No trial. No legal counsel. No phone call to his chief at police HQ or to his mother and his son at home. Merely an order from a senior member of the secret state police that he was to be despatched to Dachau to be held in protective custody pending inquiries, and he was on his way in a van heading north-west out of Munich with three other prisoners, one of them a professor at the technical university who told Seb he had been denounced for complaining about the sacking of a Jewish colleague. The others were a glum communist and a bright-eyed Jehovah’s Witness. None of them guilty of any recognisable crimes, simply designated ‘dangerous elements’.
At the camp, he was marched to the so-called shunt room where he was registered at great length, then relieved of his clothes and personal effects which amounted to no more than his wallet, ID and a few coins. His Walther PPK 7.65 police-issue pistol had already been removed at political police headquarters in Wittelsbach Palace.
He was made to stand naked for a full ten minutes as SS men wandered in and out of the room, occasionally glancing at him with varying degrees of disinterest. Then he was marched to the prisoner baths where he was disinfected and made to scrub himself before returning to the shunt room where he was handed an ill-fitting set of second-hand camp clothes which, he was informed, had previously been worn by a prisoner who had died while attempting to escape. Seb imagined they told all the newcomers that to focus their minds on staying away from the electrified wire.
Finally, he was handed a toothbrush, a small bar of soap, a tin cup and plate and was escorted to one of the barrack huts with its rows upon rows of wooden bunk beds, each of them three decks high with a complete absence of comfort. No mattress, just hard wood, a palliasse and a single blanket – bearable in June, but bitter in winter.
The block leader was a curious fellow named Rudolf Höss, an SS Death’s Head NCO with the skull and crossbones badge on his cap. He had a ready smile and surface good humour, but Seb knew it was unreal. He was a good reader of faces, an important asset for a detective, and he didn’t like him. It seemed to him the world might be a better place if Herr Höss were the prisoner here, not the guard.
Höss told Seb that if he kept out of trouble, his stay in the camp would be relatively painless, but that if he was slow in obeying orders, failed to keep clean, didn’t do his work properly, stole food or cigarettes, he would be flogged. Or worse.
He looked at his new prisoner’s notes, quickly spotted that it was his birthday and that he was a cop and admonished him for disloyalty to the Führer. He told Seb in a cold, indifferent manner that he was a stain on the force and needed to be re-educated. ‘You come here as an enemy of the state. You will leave here as a good, dutiful German, or you will not leave here at all.’
If he behaved well and was considered rehabilitated, he would be freed in six months.
Seb didn’t bother to respond. What was the point?
‘And remember this,’ Höss continued. ‘You have no rights. You are a piece of shit and will be treated as such.’
The other inmates were marching back from their day’s work. They were sullen and exhausted. Most of them seemed to have been broken by their imprisonment, their very souls sucked out through their dead eyes. None of them bothered to talk to Seb, which didn’t worry him because he was in no mood to strike up a conversation.
Collecting their tin plates, they were marched to the kitchens. Supper was a piece of black bread with a cup of thin, unseasoned soup – cabbage, potato and a few scraps of gristle. He couldn’t be bothered with it, but seeing Seb push the bowl to one side, the fellow next to him happily grabbed it and devoured it in seconds.
‘Was that good?’ Seb enquired.
‘It’s never good, but tomorrow you will eat it. I promise you.’
‘Why are you here?’
‘No one asks that. We are all here for the same reason. The pasty-faced man with the moustache.’
At evening roll call, block leader Höss was missing, but word of the newcomer’s birthday had been passed on to his deputy, an even less appealing figure than his chief, and he made Seb step forward from the ranks.
‘This man is the lowest of the low,’ he informed the assembled inmates. ‘He is – or was – a police officer in the Munich Criminal Police, but he has shown disrespect and disloyalty to the Führer, the very man who has provided him with employment and put food in his belly. Today is Inspector Wolff’s birthday, however, so let us celebrate. No cake, I’m afraid, but we can offer him a night out to mark the big day and as a “welcome-to-Dachau” gesture.’
A night out. That was his idea of humour. A night out in Dachau meant standing to attention on the parade ground from dusk to dawn.
