Arriving at the clearing in full sight of his men, Frick feels diminished: an older, dwarfish, hunched figure having to straighten up and pretend to look like a true SS officer of the Reich. The stink of fresh blood from the trench smarts his nostrils and he shields his nose with a gloved hand.
The sergeant steps up to meet him and salutes. Frick salutes too, but, because he must reek of vomit, steps back from him. He has to shout over the scourging wind. “The fugitive is dead, Scharführer,” he says. “She lies in a sawpit.” He points through the trees. “It’s in front of a dilapidated house. Take two men, you’ll need petrol and torches. Take whistles to keep in contact.”
“Do we bring the body here, Herr Obersturmführer?”
“No, we’re late as it is. Just drag her into the house and… burn it down, it’s old timber. In this wind it should go up in minutes. Schnell. Schnell.”
2
Frick travels back in the lead lorry. This carries the greater risk of ambush, but for the sole officer to travel in one of the rear vehicles is unthinkable. As it is, the journey is anything but comfortable; the forest road is a slushy mire and, at times, the substantially lightened truck skids lethally close to a sheer drop above an iced river. Now and again, the centre hump of the road scrapes the axle shield and, as the wheels strike snow-covered potholes, the vehicle rises and crumps like a broncing horse, and Frick wonders how Trummler fared in his low-slung Opel. They are down to twenty kilometres an hour, and the driver leans forwards trying to scan the way ahead as the wipers smear brown slush across the windscreen.
But Frick’s mind is on the house in the forest. The wind would have whipped the fire to an inferno and by now the whole abomination, along with the corpse, should be levelled to embers hissing in the snow. An hour ago, he had glanced at the wing mirror to see if the sky was blushing with reflected flames, but all he could make out was a wall of grey.
At last, they fork onto a tarred highway devoid of traffic and strewn with the detritus of the advance: broken hand carts – some richly carved, others coffin shaped with rubber tyres – no doubt all of them the heirlooms of peasant farmers. The wheels of the lorry splodge muck over the blitzed Kapliczi shrines and tottering wayside crosses mutely bearing witness to a god in ruins. In the thickening air, the headlights reflect back, and the driver shields his eyes and eases up on the accelerator.
“The weather’s getting worse, Herr Obersturmführer; it’s a blizzard.”
“Yes,” says Frick, but his thoughts are fixed on the image of the dead woman. He stares mindlessly at the impish snowflakes pirouetting over the bonnet. Beyond the roadside, the stark limbs of naked trees are plumped into long pillows of virgin snow. A slinking movement captures his gaze – a fox. He swallows and wishes the driver would speed up again, for he senses a gathering blackness looming up behind the convoy to engulf them all.
He is relieved when they enter a more-populated district, but this region is still a conflict zone. The road is littered with crumpled cars, overturned Polish army vehicles and tanks blasted apart, their exposed interiors scorched black like garden incinerators. Despite the closed windows in the lorry, Frick detects another aroma along with the smoke, which is sweet and sickly from the corpses already rotting before they had time to freeze, their twisted forms unburied since the start of the advance. The gaunt forms of starving dogs scavenge among the dead, and his attention is drawn to a mongrel of fur and bone, tethered to a gate and straining weakly against its chain. Frick looks away and stares at the town itself, which is disfigured by razed cottages, ruined churches and bullet-pocked walls.
Behind one of these is SS Base HQ.
*
Half an hour later Frick arrives at the mess freshly bathed, scented with eau de cologne and wearing his dress uniform, its blackness enhanced by the imprimatur of the peaked Tellemütze cap emblazoned with the SS eagle and the silver death’s head. The zigzag lines of the SS collar tabs add to the uniform’s flashy glamour. Thanks to Stroop, his trouser creases are sword edged and his boots are gleaming black, their steel bands glinting on each heel.
