The Mechanic

by Alan Gold

  I’ll never forget his stance. It was the arrogance, the utter confidence in his power. I remember thinking to myself, ‘If this is God, then how can I be one of His chosen people?’ He remained silent for several seconds as the guards stood formally to attention and screamed at us to stand still and be quiet.

  And then he spoke. At first, it was quiet and we had to strain forward to hear, but then the volume of his voice increased and his words washed over us like a cesspool let loose. ‘You have been brought here to work. That is your mission, your purpose for living. Fail to work, and you will die. Work and we will reward you with food and shelter. As soon as the war is over and the Führer is in command of all of Europe and America, a special place will be made for you on an island off the coast of Africa called Madagascar. If you work hard, the rest of your lives might be enjoyable.

  ‘But be under no illusions. You are here because you are vermin. The worst examples of the worst peoples of the worst races which have ever walked the earth. Whether you live or not is of no consequence to me or my guards.’

  And then the silence which greeted his harangue was suddenly broken when a child began to whimper. Softly at first, barely audible above the freezing winds which were turning our skins blue; but his whimper soon became a hideous cry for his mama. There was stirring in the groups of naked men and women, as though parents somewhere were about to go over and comfort the child. Paternal and maternal instincts were everywhere. Mothers and fathers forgot their own misery and thought only of their children.

  The noises were ominous. Obergruppenführer Kaindl stopped talking. I was close to the car, and I perceived a slight smile on his face. As if he was suddenly touched by the humanity of a terrified little child. Instinctively a guard forced his way into the group of children and hauled out the crying boy who couldn’t have been a day over seven. And it was then that I realised that the benign smile on the commandant’s face was merely that of an actor, pleased that he had reached a particular and favourite part in his performance. This wasn’t a welcoming speech, an induction into routine; this was a morality play, an act of life and death, something which Kaindl did every time there was a new intake; a demonstration of his godhood in order to strip us of any remaining vestiges of humanity and to quell any potential and future resistance from the group. I shuddered in the absolute certainty of what was going to happen.

  ‘Here is a boy unable to control himself,’ said the commandant, looking at the now-howling child, standing alone and forlorn now, wailing in front of the group of other children. I looked at him. I have never ever seen such terror on the face of a human being. This poor boy had lost control of his bladder, he was so horrified at what was happening to him. He stood with his hands hiding his penis, trying to stop urinating, the piss running through his fingers. He was shaking his head in terror, stamping his little feet on the ground, howling in agony for his mother to come and comfort him, but not knowing what to do. All he kept screaming in his little, high-pitched voice was ‘Mama, Mama.’ I was close to tears. I knew I should run and hold the child in my naked arms and assure him that everything was all right, but I couldn’t move. To move was impossible. Fear held me in my place.

  The poor child wanted to hide, to get away from the misery. And so he started to run towards the gates, screaming, ‘Mama, Mama,’ all the way. The soldiers let him run. They knew what was going to happen. They even grinned in anticipation of the fun, like an audience which knows the good bits in a play. These guards, these men, these fathers and sons and brothers and uncles, these were willing and supportive actors in the commandant’s bravura performance.

  ‘This child has no discipline,’ shouted Kaindl. ‘He needs to learn discipline if he is to enjoy his stay at Sachsenhausen.’ He took out his pistol from his shining holster, aimed, and shot the retreating child in the back. The boy pitched forward on to the hard and unyielding ground, a hideous red stain on his shoulder. A roar of horror went up from all of us. A cry of incomprehension. And above our pain, the pain of a mother, who screamed out, ‘Mein kind.’

  The guards all levelled their machine guns at us as the silent child’s mother struggled to get free from the women who were restraining her, for they knew that she, too, would die if she emerged from her anonymity. But she pushed her way through to the front. She ran towards her dead child, but three guards stepped forward to hold her rigidly in place, despite her struggles. And then one of the guards took out his pistol and hit the mother on the back of the head with its butt. She was stunned and stopped her screaming. She slumped down, a naked and defeated woman, held crouching by the burly guards. We looked from the boy to his mother. If her husband were in the audience, we all wondered how he would react. If it were my son and wife? What would I do? Nothing.