At least it was summer, so the hours of darkness were not only short, but warm and probably rain-free. Standing there as the night wore on, pain began to tear into his shoulders and lower back, but he had endured worse on night-time guard duties in the trenches, and he would get through this too. The problem was his bladder; by the early hours he desperately needed a piss.
*
As the sky began to lighten and reveille was called for the other prisoners, he began to think he could hold out. And then the sun nudged over the barbed wire and grey concrete wall at the eastern perimeter, beneath a guard tower, and he realised he had managed it. He had beaten the bastards.
It was a small victory and short-lived.
Even as he was congratulating himself, his tormentor re‑appeared. ‘Well done, prisoner Wolff, you haven’t collapsed.’
‘No.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said no, meaning I haven’t collapsed.’
‘Did I say you could talk? You talk only when it is demanded of you.’
‘I understand.’
‘There, you have done it again. Put your arms out at right angles to your torso.’
Seb obeyed the order.
‘Now you will stay like that until noon. If you say another word or move in any way, it will be midnight. After that, the lash.’ With a grin that exposed yellow-black teeth, the guard slapped both sides of Seb’s face with his riding crop. Hard.
He didn’t cry out but the battle was lost; he gave up on bladder control, and pissed himself.
It was impossible to protest. If he complained, the punishment would simply be intensified and extended and he would be there for many more hours. But he was mortified. His cheeks were red from the riding crop and from embarrassment. He hadn’t pissed his pants since he was a small child. Now the warmth of the urine spread down his legs and he could smell it.
There was no wound on his body, no bruises or stripe, but the pain and humiliation were real enough for all that. And now he faced a new problem: thirst.
His mouth was parched, his throat raw.
And then, at eleven o’clock, block leader Höss arrived again.
Seb tightened his shoulders, kept his arms rigidly in place and his lips sealed.
Höss looked at him for a full minute, then sighed. ‘Well, prisoner Wolff, you’re free to go. Consider yourself fortunate to have avoided the bullwhip welcome.’ He glanced down without comment at the dark urine patch on his coarse cotton uniform. ‘Return your soap, toothbrush, utensils and camp uniform to the shunt room and collect your own clothes and effects.’
For a few moments, Seb did not react. This was another trick designed to heap more punishment down on his head.
‘Move, Wolff. We don’t have all day.’
Slowly, Seb lowered his aching arms. Höss handed him a piece of paper with official Dachau heading. It was a signed and stamped pass. ‘Show this at the gate and you will be allowed out. You will find a car waiting for you. It seems you have friends in high places.’
Seb didn’t thank him. More than anything he hoped never to see his rather bland, emotionless face again. He returned to the hut, which was empty. All the other inmates were out on a work detail. He glanced at the plain wooden bunk beds which he had avoided sleeping in. Gathering up his toothbrush, soap and eating utensils, he walked out across the parade ground, hoping never to see the camp again. His arms ached badly, as though he had been lifting weights all morning. It was an experience he had no wish to repeat.
This was a terrible place, he decided, designed to destroy, not rehabilitate.
*
The car waiting for him was yet another open-topped Mercedes, the type beloved of every senior Nazi in Munich. Two swastika flags mounted on short poles decorated the rear offside and nearside wings. It was driven by a uniformed chauffeur but Seb knew who it belonged to, of course. Uncle Christian, his mother’s younger brother.
He nodded to the driver. ‘Good day.’
‘Heil Hitler.’
‘Ah, yes, Heil Hitler to you too.’ He waved his arm back at the driver, wincing from the pain occasioned from holding himself in an unnatural position for several hours. ‘Drive me to my house in Ainmüllerstrasse if you would.’
‘I have orders to take you to the Residenz. Councillor Weber wishes to see you.’
‘Can’t it wait? I could do with some coffee and a couple of hours’ sleep.’ He knew he was wasting his breath even as he spoke the words.
The driver shrugged his shoulders and pulled away. He threw the Mercedes into a U-turn and sped off at 100 kph straight towards the heart of Munich, ignoring traffic cops, cutting up other vehicles at crossroads, slewing past trams and buses with centimetres to spare. Seb closed his eyes, deciding he had no desire to witness his own death hurtling at him in the shape of a ten-tonne truck.
