reason why I'm out of step with your new Federal Republic. And maybe it's just that I'm a bit old-fashioned. But you see, there's something about a man who massacred a hundred thousand men, women, and children that I just don't like. And I tend to think that the best way of getting the new Germany off to a flying start is if we just get on and hang him and his ilk.'
FOUR
Kaufmann didn't strike me as spiteful man at all. Merely a pompous one, and I think it irked him a little that I ticked him off about helping the Red Jackets. So I suspected it was he who steered my next client to me, knowing that I would dislike him, and knowing also that I couldn't afford to turn him away. Not when I was just getting started in business again. Maybe he even hoped to change my mind about how we were going to ensure the best beginning for the Federal Republic.
The phone call told me to catch a train to Starnberg, where a car would pick me up. All I knew about the client was that he was the Baron von Starnberg, that he was extremely rich, and that he was the retired director of I. G. Farben, once the largest chemical manufacturing company in the world. Some of directors of I. G. Farben had been put on trial at Nuremberg for war crimes, but von Starnberg wasn't one of them. I had no idea of the job he wanted me to do.
The train climbed through the Wurm Valley and some of the loveliest countryside in Bavaria before arriving after thirty minutes in Starnberg. It made a very pleasant change from breathing the builder's dust of Munich. Starnberg itself was a smallish town built in terraces at the north end of the Wurmsee, a lake twelve miles long and a mile wide. The sapphire blue water was studded with yachts that shone like diamonds in the morning sunlight. It was overlooked by the ancient castle of the dukes of Bavaria. 'Scenic' hardly covered it. After only a minute looking at Starnberg, I wanted to lift the lid and eat the strawberry creme.
There was an old Maybach Zeppelin at the station to collect me. The chauffeur was kind enough to put me in the backseat instead of the trunk, which was probably his first inclination with someone getting off a train. After all, there was enough silver in the back to keep the Lone Ranger in bullets for the next hundred years.
The house was about a five-minute drive west of the station. A brass plaque on one of the obelisk-shaped gateposts said it was a villa, but probably only because they were a little shy about using a word like 'palace.' It took me a whole minute to climb the steps to the front door, where a fellow dressed to go cheek-to-cheek with Ginger Rogers was waiting to take my hat and act as my scout across the marble plains that lay ahead. He stayed with me as far as the library, then wheeled around silently and set off for home again before it started to get dark.
In the library was a small man who turned out to be quite tall by the time I got near enough to hear him shouting an offer of schnapps at me. I said yes and got a better look at him while he fussed with a huge decanter of glass and gold that was so big it looked like it was guarded by seven dwarfs. He wore glasses and an eccentric sort of white beard that made me suspect I might have to drink my schnapps in a test tube.
'The old parish church in our town,' he was saying, in a voice with about a half ton of gravel heaped on top of his larynx, 'has a late-rococo high altar by an Ignaz Gunther. Would he be a relation of yours?'
'Ignaz was the black sheep of the family, Herr Baron,' I said brightly. 'We never talk about him in polite society.'
The baron chuckled his way up into a cough that lasted only until he had lit a cigarette and got his breath. Along the way he somehow managed to shake my hand with only his fingertips, offer me a nail from a gold box as big as a dictionary on the library table, toast me, sip his schnapps, and draw my attention to the studio photograph of a baby-faced young man in his early thirties. He looked more like a movie star than an SS Sturmbannfuhrer. The smile was pure porcelain. The frame was solid silver, which, next to the gold cigarette box, made me suspect that someone had been forcing some economies on the Starnberg household.
'My son, Vincenz,' said the baron. 'In that uniform it would be all too easy to think of him as my own black sheep. But he's anything but, Herr Gunther. Anything but. Vincenz was always such a gentle boy. In the choir at school. So many pets when he was young you'd have thought his rooms were a zoo.'
