The Mechanic

by Alan Gold

  What was of value was newspapers. Not for that they said! No, we had no willingness to waste a precious newspaper on the words printed on it. What we used newspapers for was to stuff into the wooden clogs they gave us to wear. It softened the hardness of the wood, it insulated our feet from the icy cold; it made us feel in some way like human beings.

  Of course, shuffling around the camps was an activity I did only for a few hours a day. I worked from six in the morning till six at night on starvation rations. Then I walked in the long line of slaves back to the barracks, where I struggled to lay down on my bed to rest. My legs were the worst. The wooden clogs which they forced us to wear made walking near impossible, and made standing an agony which spread from the feet to the ankles to the calves to the legs and buttocks, and quickly turned my whole body into a torture chamber.

  The cramps and numbness in my legs were what gave me the most trouble. Twelve hours of standing. At least my hands and arms and body were moving as I operated the lathe, or carried heavy timbers or iron girders. But my legs were immobile for most of the day, and after about ten in the morning, I failed to feel anything in them which wasn’t pain. I was terrified that they would collapse on me, and I would fall down at the lathe. And if that happened, a guard would happily set a German shepherd on me, and the vicious dog would take great delight in tearing at my throat. It did happen. It is not my imagination. I’d seen a dog attack on the slaves before, many times. Fear of it happening to me was what kept me going. Two lathes away from me, a man had suddenly sat on the floor, feeling faint. He tried to stand because he knew he was courting death. But a dog was let loose by a guard on the other side of the factory, and like a meteor, it wove its way through the machinery and pounced on the Jew. He didn’t even try to defend himself. He had no strength. He just screamed for a brief moment, and then his throat and voice box were torn from his neck. He twitched a couple of time as blood poured out of him. He was carried, still twitching, from the lathe, and within an hour another man was turning the same machinery. And so life continued.

  I’d seen many dog attacks in my year in the DEMAG factory. Men who were too slow, or who answered a guard back, or who didn’t look right, were the ones earmarked for attack. The guard would smile his evil smile—they were often ignorant Bavarians or Ukrainian collaborators—and would release the dog, urging him on by shouting in the dog’s ear. The dog would then bound over to the man and jump on him, pushing him to the ground. The victim’s screaming would impel the dog and drive him to even higher frenzies of attack. He’d tear at the man’s throat or face or arms. The man would be weak and puny and starved and little more than a skeleton. What match, then, against a dog whose rations were ten times what the man was given to eat?

  So to prevent my legs from collapsing, at the occasional breaks we were allowed, I would force myself to go to the benches to eat something—potato soup, a couple of slices of bread … if there was something solid in the soup, we’d go fishing for it with our spoons, but it was usually just thin, watery muck—and then I’d walk to exercise my legs.

  They starved us because they knew that we would work till we dropped, and then we’d be replaced by other slaves. There were a hundred million slave labourers Hitler could bring in from the East, from Poland and Hungary and the Ukraine and the Czech lands. Why waste food and effort on men and women workers? Get the most out of them, and when they dropped, throw them on the rubbish heap, and put a dozen more in their place.

  Normally we lasted for only three months before malnutrition and disease and infection carried us off. Why did I last a year? Maybe because of those three months in which I had been well fed. Maybe I’d built up reserves of energy and fat. Maybe it was Deutch who save my life. But saved it for what?

  But for whatever reason, survive I did.

  Until I was sent to Auschwitz.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Subsidiary Courtroom of the Palace of Justice

  Nuremberg, Allied Occupied Germany

  June, 1946

  COURTROOM SEVEN

  The trial of an alleged War Criminal W. A. Deutch, before the International Military Tribunal. 11/14/1946. Occupied Territory, United States Jurisdiction.

