by Alan Gold
Chasca stared at him in silence. She knew all about the neo-Nazi movement, and the revisionist historians like David Irving and Fred Zundel and the rest of the motley troupe of Hitler’s apologists. But what did that have to do with Gottfried?
Chasca listened in apprehension, uncertain where he was going with this approach. But there was a story which was about to come out … of that, she was certain.
Diffidently, he avoided her eyes, speaking to the carpet as he paced the room, ‘Even I, when I was younger … well, two years ago to be precise … I played around with German pride. I was fed up with everyone in the world saying that my nation was perpetually guilty. I was fed up with trying to live down the crimes of my grandfather. I just wanted to be able to hold my head up in pride and say to hell with the rest of the world.
‘So I went along to meetings of a group which was composed of the sort of people I’m sure you’d hate. It was a group called the Kammeraden and was composed of such people as the sons of guards from the concentration camps and soldiers in the Wehrmacht or members of the Waffen SS, a few of the actual soldiers, or their sons and grandsons. Not just Germans, but Austrians as well.’
Tentatively he looked at her, as though he were admitting some heinous crime. ‘I joined because I didn’t see why I should be punished because of the crimes my grandfather committed. Yet I was punished. In school, in the Scouts, always somebody knew that my grandfather was a war criminal. And so I joined the Kammeraden and I went along to a few of their meetings. But it was horrible. It wasn’t a self-help group of people like me. It was full of young Nazis and people who glorified the war and who were trying to relive the past or make the past into the future. Anyway, one day my mother was taking one of my jackets in for dry-cleaning and she found a leaflet I’d kept from one of the meetings. That was how she found out that I’d joined. I’ve never seen her so angry. She was shaking. She screamed at me. She’s not a well woman, she’s fairly weak, and yet she could have murdered me with her bare hands. I’ve never seen her so near to hysteria. She shouted, ‘Isn’t it enough I lost a father to these bastards, now I’m going to lose my son …’
‘I never went to another meeting …’ He lapsed into an ashamed silence.
Chasca was stunned. ‘Gottfried, why are you telling me this?’
He remained silent for many moments. Softly, he said, ‘Because this document might turn out to be my salvation.’
Allied Occupied Germany, June, 1946
From the memoirs of Joachim Gutman:
It might sound odd to you that I call Wilhelm Deutch ‘my saviour’. Saviour is a term used for a Messiah—a Christ or a Moses or a Muhammad. Was Deutch like these religious heroes? Was he like some chivalric knight in shining armour, come to save me from the Teutons who were threatening to put me to death?
No, of course not. He was an ordinary man. Prosaic, commonplace, and somewhat matter-of-fact. But how often do ordinary people do extraordinary things in exceptional circumstances? How often do we read tales about foot soldiers becoming heroes in the thick of a battle, or a mother plunging into a torrent of icy water to rescue her drowning child?
No, I’m not going to exaggerate what Deutch did. He used his powers of manipulation and persuasion to keep me alive. He didn’t plunge into a whirlpool or race across a battlefield laden with mines to pluck my dying body from barbed wire. But he did put his own life in jeopardy in order to save me. And he did so not once, but on dozens and dozens of occasions. In many small ways. Oh, we recognise our heroes from one heroic act, but true heroes aren’t just brave once, but are consistently brave in lots of little ways. That’s why I consider Deutch not only a Messiah, but also a hero.
And as far as I know, he did the same for others as he did for me. But when I asked him, he’d never admit it. Possibly for fear of what he was doing being found out by the Germans; possibly because of modesty; I’ll never know.
Let me start at the beginning. I’m always racing ahead, but I’ve said that before. I had been in the Sonderkommando unit for about three weeks. I’ve already told you that we lived separately from everybody else in the camp. The reason the guards made us live separately was so that our work would be a secret … so that nobody would know what was going on in Birkenau. Ha! As if every Jew and Gipsy and homosexual and Jehovah’s Witness walking like an automaton in the compounds of Auschwitz didn’t know precisely what happened to half the people on the trains which pulled in many times each day, people whom they never ever saw again. To their mothers and fathers and children. Where did they think these hundreds of thousands of people had disappeared to? What fools the Germans were for thinking that the death camps could be their little secret until the war had been won. And what then? When they were the master race and everybody knelt down before them? Did they think the world would thank them for getting rid of the Jews? Yes, they did!
But our masters thought they could keep the destruction of European Jewry an international secret, and so we Sonderkommandos were housed separately. Of course, that meant that we would never leave the camp alive. How could they afford for us to live and be witnesses?
Indeed, the Sonderkommandos knew this very well, and had revolted several days earlier. On October 7, 1944, something like four hundred Greek and Hungarian Sonderkommandos blew up Crematorium Four and attacked the SS guards with hand grenades they’d made themselves. They, like us, heard the low and welcome drones of the Allied bombers ruling the sky night after night. They, like us, smelt the acrid tang of high explosives and incendiary devices dropped from Allied bombers into the air of Europe. Some even thought that they could hear the distant boom of cannon coming from the East … from what could be an advancing Russian army.
