Lanny didn’t want knowledge of the Vikings or yet of the inner core of the planets and the stars. He wanted to be taken at once to the Physics Department, and there he wanted to collect and impound all papers and records of whatever character. This was a task of some magnitude, and both janitors and professors were pressed into service. The documents were all stacked in one room, and the door locked, and a day-and-night guard set up by the obliging Seventh Army, pending the arrival of the Jewish-Dutch-American discoverer of the “spin of the electron”—something in which real Nazi physicists of course did not believe.
IV
Having done this important job, Lanny ventured to ask another favor of Seventh headquarters; he wanted them to let him have one of their PFCs named Freddi Robin for a week to act as his bodyguard and general handyman. One Joe being the same as any other to this busy Army, they were willing to cut the red tape and give Doc Budd an order, a jeep, and driver for a quick run to Rosenheim, where the Jewish boy’s unit was now—but of course nobody could be sure how many moments it would stay there. The Seventh was on its way down through the Brenner Pass—they being the fifty-eighth conquering force to travel that route during recorded history. They could cut off the retreat of the Germans in Italy and bring them to a quick surrender.
So Doc had another holiday drive, with a chauffeur who told him about the delights of dashing across Germany from the Rhine to the Danube, with some of the enemy fighting like devils and others standing by the roadside holding up their hands and waving any sort of white rag they could get. The war was fun at that stage; but Jesus Christ, what a lot of misery it had meant in the winter time, driving the Huns back against the Rhine! Private Jack Forrester had had enough of it to last him for a lifetime, and all he wanted was to get back to Abilene, Texas, where there was a girl waiting for him. From first to last Lanny didn’t meet a single “dough” who had any thought about solving the problems of Europe; what was worrying them was that there mightn’t be enough jobs back home to go round, and the guys who got there first would get the pick. “How soon do you think they’ll start shipping us back, Doc?”
Lanny’s appearance in the town of Rosenheim was truly like a miracle to young Freddi. He had joined up at Saarbrücken, and had helped count prisoners all the way across the Rhineland and South Germany. He had by-passed Dachau and Munich—nobody had had time to listen to his plea that he might as well count prisoners in a concentration camp. Now he was going to be with his friend Lanny Budd, whom he adored as the greatest man in the Army, not even excepting General Ike.
Lanny had a magic piece of paper which did the business in a minute or two, and it took the boy not much longer to stuff his belongings into his kitbag and throw it into the back seat of the jeep. Away they went, not stopping for even a glimpse of the swift-flowing Inn River, along which Lanny had driven with Laurel Creston, getting out of Germany with Hitler’s permission on the day the war broke out. Then the road had been crowded with German troops going to the front, and now it was crowded with Americans doing the same—but a different front!
Lanny wasn’t going to Dachau just on young Freddi’s account. Freddi’s father was dead and gone and there was no way to help him. Lanny was interested in helping the living, by ending one war and making another impossible. He knew that Dachau had been the first of the concentration camps, Hitler’s own. Here he had sent his special enemies, those who threatened his regime—beginning on the 30th of January 1933, the day that he took power, and continuing for exactly a hundred and forty-seven months, up to the 30th of April 1945, the day that he put a bullet into his disordered brain. In Dachau he had assembled his most skilled torturers, to wring secrets out of the prisoners and to render them incapable of acting, or even of thinking, against his regime. Here he had assigned his most fanatical zealots, to inflict in the name of experimental science the most hideous sufferings upon these unfortunate wretches; freezing them, baking them, injecting drugs and poisons into them, depriving them of food, of water, of sleep, and keeping exact records of how much they could endure and how they could be brought back and got ready for the next set of experiments.
In this enormous prison pen, several miles in circumference, had been confined the flower of Germany’s political and social idealism: those leaders who had been guiding the toiling masses and those younger men who had been trained at the labor school which Lanny and the elder Freddi had helped to keep going in Berlin. It was possible that he might find Ludi Schultz, husband of Trudi, the woman whom Lanny had married after he had been told that Ludi was dead. It was conceivable that the Nazis might have immured one of their most hated foes for twelve years and never permitted the outside world to hear a word from him. It was even conceivable that Trudi might be here! Rudolf Hess had had the records looked up and reported that she had died in Dachau. But then, there were probably as many Trudi Schultzes in Germany as there are Mary Smiths in America, and suppose Hess had got the wrong one?
There were not only German Social Democrats in Dachau, there were Communists and democrats and liberals and pacifists and in general all friends of mankind. Their crimes had been such as listening to foreign broadcasts or speaking disrespectfully of the Regierung. There were more than a thousand Catholic priests, and perhaps as many Protestant pastors, accused of practicing their religion. And not merely Germans, but Frenchmen and Dutchmen and Norwegians and Czechs and Danes, and perhaps some British and Americans; all the finest spirits of the world who had got caught in Adi Schicklgruber’s death trap.
