The Austrian: A War Criminal's Story

by Ellie Midwood

  “Well… It’s quite a complicated matter, Brigadeführer,” he started slowly. “We faced the same problem not that long ago as well, after we sent several Jews to a labor camp and their wives organized quite a protest right outside our office. The people of the Reich don’t really care about their Jewish neighbors, as long as the matter is handled humanely in their eyes. We tell them that those people will be resettled in areas chosen especially for them, small towns so to say, with all the needed infrastructure. Dr. Goebbels made quite a nice movie to show to our citizens to appease their concerns. We most definitely don’t want them to start suspecting something vile behind our actions, so my advice for you, for now, would be to handle the matter as you see suitable, but don’t make any big waves with it. I don’t want any unflattering publicity in the foreign press.”

  “I understand, Reichsführer.”

  “Very well then. Have a good day, Brigadeführer. Heil Hitler!”

  “Heil Hitler, Reichsführer.”

  Nice going, Reichsführer, let’s dump all the responsibility on Kaltenbrunner and wash our hands, like we did so many times before, I was thinking while putting reports from one stack to another. Very well. You want me to act on my own behalf, I will gladly obey.

  I picked up the phone that connected me directly to my adjutant in the anteroom, and told him to come in.

  “I need you to type the report for the Gestapo,” I said, finishing writing everything down on paper prior to giving it to him. “They are not to take any executive action concerning these families. They are to keep them filed and to send those files to the main office in Berlin, to Gruppenführer Müller’s Amt, just so we have them all accounted for. The non-Aryan spouses are still categorized as citizens with limited rights, and are to follow the rules for employment for the non-Aryans. However, they aren’t subjects considered for immediate resettlement. None of the Aryan spouses are subjects for prosecution for Rassenschande, given that they were married prior to the Anschluss of Austria.”

  “Not prior to declaration of the Nuremberg Laws?” My adjutant stopped his writing for a moment and lifted his eyes at me.

  “The Nuremberg laws were for the Germans, not Austrians. We only adopted them after we became a part of the Reich, three months ago, not in 1935. Does it make sense to you?” I explained irritably.

  “Jawohl.” He clicked his heels. “Are the non-Aryan spouses required to wear Stars of David on their clothes as well?”

  “Why is everybody asking me something I have no fucking clue about?!” I rubbed my eyes with both hands and looked at my confused adjutant, who uncomfortably stepped from one foot to another at my sudden outburst. “I don’t know. Call Müller’s reception and ask what they do in Berlin. Do like they do, and leave me alone with your Jews! Dismissed!”

  “Jawohl, Brigadeführer.” He saluted me, but turned around at the doors again. “Oh, I almost forgot. I’m sorry to bother you with this, but there’s a Jewish woman who’s been coming almost every day and asking for a meeting with you. I’ve been telling her to go to the office for the resettlement but she insists that she speaks to you only. She says she knows you.”

  I lifted my head from the papers to my orderly.

  “She says she knows me?” I asked, not sure if I heard him correctly. I certainly couldn’t recall a single Jewish woman, who could possibly say that she knew me. Or did I get so drunk that I picked her up in some pub and now she’s going to blackmail me? Crap. I quickly composed myself again, pretending to look unfazed. “How does she look like, the Jewish woman?”

  My adjutant shrugged.

  “Like most of them do. Dark hair, dark eyes, really Jewish looking. In her late thirties-early forties, I’d say. Just a typical Jewish woman.”

  I almost let out a sigh of relief, smiling to myself. No, I couldn’t have been that drunk. And besides, I preferred blondes. Young and very pretty blondes.

  “Well, I’m curious actually,” I said jestingly. “Send her up.”

  “Jawohl.”

