A Man Without Breath

It was a twelve-minute walk to work, depending on the weather. When it was cold, the streets froze hard and you had to walk slowly or risk a broken arm. When it thawed, you only had to beware of falling icicles. By the end of March it was still very cold at night but getting warmer during the day, and at last I felt able to remove the layers of newspaper that had helped to insulate the inside of my boots against a freezing Berlin winter. That made walking easier, too.

The Wehrmacht High Command (OKW) was housed in perhaps the largest office complex in Berlin: a five-storey building of grey granite on the north side of the Landwehr Canal, it occupied the whole corner of Bendlerstrasse and Tirpitzufer. Formerly the headquarters of the Imperial German Navy, it was better known as the Bendlerblock. The Bureau’s offices, at Blumeshof 17, looked onto the back of this building and a rose garden that, in summer, filled the air with such a strong smell of roses some of us who worked there called it the flower house. In my office under the eaves of the high red saddle roof, I had a desk, a filing cabinet, a rug on the wooden floor, and an armchair – I even had a painting and a little piece of bronze from the government’s own collection of art. I did not have a portrait of the leader. Few people who worked at the OKW did.

Usually I got to work early and stayed late, but this had very little to do with loyalty or professional zeal. The heating system in the flower house was so efficient that the cold windowpanes were always covered in condensation, so that you had to wipe them before you could look outside. There were even uniformed orderlies who went around building up the coal fires in the individual offices; which was just as well, as these were enormous. All of this meant that life was much more comfortable at the office than it was at home – especially when one considered the generosity of the OKW’s canteen, which was always open. Mostly the food was just stodge – potatoes, pasta and bread – but there was plenty of it. There was even soap and toilet paper in the washrooms, and newspapers in the mess.

The War Crimes Bureau was part of the Wehrmacht legal department’s international section, whose chief was the ailing Maximilian Wagner. Reporting to him was my boss, Judge Johannes Goldsche. He had headed the bureau from its inception in 1939. He was about sixty, with fair hair and a small moustache, a hooked nose, largish ears, a forehead as high as the roof on the flower house, and an Olympian disdain for the Nazis that stemmed from many years in private practice as a lawyer and judge during the Weimar Republic. His appointment to the bureau owed nothing to his politics and everything to his previous experience of war-crimes investigations, having been deputy director of a similar Prussian bureau during the Great War.

By state law the Wehrmacht was not supposed to be interested in politics, and it took this independence very seriously indeed. In the Wehrmacht’s legal office none of the six jurists charged with the regulation of the various military services were Party members. This is why – although I was not a lawyer – I fitted in very well. I think Goldsche regarded a Berlin detective as a useful blunt object in an arsenal that was filled with more subtle weapons, and he frequently used me to investigate cases where a more robust method of inquiry was required than just the taking of depositions. Few of the judges who worked for the bureau were capable of treating the shirking pigs and lying Fritzes that made up the modern German army – especially the ones who had committed war crimes themselves – as roughly as they sometimes deserved.

What none of these invariably Prussian judges perceived was that there were benefits that attached to being a witness in a war-crimes inquiry: a leave of absence from active service being the main one. As much as possible, we tried to interview men in the field, but it wasn’t every judge who wanted to spend days travelling to the Russian front, and one or two of the younger judges who did – Karl Hofmann for one – found themselves posted to active service. Those who had tried the experience were very nervous about flying to the front and, it’s fair to say, so was I. There are better ways to spend your day than bouncing around inside the freezing fuselage of an iron Annie in winter. Even Hermann Goring preferred the train. But the train was slow and coal shortages often meant that locomotives were stranded for hours – often days – on end. If you were a judge with the bureau, the best thing was to avoid the front altogether, to stay warm at home in Berlin and send someone else to the field – someone like me.