‘It involves an upcoming operation,’ I said. ‘Do I have your permission to inform you of its nature?’

  ‘Ah, Heuser,’ he smiled, ‘always so careful to protect your back. All right, then, let me protect mine, too. Is this operation conducted under the auspices of the Security Police?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I see no reason why you, as a junior officer, should not ask for professional advice from a former commander.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Ah, here comes Frau Meissner with our soup. Why don’t you mull over what you need to talk about while we deal with it. The hotter the better, eh?’

  This was indeed a soup that was greatly improved by being too hot to taste. We chatted inconsequentially about old times in the murder squad. Lüdtke mentioned that he’d received a Christmas card from Biene and I said I’d bumped into Frank Baum.

  Lüdtke grinned at the mention of his name. ‘How was he?’

  ‘He’s changed a great deal.’

  ‘War does that. No one gets out unmarked.’

  ‘It wasn’t war that changed him – at least, not in the sense of fighting. It was something else … Baum’s unit were shooting Jews, thousands of them. It’s what we call an “action”. The thing is, I’ve got my first action when I get back to Minsk next week: five thousand ghetto Jews … And I don’t know what to do.’

  Lüdtke stuck a cigarette in his mouth and used the time taken to light it, draw the first smoke into his lungs and then blow it slowly, contemplatively, back out again to collect his thoughts.

  ‘I’ve heard about this sort of thing. There’ve been rumours ever since we went into Poland, back in ’39. But one always hopes the stories are exaggerated, or simply invented. I assume you know for certain that they’re not.’

  ‘Oh yes, they’re true all right.’

  ‘So what will your part in this be?’

  ‘I’m working on the initial round-up and then I’ll be included in the actual shooting, too. Hofmann says that it’s a matter of principle. Everyone knows that this is a terrible business and the men can’t be expected to participate unless the officers are seen to be doing it too.’

  ‘Well that’s true enough.’

  ‘It feels as though I’m being asked to commit murder. How can a police detective, of all people, possibly consent to that? But equally, I’m an officer, I’m supposed to obey orders and set an example to my men.’

  Lüdtke stubbed out his cigarette and immediately lit another. ‘I can see your dilemma. But you’re not the first man and you certainly won’t be the last to face this kind of choice. War is always filled with cruelty and suffering. That’s the nature of it.’

  ‘But not towards defenceless civilians, surely?’

  ‘On the contrary, it has always been cruellest of all towards them … You surely remember your classical history: “Carthago delenda est.’”

  ‘Carthage must be destroyed …’

  ‘That’s it. Carthage was a massive city. When the Romans finally seized it they killed more than four hundred thousand people and sold the survivors into slavery. Then they razed the city to the ground, obliterating it for ever. Scipio Africanus gave the orders for that “action”. I dare say there were officers under his command who baulked at them. But they obeyed all the same.’

  ‘But the Romans and the Carthaginians were at war with one another. Are we at war with the Jews?’

  ‘We’re at war with whoever our leaders care to choose. Look, Heuser, I know how you feel. I was called up in 1916 and I ended up on the Italian front, in the 12th infantry division under Lequis. In October ’17 we came down out of the Carinthian Alps, smashed through the Italian lines and didn’t stop moving till we reached the Adriatic. The Italians were routed. Their entire army just evaporated. Six hundred thousand men either deserted or surrendered. A splendid result, wouldn’t you agree?’

  I said: ‘Absolutely,’ with enthusiasm, but I felt a degree of envy too. Lüdtke’s war service had been an uncomplicated matter of one fighting man against another. I envied that simplicity. I soon discovered, however, that it wasn’t as simple as I had imagined.

