He had to stay until the orchestra had finished its performance, now exclusively directed at the music-loving commandant and his SS colleagues. Meanwhile, the great steel doors of the death chamber were closed and locked, and the blue crystals of Zyklon B fed in through the specially constructed vents. Now the bedlam of muffled screams and frantic pounding of fists on metal competed for a while with the violins, causing Hoess to frown and shrug apologetically at Voegler. But the disturbance was short-lived. The steel doors opened again and the Sonderkommandos went in with their hoses, their shears, their plyers and their grappling irons.
The smoke from the crematorium chimney began to turn black and thicken, and the stench of burning poisoned flesh was already coming at them when the orchestra reached the end of the symphony. With an expressive wrinkling of his large nose, Rudolf Hoess led his group toward the waiting staff cars. Kurt looked back once, as he waited to take his seat. The orchestra was packing up its music-stands and scores. The trucks were arriving to collect that afternoon’s harvest of human hair, gold teeth, spectacles, wedding rings and with luck, a diamond engagement ring or two. The smoke was pouring thickly from the chimney now, forming a black polluting cloud through which the distant birch trees were barely visible. One of the guards’ dogs was barking.
It was important to him, that last look back. It was a final purging, perhaps a self-imposed sentence of death.
The tour of the New Order had started with an unscheduled visit to Ravensbrueck, the concentration camp for women, about fifty miles north of Berlin. Voegler had come striding into the lobby of the Adlon, a brisk and delighted bearer of good news.
“We’re in luck, Armbrecht,” he announced. “By pure chance, I ran into Helga Obeheuser, one of the medicos at Ravensbrueck, last night. She has a car outside and we’re going off to see her ‘rabbit women’ and maybe a few other interesting sights. Where’s your bag?”
“Right here.” Kurt reached for it, behind his armchair. “But what about our plane to Warsaw? And what the hell are ‘rabbit women' anyway?”
Voegler snatched the bag from him. “Let’s get going. I’ll fill you in on the way.”
The staff car, chauffered by a “Death’s Head” driver, reached the camp just before ten-thirty. On the way the lady doctor, prim and severe in her women’s SS uniform, told them of the valuable medical experiments she and her colleagues were carrying out on some of the women inmates of the camp, experiments “of profound importance to medical science and ultimately of tremendous benefit to the human race.” A whole new field of progress had been opened up by the availability in Germany of clinical human specimens—as distinct from rabbits, guinea pigs and so on—whose lives were socially of less importance than those of dumb animals and whose deaths in the pursuit of medical knowledge were therefore not only excusable but the only useful contribution these people could ever hope to make to humanity’s triumph over its environment. Doctor Obeheuser had a very busy day ahead of her, but she would put Kurt and Voegler in the good hands of one of her assistants. They could make a tour of the hospital wards, observe an experimental operation or two, if they so wished. After lunch, there would be time for a general tour of the camp before they were driven back to Berlin, to emplane for Warsaw.
It was the silence in this camp housing thousands of women (Polish, Czech, Dutch, French, Russian, Greek and Yugoslav) that made the first bizarre impression on Kurt—that and the ubiquitous SS Aufseherinen, hefty jack-booted women guards, mostly German but with a strong leavening of Scandinavian women volunteers, hardly one of whom was not swinging a long rubber truncheon or a dog whip as she marched about her business. He had steeled himself for the worst as they made their way from the camp commandant’s office toward the main hospital ward, a low concrete building set apart from the bleak geometrical complex of wooden dormitories and gray-brick workshops. From the doctor’s description of some of the experiments carried out on the “rabbit women,” Kurt was expecting a kind of terrestrial purgatory, hideous with the moans and dying screams of its suffering inmates. Instead, he found himself walking between two long rows of iron-framed beds whose occupants were either lying quite still under their single covering of a gray blanket or with their shoulders propped up against the head rail, their lusterless eyes following the visitors’ slow progress down the ward. The only sound was the low conversational tone of the young medic, answering the questions put to her by Voegler.
“There’s nothing infectious in this ward, you’ll be glad to know. These are all cases from our sterilization experiments. We’re trying to simplify the techniques as much as possible, for a real blitz on the problem of unwanted breeding in the eastern territories. Here, we pick out only the young and the fertile, and those who recover from the treatment are mated with males from Sachsenhausen. We are already getting very encouraging results.”
Behind her white-coated back, Voegler pulled a droll face at Kurt. “When you talk,” he prompted her, “about simplifying the . . . um . . . process—”
“No anesthetics. Swift intrauterine surgery or injections of acid, such as could be administered by any medical orderly. Mortality rate from hemorrhage, infection and shock has been a little disturbing, but we have another team of doctors looking into that. The object, of course, is to have the survivors up and working again in the shortest time.”
The place was nauseating with the stench of blood, urine and untreated pus. It was good to get out again into the cold fresh air. Voegler expressed an interest in seeing some of the bone-graft results, and for the first and only time during their whole tour Kurt put up an objection.
