The Doomsday Testament

‘8 May 1945, 1 p.m., 3 miles south of Blumberg. We have travelled two hundred and fifty miles over the past seven days and throughout that time I have felt as if a volcano has been building up inside me. Klosse and Strasser might look like a pair of mismatched British Army cooks in their ill-fitting battledress, but the miasma of evil surrounding them is as corrosive as mustard gas. They literally stink of death, or perhaps it is truer to say that the stink of death has never left my nostrils. I have done many things that sickened me during six years of war, but I have never felt dirtier than while helping these men to escape the justice that awaits them back in Germany. I knew now that Klosse was the Nosferatu of the camps. I had seen the camps. The awfulness of Belsen will never leave me; the living turned into walking skeletons, the dead discarded like so much refuse, the smell of decaying flesh and the taste of burning bodies on my lips, the staring eyes of doomed children pleading from the faces of old men. The beaten, the starved, men torn apart by dogs, shot or hanged. Physically destroyed by the inhumanity of their treatment and mentally by the misery of their existence and the removal of all hope. Casual violence is symptomatic of war. The systematic annihilation of a race is beyond comprehension. Yet, if I am to believe Brohm, Klosse’s crimes went beyond even that. He had hovered unseen in the smoke from the ovens and chosen his victims from among the living dead below: men, women and children, every individual specifically selected to suit his purpose; measured, weighed, injected or dosed, analysed and inspected in their agonies, each convulsion recorded, until the last, and finally eviscerated, dissected or disassembled for the knowledge their abused bodies would provide, their organs and parts bottled and stored for comparison with those who had gone before and those still to come. Not human beings. Not even animals. Things. Experiments. And all of it justified in the name of progress. There is no remorse in Klosse; it is plain on his smug Prussian face as he contemplates his new life. I think I have never hated anyone more. By comparison, Strasser is a babe in arms in the pantheon of genocide, a mere torturer; extractor of teeth and toenails, and twister of genitals. A dull bureaucrat driven by ambition and flattery to exchange his pen for a cattle prod and a soldering iron. Strasser is already doomed. Escaping to America will not save him, because he cannot escape from himself. For the same reason, he will never know forgiveness or absolution. The things he has seen and done are devouring him from the inside and the only escape will be oblivion. I can feel no pity for him. His crimes, paltry as they are in this terrible war, surely cannot just be forgotten.

‘Yet it was only when Walter Brohm told me about his bomb “greater than any bomb ever invented” that I finally came to my decision.

‘He sits directly opposite me, beneath a tree on the bank of the stream, watching me write, smiling that knowing smile of his, well fed and satisfied, certain of his own greatness, his genius merely dormant and soon to flower again beneath the benevolent rays of a Californian sun. I know of no crime Walter Brohm has committed, apart from the crime of complacency. He is a garrulous, almost likeable man, who, but for a tendency towards arrogance, would make a perfectly acceptable dinner companion. In a world full of enemies, Brohm wishes to be everyone’s friend.

‘Why is Walter Brohm more dangerous than a hundred Klosses? Because his curiosity knows no boundaries. Because no price is too high if it proves him right. Because no risk is too great if it enhances his genius.

‘I carefully placed the journal in my pack and roused them from their rest. Klosse and the Ox were reluctant to move, but I explained that our contact was waiting for us across the border less than an hour away.

‘Klosse laughed. “Gut,” he said to me. “At least the Amis will treat us with the respect we are due. I intend to report you for your treatment of your prisoners. You will be reprimanded.”

‘Strasser eventually pushed himself to his feet, grumbling quietly and scratching his fat backside.

‘Walter grinned at me. “You will visit me in America, Leutnant Matt? They say we will have fine houses and big cars. Perhaps even a swimming pool. Who would believe such a thing? That is how precious my work is to them.” He took my hand and shook it. “I thank you for bringing us here. Do not mind Klosse. His opinion counts for nothing against Walter Brohm.”

‘I detached myself and told them we wouldn’t be stopping again. If they wanted to take a pee now was the time to do it.

‘They stayed together, as men do in such circumstances, and lined up along the ravine as I had predicted they would.

‘I had the Browning ready, with the safety catch off and I walked quickly up behind them. I shot the Ox first, in the back of the skull, and his body was thrown forward on to the rocks below. Klosse turned, prepared to attack me, but a man with his penis in his hand is peculiarly vulnerable and I had time to aim the gun directly at his heart. He died cursing me, as I suppose was his due. Walter Brohm calmly finished what he was doing and turned to face me…’