The Death's Head Chess Club (22 page)

Bär shifted in his chair, his discomfort at the senior officer's words only too evident.

‘Don't pretend to be so shocked,' Höss continued. ‘It's hardly heresy – one sees these kinds of ideas expressed almost every week in the
Schwarze Korps
.
²
In my opinion, what Hauptsturmführer Meissner is doing should be applauded as a bold experiment designed to challenge complacency within the SS and at the same time expose the very real danger posed by the Jews, who will take advantage of any weakness they perceive on our part. With the Jew taking full advantage of his natural slyness, it is working exactly as one would expect, and should continue to its natural conclusion.'

‘Which will be?' the Kommandant asked.

‘The defeat of the Jew at the hands of the SS, of course. But only when we begin to take him seriously.'

There was no mistaking the look Bär gave Meissner:
This had better work
. ‘Very well,' he said. ‘But from now on, Meissner, it will be your responsibility to make sure our men do not underestimate the cunning of their opponent.'

‘That should hardly be necessary,' Höss observed.

‘No, sir,' Bär replied, ‘but if it's all the same to you, I would prefer to leave nothing to chance.'

1
Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei – National Socialist German Workers Party – the full name of the Nazi Party.

2
The official newspaper of the SS.

27.

T
HE
E
NGLISH
O
PENING

June 1944
Cologne

The rail lines running west from Kraków had been repaired, so Meissner was at last able to go home on leave. He had written to his parents to let them know he was coming, but they hadn't replied; indeed, it was over a month since he had last heard from them, but he wasn't unduly worried: Allied bombing was still severely disrupting all but the most urgent communication throughout Germany.

The devastation that met him in Cologne shocked him to his core: as a living organism, the city had all but ceased to exist. He was used to the carnage of battle, but this was different: it was his home, the place that had nurtured his hopes and dreams. For as far as he could see, apart from the cathedral, all that remained of the city was rubble and the skeletons of buildings gutted by fire that had fallen from the sky in an avenging hail. It was only eight years since he had left to go to university. Then it had been a bustling metropolis of over three-quarters of a million inhabitants; now it was a ghost-town, reeking of the stench of a dead city: escaping gas, smoke and exposed sewers.

His childhood home on Friedrichstrasse was a charred ruin. Of his parents and his fiancée there was no sign. He knew he should have been frantic for news of them, but the sheer scale of the desolation overwhelmed
him, numbing his emotions. They could not have survived.

The Reich records bureau had no information, and all he could discover from the civilian defence centre was that the area had been hit by incendiary bombs about six weeks earlier. Now all that remained was the blackened form of the cathedral with its twin spires still reaching upwards to Heaven, miraculously preserved in the very midst of the inferno as if by the will of God Himself.

Meissner stood on the cathedral steps and watched a small number of people as they straggled in for Sunday Mass. The world had become incomprehensible to him. What kind of faith, he wondered, could draw people to this place on such a day: the desperate devotion of those who prayed for salvation before they too were consumed by fire, or the hubris of those who could not believe that they were deserving of God's wrath and who begged fervently for Him to send this rain of destruction elsewhere? And what had happened to his own faith? Was it lost, or simply hiding? The Lord knew he had seen enough for it to shrink to nothingness: the horrors of the Eastern Front and Auschwitz were more than any man should be asked to witness. But to see hell visited upon his own home, on his own family – that was too much to bear. He knew should have been feeling grief, anger, sorrow, fury, but the truth was he felt nothing. He was empty.

The only certainty was that nothing remained for him there.

He took a last drag on his cigarette and flicked it to the ground before turning his back on the cathedral doors.

Meissner had been ordered to report to the WVHA, the SS economic and administrative HQ, on his way back from leave, to give a first-hand report to Glücks on the status of the armaments factories within the Auschwitz
sphere of control. It was the last thing he felt like doing. After the devastation he had just witnessed, it seemed pointless.

There was a tension within the higher echelons of the SS, with the RSHA
¹
and its fixer, Eichmann, set on the extermination of as many Jews as possible, and the WVHA wanting workers for its slave factories. The war situation was becoming increasingly desperate, but nobody seemed willing to make a decision as to which of these contradictory demands should take precedence. Of all the actors in the drama, Meissner understood least the role of Höss. In the WVHA he was second in authority only to Glücks, yet he was carrying out the mandate of the RSHA with quiet yet unstoppable efficiency.

