There was another source of gold, one that I could hardly credit when I first heard of it: gold teeth and fillings, removed from the mouths of liquidated Jews, shortly before they were killed.

  ‘Don’t look so fucking squeamish, Heuser,’ Stark said contemptuously, when the look on my face too clearly gave away the disgust I felt on being given this information. ‘Or are you just worried you won’t get your share?’

  Ten months had passed since I’d been troubled by the thought of drinking contraband coffee. Now I was being cut in on the gold-tooth racket. I got a piece of the rings and watches. And somehow I came to terms with that, too. Little by little I was making all the necessary adjustments that we all employed simply to hold on to our sanity. The crucial thing was to distract oneself from the truth of what was really going on: to try, so far as possible, to live in denial. One way of doing that was to look inwards instead of out, and immerse oneself in the professional conflicts and power struggles of the KdS.

  Thanks to my joint Kripo–Gestapo role I had access to personnel files, so I took the opportunity to look at Stark’s record. It turned out that those American rumours were true. Franz Stark was born in St Louis, Missouri, on 27 October 1901. Mother: Christiane Stark, father: unknown. Fräulein Stark had emigrated to America in 1890, but she returned home to Germany in 1903, bringing her son with her. She was not a good mother. She beat the boy, inflicting such serious injuries to his head that in 1905 he was taken from her and given to foster parents. His schooling ended at the age of thirteen. He subsequently trained as a mechanic without gaining any formal qualifications.

  It was like reading the life stories of Kürten or Ogorzow: a poorly educated child of an unstable family and an unsuitable mother who was the subject of violent abuse. I was working alongside a psychopath, one whose lust for violence was evident from the start of his adult life.

  In 1919, aged eighteen, Stark had moved to Munich. He joined the National Socialist movement on 1 January 1920, in its absolute infancy, when it was still the German Workers’ Party and Drexler, not Hitler, was its leader. In 1921 he signed up with the Brownshirts on the very day they were formed. Two years later he fought alongside Hitler at the Beer Hall Putsch and later won the Party’s Blood Medal for his participation in this and countless other acts of violence. After a few years of menial employment he found work in 1933 as a handyman on Heydrich’s personal domestic staff. From there he became a clerk in the SS. His rise from clerk to officer class was swift.

  It was clear I was dealing with a very dangerous man indeed. Stark had free rein in Minsk to act out his most wicked urges without restraint, indeed with the approval of his superiors, while his Party history and his personal connection to Heydrich made him untouchable. Stark’s problem, however, was that, like Paul Ogorzow, he was handicapped by his stupidity. He had just enough intelligence to realize the strength of his position, but not quite enough to appreciate its limitations. In the end he would be brought down by a lowly Jewish barber, a man called Steiner, whom I was just about to meet.

  *

  I’d been allotted the services of a stenographer/typist to assist with the writing of memos. Her name was Fräulein Krankl, and she was one of the many women who had come to Minsk in the hope of finding a husband among the thousands of single men, far from the comforts of home, who were stationed in the city. A man would have to have been sexually deprived for a very long time, however, before he turned to Fräulein Krankl. She had the plain face and shapeless physique of a woman doomed to spend her life as a spinster. Yet even the dowdiest wallflower can dream of being a rose, and one day, not long before Christmas, she arrived to take dictation looking as though she’d just put on a bright yellow wig.

  I was foolish enough to comment on the fact that she appeared to have had her hair done, and Krankl started simpering coyly and batting her eyelashes at me in her idea of an alluring, coquettish manner. I then had a long account of her session with some Viennese Jew called Steiner. He and his two sons were barbers by profession.

  ‘Steiner cuts Gauleiter Kube’s hair, and gives him his morning shave every day,’ Krankl told me. ‘Now he and his sons are looking after us girls as well. Such a charming man …’ I looked at her pointedly and she became very flustered. I could see her trying to find a way to rectify her error. ‘For a Jew, I mean,’ she said.

