Sofie
It was supposed to be the most important evening in Jürgen’s career, but the work never stopped. Lydia and I spent a leisurely afternoon pampering ourselves, while Karl and Jürgen threw their tuxedos on and disappeared for meetings in some corner of the vast Castle Varlar. I hadn’t seen him since, but I wasn’t anxious. This event couldn’t start without Jürgen, the guest of honor.
Lydia was by my side as I paused in the doorway to the dining hall, taking in the opulent scene. Most of those in the room were men in SS uniforms or tuxedos. Only a handful of women were permitted to attend.
Lydia was wearing yet another dirndl-style dress—a more formal version with puffed sleeves and elaborate embroidery on the skirt. I was wearing the finest outfit I’d ever owned—finer than my wedding dress. A designer at the Deutsches Modeamt fashioned the suit in cream silk, elevated by thousands of tiny pearls and crystal beads.
I was pretending to be excited, but I felt nothing more than a sense of simmering anxiety. I was always anxious around senior Nazis.
I’d been particularly concerned for Jürgen since the rocket program moved to the site they called Mittelwerk in the wake of a British bombing raid on Peenemünde, in the summer of 1943. The move had been unimaginably complex—the entire rocketry operation shifted more than six hundred kilometers across Germany into the tunnels of a supposedly air raid–proof gypsum mine, beneath a huge hill called the Kohnstein. Jürgen and Karl and their staff were tasked with reconstructing the research program and establishing a factory to mass-produce the rockets in those mines, and they were given just a few short months to do it.
I tried to call him most days, but his phone usually went unanswered. I’d taken the children to see him several times, only to spend the entire weekend at Jürgen’s villa in the nearby town of Nordhausen, waiting for a break in his work schedule that never came. At some point, I’d started to learn more about my husband’s life through Karl, via Lydia, than from him directly.
He was busy, but that wasn’t why he avoided my calls. He was stressed, but that wasn’t why he didn’t make time to see me and the children. Jürgen was withdrawing from us, and it was time to force a confrontation.
Lydia and I approached the host at the door, and he greeted us warmly as we introduced ourselves. After checking a seating chart, he led the way to our tables.
“You’re here, Mrs. zu Schiller,” he said politely, holding out a chair for Lydia at a table near the back of the room.
“Hello, Mrs. zu Schiller,” Aldo Radtke said, smiling warmly at her from his own seat, a few chairs down from Lydia. “And Mrs. von Meyer Rhodes. Congratulations.” A decade after that dinner party at Lydia’s house, Aldo was no longer fresh-faced and anxious, but he still seemed sweet. He was a key member of Jürgen’s team, one of only a handful of colleagues who was invited to join us that evening.
“Hello, Aldo.” I smiled, nodding at him. “Thank you.”
But Lydia seemed confused. She looked from Aldo to her seat, her expression darkening when the waiter indicated I should follow him to another table.
“You are a guest of honor, Mrs. von Meyer Rhodes. You have a reserved seat at the front.”
Lydia was not a woman accustomed to sharing the spotlight, and that night, she was watching someone else bask in it. I gave her an apologetic shrug, and she forced a smile and nodded, as if permitting me to go to my own seat.
The head table was set just in front of a heavy red velvet curtain, facing the rest of the room like a bridal table. Trails of ivy hung along the front, and bright arrangements of winter flowers were set between pairs of seats—lily of the valley and pansies and coral bells. The sweet scent rising from the arrangements reminded me of Adele’s garden.
I took my seat alone, feeling awkward and on display, and finished a glass of champagne before Jürgen joined me. There were strands of silver along his hairline now, new lines around his eyes, and his tuxedo hung on his gaunt frame. Every time I’d seen him that year, he looked more beaten down. Now, as he sat and shuffled his chair closer to the table, there was barely disguised distress in his gaze.
“What is it?” I whispered.
He turned toward me and whispered heavily, “I’ve been invited to join the SS.” I pulled away and stared at him, forcing a smile. Invited seemed the wrong word for that sentence, because it suggested there was an option to decline. “Karl too.”
