by Philip Kerr
“I apologize for disturbing you, Comrade,” I said. “This is not a formal inquiry. I’m not here on duty.” All of that was to preempt any requests to see my nonexistent warrant disk. “Does the name Poroshin, of the MVD, mean anything to you?”
“I know a General Poroshin,” she said, adjusting her manner very slightly. “In Berlin.”
“Perhaps he has already telephoned you,” I continued. “To explain my being here.”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid not,” she said.
“No matter,” I said. “I have an inquiry relating to a fascist war criminal here in Austria. The general recommended that I come to this office. That the legal officer in this office was one of the most efficient in the Special State Commission. And that if anyone could help me to track down the Nazi swine I’m looking for, it would be her.”
“The general said that?”
“Those were his exact words, Comrade,” I said. “He mentioned your name, but I’m afraid that I have forgotten it. I do apologize.”
“First Legal Officer Khristotonovna,” she said.
“Yes, indeed. That was it. Once again, my apologies for having forgotten it. My inquiry relates to two SS men. One of them was born here in Vienna. His name is Gruen. Eric Gruen. G-R-U-E-N. The other is Heinrich Henkell. That’s Henkell as in the champagne. I’m afraid I’m not sure where he was born.”
The lieutenant moved quickly out of her chair. The mention of Poroshin’s name had seen to that. I wasn’t surprised. He had scared me when I had known him, first in Vienna and then in Berlin two years later. She opened the glass door and led me to a table, where she invited me to sit down. Then she turned to face a large wooden card index, drew out a drawer as long as her arm, and riffled through several hundred cards. She was taller than I had supposed. Her blouse, buttoned up to the neck, was dun-colored, her longish skirt was black, and her army boots, like the belt around her waist, were as black and shiny as a village pond. On the right arm of her blouse was a stripe indicating that she had been wounded in combat, and on the left two medals. Russians wore actual medals rather than just the ribbons, like the Amis, as if they were too proud to take them off.
With two cards in her hand, Khristotonovna went over to a filing cabinet and started to search there. Then she excused herself from the room and went out a door in the back. I wondered if she was going off to check my story with the Austrian police, or even Poroshin in Berlin, if she would be coming back to the room with a Tokarev in her hand or even a couple of guards. I bit my lip and stayed where I was, diverting myself by thinking of yet more ways in which Gruen and Henkell and Jacobs had played me for a fool.
The way they had taken me into their confidence. The way Jacobs had pretended to be so surprised to see me again. The way he had pretended to distrust me. The way “Britta Warzok” had sent me on a wild-goose chase for no other purpose than to make me believe that an assault occasioning the loss of my finger had been the direct result of asking awkward questions about the Comradeship.
Khristotonovna was gone for about ten minutes, and when she returned she was carrying two files. She laid them on the table in front of me. She had even brought me a notebook and a pencil. “Do you read Russian?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Where did you learn?” she asked. “Your Russian is very good.”
“I was an intelligence officer, on the Russian front,” I said.
“So was I,” she said. “That is where I learned German. But your Russian is better than my German, I think.”
“Thank you for saying so,” I said.
“Perhaps . . .” But then she seemed to think better of whatever it was she had been about to say. So I said it for her.
“Yes. Perhaps we were adversaries once. But now we are on the same side, I hope. The side of justice.” A bit corny, perhaps. It’s odd, but Russian is a language that always brings out the sentimental in me.
“The files are in German and Russian,” she said. “One more thing. The rules state that when you have finished I shall have to ask you to sign a document stating that you have examined them. This document must remain on the file. Do you agree, Inspector?”
“Of course.”
“Very well.” Khristotonovna tried a smile. Her teeth were going bad. She needed a dentist like I needed a new passport. “Can I bring you some Russian tea?” she asked.
“Thank you, yes. If it’s no trouble. That would be very kind of you.”
“It’s no trouble.” She went away, her underskirt rustling like dried leaves, leaving me regretting my earlier unkind thought about her. She was much friendlier than I could ever have supposed.
