The Austrian: A War Criminal's Story Read online

  “There aren’t too many to know,” Dalia chuckled.

  “Yes, you’re right. Well, maybe we should tell them.”

  “Yes, we should.”

  Speaking about our families, brothers and sisters, I hadn’t noticed that we had stopped in front of a big and a very nice house, twice the size of the one where I lived.

  “That’s it, we’re here.”

  Dalia turned to me and extended her delicate hand. I shook it with a smile and nodded at the house. “You live here?”

  “Yes, why?”

  “It’s a very nice house.”

  “Thank you. You should come by for dinner one day. Maybe with your parents. When our fathers become friends.”

  “Yes, that would be nice,” I replied. We stood near the front porch smiling at each other awkwardly, until Dalia nodded at me once again and ran up the stairs to the front door.

  “See you tomorrow after school?” she asked, after knocking on the door.

  “Yes. Goodbye, Dalia!”

  “Goodbye, Ernst!”

  Chapter 3

  Nuremberg prison, October 1945

  “Hello, Annalise,” I whispered, taking my most precious possession out of the inner pocket of my jacket: a simple black and white picture that made me burst into tears when agent Foster handed it to me two months ago.

  I always liked his unexpected visits, and honestly speaking, was always looking forward to our long conversations, even though the question he came to ask me was always the same: where are Bormann and Müller? The American knew that I had that information, he felt it in his gut like any good intelligence agent would, but he still couldn’t get it out of me.

  Another reason I was waiting so anxiously for him was that Annalise’s husband Heinrich was working for the OSS office in New York, and therefore agent Foster was in constant contact with their family. He always patiently answered all my questions about Annalise and our son, Ernie, but that humid August afternoon he brought me a present.

  “She asked me to give you something. I shouldn’t have agreed, but…” He sighed and shook his head. “What can I say, I guess I have a soft spot for the two of you.”

  I craned my neck as he put his hand in his inner pocket, and produced a small photograph. I held my breath as he contemplated whether he should give it to me. All I could see was the blank back side of it. I shifted in my seat impatiently.

  “Try to keep it away from everybody’s eyes, will you?” he finally said, putting the picture face down on the table and sliding it over to me. “If somebody asks, tell them it’s your brother’s wife and your nephew.”

  I carefully picked up the photo and felt my heart squeeze to the size of a tiny dot. It was her, my Annalise, with a halo of blond hair around her angelic face, holding our son on her lap, his tiny hands wrapped around the glass milk bottle she was feeding him with. She was looking at him with such indescribable love that it was causing me almost physical pain to think that I’d never be able to see them, never be able to sit with her in a park like that, never be able to watch her feed our son…

  Ernie, our son. My son. Agent Foster didn’t lie when he said that he looked just like me. He did. He was so different from his mother, with his big brown eyes and dark hair. I clenched my jaw and wiped a tear, then another one, and then completely buried my face in my hands, in my despair forgetting about the American sitting across the table from me, the guards outside, and God, who had turned his face away from me a long time ago. One thought only was on my mind: I would never see my son. I would never see both of them. I would die here, never able to tell them how much I loved them.

  I looked at this picture every single day, at every chance I had. And when I wasn’t alone, it was still there, in my inner pocket, right next to my heart. I studied it so well that I could draw an exact copy of it just from my memory. That little photograph that she sent to me with agent Foster was the last tiny piece of sanity still bringing me back to life, when I was ready to give up on everything and master a hanging rope out of a towel, just like Robert Ley, the former head of the Labor Front, recently did here, in Nuremberg. But how could I abandon the two of them, after agent Foster delivered me a message from her, just words, since the note would compromise the both of us.

  “She asked me to tell you that she loves you very much. She says that she’s always thinking of you and wishes she could be with you. She was asking you to forgive her for everything.”

  “You’re not guilty of anything, my love,” I whispered to the picture before kissing it and putting it back into my hiding place. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me. I have nothing to forgive you for.”

