Prologue: MAX and MORITZ Invent Themselves

Abstract

It is 8 November 1940. Deposited hurriedly and without ceremony on the cool, misty quayside of the bustling Caspian port of Pahlevi (now Bandar-e-Anzali), two young SS lieutenants, smartly attired in the inappropriate white summer suits with which they were issued in Berlin, stand beside their service-issue suitcases and, exchanging uneasy glances, survey the unfamiliar oriental hubbub swirling around them in the humid grey light of late autumn. It is much warmer here than in frigid, snowy Moscow, which they left barely a week before; even so, Gilan province’s clammy coolness comes as a surprise to them, after the nightmare stories they have been told back at HQ about the hellish Persian heat. Though both are fairly tall (182 cm) and slim, they make an odd couple: Roman Gamotha with his ‘princely’ bearing and ‘blond, film-star type of masculine beauty’; his companion, Franz Mayr, ‘his face like a devil mask — black hair, black moustache, and black fanatical eyes’ — could easily be taken for an Azeri or a Persian, were it not for his obvious unease and disorientation.² For nothing that MAX and MORITZ (their newly acquired codenames)³ have learned from weeks of browsing through books about Persia in Berlin’s finest libraries could have prepared them adequately for the sheer sensory impact of their arrival in Central Asia: the cacophony, the odours, the jostling crowds, the strange costumes and uniforms (Persian officers in mustard yellow!) — the overwhelming chaos of it all, so unfamilar to either of these two young Germans, one from a neat little hamlet in rural Bavaria,⁴ and the other accustomed to Sunday promenades along the wide, fashionable boulevards of Berlin and Vienna, a dashing figure in his black Hugo Boss uniform, usually with at least one pretty girl beside him.

Ja, zur Übeltätigkeit, ja, dazu ist man bereit! … Dieses war der erste Streich, doch der zweite folgt zugleich. (Wilhelm Busch)¹