16mm of Innocence

by Quentin Smith

  Hamburg burns, bodies lying in silent surrender to the incendiary forces of war, way beyond the survival limits of humans, roasted in their clothing, buildings collapsed in ruin across ash–strewn streets. A swathe of Hamburg is gone. The image jerks and the screen turns white.

  The rotating front reel, now mercifully empty of its awful memories, slowed to a stop. Otto couldn’t move; his mind was traumatised by what he had seen. “I wasn’t expecting that,” he said quietly.

  Dieter turned to look at him, his head cradled incredulously in his hands.

  “Do you remember any of that?” Otto said.

  “No, thank God,” Dieter said, standing up, “I need a drink. Want one?”

  “Is the Pope Catholic?”

  Otto switched the projector off and stared at the coils of forty–year–old film wound tightly around the take–up reel. This very film had rolled through Father’s movie camera, focused by his own hand on those heinous scenes, capturing events that, unlike the subjects in them, would now live on almost indefinitely in the eyes of those who viewed them.

  Dieter returned with two tumblers half–filled with scotch and ice. He rested a hand on Otto’s shoulder. “Not your average family home movie, is it?”

  “You said something strange to me recently.” Otto looked up. “You asked if we celebrated Christmas.”

  “Did I?”

  “Uh–huh, you thought Sabine was Jewish.”

  “Oh yeah, I remember now.”

  “What did Ingrid tell you?” Otto said.

  Dieter exhaled and shifted his body posture. “I can’t remember, honestly Otto. I don’t know why I got that notion in my head – something to do with Jews.”

  Otto frowned, thinking about the scenes they had just watched. “I was wondering, since we’ve been watching all this footage of Neuengamme concentration camp, could there be a connection?”

  Dieter shrugged. “I don’t see how.”

  Otto’s mind was swirling with crazy thoughts. “Obviously Dad and Mum were both German.”

  “Of course!” Dieter snorted loudly, pulling a face.

  Otto paused and drank some of his scotch, his eyes downcast and ponderous. “What was Dad doing in that concentration camp?”

  Dieter just looked at him.

  “Why did they end up in Lüderitz?” Otto added. “Why don’t we still live in Hamburg?” Otto sank once again into the soporific promise of the malt. “Part of me wants to watch that reel again.”

  “You don’t believe your eyes?” Dieter said.

  “I’m… astounded… and…” Otto struggled for the appropriate words, forming a contorted clawed shape with his hand.

  Dieter took a deep breath and sat down on the corner of the dining table beside Otto. “I’ll watch it again with you.”

  Otto rewound the film and they sat through it once more in complete silence, this time armed with scotch to assuage the abhorrence of the worst scenes.

  They looked into the lifeless eyes of starving prisoners, clad in dirty rags, wondering how many of them lived to see the end of the war; watched two men being shot in the head for no apparent reason; they studied Alfred Trzebinski’s clean–cut face and sharp clinical eyes, watched as he methodically poisoned innocent men powerless to refuse; they shuddered at the indiscriminate cruelty of war as Hamburg burned like a furnace under the calculated yet indiscriminate retaliation of Allied bombers.

  Squeezed in between all of this were fragments of their happy family growing up in evident privilege, blissfully unaware of how fate would tear them apart as time unfolded its dispassionate destiny.

  When the film ended for the second time they sat in silence until the phone rang. It was Frans. He had something to tell them, but he wouldn’t do it over the phone.

  Twenty–One

  “You been watching a film?” Frans said, glancing across at the projector and reels of film visible through the door into the living room.

  “Just home movies,” Otto said, placing three mugs of steaming black coffee down on the kitchen table.

  “Where’s Ingrid?”

  “At the hotel,” Otto said.

  Frans nodded and tried his coffee, withdrawing abruptly and then blowing over the liquid. He looked uncomfortable, his eyes staring down at his hands and his shoulders constantly on the move.

  “Listen, guys, I am sorry about this… what with your ma’s funeral tomorrow and all that.”

  “What’s happened?” Dieter asked.

