Alphabet House

by Adler-Olsen, Jussi

  Chapter 13

  For the most part the accounts were horrifyingly detailed. Night after night the malingerers feasted on tales of their atrocities and tried to outdo one another. Each of them usually began relating a piece of the mosaic with a ‘Do you remember…’ that gradually revealed why they had ended up beside him, and why they intended to remain there at any price until they could slip away or the war came to an end.

  More often than not James was shocked.

  When these monsters finally stopped talking, their stories became transformed into nightmarish dreams with a form, colour, smell and wealth of detail that usually ended with his waking up bathed in sweat.

  Throughout 1942 and 1943, Obersturmbannführer Wilfried Kröner had been ordered make sure his SS Wehrmacht support troops for the SD security police kept close on the heels of the Waffen SS armoured divisions operating on the Eastern Front. Here he learned that every will can be broken, and that made him love his job.

  ‘Before we came to the Eastern Front we’d heard how stubborn the Soviet partisans could be when interrogated.’ Kröner paused. ‘But when the first ten partisans finished screaming, then it was time for ten more, right? One of them would always say something in order to get into Heaven a little less agonizingly.’

  The silhouette in the bed beside James spoke about hangings in which the delinquents were hoisted up slowly until their toes just reached the ground, and tried to describe the tingling sensation he’d felt when the ground was frozen and the condemned’s toes danced feverishly over the mirror-smooth ice. He related with satisfaction the time he’d managed to fling the rope so precisely over the gallows that two equally heavy partisans could be hanged at each end. ‘Naturally, if they wriggled too much it wouldn’t work every time, so we had to resort to more traditional methods,’ he added. ‘But otherwise one was encouraged to show a little imagination. It inspired respect. You could say the partisans spoke their minds more freely during my interrogations…’ Kröner glanced around to see if there was any movement in the ward. James shut his eyes instantly when Pock-Face turned around and stared at him. ‘…if they spoke at all,’ he added.

  James felt nauseous.

  In many respects those had been rewarding times for Kröner. During one interrogation a stubborn little lieutenant in the Soviet Army had broken down despite his iron will and obstinacy, and had pulled a leather purse from his riding breeches. It hadn’t helped him since they beat him to death anyway, but the purse was interesting.

  Rings and money, silver and gold amulets and a few roubles poured out onto the table. Kröner’s aide-de-camp estimated there were 2,000 marks when the time came to share the spoils. That made 400 for each of the officers on Kröner’s staff and 800 for himself. They called it recovered spoils of war and took care in the future to search all the prisoners personally before they were brought for interrogation, or ‘liquidation’, as Kröner laconically termed the summary executions. Pock-Face laughed as he related the time his subordinates had caught him in the process of plundering a prisoner without intending to share with them. ‘They threatened to rat on me, the ridiculous beasts! They were just as guilty! Everyone pocketed something if they could get away with it.’ The two listeners laughed quietly with legs drawn up beneath them, even though they had heard the story before. Then, in a low, confidential voice Kröner said, ‘But one has to take care of oneself! So I got rid of all three of them so they couldn’t try any more stunts. I was questioned when two of the bodies were found, but of course they couldn’t prove anything. They reckoned the third man had deserted. All very admirable. And this meant that in the future I wouldn’t have to share with anyone, would I?’

  The man in the middle bed raised himself on his elbows. ‘Ah, but you shared with me, nonetheless,’ he said. His face was absolutely the broadest James had ever seen, full of small transverse wrinkles that turned into a smile for no apparent reason or, more rarely, showed a tinge of anxiety. The dark eyebrows shot up and down, inspiring confidence.

  A fatal misjudgement.

  The first time Kröner and this Horst Lankau had come across each other was in the winter of 1943, more specifically two weeks before Christmas. Kröner had been on a raid in the southern sector of the Eastern Front. The objective was to mop up after a recent attack.

