Ordinary Heroes (47 page)

Our man captured STOP Will communicate 0600 tomorrow by secure channels.

He phoned on the dot. For the last three or four days, he said, Seventh Army forces outside Balingen in southwest Germany had been negotiating with the commandant of a German camp holding political prisoners. The Nazis had hoped to exchang
e t
hem for their own POWs, but the Americans had simply waited out the Krauts and they had finally surrendered control yesterday. Entering the camp, the Americans found an infernal scene of sickness and starvation.

"They say it's quite awful. Most of the SS escaped, of course. But when the intelligence officers went nosing around, inmates pointed out a fellow with one hand who'd appeared in their midst only a few days ago. They all assumed he was a German guard who couldn't get away because of his injury. He claimed to be another internee, a Spanish Jew, who'd been working in Germany when he was deported to another slave camp, but that was plainly a lie. He was too well nourished, for one thing, and spoke terrible German. And when they made him lower his drawers, it was clear he wasn't Jewish. He told several more stories, the last of which was that he was an American OSS officer named Robert Martin. That one was wrung from him only when his interrogators threatened to turn him over to the inmates, who've torn several guards apart with their bare hands. Literally, Dubin. Literally. I can't even imagine what the hell is going on down there. But I guarantee you one thing: Martin won't be getting away. They have him chained to the wall. He will be surrendered only to you.

I asked if Winters had any clue what had brought Martin there.

"I would say, Dubin, that the people around here who took Martin for a traitor are the ones smiling a little more broadly. Once you have him back in Frankfurt, we'd like to send our people to interrogate him at length." He ended the conversation with the familiar apologies for not being able to say more.

I ordered up an armed convoy to transport the prisoner, and immediately headed south in advance to take custody of Robert Martin.

And so, driven by a new MP sergeant to whom I barely had the heart to speak, I traveled to Balingen. It was April 12, 1945, a sweet morning with a spotless sky and a swelling, vital aroma in the air. There had been many reports about the German concentration camps, including one or two published accounts by escapees. But the authors had gotten away months ago, before matters turned dire for Hitler's regime. And even the claims made by the few survivors of the slave camp at Natzweiler in France, which several of us had heard of, tended to be dismissed as propaganda or yet another of the improbable, ultimately baseless rumors of disaster that circulated routinely among U
. S
. troops: The Russians ha
d g
iven up and Stalin had killed himself. Two hundred kamikaze pilots had flattened large stretches of L
. A
. Montgomery and Bradley had engaged in a fistfight in front of the troops. The Nazis were exterminating political prisoners by the thousands. The last of these stories had cropped up after the Soviets in Poland captured a supposed Nazi death camp called Auschwitz at the end of January, but these days nobody put much stock in what the Russians were saying.

From outside, the camp at Balingen was unremarkable, a sizable former military post at the margin of town, set on a high knoll amid the larches and pines of the Black Forest. The entire site was encompassed by a tall barbed-wire fence topped by brown electrification nodes, with the yellow-brick administration buildings standing in sight of the entrance. There the swinging gate was open and a lone apple tree was in bloom beside a young soldier, probably an SS guard, who lay dead, facedown, beneath a wooden sign reading
ARBEIT MACHT FREI. Work makes freedom. Ou
r t
roops had simply driven around the corpse--we could see the tanks and half-tracks within--and we followed.

We had not traveled far when my driver tromped on the brake, suddenly overpowered by the stench--excrement, quicklime, decaying flesh. It was crippling, and only grew worse when we finally drove on. That smell still revisits me without warning, usually propelled by a shock of some kind. At those instants, I imagine that the odor was so potent it somehow burned itself permanently into my olfactory nerves.

