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
“There you will have to seek out a priest called Father Gotovina and show him a one-way ticket for any local destination with the letter S printed twice in a row. Peissenberg, perhaps. Kassel if you were near there. Or Essen, perhaps. You must cross out all of the other letters on the rail ticket so that SS are the only letters remaining. When you speak to this priest or anyone else in the Comradeship for the first time, you must hand this ticket over. At the same time, you need to ask if he can recommend anywhere to stay in the place you bought a ticket for. That’s really all I know. Except for one thing: You will be asked some apparently innocent questions. If he asks what your favorite hymn is, you are to say ‘How Great Thou Art.’ I don’t know the hymn myself, but I do know the tune. It’s more or less the same tune as the Horst Wessel Song.”
I started to thank him but he shrugged it off. “I might need your help some day, Herr Gunther.”
I hoped he was wrong. But then again it’s just a job, so maybe I would help him if he ever asked for my help. He’d been unlucky, that was all. For one thing, there was another officer, an SS Lieutenant Colonel Peiper, who had been in charge of that Waffen-SS unit at Malmedy. Executing the prisoners had been Peiper’s call, not Gebauer’s. For another—at least from what I’d read in the newspapers—the unit had already taken a lot of casualties and were under a lot of pressure. Under those circumstances, giving Fritz Gebauer a life sentence seemed a little harsh, to say the least. Gebauer was right. What choice did they have? Surrendering in a theater of war like the Ardennes was like asking a burglar to look after your house while you were on holiday. On the Russian front there was no one who expected to be take prisoner. Most of the time we shot theirs and they shot ours. I had been one of the lucky ones. Gebauer hadn’t, and that was all there was to it. War was like that.
I skipped out of Landsberg feeling like Edmond Dantès after a thirteen-year stretch in the Château d’If, and drove quickly back to Munich as if a fortune in gold and jewels awaited me at my office. Prisons affect me like that. Just a couple of hours in the cement and I’m looking for a hacksaw. I hadn’t been back very long when the phone rang. It was Korsch.
“Where have you been?” he asked. “I’ve been ringing you all morning.”