The Butcher

By Rolf Esser

A nine-year-old boy has to watch his father being cruelly killed in a concentration camp. He is traumatized for the rest of his life because he can never forget the names of those men who were involved in the murder. The boy comes to the USA, is adopted there and experiences a happy youth. He studies and starts a career with a New York advertising agency after graduation. At that time, horrific murders were happening all over the world. The criminalists are at a loss. Neither the motive, nor the perpetrator or the perpetrators can even be recognized to a degree. From Paraguay via Italy to Egypt, there is feverish investigation. In New York the circle closes at
the end.

• Language: English
• Publisher: tredition
• Release date: Oct 17, 2022
• ISBN: 9783347751071

Rolf Esser

Rolf Esser, Jahrgang 1948, ist im Hauptberuf Lehrer und inzwischen pensioniert. Er unterrichtete an einer integrierten Gesamtschule in den Fächern Deutsch, Gesellschaftslehre, Kunst und Musik. Seit etwa 1990 war er für verschiedene Verlage als Autor im Bereich Unterrichtsmaterialien tätig. Darüber hinaus war er immer künstlerisch und musikalisch aktiv. Neben der Ausstellung seiner Kunstwerke (zuletzt im Osthaus-Museum Hagen) spielte er viele Jahre als Schlagzeuger und Gitarrist in Bands seiner Heimatstadt. Rolf Esser hat inzwischen drei Jugendromane, einen Roman für Kinder, zwei Kriminalromane, eine Kurzgeschichtensammlung, ein Sachbuch für Musiker und eine Reihe von verschiedenen Unterrichtsmaterialien veröffentlicht.

Book preview

1945

Chapter 1

In the Concentration Camp

Its five o´clock in the morning. There is order here. In German thoroughness, the men stand in rank and file, divided into groups, recognizable by their badges, the so-called corners, which were sewn to their striped garments: political, criminals, emigrants, biblical scholars, homosexuals, asocials and Jews. In addition, they must bear a number. Man becomes the number. He has no name, he loses his reputation and honor.

At this early hour, the men stood stiffly on the large square in front of the wooden barracks, ready for the count. Already at four o´clock they were awakened and had to clean the wretched rooms of their lodgings. It is still dark, bright headlights brighten the action. The April of 1945 is already well advanced, but the morning is still cool and the thin, emaciated figures freeze. Not to be compared with that night in January of the extremely severe winter, when they had to stand here collectively as a punishment for the escape of two prisoners in an ice cold. For fifteen men it was death.

They stand there and basically have no strength for it. They are all prisoners. In the morning they have to endure the torture of the Apell, which repeats itself in the evening. In addition, they are sent to the equally debilitating workplace: road construction, tree cutting, construction work, weapons factory - every slave work is conceivable as long as a profit is obtained from it.

There is a typhus epidemic in the camp. The barracks of the hospital are overcrowded. Those who are still able to stand on their legs must also take part in the towing table and be beaten to work. Many of them will not experience the evening.

All these men were taken into custody and went to hell. With the difference that there is not only a devil in this hell, devils are here in the dozen. Nine of them stand before them, all men of the SS-Totenkopfverband. The SS Obersturmbannführer Fritz Meinert, the first guard of the Schutzhaftlager, has the say. The prisoners are under the control of the Schutzhaftlagerführer in this concentration camp. His direct superior is the camp commander Eduard Weiter. He was not seen any more for a long time. The dirty business now deal with his merciless subordinates.

The Schutzhaftlagerführer Meinert is feared for the execution of punitive measures and executions. As late as September, he ordered ninety Russian prisoners to be executed. He is uncontrolled, enters the prisoners, beating them with a whip, or hounding dogs upon them.

They are there, thousands kept so by nine men who proudly wear their SS uniforms and feel themselves as masters, as lords of life and death. Also this morning, the piercing voice of Meinert penetrates deep into their brain. They will never forget it if they ever will survive this camp. I will ruthlessly destroy anyone who does not devote himself to all his daily work. You are a miserable heap of plagues, pretending to be sick, to evade your duty. Have you ever wondered why you were put in protective custody? I will tell you, because you are, without exception, lazy, industrious rascals who use shamelessly the state´s well-being and the goodness of the Führer.

So they hear it every morning. Before Meinert, it was another Schutzhaftlagerführer. They are all of the same kind, these SS perpetrators, animated by an order of extermination, which the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler has time and time again thrown in with them and underpinned with orders and ordinances.

However, in his most recent decree, Himmler ordered the prisoners´ labor to be secured. The prisoners are the only ones who can keep armament production going for the still raging and long-lost war. They must therefore no longer be unnecessarily punished or tortured. Such an opinion is not reached by Meinert. Not for nothing they call him the ´butcher´ in the camp.

