The Austrian: Book Two

by Ellie Midwood

  “Splendid.” Himmler concluded with a shrug. “It’s all settled then. And I’m certainly glad that you two could work everything out at last, in a civilized manner.”

  I hardly suppressed a chuckle at those last words of his, and proceeded to shake hands with him.

  “Thank you for seeing Obersturmführer Höttl and I, Reichsführer.”

  He pressed my hand and smiled encouragingly at Höttl, who saluted him in the best way possible. Only after we both left the office did Höttl start pouring his gratitude on me. Abruptly I was stopped by Heydrich’s voice behind my back.

  “Kaltenbrunner.”

  I motioned Höttl to go to the garage without me, where I’d left my car, and turned back to the smiling chief of intelligence, already sensing some malice.

  “Joachim, could you go make Reichsführer tea?” Heydrich asked Himmler’s adjutant. He clearly wanted us to be alone in the anteroom. After Peiper had disappeared behind the doors, I noticed that Heydrich was fondling something in his hand.

  “You dropped something, Ernst.”

  Breaking into a cold sweat I instinctually reached into my pocket where I kept my cigarette case, a lighter and the little golden chain that looked suspiciously like the one in my enemy’s hands. Her chain, and the one that I kept for whatever stupid reason on me at all times. After Annalise Friedmann gave her torn necklace to me in the Gestapo, I had it fixed but didn’t give it back to her; I don’t even know why. It became a sort of talisman for me, a tiny piece of solace in the world of darkness around, that brought me comfort and content whenever I rubbed the little golden pendant between my fingers. Maybe because it belonged to her I felt like having it in my hands was the only way I could feel close to her. But, whenever I asked myself those questions, I’d only shake my head to get rid of them all, because I was too afraid to admit to myself that I cared for her much more than I should have.

  I walked over to him and held my hand in front of him with my palm open.

  “Give it back.”

  Heydrich, however, was in no rush to return my secretly guarded possession back to me. He turned the pendant in his hands, appreciating the exquisite work.

  “And whose, I wonder, pretty little neck did you take this beautiful thing off?” he asked in a deceivingly soft voice. “Some ballerina? Must be. A.M. Those are her initials? Is she Viennese or local?”

  “None of your business. Give it back.” I caught the chain and pulled it towards me, but he still had the pendant clasped in his hand. I was staring at him hard, and yet he looked completely unfazed.

  “It’s nice to know that you finally turned to art, even in such form. Oh well, what can you do? You’ve always had a reputation of being a rake, and who, if not me, could understand you. But this one must be really special, if you’re carrying her little necklace in your pocket.”

  As I was blinded by anger, I didn’t come up with something cunning, and I didn’t nonchalantly tell him a lie that it belonged to a friend who I had it fixed for, or that it belonged to my daughter. Instead, I only pulled harder on the chain, until Heydrich let it slip between his long fingers. He was smiling victoriously at me.

  “Don’t tell me her name, Ernst. I like playing games, just like you do. I’ll find her myself.”

  I dropped Höttl off at his Berlin apartment, and drove to see Melita, cursing Heydrich under my breath. But what if he does find her, then what? What is he going to do? Harm her in some way just to get to me? His Gestapo does have that file on her, about the Jewish star, but still… would he go as far as falsifying something against an innocent woman just out of spite? She’s married to one of his officers, so he wouldn’t do that… Besides, who is she to me? No one. I don’t even know why I’m carrying this necklace with me, why I haven’t given it back to her yet… No, he’ll find out everything, he’ll know that we aren’t connected in any way, and then he’ll lose interest in her.

  Why am I so agitated about the whole ordeal then? What do I care what he does to her? She’s not my wife. She’s not my mistress. Just a pretty girl… Just a damn pretty girl, who I can’t get out of my mind for one second, I finally admitted to myself, stopping at the light and frowning at the golden necklace, still wrapped around my fingers. I shoved it angrily into my pocket and took my cigarette case out instead. That always helped.

