our very survival as a race. Things happen in war that one regrets in peacetime. That's natural. But the Amis weren't exactly saints In wartime, themselves. Ask Peiper. Ask Dietrich. They'll tell you. It wasn't just the SS who shot prisoners, it was the Amis, as well. To say nothing of the systematic mistreatment of the Malmedy prisoners of war that has occurred in this and other prisons.'
Haensch twitched, nervously. His were the kind of chinless, weak features that gave war criminals and mass murderers a bad name. Not that the Amis looked on Haensch with any more disgust than anyone else. That particular distinction was reserved for Sepp Dietrich, Jochen Peiper and the perpetrators of the so-called Malmedy massacre.
'Just remember this,' said Biberstein. 'That we're not without friends on the outside. You certainly should not feel that you are alone. Doctor Rudolf Aschenauer has represented hundreds of old comrades, including Walter Funk, our former economics minister. He is a most ingenious attorney at law. As well as being a former party member he is also a devout Roman Catholic. I'm not sure what your religious affiliations are, Captain Gunther, but it cannot be denied that in this part of the country, the Catholics have the louder voice. The Catholic Bishop of Munich, Johannes Neuhausler, and the Cardinal of Cologne, Joseph Frings, are active lobbyists on our behalf. But so is the Evangelical Bishop of Bavaria, Hans Meiser. In other words, it might be in your interests to find your Christian faith again, since both churches support the Committee for Church Aid for Prisoners.'
'I myself have had the personal support of the Evangelical Bishop of Wurttemberg, Theo Wurm,' said Haensch. 'As has our comrade Martin Sandberger. And you needn't worry about paying for a defence. The committee will take care of all your legal team's expenses. The committee even has the backing of a few sympathetic US senators and congressmen.'
'Quite so,' said Biberstein. 'These are men who have been most vocal in their opposition to Jewish-inspired ideas of vengeance.' He turned for a moment and waved his hand dismissively at Landsberg's brick walls. 'Which is all this is, of course. Keeping us here, against all the rules of international law.'
'The important thing is that we all stick together,' said Haensch. 'The last thing we want now is any unnecessary speculation as to what some of us did or did not do. Do you see? That would only complicate matters.'
'In other words, it would be desirable, Captain Gunther, if your statements to the Amis concerned only yourself.'
'Now I get it,' I said, 'and here I was thinking it was really my welfare you were concerned about.'
'Oh, but it is,' said Haensch. 'My dear fellow, it is.'
'You've got a big pile of potatoes in the office of the Parole and Clemency Board,' I said, 'and you don't want anyone like me knocking it over.'
'Naturally we want to get out of here,' said Haensch. 'Some of us have families.'
'It's not just in our interest that we're released soon,' said Biberstein. 'It's in Germany's interest that we draw a line in front of what happened and then move on. Only then, when the last prisoner of war has been released from here and in Russia, can we Germans plan for the future.'
'Not just German interest,' added Haensch. 'It's in American and British interest, too, that good relations are fostered with a fully sovereign German government, so that the real ideological enemy can be effectively opposed.'
'Don't you think we've killed enough Russians?' I asked. 'Stalin's dead. The Korean War is over.'
'No one is talking about killing anyone,' insisted Biberstein. 'But we're still at war with the communists whether you like it or not. A cold war, it's true, but a war nonetheless. Look, I don't know what you did during the war and I don't want to know. None of us do. No one in here talks about anything that happened back then. The important thing is to remember that every man in this prison is agreed on one thing: that none of us is or was criminally responsible for his acts or those of his men because we were all of us following orders. Whatever our personal feelings or misgivings about the odious work we were tasked with, it was a Fuhrer order and it was impossible to disobey. As long as we all stick to that story it's certain we can all of us be out of this place before the decade is out.'
'And hopefully well before that,' added Haensch.
I nodded, which was misleading because it made me look as if I cared what happened to any of them. I nodded because I didn't want any trouble and just because they were convicts was no reason they couldn't give me any. The Amis wouldn't have minded that at all. Unlike the Parole and Clemency Board, most of the MPs in Landsberg were of the opinion that we all deserved to hang; and possibly they were right. But most of the reason I nodded was because I was tired of not being liked by anyone, including myself. That's okay when you can go and put that feeling under several millilitres of alcohol, but the bars in prison are never open, especially when you need a drink the way I needed one now. Life in most prisons would be improved by the ration of a daily tot of liquor, like in the British Royal Navy. That's not a penal theory with which Jeremy Bentham would have agreed, but you can take it to the bank.
Most of all I could have used a drink at night just before I went to bed. Perhaps it was having to talk about and relive the summer of 1941, but while I was in Landsberg, sleep provided little respite from the cares of the world. Often I would awake in the unfocused gloom of my cell and find myself soaked in sweat having dreamed an awful dream. And more often than not it was the same dream. Of earth shifting strangely beneath my feet, turned, not by any unseen animal, but by some darker, subterranean elemental force. And, as I watched closely, I saw the black ground as it shifted again and the blank-eyed head and spiderlike hands of some murdered Lazarus, self- raising from its own corpse gases, appeared on the mysterious surface. Thin and white like a clay pipe, the naked creature lifted its behind, its chest, and, last of all, its skull, moving backwards and unnaturally, the way a collapsed puppet might arrange its various limbs, until at last it appeared to be kneeling in front of a cloud of smoke which cleared suddenly as it was sucked into the muzzle of the pistol in my steady hand.
CHAPTER TEN: GERMANY, 1954
It's one of life's little jokes that whenever you think that things can hardly get any worse they usually do.
I must have fallen asleep again, and for a moment I thought it was just another bad dream. I felt several pairs of hands upon me, turning me over onto my stomach and ripping the pyjama jacket off my back; and then I was simultaneously hooded and handcuffed. As the manacles pinched my wrists painfully I cried out, and for this sound I received a punch on the head.
'Quiet,' hissed a voice – an American voice. 'Or you'll get another.'
The hands, which wore rubber gloves, hauled me onto my feet. Someone pulled down my pyjama trousers and I was dragged and then marched out of my cell, along the landing and down the stairs. We went outside briefly and crossed the yard. Doors opened and slammed behind us and after that I quickly lost track of where I was beyond the obvious fact that I was still within the walls of Landsberg. I felt a hand push down on top of my hooded head.
'Sit down,' said a voice.
I sat and that would have been fine except that there was no chair and I heard several loud guffaws as I lay sprawled in pain on the stone-flagged floor.
'Did you think of that one all by yourself?' I said. 'Or did you get the idea from a movie?'
'I told you to shut up.' Someone kicked me in the small of my back, not so hard as to cause any damage but enough to shut me up. 'Speak when spoken to.'
More hands picked me up again and dumped me onto a chair, and this time it was there.
Then I heard lots of footsteps leaving the room and a door closing but not being locked, and I might have supposed myself alone but for the fact that I could smell the smoke from a cigarette. I would have asked for one myself if I thought I could have smoked it with a hood over my head. There was that and the chance I might get kicked or punched again. So I stayed quiet, telling myself that despite their threats this was the opposite of what they wanted. Unless you're going to put a man on a gallows trapdoor and hang him, you hood him for only one reason: to help soften him up and make him talk. The only thing was, I couldn't imagine what they wanted me to say that I hadn't already told them.
