The Austrian: A War Criminal's Story Page 8

  Naturally, the troops in the front were all wearing protective masks, but the ones who were in the trenches behind them, including my father, soon started grabbing their throats, trying to force at least some air into their rapidly collapsing lungs. Luckily, he quickly realized what was going on and pulled the gas mask on; some of his comrades, who weren’t as quick or savvy, suffocated within minutes.

  However, the longtime effects of the newly discovered and so highly effective weapon would affect my father for the rest of his life. Even a slight cold would always turn into severe bronchitis in his case, and smoke would become his worst enemy. He would refuse to quit smoking at first, but after my mother’s teary reproaches of how pointless it was to survive the front to just kill himself with something so stupid he later crushed his last pack without even emptying it.

  “What do you mean, Hugo?” My father’s friend from his political ‘society,’ as Dalia was calling it, looked at him inquisitively, frowning. “We certainly weren’t hit with retribution as severely as the German Reich. Yes, we lost Hungary, we lost our empire, we lost part of our lands, and we aren’t even allowed to form coalitions with any other country for thirty years, but think about it: they still got it worse! The amount of reparation that we are supposed to pay to the allies doesn’t even come close to what the Germans will have to pay. And don’t forget that it was us, Austro-Hungary, who started all that. So I would consider us lucky, my friend.”

  “Lucky?!” My father pulled forward, as if not believing what he had just heard. “Lucky?! I’ll tell you how lucky I am, Alfred. I spent four years in the tranches, crawling on my fours mostly because if you stick your head out your brains will be a decoration on the opposite wall in a second – I saw it happen in front of my eyes so many times that it didn’t even bother me anymore. I was sleeping in the mud, in the freezing cold, in suffocating heat, with lice eating me alive, with frostbite on my feet and fingers, eating food that I would be ashamed to throw to my swine in the farm, and for what?! So I could come back here like who? A war hero? Well, nobody fucking cares, Alfred, and do you know why? Because we lost. There are no heroes amongst the losers. And now my new government ‘doesn’t have enough funds’ to pay me for my service.”

  Under Alfred’s lowered eyes, my father leaned back onto his chair and took another labored drag. I was embarrassed that he so openly attacked his political ally, but he had his own reasons for it. Alfred suffered from complications of poliomyelitis, a disease that he was unlucky to catch when he was a child, and which made him limp in one leg. The Austrian army always found pride in refusing any unsuitable candidates even if they weren’t tall or strong enough, but truly speaking Alfred was very much relieved that he wouldn’t be going to the front, and my father upon his return despised everyone who didn’t do their civic duty for their country; physical condition or no physical condition.

  “Lucky. I am ashamed to say that my own fifteen year old son,” he continued with poison in his voice, pointing at me, sitting in the corner of our kitchen and trying to mind my own business, “now has to tutor little children to help me get back on my feet and re-open my law office. And you’re saying that we’re lucky?”

  This time Alfred didn’t answer anything. He was too embarrassed to interject something to my father without sharing his experience with the front. And, besides, because he stayed in Linz and worked, his financial situation was much better than ours. The other two men, sharing a glass of the cheapest port we could afford, were also discharged military men, and only nodded in agreement with his words, their sullen faces furrowed with discontent.

  As soon as my father returned from the front he stood for several minutes studying my face and trying to wrap his mind around the fact that he had left with me a child and now found me a young man. My father insisted upon me going with him to all the political rallies his ‘society’ were having, and listen to them talk whenever they brought those ‘rallies’ back to our house. I always thought of all that politics talk as an old men’s entertainment (my father was only forty-three, and most of his friends were of the same age, but they were still ‘old men’ to me) and would much prefer to spend time with my friends, but my father would have none of it.

  “We aren’t losers, Hugo,” one of them, Ludwig, a monster of a man with a chest of a size of a barrel and with always reddened grey eyes, growled under his breath. “We shouldn’t have lost that war. We didn’t lose it, that is.”

  “That’s right, we didn’t.” His comrade Paul squinted at his port through his glasses, twisting the end of his black moustache in his fingers. “We were standing deep in French territory. We were drowning them with our gas, we were making them run for cover together with their British friends, with our tanks and machine guns. Our planes were ruling the air. And all of a sudden, an armistice? A peace treaty? On their terms?! And we’re the ones who lost?! Now how did that happen?”

  “You know perfectly well how it happened.” My father finished his glass and reached for the bottle in the middle of the table to refill it. “It’s all the Jews’ fault. They had it all planned from the very beginning, I tell you that. They all knew how it would end. They ended it. We were winning the war.”

  “How come, Father?” I opened my mouth for the first time in the evening and only because I wanted to point out how little sense he was making.

  “How come?” My father turned to me. “I’ll tell you how, son. Pull your chair up and get yourself a glass. You’re not a kid anymore, it’s time you learn how the world works.”

  I did as he told me and occupied a spot between him and Alfred, who looked very much relived that the attention had shifted away from him.

  “You see, Ernst, there is a thing called the world Jewry conspiracy.” He gave me a long look. “Who do you think controls our country?”

