him a cushion, but in spite of his continuing smile, there was good reason to doubt he had a sense of humour. For one, he was short, and I’ve never yet met a short man who could laugh at himself as easily as a taller one; and that’s as true a picture of the world as anything you’ll find in Kant or Hegel. For another he was a doctor of philosophy, and nobody in Germany ever calls himself doctor unless he wants to impress upon other people how impeccably serious he really is.
‘How are you, Judge?’
‘Fine, sir, thank you.’
‘And your family?’
‘We’re all fine sir, thank you for asking.’
The doctor clasped his hands and bounced them excitedly on the blotter, as if chopping herbs with a mezzaluna. He wasn’t wearing a wedding band, although he was famously married. Maybe he figured that none of the starlets at the UFA studios in Babelsberg he was reputedly fond of banging would recall having seen the pictures that had been in every German magazine of the minister marrying Magda Quandt.
‘It’s a great pity your investigation into the sinking of that hospital ship didn’t come off,’ Goebbels said to me. ‘The British are experts at occupying the moral high ground. That would have removed them from it, permanently, make no mistake. But this is even better, I think. Yes, I read your report with great interest, Captain Gunther, great interest.’
‘Thank you, Herr doctor.’
‘Have we met before? Your name seems familiar to me. I mean before you were with the War Crimes Bureau.’
‘No, I’d certainly have remembered meeting you, sir.’
‘There was a Gunther who used to be a detective with Kripo. Rather a good one by all accounts. He was the man who arrested Gormann, the strangler.’
‘Yes sir, that was me.’
‘Well, that must be it.’
I was already nervous about meeting Dr Goebbels – about ten years ago I’d been asked to drop a case as a favour to Joey, but I hadn’t, and I wondered if this was what he remembered. And our little exchange did nothing to make me feel any less like a man sitting on hot coals. The judge was equally nervous – at least he kept tugging at the stud of his wing collar and flexing his neck before he answered the minister’s questions, as if his throat required a little more space to swallow whatever it was that he was going to have to agree to.
‘So, do you really think it’s a possibility?’ Goebbels asked him. ‘That there is some sort of a mass grave hidden down there?’
‘There are lots of secret graves in that part of the world,’ he said, carefully. ‘The problem is making absolutely sure that this is the right one: that this is indeed the site of a war crime committed by the NKVD.’
He nodded at a manila file that lay on top of a copy of that day’s Völkischer Beobachter.
‘It’s all there in Gunther’s report, sir.’
‘Nevertheless I should like to hear the captain talk about it, himself,’ Goebbels said smoothly. ‘My own experience of written reports is that you can usually get more out of the man who wrote it than the report itself. That’s what the leader says. “Men are my books”, he says. I tend to agree with that sentiment.’
I stirred a little under the minister’s sharp eye.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do think it’s a possibility. A strong possibility. The local inhabitants are quite unequivocal that there isn’t a grave in Katyn Wood. However, I believe that’s probably a good sign that there is. They’re lying, of course.’
‘Why would they lie?’ Goebbels frowned, almost as if he regarded lying as something quite inexplicable and beyond all countenancing.
‘The NKVD might be gone from Smolensk but the people are still afraid of them. More than they’re afraid of us, I think. And they’ve got good reason. For twenty years the NKVD – and before them the OGPU and the Cheka – have been murdering Russians wholesale.’ I shrugged. ‘We’ve only been doing it for eighteen months.’
Goebbels thought that was very funny.
‘I’ll say one thing for Stalin,’ he said, ‘he knows the best way to treat the Russian people. Mass murder is as primitive a language as there is, but it’s the best language in which to talk to them.’
‘So, there’s that,’ I said. ‘And there’s the fact that what they actually told me flies in the face of what I found lying on the ground.’
‘The bones and the button; yes, of course.’ Goebbels pinched his lower lip thoughtfully.
‘It’s not much to go on, I’ll admit, but I’ve had it verified as belonging to the greatcoat of a Polish officer.’
‘Is it possible that the coat could have been stolen from a Polish officer by a Red Army soldier, who was subsequently killed in the battle of Smolensk?’ asked Goebbels.
‘That’s a good question. What you say is certainly a possibility. But against that are the numerous intelligence reports the Abwehr had received of Polish officers seen on a train parked in a local railway siding. These would seem to confirm at least that at some stage in 1940 there were certainly Poles in the vicinity of Smolensk.’
‘Many or all of whom may have been murdered by the NKVD,’ said Goebbels.
