Zero, p.9
ZERO, page 9
People tend to have misconceptions about what investigative journalists are. These are no small-town reporters. These are guys who, in a different time and place, could have been Pinkertons or, nowadays, counter-intelligence operatives. Given that, I was more than a bit surprised when my boss at the time told me that I’d be heading to Russia for about a week. I had been living for my job for about two and a half years, and it seemed like I wasn’t going anywhere. I must have impressed someone, because the opportunity simply came out of the blue, but it probably helped that I speak enough Russian to order a drink.
I was told to go with Pretlow. He had been with The Post for a few years, and he was well established as one of the paper’s top translators. Other than English, he spoke five languages like a native: Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, and Dutch. I figured that there must have been a good reason to have the two of us go together, but it wasn’t obvious to me at the time. These higher-ups have a pretty good grasp on what they want, and they know which tools to use to get it.
Pretlow and I were put on a flight to St. Petersburg. They handed me an address, and my job was to go there immediately after we landed. Once we arrived at the location, I was to tell the elderly man we’d find there that we were reporters. He would give us some documents, and then we would head back to the airport to catch the next flight to Washington. It seemed like a pretty simple assignment, and in fact, it was, but the repercussions of it all…good Lord, saying that it was merely out of my league would trivialize the entire situation.
The flight was a long one with layovers in Newark and Paris. Pretlow and I were anxious to get back on the ground by the second leg of the flight. In spite of the usual noisy children, sick passengers, and sub-par food, it turned out to be a good thing to have some time to talk to Pretlow. Between chatting about past assignments and trading various stories about mutual coworkers, he filled me in on some of the details of our assignment by telling me about Dr. Edwin Fenstermacher, a young Nazi SS officer.
Fenstermacher completed his medical schooling in Germany in 1943, and because his father was a personal friend of Wilhelm Koppe, the SS commander of Poland, some strings were pulled to have the doctor placed as the head medical officer at the Gross-Rosen concentration camp in early 1944. The camp put inmates to work in the nearby stone quarry until they outlived their usefulness.
While Fenstermacher is not nearly as notorious as Dr. Josef Mengele, records show that he committed similar war crimes on a smaller scale through his experimentation on some of the prisoners. What Pol Pot was to Joseph Stalin, if you will. Dr. Fenstermacher remained at Gross-Rosen until its liberation by the Red Army in February of 1945. At that point, he fled the encroaching forces. His whereabouts were unknown until the late 1950s when he was discovered to be living in Argentina. It is unknown how long he lived there, and he disappeared shortly after the one verified account of his residence in that country surfaced. It is strongly rumored that the Israeli Mossad found him and either killed him in Argentina or forcibly extradited him to Israel where he was either executed immediately or held in captivity for a number of years first.
Pretlow also told me, in more detail than I will repeat here, of Fenstermacher’s experiments. While the good doctor was not present at the hearing, formal charges from the Nuremberg Tribunal alleged that, aside from enabling mass murder, Fenstermacher committed crimes including his “studies” on the functionality of the human brain.
Pretlow claimed ignorance on the exact nature of the documents that we would be retrieving in St. Petersburg. The only thing he said was that they related to Dr. Fenstermacher in some way.
***
The beauty of historic St. Petersburg greeted us upon our arrival in the city: monuments to war heroes and leaders, unique architecture, and of course the vast cathedrals. I asked for directions from some locals, and we began our trek. However, we quickly realized that poverty still cripples modern Russia. The poor hid in the shadows of derelict buildings. We could not see their faces since most were completely covered in rags to fend off the insatiable maw of the biting cold. Skeletal dogs pawed at anything that might yield something edible. Signs on shops were so worn that they were barely legible. We kept moving until, well after dusk, we finally reached our destination: a decrepit old building with broken windows and the street urchins to match.
The rotting doorway led to a long, yellowed, and stinking hallway littered with paint chips. The bare and dripping pipes along the ceiling pointed the way to our goal. We knocked on the door, and, after a long wait, a scruffy elderly man opened the door. I explained to him that we were the reporters from The Post.
The small man shook my hand with an unexpectedly firm grip for his size and waved us in and over to his kitchen table. I looked around at the walls as they were the only portions of the cubby hole-sized dwelling not covered in clutter. There were various framed black and white photographs hanging in the room, all of them concerning one of two themes: a wrinkled woman with sunken eyes who did not appear to be present in the quarters, and young men in their twenties wearing military uniforms.
The old man limped to a well-worn chair and slowly took a seat. The man identified himself as Aleksandr Zamenhof. The impediment, he soon explained, was the result of a shrapnel injury he incurred while serving as a lieutenant in Stalin’s Red Army. He led a platoon of rifle infantry and apparently saw a lot of action when fighting the Germans. Zamenhof worked at a factory after the war because his limp precluded him from further military service. Since then, the only significant thing that has happened to him was the passing of his wife about fifteen years ago. Otherwise, his daily routine of working at the steel mill and coming home has been going on since the end of the war over fifty years ago.
