The Austrian: A War Criminal's Story Read online

  “Stitches are for girls! Leave it alone, and let me sleep. I have an exam tomorrow.”

  Rudolf lost his patience at last and pinned my hand to the bed with his knee, forcing the cloth back onto my face. I scrunched my nose instinctually from the overpowering smell of the alcohol.

  “This is going to be an ugly one,” I heard him mutter under his breath. “How many times did I tell you that fencing is a sober sport?! Idiot!”

  “Whatever,” I replied, yawning. “I still showed him what’s what.”

  “Right.”

  “What? Did I win or did I not win?”

  “It’s not the point.”

  “Sure it is. I always do, drunk or not.”

  Rudolf only sighed in reply and gently turned my face in his hands, positioning the cut side closer to the dim light of the table lamp to inspect it closer. We weren’t allowed to keep any other lights after ten, according to the fraternity house rules. I felt his warm breath on my skin and forced myself to open my eyes.

  “Will you stop staring at it?”

  “I’m a medical student, and you’re making me break my oath to Hippocrates by refusing my help. I can stitch it up myself, you know. Better than the medical ward.”

  “You wish I allowed you to use me as a live doll for your practice, don’t you?” I smirked with sarcasm and closed my eyes, drifting away again.

  “I’ll pay you for it,” he finally said after a pause.

  I opened my eyes again and saw his roguish grin. That son of a bitch knew just the right words to say. And God knows, I’d already blown my monthly allowance even though it was only the second week of April. I eyed him for a little while, trying to decide what I needed more: the money, or a possible blood infection from this doctor apprentice, with his unhealthy obsession of dissecting and sewing back everything he could get his hands on. Finally, I turned with my bruised side towards him, put both hands under my right cheek and muttered, “It’ll cost you two hundred krones. Do whatever you want, just don’t wake me up.”

  “I doubt you’ll be sleeping,” he replied, joyfully jumping off my bed to get his medical case with instruments. “It’s not the most pleasurable, and I admit it, not really a painless procedure.”

  I mumbled a quiet curse; usually fencing cuts were so clean that they didn’t need any stitches. Maybe I really shouldn’t have gotten so drunk, and shouldn’t have allowed my fencing partner to slash me like that, this way I wouldn’t have to pose as a guinea pig for some doubtful medical experiments. But it was too late. The next morning, waiting by the auditorium with a terrible hangover and a throbbing cheek, I caught one of the Slovak students staring at me almost without blinking.

  “Do you like it?” I pointed to the fresh deep cut with black thread pulling its ends together. “Keep staring, and I’ll make you one.”

  My fraternity brothers lifted their heads from their textbooks and papers, and replied with sneers and cheering. All of us honored the oldest tradition of fencing and actively participated in it, and therefore my brothers didn’t look much different from me, some with fresher cuts, and some with healed slashes on their faces. The international students couldn’t quite take it in – why would anyone want to deliberately allow his opponent to scar them when the protection gear could be used – and kept throwing confused and intimidated glances at us. We were especially feared, our fraternity. We were never up to any good, in their eyes that is.

  As for me, I loved my new brothers. Most of them were from well-to-do families; brilliant, charismatic and fearless. And superior. Yes, superior was the right word to describe the mood in every fraternity both in Austria and the Weimar Republic back then, and it was all that damn war’s fault. First of all, the selection to become a member of any fraternity was very strict, since the ones who could pass it received multiple privileges, starting with a very nice fraternity house with spacious, furnished rooms that we were allowed to rent dirt cheap, to the help with placement after the graduation.

  The rule number one for the selection was that the candidate must be of pure Aryan descent. Yes, we, Arminia, were nationalists. And yes, we quite often got into brawls with Communists, who dared to preach their Bolshevik ideas in our beer halls, insisting that all the working class were brothers and needed to unite, kill their oppressors, take away their hard earned money and property, divide it amongst themselves and live in equality. The problem we had with their ideas was that we were the children of that very ‘oppressing’ bourgeois class, which they blamed for all the problems, and we, having suffered no less than everybody else after that devastating war and its consequences, knew that we were most certainly not the problem.

