On the morning of 7 July 1941, I commanded a firing squad that executed thirty Russian POWs. At the time I didn't feel bad about this because they were all NKVD, and less than twelve hours before they themselves had murdered two or three thousand prisoners at the NKVD prison in Lutsk. They also murdered some German POWs who were with them, which was a miserable sight. I suppose you could say they had every right to do so given that we had invaded their country. You could also say that our executing them in retaliation had considerably less justification, and you'd probably be correct on both counts. Well, we did it, but not because of the so-called 'commissar order' or the 'Barbarossa decree', which were nothing more than a shooting licence from German field headquarters. We did it because we felt – I felt – they had it coming, and they would certainly have shot us in similar circumstances. So we shot them in groups of four. We didn't make them dig their own graves or anything like that. I didn't care for that sort of thing. It smacked of sadism. We shot them and left them where they fell. Later on, when I was a pleni in a Russian labour camp, I sometimes wished I'd shot many more than just thirty, but that's a different story.
I didn't feel bad about it until the next day when my men and I came across a former colleague from the Police Praesidium at the Alex, in Berlin. A fellow named Becker, who was in another police battalion. I found him shooting civilians in a village somewhere west of Minsk. There were about a hundred bodies in a ditch and it seemed to me that Becker and his men had been drinking. Even then I didn't get it. I kept on looking for explanations for what was essentially inexplicable and certainly inexcusable. And it was only when I realised that some of the people Becker and his men were about to shoot were old women that I said something.
'What the Hell do you think you're doing?' I asked him.
'Obeying my orders,' he said.
'What? To kill old women?'
'They're Jews,' he said, as if that was all the explanation that was needed. 'I've been ordered to kill as many Jews as I can and that's what I'm doing.'
'Whose orders? Who's your field commander and where is he?'
'Major Weis.' Becker pointed at a long wooden building behind a white picket fence about thirty yards down the road. 'He's in there. Having his lunch.'
I walked toward the building and Becker called after me:
'Don't think I want to do this. But orders are orders, yes?'
As I reached the hut I heard another volley of shots. One of the doors was open and an SS major was sitting on a chair with his tunic off. In one hand he held a half-eaten loaf of bread and in the other a bottle of wine and a cigarette. He heard me out with a look of weary amusement on his face.
'Look, none of this is my idea,' he said. 'It's a waste of time and ammunition if you ask me. But I do what I'm told, right? That's how an army works. A superior officer gives me an order and I obey. Chapter closed.' He pointed at a field telephone that was on the floor. 'Take it up with headquarters if you like. They'll just tell you what they told me. To get on with it.'
He shook his head. 'You're not the only one who thinks this is madness, Captain.'
'You mean you've already asked for the orders to be confirmed?'
'Of course I have. Field HQ, told me to take it up with Division HQ.'
'And what did they say?'
Major Weis shook his head. 'Questioning an order with Division? Are you mad? I won't stay a major for very long if I do that. They'll have my pips and my balls and not necessarily in that order.' He laughed. 'But be my guest. Go on, call them. Just make sure you leave my name out of it.'
Outside there was another volley of shots. I picked up the field telephone and cranked the handle furiously. Thirty seconds later I was arguing with someone at Division HQ. The major got up and put his ear to the other side of the telephone. When I started to swear he grinned and walked away.
'You've upset them now,' he said.
I slammed the phone down and stood there trembling with anger.
'I'm to report to Division, in Minsk,' I said. 'Immediately.'
'Told you.' He handed me his bottle and I took a swig of what turned out to be not wine, but vodka. 'They'll have your rank, for sure. I hope you think it was worth it. From what I hear this-' he pointed at the door. 'This is just the smoke at the end of the gun. Someone else is pulling the trigger. That's what you have to hold on to, my friend. Try to remember what Goethe said. He said "the greatest happiness for us Germans is to understand what we can understand and then, having done so, to do what we're fucking told."'
