The Karnau Tapes (28 page)

At this point the nocturnal conversation is interrupted by a loud rustle, a disturbance emanating from somewhere near the microphone beneath the bed. What can it be? As soon as it ceases I hear the children talking normally. Then the inexplicable sound is repeated. I stop the turntable and decipher the inscription on the disc: Friday, 27 April. Not a date that affords any clue to the origin of the rustling sound.

I can't bring myself to listen to any more, not for the moment. It's still dark, but a light has now come on in a window across the way. Behind the glowing curtain I can make out the shape of a man slowly, sleepily getting dressed in time to leave before daybreak for the early shift. Silence still reigns, but my head is filled with the six children's voices.

A terrifying possession, these very last recordings of them, for all six died soon afterwards. Not in an air raid, not while escaping, not of debility or malnutrition in the aftermath of war. Before any such fate could befall them, they were killed in the Bunker itself. It must have happened at a time when their murderer could feel sure that I wouldn't catch him in the act. Someone must have timed their murder with care to guard against interruptions, because I hovered in the vicinity of the children's room on the upper level whenever I could spare a moment from my work. Quite instinctively, I felt it essential to keep an eye on them.

The children themselves could not have known about their impending murder, but why didn't I, an adult in regular contact with the other occupants of the Bunker and well placed to overhear them talking together, get wind of those lethal preparations? Although no one betrayed them to me, why didn't I, the sound expert, detect some sign in the voices around me, be it only a faint undertone, a brief hesitation, or a sudden silence — the curtailment of a remark uttered in passing? Hadn't Helga, in the course of a private conversation during those last days in the Bunker, extracted an assurance from me that all present would do their utmost to ensure her own and the others' survival? Who would deliberately have broken such an undertaking?

A certain Dr Kunz was interrogated on 7 May 1945. Kunz, who had a habit of opening his mouth with a jerk and exposing both rows of teeth as if biting the air, testified that the children's mother had asked him on 27 April to help her kill them, and that he had agreed to do so. Between four and five p.m. on Tuesday, 1 May, she called him on the internal phone — all links with the outside world had been cut for some time — and asked him to come to the Bunker. He took no medicines with him, he insisted, fixing his eyes on the interrogation-room's ceiling as if air raids still presented a danger: his medical case contained no pain-killers, not even a sticking plaster. The children's mother then informed him that the time had come. Their father, who appeared some twenty minutes later, said that he would be very grateful if Kunz would help to put the children to sleep. At that moment, said Kunz, whose tie did not hang inert on his chest but swung to and fro in time to the vehement gestures that accompanied his testimony, the Bunker lights began to flicker. For some unaccountable reason this reminded him of early mornings in his childhood, when he would sit at the kitchen table and run his hand over the oilcloth.

The children's father had then disappeared and their mother spent approximately an hour playing patience. Thereafter she took Kunz to her living-quarters, where she produced a hypodermic syringe filled with morphine from a cupboard in the outer room and handed it to him. The syringe and its contents had been given to her by Stumpfecker, said Kunz, keeping both feet flat on the floor as if afraid of losing contact with it. Together, they then entered the children's bedroom, where the six were already in bed but not yet asleep. Their mother addressed them in a low voice: 'Don't be frightened. The doctor here is going to give you a little jab, the kind that all other children and soldiers are getting.'

On that note she left the darkened room and Kunz proceeded to administer the injections in descending order of age. Helga, Hilde, Helmut, Holde, Hedda, Heide — all received a 0.5 cc shot in the lower arm to make them drowsy. Kunz particularly recalled the softness of their skin. After completing this task, which took him between eight and ten minutes, he rejoined the children's mother and waited with her for another ten minutes to allow them to go to sleep undisturbed. He looked at his watch: eight-forty p.m. They then re-entered the bedroom, where the mother took some five minutes to insert a crushed ampoule of cyanide in the mouth of each sleeping child. 'There,' Kunz recalled her saying, 'all over.'

