by Richard Wake
"Just listen," he said. "About six months ago, Hitler and his generals had a meeting where he told them his plans—general plans, no timetables or anything like that. There wasn't supposed to be a record, but one of the junior officers, a guy named Hossbach, took some notes that we've seen. The basic summary is that he's about to move east—Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, you get the picture—for raw materials needed to continue the military buildup. The decision is made. We already kind of knew that, but now we really know it. It's not if, it's when.
"Okay, so there's that piece. The second piece is that a group of the big names—Blomberg and Fritsch from the military, Neurath from the foreign office—all thought the idea was crazy. They thought the army wasn't ready and that any move—against the Czechs especially—would bring the French into a war against Germany, and that the French army could kick their ass blindfolded. I should say our ass. And that's why all three of them have been replaced. Again, it's what people suspected, but this is the confirmation. It was all quite fishy—right after they expressed their skepticism, there was suddenly a rumor about Blomberg's wife and some nude pictures, and another rumor about Fritsch and a young boy in a public restroom, and they were both gone. Pretty convenient, it seems to me. When in doubt, sex it up."
"But you don't know when?"
"No. There's nothing from Hossbach about when, and I haven't seen any planning documents. Nobody here has. You have to think Austria is first, but there aren't any plans. Well, there's this thing called 'Case Otto,' but it's really just a training exercise that somebody drew up a couple of years ago in case somebody tried a Habsburg restoration. But it's nothing, a piece of shit. So there aren't any concrete plans that we know of. But really, how long would it take to draw up a battle plan to take over a country that is going to have brass bands playing to serenade us when we enter?"
"But what about the French?"
"Nah, nobody thinks they care about Austria. You know there are a lot of people in Europe who think Austria should have been a part of Germany to start with."
"A lot of people in Austria think that, too."
"Brass bands, I'm telling you."
"And you're telling me that there's nobody in Germany who can stop it?"
"That's what I'm telling you. You should go now."
"No Hail Marys?"
"I'll say a couple for you. And for Austria."
40
There wasn't a lot to do, or think about. On the one hand, Peiper didn't tell me anything I didn't already know; in fact, he kind of told me the same story as last time. I mean, everybody knew, deep down. Hitler was coming, and there was no stopping him. Once he got Austria, Czechoslovakia was next. It was just that plain, that certain, that final.
I was walking vaguely back toward the hotel, and some lunch, when the big-ass black Mercedes 260D, the spare tire sitting there on the running board, pulled up beside me and two black leather trench coats got out and sandwiched me, front and back, each then grabbing an arm. From the front passenger seat, the window rolled down, and a Gestapo officer I had not seen before said, "Herr Kovacs, your presence is needed at EL-DE Haus. I hope this is not too much of an inconvenience."
I had rehearsed for this moment, more than once, always praying it would never come but practicing just in case. And what I had decided on was to act naturally. That is to say, scared beyond belief. That was always the plan, and it didn't take a lot of acting. But as I settled into the back seat, between my minders, I did ad lib one question.
"Am I to see Captain Vogl?"
The officer in the passenger seat turned and smiled. "Eventually," he said.
The ride wasn't five minutes. We pulled up right in front. There were no screams that day from the array of knee-high windows along the sidewalk. On a cold February day, there were none of the fetid smells that were there in August. When they let me walk into the building without holding me by each arm, I allowed myself a few seconds of hope. But it ended quickly. We were not headed straight, up the staircase to the offices. We headed right, toward the big iron door, the door whose hinges screamed when they opened it, and the cellar behind it. The officer continued up the stairs; the trench coats and I headed down.
It was quiet. The doors of the first two cells were open, and they were empty. I was placed in the third cell. It was empty, too.
"Your clothes, sir," said the bigger of the trench coats. And so it was—topcoat and hat, suit and shoes and socks. They left me in my undershirt and shorts. My arms were folded, and I was shivering when they clanged the iron door behind them.
I kept telling myself not to panic. I also kept telling myself the fact that I had not seen or heard Peiper in another cell was a good thing. All I had done was go to church, and I didn't think things had gotten to the point where they would question a priest about what somebody had said in confession. As long as Peiper had been careful, I hadn't done anything. Then again, how many people admitted to doing things they hadn't done just to try to bargain their way out of whatever torture could be coming.
I wasn’t sure how long I had been in there—maybe an hour, maybe a little more—when nature called. There was a bucket in the corner of the cell for that purpose. As I peed into it, the iron door opened. The Gestapo officer from the car and one of his henchmen stood and watched as I finished.
I suddenly forgot about my just-act-scared rehearsal. "Enjoying the view?" I asked as I pulled myself together.
The officer locked eyes with me.
"Take the underwear," he said, and walked out, leaving his aide to collect my shorts and shirt. I was naked now, alone and naked when the door slammed again.