  It struck me then that I’d not had my hair cut for some while and it was in danger of looking unkempt. So I told Krankl: ‘In that case, please arrange an appointment for me with this Steiner man. He can see me tomorrow morning at nine.’

  That evening, nursing a glass of schnapps in the officers’ mess, I thought how Steiner’s role illustrated a strange contradiction about our life in Minsk. On the one hand, we were told to regard the Jews as little more than subhuman vermin. Yet at the very same time, we relied on them to do all our dirty work. They were orderlies, cleaners and porters in the military hospitals. They took out the garbage. They cleaned our offices, our living quarters and even the cells in our prisons. They mended our shoes and clothes. They sorted through captured Russian weapons and the appropriated possessions of their own people. They staffed army and Luftwaffe warehouses and typed letters for the few German businessmen brave enough to come here in search of their fortunes. They provided sexual services too, since some of the men had pretty Jewish girlfriends, though such behaviour was strictly forbidden. And now, apparently, they cut our hair, too.

  So it was that the following morning I found myself sitting back in the barber’s chair: an SS officer allowing a Jew to run a razor blade over his neck. Having trimmed my hair, Steiner had asked if I would like him to give me a shave and hot towel treatment as well. None of this was costing me any money and my morning schedule was comparatively light, so there was no reason to decline the offer. And I could hardly say: ‘I don’t think so. I’m worried that you might slit my throat.’

  Steiner and I made inconsequential conversation, just as if I were a customer in his shop in Vienna. The haircut was perfectly satisfactory and the shave a very smooth one. The hot towel treatment afterwards was particularly relaxing. Only one thing puzzled me: he wore no yellow badges on his coat. Either he had a death wish, coming to SS headquarters improperly dressed, or someone very powerful indeed had given him permission to do it.

  ‘Ah yes, sir, that was Gauleiter Kube’s idea,’ Steiner said, when I raised the subject with him. ‘It was the ladies, you see. They didn’t like seeing the Stars of David – upset them apparently. So I’ve got an exemption,’ and then he paused for a fraction: ‘although Captain Stark does not seem to approve of it.’

  ‘No, I shouldn’t think he does,’ I said.

  ‘He was – how can I put this? – somewhat upset when he saw that the badges had been removed from my coat.’

  ‘Ah well, if the Gauleiter has given the order that’s all that matters, eh?’

  I thought no more about Steiner and his coat. There were other far more pressing matters to concern us all. But Stark hadn’t forgotten. He regarded all the ghetto Jews as his property. He took Steiner’s coat as a personal insult, delivered by the barber and the Gauleiter alike. And in time he would have his revenge.

  33

  December 1941 marked both the furthest limits of Germany’s wartime conquests and the moment at which our fortunes turned irrevocably for the worse. The retreat that wouldn’t end until Berlin itself was an occupied city began when the Russians launched a counter-offensive across a broad front either side of Moscow, and a second assault down in the Ukraine, advancing on Kharkov. Days later I happened to be talking to an officer in military intelligence. He told me in strict confidence that Stalin had shipped his entire Siberian army, forty divisions, all the way from the far Pacific coast to Moscow. They were crack troops, apparently, fully equipped for winter, and their T-34 tanks were a class above anything we’d got. Meanwhile our armoured divisions were stuck and our guns wouldn’t fire because we didn’t have any lubricating oil that worked in extreme cold. ‘We’ve lost the best part of 300,000 men already and the whole campaign is going to shit,’ the officer said. ‘Of course we’ll turn it around. But even so, it’s a shock.’

  A day later came the news that the Japanese had bombed the US Navy base at Pearl Harbor, on the island of Hawaii. That was a sensational enough event in itself. But what followed was even more significant, for Hitler used the attack as a pretext to declare war on the United States of America. It was a moment of pure, self-destructive folly on the Führer’s part. We were stretched to the very limit fighting the Russians in the east. If the Americans now joined the British in the west, how could we possibly keep them at bay?

