by Therese Down
Karl opened his eyes. He suddenly looked very, very tired. “You are Ernst Schroeder’s daughter?” How could he not have known? The irony was almost comic. He allowed himself a wry laugh.
“You know him?” Hedda was incredulous. “How can you know my father?”
“I know him, Hedda,” he said quietly. “I work with him. And so does Walter.”
Hedda’s eyes widened in disbelief. She shook her head. “He is just a chemist,” she protested. “He makes… he makes drugs, medicines and…” Her voice faltered as she looked into Karl’s eyes; as his expression encouraged her to make the connections. The pieces of information found each other and another monstrous thing came to birth.
“I am so sorry, Hedda.” Karl felt enormous compassion for her. He knew how debilitating it was to be unsure of anything – suddenly less than certain of the difference between reality and the unimaginable. “Like I have said before, it is better not to know what people do for a living these days. I really am truly sorry, Hedda.”
Then he wished her well, expressed again his profound joy that Agnette was safe, and took his leave. He had to get to Greta before the net closed around him.
Walter was considering going home. He couldn’t go home this Friday evening because he was now very drunk. He had been sitting in his Berlin apartment and trying to determine why he was so reluctant to face Hedda. So, she knew he had signed Agnette’s death warrant. That was embarrassing. OK, it was more than embarrassing, he admitted to himself; it was a lot of stuff he had no wish to contemplate. Like the stuff about his parents. Well, it was too late to get maudlin about it now. To hell with it! He had done his duty, after all. In each case, he had put aside his personal feelings and put his country first. Wasn’t that what every great warrior had to do? Country first! He had behaved honourably and he had raised the glorious Reich above the personal, petty considerations of one man’s heart. Himmler himself had commended him. Well then, how dare anyone point the finger and accuse him of dishonourable behaviour or… or… whatever it was they thought.
Yes, it was all very sad. Very sad that his daughter had been bombed by the RAF – they were the enemy, not him! The British had done the damage in the first place and as good as killed his lovely daughter. The doctors had declared her to all intents and purposes dead – not him! How unfair it was to point the finger at Walter, as if he were the culprit in all this.
He pushed himself up from the floor where he had been leaning against an armchair and draining a very good bottle of whisky. It was American and had been given to him by the commandant of Sachsenhausen at a dinner party the week before last. “Hah!” Walter laughed aloud to himself at the irony of toasting the Reich with enemy liquor. The US were backing Britain to the hilt in this war; that was common knowledge. “Swines!” he muttered.
He rose unsteadily to his feet, realized his boots were still on and sat down heavily in the armchair. He tried to get one boot off, failed miserably, then sat back and laughed out loud again. “Emilie!” he shouted at the top of his voice. “Emilie! Come and get my boots off!” Then he laughed at his own hilarity in imagining his rabbit-like secretary popping up in his apartment, like something out of a fairy tale. He reached down to the floor, retrieved his bottle and knocked back the last of the whisky while considering Emilie’s lack of sexual allure. He held up the empty bottle and eyed it disappointedly, becoming very serious. Emilie hated his guts. Even if he did find her attractive – which he certainly did not – she wouldn’t touch him with a very long stick. That was embarrassing too. Actually, he wasn’t sure if there was anybody who did like him. His wife certainly didn’t. Well, he didn’t like her either. But she was beautiful. And she had loved him once. He was pretty sure of that.
His heart suddenly ached for his beautiful wife as she had been when she was young and vulnerable; for his lovely daughter; for his mother, his father; for all that might have been. Even in his advanced drunkenness, Walter could not allow such sentiment to overwhelm him. He threw the empty bottle across the room.
He wished he’d picked up some tart earlier. That would have been a distraction. It was no fun being alone and drunk. He put his head in his hands and waited for words; the right words to describe why he couldn’t go home and deal with Hedda or look at his daughter. He had done what Brandt suggested and ordered his child removed from the hospital. Ernst had confirmed to him that Agnette was home.
