The Mechanic

by Alan Gold

  What did we Sonderkommandos have to do? We ushered the naked Jews into the room where they were to be gassed. On top of the door was the word, SHOWERS. Many thought it was genuine, and only objected to the overcrowding, to bodies of men and women and children being too close together. But there were always some in the groups who you could tell didn’t believe it. And then they would start to object, flailing their arms wildly and crying and appealing. Then we’d have to push and shove and force them, and beat them with sticks until every last one was inside the room, squashed like sardines, and we could close the door. Sometimes, before we could close the door, one of the children would slip through legs and escape. We’d catch the struggling naked child, and despite his screaming, we’d throw him or her on top of the crowd. Then we’d close and lock the door, and sit down to wait for the Zyklon-B to be administered.

  This would happen when a doctor or a guard climbed a ladder and, wearing a gas mask, opened the tin and dropped the granules through the funnels in the roof. It would drop through what looked like shower-heads on the people down below. God knows what it felt like, but the moment the granules started to drop on to naked flesh, we could hear the screaming getting louder and louder until it reached a crescendo of panic, and then the crescendo slowly getting quieter and quieter until through the airtight door, all we could hear was the horrifying emptiness of silence.

  Yes, I think that was the most horrific part of the whole thing. They would be forced into the gas chamber screaming and yelling and complaining and begging. Then the volumes of their voices would suddenly drop as we closed the door … as though they were waiting for something awful and dreadful to happen. Then there’d be this rising sound of hysteria in fear and anger which wafted through the closed and locked doors of the airtight chamber as they realised the horror of their situation; that this wasn’t a shower room at all, and that there were no spaces between the people for them to move, or for the water to cleanse and refresh them; that there would be no water dripping down from the showerheads. But despite the thick walls and the airtight nature of the chamber, we could hear their screams well enough as we sat outside on the benches, waiting for their death. We’d hear … and feel … the hammering of fists on the door and the walls in their utter terror of what was going to happen to them.

  And then, as the funnels leading to the showerheads were unscrewed and the granules poured down, the screaming would become louder and louder, more and more hysterical. Through the portholes, we could see the men and women writhing in agony and terror, clawing at the walls and one another to get out. The look of terror on their faces was something which … well, it didn’t take me long to learn to close my eyes and shut my ears.

  But then the hideous phantasmic noises started quickly to go away. As they died, the volume of screams and shouts and agony grew softer and softer. And it was always the children whose voices I heard last. They were stronger than the adults. Their lungs worked better, their little hearts were stronger, they lived longer. Was that the hardest thing of all that I had to bear? To hear the screams of children who hadn’t enjoyed the peace and quiet and privilege of a quick death?

  After twenty minutes, when the ventilation system had removed almost all of the Zyklon-B, we put on our gas masks, opened the door, and were greeted by a sight which will never leave the memory of my eyes.

  I can think of no image which will explain to you what it was that greeted the Sonderkommandos when they opened the door of the gas chamber and saw the plug of humanity blocking the entrance. Every image fails to pay homage to the reality, to the fact that these were human beings. What words can I use which don’t sound banal? Human spaghetti? A nest of dead snakes, all arms and legs intertwined. You see, nothing which human language has dreamed up will enable me to describe the horror of the scene.

  Peoples’ faces had changed from human to demonic; limbs were weeping dark, thick, and rapidly congealing blood; arms and legs were gashed with gaping wounds where others had tried to claw their way out with their fingernails; imagine necks twisted almost completely around; imagine a mouth fixed open as someone dying tries to get a last breath of life-giving air; imagine … but what am I saying? Why am I saying this? You can’t imagine it, can you! You had to be there.

  We opened the doors of the gas chamber, and it was only our gas masks which prevented us smelling the terrible smells of human waste and gases which the ventilation system hadn’t yet extracted. We began the task of pulling bodies out of the chamber to make it ready for the next batch of prisoners, already being herded into the changing rooms, being told that they would be given a cup of strong coffee after their shower in order to help them recover from the harsh train journey.

  Sometimes the bodies were almost impossible to separate and would fill the entry to the gas chamber like some obscene naked human cork. Then we would have to pull them out in whichever way was possible, nearly tearing heads off shoulders and arms and legs off bodies. Our SS guards would force us to work harder, quicker. They’d beat us, even though they could see that we were straining every muscle to remove the tangle so that we could clean it up for the next batch.

  And eventually the bodies would be cleared and loaded on to the elevators which took them upwards to the upper levels where there were retorts that were used for burning the bodies to ash. An efficient killing production line. In the final days of the war, however, they often took the bodies outdoors and piled them into ditches, where they’d burn on open fires; you see, the ovens couldn’t keep up with the demand. After all, they were only machines!

  When we’d loaded the bodies onto the elevators, we’d then go in and clean out the gas chamber. It had concrete walls and a concrete floor, and so wasn’t all that hard to clean. We used buckets of water to get rid of the shit and the piss and blood as best we could, but time pressures always prevented us from doing a good job. We would be hurried out of the particular gas chamber in which we were working, and have to prepare ourselves yet again for forcing in another batch of Jewish Hungarians or Poles or Ukrainians into their chamber of death.

