by Therese Down
“Greta is our daughter!” Hans rose to his feet and glowered at his son-in-law.
Karl also rose, and assumed his best SS tone. “She is my wife. I am sorry, Hans, but Greta’s safety and well-being are the most important things. I only want to make sure she is… safe. Of course, if you and Clara can look after her, she must come here. If not, she must go to my parents’ home in Taucha.”
“Why can’t she stay in the hospital until she is better? Tell us!” Hans took a few steps towards Karl. Clara had reverted to simply staring wide-eyed at her son-in-law.
“I cannot tell you. I told you not to ask too many questions. She must come home, that is all. If she comes here, I will give you money every month to get extra help – a private nurse. Not one from Leipzig hospital – somewhere else. We’ll get her a private physician. Finish with Kaufman. Tell them we want a second opinion. That is our right.”
Hans suddenly looked exhausted. “I don’t understand anything. So many secrets all of a sudden.” He moved behind Clara’s chair, leaned on the back of it. She turned to look into her husband’s face, putting a hand briefly over one of his. Karl continued.
“I am sorry for… all this. I only want what is best for Greta. You know that.” He was not wearing his SS uniform today. In civilian clothes, he was far more like the handsome, well-mannered young man their daughter had brought home from university and later married. But there was a tone to his voice and an intolerance marking his demeanour that were not endearing. Uniformed or not, Obersturmführer Karl Muller, SS, stood before them, and both now wanted him to leave.
“We understand, Karl. We shall look after Greta here. Make whatever arrangements you wish,” Hans said calmly.
Karl regarded his wife’s parents: Clara, small and frightened in her dressing gown, twisted in her chair to allow her to grip her husband’s left hand with both of hers. Hans leaning protectively over her. The tableau they created was one of unity, love, defiance against all that would threaten them. How he envied them.
“I must go.” Karl’s heart was heavy indeed as he uttered the words. The sense of foreboding he felt, the welling grief at the impression of loss, was another spectre slipping from his nightmares and under his skin. “I shall be in touch, as soon as I know anything definite – about arrangements. Happy Christmas.”
Hans looked at him then with an expression clearly intended to convey his incredulity that Karl had just uttered such a wish. The greeting was not returned.
Trudging the streets of an almost deserted city, back to where he had parked his car, Karl looked to the few who passed him, unremarkable: a tall young man in a heavy coat, scarf and gloves, making his way on Christmas morning to an early church service, perhaps, or to some family gathering where he would greet loved ones and assist with the Christmas preparations. Perhaps he was a soldier or officer home on leave, off to see his sweetheart; or a husband and father who had popped out to get something before he ensconced himself in the bosom of his family for Christmas Day. None could guess that Karl was a senior SS officer on the brink of treachery to the Third Reich; desperate beyond the ability of language to convey, to prevent the removal of his wife to Sonnenstein hospital near Dresden, where she would certainly be gassed to death – very possibly in a room he had converted for the purpose.
When Karl arrived once more at his parents’ house on that Christmas Day it was about half past ten. His mother was smartly dressed and wearing an apron. She was checking on the progress of the roasting goose when he let himself in.
“You left very early this morning,” she said, closing the oven door, standing up to remove her apron and turning to him with a smile. His countenance shocked her. “What is the matter, darling?”
Karl sighed and slumped into the nearest chair. He didn’t know what to say. “I have been to see Clara and Hans.” There was a long silence as Ellie considered the full implications of this statement. She felt enormous compassion and concern for her son, but she also knew that he would not welcome an open demonstration of maternal solicitation.
“I hardly know what to say, Karl. I am desperately sad for both of you. We go and see her, your father and I, whenever we can. I wish I knew what to do, my darling.”
“There is nothing you can do, Mother. I don’t know what to do myself.”
“How are Clara and Hans? It must be very hard for them. Especially today.”
