As always we needed somewhere secure and reasonably discreet in which to do the job, and with so little territory left to work in, the obvious place was the cellar. Late on 30 June, during a break in the endless task of document-burning, I took a squad of men to the camp. Some of the inmates had been working in the Lenin House as long as I had. I knew all of them by sight and many by name as well. One or two of them even said: ‘Good evening, Doctor.’ I didn’t answer. As I knew from bitter experience, the more you acknowledged a man’s existence, the harder it was to kill him. So I had them herded downstairs, letting the men kick or rifle-butt any who slackened their pace. Then they were locked in for the night, to be disposed of as easily as possible on the following morning.

  This was, of course, the same cellar where the Langs had been kept, and as I woke up on 1 July, soon after dawn, I couldn’t help thinking about my final conversation with Hannah. She was right: I was damned, no matter what. I’d done too much to ever be forgiven. But maybe, just this time, I didn’t have to kill these particular Jews. I was the only SS officer left in Minsk, there was nothing to stop me clearing out and leaving them to their fate. No one would give a damn. The city was falling. The war was lost. We hadn’t managed to get rid of all the documents, either. What did any of it matter any more?

  I dragged myself out of bed and didn’t bother with breakfast. There was no food to be had, anyway. All I could find was one last case of vodka, so I had half a bottle to steady my shaking hands and went to get my men, who were in no better state than me. They stared at me through a dozen bleary, bloodshot eyes waiting for orders. I looked back, wondering what I would say, thinking all the times I’d done my duty, no matter what. My whole life had been dedicated to following orders and doing my best. How could I bring myself to stop now?

  I decided to give the order to shoot.

  But when I opened my mouth what I actually said was: ‘Load your machine pistols. Get your gear on the trucks. We’re out of here in ten minutes, and we’re not stopping for stragglers. If you’re not on a truck, you stay here.’

  One of the men spoke up. ‘What about the Jews, sir? I thought we were supposed to get rid of them.’

  Good question: what about them? My answer, like my order seemed to come without thinking: ‘That’s right, Maier, we were. But we’re going to need every bullet we’ve got for shooting Ivans.’

  ‘But sir, we’re leaving witnesses alive.’

  ‘Exactly. And if anyone ever accuses us of being killers, those witnesses can testify that we let them live. Trust me, Maier, I’m a lawyer and a policeman, I know about these things. And you’ve just used up one of your ten minutes.’

  The men raced away. Von Toll watched them go and said: ‘Why’d you do it … really?’

  ‘It was a test. I wanted to see if I was still a human being. You know, see if there was anything left.’

  ‘I’m glad there is.’

  ‘Yeah, well, the Ivans’ll probably shoot them anyway, just to make it look like we did it. They don’t care. The Jews are just more Germans as far as they’re concerned.’ I slapped him on the shoulder. ‘Let’s get out of here. I’m sick of this fucking place.’

  We left the Lenin House with the Reds just a couple of hundred metres behind us. The trucks raced away down the street, dodging between bomb-craters and falling shells, the men blazing away at the brown-coated figures chasing after us until we escaped the confines of the city and headed southwest towards the Polish border.

  Three hours later we hit the tail-end of the main retreat. A line of trucks, tanks, artillery and horse carts was crawling down the road ahead of us: the pride of the Wehrmacht going back home with its head bowed low and its tail between its legs. A rucksack lay in front of me on the floor of the truck. It contained a few personal belongings and my bag of gold rings and teeth. As long as I kept hold of that, I would not be poor. The day dragged on, the sun went down and progress was painfully slow. The men were exhausted, the drivers half-asleep at the wheel. But no matter how much they protested I forbade them to stop on any account: we’d be continuing on through the night.

  I wanted to be at least one hundred kilometres from Minsk by the time the sun came up.

  52

  Koblenz: 22 May 1963

  The trees outside the courthouse were bright with blossom and fresh new leaves. Kraus was already inside: he’d gone ahead, wanting a private word with the prosecutor. Paula was grateful for the chance to gather her thoughts in private as she walked from the hotel. As she had suspected, Barbara Kraus had decided that she wanted her husband after all. He hadn’t moved back in yet, but he was spending more and more time at the family house or going on expeditions with Barbara and the children: trips to the zoo or the cinema, walks in the country, Sunday lunches and so on. Paula and Kraus were still together, still telling one another: ‘I love you,’ but both well aware that things couldn’t go on the way they were. They’d talked many times and agreed that a decision of some kind had to be made. But nothing had been done.

  It had always mattered a great deal to Paula that Kraus had already left home before she started going out with him. She had not stolen him from his wife, and if he went back to the marriage she had no desire to be his mistress: his little bit on the side. But she knew that Kraus would try to put off making a definitive decision for as long as possible. When she was feeling cynical she saw his procrastination as a simple matter of selfishness: why choose one woman as long as he could have both? But Kraus was fundamentally a decent man and Paula could also see that he was trying to find a way of resolving the situation without hurting either of the two women involved, however impossible that might be. Even so, she wasn’t quite sure whether he was more bothered by causing pain to someone he loved, or having to cope with its consequences: an angry, tearful woman letting him know precisely how humiliated and deserted she felt. Well, Paula was going to save him that embarrassment.

