‘On another matter,’ said Edvin, ‘what do you know about any organized resistance? Is there any?’
‘No,’ said Willi. ‘None. There isn’t any organized resistance that I know of. That’s not to say there’s no resistance at all. Only it’s mostly lone wolves, people operating on their own, slowing down production in factories, sabotage, that sort of thing. And there’s been some opposition among a few politicians. You probably know who they are. But one by one they’re being found out, arrested and hanged.’
‘What about among the police? Anything there?’
‘Nothing organized that I know of,’ said Willi. ‘Again, a few lone wolves is all. But what do you know? What about the army? Anything stirring there?’
‘Ah, the army,’ said Edvin, shaking his head. ‘That’s a pitiful case. They’re the one group that could overthrow him. Ella has some contacts there, and she’s heard rumblings. So have I. But it never comes to anything.
‘Officers tell me they’re horrified by Hitler; they find him reprehensible. But they can’t imagine rising up against him. They’re afraid, yes. But it’s more that they’re completely paralyzed by their idiotic Prussian code of honor, their nobility, the duties and loyalties of rank. He’s reprehensible, abominable, evil, they say, but he’s their Führer, their commander-in-chief, no matter what. Attacking him in any way would amount to treason, which is out of the question.
‘Besides that, and this is interesting, they are reluctant to turn against him because he’s been successful. Marching into the Rhineland, for instance. The generals warned him that was doomed. It wasn’t. Austria, last March, the same thing. He succeeds where he is bound to fail. And they embrace his successes.
‘He’s gotten rid of whatever opposition there might have been in the general staff, you know. Von Blomberg, von Fritsch, both damaged, yes, but they offered some opposition. And now even they’re gone.’
There was a funny story making the rounds about General von Blomberg, the field marshal and minister of war. Blomberg was a widower and wanted to marry again. He proposed to his young secretary, Erna Gruhn, and she accepted his proposition. This, of course, scandalized the Prussian officer corps because Erna Gruhn was of the lower classes and not suited to be the wife of a general and a Prussian aristocrat. But the Führer gave the marriage his blessing – maybe he liked the fact that the Prussians objected – and he and Goering served as witnesses at the wedding.
A short time later, rumors started flying, and then the story broke that General Field Marshal von Blomberg’s new wife was not just a commoner. She had once been arrested for prostitution and pornography. There were photos. ‘Doesn’t that make the Führer a pimp?’ someone said. It was a good joke, but too dangerous to repeat.
Edvin and Willi met repeatedly. Edvin offered Willi help. Was there anything he could do? Willi said he was working on a case, which caused Edvin to raise his eyebrows. ‘A case?’ he said.
Willi explained that he had been pursuing the serial killer who, he was all but certain, had attacked Lola years earlier. Willi was also fairly certain the killer was in the Gestapo. Certain other evidence indicated that he was also a senior SS officer. Willi thought he was getting close, but thought also that the Gestapo was getting close to him. He thought he would probably be warned by a contact in the SS when his arrest was imminent and it was time for him and Lola to leave the country. Edvin promised he would arrange their departure. Willi had never imagined he would be caught by Gruber. How could he have imagined that?
A light rain began falling. Willi left his flowers by a stranger’s grave, and the two men went their separate ways. They arranged for another meeting two weeks later. The persecution of Jews was being stepped up; Edvin was trying to establish a network of safe houses and could use Willi’s help. The day of the meeting Edvin waited in vain for Willi to show up. Edvin had two Swedish visas in hand, but Willi was already in Dachau.
Benno and Margarete Horvath listened every night to the BBC. You could hear the world unraveling and stumbling toward war. Chamberlain, the British prime minister, had made repeated trips to Germany to meet with Hitler to prevent an invasion of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain gave up the Sudetenland, a corner of Czechoslovakia with a German population, for vague promises by a known liar. Were the English that blind, Benno wondered, or desperate, or both? Chamberlain tricked himself into believing he was preventing a larger invasion of the entire country of Czechoslovakia and the war that would necessarily follow, when in fact he was enabling both.
The Czech border with Germany had strong defenses, but thanks to Chamberlain’s Sudetenland concession, the German army got past them without firing a shot. The rest of Czechoslovakia lay there for the taking, defenseless and without allies. The French and the British had made it clear their promises weren’t worth the paper they were written on. Within five months Czechoslovakia ceased to exist.
Hard Labor
The Dachau kapos treated prisoners badly. The kapos’ survival depended in part on their brutality. A kapo who wasn’t sufficiently brutal could find himself back in the general prison population where he would be treated with particular contempt by SS and prisoners alike. Willi’s barracks kapo was a man named Franz Neudeck, a gang member whom Willi had arrested more than once. As a result of his many arrests Neudeck had been classified a habitual criminal. Even though it was not Willi who had landed him in Dachau, when Neudeck saw Willi for the first time, he turned his rage about being in Dachau in Willi’s direction.
He came up behind Willi in the barracks early one morning. ‘Geismeier,’ he said, and when Willi turned, Neudeck hit him hard in the ribs with a short metal pipe he was carrying. Willi crumpled to the floor. ‘Welcome to my world, Geismeier,’ said
