Pilgrim Soul (17 page)

‘There were
no
plans.’

‘Or you would have heard?’

‘Certainly.’

‘You had access to gold. Jewish gold. Why didn’t you use it?’

He dropped his stare. He peered at the table. ‘I want a cigarette.’

I pushed my pack across to him and lit the cigarette he pulled out. ‘Keep it.’ I pointed at the pack. He grabbed it. I let him take in deep lungfuls. He smiled.

‘Why are you smiling?’

‘Himmler said these were bad for us.’

‘Himmler was wrong about a lot of things. But at least he had the courage to kill himself. Why didn’t you?’

A flush appeared on Schwarzhuber’s sallow face. ‘I have been prevented. Give me your gun and leave me for twenty seconds. You will see how an officer dies!’

‘I don’t waste bullets. So, let me understand. You were not important enough to be given a cyanide pill like Himmler. You weren’t important enough to be told about the escape routes. You’re small fry. Cannon fodder. While you swing on a rope your old comrades will be swinging in a hammock in Argentina.’

‘This is not true!’

‘Which bit?’

He sat back, his eyes darting about the room. He grabbed another cigarette and lit up. I waited.

‘What’s in this for me?’ he asked.

‘If you give me useful information, will it save you from the gallows? I doubt it. But I could ask the hangman to set the rope right. Not short like the Americans prefer it. I heard one of your Nuremberg gang took twenty minutes to strangle to death. Better the long drop. Knot under here’ – I pointed at the side of my neck – ‘so that as you fall, you’ll just hear a click and that’s it. You’ll join your Führer in hell.’

His face went into spasm. I thought he was going to have a fit. I went for the kill.

‘Of course I could only arrange that while you’re in the British sector. The Polish Free Army want you for their trials. They seem quite bitter about what you did to their country.’

He sat, panting, thinking. Something seemed to break in his face. Finally he shrugged.

‘What does it matter?’

I waited.

‘The commandant . . .’ he started again.

‘Suhren?’

‘Suhren told me to get to Zurich. Or Rome.’ He snorted. ‘Right across Germany. Through the Russian lines. Or the Americans. It was out of the question. And . . .’

‘And?’

‘We did not believe it would happen. We did not hear about the Russian advance. They told us the Eastern Front was holding. Another lie. Ach, you know, Colonel Brodie, belief becomes a habit. Like these.’ He held up his cigarette. ‘Until it’s too late.’

‘Did he mention a northern escape line?’

‘Yes. From the coast. It made sense. South were the Americans and the Russians. But he didn’t talk much about it.’

‘Keeping it for himself? Did he give directions?’

He smiled. ‘No. I didn’t press him. It seemed disloyal to even be talking about it.’ At last some regret.

‘Pity for you. Loyalty seems to have been one way only.’

Afterwards I felt dirty and drained. As though I’d been sick and then had to clean up my own mess. Bargaining with a man over whether he dies slow or quick on the end of a rope. I got nothing more out of him. But it was a start. The Scottish rat line began to take on deadly substance.

I pulled myself together for the court session in the afternoon back at the Curiohaus. It was jammed with sour-smelling humanity. Sam told me the public galleries held 150 or so. It seemed every seat was taken. The good burghers of Hamburg were here to see what they claimed not to have known about for so many years. I took a seat to one side of the upper gallery with a clear view of the whole court. The local Germans gave my uniform a wide berth.

I looked down. On one side were the jammed ranks of prisoners, mainly women, each with a huge number attached to her breast. Flanking them were British WRAC guards. Our poor girls’ faces showed how much they were hating their proximity to such evil. In front of the prisoners sat a line of defence lawyers. Facing them, across the short floor of the court, were the wigged and gowned prosecutors, including Advocate Samantha Campbell. She sat beside Scrymgeour, files at the ready, earning her modest fees.

Forming the linking bar of the horseshoe between defendants and prosecutors was the bench of court members. They faced the tall windows of the Curiohaus. General Westropp, the court president, sat in the middle of a line of uniformed British officers and one wigged lawyer. It gave the sense of a tightly packed kirk with the dock serving as a pulpit for grudging penitents.