Karl nodded, leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. His mother crossed the kitchen and stroked his hair for a moment. She contemplated his face, unshaven, pale. She hardly knew him these days. “Why don’t you have a rest, Karl? You were up so early. You haven’t really… rested since you arrived yesterday. Your father and I are going to Mass.” This last statement was said very quickly, and with a degree of awkwardness.
Karl opened his eyes and looked at his mother. “And you don’t expect me to come? I have gone with you to Christmas Mass every year – all my life.”
Ellie looked uncomfortable, bustling around the kitchen checking things, pointing at bowls and dishes; saucepans containing vegetables and potatoes, sauces and desserts in various stages of preparedness, as if conducting a symphony.
“Where is your father? We shall be late.”
“I’m here, I’m here,” came a reply from the hallway. “Ready?”
The impression of loneliness that had been dogging Karl increasingly became near panic. Never – not ever – would his father waive the expectation that anyone in his house on Christmas Day should attend Mass. Indeed, until he had left home for university, Karl had been expected to attend Mass every Sunday.
“Don’t you want me to come to Mass?”
“I, er… I didn’t think you’d want to come, son.” His father’s voice was sombre.
“Why not?” Karl persisted, though his heart began to beat a warning tattoo in his chest.
His parents exchanged glances. “All right. Well, time is short. We are supposed to be there by…”
“I know what time it starts.” Karl shouted his interruption. Growing panic made him vicious. Everything comforting and secure seemed to be spinning away from him.
His father matched his anger in his reply. Such a voice and tone still had the power to instil fear in Karl’s heart. “In the last year, Karl, much has changed in this country. You have changed a good deal too, son. This so-called ‘government’ is not a friend to the Catholic church!”
Erich Muller stood before his son and confronted him unapologetically. Karl returned his father’s glare and braced himself. He could say nothing. The authority of the Reich was a poor rival for the natural, God-given mandate this man had to speak law into his life.
Eventually, Karl responded quietly, “And so I am not a friend of the church?”
Erich closed his eyes, took a deep breath and adopted a more measured tone. “You are and always will be my son. And I love you. But you are also an SS officer of senior rank in Hitler’s Reich. I do not love that.”
“Erich…” Ellie’s voice was fearful, pleading. “Please, Erich. Not now.” Both men ignored her.
“I see.” Karl could not defend himself. It was like being sixteen again and being punished for some trangression of which his father was suspicious but for which he had no hard evidence. Only this time Karl would not be lying about having stolen a neighbour’s motorbike to joyride around Leipzig and finally creep home much too late. How much did his father know about Hitler’s Reich and Karl’s part in it?
“I am possibly about to be imprudent, Karl, but I’ll take the risk. The boy I raised would respect my right to freedom of speech, to a political opinion and to worship my God.”
“Of course.” Karl watched his father’s jaw clench and unclench, heard the slight tremor in his voice when he started speaking again.
“You know, Karl… we know what is happening in Poland. We know and we are ashamed and sick to our stomachs. Polish Catholics – hundreds of priests – are being systematically brutalized and murdered by Germans – b
y Germans! By men who call themselves Christians! We have heard such stories…”
Ellie was sobbing quietly. She had put on her coat and buttoned it, pulled on her gloves and found her handbag. Now she sat down, put her handbag on her knee and clutched it with both hands, tears running freely down her face.
“The SS, they pull off the fingernails of priests who object to the way their parishioners are treated. They strip them naked and flog them to death in public. They are shooting and burning people. They even crucified a priest last week – strung him up naked on a pole and left him to hang for two days. Did you know all this?”
“No.” Karl’s answer was truthful. But he was not remotely shocked.
“Well…” Erich was red-faced, his eyes moist. Karl had never seen his father weep. He was not ready to witness such a thing, even now. “Well… well, I am glad of it. I am surprised you don’t know, but I am glad.”
Karl said nothing, resorting to his teenage ploy of remaining silent under interrogation.
“Our bishop, Bishop Bertram – and the Bishop of Berlin, Cardinal von Preysing – they are outspoken. I am surprised you have not heard what they have been saying against your masters.”