  “The Commissioner in Windhoek authorised for a sample to be taken from your ma and sent to England.”

  Otto felt an immediate pang, a sense of violation, even though he realised that this was unreasonable. Could they do such a thing without the family’s permission? He suppressed the immediate urge to protest.

  “For DNA analysis?” Otto said.

  “Ja.” Frans still hadn’t made eye contact. “I’m sorry, guys. I just didn’t know how to tell you.”

  “What sort of sample?” Dieter asked.

  Frans pulled a face and shrugged. “Blood, I think.”

  “They’ll compare her DNA with that of the body found in the garden, I expect,” Otto said, then looked at Frans. “Any idea how long it will take?”

  “They said we should have a result by next week.”

  Otto nodded in acceptance. The deed was done and there was little more to be said. This was a police investigation that had to run its full and proper course.

  “Well, thanks for telling us,” Dieter said.

  “Are you coming to the funeral tomorrow?” Otto asked.

  “Of course.” Frans looked up for the first time.

  Otto bit his lip, deliberating over the controversial notice they had seen in the paper.

  “We saw in the Lüderitzbuchter that there is a celebration for Hitler’s birthday tomorrow,” Otto said.

  Frans drew breath slowly and leaned back. “Ja, at Kreplinhaus.”

  “Why?” Otto asked, pulling a face.

  “It happens every year.”

  “Every year?” Dieter said.

  “It won’t affect the funeral at all, don’t worry,” Frans said.

  This seemed a small consolation to Otto. “It’s abhorrent.”

  “There are a lot of Germans in this country; many of them were very sympathetic to the Nazi cause.” Frans paused. “That has not changed.”

  “Who is Jurgen Göring?”

  Frans raised his eyebrows. “The Görings are famous here. Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring – heard of him?”

  Dieter and Otto nodded. Who indeed had not heard of Field Marshall Hermann Göring in the context of the Second World War in Europe?

  “His father, Heinrich Göring, was one of the early Governor Generals of Deutsch Südwestafrika – er, German South West Africa.” Frans fell silent and sipped his coffee cautiously. “Those Governors were responsible for implementing one of the most evil plans ever to come out of Germany.”

  “The Görings have strong ties to Lüderitz?” Otto said incredulously. He recalled having seen Göring Street in town but had never as a schoolboy made the link.

  “Oh ja. They go back a long way here.”

  “In what way?” Dieter asked.

  Frans’ squint seemed to express itself suddenly, one eye contemplating Dieter while the other’s gaze wandered without commitment about the room. “They created a place of such inhuman depravity… right here in Lüderitz. The worst of it all is that the Governor General’s son, Hermann, together with Adolf Hitler and the rest of the Nazi elite, did exactly the same thing in Europe, just thirty years later.” Frans measured his words and contorted his hands in tense, clawed balls.

  Otto felt a chill run down his spine as he thought back to the images they had watched of Neuengamme concentration camp, captured amongst his family’s very own cine film memories, interspersed with family picnics and days at the seaside. He caught Dieter’s eyes and perceived in them great perturbation.

  “What kind of place?”
Dieter said.

  Frans sat back and took a sharp, deep breath, glancing from Otto to Dieter. “You guys got some free time?”

  They nodded in unison.

  “Come with me. I want to show you something you probably don’t know about.”

  Otto felt as though his heart was enlarging within his chest. He was both curious and apprehensive: would this have any bearing on his family history? Did this have something to do with Father? Having been to Kolmanskop and Inez’s grave he assumed that the worst was behind him.

  *

  The air smelled strongly of kelp and salt, a richly pungent aroma that unmistakeably evoked heady perceptions of fresh fish and deep sea trawlers. The fog bank hugging the Atlantic Ocean was moving ever closer to the shore, looming ominously just beyond reach, threatening at any moment to invade the sanctity of land and obliterate its sovereignty.

  Frans drove down to Hafen Street and parked beside Woermann Haus. The fluffy dice hanging from his rear view mirror twirled aimlessly after the car had been parked.

  “Have you ever been to Shark Island?” Frans asked them as they began to walk towards the harbour.

