When Gregory’s eyes opened he was lying on his side. They took in the uniformed torso of a State policeman then, as his glance wavered round, another policeman standing a little further off against a background of whitewashed wall with notice-boards on it. That, and the memory of his recent crash, told him that he was in a police station. Behind him another man was doing something to his left arm, and he realised it must be a doctor patching him up.
Considering the speed at which the Mercedes had hit the lamp standard, he had come off very lightly. The muscles of his left arm had been strained, his ribs were badly bruised where the steering wheel of the car had caught them, and he had knocked himself out on the windscreen. When the doctor had bandaged his head and strapped up his arm they helped him to sit up and a police sergeant said:
‘Altesse, it is my duty to charge you with driving dangerously and with ignoring the signals of a police officer to halt.’
For a moment, still being half dazed, Gregory was foxed at being addressed as ‘Highness’; then it clicked home that the police must have the wallet and identity card he had been carrying, so took him for Prince Hugo von Wittelsbach zu Amberg-Sulzheim. With a slow nod he asked, ‘The woman—the woman who ran out in front of my car. Is she … is she badly injured?’
The Sergeant shook his head. ‘No. Fortunately, Altesse, she only strained her wrist and grazed one side of her face.’
Gregory sighed with relief. At least he would not be charged with manslaughter. But all the same he was in a nasty mess.
For the night he was put in a cell and the doctor gave him a sedative. At seven o’clock next morning he was brought breakfast and an hour later the doctor examined him, then pronounced him fit to appear in court. The Sergeant asked if he wished to send for his solicitor and he replied that he had not got one in Berlin, so would choose a lawyer to defend him when he was brought before a magistrate.
On waking he had felt sick with disappointment that when everything had been set fair for him to get away over the Swiss frontier this misfortune should have befallen him. But he tried to console himself with the thought that his case would be infinitely worse had he fallen into the hands of the Gestapo instead of those of the Civil Police.
At nine o’clock he was taken in a prison van to the Potsdam Law Courts. In a cell there a dapper little man came and introduced himself as Herr Rechtsgelehrter Juttner and deferentially offered his services. Clearly he was eager to have the chance to act as Counsel for a Hochwohlgeborener and, knowing the profound respect with which the German middle classes still regarded the old nobility, this suddenly brought home to Gregory the advantages of temporarily being a Prince. Putting on the naughty manner expected of him, he accepted the lawyer’s offer and for some while they discussed the case.
Herr Juttner could not disguise the fact that it was a bad one, because Gregory might well have killed the policeman who had tried to stop him. There would also, he said, be two cases: one, the Reich against Gregory for dangerous driving, and another, private action, brought by the injured girl, Fräulein Elfrida Trott, for damages.
Now that Gregory’s mind was again working at full speed he at once realised that the second could be the more dangerous to him. The first would be settled that morning; but a private action might not come on for some weeks. For that he would be expected to call in his Insurance Company, and that he could not do. Almost certainly, too, the Prince’s relatives in Munich would get to hear of it. He would then be exposed as an impostor and the wrecked car would be traced to Sabine. An investigation would follow which, as they would be unable to meet and concoct a story to explain their association, was certain to land them both up to their necks in trouble.
Although the Prince’s wallet had been taken from Gregory, he knew that he still had at his disposal the considerable sum in it; and, as Fräulein Trott’s injuries were not serious, it occurred to him that she might be willing to settle out of court. Seeing his prospects of a second case slipping away from him, Herr Juttner somewhat reluctantly agreed to this; but she was waiting in another room to give evidence, so Gregory sent the lawyer off to see her. Ten minutes later he returned to report that she had accepted five hundred RM. as compensation.
That fence over, Gregory took the next one: that of dealing with the wrecked car. If it were left at the garage to which it presumably had been towed, unless something was done about it at once the police would ask for instructions about its disposal. To forestall their doing so Gregory asked Herr Juttner to deal with the matter as soon as the court hearing was over.
He said that the car belonged to the Baroness Tuzolto and, knowing her to be absent from her home, he had taken it without her knowledge or permission. Out of the money held temporarily by the police he asked Herr Juttner to pay the garage for returning the car to the Baroness. He then swore the lawyer to secrecy about the transaction, on the grounds that he had used an illegal store of petrol that the Baroness had had in her garage and wished to prevent her getting into trouble should that come out. Herr Juttner also agreed to convey to the Baroness the Prince’s sincere apologies for having taken and wrecked her car, and say that as soon as he could he would pay her any compensation she might ask.