But Otto took the seat beside me then, and Helene soon took the seat on his other side. We exchanged pleasantries as my heart raced, and my stomach churned so much I couldn’t tolerate more than a bite or two of the elaborate meal.
Was this just a ceremonial appointment—a uniform and title, and that was it? Or would Jürgen be forced to participate in still more activities that went against his values? He obviously knew enough to be worried, but he was so much better at playing the game than I was. He laughed and he joked and sipped champagne and ate his food as if he hadn’t a care in the world. But I saw the strain in the lines around his lips and the tense set of his shoulders. I heard the brittleness beneath his chuckles.
I felt the sweat on his palm when I reached to take his hand. Jürgen was scared, and that was more than enough to make me scared too.
The proceedings began in earnest after the dessert plates were cleared. Otto was honored first—called to a podium in the corner of the room by another senior SS official, who gushed praise at his commitment to the Nazi cause and his “genius” oversight of the rocket program, then slipped a red, blue, and white ribbon over his head. The Ritterkreuz des Eisernen Kreuzes sat heavy and bold at his collarbone. The Knight’s Cross was the highest award in all of Nazi Germany—rarely offered, highly revered. As Otto returned to his seat, the lights dimmed. The heavy velvet curtain behind us drew back. Those of us at the head table awkwardly shuffled around to face a large window overlooking a moonlit lawn.
A crackling anticipation filled the air and a hush swept over the room. A flare burst to life on the lawn, and then came a roar so loud it made my ears ache. Red and blue fire spilled from beneath an enormous rocket, and after some seconds, the missile rose, smooth and steady. There were gasps of delight and cheers, then riotous applause as the rocket disappeared from view.
It might have been going anywhere—into orbit, into space, to the moon. It might have been taking man to new heights, expanding our understanding of the universe and the galaxy—extending our knowledge about our world and ourselves. But that rocket wasn’t a space exploration device—it was a warhead, destined for some unsuspecting village or city...some innocent family in their home, just as Jürgen had once feared. His rockets, now public knowledge, were renamed Vergeltungswaffe 2, Retribution Weapon 2, part of the set of Nazi “vengeance weapons” that were supposed to turn the tide of the war. Since September, over three thousand V-2 rockets had been launched, mostly against Belgium and London. Each was almost fifty feet high and weighed thirty thousand pounds. My head ached if I thought about the scale and size of the operation.
Jürgen was the next to receive his medal, and when he was invited to the podium, I watched him closely. He had been quiet and pensive by my side until they called his name. He played the role so well, he momentarily looked like a different man as he stood—a stony, cruel version of the man I’d loved for my entire adult life.
He barked the victory salute back at the official, his gaze firm and his muscles tense. But once he’d returned to his seat beside me, and when the lights in that room went down and the curtain again opened, the burst of flame from another rocket lit up over the lawn. I dragged my eyes from the rocket so that I could watch Jürgen’s reaction to it.
The colors of the flames were reflected in the sheen of tears in his eyes as he watched the rocket’s flare. Jürgen’s expression suggested he might have been staring into hell itself.
An instinct sounded. Was he going to refuse to join the SS? Surely not. It would be an act of suicide—
A chill ran down my spine.
What if that was the point?
We were both more than a little tipsy by the time we tumbled into bed, and for the first time in months, we held one another. After a while, Jürgen lifted the blanket over our heads. It had been so long since we’d seen each other, longer since we’d been through this routine, but the act of hiding beneath the blankets was so ingrained in our relationship—as intimate as making love. I took no solace in the action, not that night. We were about to have the conversation I’d been dreading all evening.
“You have to do it,” I said. Jürgen remained silent. “Why would this be the line you refuse to cross? After everything we’ve done?” I drew in a breath. “Is it true that the war is almost over anyway? Hitler is losing?”
The papers suggested the opposite, of course. Victory was within reach, and if our troops were pulling back, this was simply for “strategic reasons.” But I learned to make the ordinary folk of Berlin my bellwether, and whispers on the streets were that the war was all but lost.
“It is only a matter of time,” Jürgen admitted. “And when Germany capitulates, the world will see what we’ve done across the Reich. The SS has been the driver for so much of the cruelty. I’ve made more than my share of mistakes in this war, but aligning myself with those bastards cannot be one of them.”