I went outside and told the men I'd brought with me in a Panzer wagon and a Puma armoured car that we were going into Minsk, to make a report on the morning's anti-partisan action. As we drove along I was in a melancholy frame of mind, but that was only partly to do with the fate of a few hundred innocent Jews. Mostly I was concerned for the reputation of Germans and the German Army. Where would this end? I asked myself. I certainly never conceived that thousands of Jews were already being slaughtered in a similar fashion.
Minsk was easy to find. All you had to do was drive down a long straight road – quite a good road, even by German standards – and follow the grey plume of smoke on the horizon. The Luftwaffe had bombed the city a few days before and destroyed most of the city centre. Even so all of the German vehicles moving along the road kept their distance from one another in case of a Russian air attack. Otherwise the Red Army was gone and Wehrmacht intelligence indicated that the population of three hundred thousand would have left the city too except that our bombing of the road east out of Minsk – to Mogilev and Moscow – had forced as many as eighty thousand to turn back to the city, or at least what remained of it. Not that this looked like a particularly good idea either. Most of the wooden houses on the outskirts were still ablaze while, nearer the centre, piles of rubble backed onto hollowed- out office and apartment buildings. I'd never seen a city so thoroughly destroyed as Minsk. This made it all the more surprising that the Uprava, the city council and Communist Party HQ, had survived the bombing almost unscathed. The locals called it the Big House, which was something of an understatement: nine or ten storeys high and built of white concrete, the Uprava resembled a series of gigantic filing cabinets containing the details of every citizen in Minsk. In front of the building was an enormous bronze statue of Lenin, who viewed the large number of German cars and trucks with an understandable look of anxiety and concern, as well he might have done given that the building was now the headquarters of Reichskommissariat Ostland – a German-created administrative area that stretched from the Byelorussian capital to the Baltic Sea.
Pushing a heavy wooden door that was so tall it might still have been growing in a forest, I entered a cheap, marble- clad hall that belonged in a Metro station and approached a locomotive-sized central desk where several German soldiers and SS were attempting to impose some kind of administrative order on the ant colony of dusty grey men who were pouring in and out of the place. Catching the eye of one SS officer behind the desk I asked for the SS divisional commander's office and was directed to the second floor and advised to take the stairs, as the elevator was not working.
At the top of the first flight of stairs was a bronze head of Stalin, and at the top of the second a bronze head of Felix Dzerzhinsky. Operation Barbarossa looked like it was going to be bad news for Russian sculptors, just like everyone else. The floor was covered with broken glass and there was a line of bullet holes on the grey wall that led all the way along a wide corridor to a couple of open doors that faced each other and through which more SS officers were passing to and fro in a haze of cigarette smoke. One of these was my unit's commanding officer, Standartenfuhrer Mundt, who was one of those men who look like they came out of their mother's womb wearing a uniform. Seeing me he raised an eyebrow and then a hand as he casually acknowledged my salute.
'The murder squad,' he said. 'Did you catch them?'
'Yes, Herr Oberst.'
'Good work. What did you do with them?'
'We shot them, sir.' I handed over a handful of Red identification documents I'd taken from the Russians before their executions.
Mundt started to look through the documents like an immigration officer searching for something suspicious. 'Including the women?'
'Yes, sir.'
'Pity. In future all female partisans and NKVD are to be hanged in the town square, as an example to the others. Heydrich's orders. Understand?'
'Yes, Herr Oberst.'
Mundt wasn't much older than me. When the war broke out he'd been a police colonel with the Hamburg Schutzpolizei. He was clever, only his was the wrong kind of cleverness for Kripo: to be a decent detective you have to understand people and to understand people you have to be one of them yourself. Mundt wasn't like people. He wasn't even a person. I supposed that was why he had a pet dachshund with him; so that it might make him seem a little more human. But I knew better. He was a cold, pompous bastard. Whenever he spoke he sounded like he thought he was reciting Rilke, and I wanted to yawn or laugh or kick his teeth in. Which is how it must have looked.
'You disagree, Captain?'
'I don't much care to hang women,' I said.
He looked down his fine nose and smiled. 'Perhaps you'd prefer to do something else with them?'
