by Therese Down
Walter was damned if he was going out again to that godforsaken place. The temperature had dropped to around minus six and he had spent all afternoon in his office at home signing requisitions and writing letters to people working at various T4 institutions, advising them of his imminent inspections. He needed to unwind in peace.
When he had replaced the receiver following the camp guard’s call, he took a swig of his wine and drummed fingers on his desk. He was aware of noises from upstairs as Hedda bathed Anselm and kept up a constant chatter with him. Then it occurred to him: Muller! Karl Muller had designed and supervised the installation of the crematorium, so he could go and fix it. Brilliant! As a senior T4 officer, Walter had Muller’s private number in his directory.
“I don’t know why it is not working.”
Walter rolled his eyes in impatience, but tried to remain polite. “That is the point, really, Muller. Something to do with the fuel supply or combustion process – or something. An engineering problem, you see. I am sorry to ask you at so late an hour, but I believe the situation is quite critical, Hygiene Director.” Walter used Karl’s T4 title as a means of firmly placing responsibility for this digression from efficiency at Karl’s feet. Walter could not resist a smile to himself when after a few seconds’ hesitation, Karl assured him that of course he would see to it. “Excellent! Please report back when it’s all sorted out, will you?” Walter sat back in his chair and raised his glass to himself. He thought he would listen to a little Wagner on the phonograph – drown out the racket from upstairs.
The thirty-five kilometre journey by car from Berlin to Sachsenhausen on a freezing, dark night took almost two hours. The roads were so slippery with black ice that the tyres could not grip the surface, and the car frequently turned and glided across the road like a drunken ballerina. Karl could only steer into the skids and pray that there would not be an oncoming vehicle around the next corner, or that the side of the road was flanked by a level grass verge and not a ditch. He cursed the darkness, his tiredness and the inhumanity of the situation that required him to drive this perilous route in order to facilitate the motion of a huge and insatiable killing machine. But why should this not be the case? He was one of its designers. It had a right to expect his attention.
Karl slammed the car into first gear, gently let his foot off the clutch for the umpteenth time, coaxed and willed the car from a horizontal position across a narrow road to a head first one in the right direction. Well then, he supposed to himself, clenching his teeth and then cursing through them, he was a sort of gimp – a serviceable, fawning thing who dwelt in fear of displeasing its overlords. “Well, not for much longer!” he shouted aloud in abject frustration as the car once more slid away from his control and turned another slow pirouette in the wrong direction.
But no definite plan for his or anyone else’s liberation had formed in his mind. He could not even imagine where he would start to subvert or elude the regime to which his country was so wholly in thrall. For the first time since he was little more than a child, Karl prayed. He addressed a God whose existence, he saw with sudden, revelatory clarity, was not negated by the evidence of evil all around him, but was a logical corollary of it. How could there be darkness if not light? How could anyone be appalled at evil if there were not an innate notion of what was good? And as he prayed the Lord’s Prayer repeatedly and out loud with a fervour born of desperation, it seemed to Karl that something perceptibly shifted; the eclipse of his soul was not quite so total.
Sachsenhausen at midnight, in 1941, was hellish. But not as hellish as it would become, or even, at midnight, as diabolical as it was by day. Presently, at least, it was quiet. The few hours between late night and dawn were the safest for the inmates; even Nazi guards got tired. During the day, the guards had nothing to do but invent relatively amusing ways of torturing and killing quotas of inmates. But those on the night shift mainly drank and slept. Even the soldiers who manned the gun turrets relaxed after two a.m. and took it in turns to sleep, for they knew their charges were too sick and traumatized to cause trouble.
Usually, the impression that one was passing through the gates of Hades on arriving at Sachsenhausen by night was enhanced by the eerie red halo around the crematorium chimney, the belch of greasy smoke inching its way like a phantasmic snake over the twelve-foot-high walls to the camouflage of darkness beyond. But that night, there was no crematorium glow as Karl’s car finally crawled quietly through the gates and into the roll call yard. A soldier bearing his rifle loosely against his shoulder saluted Karl and waited while his superior officer got out of the car, put on his cap and indicated that he was ready to be escorted to the crematorium.
