Beelitz-Heilstätten Sanatorium, Berlin, Germany (Credit: Paul “Howzey”)
When the 222nd Infantry Regiment liberated Dachau, we thought we had seen the worst of the horrors. The war had worn down even the strongest among us until they stared out at the horizon, transfixed on the remnants of some tree blown to hell by artillery, or their hands shook when raising a canteen to their lips. A scant six days after Hitler’s suicide, and one day before Germany’s official surrender, my unit was stationed outside Munich to clean up the war effort.
I hadn’t slept a wink without thinking upon the gaunt faces and shattered souls shuffling around the remnants of that camp. After the camp was secured, we were tasked with moving through the area around the town of Dachau itself, investigating any potential pockets of resistance. It was a welcome distraction from ruminating on the nightmares we saw inside that camp.
Every so often, the roar of planes on patrol overhead interrupted the eerie silence marked by the footfalls of our boots on the town’s cobblestone streets. Our patrol led us to a hospital on the edge of town. Constructed sometime in the previous century, the sanatorium was obviously coopted as a field hospital in recent years. Whispers from the locals said the local SS units running the camp had set up shop inside as well. The other side of the courtyard was as far as I wanted to go, but our Sergeant wordlessly ordered us onwards.
This towering structure of grey stone and red brick with a blue-shingled roof radiated evil. The towers would have been perfect for a sniper, though the glass was shattered in most of the windows and the wind whistled through the open window frames and rustled what remained on the inside. The giant hole through the western wall from where an Allied bombing raid struck home gave me the impression of something monstrous tearing its way out of this building. It had been no mere field hospital for wounded Wehrmacht soldiers, this was…something else.
I had marched across the battlefields of France and into Germany, never unwilling to press forward and beat back the Nazi bastards which desecrated Europe. But that darkened entryway to the sanatorium might as well have been the gates to hell itself. Or whatever was worse than hell. Despite willing to charge German machine gun positions, my feet refused to shuffle closer to that doorway.
Private First Class Jacob Dixon didn’t seem to share my trepidation.
“You think any of the Krauts are still kicking in there? Or did they all go running scared when they heard we were coming?” He punctuated his sentence with a chuckle.
Dixon was the resident comedian of our unit, and there were many times throughout our tour which made me grateful for his characteristic distractions. Even when I wanted to shoot him as the victim of his evil glare. However, standing in front of that terrible, twisted structure had me in no mood for his usual levity. I don’t think anyone else was either. Instead of indulging, I gestured for him to be quiet.
Dixon, to his credit, pressed on as though nothing was wrong, “I mean, come on, at least better us than the Reds. We only put our hands on the men.”
We held little sympathy for the Germans, especially after seeing what they did in the camp, but the reports we heard about the Red Army’s treatment of those on the eastern side, especially the civilians, raised more than a few eyebrows. Reports of rapes, executions, and worse troubled even the most hardened of us. Dixon’s cracking wise didn’t make anyone feel any better about any of it.
“Honestly Dix, would you shut the fuck up?” Corporal Thomas Ritter snapped. Ritter is the son of a German who moved to the US after the last war. Ritter was never one to be rattled, nor uncertain. A constant coolness under fire was Ritter’s trademark. In many ways, he was our rock. But I had known he was bothered since the camp. His patience had been growing shorter since we left the gates, and he almost came to blows with Dixon the previous day. Even steel has its breaking point.
“What? All I’m saying is that we’re being pretty civil for conquering the country that started all this shit.” Dixon never knew when to shut his mouth.
“And I’m telling you to shut the fuck up.” The ice in Ritter’s tone was more pronounced than usual, and I saw a clenched fist leave his rifle and reach towards his bayonet. I made a soft click with my tongue, and he composed himself.
“Quiet, both of you,” Keller growled as we reached the entrance to the main building. Sergeant Harlan Keller had been in the 222nd longer than any of us. He had hair that was starting to gray around his temples, and a gravelly quality to his voice. He seemed like he had the wisdom of the ages in him, but I don’t think he was any older than twenty-nine by the time our tour ended. Ritter and I both arrived in the unit around the same time, while Dixon only joined us shortly before D-Day. Despite not taking part in the attacks, it was his first taste of the realities of our situation. But Keller had been in the fight since North Africa.