  “Dad’s ashes were scattered on the island, but I don’t recall ever going there,” Otto said, pushing his hands deep into his chino pockets, warding off not so much cold as fear of impending unpleasant disclosures.

  “Were they?” Frans said, raising his eyebrows.

  They walked past the trawlers moored at the quayside where toothless fishermen mended nets and tended their vessels, the discordant clang of an occasional hammer echoing across the water. Seagulls swooped and cawed, constantly alert to the promise of fish.

  “Is there anything out there?” Dieter asked, pointing towards the end of the Shark Island peninsula that protruded into Lüderitz’s harbour like a dagger.

  “Not anymore, but I’ll tell you what it used to be, because you won’t find this in any books or tourist guides.” Frans tapped the side of his nose. “Its history has been well and truly buried.”

  They walked past warehouses where forklifts moved pallets and crates back and forth. Workers waved to Frans – “Hello Chief,” said some; “Gooie dag,” said others, all evidently unable to disguise their curiosity as he walked the two strangers through their bustling enterprise to the open expanse beyond. One wrinkled, copper–skinned man with tight curly hair nudged his friend and smiled, revealing massive gaps in his dentition. “I told you not to smoke that dagga, Boesman,” he said, and cackled wickedly. “The Chief’s come for you.”

  Beyond the buildings and dockside activity Shark Island opened into a finger of craggy, windswept land fringed on three sides by rocky inlets where the waves crashed on caramel pockets of sand. Littering the sand were scores of dead crimson and purple jellyfish, the giant Namibian sea nettle over thirty inches in diameter, flattened on the sand in decomposing glassy domes, like remnants of a lemming run. Otto’s hair whipped around his face and his clothes flapped about his body. When Frans reached the tip of the barren and inhospitable peninsula he stopped and turned to face them, his face silhouetted against the ghostly outline of the approaching fog and ethereal sunlight piercing it.

  “Hermann Göring’s father is credited as the idea behind this atrocity which his successor, Lothar von Trotha, saw fulfilled.” Frans paused as the wind buffeted him “This, my friends, is the site of Germany’s first concentration camp for extermination.”

  Otto thought he must have misheard Frans. “Exterminating what?” he said.

  Frans looked at him without blinking. “Humans.”

  The wind gusted and stung Otto’s eyes. A seagull swooped and splattered creamy excrement on the rocks nearby.

  “The German settlers were not welcomed by the native tribes here, the Nama and the Herero, and constantly had to battle uprisings by the natives. Well, you can imagine,” Frans said.

  “It was the same in all colonial countries,” Dieter said, resting one foot on a rock.

  “Eventually they built the Shark Island concentration camp, right here.” He pointed at his large, splayed feet. “In just four years they exterminated thousands of men, women and children. Conditions were apparently appalling.” He walked towards the water’s edge and gesticulated into the lapping waves. “If you scuba dive in the bay they say you’ll find shackles and chains, rusting remnants of the manacles and restraints used on prisoners. But even worse, there are still bones down there amongst the sand and diamonds, Nama and Herero bones, never buried. No–one talks about that.”

  Frans held their gaze steadfastly, as if measuring the depth of their horror and shock.

  “Killed, how?” Dieter said.

  “Prisoners were simply worked to death. Many starved, died of disease, and some were just murdered. The camp doctor, a guy called Bofinger, decapitated dozens of prisoners and made the women boil the heads and scrape the flesh off the skulls with sharpened stones to clean them up for shipment back to Germany.”

  “Here, in Lüderitz?” Otto said in disbelief.

  “Right here.” Frans nodded.

  Otto could feel himself paling. “Jesus Christ!”

  “The skulls were sent back to Germany to be studied by scientists, the same scientists who would later influence and assist Hitler.”

  “What?” Otto said, appalled.

  Frans nodded. “They are still there, sitting in their museums, in glass cases.” Frans paused. “Have you heard of Eugen Fischer?”

  “Nazi doctor, wasn’t he?” Dieter said.

