Dragon's Teeth

by Sinclair, Upton;

  Story after story, the most sensational, the most horrible! Truly, it was something fabulous, Byzantine! Ex-Chancellor Franz von Papen, still a member of the Cabinet, had been attacked in his office and had some of his teeth knocked out; now he was under “house arrest,” his life threatened, and the aged von Hindenburg, sick and near to death, trying to save his “dear comrade.” Edgar Jung, Papen’s friend who had written his offending speech demanding freedom of the press, had been shot here in Munich. Gregor Strasser had been kidnaped from his home and beaten to death by S.S. men in Grunewald. General von Schleicher and his wife had been riddled with bullets on the steps of their villa. Karl Ernst, leader of the Berlin S.A., had been slugged unconscious and taken to the city. His staff leader had decided that Göring had gone crazy, and had flown to Munich to appeal to Hitler about it. He had been taken back to Berlin and shot with seven of his adjutants. At Lichterfelde, in the courtyard of the old military cadet school, tribunals under the direction of Göring were still holding “trials” averaging seven minutes each; the victims were stood against a wall and shot while crying: “Heil Hitler!”

  IV

  About half the warders in this jail were men of the old regime and the other half S.A. men, and there was much jealousy between them. The latter group had no way of knowing when the lightning might strike them, so for the first time they had a fellow-feeling for their prisoners. If one of the latter had a visitor and got some fresh information, everybody wanted to share it, and a warder would find a pretext to come to the cell and hear what he had to report. Really, the old Munich police prison became a delightfully sociable and exciting place! Lanny decided that he wouldn’t have missed it for anything. His own fears had diminished; he decided that when the storm blew over, somebody in authority would have time to hear his statement and realize that a blunder had been made. Possibly his three captors had put Hugo’s money into their own pockets, and if so, there was no evidence against Lanny himself. He had only to crouch in his “better ’ole”—and meantime learn about human and especially Nazi nature.

  The population of the jail was in part common criminals—thieves, burglars, and sex offenders—while the other part comprised political suspects, or those who had got in the way of some powerful official. A curious situation, in which one prisoner might be a blackmailer and another the victim of a blackmailer—both in the same jail and supposedly under the same law! One man guilty of killing, another guilty of refusing to kill, or of protesting against killing! Lanny could have compiled a whole dossier of such antinomies. But he didn’t dare to make notes, and was careful not to say anything that would give offense to anybody. The place was bound to be full of spies, and while the men in his own cell appeared to be genuine, either or both might have been selected because they appeared to be that.

  The Hungarian count was a gay companion, and told diverting stories of his liaisons; he had a passion for playing the game of Halma, and Lanny learned it in order to oblige him. The business man, Herr Klaussen, told stories illustrating the impossibility of conducting any honest business under present conditions; then he would say: “Do you have things thus in America?” Lanny would reply: “My father complains a great deal about politicians.” He would tell some of Robbie’s stories, feeling certain that these wouldn’t do him any harm in Germany.

  Incidentally Herr Klaussen expressed the conviction that the talk about a plot against Hitler was all Quatsch; there had been nothing but protest and discussion. Also, the talk about the Führer’s being shocked by what he had discovered in the villa at Wiessee was Dummheit, because everybody in Germany had known about Röhm and his boys, and the Führer had laughed about it. This worthy Bürger of Munich cherished a hearty dislike of those whom he called die Preiss’n—the Prussians—regarding them as invaders and source of all corruptions. These, of course, were frightfully dangerous utterances, and this was either a bold man or a foolish one. Lanny said: “I have no basis to form an opinion, and in view of my position I’d rather not try.” He went back to playing Halma with the Hungarian, and collecting anecdotes and local color which Eric Vivian Pomeroy-Nielson might some day use in a play.

  V

  Lanny had spent three days as a guest of the state of Bavaria, and now he spent ten as a guest of the city of Munich. Then, just at the end of one day, a friendly warder came and said: “Bitte, kommen Sie, Herr Budd.”

  It would do no good to ask questions, for the warders didn’t know. When you left a cell, you said Adé, having no way to tell if you would come back. Some went to freedom, others to be beaten insensible, others to Dachau or some other camp. Lanny was led downstairs to an office where he found two young S.S. men, dapper and correct, awaiting him. He was pleased to observe that they were not the same who had arrested him. They came up, and almost before he realized what was happening, one had taken his wrist and snapped a handcuff onto it. The other cuff was on the young Nazi’s wrist, and Lanny knew it was useless to offer objections. They led him out to a courtyard, where he saw his own car, with another uniformed S.S. man in the driver’s seat. The rear door was opened. “Bitte einsteigen.”

  “May I ask where I’m being taken?” he ventured.

  “It is not permitted to talk,” was the reply. He got in, and the car rolled out into the tree-lined avenue, and into the city of Munich. They drove straight through, and down the valley of the Isar, northeastward.

