Ostland, p.33
Ostland, page 33
Those words were read aloud in the mess to hoots of derisive laughter. How could Himmler of all people talk about being hard? And decent fellows: was that what we were? The officers of the KdS were slumped and sprawled around our dining-table with our jackets thrown across the backs of chairs, or simply fallen on the floor; our collars open and our braces off our shoulders, just hanging down beside our trousers. Empty bottles rolled around the table and the air was rank with the stench of spilled alcohol, our sweaty, unwashed bodies and the cigarette ends pressed into ashtrays or stamped beneath our heels. Several women had joined us at our table. They’d come here to Minsk as nice German girls, hoping to do their bit for the Fatherland and perhaps find a husband at the same time. Now they were drunken sluts in stolen clothes with dead women’s lipstick smeared across their mouths, who sat on our laps with their breasts exposed, happy to let men stick their hands, or worse, up their skirts.
To one side a vodka-sweating sot, who not so long ago was a decent well-mannered gentleman, grabbed a Russian waitress and dragged her towards him without the slightest momentary concern for her dignity. Another man had his tongue in a Jewess’s mouth. The Jewess was Liselotte Lang, a sweet, innocent little girl who’d become a hard, calculating bitch in the year that she’d been here, selling her body for food and warm clothing. None of us thought worse of her for that. It was the only way to survive.
Someone picked up the transcript and read what Himmler had said about the treasure we had taken from the Jews. ‘This wealth has been handed over to the Reich without reserve. We have taken none of it for ourselves.’
There was more laughter at this, and it grew stronger as another officer grabbed the text from the first one’s hand and took up the recital: ‘Whoever takes so much as a mark is a dead man. A number of SS men – there are not many of them – have fallen short and they will die without mercy.’
Suddenly the SS officers of Minsk, the supposed flower of Aryan manhood, were pointing fingers at one another, like schoolboys in a playground, shouting ‘Bang!’ and pretending to fall over dead. But Himmler had more rhetorical jewels in store for us: ‘We had the moral right, we had the duty to our people to destroy this race which wanted to destroy us. But we have not the right to enrich ourselves with so much as a fur, a watch, a mark, or a cigarette, or anything else.’
Oh didn’t we? Why was there a bag of gold wedding rings, teeth and fillings under the bed in my room? Why did every other man at this table have his own bag too, and a good thick wad of banknotes? How else was Lisl so smartly dressed and so prettily painted?
We’d become the twentieth-century citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah, and even if Himmler didn’t know it, plenty of other people did. Official complaints were filed and a team from the Reich Security Main Office was sent to Minsk to investigate them. We managed to get a day’s notice of their arrival, so the men desperately tried to sober up and kicked their mistresses out of their quarters. The women put their panties back on and came to work without any paint on their faces. We all behaved like good, clean, obedient SS officers and personnel. And then as soon as the inspection team had gone, the saturnalia commenced all over again.
I continued to have some contact with the Langs. Hannah was still Schinkel’s mistress. She told me that she had to keep all the jewels and clothes he had supposedly given her at his apartment. ‘As soon as he has done with me, he’ll simply pass them on to the next one.’
‘So what has he actually given you, after all this time?’
‘Ten kilos,’ she said.
Well, better that weight in body fat than gold, and better the sweaty heat of Schinkel’s bed than the icy chill of the grave. For all our complicated, bitter history, Hannah and I had come to some sort of unspoken accommodation. At least I had kept my word and done no harm to her or her siblings. I liked to think that she respected me a little bit for that, at least. Her most useful function now as an intelligence asset was to keep me apprised of all the orders placed by the local Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe units for various forms of fuel and lubricant oils and Schinkel’s success – or increasingly the lack of it – in supplying them. It was remarkable how much one could learn about military operations from data about supplies. In this case it was all too apparent that we were in very serious trouble, a fact that Hannah was bright enough to work out for herself as well. Under other circumstances she would have made a first-rate intelligence officer, for she was far more perceptive than most of the men under my command.