But he is late, and the other officers are already on their soup as Frick hands his cap and gloves to the aide at the door. He feels a tightness in his neck because no one should ever be late at a formal dinner for the visiting SS Standartenführer Friedrich-Wilhelm Krüger. Frick approaches the long table but remains standing as the officers put down their spoons and await his apology. There is a snap of steel against steel as Frick clicks his heels.
“I wish to formally apologise to you, Herr Standartenführer, and to you, my brother officers; I was delayed at the Aktion.”
There is silence. No one lifts his spoon until Krüger responds.
“And why is that, Obersturmführer?”
“I had to shoot a woman, Herr Standartenführer.”
Krüger smiles in amazement. “Today your company executes hundreds of Untermenschen and now you solemnly report to us that you had to shoot one woman?”
Some of the officers snigger, but most look vaguely curious; Frick glances around fleetingly for Trummler, but his chair is empty.
Krüger waves Frick to his place. “Now tell us, Obersturmführer, why is this woman of yours so exceptional?”
Frick feels his face reddening. “She was an escapee, Herr Standartenführer.”
“So?”
Frick looks at the officers’ expectant faces. “She had very bright red hair, sir.” he says.
At this there is more sniggering among the officers, and Frick’s cheeks feel hotter than ever. He knows he must offer some explanation, but in doing so he only increases his embarrassment. “I’ve never seen a Pole with such red hair, sir.” At this there is open laughter from the officers, but it sounds forced and uneasy.
Thank God, at this moment, the pedantic Brunner butts in. Brunner is one of the older officers who used to be a lecturer of some sort.
“She was probably a Khazar,” he says in his usual anodyne tone. “Frick, are you familiar with the legends about the Khazars?”
“I am sorry, sir. I have never heard of them.”
Brunner loves to educate everyone. “They were red-haired warrior Jews from beyond the Caucasus.”
Brunner is perilously out of line and Frick’s stomach tightens. “Warriors, sir? How can Jews be warriors? They’re… Jews!”
“But, my dear Frick, Jews can indeed be warriors. Have you never heard of the Jewish war with Rome and the siege of Masala? When you were at school didn’t they teach you how David defeated the Philistines? We’re talking antiquity, you know.” Brunner starts coughing and he pauses to take a sip of his claret. “The Khazars believe they’re one of the lost tribes of Israel, God’s avengers, there are many superstitions about—”
“Enough.” Krüger crashes his fist on the table. Brunner abruptly shuts up and gulps a whole mouthful of claret, some of which dribbles down the corners of his mouth. Frick feels his pulse quicken. Krüger is known for his outbursts, and, as the commanding SS colonel, he would be paranoid about maintaining the morale of his officers and quite aware that few of them can stomach the Aktion. Most, like the absent Trummler, are drinking too much and some are even starting to talk to themselves.
Again, Krüger strikes the table. “Now hear this. There’ll be no more talk of warrior Jews or red-haired sub-humans wielding battleaxes. Do you understand me, gentlemen?”
“Yes, Herr Standartenführer,” they mumble.
After the meal, when Frick goes back to his quarters, he finds that Stroop has been busy: the desk has been waxed, the bed is squarely made up, and his shoes and spare boots have a lacquer shine. On his canvas chair is an envelope, addressed in Brigitte’s handwriting. He slits it open with care, then sits down on the bed and reads it word by word, except for three sentences that he skims over and tries to ignore:
‘I realise that I should be brave and patrio
tic, but I do worry about the fighting. I know you protect your men, but please, please protect yourself too, not only for my sake but also for our little Cordula’s. She will grow up to be so proud of you, as am I.’
Brigitte’s fears make Frick ashamed that he has never once confronted an armed enemy of the Reich and he loathes deceiving his wife, but Hans Frank, the governor general of occupied Poland, has ordered the Aktion to be kept a military secret.
Dear, lovely Brigitte has no conception of the necessity for his work – that it is for her future, for Cordula’s future and for Germany’s – but he knows she will never understand that the supremacy of the Aryans can only be achieved when the East is finally cleansed of its sub-species.
