The Redacted Sherlock Holmes, Volume 6

by Orlando Pearson

  “How will be able to justify that to your superiors?” asked Roberts disbelievingly.

  “There was a recent escape of prisoners from a train bound for the prison camp. I can tell my superiors that typhus has broken out there and conditions in Germany are too chaotic for anyone to check.”

  Roberts turned to Holmes.

  “What do you think?”

  “My dear General Roberts, our prime duty must be to the prisoners at Belsen. Every minute we spend here, more people will die there. I have no love of this dealing, but everything else is secondary to our duty to minimise loss of life at the camp.”

  “You are right, Mr Holmes. Let us return to our lines.”

  When we were back at our encampment, Roberts was told that a large contingent of journalists from Fleet Street and the BBC had arrived.

  “That’s all I need,” he said. “How did they find out about what is happening here?”

  “I suggest,” said Holmes, “that you wait and see what happens once they have filed their reports.”

  That evening we once again gathered round the wireless and listened to the BBC news from London. The Belsen prison camp, or concentration camp as the BBC journalist put it, was the first item. “British soldiers fighting east of Hanover have made a gruesome discovery. At the village of Belsen is a concentration camp, a prison camp set in fields. Our reporter, Richard Dimbleby has filed this report, ‘Here, over an acre of ground lie people dead and dying. You could not see which was which. The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved an awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around th….”

  Roberts leaned over sharply and turned the wireless off. “It is my duty to deal with this,” he said. “Mr Dimbleby is a great reporter, but no words can do justice to what we have seen.”

  Esmond came in. “The wireless operator has told me we will get the medical support and supplies you asked for, sir. We just got the message from London.”

  Roberts stared at Holmes with a look of disbelief on his face. “You seem, Mr Holmes, to have powers that are scarcely human.”

  “It is the least that I can do,” said Holmes soberly. “I feel I have nothing much more that I can offer you here as, for the moment your task as a soldier must be to organize the saving of lives rather than ending enemy lives. You must arrest Kramer before he is due to be handed back to the Germans although he is only a small cog in a wheel. The gallows await him, but we must get to the people to whom he answered if true justice is to be served.”

  I will provide my reader with a summary of what happened next at Belsen before moving onto the epilogue of this account.

  Kramer was arrested the day after the conversation above and faced the trial followed by the punishment to which I have referred. Amongst inmates of the camp, deaths continued at a shockingly high rate even after it was liberated. Many were beyond the help of medicine and nearly a quarter of the sixty thousand who were alive when we took it, had died within two months. The camp itself was burnt to the ground as the buildings harboured not just typhus but other killer diseases such as cholera and tuberculosis but Holmes and I were back in England when this happened.

  It was in mid-May that Holmes and I were summoned back to Germany. The chaos on our return was even more palpable than it had been a month previously. While efforts were being made to clear the piles of rubble, many roads were still mined, buildings booby-trapped, and many areas inaccessible.

  And then there was the search for criminals.

  Playing cards had been printed out and circulated with pictures of the most wanted men. Hitler was, inevitably, the ace of spades, and the other aces were Göbbels, Himmler, and Göring even though the latter had been captured after the cards had been printed. They stared out at anyone who got a pack—Hitler with his toothbrush moustache; Göbbels with his look of malevolence; Himmler, like a junior clerk with his pencil-like moustache and rimless glasses; and Göring looking gross and thuggish.

  The wildest rumours abounded and would continue to do so while these and so many others remained unaccounted for. The death of Hitler had been announced but no body found, and there were suggestions that he had escaped the capture of Berlin. Hitler was variously rumoured to have fled to South America, to be hidden in the Alps, and to be living submerged in a submarine. Göbbels appeared to have disappeared without trace, and there was no knowing where Himmler was.

  Lammerding had sought out Roberts’s division and had asked for British protection from the French who were already seeking his hand-over. Now Holmes had been detailed to interrogate Lammerding on what he knew of the Tulle and Oradour-sur-Glan massacres to establish what had happened and find out what other people should be sought in connection with the atrocities.

  Roberts’s men had been amongst the British troops who had made an advance across the south of the Jutland peninsula in early May of 1945 so as to forfend a Russian march for the same territory from the east. The British advance had been swift but costly—Esmond had been killed by a sniper at Roberts’ side only four hours before the German surrender was announced.

  Roberts greeted us outside his quarters in a schoolhouse at Bremevörde about twenty miles west of Hamburg by a bridge across the river Oste. The crossing was controlled by a guard post.

