Siebert was about to speak, but Mauritz raised a hand to stop her. ‘Wait … think … where is the proof? How can you or anyone else possibly say that Heuser is guilty in this particular case beyond any reasonable doubt? And what would it say if we were to find men guilty merely on the strong suspicion that they had committed a crime?’

  ‘It would say that we are serious about dealing with the evil done by the Nazis in our name.’

  ‘Would it? I don’t think so, and I experienced that evil at first hand. Personally, I am glad that these animals are being allowed all the rights and due process that they denied to their own victims. If we ever resorted to summary justice, we would be no better than them. So when you tell me that Randenbrock is looking at the evidence that has been presented to the court and concluding that it’s insufficient, I applaud him. In fact, I am delighted. It tells me that all my work, all my faith in justice, everything that I suffered, was not in vain, because in the end we have created a country in which even war criminals are treated fairly under law.’

  Mauritz finished making the point with the assertiveness of a man who is expecting a counter-argument, but Paula’s response surprised him. She sipped her coffee reflectively and then said: ‘It’s funny, I was saying something just like that to a friend a few weeks ago. He was complaining about Strauss – the way he’d handled the whole Spiegel thing – and I said, yes, but at least we live in a country in which we can complain without being arrested. And if we don’t like our leaders we can vote them out. So if that’s a step forward, then how can I complain if criminals aren’t found guilty unless there’s actual proof of their crimes?’

  ‘And one in which Nazis face trial in a German court. That’s true progress! Let me ask you another question. Are there any charges on which you are reasonably confident of getting guilty verdicts?’

  ‘I think so. We have a mass of documentary evidence for the major actions. Many of the defendants have confessed to taking part in mass killings.’

  ‘Have any of them tried to pretend that the killings as a whole did not take place?’

  ‘Heavens no! That would be impossible. They know as well as we do what went on.’

  ‘Well then, you’ve done a fine job. The court is considering everything with scrupulous care and absolute regard for the law. It’s subjecting evidence to stringent tests. In cases of doubt, it’s always erring on the side of the defendants. Yet despite all this, it is still undeniable that acts of great evil were done. That, my dear, is a triumph for justice and freedom, and I salute you for your part in it. Now just trust in the court and it will reach the correct conclusions.’

  ‘Thank you, that means a great deal to me … I just hope you’re right.’

  Mauritz smiled. ‘Of course I’m right. I’m your professor. I’m always right. Now … more coffee?’

  42

  Minsk: June 1942 – October 1943

  The longer I spent in Minsk, the harder I found it to recognize myself. I became a completely different man, one capable of doing things he could not previously even have imagined. Every time I took part in one of the transport actions I killed more people by the time I’d emptied my first magazine than Paul Ogorzow had in all his assaults in the gardens of Fried-richsfelde and the carriages of the No. 3 Line. But perhaps this had always been my true self. Had the killer been lurking in me all the time, just waiting to be let out? He was, of course, a secret self, an identity I could not admit to anyone outside the closed circle of the Minsk KdS, and so the sense of alienation from the people I’d known in my other life, already strong when I went back to Berlin on leave, became overpowering. Back then, my love for Biene and her faith in me had broken down the wall between me and the rest of the world, but now that rampart of skulls and bones had grown taller, stronger, infinitely more impervious to other people’s emotions and entreaties.

  Biene wrote to me every week and my only replies were occasional paltry jottings that said nothing of any worth whatsoever. In the end even these meagre responses were beyond me. I started several letters, but found myself becoming as wordless as Baum had been that night we met in Riga. I wasn’t allowed to tell Biene what was happening in Minsk, nor what my duties entailed, and even if I had been, it would have made no difference. Who could possibly inflict the violence, the filth, the lies and the self-delusion of a life like mine on anyone they cared about at all?

