Ruins of War (15 page)

I
t was just shy of noon on Monday morning when Mason exited the military train at the Frankfurt central train station and stepped into a bone-chilling fog. Another train had pulled in just before Mason’s, returning from the countryside. Every day, city dwellers would take their jewelry, cameras, furs, brandy, anything left of their valuables, and trade with the farmers for food. The train cars bulged with desperate and hungry Germans. So full, in fact, that many had to cling to the outside using the handrails, and the warmer passengers had to help pry their near-frozen fingers from the ice-cold metal.

The worst scene was of another train that had arrived thirty minutes earlier from Czechoslovakia. The Czechs were expelling all ethnic Germans from the Sudetenland, close to two million of them. Ethnic Germans had lived there for generations, but after Hitler and the war, they were no longer welcome. Entire families were forced from their homes with only what they could carry and were loaded onto open freight cars to make the days-long journey into the heart of Germany.

Most of the passengers still wandered the platform with no place to go. Others helped officials remove those who had died from cold after the long trip, many of them children or the elderly. Mothers wailed over their dead children; children wailed from hunger and the
freezing temperatures. The expulsions from Czechoslovakia and Poland had just begun, and millions more would follow.

Mason caught a taxi waiting in front of the station. He gave the man directions and watched the crumbled cityscape pass by. Frankfurt had suffered more damage than Munich. In Munich there were rows upon rows of burned-out shells of buildings, but in Frankfurt entire blocks contained only piles of brick and stone, nothing to indicate that a great city had stood there. There were few landmarks left, whole streets no longer existed, and while Mason was stationed there, he had gotten lost many times. Fortunately the taxi driver knew how to navigate this wasteland and bring him to USFET headquarters.

USFET stood for United States Forces, European Theater, the designation for supreme headquarters of all American forces in Europe. This was General Eisenhower’s home away from home. The building that housed USFET was reportedly the most massive building in all of Europe and, in Mason’s mind, one of the most notorious—the headquarters of IG Farben, the company responsible for developing the chemical, Zyklon B, used to gas millions in the death camps.

The building sprawled for most of four city blocks, with six nine-story buildings connected by a central lobby. After three security checks, Mason entered the gargantuan lobby. It was originally built as a temple to the corporate gods: marble, marble everywhere, with two identical ascending staircases in aluminum, and a back wall of glass looking out onto a reflection pool circled by statuary. Now it was a general’s temple to the gods of war. Rumor had it that it had been spared Allied bombs on Eisenhower’s orders so he could adopt it for his headquarters.

On one side of the lobby two immaculately dressed soldiers stood at attention behind a reception desk. Mason approached the desk and both soldiers snapped a salute. Mason wondered how many times a day the poor guys had to do that.

“I should have orders from Colonel Donaldson’s office waiting for me,” Mason said.

Mason had contacted Colonel Donaldson in JAG, the Judge Advocate General’s office, as his CIC buddy Forester had recommended. Mason suspected that Forester had paved the way for him, because Colonel Donaldson’s office had responded immediately to his request, instructing him to see a Colonel Marsden.

The guard handed Mason his clearance orders and directed him to wing F, first floor. It took a good fifteen minutes of elevators and hallways to find the door labeled,
COLONEL HUGH MARSDEN, DIRECTOR, WAR CRIMES COMMISSION DOCUMENT REPOSITORY
. Mason entered a large rectangular office. On one side was a long reading table; on the other, a desk cluttered with files, picture frames, and a cluster of replicas of ancient Egyptian statuettes—at least, Mason assumed they were replicas. Behind the desk and above a row of file cabinets hung portraits of Field Marshal Montgomery and King George VI.

A moment later, Colonel Marsden exited a reinforced door opposite the reading table. He was tall and thin with graying temples and a salt-and-pepper mustache. He wore a crisply pressed British officer’s uniform sporting a fistful of campaign ribbons and medals. His gait was parade-ground straight, never bending at the waist, and swiveling on his heels.

