The Avenger- Thomas Bennet and a Father's Lament

by Don Jacobson

  “Mr. Bennet and I come from an age where one of your ancestors forgot Frederick the Great’s reminder that the king is first citizen of the state: a king, yes, but a citizen none-the-less.

  “I am certain that my husband is astonished at my pair of classical references in as many sentences. Never, my dear, become wholly predictable. I must remind my husband that I have listened to him declaim about ancient Romans and more modern Prussians for decades. Some of his ruminations must have taken hold.

  “Your late service during the war speaks well to your level-headed nature. You appear to have a well-formed sense of duty. That will serve you well in the coming years.

  “However, I would also imagine that there might be times where you would wish to forget duty, to dine en famile with only your husband. I know that Mr. Bennet and I,” at this she reached over and placed her hand upon her husband’s arm before continuing, “found those quiet moments we spent together over a pleasant dinner before our daughters began arriving to be the source of many of the memories we have enjoyed in the near five-and-twenty years since we married. I urge you to give into those inclinations when they are not in direct conflict with the affairs of state.

  “There will always be another crisis, but only one first tooth.

  “I do beg you, as an older woman to a younger, to pay attention to your womanly heart. There will come a day when you, sadly, will be forced to shoulder the burdens of the Empire. Yet, for your own health and peace of mind, and your family’s welfare, I pray you will discover the balance between throne and hearth. While one defines you to the world, the other will give you the strength to be the woman our nation needs.”

  The Queen nodded as her face softened, recalling the toll taken on her sensitive husband when he had been thrust into the role he never craved.

  The Princess paused, considering her words, before offering a great compliment, “You, my dear Aunt Bennet, would serve us well on the Privy Council. You offer fearless, and wise, advice. If I embroidered rather than repaired ambulances, I would cross-stitch a sampler to remind me and my children…

  “There will always be another crisis, but only one first tooth.”

  The half-hour audience ended with a smiling Queen passing the gilt-edged invitation to Mrs. Bennet who received the coveted billet knowing that t’was a long way from Meryton to Westminster, yet she and her husband had accomplished a journey closed to nearly all their class.

  The Bennets were able to hide in plain sight amidst the massive crowds both inside and outside the Abbey. The BFT had long since organized their legend, sliding a baronetcy into one of King George IV’s honors lists in the 1820s when the King’s purse had not jingled with enough coin to cover his expenses. T’was in this manner that Sir Thomas Bennet, Bart. and his good wife, Lady Frances, visiting from their estate in Canada, celebrated the royal wedding. They watched the two lovers plight their troth from choice seats in the choir itself.

  

  Later, after a full day of wedding festivities followed by a ball at the Palace, Tom and Fanny readied themselves for bed in their chamber at Oakham House. Fanny was seated at her vanity, brushing her greying blonde tresses. Tom had settled on the edge of the bed behind her, watching her with rapt attention that eventually drew his wife’s eye.

  She stopped her brushing and succinctly asked, “What?”

  Bennet smiled and replied, “You are truly a complicated woman, a lady of contrasts, Miss Gardiner. I was reflecting on two times in recent months when you have put me back on my heels. The first was at the Palace when you offered the sagest advice I have ever heard, although I imagine young Miss Windsor heard as much from both her mother and her father.

  “The second is older still: how you revealed to me the depths of your thoughtful mind as we tarried on Oakham’s slopes. I am amazed that I had never appreciated your cleverness and analytical strength. That is the complex side of you.

  “And, yet, here you are, doing your 100 strokes as you have every evening since that first time I was granted access to your bedchamber. Such a simple routine, yet one which I have come to enjoy watching as you undertake it.”

  Mrs. Bennet pondered his comments, her hand slowing.

  Then she spoke, “Am I so different today than I was before Jane and Lizzy married, Tom? T’is true that my worries occupied me during that time, but you must agree that a woman of one-and-forty will not suddenly become someone new overnight.

  “Just as I have brushed my hundred every night since I became a woman, those elements of my mind and personality you marvel at now were present before my disappointment. T’is perhaps the case that I was concerned with that which seemed most important and, thus, ignored my more sensible nature, preferring to allow my sensibilities to overtake me.”

  Bennet objected, “You task yourself with far too much severity, dearest. How else should you have behaved? A mother protecting her young may act without apparent reason.

  “Was it unreasonable for you to worry after your daughters’ futures given my indolent nature, especially when it came to providing dowries to either attract a man or set them up in their own establishment if they chose to make their own way in the world?

  “Was it unreasonable for you to hope that your husband would step up to care for you as you deeply mourned our loss?

