For Woermann was moving forward. He had stomached all he could of this strutting thug who discussed the "liquidation" of millions of defenseless lives as matter-of-factly as he might discuss what he was going to have for dinner. Woermann made no overtly threatening gesture, yet Kaempffer took an involuntary step backward at his approach. Woermann merely walked past him and opened the door.
"Get out."
"You can't do this!"
"Out."
They stared at each other for a long time. For a moment he thought Kaempffer might actually challenge him. Woermann knew the major was in better condition and physically stronger—but only physically. Finally, Kaempffer's gaze wavered and he turned away. They both knew the truth about SS-Sturmbannführer Kaempffer. Without a word, he picked up his black greatcoat and stormed out of the room. Woermann closed the door quietly behind him.
He stood still for a moment. He had let Kaempffer get to him. His control used to be better. He walked over to the easel and stared at his canvas. The more he looked at the shadow he had painted on the wall, the more it looked like a hanging corpse. It gave him a queasy feeling and annoyed him as well. He had meant for the sunlit village to be the focus of the painting, but all he could see now was that damned shadow.
He tore himself away and returned to his desk, staring again at the photograph of Fritz. The more he saw of men like Kaempffer, the more he worried about Fritz. He hadn't worried this much when Kurt, the older boy, had been in combat in France last year. Kurt was nineteen, a corporal already. A man now.
But Fritz—they were doing things to Fritz, those Nazis. The boy had somehow been induced to join the local Jugendführer, the Hitler Youth. When Woermann had been home on his last leave, he had been hurt and dismayed to hear his son's fourteen-year-old mouth regurgitating that Aryan Master Race garbage, and speaking of "Der Führer" with an awed reverence that had once been reserved for God alone. The Nazis were stealing his son from him right under his nose, turning the boy into a snake like Kaempffer. And there did not seem to be a thing Woermann could do about it.
There didn't seem to be anything he could do about Kaempffer either. He had no control over the SS officer. If Kaempffer decided to shoot Romanian peasants, there was no way to stop him, other than to arrest him. And he could not do that. Kaempffer was here by authority of the High Command. To arrest him would be insubordination, an act of brazen defiance. His Prussian heritage rebelled at the thought. The army was his career, his home ... it had been good to him for a quarter century. To challenge it now...
Helpless. That was how he felt. It brought him back to a clearing outside Posnan, Poland, a year and a half ago, shortly after the fighting had ended. His men had been setting up bivouac when the sound of automatic gunfire came from over the next rise, about a mile away. He had gone to investigate. Einsatzkommandos were lining up Jews—men and women of all ages, children—and systematically slaughtering them with fusillades of bullets. After the bodies had been rolled into the ditch behind them, more were lined up and shot. The ground had turned muddy with blood and the air had been full of the reek of cordite and the cries of those who were still alive and in agony, and to whom no one would bother to administer a coup de grâce.
He had been helpless then, and he was helpless now. Helpless to make this war into one of soldier against soldier, helpless to stop the thing that was killing his men, helpless to stop Kaempffer from slaughtering those Romanian villagers.
He slumped into the chair. What was the use? Why even try anymore? Everything was changing for the worse. He had been born with the century, a century of hope and promise. Yet he was fighting in his second war, a war he could not understand.
And yet he had wanted this war. He had yearned for a chance to strike back at the vultures who had settled upon the Fatherland after the last war, saddling it with impossible reparations, grinding its face into the dirt year after year after year. His chance had come, and he had participated in some of the great German victories. The Wehrmacht was unstoppable.
Why, then, did he feel such malaise? It seemed wrong for him to want to be out of it all and back in Rathenow with Helga. It seemed wrong to be glad that his father, also a career officer, had died in the Great War and could not see what atrocities were being done today in the name of the Fatherland.
And still, with everything so wrong, he held on to his commission. Why? The answer to that one, he told himself for the hundredth—possibly the thousandth—time, was that in his heart he believed the German Army would outlast the Nazis. Politicians came and went, but the army would always be the army. If he could just hold on, the German Army would be victorious, and Hitler and his gangsters would fade from power. He believed that. He had to.
Against all reason, he prayed that Kaempffer's threat against the villagers would have the desired effect—that there would be no more deaths. But if it didn't work ... if another German was to die tonight, Woermann knew whom he wanted it to be.
TEN
The Keep
Tuesday, 29 April
0118 hours
Major Kaempffer lay awake in his bedroll, still rankling at Woermann's contemptuous insubordination. Sergeant Oster, at least, had been helpful. Like most regular army men, he responded with fearful obedience to the black uniform and the Death's Head insignia—something to which Oster's commanding officer seemed quite immune. But then, Kaempffer and Woermann had known each other long before there was an SS.
The sergeant had readily found quarters for the two squads of einsatzkommandos and had suggested a dead-end corridor at the rear of the keep as a compound for the prisoners from the village. An excellent choice: The corridor had been carved into the stone of the mountain itself and provided entry to four large rooms. Sole access to the retention area was through another long corridor running at an angle directly out to the courtyard. Kaempffer assumed that the section originally had been designed as a storage area since the ventilation was poor and there were no fireplaces in the rooms. The sergeant had seen to it that the entire length of both corridors, from the courtyard to the blank stone wall at the very end, was well lit by a new string of light bulbs, making it virtually impossible for anyone to surprise the einsatzkommandos who would be on guard in pairs at all times.
For Major Kaempffer himself, Sergeant Oster had found a large, double-sized room on the second level within the rear section of the keep. He had suggested the tower, but Kaempffer had refused; to have moved into the first or second level would have been convenient but would have meant being below Woermann. The fourth tower level involved too many steps to be taken too many times a day. The rear section of the keep was better. He had a window overlooking the courtyard, a bed-frame commandeered from one of Woermann's enlisted men, and an unusually heavy oak door with a secure latch. His bedroll was now supported by the newly made frame, and the major lay within it, a battery lamp on the floor beside him.
His eyes came to rest on the crosses in the walls. They seemed to be everywhere. Curious. He had wanted to ask the sergeant about them but had not wanted to detract from his posture of knowing everything. This was an important part of the SS mystique and he had to maintain it. Perhaps he would ask Woermann—when he could bring himself to speak to him again.
Woermann ... he couldn't get the man off his mind. The irony of it all was that Woermann was the last person in the world Kaempffer would have wished to be billeted with. With Woermann around he could not be the type of SS officer he wished to be. Woermann could fix his gaze on him and pierce right through the SS uniform, through the veneer of power, and see a terrified eighteen-year-old. That day in Verdun had been a turning point in both their lives...