  _______________

  Nuremberg prison, May 1946

  They always helped, Henry’s treats that he kept sneaking in for me away from his fellow guards’ eyes. This time he managed to smuggle a whole jar of jam in his pocket, and even though it was a very small jar, and I was not supposed to have anything made of glass inside my cell, Henry still handed it to me and made me swear that I wouldn’t break it and cut my neck with it.

  “Only after I eat all the jam,” I promised with a most solemn expression on my face.

  My young guard knitted his brows at first, not catching on to the joke said in a language foreign to him, but then he burst out laughing.

  “Please, don’t do it even after. If you die, they’ll put me on guard by Streicher’s cell, and he will drive me mad with his insanity!”

  “Why, what does he do?” I asked, hiding the jar in my pocket.

  “Well, apart from the constant anti-Semitic ramblings, he now demands women to be sent to his cell, so he can prove to everyone around what fantastic physical shape he is in!”

  “You have to be joking!”

  “Oh no, I’m not.” Henry laughed together with me. “James, the guy who stands guard by his cell, told me this morning during breakfast! Can you believe that old pervert? And on top of it he accused James of not supporting the German war on the rest of Europe as he was supposed to ‘as a fellow Germanic brother,’ because James is British, which is the closest one can be to German blood in his eyes I guess. I came up to his cell to ask, what about me? Why is he not accusing me of not supporting Germany, since my ancestors are Irish. To that Streicher looked me up and down, squinted and said, ‘You won’t trick me! You’re not Irish, you’re a Jew if ever I saw one!’ I asked why he thought that I was a Jew? And he said to me, ‘You’re from America, all of you are Jews there!’ Do you understand now that my very sanity depends on you staying alive? Please, don’t kill yourself, Mr. Kaltenbrunner!”

  “I won’t, I promise,” I replied, still laughing, and went to my cot.

  Later that night, when the lights went off, I waited for the guards to finish their usual roll call, and fished out the American raspberry jam out of my trousers. The top came off with a slight pop, and the unmistakable aroma filled the room right away. In a dim light coming from the open window in my cell door, I picked up some jam on my finger and put it in my mouth, smiling, and right away painfully recollecting another night and another jar of jam that Melita brought to bed. She never asked me to stay for the whole night, and neither did she like sweets. That’s how I knew that something was wrong.

  “You don’t have to catch a train till twelve, do you?” she asked me warily, nestling next to me and freezing at once, as if afraid that I’d get up and leave, like I always used to. It was our usual routine, actually. Melita was never the cuddling type, and I, to be honest, much preferred waking up alone and in my own bed, regardless of whose bed I had occupied the night before. I was never a morning person; I was always late for some meeting or late with yet another report, and women were always under my feet when I rushed to put myself in the most presentable state as quickly as possible.

  “No, I don’t.” I rubbed my unshaven cheek on Melita’s soft locks and asked the question she couldn’t bring herself to pronounce, “Do you want me to stay? For the rest of the night?”

  “You don’t have to, if you don’t want to.”

  She couldn’t see me smile at how solemnly she still cherished her independence from any man, even when she needed one for whatever reason she had, like tonight, but was too proud to say.

  “I want to.”

  We lay in silence, which was very unusual for both
of us. Both of us were unable to fall asleep. I knew that she wanted to talk about something, and waited for her to start.

  “I’m hungry,” I finally said, thinking that small, insignificant talk would give her the necessary push to whatever she was keeping to herself so far.

  “Are you really?”

  “Why yes, almost two hours of non-stop physical activity makes a man hungry, you know.” I chuckled.

  “That’s why I don’t like any men staying over for the night. You start demanding things after you’re done,” Melita grumbled with fake contempt in her voice, but nevertheless got up, picked up my shirt from the floor and put it on instead of a robe. “What do you want? And keep in mind that I barely cook for myself, and I’m not going to make anything that demands warming up for you either.”

