I kept on smiling. I wasn’t exactly sure what he had said but his expression told me he wasn’t inclined to be friendly. After he had found my name on his list, he tossed my papers back at me and pointed to a white, four-story building with a mansard roof made of red tiles. From a distance it looked almost like a school. Up close, it looked exactly what it was: a prison. Inside was no different. All prisons smell of the same things. Cheap food, cigarettes, sweat, urine, boredom, and despair. Another stone-faced military policeman escorted me to a room with a view of the Lech Valley. It looked lush and green and full of the last days of summer. It was a terrible day to be in prison, assuming there’s such a thing as a good day to be in prison. I sat down on a cheap chair at a cheap table and dragged a cheap ashtray toward me. Then the American went out, locking the door behind him, which gave me a nice warm glow in the pit of my stomach. And I imagined what it must have been like to be one of the Malmedy Unit, in WCP1.

Malmedy was the place in Belgium’s Ardennes Forest where, during the winter of 1944, at the Battle of the Bulge, eighty-four prisoners of war had been massacred by a Waffen-SS unit. American POWs. The entire SS unit—seventy-five of them, anyway—were now in Landsberg, serving long terms of imprisonment. A lot of the men had my sympathy. It’s not always possible to take a lot of men prisoner in the middle of a battle. And if you let a man go, there’s always the chance that, later on, you might find yourself fighting him again. War wasn’t some game played by gentlemen, where paroles were given and honored. Not the war we had fought. And inasmuch as these particular SS men had been fighting one of the most brutal battles of the Second World War, it hardly made sense to charge them with war crimes. To that extent Kaufmann was right. But I wasn’t sure if my sympathy extended to Fritz Gebauer. Prior to his front-line service with the Waffen-SS, Obersturmbannführer Gebauer had been the commandant of Lemberg-Janowska. At some stage he must have volunteered to fight on the western front, which required a certain amount of courage—perhaps even a certain amount of distaste for his job at the labor camp.

The key scraped in the lock and the metal door opened. I turned around to see a strikingly good-looking man in his late thirties enter the room. Tall and broad-shouldered, Fritz Gebauer had a vaguely aristocratic bearing and, somehow, managed to make his prisoner’s red jacket look more like a smoking jacket. He bowed slightly before sitting down opposite me.