  The villages had been devastated, but not crushed. Behind the bombarded plank walls and screened by bunches of straw, families were still sitting, making soup from the last bones of their slain animals. Kröner had them all hauled out and shot. ‘Onward!’ he commanded the SS soldiers. It wasn’t potential partisans he was after, but Soviet officers who had something to tell and perhaps also a few valuables to be stolen.

  On the outskirts of the fourth village a detachment of SS soldiers dragged a man out from among the burning huts and threw him in front of Kröner’s staff car. The cur got up immediately, brushed the snow off his face and sneered at his captors. He stared fearlessly at their leader. ‘Order them to go,’ he said with a broad Prussian accent, waving SS men away with a deprecatingly cold-blooded look. ‘I have important things to tell!’

  Kröner found such contempt for death irritating and ordered him to kneel down, tightening a leather-gloved finger on the trigger as he aimed at the defiant face. Without the slightest hesitation the man in the shabby peasant clothes reported that he was a German deserter, a standartenführer in a mountain commando division, and a damned good soldier who’d been decorated many times and definitely not one to be shot without a court martial.

  Kröner’s rising curiosity saved the wretch’s life. Triumph was already painted on his broad face when he said his name was Horst Lankau and that he had a proposal to make.

  Horst Lankau’s military past was diffuse. James concluded that he’d already started on a military career before war broke out. He was a seasoned soldier and had apparently been destined for a glorious, if traditional, military career.

  But even the most illustrious traditions were quickly affected by the war on the Eastern Front.

  Originally Lankau’s mountain division, one of the trump cards of the offensive, had been deployed in order to capture Soviet staff officers at the enemy’s rear. Whereupon they were to leave it to the SD, or occasionally the Gestapo, to extract what they could from them. This is what Horst Lankau had been doing for some months. A dirty, dangerous job.

  One lucky day they had picked up a major general whose possessions included a tiny box containing thirty small diamonds, clear as glass and worth a fortune.

  These thirty small stones made him decide to survive the war, whatever the price.

  Kröner laughed with recognition when Lankau came to the point in the story where he said, almost apologetically, that the theft had been discovered by his own men.

  ‘I gathered them around the bonfire and gave them an extra ration of ersatz coffee, the trustful idiots.’ While they were slurping their coffee, Lankau blew all his elite soldiers and their prisoners into unrecognisable bits with a single hand grenade. Both he and Kröner laughed when he reached the climax of his story. After that, Horst Lankau had sought refuge among Soviet peasants with whom he traded small change for safety. He and the war would just have to get along without each other, he’d reckoned.

  And then Kröner had come into the picture and made things complicated.

  He’d enticed his captor, undaunted. ‘I’ll pay for my life with half the diamonds. If you want them all, you can shoot me now because you won’t get them and you won’t find them, either. But you can have half if you hand over your pistol and take me to your quarters. When the time comes you’ll report that you’ve liberated me from Soviet partisans. Until then you’ll let me remain in your quarters without my having to have any contact with the other officers. I’ll tell you later what’s going to happen after that.’

  He and Kröner haggled over the division of the diamonds, but it ended up with Lankau having his way. Fifteen each, and Lankau was to be quartered in Kröner’s camp with a lo
aded pistol in his pocket.

  Kröner made a final attempt. ‘I want a diamond for every week I take care of your board and lodging.’ The broad face broke into an even broader smile. Kröner realised it was a refusal. He would have to get rid of Lankau as quickly as possible so he wouldn’t attract unwanted attention.

  Lankau was by his saviour’s side constantly during the three days Kröner was on Christmas leave outside the camp. Kröner wasn’t sure whether it was the hand permanently planted in the pocket with the pistol or Lankau’s eternally foolish-looking, almost pious facial expression that made him uneasy. But he began respecting the man’s cold-blooded endurance. Gradually he began to realise that together they’d be able to achieve results that would be impossible to achieve separately.

  On the third day they travelled to Kirovograd where most of the soldiers went when the food in the field kitchen became too monotonous or life at the front too depressing.

