Chapter 8 Photographers in Salzburg - 7

After leaving Reichenau, Reber spent the rest of the day and the night at the house of the old coachman in Peyerbach.The old farmer invited him to stay, but at first he refused to accept it.For the first time in the four years since Reber left Vienna for Lviv with his mother, sister, and sister, he slept in a real bed and ate at a family table for the first time.The old man's surname was Doppler, and his three grandsons were all recruited by the German army to serve as soldiers.Two of them were officially notified to be dead, and there was no news of the third.Reber told Doppler about Emma Donning's three children in foster care and asked him to look after them.

Reber made a mistake when he returned to Vienna.Not because he was always stalking around the Bohemian Office, or even because he was home again, but because he was asking too much about the man Epoke.He found out nothing.No one knew the name at all, as if Emma Donning had made it up herself. In fact, Leiber's knowledge of this name has already shown that his investigation has made progress.His inquiry into the exact circumstances of Anton Hinterzejer's death was equally rewarding.This "white-haired old man" who had served Klimrod's family for more than 50 years died under a military wheel.If anything, it is this: Reber is convinced that Anton was murdered by Epoke.

The tall, handsome, blond man in the uniform of an SS general described by Emma Donen was undoubtedly Erich Steyr.Now, both Steyer and Epke realized that Reb Klimrod's visit was a signal that Reb was very close to the terrible truth. If you head northwest from Linz to Passau, Germany, you will see Hartheim Castle just off the road along the Danube.That place is called Alkhohan.This is a quiet little village, of which you can find hundreds in northern Austria.From Alkhohan to Linz, it is only about fifteen kilometers.This castle is a very large building, but several window openings are blocked. The heavy and gloomy German character of the era of the King (1476) and the Holy Roman Emperor (1493).There is a very large courtyard in the fort, surrounded by magnificent colonnades, but they can't dilute the different impression given by the entire complex of buildings dominated by the four towers.

"This used to be a nursing home," the red-haired electrician said reluctantly to Reber. "It can also be said to be a hospital. I went in twice in 1942 and 1943. There was a short circuit in the electrical wiring system, and they asked me to fix it." As soon as he said this, he hurried Shaking his head, he added cautiously: "But I didn't see anything abnormal." The red-haired electrician's shop was opened in the city of Linz not far from the Holy Trinity Column.Reb Klimrod had just appeared in front of his shop, and the electrician immediately recognized the tall, thin young man.During the war, he worked as an electrician and entered the Mauthausen concentration camp several times.He remembered that in the concentration camp, the SS officers dragged the boy around. On one occasion, they put a leash around Leiber's neck, like a dog.Like anyone else who had more or less experience with concentration camps, he knew that the War Crimes Commission was currently hunting down war criminals with all its might.He was particularly afraid of the recently established Jewish committee in Linz.Today's Jews are dangerous people, too dangerous.He had already met twice on the streets of Linz another former prisoner, Simon Wiesenthal, who lived nearby.He had nightmares at night, and several times dreamed that Wiesenthal's black eyes were blazing menacingly, although he thought he had done nothing wrong and had a clear conscience. He was just an electrician, nothing more, and what could people blame him for?

However, the boy who had just walked in and asked him about Hartheim was also Jewish.The red electrician clearly remembered that on the striped prison uniform worn by the young man, there was a yellow "J" in the center of the orange double-lined triangle.It was the red-haired electrician who told Reber Klimrod the name of the Salzburg photographer. The Austrian railway department tried every means to put some almost completely destroyed open car tares on the tracks of certain routes. Reber took such a car and drove from Vienna to Linz.On June 30 he arrived in Linz.He covered the distance from Linz to Alkhohan on two legs and in an army jeep.Soldiers are happy to give civilians a lift.

Reber never specifically told anyone whether he entered Hartheim Castle or not.Neither Taras nor Setiniaz dared to ask him this question. Reber Michel Klimrod was the first to discover the inside of Hartheim Castle (except, of course, those who worked there); To a certain extent, due to an accidental opportunity, coupled with the active efforts of Simon Wiesenthal, the truth of this castle was officially revealed to the world.Reber arrived in Salzburg on the evening of July 2nd or the morning of July 3rd. He walked there for more than two-thirds of the distance from Mauthausen, sleeping very little, except for the night spent at the Peyerbach Doppler's; The exception was the meal at Doppler's, and he received no physical support from any kindly food.He was immersed in desperate and dramatic loneliness, driven by only one persistent idea, to find out where and how his father died?

