The Pale Criminal (36 page)

Heydrich started to smile a slow, curling sort of smile that got no further than the corner of his mouth. Then his eyes found mine and steered me towards the other door. Arthur Nebe followed, leaving the remaining officers to talk loudly among themselves.

‘It’s not many men who live to receive a personal apology from Heinrich Himmler,’ Heydrich said when the three of us were alone in the castle library.

I rubbed my shin painfully. ‘Well, I’m sure I’ll make a note of that in my diary tonight,’ I said. ‘It’s all I’ve ever dreamed of.’

‘Incidentally, you didn’t mention what happened to Kindermann.’

‘Let’s just say that he was shot while trying to escape,’ I said. ‘I’m sure that you of all people must know what I mean.’

‘That’s unfortunate. He could still have been useful to us.’

‘He got what a murderer properly has coming to him. Someone had to. I don’t suppose any of those other bastards will ever get theirs. The SS brotherhood and all that, eh?’ I paused and lit a cigarette. ‘What will happen to them?’

‘You can depend on it that they’re finished in the SS. You heard Himmler say so himself.’

‘Well, how ghastly for them all.’ I turned to Nebe. ‘Come on, Arthur. Will Weisthor get anywhere near a courtroom or a guillotine?’

‘I don’t like it any more than you do,’ he said grimly. ‘But Weisthor is too close to Himmler. He knows too much.’

Heydrich pursed his lips. ‘Otto Rahn, on the other hand, is merely an NCO. I don’t think the Reichsführer would mind if some sort of accident were to befall him.’

I shook my head bitterly.

‘Well, at least there’s an end to their dirty little plot. At least we’ll be spared another pogrom, for a while anyway.’

Heydrich looked uncomfortable now. Nebe got up and looked out of the library window.

‘For Christ’s sake,’ I yelled, ‘you don’t mean to say that it’s going to go ahead?’ Heydrich winced visibly. ‘Look, we all know that the Jews had nothing to do with the murders.’

‘Oh yes,’ he said brightly, ‘that’s certain. And they won’t be blamed, you have my word on it. I can assure you that–’

‘Tell him,’ said Nebe. ‘He deserves to know.’

Heydrich thought for a moment, and then stood up. He pulled a book from off the shelf and examined it negligently.

‘Yes, you’re right, Nebe. I believe he probably does.’

‘Tell me what?’

‘We received a telex before the Court convened this morning,’ said Heydrich. ‘By sheer coincidence, a young Jewish fanatic has made an attempt on the life of a German diplomat in Paris. Apparently he wished to protest against the treatment of Polish Jews in Germany. The Fuhrer has sent his own personal physician to France, but it is not expected that our man will live.

‘As a result, Goebbels is already lobbying the Führer that if this diplomat should die then certain spontaneous expressions of German public outrage be permitted against Jews throughout the Reich.’

‘And you’ll all look the other way, is that it?’

‘I don’t approve of lawlessness,’ said Heydrich.

‘Weisthor gets his pogrom after all. You bastards.’

‘Not a pogrom,’ Heydrich insisted. ‘Looting will not be permitted. Jewish property will merely be destroyed. The police will ensure that there is no plunder. And nothing will be permitted which in any way endangers the security of German life or property.’

‘How can you control a mob?’

‘Directives will be issued. Offenders will be apprehended and dealt with.’

‘Directives?’ I flung my cigarettes against the bookcase. ‘For a mob? That’s a good one.’

‘Every police chief in Germany will receive a telex with guidelines.’

Suddenly I felt very tired. I wanted to go home, to be taken away from all of this. Just talking about such a thing made me feel dirty and dishonest. I had failed. But what was infinitely worse, it didn’t seem as if I’d ever been meant to succeed.

A coincidence, Heydrich had called it. But a meaningful coincidence, according to Jung’s idea? No. It couldn’t be. There was no meaning in anything, anymore.

‘Spontaneous expressions of the German people’s anger’: that was how the radio put it.

I was angry all right, but there was nothing spontaneous about it. I’d had all night to get worked up. A night in which I’d heard windows breaking, and obscene shouts echoing up the street, and smelt the smoke of burning buildings. Shame kept me indoors. But in the morning which came bright and sunny through my curtains I felt I had to go out and take a look for myself.