But for Sam’s presence, it was as though time had reversed. The layout and the attendees were different, but it might have been Lüneburg and the Belsen trials of over a year ago. General Westropp rapped his gavel for silence and the first defendant was brought to the witness box: Warden Greta Bösel. She was perhaps late thirties, dark hair swept up and back under a hat. Just another hausfrau on a shopping trip, apart from the big number 7 on her breast. They gave her headphones for the simultaneous translation of questions.

Sam stepped forward and I felt a surge of pride as she quietly and efficiently exposed the woman as an uneducated sadist given the power of life and death over her betters. Power used to crush women who’d lived in nice homes, who could play piano, read Schiller and Goethe, and discuss Nietzsche without seeing it as a licence to slaughter the
Untermensch
.

Sam called a witness: a frail bird of a woman who had to be helped into the witness box. Her hair was grey. She looked about sixty.

‘What is your name, please?’

‘Ruth Silverstein.’ Her voice was cracked and slow.

‘What is your age?’

‘I am twenty-nine.’

‘You were a prisoner in Ravensbrück concentration camp?’

‘I was taken there in May 1944 with my daughter.’

‘What was your daughter’s name?’

‘Rachel. She was called Rachel.’ A memory lightened her face.

Sam’s voice softened. ‘How old was Rachel?’

‘Just two. Her birthday was in March that year.’ She smiled. ‘We had balloons.’

The court was still. Not breathing.

‘Do you recognise the woman in the dock?’

Ruth looked up and stared at number 7. She nodded.

‘Do you know her name?’

‘Oh, yes. I know
her
name. She is Greta Bösel.’

‘Why are you so sure?’

Ruth Silverstein said it quietly, so quietly that the whole gallery leaned forward to hear. Sam asked her to repeat it.

‘Because she killed my daughter, Rachel.’

Sam let the words hang in the air until they’d been absorbed by every ear in the court.

‘Ruth? Do you mind if I ask you how the defendant killed Rachel?’

Ruth turned to stare at Bösel. She inspected her, scrutinised her. Her voice grew firmer. ‘We got off the train. We were all tired and thirsty. The children were fractious, crying.
They
were waiting for us.
She
was. With dogs. The wardens took the children from us. They said they would be given food, water.’

‘Did they?’

Ruth shook her head. ‘There was a lorry with its back open. Steel sides. The guards took the children over to it. When they were all there, the wardens started to kill them. Some used iron bars. Some picked up the kids by their legs and swung them against the side of the truck. They smashed them. Then they threw them on the truck.’

The silence was wrecked now. There were gasps and stifled cries of
Nein
from the German spectators. Ruth waited for quiet. She lifted her finger and pointed at Bösel, whose head was down now. She spoke slowly, making every word draw blood from the defendant and the spectators.

‘Greta Bösel took Rachel. Hers was the last hand Rachel held. I saw Rachel ask her something. Bösel smiled down at her. Like a kind lady. Bösel was laughing as she swung my little girl against the truck.’

Later, Sam and I were crunching along the bitter shore of the lake, arm in arm. Our coats were tightly buttoned against the freezing mist that hung over the dead water.

‘You were brilliant, Sam.’

‘No. I always do my homework. The rest is easy. The evidence speaks for itself.’

‘It’s the way you deliver it.’

‘Is it ridiculous to say I almost felt sorry for her?’ she said.

‘Bösel? As long as it’s only
almost
.’

‘
You
hate them. I can see why.’

‘Hate? I’m not sure that’s the emotion. Hate’s something you feel for another person. The Nazis are a stunted branch line of human development. Like Wells’s Morlocks. You don’t hate cold-blooded reptiles.’

‘Was that how you saw Schwarzhuber?’

‘He’s had almost two years to contemplate his crimes. Two years wasted. Not a hint of contrition. We should have lined the buggers up and shot them while we had the chance. Said he’d been given orders and carried them out. That’s what a soldier did. Surely
I
understood that. A
fellow
soldier!’

‘Why does that upset you so much?’

I took a deep cold breath. ‘Damn it, because he had a point. The last thing I needed going into battle was some squaddie saying
I don’t fancy this fight, sir. I think I’ll stand this one out
.’

‘This wasn’t a battle.’

‘No. But who in uniform gets to choose? When? Look at the last war, at the Somme or Passchendaele.
On my whistle, go and commit suicide, there’s a good lad. Or face a firing squad for cowardice
.’