Still ten feet away from the crematorium, Karl could detect the muffled sounds of voices, and these assumed knife-edge clarity when the soldier opened the door and light burst into the yard, as though it too would flee from the scene below. There was a sudden up-draught on which came a stench, the like of which Karl had never experienced. Instinctively, he put a hand over his mouth and nose. Men were shouting and swearing good-naturedly at each other. Women’s voices, softer and laced with laughter, were an unexpected counterpoint to the gruff male tones. And then, having gone down two flights of narrow, concrete steps to the floor of the crematorium itself, Karl was indeed under the impression he had entered a circle of hell.
By ten-thirty, the night shift guards had given up expectation of an engineer to fix the crematorium oven. So they had resorted to drinking, and after a few drinks the idea had occurred that it might be pleasant to invite a few Aufseherin to join them. And if their female counterparts were too shy to indulge in a little drunken debauchery, perhaps some of their charges would be more obliging. There were about 2,000 women prisoners at Sachsenhausen, occupying a few barracks at the far end of the prison complex.
Under the amused and less than sober auspices of their female comrades, a couple of camp guards had turned on the lights in one of the female prisoner barracks and forced the women to stand to attention so that they could be inspected. No Jews – that was punishable by court martial or worse. But gypsy girls, Communists, Catholic dissenters and Aryan hiders of Jews – these were all fair game. They singled out a few young ones, pretty girls whose emaciation and exhaustion had not destroyed their looks entirely. They chose a couple of older women too: a political anti-Nazi activist in her early thirties and a Catholic schoolteacher who had hidden a Jewish family in her loft. She had been troublesome, that one, protesting in fine language at the inhumanity and degradation of her treatment, so she was pistol whipped. A few of her teeth flew from her mouth and hit the filthy floor in a stain of her blood and spit. She wasn’t so desirable after that, or even very conscious. So they left her huddled on the floor, head forward, and bleeding in dark gobbets from her open mouth.
The rest they took, whimpering and freezing, across icy expanses of concrete, to the main roll calling yard and then on to the crematorium, where they were pushed and bundled down the steps, and the door shut behind them. Even SS camp guards could be shy in front of ladies, so, to warm up proceedings, the men drank plentifully and quickly with their female colleagues before they turned their attention to the cowering, shivering women on the crematorium floor.
At the moment Karl appeared, the fun was just getting started. An overweight camp guard had grabbed a gypsy girl and was whirling her around the floor to a discordant, giddy polka in his head. Her feet left the floor and her eyes stared fixedly in terror. She was limp and paralysed in his embrace while he leered from her face to the spectators, who lifted bottles in salute and cheered him on as he dipped and lifted her at will. But it was not the grotesqueness of this tableau alone that particularly arrested Karl’s ability to think or remain convinced he was conscious and not in some fiendish nightmare. It was also that all around the walls of the crematorium building, at regular intervals of about four feet, corpses of male prisoners hung like gruesome marionettes, their heads pushed to one side as a function of the ho
oks penetrating the other side of their heads, just beneath the ear. Their eyes stared ahead glassily in the naked electric light, and their hands and arms hung limply by their sides. Blood dripped along the lengths of their fingers, congealed on the floor in flamboyant chrysanthemums.
And then, just distinguishable in the poor light of a far right-hand corner, was an amorphous heap of naked corpses, thrown higgledy-piggledy one on top of the other: Jew, Communist and homosexual in a last, levelling embrace.
The music in the drunken dancer’s head seemed to stop abruptly and he dropped the girl when he saw Karl. She simply fell; remained quite still at his feet. He saluted uncertainly. The Aufseherin jumped from the knees of SS guards and bottle-crate seats to add their homage to a superior officer, smoothing and adjusting their uniforms as they did so. Karl still could not speak. He looked at them with an expression they could not discern, but which could not safely be construed as merely mock horror. They were used to the dramatic posturing and ironic verbal parrying of senior officers who liked to toy with them then suddenly attack. It was the pecking order, the privilege of rank. They got their turn with the prisoners.