I pondered this, my heart sinking. Of course the SS would be targets—they’d been the architects of the concentration camps.
“So you think if you decline the invitation to join the SS, you’ll fare better when the Allies arrive,” I surmised.
“Can you really be so naive?” he whispered fiercely. “One way or another, I’m as good as dead. I am the technical manager of a program built on forced labor, Sofie. The rockets are nightmarish enough—they’ve almost certainly resulted in the deaths of thousands of innocent people. But the Mittelwerk operation is an abomination. I’ll hang.” His voice broke as he added weakly, “I should hang.”
“But you were only following orders,” I whispered. “You aren’t responsible for whatever has gone wrong at Mittelwerk. Are you?”
He sighed then, a miserable, resigned sound that almost broke my heart.
“This isn’t a conversation you have under a blanket,” I whispered, tearing up suddenly. “Can we talk about this tomorrow?”
I pulled the blanket back down and sat up. Jürgen sat up too, and we stared at each other in the dim light. He pinched the bridge of his nose, squinting as if he were in physical pain.
“Where else can we have the conversation, Sofie?” he mouthed. I started to cry, and he reached to cup my cheek. “We have to talk about this.”
I pressed my mouth against his ear and whispered tearfully, “But maybe not when we’re so tired and emotional. Maybe not when we’re both half-drunk.”
He sighed as he nodded, and we stretched out side by side, staring up at the roof. Neither one of us slept much.
At breakfast the next morning, Jürgen and I sat with Lydia and Karl. I saw the tight smile she pinned to her face when she glanced at the medal, already fixed around Jürgen’s neck. Her gaze immediately skimmed to Karl’s bare neck, and she pursed her lips. Otto and Helene soon joined us. Otto was wearing his Knight’s Cross around his neck, a matching pair with Helene’s Mother’s Cross.
The chefs had prepared a celebratory breakfast for us all—thick slices of salty wild boar bacon, heavy rye bread spread thick with cultured butter. Best of all was the coffee—real coffee, the first I’d had in years, as it had been impossible to find in Berlin during the war. I drank the first cup so fast, I scalded the roof of my mouth.
“Yesterday was an especially successful day with the rockets,” Otto announced, beaming as he devoured his meal. “One of the V-2s we launched from Zeeland landed on a cinema in Antwerp. It was completely full at the time! Our early intelligence suggests five hundred enemies may have been destroyed.”
A resounding cheer went up from the breakfast diners, but I was doing the calculation in my mind—an ordinary Thursday afternoon. A cinema, for God’s sakes. A cinema couldn’t possibly have been full of soldiers. Why are we celebrating the death of hundreds of civilians? I clapped even though I felt sick.
I looked at Jürgen. He cheered with the rest of them, but his eyes were hollow, as if part of him had already died.
“We need to stop here for the night,” Jürgen said abruptly. At breakfast, he asked Lydia if our children could stay at her home for a few extra nights so he and I could share some extra time together. Now we were midway through the five-hour drive from Castle Varlar to his villa in Nordhausen and I was startled at the sudden change in plans.
“Why? Are you unwell?”
He ignored me, turning the car into the parking lot of an historic, stone-walled hotel in Kassel. Something about his steely silence warned me to leave the question hanging, so I didn’t ask again.
Soon, we were alone, with black-washed wooden floorboards beneath our feet and exposed beams across the sloped ceiling above us. A large bed sat in the center of the room, with soft white pillows and layers of thick blankets. Huge, wood-framed windows washed the room in silver-blue light, reflected off the snow on a nearby rooftop. On any other day, at any other stage of my life, I’d have been delighted by the scene.
“They will bring dinner for us later,” Jürgen said, as he sat on the bed and stretched his legs out. He patted the mattress beside him and added gently, “Come here, my love.”
“Why did you do this?” I asked, as I crawled up onto the bed next to him. He immediately pulled me close, and I reclined, my ear to his chest.
“A random room in a random hotel that even I didn’t know I was going to book seemed our best chance at privacy.”
“What if the room has a listening device?”
“They can’t have one in every room in the country, and even if they do, I checked in under a false name.”