Sam squeezed my arm. ‘Nothing useful then?’

I calmed down. ‘I filled in a couple of gaps on the hierarchy. Schwarzhuber knew who’d got away all right.’

‘Did he say
where
they might have gone?’

‘He’d heard of the escape lines to Rome and Zurich, and on to Spain. Franco’s regime was very welcoming and if he’d had the chance he’d have gone to Barcelona. Or Argentina. He fancied Argentina. Likes horses. Says General Perón is one of
them
.’

‘Fascists?’

‘The world is split in three: fascists, communists and us.’

‘Us being the sane ones? Soft old Western capitalists?’

‘Not so soft. We won, didn’t we?’

‘Did we, Sam? Did we?’

We walked together for a while, silent with our thoughts.

‘Are you all right, Douglas? Is this too much?’

‘It needs doing. Come on. I think we’ve earned that first drink.’

We had and we did and it wasn’t the last. And I shouldn’t have asked for a bottle for my room. But it got me to sleep. Eventually. I dreamed of broken dolls.

TWENTY-SIX

We’d planned an early start. I set my alarm for the morning. It came with a jolt, and I struggled to free myself from the knotted sheets and the bloody images. The mattress was soaked with my sweat. I shaved, showered and forced some toast down to quell the nausea.

This morning I faced Ludwig Ramdohr, Gestapo. I wasn’t afraid of him. I was afraid of how I’d react. With my temper running so hot I wondered about leaving my service pistol with the guard.

I forced myself to think about how useful this session could be. Ramdohr would have had a unique view of all the personnel running the camp, including the doctors. He had access to all their personal records. He had also been a detective before the war. It didn’t mean we were going to be matey and clubby, two old professionals comparing notes on how detectives operated differently in Gallowgate and Ravensbrück. But it was a convenient entry point. We were – according to his file – of a similar age.

Lieutenant Collins and I went through the usual security rigmarole and took our seats in the interview cell. Ramdohr was brought in, hair thinner than I recalled, but the square face familiar enough. I deliberately spent time reading his file. It unsettles a man trying to read damning notes about himself upside down.

It reminded me that our Ludwig showed an aptitude for heavy-handed interrogation that would have won him plaudits from the more thuggish members of the Glasgow police. But even the polis would have stopped short at drowning prisoners to screw confessions out of them. Most of them anyway.

I looked up at him. Ramdohr seemed uncrushed physically by his time behind bars. He’d recognised me immediately but made no mention of my new outfit and rank.

I started gently, mindful of my blood pressure. We went through his Political Department and I fleshed it out with names and ranks. Then I put my pencil down and sat back.

‘Was there anyone you trusted? Among your comrades?’

‘It wasn’t my job to trust people. That was the first lesson I learned. Didn’t you?’

‘I think we went to different schools. In particular, what did you think of Suhren, the commandant?’

He shrugged. ‘Loyal enough. That was my job. I had to test for it.’

‘How? I see you were inventive.’ I tapped his file. ‘Liked playing with water.’

He smiled, perhaps in fond memory. ‘People don’t like drowning. Or thinking they are. They prefer to breathe and talk.’

I decided to try one of the names I got from Schwarzhuber.

‘Exactly how loyal was Dr Walter Sonntag?’

‘The nerve man?’

‘The nerve man. His file says he removed nerves, bones, muscles. To see what happened. Tried to give them to other prisoners. Transplants, he called them. “Like grafting a rose” was the phrase he used.’

Ramdohr smiled. ‘Obsessed. He’d do anything for the Führer.’

‘He got away.’

‘I thought so.’

‘One of the lucky ones?’

‘Just smarter than the rest. Smarter than me. He got out before the Reds arrived. Spirited away.’

‘The rat lines.’

‘
Ja
. Down a sewer.’

‘Did you know where the entrance to this sewer was?’

He shook his head. ‘Above my pay grade.’

‘Did you know where it came out?’

‘South America. New York. London. Somewhere nice. You’ll never find them.’

‘So we’ll hang you instead.’

That got through. His lips became lines. ‘Is there an alternative?’

‘I’m not the judge. But I can talk to him.’

‘You’re lying.’

‘Even if I am, what have you to lose? Tell me about the gold.’