Fox at the Front (Fox on the Rhine)
Page 42
“But you didn’t know.”
“I did, don’t you understand? I chose not to, but I did. Maybe not in the beginning, but I did. I did. God help me, I did.” He buried his face in his hands. His shoulders heaved with silent sobs.
“You didn’t know,” Clausen said again. “You couldn’t.”
Rommel looked up. His eyes were red, but dry. “I chose not to know. In the beginning, there were only a few cases of abuse, and I could believe that as the Nazis settled into power, even that would go away. Every nation has some of this behavior, and in an imperfect world, we accept it. Then came the Nuremberg laws that restricted the Jews, but I understood that was a temporary situation and in the end, it would just mean that people would be moved to new locations where like would be with like. Then I was in North Africa, and all that came to me was the occasional rumor, and rumors can easily be disregarded.”
His voice grew steadily more controlled. “Then I returned from North Africa and started to learn who Adolf Hitler really was, but I resisted that knowledge because he had always been kind and supportive to me personally, at least until the end of the African campaign.”
“But there were more rumors. These were harder to ignore, but I had sworn a soldier’s oath of loyalty. I was a servant of the state and not its master. It was my duty to follow my orders, and these other matters were none of my business. And then came more rumors, but they were so ridiculous, so absurd, that no sensible person could possibly give them credence. Thousands dead? Millions? War is hard and bad things happen; I knew that. I did my duty. It’s taken me this long to figure out what my duty really is.”
“But you switched sides ultimately,” Clausen argued. “You liberated this camp and these people. You are doing what is right.”
“I didn’t switch sides for the victims; I switched sides for one reason—Germany’s leadership was losing the war. I’m still not fighting on the right side.” He shook his head. “I thought of myself as a man of honor, a man dedicated to duty and to virtue. But I have betrayed everything.”
Clausen said nothing. Rommel’s eyes were unfocused, distant.
“I found the children’s barracks shortly after we took the camp,” he said quietly. “There were guards. I wanted to kill them. I wanted to kill myself. But there were all the children, looking at me. They knew. I wore a German uniform. They knew. I took off my coat, and tried to hand it to a child, but he shrank from me. He knew. So I sat down and took the insignia off the coat. I handed them to one child. The insignia were bright and shiny. She took them. When the coat was clean, one of the children finally took it.”
“So, I—” He paused again. The lump had returned. “I … took off my jacket and began to unpin my medals. I gave them all away. I didn’t want them anymore. I even gave away my Pour Le Merite.” The Pour Le Merite was the Imperial German equivalent of the Congressional Medal of Honor. Rommel had won the medal, normally reserved only for generals, as a lieutenant at Caporetto in World War I. “I climbed five mountains and captured ten thousand Italian soldiers to earn that medal because I was angry that someone else had gotten credit for my ascent of Mount Cosna.” Rommel shook his head. “But it doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing matters anymore.”
“The children matter,” Clausen said slowly.
“Yes, the children matter.” Rommel put his face back down in his hands, and this time the tears flowed more easily.
23 FEBRUARY 1945
MAIN CAMP, KONZENTRATIONSLAGER BUCHENWALD, 0752 HOURS GMT
Chuck Porter ditched the press-pool escort as soon as he had a chance, and went looking for someone he knew. This story was huge; it was crowding everything else off the page. He needed an original slant, a different perspective. He needed to talk to the Desert Fox.
Of course, so did everybody else, and the Desert Fox wasn’t talking to anybody. And that story—Rommel doing some strange sort of penance in the middle of a hellish prison camp ripped right out of the Spanish Inquisition—was the story he needed.
Porter figured the best way to go about it was to get access to his friends and trade on his personal relationships. Nothing much embarrassed him when he was after a story.
He was surprised to find Müller, the supply officer who had saved Rommel’s life, occupying the old camp commandant’s office. All the former camp offices and barracks were occupied by the liberating forces. Müller, though, was buried three feet deep in paperwork. Günter von Reinhardt was working some private mission, and no one knew where he was. Porter sniffed a story there, but maybe later.
