The Collini Case

by Ferdinand von Schirach

  The journalists were waiting outside the courtroom. An officer helped them, opening a small door and letting them through; the reporters couldn’t follow. Leinen didn’t want to go out through the main entrance; he led Johanna down long corridors to the multi-storey car park. The engine of the old Mercedes wouldn’t start at the first attempt.

  ‘Where do you want to go?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t mind, just away from here.’

  He drove through the city to the Schlachtensee. She sat beside him, crying, and there was nothing he could do. He parked the car on a path in the grounds of the lake, and they walked a little way through the wood there.

  ‘Why didn’t you say anything before?’ she asked.

  ‘I wanted to protect you. You’d have had to tell Mattinger.’

  She stopped and took his arm. ‘Do you really think all that happened?’

  He waited for a while. ‘Shall we go down to the lake?’ he said. He thought about her question. ‘Yes, I think it did happen,’ he said at last. He wished he could have said something else.

  ‘Why have you ruined everything?’ she asked. ‘Your profession is so cruel.’

  He didn’t reply. He thought of Hans Meyer. He could almost feel the old man patting his head. As children they used to go fishing with him, and they had fried the trout they caught over a campfire and eaten them with nothing but butter and salt. Philipp and he would lie in the grass while Meyer sat on a tree trunk, in gumboots with his trousers rolled up. He remembered the dark green of the trees and the darker green of the stream where they caught the fish. The old man’s cigars, the warm smoke, the heat of summer. None of that would feel all right any more. It would never be all right again.

  Leinen went down to the bank and skimmed a stone over the lake. It skipped three times before it sank.

  ‘Your grandfather taught me how to do that,’ he said, throwing another stone. When he turned round, Johanna had disappeared.

  16

  On the next day of the trial, the benches for the press and the spectators were crammed. The presiding judge briefly greeted participants in the trial. Then she nodded in Leinen’s direction and said, ‘Please go on.’

  Leinen rose to his feet. For the last week he had spent his days in the prison and his nights at his desk. He was glad that the moment had come; he could do no more. He had fallen asleep in the taxi taking him to the courthouse, and the driver had to wake him up. He placed his text on the lectern. As he began to read, he knew that today he was going to destroy his childhood, and Johanna would not come back to him. And that none of that was of any relevance.

  At eighteen minutes past ten on the evening of 16 May 1944, all fourteen tables in the Café Trento in the narrow Via di Ravecca in Genoa were occupied. All the guests in the café were German soldiers, as usual, and nearly all of them were serving in the marines. The men had unbuttoned the jackets of their uniforms, they were playing cards, some of them were drunk already. The man who put the bag down beside him at the bar wore a lance corporal’s uniform. He didn’t speak to anyone; he ordered a small glass of beer and drank it standing. He nudged the bag half under the bar with his foot; it wasn’t heavy, only a kilogramme. Before coming into the café, he had crushed the ampoule at the end of the little brass tube with a pair of pincers. As he drank his beer, the copper chloride solution in the bag slowly began to corrode the iron wire. He would have at least a quarter of an hour. They had explained the English detonator to him again and again: as soon as the wire was eaten away a spring inside the tube would be released, and a bolt would strike a percussion cap and produce a spark. They couldn’t have used German detonators: they were too quick and made a loud hissing noise. The man put his empty glass down on the bar, placed money beside it, and went away. Eighteen minutes later the Plastit W detonated at a speed of 8,750 metres a second, a far more violent explosion than TNT. The pressure wave crushed the body of the man who happened to be standing near the bag and tore another man’s lungs apart; they both died instantly. Tables and chairs were hurled through the air, bottles, glasses and ashtrays broke. A splinter of wood entered an NCO’s left eye, fourteen other men were injured, they had splintered glass in their faces, their arms and their chests. The café windows shattered, and the door was torn off its hinges and lay on the paving outside.

  The interpreter woke at two in the morning. His back hurt because he had been sleeping on the sofa again; he didn’t want to wake his wife and children early in their small apartment. It had been like this for weeks, ever since the new German had taken over the Nazi office in Genoa and was running it like a business venture. The new German’s name was Hans Meyer. He was supposed to be putting an end to the strikes in this district – local industries were needed for the production of war materiel.

