“But I won’t. That’s rather the point I’ve been making.” He pointed at my drink. “Come on. Get that down and cheer up. And stop worrying about a few Jews. People have been killing Jews since the Emperor Claudius ordered them expelled from Rome. What does Luther say? That next to the devil there is no more bitter, more poisonous, more vehement enemy than a real Jew. And let’s not forget the Kaiser, Wilhelm the Second, who said that a Jew cannot be a true patriot—that he is something different, like a bad insect. Even Benjamin Franklin thought that Jews were vampires.” Nebe shook his head and grinned. “No, Bernie. You’d better pick another reason to hate the Nazis. There are any number of reasons. But not the Jews. Not the Jews. Maybe if there are enough pogroms in Europe they’ll get their fucking homeland, like that British idiot Balfour promised, and then they’ll leave the rest of us in peace.”

I drank the schnapps. What else was I going to do with it? People say all kinds of crazy things when they’ve had a drink—me included. They talk about God and the saints and hearing voices and seeing the devil; they shout about killing Franzis and Tommies, and they sing Christmas carols on a summer’s day. Their wives don’t understand them and their mothers never loved them. They’ll say black is white, up is down, and hot is cold. No one ever expects a drink to help you make sense. Arthur Nebe had taken several drinks, but he wasn’t drunk. Even so, what he said sounded crazier than any drunk I’d ever heard and ever hope to hear again.

I stayed at Lenin House for two or three weeks, sharing a seventh-floor billet with Waldemar Klingelhöfer, who was an SS-Obersturmbannführer—a colonel—in overall charge of the antipartisan hunts in the Minsk area.

Minsk was one place where German propaganda did not exaggerate the strength of local partisans, who took advantage of the huge thick forests called pushcha that characterized the area. Most of these fighters were young Red Army soldiers, but quite a few were Jews who’d fled from pogroms to the comparative safety of the forest. What did they have to lose? Not that the Jews were always welcomed with open arms: Some of the Byelorussians were no less anti-Semitic than Germans, and more than half of these refugee Jews were murdered by the Popovs.

Klingelhöfer spoke fluent Russian—he’d been born in Moscow—but he knew nothing about police work or hunting partisans. Real partisans. I gave him some advice on how to recruit some informers.