by Jana Petken
Biermann opened his briefcase and pulled out another file. He set it on the table, closed the case and leant it against the table leg. “This has been a long time coming, but the proof that you lied to me, to Laura Vogel, and to the SS, is inside this file. The question is, what should I do with it?”
Kurt eyed the name on the cover. Dieter Vogel, case 176392. “I haven’t lied to anyone.”
Biermann scowled. “The only reason it has taken me this long to prove what I’ve always suspected is because Laura Vogel refused to allow the pathologist to conduct an autopsy on her husband’s body. Had he done one, he would have discovered straight away that Dieter Vogel was not a victim of the factory explosion.”
Freddie tapped the matchbox on the table, shaking the matches inside.
“This is crazy,” Kurt snapped, incensed at the suggestion, and irritated by the noise the matches were making. “I saw and felt the explosion … you saw my injuries … you were a pall bearer at Herr Vogel’s funeral. You watched the coffin go into the grave.”
“The coffin I dug up. When Laura Vogel crossed into Switzerland, I no longer needed her permission to exhume Dieter’s remains, as she no longer had the right to object.”
Biermann lit another cigarette. “For weeks, you’ve kept to your story about Dieter going into the chemical plant with two guards just minutes before the explosion, and for weeks I wanted to shove your lies down your throat. Today, I feel justified, no, satisfied with my evidence.”
Kurt swallowed, but kept his eyes turned away from the file. He had not been brought up in a family environment that encouraged emotions, whether they be sad or happy. He’d never displayed fear or hatred, for his father had frowned upon those feelings; hysterical outbursts, he had called them. Now, for the first time in his life, he was unravelling inside. It was all about Dieter’s teeth – the bloody missing teeth – it had to be.
Biermann flicked through the documents in the file while Kurt tried to relax in his chair. The Kriminaldirektor had bided his time, probably to try and find out who else might be involved in the conspiracy against the SS gas plant. He wondered if the Gestapo knew about Herr Brandt or Dieter’s connection to MI6, or him also being a spy?
“Don’t you want to ask me why I feel vindicated?” Biermann eventually asked.
“Why? I’m sure you’re going to tell me.”
Freddie opened the file, pulled out a piece of paper and slid it across the table to Kurt. “Read it.”
Kurt looked at the heading, then scrolled down, much of which was medical jargon, like a foreign language he didn’t understand. Impatient to learn the laboratory results, his eyes jumped from one line of mumbo jumbo to another until he got to the last sentence: The remains, therefore, cannot be those of Dieter Vogel.
“That’s right,” Biermann said. “It was the missing teeth that gave you and Dieter away. Any good dental surgeon who’d been given the chance to examine the skull’s mouth straight after the explosion would have concluded that two teeth had been recently pulled. The gums, although badly burnt were…” Freddie turned the document to face him. “Ah, yes, here it is. Gum and bone tissue had recently been cut away using a non-surgical instrument – ends were ragged, and gum bone was chipped. What did Dieter use to pull out the dead guard’s teeth, hmm? Pliers? A knife? No, never mind, don’t bother answering that question. I’d much rather know where Dieter is now. I suspect England with Laura. How nice for them both – and where is his art collection? You remember all those marvellous paintings he hung on his walls – the Goya, the Rembrandt among others? They seem to have disappeared? Why don’t you tell me where they are, Kurt?”
Kurt smiled through his cracked lips. This was contemptable. Biermann was more interested in Dieter’s artworks than finding justice for the Third Reich. Good luck with retrieving the paintings and lining your pockets with money for your retirement, Kurt wanted to say, but instead, he uttered, “I have nothing more to say to you. You’ve concocted this whole story to rattle me. If Dieter isn’t dead, I say, bravo, but here’s the thing, I had nothing to do with any of this. I have no idea what happened to Herr Vogel after he went into the gas plant, and I certainly wasn’t privy to any plans he might have had for his paintings.” Pleased with his lies, he added, “Ask the factory’s night-watchman about me. He saw me running towards the exit just before the place exploded. How many times do I have to tell you that?”
