March Violets (34 page)

‘I've taken better cases,' I said.

‘You must forget who you are now,' said Sohst quickly. ‘We have arranged for you to have a new identity. You are now Willy Krause, and you are a black-marketeer. Here are your new papers.' He handed me a new identity card. They'd used my old police photograph.

‘There is one more thing,' said Heydrich. ‘I regret that verisimilitude requires a certain amount of further attention to your appearance, consistent with your having been arrested and interrogated. It's rare for a man to arrive at Columbia Haus without the odd bruise. My men downstairs will take care of you in that respect. For your own protection, of course.'

‘Very thoughtful of you,' I said.

‘You'll be held at Columbia for a week, and then transferred to Dachau.' Heydrich stood up. ‘May I wish you good luck.' I took hold of my trouser band and got to my feet.

‘Remember, this is a Gestapo operation. You must not discuss it with anyone.' Heydrich turned and pressed a button to summon the guards.

‘Just tell me this,' I said. ‘What's happened to Six and Helfferich, and the rest of them?'

‘I see no harm in telling you,' he said. ‘Well then, Herr Six is under house-arrest. He is not charged with anything, as yet. He is still too shocked at the resurrection and subsequent death of his daughter to answer any questions. Such a tragic case. Unfortunately, Herr Haupthandler died in hospital the day before yesterday, having never recovered consciousness. As to the criminal known as Red Dieter Helfferich, he was beheaded at Lake Ploetzen at six o'clock this morning, and his entire gang sent to the KZ at Sachsenhausen.' He smiled sadly at me. ‘I doubt that any harm will come to Herr Six. He's much too important a man to suffer any lasting damage because of what has happened. So you can see, of all the other leading players in this unfortunate affair, you are the only one who is left alive. It merely remains to be seen if you can conclude this case successfully, not only as a matter of professional pride, but also your personal survival.'

 

The two guards marched me back to the elevator, and then to my cell, but only to beat me up. I put up a struggle but, weak from lack of decent food and proper sleep, I was unable to put up more than a token resistance. I might have managed one of them alone, but together they were more than a match for me. After that I was taken to the S S guardroom, which was about the size of a meeting hall. Near the double-thick door sat a group of S S, playing cards and drinking beer, their pistols and blackjacks heaped on another table like so many toys confiscated by a strict schoolmaster. Facing the far wall, and standing at attention in a line, were about twenty prisoners whom I was ordered to join. A young SS Sturmann swaggered up and down its length, shouting at some prisoners and booting many in the back or on the arse. When an old man collapsed onto the stone floor, the Sturmann booted him into unconsciousness. And all the time new prisoners were joining the line. After an hour there must have been at least a hundred of us.

They marched us through a long corridor to a cobbled courtyard where we were loaded into Green Minnas. No S S men came with us inside the vans, but nobody said much. Each sat quietly, alone with his own thoughts of home and loved ones whom he might never see again.

When we got to Columbia Haus we climbed out of the vans. The sound of an aeroplane could be heard taking off from nearby Tempelhof Flying Field, and as it passed over the Trojan-grey walls of the old military prison, to a man we all glanced wistfully up into the sky, each of us wishing that he were among the plane's passengers.

‘Move, you ugly bastards,' yelled a guard, and with many kicks, shoves and punches, we were herded up to the first floor and paraded in five columns in front of a heavy wooden door. A menagerie of warders paid us close and sadistic attention.

‘See that fucking door?' yelled the Rottenführer, his face twisted to one side with malice, like a feeding shark. ‘In there we finish you as men for the rest of your days. We put your balls in a vice, see? Stops you getting homesick. After all, how can you want to go home to your wives and girlfriends if you've nothing left to go home with?' He roared with laughter, and so did the menagerie, some of whom dragged the first man kicking and screaming into the room, and closed the door behind them.

I felt the other prisoners shake with fear; but I guessed that this was the corporal's idea of a joke, and when eventually it came to my own turn, I made a deliberate show of calm as they took me to the door. Once inside they took my name and address, studied my file for several minutes, and then, having been abused for my supposed black-marketeering, I was beaten up again.

