He was glad, though, for this assignment. He was weary of his Gestapo job, tired of interviewing informers whose eyes shone with malice or greed, tired of searching through the endless file cards. Even the payoff when, through one of his intuitive leaps, he found one of the few remaining hidden Jews, was less rewarding these days.
For over twenty years he had been full of anger at the Jews, at the terrible things they had done to Germany. He knew they were still a threat, with their power in America and what was left of Russia, but in recent years it was as though his rage, his strength, was wearing out as he got older – he would be forty-five soon. Yesterday he had arrived at a home in a prosperous Berlin suburb at daybreak with four policemen, banging on the door and shouting for entry. They had found a family of Jews, a mother and father and a boy of eleven, in a damp cellar. Bunks and armchairs and even a little sink had been installed there. They hauled the three upstairs, the mother yelling and screaming, and took them into the kitchen where their hosts, Mr and Mrs Muller, waited with their children, two little blonde girls in identical blue nightshirts, the younger one clutching a rag doll.
Gunther’s men shoved the three Jews against the kitchen wall. The woman stopped screaming and stood weeping quietly, head in hands. Then the little boy, crazily, attempted a run for it. One of Gunther’s men grabbed his arm, banged him back against the wall, and gave him a punch that sent blood trickling from his mouth. Gunther frowned. ‘That’s enough, Peter,’ he said. He turned to the German family. He knew Mr Muller was a railway official with no political record. ‘Why have you done this?’ he asked sadly. ‘You know it will be the end of you.’
Muller, a little balding stick of a man, inclined his head to a small wooden cross on the wall. Gunther nodded. ‘I see. Lutherans? Confessing Church?’
‘Yes,’ the man said. He looked at the captive Jews, and added, with sudden anger, ‘They have souls, just like us.’
Gunther had heard that stupid argument many times before. He sighed. ‘All you have done is bring trouble on yourselves.’ He nodded to the Jews. ‘Them too. They should have gone for resettlement like all the others. Instead they’ve probably spent years running from house to house.’ People like Mr and Mrs Muller were so stupid; they could have lived normal quiet lives but now they would suffer SS interrogation and then they would be hanged.
Mrs Muller took a deep breath. ‘Please do not hurt our little girls,’ she pleaded, her voice trembling.
‘Shouldn’t you have thought of them before you did this?’ Gunther sighed again. ‘It’s all right, your girls won’t be harmed, they’ll be sent for adoption by good German families – who’ve probably lost sons fighting in the East,’ he added bitterly, looking the woman in the eye.
Her husband said, ‘Do I have your word on that?’ Gunther nodded. The woman said, ‘Thank you,’ then lowered her head and began to cry. Gunther frowned; no-one he had arrested had ever thanked him before. He looked at the little cross on the wall. He had been brought up a Lutheran himself, and was aware the cross was supposed to be a symbol of sacrifice. Gunther knew about real sacrifice. Hans, his twin brother, had been killed eight years ago by partisans in the Ukraine. Sitting in the comfortable car crossing London he remembered his brother’s first leave, after the invasion of Russia in 1941. Hans had gone into Russia as part of an SS Einsatzgruppe, liquidating Bolsheviks and Jews. Hans was thirty-three when he came back that December, but he looked older. He had sat in Gunther’s house, after Gunther’s wife had gone to bed, his face pale and drawn against the black of his SS uniform. He said, ‘I’ve killed hundreds of people, Gunther. Women and old people.’ Suddenly he was talking fast. ‘A whole Jewish village once, a shtetl, we got them to dig a huge pit, then kneel naked on the edge while we shot them. It was so cold, they began shivering as soon as we got them undressed; it was fear as well, of course.’ Hans took a deep, shuddering breath, then braced himself, squaring his shoulders. ‘But Himmler says we have to be utterly hard and ruthless. He addressed us before we went into Russia. He said we must do this for the future of the Reich. For the generations unborn.’ He looked at his brother, a desperate fierce stare. ‘No matter what it costs us.’
After the arrests Gunther had spent the rest of the day back at Gestapo headquarters in Prince Albrechtstrasse, dealing with the paperwork. He signed the documents transferring the Jewish family to Heydrich’s Jewish Evacuation Department, the Mullers to interrogation. Then he went wearily down the wide central staircase, past the busts of German heroes, and walked home to his flat. His route took him through the vast, endless works being carried out in the city centre to build Germania, Speer’s new Berlin, in time for the 1960 Olympics. The buildings they planned were so huge the sandy soil on which they would be built could never support them without concrete foundations hundreds of feet deep. A special railway line had been laid to take away the sand. On a cold, clear day like this the air was full of dust; sometimes the pall hung so heavy that Gunther, like other people susceptible to it, wore one of the new little white facemasks from America. Thousands of Polish and Russian forced labourers swarmed round the giant pits that made up the largest building site on earth. A few always died during the day and Gunther saw the hands and feet of corpses sticking out from underneath a tarpaulin to one side. Police patrolled with their rifles; they were vastly outnumbered by the labourers but one man with a gun can command many without.
He noticed that fewer passers-by wore their Nazi Party badges these days. The streets that weren’t being rebuilt looked increasingly shabby. Cheap imports from France and the occupied east had kept German living standards up until a couple of years ago, but they were falling now as the Russian war ground on; five million Germans dead and more announced each week. It was daily talk in Police Intelligence that morale was falling; many citizens didn’t even give the German greeting ‘Heil Hitler’ to each other any more.
Back home in his flat he ate his usual lonely dinner at the kitchen table, then sat and listened to the radio. He opened a beer and began thinking of his wife and son. Four years ago Klara had left him for a fellow police officer; they had taken his son, Michael, and gone to live as subsidized settlers in Krimea, the only part of Russia that had been completely cleared of the original population and, an easily defensible peninsula, it was deemed safe for Germans. Gunther knew, though, that the thousand-mile-long railway the Germans had built to it was under constant partisan attack.
He switched off the radio – Mozart was playing and he found his music effete and irritating – and put on Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture. He liked the confident, crashing beat, even though Tchaikovsky was Russian and disapproved of. The music stirred him but when it was over the sad empty bleakness that came over him sometimes crept back. He told himself it was the times; those who believed in Germany had to pay a hard price for the future.
The telephone’s ring made him jump. The call was from Gestapo headquarters. He was to come in at once, to see Superintendent Karlson.