The Austrian: A War Criminal's Story Read online

  I kissed the rabbit for the last time and lowered him to the ground. He sat still without moving, still looking at me. Realizing that soon my grandfather, or my father, might come here looking for me, wondering what was taking me so long, I started clapping my hands and stomping my feet in order to chase the rabbit away. It worked, and after the first uncertain leap, he quickly picked up pace and soon disappeared in the field. I quickly wiped my tears, tore the trap apart, and threw the parts in different directions as far as I could. Later I would lie – for the first time I dared to do so – to my grandfather that someone broke the trap, and he blamed the neighbors’ kids for it. I could never eat rabbit again.

  _______________

  British prison, May 1945

  “Eat what we give you, it’s not the Hotel Ritz, it’s a jail. You should be grateful we give you food at all, you bloody Nazi.”

  The guard slammed the little window of my cell door as I stood, frowning at the plate in my hands, with what they called food. I was starving after a long campout in the mountains with my loyal SS adjutants, where we had nothing to eat except for French bonbons. We had almost ran out of them right before the Americans came to arrest me. But, at least we had a couple of cases of champagne and a whole load of confiscated cigarettes that I stole from the RSHA storage before taking off to Austria. Being the Chief of the RSHA, or the Reich Main Security Office, had its perks. No one said a word when we were carrying the cases out. I was climbing the walls without my cigarettes here.

  I put the plate down on the very shaky table, sat on a little stool, which made a threatening screech under my 220 pound body, and smelled the contents of the bent aluminum plate. I wasn’t even sure what it was, and pondered the possibility of my hospitable guards spitting in it prior to bringing it to my cell. The two pieces of bread didn’t look as suspicious as the brown bean liquid in the plate, and I started stuffing them into my mouth with a hearty appetite. The bean soup went straight to the toilet. I wasn’t that hungry to eat food they used to serve to swine in our farm.

  I smiled when I remembered how she had rejected the pork chops in one of the best restaurants in occupied Poland that I took her to.

  “What are you, Jewish?” I raised my eyebrow, watching her push her plate away. She couldn’t be Jewish, I was sure of it back then. I looked more Jewish than she did. She was a breathtaking Aryan beauty with golden hair and sky blue eyes. A real Prussian princess, with perfectly straight posture and the manners of royalty. Annalise Friedmann.

  “I thought we straightened this question out during our last meeting in the Gestapo jail, no?” She mocked my raised brow. “But if you have to know, I don’t eat dirty animals, that’s all.”

  “A pig is a dirty animal just because it rolls around in dirt? I know several of who do that when they get drunk.”

  She giggled, licked her soft lips and took a sip from her glass, which I continued to generously refill with champagne. She was still a little nervous in my company, and it seemed like alcohol was putting her more at ease. It was quite understandable for her to be nervous when having an early dinner with her former interrogator from the Gestapo, even when that interrogator had cleared her of all charges.

  “No, Herr Gruppenführer. A pig is a dirty animal because it consumes its own… you know what. And I don’t want to eat something that might have that… you know what, inside its body, no matter how well it’s cooked.”

  My hand, holding a piece of pork stabbed on the fork, froze an inch from my mouth. Under her very amused gaze I slowly put it down and pushed the plate away, just like she did before.

  “Thank you for ruining my dinner, Frau Friedmann, very nice of you.”

  “You can always eat beef, Herr Gruppenführer. Or fish, or chicken.”

  “Yes, I think I’m done with pork from now on.”

  “Be careful with that, someone might think that you’re a Jew.”

  Even though I playfully squinted my eyes at her, I noticed with relief that she wasn’t afraid of me anymore, or at least not as much as in the beginning of the evening. As a matter of fact, my usual charms worked, and she even started flirting with me, still a little unsure, still slightly blushing both from champagne and my too straightforward gaze, but she did.

  I didn’t want to let her go that evening. It was only the third time that I had seen her, and the first time when I could actually get to know her, not in an interrogatory sense, but in the normal, human way, where she’d tell me about herself because she wanted to, and not because she was afraid that I’d start torturing her if she didn’t answer.

