September 1941: Bernie Gunther returns from the horrors of the Eastern Front to find his home city of Berlin changed, and changed for the worse. The blackout, rationing, the RAF, the S-Bahn murderer and Czech terrorists are all conspiring to make life very unpleasant. Now back at his old desk on Homicide in Kripo HQ, Alexanderplatz, Bernie starts to investigate the death of a Dutch railway worker, while starting something — of an entirely different nature — with a local good-time girl.But he is obliged to drop everything when his old boss, Reinhard Heydrich of the SD, the new Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia, orders him to Prague to spend a weekend at his country house. It's an invitation Bernie feels he would gladly have been spared, especially when he meets his fellow guests — all of them senior loathsome figures in the SS and SD.The weekend turns sour almost immediately when a body is found, in a room that was locked from the inside. Now the spotlight falls on Bernie to show off his investigative skills and solve this seemingly impossible mystery. If he fails to do so, he knows what is at stake — not only his reputation, but also that of Reinhard Heydrich, a man who does not like to lose face.
It was a fine warm day when, together with SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich, the Reichsprotector of Bohemia and Moravia, I arrived back from Prague at Berlin’s Anhalter Station. We were both wearing SD uniform but, unlike the General, I was a man with a spring in my step, a tune in my head, and a smile in my heart. I was glad to be home in the city of my birth. I was looking forward to a quiet evening with a good bottle of Mackenstedter and some Kemals I had liberated from Heydrich’s personal supply at his office in Hradschin Castle. But I wasn’t in the least worried he might discover this petty theft. I wasn’t worried about anything very much. I was everything that Heydrich was not. I was alive.
The Berlin newspapers gave out that the unfortunate Reichsprotector had been assassinated by a team of terrorists who had parachuted into Bohemia from England. It was a little more complicated than this, only I wasn’t about to say as much. Not yet. Not for a long time. Maybe not ever.
It’s difficult to say what happened to Heydrich’s soul, assuming he ever had one. I expect Dante Alighieri could have pointed me in the approximate direction if ever I felt inclined to go and search for it, somewhere in the Underworld. On the other hand I’ve a pretty good idea of what happened to his body.
Everyone enjoys a good funeral and the Nazis were certainly no exception, giving Heydrich the best send-off that any psychopathically murderous criminal could have hoped for. The whole event was mounted on such a grand scale you would have thought some satrap in the Persian Empire had died after winning a great battle; and it seemed that everything had been laid on except the ritual sacrifice of a few hundred slaves – although, as things turned out for a small Czech mining village called Lidice, I was wrong about that.
From Anhalter Station Heydrich was carried to the Conference Hall of Gestapo headquarters, where six honour guards wearing black dress uniforms watched over his lying-in-state. For a lot of Berliners it was a chance to sing ‘Ding-Dong! The Witch Is Dead!’ while sneaking a wary tiptoes look inside the Prinz Albrecht Palace. On a par with other semi-hazardous activities like climbing to the top of the old radio tower in Charlottenburg or driving on the bank at the Avus Speedway, it was nice to be able to say that you’d done it.
On the radio that night the Leader eulogized the dead Heydrich, describing him as ‘the man with the iron heart’, which I assume he meant to be a compliment. Then again, it’s possible that our own wicked wizard of Oz might simply have confused the Tin Man with the Cowardly Lion.
The next day, wearing civilian clothes and feeling altogether more human, I joined thousands of other Berliners outside the New Reich Chancellery and tried to look suitably gloomy as the whole ant’s nest of Hitler’s myrmidons came bursting out of the Mosaic Hall to follow the gleaming gun carriage as it bore Heydrich’s flag-draped coffin east along Voss Strasse and then north up Wilhelmstrasse toward the General’s final resting place in the Invaliden Cemetery, alongside some real German heroes like von Scharnhorst, Ernst Udet and Manfred von Richthofen.
There was no doubting Heydrich’s bravery: his impetuous part-time active service with the Luftwaffe while most of the top brass stayed safe in their wolf’s redoubts and their furlined bunkers was the most obvious example of this courage. I suppose Hegel might just have recognized Heydrich’s heroism as the incarnation of the spirit of our despotic times. But for my money heroes need to have a working relationship with the gods, not the Titan forces of darkness and disorder. Especially in Germany. So I wasn’t in the least bit sorry to see him dead. Because of Heydrich, I was an officer in the SD. And pressed into the tarnished silver cap badge that was the loathsome symbol of my long acquaintance with Heydrich were the hallmarks of hatred, fear and, after my return from Minsk, guilt, too.
That was nine months ago. Mostly I try not to think about it but, as another famous German lunatic once observed, it’s hard to look over the edge of the abyss without the abyss looking back into you.
The thought of suicide is a real comfort to me: sometimes it’s the only way I can get through a sleepless night.
