Field Grey by Philip Kerr

  'Nebe was two different men,' I said. 'Perhaps several more than just two. In 1933 Nebe believed that the Nazis were the only alternative to the communists and that they would bring order to Germany. By 1938, probably earlier, he'd realised his mistake and was plotting with others in the Wehrmacht and the police to overthrow Hitler. There's a propaganda ministry photograph of Nebe with Himmler, Heydrich and Müller that shows the four of them planning the investigation of a bomb attempt on Hitler's life. That was November 1939. And Nebe was part of that very same conspiracy. I know that because I was part of it, too. However, Nebe quickly changed his mind after the defeat of France and Britain in 1940. Lots of people changed their minds about Hitler after the miracle of France. Even I did, for a few months, anyway. We both changed our minds again when Hitler attacked Russia. Nobody thought that was a good idea. And yet Arthur did what he was told. He'd plot away and do what he was told even if that meant murdering Jews in Minsk and Smolensk. Doing what you were told was always the best kind of cover if you were simultaneously planning a coup d'etat against the Nazis. I think that's why he seems like such an ambiguous figure. I think that's why, as you said, he was falling down on the job as commander of Task

  Force B. Because his heart was never in it. Above all, Nebe was a survivor.'

  'Like you.'

  'To some extent, yes, that's true. Thanks to him.'

  'Tell us about that.'

  'I already did.'

  'Not in any great detail.'

  'What do you want me to do? Draw you a picture?'

  'Really, we want as many details as possible,' said Earl.

  'When someone is lying,' said Silverman, 'it's nearly always the case that they start to contradict themselves in matters of detail. You should know that from being a policeman yourself. When they start to contradict themselves on the small things you can bet they're lying about the big things, too.'

  I nodded.

  'So,' he said, 'let's go back to Goloby, where you murdered the members of an NKVD squad.'

  'The ones you claim had murdered all of the inmates at the NKVD prison in Lutsk,' said Earp. 'According to the Soviets, that was just German propaganda, put out to help persuade your own men that the summary execution of all Jews and Bolsheviks was justified.'

  'You'll be telling me next that it was the German Army who murdered all those Poles in the Katyn Forest.'

  'Maybe it was.'

  'Not according to your own congressional investigation.'

  'You're well informed.'

  I shrugged. 'In Cuba, I got all the American newspapers. In an attempt to improve my English. 1952, wasn't it? The investigation. When the Maiden Committee recommended that the Soviets should answer a case at the International Court of Justice in The Hague? Look, it's a story I've been interested in for a long time. We both know the NKVD killed as many as we did. So why not admit it? The commies are the enemy now. Or is that just American propaganda?'

  I fetched a packet of cigarettes from the pocket of my prison jacket and lit one slowly. I was tired of answering questions but I knew I was going to have to open the door of my mind's darkest cellar and wake up some very unpleasant memories. Even in a room with bars on the window, Operation Barbarossa felt like a very long way away. Outside it was a bright and sunny June day, and although it had been a very similarly warm June day when the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union, that wasn't the way I remembered it. When I recalled names like Goloby, Lutsk, Bialystok and Minsk I thought of infernal heat and the sights, sounds, and smells of a Hell on earth; but most of all I remembered a clean-shaven young man aged about twenty standing in a cobbled town square with a crowbar in his hand, his thick boots an inch deep in the blood of about thirty other men who lay dead or dying at his feet. I remembered the shocked laughter of some of the German soldiers who were watching this bestial display; I remembered the sound of an accordion playing a spirited tune as another, older man with a long beard walked silently, almost calmly toward the fellow with the crowbar and was immediately struck on the head like some ghastly Hindu sacrifice; I remembered the noise the old man made as he fell to the ground and the way his legs jerked stiffly like a puppet's until the crowbar hit him again.

  I jerked my thumb at the window. 'All right,' I said. 'I'll tell you everything. But do you mind if I put my face in the sun for a moment? It helps to remind me that I'm still alive.'

