The Commandant's Daughter: A compelling and heart-wrenching World War 2 historical novel (Hanni Winter Book 1) by Catherine Hokin

Author:Catherine Hokin [Hokin, Catherine]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781800197008
Publisher: Bookouture
Published: 2022-01-25T16:00:00+00:00

All the dated sections followed the same pattern. Hanni and Freddy read the first few and then Freddy flicked through to the back pages. Those were stuffed with tables and graphs and photographs supporting the written entries and with appendices comparing body weights to immersion times. It was a complete and diligently kept catalogue of nine months of experiments using forced freezing which had been carried out to test the capacity of the human body. All sanctioned, according to the log, by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler and implemented by Wittke.

The work he’s most proud of.

Hanni swallowed hard as Freddy opened an envelope which had been tucked into the flap in the book’s back cover. That contained a set of reports from the Doctor’s Trial. Hanni skimmed through them, wondering if Wittke had been comparing his own work against the horrors laid out in the newspaper columns. Wondering how Freddy could still be holding the papers without shaking.

The reports carried no details, but the briefly sketched charges were enough to cast a darkness over the room. Experiments on twins; bone and muscle transplants; attempts to replicate and study head injuries; injections of contagious diseases; experiments that exposed prisoners to mustard gas and to drinking seawater and to phosphorous burns and deprived them of oxygen. Not a single procedure carried out under anaesthetic, and the victims who died or were maimed running past counting. The defence offered in every case was the same: that these experiments were not part of a programme of persecution or murder, but research carried out in the name of medical science. Hanni sped through those until she got to the names. Some of the sixteen men arraigned had been based at Dachau, but there was no mention anywhere of Konrad Wittke.

He was like my father – he knew better than to leave his name on the page.

The room had slipped into an eerie quiet, the only sounds the rustling pages and the soft thud of the ball from outside. It was quiet and yet so full of ghosts, the air was thick with them.

Freddy closed the book and let his fingers rest on top of it. Hanni looked at him, expecting to see anger or hatred or fear. Instead, his face was empty, his eyes were blank.

He’s walking there with them.

Hanni could sense him moving through the diary entries, trying to put faces to the broken bodies, trying to imagine endings that no one ever should.

‘Freddy.’ She squeezed his arm, but he didn’t come back. ‘Freddy, maybe we should go. Maybe we should do this another day.’ She squeezed his arm again and this time he shuddered and gasped and his face became one closer to his own.

‘No. I’m all right. I can do this.’

He put the book onto the table and turned his attention back onto Ottilie.

‘If this is his and if everything in it is true – which I have no reason to doubt – how was your husband able to hide it? How did he

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