The Mechanic

by Alan Gold

  So instead of demanding answers as to why he’d been brought there, Wilhelm simply sat. He knew the guard would act as though he was dumb … and even if he did speak, he would know nothing.

  Ten minutes later, and his defense lawyer burst through the door with the arrogance of a German admiral. In his wake strode the translator. Wilhelm’s heart sank. Without acknowledgment of Wilhelm’s presence, Theodore Broderick looked at the ceiling like a man about to deliver a lecture.

  ‘Regardless of your refusal last night and this morning, I’ve reapplied in camera, and have successfully been granted a separate trial,’ he said. ‘You have no understanding of the issues involved. The men with whom you’re currently co-accused are all ex-Einsatzgruppen troops who, towards the end of the War, were seconded to work the gas ovens. I’m disgusted to be sitting in the same room as them. I know I’ve only been appointed your counsel very late in the day, but from everything I’ve read, and from the evidence my predecessor took, the actions of these men, the matters with which they’ve been charged, simply don’t apply to you. You seem to be a different kettle of fish …’ The metaphor didn’t translate, but the translator, damn his hide, made no allowance, and didn’t let the puzzled expression on Wilhelm’s face detract from his work. ‘The men upstairs in the dock are mass murderers. They followed the troops into Poland and Russia and were responsible for rounding up Jews and taking them into fields and machine-gunning them down. Hundreds at a time. And they’d round up the women and children and force them into these special trucks, and turn on the exhaust and kill them all.

  ‘Whatever your crimes, all you did was follow orders to keep the gas ovens at Auschwitz-Birkenau in good working order. You were only a mechanic, following instructions. You’re tainted with the evil of others, but I think it’s up to the prosecution to prove that just by keeping things in running order, you’re not deserving of the punishment which will undoubtedly be meted out to those fiends upstairs. That’s why, despite your refusal, I’ve overruled your decision by treating you, in effect, as a hostile witness, and demanding a new trial. You’ll be tried separately by a single American judge. The prosecutor in the case which is being conducted now with the beasts from the Einsatzgruppen has said that he’ll lead the case against you, but that’s okay, because he’s a fair and reasonable man, and in the intervening weeks, I’m sure I’ll be able to talk him into some form of judicial mitigation. Hopefully he’ll take the death penalty off the table, and we’ll only be talking about a custodial term at the very worst. Like I say, you’ll have to wait another month or so before we get these sons of bitches out of our hair, but at least then you’ll have a fair trial.’

  It took the interpreter over a minute to complete the translation of what Broderick had just said. He was suddenly surprised when Wilhelm burst out laughing.

  ‘Would you kindly ask him why he finds this funny?’

  The translator listened to Deutch’s response and nodded. ‘He says that the concept of a fair trial is nonsense. He says you and your Allied colleagues are here to see him hanged, and this whole trial is a sham.’

  The Bostonian academic lawyer frowned and shook his head. ‘That’s a canard. Nonsense. We’re here so that the world can see we’re totally different from the Nazis. Tell him that. Tell him that regardless of what the Nazis did, we will ensure that the new Germany is governed by law, and that justice is the rule rather than the exception.’

  ‘And why should justice rule?’ asked Wilhelm. ‘You’re victors. You have us in your power. Why not do what victors have done throughout the ages and take your revenge?’

  ‘We might be victors, but we’re not barbarians. Without the rule of law, without justice, we will become barbarians, like the Nazis. Our revenge is to see all the pestilential remnants of the Nazi regime buried in the rubble of the old Germany.’

  ‘How little you know,’ Wilhelm sneered. The translator looked at Broderick, wondering how much more the American would tolerate without walking out, but continued faithfully to record Wilhelm’s disdain for the court process. ‘What idea do you have of the rule of justice when a country is on its knees?’

  The defender looked at his client, fighting hard to remain impassive. ‘I’ll tell you what I do know. Justice is the foundation for occupied Germany in 1946, unlike it was for Jews and homosexuals in the Germany of Adolf Hitler in 1936.’

