Black Cross wwi-1

by Greg Iles

  “I’m sure Freud would have a lot to say about my career choice,” McConnell said lightly. “I don’t really give a damn. I saw very young what war did to people, and I didn’t like it. I still don’t. When this one started, I tried to use my talents to prevent suffering, not inflict it. As you can see, the British weren’t satisfied with that.”

  She leaned forward and looked down into his eyes. “You remind me a lot of Franz, Doctor. I think you are a good and kind man. But I don’t think you really understand what is happening in Germany.”

  Anna got up and walked over to a shelf lined with what appeared to be old account books. “I would like you to look at something.”

  She removed several books, then reached into the space behind and pulled out a small leather-bound volume, its cover worn to a dull shine. “This is my diary,” she said. “I began it the day after Franz was killed. In some ways it has been my only friend. The first part contains nothing of consequence — merely personal things. But somewhere around page thirty, I began to record my experiences at Totenhausen. I recorded every experiment I witnessed myself, as well as things I overheard Dr. Brandt confide to other doctors, either in person or on the telephone. Some passages are things he said directly to me after visiting other Reich medical facilities. Concentration camps, euthanasia centers, various clinics.” She carried the book part of the way to the stairs, then turned and tossed it to McConnell.

  “You’re a doctor,” she said. “Read the Curriculum Vitae of one of your fellow physicians.”

  When she had gone, McConnell opened the diary and began to read.

  Rachel Jansen sat motionless in the wing chair in the anteroom of Major Schörner’s quarters. Schörner sat on the sofa opposite her, sipping from a glass of brandy.

  “Why didn’t he kill me in the reprisal?” Rachel asked in a monotone.

  Schörner held his glass up to a lamp and watched the light play through the amber liquid. “Sturm is just the slightest bit afraid of me,” he said. “And well he should be. I’d like to cut his throat with his own dagger. When I look at those bruises on your beautiful face . . . my blood burns. And I can tell by the way you sit and breathe that you are hurt in the side. Did that bastard Grot kick you?”

  “This is madness,” Rachel said softly, the act of speech sending stabbing pains along her damaged ribs. “What if I am discovered here? Now? Tonight?”

  A reckless smile played at the corners of Schörner’s handsome mouth. “That is the last thing that would happen tonight, Liebling. Brandt wants no conflict, nothing that might disturb his arrangements with Reichsführer Himmler. To Brandt, Sturm and I are merely a sideshow. Besides that” — his voice softened — “I had to see you. I had to know that the pig had not hurt you badly.”

  Schörner leaned forward on the sofa. “Did he? If you are unable tonight . . . I will understand.”

  Rachel shivered in the chair.

  “You are cold?” Schörner asked, his voice full of concern. “Here, Liebling, come and sit beside me.”

  Rachel hesitated, then rose and walked to the couch like a woman going to the guillotine.

  32

  Jonas Stern stood in the shadow of a wooden barracks building and listened. At first he heard only the wind, blowing down the Recknitz River. Anna Kaas was right. It was stronger here than in the treetops on the hills.

  It took time to separate the snoring from the wind. But that was the sound, he realized: snoring. He moved silently along the row of barracks buildings.

  A combination of stealth and boldness had brought him this far. Just before reaching Totenhausen’s back fence, he had crossed over three long, shallow pits dug under the trees. He remembered the smell of burnt flesh from North Africa, and recognized the pits for what they were.

  It was the trees that gave him his plan. Tall evergreens grew right up to the electrical fence on three sides of the camp. Since he was outside the fence, he simply slung his Schmeisser over his shoulder, climbed a fir tree, shinnied out along a branch and dropped to the snow beside the barn that concealed the gas factory.

  Before his nerves had time to stop him, he straightened his back and marched toward the gate that separated the factory from the camp proper. There was one sentry there, an SS private wearing the earth-brown uniform of a concentration camp guard. Stern made ready to get out his papers, but his gray-green SD uniform and Iron Cross were apparently all the identification he needed. He rapped out a “Heil Hitler!” as he passed the respectful guard.

