Erich Kaufmann was a lawyer, a neoconservative, and a member of the so-called Heidelberg Circle of Jurists, which was the central coordinating body for freeing the prisoners at Landsberg. On September 21, 1949, I went to Kaufmann’s plush office near the Justice Palace on Karlsplatz, which was another public building under repair. The sound of cement mixers, hammers, saws, and empty hoist containers hitting the ground made Karlsplatz as noisy as any battlefield. I remember the date because it was the day after the right-wing populist Alfred Loritz had stood up in the new Parliament, demanding an immediate and general amnesty for all but the most serious war criminals—by which he meant those who were already dead or on the run. I was reading about it in the Süddeutsche Zeitung when Kaufmann’s sirenlike secretary came to fetch me into the palatial suite he modestly called an office. I don’t know what surprised me more: the office, the story in the paper, or the secretary; it had been quite a while since anyone as attractive as that little fräulein had caressed me with her eyelashes. I put it down to the new suit I had bought at Oberpollinger. It fit me like a glove. Kaufmann’s suit was better. It fit him like a suit.

I guessed that he was about sixty. But I didn’t have to guess very hard to know that he was a Jew. For one thing, there was something written in Hebrew on a little plaque by the door. I felt pleased about that. Things in Germany were getting back to normal. It made a very pleasant change from a yellow Star of David daubed on his window. I had no idea what had happened to him under the Nazis, and it wasn’t the kind of thing you asked. But in the few years since they’d been gone it was plain he’d done very well for himself. It wasn’t just his suit that was better than mine, it was everything else as well. His shoes looked handmade, his fingernails were beautifully manicured, and his tie pin looked like a birthday gift from the Queen of Sheba. Even his teeth were better than mine. He was holding my card in his chubby fingers. And he came straight to the point without any of the time-wasting courtesies that can plague Munich business life. I didn’t mind that one bit. I’m not big on courtesies. Not since my time in a Russian POW camp. Besides, I was in a hurry to be in business myself.

“I want you to interview an American soldier,” said Kaufmann. “A private in the U.S. Third Army. His name is John Ivanov. He’s a guard in War Crimes Prison Number One. You know where that is?”

“Landsberg, I imagine,” I said