Ruth turned to stare at Bösel. She inspected her, scrutinised her. Her voice grew firmer. ‘We got off the train. We were all tired and thirsty. The children were fractious, crying. They were waiting for us. She was. With dogs. The wardens took the children from us. They said they would be given food, water.’
‘Did they?’
Ruth shook her head. ‘There was a lorry with its back open. Steel sides. The guards took the children over to it. When they were all there, the wardens started to kill them. Some used iron bars. Some picked up the kids by their legs and swung them against the side of the truck. They smashed them. Then they threw them on the truck.’
The silence was wrecked now. There were gasps and stifled cries of Nein from the German spectators. Ruth waited for quiet. She lifted her finger and pointed at Bösel, whose head was down now. She spoke slowly, making every word draw blood from the defendant and the spectators.
‘Greta Bösel took Rachel. Hers was the last hand Rachel held. I saw Rachel ask her something. Bösel smiled down at her. Like a kind lady. Bösel was laughing as she swung my little girl against the truck.’
Later, Sam and I were crunching along the bitter shore of the lake, arm in arm. Our coats were tightly buttoned against the freezing mist that hung over the dead water.
‘You were brilliant, Sam.’
‘No. I always do my homework. The rest is easy. The evidence speaks for itself.’
‘It’s the way you deliver it.’
‘Is it ridiculous to say I almost felt sorry for her?’ she said.
‘Bösel? As long as it’s only almost.’
‘You hate them. I can see why.’
‘Hate? I’m not sure that’s the emotion. Hate’s something you feel for another person. The Nazis are a stunted branch line of human development. Like Wells’s Morlocks. You don’t hate cold-blooded reptiles.’
‘Was that how you saw Schwarzhuber?’
‘He’s had almost two years to contemplate his crimes. Two years wasted. Not a hint of contrition. We should have lined the buggers up and shot them while we had the chance. Said he’d been given orders and carried them out. That’s what a soldier did. Surely I understood that. A fellow soldier!’
‘Why does that upset you so much?’
I took a deep cold breath. ‘Damn it, because he had a point. The last thing I needed going into battle was some squaddie saying I don’t fancy this fight, sir. I think I’ll stand this one out.’
‘This wasn’t a battle.’
‘No. But who in uniform gets to choose? When? Look at the last war, at the Somme or Passchendaele. On my whistle, go and commit suicide, there’s a good lad. Or face a firing squad for cowardice.’
Sam squeezed my arm. ‘Nothing useful then?’
I calmed down. ‘I filled in a couple of gaps on the hierarchy. Schwarzhuber knew who’d got away all right.’
‘Did he say where they might have gone?’
‘He’d heard of the escape lines to Rome and Zurich, and on to Spain. Franco’s regime was very welcoming and if he’d had the chance he’d have gone to Barcelona. Or Argentina. He fancied Argentina. Likes horses. Says General Perón is one of them.’
‘Fascists?’
‘The world is split in three: fascists, communists and us.’
‘Us being the sane ones? Soft old Western capitalists?’
‘Not so soft. We won, didn’t we?’
‘Did we, Sam? Did we?’
We walked together for a while, silent with our thoughts.
‘Are you all right, Douglas? Is this too much?’
‘It needs doing. Come on. I think we’ve earned that first drink.’
We had and we did and it wasn’t the last. And I shouldn’t have asked for a bottle for my room. But it got me to sleep. Eventually. I dreamed of broken dolls.
TWENTY-SIX
We’d planned an early start. I set my alarm for the morning. It came with a jolt, and I struggled to free myself from the knotted sheets and the bloody images. The mattress was soaked with my sweat. I shaved, showered and forced some toast down to quell the nausea.
This morning I faced Ludwig Ramdohr, Gestapo. I wasn’t afraid of him. I was afraid of how I’d react. With my temper running so hot I wondered about leaving my service pistol with the guard.
