The SS Officer's Narrative

Introductory Text

Complete Animals
The SS Officer's Narrative Part 01 34th Post Posted 4 May 2016 at 04:03:41 EDT Link to original

How quickly they turn to complete animals.

They come out of the wagons already quite bestial, crying and lowing for water, yet there is still the facsimile of humanity about them: they wear clothes, spectacles, wedding rings, the women have their long hair and jewelry. We strip away all this deceit quite quickly.

At the front of the camp there is a phony train station with a phony name and a phony clock with hands that are painted on. All of it is just as phony as all their posing, their insinuating, their pretending to be normal folk. As soon as they come down the ramp, the blue prisoner units are screaming at them, beating them, lashing them, drawing blood, and they move through the front gates in huddled, weeping herds. There we separate the men and women and have the women's haircut to make socks and such.

And in a moment, it is complete.

Centuries of hiding among us, posing and passing, is all erased, exposed, and their nature is plain. Looking at their hideous gnarled faces, all the varieties of bloodline impurities, the women's sagging udders, the fatty hanging bellies, the men's mutilated penises in thatches of pubic hair -- you see it quite clearly, and you absolutely cannot deny that they are utter beasts. That we allowed them to infest our cities like vermin, to hold power over us, while we were tilling the soil and building the Fatherland -- it absolutely appalls. This will be our great shame in history's eyes.

We move them through the long tube to the gas chambers. The men can go first, as their hair does not need cutting. Then the women. The women panic. Screams everywhere. You watch the mottled haunches of the old women shudder and ripple as their legs shake like newborn calves. They realize that we will not be wasting any time, that it will all be immediate. Streams of fresh shit run down their legs, and now the helpers must club them every step of the way or they will turn back.

Marchenko carries a sword. He thinks it is an Imperial cavalry sword, but it is just an imitation. Still, it is an actual sword, and in his hands, it is more effective than the clubs. He hacks at the crowd like jungle explorer in an American film. He makes all sorts of sneering, dramatic faces as he works, and whenever he scores a particularly impressive blow, his whole face red with delight. Once he sliced an old woman's tit clean off. He picked it up and showed it to me. The inside was made of corn-colored pearls of fat. I let him take it to the work camp and have a good chuckle watching a prisoner devour it, and I had a good chuckle watching Marchenko's face.

There are only a couple dozen SS at the camp. Almost everything is run by Red Army watchmen and special prison units. And yet we can process 15,000 a day. Wonderful. It is because of the way the camp has been built. There is the fake train station, the tales of showers and uniforms and assignments, the narrow tube to funnel people into, the walls to hide the chambers and the pits. And there is the hierarchy: the captured Red Army men and the special unit prisoners, all set against each other with the proper incentives. Everything in the structure concentrates power on us.

Perhaps, if the right structure was built, an entire race could eliminated by a single man with an unloaded gun.

A team of doctors from Berlin
The SS Officer's Narrative Part 02 37th Post Posted 6 May 2016 at 19:12:20 EDT Link to original

One day during the final summer, a team of doctors came in from Berlin.

They were in the midst of a grand experiment which they considered to be of the utmost importance and needed access to a large number of prisoners, something beyond what they could acquire in Berlin. We protested that we were not equipped for any sort of medical experiments, that our camp was designed for a single purpose, but they insisted, and we were forced to accommodate them.

I was immediately irritated by their senior doctor, a haughty man in his late forties named Engel, who always wore a crisp white coat and fine leather shoes. He arrived with his team of doctors and-- I could scarcely believe it -- a Jew.

This was perhaps the ugliest Jew to have ever personally offended my eyes. He was a very tall man, a full head taller than average, with a furry black beard, a gnarled, claw-like nose, and very prominent eyes. These eyes were something of a source of fascination to me, as they were not the rat-like black color of the normal Jew, but a much lighter shade of brown, almost like bronze. He wore a shabby suit and followed Engel around quite closely, almost as if they were associates, and always his strange, flashing eyes were roaming about in a suspicious way.

When I first met Engel, I asked who this Jew was, but my question was brushed aside. They immediately set about converting one of our buildings into a station for their experiments, the details of which were kept from me entirely. Engel and his team made no contact with the other staff except to demand various supplies.

After a few days of being subjected to Engel's imperious behavior, I could feel that my SS subordinates and even the Ukrainians were smirking at me behind my back, so I decided to give Engel a tour of the other part of the camp, which he had not yet seen, the part where we processed prisoners. Of course he refused, but I insisted. Fortunately, a trainload of prisoners was arriving at the moment, and we went out to the platform. The odious Jew with glittering eyes followed us, which pleased me all the more.

