We all knew the castle, of course, we’d grown up with it. Its three towers shielded a triangular courtyard, perched high on a rock above the Alme valley; it was part of our local history lessons. But none of us had been inside since the SS began its reconstruction. Now, it was no longer a place to play football in the courtyard; it was for the elite.
“Who can tell me why this castle is so important?” Herr Sollemach asked, as we trudged up the hill.
My brother, the scholar, answered first. “It’s got historic relevance, since it’s near the site of an earlier German victory—where Hermann der Cherusker defeated the Romans in A.D. nine.”
The other boys snickered. Unlike in Gymnasium, Franz wasn’t going to get any points for knowing his history textbook here. “But why is it important to us?” Herr Sollemach demanded.
A boy named Lukas, who was a member of the HJ-Streifendienst like me, raised his hand. “It now belongs to the Reichsführer-SS,” he said.
Himmler, who as chief of the SS, had taken over the German police and the concentration camps, had visited the castle in 1933 and had leased it that same day for a hundred years, planning to restore it for the SS. In 1938, the north tower was still under construction—we could see this as we approached.
“Himmler says the Obergruppenführersaal will be the center of the world, after the final victory,” Herr Sollemach announced. “He has deepened the moats already and is trying to spruce up the interior. Rumor has it he will be here today to check on its progress. Do you hear that, boys? The Reichsführer-SS himself, right in Wewelsburg!”
I did not see how Herr Sollemach would gain entrance to the castle, since it was guarded, and not even the leader of the local Kameradschaft was in the habit of mingling with the highest echelon of officers in the National Socialist Party. But as we approached Herr Sollemach heiled and the guard heiled back. “Werner,” Herr Sollemach said. “Quite an exciting day, no?”
“You’re right on time,” the soldier said. “Tell me, how is Mary? And the girls?”
I should have realized that Herr Sollemach would leave nothing to chance.
My brother pulled me by the arm to draw my attention to the man in the center of the courtyard, addressing a clot of officers.
“Blood tells,” the man said. “The laws of Aryan selection favor those who are stronger, smarter, and more righteous in character than their inferior counterparts. Loyalty. Obedience. Truth. Duty. Comradeship. These are the cornerstones of the knighthood of old, and the future of the Schutzstaffel.”
I did not understand what he was saying, really, but I knew from the respect he was getting from the crowd that this must be Himmler himself. Yet this slight, stuffy man looked more like a bank teller than the head of the German police.
Then I realized he was pointing at me. “You, boy,” he said, and he gestured.
I stepped forward and saluted the way we had been taught at our HJ meetings.
“You are from around here?”
“Yes, Reichsführer,” I said. “I am a member of the HJ-Streifendienst.”
“So tell me, boy. Why would a country looking toward racial purity and the future of a new world choose a decrepit castle as a training center?”
This was a trick question. Clearly, a man as important as Himmler would not have made a mistake in choosing a place like Wewelsburg. My mouth went dry.
My brother, standing beside me, coughed. Hartmann, he whispered.
I didn’t know what he was trying to say by speaking our last name. Maybe he thought I should introduce myself. That way Himmler would know exactly who was the idiot standing in front of him.
Then I realized my brother had not said Hartmann. He’d said Hermann.
“Because,” I replied, “it’s not a decrepit castle.”
Himmler smiled slowly. “Go on.”
“It is the same place Hermann der Cherusker fought the Romans and won. So even though other cultures wound up becoming part of the Roman Empire, the German identity stayed intact. Just like we will again, now, when we win the war.”
Himmler narrowed his eyes. “What is your name, boy?”
“Kameradschaftsführer Hartmann,” I said.
He walked through the crowd and put his hand on my shoulder. “A warrior, a scholar, and a leader—all in one. This is the future of Germany.” As the crowd erupted in cheers, he pushed me forward. “You will come with me,” Himmler said.
