But the frostbite nearly cost me one of my toes and an incipient infection in my jaw forced me to return to Paris for treatment. Once I recovered, I joined Noël Coward and Maurice Chevalier for a musical performance, but as soon as I could, I went back to the front in early February, following the epic lightning strike of the Battle of the Bulge. Patton was now in Aachen, the first German city to fall en route to Berlin, which the Soviets had encircled. In Aachen, I did another show, only this time I sat squeezed between two bodyguards, my pistols at my hips as I rode in Patton’s open-air jeep at the head of the Third Army. As the German people who’d survived the Allied bombardment gathered at the roadside in freezing temperatures, I called out my name through a megaphone, requesting immediate evacuation of the streets so our tanks could pass.
No one fired a shot at me. Regardless of the USO warning that I had a bounty on my head or Patton’s advice that Germans reviled me for my stance, I found only limpid acceptance in those with whom I stopped to speak, the hunger and fear scoring their faces turning to befuddled awe when they realized who I was.
“Lola-Lola,” one woman whispered. “You’re the Blue Angel.”
No one denounced me. No one shook their fist or turned their back. Regardless of the bile Goebbels had spewed, it seemed not everyone had been hoodwinked into thinking I was the enemy. Still, when a reporter for the International News Service asked me what I thought about the destruction, compared with my life in Hollywood, I had to blink back sudden tears.
“I’m not thinking about the movies,” I replied. “I may never think about movies again. As for all this”—I gazed at the wreckage, the toppled buildings and rubble-piled avenues, the charred parks, the destitute scavenging for anything to eat or drink—“I hate to see it, but I guess Germany deserves everything that’s coming to her.”
My declaration was printed in newspapers across the globe. “If they weren’t running away to escape us”—Patton grinned—“they’d be hunting you down now for sure.”
“Let them try,” I said, and I continued to perform for the troops in half-collapsed theaters or on makeshift stages in frozen fields. When not regaling the boys, I combed my pubic hair for crabs and assumed duties as a translator and goodwill ambassador to the dazed German populace along the way, all of whom acquiesced in the concerted effort to bring down the Reich around their ears. In private with Patton, I railed, “They’re like sheep! If they had any character at all, they would fight us. This is who they are: Germans to their bones, who obeyed even a lunatic.”
“The lunatic isn’t dead yet,” Patton grimly said. “He’s still their führer.”
But after April 30, 1945, he no longer was. After forcing an army of children to defend Berlin while the Soviets hammered the city with rockets and grenades, Adolf Hitler cowered in his underground bunker and swallowed a lethal dose of cyanide that he first had tested on his elderly dog. He took his wife, Eva Braun, with him. Goebbels followed suit. On May 8, Germany surrendered. The way to Berlin cracked open, albeit through colossal wreckage from the Allied assault.
My country had fallen. The Third Reich was over.
I had no idea if anyone in my family had survived it.
IN MUNICH, I tried to recover from my exhaustion, dehydration, and a severe lice infestation that required me to stand under a scalding shower and shave off every last bit of hair I had except what was on my head, which I would not sacrifice, submitting instead to a stinging delousing solution that turned my scalp crimson and my short locks a pale greenish hue.
Munich looked no better. That beautiful city, ancient citadel of the Bavarian dukes, where Hitler first attempted to seize power, had fallen to seventy-one separate air raids—a jagged heap, where even the rats were starving and disease festered. The stink was atrocious. I couldn’t step outside my tent in the U.S. Army headquarters on the edge of the city without breathing in a toxic miasma of chemical fumes and human putrefaction, thousands of corpses rotting under still-smoldering rubble.
Horrifying news had been filtering into the headquarters for weeks, as Allied troops swept eastward and uncovered the abomination beneath Hitler’s bombast: his Final Solution, exposed in his Konzentrationslager, or “concentration camps,” where his right-hand henchman Himmler had devised vast complexes, with specially designed gas chambers and crematoria, to dispose of millions of Jews.
