This surely had to be the genuine protocol of that meeting? Either that or Angela was an unsung giant of German literature.
The most interesting part – especially for a quarter-Jew like Felix – was where Stuckart defended the rights of the Mischlinge. The SS tried to suggest he was only half-hearted in his support of the Final Solution but he pointed out that if Germany lost the military war, it would automatically fail to achieve the Final Solution, too – so it was the SS who were risking both failures, by their insistence on diverting resources and men to promote their own glory. It did not go down well. Heydrich’s only answer was that the Führer had decreed it – at which Kritzinger leaped in with a demand to see that in writing in the Führer’s own hand. Heydrich answered that adroitly:
HEYDRICH: I’d like to quote from a speech he made as long ago as the twelfth of April, 1922. ‘My feeling as a Christian,’ the Führer says, ‘points me to my Lord and Saviour as a fighter. It points me to a man who once in loneliness, surrounded by a handful of followers, recognized these Jews for what they were and deputized men to fight them.’ Remember, Adolf Hitler himself had only a ‘handful of followers’ at that time, so the parallel does not escape us. He goes on: ‘In God’s truth, He was greatest not as suffering Jesus but as warrior Jesus. It filled me with boundless love, both as a man and as a Christian, to read how He at last rose in all His might and, whip in hand, drove that race of vipers out of God’s Temple. How inspiring is His struggle against that Jewish poison, a struggle on behalf of us all! Today, two thousand years later, I am most profoundly moved to recognize that it was for this God-ordained struggle that He had to shed His blood at Calvary.’ And so on. There is much more in the same vein – all of which proves, if anyone here still needs such proof, that the Führer has not cooled in his desire to drive out this race of vipers. On the contrary – if he wants to hear no more about the Jewish Question, it is because he trusts us to get on with it. And let me assure you that I heard as much from his own lips only last year.
After that, Neumann flexed his muscles and demanded that all his Privileged Jews should be exempt from the Final Solution. ‘This is not a request,’ he said. ‘Reichsmarschall Göring has authorized me to make clear that this is a condition of our cooperation.’
Heydrich and Eichmann caved in at once, which gave Stuckart the chance, once again, to make the case for partial Jews.
STUCKART: The half-Jew is also a half-German. He has as many Aryan relations as Jewish ones. The quarter-Jew is a three-quarters-German. He has three times as many Aryan relations as Jewish ones. It is one thing to arrest a Jewish family. No German will worry about that. Other Jews will worry, of course, but they will soon take the same road east. But if you were to arrest all of the Mischlinge and deport them and process them, you will leave behind several million Aryan Germans who have lost a relative – a husband, wife, son-in-law, daughter-in-law, aunt, uncle, cousin. They will talk to other Germans . . . who will talk to others . . . and soon the whole country will know what we have been told here today. Is that the will of the Führer, too – that all the world should know what ‘Resettlement in the east’ really means? If so, why not simplify matters and just publish a verbatim transcript of this meeting?
And it all turned to farce when Heydrich mused that if two half-Jews marry, they produce a full Jew.
STUCKART: Not necessarily.
HEYDRICH: I beg your pardon?
STUCKART: They have only a twenty-five percent chance of producing a full Jew – and, equally, a twenty-five percent chance of producing a full Aryan.
KLOPFER: Impossible!
STUCKART: Not at all. It’s simple science. Genetics.
HOFMANN: It is impossible . . . it is repugnant for a pair of half-Jews to produce a full Aryan.
STUCKART: Nonetheless it is the case, believe me.
From that point the discussion veered back to the well known arguments for sterilization of the Mischlinge by radiation – which was also a feature of the ‘official’ protocol. Mixed-race Jews could be invited into a special room to fill out a form that would keep them busy for twenty minutes or so, during which time a secret dose of gamma-rays would do the trick. They might have tummy upsets for a day or two but Stuckart put it all into its historical context:
STUCKART: Ha! So we go right back to Athens and the birth of democracy!
