“Why did you refuse to write the appeal to the court?” Henry asked me after we reached the furthest end of the long corridor. “Everybody else did.”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly. “Maybe because I’m too proud to ask. Or maybe because I deserve to die.”
He brushed my hand with his fingers, squeezing it just for a second. After that, he motioned for me to turn around and we both resumed our walk with blank, immobile faces.
_______________
Altaussee, Upper Austria, May 1945
I woke up with the sun, turned around in my bed, and opened the shutters for a second to be immediately blinded by the bright light, which was banished from getting inside the small hunters’ hut that I, my adjutant and two of our loyal SS men were currently hiding in. The new day outside was breathtakingly beautiful; I couldn’t help but smile at the emerald green covering the ground as far as the eye could see, at the imposing mountain top, still covered with sparkling white snow on the very top, at the sky, so blue and clear that it was inconceivable to even think that, just days ago, the war was wiping out whole cities just across from the very same mountain chain that I was currently looking at.
I had said my goodbyes to my wife when I stopped by my house in Linz for a couple of days, right after I made a long, despair filled, journey from Berlin to that small Austrian town; back home, all alone. Annalise told me to go home, back to my wife and children, and so I went, because she refused to run with me. I never expected it from her, never from her, to push me away so cold-heartedly after the many times that she had reassured me of her love and affection. She cried of course, but I didn’t believe her tears. Dalia cried too, a long time ago, and it didn’t matter at all. Women always cry tears of deceit. I didn’t blame either of them. Why would they want to stay with someone like me? Even I couldn’t stand myself sober, for the most part.
I kissed my children on top of their heads and told them to take care of their mother, because their father wouldn’t be able to come back to them after the great war. They cried, and so did I. I changed into civilian clothes, wiped off the last few tears, and left for the place where I wanted to meet my death. Now, I was looking outside the window, feeling completely empty, numb… and plain tired of everyone and everything. Of life itself.
This was the perfect place to die. I only wondered what was taking them so long – the OSS, or SOE, or NKVD, or whoever ended up being the first to come and kill me. I looked back at my sleeping comrades, all of them still snoring evenly after finishing another case of champagne last night, drowning our hopelessness in wine. We got drunk quickly – there was no food left except for the French bonbons, and those weren’t particularly nutritious.
I closed the shutters and lowered myself back to my bed, closing my eyes once again. And in about an hour he finally knocked on our door, an American, all alone and unarmed, with a small wrap under his arm. My adjutant, who was talking to him through the slit in the door, turned back to me and told me that there was an armed group of men further down the road, but their leader wanted to talk to me first about something that he claimed was of interest to me.
Nothing was of any kind of interest to me anymore, but out of politeness I told my adjutant to let the American in. He looked around the hut as soon as the door was closed behind his back, walked up to the rough wooden table that I was sitting by, and moved a chair next to me.
“General Ernst Kaltenbrunner, I suppose?” He inquired in a thick American accent. I could barely understand him.
After I didn’t bother with a reply, he put his small package, wrapped in brown paper, on top of the table, and spoke in the same level voice, only his eyes were glistening with barely contained hatred; hatred I didn’t quite understand. We had never met.
“I will need you to give me your hands so I can handcuff you, General Kaltenbrunner. After that we will exit this hut peacefully and without further senseless bloodshed. Order your people to cooperate, too, and soon it will all be over with.”
I snorted in contempt at his insolence. “What if I have other plans?”
“I strongly suggest that you change your plans, so they are in accordance with mine, General.”
“You have some cheek,” I replied with a sneer, shaking my head in disbelief.
“No,” he said in the same emotionless, cold voice. “I have something better.”
With those words he unwrapped his package over my lap, and a long braid fell out of it on top of my knees. I jerked back in my chair instinctively, not quite understanding what the hell he was doing.
“Are you threatening me with a human braid?” I lifted my eyebrow, eyeing him with as much contempt as I could muster. “What is it, your new secret tactical weapon that you’ve been working on this whole time?”
The American smiled at last, and that smile of his made the hair on the back of my neck stand up for some reason.
“Look closely at it. I bet that you have held it in your hands on quite a few occasions.”
The uneasy feeling started creeping up inside me, while my brain still refused to process the idea. I picked up the long, blonde braid and slowly let it through my fingers, until I spotted it at last, at the very end – the simple, thin, black ribbon that she always tied it with, before curling the braid into a thick bun on the back of her head. I had seen her do it so many times; in my bedroom, in the office at the end of the war, when it was safer to stay inside than wander back into the constantly bombed city, in the bomb shelter, in my car, her delicate fingers braiding her golden locks while she smiled at me. The ribbon was always black closer to the end of the war – there were no stores to buy new ones around, and to my question where she was getting all those ribbons from she laughed and confessed that she was cutting them from the lining of her dress. It was Annalise’s braid.
My hands closed into fists at once, but he managed to move away a second before I charged at him, infuriated like never before in my life, ready to tear him apart with my bare hands.
