The Tenth Witness (Henri Poincare Mystery) (12 page)

I was shown to a former prison cell, bright and white-walled with a view of the exercise yard. I opened the window and leaned outside, where I found three surveillance cameras. On the plain metal desk were folders, including photos captioned just as I had seen in Plannik’s office. I had no plan other than to plow through it all. A quick survey of the images revealed what I was in for: preening soldiers posed beside bodies piled like cordwood or hanging from ropes or meat hooks. The document files contained hundreds of yellowed pages with official Nazi letterhead. I had brought a French-German dictionary; the woman who showed me into the room left me with a magnifying glass.

I didn’t expect to find a photo of Isaac, which would have confirmed his imprisonment at Drütte. But I found something nearly as definitive, a stamp on a worker’s pass that identified the bearer as a member of the factory air defense system at HGW, the Hermann Göring Werke. Drütte was part of the mill complex, and on the pass, stamped in faded red, was the HGW logo: a thick ring connected to a square, seated atop a bar.

All these years, I’d assumed the stamped pattern on Isaac’s medallion was complete in itself. I had seen a boot in it, and why not? He had been a cobbler; it made sense. I set the medallion on the table before me:

It was not a boot. I turned the metal ninety degrees and saw it at once:

Isaac had picked up a sliver of stamped metal off the floor of the mill. What had happened there that he couldn’t tell? I went to the window and stared at the perimeter walls. It must have been a daunting obstacle when the Zentrale Stelle was a prison. Branches of a large oak arched into the yard. The roof lines of neat and trim houses rose beyond, and I imagined children in earlier times spying on the inmates from attic windows. On the pale walls I saw Isaac shuffling in the striped uniform of a prisoner, head shaved, lice infested, wearing ill-fitted wooden clogs as a defense against winter. They had tried killing him through work. How close had they come?

I let him go and returned to the image of an SS guard with a truncheon in the act of beating a prisoner he’d hung by the wrists, followed by an image of that same guard posing in the countryside on what must have been a rare day off. He toasted the photographer with a stein full of beer.

I rose from the desk and closed the door to my cell, then tore through the remaining folders in search of Otto Kraus and Rein-hard Vogt, the man Zeligman had cursed. I read several documents signed by Kraus, pro forma letters detailing steel output versus monthly quotas set in Berlin. It was true, Otto was a producer: twelve tons ordered for March 1941, fifteen tons delivered. Eighteen tons ordered for July 1941, twenty delivered. And here were photos of Kraus at his desk, in a business suit. Here he was on a catwalk overlooking a furnace and there, standing before a mountain of finished product destined, said the caption, for the Opel plant, owned by General Motors.

Otto’s hand was in it all. Using the magnifying glass, I could locate the Herman Göring stamp on many pieces of steel. I read a letter of commendation signed by Hitler himself, praising Kraus for taking the poor quality ore of Salzgitter and finding a process for creating high quality steel for the Fatherland. I held a letter signed by, touched by, Adolf Hitler.

I found no evidence that Kraus secretly saved hundreds, nor did I find evidence that he participated directly in the abuse of prisoners. Despite my urgency, the documents did not establish the facts one way or the other. I saw dozens of SS guards, repeating faces from one photo to the next, though none with the name Vogt—until I stopped at a sheet on which was printed, as a caption, the following:

Salzgitter HGW, October 1943. Otto von Kraus, Reinhard Vogt, Menard Gottlieb

Gottlieb I had never heard of, but here were Kraus and Vogt mentioned together. The photo was gone, and the page was coded with a green tab. The reference sheet told me that green pointed to an additional file, one started for a preliminary investigation into war crimes. I walked down the prison corridor to the administrative office and asked to see it.

The administrative assistant soon arrived at my cell with fresh folders. She leafed through them, scanning the summary memo clipped to each. “The evidence of war crimes was sufficient to refer the cases out for prosecution for both Vogt and Gottlieb, but they were returned as non-actionable because the men could not be located. It’s common enough,” she said, looking over her glasses at me. “Vogt and Gottlieb may have died during the war. If they survived and were on the run, they likely changed their names. Whether they left the country or stayed, it’s very difficult to track these people down. We couldn’t find them, and it appears there are no other photos. It happens, these dead ends.”

She set the files on the desk. “Remember to sign and date the files you review. There’s a log inside the file jacket.” I opened the top one, Gottlieb’s, and read the summary memo: wanted for murder, torture, and rape. The second file, on Vogt, was another catalog of horrors. In both files, I found photo sheets with captions but no photos. I signed the log, noting that von Kraus’s biographer, A. Bieler, had visited and read these same files in 1973. No surprise there. I made a note to contact Bieler and learn what had become of the photos of Gottlieb and Vogt.

