I thought of the day Heydrich had come to Minsk and boasted of a new camp that could dispose of ten thousand Jews in a single day by gassing them and then cremating their bodies. And it struck me that this was exactly what the British had done in Hamburg. First they had gassed their victims, using carbon monoxide, just as we did in our gas vans here. And then they had cremated them. But the British had made Heydrich’s great camp look puny, for they had not processed ten thousand innocent people, but forty thousand.

  Then I considered all the planning that must have gone into the raids. Just putting seven hundred bombers into the air at once, and getting them to the same place at exactly the right intervals so that they didn’t collide with one another – why, that would require a timetable that even the Reichsbahn boys would be proud of. I imagined all the meetings that must have taken place, all the memos that must have been written to make sure that there was enough aviation fuel at the airfields, and all the correct bombs for each plane, and plenty of bullets for the gunners.

  It all seemed very familiar to me, so then I realized what the British were really up to. ‘This,’ I decided, ‘is their final solution to the German question.’

  *

  Summer gave way to autumn, the season of decay – an apt metaphor, perhaps, for the overwhelming sense of entropy that now engulfed us. At every level, from the lowliest individual to the entire state of the Reich itself, there was a sense of things fraying at the edges, crumbling from within, heading inexorably towards a point of total collapse. The Russians could sense it. The partisans became ever more bold in their attacks on us, placing bombs in one German installation after another, even killing twenty people when they left an explosive device in the dining hall of the Lenin House itself. Of course, reprisals were ordered, local civilians rounded up and shot, but it made no difference, the attacks kept coming.

  By now, most of my professional life was focused on anti-partisan activities. It was my job to catch spies and saboteurs. But the business of occupying a hostile nation and suppressing its population depends upon maintaining the balance of terror. As long as one can convince the mass of the population that one has the power and will to find, capture, torture and kill wrongdoers, then fear will inhibit the vast majority from hostile action. But the very second that one loses one’s grip, the people sense it and rise up, and once they do that, their sheer numbers become terrifying to their oppressors, for no matter how many you kill there are always many more to take their place. We were on the very point of that balance now. So both sides kept raising the stakes, making the wantonness and brutality of their actions ever more severe, waiting to see which would crack first.

  On 21 September the partisans assassinated Gauleiter Kube. I was summoned from my bed to go to the scene. It wasn’t difficult to piece together what had happened. The culprit was one of Frau Kube’s ‘twelve Russian swine’ – an attractive 22-year-old housemaid called Yelena Mazanik. That evening, shortly before the Kubes retired to bed, Mazanik approached the guard on duty at the door to the Kubes’ private quarters and said: ‘I bet you haven’t had a drop of coffee today, officer.’ Under questioning, he admitted that she was looking at him in a seductive fashion as she said these words.

  The guard agreed that he’d not had any coffee and was thirsty, at which point Mazanik said that if he went downstairs to the kitchen, Domna the cook would give him a cup. Sure enough, this Domna woman confirmed that Mazanik had previously asked her to make coffee for the guard, saying that he was her boyfriend.

  While the guard was in the kitchen, Mazanik entered the Kubes’ quarters, went directly to the main bedroom and placed a bomb between the mattress and the springs of Kube’s bed. She remained in the building until the bomb went off but then left immediately, telling the guards on the main entrance that she was going to find a doctor. Shortly afterwards, a car was heard in the distance, starting up and then accelerating at high speed.

  Two things then happened. For our part we rounded up three hundred men, women and children from the area of Minsk where Mazanik lived and shot the lot of them. The Russians, meanwhile, declared Mazanik a Hero of the Soviet Union and broadcast a radio interview in which she described how she had carried out the bombing in the kind of detail that only the actual assassin could have known. So Mazanik had not only killed one of the most senior German officials in Russia, she had managed to get back behind Russian lines without our being able to lay a finger on her. We could have killed three hundred thousand people, it would have made no difference. Everyone knew that the Russians were winning.