The first soldiers to enter the camp yesterday had come from the moth Infantry Division, the same outfit whose reserve regiments had briefly seized Martin at Pforzheim. There were a few officers from divisional G-3 present now, but most of the troops I saw were with associated armored cavalry units and, a day later, still seemed at a loss over the scene. They stood beside their vehicles while perhaps a dozen of the former inmates in their threadbare striped uniforms teetered around near them, frightful otherworldly creatures. Many were more emaciated than I'd believed human beings could become, veritable skeletons with skin, whose wrists and knuckles bulged hugely within their hands, and whose eyes were sunk so far into their skulls they looked sightless. Several were barefoot, and a number had large spots of feces and urine on their clothing. All of them moved with almost inanimate slowness, staggering inches at a time, with no apparent destination. One of them, a man with arms like mop handles, turned to me as soon as I
alighted from the jeep and lifted both hands in a shameless plea.

I still do not know what he wanted, food or just understanding, but I froze there, shocked again to my battered core, and gripped by revulsion. This man, and those around like him, frightened me more fundamentally than the dead on the battlefield, because I recognized them instantly as unmistakable tokens of the limitless degradation a human would endure in order to live.

It was some time before I noticed a lieutenant who'd ventured forward to greet me. A tall, sandy-haired young man from divisional G-3, he gave his name as Grove and told me he had received a signal I was on the way. He motioned where I was looking.

"These are the lucky ones," he said. "Still on their feet."

"Who are they?" I asked.

"Jews," he answered. "Most of them. There are some Polish and French slave workers in one sub-camp. And a few of the Germans Hitler hated in another, mostly Gypsies and queers. But the greatest number of the folks here seem to be Jews. We've hardly sorted them all out. There's so much typhus here, we're afraid to do much."

I gasped then, choked almost, because I'd suddenly recognized the nature of a pearly mound a hundred yards behind the Lieutenant. It was mad
e u
p of corpses, a nest of naked starved bodies, wracked and twisted in death. Instinctively, I moved a few steps that way. Grove caught my sleeve.

"You'll see a lot of that, if you care to."

Did I?

"I'd take a look," Grove said. "You'll want to tell people about this."

We began walking. Grove said there were probably 20,000 people held here now, many of them having arrived in the last few days. Some had been marched on foot from other concentration camps, with thousands dying along the way. Others, especially the sick, had been dumped here by the trainload. All had been crowded into makeshift wooden barracks, each about 150 feet long, in which there were only empty holes where the doors and windows were intended to be. I could not imagine what the savage winter had been like for the people already here, most of whom had had no more than their thin uniforms to protect them from the cold.

Outside the huts, there were open latrines, all overflowing with human waste because they were plugged intermittently by corpses. American bombing of a pumping station a few weeks ago had put an end to running water, and the prisoners had not been fed with any regularity since early March, when the German commandant had cut off mos
t m
eals as a cruel means of controlling the plagues of dysentery and typhus that had broken out. For the last week, while the camp was surrounded, those interned here had received nothing at all. Some of those we passed, with their scraps of clothing and impossibly vacant looks, begged for crumbs. Grove warned me not to oblige them. The troops who arrived yesterday had given candy and tinned rations to the first inmates they saw. Rioting had broken out and then several of the prisoners who'd won the grim struggle that ensued had died when their intestinal systems revolted as a result of their gorging.

The huts that had housed these people were miserable, dark and reeking. Piles of feces stood here and there on the straw-covered floors, and in the wood bunks, stacked like shelving, the sick and starving lay side by side with the dead. You could tell the living only by their occasional moans and because the lice were so numerous on the deceased that the bugs appeared to be a moving wave. Hundreds of inmates had died since yesterday, Grove said. The division's docs had arrived this morning but were at a loss for a treatment plan that had any chance of success for those already so sick or that would afford a sanitary means to avoid spreading the typhus, especially to American troops.

As a result, Grove said, we really had only marginal control of the situation. As a case in point, w
e c
ame upon the remains of a female guard Grove had seen killed earlier this morning. A group of female internees had found her hiding under one of the buildings and had pulled her out by the hair. The guard had screamed and called the prisoners filthy names, while they stomped and spat upon her. Ultimately, several men arrived with discarded pieces of wood to beat her to death. The killings of the kapos--most of them thugs sent here from German penitentiaries--and the Wehrmacht guards the SS had deserted had been going on for a day now, Grove said. A water tower had been converted to a makeshift gallows yesterday, and several of our troops had volunteered and helped with the hangings.