  _______________

  Linz, October 1913

  “Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,” I repeated the phrase my mother taught me only minutes ago, before nudging me toward a draped confession booth.

  I didn’t understand the whole idea behind making confessions secretive, at least in this church. It was so small, and with hardly twenty people sitting through the mass, and me, being the only young boy amongst them, there would surely be no secret confession made to the priest that no one could not already overhear. Neither did I feel that I had committed a sin of any kind to begin with, but my mother wouldn’t listen to any arguments.

  “What is it that you’ve done, my son?”

  The priest’s voice was calm and mild, just like his whole manner and face during the service. Unlike our old priest, back at the farm, who would spray his saliva and shake his fists, promising eternal hell for all sinners, this one was far more liberal. In fact, he never mentioned hell once in his speech today. He mostly spoke of compassion. I actually liked him, that kind man in his early forties, speaking so softly but engagingly at the same time that everyone was afraid to move, so as not to miss a single word.

  I looked at the mosaic floor under my feet and sighed. “I beat somebody up, Father.”

  I expected to hear a long speech about how bad it was and how anger leads to hell – something that our old priest used to say to my father, which made the latter eventually give up on the Catholic Church, and the institution in general, but Father Wilhelm only smiled slightly behind the carved wooden mesh.

  “Did you have a good reason for it?”

  “I suppose so, Father. These boys were bothering a girl from the school next to mine, and I stepped up to help her.”

  “That’s not a sin then, is it?” I could see him smile through the mesh and couldn’t help but smile myself. He was talking nothing like the way the priests that I was used to spoke.

  “My mother thinks it is.”

  “Well, how about we tell your mother that I made you read Pater Noster five times, and now you’re forgiven?”

  I tried my best to conceal a wide grin on my face, just like Father Wilhelm on the other side. “Thank you, Father.”

  “You’re welcome, son. And don’t be afraid to come back when you get into trouble again. I’m always here.”

  Still smiling, I lowered my head as he blessed me through the mesh. “I will, Father.”

  However, the idea of visiting a spiritual father didn’t seem like a good one to my biological father, who met us at home with his hands on his hips.

  “Why would you even think of dragging the kid to the church in the first place, Therese?! Don’t you have anything better to do?”

  “I wanted him to realize that what he did was a bad thing and make sure that he wouldn’t do it again.”

  “Right, and the fellow in the black robe, who’s probably molested every second choir boy, is just the right man to teach him all the ‘good things!’”

  “What’s ‘molested?’” Werner, my eight year old brother, picked his head up from his homework.

  “That’s what’s going to happen to all of you, if your mother keeps taking you to see her new favorite priest.”

  “His name is Father Wilhelm, and he seemed nice.” I shrugged.

  “I’m sure he did.” My father
gave me a stern look. “Did he offer you candy and make you sit on his lap during the confession?”

  “Hugo!” My mother slapped the table in indignation. “Will you stop it?! Father Wilhelm is a wonderful priest, I asked around about him, and nobody ever has a single complaint on his account. Everybody likes him.”

  My father only crossed his arms over his chest and smirked. “I’m sorry, darling, but I want my sons to like girls, not priests.”

  “Ernst has a girlfriend.” Werner giggled without lifting his eyes from the textbook, and he had to duck under his desk after I grabbed a plum from the platter on the table and hurled it at his head.

  “Shut up!”

  “Ernst!” My mother shrieked. “Mind your language!”

  My father just laughed and messed my hair. “Now who’s your little girlfriend?”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.” I gave a menacing look to my younger brother, who showed me his tongue. He’s going to have it big time, after we’re alone in our room, I thought.

  “She so is, she so is!” Werner obviously wasn’t intimidated by the menacing face I made at him, and kept mischievously smiling, selling me out to my own father. “They’re always together! He even helps her carry her books home every day!”