  That was probably the worst job in the world. The job upstairs, in the retorts, the ovens, was not so bad. It was not dealing with the living, but with the dead (except where someone was still alive despite the Zyklon-B, and then we had to toss him alive and twitching into the ovens). And upstairs, you could actually be allowed a sense of humour. Yes! Oh, I know that sounds bizarre, but human bodies make strange noises when they’re dead. Farting and creaking and blowing up with gases. I sometimes laughed. It was my escape mechanism.

  And it was upstairs, in the people-burning section, where I again met my saviour, Wilhelm Deutch.

  Palace of Justice

  Nuremberg, Allied Occupied Germany

  June, 1946

  ‘Mr. Deutch, let me now come on to your transfer to Birkenau, to work on the ovens into which the recently killed Jews were placed to burn their bodies to ashes.’

  Wilhelm Deutch nodded. It hadn’t been a good day at the trial. More evidence from people whom Wilhelm had never before seen, or whose faces he couldn’t remember; testimony about how he’d done evil things with the SS, how he’d stood by and allowed men and women to be shot; one witness even said that he’d lost his temper over something totally trivial and had deliberately thrown a huge sack of tools down into a ditch being dug in the ground near to the administration building, crushing to death a sick inmate who was working in there. Under cross-examination, the witness said he knew it was deliberate because Deutch had called over four SS guards and two kapos to allow them to watch. But Wilhelm Deutch told Broderick he couldn’t even remember the incident; just as he couldn’t remember killing the man about whom the other witness the previous day had given evidence. Broderick was stunned. ‘Do you mean you can’t remember whether or not you killed a man?’

  ‘No,’ he insisted to Broderick, when the lawyer insisted that he must remember the faces of some of these witnesses. ‘It isn’t that I can’t remember, ju
st that these things never happened. The witnesses are confusing me with another man.’

  Now it was early evening, and the American lawyer was going over what would be the prosecution evidence for the following day, hoping that Deutch could give him some line of inquiry.

  ‘When were you called over from your work as a mechanic in Auschwitz to work on the ovens in Birkenau?’

  ‘In October, 1944. Just before they were closed down on orders of the High Command, when they knew that the Russian invasion was very serious and was driving the German Army back in full retreat from occupied lands. There were major problems with bottlenecks which were forming, and they wanted to process as many Jews as possible. The gas chambers were working very well, but the retorts … the ovens … which they used for burning the dead bodies couldn’t keep up. They kept on breaking down. The other death camps, places like Belsen and Sobibor and Treblinka and Kulmhof and Majdanek, were having far fewer problems, although in fairness to the Auschwitz camp commanders, these other extermination camps weren’t being sent nearly as many prisoners as were we.’

  Despite a year or more of listening to the way in which genocide had been mechanised by the Germans, Theodore Broderick still found it nearly impossible to listen to this kind of an explanation without howling in disgust. But he retained his professional detachment.

  ‘And what was the job which you were told to do?’

  ‘I had to work out why the retorts weren’t working properly, and how to fix them as a matter of great urgency. This meant that I had to consult with the engineers of the companies which had manufactured them. The engineers from the firm Topf and Sons were excellent. They really knew their job, but despite their skills, the ovens still kept on breaking down.’

  ‘What was the reason given?’ asked the lawyer. ‘What was going wrong over there?’

  Deutch thought for a moment. It was like a discussion between a student and a teacher—cold, clinical, precise.

  ‘Well, in the early days of the war, when the Final Solution was no longer a theory but something which the High Command was going to put into practice, experiments had been carried out by various companies for the most efficient ways of getting rid of dead bodies. In theory the ovens worked well. But in reality, they suffered in their operation from the war itself. You see, proper fuel supplies like oil and petroleum spirits and even gas were very scarce towards the end of the war, and so we had to rely on coking coal to do the job. But the heat wasn’t sufficient, so it was worked out by trial and error that the best combination to produce the greatest amount of heat and the greatest efficiency was to determine the combustibility rate of different body types. In the end, to reduce fuel consumption, they experimented with burning well-nourished corpses with emaciated ones. They burned three or four bodies at a time and monitored the results. They soon determined that the most economical and fuel-saving procedure was to burn the bodies of a well-nourished man with an emaciated woman, and vice versa, together with that of a child because in the experiments, it was found that when the bodies caught fire, the fat from the well-nourished dead man or woman would be sufficient to continue to burn the other corpses without any further coke being required.

  ‘This, however, didn’t translate to the large scale on which Birkenau operated. They thought it might be the selection process which the Sonderkommandos were using, but my view was that the ovens were inefficient from when we started to use the different and poorer grades of fuel, and I was sent over to see what I could do.’

  Deutch looked at his lawyer and wondered in surprise why his face had suddenly turned grey.

  ‘I’m sorry. Is this distressing you? You wanted to know.’

  Broderick urged him to continue.

