The End of Law

by Therese Down

  Following his chance meeting with Hedda, Karl was much disturbed. The knowledge that he would have to tell Hedda that her daughter was in mortal danger was yawning awake and soon would dominate his consciousness. He decided to take a long lunch break away from the offices. He crossed the city by tram to an area of Berlin characterized by large expanses of open land. The Lichtenberg district was relatively quiet and beautiful. He would be able to think there. The snow had thawed a good deal in recent days, so it would be possible to see the grass and contemplate the sleeping trees.

  He saw the assembled crowd on Weitlingstrasse before he alighted from the tram. An assortment of people had gathered and were looking with great interest at some spectacle in their midst that Karl could not discern. Curious, he walked towards the excited group and was increasingly aware of the high level of activity and energy that defined the gathering. Soldiers with rifles and wearing army-issue helmets milled among the people, apparently unsure of how to behave. Should they disperse them? One seemed to think so and put a whistle to his lips in readiness to silence the people and give the order to move on, but he saw Karl approaching at the last moment and let the whistle drop from his mouth. He disappeared into the throng of people, no doubt to alert his comrades that an SS officer was coming.

  As Karl got closer, he became aware of raised voices. One man’s voice in particular rose above the others in assuredness and clarity. It was angry and came to Karl’s ears in punctuated, irregular ejaculations. He could not make out the words. Occasionally, soldiers issued orders to the crowd, though in tones less convincing than that used by the speaker who seemed to be central to the hubbub. As Karl reached the fringe of the crowd, a thoroughfare opened up as people noticed and made way for him. And then it was clear what was causing such excitement. Karl had to stop and process the spectacle for himself before he could formulate any coherent response.

  The soldiers led a street-cleaning detachment whose job it was to ensure the main streets in this area of Berlin were kept free from snow, and when there was no snow, dirt and litter. The people who were forced to clear or clean the streets were Jews – young and old of both sexes. This was now common practice throughout the city and in other cities of Germany. Those who had not yet been deported to ghettoes in Poland were put to work in this fashion. Even if the streets were already clean, they must be cleaned again. And again. For the object was not hygiene and urban aesthetics. The primary object was the systematic humiliation, abuse and murder of as many Jews as possible. The more Jews who dropped dead of heart attacks, hypothermia, pneumonia, exhaustion, the better. After all, the only reason they had not yet been deported was administrative or logistical; a matter of delayed paperwork, congested trains or temporary overcrowding of the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes.

  This particular “hygiene” detail, consisting of men and women ranging in age from fifteen to forty, had been consigned to clean Weitlingstrasse with toothbrushes. One look at the Jewish people kneeling on the ground was enough to inform any onlooker of how they had been abused. None of them was dressed well enough for the cold weather. The soldiers had deemed coats too restricting of the necessary vigorous movements for street cleaning and had ordered their removal. The people shivered violently. A young girl was in particular trouble. She seemed to be very unwell, flu perhaps, and slumped where she knelt. On the couple of occasions Karl saw her lift her head, her face was flushed with fever and she struggled to keep her eyes from closing. Women in headscarves took advantage of the distraction to edge closer to the adolescents in surreptitious bids to comfort them. It was not unusual for whole families to be assigned to street-cleaning duties. All were shivering violently, all had bare hands that were red raw and chilblained, and all were exhausted. Some were silently crying with eyes closed as if praying.

  The man who was the cause of the disturbance was dressed in an expensive, tailored suit. He had removed his pure wool brown coat, his fine fedora hat and leather gloves and his suit jacket, and had folded them neatly on the pavement. He worked in his waistcoat and rolled-up shirtsleeves, kneeling on the road, punctuating his rhetoric by occasionally scrubbing the tarmac vigorously with a toothbrush he had taken from an old man beside him. As Karl contemplated him, the man looked up from his scrubbing to shout abuse at the soldiers, and rebuke the crowd of onlookers.

