The German Half-Bloods (The Half-Bloods Trilogy Book 1)

by Jana Petken

  “Watch carefully what I’m doing, Vogel,” said Leitner, his hand gripping a vertically-aligned lever.

  Paul’s mouth was as dry as a desert, his tongue thick against his teeth, his injured head pounding. When Leitner turned the tap horizontally, Paul was transfixed, horrified beyond his wildest imagination. He’d suspected what was about to occur but was unable to believe such an abominable thing was possible in his country.

  “The entry of gaseous carbon monoxide into the barn will take effect almost immediately.” Leitner said. “See how slowly I turned the tap? This is to limit the hissing sound that can sometimes upset the patients.”

  As the first women and children fell to the ground, Paul’s knees buckled. He grabbed the narrow counter in front, his head on his chest. He could tell himself a hundred times that this wasn’t really happening, that it was a nightmare, a sick joke or a moment of madness that had never occurred before and would never happen again. But he would never be able to deny the inconceivable truth of what he was witnessing on the other side of the glass...

  “Doctor Vogel – Doctor!”

  Paul took in the naked women and children spreadeagled across each other on the cement floor like discarded dolls in a child’s playroom. Others were sprawled on the benches, heads on laps, arms outstretched as if reaching for help. He took a step back from the window. His legs gave way again, and he fell to his knees, vomiting violently over Leitner’s black leather shoes.

  “Vogel, you’re a disgrace. Get up!” Leitner shouted, shaking the vomit from his shoes.

  “No, you’re the disgrace. You shame your country and every decent German man and woman living in it.”

  Paul spat the last of his vomit onto the floor and lurched to his feet. Enraged, he looked at Leitner’s scowling face, and was then angered further when the scowl was replaced by a snigger of amusement. “You disgust me, Hauptsturmführer. You’re a murdering swine, and you enjoyed it,” he continued as he wiped his mouth with his sleeve. Once his stomach had stopped heaving, Paul escaped through the anti-room’s back door. Head bent, he stared at the ground, still muddy, still green, waiting for hands to grip his arms, to be hit, handcuffed, arrested or shot.

  Leitner came out of the barn behind Paul, shutting the door behind him. He nodded at the Scharführer and lit a cigarette. “We’ll give it a few minutes longer to be on the safe side.”

  Paul, aware of his laboured breathing, hunkered down on the wet grass. Not even his father would be able to get him out of this mess. He had crossed a Nazi line, but he was determined to leave Brandenburg regardless of the punishment he might face. He glared at Leitner puffing on his cigarette as if he hadn’t a care in the world. If he had a gun, he’d shoot the bastard.

  “Have one, Vogel. It’ll make you feel better.” Leitner threw the pack at Paul. It landed in the mud at his feet, but Paul ignored it, got up, and turned his back on the tittering Scharführer and Leitner, both of whom appeared to be highly entertained by his traumatised state.

  He spotted a glint of metal beside the barn wall and strode towards a row of compressed steel gas canisters fitted to the facade next to a vent. He bent to take a closer look and his gut erupted with bile. His disgrace was now complete:

  Pure Compressed Carbon Monoxide – Highly Toxic – Do not touch without the regulation breathing mask protection to face – Vogel Medical Equipment Industries, Berlin.

  His eyes slid from soldier to soldier until they finally settled on the Scharführer. Did he and Leitner know beforehand who had manufactured the gas? Of course, they did. That was probably the only reason he’d not been thrown inside the barn with the other poor wretches who had just been murdered. His own gassing would have been an ironic touch.

  “May I go now?” Paul asked Leitner.

  “No, Doctor Vogel, you have not completed your training for today. In a few minutes, you’ll be going inside the chamber to confirm that they’re all dead, and afterwards you will remain here until their bodies have been disposed of. You can do that, can’t you?”

  Inside the barn, Paul set to work checking pulses, looking for signs of life. A soldier followed behind him removing any jewellery the women in the group might have been wearing. Paul also solved the mystery of why numbers had been written on some of the patients’ foreheads before Leitner’s arrival, and for the umpteenth time that day he felt sick.