“Kurt. Kurt, you’re missing my point. Dieter’s body was not in the building.”
Without another word, Freddie shuffled the papers, slid them into the file, and then left the room.
Minutes later, Kurt was dragged back to his cell where he reflected upon his failure. Laura had been told at the time that the corpses were unrecognisable. Yet even after weeks in the ground, the medical authorities had still managed to determine that the remains with the missing teeth were not Dieter’s. The skull’s bones and gums had revealed enough to convict, apparently, but what precisely was his crime? At best it was conspiracy to arson and vandalism. “Fuck Biermann,” Kurt mumbled. He wasn’t signing the already-written confession. He’d rather kill himself than hand the bastard a victory.
Kurt recalled that before setting the timer for the explosives, Dieter had stripped an SS corpse naked and had redressed it in his own civilian clothes. Then, he’d dressed himself in the dead man’s ill-fitting SS uniform. Kurt also remembered that Dieter had planted his wedding ring on the young guard’s body and had then ripped the corpse’s two bottom teeth out using pliers, just as Biermann had suspected. Not wanting to leave evidence, Dieter had taken the precaution of putting the teeth in his jacket pocket. The plan had succeeded to the letter.
Dieter’s body had been buried after a high-profile funeral in Berlin’s cathedral with Nazi Party members in attendance giving tear-jerking eulogies about Dieter’s loyalty to the Führer. Later, Laura had left the country, just as Dieter had wanted.
The Gestapo had arrested Kurt on the night of Laura’s departure for England. That day, he’d driven her to the train station and afterwards he’d returned home to close the house and store the Vogel’s expensive ornaments. The paintings from both houses had been removed during the days before the explosion. Dieter had told Laura that he was putting them into storage because of allied air-raid threats. He’d also advised her to feign ignorance about the artworks’ removal. Money was tight for most people, and thieves were breaking into houses to steal expensive items to later sell them on the black market. Laura Vogel was not a stupid woman. She must have known that the paintings had been stolen from Jews in the first place, yet she had agreed not to say a word, specifically telling Dieter she didn’t want to know where he’d taken the canvases.
Laura had never been his friend, Kurt knew, not like the other members of the family. Their conversations had always been polite, rather formal, and she’d never mentioned the paintings to him in the days after Dieter’s supposed death, nor had she to Biermann. The Gestapo was pissing against the wind with that line of enquiry.
On that last evening, Kurt had sent a transmission to Heller from the cabin in the forest, telling him that Laura had left Germany. Then he’d returned home to Dieter’s house to fill the car with his belongings. Laura had instructed him to live in the Berlin house to make sure it wasn’t looted or damaged from neglect, but Dieter had ordered him to leave Berlin as soon as Laura got away safely. Unfortunately, Kurt had made his departure too late to escape Biermann’s Gestapo.
Terrified of what might come next, Kurt stared at the cell door and thought again about his kill-pill, and whether he had the balls to crack it open in his mouth. Was Biermann really going to send him to a concentration camp or try a more robust form of interrogation to get the information he needed to find Dieter? Would he arrest Wilmot? Had he the gumption to incarcerate Paul, now a member of the Biermann family? Was he going to try and find whoever he and Dieter had been working with? Just how far would the Gestapo go to hunt down Dieter, the man who had foiled Him
mler and Heydrich’s plans for their precious gas programme?
Chapter Nineteen
Kurt Sommer
Kurt had spent weeks in solitary confinement. He’d been left naked, freezing, and starved of food and drink apart from one lump of bread a day and a tin cup of water every eight hours. The chamber pot, never emptied since his incarceration, had overflowed numerous times, forcing him to sit in his own piss and choke on the stench of his excrement. He had pleaded, to no avail, for a scrap of paper, water, or soap, and had sacrificed one cup of water a day to cleanse the filthiest parts of his body. He was skeletal and losing muscle strength from lack of exercise and nutrients. And though he had the means, he still couldn’t bring himself to end his own life.