The Salzburg photographer's surname is Lothar. "He's not here," a woman with gray and cropped hair told him. "He lives here, but he doesn't work here. You can find him at the photo studio." It was given to him—in a covered passage behind the bell tower. "Do you know the way?" "I'll find it," Reber said. He tried not to let himself limp from there.Crossing a square called the Old Market, he saw the ambulance for the second time.The first time was on the other side of the Salzach, when Reber was coming down the road from Linz to here.he noticed.The car was parked at the bridge of the highway bridge, facing him.The two boys sitting in the front seat did not move, and their expressionless expressions showed that they were waiting for the commander's order before taking action.The ambulance was painted tan with a red cross on white.At first glance, there is nothing unusual about it.

Now, it is parked in the old city center of Salzburg again, and there is no one on board.However, the ambulance's license plate still had the same number, and there was also a scratch on the front right fender. Reber walked across the square without compromising, but then suddenly looked awkward, limping even worse than before. At this time, he was only two hundred and fifty meters away from the bell tower. It was twenty-five minutes before Leiber got there. The passage behind the bell tower was dark and narrow; Reber could reach out and touch its vault before reaching the entrance.He walked in for about ten meters, passed several dark storefronts, and then saw a painted signboard with white and black letters on it, which read crookedly: Ka Hai Lothal Art Photography.As soon as he pushed the glass door, he immediately touched a small bell, which made a sharp jingle.Reber stepped into a low room with walls and roof of unpainted stone.There were a few rather large wooden counters lined either side of Reber, but there was nothing inside, and the ledges were equally empty.

At this moment, a voice came from the back room, "Here I am." A curtain hung over the door leading to the back room.Reber lifted the curtain and walked in.He found himself facing four men, one of whom immediately pressed the barrel of the gun to his left temple. "Don't move, don't scream!" Reber recognized two of them as the same people who had just been sitting in the front seat of the military ambulance.From the features Emma Donen had described to him in Reichenau, he identified the third person as Epock.As for the fourth person, he had never seen him before.They asked Leiber, where did he go just now?From the old market to here, it only takes two or three minutes to walk with a limp, but why did he spend so much time?

Reb Klimrod's countenance and his whole demeanor were changed, and he looked like a completely different person.Now, he looked younger than he was, more frail and tired than could possibly have been imagined.A pair of eyes opened wildly wide. "I'm hungry and lost," he replied in a voice close to tears, like a child overwhelmed by developments.He was absolutely terrified. David Setiniaz was acting as an agent for Taras who was away when he received the call. In Taras's own words, he was "going to the countryside to conduct a surprise search."The call must have come from a military institution, since public telephones had not yet been fully restored in Austria at the time.The other party said a series of hurried and unclear words on the phone, which were probably in English.