  She accidently brushed her foot on my ankle under the table, quickly smiling with embarrassment and apologizing. When she became distracted by her coffee I cautiously pushed my legs even further towards her chair so she’d do it again. She was exciting me, even in such a small, innocent way, and I already knew after that that I’d make her mine. Maybe for one night only, maybe for a longer period of time until I’d get tired of her like I always got tired of all my women… I had no idea back then that I’d find myself in this British dungeon because of her. I smiled at the thought of how much she was worth it.

  _______________

  Linz, Upper Austria, October 1913

  “Ernst, let’s go! She’s not worth it!”

  Despite Hannes yanking my sleeve, I stopped, watching three older students, who had encircled a girl, quite obviously bothering her.

  “Show us where you hide it!” One of the boys tried to grab her jacket, but the girl swiftly moved to one side, just to bump into another boy.

  “We know it’s somewhere under your clothes!” He grabbed the hem of her long black skirt, but she pulled it out of his hands.

  “Stop it with your idiotic jokes!” the girl snapped at them angrily. “You know perfectly well that I don’t have any gold on me! Leave me alone!”

  “Just give it to us and we will!” the third one chimed in, the tallest of the three, his voice making awkward transitions from lower to higher tones. He was probably the oldest of them too, maybe pushing thirteen or fourteen. I was a day shy of ten, but only slightly shorter than him.

  “Ernst, let’s go!” My classmate pulled on my sleeve again. “I know them, those guys are trouble! Besides, there’s nothing you can do against three mid-graders! Let’s go!”

  I frowned, thinking over the situation. Hannes was right, there was no doubt about it, and it only seemed logical for us to turn around and go about our business. But I was raised in an environment where men always respected and protected women, maybe because all of our men were so big and strong that they considered it their own knight’s code, maybe because they kept passing it from father to son, I don’t know. But what I do know, is that no one ever laid a hand on a woman in our family, and never disrespected their wife with a curse word. Therefore, the decision, no matter how illogical it was from Hannes’s point of view, came to me as clear as day. I confidently walked over to the mid-graders around the girl and grabbed the oldest one’s jacket, as he once again tried to pull up the girl’s skirt, looking for that mysterious ‘gold.’

  “Didn’t you hear what she said?!” I yelled to his face as loudly as I could, even though in my calm old farmland I’d never even seen a fight, leave alone participating in one. Elementary school here in Linz was also relatively calm, and the closest thing to a fight was me slapping Hannes’s hand on the second day of school, when he tried to grab one of my lunch sandwiches. “Leave her alone!”

  The leader of the group yanked his hand free and looked me up and down, stepping forward to almost touch my nose with his.

  “Look who’s here,” he hissed with a sarcastic smile on his pimpled face. “Are we bothering your little girlfriend? Maybe you have some gold on you too?”

  “I don’t have any gold,” I replied, confused about the gold he was talking about and why he assumed that the girl was my girlfriend. But, I could deal with those questions later - now I had to concentrate on not backing up. I made my best a
ngry face and continued firmly, “And she’s not my girlfriend. But you leave her alone now, or else!”

  “Or else what?”

  The three of them were encircling me now, but at least the girl was free to go, and so she did, quickly picking up her skirt and running away from the front yard of the girls’ school, which neighbored our boys’ school.

  “Or else I’ll beat you up!” I thrust my chin forward in confirmation of my intentions, even though I didn’t have the slightest idea of how to throw a punch.

  “You’ll beat me up, you little shit?” With those words the tallest one shoved me in the chest, and I unwillingly stepped back, hardly keeping my balance.

  “Yeah, show him, Barney!” The two other boys started whistling and cheering, stepping aside and giving room to their leader. A small crowd of students started gathering around us, anticipating a fight.

  “You’ll beat me up?!” He almost spit out the last words and shoved me again, but this time not only did I not step back, I shoved him back with such force that he staggered back, tripped over a stone and fell to the ground.

  That’s when I first experienced it, what my mother and grandmother always spoke so condemningly about as if it was a family curse in our clan – the infamous Kaltenbrunner rage. It made everyone around fear the male members of our family and step away at the very first sign of an approaching storm. As I found out later that day, it was by all means not a pretty sight.

