A Man Without Breath

BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SAY. LUTZ IS GESTAPO. THEY RECRUITED HIM WHILE HE WAS STILL AT SIGNALS SCHOOL IN LUBECK. DON’T WANT TO SAY ANYTHING IN FRONT OF HIM. I HAVE INFORMATION ABOUT RIBE AND GREISS THAT MIGHT HAVE A BEARING ON THEIR DEATHS BUT I AM WORRIED THIS COULD GET ME KILLED. MEET ME IN THE GLINKA GARDEN ON WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON AT FOUR PM AND COME ALONE. NOD IF YOU AGREE.

I nodded. ‘Yes, that’s fine,’ I said, and put the folded-up message in my pocket.

CHAPTER 4

Wednesday, March 31st 1943

Goldsche had appointed Judge Conrad to be in overall charge of the Katyn Wood investigation for the bureau. Conrad was a senior judge from Lomitz, near Wittenberg, and while he could be a little gruff, I liked him. In his early fifties, Conrad had served with distinction in the Great War. After a stint as a public prosecutor in Hildesheim he had joined the Army Justice Service in 1931 and had been a lawyer in the army ever since. Like most of the judges in the War Crimes Bureau, Johannes Conrad was no Nazi, and so neither of us felt comfortable at the idea of working closely with Army Group Centre’s own advisory coroner, Dr Gerhard Buhtz, who Von Kluge had succeeded in imposing on the bureau’s bosses as the man in charge of the forensic part of the investigation.

On the face of it, Buhtz, a former professor of forensic medicine and criminal law from Breslau University and an expert on ballistics, was extremely well qualified, but he certainly wouldn’t have been my choice or Conrad’s for such a politically sensitive role, since prior to his appointment in August 1941 as the coroner of Army Group Centre, Gerhard Buhtz had been a colonel in the SS and an early member of the Nazi Party. Buhtz had also been the head of the SD in Jena, and Conrad argued that his being part of our investigation was a not-so-subtle attempt by Von Kluge to undermine it from the very outset.

‘Buhtz is a fanatical Nazi,’ Conrad told me on our way to a clearing in Katyn Wood where a meeting had been arranged with Buhtz, Ludwig Voss and Alok Dyakov. ‘If any of that bastard’s history gets out when the international commission is here it will fuck everything up.’

‘What sort of history?’ I asked.

‘While he was in Jena Buhtz was in charge of carrying out autopsies on prisoners who were shot while trying to escape from Buchenwald KZ. You can imagine what that meant, and what Buhtz’s death certificates were worth in terms of honesty. And then there was some scandal involving the Buchenwald camp doctor. Fellow named Werner Kircher, who’s now the chief physician with the RSHA in Berlin.’

‘Isn’t he the deputy director of the forensic pathology unit?’

‘That’s right. He is.’

‘I thought I knew the name. So what was the scandal?’

‘Apparently Buhtz persuaded Kircher to let him remove the head of a young SS corporal who had been murdered by some prisoners.’

‘He actually cut the head off?’

‘Yes, so that he could study it in the lab. Turns out he had quite a collection. God only knows what they did to the prisoners. Anyway, Himmler found out about it, and went crazy that an SS man should be treated with such disrespect. Buhtz got kicked out of the SS, which is why he went first to Breslau and then to Army Group Centre. The man is a barbarian. If the commission or any of these reporters picks up on the fact that Buhtz was at Buchenwald, it will make us all look bad. I mean, what price the German search for truth and justice in Katyn when our leading pathologist is little better than a mad scientist?’

‘It would be just like Von Kluge to hope that something like that would put a stick in our spokes.’

For a moment I thought of the two dead signallers near the Hotel Glinka and how their heads had been almost completely severed by someone – a German – who clearly knew what he was doing. And I wondered about Buhtz again as he arrived on a BMW motorcycle.

I went down to greet him and watched him climb off the machine and remove his leather helmet and goggles. Then I introduced myself; I even held his leather coat while he found his glasses and his Wehrmacht officer’s cap.

‘My compliments, it’s a brave man who rides a motorcycle on these roads,’ I said.

‘Not really,’ said Buhtz. ‘Not if you know what you’re doing. And I like my independence. There is so much time wasted in this theatre just waiting for a driver from the car pool.’

‘You have a point.’

‘Besides, at this time of year the air is so fresh that one feels alive on a motorcycle in a way one never could in the back of a car.’