  ‘Well, let me tell you why we won so easily.’ Lüdtke said. ‘We gassed them. The Italians had useless gas masks, much worse than the French or the Tommies, so they had no chance. They’d lost thousands dead and wounded before we even reached their lines. The rest took one look and ran away. It was amazing. We walked right up to their lines and they hardly fired a shot. If anyone did have the nerve to fight back we showed them our latest toy – flamethrowers. Most of them were burned to death in their trenches and bunkers, but a few ran down the hill in flames, screaming and tumbling over like human Catherine wheels. It was terrible to see and it was also wrong. After all, the whole world agrees that the use of gas was criminal. So should the artillery officers who commanded the guns that were loaded with gas shells have obeyed the order to fire?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, feeling that my chances of finding a right answer were diminishing even further.

  ‘No you don’t know,’ he said. ‘That’s the whole point. Soldiers almost never know the true purpose, let alone the outcome of what they’re ordered to do – not at the time. But looking back now, I’m certain that the use of poison gas saved many more lives than it took. After all, we didn’t have to spend weeks trying to fight our way through the Italian lines. Tens of thousands of men on both sides made it to the end of the war because of that – me included. So you’ll never find me apologizing for what we did.’

  ‘I suppose not, but …’

  ‘But nothing. Look, Heuser, I don’t know what’s happening out there in the wilds of Russia. But I cannot believe that you, or anyone else, would be asked to slaughter your fellow human beings, whatever race or religion they are, for no strategic purpose at all. For God’s sake, man, we’re Germans. We’re the most cultured, scientifically advanced people on earth. We believe in laws, in order, in correct procedures. So whatever you’re ordered to do, there will be a reason for it. You must simply trust that the reason is good. And if any of your men come to you and say: “I can’t do this, I don’t believe it’s right,” just tell them what I have told you. It is not our business to think. It is our business to obey. Trust me, my boy, once you think like that, everything becomes much easier.’

  So Lüdtke concluded by telling me almost exactly what I had told von Toll. His endorsement of my opinion lifted a huge weight of doubt off my shoulders.

  ‘Thank you sir, that’s been a great help,’ I said.

  Lüdtke reached across the table and patted me on the shoulder. ‘Think nothing of it. Tell you what, it’s bitter cold outside. Why don’t we have a quick glass of schnapps to warm us up before we go?’

  From that moment on, my leave seemed to get better with every passing day. I went for a drink with Uli Schneider, an old friend who’d been a Luftwaffe reservist with me together back in ’35 and ’36. Schneider was on the administrative staff at Tempelhof Airport, coordinating transport for senior officers, politicians, even the Führer himself. He told me there was a flight leaving Berlin on the morning of the 28th, bound for Minsk: some bigwig from the Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories. So if I wanted to fly back to Minsk in a few hours, instead of spending two days on a train, I only had to ask. ‘And he’s taking one of the Führer’s personal Condors,’ Uli added. ‘So you’d really be flying in style.’

  Naturally, I leapt at his invitation. Now I could spend all of my birthday – and all night – with Biene. I called her in Hamburg and she was thrilled by the news. A day later her train was pulling into Berlin’s Lehrter station, and from the moment Biene and I set eyes upon one another at it was as though it had been minutes rather than months since we were last together. For three days and nights we hardly left my apartment, except for occasional expeditions to buy food and champagne and one trip to the movies. We saw something called Women are Better Diplomats because everyone I’d met in Berlin said Biene would love it. But it made no impression on me at all, since she and I spent the entire time in the back row, kissing like a pair of lovesick students. It was wonderful just for once to forget about the war, the Russians and the damn Jews; to think of nothing more than her skin, her lips, her breasts and her hot, wet pussy; to fuck and fuck … my God, I have never in my life done it so often or so excitingly.

  It wasn’t just the physical release after all the months away, nor even the passion between us, that made our lovemaking so exciting. It was the glorious sensation that having lived so long in the shadow of death I was plunging into the ultimate celebration of life. The warmth of Biene’s body, the sparkle in her eyes, the dazzling joy of her smile, were the very opposite of the cold, dark, barrenness by which I’d been surrounded. Her love was like a magic potion spreading through me, reviving my spirits and leading me back from the underworld up to the light of the sun.