  The interpreter lay there for a moment longer. He often thought that he’d rather have stayed in his mountain village above Merano, where he had met his wife at her parents’ inn in the summer fourteen years ago. She had smelled of fresh strawberries. She was much more elegant than the girls from his village: even up there in the mountains she wore high heels. Her parents had agreed to the engagement, he had followed her to Genoa, and for a long time all had gone well. But when the war began her father had fallen sick, and they had to sell everything to pay the doctors’ bills. He dealt on the black market: food, cigarettes, sometimes a little jewellery. He could have gone on living like that; after all, the war must come to an end some time.

  Then his luck changed. The Germans had been searching the harbour for ‘bandits’, as they called the partisans. He wasn’t a partisan, he had only been selling his stuff, but he fled with the others and hid in a warehouse. A woman partisan was lying across the entrance; he had simply climbed over her. She was bleeding heavily; the ground around her was black. He waited in his hiding place and heard the woman groaning. After a while he didn’t hear her any more. He went over and looked at her. Then he felt the barrel of a gun in his back.

  The Germans confiscated his bags of food and cigarettes, and took him to their HQ with them. When they found out that he spoke South Tyrolese German, they said he must either go to prison or be an interpreter for them.

  The interpreter stood up, took his things off the chair and dressed. Half an hour later he left the apartment. He cycled to the Marassi district of Genoa. The head of Department V – criminal investigation – had told him to be at the prison by quarter to three in the morning at the latest. They hadn’t told him what they were going to do. They didn’t need to; he’d guessed it long ago. There had been other attempts to assassinate German soldiers before now, but they couldn’t meekly accept the bomb in the Café Trento. They would respond; ‘uncompromising measures’ would be taken. ‘Uncompromising’: that was the kind of word the Germans liked to use.

  He was given the list in Marassi Prison. It was three in the morning. He had to call the numbers beside the list of names out in the corridor. Only the numbers, no names, twenty in all on the list. None of them had had anything to do with the bomb. Then the prisoners were standing outside their cells; a smell of sleep was in the air. The German from Department V stammered when he spoke quietly, but when he raised his voice he didn’t stammer any more. The interpreter had to translate. The men were to get dressed; they were being moved; they could leave their things where they were; they would be sent on. That was a mistake: no one sent prisoners’ things anywhere these days. The prisoners knew at once that they were going to die today. Finally the German checked the numbers on the cell doors and crossed them off his list.

  The prison yard was brightly lit: the floodlights on the walls were switched on. People’s faces looked white, as though they were on an overexposed film. A truck stood in the middle of the yard, with its tarpaulin cover folded back. The prisoners climbed in and sat down on benches. Four men armed with sub-machine guns guarded them. They were not staff at HQ; they were in marine uniforms. No one shouted orders, none of the prisoners resisted. The interpreter and the offic
er in charge of the marines rode in a jeep. At the prison door Hans Meyer got into the back of the jeep. The interpreter was in front beside the driver. He didn’t understand everything the men in the back were saying. Hans Meyer said something about ‘Hitler’s orders’, about ‘General Kesselring’, about ‘reprisals in a ratio of one to ten – ten dead bandits for one dead soldier’. He had been summoned to Florence, said Meyer, in Rome thirty-three German soldiers had been shot by bandits in the Via Rasella. It was all about ‘paying the price’. The interpreter had heard of this incident; the Germans had been military police from Bolzano. In reprisals, General Kesselring had three hundred and thirty-five civilians shot in the Ardeatine Caves; they had had nothing to do with the attack on the Germans, and there had been a child among them. ‘Otherwise a neat, clean military operation,’ said Hans Meyer.

  They drove for about an hour, then the road became narrower, and the headlights of the truck stayed right behind them. Once the interpreter saw a deer, rigid and beautiful, eyes like glass.

