Prussian Blue (Bernie Gunther, #12)

by Philip Kerr

Our Major Högl was in the Sixteenth Bavarian Infantry.’ ‘So? I wouldn’t have thought that’s so unusual around here.’ ‘He was a noncommissioned officer. A sergeant. And by all accounts his orderly in the Sixteenth was a man named Adolf Hitler.’

Nobody, including me, could quite believe that the British and the French might be prepared to fight for the Poles, whose Sanation government was no more democratic than the government of Germany.

they know all the old salt mine tunnels better than they know their wives’ gynaecology.

she was as slim as a used match.

‘Your husband was Paul Troost, wasn’t he? Hitler’s architect, until he died a few years ago.’ ‘That’s right.’ ‘And now his architect is Albert Speer.’

I’d seen so much lately that I didn’t know where I’d left my own arsehole.

Paulaner was the biggest brand of beer in Bavaria.

Where Adolf Hitler was concerned, truth was a concept that only a Cretan would have recognized, and I suspect even he’d long forgotten where he’d hidden it.

It was said that they could open a gnat’s arse with a paper clip and that the gnat wouldn’t even notice.

What irritates me most about the Nazis is not that I’m supposed to hate the Jews, Friedrich. And I don’t. Hate them. No more than I hate anyone else these days. What I find a lot harder to deal with is that I’m supposed to love Germans and everything German. That’s a tall order for any Berliner. Especially now that Hitler’s in charge.’

In Germany love is as rare as a Jew with a telephone.

‘You know, this sort of thing reminds me of the good old days when there were criminal rings who charged people protection. The trouble is, the only people you need protection from these days is the government. They’re the biggest criminal ring in history.’

it was plain to see why Hitler kept him around; Bormann was fascism incarnate, carrot and stick on the same black lanyard. He could just as easily have been a crime boss as a senior member of the German government, although, in my estimation, there was little difference between the two. Germany was in the grip of a gang just as ruthless as Al Capone’s Chicago Outfit. Bormann even looked like Capone.

In my book cruelty to animals is always a sign that cruelty to human beings is not far off.

It’s a well-known fact that many of Weimar Germany’s worst lust murderers began their murderous careers by torturing and killing cats and dogs.

It’s a fact that many men of my own acquaintance belonging to the SS Einsatzgruppen had often needed to get drunk in order to murder Jews, and even in the higher ranks, nervous breakdowns were common.

‘I like him. I like him a lot. But not like that. Besides, he already has a girlfriend. Her name is Eva Braun.’

‘Eva doesn’t know much about anything. Which is the way the Leader seems to like it. Except for me and the Leader, this whole administration is run by complete philistines.’

The dog is a gift from Hitler. He and I are hoping that eventually his own dog Blondi and Harras will mate and have puppies. But right now, they don’t seem to like each other very much.’

then I could easily understand Harras’s problem. I’d seen friendlier dogs with rabies.

Bormann is a bully and corrupt? Because he’s been getting away with murder?’

‘And you’re the one breaking into confidential filing cabinets with vaginal dilators.’

‘Here, in Berchtesgaden? Nothing sounds crazy in a place where they spend thirty million on a lousy tea house. Nietzsche and Mad King Ludwig would feel right at home in this town.’

Women never are what you think they are. It’s one of the things that makes them interesting. Either way, I liked her. Admired her, even. I wasn’t about to do anything about that, though. With so many Nazis on the scene, courting her would have been courting disaster. Like wooing a nun in the Sistine Chapel.

Hitler said that words build bridges into unexplored regions.

Hitler also said that great liars are great magicians.

Another thing Hitler said was that it’s not truth that matters, but victory.

there was another Johann Diesbach, Johann Jacob Diesbach, a Berlin paint maker who invented the colour Prussian blue, back in 1706. The whole Prussian army wore coats of Prussian blue until the Great War, when it moved over to field grey. At one time every Berlin schoolboy used to know the name of Johann Jacob Diesbach. So how about that, sir? How about Prussian blue?’

