It was fortunate for me that the general commanding Special Action Group B, Arthur Nebe, was an old friend of mine. Before the war he had been the chief of Berlin’s criminal police, a career detective like myself. So I went to him and asked for a transfer to the Wehrmacht for front-line duties. He asked me my reason. I told him that if I stayed it would only be a matter of time before I was shot for disobeying an order. I told him that it was one thing to shoot a man because he had been a member of an NKVD death squad, but that it was quite another to shoot him just because he was a Jew. Nebe had thought that was funny.

“But Obersturmbannführer Mundt tells me the people you shot were Jews,” he said.

“Yes, but that’s not why I shot them, sir,” I said.

“The NKVD is full of Jews,” he said. “You know that, don’t you? Chances are you catch some more of these death squads, they’ll be Jews. What then?”

I stayed silent. I didn’t know what then. “All I know is that I’m not going to spend this war murdering people.”

“War is war,” he said, impatiently. “And frankly, we may have bitten off rather more than we can chew in Russia. We have to win in this theater as quickly as possible if we’re to secure ourselves for the winter. That means there’s no room for sentiment. Frankly, we’ll have a job looking after our own army let alone Red Army prisoners and the local population. It’s difficult work we have ahead of us, make no mistake. Not everyone is suited to it. I don’t particularly care for it myself, Bernie. Do I make myself clear?”

“Clear enough,” I said. “But I’d rather shoot at people who were shooting back. I’m peculiar like that.”

“You’re too old for front-line duty,” he said. “You won’t last five minutes.”

“I’ll take my chances, sir.”

He looked at me for a moment longer and then stroked his long, crafty nose. His was a cop’s face. Shrewd, tough, good-humored. Until then I hadn’t really thought of him as a Nazi at all. I knew for a fact that only three years before he had been part of an army plot to depose Hitler as soon as the British declared war on Germany following the annexation of the Sudetenland. Of course, the British never declared war. Not in 1938. As for Nebe, he was a survivor. And anyway, in 1940, after Hitler defeated the French in just six weeks, a lot of his opponents in the army had changed their opinion of him. That victory had seemed like a kind of miracle to many Germans, even those who disliked Hitler and all that he stood for. I supposed Nebe was one of these.