An Infinity of Mirrors (12 page)

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Heil Hitler!

Eberhard Drayst

SS Obersturmbannfuehrer

Chief, Special Projects Office

The Reichsfuehrer SS showed his innate tact by not mentioning the project again. Drayst liked the challenge of intelligence work, interrogations, and raids, but he would always cherish the two years of scholarly tranquility as Special Projects Chief which the Reichsfuehrer's restless, questing mind had made possible.

Eberhard Drayst was born in Munich on May 26, 1906. He had a mother and seven sisters who remained invisible throughout his life. His father was dean of men and assistant manager of the Kullers' Barber College, a commercial institution which graduated a new class each month at economical rates—or in two weeks with expert tutoring provided by Drayst's father or by the chancellor of the college, Dr. Kullers, at extra expense. Kullers was the businessman of the faculty; Drayst's father was more the artist. His father had been appointed Court Barber to Crown Prince Heinrich of Bavaria; the Prince had become little Eberhard's godfather, thus imbuing the lad with a snobbism which time was never to dull.

Because of the royal appointment, the Royal Coat of Arms was displayed at the street-level window of the college and was printed on its diplomas. The student body usually represented all regions of Germany, many Austrian barbering hopefuls, and even young men from as far away as Glasgow. The literature of the college showed that its graduates were working at their trade in Luxor, Egypt, and Erwinna, Pennsylvania, in the United States of America.

Young Drayst himself received a more formal education. He earned his
Abitur
in 1925, then attended the Universities of Frankfurt and Munich, winning his philosophical doctorate with a thesis entitled “On Pagan Roots in Modern Funeral Practices.” He had hopes of being invited into the business of his only bachelor uncle, who had the largest undertaking practise in eastern and southern Germany and who was known as The Scientist Embalmer. Many people had specified in their wills that they must be embalmed by Herr Dr. Drayst personally.

Drayst knew embalming. On his days off from school and the university his uncle permitted him first to watch the work, then to assist him at it. Drayst was attracted to the stillness and the sublime serenity of the profession, but his father was an ardent militarist who in 1873 had invented and popularized the military haircut known as
“der Buerstenhaarschnitt,”
and in 1906 had designed and disciplined the moustache of Erich von Ludendorff (which was said to have influenced the shape of the moustache of von Hindenburg himself). Drayst's father had been deeply influenced by the prestige with which that experience had endowed him, and he transferred this military ardor to his son.

Drayst's father was anti-Semitic because Dr. Kullers was Jewish; as Drayst's father saw it, Jewish money had made Kullers chancellor. As early as possible Drayst was enrolled in the Deutschvoelkische Jugendschar and the Jungfrontkampferverband so that he could understand the danger of the Jews. When he was old enough, the boy was enlisted in the Stalhlhelm, a hearty nationalist organization. His father also insisted that the lad become a physical-culture instructor; this strengthened him and served him well during the exacting hours of service on SS interrogation teams.

In 1924, when Drayst was eighteen years old, his father presented him with his own membership card in the Nazi party. In 1930, after he had received his doctorate, his father's connections were strong enough to place him in the navy. He was stationed at Kiel and assigned to work in the military intelligence organization, Abwehr, with the rank of ensign. Drayst was well-adapted to intelligence work, but he made the fundamental mistake of anonymously telephoning the wives of some of his superior officers and making lewd and obscene representations to them. Drayst was apprehended without delay and dishonorably discharged from the service, which ruined him for any chance of distinction in any of the other branches of the German military. It was a blessing that Drayst's father had been killed in a political riot for the boy could not have faced him. As it was, he even lacked the courage to confront his uncle and ask for his old embalming job.

Drayst drifted into part-time private detective work in Berlin, but on his last case he was beaten up so badly by a love-crazed client who was broken-hearted over the shocking—not to say needlessly lascivious—details on which Drayst had dwelt in a report on the man's wife's infidelities, that he had to leave Berlin in fear of his life. He almost died on the night train to Munich, where he was taken off the train unconscious and removed by ambulance to the hospital near the Central Station. One of the police officials who attended Drayst was an admirer of the Nationalsozialistiche Deutsche Arbeiterpartei; having looked into Drayst's background while he was still unconscious, the official recommended him to the Reichsfuehrer SS. Drayst's combination of a university degree, naval experience, Abwehr training, youth, strength, a dishonorable discharge and a police record impressed the Reichsfuehrer, and when the police official showed him Drayst's paid-up party card dated 1924, the Reichsfuehrer saw to it that the lad's hospital bills were overlooked and had the young man summoned as soon as he had recovered.

