Eagles at War (43 page)

The factory was totally bomb-proof, and there were no limits to its expansion. Plants for producing liquid oxygen and synthetic oil were being built. No attempt had been made to build a runway—they were too attractive as targets—but there was talk of making complete jet aircraft there and catapulting them into the air from the factory entrance.

They had entered via an open elevator, which had clanked down a cool, moisture-glistening limestone shaft. Humidity hung in the tunnels in sponge-like air, stirred periodically by chill gusts of wind that whistled in the skein of electrical wires suspended overhead. Despite the moisture, there was dust everywhere. Hafner had a small cut on his finger, and the dusty air stung it like iodine. Underlying the hollow echoing noises of the workplace was a dull drumming, the hacking cough of the slave laborers. The lights swinging in the gelid draft danced the workers' shadows across the chiseled cavern walls, surrealistic silhouettes waxing large as giants, then waning to nothingness.

"Dr. Caligari's cabinet. Macabre," was Kurt's first comment.

On each side there were endless rows of machine tools, each one served by teams of emaciated laborers in torn striped pajamas. Some wore the yellow patch of the Jew, some the sr for
Sowjetrusseland,
some p for Poles. All wore wooden clogs for shoes. Those at work bent hastily over their tools. Any others stood at a bony attention against the side of the passage, their striped caps doffed, cringing if one of the black-shirted SS
Totenkopfverbande
guards—"death's head" was so appropriate—made a sudden movement. Even in passing, Hafner caught their death scent. They were already decaying, dissolving into the moldy vapors of the manmade cave.

He pointed down one of the tunnels to the side. Strung across on a rope, eleven cadavers in advanced stages of decomposition were hanging. A twelfth had rotted and fallen to the ground beneath the rope he had died on.

Hafner couldn't speak. My God, he thought, what are they doing? Imagine trying to produce sophisticated weapons in a charnel house! How could Von Braun or Dornberger permit this? If they want to kill people, do it decently in gas chambers!

The appalling condition of the Nordhausen slave labor was the reason for the meeting. With six months of back-breaking effort, sixty thousand slave workers from Buchenwald had transformed a small ammonia mine into a monstrous death mill. There had been no power tools, no jack hammers, no blasting—only pickaxes and spades. Despite the disease and the death, V-2 production had started on schedule in January.

In the process, more than twenty thousand workers had sacrificed their "existing stocks of muscle and fat in the service of the Reich." Their skeletal cadavers were laboriously carted by prison labor to the crematorium at Camp Dora.

Someone at Himmler's headquarters had compared this death toll to the number of slaves who died in building Hafner's most recent project, the mammoth V-2 launch site at Watten near Calais. Six miles north of the Luftwaffe field at St. Omer, it was a huge facility, intended to launch fifty V-2s against England every day. More than a hundred meters long by forty-five meters wide, it reached thirty meters into the air. Over one hundred thousand kilotons of concrete had been poured into it by thirty-five thousand slave workers in a six-month period. The project was at least comparable in scope to Nordhausen, but with an enormous difference. Only four thousand workers had died at Watten, and now the SS wanted to know what were the lessons to be learned.

But that hardly seemed adequate justification for a personal visit by Himmler. The fact that he'd leave Berlin at a time of stress like this meant that he was either terribly secure—or frightened.

There was a tap at the door to the little office, a bare cubicle hewn into the side of a gallery, furnished with a table, four chairs, and a field telephone whose wires straggled out the door and up into the rat's nest suspended along the center of the tunnel.

A voice said only, "The
Reichsfuehrer."

Weigand and Hafner struggled to attention as Heinrich Himmler, Dr. Felix Kersten, and an aide came in. For a moment, the taller Kersten stood immediately behind Himmler, so that their round faces were superimposed like a figure-8. The aide immediately went to the field phone, cranked it, and put a call through for Himmler.

Holding the phone in his pale, almost girlish hand, Himmler said, "Excuse me, Colonel Hafner, I must make an immediate call to my train."

