Voices in Time

by Hugh Maclennan

  “There are many hares now. I also have a small garden.” Then he said in a resigned voice, “They have forgotten all about me.”

  The forester’s mind seemed vague, but when he and I sat in the sun and smoked our pipes – I had given him the first tobacco he had seen in more than a year – he began to talk. He spoke slowly, in fits and starts. He said his first wife had died so long ago he could hardly remember her. His second wife was also dead. By her he had had three sons and they had all been killed in Russia.

  “One of them intended to take my place, but he can’t because he’s dead. They’ve forgotten all about me.”

  Birds chirped in the forest, I saw a hare come out and squat in the sun, and we smoked in silence.

  As though he were talking to himself, the forester said, “The Austrians got us into the first war and we lost it. Now another Austrian has got us into a worse one and we’ll soon lose it. That’s how it happens. Three sons. I’m all alone here. No work. They don’t tell me what to do.”

  The old path I had followed as a child had been widened into a corduroy road which passed the cottage at a distance of about a hundred meters. The cottage was invisible from the road, which was overgrown with a short covering of grass. I asked him if it was still used and he shook his head.

  “There’s another one about three kilometers away they use very much.”

  On my way back to the city I had examined the surface of the road and calculated that if I could acquire some kind of vehicle I could convey Hanna and her father to this place along with rations and bedding. There was even a well behind the cottage near where the garden was. There were cooking utensils and an old stove inside. The forester might accept us and of course he could be paid, if only with tobacco. But I did not believe he would be influenced by a bribe. He was of the old stock of the old Breisgau; he was a tribesman.

  I looked Canaris in the eyes and said, “All right, I’ll try.” And with those four syllables I committed myself.

  A week later, wearing my naval uniform, I appeared before Himmler. I had seen many pictures of this man, but only when he was performing in some public affair in an imposing setting. The reality of Himmler alone in his office was very different. He was a dumpy, slope-shouldered little man almost chinless, hollow-chested and wide-hipped, pot-bellied and myopic behind rimless pince-nez that glittered in such a way that they seemed to mask the chilly eyes behind them. He made me think of a pettifogging clerk with nasty personal habits and a disagreeable body odor.

  Himmler surveyed me as though I were a lifeless object, picked up a note from his desk, appeared to study it, then laid it down.

  “I understand that you are the son of Rear-Admiral Dehmel?” he said.

  “Yes, Herr Reichsführer.”

  Himmler made some coldly poisonous remarks about the navy and its admirals and I was chilled and terrified. I had never met a man before who held such monstrous power and it was not reassuring to realize that in himself he was a total nothing. By his mere appearance this little creature seemed to define the preposterous character of the entire regime. Somehow I managed to articulate that the sailors had done their duty as they saw it.

  “Then why have they done so badly?”

  “Herr Reichsführer, do you believe my brother Siegfried did badly?”

  “When I said the navy did badly, I was not referring to young submarine officers. Naturally, the Jugend are heroes. They grew up under the Führer. But their commanders?” He did not even shrug. He left it in the air.

  “Herr Reichsführer,” I said, “if you are thinking about my father, he is a brave and loyal man. Unfortunately he is also an oldfashioned man who cannot understand the kind of world we’re living in now.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  “The treachery, Herr Reichsführer. The last time I spoke with my father he was very worried. I told him that if our naval Intelligence had been half as good as England’s, my brother would still be alive and serving the Führer.”

  With no expression, Himmler said, “You are a protege of Admiral Canaris. Are you criticizing your protector? If so, tell me why.”

  “What can Admiral Canaris do when there are so many traitors?”

  His chilly eyes became chillier. “That is very interesting, what you say. What do you know of these traitors you speak of?”

  “Nothing of them, Herr Reichsführer. If I knew their names, I would have informed Admiral Canaris. I simply know they exist.”

  “How do you know this?”

  “What other explanation can there be except traitors in high places?”

  “Explanation for what?”

  “For the victories the British and Americans have been winning. Without treason they could never have done it. Africa – Sicily – Italy. Always they win by surprise. So there must be traitors, and in high places.”

  A flicker of light appeared in Himmler’s little eyes and he said, “Yes, what other explanation is possible?”

  Then the flat face turned cold again and he asked me what I thought of the Jews. Did I know that the service I wished to join was now committed to the Final Solution of the Jewish Problem? Did I know what the final solution was?

  I had expected this question, had been told to expect it, and I had rehearsed my answer. I was trembling when I made it, for I had never had experience with these high fanatics and I still could not believe that anyone would take seriously what I had been told to say. I looked at him earnestly.

  “I don’t deny, Herr Reichsführer, that when I was young there were some individual Jews I thought I liked. It took me far too long to realize that the supreme proof of the Führer’s genius lies in this – that he understood the Jews as nobody has ever understood them. The Romans loathed them. ‘This disgusting people’ – that is how their historian Tacitus described them. But he did not understand them. Neither did the Christians. We had to wait until the Führer made us realize that though they are human in the anatomical sense, they have always been a disease within every civilization they have infected, and that no civilization can hope to survive unless they are exterminated.”

