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“Ah, silly old thing I am,” Jürgen said dismissively, as he reached a hand to touch his face. “I fell down the stairs working late one night.”
The girls accepted the lie easily. They each hugged Jürgen, then ran ahead to take their bags into the villa. Georg remained standing by my car, staring at us.
“I know you were in trouble,” he said. “I could tell from the way Mrs. zu Schiller was acting while Mama was away. And then you both come home looking likethis.”Even after some weeks, Jürgen and I were both rail thin. I was still struggling to eat normally. Even my stomach was traumatized by the experience. “Papa, I’m not a fool. It’s obvious you were beaten. You were both arrested, weren’t you?”
“I am a clumsy fool and your mother was away attending to family business,” Jürgen said dismissively.
“But—”
Jürgen raised his chin and adopted a tone that left no room for argument. “You’ve been raised to respect your elders,” he barked. “Collect your things and go into the house, and I don’t want to hear this nonsense in front of your sisters.”
I hated to hear Jürgen take that tone, but I understood why he did. The last thing we needed was the girls becoming suspicious too.
Georg’s nostrils flared, but he scooped up his overnight bag from the ground and stomped toward the villa.
“He can accuse us all he wants, but until the war ends and we can explain, we can never confirm his suspicions,” Jürgen said heavily. “His whole identity is wrapped up in the Nazi cause. I fear he’d lash out if he knew.”
I looped my arms around his neck and stared up at him.
“I love you,” I whispered.
The tension in his face eased a little as he stared down at me and whispered back, “I love you too.”
Under the blankets that night, with the children all asleep in their beds down the hall, Jürgen’s voice shook as he told me how it had all gone wrong.
“Otto was waiting for me on-site when I arrived that morning. It all happened so quickly, before I even had a chance to help anyone. He told me that someone saw us stop at Kassel and asked me why we’d checked in under a false name. I told Otto that I wanted out. They arrested me immediately.”
“They must have been following us the whole time,” I said. Jürgen nodded.
“I thought they’d just execute me, but there was a beating...” His tone was curt—an unmistakable message that he wasn’t yet ready to discuss the assault. My heart broke for him.
“Oh, Jürgen...”
“I thought it would continue until they killed me. But over the days, I realized they were toying with me—beating me unconscious, patching me up again...just trying to get me to break and beg for mercy. But I refused to speak, mostly because I knew you were being held too, and I didn’t want to incriminate you. It nearly killed me knowing you were in a cell somewhere, Sofie, but we’d prepared for that.”
“We had.”
“After... Hell, I don’t know how many days, something changed. They sent a doctor in to patch me up again, then took me to the interrogation room and told me a car was on its way to the zu Schiller house to collect the children.”
My breath caught in my throat.
“Thechildren?”
“God forgive me, as soon as they started talking about the ways they’d torture our children to death, I lost my nerve. I should have expected it,” he whispered miserably. “They think nothing of imprisoning and murdering Jewish children. Of course they wouldn’t hesitate to interrogate the children of a traitor.”
It was one thing to take a stand when Jürgen and I were going to pay the price for it. It was another thing to threaten the children’s lives.
Jürgen was freed after he expressed his remorse and begged for another chance, just as the Gestapo hoped. He was again invited to accept an SS rank, and this time he relented.
“You said the rocket program will be forced to wind down soon. Why go to such lengths to force you to join the SS?” I whispered, frustrated and bewildered.
“I think this may be Karl’s fault,” Jürgen whispered back. “A few weeks before Castle Varlar, Otto suggested we might need to make preliminary plans so we can quickly ensure the destruction of the Mittelwerk site. He suggested we plan to cover our tracks as protection against accusations of war crimes once the Allies take the district.”
“Even Otto knows that what has gone on is not right.”
“He does. Karl agreed we should be ready, because if we can hide the truth about Mittelwerk, he and I may have a chance at refuge with one of the Allies because of our experience with rocketry.”
“Karl isn’t a scientist.”
“No, but he’s a manager with a unique insight into what it takes to mass-produce rockets. Or so he tells me.”
“That’s absurd.”
“It’s a fantasy,” Jürgen said dismissively. “Even if we could destroy the Mittelwerk site, there would still be witnesses. The truth will prevail. But the thing is—Karl didn’t mention Otto ‘escaping’ with us.”
“Because even if you could somehow suppress the truth about Mittelwerk, none of the Allies would ever pardon an SS officer,” I surmised heavily.
“Exactly. Otto is a man who delights in cruelty, my love. It wouldn’t surprise me if he put us through all of this just to make doubly sure Karl and I were trapped along with him.”
We had made one crucial mistake in our attempt to take a stand. We forgot that, in the Reich, control was absolute. There were no measures too extreme when it came to ensuring perfect compliance.
