Pursuit (4 page)

“We'll come to the matter of the pits,” he said unhappily, and ran his finger down the list again. He looked up. “Dr. Schlossberg—”

“Here, sir.”

The doctor was the only person in the room not in regulation uniform; instead he wore a long laboratory jacket. He was a man in his early forties, cavernous and prematurely bald, who always looked as if he expected to be blamed for something and was ill prepared to offer an excuse for whatever it was. Mittendorf studied him without expression. He had profound contempt for the doctor, not because of any lack of professional ability—although Mittendorf himself would not have let the man treat him for a hangnail—but because of the man's apparent weakness.

“How is your assignment going at the hospital?”

“My assignment?” The doctor rubbed the bare top of his head as if, genie fashion, to raise an answer there. Before the war Schlossberg had a reputation as a brilliant surgeon, although Mittendorf found it hard to believe the doctor could have made the necessary difficult decisions.

“Your experiments, Doctor!”

“Oh, the experiments. Why, they're going along all right, sir.” The doctor suddenly realized the question had been asked in conjunction with the questions others in the meeting had been called upon to answer. “Oh, you mean about evacuating the camp, sir. They can be stopped without—none of them are long-term experiments …” The doctor suddenly further understood the question. “Oh, the patients will be no problem, Commandant. We have various means—”

“And more corpses for the
verdamnt
ovens!” Mittendorf's thick fingers drummed restlessly on his desk while he considered all phases of the enormous problem. “All right,” he said at last, making up his mind. “Sergeant Schmidt, I want you to take charge of the pits—” For raising the question, he told himself. “Forget those in Krepiecki; concentrate on those inside the camp area itself. You will have to dig them up and rebury the bodies deeper, much deeper. Put enough lye on them this time. If you have time, try to start some sort of construction over them to hide them—”

“Commandant?” It was Schmidt again. Mittendorf's face darkened. What now? Hadn't the idiot caused enough problems already?

“Yes? What is it?”

“Why not make a latrine over the old pit? The one back of the baths? The new pit is probably too far away to convince anyone it was used as a latrine, but the old pit is close enough. The Russians will never dig up a pit that is full of shit.”

The officers grinned; even Mittendorf permitted himself a brief smile. For once Sergeant Schmidt had made a constructive suggestion, although it had obviously been triggered by his own idea of constructing something over the pits.

“Good enough. Have plans prepared for building it. Inmates of Fields II and III can use it. Maybe you can make the old pit also look as if it was once used as a latrine. If you have time have some prisoners haul some shit down there and spread it around; we have plenty of it. In any event, it's your assignment, Sergeant. Do what you have to do.”

He swung about.

“Colonel Schneller, get into Lublin and see what you can do about arranging boxcars. As soon as you get any, load them up and ship them west. Contact Auschwitz and have them check their companion camps, and they can check Birkenau next door. See how many people they can take. Possibly we can get a turnaround on the cars going to camps that aren't too far away. See what you can do. And we'll push the ovens to capacity. In a week or so, when we see where we are, we'll start making arrangements to destroy the ovens and the gas pens and move the rest of the prisoners out on foot with the balance of the guards. All right. Any questions? Any comments?”

“Sir?” It was a Lieutenant Frisch. As Mittendorf recalled, another idiot who probably shouldn't even have been at the meeting. “We tried pyres once—”

“Which weren't worth the petrol they burned. Any other comments? Captain Müeller?”

“Sir, if we could start clearing the fields one by one, rather than sending men to the gas chamber a few from each field, I could get a head start by burning those barracks once they're cleared—”

“Not a bad idea.” Mittendorf made a note and then scratched through it. It was a terrible idea. “We do not have to burn the barracks. What do barracks signify? There was an army camp here. Don't waste your time; concentrate on the ovens and the gas pens.”

