Chapters (50)
- Praise
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- ONE
- TWO
- THREE
- FOUR
- FIVE
- SIX
- SEVEN
- EIGHT
- NINE
- TEN
- ELEVEN
- TWELVE
- THIRTEEN
- FOURTEEN
- FIFTEEN
- SIXTEEN
- SEVENTEEN
- EIGHTEEN
- NINETEEN
- TWENTY
- TWENTY-ONE
- TWENTY-TWO
- TWENTY-THREE
- TWENTY-FOUR
- TWENTY-FIVE
- TWENTY-SIX
- TWENTY-SEVEN
- TWENTY-EIGHT
- TWENTY-NINE
- THIRTY
- THIRTY-ONE
- THIRTY-TWO
- THIRTY-THREE
- THIRTY-FOUR
- THIRTY-FIVE
- THIRTY-SIX
- THIRTY-SEVEN
- THIRTY-EIGHT
- THIRTY-NINE
- FORTY
- FORTY-ONE
- FORTY-TWO
- EPILOGUE
- AUTHOR’S NOTE
- Teaser chapter
I nodded. Who was I to argue with what everyone wanted?
TWELVE
TWELVE
I drove west out of Munich, toward the medieval town of Landsberg. With its town hall, Bavarian Gothic gate, and famous fortress, it was a historic place, and largely undamaged because, during the war, Allied bombers had given it a wide berth, to avoid killing thousands of foreign workers and Jews held in as many as thirty-one concentration camps in the surrounding area. After the war these same camps had been used by the Americans to take care of displaced persons. The largest of these was still in existence with over a thousand Jewish DPs. Although it was much smaller than Munich and Nuremberg, the Nazi Party had considered Landsberg one of the three most significant towns in Germany. Before the war it had been a place of pilgrimage for German youth. Not for the architecture or religious reasons, unless you counted Nazism as a kind of religion, but because people were intent on seeing the cell in Landsberg where Adolf Hitler, imprisoned there for almost a year after the abortive Beer Hall Putsch of 1923, had written Mein Kampf. By all accounts Hitler had been very comfortable in Landsberg Prison. Built in 1910, within the walls of the medieval fortress, the prison had been one of the most modern in Germany, and Hitler seems to have been treated more like an honored guest than some dangerous revolutionary. The authorities had afforded him every opportunity to meet with friends and to write his book. Without his time in Landsberg, the world might never have heard of Hitler.
In 1946, the Americans had renamed Landsberg Prison War Criminal Prison Number One and, after Spandau in Berlin, it was the most important penal facility in Germany, with over one thousand war criminals from the Dachau trials, almost a hundred from the Nuremberg trials, and more than a dozen from the trials of Japanese POWs in Shanghai. Over two hundred war criminals had been hanged at WCP1 and many of their bodies were buried nearby in the cemetery of Spottingen Chapel.
It wasn’t easy getting into Landsberg to see Fritz Gebauer. I’d had to telephone Erich Kaufmann and eat a couple of spoonfuls of humble pie in order to persuade him to contact Gebauer’s lawyers and persuade them that I could be trusted.
“Oh, I think we can rely on you, Herr Gunther,” Kaufmann had said. “That was a good job you did for Baron von Starnberg.”
“What little I did I got paid for,” I said. “And handsomely, too.”
“You can take a certain amount of satisfaction in a job well done, can’t you?”
“A certain amount, sometimes, yes,” I said. “Not too much on this one, though. Not as much as I got from working your case.”
“Proving the unreliability of PFC Ivanov? I’d have thought that being an ex-SS man yourself, you would be keen to see your old comrades out of prison.”