Zamenhof slowly rose from his chair and shuffled toward the stove to pour us some tea. After preparing the beverage for us, a look of concern overcame Zamenhof’s face as he hobbled toward a darkened back room.
Pretlow and I sipped the diluted, lukewarm tea while the old man searched for the documents. About half an hour later, after refusing our help on multiple occasions, Zamenhof made his way back to the table. He dropped a book and various loose papers in front of us and scowled. He muttered under his breath, which sounded to me like “the things those people went through…”
Zamenhof explained that his mother was of German descent, so he was familiar with some basic German. He said that from the little bit he could read of the documents, it looked like a personal journal, and we surmised that it had belonged to Edwin Fenstermacher. He explained that it came into his possession when he and his platoon, among others, marched across Poland and found the Gross-Rosen camp deserted by the occupying Nazis. They found many dead prisoners with a handful barely alive. The Nazis had tried to cover their tracks by killing the inmates and incinerating the bodies, but they did not have time to finish either task before the Red Army approached. Zamenhof said that he discovered the officers’ quarters and looked around one of the rooms. There he found a Jew in his late teens by the name of Kapler who had been rummaging around. This Kapler was ushered out to join the other refugees, but not before he took a tattered, thick notebook that was losing pages even during the commotion. Since none of the high-ranking Russian officers were present, no one gave the boy any trouble, especially considering the living conditions that were plain to everyone. Instead, Zamenhof looked through what was left of the officer’s belongings himself. Finding nothing of real value, he merely took the few loose pages from Kapler’s notebook as well as the journal that now lay before us because he thought it all simply “looked interesting.”
Zamenhof told us that he would not give us the original copy of the journal, but he would permit us to hand copy as much of it as we wanted. Pretlow glanced briefly at the loose pages from the other journal and said that it thoroughly described some sort of laboratory report detailing the symptoms of a previously unknown contagion. The terminology was sophisticated and precise, so for the sake of time and his interest in the assignment, Pretlow opted against translating them, at least not right away.
We spent a few days sleeping on the floor of the dirty apartment while Pretlow transcribed all of the information. Throughout the copying process, I couldn’t help but notice Pretlow’s demeanor grow increasingly more tense and distraught.
When Pretlow finally completed the task, we thanked Zamenhof for his hospitality and offered him some money. After he refused, we departed on our hike to the airport where we booked a flight leaving the next day. Before our departure, while struggling to fall asleep during the early hours of the morning in the still-busy airport, I asked Pretlow to explain what he read in the journal. We had a difficult time discussing the topic in mere whispers, but it was certainly important enough to keep quiet.
The following includes excerpts from Dr. Edwin Fenstermacher’s personal journal. I have included only the most relevant journal entries. The journal is reproduced here as a translation from the original German. During our last night in Russia and on the return plane trip, I took my own English notes of what the journal said while Pretlow translated for me. Even though it is not the original manuscript, I am confident in Pretlow’s abilities, and I am unfortunately quite certain it is an accurate representation of the documents that are doubtlessly tucked away in that apartment, once again out of sight from the rest of the world.
***
April 17, 1944
Things are going well for me here at Gross-Rosen. The soldiers treat me with respect, and the other officers treat me as an equal. I suppose it helps that I am one of the only qualified people in the camp to treat their ailments.
Today, I spoke with Oberst Achen, the camp commandant, about my proposal, and he said that he would consider it. I feel I have been here long enough to do my own research beyond my menial tasks of routine check-ups. I told the commandant that I could conduct my studies in the unused section of the inmate quarters. I made clear to him that I am no monster like Dr. Mengele. The Angel of Death, indeed. He tortures inmates for the sheer sake of brutality, but I want to actually learn something to contribute to the field. My research has a purpose.
I heard yet another report about Mengele on the radio this morning. He is being hailed as a “hero of the state.” But I know better. The real nature of his nefarious work is being altered during the propaganda process. I am happy with being anonymous to the German people as long as I can be a catalyst for scientific advancement. There is much honor in that.
It is because Mengele does not have anyone to keep him in check that he lets his sadistic desires get the best of him. Of course, I would not have anyone looking over my shoulder either. But I will learn from Mengele’s mistakes. I can conduct research without being cruel.
April 18, 1944
Oberst Achen gave me permission to proceed! I was hoping for a favorable response, but after only one day? This far exceeds my expectations. Maybe the commandant simply wanted to keep me from bothering him incessantly, but the reasons do not concern me.
Through the final years of my medical studies, I was particularly interested in the functions of the brain. My research will focus on that area. Considering the nature of the human brain, my research will necessarily result in the crippling, and possibly even death, of many of my patients. However, this is justifiable. My research is conducted for science and the good of humanity. The German people will benefit from my studies, and the patients who must die will be granted painless deaths since they will be anesthetized beforehand. [The final sentence is undecipherable from the original text].
