The Butchers of Berlin (48 page)

Himmler said in his chatty, rather dull way, ‘I want this place cleaned up tonight. A lorry-load of men will be here to assist.’

Morgen wondered how practical the Reichsführer was, with the small matter of an air raid imminent.

Himmler picked up a bound document resting on his knee.

‘Published by the Ministry of Food and Agriculture.’ He waved it in contempt. ‘If it’s supposed to be secret why commit to paper? Don’t they know
anything?’

He removed his spectacles and cleaned them with a silk handkerchief; he looked at Morgen with myopic eyes. One thing Morgen had learned about the man was he was frighteningly literal, almost
childishly so.

Himmler sighed. ‘Two years ago the same ministry instigated a policy of official starvation known as the Hunger Plan for those designated useless eaters, not worth feeding. Are you
familiar?’

Morgen said he wasn’t; always the safest answer. In fact, it was well known as the work of a clever idiot named Backe, one of those dangerous high-flyers who had acquired a name through
daring academicism and currying Himmler’s favour. From what Morgen had seen of Russia, the policy hadn’t worked, not least because the local peasantry was endlessly cunning. Himmler had
been blamed and now Backe was virtually a minister, from what Morgen had heard, and estranged from Himmler, who drew the line at the latest adventure of feeding human remains to pigs.

‘Can you believe this? I quote: “in order to alleviate short-ages suffered by our people”. Next he will be suggesting we turn our glorious dead into sausages and we all eat
each other. Do we wear bones through our noses? What if it were to get out that our reward for the fallen is to turn them into animal fodder?’

Cannon fodder to animal fodder, thought Morgen grimly.

Turning to look out of the window, Himmler said, ‘This place is out of control. Feeding the dead to pigs. Boys being allowed to run around conducting executions. I am recently informed of
a highly irregular practice involving sending condemned men from our own camp at Sachsenhausen to be killed at this . . .’ He broke off and cast around with an expression of appropriate
disgust. ‘Meat factory. No more. You did a good job in Weimar. I will be sending you to other camps. The importance of our task is such that we must remain pure when faced with the greatest
temptation. I am making you my conscience, Morgen.’

Who flayed? Schlegel asked himself. Gersten liked to cut; he had evidence of that. But he wasn’t sure he did the flaying. He thought Gersten internalised. Perhaps knowing
was enough.

Morgen was walking towards him and Schlegel wondered whether to give him an official salute, to show his contempt. A ground tremor signalled the crump of the first bombs before the report of the
distant explosions.

‘The deals one has to do with the devil,’ growled Morgen. ‘What happened to your face?’

One, two, three cuts. Down the arm. Cutting the Achilles tendon; painful that. The slow draw across the scrotum while reminding the man of what he had done to Abbas.

Gersten was in the steam room with Sepp, who was on the bottle. Grigor stood half-naked and defiant.

Gersten said he was about to embark on the psychological equivalent to making him come. He wanted him to admit there was no perfect note.

It took ten minutes. Gersten informed Grigor he had just made himself redundant. In an uncharacteristic fit of petulance he ground his heel into the man’s hand, listening to bone snap, and
announced, ‘No more perfect note. A pity. I had high hopes.’

Gersten nodded at Sepp. Grigor was dragged to his feet and stood swaying with pain, unbowed.

‘I will execute you myself. Face the wall.’

Grigor said he preferred to look at him.

‘Then die like a dog in a ditch.’

Gersten stuck his pistol in the man’s stomach and pulled the trigger. Grigor recoiled and Sepp kicked his feet from under him and clapped his hands in delight.

‘Flay him,’ said Gersten.

Grigor lay groaning, not yet dead.

Gersten watched Sepp, drunk and reeling, go about stripping Grigor of the rest of his clothes, wadding and chucking them aside, lugging the naked body with its floppy, useless cock – it
couldn’t be said to be Grigor any more – onto the trolley, hoisting it with the rattling chain, levering it so it hung over the boiling vat. The skin came off easily after scalding.
Then the dismemberment, with the knack of letting the meat resist the blade before yielding to the cut.

Next door was sorting night. Reitner would be charging around like a man possessed, a very different sight from his blubbing over the boy.