  I didn’t hear anything around me, only the blood pulsating violently in my ears. Blinded by an uncontrollable rage, I charged at my aim, who was still laying on the ground and looking at me with his eyes wide open in awe. At that moment no thoughts were left in my mind, except for one: I wanted to kill him. Physically kill him. Make him stop breathing.

  My fists were doing the job without my brain involved. After I sensed the metallic smell of blood from his broken lips and nose, the rage only intensified, and even his friends couldn’t pull me away from the moaning boy. Only when the headmaster ran out to the screams outside and dragged me, still swinging right and left, away from him, he was saved.

  Not realizing who was holding my collar, I swung at the headmaster too, barely missing his jaw by an inch. After that I immediately received a couple of hard kicks, and smacks on the back of my head, and was dragged by the ear to the headmaster’s office, where he didn’t forget to whack me several times across the back with his wooden pointing rod, just to teach me a lesson about how to throw punches at an authority figure.

  I didn’t feel any pain when he hit me. I was actually smiling at the thought that I had just won my very first fight, and for the first time I realized what an immense power I had in my hands, even if they were still small. I felt strong and powerful. It felt good.

  “Are you smiling?! You’re smiling at me?!” The headmaster’s voice sounded very far away, as if I was floating somewhere above my body, bathing in some unexplainable euphoria. “Did you see what you did to that boy’s face?! His own mother won’t recognize him now! You wait till I get your father here, see what he does to you!”

  However, my father, who almost ran all the way from his law office to the school after a boy was sent to tell him that I was in a fight, didn’t seem to side with the headmaster on the matter.

  “My son is exceptionally well-behaved. I know that I raised him well, and I raised him to be a good, respectful, young man. He wouldn’t start a fight without a reason.” My father turned to me, sitting on one of the squeaky Viennese chairs in the headmaster’s office. “Ernst, why did you start the fight?”

  “I didn’t,” I answered honestly. “He started first. He and his friends were bothering one of the girls, pulling up her skirt and yanking on her jacket, so I told them to leave her alone. And then he pushed me. So I pushed him back. He fell… and then…”

  I could hardly remember what happened ‘then,’ so I only looked at my bruised knuckles and hands, covered in a thin film of dried blood.

  “So my son steps up for a girl, beats up a bully, and you want to exclude him from school?! For protecting a weak, innocent girl from an older and stronger boy? That’s the only right thing to do?! And I’m sorry, but what if we suggest that your wife or your daughter gets surrounded by some crooks on the street with God knows what intentions, wouldn’t you want someone to protect them and teach those bastards a lesson? Or would you prefer them to do whatever they want and leave unpunished?”

  I grinned at the sight of the headmaster’s opened mouth. He hadn’t taken into consideration that my father was a lawyer, and a good one, so making speeches and bringing arguments, which needed no discussion, was his greatest talent. Besides, he was right; I did the right thing, as it seemed to me at least. I didn’t feel guilty, that’s for sure.

  The question of expelling me wasn’t a question anymore. Especially after my father mentioned that the editor of a local newspaper would make a juicy story out of this. The headmaster ended up apologizing to my father for not looking into things as he should have. My father was that good.

  On our way home he shook my hand, very firmly, as if I was an adult, and said, “I’m very proud of you, son. You did the right thing, and you weren’t afraid to face an enemy, who was older and bigger than you. That’s where true manhood is, Ernst, when you go against the strong ones, not the weak ones. Always protect the weak, and especially women. We are responsible for them, because they can’t protect themselves. You understand?”

  “Yes, Father.”

  “Good. And never lose a fight. Always fight till your last breath, to your death, but never step back, never give up, no matter how strong and powerful your enemy is.”

  “I will, Father.”

  “Good. I can be tough on you sometimes, but it’s for your own good, son. I want you to grow up strong and fearless, like all men in our family have always been.”

  I nodded. I don’t remember him ever saying that he loved me, but in moments like that, I knew how much he did.

  Chapter 2

  British prison, June 1945

  “You know how much she loves you, right?”

