Hitler Has Won

by Frederic Mullally

  “That’s the whole idea of the trip,” Kurt said. “Obviously I can’t write about it till I get out there into the field.”

  “Has anyone briefed you, yet, about places like Auschwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka, Sobibor? Have you been told about our farming techniques in the Ukraine?”

  “Naturally, I’ll be interested in the farming techniques. The other places you mention—concentration camps? I can’t imagine they’ll come into the tour.”

  “Just as I thought,” Voegler nodded slowly. “You wouldn’t have the stomach for it.”

  “Oh, come now, it’s not a question of that! Look, I’ll have about four weeks and a helluva tight schedule.”

  “Which one have you seen?” Voegler asked quietly.

  “None, in point of fact.” Kurt tried to cover his discomfiture by emptying his glass and getting up to replenish it. “I’ll take a look around one of them, of course. It’s not a prospect that particularly appeals to me, to tell the truth.”

  Voegler said, “You’d better go with someone who knows his way around. Also, someone with rank.”

  “You think so? I shall have my laissez-passer from the Fuehrer’s office.”

  “That’s not enough. There are colonists and camp guards out there who can’t bloody-well read! They pretty quickly recognize a Leibstandarte Obersturmbannfuehrer, however.”

  “You mean ...” Kurt put the bottle down and turned to Voegler, his eyebrows up.

  Voegler smiled. “Can’t promise anything. But I’ll have a word with Rattenhuber in the morning. Time I had a change of scenery, myself.”

  IV

  THE FIRST-CLASS SS coach was uncoupled from the Berchtesgaden train at Munich and coupled onto the Berlin express; and there on the station platform, as planned, were Kurt’s mother and sister squinting their eyes against the blustering rain as they strained for a sight of him, then scampering under their shared umbrella to greet him at the door of the coach.

  “Come on up! We’re not pulling out for about quarter of an hour!”

  There weren’t many others from the Berghof in the well-appointed sleeping-cum-restaurant-car: Werner Voegler, of course, and his SS orderly, chatting in the rear of the car with a Wehrmacht courier; an official from Reichsmarschall Goering’s Economic Staff, East; a Waffen-SS Gruppenfuehrer and his wife, returning to Berlin from a weekend as Bormann’s guests on the mountain. Kurt settled his mother and sister at a table just inside the door, meticulously avoiding Voegler’s eye. He had already warned Sophie by letter that the SS officer would be traveling with him and had suggested that if they met at the station she should try to be polite to him, for the sake of harmony on the trip. He saw Sophie looking past him now, with a bright strained smile, as Voegler sauntered toward them.

  “Now, why haven’t I got a beautiful sister to see me off? And this, I take it, is Frau Armbrecht.” He moved in, making a gesture of kissing Margit’s hand. “I can see now where your daughter got her good looks.”

  Kurt’s mother was enchanted. Sophie said, “I hope you’ll look after my brother, Herr Obersturmbannfuehrer. He’s the only one I have.”

  “I take that as a sacred order.” Voegler clicked the heels of his shining jackboots. “But I’m going to start by looking after his charming mother and sister.” He snapped his finger and the batman came running. “Fill two coffee cups from your vacuum-flask and bring them here on the double—” then, turning back to the women—“unless you’d prefer a glass of cognac to warm you up?”

  Margit Armbrecht shook her head, laughing, and made room beside her for the SS officer. He held her in light conversation until the departure whistle blew, managing at the same time to direct at Sophie, sitting opposite him, two or three glances of such open admiration as to make Kurt almost wonder whether it was not love sickness rather than lust into which the SS officer had fallen. Whatever it was, it was clear, to Kurt at least, that his sister hadn’t been infected by it, for when his mother, just before leaving them, invited Voegler to join the family for dinner the night he and Kurt returned to Munich, Sophie’s nails dug so fiercely into Kurt’s thigh he had to smother a yelp of pain. Well, that was something his young sister would have to get out of by herself. Her rooted conviction—which to some extent he shared himself—that their deeply religious mother somehow regarded her children as untouched by the sordid side of the battle of the sexes had obviously inhibited Sophie from briefing her about the motives behind Voegler’s telephone calls to the house.