Gregory then enquired the lawyer’s fee for all that he was to do for him and when Herr Juttner tentatively suggested seven hundred and fifty RM., the lordly Prince secured his complete allegiance by telling him that he should have a thousand. After Fräulein Trott, the garage and the lawyer had been paid, Gregory reckoned that would leave him only about three hundred RM. out of the sum Sabine had given him. But Juttner had been quite definite that he would not be able to get him off with a fine, and he knew that any balance of his money would not be returned to him until he left prison; so, for what he had achieved, he felt that the sixteen hundred or so marks had been well spent.
Soon after midday he was taken into court. There he pleaded guilty, offering as an excuse only that he had been desperately anxious to get back to Munich as soon as possible because a relative of his was lying dangerously ill there. Fräulein Trott, the man who had chased her out of the block of flats and the policeman whom Gregory had nearly run down gave their evidence. In view of the prisoner’s rank the magistrate treated him with some deference; but said that the case was a serious one and that people in his position should set an example instead of committing such a flagrant breach of the law; then sentenced him to six months’ detention.
Knowing that in Germany, unlike Britain, the authorities had a stranglehold over the Press, Gregory then expressed his contrition and asked that in order to spare his family the disgrace of his being sent to prison no account of the case should appear in the papers. To his great relief the magistrate agreed and gave the necessary instruction.
From the court he was removed to a cell in the Potsdam police barracks; and there for the rest of the day he contemplated his unpromising future. As a convict he considered his prospects of escape as far less good than if he were being sent to a prisoner-of-war camp. But at least he would be safe from the Gestapo—provided that his imposture as Prince Hugo was not discovered. And to maintain it, he had taken all the steps he possibly could.
On the Tuesday morning he was driven some twenty miles in a prison van and, on being let out, learned to his consternation that he had been taken to Sachsenhausen. He had expected to have to serve his sentence in a prison among ordinary criminals, which would have been bad enough; but Sachsenhausen was well known to be a concentration camp and he at once envisaged all the horrors that being confined in one called up.
To his surprise and relief, after the formalities of booking him in had been completed, he found that not only were his fears groundless but that his lot, anyway for the time being, was to be far better than any he could have expected. The camp consisted of several square miles of hutments surrounded by an open zone between high, barbed-wire fences. Within it there were many thousands of internees and, as a precaution against mass riots, it was divided into a great number of sections, one of which was known as the ‘Political Bunker’. The inmates of it numbered only a few hundred and were termed ‘Prominente’, because they were all people of standing who had been placed under restraint for a variety of reasons.
Some were awaiting trial, some were held only on suspicion that they were anti-Nazi and some were serving sentences of detention for anti-social activities; and Gregory had failed to appreciate that the magistrate had sentenced him not to imprisonment but to detention. For that, and for having been sent to serve his sentence among the Prominente, he had to thank the status he had acquired with his title; and before he went to sleep that night he was calling down blessings on Paula of the letter-box mouth, whose misadventure had provided this status for him.
He was allowed to continue wearing his own clothes, the guards were quite friendly, the food passable, the hut into which he was put clean and the wire-net bed he was given comfortable. The only hardship imposed was a prohibition against talking, and to enforce this guards kept the prisoners under observation both day and night. This constant surveillance convinced Gregory that escape was next to impossible, but he soon found that when out on exercise or in the wash-house neighbours managed to exchange whispered sentences.
By these means he learned that among the prisoners in his hut were Pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Professor Edouard Jessen and General von Rabenau; while in other huts were Baron Karl von Guttenberg, Judge Hans von Dohnanyi, the Christian Democrat Deputies Adolf Reichwein and Theodore Haubach, Prince Philip of Hesse, who before quarrelling with Hitler had been a prominent Nazi, the Socialist leaders Julius Leber and Wilhelm Leuschner, Generals Stieff and Lindemann, Counts Moltke and Matuscha and many other distinguished Germans.
