Konrad Feldpetzer
August 8th, 1943
Parisian Underground, France
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I didn’t know where I was when I awoke, nor what time it was.
I was strapped into a chair in a room. At first, my vision was blurry; I couldn’t tell the details. Over a few seconds my vision managed to fix itself. I was in a brick room, with a sole lamp overhead illuminating the area. An old wooden table sat in front of me, with another chair across.
To my left, a door presumably led to the exit.
I felt myself start to panic, and I struggled against the bondage. It turned out to be double-twined rope; impossible to break through with sheer strength.
After a few minutes of trying, I gave up, letting my head hang. And that’s when I realized I had a throbbing headache. I did my best to ignore it and come up with a plan to escape.
My mind ceased to function properly when I heard footsteps in the hall. I started panicking again. I heard hushed voices speaking in French. I could roughly understand them. One was a male voice while another was female.
“I thought you captured Klugmann, not some random soldier!” the female voice scolded.
“How was I supposed to know? The kid looked just like the guy!” It was the voice from the alley
The footsteps got closer and closer, until they were right outside the door. And that’s when it stopped.
“I’m going to go work with Matreux, you two deal with the kid,” the man’s voice said, footsteps echoing away.
“Alright, I’m going to wake the poor sap up and then you’ll question him,” another male voice stated.
“Poor sap? He’s a Nazi!” the female voice grew in intensity.
“He’s not even out of his teens! Chances are he’s been forced to serve!” the male voice bit back.
With that, silence and then the jiggling of keys. With little fanfare, the door opened. It was a man accompanied by a shorter woman holding a folder.
Neither was too imposing; I had a solid foot over the man, and even more on the woman. Both seemed to be intellectual types, and chances are that I could have taken both down with the basic CQC training I had received.
I felt myself calm down slightly, knowing that I wasn’t in any immediate harm judging by the man’s words.
“Ah, he’s awake,” he stated in French.
I made the half-second decision to pretend I don’t know French. After all, how loose lipped would they be if they believed I didn’t understand what they were saying?
I simply blinked at them in confusion, as if I didn’t understand a word.
“As if I couldn’t tell,” the woman sneered.
The two walked in, closing the door behind them.
“Now, Konrad,” the man started in perfect German, sitting at the seat across from me, “How old are you?”
“Seventeen,” I kept as neutral a face I could.
The man shared a look with the woman, most likely a ‘told you so’ one.
He turned to me again, “Did you join the military voluntarily?”
“No,” my voice was surprisingly cold.
“I told you, Myriam,” the man reverted to French, “He’s not even eighteen. Poor kid got drafted into service.”
“Fine; just keep questioning him,” the woman I now knew as Myriam conceded.
“What is your rank within the Wehrmacht?”
“You took my dog tags,” I deadpanned, taking a guess since they knew my name, “So you should already know.”
“Alright, this obviously isn’t going to work…” the man sighed, starting over again, “My name is Erhardt.”
“The hell are you doing? You’re just giving your information to a German!” the woman scolded in French. Erhardt ignored her.
“I’m from Germany too. Born before the Great War, and lived there almost my entire life,” Erhardt continued.
“Yet you turned your back on your country,” I narrowed my eyes.
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He stared at the table for a moment somberly, before responding, “Perhaps I did. But not in the way you think. What do you know of the Nazi party?”
The question threw me for a loop. What did I know about the Nazi party? That they fixed the economy for one.
“They fixed the economy?” I offered weakly, not meaning to sound as unsure as I did.
“And?” Erhardt pressured.
I simply gave him a confused look, “Started a racial hierarchy?”
“Well, they didn’t start it, but they use it extensively,” Erhardt corrected, continuing, “And?”
I racked my mind, “Anti-semitism?”
“You’re getting closer.”
“Death camps?”
“Yes!” Erhardt cried.
I was caught completely off-guard by the change in volume and would’ve jumped had I not been tied down.
He seemed to take a moment to collect himself, “Do you know what happens in these death camps?”
“Well, Jews die…” I racked my brain for any other kinds of knowledge, “And handicapped people. To an extent.”
I wince at the words.
“Yes; do you know how they’re killed?” Erhardt asks, intertwining his fingers on the table.
I blinked. I tried to recall any sort of information I had on the death camps. I had never served at one, and while there were rumors, no one was sure which ones were true or false.
After a few seconds of I silence, I shook my head, “No.”
Erhardt’s face turned grim, turning to Myriam, speaking in French, “Photos?”
Myriam opened the folder and took out multiple photos, handing them to Erhardt who showed the first one to me.
It nearly made me throw up.
A man wearing what appeared to be a hazard suit with a swastika on his left shoulder was injecting something into a Jewish man strapped to a chair, who seemed to be screaming in pain.
Flip. Another one.
Two children being beaten by German soldiers, crying and shouting.
Flip. Third photo.
