Strindberg's Star (36 page)

H
einrich Himmler was personally involved in the Ahnenerbe’s work, particularly when it came to the Aryan people’s art of battle. Among other things, he was interested in the Norse gods’ thunder-weapon Mjöllnir, and therefore he ordered in his bureaucratic style:

When the war began to go badly, Himmler was forced to decrease the activity of the Ahnenerbe. The Führer claimed that the country’s resources now had to be concentrated on what was truly important. Himmler consoled himself with the fact that at least this included RuSHA, the Race and Settlement Office.

But the race researchers had gotten stuck by this point. The invasion of the Soviet Union had upended all their theories.

In the well-organized race registry there was no room for the myriad new names. Who had heard of Chuvashes, Mordvins, and Tungus? Who knew which of all these peoples were Jews? Maybe all of them were Aryans? The German officials had no answers.

The question was complicated further because no one could scientifically distinguish between the Jews of their own country from those who were considered Aryans. One unfortunate study had revealed that one in ten Jews in Germany, for example, had such Aryan characteristics as blue eyes and fair hair.

They were forced to realize that only a small number of people matched the formulaic description of the truly Jewish:

Because the selection of people that fit these criteria was so tiny, they were on a desperate hunt for more measurable differences.

The German officials scrutinized cranial sutures, calf muscles, heart rhythms, fingerprints, and blood types—but found no differences at all. Desperate, they then switched to an examination of the Jews’ body odor and earwax, but no matter how they went over and over it, the results were always just as scant.

T
hat was when the thought of creating a special reference collection consisting solely of Jewish skeletons arose. The victims were chosen from the concentration camp Natzweiler-Struthof, and the executions would be done tidily. No parts of the skeleton could be harmed, because that would destroy the scientific worth of the collection. The corpses were shipped by truck to a newly built laboratory, where they were placed in storage tanks filled with alcohol.

In this case, there was a problem that the officials had trouble solving: How would they remove the flesh from the skeletons without leaving unnecessary marks and traces on the surface of the bone?

The first thing they tried was dissolving the muscles away with the help of chemicals. But that process turned out to be time-consuming, and it caused the skeleton to smell horrible.

The next method involved placing the Jews’ bodies in a number of closed containers. There, colonies of insects could cleanse the corpse of flesh in peace and quiet. But they changed their minds about this too, because having insects in a newly built laboratory was considered neither clean nor proper.

Finally, the officials decided that the best method would be a form of leaching. When the bodies were lowered into a bath of calcium chloride, all the muscles dissolved. After another period of storage in distilled benzene, the last bits of fat and cartilage had melted away.

The reference collection had already been initiated when the laboratory was taken by the Allies, and in the clinical rooms, the soldiers soon found sixteen bodies of young women and men. They were floating around naked in the large tanks, and none of the German officials seemed to have any idea of how the bodies happened to end up there. On fifteen of the corpses, the skin of the left arm had already been cut away, but on the sixteenth was the blurry blue tattoo that revealed where the bodies came from.

E
ven in the final stages of the war, Himmler still had grandiose plans for Wewelsburg. He had become so enamored with Wiligut’s north tower that he saw it as the core of a gigantic, future SS complex.

The project was called
Mittelpunkt der Welt
, the Center of the World. The drawings were already finished, and it was estimated that the construction would take twenty years. It was thought that it would be finished in the midsixties, with an airport and its own hydroelectric dam.

In order to supply the dam with enough water, large portions of the valley around the city of Wewelsburg would be flooded. The population would be forced to relocate—but when the American troops arrived, all of this was put on ice.

In March 1945, the castle was blown up by SS special forces. They didn’t want to leave it in the hands of the Allies, who were only ten or twenty miles away. But no matter how much they tried, the SS men couldn’t get the north tower to budge. Just as Karl Maria Wiligut had said, it was durable, and it wasn’t at all affected by dynamite.

I
mmediately after the war, the political elite of Wewelsburg declared that the castle was to be considered a war monument. It was carefully
renovated into a museum that concentrated on the years before 1933.

The castle’s affairs were handled by a locally established foundation that met once a month in the management office of the large bank building. From its picture window, you can see Wiligut’s north tower, if you ever happen to be passing by.

T
he vibrations from the taxi’s spinning tires spread up through the seat under him. And even if Don tried to hold his legs still, the cardboard box on his lap began to tremble, if only slightly. The box weighed next to nothing. Under its tied-down lid there was only loosely packed cotton and Strindberg’s white star, which was forged of such amazingly featherlight material.

H
e had followed all of Hex’s instructions. She had taken over from a distance of seven hundred miles. Yet Don now wondered whether it had been a particularly bright idea.

The message the Germans had left had been short, and it most resembled a polite invitation:

“Our star for your friend, Alter Hof in Wewelsburg, Wednesday at noon.”

But the friendly German tone had insincere overtones, because the
person who’d left the message had been well on his way to copying and then burning out Hex’s server.

When his sister had finally managed to regain control of her computer, she sent the harmful code to one of her online friends, who had a central post in the NSA’s cyber-security unit in Maryland in the United States.

The friend had thought that the design of the code was interesting in and of itself and had promised to contact her when he had more answers. At the same time, he didn’t know how much he was actually allowed to say, because even at first glance he could see traces of its being manufactured by a familiar, and friendly, German intelligence agency.

