Sommer’s murder at the Ansbach prisoner-of-war camp is a concealed wartime killing that Hans Reiter recounts only later, while explaining why he thought authorities might be looking for him. The camp’s sparse investigation never identifies the murderer in the evidence presented, but Reiter admits that he had done away with Sommer. The interval between the death and that admission makes the episode both a crime within the story and a belated, guarded act of testimony about guilt, fear, and postwar justice.

The Camp and Sommer’s Fear

After the war, Reiter was held at the prisoner-of-war camp at Ansbach, where he watched Sommer from a distance. Sommer watched him too, with visible unease and mistrust. Their exchanges took place under the eyes of the former police chief and fire chief, who had once served alongside Sommer and now kept several feet away, as though unwilling to interfere in their former superior’s affairs.

Sommer spoke of the actions and words people later regret. He also anticipated that the American police would return to question him and said he expected arrest and public disgrace. His apprehension gives the killing an immediate context: he believed an inquiry was coming, while Reiter knew him as a man implicated in the murder of Jews. The account establishes Sommer’s fear and his past, but does not claim that the anticipated interrogation directly caused his death.

The Killing and Its Immediate Aftermath

One morning Sommer was found dead halfway between his tent and the latrines. He had been strangled. The discovery is reported without an identified witness or an account of the killing itself; the narrative supplies the location and cause of death, not a reconstruction of who acted or how the event unfolded.

American personnel questioned perhaps ten prisoners, Reiter among them. He told them he had heard nothing unusual during the night. They took Sommer’s body away and buried him in the common grave at the Ansbach cemetery. The inquiry, as described, produces no disclosed culprit or public resolution. The common grave fixes Sommer’s physical fate while leaving the circumstances of his death unsettled.

Reiter’s Later Account

The murder returns when Reiter tells Ingeborg that American and German police might be searching for him, or that his name might appear on a list of suspects. He says he had done away with Sommer and identifies him as a killer of Jews. Ingeborg tries to reassure Reiter that killing such a man was no crime, but Reiter does not accept her interruption and continues with the explanation.

In Reiter’s account, Sommer had concealed his identity under the name Zeller. Reiter says he does not know whom Sommer thought he was, but that Sommer kept telling him things. He also distinguishes what Sommer feared from what the Americans were actually investigating: he believes they were pursuing prominent war criminals, such as people from the death camps, SS officials, and senior party figures, not a relatively minor civil servant like Sommer. The gap between Sommer’s anticipated disgrace and the authorities’ priorities leaves his fear intact without confirming that the Americans were close to exposing him.

The policemen questioned Reiter about Sommer, including whether Sommer had mentioned enemies among the prisoners. Reiter says he denied knowing anything of that kind and reported that Sommer spoke only about his son, who had died at Kursk, and his wife’s migraines. Reiter recalls that the young policemen looked at his hands, wrote down his name, and questioned him again about his political membership, acquaintances, family, and home. He says he answered honestly and asked for help finding his parents. These details place the murder inside a wider postwar search for people responsible for Nazi crimes, while showing how little the questioning resolves about Sommer’s death.

Escape, Silence, and Narrative Significance

As the camp began to empty and new groups of prisoners arrived, Reiter was not released. A fellow prisoner told him the guards were only for show and were distracted; during a transfer, Reiter slipped away. He then wandered between cities, worked in reopening mines in Koblenz, and felt pursued by the memory of Sommer. After reaching Cologne, he concluded that what could happen to him had already happened. Once arrested after a bar scuffle, he was released when officials could not find his name in their files.

The account leaves a telling asymmetry. Sommer, who feared public disgrace, is buried in a common grave; Reiter, questioned but not convicted in the episode, survives by escaping detention and moving through a damaged postwar landscape. The novel does not supply an independent investigation or a fuller account of the killing. Instead, the murder emerges retrospectively through Reiter’s own words, in a confession framed by his fear of being sought and his insistence that Sommer was a killer of Jews. That delayed disclosure makes the episode central to the ambiguity of his postwar identity: he presents the killing as an act against a perpetrator, yet remains conscious of the possibility that authorities may treat him as a suspect.