  A sullen silence descended upon us all. Only the bitter winter winds, blowing through the nearby forest and biting into our blue skins, could be heard.

  ‘This woman will go to the guards’ recreation and enjoyment area. This is an illustration that you must keep in your minds, and remember that order and discipline are essential to your welfare all the time you are here. If you fail, then not only will your life be forfeit, but also the lives of many of those around you, who will be punished for your misdeeds. Therefore you will observe one another, and you will report troublemakers to the guards. Failure to do so will result in your death.’

  The performance was over. The lesson learned. Horrified, we saw the commandant replace the gun in its holster. Without a word, the driver started the car and returned him to his villa, where he would eat his venison and saubratten and potatoes and drink his vintage red wine, and tell his mistresses what a hard day it had been at the office.

  The woman began to moan, blood dripping from the wound in her naked scalp on to her shoulders and running down her back. I prayed that she wouldn’t recover and look again upon the dead body of her son.

  Three of us were forced at gunpoint to go over and pick up the boy’s body and carry it to another part of the camp where, as we rounded one of the barrack blocks, we saw for the first time a mound of white and decaying skeletons which once were Jews.

  It was then that I knew we were in hell. But in retrospect, how little I really knew. Two years later, I would look on Sachsenhausen as the purgatory before the hell which was Auschwitz. And who on earth would have realised that my Saviour wasn’t the Messiah, but a mechanic?

  Interrogation Room, Palace of Justice

  Nuremberg, Allied Occupied Germany

  June, 1946

  ‘I don’t understand. What were you doing at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp? I was under the impression that you spent your entire experience of the camps and the factories at the Auschwitz complex.’

  Wilhelm Deutch looked at his legal representative and gave a benign smile. Under other circumstances, would these two men willingly spend any time at all together? Deutch was German and working class, and had become elevated above his station in the new Germany because of his skill as a mechanic. He had been told that Theodore Broderick was a high-ranking university person, apparently a top professor of law, a noted ethicist (according to one of the guards who had read a profile of him in Stars and Stripes), a friend of President Roosevelt and of Supreme Court judges, a humanitarian and a philanthropist. He was the backbone of Boston society. And he was here, by his own admission, because he wanted to understand what made a man into a Nazi. Would these men have spent time together under any other circumstances? Yes, if Broderick had a problem at his home and called in Deutch to come round to fix his plumbing.

  But now, they were co-equals, brothers in a common fight, thrown together by the vagaries of war and peace. And for the time in which Theodore Broderick was representing him, Wilhelm Deutch would ensure that he had the patrician’s full attention and respect.

  ‘I was sent back from Poland for three months during which time I was seconded to Sachsenhausen to fix some major problems which DEMAG had with some of its machinery. The pressure fr
om hydraulic systems kept fluctuating and failing and causing major holdups in the manufacturing process. Machinery stopped working and that ruined production schedules. The commandant was very worried. There was unbelievable pressure on him from the High Command, and those in charge of war materiel.

  ‘The problem which he had was all to do with the steam pressure. Everything would be working well in the morning, and then suddenly everything would seize up and the boilers would be in danger of exploding and they’d have to let the steam pressure escape and that ruined the afternoon’s production. They thought at first that it was the slave labour sabotaging the works, but it was soon apparent that it was not human intervention, but something mechanical. They tried to fix it themselves with engineers from Berlin, but they couldn’t.

