sitting down opposite me.
'Thanks for agreeing to this meeting,' I said, placing a packet of Lucky Strikes and some matches on the table between us. 'Smoke?'
Gebauer glanced around at the soldier who remained with us. 'Is it permitted?' he asked, in English.
The soldier nodded, and Gebauer took a nail from the packet and smoked it gratefully.
'Where are you from?' asked Gebauer.
'I live in Munich,' I said. 'But I was born in Berlin. I lived there until a couple of years ago.'
'Me, too,' he said. 'I've asked to be moved to a prison in Berlin, so that my wife can visit me, but that doesn't appear to be possible.' He shrugged. 'But what do they care? The Amis. We're scum to them. Not soldiers at all. Murderers, that's what we are. It's fair to say that there are some murderers among us. The Jew killers. I never much cared for that kind of thing myself. I myself was on the western front, where Jew killing was of little importance.'
'Malmedy, wasn't it?' I said, lighting one for myself. 'In the Ardennes.'
'That's right,' he said. 'It was a desperate fight. Our backs were really against the wall. It was all we could do to look after ourselves, let alone a hundred surrendering Amis.' He inhaled deeply and looked up at the green ceiling. Someone had done a good job of matching the paint on the walls and the floor. 'Of course, it doesn't matter to the Amis that we had no facilities for taking prisoners. And no one thinks for a minute to suggest that the men who surrendered were cowards. We wouldn't have surrendered. Not a chance. That's what the SS was all about, wasn't it? Loyalty is my honor, wasn't it? Not self-preservation.' He took a hit on the cigarette. 'Aschenauer says you were SS yourself. So you would understand what I'm talking about.'
I glanced at our American guard, uncomfortably. I hardly wanted to talk about having been in the SS in front of an American MP. 'I really wouldn't like to say,' I said.
'You can speak quite freely in front of him,' said Gebauer. 'He doesn't speak a word of German. Few of the Amis in here do. Even the officers are too lazy to learn. From time to time you get the odd intelligence officer who speaks German. But mostly they don't see the point of it.'
'I think they feel that it would demean their victory to learn our language,' I said.
'Yes, that might be true,' said Gebauer. 'They're worse than the French in that respect. But my English is improving all the time.'
'Mine, too,' I said. 'It's a sort of mongrel language, isn't it?'
'Hardly surprising when you see the miscegenation that's gone on,' he said. 'I've never seen such a racially diverse people.' He shook his head wearily. 'The Amis are a curious lot. In some ways, of course, they're quite admirable. But in others, they're completely stupid. Take this place. Landsberg. To put us here, of all places. Where the Fuhrer wrote his great book. There's not one of us who doesn't take a certain amount of comfort in that. I myself came here before the war to look at his cell. They've removed the bronze plaque that was placed on the Fuhrer's cell door, of course. But we all know exactly where it is. In the same way that a Muslim knows the direction of Mecca. It's something that helps to sustain us. To keep up our spirits.'
'I was on the Russian front myself,' I said. I was showing him some credentials. It didn't seem appropriate to mention my sometime service with the German War Crimes Bureau, in Berlin. Where we had investigated German atrocities as well as Russian ones. 'I was an intelligence officer, with General Schorner's army. But before the war, I was a policeman, at the Alex.'
'I know it well,' he said, smiling. 'Before the war I was a lawyer, in Wilmersdorf. I used to go to the Alex now and then to interview some rogue or other. How I wish I was back there now.'
'Before you joined the Waffen-SS,' I said, 'you went to a labor camp. Lemberg-Janowska.'
'That's right,' he said. 'With the DAW. The German Armament Works.'
'It's your time there that I wanted to ask you about.'