They exchanged salutes. Marsden found his place behind the desk. He had an air of formality but with a hint of a smile, as if something privately amused him.

Mason offered Marsden the letter from Colonel Donaldson, but Marsden waved it away. “No need for that, Mr. Collins, and do, please, sit.” Marsden leaned back in his swivel chair and folded his arms in his lap. “I’m all attention.”

Mason could see immediately that Colonel Marsden enjoyed his role as gatekeeper to the vaults of knowledge, and he knew he would have to do a little tap dancing to gain access to the keys of the colonel’s realm. “Well, sir, as Colonel Donaldson’s letter states, I have—”

“Yes, I know what the letter contains. Colonel Donaldson explained that you requested access to documents in our repository. I know you’re
a criminal investigator with CID. All these things are known to me. I am more interested in your purpose and selected goals.”

“The purpose, sir, is to identify the perpetrator of a series of murders,” Mason said flatly.

“The room behind that door is full of documents on tens of thousands of perpetrators of murder. Perhaps you could narrow it down for me.”

Mason took a deep breath to keep from saying something he’d regret later. “I have reason to believe that our prime suspect in a series of particularly brutal murders was once an SS doctor at Ravensbrück.” He pulled out the photograph of Scholz and laid it in front of Marsden. “He’s about six-four with a small head, glasses, weak chin, and thin lips. He went under an alias of Heinrich Scholz. A witness accuses him of sterilizing her and other women in the winter of 1942. Do you recall having any information on this man?”

Marsden shook his head. “But you don’t understand—”

“If I could have access to files pertaining to this doctor, his experiments, who he worked with, and where the surviving ones are now—”

Marsden shot up from his chair. “Come with me.”

Mason followed him to a reinforced door.

“I am not here to impede you,” Marsden said. “I am your first step, your first source of information, if you will. As a matter of fact, I have taken a keen interest in the Nazis’ medical atrocities. The very idea that an entire group of self-proclaimed healers could turn into cold-blooded, sadistic killers is so egregious and aberrant that it fascinates me.”

Marsden opened it and stepped aside for Mason to enter. What had been one of IG Farben’s immense research labs now housed floor-to-ceiling shelves loaded with boxes. The room seemed to go on for the length of a football field and just as wide. A bustle of men and women in uniform or civilian clothes searched or filed documents throughout the room.

“There are four more rooms like this one,” Marsden said. “There is no card catalog you can browse through.
I
am the card catalog.”

“You made your point, Colonel.”

Marsden started walking along the wall to his left. After four endless rows of shelves, he said, “Ah, here we are,” and turned to enter the row. “The next five rows deal with human experimentation.” He continued down the row, looking up and down at labeled boxes. “Believe it or not, you are looking at a very incomplete collection. If you were hoping to discover information on every doctor or experiment, then you’ll be disappointed. At Ravensbrück, in particular, the SS guards destroyed their files before fleeing the advancing armies. The Russians overtook some of the biggest death camps, Auschwitz, for example, and any captured documents are in their hands. We get them only when deemed necessary.”

Marsden found a box he was looking for and rifled through the contents. “There are photostatic copies of documents from camps the British Army captured, and we’re still in the process of compiling documents or copies of documents from all the various document repositories, hoping to one day create a central repository in Berlin. Witnesses are still coming forward and being interviewed, which leads us to new information, new doctor suspects.”

“How many camps had doctors doing medical experiments?” Mason asked.

“We know of ten, so far.”

“And the number of Nazi doctors?”

“Woefully imprecise,” Marsden said as he pulled out a file folder. “Plus, it depends on how you count. There were many camp doctors, though some were there to evaluate arriving prisoners, separating the healthy ones for slave labor, while sending the rest to the gas chambers. Some were assigned to stem the spread of camp diseases, like typhus and tuberculosis. There were staff administrative doctors whose job was to oversee medical operations; they’d supervise or delegate requested experiments by the military or the scientific community.”

“How many Nazi doctors performed or assisted in the human experiments at the camps?”

