Europe Central (83 page)

Absolutely, Herr Commandant, and once again I assure you that it’s not my—

Do you know what I find very strange? Most of our Zyklon comes from Dr. Mryugowsky’s hygiene service. And his gas never seems to spoil. Who’s your supplier?

A Dr. Peters, at the Degesch Company. Herr Commandant, I want you to know that I have already been following up this matter with him. Apparently the most microscopic impurities in the tin cannisters may cause—

All right, all right, sighed Commandant Höss. We don’t want any impurities . . .

Sorry about the inconvenience, Herr Commandant.

Don’t worry, Höss said calmly. Had you inconvenienced me, I should certainly have filed a report. As it is, Gerstein, the quantity you’re able to supply is so negligible in comparison to Dr. Mryugowsky’s that these interruptions don’t impede our operations here. Will you be staying for lunch?

With pleasure, Herr Commandant. I—

That’s enough now. Don’t worry. Nobody’s going to file any report at this stage. I’ll expect you at 1315 sharp. Heil Hitler!

Heil Hitler!

What a goodlooking boy! Höss was thinking to himself as he continued on to the crematorium.

29

Now he no longer dared to destroy the prussic acid. Therefore he became an accomplice, history said.

Suffering from diabetes, he frequently blacked out. His
-brothers also lost heart; they got drunk more often than ever, saying to one another: If only I’d known how everything was going to turn out . . .—In his dreams he saw Berthe’s skull, which wept, the tears drying, leaving a whitish crust on the verdigrised bell-dome of her skeleton-church. Just as trenches grow shallower as they approach the front line, so his own defenses against what he had seen, and the secret life he led, sheltered him less and less. Another way of saying it is that culture gets cruder, life less valuable, as we go East: Prague’s baroque decorations, for instance, are heavier and squatter than the fluid marble nudes of Vienna. By the time we get to Leningrad, there’s nothing at all, only a smoking mass grave bereft of any adornment but snow and rubble—pure proof of Slavic subhumanity. On Kaprova-Josefov Street in Prague, not far from “Clever Hans” Günther’s office, a tall, skinny, mummylike bas-relief flexed its skinny arms upon a corner wall; adorned with chains and fishes, it was a harmless Christian symbol, but to Gerstein it was a dead Jew hanging there and haunting him. (Don’t be a coward! Captain Wirth would have said.) In Berlin, thank God, no bookstores assaulted him with the word
SLAVISTIKA;
but other items frightened him unpredictably. His depositions against the Hitler regime were now as white, regular and endless as a German cemetery in December at Stalingrad. If the Gestapo found those, he’d be lucky if they did nothing worse than shoot him and his family . . . In his office the telephone rang and said:
. . . A block raid, to catch suspects
. . .

He sought out Monsignor Orsenigo again, to try to reach the Pope, but once more got turned away. In anguish he cried out to his wife: What action against Nazism can anyone demand of an ordinary citizen when the representative of Jesus on earth refuses to hear me?

Listen to me, Kurt! Please, please listen! Nobody demands of you what you’re doing!

Our Lord Jesus Christ would have done this much and more, he said to her.

Elfriede wrung her hands, but in fact she’d become very bitter against him. Every other
-wife she knew lived well, but Kurt never brought anything home, not even Bohemian honey anymore, no matter how hungry the children became. He was an egotist, she told everybody; he didn’t care about anybody but himself. And those Yids he went on and on about, they made her ill. Didn’t he remember that our people were suffering, too? In fact, our Führer had said . . . She longed to command her husband, as her father-in-law could:
And now we’ll never talk about it again.

The truth was that Kurt had never been normal. Even before the war he’d been so highstrung; she wondered what could have possessed her to marry him.

