The Living Dead 2

For the next several months we were collecting the breath and sweat of subjects into vials, injecting the vial contents into the mass spectrometer, and determining what was there. Then we concentrated the effluvia and tried it on the tote Mä

In October of 1942, we hit on a combination of aldehydes and ketones the tote Mä

We had proved our attractant in the laboratory by the end of October of 1942. But the war appeared to us to be going so well, our little military experiment would never be needed. We would win the Battle of Stalingrad in a month and concentrate on the western front.

That changed in November.

The Battle of Stalingrad evolved into what I had feared: a siege over a Russian winter. The Red Army began their counter-offensive along with the winter. Like Napoleon, the German army was stuck.

The Germans lost ground in other places. Willem suggested if I could hurry up the program, I should.

We were in part saved by problems encountered by the Daimler-Benz engineering team. Developing a deployment methodology had been proved harder than the engineers had foreseen. They had broken the problem into three parts. The first, and most easily solved, was how to restrain and cushion the tote Mä

But once the secret was out and the Allies were looking for tote Mä

These issues so dwarfed our own minor problems that we were given, for the moment, no close scrutiny and I had the opportunity to address shortcomings in our own production.

In February 1943, Russia won the Battle of Stalingrad. Willem warned us that we would have to expect to send tote Mä

I went home and spent a week with Elsa and Helmut. Each morning I sat down and drew up production schedules, scrapped them, smoked cigarettes, and tried again. In the afternoon, I played with my son. It was cold in Krakow and with the war not going very well, heating fuel was hard to come by. I was able to requisition what we needed due to my position but even I couldn’t get coal for the theater or the restaurants. Often, we spent intimate evenings together with just ourselves for company. I didn’t mind. Elsa and Helmut were company enough.

All that spring Willem told us of defeat after defeat-I don’t think we were supposed to know what he told us. I think we served as people in whom he could confide as his world crumbled. Germany retreated in Africa. The Warsaw Uprising. The Russian advance.

I buried myself in my work. I resolved that if there were to be a failure in the program, it would not be where I had control. Production was, in my opinion, our weak point. Weber’s approach to creating tote Mä

I came to the conclusion that our production schedule had to revolve around the progression of the disease. For three days there was a strong euphoria. Often, the new hosts tried to kiss anyone who came near them, presaging the biting activity of the fully infected toter Ma

The coma period lasted as long as five days, though we saw it end as soon as three. Arousal was sudden, so often precipitated by a nearby possible victim that I came to the conclusion that after three days, the toter Ma

After that, a toter Ma

Therefore, we required an incubation period of six days, minimum. Effectiveness could not be counted upon after eight weeks. This gave us a target window. If we wanted, for example, to deploy on June first we had to have infected our tote Mä

The first order of business was to synchronize the incubation period. I performed a series of experiments that showed that, as I suspected, once the coma period had been entered the toter Ma

The new Chief Medical Officer, Mengele, delivered the necessary insight. Zyklon B was the answer. Though the standard Zyklon B dose would kill the subject quickly, a reduced dose weakened the subject sufficiently to allow infection almost instantly. Commander Hoess was able to supply me with enough experimental data that I could proceed with my own tests. We introduced the gas, waited for ten minutes, then sprayed the subjects with an infecting agent. The remaining three days were sufficient for subjects to recover from the gas just in time to provide healthy hosts for the organisms. This method had the added bonus that the same production chambers could serve two purposes.

By November, when the march up Italy by the Allies had begun and Germany seemed to be losing on all fronts, we could incubate as many as a thousand at a time, six days after exposure. The trains supplying the rest of the camp came in full and left empty so by using the empty trains for transport, we could send tote Mä