Alone, as Meinert new arrivals is going to welcome, when they have crossed the camp gate, is unmasking. The whole sadism of this SS man unfolds in his first sentence, which he hurls out: Here no one has to laugh! The only one who laughs here is the devil, and the devil is me! He also never forgets to mention that there is only one way out of the camp, namely through the chimney of the crematorium.

The camp is surrounded by a high barbed wire fence, which is also powered by electricity. There are two SS guards with machine guns on eight watchtowers. Himmler had written down in the posting that prisoners had to be shot at once without warning. In numerous unnatural deaths, the concentration camp guards simply state that they had shot prisoners in an alleged escape attempt. As an escape attempt, you can only enter the wide safety strip along the fence. An actual escape attempt, however, is almost always fatal. And once he succeeds, the fugitives are almost always caught again, tortured them terribly, and then shoot them before all eyes.

For half an hour they had to listen to the salvating verbal excesses of Meinert. In the first row of a group stands Hermann Glockenspiel. Two yellow juxtaposed angles in the form of the Davidstern on his jacket, which the Nazis call ´Judenstern´, characterize him as Jew, as all here in this group. In the eyes of the SS, the Jewish prisoners form the lowest level of the hierarchy in the camp. Even in the rank order among the prisoners, they are at the bottom.

Hermann Glockenspiel is sick, he also has typhus. He could just drag himself to the pitch. Next to him stands the nine-year-old Erich, his son. Slowly Hermann disappear the senses, then he faints, falls forward and strikes the ground.

It is as if Fritz Meinert had been waiting for such an incident. Immediately, he grows up before the impotent and shouts: You damned Judensau, just want to sneak out of work! We´ll drive you out, once and for ever! A hint from him and two SS Sturmbannführer hurry up and grab the poor Hermann Glockenspiel, whose nose is bleeding from the fall. They drag him into the middle of the square. There is a kind of gallows framework that is used for all kinds of worst punishments.

The SS men tie Hermann´s arms on his back and pull him up with a rope back on the gibbet pile. Piling - a punishment, which is no longer welcomed by the SS leadership. Because of the preservation of the labor force. Meinert! does not care. In this medieval torture, the delinquent suffers unimaginable pain and agony.

Hermann is still powerless. Now the SS minions drag him down the jacket so that his upper body is free. Meinert pulls the whip out of his belt, which he always carries with him, and strikes Hermann Glockenspiel in the best way. Whether the intensified torrent of pain awakens Hermann from his impotence, he must suffer with all his still existing senses worst torments. He cries out all his misery. Then he fainted again.

Little Erich must look at it all. When the father begins to scream, he immediately wants to hurry to him. A Jewish fellow-inmate standing behind him can just keep him behind. Erich begins to weep. The fellow prisoner holds his mouth shut. It would be impossible to imagine what would happen. The first guardian of guardianship also does not stop in front of children.

Then the prisoners move out to work. Erich must go to the ammunition factory, where he has to sort and transport cartridge cases. He has to get together very much, he thinks of his father all day.

After the morning roll call, Fritz Meinert wants to have a second breakfast as always. He has to get out early every morning. He owes that to these bastards here. He goes over to the strictly divided SS area, which is twice the size of the prisoner area. Here are SS training camps with barracks and training rooms, workshops where prisoners also work, team barracks and officers´ apartments, a bakery and the administration building.

Meinert and his wife live in a spacious officer apartment. When he enters the apartment, it smells of fresh coffee. His wife Gisela knows his work rhythm very well, she has prepared everything for breakfast. Gisela is a thin, impoverished woman. She seems to lack any kind of zest for life. Basically, she knows exactly what her husband is doing there in the camp, alone, she doesn´t want to admit it. Certainly not to speak to him about it. An Aryan woman has a duty to perform: she must be loyal, willing to sacrifice, capable of suffering, selfless. In her courage role, she takes care of steel, ready to fight, she is the source of the nation and the keeper of high-quality genetic material. The decisions are made by the men.

The Meinerts have a grown son who left for London at the beginning of the war, when he was just 21 years old. He wanted nothing to do with the Nazis and their fatal longing for war. Although Fritz Meinert beat the boy almost bloody, he even refused to join the Hitler Youth. Such a son is a shame for an SS man. He died for Fritz Meinert.