  Accession Number: AX-00452-C1947

  Defendant: (No Military Title) WILHELM AUGUSTUS DEUTCH

  Charge and Indictment:

  That the defendant Wilhelm Augustus Deutch, adult German citizen, along with other person or persons unknown and unidentified at this time, during a period of years preceding 5/8/1945, participated as organiser, instigator, and accomplice in the execution of a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit Crimes against Humanity, as defined in the Charter of this Tribunal, and, in accordance with the provisions of the Charter, is individually responsible for his own act or acts. The Common Plan or Conspiracy of the former Government of Germany, embraced the commission of Crimes against Humanity, in that the defendant committed such crimes concerning the enforcement and slavery of captured and unlawfully imprisoned persons, such deprivations as which were in violation of international treaties, agreements, or assurances and in contravention of the rights ascribed to humanity by the general consent of Nations.

  Assistant United States Prosecutor William Sherman, Allied Nations (US Jurisdiction), Advocate for the International Military Tribunal.

  Professor Theodore Broderick, Advocate for the Defendant.

  Presiding Judge: Justice Jonathan Parker, Alternative United States Justice.

  ‘Yes, Mr. Prosecutor.’

  ‘May it please Your Honour. This court has been called to a special hearing of the charges laid against the defendant Deutch, whose previous trial was aborted after two days at the request of his defense counsel, Professor Broderick.

  ‘Dr. Broderick believed that the evidence which was to be laid against Deutch would become confused in the judicial mind with the evidence of the other defendants whom, I might remind Your Honour, have recently been sentenced to death by your brother judges for their part in the commission of Crimes against Humanity.

  ‘It was Professor Broderick’s contention that the evidence against Deutch and the crimes he was alleged to have committed were of a far lesser nature than those laid against his former co-defendants, and as a result, in the interests of justice, the Prosecutor’s Office agreed to allow him the unique distinction of a separate trial.

  ‘Upon opening the prosecution’s case against Wilhelm Deutch, may I remind your honour of the words of the Chief Prosecutor of the International Military Tribunal, United States Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who said something in this very courtroom just twelve months ago which will, I sincerely believe, go down in the annals of civilised nations as the guiding principles by which all must behave. At that time, Justice Jackson, prosecuting the major war criminals Göring, Dönitz, Frank, Frick, and others said, inter alia:

  ‘What makes this inquest significant is that these prisoners represent sinister influences that will lurk in the world long after their bodies have returned to dust. We will show them to be living symbols of racial hatreds, of terrorism and violence, and of the arrogance and cruelty of power. They are symbols of fierce nationalisms and of militarism, of intrigue and war—making which have embroiled Europe generation after generation, crushing its manhood, destroying its homes, and impoverishing its life. They have so identified themselves with the philosophies they conceived and with the forces they directed that any tenderness to them is a victory and an encouragement to all the evils which are attached to their names. Civilisation can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.

  ‘Your Honour, I make no distinction here between the duty imposed upon your brother judges in the trials of the major war criminals, and Your Honour’s need to judge this minor and pathetic war criminal Deutch. The magnitude of other Nazis’ crimes might be different, but Deutch, like they, must be punished for his wi
lling participation in crimes which were so repugnant as to leave the civilised world agasp, wondering how human beings could possibly behave like this towards other human beings.

  ‘Your Honour, the defendant Wilhelm Deutch was part of a machine which tortured, enslaved, murdered, and behaved in a way not seen since before the era of Christ. He will try to convince you that he was a cog in the wheel of that machine, that the makers and the drivers of that machine have been punished, and that he should be allowed to live the rest of his life with the crimes, which they committed, resting on his conscience. That, Your Honour, is the punishment he believes he deserves. He will contend, Your Honour, that as a mere mechanic in the concentration camps, he was just following orders. That he took no part in the determination of those orders, but was merely the instrument of their directives.

  ‘This defense has now become part of the parlance of the war which has gone before us. It’s now being called the Nuremberg Defense. And it holds no truer today for a minor criminal like Wilhelm Deutch than it did a year ago for the monstrous war criminals who have been found guilty by your brother judges, and hanged for their bestial crimes. Crimes are crimes, and criminals are criminals. The contention of the prosecution will be that the major crimes could not have been committed without the willing participation of a nation of executioners.