Making small talk with Kersten, Hafner recalled an extraordinary meal he had a few months ago on board the train. It was called the
Heinrich,
for obvious reasons, a weird combination of baroque coaches out of a mad King Ludwig fantasy and ultra-modern communication and flak cars. Breakfast had started with a flurry of anxiety when Himmler found that by mistake there were thirteen seated at his table. A hapless colonel was exiled immediately. The food was "idealized SS"—stewed leeks, with mineral water to drink. While they ate, Himmler lectured them on the values of vegetarianism and the evils of hunting "innocent wild animals." Speer had been there, dabbling at the green mess, looking faintly superior. Later he'd called Himmler "half schoolmaster, half crank."

For a man as astute as Speer it had not been a perceptive description. For all his idiosyncrasies, Himmler exercised an iron control second only to Hitler over the most efficient of the Party's many organizations. Himmler, now obviously stressed as he talked excitedly into the phone, was not physically impressive. Of medium height and slender build, he had an aura of too-ripe-peach softness, as if his flesh would puncture at a finger's touch. Under his round wire-rimmed glasses, his gray-blue eyes were expressionless, and his thin lips maintained a faint, set smile. Deep creases formed an inverted V around his mouth, and his small mustache was trimmed to match, giving him a weak, downcast look.

Since Ploesti, Hafner had often worked with Himmler, finding him shallow as a saucer but hard as steel. The man had no life substance of his own, borrowing his very existence from Hitler. With an inhuman subservience, he had become the Fuehrer's most diligent servant, gifted with a demonic ability to inspire killing.

He hung up the phone and the aide left.

"The assassination attempt has given us all much to do. Thank you for meeting me here. Have you had a chance to look around?"

"No, but I think I've seen enough for our meeting. I can investigate more thoroughly later, if you wish."

"Colonel Hafner, Dr. Kersten is a bond between us. He has quite literally saved my life, and I know what he has done for you. He has also confirmed my belief in you as a human being. And, of course, we have the bond of the work you and
Obergruppenfuehrer
Weigand have done in increasing production."

Hafner nodded appreciatively, as Himmler went on.

"We have two things to discuss. The first is laborer care at Nordhausen. This place is a scandal! Workers are dying at an appalling rate. Two years ago, when we were still capturing huge numbers of Russians, it wouldn't have mattered. Now it is critical. How were you able to do a better job at Watten?"

"Simple,
Herr Reichsfuehrer.
Watten is on the main canal network that connects to the sea. It serves as a runoff drain for the countryside. I assigned one thousand of the laborers, under
Kapo
guards, to use nets to gather food from the canals. They were to touch nothing else, not even if it were on the path beside the canal. They brought in everything, fish, mollusks, weeds, dead animals, birds, frogs, everything. It was cooked in big pots and added to the rations. It stank like shit—I can't imagine what it must have tasted like—but it had calories, and calories meant life. It probably even had some vitamins, from the seaweed and the algae."

"No chance to do that here."

"There are no canals, of course. The prisoners could gather acorns in the forest, pine nuts, bark, even weeds. Anything helps."

"We'll see that that is done. But I have an idea that must not be repeated outside this room. We are wasting an enormous amount of protein and even some fat in the camps. You know what I mean?"

"But perhaps there is an intermediate way. Could some animal—rats perhaps—be allowed to feed on the bodies, and then subsequently be farmed as protein for the prisoners?"

Hafner thought about a question that would have been bizarre anywhere but in a cave factory of the Third Reich in 1944. "It's possible. Chickens might be better."

He heard Kersten gasp and realized his gaffe—Himmler had once been a chicken farmer.

It didn't seem to bother him. "Yes, I have some expertise in chicken farming, as you know. But if it got out that we were feeding the prisoners chicken, it would be bad for the troops' morale. The same with pigs. No one would care if the prisoners were eating rats."

"Do you want me to experiment? It would take a few weeks to get some data. I think there would have to be some processing—a grinder perhaps, like farmers use to prepare swill for hogs. Rats probably are the best choice—they could endure the conditions down here better than chickens or hogs."