  To these human enemies could be added another foe, even mightier and more pitiless than the rest: Old Father Frost. The winter of ’41–42 was brutally cold and we were utterly unprepared for its rigours. One morning my work took me to the main railway station. A troop transport had just come in, bringing the wounded back from the Front. There were men walking around the platform with crazed, staring eyes. It took me a moment to realize that they had no eyelids. I asked a medical orderly what had happened to them and he simply said: ‘The cold.’

  He went on to explain that the frost singed skin and flesh, like a sort of cold fire, so that it simply died and fell from men’s bodies. Eyelids, ears, noses and lips were stripped from faces; hands lost their fingers; bodies their arms and legs. Even sexual organs had been known to freeze like icicles and snap off.

  For the Jews, of course, it was even worse. They died by the hundred and their frozen corpses piled up in the streets because they couldn’t be buried in the rock-hard soil. Finally matters got so bad that Burkhardt had to organize a detachment of men to go into the Jewish cemetery and use dynamite to blast a hole big enough to be used as a mass grave.

  When those Jewish bodies were finally buried almost all were naked: their clothes had long since been stripped to provide some tiny scrap of warmth to those still living. Our people were no different, taking any clothes or blankets they could find just to stay warm. I spotted an army corporal on the street one day wearing a real banker’s coat: dove-grey cashmere down almost to his ankles, with a collar of soft black mink. When he passed me I saw there was a hole on the back. Someone had crudely tried to darn it, but after my months in the murder squad I hardly needed to be told the significance of the blood spatter that still stained the fabric. I didn’t do anything. The soldier belonged to the Wehrmacht, so whom he chose to shoot was their business, not mine.

  Among the women here, there was no more fashionable item of clothing than a fur coat from the Jewish baggage, and a man who could provide such a thing was never short of company. There were Jewesses working in menial roles at the KdS and it struck me that any one of them might see a German girl walking around in what had once been her coat and know that there was no possible hope of recovering her property. Were she to be so crazy as to report the theft to a policeman, she would most likely be shot. So the Jews kept their mouths shut and shivered in silence. Never, not for a single instant, was there any relief from their degradation.

  Yet they were not the only victims of our presence in Minsk. Another day, word reached the KdS office that there were thousands of Russian prisoners-of-war lying dead on the outskirts of the city, lined up on either side of the Smolensk road. They had been sent on a work detail in the middle of a blizzard with no coats, gloves, or even in some cases boots, and were simply left outside until they were all dead. A party of Jewish workers had seen the Russians and one of them, a young woman, tried to offer one of the freezing men a small scrap of bread: her ration for the day. Both she and the prisoner were shot dead on the spot.

  The army liked to look down on the SS, seeing themselves as honourable warriors who fought for their Fatherland, while we were just thugs and murderers in the service of the Nazi Party. Yet for every Jew that ever died at the hands of the SS in Minsk those chivalrous gentlemen of the Wehrmacht killed a Russian prisoner. I wrote in my diary:

  This miserable country makes barbarians of us all. No matter where one turns it is impossible to escape the presence of death. Some of us may continue to exist, but who is truly living? And where, apart from the vodka bottle, can one find the slightest warmth or comfort amidst the ice and snow and frozen flesh? One day, perhaps, Minsk will be a thriving provincial centre within a mighty German empire. For now, however, it is just a vastly magnified version of Dr Weimann’s chilly mortuary.

  That winter destroyed us. Though our retreat from Moscow was not yet as calamitous as Napoleon’s had been, the notion of our invincibility was stripped from us. And as our physical might began to fray, so did the qualities that had provided our inner strength: our discipline, our determination, even our dignity. Stark, for example, celebrated Christmas in his own special way. He and a small troop of men went to the Novinki lunatic asylum, not far from the city, and selected twenty-five inmates, apparently at random. They then took them, still wearing their asylum uniforms, to one of the many small natural sandpits, formed by deposits from ancient rivers, that littered the region. These were too small to be used for large-scale operations, but Stark demonstrated that they sufficed perfectly well for smaller actions, for all twenty-five inmates were shot and then dumped in the pit. Stark killed at least seven of the loonies personally. ‘I emptied a whole magazine into them,’ he boasted when I saw him at the mess, later in the day.