He takes down Brigitte’s photograph, in its brown leather frame, and brings it closer to his reading lamp. He stares at her for some time and sees a face full of love looking back at him, but then his hand begins to tremble as Brigitte’s features blur into the face of the corpse in the saw pit. Seized with terror he snaps the frame shut.
Minutes later, he composes himself. It is obvious that he needs to see real action. Tomorrow, he’ll front up to Krüger and request an immediate transfer to the Waffen SS, where his comrades will no longer be melancholic drunks like Trummler or pedants like Brunner; they’ll be proper fighting troops. Brigitte will have a husband she can be truly proud of.
Frick hates the fact that Hans Frank’s wife is also called Brigitte. Dear God, what a comparison. He remembers when the Franks first arrived in Krakow, they were crowned ‘King and Queen of Poland’. The ceremony took place at Wavel Castle overlooking the Vistula; Krakow was adorned with billowing swastikas and a Brownshirt guard of honour stood to attention at the castle entrance as mass units of the Volksdeutsche militia lined the quadrangle, all bearing flaming torches. When the Silesian Philharmonic Orchestra started up, Frank and his wife processed through the gates behind the biggest Hakenkreuz that Frick had ever seen. On the podium Frank pointed to the giant swastika and told the multitude that it would fly over Wavel Castle for a thousand years, and through the loudspeakers it sounded like a decree from Mount Sinai. How dare this pompous fool also have a wife called Brigitte!
Unlike the dowdy Frau Frank, Frick’s own Brigitte is the epitome of how all Aryans should be – tall, blonde and athletic. Although, to be truthful, he and Brigitte had been coerced into a duty marriage by the SS and the wedding was attended by Himmler himself, who would have thought it all very scientific with Frick the pure-bred stallion and Brigitte his matching filly.
Cordula could not have been his first child, but Brigitte must realise this; she never says anything, but of course she knows, as she’s not stupid. At the academy, where he studied civil engineering, Frick was an elite above the other elites – one of the tallest and blondest of his peers, fully muscled and twice winner of the SS marathon. Brigitte would have taken it for granted that he would have been cajoled into the Lebensborn Project for breeding pedigreed Aryans; in fact, Brigitte would have been surprised if he had not been selected. He recalls with secret satisfaction each one of those couplings by the Baltic in the arms of Nordic goddesses. Of course many of them became pregnant, probably all of them.
But Brigitte has only given him one child and he supposes that the hierarchy will soon be asking questions; the Third Reich demands more of its elite, four children at least.
Next month he will be twenty-five, still young enough for high promotion in the Waffen SS, if his transfer is approved. He’ll have to put more effort into his fitness regime. He fears the Aktion campaign has been making him soft. For an SS officer, physical fitness is not merely an evolutionary imperative, it is also a moral choice. Bodies matter, and this means you have to stay young, handsome and very fit, like Reinhard Heydrich and quite unlike Hermann Göring, who is letting himself go to seed. Once you let yourself grow fat and flabby, you’re finished. Why choose Hugo Boss to design uniforms for the SS if they are not tailor-made for virile, youthful warriors?
Damn. Damn. Damn. He clamps his eyes shut – so tightly that his ears ring – yet he cannot blot out the face of that woman he shot today. Brunner called her an avenging ‘Red Jew’; what the hell did he mean by that? Anyway, she’s dead, she’ll never take her revenge on anyone – unless… no, that’s all superstition – yet this is the ‘Wild East’, and, as he’s been told, superstition is not only rife out here, it is contagious. He has to keep a grip on himself if he is to front up to Krüger tomorrow about his transfer.