Weigand giggled. "Certainly better than humans can."

Himmler looked at him with astonishment, then went on to Hafner. "No. Your agreement that it is feasible is enough. I'll put some of my agricultural experts on it. It's more important that you and Weigand give me a complete report on Nordhausen, telling me what we can do immediately to improve the life expectancy of the workers."

Hafner adopted a professional tone. "In my own work, I've developed the phrase 'productive life-hours' as a measure of efficiency for forced labor. After a certain point, life can be sustained but no work results."

Weigand interrupted. "You could vary the rations, you know. Jews to the rats today, Gypsies tomorrow, Poles the next day." He began to laugh openly as the others stared at him. "The rats might have preferences, so . . ."

Himmler went to the door and spoke in a low voice to the guards standing outside. They came in and led Weigand away. At the door he shouted over his shoulder, "There could be prizes for the biggest

Embarrassed, Hafner said,
"Herr Reichsfuehrer, Obergruppen-
fuehrer
Weigand has not been himself since his entombment at Regensburg."

So furious that his hands were trembling, Himmler tried to calm himself. "One must be hard! We cannot risk his talking about this. Why did you bring him?"

"I had no idea he was so ill!"

Shaking his head like a swimmer just out of the water, Himmler went on, his voice now icily cold. "Now to the second order of business. I am well aware of your contacts with the Americans and the Russians. Ordinarily, this would be cause for immediate execution. But these are difficult times. You are able to do some things that I might wish to do—but cannot—because of my unswerving loyalty to the Fuehrer."

Hafner said nothing. A few months earlier, Himmler's words would have been a death sentence for him, as they had just been for Weigand.

Himmler seemed to relax slightly, going on as if he were giving a potentially bright student a lesson.

"The invasion has succeeded. It might at some point be wise for Germany to negotiate a peace. As long as the Fuehrer is alive, negotiations are impossible. He would never permit it—and it is doubtful if anyone would negotiate with him."

Hafner shot a glance at Kersten, amazed that Himmler would speak this way in front of witnesses. But then, Himmler had just demonstrated how he dealt with witnesses.

"Wha ..." Hamer's voice faded. He composed himself and said, "What is it you wish me to do?"

"Nothing for now. But if Providence removes the Fuehrer at some time—some insanity like this officers' plot, or perhaps if, God forbid, his health fails—I may want you to signal one side or the other that I'm prepared to negotiate as the leader of the Reich. If that doesn't come to pass, then I may wish to make some arrangements for my postwar life, as you have done."

Hafner nodded in agreement. Himmler's eagerness betrayed him. His real concern was obviously escape.

"In the meantime, I'm going to arrange for you to have a large aircraft placed at your disposal—perhaps we might wish to go to Argentina."

Hafner took careful note of Himmler's use of the word "we," saying, "Let me work that out. It might be possible, with some arrangements. I've plotted out the distances more than once. The big Junkers, the Ju 390, has a range of more than ten thousand kilometers. We could probably arrange with Spain to land in the Canaries, or with Brazil to refuel at Natal."

Himmler seemed satisfied, responding, "There is time to see about that. Just come to me with your needs. In the meantime, I want you to carry on exactly as you have been doing."

Himmler and Kersten left, leaving Hafner to ponder his narrowing range of options. There were some precautions to be taken. Poor old Kurt! Not much of a reward for all the work he'd done.

*

Nashville/August 28, 1944

Caldwell, the pain from a burgeoning ulcer almost twisting him in half, sat glassy-eyed in front of the reports. The better the war news got, the worse things became for him. When he'd gone to Stockholm, he'd found that Lyra had vanished. He couldn't find out if the child had been taken away with his mother or placed in someone else's care. No one, neither the Swedes who knew her nor his German contact in the Embassy, would venture a guess on what had happened. Hafner's got her, he thought. The man is poison. Now Hadley Roget had summoned him from Washington with disastrous news. The performance of the McNaughton jet was as disappointing as the Sidewinder's had been.