  On New Year’s Day, a group of KdS men went into the ghetto and shot almost five hundred of its inhabitants, without any authorization from a senior officer, let alone any actual orders. It was astonishing, frankly, that anyone had the strength to carry out a mass liquidation after the debauchery that had occurred the previous night. Fräulein Krankl, who was outraged by our behaviour, took to describing the KdS as a pigsty, and it was hard to argue with her. Of course the Ogorzow case had shown me the effect that overwork, stress and fatigue can have on even the most conscientious people. But this was something more. There was a wantonness, a wilful spitting in the face of conventional morality. As if to prove the point, Stark shot a drunken Russian dead for the crime of singing a patriotic song as he staggered down the street, waving his empty vodka bottle in the air.

  ‘It’s very simple,’ said von Toll when I mentioned my impressions to him. ‘We are all damned and we know it. So now we have nothing to lose.’

  He was right. Yet we hadn’t even begun to scratch the surface of our sins. The real evil, however, wouldn’t be long in coming.

  In January, my original commanding officer, Ehrlinger, was transferred out of Minsk and replaced by SS-Major Dr Walter Hofmann. Within days of taking over Hofmann was summoned to Riga by SS-General Jeckeln, the overall commander of all police forces in the Reich Commissariat of Ostland. While we were shivering in Minsk, Heydrich had summoned representatives from various arms of the Reich’s military and civil administration to a day-long meeting at a villa on the Wannsee in Berlin. There he outlined the precise nature and extent of the ‘final solution to the Jewish question’. Jeckeln then passed Heydrich’s orders on to Hofmann, who flew back to Minsk, summoned all us KdS officers and told us that in future, our policy towards all the Jews of Europe, including German Jews, would be one of total liquidation, although neither that, nor any other word suggesting mass extermination, was ever to be used in public. The approved term for the transportation of Jews to their places of execution would continue to be ‘resettlement’. What happened to them on their arrival was now to be referred to as ‘processing’.

  Between ourselves, of course, we could be more frank. Thus Hofmann felt free to inform us that we would soon engage in ‘a vigorous schedule of executions in the spring’. As soon as the snow disappeared, so, he assured me, would the Jews. In the meantime, Hofmann was keen to show Berlin that, in his words, ‘We’re not just sitting here in Minsk with our fingers up our arses.’ To that end Stark was dispatched with a unit of twenty men to Rakov, a small village about thirty-five kilometres to the west of the city chosen because there was a natural depression there that alleviated the need to dig a pit. Stark and his people killed a hundred Jews.

  I, however, still possessed enough common humanity to be deeply troubled by what we were about to do. As a policeman I’d been trained to obey orders without question: even Lüdtke, so cavalier with the rules in some respects, had been adamant about that. Yet I’d also been trained to protect the innocent and punish those who killed. I was finding it very hard indeed to resolve those two contradictory imperatives. And for all my arguments to the contrary, I knew deep down that it was quite simply wrong.

  Von Toll, needless to say, felt even more strongly than I. He insisted that this new policy of extermination was nothing more or less than ‘criminal insanity’ and made no secret of the fact that he was desperate to be transferred away from Minsk. Anywhere would do, he said, including the front line. ‘I’d far rather be shooting at armed Russians than defenceless Jews. For one thing I actually hate the damn Russians.’

  I replied that it was not in my power to get him sent somewhere else. That wasn’t entirely true. Hofmann would probably have done it for me had I insisted. The fact was I needed von Toll as an interpreter and I hated the thought of losing the one person with whom I could talk openly about the truth of our task in Minsk. I might argue with the things he said, but that didn’t mean that I wasn’t thinking them too. I simply lacked the courage to express those thoughts out loud. Still, at least I’d one good thing to look forward to. After a full year of service I was due for three weeks’ leave from 10 February to 3 March and I intended to spend it in Berlin. Biene was trying to get some time off too, so that we could be together again. Barely three months had passed since I’d last seen her, but it seemed more like three years, such was the chasm, of experience as much as distance, that now seemed to separate us.