‘You fools – the prisoner has escaped! He shot me!’ Reinhard screamed. Reinhard tried to show them his bloody hand, but they held him fast. They started walking him to the Juhrhaus where the duty officer would sort things out.
‘My car! He stole my car!’ Reinhard tried to shake free.
‘Keep walking!’ said one of the SS men.
‘How dare you!’ Reinhard screamed. ‘Take your hands off me!’ He tried to shake free again, kicked at them, struggled to get his hands free.
The SS men were uncertain about the situation. But they had been trained to respond to uncertainty with brutal resolve. One pulled Reinhard’s two arms behind his back while the other began beating Reinhard with his fists. He punched his middle over and over again. Reinhard sagged in pain, but he was held upright and punched again. They maneuvered him in the direction of the Juhrhaus.
Once inside, someone went in search of the duty officer, an SS captain. He came running and quickly determined that Reinhard was who he said he was. The duty officer sounded the alarm that the prisoner Willi Geismeier had escaped. All work details were immediately herded back into camp. The guards and kapos were on edge and there was lots of pushing and hitting.
The prisoners were assembled on the Appelplatz for an emergency roll call. It was not announced that there had been an escape, but everyone had figured it out. And by that evening, they all knew it was Willi Geismeier and how he had done it.
‘No one escapes for long. He’ll be back.’
‘No, he won’t,’ said Neudeck. He knew Willi. ‘He’s long gone.’ The thought that Willi had succeeded and that he had played a small part in his escape made Neudeck happy. You had to hand it to that son of a bitch Geismeier.
SS Obersturmbannführer Reinhard Pabst had suffered a concussion, a broken jaw, some cuts to the face, and a gunshot wound to the hand, and that was just from the prisoner. Then he had suffered possible kidney damage, and other serious damage to his body from the two SS guards.
Reinhard filed a complaint against the guards that had beaten him up.
‘But how were we supposed to know that guy was an SS colonel?’ one guard said at his hearing.
‘I mean, did you see him?’ said the other guard. ‘He was wearing prison clothes. He had shit his pants. He was bloody and filthy. He was fighting like crazy. What were we supposed to do?’
The captain conducting the hearing reduced both men in rank. SS Obersturmbannführer Pabst had insisted that they be punished, and that was the lightest punishment the captain could get away with. That’s the way it went sometimes. You did what you were supposed to do, and still they punished you.
The Man Who Loved Women
According to the urgent bulletin tacked up on police notice boards all over Germany, the convicted criminal Willi Geismeier had attempted to murder a senior SS officer and had escaped from Dachau. Standartenführer Pabst (Reinhard had just been promoted to full colonel) had extracted a confession from the prisoner for various crimes when the prisoner had seized his weapon and grievously wounded him. The escaped prisoner was now also being sought as a suspect in the serial-killer case. He was considered armed and dangerous. A substantial reward was offered for information leading to his apprehension.
Gruber muttered as he read the notice. ‘My God! That son of a bitch Geismeier. How does he do it?’
‘No kidding,’ said Bergemann.
‘I didn’t take him for a killer though,’ said Gruber. ‘Thirteen women? Jesus!’ Gruber seemed unconcerned by the fact that Willi had been in Dachau when four of the murders had been committed. The official position was that Willi had done the murders, which meant that Willi had done the murders. Truth was a matter of policy, not a matter of fact. And it followed therefore that Willi would be sought for the serial killing of thirteen women. The police, the Gestapo and the SS were so notified.
After a week in the hospital and eight weeks at home recovering from his injuries, Reinhard Pabst went back to work. His subordinates and coworkers lined the hall and applauded as he arrived on his first day back. ‘Thank you for your good wishes,’ he said to them. ‘Now, let’s get back to the serious and important tasks at hand. We have a killer to catch.’
Reinhard’s first task, as he saw it, was to take over the serial-killer case again. His deputy, an ambitious young Gestapo man and SS lieutenant, had taken over in his absence and had been a little too conscientious for Reinhard’s taste. The deputy had fortunately not discovered the connection between the murders and the streetcar lines. But he had been going around to city hospitals trying to find out exactly what sort of wound the killer had sustained in his attack on Suzanna Merkl, and, having failed to do so, was about to begin questioning at smaller clinics.
Reinhard was eager to steer the investigation toward Willi Geismeier. This might require manufacturing some evidence, but that would be simple enough. He had already found a report filed by a man named Schleiffer, a neighbor of Geismeier’s, that Geismeier, living under an assumed name, had left home late on the night of the Suzanna Merkl murder. Then there was also the fact that Geismeier had used a different false identity to impersonate a detective asking questions about the very murders he had himself committed.
In any case, Reinhard wouldn’t have to convince a
