“They will be exterminated,” the Graf said. “Men, women, and children.”
“My God!”
“On arrival at the camps,” the Graf went on unemotionally, “a medical doctor—sometimes an SS medical officer, but as often as not an Army doctor—will make a cursory examination to determine which prisoners are fit for labor. They are segregated from the others. Since there is no point in feeding anyone who cannot contribute his or her labor to the State, the unfit prisoners and the children are immediately exterminated.”
“The children too?” Peter asked softly.
The Graf ignored him and went on: “At one time—and today in the East—extermination was accomplished by having the prisoners dig a mass grave. Then they were—are—forced to kneel at its edge. When they received a pistol shot to the back of the head, their bodies fell into the grave.
“But German science has been applied to the problem. German efficiency. In the Dachau and Auschwitz camps, extermination has been modernized. Those to be exterminated are stripped of their clothing and herded into rooms marked ‘Shower Baths.’ The doors are then locked and a poison gas—it’s called Zyklon-B—is introduced by way of the showerheads. As many as a hundred and fifty people can be exterminated in fifteen minutes.
“The gas is then evacuated, and other prisoners are sent in to remove gold teeth fillings from the mouths of the corpses, and to shear the women’s hair. This is used primarily to stuff mattresses, but sometimes to make wigs.”
“Oh, my God!” Peter said.
“And then the corpses are taken to furnaces specially designed for the purpose and incinerated.”
“Poppa, you’re sure of this?”
“Of course I’m sure. And it cannot be argued that the blood is only on the hands of the Nazis, Hansel. It is on the hands of the army. We put the Austrian Corporal in power.”
“But how could you have known?”
“We didn’t want to know, Hansel. That’s our guilt.” He looked at his son. “Whenever I waver in what I now know is my duty, Hansel, I think of children being led to the slaughter.”
[TWO]
Recuperation Hospital No. 3
Munich, Germany
1015 16 May 1943
Starting at breakfast in the Hotel Vier Jahrseitzen, where they had spent the night, and continuing in the Horch as they drove to the Munich suburb of Grünwald, Generalleutnant Karl Friedrich Graf von Wachtstein delivered to Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein a detailed briefing concerning what he could expect to find at Recuperation Hospital No.3.
The briefing contained as many details as an operations order for a regimental assault on an enemy fortress, and was very much in character for Peter’s father, a reflection of his many years as a planning and operations officer of the General Staff Corps. Minute details are the stock-in-trade of a planning and operations officer; nothing that can possibly be included in an operations order is ever omitted.
Peter had a hard time restraining a smile.
The Graf began with a description of the terrain, informing Peter—quite unnecessarily; he had been to Grünwald before—that Grünwald was an upper-class suburb of Munich, much as Zehlendorf was of Berlin. “It contains a large number of substantial villas,” the Graf pronounced, “most of them built before the First World War by successful businessmen and merchants of Munich, and a number built in the late 1930s for actors, writers, producers, and the like—people connected with the motion picture studios, which were built at the same time.”
Peter knew that, too. There was a small hotel on Oberhachingerstrasse in Grünwald, called “The Owl,” where young women connected with the movie business could be found. Many of them were as fascinated with Luftwaffe fighter pilots as were the girls in the bars of the Hotels Adlon and am Zoo in Berlin, and as willing to hop into their beds.
Peter had not infrequently arranged to be “forced to land for necessary repairs” at Munich late enough in the day that the “repairs” to his aircraft would require a night in Munich.
“When recuperation hospitals became necessary to care for officers whose condition did not require all the facilities of a general hospital,” the Graf went on, “private homes with adequate space were requisitioned—those that were not needed to house other military facilities, and were located where the patients would not be visible to the public….”
Nobody wants to look at mutilated cripples, right? There’s nothing very glamorous about those kinds of heroes, right?
“…Schloss Wachtstein and similar large houses on estates met those criteria, and so did the some of the larger villas of Grünwald.”
There were at least three hundred “recuperating” patients at Schloss Wachtstein—all of them enlisted men, and most of them horribly mutilated and disfigured.
What does that mean? Is that another manifestation of “rank hath its privileges”? Crippled enlisted men are sent to spartan accommodations in an old castle in the country, and officers to requisitioned villas in Grünwald?
Or is it just that there are so many more torn-up enlisted men than officers?
“How many officers are in…where Claus is?” Peter asked.