The train arrived with the cries of its passengers blending into the squealing of the metal wheels. The blue units worked themselves into their usual frenzy, pulling the passengers out, shouting and clubbing and herding them toward the main gate. Amidst the crush of passengers, the limp bodies of children occasionally came spilling out onto the platform, and the blue units tossed them into a pile. Engel watched all of this impassively.

A woman came out of the train clutching a child of perhaps three years. She looked about frantically, screaming for a doctor. I gave her a sympathetic look and held out my arms. She approached me, the handsome stolid-looking authority figure that I am. I took the child from her and tenderly examined it. It was still alive. I placed it gently on the ground and used my boot to reshape its skull. The woman I shot.

A rather perverse request
The SS Officer's Narrative Part 03 39th Post Posted 7 May 2016 at 16:50:23 EDT Link to original

After a week at the camp, Dr. Engel put in a rather perverse request: he wanted to move his laboratory to the old gas chamber. I had no problem with this. We had installed new, more efficient gas chambers with the help of an expert on the matter, and although they had a capacity of over 20,000 a day, we were seldom ever able to process more than 15,000 in a single day, due to the unreliability of the trains, which were often slow enough to preemptively process many of their passengers for us.

At this point we had orders to cremate the bodies, and they burned in open pits day and night, and we warned the Dr. Engel that the old gas chamber would be a rather distracting environment to work in, as it was between the smoke of the burning pits and the noise of the new gas chambers. He disregarded this, and his team moved in that day. After that, I rarely saw him, as that part of the camp was somewhat hidden from the rest, and my headaches, which were growing more severe, had always made me reluctant to visit.

Soon my men began to me strange tales from the new laboratory. Nobody except Engel and his men was allowed inside, but we surmised that he had removed or reduced the chamber's interior walls and sealed up all doors except one. He requested his own SS detail, and two guards were posted at the door at all times. A steady flow of prisoners went into the laboratory, whom Engel selected with the help of his odious Jew assistant, often to the great irritation of my units, as their fussy selectivity often slowed down our processing activities. Nobody could make any sense of his selection process, as it mainly consisted of the Jew looking the person over and making various mutterings.

It was reported that every few days, a enormous "package" wrapped in tarpaulin would be removed from the laboratory and carried over to a special burning pit which they had made. These packages tended to bleed, leaving a trail of blood to the burning pit, where they were burned under the watch of Engel's personal guard. This behavior was only extraordinary in that there was no need for secrecy when it came to killing prisoners. Thousands were being killed every day just a few meters away in the new gas chambers.

Between this and the inexplicable presence of the Jew assistant, I slowly became curious about their project. My men, however, were unable to get any information about what was occurring inside the laboratory. So I decided focus a few questions on the member of the team who presumably had the least sense of loyalty: the Jew.

On one of our days off, I found the Jew in our little zoo, admiring the peacocks. He looked very much at peace as he watched the birds strut around, while I was suffering from vicious headache. I began to talk to him, affecting an offhand, friendly manner. His German was perfect. I asked him about his background. He told me he had been a religious student in Berlin until he was expelled to a ghetto in Krakow. I asked him how he had met Engel. Here he told me something quite surprising: this was actually his second time coming to Treblinka. On his first visit, he was on the very verge of being shot when somebody had noticed his perfect German. Apparently, there had been a request for prisoners who spoke excellent German, and this earned him a reprieve. He was sent back to Berlin, where Engel performed tests on him.

I asked about the nature of these tests. At this he became more reticent. He had been instructed to discuss nothing with me. I merely informed him that I would shoot him through the face if he didn't tell me everything. At this, he showed no fear, but looked at me with his odd, brazen eyes and gave me an almost pitying smile. He said that the doctors were testing a new Swiss invention, some kind of chemical which was administered orally and caused profound changes in thinking.

I asked him about these changes. He said that the chemical allowed him to see the mind of God. Naturally, I asked for elaboration. At this, he launched into a rather overworked simile involving a broken mirror, then switched to another simile using a spider's web, neither of which made any sense to me. I informed him that I was a practical man and had little use for philosophy. He told me that after taking the chemical many times, he had become possessed of two minds: his own and that of God. In all his doings, he was conscious of God's intentions, of God's plan for all human life. I asked him if he was following God's plan, and he said he was not following it entirely.

"I am wrestling with God," he said cryptically.

"How does one wrestle with God? Isn't he all powerful?"

"When God presses forward, you must yield or be destroyed. And when God yields, you must press forward."

"That sounds more like dancing than wrestling. Or making love," I said with a snort.

He smiled. "Yes, it is... Except that dancing is not so painful."

