The Austrian: A War Criminal's Story Read online

  I tried to ignore Annalise’s stare, when, for the first time, she saw the order for the Einsatzgruppen, or death squads, which carried out mass executions of mostly Jewish populations in the conquered territories. I regret that I asked her to sort those damn top secret letters for me. Working in SD-Ausland, all she had to concern herself with was intelligence. She never knew of this horror.

  Why on earth did I decide to ask her to handle that mail for me? To show her that I trusted her, idiot. So she would know to trust me to. I thought that common secrets would bring us closer, because I did want her to be close to me… What a stupid, idiotic idea that was! And then she looked at me with those big, serious eyes and asked if I was going to sign the order. How was I supposed to explain it to her that I had no choice? That it was approved by Reichsführer Himmler, and the stamp of my organization was merely a formality… I had nothing to do with the murder of those people.

  I had tried to say something, but she only folded her arms and pressed her lips together. Why wasn’t she a dumb, pretty girl like most of them that I had been with? Why did she have to ask me questions that I didn’t want to ask myself? I got angry and started yelling at her, something stupid about subordination and doing my duty before my Fatherland… She threw another despising gaze at me, and I wanted to strangle her right there, break her proud little neck for making me burn with guilt. Instead, I dismissed her, and she stormed out of the room and slammed the door on her way out. I swept the papers off the table and clasped my hands together so as not to break anything. I hated her at that moment, like I had never hated any woman in my life before. The truth was that none of them ever made me feel something for them that was remotely strong enough for me to care about what they thought about me. I hated her even more after I realized that. I realized that I was falling in love with her…

  “Your ‘who?’”

  Dr. Gilbert’s question brought me back to the real world, to the cold cell I was confined to; back to the somber reality that I was trying to escape from in my dreams and memories at any chance I got. It was too painful to be here all alone, and not even to be able to pronounce her name.

  “Nobody. My second adjutant. But he’s also dead, just like my first one.”

  “You still have to sign your indictment.” He held out his pen to me.

  I took the pen in my hand and smiled sadly. How could I explain it to him that it was the same way I had signed those orders. The only difference was that it was Himmler who was putting them on my table and not him, the American military psychiatrist. Only, before, I was signing other peoples’ death sentences, and now I would basically sign my own. And yet, what choice did I have?

  I squeezed the pen firmly in my fingers and started writing my name down onto the top page, wishing her to be near once again, just for the last time, just to stand near me and hate me if she wanted, but just to see her once again, the dearest person in the whole world, who still saw and loved the human inside the monster I’d become. I wanted her and our son to be with me.

  “I want my family,” I said out loud through my tears, hoping that just the power of my voice would somehow make them magically appear here. The indictment fell off my lap as I turned away from Gilbert, burying my face in a thin pillow. He sighed uncomfortably, picked the papers up and left, without saying a word.

  Chapter 4

  Linz, August 1914

  My father picked up his bag from the floor and left, without saying a word. Maybe it was better that way. He hated teary goodbyes, and, besides, he had said his farewells to us last night, when none of us could sleep. We stayed up almost till dawn, sitting in our kitchen, my mother trying to conceal her tears, and my father frowning at the mug of coffee that his hands were cupping.

  Roland nodded off by midnight in my father’s arms, and, against my mother’s quiet protest, he gently picked him up and carried him to the bed. Werner and I were allowed to stay up with them, but, truly speaking, I envied my youngest brother, because he was too small to understand that it could quite possibly be the last night that we saw our father alive.

  After Serb nationalists carried out an assassination on our Austrian archduke, Franz Ferdinand, and his wife, shooting them both dead in their open car, our government declared war on Serbia. According to my father, the archduke was merely a convenient coincidence for us to take over the lands we had long been eyeing, and, besides, German Reich promised to stand with us, according to the pact we’d made earlier. I was only two months away from being eleven, and it was quite understandable that all this talk of politics concerned me little. Little did I know that my father would be conscripted to the army right after the declaration of war.

  “Ernst?” My father tapped me on the tip of my nose and smiled. Just hours earlier he had taken a bath, shaved and dressed in the new uniform he was issued. Its musky woolen smell is still fresh in my memory, but back then I was watching him closely polish his new boots till they were shining, straighten out his uniform jacket and smooth his dark wavy hair back. After that he sat next to me by the table and tried to distract me with an old joke. “Why the long face?”

  I managed a little chuckle just to humor him, and looked back at my cup. Inside my mouth I was painfully biting the tip of my tongue to prevent the tears from pooling my eyes. My father despised tears, and, besides, I was too big to cry anyway; even though for the first time in my life I had to deal with something as heart-wrenching as saying goodbye to someone I loved so selflessly and dearly, who I might never see again.

