“I wouldn’t like you to make the same mistake as Otto,” said Biberstein. “So I’d like to give you some advice. If you can’t remember something, then really you should just say so. No matter how feeble that might seem or how culpable it might make you look. When you’re in any doubt at all, remind the Amis that this all happened almost fifteen years ago and that you really can’t remember.”

“Speaking for myself,” said Haensch, “I have always maintained that any prisoner has the right to silence. This is a legal principle known and respected throughout the civilized world. And especially in the United States of America. I was a lawyer in Hirschfelde prior to joining the RSHA, and you can take it from me that there is no court in the Western world that can force a man to give evidence against himself.”

“They managed to convict you, didn’t they?” I said.

“I was convicted in error,” insisted the bespectacled Haensch, who had a lawyer’s slimy face to match his lawyer’s slimy manner and even slimier patter. “Heydrich did not order me to Russia until March 1942, by which time Task Group C had more or less completed its work. Quite simply, there were no Jews left to kill. However, all of this is beside the point. As Biberstein says, this happened almost fifteen years ago. And one cannot be asked to remember things that happened then.”

He took off his glasses, cleaned them, and added exasperatedly, “Besides, it was war. We were fighting for our very survival as a race. Things happen in war that one regrets in peacetime. That’s natural. But the Amis weren’t exactly saints in wartime themselves. Ask Peiper. Ask Dietrich. They’ll tell you. It wasn’t just the SS who shot prisoners, it was the Amis as well. To say nothing of the systematic mistreatment of the Malmédy prisoners of war that has occurred in this and other prisons.”

Haensch twitched nervously. His were the kind of chinless, weak features that gave war criminals and mass murderers a bad name. Not that the Amis looked on Haensch with any more disgust than anyone else. That particular distinction was reserved for Sepp Dietrich, Jochen Peiper, and the perpetrators of the so-called Malmédy Massacre.