‘Ah. It’s always the gold.’
‘Did Walter get his hands on gold? Gold from teeth. From jewellery. From your victims?’
‘There were several at it. Suhren, of course. Sonntag certainly; once he knew the Reds were coming.’
‘Where did they get it?’
‘Why, from the dentist, of course.’
It was so blindingly obvious that I didn’t speak for a while. I flipped though my notepad. I looked up.
‘That would be Hellinger. Dr Martin Hellinger.’
‘That’s your man.’
As luck would have it Hellinger was in the prison hospital. He’d cut his wrists, but had made a mess of it and would live. I’d get to him when they brought him back.
I kept at Ramdohr without a break until midday. I’m not sure which of us was more wrung out. Collins and I wrote up some brief notes over a plate of ham from the canteen and I prepared for my first inquisition in the witness box in the afternoon. I was to be grilled about my eighteen-month-old report on Schwarzhuber.
I had a very different perspective down in the well of the court. More claustrophobic. I was able to view Schwarzhuber directly opposite me, standing in the dock with guards either side. He wore headphones as I was answering in English. He allowed that maddening sneer to play about his lips as he listened to my answers. It didn’t take me long to confirm the details of our first meeting. Then the defence lawyer went on the attack.
‘Lieutenant Colonel Brodie, it was a confusing time back in June 1945 when you were interrogating the defendant, was it not?’
‘Confusing for whom? Not me.’
‘Your certainty is admirable. The whole of Europe was in turmoil. Officers like the defendant were dragged before you and made to sign anything in the interests of expediency. Is that fair?’
‘Not in the slightest. I asked questions and wrote down answers.’
‘You speak German. Fluently?’
I answered in German long enough for Counsel to cut me off.
‘Let us assume that’s a yes. But returning to your notes from that time. These are not verbatim, are they?’
‘No. They are in a sense minutes of our discussion.’
‘And like all good minutes, they say what the minute-taker wants to get across? Is that correct?’
‘This wasn’t a board meeting. We weren’t dealing with policy matters. I asked Obersturmführer Schwarzhuber his name, rank and unit. He told me. I asked him how many victims had died under his command. He gave me an estimate. I asked him whether he personally oversaw the gas chambers. He said he had. Did he stand by the crematoria and order his men to shovel bodies into the flames? He said he did. I asked—’
‘Thank you, Colonel. We get the picture.’
‘I haven’t finished. Your defendant gave me his answers. We wrote them down. In his role as deputy commandant, he was directly responsible for the murder and incineration of thousands of innocents. That was the statement he signed.’
Counsel dug into the details and tried to find weak spots:
The defendant simply took orders and passed them on. He had no choice. There were thousands of prisoners; how could he have seen what was happening to all of them . . .
I began to find Counsel’s probing unsettling. I was hardly an objective interviewer back then. I’d fought these men for five years. The liberation of the camps had sent shock waves of revulsion through the West. Schwarzhuber and his like came in front of me tainted beyond redemption. My reports were always going to be skewed to convict.
And God knows, I’d seen at first hand, back in Glasgow, how evidence could be cooked. How an innocent man could end up in the condemned cell.
But with Schwarzhuber I had no need to exaggerate.
By the end of Counsel’s inquisition I felt I’d been through the mangle. His clever probing had uncovered my own growing view that there were no certainties any more. I walked stiffly from the court desperate for clean air. It wasn’t just the stuffy reek of packed humanity I was trying to get away from. I’d been soaked in horror since I flew in. It had poured on me remorselessly every day. I went back to the hotel alone while Sam ploughed on. I should have waited for her to join me before hitting the bar, but my throat was dry.
Wednesday and Thursday followed the same pattern. I interrogated three of the smaller fry, who knew nothing about anything, except that they expected to hang. They were probably right. I put in a couple of appearances in the witness stand to underscore and corroborate my first interviews some eighteen months ago. And at day’s end I tried to erase the images with Red Label, that convenient scouring agent for filth in the mind’s U-bend.
Friday came too soon. I was renewing acquaintance with 26-year-old Aufseherin Dorothea Binz, Deputy Camp Warden. Binz was a kind of anti-she. The negative of all that I appreciated in a woman: softness, sweetness, kindness, tenderness; the necessary counterweight to our barbed manhood. La Binz was all dark, hard, and warped. She was licentious to the point of absurdity, reportedly performing lesbian acts in full view of the camp inmates and her SS lover Edmund Bräuning. It wasn’t interrogation Binz needed. It was exorcism.