  “You better shut it, Werner, or else!” I warned him once again, but, encouraged by my father’s interest, he gave me a ‘try-and-stop-me’ look and started singing one of the teasing songs that girls usually sang in the school yard whenever they saw a boy and a girl together. “Ernst and Dalia sitting on a tree…”

  “Dalia? That’s her name?”

  I was glad that my father’s question interrupted my brother’s teasing, because I was ready to kill him right there and then.

  “Yes, why?” I turned away, and, busy with stuffing my pockets with plums on which I was going to snack on later while playing outside with my friends, I didn’t notice my father’s stern look.

  “It’s a strange name for a girl.”

  I shrugged.

  “Her father is a lawyer too.” For some reason I wanted him to like Dalia, and thought that mentioning that her father was working in the same field would help the case. “He’s working across the street from you.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “Franz Katzman.”

  “Katzman?”

  I dropped a plum on the floor after he almost spit out the name.

  “Franz Katzman?! A Jew?!”

  I froze on the chair under my father’s withering stare, trying my best not to look away. Werner stopped his giggling, and sniffled quietly, lowering his head over his textbook. Even my mother stopped her fussing in the kitchen, where she was preparing a meal for my three year old brother Roland, and looked into the living room.

  “I didn’t ask her if she was Jewish,” I finally said, in an attempt to break the heavy silence.

  “The girl’s name is Dalia Katzman. And that didn’t give you any clue as to what she might be?!”

  “Hugo, he’s too young, he doesn’t know these things yet.” My mother tried to pacify my infuriated father with a small voice.

  “It’s not like it’s written on her forehead,” I mumbled in my defense, looking away.

  “Are you being smart with me?!”

  “No, sir.”

  “Hugo, leave him, he didn’t know.”

  “Well, he does now!” My father turned back to me. “Now listen to me carefully, young man. I don’t want to hear a word about that Jew ever again, and make sure you stay away from her, stay as far away as is possible. If I hear once more that you speak to her, leave alone carry her things home, I’ll let you really have it. Do you understand?”

  I should have just said ‘yes, sir, I understand,’ but for some reason I decided to open my mouth when I shouldn’t have. “But Father, what if those boys bother her again?”

  “Wait, that’s the girl who started all the trouble? Because of her you almost got expelled?! Because of a Jew?!”

  Now I was more confused than scared. “But you told me yourself that I did the right thing…”

  “How was I supposed to know that she was Jewish?!”

  “But… what difference does it make if she’s Jewish, Papa? She’s still a girl…”

  “She’s a Jew!!!”

  I blinked at him several times, opening and closing my mouth and trying to make sense of what he was saying. “So, I’m not supposed to help her if she’s Jewish?”

  “No, son. You are not ‘not supposed to,’ you are ‘prohibited from’ helping her. I. Prohibit. You. To even go close to her. If she ever. Causes trouble. Again.”

  “But she didn’t cause trouble, Papa… Those boys started it, like I told you,” I hardly whispered, clenching the plum in my sweaty palm and pressing into the chair.

  My scowling father leaned over me, almost touching my nose with his.

  “It’s her fault and hers only. She started it on purpose. They always do it, the Jews. They start their provocations to seed animosity amongst us, the Germans, and laugh, watching us fight over something they caused. They’re a rotten nation, whose only purpose is to make us all into enemies against each other, to quarrel with us and then control us, while we’re too busy tearing into each other’s throats. It’s the Jewry conspiracy, son. And now you’ve seen how it works, firsthand. Stay away from that Jew. I’m not going to repeat it twice, and I definitely won’t help you out next time. I understand that you slipped the first time; your mother is right, you are too young and don’t understand certain things, and maybe it’s my fault too, because I wasn’t hard enough on you. But the second time, if you do the same thing purposely, I won’t care if you get expelled. You can work sweeping streets for the rest of your life for all I care. I’d rather not have a son at all than have one who messes with filthy Jews.”

