Dietrich turned down the side road headed for the gate, and said wistfully, “Well, if you want a doctor, Edward, I suspect they will have one here.”
As they drew closer, Scanlon’s heart sank, but what choice did he have? It was a prison camp, and a very large one at that. The first guard tower they passed was not some makeshift affair open to the weather. It was a permanent hut towering twenty feet in the air with a shingled roof, a wide overhang, and a wrap-around deck outside. It had clapboard siding, glass windows, a heater, and permanently mounted machineguns and spotlights. The guards could cover the entire encampment or aim down the fence line if they wanted. Further on, Scanlon saw another guard tower like it, and then another off in the distance. There were four in all, on just this one side of the huge rectangular compound. Inside the fence, were row after row of perfectly aligned, wooden barracks, hundreds of them. Worse, he saw that the fence had small, white ceramic insulators on each strand of wire, which meant it was electrified.
“You bastard, Dietrich,” Scanlon said as he felt an icy chill run down his spine. “What the hell is this?”
The Chief Inspector’s eyes danced contentedly across the large compound. “I am surprised at you, Edward. This is one of the seven wonders of the modern world; it is Dachau. I doubt you will find it on any map, but for the past twelve years, this is where the Third Reich performed one of its signature magic tricks. Like Dora, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibor, Belzec, and many, many more, they make people disappear.”
Dachau! No wonder the bastard seemed so confident, Scanlon groaned. Dietrich had known all along where they were headed. It was too late to turn around, and Paul Von Lindemann desperately needed a doctor. They would just have to bluff their way through, as they had ever since they left Leipzig. As they drove along the fence toward the main gate, he looked inside the compound and saw hundreds of emaciated, gray men in striped pajamas milling about the central parade ground.
“You have no idea how hard I had to work to get Berlin to leave me in Leipzig, in the law enforcement end of the business,” Dietrich told him. “I never did like these places.”
“It won’t matter, Otto.” Scanlon shook his head in disgust. “No one is going to forget them, the SS, the Gestapo, and all the officials who put people here. These camps will get you hung whether you worked at them or not.”
Tiny beads of sweat formed on the bridge of Dietrich’s nose as he stared out at the grim compound. “You surprise me, Edward,” he put on a plastic smile. “You are an educated man. With your history, I would have thought you Americans might appreciate our problem with the Jews, the Gypsies, the Communists, the homosexuals, and all the other social misfits. After all, you had your Yellow Peril and even Red Indians. We may have taken our social engineering a tad further than some, but personally, I fail to see the difference.”
Scanlon stared. “We don’t kill people, Otto.”
Dietrich smiled. “Now, who is being naive, Edward?”
Scanlon had heard stories about Dachau and the other Nazi concentration camps. Like everything else in Adolf Hitler’s Germany, hearing or reading about it never prepared you for the grim reality. This was no prison camp. It may have begun that way in the early 1930s, with the short-term internment of a wide variety of Hitler’s political enemies; but when the war started and German armies fanned out across Europe, it evolved into something infinitely more sinister and evil.
“I will admit, the place does look a bit grim,” Dietrich added. “You know how the SS can get so full of themselves.”
Inside the fence and beyond the gate, Scanlon saw the administration building. At the far end, there was a small office with a red cross painted on the door. “Turn in the gate and get us into that infirmary, Otto. You have the rank, and if you don’t get us in and back out again, that’s where they’ll take your corpse.”
“No need for threats, Edward. I believed you the first time, even before you hit me with that pistol. Truly, I did. So, just tell me what you want, because I plan on living past this afternoon. In fact, I plan on living for a very, very long time.”
The main entrance to the prison compound was through a decorative brick, arched tunnel built through the front wall of a wide two-story building. Dietrich swung the Maybach into the driveway and stopped at the tall, wrought-iron gate that blocked entry. An SS guard carrying a submachine gun strode over to the car and glanced inside, cautiously but politely. Big cars usually meant big shots and that was grounds to cause any mere Private to worry. Dietrich held out his Gestapo medallion and identification book at the guard and roared, “Open the gate, you moron. My pilot is injured and we need to see your camp doctor.”