  He disappeared behind the door, and I lit up a cigarette waiting for the mysterious visitor. In less than a minute my adjutant opened the door, announced that Frau Blumenthal was here and let the black-clad woman in, closing the door behind her back. I was almost positive that I had never seen her in my life, even though there was something strangely familiar about her. The woman fixed the cover on her head, looking at me intently but still unsure if she could approach my table. I motioned my hand, inviting her to sit in the visitor’s chair.

  I was looking for a clean sheet of paper amongst the stacks and stacks of files on my table as she took her place warily across the table from me.

  “So what is it that you want that your office for the resettlement can’t help you with, Frau Blumenthal?” I asked her, getting irritated by the mess on the table and the absence of clean paper.

  I started opening and closing the drawers when she asked me quietly, “You don’t recognize me, do you?”

  I looked up at her once again, more attentively this time. “I don’t think we’ve ever met, Frau Blumenthal.”

  “Yes, we did,” she insisted, color painting slightly her cheeks. “More than twenty years ago. My maiden name is Katzman. Dalia Katzman.”

  I almost dropped my cigarette, stunned by the sudden revelation. Yes, of course, how did I not see it before? It was her, definitely her. Only much older, paler and scrawnier. I was studying the face that I used to know so well, that I used to think was the dearest and most beautiful, now stripped of all the freshness of her youth and innocence. I smiled sadly, suddenly recalling my adjutant’s characterization: just a typical Jewish woman. I haven’t thought of her for many years; the last time I did was probably when my mother mentioned her and her father’s law office that was closed down. In my mind Dalia was always an exotic beauty with bright onyx eyes, porcelain skin and a cascade of silky black hair; a very distant and almost unbelievable memory. I often wondered what would happen if I met her one day, if she would stir those bitter-sweet, long forgotten emotions in me; I used to think that she was my first love after all. I had even wanted to marry her. I almost laughed at myself now. How ridiculous, really. And nothing, nothing at all in me could bring back at least some faint shade of any sentiments I was expecting to feel. Does that mean that there wasn’t anything to begin with? I never loved her. I never cared.

  “Dalia.” I pronounced the forgotten name, a little disappointed with how cold it felt on my lips. So I didn’t love a single woman after all. “It is really you. How did you find me?”

  “It wasn’t difficult with your new position in the government,” she replied with a small smile. “It was more difficult to get inside. They would chase me off every time, the people in the reception. Thank you for allowing me this meeting.”

  I just nodded. “So how have you been?”

  “Good, thank you. I’m not asking how you’ve been because it seems you’ve done well in life.”

  “It came with a price,” I replied coldly.

  Dalia lowered her eyes. I glanced at the yellow star sewn onto the left side of her black dress.

  “You wanted something from me, as I understand?”

  An uneasy feeling came back. She had already told my adjutant that she knew me; if she started telling people how close she knew me that would be… very unfortunate for my career, I concluded in my mind. Who am I kidding? That would be the end of everything I was working toward for so long. I shifted in my seat, looking for clues on her face.

  Dalia smoothed out an invisible wrinkle on her skirt without looking at me. It seemed like she was trying to collect her thoughts.

  “Yes, I have… I came to ask you for a favor.”

  There it goes. I sighed. “Go on.”

  “My family, we all have received those notices of resettlement,” she started carefully. “I was explained in that we don’t have to go if we receive visas from any countries that accept refugees. Our applications for a visa to the UK have been recentl
y approved, but… there’s a problem.”

  She stopped and looked at me.

  “What’s the problem?” I asked after the pause started getting too long.

  “The problem is that we can’t leave Austria until we pay all our taxes for the next year. We could have paid them, but the resettlement office seized all of our property and bank accounts, explaining it was because as Jews we aren’t allowed to own any property anymore. So the UK are ready to accept us, but the Austrian government wouldn’t let us out without getting their payment. But how can we possibly pay the taxes if they took all of our money?”

  “So you need money,” I concluded, congratulating myself with some cold, sadistic pleasure on being right with the hunch that some Jewish woman would indeed come and start blackmailing me. “How much?”

