A Man Without Breath (Bernie Gunther Mystery 9) (6 page)

Goldsche looked puzzled.

‘Money for refugees,’ I added. ‘Well, you know how bighearted the Swiss are. They make all that lovely white chocolate just to help sugar the lie that they’re peace-loving and kind. Of course they’re not. Never were. Even the German army was in the habit of recruiting Swiss mercenaries. The Italians used to call it a bad war when Swiss pikemen were involved because their kind of fighting was so vicious.’

‘What did you tell them?’ asked Goldsche. ‘The Gestapo?’

‘I didn’t tell them anything.’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t know about a currency racket. The Gestapo mentioned a few names, but I certainly hadn’t heard of them. Anyway, the commissar who came to see me – I know him. He’s not bad as Gestapo officers go. Fellow by the name of Werner Sachse. I’m not sure if he’s a Party member but I wouldn’t be surprised if he wasn’t.’

‘I don’t like the Gestapo involving themselves with our inquiries,’ said Goldsche. ‘I don’t like it at all. Our judicial independence is always under threat from Himmler and his thugs.’

I shook my head. ‘The Gestapo are like dogs. You have to let them lick the bone for a while or they become savage. Take my word for it. This was a routine inquiry. The commissar licked the bone, let me fold his ears and then he slunk away. Simple as that. And there’s no need for alarm. I don’t see anyone winding up this department because seven Jews went skiing in Switzerland without permission.’

Von Dohnanyi shrugged. ‘Captain Gunther is probably right,’ he said. ‘This commissar was just going through the motions, that’s all.’

I smiled patiently, sipped my coffee, checked my own natural curiosity about exactly how it was that Von Dohnanyi had known Meyer was in the Jewish Hospital, and tried to bring the meeting to order. ‘What did you want to see me about, sir?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Goldsche nodded. ‘You’re sure you’re fit, now?’

I nodded.

‘Good.’ Goldsche looked at his aristocratic friend. ‘Hans? Would you care to enlighten the captain?’

‘Certainly.’ Von Dohnanyi put down his cigarette holder, removed his spectacles and then a neatly folded handkerchief, and started to clean the lenses.

I stubbed out my cigarette, opened my notebook, and prepared to take some notes.

Von Dohnanyi shook his head. ‘Please, just listen for now if you would, captain,’ he said. ‘When I’m finished you’ll perhaps understand my request that no notes are taken of this meeting.’

I closed the notebook and waited.

‘Following the Gleiwitz incident, German forces invaded Poland on the first of September 1939, and sixteen days later the Red Army invaded from the East, in accordance with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact signed between our two countries on the 23rd of August 1939. Germany annexed western Poland and the Soviet Union incorporated the eastern half into its Ukrainian and Belarussian republics. Some four hundred thousand Polish troops were taken prisoner by the Wehrmacht, while at least another quarter of a million Poles were captured by the Red Army. It is the fate of those Polish men taken prisoner by the Russians with which we are concerned here. Ever since the Wehrmacht invaded the Soviet Union—’

‘Germany’s always been unlucky that way,’ I said. ‘With her friends I mean.’

Ignoring my sarcasm, Von Dohnanyi put his glasses back on his face and continued: ‘Possibly even as soon as August 1941, the Abwehr has been receiving reports of a mass murder of Polish officers that took place in the spring or early summer of 1940. But where this took place was anyone’s guess. Until now, perhaps.

‘There’s a signals regiment, the 537th, commanded by a Lieutenant Colonel Friedrich Ahrens, stationed in a place called Gnezdovo near Smolensk – I understand from Judge Goldsche that you’ve been to Smolensk, Captain Gunther?’

‘Yes sir. I was there in the summer of 1941.’

He nodded. ‘That’s good. Then you’ll know the sort of country I’m talking about.’

‘It’s a dump,’ I said. ‘I can’t see why we thought it worth capturing at all.’

‘Er, yes.’ Von Dohnanyi smiled patiently. ‘Apparently Gnezdovo is an area of thick forest to the west of the city, with
wolves and other wild animals, and right now, as you might expect, the whole area is under a thick blanket of snow. The 537th is stationed in a castle or villa in the forest that was formerly used by the Russian secret police – the NKVD. They employ a number of Hiwis – Russian POWS like those glaziers in the corridor – and several weeks ago some of those Hiwis reported that a wolf had dug up some human remains in the forest. Having investigated the site for himself, Ahrens reported finding not one but several human bones. The report was passed on to us in the Abwehr and we then set about evaluating this intelligence. A number of possibilities have presented themselves.

