Ostland, p.18
Ostland, page 18
Until I did, I was more than happy settling down to the regular work of a police homicide department: domestic murders in which one had to look no further than the surviving spouse for the prime suspect, or underworld killings in which one antisocial leech of a black-market profiteer rid the world of another. My hours were regular and free time guaranteed. Much, much more significantly, Biene and I now had the time and freedom to enjoy the glorious sensation of being young and in love.
We spent evenings together seeing films and plays, walking arm-in-arm through the city or dancing cheek-to-cheek around my living-room floor while the gramophone played recordings of our favourite dance bands. For all the perils of the age, life was still rich with opportunity and great hopes for the future. Biene and I made love with the passion that comes when animal desire is combined with heartfelt emotion. At the weekends we would go out to the Wannsee beach and bask in the sunshine. I took a picture of Biene there one Sunday afternoon, looking like a movie star with her huge smile, her round sunglasses and her two-piece bathing costume, and it kept me warm for many months in the freezing winter that followed. The beach showed off Biene to her very best advantage, and that sporty, coltish body of hers looked equally splendid stretched out on the sand or cutting through the waters of the lake in a front crawl worthy of an Olympian.
At the end of July my friend and comrade Frank Baum was posted to join Einsatzkommando 9, part of Einsatzgruppe A, which had followed Army Group North into the Baltic states and on to the gates of Leningrad. The former Latvian capital of Riga was now the administrative centre of a new German province called the Reich Commissariat Ostland, or ‘East Land’. On the central Front, our forces had stormed into Smolensk and were heading east, and by August they were within striking distance of Moscow. Arthur Nebe, who was still the nominal commander of the Criminal Police, had established his headquarters in Minsk as leader of Einsatzgruppe B. In the south we had driven the Red Army out of Kiev and were advancing towards the oilfields of the Caucasus. A second Reich Commissariat of the Ukraine had been established and was now being administered from the city of Rivne.
As hard as it may be to believe this, those of us still working at our normal jobs had no idea of what was really happening in Russia. So far as I was concerned, Baum was lucky to be going there. Ostland was one of the foundries where our vast new empire would be forged, and where a young man of ability and determination could make a name for himself. I longed for such an opportunity myself. And not long afterwards, I got it.
In the early autumn of 1941 my promotion to Criminal Police Commissar and SS-First Lieutenant was duly confirmed. It came with a pay rise and, best of all, the elevation to Beamter status. From now on my position as an officer of the state was secure for life and, as if that were not enough, I was informed that so far as the SS was concerned I could now refer to myself as ‘Dr Heuser’. It was felt that my studies at the Leaders’ School more than compensated for not taking the final exams of my legal doctorate.
In October I received orders to transfer to Riga to join a unit within Einsatzgruppe A known as Sonderkommando 1b, under the command of SS-Lieutenant-Colonel Erich Ehrlinger. I was promised a special hardship bonus and extra annual leave, but those incentives were of far less interest to me than the prospects that this new posting would surely bring with it.
Of course, Biene and I were a little downcast as we spent our last night together. She cried as we danced, our bodies pressed close together to the sound of Rina Ketty singing that most melancholy, but beautiful song of wartime parting, ‘J’attendrai’. The title meant ‘I will wait,’ and Biene swore that she would wait for me, no matter how long it might be before I returned home. Yet as sad as we both were to be parting, we had no doubt that – like a young Roman tribune being sent to the wilds of Britannia – I was embarking on the vital task of bringing civilization and the rule of law to a distant province still mired in barbarism. I was safe from the perils of the front line itself, and I was building a career that we both believed would bring us security for the rest of our days.
For her part, Biene planned to return home to her family in Hamburg. ‘I won’t miss you so much if I have my parents to comfort me,’ she said. ‘And I can’t stay here. It would be too painful to work in the same old office, but without you there. Every building, every street, every blade of grass in the Tiergarten reminds me of you. But I promise you, the day you come back I’ll be here, waiting for you.’
On our final morning together, after we had said our last farewells on the station platform, kissed with the longing of those who fear they may never be able to kiss one another again and sworn our undying love for the thousandth time, I turned to step up on to the train. Biene caught my arm. ‘There’s one last thing I want you to know,’ she said. ‘I’m proud of you, my darling. I’m so very, very proud.’
27
Koblenz, West Germany: 22 October 1961
From her seat in the Koblenz District Court Paula Siebert had a view through a window across the treetops towards the facade of the old Electoral Palace. With its magnificent portico of eight huge Ionic columns, its arcaded ground floor and the calm, symmetrical march of its windows and skylights the palace was a temple to the classical, rational values of its late eighteenth-century creators. There was a similar appeal to reason in the courtroom itself, where a large mosaic on one wall depicted the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. It happened to stand in the direct eyeline of the defendants: a not-so-subtle reminder of the consequences of their own foolishness. Even before the proceedings had properly got under way, many of the accused were already staring at that mosaic so intently that they seemed to be counting every single one of the countless thousand marble tesserae involved in its making. It took Paula a moment or two to register that this was just a means by which they could avoid any eye contact whatever with anyone else in the court, or any acknowledgement of its proceedings.
