Hauptscharfuhrer Kolb in fact did murder Sturmbannfuhrer Straus. Occasionally, when there are many factors in a murder case, the facts which matter hide in plain sight. Often it is better to take a step back and, after careful deliberation, have a fresh look from another perspective.
These, I detail for you below.
1. Sturmbannfuhrer Straus was a homosexual who was being blackmailed by Hauptscharfuhrer Kolb.
2. Hauptscharfuhrer Kolb went to Sturmbannfuhrer Straus’ office on that evening to extort money from him.
3. Sturmbannfuhrer Straus refused to continue any further payments and attempted to shoot Hauptscharfuhrer Kolb. This was the first shot, the one which was not heard due to the thunder, the bullet found embedded in the floor.
4. In the struggle, Hauptscharfuhrer Kolb took possession of Sturmbannfuhrer Straus’ weapon.
5. Either in the heat of the argument or accidentally in the struggle, Sturmbannfuhrer Straus received a fatal wound inflicted by a gunshot from his own pistol.
6. Only Sturmbannfuhrer Straus and Hauptscharfuhrer Kolb were in the room at the time, leading me to conclude that only Hauptscharfuhrer Kolb could have fired the fatal shot.
7. Hauptscharfuhrer Kolb was found with the murder weapon in his hand, giving conclusive proof that he is the murderer.
Please accept my sincerest apologies in this matter. I hope that justice does not fail Untersturmfuhrer Ritter and he is released before sentence is carried out.
Yours sincerely,
Manfred Meyer
Ritter was innocent. It was Kolb. It had always been Kolb. It was so obvious. He had known it right from the start. How could it have been anyone else other than Kolb? He was found with the pistol in his hand.
Liebehenschel placed the letter back in the envelope. “We shot the wrong man, Josef.”
Anton Geller returned to Hut 72 under guard. Langer and Braun both clapped and laughed when he appeared through the door.
“I thought you would never be coming back,” came the gruff shout from Langer. “Did the Commandant see you, Geller? Did he ask you in and give you a drink?”
Geller ignored the jibes and made his way back to his bunk. He made sure that Langer was not following him, to continue his entertainment for the evening, before removing the second envelope from inside his top. He coughed to cover the noise of the paper tearing as he ran his finger under the flap. Geller slid out the letter inside and, shielding it from anyone else’s view, read its contents.
Dearest Anton,
If you are reading this, then I will be long gone. There are a few things which I want you to know. The first is that I am eternally grateful for your friendship. Without you I would have never lived for so long in this terrible place.
The second is not to mourn me. I realised quite some time ago that very few of us will survive this camp. Who knows if places like this will ever stop, but if they do, it will be at some distant point in the future and I have come to the conclusion that that will be a day I will never see.
If you are reading this then I will have spent the last few hours of my life with Klara. If there had been a way in which we could have escaped from here then I would have taken that chance but never without Klara. We have lost our children and now only have each other. No more suffering for either of us.
The third is this; you will have delivered an envelope to Liebehenschel. In the letter to him I have told him that they were wrong in convicting Ritter and that it had been Kolb all along. I know that Ritter will have been executed by now and my hope is that Kolb will follow him to the firing squad. It may seem a small victory against the might of the SS but, if I could, I would have laid down my own life to remove any number of them from this extermination camp.
There is something else though. From the very beginning, my feelings were that things were not quite as they seemed in what had happened in Straus’ office that night. In truth, it may have been a mixture of the various stories which were told at the court martial but I am now certain of one thing. Neither Ritter nor Kolb murdered Straus.
Everything I can see points to Straus committing suicide.
Ritter told the truth. He left the office that night and went straight to his barrack room. Kolb also told the truth; when he arrived in the office, Straus was already dead. He had shot himself at the moment of the thunder, which masked the shot, dropping his Luger on the floor, the pistol which Kolb then picked up and discharged in error.
There is one last thing. Over the winter, I have been keeping my ration of tree sap and storing it in the box at the back of the tool hut. It won’t make you rich but you may be able to swap some of it for food.
