A skull and a looking glass

On a grey Tuesday, Martin received the classified letter about Hirt's Schädelsammlung (skull collection).

He sat cross-legged on the couch and had to read the letter three times until he could be sure he'd understood it correctly.

Dear comrade Weiher

I greatly valued your help with the experiments with mustard gas.

Sievers, Schneider, and I have decided you are the man for the job. Since you have become my right-hand man, along with Wimmer* and Kiesselbach*, it's important to me that you remain involved with this next project.

We have decided to create a collection for the anatomy museum. There are extensive skull (skeleton) collections of almost every race and people. However, only a few skulls of the Jews are available for science, meaning that their study wouldn't allow any sure findings. The war in the East gives us a chance to remedy this shortcoming. In the Jewish-Bolschweistic commissars, who embody a revolting but characteristic subhumanity, lies the opportunity for us to create a scientific document by securing their skulls. RF-SS Himmler has granted us this opportunity.

We will select 150 inmates from Auschwitz, who will be brought to the Natzweiler Struthof and be gassed. Their bodies will be transported to our university, where they will be preserved until the process of defleshing can be started.

Wolfram Schneider and I have decided that you should be present in Auschwitz during the phase of selecting the inmates and during the measurements. We have not decided whether you should be present at the Natzweiler Struthof during the gassing, which Lagerkommandant Joseph Kramer will execute.

We will discuss the details personally early next week. Enjoy your weekend with your family.

With friendly greetings and Heil Hitler!

Professor August Hirt

Martin folded the letter and placed it back into the envelope. It was about the same collection Schneider had talked about on that night they'd both gotten drunk in the Wirtshaus.

And he was about to be directly involved with it.

Martin let out a shaky breath and opened up a bottle of whiskey. He was going to drive home later that night. For three days - longer than usual. He was going to see Marlene and the children again.

Over the last several months, he'd grown very close to them. He still kept his distance from Marlene in every way sexual, blaming it on the stress from work.

Marlene could always tell that he'd been drinking. But tonight, he didn't care. There was no way out. He might have attempted to escape somewhere with his family if he had been Franz Weiher and not Martin. But he wasn't a forty-year-old veteran. He was a seventeen-year-old boy who didn't even have a high school diploma yet. Every attempt to escape would fail. Where would they even go? There was no way they could go to the East - Germans were despised and pursued there - for obvious reasons. Switzerland wouldn't let them in either; they had no Swiss family.

Spain? The unoccupied parts of the West? They would probably laugh at the SS-Hauptsturmführer and his family, telling him to go back and serve alongside the rest of the Nazi scum.

There was no way out.

Except for suicide, of course.

But it wasn't Martin's life, was it? It was Franz's. And the seventeen-year-old had no business ending a life that wasn't his. 

He emptied the glass and poured another. Did Hirt sometimes ask himself the same question? When the Professor had just been a young man studying medicine, had he ever dreamed of being able to do whatever he wanted to whoever he wanted? And what about now? Was August Hirt a racist and anti-Semite, or was he just a man - an opportunist who, after years of cultivation, became a Nazi? Was he just as convinced as Martin that whatever he did wasn't a product of choice but of consequence?

Martin had heard a rumor that Hirt had used to work with a Jewish Professor back in Heidelberg. They'd been successful partners. How could Hirt do the things he was preparing to do when he owed most of his scientific prestige to a Jew?

Martin stared into the bottom of his whiskey glass. Through the glass, the table looked grotesque and deformed. He took the glass down from his eye. The table looked normal again. He sighed and ran his hand through his hair. He looked up into the mirror he'd hung on his wall a few weeks ago.

For the first time, Franz Weiher didn't look like the strong, impressive man that Martin had thought him to be. He looked tired and forlorn. Almost ugly in the twilight.

Martin leaned toward the mirror, so close that his nose almost touched the smooth surface. He ran his hand through his hair again. It was turning grey - not just single strands but large areas.

He leaned back and tapped his fingers on the wooden surface of his dining room table. After a second of intense thought, he raised the whiskey glass to his eye again and peered through at his reflection.

A distorted version of Franz's face stared back at him.

For the first time in almost a year, Martin felt like he was looking at himself again.