He talked about the three prosecution witnesses found shot dead and facially mutilated. "They were not removed in order to decrease the number of witnesses at the Hanover Trials because there are as you know nearly one thousand of them, and the mass of evidence is such that one could remove ninety per cent of them and still remain certain of conviction. Those three were murdered in reprisal and we believe that there will, follow twelve more unless the Federal police can protect them. In all, fifteen. One for every war-criminal convicted. Further, the intention is to dissuade new witnesses from coming forward at the successor trials in Bonn and Nurnberg. They intend by terror tactics to ensure that the Hanover Trial shall be the last of its kind ever held."
I had his accent now, from the ` ur ' in ` Nurnberg '. He was a Rhinelander.
He talked about the seventy thousand Nazi refugees and self-exiles living in the German colony in San Caterina, Argentine, among them the Hitler deputy Bormann. "As you know, their Tacuara organisation carried out reprisals against the Jewish population following the Eichmann abduction."
I wished he would stop saying 'As you know,' or better, tell me something I didn't.
"But Zossen is here in Berlin."
He stopped. I knew why. I was hooked.
I said: " Heinrich Zossen?"
"Yes."
A thin man. Pale of face, with dewlaps and a pouchy mouth. Round-shouldered like his Fuhrer. Little blue eyes, the blue of ice. A voice like a reed in a winter wind.
I had last seen him twenty-one years ago, on an August morning when three hundred of them were lined up at the brink of the pit they had been made to dig from the rich earth of the forest of Briicknerwald. The birds had stopped singing when the SS staff car drew up and Obergruppen-fuhrer Heinrich Zossen got out. I watched him as he walked behind the lines of the three hundred naked men as if inspecting them. He turned and walked back and I watched him. He was a young man for his rank and proud of his uniform. He was not a thug. A thug would have taken a whip from a guard and drawn blood from even these bloodless buttocks for our amusement; he would have pointedly held his nose, reminded that these men had been moved a hundred and thirty miles through the night in sealed cattle-trucks, packed ninety to a truck; he would have taken his revolver and fired the first bullet himself, to lead the fun. He did none of these things. He was an officer.
He did worse, and I watched him do it.
A guard shouted as one of the three hundred men broke from the ranks and came towards the Obergruppenfuhrer. He was not riddled where he stood because Zossen had raised his gloved hand, curious to know why the man had left the ranks. He had once been bigger than Zossen; his frame, outlined beneath the skin, was wide at the shoulder; but now he was smaller, because most of the flesh had gone and he looked as if made of paper. This batch, as I knew, had lived for months on acorns, crusts and rancid water. It would be impossible to judge how long it had been since they had eaten what anyone could call a meal.
The Jew walked up to the Aryan in black and came to a lurching stop. The effort of walking ten yards had brought the breath hissing in his mouth, and his rib-cage pulsed beneath the skin that hung from the bones like loose yellow silk. I heard him ask Zossen if it were allowed that they all might chant the Khaddish, the prayer for the dead. The Obergruppenfiihrer did not knock him down for his impudence, as I had expected. He was an officer. He looked at the watch on his wrist, considered a moment, and shook his head. "There is not enough time. The roads are bad and I am due back in Briicknerwald in one hour, for luncheon." He signalled his Stiirmbannfuhrer and the machine-guns opened up.
Heinrich Zossen. I remembered him.
Normally one would keep such a memory to oneself for the sake of decency but as a leading witness for the prosecution at the 1945Tribunal I was obliged to recount this event, among many others. The others were no better, but it was mentioned afterwards that throughout my testimony totalling fifteen weeks I spoke calmly and objectively, with one brief lapse. This was when I spoke of Heinrich Zossen. Even now, twenty-one years later, in a Berlin where you could hear the singing from the synagogue rising freely, I was unable, when in a restaurant, to open a menu headed with that word, Mittagessen. Luncheon.
Pol was still silent, knowing that he'd played the ace. Zossen was in Berlin.
"Then I hope you get him," I said.
Still silent. Playing my own game. I said:
"But I think you're wrong. They say he's in the Argentine."
Now we both talked and I knew that he knew that he'd won. He said:
"He was seen in Berlin a week ago."
"Who saw him? "
"A witness at the trial."
"I'll talk to him then."
"He fell from the tenth floor of the Witzenhausen Hof the day after he had told us."
"Olbricht?"
"Yes."
"He could have been mistaken."
"He knew Zossen well. You know that."
"Is that part of the search area, then? Zossen? "
"It has become part of it."
"So you're roping me in."
"Yes."
"Because you know I'd like to see him on trial. No go. They don't hang them any more." I suddenly said a terrible thing, because I believed Pol was genuine and my guard was down. "Give me a rope, though, give me a rope and ask no questions."
His silence was disapproving.
I said: "I'm tired, that's all."
"Of course. After sixmonths' work -"
"Don't talk to me like a bloody nurse."
He was silent again. The hum of voices was loudening under the domed roof as the people left the bars and went back to their seats.
"Come on then, Pol – you haven't got long. Finish me off."
He said immediately as if I'd switched on a tape: "There are thousands of Nazis still living in Germany with false papers and even the Federal Intelligence Services are riddled with them. The U.S. Gehlen Bureau quietly released hundreds of Army and SS officers from internment when General Heusinger dictated his terms to NATO andthey have since reorganised the German Army, which is now the largest and best equipped in Europe. The German Air Force is at present ahead of the RAF in striking power. The German General Staff has made secret non-NATO deals with Spain, Portugal, Egypt and African countries and established its own bases with ground-to-ground missiles. Scores of Hitler's officers have returned to power and influence in both civil and military key positions, and their, posts were granted them in the full knowledge of their past activities. In the General Staff itself there is a military microcosm of dedicated Nazis, a hard core prepared for an explosive expansion when the opportunity comes. If -"
"Pol," I said, "did the Bureau give you this stuff? "
"I am an executive, like yourself, not an administrator."
"If I decided – and I haven't – to take over this new operation without even a day's break I'd have to be convinced of their argument. It would take days. I think the German GGS is no more likely to make a war than the Ku-Klux-Klan."