  Within days of Kube’s death, Smolensk fell. The Red Army were now just two hundred kilometres away. Our old commander Ehrlinger was forced to retreat from Smolensk, ended up in Minsk and made the best of a bad situation by taking charge. There were yet more organizational changes: the kind that beset an organization when its leaders try to pretend they can reshuffle their way out of imminent disaster. I was placed in charge of an entire new Department N, dealing exclusively with counter-espionage and anti-partisan activities. There was, of course, no promotion to go with my new role, but it did have a very significant effect on me as a person. For now I was no longer obliged to take part in mass actions against huge numbers of people. Instead I frequently acted as an individual, dealing with solitary perpetrators. And so I found myself behaving in a way that must have made the ghost of Paul Ogorzow look on in admiration and even envy. For I became his brother-in-arms. Cloaked in the respectability of my uniform, I went out into the battered streets of Minsk to hunt my prey: a stalker and killer of women in the night.

  47

  Ludwigsburg: 22 December 1962

  Kraus was going back to his family for Christmas, ‘for the children’s sake,’ he said. They had one more night together before Paula drove up to Frankfurt to spend ten days with her mother being ferried round to endless social events to meet the few remotely suitable men who were still unmarried and whom she had not already rejected. They should have been making wild, unfettered love, the kind that had come so naturally a year earlier, but as Paula lay in Kraus’s arms she was consumed not by passion, but the searing barbarity of the evidence she had been hearing in Koblenz.

  ‘We had a witness last week talking about the gas vans,’ she said. Her eyes weren’t looking up at Kraus, just staring into the darkness. ‘It was ghastly. They looked just like ordinary furniture vans, but the insides were lined with sheet metal, so they were airtight and impossible to escape. They put the Jews in there and then they ran a hose from the van’s exhaust up into the back of the van, where all the people were, and started driving. The exhaust fumes would go into the compartment, people would start to choke and the van would just keep driving. Of course by now all the people were banging on the side of the van, screaming and begging to be let out, but they were just ignored. When they got to the burial pit, they let the engine run until there was no more sound or movement from the back of the van and then they would open up the door …’

  ‘Paula, darling …’ said Kraus, squeezing her tighter, but she ignored him. She was lost in the world she now inhabited, telling this vile story because she simply could not keep it inside her any longer. She had to let the poison out of her mind.

  ‘All the bodies would be carried out and then the inside of the van was hosed down. I can’t even begin to tell you what was in there. Blood, shit, hair, false teeth … even the judges were going pale …’

  ‘Paula …’ his voice was less patient now, but still she hardly even heard him, carrying on regardless.

  ‘But that wasn’t the thing that really got to me. The vans were actually converted from regular trucks by mechanics at the Criminal Police headquarters in Berlin. It was Nebe, the old police chief, who thought of running a hose from the exhaust, you see. So the van drivers would bring their vehicles all the way from Berlin to Minsk, and one of the men brought his fourteen-year-old son with him. Can you imagine, bringing a boy into that hell? The man must have been mad. The witness was quite indignant when it was suggested to him that there was something profoundly wrong about it all. He said: “Oh no, the lad never saw anything nasty. They gave him a job as an office boy for the SS.”’

  ‘Paula! That’s enough!’

  ‘I’m sorry, it’s just that I have to talk about it. I have to tell someone. And if I can’t tell you, of all people …’

  ‘Of course you can tell me. But not here, not now …’

  ‘When then? I’m not going to see you for a week, maybe more. Am I just supposed to keep it all inside, just stick a fake smile on my face and pretend that Christmas with my mother means anything at all to me? Well? Come on, tell me! What do you want me to do?’

  ‘You could calm down. That would be a start.’

  Paula couldn’t believe it. Kraus, the man who always had time for her, who was always ready to listen, implying she was just being a hysterical female. How could he do that, be just like all the other, lesser men? Then it struck her that he might be right. Maybe she really was being hysterical, and that realization only made her even angrier – at herself now as well as him – and she had to get away from him. She sat on the edge of the bed, her back to Kraus, her head in her hands, and suddenly her shoulders were shaking and the tears were flooding down her face.