I sat down on the wooden bunk. I had been sitting there before, but this time I rubbed my hand across it, to make sure I didn't catch a splinter in my ass—as if that was the biggest of my worries. For some reason, I wasn't all that scared about having a finger or toe lopped off with a pair of bolt cutters. But when I played this out in my nightmares, all I could think about was that same recurring dream, with wires leading from a battery's electrodes being attached to my balls—or, if they were feeling like kind torturers, maybe it would be my nipples. Those were the things that terrified me.
But I kept playing it out in my head, wondering if there was anything I could admit if I had to. It kept coming back to this: If I knew for a fact that they had Peiper in a nearby cell, and that he had admitted something specific to them, I could confirm it with a clear conscience. I mean, at that point, Peiper would be a corpse in waiting. There would be nothing I could do for him, and there was no reason not to try to save myself—and admitting a little something would probably play better than denying something they knew for a fact to be true.
But if not? Then I just had to deny everything. I mean, there was no physical evidence—not on this trip, anyway. And the more I thought about it, the more I could convince myself that they weren't going to kill me, even if they had something. It was tricky for them; they did need the magnesite, after all. I did have some level of protection because of that, and the Gestapo knew it. At least Vogl knew it. So maybe they would just threaten me and tell me that I would be under 24-hour surveillance any time I came back to Germany. Or perhaps they would tell me I couldn't come back to Germany at all. Or maybe I would be going to Dachau. But to kill me would risk international news coverage and repercussions, especially if Leon managed to make a stink about it at home; "The Two Kovacs Murders in Cologne" was my working headline. It was a small risk, granted, but it would be there. No, they didn't want that. That's what I kept telling myself.
Then I heard a scream—just one, but it was piercing. And as I sat there on that bunk, bare-assed and shivering, all I could do was try to convince myself that the scream didn't sound like the way Major Peiper would scream if someone showed him a wire attached to an electrode from a car battery.
41
I didn't know how long I’d been waiting—another hour, maybe more—when the iron door of the cell was opened again, the turning
of the key accompanied by a loud, angry-sounding conversation, muffled by the iron barrier and then clearly heard as the door cracked open. The last bit of the rant:
"—EVER LEARN TO FOLLOW INSTRUCTIONS? HOW DID YOU EVER GET PROMOTED?"
Vogl was doing the screaming. The junior officer who had collected me off of the street was the one being screamed at. I was the only naked person in the room, reflexively covering my manhood as I stood, but it was the young officer who appeared to be holding his balls in his hands.
Vogl looked at me for a second, then exploded again.
"NAKED?" And then he paused a beat, leaned into his underling, nose to nose, and in a lower voice, lower but even more frightening, said very slowly, "Get . . . his . . . fucking . . . clothes."
The eunuch scurried off, and Vogl and I were alone. I couldn’t have said how long the silence lasted. After a time, he walked out into the hallway, as if to offer me an apologetic gesture, to give me some privacy.
For the next minute or two, I ran the phrase "learn to follow instructions" over and over through my head. What could that have meant? Learn to follow instructions. For one thing, it meant that there were, in fact, instructions attached to my name. But what kind of instructions? Keep an eye on me discreetly? Or don't be discreet about it and make sure I knew I was being followed? Or do something a little more overt, like question me briefly, just to make it entirely clear that the Gestapo had suspicions?
Whatever it meant, naked in a cold cell appeared to have crossed the line. Unless, that is, this was all some elaborate bit of playacting, a good-cop/bad-cop routine like in the movies. Anything was possible. But the one thing was, Vogl really did seem enraged. If this was an act, it was a damn good one.
Soon, Vogl walked in with my clothes, folded and in a neat pile, shoes and hat on top. He placed them gently next to me on the bunk and returned to the doorway. "Please," he said, motioning to the pile.
I did my best not to display any emotion in reply. I turned my back on him, began getting dressed, and attempted to think of the proper response. I buttoned up slowly, tucked in fastidiously, tied my necktie with care. I went as slowly as I could and tried to think of what to say. There was a point where he coughed behind me. I thought he might be clearing his throat to say something, but no. There was just the silence, both of us clearly calculating.
I could be meek and essentially thank him for clearing up the misunderstanding. I could be curt and just nod and leave. I could be furious at this violation of my rights and promise to lodge a complaint with the Czech consulate. Or I could be silent and wait for him to say something. That's what I ultimately chose, silence.
In my stocking feet but otherwise dressed, I turned to face Vogl. As it turned out, he began speaking almost immediately.
"You must accept my apology. My man was overzealous. You have heard me reprimand him verbally, but he will be reprimanded formally as well. He will apologize, also, when we are leaving the building. I hope you can accept it with the sincerity it is offered."
I just looked at him, no nod, no acknowledgment of what he had said. He continued.
"I am not excusing him, but you need to understand his motivations, all of our motivations. We are working here in the service of something great, something greater than all of us. It is an awesome responsibility."
He stopped again, seemingly seeking some sort of acknowledgment from me, some flicker of recognition. I did my best to remain expressionless. He continued.
"You have seen the Romerturm?" he asked. And I did nod here. The Romerturm was the remains of a stone wall and tower, built in the first century AD, when Cologne was part of the Roman Empire. It was only a couple of blocks away from where we were standing, although, when I’d seen it a few years earlier, I had no idea what EL-DE Haus was, or what it would become.