  I had been told that Himmler’s little eyes could smile at his wife and child with adolescent sentimentality but for me they remained cold as a snake’s.

  “Am I supposed to be impressed by that statement? You repeat only what the Führer was saying when you were still in school. Just when did you come to share his opinion, Professor?”

  This question I had also expected and was ready with an answer.

  “I remember the day precisely, Herr Reichsführer. It was the day after the Führer became Chancellor and I knew that at last Germany had found her savior.”

  His eyes remained a snake’s. “In that case – quite a long time after the date you mentioned – why did you return from England to work under the Jew Rosenthal?”

  “I returned to serve Germany, Herr Reichsführer. I knew that Rosenthal was sure to be dismissed.”

  The snake’s coil tightened. “I am very well informed, Dehmel.”

  “One knows that, Herr Reichsführer. One is thankful for that.”

  “I have filing cabinets containing many more than a million names and incidents. I review them constantly.”

  I bowed and said nothing.

  “Answer me this – why, the day you arrived from England at the Grosser Kurfürst Institut – why did you defend this Jew against a loyal German you later dismissed?”

  This question I had been sure would be asked and as I still remembered with bitterness my first day at the Institut, I was able to answer with real indignation.

  “I did not defend Rosenthal, Herr Reichsführer, though that stupid oaf of a Blockwart probably thought I did. I am not accustomed to insolence from a Kerl like him. The man was a fool. Loyal, certainly, but a hopeless fool. I wished to talk privately with Rosenthal before he left the country. I wished to learn some of his connections abroad. All I learned was that he knew Einstein – or pretended that he did. He was very
clever and very slippery. I still wonder why he was allowed to leave with his life.”

  Himmler nodded. “He did know Einstein. They’re both in the same place in America.”

  For nearly a minute Himmler was silent and expressionless. Then he murmured as though he were talking to himself.

  “These Jews are so difficult. I have never been hostile to them. I even tried to like them. But they remain Jews and they can never be anything else. They have given me a terrible problem. They have made me do things that may injure my reputation.”

  Again he fell silent and for the next few minutes he seemed unaware that I was in the room. There were many papers on his desk. He picked up one after the other, glanced at them, and initialled them. A filing clerk of death and murder, I thought, and stood before him wondering whether another paper would be initialled that would send me to my end.

  Suddenly he looked up. “You will report to Gruppenführer Krafft in Munich. One of the secretaries will give you the address and the date.”

  “Thank you, Herr Reichsführer.”

  Himmler extended across the desk a limp, clammy hand. “Hals und Beinbruch,” he said.

  I left him, spoke with the secretary, and was given a date and an address in Munich. I saluted, pocketed the information, and asked where the men’s room was. I locked myself into a toilet cabinet and vomited with such violence I felt as though I were vomiting up some of the tissues of my stomach. Weak, wet, sweating, and pale I got to my feet, wiped my face clean with a handkerchief, and opened the door of the cabinet to confront a Gestapo sergeant.

  “I had too much to drink last night,” I said to him.

  The sergeant’s face was a block of expressionless bone and muscle.

  “But it wasn’t really that,” I said. “To meet the Reichsführer – to be accepted by him when I hardly dared hope I’d be accepted – it was too much for me.”

  “What can I do for you, Herr Leutnant?”

  “A car to my lodgings, if that’s possible.”

  “Bestimmt, Herr Leutnant.”

  The man crashed into a salute. I replied with a casual naval one.

  The next day in Munich I was inducted into the Gestapo. My fingerprints were taken and checked against those on the dossier which Krafft had ready on his desk. He asked me a series of routine questions about my past career and turned me over to a doctor for a medical examination. The doctor stabbed a thick finger up my rectum with such violence I nearly screamed from pain and shock. He grinned at me.

  “So you’re not a homosexual. What a pity! However” – he was still grinning – “it was a necessary medical examination.”

  Later that day I was fitted for the black uniform and the next morning my training began. It occupied me entirely and I discovered it would take a good deal longer than Canaris had expected. For more than six weeks I studied manuals, listened to lectures, spent four hours a day in rugged and exhausting physical exercises, underwent weapons training, and was instructed in various methods of making arrests. I had been in the Gestapo for more than two weeks before the western Allies landed in France. The first communiqués were vague and made light of the situation and I was afraid it was another failure like Dieppe.

  The pace of the training became faster and harsher. One morning a senior officer barked at me to stand at attention. I did so, and without warning he slapped me hard across the face with the back of his hand. It was a test, of course, and as I had heard about it I did not flinch. Later I was put into a section of twenty young men with blank faces and powerful bodies and taught some routine methods of quick killing. Finally I received a summons to appear before Krafft once more.

  “You have done quite well,” he said. “At least adequately well. I will now tell you what lies ahead.”

