by Therese Down
Walter’s first day as a T4 director overseeing work at Brandenburg-on-Havel hospital prison was hard, even for him. He was to assist SS-Obersturmführer Wirth to dispose of around a hundred mentally impaired and chronically ill lebensunwertes leben – those deemed medically to be “unworthy of life” and subjected to what the Führer termed “mercy death”. Many children would be among those whom Gunther and Wirth would assist to a “merciful” release from their torment in the gas vans at Brandenburg.
Disposal of bodies was what most preoccupied Walter these days. That, and the images of children arriving in gas vans, twenty at a time, crushed like cattle bound for the abbatoir. But cattle probably didn’t make such piteous noises or cry and shake like these “unworthies” did as they waited to die. They stood cold and naked, while the medical staff attached the pipes from the truck engine to the platform beneath the chassis and left the engine running for the prescribed fifteen minutes. It was necessary to monitor the death process through small windows in the vans, to determine how long it took for the children to die. Then measurements had to be done quickly, by scientists, of the CO concentration in the van before the back doors were opened and it was too diluted by oxygen.
Finally, the little bodies were driven to prepared trenches or crematoria and tipped out of lorries in a profuse jumble of limbs and staring eyes. Some had ears missing, bitten off by others in the frenzy caused by a quite remarkable unwillingness to die. Wirth was not plagued by visions. He watched Walter’s face during the first few deliveries to Brandenburg and laughed at his colleague’s evident distaste.
“You get used to it. You know, in the end, this is just so much… flotsam. Look at them,” he had said on one occasion, peering through the gas van at the children and waving at them. Walter had indeed looked at the traumatized children and they stared back at him, some with faces contorted in terror, crying huge tears. He observed how the smallest ones reached out for others, desperate for comfort in this new and ungentle experience. “Would you like to live like that?” Wirth had shouted, slapping Walter on the back. “We’re doing them a favour.”
Walter envied Wirth. He hoped in a short time to reach such a state of comfortable inurement. He drank more, slept less and grew daily more irritable as his dreams followed him into comfortless sunlight and down cold stone corridors permeated by the odour of gas; corridors whose thick silence was the accumulation of the very moments countless mouths ceased to scream. These days, increasingly, that was almost exactly ten minutes after a precise quantity per head of carbon monoxide had been released into an enclosed space.
And Wirth was right. After weeks of repeated exposure to the most extreme cruelty of which men are capable, Walter attained indifference of a kind. Everyone who worked for the chancellery’s T4 programme achieved some state of mind in which they could carry out their duties and still go home to families and tuck children into bed at night. It was that or succumb to mental illness themselves.
The ten thousandth person to be gassed at Sonnenstein was an eight-year-old boy. He had suffered from cerebral palsy and had needed much close nursing care. The staff on the night shift during which Gregor was gassed laid him upon a gurney and covered him in a snow-white sheet. They placed red roses around his head and someone put a teddy bear on his breast, held firm by a carefully placed right arm, as though the child had passed away peacefully in sleep. And then they photographed him. They threw a celebratory “ten thousandth victim” party; the beer flowed and staff gave themselves up to wanton, sexual antics around the gurney. Walter heard of this cabalistic ritual, but shrugged his shoulders. Frankly, as long as the job got done and there were people willing to do it, what did it matter? The boy’s mother treasured the photograph of her son in peaceful repose for the rest of her life. She told everyone he had never looked so untroubled – and how caring the staff must have been to put flowers around his head.
By the time Walter was also assigned to the euthanizing administrative team at Eichberg, he was practically insensate to atrocity. He signed the euthanasia requisitions without any thought beyond that needed to move the pen.
On the 23rd August 1940, Hermann Goering made a professionally lethal tactical error. A certain lack of clarity in his orders to a Luftwaffe detail resulted in the accidental bombing of Harrow, just outside London. This destruction of a non-military location triggered a reprisal by eighty-one RAF Bomber Command planes on Berlin on the night of the 25th August. Their targets were industrial and commercial – but it was foggy. On this occasion, there was no time for Hedda and the children to seek protection in the cellar. Elise the cook was killed outright, as her bedroom was at the gable end of the house, which was obliterated in the blast. Hedda’s room was ripped apart, but the area of floor where her bed stood was left intact, though precariously close to the ragged and splintered ends of the timber planks that jutted into the open, fiery darkness of the Berlin night. When she had recovered enough presence of mind to process what had happened, Hedda inched her way in a state of barely controlled panic along that part of the wall remaining and onto the landing.
Her head was pounding and her ears felt as though they would burst. She could see Anselm’s tiny form, screaming his terror into the open sky, but she could not hear him. She reached for and clung to him. Agnette – where was she? Why hadn’t she come from her room? Where was Agnette? Hedda was assailed by a powerful nausea born of shock and agonizing terror. Clasping Anselm’s tiny hand, she leaned away from him and was violently sick. Where was Agnette? Anselm’s relentless screams were a steady counterpoint to the constant sirens that filled the night, but Hedda could hear only her own blood throbbing through her veins and a rushing, ringing sound like an untuned radio.