"Why wrestle at all? If God is God, and you know his plan, why not simply follow it? Surely this is the best course."

"Yes, but I cannot bring myself to," he said. For the first time, I saw the peaceful expression flee from his face to be replaced by a unsettling dread that trembled in his eyes.

"God's plan... is simply too awful."

An extremely unusual fragment
The SS Officer's Narrative Part 04 43rd Post Posted 9 May 2016 at 19:07:26 EDT Link to original

I asked the Jew exactly what sort of procedures they were performing in their laboratory, but at this point we were interrupted by several members of Dr. Engel's team, and they hurriedly ushered him away. Although there were still many unanswered questions, my curiosity was largely satisfied. They were testing a new chemical and probably performing vivisections and such to ascertain its physical effects. Perhaps the bodies were burned separately because they required special handling due to the presence of the chemical. There was nothing especially sinister in that. It was actually rather considerate of them.

That night, shortly before I was about to retire for the day, one of the Ukrainians came to me with a small package wrapped in cloth, about the size of a loaf of bread with an irregular shape. He was very excited. He unwrapped the package, and inside was a fragment of pale white bone. An extremely unusual fragment. It was a sort of rounded carapace, like part of a giant skull, but with 5 round holes in it, much like eye sockets but obviously too numerous to be so. Studded throughout the fragment were extrusions that looked like molar teeth. Looking at it, I could not place it as a part of any animal I had ever seen.

I asked the man where he got it, and he said he had retrieved it from near the laboratory's cremation pit just an hour before. The piece itself did not appear to have been burned, as it had the meaty stink of death about it. I asked him a few more questions, but he knew little else. Still, he insisted that the bone fragment was from something monstrous and unnatural which they were creating in their laboratory and that I should shut down their experiments. One of my SS subordinates immediately set to thrashing the Ukrainian with a baton for presuming to advise me on my duties, and with that, the conversation came to its natural conclusion.

I took the fragment with me and spent a while in turning it over in the dim lamplight of my quarters. It was indeed otherworldly, and, as the Ukrainian had said with a kind of wild fear in his eyes, it was truly monstrous. Despite the Ukrainian's impudence, I decided to take his advice. This had all gone too far. Whatever the high command might say, I mustn't let this camp be overrun by secretive madness, but must maintain a spirit of rational cooperation. I would insist on full inspection of the laboratory first thing tomorrow morning.

I lay down to sleep and was soon visited with a dream so intense that I did not feel like I was sleeping at all. At first, the bed in which I lay seemed to rise up from the floor and float ever upward through a large, glowing tunnel which was painted with all manner of designs, from paisley to topographical lines to various kinds of calligraphy in unknown languages. After this, the dream became a series of absurd images ever changing and blending into new images and shapes. Many of these shifts struck me as clever or absurd, and I found myself laughing maniacally at it all.

Finally, all of these disparate images appeared at once before me and began to rotate around each other as part of a fantastic wheel, and slowly I began to suspect that by combining them all, some sort or grand secret would be revealed. Just as this notion occurred to me, all the images began to coalesce into one final image of stunning clarity.

It was the image of a woman, or something which was mainly a woman but also other creatures, who was vastly large and seemed to tower over me miles in the sky, who looked down on me with filmy inhuman eyes. Her skin was an inhumanly pale, but she wore a crown of exquisite thorned flowers, and blood ran in shimmering red streams down her skin. She was pregnant, vastly pregnant, with a stomach so swollen it was like she sat upon a huge mountain of distended flesh. I could sense within her belly there was a hive of activity, of something or many things pulsing and squirming feverishly. Soon the belly burst open like a ripe fruit, and rivers of blood poured out, and a revolting mass of fleshy tubes came spilling out, unraveling and tearing open to set free hundreds and thousands of monstrous infants who were both human and not human, who had the same filmy eyes as their mother, who were slathered and dripping with blood.

Under the Weather
The SS Officer's Narrative Part 05 47th Post Posted 11 May 2016 at 18:54:51 EDT Link to original

The next day, I felt under the weather. The vivid dreams of the previous night had left my mind feeling dull and exhausted. As soon as I left my quarters I was greeted with the news that one of our Ukrainians had gone mad during the night and attempted to attack Dr. Engel's team in their quarters. It was none other than the one who had brought me the strange skull fragment.

After shooting him, they had come to the conclusion that he had somehow ingested some of their magical chemical, which they referred to as the "Swiss Invention." Engels insisted that I make an announcement to the camp: anyone found ingesting this chemical under any circumstance, whether by intention or accident, will be summarily shot, regardless of whether they are prisoner or Hiwi or even SS. This was by order of the high command.

