There were three men sitting in judgment: an army general, Hermann Reinecke; a prosecutor, Ernst Lautz; and sitting between them, presiding over the lunacy, the president of the court, Dr. Roland Freisler.
As Gerhard discovered, Freisler was the only one of the trio who counted. He played the role of prosecutor, judge and jury. A beaky, unattractive man of almost fifty, with wiry dark hair surrounding a bald pate, he liked to begin his cases by berating the defendant before him. And the moment Freisler began this particular diatribe, Gerhard knew who had been feeding him his lines.
“You come from a parasitic life of privilege and wealth. You take money that would feed an honest German family for years and squander it helping your Jew friends. You reject German women in favor of British whores. The Führer reaches out a hand of friendship to you and you repay him with treachery.”
As he spoke, the volume and pitch of his voice increased until it was a harsh, grating screech. “You have been heard insulting the Führer in terms so vile that I will not repeat them in this courtroom! Drunkenly insulting him in public, spitting in the face of loyal German soldiers as you do so! You are a wastrel, a lecher, a traitor, a coward! I dare you to deny it!”
Gerhard said nothing. He was too tired, too hungry to argue with this gibbering maniac, and there was no point. The deal had been done and they both knew it.
“Your silence condemns you!” Freisler shouted. “You are a known associate of the traitor von Tresckow and his loathsome gang of assassins, conspirators and subversives. There is proof, overwhelming proof, that you met with von Tresckow and agreed with his views. It is also beyond dispute that you failed to report your meeting either to your superiors, or those of the traitor, so that proper measures could be taken against him. Your inaction was treasonable. By saying nothing you placed our beloved Führer in danger. A loyal pilot fights for his Führer. But you do not fight for him. You fight against him. You are a disgrace, a criminal disgrace!”
Still Gerhard said nothing. The mood in the courtroom was changing. There was a general sense of dissatisfaction. The show had not been following the approved script. One of the performers was failing to play his role. Most defendants would be begging, grown men in tears, pitifully admitting their guilt and pleading for mercy. They were not supposed to stand in silence, refusing to acknowledge the judge’s harangue.
Freisler could sense it too. But he knew that there was nothing he could do. He had received his orders from on high and if he dared dispute them, the next time he returned to the People’s Court it would be as the accused rather than the judge. He took a deep breath, did his best to maintain a commanding, assertive air and said, “Gerhard von Meerbach, you stand accused on three counts of anti-social behavior . . .”
Freisler paused. It was impossible to ignore the sound of murmuring among the spectators, or the mood of surprise and disappointment at what he had said. The people had expected charges of treason, sedition and even attempted assassination. They were looking forward to a death sentence, not a petty crime and a slap on the wrist.
“Silence!” Freisler shrieked, hammering his gavel. “There will be silence in this court!”
He waited until the hubbub had subsided and continued. “Firstly, you are accused of making derogatory remarks about the Führer and his conduct of the war. On this first count, how do you plead?”
“Guilty,” Gerhard replied.
“Secondly, you are accused of taking a private meeting with a known traitor. On this second count, how do you plead?”
“Guilty.”
“Thirdly, you are accused of failing to report this meeting or what was said by the traitor von Tresckow. How do you plead?”
“Guilty.”
The admissions of guilt seemed to have mellowed the mood in the room. Freisler was more confident as he continued. “These are serious matters and the accused has admitted his guilt. But the court is aware of his war service and will show mercy, so long as the accused now pledges his unconditional loyalty to the Führer, his willingness to fight and die in the cause of National Socialism, and his confidence in the certain victory of the Reich against all its enemies.
“Gerhard von Meerbach, will you solemnly swear this vow in this courtroom, making your oath of loyalty in front of this court, for all the world to hear?”
The silence was profound as the spectators waited for Gerhard’s answer. He looked around the room. The Luftwaffe officers were staring ahead, confident that their man would keep his side of the bargain and preserve the honor of their service. Konrad was not hiding his fury at being outwitted at the last moment. Chessi was looking at him with poisoned daggers in her eyes.