The ground beneath her feet was unsteady and flames grew brighter at her back as Hedda made for Agnette’s room and found herself screaming “No, no, no!” even before she clambered onto the door, where it lay twisted on the ground, blown from its hinges. Agnette’s curtains billowed like tethered birds desperate to be free, and the shattered windows breathed smoke into the room, where it was snatched away instantly by the draughts from the gaping doorway.
Agnette lay several feet from her upturned bed. The blast that had ripped through her room, shattered her windows and blown her door from its hinges had thrown her with great force against a wall, and she had hit her head on the lip of the ornate wrought iron of the mantlepiece. She lay perfectly still, twisted where she had fallen, her left arm beneath her body, her right thrown in front in a most unnatural position. Her eyes were closed and her mouth a little open, so that the thick and steady rivulet of blood that coursed from the wound in her forehead readily poured over her top lip and pooled against the cheek closest to the floor.
Walter and an SS officer, as well as firefighters, appeared at Hedda’s side. Hedda dared not move her daughter, dared not check for a pulse, could not countenance leaving her. Traumatized and shell-shocked, she knelt in her nightdress holding the screaming Anselm and stroking Agnette’s hair with a violently trembling hand. One of the firefighters put his head to Agnette’s breast, felt for a pulse in her right wrist, could determine nothing in the noise and the chaos, and shrugged his shoulders.
As gently as they could, coughing and signalling through the heavy smoke, two firefighters lifted Agnette and laid her on the floor of a wire cage they had hoisted to the first floor level of the house by means of an extending metal arm from a fire engine. Once Agnette was securely within the cage, they beckoned to Hedda and Anselm. Walter watched as all three were lowered to safety. Once Hedda and the children were out of the now steadily burning house, the men made their exit as quickly as they could. Ladders had been propped against the wall at this and the next window along the corridor, and as they jumped from the ladders to the street, the upstairs floors groaned and collapsed in a mighty rush of flame, timbers and dust.
The night was a cacophony of ambulance and bomb sirens, the clanging of the fire-trucks and the roar of fire and coll
apsing buildings. Hedda, lost in shock and deafness, clung to Anselm, rocking instinctively to comfort him as they and Walter accompanied Agnette to hospital in an ambulance.
Agnette was not dead. At the hospital, they found a weak pulse, stopped the bleeding from her head and rushed her to X-ray. Walter scribbled “X-ray” on a cigarette box to explain to the frantic Hedda where Agnette was being taken, and then a sympathetic nurse gave him a notepad. Hedda pushed the screaming Anselm to his father and insisted on following the gurney, even though she looked like an escapee from a lunatic asylum in her tattered and bloodstained nightdress, and was in need of urgent medical attention herself. Walter did his best to restrain Anselm as he screamed shrilly and strained against his father’s embrace in the direction taken by his mother. The same nurse who had given him the pad of paper relieved him of his child, and he stood still for a moment, then headed for the nearest exit, leaned against a wall and lit a cigarette. More than anything, Walter wished he were in France, pointing a flak gun at the sky and pumping it full of lead. He dropped his cigarette butt on the ground and crushed it beneath his boot. His last thought as he did so was that Goering was no longer very useful to him.
Walter took the pad of paper from his jacket breast pocket and scribbled a note for the waiting casualty nurse and ordered a passing soldier to give it to her. The soldier accepted his errand without question and saluted before running to execute it. Walter smoothed his jacket, straightened the leather belt around his waist, tapped his Parabellum and walked back into the hospital. He asked an orderly to direct him to the nearest office telephone. He dialled the Berlin exchange and ensured that the operator understood he was a high-ranking SS officer, whose calls were a matter of national security and to be given priority. He instructed her to call the home of Marguerite, his and Hedda’s maid. Walter himself had taken the precaution of installing a telephone in Marguerite’s house in case of just such an emergency.
Marguerite was safe but audibly distraught, and her family and several neighbours had gathered in her small living room to exclaim at the assault on their city. He instructed her to dress hurriedly and he would send a car to collect her and bring her to the hospital, where she was to take care of Anselm. She should also bring toiletries for Hedda. He would return to the hospital in the morning with money, so that Marguerite could buy clothes for Hedda and Anselm. At present, he was going to try and secure accommodation somewhere in Berlin. He made a second call, ordering himself a chauffeured car, a necessity for inspecting and servicing the growing number of elimination centres from Salzburg to Hamburg, Dresden to Stuttgart.
The journey he intended tonight, however, would be a short one. He wanted nothing more than to ascertain that his office at Tiergartenstrasse 4 was intact. He wished only to lie down upon its sumptuous leather sofa and rest. Tomorrow, he would use his connections to find and furnish a new house. Now, he wished only to sleep. He made one final telephone call. He curtly informed Hedda’s father that Hedda and the children could be found at the Rudolf Virchow hospital. He informed his parents-in-law that he would be seeking alternative accommodation and noted with an ironic twist of his mouth the hesitation before Ernst Schroeder offered his own many-roomed residence in the Tiergarten as a refuge for as long as Walter and Hedda might need. Walter thanked him, but hoped it would not be necessary to impose.