There were no trains to be had to Berlin, but Meissner managed to hitch a ride to Potsdam with two SS officers. They were both SIPO
²
officials and besieged the Waffen-SS man with questions about his experiences on the Eastern front and in Auschwitz.

‘I intended to go to the east myself, to serve in the Einsatzgrüppen,'
³
one of the SIPO men confided, ‘but I was told the quota for this region was already full. Then we began to hear the stories of how the work was affecting the men who did go – how they had to be plied with drink in order to carry on and how many were driven to suicide. I was glad in a way that I was spared all that.'

‘That's why the extermination camps were set up,' the other added. ‘To find a cleaner way of eliminating the Jews.'

‘And it seems to have worked,' the first one said. ‘Look at you – being in Auschwitz doesn't seem to have done you much harm.'

‘I'm not involved in the liquidations,' Meissner replied, trying to keep his tone neutral. The SIPO was notorious for finding dissent and sedition in the most unlikely places, even among war heroes. ‘I'm based at the main work camp. My responsibility is to keep the armaments factories running, so you could say I am more interested in keeping Jews alive than in killing them.'

‘Does that not bring you into conflict with your fellow officers?'

Meissner frowned. ‘Yes, from time to time.'

‘And how do you deal with it?'

‘I tell them I'm following orders, same as they are.'

From Potsdam he got a train into the centre of Berlin, and from there begged a ride with the daily courier between SS headquarters and the WVHA offices in Oranienburg.

Gruppenführer Glücks seemed less interested in the state of the slave factories than he was in the performance of Obersturmbannführer Höss. Meissner sensed the Gruppenführer disliked his deputy and wanted information that would undermine him. It was not an intrigue in which Meissner wanted to become embroiled, and he kept his answers short and evasive. He knew it would not commend him to the head of the concentration camps but, as he saw it, unless a miracle happened to save Germany from total defeat, this was hardly something he needed to worry about.

The final leg of Meissner's journey back to Kraków found him alone in a train compartment. He had had plenty of time since leaving Cologne to reflect on where his fate had led him. The Nazis had lied. The whole edifice was built on lies. Mentally he ticked off the lies of which he had personal
evidence: the Bolsheviks were sub-humans who would be defeated easily; no enemy bombs would fall on German cities; Germany would never be asked to fight on two fronts again. And then, there were the Jews. How many lies had been told about them? They were beyond counting. And he had swallowed those lies, all of them. What did that make him? A fool or an accomplice – or both?

In Berlin he had obtained writing materials and, using his valise as a table, he started to compose a letter that he hoped would help him make his escape.

Abteilung 1
Konzentrationslager Auschwitz
30 June 1944

Dear Peter,

It seems an age since we faced the Ivans together at Voronezh, but it's actually been less than a year. Hard to believe, I know. Do you remember how we said we would laugh in the teeth of death? That was a lifetime ago. Duty in the K-Z is much less dramatic than fighting in the front line, but it has to be done. The amount of material we are able to contribute to the war effort is quite staggering. The workshops for which I am responsible produce thousands of steel helmets, bullets and shells every week – imagine how you would fare without them – and I am told that the first production of synthetic oil in the Buna
Werke
here at Auschwitz is only weeks off. Your Panzers will need that oil, so don't be too quick to look down your nose at me, even if all I have become is a glorified factory manager.

I have to confess I have not found life easy in Auschwitz. Most of the officers in the Totenkopfverbände look down on the Waffen-SS as
brainless apes who can hold a rifle, but not much else. The way they see things, theirs is the more difficult and more important task. They have been entrusted with the struggle against the eternal enemy of Germany, even though they can't fight back. I'm talking about the Jews, of course. When you're facing a squadron of enemy tanks, everything is simple. It's a case of kill or be killed. The Ivans know that as well as we do – no quarter expected, and none given. When we were indoctrinated in officer training, I accepted what we were told about the danger posed by the Jews, but I never dreamed it would come to what I have witnessed here. Do not doubt me when I tell you that thousands of Jews – men, women and even children – are killed every day. There is no let-up in the slaughter.