He led me down a set of stairs toward die Gruft, the vault. In the basement of the tower that was still under construction was a round room. At its center, buried in the floor, was a gas pipe. Around the edges of the room were twelve niches, each with its own pedestal. “This is where it will all end,” Himmler said, his voice hollow in the small chamber. “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
“Reichsführer?”
“This is where I will be, long after the final victory. This will be the final resting place of the top twelve SS generals.” He turned to me. “Perhaps there is time for a bright young man like you to reach that potential.”
It was at that moment I decided to enlist.
• • •
As proud as Herr Sollemach was about my enlistment as an SS-Sturmmann, my mother was equally devastated. She was worried for me, as the war escalated. But she was equally worried for my brother, who—at eighteen—still lived with his head in a book, and who would be losing the protection I provided.
She and my father held a little social gathering on the eve before I was to report to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen, as part of the SS-Totenkopfverbände, the Death’s Head Unit. Our friends and neighbors came. One of them, Herr Schefft, who worked for the local newspaper, took a photograph of me blowing out the candles on the chocolate cake my mother made—you can see it here; I still have the clipping she mailed me afterward. I have looked at that picture often. You see how happy I am in it? Not just because I am holding my fork over the plate, waiting to eat something delicious. Not just because I was drinking beer like a man, instead of a boy. Because everything is still possible, for me. It is the last photograph I have of myself where my eyes aren’t full of knowledge, of understanding.
One of my father’s friends began to sing to me: “Hoch soll er leben, hoch soll er leben, dreimal hoch.” Long may he live, long may he live, three cheers. Suddenly, the door burst open, and my friend Lukas’s little brother ran in, wild and quivering with excitement. “Herr Sollemach says we must come right away,” he said. “And we shouldn’t wear our uniforms.”
Now, this was curious; we always wore our uniforms with great pride. And my mother was not terribly inclined to let us out at midnight. But the other members of the HJ—including Franz—and I followed. We ran to the community center, where we held our meetings, and found Herr Sollemach dressed, like us, in street clothes. Parked in front was a truck, the kind used by the military, with an open back and benches for us to sit on. We piled in, and from the snippets of information I received from other boys, learned that some German official named Vom Rath had been assassinated by a Polish Jew, that the Führer himself had said spontaneous retaliations by the German people would not be stopped. By the time the truck pulled up in Paderborn, just a few miles away from Wewelsburg, the streets were filled with people armed with sledgehammers and axes. “This is where Artur lives,” Franz murmured to me, speaking of his former friend from school. This didn’t surprise me. The last time I’d been to Paderborn was a year ago, when my father had gone to buy my mother a fancy pair of leather boots for Christmas, handmade by a Jewish cobbler.
We were given instructions:
1. Do not endanger non-Jewish German life or property.
2. Do not loot the Jewish businesses or homes, just destroy them.
3. Foreigners—even Jewish ones—were not to be the subjects of violence.
Herr Sollemach pressed a heavy shovel into my hand. “Go, Reiner,” he said. “Show these swine the punishment they deserve.”
There were torches, the only way we coul
d see in the dark of the night. The air was filled with screams and smoke. The sound of shattering glass was a constant rain, and the shards crunched beneath our boots as we ran through the town, yelling at the tops of our lungs and smashing the storefront windows. We were wild boys, frenzied, our sweat and our fear drying on our skin. Even Franz, who did not strike a single business storefront that I saw, was running with his cheeks flushed and his hair matted down with perspiration, caught in the vortex of a mob mentality.
It was strange, being told to cause destruction. We were good German boys, who behaved well and who were reprimanded by our mothers for breaking a lamp or a china teacup. We had grown up poor enough to recognize the value of one’s belongings. Yet this world, full of fire and mayhem, was the final proof that we had fallen through Alice’s Looking Glass. Nothing was as it had been; nothing was as it seemed to be. The proof lay broken and glittering at our feet.