  Wilhelm shook his head and responded. The translator said, ‘The prisoner Deutch instructs me to tell you that there’s no justice in this court, and nor will there ever be while he and the others are represented by anyone other than Germans. That you and the other Allied defense lawyers are just paid hacks, doing a put-up job to make the victors look good, before hanging all the Nazis.’

  Theodore Broderick bridled and flushed with anger. He didn’t want to be here. He didn’t want to defend one of the beasts who had plumbed the lowest depths to which humanity had ever sunk. He’d been to the concentration camps. He’d seen for himself mountains of spectacle frames and shoes and artificial limbs and bones and teeth, the white gargoyles, pushed into monstrous garbage piles of what had once been human beings. He’d smelt the damp earth, and tasted in the air the rotting flesh and bitter blood of European Jewry. Yet his sense of the fundamentals of justice, of equity, that everyone regardless of the crimes committed was entitled to the very best defense, had forced him to stay. That’s why he’d agreed to defend one of the beasts upstairs; that’s why he’d fought so hard for this man, Deutch, possibly the one German who could honestly and justifiably say that he was only following orders. He looked at his client. Such an ordinary man. Just a mechanic. So banal.

  Broderick wanted to go home. Home, to where the air was untainted by the dust of burning humanity; home to where he’d enjoyed the pleasures of his university appointment. Where he was a respected professor of law, and a judicial ethicist, a counsel to judges and presidents on morality and standards of decency. Where he’d happily been ensconced, writing his learned commentaries on Supreme Court decisions, until one day in the Washington Post, he’d read of the retributive anger of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s newest Supreme Court Justice Robert Houghwout Jackson, in his disgust at the effects of Nazism.

  Broderick remembered vividly the opening words of Justice Jackson at the beginning of the first Nuremberg Trial a year earlier, in November 1945. ‘ The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilisation cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury, stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.’

  Those words had burned within his breast for weeks. He’d pondered them a dozen times. What was the relationship between power and justice when a nation became anarchic? What part did reason play in a government which appropriated the judicial system to pursue its own ends? What happens when the doctrine of the separation of powers is torn up and the scraps are thrown in the face of a civil society and used to light something like Savonarola’s bonfire of vanity?

  That was why he had applied for special permission from his university and from the International Military Tribunal to travel to Germany to assist in the defense of the beasts. Because he had to understand how power had become so utterly corrupt, how justice had been so easily prostituted, and how reason had been so completely devalued. Nazism flew in the face of humanity. Humanity for Broderick was reason. Nazism was a denial of everything he had taught and learned. For him to continue to practice as an ethicist, as a philosopher for the judicial system, Theodore Broderick had to understand and explain Nazism.

  Broderick stood. Right now, right at this very moment, he had to be away from this man. He needed to breathe clean air. His chair fell backwards on to the stone floor, but reason and self-restraint left him as he looked at Wilhelm’s arrogant and
smirking face.

  In an unaccustomed fury, he said, ‘Don’t think for one minute that I either enjoy being here, or want to be representing you. I’m only interested in justice. And in America, my country, which now is the occupying force of your country, you’ll abide by my laws and my system of morality. So listen up, you bastard, and understand me good and proper. You’ll get a fair trial, whether you want one or not.’

  Written in the remnants of Germany, occupied by the Allied Powers, 1946

  From the memoirs of Joachim Gutman:

  I, Joachim Gutman, am witness to unspeakable and incomprehensible acts of barbarity. Yet if I don’t speak of them, who will? Who is left to act as witness? For if I don’t bear witness, then they will have won, and that is something which I cannot permit. So here, I will use this opportunity while my memory is still raw and my hatred naked, to record my experiences of the Concentration Camps. This is not a last will and testament. I have survived. I am alive. But none of my family lives, so for them, voiceless but never forgotten, this will be my compact, a record of faith between the living and the dead.

