Field Gray by Philip Kerr

Glawik, who was a lawyer appointed by the Bavarian Ministry of Justice; and a man from the Association for the Welfare of German Prisoners whose name I don’t recall. Most Bavarians, and quite a few Germans, too, regarded all of the inmates at WCPN1 as political prisoners. The U.S. Army saw things differently, of course, and it wasn’t very long before I was also visited by two American lawyers from Nuremberg. With their strongly accented German and their bullshit bonhomie, these two were patient and very, very persistent; and it was only a relief in part that they seemed hardly interested in the two Vienna murders—which had nothing to do with me—and not at all interested in the killings of two Israeli assassins at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, of which I was undeniably guilty, albeit in self-defense. What they were interested in was my wartime service with the RSHA—which was the security office created by the mergers of the SD (the security service of the SS), the Gestapo, and Kripo in 1939.
    Several times a week we would meet in an interview room on the ground floor near the main entrance of the castle. They always brought me coffee and cigarettes, a little chocolate, and sometimes a Munich newspaper. Neither man was older than forty, and the younger of the two was the senior officer. His name was Jerry Silverman, and before coming to Germany he’d been a New York lawyer. He was hugely tall and wore a green gabardine military jacket with pink khaki trousers; there were several ribbons on his breast, but instead of the metal bars most American officers wore on their shoulders to indicate their rank, Silverman and his sergeant had a cloth patch sewn on their sleeves that identified them both as members of the OCCWC—the Office of the Chief Counsel for War Crimes. The fact was, they were wearing uniforms but they didn’t belong to the U.S. military; they were Pentagon bureaucrats, prosecutors from the American Department of Defense. Only in America could they have given lawyers a uniform.
    The other, older man was Sergeant Jonathan Earp. He was a head shorter than Captain Silverman and had—he told me, in an idle moment when I asked him—graduated from Harvard Law School prior to his joining the OCCWC.
    Both men had one or two German parents, which was why they spoke the language so fluently, although Earp was the more fluent of the two; but Silverman was cleverer.
    They came armed with several briefcases that were full of files, but they hardly ever referred to these; each man seemed to carry a whole filing cabinet in his head. They did, however, take copious notes: Silverman had small, very neat, distinguished handwriting that looked as though it might have been written by Völundr, the ruler of the elves.
    At first I assumed they were interested in the workings of the RSHA and my knowledge of Department VI, which was the office of Foreign Intelligence; but it seemed they knew almost as much about that as I did. Perhaps more. And only gradually did it become clear that they suspected me of something far more serious than a couple of local murders.
    “You see,” explained Silverman, “there are some aspects of your story that just don’t add up.”
    “I get a lot of that,” I said.
    “You say you were a Kommissar in Kripo until—?”
    “Until Kripo became part of the RSHA in September 1939.”
    “But you say you were never a party member.”
    I shook my head.
    “Wasn’t that unusual?”
    “Not at all. Ernst Gennat was the deputy chief of Kripo in Berlin until August 1939, and he was to my certain knowledge never a Nazi Party member.”
    “What happened to him?”
    “He died. Of natural causes. There were others, too. Heinrich Muller, the Gestapo chief. He never joined the party either.”
    “Then again,” said Silverman, “maybe he didn’t need to. He was, as you say, head of the Gestapo.”
    “There are others I could mention, but you have to remember that the Nazis were hypocrites. Sometimes it