Under The Pope's Windows by JC Ryan

Author:JC Ryan [Ryan, JC]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2020-05-04T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter 34 – A blanket

Camp Stalag XIII-D, Nuremberg, Germany

October 2, 1946

KARL BAUER WAS a defeated man; he had been for a long time. The deterioration of his psychological condition had been a gradual but persistent process which started on the day of his arrest on 3 August 1945. After his arrest, during his first two weeks of internment at Camp Siershahn, he was convinced he would soon die from thirst or hunger or cold or some kind of disease or a combination of it all. But then he was transferred to the Stalag XIII-D Nürnberg Langwasser camp in Nuremberg where he got more food and water and better shelter.

Stalag XIII-D was a Nazi prisoner of war camp built on Hitler’s party rally grounds in Nuremberg, northern Bavaria. Throughout the war, the Nazis imprisoned thousands of prisoners of war from Poland, Norway, France, and the Soviet Union at Stalag XIII-D. However, on 16 April 1945, the camp was liberated by the United States Army and turned into a POW camp for 15,000 captured members of the SS.

After a few weeks of better treatment, the fear of starving or freezing to death had subsided but returned with a vengeance a few months later.

It was shortly after breakfast when he became violently ill and so did more than 2,000 of his fellow inmates. All with the same symptoms which had set on within half an hour after breakfast—nausea, vomiting, and abdominal pain followed by severe diarrhea. They didn’t have to speculate much; it was obvious they had been poisoned. But it didn’t make much sense. If the idea was to kill them, why use poison and not bullets?

The rumor mill had gone into overdrive.

It would only be much later when Bauer would learn what had really happened. It was the work of a Jewish group who called themselves Nakam, the Jewish word for revenge. Their leader was Abba Kovner. Nakam aimed to kill six million Germans in retaliation for the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust—a nation for a nation. They had plans to poison the main water supplies of Germany, but that never came to fruition when Kovner was arrested by the British on his way back from Palestine with a boatload of poison which he had to dump overboard. Nonetheless, Nakam succeeded in infiltrating one of their members, a baker, into Camp Stalag XIII-D, where he managed to slip arsenic into 3,000 loaves of bread. However, in his eagerness to kill as many Germans as possible, he must have diluted the poison too much—more than 2,000 prisoners became ill, but none died.

Over the past thirteen months, Bauer had been interrogated several times, thankfully not violently, to collect evidence from him to use against his former superior, Alfred Rosenberg. Bauer was often tempted to let them know that he was willing to testify in person in exchange for his freedom. But he thought better of it. Trying to make such a deal would have been an admission of guilt, and his

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.