Level: Attendant

SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler sat back in the tiny cell and realised that death had finally come for him.
Somehow, all his plans had gone awry. When he went back to his armoured car for a missing document, alone in the dark, in that one, brief moment of impulse, he had fallen from a position as one of the dozen most powerful men in the Third Reich to a caged prisoner on the Death Row that he had created.
A naked figure had leaped from the bushes beside the path and thrown him to the ground before he had time to draw his Luger pistol. The man’s strength seemed supernatural, so Kammler had no chance. He came to, gagged and bound, in a wood, his uniform replaced by peasant’s clothes.
Kammler stared up at himself, at least, a man dressed in his own SS uniform, complete with holster and Luger, and with a face that could be mistaken for him in the poor light between the trees.
“Who are you?” he tried to ask, his words smothered by the cloth gag.
“Struggla. I you hit,” a voice said.
‘Polish?’ Kammler wondered.
Two corpses, of a man and woman, lay on the ground, not far away. Kammler thought he had been kidnapped by a madman, but then he noticed the trees. Two large trees had lost their thick trunks to concave cuts, like nothing Kammler had ever seen. It looked as if a giant tunnel borer had come through the woods and shorn off those trunks at waist height. Furthermore, the air between the two trunks shimmered like water that an oily substance has spread upon and crackled with static that made Kammler’s hair stand on end. Even more curiously, the woodland just beyond the trees looked to be in the bloom of early summer, while winter still shrouded the woodland where he lay. But the number of strange things happening had already grown too much for the SS officer to take in.
The answer to his smothered question came in the form of a black hood thrown over his head and tied tightly under his chin
“What the hell’s happening!” the German screeched into the gag.
Without saying anything, the muscular figure picked Kammler up and threw him over his shoulder.
Kammler forced himself not to struggle, but when he heard the unmistakable noises that told him he had been carried inside the top-secret experimental facility and had almost reached carefully named ‘Detention Pens,’ he began to panic. He struggled with every fibre in his well-exercised body, but his captor easily held on.
“SS-Obergruppenführer Hans Kammler,” the intruder told the guard
“Obergruppenführer?” a clipped voice replied.
“Don’t ask!” the intruder replied.
Kammler moaned, guessing that his captor had been stopped by the guard but not even been asked for his papers. He regretted his policy of banning any photographs of himself and generally trying to keep as low a profile as possible. Few could now be certain of his identity, which had been just the way he had wanted it, until now. He tried to make out the stranger’s face in the gloom, but all he could see were angular features above an angular chin, a wide, blunt nose and deep shadows where the eyes should have been.
“Thank you Obergruppenführer!” the clipped voice shouted, over the sound of two SS boot heels clicking together.
Kammler struggled harder but began to feel it would too late. Moments later, his captor threw him against the corner walls of a cell and cut loose his hands with a knife. Kammler ripped off the hood desperately and pulled down the gag, just as the door closed on him.
‘Detention Pens!’ his brain confirmed.
He opened his mouth to scream his own name. But it would do him no good. The cells were filled with Polish concentration camp prisoners, and nobody would believe what any of them screamed, even if one voice could be heard over the others. The din of desperate voices further demoralised Kammler; he knew that the cells were only filled twenty minutes before another experiment, which would expose them to massive doses of radiation.
“No more than a few hours to live!” Kammler told himself.
He wanted to weep, but no tears would come. He felt dried up, a shell of the man he had once been. He couldn’t even feel pity for himself, because of Elizabeth Borman.
Kammler half-heartedly began to untie his feet. He intended to at least scratch his name into the wall if he could find something sharp. The worst thing about this death would be that nobody would ever know what had happened to him. He had deliberately avoided attaching his name to any communications, since replying to Himmler on 17th April. His response had refused a ‘truck,’ code word for the top-secret Ju 390 transport aircraft he had needed to smuggle out Project Thor in a deal with the American for his escape. Since that date, his many locations, all over the Reich, had been a closely guarded secret. Nobody would ever identify his body.
Having released his painfully tight bonds, Kammler began to crawl about the floor, but he couldn’t find anything sharp.
Almost ten days ago he had arrived to supervise the ‘disposal’ of all the Polish technicians and fifty-two middle level scientists that worked on the project, because they were no longer needed and might squawk to the allies about his role. Most outsiders believed Project Thor to be simply an extremely expensive killing machine, but Kammler knew otherwise.
“Perhaps, if we’d had time!” Kammler had told his SS staff. “We will continue to dispose of all the Polish vermin in the Detention Pens but not the others. They are, after all, citizens of the Reich!”

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