I liked that: rooms. It said a lot about the childhood of Vincenz von Starnberg. And I liked the way the baron talked German the way people used to talk German before they started using words like 'Lucky Strike,' 'Coca-Cola,' 'okay,' 'jitterbug,' 'bubble gum,' and, worst of all, 'buddy.'
'Are you a father, Herr Gunther?'
'No, sir.'
'Well, what's a father supposed to say about his only son? I know this much: He's not nearly as black as he's been painted. I'm sure you of all people would understand that, Herr Gunther. You were an SS man yourself, were you not?'
'I was a policeman, Herr Baron,' I said, smiling thinly. 'In the KRIPO until 1939 when, in order to increase efficiency--at least that's what they told us--we were combined with the Gestapo and the SD into a new office of the SS called the RSHA--the Main Office of Government Security. I'm afraid none of us had much choice in the matter.'
'No, indeed. Giving people choice was not something Hitler was good at. We all had to do things we didn't much care for, perhaps. My son, too. He was a lawyer. A promising lawyer. He joined the SS in 1936. Unlike you, it was by his own choice. I counseled caution, but it is the privilege of being a son to pay no attention to his father's advice until it's too late. We fathers expect that of our sons. Indeed, it is why we grow old and gray. In 1941, he became the deputy leader of a mobile killing unit in Lithuania. There. I've said what it was. They called it something else. Special Action, or some such nonsense. But mass murder was what it was charged with. In all normal circumstances Vincenz would have had nothing to do with such a terrible thing. But like many others, he felt duty- bound by reason of the oath he had taken to the person of the Fuhrer as the highest organ of the German state. You must understand that he did what he did out of respect for that oath and the state, but always with acute inner disapproval.'
'You mean he was only obeying orders,' I said.
'Exactly so,' said the baron, ignoring or just not noticing the sarcasm that was carried in my voice. 'Orders are orders. You can't get away from that fact. People like my son are the victims of historical value judgments, Herr Gunther. And nothing besmirches the honor of Germany more profoundly than these prisoners at Landsberg. Of whom my son is one. These Red Jackets, as the newspapers call them, present the greatest obstacle to the restoration of our national sovereignty. Which we must have if we are ever going to contribute, as the Americans want, to the cause of Western defense. I am referring, of course, to the forthcoming war against communism.'
I nodded politely. It was my second lecture in as many weeks. But this one was easier to understand. Baron von Starnberg didn't like the communists. That much was plain from our surroundings. If I'd lived there I wouldn't have liked the communists either. Not that I did like the communists. But having very little myself, I had more in common with them than with the baron, who had so much. And who wasn't about to put his hand in his pocket and help win America's war on communism as long as America treated his son like some common criminal.
'Has he been tried yet?' I asked.
'Yes,' said the Baron. 'He was sentenced to death, in April 1948. But following a petition to General Clay, that sentence was commuted to life imprisonment.'
'Then I really don't see what I can do,' I said politely, neglecting to add that, as far as I was concerned, the baron's 'black sheep' had already been luckier than he could ever have reasonably expected. 'After all, it's not as if he denies doing what he did. Does he?'
'No, not at all,' said the baron. 'As I have explained, his defense was based on force majeure. That he could not act but as he did act. We now wish to draw the governor's attention to the fact that Vincenz had nothing personal against the Jews. You see, after graduating, Vincenz became a reader in law at the University of Heidelberg. And in 1934, he saw to it that measures taken by the Gestapo against a student who had been sheltering Jews at his home were brought to a halt. His name was Wolfgang Stumpff, and I want you to find him, Herr Gunther. You must find him so that we might attach his testimonial regarding the Heidelberg Jewish affair to a petition for Vincenz's early release.' The baron sighed. 'My son is only thirty-seven, Herr Gunther. He still has his whole life in front of him.'
I helped myself to some more of the baron's excellent schnapps to take away the taste in my mouth. It also helped to prevent me from making the tactless remark that at least Vincenz still had a life to have in front of him,
