Prisoner of Night and Fog (30 page)

Berlin was a polished diamond. Broad boulevards lined with massive buildings stretched in all directions; sleek automobiles and streetcars wound along the roads without any of the horse-drawn carts that Gretchen was accustomed to seeing in Munich. Pedestrians swarmed along the sidewalks, the ladies smart in their suits and gloves, the men professional in business suits and hats, all hurrying to their mid-morning destinations. At a corner, two dark-skinned men waited for their turn to cross the street, and Gretchen stared because she had never seen Negroes except in the cinema.

Everywhere she looked was evidence supporting Berlin’s reputation as a liberal, progressive city: Cubist paintings hanging in the front windows of art galleries; cabarets featuring political comedians whose work would earn them a beating back in Munich; sidewalk cafés where bohemian types sipped tea together, their mix of fine and shabby clothing proclaiming that members of different social classes mingled in this city.

Gretchen had never seen anything like it, and suddenly Daniel made complete sense to her: his openness, his fierceness to learn the truth, his insistence that others see with their own eyes. He had come from another world. Although Berlin and Munich were only a few hundred miles apart, they might have been on separate continents.

Gretchen and Daniel changed clothes in a tearoom’s lavatories, he into his best dark suit, she into a pale blue linen frock dotted with flowers. The dress was the fanciest thing she had in her suitcase, but she worried it wouldn’t conform to the hotel’s dress code.

Apparently it did, for the waiter only ran a brief disapproving glance over her outfit before leading them to a table where a middle-aged man sat alone, chasing peas with his fork. He didn’t notice them until the waiter cleared his throat and said, “Pardon me, Herr Professor Forster, but this lady and gentleman wished to meet with you.”

The man looked up, blinking as though waking from a deep dream. He was a pleasant, ordinary-looking fellow of around fifty. He peered at them through small, round spectacles. “Yes?”

Daniel extended his hand for the fellow to shake. “My name is Daniel Cohen, and this is Fräulein Müller. I sent you a telegram a few days ago. We’re very interested in your work.”

“Ah, yes, I remember.” Smiling now, the man rose and bowed slightly. “Please, sit and join me. You haven’t eaten luncheon yet, have you? A couple of menus, waiter.”

“Just tea for us,” Daniel said as they sat down, and one glance round the large dining room told Gretchen why he didn’t want to order lunch. Ladies in silk and men in fine suits lounged about the tables, and waiters in full livery carried heavy silver platters. She couldn’t even guess how much a single meal would cost.

“It isn’t often I meet someone not in the medical field who’s aware of my work,” Forster said as the waiter poured them cups of steaming, fragrant tea. He pushed aside his plate. “Particularly a young lady.”

Gretchen met his gaze. “I find the study of mental disorders fascinating. I plan to become a psychoanalyst.”

A trio of ladies in silk frocks walked past, trailing a waiter. Their flowery scent wafted over Gretchen, and she felt again that she had stepped into another world, one made of fine clothes and gourmet meals and pearls and perfume. Munich, with its grimy cobblestones and tobacco-choked beer halls and streets teeming with brown and black and red and green and yellow political uniforms, seemed far away.

“Indeed?” Forster picked up his teacup and studied her over its rim. “A worthy but difficult ambition.”

“‘I’ve always wanted to be a doctor, ever since my father died when I was a child.” Gretchen set her cup on its saucer on the damask tablecloth. Although her throat was painfully dry, she wasn’t sure she could swallow a single sip. “But we didn’t come to discuss psychology with you. We need to know what happened at the end of the war in the military hospital in Pasewalk, when you treated my father, Klaus Müller, and his friend Adolf Hitler.”

“Ah.” Behind his spectacles, the doctor’s eyes narrowed. He studied her with the same intentness that she had often witnessed in Herr Doktor Whitestone. As though he could dissect her with a look, slice beneath the skin to the beating heart and learn all her secrets with an unblinking stare.

“You look like him,” he said at last.