  Meanwhile, Biene tried as hard as she could to be happy and positive for my sake. She told funny little stories about her mother’s dachshund, which she insisted was the silliest dog in all the world; or the crazy things people were doing at the Kripo department in Hamburg where she’d gone to work. She sent photographs of herself smiling and blowing me kisses. There was never any talk of poor rations or bombing raids, though I knew the city had suffered them, never any self-pity or weakness. She was as brave as she was beautiful and I knew that I did not deserve her. Even worse, I felt ashamed by her love.

  One morning, when my guts were heaving, my nose still filled with the pit-stench of blood, shit and cordite and my head feeling ready to crack open with the battering it had received from all the vodka it had taken me to get through the day before, and with a hand that shook as it lifted the first cigarette of the day to my lips – for I’d become a smoker as well as a murderer – I wrote to Biene and told her not to wait for me any longer. I lied and said that perhaps when this war was over we would meet as friends and I would be able to explain. I can’t remember what other self-serving rubbish I spewed at her: probably the standard nonsense about how I didn’t believe I could give her what she wanted, and how my decision wasn’t a reflection upon her, but on me. But I can still recall the emptiness that opened up inside of me when I put the letter in the mail and threw away my darling Biene, the finest woman I ever knew, who truly loved me and would certainly have married me if I’d asked. And I remember reaching for another bottle after I’d done it, too.

  By midsummer we were well into the schedule of weekly transports. We now had gas vans intended to save our men from the onerous, distressing business of shooting all our victims, though the vans kept breaking down and were, in any case, too few to do the whole job even when they worked. We persuaded the Reichsbahn to restore an old Russian branchline so that the trains could be taken almost all the way to Blagovshchina, making the job of processing the passengers very much less complicated. And while all this was going on, General Heydrich’s own body lay rotting in a grave at the Invaliden Cemetery in Berlin, for the man I’d once so foolishly idolized had been assassinated by Czech partisans in Prague. But really, who cared about one more body here or there when the whole world had just become one gigantic charnel house?

  At the end of July we carried out the single bloodiest action undertaken in all my time at the Minsk KdS. More than nine thousand Jews were shot and gassed at Blagovshchina, another pit to the west of the city and in the houses and streets of the ghetto itself. I was involved on all three days: it all felt horribly familiar, tedious even. As I was coming away from my two-hour shift at the shooting pit I bumped into Kaul, another KdS officer who worked in the administrative department and pulled every string he could to avoid these actions.

  ‘It’s all right for you, Heuser,’ he said as we walked away from the pit. ‘You’re used to it all.’

  ‘Trust me,’ I told him, ‘I’ve had enough of this shit, too.’

  I wasn’t the only one. Lütkenhus, who had initially taken up his responsibility for Jewish affairs with such enthusiasm and determination, proved to be even more badly scarred than the rest of us by the ghastliness of it all. That he was now a chain-smoking drunk was nothing unusual: it would have been more of a shock to find a man who wasn’t. It wasn’t even remarkable that he’d lost the will to live. To exist in a world so devoid of any redemption, to have proved as conclusively as we had done that the God of love and mercy had either died or simply lost interest in his creations, was enough to deaden the strongest soul. But what marked out Lütkenhus was his active determination to perish as violently as possible. His stated ambition was to get himself a transfer to the Front, to a unit guaranteed to be in the thick of the fiercest fighting, so that he could take a bullet in his brain, to go along with all the bullets he’d shot into the Jews.

  He confessed this to me one night in late September. We’d gassed and shot another trainload that day. After all the hundreds of people he’d killed there was one who’d finally broken him.

  ‘You know how it is, Heuser,’ he said, having armed himself with what we used to call the Minsk Cure: a cigarette in one hand and a vodka bottle in the other. ‘It’s always the damn kids that are the worst. Don’t you find that when they’re standing in front of you, hardly more than chest-high some of them, you just want to ruffle their hair? Well I do, anyway. That’s what I want to do, not shoot the poor little bastards.’

  ‘Don’t think like that. It won’t do you any good,’ I replied, trying as ever to put it all at a distance.