They had a talk which Drayst was never to forget. The Reichsfuehrer SS became his idol. Drayst was admitted into the SS on July 2, 1932, as a Hauptsturmfuehrer because of his naval record. He was permitted to buy his own boots and black trousers—a privilege of new members of the Corps—and settled into intelligence work. This included reading foreign newspapers in French and English and, three mornings a week, soliciting advertising with two armed, uniformed men, for
Voelkischer Beobachter
, the party newspaper. He also handled indoctrination sessions for new recruits and sought out desirable Corps candidates on the campuses of universities.

The day began with reveille at six o'clock, followed by an hour of physical training before a breakfast of mineral water and oatmeal. After breakfast came weapons training, but three times a week the recruits enjoyed the activity at which Drayst shone: indoctrination lectures. These were broadly based upon such fixed tenets as: “Providence has sent Germany the Fuehrer and it is almost amazing that he is never mistaken,” and “Jews are the cancer of society and must be removed with surgical ruthlessness.” Free discussions were held on the philosophy of racial selection from such textbooks as Dr. Rosenberg's
Myth of the Twentieth Century
and Walter Darré's
Blood and Soil
.

After dinner at midday, the recruits spent four hours drilling on the parade ground; this was followed by scrubbing, plank scouring, pipe claying, and polishing. Then, if the recruit could still stand, he was permitted to leave the barracks providing his well-flattened pockets contained only a modest supply of paper currency, his paybook, his handkerchief creased according to regulation, and one prophylactic. The recruit remained a novice until he had earned the right to take the SS oath.

Drayst composed his character very carefully during this period. He developed the rare gift of attentive listening. He would cross his legs respectfully, perhaps smoke a cigarette, and wear the same amiable expression throughout any conversation; he seemed always intensely interested but was never pushy about it. He was a man of carefully rehearsed emotional gestures. The perimeter of his long, wide face formed a shape like a heraldic shield; and with his thrusting, sharp-ridged nose hurtling out above his heavy bluish lips, his deep, all-wise eyes in sockets like twin anchor ports, he resembled a modern ocean liner seen dead on. His skin had the color of the interior of a Reblochon cheese, and his chin seemed as pointed as the tip of a spade on a playing card. His ears were not much larger than those of a guinea pig, but the bell-clapper lobes hung down on either side of his face like blank tavern signs in the wind. Beneath almost white-blond hair his eyes, more turquoise than blue, were comic eyes, excepting perhaps to a subject under interrogation, for he could flicker them from side to side with horrendous rapidity. He used this device professionally as an instrument of terror. Altogether, Drayst's face gave the impression of having been homemade, run up by an over-enthusiastic hobbyist.

Drayst had good French and fair English. When he spoke French with his odd accent and his high-pitched voice, it sounded like the record of a
chanteuse
being played at the wrong speed, but he had learned to speak it perfectly and with the same thoroughness he brought to everything he did. Drayst polished whatever corner he was inhabiting with such fierce energy and commanding determination that, combined with his face, his slender, supple height, and his chilling lack of expression, even his associates feared, resented, and admired him.

If Drayst had any professional flaw it was his choice of sexual expression, which was linked to adoration of power and which presented a tricky ethical problem for the SS. The pleasure Drayst took in uttering obscene phrases to a distant woman over a telephone had to do with his own power search but nothing to do with the SS. The Reichsfuehrer SS knew about his telephone aberration and dismissed it as a “trick of character.” Drayst's work with the interrogation teams always excited him; not that he ever allowed this ecstasy to get out of hand during interrogations beyond, perhaps, a tendency to overemphasize the
anschnauzen
technique. The larger proportion of those interrogated were Jews whose savings, business interests, and collateral property were the interest of the Party, and of course after 1933 there were more and more Jews to be interrogated. Working with women almost sent Drayst into hysterical blindness although, to his credit, he controlled this so well at work that no one ever knew the intensity of his feeling. It was afterward—afterward during the nights when he would lie alone in his room, remembering, sweating, and trying to breathe, he would have to get up, no matter what the hour of the night, put on civilian clothes and go out to find Jewish prostitutes. In Berlin he would move in the shadows of the Wedding district around the Stettiner Bahnhof, or in the Ackerstrasse, or sometimes, needing more variety, a hotel called the Danziger Hof, which was really a brothel.