Every three hours or so, a guard came to Kurt’s three metre by two and a half metre holding cell. He slid open the small window half way up the iron door and blew a horn for ten minutes, and when the noise ended, he told Kurt a series of lies: guards were coming to take him to the interview room, he might be going home a free man or taken to a camp, or this was to be his last day in the cell. Kurt had long since figured out that it was all a ruse to deny him sleep and continually jar his nerves.
During his confinement, he’d braced himself for what was to come by envisaging every possible Gestapo torture known to him. Biermann wanted solid confirmation to incriminate Dieter, but that wasn’t Kurt’s biggest worry. For years, he had been one step ahead of the Secret Police. He was a Jew by birth, and in possession of forged papers and a carefully devised false background story that had, up until now, fooled everyone. That backstory had been concocted by the British Secret Service in 1935 after he had approached them in London to offer his services as a spy.
His biggest regret in life was that he’d never contacted his family to let them know he was alive and still living in Germany. He’d hidden from them to keep them safe from the Einsatzgruppen Schutzstaffel, the SS paramilitary death squads who had been after him for months during that period in 1935. But despite his bid to protect his Jewish parents and sister, they had died in an unrelated event on November 10th, 1938.
On that day, the Reich had conducted a pogrom against Jews throughout Nazi Germany, using the SA paramilitary forces and German civilians. It had been said at the time that the German authorities had watched the whole thing without intervening, but the Reich had later denied those reports. They had also stated that they did not condone violence against Jews, which Kurt had seen as a blatant lie, like all the other untruths coming out of Nazi mouths at that time.
The day after the riots, he had driven Dieter into Berlin where they’d seen the damage first hand. Jewish homes, hospitals, and schools had been ransacked. The attackers had demolished buildings using sledgehammers. A week later, Dieter had got hold of The Times of London, in which a journalist had eloquently written: ‘No foreign propagandist bent upon blackening Germany to the world could outdo the tale of burnings and beatings, of blackguardly assaults on defenceless innocent people, which disgraced that country yesterday.’ And for weeks, dribbles of information leaked from authorities into the public domain until the full extent of the destruction became shockingly clear: over one thousand-four-hundred synagogues had been burnt to the ground, seven thousand Jewish businesses were either destroyed or damaged. At least ninety Jews had been killed, and over thirty thousand Jewish men had been arrested throughout the Reich and incarcerated in concentration camps. No one at the time had been able to verify if the number of casualties was entirely accurate, but they’d been close.
Germans, when they talked about those two nights of brutality, referred to the Pogrom as the Reichskristallnacht – the night of the broken glass – for all the shards of window panes that had littered the streets. Who cared what they called it, Kurt had remarked to Dieter. The event would live on in infamy, a stain on Germany for a thousand years.
In the aftermath of Kristallnacht, Kurt had found it difficult to separate fact from fiction. Every time Goebbels got on his soapbox, he spewed lies about the reasons behind the violence: the Jews, according to him, had attempted to bring down the Führer’s Nazi Party in a violent coup, and had it not been for the intervention of real Germans, they might have succeeded. Another: a Nazi German diplomat, Ernst vom Rath had been shot multiple times by Herschel Grynszpan, a seventeen-year-old German-born Polish Jew living in Paris. And Goebbels’ final statement: that the assassination had been organised by the Jewish councils. The last part was utter fabrication.
Kurt rested his head against the wall and recalled his and Dieter’s trip to Munich three days after the riots. Worried about being recognised in his home city, but desperate to find out what had happened to his parents, Kurt had asked Dieter to make discrete enquires in his parent’s Jewish neighbourhood. The news had been devastating: neighbours had told Dieter that Kurt’s parents, sister and brother-in-law had either been killed or transported to a camp.