  ‘I can’t help it. I can’t stop thinking. Like this afternoon, for example … there was a line of them coming towards us and I was doing the usual thing, trying to work out which one I was going to get. I always hope it’ll be a really ugly one, or one that’s so old you feel you might be doing them a favour, putting an end to their suffering.’

  ‘I know, I do the same thing,’ I admitted. We all did. We all wanted the vilest possible caricature of a conniving Jew in front of our gun.

  ‘But then you never seem to get them, do you? I looked at the Jews and there was a mother and her little boy and they … they …’ Lütkenhus dragged a hand across his face to wipe tears from his eyes and watery snot from his nose. ‘They were beautiful, Heuser, really beautiful. I mean, you or I would be proud to have a wife and son like these two. And she was talking to him, the way they do, and by now it was obvious that I was going to get one or the other of them. It was the boy. He was, I don’t know, eight or nine I suppose, something like that, thin as a rake of course, with a mop of brown hair. Do you know, she was tidying it as they got near us. She wanted her little boy to look his best as … as … Oh Christ …’

  Lütkenhus was sobbing now. No one paid too much attention. We’d all broken down at one time or another.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said, rubbing his bowed shoulders and trying to comfort him. ‘Just try to forget it …’

  Lütkenhus shook his head. ‘No, no,’ he said, straightening up. ‘I don’t want to forget. I want to tell you about the boy.’

  I wished he’d just shut up, but there was nothing to be done but hear him out. ‘Of course,’ I assured him, ‘I understand.’

  ‘The boy came up to me and stood with his back to me and I … I couldn’t shoot. I just couldn’t do it. And then he turned around to look at me with these huge, dark eyes and he said: “Wasn’t I standing still enough, sir? My mother told me I had to stand still.” So I said: “No, you were standing very still. You did well.” And then he smiled, Heuser. This little boy smiled at me and he turned his back to me again and …’ He took another desperate swig from his bottle, ‘and he stood to attention like a good little soldier. And so I … I shot him.’

  Lütkenhus got his transfer by the end of the year, though he never managed to find a way of getting himself killed: not in wartime, at any rate. I, meanwhile, carried on exactly as I always had done: obeying my orders, doing my best and trying not to think too hard, too often about the consequences. But something must have been going on inside me, some sort of unspoken, subconscious rebellion against what we were doing. For why else was my next move so precipitous, so foolhardy and so totally contrary to my apparent best interests?

  43

  The final transport on the Reichsbahn timetable arrived at the new railway siding by Maly Trostinets at the very beginning of October: just over five hundred Vienna Jews, all to be gassed on arrival. I was in charge of disembarking them from the transport and then loading them into the vans. I had a small detachment of our men with me and also von Toll, who was acting as an interpreter with a platoon of Ukrainian police auxiliaries assigned to the job. The men were in a good mood. This was the last major action of the year, the load was only half as big as usual, and all the vans were actually working for once, so they wouldn’t have to do any shooting.

  The train arrived and we started the usual routine of unloading the Jews and their baggage, handing out the receipts and postcards, and all the rest of it. There were probably three or four hundred people already on the siding when I saw a woman getting off one of the wagons. All the other transportees looked as exhausted, hungry and filthy as usual, but this one was different. She seemed to have been completely untouched by her experience, a blonde angel who couldn’t be sullied by anything earthly. Even the sun came out from behind a cloud after days of incessant rain, just for the pleasure of shining on her.

  I was dumbstruck. People talk about love at first sight, of men who catch sight of a beautiful woman across a crowded room, or in the stalls of the opera house, and in that single instant they are lost in desire. This was exactly like that, except that my first sight of this beauty took place on a dirty siding in the middle of Russia, amidst a crowd of people who were all condemned to death, the very last place where one would ever expect such a thing.

  I walked towards the point where my angel had come to ground, drawn to her as helplessly as an iron filing towards a magnet. I’d seen countless beautiful women going to their deaths at the pits of Koidanov and Blagovshchina, some even more lovely than this one. But for some reason, she was the one who touched me. I felt impelled to save her. I couldn’t let her die. And so, without any clear plan in my mind, I went to her.

