“Since when were the SS interested in horticulture?”
“I think it’s a home, for Jews,” said Nebe. “The forced laborers who work on the gardens round here.”
“That sounds almost benign. And the Havel Institute?”
“A radio HQ that directs spy and sabotage operations against the Soviet Union.” Nebe shrugged. “There are probably more houses that even I don’t know about. Frankly, the state has so many houses coming into public ownership that the Ministry of the Interior could open its own sales and lettings agency. Maybe I’ll do that instead of being a policeman.”
“So it’s not the Nordhav Foundation that owns this house.”
“What do you know about the Nordhav Foundation?”
“Not much. There’s an office upstairs with that name on the door. Apart from that, not much. That’s why I asked.” I shrugged.
“Where Nordhav is concerned, nothing is always the best thing to know. Take my advice, Bernie. Stick to homicide. It’s a lot safer.” Nebe glanced around as the delegates started to file into the central hall where the speeches were to be given. “Come on. Let’s get it over with.”
Seven
The irony of being introduced to the audience at an international crime commission conference by a man who had not long finished murdering forty-five thousand people did not escape me, or indeed Nebe himself. Arthur Nebe, who was ex — political police, when such men had still existed, had never been much of a detective. He colored a little around the ears as he talked, a little, about the Murder Commission, almost as if he recognized that the commission of murder was something in which he was rather more expert. I don’t think there was anyone in that room who could have looked death in the face more often than Arthur Nebe. Not even Himmler and Kaltenbrunner. I still remembered something Nebe had told me back in Minsk, about experimenting with blowing people up in the search for a more efficient and “humane” method of mass killing. I wondered what some of the Swedes and Swiss in our audience would have said if they’d known anything of the crimes that were being committed by German police in Eastern Europe and Russia, even as we spoke. Would they have cared? Maybe not. You could never quite predict how people would react to the so-called Jewish question.
When he finished his introduction there was a ripple of polite applause and then it was my turn. The bare wooden floorboards creaked like an old leather coat as I walked on jelly legs to the lectern, although that might have been the sound of my nerves pulling at the muscles of my heart and lungs.
I’ve seen a few tough-looking crowds in my time but this was the toughest. At least five or six of them only had to raise a finger to have me face a firing squad before morning coffee was over. Galileo had an easier job with the Inquisition, trying to persuade them that the algebra in the Bible doesn’t add up to a month of Sundays. The audience at the Café Dalles on Neue Schönhauser Strasse used to throw chairs at the piano player when they were bored. And I once saw a tiger get a bit rough with a clown at the Busch Circus. Now, that was funny. But the faces I was looking at would have given Jack Dempsey pause for thought. Anita Berber was wont to piss on the customers when she decided that she didn’t like them, and much as I should like to have taken a leaf out of her book, I thought it best if I just read what was written on the pages I’d spread on the lectern in front of me, although a lot of what I said had been added onto my speech by Leo Gutterer and stuck in my throat like an S-hook from a burglar’s cigar box.
“Heil Hitler. Gentlemen, criminologists, distinguished foreign guests, colleagues, if the last ten years have proved anything at all it is that many of the frustrations the German police experienced under the Weimar Republic have diminished to the extent that they no longer exist. Street fights and the threat of communist insurrection that characterized the time before the election of a National Socialist government are a thing of the past. Police manpower has been increased, our equipment modernized, and, as a corollary, the institutions of state security are considerably more efficient.
“From a time when Germany, and Berlin in particular, was virtually run by criminal gangs and cursed by one ineffective government after another, a strong centralized, classless state now exists where factionalized politics ensured that only anarchy existed before. When the National Socialists came to power, one or two policemen such as myself remained mildly skeptical of the party and its intentions; but that was then. Things are very different now. A healthy respect for the law and its institutions are now the natural inheritance of every true German.”
As I spoke, Himmler — who moments earlier had removed his glasses to polish the lenses with a neatly folded handkerchief — smiled and put a mint in his mouth. He showed no signs of having remembered our first and only meeting, at Wewelsburg Castle, in November 1938, when he kicked me on the shin for being the bearer of some unwelcome news about one of his SS colleagues. Even wearing boots, it was not an experience I was keen to repeat. Meanwhile, Kaltenbrunner scowled and inspected his manicure; he had the look of a man who was already craving a drink. I put my head down, and pushed on.
“My name is Bernhard Gunther and I’ve been a Berlin policeman since 1920. For more than fifteen years I’ve been a member of Berlin’s Murder Commission, which as General Nebe has explained is a group of detectives assisted by experts such as a medical jurisprudent and a photographer. The cornerstone of the commission is the criminal commissars, several of whom are also German lawyers. Under each commissar is a staff of about eight men, who do all the work, of course. The commission is controlled by Commissioner Friedrich-Wilhelm Ludtke, whom many of you will know. Anyone who wishes to discover more about the Berlin police and in particular its famous Murder Commission, should perhaps read a book called Continental Crimes by Erich Liebermann von Sonnenberg — who was himself the director of Kripo until his death last year — and criminal director Otto Trettin. Writing about the stories that appear in this book, George Dilnot, the celebrated English crime reporter, said, ‘There is enough drama and excitement in these tales to satisfy the most voracious appetite.’”
(This was a lie, of course: the truth was that Dilnot hated the book, considering it clichéd and naïve. The book’s many failings were perhaps hardly surprising given that it had been subject to the censorship of the Ministry of Truth and Propaganda, and many of the more interesting cases the commission had investigated, including the Fritz Ulbrich case, were deemed to be too sensationalist for public consumption. But Dilnot, an Englishman, wasn’t exactly around to contradict me, or more accurately, Gutterer.)
“I’m afraid I can’t promise to provide much in the way of drama and excitement. The fact is that Liebermann von Sonnenberg or Otto Trettin would almost certainly do a better job of speaking to you, today; as would Commissioner Ludtke or Inspector Georg Heuser, who recently and cleverly apprehended Ogorzow, the S-Bahn murderer, here in Berlin. The fact is that, even by the blunt standards of this city, I’m a plain speaker. But I’ve always believed that a certain amount of straight talk comes with the job, so if you’ll forgive my lack of rhetorical flourish, I will do my best to describe one particular crime which, at the time I took over its investigation, had become a cold case and was generally symptomatic of the devastating lack of morale that affected the Berlin police under the previous government.
“Indeed, back in 1928, five years after the events I’m about to describe to you, the case was almost forgotten, and when it was assigned to me by the then Berlin police commissioner, Ernst Engelbrecht, at the Police Praesidium on Alexanderplatz, it was with the expectation that I would come up empty-handed. In truth, this case had almost become a means of putting arrogant young detectives like me firmly in their place, as more experienced policemen are wont to do. And the fact that I eventually apprehended the perpetrator owes as much to my own good luck as to any forensic judgment on my part. Luck is not something that should ever be discounted in a criminal investigation. Most detectives rely on good luck a lot more than they would have you believe — including Engelbrecht, who was something of a hero and a mentor to me. Engelbrecht once told me that a good detective has to believe in luck; he said that it’s the only explanation why criminals ever get away with anything.”