The Nero Decree

by Greg Williams

  The two hard consonants hit Johann with a thud.

  He felt like the air had been sucked from his lungs.

  All Johann could hear was KZ. Konzentrationslager.

  He was carrying the history of the camps.

  All those names. All those people reduced to mere paperwork that had been copied dutifully onto microfilm. Of the seven departments in the Reich Main Security Office it would be the operatives in the seventh office, “Written Records,” who would ensure protocol was followed to the letter. Lives extinguished, made real only by the functionaries who organized it with no more emotion than they would coordinate a train timetable. But why had they gathered the documentation into one place? What were they intending to do with it?

  “So you are accompanying the documents to the Ministry?” Johann asked. He tried to make his words sound as if he was ensuring the safety of the data.

  “Indeed,” Schorner said, leaning against the fireplace. “What a shithole Poland is. Four weeks of driving from godforsaken place to godforsaken place collecting all these documents.”

  “Quite,” Johann said, pretending to laugh.

  “I don’t know why they needed two units to do what one could have done,” said Beckmann, cutting another slice of sausage.

  “If one unit had done both, then if they were captured the entire archive would be lost,” Schorner said dismissively, as if he had told Beckmann before.

  The three men stood awkwardly. Johann still held on to the briefcase tightly.

  “What are your orders after this?” Schorner asked Johann. Both SS officers looked at him curiously. Was this a test? Johann held their gazes, his mind searching desperately for a plausible answer.

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” he said eventually.

  Both men nodded. This was clearly not unusual. Johann felt some of the tension ease.

  “And when you arrive at the Ministry with the documents and the microfilm?” Johann asked.

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that,” Schorner replied. He kept a straight face before breaking into a smile.

  Beckmann laughed and set fire to a piece of greasy paper that had been used to wrap the salami. It flared briefly before twisting and turning to carbon.

  “Up in smoke,” he said.

  “Even now they are stoking the furnaces at the Ministry,” Schorner said with a smirk.

  They were going to burn the files and the microfilm. They wanted to erase history, to pretend that the deportations, the separation of families, the murder, had never happened. Johann had heard the stories, but many people were still oblivious, wouldn’t believe the rumors, or just didn’t want to know what had happened to their neighbors when they were marched off—what the authorities described as a “resettlement program in the east.”

  The Nazis hoped that they would never find out, that the rumors would remain just that.

  Johann knew now what Dieter had been doing: cleansing history, removing the corroboration so that conjecture would take the place of truth. His half brother was a willing manipulator of fact, an adversary of light.

  Johann tightened his grip on the handle of the briefcase. He held the truth in his hands.

  And at that moment, it struck him: Hidden in the back of the truck was a file with the name “Meier” on it. If he could get inside the vehicle he could find out what had happened to his father.

  “We have an early start,” Schorner announced, stretching. “And tonight will be the first time that I have slept on a real bed for months. There are several rooms upstairs, Schnell. Feel free to help yourself, if you wish. They seem to have taken the bedding, but you might be lucky enough to find a blanket if you look around.”

  “The Sturmbannführer is very kind,” Johann said, clapping Schorner on the back as the man moved past him to the staircase.

  “Forgive us for not having some girls to keep you warm,” Beckmann blurted, laughing at his own joke.

  Johann followed Schorner up the narrow stairs. He noted that half of them creaked. He felt his way along the corridor and into a small room with a wire-framed bed. Johann approached the window and looked down into the courtyard. He watched as the driver stepped out of the cab of the truck into the moonlight and walked into the house for the night.

  Johann heard a crunch beneath his feet. He looked down and moved whatever was on the floor with the toe of his boot. He saw that he was standing on a broken ceramic washbowl. As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could see that there were pictures of nursery rhymes on the wall. This had been a child’s room once. Maybe only last week. His body ached. His eyelids hung heavily. He yearned for rest, but his mind was racing too fast for him to be able to sleep. He thought about how his half brother was complicit in this criminal act of denying the terrible fate of so many. It was almost inconceivable to Johann that someone could side with such cruelty with absolute passion and belief.

  He leaned his head against the freezing wall and tried to displace the thought that Dieter was now only a few miles, if that, from Anja and Nadine.

  Johann waited until he could hear Schorner snoring before negotiating the staircase. He had decided to tell anyone he might encounter downstairs that he was searching for some water. Beckmann was sprawled on the table, asleep.

  Johann edged out of the kitchen door and into the still night. He moved slowly, feeling his way on the cobbled courtyard to ensure that a scrape of his boots didn’t give him away. Any stray noise would be the end of him. He glanced back up at the house. None of the inhabitants appeared to be awake.

  The body of the truck was coated with a thin sheen of frost. Johann worked his way to the rear of the vehicle and felt for the handle on the back door. He turned it upward and the doors were released.

  He pulled the left door ajar slowly, lifting it slightly from its hinge to ease its passage, then climbed inside the vehicle, closed the doors carefully behind him, and fished in his tunic for his flashlight. He took what felt like his first breath since he had left the bedroom. He moved the beam of light around the interior. Cardboard boxes were stacked in rows two or three deep along the sides and backed up against the cab of the vehicle. Johann crouched and cast the light on a scuffed box at the bottom of the pile—it was bulging from the weight of others on top of it read “Belzec” in scrawled script. He had heard of the place: a town in the south of Poland. The one next to it said “Kulmhof.” He moved the light beam to the next: “Dachau.”