  “A sandwich with jam will do,” I replied, trying to keep amusement out of my voice.

  “You’re such a sweet tooth! How come you don’t look like Göring yet, that’s what surprises me!”

  “I have a lot of sex with a lot of different women.”

  “You don’t say.”

  My sarcastic mistress of over twenty years disappeared into the kitchen, and came back in less than a minute without any plates, but holding a jar in her hand.

  “I don’t have any bread.”

  “Who doesn’t have bread in their house?”

  “Well, I guess I ran out of it and forgot to buy it!” she said in her defiant manner. “I have jam though. If you want it…”

  “I don’t seem to have much of a choice, do I?” I arched my brow, but, seeing her folding her arms, I lowered my head and outstretched my hand. “I’m sorry, please, don’t leave me starving. Give me the damn jar!”

  Melita laughed her still girlish laughter and climbed into bed with me, handing me the jam. We both dug into it with our fingers as soon as I opened the top.

  “So what’s going on?” I asked her at last.

  “Why?” Melita pretended to look busy with the jam just so she did not have to meet my eyes.

  “You hate it when people stay with you for the night. And you don’t like sweets. You only keep jam in your house because I eat it when I’m here.”

  “You’re very observant.”

  “I’m the intelligence chief, I have to be. So what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” she answered, trying to sound as matter-of-fact as possible. “Just overworked, that’s all.”

  “Want to talk about it?”

  “I’m the psychiatrist here.”

  “Sometimes even psychiatrists need someone to talk to.”

  Melita sighed and leaned against the wooden headboard.

  “Maybe, you’re right.” She paused for a while, twirling and pulling on a short curl at her neck – a nervous habit that she succumbed to very rarely. Last time I saw her do it was when she was telling me about the new program, related to the research in which she had to participate – the T4, mass euthanasia program. It had been over a year and she had never uttered a word about it since. For some reason I knew that I was going to hear about it within the next few minutes.

  “Ernst, have you ever doubted the Party policies?” she asked suddenly.

  “What policies?”

  “Party policies… in general.”

  I lifted my head from the jar and looked at her. In the blue-grayish nightlight I could still see her brows, tightly drawn together, and noted her lip that she was relentlessly biting. While I was thinking of the right question to ask, Melita turned away.

  “Don’t look at me like that.”

  “I wasn’t—”

  “No, just forget about it. I shouldn’t have said anything at all.”

  “Melita.” I put the jar on the nightstand and touched her chin, turning her face back to me. “I can’t read your mind. Talk to me. You know better than to think that I’ll go and tell Heydrich on you.”

  She finally smiled.

  “I know you won’t. I’m just afraid to say it out loud. In front of you and myself. I’m afraid to talk about it, because I’m afraid that you will only confirm my doubts and I won’t be able to go back to work…”

  “I knew that it had something to do with your work.”

  “It has everything to do with it.” Melita lowered her eyes once again. “I went to Soldau two weeks ago. It’s a new camp they made from the former Polish army barracks after we annexed the territory. Have you heard of it?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Of course you didn’t. I don’t know why I asked. They keep it all secret.”

  “They?”

  “Reichsführer Himmler and Gruppenführer Heydrich.”

  Melita went quiet again.

  “What were you doing there?” I asked carefully.

  “I was… a part of the official research staff, under Obersturmführer Lange’s command.”

  “What kind of research?” I felt like I was interrogating her, having to ask all these questions to drag answers from her that she was very reluctant to give.

  “The forced euthanasia research,” Melita replied after another long pause.

  “The mental patients?”

  “Oh no. Not anymore.” Melita pulled her knees to her chest and hugged them tightly. I didn’t interrupt her this time, allowing her to collect her thoughts. It was evident how difficult it was for her to speak of it. “At first it was only mental patients. I told you about that. It made sense in a way. It even made sense to euthanize the Polish ones, from the annexed territories. But in Soldau… for the first time I witnessed it… Ernst, they started bringing normal, healthy people there, and… killed them. In gas wagons, this new invention that Reichsführer borrowed from the Soviet NKVD. Those are the special mobile death units, which are based on the same principle we were working on in Tiergarten. Remember I told you? About the mass gassing by carbon monoxide?”

