The Auslander (15 page)

She was taunting him now.

Peter was almost too frightened to think. But somewhere in his head he managed to string some words together. ‘This . . . just look at it. It's experiments. It looks like experiments on human beings . . .'

She stopped for a second. ‘I don't care what it is. You, especially, are not allowed to look at it. You are a spy. You should be shot. And to think, we took you into our home and treated you like a brother.'

But for Peter, anger was taking the place of fear. ‘Elsbeth, you trained as a nurse. Look at this. You know it's wrong.'

‘It is not my place to look at secret information.'

‘Look,' said Peter. ‘Tell me what this is about.'

He read out the foreword to the report:

The General Commissioner of the Führer, SS Brigadeführer Professor Dr Brandt, has approached me with the request to help him obtain prisoners to be used in connection with his research on the causes of Epidemic Jaundice which has been furthered to a large degree by his efforts. In order to enlarge our knowledge, so far based only on inoculation of animals with germs taken from human beings, it would not be necessary to reverse the procedure and inoculate human beings with germs cultivated in animals. Casualties must be anticipated . . .

He looked up at her. The malice had gone from her face. For a moment she seemed lost for words. Then they came tumbling out. ‘It's none of our business. Whatever it is is for the good of Germany. It will be to keep our soldiers alive. I don't care if they kill
Untermenschen
, they can kill a thousand
Untermenschen
if it saves the life of a single German soldier . . .' but she began to cry when she said it.

Tears flowed down her face and, leaning against the wall, she slid to the floor. Peter was flabbergasted. What was he supposed to do now? He stood there for a minute while she sobbed to herself. Then he said, ‘We should go out of here,' and walked towards the door.

She began to compose herself, and wiped the tears away. ‘No. Let me see,' she said. She moved over to the desk and swiftly leafed through the report. After a minute she said, ‘It's a medical experiment. They're infecting the prisoners at Sachsenhausen with jaundice. Then they're seeing whether their blood group and racial type have any bearing on the progress of the disease. It's the sort of thing pharmaceutical companies do with animals when they test new vaccines, new drugs. Instead they're testing directly on humans. That's why Vater has the report. To see if different races have a greater or lesser resistance to pathogens.'

She had never talked to him like this before. Peter started to wonder if she was still going to betray him.

‘My God, look at this,' Elsbeth said, as she carefully picked up papers from another open file. Peter stood next to her, hardly daring to breathe, as she swiftly read the first page. Then she picked up a form with a photograph attached of a dishevelled, dark-haired young man, staring mournfully into the camera.

‘This is Doktor Magnussen's project,' said Elsbeth. ‘I've met her – she works with Vater at the Institute. She's trying to discover if there's a link between race and the patterns of the iris.'

Peter looked puzzled.

‘The iris, dummkopf,' she said, pointing at her eye. ‘So they are sending her eyeballs from one of the camps. This young man, he's Sinti – they're one sort of gypsy. This is the form that came with the eyes. They probably killed him just after they took the picture. I dare say they're sending Frau Doktor eyeballs from Jews, Slavs and Russians. And some Germans, too, who have come to the attention of the Gestapo. I cannot bear to look any more,' she said.

She put the papers back on the desk and walked out. Peter rushed over, hurriedly trying to put the desk back exactly as he had found it.

While she fussed in the kitchen, Peter said, ‘I thought you were all out. The door was double-locked.'

‘I do that sometimes, when I'm here on my own. I don't feel safe unless the door is secure.'

They sat together in the living room, drinking coffee. Peter wondered if she might still tell her father. But she had looked. She had become his accomplice. She was guilty too.

‘I wonder how much the Führer knows of these medical experiments,' she said. Then she corrected herself. ‘No. I can no longer pretend. I'm sure the Führer knows. What I do not understand is how something so good and right for Germany could turn into something that has become so misguided. I remember, when I was a small child . . . before you were born, how awful it was to be in this country. We were always hungry. My grandparents' life savings couldn't buy a loaf of bread. There was fighting on the streets. And the Führer came and saved us from all that . . .'

All of this trotted out in a flat monotone. Face blank. No eye contact. Peter wondered what had turned her into such an empty shell.

.

CHAPTER 26

‘I did everything right,' said Elsbeth, sitting back in the armchair with her eyes closed. She lit a cigarette and blew plumes of smoke up to the ceiling.

‘I was the perfect National Socialist.
Jungmädel
at eight. Group leader in the
Bund Deutscher Mädel
at fourteen. I was chosen from our squad to meet the Führer. He looked right into my eyes and I swore then I would dedicate my life to Germany. I even tried to give the Führer a baby when I met a young SS officer. I knew Mutter would understand and arrange a place for me in one of the
Lebensborn
hostels.

