Löwe raised an eyebrow.
‘Where have they come from?’
‘Just about everywhere. Fuhlsbüttel, Struthof, Torgau, Germersheim . . . The last lot were picked up from Buchenwald and Borge Moor. If you’ll just sign the receipt and let me have it, I’ll be getting on my way.’
‘Sorry,’ said Löwe. ‘Quite out of the question.’ He smiled rather grimly. ‘It’s a habit of mine never to sign a receipt until I’ve checked up on the goods . . . Get the prisoners unloaded and have them lined up on the platform. I’ll take a count of heads. Produce for me the correct number and you can have your receipt. But mind this: I don’t sign for dead bodies.’
The officer pulled an irritable face.
‘Alive or dead, where’s the difference? You can’t be too fussy after five years of war. You want to see the way we make a delivery to the Waffen SS. Short and snappy. No trouble at all. A nice quick bullet through the back of the neck, and Bob’s your uncle! Finished for the day.’
‘Very likely,’ said Löwe, with his top lip curling distastefully. ‘But we are not the Waffen SS. We are a tank regiment and are supposed to be taking delivery of five hundred and thirty volunteers for the front. Dead men are therefore of no possible use to us. You’ll get a receipt for the actual number of live prisoners handed over to my sergeants, and if you wish to raise any objections you are quite at liberty to take matters up with the camp commander, the Count von Gernstein. It is entirely up to you.’
The officer pursed his mouth into a thin line and said nothing. Gernstein was not a man anyone in his right senses would ever choose to take matters up with. Rumour had it that he communed with Satan every night from twelve o’clock till four, and he had a reputation for wanton cruelty and viciousness which struck terror to the heart even after five years of bloodshed and slaughter.
The wagons were opened and they vomited out their load of tortured humanity. The guards stood by with dogs and guns, ready to club senseless the first man who stumbled or fell. One poor devil, palsied and trembling, caught up in the general panic yet not strong enough to keep his footing, disappeared beneath a flood of bodies and emerged at the end of the stampede a bloodied mass, his throat torn open by the snarling hounds.
We stood watching as the trembling figures were lined up in three columns. We saw the dead bodies being tossed back into the wagons. The officer in charge strutted down the columns and briskly saluted Löwe.
‘All present and correct, Lieutenant. I think you’ll find there’s no need to waste time on a roll-call.’
Löwe made no reply. He walked in silence the length of the ragged cortège of men, who had been collected from some of the worst hells on earth and confined in communal suffering for the past fourteen days. He waited while a count was taken. Three hundred and sixty-five men out of the five hundred and thirty who had set out on the journey were still alive.
Löwe stood a moment with bent head. He turned at last to the waiting officer.
‘I will sign for three hundred and sixty-five men,’ he said.
There was a pause. We could feel the tension mounting.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said the officer, through clenched teeth. ‘I believe I have delivered my full quota. The condition of the goods is immaterial. It is the quantity which concerns us.’
Löwe raised an eyebrow.
‘Do we deal in human flesh?’ he said. ‘What is your merchandise? Men or meat?’
Another silence fell. It was broken, none too soon, by the arrival of Gernstein’s aide-de-camp, Captain von Pehl. His car came to a flamboyant halt a few yards away, and the Captain leapt out, smiling benignly upon one and all. He adjusted his monocle and swayed up to the two disputing officers, spurs jingling and gold braid flashing. He clicked his heels together and tapped his polished boots with his riding crop.
‘What news on the Rialto, dear sirs? The end of the war? Or merely another bomb in the Führer’s bunker?’
Gravely, Löwe explained the situation. The Captain brought his riding crop up to his face and thoughtfully scratched his beautifully-shaven chin with it.
‘A slight question of numbers,’ he murmured. ‘One is expecting a battalion, and one receives scarcely three companies. One can understand the predicament.’ He turned pleasantly to the convoy officer. ‘How, if the question is not too impertinent, dear sir, could you possibly manage to mislay so many men?’
He strolled across to the wagon containing the corpses. He inspected for a moment the top layer, then motioned with his riding crop towards one of the bodies. A couple of guards stepped forward and heaved it on to the platform where it lay in a sawdust heap, a dead man without a head. Von Pehl readjusted his monocle. Gingerly, with a handkerchief held to his nose, he bent over the body and examined it. He straightened up and beckoned to the officer.