The consensus among the stunned Jewish communities was that predominately well-to-do families had been specifically targeted. That rumour had been confirmed when, sometime later, Biermann had remarked to Dieter that the Reich had seen Kristallnacht as an opportunity to beef up Nazi revenue streams from the deported Jews’ holdings and possessions. Kurt believed that scheme was still being used in the many Jewish deportations taking place in every corner of the Third Reich.
In retrospect, he had never accepted Goebbels’ pathetic justification for the attacks that had wiped out the people he’d loved. Even now, he struggled to grasp that almost one hundred innocent people had been battered to death in retaliation for the assassination of one man in Paris. He also found it hard to stomach that the average German man and woman had condoned or stayed silent about the Nazis’ slaughter against Jewish citizens in their own cities.
The cell door opened for the first time in six days, letting in a slanting shaft of sunlight from the hallway. Kurt, blinded by the brightness, shielded his bloodshot eyes with his hands and kept them there while he was dragged out of the cell; his faeces-stained backside skidding across the concrete floor.
After a long walk through a maze of hallways, Kurt was taken to an empty room with a wet floor and bare brick walls. He breathed in the pungent, mouldy stench mingled with his sweat and sewage-covered body, and choked as the guards bound his wrists and ankles with rope.
“I presume this is the physical torture part of your interrogation,” he chuckled through cracked lips. For weeks, he had endured mental abuse and physical beatings in his cell, and now they were going to officially brutalise him. Maybe they’d do him a favour and finish him off.
The guards used a pulley to raise Kurt’s arms up until only his toes were touching the ground and his arms were stretched above him. Beyond terror or embarrassment at his nakedness, he squeezed his eyes shut and bit his lip. Fuck them, he wouldn’t give the bastards the satisfaction of seeing him squirm or beg.
The men were chatting together, ignoring Kurt as though they had done this job a hundred times and were immune to their victim’s suffering. He wondered when the questions would come and who would ask them? It didn’t matter. They could send in Hitler himself and he wouldn’t say a bloody word to the insane dictator or his equally demented minions.
His collarbone cracked as the head of his humerus slipped out of joint causing his shoulder to dislocate. He screamed in agony but was rewarded with a punch to his ribs.
“He stinks,” one of the guards said to the other.
“We better get to it before the Kriminaldirektor comes in here,” said the other, tying off the pulley rope.
One of the men dragged a hose across the floor. Kurt, gasping with pain looked down the length of his body to the floor and saw the drainage holes. Dazed and losing consciousness, he murmured, “A shower … how nice of you to think of it.”
When the freezing water hit Kurt like needles pricking every inch of his skin, he screamed again. The force of the spray combined with the water’s icy temperature turned his body
purple, and finally, unable to breathe, he squirmed in silence, lips set in a tight line and turning blue, his eyes squeezed shut, and pain wracking his whole body until he slipped in and out of oblivion.
After they’d turned off the water, the guards cut Kurt down and made him lie on his stomach over a chair while they beat him with clubs on his back and behind. Then, they threw him on the floor and kicked him in the stomach and genitals.
Kurt curled himself into a ball, his body shivering with shock and the agony of his bleeding backside and dislocated shoulder. His teeth began to chatter as the cold air hit his wet, naked body and seemed to frost the hair on his head. He focused on the concrete floor and a circular patch of blood staining it, and prayed for unconscious bliss…
“… I know, but we can’t leave him like that. The Direktor won’t be happy,” one of the guards was saying.
Kurt screamed again, as the guards rolled him onto his back. One lifted his arm in the air while the other held him down. Then without warning, the guard manipulated Kurt’s arm and clicked the joint back into its socket.
After the men had left the room, Kurt rolled back onto his side and let the cold air soothe the cuts to his backside. He didn’t know what was worse, the physical torture or not knowing what was coming next. He ran his tongue over his fake tooth. It was time. He knew better than to hope he’d get out of there a free man. Worse was coming, more pain, death by firing squad, or a short, miserable life in a camp. Yes, it was time to end it.