The one person he did find was Reid Sanger, the officer who had replaced him as acting translator for Rommel’s surrender. Sanger was occupying a small office that could barely accommodate a desk and a military-issue cot in the corner.
“Sanger?” Porter called out as he stuck his head into the office.
Reid Sanger stood up, slid his fingers through his disheveled blond hair. “Porter! Good to see you, though not surprising, I guess. This sure is the story now, isn’t it?”
Porter stepped in, shook hands. He was aware that Sanger had been promoted to the liaison-officer role with Rommel, and that was just the inside track he needed. “Yep. I bet everybody’s here.”
“I guess. I actually saw Margaret Bourke-White taking pictures. I used to see her stuff in Life. I think she’s the biggest nonmilitary celebrity I’ve ever met.”
“Peg? Is she here?” Porter asked with studied casualness. He remembered an embarrassing dinner prewar in Paris, where he’d gotten seriously drunk and made an ill-received pass at the well-known photojournalist.
“Sure. You know her?”
“We’ve met. But, hey, listen, Sanger. The Desert Fox remembers me, right? I helped him out when he needed me. I know he’s off-limits right now, but do you think he could spare a few minutes for an old buddy?”
Sanger laughed. “Nice try, Porter. But it’s no way, no how. I’m sorry.”
“Come on, Sanger. Tell him it’s me, his old friend Chuck Porter. Didn’t I do right by him in the surrender negotiations? Didn’t I put him first and my story second? He owes me one. Just ask him. What harm could that do? All he could say is no, and he might say yes. How about it?”
“Porter, I’m truly sorry, but I can’t. It’s completely and absolutely out of the question. If there was any way, I’d help you, but there is just no way. None.”
“So, I’ll take that as a maybe,” Porter replied. “And while we’re waiting for you to arrange my interview with Rommel, maybe you could walk me around a little bit? I’m supposed to be on a leash with the rest of the press corps, but if I’m with the liaison officer to the German Republican Army, that would be all right, wouldn’t it? Unless you’re too busy doing liaison work … What the hell is liaison work, anyway?”
“Mostly going to meetings,” said Sanger, his face suddenly blank.
Porter could tell that Sanger was holding something back. That was okay. Porter would keep prying and sooner or later something would break loose. “So, too busy to spend some time with an old friend?”
Sanger laughed and shook his head. “Okay, you win. Let’s go for a walk and I’ll tell you everything I can. But don’t screw me, okay?”
“Screw you? Would I screw an old friend?” Porter spread his arms wide to show he meant no harm.
“Not unless it would make a good story,” replied Sanger cynically.
“I am deeply wounded and hurt by your suspicious nature,” Porter said, putting his hand over his heart. “But I guess the suspicious nature comes from being an intelligence officer.”
“You got it,” said Sanger. He grabbed his hat and overcoat and began to bundle up. “It’s still colder than a witch’s tit out there.”
“Don’t I know it,” Porter replied. “Let’s hold the next war someplace warm, okay?”
“I’ll get right on it.”
“Okay.”
When they stepped outside of the long, low building, Porter immediately hugged himself ev
en inside his thick coat. “God damn, it’s cold. Brrr!”
“Imagine all you had on was a shirt and pants, maybe shoes,” Sanger said. “That’s what most of the prisoners had. They were worked between ten and fourteen hours a day and fed maybe a few pieces of bread and some soup. Technically it was soup. Mostly it was hot water with a few chopped-up vegetables in each barrel.”
Porter looked at the barbed-wire fence that separated the administrative area from the main prisoner compound. Near the main gate he saw the burned wreckage of a couple of guard towers. The remaining guard posts were manned. “How come you have guards? Worried about escapes?”
“Not as such,” Sanger said. “Some prisoners have been doling out a little freelance justice on the former guards, but our guards are mostly keeping supplies secure. These people are starving, but if they eat too much too quickly, they get sick, they can’t keep it down, and the shock can actually kill them.”
