Free Pursuit by Robert L. Fish

nodded calmly.
    â€œDo you expect me to deny it? I liked being at the front and seeing a man die under my bullet. All men like killing. If they didn’t, there would be no wars. Why do men hunt? Because they enjoy killing; in fact they call it a sport, a blood sport. Really, you know, it’s the opposite side of the coin of survival. How can one enjoy sweet if he has never tasted sour? Or enjoy pleasure if he has never known pain? And how can a man enjoy the feeling of being alive if he has never seen others die and imagined what it must be like? How can a man feel the power of life if he has never enjoyed the power of death?”
    Dr. Schlossberg was staring at him in disbelief. Von Schraeder shook his head a bit impatiently.
    â€œMy dear Franz, do not look at me as if I were insane. I’m only being honest. If it comes to war-crimes trials, do you think the men who hang us will not enjoy it? Oh, they’ll make very pious speeches about our monstrous crimes, but the truth is they would enjoy hanging their own judges just as much. It makes a man realize how very much alive he is, to walk out of a room where someone has just been hanged by the neck. He is walking out and the other is gone, dead, never to walk anywhere again. Just to be buried. Hidden.”
    He stared from the window and went on.
    â€œBut the gassing of people in the camp was not like this,” he said, almost to himself. “That was simply an engineering problem. There was none of the pleasure of battle in it. There was no satisfaction, other than in having done a necessary job as well as it could be done. Do you understand?” He turned from the window, looking across the car at his companion. He sighed. “No—I suppose not.”
    The doctor might not have been listening to him, for Schlossberg said quietly, “Why are you threatening me?”
    Von Schraeder looked honestly surprised.
    â€œI’m not threatening you,” he said patiently. “I’m trying to tell you how to survive. When and if the time comes.”
    â€œWhich you hope will not.”
    â€œWhich I hope will not—but greatly fear will. Then I will tell you where to go and whom to see to get you out of the country and save your neck.”
    â€œI see.” Schlossberg nodded. “After which you will die. Of typhus.”
    Von Schraeder smiled, a humorless smile, and leaned back. “Now you understand.”

Chapter 4
    Buchenwald concentration camp lay a few miles north of the town of Weimar, laid out in uneven clearings spread across the desolate wooded slopes of the Ettersberg. The neat officers’ homes with their gardens were built along Eicke Street on the more protected southern flank of the mountain, while the prisoners’ barracks were in a wire-enclosed area on the more open upper slope. Beyond the narrow two-story gatehouse with its motto “Right or Wrong—My Country” lay the roll-call area, a barren yard that was a dust bowl in the dry days and a sea of mud in the rain. Then came the barracks, row upon row, fanning out from the roll-call yard, wooden buildings without windows, stretching up the slope almost to the summit. Unlike Maidanek or Auschwitz or the majority of the German concentration camps in Poland, Buchenwald was not an extermination camp but had been built in the early days of the Nazi regime as a detention camp for dissenters, and had later been expanded to furnish labor to the Gustloff Armament Works and the German Armament Works, both built on the outskirts of the camp. In addition, the camp furnished labor for any other endeavor in the area that was recommended to the SS, from the railroad to Weimar that was never used because of its poor construction to the huge riding hall that had been constructed to satisfy the whim of the wife of the ex-commandant, Frau Iisa Koch, and which had been used only half an hour a day for her horseback exercises.
    To Colonel Helmut von Schraeder,