Two Brothers

From Untermensch to Superman Berlin, 1940

‘STENGEL! STEP FORWARD!’

Corporal Stengel rose from the wooden bench where he had been sitting alongside half a dozen other field-grey-clad soldiers, and stepped forward.

‘Ahnenpass,’ the SS-Sturmscharführer barked.

Paulus, now in the uniform of a Wehrmacht Obergefreiter, produced his ‘pass of ancestors’, that document essential to survival which proved that the previous three generations of his family had been of purely Aryan stock.

The SS sergeant-major studied it.

‘Your name is Otto Stengel?’

‘Ja, Sturmscharführer sir,’ Paulus barked.

‘Adopted?’ the sergeant enquired.

‘Ja, Sturmscharführer sir!’

‘By Jews?’

‘Ja, Sturmscharführer sir!’

He said this last with equal clarity, equal volume. Never show weakness. Paulus’s year inside the German military had shown him that the only thing they respected was strength.

‘And your blood family?’

‘Parents dead. Grandparents abandoned me. The only family I knew were Jews, Sturmscharführer sir!’

He could almost feel the eyes of his fellow applicants opening wide behind him. Many men and women from Jewish families had passed through the dreaded Reich main security office on the Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse, but it was certain that prior to Paulus none of them had been applicants to join the Waffen SS.

The sergeant major was looking at him with narrow suspicion. ‘An SS man brought up by Jews. That would be a first, I think,’ he said curtly.

‘I was less than an hour old, Sturmscharführer sir!’ Paulus barked again. ‘It wasn’t my fault. As you can see from my record, I am a graduate of a Napola academy.’

The sergeant major smiled, clearly seeing some humour in the situation.

‘Did they make you work for them? In the scullery, like Cinderella?’

‘No. And they didn’t drink my blood either,’ Paulus replied. ‘In fact, they were kind to me.’

‘You defend them? You would stick up for the race enemy? For the people who stole you?’

‘No, of course not, sir.’

‘Why not? They’re your family. You just said they were kind.’

‘I do not defend them, sir, because they are stinking Jews and blood enemies of the Fatherland. I didn’t know it when I was an hour old but I know it now because my leader has told me so.’

The SS man looked down at Paulus’s papers. ‘You served in Poland?’

‘Ja, Sturmscharführer.’

‘Must have been fun.’

‘Ja, Sturmscharführer.’

Perhaps the sergeant major would have thought so. Brutality had without doubt become a sport for many of those brothers-in-arms with whom Paulus had stormed east the previous September. A lot of the guys had had ‘fun’.

Once again in his mind’s eye Paulus saw the eight corpses hanging from the hastily erected gallows. Their feet tied together and weighted with stones. Faces blue-green. Tongues distended like great crimson slugs exploring little dark caves.

Not dead yet, not for an hour if their tormentors had their way.

What village had it been? Rajgród? Witosław? Bial´owiez˙a? They had been moving so fast it was hard to remember. Blitzkrieg, the papers were calling it. War conducted as fast as lightning.

Unless of course you took an hour to die.

An SS band had been playing in the mean, dusty patch of ground that served as a village square. Public torture and cold-blooded murder conducted to music. Military, marching music. As if it had been a flag the victorious army were raising over the village, and not the twitching bodies of husbands and fathers. With the noise of the music and of the truck on which he and his comrades were riding, Paulus could not hear the screams of desperate protest from the traumatized civilians.

But he saw them.

The mouths of the women and children open and wide, howling with an anguish that seemed to make no sound.

Like a silent movie shot in hell.

‘Nothing like winning, eh?’ the SS man added.

‘Ja, Sturmscharführer.’

It was true. Winning had been unlike anything he could have imagined, certainly more terrible than if they had lost. He was sure of that.

‘Strip,’ he heard the Sturmscharführer demand.

Paulus removed his calf-length jackboots, his belt and webbing, his jacket, trousers, shirt and underwear, and stood naked and to attention as an SS doctor inspected him for any suspicious racial characteristics.

‘So those Jews didn’t circumcise you then?’ the doctor remarked, taking Paulus’s penis in the palm of his hand and staring at it as a farmer might inspect a bull.

‘No. They were modern people and not religiously minded.’

‘Well, it was decent of them anyway,’ the doctor said, adding with a hearty laugh that it would have caused a few problems for Stengel in the showers if they had.

Then the doctor produced a set of measuring callipers, which for a moment Paulus presumed were to be applied to his penis but which instead the doctor applied to his head.