At this, I was forced to admit to myself what was already obvious: I had somehow been dosed with the chemical in handling the bone fragment. My dreams had been a reaction to the poisoning. Looking into Engel's cold blue eyes, I tried to deduce the consequences of confessing this to him. Despite his disagreeable haughtiness, he seemed like a rational, efficient man with an appropriate love of duty and country. I had no doubt that he would murder me without hesitation. I decided to keep my little nocturnal epiphany to myself.

Naturally, my curiosity in Engel's project had been aroused again. He apparently was working with a chemical which could induce temporary madness. The value of such a chemical was obvious. But what of the bizarre bone fragment? What had it come from? I couldn't help but feel that this creature, whatever it was, was somehow connected to the vision of the monstrous bloody mother. Again and again, her blood face appeared in my mind, her filmy eyes gazing down at me, inhuman and imperious.

I attempted to contact the Jew again, but after our conversation, Dr. Engel's team guarded him jealously. He was never left alone. As the hot summer days went by, my curiosity about the matter grew to obsessive proportions. The monstrous mother visited me several more times in my dreams (of the normal variety this time, but no less vivid and disturbing.) I began surreptitiously observing Engel's laboratory, which was guarded day and night, and I asked some of my men to do the same.

To our knowledge, the bloody "packages" had ceased to emerge from within, but something stranger began to happen. This new phenomenon was presumably occurring at all hours, but was imperceptible in the bustle of the day, when men were about and the gas chambers were operating. Only at night, and only when the fires were burning quietly, could it be perceived. I first observed it shortly before dawn one muggy morning.

As ridiculous as it might sound for me to be skulking about in my own camp, I did just that, slipping along the wall of the new gas chamber to come within a short distance of the laboratory. There I witnessed what others has reported to me. At fixed intervals, a sound emerged from the laboratory. It was very quiet but not just my imagination. A creaking sound. The sound that many old houses and structures make as their materials shrink and swell from temperature and moisture. But this came very regularly, every 4 or 5 seconds. Slowly, a realization crept upon me. The building was breathing. Steadily, in and out, it was breathing. It was alive.

This "realization," which I'll admit was more of an unconfirmed intuition, filled me with a dread so strong that tears came to my eyes. There was something enormous and alive inside that building. The sight of death, bloody death beyond most men's imaginings, had left me unmoved, but the sight of life, this new and unnatural life, pressing against the walls of the building, was enough to chill me. Again I saw the face of the unholy mother in mind my, saw her filmy eyes, saw a slight smile form on her lips between the streams of blood.

That night I could not sleep. Fortunately, the next day was our weekly day off, and I was able spend most of the day in my quarters. It was abnormally, intolerably hot and humid. My thoughts followed disorderly circles around the revolting image of the Mother, and I felt as if I was being revisited by the temporary madness brought on by the so-called Swiss Invention. I had long loathed life at the camp, but had accepted it as an tolerable hardship. But now the constant smell of the burning sickened me, and I felt I could take no more.

That afternoon, some of my men decided to go off to a nearby lake for a swim, and on a whim I accompanied them. I needed a reprieve from the heat. At the lake, I eased myself into the cool water and floated idly, watching the clouds pass overhead. Here, there was nothing but the gentle twittering of nature. It had been here before our murderous camp had been built, and it would be here long after. Gentle and peaceful.

I had been in water for just a few minutes when I received the news: group of prisoners had broken into the armory, smuggled weapons out, and a full-scale uprising occurring back at the camp.

The rest of the day was a whirlwind. We raced back to the camp, and I found myself personally trading fire with the prisoners, as all about buildings burned and everything was chaos. We called for reinforcements, managed to subdue the camp, and set out into the woods to catch the escapees. A fair number were intercepted, but over 100 escaped. This was an unmitigated disaster. Coming back into the camp after the hunt, I had only to look around at the faces of my men to know that I was now in a position of total disgrace.

As calamitous thoughts raced through my head, I found myself walking towards Engels' laboratory. Deep black soot stains around the front door showed me that the interior had been burned out. All around the entrance lay the bodies of Engel's team, their white coats dyed in fresh red. They had been massacred. Engle himself had been stabbed or shot several times, and his throat had been slashed. And then there was the Jew...

The Jew lay on the ground with one of my SS men standing over him, holding a rifle with a fixed bayonet. The Jew's abdomen had been bisected and his bowels spilled out all over the ground. They were now caked with dust. A few feet from him lay a kitchen knife. Apparently, he had stabbed Engel's whole team to death before being opened up by the bayonet. To kill a half dozen men like this was no mean feat.

