The man would give no name, but he reminded Reinhardt of someone he had met in Sarajevo, in the 999th Balkan Field Punishment Battalion. Kreuz had been a convict in the battalion he was investigating, a man with a loaded past, a live wire, a man constantly in need of being grounded.
This man wore the white coat of a medical officer, and had a faintly cadaverous air about him, with a sharply receding hairline and a chipped line of yellow teeth. He would say nothing about whether he was a doctor or a nurse or neither but that, and the way in which the man’s heavy black eyes remained fixed on a point just out of sight, told Reinhardt he, too, had a heavy past.
“Before you ask,” the man said, “I’ve been denazified. All right? The professor here’s seen my certificate, so we’re aboveboard on that. I’m not giving you my name . . . because . . . I don’t want any part of a police investigation. All right? My name goes nowhere. It stays with me.”
“That’s fine,” said Reinhardt quietly. They were sitting in an abandoned office that reeked of something chemical. The building echoed with noise, and smells and scents tangled across Reinhardt’s nose. He hated hospitals, and this place was redolent with the smell of old blood, of misuse and disuse, of men’s misery. He pushed a packet of Luckies onto the table, and then the photograph of Noell, kneeling with another man over something in what looked like a tank of water. “What can you tell me about that?”
The man recoiled from the photograph, lit a cigarette, inhaled deeply, then picked up the photo in both hands. The cigarette smoked gently over one corner of the photo as he looked at it. Then he nodded to himself, his nose crinkling. He took another long drag of the cigarette and began to jiggle his legs, tapping his heels against the floor.
“All right. I know what this is. I saw it. I didn’t have any part in it though.” The man’s heavy eyes swung across the space between Endres and Reinhardt without ever quite focusing on either of them, as if searching for the contradiction in what he had just said. Reinhardt said nothing, waiting. “What do you know about the various experiments the Nazis conducted, using human beings as the test subjects?”
It was not a rhetorical question. The man waited, going very still, until Reinhardt’s mouth moved around words he did not want to speak. “I’m not sure I know that much. I heard rumors when I was a POW. That some of the camps did . . . things. Before the war, there was the euthanasia program. My wife’s cousin was . . .” He tailed off, but it seemed to be enough for the man as he juddered back to life, jiggling his legs up and down, up and down with his heels.
“Well, whatever you heard, however far-fetched, they were all true. All right? All the rumors. Everyone was involved in some way. The civilian administration, the navy, the air force, the SS—everyone—was involved in some way. Everyone wanted something. All right? Everyone had some idea that needed to be tested, some cure that needed support. Illnesses. Battlefield trauma. Eugenics. Sterilization. Curing homosexuality. Testing racial theories and vaccines and blood coagulation. You name it, everyone had a need or a project, and there was a never-ending pool of subjects to try them on.” He went still, again.
“Prisoners of war,” said Reinhardt.
“Millions of them. We took Christ knows how many millions of prisoners in the USSR, right? Hundreds of thousands of Poles. And not just prisoners. Jews. Homosexuals. Political dissidents. The elderly. Women. Children.” The man’s hands shook and he trembled to a stop. Reinhardt’s mouth was dry, as if he had been talking a long time. All three of them pulled on their cigarettes at the same time, letting the smoke fill the silence, until the man quivered again and resumed talking.
“All right,” he said, stabbing the photograph where it lay with his cigarette jutting at right angles from between his fingers. “Judging from the people in it, their ranks, what I can see of what’s happening, this particular photograph was probably taken at Dachau concentration camp, sometime in 1943. There was a Luftwaffe facility there that conducted experiments on human beings. These experiments were under the direct authority of Erich Hippke, the Luftwaffe’s general surgeon. Its chief medical officer. There were a variety of projects, particularly those linked to the impact of pressure and of survival in extreme conditions. All right? So, one of the two men in the photograph is Dr. Sigmund Rascher. Him, there,” the man said, pointing at the man next to Noell, with his face down looking at whatever they were doing. “He led the experiments. Rascher was a doctor. He was an ardent Nazi. He was an arch self-promoter. But he may as well have been insane.”