Finally we reached the store I had visited with my father, the cobbler’s tiny shop. I leaped up and grabbed the bottom of his swinging sign, yanking it from its moorings so that it hung drunkenly by a single chain. I hurled the bowl of my shovel into the showcase window and reached between the jagged edges of glass to pull out shoes, a dozen pairs of boots and pumps and loafers, sweeping them into the puddles of the street. SA Stormtroopers were kicking in the doors of homes and dragging the residents, in their nightclothes, into the center of town. They cowered in small knots, huddled over their children. One father was made to strip down to his underclothes and dance for the soldiers. Kann ich jetzt gehen? the man begged, as he twirled in a circle. Now may I go?
I do not know what made me do it, but I approached the man’s family. His wife, maybe seeing my smooth cheeks and my young face, grabbed onto my boot. Bitte—die sollen aufhören, she pleaded. Please make them stop.
She was sobbing, tearing at my trousers, grabbing for my hand. I didn’t want her snot on me, her saliva. Her hot breath and those empty words falling into the cup of my palm.
I did what came naturally. I kicked her away from me.
As the Reichsführer-SS had said at Wewelsburg that day: Blood tells. It was not that I wanted to hurt this Jewish woman. I wasn’t really thinking of her, at all. I was protecting myself.
In that instant I realized what this night had been all about. Not violence, not riots, not public humiliation. These measures were a message, to let the Jews know they had no hold over us ethnic Germans—not economically or socially or politically, not even after that assassination.
It was nearly dawn by the time the convoy headed back to Wewelsburg. The boys dozed on each other’s shoulders, their clothes glittering with the pixie dust of broken glass. Herr Sollemach was snoring. Only Franz and I were awake.
“Did you see him?” I asked.
“Artur?” Franz shook his head.
“Maybe he’s gone already. I hear a lot of them have left the country.”
Franz stared at Herr Sollemach. His blond hair fell over one eye as he shook his head. “I hate that man.”
“Shh,” I warned. “I think he can hear through his pores.”
“Arschloch.”
“He probably hears through that, too.”
My brother smiled a little. “Are you nervous?” he asked. “About going away?”
I was, but I would never admit that. It wasn’t officer-like to be afraid. “It will be fine,” I said, hoping I could convince myself, too. I shoved against him with my elbow. “Don’t get into trouble while I’m gone.”
“Don’t forget where you came from,” Franz said.
He talked like that, sometimes. Like he was a wizened old man in the body of an eighteen-year-old. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Franz shrugged. “That you don’t have to listen to what they say. Well, maybe that’s not true. But you don’t have to believe it.”
“The thing is, Franz, I do.” If I could explain to him how I felt, maybe then he wouldn’t stick out like such a sore thumb at the HJ meetings when I was not around. And God knows the less he stuck out, the less likely he was to be bullied. “Tonight wasn’t about hurting Jews. They were collateral damage. It was about keeping us safe. Us Germans.”
“Power isn’t doing something terrible to someone who’s weaker than you, Reiner. It’s having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.” He turned to me. “Do you remember that mouse in our bedroom, years ago?”
“What?”
Franz met my gaze. “You know. The one you killed,” he said. “I forgive you.”
“I didn’t ask for your forgiveness,” I told him.
My brother shrugged. “That doesn’t mean you didn’t want it.”
• • •
The first person I ever shot was running away from me.
I was no longer working at a concentration camp. In August 1939, we had been mobilized from Sachsenhausen and sent to follow the German troops as part of the SS-Totenkopfstandarte. It was now September 20. I remember this, because it was Franz’s birthday and I did not have the time or the resources to write to him that day. We had crossed into Poland seven days earlier, trailing behind the army. Our route was from Ostrowo, through Kalisch, Turek, żuki, Krosniewice, Kladava, Przedecz, Włocławek, Dembrice, Bydgoszcz, Wirsitz, Zarnikau, and finally Chodziez. We were to annihilate any form of resistance we found.