At first, on finding himself among such people, several of whom might know Prince Hugo, Gregory was greatly alarmed that his imposture would be discovered. But on arrival at the camp two pieces of cloth, each bearing the letter P and a number, had been sewn on to his coat and trousers, and after being for only a short time in the hut to which he was allotted he found that the guards always addressed the prisoners by their numbers. Thus, as Number 541, his identity was screened from his companions and he swiftly decided to keep it so by refusing to give them any information about himself. As most of them had something to hide and they all believed that stool-pigeons had been put in among them, when he replied to their whispered enquiries only by a shake of the head none of them showed any resentment; and soon he had made friends of several of them.
As is the case in all prisons a mysterious grapevine existed by which news of the outside world regularly trickled into the camp, and this was frequently augmented by new arrivals. A number of them, like many of the prisoners already there, had first been confined for some days in cells under the Gestapo headquarters in Berlin. All of these had been subjected to a greater or lesser degree of torture in an attempt to force them to admit their guilt and incriminate others. But they all maintained that they had managed to stand up to it; and that, although in its early stages the pain had seemed to become unbearable, there came a point at which the human mind could not only accept it but ignore it until relieved by unconsciousness.
Towards the middle of August the fate of the Generals in the 20th July plot became known. Field Marshal Witzleben, Generals Hoeppner, Fellgiebel, Hase, Thomas, and several officers of less senior rank had been dragged before a ‘People’s Court’ and shamefully exhibited there, unshaven, in old clothes and without braces or belts, so that they had had to hold their trousers up. They had then been condemned to death. The manner of their death had been personally decreed in detail by the fiendish Hitler. They had been stripped naked, hanged, cut down and revived, then hung up again with butchers’ meat hooks in their backs until they expired in agony.
General Fromm, too, had not escaped. In spite of his having endeavoured to save himself by ruining the conspiracy, he had shared the fate of the colleagues he had from cowardice refused to aid. Kaltenbrunner who, with the possible exception of Grauber was Himmler’s most brutal-minded Lieutenant, had seen to that, because he was furious that Fromm had had von Stauffenberg and the other most active conspirators shot, instead of simply arresting them and handing them over to be tortured.
War news was also coming through. After over two months on their Normandy beach-head without launching an offensive the Allies had at last broken out. Towards the end of July the Americans, under General Bradley, had driven through to St. Loo on the coast of Brittany and simultaneously the Canadians had made a determined assault up the Falaise road against Caen. The Russians, meanwhile, had arrived at the gates of Warsaw and, although they were the hereditary enemies of the Poles, many thousands of Poles had risen in rebellion at dawn on August 1st with the intention of annihilating the German garrison and so enabling the Russians to enter their city.
During this time, and particularly at night before going to sleep, Gregory frequently concentrated his thoughts on Erika and did his utmost to assure her that he was safe and well. At times he seemed to get through and see her clearly at Gwaine Meads; but she looked ill, and he knew that was from worrying about him.
Once, in the third week of August, he spontaneously contacted Malacou. The Jew was sitting in a prison cell. Whereabouts Gregory had no idea, but it was clear that the occultist had been caught. Yet he conveyed a strong impression that he was not in the least worried about his situation. Why that should be Gregory could not imagine, but he had no doubt at all that his old associate was perfectly content to be where he was.
At the end of the month there was an influx of new prisoners: Dr. Karl Goerdeler, Ambassadors von Hassell and von der Schulenburg, Admiral Canaris, General Hans Oster, the Police Chiefs Count Helldorf and Artur Nebe, the ex-Finance Minister Johannes Popitz and several others. All of them had been arrested in the last week in July or early in August, on suspicion of having been concerned in the plot to assassinate Hitler. They had since been confined in the Gestapo headquarters, but no evidence against them being forthcoming they had now been sent to Sachsenhausen.
Gregory was particularly interested in Admiral Canaris, as he knew the little man to have been the pre-war head of the German Secret Service and to have continued in that capacity until the previous winter. Only then had Himmler’s inordinate ambition to control everything he could lay his hands on enabled him to secure the Admiral’s dismissal and absorb the old regular-officered Secret Service into the much greater Foreign Intelligence Department UA-1, that had been built up for him by his own man, Gruppenführer Grauber.
Rumour in the camp had it that Canaris had been anti-Hitler from the beginning, and had even deliberately withheld Intelligence because he wanted the Allies to win the war quickly so that Germany might escape the terrible punishment that was now being inflicted on her. It was said, too, that his second-in-command, General Oster, who had been kept on after the Admiral had been sacked, had stubbornly continued to thwart the Nazis whenever possible; so that either of them should still be alive was a miracle.
