The bunks were stacked three high and were often covered in fleas, which jumped all over prisoners who already had lice infestations and permanently weeping sores on their bodies.
Johnson tore his eyes away from the page and gazed out the window. He realized he was gripping the file so tightly his knuckles were showing white. It was the kind of tale he had often heard from witnesses he had interviewed while on the trail of any number of sadistic Nazi war criminals.
Indeed, it was exactly what had spurred him on to ensure they went to court to answer for what they had done.
But reading his own mother’s account was something quite different. He looked up at the ceiling for a few moments to compose himself, then carried on.
The cruelty of the SS camp commanders was indescribable, unfathomable. I could not work out how such depths of cold hatred and savagery could exist in a person. Any excuse to beat one of us, any reason conjured out of nowhere, any minor fabricated indiscretion—they would grab it, a horrible thin smile on their lips. Inflicting pain, agony, humiliation, and then eventually death, was their daily reason for living.
For them it was the only way to be. To follow orders and to cause pain.
Did they have a choice? Of course they did. And they chose the way of darkness always.
The daily roll calls were a ritual of agony for all of us, of fearful expectation. And it was the time when the SS officers held the stage and could terrorize all of us at once.
The camp commanders Captain Albert Lutkemeyer and his number two, First Lieutenant Erich Brenner, were the ringleaders. They were a double act of utter sadism.
One day, at the end of May that year, the guards were all walking up and down the endless lines of prisoners at roll call in the yard—slowly, looking around them, like cold-eyed, emotionless lions prowling, hunting for a victim. I always tried to avoid making eye contact, always stood motionless. But this day, Brenner stopped in front of me, about half a meter away.
He squared his shoulders, his feet apart, and put his hands behind his back, holding his black leather riding crop whip, which he used to lash us with. His words to me were “You—you never look me in the eye, do you?” Then he repeated them, shouting at the top of his voice, screaming. He said it was disrespectful to avoid eye contact and that he was going to teach me some manners.
Then he turned to one of the Jewish kapos, the Jews who had either volunteered or had been told to do certain jobs to help the guards, and told him to fetch the ox whip.
I was shaking with fear because I had previously seen the first lieutenant whipping prisoners with it while they were held motionless on a whipping block.
Now it was my turn. The guards called this torture the fünfundzwanzig, German for “twenty-five,” because it involved that number of strokes with the whip across the buttocks. I’ve never felt such pain, and even now, I can’t put into words how it felt.
Then and now, I’ve no idea how I avoided fainting, but I think this was the only thing that kept me alive, because if I had lost consciousness while the first lieutenant was beating me, I’m certain I would have been shot. That’s what happened to others.
Afterward the guards were instructed to leave me standing in the Appell yard, where the daily roll call of prisoners was taken, for a whole day in the sun without food or water, and that no one must speak to me, and I mustn’t sit or lie down.
And that’s what happened. It was summer, and the sun shone from a cloudless sky for the whole day. I must have been very close to death. I had blood running down my legs from the whip, and I was horribly sunburned on my head and hands and feet, in utter agony.
I was unconscious for quite some time toward the end. I must finally have passed out; I don’t know how long for.
Afterward I developed some sort of infection from the whip wounds and even today bear those scars. The camp doctor came to look at me. He could do nothing, or wanted to do nothing.
But I prayed to the Almighty while I was out in that Appell yard, and he spoke back to me and told me I would live. And I did, somehow. He also told me I was loved and had to forgive those SS commanders for what they had done, or I would go mad.
And that was true. I had a sudden realization that inside me, I couldn’t choose my circumstances, but I could choose my response.
That is how I survived the whipping and how I survived Wüstegiersdorf.
Yet those who perpetrated these crimes, even if forgiven, must face justice.
Johnson flicked through the rest of the document. It included many more pages detailing camp life and then the utter relief his mother had felt upon unexpectedly being transferred to another camp prior to the end of her ordeal in 1945, when the Russians arrived.
It also described how, by the time she was released, two of her ribs were misaligned, causing her permanent pain, from where she had been knocked over and kicked by guards.
Helena, standing five feet eight inches tall, weighed just 80 pounds when she was finally freed, compared to the 125 pounds she weighed before her long ordeal began.
His mother. What a remarkable, strong woman she had been. Johnson could still hear her voice very precisely in his head.
He turned around to his computer. There were two new e-mails sitting in his inbox: one from the assistant school principal’s wife, which he ignored, and one from the Simon Wiesenthal Foundation, set up by the famous Nazi hunter of the same name. It was announcing the organization’s 2011 Annual Status Report on the Worldwide Investigation and Prosecution of Nazi War Criminals, the latest update of a document first published in 2001.
The report included a list of the most wanted former Nazis. The numbers on the list had dwindled sharply over recent years, due mainly to death from old age, with the odd successful prosecution to celebrate.
Johnson scanned through it, tapping the desk with his fingers.
Yes, the names were still there. Those bastards from Wüstegiersdorf had never been caught.
Chapter Six
Friday, November 11, 2011
Portland, Maine
Johnson was busy typing an update on the missing assistant principal when, not long after his children had headed off to school, an e-mail alert popped up on the top right-hand corner of his computer screen.