  “I know how you feel, son.” His heavy arm pressed my shoulder down, and I could hardly restrained myself from hugging it with my hands. I wanted to grab his jacket, to beg him not to leave us alone, or to take me with him if he had to. Instead, I swallowed hard and kept staring at my tea. “Believe me, it is as hard for me as it is for you. I hate to leave the four of you here alone, without my protection and support. But, in every man’s life there’s something even more important than his selfish desire of safety and a peaceful life. This something is the duty toward our country, Ernst. It’s an honor to fight for it. That’s why they don’t take just anybody in the army, but only the fittest and strongest of us. It’s a privilege, son, and you shouldn’t be upset about me leaving to bring vengeance on those who rightfully deserve it. You should be proud of it.”

  “I am proud, Father.”

  I was. My father looked even more imposing in his uniform than he did in his usual lawyer’s suit and tie. And now he was going away to punish those who brought our wrath on themselves. His rifle, as a silent reminder of his newly obtained power to take a human’s life by a single movement of a finger, was standing in the hallway. Both Werner and I were in awe when he allowed us to touch it.

  “I’m glad to hear that.” He smiled at me warmly and softly brushed the bangs off my forehead. Unlike my mother, he wasn’t an affectionate parent, and was firmly convinced that his sons should be raised by being loved from a distance, and believed any unnecessary physical touch would harm us. But now, preoccupied with the thoughts of that night being the last one when he could be close to me, he couldn’t restrict himself from displaying his affection. “I have something else to tell you, Ernst. You are my oldest son, and I’m leaving you as the head of this family. You still have to obey your mother, but I want you to keep in mind that when I’m away it is your responsibility to protect her and your younger brothers. I’m sorry to burden you with such a grave obligation, but with time you will be grateful, because it’s duties like this that make you into a real man.”

  “Yes, Father,” I whispered solemnly, and heard my mother sob almost inaudibly, pretending to be busy with washing the dishes.

  Werner lowered his eyes and nodded eagerly when my father demanded he promise to obey and listen to me, as he would listen to his father. The next morning my father hugged my inconsolable mother, kissed all three of us on top of our heads, and left. I stood outside and watched him walk away with the other men from our street. Nobody knew if
any of them would come back.

  _______________

  Prison hospital, Nuremberg, November 1945

  “Come back, Annalise… Please, don’t leave me…”

  Chasing my beautiful ghost in my morphine induced half-conscious state, I didn’t realize that I was talking aloud.

  “Who is he calling?” someone else’s voice asked, strangely familiar but distant, causing me some unexplainable discomfort.

  “I don’t know, sir. He’s been talking to himself for quite some time. We don’t really pay attention to what he says. It’s quite a common side effect of morphine… and, besides, don’t forget, it’s still a form of stroke he suffered. A very slight one, but still. It’s the human brain we’re talking about, not a shoulder dislocation. Don’t mind his mumbling though, the doctor expects him to make a full recovery very soon.”

  “On the contrary. You have to listen very carefully to what he says… It might be a big help for us…”

  The man’s voice sounded as if was coming from under water, and soon disappeared completely. Warm, welcoming darkness was surrounding me. I was walking through the cemetery, making my way from one tombstone to another in the cold moonlight. I was looking for something very important, my gloved hand dusting the moss off the names, engraved in granite, dimly shimmering under my touch.

  It was unusually quiet. Not a sound disturbed the eternal dream of the ones who would never open their eyes again. Not a gust of wind moved the edges of my uniform overcoat, as I moved from yet another useless marble column further into the cemetery, as if all the life had been sucked out of this place, condemned forever to this mind-numbing quietness. Not even a frightened bird, awoken by an approaching human’s steps, rustled its wings on my way. There were no birds in this place. So this is what hell looks like, I thought to myself, falling down to my knees in front of a statue of an angel with her wings shadowing me from the silver moon. I laughed and couldn’t hear my own voice. I sat on the ground and pressed my back against the hard stone.

  So all those priests were mistaken after all, promising sinners endless suffering in the claws of ugly creatures, serving their eternal term in hell. There are no demons and there is no hell. Only a silent night, a cemetery and my cursed soul, condemned to spend the rest of its existence in solitude. It would be more merciful if I didn’t remember anything from my previous life. But, on the other hand, it made sense to reflect on all my wrongdoings until my own conscience made me cry in agony, and pull my hair, and beg some higher power for forgiveness.

  Why did they decide to leave me my uniform? I wondered, clasping my fingers around the sword handle, a personal girt from the dead Reichsführer. To make me understand that it was the reason of all this? When did I make the first turn that made everything go so terribly wrong? When I joined the SS? Or when I handed my country to the Führer? Or when I was made into something I never wanted to be – a shadow of Heydrich, with power to send thousands of people to death with a single signature? When did I become this?

  I sat motionless for hours probably. Only there weren’t ‘hours’ here as well; the morning would never come. It was one life-long night, and only me and my voice inside, bitter, accusing, and with cruel coldness enumerating all the deeds I’d done. I pressed my ears with my hands in a useless attempt to stop it from talking, but it was my conscience speaking, the only thing you can’t escape from no matter how far you go. You can run away from the prosecution, you can change your name and looks, but this cruel little voice will get to you no matter how far you go. And now I was to listen to it for eternity. I raised my wet face to the marble angel, who was looking at me from the top of the tombstone, attentively and curiously.

