The Death's Head Chess Club (36 page)

Kastein raises his eyes to look wonderingly at the iron-grey clouds overhead. Eternity is beyond his ability to imagine.

Eidenmüller pulls back his sleeve to glance at his watch. ‘We should go before the professor comes looking for us.'

‘There's one more thing we have to do,' Emil says. He reaches into his bag, pulls out a small box, and passes it to Willi.

‘What is it?' Kastein asks.

‘It's pocket chess,' Willi says, starting to smile. ‘Are we going to play here?'

‘We are. The game we should have played all those years ago. Can you think of a better way to honour him?'

‘No. We had better make sure it is a good one.'

Willi picked white. He moved his king's pawn forward two spaces. Emil did the same. A faint breeze stirred the trees. Willi glanced over his shoulder to where Emil had scattered Meissner's ashes. ‘Do you think he's here now, watching us?'

Emil smiled. ‘I'm sure of it.'

1
‘The Immortal Game' was played by Adolf Anderssen and Lionel Kieseritzky in London in 1851. In a series of seemingly rash moves, Anderssen sacrificed most of his major pieces – queen, both rooks and a bishop – but then achieved checkmate with his remaining bishop and knights. It is considered to be a chess game without peer.

SS R
ANKS USED IN
The Death's Head Chess Club

H
ISTORICAL
N
OTE

Introduction

The Death's Head Chess Club
is a work of fiction, but its setting is the worst crime against humanity in recorded history. Hans Frank, the governor-general of Nazi-occupied Poland during the Second World War, said, ‘Jews are a race that must be completely exterminated.'

Of all the death camps, Auschwitz had the biggest role to play in this genocide. An estimated 1.1 million people died in Auschwitz during its four and a half years as a concentration and death camp, the vast majority of them Jews from across Europe.

Auschwitz – the camp

Auschwitz was originally conceived of as a concentration camp, a place where the enemies of the Nazi state could be incarcerated away from public view. These included political enemies (mainly Communists), homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses and Jews.

Concentration camps in Germany (such as Dachau and Sachsenhausen) and the principles on which they were run were long established. Prisoners were subject to brutal, sometimes capricious discipline, housed in primitive conditions with inadequate nutrition, and hard labour was imposed mercilessly. This was what was expected when SS-Hauptsturmführer Rudolf Höss was appointed as the first Kommandant of Auschwitz to establish one of the first concentration camps in the newly conquered territories (Silesia), arriving on 30 April 1940.

Auschwitz was established as a penal work camp on the site of a former Polish army barracks. Its beginnings were inauspicious: the barracks were extremely dilapidated and infested with vermin, and the resources available to Höss were meagre, but his appointment as Kommandant was well judged: he was resourceful, hard working and completely dedicated to his task.

As the number of camps included in the Auschwitz umbrella expanded, this first camp would be designated Auschwitz I, the
Stammlager
. Eventually, there would be three main camps: Auschwitz-I, Auschwitz-II Birkenau and Auschwitz-III Monowitz.

It was with the expansion into Birkenau that the role of Auschwitz evolved to become a combined work camp and death camp (unlike other sites in Poland, such as Chełmno, Sobibór and Treblinka, which were solely extermination camps). In the late summer of 1941, while Höss was away from the camp, his deputy, Fritzsch, conducted an experiment, killing Russian prisoners of war using the pesticide
Zyklon Blausäure
(Cyclone cyanide) which until then had been used to kill infestations of insects. When Höss returned, Fritzsch demonstrated the new method of killing, of which Höss approved whole-heartedly, writing later that he was relieved that this method had been found as it would spare him a ‘bloodbath'. Between then and the summer of 1942, Höss supervised the construction of the first purpose-built gas chambers in Birkenau for mass murder using Zyklon-B.

During this time, the German industrial giant IG Farben put forward a proposal to build a factory in Silesia to manufacture synthetic rubber and oil from the poor-grade coal that was abundant in the area. The factory would be part of the Auschwitz complex and would be built using slave labour from the camp. This was designated Auschwitz-III Monowitz.
It is here that the Watchmaker's story unfolds.