A word kept flitting past his inner sight, as if typing itself again and again, stenographed on endlessly spewing reams of paper, and he could not focus on it. But, as he finally passed out, it was as if the monosyllable were able at last to get his undivided attention and he understood what his heart could neither quell nor cease to manufacture: guilt. Guilt. Guilt. Guilt.
When Karl arrived in Leipzig it was very dark. He drove tentatively through the city streets, fearful at every moment that he would be stopped and arrested by Gestapo officers. But the ones he saw on Leipzig’s streets this night were relaxed, clustering under the downward-deflected light from hooded street lamps. The officers laughed with girls or smoked cigarettes in spotlit drizzle, their rifles slung loosely over their shoulders. Others patrolled the shadows, nosing sharklike from restaurants to clubs along the city streets. All seemed peaceful enough, unless, Karl reflected grimly, you knew of the terrified Jews huddled and praying for deliverance in ghettoes, forbidden to be on the streets; unless you knew about the countless hospital and death-camp night shifts from Hamburg to Munich, Warsaw to Mauthausen, in which quotas were being met to ensure the annihilation of Jews, defective Germans and anyone opposing evil in Germany who had been unable to escape detection.
Karl parked several streets from the Erlachs’ house and walked the remaining distance. It was impossible to tell if anyone was still awake when he reached the house, for the windows were blacked out. When she opened the door cautiously in response to his quiet knocking, Greta appeared to Karl as if she had been cut out from light. The most wayward wisps of her hair were defined against the electric glow of the hallway, and the contours of her angular frame were etched and haloed from his perspective of darkness.
She saw the SS uniform and was instantly afraid – made as if to close the door, for fear of being upbraided for having opened it so widely in blackout – but Karl spoke her name. Greta gasped in joy and disbelief. Within moments, he was in the hallway and holding his wife in his arms as he had dreamed of doing for so long. And Greta was repeating his name over and over in a delirium of love and relief, while kissing his face, and then they stood looking at each other, laughing through tears at the perfection of the vision each beheld. Greta was frail and thin, and her prolonged depression had taken its toll on her features, but to Karl she had never looked more beautiful; his love for her had never been more complete.
During the course of the evening, while Clara excitedly lay before him a late supper, Karl heard how, since he had brought Greta home in January, she had gradually recovered from the heavy sedation under which Dr Kaufman kept his patients manageable. And slowly, slowly she had started to get better. He heard how Hans and Clara had tended lovingly to her needs, sat vigil with her through long nights when she could not sleep and missed her husband most desperately.
As Karl had instructed, the Erlachs sought the advice and ministration of another psychiatrist, a kindly man who put more store by compassion and common sense than mind-altering medication. His name was Professor Schmidt, a professor of psychiatry at Leipzig University. He had spent time with Greta, listening to her anxieties and assessing the extent to which her depression was reactive rather than organic. He encouraged her to read again, to go to the library and take an interest once more in the law.
At first, Greta had seen no point in such an activity, for Hitler’s Reich forbade her to practise law. But Professor Schmidt was gently adamant that what Greta needed was to reclaim that part of her which had been sentenced to death by the Third Reich: her intelligence. Hitler’s sudden prohibition of women’s
right to work in the professions, combined with Greta’s increasing outrage at the perverse social injustices being enshrined in German statute, had “derailed” her, according to Professor Schmidt. She had been dehumanized, he thought, by the statutory imposition of “feminization” throughout the Reich, which dictated that the highest aspiration an Aryan woman could embrace was the reproduction of Aryan stock. Add to the mix the loss of her husband, as she saw it, to this same Reich, and Greta’s depression was a predictable outcome.
Greta herself knew, in any case, that she was in possession of an excellent mind which, if not exercised, had a tendency to depression. And so, at first tentative and terrified, Greta had walked, leaning on her mother’s arm, to the library. To begin with, she was unable even to focus on the words of the books she took from the shelves. The concepts, the vocabulary of law, once her native language, eluded her comprehension, as though the cognitive processes necessary to give them meaning had ground to inaction through neglect. But, encouraged by her parents’ loving persistence, the panic began to subside and something deep within her was reawakened. Within a few weeks, Greta was rising and getting dressed before her parents, able to walk the mile or so to the library on her own, eager to return to her books and the benevolence of a world welcoming her back.
