Five Past Midnight - James Thayer [2]
Dietrich's cell contained the cot and blanket, a chamber pot, and nothing else. The cell was belowground. Water seeped down the mold- encrusted stone walls to the floor where it gathered in brown pools speckled with rotted waste. A single bulb was behind an iron grate in the ceiling, and it was never extinguished. The door to the corridor was an iron sheet with a viewing port at eye level. Another hatch was near the floor, through which a soup bowl and a cup of water was pushed once a day, and through which would come his Henkersmahlzeit, the condemned's last meal. There were no windows to the outside, and the cell walls were so thick that sounds could not breach them — not the guards' footsteps, not the wind, not the other prisoners' cries. The only noise in the cell was Dietrich's stertorous breathing and the steady dripping of water.
With an effort that made him moan, the prisoner struggled to a sitting position. He would meet his fate with dignity and would stand when they came for him. He had not bathed or shaved in three months, nor had he had a change of clothing. His skin was covered with dirt and insect bites and open sores that refused to heal. Grease and grime matted his hair and beard.
Dietrich doubled over with a grinding cough. Pneumonia, he suspected. His lungs rattled with each breath. He had lost two teeth while in the cell. His hands shook uncontrollably, and the skin around his fingers had shrunk for want of nourishment. They resembled claws.
Dietrich levered himself from the cot. He placed a hand on the oozing wall to steady himself. He spit into a hand, and pawed his face with it, trying to wipe away the filth. They had reduced him to an animal's existence, but every day he cleaned himself as best he could. He straightened his foul clothing and turned to the door. They were always prompt.
Dietrich's cell was in Wing B of the Lehrterstrasse Prison, across the Spree River from Berlin's Tiergarten. The prison was star-shaped, with three floors of cells. It had been built in the 1840B, patterned after London's Pentonville. The structure had no adornment. Brick walls and iron bars across small windows spoke of its sole purpose, to punish. Berliners found it impossible to pass Lehrterstrasse Prison without shivering. Many entered the prison. Far fewer left alive. Executions occurred in the cellar.
It had been a busy place since July 20,1944. At Hitler's headquarters at Rastenburg in East Prussia, Colonel Count von Stauffenberg's briefcase bomb had only slightly wounded Hitler because the attache case had been shunted aside by another officer, and Hitler had been shielded by the conference table's heavy leg. Colonel Stauffenberg, Generals Beck and Haider, Field Marshal Witzleben, former Leipzig Mayor Goerdeler and other plotters had already met their ends. Five thousand others — army officers, professors, writers, doctors, clergymen, district and town officials, most with utterly no knowledge of the plot — had also been executed.
Before his arrest Otto Dietrich had been chief criminal inspector with the Berlin Police. He had joined the Kriminalpolizei, known to Berliners as the Kripo, after the Great War. Arguing that the investigation of criminal acts was irreconcilable with political police work, he had assiduously avoided involvement in the political police—then called the Schupo—and the growing National Socialist German Workers' Party and its strong-arm branches, the SA and the SS. He graduated from the Institute of Police Science in Charlottenburg. He won promotion to inspector that year.
Dietrich's investigative gift was clear from the start. In 1928 he solved the murder of the heiress Elisabeth Hoffer, whose headless corpse had been found in the Spree, put there, Dietrich learned, by her younger sister, whom he tracked to Buenos Aires. Two years later he was assigned to the highly publicized murder