She happened to have been walking up to the court when Heuser had arrived not long before. He’d been driven there in a prison bus, and though he’d raised a file of documents to his face to hide himself from the handful of photographers waiting by the entrance, she’d recognized his profile and caught sight of a single nervous bloodshot eye peering round the side of the pale brown cardboard file. He’d managed to compose himself since then, and from the way the others had greeted him it was evident that he was the leader of the group. Of the others, nine were instantly forgettable, middle-aged men whose absolute lack of physical presence felt like a plea of innocence in itself. ‘Look at me,’ they each seemed to be saying. ‘Can you really believe that anyone so insignificant could possibly have been a killer? Can you honestly imagine me in an SS uniform? Do I look like a devil to you?’
And the truth was they didn’t, for these were an essentially random collection of individuals who happened, by chance, to have been given a posting to a particular place at a specific time. When the war broke out Feder, Dalheimer and Wilke were all policemen, though none had shown anything like the promise Heuser displayed as a detective. Wilke, for example, had been a student of theology and classics who had only joined the force after a brief, unfulfilling career as a primary school teacher. Kaul also worked for the police service, but as an office administrator: he was always happiest checking accounts and ticking boxes, and that had still applied in Minsk, too.
The rest had been civilians. Harder was a shopkeeper in Paula’s own hometown of Frankfurt – she’d never dared ask her mother if she’d ever bought goods from his store. Merbach was a car mechanic by trade, whose chief role in Minsk had been to supervise the SS motor-pool. Oswald was an electrical technician and engineer. Schlegel was an academic. His prewar ambition had been to teach business studies. Von Toll had been managing a country estate in east Prussia when the conflict began.
The three judges presiding over the case would be well used to the idea that apparently meek and harmless individuals could be capable of the most heinous crimes. But how could the six lay jurors alongside them not think to themselves that these men looked just like their neighbours; that they were simply ordinary, law-abiding Germans forced to obey disgusting orders?
Only one of the accused seemed in any way to conform to the stereotypical image of an unrepentant Nazi killer. While all his old comrades were dressed in suits and ties, doing their best to look respectable, Franz Stark wore an old leather jacket and a rough plaid shirt. His pinched face glowered at the courtroom in brazen defiance. The others seemed to shy away from him a little, repelled by both snobbery and fear. Of all the defendants, Stark had by far the roughest background, the most meagre education and the least professional prestige. He’d been a committed Nazi since the very earliest days of the Party, but even senior Reich officials had been appalled by his brutal behaviour in Minsk.
Paula herself had no legal standing in the trial. She wouldn’t be allowed to examine witnesses, let alone the accused. Her role was simply to observe the progress of the case and be ready to provide additional evidence or undertake further inquiries, should the need arise. She’d expected to find herself amidst a horde of reporters and members of the public, all gathering to see the wicked war criminals in the flesh. Less than five months had passed, after all, since the Israelis had hanged Adolf Eichmann, the principal organizer of the Holocaust. His trial and execution had attracted huge headlines all over the world. But here they were, about to start by far the biggest trial ever conducted by Germans on their own war criminals, and the press seats and public gallery were less than half full. Of the reporters who were present, the majority were talking to one another in English: foreign correspondents from the American and British press.
Perhaps the German press had other fish to fry. Two weeks earlier Der Spiegel had printed a cover story claiming that the West German armed forces had performed so poorly in a multinational training exercise called Fallex 62 that they had been officially described as ‘prepared for defence to a limited extent’ – the lowest possible rating that any NATO force could receive. Franz Josef Strauss, the Federal Minister of Defence, responded to this public humiliation by accusing the magazine of treason and threatening the strongest possible retaliation against its owner, Rudolf Augstein, and his journalists. The Spiegel Affair, as it was now being called, had become the topic of every conversation and many an argument as believers in free speech clashed with government supporters. That was one good enough reason why the Heuser case had slipped off the radar, but there might only have been limited interest in the trial, no matter what. Paula’s fellow countrymen and women really did seem to be sending a very clear message that they had no desire to rake over the ashes of the past. Or perhaps they just couldn’t face the truth of what lay among those ashes.
When the initial formalities of the trial had been concluded, with all the defendants pleading not guilty to every one of the charges in front of them, the prosecution began to lay out the basic facts of the case. A series of place names were read out, each with its own number … Rakow, 100 … Minsk/Koidanov, 3,000 … Trostinets, 16,500 … Slutsk, 1,600 … on and on, these names and numbers, each representing the site and death-toll of a mass execution. And these insignificant grey men had helped carry them out. Not that they ever used any term as vulgar as ‘execution’, for theirs had been a world of euphemism and evasion in which ‘actions’ consisted of the ‘resettlement’ of men, woman and children to ‘settlement areas’ where they were ‘processed’. But they had known exactly what they were doing, which was why they were always drunk out of their minds on the vodka stacked in crates right next to the bullets as they did it. Ah yes, the vodka … the prosecutor had already stated that a conservative estimate of 31,970 people had been killed. Paula was curious to know when he would reveal something she’d learned while interviewing a quartermaster who had supplied the killers with their food and drink. He reckoned that he’d delivered around 30,000 bottles of vodka to the various killing sites: a bottle, in other words, for every single person that had died.