  Dalia frowned.

  “I don’t need your money,” she replied with a hint of reproach in her voice. “I only need my own, the one that the government took.”

  “Well, that’s long gone and not even in my department’s sphere. Seyss-Inquart has it now. So tell me how much do you need and let’s arrange how I can deliver it to you without anyone knowing, and get it over with. Thanks to you I’ll be getting phone calls from the Reich chancellery by tomorrow already, inquiring how I came to know a certain Jewish woman, who walks in to my office like we’re best friends.”

  Dalia only shook her head slowly, giving me the coldest glare.

  “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “Yes, I have. I’ve gotten worse if you ask me.” I leaned back in my chair and crossed my legs, lighting up another cigarette.

  “Do you really think that I came here to threaten you?” she asked in bewilderment after a pause. “After all those years that you knew me you expect something so low from my side? I would have never done anything like that to you.”

  “And yet you’re here.”

  “It took a lot from me to overstep my pride and come and ask you for help,” she replied, discontent creasing her brow. “If I only knew how you would treat me, I would have never came.”

  “I’ll tell you what. I will help you, and you know why? I owe you. Yes, Dalia, I owe you big time. If you said yes then, I would have been on my way for resettlement now. I wouldn’t be sitting in this beautiful big office, and I wouldn’t be enjoying a ride in my brand new Mercedes with a pretty girl by my side every other weekend. I wouldn’t be dining in the best restaurants, have my own balcony, reserved only for me in several opera houses, and open a bottle of the best French champagne every time I feel like it, just to celebrate my wonderful life. So bring me all your family papers tomorrow, and not only will I sign your release forms, I’ll also take care of all your unpaid taxes, as a way to express my gratitude.”

  Looking back, I can’t even explain why I was being so intolerably rude to the humble woman, who indeed was always too proud to ask anyone for anything. The only explanation that I could find later, when I was sitting alone in my apartment and silencing my conscience with the fifth glass of wine, was that I was ashamed. It was all very wrong, that she re-appeared in my life so suddenly and reminded me of something that I was trying to bury in my memory forever: my feelings for her, her rejection, my anger and disappointment. If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have met Melita and her friends. I wouldn’t have followed them out of spite and revenge. Or maybe I was ashamed that I blamed her for it, when in fact she was absolutely innocent. And I was definitely ashamed that I was boasting about my worthless life, and she caught up on that.

  “Maybe you’re drinking so much champagne because you want to fill a certain void, and not to celebrate?” she asked me after a pause.

  “I’m very happy with my life.”

  “Are you really?”

  “I have a very prestigious position, which is ridiculously well paid. What else would I need?”

  “Something that money can’t buy.”

  “And what is that?”

  “Love, for instance,” Dalia answered simply, in her usual sincere manner.

  I laughed. “That I have in spades, trust me. And from several women at once.”

  Dalia smiled. “No, I’m not talking about meaningless liaisons. I’m taking about a different type of love, when you love somebody, and love that somebody so much that it is impossible to breathe without that person, when the whole world can be found only in one pair of eyes, and nothing else matters when those eyes look at you, because in those eyes you see the reflection of your own soul.”

  I smirked, stretched and interlaced my fingers behind my head.

  “You should become a writer when you move to the UK.”

  “And you should fall in love with somebody. Maybe then you’ll get rid of all that poison inside of you.”

  “Yeah, well, that’s going to happen sometime around the Second Coming. Oh, my bad, you don’t believe even in the first one, so…” I laughed again. “Let’s just say that it’s never going to happen. But thank you for stopping by, send my regards to your husband and seven kids—”

  “I only have four.”

  “Four kids, and I’ll see you and your paperwork tomorrow.”

  “Thank you,” she answered simply.

  “You’re welcome. I hope we can remain friends.”

  “I do care about you, Ernst. I always have. I will be praying for you.”