“You remember him.”
Thank God
.

“Of course. But I can tell you nothing about his treatment. The medical field’s code of ethics requires my silence.”

Gretchen glanced at Daniel. He nodded in silent understanding. They must tell the doctor everything.

She leaned across the table, pitching her voice low. “I understand, Herr Professor Forster. But I’m not a weepy, sentimental girl trying to pry into her father’s secrets. I’m trying to solve his murder.”

“Murder?” Forster’s eyebrows rose. “Your father was the sainted Nazi martyr, I believe.”

“That is what everyone believes,” Daniel cut in, “but her father was shot from both the front and the back.” He paused as Forster’s forehead creased in surprise. “We believe something crucial happened in the military hospital in Pasewalk, Herr Professor Forster, and you might be the only person who can tell us what it was.”

Forster sat very still.

Gretchen rose. She bent close to Forster’s ear, whispering so the diners at the next table wouldn’t overhear. “I’m beginning to realize I barely knew my father. But he was kind and good to me, and he didn’t deserve to die in the street like a dog.” When he didn’t answer, she moved slightly, trying to meet his gaze. “Please. If something happened in the hospital that led to my father’s death, I need to know what it was.”

The doctor sat motionless. Then he looked her hard in the face. “Yes,” he said at last. “I shall tell you all you need to know.”

34

AS THEY WALKED TOWARD THE BRANDENBURG
Gate, Daniel kept his hand lightly on Gretchen’s arm. On her other side, Forster moved jerkily, as though at any moment he might turn around and return to the hotel, and Gretchen feared he was reconsidering his offer to help them.

Ahead, the massive triumphal arch loomed like a great, hulking mountain of stone. It should have looked beautiful to her, but she remembered Daniel’s words in the restaurant—
You never know who might be listening; let us walk in the Tiergarten, where we may be assured of privacy
—and she shivered.

Beyond the gate, the Tiergarten stretched out for miles. Leafy trees clustered together on tidy lawns intersected by long paths. The doctor took the nearest one, striding so quickly they had to hurry to keep pace. Gretchen heard the voices of small children, playing somewhere nearby, beyond the trees, their gleeful giggles the sound of a separate world.

In silence, Gretchen walked with Daniel and the doctor until the trees formed a protective green tunnel over their heads. Enclosed in this verdant passage, she felt safe enough to speak.

“Herr Professor,” she began, “my father overheard you talking with another doctor about Herr Hitler when he was a patient in your hospital. You used a word he didn’t understand. I realize this was a long time ago, but it occurred on a momentous day, when the patients learned about our surrender. Perhaps you can remember—”

Forster looked sharply at her. Sunlight pushed through the overarching trees, sending panels of shadow and gold across his quiet face.

“Then you don’t know,” he said. “Of course, you wouldn’t. I’m sure your parents wished to keep the truth from you.”

Daniel’s hand tightened on her arm; she was glad of the steady pressure, a tangible reminder he was there. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“The Pasewalk hospital wasn’t an ordinary military hospital. It contained seven different clinics and sick bays.”

But that still didn’t explain . . .

“For treating hysterical soldiers,” Forster added.

“Hysterical . . .” She remembered Whitestone’s teachings. “You mean mentally diseased.”

Ahead, the path arrowed forward in a straight line. A breeze shivered through the trees. As she walked, she saw a few early leaves on the ground; colored red and orange, crackling like paper beneath her feet, they were already dead.

“Neurotics unfit for duty,” Forster corrected. He spoke so quickly, she had to concentrate to snatch hold of each word, or they risked running together in a stream of sound. “Not through any physical injury, you understand, but from their weak constitutions. There were so many of them that the Berlin War Ministry had to pass a law, quarantining the hysterics from the able-minded soldiers in hospitals. Eventually, different facilities were set up to treat them.”

What the doctor said couldn’t be correct. Gretchen’s throat closed. She felt her legs moving, propelling her forward on the path, but they seemed disconnected from her body.
Hysterics. Mentally diseased. Neurotics. Not Papa
.