I forced myself to think about how useful this session could be. Ramdohr would have had a unique view of all the personnel running the camp, including the doctors. He had access to all their personal records. He had also been a detective before the war. It didn’t mean we were going to be matey and clubby, two old professionals comparing notes on how detectives operated differently in Gallowgate and Ravensbrück. But it was a convenient entry point. We were – according to his file – of a similar age.
Lieutenant Collins and I went through the usual security rigmarole and took our seats in the interview cell. Ramdohr was brought in, hair thinner than I recalled, but the square face familiar enough. I deliberately spent time reading his file. It unsettles a man trying to read damning notes about himself upside down.
It reminded me that our Ludwig showed an aptitude for heavy-handed interrogation that would have won him plaudits from the more thuggish members of the Glasgow police. But even the polis would have stopped short at drowning prisoners to screw confessions out of them. Most of them anyway.
I looked up at him. Ramdohr seemed uncrushed physically by his time behind bars. He’d recognised me immediately but made no mention of my new outfit and rank.
I started gently, mindful of my blood pressure. We went through his Political Department and I fleshed it out with names and ranks. Then I put my pencil down and sat back.
‘Was there anyone you trusted? Among your comrades?’
‘It wasn’t my job to trust people. That was the first lesson I learned. Didn’t you?’
‘I think we went to different schools. In particular, what did you think of Suhren, the commandant?’
He shrugged. ‘Loyal enough. That was my job. I had to test for it.’
‘How? I see you were inventive.’ I tapped his file. ‘Liked playing with water.’
He smiled, perhaps in fond memory. ‘People don’t like drowning. Or thinking they are. They prefer to breathe and talk.’
I decided to try one of the names I got from Schwarzhuber.
‘Exactly how loyal was Dr Walter Sonntag?’
‘The nerve man?’
‘The nerve man. His file says he removed nerves, bones, muscles. To see what happened. Tried to give them to other prisoners. Transplants, he called them. “Like grafting a rose” was the phrase he used.’
Ramdohr smiled. ‘Obsessed. He’d do anything for the Führer.’
‘He got away.’
‘I thought so.’
‘One of the lucky ones?’
‘Just smarter than the rest. Smarter than me. He got out before the Reds arrived. Spirited away.’
‘The rat lines.’
‘Ja. Down a sewer.’
‘Did you know where the entrance to this sewer was?’
He shook his head. ‘Above my pay grade.’
‘Did you know where it came out?’
‘South America. New York. London. Somewhere nice. You’ll never find them.’
‘So we’ll hang you instead.’
That got through. His lips became lines. ‘Is there an alternative?’
‘I’m not the judge. But I can talk to him.’
‘You’re lying.’
‘Even if I am, what have you to lose? Tell me about the gold.’
‘Ah. It’s always the gold.’
‘Did Walter get his hands on gold? Gold from teeth. From jewellery. From your victims?’
‘There were several at it. Suhren, of course. Sonntag certainly; once he knew the Reds were coming.’
‘Where did they get it?’
‘Why, from the dentist, of course.’
It was so blindingly obvious that I didn’t speak for a while. I flipped though my notepa
d. I looked up.
‘That would be Hellinger. Dr Martin Hellinger.’
‘That’s your man.’
As luck would have it Hellinger was in the prison hospital. He’d cut his wrists, but had made a mess of it and would live. I’d get to him when they brought him back.
I kept at Ramdohr without a break until midday. I’m not sure which of us was more wrung out. Collins and I wrote up some brief notes over a plate of ham from the canteen and I prepared for my first inquisition in the witness box in the afternoon. I was to be grilled about my eighteen-month-old report on Schwarzhuber.
I had a very different perspective down in the well of the court. More claustrophobic. I was able to view Schwarzhuber directly opposite me, standing in the dock with guards either side. He wore headphones as I was answering in English. He allowed that maddening sneer to play about his lips as he listened to my answers. It didn’t take me long to confirm the details of our first meeting. Then the defence lawyer went on the attack.
‘Lieutenant Colonel Brodie, it was a confusing time back in June 1945 when you were interrogating the defendant, was it not?’
‘Confusing for whom? Not me.’