  Having waited in vain for Kraus to take action, she was doing so herself. She’d done her very best to come to terms with the idea of losing a man she still loved, and then she’d set about planning a new life for herself. She told herself that it was for the best, a change of seasons in her heart to match the one in the world around her. Kraus had changed her life, and all for the better, but he belonged to a different generation. He could only ever be a temporary lover and now, while there was still time, she wanted to find someone closer to her own age to be the man for the rest of her life. But there was all the difference in the world between rationalizing something intellectually and coming to terms with it emotionally. That she still had to do. And in the meantime there was a trial to be finished: the last step on a four-year journey to which she still did not know the ultimate destination.

  *

  The Koblenz District Court was about to deliver the verdicts and sentences in the case of Georg Heuser and his ten co-defendants.

  The whole of the previous day had been given over to the reading of the judges’ summing-up of the case. It ran to more than one hundred and fifty pages and included detailed biographies of all eleven defendants and authoritative summaries of Nazi policy against the Jews; the general activities of the SS in the occupied Eastern Territories from June 1941 onwards; the structure and personnel of the KdS; the various genocidal ‘actions’ that were the principal subjects of the case, and a charge-by-charge analysis of the case against each individual defendant. The evidence was described and its merits or failings assessed with absolute fairness and a scrupulous consideration for the rights of the accused.

  Some of the men, notably von Toll, were dealt with in a matter of minutes, so straightforward and so relatively insignificant were the accusations against them. Heuser was another matter altogether. The sheer number of his alleged crimes, the complex and often contradictory nature of the evidence against him and the extreme difficulty of meeting the proper standards of proof when dealing with events from so long ago, with so few surviving witnesses, had clearly taxed the judges to the limit.

  That Heuser had organized, commanded or participated in multiple mass executions and individual homicides was apparent to anyone who had followed the case. Having established beyond any doubt that almost thirty-two thousand people had died at the hands of the men of the KdS, the judges’ only caveat was that this might be an underestimate: ‘It should be noted that the jury found the victim counts of two major actions in March and July 1942 are minimum figures, which in reality may have been much higher.’

  But did any of that make Heuser guilty beyond a reasonable doubt?

  As one prosecution case after another was analysed and found wanting, Paula thought of herself sitting in Albrecht Mauritz’s study while he pointed out that she could not provide a date, a victim’s name, a body or a murder weapon for the case of the letter-writing Jew allegedly shot at Maly Trostinets. She’d watched in dismay as Heuser, who had begun that penultimate day looking exhausted and fearful, relaxed with each passing hour. It was painfully obvious that he thought he’d got away with it.

  Now, on the final morning, that impression was even stronger. Before the formal proceedings got under way Heuser was chatting cheerfully to his lawyer, Geis, laughing like a man without a care in the world and telling the others not to worry. So it was Paula, her personal problems temporarily quite forgotten, whose guts were twisted with tension.

  Having considered the events under review and the evidence pertaining to them on the first day, the court came to matters of the law as it related to the nature of guilt and the culpability for acts of homicide. After her session with Mauritz, Paula could accept the accused being given the same rights as any other criminal when considering the evidence against them, even if that policy made it much harder for the prosecution to secure convictions. But the court was bending over backwards even when they were guilty, and providing special dispensation when considering their possible sentences, too. The Federal Republic had done away with capital punishment from the moment of its birth, an understandable reaction after so much legalized, state-sanctioned murder during the Nazi years. But the judges were going further. They appeared to be ruling out life sentences, too.

  Their verdict stated that: ‘The court is not dealing with the ordinary class of criminals.’ Paula’s spirits sank as she heard the words being read out loud. ‘None of the accused committed these crimes of their own volition. Instead, they followed the orders of a government that no longer exists. Aside from the events dealt with in this trial, none had any conflicts with the law, and after the war, without exception, they regained reputable jobs and led a proper life in honourable circumstance. For this reason, they as well as their families are especially hard hit by punishment so long after the event. Given the exceptional circumstances that made them criminals, their guilt does not seem so grave as to call for lifelong imprisonment as a means of expiation.’

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ Paula whispered to Kraus, who was sitting next to her. ‘First they say that the estimated number of victims is probably too low, and then they decide that none of the accused will die in prison? It’s just not logical.’

  In only one case did the court deem a life sentence appropriate: Stark’s murder of the barber Steiner and his two sons. Paula could follow that legal reasoning easily enough. The Steiners had died because Stark had chosen, of his own free will, to kill them. In that case he had been acting entirely as an individual, rather than the agent of the state. Therefore it was murder, pure and simple. Kraus gave a bitter little snort at that. ‘Ironic, huh? The court took precisely the same view as the Nazi authorities in Minsk.’ His head was right by Paula’s ear and he was speaking in a disturbingly intimate whisper. ‘They both thought shooting those three men without orders was more serious than wiping out three thousand ghetto-dwellers with them.’