  When they stopped he had lost all sense of direction. Two buses stood at the roadside. There were German marines everywhere, maybe forty of them, barricading the road. The prisoners got out of the truck. The marines tied them together in pairs by their left arms, so that one had to walk forward, the other backwards.

  The interpreter stayed with the prisoners, translating the Germans’ orders. Then he followed Meyer and the marines into the ravine. He stumbled, grazed the side of his hand on the rock, grabbed hold of the damp moss on the stones. After going round a bend, they stopped at the bottom of the narrow valley. Thin mist clung to the walls of the ravine. A pit lay ahead of them; other prisoners must have dug it, its sides were reinforced with boards. The interpreter couldn’t help it, he had to look down.

  Suddenly everything happened very fast. Ten marines took up their positions in a row five or six metres from the pit. Five prisoners were led to the pit until they were standing on a wooden plank. They looked into the muzzles of the guns, their eyes were not blindfolded. No explanation, no priest – no one spoke. The officer gave the commands: ‘Release safety catch.’ ‘Take aim.’ ‘Fire.’ Ten shots immediately rang out. The rocks threw back the echo. The men fell backwards into the pit. After that the marines led five more partisans up. In the meantime an older NCO with a pistol climbed down a small ladder into the pit. He was wearing gumboots so as not to soil his leather boots. Down in the pit, he shot two men through the head. The coup de grâce. As if there were still any mercy, thought the interpreter.

  The partisans on the wooden boards saw their own death coming. Those who had gone before them lay in the dirt below, one on top of another, legs and arms grotesquely distorted, heads split open, blood on their jackets, blood in the muddy puddles. All the same, they didn’t resist. The daily bulletin would report, later: ‘Reprisal Operation carried out successfully. No incident of note.’ Only one of the prisoners did not stick to the prescribed order of events; the man did not look at the soldiers, he looked at the sky and flung his arms high in the air. ‘Viva Italia!’ he cried. And then again: ‘Viva Italia!’ His voice sounded unreal. Naked, thought the interpreter. One soldier lost his nerve and fired too soon, a single shot fired into a scream. The interpreter saw the projectile strike the man in the chest, knock him down with his arms still outstretched. Saw the face of the soldier who had shot too soon: very young, little more than a child, his mouth open, the gun still levelled to take aim. That young man would never tell anyone about this day. It wasn’t war now, it wasn’t battle, contact with the enemy. It was human beings killing other human beings, that was all. The interpreter saw the young man’s eyes; maybe he’d still been sitting, until only recently, in school or in a lecture hall. As long as the interpreter lived he would remember it – a moment of truth, but the interpreter didn’t know what truth that was.

  At last it was over. The marines shovelled earth over the pit where the dead men lay. Finally they heaved a large rock over to mark the spot. No one in the jeep talked on the way back. By the time the interpreter got on his bicycle back in Genoa, the sun was well up. He didn’t want to go home, he didn’t want to look at his wife and children. He went down to the sea, lay on the beach and looked out at the waves.

  In the evening the interpreter got drunk. When he came home he told his wife about that morning in the ravine. They were sitting in the kitchen; his wife stared at him until he had finished his story. Then she stood up and struck him in the face, again and again, until she was exhausted and couldn’t hit him any more. They stood like that in the dark for a long time. After a while he switched the light on and gave her the list with the names of the prisoners that he had brought away from the prison with him. His wife read it out loud. The first name was Nicola Collini.

  Four days later the news reached the village where the Collinis lived. Uncle Mauro bent over the boy that night and kissed him on the eyes.

  ‘Fabrizio,’ he told the sleeping child, ‘from now on you are my son.’

  17

  ‘The interpreter,’ said Leinen, ‘was condemned to death by the Extraordinary Court in Genoa in 1945.’ Then he sat down.

  The silence in the courtroom was unbearable. Even the presiding judge watched, motionless, as Leinen put his papers together. At last she turned to Reimers, the senior public prosecutor.

  ‘Would the public prosecutor’s office like to express any opinion?’

  At this question the tension in the courtroom was broken. Reimers waved it away, saying that he would give an opinion only after checking the papers. His voice was barely audible.