“Why were they quarantined?” Daniel asked.

“My dear young man.” Forster looked astonished. “Hysterics
had
to be separated from other soldiers in the hospital for fear of their hysteria infecting entire wards and rendering hundreds more men unfit for battle. Their weak nerves were contagious, you see.”

A woman pushed a baby carriage toward them. They waited until she had passed, cooing to the screaming infant. Beneath the carriage’s canopy, Gretchen had seen the baby’s tiny red face, screwed up in rage. Quickly, she looked away.

Forster continued. “Naturally, Hitler and Müller were sent to a different hospital than the rest of their regiment. There was no question they had been gassed, but the other soldiers had already recovered their sight. Those two still claimed to be blinded.”

Gretchen stiffened. Her father had been a war hero, not a coward hiding behind a pretend injury. “How could you possibly know they weren’t blinded?”

Forster stopped walking. His body seemed coiled tightly as a spring when he burst forth, “Because that was my job! I saw hundreds, perhaps thousands, of soldiers during the war. In a moment, I could determine who was genuinely wounded and who was faking.

“Neither Hitler nor Müller had any of the physical characteristics of men still suffering from gas poisoning.” Forster pointed a finger at her. “Hitler’s eyes were reddened, probably from conjunctivitis; Müller’s eyes were clear. Their eyes had none of the dead tissue or milky-gray appearance that would have resulted from a blinding gas attack. They were what we called malingerers—clear cases of hysteria.”

Gretchen bowed her head. The nights Papa spent sobbing, alone, in the bedroom while Mama slept with her and Reinhard in the parlor. The times he beat Reinhard with his fists or his belt, finally sagging in exhaustion against the wall.

“Shell shock,” she whispered. “That’s what it was called, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” Forster said. “The trauma of warfare can be devastating. Some men improve after treatment. Others never recover.”

Daniel began walking again, Gretchen and Forster falling in step beside him. “How did you treat hysterics?” he asked. “With electrical shocks?”

“As a last resort,” Forster said. “My preferred method is what I call ‘the enlightening technique.’ I spoke to the men as though they were naughty, disobedient children, told them their behavior was shameful for a German soldier. Most hysterics were cured quickly and sent back to the battlefield. Fräulein Müller’s father responded well to talk therapy, and if the war hadn’t ended, he would have returned to the front. But Hitler was most resistant to treatment.”

Gretchen could hardly bear to ask. But she had to know. “What did he do?”

They continued walking, veering off the path and plunging deep into the gardens. Grass murmured under their feet.

“Sometimes he was furious,” Forster said, “and sometimes he cried inconsolably, like a small child left alone in the dark. To the layperson, he would have appeared as a typical malingerer, recalcitrant and moody, to be sure, but typical.”

He paused. “Not to me. I immediately suspected what he was, and when Müller came to me, saying Hitler had lost his sight again, I knew I was right. Hitler could not bear to see because he couldn’t bear to see his beloved Germany defeated.”

Gretchen’s heart throbbed through her dress’s thin fabric. “What happened next?”

“Hitler had chosen blindness again,” Forster said. “As we walked to the dormitories, I ran into one of the neurologists and stopped to consult with him about Hitler’s case.”

At last, he looked directly at her. “Although I diagnosed Hitler when he was in my care, I have watched his career since and I have been forced to concede that he is utterly unlike anyone I have encountered in all my years of medical practice. He exhibits traits of a certain type of personality, but he also appears to be a narcissist and swings wildly from high to low moods with dizzying speed. He is a volcanic eruption, a lightning strike in the desert, a man perhaps with several different mentally diseased conditions. By all rights, he should be impossible. And yet he exists.”

The doctor raised his hands, then let them fall helplessly to his sides. “What I originally diagnosed him to be, and what I said to the other doctor that day in the corridor, is that Hitler is a classic psychopath. And I’m very much afraid your father heard me say it.”