“Well, what’s a father supposed to say about his only son? I know this much: He’s not nearly as black as he’s been painted. I’m sure you of all people would understand that, Herr Gunther. You were an SS man yourself, were you not?”

“I was a policeman, Herr Baron,” I said, smiling thinly. “In the KRIPO until 1939 when, in order to increase efficiency—at least that’s what they told us—we were combined with the Gestapo and the SD into a new office of the SS called the RSHA—the Main Office of Government Security. I’m afraid none of us had much choice in the matter.”

“No, indeed. Giving people choice was not something Hitler was good at. We all had to do things we didn’t much care for, perhaps. My son, too. He was a lawyer. A promising lawyer. He joined the SS in 1936. Unlike you, it was by his own choice. I counseled caution, but it is the privilege of being a son to pay no attention to his father’s advice until it’s too late. We fathers expect that of our sons. Indeed, it is why we grow old and gray. In 1941, he became the deputy leader of a mobile killing unit in Lithuania. There. I’ve said what it was. They called it something else. Special Action, or some such nonsense. But mass murder was what it was charged with. In all normal circumstances Vincenz would have had nothing to do with such a terrible thing. But like many others, he felt duty-bound by reason of the oath he had taken to the person of the Führer as the highest organ of the German state. You must understand that he did what he did out of respect for that oath and the state, but always with acute inner disapproval.”

“You mean he was only obeying orders,” I said.

“Exactly so,” said the baron, ignoring or just not noticing the sarcasm that was carried in my voice. “Orders are orders. You can’t get away from that fact. People like my son are the victims of historical value judgments, Herr Gunther. And nothing besmirches the honor of Germany more profoundly than these prisoners at Landsberg. Of whom my son is one. These Red Jackets, as the newspapers call them, present the greatest obstacle to the restoration of our national sovereignty. Which we must have if we are ever going to contribute, as the Americans want, to the cause of Western defense. I am referring, of course, to the forthcoming war against communism.”