I’d met one of her protégées, Irma Grese, in the Belsen trials. They called her Die Hyane, the beautiful beast: just twenty-two and addicted to torture and slaughter. I had a hand in sending Irma to the gallows in December 1945. Her mentor, the blonde Dorothea, would surely follow her on to the trapdoor.
She was already seated in the small interrogation room when I arrived. Her face lifted to mine and recognition dawned. Was that fear? I was struck again at how ordinary she seemed. A blonde but with disappointingly coarse features. Blue eyes like Sam’s but without the intelligence. Her dull, country-girl looks would have been perfect on billboards advertising milk or honey, if she weren’t so sulky.
I sipped at my strong tea and wished it were gin as I read through her file. The last time I’d interrogated her, she’d said little or nothing. She was contemptuous and sneering. This time I decided to go for the jugular. It wouldn’t be nice. I hoped Will Collins, sitting behind me, had a strong stomach. The file mentioned an affair with another woman, Dr Heidi Triedelmann. It would be worth seeing how she reacted to my disclosure of her love life.
‘Fräulein Binz, it has been a while. You remember me? My name is Brodie.’
‘I remember
you
.’ She spat the word.
‘Have you heard from Edmund recently?’
‘What? What are you talking about?’
‘Your boyfriend SS-Obersturmführer Edmund Bräuning? Your lover boy.’
Her face contorted. ‘Where is he?’
‘Dead. We hanged him.’ I heard a gasp behind me from Collins.
Binz shot out of her seat and lunged at me. ‘You bastard!’ The guard grabbed her and pulled her down.
‘And I suppose you won’t have heard from your little protégée Irma either. Have you?’
Her eyes were wild.
‘Fräulein Grese took the drop a year ago. I personally made sure of that.’
‘So? What do I care?’
‘You’re next, Dorothea. And the instructions will be to make it slow. A very short drop.’
‘Fuck you!’
I sighed. ‘Shame that Dr Triedelmann won’t be joining you.’
‘What?’
‘Your other little sex pal, Heidi, got away. She was sent down a rat line. They made sure that the best Nazis, the ones they wanted to survive, got away. Live and fight another day, eh? But no one cared what happened to you. Did they?’
‘Shut up, shut up!’
I sat back and lit a cigarette. I was no longer sure if I was probing her for answers or just to rile her. What she’d done was sickening but what I was doing didn’t seem much better. I could feel Lieutenant Collins’s eyes on my back. I’d been innocent once. Binz was breathing hard and staring at my pack of cigarettes.
‘Want one?’
She nodded.
‘OK. We’re going to play a little game. I will give you a cigarette for every useful answer you give me. I will take one back if you are evasive or I think you’re lying. Ready to play?’
Her eyes flicked between mine and the fags. Her tongue moistened her lips. She nodded.
I got corroboration of some of the new names on my list and pointers to others. Binz knew about escape routes but not how to find one, far less a northern one to Scotland. She also knew about the pilfering of gold. Had even done a bit herself.
‘Why not? Everyone else was doing it.’
‘Where did you get it?’
She shrugged. ‘Sometimes direct.’
‘You mean you stole it directly from the prisoners?’
She laughed. ‘They weren’t going to need bangles where they were going.’
I stared at her brazen face, her pitiless eyes, and I reached across and slapped her as hard as I could.
She screamed and fell off her chair. Collins leaped forward and pulled me back. The sergeant jailer helped her to her feet and back into her chair. ‘Shut up or you’ll get another from me,’ said the sergeant. My red handprint tattooed Binz’s shocked white face.
I reached over and picked up the five cigarettes she’d won and crushed them. I threw them at her; then I got up and marched out. My head was pounding. Anger blazed in my chest. I stormed down the corridor and through the metal doors until I got outside. I walked faster and faster until I was running down the street. I floundered to a halt in a small park and threw up. Collins found me with my head in my hands sitting on a damp bench. He got out his fags and gave me one. He lit me and we sat quietly, embarrassed by my outburst, sandbagged by her poison.
‘Sorry, Collins.’
