“There was another officer at the camp,” I said. “Friedrich Warzok. Do you remember him?”
“I remember Warzok,” he said. “He was Wilhaus’s man.”
“I’m a private detective,” I explained. “I’ve been asked by his wife to see if I can find out if he’s alive or dead. She wants to remarry.”
“Sensible woman. Warzok was a pig. They all were.” He shook his head. “She must be a pig, too, if she was ever married to that bastard.”
“So you never met her.”
“You mean she’s not a pig?” He smiled. “Well, well. No, I never met her. I knew he was married. Matter of fact, he was always telling us how good-looking his wife was. But he never brought her to live there. At least not while I was there. Unlike Wilhaus. He had his wife and little daughter living there. Can you believe it? I wouldn’t have had a wife and child of mine within ten miles of that place. Almost everything unpleasant you’ve heard about Warzok is likely to be true.” He laid his cigarette in the ashtray, put his hands behind his head, and leaned back in his chair. “How can I help?”
“In March 1946, Warzok was living in Austria. His wife thinks he might have used an old comrades’ network to get away. Since then, she’s heard nothing.”
“She should count herself lucky.”
“She’s a Roman Catholic,” I said. “She’s been told by Cardinal Josef Frings that she can’t remarry without some evidence that Warzok is dead.”
“Cardinal Frings, eh? He’s a good man, that Cardinal Frings.” He smiled. “You won’t hear anyone in this place say anything bad about Frings. He and Bishop Neuhausler are the ones trying hardest to get us out of here.”
“So I believe,” I said. “All the same, I was hoping that I might get some information from you that might enable me to find out what happened to him.”
“What sort of information?”
“Oh, I don’t know. What kind of man he was. If you ever discussed what might happen after the war. If he’d ever mentioned what plans he had.”
“I told you. Warzok was a pig.”
“Can you tell me any more than that?”
“You want details?”
“Please. Anything at all.”
He shrugged. “Like I said, when I was there, Lemberg-Janowska was just another labor camp. And there were only so many workers that I could use in the factory before they started to get in one another’s way. Nevertheless they kept sending me more and more. Thousands of Jews. At first we transported our surplus Jews to Belzec. But after a while we were told that this couldn’t happen anymore and that we’d have to deal with them ourselves. To me it was quite clear what this meant, and I tell you frankly that I wanted nothing to do with it. So I volunteered for front-line duty. But even before I had left, Warzok and Rokita—he was another of Wilhaus’s creatures—were turning the place into an extermination camp. But nothing on the industrial scale of some other places, like Birkenau. There were no gas chambers at Janowska. Which left bastards like Wilhaus and Warzok with something of a problem. How to kill the camp’s surplus Jews. So Jews were taken to some hills behind the residential camp and shot. You could hear the firing squads in the factory. All day that went on. And sometimes part of the night. They were the lucky ones. The ones who were shot. It soon turned out that Wilhaus and Warzok enjoyed killing people. And as well as killing large numbers of Jews by firing squads, these two started killing for their own amusement. Some people get up in the morning and exercise. Warzok’s idea of exercise involved walking around the camp with a pistol and shooting people indiscriminately. Sometimes he hanged women up by their hair and used them for target practice. For him, killing was like lighting a cigarette, having a coffee, or blowing his nose. Something utterly commonplace. He was an animal. He hated me. They both did, he and Wilhaus. Wilhaus told Warzok to think up some new ways of killing Jews. So Warzok did just that. And after a while they all had their favorite ways of killing people. After I left, I believe they even had a hospital for medical experimentation. Using Jewish women for research into various clinical procedures.
“Anyway, what I heard was this. That the camp was liquidated in the last weeks of 1943. The Red Army didn’t liberate Lvov until July 1944. Many of the people at Janowska were sent to the concentration camp at Majdanek. If you want to find out what happened to Warzok, you’ll need to speak to some of the other men who worked at Janowska. Men like Wilhelm Rokita. There was a man called Wepke—I can’t remember his Christian name—only that he was a Gestapo Kommissar and that he was friendly with Warzok. Warzok was also friendly with two fellows from the SD. A Scharführer Rauch and an Oberwachtmeister Kepich. They could be alive or dead. I have no idea.”
“Warzok was last seen in Ebensee, near Salzburg,” I said. “His wife says he was being helped to escape by the old comrades. The ODESSA.”