Once in the main body of the prison I was taken, painfully, to my cell, and on the way there I was surprised to hear a large choir of men singing
If You Still Have a Mother.
It was only later on that I discovered the reason for the choir's existence: its performances were made at the behest of the S S to drown out the screams from the punishment cellar where prisoners were beaten on the bare buttocks with wet sjamboks.

As an ex-bull I've seen the inside of quite a few prisons in my time: Tegel, Sonnenburg, Lake Plœtzen, Brandenburg, Zellen-gefängnis, Brauweiler; every one of them is a hard place, with tough discipline; but none of them came close to the brutality and dehumanizing squalor that was Columbia Haus, and it wasn't long before I was wondering if Dachau could be any worse.

There were approximately a thousand prisoners in Columbia. For some, like me, it was a short-stay transit prison, on the way to a KZ; for others, it was a long-stay transit camp on the way to a KZ. Quite a few were only ever to get out in a pine box.

As a newcomer on a short stay I had a cell to myself. But since it was cold at night and there were no blankets, I would have welcomed a little human warmth around me. Breakfast was coarse rye wholemeal bread and ersatz coffee. Dinner was bread and potato gruel. The latrine was a ditch with a plank laid across it, and you were obliged to shit in the company of nine other prisoners at any one time. Once, a guard sawed through the plank and some of the prisoners ended up in the cesspit. At Columbia Haus they appreciated a sense of humour.

I had been there for six days when one night, at around midnight, I was ordered to join a vanload of prisoners for transport to Putlitzstrasse Railway Station, and from there to Dachau.

 

Dachau is situated some fifteen kilometres north-west of Munich. Someone on the train told me that it was the Reich's first KZ. This seemed to me to be entirely appropriate, given Munich's reputation as the birthplace of National Socialism. Built around the remains of an old explosives factory, it stands anomalously near some farmland in pleasant Bavarian countryside. Actually, the countryside is all there is that's pleasant about Bavaria. The people certainly aren't. I felt sure that Dachau wasn't about to disappoint me in this respect, or in any other. At Columbia Haus they said that Dachau was the model for all later camps: that there was even a special school there to train S S men to be more brutal. They didn't lie.

We were helped out of the wagons with the usual boots and rifle-butts, and marched east to the camp entrance. This was enclosed by a large guardhouse underneath which was a gate with the slogan ‘Work Makes You Free' in the middle of the iron grille-work. The legend was the subject of some contemptuous mirth among the other prisoners, but nobody dared say anything for fear of getting a kicking.

I could think of lots of things that made you free, but work wasn't one of them: after five minutes in Dachau, death seemed a better bet.

They marched us to an open square which was a kind of parade ground, flanked to the south by a long building with a high-pitched roof. To the north, and running between seemingly endless rows of prison huts, was a wide, straight road lined with tall poplar trees. My heart sank as I began to appreciate the full magnitude of the task that lay before me. Dachau was huge. It might take months even to find Mutschmann, let alone befriend him convincingly enough to learn where he had hidden the papers. I was beginning to doubt whether the whole exercise simply wasn't the grossest piece of sadism on Heydrich's part.

The KZ commander came out of the long hut to welcome us. Like everybody in Bavaria, he had a lot to learn about hospitality. Mostly he had punishments on offer. He said that there were more than enough good trees around to hang every one of us. He finished by promising us hell, and I didn't doubt that he would be as good as his word. But at least there was fresh air. That's one of the two things you can say for Bavaria: the other has something to do with the size of their women's breasts.

They had the quaintest little tailor's shop at Dachau. And a barber's shop. I found a nice off-the-peg in stripes, a pair of clogs, and then had a haircut. I'd have asked for some oil on it but that would have meant pouring it on the floor. Things started to look up when I got three blankets, which was an improvement on Columbia, and was assigned to an Aryan hut. This was quarters for 150 men. Jewish huts contained three times that number.