We sat for a while as I pondered the risk calculation, too accustomed by then to assuming no space was safe for me to speak freely. I listened to the slow breaths of my husband and the beating of his heart beneath my ear. After a while, he whispered, “There is a sign above the gate at the Buchenwald camp. Jedem das Seine.” Roughly, To Each What He Deserves.
“I think about that every day. The people inside those gates have done nothing to deserve their fate. I always thought that hell was a myth. It made good sense that the church would come up with a lie like that—eternal damnation is a strong motivation to convince people to comply. But now I understand that hell is not an abstract concept. It’s real, but it’s not about pitchforks or rivers of lava. Hell is simply the place where hope is lost.” He sighed heavily. “Sofie, even my villa is haunted.”
“Haunted?”
“Otto said the villa was a reward. Somewhere big enough for you and the children to come and stay. I was pleased at first—it’s a lovely home.” His villa was outfitted with expensive furnishings, new appliances, and ample space. “I learned from the neighbors that the villa belonged to a Jewish businessman. They took it from him, and they took his business too. I bought a new mattress, but it is his bed I sleep in. When I come home after work, I feel him there. We have taken everything from the victims of the Reich. Their homes. Families. Communities. Clothes. Assets. And now we work the prisoners day and night for us at Mittelwerk, and all we give them in return is the chance to take one more breath—there is never any guarantee of more than that. There is no hope of rescue or reprieve. This is what I have done to them.”
“Well, you haven’t—” I started to argue, but behind me, I felt him shake his head fiercely.
“I have been to the camps. I’ve seen the conditions these people are trapped in. I’ve stood idly by while Otto and Karl worked them to death at Mittelwerk. Those men build rockets according to my instructions. When the story of the war is written, the pages will be full of men saying I was only following orders and the world will know that is fiction. Every single time I opted not to take a stand, I was taking a stand—for the wrong side.”
I sat up, turning to face him. He was shaking with rage and guilt, and when I touched his shoulder, he shook me away.
“None of this is your fault, Jürgen.”
He turned to stare out the window. It was freezing outside and fat flakes of snow began to fall. Without turning back to me, he murmured, “The only thing that’s kept me going the last few years is that you get to live a reasonably ordinary life in Berlin with the children. But from time to time, I realize that it’s my fault that you have no idea what it has cost for you to have that nice life.”
“Jürgen...” I whispered, stunned.
“I wanted to shelter you from the horrors of what I was seeing. What I was a part of. But I can’t keep doing that, Sofie. Sooner or later, you have to know the truth.”
“The truth?” I repeated hesitantly.
“A while back, I mentioned to Otto that it made no sense to make the prisoners at Mittelwerk live and work as they are. I know he hates the Jews. Even at a practical level it seemed to make sense to be smarter about our work practices. And do you know what he said?” He didn’t wait for my response before he carried on. “He said that whether the workers fall off a scaffold or die from starvation or disease or go back to the camps, the outcome is the same. Some of the camps have transitioned. They are now extermination camps.” Jürgen’s voice broke. He cleared his throat, then whispered, “Otto knows the war is lost—we all do. The Reich will aim to wipe the Jews from the face of the earth right up until Germany falls.”
“But—there must be hundreds of thousands of people in those camps...”
“Millions,” he corrected, and then to my horror, he choked on a sob. “And they plan to murder them all.”
“The logistics of that would be impossible,” I said urgently. “You must be mistaken, Jürgen. This simply cannot be.”
“They have developed a gas that suffocates in minutes. Men, women, children—it doesn’t matter to the SS. Thousands of people die at one time, and some camps are executing them around the clock.”
“You can’t be sure. This can’t be real. Not millions of people—”
“Sofie. I’m sure.”
I had been turned inside out—my nerves left raw and my breath shallow. I started to cry, big heaving sobs of shame and confusion and grief. War was always ugly. What Jürgen spoke of was different—a scale of cruelty and violence that was impossible to fathom.
Maybe I had assumed that Germany would fall and the normal rules would apply again—that Mayim would come home or that I’d meet up with her in Poland, and Jürgen might be a prisoner of war, maybe he’d even go to jail, but that eventually, there would be an after.