Early in September, further news of Germany’s rapidly deteriorating situation percolated through the camp. In mid-August the Allies had made another landing in the South of France. Soon afterwards Bradley and Montgomery had succeeded in encircling and destroying a great part of the German Army in the West, in the neighbourhood of Falaise, while another American Army under General Patton had reached the Seine at Fontainebleau.
Then the 23rd of the month had proved a truly black day for Germany. King Michael of Rumania had carried out a coup d’état, disarmed the German troops in Rumania and gone over to the Allies. Simultaneously there had been a rising against the Germans in Slovakia and on General Le Clerc reaching Paris with an armoured spearhead the population of the French capital had risen and set about massacring its German garrison. A few days later the Finns, who, with extraordinary bravery, had for five years fought as Germany’s ally and kept a large Russian Army occupied on their front, had at last thrown in the sponge and asked for an armistice.
It was clear that Hitler’s ‘Europa’ was cracking right and left, if not yet in the centre. But Gregory’s mind was by then more seriously occupied about his own situation. Admiral Canaris had been put in his hut and, being greatly interested in the little Admiral’s career, Gregory had taken special pains to cultivate him. It had, however, transpired that, even while confined at Sachsenhausen, the ex-Chief of Abwehr Intelligence had special sources of information. One day when they were employed in their morning chore of cleaning out the hut, the Admiral had whispered:
‘Number 541, I gather that you are on the camp register as Prince Hugo von Wittelsbach zu Amberg-Sulzheim. But I know you are not. Who are you?’
Rigid with alarm, Gregory had whispered back, ‘You are right. But if it is found out who I am it will cost me my life; so I beg you to keep my imposture secret.’
Canaris had agreed but Gregory was badly scared. Since the Admiral had found him out others, less discreet, might do so. Moreover, the thought had never ceased to nag him that, sooner or later, the story of the false Prince Hugo’s car smash would reach Munich, and an enquiry be set on foot that would lead to his detection. Escape, except in the event of some unforeseen circumstance, being out of the question, he decided that, somehow or other, he must rid himself of his dangerous identity.
To do so would be difficult, but it might be achieved if, owing to some mix-up among the prisoners, he could get himself transferred to another section of the camp under a different name. The only place in which such a mix-up might be stage-managed was the camp hospital and, as he was on the camp register as Prince Hugo, it occurred to him that he might get himself admitted by making use of the well-known strain of madness in the Wittelsbach family.
The following day, in pursuance of this plan, at the midday meal he poured his soup over his head. His companions showed surprise, while the guards only laughed. But he followed this up by a variety of eccentricities, including violent outbursts of speech in which he declared himself to be the King of Bavaria. Forty-eight hours later these tactics had the desired result and he was escorted, violently protesting, to the camp hospital.
There was no special hospital for the Prominente and that which served the whole camp was some distance from their quarters. Although it was a big building, with at least twenty wards, it could not have accommodated a tenth of the internees who should have been receiving hospital treatment.
By far the greater part of the prisoners were Jews, foreigners or middle-class Germans who had been arrested as socialists, pacifists or just for having been heard to grumble at the hardships brought about by the war. When, from malnutrition, tuberculosis, cancer or other diseases, these political prisoners became too weak to be any longer driven to work they were shot or left to die. Only those who were still strong enough to be useful, but had met with some accident temporarily incapacitating them, were sent to the hospital for treatment. The majority of its inmates were criminals who had received sentences and had been evacuated from the bombed-out prisons of Berlin to a special section of the camp. As Germans who were assumed to be politically ‘clean’ they were still protected by the old laws so, if seriously ill, sent in; but often not until they were at death’s door. The two types could be distinguished on sight, for below their identification numbers on coat and trousers the political prisoners had triangles of red cloth, while the criminal prisoners had triangles of green.
In due course, an elderly overworked doctor gave Gregory a brief examination. As he had confined his violence to speech and had not attacked anyone, the doctor decided that he was not dangerous but inflicted with periodical fits of insanity; so would probably recover in the course of a few days, and sent him to an ordinary ward for observation.
He found, as he had expected, that manpower now being so short in Germany, the hospital was greatly understaffed and that conditions in it were appalling. There were no female nurses. The scant care given to the patients was by medical orderlies, all of whom were too badly crippled by old wounds to be sent back to the Front, and of these there was only one to each ward of forty beds. To assist him each had two ‘trusties’ who, helped by the inmates of the ward who were not bedridden, took round the food and kept the ward free of its worst filth.
