33

Wewelsburg Castle, NORTH RHINE-WESTPHALIA, Germany

February 15, 1939

8:30 a.m.

Josef was almost finished preparing his pack for his daily training march when Pfeiffer entered the guardroom. Immaculately dressed, as always, but with the hint of a rare smile on his face, he appeared to be holding something behind his back. Probably his damn SS dagger, Josef thought, looking up without bothering to hide the hatred that came naturally to his face whenever he saw or even thought about the SS officer.

Pfeiffer had been absent since Josef had returned to Wewelsburg. The last time they had met was when Pfeiffer collected him from four weeks’ basic training with the Liebstandarte SS Adolf Hitler at Berlin-Lichterfelde only to deliver him for a further month’s combat and survival training with elite Waffen-SS troops in the Harz Mountains.

Josef wondered what the murderous man wanted; his appearances were never casual. He moved to get to his feet to find out, but the officer stopped him. “Continue. I have no wish to interrupt your training regime,” Pfeiffer said, looking down at Josef kneeling on the cold flagstones and cinching his heavily weighted pack.

Beyond the heavy oak and iron door, the castle grounds had been blanketed with a thick covering of snow since the winter solstice, the New Year bringing a persistent, freezing north wind that had encased everything with ice. As he studied the man preparing to head out alone once more into that frozen world, Pfeiffer approved of what he saw. Although reportedly sullen and silent throughout, Becker had been classified as “excellent” at both Lichterfelde and Bad Harzburg, despite the instructions to single him out and push him to his very limits. Since his return to Wewelsburg, Becker’s guards reported that every day, whatever the weather or temperature outside, the man hiked for six or seven hours with a pack that weighed forty kilos, pounding himself up and down the steep sides of the hills that surrounded the castle. After, he would shower and change, eat like a horse, and spend the rest of the day in the library studying everything he was given about the mountain they wanted him to climb. Even if he said little to anyone other than the librarian, Josef Becker gave every appearance of having wholeheartedly followed every order Pfeiffer had given.

“I bring good news,” Pfeiffer said. “Ernst Schäfer’s team has finally been permitted to cross into Tibet. It is now an official and internationally accredited Reich expedition. Legitimate diplomatic contact with it therefore permits us to also secretly furnish you with everything you will need when you arrive at the foot of the mountain as I have always envisioned. Given that things will soon be accelerating, I am here to review progress and advise you of the next steps. We will talk further when you return from your training session. In the meantime, I have brought you some things in recognition of the efforts I hear you have been making.”

With a deliberate flourish, Pfeiffer pulled his arms from behind his back. He was holding Becker’s ice axe, his Gebirgsjäger mountain cap, and his army identification tag, Ganzler’s edelweiss ring still attached to it.

“I understand that these were taken from you when you were first arrested. I think you have earned the right to have them back. I have taken a small liberty with your cap, as you will see.”

Becker stood up and said nothing as he pulled his heavy backpack first up onto his knees and then up and around onto his back. Reaching for his axe, he gave its metal head a sweep with his gloved hand before spinning the wooden shaft back over his right shoulder. He inserted its point between the pack and his back, letting the axe slide down until the head hooked. It always lived there when he wasn’t using it. It felt good to have it back. Still silent, he took the tag, the ring, and the cap from the SS officer.

The tag and the ring he retied around his neck and pushed back down under his clothes. Touching the ring, he felt no luck in it now, only shame and loss. Bending the peak of his cap in a little on both sides, as was always his habit before wearing it, Josef saw what Pfeiffer had been talking about. The small colored roundel beneath the German eagle to the front had been replaced. He looked at the new, polished metal badge in its place.

It was the totenkopf, the death’s-head insignia of the SS.

Death. Yes, that, rather than the edelweiss, is the correct talisman for me now.

Josef put the cap on, pulling it down tight over the woolen scarf that already bound his ears and chin. He then covered his eyes with black-lensed snow goggles that pushed Pfeiffer into the dark shadow where he belonged.

Pulling the hood of his white jacket up and over his head, Josef said only, “I will start now, if I may, Herr Oberst.”

“Of course,” Pfeiffer replied, opening the heavy door to the outside. The bitter cold instantly slammed them both, Pfeiffer gritting his teeth against it to watch Becker step out into the monochrome winter morning without the slightest hesitation.