But we were playing by a different rule book—the scale and depth of the Reich’s depravity changed everything, and the impact on us was the very least of it. The world would never be the same.
“I’ve known for months and I did nothing. How many people have died in that time? How many lives could I have saved if I just made different decisions along the way?” he whispered, almost to himself.
My limbs had turned to jelly. I sank onto the bed, my head fell onto the pillow, and I curled my legs up as my sobs came harder. For a long time, we lay like that. Me on my side, facing Jürgen, him on his back, crying silently as he stared at the roof. The light outside shifted as the sun moved overhead, until shadows were falling over the snow, and the room began to grow dark.
“Given everything that’s behind and before us,” Jürgen said, after a while, “I know you will understand why I cannot join the SS.”
My throat was raw from crying, and my eyes swollen from the tears.
“When will the war end?” I whispered, reaching up to touch his cheek. His hand lifted, and for one startling moment, I feared he would push mine away. But instead, he caught it in his, resting his palm over my hand as I touched his face.
“We are losing ground, slowly but surely. I’ve visited some test sites around the Reich in the last few months and there are signs our troops are deserting already—even our equipment is crumbling. But there’s still a long way to fall back before the Allies reach Germany. It may be some months.”
I nodded slowly.
“Only a matter of months,” I said hesitantly. “And you think...”
“I told you. They will hang me.”
“But surely—”
“Sofie,” he interrupted me, his voice raw. “If you saw the conditions at Mittelwerk, you would understand why I will hang.”
“And if you decline the SS invitation—”
“Whether I wait and surrender to the Allies or refuse to join the SS now, the outcome will be the same. This final line is one I can refuse to cross. It is too late to make one shred of difference to the people we have failed, but at least I will have the dignity of knowing I made one right decision.”
“Have you thought about what happens to the children if you refuse to join the SS? They will be pariahs,” I whispered hesitantly.
“I’ve thought of nothing but that since last night,” Jürgen said abruptly. “Things will be difficult for them until the war ends, but they will recover eventually.”
Stricken, Jürgen pulled me close, and I pressed my face into his neck and I wept.
“Hold on,” I pleaded, between my sobs. “Just play the game until the war ends, Jürgen. Just buy us a little more time for a miracle.”
“We are the last people on earth who deserve a miracle.”
“We’ve made mistakes, but we aren’t bad people.”
“You have no idea the things I’ve seen. The things I’ve watched happen, without ever once speaking up. You have no idea if I’m a bad person.”
He started to cry then in a way I’d never imagined my strong, brave husband ever would.
“I miss Aunt Adele,” he choked out, his voice hoarse.
“Me too,” I whispered.
“She would know what to do.”
It’s not always the strongest trees that survive the storm. Sometimes it’s the trees that bend with the wind.
I knew exactly what Adele would tell us to do, but I was no longer sure it was the choice we should make.
We checked out of the hotel the next morning. My eyes were puffy and my throat sore from crying, and Jürgen seemed every bit as tender as I felt. We made the final leg of the journey back to Nordhausen without a word. The privacy of the hotel was gone, and neither one of us seemed in the mood to playact. That night we stayed in at the villa, in the home that I now knew once belonged to a Jewish businessman. And just like Jürgen, I felt that man everywhere. By the time the sun went down, I couldn’t bear another minute of it.
“I need to go to bed,” I told Jürgen, my voice hoarse. Through all of this, he was doing what he’d been doing all afternoon—sitting at the dining room table, marking up diagrams with notes in pencil. He glanced at me, as if he’d forgotten I was there. “Can you come too?”
I wanted him to hold me. I wanted him to lie to me—to tell me that it was all going to be okay. Instead, he looked back to the blueprints, his gaze hollow.
“I need this for tomorrow. I’ll be in soon.”
Jürgen was already out of bed when I woke the next morning. I could hear him moving around in the living room. As I roused slowly from a fitful night’s sleep, he appeared in the doorway, fully dressed.
“I’m sorry I can’t stay to have breakfast with you,” he said. “I have an early meeting and I slept in—I’m already a little late.”