Come the spring of 1944, we mounted a series of operations against the partisans, fighting them all across White Russia throughout April and May. Our troops burned villages and slaughtered their inhabitants. The partisans sprang ambushes and either killed every German they found, or captured and tortured them in ways so bestial that even experienced Gestapo men such as myself were shocked. Meanwhile the Soviets came closer and closer to Minsk, advancing inexorably with every hour that passed.
By the last week of June, the Red Army was just a few kilometres away. The heat was stifling and the incessant air raids and partisan bombings filled the air with acrid smoke and rasping dust that left one red-eyed and choking. Minsk was being pulverized into dereliction. The entire city would soon be a barren wilderness, dotted with ruined buildings and pitted with the craters left by bombs and artillery shells. The roads were jammed with traffic: tanks and troops moving up to the front; trucks packed with wounded coming the other way; refugees fleeing the Russian advance.
Amidst the noise, the chaos and the overwhelming atmosphere of panic, the administration of the city had totally broken down. There were no police, not even secret ones. The only thing on the mind of any German was finding a way out of this hellhole. In the past few weeks we’d been evacuating the wives and children of German officials, followed by female workers. Plenty of men had found a way to barge into the queue ahead of the womenfolk: Schinkel, for example, scurried off without so much as a farewell to Hannah Lang – taking her jewels and clothes, of course. But there were still thousands of people desperate to get back to the Fatherland, and one by one the means of departure diminished until there was only one final train sitting at Minsk station. It had room for at most five hundred people, just a fraction of those who wished to get aboard.
The station was a seething mass of fear-stricken humanity. Between these frantic hordes and the safety of the passenger carriages stood a platoon of Waffen-SS soldiers. Their orders were very simple. The only people allowed to board were those with official travel passes, issued for this specific train. Anyone without a pass who attempted to stow away was to be shot. The soldiers felt very strongly about ensuring that the train got away safely with the correct number of people aboard, because they would be travelling on it too, as an armed guard. So they were fighting for their own escape as well.
I, however, could not be on that train. My work would not be done for two or three more days yet. My orders were to stay to the very end, destroy as much evidence as I could, and kill the tiny number of Jews, mostly workers for the KdS, who had somehow managed to stay alive until now. I’d therefore made my own travel arrangements. That just left the Langs to be dealt with.
51
First thing in the morning on 28 June I picked up my briefcase, walked through the empty, paper-strewn halls and corridors of the Lenin House and went down to the cellar where the Langs had been living all this time. The three of them had not yet got up, but as soon as he heard my tap of my boot-heels on the concrete, Gottfried Lang sprang to his feet and watched me through hard, cynical eyes as I came ever closer.
Once a golden boy with a beaming smile and boisterous energy, Lang had become a shifty, conniving, ruthless seeker after the slightest advantage. I was quite certain that he had stolen, cheated, lied and for all I knew killed, to stay alive. Now he looked as though he was ready to kill again. He was standing up against the wall, besides his filthy scrap of a mattress, a scrawny urchin glaring at me with the desperate intensity of a cornered animal.
‘Have you come to finish us off?’ he snarled.
‘That’s not why I’m here,’ I said.
‘I don’t believe you.’ Lang moved a fraction and as he did so the light from the single bulb that illuminated the cellar glinted on something in his hand, a shard of glass he evidently intended to use as a home-made dagger. ‘You’ve been told to get rid of all the Jews,’ he said. ‘I know you have.’
Very slowly, deliberately, I placed my briefcase on the floor and then, without at any time taking my eyes off Lang, unbuttoned the flap of my holster and placed my right hand on the handle of my pistol. I raised my left, palm pointing towards Lang in a pacifying gesture. ‘I promise you that I mean no harm. I’ve always kept my word to you and your family in the past. You should believe me now. So just let go of whatever it is you’ve got in your hand, sit down nice and easy and no one will get hurt.’
‘Do what he says,’ Hannah Lang said, very calmly. ‘Please, Friedl. Do what Dr Heuser says.’
