"But Zossen is here in Berlin."

He stopped. I knew why. I was hooked.

I said: " Heinrich Zossen?"

"Yes."

A thin man. Pale of face, with dewlaps and a pouchy mouth. Round-shouldered like his Fuhrer. Little blue eyes, the blue of ice. A voice like a reed in a winter wind.

I had last seen him twenty-one years ago, on an August morning when three hundred of them were lined up at the brink of the pit they had been made to dig from the rich earth of the forest of Briicknerwald. The birds had stopped singing when the SS staff car drew up and Obergruppen-fuhrer Heinrich Zossen got out. I watched him as he walked behind the lines of the three hundred naked men as if inspecting them. He turned and walked back and I watched him. He was a young man for his rank and proud of his uniform. He was not a thug. A thug would have taken a whip from a guard and drawn blood from even these bloodless buttocks for our amusement; he would have pointedly held his nose, reminded that these men had been moved a hundred and thirty miles through the night in sealed cattle-trucks, packed ninety to a truck; he would have taken his revolver and fired the first bullet himself, to lead the fun. He did none of these things. He was an officer.

He did worse, and I watched him do it.

A guard shouted as one of the three hundred men broke from the ranks and came towards the Obergruppenfuhrer. He was not riddled where he stood because Zossen had raised his gloved hand, curious to know why the man had left the ranks. He had once been bigger than Zossen; his frame, outlined beneath the skin, was wide at the shoulder; but now he was smaller, because most of the flesh had gone and he looked as if made of paper. This batch, as I knew, had lived for months on acorns, crusts and rancid water. It would be impossible to judge how long it had been since they had eaten what anyone could call a meal.