The administrative assistant knocked on the door. “You had asked for this as well, Herr Poincaré, but we had to go to another office to find it. Otto Kraus’s file.” She stood in the doorway reading the summary note. “Prosecutors from this office didn’t initiate this file. It’s an earlier one that came to us from the days the Americans administered part of Germany after the war. The American military courts ran their own judicial process to prosecute war criminals. This file was begun on Kraus for using slave labor, and it looks as though he was going to be prosecuted. But the evidentiary materials are gone and the investigation was abruptly ended. What we do have here is a statement, a document signed by ten men dated February 11, 1946.”

I was looking at the original affidavit.

I signed my name, again after Bieler’s, and found a second sheet listing each witness’s address in April 1946. Of course, they would have moved, but now I had a place to begin my search.

I heaved a huge sigh of relief.

Outside, shadows were cutting long angles across the prison courtyard. I had to catch a train back to Stuttgart, then to Munich. I selected documents from the combined files and asked the administrative assistant to copy them.

The woman nodded. “I’ll just be able to finish before I leave for the day, Herr Poincaré. While you’re waiting, why don’t you take a walk in the courtyard? You look like you could use the air.”

She couldn’t name what she saw in my expression. But I could: sudden despair at the difficulty of locating witnesses thirty years after the fact. Who would be living at the same address? What had I been thinking? I needed advice and asked to see Gustav Plannik.

But he had been called away on family business and was leaving early the next morning, on holiday, for three weeks.

“To Australia,” said his assistant. “The bottom of the world. Imagine that!”

nineteen

T
he documents I had copied were singeing my fingertips. In them was evidence of crimes so horrible that I felt, on leaving the Archive, that I was carrying some dread virus into an unsuspecting world. I didn’t want the burden of their sitting unprotected at my apartment as I worked in the lab. I needed to park them somewhere; so on my way from Ludwigsburg I stopped at a bank in Stuttgart and rented a safe deposit box, figuring I’d take the late train to Munich.

A security officer directed me to an elevator, and I descended three levels below street grade, where a woman buzzed me through a steel gate. I filled out some forms, and fifteen minutes later was seated in a tiny room behind a closed door, transferring the files from the Zentrale Stelle into a steel box that would be locked in a vault. They’d be out of harm’s way until I could figure out what, if anything, to do with them.

I reviewed Vogt’s file before leaving. He was known for pulling prisoners from morning assembly and beating them with a rubber truncheon. Other prisoners learned to stare dead ahead and make no sound, for if they revealed the slightest unease or showed any sign of compassion Vogt would pull them from the line for their turn. In this way, he trained prisoners into a kind of studied numbness. At Drütte and, I suspected, the other camps, one learned to live for oneself.

I copied the names and addresses of the signatories to the von Kraus affidavit. This information I needed with me and could safely hold, for only someone who knew about the case would have reasons to raise questions.

I was packing up the steel box when, incredibly, the door to my private viewing room opened. No knock. No request to enter. These are privileged rooms, and I was about to stand and complain loudly when Renard Malet, or was it Roland Kempf, closed the door behind him, a finger raised to his lips.

“What—what is this!”

“Shh. You’ll wake the neighbors.”

I placed my hand over the safe deposit box.

“Get out! Right now!”

Again, the finger to his lips.

“How did they let you—? Only the police . . .”

Malet nodded. “What’s in the box, Monsieur Poincaré?”

I didn’t answer.

“I could get a court order, you know.”

“Who are you this time?”

He was wearing another of his linen suits.

“My name is Serge Laurent, and I work for Interpol. Your friend Anselm Kraus has a problem and, if I’m not mistaken, so do you.”

“What!”

“May I sit?”

“Laurent? What, a third name? Why should I believe—”

He produced a badge. “I had to speak with the bank manager to get in. He called my headquarters in Lyon. The manager was satisfied, and so should you be. I’m international police, Monsieur Poincaré. How else does a man talk himself into a private viewing room in a bank vault?”

“How did you find me?”

He shrugged. “You’re close to the Kraus family. I’ve been observing the comings and goings at the estate. I saw you meet with him and decided to follow you and have a chat. You see, I’d like to know someone on the inside, someone with information.”

“Jesus,” I groaned.

“No, Jesus won’t help you. But I may be able to.”

I could not have been more amazed.

“You said I have a problem. What problem?”

“I’ve been following you the last day and a half, and I discovered someone else following you, too.”

“No! Why?”

The steel box that I was intending to lock into the vault might have been one reason. But I had only discovered the files that afternoon. I did not understand why I’d be followed in advance of my visit to the Nazi archives.

“You were in China with Schmidt,” said Laurent. “You’ve become friendly with Anselm’s sister. And I believe you’re doing some work for Anselm. I’m assuming you have information that could be useful to me. To demonstrate good faith, I helped you out just now. The other tail—I ran his plates—he’s a private detective out of Munich. I had the Stuttgart police detain him for resembling a man wanted by Interpol. It’s not true, but it got him to go away for a bit. Aside from me no one knows you’re here, although the detective and those he reports to know you visited the Archive.” He pointed. “What’s in the box?”