Karl visibly darkened at the accusation of allegiance to the Reich. He sat up straight and looked angrily into his father’s eyes as if he would refute it, but said nothing.
Erich seemed almost pleased that his son had bridled at the taunt. “Cardinal von Preysing has circulated to all Catholic churches in Berlin and Saxony, with Bertram’s help, a copy of a sermon he delivered recently, denouncing the barbarity against Jews and Catholics in Poland – and here, for that matter – right under our noses. We are not stupid! Do you think we suppose the Jews, our friends and neighbours, are all going on holiday? Leaving behind their cars and their furniture? We know what is happening. If we know, how can you not know, my son? Can you look me in the eye and say you do not know?”
Silence, except for his mother’s crying and the indifferent tick of the kitchen wall clock. Karl closed his eyes and looked down. He had assisted the murders of countless people in the last twelve months. He was as guilty as any of the SS officers indulging brutality against Polish Catholics, Jews, gypsies. As his father’s voice finally cracked so that he could no longer speak, Karl felt the blackness finally eclipse him. Further speech was useless.
When Erich collected himself and spoke once more, it was quietly and with considerable bitterness. “I do not for a moment suppose that you should be seen in a church where the Christmas Day homily will centre on all those who today are freezing to death – or worse – in Polish camps. It might not be… politic.” Then he added more gently, “I am sorry, my son. Truly very sorry. I know life is not easy for you at the moment.” Erich signalled to his wife to join him and he put an arm around her. She rose and leaned on his shoulder and they walked out of the kitchen and down the hall, slowly, as though to a funeral.
It snowed relentlessly. The drive from Leipzig to Berlin took almost seven hours. Karl ran out of petrol once and had to refuel from a can he carried in the boot, his fingers raw and shaking with cold as he tried to direct the flow of fuel into the tank, straining to see through a blizzard of snow. Exhausted and harrowed by the total alienation from his entire family in just one day, Karl finally walked into his Berlin apartment on Potsdamer. He knew it would be foolhardy to maintain contact with his parents now. He endangered them. They endangered him. And his guilt before the humanity and honour of his father was intolerable. If Erich Muller had the slightest inkling of T4 and its domestic euthanasia policy; if he knew that his son worked for Office IV of the Reich Committee and attended secret meetings to present plans for “hygiene” initiatives designed to clear Germany of its imperfect children and mental patients…
But he could not know. The people of Germany did not know that thousands of their handicapped, mentally ill and “genetically impure” children and adults were being systematically poisoned, lethally injected and starved to death every day. Until he had been offered his present post, Karl had not known either.
Berlin, 1940, Christmas Day. Karl did not turn on the light in his apartment nor attempt to heat it. He slumped into the nearest chair and allowed despair to engulf him. Christ, it seemed to him, would not be reborn in Germany this year.
CHAPTER SIX
The top secret meeting at ten-thirty a.m. at 8 Voss Strasse on the 4th January 1941 to discuss the child euthanasia programme and its future was as disturbing and surreal as Karl had known it would be. Present were Drs Brandt, Gutt and Heinze, all key Aktion T4 medical directors with special responsibilities for child euthanasia. Also present were Ernst Schroeder and several logistics and administrative staff members and, of course, the secretaries to take minutes. Nobody’s real name would be mentioned in the minutes; everyone had a code name.
The meeting was brief, its purpose to inform the assembled personnel that gassing of small children was to cease and alternative drug-centred methods of dispatch were to be refined and made more effective. It seemed even SS officers and T4 nurses were too much affected by the process of carrying babies and toddlers into gas vans or watching them choke to death in carbon monoxide chambers. There was too high a risk of public exposure from dissenting staff going sick or simply confiding in people they knew.