‘Your certainty is admirable. The whole of Europe was in turmoil. Officers like the defendant were dragged before you and made to sign anything in the interests of expediency. Is that fair?’
‘Not in the slightest. I asked questions and wrote down answers.’
‘You speak German. Fluently?’
I answered in German long enough for Counsel to cut me off.
‘Let us assume that’s a yes. But returning to your notes from that time. These are not verbatim, are they?’
‘No. They are in a sense minutes of our discussion.’
‘And like all good minutes, they say what the minute-taker wants to get across? Is that correct?’
‘This wasn’t a board meeting. We weren’t dealing with policy matters. I asked Obersturmführer Schwarzhuber his name, rank and unit. He told me. I asked him how many victims had died under his command. He gave me an estimate. I asked him whether he personally oversaw the gas chambers. He said he had. Did he stand by the crematoria and order his men to shovel bodies into the flames? He said he did. I asked—’
‘Thank you, Colonel. We get the picture.’
‘I haven’t finished. Your defendant gave me his answers. We wrote them down. In his role as deputy commandant, he was directly responsible for the murder and incineration of thousands of innocents. That was the statement he signed.’
Counsel dug into the details and tried to find weak spots: The defendant simply took orders and passed them on. He had no choice. There were thousands of prisoners; how could he have seen what was happening to all of them . . .
I began to find Counsel’s probing unsettling. I was hardly an objective interviewer back then. I’d fought these men for five years. The liberation of the camps had sent shock waves of revulsion through the West. Schwarzhuber and his like came in front of me tainted beyond redemption. My reports were always going to be skewed to convict.
And God knows, I’d seen at first hand, back in Glasgow, how evidence could be cooked. How an innocent man could end up in the condemned cell.
But with Schwarzhuber I had no need to exaggerate.
By the end of Counsel’s inquisition I felt I’d been through the mangle. His clever probing had uncovered my own growing view that there were no certainties any more. I walked stiffly from the court desperate for clean air. It wasn’t just the stuffy reek of packed humanity I was trying to get away from. I’d been soaked in horror since I flew in. It had poured on me remorselessly every day. I went back to the hotel alone while Sam ploughed on. I should have waited for her to join me before hitting the bar, but my throat was dry.
Wednesday and Thursday followed the same pattern. I interrogated three of the smaller fry, who knew nothing about anything, except that they expected to hang. They were probably right. I put in a couple of appearances in the witness stand to underscore and corroborate my first interviews some eighteen months ago. And at day’s end I tried to erase the images with Red Label, that convenient scouring agent for filth in the mind’s U-bend.
Friday came too soon. I was renewing acquaintance with 26-year-old Aufseherin Dorothea Binz, Deputy Camp Warden. Binz was a kind of anti-she. The negative of all that I appreciated in a woman: softness, sweetness, kindness, tenderness; the necessary counterweight to our barbed manhood. La Binz was all dark, hard, and warped. She was licentious to the point of absurdity, reportedly performing lesbian acts in full view of the camp inmates and her SS lover Edmund Bräuning. It wasn’t interrogation Binz needed. It was exorcism.
I’d met one of her protégées, Irma Grese, in the Belsen trials. They called her Die Hyane, the beautiful beast: just twenty-two and addicted to torture and slaughter. I had a hand in sending Irma to the gallows in December 1945. Her mentor, the blonde Dorothea, would surely follow her on to the trapdoor.
She was already seated in the small interrogation room when I arrived. Her face lifted to mine and recognition dawned. Was that fear? I was struck again at how ordinary she seemed. A blonde but with disappointingly coarse features. Blue eyes like Sam’s but without the intelligence. Her dull, country-girl looks would have been perfect on billboards advertising milk or honey, if she weren’t so sulky.
I sipped at my strong tea and wished it were gin as I read through her file. The last time I’d interrogated her, she’d said little or nothing. She was contemptuous and sneering. This time I decided to go for the jugular. It wouldn’t be nice. I hoped Will Collins, sitting behind me, had a strong stomach. The file mentioned an affair with another woman, Dr Heidi Triedelmann. It would be worth seeing how she reacted to my disclosure of her love life.