The lack of supervision in this death house—for it was little else—was most favourable to Gregory’s project and he set about it without delay, for his best chance of carrying it out successfully lay in doing so before the hospital staff became familiar with his features.
Being allowed to move freely about the ward he tried to put the awful stench of the place out of his mind and spent the afternoon going from bed to bed, finding out the circumstances of the other occupants. Several of them were obviously dying and it looked as if two or three of them would not last out the night. One of these, wheezing terribly, said that his name was Franz Protze and that he was a Lubeck lawyer who had been sentenced to three years for having forged the will of one of his clients. Having sympathised with him on his harsh fate, Gregory moved on among the other beds until he had completed the round of the ward. He then decided his purpose would best be served by making use of the dying lawyer.
About six o’clock a doctor, who was himself a prisoner, made the round of the ward; but he was evidently so inured to being unable to cope with its perpetual horrors that he spoke only briefly to a few of the patients, here and there handing out a couple of aspirins and giving the others no more than a glance. One man was found to be dead and the doctor told the two trusties to remove his body. No night garments were issued to the patients, so those in bed were all lying in their soiled underclothes. The trusties unceremoniously stripped the dead man and carried away his naked corpse.
When the doctor had gone bowls of bluish, heavily watered milk and slices of bread with a smear of margarine were passed round. Then, when darkness fell, to economise electricity, only one low-power electric light was switched on, and those patients who had been capable of moving about began to undress. The crippled medical orderly also started to undress and it became evident that he did night as well as day duty, occupying a bed near the door. That gave Gregory some uneasiness, but he felt that the chances were that, after their long day’s work, the orderly and the two trusties would all sleep soundly, so prove no impediment to his plans.
By nine o’clock the ward had settled down for the night, but Gregory felt sure that the doctors and other staff would still be about in their quarters for some time to come; so he controlled his impatience as best he could and lay listening to the grim symphony of groans, coughs, incoherent ramblings and occasional cries of pain that came from the other beds.
At length, about one in the morning, he got up; but, instead of dressing, he put on only his shoes, pulling his socks on over them to muffle the sound of his footsteps. Carrying his outer garments he crossed the ward to Protze’s bed. The lawyer was scarcely breathing and did not open his eyes. Taking his coat and trousers from under the bed Gregory got into them, then left his own, carefully bundled up so that the identification numbers with their large P should not show, in place of those he had taken. Turning away, he stole like a shadow down the faintly lit ward, glided past the snoring orderly’s bed, eased open the door, stepped out into the corridor and closed the door softly behind him.
When he had been brought to the hospital that morning he had seen that no sentries were posted outside it. That was not surprising, as comparatively few of the patients were in any condition to leave it and, even if they had, their chances of escape from the camp would have been no better than from one of its many sections. He was, therefore, fairly optimistic about getting away from the building provided he was not caught while leaving by a door or window.
Still moving like a shadow, he made his way down two passages then halted at a partly open door. As he peered in there was just light enough for him to see that the room was a kitchen. Slipping inside he gave a quick look round. On several long side tables there were stacks of food left ready for preparing the first meal of the day, among them ham, Leberwurst and apples, evidently intended for the staff. Having crammed his pockets with a selection of these he climbed up on one of the sinks, opened the window beyond it and climbed out. A quick look round showed him that no-one was about and he made off into the semi-darkness.
Had there been the least chance of escaping from the camp he would have made the attempt. But he was already convinced that to do so would be suicidal. The whole of the vast area that it covered was enclosed by two barbed-wire and electrified fences a hundred yards apart. The intervening space was floodlit by arc lamps and at intervals along it there were watch towers manned by sentries armed with light machine-guns. In addition, between the two fences a number of fierce Alsatian dogs were let loose every night; so even if a prisoner could have cut his way through the inner fence and the nearest sentries had been dozing, one or more of the dogs would have given the alarm and the escaper been riddled with bullets before he could reach the outer barrier.
Each section of the camp was also fenced off from its neighbours, but these fences were not electrified so could be got through without difficulty; and Gregory’s immediate object was to get as far from the hospital as possible. During the next half hour he climbed through half a dozen fences and, while between them, kept as far as possible in the shadow of the huts. But there was little danger of his being caught, for no guards patrolled the interior of the camp at night because the brightly lit, well-guarded perimeter made escapes impossible.