Gebauer shook his head. “No, it wouldn’t have been the ODESSA,” he said. “The ODESSA and the Comradeship are two very different things. The ODESSA is largely an American-run organization, not German. At the bottom level, yes, it uses a lot of the same people who work for the Comradeship, but at the top it’s CIA. The CIA set it up to help some Nazis escape when they outlived their usefulness as anticommunist agents. And I can’t see that Warzok would have been much good as a CIA agent. For a start, he knew nothing about intelligence matters. If he ever got away it’s the Comradeship, or the Web as it’s sometimes called, who would have helped. You’d have to ask one of the spiders where he might have gone.”
I chose my next words carefully. “My late wife was always afraid of spiders,” I said. “Really afraid. Every time she found one I would have to go and deal with it. The curious thing is that now she’s gone, I never see a spider. I wouldn’t know where to look for one. Would you?”
Gebauer grinned. “He really doesn’t speak a word of German,” he said, referring to the guard. “It’s all right.” Then he shook his head. “One hears things in here about the Comradeship. To be frank, I don’t know how reliable any of this is. After all, none of us ever managed to escape. We got caught and banged up in this place. It also occurs to me that what you’re doing could be dangerous, Herr Gunther. Very dangerous. It’s one thing to avail yourself of a secret escape route, it’s quite another to ask questions about such a thing. Have you considered the risks you are running? Yes, even you, a man who was in the SS himself. After all, you wouldn’t be the first SS man to cooperate with the Jews. There’s a fellow in Linz, a Nazi hunter by the name of Simon Wiesenthal, who uses an SS informer.”
“I’ll take my chances,” I said.
“If you were looking to go missing in Germany,” Gebauer said carefully, “the best thing to do would be to go and see the experts. The Bavarian Red Cross are very good at finding missing persons. I believe they also have some expertise in achieving the opposite result. Their offices are in Munich, are they not?”
I nodded. “Wagmullerstrasse,” I said.
“There you will have to seek out a priest called Father Gotovina and show him a one-way ticket for any local destination with the letter S printed twice in a row. Peissenberg, perhaps. Kassel if you were near there. Or Essen, perhaps. You must cross out all of the other letters on the rail ticket so that SS are the only letters remaining. When you speak to this priest or anyone else in the Comradeship for the first time, you must hand this ticket over. At the same time, you need to ask if he can recommend anywhere to stay in the place you bought a ticket for. That’s really all I know. Except for one thing: You will be asked some apparently innocent questions. If he asks what your favorite hymn is, you are to say ‘How Great Thou Art.’ I don’t know the hymn myself, but I do know the tune. It’s more or less the same tune as the Horst Wessel Song.”
I started to thank him but he shrugged it off. “I might need your help some day, Herr Gunther.”
I hoped he was wrong. But then again it’s just a job, so maybe I would help him if he ever asked for my help. He’d been unlucky, that was all. For one thing, there was another officer, an SS Lieutenant Colonel Peiper, who had been in charge of that Waffen-SS unit at Malmedy. Executing the prisoners had been Peiper’s call, not Gebauer’s. For another—at least from what I’d read in the newspapers—the unit had already taken a lot of casualties and were under a lot of pressure. Under those circumstances, giving Fritz Gebauer a life sentence seemed a little harsh, to say the least. Gebauer was right. What choice did they have? Surrendering in a theater of war like the Ardennes was like asking a burglar to look after your house while you were on holiday. On the Russian front there was no one who expected to be take prisoner. Most of the time we shot theirs and they shot ours. I had been one of the lucky ones. Gebauer hadn’t, and that was all there was to it. War was like that.
I skipped out of Landsberg feeling like Edmond Dantès after a thirteen-year stretch in the Château d’If, and drove quickly back to Munich as if a fortune in gold and jewels awaited me at my office. Prisons affect me like that. Just a couple of hours in the cement and I’m looking for a hacksaw. I hadn’t been back very long when the phone rang. It was Korsch.
“Where have you been?” he asked. “I’ve been ringing you all morning.”
“It’s a nice day,” I said. “I thought I’d go to the English Garden. Have an ice cream. Pick some flowers.” That was what I felt like doing. Something ordinary and innocent and outdoors where you didn’t breathe the smell of men all day. I kept thinking about Gebauer, younger than me and facing life in prison, unless the bishop and the cardinal came through for him and the others. What wouldn’t Fritz Gebauer have given for a fistful of ice cream and a walk to the Chinese pagoda? “How did you make out with the Amis?” I asked Korsch, stabbing a cigarette into my mouth, and scarping a match along the underside of my desk drawer. “Anything on Janowska and Warzok?”