  I nodded.

  “They decided to use the same idea in the vans. The inside of the van is air-tight, and the exhaust pipe has been reconstructed in such a way that the exhaust fumes go inside the van, where the people are locked.” Melita looked me straight in the eye and that look gave me shivers. “They aren’t simple, like the mental patients were, Ernst. They understand everything that’s going on. They aren’t just screaming, they are… saying things, asking why we’re doing this to them, begging to let them out, calling for mercy. Normal, healthy people, who Reichsführer doesn’t want alive as well. Many were priests, some nuns, all Polish… Polish and German intelligentsia, too, Ernst. Professors, who… were expressing the wrong views. We are ordered to kill them too now. University professors, the brightest minds, who were unfortunate enough to get arrested for the wrong article they submitted for publication, or for allowing a suspicious idea to slip out during a lecture. We gas them now, too. Our fellow Germans, the intellectual elite of the Reich. Jewish people as well. They started bringing them, too, for the experiments in the vans. They are all educated Polish Jews; musicians, journalists, professors also. Their wives and children, the whole families. We killed them all, the ones who didn’t pass the selection for work in the camp. Children, all children. All the elderly ones. It’s a new directive, given by Reichsführer. If they can’t work, they have no right to eat our food for free. All of them to the gas wagons, so we can see how efficiently we can kill them. Going back to my initial question, Ernst. Have you doubted any of our policies yet? Have you ever thought, for a split second, that we’re going someplace very wrong with all this? Is it right to kill normal, sane people because they don’t fit with our criteria of the ones who are worth living? Are we really the ones who have the moral right to decide who is worthy of being kept alive and who’s not? Or is it me, who has all these very wrong ideas and I should go before my superiors, to admit my guilt, and let them put me on trial for treason, because I am a weakling, I don’t deserve to be called a German because… I just can’t wrap my mind around the idea that what I’m doing is right? Tell me, Ernst, what should I do?”


  I sat silently for quite some time, thinking that it was me, who couldn’t wrap my mind around all the information Melita had just dumped on me. It was all too appalling to even believe, let alone speculate about it. If I heard it from someone else I wouldn’t have believed it one bit. And then the memory of Himmler and Heydrich’s crooked smiles came right back to me, the ones that they exchanged during the conference we had in September 1939, in Warsaw, when Heydrich, for the first time, announced that there wouldn’t be any more border passes, and no more deportations. Only internal ones, to the newly constructed working camps. I recalled how I argued with him that he wouldn’t be able to fit all those people in camps. And then he had said that he was working on a solution for this ‘little problem.’ So this was his solution.

  I stretched my hand to the nightstand and found my cigarette case.

  “Can I have one, too?” Melita asked in a quiet voice.

  “Certainly.”

  “Do you hate me, Ernst?” I could swear I heard tears in her voice, and Melita never cried.

  “Why would I hate you?” I asked as softly as I could.

  “For being a weakling. For doubting my Party and my Führer.”

  “You’re not a weakling, Melita. You have all the right to doubt them.”

  I could see the tip of her cigarette shaking slightly together with her hand when she lifted her searching eyes to me again.

  “So you’re saying… that you’re doubting them too?” She barely whispered, with hope in her voice.

  “I have had certain doubts for quite some time now. But after what you just told me… No, we’re absolutely not doing the right thing, Melita. This is… not just wrong, but horrifying and unforgivable.”

  For the first time in my life I saw Melita cry, almost silently, quickly wiping shameful tears off her wet cheeks before I could see them. I put my cigarette in the ashtray, took hers from her hand, and pressed her tightly to my chest.

  “What should I do, Erni? I’m not sure I can go back there… To see all that again… What should I do?” She kept whispering between quiet sobs.