And like us, these brave Sonderkommandos who revolted knew that if the war was coming to an end, their time on earth was limited; so they thought that they’d either escape to freedom by breaking through the walls and disappearing into the forests, or die like heroes in the attempt.
How did they get grenades? Well, a group of Jewish women who were slaves in the Union ammunition factory in Auschwitz smuggled out the gunpowder from their factory and gave it to the resistance group in the camp who worked in the clothing storehouse. These incredibly brave women and men then gave it to the Sonderkommandos.
Somehow the SS got to know of the escape plan, and that the Sonderkommandos were plotting an uprising, and decided that they would kill all the troublemakers. So they rounded up three hundred of them as a work detail, ostensibly to dig ditches outside the camp, but really to execute them. Well, the Sonderkommando instantly knew what was going on and began throwing stones and rocks at the SS and naturally refusing to go with them to the work detail. They shut themselves into the buildings surrounding Crematorium Four and blew up the charnel house with the stolen explosives. One hundred trucks filled with heavily armed SS men immediately arrived to put an end to their rebellion, but the Sonderkommando had stolen machine-guns from guards they’d killed and fought them off.
What did the SS do? When they saw that three of their number had been killed by the slaves, they released fifty German shepherd attack dogs, which tore men’s throats out. The rest of Birkenau’s Sonderkommando group, all seven hundred, then rose and revolted. By the end of the vicious day, not one was left alive.
It was because of their revolt that I was selected to be a Sonderkommando. We’d been told a lie. We’d been told that I was replacing some who had suicided. But in fact, the entire work troop had to be reconstituted. As if we wouldn’t have found out eventually!
Three weeks of this living hell, and I was ready and eager to have my own throat ripped out by an attack dog. Anything would be preferable to what I was doing. A day as a Sonderkommando is a lifetime of normal work. Indeed, I was very seriously thinking of stripping off my own clothes, mixing myself in with a batch of inmates walking into the gas chambers, and ending the pain. After all, when we’re naked, we’re no longer Sonderkommandos or inmates, or even SS guards—when we’r
e naked, we’re human beings.
But my life changed, again, when I caught sight of Wilhelm Deutch. Had I not seen him at that moment, I know for certain that I would not be alive today to record this testimony. I know with absolute confidence that the next day, or the one after, I’d have stripped bare and gone to meet my God. Had I not seen Deutch!
I remember so clearly what I was doing. I was working the elevators, carrying dead bodies off the line, and sorting them out for the ovens in an obscenity of the arithmetic of death … nourished one, plus starving one, plus child, plus old person in one pile. Fat old woman, plus thin grandfather type, plus young woman who looks pregnant, plus baby—no, that pile can afford two babies if we can squeeze them in … and so it went on, as though we were working in a draper’s shop sorting out bales of cloth while doing a stock-take.
My movements had become increasingly automatic, like those of a golem. I knew that I was jerky in my responses. I never smiled, I never frowned, I never complained. I just worked. Of course, that was what my body did … as to my mind, well, I did everything in my power to shut out the reality of what I was doing, but no matter how much I tried, reality always broke through, and I understood that these still-warm, lifeless things not moments ago had been terrified for their future, praying to a God who had abandoned them.
Wait! What I’ve told you is a lie. I determined that when I wrote this memoir, I wouldn’t lie or exaggerate the truth, and I don’t intend to now. So I’ll tell you what went through my mind as I worked pushing dead bodies into the ovens … humour. Yes, I tried to think humorously. I looked at each body and tried to see different aspects of humour in the expression (this one looks like Adolf Hitler dead drunk); or the way the limbs were setting upon death (this one looks like he’s just been making love to a woman and her husband caught him in the act); or their physical shape (this one’s so fat she looks like she’s got rabbits in her backside). Or maybe when men and women, maybe husband and wife, were locked in death in each other’s arms (they look like lovers, and her husband just walked into the bedroom at the moment of his climax, and then the husband raced to the gun cupboard before her lover could extract himself from her body, and now the husband has shot them both … Look, you can see the wound on her face, and where he’s tried to scratch her eyes out).
Does this disgust you? Talking about the dead that way? It disgusts me now, but it was the only possible way I could stop from going completely mad.
Another couple of days and I would have gone mad. Humour, even bad humour, isn’t funny when it’s repeated too often. And then I looked up and I saw Wilhelm Deutch. Thoughts of sitting in the sun on the roof, of digging a trench and talking to him about myself, of eating fresh bread and meats and eggs and pickled cabbages suddenly burst into my brain. I clearly remember feeling giddy, as though I were about to faint. Suddenly I was a young lad again, and I’d just caught a glimpse of a brassiere or the top of a woman’s stocking, and my hormones were racing around my body and I felt giddy from the excitement. It was the same when I caught a glimpse of Deutch, my saviour. In death, I found life. I remember clearly feeling giddy at the sight of him, and starting to reel over. But fainting was punishable by beating, and probably death. Yet I couldn’t stop myself from shaking.
At first, he didn’t recognise me. It was a room full of the smoke of the ovens and dirt and the smells of freshly killed bodies; it stank of the combustion gases of the coke we used as fuel to burn the bodies, and at times, the air was almost impossible to breathe. And it was almost impossible to see through the Stygian gloom of the place.