  “The government.” I shrugged at the obvious answer, which to my big surprise was met by smirks and chuckles from my father’s comrades and himself.

  “That’s what they want you to think, son. But in fact, our government is controlled by Jews.”

  “I don’t remember any Jews in our government,” I argued once again, still not convinced.

  “No, Ernst, it’s much bigger than that, the conspiracy of those blood-suckers. It’s those Wall Street Jews, the executives, the big shots, the money bags, who control the world economy. The United States, that’s where their nest is. And from there they’re pumping the money out of our depleted empires, which they destroyed, into their bottomless pockets. Paul said it right, we were winning. And out of the blue they bring a peace treaty? Nonsense. We all know that it was them, the American Jewry, who paid our new ‘government’ for this peace treaty. We were betrayed, Ernst. Stabbed in the back. And now they are going to take it all from us, the reparations, the land, our northern brothers in the former Reich… but one thing they will never take. Our pride.”

  A toasting of glasses, accompanied by an approving rumble, followed that speech. My father took several big gulps, while I only tasted the disgusting sour port.

  “And do you know what is the most unquestionable proof of their malevolent intentions, son? The fact that they won’t allow us to become a part of the Weimar Republic. But we are descendants of the same race, we are all Germanic people, we originally came from the same place and share the same blood, language and traditions. We are their biggest threat. That’s why they want to separate us first and then starve us all to death.”

  “Father, I find it very improbable that the American Jews would care what we do here, in Europe. If they are already rich, as you say, and live across the ocean, why would they feel threatened by us? It all sounds too farfetched to me.”

  “Farfetched?” He arched his brow and smirked. “I’ll give you an easier example then to prove my point, that they’re nothing but a rotten nation, who only wait for us to collapse and take over our country. Remember that little Jewish girl you almost made friends with at school?”

  I nodded and concentr
ated on my glass. My father was never sympathetic to the Jews to begin with, but after the war he returned a completely different man, and now openly blamed them. Needless to say, my friendly relationship with Dalia and her family remained a secret from him, unless I wanted to be disowned in the near future.

  “Let me ask you a question now: what was her father, the good and prosperous Dr. Katzman, doing while we were getting killed in hundreds? You must know the answer because you saw his new, big and shiny sign while we were trying to repaint ours ourselves, as we can’t afford the sign man. He is a perfectly healthy man, but while we were doing our duty, he was feeding on our blood. How, you ask? Very simple. He was amongst the very few lawyers left in Linz, after most of the Austrians went to the front. And while mine and my colleagues’ wives were taking up two or three jobs at a time, trying to feed their families, he was stuffing his pockets with cash. I bet they never suffered from food shortages, when you, your brothers and your mother were going to sleep hungry. I bet they had a nice, fancy dinner every Shabbat, the Katzmans. I bet it was our money that paid for that brand new car he drives now. Now look at us: half of our women widowed with three or four children left in their hands. I came back still carrying some of that shrapnel in my chest and leg. And they got only wealthier and healthier. Now tell me, Ernst, am I wrong?”

  I took a big gulp from my glass under his stare. I found it terrifying, the thought that I had no argument to bring up against what he just said.

  Chapter 6

  Nuremberg prison, December 1945

  “All the arguments that you’re bringing, they’re just ridiculous.”

  My attorney, who was sitting in the visitation room across from me, removed his glasses and looked at me through the glass, separating us.

  “Dr. Kauffmann, I’m only telling you the truth.” I sighed tiredly and started picking the metallic mesh with my finger.

  I had finally started getting around all by myself, even though my arms and legs still weren’t moving as fast and as normal as I would like them to. The constant headache was still there; not that they bothered to give me something stronger than aspirin to alleviate it.

  Sometimes the pulsating would become so unbearable, that I had to physically squeeze my temples with both hands and lean toward the one side where it was hurting the most. When I was entering my plea in court, it happened again, but I just pressed my jaws together and didn’t even flinch. I wasn’t going to give them the pleasure of seeing me suffer.

  “How can it be possible that you didn’t see half of these orders?”

  “Why would I bother?”

  “What do you mean, why would you bother, doctor?”

  Even though he resented me, my own lawyer, silently condemning me for using our common profession for my government’s malicious goals, he still addressed me respectfully as ‘doctor.’ The only other man who was doing the same was agent Foster. I smiled with a corner of my mouth, remembering his friendly attitude and his cigarettes. I missed the American.

  “See this little marking in the corner of the document in front of you?” Even though I was bored to death repeating the same thing for the millionth time, first to the Americans who captured me, then to the British SOE, then to the same Americans here, in Nuremberg, and now to Dr. Kauffmann, I still picked up a pencil and through the mesh pointed him to where he was supposed to look. “See that Roman IV?”

  “Yes.”

  “If you go through the rest of the orders, you’ll see that all of them with that IV on top bear an absolutely identical stamp. It’s not my signature there, it’s a facsimile. In comparison, the ones that have a Roman VI in the same corner are signed in ink, and the signatures will be similar, but differ slightly. Those I was signing by hand.”

  He rustled the copies of the orders handed to him by the prosecution, while I rested my head on my hand, patiently waiting for him to sort them out.

