Talking Location With author Simon Scarrow – BERLIN

20th December 2022

#TalkingLocationWith…Simon Scarrow, author of Dead of Night, set in BERLIN WW2.

The story behind DEAD OF NIGHT

DEAD OF NIGHT is the sequel to BLACKOUT, the first two books in series of crime novels set against the backdrop of Berlin during the Second World War.

The series came about largely as the result of an accident. For some years I had been attending the Alderney Literary Festival (in my experience one of the very best history festivals around) and I had become interested in what had taken place on the island during the Second World War. Alderney was the site of the only concentration camp (Lager Sylt) on British soil during that period. Thousands of slave labourers had been set to work creating the defences of an island that Hitler was convinced would play a pivotal role in controlling the English Channel. In the event, the Allies simply by-passed the Channel Islands when they invaded France in June 1944 and the very last German soldiers to surrender at the end of the war were the handful of men manning the small islet of Burhou.

My idea was to write a slightly creepy crime novel set on the island where a series of deaths amongst the garrison leads to the summoning of a detective from Berlin to deal with the case. The thing is that a posting to Alderney was seen as something of a punishment which led to the question of what my detective would have had to have done in order to be sent to the isolated garrison? That meant tracking back to the Criminal Investigation Police (Kripo) in Berlin. It was while I was doing the research into the Kripo that it struck me there was the possibility of a series of novels before my detective was sent to Alderney, and this punishment would arise out of the earlier cases in Berlin.

One of my key convictions as an historical novelist is that it is important to travel to where a novel is set to get some sense of the atmosphere and the feel of a place. So I packed my bags for the first of my research trips to the German capital and began to explore the city. I arrived in the Autumn, just as the cold and damp weather starts to enfold Berlin. Despite this, it quickly became apparent from the museums and landmarks that I visited that the Germans take a very different view of history than many tend to in the UK. Rather than seeing history as a celebration of our past, the Germans regard history as more of a warning we would be wise to learn from. This is the thinking that underpins such museums as ‘The Topography or Terror’ constructed over the ruins of the headquarters of the Gestapo and the SS where the remains of the cells where prisoners were held, tortured and died still stretch for some distance outside the museum.

The Holocaust Memorial

Elsewhere the same sombre tone hung about the huge sprawl of concrete blocks that form the Holocaust memorial and the sparse Jewish museum. The appalling atrocities of the Nazi era will serve as a stark warning of what extreme nationalism and populist politics can lead to for generations to come.

There are many ways in which the history of that era persists in Berlin. Quite often, I would come across buildings still scarred by the bullets and shells from the battle fought in the capital as the Russians closed in on the remnants of the fascist regime.

By contrast, some of the more sinister buildings seem to have escaped largely undamaged. The vast office complex built for Herman Goering’s Air Ministry seems to be untouched. It is an ugly structure that  was the largest office building of its time and I could not help wishing that it had not survived the conflict.

Elsewhere the headquarters of the German army still stands, serving as a museum dedicated to the struggle against the Nazi regime by Germans. There is a memorial in the courtyard outside the remembers the ill-fated conspirators behind the July plot in 1944 to assassinate the Fuhrer. The leading figures of the plot were dragged out of the building and shot in the courtyard. It made flesh creep a little to stand where they had died.

Elsewhere the headquarters of the German army still stands, serving as a museum dedicated to the struggle against the Nazi regime by Germans. There is a memorial in the courtyard outside the remembers the ill-fated conspirators behind the July plot in 1944 to assassinate the Fuhrer. The leading figures of the plot were dragged out of the building and shot in the courtyard. It made flesh creep a little to stand where they had died.

It is perhaps fitting, and satisfying, that the final refuge of Hitler and his entourage is today covered over with a slightly scruffy car park nestled between some apartment blocks.

Having captured some of the ambience of the German capital and a sense of how it might have felt during the war years I began to read into the background as much as possible on my return to the UK. In particular I was interested in the organisation and activities of the Kripo and how their elite officers fitted in within the wider apparatus of the German police force and their new political masters once the police had been taken over by Himmler and his icy henchman, Heydrich. What was of particular interest to me was the way in which many Kripo officers had professional contempt for the parvenus of the SS and the Gestapo and did their best to keep themselves at a distance. Many refused to join the party or accept a rank within the SS. More surprisingly, this was tolerated to a degree by the Nazi party who obviously valued the skills of the Kripo officers. This gave me a useful steer in the creation of my hero, Criminal Investigator Horst Schenke. In fleshing out his character I gave him a racing career past that resulted in a severe car crash that would leave him sufficiently disabled to prevent him being sent on active service during the war. His able-bodied peers were amongst the first to be called up and during the course of the war those who remained in the police force were increasingly the old and incapable, the kind of people it would be hard for the reader to identify with.

While the broad outlines of the Holocaust and the other victims of the concentration camps are familiar to many what is seldom considered is the origins of the means by which the Nazis came to dispose of so many of their victims on an industrial scale.  The gas chambers and crematoria were the result of experiments carried out on mentally and physically disabled adults and children – those the Nazis referred to as ‘useless feeders’ and who had ‘lives not worth living’. Richard Evans covers their fate in some detail in his wide-ranging history of the era. The numbers of those murdered and the heart-rending manner in which they died make for painful reading. What particularly stands out is the way those who contributed to the exterminations perpetrated by the Nazis attempted to absolve themselves from the moral burden of their actions. They managed to live with the excuse that they only contributed to a small part of a system, or professed ignorance of the purpose to which their skills were harnessed. Many of those who made the Holocaust possible not only survived the war but went on to have successful business careers. Albert Widmann, a real life character in DEAD OF NIGHT being a case in point. The industrial scale murder of millions was made possible by the dilution of individual responsibility across the bureaucracy that inaugurated it and then left the quotidian outrages to thuggish brutes who were held primarily accountable by the victors at the end of the war.

The Courtyard of Wehrmacht HQ

There’s a darker aspect to the parallel programme of forced sterilisations that was carried out by the Nazis as soon as they came to power. The procedure was carried out on disabled people, petty thieves, those deemed ‘workshy’, people of mixed race and others who were deemed to compromise the gene pool of the master race. What is often overlooked in the palliative history we like to tell ourselves is that similar sterilisation programmes were carried out in many other nations long before and after the Nazi era. Indeed, compulsory sterilisation in Norway only came to an end in the 1970s. By the same token, anti-semitism was a widespread phenomenon in the first half of the 2oth century. Only two years before the outbreak of WW2 a conference was held to discuss the Jewish situation and to find homes for those affected by the policies of Nazi Germany. Not one nation stepped up to offer refuge to the Jews. Even as the first evidence of the genocide reached other nations, most refused to believe it. Perhaps it’s a guilt aversion strategy that compels so many to reference Nazi Germany as the sole repository of the evils perpetrated, albeit to a much lesser degree, by other nations as well.

DEAD OF NIGHT, I hope, reminds us of those functionaries, present in all  societies, who contribute to the horrors inflicted on other people. If the novel reminds us of the ease with which a society can slip into barbarism while maintaining it is pursuing some higher purpose then that is a good result. Sometimes fiction can do that job better than dry tomes of history.

SIMON SCARROW

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