The guard saw the Gestapo ID and snapped to attention. “My apologies, Chief Inspector, but this is a closed compound.”
“Who’s the Commandant now?" Dietrich roared. “Is it still that fool Weiter?”
“Yes, Sir! Uh, no… I mean…”
“Get him on the telephone, man. Tell him Oberführer Dietrich from Leipzig needs his immediate assistance. Do it now, you idiot. If this man dies, you shall find yourself on the other side of that fence, wearing the striped pajamas.”
The guard dashed back to the gatehouse, and Dietrich turned toward Scanlon with a self-satisfied smile. “Lord, I almost forgot how much fun being a thorough bastard can be, Edward. As your Bob Hope says, ‘Thanks for the memories.’ ”
“You only did what comes naturally, Otto.”
“Actually, I gave the man what he expected,” Dietrich corrected him. “Welcome to the German psyche, Herr Scanlon. After all, I am a full Colonel. That idiot Weiter will never be more than a simpering Lieutenant Colonel, so the gate will open. You shall see.”
Dietrich was right. The wrought-iron gate immediately swung open, and the guard snapped to attention rendering a rigid Nazi salute. “The first building on your right, Sir,” he said. “The Commandant will join you shortly.”
As they drove through the archway, Scanlon saw ornate wrought iron lettering across the top of the gate. “Arbeit Macht Frei,” it said. Work makes one free.
“It is an old SS joke,” Dietrich smiled. “You know what a marvelous sense of humor Reichsführer Himmler has — free as the clouds in the sky, as they say.”
The Chief Inspector drove into the compound and steered the car toward the infirmary along a narrow white gravel drive. In the far corner of the camp, they saw a small brick building with a very tall chimney. That was where the thin plume of smoke was coming from that Scanlon had seen from the road. A power plant or incinerator, he assumed. Today, the smoke rose slowly before the light breeze pushed it west. Slowly, it dissipated until it became a dull, gray smudge.
“What is that smell?” Christina Raeder asked from the back seat as she sniffed the air and turned up her nose.
“That is the crematorium,” Dietrich gave a curt answer. “This camp began as a reeducation center for political prisoners, or anyone else stupid enough to defy the Reich. When the education doesn’t take — well, people have been known to die here.”
“Then they got what they deserve,” her father declared.
Christina looked at him, and then stared wide-eyed out the car window, trying to understand it all. “How… how many, Herr Dietrich?” she asked, looking at the tall smoke stack.
“Here? Oh, perhaps 25,000 now, maybe more.”
“No, Otto, she wants to know about the crematorium,” Scanlon prodded him.
Clearly, this was not a conversation that the Chief Inspector wanted to have outside a limited circle of Nazi Party friends. “I once heard Weiter tell Himmler that the only way to escape Dachau is up that chimney. On a good day, he says they can eliminate 300 corpses, but even that is not nearly enough now. They are dying too fast for the ovens to handle.”
Christina Raeder suddenly grabbed the handle and opened her door. Dietrich stopped the car as she leaned out the door and threw up. “Pardone, pardone,” she mumbled.
“My sincere apologies, Fraulein
,” Dietrich said as he handed her a handkerchief from his pants pocket. “Just remember, it was not my idea to bring you here.”
“No, she needed to see it, Otto. Everyone in Germany needs to see it,” Scanlon said.
As they drove into the compound, they saw dozens of gray, emaciated men with shaved heads, pale skin, and gaunt expressions, milling about in small groups or sitting on the ground near the barracks buildings. The black limousine drew every eye, as if Flash Gordon’s spaceship had just landed in their midst. Sensing danger, however, they all kept their distance. The prisoners wore tattered gray and white striped prison garb that hung on their bony frames like rags. Each man had a triangular cloth patch sewn on the sleeve. They might be faded and torn, but the remaining colors ranged from yellow to red, green, or black. Scanlon would never forget the sight. They looked like skeletons.