'That must be someone else you're thinking of, sir. What I mean is, I don't much like waging war on women. I'm the conventional type. That's the Geneva Convention, in case you were wondering.'
Mundt pretended to look puzzled. 'It's a strange way of observing the Geneva Convention you have,' he said. 'To shoot thirty prisoners.'
I glanced around the office, which was a good size for just one desk. It would have been a good size for a sawmill. In the corner of the room was a fitted cupboard with its own little sink where another man was washing his half-naked torso. In the opposite corner was a safe. An SS sergeant was listening to it like it was a radio and trying, without success, to persuade the thing to open. On top of the desk was a trio of differently coloured telephones that might have been left there by three wise men from the East; behind the desk was another SS officer in a chair; and behind the officer was a large wall map of Minsk. On the floor lay a Russian soldier, and if this had ever been his office it wasn't any more; the bullet hole behind his left ear and the blood on the linoleum seemed to indicate he would soon be relocated to a much smaller and more permanent earthly space.
'Besides, Captain Gunther,' added Mundt, 'it may have escaped you but the Russians never signed the Geneva Convention.'
"Then I guess it's fine to shoot them all, sir.'
The officer behind the desk stood up. 'Did you say Captain Gunther?'
He was a Standartenfuhrer, too, a colonel, the same as Mundt, which meant that as he came around the desk and placed himself in front of me I was obliged to come to attention again. He had been spawned in the same Aryan pond as Mundt and was no less arrogant.
'Yes, sir.'
'Are you the Captain Gunther who telephoned to question my orders to shoot those Jews on the road to Minsk, this morning?'
'Yes, sir. That was me. You must be Colonel Blume.'
'What the devil do you mean by questioning an order?' he shouted. 'You're an SS officer, pledged to the Fuhrer. That order was issued to ensure security in the rear for our combat forces. Those Jews set their houses on fire when the local combat commander told them to make them available as billets for our troops. I can't think of a better reason for a reprisal action than the burning of those houses.'
'I didn't see any burning houses in that area, sir. And Sturmbannfuhrer Weis was under the impression that those old women were being shot only because they were Jews.'
'And if they were? The Jews of Soviet Russia are the intellectual bearers of the Bolshevik ideology, which makes them our natural enemy. No matter how old they are. Killing Jews is an act of war. Even they seem to understand that, if you don't. I repeat, those orders must be carried out for the safety of all Army areas. If every soldier only carried out an order after having considered the niceties of whether or not it agreed with his own conscience, then pretty soon there would be no discipline and no Army. Are you mad? Are you a coward? Are you ill? Or perhaps you actually like the Jews?'
'I don't care who or what they are,' I said. 'I didn't come to Russia to shoot old women.'
'Listen to yourself, Captain,' said Blume. 'What kind of an officer are you? You're supposed to set an example to your men. I've a good mind to take you to the ghetto just to see if this is some kind of an act; if you really are this squeamish about killing Jews.'
Mundt had started to laugh. 'Blume,' he said.
'I can promise you this, Captain,' said Colonel Blume. 'You won't be a captain any more if you can't manage it. You'll be the lowest Schutze in the SS. Do you hear?'
'Blume,' said Mundt. 'Look at these.' He handed Blume the papers of the NKVD I'd executed at Goloby. 'Look.'
Blume glanced at the documents as Mundt opened them for him. Mundt said: 'Sara Kagan, Solomon Geller, Josef Zalmonowitz.
Julius Polonski. These are all Jewish names. Vinokurova. Kieper.' He grinned some more, enjoying my growing discomfort. 'I worked on the Jew desk in Hamburg so I know something about these Yid bastards. Joshua Pronicheva. Fanya Glekh. Aaron Levin. David Schepetovka. Saul Katz. Stefan Marx. Vladya Polichov. These are all Yids he shot this morning. So much for your fucking scruples, Gunther. You picked a Jewish NKVD squad to execute. You just shot thirty Kikes whether you like it or not.'