Lanny was moved not merely by friendship and friendly curiosity; he hoped to get a mass of information from these different kinds of people, and from the records of this enormous Lager. The inmates could put their fingers on the guilty and defend the innocent, inside and outside the camp. They could tell where treasures were hidden, and paper secrets more precious than treasure. Those who had enough life in them were the persons who would redeem the soul of Germany and guide its future. G-2 of Army would be there, busily asking questions about war criminals; but Lanny Budd knew special questions to ask, and tactful ways to ask them. He might help not merely Alsos and Monuments, but also AMG and the government of Germans by Germans which AMG was already setting up in conquered territory.
V
Dachau lies some ten miles to the northwest of Munich, and there is a railroad but it wasn’t working. Lanny got a Daimler car which one of the Nazi Bonzen had left behind, presumably because he couldn’t get gas; it was odd to hear how these masters of the Thousand-Year Reich had hitched horses, oxen, cows, and even Poles and Russians to their rubber-tired chariots in order to get their corpulent selves hauled away toward the east. They fled from General Patch’s Seventh Army, only to run into Georgie Patton’s Third, headed hell-for-leather into Austria. And believe it, those were real man-sized armies! Patton alone had more than three hundred and fifty thousand men.
Before setting out on this journey the two investigators had had to have typhus shots, and have their hair and clothing well dusted with DDT. There were reported to be two thousand cases of typhus in the camp, and a visitor could not touch anyone or sit in a chair or lean against a wall without getting lice on him. The inmates could not have been turned loose without spreading the plague all over Germany; they would be kept under quarantine until they were safe to move. Doc Budd was urged against going, but he was a special sort of Intelligence man, and if he felt it was his duty no one would forbid it.
Dachauerstrasse from Munich had shell holes, and was crowded with displaced persons and military traffic; bridges were down, and you detoured into small streams. It was Army etiquette for the private soldier to drive the car; but Lanny wouldn’t trust his young friend, who was so excited that he couldn’t keep his hands from shaking. “Chillon! Thy prison is a holy place,” the poet Byron had written, and so this sensitive Jewish lad felt about the place to which he was bound. If he could manage to find the building where his father had been confined he would search every inch of it for traces of wri
ting. “May none those marks efface! For they appeal from tyranny to God.”
Lanny remembered the gates, and the wide street inside, lined with tall administration buildings. To keep his Thousand-Year Reich safe, Hitler would need thousand-year prisons and cages for his opponents; he had known that and planned with German thoroughness. The officers in charge must be comfortable; they must have well-built homes with all modern conveniences, crystal and silver and linen, books and radios and music, all elegance and all culture for the Herrenvolk, those whom the Creator had chosen to rule the inferior races of the earth. These homes must be situated in beautiful gardens remote from all scenes of horror.
In the course of his visit Lanny was escorted into one of these by the American officer who had that day moved in and had barely had time to look around. A bit crude by American taste but pleasant; on the center table lay a volume, and Lanny picked it up; Goethe’s Lieder und Gedichte! The visitor’s mind was swept back to his early youth when he had discovered the young Goethe of the lyric days, a godlike being, singing of all things lovely and noble in human life; im Ganzen, Guten, Wahren resolut zu leben! Then Lanny noticed the reading lamp, with a shade of a peculiar sort, a tissue like parchment, yellowish in color and ornamented with crude designs in red and blue—German eagles, flags, heraldic coats of arms, mermaids, quite a collection. “What is that?” he asked, and the answer was, “Somebody had a bright idea; that is tattooed human skin.”
“Good God!” exclaimed the visitor. “Do you suppose they killed people to get it?”
“We haven’t made sure about that,” was the answer. “Maybe they just made note of men who had good tattooings and waited for them to die. In this place they were dying at the rate of two every hour.”
VI
“You should go and see the train first,” remarked the officer at the gates. “If you want to know what death is, go see it and smell it.” So the visitors went outside and around to the north, where the train stood on a siding. What had happened was that at Buchenwald, a camp near Weimar, to the north, the Americans had been drawing near and the Nazis apparently had the idea that things were going to be safer in the south. They had loaded some four thousand of their Russian and Polish slave laborers into a long freight train—thirty-nine cars, said the officer, more than a hundred men to the car. But the railroad had been bombed, and of course military traffic had the right of way; the journey to Dachau took twenty-one days, and it was early April, with cold and rain, and most of the cars were open flatcars, “gondolas” as they are called in America. Half the prisoners perished on the way, and most of the rest in the few days after reaching Dachau.
The track was curved, making it possible to view the whole train. Lanny and Freddi looked into the uncovered cars and through the open doors of the boxcars, and saw the ghastliest sights of their lives: rows and piles of human bodies, many naked, others covered with rags and bits of filthy blanket, lying as they had fallen, because they could no longer stand or sit; a few out in the fields where they had been shot trying to escape. Many of the naked bodies bore the marks of whips.
There is a familiar phrase, “mere skin and bones.” It is an accurate phrase, for in starvation the body does not give up easily, but protects itself by drawing all the substance out of the muscles and putting it into heart and lungs and blood vessels. These creatures who had once been men were now skeletons covered with skin; their bowels had shrunk to nothing, and the skin of the belly lay against the backbone; their eyes had sunk into the sockets, and their skulls were like those of mummies. They gave out a sickly sweet odor that threatened to set you to vomiting.