‘But we won’t really know for sure that there’s more than one body until the ground thaws and we’re able to carry out a proper exhumation.’
‘When is that thaw likely to happen?’
‘A couple of weeks at least,’ I said.
Goebbels grimaced with impatience. ‘There’s no way of speeding this up? Building fires on the ground, f
‘Not without the risk of destroying important evidence,’ said Goldsche.
‘I’m afraid that for the moment we’re at the mercy of the Russian winter,’ I said.
Goebbels took his long chin in his hands and frowned. ‘Yes, yes of course.’
He was wearing a grey three-piece suit with wide lapels, a white shirt and a striped tie. The tie was without any sort of knot, just a Party badge for a tie-pin – like a nurse’s collar – which added a fussy and curiously feminine touch to his appearance.
‘Gentlemen, I hear what you say. However, at the risk of stating the obvious let me make quite clear to you both the enormous propaganda value to us that this investigation presents. After the disaster of Stalingrad and the likelihood of another disaster in Tunisia, we need a coup like this. Jews all over the world are doing their best to make Bolshevism look innocent and to represent it as a lesser danger to world peace than National Socialism. They maintain the lie that the dastardly deeds typical of the Russian beast simply never happened. Indeed, in Jewish circles in London and Washington the present slogan is that the Soviet Union is destined to lead Europe. We cannot allow this to pass unchallenged. It is our job to stop it. It’s only Germany that stands between these monsters and the rest of Europe and it’s time that Roosevelt and Churchill woke up to this fact.’
He must suddenly have realized that he wasn’t giving a speech in the Sports Palace because he came to an abrupt stop.
A few seconds passed before Judge Goldsche spoke. ‘Yes sir. Of course, you’re right.’
‘The very second the ground down there thaws, I want a dig to commence,’ said Goebbels. ‘We can’t afford any delay in this matter.’
‘Yes sir,’ agreed the judge.
‘But since we have a little time before then,’ continued Goebbels, ‘two weeks you say, Captain Gunther?’
I nodded.
‘Might I ask a question, Herr Reich minister?’ said the judge. ‘You say “we”. Are you referring to Germany as a whole or to this particular ministry?’
‘Why do you ask, Judge Goldsche?’
‘Because the standard protocol is that the Bureau of War Crimes prepares investigative reports and the Foreign Office publishes them as white books. Reich minister Von Ribbentrop doesn’t like it when the normal protocol is ignored.’
‘Von Ribbentrop.’ Goebbels snorted with disgust. ‘In case you hadn’t noticed, Judge Goldsche, the current foreign policy of this country is to wage total war on its enemies. There is no other foreign policy. We use Von Ribbentrop to speak to the Italians and the Japanese and not much else.’ Goebbels grinned at his own joke. ‘No, you can leave the Foreign Office to me, gentlemen. Let them publish their silly white book, if that makes them happy. But this investigation is a propaganda matter now. Your first port of call in this matter is me. Is that clear?’
‘Yes, Herr Reich minister,’ said the judge, who looked sorry he’d ever mentioned a white book.
‘More importantly, perhaps we can turn this delay to advantage. Let us suppose for a moment that it is indeed a mass grave containing some unfortunate Polish officers. I should like to hear your thoughts on the proper way to go about handling things when eventually we’re able.’
The judge looked puzzled. ‘In the usual way, Herr doctor. We should act carefully and with patience. We must allow the evidence to lead us, as it always does. The business of judicial forensic inquiry is never something that can be rushed, sir. It requires painstaking attention to detail.’
Goebbels did not look satisfied with this answer. ‘No, with respect, that won’t do at all. We’re talking about the crime of the century here, not a tomb in the Valley of the Kings.’
He flicked open a cigarette box on the desk and invited us to help ourselves. Goldsche declined in order to continue his line of argument, but I took one: the box was made of white enamel with a handsome gold eagle on the lid and the cigarettes were Trummers, which I hadn’t seen – or more importantly smoked – since before the war. I was tempted to take two and put one behind my ear for later.
‘If the evidence is to sustain the investigation, we must proceed with caution, sir,’ said the judge. ‘I’ve never seen an investigation that was improved by haste. It contributes to error of interpretation. When we rush things we leave ourselves vulnerable to criticism by enemy propaganda: that we faked something, perhaps.’
