They talked about the alleged medical experiments which Nazi doctors had been carrying on in the camp, under government orders. The son of Budd-Erling had been told about these at Karinhall, by one of the “scientists” who had planned the work. Eleven thousand men had died from being infected with malaria, in order to test various cures which didn’t succeed. With the idea of helping Nazi airmen who parachuted into the North Sea or the Baltic, the Luftwaffe had sought to discover how long a man could survive in freezing water and how he could best be revived. To make sure, they had a tank here at Dachau, whose temperature could be lowered at will, and prisoners were immersed for exact times and careful records kept; these records were burned, but copies were found later at Luftwaffe headquarters. They were grotesquely thorough; among the methods of revival was putting the victim in bed with a young woman; the records of “Section H” showed “rewarming by one woman,” “rewarming by two women,” and “rewarming by women after coitus.” Six hundred victims had died in spite of such rewarming. Dr. Rascher, who conducted these unique experiments, had requested that he be transferred to Auschwitz, because it was colder there and “patients” could be frozen in the open; also because they made trouble in Dachau, they “roared while being frozen.”
VIII
Lanny and his young friend spent two days and three nights in this inferno, sleeping in one of the officers’ homes. They questioned everybody they met regarding prisoners named Freddi Robin and Ludi and Trudi Schultz, but without results. Twelve years was a long time ago, and when sixty thousand human beings have died and been burned to ashes, who can remember names? Who even tries? Here human beings had been deliberately deprived of personality and had become bundles of bones, to be stacked like cordwood. All the intellectual persons had been killed or taken away. Freddi went tirelessly into the compound and was passed from one Social Democrat to another, but he did not find anyone who claimed to have been in this camp from the beginning; men did not last that long, they said.
Lanny asked concerning an officer of the Wehrmacht, Oberst Oskar von Herzenberg, but nobody had heard of him. That was a long shot, of course; Lanny had had no tidings of Marceline’s lover, and it was just a wild guess that he might be here. He had known about the bomb plot to kill Hitler last July. Several thousand men had been shot or hanged for that; but it might be that others, against whom there was nothing but suspicion, had been incarcerated. It might even be that Marceline was among the few women prisoners at Dachau. Lanny met a man who had seen her dancing in a night club, but that was the nearest he got to her.
He questioned the doctors, and then the religious groups. It was hard to imagine anyone with less religion than Marceline Detaze; but who could guess what might happen to a man or woman facing the tortures of a hell like this? They were deliberately designed to break the human spirit; and to what extent had they succeeded? He discovered that the political groups had not stood the test very well; they had some heroes and saints among them, but many others had broken and had accepted jobs to lord it over the less fortunate inmates, the Jews, the Poles, the Slavs. They had squabbled over a bit of bread or a cigarette butt—even though possession of the latter involved the penalty of being shut up in the “box,” a place the size of a telephone booth in which four men were locked and left for three days and nights without food or water.
The religious people, it appeared, had done better. There were all sorts of clergy in this Lager: orthodox Jews, and every sect of Christians—Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Old Catholic, Mariavite, and a score of different Protestant creeds. They were objects of especial hatred to the Nazis and were exploited in every way. Three hundred and fifty were crowded into a single dormitory, managed by “capos,” convicted criminals who were sent here because of their dependable brutality. In winter the priests and ministers shoveled snow and removed it from the camp; inverted dining tables were put upon long wheelbarrows to carry the snow and it was dumped into the river which flows past the camp. They had stood it all and kept their faith.
This involved a psychological problem of interest to Lanny. How had they managed it? Obviously, if you call yourself a materialist, you have your body and your body is all; if it is weakened, you are weakened, and if it is destroyed, that is the end of you. You resist that happening in physical ways, but when you are caught and penned up and your foes have all the weapons, what more can you do? You can hate them, but you realize that your hatred is impotent, and sooner or later that saps the power of your will.
But how different if you believe that your body is a purely temporary and relatively unimportant thing! All flesh is grass, and whether it withers early or late matters not at all. When it is dead, an immortal soul escapes from its bondage and flies to heaven to have a martyr’s crown put upon its immaterial head. Meantime God is with you, the Holy Family and all the heavenly host, the cherubim and the seraphim, the blessed saints and the goodly company of martyrs; you pray to them, they give you spiritual strength, they enable you to defy your oppressors, to laugh at the worst that Satan can do. As your physical strength wanes, your moral strength grows.
IX
The Catholic clergy especially had the advantage in an ordeal such as this. Their religious life had been a training for it; their traditions were full of martyrdom, and also self-punishment. Their St. Simeon Stylites of Antioch had lived his life on top of a stone pillar, a sort of old-style flagpole sitter—and surely a dormitory in Dachau was no less comfortable. Catholic zealots had practiced flagellation, tearing their own backs with barbed steel whips—it was still done in Mexico. Catholics mortified their flesh in various ways and denied its claims; their orders practiced celibacy, they wore unlovely and uncomfortable clothing, they went without food on occasions, and learned not to be bored by the repetition of prayers and ceremonies. When they were put in any sort of prison they were like well-trained troops going into battle; they knew exactly what to do, and their new life was like their old, only more so.