  “Kill me, do something, execute your justice,” I pleaded with her, certain for some reason that she could hear and understand me. “I deserve it, I understand everything, I swear, I understand! There is no justification for me. It was my decisions, and mine only. I deserve all the suffering of hell. Take me there, I surrender to you.”

  The cold stone remained motionless, and I was ready to drop my head hopelessly on my chest, when finally she looked away from me and slowly stretched her white hand and pointed at something in the distance, something that kept escaping my memory, something that I was looking for for so long and couldn’t find.

  I jumped to my feet and started making my way on the dimly lit path, from time to time catching the branches sticking out to the road and preventing them from hitting me on the face. I walked where she showed me to, and at last I could make out a small figure in a black hooded cloak, sitting in front of a tombstone. I slowed down and was approaching the figure with caution, relieved and terrified at the same time. Did the angel point me to death? Is it going to take my soul with it now? Is it going to hurt? Where will it take me?

  The figure didn’t move, and, not knowing what I should do, I raised my eyes from it to the tombstone it was looking at. And then I saw the names engraved on it: Norbert Meissner, baby Friedmann, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. I stepped away in shock, backed away from the figure and the tombstone, stumbled upon a branch and fell to the ground. I froze where I fell, my eyes fixed on the hooded figure. But it didn’t turn around to show me its ugly face with a skull and dark, empty holes where the eyes should be.

  “Why did you take them all away from me?” she said quietly instead, and removed the black hood covering her locks, which seemed almost platinum in the moonlight. “Why? I loved them all… Why?”

  “Annalise!” I got up from the ground, smiling, and not able to believe that she was here, with me. Hell suddenly appeared to be a beautiful place. However, she didn’t turn around to the sound of my voice. “Annalise, it’s me!”

  I dusted off my overcoat, walked up to her and kneeled next to her, looking into her sad eyes fixed on the stone in front of her, with eyelashes still wet from the tears she had been shedding here for God knows how long.

  “I’m here, Annalise,” I repeated, trying to touch her shoulder. My hand went right through it, as if she was a real person and I was only a ghost, trying to touch her. No, but it couldn’t be… “Annalise!”

  “Why?” she hardly whispered, and covered her face with her hands.

  “I’m here, sweetheart, look at me!”

  I tried to embrace her once again, but to no avail. She couldn’t hear me or see me. And the most terrifying thing was that she was mourning me by my grave, obviously thinking that I was dead, together with her brother Norbert and her unborn baby.

  Their death was Heydrich’s fault, and the reason why the two of us bonded in the first place: me, Chief of the Austrian Gestapo and the leader of the Austrian SS, and her, a ballerina, who traded her pretty dresses for a SS uniform to revenge her sworn enemy. She came to me to ask me for help, and I was glad she did. I knew how to get rid of people. I asked her if she was afraid to come and ask me for something so daring, and she smiled and said that she trusted me. She trusted me with her life, because I could easily execute her for just suggesting such an audacious political assassination. She said that she wasn’t afraid. She said that she thought that I was a much better man that everyone said I was.

  Nobody had trusted me like that before. Nobody wanted to deal with me. I was the Chief of the Gestapo, for Christ’s sake! And she told me that I was good. I agreed to help her just because she reminded me of who I used to be long ago.

  “Annalise!” I cried out once again, and lowered my head to the ground next to her knees.

  “Who is this Annalise that he keeps calling?” the familiar voice spoke again, tearing through my never-ending nightmare.

  “I don’t know, sir… Maybe he says ‘Lisl’? That’s his wife’s name.”

  “No, it’s ‘Annalise,’ and obviously she was someone very dear to him if he keeps calling her. Find out who in his immediate circle has that name, a lady friend or someone who worked with him, and bring me a file on her. We might be able to use it.”

  An excruciating headache replaced the numbness, but it
wasn’t the reason why I allowed an inaudible moan to escape my mouth. In cold sweat I realized that, unwillingly, I had endangered the woman who I was ready to die for, for the first time in my life.

  _______________

  Linz, September 1914

  Dalia hugged me for the first time since our friendship had started. Started, and almost ended right away, if I had listened to my father and finished at once any interaction with her as he demanded. But how could I tell her that I couldn’t see her anymore, because my father was such a brutal anti-Semite? The problem was that I, for one, wasn’t.

  It was shameful enough to stand before her and explain why I couldn’t openly escort her home anymore, that it wasn’t my wish but my father’s, that I still wanted to be friends with her and still considered her safety to be my responsibility. I was embarrassed to tell her that I couldn’t be seen with her anymore, but I promised that I would still follow her from a distance to make sure that she made it home safely without anyone bothering her.

  She took it all surprisingly well and even slightly touched my shoulder, because I couldn’t bring my eyes to meet hers.

  “You don’t have to apologize, Ernst. I understand everything perfectly. And I do appreciate your help. My father, when I asked him why he still hadn’t made his acquaintance with yours, despite working across the street from one another, explained to me that it was quite improbable that the two of them would become friends. Your father belongs to some political society, as I understand?”