He undresses and gets into bed, but his mind roils like a cauldron of bubbling Kartoffelsuppe. Of course, the Aktion is essential for Germany’s expansion, but surely his own talents go further than executing sub-humans in a forest; he’s a qualified engineer, for God’s sake. The SS had definitely misled him. They’d said that the Reich needed first-class officers for its most essential priority – ‘relocating’ Untervolk from the new German colonies to unspecified regions further east – and it was Eichmann who had encouraged him, even promised him that he would play a senior part in resolving the Jewish Question. Eichmann had said it was a vital arm of policy, especially here in Poland where soon he would be encountering ‘real’ Jews – the ones caricatured by Julius Streicher in Der Stürmer, hunched degenerates with side-curls, long beards and ringlets, some wearing kaftans and round caps trimmed with fur, and villainous sub-humans – and, of course, all of them should be exterminated, but surely anyone can order the lower ranks to shoot static targets in the back of the head. Why should it be him?
Frick needs to get to sleep, but all the same he dreads it. Lately, he is being tormented by a recurring nightmare in which the graves are being torn from the earth and rising in the air, the corpses unravelling themselves from the Sardinenpackung into a writhing mass of limbs, waxen faces and blood, so much blood. And, tonight, he is bound to dream of that fox woman in the pit.
His stomach feels tight and his jaws are clenched. This won’t do, and he remembers the voice of his old headmaster in Weimar.
Self-discipline, Frick. Show some self-discipline, boy.
There’s a hammering outside. “Herr Obersturmführer. Wake up, sir.”
For Christ’s sake, now what? Frick rolls out of bed, reaches for his dressing gown and opens the door. Stroop stands to attention in the corridor and salutes him.
“Come in, Stroop.”
Stroop salutes him once more. “Sir, I am sorry to disturb you, but Base HQ is on special alert.”
“Why, Stroop?”
“Hauptsturmführer Trummler is missing, sir, and I am to tell you that all officers are to report to the Besprechungzimmer to lead search patrols.”
*
Trummler’s body is discovered the next morning. He had evidently staggered through the blizzard to the shell of a burnt-out church three kilometres away so the discharge of his one bullet would not disturb Krüger’s formal dinner.
Frick’s request for transfer to the Waffen SS is turned down, and Krüger orders him to take command of one of the new SS Einsatzkommando execution units fifteen kilometres from the Soviet occupation zone.
3
“I have bad news for you, Ernst. Please sit down.”
Frick perches himself on the edge of the canvas chair. It is harrowing enough to know the war is lost, but why has he been summoned by Obergruppenführer Krüger? Surely the general is not about to order him to lead some sort of SS last stand against the allied forces rapidly overwhelming the Third Reich.
“Herr Obergruppenführer?”
“Your wife has died in Berlin… your daughter too. I am sorry.”
He swallows; if he were alone, he would weep. He would weep for their deaths and he would weep for what might have been. He last spoke to Brigitte in 1943 and after that there had been nothing more between them. Frick bends forwards on his chair, his shoulders trembling, then he sits up and stares out of the window, but the billowing cloudscape over th
e Styrian forests, the ancient castle and its dazzling lake are wasted on him.
Krüger waits until Frick composes himself. “It was suicide, Ernst; cyanide. They would not have suffered.”
How the hell would Krüger know that? Not have suffered? What, just the two of them in that tiny flat in the Grünwald with rubble all round, enemy bombers overhead, Red Army tanks just blocks away and shells shrieking down the streets, and they would not have suffered?
Frick’s eyes snap shut like a trap. He tries to smother his feelings by imagining the technical details. How did she obtain the cyanide? But, of course, her social standing was sufficiently high to be invited, even expected, to attend the Berlin Philharmonic’s production of Der Götterdämmerung.
The Twilight of the Gods – what mawkish irony was that? He’d heard that after the final curtain call there was an announcement that cyanide would be offered to members of the audience. He imagines Brigitte waiting in a queue by one of the velvet-clad doors where a Hitler Youth would have been handing out the glass capsules.
“May I have two?” she would ask ever so politely and probably smile at the boy while one of Goebbels’s hacks on the microphone tells everyone that death will be painless and quick. No doubt some of the vials are dropped and trampled underfoot, and the whiff of prussic acid would not be unpleasant, rather like crushed almonds.
Orphaned Leaves Page 2
