Quest for Anna Klein, The

by Thomas H. Cook

  “You hated them that much?” I asked.

  “They were dust to me,” Danforth said. “They had killed the only woman I would ever love, along with millions of innocent people.”

  I started to speak, but the flash in Danforth’s eyes stopped me cold.

  “If the crimes of a people go on through time, then why shouldn’t our revenge?” he asked. He seemed to realize that his arctic chill had frozen me, and to warm the atmosphere, he sat back casually, like a man about to tell a lighthearted fireside story. “Anyway, by the time I was allowed to visit Plötzensee, it had pretty much been cleared out. It had been badly damaged from the bombings. There was a lot of charred brick and rubble, and for a carton of cigarettes one of the Russian guards let me walk around the place.”

  I imagined Danforth in his army uniform, a pistol strapped to his side, moving through the blackened ruins, then into the old cell blocks of Plötzensee, where, as he told me, many of the doors had been blown off and left lying in the wide corridors.

  He had not been sure what he was looking for, he said, but in his rambling he found what appeared to be the prison’s record room. There were still file cabinets, and he searched through the papers he found inside them for quite a few hours. There were prisoner lists and execution lists, along with the usual detritus of the Nazi bureaucracy, petitions for clemency almost always stamped Denied.

  “Most of what I found was of no value to me, but I did discover that at least one thing Dieter had told me was true,” Danforth went on. “He’d even gotten the nickname right: Lilo.”

  As it turned out, Lilo was Liselotte Herrmann, a German Communist who’d joined the Roter Studentenbund, the Red Students League, in 1931, participated in all sorts of anti- Hitler actions, and gotten herself kicked out of the University of Stuttgart.

  To my surprise, he drew a photograph from his jacket pocket and handed it to me. “This is Liselotte,” he said.

  In the picture, Liselotte Herrmann wore a plain white blouse and was holding a small child. She had straight hair, cut very short, and bottle-bottom glasses with thick, black frames, a woman who could not possibly have been mistaken for a dark, curly-haired Anna Klein.

  “The child is her son,” Danforth said. “He was four years old when his mother was executed.” He drew the picture from my hand and returned it to his pocket. “Anyway, I went through the records I found — which were by no means all the records, of course; God knows how many had been burned or blown to bits or used for toilet paper by the Russians — but there was no mention at all of Anna. Which meant that although I couldn’t prove what Dieter had told me, I’d found nothing to disprove it, and so for me the mystery of what had become of Anna only deepened.”

  “But she’d surely been killed,” I said. “You had to assume that.”

  “Of course,” Danforth said. “But a certain kind of devotion — of obsession — demands to know what really happened, and I was stricken in that way, Paul. I simply had to know.”

  Danforth’s had been a sad passion, it seemed to me, and clearly a futile one; even now he struck me as a man with much love and no one to give it to.

  “You never fell in love again?” I asked.

  “No,” Danforth said.

  “But surely your love for Anna faded over time,” I said.

  “That’s exactly what Clayton believed would happen eventually,” Danforth said. “That in the end Anna would pass into memory, and I would find a way to make a good life without her. Which was why he’d made up the whole business of Anna’s execution.”

  “Made it up?” I asked, astonished.

  “Yes,” Danforth said. “As he admitted after the war. He’d done it because he believed that I would never stop looking for her if I thought she was alive. It was the action of a friend for the benefit of a friend, he said. Then he asked me to forgive him, and I did. It was as simple as that.” He shrugged. “To save a man from a fruitless passion, I’d probably do the same. After all, a passion can die. But not a mystery, Paul, unless you solve it.” He smiled softly. “Odd, though, that the next clue would find me working on the war crimes trials. On the Oswald Rothaug prosecution. He’d been the presiding judge in the Katzenberger case.”

  Leo Katzenberger was a sixty-two-year-old shoe magnate, Danforth told me. He’d lived and prospered in Nuremberg. A friend had written to tell him that his daughter, twenty-two-year-old Irene Scheffl er, was coming to Nuremberg in order to pursue her career as a photographer. Scheffl er ended up taking an apartment in the same building as Katzenberger’s offi ce, and over the next few weeks, neighbors became certain that the two were having an affair.