  It was easy enough to get his bearings. Walking with obvious purpose — for the benefit of the men in the watchtowers — he moved through the alley that separated the hospital from the E-Block, turned left, then walked up to the mesh fence that bordered the inmate blocks. He strolled along the fence until he found a spot out of sight of the tower guards. One sentry stood watch at the camp’s rear gate, but he was facing the woods. Stern saw no insulators on the fence wires — no electricity here. He quickly scaled the fence and dropped to the other side.

  He’d heard the snores at the first block. He heard the same thing at the next three. Only at the fifth barracks, when he bent low to listen at the crack beneath the door, did he see a faint yellow glow, as from a candle. Then he heard a voice. A whisper, really. The hairs on his neck rose like quills.

  The voice was speaking Yiddish.

  He took a quick breath and slipped his right forefinger into the trigger guard of his Schmeisser. Then he stood erect, walked up the three steps and into the block.

  The candle went out instantly. He heard a frantic scuffling like rats in the walls — then silence. The air was warmer here, thick with the smell of soiled wool and disinfectant.

  “Listen to me,” he said softly in Yiddish. “Are you all Jews here?”

  No one answered.

  “Listen. I am not what I appear to be. Please, are you all Jews?”

  Nothing.

  He wished he had stripped off the SD uniform outside. “I myself am a Jew,” he said. “I have come to Germany from Palestine. I am a spy. I have come to learn the truth of what the Nazis are doing to our people.”

  Stern realized that if he had claimed he was the Messiah sent from God, he could not have stunned the prisoners more. He saw a faint reflection from eyes peering at him in terror and astonishment, like a den of rabbits surprised in the dark.

  “Who is leader here?” he asked.

  “Our leader is dead, SS man,” said a harsh voice from the darkness. A woman’s voice. “You know that.”

  “Who spoke? Please, I have not come to harm you, but I haven’t much time.”

  “You know who we are,” hissed another voice. “What do you want, SS man?”

  “This is an SD uniform,” Stern said in measured tones. “But I am neither SS nor SD. I am a Jew from Rostock who fled to Palestine. I am ready to prove that to anyone who will speak to me.”

  “Say kaddish then,” someone challenged him, “for all the people you have murdered.”

  Stern began: “Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may ra-bo, B’ol-mo dee-v’ro hir u-say, v’yam-leeh mal-hu-say — is that enough?”

  “He knows it,” said a hesitant voice.

  “That means nothing,” whispered another.

  “What year is it?” someone asked.

  “By the Hebrew calendar 5705.” Stern felt the pressure of time, but he was proud of the women for testing him this way.

  “What are the Four Questions?”

  He smiled in the darkness, remembering the Passover seders of his youth. “Why do we eat matzo? Why do we eat bitter herbs? Why do we dip our vegetables? Why do we recline?”

  “He knows.”

  “More lies,” said the skeptic. “No Jew would come here by choice.”

  “There is only one way to tell,” said a more confident voice. “The same way the SS pick our men from the crowds.”

  Stern was confused only a moment.

  “Can you pass that test, SS man?” asked the skeptic.
/>   With a flush of anger and embarrassment, Stern unfastened the trousers of the SD uniform and let them down a little.

  “Light the candle,” said the confident voice.

  In the uncertain light of the candle flame Stern saw five women wearing striped gray shifts. Sallow faces, dull eyes, hair cropped almost to the skulls. Beyond them others waited, watchful in the darkness.

  “Come closer,” said one of the women. She was young, with a dark thatch of hair and onyx eyes.

  He obeyed.

  The dark-haired woman crept forward with the candle and crouched in front of him. “He speaks the truth,” she said. “He is circumcised.”

  Several women gasped. Stern pulled up his pants. When the woman before him straightened up, he peered deep into her eyes. She seemed younger than the other women. Healthier, too. When he looked down, he saw not only skin over her bones, but also feminine contours.

  “I am Rachel Jansen,” she said. “You must be mad.”

