Swastika (14 page)

Keith’s sixteen days extended into eight months. He returned to England at the same time that Rommel was called back to the Reich. Not only was El Alamein the turning point in North Africa, but it, along with Stalingrad, was the turning point in the war. “It is not the end,” Churchill said. “It may not even be the beginning of the end. But it is undoubtedly the end of the beginning.”

Keith was through with operations.

From then on, he trained pilots.

Except for one more raid.

A final entry was made in red, and after that, the Pilot’s Flying Log Book in Dane’s grip contained nothing but blank, empty pages.

On returning from North Africa in March 1943, Keith was posted to the #6 (RCAF) Group at Topcliffe, Yorkshire. That August saw the only time in the second half of the war when the whole of Bomber Command attempted a precision raid by moonlight on such a small target, so Keith went out for a last hurrah in one of the bomber stream’s Halifaxes.

The last entry in red:

“August 17. Ops. to Peenemünde. Bombed V-2 rocket site.”

*    *    *

The Canadian #6 Group lost twelve of fifty-seven aircraft in the Peenemünde raid, 20 percent of its fleet. Defending Peenemünde was the first time Messerschmitt 110s used their new
Schräge Musik
—“jazz music”—guns. Those upward-spitting cannons ripped into the underbelly of Keith’s Halifax, where there was no armament or even a window to observe below.

Keith and his crew were forced to bail out over Hitler’s Reich.

There were no entries in his flying log after the Peenemünde raid because Papa had spent the rest of the conflict in Europe as a prisoner of war—a
Kriegsgefangene,
or “Kriegie”—in a Stalag Luft camp.

*    *    *

Dane was surprised, when he glanced at his watch, to see how time had flown. He had his date with the Mountain early the next morning, so it was time to pack it up for the night.

As he closed Keith’s Pilot’s Flying Log Book on that last entry in red, the Mountie spoke to the cat who’d curled up on the rug.

“Papa had more lives than you, Puss.”

He thought it ethical to take the pregnant cat home with him, because the twenty-four-hour vet clinic was near his condo.

Nordhausen, Germany

April 4, 1945

Damn Bomber Harris!

SS-Obergruppenführer Ernst Streicher was sorely tempted to draw the Walther from the holster at the waist of his Black Corps uniform and empty it in futile anger at the flaming sky. Last night, while he and both of his sons were off in Berlin, meeting Hitler down in the
Führerbunker
, 247 Lancasters with RAF Bomber Command had relentlessly hammered the Nazi stronghold of Nordhausen, dropping firebombs on what were believed to be the military barracks of Boelcke Kaserne. The barracks, in fact, were a dumping ground for worn-out factory slaves and deportees from the eastern camps that were now being threatened by the Red Army.

“How many killed?” Streicher demanded of an SS bureaucrat with a tally board in hand.

Ordnung muss sein.

Things must be in order.

“Fifteen hundred, General. They hit us on two nights.”

Streicher nodded grimly. “At least that’s fifteen hundred
Untermenschen
who won’t turn on us.”

The corpse-counter smirked half-heartedly. There were still almost thirty thousand subhumans alive in the Dora-Mittelbau camp system. That was a lot to get rid of.

“Do we gas the rest of them?” the tallyman asked.

It had taken the general and his sons all night to journey from Berlin back to the V-2 tunnels. The SS car had just pulled up in front of the yawning caverns in the mountainside to disgorge its three passengers. The tallyman had rushed out of Tunnel B to greet Streicher with his death-by-bombing damage report. From the storage area that fed supplies to the factory, the general watched Nordhausen burn a few miles to the south. The sky was fiery and alive with a billion sparks, but Boelcke Kaserne was choked behind a cloud of seething black smoke.

“Fritz!” snapped the general. “Fall into line.”

The elder Hitler Youth was standing several feet away, fixed to the exact spot where he and Wernher von Braun had stood, gazing up at the wonders of outer space. Mesmerized by the sparks, Fritz shook his head to clear his mind.

He returned to his father’s side like a dutiful son.

Tonight, the general stood resplendent in the black greatcoat of the Black Corps. Double-breasted, with two parallel rows of silver buttons down the front, it had two slanting pockets with flaps on the sides and a half belt at the back. The Death’s Head badge leered down from the peak of his high-fronted cap. The silver skull and crossbones matched his silver ring, which had been presented to the general by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler for his meritorious service to the Swastika.

