The German Suitcase

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THE

GERMAN

SUITCASE

A Novel

Greg Dinallo

Premier Digital Publishing - Los Angeles

eISBN-13:978-1-938582-42-4

eISBN-10:193858242X

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THE OATHS

“The physician must be able to tell the antecedents, know the present, and foretell the future - must mediate these things, and have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm.”

Hippocrates,
The Epidemics

“I swear to thee Adolph Hitler, as Führer and Chancellor of the German Reich, loyalty and bravery. I vow to thee, and to the superiors whom thou shalt appoint, obedience unto death. So help me God.”

Oath sworn by members of the SS

“I will neither treat any patient, nor carry out any research on any human being without the valid informed consent of the subject…While I continue to keep this Oath unviolated may it be granted to me to enjoy life and the practice of the art and science of medicine with the blessing of the Almighty and respected by my peers and society, but should I trespass and violate this Oath, may the reverse be my lot.”

Hippocrates, Oath sworn by physicians

DEDICATION

For my grandchildren, Robert, age 12 and Amelia age 10, whose inherent goodness, sense of adventure, love of laughter, and tolerance for their fellow man have—despite their tender years—made the world a better place; and for their parents Eric Dinallo and Priscilla Almodovar whose altruism, personal integrity and commitment to public service have taught by example; and, especially, for my wife Gloria whose strength of character, grace under pressure, intellectual curiosity, willingness to take chances, creative depth, and unconditional love have given me the most wonderful life for more than fifty years.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

For historical information, technical data, psychological analysis, and the testimony of those who survived, I am greatly indebted to the following authors and their scholarly works: Martin Gilbert,
The Second World War
; Heinz Hohne,
The Order of the Death’s Head
, The Story of Hitler’s SS; Dr. Robert Jay Lifton,
The Nazi Doctors
, Medical Killing and the Psychology of Genocide; and Michael Selzer
Deliverance Day
, The Last Hours at Dachau.

The anecdotes, observations and inner workings of the worlds of advertising, graphic design, photography, and fine art are from personal experience and a life-long immersion in the visual arts and creative expression.

PROLOGUE

Adolph Hitler’s elite SS guard operated out of a fortress of deeply stained limestone in the center of Munich next to Nazi Party Headquarters. The Order of the Death’s Head was ruled with ruthless precision by Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and struck terror in the hearts of everyone who had contact with its black-uniformed henchmen as well as those lucky enough to avoid it. Indeed, in the more than two decades that the SS was in existence, many more German citizens went into No. 50 Schellingstrasse than ever came out. The concentration camps—invented by Himmler and operated by his SS—exterminated millions of Jews and other imagined threats to the National Socialist’s obsession with racial purity, and incarcerated and/or killed many additional millions of political prisoners including Bolsheviks, Clergymen, Communists, Liberals and members of other groups, or individuals, judged to be an enemy of Hitler’s plan for world domination.

“He’s my Ignatius Loyola,” Hitler once said of his Reichsführer. “Yes, faith! Faith in his Führer! That’s what inspired him to transform the SS from a weak and ineffective organization into the one of bone-crushing power and iron-fisted discipline that we have now! And what was his stroke of genius? To infuse it with the principles of the Order of Jesuits! Who else but the Reichsführer would have thought of it? Can you imagine? An entire army of Nazi warriors who, just like Loyola’s dedicated priests, swear eternal loyalty and blind obedience to their God and their Pope!” The Führer didn’t feel the need to name the god and pope to whom he was referring. Indeed, his fervent approval of Himmler’s choice of role models wasn’t surprising; nor was their choice of staunchly Catholic Bavaria and its capitol city Munich—which means monk in German—as the springboard for their rise to power, since both men had been raised as devout Catholics.

Those were headier times. Now, more than six months after the Allied invasion of Normandy, Russian troops were advancing on Berlin from the East, and American and British forces were sweeping across France and Holland toward the Rhine from the West. However, one of the worst winters on record had slowed the ground offensive and kept the Allies from achieving their goal of ending the war by Christmas. The Führer, driven by ever-growing disillusionment and denial, had taken to his bunker clinging to the fantasy that his vaunted Schutz-Staffel would take advantage of the heavy snows and sub-freezing temperatures and, somehow miraculously, turn the tide of the war.

Under such extreme pressure, the control-obsessed Himmler had become all the more intent on keeping the troops in line. He had always mistrusted the German upper class and aristocracy from which the officer corps was traditionally drawn because their allegiance was, and always would be, to the military and the nation, not the Nazi party. The fact that, more than once, and as recently as last July, groups of officers born to privilege had attempted to assassinate the Führer, intensified Himmler’s paranoia. In a desperate effort to tighten his grip—to insure the unquestioned and immediate execution of any order he issued—the Reichsführer had begun replacing Army officers with Party functionaries and political zealots, who had little military training, but would ruthlessly and brutally enforce National Socialist doctrine.