At first, I couldn’t believe it. Hitler had been insane, obsessed by his hatred of the Jews. But wholesale decimation of an entire people? It was unimaginable. Reports had it that Germany itself was riddled with these camps; regardless of the Nazis’ stranglehold, surely my own people had not condoned such savagery? Surely someone, somewhere, had tried to stop it? Yet Bette’s prophetic words, “Thousands are disappearing,” returned to me as the liberations of Dachau, Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Ravensbrück, and other camps forced me into recognizing that what had happened in Germany went beyond anything I could ever have imagined.
Still, I clung to denial when word came that in Bergen-Belsen near Hannover, a camp recently liberated by the British, a woman claiming to be my sister had been found.
“Impossible,” I told Patton. He was with General Omar Bradley, a stalwart man who’d also performed miracles during the Battle of the Bulge, that monthlong offensive launched by Hitler to recapture Antwerp, which had caught the Allies off guard. Like Patton, Bradley had lost thousands in the battle. Nonetheless, they were more rivals than friends (similar to movie stars, I had discovered, generals competed for acclaim), although Patton, due to leave for engagement in the Pacific, had instructed Bradley to assume charge of me.
With a concerned frown, Bradley handed me the wire. “She says she’s Elisabeth Felsing Wills. That’s the name you gave us. You requested that we look into her and your mother Josephine Felsing Dietrich’s whereabouts.”
“She can say whatever she likes,” I said, ignoring the wire. “She can’t possibly be my sister. Liesel lives in Berlin. Her husband was managing a chain of kinos there—”
“Kinos?” asked Patton.
“Picture houses,” I explained. “He oversaw government-approved cinemas. He told me himself the last time I saw him. He wouldn’t have been sent to this camp unless . . .” My indignation faded as I recalled my refusal to accept Goebbels’s second invitation, sent through Georg. I had no idea where my brother-in-law worked. I’d assumed he and Liesel remained in Berlin, but now a dark wave of fear pushed through me. What if the Nazis had arrested my family? What if they’d all ended up in a camp because of me? It wasn’t impossible. Nothing was impossible anymore, not where Hitler was concerned.
Patton said quietly, “Is it possible, Marlene?”
I nodded, swallowing. “Yes. I suppose it is.” I searched their faces. “What should I do?” I asked at length, my voice subdued.
Patton glanced at Bradley, who said, “We think you should see this woman for yourself. It’s the first lead we’ve had regarding your family. We can arrange air transport.”
I found myself wanting to refuse. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t even want to contemplate it, though he was right. It was the first lead we’d had, though it couldn’t be true. It had to be a mix-up, a bureaucratic mistake. People had been flung everywhere since Hitler plunged us into disaster. Identities had been stolen, papers and passports forged. Perhaps this woman was using Liesel’s name. Perhaps she might know where my sister actually was. In any event, I was the only person who could confirm or deny her claim.
“Fine.” I tossed the wire back on the desk with an umbrage I no longer felt. “But you won’t stop searching in Berlin. You’ll keep inquiring there?”
Patton nodded. “We’re doing everything we can. But it’s very chaotic; there have been thousands of casualties. I wouldn’t get my hopes up. The city is in ruins.”
I came to my feet, clutching the side of the desk. “My mother is stronger than you think. She made it through the first war. If she made it through this one, she’s there. She must be.”
> Bradley went quiet as Patton reminded me, “I did warn you. I told you, this isn’t a movie. There is no script. No happy ending.”
“I remember,” I said. “How could I forget? No movie could be this horrible.”
GENERAL BRADLEY BRIEFED ME before I departed from Munich. Bergen-Belsen was one of the last camps to be forsaken by its Nazi overseers—a detention center where wealthy Jews coming in from France and Holland had waited for transport to Poland. Soviet prisoners of war had also been held there, in exchange for German POWs taken by the Allies. As British-Canadian forces neared the camp, a typhus epidemic swept the compound. Years later, I would learn that a Jewish girl named Anne Frank had died in that epidemic, along with many others.
“They left corpses everywhere,” said Bradley. “You’ll be taken to the former Wehrmacht headquarters, which the Brits use as their command post. Captain Arnold Horwell is in charge and will receive you. But you mustn’t ask to tour the camp itself. Just meet this woman to see if she’s your sister. We need the airplane back. One day, Marlene. It’s all you have.”
