“And what did they say?”
Major Weis shook his head. “Questioning an order with Division? Are you mad? I won’t stay a major for very long if I do that. They’ll have my pips and my balls, and not necessarily in that order.” He laughed. “But be my guest. Go on, call them. Just make sure you leave my name out of it.”
Outside there was another volley of shots. I picked up the field telephone and cranked the handle furiously. Thirty seconds later, I was arguing with someone at Division HQ. The major got up and put his ear to the other side of the telephone. When I started to swear, he grinned and walked away.
“You’ve upset them now,” he said.
I slammed the phone down and stood there trembling with anger.
“I’m to report to Division, in Minsk,” I said. “Immediately.”
“Told you.” He handed me his bottle, and I took a swig of what turned out to be not wine but vodka. “They’ll have your rank, for sure. I hope you think it was worth it. From what I hear, this”—he pointed at the door—“this is just the smoke at the end of the gun. Someone else is pulling the trigger. That’s what you have to hold on to, my friend. Try to remember what Goethe said. He said the greatest happiness for us Germans is to understand what we can understand and then, having done so, to do what we’re fucking told.”
I went outside and told the men I’d brought with me in a Panzer wagon and a Puma armored car that we were going into Minsk, to make a report on the morning’s antipartisan action. As we drove along I was in a melancholy frame of mind, but this was only partly to do the fate of a few hundred innocent Jews. Mostly I was concerned for the reputation of Germans and the Germany army. Where would this end? I asked myself. I certainly never conceived that thousands of Jews were already being slaughtered in a similar fashion.
Minsk was easy to find. All you had to do was drive down a long straight road—quite a good road, even by German standards—and follow the gray plume of smoke on the horizon. The Luftwaffe had bombed the city a few days before and destroyed most of the city center. Even so, all of the German vehicles moving along the road kept their distance from one another in case of a Russian air attack. Otherwise, the Red Army was gone and Wehrmacht intelligence indicated that the population of three hundred thousand would have left the city, too, but for the fact that our bombing of the road east out of Minsk—to Mogilev and Moscow—had forced as many as eighty thousand to turn back to the city, or at least what remained of it. Not that this looked like a particularly good idea either. Most of the wooden houses on the outskirts were still ablaze while, nearer the center, piles of rubble backed onto hollowed-out office and apartment buildings. I’d never seen a city so thoroughly destroyed as Minsk. This made it all the more surprising that the Uprava, the City Council, and Communist Party HQ had survived the bombing almost unscathed. The locals called it the Big House, which was something of an understatement: Nine or ten stories high and built of white concrete, the Uprava resembled a series of gigantic filing cabinets containing the details of every citizen in Minsk. In front of the building was an enormous bronze statue of Lenin, who viewed the large number of German cars and trucks with an understandable look of anxiety and concern, as well he might have done, given that the building was now the headquarters of Reichskommissariat Ostland—a German-created administrative area that stretched from the Byelorussian capital to the Baltic Sea.
Pushing a heavy wooden door that was so tall it might still have been growing in a forest, I entered a cheap, marble-clad hall that belonged in a Métro station and approached a locomotive-sized central desk where several German soldiers and SS were attempting to impose some kind of administrative order on the ant colony of dusty gray men who were pouring in and out of the place. Catching the eye of one SS officer behind the desk, I asked for the SS divisional commander’s office and was directed to the second floor and advised to take the stairs, as the elevator was not working.
At the top of the first flight of stairs was a bronze head of Stalin, and at the top of the second there was a bronze head of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Operation Barbarossa looked like it was going to be bad news for Russian sculptors, just like everyone else. The floor was covered with broken glass, and there was a line of bullet holes on the gray wall that led all the way along a wide corridor to a couple of open facing doors, through which more SS officers were passing to and fro in a haze of cigarette smoke. One of these was my unit’s commanding officer, SS-Standartenführer Mundt, who was one of those men who look like they came out of their mother’s womb wearing a uniform. Seeing me, he raised an eyebrow and then a hand as he casually acknowledged my salute.
“The murder squad,” he said. “Did you catch them?”
“Yes, Herr Oberst.”
“Good work. What did you do with them?”
“We shot them, sir.” I handed over a handful of Red identification documents I’d taken from the Russians before their executions.
Mundt started to look through the documents like an immigration officer searching for something suspicious. “Including the women?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Pity. In future, all female partisans and NKVD are to be hanged in the town square, as an example to the others. Heydrich’s orders. Understand?”
“Yes, Herr Oberst.”
Mundt wasn’t much older than me. When the war broke out he’d been a police colonel with the Hamburg Schutzpolizei. He was clever, only his was the wrong kind of cleverness for Kripo: To be a decent detective you have to understand people, and to understand people you have to be one of them yourself. Mundt wasn’t like people. He wasn’t even a person. I supposed that was why he had a pet dachshund with him—so that it might make him seem a little more human. But I knew better. He was a cold, pompous bastard. Whenever he spoke he sounded like he thought he was reciting Rilke, and I wanted to yawn or laugh or kick his teeth in. Which is how it must have looked.
“You disagree, Hauptmann?”
“I don’t much care to hang women,” I said.
He looked down his fine nose and smiled. “Perhaps you’d prefer to do something else with them?”
“That must be someone else you’re thinking of, sir. What I mean is, I don’t much like waging war on women. I’m the conventional type. The Geneva Convention, in case you were wondering.”
Mundt pretended to look puzzled. “It’s a strange way of observing the Geneva Convention you have,” he said. “To shoot thirty prisoners.”
I glanced around the office, which was a good size for just one desk. It would have been a good size for a sawmill. In the corner of the room was a fitted cupboard with its own little sink, where another man was washing his half-naked torso. In the opposite corner was a safe. An SS sergeant was listening to it like it was a radio and trying, without success, to persuade the thing to open. On top of the desk was a trio of different-colored telephones that might have been left there by three wise men from the East; behind the desk was another SS officer in a chair; and behind the officer was a large wall map of Minsk. On the floor lay a Russian soldier, and if this had ever been his office it wasn’t anymore; the bullet hole behind his left ear and the blood on the linoleum seemed to indicate he would soon be relocated to a much smaller and more permanent earthly space.
“Besides, Captain Gunther,” added Mundt, “it may have escaped you but the Russians never signed the Geneva Convention.”
“Then I guess it’s fine to shoot them all, sir.”
The officer behind the desk stood up. “Did you say Captain Gunther?”
He was a Standartenführer, too, a colonel, the same as Mundt, which meant that as he came around the desk and placed himself in front of me I was obliged to come to attention again. He had been spawned in the same Aryan pond as Mundt and was no less arrogant.