  ‘Your Honour, the prosecution will contend that it is just as important for you to punish this insignificant man for his complicity as it was for your brothers a year ago to send the Nazi leaders to whatever hell will be the final resting place for their evil flesh. Your finding of guilt of the mechanic, Wilhelm Deutch, will send a clear message to each and every German, to each and every citizen of each and every nation, that they are as responsible for the actions of their leaders as are the leaders themselves responsible for the crimes they commit; that while those in minor office might just be following orders, the nation which closes its eyes to the behaviour of its leaders is as responsible for their crimes as are the leaders responsible to their nation.’

  William Sherman, the prosecutor cleared his throat. He had no idea of how many cases he’d prosecuted during his thirty-four-year career. But in each and every case, he found this the most exhilarating moment, the time when the entire court—judge, jury, defendant, spectators—hung on his every word to determine whether the finding would ultimately be guilty as charged, or innocence and freedom. But he felt no such charge of emotion right now. There was none of the adrenaline which normally coursed through his body when he stood in court for the first time to present a case.

  He was tired. He’d been prosecuting these monsters for the better part of a year now. He’d interviewed living corpses to garner evidence, and been told the most heart-rending and incredible stories of human depravity and cruelty he’d ever heard. He spoken to ordinary foot-soldiers, men who had been bloodied in war and tempered by the furnace of battle, and he’d had to console them as they recounted their experiences of entering concentration camps like Ravensbrück and Sobibor and Dachau and Buchenwald; and the very nadir of evil, Auschwitz-Birkenau. He’d spent weeks disbelieving written depositions about the activity of the Einsatzgruppen and their mobile killing vans, until he saw the engineer’s plans and read the first-person accounts of the participants.

  He wanted to go home. Wanted to go back to Maine and breathe the air and swim in the rivers and creeks and see the colour of the leaves in fall and clear snow from his porch. He didn’t want to be prosecuting such a man as Wilhelm Deutch, a mechanic, a functionary so minor as to be nothing more than a cipher in the alphabet of the Nazi bestiary. But he’d written the words he’d spoken carefully, after having discussed them with his staff. What he’d just told the judge was his honestly held opinion, and it was his role to ensure that every Nazi was punished for every infraction conducted during the currency of the war. Regardless of how trivial his crimes compared to those of Göring and Hitler and the real monsters, men like Deutch had committed evil. He was a slave master, and in the memory of all of the slaves who had dropped down dead from exhaustion, Deutch and all like him would be punished.

  ‘May it please the court, I call my first witness …’

  Allied Occupied Germany, 1946

  From the memoirs of Joachim Gutman:

  ‘It came as a complete surprise that my name was suddenly called. I was asleep in the barracks. I’d been back from the factory for only a matter of minutes, yet I was already in the deepest of deep sleeps. Indeed, I had to be roused by the Barracks Captain, pushed and shoved until I almost fell off my bunk.

  ‘He screamed at me, ‘Gutman, you filthy fucking Jew scum. The adjutant wants to see you. Off your fucking bed now.’

  ‘I knew that something momentous was about to happen to me the moment the evil swine told me that I had to go before the camp adjutant. Me? A piece of filth, vermin, a skeleton, walking and talking and still living because of some manic determination not to succumb to the will of the beasts called Germans. Give in to exhaustion and it would mean your death and they would have won!

  ‘I struggled to walk down the central aisle of the barracks. Nobody who hasn’t been a slave labourer can ever begin to understand the exhaustion I felt at that moment. The only thing I wanted to do was to lie down and try to breathe. Yet I had to walk. Even when I slowed, he hit me in the back with his stick. Pitching me forward, nearly making me fall.