  Shortly after their train pulled out of Munich, the man from Goering’s economic staff, a former Reichswehr quartermaster-general named Weinbacher, took a seat beside Kurt, obliging him to lay aside his book.

  “A bit early, don’t you think, to start in on the hard stuff?” He gestured toward the other end of the carriage, where Yoegler and the Gruppenfuehrer were being served Schnapps by the SS batman. “I myself make a point of never taking a drop until I have food inside me.” They had already been introduced on the platform at Berchtesgaden. Making the best of the situation, Kurt got his pompous elderly companion talking about his job.

  “Fascinating, fascinating! On the statistics side, you understand? Would you believe it if I told you the Reich is on the way to becoming richer than the United States in material resources and productivity?”

  Kurt showed himself to be suitably impressed.

  “Well, just think about it, my dear chap. The iron ore of Sweden, nickel from the Kola Peninsula, all that Caucasian oil, soon as we get Maikop and Grozny working full-tilt again. Lumber from Finland, iron, steel and magnesite from Austria—I beg your pardon, the Ostmark—synthetic rubber from the new I. G. Farben plants in Poland. Now consider the food-supply situation. A virtually unlimited supply of cereals, fodder and potatoes from the Ukraine. The fruit, vegetables and wine of the Black Sea. Meat? My dear fellow, do you know how much meat we lifted off the Russians last year?”

  Kurt confessed his uncertainty.

  “Ten million cattle! Fifteen million pigs! How can a nation like the United States begin to compete with such a setup?”

  “It’s a pretty big country, the U.S.A.,” Kurt murmured. “Three million square miles and a hundred and thirty million people.”

  “Pah!” Weinbacher threw up his hands. “How does it compare with the Greater German Reich of today? Look at the miracle our Fuehrer has worked in ten short years of power! Twenty-eight individual nations conquered, annexed, or otherwise incorporated into the New Germanic Order. Are you aware what that amounts to in terms of people and territory?”

  Kurt was finding it difficult not to yawn; he had heard all these statistics a hundred times, notably from the Fuehrer himself. Besides, he had had to get up before dawn to catch the daytime express to Berlin, and it would be nice if this Weinbacher fellow would now leave him alone so that he could close his eyes and indulge in a little erotic daydreaming about his reunion that evening with Helga Gruyten.

  “You’re absolutely right, sir. Perhaps we could continue this interesting chat over lunch? Unfortunately—” He gave an apologetic smile, waving his hand at the heavily bookmarked volume still open on the table between them.

  “Of course, of course!” Weinbacher settled back in his seat. “You mustn’t let me come between you and your studies.” He closed one eye in a sage and oddly out-of-character wink. “Believe me, I’m fully aware of the important character of your work for the Fuehrer.”

  Picking up the book and pretending to go on reading it, he let his thoughts wander ahead to an apartment building on the Kurfuerstendamm and to the girl who had taught him that a fellow could get by enormously well with only one arm, plus an enthusiastic bed companion.

  The arrangement was that Voegler would spend the evening and night visiting old comrades in the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler barracks at Lichterfelde, a suburb of Berlin, and they would meet in the morning in the lobby of the Adlon Hotel before taking the train to Warsaw. It could hardly have suited Kurt better, and as he settled back in the cab, aft
er telling the driver to stop at the first flower shop en route, his thoughts turned again to Helga and the unique quality of their relationship.

  There had been an opportunity, after the Christmas and New Year festivities were over and Hitler had decided to stay on at the Berghof, to have Helga join the staff on the mountain, with a room in the unmarried secretaries’ quarters. Fräulein Eppler had put the suggestion to him, in her brusque official way, but after reflection he had declined the offer. Helga was currently retyping a large chunk of the first draft of Mein Sieg and checking for him a long list of minor queries, the answers to which were readily available in the archives of the Chancellery and the Foreign Ministry. There had been no need, of course, to go into this with Fräulein Eppler; he was his own boss at this stage of the book’s preparation and could direct his own secretary as he pleased. The real reason for not wanting Helga at the Berghof was simply that he was desiring her, physically and sexually, too much. The thought of daily propinquity during working hours, with no hope of sleeping together, was intolerable to him. He himself could never leave the Berghof complex, even on a twenty-four-hour pass to visit his parents, except at Hitler’s own suggestion, and this showed no signs of being forthcoming. And any prospect of being able to make love to Helga within the Obersalzberg estate—short of burrowing into the snow somewhere up in the pinewoods—was thwarted by the very rules against unmarried coupling in the barracks and staff quarters that had finally prompted Himmler to permit the SS brothel.