CHAPTER ONE

New York City, Monday, June 1, 2009

“Hey boss, it’s me! — Yeah, yeah I got it! A stroke of genius,” Stacey Dutton exclaimed into her cellphone, her spiky blond hair bristling with excitement. She had the Blackberry in her left hand, and the handle of an old suitcase that she had just found on the street clutched in her right. “Yeah, I wracked my brain all weekend and came up with nada. This morning, I’m leaving my building and damn near tripped over it. — Yeah, go figure — Nope. Nope, you’re gonna have to wait til I get there. Ciao.”

Stacey spotted the battered suitcase amidst the rolling hillside of trash bags, discarded furniture, household items, and miscellaneous building materials awaiting pick-up outside the West 79th Street service entrance of The Apthorp. Built by John Jacob Astor, the elegant pre-war apartment building had a barrel-arched entrance flanked by ornate iron gates that opened onto a courtyard with two marble fountains and limestone benches shaded by perfectly scaled trees…much like the Florentine palace after which it was modeled. Home to an eclectic group of the Upper West Side’s wealthy elite, it had long been a source of high quality junk. Now, the once rent-controlled dowager was being turned into luxury condominiums; and the mass turnover of units and the emptying of storage rooms of belongings abandoned by long-departed tenants, had turned it into the mother lode. Far from unique to The Apthorp, this citywide scavenger hunt had been fueled by the real estate boom; and the stories of Manhattanites who had renovated and/or furnished entire apartments with what they’d found on the street were legendary.

Stacey Dutton was one of them. But this morning’s find had nothing to do with her one bedroom, one bath with a view of The Apthorp’s service entrance. As a copywriter for Gunther Global, a full service advertising agency, Stacey had been tapped to come up with a campaign idea for a client who was threatening to pull his account; and it was her quirky personality and nanosecond-fast cortex that had caused her boss to pull her off other assignments and have her work on this one, exclusively. Indeed, Stacey had one of those minds; the kind that when asked by a teacher to provide a synonym for friend, enabled her, without missing a beat, to reply: Tumor. And when the baffled fellow asked, Why? to answer: Because they both grow on you.

The hefty suitcase pre-dated roll-aboards, and lugging it around the city was a formidable task for its petite savior. So, instead of taking the subway, Stacey hailed a taxi. The driver swerved across two lanes cutting off a competitor and a city bus that almost rear-ended him. Stacey slithered between the bumpers and tossed the suitcase into the trunk. When she climbed into the back seat, the news crawl on the built-in TV screen read:
OBAMA TO VISIT CAIRO. HOPES FOR MID-EAST PEACE RISE
. The Pakistani cabbie stopped talking on his cellphone long enough to ask, “JFK? LaGuardia? Newark? Where you go?”

“No, no, Fifty-first and Park,” Stacey replied.

“But you have suitcase!” the driver erupted. “Suitcase! With suitcase you go to airport! Forty-five dollars fare!” He capitulated with an angry groan and went careening down Broadway.

There were days Stacey wondered what she was doing in the advertising business. She’d long-ago given up trying to explain it to her family, all God-fearing, football-crazed Texans who drove pick-up trucks with gun racks and Sarah-cuda bumper stickers. It wasn’t exactly where the editor of
Westerner World
, the Lubbock High newspaper, who had submitted short stories to The New Yorker as a teenager, and majored in creative writing and journalism at Columbia planned to end up. But Stacey was earning a living; and saddled with hefty student loans, she really needed to earn a living. Then again, Mad Men was the hottest show on TV, and she was Gunther Global’s reincarnation of Peggy Olson, and then some…if fifty years after the fact.

Her quirky mind was fully engaged, accelerating like her boss’ anthracite-black Porsche down the Long Island Expressway; and she knew from experience that once the creative fire started burning it wouldn’t go out. She could already envision the print ads, the TV spots, and the internet pop-ups, along with the lines of snappy copy, and the lyrics for jingles. Indeed, she could see the entire ad campaign laid out in front of her. It was as if all the pieces of a puzzle had suddenly leapt out of the box onto the table and locked into place forming a complete picture; and as the cab snaked its way through rush hour traffic, Stacey’s thumbs were dancing across the keys of her Blackberry, recording the ideas that kept coming.