  “I have seen my men die in Tunisia, France, Belgium, and Germany but it is heart-breaking to have lost Esmond so close to the end of the war. Now,” he said, “I have to deal with Lammerding. And it will be to enable him to escape justice. Let us bring him before us and see what he knows before I pass him up the line. Still, at least Kramer will face trial on a capital charge.”

  A stream of miserable looking people in German military uniforms were making their way south across the bridge and they were being checked as they crossed. Roberts looked at them and commented, “I sometimes feel pity for them but when I need to take a more objective view, I look at pictures from Belsen which I keep with me at all times.”

  Holmes, Roberts, and I stood watching for a few minutes more until something suddenly caught Holmes’s attention. “The group of three,” he said, pointing at some bedraggled men, one in civilian dress with a patch over his left eye and the other two in military uniform who were approaching the sentry post. “It looks as though the two in military uniform are escorting the man in civilian clothes yet one of the soldiers is a lieutenant colonel and other is a major.”

  “Do you want me to stop them?” asked Roberts.

  “If you would be so kind.”

  Roberts went to the sentries to organize the detention of the three people that Holmes had noted. “A recently shaved off moustache on that man in civilian dress,” murmured Holmes to me, and even my eyes could see that the man’s upper lip was a lighter colour than the rest of his grimy face. “And he has marks on the side of the nose.”

  The man’s papers were examined. Roberts came over to us. “The papers are false,” he said. “They belong to a sergeant-major called Hitzinger but the stamp on his demobilisation papers was made with a coin.”

  Burgess a tall, bespectacled sergeant brought the prisoner into Roberts’s office.

  “So where have you been fighting?” Holmes asked the prisoner.

  “I am now in the north, but I was fighting in the west,” said our prisoner evasively, his one eye rolling in its socket.

  “Now then Hitzinger,” said Holmes, “we have your demobilisation papers here, but the date is obscured by dirt. Could you have a look and confirm the dates to us.”

  The prisoner squinted at the grubby piece of paper.

  “Do you need glasses?” asked Holmes solicitously. “Burgess, perhaps you could lend Hitzinger your pair, if his are missing, and see if they help him.”

  I could see t
hat Burgess’s astonishment at this request, but he complied and placed them on the prisoner’s head.

  Hitzinger was still struggling with reading his papers and Holmes walked over to him and flicked the eye-patch off the prisoner’s head.

  Suddenly Hitzinger was gone and in his place was the insignificant clerk-like presence of Heinrich Himmler whom we had just seen from the playing-cards.

  He looked calmly up at us. “I am rather glad to be revealed in my true form,” he said, and Holmes translated. “I am of far senior rank to anyone else left in this country. The Führer is no more, and I was his nominated successor. I insist that I be taken to see Field Marshal Montgomery or General Eisenhower.”

  “Look at this,” snapped Roberts, and showed Himmler some of the pictures he had from Belsen. “And Kramer told us that other places were worse. Eight tonnes of human hair were found at Auschwitz.” He looked as though he were about to attack our prisoner but then he mastered himself. “Tell me why I should not just shoot you out of hand?”

  “Do you know what it is to disobey a command from the Führer?” asked Himmler plaintively in reply.

  “But you are yourself a Führer. Your title was Reichsführer and you had the power to order a ceasefire at Belsen. Did you need instructions from Hitler to do that? The culpability of Kramer and of others will be established by a process of law and I am sure their defence will be that they were only obeying your orders. You have no such defence. You knew what was happening. You could have prevented it happening. I will not be happy till you are dangli..”

  There was a crunching of glass and a sudden smell of burnt almonds filled the room. “Fool I am,” shouted Holmes, “not to think he might have a capsule of poison in his mouth.”

  I froze for a second and then remembered my medical skills, I punched our prisoner in the stomach with all the might my frame could muster in order to make him vomit. Orderlies were summoned and emetics were forced down Himmler’s throat. But all to no avail. In fifteen minutes, he was gone. As he lay before us, he still had the air of a minor civil servant.

  Holmes and I completed the debrief of Lammerding over the next few days and about a week later we were back in Fenny Stratford. It was only then that the reaction to what we had done over the previous month set in. Food was scanty enough anyway in that summer of 1945, but Holmes starved himself, and I was completely unable to leave our cottage. My sight started to fail—a common experience among men subjected to the horrors of Belsen and other camps—although it has now largely returned. And, in my early nineties, I count myself fortunate that I have had so many years behind me with hopes of more to come when such a lifespan has been denied to so many of my fellow men.

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