  What was remarkable was that Helga hadn’t once, in her weekly letters to him, tried to pressure Kurt into having her transferred, though she must have known he could have wangled it. Conceivably, it was because she also realized what a strain they would both be under at the Berghof. Whatever the reason, he was grateful to her. He even forgave her the fact that his last two letters had been unanswered. He couldn’t wait to see her face when she opened that door to him.

  It was a relief to see the lights on in her flat up on the second floor. The plainclothes policeman on duty inside the entrance gave him the usual friendly greeting, as if he had been away for only a week, and offered to carry his valise with the bouquet of flowers taped to the straps. Kurt waved him off. “Surprise visit,” he grinned. “Don’t call her up on the house phone.”

  She ruined the surprise by calling through the closed door, “Who is it?” when he rang the bell, and there was a short silence after he called back, with a poor attempt at disguising his voice, “Guess who?”

  The door opened. She stood there, blinking her small eyes at him as she tightened the belt of her thin cotton wrap. She had no lipstick on and her hair was tousled, as if from sleep. He felt like someone who had come to read the electric meter.

  “Remember me?” He was fighting a sudden panic.

  “You’d better come in, I suppose.” She turned around with a shrug of her shoulders and led the way into the sitting room, with its familiar smell and all its memories. He followed her, leaving his valise in the small hallway.

  “Helga, for Christ’s sake—what’s all this about?”

  “You turn up here,” she said, shaking her head slowly, “without warning, after nearly three months, and you want to know what it’s all about?”

  He heard a sound from the next room, like someone turning over in bed, and he strode to the open door, his heart pounding. A young, entirely nude brunette lay with her shoulders propped against the headboard. His mouth stayed open but no sound came out. The obscene object strapped about her pelvis was something one had read about in smutty books but never really believed existed. The girl was smiling at him in an incongruously feminine, reassuring way. He whirled back into the sitting room, where Helga was draining the last of a bottle of vodka into a glass.

  “It’s pretty obvious what’s been going on,” he said through his teeth. “Did you really have to sink this low?”

  “What do you know about it?” She was circling the room, keeping clear of him. “Up there in the mountains, with your own private whorehouse! Did you really expect me to spend every evening home, tidying up my stamp collection?”

  “I know what I didn’t expect—that!” He flung his arm out, pointing to the bedroom.

  She was looking straight at him now, with a twisted little smile. “There’s an acute shortage of young men on the home front, didn’t you know that? There’s even talk of allowing polygamous marriages—selectively, of course, and mainly for the Reichsdeutscher SS. But that’s for some time in the future.” She looked away, frowning. “It wasn’t very smart of you, dropping in without warning, like this.”

  “I wasn’t trying to be smart. I thought it might be fun to give you a surprise.” He drew a deep shuddering breath. “I’m glad I did. At least I know now just what I’m worth to you!”

  It was ridiculous. She was perching herself on the arm of the sofa, her small face tight with guilt and self-pity, and the skirt of her wrap had slipped open, exposing one pale thigh, and he wanted her like hell. He also wanted to smash up the place and fling that silent obscene brunette in the next room out by the scruff of her neck.

  Helga said, “What do you want me to do? I can ask her to leave.”

  “And break up a beautiful friendship? Don’t bother!” He was heading for the hallway, forcing his eyes away from her. As he ripped the tape from his grip and sent the flowers skidding across the floor he heard the girl in the bedroom calling out, “What’s going on, darling?” and Helga’s low hiss, “Stay where you are!”

  Kurt had slammed the front door behind him and was hesitating at the top of the steps, thinking how best to deal with the raised eyebrows that were going to greet him in the downstairs lobby, when the door of the apartment clicked open behind him and Helga’s voice called out to him. He turned halfway around. She had taken a step onto the landing and was standing there, gazing solemn-faced at him. Without a change of expression, she slipped the knot at her waist and opened wide her wrap, raising the flowered cotton high, like some exotic bat’s wings.