CHAPTER TWO

Munich, Germany, Monday, January 8, 1945

Like all Nazi installations, the facade of SS Headquarters on Schellingstrasse was brashly identified by enormous flags. The white-circled swastikas, set against bright orange fields, shimmered ominously in the icy winter light. The massive steel door beneath them swung open, and a young captain strode through it into the snowy street at a hurried pace. Square-shouldered and trim, he had a strong profile and the military bearing prized by the leaders of the Third Reich. The distinctive all-black uniform of the SS—belted jacket, jodhpurs, jackboots, swastika armband, and cap with silver skull-and-crossbones perched above the peak—gave him an air of frightening authority. Though he had the panther-like stride of a Himmler acolyte, a closer look would reveal the serpent crest of the caduceus on his collar insignia, and the precise surgeon’s hands that, protected from the cold by black leather gloves, were clenched into fists, one of which held a cigarette. The University District was at the opposite end of Schellingstrasse. Less than a fifteen minute walk from SS Headquarters. He wanted to run but didn’t dare. He couldn’t even chance being seen at the Medical School, now. Not after what had just happened. Not after the harrowing night he’d spent being interrogated by an SS major named Steig.

The streets were busy with pedestrians bundled against the cold, trailing streams of gray breath behind them. Edgy, exhausted, eyes sunken from fear and lack of sleep, Dr. Maximilian Kleist, Captain, Waffen-SS, moved swiftly between them, his woolen greatcoat, left unbuttoned in haste, flowing behind him. The workers and students who were trudging through the snow-blanketed city to offices, factories and schools that had survived the relentless Allied air strikes, gave him wide berth as he came toward them, his jackboots clacking on the frozen pavement.

Yesterday, the industrial districts of Neuhausen and Schwabing had been heavily bombed; and the winter air was thick with the pungent smell of explosives, centuries old dust, and death. Rescue crews, hampered by the weather were still finding survivors in the collapsed buildings. The smoldering rubble was dotted with bits of brightly colored Christmas wrapping and the sparkle of shattered glass ornaments. The most seriously injured were taken either to the General Hospital in the Medical District southwest of the city, or to the Medical School and affiliated hospital in the nearby University District. At the latter, every member of the staff—doctors, nurses, professors and medical students—had been working round the clock treating casualties. Despite the chaos, things were gradually returning to what, during the war, had come to be considered normal, and classes had resumed.

Captain Kleist had almost reached the corner of Lentnerstrasse where he knew there was a public telephone. It was one of the few in the area that still worked and he had used it often, but never in such extreme circumstances. He was inhaling deeply on his cigarette when the roar of an engine rose behind him. He glanced back at SS Headquarters to see a staff car pulling out of the driveway. It came down the street toward him, SS flags fluttering above its headlights. He recognized the officer in the command seat next to the driver and shuddered. He knew all too well who he was; knew where he was going; knew what he would do!

Kleist turned the corner, dashed down the street and slipped inside the tiny phone booth. He set his cigarette amid the burn marks on the edge of the wooden shelf, pulled off a glove, and took a few coins from a pocket, setting them next to the cigarette. His hands were shaking as he lifted the mouthpiece and thumbed one of the coins into the slot. An electric hum. No dial tone. The line was dead. The young Captain jiggled the hook several times to no avail, then grimaced and left the earpiece dangling. He took his cigarette and hurried off, not wasting the time it would take to collect the coins.

Debris from a bombed-out building forced him to cross the street. As he reached the corner of Hiltenberg, a narrow road that ran north from Josephsplatz, he caught sight of a barman through the window of a small cafe. The crooked neon sign flickered Cafe Viktoria. What was he holding up to his mouth? A coffee mug? A beer stein? A telephone handset? Was he talking on a telephone?! Yes! Yes, despite the Christmas decorations in the window, and the reflections and condensation on the glass which obscured much of the interior, Captain Kleist was reasonably certain it was a telephone. He flicked his cigarette into the gutter and pushed through the door.

The cafe was nearly empty. A Christmas garland hung in loops above the bar. The air smelled of stale beer, cigarettes and wet wool. A layer of smoke drifted between the tables where a few customers sat hunched over glasses of schnapps and—due to the unavailability of coffee which could no longer be imported—steaming mugs of a bitter tasting substitute brewed from roasted barley seeds and acorns.

Captain Kleist strode between them with as much intimidating authority as he could muster. The barman stiffened at the sight of an onrushing SS officer and ended his call. “The phone,” Captain Kleist said, sharply. “SS emergency.”

The anxious fellow nodded and nervously wiped the mouthpiece with a bar rag. His eyes were locked on the Death’s Head insignia on the young captain’s cap, not the caduceus in his lapel. “Bitte…” He smiled faintly and pushed the phone across the scratched varnish with a subservient gesture.

Captain Kleist wanted the privacy of a telephone booth, but he had run out of time. Three of his closest friends and colleagues were in extreme danger, and he had no choice but to risk being overheard. He turned his back to the barman and those at the tables and began dialing a number with a University District prefix. He spun the rotary dial as fast as he could; but after each digit it circled back at a painfully slow pace that intensified his anxiety.