  Kröner often sat there half-dozing with his elbows on the oak tables of the pub, amusing himself by picking out patrons he could start a fight with or, better still, who would pay him for not being beaten to a pulp.

  It was there that Lankau initiated Kröner into the plans he had hatched during the months of dreary idleness in the Soviet village.

  ‘I want to go back to Germany as soon as possible and now I know how,’ he said quietly, straight in Kröner’s ear. ‘One of these days you’ll report to headquarters that you have liberated me from captivity, just as we’ve agreed. Then you’ll procure me a doctor’s certificate saying that I’ve been so badly tortured by the partisans that I’ve gone raving mad. When I’m sitting in the hospital train on its way west, you’ll get two more of my diamonds.’

  The idea appealed to Kröner. He could get rid of Lankau and benefit from it at the same time. It could be a kind of dress rehearsal for what he himself could do if life at the front became too risky.

  Dress rehearsal or not, it was not to be. Behind the officers’ pub there were four small outhouses to supplement the ones indoors. Kröner had always preferred shitting in the fresh air.

  He swayed as he buttoned up his fly, relieved, and smiled at the thought of the two extra diamonds as he opened the door wide. In front of him stood a shape almost completely engulfed by darkness that made no signs of letting him pass. A stupid thing to do, thought Kröner, for someone so small in stature and puny to look at.

  ‘Heil Hitler, Herr Obersturmbannführer,’ piped the man without budging. Just as Kröner had clenched his fist and was about to knock the obstacle out of his way, the officer stepped back into the feeble light illuminating the wall of the backyard.

  ‘Obersturmbannführer Kröner, have you time to talk for a moment?’ asked the stranger. ‘I have a proposal to make to you.’

  After a few sentences the officer had Kröner’s undivided attention. He looked around, took the hauptsturmführer under the arm and led him out to the street where Lankau was standing, and into his car that he’d parked at the end of the nearest side street.

  The sinewy, little man’s name was Dieter Schmidt. He had been ordered by his superior to make contact with Wilfried Kröner. His superior didn’t wish to disclose his identity but added that Kröner wouldn’t find it very difficult to find out if he absolutely wanted to.

  ‘It’s safer for everyone that we don’t all know each other’s identity in the event that anything should go wrong,’ Dieter Schmidt said, glancing at Horst Lankau, who made no signs of introducing himself. ‘Since it is my superior’s plan, and until things get going he is the only one who would be incriminated, he asks that the gentlemen respect his desire for anonymity.’

  The thin man undid the top buttons of his coat and looked them both in the eyes for a long time before he continued.

  Dieter Schmidt came from an SS Wehrmacht armoured division, this was obvious. But originally he had been a sturmbannführer and vice-commandant of a concentration camp. This was something very few people knew.

  Some months previously he and his commandant, who was responsible for the concentration camp and a few smaller work camps belonging to it, had been forcibly removed from their posts, degraded one level and transferred to administrative duty in the SS Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, a practical alternative to dishonour and execution. But the longer they remained on Soviet soil, the more they realised they would probably never leave it again. The Germans fought like devils to hold their positions, but there was no longer any indication that they would be able to stop the massive Soviet Army. Despite the fact that Dieter Schmidt’s and his superior’s job consisted mainly of administration and office work, the distance from the front could be covered in less than half an hour by Soviet armoured cars.

  In short, their lives were in constant danger. Every day their typewriter tapping was accompanied by the thunder of cannons. Only fourteen of the original twenty-four superior staff officers remained.

  Such was life on the Eastern Front. Everyone knew that.

  ‘Our little game in the concentration camp probably wasn’t that unique, but we didn’t know that then,’ Dieter Schmidt explained. ‘We had a daily budget for running costs that had to be kept. For example, we had 1,100 marks a day for the prisoners’ food. So we cheated central administration and skipped food distribution roughly every fifth day. The prison mob didn’t make a fuss. We called it collective hunger punishment and referred to offences that had never taken place. Of course a few thousand of them gave up the ghost because of it, but nobody complained about that.

