I shook my head. “When I made that remark to Nebe…about blowing up Jews in a field. Look, I had no idea he would actually try something like that. It was sarcasm. Hardly a genuine suggestion.” I shrugged. “Then again, I don’t know why I’m surprised, given everything else that happened.”
“We’ve always thought it was Arthur Nebe himself who came up with the idea of the gas vans,” said Silverman. “So maybe that was another of your jokes, too. Tell me, did you ever visit an address in Berlin—number four Tiergartenstrasse?”
“I was a cop. I visited a lot of addresses I don’t remember.”
“This one was special.”
“The Berlin Gas Works was somewhere else, if that’s what you’re implying.”
“Tiergartenstrasse number four was a confiscated Jewish villa,” said Silverman. “An office from where Germany’s euthanasia program for the handicapped was planned and administered.”
“Then I’m sure I was never there.”
“Maybe you heard about what was happening there and mentioned it in passing to Nebe. As a little thank-you for getting you out of Minsk.”
“In case you’ve forgotten,” I said, “Nebe was head of Kripo and, before that, a general in the Gestapo. It’s quite likely he knew Wildmann and Schmidt for the same reason I did. And I daresay he would have known all about this place in Tiergartenstrasse as well. But I never did.”
“Your relationship with Waldemar Klingelhöfer,” said Silverman. “You were quite helpful to him. With advice.”
“Yes. I tried to be.”
“Were you helpful in any other ways?”
I shook my head.
“Did you accompany him to Moscow, for example?”
“No, I’ve never been in Moscow.”
“And yet you speak Russian almost as well as he does.”
“That was later, when I learned. In the labor camp, mostly.”
“So between September 28 and October 26, 1941, you say you were not with Klingelhöfer’s Vorkommando Moscow, but in Berlin?”
“Yes.”
“And that you had nothing to do with the murders of five hundred and seventy-two Jews during that time?”
“Nothing to do with it, no.”
“Several of them were Jewish mink ranchers who failed to provide the prescribed quota of furs for Klingelhöfer.”
“Never shot a Jewish mink rancher, Gunther?”
“Or blown one up in a pillbox?”
“No.”
The two lawyers were quiet for a moment, as if they’d run out of questions. The silence didn’t last long.
“So,” said Silverman. “You’re not in Moscow, you’re back on the plane to Berlin. A Junkers 52, you said. Any witnesses?”
I thought for a moment. “Fellow named Schulz. Erwin Schulz.”
“Go on.”
“He was SS, too. A Sturmbannführer, I think. But before, he’d been a cop in Berlin. And then an instructor at the police academy in Bremen. After that, something in the Gestapo, maybe in Bremen, too. I don’t remember. But we hadn’t seen each other in more than ten years when we both got on that plane out of Baranowicze.
“He was a few years younger than me, I think. Not much. I think he’d been in the army during the last months of the Great War. And then the Freikorps while he was at university, in Berlin. Law, I think. Tallish, fair-haired, with a mustache a bit like Hitler’s, and quite tanned. Not that he looked well when he was on that plane. There were huge bags under his eyes that were more like bruises, almost as if someone had punched him.
“Well, we recognized each other, and after a few moments we started talking. I offered him a cigarette and I noticed the hand that took it was shaking like a leaf. His leg wouldn’t stay still either. Like it had Saint Vitus’ dance. He was a nervous wreck. Gradually, it became clear that he was returning to Berlin for much the same reason I was. Because he’d put in for a transfer.
“Schulz said that his unit had been operating in a place called Zhitomir. That’s just a shit hole between Kiev and Brest. No one in his right mind would want to go to Zhitomir. Which is probably why the SS brass in the person of General Jeckeln had established its Ukrainian HQ there. Jeckeln was never in his right mind, as far as I could see. Anyway, Schulz said that Jeckeln had told him that all of the Jews in Zhitomir were to be shot immediately. Schulz wasn’t bothered about the men. But he had more than a few qualms about the women and the children. Fuck that, he said. But no one was listening. Orders were orders and he should just shut up and get on with it. Well, it seemed that there were a lot of Jews in Zhitomir. Christ only knows why that should be the case. After all, it’s not like the Popovs ever made them feel welcome there. The tsar hated them, too, and they had pogroms in Zhitomir in 1905 and in 1919. I mean, you would think they’d have got the message and cleared off somewhere else. But no. Not a bit of it. There were three synagogues in Zhitomir, and when the SS showed up, there were thirty thousand of them just waiting around for something to happen. Which it did.
“According to Schulz, the first day the SS got there they hanged the mayor, or perhaps it was the local judge, who was a Jew, and several others. Then they shot four hundred right away for one reason or another. Marched them out of town to a pit, had them lie down like sardines, one on top of the other, and shot them in layers. Well, Schulz thought that would be it. He’d done his bit and that was enough. I mean, four hundred, he thought. But no, he said, they kept on coming. Day after day. And four hundred Jews soon became fourteen thousand.
“Then Schulz was told that they would have to do the women and children as well and for him that was the last straw. Fuck this, he thought, I don’t care if Almighty God has ordered this, I’m not killing women and kids. So he wrote to the personnel officer at RSHA HQ. To a General Bruno Streckenbach. And put in for a transfer. Which was why he was on that plane with me.
“They were pretty pissed off with him, apparently. Especially his CO, Otto Rasch. He accused Schulz of being weak and letting the side down. He asked Schulz where was his sense of duty and all that crap. Not that Schulz said he was surprised about this. He said that Rasch was one of those bastards who liked to make sure that everyone, officers included, had to pull the trigger on at least one Jew. So that we were all equally guilty, I suppose. Only he had another word for it: one of those compound words that Himmler used at Pretzsch. Blood part, I think it was.
“Anyway, Schulz didn’t know what fate awaited him back in Berlin. He was nervous and apprehensive, to say the least. I suppose he was hoping his behavior would be overlooked and he’d get the okay to resume his police work in Hamburg, or Bremen. ‘I’m not cut out for this kind of thing,’ he said. ‘Don’t get me wrong, he said, ‘I care nothing for the Jews, but no one should be asked to do this kind of work. No one. They should find some other means of doing it,’ he said. That’s what he told me, anyway.”
“So,” said Earp. “Are you telling us your alibi is another convicted war criminal?”
“Schulz was convicted? I didn’t know that.”
“Gave himself up in 1945,” said Earp. “He was convicted in October 1947 of crimes against humanity and sentenced to twenty years. That was commuted to fifteen years in 1951.”
“You mean he’s here, in Landsberg? Well, then he can confirm our conversation on the flight back to Berlin. That I told him what I already told you. How I was sent back for refusing to kill Jews.”
“He was paroled last January,” said Earp. “Too bad, Gunther.”
“I don’t think he’d have made such a great character witness for you, anyway,” said Silverman. “He was a brigadier general in the SS when he gave himself up.”
“The reason Bruno Streckenbach went easy on Schulz is obvious,” said Earp. “Because he participated in the murders of fifteen thousand Jews before he sickened of the work. Probably Streckenbach figured Schulz had done more than his fair share of killing.”