  “I won’t do it again, Papa, I promise,” I mumbled, swallowing tears, even though he had already turned around and left the room. I wanted to run after him and hug him and beg him for his forgiveness, because the mere thought of him renouncing me was too much to bear for any ten year old. Beyond all, I loved my father dearly and always sought his approval.

  _______________

  Nuremberg prison, October 1945

  “It was because I was seeking his approval so much that I was ready to succumb to the evil, which I wasn’t able to recognize yet.”

  The indictment that I had just been served and was yet to sign, lay flat on my lap, where he had to put it after seeing me stare blankly into space and not making any motion to take it from him. Dr. Gilbert, our new prison physiatrist, showed up on the first day after we were all transferred here and had been probing us ever since, trying to figure out if we were all just a bunch of sick psychopaths, who one day got together in a beer hall and decided to conquer all of Europe and kill all non-Aryans. He was a former Austrian Jew who had been persecuted, and, needless to say, his attitude towards me especially, the man at fault of bringing an end to independent Austria, wasn’t the warmest one.

  “Are you talking about Adolf Hitler?”

  I remained motionless for quite some time and then finally nodded. “Yes. Adolf Hitler.”

  It was difficult for me to speak about it, and particularly to him. He wouldn’t understand. I only started to understand not so long ago, and it was her who made me open my eyes for the first time. Now, here in prison, I felt terribly betrayed; betrayed and mortally offended by my former Führer, the leader, who I gave my whole country to, who I was ready to give my life for, and he left us all like stranded kittens for our enemies to feast on our bones after all that circus they were so meticulously planning.

  Just days before the Reich fell, he condemned us all to be unworthy of living considering we had lost the war, and shot himself, leaving us to pay for everything he did. He should have been facing this trial together with us. He should have been held accountable for all his deeds. I wished that he was still alive, because I would have done anything to break away from this prison, fi
nd him and kill him myself, with my own bare hands, just for everything he did to us, to the whole nation, to the country, to all the innocent people who lost their life because of one single madman.

  “Adolf Hitler.” I heard my own voice say it once again, as my fingers clenched the heavy, thick indictment, probably totaling a hundred pages, which described in detail all the atrocities of the Gestapo and the office in charge of it – the RSHA, the office that I was the chief of.

  “Didn’t you realize that he was only using all of you?”

  I cringed at his words. It was easy to sit here with me and talk politics when he had no idea how we all felt.

  “He was like a father figure to all of us. We loved him. We worshiped him. We were ready to die for him, and many, many of us did. And he betrayed us in the worst way. That’s not what a true leader does. He’s not worthy of being called a leader. He’s a traitor, no more than that. A worthless traitor.”

  “You’re only sorry that your leader abandoned you? Aren’t you sorry for all those innocent lives that were lost? Not only Germans died in that war, you know. Twenty-seven million Russians, millions of allied soldiers, prisoners of war, gypsies, religious minorities, members of the political opposition… You killed almost six million Jews!”

  I looked at him for the first time in a long time. “I didn’t kill anybody.”

  “Not you personally, but your government, your office did. You were signing all those orders! It’s all here, in your indictment!”

  I looked at the indictment once again, but the words still didn’t make any sense to me.

  “I didn’t kill anybody,” I repeated, more firmly this time. “Those are all Himmler’s orders. I didn’t even read most of them. I didn’t want to know… My adjutant was stamping them with my facsimile. And sometimes my…”

  I bit my tongue before I accidentally blurted out her name and dragged her into all this. Annalise had been working as a secretary in the main RSHA office long before I took it over. When I became its Chief, the first thing I did was to make her my personal secretary. She was working with Schellenberg in SD-Ausland, or external intelligence, and he never got over the fact that I stole her from him. He was always praising her work before his superiors, or so I heard, but I always suspected that maybe he liked her as a woman too. Whatever the case was, that was the beginning of our lifelong feud.