After some moments, one, more daring than the rest, began to offer an explanation. He was not too drunk to interpret the insignia on Karl’s shoulder, so began respectfully, “Mein Obersturmführer, sir, we waited a long time for an engineer. The furnace, it will not work. We did not think anyone would come –”
Karl cut him short, raising a hand. With as much dignity as he could summon, he turned and, pushing the accompanying soldier out of his way, he took the steps two at a time and still only just made it to the yard before vomiting copiously.
The soldier was soon behind him. “Are you all right, sir?”
Karl sniffed, took a couple of deep breaths. “Yes, yes. It’s the stench.” Then more assertively: “Are they animals? Are they pigs down there?” Karl drew himself upright, searched inside his coat for a pocket from which he drew a handkerchief. He wiped his mouth. “Right,” he declared, “let’s sort out this disgusting mess.”
In the crematorium once more, in the stench of blood and faeces, sweat, body odour and other things less definable, Karl faced a rapidly sobering and worried row of male and female camp guards. One of them started again to explain. “We didn’t think anyone was going to come, sir. We –”
“Clearly.” Karl cut him off. The gypsy girl was still in a heap on the floor, head down, not daring to move, her long dark hair falling over her face. She looked like a flower picked and discarded, wilting where it fell. Karl stepped forward and, putting a hand under her left arm, lifted her to her feet. When he was sure she could stand, he walked her back to the other prisoners. Karl then turned, addressed himself to the women guards. “Get out.” They darted like startled gazelles across the crematorium to their prisoners and ushered them back up the steps into the freezing night and the relative security of their barracks.
His shock and horror were now giving way to cold fury. When he shouted, even he was startled. “Why have you put these men on hooks?”
The guards exchanged quizzical looks. One answered him, his tone full of confusion at such a question. “We always do this. It is a way of keeping the floor clear… while we’re getting the furnace hot enough.”
“It is what we were told to do,” offered another, also emboldened by the absurdity of the question and the evident eccentricity of this SS officer who showed kindness to gypsy scum and got upset by queers on hooks. Karl lowered his face into a hand for a moment and tried to clear his thoughts. He was bone-achingly tired. He seemed never to sleep these days. His reality was no respite from his dreams, and his dreams were only marginally more frightening. Either way there was no rest. Ever.
“Well,” he said at last, much more quietly, “I am Obersturmführer Muller. I am in charge right now and I am telling you to get these men down from the hooks. Do it now.”
They moved at once, lifting and manoeuvring the corpses from the hooks. Rigor mortis made it impossible to unhook one or two, and Karl watched one of the guards cross the room and pick up a huge club, intending to break the men’s limbs to make them more pliable. The club was bloodstained and clearly used regularly for this purpose, among others.
“No!” cried Karl. “Leave them.” Then, adding with affected nonchalance, “We have work to do.” So saying, he turned from them, closed his eyes, and for the second time that day muttered an earnest prayer for strength – and forgiveness.
He removed his coat and placed it on a crate, saying, “Now, try turning on the furnace, if you please.” It was soon obvious to Karl that the pressure pump in the fuel tank of the double four-muffle furnace was broken. Without pressure, the diesel fuel would not rise through the main valve and combust when it met the heated coil, so no gas and no ignition.
“It needs a new pump,” he pronounced. “Get me something to clean my hands, please.” One of the guards found him a rag. “I shall have a new pump sent with one of my junior engineers tomorrow.” He saluted them, they saluted back. He was on the steps when he half turned and addressed the men again. “Tell me,” he demanded, keeping his tone as even as he could, “out of interest. Were those men dead when you hung them on hooks?”
There was a brief silence, then the dancer, sober now and feeling rather cheated by this killjoy officer with mad eyes, answered him, “Not all of them, sir. No.”
