predator; prey to his pitiless passion. The noise of his animal instincts echoed through the house, with sneering, guttural invectives in German directed at its victim; thrusting mercilessly into a body made compliant by shock and fear. Pain and revulsion throbbed through her as her assailant writhed and grunted, inserted in her, inside her, in violation of the most primitive intimacy of her being. Her jerky, pitiful yelps and pleas were stifled against the hand of another SS man, clasped tight in her savage defilement until the cruel display was halted upon Amon Goeth’s entry into the room.
The Austrian lieutenant strode in with fire burning in the dark globes of his eyes. Unhesitant, he struck the enlisted man hard across his angular jaw, flooring him, and the thump shuddered through the silence that had descended on the house as suddenly as the noise of violence had defiled it. The other men partially dropped the woman, who was now shaking in a state of fugue, whimpering pitifully with a wordless noise.
“Unterscharführer Beckenbauer, what the fuck do you think you are doing?” Goeth began, with dangerous calm.
“It’s Scharfü…” the trooper began, tenderly checking his injured jaw as he rose unsteadily to his feet.
Beckenbaur stopped himself, and stood up straight, withdrawing his still-exposed erection and wiping away the woman’s fluid as he did so with sullen contempt, as though her body’s unwanted evidence of his crime had been something insulting, disgusting and deliberate. Goeth cut in.
“I don’t care what it is. Is this Poland? Are we in Warsaw, or Leeds, England?”
“Leeds, sir.”
“Why would you have the men waiting outside, as I’m sure the other arrests have been made, while you commit a crime against Reich policy?” Goeth snarled at him, abandoning the superficial calm of his silky tone and unruffled air.
“Sir?” Beckenbauer asked, confused.
Kriminalassistent in a provincial Gestapo, Beckenbauer had been drafted in to the fold with the Einsatzgruppen Britain on the strong recommendations of his chief. Chosen by Heydrich and his Reich Security Office as an enlisted EGB stormtrooper, he had been assigned to the gruppe of Dr Rudolf Lange. In his platoon’s Austrian Einsatzkommando leader Goeth, however, Beckenbauer suddenly saw an imminent return to the province was at hand if he was lucky; perhaps there was even a court martial on the cards. With a predator’s instinct, he sensed danger.
Goeth’s evil stare continued to bore through the rapist.
“You stupid swine .”
“Sir?”
“This is house no. 7, is it not , Kriminalassistent whatever-your-fucking-SS-rank-is in your shithole province, you Gestapo clown?”
“Yes, sir,” Beckenbauer replied, resentfully.
Such a derogatory comment could have been used against an enlisted man and reported, but for Goeth to have been drafted as a chief lieutenant of SD Major Lange meant he was likely protected. The SD, after all, was under the wing of the same man as the Gestapo; complaints from one agency of the other at such a junior level would only serve to aggravate Heydrich the Hangman.
“Well…” Goeth said, jutting his brutal face into the smooth features of the younger man. “The woman of no.7 is a Mischling . You just fucked a Hebrew, a full-on half-breed , and in SS uniform . Bearing the badge of Heydrich’s own security service …” and he tapped the small ‘SD’ diamond on the sleeve, with gleeful malice underlying his rage.
Goeth’s eyes were terrible; the junior officer could only stand rooted to the spot, mortified, hardly believing his ears. The final words had been hissed with ferocity.
“What would the General say, I wonder,” Goeth mused sneeringly, his eyes bulging, “or indeed, Reichsführer Himmler? You fucked a Jew in uniform. I could have you shot .”
Beckenbauer was horrified. Neither he, nor the others present spoke, and the awkward tension grew, hanging palpably between them in the