A German doctor sawing the arm of a Jewish woman off.
Flip.
A man laying on the ground, presumably dead, as his children tried to pick him back up.
The fast sequence of the photos delayed my reaction time but quadrupled the impact. My throat clogged up; I couldn’t breathe. My stomach felt like it was trying to both turn inside out and eject everything it had. My eyes desperately wanted to start leaking tears.
“I know,” Erhardt’s voice came. Low, but trying to be comforting.
“These people that are forcing women and children to suffer so much are Nazis,” Erhardt’s voice was steady, becoming full of vitriol at the word Nazi.
He stood up from his desk, slowly, and walked over to me, “But I can see you don’t want that. You’re just a kid who’s been lied to and forced into something you wanted no part in.”
That cracked me. Tears started brimming at the edge of my eyes, and then falling down my cheeks. I hadn’t cried in years. Not since mother died when was twelve.
Were these the atrocities that I had been supporting? That I had been willing to lay down my life for?
“Now that you know what the Nazis have done, do you really want to serve a government who tortures innocent people to death for something they can’t control? And in such horrible ways?” Erhardt spoke in a manner that was both firm yet comforting. It made me feel slightly better, but still.
Not trusting my own voice, I just shook my head, hanging it in shame.
I had been aware of the death camps for years. But the thought had always been distant. I never gave it much thought at first. As I had grown, I hated the death camps but had simply accepted them as a part of life in Germany. Now, with the horrible events that occurred in there being shown to me, I felt… I didn’t know what I felt. Just that I felt hollow and shattered.
I wanted to go back home, to mother’s soothing voice whenever I felt upset. To my father’s guidance whenever I was lost. To my sister’s bubbliness whenever I felt down. But now, that was all gone. Father was in the military, mother had died, and my sister was in a boarding school.
So those days were nothing but a distant memory, scattered dust in the wind.
I heard the two talk in French.
“I told you. He’s just a boy who had no idea what he was doing or who he was serving,” Erhardt defended me.
Myriam sighed, “I guess you were right.”
Erhardt kneeled in front me, reverting to German, “How do you feel right now?”
“Like shit,” I weakly attempted a joke.
“I’d imagine,” he agreed, sighing afterward.
“I’m going to take the binds off, okay? We’ll get you some food and rest,” Erhardt started to slowly take the ropes off.
At this point, I didn’t care much. Even once he untied all of the bindings, the atrocities that I had helped commit weighed on me.
“Do you have anywhere to rest?” I ask, “I’m not hungry.”
Erhardt looked a bit hesitant, while Myriam looked outright worried, but after a second or two, Erhardt nodded, “Follow me.”
With an inordinate amount of strength, I pushed myself out of the chair, my head still hanging. I followed Erhardt as he opened the door, saying something in French. I was too busy hating myself to listen.
How had I helped perpetrate these crimes against mankind for so long? I shook my head slightly. I had been brainwashed. Lied to and indoctrinated. It hadn’t been my fault nearly as much I had first thought. I had simply fallen victim to the barrage of pro-Nazi propaganda that I had been fed for as long as I could remember.
The posters, depicting Hitler as a glorious leader rebuilding the Vaterland and taking it to new heights. The broadcasts, with the Führer’s speeches sounding passionate and hopeful for Germany’s future. It sickened me to my core; the wool had been pulled out from under my eyes. The pedestal I had put the Führer on was gone, replaced only with shock and disgust
As we walked into a hallway, two men walked beside me, brandishing British STEN guns. I glanced back at them, uneasy. While I may be opposed to my old party now, that didn’t mean I felt safe in the hands of their enemies.
“I hope you can understand,” Erhardt explained, noticing my uneasiness, “We’ve had a few Nazis act shattered before, only to either kill or escape later.”
I simply mumbled an acknowledgement, abruptly feeling exhausted. My eyelids felt like they weighed as much as a Panzer, and all I could think of now was putting one foot in front of the other. It was momentary bliss, not having to worry about all new thoughts. Just me focusing on walking and getting sleep.
Clack, clack, clack. The steady pace of my jackboots helped me focus. They were also surprisingly loud, or was I just hyperaware of the noise?
We kept on walking into a large room, with several people in it. They all became silent as we walked by, me too tired to care much. After another minute, we arrived at a small hallway with two rusted doors on either side. A large glass panel was in the middle, allowing a clear view inside.
Inside, there was a small cot alongside a desk with a lamp. The walls were plain cement, and the floor stained wood. On any other day, it would’ve seemed downright distasteful, but to my weary eyes, it was heaven.
“We’ll have a few guards posted outside,” Erhardt told me, turning to me, “Standard protocol.”
I just nodded, my words slurred slightly, “Can I sleep now?”
The man simply nodded, opening the door for me. I stepped in closing it behind me. I was so tired I simply collapsed into the cot, not even bothering to take off my jackboots or stahlhelm.