“You go ahead,” he said. “I can’t see how any of this is going to help me with the book.”
Voegler stared at him with astonishment. “You can’t possibly mean that, Armbrecht. What’s the New Order all about, if it’s not about racial hygiene?”
“All right. But what on earth has bone-grafting got to do with that?”
Frowning, Voegler turned to their guide. “Tell the Captain,” he snapped. “And then let’s get on with the job we set out to do.”
“A successful bone graft can give one of our German soldiers a whole new lease of life.” The doctor’s tone was reproachful, her eyes hostile. “Would the Captain prefer that we experimented on war heroes like himself?”
He followed them into the recovery ward. He stood apart, numb with horror, as the “rabbit women” were inspected, to a running commentary from their guide. There were women whose shinbones had been shortened or lengthened in the cause of medical science; one whose healthy hipbone had been removed and replaced by an aluminum replica. The swinging door leading to the lavatory came slowly open as they moved down the ward and a creature with shorn hair worked her way through on all fours, pausing every few seconds to summon strength. “Spinal case,” the SS doctor said tersely. “Looks like a failure.”
Over lunch the commandant got talking about his Aufseherinen. “You’d be amazed, gentlemen, at the variety of types we have volunteering for this work. A Berlin streetcar driver, an opera singer past her prime, a hairdresser from Dusseldorf, a circus equestrienne, a former prison wardress, a graduate nurse, believe it or not! We train them here, you see, for all the other important camps. I tell you, if they don’t make out here, they’re pretty useless anywhere else.”
Voegler said, dabbing a napkin to his mouth, “How do you judge failures in this kind of work?”
“Oh, by their squeamishness mostly. You’ll hardly believe this, but we had a young Aufseherin in here, a few weeks ago—girl from a good-class family—who never stopped blubbering from the time she arrived till the day I kicked her out. There was another, only last week, who started off by saying ‘Pardon me’ whenever she stepped in front of a prisoner! I had a feeling about that one though, so I put her with one of our top girls, Irma Greese, for four days. You wouldn’t believe the transformation!”
“Greese? They were talking about her in the mess at Lichterfelde.”
“Really?” The commandant looked pleased. “Beautiful-looking animal. Hoess wants her at Auschwitz, but not if I can help it.”
“What’s so special about her?” Voegler asked quietly, with a sidelong glance at Kurt. “Apart from her looks, I mean.”
“Special? I guess it has to do with the fact that she really enjoys her work. She’s in there, licking the hides off slackers at the drop of a hat. Most of the poor bitches start trembling if they see her a mile off!” The commandant started to peel an apple. “How about this, for example? When she first started here a year or so ago, she found out there were still about forty survivors from the hundred and ninety Czech women put to work here after we wiped the village of Lidice off the map. Apparently, Reinhard Heydrich had been Irma’s girlhood idol. She still has pictures of him plastered all over the wall of her room here. So what does she do to revenge her murdered hero? She asks to be put in charge of the Czech huts. And every day, for the past year, she gets those Lidice women out of bed half an hour before roll call at four a.m., lines them up stark naked in front of the block and lays into them with that whip of hers till her arm’s practically falling off. What’s incredible is that she hasn’t finished them all off by now. There’s about half a dozen of them left. Nut cases, of course, and they don’t bleed anymore. Too much scar tissue.”
Kurt had glanced at Yoegler toward the end of the commandant’s account, looking for some slight reflection of his own feelings on that lean intent face. There was nothing—only absorption in the story and a perceptible swelling of the vein over the right brow. It might have been then that his mind’s eye saw the first faint outlines of the trap that had been set for him, but this was something he would never be able to fix for certain during the trek through disillusionment and despair that lay ahead.
As the car taking them back to Berlin passed through the electrified fence, Voegler turned for a last look back before settling down beside Kurt. “Very impressive,” he murmured.
“Sir?” Their ever-alert orderly looked quickly around from his seat beside the driver.
“As you were! I was thinking about what we’ve seen here— one of the best-run camps in the Reich.” A smile for Kurt. “Wouldn’t you agree, Armbrecht?”
Words were nothing. They could have his words, at least.
He said, “I certainly would.”
From Warsaw they were taken to see one of the big estates on the River Bug now being turned over to German “colonists,” with priority given to former Wehrmacht officers and men. Here, as in both areas of partitioned Poland, the Fuehrer’s edicts were being carried out to the letter. The local population—men, women and children over ten years of age—worked the fields from dawn to sunset as slave labor under the whips of mounted volksdeutsche guards of both sexes. They received no pay, no food rations, no medical attention, and were hanged if they failed to report to work. Their livestock was confiscated, their schools were closed down, public transportation was forbidden and only one Mass a week was permitted them, on Sunday. The German settlers were given power of life and death over their slaves, and they used it indiscriminately.
As Voegler put it, on the way back to the Polish capital that night, “In ten years’ time we Germans will truly be a nation of Herrenvolk. You can forget about the patricians of Rome. For every slave those fellows owned there’ll be twenty working directly or indirectly for every individual German, however stupid and lazy he might be. Isn’t that a fantastic thought?”