Gersten knew the edifice was about to come crashing down. He was losing control. Time was running out. Reitner and the rest were crass, no play to their work, no instinct for the right question,
no appropriate awe of the terror induced, no tenderness to their cruelty, no elegance of cut, only merciless glee.

Sepp had already come to him before the roundup, worried about Reitner’s rampaging. A thing with a boy had got out of hand. No change there, but Reitner had previously kept disciplinary
sadism within bounds, and never managed yet to kill one of his love boys, however much it had been on the cards.

Sepp turned to Gersten to get them out of trouble, as usual. Feed the body to the pigs, Gersten said. What’s the problem?

Then he had an idea. Spread a little terror, stand back and admire. Borrow an old trick from psychological operations in the east. Disguise through obliteration and show, dress it up to look
like something other than Reitner’s drunken, maudlin cruelty. Blame the Jews. Baumgarten had been grumbling on about having to work with Jewish butchers. Make a Jew murder shrine and ship off
the butchers before they could protest their innocence.

In the old days they had whipped women to death and flayed them after for public display: see how the Bolsheviks behave like beasts!

It remained his fancy from time to time still to relish the resistance and collapse of a mind and body, the mewling, sobbing and begging, the messy evacuations, moments of respite and
generosity, learning to know, understand and appreciate that other inside out, his own failures, strange humour and compassion, the cradling before the breaking of the soul, and always afterwards
secret desolation when the body was tidied away, with nothing to show for his artistry.

Reitner had loved the boy up whose arse he stuck the bayonet. Oh, for goodness sake! Reitner could live with that. They flayed the dead little fucker together, in the room Gersten was standing
in, wearing butchers’ aprons, Reitner snivelling to Gersten’s caustic, weary commentary. He couldn’t stand it when killers grew mawkish.

He relished how the simple fact of leaving the remains to be found grew into someone else’s problem, with all the speculation and curiosity and everyone barking up the wrong tree. It made
him feel like a real murderer rather than just another killer. Reitner was his blunt instrument, allowing him to appropriate and embellish, like an artist, becoming death’s author, creating a
story beyond anything Reitner’s savagery was capable of.

Sepp lowered the flesh into the vat, with a slight hiss as it entered the water. The man was still alive and uttered a final blood-curdling, thrilling scream.

Flay and display. Gersten enjoyed the cutting, the way the epidermis lifted from muscle. He wished to practise and improve. The idea of murder as art – the individual act as opposed to so
much senseless killing – was beyond Reitner and the rest, with the exception of Sepp, who was all brains and mush for stomach.

One bottle of schnapps, soon after the Reitner business, and the whole sorry story had splurged out in Sepp’s tedious, drink-sodden account, layer upon layer. How Metzler’s Jews had
never left. How it was Reitner’s idea to kill them. How the first time he pretended afterwards it was an accident and needed to be hushed up. How that brought Metzler sniffing, smelling a
rat, arranging a transfer to the slaughterhouse, with the help of the interfering Jewish butchers. How it was Sepp’s idea to stick Metzler in the steam room. How he wanted to get rid of him
too, and the Jewish butchers. How Gersten warned him Metzler was off-limits (with the prospect of the perfect note in the pipeline). How the Jews that followed never left either, though Metzler
watched them go and believed they had, not seeing the train stop down the line; change of plan, everyone out, lorries waiting.

Gersten hadn’t known they were killing Jews on top of everything. It wasn’t necessary. There was no shortage of bodies. It was the one thing there was a surfeit of. They were even
shipped in by train.

Sepp explained it was a fallow period, with a break in supply from the east, a reversal of war, transportation difficulties.

The live cargo had dried up. Gersten hadn’t been told about that either, how Reitner had a brother who worked in the big camp north of the city. Condemned men were being sent down so the
boys could be inducted into the execution game. Reitner had in mind a killer elite.

But the camp was in lockdown after a prisoner escape, and in quarantine after a typhus outbreak. Nothing coming for three weeks. The boys were getting restless. Reitner told them the test of
real mettle was killing Jews.

Reitner, the enterprising, no-nonsense NCO, exercised initiative in the face of a crisis; the constant how-to of solving problems; satisfying the economics of supply and demand. Two birds with
one stone.