‘Good cranium, I must say,’ the doctor remarked with an approving nod. ‘Teutonic shape, excellent Aryan lobes.’

‘Thank you, Herr Doktor.’

On the wall was a chart depicting in what purported to be scientific detail the defining features of a Jewish skull. From what Paulus could see, the main characteristic appeared to be a forehead that sloped brutally backwards. Certainly the owner of such a skull would have a sneaky and ignoble look about him.

Paulus thought of his handsome father. His beautiful mother.

These people truly were insane. Could they really believe it?

Paulus knew that Otto had been subjected to the same inspection when he entered the Napola school. One Jew, one Gentile, no sense. This was supposedly the most technologically advanced army in the world and they thought they could define ‘valuable’ blood with a ruler.

Satisfied with the physical evidence of racial purity, the doctor turned his attention to the question of health.

‘Mouth.’

Paulus opened his mouth. He had five filled cavities, one less than the maximum number allowed. Himmler had originally stipulated that an SS man must have no fillings at all, nor wear spectacles or indeed display any imperfection of any kind. How the stoop-shouldered, short-sighted, rat-toothed and chinless Reichsführer SS could have written these instructions with a straight face was beyond most members of the public, even Nazis.

Unfortunately for the Reichsführer’s visions of a master race, the privations of the previous twenty years had ensured that almost no young German men whatsoever met the idealistic criteria of the Herrenmensch, and so the standards had been relaxed immediately. In fact, it was pretty plain that if you had all four limbs and weren’t a Jew, they’d take you.

After Paulus had dressed, the interview continued.

‘Why do you want to join the SS?’ the Sturmscharführer enquired.

That was easy.

Because he was in love with a beautiful woman who was a Jew. And one day soon he knew he would have to hide her. And the closer he was identified with the murderer’s gang, the less likely anybody would be to imagine that that was what he was doing.

Paulus had made his plan in Poland, when he saw for the first time what Hitler really had in store for what he called the Untermensch.

Until then, Paulus, like every half-civilized person in Germany, Jew or Gentile, had hoped that somehow, one day, a line would be drawn. That the steady erosion of all humanity towards the ‘race enemies’ would reach its nadir. Deprived of rights, property, dignity, security. Yes.

But murder? Mass murder? Surely not. That couldn’t be.

Nobody. Nobody would do that.

Least of all the sons and daughters of Bach, Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller, Mozart, Bismarck, Gutenberg and Luther.

Murder all the Jews. All of them?

It couldn’t happen.

And yet…

Maybe it wasn’t planned. Maybe they scarcely even knew themselves that this was what they were about. But Paulus had seen in Poland with his own eyes which way the devilish wind was blowing. He had seen what sudden and absolute victory was doing to the men in black and, yes, also in field grey. They were supermen and they could do what they liked.

And what they liked, it seemed, was to kill defenceless people.

Poles, gypsies, the weak, the sick. And above all Jews.

Certainly it had seemed improvised and almost random; there appeared to Paulus to be no guiding system or specific orders. And yet everywhere he had been as the lightning war struck, he had seen dead Jews.

Or Jews for whom he could see no chance of survival.

Herded up. Shipped from here to there.

To where?

Three times the truck in which he was riding with his Wehrmacht comrades had been commandeered by the SS in charge of huddled masses of humanity being torn from their villages.

‘Don’t let them take us,’ came the pitiful cries of children. ‘They’ll kill us.’

Paulus’s comrades said they wouldn’t.

Even they, who had passed village squares in which every father hung from a rope, still declined to believe it.

‘They won’t kill them. That’s a Jewish lie. A slur on Germany. They’re just shifting them out to make room for decent Germans.’

But Paulus could only ask himself the obvious question.

Shifting them to where?

If you tore every Jew from his home as clearly the Einsatzkommando of the SS were intent on doing, what would you do with them then? He had been told that they were being taken to the cities, massed in tiny ghettos from which they were not allowed to leave.

And what then?

Paulus thought that if he were Hitler he would kill them. After all, they were vermin and leaving them to starve would be messy and dangerous. A source of infection. A source of resistance. A source of witness.

Paulus had concluded that the path down which Germany was travelling could lead to only one dark and terrible place.

And his mother and his beloved Dagmar were trapped in Berlin.

Which is why, bumping along the dusty roads towards the charnel house that Germany was to make of the ancient city of Warsaw, he had made his plan.

‘I want to join the SS in order to better serve my Führer and to cleanse myself once and for all of my shameful family history, Sturmscharführer sir!’

‘Well done, lad,’ the sergeant said. ‘I think we’ll take you.’