How hard those killers had tried to obliterate their consciousness along with their consciences. And that was not all, for in addition to the other indictments against them, two of the defendants were charged with a variety of individual killings. Stark had killed three innocent, defenceless men while enraged by a perceived humiliation for which they had been in no way responsible. The other lone murderer was Heuser. He had been directly, personally, responsible for the deaths of at least eight other people. He’d ordered the death of one woman with the writing of a single letter ‘L’, for ‘liquidation’, on her case-file. Her crime had been to have sex with a Luftwaffe pilot, an unforgivable sin for someone classed as less than fully human (the pilot, of course, had not been punished at all). One, possibly two other men had been shot either by him or on his direct instructions for the capital crime of writing letters. Like the serial killer he once hunted, Heuser had dragged two women out into wastelands in the dead of night, murdered them and left their bodies where they lay. He’d shot a Catholic priest and then ordered the execution of three suspected saboteurs in circumstances so hellish that Hieronymus Bosch would have struggled to invent anything more grotesque. One of the trio had made a bid to escape. Heuser had shot him, too.
Paula knew, beyond any doubt, that these events had happened. She knew that Heuser had been responsible for them. Yet his transformation from the fine, principled detective who had helped track down the infamous S-Bahn murderer to the blood-drenched fiend that the case against him described was impossible to comprehend. How could a human soul be corrupted so totally, so fast? And how, knowing all that he’d done, could Heuser then return to civilian life, re-establish himself in the police and present himself once again as an admirable, honourable pillar of law and order? It was not just that he’d deceived the police force for which he worked, or the public that he served. He had somehow managed to persuade himself of his own essential blamelessness, his moral superiority to the criminals he hunted with such exemplary energy and rigour.
What in God’s name had happened to make him the way he was?
Paula was suddenly aware that Heuser profoundly scared her. It was not that she feared him in any physical sense. There had never been any suggestion that he’d hurt anyone before or after his time in Minsk, nor had he been remotely threatening in any of his interviews with her. No, what chilled her to the bone was that she, Kraus – absolutely anyone – might have within them the same capacity for evil and the same ability to numb themselves to its consequences.
She looked at Heuser now, impassively taking notes as the prosecutor set out the case against him. He seemed as normal and innocuous as the men on either side of him: just a rundown, middle-aged man of the sort one might find sitting alone in a city café, or watching the world go by from a lonely park bench. From time to time, when the crimes being described were particularly egregious, he fiddled nervously with his spectacles. When the evidence against him seemed exceptionally telling, he would dab his face with his fingers to wipe away the sweat glistening on his forehead or beading his upper lip.
That sweat seemed to Paula like the shame and guilt seeping from Heuser’s body. His attempts at self-deception were breaking down. His physical reactions were giving him away. She thought of the effort, the years of concentration and self-discipline, that he must have expended in building the wall that he’d put between himself and his memories of Minsk. The identity photo that had troubled her so much now seemed to her like the picture of a mask beneath which a maggot-infested head was being eaten away from within. It was almost enough to make her feel a shred, not of sympathy, but perhaps of compassion for Georg Heuser. He had arrived in the Reich Commissariat Ostland as a decent enough young man. But he had left it a monster.
28
Riga and Minsk, Reich Commissariat Ostland: October 1941 – February 1942
In October 1941 I reported to Sonderkommando 1b in Riga. My new commander, Ehrlinger, and his men had undertaken a number of what they called ‘actions’ on their march into Russia and the Baltic states, but I knew almost nothing about these events, for my new comrades were oddly unwilling to talk about their experiences to date. I therefore had no idea what I was letting myself in for. It took an accidental encounter to give me a hint of what was to come.
One night I was walking down a narrow side street in the old part of Riga, not far from the cathedral, when I heard someone call my name from the far side of the street. It was Frank Baum. He’d been given a 48-hour leave from Einsatzkommando 9 and was hell-bent on spending every minute of it blind drunk.
I have to admit, I didn’t at first recognize my old murder squad colleague. The last time I’d seen Baum, he was still a cheerful soul who could bring a smile to my face on the gloomiest of days. Now he was a stumbling, ill-kempt wreck, and it was apparent from his hollow eyes and drawn face that his condition was more than just a matter of a few too many drinks. But what the real problem was, I did not immediately discover.
Only when we had found a restaurant whose sole available dinner dish was a tasteless horse-meat stew, washed down by vinegary red wine and vodka, did Baum slowly begin to open up, though his story was so rambling and his speech so indistinct that I found it hard to keep track of what he was trying to say. I managed to establish that something had happened at a place called Ponary in Lithuania. Baum said the site had been chosen because the Russians had been planning a military airfield there and had dug a series of huge holes in the ground, where they planned to put aviation fuel storage tanks: ‘Saved my men from having to dig pits of our own.’
