Soon enough it was time for the crew to move to a different part of the road. They got into formation. Reinhard stood up then. He was unsteady on his feet. He got in line at the back of the formation. As they started to march, Reinhard spun around suddenly and started running. He charged with surprising speed, given his injuries, toward the death zone and the fence beyond it, screaming incoherently as he ran. By the time the guards in the tower could swivel their machine gun around and point it in his direction, he had reached the zone and was only steps from the fence. They began shooting, splattering the ground with raking fire. Reinhard was hit several times, but somehow kept moving forward, jerking and convulsing with each step, almost as though the bullets were carrying him to his destination. His arms were stretched out in front of him as though he wanted to, he had to reach that fence. No one knew whether he was still alive when he did. The fence’s barbs caught his clothes and his flesh and held him upright while the electricity crackled and flamed around him.
There was a hum from the west that grew into a roar as a squadron of Stuka dive bombers passed overhead on their way to Warsaw. There seemed to be hundreds of them. Reinhard’s body smoked and smoldered. It remained hanging there on the fence until the prisoners were back in their barracks and the electricity running through the fence could be turned off.
Table of Contents
Contents
Also by Peter Steiner
Title Page
Copyright
Part One Willi
Schloß Barzelhof
The First Kiss
Operation Hummingbird
And It Didn’t Stop There
Tullemannstraße 54
Heinz Schleiffer
The Gestapo
The Blood Flag
The Second Report
Frau Schimmel
Detective Sergeant Hermann Gruber
The Steins
Lili Marlene
The Logbooks
Corpus Delicti
Erna Raczynski
Briennerstraße 20
The Green Dress
Degenerate Art
The Mind of a Killer
The Third Report
The Lion and the Hyenas
Part Two Dachau
Outside
Schleiffer in Trouble
The Sudetenland
Hard Labor
The First Interrogation
The Riegsee
Frau Schimmel Again
The Second and Third Interrogations
Kristallnacht
Escape
The Man Who Loved Women
Altdorfer Investigates
The Bavarian Forest
Heinz Schleiffer Gets a Letter
The Evidence
The Arrest
The Woodcutter
The Holy Fire