HEYDRICH: Really? How?
STUCKART: Slaves. They castrated all their male slaves. They were afraid they would breed and outnumber the Athenians. Democracy was only for them, not for the slaves.
HEYDRICH: So! A noble precedent. [to Eichmann] Make a note of that. It sounds feasible.
Then, after Neumann yet again staked the claim for his Privileged Jews and all their relations, Heydrich brought the conference to a rousing conclusion:
HEYDRICH: Thank you Herr State Secretary. It is clear that we have started as we mean to continue – united in purpose, strong in our determination, and steadfast in our desire to see Europe cleansed of this filth once and for all. It has been our Führer’s most heartfelt desire ever since he returned from the battlefield to a Fatherland defeated and bankrupted by home-grown Jewish traitors and the international Jewish conspiracy. And now – working together with the will, the vision, and the spirit that only National Socialism can supply – and only German National Socialism, at that – working together under the cloak of war, we can turn that long-held desire of his into a reality. We on this side of the table are merely the agents of that transformation. The driving force lies elsewhere – on your side of this same table, gentlemen, for you represent every important branch of the party, the government, and the Reich. If you falter, if you take your eye off this great objective, then we cannot make up the difference. So I ask you all now to stand – and take the man on either side of you by the hand – and say with me that one word our great Führer most longs to hear in all this world: judenrein!
ALL: Judenrein!
HEYDRICH: And again!
ALL: Judenrein!
HEYDRICH: And again!
ALL: Judenrein!
HEYDRICH: One more time!
ALL: Judenrein!
[applause]
HEYDRICH: -Obersturmbannführer Eichmann will now collect up all the notes you have been taking during this meeting. [protests] In the next week or so his office will circulate a very partial version of our discussions to all departments that request it. But in general we think you will agree – when you think about it – that a verbal report by you to your various departments and ministries (or, in fact, to those who wish to know) is far preferable to a verbatim protocol. Heil Hitler!
ALL: Heil Hitler!
But Angela’s transcript did not end there for she had also recorded some conversations among the delegates as they dispersed – one of which almost made him vomit:
KRITZINGER [to STUCKART]: I didn’t want to point this out at the meeting but when you spoke of the ‘bar-mitzvah Jew’ and the ‘circumcised Jew’ you were straying from strictly racial criteria into religious ones – despite the fact that you and your office have always said that the Jew’s crime is racial not religious.
STUCKART: It’s a little bit more subtle than that, Herr Ministerialdirektor. The Mischling is a fundamentally ambiguous creature, half pulling toward the Aryan, half toward the Semite. So the question becomes, ‘Which half is pulling the harder?’ This Mischling is an atheist . . . loves Wagner . . . so the Aryan is pulling harder. But this Mischling loves Mendelssohn and won’t light a fire on Saturdays . . . well – he selects himself as a Jew. And the consequences follow as night follows day. He is not being liquidated for practising religion but because his practice reveals which side, Jew or Aryan, is the stronger in him.
KRITZINGER: Elegant!
HEYDRICH [to MEYER, LIEBBRANDT, and BüHLER]: Gentlemen! You cannot come all this way, here, to the very heart of the Reich, without taking back some happy memories.
MEYER: Today’s decisions have been the happiest of my—
HEYDRICH: I mean happy in a more personal sense.
BüHLER: The house in Giesebrechtstrasse!
HEYDRICH: Just so! Unfortunately I have to return to Prague this afternoon, but I’m sure -Gruppenführer Müller will be happy to take you to dinner and then onward to that delightful rendezvous!
LIEBBRANDT: Talking of which – I didn’t think it correct to bring this up in the meeting – but many young Jewesses are extremely . . . what shall I say . . .
MEYER: Voluptuous.
LIEBBRANDT: Yes. So, just as fit young Jewish males can be temporarily spared for unpaid work in our factories, surely voluptuous young Jewesses could be put to unpaid work in brothels for . . .
HEYDRICH: It’s already happening.
