American Reich

by Todd Colby Pliss

  “Name?” a shifty-eyed SS clerk shouted with intimidation.

  “Wayne.”

  “Wayne what?”

  Wayne had to think fast about what to say next. If he gave his real last name, then the SS would know he was Jewish, if they did not know already. Should he try and hide that fact? Where he was being admitted, would it make any difference anyway? Wayne decided not to take the chance of being caught fibbing. He answered, “Goldberg.”

  “Height?”

  “Five foot, eight inches.”

  The SS clerk typed Wayne’s information onto a file card. “Weight?”

  “A hundred and seventy-five.”

  “Hair color?”

  “Black.”

  “Eye color?”

  “Brown.”

  “The name of the whore that spat you into the world?” the clerk wanted to know of Wayne.

  With that question, Wayne wanted to punch the clerk. It was part of the Nazi strategy to demoralize the prisoners, Wayne knew. He would have to bear it, at least for the time being. He responded to the clerk, “Phyllis.”

  “The agency that arrested you and the other scum?”

  “The Gestapo.”

  The SS clerk put a pen and the file card he had just been typing on in front of Wayne and told him, “Sign it.”

  Wayne signed his signature on the bottom of the card. To the SS, that served to certify the accuracy of his statements.

  After all of the prisoners had their information writen down and their photographs taken, they were then admitted to the camp center.

  As Wayne walked through the camp’s main gate, he felt like crying. How could he have screwed up the world so badly? He thought of Dr. Hoffmann and her time machine. He wished he had never enrolled at New York University. Never had met Dr. Hoffmann. Never had let himself get talked into doing something so stupid as going back in time and killing Hitler.

  Once inside the camp, the newly arrived prisoners, lined up in columns, were forced to stand at attention. The seconds turned into minutes, the minutes into hours. Every time a prisoner would move so much as a fraction of an inch to scratch himself or wave a mosquito away, one of the always watchful SS men would waste no time in lashing out a blow with a club to the unfortunate man.

  Two hours into the torturous time the prisoners had been forced to stand motionless at attention, a prisoner sneezed loudly. A sneeze, usually a normal human function, was but one more excuse for the SS men to dish out inhuman pain and humiliation.

  An SS Noncom pointed his rifle at the poor man, who was in his fifties, who had sneezed. “Get down on the ground, as the dog you are,” he ordered.

  The prisoner looked at the SS Noncom with a pleading desperation in his eyes. The prisoner was the recipient of only a shine of hatred from the SS Noncom, who pushed his rifle barrel into the man’s temple. The prisoner obeyed the order and got down on all his fours on the muddy ground.

  The SS Noncom purposely kicked the man so hard in the gut that he fell over in pain. He said, “Roll around, you swine.”

  The prisoner abased himself by rolling around in the mud, getting his body and his clothes all dirty.

  With his rifle pointed at the man, the SS Noncom commanded the muddy prisoner, “Oink as the pig you are. Oink.”

  The prisoner further degraded himself by oinking.

  “Louder, you dirty pig. Louder,” the SS Noncom directed.

  “Oink, oink, oink…” the man blurted out at a higher volume.

  The SS Noncom and the other SS men watching had a huge laugh at the sight. No matter how many times they had seen a prisoner, whether a new arrival or an old timer, do the pig routine, it never lost its charm.

  Wayne thought to himself how demeaning it was, not only to the man down on the ground, but to the other prisoners who were witnessing what was occurring. Wayne, and the other prisoners, knew well that it just as likely could have been any one of them that was being degraded like the man in front of their eyes.

  Hollenburg Concentration Camp had been constructed in the same manner as the other Reich camps had shortly after the War. As with the other Reich camps, Hollenburg had three main, distinct areas: headquarters area, the SS residential settlements, and the main compound.

  The SS residential settlements were placed around the outskirts of the headquarters area and consisted of handsome houses, each with its own garden and terrace. A guard tower was evenly spread out every 250 feet inside the main compound. Around the clock, each guard tower contained an SS man with a high-powered machine gun directed at a specific area of the compound. From the main gate, a great bare space extended into the main compound. This was the all-important roll call area.