He pressed his lips together and opened the message.
Hi Joe,
Just following up on our phone chat, and hope your meeting was ok :)
This Nathaniel Kudrow thing. I have a gut feeling there is a great story in there somewhere. Not just his actual death, and our crime guys are on that one, but how that might be linked to what he said about the campaign funding.
It would fit into the election agenda ahead of 2012. Our editors here are very, very eager to pursue this.
Apart from Nathaniel’s info, my sources tell me David Kudrow’s got a big campaign fund, but nobody can work out where it’s all come from.
I’ve been speaking to a few people, and they’re convinced there’s something not right. One said to me that Kudrow’s father, Daniel, and his uncle Jacob in London are basically just small businessmen, yet they seem to have enough money to bankroll Kudrow’s campaign. So how do they do it? Where’s the money coming from?
Given the Nazi angle, would you be interested in chasing it for us? We can pay you out of our freelance budget. Our rates are quite generous, plus very good expenses.
Could start with the company accounts if you can get hold of them. It’s a private jewelry business, Kudrow Group. They have a chain of shops, Kudrow & Co., and a factory somewhere.
Fiona
Johnson leaned back in his swivel chair and spun round full circle, whirling past the whiteboard, the maps of the U.S. and the world, and his printer and scanner, then coming to rest in front of his computer again.
What to do? He didn’t feel very sure about taking on something that would involve working closely with Fiona. Then again, it had been years. They could keep it professional, couldn’t they? He considered the whiteboar
d, on which he had written his current list of jobs, along with a couple of prospective ones, all in red felt-tip pen.
His typically tech-minded son, Peter, teased him frequently about the whiteboard, calling it “very retro.” He had scribbled at the top of it Dad’s iBoard.
“I just don’t see how you can be an Apple guy with a whiteboard on the wall,” he’d said over breakfast just that morning. “You’re a dinosaur, Dad!”
Johnson often played a game with himself, writing tabloid-style alliterative headlines on the whiteboard for the jobs he was working on, trying to make them sound more interesting. Teacher trapped in teenage tryst, was his latest.
But truthfully, no matter how he dressed them up, none of the four he had listed were anything other than small-town stuff.
So what about this one from Fiona? Nazi money? It seemed unlikely. She knew exactly which buttons to press. It would mean time in the U.K. away from the kids, and there wasn’t much information to go on. Could Nathaniel even have been put up to it?
But then again . . .
What was it his old OSI boss Mickey Ralph used to say? Never die wondering, my friend.
He’d adopted that philosophy during his career at the OSI and beyond, drawing many, many blanks in his investigations but then sometimes coming up with the odd jewel, the occasional high-profile prosecution. The letters of thanks received from former victims of the Nazi perpetrators and their families, all kept in a box in his study, made it worthwhile.
Johnson scrolled through his text messages until he found the one from Vic about their planned meeting for the following Wednesday. He sent a short note back, asking if he was free for a phone chat.
A couple of minutes later the phone rang. It was Vic, using his personal cell phone but over the military-grade encryption system the two of them always used when calling each other. It was an old habit.
“Vic, how you doing buddy?”
“Good, nothing changes here. How’s things with you?”
“Okay-ish. Could do with a bit more action work-wise, but generally all right. Thanks for calling back. I’m looking forward to catching up on Wednesday.”
“Yeah, likewise, been a while.”
“Listen, I’m just after a favor, actually.”
Johnson went on to explain what he needed and the urgency of the request. “I’d like to know as much as possible about the Kudrow companies in the U.S., in the U.K., in Argentina. I want turnover and profitability over the past several years, and margins. If possible, I’d like those numbers for the different divisions of these companies, as well as the parent business. I’ll need balance-sheet strength, levels of debt, and anything that you can find on their suppliers and their customer base. Also which of the Kudrow family are listed as directors of these companies. And keep a particular eye out for anything that looks out of the ordinary,” he said.
“Is that all?” Vic asked.
Johnson ignored the slight note of sarcasm in his friend’s voice. “You’ve always been a wizard when it comes to company accounts, so I thought it might be up your alley. Those private companies can be hard work to research.”
“They can be, I mean, they obviously don’t file public accounts, but there’s ways and means, credit reports and so on. I think I can get something by the time I see you next week. I’ll get Neal on the case as well. He’s sitting here next to me.”
Neal Scales was another of Johnson’s former CIA colleagues who worked with him in Pakistan and still worked alongside Vic.
There was a short silence before Vic added, “Just to let you know, Joe, we do have to be careful with this sort of personal information request these days. We’re not meant to do them, as you know.”
“Yes, appreciate that, Vic. Anything you can do would be very helpful, and I’ll see you soon. Thanks again, buddy.”
Johnson ended the call and sat, deep in thought.
He, Vic and Neal always reminisced about their time in Pakistan and Afghanistan, as operatives for the Near East Division. But it was often black humor: they all knew it had been a difficult period for Johnson.
The three of them had been based in Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad, where the CIA’s station was located on the third floor of the embassy building inside a walled complex. But occasionally there was a need for covert trips up to and sometimes over the border into Afghanistan, which was then occupied by Soviet forces.