“Don’t do anything stupid now,” he yelled at me, holding a hand in front of him in warning. “If I don’t come out of here alive, your whore dies too.”
I stood face to face with him, still clasping the severed braid in my hand, grinding my teeth in helpless fury. My adjutants froze behind the American’s back with rifles ready to shoot. They wouldn’t miss from such close range.
“Why?” I asked him one last question that wouldn’t let me be without being answered. “Why her? She was working for you all along.”
“Yes, she was,” he replied nonchalantly. “However, people are dispensable. We need you more than her.”
“How do I know that she’s still alive?”
“You’re just going to have to trust my word.”
I was boring him with my eyes for another minute, until he got tired of it, took handcuffs out of his back pocket and held them in front of me. “Your hands, please.”
I slowly wrapped the braid in a knot and hid it in my inner pocket. The American didn’t object to that, but later told my first interrogator, who found it after searching me, that I was indeed a sick individual, who in view of the lost war, did not want my pregnant girlfriend to fall into enemy hands so I had shot her in the head and cut her braid off as a sentimental souvenir. I had no idea what the official story with Annalise was within the OSS, and didn’t know anything about her current status in the organization, so I had nothing else to do but keep my mouth shut instead of respond. They took it as an affirmation, of course.
_______________
Nuremberg prison, October 1946
“I need an affirmation regarding your words. I can’t just accept them in good faith… This is… This is insane! I should have never allowed her to come here at all! I knew it would end up in something like this!”
Agent Foster cut himself short after realizing how dangerously loud his voice sounded. I jumped to my feet from my cot, where I was sitting twitching my leg and biting my nail to the quick, and started
pacing around him again, stumbling over the cot, chair and a shaky table.
“You can ask Otto, he’ll confirm my words. I’m not lying and neither is he. Hitler is alive and in hiding, that’s why the Russians wouldn’t show you his body, because they knew perfectly well that it’s not him!”
“They didn’t show us the body because they had to transport it to Moscow. Stalin wanted it. He said he had a right to it because they lost the most people—”
“Bullshit!!! You know it and I know it! What kind of an excuse did they give you when your representatives asked for permission to examine it in Moscow?”
Agent Foster was chewing on his lip vigorously, his eyes glistening feverishly just like mine.
“They didn’t. They plainly refused,” he mumbled at last.
“And why would that be?” I made another circle around the OSS agent.
“No, this is… impossible, this can’t be!” He shook his head once again, refusing to believe my words. “You just saw your Annalise, you held your son, and now you’re making this story up for me, just so I can, by some miracle, get you out, that’s what it is!”
“I swear on my life, I swear on all of my children’s lives that it’s true!” I pressed a fist to my chest, confirming my sincerity.
He was right in a sense; I did completely lose my head after I saw the two of them. I couldn’t believe it when Henry showed his beaming face through the window and told me that I had visitors. He refused to tell me who it was and just kept smiling all the way to the cell, where they set the last meeting for us. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw her, my Annalise, jumping to her feet from the chair that she was sitting in and hugging her son tighter. Our son, who I could see for the first time in my life.
How could I not lose my head after she cried so much, telling me how she loved me more than life herself and wanted to ascend the gallows together with me so we would die together, how I could not lose my head after my infant son smiled at me for the first time, hugging my face with both his tiny hands while calling me ‘Papa.’ Annalise wept even harder after that and told me that she kept my picture next to his crib and he kissed it every night before he went to sleep. And all this time I was so certain that he would never know me, his real father, but he did, he already did, he recognized me and asked me not to go away when it was time for Henry to take me back to my cell… All my humility and acceptance of fate went to hell in that instant. As soon as Henry locked my door, I stopped in the middle of the cell and almost screamed at myself, “What the hell am I doing? I can’t leave them, not after what she said, not after my son asked me to stay, no… No, no, no, I can’t, I can’t die, I have to find a way to get out of here, I have to find my way back to her!”
“Henry!” I yelled, banging on the door, even though he stood right there. “Bring him back, bring the American OSS agent back, Foster his name is, bring him back before he leaves to go to New York, I have something of the utmost importance to tell him!”
Henry, looking both startled and confused at my sudden outburst, even moved away from the door slightly. “I… I’m sorry, I can’t leave my post…”
“Henry, I’m begging you, for the love of God or anything that is sacred for you in this world, bring him back! He’s going to leave now and then it’s all going to be over with!!!”
I couldn’t help but notice how another guard from across the hallway, standing by von Ribbentrop’s cell, swirled his finger by his temple to one of his comrades, clearly thinking that I had finally lost it.
“Tell him I know about Bormann and Müller,” I said quietly so only he could hear me as I tried using my last trump card. Agent Foster already knew that I knew of their whereabouts, however I hoped that maybe this would make him at least come back to finally learn the answer.
Henry threw a glance at his comrades and asked the one guarding the cell right next to me, “Can you watch them both? It’s important.”
“I will, but call the guard by the central door to be your substitute while you’re gone. We can’t break protocol.”