  “Have you no shame?” he yelled as people gasped and pointed at him. “Madam –” he looked directly at one well-dressed Aryan lady, who took a step backwards in a vain bid to shrink from his attention – “would you like to get down on your knees in the filth on this road and scrub it with a toothbrush? No? What a surprise! Yet you are happy to walk past this woman.” And here, he leaned backwards, put his arm around a middle-aged Jewish lady who buried her face in her hands and began to sob loudly. “You will stand by,” he continued, “and allow her to do what you would never consent to. Shame on you!” He took his arm away from the Jewish lady, but she did not lift her head or uncover her face. “Shame on you all! Call yourselves Germans? The Germany I love would never have consented to such an abomination. Are you really going to stand behind the tyranny of Hitler’s Reich and support this?”

  He fell to scrubbing again, stopped once more, aimed his invective at Karl this time, whose appearance some moments earlier seemed to have made no impression on him whatsoever. “And you – you are proud to stand there in your SS uniform and represent a nation which treats its citizens like this?” Then the man stood up, threw down his toothbrush and approached Karl, looking him fiercely and directly in the eye. “Are you mad?” More gasps.

  The soldiers were paralysed in their confusion. Should they shoot him? Should they arrest him and take him to Gestapo headquarters? Two things prevented either course of action: one was now the presence of an SS Obersturmführer and the other was that the man had earlier produced evidence that he was the brother of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering.

  Karl met Albert Goering’s angry glare with bemused calmness and genuine admiration, which made Goering falter in his confrontation and frown. For a few seconds, their eyes were locked and then Goering stepped back.

  “So, Herr SS Officer,” he challenged, “what are you going to do with me? Shoot me?” He made an expansive, provocative gesture with his arms. “Tell me off?” He grinned, but his eyes did not lose their ferocity. “Arrest me?” He held both his arms out straight in front of him as if asking to be handcuffed. “Well, what are the SS going to do to stop the bad man from embarrassing the Reich?”

  Karl seemed to consider for a moment, smiled, raised his eyebrows before turning to the nearest soldier. “Get rid of the people.”

  The soldier blew his whistle and signalled to his fellows to move the people along.

  “Oh! So you are going to shoot me; is that it?” Goering roared this at the top of his voice, turned a 360 degree exaggerated circle, swinging his arms dramatically. “I am to be murdered in cold blood for speaking my mind. This is Germany, folks!”

  “Who is this man, Private?” asked Karl of one of the soldiers.

  “Well, mein Obersturmführer, he says he is Reichsmarschall Goering’s brother. These are his papers… it seems.” The private passed the identification papers to Karl. Karl could not prevent his guffaw of complete incredulity following the soldier’s statement. Goering meanwhile had gone back to scrubbing the road, shouting all the while that he and the Jewish citizens of Germany had inalienable human rights and were being unjustly and outrageously persecuted, and he demanded justice.

  “He said what?” Even as Karl perused the papers and considered the likeness of the photograph to the face he had just contemplated at close quarters, he could not believe his ears. “Is he drunk?”

  The soldier shrugged. “I do not think so, sir. I am not sure.”

  Soon, all the people were gone. Two soldiers stood guard to ensure more did not convene, and Karl continued to quiz the private. “How long has he been doing this?”

  “Just about fifteen minutes, sir. What sha
ll we do?”

  Karl was trying not to laugh out loud at the sheer absurdity of the situation. “I’m really not sure, Private! Let me see.” And he handed the papers back to the soldier and stepped forward. “Herr Goering, a word, if you please, sir.”

  At the mention of the Reichsmarschall’s name, the Jews in the road were startled anew. They looked in terror at the well-built, obviously wealthy man on his knees and suspected some kind of perverted trick.

  “Fear not, my friends,” said Albert Goering loudly. “I am not Hitler’s dogsbody. I am the dogsbody’s brother. Nothing to fear from me, I assure you. Now, good people, get off your knees, get your coats back from these fiendish soldiers and go home. Better still, get the hell out of this godforsaken country in any way you can. Go!” And Albert Goering threw bank notes to the confused people. They looked at each other. “Pick them up – please!” urged Goering, and the frozen, frightened people stooped and gathered up the notes, bowing and nodding thanks.