  It was into the roll call area that the prisoners were led. In the center of this large square space, stood a gallows.

  The gallows served as a constant reminder to the prisoners of what would await them should any one of them get out of line.

  The prisoners again were directed to stand at attention.

  SS-Hauptsturmführer Wilhelm Himmelmann rode into the roll call area on a handsome white horse. The horse, Snowflake, had become his trademark. From his position on the horse, brandishing a whip, Captain Himmelmann would tour and inspect the camp on a daily basis. When prisoners would see the tall, lanky camp commandant approaching on horseback, they knew to keep their eyes focused on whatever work they were doing at the moment. If a prisoner, even for a second, looked up towards the Captain or in any way removed his eyes from his workstation, the punishment was an immediate twenty lashes.

  The camp Commandant was there to personally give the indoctrination lecture to the prisoners. He dismounted his horse beside the gallows in front of the hundreds of new male arrivals.

  “Do not be so foolish as to delude your feeble minds as to why you were brought to Hollenburg,” he spoke coldly. “You were brought here for one reason. You are here to serve the Reich. Your type has been permitted to exist to serve the Reich. You should all be honored. If you do what you are supposed to, work hard and follow orders, you will be fed and will stay alive. For those of you that do not like to work hard or have trouble obeying orders, I can find a special place for you.” Himmelmann grabbed the noose hanging from the gallows' pole, and ran his long fingers up and down the length of the rope.

  “It is a place, I guarantee, where you will be able to get all the rest you desire.” He let out a short perverse laugh, and then continued his speech to the prisoners in the icy tone. “At Hollenburg I have rules that must be followed. The penalty for a violation of any rule is death. There are procedures at Hollenburg that must be carefully obeyed too. The penalty for the violation of a procedure is twenty-five lashes or perhaps a week in the underground isolation chamber without food. Rule number one: each morning at roll call, every prisoner…”

  Wayne watched the Commandant speaking next to the gallows and thought how fitting the Captain would look with the noose wrapped around his scrawny neck. Wayne pictured the scene over and over in his mind as he stood standing there motionless. On more than one occasion, he also pictured himself as the person who would be the one to kick out the bucket from underneath the Captain’s feet, sending the Nazi dangling to his death.

  SS Captain Himmelmann’s speech tediously crept on. He threatened the death penalty over thirty times for an endless series of offenses, some of which included stealing bread, attempting to escape, sabotage, not working hard enough, and being absent from roll call. Himmelmann did not mention a single permissible act. Hard work and serving the Reich was a recurring theme of the Captain’s speech. At no time, during the forty minutes that he talked, did he mention any chance of the prisoners being released from the camp.

  When Captain Himmelmann was finished with his longwinded orientation speech, the prisoners, in groups of thirty, were led into the bathhouse building. Wayne was part of the third group brought in.

  Once inside the bathhouse, the prisoners, in assembly line fashion, had their heads shaved by a
team of six resident prisoners. Lice had at times been a problem at Hollenburg. The SS was not so concerned with the prisoners whom provided a home for the winged insects on their head. Since the lice, though, were not able to distinguish between the body of a lowly prisoner or the body of a superior SS man, and the SS often had contracted the pests from the prisoners, the SS was insistent that prisoners hair always be kept as short as possible. That meant, for the prisoners, getting the heads shaved routinely every three weeks.

  After each group of prisoners received their “haircut”, they next had to completely strip down. The other prisoners working in the bathhouse collected their clothes and put them into large trash bags. Wayne wondered what the Nazis did with all their clothes, most of which were little more than rags. He would later find out from the prisoners who had been at the camp for a while that the clothes were incinerated.

  The prisoners, in their groups of thirty and stark naked, entered the shower room. The prisoner orderlies tossed them soap. Cold water flowed down from the showerheads. With only ten showerheads for each thirty prisoners, all of the men were required to share shower space. The new prisoners had exactly two minutes to cleanse themselves. They were given recently used, damp towels. Wayne thought about how the last groups of prisoners to pass through the bathhouse were going to get drenched towels to try and dry their bodies with.