  Here Canaris had been accurate. My work with the Gestapo would be purely bureaucratic. I would be assigned to a small district in Hungary where I was to order a compilation of the names and addresses of all the Jews living there. Those still at liberty I was to have arrested and finally I was to make arrangements with the railway officials for the trains that would take them to the gas chambers and the ovens in Poland. When I asked when I was to leave for Hungary, Krafft became irritable.

  “The damned bombing is causing delays everywhere. In France alone we’ve lost thousands of freight cars and hundreds of locomotives. Anyway, your training is not complete. You must still pass your final stage.”

  He did not tell me what the final stage was and for another week I was put through even more exhausting physical drills and weapons training. It was now midsummer and the weather was hot and humid. I worried constantly about Hanna and her father because time was passing and I was afraid they had already been arrested. If there was any reliable news about the battle in France we were not told of it. The first real information came to me by chance at the mess table when a senior officer joined Krafft and I overheard the conversation. This officer looked tired, strained, and very worried. He had just returned from Normandy.

  “It’s not good,” I heard him say. “We knew the English and the Canadians would be tough but we thought the Americans would be soft. We were wrong about that. Of course, none of them are in our class, but that fool Goering has left us without an air force. Their planes are over us like an umbrella from dawn till dark. The bombing is unbelievable. The fighting is worse than anything I ever saw in Russia.”

  I kept my eyes fixed on my plate. So the invasion was successful. So Hanna and her father might have a chance if they were still free. I myself might have a chance. And surely the British and the Americans would know there were men like Canaris in Germany who could do away with Hitler and make peace with the West before the Russians came in and tore what was left of the country to pieces.

  When the visiting officer departed I finally made my gamble. I told Krafft that I had just learned that my mother, who was in Freiburg, had been diagnosed for cancer. I wanted to speak with her physician to learn the exact nature of her case. As she might have little time left, I begged for a few days’ leave to visit her before going to Hungary. Krafft looked at me with suspicion.

  “Your final sessions begin tomorrow. You will have three of them on successive days.”

  I asked him what they would consist of and he said casually, “Interrogations.”

  Stephanie, those next three days were the second most horrible I ever spent in my life. The sessions I attended lasted from four to six hours and I had to watch what they did to the victims strapped to a bloodstained table and I had to hear their screams. I had to look on with a frozen face, for Krafft kept watching me. If I had protested, fainted, or vomited I would have been disgraced in Krafft’s eyes, and any chance of rescuing Hanna would have vanished.

  After the final session Krafft became very friendly. He clapped me on the back and called me ein ganzer Kerl (a fine boy) and told me he now trusted me completely. He also said I might have four days’ leave to visit my mother in Freiburg.

  “Give your respected mother my greetings,” he said. Then he added reflectively, “Those interrogations weren’t much. Those men broke very quickly.”

  “Two of them screamed in French and one of them screamed in Czech.”

  “Did they? The difficult ones were the Germans in the early days. Communists. Swine of course, but they were at least Germans. Most of them died before they talked. What a waste!” He smiled at me. “You’ll enjoy your work in Hungary. I think you’ll enjoy it very much.”

  I hoped to get some more information about the battle in France but he was indifferent.

  “The Führer will soon take personal charge of the situation and settle it. So now, on your way to Freiburg! Report to our barracks when you arrive and if you need anything, they’ll provide it.” He then gave me requisitions for a Volkswagen and gasoline and shook my hand. “Heil Hitler,” he said. “Heil Hitler,” I said.

  TWO

  I told you, Stephanie, that I have found it impossible to love myself. It was this exper
ience that started it. The next day, driving in the Volkswagen to the mountain village where I hoped to find Hanna and her father, I was no longer the same kind of man I had been before. Even now as I write this I can hear the screams of those tortured men, but that morning they deafened me. I felt worse than a murderer. I wondered if the shame and horror had passed into my face and I soon discovered that it had.

  Hanna and I had not seen each other for more than five months and when I appeared at the door in my ss uniform her face went pale and she flinched away with loathing in her eyes. Let nobody blame her for that. This was a time so unnatural that almost anything could happen and I realized that her first thought was that I had joined the Gestapo in order to save my own life and that part of the deal was to arrest her father and possibly herself. I was in partial shock anyway and her attitude paralyzed me. But her father understood instantly and closed the door behind me.

  “So you are Conrad!” he said and smiled and shook my hand.

  Hanna was still staring at me. “How long have you been wearing that?” she said and pointed at my uniform.

  Then something like fury exploded inside me and my voice shook. “I’ve planned everything. You must leave here at once.”

  “For where? Dachau?”

  Dr. Erlich intervened. “Hanna – please! You’re not yourself. Listen to what Conrad is trying to tell us.”

  “I’ve found a place where I can hide you both,” I said. “It’s in the Black Forest near Freiburg. I have a car to take you there. Believe me, it’s your only chance.”