It struck Gerhard that once again the case had come down to the same two letters. “Ja.”
Freisler was becoming impatient. “Give the court your answer,” he demanded.
Gerhard drew himself up straight. He stood to attention. He told himself that all he had to do was to keep his side of the bargain and stay alive, by any means possible, until the Allies won, Nazism was crushed and Germany was rid of the evil that had enslaved it.
And then he knew, more surely than he had known anything in his life, that he could not make that vow. He saw that this was not a deal for his freedom, but for his soul. If he said “Yes” he would betray himself so profoundly that he would never be able to look at his own reflection again without seeing a man who had condemned himself. What was the point of surviving if he made himself so contemptible that he could never look Saffron, or his mother in the eye again? What could betray Schrumpp’s memory more utterly than this?
Once before, Gerhard had given in to a Nazi’s blackmail and betrayed his principles in the name of expediency. Never again.
“No,” he said. “I refuse to take that vow.”
The silence turned at once to uproar. Konrad clapped his hands at his brother’s willful self-destruction. The Luftwaffe men were standing and shouting at him, one or two of them waving their fists.
The judges looked aghast, then turned inward and consulted with one another, heads bowed in conference with only the occasional hand gesture to give a hint of what they were feeling.
Gerhard smiled to himself. He had pleaded guilty to a series of minor crimes. They could not now insist he should be accused a second time of more serious ones. But then he understood. They did not have to charge him again. They could sentence him as if he had been guilty of treason.
Then three heads separated. Freisler looked across the court. “The prisoner accused has held this court in contempt,” he declared. “He has spat in the face of his mercy. He has made his hatred for our Führer, our party and our fatherland all too plain.
“Very well then, Gerhard von Meerbach, you have made your choice and you must pay the price. This court will show you how it deals with traitors, anti-social conspirators and enemies of the state. You are to be sent to Sachsenhausen camp to serve a sentence of hard labor. I will not set a term of imprisonment. There is no point. By the time that even the shortest term is over, you will long since have died from starvation, exhaustion or disease.”
A few of the spectators burst into applause. One or two cheered. The show had been saved by the twist in its tail.
“Take him away!” Freisler commanded. “And let us move to the next traitor to be tried.”
•••
Gerhard was removed from the court, placed in the back of a van and driven with three other prisoners north out of Berlin to the town of Oranienburg. It was a distance of around thirty-five kilometers and when they arrived at the town, the van drove past a series of large white buildings, which contained the administrative headquarters of the Reich’s concentration-camp system. It approached a gatehouse, also white, into which were set iron gates bearing the slogan of the concentration camps: “Arbeit Macht Frei” or “Work Sets You Free.”
A small clock tower stood on the roof of the central section of the gatehouse and Gerhard could see the long, thick barrel of an 8mm Maxim ma
chine gun protruding from the entrance gate guard tower. The gunner was sighting the prisoners as if preparing for target practice.
The prisoners were pushed into a room and told to strip. When naked, they lined up in a row and one of the men was turned around by a guard to face the wall. He ran his hand through the thick black hair on the back of the prisoner’s head, grabbed a handful and slammed him against the white tiles of the wall. From the corner of his eye Gerhard saw the crimson spray against the tiles.
“Too much hair,” said the guard. “You break the rules.”
The prisoners were sprayed with a hose, the water ice cold. One by one, they were seated on a wooden crate, their bodies shaking. Their heads were shaved. Gerhard felt the nicks of the razor on his scalp, trickles of wetness on his forehead. They were marched into another room.
They were notified that they no longer had names. In the future they would be known only by their numbers. If asked for their identity they would give their number. If they failed to do so they would be punished. If they failed to respond when their number was called, they would also be punished.
“You will give us the Sachsenhausen salute!” one guard declared, with a grin.