For a moment his face wrinkled with disgust as he recalled it. 'It was a forced labor camp constructed around three factories in Lvov. The camp was named after the factory address: 133 Janowska Street. I went there in May 1942, to take command of the factories. Someone else was in charge of the residential camp where the Jews lived. And things were pretty bad there, I believe. But my responsibility was the factory only. This meant that there was a certain amount of friction between myself and the other commander, as to who was really in charge. Strictly speaking, it ought to have been me. At the time, I was a first lieutenant and the other fellow was a second lieutenant. However, it so happened his uncle was SS Major General Friedrich Katzmann, the police chief of Galicia and a very powerful man. He was part of the reason why I left Janowska. Wilhaus--that was the other commander's name--he hated me. Jealous, I suppose. Wanted control of everything. And he'd have done anything to get rid of me. It was only a matter of time before he made his move. Framed me for something I hadn't done. So I decided to get out while I could. And, after all, there was nothing worth staying for. That was the other reason. The place was ghastly. Really ghastly. And I didn't think I could stay there and serve with any honor to myself. So I applied to join the Waffen-SS, and the rest you know.' He helped himself to another one of my cigarettes.
'There was another officer at the camp,' I said. 'Friedrich Warzok. Do you remember him?'
'I remember Warzok,' he said. 'He was Wilhaus's man.'
'I'm a private detective,' I explained. 'I've been asked by his wife to see if I can find out if he's alive or dead. She wants to remarry.'
'Sensible woman. Warzok was a pig. They all were.' He shook his head. 'She must be a pig, too, if she was ever married to that bastard.'
'So you never met her.'
'You mean she's not a pig?' He smiled. 'Well, well. No, I never met her. I knew he was married. Matter of fact, he was always telling us how good-looking his wife was. But he never brought her to live there. At least not while I was there. Unlike Wilhaus. He had his wife and little daughter living there. Can you believe it? I wouldn't have had a wife and child of mine within ten miles of that place. Almost everything unpleasant you've heard about Warzok is likely to be true.' He laid his cigarette in the ashtray, put his hands behind his head, and leaned back in his chair. 'How can I help?'
'In March 1946, Warzok was living in Austria. His wife thinks he might have used an old comrades' network to get away. Since then, she's heard nothing.'
'She should count herself lucky.'
'She's a Roman Catholic,' I said. 'She's been told by Cardinal Josef Frings that she can't remarry without some evidence that Warzok is dead.'
'Cardinal Frings, eh? He's a good man, that Cardinal Frings.' He smiled. 'You won't hear anyone in this place say anything bad about Frings. He and Bishop Neuhausler are the ones trying hardest to get us out of here.'
'So I believe,' I said. 'All the same, I was hoping that I might get some information from you that might enable me to find out what happened to him.'
'What sort of information?'
'Oh, I don't know. What kind of man he was. If you ever discussed what might happen after the war. If he'd ever mentioned what plans he had.'
'I told you. Warzok was a pig.'
'Can you tell me any more than that?'
'You want details?'
'Please. Anything at all.'
He shrugged. 'Like I said, when I was there, Lemberg-Janowska was just another labor camp. And there were only so many workers that I could use in the factory before they started to get in one another's way. Nevertheless they kept sending me more and more. Thousands of Jews. At first we transported our surplus Jews to Belzec. But after a while we were told that this couldn't happen anymore and that we'd have to deal with them ourselves. To me it was quite clear what this meant, and I tell you frankly that I wanted nothing to do with it. So I volunteered for front-line duty. But even before I had left, Warzok and Rokita--he was another of Wilhaus's creatures--were turning the place into an extermination camp. But nothing on the industrial scale of some other places, like Birkenau. There were no gas chambers at Janowska. Which left bastards like Wilhaus and Warzok with something of a problem. How to kill the camp's surplus Jews. So Jews were taken to some hills behind the residential camp and shot. You could hear the firing squads in the factory. All day that went on. And sometimes part of the night. They were the lucky ones. The ones who were shot. It soon turned out that Wilhaus and Warzok enjoyed killing people. And as well as killing large numbers of Jews by firing squads, these two started killing for