  “But this was not just some commonplace May-December fling,” Danforth said, “because Katzenberger was a Jew, and Scheffl er was an Aryan, and the Nuremberg laws expressly forbade this kind of association.”

  Once alerted to offi cial interest, Katzenberger and Scheffl er had denied the affair. And since there was no evidence for it other than the speculation of neighbors, the case had been dismissed by the first investigating judge.

  “But by then a judge by the name of Oswald Rothaug had gotten wind of the case,” Danforth said. “Rothaug was a rabid Nazi, and he found Katzenberger and Scheffl er guilty on no evidence but rumor.”

  At that time, the “crime” did not carry the penalty of death. But Judge Rothaug knew that the death penalty could be im posed on anyone who used wartime regulations to commit a crime. A single witness had testified that Katzenberger had taken advantage of the wartime blackout regulations to carry on his affair, and for this, Katzenberger was sentenced to death.

  “He was beheaded at Stadelheim Prison,” Danforth said. “After the war, Rothaug was arrested and put on trial. By then I was working as an interpreter for the war crimes tribunal, so when it came time to interview witnesses I was transferred to Nuremberg.” He took a brief pause in this narrative, as if he knew that what he was about to tell me — the next twist in his story — would surprise me as much as it had surprised him. “One of the men I was assigned to question was named Gustav Teitler,” he continued. “A seedy little character. I hated him immediately.” Danforth’s gaze hardened. “I could have shot him without a blink.”

  Nuremberg, Germany, 1946

  “You are Gustav Teitler,” Danforth said with the unrelenting hardness of the man he had become.

  “I am, yes.”

  Teitler was a pudgy little fellow with the mild look of department-store clerk, and as he sat down in the chair in front of Danforth’s desk, he offered a smile that proclaimed his great willingness to cooperate. To this he added the usual look of hapless innocence Danforth had seen in a thousand German faces by then, all baffl ement and consternation, as if their malign recent history had caught them completely by surprise.

  “I am pleased to meet you, Herr Danforth,” Teitler said amiably.

  They took their seats in a room just a few yards away from where an American tank sat idly in the square and American soldiers lounged about absent-mindedly smoking cigarettes, a fact that was not wasted on Gustav Teitler.

  “The Russians are treating Germany like a dead whore,” he said. “We are fortunate that you Americans are —”

  “The Russians are treating you better than you deserve,” danforth interrupted sharply.

  Danforth’s hatred of the Germans had been intensified by his recent visit to Plötzensee and his finding no clue of what had happened to Anna, a dead end that over the past days had caused him to conjure up a hundred dreadful fates for her. The grim speculations were made even more painful by the release of yet more terrible images from the trials, all of which had turned the language he loved and spoke so well into an object of repulsion.

  “You’re here because you are associated with a judge who is going to be tried as a war criminal,” Danforth said sternly. “And you’re going to answer my questions fully. Do we understand each other?”

  This was not a pose, and Teitler seemed to comprehend that he faced someth
ing volcanic in the man who sat opposite him.

  “Of course, Captain Danforth,” Teitler said.

  “Oswald Rothaug,” Danforth said briskly. “You were a stenographer in his courtroom.”

  “Yes,” Teitler answered.

  “At the Leo Katzenberger trial,” Danforth added.

  “That was a terrible thing,” Teitler said. “The poor man couldn’t believe what was happening to him, that his life was at stake simply because —”

  “Yes, yes,” Danforth interrupted curtly. He was not interested in any German show of sympathy for the fate of Leo Katzenberger. He began a series of questions designed to discover any incriminating evidence against Rothaug that might have been gained by such a lowly functionary as Gustav Teitler.

  There wasn’t much, as the next hour proved, but Danforth slogged on through Teitler’s asides, how he had only “by chance” ended up as a court stenographer, as he’d once hoped to be a civil engineer. This dream had been dashed by the Great War, in which he’d been wounded; his career hopes had been destroyed, along with the Germany of his youth, and the country had been “ripe” for what happened next.

