Wolfram Prufer, along with two other SS, got beaten to death with rocks and pickaxes in the Sonderkommando revolt of October 7, 1944.
Konrad Peters was among the approximately five thousand suspects arrested in connection with the assassination attempt of July 20, 1944; he was also among the approximately twelve thousand prisoners who died of typhus, in Dachau, during the first four months of 1945.
Uncle Martin, Martin Bormann — well, it was several years before the facts were finally verified. He was wounded by a Russian artillery shell (and then took cyanide) as he tried to flee the Chancellery in Berlin in the small hours of May 1, 1945 — after the joint suicide of the newlyweds and their subsequent immolation, which (with Goebbels) he oversaw. He was condemned to death in absentia on October 1, 1946.
Ilse Grese was hanged in Hamelin Prison in the British Zone on December 13, 1945. She was twenty-two. All through the night she loudly sang the ‘Horst Wessel Lied’ and ‘Ich Hatt’ einen Kameraden’; her last word (spoken ‘languidly’, according to her executioner, Pierrepoint, who also dealt with Lord Haw-Haw) was schnell. Quick.
Paul Doll was demoted sideways in June 1943 to a clerical post at the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, in Berlin (which was being bombed nightly, and then daily as well as nightly), and subsequently reinstalled as Commandant in May 1944. He was captured in March 1946, tried at Nuremberg, and delivered to the Polish authorities. As part of his final statement Doll wrote, ‘In the solitude of my cell I have come to the bitter realisation that I have sinned gravely against humanity.’ He was hanged outside Bunker 11 in Kat Zet I on April 16, 1947.
Professor Zulz and Professor Entress were among the Nazi doctors put on trial in the Soviet Union in early 1948 and sentenced to ‘the quarter’ — twenty-five years in the slave camps of the Gulag.
Thirteen IG Farben executives and managers (not including Frithuric Burckl) were convicted at Nuremberg in July 1948. Suitbert Seedig was sentenced to eight years’ imprisonment for slavery and mass murder. Rupprecht Strunck, called out of early retirement (which began in September ’43), was sentenced to seven years’ imprisonment for plunder and spoliation, slavery, and mass murder. Not a kilogram of synthetic rubber, nor a millilitre of synthetic fuel, was ever produced at the Buna-Werke.
Alisz Seisser contracted tuberculosis of the hip, and in January 1944 was transferred to the (very occasionally Potemkinised) camp of Theresienstadt, near Prague. There is a better than even chance that she survived the war.
The fate of Esther Kubis is unknown, at least to me. She won’t go down, Boris used to say. She’s rash, but in the end her spirit will refuse to give them the satisfaction. And he often cited the first thing she ever said to him. Which was I don’t like it here and I’m not going to die here…
I last saw her on May 1, 1943. We were in a sealed Block together, just the two of us. I was about to be carted off to some other camp (Oranienburg, it turned out); Esther was serving the final hours of a three-day confinement (without food or water) for not making her bed, or for not making it properly — Ilse Grese was very particular when it came to the making of beds.
We talked for almost two hours. I told Esther about the promise Boris extracted from me (to do everything in my power for her), a promise I was no longer able to keep (I had nothing to give her, not even my wristwatch). She listened to my urgings with real attention, I thought — because I was now so clearly on the wrong side of the Reich. Nor did I correct her silent inference that Boris too, perhaps, was not all he seemed.
‘Esther. This insane nightmare will end,’ I concluded, ‘and Germany will lose. Be alive to see it with your own eyes.’
Then I dozed, having had a long and repetitive but not especially brutal night underneath the Political Department. For the first six hours I was joined by Fritz Mobius who, despite a lot of incredibly vociferous shouting (and it wasn’t simulated, it wasn’t an act, the millennial German anger), used no force. As the shift changed at midnight, Paul Doll looked in. To me he seemed transparently haunted and furtive; but he managed to slap my face a few times, as if in spontaneous patriotic disgust, and he punched me in the stomach (quite feebly hitting the bony ridge just above the solar plexus). From then until dawn it was Michael Off, who did a bit more of exactly the same; it appeared that someone had told them I was not to be marked.
This was curious: in his appearance Doll made me think of a coal miner coming off shift. His tunic and jodhpurs minutely glinted with specks of light, and on his back there was a shard the size of a coin. It was mirror glass.
Mobius, Doll, Off — they all yelled, they all hollered fit to kill. And I vaguely and confusedly wondered if the story of National Socialism could have unfolded in any other language…
When I woke up Esther was standing in front of the window, with her forearms flat on the sill. It was an exceptionally clear day, and I realised she was gazing at the mountains of the Sudetenland. She had been born and raised, I knew, in the High Tatras (whose peaks were perennially capped with gleaming ice). Seen in profile, her face wore a frown and a half-smile; and she was so lost in memory that she didn’t hear the door as it creaked open behind her.
Hedwig Butefisch came into the Block. She paused, then bent her knees, almost to a crouch; she moved quietly forward, and delivered a pinch to the back of Esther’s thigh — not viciously, not at all, but playfully, just hard enough to give her a fright.
‘You were dreaming!’
‘… But you woke me up!’
And for half a minute they wrestled, tickling each other and yelping with laughter.
‘Aufseherin!’ shouted Ilse Grese from the doorstep.
At once the two girls recollected themselves and straightened up, very sober, and Hedwig marched her prisoner out into the air.
2. GERDA: THE END OF NATIONAL SOCIALISM
‘Try and drink some of this, my dearest, my darling. I’ll hold it. There.’
‘… Thank you, Neffe. Thank you. Neffe, you’re thinner. Though I’m one to talk.’
‘Ah but I’m like the troubadour, Tantchen. Famished for love.’
‘Pass me that. What did you say?… Oh, Neffe — Boris! I wept for you, Golo, when I heard.’
‘Don’t, Tante. You’ll start me off.’
‘Wept for you. More than a brother, you always said.’
‘Don’t, Tante.’
‘At least they made a nice big fuss about him. Well, he was so photogenic… Is Heinie all right?’
‘Heinie’s fine. They’re all fine.’
‘Mm. Except Volker.’
‘Well, yes.’ Volker was her ninth child (if you included Ehrengard), and a boy. ‘Volker’s a little out of sorts.’
‘Because this is such an unhealthy place!’
The place was Bolzano, in alpine Italy (and the time was the spring of 1946). My remaining Bormanns had met an unlikely fate: they were in a German concentration camp (it was called Bozen from 1944 to ’45). But there was no more slave labour, no more flaying and cudgelling, no more starvation, and no more murder. Full of DPs, POWs, and other internees awaiting scrutiny, it was Italian now, with unabundant yet appetising food, reasonable sanitation, and many cheerful nuns and priests among the helpers. Gerda lay in its field hospital; Kronzi, Helmut, Heinie, Eike, Irmgard, Eva, Hartmut, and Volker were in a kind of military marquee nearby. I said,