The life of Auschwitz as a concentration camp came to an end in January 1945. On 18 January, with Red Army units within a few miles, the SS force-marched around 60,000 prisoners who were considered fit enough out of the camp, westwards, on foot, in appalling weather conditions. This was the infamous death march. Already debilitated by starvation rations and wearing only their ragged camp clothing and camp-issue clogs, thousands died: some collapsed and froze to death, others were shot if they lagged behind. When Russian soldiers arrived at the camp on 27 January they found nearly 8,000 prisoners who had been left behind: close to 6,000 in Birkenau, a little more than 1,000 in the
Stammlager
and about 600 in Monowitz. Among the Monowitz survivors was Primo Levi. Orders had, in fact, been given by the SS area commander, Obergruppenführer Schmauser, that prisoners considered too weak to be included in the mass exodus should be shot, but the rapid advance of the Russians had made the camp SS nervous and, in the end, they had been more concerned with saving their own skins than with the fate of a few prisoners who they thought were likely to die of disease or starvation anyway.

Historical characters in
The Death's Head Chess Club

The main characters – Emil, Paul, Willi, Bodo Brack – are fictitious. Some of the supporting characters are historical figures. These are:

Klaus Hustek's character is based on SS (Gestapo) Oberscharführer Josef Erber.

After the war, a series of war crimes trials took place. Between 1946 and 1948 about 1,000 former members of the Auschwitz SS were extradited to Poland where a number of special courts were set up, including the Supreme National Tribunal which tried the most important criminals. In March 1947, the first Auschwitz Kommandant, Rudolf Höss, was tried in Warsaw and sentenced to death. In November and December of the same year, in Kraków, forty former members of the Auschwitz SS were tried. Of these, twenty-three were sentenced to death, including the second Auschwitz Kommandant, Arthur Liebehenschel. Others received sentences ranging from three years to life imprisonment. In 1950, following numerous appeals, the former SS Hauptsturmführer Otto Brossman was acquitted of war crimes by the Kraków court.

Some former SS personnel from Auschwitz were tried and convicted for crimes other than those that were committed at Auschwitz, including Vinzenz Schottl who, as early as 1945, was convicted by a US war crimes tribunal and sentenced to death.

Eduard Wirths and Richard Glücks committed suicide.

Between 1949 and 1980 other former SS personnel were tried in the Federal Republic of Germany. The last Auschwitz Kommandant, Richard Bär, was arrested in 1960 and died in detention awaiting trial. Former SS Oberscharführer Josef Erber (who had changed his name from Houstek)
was arrested in 1962 and brought to trial in Frankfurt in December 1965. He was sentenced to life imprisonment and released in 1986. He died one year later.

Chess

Most of the chapter headings relate to chess moves. The moves were chosen to reflect some aspect of the chapter content. I do not know whether or not there was a chess club for the SS in Auschwitz, and in my research I have found no evidence to confirm it either way. The unofficial Chess Olympiad did take place in Munich in 1936, in circumstances as described in Chapter 21, though, of course, Wilhelm Schweninger's involvement is fictitious. The teams from Poland and Hungary were made up of Jews, and they both beat the German team. Hungary won the tournament with ease with twenty wins in a row, something that wasn't repeated until 1960. Poland finished second, with Najdorf winning an individual gold medal.

A
CKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am indebted to many who have inspired or helped me on this journey.

I found great inspiration in the harrowing and courageous personal accounts of those who survived Auschwitz, particularly Primo Levi, Filip Müller and Elie Wiesel, and also of those who did not survive and whose names are all but forgotten today: Zalman Gradowski, Dayan Langfus and Zalman Leventhal were among the numbers of the
Sonderkommando
; their diaries were unearthed after the war. In addition, I could never have written this book without the meticulous scholarship of numerous historians who have documented various aspects of the Nazi state, the SS, the Holocaust and Auschwitz.

I would like to express my thanks to the people who helped to make this book a reality: my agent, Carolyn Whitaker, for having faith, Ravi Mirchandani, for giving me a hearing and James Roxburgh, Belinda Jones and Ileene Smith for their endless patience and constructive editing suggestions.

And to my family – Barbara, Hannah, Laura, Andrew and Jack – thank you always for your constant love and understanding.

To all those who suffered or died as a result of the Holocaust, this book is respectfully dedicated.

N
OTE ON THE
A
UTHOR

John Donoghue has worked in mental health for over twenty years and written numerous articles about the treatment of mental illness in a variety of medical journals. He is married and lives in Liverpool