Lanny talked with a Father de Coninck, a Catholic priest from Belgium. His offense had been lecturing to other priests concerning the incompatibility of Nazism with the Gospel. When he arrived at Dachau there were some twenty-five hundred Catholic priests, and now after three years there were only eleven hundred, the rest having died or been killed. He had reason to believe that he was one of those destined for the gas chamber, and for two months he shared the life of the condemned. He was saved through a chain of circumstances in which, as he said to Lanny, “the protection of the Virgin was obvious.” To the non-believer, that seemed polytheism, but Lanny kept the opinion to himself.
This long-enduring priest went on to explain that he had succeeded in obtaining some consecrated Hosts, meaning wafers which by the process called transubstantiation had been turned into the mystical body of Christ. He had broken these into tiny particles, twenty to each Host, and wrapped them in cigarette papers. A dying man who confessed his sins, repented, and ate one of these crumbs in reverent ceremony had his sins forgiven and his soul transported to heaven. This gift was called the Viaticum—“provision for a journey”—and Father de Coninck was able to give it to many on the way to execution. They died, as he said, “with true saintliness.”
To Lanny this host seemed true fetishism, but again he held his peace. What did he, man of the world and art lover, have to say to the two thousand victims of typhus locked up here in quarantine, and would he be willing to have himself locked up with them, as many of the priests had done? He had had himself well dusted with DDT, and knew that the hard-working Army was doing the same for the whole camp as quickly as possible. If you ended war, poverty, and ignorance all over the earth, you could end typhus and all other plagues, and Lanny had taken that for his job. But meantime here were two thousand men, most of whom had to die, and if anybody could make them happier while dying, even by telling them a myth, by all means let it be done. So Lanny said to young Freddi, and discovered that the new generation was shocked by this idea. Let men be told the truth, eve
n though it made them unhappy!
“But what is the truth?” asked this modern Pilate, driving the Daimler back to Munich. “Can you be absolutely certain that no portion of your father’s psychic being has survived? You can say that the probabilities appear to be against it; but can you say that it positively is not so? And what was your father’s psychic being, anyhow?”
BOOK FIVE
Appeal from Tyranny to God
14
The Mighty Fallen
I
When Lanny and Freddi got back to Munich the war with Germany was close to its end. First the German armies in Italy surrendered; two days later those in Holland and Northwest Germany, and next day those in Berlin. And what were the Allies going to do with this colossal victory? Young Freddi wanted to know, but Lanny couldn’t help him much; he didn’t know that new man in the White House and had no way to find out about him. Subconsciously, perhaps, he resented having him there, as a child resents a new baby in his mother’s arms. What Lanny wanted was to get a bath and a change of underwear and to have his uniform cleaned and pressed; it seemed to him that he stank of carrion, and he imagined that people looked at him queerly. He wanted to see something different from Dachau, and it didn’t do him much good to wander about the streets of Munich and watch ill-clad and undernourished citizens shoveling rubble into Army trucks. Burned-out buildings reminded him of human skulls with blackened eyesockets, and girders sticking up into the air were the bones of dead buildings.
He sent the younger man back to his outfit, telling him not to be too sad over the outcome of their expedition. He had done his best, and no one could have done better. Whatever else might happen, Nazi-Fascism was dead in Italy and Germany. That was what the elder Freddi had given his life for, and he would surely have given it gladly. The new generation must carry on from there.
Professor Goudsmit and his party arrived in Munich, and with them Jerry Pendleton. Jerry had been out with a T-force to a small town named Celle, north of Hannover, where it had been reported that the Germans had a centrifuge laboratory. They had found it in some rooms of a parachute-silk factory, and like everything else the Germans had done along the line of atomic fission, it was on a small experimental scale. They had found some important reports by Professor Walther Gerlach, a physicist whom Hitler had named as the man whom Lanny should see at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. Now Gerlach had fled to Munich, and Jerry was to help in the hunt for him.
II
Lanny wasn’t needed and decided that he would turn Monument for a while and look at something beautiful. He would cultivate his old-time Munich acquaintances—assuming that any of them were alive and had not fled the bombs. His first thought was of Freiherr von Breine, Bavarian landowner and art collector from whom he had purchased a painting as a cover for his presence in Munich while working up a scheme to get the elder Freddi out of Dachau.
He went walking and saw the great Deutsches Museum, a burned-out shell. He saw the Nazi Braune Haus, where he had met Hitler; he remembered the red-leather chairs studded with bronze nails and the big bronze initials on the office door. In the entrance hall had been a marble statue of Dietrich Eckhard, sot, drug addict, and Nazi philosopher, a large benevolent-looking Aryan god with an immense head, bulging forehead, and surprisingly small eyes. Now the building, a shrine of Nazism, was one heap of wreckage. Farther on was the enormous white-colonnaded Haus der Deutschen Kunst, which the wits of the town had called “the Greek railroad station”; here Hitler had housed the commonplace art works of which he approved. He had had it covered with a huge fish net, dark green in color; now the net flapped in the wind, but it had done its work, making the bombardiers think it was a park.