On that particular day, we were doing what we’d been dispatched to do—conducting house searches, rounding up insurgents, and arresting those who were suspicious: Jews, Poles, activists. Another soldier, Urbrecht—a boy with a face like risen dough and a sensitive stomach—had accompanied me to this enclave of homes. It was a miserable, rainy day. We did a lot of shouting; my voice was stripped raw from telling the stupid Poles, who did not understand my German, to get out and join the others. There was a mother, a girl of about ten, and a teenage boy. We were looking for the father, who was one of the leaders of the local Jewish community. But there was no one else in the house, or so Urbrecht said, after canvassing it. I screamed in the face of the woman, asking her where her husband was, but she would not answer. As the rain drenched her, she fell to her knees and started sobbing and pointing back to the house. It was giving me a headache like no other.
Nothing the son said could soothe her. I poked her in the back with my rifle, indicating where they should march, but the woman remained kneeling in a muddy puddle. As Urbrecht hauled her upright, the teenage boy started to run back to the house.
Now, I had no idea what he was after. For all I knew, it was a weapon that Urbrecht had overlooked. I did what I had been told to do: I shot.
The boy was running, and the next instant, he wasn’t. The sound of the bullet was deafening, hollow. At first, I couldn’t hear anything because of it. And then, I did.
The cries were soft and hitched together like train cars. I stepped over the broken body of the boy and walked into the kitchen. I have no idea how that idiot Urbrecht might have missed the baby who had been lying in the laundry basket, the one who was now wide awake and shrieking her head off.
Say what you will about the inhumanity of the SS-TV during the invasion of Poland, but I gave that woman her baby before we marched her off.
• • •
We started with the synagogues.
Our commander, Standartenführer Nostitz, explained the Judenaktion we would be undertaking in Włocławek. It was much like what we had done with Herr Sollemach in Paderborn almost a year earlier, but on a bigger scale. We rounded up Jewish leaders and forced them to clean lavatories with their prayer shawls; we made them dig ditches in pools of water. Some of the soldiers beat the old men who couldn’t work fast enough, or bayoneted them, and others took pictures. We made religious leaders shave off their beards, and throw their holy books into the mud. We had dynamite, and we used it to blow up the synagogues and set them on fire. We broke the windows of Jewish shops and rounded up masses of Jews to be arrested. Leaders of the Jewish community were lined up in the street and exec
uted. The scene was chaos, with glass raining through the air and burst pipes spilling water onto the street, horses rearing back from the carts they pulled; blood turning the cobblestones red. The Polish civilians cheered us on. They didn’t want the Jews here any more than we Germans did.
Two days into the Aktion, the Standartenführer ordered two Sturmbanne within the battalion to splinter off and perform a special task. There were lists of names recorded by the SD and the police, names of intellectuals and resistance leaders in Poznań and Pomerania. We were to find and eliminate these people.
It was an honor to be chosen. But it wasn’t until we reached Bydgoszcz that I came to understand the scope of this exercise. The “death list” wasn’t a sheet of names. It was eight hundred people. A tome.
True, they were easy to find. They were Polish teachers, priests, leaders of nationalist organizations. Some were Jews; many were not. They were rounded up and gathered. A small group was singled out to dig a ditch—they believed it was an antitank trench they were creating. But then the first group of prisoners was led up to the ditch and it was our job to shoot them. There were six of us trusted with this task. Three were to aim at the head, three at the heart. I picked the heart. Our shots rang out, and there was a fireworks display of blood, of brains. Then the next group of prisoners stepped up to the edge of the ditch.
The ones at the end of the line, they saw what was happening. They must have understood as they turned toward us soldiers that they were facing their death. And yet for the most part they did not run, they did not try to escape. I do not know if this meant they were very, very stupid or very, very brave.
One teenage boy stared at me as I lifted the rifle to my shoulder. He lifted his hand and pointed to himself. In perfect German, he said, neunzehn. Nineteen.
After the first fifty, I stopped looking at their faces.
• • •
My fortitude in Poland got me sent to SS-Junkerschule Bad Tölz, an officers’ training school. Before shipping out, I was given three weeks’ leave, and I went back home.
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