Two Brothers

‘Thank you, Herr Doktor.’

On the wall was a chart depicting in what purported to be scientific detail the defining features of a Jewish skull. From what Paulus could see, the main characteristic appeared to be a forehead that sloped brutally backwards. Certainly the owner of such a skull would have a sneaky and ignoble look about him.

Paulus thought of his handsome father. His beautiful mother.

These people truly were insane. Could they really believe it?

Paulus knew that Otto had been subjected to the same inspection when he entered the Napola school. One Jew, one Gentile, no sense. This was supposedly the most technologically advanced army in the world and they thought they could define ‘valuable’ blood with a ruler.

Satisfied with the physical evidence of racial purity, the doctor turned his attention to the question of health.

‘Mouth.’

Paulus opened his mouth. He had five filled cavities, one less than the maximum number allowed. Himmler had originally stipulated that an SS man must have no fillings at all, nor wear spectacles or indeed display any imperfection of any kind. How the stoop-shouldered, short-sighted, rat-toothed and chinless Reichsfuhrer SS could have written these instructions with a straight face was beyond most members of the public, even Nazis.

Unfortunately for the Reichsfuhrer’s visions of a master race, the privations of the previous twenty years had ensured that almost no young German men whatsoever met the idealistic criteria of the Herrenmensch, and so the standards had been relaxed immediately. In fact, it was pretty plain that if you had all four limbs and weren’t a Jew, they’d take you.

After Paulus had dressed, the interview continued.

‘Why do you want to join the SS?’ the Sturmscharfuhrer enquired.

That was easy.

Because he was in love with a beautiful woman who was a Jew. And one day soon he knew he would have to hide her. And the closer he was identified with the murderer’s gang, the less likely anybody would be to imagine that that was what he was doing.

Paulus had made his plan in Poland, when he saw for the first time what Hitler really had in store for what he called the Untermensch.

Until then, Paulus, like every half-civilized person in Germany, Jew or Gentile, had hoped that somehow, one day, a line would be drawn. That the steady erosion of all humanity towards the ‘race enemies’ would reach its nadir. Deprived of rights, property, dignity, security. Yes.

But murder? Mass murder? Surely not. That couldn’t be.

Nobody. Nobody would do that.

Least of all the sons and daughters of Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller, Mozart, Bismarck, Gutenberg and Luther.

Murder all the Jews. All of them?

It couldn’t happen.

And yet…

Maybe it wasn’t planned. Maybe they scarcely even knew themselves that this was what they were about. But Paulus had seen in Poland with his own eyes which way the devilish wind was blowing. He had seen what sudden and absolute victory was doing to the men in black and, yes, also in field grey. They were supermen and they could do what they liked.

And what they liked, it seemed, was to kill defenceless people.

Poles, gypsies, the weak, the sick. And above all Jews.

Certainly it had seemed improvised and almost random; there appeared to Paulus to be no guiding system or specific orders. And yet everywhere he had been as the lightning war struck, he had seen dead Jews.

Or Jews for whom he could see no chance of survival.

Herded up. Shipped from here to there.

To where?

Three times the truck in which he was riding with his Wehrmacht comrades had been commandeered by the SS in charge of huddled masses of humanity being torn from their villages.

‘Don’t let them take us,’ came the pitiful cries of children. ‘They’ll kill us.’

Paulus’s comrades said they wouldn’t.

Even they, who had passed village squares in which every father hung from a rope, still declined to believe it.

‘They won’t kill them. That’s a Jewish lie. A slur on Germany. They’re just shifting them out to make room for decent Germans.’

But Paulus could only ask himself the obvious question.

Shifting them to where?

If you tore every Jew from his home as clearly the Einsatzkommando of the SS were intent on doing, what would you do with them then? He had been told that they were being taken to the cities, massed in tiny ghettos from which they were not allowed to leave.

And what then?

Paulus thought that if he were Hitler he would kill them. After all, they were vermin and leaving them to starve would be messy and dangerous. A source of infection. A source of resistance. A source of witness.

Paulus had concluded that the path down which Germany was travelling could lead to only one dark and terrible place.

And his mother and his beloved Dagmar were trapped in Berlin.

Which is why, bumping along the dusty roads towards the charnel house that Germany was to make of the ancient city of Warsaw, he had made his plan.

‘I want to join the SS in order to better serve my Fuhrer and to cleanse myself once and for all of my shameful family history, Sturmscharfuhrer sir!’

‘Well done, lad,’ the sergeant said. ‘I think we’ll take you.’

A Marriage is Discussed Berlin, 1940

THE NEWLY APPOINTED SS Obergefreiter Stengel turned left on to Prinz- Albrecht-Strasse and walked the length of the state security building. His jackboots rang on the paving stones as he passed the various queues of miserable people who had come with their papers in search of some stamp or other. Helpless suppliants begging for permission to survive.

He turned right on to Saarlandstrasse, a great blood-red double vein of fluttering flags, which led up to Potsdamer Platz. Two lanes plus a central island. So many flags. Red and black. Red and black. Red and black. All the way up to the Haus Vaterland.

He saw Dagmar before she saw him.

Which gave him a moment. A moment to drink her in. To savour. To treasure. To stand and stare across the thundering traffic at an oasis of poise and beauty.

She was standing beneath the famous Traffic-light Tower.

They loved the tower. Everyone in Berlin did. They had both been present at its unveiling in 1924. She a much-indulged little princess, separate and safe in a viewing area reserved for city dignitaries and leaders of commerce. He in the crowd, watching with his brother from atop their parents’ shoulders, cheering and shouting as the policeman in his little box seven metres above the ground turned on the lights that would finally bring order to the traffic chaos of the Potsdamer Platz.

The tower had been a symbol of Germany’s burgeoning economic revival. A miracle of modern technology, the first of its kind in Europe.

The tower was hung with swastikas now of course. The whole city was hung with swastikas and had been