I agreed, but as my plane touched down on a tiny airfield in Fassberg and an army escort drove me to Bergen-Belsen, I found myself suddenly longing to see. I had to fight against the overwhelming need to see. I’d heard enough by now to know that the horror unleashed by the Nazis would haunt me forever, ravaging the last shred of hope I had for my nation. Yet I had an obligation to bear witness to the carnage waged in our name, if only to prove to the world, and myself, that not every German was capable of looking the other way.
Then I sensed it—not a stench, precisely, though there was that. Most of the dead had already been bulldozed into pits, while the worst areas had been cordoned off to contain the spread of disease. The survivors were sequestered in hastily erected infirmaries, where they continued to die; but I could still feel it, an indefinable thickness in the air, like a miasma, that made breathing difficult and raised the hairs on my neck. As we approached a disconcertingly banal spread of brick buildings and wooden barracks, I beheld miles of electrified wire fencing.
Despair, I realized. This was what I felt. The entire place exuded human despair.
The corporal who’d driven me had to assist me from the jeep. My knees were wobbling; I focused on putting one booted foot before the other, staring straight ahead as he led me toward the Wehrmacht headquarters, still adorned with a swastika over its entryway. Then I glanced to my left, through the sagging fence, my attention caught by the sound of a truck coughing exhaust and men speaking in clipped British accents: “Careful, now. It’s heavy.”
Soldiers. Hauling a load of what looked like kindling.
“Major Dietrich.” The corporal, an exhausted-looking Canadian, touched my sleeve. “Please. This way.”
My soul curdled. Not kindling. Not wood. Legs and arms and skeletal ankles, jutting in a pyramid of bones from the truck’s rear compartment.
“Dear God,” I whispered. “What have we done . . . ?”
“Please.” The corporal propelled me inside, but I kept looking over my shoulder as the truck lumbered toward a distant field from where I could discern the grinding of heavy machinery, of tractors and other equipment, so loud I had to resist putting my hands over my ears and nose, as if I stood on the edge of whatever was there, choking on putrid dust.
A gateway tilted near the field, bearing an askew sign: KINDERGARTEN.
All of a sudden, I wanted to scream. Was Liesel here, a victim of this hell on earth?
“Do—do you have a cigarette?” I searched the pockets of my fatigues but did not feel anything, my fingers numb. I was so light-headed, I thought I might faint.
He extracted one from a pack, flicked his butane lighter. As I drew in acrid smoke—army-issued cigarettes made me rasp—and the nicotine jolted my blood, he said, “Wait here. I need to alert Captain Horwell that you’ve arrived.” He paused, his gaze tender, so understanding that I could only meet it and let him see my anguish, my helpless disbelief drowning me as he repeated, “Wait here, please. I’ll be back in a moment, Major.”
He proceeded down the corridor as I stood under a framed portrait of Hitler on the wall, dressed in his tan uniform, with his protuberant eyes and pursed mouth under that ridiculous block mustache. I wondered why his picture was still here. Why hadn’t they torn it down? I couldn’t understand any of it, how anyone could have taken such a ludicrous man seriously enough to commit mass murder. It was like the movie Patton had assured me it was not, only nothing a studio contrived could equal this inhumanity, executed for maximum impact. We would never outlive it. We must all bear the shame and the world’s condemnation for it.
In those endless seconds as I waited to be summoned, I lost whatever remained of my hope. I surrendered it. Never again would I regard my country with anything but contempt. Never again would I take pride in calling myself a German.
I could not. I refused.
The corporal reappeared, beckoning me. Crushing my cigarette under my heel, I picked up the butt and flung it at the portrait. “Monster,” I whispered.
And I went down the hall to face my own monsters.
VIII
He spoke German. That was the first thing he told me after I saluted him in an office that had sheltered the SS command. Mounds of dossiers and other files littered the desk, some bearing the red eagle stamp of the Reich. As he saw me staring at them, he said, “They destroyed a lot of records before they left. But what is here—it’s more than enough.”