It was true what they said: there's always somebody else who is worse off than you. That is, unless you were unfortunate enough to be Jewish. The Jewish population in Dachau was never large, but in all respects Jews were the worst off. Except maybe the questionable means of attaining freedom. In an Aryan hut the death rate was one per night; in a Jewish hut it was nearer seven or eight.

Dachau was no place to be a Jew.

Generally the prisoners reflected the complete spectrum of opposition to the Nazis, not to mention those against whom the Nazis were themselves implacably hostile. There were Sozis and Kozis, trade unionists, judges, lawyers, doctors, school teachers, army officers. Republican soldiers from the Spanish Civil War, Jehovah's Witnesses, Freemasons, Catholic priests, gypsies, Jews, spiritualists, homosexuals, vagrants, thieves and murderers. With the exception of some Russians, and a few former members of the Austrian cabinet, everyone in Dachau was German. I met a convict who was a Jew. He was also a homosexual. And if that weren't enough, he was also a communist. That made three triangles. His luck hadn't so much run out as jumped on a fucking motorcycle.

 

Twice a day we had to assemble at the Appellplatz for Parade, and after roll-call came the Hindenburg Alms — floggings. They fastened the man or woman to a block and gave you an average of twenty-five on the bare arse. I saw several shit themselves during a beating. The first time I was ashamed for them; but after that someone told me it was the best way you had of spoiling the concentration of the man wielding the whip.

Parade was my best chance for looking at all the other prisoners. I kept a mental log of those men I had eliminated, and within a month I had succeeded in ruling out over 300 men.

I never forget a face. That's one of the things that makes you a good bull, and one of the things that had prompted me to join the force in the first place. Only this time my life depended on it. But always there were newcomers to upset my methodology. I felt like Hercules trying to clean the shit out of the Aegean stables.

 

How do you describe the indescribable? How can you talk about something that made you mute with horror? There were many more articulate than me who were simply unable to find the words. It is a silence born of shame, for even the guiltless are guilty. Shorn of all human rights, man reverts back to the animal. The starving steal from the starving, and personal survival is the only consideration, which overrides, even censors, the experience. Work sufficient to destroy the human spirit was the aim of Dachau, with death the unlooked-for by-product. Survival was through the vicarious suffering of others: you were safe for a while when it was another man who was being beaten or lynched; for a few days you might eat the ration of the man in the next cot after he had expired in his sleep.

 

To stay alive it is first necessary to die a little.

Soon after my arrival at Dachau I was put in charge of a Jewish work-company building a workshop on the northwestern corner of the compound. This involved filling handcarts with rocks weighing anything up to thirty kilos and pushing them up the hill out of the quarry and to the building site, a distance of several hundred metres. Not all the S S in Dachau were bastards: some of them were comparatively moderate and managed to make money by running small businesses on the side, using the cheap labour and pool of skills that the KZ provided, so it was in their interest not to work the prisoners to death. But the S S supervising the building site were
real
bastards. Mostly Bavarian peasants, formerly unemployed, theirs was a less refined type of sadism than that which had been practised by their urban counterparts at Columbia. But it was just as effective. Mine was an easy job: as company leader I was not required myself to shift the blocks of stone; but for the Jews working in my kommando it was back-breaking work all the way. The S S were always setting deliberately tight schedules for the completion of a foundation, or a wall, and failure to meet the schedule meant no food or water. Those who collapsed through exhaustion were shot where they fell.

At first I took a hand myself, and the guards found this hugely amusing; and it was not as if the work grew any lighter as a result of my participation. One of them said to me:

‘What, are you a Jew-lover or something? I don't get it. You don't have to help them, so why do you bother?'

For a moment I had no answer. Then I said: ‘You don't get it. That's why I have to bother.'

He looked rather puzzled, and then frowned. For a moment I thought he was going to take offence, but instead he just laughed and said: ‘Well, it's your fucking funeral.'