  The soldiers looked frantically from one to the other, then to Karl, expecting him to countermand Goering’s instruction, but it didn’t come. Goering meanwhile was helping the people to their feet. He lifted the chin of the sick girl and looked with compassion into her face. He said something to her; she responded. He spoke again and she nodded. He helped her to her feet, then supported her while one of the women brought her coat, put it around her shoulders, then led her away slowly down the street.

  “Hey, SS Officer, that girl’s name is Rachael Eisenberg. She is not to be asked to do any more stupid things for these soldiers, do you hear me? She is very sick. Give me your word – if you are a man.” Goering stood, feet apart, shivering in the cold now that his angry euphoria was spent. He simply stared soberly and completely without fear at Karl, and waited for the assurance that the girl would be safe. The dumfounded soldiers gawped at the confrontation.

  “You have my word,” said Karl. Then he addressed the soldiers: “See to it.” The private to whom he had just spoken nodded. The others merely regarded him, inscrutable expressions on their faces. “Bring me a truck,” Karl commanded the private again, and the soldier began to run to where he had parked his army vehicle earlier that day, a mile or so south of their present location. Karl approached Goering. “I must ask you to accompany me to Gestapo headquarters, Herr Goering,” he said loudly and assertively, all the while conveying his admiration with his eyes and allowing himself to smile warmly into Goering’s.

  Goering again frowned, tried once more to determine the mien of this dark eyed, unusual SS officer. He decided not to trust him. “Of course you must,” he responded. And he again held out his arms for handcuffs.

  “That won’t be necessary,” said Karl. “I am sure this will just be a formality.”

  Goering picked up his discarded jacket and put it on, then his coat, gloves and hat. He took a cigar and lighter from an inside pocket and, still shivering with cold, put the cigar in his mouth, then lit it, inhaled deeply and walked towards Karl. He offered him a cigar.

  “No, thank you,” Karl declined graciously, then added, “That was quite a performance.”

  “A performance? No. The performance is making decent people get down on their knees to clean the road with toothbrushes. It is a sick, perverted… it’s…” He seemed unable to find adequate words to describe how he felt, drew again on his cigar, narrowed his eyes and scowled in disgust, then found some more words, shouted them, all the time glaring at Karl: “A fiasco! A judicial travesty… profane barbarity!” He tapped his head with gloved index finger and took a step closer to Karl, searched his eyes. “Have you SS blokes lost your minds? Have you relinquished all reason? Can you not see how… abominable this is? They are people. Flesh and blood, with hearts and minds like you and me. Well,” he added wryly, “like me, anyhow.”

  Karl was very mindful of the soldiers who were listening to every word but could not see his face. Holding Albert Goering’s gaze, he allowed his expression to register the harrowing profundity of the horror he daily carried in his heart but had not dared to show to anyone. How he ached to cry out in gratitude to God for this extraordinary affirmation of the conviction he kept alive in some inner sanctum of his soul, that he could not be alone in realizing the insanity that had gripped his entire country. And while his eyes threatened to fill with tears, he replied in a voice remarkably calm and assured, “Unfortunately, Herr Goering, not everyone agrees with your point of view.”

  The soldiers took his words and demeanour for practised SS irony and a tactic to placate the clearly insane Albert Goering, and they exchanged knowing grins. “Perhaps you can persuade your brother of the sanity of your view and the utter perversion of his?” Then he turned from Goering and announced in his best SS senior officer tone, “Ah. Here is the truck.”

  When the truck drew up alongside them, Karl stood back and ushered Goering into the front seat, beside the driver. He climbed in the front after him. The two soldiers clambered into the back and they set off for Prinz Albrechtstrasse, near Potsdamer Platz, and the headquarters of the Gestapo. Albert Goering was very quiet all the way there, stealing frequent glances at Karl, who stared ahead with apparent stoicism.

  The last scene of that extraordinary afternoon for Karl was of Albert Goering laughing and shaking his head at what he considered out loud to be the asininity of the Gestapo officers who began to question him and pass his papers between themselves. One immediately telephoned the Reich Main Security office, also on Prinz Albrechtstrasse, and asked to speak directly to Reichsfürer SS, and Chief of German Police, Himmler.