I don’t suppose I shall ever forget it.

Ever since 1933, a broken window had been something of an occupational hazard for any Jewish business, as synonymous with Nazism as a jackboot, or a swastika. This time, however, it was something altogether different, something much more systematic than the occasional vandalism of a few drunken SA thugs. On this occasion there had occurred a veritable Walpurgisnacht of destruction.

Glass lay everywhere, like the pieces of a huge, icy jigsaw cast down to the earth in a fit of pique by some ill-tempered prince of crystal.

Only a few metres from the front door to my building were a couple of dress shops where I saw a snail’s long, silvery trail rising high above a tailor’s dummy, while a giant spider’s web threatened to envelope another in razor-sharp gossamer.

Further on, at the corner of Kurfurstendamm, I came across an enormous mirror that lay in a hundred pieces, presenting shattered images of myself that ground and cracked underfoot as I picked my way along the street.

For those like Weisthor and Rahn, who believed in some symbolic connection between crystal and some ancient Germanic Christ from which it derived its name, this sight must have seemed exciting enough. But for a glazier it must have looked like a licence to print money, and there were lots of people out sightseeing who said as much.

At the northern end of Fasanenstrasse the synagogue close to the S-Bahn railway was still smouldering, a gutted, blackened ruin of charred beams and burned-out walls. I’m no clairvoyant but I can say that every honest man who saw it was thinking the same thing I was. How many more buildings would end up the same way before Hitler was finished with us?

There were storm-troopers – a couple of truck-loads of them in the next street — and they were testing some more window-panes with their boots. Cautiously deciding to go another way, I was just about to turn back when I heard a voice I half-recognized.

‘Get out of here, you Jewish bastards,’ the young man yelled.

It was Bruno Stahlecker’s fourteen-year-old son Heinrich, dressed up in the uniform of the motorized Hitler Youth. I caught sight of him just as he hurled a large stone through another shop window. He laughed delightedly at his own handiwork and said: ‘Fucking Jews.’ Looking around for the approval of his young comrades he saw me instead.

As I walked over to him I thought of all the things I would have said to him if I had been his father, but when I was close to him, I smiled. I felt more like giving him a good jaw-whistler with the back of my hand.

‘Hallo, Heinrich.’

His fine blue eyes looked at me with sullen suspicion.

‘I suppose you think you can tell me off,’ he said, ‘just because you were a friend of my father’s.’

‘Me? I don’t give a shit what you do.’

‘Oh? So what do you want?’

I shrugged and offered him a cigarette. He took one and I lit us both. Then I threw him the box of matches. ‘Here,’ I said, ‘you might need these tonight. Maybe you could try the Jewish Hospital.’

‘See? You are going to give me a lecture.’

‘On the contrary. I came to tell you that I found the men who murdered your father.’

‘You did?’ Some of Heinrich’s friends who were now busy looting the clothes shop yelled to him to come and help. ‘I won’t be long,’ he called back to them. Then he said to me: ‘Where are they? The men who killed my father.’

‘One of them is dead. I shot him myself.’

‘Good. Good.’

‘I don’t know what is going to happen to the other two. That all depends, really.’

‘On what?’

‘On the SS. Whether they decide to court-martial them or not.’ I watched his handsome young face crease with puzzlement. ‘Oh, didn’t I tell you? Yes, these men, the ones who murdered your father in such a cowardly fashion, they were all SS officers. You see, they had to kill him because he would probably have tried to stop them breaking the law. They were evil men, you see, Heinrich, and your father always did his best to put away evil men. He was a damned good policeman.’ I waved my hand at all the broken windows. ‘I wonder what he would have thought of all this?’

Heinrich hesitated, a lump rising in his throat as he considered the implications of what I had told him.

‘It wasn’t — it wasn’t the Jews who killed him then?’

‘The Jews? Good gracious no.’ I laughed. ‘Where on earth did you get such an idea? It was never the Jews. I shouldn’t believe everything you read in
Der Stürmer
, you know.’

