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  4 January 1944—A most distinguished “guest” arrived at camp yesterday. It was a Tuesday and I was making my usual rounds of the laundry in the morning. This inspection tour takes me uncomfortably close to the crematoria and interrogation cellars. I would rather not be reminded of what transpires in those cellars. The political officers have a hard row to hoe: They must be ruthless in service to the state. Like me, they receive little credit for their efforts. At any rate, as I was saying, I was busy with my inspection of the laundry, making sure the prisoners were not wasting precious soap, when I heard Ziereis on his megaphone addressing a new arrival of prisoners from his perch over the administrative offices. I finished my inspection tour and was passing back to the administrative wing when I gave the new arrivals a glance. As motley looking a crew as we had yet received. Mostly Reds, political prisoners, by the look of them. That anemic, intellectual pose. They would surely not hold up under the labors of the quarry. Give us some more thieves and forgerers, I thought then. At least they can handle the physical abuse of breaking rock and hauling it up the 186 steps. One of the prisoners looked familiar. A strange sensation for me to recognize one of these misfits, but nevertheless an experience I had prepared myself for. I approached the prisoner and saw that my eyes had not tricked me: Though much wasted and diminished in grandeur, here before me was the famous Advokat Haberloch, the lawyer and professor who had been a boyhood idol of mine, who had once offered me a position as his aide.

  Haberloch did not see me, but I smiled to myself as I passed. So they finally got him, I thought. Arrested for his homosexuality. I scanned his uniform for the telltale pink triangle and was quite surprised to see the red one instead.

  12 January 1944—I am told Haberloch is here for crimes against the state: seems he was actually trying to investigate our KZ system! The arrogant man. Searching for scandal, as is his wont. Ziereis let slip that the fellow had actually come close to uncovering various contracts between the camps and private industry.

  17 February 1944—Haberloch is dead. He fell to his death in the quarry. Such a strange man he was. And another chapter of my life closed.

  18 May 1944—Monte Cassino has finally fallen. And who should raise the ragtag flag of victory but some blackguardly Polish division. The ironies of war that those from the guilty country of Poland should now act the role of liberator. Quite disgusting.

  We are feeling the influx of prisoners originally resettled in the east. As the Russians push farther and farther west, we will be experiencing more and more such overcrowding and dislocations. How strange: I read of the great events of the day in Das Schwarze Corps and hear of them on Radio Berlin, and yet with all this information, here I sit, a miserable scrivener unable to affect the course of these events. I work ceaselessly but receive no commendations, let alone respect for what I do.

  7 June 1944—So they have come, the new barbarians. They landed yesterday at Normandy, and two days earlier took Rome. The classic pincer movement is on. It is only a matter of time now. Despairing thoughts. I shall no longer follow the war news. To that effect, I have taken down the ordnance maps in my bungalow, all so carefully pennoned with armies and their movements. No, the war no longer interests me.

  13 June 1944—The first of the secret weapon rockets fell on London today. Perhaps we, with German know-how, can stem the tide after all.

  I do not think I ever want to see another transport in my life. When this is all over, I shall find some place very quiet in which to retire, much to myself, and simply give over to relaxation and inner peace. Perhaps even compose my memoirs. But someplace free of the stench of this place with its load of noxious smoke released nonstop from the crematorium chimneys. The influx from the east, as our lines there fall, is insupportable. Trainload after trainload of every imaginable sort of scum is being dropped on our doorstep. Increasingly, Mauthausen is becoming the dustbin of the Reich. No figures can be accurate any longer, but I estimate we have now upward of forty thousand prisoners, at least half of whom live in tents and other temporary shelter. The satellite camps have grown at Gusen and Ebensee, but even so, our camp system simply cannot take in such numbers. Something must give. Lucky that we are now in the summer months, but when winter hits, and if the fronts are no better than last year, well, then we shall have trouble on a major scale. Ziereis is phlegmatic as usual about it: “Things will sort themselves out,” he says. “They always have a way of sorting themselves out.” Of course, for Ziereis, if the hunting is good in the fall and the trout fat in the spring, then life is satisfactory. A man of limited needs and means.