  At first we tried persuasion, but when arguments didn’t work and they kept thumping their chests and trying to out-yell us just because they failed to bring any sensible arguments, then the fights would start. It is quite difficult to try to reason with someone who simply refuses to listen and insists on his point of view, just because he likes it better than yours. But, maybe, that’s what the force is for, and that we were more than happy to offer in spades. I’d say that we easily got into fist fights at least twice a month, and sometimes even more often. And of course my brothers, who were quite fascinated by my fighting skills after the very first brawl we got into, when I singlehandedly threw five communists around like they were spineless kittens, would drag me to every single altercation, planned or not planned.

  We were all good fighters though. It was mandatory in the fraternity. Some of us heard that in the Weimar Republic they were arming their members, buying illegal weapons on the black market, and soon we adopted the idea and became para-military as well, storing weapons under our beds – just in case. We never took them to the beer halls though; nobody needed jail time for shooting some dumb communist in the leg.

  They weren’t noble fighters either, maybe because they belonged to the working class and nobody taught them manners, but they could easily hit you with a chair on the back, if they couldn’t win otherwise. I got hit in the back of my head with a beer mug once. I woke up in the hospital, with a concussion and multiple painful stitches behind my ear. They took the stitches out later, but the hair on that spot never grew back, and just for that I swore to personally strangle every single communist I’d meet in the future. However, one didn’t have a right to blame us for our feisty mood. We were merely a product of those post-war years, confused with the outcome, angry at the world, holding a grudge against the ones who ‘betrayed’ us, and slowly, but with deadly determination, swearing to get rid of our chains and restore our dignity.

  Some of my fellow brothers were several years older than the others, since they gave up their study to go to the front and then couldn’t afford to go back to the university, because they became the only source of income for their fatherless families. The rest of us, who were too young to join the army, always felt guilty for some reason, as if our young age was our fault for not protecting our country the way we should have. We always looked up at our older brothers; their military service made them an undoubtable authority in our eyes. Most of our group leaders were former soldiers, and from day one, when I was nothing but a clueless freshman in the new city on the other side of the country, they were the ones who took me under their wing and taught me unquestionable subordination.

  Other than that, we were all equal. We were almost like a real family, living together in one fraternity house, sharing meals together, helping each other with our studies, passing our free time at games and singing national songs, and certainly fencing. Fencing was not just a sport, it was more of a tradition, the oldest and the most honorable one, which was meant to bring us closer as brothers and teach us bravery, agility, courage and pride. That’s why we didn’t cover our faces, because laughing in the face of danger and allowing the opponent to hit you instead of shying away from his sword, which was sharper than a shaving blade, that’s what made boys into men.

  I was terrified to allow myself to get hit for the first seve
ral months. I was good at fencing, even more than that. My oldest brother, the one who decided to teach me after he saw me dueling several times, used to slap my back every time, and say something like, “You’re good, you devil! But you’re good because of your fear. And it’s not a good thing.”

  At first I couldn’t understand what he meant by it, until one day during our training he took the sword out of my hand and told me to stay still no matter what he did. I obeyed as he brought the sword close to my eyes, to my nose, touched my neck with its tip… but when he swiped it at me, I instinctually jerked my head away.

  “See? You’re afraid of the steel. That’s the only reason you became so damn good, because you’ll do everything to defend yourself. Now, I don’t want you to defend. The weak ones defend. I want you to attack, and attack without fear. You can’t be afraid of being cut. You can’t win a battle without a scratch, and I want you to understand it now, while you’re young.”

  As I stood there, ashamed to admit my weakness, he pulled his shirt out of his pants and revealed an ugly scar on the right side of his chest, the most noticeable one out of a faint spider web of thin white fencing ones on his chest and face.