Having put three-quarters of a mile between himself and the hospital, he found a tool shed in which the implements used by the slave labour in that section were stored at night. Groping about in it, he made himself a place to sit down with his back comfortably propped up then eagerly devoured the food he had taken from the kitchen. Replete from this unusually substantial meal he closed his eyes and fell into a doze.
When daylight came he remained where he was, praying that the next stage in his plan would prove equally successful. Sounds of the camp stirring into life filtered through to him then, at about seven o’clock, the shuffling of feet outside. A sharp order was given and a line of wretched, ragged prisoners filed in to collect picks and shovels. Some of them looked at him with dull, lacklustre eyes, but none of them spoke. A Capo, as the trusties selected as overseers were called, appeared, saw him sitting on the floor, yelled at him to get up and struck him with a whip. As he came to his feet one of the prisoners muttered, ‘He’s not one of our gang.’
The Capo went out and fetched an S.S. man who proceeded to shout questions at Gregory. Passing a hand over his eyes to give the impression of being bemused, he told him that he did not know who he was or how he had got there, but he thought that he had been wandering about for most of the night.
As there were so many thousands of prisoners in the camp living under such appalling conditions, he felt confident that from time to time there must be cases in which the mental strain caused some of them to have blackouts and lose their memories. The result was as he had expected. The S.S. man gave him a kick, prodded him with a Sten gun, then marched him off to the camp headquarters. There, after a short wait, he was taken in to a lean, scar-faced Untersturmführer and his case reported.
Apparently in a daze, he stood there staring at the floor; but he knew that the next half-hour would decide the success or failure of his plan. By this time Franz Protze would almost certainly be dead. When the hospital orderlies removed his body to throw it into one of the common burial pits they would collect his clothes and turn them in at the camp clothing depot. With such deaths taking place every few hours it was most unlikely that anyone would notice that the number on the clothes was not that under which Protze had been admitted.
Gregory’s bed would be found empty. But as he had gone in as a mental case there would not be anything very surprising about his having wandered off in the night. The headquarters would be notified, but he had not been in the hospital long enough for anyone there to give an accurate description of him. Where his danger lay was in his disappearance being connected with a man being found who had lost his memory. His hope was in the vastness of the camp and that as it was understaffed no serious effort would be made to trace him. Anxiously he waited to learn how the Gestapo officer would react to the report about him.
The number on Protze’s clothes was E1076 and Gregory had made very certain that the triangles they bore were green, for had they been red to take them would have been the next best thing to signing his own death warrant. The Untersturmführer wrote the number down on a slip of paper and sent an orderly with it to the camp registry. Gregory was marched to a corner of the room and ordered to stand there facing the wall He remained there for ten anxious minutes. The orderly then returned and handed another slip of paper to his officer. After a glance at it the Untersturmführer said to the guard, ‘His name is Protze, and he’s serving a three-year sentence.’
Gregory held his breath. If the register also contained the information that Protze had been admitted to hospital the game was up. He would be sent back there and his imposture discovered. But after a moment the officer added, ‘Take him back where he belongs.’
Although Gregory breathed again, he had other fences to get over. When he arrived at Section E would the officer in charge there, or one of the guards, have known E1076 well enough by sight to declare that Gregory was not the prisoner who had borne that number? He could only hope that with so many deaths and the constant influx of new prisoners the guards never bothered to look on the poor devils as individuals.
A quarter of an hour later he was temporarily reassured. The bull-necked Blockführer to whom he was handed over gave him barely a glance, then said to the guard who had brought him, ‘Lost his memory, has he? Well, perhaps that’s lucky for the poor sod. You can’t miss what you don’t remember, can you?’
Jerking his head towards a hut that had a large 6 painted in white on the door, he added to Gregory, ‘That’s your hut, No. 1076. Get inside and report to the Lagerältester.’
While a prisoner among the Prominente, Gregory had picked up quite a lot about the organisation of the camp outside that privileged section. Only there were S.S. guards on duty night and day. The many thousands of ordinary prisoners were supervised and disciplined by trusties, the majority of whom were habitual criminals. Under the orders of the S.S. Blockführers, there were two types of these. Each hut, containing about two hundred prisoners, was in charge of a Lagerältester who tyrannised over its inmates and was responsible for their good behaviour, while even tougher old lags, the Capos, ran the working parties during the day.