Made of concrete the colour of old dog shit, the Praesidium was a five-storey building of recent construction, with regular square windows, a cumbersome door that was clearly meant to remind people of how small they were in comparison with the state, and nothing to commend it architecturally.

for anyone who came from Saarbrücken, Italy must have looked like Shangri-la. A house built on the slopes of Vesuvius would have seemed more attractive than the finest dwelling in Saarbrücken.

And one thing they’re not short of in Berchtesgaden is a supply of slow-burning wood.’ I

‘Since 1935 Nuremberg’s had the best rail connections in Germany. Because of all the Nazi Party rallies, of course.

the Nazis had never been that popular in Berlin, where no more than thirty-one per cent of people had ever voted for them in any election,

We drove into Homburg and found it a place even less remarkable than Saarbrücken, which was saying something.

‘Centralverlag is the Party’s publishing arm and in case you didn’t know it, they’re Hitler’s own publishers. In other words, Max Amann is the man who publishes Mein Kampf.’

my brother was sentenced to just one year in Leipzig Prison and, after nine months, was released. He promptly joined the Nazi Party and soon achieved an important position within the SS simply by virtue of the heroic status that was conferred by his act of politically motivated revenge against Kadow. Indeed, Adolf Hitler praised my brother so warmly for this action that Himmler conferred on him an early SS number to reflect his Old Fighter status. In other words, all of his current high standing within the Nazi Party rests on a lie told to the Leader himself. Kadow was murdered not because he had betrayed the Freikorps and informed upon a freedom fighter but because he objected to my brother’s rape of his only daughter.

Given the hell Hitler unleashed upon the world, it might have been better if she’d seen him for what he was: a political criminal. Everyone knows that now, of course; Hitler’s name is a byword for mass murder, but back in 1939 it was still shocking to realize that the head of the government was capable of such barbarous behaviour. Until then all I’d heard had been rumours that he’d been in charge of a Freikorps death squad in Munich, but these were nothing more than that: rumours. Bormann’s photograph was the first time I’d seen actual evidence and when you’re a cop, that’s really all that’s supposed to matter.

history was nothing more than an accident, a fluke, a matter of a few centimetres here or there, a head turned, a sudden gust of wind, a dirty gun barrel, a misfired cartridge, a breath held for a second too long or too little, an order misheard or misunderstood, an itchy trigger finger, a second’s delay, an instant’s hesitation.

The idea that anything is ever meant to be seemed nonsensical; small causes can have large effects, and some words of Fichte came to mind, about how you could not remove so much as a grain of sand from its place without changing something in the immeasurable whole.

Martin Bormann became Hitler’s private secretary and the most powerful man in Germany after Hitler himself. He died while making his escape from the Führerbunker on the 2nd May, 1945. His co-conspirator in the murder of Walther Kadow in 1923, one Rudolf Höss, was released from prison in 1928; he joined the SS in 1934, and subsequently became the commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp. He was hanged as a war criminal in Warsaw in 1947.

Dr Karl Brandt took charge of the Aktion T4 Euthanasia Programme in 1939, which gassed some seventy thousand victims.

Erich Mielke served as the head of the Stasi from 1957 until after the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989.

Prior to this, in October 1989, Mielke had ordered the Stasi to arrest and indefinitely detain eighty-six thousand East Germans in what he considered was a state of emergency. But local Stasi men refused to carry out his orders for fear of being lynched. Mielke resigned on the 7th November, 1989. He was arrested in December 1989 and went to trial in February 1992. Suffering from the effects of old age, he was released in 1995 on compassionate grounds and died in May 2000.

The tea house at the Kehlstein exists to this day and is a popular visitor attraction, as is the excellent Hotel Kempinski in Obersalzberg, which is built on the site of Hermann Göring’s house. The ruins of...