The guard peered closely at each of the prisoners in turn, his expression a mixture of fascination and disgust. He spat in the face of the prisoner whose nose continued to bleed.
From this moment on, Gerhard von Meerbach no longer existed. He was prisoner No. 57803. The number was printed on a patch crudely stitched onto the striped prison uniform he was given. An inverted red triangle marked him out as a political prisoner. To his relief he kept his shoes and socks. The photograph was still safe.
As they were led out of the van and into the building where the uniform was issued, Gerhard had caught a glimpse of some of the Sachsenhausen inmates, milling around a large, open space. Though it was a baking hot August day, a few of them had jackets and even coats over their uniforms. He understood now why that was: any item of additional clothing was a precious treasure, for in winter it could be a lifesaver.
Gerhard identified the most senior of the guards supervising their arrival at the camp. The man was an SS-Rottenführer, a corporal in military terms. Ten days ago he would have jumped to attention at the sight of Gerhard in his lieutenant colonel’s uniform. Now their positions had been reversed and it was Gerhard who adopted a subservient, respectful tone as he asked, “Please, sir, may I make a request?”
“You just did,” said the Rottenführer. He and the other guards burst out in laughter. “Would you like to make another?”
“Yes please, sir, if I may.”
“What’s your name?”
Gerhard stopped himself in time. He glanced at the patch on his uniform: “Prisoner 57803, sir.”
“Almost had you, didn’t I, eh? Spit it out then. What do you want?”
“May I keep my jacket?”
The Rottenführer picked up the jacket and examined it with distaste. He smelled it and recoiled in mock horror. “God in heaven! Smells like a tramp’s wiped his arse on it. Is that what you are, then, a tramp?”
Gerhard longed, more than anything else, to say what he really thought, to assert himself as a man and put this tawdry bully in his place. But he knew that there was nothing to be gained from that. All that mattered was getting the jacket.
“Yes, sir, if you say so, sir. I’m a tramp.”
“Did you wipe your arse on your jacket, tramp?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Then you’d better have it, in case you do another shit.”
“Thank you, sir. Thank you so much.”
Gerhard and the other prisoners were marched off to the barracks hut where they would now be housed. It was a long, low building. Inside its dimly lit interior, two unbroken lines of wooden bunks ran the length of the building, with a narrow aisle between them. The bunks were three levels high. The prisoners slept on the bare wooden slats, without mattresses or blankets, two or even three to each bed.
Gerhard was allotted a space on the bottom level of one bunk, and was exposed to any fluids, be they bodily waste, blood or pus that might drip down from the levels above. He shared the space with a former Social Democrat politician, No. 36419, who introduced himself as Karl.
“We still use names between ourselves,” he said. “That’s the only way we remember them.”
He was painfully thin. His eyes stared from his fleshless face. When he grinned, his teeth were yellow-brown.
“How long have you been here?” Gerhard asked, thinking he must be one of the longest-serving prisoners.
“I arrived in March,” Karl replied. “What’s the date today? I don’t know what month it is anymore.”
He asked Gerhard what his crime had been. They talked about their separate experiences of the People’s Court and Gerhard described how he had been able to keep the jacket that had been issued to him for the trial.
“By the way,” he added, “when we were being given our numbers, one of the guards mentioned something about the Sachsenhausen salute. What’s that?”
Karl gave a wheezy laugh that turned into a hacking cough. “You get down on your haunches with your arms held straight out in front of you. You stay like that for as long as they want, hours at a time. For a fit man that is hard enough to do for a few minutes. For men in our condition . . .” He shrugged. “That’s Sachsenhausen.”
Over the next few days, Karl helped Gerhard get his bearings. The main body of the camp was laid out inside a huge triangle, outlined with a barbed-wire fence and guarded by a watchtower from which an old First World War machine gun was trained on the prison below.