  I hadn’t even eaten yet. Not a thing since breakfast. The potato and beet broth was particularly evil that day, and I’d vomited it up in a gutter. Secretly. Without the guards seeing, for I would have been beaten and forced to clean it up with my bare hands. Some of my co-slaves could drink many litres of this thin and evil stuff, but I couldn’t and that was why I was wasting away, why my hair was falling out, my skin flaking as if I had some sort of disease … Maybe I did. Who knows? So much dirt, so much disease. And wasn’t I some vermin? Some bacterium … according to my lords and masters!

  But how could I continue with such a hunger eating away at me, gnawing my very insides? What would I do if I had to stand around waiting for the adjutant—whoever he was—to see me. For one such as me, for a half man whose bones stretched his thin white skin to breaking point, minutes could equate to death. In the beginning of my stay in Sachsenhausen, fear had been my companion; but since the mechanic had gone from the camp, I was no longer afraid of death, only the daily, yawning ache of starvation. And the only thing which kept it at bay, letting me live to work for another day, was the watery and evil-tasting broth they called soup which kept me alive, stuff which in their heyday, my family would have thrown out in disgust as unfit for human consumption.

  Most prisoners lasted only three months on that starvation diet. I had managed to remain alive for nearly nine months … long enough for a woman to bring new life into this evil world! Alive? An odd way to define my condition. I was closer to death than to life; yet in that demi-world between life and death, instincts somehow sharpen. Colours become more vivid, as though they are the stuff of living; sounds which we take for granted, such as the chirping of a bird or the mewing of a cat, take on a whole new meaning, a celebration of life; and smells translate into blessed memory. The wind changes, and the smell of fat cooking in the officers’ mess becomes the memorial of a family feast or a barmitzvah or the joyous wedding of the girl next door. In death, we remember life.

  The peasant kapo led me to the door of the hut and pushed me out so that I sprawled onto the ground at the feet of a sadistic SS Nazi guard, whose job it was to conduct me to the adjutant’s office. I stood, and followed the guard who screamed in my ears, ‘Up Jew scum.’ Then he hit me, so that everyone around in the command area could see what a good guard he was. He screamed at me again, ‘Pick up your feet, fucking Jew swine. Walk slowly and I’ll kill you.’

  Someone in a uniform of an officer looked in our direction. The guard hit me on the head with his stick. My eyes lost focus. I saw black and white. I pitched forward as if I were going to fall, but reta
ined my balance. Somehow, my feet kept moving; every step was an agony. I had no energy to do more than try to walk to the gates and then into the command compound.

  The guard had a dog which he threatened to set on me, barely restraining the German shepherd so that I could feel its hot, salivating breath on my hands as it tried to rip into my flesh. But the guard held it on the leash … as though fear of a dog could make a dead man walk.

  We arrived at the office of the adjutant. I had never before been inside the camp headquarters. This was not a place for prisoners. We had often talked about it, this building on a hill at the edge of our camp, protected from us inmates by electrified barbed wire. What went on in here, we wondered? Was it at Monday morning meetings that some faceless Nazi executives picked up the phone to Hitler to get instructions on how many of us were to live, how many to be tortured, how many starved, who should work till he dropped, who would die? Like the opening of the solemn Kol Nidre Service of Yom Kippur, before Almighty God, Blessed Be He, closes the Book of Judgement for another year, the time when the Almighty One, decides who will prosper and who will decline, who will live and who will die … so were there godlike Nazis in some heavenly antechamber in this building deciding on our fate? Maybe now I would find out.

  It was a squat, ugly building, part wood, part brick. There were guards standing smartly to attention outside. Oddly, as we walked up the stone staircase, I felt embarrassed. I felt as though I hadn’t dressed properly, as though my clothes were inadequate for the occasion.

  How strange that I should feel embarrassed about my appearance. After all, I looked like I did because of these men; yet I felt weak and foolish and ill-dressed in this most alien of environments.

  The guard followed me to the top of the stairs. But a drama suddenly took place, something which could only have happened in Teutonic Germany; for suddenly my guard met the eyes of one of the senior officers who appeared at the doorway of the building, and a curt nod of the officer’s head dismissed the guard, who nodded back, turned, and hurried down the steps.