Free Swastika by Michael Slade Page A

She-wolf of the SS read their labels.
    On the shelf, beside the fantasy pile, Swastika had also discovered an album of Second World War photographs of the two most notorious Nazi women.
    Both Ilses.
    Irma Ilse Grese. Born 1923. She became a camp guard at the age of nineteen and transferred to Auschwitz in March 1943. There, she rose to the rank of senior SS supervisor and was placed in charge of thirty thousand female prisoners. Her murders, tortures, and sexual excesses were legendary. Irma enjoyed shooting prisoners in cold blood, or beating them to death with a plaited whip, or allowing her half-starved dogs to tear them to pieces. She ordered guards to cut off the breasts of Jewish and gypsy women, and personally selected victims for the gas chambers. She demanded that she be brought their skins, which she stitched into lampshades, book covers, and household items. At Auschwitz, she had a love affair with Dr. Josef Mengele, and later, at Bergen-Belsen, she had one with Kommandant Josef Kramer.
    The first photo in the album showed Irma Grese in her SS uniform, complete with jackboots, pistol, and whip.
    On her arm was the swastika.
    Ilse Koch. “The Bitch of Buchenwald.” Married to Karl Koch, the kommandant of that camp. Ilse was especially fond of riding her horse through Buchenwald, whipping any prisoner who attracted her attention, and selecting those with distinctive tattoos for gassing. Like Grese, Koch had a sexual fetish involving human skin. But in addition to making those tattooed hides into lampshades, book covers, and shrunken heads, she had them tanned into human leather and stitched into gloves and a lady’s handbag. Those, Ilse wore as proudly as any South Seas cannibal did his harvested human trophies.
    The iconic photo of Ilse in that album showed her in her riding attire, with whip and spurs.
    Beneath the shelf of that closet full of inspiration, Swastika’s mother had hung her Freudian role-playing costumes. She had imitations of the bodice-rippers and SS Black Corps uniforms like Ilsa wore on film and copies of the dominatrix wardrobes favored by Grese and Koch.
    What she had done with them, Swastika had no inkling. For try though he might, he couldn’t get backstage of that iron curtain in his tortured mind to whatever sadistic burlesque had gone on in the master bedroom.
    That’s where the peephole was.
    Whatever the trauma his father’s belt had masked, it still shook him to the core. When he broke open the closet that day to release the evils of Pandora’s box, Swastika had inexplicably burst into tears.
    His sobs had gone on for an hour.
    *    *    *
     
    Red, white, and black swastika banners flanked the trio of waxworks that captured the ideal Aryan family. The third figure was that of a young lad in a Hitlerjugend uniform. His mother had sewn that for Swastika at an early age, lengthening both it and the wax mannequin as he grew up.
    As soon as he was old enough to learn how to kill, Swastika and his dad had gone hunting with a crossbow, a rifle, and a skinning knife up in the Cariboo.
    “Fire!” his father had whispered, so fire he had, and the bolt of the crossbow had shot through the trunks of the forest trees to strike a doe in the flank with a sickening thud. “She’s down,” his father said, handing him the skinning knife. “Now go finish her off with your bare hands,” he ordered.
    If you’d seen them stalking through the brush toward the wounded deer, you might have thought they were Lord Baden-Powell and one of his Boy Scout cubs. In a way, they were. The Hitler Youth version, with him in the uniform sewn by his mother. His father had taken him roughing it in the woods near their Cariboo ranch—in that part of central British Columbia that seems to speak to the Black Forest yearnings of Germans today—for the same survivalist training that Nazi instructors had drilled into his dad as a youth.
    “Kill her,” came the order as they stood over the downed