‘But the baby didn't happen so I enrolled as a nurse and volunteered for the difficult work – with the incurables, the feeble-minded, the cripples. Someone has to do it and I felt I was serving our country.

‘They told us we were to report every child up to the age of three who wasn't right.They got taken away from the hospital to a “specialist centre”. They came to collect them in a big old van with all the windows blacked out. We told the parents they would be better looked after there.

‘It was whispered among the staff that they were put to sleep, like sick animals. Morphine. Veronal. Luminal. The right amount of one of those would do the job quick enough. “Mercy deaths” they call them. I was shocked when I first heard about it.'

Peter watched as she stubbed her cigarette out in the ashtray, then got up to tip it in the bin. He was astonished that she was talking to him like this.

‘But then, after some reflection, I thought it made sense,' she said, returning to her chair. ‘“For the good of the Fatherland”, that was the term we used. These children, they were “life unworthy of life” or “the useless eaters”. I trotted out all that when Doktor Knodel asked me about it. He was one of the doctors at the specialist centres we sent them to. He came to the hospital sometimes, to see the patients first-hand. He must have liked my attitude because he asked if I would come to work with him in Brandenburg.

‘He said that because of the sensitive nature of their work, they were looking for staff who were capable of great discretion.

‘So I said I would go. Vater had told me so much about his work and how Racial Science was at the centre of the Nazi revolution. I remember the little speech he gave me, almost word for word. “Imagine a world without illness, or weakness. A world without misery. That is what we can create now the Nazis are in power.” Wouldn't you do it, Peter? If that's what you thought? He said modern humanist values favour the weak, the worthless. We must return to nature's way and weed out the inferior, that nature's tools no longer do this in the modern world. So we must do it with our political will.'

Peter said nothing. He tried to keep his face as neutral as possible. He didn't want her to see him looking disgusted and then clam up. He needn't have worried though. She wasn't looking at him. It was as if she were talking to herself. This speech, this monologue, it poured out with so little hesitation, he wondered if she had sat here alone on many other occasions, just talking out loud to herself, running over the same grisly story.

‘So I went over to the other side. Instead of helping select the children who would be sent to the specialist centres, I went to work in the one at Brandenburg. It was an extraordinary place. An old psychiatric hospital surrounded by a high fence and signs saying “Danger of Disease”, to warn off the curious.

‘I became the nurse in the big van with the blacked-out windows. We visited the hospitals of Berlin, and the towns and villages to the west. They used to collect the post, those vans. Now we collected the “useless eaters”. We used to say to ourselves we were turning them into angels. It's amazing, isn't it? How sentimental people can be. Even doing something like that. Not Doktor Knodel, though. He called them “an assemblage of malfunctioning parts”, like they were faulty automobiles fit only for the crusher.'

She lit another cigarette.

‘I coped for a while. My staff nurse told me “Where there is no suffering there can be no pity.” But then I started to doubt that. There's not many who have no sense of where they are. Even the really hopeless ones, the ones who can't talk or feed themselves and wear nappies all the time. Even they like a cuddle. When they're agitated, they'll calm down if you stroke their hair. And the scenes at some of the asylums, when we'd come and take them away . . . Some of them thought they were going on an outing! They were so excited. But others, they had to be prised away from their helpers. There'd be tears, screaming, hysterics. As I had done, some of the nurses knew exactly what was happening and they'd hiss “Murderers” at us. We were supposed to report them, but I didn't see the sense in that. They weren't betraying the Fatherland. I just thought they were too ignorant to appreciate the value of the work we were doing.

‘We tried to keep it a secret but then people started to find out. We took so many of them to Brandenburg there were bound to be slip-ups. “Disinfected”, that's what we used to call it. They'd been “disinfected”.'

She spat out the word, sickened by her own callousness.

‘People got careless. Some of the parents were told their children had died of measles, when they'd had that illness years before. Well, no one gets measles twice, so you can imagine the stir that caused. Or we'd say some died of a burst appendix, but they'd already had it taken out. We always cremated them as soon as they'd been “disinfected”. That saved a lot of bother. No chance of an autopsy then.'

She gave a mirthless laugh.

Peter, no longer able to conceal his feelings, was shaking his head in utter disbelief. ‘So what happened when people complained?' he asked.

‘If it was just the parents, we could handle them. We'd say there were many patients under our care, and regrettably, very infrequently, mistakes were made. If they persisted, we'd remind them that the Fatherland was at war and our medical resources were stretched to the limit providing for our wounded soldiers. That worked in most cases. But the more persistent would bring in lawyers or priests or other professional busybodies.'