“Eating can kill them?” Porter shook his head in noncomprehension.
“Most of them are on the edge of dying, and they’ve got to take it slow and easy, build up their strength. We’re feeding them as fast as the doctors say they can take it. Warm clothes, heat, medical care—those things they can use immediately.”
“Are they still dying?”
“Yeah. Twenty or thirty a day.” Sanger shook his head sadly. “It’s a damned shame, but there is nothing we can do for some of the worst cases. They’re already dead, but still walking around until their bodies finally stop. You know, almost none of these people have been here more than six months. Hardly anyone lasts longer than that under these conditions.”
As they approached the main gate, the German MP saluted Sanger, and opened the gate to admit the two men to the main compound. Although the cold kept the smell somewhat in check, it was still powerful. “Jesus,” Porter said, putting his hand over his nose and mouth.
“Yeah, it’s bad. It’s better than it was, though,” Sanger said. The remains of the last snowstorm had mixed with the mud to create a brown, crunchy expanse. Aside from soldiers and medical personnel, no one was out in the compound.
“How many people were in here?” Porter asked.
“At the height, about sixty-eight thousand. But that’s not just here; there are over a hundred subcamps, most of them close to places where the prisoners were assigned to work. Still, it got quite overcrowded. When this camp was liberated, there were around twenty thousand people actually here. A couple of trainloads of Jews had been transported toward the East.”
“I’ve been hearing about that. The death camps, right?”
“Evidently. Between you and me and the fencepost, the intel groups have known about the camps for a while, mostly from aerial photography. Now, Buchenwald is only a concentration camp. That’s a combination of prison, torture of political prisoners, and management of slave labor. People died here—lots of people—but they were worked to death or beaten to death or killed after they were unable to work any more. Death was a by-product. The death camps, on the other hand, don’t furnish slave labor. They’re simply killing factories, processing plants. There’s at least one in occupied Poland that is both a death camp and a concentration camp, but most of the camps are one or the other.”
Porter shook his head. “How many dead?”
“We keep revising the likely death toll upward, but we won’t know for sure until we can get everywhere. But it looks like well over a million victims just in the death camps, besides all the people that got worked to death here. Call it at least two million as a low-end estimate; the final number could end up a hell of a lot higher.”
“And they were mostly Jews?”
“At the death camps, the vast majority are Jews. Concentration camps get more variety, but still a lot of Jews. There aren’t a lot here right now, but that’s because they tended to be worked to death faster, and a lot of them were cleaned out before we came. One thing is clear, though. The Nazis have been doing their level best to kill every single Jew in Europe. Men, women, children … everybody.”
“Jesus Christ,” Porter said.
“He was a Jew, too,” Sanger observed.
“What’s the story, though? Why Jews? Any particular reason?”
“Well, the Nazis believe that everything that ever went wrong in their country was the fault of the Jews and the International Zionist Conspiracy, whatever the hell that is. Communism, high interest rates, the loss of World War I—for all I know, the common cold and hangnails. Himmler was in charge of the mechanics of the operation, but it was Hitler’s passion. When the war turned against him, the killing sped up. He was determined to get that job finished even if he lost the war. Hitler’s dead, but as I said, it was Himmler’s operation and he’s still doing his level best to finish it.”
“You mentioned kids. I heard there were children here.”
Sanger shivered in his heavy coat. “Hundreds. They were not in as bad shape as some of the grownups. It looks like the women starved themselves even more to get at least some food to the kids. They were worked, though, just like grownups, and beaten and killed and abused in pretty much the same way. Well, in other ways, too.” Sanger stopped walking, his eyes unfocused as he spoke.
“Listen, Sanger, seeing this stuff must have been hell, I know,” Porter said sympathetically.
Sanger turned to Porter. “Yeah. But not as bad as living it.” His voice was flat.
There was a commotion at one of the barracks. Sanger immediately began striding in that direction. Porter had to take about a step and a half for every pace of the taller man. Two German guards were marching someone out of one of the buildings. It was a woman, holding a large-format camera in her hands. Porter recognized her at once. Margaret Bourke-White had been traveling with Third Army throughout Europe.