  'Unlike millions of others,' Earp said pointedly. 'Go ahead. We're in no hurry.'

  I went to the window and looked out. By the main gate a small crowd of people had gathered to wait for someone. Either that or they were looking for the window of cell number seven, which seemed a little less likely.

  'Is someone being released today?' I asked.

  Silverman came over to the window. 'Yes,' he said. 'Erich Mielke.'

  'Mielke?' I shook my head. 'You're mistaken. Mielke's not in here. He couldn't be.'

  Even as I spoke a smaller door in the main gate opened and a short stocky grey-haired man of about sixty stepped out and was cheered by the waiting well-wishers.

  'That's not Mielke,' I said.

  'I think you mean Erhard Milch, sir,' Earp told Silverman. 'The Luftwaffe field marshal? It's him who's being released today.'

  'So that's who it is,' I said. 'For a moment there I thought it was a real war criminal.'

  'Milch is - was - a war criminal,' insisted Silverman. 'He was director of air armaments under Albert Speer.'

  'And what was criminal about building planes?' I asked. 'You must have built quite a few planes yourself if the state of Berlin in 1945 was anything to go by.'

  'We didn't use slave labour to do it,' said Silverman.

  I watched as Erhard Milch accepted a bunch of flowers from a pretty girl, bowed politely to her, and was then driven off in a smart new Mercedes to begin the rest of his life.

  'What was the sentence for that then?'

  'Life imprisonment,' said Silverman.

  'Life imprisonment, eh? Some people have all the luck.'

  'Commuted to fifteen years.'

  'There's something wrong with your High Commissioner's maths, I think,' I said. 'Who else is getting out of here?'

  I took a puff on my tasteless cigarette, flicked the butt out of the window and watched it spiral to the ground trailing smoke like one of Milch's invincible Luftwaffe planes. 'You were going to tell us about Minsk,' said Silverman.

  * * *

  CHAPTER SIX: MINSK, 1941

  On the morning of 7 July 1941, I commanded a firing squad that executed thirty Russian POWs. At the time I didn't feel bad about this because they were all NKVD, and less than twelve hours before they themselves had murdered two or three thousand prisoners at the NKVD prison in Lutsk. They also murdered some German POWs who were with them, which was a miserable sight. I suppose you could say they had every right to do so given that we had invaded their country. You could also say that our executing them in retaliation had considerably less justification, and you'd probably be correct on both counts. Well, we did it, but not because of the so-called 'commissar order' or the 'Barbarossa decree', which were nothing more than a shooting licence from German field headquarters. We did it because we felt - I felt - they had it coming, and they would certainly have shot us in similar circumstances. So we shot them in groups of four. We didn't make them dig their own graves or anything like that. I didn't care for that sort of thing. It smacked of sadism. We shot them and left them where they fell. Later on, when I was a pleni in a Russian labour camp, I sometimes wished I'd shot many more than just thirty, but that's a different story.

  I didn't feel bad about it until the next day when my men and I came across a former colleague from the Police Praesidium at the Alex, in Berlin. A fellow named Becker, who was in another police battalion. I found him shooting civilians in a village somewhere west of Minsk. There were about a hundred bodies in a ditch and it seemed to me that Becker and his men had been drinking. Even then I didn't get it. I kept on looking for explanations
for what was essentially inexplicable and certainly inexcusable. And it was only when I realised that some of the people Becker and his men were about to shoot were old women that I said something.

  'What the Hell do you think you're doing?' I asked him.

  'Obeying my orders,' he said.

  'What? To kill old women?'

  'They're Jews,' he said, as if that was all the explanation that was needed. 'I've been ordered to kill as many Jews as I can and that's what I'm doing.'

  'Whose orders? Who's your field commander and where is he?'

  'Major Weis.' Becker pointed at a long wooden building behind a white picket fence about thirty yards down the road. 'He's in there. Having his lunch.'

  I walked toward the building and Becker called after me:

  'Don't think I want to do this. But orders are orders, yes?'