When they came to the gridlocked traffic close to the old town, the driver simply pressed his hand on the horn and kept it there until the hapless occupants of the other cars saw that this was an official Nazi vehicle and pulled aside to let him through as though he were an ambulance driver racing towards hospital. Big, black, open-topped Mercedes had that effect on people in the Third Reich, especially when decorated with the hooked cross flag.
The driver did, however, slow down as they passed the Feldherrnhalle, taking great care to thrust out his right arm like a stallion’s pizzle in salute to Hitler’s friends who had died there in the ill-fated putsch of 1923. Seb did likewise, not wishing to return to Dachau in a hurry, for this salute was mandatory and was policed by a permanent guard of SS men. Anyone failing to honour the fallen heroes of the Third Reich would be in serious trouble. Old ladies on bicycles wobbled and swerved as they removed their grip on the handlebars to make their obeisance; others simply took detours to avoid paying tribute to the Nazis.
The driver bore left and stopped on Max-Joseph-Platz. ‘Here we are, Inspector Wolff,’ he said without turning in his seat to address his passenger. ‘You are to make yourself known at the main entrance and then you will be escorted to the Black Hall and wait there for Councillor Weber.’ He looked at the little clock on the dashboard. ‘You are to be there in five minutes, no more, so get a move on.’
More orders. Seb rather fancied that his driver might be happier as a block leader in Dachau concentration camp than working as his uncle’s chauffeur. He had that way about him and he clearly loved his uniform. Getting out of the car, Seb did not thank him, or even say farewell. He merely left the rear door wide open so that he would have to shift his overfed arse from his comfortable seat to close it.
The Residenz was a remarkable place, one of the royal palaces of the Wittelsbach family, kings of Bavaria until the monarchy was abolished at the end of the Great War. With its vast maze of rooms – one hundred and thirty of them – and its ten splendid courtyards, you could easily get lost. Seb certainly would have without one of his uncle’s secretaries as guide.
Upstairs in the Black Hall – not really black, but a little dark perhaps beneath the richly painted trompe l’oeil ceiling – he was ushered across the marble floor to an antique chair at the base of one of the windows and told to sit and await the master. The sun was streaming down on his neck as he gazed at the portraits of long-forgotten princelings and his eyes grew heavy.
Another assistant appeared. ‘Councillor Weber is delayed. He has asked me to offer you refreshment.’
‘Breakfast would work for me.’
‘It’s more like lunchtime, sir.’
‘Then lunch, with coffee.’
‘I have some liver dumpling soup.’
‘I’m sure that would be excellent. Also perhaps some bread and cheese.’
‘Very good, sir.’
Five minutes later the food arrived on a tray and the servant set up a little trestle table for his guest. The soup was delicious, the bread was fresh and the cheese was an Italian blue. There was even butter and a small plate of pickles and he ate it all hungrily and felt a great deal better. It was wonderful, the best meal he’d had in days, but he had had a night without sleep and the food made him even drowsier. Now he really needed a siesta and quickly leant back in the chair and fell asleep.
He had no idea how long he was out, but Uncle Christian woke him with a prod in the belly with the leather riding crop he habitually carried. ‘Wake up, boy.’ He had always called his nephew that, never his name.
‘Sorry,’ Seb muttered. ‘I didn’t get any sleep.’
‘Well, you shouldn’t have got yourself sent to Dachau, you fool. Are you trying to embarrass me? Humiliate your saintly mother?’
‘Thank you for getting me out.’
‘For myself, I wouldn’t lift a finger to help you. I did it for my sister.’
Christian Weber was large and ill-favoured and smelt as though he had bathed in a sea of eau de cologne. He was probably the richest and most corrupt man in Munich. And the most despised. Everyone called him The Pig, though never to his face.
He had started life poor, shovelling shit for a racehorse trainer, but luck was on his side because he was with Hitler at the very beginning; they had beaten people up together, plotted and campaigned together, and they were still friends. Few men could laugh with the Führer and even make jokes at his expense these days, but Christian Weber was one of them.
