After a while I heard footsteps and the door was opened by a young SS major. He could have been something straight out of one of Irma Hanke’s racial-theory classes: pale blond hair, blue eyes and a jaw that looked like it had been set in concrete. His tunic was unbuttoned, his tie was loose and it didn’t look like he was there to sell copies of the SS magazine.
‘Who is it, darling?’ I heard Hildegard call. I watched her walk towards the door, still searching for something in her handbag, not looking up until she was only a few metres away.
She was wearing a black tweed suit, a silvery crêpe blouse and a black feathered hat that plumed off the front of her head like smoke from a burning building. It was an image that I find hard to put out of my mind. When she saw me she stopped, her perfectly lipsticked mouth slackening a little as she tried to think of something to say.
It didn’t need much explaining. That’s the thing about being a detective: I catch on real fast. I didn’t need a reason why. Perhaps he made a better job of slapping her around than I had, him being in the SS and all. Whatever the reason, they made a handsome-looking couple, which was the way they faced me off, Hildegard threading her arm eloquently through his.
I nodded slowly, wondering whether I should mention catching her stepdaughter’s murderers, but when she didn’t ask, I smiled philosophically, just kept nodding, and then handed her back the keys.
I was half way down the stairs when I heard her call after me: ‘I’m sorry, Bernie. Really I am.’
I walked south to the Botanical Gardens. The pale autumn sky was filled with the exodus of millions of leaves, deported by the wind to distant corners of the city, away from the branches which had once given life. Here and there, stone-faced men worked with slow concentration to control this arboreal diaspora, burning the dead from ash, oak, elm, beech, sycamore, maple, horse-chestnut, lime and weeping-willow, the acrid grey smoke hanging in the air like the last breath of lost souls. But always there were more, and more still, so that the burning middens seemed never to grow any smaller, and as I stood and watched the glowing embers of the fires, and breathed the hot gas of deciduous death, it seemed to me that I could taste the very end of everything.
Author’s Note
Otto Rahn and Karl Maria Weisthor resigned from the S S in February 1939. Rahn, an experienced outdoors traveller, died from exposure while walking in the mountains near Kufstein less than one month afterwards. The circumstances of his death have never been properly explained. Weisthor was retired to the town of Goslar where he was cared for by the S S until the end of the war. He died in 1946.
A public tribunal, consisting of six Gauleiters, was convened on 13 February 1940, for the purpose of investigating the conduct of Julius Streicher. The Party tribunal concluded that Streicher was ‘unfit for human leadership’, and the Gauleiter of Franconia retired from public duties.
The Kristallnacht pogrom of 9 and 10 November 1938 resulted in 100 Jewish deaths, 177 synagogues burnt down and the destruction of 7,000 Jewish businesses. It has been estimated that the amount of glass destroyed was equal to half the annual plate-glass production of Belgium, whence it had originally been imported. Damages were estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Where insurance monies were paid to Jews, these were confiscated as compensation for the murder of the German diplomat, von Rath, in Paris. This fine totalled $250 million.
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Ex-policeman Bernie Gunther thought he’d seen everything on the streets of 1930s Berlin — until he turned freelance and each case he tackled sucked him further into the grisly excesses of Nazi subculture. Even after the war, amid the decayed, imperial splendor of Vienna, Bernie uncovers a legacy that makes the wartime atrocities look lily-white in comparison. Philip Kerr’s taut, gripping Berlin series is noir storytelling at its best, nothing short of spellbinding.
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A Pale Criminal
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ISBN 0-14-200415-4
Available from Penguin in 2006: The third book in Philip Kerr’s Berlin Noir Trilogy
A German Requiem
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Philip Kerr, The Pale Criminal
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