LITMIR.BIZ

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grey undersides, golden rims and fluffy white tops with occasional gaps revealing intense blue sky above.

      ‘Are you all right, sir?’ asked Himmel.

      ‘I’m fine. Is the aircraft functioning?’

      ‘It took a couple of knocks but the controls are working.’

      ‘That was damned remarkable flak, Himmel.’

      ‘They get a lot of practice.’

      ‘They get trigger-happy too,’ said Löwenherz.

      They both laughed too much and the tension was relieved.

      ‘Do you remember that fellow they called Porky?’ asked Löwenherz.

      ‘Ostend in May 1941. When Karl Reinhold phoned him at the Alert Hut and told him he’d been awarded the Knight’s Cross …’

      ‘… for low-level attacks against friendly shipping,’ hooted Löwenherz. ‘Then he phoned me, but luckily you’d warned me that they would play pranks upon the new boys.’

      ‘They always did.’

      ‘You saved me being made a fool of, Christian.’

      ‘You were a good wingman.’

      ‘And now I’m your Staffelkapitän. It’s funny how things work out.’

      ‘You should be the Kommodore,’ said Christian Himmel.

      ‘For God’s sake, Christian, why did you take those documents?’

      ‘Is that why the Herr Oberleutnant came along?’ Himmel had moved into the respectful third person.

      ‘Of course it is, Christian.’

      ‘It was a matter of honour, Herr Oberleutnant.’

      ‘Honour?’

      ‘Those documents shame us all.’

      ‘What are you saying? What sort of documents were they?’

      ‘They didn’t tell you, eh? Well, perhaps they were ashamed. Even shame is progress.’ Himmel reached into his flying overalls and pulled out a bulky document with brown-paper covers. He passed it over his shoulder to Löwenherz. ‘Read it first, Herr Oberleutnant. Then you’ll see why I have to go through with this.’

      It was not an impressive-looking dossier. There was a metal clip holding it together and a Luftwaffe eagle rubber-stamped on to the cover. Along the top it said ‘Luftwaffe High Command: Medical Corps: Secret’. It wasn’t a printed document. It was a duplicated typescript and in places the words were scarcely legible.

      ‘Go through with what?’

      ‘Please read it, sir.’

      At first Löwenherz was inclined to return it to Himmel unopened. He feared he was being drawn into a tacit conspiracy. For some time he stared out from the cramped little pulpit and watched the green sea creep past. By the time they crossed the coastline the cumulus fractus was below them, but only by an arm’s reach. It stretched before them like a blinding white wasteland of ice and snow. The motors held a bass note like an organ pipe and the plane trembled with its power. Oberleutnant Löwenherz made his decision: he undid the metal clip and began reading the stolen medical report.

      The convoy resumed the proper course after its evasive zigzagging. The destroyers and other armed ships hurried up and down, chivvying the merchantmen into line with loud-hailers and signal lamps. At the rear the light cruiser Held maintained a dignified straight course like a mother hen. The Held had been the 3,500-ton light cruiser Jan Koppelstok of the Royal Netherlands Navy until 1940 when she was seized by the Germans and refitted as an anti-aircraft ship. In the forecastle battery, hidden by the steel door, a gunner named Franz Pawlak was smoking a cheroot. His loader cleaned the breech of the 10.5-cm Model 37 with care and affection. They were both wearing the hooded fur-lined winter clothing that had been designed for the Russian Front. It gave them some protection against the piercing North Sea winds that even in the middle of summer chilled professional sailors to the bone.

      The gun crews suffered even more, for many of them were ex-Luftwaffe personnel, most of whom found it hard to adapt to the rigours of a seaman’s life. Obergefreite Franz Pawlak 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

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