Again the record makes that rustling sound. Of course! It's paper, wrapping paper — the bar of chocolate Helga was going to give Hedda for her birthday on 5 May. Helga had asked me to get her some chocolate, and I'd managed, behind the diet cook's back, to purloin a bar from her well-stocked store cupboard — a perilous undertaking, given that stealing food was an offence punishable by summary execution: no trial, just a bullet in the head. Would that have applied to a child, too, I wonder. Helga needed a hiding-place, so she must have concealed the present under her mattress and checked on it at night, when the lights were out and the others couldn't see. By feeling for the chocolate, she would unwittingly have put her hand near the microphone.

The switchboard operator, whose name was Mischa, testified that Dr Naumann had come to the telephone exchange and told him that Stumpfecker was going to give the children some 'bonbon water', in other words, that they were to be killed. He could not, however, be precise about the time he received this information. He only knew that all the outside lines were dead.

But what was 'bonbon water'? Now that the rustling sound has ceased, I'm able to follow the children's conversation without further interruption. They recall their visit to Moreau. Never having been told of Moreau's death, they refer to him as if he's still alive.

Hilde: 'Do you think Herr Karnau's friend is still angry with us for getting chocolate all over his furniture?'

Holde: 'If only we had some chocolate now ...'

Helga, in answer to Hilde's question: 'No, I'm sure Herr Moreau isn't angry any more, Herr Karnau calmed him down. Remember how we went outside with them that night?'

Helmut: 'Yes, looking for bats.'

Heide, disappointedly: 'But they never came.'

'Yes, they did.'

'No, they didn't. Not one.'

'You'd probably fallen asleep by then, sleepyhead.'

'Hadn't.'

'Anyway, we saw some.'

Holde: 'Those were birds.'

Helmut, impatiently: 'No, they weren't. Bats flap their wings quite differently, Herr Moreau showed us.'

'But it was dark by then.'

'It was prickly, hiding in those bushes.'

Helga's voice again, very near: 'No, later on, when we were standing under that light. We threw stones in the air, and the bats darted after them.'

Hedda, from above: 'They flew down, right past our heads. They ruffled our hair.'

'Well, almost.'

'But they came very close, the horrid black things.'

Helga: 'Herr Karnau said the bats mistook the stones for gnats.'

Heide again: 'Yes, gnats. And mosquitoes.'

At this point on the night of 27 April the recording breaks off. Earlier that day the children's mother had called Dr Kunz for the first time. Who was Kunz, and why should he have acceded to her request? Why did our paths never cross at that time? Someone should have restrained the man, if necessary by force. At a second interrogation on Thursday, 19 May 1945, Kunz retracted his previous statements in the light of suspicions that another doctor was also involved in the murder of the six children. Continually stroking his hair, fiddling with his ears, and wiping his eyes as if plagued by swarms of little black flies, Kunz conceded that his earlier account of the circumstances of the killing had been inaccurate: it was true that Stumpfecker had helped him.

But what was 'bonbon water'? Was it a pleasant-tasting drink consisting of water in which bonbons had been dissolved with an admixture of morphine, or was the sweet, strong-tasting beverage doctored not with sedative but with the lethal poison itself? Or should bonbon water be construed as an imprecise description of chocolates with a poisonous liquid centre that were given to the children to suck, no resistance being anticipated because it was so long since the six of them had had any sweets that their tongues would swiftly have licked away enough of the outer crust to enable the cyanide to seep through into the oral cavity? Were the doctors apprehensive because they could not be absolutely certain that the dominant sugary taste would render the children's gustatory nerves so desensitised against other stimuli that they would fail to notice the poison and unsuspectingly swallow it, mingled with saliva and sugar?

Having injected the children with morphine, Kunz left them and joined their mother in the room next door, where they waited for them to go to sleep. She then asked him to help her administer the poison itself, but he refused, so she sent him to fetch Stumpfecker, whom he found in the Bunker canteen. She had already disappeared into the children's bedroom by the time Stumpfecker got there, so he went straight in. When the two of them emerged four or five minutes later, Stumpfecker walked off without so much as a word to Kunz.

Stumpfecker was a man who had shattered children's legs at Ravensbruck and adorned his office with jars containing pickled foetal speech organs. I would have thought him capable of anything, but not of that, not of ending those six young lives. He sent me off to make copies of our recordings. Why? To get me out of the way while he dealt with the children. 'Copy them all very carefully,' he told me, meaning those wholly unimportant recordings of a crippled voice. And to think how insistent he was, once the deed had been done, that those discs should be preserved intact. . .

