The Butchers of Berlin Read Online Free Page A

to get on with it. The camera flashes looked like gunshots from outside the
wagon.
    Stoffel said to Schlegel, ‘Here, take one of these.’
    ‘What is it?’
    ‘Grown-up pill. Make you feel better.’ Stoffel put one in his mouth. He shook another out of the cylinder for Schlegel, who couldn’t feel any worse.
    ‘You’re going to have to write up this one too,’ said Stoffel. ‘I’m short-staffed. It either came in on the train, which means it could have come from anywhere, and
we bury it, or it was done by one of the locals.’
    Stoffel asked the assembled men who had found the body. One of the railway officials said he had checked the wagon because the door was open. Old vagrants from the last war made a habit of
sleeping there.
    Stoffel whistled in the direction of the loitering civilians and demanded to know who was in charge. A tall fellow wearing a bowler hat and brown overalls wandered over in no hurry and announced
he was Baumgarten, the slaughterhouse foreman.
    Stoffel asked, ‘Any of your boys been misbehaving?’
    Baumgarten, an elderly, unshaven giant with a missing top front tooth and enormous hands, was slow to answer.
    ‘It would be Jews,’ he eventually said.
    ‘What Jews?’
    ‘Jewish butchers.’
    ‘Excuse me,’ said Stoffel. ‘Since when did butchering count as war effort?’
    Baumgarten agreed he was as surprised as anyone when they turned up. Most of his men had been drafted into army catering.
    ‘Even our trainees were shipped off and the Dutch and Danish labour we were promised never showed, so we got Jews.’
    Stoffel asked whether the Jewish butchers operated according to kosher practice. Baumgarten explained they didn’t do the killing, they only prepared the carcasses afterwards. He laughed
uncertainly.
    ‘How many of these Jews work here?’ Stoffel asked.
    About a dozen, Baumgarten replied, counting on his fingers.
    They even had their own foreman.
    ‘A dozen working here at one time with axes and knives!’ exclaimed Stoffel. ‘Whose bright idea was that?’
    ‘The penpushers. They wouldn’t listen.’
    ‘You had better go and fetch these Jewish butchers.’
    ‘They were taken away this morning.’
    Stoffel gave a hoot of disbelief. ‘In the roundup?’
    Baumgarten said he’d heard it was happening all over. The least they could have done was warn them. Now they were short again. Over two thousand personnel used to work there before the
war. Barely a hundred were left.
    ‘Where were the Jews taken?’ asked Stoffel.
    They hadn’t been told.
    ‘Well, go and find out.’
    The man lumbered off. Stoffel turned to Schlegel.
    ‘Thirteen suspects, including the foreman. Take a look around while that shirker finds out where they are, see if anything comes to mind.’
    Schlegel passed through huge separate compounds, the length of three S-Bahn stops.
    He was given a map by the main reception in the central building on Eldenaer Strasse, where the talk was of that morning’s arrests. The desk was staffed by three roguish old women who
flirted clumsily as a matter of course. One marked for him where she thought the Jewish dormitory was.
    ‘We didn’t really know anything about them until they were taken away this morning.’
    The dormitory was back up the end he had come from.
    Outside, he rotated the map, using the towers of the ice factory as a marker. The dirty boundary wall he remembered from his one trip there with his stepfather, a dozen years before, to see a
vet about a lame racehorse. He had been an impressionable age. The high wall didn’t prevent those passing from hearing the bellowing of animals about to be slaughtered. It was, his stepfather
laconically stated, where the animals went in and the meat came out.
    The Jewish butchers’ dormitory was a temporary wooden barracks like those crammed into every bit of city wasteland to house the growing army of foreign workers. Schlegel
stepped straight into the sleeping area, with double bunks and a tiny