I opened Gruen’s file and began to read.
There was everything and more. Gruen’s SS record. His Nazi Party record—he had joined the party in 1934. His officer’s commission. His SS record—“exemplary.” The first revelation was that Gruen had never been with the SS Panzer Corps at all. He had never served in France, nor on the Russian front. In fact, he had seen no front-line service at all. According to his medical records, which were sufficiently detailed to mention his missing little finger, he had never even been wounded. Gruen’s most recent medical examination had been in March 1944. Nothing had been overlooked. Not even a slight case of eczema. No mention there of a missing spleen, or any spinal injury. I felt my ears start to burn as I read this. Was it really possible that he had faked his illness? That he wasn’t confined to a wheelchair at all? That he hadn’t lost his spleen? If so, they really had played me like a piano. Nor was Gruen the junior officer he had claimed to be. The file contained copies of his promotion certificates. The last one, dated January 1945, revealed that Eric Gruen had ended the war as an SS Oberführer—a senior colonel—in the Waffen-SS. But it was what I read next that disturbed me most of all, although I was half expecting it after the revelation that he had never been in the SS Panzer Corps.
Born to a rich Viennese family, Eric Gruen had been considered a brilliant young doctor. After graduating medical school he had spent some time in Cameroon and Togo, where he had produced two influential papers on tropical diseases that had been published in the German Medical Journal. Upon his return in 1935, he had joined the SS and been a member of the Interior Health Department, where it was suspected he had been involved in experiments on mentally handicapped children. After the outbreak of war, he had been a doctor at Lemberg-Janowska, at Majdanek, and finally at Dachau. At Majdanek, it was known that he had infected eight hundred Soviet POWs with typhus and malaria and conducted studies of the progress of the disease. At Dachau, he had assisted Gerhard Rose, a brigadier general in the medical service of the Luftwaffe. There was some cross-referencing to Rose. A professor at the Robert Koch Institute of Tropical Medicine in Berlin, Rose had performed lethal experiments on concentration camp inmates at Dachau in pursuit of vaccines for malaria and typhus. More than twelve hundred prisoners at Dachau, including many children, had been deliberately given malaria by infected mosquitoes or injections of malaria-infected blood.
The details of the experimentation made extremely uncomfortable reading. In the Dachau doctors’ trial of October 1946, a Roman Catholic priest, one Father Koch, had testified that he had been sent to the malaria station at Dachau, where, every afternoon, a box of mosquitoes had been placed between his legs for half an hour. After seventeen days he left the station, and it was another eight months before he succumbed to a malaria attack. Other priests, children, Russian and Polish prisoners, and, of course, many Jews, had not been so lucky, and several hundred had died in the three years that these malaria experiments had continued.
For their crimes, seven of the so-called Nazi doctors had been hanged at Landsberg in June 1948. Rose had been one of five sentenced to life in prison. Another four doctors had been sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from ten to twenty years. Seven had been acquitted. At his trial, Gerhard Rose had justified his actions, arguing that it was reasonable to sacrifice “a few hundred” in pursuit
of a prophylactic vaccine capable of saving tens of thousands of lives.
Rose had been assisted by a number of other doctors including Eric Gruen and Heinrich Henkell, and a nurse-kapo called Albertine Zehner.
Albertine Zehner. That was a real shock. But it had to be the same girl. And it seemed to explain a great deal that had been a mystery to me. Engelbertina Zehner had been a Jewish prisoner turned kapo and nursing assistant in the medical block at Majdanek and Dachau. She had never worked in a camp brothel at all. She had been a nurse-kapo.
Gruen’s file described him as being still at large, a wanted war criminal. An early investigation into Gruen’s case by the legal officer of the 1st Ukrainian Front and two legal officers from the Soviet Special State Commission had come to nothing. Statements from inmates at all three camps, and F. F. Bryshin, a forensic medical expert from the Red Army, were provided.