‘Perhaps you would be so kind as to show me the point of entry of the bullet, dear sir?’
The indignant officer slowly turned crimson. All this absurd amount of fuss over one dead prisoner with a bullet through the back of the head! Did they live in a fool’s paradise, out here at Sennelager?
‘The point of entry,’ gently insisted von Pehl. ‘Purely as a matter of interest, I assure you.’
Behind von Pehl stood his ordnance officer, Lieutenant Althaus, with a sub-machine-gun under his arm. Behind Althaus stood a lieutenant of the military police, rocklike and immovable. They were mad, of course. They were all mad. No one in his right mind would have made such a song and dance over one dead prisoner. One dead prisoner, a hundred dead prisoners, what the devil did it matter? There were plenty more where that lot had come from.
‘There was a revolt.’ The officer tilted his chin, in sullen defiance. ‘There was a revolt. The guards had to fire.’
Von Pehl stretched out a languid hand.
‘Report?’
‘I – I haven’t had time to write one out yet.’
Von Pehl tapped his teeth with the handle of his riding crop.
‘So tell me, dear sir – where, exactly, did this – ah – revolt take place?’
‘Just outside Eisenach.’
Eisenach.
It was far enough away, in all conscience. Perhaps now the man would stop poking his interfering Prussian nose into other people’s business and let him get on his way to Dachau for the next batch of human misery.
‘You know, my dear sir,’ murmured von Pehl, ‘that the regulations quite plainly state that any such incident as the one you have mentioned should be reported immediately? Without fail? No matter what?’ He turned to Althaus, standing at his shoulder. ‘Lieutenant, perhaps you would be so good as to telephone at once to the station master at Eisenach?’
We stood patiently waiting in the rain, while von Pehl amused himself by walking up and down looking like a mannequin with a hand on his hip, jangling his spurs and tapping himself with his crop. The officer of the convoy ran a finger round the inside of his collar. Discreetly, his men began to edge away from him. One of the guards, finding himself at my side, spat on the floor and spoke to me out of the side of his mouth.
‘I always said he was riding for a fall. Over and over again I’ve said it. The way he treats those prisoners is disgraceful. Absolutely bloody disgraceful. I’ve said so all along.’
Lieutenant Althaus returned, accompanied by the station master, a small squat man wearing a steel helmet just in case things should turn nasty. He held out a jovial plump hand, which von Pehl adroitly managed not to notice without giving any offence. The convoy officer made a rasping sound in the back of his throat.
‘I trust Colonel von Gernstein is keeping well?’ he said.
His attempt at polite conversation fell into a void of stony silence. The station master dropped his hand to his side. Lieutenant Althaus fingered his sub-machine-gun. Von Pehl examined his filbert fingernails. The convoy officer took a step backwards. He should have remained where he belonged, in Budapest, in the Hungarian Army. It was a dangerous game he was playing, gambl
ing on fame and fortune in Nazi Germany.
Von Pehl turned casually to his aide.
‘Well, Lieutenant? What news from Eisenach?’
Eisenach, it seemed, not only had no knowledge of the alleged revolt: they had not even heard of the convoy. I saw a frosty sparkle appear in von Pehl’s cold Prussian eyes. He beckoned to Danz, who charged up like an eager rhinoceros. The Hungarian was arrested on the spot on charges of murder, submitting a false report and sabotaging a convoy. He was promptly manhandled into a waiting truck and driven off to Sennelager. Lieutenant Löwe duly signed a receipt for the delivery of three hundred and sixty-five volunteers, and the guards, cowed and nervous since the arrest of their officer, withdrew in some disorder. Von Pehl unscrewed his monocle, nodded affably at the assembled volunteers, gave himself one last hearty thwack with his riding crop and mercifully disappeared.
Relief was instantaneous. The tension went out of the atmosphere, cigarettes were lighted, men breathed more easily. Some of the MPs even went so far as to pass round bottles of booze they had recently brought back from France with them, and under the comfortable influence of alcohol we all became blood brothers and rolled off arm in arm to the station canteen to drink each other’s health.