But there was a price for her restitution: a disturbance of mind of a new order. Greta learned, by reading back copies of The Reich Gazette filed in the Leipzig University library, of the increasingly bizarre judgments of the “People’s Courts” which were not subject to the due process of the time-honoured legislation on which her own university course had been founded. Judges whose names she had revered and whose rulings she had learned as precedents, were now summarily sentencing hundreds of people to death; people whose only crime was that they were Jewish or objectors to the increasing evidence of the abominable, inhuman cruelty of Hitler’s Reich. Judges, for whose integrity and brilliance Greta had once harboured profound respect, were executing people summarily, within hours of sentencing; relying on a series of legal amendments imposed without reference to the Reichstag.
To Greta, the absurdity of this new “legal system” was overwhelming; the ceding of reason to insanity, obvious. Innumerable lawyers had already been condemned to death or imprisoned without trial by Hitler’s judiciary, and Greta knew she would be one of them, were she allowed to practise. But the very clandestine nature of her research, the realization that she was part of a resistance network that was busy weaving a safety-net of sanity beneath the surreality of Nazi despotism, was itself an antidote to Greta’s depression.
Soon, the only drug she needed was her books. She took to studying avidly the newspapers, making her father buy every paper he could. She gasped and exclaimed in horror and indignation as she read Goebbels’ weekly propagandist journal Das Reich, in which he lauded Hitler’s “brilliant statesmanship” and his wielding of the “weapon of truth”, justifying the persecution of Jews on grounds that “every Jew is an enemy”, whether “he vegetates in a Polish ghetto” or “carries out his parasitic existence in Berlin or Hamburg”. Goebbels shouted from his lead articles in Das Reich: “The historic responsibility of world Jewry for the outbreak of this war has been proven so clearly that it does not need to be talked about any further.”
Why could the people not see that this was more fictional than a Grimm fairy tale? What had happened to Germany’s intellect? Her conscience? Greta emerged from the stupor of her depression into a wakefulness undefiled by Third Reich brainwashing. By the time Karl stepped into the hall on that rainy Friday evening at the end of March 1941, she was fully alive and ready to make her husband aware, if he were not already so, of the truly abominable nature of the master he served.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Walter woke up very early on Saturday morning in an armchair in his apartment living room, still wearing his boots. That his eyes were open and he was conscious, he was aware, but he felt as if his eyes were the only physical bits he could account for, blinking stupidly from the midst of an indeterminate mass that was the rest of him. Little by little he understood he was very cold. The headache that kicked in when he tried to move told him that he was still drunk. He fell back again, opening and closing his mouth in a bid to salivate. He might just stay there a little while longer. It wasn’t that cold…
Around the same time in Leipzig, Karl woke suddenly and tried to make sense of the excitement and well-being he felt. For a couple of seconds, he could not place himself; could not make sense of the floral wallpaper and the absence of a window directly before his vision. And then memory illumined his thoughts and he turned joyously to behold his wife still dozing beside him. He closed his eyes in prayer and gave thanks.
Saturday passed in an irritating haze for Walter. Hours after he had finally slept off his drunkenness enough to get up from the chair, remove his boots, take off his uniform, and shower, he felt as though his brain were wrapped in gauze. He regretted the bottle of Chablis he had downed alone, over dinner, in a small restaurant on Wilhelm Strasse before he had come home and cracked into the malt whisky. He had wanted to obliterate thought, but had succeeded rather in isolating only those thoughts that could not be etherized. Even his dreams had been lurid and disturbing, though their residue was impressive rather than memorable. The impressions added significantly to the heaviness and melancholy of his mood.