The last page in the file was the record of file protocol, and this, too, provided a surprise for me, for here I found the following note: This file examined by American occupation authorities in Vienna, October 1946, in the person of Major J. Jacobs, United States Army.
Khristotonovna returned with a glass of hot Russian tea on a little tin tray. There was a long spoon and little bowl of sugar lumps. I thanked her and turned my attention to Heinrich Henkell’s file. This was less detailed than Gruen’s. Before the war he had been involved in Aktion T4, the Nazi Euthanasia Program, at a psychiatric clinic in Hadamar. During the war, as a Sturmbannführer in the Waffen-SS, he had been deputy director of the German Institute of Military Scientific Research and had seen service at Auschwitz, Majdanek, Buchenwald, and Dachau. At Majdanek, he had assisted Gruen in his typhus experiments, and later, at Dachau, his malaria experiments. In the course of his medical research he had amassed a large collection of human skulls of different racial types. Henkell was believed to have been executed by American soldiers at Dachau, following the camp’s liberation.
I sat back heavily in my chair. My loud sigh brought Lieutenant Khristotonovna back to my side. And she mistook the lump in my throat for something other than feeling sorry for myself.
“Tough going?”
I nodded, too choked to say anything for a moment. So I finished my tea, signed the protocol, thanked her for her help, and went outside. It felt good to be breathing clean, fresh air. At least until I saw four military policemen come out of the Ministry of Justice and climb into a truck, ready to patrol the city. Four more elephants followed. And then another four. I stayed in the doorway, watching from a safe distance and smoking a cigarette until they had all gone.
I had heard about the Nazi doctors trial, of course. I remembered the surprise I had felt that the Allies should have seen fit to hang the president of the German Red Cross—at least that is until I read about how he had conducted sterilization experiments, and forced Jews to drink seawater. A lot of people—most people, including Kirsten—had refused to believe any of the evidence presented at the trial. Kirsten had said that the photographs and documents presented during the four-month-long trial had been faked in a grand sham to humiliate Germany even more. That the witnesses and victims who had survived had all been lying. I myself had found it all hard to comprehend—that we, perhaps the most civilized nation on earth, could have done such appalling things in the name of medical science. Hard to comprehend, yes. But not so hard to believe. After my own experiences on the Russian front, I came to believe human beings were capable of an unlimited degree of inhumanity. Perhaps that—our very inhumanity—is what makes us human most of all. I was beginning to understand what was going on. I still had one question about what Gruen and Jacobs and Henkell were up to. But it was the kind of question to which I had a good idea where to find the answer.
When the last IP vehicle had set off from outside the Justice building, I walked onto Heldenplatz, the great square of green that faced onto the Ring. Ahead of me was the New Palace, also occupied by the Russian army, and decorated with a large picture of Uncle Joe. I passed through an arcaded walk and onto a cobbled square that was home to the empty Spanish Riding School—the horses were all safe from Russian appetites—and the National Library. I went inside the library. A man was polishing a wooden floor as big as a football field. The library itself was chilly and, for the most part, unused. I approached the main desk and awaited the attention of the librarian, who was busy writing a catalogue card. The sign on her desk said “Inquiries.” But it might just as easily have said “Cave canem.” A couple of minutes passed before, with her glasses flashing the Morse code for “Go away,” she finally condescended to acknowledge my presence by looking at me.
“Yes?”
There was a blue rinse in her gray hair and her mouth was as severe as a geometry box. She wore a white blouse and a double-breasted navy blue jacket. She reminded me a little of Admiral Dönitz. There was a hearing aid attached to her pocket. I bent toward it and pointed at one of the marble statues.
“Actually, I think he’s been waiting rather longer than I have,” I said.
Just for that she showed me her teeth. They were better than the Russian woman’s. Strong-looking, too. Someone had been feeding her meat.
“Sir,” she said crisply. “This is the National Library of Vienna. If it’s laughs you want, I suggest you find a cabaret. If it’s a book, then maybe I can help you.”
“Actually, I’m looking for a magazine,” I told her.