“I know.” Squaring my shoulders, I said, “I saw. Outside. I want to see everything.”
“Major Dietrich.” He sighed. He was a diminutive man with a receding hairline and a weary face; had we been anywhere else, at any other time, I’d have mistaken him for a studio accountant. “I don’t believe you do.” He lit a cigarette, offering me one. I declined. Beyond his narrow window, which allowed a circumscribed view of the camp, thick smoke was roiling from that field. Were they incinerating the corpses?
“We found evidence of cannibalism,” he said, wrenching my gaze back to him. “That’s the least of it. They cut off the water and access to supplies; bolted the gates behind them and left the prisoners to endure as best they could. Women and children. Entire families. Entire generations. Gone. You don’t want to see it. Trust me, no one should ever have to see it.”
Without requesting leave, though he was my superior according to military protocol, I sank onto the chair before his desk. I couldn’t breathe. I had to sink my face in my hands, clamping back a howl, until I felt him come around and awkwardly pat my shoulder. “Chin up, Major. Yes?”
I raised my eyes to him.
He offered me a cigarette again. This time, I took it. As I smoked anxiously, he returned to his papers. “Is Elisabeth Felsing Wills your sister?”
I hesitated. “That is her name. But I . . . I’d have to see her.”
“Well, she is here. Until recently, she was in our infirmary, in fact.”
“Infirmary?” My heart started to pound. “Is she sick?”
“A mild case of influenza. Nothing serious. According to her husband, Herr”—he consulted the dossier in hand—“Wills, they were only doing as directed. It’s a common refrain, I’m afraid. They all say that. They were all just obeying orders.”
The office seemed to shrink, closing in around me. “Orders?” I echoed. My voice sounded remote, not mine at all. “Aren’t they prisoners?”
He looked at me. “No. Or they weren’t when the camp was under German command. Now . . . well, I’m afraid it’s not so simple.”
I whispered, “What do you mean?”
He set the dossier aside. “First, let me tell you that I have lost loved ones. My actual surname is Horowitz. I am a Jew. I fled Berlin in ’38 and was fortunate to find a post in the British army, though I had to lose my ‘witz.’” His smile was brief. “I have a doctorate in economics and of course speak fluent German, so men like me were vital to the cause. But others in my family wer
en’t so fortunate. My parents died in Czechoslovakia, in Theresienstadt. Some of my other relatives were gassed in Treblinka.”
I wanted to offer my condolences, but it seemed so futile, unworthy of the enormity of his loss. Instead, I heard myself utter, “I don’t understand.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Forgive me.”
I sat immobile. “What aren’t you telling me? If this woman who claims to be my sister and her husband weren’t prisoners, why are they here?”
He went quiet, meeting my eyes. Then he said, “They were assigned here. Georg Wills was a Special Services officer, appointed to run the canteen for the SS. He also managed a nearby cinema in Fallingbostel for the troops. He was well compensated. They had private accommodations in town, ample rations, hot water, and a bedroom for their son—”
“Son?” I bolted to my feet. “Then she can’t be Liesel.”
“No?” He frowned, reaching for the dossier.
“I never heard that she gave birth,” I said. “I spoke with my uncle in Berlin. He never mentioned it.”
“Recently?” he asked, and when he took in my silence, he added, “If it was more than six years ago, you may not have known. The boy is five, according to these records.”
“It can’t be her. I’m sorry to have wasted your time.” I had started to turn to the door, desperate now to escape, when I heard him say, “You still must see her. I insist. When we found them hiding, Herr Wills declared that his wife had an important family member with the Americans, one of considerable propaganda value. He said this relation could vouchsafe for them. We didn’t know whom he meant at first, until further questioning of Frau Wills in the infirmary revealed your name. That’s why I telegraphed Munich. Those who were involved, in whatever capacity, will say anything now to avoid repercussions. We need to confirm their identities before we can file the appropriate paperwork.” He paused. “Their ultimate fate rests with the military governor. I’m not here to exact revenge. I understand that ordinary people, placed in extraordinary circumstances, will do whatever they think is necessary to survive.”
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