“Yes, sir.” Müeller sounded doubtful. “I'll still need the time and the men and the dynamite to get the job done, and that's four days at the very least—”

“You'll have it! If we have it, that is. Good God! All right—anything else? All right, gentlemen, let's get to work. Heil Hitler!” There was a murmur of response as the men came to their feet. The commandant cleared his throat. “Colonel von Schraeder, if you please. And Dr. Schlossberg. If you two might remain a moment after the others.”

The two men settled back into their chairs while the others filed out. The tall thin doctor looked guilty at being selected, as though—while he had no idea of the details of his crime—he was sure he must have committed it. Von Schraeder merely looked bored. He ejected his cigarette from his holder and ground it out beneath his boot heel on the conference-room floor, well aware that Mittendorf was watching and equally aware of the commandant's pride in the neat appearance of the command post. When the door had closed after the final man, the commandant turned first to the doctor.

“Doctor, your work is in order?”

“Why—yes, sir.”

“Good. I want you to turn everything you have in progress over to your chief assistant. You are being transferred, together with Colonel von Schraeder.”

The doctor looked alarmed. “I beg your pardon?”

“I said you are being transferred to a different camp.” Good God! Couldn't the idiot understand simple German? “You will leave for Buchenwald camp tomorrow morning. I have your orders here. Colonel von Schraeder's car will pick you up tomorrow morning at your quarters at five o'clock sharp. Be ready to leave.”

“Yes, sir.” The doctor stroked his bald spot almost frantically. “But, sir—I didn't ask for a transfer …”

“I know,” Mittendorf said dryly. “And I didn't request one for you, either. But it's evident someone did. In any event, it's really of no great importance. You'll just be leaving a bit earlier than the rest of us, the way the situation appears.” He turned to the colonel, trying his best to sound normal, a commandant speaking with a subordinate, fighting to hide the bitterness, the hatred that twisted his stomach each time he had to deal with the colonel. “I'm sure you're not surprised to be transferred, are you, Colonel?”

Von Schraeder shrugged, looking faintly amused at the commandant's attempt to be subtle.

“I try not to be surprised at anything, Commandant.”

“Yes …” Mittendorf looked into the colonel's cold slate-blue eyes but could read nothing there. “Well, your orders are to be transferred to Buchenwald, as well. After you've gone”—he could not help but add—“we'll see if we can't improve on your vaunted efficiency. Get a bit more out of the ovens than you were able to do.”

“I'm sure you'll do your best,” von Schraeder said. His tone indicated that Mittendorf's best would break no records. He came to his feet and raised his hand in a half salute that was customary with him. “Possibly we'll meet again, sometime.” He reached over casually, removing the papers from Mittendorf's hand, checking them as if the commandant might not be trusted to give him the right ones. He handed the proper set to the doctor. Schlossberg paused long enough to first salute, then shake hands, and finally say “Heil Hitler” before following the colonel from the room. He closed the door quietly behind him.

In the now deserted conference room, Klaus Mittendorf stared at the closed door, his loathing for von Schraeder almost making him physically ill. He had been, first, with the Brown Shirts, then with the SS since the bully-boy days of the early twenties, and had never gotten beyond the rank of sergeant major, and although rank had nothing to do with position in concentration-camp leadership—the commandant was commandant regardless of military rank, and received the respect due him—it still rankled. Mittendorf sat and gritted his teeth; he would have given a month's pay to know how von Schraeder had managed to pull strings and get both himself and Dr. Schlossberg transferred without his approval. It was done on the Berlin trip, of course; if he thought for a moment messages had gone back and forth from the camp communications center without his knowledge, someone would pay for it dearly. But he was sure it had been handled on von Schraeder's last leave of absence. Personal business! What a story! And why the transfer at this particular time? Did von Schraeder think the Maidanek camp was going to be surrendered to the Russians with all personnel attached? Although if Mittendorf could have done it, he would have loved to leave his deputy in charge when the evacuation was complete. But it would have been impossible, and von Schraeder should have known it. He was merely anticipating a transfer that would have taken place in any event in another week or two. Why?
Why
?