My officer stood with one of his boots atop a loop of the Jew's intestine, sneering at him. Remarkably, the Jew was still alive and aware. When I approached, he lifted his head and I, for the last time, found myself caught in his strange gaze. We stood like this for a moment, staring at each other, inexplicable emotions flooding my mind.

The Jew opened his mouth and croaked something. A bloody foam spilled out over his lips. He tried again. "Water," he said.

I quietly instructed my man to get some water. He scoffed, and I clouted him about the head and screamed at him. He scurried off and returned a moment later with a large ladle of water. I took it and stooped down over the Jew and carefully tipped the ladle to his lips, letting him drink. He drank carefully. I wiped the bleeding foam from his lips. All the while, I could not fathom why I was doing this except by the commandment of the man's pleading eyes.

His lips trembled and he attempted to speak. I cradled his head and leaned close to hear his words.

"I know... This is not... God... I've killed them... But others... You must..."

He waited for him to continue, but he did not. "Must what?" I asked.

"You've seen her... Your dream... Is the future..."

"The mother?" I asked. "The bloody woman?"

"There is still time... To stop her... You must... You must..."

And just like that, his life fled from him, and the glimmer in his eyes went dull.

I set his head gently on the ground again and stood up. I looked to the burned out entrance of the laboratory. It was now unguarded. I could walk right in. A chill went through me at the thought, but I knew that I must. I walked to the entrance. Just inside was a curtain made of tarpaulin concealing the interior. The smell of charred meat and petrol, which normally pervaded the entire camp, which had been giving me headaches and slowly driving me mad all the past year, was especially, sickeningly strong here. With a trembling hand, I pulled back the curtain and looked inside.

Surely
The SS Officer's Narrative Part 06 48th Post Posted 11 May 2016 at 22:14:03 EDT Link to original

There, mostly hidden in the darkness, was a great inexplicable monstrosity. Everything had been burned and blackened, but still I could see human shapes and forms. Arms, fingers, faces, jawbones, teeth, eye sockets, all burned and reduced to ash clinging to bone. But this was no pile of burned bodies. I had seen piles of burned bodies. I had seen mountains of burned bodies. This was something different.

Human parts were coming out of the walls and the floor and ceiling. Arms and legs hung like stalactites. Faces came out of the floor. They were fused together in ways that could not be possible. At seeing this, I was filled with the strongest possible urge to turn away, to back out of the awful laboratory and run for my life. But I heard again the Jew's final words, "You must," and knew this to be a command.

I went inside. As the curtain closed behind me, I was enveloped in almost total darkness. Bones cracked beneath by boots. Near the back, I saw a shaft of light where one of the old doors had been sealed up but had become partially open again. I walked toward it, stepping over unspeakable, crunching shapes, brushing past nightmarish forms. I reached out to the crack of light and pulled back a board which was covering the door. Though I was not able to rip it free, I pulled it loose enough to let in a considerable amount of light, enough to reveal what sat at the back of the laboratory.

As a child, I once went to a zoo in Vienna where I saw an elephant skull. Looking at the object now before me, I was reminded of this long ago moment and of how I had spent maybe half an hour staring at the skull from every angle, how I was titillated by its enormousness, its impossible alienness, and its unsettling similarity to what was familiar and human.

Before me was a large obloid shape, almost as tall as me, stippled with hundreds of what looked like eye sockets. The lower portion consisted of a complicated structure that resembled several sets of jaws, each with hundreds or thousands of teeth of all different kinds, including molars, incisors, canines, even animal teeth, some of them of normal size, some of them as big as my fist. The center of the shape was split vertically and inside was a set of curving bone tubes that seemed to fill the interior.

I stood there in the charred darkness, staring at this thing, this blasphemous, alien thing, while my mind filled with images of the awful dream mother and the final gasping words of the Jew.

"There is still time... To stop her..."

His commandment became strangely clear to me. This thing that the scientists were attempting to create, whatever it was, must not be allowed to exist. It was an abomination. Engel and his team were dead, but there were others working on the project. It was secretive enough that the essential personnel would be few in number. The lab in Switzerland. A few top scientists. Perhaps that was entirety of it. It would not be easy, but far from impossible to find them all.

It was perhaps in my power to destroy the whole project, especially if we lost the war, which seemed increasingly likely after Stalingrad. And if this chemical that they were using was obscure enough, it might be possible to eliminate the entire world's supply. Thus I could shut the door on whatever unholy creature these madmen were attempting unleash.

Yes, I could do this. At least I could attempt it. I felt now a distinct sense of the entire world's history resting on what I decided to do next. Surely moments like this did not come about often. Surely they must come only to men who are worthy of them...

Surely...