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good, isn't it, the story of her life? She told me she could make a thousand dollars a week without breathing hard.
    Carl saw her making fifty thousand a year with two weeks off. If she took a month off she'd still make forty-eight thousand.
    What I want to know, Jurgen said, is why you call me a Kraut?
    We call all of you Krauts. It caught on and it's how you're known. Short for sauerkraut.
    Yes...?
    Isn't it your national dish?
    I'm not sure, Jurgen said, and asked Carl, Do you like sauerkraut?
    I'll eat it if it's what we're having?
    I eat it, I'm a Kraut, Jurgen said. You eat it, you remain who you are.
    It doesn't have to make sense, Carl said. The Tulsa World and my dad call you Huns most of the time. You mind 'Huns'?
    No, it's Kraut I don't care for.
    Don't worry about it, Carl said. What I want you to tell me is how the hard-nosed Nazis have come to run the camps. Because they're mean buggers but disciplined, they do what they're told? That's why the guards prefer Nazis. Tell me why they intimidate the less Nazified ones, beat them up, go so far as to lynch them, the ones you call suicides? I want to hear what you have to say about Nazis, an d t ell me what they did with a million and a half Jews in Poland.
    A million and a half, Jurgen said. I thought it was more like three million have gone missing. The Russians have accounted for half of them.
    Chapter Five

Carl and Louly in Love
    You see us, Jurgen said to Carl Webster in the solitary confinement room, we are either Nazis or we'r e a gainst them. You don't see degrees of belief between the two extremes?
    You know how to sound like a Nazi, Carl said, to get by in the camp, you and your friend Otto Penzler, going back to when you were Hitler Jugend and learned the spiel. Otto makes sure you know he's SS, an elite group of thugs as Nazified as you can get. But I can't see either of you guys wanting to live in a police state. People telling on each other. Kids telling on their mom and dad. People hearing the truck coming and know it's the SS on a roundup. And you think, Oh, my God, in the beerhall last night you sai d i f that fat slob G/ring and that gimp Goebbels and that humorless twit Himmler, if those guys represent the master race... You don't remember what else you said but that would be enough. How many people are tried and hanged for making remarks like that? They torture you, pull out your fingernails... You go along with that? You look up to Hitler as an inspiring leader?
    As leaders go, Jurgen said, smoking one of Carl's Chesterfields, he hasn't done too badly. He made himself Fnhrer in Thirty-four. He restored the German Reich. By 1942 he owned Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Luxembourg, Yugoslavia- I forget Holland -also Greece, Czechoslovakia, Poland and a big chunk of Russia and the Ukraine. Jurgen paused to draw on his cigarette. Still, Erwin Rommel, after North Africa when he was appointed to the Fnhrer's staff, and personally witnessed the Fnhrer's outbursts and irrational behavior, he told people close to him the Fnhrer was over the edge, far from normal. I was with Rommel most of two years, Jurgen said, and believe every word he ever said to me and continued to believe him, his predictions, his assessments of the war, even when they failed to happen. He is the only man I have ever known I would step in front of to take a bullet meant for him.
    For Rommel, Carl said, but not your Fnhrer? I would be happy to see someone kill him, Jurgen said, if he doesn't do it himself.
    *
    The YMCA gives you radios, Carl said, and you modify them to receive shortwave broadcasts from Germany. You need parts, you order them from a Sears and Roebuck catalog. The camp commander says they find shortwave radios that were meant to be found, but you have other transmitters and receivers hidden away.
    You want me to tell you, Jurgen said, if I know where they are?
    I want to know, Carl said, if you believe what the broadcasts from home tell you. We listen to them. They get