Maintaining the vacant stare of a half-wit, Gregory went into the hut and confronted the Lagerältester. He was a small man with a mean, vicious face. On receiving no reply to his questions he slapped Gregory hard across the mouth. With iron self-control Gregory refrained from kicking the little brute in the crutch then strangling him, and remained there standing passively with drooping head. His restraint paid off. With a contemptuous shrug, the Lagerältester pointed to a bunk that had on it a blanket roll, a mess tin and a tin cup but, unlike the majority of the others, none of the few private possessions that the prisoners were allowed to retain.
Going to the bunk, Gregory put on the shelf above it his safety razor and the few other things he had been able to bring in his pockets. Meanwhile, he thanked his gods that the Lagerältester had either not familiarised himself with the faces of the two hundred men over whom he ruled or had assumed that Protze had died in hospital and his number been re-issued to a newcomer.
Two other men, both obviously so ill that had they been sent out to hard labour they would have collapsed, were in the hut scrubbing the floor, and Gregory was put to work with them. As he got down to it he took stock of his surroundings. Although the furnishings of the Prominente’s huts were far from luxurious, those here were much inferior to them. The bunks were in three tiers instead of two, there were only benches instead of chairs and the narrow table in the centre did not look as though it would seat more than half the two hundred prisoners the hut was supposed to accommodate.
At midday he caught the trampling of feet and the prisoners came pouring in. Unlike the Prominente silence was not enforced upon them. A little group at once surrounded Gregory and asked him about himself, but he returned them only vague looks and stuck to his role of having lost his memory. The majority took no notice of him, their thoughts being centred on the meagre meal of coarse bread and thin soup that was brought in half cold from the cookhouse by some of their number. Although he was still replete from his midnight feast, in order not to arouse comment he entered the jostling crowd and secured his share.
The break lasted only half an hour, then the Capo came in and hustled the prisoners out. Gregory went with them as they were marched to the northern end of the camp, where an extension to it was being made, and set to work there digging shallow foundations for a new row of hutments. From weeks of underfeeding most of his companions were incapable of sustained effort and from time to time the Capo lashed one of them with his whip; but Gregory was still in good condition so escaped such unpleasant attentions.
At five o’clock they were marched back to the hut, then ate a meagre supper consisting of herb tea and a slice of bread with a spoonful of jam apiece. Afterwards some of them talked in groups or played games with small stones or bits of paper they had collected; but most of them turned in, and by seven o’clock they were all in their bunks.
Before dropping off to sleep Gregory lay for a while congratulating himself on having pulled off a very risky venture. Yet within a week he came near to regretting that he had not continued to run the risk of impersonating Prince Hugo.
The fact that he had no longer to talk only in whispers was small compensation for the loss of the other amenities he had enjoyed as a Prominente. Conditions in the Criminal Section of the camp were infinitely worse. The food consisted almost entirely of slops: Linden tea twice a day and vegetable soup with only a few pieces of meat in it. The bread ration was strictly limited and their only solids were a few half-rotten potatoes in their skins or, three times a week, a small portion of sausage. The liquid diet was not only insufficient and gave many of them dysentery but also affected their bladders, forcing them to get up to urinate two or three times every night. Added to this they lived in constant dread of becoming the victims of the spite of the Lagerältester or the Capo, the hut was squalid and stank foully, and they were kept at their dreary task of digging for the best part of twelve hours a day.
Yet Gregory’s companions assured him that they lived like princes compared with the tens of thousands of ‘politicals’ who occupied the other sections of the camp. These poor wretches had no bunks but slept, when they could, on palliasses filled with rotten straw inadequate to their numbers; so that if one of them got up in the night, he would find his place taken and have to lie on the hard floor. For the least slackness they were flogged unmercifully by their overseers; they were fed only on raw vegetables and stew made from half-rotten cabbages, potato peelings and consignments of food sent from all over Germany that had been condemned as unfit for human consumption. When too weak to work any longer they were shot or herded into the gas chambers and, daily, scores of them, driven to desperation, committed suicide by throwing themselves on to the perimeter fences which electrocuted them.