I pushed myself into a sitting position and stared at him. He was freshly shaven and wearing a suit. He looked at his watch, clearly anxious about the time.
“What...have you decided...?” I started to whisper, but I stopped, unsure how to ask him if he’d made a final decision without giving away his doubts to a potential audience.
He shook his head, then took two steps to the bedside. He bent to kiss my cheek, then whispered in my ear, “I won’t do anything drastic without talking to you. But if I call and ask you to come, find a way to get here to say goodbye?”
We’d cleared the air but resolved nothing. I caught his elbow just as he moved to straighten, and then I scrambled to my knees and threw my arms around his neck.
“I love you,” he said softly.
“I love you too,” I whispered.
I dragged myself out of bed after a while, deciding I would tidy his villa before I started the long drive back to Berlin. But as soon as I stepped into the living space, I saw the blueprints on the table—the ones he’d been working on the previous night. I hovered over them, trying to make sense of his scrawl and the diagrams, unable to even decipher what the component represented.
Then I remembered Jürgen telling me he was staying up to finish the review because he needed the blueprints that morning.
The entrance to Mittelwerk was a large opening at ground level on the side of a hill, guarded by dozens of men in Wehrmacht and SS uniforms. I found the site easily enough. Several officers approached my car the minute I neared their station.
“Are you lost, miss?” a young soldier asked. I fumbled for Jürgen’s blueprints, my heart racing as I eyed the gun in his hand and the unwelcoming expression on his face.
But just then, I saw Aldo, a few dozen feet away, supervising a crane lifting some sheets of metal onto the back of a small train carriage. He happened to glance over at me just as I noticed him, and set his clipboard down on a pile of boxes, then jogged toward me.
“Mrs. von Meyer Rhodes,” he greeted me. “What on earth are you doing here?”
I looked past him to the entrance. The mouth of the tunnel was maybe two stories high. Two sets of railway tracks disappeared into the darkness, and even from the guard station, I could see people milling about inside. Some were wearing striped uniforms.
If you saw the conditions at Mittelwerk, you would understand why I will hang.
I wanted to understand. I’d allowed Jürgen to shelter me for all of those years, and in doing so, I’d allowed him to bear the burden of a guilt we both deserved to share. I couldn’t fix a single thing—but I could face the truth.
“Jürgen forgot some important paperwork,” I said. My tongue stuck to the dry roof of my mouth.
“I’ll take it,” Aldo offered. I shook my head and picked the blueprints up.
“It’s very important that I see him myself,” I said, my voice growing stronger. “Please, take me to him.”
I parked my car off to the side according to the guard’s instructions and walked through the gates. Aldo was waiting for me beside a small khaki truck. He looked unsure, glancing between me and the entrance to the tunnel.
“He’s quite a way in...”
“That’s okay,” I said, forcing a confident smile. “I’m not in any hurry.”
I took the front passenger’s seat and Aldo started the car. As the engine ignited, he glanced at me one last time.
“It’s not pleasant in there, Sofie,” he said, his voice low. “Are you sure you want to do this? I know Helene Schönerer is well familiar with the camps, but even she found it to be...too much.”
“I’m just here to see Jürgen,” I said firmly. “Let’s get this over and done with.”
He sighed and nodded, then steered the car beneath the crane’s frame.
“Wind up that window, please.” I did as I was instructed, and Aldo did the same on his side, as the car moved into the mouth of the tunnel.
Inside, the light was much dimmer, and at first, it was hard for me to see. As my eyes adjusted, I saw dozens of men working at tables and on components on flatbed train trolleys. Aldo drove slowly, driving around some of these stations, crossing each of the train tracks at different times to avoid carriages left in place. As we moved farther along, the air in the car became so pungent, my stomach rolled with every breath.
“What is that smell?” I asked Aldo. I covered my nose with my hand and tried to breathe through my mouth, but even inside the sealed car, I could taste the filth.
“We had to move quickly after the Peenemünde site was bombed, and we’ve had high quotas to meet for the V-2s. There was no time to install sanitation or ventilation...”