  “A Brit impaled me on his bayonet during a counterattack. Do you know what I did? I kicked him in the stomach, yanked the damn blade out of my chest, stabbed him with it and threw that goddamn grenade I was holding at the tank after all. I woke up in the field hospital looking like an Egyptian mummy, but the point is, I didn’t run. I didn’t run for cover to one of the trenches, didn’t start calling my mommy or put my hands up like a coward. I fought, and I didn’t care if I died, as long as I died with a wound in my chest and not in my back, running away. Now stand there like a man, and don’t you dare move!”

  I still remember how I rooted my feet to the floor and pressed my tongue against my tightly shut teeth, with horror watching him slowly raise the point of the blade back to my face. He was looking me straight in the eye, and I made myself hold his gaze. It was only the two of us in the gymnasium where he was training me, and if I moved away once again, no one would be a witness to it. Only he and my conscience would call me a coward. He held the sword with a steady hand, before effortlessly turning his wrist, the deadly metal following his swift move. I even fought the instinct to close my eyes shut at the sight of the approaching blade, and only flinched slightly as it cut my skin on my left temple like butter, almost painlessly. I was laughing when he threw his handkerchief at me.

  “That’s it? That was it?”

  “That was it. That was all you were afraid of.”

  He handed me my sword back. “Remember, Ernst, all the fear is in your head. If you get rid of it, you’ll become invincible.”

  I did. After that night some of my brothers refused to duel with me, because I was insane – or drunk – enough to laugh, while purposely lowering my sword when every normal person would do the opposite. And during my first summer break, when I went back to Linz, my poor mother gasped in terror, closing her mouth with her hand at the sight of the results of those duels. Nothing, even my explanation that some students, who didn’t belong to the fraternity but desperately wanted to impress their lady friends, would pay barbers to cut their faces so they’d look like fencing scars, didn’t have any effect on her.

  After two years she got a little bit more used to it, but still wouldn’t miss a chance to wipe a tear and reproach me in ruining ‘my handsome face.’ I don’t think she would bother as much if Werner or Roland would have done the same, I guess I was always her favorite son, and her overprotective attitude was a result of it. This summer, however, my mother met me with deep concern instead of her usual beaming expression on her still youthful face.

  “Erni, Papa is very unwell,” she said right away, after hugging and kissing my face all over, like she always did. “He pretends it’s nothing, but I know it must be his old wounds, which were never treated properly.”

  She was enumerating occasions on which he couldn’t fulfill his duties in the office because of his health, and I started to realize that maybe it was more serious than I hated to admit for the past year, discounting my mother’s concerns which she expressed in her letters as a typical woman’s worrisome nature.

  “I’m afraid that he’ll have to abandon his practice altogether, if it keeps going this way,” she concluded with a heavy sigh, hardly restraining herself from tears.

  “Well, that’s… unfortunate,” I admitted, looking away.

  I knew where she was heading; the same request which she kept putting before me in her letters, and that was to transfer to the faculty of jurisprudence and take up my father’s practice, if his health kept deteriorating. I couldn’t even begin to explain how much I detested law and how boring I found it to be, and how the prospect of such a future was quite undesirable in my eyes.

  “Erni, son, listen to your mother.”

  “Mama, please, I know what you’re going to say, let’s not start,” I pleaded with her, covering my eyes with my hand with a pained expression on my face.

  She knew that Austria was a country without any perspectives toward the nearest future at least, and that getting out of the country was my long-term goal since my high school years, but even though my mother would always allow me to have everything my way, this time she would have none of it.

  “Ernst, you’re our oldest son. If, God forbid, something happens to your father, you are the one who should inherit his practice. I know that you don’t have any particular interest in law, but I’m afraid we don’t have much of a choice in our current situation. You father would be devastated to lose it altogether if you don’t step up and help him with it. I’m begging you, son, be sensible, support him when he needs you the most. You know how he is, he will never ask for help himself, he’s much too proud like his father was, too proud for his own good!” My mother gave me a faint smile, moved her chair closer to mine and took my hands in hers. “Will you do it for him?”