  As I drew closer I could see that she was a slender creature in her early twenties. She had short blonde hair and bright blue eyes, and the smile that she was directing at the girl next to her – a brunette in her teens – was filled with cheek and mischief, as if they had embarked on a daring adventure made all the more exciting by their parents’ disapproval. She reminded me a little of Biene, maybe that was what had attracted me. In any case I stopped before the two of them, held out my hand and, trying to hide any trace of what I was really feeling, brusquely demanded: ‘Papers!’

  The two of them reached into their coats and produced their identity documentation. They were sisters: surname Lang, place of birth Vienna, aged twenty-two and seventeen, respectively. The older, blonde one was called Hannah. Her younger sister was Liselotte.

  ‘Are there other members of your family with you?’ I asked.

  ‘Our brother Gottfried,’ Hannah Lang answered, without any trace of nervousness or intimidation.

  ‘Where is he?’

  She looked around, darting her eyes across the crowd, then called out: ‘Friedl! Friedl!’ Her voice sounded confident, clear and beautiful. A tall, strapping lad appeared and gave his sisters a smile that was, like his eyes, the spitting image of Hannah’s.

  ‘Give the officer your papers,’ she instructed him.

  ‘There you are, sir,’ he said as he handed them over: Gottfried Lang, aged nineteen, also born in Vienna.

  I handed all three sets of papers back to their owners and looked at the three Langs. It was just possible to believe that young Liselotte might conceivably be Jewish, but the other two looked as Aryan as it was possible to imagine. That at least gave me a plausible excuse for what I planned to do next.

  ‘A word, please, Fräulein Lang,’ I said summoning her, like a waitress, with my finger. ‘You other two, stay exactly where you are.’

  I led Hannah a few metres away, so that we could no longer be overheard, and, keeping my voice as low as possible, told her: ‘I am SS-First Lieutenant Dr Georg Heuser, the head of the Gestapo here in Minsk.’ I saw the first stab of fear in her eyes at the mention of the word ‘Gestapo’. Good. I needed her to believe in the seriousness of her situation. ‘I have the power of life and death. There is no one in this city so mighty that he would not fear my knock on his door. Nor is there anyone so low that I cannot save him, if it suits my purpose. Do you understand?’

  She nodded, and now her voice was a small, frightened thing as she barely whispered: ‘Yes.’

  ‘Now I’ll present you with a choice. You can follow the other people on this train into one of those black vans over there. In that case you, your brother and your sister will die very horribly, very soon.’

  The blood was draining from her face and I could see the first tears welling in her eyes. ‘Or you can trust me, do exactly what I say, without a word to anyone of our conversation, and the three of you will live.’

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Go to your brother and sister and tell them to obey my instructions to the letter. Are you sure they will follow your lead?’

  ‘Of course, but what about my parents? When will we see them?’

  I was about to walk away, but those last words stopped me in my tracks. ‘What do you mean? Are your parents on this transport, too?’

  ‘No. They came here about a month ago, at the beginning of September. Look, I have a postcard from them.’

  She put her hand in her pocket again and pulled out one of the cards we handed out to the Jews to occupy them while they waited to be taken to the pit. ‘My darling Hannah, Lisl and Friedl,’ it read. ‘Papa and I have arrived safe and sound in Russia. We are in the countryside, just outside Minsk. Soon we will be driven to our new home. I hope we will see you all here very soon. Papa sends his love. With all kisses to you, my beloved children, Mama.’

  Now it was my turn to feel my skin go pale. I’d been at the pit that day. My God, maybe I’d killed this woman or her husband. It was all I could do to remain impassive as I told their daughter: ‘I have to tell you, Fräulein Lang, that your parents are dead. Everyone who comes here on these trains dies. Everyone you see around you will soon be dead. That is why you must do as I say.’