“What are we doing, Sarge?” I had asked, hoping beyond hope it wouldn’t be me going into the building which threatened not to let me leave. Even as I offered silent prayers to remain in the sunlight that still felt too cold, I knew they were in vain.
“Hartmann, you and Ritter take a look. We’ll secure the entrance. Report anything suspicious.”
I affirmed the order despite every bone in my body screaming at me not to. Ritter and I raised our rifles and moved into the building. The patient wing off to the left didn’t raise my suspicions as much as the hallway to the right. A voice in German caught our attention, and I tapped Ritter on the arm and gestured towards the room. He nodded, teeth grit in what I assumed to be a mix of fear and determination. At least that’s what I had felt at that moment.
We followed the hallway into a ransacked lab. Shattered glass glistened on the ground, tossed tables and documents laid where they had fallen, and smoldering piles of paperwork in waste bins told us that people were there not too long ago.
As we made our way towards the doorway to what looked like an operating suite, my right foot kicked something which shifted. An SS officer in a bloodied uniform stared at us, paralyzed with fear in his eyes. His leg was broken at an horrid angle, bone jutting through his uniform trousers, and one arm laid limp against his side with a deep gouge in his shoulder. He began to whisper.
Ritter, through virtue of his parents, spoke fluent German. I had learned quickly, though I could never have hoped to match his skills. While we both listened, I relied on him for most of the translation.
The man told us the nature of that horrid place. When the war had broken out, the sanatorium was used as a field hospital. However, in their bid to win the war and fulfill the promises of the Übermenschen, Himmler had sent SS scientists, doctors, and occult specialists to conduct research. They refined their processes on living and dead victims of the camps we had been liberating in the area, using humans as medical test subjects before throwing them aside. While the war bore on, the patients that would never again be able to see battle became fodder for the research which had occurred in this place.
Ritter pressed the dying officer for more information. I stood guard, my finger on my rifle’s trigger, ready to raise and fire in a split second. The uncomfortable feeling of something else still being in that house of horrors with us pushed adrenaline through my veins. My heart thumped so loudly in my ears, yet I could hear every slight movement as shattered glass and old papers shifted and settled. The darkened hallways and rooms around us looked as though the sun was hung from the rooftops. My senses had been at their highest, and every piece of me was screaming that something was horribly wrong.
The German told us he had been given orders to sanitize this location when Berlin fell and Adolf Hitler committed suicide. For days now, he and his men had been eliminating the remaining prisoners, the researchers, and all records of their findings. It was only a mere few hours before we arrived at the sanatorium which saw the escape of the one who killed the soldiers cleaning up the facility. They were picked off one by one.
While Ritter pleaded with the man to give us more, he breathed his last, head rolling over and dragging the upper part of his body with it. I reached for his eyes, to close them as a sign of respect, when something crashing and voices came from the next room. I hadn’t given the thought to it at the time, but I had executed my fair share of Nazis in cold blood after they had surrendered. I was never proud of it, but I never regretted it either. War changes the rules, and civilized people on the other side of the divide never had the knowledge with which we became so intimately acquainted. Perhaps I went to offer some recognition of the fallen officer’s humanity, despite him being a true believer in the monstrous ideology which had laid waste to the whole continent. Perhaps it was a small act of mercy because anything which could shock and scare and horrify a fanatical adherent to that warped system of beliefs was probably more horrible than anything I could have imagined.
It would only be moments before I would see how correct that thought was.
I silently gestured for Ritter to move towards the next room with me. Our rifles were raised, and we crept forward as slowly as we could. We shifted our weight as best we could, though the crunching of glass underneath our boots threatened to give us away. I had hoped not to fire my rifle again before I shipped home, yet I was prepared in that moment to pull the trigger as many times as it took to kill whatever was on the other side of the threshold.
As we neared the door, a man roughly six feet and eight inches tall came into view. He had his back to us, a slight hunch. In his outstretched right arm was another SS officer held by the neck. The German pled for his life in a choked whisper, but the creature chose not to hear. It held the German as if he weighed almost nothing, and the act of killing him was boring. Eventually, boredom won, and the figure snapped the soldier’s neck and tossed the body aside.