  The last stop for the new prisoners in the bathhouse building was the tattoo room. Each prisoner was marked with an identification number on their right forearm, seven centimeters above the wrist. The blue ink on Wayne’s forearm read: 31740. When Wayne was a child he had wanted to get a tattoo so he could look cool; this wasn’t exactly what he had in mind. He looked at his arm and was repulsed by the notion that he had ever wished for one.

  Behind the roll call area and the bathhouse were the mess hall, laundry building, and prisoner hospital. In back of those camp buildings, was the prisoner barracks — a series of one story wooden buildings lined up in neat rows. A network of unpaved dirt roads connected the various buildings throughout the camp.

  The SS men deliberately guided the new prisoners, straight from the bathhouse naked and cold, through the long web of camp roads. SS men threw anything they could get their hand on at the wandering men, including stones, sticks, rotten fruits, and small rubber balls, as well as hurling a steady barrage of insults. Wayne was hit by a raw egg smack in his chest. The egg yolk streamed down his body as he and the other prisoners were forced to keep moving. The SS men made it a point to aim their throws at the men’s genitals. This was one more episode designed to eat away at the new arrivals self-esteem and pride.

  The new prisoners lined up in front of the clothing room, which was part of the laundry building, to be issued clothes. As each prisoner passed by a window, a set of striped workclothes were flung at him. The bundle included a shirt, trousers, thin coat, socks, cap, and a worn out pair of black shoes. To Wayne the clothes appeared tattered and he questioned himself as to how many other prisoners might have worn the clothes he held in his hands. The only good thing about them was that they smelled freshly laundered. Prisoner orderlies instructed them to get dressed.

  They were then led to the camp infirmary for the basic medical examination. As he was about to enter the infirmary, one of the prison orderlies, whispered in his ear, “Do not talk of any medical problems, past or present.”

  The short medical examination by the doctor consisted of him looking down Wayne’s throat with a flashlight and asking Wayne general questions about his health.

  “Do you have any current ailments that would cause you to not be able to perform your work?” the ancient doctor asked.

  “No,” Wayne said.

  “Have you had surgery or medical problems in the past?”

  Wayne had a bad back, the result of doing too many dead lifts in the gym his senior year in high school. A disc had herniated and caused Wayne to be inactive and in pain for months. He remembered, though, what the prisoner orderly said to him. Wayne had no reason to trust that stranger, but something in the man’s eyes told Wayne that he knew that he should.

  Wayne heeded the orderly’s advice and answered the doctor’s question, “No.”

  The last stop in the whole sickening procedure of the prisoner orientation was the orderly room. The same questions that were originally asked of Wayne when he first entered Hollenburg were again asked of him, only that second time by prisoner orderlies instead of SS men. Wayne’s answers to the questions asked of him were recorded on an official camp file index card. Wayne had a hunch that the other prisoners and himself being subjected to a second round of questioning was a way of the SS checking out their honesty by seeing if there were any discrepancies between the two different sets of answers given by each individual prisoner.

  Wayne was handed a ration of cigarettes (10) and a ration of bread (6 slices). He was then assigned to his barracks.

  The barracks each had two wings. A wing contained a day room and sleeping quarters for 200 prisoners. A communal washroom, with six pit toilets and four sinks, separated the two wings of the barracks. No barracks had showers. They were located in the bathhouse.

  Barracks 19 was Wayne’s new home. On the inside it was a gloomy place. The wooden floor was cold and full of splinters. There were no windows, just small ventilation portholes. Old rusted, metal bunk beds were tightly packed in together. Matted straw was what passed for the bed mattresses. An awful stench, which smelled like a combination of rotted wood and urine, permeated the air. Wayne was assigned the top part of a bunk by the Barracks orderly.

  A prisoner approached Wayne. “You got an extra smoke?” he asked.

  “Yeah, sure,” Wayne said and handed him a cigarette.

  The prisoner placed the cigarette in his mouth, lit it up, and took a deep drag. He asked, “Could I bum another one off you?”