The prisoners were given permission to sit down, and some food was passed out. Only dry bread. But even dry bread can be a luxury to a man who has seen the inside of Torgau or Glatz – to anyone who has lived for days on a diet of water in the dark hell of Germersheim, where more people go in than have ever come out.
Germersheim . . . It’s a name that conjures up fear. It’s a place not marked on the map, yet it’s easy enough to find your way there. Just leave the motorway near Bruchsal, between Mannheim and Karlsruhe, and drive straight on towards the Rhine. Anyone will tell you the road. It’s not difficult to follow. You go through a pretty little village full of jolly cottages with roses round their doors. You take the first turning to the left, and you leave the little village with its cheery cottages and you drive into the cold dark midnight of the forest. And there, on a large signboard, is your first introduction to Germersheim: ENTRY FORBIDDEN, it says, in capital letters a foot high. ENTRY FORBIDDEN: MILITARY ZONE. You can drive on for only another half mile or so before the road narrows to a mere track. And that’s where you stop, and you thank God and your lucky stars that you’re only a sightseer. You can get a good view of the prison from there. A vast grey block of stone straddling like a colossus among the trees. Military Correction Centre, that’s what they call it. And if you care to advance any further along the narrow road, and if you manage to escape the armed guards and the dogs, and if you can safely pick your way through the minefield beyond, then they’ll no doubt welcome you with open arms, and Germersheim will be your last resting place. Because once you’re in, the chances are that you’re in to stay. Between 1933 and 1945, one hundred and thirty-three thousand men were swallowed up by Germersheim and never seen again . . .
While the prisoner-volunteers sat smacking the edges of their ragged lips over hunks of bone-hard bread, and while the rest of us lounged about drinking and smoking, Lieutenant Löwe was being regaled by the station master with roast hare. But even eating that delicacy did not put him in a good humour. He marched us out of the station on the double, and not even Porta, dragged away from a pleasant drinking session, saw fit to do more than make an obscene gesture and mutter under his breath.
The arrest of the convoy officer was likely to have tiresome repercussions for Löwe. It would have been simpler by far if the man had accepted a receipt for only three hundred and sixty-five prisoners and there let the matter rest. As it was, the wheels of the military machine had been set in motion and there could be no stopping them now. Colonel von Gernstein was at the moment absent from camp, hunting in the mountains. It was common knowledge that whenever he returned from a hunting trip he was in an even more satanic frame of mind than usual. God help the officer who had the temerity to trouble him with affairs such as this present one. And it would certainly be Löwe who was left to lay the matter before him. Everyone else could disclaim responsibility, but in the final analysis it was Löwe’s affair and no one else’s. He could expect no support from within the camp. Gernstein’s second-in-command, who had lost an arm during the early years of the war and tended to make capital out of it, always took the opportunity to report sick on such occasions; and the next in the chain inevitably managed to put in a few days’ leave at the right moment. All in all, it would have been far less bother if the Lieutenant had followed normal Sennelager procedure and shot the wretched Hungarian on the spot.
We marched mutinously, infected by the Lieutenant’s ill-humour and harangued on all sides by bawling NCOs. Non-commissioned officers in the Prussian Army spent their entire lives, from the cradle to the grave, shouting themselves hoarse on the principle that the more noise one makes, the more likely one is to be obeyed. On the whole, men grew so accustomed that they never even noticed it any more, but still the NCOs went on shouting. It was, by this time, probably a reflex action. Not even the prisoners, straggling and stumbling in our midst, took any notice of the threats and curses that accompanied us.
About six miles off from camp, some of them began to flag pretty badly. Löwe yelled at them to keep in line, but they were past it, they were dropping down like flies and lying in heaps at the side of the road. Not even the frenzied clubbing of the guards could bring them to their feet. Löwe was forced to call a halt and give them a breathing space. He stood before them in the pouring rain and delivered one of his pep talks, to which I listened with growing fascination.
‘You are all volunteers, you men. No one has forced you to come here – but now that you are here, by God, you’re going to be treated like soldiers!’