  “But I’m on my third year already… I’ll lose two years of study for nothing this way…” I tried my last argument, hoping that maybe my mother would feel sorry for me like she always did, and would leave me alone.

  Instead, she did the worst possible thing she could – she broke into tears.

  “Erni, don’t you think it breaks my heart to ask you for it? I restrained myself from saying anything at all in my first letters only because I didn’t want to upset you with our misfortunes… Papa’s health is much worse than I had told you before. He had to be hospitalized for a few days several times because of those pieces of shrapnel that keep moving in his chest… The doctors say if one of those pieces hit one of the major arteries or his heart, he can die! And they can’t operate on him because there are too many of those tiny pieces, and they would have to cut his whole chest open. I am so afraid that if something happens to him… I tried to tone it down in my letters not to upset you too much… I only wish the best for you. You know how much I love you! You were always more precious to me than life itself, Erni. Do you know that I almost died bringing you to this world? And I told the doctor, don’t you worry about me, just save my darling baby, that’s all I care about…”

  “Oh, Mama! That’s just not fair! You’re blackmailing me!” I moaned and hid my face on the table, covering my head with both hands. She knew I couldn’t stand her tears, but it was the last straw, that last thing she said just to instill more guilt into me than I already had, for being a careless son, who had finally obtained freedom and for once was enjoying himself like any other young man should.

  “No, I’m not. I’m sorry, I’m not,” she said quietly, and drew her body in, sharply regaining her composure. I felt her hands stroking my hair. “I’m sorry, I only said that because I wanted you to know how much I love you. I want you to be happy, son. You can’t do wrong in my eyes. You’re right, I shouldn’t have asked you that, it wasn’t fair. You go ahead and do what you want to do, you want to travel, I understand and I will always support you. We’
ll ask Werner to enter law school. We’ll figure something out. I will never forgive myself if I become the reason why you became what you hate to be.”

  I lifted my head and looked into her loving eyes. My mother was the only woman who knew how to control me through the biggest power she possessed – her love. What all the pleading, begging, tears and reproaches couldn’t do throughout the whole year and this particular conversation, her motherly, all-forgiving, unconditional love did the trick. She blessed me to be free, but after that all of a sudden I couldn’t find the strength to leave her when she needed me so.

  I looked out of the window of the living room longingly, as if it was the glass that separated me from that life I wished for and which I was never going to have now, looked back at my mother and kissed her on her forehead.

  “I’ll send a letter to the dean tomorrow, asking for a transfer to the law faculty. And another one to my brothers in Arminia. I’m sure with their influence, it’ll be a done deal by September.” Her bright smile and the adoration with which she looked at me, made it almost worth it. I rubbed her back slightly after she threw her hands around my neck and hugged me tightly. “Don’t you worry about a thing, Mama. I’ll take care of everything.”

  _______________

  Nuremberg prison, January 1946

  “Everyone’s taking care of their cell except for you, Mr. Ribbentrop.”

  Sweeping the floor with the broom that the guards provided us with twice a week to clean up, I smiled at the all-too-familiar reproaches that the former Minister of Foreign Affairs was always subjected to – not that they had any effect on him. Suffering from severe insomnia and, therefore, sleeping no more than three or four hours a day, Ribbentrop seemed to have learnt how to ignore everything around him – the ongoing tribunal hearings, guards, prison – and could lock himself in his own private world. The constant lack of sleep painted black half-moons under his eyes, and I caught him quite a few times sleeping shamelessly during the court procedures as well. When one of the American prosecutors barked something especially loud he’d wake up and slowly circle the room with his bleak eyes, frowning, as if trying to remember where he was and why. But, as soon as the sad reality consumed him once again, he’d only sigh quietly and close his eyes again.