  Kraus reached over to the bedside table where she kept a box of tissues, pulled out a bundle and then shuffled back across the bed. He sat on the edge beside her and handed her a couple of tissues.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said, wrapping an arm around her. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’

  Paula gave a sad little shake of the head. ‘No it isn’t.’

  Kraus didn’t say anything right away. He let her cry herself out, blow her nose, dry her face and compose herself before he asked her: ‘What’s really the matter?’

  She shrugged. ‘Everything.’

  Kraus chuckled affectionately. ‘Could you be more specific?’

  Paula managed a forlorn smile.

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘I’m all ears.’

  ‘The case is killing me …’

  ‘Hmm, I think I’d worked that out for myself.’

  ‘I’m sorry … I know it wasn’t what you wanted to hear tonight.’

  ‘But it was what you had to say, so …’ He pulled her closer to him. ‘It is all right. Really.’

  Now she turned her head to look up at him. ‘I don’t think so … Barbara wants you back, it’s obvious.’

  ‘That’s not what it feels like to me. As far as I’m concerned she’s just decided that the kids deserve to have a proper family Christmas and it’s up to us to be grown-up enough to behave properly and give it to them.’

  Paula sighed, amazed that even a man as intelligent and perceptive as Kraus could be so deaf, dumb and blind to the intentions of a woman he had known for almost all his adult life. ‘Is that what you think?’ she asked.

  ‘Why shouldn’t I?’

  ‘Because that’s not what’s happening.’ It all seemed very clear to Paula now, and she found herself able to talk as calmly as if she were analysing the tactics of an opposing lawyer. ‘Can’t you see? She’s changed her mind. Either she’s discovered how much she misses you, or she just doesn’t want to raise two children by herself, worrying about money, knowing the neighbours are looking down on her.’

  ‘My God! You make Barbara sound like some cynical, calculating Machiavelli! She’s not like that at all.’

  ‘She’s a woman who’s fighting to rescue her marriage, and honestly I don’t blame her, because it’s just what I would do if I were in her shoes. She’ll be waiting at the door to greet you with the biggest smile you’ve seen from her in years and a kiss – just a little kiss on the cheek. And you’ll smell her perfume and it’ll bring back memories of all the good times and she’ll know it because it brought back the same memories when she put it on too.’

  ‘My God! I had no idea you had such a vivid imagination!’

  ‘She’ll be five kilos lighter than the last time you saw her,’ Paula continued, barely pausing while Kraus spoke. ‘She’ll have had her hair done, and even if you don’t notice that you’ll certainly notice that it’s roast pork for dinner …’

  ‘My favourite, as everyone knows,’ said Kraus wryly.

  ‘Exactly … and a Pilsner to go with it … and everything arranged just the way you like it.’

  ‘If you ask me, it’s just as likely she’ll be ice cold, polite at best, maybe one of those fake smiles you were talking about, just to make the children think we’re getting on.’

  ‘Well, if she’s like that, then I’m wrong. But she won’t be, I know she won’t.’

  Kraus looked at her with something close to alarm on his face. ‘Do you think it would make any difference to me … to us? For God’s sake, I love you.’

  ‘I know you do,’ she said, with a sadness that cut Kraus to the heart, for she sounded like a woman who’d already written them off.

  ‘And you love me too!’ he insisted.

  ‘Yes … I do. But don’t you see? It makes no difference. In the end, Barbara has everything: your children, your house, all your years together. I can’t compete with that.’

  ‘You don’t have to compete with her … or anyone. I’m here. I’m not going anywhere else. You’ve got me.’

  She kissed his chest.

  ‘You silly thing,’ Kraus murmured. ‘I love you. I want you … I want you right now.’

  And so they made love, just as the occasion demanded. But even as they did, Paula was overwhelmed by a sense that the foundations of her life were crumbling beneath her. Her relationship with Kraus was bound so closely to the Heuser trial. And it seemed to her that both were entering their final stages.

