Len Deighton 3-Book War Collection Volume 1: Bomber, XPD, Goodbye Mickey Mouse. Len Deighton

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СКАЧАТЬ did. He had joined the Luftwaffe during the Battle of Britain, when cinema newsreels showed pilots relaxing in deckchairs between jousting amid puffy white clouds, yelling ‘Spitfire’ and smiling in the sunlight as high-ranking leaders shook their hands firmly and garlanded them with medals. Franz had been washed out of pilot school after a very bumpy solo landing. His marks in navigation theory had precluded his transfer to observer school and by the time he arrived as an officer candidate for the flak service he was confused and demoralized. He flunked, and was now an Obergefreite on a flak ship with precious little chance of becoming anything better. Franz loathed all aeroplanes with a terrible and sustained hatred. The previous month he and his gun crew had been credited with an RAF Blenheim bomber shot down. The gun barrel wore a white ring to celebrate it. Franz wanted to add another ring only a little less than he wanted to become a civilian again. His K3, a plump butcher’s delivery boy from Königsberg, was flushed with the exertion of loading 15-kg shells on to the awkward, steeply inclined loading-tray. He was arguing with Franz. ‘You can’t paint a white ring on the barrel until the destruction of the plane is confirmed. That’s the captain’s orders.’

      ‘You saw it come down,’ said Franz. ‘Now am I the best gunner in the whole damn convoy?’

      ‘It may have dived to sea level to avoid the gunfire, Admiral.’ Both his friends and his enemies called Franz Pawlak ‘Admiral’.

      ‘Get the white paint. We shot it down, I tell you.’

      ‘I still say it might have been one of ours.’

      ‘What are you talking about, Klaus, every gun in the convoy was firing,’ said Franz.

      ‘They didn’t start until you did,’ said Klaus.

      ‘Exactly. When I started, old glass-nose gave the order.’

      ‘I’m still frightened it might have been one of ours. It looked very like a Junkers 88 and it flew south to escape.’

      ‘Beaufighter. A Bristol Beaufighter. Anyway, it was an aeroplane,’ said Franz. ‘Aeroplanes drop bombs and any aeroplane that comes within range of this contraption gets shot at. Now will you get the white paint?’

      ‘Whatever you say, Admiral. We’ll be the only gun on the Held with two victory rings, providing the old man doesn’t make us paint it out again.’

      ‘I tell you something, Dikke,’ said Franz, prodding his friend in the belly. ‘We’re averaging eight and a half knots and if that damned Danish bucket doesn’t have any more steering-gear trouble we’ll be sailing past the Hook of Holland by midnight. That’s the place for aeroplanes; the RAF are over there nearly every night lately.’ He stroked the barrel of the big gun. ‘By tomorrow morning, Heini, we might have three rings on our Würstchen. Now wouldn’t that be something to write to your cousin Sylvia about?’

      Klaus Munte looked at his friend and smiled, but if there was anything he hated more than to be called ‘fatty’ it was to be called Heini. ‘By tonight the war might be over,’ said Munte.

      ‘It won’t be over for me,’ said Pawlak.

      In this, as in so much of his plausible patter, he was wrong.

      What Löwenherz had before him was one of the most bizarre, macabre and horrifying documents produced by a civilized society.

      ‘Freezing Experiments with Human Beings’ was a thirty-two-page report drawn up by Dr Sigmund Rascher of the Luftwaffe Medical Corps, helped by a professor of medicine at the University of Kiel. The experiments took place at Dachau concentration camp and consisted of putting naked prisoners into ice-water or leaving them out in the snow until they froze to death. Their temperatures were taken from time to time and recorded by the doctors. After death there was an autopsy.

      Dr Sigmund Rascher had moved the Luftwaffe’s decompression chamber from Munich to Dachau concentration camp a few kilometres down the road. Two hundred prisoners were put into this chamber and each was depressurized until his body exploded. The report on this series of experiments was sent to the Medical Inspector of the Luftwaffe in the summer of 1942.

      The third and final part of the stolen file was a report of Dr Rascher’s ‘warming experiments’. These were even more perverted. Male prisoners were frozen almost to death in ice-water and then placed in a bed between two naked women. (The women were prisoners from Ravensbrück concentration camp.) Dr Rascher noted in great detail the sexual reactions of the half-dead men and to what extent these improved their chance of survival. He reported in a paper dated February 1943 and marked Secret.

      It stabbed Löwenherz to the heart of his belief. Of course he had misgivings; few men didn’t. Baron Löwenherz, his father, had not disbelieved the rumours; he called them symptoms of unrest. The Nazi Party was a bridge to sanity, a stage between the 1918 breakdown on the home front and the return to a natural state of things where a strong German officer corps held Germany’s honour in trust. For the time being the nation was in the hands of these Bavarians and among them there were some villainous rascals, but better this sort of revolutionary than the Bolshevik variety, who was prepared to butcher families because their hands were clean or their names patrician. Inventive, creative men are inclined to be ruthless, the baron had told him. We must work with these Nazi condottieri, just as Leonardo had to work with Machiavelli, with Cesare Borgia and with his Count Sforza; just as three centuries later the Industrial Revolution pushed aside philosophers and humanitarians so that single-minded despots ruled Europe. They put children up chimneys and women down mines, they bullied, cheated, bribed and literally worked their employees to death. They caused misery and strife but, as we now know, the Industrial Revolution put Europe a century ahead of the rest of the world.

      Now the Nazis are transforming Germany with a similar single-minded ruthlessness. Of course we can’t approve of the sort of things that occur, these camps that people speak of in whispers, the witch-hunts for Jews and Communists, the ‘gunboat diplomacy’ that Hitler used to annex Austria and then Czechoslovakia. These things are bad things, but they are all things that Britain did, or would have done if necessary, to achieve its position as a world power. If Hitler cheats he cheats for Germany, if he steals he steals for Germany, if he kills then this he does for Germany too. If he needs our help then the officer corps must give it, generously and unstintingly.

      All these things that his father had told him Löwenherz explained to Christian Himmel, but Christian remained unconvinced.

      ‘But what would you achieve if you gave these unpleasant documents to the British? Would you like their propaganda people to reveal such things to the world?’

      ‘I? Give them to the British?’ said Himmel. ‘Is that what they told you?’

      ‘Then what do you want with the papers?’

      ‘It’s very simple,’ said Himmel. ‘These things are being done in our name, Herr Oberleutnant. Oh, it sounds very grand when you say it’s for Germany, but these things are being done on behalf of us aviators. The research will be used to help us survive should we force-land in the ocean or the Arctic. But, Herr Oberleutnant, do you know a flyer who wouldn’t sooner die than have these disgusting experiments done to prisoners?’

      ‘None,’ agreed Löwenherz. ‘But that’s because we should ask them the question while they are warm and dry and on the ground, perhaps sitting back in the Mess with a cognac in their hand. Ask a flyer that question a few moments after he has crashed in the cold sea and perhaps he’ll decide differently.’

      ‘I won’t.’

      ‘No. СКАЧАТЬ