Back near the yellow-brick administrative cluster, out of sight of the huts, was a square building that contained an enormous brick furnace at its center. Using two hands, Grove pried open the giant cast-iron doors, revealing two half-burned bodies. The eyeholes in one skull faced straight my way, and I flinched at the sight. In front of the oven was a huge butcher block, which some of the interrogated guards had admitted was used to crush the gold fillings from the teeth of the dead.

But death had come too swiftly of late for far too many in Balingen to dispose of them in one furnace. Everywhere--between the huts, along the camp's roads, around every corner we turned--were th
e b
odies, ghastly grayish-white mounds of dead human beings in various states of decomposition, every body stripped naked and pitted by the appetites of vermin. The piles here were nothing, Grove said. At the edge of the camp, there was a giant pit full of human remains that the inmates still standing had been forced to drag there in the last few days. Someone from G-3, trying to find a way to communicate the scene to superiors, had begun counting the corpses heaped about the camp and had quit after reaching 8,000. For me, again and again, as I stared at these hills of human beings, so pathetic in their nudity, with their stick-figure limbs and exposed genitalia, I experienced the same panic, because I could not tell where one person began and ended in the pile.

Several times I noticed that the uppermost bodies in these mounds were marked with bloody gashes in their abdomens.

"Why?" I asked Grove. "What was in their stomachs that anyone wanted?"

The Lieutenant looked at me. "Food," he said.

My war without tears ended at Balingen. A moment after entering the only but I visited, I rushed behind the building and vomited. Afterward, I found I was weeping. I tried for several minutes to gain contro
l a
nd eventually gave up and continued walking beside the Lieutenant, crying silently, which made my eyes ache in the strong sun. "Cried like a babe myself," he said at one point. "And I don't know if it's worse that I've stopped."

But it was not simply the suffering that had brought me to tears, or the staggering magnitude of the cruelty. It was a single thought that came to me after my first few minutes in the camp, another of those phrases that cycled maddeningly in my brain. The words were "There was no choice."

I had been on the Continent now for six months, half a year, not much longer than a semester in school, but it was impossible to recall the person I had been before. I had fought in terror, and I had learned to despise war. There was no glory in the savagery I saw. No reason. And surely no law. It was only brutality, scientifically perfected on both sides, in which great ingenuity had been deployed in the creation of giant killing machines. There was nothing to be loyal to in any of this and surely no cause for pride. But there in Balingen I cried for mankind. Because there had been no choice. Because knowing everything now, I saw this terrible war had to happen, with all its gore and witless destruction, and might well happen again. If human beings could do this, it seemed unfathomable how we could ever save ourselves. In Balingen, it wa
s i
ncontestable that cruelty was the law of the universe.

Amid all of this, I had lost any recollection of why I was there. When Grove walked into one of the yellow buildings near the gate, I expected him to expose another horror. Instead he led me down a cool stone stairway, into a rock cellar where an MP guarded an iron door. I could not imagine what the Germans had needed with a jail in a place like this, until I remembered that the camp had originally been a military post. This, apparently, was the stockade. There were eight cells here, each with stone walls and a barred front. Josef Kandel, the former camp commandant, today known as the Beast of Balingen, sat in one, erect in a spotless uniform but wearing no shoes, his legs chained. There were two SS officers in adjoining cells who'd been through rough questioning. One was in a heap on the floor; the other was largely toothless, with fresh blood still running down his chin. And in the farthermost cell, on a small stool sat United States Army Major Robert Martin of the Office of Strategic Services. The lousy clothes which he'd stripped from one of the corpses as a disguise had been burned following his capture and replaced with a fresh officer's uniform, a russet shirt, under a sleeveless wool sweater, his oak leaves still on the right point of his collar.