Dachau, the prison camp, was surrounded by a no man’s land overseen by machine gunners in towers with orders to shoot anyone in or even near this ‘death zone.’ Beyond the death zone was a high fence of reinforced concrete posts and multiple strands of electrified barbed wire.
Once Willi’s team had finished the road bed to the engineer’s satisfaction, they were marched out the gate and into the marshland beyond the fence where they were to clear boulders from the muck and prepare the ground to be cultivated. They were guarded by SS men. All you had to do was look like you were thinking of running, and the SS guards would shoot you down.
One morning Willi was called out at roll call. He was marched by Franz Neudeck to another part of the camp where the old armaments factory had been, to a square stone building that had been reconfigured for interrogations and punishment. Once inside, Neudeck pushed Willi ahead of him down a long concrete corridor lined with heavy wooden doors crisscrossed by iron straps. These might have been prison-cell doors, except they dated from the building’s early days as an armory. They stopped by one such door, and Neudeck knocked and then entered, again pushing Willi ahead of him.
They were in a small room, no more than four by four meters. An SS Hauptsturmführer, a captain, sat at a table. Carefully arrayed on the table in front of him, as if on display, were his hat, an open portfolio, and an oxtail whip, made up of multiple strands of wire. A second SS man stood beside the captain. He looked to Willi to be a boy barely out of school. Two kapos stood against the wall behind them, just under a small window, the source of the only light in the room. Attached to the wall to Willi’s left were some heavy canvas straps.
The captain signaled Neudeck that he should leave. Willi stood at attention while the captain leafed through the papers in the portfolio, turning back and forth until he settled on one. ‘Shall I call you Herr Geismeier or Herr Juncker?’ said the captain.
Willi didn’t answer.
‘Geismeier, then,’ said the captain. ‘According to your file, Geismeier, there was a time when you were a good policeman. You closed a lot of cases. You were highly decorated, weren’t you?’ He looked up expectantly, but Willi remained silent.
‘Fine,’ said the captain, as though he considered Willi’s silence a response. ‘You didn’t like the rules or regulations, though, did you?’
Again, Willi said nothing.
‘I see,’ said the captain. ‘You thought you were of a higher order, didn’t you? You could operate outside the rules, beyond the laws. You disobeyed your superiors because you thought you were smarter than they were?’
Silence.
‘Is that really the way you want to play this, Geismeier? Let’s try once more, shall we?’
Willi knew how this worked. The captain played a patient man. He even said ‘I am a patient man’ at one point. Willi understood the captain would then choose a moment to lose his patience, and his rage would come suddenly and violently. Then Willi would be strapped to the wall and beaten.
‘When did you last see your Fräulein Zeff? We have her in custody, you know.’
Willi had been expecting the captain would say this or something like it. There was no way to know for certain whether it was true or not, but Willi doubted it. He and Lola had made contingency plans to get her away from Munich. But even if it was true, nothing he could say now would save her.
‘We know about Schleiffer, your neighbor, too,’ said the captain.
This gave Willi comfort. There was nothing to know about Willi and Schleiffer. The captain was either fishing or laying a trap. Either way, it meant they had only general knowledge about Willi’s more recent misbehavior, but no specifics, no names, no places, no actions. In fact, the more questions the captain posed, the more he gave Willi the rough outlines of what they knew about him and what they didn’t know. They didn’t know much.
The captain wanted to know who, for instance, among Willi’s higher-ups during his time as a detective, had been directing him in his treasonous behavior. Who were his confederates among the police and detectives he knew? Bergemann? Gruber? Wendt? Who had wanted Otto Bruck killed? What were Willi’s connections to the Communist Party? Why had he recently been impersonating a detective?
The captain surprised Willi in one regard: he did not lose patience. When, after a considerable amount of time, he had gotten no response of any kind from Willi, and the only thing left to do was punish him, the captain still leafed through the file folder one more time, looking for more questions to ask, looking for some way he could continue the interview and forestall the punishment. Whatever allure inflicting pain had once held for him, it was long gone by now.
The captain rose from his chair, picked up his hat and put it on his head. He fussed with it a bit, getting it just right, delaying again, Willi thought, what they both knew to be inevitable. ‘You leave me no choice, Geismeier.’ They always said something like that. He picked up the file folder and left the room.
The two kapos who had stood silent and motionless against the wall the entire time now stepped forward, seized Willi, pulled off his jacket and shirt, and wrapped the leather straps tightly around his biceps with him facing the wall. The larger of the two picked up the whip and without hesitation began lashing at Willi’s back.
As