  He stood up, reached toward the box on the top of the stack, and lifted the lid. He peered inside. He saw dozens—maybe hundreds—of manila folders. Each file had a tab on the top right-hand corner with a name typed onto it. The one at the front read “Aaronson.” Johann pulled out the file and opened it. The light fanned out across the yellowing page that was embossed with the words “Konzentrationslager Sobibór.” He followed a story that revealed itself in neat typewritten letters.

  Name: Aaronson, Ruben

  DOB: 19/10/22

  Father’s name: Eyou

  Mother’s name: Maia

  Date of arrival: June 28, 1942

  Notes: Jew

  Date of death: February 12, 1943

  Cause of death: Unknown

  Johann stared at the word through the mist of his breath. Unknown. A deception perpetrated by liars. They could kill a human being, but not tell the truth about what they had done.

  Unknown: a euphemism for what? Worked to death? Beaten by a guard for sport? Perished for want of medical care? There were so many ways to die in an unknown manner. So many opportunities to no longer exist, to slip from the memory of others without any reckoning.

  Johann looked around the truck, overwhelmed. Here they were. Thousands of them. Every single file a life, every one a living, breathing person. Each box contained hundreds of them: notifications of unchallenged, unremarked deaths sandwiched between two pieces of manila paper.

  Unknown. The word revolted him. A denial of action, of responsibility, of culpability. It needed huma
n beings to obey orders, deliver beatings, and pour lime into pits. This tragedy didn’t occur randomly—choices were made and paths were followed for horror to come to pass.

  Johann looked around at the boxes and boxes of files, the thousands of souls.

  “Someone did this,” he whispered to himself. “Someone did this.”

  And someone—Dieter—was responsible for one of the files that might be here. He looked through the names on the boxes: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Bogdanovka, Buchenwald, Dachau, Gross-Rosen, Jasenovac, Lublin, Poznan… His head spun at the scale of the monstrosity. He shut his eyes for a moment, like a climber with vertigo. He needed to take himself away from his current situation. He tried to loosen his limbs, to let the feelings of disgust and dismay drain away. He opened his eyes again. He didn’t have time for this. He had to disengage his emotions and hurry. The house contained three members of the SS. Discovery would mean immediate execution.

  His flashlight moved from box to box, but still he couldn’t see what he was searching for. Then he moved one of the containers and realized that there was another layer behind them. He slid some of the boxes out of the way and scanned the beam deeper into the truck.

  His eyes came to rest on one word: Sachsenhausen.

  Johann slid the box out and paused. He was acting on a hunch. He had no idea if Nicolas had been sent there, but it was the most likely: Political opponents of the regime from Berlin had first been sent to Oranienburg, which had been set up in a former brickworks. In 1936 it was replaced by Sachsenhausen, a camp designed with a singular purpose in mind. He had sent repeated requests to the authorities for information about his father’s welfare and whereabouts, but had never received a reply.

  The air in the truck was thick with cold; he could virtually feel its weight as he moved about the vehicle. Johann lifted the lid and pointed the flashlight at the contents, which looked exactly the same as the other boxes he’d examined—hundreds of files organized alphabetically, with names typewritten in a cutout area in the top right of the file. Everything in perfect order: It could have been a filing system at a doctor’s office. Johann leafed across the files, pulling the paperwork forward with his fingers to get a look at the names at the top. As he came to the letter M he wondered whether it might be better not to find any news than something conclusive. Or worse, something “unknown.”

  And then there it was: Meier, Nicolas. His father, documented by a bureaucrat. Johann opened the file quickly—he needed to know. He scanned down the document.

  His blood ran cold.

  He was sure he had heard movement in the courtyard.

  Johann stopped breathing. There it was again: the click-clack of gravel moving. He stood up very slowly and took a step toward the door, his pistol raised. His legs were cramped from crouching, and his breath had clouded the small window at the back of the truck. The condensation had made the window opaque. He raised his arm and used the cuff of his jacket to wipe away a small area to see outside. There was enough moonlight to make out a large part of the courtyard. Johann craned his neck. A pair of eyes stared back at him. Johann steadied the pistol. His index finger tightened on the trigger before he lowered his weapon—he was about to shoot a dog. The mutt was standing in the courtyard looking up at the truck hopefully.

  Johann crept back to the file he had been looking at. The paper inside was slightly yellowed. Nicolas’s name, date of arrest, and supposed crime were written in elegant script. Johann ran his finger down the form, looking for more information.

  There it was: date of death.

  Johann experienced a moment of hopelessness: Nicolas had died in the winter of 1940 at the Heinkel factory. He had been a forced laborer. Although Johann had, in his heart, always expected his father to be dead, he had clung to the golden promise of hope: a pardon, a mistake with paperwork, an unlikely escape. His eyes filled with tears. He pulled out his handkerchief and wiped his face.