‘One: that the bones are from a mass grave of political prisoners murdered by the NKVD during the so-called Great Purge of 1937 to 1938 following the first and second Moscow trials. We estimate as many as a million Soviet citizens were killed and that they are buried in mass graves all over an area west of Moscow hundreds of square kilometres in size.

‘Two: that the bones are from a mass grave of missing Polish officers. The Soviet government has assured the Polish prime minister in exile, General Sikorski, that all Polish prisoners of war were freed in 1940, after having been transported to Manchuria, and that the Soviets have simply lost track of many of these men because of the war, but it seems clear to our sources in London that the Poles do not believe them. A key factor in the Abwehr’s suspicion that these bones might be those of a Polish officer is the fact that this explanation would fit with previous intelligence reports about Polish officers who were seen at the local railway station in Gnezdovo in May 1940. Remarks made by Foreign Minister Molotov to Von Ribbentrop at the signing of the Non-Aggression Pact in 1939 have always led us to suppose that Stalin has a deep
hatred for the Poles that dates from the Soviet defeat in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–20. Also, his son was killed by Polish partisans in 1939.

‘Three: the mass grave is the site of a battle between the Wehrmacht and the Red Army. This is perhaps the most unlikely scenario, as the battle of Smolensk took place largely to the south of Smolensk and not the west. Moreover the Wehrmacht took over three hundred thousand Red Army soldiers prisoner, and most of these men remain alive, incarcerated in a camp to the north-east of Smolensk.’

‘Or working in the corridor outside,’ I said helpfully.

‘Please Gunther,’ said Goldsche. ‘Let him finish.’

‘Four: this is perhaps the most politically sensitive of all the possibilities and is also why I have asked you to forbear from taking notes, Captain Gunther.’

It wasn’t difficult to guess why Von Dohnanyi hesitated to describe the fourth possibility. It was hard to talk about this subject – hard for him and even harder for me, who had first-hand experience of some of these dreadful things that were so ‘politically sensitive’.

‘Four is the possibility that this is one of many mass graves in the region full of Jews murdered by the SS,’ I said.

Von Dohnanyi nodded. ‘The SS is very secretive about these matters,’ he said. ‘But we have information that a special battalion of SS attached to Gottlob Berger’s Group B and commanded by an Obersturmführer by the name of Oskar Dirlewanger was active in the area immediately west of Smolensk during the spring of last year. There are no accurate figures available, but one estimate we have holds Dirlewanger’s single battalion responsible for the murders of at least fourteen thousand people.’

‘The last thing we want to do is step on the toes of the SS,’
said Goldsche. ‘Which means this is a matter requiring great confidentiality. Frankly there will be hell to pay if we go around uncovering mass graves of their making.’

‘That’s a delicate way of putting it, Judge,’ I said. ‘Since I assume it’s me you want to send down to Smolensk and investigate this, then I’m supposed to make sure that this is the correct mass grave we’re uncovering, is that what you mean?’

‘In a nutshell, yes,’ said Goldsche. ‘Right now the ground is frozen hard, so there’s no possibility of digging for more bodies. Not for several weeks. Until then we need to find out all we can. So, if you could spend a couple of days down there. Speak to some of the locals, visit the site, evaluate the situation, and then come back to Berlin and report directly to me. If it is our jurisdiction, then we can organize a full war-crimes inquiry with a proper judge almost immediately.’ He shrugged. ‘But to send a judge at this stage would be too much.’

‘Agreed,’ said Von Dohnanyi. ‘It would send the wrong signals. Best to keep things low-key at this stage.’

‘Let me check my mental shorthand, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘About just what you want me to do. So as I know, for sure. If this mass grave is full of Jews, then I’m to forget about it. But if it’s full of Polish officers, then it’s the Bureau’s meat. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘That’s not a very subtle way of putting it,’ said Von Dohnanyi, ‘but yes. That’s exactly what’s required of you, Captain Gunther.’

For a moment he glanced up at the landscape above Goldsche’s fireplace as if wishing he could have been there instead of a smoky office in Berlin, and I felt a sneer start to gather at the edge of my mouth. The picture was one of those Italian campagnas painted at the end of a summer’s day, when the light is interesting to a painter, and some tiny old men with
long beards and wearing togas are standing around a ruined classical landscape and asking themselves who’s going to carry out the necessary building repairs because all the young men are away at the wars. They didn’t have Russian POWs to fix their windows in those Arcadian days.