Karl proceeded up the stairs without further speech and was greatly relieved at the prospect of a long, arduous drive home in the icy night. His thoughts needed the discipline of the concentration that would be necessary to get home safely. He had a very important letter to write.
CHAPTER SEVEN
February 1941. The snow fell intermittently, but there were many days of rain, when the people trudged through streets scummed with waves of blackened sludge. The pavements were often icy and it was hard to travel anywhere with haste. Feet and tyres alike proceeded cautiously. What struck Karl as he made his way on one such day to a small coffee shop on Bellevuestrasse, was that nothing was what it seemed. The realization was vertiginous. The men and women who smiled quickly and nodded at him as he passed them in the streets were good Germans of pedigree Aryan stock, for no one else was allowed to be on the streets outside certain hours. Jews, for instance, could shop in a very few locations, and only for certain low-grade goods that were still in reasonable supply, between the hours of four and five p.m. – when there was hardly anything left to buy. As Karl approached the coffee shop it was almost twelve-thirty in the afternoon.
The people who smiled at him did so because he wore an SS uniform and made them feel safe. Many had either consigned their Jewish neighbours to death or were busy pretending their deaths did not concern them. Yet even these accessories to mass murder would have been scandalized if they knew of the thousands of helpless Aryan children and adults dying horribly in the local hospitals to which they had entrusted them – or to which they had been forced to relinquish their defective relatives.
Karl became dizzy, fought a rising nausea that had become an almost daily feature of his existence, as he reflected yet again that this was just Berlin. Zoom out quickly and look down on Dresden, Frankfurt, Leipzig, Hanover, Hamburg, Nuremberg, Munich, Stuttgart, and it was plain: the grotesque shadow of evil beneath the skin, conducted from hell into the fabric of Germany’s waking life. “We’ve got it all wrong. This is all wrong!” was the simple mantra of Karl Muller’s life these days. The good, harmless and sane were being gassed and starved and shot and overdosed and choked to death by exhaust fumes, and the bad people were calling it civilization. Was this not obvious? Who else realized? Whom could he trust with his thoughts? He feared for his sanity. Certainly, he was not well. So hard to eat or sleep or think straight. And his hands shook much of the time, so that he was afraid to take off his gloves in a meeting, or hold a pen. He wasn’t sure how long he had before they guessed he was an imposter.
“Karl?” Hedda’s voice was timid and quie
t, but it made him jump. He looked at her without comprehension for a few moments.
“Hedda! Forgive me – preoccupied, with work… and things. You know?”
Hedda nodded. She knew well enough how preoccupied men could be. “How are you?” Hedda was glad to see Karl. She had often thought of him since the previous July when she had spoken to him at Carinhall. He looked gaunt and undernourished, she thought. His dark eyes had acquired a nervous quickness, as though unable to light on anything for long. “Haunted” was the word that came to mind when she contemplated his badly shaven face, pallor and sunken eyes.
“I am quite well.” Karl forced his eyes to smile, but was eager to get away from the wife of Walter Gunther. He counted Gunther among those to be most feared and mistrusted.
“Are you having coffee here?” Hedda smiled at Karl’s apparent confusion at the question. He seemed to survey his own hand upon the coffee house door with some surprise.
“Er, yes, I was going to… yes, I think.” Hedda was amused in spite of manners and a genuine concern for this SS officer in full uniform, who seemed to have caught himself sleepwalking.
“Karl, are you sure you’re all right?”
“Yes, yes! Just… er, surprised to see you and thinking of all sorts of things… to do with work. Yes… you are going for coffee too?” He stood aside and held open the door to let Hedda past him and into the welcoming embrace of the warm and aromatic café. Coffee was in short supply. Patrons of this establishment were strictly Aryans and then only the wealthy. Poor people could not afford the luxury of pure coffee, let alone cups of it made for them and served with fresh milk or cream. A huge sign on the door warned “STRICTLY NO JEWS”.