  “You bitch!” It came out of him like a cry for help as he turned right around to face her. Still deadpan, she began to rotate her hips, very slowly. Only when he was close, looking down at her with his stricken eyes, did she let the wings fall and reach for him.

  “You’ll like my friend Hanni,” she murmured. “She’s from Bavaria.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  I

  THERE HAD to be one clear and indestructible image that would stay tattooed on his memory long after all the other images of that nightmare journey through the New Order had shuddered and reformed into an obscene kaleidoscope of blood, stench and brutality. It was toward the end of the tour, and their second day in Auschwitz-Birkenau, the extermination camp in southern Poland. By then, Kurt understood that he was on trial—certainly by Werner Voegler and the SS and probably by Martin Bormann. He knew, too, that they had been right to put him on trial, for he had failed them—though they could hardly judge him yet—and now they had lost him, somewhere between Ravensbrueck and this charnel house of a Vernichtungslager.

  It was a Sunday afternoon in April, with the sky a uniform dull gray from horizon to horizon and a light chill breeze coming from the northeast. Kurt and Voegler were standing with the camp commander, SS Obersturmbannfuehrer Rudolf Hoess, and two of his senior Totenkopfverbaende staff, watching the last of a long column of Hungarian Jews—mostly youths over fourteen and men of middle age—wending its way, to cries of “Los! Los!” and blows from long rubber truncheons, toward the distant labor-camp complex of Auschwitz. A larger column, made up of older men, women and children, was packed, half-a-dozen abreast, down the long railway siding dividing Auschwitz from the extermination camp of Birkenau. The two SS doctors, who with brisk flicks of their canes had separated this new trainload of prisoners into two groups, “useful” and “disposable,” were now standing together near the head of the column, tossing back glasses of Schnapps and, from what Kurt could hear of it, conducting a post-mortem on last ni
ght’s carousal in the officers’ mess.

  This trainload had been the first of two, each of two thousand Jews, expected that day from Hungary. As usual, Werner Voegler was putting the questions Kurt himself should have been asking and nodding solemnly over the replies, as if he were learning something for the first time.

  “At a rough estimate, Herr Commandant, how much of this rubbish would you say you can dispose of in, say, the average year?”

  “An average year . . . ?” Hoess raised his eyebrows, dubiously. “We don’t really get them here, you know, Herr Standartenfuehrer. Last year, for example, I had to take care of about a hundred thousand Jews. We’re doing appreciably better this year—so far anyway. Call it about two thousand a day—mainly Hungarians and Poles—and you wouldn’t be far off.” He was a small man, with a gaunt, sensual face and very pale eyes. He could have been a factory foreman, wishing to impress one of his firm’s major shareholders.

  Voegler said, “This lot still here on the siding—there must be well over a thousand of them. Do they all get processed today?”

  Hoess nodded. “We don’t keep them hanging around in this camp.” He glanced at his watch. “Let me invite you gentlemen to hear some excellent music.”

  The orchestra, about fifty strong, was made up of prisoners dressed in their civilian clothes, forming a circle around the white-coated bandmaster, who, Hoess informed them, had been the conductor of the Warsaw State Opera. The work chosen was Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony.

  From where he stood, Kurt could clearly read the faces of the Hungarian Jews as they trudged past toward the “shower rooms.” Among the adults, expressions ranged from weary detachment to a kind of perplexed animation as the orchestra came into view. Some of the smaller children, trotting to keep up with the pace set by the guards, tugged at their mothers’ soiled and crumpled overcoats, plying them with questions. A baby, held against the breast of a young woman with a dark sensitive face, was gurgling happily as it tugged at its mother’s hair. She shook her head free and, in averting her face, her eyes locked for a second or two with Kurt’s. Tears welled from them, streaking the dust and grime from the long train journey. Kurt looked away . . . Beyond the low, squat building of the “shower rooms” a tall brick chimney rising up from the well-trimmed lawn was giving off a light-gray smoke. Beyond that, again, a dense screen of birch trees afforded the last view of natural beauty to the people now being guided and coaxed into the “shower rooms” by the Jewish Sonderkommandos, under the watchful eyes of the SS men and women guards.