The Mechanic
Page 30
After she’d compared the handwriting of the Jew to that of her father, she looked up at Chasca, and said softly, ‘I don’t understand.’
Prisoners’ Cells beneath the Palace of Justice
Nuremberg, Allied Occupied Germany
June, 1946
Lovingly, Wilhelm Deutch carried the sheaf of handwritten papers over to where Broderick was standing and placed it on the table. ‘I want you to get this published. After I’m dead, I want you to take it to reputable publishers and beg, even pay for them, to publish my memoirs. This is how I want the world to remember me.’
Broderick glanced down at the sheaf. He knew enough German to translate the title.
The Memoirs of Joachim Gutman.
A Jew in Germany during the Time
Of Adolf Hitler.
A Story of Concentration and
Death Camps.
And how a single good German saved my life
‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘Who is this Joachim Gutman?’
‘This,’ said Deutch softly, ‘is the way I want the world to know me. There’s truth in here. Truth which hasn’t yet been told. You ask who is this Gutman fellow. He’s my mouthpiece, if you like. He’s the person who should have given evidence on my behalf … if he was a real person. There’s so much distortion, so many lies about what we ordinary Germans did during the war. Today, it’s fashionable to hate us because we’re on the losing side, but in half a century or more, people will look back on this war and see it very differently. They’ll see what we Nazis were really trying to do. To purify our continent, to rid our bloodstream of the rubbish which is clogging up our arteries. The Jews and the Poles and the rest of those races. And when the hatred subsides, then people will write the truth about what happened here. They’ll write about why we had to build the camps and what really happened in them.’
Broderick looked at him in astonishment, and Deutch continued, ‘Okay, so right now we’re monsters, but in the future, we’ll be looked upon as a peoples’ army of loyal Germans who were fighting for our country. This,’ said Deutch, pointing triumphantly to the sheaf of papers, ‘this will redress the balance a bit. Show the world we aren’t all lunatics and killers.’
Broderick continued to stare at him, remaining silent as the magnitude of Deutch’s deception began to sink in.
‘Okay,’ said the German, ‘so there is no Gutman. But only you and I know this. Millions of Jews have been killed. What’s one amongst millions? They’ll never be able to trace somebody called Gutman. And in fifty years time, who will give a damn? Germany has to come out of this nightmare with some pride, doesn’t it?
‘This was written by me during the trial with great care and attention to detail. When I’m hanged, it will act as my memorial. It’s how I wish to be remembered. It’s the way Germany must be remembered. And you, Theodore, must remember your own promise to get this book published, so that I’ll be remembered properly and respected by future generations.’
And he pushed the papers across the table into the open hands of Theodore Broderick.
END NOTE
DURING HIS TRIAL IN Israel for his involvement in the Holocaust and his crimes against the Jewish People, Adolf Eichmann wrote a long and detailed exposition of his side of events concerning his involvement with the Nazi Party during the Second World War.
After he was hanged, the Israeli Government made the decision that they would keep the diary secret from the public as its veracity was impossible to determine. Only a handful of bona fide historians and Holocaust scholars were ever allowed access to it. But the main reason it was kept secret was because of the fear of the Israeli Government that, like Mein Kampf, the diary of Eichmann, one of the architects of the Holocaust, would be used as a bible by neo-Nazis.
It was only released into the public domain when the Government of Israel decided to give it to the Defense Counsel acting on behalf of Professor Deborah Lipstadt of Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, and author of the book Denying the Holocaust. Lipstadt was defending a libel action brought against her by David Irving, a notorious Holocaust revisionist. The trial was held in the High Court of Justice, Queens Bench Division in London, and for weeks the veracity of the Holocaust was again questioned, Irving claiming that it never happened. The judge, Mr. Justice Grey, found Irving to be a liar and a pro-Nazi polemicist rather than an honest historian, and that he had deliberately falsified facts in his own research.