Douglas Brodie 03 - Pilgrim Soul

by Ferris, Gordon

  I tried to be encouraging even as my spirits sank. ‘You’ve got better data on the lower orders,’ I noted, pointing at the middle of the chart, which had a number of photos and names.

  He grabbed it like a lifebelt. ‘That’s right. Suhren started at the top with his incineration. So we can corroborate that your man Draganski was one of the SS guards.’ He patted, with satisfaction, a small grey card at the bottom of the chart with the name, rank and number of the man who’d been assassinated by pitchfork in Glasgow. It was a small but significant step.

  Sam touched the blank grey cards at the top of the chart.

  ‘How do you even know there was a person missing?’

  ‘We don’t. We’ve extrapolated positions based on other camps’ chain of command. Inspired guesswork tells us there should be someone there, but we’re not sure. That’s where Brodie’s detective skills come in.’ He grinned at me.

  ‘I may need an Ouija board. So, to sum up, you think there’s maybe six senior staff missing. Two medics and four SS?’

  ‘Give or take a couple either way.’

  ‘But no names.’

  ‘No. Not a trace. We haven’t had time or manpower to interrogate the ones we’ve caught.’

  ‘And maybe thirty or so lower-order staff missing?’

  ‘Looks like it.’ He gazed at the blanks gloomily.

  ‘What’s this other group?’ I pointed at a single large sheet standing by itself.

  ‘You might say that’s the alumni. Ravensbrück was a training camp. As far as we can tell over four thousand Aufseherinnen – women guards – passed through these portals and on to hone their skills in other camps.’

  ‘Four thousand! How many have been caught, Iain?’

  He looked rueful. ‘We don’t know.’

  ‘Good God! Show me to your Augean stables. I stand a better chance of cleaning them than getting names of SS rats in Glasgow!’

  He flushed. ‘That’s not quite the end of it, Brodie. Might as well have the full horror show. Ravensbrück was the administrative centre for forty or so sub-camps. Places like Grüneberg, Neubrandenburg, Barth, Leipzig-Schönefeld, Magdeburg, Altenburg and Neustadt-Glewe . . .’

  ‘Enough! I get the picture. This is a waste of time. A wasted trip!’

  I could hear myself getting more Ayrshire as my anger rose. I felt duped, stupid. I should have known things were a total mess, that it would be impossible to cut through the chaos so soon after the entire continent had been ravaged from east to west and back again. I might as well pack up and head home. I could claim I was deceived, and avoid stirring up the dirt pond that was festering in my head. Scrymgeour seemed to read my thoughts.

  ‘Look, Brodie, you can still get something out of this,’ he pleaded. ‘We certainly will via your court testimony. You should at least be able to confirm the Scottish rat-line theory.’

  ‘But there’s no obvious way of linking the missing to Glasgow! Nor do we have a clue who’s flown and who’s still here.’

  Sam touched my arm. Her face was stretched with anxiety. ‘You can fill in these top gaps, Brodie. You know you can. They’ve captured enough of the Ravensbrück senior staff for you to get them to explain their reporting lines and who they worked with.’

  She was right. I could do something. Deep inside, I needed to admit that I was looking for a way out. I blew out a big breath and rubbed my face. It was sweltering in here.

  ‘Well, I’m here now. It would be a shame not to renew old acquaintances.’

  Iain and Sam’s faces relaxed.

  I went on: ‘Tell me. Do the ones in custody know Suhren scarpered?’

  Iain shook his head. ‘We’ve said nothing. But I’d be amazed if they hadn’t heard.’

  ‘Can I use his escape as part of my interrogation? Can I mention it?’

  ‘Why not? You’re going to say he used a rat line?’

  ‘It might help. Let me make some notes of your rogues’ gallery.’

  I took out my reporter’s notebook, which suddenly seemed so out of place here. I jotted down what sparse details we had on the missing persons. I wished I’d had this shorthand skill back in ’45 during my earlier interrogations. When I had all I needed, I rejoined Sam and Iain at his desk.

  ‘One other thing, Iain. You didn’t by any chance pick up any gold from any of your defendants? Ingots?’

  ‘I said the Red Army got there first. Locusts. The safe was emptied. But we found a cache in the medical wing. About a hundred pieces.’

