Paul was nursing me and giving me my medicine. My sedatives. I mustn’t make excuses for myself but it was all like a dreadful dream. The next thing I knew I was pregnant. And the next thing I knew I was married…
In March 1933, of course, after the Reichstag Fire (February 27), four thousand Leftist notables were arrested, tortured, and imprisoned, and Dieter Kruger was one of them.
Dieter Kruger went to Dachau; and among his jailers, early on, was Corporal Doll.
I put aside my ambivalence and after a false start or two established contact (by teletype and then by telephone) with an old friend of my father’s in Berlin, Konrad Peters of the SD — the Sicherheitsdienst Reichsfuhrer-SS, or Party Intelligence. Peters was formerly a professor of modern history at Humboldt; now he helped monitor the foes of National Socialism (sardonically specialising in the Freemasons).
‘And speak freely, Thomsen,’ he said. ‘This line’s a virgin.’
‘It’s very good of you to take the trouble, sir.’
‘Happy to help. I miss Max and Anna.’
We shared a brief silence. I said,
‘Arrested in Munich on March first. To Dachau on March twenty-third.’
‘Oh. In the first batch. Under Wackerle. That must’ve been enjoyable.’
‘Wackerle, sir? Not Eicke?’
‘No. At that point Eicke was still in the lunatic asylum in Wurzburg. Then Himmler sprung him and had him declared sane. It was actually worse under Wackerle.’
Konrad Peters, although far more exalted, was like me. We were obstruktive Mitlaufer. We went along. We went along, we went along with, doing all we could to drag our feet and scuff the carpets and scratch the parquet, but we went along. There were hundreds of thousands like us, maybe millions like us.
I said, ‘Transferred to Brandenburg Penitentiary in September. That’s all I have.’
‘Give me a day or two. He’s not family, is he?’
‘No, sir.’
‘That’s a relief. Just a friend then.’
‘No, sir.’
By early November the change in the ergonomics of the Buna-Werke had become palpable: a marked relaxation of tempo (particularly evident in the Yard), and a significant burst of progress. Accordingly I made an appointment with the head of the Politische Abteilung, Fritz Mobius.
‘He’ll be about half an hour,’ said Jurgen Horder (thirtyish, of medium build, with slicked grey hair worn almost romantically long). ‘Are you going to the thing on Monday? I haven’t been invited.’
‘Officers,’ I said, ‘and their wives. Mandatory. Your boss’ll represent you.’
‘Lucky him. It’ll be colder than a witch’s tit.’
We were on the ground floor of Bunker 13, one of the Stammlager’s many three-storey slabs of dull grey brick; its few windows were all boarded up, so there was a blind quality, and a sealed quality (as well as the devious acoustics you found everywhere in the Kat Zet). For the first ten minutes I could hear, from the cellars, a succession of slowly building, slowly bursting screams of pain. Then there was a long silence, followed by the sound of boots on dusty or even gravelly stone steps. Michael Off entered, wiping his hands with a tea towel (in his cream singlet he looked like the young man at the travelling funfair who synchronised the dodgems). Nodding, he stared at me while apparently counting his teeth with his tongue, first the lower, then the upper. He took a packet of Davidoffs from the shelf and went back down again, and the slowly building, slowly bursting screams resumed.
‘Good day. Please sit. How can I help you?’
‘I hope you can help me, Herr Mobius. This is somewhat embarrassing.’
Mobius was originally a penpusher at the HQ of the Secret State Police, the Gestapa — not to be confused with the Gestapo (the actual Secret State Police), or the Sipo (the Security Police), or the Cripo (the Criminal Police), or the Orpo (the Order Police), or the Schupo (the Protection Police), or the Teno (the Auxiliary Police), or the Geheime Feldpolizei (the Secret Field Police), or the Gemeindepolizei (the Municipal Police), or the Abwehrpolizei (the Counter-Espionage Police), or the Bereitschaftpolizei (the Party Police), or the Kasernierte Polizei (the Barracks Police), or the Grenzpolizei (the Border Police), or the Ortspolizei (the Local Police), or the Gendarmerie (the Rural Police). Mobius had prospered in his wing of the policing business because he turned out to have a talent for cruelty, a talent that was widely discussed, even here.
‘All going forward at the Buna-Werke? You’re winning? We do need that buna.’
‘Yes. Funny, isn’t it? Rubber — it’s like ball bearings. You can’t make war without it.’
‘So, Herr Thomsen. What seems to be the difficulty?’
Almost completely bald, with a few shreds of straight black hair daubed round his ears and extending to the nape of his neck, dark-eyed, strong-nosed, even-mouthed, he looked like a warmly intelligent academic. Meanwhile, Mobius’s most controversial novelty was his use, during interrogations, of an experienced surgeon — Professor Entress of the Hygienic Institute.
‘This is awkward, Untersturmfuhrer. And slightly distasteful.’
‘It’s not always fun to do one’s duty, Obersturmfuhrer.’
The last word was stressed with some fastidiousness (because it was voguish, in the secret police, to despise rank and other outward forms of power. Secrecy, hiddenness, was power, they knew). I said,
‘Please regard all this as tentative. But I don’t see any way round it.’
Mobius twitched a shoulder and said, ‘Proceed.’
‘At Buna progress is steady, and we’ll get the thing done, and not significantly behind schedule. As long as we go on using the established methods.’ I exhaled through my nose. ‘Frithuric Burckl.’
Mobius said, ‘The moneyman.’
‘If he’d confined himself to a stray remark I’d have let it go. But he harps on it. He appears to have some very peculiar notions about our uh, about our Red Sea pedestrians… Sometimes I wonder if he has the slightest grasp of the ideals of National Socialism. Of the delicate equipoise of our inseparable twin aims.’
‘Kreative Vernichtung. The postulate of all revolutions. Kreative Vernichtung.’
‘Quite. Now hear this. Burckl says the Jews are good workers, can you believe, so long as you treat them gently. And he says they’d do even better on a full stomach.’
‘Lunacy.’
‘I implored him to see sense. But the man’s deaf to reason.’
‘Tell me, what are the objective consequences?’
‘Entirely predictable. Classic erosion of the chain of command. Burckl doesn’t goad the foremen, the foremen don’t bully the guards, the guards don’t terrorise the Kapos, and the Kapos don’t thrash the Haftlinge. A kind of rot’s set in. We need someone who…’
Mobius took out his fountain pen. ‘Go on. More details, please. You’re doing the right thing, Herr Thomsen. Go on.’
Walking reasonably steadily but unbelievably slowly, his stride somewhere between a parade march and a goose step, and with neck tipped back as if monitoring a distant aeroplane, Paul Doll came down the aisle between the two halves of the standing audience and climbed the little staircase to the low stage. It was minus fourteen Celsius, and snow, tinged brown by the pyre and the smokestacks, was purposefully falling. I looked to my right at Boris, and then to my more distant left at Hannah. We were all bundled up to the thickness of mattresses, like experienced tramps in a wintry northern town.