Dr. Müller then showed Maria how to chop ten grams of ginger into small pieces, which were then to be boiled in water and strained. Von Deitzberg was to drink the hot, strained mixture two times a day.
Maria and von Deitzberg were then introduced to the medicinal properties of okra. She was shown how to cut one hundred grams of the vegetable into small pieces, which were then to be boiled down in half a liter of water to make a thin paste. During the boiling process, von Deitzberg was to inhale the fumes from the pot. The boiled-down okra, when swallowed, Dr. Müller said, was certain to relieve von Deitzberg’s throat irritation and to help his dry cough.
And finally came turmeric: Half a teaspoon of fresh turmeric powder was to be mixed in a third of a liter of warm milk, and the mixture drunk twice daily.
This was von Deitzberg’s fourth day of following the herbal routine.
Dr. Müller further counseled von Deitzberg that, in order to keep his strength up, he was to eat heartily, even if he had to force himself to do so.
Von Deitzberg had little appetite from his first meal, and that hadn’t changed much either. The meals were delivered from a nearby restaurant. Breakfast was rolls and coffee. Lunch was a cup of soup and a postre, which was Spanish for “dessert.” Dinner was the only real meal he could force down, and he had trouble with that.
The appetizer was invariably an empanada, a meat-filled pastry. One bite of one of them was invariably quite enough. The first entrée had been a pink-in-the-middle filet of beef accompanied by what the Argentines called papas fritas. The second day had been baked chicken accompanied by mashed potatoes; and the third, a pork chop that came with papas fritas.
None of them seemed, in von Deitzberg’s judgment, to be the sort of thing someone in his delicate condition should be eating. But Dr. Müller’s orders were orders, and von Deitzberg tried hard to obey. He had to get well, and as quickly as possible. He had a great deal of work to do, and the sooner he got at that, the better.
The postres, however, were something else. They immediately reminded von Deitzberg of Demel, the world-famous pastry shop in Vienna to which his grandfather had taken him when he was a boy.
If anything, the pastry chef here in Argentina had used more fresh eggs and more butter and more confectioners’ sugar than even Demel would have used. There of course were very few confectioners’ fresh eggs, hardly any butter, and no confectioners’ sugar at all these days in Berlin, even in the mess of Reichsführer-SS Himmler.
On the first day, von Deitzberg had sent Maria back to the restaurant for an additional postre, and then, on second thought, told her to fetch two. Dr. Müller had told him he had to eat to keep up his strength. Maria had since routinely brought two postres with his lunch, and three for his dinner.
Many were new to him, and they were invariably really delicious. One became his favorite: pineapple slices with vanilla ice cream, the whole covered with chocolate syrup. He sometimes had this for both lunch and dinner.
On two of the four n
ights he had been in the apartment—the first night, he had simply collapsed and slept until von Gradny-Sawz showed up with Dr. Müller the next morning—something occurred that hadn’t happened to him in years: On both nights, following an incredibly realistic erotic dream, he awakened to find he had had an involuntary ejaculation.
His first reaction—annoyance and chagrin—was quickly replaced by what he perceived to be the reason. It was clearly a combination of his condition—whatever gottverdammt bug he had caught on the gottverdammt U-405—and Dr. Müller’s herbal medications to treat it.
And then his mind filled with both the details of the erotic dreams and the facts and memories on which the dreams were obviously based, and he allowed himself to wallow in them.
His carnal partner in the dreams had been Frau Ingeborg von Tresmarck, a tall slim blonde who was perhaps fifteen years younger than her husband—Sturmbannführer Werner von Tresmarck—who was the security officer of the Embassy of the German Reich in Montevideo, Uruguay.
One of the things von Deitzberg thought he would probably have to do while in South America was eliminate Werner von Tresmarck, and possibly Inge as well, as painful as that might be for him in her case.
When the lucrative business of allowing Jews—primarily American Jews, but also some Canadian, English, and even some South American—to secure the release of their relatives by buying them out of the Konzentrationslagern to which they had been sent en route to the ovens—one of the problems had been to find someone to handle things in South America.
In August 1941, shortly after Adolf Hitler had personally promoted Reinhardt Heydrich—Himmler’s Number Two and the Reich Protector of Bohemia-Moravia, as the former Czechoslovakia was now known—to SS-OBERGRUPPENFÜHRER and von Deitzberg—newly appointed first deputy adjutant to Reichsführer-SS Himmler—to obersturmbannführer, von Deitzberg had confided to Heydrich that, although the promotion was satisfying for a number of reasons, it was most satisfying because he really needed the money.
Two days later, Heydrich handed him an envelope containing a great deal of cash.
“You told me a while ago you were having a little trouble keeping your financial head above water,” Heydrich said. “A lot of us have that problem. We work hard, right? We should play hard, right? And to do that, you need the wherewithal, right?”
“Yes, sir,” von Deitzberg said.
“Consider this a confidential allowance,” Heydrich said. “Spend it as you need to. It doesn’t have to be accounted for. It comes from a confidential special fund.”
And a week after that, Heydrich told him the source of the money in the confidential special fund.
“Has the real purpose of the concentration camps ever occurred to you, Manfred?” Heydrich asked.
“You’re talking about the Final Solution?”
“In a sense. The Führer correctly believes that the Jews are a cancer on Germany, and that we have to remove that cancer. You understand that, of course?”
“Of course.”
“The important thing is to take them out of German society. In some instances, we can make them contribute to Germany with their labor. You remember what it says over the gate at Dachau?”