Slaves of the Swastika Read Online Free PDF

beaten.
    In his opinion, Frau Helga Nordheim was just about ready for some really persuasive questioning. He made a sign to his “boys,” as he called them, for he was very fond of Willi Murtens and Manfred Strobel. They had worked with him for quite a while now, and they knew his little idiosyncrasies and could even anticipate them. It made it so much more convenient and pleasurable when you were dealing with assistants who enjoyed their work and wanted to make you look good too. In his next reports to the Gestapo chief of all Berlin, he would take pains to recommend Willi Murtens and Manfred Strobel for the Iron Cross, Fifth Rank.
    The two men at once abandoned their sobbing prisoner on the table, and Manfred Strobel moved to one side of it and pulled out a little drawer. Inside were various lengths of rope, a pair of dental pliers, manicure tweezers, a nail file, a sheet or two of very coarse sandpaper, a little box of sharp-pointed toothpicks, a long bone darning needle, and other ingenious implements which at first glance seemed to have no useful purpose in a place like this. On the contrary, they were the imaginative little tools which Oberst Friedrich Muller used to bring his female victims to the final stage of the interrogation ritual and drew from them, while they were still coherent, the information he wished to know.
    The two men began to bind Helga Nordheim to the table. Willi Murtens put a cord around her left wrist and made it fast to the front lower table leg, as Manfred did the same to the right wrist. Helga Nordheim began to plead for mercy, protesting her innocence, insisting that all she had ever done was see one copy of Till Eulenspiegel. The Gestapo officer ignored her, lighting a cigar with evident relish, then taking a rag which lay on the floor near the table and carefully polishing his boots until every inch of them gleamed with parade-drill luster.
    Manfred Strobel, meanwhile, was binding Helga Nordheim's ankles to the rear legs of the table. When they had finished, she was spread-eagled tightly, and her legs were at least three feet apart. The traction necessarily tightened the skin of her body and made the burning, darkening weals left by the riding crop even more atrociously painful. The slightest involuntary jerk or squirming of her body sent new waves of torment through her striped posterior.
    “Oh please... Gott in Himmel ... what—what are you going to do to me now? I swear before Him that I know nothing more than I have already told you. Oh, for God's sake, lieber Herr Oberst, have pity on a helpless woman who has never done anything criminal in all her fife!”
    The Gestapo officer made another gesture, and Willi Murtens dug his hand into the pocket of his uniform trousers, produced a dirty handkerchief and bound it around Helga Nordheim's eyes, knotting it tightly at the back of her head. This action drew a fresh paroxysm of terrified cries and appeals and pleas for mercy.
    “Oh no, please no—what are you going to do to me? Oh, don't hurt me any more—I can't stand pain, I truly can't—I'm only a helpless woman— Oh, good Herr Oberst, have pity on me! I can't tell you anything more, I swear I can't! Oh my God, oh my God, what are you going to do to me now?”
    As the Gestapo officer himself was fond of telling his subalterns, it was amusing to see how easily you could prick the bubble of a person's vanity and self-importance by the simplest of means. Human nature always delighted him because it was so predictable within variations which themselves always afforded him the utmost sensual gratification. You didn't need elaborate torture apparatus, you didn't need the fiendish cunning of the Orientals with cages of rats and scorpions and spiders, with tiny little knives that would flay the skin so neatly that it husked off like rabbit fur. A few simple things, things so simple in themselves that a glance at them would make you think you were in a supply room of some big industrial