Now a few hundred feet into the tunnel, I saw a rough-hewn cross tunnel that seemed to have been cut by hand, the texture of the walls and ceilings coarse and uneven. I was startled to see rows of wooden bunks in the tunnel, most without even a mattress on them, and beside these, drums lined up, one after the other. A man sat on the last drum. His striped trousers were down around his ankles, but he seemed unconscious, leaning back against the wall behind him, his mouth wide and his eyes vacant as he stared at the ceiling. I gasped involuntarily and squeezed my eyes shut.
“They...the prisoners live in here?”
I looked out the window again, and now noticed the slumped shoulders of the men as they worked.
“Some live at the Dora camp now, not far from here. But other men still live in the cross tunnels. It’s about efficiency, you see. If they are here, we don’t waste time transporting them back and forth.”
I heard what he was really saying: the rocket program had been deemed more important than anything else—a higher priority than hygiene or dignity or comfort or even the sanctity of human life.
I turned back to face the tunnel in front of the car, but my eyes had finally adjusted to the light and now I saw striped uniforms hanging on skeletal frames everywhere. There were hundreds of men in this section, maybe even more. They were bent over tables, fixing fine parts to small components. They were on scaffolds, working on the lights that illuminated the passage. They were collapsed on the floor, as if they’d died standing and simply folded over themselves. They were pushing train carriages by hand, dozens of men grunting and grimacing as they tried to push components along.
Not one of them looked at the car as we passed, and I wanted nothing more than to look away from them too. Each seemed more drawn than the last, their hair matted, their bodies often showing signs of trauma—a bloodied hand, a severe limp, a bruised face. Every single man was emaciated. I had no idea how they were sustaining the intense manual labor—sometimes I saw four or five men working together to lift one small piece of metal, or two men struggling to push a tiny component into place.
“How do you bear this every day?” I whispered to Aldo.
“I tried to warn you,” he said weakly. “This is no place for a lady.”
“Is it always like this?”
“It was much worse in the beginning,” he said. “This is more orderly...less distressing than it used to be.”
My stomach lurched at the thought. I pressed my fist into my mouth. I wanted to pray for strength, but I had the sense that what was happening in those tunnels was beyond the reach even of God.
The tunnel kept rolling on and on. It felt like we’d been driving for hours, although a glance at my watch confirmed it had only been minutes. I was desperate to see Jürgen. I was desperate to get out of there. How did these prisoners endure it?
“How much farther?”
“A few hundred feet more.”
“How long is this facility?”
“The entire loop through both is about two miles long.”
“Is it all like this?” I asked, my voice small.
“Yes.”
We drove on in silence. But for the evolution of the rockets on the line, I might have been caught in an endless loop of the same fifty feet of tunnel, a repeated, sickening montage of the absolute depths of human misery.
But then I finally saw Jürgen, his suit protected by a lab coat, clipboard in hand as he stood next to a rocket that seemed to be fully assembled. Aldo parked the car, as he gnawed at his lip.
Just then, Jürgen noticed me. He passed the clipboard to a man beside him, slapping it against his chest in a move that was close to aggression, and, without a word, strode toward me.
“What the hell are you doing here?” he hissed.
“I—I came to bring you these,” I stammered, extending the blueprints toward him. Jürgen’s nostrils flared. He grabbed me firmly by the elbow and dragged me to the cross tunnel nearby. Several workers in striped uniforms scurried from the space as we approached, dismissed without a word. When we were alone, Jürgen dropped the blueprints to the ground and he cupped my face in his shaking hands.
“You shouldn’t be here,” he choked out, staring desperately into my eyes. “Sofie, I never wanted you to see this.”
“I didn’t mean to come inside, I promise. But when I got here with the blueprints, I realized this was my chance to understand...” His throat was working as if he wanted to speak, but he didn’t say a word—he just stared into my eyes. “Remember? You said I didn’t understand. You said I didn’t know what it had cost for me and the children to live our lives in Berlin. I wanted to—”
“This isn’t a game,” he snapped, stepping away from me, pinching the bridge of his nose. He drew in a series of sharp breaths, then dropped his voice as he hissed, “Get out of here, Sofie. Please.”
I held myself together until I made it back to my car, out the gates, back onto the main road—but then I swerved to a shoulder and opened the car door just in time to be violently ill.