April 22, 1944
I have finished my first experiment. I wanted to determine the exact areas of the brain that control vision. While the experiment was largely successful, I did run into a problem that I did not consider earlier this week: if vision is to be measured accurately, then the patients must be conscious. I had to do some serious thinking about how I would handle this issue.
Ultimately, I sedated the patients while I removed small parts of their skulls for access to the occipital lobe. After destroying the necessary areas of the brain in my test subjects, I allowed them to regain consciousness. At this point, I medicated them enough to keep them from feeling any pain from the surgery but not enough to cause them to lose consciousness again.
The patients were docile for the most part. All they had to do was answer my simple questions about what they were able to see when directed to the chart on the wall. The only patients who seemed nervous were my control subjects who were not operated upon, and thus they did not need to receive any kind of medication.
I was faced with a final problem. The control patients who did not have any parts of their brains removed did not come into contact with my test patients since I kept them all in different rooms of the abandoned ward, so the control patients could be returned to the general inmate population without any problems. However, the test subjects had grisly wounds on the backs of their heads as a result of the surgeries. I could not justify using our scarce medical supplies to patch the wounds properly, so it is nearly guaranteed that they would get some kind of infection or other within a short period of time. To prevent the test patients from suffering, and to prevent a mass panic among the unsuspecting inmate population, they were put down. It was a painless procedure in which inmates were anesthetized and received a chloroform injection directly into their hearts. This short burst caused a quick and painless death. [There is a crude picture in the margin depicting a hole in the back of a human head. The brain is more detailed than the rest of the drawing].
My actions in this matter were certainly necessary. Reinstituting my test patients into the general population would result not only in a panic among the inmates, but the inevitable infections would likely lead to widespread illness. It was for the good of everyone in the camp to put them painlessly to sleep. Mengele could learn a lot from the way I handled the situation!
I am pleased with the results of my research so far. It appears that my findings, which I have recorded quite systematically in my methodology notebook, will be useful to many scientists in the medical field. These eight people who died today unknowingly helped their fellow man. Had they not been inmates here, I do not know if they would have volunteered to participate in such an opportunity, but I do know that my results are more than enough to outweigh any possible ethical issues that could arise. The next round of experiments shall begin on Monday.
July 12, 1944
I have learned much over the past months of my research. I have meticulously recorded the details of everything that I have done in my methodology notebook, so it will [the rest of the sentence is smudged]. The best part is that the inmates are still ignorant of the proceedings. I can see the fear in their eyes when I enter their quarters since they know that most subjects I pick to take with me will not be seen again. However, they are still docile. This could be a result of their weakness due to the substandard accommodations and malnutrition, but it is not my concern. After all, it is much more important that I perform my research and continue launching the scientific community forward.
My latest study on attention abilities between the left eye and right eye has led me to a new avenue of research. I must have miscalculated the amount of sedative that one of my test patients needed after his surgery because he made it all too clear to me that he felt severe pain. I was still able to get the needed information from him before I put him to sleep, but it made me begin to wonder about studies involving the pain centers in the brain. Due to the high volume level of the man’s screams and the proximity of the control subjects in the next room, it was necessary for all of them to die this time so that they would not be able to scare the rest of the inmates with stories of what occurs here. The important thing is that I have my data, so anything else is of no consequence.
I know that I set ground rules a few months ago [hole in page] I would not cause pain to any of my patients, but this area of research is certainly an important one. I think it will be necessary to cause pain to some of the patients, and even a great deal of it, for the purposes [hole in page]. The focus of my next round of studies will be on pain. Due to the nature [hole in page], I will have to put all of my patients down like I did earlier. [The rest of the page has extensive damage consistent with roaches having eaten away at it at some point].
November 24, 1944
My latest studies of the inmates’ poor living conditions over the past few weeks have led to an unfortunate discovery. One of the boys from the test group is in the late stages of the noma sickness. Since the disease breeds in the worst squalor, I suppose I should not be surprised that this boy contracted it given that he spent almost a full week on a dirt floor. I regret that I investigated this line of research in the first place.
Even though it is only the one boy who has been affected so far, my knowledge of the disease tells me that there will be many more to follow. Fortunately, since noma only affects children, none of the soldiers are at risk. However, it will still be important to try to control the situation somehow.
I took the infected boy into my examination room. The symptoms were advanced: much of his face had rotted down to the bone. It is a frightening sight to behold, but due to the nerve damage, he was not in any pain. Should this progress as it has in other camps, it will be difficult to contain. Since this boy is going to die anyway, I took the liberty of helping him along with a chloroform injection. His body must be [The page is ripped beyond this point].
November 27, 1944