  Damn this war. Damn Dieter.

  He tilted his head upward and swallowed. He didn’t have time for this now. He had to escape. To leave with the briefcase and to prevent its terrible secrets from being erased. More than that, he had a final task: to discover the true meaning of the directive that had so terrified Lehman, the executive order that menaced those he loved in Berlin. The SS man had suggested that the diktat was the final ignominy the Nazis would bestow upon the world.

  Johann replaced the boxes where he found them. He needed to be quick. He must get back to the city before Dieter regained consciousness and Anja and Nadine were arrested. He took a final look at his father’s file. The flashlight revealed one other detail. He had stumbled across it years before, when, as a newly qualified doctor, he had gone to the bank on Behrenstraße and opened the safety deposit box with the key that had not left his neck since the night his father had handed it to him.

  Johann nodded to himself, satisfied by the confirmation.

  He folded the document and tucked it inside his jacket. If nothing else, the last vestige of his father would remain next to his heart. Furnaces be damned.

  Ten minutes later Schorner, Beckmann, and the driver, Glaezer, sat blinking at the table, their hands tucked behind their heads. Johann had used a technique that one of the doctors told him was employed by officers in the field: He had ordered the men to strip. Not only did it mean that Johann was sure none of them had weapons but also that each of them was vulnerable and—in March in Brandenburg—cold.

  “Push your clothes toward me with your feet,” Johann ordered.

  Each of them did as they were told. Johann warily picked up a pair of trousers and threw it on the fire.

  “What do you know about the Führer’s directive?” Johann asked.

  Beckmann looked at Schorner.

  “You should know,” Schorner said.

  “Really,” Johann said, and threw another item of clothing on the fire. It was March, but it was touching zero outside.

  “Tell me anyway,” Johann said.

  “I take it that you are not Sturmbannführer Schnell?” Schorner said.

  “Tell me now,” Johann said, fixing his handgun on Schorner.

  Silence.

  “You won’t get away,” Schorner said. “Not out here. There are Feldgendarmerie units everywhere.”

  Johann tossed a shirt and underwear into the flames, which were greedily consuming the woolen garments.

  “Answer the question,” Johann ordered them.

  “I’m just a soldier,” Glaezer said. Johann had found him asleep upstairs, snoring like a bear. “I do what I’m told. I don’t know anything.”

  Johann desperately wanted to leave. It would be sunrise in around three hours and he needed to be far away from here by then.

  “What is due to happen in Berlin?” he insisted.

  Silence.

  “None of us has any idea what you’re talking about.”

  Johann picked up a broken chair leg, gripped it hard, and suddenly swung at Schorner, hitting the officer across the face.

  “Don’t tell me lies!” he shouted. “You sit here with a truck full of files that you intend to destroy. How dare you tell another lie!”

  Schorner looked up from the flagstone floor at Johann.

  “You’re talking about the Demolitions on Reich Territory,” he said, coughing. He spit blood onto the rust-colored tiles.

  “The truth!” Johann ordered.

  “I can hear a Berlin accent,” Schorner said with a cackle. “Oh, dear…”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Johann demanded. There was a trace of desperation in his voice.

  “Still got loved ones there, have you?” Schorner asked.

  Johann didn’t react. He would avoid revealing anything about himself.

  “Well,” said Schorner. “You won’t have long if they’re sheltering in the U-Bahn or going through a railway station, or anywhere near a fuel dump. Because if the British bombers don’t get them, the Party will.”

  “
What are you talking about?”

  “They’re destroying it all,” Schorner said, suddenly serious. “The Führer issued the order on March 19.”

  “Anything of value within Reich territories,” Beckmann said, acting as a chorus. “It’s all going to hell.”

  Johann thought for a moment. Anything of value—that would be most of the city. “Railway stations, bridges, food supplies, factories, S-Bahn, U-Bahn, vehicles…” Johann recited the words as if in a dream.

  “All gone,” Beckmann said.

  This was the final insult. After the misery and cruelty of the past twelve years, the Nazis had one last act of destruction that would make the lives of the ragged survivors of their folly even more wretched. Johann put his hand against a wall to steady himself. Not satisfied with erasing the records of millions of lives, Dieter was the enforcer of a decree that was pointless and cruel—the Nazis’ final insult to a ravaged Europe. A ruling devoid of compassion or human decency.

  Johann’s head spun.

  “But what about the people?” Johann asked. There was no artifice to the question; he simply couldn’t believe what he was being told.

  “The order makes no provision for the protection of civilians,” Schorner said. “They will have to take their chances. Better that than the Bolsheviks get their dirty hands on it.”

  Johann’s body shook as if he had been shoved.

  He had to get back. He had to warn Anja and Nadine.

  Johann picked up the briefcase while keeping the P38 trained on his captives.

  “I’m leaving now,” he said, backing away from them while holding the remaining clothing. He had confiscated the weapons he could find, but they might have others hidden. “And if any of you try and pursue me, I will kill you.”

  Glaezer remained passive. He was happy to see Johann leave. But Schorner and Beckmann stared back at Johann threateningly.