At the beginning in Berlin, Drayst would find friends in the hotels around the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof, and in the so-called
Offizierspensionen
where call-girl syndicates operated. In Munich the number of registered prostitutes was much smaller than in Berlin, about four hundred as compared to six thousand, but the difference was reduced by the
Bueffetmamsells
, the waitresses in the third-class bars. These were a Bavarian institution rather than a German one, and until he was transferred to Berlin, taken off Special Projects, and required to conduct multiple interrogations day and night, the rewards and loving attentions of the girls in the Sendlinger Torplatz had been completely satisfying.

As time went on, Jewish prostitutes became more and more difficult to find, and it became necessary for Drayst to wait later and later in the night to find and overpower Jewish women night workers. He did this because he had to, despite the SS penalty of death by firing squad if he were caught, the supreme penalty provided by the Reichsfuehrer SS to prevent race defilement within the proud corps. Drayst was soon past caring about that. He
had
to do what he did, and as he entered the women in bordellos, in furnished rooms, in alleyways, or behind hoardings he would plead with them to love him. But after a while his lust took a more sophisticated form: he would beg them to forgive him and then—because he had to protect himself from being charged with such a heinous crime even if they could find it in their hearts to forgive him—he would have to strangle them anyway.

Eleven

Paul-Alain von Rhode-Kusserow was born on the twelfth of November, 1934, at 2:46
A
.
M
. in the Krankenhaus Westend in Charlottenburg-Berlin. He was not baptized, though the decision not to do so shocked his Calvinist aunts. His aunts thought the baby was the image of his father. His father thought he looked exactly like Paule. Paule was certain he strongly resembled her own father. His nursemaid, Clotilde Grellou, who had traveled from Paris for the event, agreed with Paule.

Paule was so happy to see Clotilde again that as soon as they were alone she wept in her arms, asking, “How is Paris? How is Paris?”

“Just the same, Madame,” Clotilde said. “Terrible weather when I left. Gray and cold.” She patted the top of Paule's head. “Please don't cry, Madame. You mustn't be so homesick.”

“You'll see, Clotilde,” Paule wept. “You'll see.”

“Everything is fine at the Cours Albert, Madame. Mme. Citron keeps everything fresh and clean with just one girl, and she does the cooking herself.”

“Have you heard from Miss Willmott?”

“She's gone to America, Madame. She always sends us cards on our saint's days.”

Clotilde had brought a letter from Maître Gitlin.

2 November, 1934

My dear Paule:

Can you tell me when you might return to Paris for ten days or so? As you may remember, your father had commissioned Rufin Portu to paint your portrait on the occasion of your 23rd birthday, now one year passed. Portu is anxious to start work. He has a frightfully busy schedule, and since he was paid in full at the rates which he commanded twelve years ago—a sum equal to approximately one percent of what he is paid today—he wants to paint you before his prices soar even higher and increase his anguish. Please advise me as soon as you can.

With all my love,

P. Gitlin

Paule answered at once.

15 November, 1934

Dear Maître:

Please relieve Rufin Portu of his obligation. I won't return to Paris for the reason that were I to leave Germany I don't think I could ever bring myself to return. Please do not let that convince you that I am miserable here. I have a wonderful marriage and a beautiful son, but mastering the customs and reactions of a foreign country are quite as difficult as you said they would be. The point is, I am adjusting—I am trying to learn to be German for Veelee and for Paul-Alain, and I will make it. Were I to disturb this progress by dropping myself into the middle of France—but it disturbs my progress even to write of that. Enough to say that you must not expect me, neither must Portu, for whom it would have been such a great honor to sit.