Frankly, when Captain Kestner told me exactly what had happened down there I thought seriously about making a formal complaint against Captain Gunther; but I was advised against it: Gunther was Heydrich’s man and this made him all but untouchable. Even when he murdered another officer at a brothel in Paris and it might reasonably have been expected that Gunther would be court-martialed, he managed to evade all charges. He was merely recalled to Berlin, from where he was immediately dispatched to the Ukraine, most likely to carry out the kind of dirty work for which the SS is now notorious. It’s not given to every German officer to behave like a gentleman. Later on, I met Heydrich and expressed my own reservations about Gunther, and his response was typical of the man. He said that he rather agreed with Schopenhauer that all honor ultimately rests on considerations of expediency. Heydrich was of course strongly influenced by Schopenhauer, and I don’t just mean his anti-Semitism. Anyway, I didn’t argue with him. That was never wise. Like Kant, I believe that honor and morality contain their own imperatives. And this is, of course, why I was part of Count Stauffenberg’s plot to kill Adolf Hitler. And why I was arrested by the Nazis in July 1944.

HELMUT KNOCHEN, interviewed May 1954

My name is Helmut Knochen and I have been asked to provide a description of SS-Hauptsturmführer Bernhard Gunther for the record. I met Gunther in 1940. He was older than me, I think. Perhaps forty years old. I recall also that he was a Berliner. I myself am from Magdeburg and I have always had a fascination for the Berlin accent. Well, it wasn’t so much his accent that marked him out as a Berliner as his manner. This might be described as rude and uncompromising; cynical and unfriendly. It’s no wonder that Hitler disliked Berlin so much. Well, this man Gunther was doubly typical, because he was also a policeman. A detective. I always think that the character of Doubting Thomas in the Bible must have been a Berliner. This fellow would only have believed Christ had risen from the dead if he could have looked through the holes in his hands and feet and seen a judge and a research physicist on the other side.

He was very German-looking. Fair-haired, blue-eyed, about one-ninety centimeters tall and powerful in the arms and shoulders, even a little heavy. His face was pugnacious. Yes, he was very much the kind of man I didn’t like at all. A real Nazi, you know?

[The witness, Knochen, was subsequently shown a photograph of a man and positively identified him as the wanted war criminal Bernhard Gunther.]

27

FRANCE, 1954