Lang darted his eyes at his sister, then back at me. He tossed the piece of glass towards me and it cracked against the stone floor close to my feet, splitting in two. Then he sat down beside his sisters.
‘Thank you, Hannah,’ I said. ‘Your brother should be very grateful to you. I came here to give you something. Look …’ Pulling my hand away from my gun I reached down, opened my briefcase and extracted a large brown envelope.
‘The last train for Germany leaves at 11.00 hours,’ I said, holding the envelope unopened in my right hand and tapping it against my left as I spoke. ‘It’s quite impossible to board it without a numbered travel pass, properly stamped and authorized. Anyone attempting to board the train without the proper papers will be shot.’
I gave another tap of the envelope to emphasize the word ‘shot’. Then I looked around. I could see the first glimmers of curiosity and even hope entering the Langs’ eyes and I knew how hard they would be telling themselves not to be so foolish. There was no hope. There was only a constant, unrelenting struggle for survival. Minsk had taught them that – and that the struggle was bound to fail in the end.
I went on: ‘Luckily, I’m not without influence. I happen to know the officials responsible for issuing these travel documents. I’ve therefore been able to acquire three passes in your names. I’ve also spoken to my colleague Lieutenant Müller in the Jewish Affairs department. We had a very interesting conversation about the status of second-degree Mischlings. We both agreed that none of you had shown the slightest sign of any Jewish tendencies during your time at Minsk and that you had all rendered valuable service to the Reich. We therefore felt entirely confident that we were acting within SS regulations to issue you with new identity papers, reassigning you as Germans. Even so, I advise you not to return to Vienna until the war is over. Go and stay with relatives elsewhere, if you have any. That is all.’
I handed the envelope over to Hannah and the other two crowded round as she opened it. One by one the travel passes and identity papers emerged. The Langs gazed at them in amazement, unable to believe their eyes. Then Lisl looked up and threw herself at me, wrapping her arms around me and crying: ‘Thank you! Thank you!’ in a voice that reminded me of the child she had been when I had first met her. I disentangled myself from her embrace, but not before she had planted a large, but quite innocent kiss on my cheek.
Friedl cleared his throat, pulled back his shoulders and walked over to me. He stuck out his hand. ‘Thank you, sir. I should have trusted you.’
‘That’s all right,’ I said, shaking his hand.
Now only Hannah was left. We looked at one another silently. Those kilos that Schinkel’s food had provided had kept her alive, but she was still painfully thin. Her face was drawn, her cheeks sunken, and her eyes looked unnaturally large. Yet she remained as fine-boned and elegant as ever. She was only twenty-four, but her experiences had given her the insight and understanding of someone much older. Still, there were times when she was simply a big sister, and this was one of them. She clapped her hands and said: ‘We’re going to need food for the journey. You two, go and scavenge whatever you can. I want a word with Doctor Heuser.’
The two younger Langs dashed off up the cellar stairs and I was left alone with Hannah.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You didn’t have to do that.’
She looked me in the eye as she spoke and there was no sense of inferiority or dependence on her part. In giving her papers that declared her a true German I’d inadvertently done more than provide her with a way out of Minsk. I’d restored her status as a human being.
‘Yes I did.’
We were standing very close together. Hannah sighed wordlessly and gave a sad, wistful shake of her head.
‘Perhaps if we had met some other way,’ I said. ‘Maybe then …’
She shook her head again. ‘I fear for you,’ she said.
‘Don’t worry. I’ll get out of here all right. I made a deal with Merbach. I’ve got two trucks packed with cans of gasoline. Von Toll’s coming with me and we’ve got six of our best men for an escort. We’re going non-stop all the way to east Prussia.’
Hannah ignored the forced cheerfulness in my voice. ‘That’s not what I meant. I’m sure you’ll escape from Minsk. I’m sure you’ll survive the whole war. I know you. Nothing touches you … That’s not what I fear.’
‘So what is it, then?’