“Freeze,” I barked, putting my limited German to use. “Turn around! Slowly!”
“Your pronunciation needs work,” the thing replied in impeccable English as he turned and stepped into the fragmented light streaming in from a shattered skylight high above. I hadn’t noticed the floorplan until I needed an excuse not to look at the creature, but the three stories above us had a lightwell into this particular space. It illuminated a room of chemical vats, operating tables, and all sorts of horrific equipment now torn to pieces.
I steeled my mind and returned my attention to the creature in front of us. He’s well-built and muscular, though that’s as far as the compliments would go. His face was stitched together from two or three different ones, and similar seams ran throughout what was visible from under the dark rags draped around him. His teeth were mismatched. But his eyes were the most horrific part. His eyes are a sickly, yellowed, bloodshot, reptilian pair of orbs which have haunted my nightmares worse than anything I saw at the camp. The normally unflappable Ritter shuddered at the sight.
The tall figure chuckled. “So, you doughboys are here. For me?” He kept his composure remarkably well, considering he had two rifles pointed at him. The smirk plastered across its face at the thought of us coming to kill him convinced me he knew there was no way we could. Ritter resettled his weapon in his grasp, and I kept a finger on my trigger.
“What’s your name?” I struggled to keep the shakiness out of my voice. My heart started beating even faster than it had when we first entered this nightmarish hellscape. The smirk on its face deepened a slight bit. I now realize it was toying with me, daring me to strike so it would have an excuse to tear my guts out.
“That is a difficult question. You may call me Monty,” it responded with a sick easiness in his voice, as though we were meeting for cocktails. “Allow me give you my abridged autobiography.” His smirk softened into a twisted sort of grin which did not inspire any confidence as to our safety.
“David, remember the reports of a seven foot tall thing tearing across the western front? I think we’re looking at it,” Ritter commented to me in a low tone.
“Congratulations, you guessed correctly!” Monty quipped, clapping his hands in celebration. It continued to mock us with its body language. “I was born, right here in this lab. Well, assembled is a more appropriate word. Doctor Franz Stern created me as part of his Übermensch project. Using research from Doctor Josef Mengele, and with the blessing of Reichsführer Himmler himself, Doctor Stern set out to create the ultimate human.”
“How come you look like somebody sewed a bunch of corpses together?” Ritter demanded. The ice cold Ritter I had fought through France and Germany with had returned to make what he believed to be his last stand. My grip around my rifle rightened, and I had kept it trained on Monty’s head the entire time.
“Honestly gentlemen, if I wished you dead, you would, quite simply, be dead,” Monty noted off handedly. The ease with which he spoke was the most disconcerting part of the whole affair. A thing covered in the blood of Hitler’s most devout fighters spoke to us with the easygoing tone of a sleazy salesman. The lack of congruence coiled around my heart like a serpent trying to kill its prey. However, Ritter and I both lowered our weapons.
Monty cleared its throat and continued. “Stern was quite successful. I exceeded all expectations as the proof of his genius. However, he could not control me. I killed two lab assistants upon my first awakening.”
“When did that happen?” I questioned.
“About nine months ago. Since then, I’ve had to teach myself everything I know. What a sad mess you all made across Europe. Pity the earth sees so much spilled blood.” The casual way Monty referred to the unprecedented loss of life from the war still sends chills up my spine. If I think about it for a moment too long, I can hear the memories of that horrendous voice as if were speaking to me right then and there.
“So then why have you been knocking out the Germans as well as our guys?” Ritter’s question was legitimate enough, but the sharp tone betrayed his desire to raise his weapon and end this thing in front of us. I caught his gaze in the corner of my eye, and ever so slightly shook my head. He received the message and eased his stance. A small bit.
“Because they’ve been in my way. When the Soviets started getting too close, he contacted the Americans to save himself and his family. But he forgot about me. You see, Stern branded me a failure. An excellent proof of concept but creating Hitler’s perfect race would need more than just sewing dead pieces of others’ bodies together and breathing consciousness into them with some of the more mystical practices of Himmler’s little circle of lunatics.”