Even Wolfe Raeder appeared moved by the sight. “This business with the Jews is most unfortunate,” he said as his nervous eyes darted about the milling crowd, “there won’t be a decent doctor or violinist left in all of Europe by the time that fool Himmler is finished.”
“Papa, my God!” Christina shrank back, appalled by her father’s callous comment. “What could any of these people have possibly done to deserve this?” she demanded to know.
“Done?" Wolfe Raeder answered, not comprehending. “They are enemies of the Reich, Christina. You read Mein Kampf. You heard Herr Hitler and Herr Goebbels on the radio. We are building a new society, a new German people. It is our historic imperative.”
Christina’s angry eyes bored into the back of Otto Dietrich’s head. “Enemies of the Reich? Tell me what that means, Herr Dietrich? I don’t understand.”
Dietrich frowned. “It began with the Communists, the Socialists, the criminal element, and political enemies of the party — the low-hanging fruit, if you will. After that, it meant anything they wanted it to mean: black marketers, trade unionists, priests and ministers who refused to shut up, uncooperative journalists, university professors, Jehovah’s Witnesses, the mentally retarded, the physically deformed, Jews, homosexuals…”
“Like Rudy? Is this what you would have done to him, too?”
“Christina!” Wolfe Raeder exploded. “What could you know of such things?”
“I know, Papa. I am not a child.”
“Lies,” Raeder puffed indignantly. “Everyone knows the Jews were shipped east for resettlement, where they have been well taken care of. It has been in all the newsreels, so all that is nothing but British propaganda. We know better.”
“For a very smart man, it amazes me to see what a gullible fool you can be, Herr Raeder," Dietrich replied, smiling benignly. He pointed through the windshield into the bleak compound beyond. "Newsreel? I am a policeman and as thorough a bastard as you’ll find, as Captain Scanlon here can attest, but I do my work up close and personal, not on a scale like this. There is your newsreel, Herr Doktor, and there is your resettlement,” he said, pointing at the column of smoke rising above the chimney. “German industrial engineering at its finest. It can all be reduced to formulas and numbers: the number of bodies, the number of ovens, and the number of hours. It is simple mathematics, the mother’s milk of science, as any good engineer should know.”
“You know nothing,” Raeder glowered.
“Is this business finally beginning to bother you, Otto?” Scanlon asked. “I don’t recall much of anything bothering you back in the basement in Leipzig.”
“That was entirely different, Edward,” Dietrich insisted. “You were a spy, you are a spy, and you deserve everything you got. It was The Game. No quarter is asked and none given. The Steiner woman knew it, your friend Kenyon knew it, and you knew it, too; so do not get all self-righteous with me. But this,” his voice failed him as his eyes scanned the sprawling compound. “This… I am a policeman, not a butcher or a mortician.”
“No, you’re the mortician’s assistant. Oh, you may not be stoking the ovens, but none of this would be here if it weren’t for men like you, Otto — good Germans, one and all, and a whole lot more like you. None of it!”
“You are wrong, my fine American friend,” Dietrich answered nervously, refusing to accept the indictment. “I did not make the definitions and I didn’t write the laws. Blame the lawyers, the judges, the politicians, and the people who voted them into office. You may not appreciate what I did back in Leipzig, but do not blame this camp on me.”
“Tell you what, Otto,” the American replied. “When they march you to the gallows and put that rope around your neck, I’ll have them sew a piece of cloth on your sleeve. That way, we can tell you apart from the psychopaths, the mass murderers, and the rest of the Nazi big shots who will be standing up there next to you. But you’ve got to help me out, Otto; what’s the color of indifference and lame excuses?”
“Very funny, but I will not find myself on any gallows, Edward," Dietrich answered. "You still have a hundred miles of my Germany to negotiate; and in the end you will have to deal with the lovely Fraulein Steiner. Personally, I do not think you are a match for either.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
By the time Hanni saw the roadblock, it was only a quarter mile away and there was no way to avoid it. The road was too open and turning around would draw too much attention. Those bastards in the black death’s-head uniforms were clever, she thought; they picked their spots well. Like a cork in the neck of a bottle, they had blocked the only bridge across the river for thirty miles. Worse, instead of the militia and a few police, it was the Waffen SS. They were combat troops in full battle gear with an armored car. It was not that Hanni was afraid of them, not after all these years, but she was tired and gut-sick of it all. She had been killing SS and Gestapo for four years now, here and in Russia, and she had enough. This hideous excuse for a war had to end.