  Stark aside, the other lesser defendants received sentences that struck Paula as derisory. Harder, the Frankfurt shopkeeper, got off with the lightest term: just three years and six months for his part in burning the three Russians. He was the only one who had never participated in the mass executions. Of those that had, Dalheimer and Oswald were sentenced to four years in jail; Feder, Kaul and von Toll got four years and six months; Merbach seven years; Schlegel eight years and Wilke ten years. These nine men had each already spent two or three years in prison. Obtaining parole would be a formality, since the court had already stated that none of them presented a continuing threat to society. All things considered, some could expect to be back on the street within little more than a year.

  But what of Heuser?

  As all the charges that Geis had managed to undermine were excluded, Max Kraus hissed, ‘You see? Triage … It worked,’ loudly enough for a few people nearby to hear and turn around with a mixture of puzzlement and disapproval on their faces. Even so, for all the skill with which Geis had mounted his client’s defence, Heuser was found guilty on a total of ten counts, of which four related to individual transport actions. Taking all the mass executions of Jews in which he had been proven to have participated, the court deemed him to have had a hand in the deaths of 11,100 Jews.

  ‘Of all the defendants, Heuser was involved in the most acts of extermination against the Jews,’ the judgment read. ‘He repeatedly played an active part and exercised a supervisory role. His education, his study of law and his professional rank of Commissar imposed a particular requirement on him not to take part in these crimes. Thanks to his intelligence, his energy and his esteemed and respected place among the members of the Security Police and SD Minsk, he, more than anyone, was in a position to avoid killing Jews if he had wanted to. It is to his credit that he recognizes this himself. He has made no excuses, but frankly admitted his guilt. He also shows genuine remorse and an inner readiness to atone for his deeds.’

  ‘Or he’s a very good actor,’ commented Kraus.

  The judgment continued: ‘Regarding the shooting of the Russian agent in the ghetto cemetery, the court accepted that the war in the east was carried out with merciless harshness on both sides. Heuser believed that by neutralizing the agent he was preventing harm to German soldiers on the front line. However, it was extremely reprehensible and inhuman to kill her without a fair hearing and without giving her the opportunity to arrange her affairs, and then to let her corpse lie unburied.’

  ‘That has to be murder, surely,’ Paula whispered.

  But apparently not: Heuser was deemed a mere accessory to manslaughter in the female agent’s case. In every other instance of guilt he was an accessory to murder. The court ruled that the element of murder in the mass executions lay not in the actions of the men who fired guns or drove gas vans, but in the minds and intentions of the men who had devised the Holocaust and given them their orders. Bearing that in mind, Heuser was sentenced as follows:

  For the mass execution of Jews from the Minsk ghetto, 1–3 March 1942: six years in prison.

  For the transport actions of 11 May, 26 May, 4 September, 25 September and 9 October 1942: four years for each offence.

  For the mass execution of Jews from the Minsk ghetto on 28–30 July 1942: ten years.

  For the mass execution of Jews during the liquidation of the Minsk ghetto in October 1943: four years.

  For the burning to death of three prisoners in November 1943: three years.

  For killing a female Russian agent, autumn 1943: five years.

  Even these sentences were little more than notional, for the jury mandated a maximum of fifteen years total prison time. The years Heuser had already spent on remand would be counted towards that, and he had the chance of parole for good behaviour.

  Paula did the sums: Heuser would be out of jail in six or seven years, maybe less. He knew it too. She was watching him being led away to the cells and he didn’t act like a man who’d been condemned, but one who’d literally got away with murder. Just as he reached the door, Heuser turned his head back to the courtroom and for a second their eyes met. A flicker of a smile crossed his face, and it felt to Paula as though he were laughing at her, his old arrogance fully restored. She couldn’t bear to look at him and had to turn her eyes away. By the time she glanced up again, Heuser was gone.

  As the judges rose and the proceedings came to a close Paula was practically in tears of frustration and rage. ‘Mauritz was wrong. This isn’t a triumph for any kind of justice. They might as well have had Eichmann, Heydrich and Himmler sitting on the judges’ bench!’

  Those final words had been said loud enough for everyone in her immediate vicinity to hear, and thunderous faces were turning round to see who had uttered them. ‘Let’s get you out of here and into a bar before someone decides to sling you in jail as well,’ Kraus said as he put one arm around her shoulder, held the other up to ward off the anger all around them and hustled her out of the court.

  53

  ‘Prost!’ said Kraus, downing a glass of schnapps in one.

  ‘Prost,’ Paula replied sullenly, swallowing the strong clear spirit and then coughing as it burned the back of her throat.

  Kraus pushed a dewy glass of Königsbacher, the local beer of Koblenz, across the table towards her. ‘Now take some of this to cool you down.’

  She did as she was told and then Kraus took out two cigarettes, handed her one and said: ‘And now the final part of the medicine.’

  Paula was only a very occasional smoker, so the first breath of the nicotine-laden smoke made her head spin. By the second, however, she had regained her senses, and the combination of all the various chemicals she had just ingested was enough to take the edge off the fury eating away at her insides. She had expected Kraus to launch straight into a discussion of the case, but instead he looked at her and said: ‘So, did you decide to quit? The job, I mean …’