During Weimar. During the war. On the Russian front. But most of the reason I hate them is because I spent almost two years in a Soviet labour camp. And until I met you boys I thought that was about as much hate as I could have for any one race of people.'
'We're not so bad.' The man with the pipe took it out of his mouth and started to refill it. 'When you get to know us.'
'You can get used to anything, it's true,' I said.
The man with the glasses tutted loudly. By now I vaguely recognised him from seven years earlier, at the Stiftskaserne Hospital, in Vienna.
'After all the trouble we had getting you this exclusive suite,' he said. He started to clean his glasses with the end of his tie. 'I'm hurt.'
'When you're done cleaning your glasses,' I said, 'the windows in here could use a wipe, too. I'm particular about windows. Particularly when I know who's been breathing on them. There's nothing about this cell I like now I know who was in here last.'
The man with the pipe was finally lighting up. Hitler would have hated his pipe. It looked as if I'd found one reason at last to like Adolf Hitler.
The Ami sucked at the stem, blew out some sweet smoke, and said, 'I watched an old newsreel the other day. Of Hitler making a speech at Tempelhof Field, in Berlin. There were one million people that day. Apparently it took twelve hours just to get everyone in there, and another twelve to get them all out again. I guess you were the only Berliner who stayed home that night.'
'Berlin nightlife was much better before the Nazis,' I said.
'That's what I hear. People say it was quite something. Degenerate but lively. All those clubs. Striptease dancers. Naked ladies. Open homosexuality. What were you people thinking? I mean no wonder the Nazis got an in.' He shook his head. 'On the other hand, Munich's kind of dull, I think.'
'It has some advantages,' I said. 'There are no Ivans in Munich.'
'Is that why you lived there, after you were in that POW camp? Instead of Berlin?'
'One reason, I suppose.'
'You were in and out of that camp relatively quickly.' He had finished cleaning his glasses and put them back on his head. They were still too small for him and I wondered if American heads were like American stomachs and kept on growing faster than those in Europe. 'In comparison with a lot of other guys. I mean, some of your old comrades are only just coming home now.'
'I was lucky,' I said. 'I escaped.'
'How?'
'Mielke was involved.'
'Then we'll pick it up there tomorrow, shall we? In here. Ten o'clock.'
'You'd better clear that with my secretary,' I said. 'Tomorrow's the day when I start writing my book.'
'What did I tell you? You know this is a great room for a writer. Maybe the spirit of Adolf Hitler will come and help you out with a few pages.'
'Seriously, though,' said the other Ami. 'If you need pen and paper to make a few notes, about Mielke, just ask the guard. Might help to jog your memory if you wrote a few things down.'
'Why now? Why not before?'
'Because things are starting to become more important. Mielke starts to become more important. So, the more details you can remember the better.'
'I know one spirit that might help a lot,' I said. 'And it isn't Hitler's.'
'Yeah?'
'I'm a little bit like Goethe,' I said. 'When I'm writing a book I find that a bottle of good German brandy usually helps.'
'Is there such a thing as a good German brandy?'
'I'll settle for some cheap vodka, only a man needs a hobby when he's got his feet in the cement. Something to take his mind off the present and put it somewhere in the past. About seven years ago, to be more accurate.'
'All right,' said the man with the glasses. 'We'll get you a bottle of something.'
'And I would like to catch up on my smoking. I'd given up until I left Cuba. Since I met you I've got a much better reason to kill myself.'
They left me alone after that. Pencils and paper, a bottle of brandy, a clean glass, a couple of packets of cigarettes and some matches and even a newspaper arrived and I placed them all on the table and just watched them for a while, enjoying the freedom to have a drink or not have a drink. It's the little things that can make prison tolerable. Like a door key. By all accounts they'd let Hitler have the run of Landsberg and he'd treated the place more like a hotel than a penitentiary. Not that he was in any way penitent about the putsch of 1923, of course.
I lay down on the bed and tried to relax, but it wasn't easy in that cell. Was this why they'd put me in here? Or was it just an American idea of a joke? I tried not to think about Adolf Hitler but he kept on getting up from the desk and, full of impatience, going to the window and staring out through the bars in that pose he always had of a man chosen by destiny.
The curious thing was I'd never really thought about Hitler. For years when he was still alive I tried not to think of him at all, dismissing him as a crank before he was elected chancellor of Germany, and after that happened, merely wishing him dead. But now that I was lying on the bed where, for nine months, he had dreamed his autocratic dreams it seemed impossible not to pay attention to the man with blue eyes at the window.
As I watched he sat down at the desk again, picked up the pen and started to write, covering the sheets of paper with furious scribbling and sweeping each page off the table and onto the floor as he finished so that I might pick them up and read what was written. At first the sentences made no sense at all; but gradually these became more coherent, affording glimpses into the extraordinary phenomenon that was Hitler's mind. Whatever he wrote was based on his own incontrovertible logic and served as a perfect guide for the commission of evil, worked out to the most minute detail. It was like sitting in the same asylum cell as the insane Doctor Mabuse, together with the ghosts of all those he had exterminated, and watching him write his last criminal testament.
At last he stopped writing and, leaning back on the chair, turned to look at me. Feeling this was my chance to put him on the spot, I tried to frame a question of the kind that Robert Jackson, the Chief American Prosecutor at Nuremberg, might have asked. But this was more difficult than I might have imagined. There wasn't any single question beyond a simple 'why' that I could have asked; and I was still wrestling with this realisation when he spoke to me:
'So, what happened next?'
I tried to stifle a yawn. 'You mean, when I left Le Vernet?'
'Of course.'
'We went back to Toulouse,' I said. 'From there we drove to Vichy and handed our prisoners to the French. Then we drove to the border of the occupied zone – Bourges, I think it was – and waited for the French to deliver them back to us. A ridiculous arrangement, but one that seemed to suit the hypocrisy of the French. These prisoners included poor Herschel Grynszpan. From Bourges we drove back to Paris, where the prisoners were locked up before being flown to Berlin. Well, you probably know better than me what happened to Grynszpan. I know he was in Sachsenhausen for a while. And there never was a show trial, of course.'
'A trial was unnecessary,' said Hitler. 'His guilt was obvious. Besides, it might have been embarrassing for Petain. Just like the Riom Trial, when that Jew Leon Blum gave evidence against Laval.'
I nodded. 'Yes, I can see that.'
'I didn't hear anything about what happened to him,' said Hitler. 'At any rate I cannot recollect. At the end I had quite a lot on my mind. Himmler probably dealt with him. I dare say he was one of those whose hash got settled by the SS at Flossenburg in the last days of the war. But, you know, Grynszpan had it coming. After all, there's no doubt that he really did murder Ernst vom Rath. No doubt at all. The Jew just wanted to kill an important German and vom Rath was merely the unlucky man he killed. There were plenty of witnesses to the murder who came forward and told the truth about what happened. Not that you would know the meaning of truth. Your behaviour at Le Vernet was a gross act of deceit and betrayal. To me and your fellow officers.'
'Yes, it was,' I said. 'But I'll live with it.'