Hex had been able to save most of the valuable data on her server, including her access to Green Cargo’s logistics system. The freight car was already on its way out of Ieper Vrachtterminal. To be safe, she had also changed its numerical designation through several hours of simple but patience-trying work in a sadly outdated administrative routine file. The car would arrive in Mechelen later that evening.

B
ut anyway, Don was sitting by himself, vibrating gently in the ivory-colored taxi on his way down the Autobahn toward a city he never thought he would have the strength to return to.

When he first saw the loathsome name, he had thought Hex was joking.

But she had been furious and said that this was no fucking joke. Now she would have to change all the addresses and rearrange her whole computer system. And if he was planning on traveling to Wewelsburg and relying on the goodwill of the Germans, that was the most idiotic idea she had ever heard.

At first she hadn’t bothered to give him an answer when he tried to explain to her that he couldn’t desert the attorney, and that maybe it would be best for everyone if the star ended up in the right hands.
For several hours, his computer had been dark and quiet, but then she had suddenly returned with a simple proposition.

D
on carefully adjusted the box and hoped that the last bit of road into Wewelsburg from Salzkotten wouldn’t be quite as full of potholes as he remembered it. He didn’t see himself as a particularly malevolent person, but his sister had always had good powers of persuasion, especially when she was enraged. And she had certainly been in a terrible mood when she sent her detailed instructions.

“Blut und Boden,”
came a voice from the front seat.

The bloodshot eyes, which were visible in the rearview mirror, belonged to the taxi driver from the night journey to Saint Charles de Potyze. Don had called the number on the business card he’d received outside the cemetery on that night when it had rained so hard.

Right now he couldn’t really remember what he’d been thinking; presumably he had wanted to have a familiar face along the way into Germany. How he had managed to repress the Belgian’s horrible driving was more difficult to understand.

“Blood and earth,” said the driver again. “Into the heart of the beast.”

It had really been a bad idea to call that number on the card.

“Family here in Westphalia?” asked the driver.

“Not very likely,” said Don, looking out through the dirt-striped side window.

T
he dull clouds hung low over Wewelsburg, but it hadn’t yet begun to rain. The small city was as he remembered it. First, scattered brick houses in 1950s style, where the destruction had been worst. Then the taxi continued into the rustic center, with timber-frame walls and medieval buildings that hadn’t been hit as hard by the Allied bombings.

It was an area that paid tribute to peasants and folklore, and
some of the low houses looked as if they had been plucked from a story from the Grimm brothers.

Alter Hof was a restaurant with rustic tables out on Wewelsburg’s city hall square, where an abnormally tall bank facade completely dominated the view. Beyond its roof, up on the lime cliff, Don could glimpse the flat upper part of the castle’s ailing north tower.

Twining ivy ran along the wavy glass in the restaurant windows, and the tables in the outdoor seating area gaped, half empty. The small group of young men in military jackets and shaved heads truly stuck out.

They didn’t look like typical neo-Nazis, Don thought, as the taxi swung in toward the square. They had earpieces in their ears, and one of them was holding something black that could be a weapon, or perhaps more likely a communication instrument.

It seemed as though his arrival was expected, because some of the men got up. One of them had a pointed head, and another one had the rugged body of a wrestler. But he could see no sign of attorney Eva Strand.

T
he taxi driver pulled the hand brake and turned around. He had parked in the middle of the open square, quite a distance from the restaurant, as Don had instructed.

“Start the car again,” Don mumbled quickly. “Keep the motor running, from now on.”

The taxi driver rolled his eyes, and then he turned the key in the ignition again.

“So, I’m going to deliver this,” said Don, nodding at the cardboard box in his lap. “When my friend has shut the back door, you should already be rolling out of here. Then you drive to Mechelen, as fast as this car can handle.”

The driver didn’t look particularly inspired. Still, he let the motor idle, rumbling, and he even gave it a little bit of gas.

T
hrough the window of the car, Don could see that all of the men were now standing. One of their dark green backs disappeared into the Alter Hof restaurant.

After a short time, a young woman popped up in the door and looked over toward the rumbling taxi. She had ordinary clothes on, but under her jacket was a glimpse of a holster that had been fastened onto her small body.

She nodded toward the wrestler, but it wasn’t until she had begun to move toward the taxi, by herself, that Don thought of the movements of the shadow across the brick facade of Hotel Langemark.

H
e carefully placed the tied-up cardboard box on the seat beside him, opened the car door, and climbed out onto the cobblestones. There was a scent of spicy sausage and grilled meat on the square, interspersed with the smell of flowing beer.

The woman smiled at him, but Don held up one hand as a signal that she had come close enough. She stopped about thirty feet away from the taxi, but her smile—that was still there.

“Where’s the attorney?” Don asked.

“I’m sorry for all this trouble …” the woman began, in English with a faint Italian accent.

“Yeah, yeah,” Don interrupted. “Where is Eva? I want you to bring her out here right away.”

The woman cupped her hand over her soft lips and whispered something up toward her earpiece. Don looked over toward the restaurant, where the taxi was visible in the wavy glass of the windows.

I
n the freight car in Ypres, the city hall square had sounded like a safe place to hand over the star: an open place, where there ought to be lots of people moving about at noon on a weekday. But now that Don was actually standing here, leaning against the ivory-colored body of the taxi, it didn’t feel good at all.