Free Field Gray by Philip Kerr

people had gathered to wait for someone. Either that or they were looking for the window of cell number seven, which seemed a little less likely.
    “Is someone being released today?” I asked.
    Silverman came over to the window. “Yes,” he said. “Erich Mielke.”
    “Mielke?” I shook my head. “You’re mistaken. Mielke’s not in here. He couldn’t be.”
    Even as I spoke, a smaller door in the main gate opened and a short, stocky, gray-haired man of about sixty stepped out and was cheered by the waiting well-wishers.
    “That’s not Mielke,” I said.
    “I think you mean Erhard Milch, sir,” Earp told Silverman. “The Luftwaffe field marshal? It’s him who’s being released today.”
    “So that’s who it is,” I said. “For a moment there I thought it was a real war criminal.”
    “Milch is—was—a war criminal,” insisted Silverman. “He was director of air armaments under Albert Speer.”
    “And what was criminal about building planes?” I asked. “You must have built quite a few planes yourself, if the state of Berlin in 1945 was anything to go by.”
    “We didn’t use slave labor to do it,” said Silverman.
    I watched as Erhard Milch accepted a bunch of flowers from a pretty girl, bowed politely to her, and was then driven off in a smart new Mercedes to begin the rest of his life.
    “What was the sentence for that, then?”
    “Life imprisonment,” said Silverman.
    “Life imprisonment, eh? Some people have all the luck.”
    “Commuted to fifteen years.”
    “There’s something wrong with your high commissioner’s math, I think,” I said. “Who else is getting out of here?”
    I took a puff on my tasteless cigarette, flicked the butt out of the window, and watched it spiral to the ground trailing smoke like one of Milch’s invincible Luftwaffe planes.
    “You were going to tell us about Minsk,” said Silverman.

6

    MINSK, 1941
    O n the morning of July 7, 1941, I commanded a firing squad that executed thirty Russian POWs. At the time, I didn’t feel bad about this because they were all NKVD and, less than twelve hours before, they themselves had murdered two or three thousand prisoners at the NKVD prison in Lutsk. They also murdered some German POWs who were with them, which was a miserable sight. I suppose you could say they had every right to do so, given that we had invaded their country. You could also say that our executing them in retaliation had considerably less justification, and you’d probably be correct on both counts. Well, we did it, but not because of the “commissar order” or the “Barbarossa decree,” which were nothing more than a shooting license from German field headquarters. We did it because we felt—I felt—they had it coming and they would certainly have shot us in similar circumstances. So we shot them in groups of four. We didn’t make them dig their own graves or anything like that. I didn’t care for that sort of thing. It smacked of sadism. So we shot them and left them where they fell. Later on, when I was a pleni in a Russian labor camp, I sometimes wished I’d shot many more than just thirty, but that’s a different story.
    I didn’t feel bad about it until the next day when my men and I came across a former colleague from the Police Praesidium at the Alex, in Berlin. A fellow named Becker, who was in another police battalion. I found him shooting civilians in a village somewhere west of Minsk. There were about a hundred bodies in a ditch, and it seemed to me that Becker and his men had been drinking. Even then I didn’t get it. I kept on looking for explanations for what was essentially inexplicable and certainly inexcusable. And it was only when I realized that some of the people Becker and his men were about to shoot were old women that I said something.
    “What the hell do you think you’re doing?” I asked him.
    “Obeying my orders,” he said.
    “What? To kill old women?”
    “They’re Jews,” he said, as if that was