Garden of Beasts

results so far.
    This study arises out of my instructions from you to make ready the German armed forces and to help them achieve most expeditiously the goals of our great nation, as you have set forth.
    In my years of commanding our courageous troops during the War, I learned much about men’s behavior during combat. While any good soldier will follow orders, it became clear to me that men respond in different ways to the matter of killing, and this difference, I believe, is based on their nature.
    In brief, our study involves asking questions of soldiers before and after they execute condemned enemies of the state and then analyzing their responses. These executions involve a number of different situations: various methods of execution, categories of prisoners, relationship of the soldier to the prisoners, the family background and personal history of the soldier, etc. The examples to date are as follows:
    On 18 July of this year, in the town of Gatow, a soldier (Subject A) questioned at length two groups convicted of Jewish subversive activities. He was then ordered to carry out the execution order by automatic weapon fire.
    On 19 July, a soldier in Charlottenburg (Subject B) similarly executed a number of Polish infiltrators. Although Subject B was the proximate cause of their deaths, he had had no communication with them prior to their extermination, unlike the Gatow executions.
    On 21 July a soldier (Subject C) executed a group of Roma Gypsies engaged in sexually deviant behavior in a special facility we have had constructed at Waltham College. Carbon monoxide gas from vehicle exhaust was the means of death. Like Subject B, this soldier never conversed with the victims, but, unlike him, he did not witness their actual deaths.
    Paul Schumann gasped in shock. He looked again at the first letter. Why, these people killed were innocent, by Ernst’s own admission. Jewish families, Polish workers . . . He read the passages again to make sure he’d seen correctly. He thought he must have mistranslated the words. But, no, there wasn’t any doubt. He looked across the dusty field at the black Mercedes, which still sheltered Ernst. He glanced down at the letter to Hitler and continued.
    On 26 July a soldier (Subject D) executed a dozen political dissidents at the Waltham facility. The variation in this case was that these particular convicts were of Aryan extraction, and Subject D spent an hour or more conversing and playing sports with them immediately before he executed them, getting to know some of them by name. He was further instructed to observe them die.
    Oh, Christ . . . that’s here, today!
    Paul leaned forward, squinting over the field. The gray-uniformed German soldier who’d been playing soccer with the boys gave a stiff-arm salute to the balding man in brown then he hooked a thick hose from the tailpipe of the bus into a fixture on the outside wall of the classroom.
    We are presently compiling the responses provided by all of these Subject soldiers. Several dozen other executions are planned, each one a variation intended to provide us with as much helpful data as possible. The results of the first four tests are attached hereto.
    Please be assured we reject out of hand the tainted Jew-thinking of traitors like Dr. Freud but feel that solid National Socialist philosophy and science will allow us to match the personality types of soldiers with the means of death, the nature of the victims and the relationship between them to more efficiently achieve the goals you have set forth for our great nation.
    We will be submitting the complete report to you within two months.
    With all humble respect,
    Col. Reinhard Ernst,
Plenipotentiary
for Domestic Stability
    Paul looked up, across the field, to see the soldier glance into the classroom at the young men, close the door, then walk calmly to the bus and turn on the engine.

Chapter Thirty-Seven
    When the door to the classroom closed, the students looked around them. It was Kurt Fischer who got out of his seat and walked to the window. He rapped on it.
    “You’ve forgotten the pencils,” he called.
    “There are some in the back,” someone called.
    Kurt found three stubby pencils sitting on a chalkboard ledge. “But not enough for us all.”
    “How can we take a test without pencils?”
    “Open a window!” somebody called. “My God, it’s hot in here.”
    A tall blond boy, jailed because he’d written a poem ridiculing the Hitler Youth, walked