  With those words Dalia got up and left, and I caught myself reaching for a wine bottle that I always kept in my bottom drawer. I looked at it, scowling at Dalia’s words about my drinking, and put it back in its place. What does she know about my life anyway? What does anybody know? If it makes me happy to get drunk and fuck around, it’s nobody’s business. And especially my reasons for it. There is no void that I’m trying to fill, and there is no remorse or any doubts in my heart. I don’t have a heart in a sense they’re all meaning. It only pumps blood. And I prefer it that way.

  I opened the drawer angrily, popped the cork out of the bottle and drank right from it. I don’t care about anything. I’m happy. I don’t care… I’m not doing anything wrong. I’m just an intelligence chief.

  _______________

  Nuremberg prison, April 1946

  As an intelligence chief, Schellenberg was a valuable asset for the prosecution. It was only natural that, trying to save his own neck, he cooperated with them in the vilest manner and poured so much dirt on me that I was surprised that they didn’t decide to hang me right there and then.

  I didn’t see him in the courtroom: they wouldn’t allow me to refute all his affidavits, composed by his new masters that he had obviously readily pledged his allegiance to, and refused my right for any cross-examination, calling it ‘an unnecessary measure.’ They said that everything was clear to them on my account, and, therefore, there was no point for them to waste their time on ‘empty word exchange’ when it was evident that I would only ‘lie about everything.’

  The Prosecutor, Colonel Amen, loved throwing sarcastic remarks at me, just like he did on the last day of my case hearing. “Is it not a fact that you are simply lying about your signature on this letter, in the same way that you are lying to this Tribunal about almost everything else you have given testimony about?”

  After that particular remark I finally lost it. “Herr Prosecutor, for a whole year I have had to submit to this insult of being called a liar. For a whole year I have been interrogated hundreds of times both here and in London, and I have been insulted in this way and even much worse. My mother, who died in 1943, was called a whore, and many other similar things were hurled at me. This term is not new to me but I should like to state that in a matter of this kind I certainly would not tell an untruth, when I claim to be believed by this Tribunal in far more important matters.”

  “I am suggesting, Defendant, that when your testimony is so directly contrary to that of twenty or thirty other witnesses and even more documents, it is almost an incredible thing that you should be telling the truth and that every witness and every document shou
ld be false. Do you not agree to that position?”

  “No, I cannot admit that because I have had the feeling each time a document has been submitted to me today that it could, at first glance, be immediately refuted by me in its most vital points. I ask, and I hope that the Tribunal will allow me, to refer to single points and to come into closer contact with individual witnesses, so that I may defend myself to the last.”

  But the Tribunal seemed to have made its decision even prior to hearing my case, and two and a half days seemed sufficient enough for them to ‘prove my guilt’ to the world, with unconfirmed affidavits, declined requests for cross-examinations and clearly falsified accusations from my former subordinate, Schellenberg.

  “No, Herr Prosecutor, I have never heard of such an agreement between Reichsführer Himmler and Defendant Kaltenbrunner. To my knowledge the Defendant possessed all the executive power in the RSHA and actively participated in the activities of all departments.”

  “Gestapo included?”

  “Oh yes. Most certainly.”

  “Have you ever personally witnessed any accounts of the Defendant discussing the above-mentioned questions with the chief of the Gestapo, Müller?”

  “Yes, on multiple occasions. I was present during their lunches, when they discussed the concentration camps, the activities of the Einsatzgruppen and much more.”

  “How often did those luncheons take place?”

  “At least twice a week, Herr Prosecutor. Sometimes movies were shown during those luncheons, movies which were filmed in the concentration camps.”

  “What kind of movies?”

  “Documentaries, Herr Prosecutor. About the construction sites, how the prisoners worked, the punishment of those who disobeyed and sometimes the executions, too.”

  I burst out laughing after reading that phrase in the transcript of Schellenberg’s testimony that Dr. Goldensohn had presented to me during his visit to my cell.