Stephen Hunter - The Master Sniper

Shmuel began slowly, with great patience. He had cautioned them, “It will be very difficult to earn this man’s trust. He is frightened of everything, of everyone. He does not even realize the war is nearly over.”

“Fine, go ahead,” Leets said. “He’s all we’ve got.”

Shmuel spoke Yiddish, translating after each exchange.

“Mr. Eisner, you worked on uniforms for the German soldiers, is this not right?”

The old man blinked. He looked at them stupidly. He swallowed. His eyes seemed to fall out of focus.

“He’s very frightened,” Shmuel said. The old man was trembling.

“Coats,” Shmuel said. “Coats. Garments. For the German soldiers. Coats like the color of the forest.”

“Coats?” said Eisner.

He was trembling quite visibly. Leets lit a cigarette and handed it to the old man. He took it but his eyes would not meet Leets’s.

“Mr. Eisner, can you remember, please. These coats?” Shmuel tried again.

Eisner muttered something.

“He says he’s done nothing wrong. He says he’s sorry. He says to tell the authorities he’s sorry,” Shmuel reported.

“At least he’s talking,” said Leets, for yesterday the man had simply stared at them.

“Here,” Shmuel said. He’d taken from his field jacket a patch of the SS camouflage material, out of which the coats had been made.

But Eisner just stared at it as if it came from another planet.

Leets realized how Shmuel had been like this too, in the first days. It had taken weeks before Shmuel had talked in anything beyond grunts. And Shmuel had been younger, and stronger, and probably smarter. Tougher, certainly.

It seemed to go for hours, Shmuel nudging, poking gently, the old man resisting, looking terrified the whole time.

“Look, this just isn’t getting us anywhere,” Leets said.

“I agree,” Shmuel said. “Too many strong young men in uniforms. Too many Gentiles.”

“I think he’s telling us to go for a stroll,” said Tony. “Not a bad idea, actually. Leave the two of them alone.”

“All right,” said Leets. “Sure, fine. But remember: records. It’s records we’re after. There’s got to be some paper work or something, some orders, packing manifests, I don’t know, something to—”

“I know,” said Shmuel.

Tony said he had a report to file with JAATIC, and so Leets found himself alone at Dachau. Unsure of what to do, too agitated to return to his billet in the town for sleep, he decided to head over to the warehouse and workshop complex, to the tailor’s shop. He walked through the buildings outside the prison compound; here there was no squalor. It could have been any military installation, shabby brick buildings, scruffily landscaped, mostly deserted, except for guards here and there. Litter and debris lay about.

After a bit he reached his destination. The place was off limits of course, for the liberators had seen immediately that such a spot would become a souvenir hunter’s paradise and in fact some elementary looting had occurred, but Leets had a necessary-duty pass that got him by the glum sentry standing with carbine outside the building.

It was a popular stop on the Dachau tour, a must along with the gas chambers and the crematorium and the pits of corpses and the labs where the grisly human experiments had been performed. Usually it was crowded with open-mouthed field-grade officers, reporters, VIP’s, of one sort or another, all eager for a glimpse into the abyss—somebody else’s abyss, as a matter of fact—but today the shop was empty. Leets stood silent at one end of the room, a long dim chamber lined with mirrors. Bolt on bolt of the finest gray-green material lay about and bundles of silk for flags and banners and wads of gold cord for embroidering, and reels of piping in all colors and spool on spool of gold thread. Tailor’s dummies, their postures mocking the decaying dead outdoors, were scattered about, knocked down in the first frenzy of liberation. The odor was musty—all the heavy wool absorbed the peculiar tang of dust and blood and the atmosphere was tomb-like, still.

Leets found himself troubled here. The tailor’s workshop was packed with the pomp of ideology, the quasi-religious grandeur of it all: swastika, slashing SS collar tabs, flags, vivid unit patches, the stylized Deco Nazi eagle, wings flared taut, preying, on shoulder tabs. Leets prowled edgily through this museum, trying to master its lesson, but could not. At one point he came upon a boxful of the silver death’s-head badges that went on SS caps. He jammed his hand in, feeling them heavy and shifty and cool, running out from between his fingers. They felt in fact like quarters. He looked at one closely: skull, leering theatrically, carnivorous, laughing, chilling. Yet the skull was no pure Nazi invention; it was not even German. The British 17th Lancers had worn them on their trip to the Russian guns at Balaklava, last century.

He moved on to a bench on which the tailors had abandoned their last day’s work, the sleeve bands worn on dress uniforms. These, strips of heavy black felt, had been painfully and beautifully embroidered in heavy gold thread, Gothic letters an inch high, with the names of various Nazi celebrities or more ancient Teutonic heroes; it was a German fashion to commemorate a man or a legend by naming a division after him or it: REINHARD HEYDRICH, THEODOR EICKE, FLORIAN GEYER, SS POLIZEI DIVISION, DANMARK, and so forth. The workmanship was exquisite, but by one of history’s crueler ironies, this delicate work had been performed by Jewish hands. They’d sewed for their own murderers in order to live. A few, like Eisner, actually had survived.

Leets passed to a final exhibit—a long rack on which hung five uniforms for pickup. He hoped their owners had no need of them now. But they loved uniforms, that was certain. Perhaps here was a lesson, the very core of the thing. Perhaps the uniforms were not symbolic of National Socialism, but somehow were National Socialism. Leets paused with this concept for several seconds, pursuing it; a religion of decorations and melodrama, theater, the rampant effect, the stunning. But only a surface, no depth, no meaning. There were four of the gray-green Waffen SS dress uniforms, basically Wehrmacht tunics and trousers, dolled up with a little extra flash to make them stand out. The fifth was different, jet black, the uniform of RSHA, the terror boys. It was a racy thing, the uniform Himmler himself preferred, cut tight and elegant, with jodhpurs that laced up the legs. With shiny boots and armband it would form just about the most pristine statement of the theology of Nazism available. Hitler had been right about one terrible thing: it would live for a thousand years, if only in the imagination. Leets felt its numbing power to fascinate and not a little shame. He was embarrassed that it mesmerized him so. He could not look away from the black uniform hanging on the rack.

Yet the uniform signified only one face of it. He’d seen the other elsewhere. Another spectacle was intractably bound up with this one. Standing there alone in the dim stuffy room, the black uniform before him, he remembered.

The weather had turned cold, this three days earlier, but the gulf between then and now seemed like a geological epoch.

They were in an open Jeep. He sat in back with Shmuel, and pulled the field jacket tighter about himself. Tony was up front, and where Roger should have been, behind the wheel, another glum boy sat, borrowed from Seventh Army. They’d just bucked their way through the crowded streets of the thousand-year-old town of Dachau, quaint place, full of American vehicles and German charms, among the latter cobblestones, high-roofed stone houses, gilt metalwork, flower beds, tidy churches. Civilians stood about and American soldiers and even a few clusters of surrendered feldgraus .