Saturday, 28 April. Helga recounts a distasteful experience: 'And the whole place was awash with wee-wee.'

The others giggle. 'It wasn't funny,' Helga says indignantly, 'it was awful. You've no idea how it stank in there, not to mention the revolting pictures on the walls.'

'What sort of pictures?'

'Naked, grinning women with big breasts and their legs apart so you could see the hair between them — even the slit. Make sure you never end up in that loo, even when there's somebody in the one up here. Better to do it in your pants than have to go down there.’

*

A belated night-owl pedals along the street below my window, bicycle tyres whirring over the asphalt.

The Führer's driver, Kempka, one false witness among many, testified that Stumpfecker told him that the children's father had requested him to end their lives by injecting them with some fast-acting poison, but that he, Stumpfecker, had refused on the grounds that he would be too mindful of his own young family to do such a thing. The children's father had been at his wits' end, he said.

Kempka kept inquiring after the dogs and sniffing his fingers. He was sorry, he said, but he hadn't managed to wash off the smell of petrol even now. The couple had eventually found a sympathetic doctor among the refugees in the other bunker, and it was he who put the six children to death. Who was this doctor? Not Kunz, it seemed, and no other candidate presented himself. Had Stumpfecker been so anxious to conceal his tracks that he lied to the others in the Bunker before anyone could question him about his involvement?

' "We're going there to say good — " What did Mama mean?'

'When?'

'Earlier on, before we went to that party in the other bunker.'

'Yes, Papa interrupted her.'

' "Goodbye" — was that what she meant to say?'

The others sound agitated. Helga tries to soothe them:

'Goodbye? Why? Who would we have said goodbye to? The wounded haven't left, they're still in that underground hospital.'

Heide: 'And the children?'

'Yes.'

Hilde: 'It's funny, there aren't any children left in Berlin apart from them.'

Helmut: 'We're still here, aren't we?'

Holde: 'They looked awful.'

'Who, the children?'

'No, the wounded. There was one hidden right at the back because he hadn't got a mouth.'

Helga: 'You're making that up to scare us.'

'No, honestly. No mouth at all, just a sort of hole.'

'That's enough.'

Helga's tone is so peremptory that silence reigns for a while on the disc marked Sunday, 29 April. It's as though each child is trying to stem the flood of images conjured up by Holde's reference to the wounded. Or as if they're doubtful of Helga's dismissal of their mother's truncated remark. Or as if Helga herself is aware that she's desperately trying to reassure the others by saying things she doesn't believe herself.

The father's aide, Gunther Schwagermann, testified that he had seen the children's mother go into their bedroom at about seven p.m. She emerged a few minutes later, ashen-faced. On seeing Schwagermann she threw her arms around him, sobbing and mumbling incoherently. Schwagermann, who, while being questioned, continually fiddled with the loose threads marking the spot where his SS collar patches had been ripped off, gradually took in what she was saying: she had just killed all six children. In a state of total collapse, she allowed Schwagermann to help her to the conference-room, where her husband, looking very pale, was awaiting her. Realising what had happened without a word being said, he remained silent for a considerable time.

Mischa, the telephonist, stated that the children's mother, her face devoid of expression, had walked past the switchboard-room and gone into her husband's office, where she sat down at the table and played patience, weeping as she did so. After about twenty minutes she went upstairs again. There was no sign of her husband during this time. Mischa could not refrain from mentioning that Schwagermann had once indignantly confided that Helga had made indecent advances to him.

Schwagermann's assertion that the children's mother had nearly fainted and was utterly distraught is at odds with other accounts to the effect that she first made herself some coffee and then, as one witness put it, chatted briskly about old times with her husband, Artur Axmann, and Martin Bormann. Kempka, too, reported that the couple were looking quite calm and composed at eight forty-five p.m., when he went back into the Bunker to say goodbye to them. He kept pausing to listen while being interrogated, as if receiving instructions from some unseen third party. The children's mother had ended by asking him to convey her affectionate regards to Harald, her son by her first marriage, if ever their paths should cross.