‘Fräulein Binz, it has been a while. You remember me? My name is Brodie.’
‘I remember you.’ She spat the word.
‘Have you heard from Edmund recently?’
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘Your boyfriend SS-Obersturmführer Edmund Bräuning? Your lover boy.’
Her face contorted. ‘Where is he?’
‘Dead. We hanged him.’ I heard a gasp behind me from Collins.
Binz shot out of her seat and lunged at me. ‘You bastard!’ The guard grabbed her and pulled her down.
‘And I suppose you won’t have heard from your little protégée Irma either. Have you?’
Her eyes were wild.
‘Fräulein Grese took the drop a year ago. I personally made sure of that.’
‘So? What do I care?’
‘You’re next, Dorothea. And the instructions will be to make it slow. A very short drop.’
‘Fuck you!’
I sighed. ‘Shame that Dr Triedelmann won’t be joining you.’
‘What?’
‘Your other little sex pal, Heidi, got away. She was sent down a rat line. They made sure that the best Nazis, the ones they wanted to survive, got away. Live and fight another day, eh? But no one cared what happened to you. Did they?’
‘Shut up, shut up!’
I sat back and lit a cigarette. I was no longer sure if I was probing her for answers or just to rile her. What she’d done was sickening but what I was doing didn’t seem much better. I could feel Lieutenant Collins’s eyes on my back. I’d been innocent once. Binz was breathing hard and staring at my pack of cigarettes.
‘Want one?’
She nodded.
‘OK. We’re going to play a little game. I will give you a cigarette for every useful answer you give me. I will take one back if you are evasive or I think you’re lying. Ready to play?’
Her eyes flicked between mine and the fags. Her tongue moistened her lips. She nodded.
I got corroboration of some of the new names on my list and pointers to others. Binz knew about escape routes but not how to find one, far less a northern one to Scotland. She also knew about the pilfering of gold. Had even done a bit herself.
/> ‘Why not? Everyone else was doing it.’
‘Where did you get it?’
She shrugged. ‘Sometimes direct.’
‘You mean you stole it directly from the prisoners?’
She laughed. ‘They weren’t going to need bangles where they were going.’
I stared at her brazen face, her pitiless eyes, and I reached across and slapped her as hard as I could.
She screamed and fell off her chair. Collins leaped forward and pulled me back. The sergeant jailer helped her to her feet and back into her chair. ‘Shut up or you’ll get another from me,’ said the sergeant. My red handprint tattooed Binz’s shocked white face.
I reached over and picked up the five cigarettes she’d won and crushed them. I threw them at her; then I got up and marched out. My head was pounding. Anger blazed in my chest. I stormed down the corridor and through the metal doors until I got outside. I walked faster and faster until I was running down the street. I floundered to a halt in a small park and threw up. Collins found me with my head in my hands sitting on a damp bench. He got out his fags and gave me one. He lit me and we sat quietly, embarrassed by my outburst, sandbagged by her poison.
‘Sorry, Collins.’
‘It’s fine, sir.’
‘It’s not what a first in languages prepares you for, is it?’
‘No, sir,’ he said quietly. ‘But I haven’t been through it. Sorry I held you back, sir.’
‘You did right. Thank you.’
We walked back to the car. I felt hollowed out. I got to my room, lay down on my bed and shivered as though I was coming down with malaria.
I woke to someone shaking me. I shot up in confusion, my arms raised to defend my face.
‘Douglas, Douglas, it’s all right. It’s me. It’s me. You’re all right.’
‘God, Sam. I was out.’
‘You were shouting. In your sleep.’
She eased back and sat by my side. I sat upright and leaned towards her. I embraced her and felt her slim arms round me, holding me tight, until the pain between my eyes lifted.
‘You’re shaking, Douglas. It’s all right now.’
I was a child wrapped in his mother’s arms.
‘What time is it?’
Douglas Brodie 03 - Pilgrim Soul Page 14