  The function of the Main Security office was to deal with all “enemies of the Reich”, among whom Albert Goering was becoming prominent. Albert listened to the phone call and the account of his misdemeanours with mock seriousness, nodding his head and frowning, then he gestured towards the Gestapo officer who was trying to turn his back on Goering and speak at a volume he could not overhear. “Don’t forget to tell Himmler how I said you are all mad,” he shouted. Then he laughed again, lit another cigar. Karl saluted in Goering’s direction from the doorway of the office, watched him tip his forehead in a return salute. Then Goering’s face was lost in wreaths of cigar smoke, and Karl backed out and closed the door. He had no wish to encounter Himmler. The soldiers had seen more than enough to furnish a formal report.

  On his way out of the building, Karl met the two soldiers who had kept guard on Weitlingstrasse while the third had gone for the truck. They were smoking and laughing together, no doubt recounting highlights of what they had witnessed that day.

  “Well done,” he shouted to them, and smiled. “What an unusual person Herr Albert Goering is, eh?” And he made a face as if to imply what he really meant was “mad”. They laughed, one of them throwing his butt on the ground and stamping it out, the other drawing long on what remained of his cigarette and nodding vigorously in agreement. “Still,” continued Karl in a more sober tone and drawing closer to them, acquiring a conspiratorial demeanour, “we can’t be too careful. Strange or not, he is the brother of the Reichsmarschall and head of the Luftwaffe – the vice chancellor of the Reich. Take my advice: humour him about the sick Jew – you never know what trouble he could cause for you lads. Heil Hitler!” And they snapped to attention, returning his salute wearing suitably appreciative expressions. Smiling to himself, Karl put on his cap and made his way to his office, from where it was his intention to order lunch, then ponder the enormity of the thing that had just happened.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When Cardinal von Preysing received Obersturmführer Karl Muller’s letter he was shocked, to say the least. He was impressed by the fluency of the prose, the evident intelligence of the writer and, most of all, by the apparently heartfelt outpourings of grief at what Muller claimed he had witnessed. Karl pleaded earnestly that von Preysing would alert the Vatican, and anyone else he could reach outside Germany, to the unspeakable atrocities of which he wrote and which were, he assured the cardinal and Bishop of
Berlin, just a sample of what was happening all over Germany – and what was to come.

  Not only did Karl describe in harrowing detail what was happening to children in Brandenburg, to prisoners in Sachsenhausen and to mental patients in Brandenburg on Havel and Sonnenstein, he also warned von Preysing of what was intended for the Jews being sent to Lodz and Warsaw; what “phase two” would involve. He made it plain that if nothing were done to stop the roll forward of the killing machine as it gathered momentum, it would be unstoppable. He revealed secret plans and strategies of T4. Karl ended by begging the cardinal to open his eyes to what was happening in the hospitals and asylums of his city and surrounding districts, then he signed and printed his name and rank.

  Von Preysing faced a dilemma. Just a month before, he had written to Pope Pius XII asking for the Holy See’s intervention in the terrible persecution by National Socialist Germany of Europe’s Jews. He had also preached against cruelty and persecution of the Jews, and his sermons had been circulated throughout Germany. He knew Hitler was furious with him. This latest letter could be a trap; it might be designed to inflame him and move him to some indiscretion that would incriminate him and the church. He had to be careful. His duty was first of all to protect his church and obey his pontiff. He could not openly counter the intentions of the Reichskonkordat between the Catholic church and Hitler’s Reich, which allowed the church to determine its own liturgical direction in Germany in return for an oath of loyalty to the government. As a bishop, he had a particular duty to maintain the treaty. If the Catholic church were caught in flagrant breach of the agreement, who knew what Hitler would do – to the church, to the clergy, to the Vatican? If he, as bishop of the capital city of the Reich, were too outspoken in defence of the church and against Hitler, he might single-handedly endanger the Catholic safe houses that were springing up everywhere in Germany to protect Jews from persecution. Monasteries, convents, Catholic households throughout the country were now numerous in their protection of Jews – many funded by the church and, indirectly, by the pope himself. Two of the priests in von Preysing’s own diocese had already been imprisoned in concentration camps for being too outpsoken in defence of Jews.