‘It’s fine, sir.’
‘It’s not what a first in languages prepares you for, is it?’
‘No, sir,’ he said quietly. ‘But I haven’t been through it. Sorry I held you back, sir.’
‘You did right. Thank you.’
We walked back to the car. I felt hollowed out. I got to my room, lay down on my bed and shivered as though I was coming down with malaria.
I woke to someone shaking me. I shot up in confusion, my arms raised to defend my face.
‘Douglas, Douglas, it’s all right. It’s me. It’s me. You’re all right.’
‘God, Sam. I was out.’
‘You were shouting. In your sleep.’
She eased back and sat by my side. I sat upright and leaned towards her. I embraced her and felt her slim arms round me, holding me tight, until the pain between my eyes lifted.
‘You’re shaking, Douglas. It’s all right now.’
I was a child wrapped in his mother’s arms.
‘What time is it?’
‘Nearly six. We’ve got dinner at seven with the court president, General Westropp, and his pal from the Judge Advocate General’s unit. I can call it off. Say you’re poorly. I’d love to miss it myself.’
‘I’ll be fine. It’s passing.’ I unpeeled myself and gazed at her worried face.
‘Are you sure?’ she asked. ‘This is taking too much out of you. I’m finding it hard enough.’
‘It fair stirs things up, doesn’t it?’
She nodded. ‘Some tea?’
‘Something stronger.’
TWENTY-SEVEN
The days blurred. I was waiting for Dr Martin Hellinger – the dentist – to be released from hospital. His wounds had turned sour but they were expecting him to live – I hoped at least long enough to tell me about his depraved alchemy: turning teeth into ingots. He was increasingly my main hope of a breakthrough. All roads led to the dentist.
Over the next week, I interrogated twelve other prisoners. The interviews were variations on a palette of black and grey. My brain was marinated in a dismal stew of foul deeds and feeble excuses. My questioning of the defendants was getting more and more derailed. I was shouting accusations at them as much as I was seeking answers.
Each evening I drank too much, and each night I paid for it in lost sleep and violent dreams. Sam woke me twice more in successive nights. My shouts had terrified her in the adjoining room. By tacit agreement – or maybe it was simply Sam’s decision – we’d suspended normal relations for the duration. Somehow the situation and the context of our work weren’t conducive.
She too was feeling the strain. Each morning her bright eyes looked duller, her fine skin paler. I looked worse. I was permanently tired, usually had a headache and always a sense of growing despair. Not about our mission; despite my mental fragmentation we seemed to be getting somewhere. Maybe because of it. I was scaring the hell out of the prisoners as well as Sam and Will Collins.
There was respite in the form of the interview I had with Odette Sansom. In a sense it put the whole wretched business in better perspective. Back in August, while I was running around Scotland reporting on the antics of the vigilante group, the Glasgow Marshals, Odette was being awarded the George Cross for bravery by our king. Now here she was, supping tea with me, after testifying against the SS guards at the trial.
She was a bonny woman, my age, with a shock of curly brown hair. Her softness and sweetly accented English belied her steel core. She was French-born but had married a lucky Englishman and moved to England in 1931. They had three daughters. She gave up sweet domesticity for the perilous life of a British agent.
‘What did you do with your girls, Odette?’
‘I made them very safe. I put them in a convent.’
‘And then marched off to war?’
‘Not war, exactly. I joined the Resistance in Cannes. As a courier. To do my bit for France. That is all.’
‘All? It was extraordinary bravery. They caught you.’
Her brows furrowed. ‘Gestapo. They tortured me and sent me to Fresnes prison. In Paris.’
‘Why didn’t they just shoot you?’
She laughed. ‘It was my cover. My SOE boss in Cannes was Peter Churchill. I told the Gestapo he was my husband and also the nephew of Winston.’
‘They
believed
you?’
‘They didn’t know what to believe. So they sent me to Ravensbrück. And there, too, they were a little wary of losing a . . .’
‘Bargaining counter?’
‘Exactly.’ She grinned.
‘I heard a bizarre story about you and Fritz Suhren, our absent camp commandant.’
‘Suhren arrived in early ’45 and I kept the Churchill story going. Just before the Russians liberated the camp, he drove off with me to surrender to the Americans. He thought they would not hang him if he had looked after a relative of Mr Churchill.’