  “Here, I don’t smoke anyway,” Wayne said and gave him another cigarette.

  The prisoner, without thanking Wayne, walked away.

  Samuel, a prisoner of about the same age as Wayne, who had been a resident of Barracks 19 since he was a teenager, strutted over to Wayne from where he had been standing. “Why the hell did you do that?” he asked with agitation.

  “Do what?” Wayne questioned.

  “Give away your cigarettes!”

  “I don’t need them. I don’t smoke.”

  “You greens never stop amazing me,” Samuel said. “Where are your possessions? Let me see them.”

  “What possessions?”

  “Exactly. You ain’t got nothing now. Nothing worth shit. Except later today or one day next week or sometime next year, if you live that long, you’re going to want an extra ration of bread or a pair of socks that ain’t full of holes or some other item in limited supply and you’ll be asked what you got in return for that item and, mister nonsmoker, if you wise up, you might just have something worthwhile to somebody else.” Samuel pointed to the remaining cigarettes in Wayne’s shirt pocket. “Got it?”

  Wayne realized that what Samuel had said made sense. “Got it.”

  “Good,” Samuel said. “Now, give me a cigarette.”

  “Is this some kind of test?” Wayne wanted to know.

  “This ain’t no test. I gave you advice that’s worth something and I want a smoke.”

  Wayne handed a cigarette to Samuel, who promptly struck a match and lit it up.

  “Samuel,” he said and put his hand out.

  Wayne shook Samuel’s hand and introduced himself, “Wayne.”

  Samuel inhaled on his smoke and said, “We have a saying around here, Wayne. The first fifteen years are the hardest, then a man gets used to it.” Without another word, he walked off.

  Wayne spent the rest of that day sitting on his bunk. Many of the prisoners, having come from the same ghetto, knew each other. A few of the new prisoners introduced themselves to Wayne. Some of the prisoners amused themselves by playing cards or shooting dice. The “old timers”, men like Sam
uel who had been prisoners for years, had been able to finagle such small amusements, like playing cards and dice, into the barracks. Wayne got the impression that most of the new arrivals did not seem fazed by their new surroundings. They appeared to have calmly accepted being interned.

  Wayne overheard one new prisoner, “At least I won’t starve here”. Wayne could only imagine the conditions of the places from where these men had come.

  A senior block inmate was assigned one per barracks and was responsible for the men living in his barracks. Each senior block inmate was chosen by the prisoner block leader, the man, who himself a prisoner, responsible for all of the barracks and the men who resided in them as a whole.

  The senior block inmate of Barracks 19, a man simply called Shorty, informed the new arrivals at ten o’clock that it was time for lights out. A full day of work was ahead.

  The main compound of Hollenburg became quiet and still under the darkness of evening, except for the occasional rustle of an SS guard patrolling the grounds. Wayne lay uncomfortably on his straw mattress and could not sleep at all that first night in the camp. He cried and felt homesick. In his mind, all he could think about was getting out of that place and getting a hold of those Gadolinium Crystals. He knew it would be suicide to try and escape, though he was tempted to take the chance. From that day on, the only thing Wayne had in his life worth living for was hope. Hope that he would get out of there somehow and be able to do what he would have to in order to right the wrongs of his actions. Hope that he would return the world back to normal. Hope that he would see his parents again. Hope that he would see his love, Lauren, again. Wayne ate a slice of his stale bread ration, and was finally able to dose off into a light sleep for an hour before the earsplitting sounds of the reveille sirens rang out form the camp loudspeakers.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The prisoners, immediately upon waking, had to assemble in the roll call area. Thousands of men dressed in zebra-striped outfits lined up in columns, arranged according by barrack number. The men were required to remove their caps from their heads and stand totally still during roll call, which lasted a minimum of an hour every morning, regardless of how bad weather conditions were. SS men kept a watch on the prisoners during roll call, always searching for the slightest excuse to dish out one of their various forms of punishment to a prisoner. A prisoner might be accused of moving during roll call, which was hard not to do, or not keeping his eyes looking straight ahead at the gallows.