Deutch looked at me. I was one of ten men working in the immediate area, and of course we were all wearing the same filthy, grime-encrusted prisoner pajamas. To an outsider, even to the guards, we were indistinguishable from one another. Every mark of identity had been stripped away from us by our work; our expressions, the set of our mouths, even the way we held ourselves. We had all become identical robots in the machine.
But when my eyes met those of Deutch, there was a spark of something; and the something made him look again, made him peer through the murk and try to identify where he’d met me before. And when recognition dawned on his face, it was as though he’d been felled by an axe. His jaw dropped, his body seemed to shrug in horror, and I could tell he wanted to run over to me and help me in my moment of need.
But he stayed where he was. He listened attentively as the captain of the guard explained what was going wrong with one of the ovens. But I knew he wasn’t listening; I knew that out of the corner of his eye, he was looking at me, aching to reach out and comfort me.
Deutch was no fool. He’d been associated with the Nazis long enough to know that he had to save his own life in order to save mine. Yes, he had sufficient experience and knowledge of the way the Nazis would react to a sudden act of heroism to stop himself from reacting in that way. And in their present mood of frantic desperation, the mood of soldiers about to lose the war, Deutch’s action of heroism would undoubtedly have led to his own death. So instead, when the captain bent over to point out something concerning the air flow of the ovens, Deutch used it as an opportunity to put his hand to his forehead as though to wipe it, and inconspicuously put his finger to his lips, telling me not to show any signs that we had recognised each other … that he knew me, knew I was there … that he would help me at some stage in the near future, as soon as he could. I stopped shaking. Suddenly my life turned around. Suddenly, I had been given hope again. Suddenly, I looked different from the other Sonderkommandos.
For a week, Wilhelm Deutch worked in my area among the dead (and sometimes living dead), trying to get the retorts to fire in proper order, trying to get them to work at their maximum capacity, trying to put life into death.
In the last days of the war, of course, the ovens were more of a backup to the alternative method devised by the Nazis for burning Jews. Months and months earlier, the Auschwitz Sonderkommandos had been forced to dig huge trenches outside the building. These trenches were used for when we burned the bodies in the open air. The ovens weren’t burning all the Jews who were being gassed, and so the Nazis had to resort to more primitive methods of disposal than machines. Indeed, the open burning pits were far more efficient methods of burning human beings than were the expensive ovens. It made me wonder whether Hitler would demand back the money he’d paid to the manufacturers.
Working outside in the open air disposing of dead bodies was more pleasant than working in the ovens, but reality kept impinging itself on us, and suddenly—when we’d see a rabbit in the distance or a bird landing on a distant tree—we’d come face-to-face with nature, and we’d realise precisely what it was that we were doing.
And what we were forced to do was indescribable. In the bottom of the trench, we would put masses of wood, douse it with petrol, and throw the dead bodies on to a fire. The Nazis quickly learned that if runnels were dug downwards to collect the fat which ran off the smouldering bodies, it could be used to pour back on to the bodies, and make them burn hotter, better, cleaner.
Then when the hundreds of human beings were nothing more than white ash with the occasional bone still smouldering, we’d dig up the ash, take it to a collection point where it was thrown in the river, or used in the fields, and be ready for the next batch. We could do thousands of bodies in a single day by this method.
But, sticklers to a fault, the Germans wanted good value from the ovens they’d paid good money for, and so Herr Mechanical Engineer Wilhelm Deutch was set to work ensuring that they became operational.
Our eyes often met as he tightened his bolts and adjusted air flows and regulated temperature gauges and checked that the temperature of the coke at the top of the furnace wasn’t too different from the temperature at the bottom and that the slag which fell from the burning coal didn’t block up the airflow systems.
But while he was doing that, he’d find an excuse to do something near me and would whisper to me, ‘I’m doing something soon. Be stron
g.’ Or, ‘I’ve left some meat bread and margarine in an old satchel underneath that pile of rags over there. Be careful when you get it …’
He gave me a reason to continue living. Even if it was only curiosity.
Allied Occupied Germany
Western Sector (American Army)
June, 1946
The Second International Conference of Allied Judicial Officers, held in one of the few hotels in Berlin which could still boast anything resembling a good dining room, had been meeting over the weekend. The war had been over for a year, and Allied soldiers were keen to return home. The Potsdam Conference told the citizens of defeated Germany that, ‘It is the intention of the Allies that the German people be given the opportunity to prepare for the eventual reconstruction of their life on a democratic and peaceful basis’, and then proceeded to quarrel over the spoils of victory without thought of the needs of the German people. And it was becoming increasingly likely that Stalin would bring down some sort of barrier between the Eastern half of Berlin that Zukhov had captured, and the Western half of Berlin which was controlled by Britain and the United States, and complicate the fragile movement towards restructure.
Professor Theodore Broderick was included with twenty-five other judicial officers who had participated in the trials, which were now almost at an end in the city of Nuremberg. It was important to the victorious Allies that the trials were held in this particular ancient German city, where Hitler had orchestrated his triumphal rallies before the war.