At the base of the triangle, by the gatehouse, was a large semi-circular parade ground, where roll calls were held, and on which stood two sets of gallows. All the barracks buildings radiated outward from this open space.
“Each hut was built to house one hundred and forty prisoners,” Karl said. “But the Nazis are such busy boys, arresting everyone they don’t like, that now there’s around four hundred poor bastards in every hut. Sometimes you get a lot of deaths, so the number goes down. Sometimes there’s a lot of new arrivals, so it goes up. But four hundred’s about normal. There are some women’s huts, too.”
He looked at Gerhard and gave another of his wheezing laughs. “Don’t get hopeful. There’s not a lot of romance around here. And if you think our guards are bad, you should see the bitches that guard the woman. One other problem—they don’t seem to have increased the rations to match the numbers. I mean, look at us . . .”
Along with the huts, the two major buildings inside the triangle were the Gestapo prison, where suspects arrested by the Secret Police were brought for interrogation and torture, and the punishment cells.
“They stick you in solitary,” Karl said. “Tiny cells, pitch black, no light, no air, even less food than you get out here. Most people who go in never come out. Those that do are so sick and so crazy they don’t last long.”
Outside the perimeter of the triangle were two other blocks. One contained the “Special Camp” for high-level prisoners. The other housed British and American officers, who had been caught trying to escape from conventional POW camps, or were being held as spies, rather than military prisoners.
“We get Russians, too, thousands of them. But they mostly seem to be killed and shoved in there . . .” He pointed to a tall chimney from which gray smoke was drifting. “The crematorium.”
There were a number of industrial facilities beyond the triangle where prisoners were sent to work. The hardest labor was in the brick works, where building materials were manufactured for the proposed Welthaupstadt or “World Capital” Germania that Hitler had been dreaming about since the pre-war days when Gerhard was a young architect, assigned to Albert Speer’s studio. It would have been a pretty irony if Gerhard had been set to work amidst the choking dust and infernal heat of the brick kilns. Instead, he was given another oddly appropriate task and put to work in the factory that made
parts for Heinkel bombers.
Karl was on the same production line. “Some of the men deliberately make faulty components,” he said. “They like the idea that they could make one of those goddamned bombers crash.”
“I can’t do that. I know the men who fly in those planes. They’re ordinary fellows, trying to get through this war. It’s not their fault that their leaders are maniacs. Besides, there’s no need to sabotage anything. We’ll have lost the war soon, whatever anyone does here.”
“How long do you think it will be?” Karl asked.
“The rate the Russians are advancing in the East, they could be in Berlin by Christmas. I don’t know what it’s like in France. But if the British and Americans move as fast as we did, when we invaded in forty, they’ll be across the Rhine by the autumn.”
Karl’s eyes gleamed with hope. “It could be over this year? Is that what you’re saying?”
“It could be. But if it isn’t . . . you may have to wait awhile. The Allies will take their time over the winter, build up their forces. They’ll wait till the spring before they strike.”
“And then?”
“The Third Reich will collapse like . . .” Gerhard was about to say “a pack of cards.” Then a memory came to him from his childhood and he said, “I have an older brother. He’s high up in the SS. It’s thanks to him that I’m here, in fact.”
“Not a very nice brother.”
“A bully, always has been. When I was a small boy, I used to make buildings out of wooden blocks. I spent hours on them. My brother would wait until I’d finished and the whole thing looked perfect. Then he’d kick it as hard as he could and send the bricks flying across the playroom. That’s what’s going to happen to Germany. Once the Allies come, they will smash our country into pieces.”
“But that will be the end of Hitler, and the SS, and camps like this . . . so it will be worthwhile.”
“That’s why I intend to live to see it happen.”
Karl gave a weary smile. “Don’t build your hopes up, my friend. We live in the shadow of death here. It can come at any moment in any number of ways: starvation, sickness or an SS man deciding, for no reason, that you are the poor soul he wants to kill today.”