  It was an old story, and Danforth had no sympathy.

  “Did you see Rothaug at any point after the trial?” he asked by way of ending the tiresome and unenlightening interview.

  “Once, yes,” Teitler answered. “In Berlin.”

  “Did he say anything about Leo Katzenberger?”

  Teitler took a moment to think before he answered. “They weren’t so happy with that trial, you know, the higher-ups,” he said. “So they moved Judge Rothaug to Berlin. He was just a low offi cial when I ran into him. Working for the prosecutor’s offi ce. A nothing. A rat sniffi ng around. Students, mostly. What they were doing. The Red Orchestra, that sort of thing.”

  “The Red Orchestra?”

  “You know, Commies,” Teitler said. “Students. They were young; they had no idea what they were up against.”

  Young and with no idea of what they were up against, danforth thought. As he once had been.

  “Rothaug was talking about a traitor the Gestapo had arrested,” Teitler said. “‘Like Katzenberger,’ he’d said, ‘another head cut off.’ He seemed to take a particular delight in it.”

  “Why?” Danforth asked dryly. “They’d already cut off lots of heads.”

  “This was a woman, and an American,” Teitler said. “Rothaug said that killing her would show these foreigners that their necks weren’t any thicker than the necks of German traitors.”

  “When did you have this conversation?” Danforth asked.

  “It was in the summer of 1943,” Teitler answered. “I was only in Berlin for a few days. There was no work in the courts for me, so I went back to Nuremberg.”

  Danforth’s pen remained still. “Did he mention the woman’s name?”

  Teitler shook his head.

  “Did he describe her?”

  “No.”

  “Did he say anything else at all about her?”

  This time Teitler shrugged. “Only that before they chopped off her head, they should shave off her hair.”

  Danforth was careful not to allow himself to consider the possibility that this woman might have been Anna. And yet, over the following days, he could not stop thinking about what Teitler had told him. It was like the Spanish idiom for relentless worrying over a single thought: dar vueltas,“incessant circling.” The prospect had led Danforth to an incessant circling of particular scenes: Anna at their first meeting; Anna strolling among the tombs of Père-Lachaise. She might have survived until the summer of 1943: this was the thought that awakened him each morning after he returned to Nuremberg following his interview with Teitler, and it was the thought that faded at last with sleep, though only after it had kept him up until nearly dawn.

  For the next few days, Danforth went about his work, interviewing others distantly involved in the Katzenberger case, mostly judges who claimed to have had nothing but contempt for Rothaug, whom they described as a clown, a buffoon, a climber, and a toady. Teitler’s tiny clue continued to work like a needle in Danforth’s mind, consuming his every free moment, keeping him in his offi ce until the early hours of the morning going through files, ledgers, accounting books, old newspapers, anything he could find that might hold, however distantly, a clue to the identity of the woman Rothaug had mentioned.

  It was three o’clock in the morning, but the man Danforth saw when he glanced up from his desk looked freshly shaved and ready for the new day with none of Danforth’s hollow exhaustion in his eyes.

  The man sat down in the chair across from Danforth’s desk. “My name is Edward Brock. I understand you’ve been looking for an American woman who you think was executed by the Germans.”

  Danforth nodded.

  “I can save you some work,” Brock said. “Her name was Mildred Harnack. She was an American who lived in Germany and spoke and wrote fluent German. She was a Communist, but — get this — she was also a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.” He drew a paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to Danforth. “The State Department kept an eye on her.” He nodded toward the paper. “Here in a nutshell is what we know.”