Frau Hedwig’s twins, considering him odd, had returned to their mother, for which he blamed himself. Edmund grew up to be more reserved than Erich, who in later life was known to say: My brother and I both saw it coming. (Summer is always pregnant with winter, of course, and when September arrives, Berlin is positively gravid, her heavy white clouds about to burst with rain, her yellow leaves ready to descend like paratroopers from the maternal stem.) The blond man became a patient at various
hospitals, muttering like so many other shellshocked men: What does God think of me?—In those places there was nothing to read but
Signal
magazine:
“I’ll have the second from the right,” says Hilde as she admires the new handbag which has just been placed in the repaired shop window. “I don’t care how many bombs they drop,” says old Mayer. “Germany will keep right on working!”

30

He entered a church’s open door and heard:
We admonish our German folk to stand by the doctrine of blood and soil.
Then he went out to the beerhall with
man Müller, “the crematorium clown.” It was Müller who first told him about the malaria experiments of Dr. Klaus Schilling at Dachau.—Commendable, said Gerstein gravely, realizing that now he would have to add an entirely new section to his war crimes affidavit.

Commendable nothing! cried Müller, who now was very drunk. I’ve got a comrade in the S.D. You know what he likes to do, just for laughs?

What?

Make the Jews kneel down and beg for their lives, and then—

And then?

Don’t be stupid. You know the rest. But first he . . .

And Müller whispered something really obscene into Gerstein’s ear. And the blond man laughed. He
laughed
! He had to.

31

Baron von Otter had been transferred to Bucharest, they told him, but he managed one last secret interview with Consul Hochstrasser, telling him: I’ve checked this information personally. The code name for Hitler’s special train has been changed from “Amerika” to “Brandenburg.” He rarely takes one of his cars anymore, but if he does, it’s worth knowing that he’s had the bulletproof tires removed for the sake of his queasy stomach. The thickness of the rear steel plate is eight millimeters . . .

Herr Obersturmführer, this is outright provocation. Do you realize what would happen to my country if Berlin had any suspicion of—

I’m telling you, even as we speak, people are being stripped naked and forced into gas chambers all over Central Europe! You can hear them screaming . . .

I do believe that you have, said the Consul as graciously as he could.

And I am grateful for your belief, said Gerstein a little stiffly. Now shall I go on? The side-plates are only four millimeters thick; therefore—

Herr Obersturmführer, your own security, and that of your family, is your business. I myself—

If Hitler should lose, he’ll slam the door behind him with such force that the earth will shake. Can’t you imagine what he’s preparing for all of us?

As I said, I myself refuse to be compromised, replied the Consul with a stony thick-lipped smile not unlike the one eternally carved on Bacchus’s face; I’ve seen him grinning and glaring at me above an archway of the Palais im Grossen Garten in Dresden. You had warning. I intend to give orders that you never again be admitted to this office.

His inspection tours of the shrinking Eastern territories, if they continued at all, went entirely unwitnessed; however, I do have at hand fairly reliable evidence of his having visited the camps at Oranienburg (where they clapped his shoulder and said: Gerstein, what you see here makes you either brutal or sentimental!) and Ravensbrück, the latter being particularly upsetting to him since its inmates were females. The
-women there (so I’m told) were quite struck by tall, handsome Kurt Gerstein. One in particular, a bisexual opera singer who had a different Frenchwoman served up to her every week, a crime for which she later become a prisoner herself, had a scheme involving the disinfection of the
laundry, which would have brought the blond man to Ravensbrück quite often; pretending to be interested in her, Gerstein was able to hear from her own lips about the secret “Night and Fog” Gestapo stamp in certain prisoners’ dossiers; he also learned from her that since the Hungarian Jewesses weren’t dying rapidly enough, other measures were in preparation. Ravensbrück was a pretty soft camp, with only one crematorium, and Gerstein fairly quickly realized that he had seen far more than
-Aufseherin Luise. I think it unlikely that she told him about the young Polish girls whose legs were slit open and injected with gangrene, to simulate war wounds.—They all whine and pretend to be specialists! giggled Luise, pinching his arm. But enough about them! Would you like me to sing the “Liebestod” from “Tristan”? It’s said I can move a man to tears. Are you ready? Kurt, I said are you ready?