  Before, in the days which are coloured golden, my father and mother and brothers and sisters used to call me Yokki. As a two-year-old, I couldn’t pronounce the name Joachim, and so my childhood name became my adult name.

  I know that history will remember only the large picture … the mounds of bodies, the mountains of clothes and shoes and spectacles, the dust of what once was a proud and ancient people, the memories of five thousand years … but what will be forgotten in the future, as memory fades and facts become distorted, will be the small things of our lives. The individual and separate brushstrokes of what Jewish life used to be before the Nazis extinguished the light of our civilisation.

  Let others paint a giant canvas; let historians and philosophers and lawyers deal with the enormity of what the Nazis did to us. Me? I’ll paint a few brushstrokes here and there, a highlight, a feature, something which will tell whoever reads this, my memoir, that the Jews weren’t just numbers, weren’t just tattoos, weren’t just lines of people queuing up to be gassed and burned, weren’t just some racial memory like the Hittites or the Carthaginians, but were a people who loved and could be loved, who sang and drank and prayed and … and … were abandoned by their God.

  I didn’t come from an orthodox Jewish household. We were liberal intellectuals. We said blessings in Hebrew, but prayed in German. We were the finest and most carefully honed products of the enlightenment and the emancipation of the Jews from the Ghettos.

  Indeed, we were more German than the Germans. Of course, despite the clothes of normality which we all wore, our neighbours didn’t accept us. On social occasions, or when we dealt with Christian Germans, we always felt as though we were tolerated at best, but more usually derided behind our backs. Only on a business level were we a part of their community. My father was a lawyer in the early years of his career and in his mid-40s became a judge. But when Hitler dismissed the Jewish judges, leaving only Aryans to administer the laws of Germany, it was as though one of the eyes of justice had been put out. Yes, of course I know that Justice is blindfolded, but the law must have vision, if only to see where it has gone wrong. When my father and his fellow judges were thrown off their judicial benches like so much refuse, just because of the religion of their birth, all Germany suffered; but Aryan Germans only came to realise that when compassion disappeared as the last robed Jewish judge sadly stepped down from his chair. When Hitler’s judges took over, the separation of government and justice meant that judges carried out the orders of the Nazis, and nobody was safe. Nobody. Not even good Nazis as they soon came to realise.

  My father refused to accept that his career was over while he was such a young man, and immediately went to the university where he was revered for his lectures on jurisprudence, and the faculty head, also Jewish, gave him a lectureship. But that too came to an end, of course, when Hitler expunged the great Jewish thinkers from the universities and put in their places the dull minds of ordinary men who could only struggle to comprehend what their predecessors had envisioned; Germany’s greatness disappeared altogether. First justice was blinded and then intellect was dulled. And these Germany thought their Hitler was a Messiah!

  But I’m racing ahead. This is a problem I have. I can’t wait to finish a novel I’m reading to find out what happened, and so I skip the beautiful descriptions and the development of the characters to find out who did what in the end. But these, my memoirs, are too important to me and to you, my reader, to be rushed, and so I will start from the beginning and exercise that discipline which was missing all my life … until I want to Auschwitz. There I learned discipline. One has to be disciplined to do the work of a Sonderkommando! The Jewish Sonderkommando had the worst job of all in the concentration camps. We were chosen because we were young and strong, and we had to … but I’m racing ahead. Too fast. Life is so fast these days. I must wait. So must you, until I have told you the reasons why I was a Sonderkommando. I must go on with my story.

  My grandfather and grandmother came to Berlin to open up a shop in Bismarckstrasse in 1881 when the city became a separate administrative district, although its mayor still had to be personally confirmed in his position by the Kaiser. They originally came from the southeastern part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, somewhere near the border of the Ukraine and Slovakia in the Carpathian Mountains. It was a poor and valueless life over there, and so they came west with what savings they had managed to accumulate with the intention of making a better life. Odd, now I come to think of it, that these people from a Stetl could ever have contemplated joining the bourgeois classes of Berlin. What they soon came to realise was that Berlin, at the end of the last century, was a large and complex city with a population approaching two million. It looked like a businessman’s dream; yet despite its size, it was as exclusive as a gentleman’s club. And Yiddish-speaking Jews from the East, despite the emancipation from the ghettos, were excluded.