Forever your friend,
Manfred Meyer
p.s. I have kept a secret from you over the time I have known you. My bunk has a crack in it which makes it bend as if it was a sprung bed.
Geller re-read the letter twice before tucking it carefully back into its envelope and hiding it once more under his vest. He lay on his hard bunk and stared at Meyer’s bed, with its dark crack running from top to bottom, then slowly slid across and felt it sink under his weight is if made of feathers.
Hauptscharfuhrer Wolfgang Kolb lit a cigarette and held up his glass of schnapps. His three compatriots also raised their glasses and shouted ‘Prost!’
Kolb wondered where Fuchs was. He had not seen him at all since the court martial.
“Here is to the Jew, Manfred Meyer. Where would I be without him, eh?” laughed Kolb, and sunk the schnapps in one go. As he held up the empty glass to allow the final drip to fall from it onto his tongue, the door to his barrack room burst open. It was Kramer. With him were the six Gestapo members who made up the firing squad. The colour drained from Kolb’s face.
Manfred and Klara Meyer stood in the mustering area outside chamber one, holding each other’s hands and looking into each other’s eyes. The wind had dropped to a tiny breeze, barely strong enough to move the strand of hair which had fallen across Klara’s face.
Around them, the men and women from the train were being encouraged to undress in the cold and enter the communal shower chamber by the Sonderkommando, but neither Manfred nor Klara saw them. They could only see each other.
Saul Rosenmann stood to one side. “I am sorry, Manfred. It is time.”
Manfred and Klara slowly walked hand in hand to the chamber door, while Rosenmann walked with them, making sure none of the other Sonderkommando took them to one side and ordered them to get undressed. He wanted his friend and his wife to have this little bit of dignity at the end.
Inside, Manfred held Klara close as she closed her eyes and laid her head against his chest. He looked down at the top of her head, at her hair and the scalp below. How he had missed her. His eyes closed and he began to hum one of their favourite tunes from their dancehall days.
And then they danced.
Epilogue
ANNA and Greta Meyer stood holding hands, looked at the entrance gate to Auschwitz, and waited for Friedrich Bauer to catch up with them. It had been seven years since they had been freed from the camp by Soviet troops. They walked under the sign ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ and made their way slowly through the buildings which made up what was now known by the world to be an extermination camp.
After the war, Bauer had looked for Meyer and his family, employing investigators in Berlin to travel through Soviet-controlled Germany and Poland to the sites of the concentration camps; those camps which the allies had forced the German population to witness at the cinemas across the country. Bauer had wondered at the horror of it. Finally, one of them returned from eastern Germany with Anna and Greta, and Bauer had taken them in and promised to give them as secure a future as he could in those troubled times.
Anna and Greta had talked to Bauer at length about returning to Auschwitz. Eventually, they all agreed that to visit the place which had caused so much horror in their lives would perhaps allow them to put some of that behind them. Bauer had applied on their behalf to the Pol
ish government, and they had been accepted on one of the first official tours of Auschwitz for victims and their families.
Back home, they sometimes talked to Bauer of the place and their experiences there, of how they had been saved from the gas chambers, simply because they were twins, by being picked out by Josef Mengele’s medical team, but had been spared the full horrors of the medical experiments by being non-identical.
One of the men who was on the tour had his jacket hanging over his arm and Anna noticed that some of his documents were about to fall out of the inside pocket.
“Excuse me,” she said, trying to get his attention. “Your jacket.”
The young man turned around at the sound of her voice as his wallet and passport slipped from his pocket. Anna and Greta both instinctively bent down and picked up his dropped items.
“Thank you,” he said smiling. “I don’t know how far I would have got without these.”
He was very young, thought Greta, too young to have been here himself and survived. It must have been a relative who had been here, perhaps his mother or father.
Anna handed back the passport to the man. “I am sorry,” she said. “Your passport has fallen open and there is dirt on your photograph.”
The man thanked her again as he took back his Swiss passport, opening it at the page which held his details. He brushed away the spots of dirt which covered the page and, annoyingly, there was a smudge over where his name was printed. But picking with his fingernail revealed the type once more; Franz Geller.
THE END
A Murder in Auschwitz Page 31