"I walk by it almost every day," Vogl said. "I can close my eyes and see it, every brick. This was the northernmost outpost on continental Europe of the Roman Empire—right over there," he said, extending his right arm and pointing. "We can almost touch it from here, the very edge. But why did it stop? And why did it end?
"You have read the history, I'm sure. You know why. It was rot from within that ended the Roman Empire. It was laziness, it was decadence, it was complacency—and it all came from within. You've heard about the barbarians, but that is rubbish. That wall was strong enough. The real problems were inside the wall, not outside."
He was speaking in a cadence now, a rhythm. He seemed like one of those preachers from the American south shown on a recent newsreel. Either that or like Hitler himself.
"This is our job, the Gestapo's job, my job—to protect against that rot while the Führer's vision is being realized, so that the realization can endure. Our job, my job, is to identify the small problems before they become significant problems, to root out the decadent and the subversive and make sure they can never become widespread enough or strong enough to challenge the vision. Because the vision must endure.
"I took an oath. It is a promise, and I take it seriously. So does that little shithead who pulled you in off the street. You must understand that I had no idea you were being detained and brought in here, and that it should not have happened. Again, I do apologize. But you also must understand that it was overzealousness in the name of a greater good—the most important good, in fact. Think about that old wall and you will recognize it. I know you will."
I did my best, again, to remain expressionless, to not give him the satisfaction. We locked eyes for a few seconds, just staring, and he blinked first, half-turning away, saying, "Finish getting dressed and I will drive you back to your hotel."
"I'll walk."
He seemed hurt. It seemed real. Then again, he might have been the Emil Jannings of the Gestapo. I just didn't know.
"As you wish. I'm sure you can find your way out." With that, he was gone. I turned to put on my shoes, resting my right foot on the edge of the bunk, tying it, then my left foot. Leaning over, my eye caught a few more wall carvings that I had not seen before. One was just a calendar marking off the days—eight days, it seemed, followed by God knows what for the poor sap in question. Near that was a single word, Papa.
Then I saw the third etching, and I stopped tying my shoe. I might have stopped breathing.
There, off by itself, was an O with three lines drawn neatly below it.
42
1) Could I kill him?
2) Did I have the guts?
3) Could I possibly get away with it?
4) Could I find out why he had Otto killed?
Those were the four questions I asked myself, over and over and over, as the train devoured the miles. It always came back to No. 2, of course. The rest were details.
We had all pulled the trigger on our rifles in the army—Leon, Henry, me, all of us. Presumably, we had hit somebody at some point. But that's not with this was. That was survival. This was an act of calculation.
Henry said he could never do it. His father had killed as a young man, establishing his credibility in a brutal line of work. He told Henry a couple of the stories, but only when he was drunk and only when he was an old man. He never used those stories to shame Henry in his formative time, to prod his son into doing something he otherwise couldn't do. Henry was not a killer, and nothing short of self-defense or war could turn him into one. He could barely rough up a gambler who was behind in his payments.
But what about me?
1) Could I kill him?
2) Did I have the guts?
3) Could I possibly get away with it?
4) Could I find out why he had Otto killed?
That I was even considering the possibility was an indication of where my head was. Seeing Otto's signature on the wall of the cell answered every question. It was not suicide. It was not a jealous husband. Otto had been in EL-DE Haus, the bruises on his torso were torture at the hands of Vogl's goons, and a day or so later, they were the ones who threw him off of the bridge and into the Rhine. One
letter with three little lines drawn neatly beneath it told the whole story.
Except for one thing: the why. Was Otto a spy? Was that really possible? The fury I felt was tempered by that unanswered question. This was not to kid anyone, of course. People who knew me knew that Alex Kovacs didn't do fury, not even when confronted with the killer of the person he loved above all others. But my friends would be wrong in this case. The rage was not outward, true enough, but it was there, and it was real. And it manifested itself in an almost manic determination to consider actually killing a captain of the Gestapo and to do it on German soil, an act that was incredible on its face, falling somewhere on the spectrum between idiotic and suicidal. Yet I couldn't let it go.
Round and round it went, then, past Frankfurt and Würzburg and wherever. No sleep on this trip, just Hennessy followed by breakfast.
And the questions.
1) Could I kill him?
2) Did I have the guts?
3) Could I possibly get away with it?
4) Could I find out why he had Otto killed?
The truth was, as the train pulled into the Westbahnhof and I grabbed a cab from the rank on Felberstrasse, I didn't know the answers to any of those four questions. But I had ten days to figure them out, especially No. 2.
MARCH 1938
43
Johanna was furious. I liked it when she treated me like crap for fun, but this was serious, even if it was about a Fasching ball. Specifically, the most glittering and exclusive and expensive of all of Vienna's annual balls, which the von Westermanns treated like church on Easter but which I was declining to attend because of a previous commitment at the secretaries’ and office workers’ ball.