‘I fear for your soul. You could have been a good person. But you’ll be damned for the things you’ve done here. You must know that, don’t you?’
‘I’ve done my duty. I obeyed the orders given to me by my superiors to the best of my ability. That’s all I’ve done.’
Even as I made them I knew how pathetic my excuses must have sounded.
Hannah implored me: ‘Dr Heuser … please! You can’t say that to me. I know you. I know what you’ve done.’ She looked me right in the eyes as if searching for a truth that remained frustratingly out of reach. ‘How could you?’
‘I don’t know …’ I shrugged. ‘Maybe the same way you could do all the things you did to survive. No sane person could possibly have imagined the things that have happened here. They were utterly inconceivable. But then they happened and we all had to find a way to cope.’
She looked at me aghast. ‘But that’s grotesque! How can you possibly compare your situation to that of the people you killed and tormented? You … all of you … you’re the Devil!’
‘Maybe … but I’ll tell you something about the Devil that I didn’t previously understand. He’s in Hell, just as much as the people he torments. He’s the most damned of all.’
‘So you do know why I’m afraid for you, don’t you? Will you promise me something?’
‘Of course,’ I said, not meaning it. Our conversation was making me uncomfortable. I’d hoped for a few heartfelt words of thanks and maybe even an admission by Hannah Lang that she’d misunderstood me. After all this time, I still wanted to hear her tell me that I was a much better man than she’d ever given me credit for, and that now she’d be for ever in my debt. I hadn’t anticipated that she would be talking to me with something close to pity.
‘What is it you would like me to do?’ I asked.
‘Just try to lead a good life. Seek redemption. Make restitution for all the wrongs you have done. If you ever want to be at peace with yourself, this is your only hope.’
She was right: of course she was. But I couldn’t afford to think in those terms, not even for one second, so long as the war continued. Only the strongest and luckiest could hope to come through this alive. The moment I weakened, I’d be lost.
I didn’t want to tell Hannah that, though. I was just wondering how to appease her when the two other Langs returned with some stale loaves of bread, a rusty can of soup and two discarded vodka bottles that they had filled with water from a tap. They’d become a couple of cellar rats, able to sniff and scavenge scraps of food that fatter, sleeker animals would miss.
Hannah must have felt that she’d made her point, for she at once turned her attention to her siblings. In no time they collected their belongings and packed them in the same trunk they had put on the transport, back in October ’42. It had been with them in the cellar since the day they arrived, and even now I doubt that there was a single Jew, anywhere in German territory, that could claim both to have survived a death transport and kept their baggage, to boot. But of course, the Langs weren’t Jews any more, even if they ever had been.
I escorted the three of them down to the station, forced my way through the crowd – even now, thank God, people made way for an SS uniform – and deposited them on the train. Hannah and I said our farewells on the platform. I wished her a safe journey, and she wished me a good life. Neither of us made any other reference to the future. We didn’t promise to write to one another or to meet up again some day. We were both aware that could never happen. We’d known one another in Minsk, and that would be all. Neither of us would ever wish to be reminded of the people that we’d been there.
When the Langs were safely aboard the train I returned to the Lenin House, where my men had made a large fire on to which they were throwing every document they could find. We cheered ourselves up with the thought that the Lenin House was by far the safest place in the city. The Soviets hadn’t dared to destroy it when they left Minsk in defeat. They certainly wouldn’t do so as they returned in triumph now.
*
Throughout the time that the SS and Security Police were in Minsk, we had a small concentration camp of our own, used to house the Jewish workers employed at the Lenin House. It consisted of little more than a single barrack building surrounded by a high barbed-wire fence, within one of the giant building’s many courtyards. If I have not mentioned it up to now it’s just that one became so used to its presence that it simply wasn’t noteworthy. The population of this camp had been declining over the past few months as our need for workers decreased and any surplus ones were disposed of, until there were just thirty-one left, and it was my responsibility to get rid of them. Once I’d done that, I’d be free to leave the city.