From time to time, as Gregory trudged out to work he passed gangs of these miserable beings forgotten by God. Gaunt-faced and terribly emaciated, their striped prison garments hanging loose about them, they staggered along to their daily labour of loading piles of rubble into trucks then pushing the trucks for a mile or more to the places where the rubble was required to make foundations. The sight of them brought to his mind the Zombies of Haiti who, it was said, had been drugged, buried alive, then dug up by the witch doctors and by a magical ceremony deprived of their minds; so that they afterwards laboured in the fields with no knowledge of whom they were or the lives they had led before they had been presumed dead and then buried. In the worst cases the simile was apt, for acute privation had robbed many of the political prisoners of the power any longer to think, and these glassy-eyed living skeletons were so numerous that a special word, ‘Moslems’, had been added to the camp argot to describe them.
As Gregory got on well with most people he soon established friendly relations with several of the men in his hut. They were a very mixed collection. Quite a number were educated men guilty of fraud, manslaughter, hoarding, sexual offences, blackmarketeering and so on; while others were professional criminals. A number of them were serving long sentences and had been inmates of the big Mobait Prison in Berlin, until its partial destruction by bombing had led to its being evacuated.
In two respects Gregory found their psychology interesting. Although in normal times most of them had been agnostics, uncertainty about whether in their present grim conditions their stamina would suffice for them to live out their sentences made all but a few of them turn to religion. It seemed that their only hope of survival now lay in the power of Jesus Christ to accept into His fold repentant sinners and, although there was no ‘man of God’ in the hut to lead them, Catholics, Lutherans, and even the unbaptised regularly joined together in prayer meetings.
The other interesting fact was that, although they were all normally patriotic Germans, they now longed for a speedy defeat of Germany as the only means of bringing the war to an end. Here, too, a mysterious grapevine operated, bringing news only a few days after major events of Allied victories that rejoiced the prisoners. How, Gregory could never discover, but at the end of the first week in September it was known in the camp that the Poles were still resisting the German garrison in Warsaw, that the Allied Army that had landed in the South of France had reached Lyons, and that the British had entered Brussels in triumph.
Soon after he had become No. E1076 he had another clear vision of Malacou. It was at about eleven o’clock in the morning. The occultist was standing in a Law Court with a warder on either side of him. On what charge he was being tried Gregory remained uncertain, but he had a strong impression that it had something to do with the von Altern estate.
At the evening roll-call on September 9th the prisoners had to make a show of rejoicing, as the Blockführer announced to them with delight that the Führer’s long-promised decisive Secret Weapon was at last in operation. That morning the first long-range rocket had been successfully launched and landed on its target—the heart of London. As for months past Goebbels had been declaring that the Flying Bombs had reduced the British capital to ruins, the prisoners were not greatly impressed. Among themselves, they agreed that at worst this new weapon could now do no more than delay an Allied victory.
Their belief was strengthened by the continued advance of General Eisenhower’s armies. By the middle of the month that from the south had advanced to Dijon, in the west the great port of Le Havre had been captured, and the main body of the Allies was pushing the Germans back to the Siegfried Line.
Some of Gregory’s companions began to say that once the Siegfried Line was breached Hitler would surrender. Gregory doubted that but prayed for it, as he could think of no possible way to escape from the camp and an end to the war now seemed the only event which could lead to a termination of his present miserable existence.
Yet, only two mornings later, he was roused from his depression by a most unexpected happening. It brought him no nearer to securing his liberty, but at least gave him something new to think about.
Many of the prisoners were suffering from dysentery, so a latrine had been set up near the site on which they worked. It was no more than a trench with, parallel to it, a long stout pole on trestles over which the men could squat. From a distance the Capos kept an eye on the prisoners making use of it, to see that they did not shirk work by remaining there longer than necessary. But it was used by two other gangs working on the same site as Gregory’s; so there were usually several men perched on the long pole at the same time, and by changing places in the row when the Capos were not looking it was sometimes possible to get a rest there of up to fifteen minutes.
Gregory had soon picked up this dodge and, on this occasion, had just moved down to squat again next to a hunched figure at one extreme end of the pole. He had been there only a moment when his neighbour said in a low voice:
‘Greetings. I knew I should meet you here within a day or two, Herr Sallust.’
Experienced as Gregory was in controlling his reactions to sudden danger, to be identified in such a place was so utterly unexpected that the start he gave nearly sent him backward into the trench. Swinging round on the man who had addressed him, he found himself staring at Malacou.