She looked at her hands as they gripped the steering wheel. They were small and delicate. Once they had been a young girl’s hands, but since then, they had been badly abused. One was bandaged and blood stained. Both were scarred, bruised, and callused now, witnesses to the many guns and knives they had held over the years. How could they possibly be trusted to hold something as small and innocent as a newborn child? Perhaps that was the answer as to whether or not she really wanted this new life growing inside her. She wanted to see that child born into a world where things like this did not happen. She wanted to see her father, she wanted to see her baby, and she wanted to see Edward, too. She wanted to see them all — all three of them — and settle down in a small house somewhere where she could forget that any of this had ever happened.
Georg Horstmann also stared nervously at the roadblock and the crowded bridge. “Are you certain you want to risk it?” he asked,
“Are you losing your nerve, old man?"
“I never had any, Hannelore,” he answered with a mischievous twinkle in his eye. “Cowardice is what kept me alive all these years. You should try it yourself sometime.”
“Life never gave me that choice. My darling Edward made certain of that, and there is nothing I can do about it now,” she said glumly as she stared at the roadblock. “If we do not try to push through, I will never catch him.”
She knew there was only one good road between Nuremberg and Munich. Edward knew it too, so this was the way he would have come. He had a good set of forged papers, better than hers, and he had Otto Dietrich and his flashy Maybach for cover. Knowing him, he would have driven right down the middle of the road, honked, and shouted at them to get out of his way. Why not? She taught him everything he knew, both in and out of bed, and in the process provided him with all the motivation he would ever need. Damn you, Liebchen; and damn me, too, if I let you win.
Ahead at the foot of the bridge, dozens of cars and trucks sat in a long queue, waiting impatiently to pass through the narrow SS checkpoint, and very little of it looked official. Most were fat cats and party big shots from Dresden, Meissen, and Torgau, fleeing south and west ahead of the Russians. They carried
everything they owned of value, like rats leaving a sinking ship. In the crush of vehicles, perhaps a young woman and an old man in a small, beat-up coupe might slip through. If not, she had her pistol hidden under her coat and Georg had a submachine gun under a blanket in his lap. Interspersed with the long line of civilian vehicles, she saw Army trucks stacked high with wooden crates. What was in them, she wondered. Weapons and ammunition for the troops? Or stolen art, gold, and secret records? Perhaps it was more blueprints, research, and industrial secrets? Those would be the currency of the next Reich and keep Krupp, Thyssen, I.G. Farben, Agfa, BASF, Hoechst, and their ilk alive. The Nazis were clever, but the big corporations were even more so. Long before the shooting started, they opened subsidiaries in a dozen foreign countries under new, benign names. They incorporated in Switzerland, Sweden, Argentina, Paraguay, South Africa, and a dozen other countries, where they had already moved money, patents, and proprietary machinery. No doubt, crates like these were destined for a deep basement, an old mineshaft, or the bottom of an alpine lake. In a few years, when the time was right, the crates would slowly resurface; and they could buy anything they wanted — wealth, power, men, and whole nations if they wished. No, she realized sadly. The rats were not leaving the sinking ship, they were merely moving the cheese.
Hanni cut around two trucks and an old farm wagon. Those were not what the SS were looking for and should be allowed through without much delay. It was the big civilian cars loaded to the axles with loot that were being pulled over and searched. It was one thing to be an official looter with all the proper documents and quite another to be free-lancing, as some of them soon discovered at gunpoint. She saw one fat, red-faced party hack waving his papers high in the air as he was marched to a stone wall. A hard-eyed SS officer in well-worn battle fatigues knocked him to his knees on top of a large pile of bodies and summarily shot him in the head as his pretty papers flew away on the wind.
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