Here, at Dora-Mittelbau, Streicher stood at the center of his power base. The black holes of the factory tunnels throbbed at his back. A quarter mile to his right, along the Kohnstein’s southern slope, Streicher had built a camp to confine the slaves who had worked, lived, and survived in the tunnels during construction.

The camp’s entry gate faced the tunnels, and between the two sat the guard compound. The gate was a simple wooden barrier covered with barbed wire. The adjoining buildings housed the Gestapo offices and Camp Dora’s administration. Beyond was the
Appellplatz
—the roll-call square—a huge open area carpeted with paving stones. From it, cement walkways led to fifty-eight barracks and down the slope to “the bunker,” a prison within the prison that was used for private torture, and uphill to a brothel—the
Puff—
and the crematorium.

The square brick chimney of the crematorium belched oily smoke night and day.

*    *    *

The screams!

Fritz was in one of those trances he found it hard to break away from. He had snapped out of it long enough to step back into line beside his father and brother, but the sparks above Nordhausen had hypnotized him again. If he listened hard enough, he could hear plaintive bellows. Shouting from the factory tunnels at his back. Screams from the blazing inferno of Boelcke Kaserne. Shrieks from all the ghosts that haunted Dora’s roll-call square.

The square where his
Über
-father had enforced his will.

“The Will to Power.”

Just as Nietzsche had prophesized—and as Fritz had learned by rote in the Hitler Youth.

Rousted from their barracks before the break of dawn, the factory slaves began each day in the
Appellplatz
, where heads were counted and punishments imposed. Fritz thought back to one cold winter morning that he knew he’d never forget.

“Achtung!”

That day, thousands of wooden prisoners’ clogs had smacked the paving stones with the order to stand at attention. The night before, one of the slaves had tried to escape, so all of the prisoners had been awakened early for the punishment known as
Stillstehen
. Freezing sleet had begun to fall as the men came together in the
Appellplatz
. Hemmed in by the dripping, low, flat buildings of Camp Dora, they had waited for hours in a U-shaped formation while the inclement weather got worse.

Standing …

Standing …

Standing still as one by one the weakest dropped.

By the time Fritz had arrived with his father and brother, the sleet was turning to snow. The
Häftlinge
—the prisoners—were clad only in rags, and the biting cold had frozen the stiff tatters to their skin. Some leaned on makeshift crutches because of putrefying wounds. Those with TB spit up the last of their lungs. Those with pleurisy shook from fever. Those with dysentery shitted out their guts, and the yellow discharge hardened to ice on their buttocks. As each weakling dropped, the thinning ranks huddled closer together for warmth. With not an ounce of fat to insulate their bones from the chill, the men shuddered and shook while haggard eyes bulged out of waxy skulls.

“Durch Kamin!”

“Through the chimney.”

That’s all he had to say, the
Lagerführer
who ran this punishment theater for Fritz’s father. The words echoed what every slave had heard in the standard welcoming speech: “You came in through that gate, and you’ll leave through that chimney.”

To emphasize the point, the
Lagerführer
snapped his swagger stick like a whip at each fallen man, then pointed up to the crematorium on the hill, which even at that early hour belched gray smoke at the tumbling flakes.

Dead or dying, the slaves on the ground would be ash by the next day.

“Auf der Flucht erschossen!”

Another SS expression.

“Killed during an escape attempt.”

That was the cue for Horse Face to haul the attempted escapee out into the square, where a trestle had been erected near the central gallows.

Horse Face was the
Lagerältester
, a criminal inmate who wore a black triangle as a sign that he was a hangman and torturer. Strong, swarthy, and dark-haired, he had a face shaped like a horse’s, with a low forehead above a prominent chin. Psychologically, he was ideal for this job. The rage that seethed within him could be quelled for a while by the death of a hapless slave.

“Fünfundzwanzig am Arsch!”
the guards began to chant.

“Twenty-five on the ass.”

Horse Face bent the attempted escapee over the trestle and tore the ragged trousers off his behind. He then lit into the man with his cudgel, thrashing his buttocks and genitals to shreds.

“Fünfundzwanzig am Arsch!”

The screams!