Of course they were all at it – as before – taking turns, Sepp got around to telling. Haager braining people with his stun gun. Baumgarten punching a man’s lights out, taking
pride in killing with a single blow. The sport of beheading chickens while doing the same to men, taking bets to see who would run around headless the longest. Even the gutless Sepp sneaked up
behind people, shooting them in the neck. Chain whippings, hangings, everything short of crucifixion, though there had been a few of those in the east, thanks to Lazarenko.

Gersten had watched from the shadows on sorting nights. Boys and the men together, killing, killing, killing; the boys queasy at first, then looking forward to it, soon unable to get enough,
with silly grins plastered over their faces.

‘We all did it,’ said Sepp. ‘All the time.’

They sated their appetite and fed the results to the pigs. The perfect equation. Sometimes they worried about getting caught.

Gersten rationalised it for Sepp. ‘They created a fierce legend for you. This is what happens when the legend comes home.’

Reitner was an increasingly loose cannon. He had taken it upon himself to get rid of Schlegel, a snooper he took exception to because of his nancy-boy white hair. He killed the wrong man
instead, went around loosing off shots and failed to finish the job, so drunk that he temporarily passed out among the pigs too, a cause of subsequent hilarity.

Gersten watched Sepp go about his drunken business. He supposed he could shoot him or leave him for others to find
in flagrante
, a prospect that amused him more than shooting the man.

The first wave of planes passed over without incident, their target elsewhere. A single bomb fell on the outskirts of the yard. Schlegel heard its whistle then the dry
explosion, followed by ringing hooves on cobblestone and the stampeding of a dozen horses that forced Schlegel and Morgen to seek shelter in the run Baumgarten had taken them up. They waited for
the onslaught.

The promised lorry hadn’t shown, forcing them to carry on alone or abandon the order. Morgen thought everyone would be hiding from the bombs anyway.

Plaster fell from the ceiling of the tunnel with the next explosion. The lights flickered, went out then struggled back on. Dismal before, the place was even more grim in a bombing raid. Morgen
said he had no intention of dying there and preferred to take his chances outside.

He returned soon after, shaken after a close call, and proceeded up the tunnel, leaving Schlegel little choice but to follow. So much debris was coming off the ceiling it was like being trapped
in a mine about to collapse.

Schlegel saw figures up ahead. Someone shouted, warning them to come no further. The tunnel plunged into darkness again, with the largest explosion yet, followed by what sounded like a rifle
report and a bullet smacking the wall by Schlegel’s head. He saw the muzzle flash as the firing continued, pushed Morgen to the ground and threw himself down. Morgen said he thought it was a
Hitler Youth. When the lights came back on they would be sitting ducks. On the other hand, the kid was inexperienced, firing in the dark. Morgen was ready when the lights went on, lying as on a
firing range, legs spread and using his elbows to steady his aim. The boy was flailing, trying to get his rifle up. Schlegel kept thinking Morgen was being too slow.

The lights flickered. Morgen fired twice. The boy went down, howling.

They hurried on. The boy thrashed on the ground. The other men wore prisoner stripes and were chained together. Schlegel pushed his way past following Morgen as darkness returned and he feared
the men would turn on them as one. Boom! Boom! Boom! in the distance. Schlegel held his pistol, thinking how pathetic, compared to outside. The stink there was terrible, like the men were diseased
and rotting. With the lights back, Schlegel turned and saw them stamping on the boy, who had stopped screaming and was pleading in vain for mercy.

The boys on the floor were being encouraged to drink, Gersten saw, as he watched the appalling theatre from a safe distance, in horror and admiration as Reitner, despite the
crashing bombs, kept everyone at it, death’s foreman screaming for overtime. Boys stood in line waiting their turn, stepping up to the platform, while others fetched from among the striped
men by the door and, showering them with blows, forced them to strip. The boys dishing it out were as convulsed with terror as the men they beat. Fear ruled them all as the next shuffling man was
driven forward, most assuming the pathetic gesture of covering their genitals. Another wave of planes passed over and Gersten thought best would be a fat five-hundred pounder in the middle of it
all and not a shred of evidence, and Morgen and Schlegel’s nasty little investigation blown to smithereens.