Free The One From the Other by Philip Kerr Page B

even here there were ways around the Liberation Law of 1946, which, if it had ever been as rigidly enforced as had been intended, would have resulted in Germany having no policemen at all. A good cop is still a good cop even if he was a Nazi bastard.
    I found a small office in Galeriestrasse, which ran west off Wagmullerstrasse. It seemed just what I had been looking for. My premises were opposite a small post office and above an antiquarian bookshop; and they shared a floor with a dentist and a coin dealer. I felt about as respectable as it was possible to feel in a building that still had its camouflage painting against Allied air attacks. The building had been some minor outpost of the War Office on Ludwigstrasse and, in an old cupboard, I found mildewed portraits of Hitler and Göring, an empty grenade bag, a rifle bandolier, and an M42 “razor edge” helmet that happened to be my size (sixty-eight). Outside the front door were a cabstand and a kiosk selling newspapers and tobacco. I had my name on a brass plate and a mailbox mounted on the wall on the ground floor. I was set.
    I walked around central Munich leaving my new business cards with offices and people who might conceivably put some business my way. The Red Cross, the German Information Bureau on Sonnenstrasse, the Israel Cultural Institute on Herzog-Max-Strasse, the American Express Company on Brienner Strasse, and the Lost Property Office at police headquarters. I even looked up a few old comrades. There was an ex-cop called Korsch who was working as a senior reporter at Die Neue Zeitung, an American newspaper; and a former secretary of mine called Dagmarr who helped look after the city archives on Winzererstrasse. But mostly I hit the offices of Munich’s many lawyers in and around the Justice Palace. If there was anyone doing well under the American occupation it was the lawyers. The world might end one day but there will still be lawyers to process the documents.
    My first Munich case was from a lawyer and, by a strange coincidence, it involved the Red Jackets at Landsberg. As it happened, so did the next case, which probably wasn’t a coincidence at all. And maybe even the one after that. Any one of them could have taken over my life, but only one of them did. And even now I find it a little hard to say that none of them were connected.
    Erich Kaufmann was a lawyer, a neoconservative, and a member of the so-called Heidelberg Circle of Jurists, which was the central coordinating body for freeing the prisoners at Landsberg. On September 21, 1949, I went to Kaufmann’s plush office near the Justice Palace on Karlsplatz, which was another public building under repair. The sound of cement mixers, hammers, saws, and empty hoist containers hitting the ground made Karlsplatz as noisy as any battlefield. I remember the date because it was the day after the right-wing populist Alfred Loritz had stood up in the new Parliament, demanding an immediate and general amnesty for all but the most serious war criminals—by which he meant those who were already dead or on the run. I was reading about it in the Süddeutsche Zeitung when Kaufmann’s sirenlike secretary came to fetch me into the palatial suite he modestly called an office. I don’t know what surprised me more: the office, the story in the paper, or the secretary; it had been quite a while since anyone as attractive as that little fräulein had caressed me with her eyelashes. I put it down to the new suit I had bought at Oberpollinger. It fit me like a glove. Kaufmann’s suit was better. It fit him like a suit.
    I guessed that he was about sixty. But I didn’t have to guess very hard to know that he was a Jew. For one thing, there was something written in Hebrew on a little plaque by the door. I felt pleased about that. Things in Germany were getting back to normal. It made a very pleasant change from a yellow Star of David daubed on his window. I had no idea what had happened to him under the Nazis, and