Blume opened another identification document at random. And then another. 'Misha Blyatman. Hersh Gebelev. Moishe Ruditzer. Nahum Yoffe. Chaim Serebriansky. Zyama Rosenblatt.' He was laughing now, too. 'You're right. How do you like that? Israel Weinstein. Ivan Lifshitz. It sounds to me like you hit the jackpot, Gunther. So far you've managed to kill more Jews in this campaign than I have. Maybe I should recommend you for a decoration. Or at the very least a promotion.'
Mundt read out some more names just to rub it in. 'You should feel proud of yourself.' Then he clapped me on the shoulder. 'Come now. Surely you can see the funny side of this.'
'And if you can't then that only makes it all the more funny,' said Blume.
'What's funny?' said a voice.
We all looked around to see Arthur Nebe, the general in charge of Task Force B, standing in the doorway. Everyone came to attention, including me. As Nebe came into the office and walked up to the wall-map, with hardly a look at me, Blume attempted an explanation:
'I'm afraid this officer was exhibiting a degree of scrupulousness with regard to the killing of Jews that turns out to have been somewhat misplaced. General. It seems he already shot thirty NKVD this morning. Apparently unaware that they were all Jews.'
'It was the nice distinction between the two we found amusing,' added Mundt.
'Not everyone is cut out for this kind of work,' murmured Nebe, still studying the map. 'I heard that Paul Blobel's in a Lublin hospital after a special action in the Ukraine. A complete nervous breakdown. And perhaps you don't remember what was said by Reichsfiihrer Himmler at Pretzsch. Any repugnance felt at killing Jews is a cause for congratulation, since it affirms that we are a civilised people. So I really don't see what's funny about any of this. In future, I'll thank you to deal more sensitively with any man who expresses his inability to kill Jews. Is that clear?'
'Yes, sir.'
Nebe touched a red square on the top right-hand corner of the map. 'And this is – what?'
'Drozdy, sir,' said Blume. 'Three kilometres north of here. We've established a rather primitive prisoner-of-war camp there on the banks of the Svislock River. All of them men. Jews and non-Jews.'
'How many in total?'
'About forty thousand.'
'Separated?'
'Yes, sir.' Blume joined Nebe in front of the map. 'POWS in one half and Jews in the other.'
'And the ghetto?'
'South of the Drozdy camp in the north-west of the city. It's the old Jewish quarter of Minsk.' He put his finger on the map. 'Here. From the Svislock River, west on Nemiga Street, north along the edge of the Jewish cemetery, and back east towards the Svislock. This is the main street here, Republikanskaya, and where it meets Nemiga, that will be the main gate.'
'What kind of buildings are these?' asked Nebe.
'One- or two-storey wooden houses behind cheap wooden fences. Even as we speak, sir, the whole ghetto is being surrounded with barbed wire and watchtowers.'
'Locked at night?'
'Of course.'
'I want monthly actions to reduce the number of Byelorussian Jews there in order to accommodate the Jews they're sending us from Hamburg.'
'Yes, General.'
'You can start reducing the numbers now in the Drozdy camp. Make the selection voluntary. Ask those with university degrees and professional qualifications to come forward. Deprive them all of food and water to encourage volunteers. Those Jews you can keep for now. The rest you can liquidate at once.'
'Yes, General.'
'Himmler is coming here in a couple of weeks' time so he'll want to see that we're making progress. Understand?'
'Yes, General.'
Nebe turned and finally looked at me. 'You. Captain Gunther. Come with me.'
I followed Nebe into the adjacent office where four junior SS officers were reading files taken from an open filing cabinet.
'You lot,' said Nebe. 'Fuck off. And close the door behind you. And tell those lazy bastards next door to get rid of that body before he starts stinking the place out in this heat.'
There were two desks in this office, overlooked by a set of Trench windows and a poor portrait of Stalin in a grey uniform with a red stripe down the side of his trouser leg, looking rather less Caucasian and more Oriental than was usual.
Nebe fetched a bottle of schnapps and glasses from one of the desk drawers and poured two large ones. He took his own drink without a word, like a man who was tired of seeing things straight, and poured himself another while I was still sniffing and tensing my liver.