  21 July 1944—News has reached us of the attempt on the Führer’s life yesterday. Colonel Count von Stauffenberg, chief plotter, is in custody. One wonders how deeply the rot has set in, how many more darlings of the military are involved in this cheap assassination attempt. And one can only wonder what the ramifications will be vis-à-vis the Allies. Now they see us bickering among ourselves, the push will be even stronger on their part. They will be able to catch the scent of blood. They see us weak and vulnerable now. The rot of the old aristocracy, of the professional army man, is responsible for this. It is something that we in the Schutzstaffel have long suspected—one need only look to the Blomberg-Fritsch affair of 1938 for early proof of decadence in the highest levels of the Wehrmacht: One man marries a known prostitute, the other is caught out as a homosexual. So now these “noble” military men have shown their true colors and the Allies, especially the British, are gloating. Listening to the BBC last night—for it comes in better than Radio Berlin now—we heard their commentator with his awful supercilious voice explaining the significance of the affair. According to him, even if Hitler had been eliminated—which thank providence he wasn’t—it proved how beaten the Germans were. A strange thought went through my mind: How well my English is coming along. After listening so much to the radio, the language feels almost natural in my ears now. And I experienced a prescience, a sort of reverse déjà vu, that I should be using it quite a lot in the future. But what is this to portend? That Germany will indeed become an occupied territory of the British? Or worse, that the Americans with their democracy and jazz will be the new imperial power in Europe? Is it to be that these people will despoil our culture and our very language?

  25 August 1944—Paris has fallen. The writing is surely on the wall for all to see.

  9 September 1944—V-2s falling on London. Aptly named: Vergeltungswaffe (reprisal weapon). Are we to believe the Führer, after all, about the miracle weapons that will pull this off for us at the eleventh hour? One can only hope. Meanwhile, it is only prudent to prepare for the worst. Shall see about making that trip to Switzerland in the very near future, just to ensure that my finances are all in order there.

  2 February 1945—The escape has been put down now. It started in Block 20 with the Russian and French prisoners of war. That should teach us to show leniency to any of them. Some four hundred of them escaped in the night, but the dogs were sent out for them and the local populace alerted. All but seven were recaptured. All know the punishment for attempted escape: One hears the execution squads at work even now, the steady crack of rifle fire from behind the Appelplatz. Let this teach the scum.

  12 February 1945—Upward of sixty thousand prisoners in camp now, and the Red Army is on the move. Time to begin making plans on an individual scale. …

  “Please stop doing this.”

  “This what, Miss O’Brien? Let’s not go into it right now, please. Just eat your food or I shall have to find some other means to deliver it.”

  “This mutual antagonism. Both becoming each other’s scapegoats and caricatures. You are not the incarnation of evil because of your career in the Reich. I am not the snake in your garden for trying to seduce you. I am neither Eve nor Mary Magdalene. I am me. Another human!”

  “Yes, quite.”

  “Don’t ‘quite’ me. Treat me like a human.”

  �
��Act like one.”

  I confess to losing my temper. I almost struck the woman, she pushes me that far. This situation becomes less tolerable daily. Yet I see no way to resolve it. We are afflicted with each other, but I cannot in good conscience simply give the Irish over to Cordoba and his military friends. I am a victim of my own moral scruples. She knows this about me and plays on it. And then she has the gall to say that she is not the snake in my garden! Errant flummery!

  So I gave her the latest bundle of papers I have been writing. What harm can it do, after all?

  Back to the war years.

  In February 1945, word of the Red Army advance on Budapest spread quickly. Once the Danube was secured, there would be no stopping the Soviet advance. The situation now was truly hopeless. One cannot imagine the utter chaos of those final days. Here is a case where no amount of book learning could educate one as to the turmoil, fear, and despondency we Germans and Austrians went through at the time.

  The days went by in a blur, and suddenly it was spring again, and I had news from Eichmann himself, just returned from the east on his way to Berlin. Vienna was about to fall to the Russians. He paid a surprise visit to Mauthausen late one afternoon, pulling into the compound in his black Mercedes, its sides heavily caked in mud. He looked pale and weak. His eyes were terribly bloodshot and large bags hung morosely under them. This was from lack of sleep, I thought at first, but then I got close enough to him to smell the alcohol on his breath. He had been a heavy drinker in the days I worked for him in Vienna. Now he seemed determined to outdo even that sorry reputation. He and the commandant secreted themselves in the latter’s office, but not before Eichmann exchanged a few words with me:

  “I see they’ve got you hard at it, then?”