But Goebbels was hardly listening. ‘This goes beyond all normal protocols,’ he said, trying to stifle a yawn. ‘I thought I made that clear already. Look, the leader himself has taken an interest in this case. Our intelligence sources in London inform us that relations between the Soviets and the Polish government in exile are already under considerable strain. It’s my estimation that this would certainly break those relations altogether. No, my dear judge, we cannot allow the evidence to lead us, as you say. That is much too passive a response to an opportunity like this. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, your approach, while being very proper as you say, lacks imagination.’
For once I couldn’t help but agree with the minister, but I kept my own counsel. Goldsche was my boss after all, and I had no wish to embarrass the man by disagreeing with him in front of Dr Goebbels. But perhaps Goebbels sensed something like this, and when our meeting was apparently over and the judge and I were being ushered to the door, the minister asked me to wait behind.
‘There’s something else I wish to discuss with you, captain,’ he said. ‘If you’ll forgive us, Johannes, it’s a private matter.’
‘Yes, of course, Herr Reich minister,’ said Goldsche, and looking a little nonplussed was led out of the building by one of the minister’s younger lackeys.
Goebbels closed the door and politely ushered me over to a sitting area – a yellow sofa and some armchairs – under a window as tall as a hop-picker’s wooden legs in what passed for a cosy corner of his office. Outside was the Wilhelmplatz and the underground railway station, which is where I could have wished to be – anywhere but the place in which I was now sitting down for a quiet tête-à-tête with a man I thought I despised. But the greater discomfort I was feeling came from the realization that – in person at least – Goebbels was courteous and intelligent, even charming. It was hard to connect the man I was talking to with the malignant demagogue I’d heard on the radio ranting at the Sports Palace for ‘total war’.
‘Is there really a private matter you want to discuss with me?’ I asked. ‘Or was that just a way of getting rid of the judge?’
But the Minister of Enlightenment and Propaganda was not a man to be hurried by a nobody like me.
‘When my ministry first moved into this beautiful house, back in 1933, I had some builders from the SA come in during the night to knock off all the stucco and wainscoting. Well, what else were those thugs good for except to smash things? Believe me, this place was like something in aspic jelly, and badly in need of some modernization. After the Great War, the building had been occupied by some of those old Prussian farts from the Foreign Office, and when they turned up the next day to take away their papers – you can’t imagine how much dust there was on those – they were absolutely horror-struck at what had been done to their precious building. It was actually quite amusing. They walked around with their mouths open, gasping like fish in a trawlerman’s net, and protesting loudly to me in their posh High German accents about what had happened in here. One of them even said: “Herr Reich minister, do you know that you might be put in prison for this?” Can you imagine it? Some of these old Prussians belong in a damned museum.
‘And these judges in the War Crimes Bureau, they’re not much more than relics themselves, captain. Their attitudes, their working methods, their accents are positively antediluvian. Even the way they dress. You would think it was 1903 and not 1943. How can a man feel comfortable in a stiff collar? It’s criminal to ask a man to dress like that just because he happens to be a lawyer. I’m afraid every time I loo
‘An umbrella is only ridiculous if it’s not raining, Herr Reich minister. But really, the judge is not the fool he looks. If he sounds ridiculous and slow, that’s just how law is. However, I think I get the picture.’
‘Of course you do. You used to be a top detective. That means you know about law in real life, not what’s in a lot of dusty legal textbooks. I could have spent the next hour talking to Judge Goldsche and he’d have given me the same old nonsense about “standard practice” and “proper procedure”.’ Goebbels shrugged. ‘That’s why I sent him away. I want a different approach. What I don’t want is all his Prussian stucco and dusty wainscoting and piss-elegant protocol. You understand?’
‘Yes. I understand.’
‘So, you can speak freely now that he’s gone. I could sense that you didn’t agree with what he was saying but that you were too loyal to say so. That’s commendable. However, unlike the judge you’ve actually been on the scene. You know Smolensk. And you’ve been a cop at the Alex and that means something. It means that whatever your politics used to be, your methods were the most modern in Europe. The Alex always had that reputation, did it not?’
‘Yes. It did, for a while.’
‘Look, Captain Gunther, whatever you say here and now will be in confidence. But I want your own opinions about how best to handle this investigation, not his.’
‘You mean if we do find some more bodies in Katyn Wood when it thaws?’
Goebbels nodded. ‘Exactly.’
‘There’s no guarantee we will. And there’s another thing. The SS were busy in that area. There are Ivans digging for food down there who worry that they’re going to pull a lot more than a potato out of the ground. Frankly, it’s probably a lot easier to find a field that doesn’t contain a mass grave than one that does.’