“I suppose so—if we forget about what happened to Rome.”
“What’s the matter with you?” Voegler turned to him with a strained grin. “Can’t you see the difference between the New Order and all that other rubbish? We’re Germans, not flabby Romans.”
“I appreciate that. But when we’ve all become Herrenvolk? There’s nothing like easy living for sapping a person’s character.”
“The Fuehrer has thought of all that. We’ll be rich, but we’ll remain a warrior state. Perpetual war, Armbrecht—the best antidote to decadence. It’ll take another generation, probably, to drive the last Bolshevik into the Bering Sea. That’ll put Alaska on our doorstep. Canada. While you and I are riding around our estates in the Ukraine or the Crimea, our children will be campaigning south of the forty-eighth parallel.”
“And dying. Don’t forget that.”
“So? Can you think of a better end than dying for the glory of the Greater Reich?”
“Living for it,” Kurt said dryly, “has a stronger personal appeal.”
Voegler was shaking his head. “You’re a strange one, Armbrecht. If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder which side you were on.”
It wasn’t a question he would have put to himself, not in those simplistic terms, anyway. He was a German and a member of the party that had lifted Germany out of disgrace and bankruptcy. So it had been done by trampling on the weak. No nation had a monopoly of virtue and no state could stand at the bar of history with a clean conscience and unbloodied hands. But there was another question he now began to face. He was on Germany’s side, all right—anything else would be unthinkable—but who or what was a German? Was it the civil administrator of Krivoyrog with his Sunday shooting parties and his boastful bag of “twenty-seven peasants and half a dozen of their brats” before lunch—or was it Professor Walter Armbrecht of the University of Munich? Was it that comely SS girl with the “Gretchen” wreath of braids he had watched flog a Crimean farm worker to death in the courtyard of their Sevastopol hotel—or was it his sister Sophie, who fainted at the sight of blood? And now Birkenau—the smoking chimney, the camp orchestra, the birch trees.
Who were the Germans? There had to be a distinction, and not simply in the convenient terms of those who obeyed orders to slaughter and those who had never had to. For example: the harmless-looking people of Essen they had passed, during that morning’s drive from the airport, window-shopping or cycling home from work; was it conceivable they were unaware of the living hell created for the thousands of Jewish women and Russian prisoners of war put to toil in the city’s war factories? Had none of them seen and passed on the appalling picture of starving, barefoot women clad in old sacks being flogged to the assembly lines before dawn and flogged back to their unspeakable camps, fourteen or sixteen hours later, carrying their dead and dying? And if this was in fact common knowledge among the citizens of Essen, how were they moved by it? To impotent pity? To pride in the resourcefulness of the New Order? To the escape of disbelief? Maybe, when it came down to it, this was the answer: there were three distinct classes of German, rather than two. Or perhaps even that was too pat. There was one basic German in whose conscience all three reactions interplayed uneasily, never in equal measure and changing in relative weight according to circumstances.
A kind of madness had seized Germany, and it had nothing to do with war or the survival of his people. He could clearly see that now, but he could see also that he was a part of the madness, had given substance to it and would have to live with it till the end of his days. And he saw something else, and was frightened. Werner Voegler hadn’t broken him. By no word or hostile action had he given the SS officer an inch of rope for the noose he so obviously wanted to hold over him. The tour was ended. Tomorrow they would be back in Munich. Next day, Obersalzberg. What frightened him now was not Voegler but Adolf Hitler.
The first draft of Mein Sieg was now short only two chapters—that on religion and an end chapter reviewing the achievements and setting out the future objectives of the New Order. Relations between Hitler and the Vatican had worsened during Kurt’s tour, as the result of wholesale arrests of priests in Poland and Czechoslovakia, and the Party press was now openly hostile, calling for the scrapping of the concordat. While Kurt awaited the outcome of this confrontation, he would have to start getting together the final chapter, under the Fuehrer’s guidance. This would call for a careful sifting of Hitler’s claims and assertions and a persuasive and credible picture of the evolving nature and purpose of the Greater Ge
rman Reich— a task he would have set about with dedication and enthusiasm only a month ago. Now, the very thought of sitting down to justify and clothe in decency the obscenities he had witnessed in Germany, Poland and Occupied Russia swamped him in dismay. Where would he find the words? He hadn’t been trained in Doctor Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda and Public Enlightenment, had never pushed a pen for the servile Party press. He was an historian who had believed in National Socialism and in the genius of its leader, Adolf Hitler, and it served little purpose now to look back over his studies, over the lectures he had attended, in the hope of unraveling the skeins of self-deception, gullibility and downright cynicism that had so effectively strangled his academic conscience. The crisis he faced was a personal one, but what hope had he of concealing it from the soulstripping eyes, the almost uncannily perceptive intelligence of the Fuehrer? How would he survive that first predictable question, “Well, Armbrecht, what impressions have you brought back from your travels?”
It was Voegler, knocking on the door of his room in the SS guesthouse.
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