  As I reached the hut I heard another volley of shots. One of the doors was open and an SS major was sitting on a chair with his tunic off. In one hand he held a half-eaten loaf of bread and in the other a bottle of wine and a cigarette. He heard me out with a look of weary amusement on his face.

  'Look, none of this is my idea,' he said. 'It's a waste of time and ammunition if you ask me. But I do what I'm told, right? That's how an army works. A superior officer gives me an order and I obey. Chapter closed.' He pointed at a field telephone that was on the floor. 'Take it up with headquarters if you like. They'll just tell you what they told me. To get on with it.'

  He shook his head. 'You're not the only one who thinks this is madness, Captain.'

  'You mean you've already asked for the orders to be confirmed?'

  'Of course I have. Field HQ, told me to take it up with Division HQ.'

  'And what did they say?'

  Major Weis shook his head. 'Questioning an order with Division? Are you mad? I won't stay a major for very long if I do that. They'll have my pips and my balls and not necessarily in that order.' He laughed. 'But be my guest. Go on, call them. Just make sure you leave my name out of it.'

  Outside there was another volley of shots. I picked up the field telephone and cranked the handle furiously. Thirty seconds later I was arguing with someone at Division HQ. The major got up and put his ear to the other side of the telephone. When I started to swear he grinned and walked away.

  'You've upset them now,' he said.

  I slammed the phone down and stood there trembling with anger.

  'I'm to report to Division, in Minsk,' I said. 'Immediately.'

  'Told you.' He handed me his bottle and I took a swig of what turned out to be not wine, but vodka. 'They'll have your rank, for sure. I hope you think it was worth it. From what I hear this-' he pointed at the door. 'This is just the smoke at the end of the gun. Someone else is pulling the trigger. That's what you have to hold on to, my friend. Try to remember what Goethe said. He said "the greatest happiness for us Germans is to understand what we can understand and then, having done so, to do what we're fucking told."'

  I went outside and told the men I'd brought with me in a Panzer wagon and a Puma armoured car that we were going into Minsk, to make a report on the morning's anti-partisan action. As we drove along I was in a melancholy frame of mind, but that was only partly to do with the fate of a few hundred innocent Jews. Mostly I was concerned for the reputation of Germans and the German Army. Where would this end? I asked myself. I certainly never conceived that thousands of Jews were already being slaughtered in a similar fashion.

  Minsk was easy to find. All you had to do was drive down a long straight road - quite a good road, even by German standards - and follow the grey plume of smoke on the horizon. The Luftwaffe had bombed the city a few days before and destroyed most of the city centre. Even so all of the German vehicles moving along the road kept their distance from one another in case of a Russian air attack. Otherwise the Red Army was gone and Wehrmacht intelligence indicated that the population of three hundred thousand would have left the city too except that our bombing of the road east out of Minsk - to Mogilev and Moscow - had forced as many as eighty thousand to turn back to the city, or at least what remained of it. Not that this looked like a particularly good idea either. Most of the wooden houses on the outskirts were still ablaze while, nearer the centre, piles of rubble backed onto hollowed- out office and apartment buildings. I'd never seen a city so thoroughly destroyed as Minsk. This made it all the more surprising that the Uprava, the city council and Communist Party HQ, had survived the bombing almost unscathed. The locals called it the Big House, which was something of an understatement: nine or ten storeys high and built of white concrete, the Uprava resembled a series of gigantic filing cabinets containing the details of every citizen in Minsk. In front of the building was an enormous bronze statue of Lenin, who viewed the large number of German cars and trucks with an understandable look of anxiety and concern, as well he might have done given that the building was now the headquarters of Reichskommissariat Ostland - a German-created administrative area that stretched from the Byelorussian capital to the Baltic Sea.

  Pushing a heavy wooden door that was so tall it might still have been growing in a forest, I entered a cheap, marble- clad hall that belonged in a Metro station and approached a locomotive-sized central desk where several German soldiers and SS were attempting to impose some kind of administrative order on the ant colony of dusty grey men who were pouring in and out of the place. Catching the eye of one SS officer behind the desk I asked for the SS divisional commander's office and was directed to the second floor and advised to take the stairs, as the elevator was not working.