  On our second night, as we were lying together in a state of drowsy bliss, Biene laid her head on my shoulder and wrapped her legs around my thigh. As her fingers toyed with the hair on my chest she whispered: ‘Do you know what the time is? Just past midnight … which means it is now February 27th.’ She looked up at me with the sweetest, most gentle expression, and said, ‘Happy birthday, my darling. I love you.’

  I replied: ‘I love you too,’ and the relief I felt was as great as the joy, for I knew then that my heart was still intact. I was now twenty-nine years old. I had seen shocking things, and feared that I would soon be called upon to commit acts of violence that went far beyond anything I had ever experienced. But I was still, for now at least, a functioning human being.

  The following morning, when the time came to leave, Biene insisted on coming with me to the airport to see me off. She said it would be romantic, standing on the tarmac, watching ‘my handsome man in his smart uniform’ climbing the steps up to the airplane that was taking him away to war. Of course, she started crying when the time came to say goodbye, but when I took pity on her she insisted that, on the contrary, crying was an essential part of romance. Only a man, apparently, would fail to understand that.

  It makes me smile, even now, just thinking of the look on her face as she said those words, and even my tired old manhood stirs a little thinking of how she pressed her body against mine to give me one last farewell kiss. Darling Biene, my beautiful flower, surrounded by bloodstained snow.

  *

  The Condor was a magnificent aircraft. From the outside it looked like a bomber, with its four mighty engines and bristling machine guns. But inside it was decked out like the most luxurious airliner in the skies. There was even a steward to serve us coffee from a silver pot into the finest bone-china cups.

  The ‘bigwig’ on the trip with me was Dr Alfred Meyer, deputy to the Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg. Meyer was a stern-looking man, who did not seem to relax throughout the entire flight. He insisted on asking me about every detail of life in Minsk. Keenly aware of the influence that a man of such eminence could have on my career, I was very careful to describe it all in terms that he would appreciate. I told him that we were experiencing a satisfactory rate of natural wastage among the Jewish settlers and were shortly to move into a more active phase of operations now that the coming spring enabled us to pursue a vigorous resettlement policy.

  ‘Yes,’ said Meyer. ‘I am hoping to examine one such action against the Jews for myself, starting tomorrow, I believe.’

  Having explained that I had been away for a number of days and had not taken part in the detailed planning for the upcoming action, I did my best to paint the best possible picture of our general approach to the task. Meyer seemed satisfied with what he heard – naturally I gave no indication whatever of the uncertainties that had plagued me – and I could tell that I had made a favourable impression. It had taken me three days by train to get from Minsk to Berlin. The return journey, however, occupied fewer than four hours.

  36

  And so our action began. While I was en route from Berlin, the elders of the Jewish Council had been informed that we would require five thousand people for resettlement, but when our men arrived at the ghetto to collect them, no one was there. They had all gone into hiding, gathering in cellars, holes they had dug in the ground, roof spaces – anywhere that a human body might be concealed.

  We were then ordered to surround the entire Russian ghetto and comb the place, street by street, house by house. It was well after midday before we had about fifteen hundred victims ready to be marched down to the freight yards, by which time the entire operation was running behind schedule. It was exhausting work and one was constantly in a state of nervous tension, playing a deadly game of hide-and-seek, never knowing when or where the next person would be found, or how they might resist.

  Many of the Jews tried to escape and a considerable number were shot. Their bodies were left where they lay as a reminder to the rest of what would happen to anyone who tried to defy us. I wasn’t personally responsible for killing anyone, but this was the first time that I had observed the process in person, and simply to witness it was bad enough.

  Stark, meanwhile, had been in a foul mood, even by his standards. He was down at the freight yard at around 16.30, loading Jews on to the trains to be taken off to Koidanov, where the actual processing was due to take place, when Gauleiter Kube came by with a couple of his people. Kube didn’t say anything at first. He was too busy laying into Burkhardt for the ‘outrageous’ methods he and his men had used to clear the ghetto. Kube, who was regarded by many of the senior SS officers in Ostland as being unacceptably soft on Jews, complained that small children had been killed and called it ‘an obscenity’.