  On a dark night the landscape becomes a mystery; the car lights illumine a far-stretching road, but it is possible to imagine any sort of thing to the right and left. Unless you are doing the driving, you will even become uncertain whether the car is going uphill or down. But there were the stars in their appointed places, and so Lanny could know they were headed north. Having driven over this route, he knew the signposts; and when it was Regensburg and they were still speeding rapidly, he made a guess that he was being taken to Berlin.

  “There’s where I get my examination,” he thought. He would have one more night to do his thinking, and then he would confront that colossal power known as the Geheime Staats-Polizei, more dark than any night, more to be dreaded than anything that night contained.

  The prisoner had had plenty of sleep in the jail, so he used this time to choose his Ausrede, his “alibi.” But the more he tried, the worse his confusion became. They were bound to have found out that he had drawn thirty thousand marks from the Hellstein bank in Munich; they were bound to know that he had paid most of it to Hugo; they were bound to know that some sort of effort had been made to take Freddi out of Dachau. All these spelled guilt on Lanny’s part; and the only course that seemed to hold hope was to be frank and naïve; to laugh and say: “Well, General Göring charged Johannes Robin his whole fortune to get out, and used me as his agent, so naturally I thought that was the way it was done. When Hugo offered to do it for only twenty-eight thousand marks, I thought I had a bargain.”

  In the early dawn, when nobody was about except the milkman and the machine-gun detachments of the Berlin police, Lanny’s car swept into the city, and in a workingclass quarter which he took to be Moabit, drew up in front of a large brick building. He hadn’t been able to see the street signs, and nobody took the trouble to inform him. Was it the dreaded Nazi barracks in Hedemannstrasse, about which the refugees talked with shudders? Was it the notorious Columbus-Haus? Or perhaps the headquarters of the Feldpolizei, the most feared group of all?

  “Bitte aussteigen,” said the leader. They had been perfectly polite, but hadn’t spoken one unnecessary word, either to him or to one another. They were machines; and if somewhere inside them was a soul, they would have been deeply ashamed of it. They were trying to get into the Reichswehr, and this was the way.

  They went into the building. Once more they did not stop to “book” the prisoner, but marched him with military steps along a corridor, and then down a flight of stone stairs into a cellar. This time Lanny couldn’t be mistaken; there was a smell of blood, and there were cries somewhere in the distance. Once more h
e ventured a demand as to what he was being held for, what was to be done to him? This time the young leader condescended to reply: “Sie sind ein Schutzhäftling.”

  They were telling him that he was one of those hundred thousand persons, Germans and foreigners, who were being held for their own good, to keep harm from being done to them. “Aber,” insisted Lanny, with his best society manner, “I haven’t asked to be a Schutzhäftling—I’m perfectly willing to take my chances outside.”

  If any of them had a sense of humor, this was not the place to show it. There was a row of steel doors, and one was opened. For the first time since these men had confronted Lanny in the Munich jail the handcuff was taken from his wrist, and he was pushed into a “black cell” and heard the door clang behind him.

  VI

  The same story as at Stadelheim; only it was more serious now, because that had been an accident, whereas this was deliberate, this was after two weeks of investigation. Impossible to doubt that his plight was as serious as could be. Fear took complete possession of him, and turned his bones to some sort of pulp. Putting his ear to the opening in the door, he could have no doubt that he heard screaming and crying; putting his nose to the opening, he made sure that he smelled that odor which he had heretofore associated with slaughter-houses. He was in one of those dreadful places about which he had been reading and hearing, where the Nazis systematically broke the bodies and souls of men—yes, and of women, too. In the Brown Book he had seen a photograph of the naked rear of an elderly stout woman, a city councilor of the Social-Democratic party, from her shoulders to her knees one mass of stripes from a scientific beating.

  They weren’t going to trouble to question him, or give him any chance to tell his story. They were taking it for granted that he would lie, and so they would punish him first, and then he would be more apt to tell the truth. Or were they just meaning to frighten him? To put him where he could hear the sounds and smell the smells, and see if that would “soften him up”? It had that effect; he decided that it would be futile to try to conceal anything, to tell a single lie. He saw his whole past lying like an open book before some Kriminalkommissar, and it was a very bad past indeed from the Nazi point of view; every bit as bad as that which had brought Freddi Robin some fourteen months of torture.

  Whatever it was, it was coming now. Steps in the corridor, and they stopped in front of his door; the door was opened, and there were two S.S. men. New ones—they had an unlimited supply, and all with the same set faces, all with the same code of Blut und Eisen. Black shirts, black trousers, shiny black boots, and in their belts an automatic and a hard rubber truncheon—an unlimited supply of these, also, it appeared.

  They took him by the arms and led him down the corridor. Their whole manner, the whole atmosphere, told him that his time had come. No use to resist; at least not physically; they would drag him, and would make his punishment worse. He was conscious of a sudden surge of anger; he loathed these subhuman creatures, and still more he loathed the hellish system which had made them. He would walk straight, in spite of his trembling knees; he would hold himself erect, and not give them the satisfaction of seeing him weaken. He dug his nails into the palms of his hands, he gritted his teeth, and walked to whatever was beyond that door at the end of the corridor.