Lanny went on to the residential district in which the Freiherr had his fine home. Such districts had been spared, except where they were too close to military targets. The Freiherr’s house was intact, but he wasn’t living there; the Nazis had turned him out, and he was living in the gardener’s cottage in back. The Americans had taken over the mansion, which pleased the owner greatly, because they would pay him rent and make it possible for him to patronize the black market.
He was a round-headed, dark-eyed Bavarian, with dark hair turned gray. He was no longer plump and rosy, but still kept his worldly grace, his bonhomie, and tried his best to take a humorous view of the experiences he had been through. Never tell your troubles, for if you do your friends will stop coming to see you! He said: “Grüss Gott!” and added, “Thank Him we no longer have to talk about blood and soil, blood and race, blood and iron, blood and guts!” Bavarians of his generation had watched a kaleidoscope of history during the past fifty years: a monarchy with mad rulers, a world war, a Socialist republic and a Communist revolution, a democratic republic, and a Nationalist revolution. “And now,” said he, “we have an American Military Government—and what are you going to do to us?”
“We are going to treat you politely,” replied the assimilated colonel; “that is, unless you have been a Nazi. I’ll be pleased to give you a clean bill of health, and you can have a position in a new civil government when it is formed.”
“Gott behüte!” exclaimed the pious gentleman. “No politics for me! But if I dared to ask a favor I’d suggest very humbly that your government might return my paintings that the Nazis got from me.”
“Lieber Baron, that happens to be exactly what I am in Munich for. Any objets d’art that you can prove were yours will assuredly be returned.”
“Technically speaking, they are not mine, for I had to sign a document parting with them. Herr Walter Andreas Hofer came to see me—you know that gentleman, perhaps?”
“I have had the pleasure of meeting him several times.” Lanny didn’t say “at Karinhall,” for that would have taken too much explanation.
“Such a visit was never a pleasure to any German who owned paintings. Herr Hofer would say, ‘Reichsmarschall Göring’s birthday comes next month, and we think it would be a gracious act to make him a present for his planned National Museum.’ If you owned a good painting, he would suggest that you give it. If you didn’t own one good enough for the great Museum, he would tell you about one, and the price; all you had to do was to pay for it. Nobody ever had to be told how dangerous it would be to refuse.”
“You were fortunate in owning good ones,” Lanny said, smiling. “You will get them back if we can find them. If you had paid money, you might not have stood so good a chance. That question has not come up.”
The elderly aristocrat gazed earnestly at this handsome American officer, no doubt trying his best not to look incredulous. “You really mean, lieber Herr Budd, that our property will be returned to us, and not seized for reparations?”
“I am telling you the policy of the organization in which I am serving; the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives Commission.”
“You Americans are indeed an extraordinary people!”
“We are hoping to set a standard for international conduct. We shall hang many war criminals, I hope, but we do not plan to rob innocent civilians.”
III
The Freiherr let it rest there. Did he remember how he had said to Lanny, in days before the war, that Germany had to expand? Most Germans had said that, but not one would say that civilians had any sort of responsibility for the hideous things that had been done in the Fatherland. One and all they would assert that they hadn’t known what was going on, and that, anyhow, there was nothing they could have done. Ein einzelner, machtloser Mensch! No one of them ever stated whether he had been among those crowds, sometimes a million in one spot, which whooped and roared for National Socialism and its Führer.
“What can I do in return?” inquired the Freiherr, and Lanny said, “You can help us to find where art treasures have been hidden, so that we can return them where they belong. Do you have any idea whether Göring kept any of his accumulations in the South?”
“I am informed that all his Karinhall collection was put into freight cars and brought south, an
d that the train is somewhere near Berchtesgaden. The French got to it first, and so you had better hurry if you plan to do anything altruistic.”
“That is indeed most interesting,” said Lanny.
“Also, Emmy Göring visits in a Schloss belonging to a rich South American at Zell am See. It is very unlikely that Hermann has failed to trust her with a few old masters, as a safeguard against mischance. I have heard that they are there.”
“Besten Dank, Baron. May I ask how you learn things like this?”
“Oh, we Bavarians are great gossips, and when we meet in one another’s homes we talk fast, always in whispers. What other pleasure have we? A few of us who trusted one another maintained a sort of underground against the Nazis.”
“Will you maintain it against us Americans?”
“If you behave in the decent manner you have told me, there will be an underground to help you. I assure you, the news you have just imparted will create a sensation in the proper social circles, and information will be poured in upon you. There is more I can tell you now.”
“May I make notes?” asked the Monuments man. He had brought a pencil and some paper, on the chance that there might be none in a wealthy Münchner’s home. He made a note of the Göring train and of the castle at Zell am See. He noted that there might be treasures hidden in Ribbentrop’s castle at Fuschl, and also in one of those built by the mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria. There was a colossal hoard in the salt mine at Alt Aussee, high up in the mountains southeast of Berchtesgaden; it was said to contain ten thousand paintings, including most of, and perhaps all, the treasures from the Vienna Museum. And so on and on, until Lanny had a sheet of paper full of notes and the promise of more in a few days.
O Shepherd, Speak! Page 28