“A magazine?” She uttered the word as if it were something venereal.
“Yes. An American magazine. Do you keep American magazines here?”
“Sadly, yes, we do. Which magazine was it that you were looking for?”
“Life magazine,” I said. “The issue for June 4, 1945.”
“Follow me, please,” she said, getting up from behind her woodpaneled redoubt.
“I’d be delighted to.”
“Most of what we have here is from the collection of Eugene of Savoy,” she said. “However, for the benefit of our American visitors, we do keep copies of Life magazine. Frankly, it’s the only thing they ever ask for.”
“Then I guess it’s my lucky day,” I said.
“Isn’t it just?”
Five minutes later I was seated at a refectory table staring at the magazine Major Jacobs had not wanted me to see. And on the face of it, it was hard to see why. On the front was an open letter written by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to the American people. And when I turned the pages it was full of patriotic war effort and wholesome American smiles, as well as advertisements for General Electric, Iodent, and Westinghouse. There was a nice picture of Humphrey Bogart getting married to Lauren Bacall, and an even nicer one of Himmler taken minutes after he had poisoned himself. I liked it better than the one of Bogart. I turned some more pages. Pictures of an English seaside resort. And then, on page forty-three, what I presumed I was looking for. A short article about how eight hundred convicts in three American penitentiaries had volunteered to be infected with malaria so that medical men could study the disease. It was easy to see why Jacobs might have been sensitive about such an article. What the American Office of Scientific Research and Development had done in prisons in Georgia, Illinois, and New Jersey looked very much like what SS doctors had done in Dachau. Clearly, the Americans had hanged men for what they themselves had done in their own prisons. It was true that all of these convicts were volunteers, but then Gruen and Henkell might easily have argued the same excuse. Engelbertina, or Albertine, was probably the proof of that. Reading this story in Life and seeing the photographs gave me an itch. Not the kind of itch you get from seeing men with bottles containing infected mosquitoes pressed to their abdomens—a curiously medieval-looking picture, like some ancient bee-sting remedy. But another kind of itch. The kind of itch you get when you start to suspect something unpleasant has been going on. The kind of itch that won’t be satisfied until you have scratched it.
I found a copy of Lange’s medical dictionary and, looking up the symptoms of mal
aria and those of viral meningitis, discovered that the two illnesses produced several symptoms that were more or less identical. In the Bavarian Alps, where mosquitoes are not exactly common, it would have been all too easy to have passed off several dozen men dying of malaria as an outbreak of viral meningitis. Who would have suspected it? All those German POWs had been used for medical experiments. Just like eight hundred American convicts. Not to mention all those people at Dachau and Majdanek. It seemed hard to believe, but experiments on human beings, for which seven Nazi doctors had been hanged at Landsberg, were obviously still going on, and under the protection of the CIA. The hypocrisy of it was staggering.
THIRTY-SIX
There was an Overseas Telephone and Telegraph Office on the ground floor of the Alliance Building in Alserstrasse, in the Ninth District. I approached an operator. He had a nose like a windsock and hair that was a sort of badger-color—gray on the outside and darker underneath. I gave him the Garmisch number, bought a kilogram of coins, and went to the telephone booth he had indicated. I didn’t expect to get through, but I figured it was worth a try. While I waited for my connection I thought about what I was going to say and hoped I could restrain myself from just using a lot of the words we used to use on the Russian front. I sat in the booth for about ten minutes before the telephone rang and the operator told me that the other phone was ringing. After a moment or two it was picked up and I heard a distant voice. Garmisch was only three hundred miles, but I imagined the call had to go through the telephone exchange in Linz, which was in the Russian zone of occupation, before being rerouted via Salzburg (in the American zone) and Innsbrück (in the French). The French were considered the least efficient of the four powers and the poor quality of the line was very likely their fault. But recognizing Eric Gruen’s voice, I started to pump a fistful of ten-groschen coins into the telephone, and after fifteen or twenty seconds we were speaking. Gruen seemed genuinely pleased to hear from me.