Thanks to a mixture of graft, intimidation and guile he now ran the city council and owned half of Munich, including most of the transport system, a huge number of properties, including hotels, the brothels, the racecourse out at Riem, and a profitable portion of the tourist industry. He had also somehow contrived to set up his home in a sizeable corner of the Residenz, which was just about big enough to accommodate his layers of excess fat.
Not just any part of the old palace – he had chosen the richest, most comfortable and heavily ornamented quarters, using the Elector’s bedroom with its embroidered silk walls and its extraordinary old bedstead as the place to bring his chosen girls each night. How none of them suffocated under his 160 kilos was a mystery to Seb. He didn’t envy them, but guessed that The Pig probably tipped well.
Now here he was, bulging out of his new SS-Oberführer’s uniform, his whiskery, rather Prussian moustache twitching as he eyed up his nephew like a cat with a songbird at its mercy.
‘Well, I shouldn’t have been there,’ Seb protested. ‘It was all a ridiculous misunderstanding. The BPP guy was just throwing his weight around. One of Heydrich’s new recruits getting one over the Kripo.’
‘You’re just lucky that fool Deubel is in charge at Dachau. Soft as blancmange. I’m told it’s like a holiday resort there. Anyway, why don’t you join the party, boy – move over to the political police yourself? You’ve got friends there, haven’t you? I’ve discussed you with the coming man, Reinhard Heydrich, and he assures me you would be welcome to apply. He’s bringing a new sense of comradeship to the operation and is fighting hard to get pay increased.’
‘It’s not for me. I’m a straightforward detective.’
‘But you could do me a lot of good there and life would be a lot easier for you. I’d find you a luxurious place to live. How about a comfortable house in Bogenhausen? You could marry that girl of yours, give her babies, get her in the kitchen. She’s a good girl – she came to me when you were arrested by that BPP man. That’s how I discovered you were in Dachau. If she wasn’t yours, I’d have her for myself. So marry her, start a family together, join the party – you’d make your Uncle Christian a proud man.’
Seb didn’t bother to remind his uncle that he already had a family – a seventeen-year-old son. ‘I’ll give it some thought. Once again, thank you. I really need to get home now and have a few hours’ sleep.’
His exhaustion was all too obvious. He yawned and, without asking permission, Weber pushed some sort of tablet into his mouth, then clamped it shut with his meaty palm. ‘Swallow that. It’ll keep you awake.’ He couldn’t spit it out, so he gulped it down.
‘What is it?’ he said when his choking fit had subsided.
‘Magic pills from America. They keep you up and fucking all night.’ Weber shook his porcine head and a little smile spread across his snout. ‘I have to say there’s another reason you’ve been released. If it was just me, I’d have left you to the tender mercies of the Dachau guards for a week, to concentrate your mind. But it seems you’re needed on a murder case.’
Was he supposed to be happy about this news? ‘I’m not the only detective at Ettstrasse 2.’
‘Apparently you’re highly regarded, though, and the case is important. Adolf himself is taking an interest.’
‘And does he know that I have recently been in Dachau?’
‘Well, I have no intention of telling him. Anyway, you should feel honoured to have been chosen for this task.’
He thought for only two seconds, then shook his head. ‘Not me. I don’t want it.’ Seb didn’t need to sip the bitter wine to know the chalice was poisoned. Even Dachau might be a safer place than working on a case where failure would incur the wrath of Herr Hitler. ‘Ettstrasse isn’t short of good operators. They can get someone else.’ A party member, perhaps; someone who had mastered the art of the Hitler salute.
‘Well, well, boy, and there was me thinking you detectives all fought to get the best cases. I thought you would be pleased to test yourself on such a high-profile murder.’
‘If the Führer is interested, it will invariably involve politics. This could be a rabbit hole, and who knows where that will lead?’
The Pig grinned. ‘I’m afraid the decision has already been made. The case is yours. It seems you’ve got the best clear-up rate in the corps and, perhaps more importantly, you’re the only one at Ettstrasse who speaks good English. Don’t let me down on this, boy. I’ve had to call in favours to get you out of Dachau.’