The SS Obersturmbannführer is having a good time at the breakfast table. Nothing is missing. Bread, sausage, cheese, everything there. He also desperately needs it. The day is still long, who knows how much the prisoner pack will still annoy him? This Jew! it escapes him and he shakes his head. Gisela flinches. Secretly, she has an idea of what an SS man does to a Jew who beats his only son the way she experienced Fritz.

Gisela evades. In the morning, a speech by Hitler was broadcast on the radio, she says. And what did he say? We should persevere, face the enemy. Yes, that´s typical Hitler, Meinert thinks. He never thought much of that. Clear statements, clear orders never came. Always slogans. What should you expect from an Austrian? He doesn´t even look like an Aryan. Now he is probably sitting in his bunker while the soldiers fight for their lives outside. Men like Himmler are knitted differently. There are no ifs and buts.

Speeches by the Führer, perseverance slogans, Fritz Meinert is very little interested in all of this. It is important for him that he does his duty wherever he is used. A real German man always does his duty. And an SS man is always a real German man. Duty in his case means: Mercilessly and without consideration of any feelings, enforce the prescribed order of the concentration camp. What does an individual count when it comes to something as grand as the national socialist idea? Inspired by these thoughts, Meinert heads to the administration building to supplement the files, if only to document his own excellent fulfillment of his duties. Fritz Meinert is certain that there have never been institutions in Germany that have recorded their tasks and duties and the resulting results more precisely in writing. You have to be proud to be able to leave such documents to posterity.

When the prisoners return to the camp in the evening after dark, Hermann Glockenspiel is still hanging on the stake. The ritual of standing by the roll call is repeated. The inmate who pulled little Erich aside in the morning takes the boy aside again and stands with him in the back row. He can´t see the father there.

After a seemingly endless litany of Meinerts with wild threats and insults, the counting follows. While the roll call in the morning must not take too long because the work should start on time, it is extremely rare in the evening that it lasts less than one and a half hours, often two hours. If only one of the prisoners makes a mistake, it all starts again. The procedure can take hours. However, if counting means that a prisoner is missing, this will result in a collective punishment. More standing on the square until you drop, food deprivation, the whole range of what a criminal SS brain can think of. Prisoners who have been in the camp for a long time know that all camp inmates had to stand uninterrupted for a whole night and a whole day. You shouldn´t stir.

Today the number is correct. The prisoners are allowed to rack in their barrack. Time for the evening meal. Can you call what they get here a meal? There are 350 grams of bread as a daily ration. In the evening they receive 20 to 30 grams of sausage or cheese and threequarters of a liter of tea four times a week. They are given a liter of thin soup three times a week. Subtracting the permanent food deprivation for all types of offenses, there is hardly enough food left to survive, considering that they have to work hard all day long.

Shortly before the absolute night´s sleep at 9:00 p.m., the hated voice of the 1st protective camp leader resounds from the camp loudspeakers: I hereby announce to everyone: The work-shy Jew has dared to evade further punishment and is dead. Who thinks himself to be able to withdraw from work by falling over at the morning roll call must face draconian punishments. We will not tolerate any refusal!

The speakers crack, then there is silence. Everyone heard it. The poor Hermann Glockenspiel, suspended from the post, is dead. In this camp, death is a daily companion. It can affect anyone every day. None of the prisoners is therefore surprised or particularly shaken.

Little Erich heard it too. His father is dead. Now he has no one left. The mother had already been caught during the November pogroms in 1938 because she wanted to shop in a Jewish shop in Berlin. She couldn´t and didn´t want to give in to the SA and SS hordes. She was a strong woman. It was also fatal for her that she was married to a Jewish man, even though she was not a Jew herself. The Nazis called it racial disgrace. They were brought to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Later she was deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered in the gas chamber. However, Erich will only find out this much later. At that time he was only two years old. He must have unconsciously internalized the mother´s sudden absence.

Hermann Glockenspiel nevertheless did not want to leave Germany. He was Jewish, but he was German. Basically, he had never cultivated the Jewish faith. His deeply religious Jewish father had fought for Germany in the First World War and had fallen on the western front. Hermann´s mother died soon after. After the unspeakable war sparked by Hitler in 1939, the situation for Jews throughout Germany became more and more threatening. One day Hermann Glockenspiel´s brother and sister had disappeared, along with other relatives such as uncles, aunts, cousins and nephews. The Jewish community in Berlin was systematically decimated by the Nazis. At first Hermann was able to hide with Erich from nonJewish German friends. There were also such people. When it became clear in 1942 that the Holocaust, the annihilation of the Jews, was a matter for the National Socialists, Hermann Glockenspiel decided not to put his friends at risk of fleeing to Switzerland with his son. Almost in the face of the Swiss border, they were seized and taken to this concentration camp.