  McConnell had been reading Anna’s diary for an hour. He did not want to go on, but he could not stop. He felt numb. Even now, he could not quite accept it. The nurse’s diary described nothing less than the systematic perversion of a renowned national medical community into the utter negation of everything medical science had sought to achieve since the time of Hippocrates.

  He had expected some horror stories. For months rumor had been rife in England about the brutality of the Nazi detention camps. But Anna’s diary had little to do with brutality. Brutality was a universal flaw in the human character, commonplace in every society. This diary described atrocities committed on another scale altogether. Even outright murder seemed banal in the face of what he had read in the last hour. One of the most alarming passages had had its effect because of who was involved, as much as what was done.

  1-6-43 Dr. Brandt returned from a trip to Auschwitz Main Camp in Silesia. All afternoon he complained to Rauch and Schmidt how the Reich’s money is being wasted there. He said Dr. Clauberg has allowed his professional standards to fall deplorably, that Clauberg’s experiments with mass sterilization border on quackery.

  McConnell knew well the name Clauberg. But could Anna’s diary really implicate the physician who had developed the standard test for progesterone action? A test that still carried his name? If the diary could be believed, it could.

  Clauberg has apparently taken to “castrating” both men and women by means of massive doses of X-rays. Brandt claims the inefficiency of this method is obvious to anyone with even rudimentary experience of gamma rays and their effects. To prove his point, Brandt requested a male prisoner, which Hauptscharführer Sturm promptly provided (17-year-old Russian POW). After the prisoner had been forcibly restrained by SS troops, Brandt pro- ceeded to perform a vasectomy, to show his protégés how rapidly the procedure could be executed by a skilled surgeon. He accomplished the procedure in four minutes. A discussion of female sterilization followed, in which Brandt again claimed surgery as the most efficient method. He said Clauberg will never regain his prewar eminence. Brandt plans to sterilize six women tomorrow morning to prove his point, before scheduled test of Sarin IV aerosol compound . . .

  The shock of this entry had lasted only until McConnell reached the first detailed description of one of Klaus Brandt’s “research projects.” This passage alone was enough to damn the Nazi state for all eternity.

  6-8-43 Eight days ago, Brandt purposely infected four boys and four girls with rapidly fulminating Group I meningococcus bacteria (by the droplet infection method, droplets being obtained from live carriers held prisoner in the isolation room). Greta Müller and I were instructed to rotate 12-hour shifts in the experimental ward until the study had run its course. This is my first opportunity to record what happened.

  Our functions were to (a) record the onset of symptoms (b) take blood samples and white counts when indicated (c) administer sulfadiazine (and also Dr. Brandt’s own formulation) to the separate patient groups at the proper intervals (d) administer fluids to prevent dehydration (e) chart the progress of each patient until recovery or death. The youngest patient was six months old (female) the oldest five years (male). The average age was three and one half years.

  On the fourth day after infection, meningococcus was recovered from the blood of all patients. Most had characteristic rashes at this time. Brandt ordered oral administration of sulfadiazine to two patients, simultaneously giving his secret preparation to two others. The remaining four patients (including the female infant) he designated as controls.

  The control group quickly exhibited symptoms of the septicemic stage of the disease: irregular fever, hypersensitivity, rapid pulse and respiration. Most curled up in the characteristic position and cried out when disturbed. All four developed serious rashes, three of these hemorrhagic. White counts of all controls hovered between 16,500 and 17,500.

  First fatality in the control group (four-year-old female) caused by overwhelming septicemic infection. 80% of body covered by hemorrhagic rash. Routine postmortem by Dr. Rauch.

  Infant control quickly exhibited bulging of the fontanelles due to massive infection. Experienced convulsions, low pulse rate and respiration. Death occurred six days after initial infection.

  The two patients given sulfadiazine showed marked improvement within 48 hours. Those given Brandt’s preparation were slower to improve. The controls quickly progressed into the next stage of the disease. The bacteria disappeared from their bloodstreams and localized in the meninges. Patients experienced vomiting and the familiar bursting headache caused by increased pressure of the cerebrospinal fluid. Also constipation, urine retention, and stiffness of neck muscles due to nerve root involvement. Two of the smaller children’s spines and necks drew backward into the characteristic “bow.” None could flex his chin.