The man drew another long, shuddering breath, then drew deeply on his cigarette. “What you are looking at is an experiment in survival times of a human being in water chilled to Arctic temperatures. All right? Various iterations were run. With the subject naked. Clothed. Or in a flight suit. Or clothed in different versions of specially designed survival gear. Like that one is wearing. It’s a survival suit. The man inside it is probably a Polish prisoner. It’s doubtful he survived, but there was a recovery element to the tests. After a certain amount of time, subjects would be removed from the water and immersed in warm water, or water at body temperature, or water that was slowly warmed up, or wrapped in various kinds of blankets or other materials. Sometimes they’d get a couple of women prisoners, strip them naked, and make them lie on either side of the test subject to see if that would help. Or not. It didn’t.” He tailed off again, drew on his cigarette, his feverish quivering winding to a stop.
“Go on,” Reinhardt said.
The man nodded, lighting another cigarette from the stub of his first. “Rascher worked on that stuff for about a year. All right? He also worked on special tests that aimed at establishing the effects of pressure on human beings. Pressure like that experienced at high altitude. Consider,” the man said, seeing Reinhardt’s frown of incomprehension, “a pilot bailing out of an aircraft at great altitude, the body will experience extremes of pressure, from low to high, as it falls. What effect does this have? Are the effects permanent? Long lasting? Short term? There were also experiments to determine the effects of a sudden loss of pressure in a pressurized environment. They called it ‘explosive decompression.’ The results were . . . unpleasant,” the man finished, clamping his mouth around his cigarette.
“What did all this work lead to?”
“I don’t know. There was an element of the research that took the results of the experiments and trialed various products with actual pilots, in proper conditions. But I was not familiar with that.”
Reinhardt frowned again, parts of the mystery beginning to coalesce around him. “You’re saying there was a, a flight unit attached to this? That would have made it a sort of test unit?” The man nodded.
“Yes,” the man said. “For example, one of the demands was to increase the survival rates of pilots shot down on operations over the North Sea and the Arctic. Survival times for airmen shot down over water was very low, and attrition was high.”
Reinhardt toyed with the cigarette packet, thinking of that gap in Noell’s soldbuch. “Would that unit have been secret?”
“Probably. Everything was secret. Everything was secret from everything. The air force from the army. The army from the navy. Everyone from the SS. Everything was broken down. Compartmentalized. Feudal. No one had the whole picture.”
“You did, apparently.”
The man’s face twisted inward, as if he wanted to swallow himself, swallow his shame, but then he stilled himself with a visible effort, smoothing his hands across the tabletop in front of him. “I had a good part of it. All right? I made myself useful. And when you make yourself useful, you hear things. You learn things.”
“I’m sorry,” Reinhardt hesitated. “I understand you don’t want to give your name. But how can I trust you? How do I know you know what you’re talking about?”
“All right. All right,” the man jiggled in his seat, lighting another cigarette. “I was there. Yes. At Dachau. But I didn’t have much choice. I was a lab technician before the war. I worked for the air force’s medical research center. I got sent up to Dachau in ’39.” He paused, jiggled his knees again, then made a sign against his chest with one finger. “Pink triangle. All right?” Reinhardt nodded. The man was a homosexual. “Dachau was . . . it was fucking awful. All right? You had to survive. Any way you could. All right? I managed to catch the eye of one of the SS guards. I managed to get into the hospital wing. I made myself useful. All right? Useful. I made myself useful to them,” he finished, pointing at the photo. “To anyone who would keep me alive another day.” His legs thudded furiously under the desk. “Then, when Rascher turned up and began experimenting, I got myself transferred. As I was ex–air force, it wasn’t too hard. I just had to stay alive.”
“And now?”
“And now I’m here,” the man said, raising his hands around him. “Lab technician, again. But a nurse most of the time. People need nurses, and no one asks questions.”
“This place is an air force hospital.”
“It was,” said Endres, the first thing he had said. Even seated, Professor Endres seemed ramrod straight, as if clenched tight around the strictures of his self-possession. “It’s just a hospital, now.”
Reinhardt felt soiled. “What happened to Rascher?”
“He’s dead. He was executed at Dachau. He went too far with something or other. His Nazism was only equaled by his ego and desire for self-aggrandizement. Well, that was a dangerous game to play with our leaders. You played, you won. You played, you lost. All right? He lost. I don’t know what he did, but whatever it was, they put him up against a wall and shot him.”
“You’re sure?”
The man nodded. “I was still at Dachau when they did it. May 1945.”
“What about the other one in the photo?”
“That’s Colonel Noell. He was more on the operations side. He was based somewhere else. Up north, I think. I don’t know where. He would take Rascher’s experimental results and operationalize them.”
“‘Colonel’ Noell? You’re sure? Not ‘Captain’?”
“Colonel,” the man said, nodding. “The other brother was the captain.”