  “Is that really necessary?” he asked the soldier who was pulling gold teeth from the mouths of those who’d been numbered.

  “I’m following orders, just like you are, Doctor,” came the man’s deadpan response.

  Paul finished examining the last dead child, and after what had been the worst hours of his life, he watched the bodies being piled onto trolleys. As instructed, he followed the soldiers into the second antechamber where mobile, fired up incinerators were situated. The trolleys, uniquely designed to roll smoothly on the tracks leading to the ovens, were engraved with Vogel stamps. Horrified and ashamed, Paul turned on his heel and ran back to the hospital, while the first dead child went into the fire.

  ******

  “You’ve failed me, Vogel,” said Herr Rudolph, tapping his pen on the desktop. “You’ve embarrassed your father and me.”

  “With respect, Herr Direktor, I’m not the person you should be berating. The soldiers beat me with a rifle butt and dragged me face down through a muddy field. They should all be on a charge.”

  “Don’t be dramatic, Paul. They were testing your commitment … teasing you. They did the same to the doctor that went before you and the one that went before him. You know how the SS behave, they have a stressful job, and they’re obsessed with loyalty. You clearly didn’t pass their test.”

  Paul wasn’t listening to Rudolph. All he could think of was his father who owned the factory that had made the trolleys and the poison or canisters, or whatever the hell he was fabricating. “Am I to be dismissed from Brandenburg?” Paul asked, hoping for that outcome.

  A knock on the door interrupted the conversation. Leitner walked in looking relaxed, as though he’d just been for a stroll in the park.

  “The next time you will take charge of the consignment under my tutelage, Doctor Vogel, and your refusal to carry out my orders will lead to your instant dismissal, which in turn will leave you vulnerable to an arrest for treason. If that happens, you will no longer have the protection we give you now.”

  Leitner addressed Rudolph. “Vogel here made quite a spectacle of himself. I had to change my shoes and trousers because he vomited over them. Isn’t that right, Vogel?”

  “Sorry. My stomach isn’t used to witnessing mass murder straight after breakfast,” Paul grumbled.

  Leitner’s expression darkened further. “Leave us, Doctor. Wait outside until you are summoned.”

  Just as the hand reached the half hour on the wall clock in the ante-room, the door to Rudolph’s office opened, and Paul was beckoned.

  “We’ve discussed your misconduct this morning.” Herr Rudolph studied Paul with a mixture of awkwardness and disappointment. “You made a damn fool of yourself in front of SS soldiers. Hauptsturmführer Leitner and I have agreed to reprimand you.”

  “And what will my punishment be? I can’t think of anything worse than what I witnessed this morning.”

  Leitner said, “You will join the SS to prove that you can be trusted. We will accept nothing less.”

  Paul’s jaw dropped.

  “In your defence,” Rudolph continued, “I believe it was wrong of the SS soldiers to antagonise you physically. I’ll also reprimand the Scharführer. Clubbing you with his rifle was unacceptable.”

  “I appreciate that, at least,” Paul muttered.

  “You were to observe the new euthanasia procedure, something that most of the doctors in this hospital have done already,” Rudolph repeated for Leitner’s benefit.

  Leitner added, “Yes, of course, Herr Direktor, but the difference between the other doctors and Vogel, is that they did as they were told without ob
jection.”

  “Really? What about the two doctors who were taken away by SS soldiers last week? Did they obey you or did they object?” said Paul, heading for the door even though he had not been dismissed.

  Rudolph stood, moving deliberately to the front of his desk.

  “Go home to your parents for a couple of days, Paul. Have a good talk with your father, and do yourself a favour, take his advice. If you agree to join the SS Medical Corps, you will be forgiven, and Vogel, before you stick your vain, self-satisfied nose in the air, thank your father for saving your arse. Were it not for his loyalty to the Party you would already be on a train to Dachau Concentration Camp.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Paul left the hospital and drove to the centre of Berlin before crossing Kreuzberg in the district of Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg. Then, he made his way to Hermann-Göring-Straße.

