A Man Without Breath

I had left Kripo in the summer of 1942 and joined the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau with the connivance of my old colleague Arthur Nebe. As the commander of Special Action Group B, which was headquartered in Smolensk, where tens of thousands of Russian Jews had been murdered, Nebe knew a thing or two about war crimes himself. I’m certain it appealed to his Berliner’s black humour that I should find myself attached to an organization of old Prussian judges, most of whom were staunchly anti-Nazi. Dedicated to the military ideals as laid down in the Geneva Convention of 1929, they believed there was a proper and honourable way for the army – any army – to fight a war. Nebe must have thought it very funny that there existed a judicial body within the German High Command that not only resisted having Party members in its distinguished ranks but was also quite prepared to devote its considerable resources to the investigation and prosecution of crimes committed by and against German soldiers: theft, looting, rape and murder could all be the subject of lengthy and serious inquiries – sometimes earning their perpetrators a death sentence. I thought it was kind of funny myself, but then, like Nebe, I’m also from Berlin, and it’s known that we have a strange sense of humour. By the winter of 1943, you found your laughs where you could, and I don’t know how else to describe a situation in which you can have an army corporal hanged for the rape and murder of a Russian peasant girl in one village that’s only a few miles from another village where an SS special action group has just murdered twenty-five thousand men, women and children. I expect the Greeks have a word for that kind of comedy, and if I’d paid a little more attention to my classics master at school I might have known what that word was.

The judges – they were nearly all judges – who worked for the Bureau were not hypocrites any more than they were Nazis, and they saw no reason why their moral standards should decline just because the government of Germany had no moral standards at all. The Greeks certainly had a word for that all right, and I even knew what it was, although it’s fair to say I’d had to learn how to spell it again. They called that kind of behaviour ethics, and my being concerned with rightness and wrongness felt good, since it helped to restore in me a sense of pride in who and what I was. At least for a while, anyway.

Most of the time I assisted the Bureau’s judges – several of whom I’d known during the Weimar Republic – in taking depositions from witnesses or finding new cases for the Bureau to investigate. That was how I first met Siv Meyer. She was a friend of a girl called Renata Matter, who was a good friend of mine and who worked at the Adlon Hotel. Siv played the piano in the orchestra at the Adlon.

I met her at the hotel on Sunday February 28th, which was the day after Berlin’s last Jews – some ten thousand people – had been arrested for deportation to ghettoes in the East. Franz Meyer was a worker at the Osram electric light-bulb factory in Wilmersdorf, which was where he was arrested, but before this he had been a doctor, and this was how he came to find himself working as a medical orderly on a German hospital ship that had been attacked and sunk by a British submarine off the coast of Norway in August 1941. My boss and the Bureau chief, Johannes Goldsche, had tried to investigate the case, but at the time it was thought that there had been no survivors. So when Renata Matter told me about Franz Meyer’s story, I went to see his wife at their apartment in Lutzowerstrasse.

It was a short walk from my own apartment on Fasanenstrasse, with a view of the canal and the local town hall, and only a short walk from the Schulstrasse synagogue where many of Berlin’s Jews had been held in transit on their way to an unknown fate in the East. Meyer had only escaped arrest himself because he was a Mischehe – a Jew who was married to a German.

From the wedding photograph on the Biedermeier sideboard it was easy to see what they saw in each other. Franz Meyer was absurdly handsome and very like Franchot Tone, the movie actor who was once married to Joan Crawford. Siv was just beautiful, and there’s nothing absurd about that; more importantly so were her three sisters, Klara, Frieda and Hedwig, all of whom were present when I met their sister for the first time.

‘Why didn’t your husband come forward before?’ I asked Siv Meyer over a cup of ersatz coffee, which was the only kind of coffee anyone had now. ‘This incident took place on August 30th 1941. Why is he only willing to speak about it now?’

‘Clearly you don’t know very much about what it’s like to be a Jew in Berlin,’ she said.

‘You’re right. I don’t.’

‘No Jew wants to draw attention to himself by being a part of any inquiry in Germany. Even if it is a good cause.’