Peter, who had been listening to every word with an appalled fascination, began to lose concentration. It was just too much to take in. He turned to gaze out of the window.

‘I cannot be boring you, surely, with this sorry tale?' she said.

Peter looked back to Elsbeth and shook his head. He was too dumbfounded to actually speak.

She was determined to finish her story. ‘The Bishops got involved. Sermons were preached from the pulpits. The programme became common knowledge. Word came down from on high to stop, but we'd done much of our work already . . . the job was almost completed.'

She paused. ‘So did you kill them all with the drugs?' Peter blurted out. He was reeling, barely believing what he was hearing.

Again, the mirthless laugh. ‘Heavens, no,' said Elsbeth. ‘That would have taken for ever. We gassed them. They turned a shower room into a gas chamber. All black and white tiles. Instead of water, gas came out of the shower heads. Much quicker, and you could do a group of them at once.

‘They'd come off the bus, and we'd take them one at a time into an examining room. They'd get undressed and the doctor there would make sure we'd got the right ones. Then, if they had any gold teeth or gold bridgework, he'd mark them with a little cross between the shoulders. Then we'd stamp a number on their hand – with one of those date stampers you see in libraries – and then they'd have their photo taken.

‘All this seemed to calm them down. They'd have no idea what was going to happen next. Then we'd tell them they were going for a shower. Ten minutes later they'd be dead. The stokers – that's what they called the staff who dragged them out – they'd go in and take them to the death room. They'd take the teeth and sometimes the brains and other organs. They got put in clear glass jars, to send to Vater's office or another of the Racial Science Institutes. I can never see those glass storage jars in the kitchen without thinking of brains . . .

‘Then the bodies went off to the ovens and that was it. Not a trace. They used the ash for fertiliser, although some of it was kept for the urns. Once they'd been informed, most of the relatives wanted an urn full of ashes. Too bad they never got the right ones.'

‘Have you told anyone else about this?' said Peter.

She waved a hand dismissively. ‘When I came back home, I talked to Mutter and Vater. I tried to explain why I couldn't do it any more. They didn't want to know. “It is not cruel,” Mutter said. “Your work has a solid basis in scientific fact. You should develop a detachment from these petty moral judgements.”

‘Vater had been especially proud to have a daughter in the
T-4 Aktion
. That's what they called the programme. It was an open secret among his colleagues that his daughter was part of it, and it embarrassed him terribly when I stopped.

‘Vater and Mutter made me feel like a failure. That's why they wouldn't help me get a decent job here. That's why I work for the post office with all the dunderheads and the drudges.'

‘So why did you stop?' said Peter. ‘What made you leave?'

‘It was the mental patients,' she said and lit another cigarette. ‘The schizophrenics, the shell-shocked soldiers. A lot of them arrived with suitcases, and one of my jobs, it was sorting through their personal possessions. The watches, the brooches and bracelets, the combs and hairbrushes. These were people – ordinary everyday people who cared about their appearance. Some of them had rosary beads. Or a little teddy bear or doll they'd kept since childhood.'

She started to cry silently, tears trickling down her face.

‘Then I started to think about the people who might have given them these things as presents. Doktor Knodel, he used to say the schizophrenics were empty shells. That there was nothing there. But I could see that wasn't true from what they'd brought to the hospital. That was it. I had to stop.

‘And the funny thing was, they understood. Knodel didn't try to dissuade me. He just thanked me for performing a valuable service for the National Community.'

Peter felt repulsed. She came over and sat down next to him. She put her hand on his arm. ‘Thank you, Peter,' she said. ‘For listening to me. I had to talk to someone. Someone who wouldn't report me. Wouldn't admonish me for being weak. Sometimes I wish it had been me who died instead of them.'

Peter couldn't help himself. Rage boiled up inside him. He shook her hand away. ‘Elsbeth, how can you live with yourself?' He was red-faced with anger. ‘You trained as a nurse. You're supposed to look after people. What sort of world is it where the nurses go around killing the patients?'

She was angry now. ‘At least we killed them quickly and quietly. In Poland I heard they just got the SS in to shoot them. At least we didn't do
that
.'

Her icy calm returned. The tears from earlier were not coming back. The scorn returned to her voice. ‘You are right, Peter. I am a monster. And I do find it difficult to live with myself. Now this shall remain between you and me, or Vater shall hear about your trespassing.'

She left the room. Peter sat in stunned silence. He regretted getting angry with her, but he couldn't help it. Her story was vile beyond words. For now, though, they were co-conspirators. He had done something unforgivable in the Kaltenbach household and she was going to keep it secret. He wondered for how long.

A few minutes later he heard footsteps in the hall and then the front door slam. She had gone out. When she came back later that day, it was as if nothing had been said between them.