I spent the afternoon in a daze, trying to process what I’d seen at Mittelwerk—but the scale of the suffering was too great to “make sense of.”
I wanted to make amends.
There was no way to make amends.
Even if I could have personally freed every man in that tunnel, it still wouldn’t be enough. They’d endured conditions and pain and torture that were beyond anything that could be forgiven. Even if they were liberated right that minute, they’d be scarred for the rest of their lives.
Jürgen and I had an odd kind of argument that night—scribbling furiously on paper as we tried to negotiate a safe way to discuss what I’d seen. I wanted to go to another hotel so we could speak freely. He refused—saying it would arouse suspicion. He wanted to “talk about it another time,” which I suspected meant he didn’t want to talk about it at all. Eventually, I all but dragged him to the bathroom and slammed the door behind us, then turned the faucet on.
“We have to talk about this,” I hissed.
“The V-2s have caused significant damage to London...to a few other cities too. That in itself is a tragedy that keeps me up at night. Our intelligence suggests maybe a few thousand people have died,” he whispered thickly. “It’s horrific. But...”
“But...?” I repeated, scanning his face.
“The guilt of that makes me sick to my stomach, but it doesn’t even end there,” he croaked. “We are losing that many prisoners every week manufacturing rockets. Maybe more. Between accidents, beatings, disease...they take train carriages full of bodies out every day. We produce two things in those tunnels—rockets and death. Mittelwerk is an extermination site, without even the pathetically small mercy of a fast death for its victims.”
I thought about how quickly word would spread if Jürgen took a stand and refused to join the SS. Whispers would race like wildfire from Nordhausen to Berlin—through party lines both official and unofficial. Maybe Berlin would fall within just a few months anyway, but it was likely I would be interrogated by the Gestapo too, and I couldn’t even be certain I would survive. The children would potentially be left without either of us.
But one day, the war would end. The endless bombardment of Nazi propaganda would stop. And my children could learn that their parents had tried to do the right thing. Too little, too late—yes. But they would at least know that there had been a line we refused to cross.
“Follow your conscience wherever it leads you, Jürgen,” I blurted. “Do whatever you have to do.”
After eleven years of ups and downs and varying degrees of distance between us, Jürgen and I were exactly together, on the same page.
The next morning, Jürgen and I faced one another as I stood beside my car. His eyes were red and so were mine. The sun was low on the horizon and the wind was icy—but the sky above us was blue. I wanted to feel every aspect of the moment. I wanted to remember every detail of those moments with Jürgen, as fraught and terrifying as they were.
We agreed we wouldn’t make a fuss that morning, but he and I both knew this would likely be our last goodbye. We discussed trying to bring the children for a final visit—but to arrange that would take time we didn’t have. I couldn’t bear to lose him, but I knew what the cost would be to keep him. He wasn’t willing to pay that price, and now that I’d seen Mittelwerk with my own eyes, nor was I.
To fail a test of loyalty like Otto’s invitation for Jürgen to join the SS was suicide. Jürgen was just determined that his death would come on his terms. He didn’t have a clear plan for the specifics—he was just going to go to Mittelwerk and look for an opportunity to make one first and last act of defiance, maybe to free a prisoner or two, or to sabotage the line itself somehow.
“I love you more than I knew I could love another person,” I said. My whole body was shaking with the effort it was taking to hold back my tears.
His expression softened, and Jürgen reached to cup my cheek in his hand.
“You have made my life, Sofie von Meyer Rhodes. My last thoughts will be of how grateful I have been to share it with you.”
And then we kissed, one last time, and I slipped into my car and drove away. Just a few miles out of Nordhausen, I had to pull over to the side of the road because I was sobbing too hard.
Sometimes, I thought I had, by necessity, grown used to living apart from Jürgen. Only now that our connection was likely about to be severed permanently did I understand that it was all that had kept me going through these years.
On that long drive back to Berlin, I wondered how quickly they would come for me. If Jürgen made some dramatic move, it was likely I’d be taken in quickly. I went straight to Lydia’s house to see the children, but a black car was already waiting in her drive. I parked near it, not blocking it in. I knew it would soon be driving me away.