Settiniaz judged by the accent and said, "Sir, you can speak French." He told the other party who he was and how much he could act on behalf of Talas, which included almost all aspects.After speaking, he listened attentively.What the French occupying officer told him over the telephone from Salzburg more and more overwhelmed him.In fact, he almost didn't even think about it, and just relying on a momentary impulse, he told the first big lie in his life.This move will have a big impact on his future life. "Don't believe that bullshit," Setiniaz said. "That young man is older than he looks and a lot more sophisticated than he looks. You can trust him. He works for OSS Yes, one of their best intelligence agents. Whatever he tells you, please do." It wasn't until he hung up that he asked himself a series of serious questions: What drove him to do such a foolish thing?What should he say to Taras to justify himself telling this monstrous lie?What would have happened to young Klimro in such an unusual and dangerous situation? In fact, the fourth person Leiber saw was Ka Hai Lothar.He was a fat man with a red face, very tall, but with small hands almost like a woman - which is not unusual.Despite the cold air coming from the stone roof, he was still dripping with sweat.He was terrified. From autumn 1940 to May 1945 two Austrian photographers worked at Hartheim Castle.One of them is still alive today in Linz.Wiesenthal later found out that his name was Bruno Bruckner. Another photographer is Karl Heinz Lothar.For him it all started in mid-October 1940.He was forty-seven at the time.The State Nazi Party Office in Linz called him in and asked him if he could do "certain special photographic assignments" in absolute secrecy.They offered him three hundred and forty marks a month.Lothar agreed, and they drove him to Castle Hartheim.At that time, the place was already called "Sanatorium". At that time, the director of the agency was Captain Christian Wirth; later, as a reward for his outstanding work in Hartheim, he was appointed to the Belzec, Subipol and Tetra in Poland. Superintendent of three concentration camps in Ryblinka.Franz Stengl succeeded him at Hartheim and later at Treblinka.The medical affairs of the sanatorium were run by Dr. Rudolf Rehauer of Linz, assisted by Dr. Georg Lenno (Rehauer committed suicide in April 1945, Lenno was arrested in 1963 arrested). Wirth explained to Lothar what kind of job they expected the photographer to do: the doctors in Hartheim were conducting experiments on some patients, and Lothar had to take pictures of these patients as clearly as possible , thirty to forty times a day.These trials include determining the most effective method of killing and perfecting the truly efficient techniques used in this field, as well as creating scientifically accurate charts of how much a person's physical body can take before death Order of magnitude of pain. Lothar's task: to use cameras and movie cameras to capture images of the brains of test subjects as they were carefully removed from the skulls, focusing on the visible changes that take place in the moments before death. This was the first mission of the "sanatorium" in Hartheim, but not its most important mission.In January 1941, Himmler put forward the idea of ​​establishing a number of killing camps at the Wangsee Conference (Note: On January 20, 1942, representatives of various ministries of the Nazi German government and various agencies of the SS Security Service, in A meeting was held in Wangsee, a suburb of Berlin, to discuss the "final solution" of the European Jewry problem. The original text was wrong in 1941.), in fact, it had been planned before that.Hartheim Castle is actually a training center for a school, and the "students" who are scheduled to be trained will be assigned to those killing camps after graduation.What's more, Hartheim isn't the only such institution.There are three more. Lothar often had to go through the peephole to take live photographs of the gas experiments, and he did not care about his work; at first he was not used to the disgusting smell of burning corpses.All told, he took pictures of at least two-thirds of the 30,000 people killed in Hartheim. Perhaps the only thing that really disturbed Lothar was the fact that the vast majority of these thirty thousand people were Christians.Among them were Germans, Austrians and Czechs.They were sent to Hartheim because they were physically, psychologically disabled or terminally ill, according to an order formulated by Hitler and written by Martin Baumann (Note: Martin Baumann (1900- 1945) - Hitler's secretary, Bormann served as deputy leader of the Nazis after Hess fled to England.) Supervised the implementation of the plan, these people were part of the part that should be eliminated; or simply because they were old, they began to be included in the useless population one type.None of them were Jewish.To die at Hartheim, Grafeneg, Hadamar, or Zonenstein was a privilege reserved only for the Aryans. "But, of course," said Epock to Klimrod, "your father did die in Hartheim. Is that what you want to know so strongly?" "I don't believe you," said Reber, in a tone of indecision and indecision, "he's still alive." Epak smiled lightly.Perhaps, his real name was not Epic.His hair was very light and his eyebrows were almost white, blending perfectly with his pale skin; he spoke German with a peculiar Baltic accent.He shook his head with a regretful expression, like a professor who doesn't get the answer he expects from a good student. "He's still alive," Reber repeated, more assuredly than before. "You're lying." Reb looked exactly like a teenager in madness, and his stature seemed to have shrunk.He was half-slumped on the ground, the muzzle of a Luger still pressed against his temple.His eyes scanned everyone quickly, staying on Lothar's face for a little longer.Lothar has never been sweating as much as he is now. Behind him is a small window with two iron bars. The window glass is covered with a lot of dust, but it is not so blurred that the outside cannot be seen. "Let's get this over with," Epock said. "In the letter my father left me..." Reber suddenly stopped, as if realizing that he had slipped his tongue.Epoke's dim gaze quickly returned to Reber. "What letter?" "My father is alive. I know he's alive." "What letter?" Through the half-moon-shaped flute, you can see the parts above the shoes and below the knees of pedestrians on the street, although the sound of walking back and forth cannot be heard.The man in the paratrooper boots had already walked past it once, and now it was discovered that, just from the front and back of those feet, it was clear that the man in the paratrooper boots was facing the window at least if he was not facing the window at the moment. the house where Uncle was with the four men. Reber was downcast. "I left the letter in