“Why didn’t you just join the Wehrmacht?”

“Because the SS is the elite. And when you’re asked if you want to join the elite, it’s pretty hard to say no, especially as a young man. Of course I wanted to join the SS—no young German wouldn’t.”

“What about the Jews?”

“What about them?”

“Do you care what’s happening to them?”

Strasser took a long drag and poured himself and Lockhart another glass of schnapps.

“You have to understand that the Jews were holding us back throughout the twenties and the early thirties. They had a stranglehold on everything….”

Lockhart scoffed, and scoffed loudly.

“I know it’s hard for you to understand,” Strasser continued, “but it’s true. The Jews were standing in the way of Germany, infecting us—”

“All right, all right,” said Lockhart, holding out his hand. “Even if that were true, which it plainly isn’t, do you think that’s any reason to slaughter them?”

“We do not slaughter them!”

“Oh?”

“We put them to work, like the rest of our enemies.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“And you wouldn’t say that it was the intention of the Nazi party to exterminate them?”

Strasser paused, removing a small piece of tobacco that had stuck to his bottom lip. He shook his head slowly.

“No. That is not correct. When the war is over, they will all be shipped to Madagascar. In the meantime, as enemies of the Reich, they should be put to work.”

Lockhart shut his eyes. It was hopeless. He would have to try another tack.

“All right, all right,” he said. “But do you genuinely believe in this war?”

“Of course!”

“You just had to invade all those countries, did you?”

Strasser shook his head as if Lockhart’s question was so naive, so banal, that it hardly seemed worth asking.

“Naturally. Somebody had to save them from Communism.”

“I see. And that’s worth all this fighting, all this death?”

“Yes,” said Strasser. “I think it’s worth dying for freedom, don’t you?”

“I happen to agree with you there, Carl. But what you’re offering is hardly freedom, is it? Try telling any one of your Jews that he’s free. Or one of your disabled people. I don’t see many of them around. Do you think the Poles, the French, the Czechs, the Greeks and God knows who else feel free under you? If they did, why would they be fighting you, why would they resist?”

“Those who resist are Communists.”

Lockhart thought of Manoli, who was about as Communist as Churchill.

“Take it from me, you’re wrong. My friends in Crete weren’t Communists. Some of them were, but most weren’t. And I think it says a lot that the Communists and the non-Communists are willing to join forces against you.”

Strasser shrugged once more. Lockhart scrutinized him. In another time, Strasser would have been an ordinary middle-class German, earning a decent salary, bringing up a decent family, but now even someone as intelligent as him had been tricked, conned into believing the rants of a madman.