The Lady from Zagreb (Bernard Gunther, #10)

by Philip Kerr

Being a Berlin cop in 1942 was a little like putting down mousetraps in a cage full of tigers.

There was no proper police work to speak of but I had little or no appetite for the company of my Nazi colleagues or their callous conversation.

But Weimar Berlin had suited me better. The Weimar Republic had been the most democratic of democracies and yet, like all great democracies, it had been a little out of control. Prior to 1933, anything was permitted, since, as Socrates learned to his cost, the true nature of democracy is to encourage corruption and excess in all its forms. But the corruption and excesses of Weimar were still preferable to the biblical abominations now perpetrated in the name of the Nuremberg Laws.

“You can’t be serious,” he said. “Oh, but I am. It’s fact that we’re systematically murdering people by the thousands out there, in the swamps east of Poland. I know. I’ve seen it for myself. And by ‘we’ I mean us, the police. The RSHA. It’s us that’s doing the murdering.”

People don’t like talking about this, for obvious reasons. You could get into trouble. We both could. I’m telling you, those Jews are on a slow train to hell. And so are we.” I walked away smiling sadistically to myself; in Nazi Germany truth makes a powerful weapon.

And that will be goodbye, Bernie Gunther.” “Nothing says goodbye quite like a bullet from a nine-millimeter Walther.”

The irony of being introduced to the audience at an international crime commission conference by a man who had not long finished murdering forty-five thousand people did not escape me,

Perhaps it’s true what Goethe says, that destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.

So let me explain it very simply in a way that even you can understand, Gunther. Only if Switzerland remains neutral will anywhere exist that Germany can conduct peace negotiations with the Allies. It’s as simple as that.