When the Allies overran Cologne in the spring of 1945, they immediately took over Langsdorf, restoring the compound to its original purpose in order to accommodate the growing number of criminals within their own ranks.
After the war, when Germany was partitioned into four zones, each one under the government of a different Allied power, the Occupational Government Prison System was formed to deal with military criminals from all the western countries. The Russians, who controlled most of eastern Germany, maintained a separate prison system for their own soldiers, but French, British and American soldiers were grouped together according to the severity of their crimes. Only the most serious offenders, those guilty of rape or murder, were returned to their own countries to face long periods of imprisonment.
Soldiers guilty of the least serious offences, such as going absent without leave, petty theft or drunkenness, were usually confined to barracks or held in regimental stockades.
Those whose crimes fell somewhere in the middle of these two extremes, who had engaged in violence causing grievous bodily harm, or large-scale theft or black-marketeering, served out their time at Langsdorf, which was located in the British zone of occupation. Their sentences ranged from one month to three years. No one stayed longer than that. At the end of their incarceration at Langsdorf, the majority of soldiers were dishonourably discharged, after being issued with civilian clothes left behind by German soldiers drafted into the 153rd Regiment during the war, who never returned to collect them.
Wearing the clothes of men whose bodies lay in shallow graves from eastern Poland to the gates of Stalingrad, the former convicts would travel to the nearest airfield or train station and begin the long journey home, after which time they would be abandoned and forgotten by the military.
Nathan Carter walked ten paces down the Seltnerallee before he caught sight of his face staring back at him from a puddle in the middle of the road. The sight of his sunken eyes and gaunt cheekbones stopped Carter in his tracks. The mirrors in the prison bathroom were all made of polished metal, which afforded a reflection so vague that most men learned to shave by memory instead of sight. This was the first time in almost a year that he had actually seen himself clearly and, at first, he was so shocked to see what had become of him that he could scarcely breathe.
Carter heard a creaking sound behind him and turned to see one of the guards, who had opened the door to the guardhouse and was staring at him, his expression a mixture of impatience and hostility. Behind him, the first rays of sun glistened on dew that had coated the barbed wire coiled along the fences of the prison yard.
Hurriedly, Carter turned again and walked off down the street.
Since the Allies had ended their occupation of Germany in May 1949, only a few weeks before, the country had effectively been split in two. In the west, a new German government had established itself in the city of Bonn. In the east, another German government had been set up, although it was a government in name only, since every facet of its existence remained under Soviet control.
Marooned within the newly created West Germany, Langsdorf prison began the process of emptying its cells so that the premises could be returned as quickly as possible to their original owners. The prisoners closest to their release dates were the first to go, their sentences commuted.
By the time Carter’s discharge papers came through, only about a third of the prison population remained.
Some days, the barren street that led away from Langsdorf would be crowded with poorly dressed men, but today that street was empty except for Nathan Carter, as he shuffled out uncertainly into a country that he knew wanted only to be rid of him.
In the distance, he could just make out the twin spires of Cologne Cathedral, still standing amidst the cadaver of a city that had been all but obliterated. Even though the war had been over for almost four years, the city had only just started to rebuild. In places, huge pyramids of brick, like the ruins of Mayan temples, were all that remained of taverns, hotels and department stores, which had once been the lifeblood of Cologne’s economy. They stood as a reminder that certain things take on a kind of memory when they spend long enough in the company of flesh and bone. This city had once been like that, but the war had erased so much of its past that even the stones had forgotten. There was a smell to all this◦– a chalky, dry sweetness which caught in the throat and lingered there, and the smell of old fires long since extinguished, punctuated now and then by the reek of pickled cabbage and boiled meat from street food vendors, of carbolic soap from barrels where women washed clothes and hung them up to dry among the ruins, and the sharp, vinegary stench of poisoned rats rotting in the catacombs.
Carter began to walk towards the spires, slowly at first, in the shuffling gait of a prisoner. But then his pace quickened, and then, for the first time since his arrest, he began to run. Weighed down by his heavy clothes, he soon began to sweat, but it didn’t slow him down. In the bright, early summer morning, Carter raced along the streets, past buildings that had somehow survived intact, and others that were patched together like poorly assembled dolls’ houses. Men and women on their way to work and children heading off to school all stopped to watch him racing past.
Carter did not stop until he reached the cathedral square. Unused to the exertion, he bent double, gasping, with his hands upon the knees of his mildew-smelling trousers, and spat onto the ground.
When he finally got his breath back, he walked a little further down the street. Passing a grocery shop, he realised with a double take that the apples, plums and pears on display were actually made of wax. A little further on, in the window of a clothing store, a mannequin with plaster fingertips crumbled as if by leprosy modelled an evening gown, at the base of which was a small card that read ‘not for sale’.
Far above, the contrails of high-flying planes cat-scratched the aquarium blue sky.
A few cars rumbled by, tyres popping on the cobblestones. One of them was a high-powered Tatra sedan, which he recognised immediately because it had three headlights set in a line across the front instead of the usual two, as well as an extraordinary fin sloping down from the rear of the roof, like the dorsal of a giant shark. The Tatra slowed as it passed him and then stopped. A well-dressed man climbed out from behind the wheel. He had a wide, smooth forehead, a square jaw and yellowish-brown eyes, which looked like chips of amber hammered into the sockets of his skull. He wore a pinstripe suit with wide lapels and shoes spit-shined as only a soldier would have done. His hair, cut short at the sides and left to grow long at the top, was combed back straight upon his head. ‘Are you Carter?’ he asked. ‘Nathan Carter?’ The man was German, but he spoke decent English.
Carter straightened up. ‘I might be,’ he replied, staring uncertainly at the stranger.
The man held out one hand towards the open door of his car. ‘Please,’ he said.
‘What’s this about?’ asked Carter.
‘My employer is anxious to meet you.’
‘And who is that?’
‘Someone who will get you a decent set of clothes and a proper meal, and after that…’
‘I don’t understand,’ said Carter. ‘Do I know him? Because I’m sure I don’t know you.’
‘My name,’ he said, ‘is Anton Ritter, and all you need to know about me and my employer is that we are your friends. From the look of you, if you will forgive me saying so, I am guessing you could use a few of those. Now, please’◦– he gestured towards the car again◦– ‘I work for an impatient man.’