  ‘Then there was the income from hiring out slave labourers, though we seldom kept precise accounts, and finally we lowered the hiring fees a bit, which definitely increased our turnover. The factory owners and the other employers never complained. The cooperation was exemplary.

  ‘During the late summer we estimated our total earnings at over a million marks. It was a fantastic business until a kapo – one of those pathetic concentration camp prisoners-turned-guard – inadvertently knocked down an official from Berlin during inspection, smashing his glasses. The kapo instantly fell to his knees and begged for his life, as though it were something they could be bothered to deprive him of. He wept and begged and clutched the official, who desperately tried to wrench himself free with the result that the man simply held him tighter. Finally the kapo screamed that he could tell him all about the running of the camp, if only his life were spared.

  ‘Naturally, what he knew was very limited, but before we could pull him away and take care of him, he managed to shout out that the food rations had been fiddled with. And by then it was too late.

  ‘As a result of the audit everything we’d put to the side was discovered and confiscated. For over a month we sat in the jail in Lublin, waiting for our death sentences to be carried out. Apart from the course the war was taking, we don’t know what it was that altered our sentences, but someone had changed his mind and we landed on the Eastern Front.’

  James gradually sorted out all this information in his mind, bit by bit. Small fragments of information here, a tale there, and endless bragging made up the story of the malingerers next to him.

  Dieter Schmidt, the thin one who lay furthest away from him, often spoke very quietly and many things were difficult to understand. In an extreme situation like that, it was hard to determine whether he was subdued by nature or if it was due to the fear of discovery. But it was obvious that the longer the bouts of electroshock, the more hazy he became, whereas neither Kröner nor Lankau seemed to react much to the treatments and exchanged stories undaunted.

  James prayed that sooner or later a nurse would hear them. Then the three fiends would be exposed and his nightmare would come to an end.

  Until then he would simply have to make sure none of them became suspicious of him.

  While the malingerers’ story was certainly horrifying, it was also fascinating. Like the films and novels James re-enacted in his mind, it absorbed him more and more.

  To him, the scenes seemed large
as life.

  Dieter Schmidt always referred to his anonymous superior as the Postman, a nickname that came from his habit of using bits of human skin when writing messages of congratulation. ‘Isn’t it the wish of everyone in the camp to be sent away from here?’ Schmidt’s superior had asked.

  He described the Postman as cheerful and inventive, as someone who had made their life in the concentration camp comparable with conditions at home in every respect.

  But after they were demoted and transferred, it was the end of their little game and their time of plenty. The means had become fewer, the responsibility someone else’s, and the supervision of their work was officious, distrustful and thorough.

  And yet their chance had come in the form of a fantastic coincidence.

  ‘One day, when several sections of the front had collapsed – which in Berlin they preferred to call “front contraction” – the Postman got an idea,’ said Schmidt. ‘You know how everyone’s always screaming for reinforcements and fresh supplies in a situation like that.

  ‘Obergruppenführer Hoth, general of the 4th Panzer Army, was furious that day. He insisted that a whole goods train with spare parts for armoured vehicles had disappeared and ordered our unit to recover these parts immediately.

  ‘Three days before Kiev was conquered by the Russians, we did in fact find the goods wagons in a corner of the city’s railway yard. Hoth was happy and ordered the Postman to personally supervise their immediate transportation to Vinnitsa, where damaged military equipment was waiting for spare parts.

  ‘In Vinnitsa hundreds of heavy wooden cases containing bits of motors, caterpillar treads, axles and smaller spare parts were unloaded into a warehouse. It was almost dark at the back of this enormous warehouse where thousands of cases were already stacked in complete disorder. There were countless objects and materials sticking out everywhere that attracted our attention and made us curious. The Postman and I, we were thunderstruck by the sight. It seemed a huge amount of war spoils were being stored here, waiting to be taken back to the Fatherland when there was a goods train available.