  “Well, alright, it seems right,” he finally concluded. I could hardly stop myself from rolling my eyes. You don’t say, doctor, I think I know what I have and haven’t been signing! “But what does it have to do with anything?”

  “Roman IV stands for Amt IV, the Gestapo. It is the oldest branch, which was controlled by Heinrich Müller since the first days of the RSHA. He was working as its chief when I was only a simple SS man in Austria. So, you can only imagine how long Müller had been in the office before I even came into the picture in 1943. He always reported directly to Reichsführer Himmler, and the order stayed the same when I took up the office. That’s why I’m saying that I wouldn’t even bother with their business, doctor. They quite often decided everything without me having the slightest clue, and, honestly, it suited me perfectly. I never understood all that police work, and had no intention to get acquainted with it. The only reason why those orders needed my signature was because Müller wasn’t chief of the whole RSHA, and Himmler was much too important to sign something insignificant, such as protective custody orders for instance. I had too many things on my hands with foreign intelligence to read all of that.” I nodded at the stack of papers in front of him, a tiny portion recovered by the OSS and SOE teams to use against me in the court. “So I had my adjutant stamp them all.”

  “Foreign intelligence is Amt VI, correct?”

  “Correct, doctor. Those are all hand signed by me.”

  Dr. Kauffmann puffed out his cheeks, took his glasses off and looked at me again. “Honestly, I don’t know how it’s going to work in court, doctor.”

  _______________

  Linz, September 1919

  How it is going to work, I was thinking on my way to Dalia’s house. I hadn’t seen much of her lately with all the political meetings that my father dragged me to on some evenings with stubborn relentlessness, and besides I had to spend yet another summer in my native Reid helping the farmers. But the farm wasn’t something to complain about. It was hard and mind-numbing work around the clock, which provided much needed distraction from all the madness around me.

  While working in the field I could concentrate on getting the job done, and at the end of the day I would be so exhausted that all I could do was quickly eat my dinner with my eyes half closed and crash onto my bed, without a thought in my mind. My thoughts weren’t something I welcomed those days, and sometimes I caught myself wondering if they were mine or my father’s, hypnotically repeated day after day with an undoubtable logic that I couldn’t refute.

  If only it was just him that displayed such a hateful obsession toward bringing about more arguments in support of the theory that both the former Reich and us, Austro-Hungary, got stabbed in the back, something which was gaining more and more popularity. But why were the beer halls, where he took me to, also jammed with people, who were of the same exact opinion? Could they all be mistaken, misguided by their far right leaders, shaking their fists at the Jews’ fault in front of the cheering crowd and calling for support of national pride?

  I would have easily accepted their misguidance if they were simple workers or farmers, uneducated and easily persuaded by fancy words. Unfortunately, the backbone of those meetings were the intellectual elite of Linz: lawyers, professors, doctors and former military leaders, head-strong and more than capable of forming their own opinions. Was it me then who was mistaken while I was silently rejecting them?

  All of them had fought and survived the Great War, all of them had lost a lot while they were away defending their country, and had come back to nothing but humiliation, to be shunned in the eyes of the world, burdened by the responsibility of redeeming themselves in the eyes of other nations by paying the reparation the country simply couldn’t afford. And all of them were repeating the same thing: while we lost everything, the Jews got rich. The Jews made us lose that war. The Jews from Wall Street inflicted us with these reparations and were now lending us money to pay Great Britain and France off, while they were getting an unimaginable percentage from the lending. It was their plan from the very beginning.

  ‘They
want to make us into slaves. But we won’t let them! We are the great Germanic nation, united under God, and it’s God’s will to lead us to prosperity, even through blood and suffering. We are descendants of gods, we are meant to rule the world, and we will bring our vengeance on the ones who denied us this right. We, the Aryan brothers, are ready to go through hell to exact the gods’ will…’

  That’s what I was forced to listen to the whole spring, and on the last day before I had to leave to the farm, I stopped by Dalia’s house, secretly of course, to say goodbye for three months. I couldn’t wait to leave, to clear my head from all those words, which clouded my mind like smoke, constantly hanging in the halls with all those speakers screaming their accusations.

  “Why didn’t your father go to the front?” I asked her for the first time in five years. Before it didn’t interest me, and I was actually glad that he was there, looking after his five children, and in some way, after me as well. But now, for some reason, I needed to hear her answer.

  “He tried to. They didn’t take him. He has some heart condition, they said,” Dalia explained, lowering her eyes, as if ashamed of the fact.

  I was sitting at her table where she did her homework and silently following the curves of the wood on its side. Only now had I started paying attention to those small things which I never noticed before. A fine redwood table in a child’s room. Heavy velvet portieres on her windows. Embroidered bedcovers and pillows, an oil painting on the wall, expensive wallpapers like silk to the touch.

  “He donated a lot of money to the war effort though,” she added quickly, when I didn’t say anything.

  “Did he?” I shifted my eyes from the enormous wardrobe, made of the same wood as her dressing table, back to Dalia. “I never congratulated him on his new car. It’s beautiful.”