  Socially, my grandparents were at the very lowest end of the spectrum of Berlin society, which in those days was divided into a pyramid of tiers. There were some fifty rigidly structured levels of the social monolith, and unless you were at the very zenith, or you wore a uniform of a Hussar or some such, you were a nobody. And the Berlin Jews who had lived there for a generation or more were worse than the Lutherans, for they rejected those Jews who came new to the city from the East as ‘dirty ostlanders.’ They were considered as inferior by the cultured and assimilated Jews of the city because of their clothes, their meagre possessions, and especially because they spoke Yiddish and not German. Yiddish is the language of Shalom Aleichem and Ahad ha Am. It’s a musical language of everyday commerce, the language which gives Russian Jews the ability to talk to Polish and Ukrainian Jews. But the German Jews proudly spoke German, the language of Schiller and Heine and Beethoven. Since Moses Mendelssohn had emancipated them from the ghetto, nobody in Germany spoke Yiddish. And they treated Yiddish speakers with derision and contempt.

  Did that put my grandparents off living in Berlin? Did they move on elsewhere in disgust, leaving the social climbers and elites far behind in their parochial world? No, my grandparents worked hard to throw off the shackles of being ‘peasants’ and instead used every means in their power to become Berliners. When their money started to accumulate from selling fabrics door to door, the first thing my grandfather did was to buy a silk top hat and tailcoat so that he could promenade along the Kurfurstendamm on a Sunday, and raise his hat and nod to the ladies and gentlemen. Of course, he had to return to his single room in the Mietskasernen district for the reality of his working week.

  But as is so often the case with our people, my grandparents quickly established a place for themselves, and their fabric sales enabled them to accomplish their dream and they opened up a small haberdashery shop in the centre of town.

  Riches flowed to them as maids bought ribbons and elegant ladies came in to choose something lovely for
a dinner or the opera that night, and by the time my father and his brothers and sisters had been born, my grandparents and their growing family were a part of the Jewish establishment of the city. They had a large house and several servants.

  Being the way of the world, my oldest uncle followed his father into the trade, my middle uncle traveled the world and became a representative for several German bullion merchants, and my own father eschewed the trade altogether and went to university, where he took law and became a first-class student.

  And then the Great Patriotic War began.

  By the time the madness was over in 1918, I had lost an uncle, and my grandparents were ruined. Too late, they tried to switch to making uniforms for the soldiers, but because they were Jews, the High Command excluded them from profiting from the War. So they had to struggle to stay in business. But who wants to buy laces and pretty bows when the world you used to know has collapsed at your feet and the only thing on your mind is having money to buy bread. And who would buy from a Jewish shop when all Germany was abuzz with the rumour that the only reason the old Kaiser had capitulated was because he’d been stabbed in the back by some conspiracy of the international Jewish business community.

  Fortunately my father’s law practice flourished in the plethora of lawsuits and injury cases when Germany began to reestablish itself, despite the crippling debt burden of the hated Diktat, the Treaty of Versailles. Were it not for my father, the family would have had to leave Berlin, as did so many families in the aftermath of that terrible conflict.

  I was born in 1919. Although he was only twenty-four years of age, my father already had three children. Of course, I knew nothing of the deprivations which he and his family suffered, nor the Herculean stresses which were on his young narrow shoulders having to sustain not only my mother and my baby brother and sister, but also my grandparents and aunt and uncle. What did I, in my cradle, know of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, published in Germany when I was only one? How was I to understand why the Freikorps, disaffected soldiers wandering the streets looking for warmth and shelter, picked up this pamphlet and believed that the Jews were responsible for every disaster in Europe in their manic conspiracy to control the world?