  VII

  The sounds had died away as Lanny came nearer, and when the door was opened he heard only low moans. Two men were in the act of leading a beaten man through a doorway at the far side of the room. In the semi-darkness he saw only the dim forms, and saw one thrown into the room beyond. Apparently there were many people there, victims of the torturing; moans and cries came as from a section of Dante’s inferno; the sounds made a sort of basso continuo to all the infernal events which Lanny witnessed in that chamber of horrors.

  A room about fifteen feet square, with a concrete floor and walls of stone; no windows, and no light except half a dozen candles; only one article of furniture, a heavy wooden bench about eight feet long and two feet broad, in the middle of the room. From end to end the bench was smeared and dripping with blood, and there was blood all over the floor, and a stench of dried blood, most sickening. Also there was the pungent odor of human sweat, strong, ammoniacal; there were four Nazis standing near the bench, stripped to the waist, and evidently they had been working hard and fast, for their smooth bodies shone with sweat and grease, even in the feeble light. Several other Nazis stood by, and one man in civilian clothes, wearing spectacles.

  Lanny had read all about this; every anti-Nazi had learned it by heart during the past year and a half. He took it in at a glance, even to the flexible thin steel rods with handles, made for the purpose of inflicting as much pain as possible and doing as little permanent damage. If you did too much damage you lost the pleasure of inflicting more pain—and also you might lose important evidence. Lanny had read about it, heard about it, brooded over it, wondered how he would take it—and now here it was, here he was going to find out.

  What happened was that a wave of fury swept over him; rage at these scientifically-trained devils, drowning out all other emotion whatsoever. He hated them so that he lost all thought about himself, he forgot all fear and the possibility of pain. They wanted to break him; all right, he would show them that he was as strong as they; he would deny them the pleasure of seeing him weaken, of hearing him cry out. He had read that the American Indians had made it a matter of pride never to groan under torture. All right, what an American Indian could do, any American could do; it was something in the climate, in the soil. Lanny’s father had hammered that pride into him in boyhood, and Bub Smith and Jerry had helped. Lanny resolved that the Nazis could kill him, but they wouldn’t get one word out of him, not one sound. Neither now nor later. Go to hell, and stay there!

  It was hot in this underground hole, and perhaps that was why the sweat gathered on Lanny’s forehead and ran down into his eyes. But he didn’t wipe it away; that might be taken for a gesture of fright or agitation; he preferred to stand rigid, like a soldier, as he had seen the Nazis do. He realized now what they meant. All right, he would learn their technique; he would become a fanatic, as they. Not a muscle must move; his face must be hard, turned to stone with defiance. It could be done. He had told himself all his life that he was soft; he had been dissatisfied with himself in a hundred ways. Here was where he would reform himself.

  He was expecting to be told to strip, and he was ready to do it. His muscles were aching to begin. But no, apparently they knew that; their science had discovered this very reaction, and knew a subtler form of torture. They would keep him waiting a while, until his mood of rage had worn off; until his imagination had had a chance to work on his nerves; until energy of the soul, or whatever it was, had spent itself. The two men who led him by the arms took him to one side of the room, against the wall, and there they stood, one on each side of him, two statues, and he a third.

  VIII

  The door was opened again, and another trio entered; two S.S. men, leading an elderly civilian, rather stout, plump, with gray mustaches, a gray imperial neatly trimmed; a Jew by his features, a business man by his clothes—and suddenly Lanny gave a start, in spite of all his resolutions. He had talked to that man, and had joked about him, the rather comical resemblance of his hirsute adornments to those of an eminent and much-portrayed citizen of France, the Emperor Napoleon the Third. Before Lanny’s eyes loomed the resplendent drawing-room of Johannes Robin’s Berlin palace, with Beauty and Irma doing the honors so graciously, and this genial old gentleman chatting, correct in his white tie and tails, diamond shirt-studs no longer in fashion in America, and a tiny square of red ribbon in his buttonhole—some order that Lanny didn’t recognize. But he was sure about the man—Solomon Hellstein, the banker.

  Such a different man now: tears in his eyes and terror in his face; weeping, pleading, cowering, having to be half dragged. “I didn’t do it, I tell you! I know nothing about it! My God, my God, I would tell you if I could! Pity! Have pity!”<
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  They dragged him to the bench. They pulled his clothes off, since he was incapable of doing it himself. Still pleading, still protesting, screaming, begging for mercy, he was told to lie down on the bench. His failure to obey annoyed them and they threw him down on his belly, with his bare back and buttocks and thighs looming rather grotesque, his flabby white arms hanging down to the floor. The four shirtless Nazis took their places, two on each side, and the officer in command raised his hand in signal.

  The thin steel rods whistled as they came down through the air; they made four clean cuts across the naked body, followed by four quick spurts of blood. The old man started up with a frightful scream of pain. They grabbed him and threw him down, and the officer cried: “Lie still, Juden-Schwein! For that you get ten more blows!”

  The poor victim lay shuddering and moaning, and Lanny, tense and sick with horror, waited for the next strokes. He imagined the mental anguish of the victim because they did not fall at once. The officer waited, and finally demanded: “You like that?”