  Harnack had moved to Germany with her husband in 1929, Danforth read. She’d gotten interested in Communism and later toured the Soviet Union. By 1933 she’d begun teaching English literature at night-school classes in Berlin. Still later she’d published articles in the Berliner Tageblatt and Die Literatur, but the work had dried up once the Nazis came to power. It was then she’d stepped over the line and become what amounted to a Soviet agent, a fact the Gestapo had discovered and for which both she and her husband had been arrested in the fall of 1943. Her husband had been sentenced to death, but for some reason Mildred had received a mere six-year imprisonment, a sentence that was not to Hitler’s liking and which he’d ordered to be reviewed. The review had ended with a predicable result, and Mildred Harnack had been executed at Plötzensee on February 16, 1943.

  Most decidedly, Mildred Harnack had not been Anna Klein. Danforth gave the paper back to Brock. “Thank you,” he said wearily. “You’re right, that will save me a lot of time.”

  Brock folded the paper and returned it to his jacket pocket. “Who are you looking for?” he asked. “Because I might be able to help you there too. We have quite a few documents from German intelligence, you know.” He lit a cigarette. “So, who was this woman?”

  “Her name was Anna Klein,” Danforth said. “She worked for me before the war. We were in Berlin in August of 1939. She was arrested by the Gestapo. I never saw her again.”

  “What can you tell me about her?” Brock asked.

  Danforth told him that she was Jewish, that she was in her twenties, small, dark, with curly hair.

  “That’s not a lot to go on,” Brock said.

  “She was brilliant with languages,” Danforth added. It was little more than a futile aside, and he was surprised to see that this suddenly spurred Brock’s interest.

  “How many did she speak?” he asked.

  “Nine that I know of.”

  “Was Ukrainian one of them?” Brock asked significantly.

  “Yes,” Danforth said. “Why do you ask?”

  “Because I have an intelligence report on a Ukrainian named Rudy Romanchuk. He was a forger who specialized in fake documents for people who were trying to get out of Germany. He was working for the Russians too. A low-level informant. But they began to suspect that he was working for the Germans. So they picked Rudy up and took him to Warsaw for interrogation. Rudy’s Russian wasn’t so great, so they brought in an interpreter. An American. In her twenties. Quite pretty, according to Rudy.”

  “When was this interrogation?” Danforth asked.

  “A week or two before the Germans attacked Russia,” Brock answered. “Which means she could be anywhere now.” He let this sink in, then added, “As you know, we’re not that chummy with the Russians anymore, so we’d be in
terested in tracking down any American citizen who might be in their hands.” He plucked the cigarette from his mouth and crushed it into the ashtray on Danforth’s desk. “So, this woman. The one who was in Warsaw. Could she have been Anna Klein?”

  Blue Bar, New York City, 2001

  “I had no idea, of course,” Danforth said, “and I told Brock that. I had too little to go on, and I didn’t want to tell him anything about Anna he didn’t already know. Which was nothing.”

  “So, you don’t think Brock knew anything about the Project?” I asked. “Anything about Anna being in France, anything at all about her?”

  “I couldn’t tell what he knew,” Danforth said, “other than that an American woman had been translating for the Soviets in Warsaw just before the Germans invaded Russia, which was in June of 1941.” He leaned back slightly. “But if this woman was Anna, then she was still alive in June of 1941, alive and in Warsaw, which meant that she’d been turned over to the Soviets.” He paused, then added, “But why would the Germans have turned a woman who’d plotted to kill Adolf Hitler over to the Russians?”

  I had no answer for this, and so I simply shrugged.

  “Don’t feel inadequate, Paul,” Danforth said. “No one knew the answer to that question. Which is why I was ordered to find it.”

  “Ordered? You?”

  “I was still in the army, so who would have been a better choice?” Danforth asked. “By that time, I spoke passable Polish and a little Russian. Brock had a few leads. He knew that Romanchuk had later been arrested and sent to Auschwitz, which he’d survived. It was only after the war that he’d vanished. But then so had this woman, which left me no option but to assume that she was still alive.”

  I thought over all Danforth had just told me, then said, “But realistically, could a woman who’d tried to kill Hitler have survived the war?”

  “I had the same question, Paul,” Danforth answered. “And although the supposition seemed far-fetched, I looked into whether it might be possible. That’s how I came across the file on Olga Chekhova.”