by Alan Gold
He walked across the small room and threw his arms around me. There was more of me to hug this time. The bread and coffee had stopped me from losing weight.
Without another word, he disappeared from the room. From my life. Will I ever see him again? He was a good man. Not a great man, but a good and decent man. In the midst of a sea of misery and evil, he was an island of calm and goodness. He never told me how many other lives he had managed to save. Many, perhaps? Or a few? But the one thing of which I am absolutely certain is that had it not been for the bravery and kindness of Wilhelm Deutch, the mechanic of Auschwitz, I, Joachim Gutman, would not be writing my memoirs. I would be one of the millions and millions of nameless, forgotten Jews, who are now the dust of Europe.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Palace of Justice
Nuremberg, Allied Occupied Germany
June, 1946
NO ONE, NOT PROSECUTION, not defense, not Wilhelm Deutch, not the occasional citizen who wandered into the public gallery, no one had any idea of the judgment that Justice Jonathan Parker was about to deliver.
The prosecution had presented their case over six searing days of testimony; the defense, devoid of witnesses, called only the man accused of crimes to offer any sort of rebuttal, any defense to the allegations of the witnesses. The defense had made great play of the fact that the real criminals of the Nazi era had either been tried and found guilty, tried and acquitted, or had managed to escape to freedom through an SS organisation of old boys known as ODESSA, along what were now being called the Rat Lines. These men, Mengele among them, were probably in South America or South Africa, a whole world away from their crimes.
And the judge had listened carefully to what the prosecution and the defense had to say. During the summations of both prosecution and defense, Jonathan Parker had taken notes of various points which William Sherman and Theodore Broderick had made. He seemed to be taking more notes in Broderick’s submission, which the American considered a good sign. The judge especially paid attention when Broderick spent much time explaining that human behaviour was neither absolute nor consistent, and must be viewed for judgment within the context of when the action happened, and not in retrospect; that while allowing for the amorality of the Nazis, ordinary Germans like his client were living in a different environment from any which they’d previously known, and hence must not be judged too harshly by the standards which apply in humane societies.
The judge occasionally nodded and interrupted, asking a question which often related to some ethical issue. Matters of individual as opposed to collective responsibility; matters concerning the nature of the guilt of the individual in a society where the rule of law no longer applied; matters concerning the nature of good and evil.
Broderick had answered them as though he was in a master’s degree seminar with his graduate students. He quoted the great Greek philosophers, the Bible, the words of ethicists from ages past … even the Constitution of the United States as a model of human rights. Best of all, he expounded at length from Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Social Contract about the responsibility of a society to its members.
But at the end of the trial, it was anyone’s guess. William Sherman for the prosecution had concerns, because even though the witnesses had given compelling evidence of direct involvement in men’s deaths, only a few had identified Deutch directly with brutality and inhuman punishments. He’d have liked a couple more witnesses, but they were so hard to come by. Oh, there were thousands of witnesses to the hideousness of the Nazis, but few people could be found who had been in direct contact with the accused. He was, after all, such a small fish in such a big and malevolent pond. However, as a prosecutor, he put on the mask of confidence to colleagues and the defense that what he’d presented was enough of a case to convince the judge.
Professor Broderick thought that the defense needed a greater amount of the weight of corroboration. Hopefully, with only a comparative handful of witnesses pointing a finger directly at his client and saying they’d seen him being inhuman and a murderer, the judge might err on the side of caution. So many witnesses were sick and frail at the time of the incidents. Their minds might not have been all there. Or they might have come to court intent on wreaking revenge against an innocent, anyone with a German name who had been in the concentration camps. Certainly, Broderick was confident enough to think that on balance of probabilities, Deutch might get off … or at worst, the judge might bring down a finding of guilty with a sentence which would be more of a slap on the wrist, a couple of years in prison.