My sneer expanded to full contempt for his delicate sensibility.

‘Oh, but it won’t be subtle, gentlemen,’ I said. ‘I can promise you that much. Certainly nowhere near as subtle as in that nice picture. Smolensk is no bucolic demi-paradise. It’s a ruin all right, but it’s a ruin because that’s how our tanks and artillery have left it. It’s a ruin that’s full of ugly frightened people who were only just managing to eke out a living when the Wehrmacht turned up demanding to be fed and watered for not much money. Zeus won’t be seducing Io, it’ll be a Fritz trying to rape some poor peasant girl; and in Smolensk the pretty landscape isn’t covered in an amber glow of warm Italian sunlight but a hard permafrost. No, it won’t be subtle. And believe me, there’s nothing subtle about a body that’s been in the ground. It’s surprising how indelicate something like that turns out to be, and how quickly it becomes something very unpleasant indeed. There’s the smell for example. Bodies have a habit of decomposing when they’ve been in the earth for a while.’

I lit another cigarette and enjoyed their joint discomfort. There was a silence for a long moment. Von Dohnanyi looked nervous about something – more nervous than what he had just told me suggested, perhaps. Or maybe he just wanted to hit me. I get a lot of that.

‘But I take your point,’ I added, more helpfully this time, ‘about the SS, I mean. We wouldn’t want to upset them, now would we? And believe me I know what I’m talking
about, I’ve done it before, so I’m equally anxious not to do it again.’

‘There is a fifth possibility,’ added Goldsche, ‘which is why I would prefer to have a proper detective on the scene.’

‘And that is?’

‘I would like you to make absolutely sure that this whole thing is not some ghastly lie dreamed up by the ministry of propaganda. That this body has not been deliberately planted there to play first us and then the world’s media like a grand piano. Because make no mistake about it, gentlemen, that’s exactly what will happen if this does turn out to be the dwarf’s ring.’

I nodded. ‘Fair enough. But you’re forgetting a sixth possibility, surely.’

Von Dohnanyi frowned. ‘And what is that?’

‘If this does turn out to be a mass grave, that it’s full of Polish officers that the German army murdered.’

Von Dohnanyi shook his head. ‘Impossible,’ he said.

‘Is it? I don’t see how your second possibility can even exist without the possibility of the sixth one, too.’

‘That’s logically true,’ admitted Von Dohnanyi. ‘But the fact remains that the German army does not murder prisoners of war.’

I grinned. ‘Oh, well that’s all right then. Forgive me for mentioning it, sir.’

Von Dohnanyi coloured a little. You don’t get a lot of sarcasm in the concert hall or the Imperial Court, and I doubt he’d spoken to a real policeman since 1928 when, like every other aristocrat, he’d applied for a firearm permit so he could shoot wild boar and the odd Bolshevik.

‘Besides,’ he continued, ‘this part of Russia has only been in German hands since September 1941. There’s that and the
fact that it’s a matter of military record which Poles were prisoners of Germany and which were prisoners of the Soviet Union. This information is already known to the Polish government in London. For that reason alone it should be easy to establish if any of these men were prisoners of the Red Army. Which is why I myself think it’s highly improbable that this could be something manufactured by the ministry of propaganda. Because it would be all too easy to disprove.’

‘Perhaps you’re right, Hans,’ admitted the judge.

‘I am right,’ insisted Von Dohnanyi. ‘You know I’m right.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said the judge, ‘I want to be sure exactly what we’re dealing with here. And as quickly as possible. So, will you do it, Gunther? Will you go down there and see what you can find out?’

I had little appetite to see Smolensk again, or for that matter anywhere else in Russia. The whole country filled me with a combination of fear and shame, for there was no doubt that whatever crimes the Red Army had committed in the name of communism, the SS had committed equally heinous ones in the name of Nazism. Probably our crimes were more heinous. Executing enemy officers in uniform was one thing – I had some experience of that myself – but murdering women and children was quite another.

‘Yes sir. I’ll go. Of course I’ll go.’

‘Good fellow,’ said the judge. ‘As I said already, if there’s even a hint that this is the handiwork of those thugs in the SS, don’t do anything. Get the hell out of Smolensk as quickly as possible, come straight home and pretend you know nothing at all about it.’