The Americans ran the prison and there were more convicted Nazi war criminals locked up there than anywhere else in Europe. Two or three hundred had been executed on the prison gallows between 1946 and 1951, and since then, a great many more had been released, but the place still housed some of the biggest mass murderers in history. Of these, I was well acquainted with several, although I avoided most of them during the times when we prisoners were allowed freely to associate. There were even a few Japanese prisoners from the Shanghai war crimes trial, but we had little or no contact with them.
The castle was from 1910 and, unlike the rest of the historic old town, was west of the River Lech: Four white brick-built blocks were arranged in a cross shape at the center of which was a tower from which location our steel-helmeted iron-faced guards could swing their white batons like Fred Astaire and watch us.
I remembered once receiving a postcard of Hitler’s cell and I had the impression that my own was not dissimilar: There was a narrow iron bedstead with a small nightstand, a bedside light, a table, and a chair; and there was a big double window with more bars on the outside than on a lion tamer’s cage. I had a cell facing southwest, and that meant I had the sun in my cell during the afternoon and evening and a pleasant view of Spöttingen Cemetery, where several of the men hanged at WCPN1—which was what the Americans called it—were now interred. This made a nice change from my view of New York Bay and Lower Manhattan. The dead make quieter neighbors than waste-cargo barges.
The food was good, although not recognizably German. And I didn’t much like the clothes we were obliged to wear. Gray and purple stripes never suited me very well; and the little white hat lacked the all-important wide snap brim I’d always preferred and made me look like an organ-grinder’s monkey.
Soon after my arrival I had a visit from the Roman Catholic chaplain, Father Morgenweis: Herr Dr. Glawik, who was a lawyer appointed by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice; and a man from the Association for the Welfare of German Prisoners whose name I don’t recall. Most Bavarians, and quite a few Germans, too, regarded all of the inmates at WCPN1 as political prisoners. The U.S. Army saw things differently, of course, and it wasn’t very long before I was also visited by two American lawyers from Nuremberg. With their strongly accented German and their bullshit bonhomie, these two were patient and very, very persistent; and it was only a relief in part that they seemed hardly interested in the two Vienna murders—which had nothing to do with me—and not at all interested in the killings of two Israeli assassins at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, of which I was undeniably guilty, albeit in self-defense. What they were interested in was my wartime service with the RSHA—which was the security office created by the mergers of the SD (the security service of the SS), the Gestapo, and Kripo in 1939.
Several times a week we would meet in an interview room on the ground floor near the main entrance of the castle. They always brought me coffee and cigarettes, a little chocolate, and sometimes a Munich newspaper. Neither man was older than forty, and the younger of the two was the senior officer. His name was Jerry Silverman, and before coming to Germany he’d been a New York lawyer. He was hugely tall and wore a green gabardine military jacket with pink khaki trousers; there were several ribbons on his breast, but instead of the metal bars most American officers wore on their shoulders to indicate their rank, Silverman and his sergeant had a cloth patch sewn on their sleeves that identified them both as members of the OCCWC—the Office of the Chief Counsel for War Crimes. The fact was, they were wearing uniforms but they didn’t belong to the U.S. military; they were Pentagon bureaucrats, prosecutors from the American Department of Defense. Only in America could they have given lawyers a uniform.
The other, older man was Sergeant Jonathan Earp. He was a head shorter than Captain Silverman and had—he told me, in an idle moment when I asked him—graduated from Harvard Law School prior to his joining the OCCWC.
Both men had one or two German parents, which was why they spoke the language so fluently, although Earp was the more fluent of the two; but Silverman was cleverer.
They came armed with several briefcases that were full of files, but they hardly ever referred to these; each man seemed to carry a whole filing cabinet in his head. They did, however, take copious notes: Silverman had small, very neat, distinguished handwriting that looked as though it might have been written by Völundr, the ruler of the elves.
At first I assumed they were interested in the workings of the RSHA and my knowledge of Department VI, which was the office of Foreign Intelligence; but it seemed they knew almost as much about that as I did. Perhaps more. And only gradually did it become clear that they suspected me of something far more serious than a couple of local murders.
“You see,” explained Silverman, “there are some aspects of your story that just don’t add up.”
“I get a lot of that,” I said.
“You say you were a Kommissar in Kripo until—?”
“Until Kripo became part of the RSHA in September 1939.”
“But you say you were never a party member.”
I shook my head.
“Wasn’t that unusual?”
“Not at all. Ernst Gennat was the deputy chief of Kripo in Berlin until August 1939, and he was to my certain knowledge never a Nazi Party member.”
“What happened to him?”
“He died. Of natural causes. There were others, too. Heinrich Muller, the Gestapo chief. He never joined the party either.”
“Then again,” said Silverman, “maybe he didn’t need to. He was, as you say, head of the Gestapo.”
“There are others I could mention, but you have to remember that the Nazis were hypocrites. Sometimes it suited them to be able to use people who were outside the party system.”
“So you admit you allowed yourself to be used,” said Earp.
“I’m alive, aren’t I?” I shrugged. “I guess that speaks for itself.”
“The question is how much you allowed yourself to be used,” said Silverman.
“It’s been bothering me, too,” I said.
He was clever, but he couldn’t ever have played poker; his face was much too expressive. When he thought I was lying, his mouth hung open and he shifted his lower jaw around like a cow chewing tobacco; and when he was satisfied with an answer, he looked away or made a sad sound like he was disappointed.
“Maybe you’d like to get something off your chest,” said Earp.
“Seriously,” I said. “You don’t want me.”
“That’s for us to decide, Herr Gunther.”
“Maybe you could beat it out of me, like your friends in the Navy and the FBI.”
“It seems like everyone wants to hit you,” said Earp.
“I’m just wondering when you two are going to figure that it’s your turn.”
“We’re not like that in the Chief Counsel’s Office.” Silverman sounded so smooth I almost believed him.
“Well, why didn’t you say so before? Now I feel completely reassured.”
“Most of the people in here have talked to us because they wanted to talk,” said Earp.
“And the rest?”
“Sometimes it’s hard to say nothing when all your friends have ratted on you,” said Silverman.
“That’s okay, then. I don’t have any friends. And very definitely none in this place. So anyone who rats on me is probably a bigger rat himself.”