And why the transfer of the doctor at the same time to the same camp? It was all part of whatever von Schraeder had in mind, because no one on earth was ever going to make him believe that it was mere coincidence. Was it possible there might be something between the two men? Something sexual? Although that seemed ridiculous, considering Colonel von Schraeder's reputation as a womanizer; the endless parade of women prisoners through the deputy commandant's house, on their way either to the
soldatenheim
, the brothel, or—if they got pregnant—to the ovens, was no great secret at Maidanek.

Ah, the fucking bastard! And that story of his for never saluting properly, that he had broken his arm as a child and it had never healed properly!
Gruss Gott
, what an alibi! Well, so the colonel said that possibly they might meet again sometime, eh? It was possible; everything was possible. And at that future meeting, whenever and wherever it took place, it was also possible that army rank might mean nothing, and it was also possible that von Schraeder might not have so many fine friends in high places. Then on that lovely day we shall see, my fine-feathered young colonel. We shall see.…

With a curse for von Schraeder and a sigh for the work that had to be done, Mittendorf bent back to his lists, trying to correlate the impossible numbers. People, including superiors who should have known better considering their own experience, seemed to have no idea of the difficulty of killing huge numbers of prisoners and getting rid of the bodies. On paper it looked simple; a bullet in the nape of the neck or the spray of a machine gun or a whiff of gas; but that was just the beginning. You couldn't leave the dead bodies lying around like cordwood, spreading disease and stinking up the place; you had to get rid of them. Once he had been permitted to bury them, but now his orders were to destroy them completely, although nobody bothered to tell him exactly how this was to be accomplished.

It was true, he had grudgingly to admit, that when that Junker prick von Schraeder had originally been assigned to Maidanek, the intention had been to make the camp a labor source for the industrial complex that was to be built there; it was also true that when, in May of 1942, the decision had been made not to build the industrial portion but to turn the camp into a
vernichtungslager
—an extermination camp—von Schraeder had not hesitated a moment. The colonel seemed to enjoy mass killing, the cold-blooded bastard! At any rate, he certainly enjoyed resolving the technical problems involved in mass killing. It was von Schraeder who had dismantled the original crematory and built the new one at the extreme rear of the camp so that those newcomers entering were not immediately aware of the end purpose of the place. It had been von Schraeder who had insisted upon the victims entering the shower area actually getting a shower before being herded into the concrete pens in the next room to be gassed. At other camps the shower heads were false; not at Maidanek. It meant far less trouble, more docility on the part of the prisoners on their way to death.

And it was von Schraeder, to give the devil his due, who had stopped the use of carbon monoxide copied from Treblinka and substituted it with the far quicker Zyclon B, working with the chemists and technicians of Tesch & Stabinow of Hamburg, and the engineers of Degesch of Dessau, the two German firms that had acquired the patent for the crystals from I. G. Farben, in order to determine the optimum quantity needed to get the job done without undue waste. And von Schraeder had brought in the engineers of C. H. Kori and worked with them on the design of the new ovens to determine the proper temperature and best fuel to cremate the bodies more rapidly. Before that innovation they had been lucky to handle a thousand through the ovens in a day.

Still, what Berlin seemed to forget was that Colonel von Schraeder, Junker prick, had done all of his engineering marvels under the direction of his commandant, although one would never have suspected it from the praise the colonel got from Berlin, while the brass there acted as if Klaus Mittendorf didn't even exist! God! If he could only expose von Schraeder for the thousand upon thousands of Deutschemarks he had sent to his secret account in Switzerland, money taken in bribes from prisoners to keep them or someone in their family alive, only to send them to the gas chamber once the last pfennig had been extracted. Or the money from the gold in the prisoners' teeth, often taken before they were killed; or the clothing on their back—all moneys that by law should have gone to the Reich. It was a charge of that nature that had finished Koch at Buchenwald. But, unfortunately, that was one closet door better left unopened; many had gotten rich at Maidanek, von Schraeder and Mittendorf included. If he could only demonstrate the colonel's complicity without having his own divulged—no, damn it! it would be too dangerous. But someday …