  The streets were packed, and he was stuck behind processionals and military vehicles. Every second day there seemed to be a parade to honour the Führer. Drums beating, flags waving, and children wearing Hitler youth uniforms instead of their school attire, gave the city an air of celebration. But under the layer of joviality and unity, fear festered. He knew it existed in free-thinking people, but it rarely saw the light of day.

  Very few civilian cars were on the roads nowadays. Petrol had almost doubled in price, and many vehicles had been confiscated by the Wehrmacht. Despite the deafening noise of drums and trumpets, Paul rolled down his window and shouted to a young boy of about fourteen dressed in a brown uniform with a Nazi armband. “What’s going on today?”

  “Can’t you see? We’ve just had a Hitler Youth parade,” he shouted back. “The Führer was here. He was here in this very street! You should have seen how many people were waving at him. It was the best day of my life. We’re going to take over the whole world. We’re unstoppable!”

  Paul marvelled at the fanaticism depicted in the flag-waving boys’ faces and in the display of full-size swastika banners on every lamp post and building. The Nazi zeal brought the last conversation he’d had with Max to mind. They had met in London for a few days in April of the previous year. It had been a special time, for they’d shared many heart-to-heart conversations together without having to put up with the rest of the family’s usual interruptions.

  Paul remembered that one of the political discussion they’d had over a bottle of whisky had seemed perfectly ordinary until it had been turned on its head by Max’s revelations.

  Paul specifically recalled that Max hadn’t been drinking very much that night because he was planning to leave for work at 5am the following morning. He wasn’t tipsy, careless with secrets or having one of those sentimental moments in which they had often shared their deepest and darkest thoughts. No, it had not been that simple, Max had wanted to talk about his rank and position in the British Secret Intelligence Services.

  Paul could still picture the earnest expression on Max’s face when he’d said, “You don’t need to know what it is I do, but I’m coming clean with you about my career just in case anything untoward should happen to me.” Shocked at first, Paul had put the whisky aside to listen to his brother’s predictions for Europe. The question of trust and need for secrecy hadn’t even been verbally raised, for the two brothers were fiercely loyal to each other, much to Wilmot and Hannah’s annoyance. They always complained that they were outsiders when Paul and Max got together, and unfortunately for them, they were right on that score.

  On that night in London, Max had been precise and utterly convinced that a war between Germany and Europe was going to be a massive conflict on the scale of the Great War. “Hitler will try to take Poland,” he’d forecast, though he’d also stressed that it was a gut feeling he had and nothing to do with any intelligence he might have received. “And the minute he goes in there, Britain and France will declare war on him. You watch, borders will fall all the way to Siberia.”

  It wasn’t hard to imagine that happening now, Paul thought, but a year earlier he, the rest of his family, and indeed most of the people he knew had remained optimistic that Britain wouldn’t go to war against Germany. Their naïve prediction that England was still exhausted from the Great War and would allow Hitler to annex parts of Poland as they had with Czechoslovakia had been very much mistaken.

  Paul arrived at his destination, parked the car and then removed his shoe. He turned it upside down in his hand, swivelled its heel, and removed a piece of paper concealed inside. Hide it, eat it, just don’t get caught with it, Max had stressed. Paul had obeyed by altering every pair of shoes he’d bought to keep the note safe for a day like today.

  He read, then re-read the phrase and address on the note before replacing it inside the heel. After he’d put his shoe back on his hand went to the door handle, but instead of turning it, he froze. His mind arguing with itself, his nerves sparking with apprehension, and the terrible sensation of being a traitor was stopping him from doing what he’d driven all this way to do.

  The row of grey, terraced houses stretched from one end of the street to the other. He wanted to knock on the elected door and say what he’d rehearsed, but with the note, Max had also given him a stern warning. “Use this information as a last resort. It is a one-time deal, and once you have triggered it there’s no going back for you, or for me.” Paul grunted with frustration, then breathed in and out for the count of nine. “That’s enough. Just do it, for Christ’s sake,” he mumbled as he got out the car.

