A Man Without Breath

‘Gentlemen, gentlemen, please forgive me,’ he said in a deeply resonant voice that belied his dwarfish stature. ‘I’ve been on the telephone complaining to the High Command about the situation we found at Kharkov. Field Marshal von Bock had reported that all German supplies would be destroyed rather than left behind for the enemy; but when Field Marshal von Manstein took the city again he discovered large quantities of our supplies still undestroyed. Can you believe it? Of course von Bock blames Paulus, and now that Paulus is conveniently a prisoner of the Bolsheviks, who is there to contradict him? I know some of these people are your friends, Judge, but really, it beggars belief. It’s hard enough to win a war without being lied to by people on your own side. The Wehrmacht really needs to be combed out. Did you know that the generals are demanding rations for thirteen million soldiers when there are only nine million Germans under arms? I tell you the leader ought to take the severest action against someone.’

Goebbels sat down behind his desk and almost vanished until he leaned forward on his chair. I was tempted to go and fetch him a cushion, but in spite of his continuing smile, there was good reason to doubt he had a sense of humour. For one, he was short, and I’ve never yet met a short man who could laugh at himself as easily as a taller one; and that’s as true a picture of the world as anything you’ll find in Kant or Hegel. For another he was a doctor of philosophy, and nobody in Germany ever calls himself doctor unless he wants to impress upon other people how impeccably serious he really is.

‘How are you, Judge?’

‘Fine, sir, thank you.’

‘And your family?’

‘We’re all fine sir, thank you for asking.’

The doctor clasped his hands and bounced them excitedly on the blotter, as if chopping herbs with a mezzaluna. He wasn’t wearing a wedding band, although he was famously married. Maybe he figured that none of the starlets at the UFA studios in Babelsberg he was reputedly fond of banging would recall having seen the pictures that had been in every German magazine of the minister marrying Magda Quandt.

‘It’s a great pity your investigation into the sinking of that hospital ship didn’t come off,’ Goebbels said to me. ‘The British are experts at occupying the moral high ground. That would have removed them from it, permanently, make no mistake. But this is even better, I think. Yes, I read your report with great interest, Captain Gunther, great interest.’

‘Thank you, Herr doctor.’

‘Have we met before? Your name seems familiar to me. I mean before you were with the War Crimes Bureau.’

‘No, I’d certainly have remembered meeting you, sir.’

‘There was a Gunther who used to be a detective with Kripo. Rather a good one by all accounts. He was the man who arrested Gormann, the strangler.’

‘Yes sir, that was me.’

‘Well, that must be it.’

I was already nervous about meeting Dr Goebbels – about ten years ago I’d been asked to drop a case as a favour to Joey, but I hadn’t, and I wondered if this was what he remembered. And our little exchange did nothing to make me feel any less like a man sitting on hot coals. The judge was equally nervous – at least he kept tugging at the stud of his wing collar and flexing his neck before he answered the minister’s questions, as if his throat required a little more space to swallow whatever it was that he was going to have to agree to.

‘So, do you really think it’s a possibility?’ Goebbels asked him. ‘That there is some sort of a mass grave hidden down there?’

‘There are lots of secret graves in that part of the world,’ he said, carefully. ‘The problem is making absolutely sure that this is the right one: that this is indeed the site of a war crime committed by the NKVD.’

He nodded at a manila file that lay on top of a copy of that day’s Volkischer Beobachter.

‘It’s all there in Gunther’s report, sir.’

‘Nevertheless I should like to hear the captain talk about it, himself,’ Goebbels said smoothly. ‘My own experience of written reports is that you can usually get more out of the man who wrote it than the report itself. That’s what the leader says. “Men are my books”, he says. I tend to agree with that sentiment.’

I stirred a little under the minister’s sharp eye.

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I do think it’s a possibility. A strong possibility. The local inhabitants are quite unequivocal that there isn’t a grave in Katyn Wood. However, I believe that’s probably a good sign that there is. They’re lying, of course.’

‘Why would they lie?’ Goebbels frowned, almost as if he regarded lying as something quite inexplicable and beyond all countenancing.

‘The NKVD might be gone from Smolensk but the people are still afraid of them. More than they’re afraid of us, I think. And they’ve got good reason. For twenty years the NKVD – and before them the OGPU and the Cheka – have been murdering Russians wholesale.’ I shrugged. ‘We’ve only been doing it for eighteen months.’

Goebbels thought that was very funny.