  “Ja. He started his work right here in this concentration camp, studying the natives, performing hundreds of autopsies, experimenting on them.” He nodded solemnly, pointing to the ground. “Right here.”

  “No fucking way,” Dieter said, mouth agape.

  “You heard of Josef Mengele?” Frans asked.

  “Of course,” Otto said, “the angel of death.”

  “Did you know that he was one of Fischer’s students? Mengele learnt from the best.”

  Otto swallowed. He had lived in Lüderitz from birth, left when he finished school, yet the place harboured awful secrets he had never heard about. What did this say about his childhood, he wondered? Was it also dissimulated, dressed up in platitudes and smoky half–truths?

  “How do you know all of this?” Dieter asked with a look of abhorrence on his face.

  Frans sat down on a rough rock. “As Police Chief you have access to lots of information; we call it ‘intel’. I’ve got to know many things about this community. I have seen the Blue Book, a report on the treatment of natives in this country by the Germans, produced in 1918 by the British. They destroyed it a few years later, such was the outcry. In it was written that the lucky ones were shot before they reached Shark Island, that this camp was the first of its kind created with the specific purpose of extermination – a death camp; not for containment. Some of the accounts of violence, rape and torture are… unbelievably inhuman.”

  “They don’t teach this in school, no–one has written about it – it’s as though it never happened. But the Hereros know, the Namas and Damaras know: it is their ancestors whose skulls sit in a German university museum, murdered in the name of colonial tyranny.”

  Otto’s brain was bursting, his pulse throbbing relentlessly in his ears even above the buffeting wind. Looking around him at the bleak landscape he wondered why Father had specifically asked for his ashes to be scattered here, on Shark Island. Why the site of a former concentration camp, a place where such atrocities and horrors were not only committed in the name of colonial subjugation, but seemingly exported to a mass market in Europe in 1939? How much did Father know about the island’s history? Otto heard Wilma’s admiring voice echoing in his head: your father would have been so proud. Proud of what? Proud of whom?

  Father’s presence in Neuengamme concentration camp could surely only mean that he worked there, or was invited to visit, perhaps in his capacity as a doctor. Was he a colleague of Dr Trzebinski, the man seen poisoning prison
ers with arsenic in the films?

  Suddenly Otto turned and retched on the rocky soil, and the wind caught his saliva and vomitus and aerosolised it, blowing it back into his face and shirt. Despite the chilly breeze he felt sweaty and wiped at his forehead with the back of one vomit–smeared hand.

  Dieter approached to comfort his brother. Their eyes met, both men visibly distressed and confused. Looking back across the waters of Robert Harbour, turned a murky grey by the approaching fog, Lüderitz appeared quite different to Otto now: stark, ornate German colonial buildings imposed upon the hostile and forbidding black rock, just as the Germans themselves had forced their presence upon this land and killed off all resistance.

  “You OK, Otto?” Frans asked.

  “He’ll be fine,” Dieter said, turning away from Otto and examining the landscape that was visible from Shark Island. “Jesus, Frans, you sure about all of this?”

  “Ja, I’m afraid so.”

  Otto no longer retched but remained bent over, watching the tendrils of stringy saliva that hung from his chin blowing in the wind. He was overcome with a foreboding sense of dread that they were on the cusp of very unpleasant revelations. Just what might be revealed about each and every one of them, not just Mother and Father but the Adermann children too?

  Twenty–Two

  The fog was gradually enveloping the land, its curling fingers extending across the harbour like a witch’s breath, engulfing fishing vessels and dockside warehouses with effortless impunity. Around them the air was ripe with the smells of giant, floating offshore kelp beds, teeming with seals and fish in their own marine playground.

  “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” Dieter said apprehensively, hanging back at the entrance to the Hotel Zum Sperrgebiet.

  Otto, still shaken by Frans’ disclosures on Shark Island, pushed through the revolving door. “Let’s just call it evening drinks… God knows I need one. We don’t have to stay long.”

  Dieter looked sceptical but did not object as they each ordered a double J&B Rare from the lounge bar. He settled into one of the corner sofas beneath a towering potted ficus while Otto called Ingrid from reception.