I could not believe the tale Monty was spinning, yet I couldn’t help but hang on to his every word. Monty explained the details behind this project. Hitler sought to create the next evolution of humanity, the perfect Aryan race, without the imperfections. Franz Stern, a brilliant Swiss scientist, wished to use the Nazis’ resources to see if he could create life. The population of the prison camp gave Stern a great deal of material to use in his experiments, though it was members of the SS that provided the last bit of kick with some ritual. After creating life, Stern was to perfect it, and create as many as possible, both to show the supremacy of the Aryan race and to create super soldiers to help turn Germany’s unfortunate tides. When Stern was unable to accomplish the latter goal before the Allies reached his doorstep, he made his preparations to leave.
“I was the only one of my kind, and malformed to boot. I could never hope to represent Hitler’s perfect race. My appearance saw to that. And the fact that I refused to follow their orders made me unsuitable for the battlefield. Thus, the good doctor cast me aside like a broken sandal. So, I resolved to teach him, and his benefactors, a lesson on their lack of manners.” Monty’s words caused Ritter to let out an audible gulp. The same Ritter who stared down a King Tiger tank with nothing a captured Panzerfaust. And won.
“So, you’re planning killing his loved ones out of petty revenge?” I inquired. Monty nodded and grinned that sickening grin once again.
“Wonderful deduction Mister Holmes!” He gave that grim, sinister chuckle once more before he delivered his parting words. “Please, tell your friends if they see the seven foot monster that they best stay away.”
Another patrol of planes flew overhead at that moment. More American forces were reaching the hospital, as I would come to find out afterwards. I wasn’t so certain we’d remain alone with Monty for very long. He had the same belief.
“I appreciate you listening to my story, boys, but I really must be going now.” With that, he turned around and disappeared into the darkness of the hospital’s haunted hallways. Only when the shadows had completely swallowed him did Ritter and I breathe again.
“I think my nightmares are going to be filled with that thing instead of the living dead we saw in Dachau,” Ritter commented, his voice shaken by the eerie sights and frightening tale we had just witnessed. I couldn’t help but look over my shoulder every inch of the way. I was convinced that creature would change his mind and decide Ritter and I knew too much, silencing us before we could tell our comrades.
“Should we tell them?” I asked.
“Would they believe us if we did?”
I never answered Ritter’s rebuttal. At the time, I was uncertain, more frightened of the thought of being a target for Monty’s revenge. As time has gone by, I wished I had told everyone. I wished we had gathered the rest of our regiment and gone hunting for that creature and ended its existence. Then, I wished we had done the same thing to Doctor Stern. The thought crossed my mind later as to whether he had made it to Allied lines and was given amnesty in exchange for putting his skills to work. I had heard rumors of other high value Nazi scientists being taken in by Americans with promises of new lives at home in exchange for using their skills. I never learned what happened to Stern, but I hope that he ran into the Soviets first if he encountered Allied forces.
While I ruminated on Stern’s potential fates, Ritter and I continued our rapid return to the front door of the hellish place. The moment we crossed into the sunlight again, I realized the chill the sanatorium had placed on me while inside.
Keller looked at us expectantly upon our return to the sweet embrace of the daylight. Ritter and I summoned our most convincing neutral expressions, though I’m not sure if Keller bought them.
“You two look like you saw a ghost in there,” Dixon commented. Ritter nor I had the mental strength left to tell him to shut up. Thankfully, Dix didn’t push his luck with his contributions. Might have been the only time during the war he picked up on an unspoken cue.
“It is clear?” Keller seemed concerned at the way Ritter and I shared a look of dread before composing ourselves and turning back to the Sergeant.
“Yeah, Sarge,” I answer, “But it wasn’t pretty. We should continue moving.”
There was no need to say anything else.
So this piece also has an interesting backstory. I was in college in the fall of 2018, and for my creative writing class that semester, we had to do a retelling of Frankenstein and read it aloud at the English department’s event celebrating the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein.
I chose to ask the question, “Since Mary Shelley wrote the original about someone who didn’t know any better, how would I tell this story of someone who did know it was unethical and just didn’t care?” From that question, World War II and the twisted science the Nazi regime practiced came to the forefront of my mind, and it evolved into the early version of the story you see here today.
I chose to rewrite and expand this story as a way to offer something spooky today. Happy Halloween!
Ark of the Lost Angels 
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