The judge, on the other hand, had looked at the impassive face of the prisoner Wilhelm Deutch and determined, with the lack of witnesses willing or able to come forward and speak on his behalf, that his crimes not only were proven, but that, as world attention focussed itself elsewhere, some strong and potent statement had to be made that crimes like these, crimes committed by ordinary Germans against humanity, crimes committed in concert with a government which was out of control, these crimes must not go unpunished.
He had listened carefully to Professor Broderick. He enjoyed listening to the Bostonian’s elegant mind clarify issues of great moment. But these discussions belonged in tutorial rooms in universities, or in gracefully furnished eighteenth-century salons. What he, as judge, had to do was deal with men and women who had acted in a way never previously seen in the long history of humanity. Ordinary Germans and Ukrainians and Poles and Latvians, who had turned their ancient and evil prejudices against Jews into murderous and uncontrollable rage. He as judge had to determine whether a man like Deutch was capable of continuing to live in society; and whether society should continue to be exposed to one such as him; one who at a whim ordered the brutal death of a pitiful man; one who delighted in torture, in slavery, in being the master of his universe.
Judge Jonathan Parker entered the courtroom in his most formal suit and gown. He sat. He looked at the counsel for the defense, and then the counsel for the prosecution. He had dined with them, played tennis with them, laughed with them. Both were elegant, intelligent, cultured men. Neither seemed to have been overly diminished by their cohabitation with evil. So for them, just as much as for the world’s newspapers, just as much for the defendant, Wilhelm Deutch, he would remind everyone of what precisely they were in Nuremberg to do. As he sat down, a Solomon come to judgment, so did the court.
‘The defendant will rise,’ the Clerk of the Court ordered. The military guard had remained standing, but either in ignorance or confusion, Deutch had sat down at the same time as counsel. Deutch immediately stood as the two guards reached over and assisted him to stand.
‘It is my duty to deliver a verdict in the case of Accession Number: AX-00452-C1947; the trial of Wilhelm Augustus Deutch conducted under the auspices of the International Military Tribunal. But before I do, I think it apposite to remind the court of why, precisely, the International Military Tribunal was established in August 1945 by the governments of the citizens of Britain, France, America, and the Soviet Union, meeting in London. These allied powers signed the agreement which created these courts at Nuremberg, and which set ground rules for the trial.
‘I can put it no better than the closing summation used by the distinguished Chief Prosecutor, Robert Jackson, who said,
‘The war crimes and the crimes against humanity of the Nazi criminals here today cannot be said to have been unplanned, isolated, or spontaneous offences. Aside from our undeniable evidence of their plotting, it is sufficient to ask whether six million people could be separated from the population of several nations on the basis of their blood and birth, could be destroyed and their bodies disposed of, except that the operation fitted into the general scheme of government. Could the enslavement of five millions of labourers, their impressment into service, their transportation to Germany, their allocation to work where they would be most useful, their maintenance, if slow starvation can be called maintenance, and their guarding have been accomplished if it did not fit into the common pl
an? Could hundreds of concentration camps located throughout Germany, built to accommodate hundreds of thousands of victims, and each requiring labour and materials for construction, manpower to operate and supervise, and close gearing into the economy, could such efforts have been expended under German autocracy if they had not suited the plan? Has the Teutonic passion for organisation suddenly become famous for its toleration of nonconforming activity? Each part of the plan fitted into every other. The slave-labour program meshed with the needs of industry and agriculture, and these in turn synchronised with the military machine. The elaborate propaganda apparatus geared with the program to dominate the people and incite them to a war their sons would have to fight. The armament industries were fed by the concentration camps. The concentration camps were fed by the Gestapo. The Gestapo was fed by the spy system of the Nazi Party. Nothing was permitted under the Nazi iron rule that was not in accordance with the program. Everything of consequence that took place in this regimented society was but a manifestation of a premeditated and unfolding purpose to secure the Nazi State a place in the sun by casting all others into darkness.’