“Sie können nicht Fotographien hier nehmen!” one of the guards was shouting as he tried to take her camera away.
“Hey! Hands off the merchandise!” she shouted. “No! Nein! Hände weg!” The German guards continued to shout.
“What is the matter here?” Sanger asked the guards in German.
“Hi, Peg,” Porter said. “How are you?”
“Oh, hi, Chuck! Long time no see. How they hanging?” Bourke-White replied, still holding tightly onto her camera.
“This woman has taken a photograph of Generalfeldmarschall Rommel without authorization!” the guard said indignantly in German.
Sanger nodded. “I see.”
“She must be turned over to the appropriate authorities for punishment!” continued the guard.
“I will see to it that the correct action is taken,” replied Sanger. “Will that be satisfactory to you?”
“Most satisfactory, Herr Oberst!” replied the guard, saluting. He was nervous and started a sieg-heil salute without thinking, then, embarrassed, switched to a conventional salute. Sanger returned the salute in a punctilious manner, then switched to English.
“I have agreed to turn you over to the appropriate authorities,” he said to the photographer.
“Oh, yeah? And who exactly would those be?”
“Those would be me,” Sanger said. “If that’s okay with you.”
“Honey, if you can get these apes to get their hands off my camera, that will be just fine.”
“Of course.” He spoke in German briefly. “Now, if you don’t mind coming with me?”
“I’ve got the shot, so it’s okay by me.”
“Thank you,” Sanger replied.
“So, you got to Rommel?” Porter asked. His tone was friendly and casual, but he was significantly pissed off and more than a little jealous.
“I got within flashbulb range, anyway,” she said. “They don’t have to stay still long for me to do my job. It was Rommel and General Bradley. They were humping boxes in a line of enlisted men. It’s going to be a hell of a photograph. A hell of a photograph!” Her eyes were shining.
“So, what’s he look like right now?” asked Porter.
“Sanger. Reid Sanger.”
“ … Colonel Reid Sanger, what’s the story?”
“It’s simple. Field Marshal Rommel wants to set an example and show the depths of his concern for the terrible situation here. General Bradley and some other senior Allied officers also felt the same way.”
“Sounds like a quote direct from the press release,” mocked Porter.
“I wrote the press release,” Sanger replied calmly.
“I guess that explains it, then,” said Porter. “That’s the story?”
“That’s the story. Nothing else. I think he sets a great example, don’t you? I’m putting in six hours a day myself,” Sanger added.
Porter looked at the tall, thin officer. “You? Yeah? When do you get the rest of your work done?”
“I put in a couple of hours at my desk in the morning through morning staff meeting, then go to work. Then I finish up paperwork after dinner.”
“Getting much sleep?” asked Porter.
“Enough,” replied Sanger.
Porter looked at him. The tall officer looked tired. “Maybe I should interview you.”
“Nah. I’m not the story, and I don’t intend to be the story. You want to interview somebody? Interview Colonel Müller. Bring him something to eat and talk him into taking a break. He needs one, anyway. He may not look like much, but he’s got a lot more on the ball than you’d think. He’s a real hero.”
“Well, the man who saved Rommel’s life should be good for a few more column inches,” Porter said. “Speaking of lifesaving, I heard another interesting rumor. I know there were Americans here, but I heard that Rommel’s driver was a prisoner here, too.”
“Mutti? Yeah. Müller found him, in fact. Feverish, nearly dead. He was obviously stuck here as a Nazi slap at Rommel. Rommel sat up next to his hospital bed for several hours last night. Terrible thing. He had saved an American airman back in the Army Group B hospital that was raided, back in Dinant, and the American airman had kept him alive here in Buchenwald. Feldwebel Clausen can’t talk yet, but you could track down the American. His name’s O’Dell. There are a lot of stories here, not just Rommel. Look around. Miss Bourke-White?”