Two Brothers

but not yet joined the Wehrmacht. He just joined instead of me.’

‘But what if he met someone who knew you?’

‘He reckoned he was pretty safe. Don’t forget, I’d been sent to boarding school. Most of my classmates were from other parts of the country. They went back to their own towns to join up, and most of them went in as officers. There were already more than a million soldiers in the Wehrmacht; soon there’d be millions more. Paulus reckoned he could keep below the radar.’

Billie whistled softly. ‘Wow. Some guy, eh?’

‘Oh yeah. My brother was some guy.’

‘Joining the Wehrmacht out of the blue, when he was supposed to be a refugee studying in England. Giving up everything to join the German army. A Jew. You both gave up everything. Jesus,’ Billie exclaimed, ‘this Dagmar must have been some chick.’

‘She was, Bill. She was some chick.’

‘Or you two were just crazy love-struck fools.’

They ate in silence for a little while. Billie using her fried bread to mop up her egg yolk with such dexterity that by the time she’d finished it looked as if the plate would not even need washing.

‘And now you’re going to find her. Right?’ Billie said, having swallowed her last mouthful.

‘What?’ Stone asked.

‘Dagmar. C’mon, P—, Otto. That’s why you’re going to Berlin, it’s pretty obvious.’

Stone’s eyes clouded a little. A beat of pain registered on his face before he turned it to a sad smile.

‘Dagmar’s dead, Bill,’ he said. ‘She died during the war. It isn’t her I’ll be seeing in Berlin.’

From Untermensch to Superman Berlin, 1940

‘STENGEL! STEP FORWARD!’

Corporal Stengel rose from the wooden bench where he had been sitting alongside half a dozen other field- grey-clad soldiers, and stepped forward.

‘Ahnenpass,’ the SS-Sturmscharfuhrer barked.

Paulus, now in the uniform of a Wehrmacht Obergefreiter, produced his ‘pass of ancestors’, that document essential to survival which proved that the previous three generations of his family had been of purely Aryan stock.

The SS sergeant-major studied it.

‘Your name is Otto Stengel?’

‘Ja, Sturmscharfuhrer sir,’ Paulus barked.

‘Adopted?’ the sergeant enquired.

‘Ja, Sturmscharfuhrer sir!’

‘By Jews?’

‘Ja, Sturmscharfuhrer sir!’

He said this last with equal clarity, equal volume. Never show weakness. Paulus’s year inside the German military had shown him that the only thing they respected was strength.

‘And your blood family?’

‘Parents dead. Grandparents abandoned me. The only family I knew were Jews, Sturmscharfuhrer sir!’

He could almost feel the eyes of his fellow applicants opening wide behind him. Many men and women from Jewish families had passed through the dreaded Reich main security office on the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, but it was certain that prior to Paulus none of them had been applicants to join the Waffen SS.

The sergeant major was looking at him with narrow suspicion. ‘An SS man brought up by Jews. That would be a first, I think,’ he said curtly.

‘I was less than an hour old, Sturmscharfuhrer sir!’ Paulus barked again. ‘It wasn’t my fault. As you can see from my record, I am a graduate of a Napola academy.’

The sergeant major smiled, clearly seeing some humour in the situation.

‘Did they make you work for them? In the scullery, like Cinderella?’

‘No. And they didn’t drink my blood either,’ Paulus replied. ‘In fact, they were kind to me.’

‘You defend them? You would stick up for the race enemy? For the people who stole you?’

‘No, of course not, sir.’

‘Why not? They’re your family. You just said they were kind.’

‘I do not defend them, sir, because they are stinking Jews and blood enemies of the Fatherland. I didn’t know it when I was an hour old but I know it now because my leader has told me so.’

The SS man looked down at Paulus’s papers. ‘You served in Poland?’

‘Ja, Sturmscharfuhrer.’

‘Must have been fun.’

‘Ja, Sturmscharfuhrer.’

Perhaps the sergeant major would have thought so. Brutality had without doubt become a sport for many of those brothers-in-arms with whom Paulus had stormed east the previous September. A lot of the guys had had ‘fun’.

Once again in his mind’s eye Paulus saw the eight corpses hanging from the hastily erected gallows. Their feet tied together and weighted with stones. Faces blue-green. Tongues distended like great crimson slugs exploring little dark caves.

Not dead yet, not for an hour if their tormentors had their way.

What village had it been? Rajgrod? Witoslaw? Bial?owiez?a? They had been moving so fast it was hard to remember. Blitzkrieg, the papers were calling it. War conducted as fast as lightning.

Unless of course you took an hour to die.

An SS band had been playing in the mean, dusty patch of ground that served as a village square. Public torture and cold-blooded murder conducted to music. Military, marching music. As if it had been a flag the victorious army were raising over the village, and not the twitching bodies of husbands and fathers. With the noise of the music and of the truck on which he and his comrades were riding, Paulus could not hear the screams of desperate protest from the traumatized civilians.

But he saw them.

The mouths of the women and children open and wide, howling with an anguish that seemed to make no sound.

Like a silent movie shot in hell.

‘Nothing like winning, eh?’ the SS man added.

‘Ja, Sturmscharfuhrer.’

It was true. Winning had been unlike anything he could have imagined, certainly more terrible than if they had lost. He was sure of that.

‘Strip,’ he heard the Sturmscharfuhrer demand.

Paulus removed his calf-length jackboots, his belt and webbing, his jacket, trousers, shirt and underwear, and stood naked and to attention as an SS doctor inspected him for any suspicious racial characteristics.

‘So those Jews didn’t circumcise you then?’ the doctor remarked, taking Paulus’s penis in the palm of his hand and staring at it as a farmer might inspect a bull.

‘No. They were modern people and not religiously minded.’

‘Well, it was decent of them anyway,’ the doctor said, adding with a hearty laugh that it would have caused a few problems for Stengel in the showers if they had.

Then the doctor produced a set of measuring callipers, which for a moment Paulus presumed were to be applied to his penis but which instead the doctor applied to his head.

‘Good cranium, I must say,’ the doctor remarked with an approving nod. ‘Teutonic shape, excellent Aryan lobes.’