  I swallowed hard and pressed my jaws together. He knew all the pressure points, this new one, so polished, well-mannered and composed, unlike my previous interrogators. But this one had a big advantage: he knew about her. My Annalise. My hands started slightly shaking, and I clasped them together, until I saw my knuckles turn white. I tried not to look him in the eye.

  “Mr. Kaltenbrunner?”

  “It’s Dr. Kaltenbrunner,” I corrected him out of habit. To my British guards I wasn’t even ‘Mr. Kaltenbrunner.’ If I was just ‘Kaltenbrunner,’ it was a very good day. Even when I was a ‘bloody Nazi bastard,’ even then it was a good day. I don’t want to bring up what I was addressed as on bad days.

  “I’m sorry, Dr. Kaltenbrunner.” The American agent from the Office of Strategic Services, or simply the OSS, who introduced himself as agent Foster, pulled his thin-framed glasses back onto the bridge of his nose. I didn’t detect any sarcasm in his voice as he said it. “Would you like a cigarette?”

  The familiar and comforting smell of tobacco, from the opened cigarette case that he held in front of me, pooled my mouth with saliva. I used to smoke two and sometimes even three packs a day, but since they brought me here no one had offered me a single drag. They knew it was a weakness of mine, that smoking for me was as essential as breathing, and would purposely torment me by enjoying a cigarette in front of me, without ever offering me one. Maybe they waited for me to start begging, just to laugh in my face and refuse. But I wasn’t going to beg anybody for anything. I would bite my nails to blood when alone in my cell, I would inhale greedily the faint remains of the smoke that the guard by my cell was exhaling, but I would never humiliate myself by begging.

  Now it was different. The American offered me a cigarette himself, and I slowly stretched my hand to his case, trying not to look too eager. He was watching me with interest, as if studying me, my movements, and my facial
expression. I had to really watch myself with this one. I nodded in gratitude after he helped me with his lighter, and took a long drag that I had been craving so much. I almost liked the American now. He smiled at me politely. I returned the smile.

  “Dr. Kaltenbrunner, your life is in your hands. And from what I’ve heard from Annalise, you’re not a criminal. You just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. She told me that you received a military order to accept the position of being the Chief of the RSHA, after Heydrich got killed.”

  “That’s right. And Reichsführer Himmler promised me that I would be relieved from the office after the end of the war.”

  “Unfortunately, this is not what our allies, and let’s be honest, even my own government, think.”

  Agent Foster fixed his grey, intelligent eyes on mine. I laughed quietly. He slightly tilted his head to one side, observing me with curiosity.

  “Pardon me, doctor, did I say something funny?”

  Even now he didn’t sound sarcastic or threatening. Just inquiring, thinking that maybe I had misinterpreted his words. After all, English wasn’t my first language, and even though I spoke it quite well and did not require an interpreter (agent Foster’s request, again), he thought that I might have misunderstood him.

  “No, no, not at all.” I couldn’t contain a chuckle again. “It’s just… we invented it. The whole procedure, the scheme, according to which you’re working with me now. It was thought of by us, the Gestapo. First Heydrich, and then me.”

  “I don’t quite follow, Dr. Kaltenbrunner.” Instead of frowning, the American smiled wider and looked at me with even bigger interest.

  “The stick and carrot method. It was invented by General Heydrich for the treatment of the population in his Bohemia-Moravia Protectorate. If they didn’t understand the ‘carrot’ – the good treatment that they will receive if they comply - then we give them the ‘stick’ – hanging that is, in his terms. And when I took over the position of being the Chief of the RSHA, I suggested to the Chief of the Gestapo, Müller, to use this method during the interrogations, instead of just the ‘stick’ that his butchers loved to use so much. Quite often literally.” I nodded and smiled. “So yes, agent Foster. The whole idea behind the evil British SOE team making my life a living hell for the past couple of weeks, and now you, so kind and sympathetic, appearing out of the blue to offer me my salvation – that was invented by us. That’s what made me laugh. I’m sorry, I just never thought that I’d find myself on the other side of the table. But I must admit, I’m proud of my invention. It does work well. I almost feel like being cooperative with you. So what is it you want from me?”