  ‘One of the DEMAG managers had worked before the war for I. G. Farben, and knew of my expertise in hydraulics, and so they sent for me. It took me three months to work out what was wrong, and how to fix it. It was a fascinating problem, you know. And although it took me ages, months to solve it because I had to do all sorts of pressure testing, the answer, when it came, was so simple. It was all to do with the differentials in pressure between one housing and another, a slight difference in elevations of the two adjoining boilers. It wasn’t so much the lie of the land, which was level, but the internal structures of the pressure tanks weren’t exactly level, and so during the day, there’d be a buildup of cooler, condensed water which would begin to flow back and lower the temperature in the first boiler, and then …’

  Broderick looked at him quizzically to see whether he was joking. He was dealing in a life and death situation, and this man was talking pressures and hydraulics. The American had no interest in the mechanics of a concentration camp boiler. He cut across him. ‘In terms of slave labour, what happened at Sachsenhausen? How was it compared to Auschwitz? What was required of you? Did those with whom you were directly related participate in any crimes against humanity—any killings or torture or some such evil? Were you a participant in any of it?’

  Wilhelm simply shook his head. ‘I worked in a place where death happened daily. I never dealt in death. Where I worked, machinery was used to make spare parts and components.’

  ‘But there was slave labour in your factories at Sachsenhausen! You’ve already admitted that.’

  ‘Certainly! That was the reason I. G. Farben and Siemans and Volkswagen and Krupp and MAN and BMW and Leica and so many other German industrialists all supported Hitler with so much money. Without the industrialists and their money for posters and uniforms and rallies, he would never have won all those elections. And without the Wagner family, the children of the great German composer, he’d never have been introduced to the industrialists. What goes around comes around. So you could say that Richard Wagner was in part responsible both for Götterdämmerung, and for this damn war …’

  He looked at Broderick to see his reaction, but the sarcasm went over his head. So the prisoner continued, ‘These companies were convinced that if Hitler went on a limited war against countries in the east, like Poland and the Ukraine, he would be able to supply them with an endless source of free or cheap workers, which would make them super-competitive with the rest of the world. Some even built factories inside the concentration camps so that prisoners could work from six in the morning till six at night. And they didn’t have to provide fancy canteens or restrooms. And it wasn’t only labour from which these industrialists benefited. Once we took over the Ukraine, we had oil and factories and iron and endless supplies of all the raw materials we needed to make us into a major power overnight. We had land and a slave population and food … everything for expansion and space for the German people to grow beyond the confines of our crowded borders. If we’d only just taken over the East and left everyone else alone, Germany today would be the greatest and wealthiest nation on earth. No country in the West would have come to the aid of Poland or any of those Slavic countries, but once he attacked Russia … we could have become another America, if he hadn’t attacked Russia and France.’

  Again Broderick looked at him askance. He was tempted to say that America had spent two hundred hard years making itself into a major power by decency and skill, and only resorting to wars which had to be fought, but not for aggrandizement or empire or conquest. But he stopped himself, because he suddenly remembered that the South had been built on the blood and sweat of millions of black Africans, brought to America’s shores in chains. Anyway, he was here as a lawyer, not a moral referee, and so he held his peace.

  ‘Were you present at any acts of unlawful killings or torture? Slavery is a crime against humanity; but were you forced to take the slaves which were offered to you as assistants? Could you have refused to use slaves on moral grounds? Did you fight against their use with the command structure of the camp?’

  Deutch hesitated for a while before answering. This, and other crucial questions would determine his fate. But his fate was already sealed by previous decisions of previous Nuremberg Trials. He knew that he was a dead man with time on his hands. ‘Yes, I took the slave labour. No, I never considered turning it down. Who in their right minds would? We were at war. British bombers were killing our people in Hamburg and Berlin and Köln. Are you asking whether I had scruples about taking a gift of free labour which never went on strike, which worked when it was told to work, which ate little … and the supply of which was never ending. If a slave labourer dropped down dead at his machine … and hundreds did … then his body would be picked up by other labourers and carried outside. Moments later, his place would be filled by another. And when that one died, then there were a hundred thousand others to take his place. A never-ending source. If you’re truly asking whether I tried to stand against the tide, then the answer is no. Not once. Never. If you ask, ‘Am I ashamed?’ then, yes, now I am deeply ashamed of what I did back then. But in those days, shame never once crossed my mind. Remember we were at war. Only societies at peace have time to experience the niceties of feeling ashamed. We Germans were experiencing the needs of survival.’