  The elderly man who opened the front door wore a dressing gown. He was not what Paul had expected. His image of spies had been grim, but exciting. They were men who lived in the shadows, hiding behind webs of intrigue. Fit and agile, they frequented bars misty with the vapours of alcohol and cigarette smoke that coiled up nostrils. And they were always surrounded by the husky voices of voluptuous females. It was a life that could reap high rewards if successful, or end in disaster on foreign gallows or behind huge prison walls. It was a world where no one used their real name.

  But the man standing at the door lived in a working man’s street and looked like an old grandfather with his pipe hanging out the side of his mouth and furry ankle boots on his bare varicose veined legs. His sharp eyes scanned his visitor up and down, down and up until his gaze settled on the paper bag in Paul’s hand. “What do you want?”

  “Good afternoon. Are you Herr Brandt?” Paul asked.

  “Yes. What of it?”

  Paul swallowed a nervous lump in the back of his throat. “The summer seems far away and so do the birds that have flown their nests.” He’d practised that phrase for a year but felt stupid saying it aloud.

  The ensuing silence unnerved Paul. He had the right house, the right man, but the spy he’d come to see continued to scowl at him.

  Eventually, Brandt’s eyes flicked to the Nazi badge on Paul’s coat lapel and without warning, his hand shot out and ripped it off. “You’re not coming in here with that on you,” he hissed.

  Inside the flat, Brandt looked Paul over until he shook his head and sighed. “Unbelievable ... unbelievable resemblance ... incredible. For a second, I thought you were Max until you asked my name, and I saw the swastika pin on your lapel. Nein, Max wouldn’t wear it in my house – nein, he’d never do that.” Brandt handed the pin back to Paul. “Don’t put that on you until you leave, you hear?”

  Paul nodded, relieved to have got this far. “Max sends you his best regards, Herr Brandt. He said if we were ever to meet I was to give you this.” From his paper bag, he retrieved the bottle of Scotch he’d bought many months before.

  Brandt beamed. “Your brother didn’t forget old Ernst. Good for him.”

  Once both men were seated, Brant opened the bottle, poured two tumblers and gave one to Paul. “I know why you’re here, but I warn you if you ask me what you’ve come to ask I will go ahead and neither you nor I will be able to stop it.”

  “I know. Max made that clear.”

  “How many?”

 
Paul had thought about that question on the journey from Brandenburg. He was about to tell a partial lie, but it was to save a life. “Two people – a woman and me – she’s a Jew.”

  Herr Brandt raised a curious eyebrow. “I see. Well, Max and I will sort you out, but I need the woman’s description: age, sex, height, a recent photograph of her, and any scars or moles. The more you have on her, the quicker I’ll be able to forge her passport.”

  Paul’s optimism was crushed, and so was his dignity. “I don’t have a picture of her, or any of the other details you asked for. Can I come back with when I’ve spoken to the lady in question?”

  Brandt thumped his tumbler on the table, the whisky spattering the polished surface. “What? Do you think I’m a bloody personal travel agent? Max should have explained how I work and you should have been organised before coming here. I’ll tell him it’s only you. If there are changes you can sort them out with him – right, that’s it, off you go – come on, I don’t have all day.”

  While Paul was being bundled out the door, he asked, “Wait a minute. I don’t know how to sort anything out with Max. How will I know when he’s organised everything?”

  “You can take it from me that I’ll have sent the transmission to him in London before you get into your car. Now go.”

  Paul panicked. “And will I be informed when and where to meet him?”

  “Not from me you won’t – and you can forget this address and my name. Don’t show your face here again. I mean it, don’t even think about coming to ask me to add your woman friend – once, only once do you get to come here. I won’t answer the door to you, ever again. I will never admit to seeing you before in my life. Max will contact you when the time and place is safe for him, and for you. In the meantime, carry on as usual. Stick that stupid pin back on now. Your routine mustn’t change, and neither should your enthusiasm for the Nazi Party. It’s important that you understand that.”