Finally, before taking his leave of the hospital in the immaculate Mercedes that drew up in the ambulance bay within fifteen minutes of Walter’s call, he informed the now terribly anxious nurse who was caring for Anselm that a maid was on her way to relieve her. He found Hedda still awaiting Agnette’s X-ray results and demanded to know of the busy staff his daughter’s status. He insisted upon seeing a doctor, and ignoring the tired and blood-spattered man’s protestations that he had other, seriously wounded, patients to attend to, made him look at Agnette’s X-ray and wrung from him a prognosis.
It seemed Agnette had sustained two skull fractures and there was, in all likelihood, a haematoma, which would need surgical attention. The situation was serious. It was possibly fatal. They would not know until they opened her skull. Coma was probable. Walter wrote all of this down on his pad of paper and handed it to Hedda. She wept and wept. Walter noticed she was shivering in her ripped and flimsy nightdress, and made a passing nurse fetch her a blanket. Insisting that his wife and son be given a side-room and made comfortable, he strode away towards the hospital entrance and his waiting car.
Walter watched the pandemonium of bombed Berlin through the Mercedes’ windows. There were fewer sirens now. Flames were intermittent, and though there were still places where people milled around in confusion and shock in their nightclothes, most of the city was now quiet. In fact, the bombing had not been extensive, and casualties were “light”.
A fine dew spritzed the windscreen as dawn lightened the sky. Walter cursed softly to himself. Sunlight was not what he wanted. He wanted the rest and comfort of darkness. He wanted quietness. In a very few hours, his office telephone would start ringing. He had a very important meeting to attend and he must bathe, and change his uniform. He cursed more loudly. He would need to find alternative accommodation. What had he been thinking? He would get no sleep.
By the time he got to his offices and noted the peach tinge of unripe sun reflecting in the topmost corners of the office windows, he was coldly furious. Damn the British. Damn Goering for an imbecile. Shivering a little in the dawn light, he threw himself onto the sofa, but the leather was cold, the stiffly upholstered arm an unyielding pillow. Unbidden reflections on the irony of his situation presented themselves for his perusal. How many children had he consigned to death – children still smiling, capable of conversation and voluntary mobility? Children capable of love? No telling. And now his own perfect daughter was to undergo brain surgery from which, it was clear, there was little hope she would recover.
Hedda and Anselm left the hospital two days after admission and went to stay with her parents. Each morning, Hedda would leave the Tiergarten district in an SS Opel Kapitan with a designated driver. She would have preferred to drive herself in her mother’s car, which, it was made clear, was at Hedda’s disposal, but her hearing did not return fully for weeks after the bomb blast and she suffered from terrible headaches, both of which conditions made driving unsafe. Anselm remained sullen and grizzly, and clung to his mother at every opportunity for days after they left the hospital. However, the family cook’s gentle encouragement and plentiful sweet treats persuaded him that he was safe in her care during his mother’s absence.
Hedda remained long hours of each day by Agnette’s bedside, watching her daughter breathe. No other signs of life were detectable in the girl’s slight body. As soon as X-rays indicated subsidence of cranial swelling and relative stability of the sizeable haematoma nestled in Agnette’s cerebellum, they would operate to remove the clot. What had already been erased of Agnette’s memories, higher thought-processing abilities, could only be estimated. Apart from the bruising to part of her face and into her hairline, Agnette seemed as if in a peaceful sleep. Hedda held her hand and wished with an indescribable anguish that she were able to recount to Agnette again, and without the slightest trace of impatience, how Iphigenia was spirited away at the last minute from the sacrificial knife.
The nurses shaved off Agnette’s beautiful hair in readiness for surgery. She seemed smaller and more vulnerable than ever. The extensive bruising to her scalp emphasized the severity of her injuries and made it impossible to avoid contemplation of the likely brain trauma caused by the fracturing of her skull. The vicious crisscross of surgical stitching following a lengthy operation did nothing to ease Hedda’s fears.
Hedda was lost in a deadening silence born of her deafness but, even more, the profound uselessness of words. She would speak to no one and made no attempt to listen to what anyone else had to say. The only way to communicate with Hedda now was to write what was essential for her to know. Anselm was content just to sit upon his mother�
�s knee each evening and fall asleep while she distractedly stroked his hair.
Weeks passed in this way. Walter stayed at his offices, then acquired a smart city apartment on the Bellevuestrasse. He made it clear to Hedda and his in-laws that his work was more important than ever, now that Berlin was in the enemy frontline, and it was better that he remained in the city where he could be called upon at a moment’s notice. No one protested. Hedda could barely look at him, and the Schroeders were hugely relieved that they did not have to entertain a high-ranking and tiresomely saturnine SS officer at their dining table each evening – Ernst not least of all because he was encountering Walter increasingly in his professional life. Besides, each man was ever conscious of the abhorrence and incredulity that would be the reactions of their wives should the true nature of their work for the Reich be exposed over dessert.
CHAPTER FOUR