The Hidden Hindenburg by McCarthy Michael

Author:McCarthy, Michael
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2020-06-07T00:00:00+00:00

EARTH

In a century of Zeppelins and stupid deaths… why fight against the flesh when the terrifying problem of the spirit exists?

—FREDERICO GARCÍA LORCA

13

Illicit Fruit

In the midst of a chaotic world and with human raw material partly sunk to deep moral depths… stern, indeed drastic interventions and methods are unavoidable.

—HUGO ECKENER, 1934 RADIO TALK ENDORSING HITLER

IT HAD BEEN ALMOST THREE YEARS THAT HE CARRIED A GUN. THEN Moisej Temkin was captured by the Germans in June of 1941. Imprisoned, head shaven, the young Russian soldier, not yet twenty-six, hadn’t seen his thick, dark hair in over two years.

When the trainload of Red Army men arrived inside the barbed-wire fence that summer of 1943, Temkin looked around, his eyebrows still thick, stunned at how large the prison was. Barracks after barracks after barracks—it was a town unto itself. At the north end of the camp, dark smoke wafted from a tall brick stack.

As Temkin was taking the place in, SS guards suddenly beat him and the other Soviet soldiers with rifle butts and fists, shepherding them into a tarp-covered truck. They were crowded inside and motoring away, somewhere. Temkin couldn’t tell why they were taken away so quickly from the large camp, or where they were now, a short drive away. He did not know he was at an SS shooting range called Herbertshausen, where firing squads shot more than 4,000 Soviet soldiers to death in 1941 and 1942.

He came to a wide courtyard with a large iron gate. Across from it, there was a long, high wall spattered with blood. He was white with fear. As he began taking in the ghastly surroundings, guards milled about. Gestapo men ordered the Russians to undress and line up in rows of five. It was clear they would face a firing squad. Suddenly, one of the Gestapo men shouted “Genug!” or “Enough!” The men were then ordered to dress again and jump onto a truck.

The truck returned to the big camp. Temkin did not know why the Gestapo men called off the execution. He stood bewildered in the large camp again.

“Do you all know where you are?” said one man in prison stripes, speaking in his mother Russian tongue. “This is one of the most famous camps in Germany—Dachau.” It was August 1943.

At the turn of the century, the remote land of Dachau was an artists’ town. It had unrelenting winters, with heavy snow falling into April. The bleak terrain of peat bogs and moors drew landscape painters, who could afford to live there more simply and cheaply than in nearby Munich. They were inspired by the beauty of the Alps in the distance. An artist colony formed. They painted the marshy uplands and especially loved to paint one particular old cottage nestled by timeworn poplars.

In 1933, the Third Reich converted the painters’ colony into a penal colony. With fanfare, Heinrich Himmler, chief of police in Munich, announced in the newspapers the formation of einKonzentrationslager, “a concentration camp,” to remove as many as 5,000 political prisoners from good German society.

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