Johnson, like his mother, was a prolific linguist who had rapidly picked up Pashto and so was a natural choice for such operations. He had become fluent in Russian and German during four years in Berlin in the early ’80s to research his Ph.D. on the economics of the Third Reich. That was in addition to the Spanish he had learned at school and at Boston University alongside his history degree courses, and other languages picked up later in life. These included Serbo-Croat, acquired during an OSI investigation in 1999, and Arabic, which he learned with the assistance of a Washington-based friend who formerly worked for the Al Mukhabarat Al A'amah, the Saudi intelligence agency.
One morning in April 1988, only a few months before the U.S. embassy in Kabul was closed, Johnson and Vic were on one such trip to the dusty eastern Afghan city of Jalalabad, a long and dangerous forty-five miles from the Pakistan border. They were returning from a meeting on the eastern edge of the city with a highly placed Afghan mujahideen rebel commander whom Johnson had recruited six months earlier—a prized agent inside the regime who supplied a flow of information that delighted the deputy director at Langley. The object was to try and get from the agent a better idea of what was happening to the huge volume of weapons the Americans were supplying to the rebels—under a project called Operation Cyclone—to help them in their battles against Soviet forces.
After the meeting, as they walked back to their car, Johnson checked behind them just in time to see his agent being marched from the supposedly safe house in which they had been talking and bundled into a car waiting in the street. The agent had clearly been compromised, and his captors, it emerged afterward, were the KGB, who were everywhere in Afghanistan at that time.
Then, a moment later, Johnson spotted a rooftop gunman and yanked Vic into a doorway just as a hail of bullets crashed into the wall next to them.
It was an extremely close thing. One of the bullets caught the top of Johnson’s right ear, leaving him with a nick, a scar for life—a small U-shaped hole with a slightly ragged edge, as if some small animal had bitten a piece out of it.
The two CIA men took cover in a derelict building, where they were pursued by the gunman. In a tense standoff, Johnson, blood still flowing from his ear injury, shot the gunman dead with his 9 mm Beretta from a range of about twenty yards, before the duo escaped down an alley. They eventually made it back to their car and over the border into Pakistan.
All hell broke loose in the days that followed.
Langley went nuts at the loss of one of its top agents.
“Deeply unimpressive. We’re meant to be protecting our sources, not throwing them to the Russians for lunch,” was the payoff line in one encrypted telegram that came out of the director’s office.
Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence played hell with Langley, demanding to know why the CIA was recruiting and running its own agents in Afghanistan rather than working through them, as had been agreed.
The U.S. chargé d’affaires, who was running the Kabul embassy because the previous ambassador had been assassinated in 1979, went ballistic because an Afghan—albeit a pro-Soviet one—had been shot dead by an American on home soil, and he was left to clear up the diplomatic mess.
Johnson’s reputation, previously rising, was ripped to shreds. He felt terrible at the loss of his agent to an unknown and probably gruesome fate at the hands of some KGB thug executioner.
But what deeply troubled him and Vic was that this had all happened despite their tradecraft being impeccable and that they had been 100 percent certain they were black, completely free of surveillance, when they entered the meeti
ng with the agent, who had been similarly certain. Their strong suspicion was that they had been seriously compromised by a mole within the U.S. embassy in Islamabad who had leaked details of the meeting to the KGB.
Interestingly to some of the conspiracy theorists at the Islamabad station, the incident had followed a series of personality clashes between Johnson and his boss in the CIA’s Near East Division, Robert Watson, who at that time was chief of station in Islamabad—the role in which Watson had made his name.
However, the identity of the mole was never discovered.
During the course of the internal inquiry that followed—some called it a whitewash—Vic argued strongly for Johnson. But it was in vain: Watson called Johnson in and informed him he was being banned from any further cross-border work: effectively grounded in the embassy. He was the scapegoat.
“I’m not going to support you over this,” Watson had told a shell-shocked Johnson, whose ear was still bandaged. “We need people who are disciplined, who will use first-class tradecraft to run their sources and won’t risk torpedoing operations for the rest of us by working asshole-fashion in the way you’ve just done.”
Strangely, the fact that the tradecraft had been almost flawless, that Johnson had saved the life of another of his top operatives, and that he had developed other first-class sources among the mujahideen in Afghanistan and had run them effectively and safely didn’t appear to have been factored into Watson’s decision.
Instead, Watson set Johnson to work on developing sources who could provide information about Pakistan’s growing, highly secret nuclear weapons program. Again, Johnson delivered the goods, while Watson took the credit at Langley, thus adding to his burgeoning reputation.
But during 1990, Johnson made a mistake. He became entangled in a brief affair with Jayne Robinson, a U.K. Secret Intelligence Service officer based in Islamabad. Unfortunately, someone mentioned the dalliance to Watson, for whom that was the final straw—or maybe the final opportunity, some people thought. He was heard storming around the station muttering something about what if it had been a Russian honeytrap and how could he ever trust Johnson again.
The Last Nazi (A Joe Johnson Thriller, Book 1) Page 6