  At the top of the first flight of stairs was a bronze head of Stalin, and at the top of the second a bronze head of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Operation Barbarossa looked like it was going to be bad news for Russian sculptors, just like everyone else. The floor was covered with broken glass and there was a line of bullet holes on the grey wall that led all the way along a wide corridor to a couple of open doors that faced each other and through which more SS officers were passing to and fro in a haze of cigarette smoke. One of these was my unit's commanding officer, Standartenführer Mundt, who was one of those men who look like they came out of their mother's womb wearing a uniform. Seeing me he raised an eyebrow and then a hand as he casually acknowledged my salute.

  'The murder squad,' he said. 'Did you catch them?'

  'Yes, Herr Oberst.'

  'Good work. What did you do with them?'

  'We shot them, sir.' I handed over a handful of Red identification documents I'd taken from the Russians before their executions.

  Mundt started to look through the documents like an immigration officer searching for something suspicious. 'Including the women?'

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Pity. In future all female partisans and NKVD are to be hanged in the town square, as an example to the others. Heydrich's orders. Understand?'

  'Yes, Herr Oberst.'

  Mundt wasn't much older than me. When the war broke out he'd been a police colonel with the Hamburg Schutzpolizei. He was clever, only his was the wrong kind of cleverness for Kripo: to be a decent detective you have to understand people and to understand people you have to be one of them yourself. Mundt wasn't like people. He wasn't even a person. I supposed that was why he had a pet dachshund with him; so that it might make him seem a little more human. But I knew better. He was a cold, pompous bastard. Whenever he spoke he sounded like he thought he was reciting Rilke, and I wanted to yawn or laugh or kick his teeth in. Which is how it must have looked.

  'You disagree, Captain?'

  'I don't much care to hang women,' I said.

  He looked down his fine nose and smiled. 'Perhaps you'd prefer to do something else with them?'

  'That must be someone else you're thinking of, sir. What I mean is, I don't much like waging war on women. I'm the conventional type. That's the Geneva Convention, in case you were wondering.'

  Mundt pretended to look puzzled. 'It's a strange way of observing the Geneva Convention you h
ave,' he said. 'To shoot thirty prisoners.'

  I glanced around the office, which was a good size for just one desk. It would have been a good size for a sawmill. In the corner of the room was a fitted cupboard with its own little sink where another man was washing his half-naked torso. In the opposite corner was a safe. An SS sergeant was listening to it like it was a radio and trying, without success, to persuade the thing to open. On top of the desk was a trio of differently coloured telephones that might have been left there by three wise men from the East; behind the desk was another SS officer in a chair; and behind the officer was a large wall map of Minsk. On the floor lay a Russian soldier, and if this had ever been his office it wasn't any more; the bullet hole behind his left ear and the blood on the linoleum seemed to indicate he would soon be relocated to a much smaller and more permanent earthly space.

  'Besides, Captain Gunther,' added Mundt, 'it may have escaped you but the Russians never signed the Geneva Convention.'

  "Then I guess it's fine to shoot them all, sir.'

  The officer behind the desk stood up. 'Did you say Captain Gunther?'

  He was a Standartenführer, too, a colonel, the same as Mundt, which meant that as he came around the desk and placed himself in front of me I was obliged to come to attention again. He had been spawned in the same Aryan pond as Mundt and was no less arrogant.

  'Yes, sir.'

  'Are you the Captain Gunther who telephoned to question my orders to shoot those Jews on the road to Minsk, this morning?'

  'Yes, sir. That was me. You must be Colonel Blume.'

  'What the devil do you mean by questioning an order?' he shouted. 'You're an SS officer, pledged to the Führer. That order was issued to ensure security in the rear for our combat forces. Those Jews set their houses on fire when the local combat commander told them to make them available as billets for our troops. I can't think of a better reason for a reprisal action than the burning of those houses.'