“When it comes to blowing people up, I don’t think anyone has ever managed that more efficiently than America,” I said. “How many did you blow up in Hiroshima? And Nagasaki? A couple of hundred thousand and still counting. That’s what I’ve read. Germany might have started the process of mechanized mass killing, but you Americans certainly perfected it.”

“Did you ever visit the Criminal Technology Institute in Berlin?”

“Yes,” I said. “I often went there in the course of my duty as a detective. For forensic tests and results.”

“Did you ever meet a chemist called Albert Wildmann?”

“Yes. I met him. Many times.”

“And Hans Schmidt? Also from the same institute?”

“I think so. What are you driving at?”

“Isn’t it the case that you returned from Minsk to Berlin at the behest of Arthur Nebe, not to join the German War Crimes Bureau, as you told us, but to meet with Wildmann and Schmidt in pursuit of your explosives idea?”

I was shaking my head, but Silverman wasn’t paying attention, and I was gaining a new respect for him as an interrogator.

“And that, having discussed the idea in detail, you yourself returned to Smolensk with Wildmann and Schmidt in September 1941?”

“No. That’s not true. Like I said, I think you must be confusing me with Günther Rausch.”

“Isn’t it the case that you brought with you a large quantity of dynamite? And used it to rig a Russian pillbox with explosives? And that you then herded into it almost a hundred people from a mental asylum in Minsk? And that you then detonated the explosives? Isn’t that what happened?”

“No. That’s not true. I had nothing to do with that.”

“According to the reports we’ve read, the heads and limbs of the dead were strewn across a quarter-mile radius. SS men were collecting body parts from the trees for days afterward.”

I shook my head. “When I made that remark to Nebe…about blowing up Jews in a field. Look, I had no idea he would actually try something like that. It was sarcasm. Hardly a genuine suggestion.” I shrugged. “Then again, I don’t know why I’m surprised, given everything else that happened.”

“We’ve always thought it was Arthur Nebe himself who came up with the idea of the gas vans,” said Silverman. “So maybe that was another of your jokes, too. Tell me, did you ever visit an address in Berlin—number four Tiergartenstrasse?”

“I was a cop. I visited a lot of addresses I don’t remember.”

“This one was special.”

“The Berlin Gas Works was somewhere else, if that’s what you’re implying.”

“Tiergartenstrasse number four was a confiscated Jewish villa,” said Silverman. “An office from where Germany’s euthanasia program for the handicapped was planned and administered.”

“Then I’m sure I was never there.”