Forsaken and saddened to death, Erich sits on his lousy sleeping place, a miserable shack in an miserable three-story structure. He cannot sleep. In any case, he has to share this bed, which can hardly be called that, with other prisoners. It got tight. There are a total of 34 barracks in two rows, with the camp street in the middle. Under a former commandant, the barracks were given the name blocks. Each apartment block has two washing facilities, two toilets and four parlors. Each room has a living room and a bedroom. Actually, 52 people are to be accommodated in each room, which means 208 prisoners per apartment block. But now up to 1,600 prisoners have to share an apartment block, that´s 300 to 500 people per room.

It´s strange. As late as 1942 the SS deported all Jewish prisoners to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Erich and his father came here later, which seems like a miracle, since Jews are usually deported to the extermination camps in the east without further ado. From last autumn, however, and increasingly since the beginning of this year, new transports with prisoners from the east are arriving. Rumor has it that the Russians keep advancing. The Americans are also said to be on the advance from the west. What is the point of clearing other camps? But the transports continue. In the meantime, around 35,000 prisoners are crowded in a confined space. New railroad trains arrive every day with sick and exhausted prisoners. When the death transport arrives from the Compiègne camp, 984 of the 2,521 prisoners are already dead. Now the camp is completely overcrowded. Life becomes completely unbearable for the inmates if you want to speak of life.

Every prisoner who arrives is dependent on the help of the inmates. You have to explain the new rules of conduct to him and give him the important hope of survival. Most newcomers experience a real shock during the admission procedure, which can often last for several days. The initial dismay gives way to outrage, which in turn triggers horror. The shock is all the more devastating the less you are psychologically prepared for this situation. At first, the newcomers are particularly at risk because the SS prefers to harass them. The highest mortality rate is recorded in the three months after arrival in the camp. During this time, the weak, the sick and those who are unable to adapt to the brutal living conditions die.

The blocks in the camp are sorted by nationality. The living conditions of many prisoners are based on their nationality. With the arrival of new groups of prisoners of a different nationality, those already present move up in the social structure. With the arrival of the Czechs, for example, the Austrian prisoners or the German anti-social got a higher status. With the arrival of the Poles and Russians, the Czechs moved up in the hierarchy.

The prisoners´ everyday lives are filled with work, hunger, fatigue and fear of illness and the brutality of the sadistic SS guards. In 1933, the first camp commander created disciplinary and street regulations, which later also applied to all other concentration camps. Since then, camp commandos have been operating in a legal space. You can switch and act as you like. It is at the discretion of every SS guard to determine alleged offenses committed by the prisoners, and it is usually completely unpredictable what can provoke the anger of an SS man and thus cause a so-called criminal report. A torn button on the jacket or a stain on the floor of the barrack, a short breather at work, or an incorrect answer - every prisoner can be punished at any time, which often amounts to a death sentence. One of the most common punishments was the corporal punishment, in which the prisoner was strapped to a wooden trestle and had to count the strokes of the bullfinch loudly to 25. If he loses consciousness, the punishment is repeated.

The particularly infamous thing about all the punitive measures is the fact that in most cases all prisoners have to attend the execution. Executions are not uncommon. This way, they can imagine what can threaten them every hour. Even little nine-year-old Erich and the other children in the camp are not spared. They too have to experience this and are psychologically damaged and traumatized for their entire life. Although it is certainly unbearable for adults. It is particularly bad for Erich. He had to watch the suffering that was done to his father.

The inmates are not only tormented by the constant reprisals by their guards. The so-called prisoner self-administration also contributes to this. The SS appoints certain prisoners to oversee the inmates´ duties. These are the functional prisoners. They are said to exert strong pressure on other prisoners, for example with regard to the order and cleanliness in the barracks and clothing. The positions occupied by prisoners remain largely in the hands of political prisoners, who organized themselves early in the camp, since they are mostly longest imprisoned, many since the camp was established in 1933. They bring with them a high degree of solidarity from their political past .

Prisoners organized the operation and maintenance of the camp largely independently. From the so-called camp elder, who is made responsible to the SS as the spokesman and representative of the prisoners, to the parlor elder, who is responsible for a parlor within a prisoners´ barrack for bed arrangement, cleanliness, meal distribution, etc. Warehousing organized hierarchically. The working groups are supervised and instructed by foremen, so-called Kapos. Most of the criminals are appointed to Kapos, perhaps because they are more brutal.

As soon as the prisoners do not do their job to their satisfaction, they lose their status again. Then they have to fear reactions of their fellow inmates if they see themselves as an extended arm of the SS and have thus gained advantages. In mid-April, the SS