Henry nodded and trotted along the corridor. The second guard showed in the window and told me in English, “Go back to your cot, sit there and be quiet. You’re not the only one condemned. No need to agitate the rest of the inmates.”
I did as he told me, but now, with Foster back in my cell, I couldn’t stop my pacing.
“It’s true,” I repeated once again. “I swear.”
“Even if it is, what good is it going to do?” he whisper-yelled at me. “How am I to get you out of here? Even I don’t know the date of your execution… I have no idea how much time we have left… How am I to prepare all this and the main question is, how am I to execute such an operation?”
“You work for the OSS.” I made my best begging eyes at him. “Surely, you can do something.”
“How?!” he whisper-yelled once again, making a desperate gesture with his arms. “How can I possibly get you, a convicted war criminal, out of the noose?!”
“I don’t know,” I answered honestly.
“He doesn’t know.” Agent Foster sat on my cot tiredly and squeezed his head between his hands. “And how am I supposed to know?”
“If you get me out, I’ll give you all three of them: Hitler, Bormann and Müller,” I promised with a smile of a madman. I had nothing to lose at that point. I was gambling for my life.
Foster sighed and looked up at me. “Why don’t you just be a conscientious man and give me all the information without all this useless trading?”
“I would. I was ready to, really. I was, before I saw her today. I even wrote a note for you and it was lying right here, on the table, this whole time, until I tore it apart an hour ago. I thought that she let go, that she had forgotten about me at last. I thought she didn’t love me anymore. I thought my son would never see my face. Now, I can’t. I’m not a conscientious man, agent Foster. I’m a horrible, horrible man, who deeply loves his woman. She always was above all for me, above conscience, morals and life itself. I can’t die now that she wants to die together with me. She’ll do something to herself, and I can’t let that happen. Get. Me. Out.”
“You’re insane,” he concluded calmly. “Both of you, you and her.”
“Yes, so we’ve been told.”
“I don’t know if I’ll be able to help you, Ernst. I really don’t think I can.” He lowered his eyes to the floor.
Epilogue
“Open your eyes. Ernst? Open your eyes.” The voice was floating in and out of my mind while somewhere in the back of my mind my brain registered how someone was persistently slapping my face. I couldn’t move a finger even if my life depended on it.
“How much did you give him?” the same voice inquired, still sounding muffled and distorted.
“I gave him a little shot after the first two minutes that they hanged him, when I first walked inside the scaffold to check on him, so he wouldn’t move on the rope and strangle himself accidentally. And the second time when I walked in, after another five minutes, I shot the whole syringe into his leg. I had to be sure that he looked dead enough, so even his pulse would be almost impossible to detect. The Soviet doctor wouldn’t leave me alone, wanted to check for himself. Didn’t trust me, I believe, after our American side had suddenly changed the scheduled doctor organized for the supervision of the executions. Smelled a rat, savvy bastard. But we still outsmarted them.”
“Are you insane?! The whole syringe?”
“He’s fine.” the same voice replied, while someone pressed fingers into my neck, causing excruciating pain. “The pulse is a little slow, but he’s even breathing on his own.”
“Yes, after I was giving him mouth to mouth all the way here!”
“Foster, I told you then and I’ll say it again now – there was no need to do that. If you couldn’t hear him breathe, it didn’t mean that he wasn’t. That’s the whole point of the whole procedure, to make him basically look like a corpse. The heart is still beating, even though ve
ry slowly, and the breathing is still there, even though it’s almost undetectable, but that’s because the brain is resting for that period of time.”
“You almost killed him!”
“Well, there is always a fifty-fifty percent chance that a morphine induced coma can be lethal, but… what can I say? We got lucky. I told you he’d be fine.”
“I’ll believe it when he opens his eyes and actually says something to me.”
“He won’t be talking for a few days, until his throat and neck heal completely. Didn’t even rapture a muscle, lucky bastard, only a little strain on both sides.”
“Ernst? Open your eyes.”
“Leave him alone, he’ll wake up soon.”
Everything went blank again.
Agent Foster’s face was the first thing that I saw in my afterlife, or whatever the hell it was. He was beaming at me, holding my head in his hands. Judging by the way he was sitting, my head rested on his lap, while I was laying on some long wooden bunk, or at least if felt like it.
“Ernst? You’re awake!” He patted my shoulder, which was hurting too. Everything was, but it was my neck that felt as if it was in a ring of fire. “How do you feel?”
I tried to reply, but suddenly realized that I had no voice. The fire ring tripled its painful grip and I reached for my throat instinctually.
“No, no, don’t touch anything.” He caught my hand and put it back on my stomach. “I can give you water, if you want.”
I managed to nod, my vision still unfocused and blurry, but I still tried to turn my head to look around, just to see several grinning faces on the other side of what looked like a military plane. Foster lifted me up to a sitting position, even though he had to hold me around the shoulders, to put an army canteen to my mouth. I tried to take a sip but all of a sudden it seemed as if I had no control of my swallowing reflex. Foster hit my back with a closed fist as I began violently coughing, each breath burning everything inside.
The Austrian: Book Two Page 24