“Apparently the Soviets set up a special commission of inquiry into the camp,” he said.
“Isn’t that a little unusual? Why’d they do something like that?”
“Because while there were German officers and NCOs running the camp,” said Korsch, “it was largely Russian POWs who had volunteered for service with the SS who did most of the killing. I say most and I mean most. With them it was all about numbers. Killing as many as they could as quickly as possible because that’s what they were told to do, on pain of death. But with our old comrades, the officers, it was something else. For them killing was a pleasure. There’s very little in the file about Warzok. Most of the witness statements are about the camp’s factory commandant, Fritz Gebauer. He sounds like a right bastard, Bernie.”
“Tell me more about him,” I said, feeling my stomach turn into a pit.
“This sweetheart liked to strangle women and children with his bare hands,” said Korsch. “And he liked to tie people up and put them in barrels of water overnight, in winter. The only reason he’s doing life for what happened at Malmedy is that the Ivans won’t let the witnesses come to the American Zone for a trial. But for that, he’d probably have been hanged like Weiss and Eichelsdorfer, and some of those others.”
Martin Weiss had been the last commandant at Dachau, and Johann Eichelsdorfer had been in charge at Kaufering IV—the largest of the camps near Landsberg. Knowing that the man I had spent the morning with, a man I had considered to be a decent sort of fellow, was, in reality, as bad as these two others left me feeling disappointed not just with him, but also with myself. I don’t know why I was so surprised. If there was one thing I had learned in the war it was that decent, law-abiding family men were capable of the most bestial acts of murder and brutality.
“Are you still there, Bernie?”
“I’m still here.”
“After Gebauer left Janowska in 1943, the camp was run by Wilhaus and Warzok, and any pretense that it was a labor camp was abandoned. Mass exterminations, medical experiments, you name it, they did it at Janowska. Wilhaus and some of the others were hanged by the Russians. As a matter of fact they filmed it. Sat them on a truck with halters around their necks and then drove the truck away. Warzok and some of the others are still at large. Wilhaus’s wife, Hilde—she’s wanted by the Russians. So is an SS captain called Gruen. A Gestapo Kommissar called Wepke. And a couple of NCOs, Rauch and Kepich.”
“What did Wilhaus’s wife do?”
“She murdered prisoners to amuse her daughter. When the Russians got close, Warzok and the rest moved to Plaszow, and then Gross-Rosen—a quarry camp near Breslau. Others went to Majdanek and Mauthausen. After that, who knows? If you ask me, Bernie, looking for Warzok will be like looking for a pin in a hay-loft. If I were you, I’d be inclined to forget about it and get myself another client.”
“Then it’s lucky she asked me and not you.”
“She must smell really nice.”
“Better than you and me.”
“It goes without saying, Bernie,” said Korsch. “The federal government prefers us to keep downwind of the Amis. So as not to scare off the new investment that’s coming here. That’s why they want all these war crimes investigations to finish. So we can all get on and make some money. You know, I bet I could get you fixed up with something here at the paper, Bernie. They could use a good private investigator.”
“For those undercover stories that won’t spoil anyone’s breakfast? Is that it?”
“Communists,” said Korsch. “That’s what people want to read about. Spy stories. Stories about life in the Russian Zone and how terrible it is. Plots to destabilize the new federal government.”
“Thanks, Friedrich, but no,” I said. “If that’s really what they want to read about, I’d probably end up investigating myself.”
I put the phone down and lit a cigarette with the butt of the one I was finishing, to help me think things over in detail. It’s what I do when I work a case that starts to interest not just me but other people as well. People like Friedrich Korsch, for example. Some people smoke to relax. Others to stimulate their imaginations, or to concentrate. With me it was a combination of all three at once. And the more I thought about it the more my imagination was telling me not only that I’d just been warned off a case, but also that this had been swiftly followed up by an attempt to buy me off, with a job offer. I took another drag on the cigarette and then stubbed it out in the ashtray. Nicotine was a drug, wasn’t it? I was smoking way too much. It was a crazy idea. Korsch trying to warn me and then buy me off? That was the drug talking, surely?