  I said that I did my job as a humble soldier is expected to.

  “Still playing the martyr, are you? Don’t imagine it goes down much better here than in Vienna or Berlin.”

  I felt my ears go red with this scathing remark. Others of the staff were within earshot and smiled at this put-down. I’d had to deal with such calumny in Vienna but had never become accustomed to it. I made no reply to this attack, and Eichmann must have felt that he had overstepped the boundaries of decency, for he came right up to me, breathing the sweet smell of cognac on me, and said: “Things are very bad in the east. The Russians are coming. We all must do our duty to the very last. I want no one to walk out of Mauthausen. Is that understood? There is only one way they will leave—through the smokestack. Verstehst?”

  I saluted him in tacit understanding but made no comment. I noticed he was not overeager himself to remain in Austria to see to the final special treatments. “Urgent” business in Berlin beckoned him. I could only too well imagine the nature of this urgent business, and I doubted he would ever reach Berlin. Subsequent reports proved me correct, for Eichmann disappeared two days later, on April 11, 1945, on an inspection tour of the Theresienstadt camp to the north. I suppose he had been planning such a disappearing act even at Mauthausen while he was telling me sanctimoniously how I should do my duty to the very end. So there was, even at the onset of Götterdämmerung, no love lost between us. How strange it is that when the entire world is falling down around one, one still has time for these petty private feuds. Indeed, small controllable matters take on a new importance in the midst of such global chaos.

  For my part, I effected my own disappearance on April 13. I had intended to wait at least until Hitler’s birthday on the twentieth—there seemed something appropriate about such a gesture—but the Russian advance on Vienna disallowed this formality. The city fell to the Russians that very day, the thirteenth. We at Mauthausen also had news that the Americans had taken both Belsen and Buchenwald KZ. A Staffel courier, himself seeking refuge, told us the horror stories of some of the instant justice meted out to camp guards at those installations. I listened to the youth’s story, for he was a mere sixteen-year-old fresh from gymnasium in Heidelberg. I betrayed no emotion, even when Ziereis sucked his teeth in distress. I had more important affairs in mind than dwelling on the days of destruction. Mother and Maria were in Vienna without protection. They had refused an earlier suggestion from me that they should get out of the city, go to the west of Austria, to Salzburg or Tirol. There the American or British armies were sure to be the “liberating” ones; the matter was most uncertain for Vienna. Or had been, at any rate. Now I knew the Russians had taken the city and one knew what that meant for the women. Uschi, of course, had taken herself off to the Salzkammergut to her family’s summer house in Altaussee two months earlier.

  I was forced then, as the young courier’s story droned on and on, to make a desperate choice: duty to my Führer and fatherland, or duty to my only blood kin. I had pledged loyalty to Adolf Hitler unto death and it was not an oath I took lightly. Yet I was filled with terror thinking of my poor mother and rather simple sister alone in Vienna. They had stayed on—it was Mother’s decision—to protect the new flat I had secured for them. And lovely it was, overlooking Stephansplatz. The booming of the bells rang through its rooms at matins. Mother would not leave this flat and her belongings to be looted by the Russians or her neighbors. A strong woman, my mother, strong and stubborn.

  By the time the courier had finished his story of how guards had been hung by their former captives while the American soldiers stood by applauding, I had made my decision. I excused myself after lunch to visit the quarries. But of course I had no intention of going there, and once outside the gate, I pulled the car into a copse of trees, fished out a small suitcase from under the passenger seat, and changed into the Wehrmacht corporal’s uniform I had concealed there for just such an eventuality. First, however, I fitted my money belt snugly around my middle. The car I left in the woods; I should like to have driven it part of the distance but could not risk it. Alone and on foot, I would be conspicuous enough: All the world seemed to be pouring out of the east into the west, and here I was, a soldier traveling east. No, I should have to make the journey on foot and in stages. Perhaps I might even be able to hide away in a train, if there were any traveling amid such utter chaos.