  Third fatality in control group (three-year-old male) died in agony on Greta’s shift. I had managed to feed him some aspirin that morning, nothing else. Brandt’s postmortem revealed cause of death to be internal hydrocephalus. Ventricles of the brain were dilated, and the brain convolutions flattened by the pressure of a thick, purulent fluid. Also optic nerve involvement: patient was blind in one eye at time of death. Purulent exudate extended all the way into the spinal canal.

  Throughout the course of the experiment, Brandt performed several spinal punctures to examine cerebrospinal fluid. He was infuriated by the slowness of his own preparation compared to that of sulfadiazine. The children were terrified of these spinal punctures, and had to be restrained by Ariel Weitz and SS men. On day six Brandt resorted to direct injection of his preparation into the spine of one child. This leads me to believe that his secret preparation is unrelated to the sulfonamides, as local therapy is not required when using those. Brandt plans to duplicate this entire experiment in one week, using a different preparation. Also, one box of polyvalent antimeningococcus horse serum arrived yesterday. . . .

  McConnell looked up from the diary. He realized then that he was in a kind of shock. There were at least a dozen separate entries recording similar experiments on children, and references to nearly fifty more performed by Brandt and his assistant physicians — all accurate down to the last medical detail. But what horrified him most was that these experiments had no valid medical reason behind them. It was known that meningitis could be cured by sulfadiazine. Was Klaus Brandt torturing children merely to try and find some new pharmacological agent with which to enrich himself after the war?

  McConnell closed his eyes and pressed his fingertips to his temples. How could Anna Kaas record such things without apparent emotion? He had searched for some sense of guilt or revulsion in the record, but after the first few entries all references to her own perspective virtually ceased. Then he realized — or rather hoped he had realized — what she was up to. The German nurse was acting as a sort of verbal camera — recording what she saw in the manner that courts of law would demand evidence of a witness. Injecting emotion into her record would only cloud the issue after
the war.

  But still, he thought, to realize that she had stood by while these atrocities were committed — and in fact had participated in them — was difficult to grasp. He longed for some expression of anguish or plea for forgiveness, however insufficient or inarticulate, from the vulnerable soul that lies at the core of every human being. But as yet he had not found it.

  He was certain of one thing: if he got out of Germany alive, the nurse’s diary was going with him.

  Jonas Stern sat in stunned silence in a corner of the Jewish Women’s Block. More than forty women surrounded him. A single guttering candle flickered on the floor. He had never seen such eyes before, not even in the faces of soldiers unmanned in the midst of great carnage. Eyes like black mirrors, at once shallow and bottomless. He had the feeling that if he pressed his finger to one of those eyes, it would shatter and fall inward through a black cavern of grief and loss that could never be filled.

  He had learned much in his short time here. He’d asked a few questions about the histories of the women, mostly to keep up the fiction of gathering intelligence for Zionist leaders in Palestine and London. But when he heard some of the answers, all else went out of his mind for a while. Each story was a variation on the same theme: We were doing all right; Hitler came to power; the rich fled; the Nazis came to our town, our village, our city, our house, our flat; they killed my father, my mother, my husband, my sons, my uncles, my sisters, my daughter, my grandparents. And almost every story ended with the same line: I am the last of my family.

  As the women spoke, Stern learned that the Block Leader’s death and the brutal reprisals that followed had thrown the block into disarray, and that the young Dutchwoman who questioned him had assumed the dead Pole’s position by default. He had made up his mind to ask her the question he had risked his life to come here and ask, when she said:

  “How do you plan to get out of the camp, Herr Stern?”

  He knew what was coming. Some of the women had begun to dream of escape. He had to discourage them. They could not know that he had no intention of leaving the vicinity of the camp until — until what? Until he had killed them all, of course.