your mass-murdering pals. No American ever killed any Jews, mister.'
'What about the Rosenbergs?' I said.
'A Nazi with a sense of humour. How about that, Bill?'
'He's going to need that when he gets back to Germany, Mitch.'
'The Rosenbergs. That's very funny. It's just a pity we can't fry you, Gunther, the way we fried those two.'
'They had lawyers and a fair trial. And I happen to know that the judge and the prosecutor were Jews themselves. Just for your information, Kraut.'
'That is reassuring,' I said. 'However, I might feel more reassured if I'd ever seen a lawyer myself. I believe it's not uncommon for someone in this country to have to appear before a court when there's a move to have him deported. Especially when it seems possible I might be facing a trial in Germany. I had the strange idea that civil liberties actually meant something to Americans.'
'Extradition was never meant for scum like you, Gunther,' said the Fed called Bill.
'Besides,' said Mitch. 'You were never legally here. So you can't be legally extradited. As far as the American courts are concerned, you don't even exist.'
'Then it was all a bad dream, is that it?'
Bill put a stick of gum in his mouth and started to chew. 'That's it. You imagined the whole thing, Kraut. It never happened. And neither did this.'
I ought to have been ready to sign for it. Their faces had been sending me telegrams ever since we'd got in the paddy wagon. I suppose they were just waiting for a chance to make the delivery and now it came, in the belly, hard, right up to his elbow. I was still hearing the bell ringing in my ears ten minutes later when we stopped, the doors opened and they clothes-lined me out onto the runway. It was a real professional blow. I was up the steps and onto the plane before I could draw enough breath to wish them both goodbye.
I got a good view of the Statue of Liberty as we took off. I had the peculiar idea that the lady in the toga was giving the Hitler salute. At the very least I figured the book under her left arm was missing a few important pages.
CHAPTER FIVE: GERMANY, 1954
I'd been in Landsberg before, but only as a visitor. Before the war lots of people visited Landsberg Prison to see cell number seven, where Adolf Hitler was imprisoned in 1923 following the failed Beer Hall Putsch, and where he had written Mein Kampf; but I certainly wasn't one of those. I never liked biographies very much. My own previous visit had occurred in 1949 when, as a private detective working for a client in Munich, I'd gone there to interview an SS officer and convicted war criminal by the name of Fritz Gebauer.
The Americans ran the prison, and there were more convicted Nazi war criminals locked up there than anywhere else in Europe. Two or three hundred had been executed on the prison gallows between 1946 and 1951, and since then a great many more had been released, but the place still housed some of the biggest mass-murderers in history. Of these, I was well acquainted with several, although I avoided most of them during the times when we prisoners were allowed freely to associate. There were even a few Japanese prisoners from the Shanghai war crimes trial, but we had little or no contact with them.
The castle was from 1910 and, unlike the rest of the historic old town, was west of the River Lech: four white brick-built blocks were arranged in a cross shape at the centre of which was a tower from which location our steel-helmeted, iron-faced guards could swing their white batons like Fred Astaire and watch us.
I remembered once receiving a postcard of Hitler's cell and I had the impression that my own was not dissimilar: there was a narrow iron bedstead with a small night-stand, a bedside light, a table and a chair; and there was a big double window with more bars on the outside than on a lion-tamer's cage. I had a cell facing south-west, and that meant I had the sun in my cell during the afternoon and evening and a pleasant view of Spottingen Cemetery, where several of the men hanged at WCPN1 – which was what the Americans called it – were now interred. This made a nice change from my view of New York Bay and Lower Manhattan. The dead make quieter neighbours than waste-cargo barges.
The food was good although not recognisably German. And I didn't much like the clothes we were obliged to wear. Grey and purple stripes never suited me very well; and the little white hat lacked the all-important wide snap brim I'd always preferred and made me look like an organ-grinder's monkey.
Soon after my arrival I had a visit from the Roman Catholic chaplain, Father Morgenweiss, Herr Doctor Glawik, who was a lawyer appointed by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice, and a man from the Association for the Welfare of German Prisoners whose name I don't recall. Most Bavarians, and quite a few Germans too, regarded all of the inmates at WCPN1 as political prisoners. The US Army saw things differently, of course, and it wasn't very long before I was also visited by two American lawyers from Nuremberg. With their strongly accented German and their bullshit bonhomie these two were patient and very, very persistent; and it was only a relief in part that they seemed hardly interested in the two Vienna murders – which were nothing to do with me – and not at all interested in the killings of two Israeli assassins at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, of which I was undeniably guilty, albeit in self-defence. What they were interested in was my wartime service with the RSHA – the Reich Main Security Office, created by the mergers of the SD (the security service of the SS), the Gestapo and Kripo in 1939.
Several times a week we would meet in an interview room on the ground floor near the main entrance of the castle. They always brought me coffee and cigarettes, a little chocolate, and sometimes a Munich newspaper. Neither man was older than forty and the younger of the two was the senior officer. His name was Jerry Silverman, and before coming to Germany he'd been a New York lawyer. He was hugely tall and wore a green gaberdine military jacket with pink khaki trousers; there were several ribbons on his breast, but instead of the metal bars most American officers wore on their shoulders to indicate their rank, Silverman and his sergeant had a cloth patch sewn on their sleeves that identified them both as members of the OCCWC – the Office of the Chief Counsel for War Crimes. The fact was, they were wearing uniforms but they didn't belong to the US military; they were Pentagon bureaucrats, prosecutors from the American Department of Defense. Only in America could they have given lawyers a uniform.
The other, older man was Sergeant Jonathan Earp. He was a head shorter than Captain Silverman and had – he told me in an idle moment when I asked him – graduated from Harvard Law School prior to his joining the OCCWC.
Both men had one or two German parents, which was why they spoke the language so fluently, although Earp was the more fluent of the two; but Silverman was cleverer.
They came armed with several briefcases that were full of files but they hardly ever referred to these; each man seemed to carry a whole filing cabinet in his head. They did however take copious notes: Silverman had small, very neat and distinguished handwriting that looked as though it might have been written by Volundr, the ruler of the elves.
At first I assumed they were interested in the workings of the RSHA and my knowledge of Department VI, which was the office of Foreign Intelligence; but it seemed they knew almost as much about that as I did. Perhaps more. And only gradually did it become clear that they suspected me of something far more serious than a couple of local murders.
'You see,' explained Silverman, 'there are some aspects of your story that just don't add up.'
'I get a lot of that,' I said.
'You say you were a Kommissar in Kripo until-?'
'Until Kripo became part of the RSHA in September 1939.'
'But, you say, you were never a Party member.'
I shook my head.
'Wasn't that unusual?'
'Not at all. Ernst Gennat was the deputy chief of Kripo in Berlin until August 1939 and he was to my certain knowledge never a Nazi Party member.'
'What happened to him?'