LIEBBRANDT: Ah!
MEYER: Men in uniform needn’t pay, I presume?
EICHMANN: A token. To cover the running costs. And there will be no Mischlinge as a result. The girls are sterilized first.
HEYDRICH: Before taking up their positions, one might say. [laughter]
LANGE [to Heydrich, on the doorstep]: Maybe I ought to have told Kritzinger we don’t waste bullets on the children – or maybe not?
HEYDRICH: How do you process them, then?
LANGE: So! [makes some gesture] Up to about eight, one good shake just snaps their necks. Older than that, strangling is easier – with bare hands or a garrotte. But we don’t waste bullets on them until they’re thirteen . . . fourteen.
[A dog barks]
HEYDRICH: You actually brought your dog!
LANGE: Max. Here boy! Let him loose. Here! Catch! This is the sort of meat they have in the kitchens here.
HEYDRICH: What teeth!
LANGE: Wasn’t there some sort of decoration for dogs in the last war? I thought I read that. If not, we should start one. I tell you – this dog’s hatred of Jews is even stronger than the Führer’s.
HEYDRICH: Careful!
LANGE: It’s true, though. I can give you an example. About ten days ago we were processing the Jews in a little village in . . . no matter. It was well below zero – below minus thirty – and the ground was almost impossible to dig and everything got out of synchronization and the women and the children had to be kept waiting back in the forest a bit. They were already naked so they huddled together really tight and did their pathetic best to keep the little children warm. But some of the children’s feet froze to the ground so that when we drove them on . . . well, you know how frozen flesh just comes away? Bits of their feet were left behind, frozen to the ground. But that didn’t please my Max! He ate every last bit of that flesh. He couldn’t stand the thought that even those small morsels had escaped justice! Good boy! Good boy!
HEYDRICH: [undecipherable]
‘What d’you think?’ Angela asked.
Felix told her.
‘I’m still shocked,’ she said, ‘that I didn’t really hear what they were saying until I typed out that transcript. You know how you can sometimes see the world through a window all running with condensation and you can’t make out a single thing? Then suddenly you realize that one of the blobs is . . . I don’t know, a car . . . or the branch of a tree. And suddenly everything else starts to make sense. It was like that. All that fog of Nazi . . . stuff . . . that endless stream of propaganda on the wireless –it all fell into place. I saw it for what it actually was. Where it was going. All those things they didn’t dare say . . . talking instead of the Jewish question . . . the final solution.’
Something Felix had not realized until now: for months after her eyes were opened, she had worked against them while she continued to act the loyal Nazi, the steadfast SS officer, the confidante of Reinhard Heydrich. And when he died, and they took their revenge on her, even under torture she had admitted no more than what they already knew – that, yes, she had, indeed, made tape recordings of that conference.
And now he knew how she had survived when so many in Ravensbrück had not. ‘When we get back to the Dower House . . .’ he said.
‘What?’
‘It will be the start of a new life. For both of us. A wonderful new life. You’ll see.’
Is Felix right? You can follow the continuing lives, adventures, and misadventures of Felix, Angela, and the other Dower House families in Strange Music, to be published soon.
Table of Contents
Cover
The Dower House
Copyright
Dedication
Map
Thursday, 15 April 1947
Tuesday, 22 April 1947
Friday, 25 April 1947
Saturday, 26 April 1947
Tuesday, 6 May 1947
Wednesday, 14 May 1947
Thursday, 15 May 1947
Saturday, 17 May 1947
Tuesday, 27 May 1947
Monday, 9 June 1947
Wednesday, 11 June 1947
Friday, 13 June 1947
Saturday, 14 June 1947
Saturday, 21 June 1947
Sunday, 22 June 1947
Thursday, 17 July 1947
Monday, 25 August 1947
Monday, 29 September 1947
Tuesday, 30 September 1947
Wednesday, 1 October 1947
Thursday, 2 October 1947
Friday, 3 October 1947
Friday, 10 October 1947
The Dower House Page 29