  Kube shouted at Burkhardt until he couldn’t think of anything more to say, muttered: ‘We’ll talk again,’ and was just about to go away when he caught sight of Stark, who was using his trusted personal methods to make sure that the Jews were herded into the cattle-trucks as quickly as possible. Stark was really laying into them with his whip. Kube marched across to him, shouting: ‘You don’t hit people with whips!’

  Kube tried to grab the whip and take it away from Stark, but it was attached by a leather loop to Stark’s wrist, so it wouldn’t come off. The two men wrestled over it for a moment, then Kube let go, stood up straight, dusted himself down and told Stark precisely what kind of an animal he thought he was, right in front of Stark’s men.

  For the next few hours, Stark stormed around in a rage, swearing he’d get his own back on Kube. The following morning we discovered what form his revenge had taken.

  It emerged that some time around midnight, Stark had summoned one of his cronies and the two of them went off into the ghetto and tracked down his old bugbear, Steiner the barber, and his two sons to the hovel where they lived. Of course it was filled to the rafters with people and pitch-black. But Stark’s man had a flashlight with him, so they shone it around until the Steiners had been identified and then dragged them out into the street at gunpoint. What happened next, neither Stark nor his sidekick would say. But whatever the precise circumstances, the outcome was not in doubt. The Steiners were dead.

  Some of the female workers in the office were actually in tears at the news, which struck both their vanity and sentimentality with equal force. They couldn’t decide whether they were more upset that three men were dead, or that they’d no longer be able to find a decent hairdresser in Minsk. I felt sorry for Steiner, of course. He had been an excellent barber and a perfectly agreeable man. But the cruel fact was that Stark had only brought forward an execution that was bound to happen eventually. The question, therefore, was how the authorities would react.

  Stark had carried out a private, entirely unauthorized act, in the middle of an official operation, specifically targeted at Russian not German Jews. If von Toll was right that the extermination of the Jews was an act of pure insanity, then part of that madness was the very pretence that this was all a perfectly rational, orderly activity, conducted according to rules. Seen from that perspective, it was unacceptable, even illegal, to kill people on a whim, even if they were all marked for eventual death. It was perfectly possible that Stark might find himself in the perverse situation of being an SS officer who was punished for killing the wrong kind of Jew.

  Meanwhile all hell was breaking loose at Koidanov because the shooting squads there weren’t killing the other kind fast enough. As darkness fell on the second day of the action, they had to cease firing with well over a thousand people still waiting to be dealt with. I was ordered to take charge at the pit on the following day. ‘I need someone I can count on to finish off the job,’ said Hofmann, paying me the least wanted compliment of my life.

  No sooner had word got around that I was running tomorrow’s show than one of the men assigned to the shooting squad sidled up and begged me to relieve him from his duty.

  ‘I’m sorry, Lieutenant, but I just can’t bear the idea of killing defenceless human beings, I don’t care what race they are.’

  I didn’t threaten to have him shot for disobedience. Whatever anyone may say, no SS man was ever shot for refusing to kill Jews. We all knew it was an intolerable duty. Of course, that didn’t stop me insisting that it had to be done, but the man wouldn’t budge. In the end I was the one who gave in. ‘You can be my loader,’ I said. ‘Stand right by me and make sure I’ve always got a loaded gun. Even if you don’t have the guts to shoot, you can damn well see what the rest of us are having to put up with.’

  Not surprisingly, von Toll also looked for a way out of the shooting squad. ‘I’m sorry,’ I told him, ‘you’ve got to shoot. People know we’re friends. If I’m seen letting you off it’ll look bad for both of us.’

  Once again, though, I allowed him a compromise that I was denied myself. ‘You will be issued with a pistol. The magazine holds eleven rounds. Fill it, with another round in the chamber. When you have fired all twelve rounds you can spend the rest of the day on guard duty, keeping the perimeter of the pit secure. Fair enough?’