Now, as Saturday late afternoon encroached and his weekend was half over, Walter was filled with a sense of waste and a gathering resentment against Hedda for the state he was in. His moroseness sharpened to fury the more focused his faculties became. That was quite enough, he resolved; he would damn well go home to his house this evening whether she liked it or not! It was his house, and if she did not like his being there, well, she could get out.
Karl and Greta rose reasonably early, for there was much they needed to do and say in the little time they had together. They had talked into the early hours of the morning, in a series of conversations that were simultaneously affirming of their love and profoundly distressing.
As gently as he could, Karl had explained to Greta that he needed no convincing of the heinousness of those who were busy perverting the country’s legislature and the population’s perception of justice. He held her hand and confessed his particular part in applying Reich “law”, and described to her haltingly and often in tears how Hitler had used the law to redefine not only human rights but what it was to be human enough to deserve life.
Greta reminded Karl of how the Reich Citizenship Law, 1935, had deprived Jews of the right to vote or marry non-Jews, and stated in Section 4 (1): “A Jew cannot be a citizen of the Reich”, and how outraged and despondent this had made her, yet she had been forbidden to discuss her feelings at work. That, she said, had been the start of what she was now calling “the illness”. Her use of the phrase detached Greta from her depression and convinced Karl more than ever that his wife was better. It was with great remorse then that he prepared her for what would surely be a test of the robustness of this new state of health: that her husband would surely and very soon be subject to Reich “justice”.
Amid tears and affirmations of love and contrition, Karl achieved the absolution he needed from his wife, and then he had to explain to her why he was home; that in what was certainly an act of vengeance for Karl’s reneging on his duties, a senior SS officer who had authorized the euthanizing of his own daughter had also authorized Greta’s return to the asylum.
“But I am better!” Greta protested, terrified. “You can see I am well!”
And Karl had kissed her hands and then her face, and smiled through his tears, nodding. “And that, my darling, is the miracle I had not counted on,” he declared. “We must get to Professor Schmidt today, as soon as the hour is reasonable. We are going to need his help.”
As for Greta’s persistent questions about what Karl was going to do to defend himself, he could only avoid telling her he had no idea and as little hope. Instead, he insisted he
would be fine and was well able to look after himself; that he was resourceful and also a senior SS officer; he would think of something. The priority was to ensure Greta was safe.
At around eight o’clock on that Saturday morning, Greta dialled the telephone number Professor Schmidt had given her for use in the event of emergencies. Within fifteen minutes, they were hurrying along the leafy street where the Erlachs lived, as indifferent to the crisp brightness of the day as were the first buds on the waking trees to their consuming anxiety.
Professor Schmidt had asked them to meet him at his office in the psychiatry department of the university hospital. He had developed a real fondness for Greta Muller. When her distraught parents had first come to him, asking him to assess their daughter, telling him of how Greta’s SS officer husband had removed her from the asylum and insisted she was to be cared for at home, he had been most reluctant to get involved. He had an intuitive abhorrence of the SS that he found hard to moderate. At work, he usually managed to confine himself to ironic “hmphing” when colleagues discussed the ways in which National Socialist legislation was affecting psychiatric practice, but there were times when the insanity of Reich impositions on his work was too absurd to go unchallenged. He had been the cause of some uncomfortable coffee breaks in the faculty staffroom.
The Law for Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring, for example, meant that medical practitioners had a duty to register with the state diagnoses within certain categories, and then apply to the Reich Office for the mandatory sterilization of those patients. In the eight years since this law was passed, Professor Schmidt and his colleagues had had their patient records inspected regularly by the chief professor of psychiatry, as well as the dean of the university medical school. Their lectures were regularly observed to ensure they were in no way subversive of Reich philosophies and ideologies. Professor Schmidt had seen his students become blonder and less culturally diverse, until only Aryan stock that had grown up singing the Hitler Youth anthem sat in his lectures and took dutiful notes. It was so obvious to Professor Schmidt that this in itself was a symptom of the most acute national psychosis.