I tell myself that I am fortunate. I am not in the camp where the killing is done and I am not involved in this brutality. In fact, I am quite insulated from it. But that does not absolve me from the guilt in which I must share because I am here and do nothing to prevent it. I tell myself that it would be futile – what would I achieve other than getting myself shot by the Gestapo? But the little rats' teeth of remorse are gnawing at me without mercy. The absurdity of it came to me recently. I got a lift from a couple of SIPO men and I told them that because I was involved in armament production I wanted to see Jews spared for work in the factories, not killed as soon as they arrive. That's what my life has come to – an SS officer in a death camp who is trying to keep the prisoners alive when everybody else wants them dead. Behind my back it is being said that I am a Jew-lover.

I must get away before I become like the rest of them. My honour is all that is left to me now. I have just returned from Cologne. Mother and Father and Maria were killed in an air raid. Do you think there is
any way in which I could return to the regiment? At least then I could hope to be killed in action.

The compartment door was pulled open. A railway conductor stood in the opening, a hand extended for Meissner's ticket. The SS man turned over the page so the conductor would not see what he had written before reaching into his breast pocket for his travel authorization. The conductor gave it no more than a cursory glance before clipping its edge and passing it back with an apology for disturbing the Hauptsturmführer.

When the man had gone, Meissner read the pages through. With a shake of his head he tore them up. Everything was wrong. All except one thing. He must find a way to escape.

1962
Kerk de Krijtberg, Amsterdam

Emil awoke not remembering where he was. It took a few moments to orientate himself. His room was unlike anywhere he had ever stayed before. It was furnished simply, with a narrow bed, a wardrobe, some drawers, a writing table and chair, and in a corner, a prie-dieu with a crucifix affixed to the wall above it. Emil knew of the Catholic devotion to the cross, but still, its presence in the room unsettled him: the suffering Saviour with His promise of redemption among whose last words were, ‘
Father forgive them, for they know not what they do
.' Every time the cross caught his eye, it brought those words back to him. After a moment or two, he could not stop himself from glancing in its direction every few minutes, as if daring it to utter the words aloud.

It is not the Jewish way to kneel to pray, but Emil did so now, lowering himself onto the prie-dieu. He was unsure of what shape his prayer
should take. Before his encounter with Meissner in the Leidseplein his life had been simple but certain. He carried the burden of Auschwitz with him everywhere and had become used to its grim companionship. He had long known that the camp was a living, breathing organism, painfully conscious that an outpost of hell had been planted in the fragment of earth on which it stood. The camp was both a victim and a witness: watching, waiting, weeping: keeping a tally of the crimes that were visited within its boundaries, yet powerless to prevent or punish them. It was this certainty that had given direction to Emil's existence for nearly twenty years. It was his duty to bear witness, never to forget, never to forgive. But it had made his life a bitter one, something to be endured, not relished.

Something Meissner had said the other night came back to him now.
But I must hope. Otherwise, I am lost.

It dawned on Emil that
he
was lost. The rules of Auschwitz had blinded him, especially the rule that forbade hope. Even at so great a distance in time, he was unable to tell where he was or see where he was going. His life was meaningless. His devotion to chess had kept him going, but it had become mechanical, something against which he could measure himself, a disguise for the true condition of his soul.

He raised his eyes to the figure on the cross. ‘Is that it?' he mouthed silently. ‘Is that how a Christian prays – by listening?'

The bronze eyes stared sightlessly back at him. Emil shook his head and pushed himself up from the prie-dieu.

He found Meissner in the kitchen. His cheeks were brighter and he seemed a little less frail than the day before.

As Emil took a seat at the table, opposite Meissner, he decided to tell him about his encounter with the crucified Christ. He was not sure
how he expected the priest to respond – perhaps with a discourse on the nature of the redeemer and redemption. After all, Meissner had been a missionary: it was his job to win souls for Christ.

Instead, Paul asked, ‘What was it you wanted when you knelt before the cross?'

Emil was taken aback by the question. ‘What makes you think I wanted anything?'

Meissner smiled. ‘In my experience, prayer is something that most people reserve for times of great need. They stand before God as a supplicant, begging for His intervention.' He sighed. ‘That's not how it works, I'm afraid. Most of the time, the best you can hope for is an insight of some sort – a revelation, I suppose you could say. It seems to me that is what has happened to you. Something has been revealed to you, but it is up to you to decide what to do about it.'

Emil shook his head. ‘I think I was hoping for more than that.'

‘Like what?'