  He saw the look of disgust on Broderick’s face. ‘Tell me, Mr. Lawyer, do you ever read Nietzsche?’

  Without waiting for a reply, Wilhelm continued. ‘He said something which I believe applies to me, and indeed to Germany. ‘He who fights too long against dragons becomes a dragon himself; and if you gaze too long into the abyss, the abyss will gaze into you.’

  Broderick stared at him impassively. He’d been shown the works of Nieztche during the war by a colleague in the Department of Philosophy in an effort for the campus to understand Nazism. But outside intellectual circles, he was hardly known in America. And his appropriation by the Nazis made him unacceptable as a philosopher to be studied along with Plato and Aristotle and Erasmus.

  ‘I see you don’t follow the meaning,’ said Wilhelm, almost didactically. ‘War corrupts. You can fight evil as long as you like, but ultimately the evil of war makes you evil. End of story. We were fighting evil. Evil was weakening the German people. The evil of Communism, of internationalism, of the Jewish conspiracy. This is what we were told daily by Hitler and Göbbels and Himmler. We had to fight evil to survive. What I, and all Germany, did in order to fight this evil and to survive was whatever was necessary. If that included using slaves, then so be it. We were told that Jews and Slavs were subhumans. Laws were passed saying as much. When your government tells you that someone isn’t a man but a subhuman, a bacterium who will infect you unless you deal with him, you tend to look at him very differently. Isn’t that how the Americans in the South of your country treat Negroes? Why are we so different?

  ‘I was applauded by my colleagues and those for whom I worked. No one told us that what we were doing was evil. Yet now, I’m forced to defend myself because a bunch of Americans who lived out the war in peace and serenity say that what I and millions of others did was evil. Very well, judge me and hang me, but when you’ve tightened the noose and I’m rotting in my grave, will
you be any better than me? You’re tainted by evil, just as I was. Is Churchill going to be prosecuted for ordering the bombing of our cities? Had Germany won the war, would we have tried and convicted Eisenhower and Patton and Montgomery?’

  It took a full minute for the translator to finish, during which time Wilhelm sat with a satisfied smile on his face. Listening, Broderick became increasingly angry. When the translator had finished, Broderick snapped furiously, ‘We didn’t … wouldn’t … have spawned concentration camps. Eisenhower and Patton wouldn’t have herded millions and millions of human beings into pens to slaughter them. You and people like you mechanised death. You industrialised it. You made it into State policy. How dare you compare the Allied war effort with the greatest monsters who ever lived?’

  As the words of the translator evaporated into the thinness of the air in the claustrophobic room, the two men looked at each other in disgust.

  Wilhelm said quietly, ‘I thought you were here to defend me.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Berlin, Germany, 1998

  THE PHRASE ‘NEEDLE IN a haystack’ kept going through her mind from the moment she landed in Germany. Chasca Broderick had interviewed the leaders of the remnant of the once-prodigious Berlin Jewish community, had searched the records at the Ministry of Information, the archives of the now-defunct Office for the Reconstruction of Germany, the also-defunct Office for the Welfare of Displaced Persons, the records of the Center of Historical and Cultural Studies at Humboldt University, and many more.

  For two weeks, she’d scoured the landscape of what remained of the Berlin Jewish community, the synagogues, the various institutions for the reclamation of the lost culture, the societies and establishments whose function for the past half century had been to attempt to rebuild what was left after the destruction wrought by Hitler and the Nazis in their frenzy to eliminate Judaism from the memory of the world.