It was with a considerable want of alacrity that Heinrich returned to his friends when he and I had finished speaking. I smiled grimly at this sight, reflecting that propaganda works both ways.

Almost a week had passed since I’d seen Hildegard. On my return from Wewelsburg I tried telephoning her a couple of times, but she was never there, or at least she never answered. Finally I decided to drive over and see her.

Driving south on Kaiserallee, through Wilmersdorf and Friedenau, I saw more of the same destruction, more of the same spontaneous expressions of the people’s rage: shop signs carrying Jewish names torn down, and new anti-Semitic slogans freshly painted everywhere; and always the police standing by, doing nothing to prevent a shop being looted or to protect its owner from being beaten-up. Close to Waghauselerstrasse I passed another synagogue ablaze, the fire-service watching to make sure the flames didn’t spread to any of the adjoining buildings.

It was not the best day to be thinking of myself.

I parked close to her apartment building on Lepsius Strasse, let myself in through the main door with the street key she had given me, and walked up to the third floor. I used the door knocker. I could have let myself in but somehow I didn’t think she’d appreciate that, considering the circumstances of our last meeting.

After a while I heard footsteps and the door was opened by a young SS major. He could have been something straight out of one of Irma Hanke’s racial-theory classes: pale blond hair, blue eyes and a jaw that looked like it had been set in concrete. His tunic was unbuttoned, his tie was loose and it didn’t look like he was there to sell copies of the SS magazine.

‘Who is it, darling?’ I heard Hildegard call. I watched her walk towards the door, still searching for something in her handbag, not looking up until she was only a few metres away.

She was wearing a black tweed suit, a silvery crêpe blouse and a black feathered hat that plumed off the front of her head like smoke from a burning building. It was an image that I find hard to put out of my mind. When she saw me she stopped, her perfectly lipsticked mouth slackening a little as she tried to think of something to say.

It didn’t need much explaining. That’s the thing about being a detective: I catch on real fast. I didn’t need a reason why. Perhaps he made a better job of slapping her around than I had, him being in the SS and all. Whatever the reason, they made a handsome-looking couple, which was the way they faced me off, Hildegard threading her arm eloquently through his.

I nodded slowly, wondering whether I should mention catching her stepdaughter’s murderers, but when she didn’t ask, I smiled philosophically, just kept nodding, and then handed her back the keys.

I was half way down the stairs when I heard her call after me: ‘I’m sorry, Bernie. Really I am.’

I walked south to the Botanical Gardens. The pale autumn sky was filled with the exodus of millions of leaves, deported by the wind to distant corners of the city, away from the branches which had once given life. Here and there, stone-faced men worked with slow concentration to control this arboreal diaspora, burning the dead from ash, oak, elm, beech, sycamore, maple, horse-chestnut, lime and weeping-willow, the acrid grey smoke hanging in the air like the last breath of lost souls. But always there were more, and more still, so that the burning middens seemed never to grow any smaller, and as I stood and watched the glowing embers of the fires, and breathed the hot gas of deciduous death, it seemed to me that I could taste the very end of everything.

Otto Rahn and Karl Maria Weisthor resigned from the S S in February 1939. Rahn, an experienced outdoors traveller, died from exposure while walking in the mountains near Kufstein less than one month afterwards. The circumstances of his death have never been properly explained. Weisthor was retired to the town of Goslar where he was cared for by the S S until the end of the war. He died in 1946.

A public tribunal, consisting of six Gauleiters, was convened on 13 February 1940, for the purpose of investigating the conduct of Julius Streicher. The Party tribunal concluded that Streicher was ‘unfit for human leadership’, and the Gauleiter of Franconia retired from public duties.

The
Kristallnacht
pogrom of 9 and 10 November 1938 resulted in 100 Jewish deaths, 177 synagogues burnt down and the destruction of 7,000 Jewish businesses. It has been estimated that the amount of glass destroyed was equal to half the annual plate-glass production of Belgium, whence it had originally been imported. Damages were estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Where insurance monies were paid to Jews, these were confiscated as compensation for the murder of the German diplomat, von Rath, in Paris. This fine totalled $250 million.