The Doomsday Testament(42)
‘This is the former gymnasium and the room the officers used for fencing practice.’ The girl, whose name tag said Magda, spoke a clipped, very formal English. ‘In nineteen eighty-two work began to transform it into a permanent museum to highlight the ideology and terror of the SS. As you see, it is an exhibition which encompasses the experiences of both the perpetrators and the victims.’
The exhibits and photographs were displayed on clean whiteboards beneath strip lights that gave the museum the atmosphere of a hospital operating theatre. Magda led them through a labyrinth of cubes and corridors, talking continuously and stopping occasionally to ask if they had any questions. The Death’s Head and lightning-flash runes attacked them from every angle and Jamie noticed that Sarah seemed almost cowed by the constant bombardment of evil. In one picture Heinrich Himmler, looking like an office clerk in a soldier’s borrowed uniform, chuckled with the architect of his Wewelsburg vision, Hermann Bartels. In another, Jamie noticed Heydrich’s elegant figure among a group who had come to the castle to discuss the creation of the Einsatzgruppen, the killing squads who had murdered one and a half million Jews, partisans and Communists in Russia and Poland.
‘Here you see the plan formulated by Bartels for the expansion of Wewelsburg.’ Magda pointed to a framed architect’s drawing, which showed the castle as a small element in a much larger complex. Broad avenues radiated from a semicircular compound surrounding the northern and western sides of the hill and what appeared to be blockhouses and bunkers dominated every crossroads and approach road. From the east, a single roadway approached arrow-straight to meet the base of a huge triangular building complex of which the castle, enormous in its own right, was only the tip. The scale of the project was astonishing and all the more so when you realized it was to be funded not by Germany’s Nazi government, but by the SS alone. ‘You will notice the shape of a spearhead and the shaft, which was to be a tree-lined avenue two kilometres in length.’ The guide pointed to the roadway. ‘This is said to be a portrayal of the Spear of Destiny, the legendary weapon that was used to pierce the side of Jesus Christ and which Himmler went to extraordinary lengths to find. The spear would be precisely aligned from south to north. He intended Wewelsburg to be the final repository of the spear. Work began on the redevelopment in nineteen forty, but it was never completed. This was fortunate for the villagers, whose homes were to be destroyed and whose land was to be flooded to form an artificial lake. Of course, such a project would require many workers. To this end Wewelsburg had its own KZ or concentration camp, Niederhagen, which provided slave labour.’
Dispassionately, she reeled off a string of statistics, from which Jamie picked up a single fact: of the close to four thousand prisoners held at the camp, one third had died of sickness or starvation or were worked to death in the quest to create Himmler’s dream.
‘Niederhagen was also used as an execution site by the local Gestapo,’ Magda continued. ‘It is recorded that fifty-six people were shot to death here, but we suspect the true figure may be much higher. You have heard the expression nacht und nebel?’
‘Night and fog. Code for people who disappeared without trace.’ Sarah’s voice sounded strained. ‘How did the local people feel about this?’
Magda looked puzzled. ‘Of course, they knew. How could they not? But there was nothing they could do. This was Hitler’s Germany. To voice dissent was to join the victims.’
‘No, I meant about this.’ The American waved her hand at the pictures of hollow-eyed men in striped suits labouring under the castle walls. ‘This was their shame. They couldn’t have enjoyed having it shoved in their faces fifty years after the war ended.’
Magda’s smile was shut off as if by a switch. ‘There was opposition, yes?’ Her English lost its assurance, the words thickening on her tongue. ‘Many people protest against the plans for an exhibition. They wish to forget. To – how is it you say? – sweep under carpet.’
‘And you, Magda?’ Jamie put a hand on Sarah’s arm as a signal to back off, but she shook it away. ‘What do you feel?’
The German woman stared at Sarah. ‘I have my own reasons for believing it is important to remember. One of my great grandfathers carried a knife just like that,’ she pointed to an SS dagger in a glass case, ‘and wore the Death’s Head on his collar. He served with the Das Reich panzer division in the Soviet union and in France. For the first fifteen years of my life I was brought up to think of him as a hero. But then I began to read and to understand what happened in my country, and the things that were done in my country’s name.’