“I would guess fifty or so. But that’s only a guess. Some are just now coming to light. And that doesn’t count the prisoner doctors.”

Mason stopped. “
Prisoner
doctors?”

Marsden found another file and was distracted by what it contained. “Hm? Oh . . . yes, many inmates who had worked as doctors or other medical professionals were forced to work as medical staff under command of the Nazi doctors.” Marsden tucked the file under his arm and turned down another aisle.

Mason remained where he was, his mind digesting the idea. The murderer had left messages at the crime scenes intimating, Mason believed, the killer’s desire to escape his own personal hell. And what could have driven a man more to believe he’s in a living hell than being forced to participate in vile human experimentation?

“Mr. Collins?” Marsden said from the next aisle over.

Mason caught up to Marsden. “Do you have any idea how many prisoner doctors there were?”

Marsden thought a moment. “Potentially, I would say several hundred, particularly if you included dentists, pharmacists, radiologists, pathologists. . . . The prisoner doctors took on a variety of duties: treating ill or dying inmates, disease control, and hygiene, especially in the labor camps.”

“How many do you have information on?”

“At the present time, I would say a little over a hundred.”

“And they came from . . . ?”

“Everywhere,” Marsden said. “Jews, Poles, Czechs, Frenchmen, even Germans.”

“Germans?”

“We know of a few, though there were at least three million imprisoned German civilians. And that’s not counting the quarter of a million German Jews. So statistically speaking, there had to be a large number of German inmates who were doctors. I imagine at least a handful of them were forced or, for survival, volunteered to partake in experiments.” He pulled out another file, then continued to lead
Mason down the aisle. Suddenly he stopped, pulled out a box, and leafed through the folders. “It seems a bit of a stretch to speculate that because your killer was involved in human experiments it drove him to murder.”

“I never said that was the cause.”

“But you have considered it a possibility.”

“Not until you told me about the prisoner doctors.”

Marsden continued down the aisle, plucking out files as he went. “You said the killer has been committing particularly brutal murders. May I ask in what sense?”

“He’s been performing the equivalent of autopsies, but on live victims. He’s removed a different organ each time, then dismembered all four limbs and arranged them in a bizarre way. And everything he’s done, as crazy as it may be, has been done with surgical precision. Literally.”

Marsden furrowed his brow as he thought. “There are other experiments that follow more closely to your killer’s methods. Including another series of experiments at Ravensbrück.”

“I’ll see those, too.”

Marsden held up a handful of files and waved them in front of Mason. “Right here.” He then moved around to the next row. “Also, you must keep in mind that many of the doctors were transferred around to different camps, so your killer doctor could have been at other camps besides Ravensbrück. Especially toward the end of the war when the Nazis evacuated the eastern camps ahead of the Russian army.” He found another box, grabbed a series of files, and held them up for Mason to see. “Contained in these are some of the most dastardly of them all. These are reports about performing operations, even vivisection, on inmates with no anesthesia.”

“What exactly is vivisection?” Mason asked.

“Well, pretty much what you just described your killer is doing. Dissecting a body while it’s still alive.”

Mason’s mind raced as he digested this information. “Maybe our
killer participated in those experiments as well. What about the doctors involved? Do you know who they are?”

Marsden allowed himself a brief smile of pride and patted his armful of folders. “Follow me.”

Mason followed Marsden out of the room and into another with shelves, researchers’ desks, and a row of reading tables. The room buzzed with clerks and researchers. Marsden stopped at a clerk’s desk. “Could you have some tea brought over to reading table twelve, please?”

Marsden then led Mason to the last reading table, which sat away from the commotion. Marsden dropped the stack of files on the table and sat. Mason pulled over a chair to sit beside him.

“As to your question,” Marsden said, “I can speculate that several doctors operated on victims without anesthesia. Most of the information we have about these acts so far is from inmate testimony. Many of these procedures were intentionally not recorded, and most of the victims of these kinds of horrendous operations were killed then cremated or put in mass graves. We’re still searching for live inmates who can give us more details.”

“Where did the operations take place?”