“Pfahlhangen!”
ordered the
Lagerführer
, moving the program on to the next act. Fritz felt as if he were Caesar’s son in the emperor’s box at the Roman Colosseum. Standing in the open end of the U, the Hitler Youth had the best view of the roll-call square. Not only could he watch what went on at center stage, but he could also catch the reaction of the crowd.

Feed him to the lions!

Thumbs-down to any gladiator on the ground!

An icy wind was picking up as the
Pfahlhangen
began. The
Pfahl
was an upright post that had been erected next to the gallows. Horse Face dragged the attempted escapee across to the post, tied the slave’s hands together in the small of his back, attached a pulley cord to his wrists, then hoisted him up. So excruciating was the shoulder pain that the slave began screeching again. Before abandoning the man to his fate, Horse Face strung the sign for would-be escapers about his neck.

“Hurra, hurra! Ich bin wieder da!”
it read.

“Hurrah, hurrah! I’m back again!”

That done, the time had arrived for the Gestapo to harvest its bounty of flesh. The first fifty rockets, delivered back in January 1944, had proved to be so flawed because of poor welding, shoddy electrical connections, and other factory problems that many disintegrated right after launch. To get to the bottom of the repeated test-fire disasters, Wernher von Braun had sent Dieter Grau, one of his engineers, to the underground factory. After probing its assembly line, Grau had found the cause to be sabotage.

The slaves could undermine the rockets in many ways. They knew just where to loosen or tighten a screw to interfere with a V-2’s performance. They would urinate on the wiring to short-circuit electrical contacts. They would accept faulty parts that didn’t meet specifications, or fail to install vital components. They would make welds on fins that couldn’t withstand launch stresses. No matter the cause, the effect was the same: Nazi rockets blew up or veered off course.

The SS cure for sabotage was to call in the Gestapo, who now ruled the Mittelwerk factory with an iron grip. A network of informers escaped torture and abuse by snitching on others when the rockets failed to work. Von Braun’s missiles were so critical to the survival of the Reich that no quarter was given to those who threatened V-2 production. To fool with the Gestapo was to end up like this.

“Stillgestanden!”
the
Lagerführer
barked.

Their boots shining like polished black steel, Streicher’s Gestapo henchmen marched across to the six-hooked gallows in the center of the quadrangle. The snow was slanting into the square on the wind, piercing the eyes and ears of shivering slaves. Each sub-zero gust made the ropes blow this way and that. Fritz couldn’t tell if it was the weather or the Gestapo’s list of saboteurs that was wrenching the sobs from frozen lungs.

When the first number was announced, Horse Face grabbed the doomed prisoner from his place in line, cinched his wrists behind his back, then hauled him to the gallows beside the wretch suspended from the
Pfahl
post.

“It was a scrap of leather!” the condemned man shouted. “I didn’t do anything wrong. I took it to make a belt. I’ve lost too much weight! My trousers won’t stay up!”

The trembling man faltered and crumpled to his knees. Horse Face kicked him, caving in his ribs. The next kick smashed in the slave’s face. The
Lagerältester
yanked him onto a stool beneath one of the ropes and slipped the noose around the groaning man’s neck.

Horse Face mumbled as he kicked away the stool.

Slow strangulation was the Gestapo specialty, so they made sure the drop wasn’t long enough to snap the cervical vertebra. Instead, the man was left to strangle by his own weight.

Twelve saboteurs were hanged that winter morning. Two gallows’ full. Finally, the
Lagerführer
called out,
“Fertig!”
That marked the end of that punishment and time for work, punishment of another kind.

Thousands of slaves from the square were herded out through the concentration camp’s gate to march the quarter mile to the mountain tunnels. Those who were snitched on that day by the Gestapo’s spies would end up hanging on the gallows at roll call the next morning.

Streicher had consulted his watch. It was almost six a.m. “Fritz, Hans, hungry? Time for a hot breakfast.”

As Fritz had turned to walk away that winter morning, he’d glanced back over his shoulder. Snow had turned those who had dropped during
Stillstehen
into heaps of white ice. The same had happened to the first six saboteurs, who’d been cut down from the gallows and discarded on the paving stones. The six who were still hanging from their nooses twirled with the gusts of wind that blew across the quadrangle. The snowdrift at the bottom of the
Pfahl
post was red with blood that had dripped from the would-be escapee’s gashes. No longer moving, he’d frozen to death.

If Fritz listened hard enough, he could still hear him scream.