  48

  Minsk: October 1943 – July 1944

  Yelena Mazanik wasn’t the only attractive young woman recruited by the Soviets to infiltrate our ranks. One day in October my men discovered sketch plans of various areas of the Lenin House being carried by a suspected partisan. There were notes written alongside the sketches detailing the senior officers who worked in various offices and the security procedures for their protection. Under interrogation the partisan confessed that he had received them from a fellow bandit called Lydia Ivanova. I was familiar with this woman, since she had worked for us for some time in a menial capacity and was the lover of a KdS sergeant by the name of Schranz. On being informed of her treachery, Ehrlinger ordered her execution and assigned me to carry it out.

  This was perfectly normal procedure. We were fighting a war to the death against an opponent at least as ruthless as ourselves. There was neither the time nor the necessity for any form of trial, and to this day I defy anyone to tell me that the Russians, or anyone else, would have been any more interested in any legal niceties. To that extent, at least, I still plead ‘not guilty’. As for the rest, well, that’s more open to debate.

  I went round to Ivanova’s apartment, knocked on the door and was greeted by the sound of Schranz’s voice telling me to come in, accompanied by the suppressed, high-pitched giggle of a playful young woman. I entered the apartment, which consisted of a single large room containing a couple of cheap armchairs, covered in tatty fabric. An SS uniform with SD flashes was thrown across one of the chairs; women’s clothes were draped more tidily on the other. The rest of the furniture consisted of an old wardrobe, a dressing table scattered with the usual female paraphernalia, a basin up against one wall with a grimy mirror above it and, directly opposite the door, a large double bed.

  Schranz grinned when he saw me enter the room. He was evidently not expecting any trouble. Ivanova, too, was more amused than fearful at the interruption. She was a pretty thing, aged twenty-four, with a slim, pert figure. Pulling a blanket over her breasts, she sat up and, speaking German with a strong White Russian accent, said: ‘Hello, Doctor.’

  I ignored her for now. Instead I told Schranz: ‘Get back to the Lenin House, right now.’ He did as he was told without question, getting up out of bed and walking across the room to get his uniform. Ivanova, however, frowned, uncertain what to do next.

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘You can stay here for now.’

  She gave me a grateful smile, assuming that she would be left alone to dress in private. Schranz pulled on his boots and walked across to get his winter coat from a hook on the back of the door. His uniform jacket was still undone as he opened the door. He paused for a moment, as if expecting me to come with him – I think he imagined that the purpose of my visit was to summon him back to work – but all he got was a jerk of my head, clearly indicating that he should get out at once. ‘See you later, darling,’ he said to the girl, and then, with a puzzled parting look at me, he departed.

  I closed the door and strode back into the middle of the room. Then I grabbed Ivanova’s clothes off the back of the chair, carried them towards the bed and threw them down on the pulled-back sheets where Schranz had been lying. ‘Put them on,’ I said. ‘You’re coming with me.’

  For the first time Ivanova appeared to be worried. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘You’ll find out in due course. Hurry up. I don’t have all day.’

  Ivanova must have known beyond any possible doubt now that this wasn’t a social call. She chewed her lip, her eyes wide with fear.

  ‘Get dressed,’ I repeated. ‘Or would you rather I dragged you out of here stark naked?’

  I watched her as she dressed, but purely to make sure that she did not try to conceal a weapon about her person or make any bid to get away. Suspects would sometimes risk death by throwing themselves from windows rather than face certain destruction at our hands. But Ivanova wasn’t quite that desperate: not yet. She was still at the stage of disbelief, still thinking of means by which she could persuade me to change my mind. But that wasn’t going to happen. I was too old a hand at the game, too used to switching off my natural responses, both sexual and protective, to the sight of an attractive woman who was marked for death. The more that one could reduce one’s victim to the status of a thing, just another job to be accomplished with the minimum possible fuss, the easier that job became.