The volunteers, beaten, starved and systematically brutalised, shivered in their prison garb and kept their heads bent low and their shoulders hunched. I wondered if the Lieutenant really could be so naïve as to believe what he was saying. Or whether for the sake of his conscience he had had to force himself to believe it. I wondered what his definition of a volunteer was. When threatened with execution on the one hand or 999 battalion on the other, could any man really be said to have had freedom of choice?
The column formed up once again. We set off in good marching order along the asphalt road, with Löwe at the head and Lieutenant Komm at his side. Komm had lost an arm at the front, and now marched with the thumb of his false hand tucked into his belt. We had barely covered half a mile when the prisoners began to falter again. They were whipped on from behind by the prison guards, encouraged by the manic vociferations of Danz, who I swear could have made a corpse stand up and dance if he had been so inclined. Inside the column, Tiny lumbered up and down his section like a sheepdog with a herd of stupid sheep, exhorting them to keep in line and not to drop down dead before they reached Sennelager. I suddenly saw him pause, and give a joyous shout, and club one of the prisoners affectionately in the chest. I thought at first that he’d met up with one of his old mates from days gone by, but the prisoner, an ugly giant of a man almost as large as Tiny himself, appeared not to know him. He screwed up his little piggy eyes in puzzlement.
‘Corporal?’
‘You remember me!’ roared Tiny, giving him another affectionate punch in the middle of the chest. The man staggered slightly. ‘Lutz!’ shouted Tiny. ‘It’s my old friend Lutz!’
‘I think,’ said the man, nervously, ‘that you must be mistaken. Perhaps you may have confused me with another—’
‘Paris!’ bawled Tiny, throwing open his arms. ‘Paris, that’s where it was! Gay Paree and all the rest of it, and you having the time of your life, shafting a different bird every night of the week . . . It had to be a different bird, didn’t it, Lutz? Do you remember that? It always had to be a different one on account of they was never there the next day . . . A quick jump with a nice bit of Jewish cunt before popping her into the oven to roast . . . That’s what it used to be, didn’t it, Lutz?
You remember that, don’t you, Lutz? Those were the days, eh? Those were the days, weren’t they, Lutz? When you was in the Gestapo and all the rest of us had to bow and scrape and lick your bleeding arsehole—’
‘Corporal, you’re making a terrible mistake!’ said the man, with the sweat pouring in glistening grey drops off his forehead. ‘I’ve never been to Paris – never in my life – never, I swear it!’
‘Next you’ll be telling me you’ve never had a woman!’ jeered Tiny. He suddenly whipped his knife out of his boot and held it within centimetres of the man’s throat, half choking him with an arm tight round his neck as they marched. ‘I’m going to make a soldier out of you, Lutz. From now on, I’m going to take you under my wing. I’m going to see to it that you’re the best bleeding soldier in the whole bleeding Army. I’m not going to know a moment’s peace until I’ve got you right out there at the front, fighting mad with half your head blown off . . . You understand me, Lutz? You understand me, do you?’ The terrified man nodded his head and almost slit his throat open on the gleaming edge of Tiny’s knife. Tiny slowly relaxed. He slipped the knife back into his boot. ‘All right, so tell me, Lutz,’ he said, sounding quite affable once again. ‘Tell me how much you weigh?’
Lutz swallowed so hard I thought his Adam’s apple was going to come shooting out the top of his head.
‘A hundred and twenty-five kilos, Corporal.’
‘A hundred and twenty-five kilos?’ said Tiny, horrified. ‘Christ almighty, you’re lucky you’re alive. They been feeding you rich food, have they?’ He gripped the man’s arm, affectionately. ‘Don’t you worry, mate, we’ll soon shift that lot for you. Good stiff diet of bread and water and lots of nice healthy exercise round and round the courtyard . . . You’ll be all right, chum, we’ll have you down to thirty in next to no time. The Sylph of Sennelager, that’s what you’ll be known as by the time I’ve finished with you . . .’
About half a mile off camp, Löwe ordered another short rest. The prisoners collapsed on to the waterlogged ground. The rest of us squatted on our haunches or tried to find a bit of shelter in the ditch at the side of the road. From now on we should be under constant observation from the camp, and it was essential we finish the march in good order. We were whipped back into line and set off yet again.