The judge took off his reading glasses and looked at the defendant. ‘Wilhelm Deutch. You have claimed all along that you were a cog in the machinery of the State of Germany. You have claimed that you were acting under orders. Your counsel, Professor Broderick, has been at pains to explain, in the absence of witnesses to support your claims that you’d helped slaves and inmates survive the Nazi death merchants, that you weren’t the monster to which nine people have testified under oath. Yet despite widespread public interest in this trial, not one single human being has come forward to speak on your behalf. I will give you the benefit of the doubt, and not invest too much capital in the fact that no one has come forward to speak for you. I will ignore that as a mark against your character. But the evidence of the witnesses arrayed against you cannot be ignored.
‘Were it but one or two or three people only who claimed you had been brutal, violent, murderous, and evil in your treatment of slave labour, then I would have erred on the side of caution. Were it but a handful who said that you’d worked in the hideous charnel house of Auschwitz II, Birkenau, fixing the gas chambers and the death ovens so that the Nazi crimes could continue unabated, then I would have given you the benefit of the doubt. But you sought neither to rebut the evidence of your work as a mechanic in Birkenau, nor did you seek to excuse yourself. You said that you had to do it because you were ordered to. You said that if not you, then another would have done it. And you and perhaps your wife and young daughter in Germany would have suffered certain death as a result of your refusal.
‘But I find it impossible to believe you, Mr. Deutch. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that your entire testimony was a patchwork of lies, distortions, and self-serving fantasy. You were more than a mechanic, a cog in the awful machinery of death. You, and all the mechanics like you, did more than just fix broken equipment. You, and all the other noncombatant Germans who cooperated and assisted Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich, played an active role in the industrialisation and mechanization of a process designed to kill off an entire race of people.
‘You were one of the gears that drove the machine of death forward; you were the oil which made it work. Had you and millions of others refused to participate in the Nazi machine, had stopped it going forward to run like a train out of control, crushing all before it, then, Mr. Deutch, there would have been no war. Tens of millions of men, women, and children would still be alive today. Entire Jewish communities in Poland, Hungary, Russia, the Ukraine, Czechoslovakia, Rumania, Latvia, Estonia, and countless other places would still be flourishing today. A thousand years of culture, of learning, of history, would still be alive, celebrating its past, flourishing in the present, and investing itself in its own future, had you and millions like you refused to do as you were told. Mohandas Gandhi in India is currently giving the world a lesson in humility and peaceful non-cooperation. It’s a pity, Deutch, that you and those like you, aren’t learning the lessons of that simple and great man.
‘It was because of ordinary and inconsequential men like you, Wilhelm Deutch, that the Einsatzgruppen, the specialised Nazi killing squads, had the machinery, the power, the ability, and the resources to do their hideous work. It was because of men like you that Nazism was able to flourish, that Hitler had so many willing hands to do his evil work!’
Justice Jonathan Parker realised that he was close to shouting in his disgust at the man who stood in the dock before him. The judge cleared his throat and pronounced the words which everyone now knew with absolute certainty were about to be delivered.
‘Wilhelm Augustus Deutch. By the power vested in me by the International Military Tribunal, I hereby sentence you to be hanged by the neck until you are dead. The sentence will be carried out at a time to be determined by the Control Council and Military Government of Germany.’
The judge stood. The court stood. The judge started to leave the courtroom. Everyone turned and looked at him, but Wilhelm didn’t notice their reaction. He was holding the earphones close to his ears, listening intently, still waiting for the words of the translator to reveal his fate.
‘I’m deeply sorry,’ Theodore Broderick said.
Wilhelm shrugged. ‘I knew it. You knew it. In these last few days of my life, I feel I’ve been privileged to have known you. You’re a good man, Theodore. I may call you Theodore, may I?’
Broderick sat at the desk. The guard was outside the cell door. They were no longer entitled to use the interview room, as the case had just been tried and concluded. Now he and his client, with the translator, had to meet in Deutch’s cell.
‘What will you do now? Go back to your wife and children in America?’