  So I kept to the quiet back roads to the north of the Danube where the villagers paid little attention to my passing. Indeed, they averted their eyes as if they no longer wanted to be witness to the army’s existence. Stopping occasionally for food or drink, I was paid common courtesy but no more. It was as if, dressed in the uniform of the Wehrmacht, I was carrying the plague. What would the reaction have been had I been decked out in my black Staffel finery? Wondering this, I was once again thankful for the precautions I had taken vis-à-vis that uniform.

  Despite this leper syndrome, I could not risk going it in total mufti. If captured—and I had to reckon on that possibility—my captors would only suspect the worst by finding one of my age and health out of uniform. They would reason this was because I had something to hide. My Schutzstaffel past would be their first guess. One examination under my left arm would give them proof of their suspicions: my tattooed service number was there. This was one thing that could not be changed by clothing. Thus, better to admit to Wehrmacht than to risk all, even though I had no intention of being captured. And as events proved, God was with me.

  I completed the arduous trip to Vienna in two days, arriving April 15. The city was in absolute turmoil with roving bands of Soviet soldiers rounding up all men of draft age, in or out of uniform, to be sent to provincial prisoner of war camps. For the most part, the Soviet command attempted to keep some semblance of order by day, but at night, Vienna, my home and the capital of culture, turned into a jungle.

  I approached the center of the city warily, hiding in bombed-out buildings on the outskirts of Brigittenau until nightfall. Then I walked the darkened streets toward the First District, little recognizing the neighborhoods where I had once played as a child. Six years of warfare had wrought terrible suffering on the city: Where there was no bomb damage, there wa
s neglect and crumbling façades. Children, as frightened and hungry looking as any of the ragtag ghetto children I had dealt with earlier in the war, huddled in one alleyway ready to pounce on any dropped crumb from a passing serviceman; ready to beg a piece of bread or a negotiable cigarette. I knew these children well from a hundred transit camps, from dozens of big-city ghettos Eichmann and I had cleared. Yet, now they were my own; they were Viennese children, but behaving like little animals. This sight disgusted me. Was this the brave new generation we had fought and sacrificed so much for? One could not tell them apart from a Jewish or Polish child under far worse conditions. I had, however, no time to consider this rather distressing observation, but merely gave the band the same evil scowl I had reserved for their brothers in Warsaw or Budapest, then pressed on into the heart of the city.

  As I neared the Ringstrasse, the frequency of Russian patrols increased. I was forced to take immediate shelter wherever possible whenever one of their American-­supplied Jeeps suddenly turned a corner. On one occasion, I had to hurl myself into a refuse container in front of a bombed-out building to hide. Peering up over the edge of the container, I was shocked to discover that the destroyed building had been my former Realschule before we moved from Hubertusgasse. I was in my old neighborhood, but took no sentimental pleasure in it.

  The First District was as dark and deserted—but for the Russian patrols—as the outer ones had been. I entered it off the Ring by the Borse and then picked my way through the garment district and thus to the old Jewish quarter behind the Hoher Markt. By the look of the jagged skyline to my right, I could see that an entire block of buildings had been destroyed on that square. I kept to the backstreets past the old Ruprechtskirche and then down by the long-closed and partially destroyed synagogue and finally out onto Rotenturmstrasse. No street women were out: Not even they were brave enough to take on the Russians by invitation. One could only imagine what barbarities such men were capable of with seasoned women of the night, let alone with innocent Germanic wives, mothers, and sisters. Such forebodings drove me on toward Stephansplatz, dodging in and out of the main thoroughfare on my way to the cathedral. It was a shock, I can tell you, to see that noble edifice a bombed-out shell. The merciless Allied bombing had seen to that, along with the State Opera, though I was not to see that wreck at the time. Of course, Allied propaganda after the war blamed the retreating Nazi artillery for leveling the church, a sorry excuse. More victors’ hagiography and demonology dressed up as history. All around the Stephansplatz was a rubble: The finest square in the finest city of Europe, and it looked like a filthy construction site.