Vienna." "Where in Vienna?" "I won't tell you." This is the tone of a stubborn child. Epock looked at Reb, undecided.Finally, without turning around, he shook his head and said, "Lothar, can you find a picture of his father?" The fat man wiped the sweat from his brow and face with his little girly hands. "As long as you know the date, you can find it." Epock smiled at Reb. "August 1941. Around the twentieth." He smiled again. "After seeing the picture, you can tell me about the letter." There were six iron boxes on the ground, and Lothar knelt in front of one of them and opened it.In the box are neatly placed photos and negatives.Lothar's fingers fumbled across the line of labels.Reb kept drooping his head.Silence continued in the room. "August 21, 1941," said Lothar. There was a sound of paper being flipped. "Klimrod?" A rough hand cupped Reb's chin, forcing him to pick up his head.However, he refused to open his eyes when he said anything, and his face was tense. This time he was not fake. "Open your eyes, boy. Isn't that why you went to Reichenau and came from Vienna to Salzburg?" Reber held out a hand to take the photo.There are three photographs, of the entire body taken through a peephole. Reber saw his father, naked body, shriveled legs, crawling on the ground, desperately scratching the concrete floor with his nails.The pictures must have been taken in fifteen to twenty second gaps.They document a person being suffocated to death.From the last one, although it is a black and white photo, you can still clearly see the blood gushing from the mouth, as well as the bitten off tongue of the victim himself. The hand that held Reber's chin loosened.Reb fell to his knees, his chin hanging on his chest.He turned around slowly and pressed his forehead against the cold stone wall. "Burn the shit," said Epock. After two other fake ambulancemen smashed the padlocks on the iron boxes, they began to pour gasoline into the boxes. "My dear Lothar," Epoke said in a nasty voice, "don't you want to start collecting information yourself?" Before Epoke finished speaking, a shot was fired almost immediately, which just hit Lothar's mouth.The impact of the point-blank nine-millimeter pistol throws the photographer backwards.He fell onto a box that was already on fire. "Let him be cremated with the picture," Epock said. "Now it's your turn, boy. Why don't you tell me all about that letter?" He raised the barrel of Luger's gun and held it to Reber's forehead.This action may have cost him his life.The Allied military police saw Epke raising his gun through the small glass window, and misunderstood what he meant.They opened fire with machine guns.At least two rounds of bullets pierced Epak's body, and at this moment, yellow and blue tongues of gasoline burning quickly lit up the room.Epoke fell on top of Leiber, and the military police were obviously very accurate with their marksmanship. Leiber was not shot, but his right shoulder was scratched a little. As for the other two people, one wanted to escape, but was knocked down at the door by a bullet, which also triggered a series of crisp bells.Another threw a can of gasoline he was holding toward the window, where it caught fire, and he fired back.He used the smoke rising from the burning iron box as a cover, and he kept the gendarme out for several minutes alone.However, all to no avail.When the smoke cleared and people discovered that he had turned into a living torch, it was someone else who showed mercy and dealt with him. Reber was dragged outside the house.At first the gendarmes were rough with him, but after the intervention of a French officer, they were slightly more kind to him.Reb was covered in blood, but it wasn't his own blood.The French officer questioned him through the Austrian interpreter, and got only vague and incomprehensible answers, and Reber's large, dreamy gray eyes kept gazing at them. Just now, when he went to the Salzburg gendarmerie for help (which led to the call from Setienaz), he falsely claimed that he was acting on the orders of Captain Taras in Linz and that he had discovered The whereabouts of some war criminals.It was not pure luck that he reported the matter to a French officer, who at the time, of the three Western powers, was far more enthusiastic about hunting down senior members of the Third Reich than Britain or the United States. Five hours after the firing, Captain Taras arrived at Salzburg.He was determined to lie for Setiniaz, so he did not hesitate to have a verbal battle with Captain O'Mara, the head of the US Strategic Intelligence Agency in Linz.Taras, as usual, took control of the situation with his fine irony.In addition, he was helped by the development of events, the investigation of Karl Heinz's house revealed that the photographer, who had no women in the house, was taken away early in the morning by three strangers who were also at the same time. Ransacked his house—no doubt looking for the contents of those boxes that had been charred. "What are you complaining about?" Taras asked the military authorities in Salzburg. "The situation is clear. Our dear Nazi gentlemen are eager to get hold of this Lothar accumulated evidentiary material, and would like to destroy them. They have done this, I should say, very well, and they have Lothar's evidence. Is there a simpler explanation than that? My goodness, even the cops should understand that. As for my young intelligence agent, he did go beyond the investigative mission I gave him. However, you should know what happened to him: his mother, sister, and sister all died in a concentration camp in Poland, and he himself was a near-death survivor. His vengeance is understandable. You can all see-- He was greatly stimulated just now. Please leave him alone for a while..." Taras took Reber Klimrod back to Linz and put him in the hospital.Seriously, Taras also tried to ask him some questions.However, the boy was still exhausted, and he simply didn't even say a word.His physical condition was very worrying, reaching the limit of what he could barely support; what was worse, the fire in his eyes—the unruly flame that had once surprised Taras and Setiniaz secretly— — gone.He seems to have developed the concentration camp syndrome that most survivors suffer from.After they are liberated, after a few hours or days, they will suddenly feel that the life they have spent so much effort to save is meaningless, so they become uninterested in everything and their spirits are depressed. After Leiber's return from Salzburg, David Setienaz remembered visiting him two or three times at his bedside.Setiniaz himself was also surprised how he cared so much about this young man.Reber still wouldn't talk.Wouldn't talk about his family, his father, the people who nearly killed him.It's as if he doesn't know anything.Nor did he mention Erich Steyr and the revenge schemes brewing in his own mind.