  ‘Can I see a couple?’

  He came back with a handful of glitter. I turned them over on his desk top. Some had the full Third Reich and swastika markings. Others, like the ones Ellen Jacobs had shown me, were smooth and blank.

  ‘That ties in.’ I handed them back.

  ‘Here, keep one. Wave it at the prisoners if you like. Jog their memories.’

  I took one and slipped it into my pocket. ‘I’ll make a start on the interrogations as soon as possible. And can you set up a meeting with Vera Atkins and her agent in the camp, Odette Sansom? That could be invaluable.’

  ‘I’ll fix it.’ He scribbled a note for himself. ‘Regarding the interrogations, where do you want to start?’

  ‘I’ll start at the top and work down. In the absence of the commandant, I’ll begin with his deputy.’

  ‘You’ve got till one o’clock each day. We have to get them into the courtroom prompt for two.’

  Ian made a phone call and within five minutes Lieutenant Collins was in front of me, saluting.

  ‘Collins, both our arms are going to get tired. Can we stop all the formalities while we’re in the office?’

  ‘Certainly, sir.’

  ‘Including the sir bit. What’s your first name?’

  ‘Wilfred. Everyone calls me Will.’

  ‘How’s your German?’

  Collins visibly relaxed. ‘Cambridge. A first in modern languages.’

  Of course. ‘What a waste. Where’s the prison?’

  ‘A short ride.’

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Even in full uniform and with all the right credentials Collins and I had to jump through hoops to get into the prison. Checkpoint after checkpoint. Eventually we were striding down a long concrete corridor lined either side by metal cell doors. A British soldier stood guard outside every cell, looking in. The authorities hated the idea of someone cheating a good hanging. There had been enough suicides among the accused.

  We stopped outside one door. I nodded to the guard. He took out his key ring and turned one lock after another until he was able to swing open the heavy grill. Gazing straight at me from his seat on his bed was the man I’d helped to put in this situation over a year ago. SS-Oberststurmführer Johann Schwarzhuber, Deputy Commandant of Ravensbrück concentration camp.

  He didn’t know me at first but his face was unforgettable: eyes the colour of ice, features so elongated he could have modelled for Modigliani. He’d always been slim-built but now he was scrawny. He wore dark civilian clothes: a creased jacket, shirt and trousers. His skin was matt grey as though dust had stuck to it.

  The soldier guarding him shouted, ‘Stand for the senior officer! Attention!’

  I outranked Schwarzhuber by three levels. He glanced at my shoulder insignia. I watched the ingrained habits of military discipline kick in even after a year in custody. He struggled to his feet and made a clumsy attempt at standing to attention. As he did so I tweaked his memory, in German.

  ‘Well then, Schwarzhuber, justice catching up with you at last?’

  A spasm crossed his face. He recognised me and my voice but not in this uniform or rank. Then it settled. His body relaxed.

  ‘Major Brodie. Or rather, Lieutenant Colonel Brodie. The war has been good for some.’

  ‘Not for anyone, Schwarzhuber. And certainly not you. Let’s go.’

  I nodded to the soldier, who stepped forward and clicked chains on hands and feet. Then with Lieutenant Collins taking his other side we marched him out
to the end of the corridor and into a small cell with a table and four chairs. I had the prisoner sit on one side of the table. I took the other. Collins sat behind me and the guard stood behind the prisoner.

  ‘Let me read your file.’

  I made a point of sitting silently while I flicked through page after page, including my own notes from so long ago. It came flooding back. Learned his trade at Dachau and Auschwitz before taking charge of the gas chambers at Ravensbrück in early 1945. I wondered if I could keep my hands off him this time.

  ‘You don’t seem to be quite so relaxed, Lieutenant Schwarzhuber? Not like our first meeting. Why is that?’

  ‘What do you want?’ There was no ‘sir’ attached. He’d dropped any pretence of acknowledging my rank.

  ‘Not sleeping? Is it the thought of being hanged? I imagine it does tend to keep you awake at night.’

  ‘Are you just here to gloat?’

  ‘A little gloating is allowed. A little Schadenfreude, don’t you think? Not just that. I’m here to give testimony against you.’