“Halt!” Pfeiffer commanded. Josef did so, turning to look back at the SS officer, the freezing draft racing around him to invade the castle through the still-open door. “You hate me, Obergefreiter Josef Becker, I know. But understand that is good. Hate is a strong emotion. It makes us capable of anything and, for what lies ahead of you, that is going to be very necessary. We will meet again later. Until then, berg heil!”

Josef shook his head, feigning an inability to hear through the layers of his headgear, but he understood every word, acknowledging even the promotion from gefreiter in the title Pfeiffer used. That man said nothing by mistake.

Striding away from his captor without a second look, feeling remote from the world within his many layers, Becker concentrated instead on the huge weight of his loaded pack bearing down onto his back, pushing the shaft of his returned ice axe hard against his spine, cutting its straps into his shoulders. Usually he would ignore it, savoring instead the relief of at least a temporary escape from the castle, but that day he welcomed its burden, letting it squeeze pain, anger, and, yes, utter hatred into every part of his body. Quickening his pace, he crossed the castle bridge, hobnailed boots clattering over the rounded, icy cobblestones.

At the cleared roadway beyond, he quickly turned down into the steep-sided wood. His legs immediately sunk into snow up to his shins, feet slipping and sliding under the pack’s weight as he began to descend, forcing him to grab at small evergreen bushes and naked saplings to stay upright. They shook their coverings of new snow onto him until he arrived, as he did each morning, at the spot below the castle where Kurt’s body must have landed. There, shaking off the snow and ice, Josef stopped, calling to mind the thudding sound of his friend’s death fall, the silent passing of Gunter before, the terrified faces of the nine Jews he had guided to execution, particularly the tiny girl he pushed into her own stone sepulchre. He said no prayer, just remembered what he had done and contemplated what their murderers now wanted him to do.

Hate, indeed.

From there, every day he would push himself as hard as he could up and down the steep slopes of the river valley beyond the castle’s promontory. He would do it for hours, punishing himself under the backbreaking load, forcing himself on until his lungs heaved and he could taste blood in his mouth. With every step he would fight the urge to just keep going in one direction. If it would have meant a single sniper’s bullet for him, there were days when he would have gladly taken it. But he knew there would be more bullets for his mother and sisters and that thought would reel him back to the castle as effectively as a fishhook through his cheek on an unbreakable line.

However far he went, he could always feel the building’s sinister presence. It brooded over the surrounding countryside as if it alone were responsible for the desolation of winter that lay on the barren, hard-frozen land. Josef knew a lot about the SS-Schule Haus Wewelsburg now. The only person within the dark castle that he regularly spoke to was the librarian, a captain called Waibel, charged by Pfeiffer with providing everything Josef needed to plan the climb ahead and supervise his studies.

A nervous man in his late fifties, Waibel hid behind a well-tailored SS uniform and medal ribbons that told of time, and wounds, in the trenches of Flanders. In breathless, lyrical sentences, he described Wewelsburg as part university, part fortress, the spiritual “axis mundi” of the SS, a new Camelot for the reichsführer’s Teutonic order of Black Knights that was going to conquer the world and never grow old, not even in a thousand years. With eyes misting, he eulogized the reichsführer, describing him as a mystical man, a spiritual man who understood more than anyone why the Aryans were the master race destined to rule all others. He whispered of a prison camp nearby that held only Jehovah’s Witnesses, the best builders, engineers, and architects deliberately selected to restore the castle, compelled by their beliefs to work to the best of their abilities and not even try to escape. Jews could never be allowed to touch such a hallowed place. The castle, he said, doomed them to death instead.

Yes, that is what they do to them now.

Josef shut the horror of the place and its inhabitants from his thoughts as he did everything: by thinking of climbing instead. It was not so difficult to do. Ever since Pfeiffer had turned over that photograph and given his next climb a name, Mount Everest, he could let it rise up before him at will. Never-ending and colorless, it was as if the black-and-white images Josef had been poring over for months were now developed directly onto the inside of his skull. Its vast size could easily fill his mind to push everything else aside, and he let it. With every leaden step of his training, he would mentally tackle the details of a route he had now learned by heart. Whenever exhaustion stopped him in his tracks, he permitted the thought of what it would be like to take that final magnificent step to the very summit to push him forward again.

The desire to climb the mighty mountain grew stronger every day, however much he told himself that to do so served his enemies and betrayed his friends. Even when he thought of his own family and told himself that he had no choice in the matter, Josef knew that it was no longer as simple as that. Everest was beginning to possess him as much as the invisible bonds that held him within the dark, almost medieval world of the castle. He risked losing his soul in the contradictions of its companionship.