‘No. I intend to apply for clemency. Unfortunately because of the way in which the rules of the London Charter have been set down establishing the International Military Tribunal, there’s no right to appeal and no court to which you can appeal. So in the past, defendants have asked the Control Council of Germany—the Allied occupation government—to reduce or change their sentences. Most of those who were found guilty did seek clemency from the Control Council. That’s what I intend to do tomorrow.’
‘And what happened to their appeals?’
‘They weren’t successful,’ he said softly. ‘But it’s an avenue which might produce results in our case. You see, the judge’s sentence can be questioned, not on the basis of the evidence, but because of the points I’ve been making in terms of collective guilt …’
‘I don’t want you to appeal.’
Broderick fell silent.
‘Instead, I want you to make me a promise.’ Deutch looked at his reaction when the translation had finished. It was impassive. ‘I don’t want to be remembered by the world as a war criminal; as one like Hitler and Göring and Himmler. I’m a mechanic, not a mass murderer.’
‘What do you want me to promise?’ Broderick asked.
‘Firstly, promise that you’ll do everything in your power to keep this promise. I assure you, it will harm nobody. It isn’t breaking the law, or any code of judicial conduct. But I want you to promise that you’ll try your very hardest to obey my last request of you.’
Broderick was inclined to deny the request without knowing what it was. But the statement was made in such earnestness that the American bent his head and whispered softly, ‘I promise to do whatever I can.’
The German nodded. ‘Good!’ He stood and went to the small wooden foot locker underneath his bed. He slid it out, opened it, and took out a sheaf of handwritten papers.
Berlin, Germany, 1998
Gottfried’s mother took the sheaf of photocopies. The original, the handwritten records of Joachim Gutman’s life in the concentration camps of Nazi Germany, were in the records of Yad VaShem in Jerusalem where they would be examined by historians for any insight they might give into the greatest crime of the entire history of humanity. And she’d left them there also
because of a promise that the Director of Yad VaShem had given to Chasca that he would look sympathetically to making some sort of addendum to the literature of the Nuremberg Trials to the effect that recent evidence showed that Wilhelm Deutch, hanged for war crimes, had not been as bad a person as was originally believed.
Gottfried’s mother was a slight woman, frail with age although only in her midsixties, and had obviously made an attempt to look neat and attractive for her important American visitor.
‘This is the document?’ Annelise asked her son Gottfried. He nodded. ‘This is the testament of the Jewish survivor?’ She looked upon it as though it was holy writ, a sacrament from a godly place.
Again, he nodded. Chasca smiled in anticipation of the joy that the testament would bring to a prematurely aged woman, whose entire life had been clouded by the grave miscarriage of justice.
Annelise took the sheaf of papers and fondled them as though she were holding a new granddaughter. Her face beamed a smile. ‘May God Almighty bless this man for telling the truth about my father,’ she said and clutched them to her bosom. Tears were welling up in her eyes, but she felt no embarrassment. Indeed, she turned to Chasca, and said, ‘And you, young lady, who have worked so hard to find the truth about a man you never knew, your rewards will come in heaven.’
Chasca reached out and touched Annelise’s cheek. The German lady turned and carried the document lovingly over to the table so that she could sit down and read the words which, despite the half century, would clarify before her eyes the image she, as a young girl, had of her father’s true and genuine nature, a father she had only known up to the age of seven before a rope broke his neck, and before the nightmares began.
But as she sat and began to read the writing on the front page, then as she turned over to several more pages inside, a frown seemed to crease her brow. She looked up at her son, then at Chasca. She adjusted the pair of reading glasses she had put on and turned several more of the handwritten pages. She reached down and opened her handbag, taking out her purse. Within her purse, she extracted a photograph of her father, Wilhelm Deutch, and turned it round to study the writing on the back. Annelise looked from the handwritten testament of the Jew Gutman, to the words on the back of the photograph, words which Wilhelm Deutch had written to his young daughter Annelise, when she and her distraught mother had visited him just a few days before he’d taken that final walk down the steel corridor of the prison to be hanged for crimes against humanity …