  ‘Ha! You think they need testimony? You think they need evidence? You are confusing this charade with a court of law.’

  ‘Justice will be served, I’m sure. No matter how we get there. I have some questions. Let’s start with the easy stuff. Your chain of command. You were the Lagerführer – head of supervision of the camp at Ravensbrück? Who did you report to?’

  ‘You know this.’

  ‘Please remind me.’

  ‘SS-Sturmbannführer Fritz Suhren.’

  ‘Did you know your boss has escaped?’

  He shrugged. ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘Who helped him?’

  ‘Good Germans.’

  ‘Good Germans would shoot him on sight for fouling their name. Sadly there’s too few of that sort left.’

  ‘Really? Do you refuse to obey orders, Colonel? We soldiers have no right to question our superiors, or else where are we? A rabble.’

  ‘That’s a worn-out defence. Look where it’s got you. Got the whole German nation! Don’t you feel any guilt for what you did personally? You were in charge of the gas chambers!’

  ‘It was my job.’

  I stared at him. He didn’t blink. His thin mouth was set.

  ‘It says here you were a drinker?’ I tapped the file. ‘Drowning your conscience?’

  ‘We were cleansing the fatherland! Our race had been weakened.’

  ‘Is that why you lost?’

  ‘You’ve Stalin to thank, not your precious Montgomery or Churchill! Even the Wehrmacht hadn’t enough bullets to kill every Russian yokel at Stalingrad. If not for Stalin’s peasant pig-headedness, Germany would have won!’

  ‘Leaving Europe a charnel house!’

  ‘Prospering!’

  ‘Unless of course you were a Jew. Or a homosexual. Or a little slow. Were you a little slow, Schwarzhuber? Slow to realise you were beaten?’

  He stiffened. His eyes were wild. I pressed home.

  ‘We know that plans were laid to allow criminals like you to get out of the country. Why didn’t you? Why are you taking the rap?’

  ‘There were no plans.’

  ‘Ah, it seems you weren’t important enough. You were only a lieutenant.’

  ‘An SS lieutenant.’

  ‘And you think that’s better? Good God. So why were there no plans to help a mighty SS lieutenant escape?’

  ‘There were no plans.’

  ‘Or you would have heard?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘You had access to gold. Jewish gold. Why didn’t you use it?’

  He dropped his stare. He peered at the table. ‘I want a cigarette.’

  I pushed my pack across to him and lit the cigarette he pulled out. ‘Keep it.’ I pointed at the pack. He grabbed it. I let him take in deep lungfuls. He smiled.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’

  ‘Himmler said these were bad for us.’

  ‘Himmler was wrong about a lot of things. But at least he had the courage to kill himself. Why didn’t you?’

  A flush appeared on Schwarzhuber’s sallow face. ‘I have been prevented. Give me your gun and leave me for twenty seconds. You will see how an officer dies!’

  ‘I don’t waste bullets. So, let me understand. You were not important enough to be given a cyanide pill like Himmler. You weren’t important enough to be told about the escape routes. You’re small fry. Cannon fodder. While you swing on a rope your old comrades will be swinging in a hammock in Argentina.’

  ‘This is not true!’

  ‘Which bit?’

  He sat back, his eyes darting about the room. He grabbed another cigarette and lit up. I waited.

  ‘What’s in this for me?’ he asked.

  ‘If you give me useful information, will it save you from the gallows? I doubt it. But I could ask the hangman to set the rope right. Not short like the Americans prefer it. I heard one of your Nuremberg gang took twenty minutes to strangle to death. Better the long drop. Knot under here’ – I pointed at the side of my neck – ‘so that as you fall, you’ll just hear a click and that’s it. You’ll join your Führer in hell.’

  His face went into spasm. I thought he was going to have a fit. I went for the kill.

  ‘Of course I could only arrange that while you’re in the British sector. The Polish Free Army want you for their trials. They seem quite bitter about what you did to their country.’

  He sat, panting, thinking. Something seemed to break in his face. Finally he shrugged.

  ‘What does it matter?’

  I waited.

  ‘The commandant . . .’ he started again.

  ‘Suhren?’