Starvation was effective in dispatching infants, but it was a drawn-out process, and their crying, as well as the attendant physical ailments which caused them pain and suffering, upset staff unnecessarily. Also, it was hard to starve to death many children at a time while keeping them on wards that could be accessed by non-T4 personnel. Older children were less compliant in taking drugs which made them sick and more difficult to “nurse” on adapted wards. And so the agenda for the Voss Strasse meeting was confined to two main items: what drug or drugs the doctors had decided to use to kill children discreetly and how these drugs would be delivered, stored and administered.
Chief Medical Director of T4 and Hitler’s personal physician, Karl Brandt, founder of the code-named Committee for the Scientific Treatment of Severe, Genetically Determined Illness, presided over the meeting. He began by reminding everyone of Hitler’s own mandate to them, written in September 1939, that physicians were to be given increasing discretion to determine the fitness for life of their patients, and should be allowed to select those whom they considered suitable candidates for “mercy deaths”. He asked if those present were aware that Aristotle himself had said, “Let there be a law that no deformed child shall live,” just in case anyone present was the least bit concerned about the civility of this, their solemn duty to ensure the eugenic purity of the German nation. The excising of impurity and disease from society was as much a physician’s duty as the excising of diseased or malfunctioning tissue from a body to preserve its life; there was no conflict between the T4 programme’s ideals and the physician’s Hippocratic Oath, declared Brandt. Incidentally, he had added, medical students would no longer be required to take the Hippocratic Oath. It was simpler that way to ensure compliance by medics with Reich policy.
Having re-established the legitimacy of the process, he asked Drs Gutt and Heinze to present to him their suggestions for the medical expansion of the Reich Committee’s work in Berlin particularly, as it was to Brandenburg that most infant designates for mercy killing were being transported at present. He had visited the newly opened and especially equipped Gorden ward at the Brandenburg hospital and congratulated the doctors on their expertise and the efficiency with which the facility was run.
Karl contemplated these three eminent physicians with their expensive suits, their slicked hair and, in two cases, their glasses. They looked and sounded for all the world like normal doctors discussing medical procedures and logistical challenges in a normal hospital. They all had families.
He rather suspected that Dr Kaufman, Greta’s psychiatrist, was very much of the opinions shared here, and he quite believed that from now on the esteemed Dr Kaufman would be taking a spe
cial interest in Greta’s case. For, just the day before, Karl had taken a train to Leipzig and he had, with as much SS authority as he could muster, explained to Dr Kaufman that he was taking Greta home.
“And so, gentlemen, to today’s business. Let us be brief, for I am lunching with the Führer in a fine eating establishment today, and I shall not be picking up the bill.” Brandt smiled a charming smile. “Dr Gutt, I understand you favour barbiturate use in the elimination of infants. Is that correct?”
“It is, Director. The advantages are significant over other methods, in that increased doses over two to three days induce fatal pulmonary congestion, which is recordable as natural death. Luminal and Veronal are most effective, based on trials, and as they are widely used throughout the country for the treatment of a broad spectrum of disease, suspicion need not be aroused by the ordering and delivery of relatively large amounts of either drug. Discretion, of course, being of the utmost importance.” Gutt finished speaking, removed his glasses as he did so and looked frankly at Brandt.
“Quite, quite,” Brandt agreed, “and presumably, Herr Schroeder, there is little difficulty in accommodating demand?”
“None whatsoever, Director Brandt.” Ernst was animated once more. Karl thought him a most enigmatic little chap. He sat almost mannequin-like for much of the time, straight-backed and serious until addressed, and then it was as if he came to life. “These are drugs isolated and developed in the first instance by German chemists at Bayer. Their production is now a staple business of IG Farben and most cost effective.”
“Excellent.” Brandt appeared delighted at how smoothly everything was proceeding. He would be full of praise for the positivity and efficiency of the T4 staff when he met the Führer for lunch later. This was, after all, a reflection on Brandt’s own organizational skills.
“Are we dismissing the morphine-scopolamine option, then?”
Dr Kaufman had been too well bred and was too wary of assertive SS officers to show openly his disagreement with anything they might say. But he had seemed genuinely affected by Karl’s suggestion that Greta should be removed from his care.