  The presiding judge looked at Mattinger. ‘Counsel for the accessory prosecution, would you like to say anything?’

  Mattinger stood up. ‘The events described by counsel for the defence are so terrible that I need time. I doubt whether anyone in this courtroom feels differently,’ he said. ‘But there’s one thing I simply don’t understand: why did the defendant wait so long before killing Hans Meyer?’

  Leinen was about to say that his client would answer that question in writing later. He hadn’t noticed Collini moving beside him. The big man got to his feet and looked at Mattinger steadily. Then he said, ‘My aunt …’ It was the first time his deep, soft voice had been heard in the courtroom. Leinen looked round at him. ‘Please leave this to me,’ Collini told him quietly. Then he turned to Mattinger again. ‘My uncle died a long time ago. My Aunt Giulia died on 1 May 2001. She could hardly bear it when I went to the country of the German murderers to find work. But to think of me in a German prison as well would have killed her. I had to wait for her death. Only then could I kill Meyer. That is the whole story.’ Collini sat down. He was careful about it, he didn’t want to make any noise. Mattinger looked at him for a moment, then nodded.

  ‘Your honour,’ he said to the presiding judge, ‘I would like to wait for the next day of the trial before I make any further statement.’

  The presiding judge adjourned the court.

  Leinen went to the courthouse car park and collected his car. He drove around the city for a long time. A homeless man was sitting at a crossroads with a paper cup. In Unter den Linden a teacher was showing his class of school students the monument to Frederick the Great, and then the monument recording the Nazi burning of books in May 1933. A poster of a politician promised economic growth and low taxes. Leinen would have liked to talk to someone, but there was no one around he could have spoken to. He drove to the flea market on the Strasse des 17 Juni and wandered past the stalls. This was where everything ended up when a dead person’s apartment was cleared: cutlery, lamps, prints of works of art, combs, glasses, furniture. A young woman was trying on a fur coat; she posed in front of her boyfriend, pouting. A man was selling old magazines, praising their merits as if they were hot off the press. Leinen listened to him for a while, then he went back to his car.

  18

  On the next day of the trial, Mattinger rose to his feet as soon as the presiding judge had greet
ed them all. He did not look the same as on the two preceding days. The vertical and horizontal lines on his forehead appeared deeper, he seemed to be full of energy and concentrating hard. The presiding judge called on him to speak.

  ‘Ladies and gentlemen on the judges’ bench,’ he began, ‘last time we met to continue this trial, counsel for the defence supplied the motive for the defendant’s actions. The defendant’s father was shot on the orders of Hans Meyer. Fifty-seven years later, Fabrizio Collini avenges him. Of course it may well be that a motive for killing is honourable. But if the shooting of Fabrizio Collini’s father was legally permissible according to the law in force at the time, the motive appears in an entirely different light. For in that case Collini killed a man who did only what was correct in the eyes of the law.’

  Mattinger took a deep breath and turned to Leinen. ‘Apart from that, it is also one of the duties of an accessory prosecution to protect the victim. And the victim in the case being tried here is not the defendant, he is still Hans Meyer –’

  ‘I don’t understand what you are trying to say,’ the presiding judge interrupted him.

  Mattinger held a sheaf of newspapers up in the air. He raised his voice. ‘Counsel for the defence has succeeded in presenting Hans Meyer as a cold-blooded murderer. Every newspaper is writing about the dreadful things he did, I’m sure you’ve read the reports yourselves.’ He threw the papers down on the table in front of him. ‘So now we must hear evidence from an expert witness who can tell us whether Hans Meyer really was a murderer. Each strike must be followed by a counterstrike – that’s a major tenet of the criminal code. In other words: we can’t keep the court bogged down for months with evidence that the shootings really happened, only to discover in the end that they were justified.’

  Mattinger took off his reading glasses, leaned on the table and looked at the presiding judge. ‘I would therefore ask the court to let me call the director of the Federal Archive in Ludwigsburg as an expert witness. I have asked Dr Schwan to be here today, and she is waiting outside the courtroom.’