There was no getting away from this odor in Dachau. The whole vast Lager was pervaded by it, and it drifted out into the countryside, paying no heed to barbed and electrified wire. It was like the smell of the Chicago stockyards, except that these bodies hadn’t all been cooked. The visitors went into some of the barracks, where the narrow bunks were in tiers, and discovered that many of the inmates had reached that stage of exhaustion where they could not move anything but their eyes; they had lost the power to assimilate food and lay waiting for merciful death. They lay in their own excrement, and so there was a new kind of stench.
When they died they were placed in stacks exactly like cordwood, until they could be carted to the crematory; there they were stacked again, for crematories were overcrowded and fuel was getting scarce. The American Army had too many things to do in conquered Germany and still needed its men for the unconquered portions. They were going to order the townspeople of Dachau to bury the bodies that were in the freight cars, so they informed Lanny.
It was interesting to note that the town’s five thousand people appeared well fed and sturdy. There was no lack of food in rural Germany; the starvation policy had been deliberate and followed from the beginning. The non-working prisoners had received one slice of bread and one dipper of thin soup twice a day; this amounted to about five hundred calories, about one-fourth of what it takes to maintain the weight of an average person at rest. From first to last there had been a hundred and twenty-five thousand captives in this hellhole, and about half of them had died of starvation and disease.
VII
It was a sunshiny day, and all the inmates who could move were out enjoying the warmth. The liberation had occurred two days ago, but the pitiful creatures had not yet got over their excitement; the sight of American visitors filled them with emotions beyond control. They came running or tottering, weeping, babbling incoherently; they wanted to touch the visitors, to be sure they were real; they wanted to clutch them with clawlike hands; they wanted to kiss them with unshaven faces, and to press stinking and verminous clothing against them; they wanted to thank them in Serbian and Russian, Italian and French, Norwegian, Polish, and even Hindustani.
There was an immense open compound, big enough for a parade ground, with a high wooden wall. It was crowded with men, and was really dangerous to go into. A cheer started and ran all over the place; a mob came crowding, pouring out their thanks, questions, requests. They wanted cigarettes, liquor, food—they had been fed, but of course not as much as they wanted, or they would have killed themselves. Thirty-two thousand men in this place, and nothing could be done for them individually; they had to be treated en masse. But they were individuals, with their individual hopes and fears, worries and needs; they wanted news of the outside world, of their families and friends; they wanted to write letters, to send messages; they wanted to tell their stories; they wanted just to have a contact with the wonderful free world, to know that it existed, to touch some fragment of it. They had all been lousy and stinking for so long that they had forgotten how this would affect normal men.
The visitors got out of the compound; no use trying to carry on conversation there. They walked through the narrow lanes between the low barracks, and here living skeletons, too weak to get to the compound, sat or lay against the walls and made feeble efforts to greet the visitors, a sickly grin and a lifting of the hand perhaps six inches, perhaps a foot. Their faces all looked alike and aged. Here and there lay a different sort of body, normal in size and vigorous, but dead; they were clad in black uniforms with the SS insignia. These were the guards of the camp, and until three days ago they had lorded it over their victims; wherever they strode with their snarling dogs the victims were required to stand at attention, hats in hand, if they had hats, and never closer than six feet. If anyone failed in this ceremonial he was seized, his hands bound behind his back, and hung to a wall hook by the cord; there he stayed for one hour. On the Sunday when the Americans came the mob rose and killed every one of their tormentors they could lay hands on. In the frenzy of the first minutes men had torn themselves on barbed wire, breaking through it, and some had been killed by electrified wire, or just by the violence of their excitement.
The GIs had never seen anything like this; they had heard stories but hadn’t believed them. Now they wanted to tell the world, and they started on one buddy and one “Doc”; as
k them one question, and they would pour out a flood of horror and rage. Look in this barrack where the Poles had been herded, the poor devils who had been hated worst of all. Triple-tiered bunks just deep enough to slide into, and five feet wide; five men had slept in each bunk, and a lot of them were still in there, dead. Or this place where a group of Jewish women had been herded three weeks ago; things here that could not be put into print.
A noncom on duty at the crematory undertook to escort the visitors through that large brick building. There was a big “office,” where the victims had been stripped, there was a gas room where they died, and there were two large furnaces where they were turned into ashes, excellent for spreading on German fields. There was a punishment room where they were hung on hooks and whipped, and this had thoughtfully been arranged so that while they were hanging they could see bodies being thrown into the furnaces. In the early days of this concentration camp Lanny had been shown through it, or so he had been told; but he hadn’t seen any of these sights, only the barracks in which the important prisoners lived.
All such persons had been taken away two nights before the Americans arrived; eight thousand had been taken in a huge caravan, and no one had any idea where they had gone. All the records of the Lager had been burned in the crematory. Later on Lanny found that some records had been secretly kept by some of the prisoner doctors, but these related only to medical matters, the number of prisoners who had died and what they had died of. The doctors were from all the nations of Europe, and were among the most intelligent of the men Lanny met; they had done the best they could with few instruments and almost no drugs. They had been given enough food so that they could work—they and the male nurses, who also had to practice medicine to the best of their ability.