  ‘Suhren told me to get to Zurich. Or Rome.’ He snorted. ‘Right across Germany. Through the Russian lines. Or the Americans. It was out of the question. And . . .’

  ‘And?’

  ‘We did not believe it would happen. We did not hear about the Russian advance. They told us the Eastern Front was holding. Another lie. Ach, you know, Colonel Brodie, belief becomes a habit. Like these.’ He held up his cigarette. ‘Until it’s too late.’

  ‘Did he mention a northern escape line?’

  ‘Yes. From the coast. It made sense. South were the Americans and the Russians. But he didn’t talk much about it.’

  ‘Keeping it for himself? Did he give directions?’

  He smiled. ‘No. I didn’t press him. It seemed disloyal to even be talking about it.’ At last some regret.

  ‘Pity for you. Loyalty seems to have been one way only.’

  Afterwards I felt dirty and drained. As though I’d been sick and then had to clean up my own mess. Bargaining with a man over whether he dies slow or quick on the end of a rope. I got nothing more out of him. But it was a start. The Scottish rat line began to take on deadly substance.

  I pulled myself together for the court session in the afternoon back at the Curiohaus. It was jammed with sour-smelling humanity. Sam told me the public galleries held 150 or so. It seemed every seat was taken. The good burghers of Hamburg were here to see what they claimed not to have known about for so many years. I took a seat to one side of the upper gallery with a clear view of the whole court. The local Germans gave my uniform a wide berth.

  I looked down. On one side were the jammed ranks of prisoners, mainly women, each with a huge number attached to her breast. Flanking them were British WRAC guards. Our poor girls’ faces showed how much they were hating their proximity to such evil. In front of the prisoners sat a line of defence lawyers. Facing them, across the short floor of the court, were the wigged and gowned prosecutors, including Advocate Samantha Campbell. She sat beside Scrymgeour, files at the ready, earning her modest fees.

  Forming the linking bar of the horseshoe between defendants and prosecutors was the bench of court members. They faced the tall windows of the Curiohaus. General Westropp, the court president, sat in the middle of a line of uniformed British officers and one wigged lawyer. It gave the sense
of a tightly packed kirk with the dock serving as a pulpit for grudging penitents.

  But for Sam’s presence, it was as though time had reversed. The layout and the attendees were different, but it might have been Lüneburg and the Belsen trials of over a year ago. General Westropp rapped his gavel for silence and the first defendant was brought to the witness box: Warden Greta Bösel. She was perhaps late thirties, dark hair swept up and back under a hat. Just another hausfrau on a shopping trip, apart from the big number 7 on her breast. They gave her headphones for the simultaneous translation of questions.

  Sam stepped forward and I felt a surge of pride as she quietly and efficiently exposed the woman as an uneducated sadist given the power of life and death over her betters. Power used to crush women who’d lived in nice homes, who could play piano, read Schiller and Goethe, and discuss Nietzsche without seeing it as a licence to slaughter the Untermensch.

  Sam called a witness: a frail bird of a woman who had to be helped into the witness box. Her hair was grey. She looked about sixty.

  ‘What is your name, please?’

  ‘Ruth Silverstein.’ Her voice was cracked and slow.

  ‘What is your age?’

  ‘I am twenty-nine.’

  ‘You were a prisoner in Ravensbrück concentration camp?’

  ‘I was taken there in May 1944 with my daughter.’

  ‘What was your daughter’s name?’

  ‘Rachel. She was called Rachel.’ A memory lightened her face.

  Sam’s voice softened. ‘How old was Rachel?’

  ‘Just two. Her birthday was in March that year.’ She smiled. ‘We had balloons.’

  The court was still. Not breathing.

  ‘Do you recognise the woman in the dock?’

  Ruth looked up and stared at number 7. She nodded.

  ‘Do you know her name?’

  ‘Oh, yes. I know her name. She is Greta Bösel.’

  ‘Why are you so sure?’

  Ruth Silverstein said it quietly, so quietly that the whole gallery leaned forward to hear. Sam asked her to repeat it.

  ‘Because she killed my daughter, Rachel.’

  Sam let the words hang in the air until they’d been absorbed by every ear in the court.

  ‘Ruth? Do you mind if I ask you how the defendant killed Rachel?’