  ‘It was as early as 1943, a year before I arrived at Auschwitz, that the ovens were going wrong. They seemed to be falling apart. Crematorium Four failed totally only weeks after it had been installed, and Crematorium Five was shut down completely shortly thereafter. There were about fifty retorts altogether for burning bodies. It took about half an hour to burn the four bodies completely, so they worked it out that with all the crematoria and all the retorts working full time, they should be able to handle about twelve thousand dead bodies a day. And with more planned, the number was hoped to reach twenty-five thousand each and every day of the week. But there were major problems, and I was regularly told to go over and fix them. When I wasn’t working in maintenance at Auschwitz, I’d be working on the furnaces at Birkenau. I did it for all the time I was at the concentration camps, on and off.’

  The look of horror, of sickness, hadn’t left Broderick’s face. He’d sat through similar evidence in previous trials of arch-criminals, especially torturers and serial killers, but he’d never been quite so close to such complacency. The clinical nature of Deutch’s evidence was threatening to make him gag. Deutch noticed the revulsion on his lawyer’s face.

  ‘Look, if I hadn’t gone over there, I would have been shot. In those days, towards the end of the war, when the Nazis were desperately trying to make the Final Solution happen before the Allies took over Germany, things were mad. Crazy. And they were doing everything in their power to burn the evidence. We were all caught up in the drive to do what the Führer ordered us to do. End the Jewish conspiracy. Put an end to the Jews. What would you have had me do, Professor Broderick? Refuse to do their bidding? I didn’t enjoy what I had to do. But I made life easier for those Sonderkommandos who worked for me. I gave them food and rest, more than they were getting before I arrived. I did what I could.

  ‘But in the end, I was only obeying orders.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Berlin, Germany, 1998

  IT WAS A STRANGE partnership, the sort of relationship which happens on a holiday when the norms of everyday living overflow usual boundaries and constraints, and unusual friendships are formed in strange and exotic places.

  For Chasca Broderick, the place was strange enough, but even on a holiday in an exotic island, she doubted she would have taken up with such an ordinary man. And every time she thought these kinds of thoughts, she checked herself for being elitist and snobbish.

  But she was the granddaughter of a patrician American, a man hailed by presidents and judges as one of the great Americans of the twentieth century; and the man with whom she was forming a working relationship bordering on friendship was the grandson of a hanged Nazi war criminal, a mechanic, a man whose life would have been led in the anonymity inhabited by the commonplace had it not been for the advent of Adolf Hitler.

  Yet suddenly and unexpectedly they were partners. Chasca had originally arrived in Germany with the intention of resurrecting the reputation of Deutch and gaining a judicial decision to reverse the finding of guilt for him, even though she could do nothing about the fact that they’d hanged a man they thought was a war criminal; Gottfried had, since his birth, tried to put his grandfather’s crimes behind him and lead as normal a life as possible, despite the presence of original sin coursing through his veins.

  And now they were together in her hotel suite in Berlin, reading and re-reading the testimony of Joachim Gutman, trying to determine any hidden message, any obscure clue which might have been written into his aching account so that they could take their investigations further.

  ‘Of course, there’s really no need to go beyond what we have here,’ Chasca said after they’d re-read the document a third time. ‘To me, although this wouldn’t be admissible in a court of law without much more forensic examination, this document should give comfort to you and your family. Perhaps we should leave it at this.’

  But Gottfried shook his head. ‘No, you don’t understand. Since the war, as I told you last night in the bar, we’ve had whole legions of people and organisations making our lives hell, trying to make us come to terms with the fact that we’ve got this bad blood in us. We can’t seem to put it behind us. My mother has had her life ruined because of my grandfather’s trial. That’s why it’s so important that we find this
man, Gutman, if he’s still alive; why it’s so important to get him to tell his story in public …’

  He stood from the couch and began to pace the room. ‘There’s much you don’t know, Chasca. Much you don’t understand about what it’s like to be a German today, with the whole world looking at you as if you’re personally responsible for the concentration camps and the evil that our grandfathers did. Again, I’m so sorry for being rude to you last night, but I thought you were one of these young and innocent American evangelists who was going to offer me life after death or somehow make me atone for original sin, or try to convince me not to feel guilty for the crimes of my grandfather.

  ‘But when I read the testimony, I knew that this was a way of changing my own life, and that of my mother. Yes, the main reason for trying to find out more is because of my mother. For all of her life, she’s hidden the fact that her father was a Nazi criminal. She’s pretended he died in the war, she’s denied he was hanged when some journalist tried to do a story on the family, she’d actually run away when people came to our door and hide in a cupboard … she’s tried to live it down, despite the fact that every decade or so, she’s reminded of it by some event or people like you appearing out of nowhere. But times have changed. Germany isn’t the same Germany as when we were growing up. Among some of us, there’s now a new pride in what the army did during the war. There’s a reason to be a German and not to be ashamed. We’re no longer hiding our heads in humiliation for what we did to the Jews or to the rest of Europe. Of course, pride can go too far. Now there are gangs of skinheads roaming the streets beating up homosexuals and Turks and immigrants, just like the SA used to do in the 1920s and ’30s; there’s a whole neo-Nazi movement which is trying to resurrect the Third Reich. They’re trying to rehabilitate Hitler and Himmler and Göring and Göbbels and the rest of them.’