  “And, Fanny, was it unreasonable to ponder how much less your distraction would have been if I had taken my responsibilities seriously?

  “No, Miss Gardiner, t’was I who failed you by leaving you to face the world alone. I cannot alter the past, but I promise you that your…our…future will see me by your side.”

  Fanny smiled and spoke a reply in Bennet’s second language, “Exagoras agapis.”

  “The love which redeems,” breathed Bennet.

  “Yes, Tom, the love which causes each of us to aspire to become the best versions of ourselves: to prove our worthiness of being loved by the object of our affections and, as a result, find our own true solution which leads to inner peace.

  “T’is the Fifth Love, or so Mr. Lewis told me when I explained it to him. He expressed surprise that a lady such as me would ascend beyond those Four Loves over which he has only begun to mull.

  “That man thought I had uncovered one of love’s transcendent forms,” Mrs. Bennet concluded.

  “Then, Mrs. Bennet, allow me to show you how much I have surpassed the man I once was but three short years ago. The man who once wooed and wed you will now court you anew in celebration of his redemption at your hands,” Bennet averred.

  Rosa chinensis—the mother plant, Frances Lorinda Bennet—turned to her man and breathily stated, “Only if you will grant me the same boon and tenderly accept love given freely and without reservation by a woman who has been saved by her own love…and yours.”

  No further words were spoken that night as the couple freely forgave each other their past.

  Chapter XXV

  Frankfurt am Main, Bizone, October 1947-May 1948

  As it turned out, both High Commissioner Clay and Prime Minister Atlee readily agreed to grant Liebermann unfettered access to the SS archives, now moved into more permanent quarters in the capital of the combined American and British areas of Occupation. The retired warrior had buried himself in the files, haphazardly collected by Western Allied forces occupying the remains of the Third Reich not under Soviet control.

  However, as he and the resident historians who tried to ply their craft quickly discovered, information without index is nearly useless. Certainly, individual items offered compelling snapshots of the activities of Hitler’s most fanatical followers. However, the moment one sought to move from the particular to the general, there was no way to relate one document to another. The minds behind the invisible filing system were either dead or thoroughly unwilling to admit they had been part of the notorious killing machine.

  Everyone seeking to engage the archives needed to first participate in the rebuilding of the logical organization behind the files.
Liebermann left that task to the long-necked, bespectacled researchers who had been involved in the project since May 1945. The Feldwebel’s education was short on historical technique and long on the practical needs of an army.

  Thus, he found he was best suited to sorting through the chaotic mess. Unlike soft-handed academics, all too often diverted into hours’-long ruminations about a single piece, Liebermann operated with a sergeant’s ruthless efficiency; not seeking to make sense of any single item, but rather separating shopping lists from prisoner rosters, trashing the former and filing the latter for later review.

  Mumbling in a polyglot of European tongues, the researchers finally settled on English as the universal solvent. They also ultimately agreed that the powerfully-built Prussian would offer them not only dogged persistence in slogging through crushing piles of paper, but also valuable insights into the bureaucratic mind that drove Imperial, Weimar, and Nazi Germany alike in its Hegelian certitude to create the mountains of records filling warehouses scattered about the Frankfurt suburbs. Hence, rather than excluding a German Graf’s servant as an uneducated peasant, the historians began to see Liebermann as a resource to be cherished.

  That he was also at least twice their age frequently placed him in the unusual position of being both father and minder. More than once, Liebermann was rousted from his breakfast, habitually taken before sunrise, by a curt message from the local constabulary about some of his sheltered comrades felled by too much schnapps. Then der Alter would pull on his feldgrau tunic, badges of rank still present. After collecting a particularly weary Jeep from the motor pool, Liebermann would pick his way across the battered city to the appropriate Polizeistation. After commiserating with the former Feldwebel and Gefreiter[lxxv]who now worked with the Allies to keep peace amidst the ruins, he would pile his bleary-eyed charges into the back of the vehicle for an intentionally bumpy ride back to the barracks.

  He never chided them for acting as young men ought when faced with the disappointing and unremitting tedium that was their daily lot. All he did was remind them that there were those amongst the starving population who would happily slit not only their pockets, but also their throats. Then he would joyfully begin to move crates around their work stations with a poorly-muffled forklift to remind the miscreants of their folly.

  Yet, there were countless days and weeks of disappointment as poorly-stored crates were levered open to uncover what appeared to be the leavings of an army of dustmen: monumental outcroppings of crumpled, scorched, and mildewed papers and photographs. Personnel records were separated from employee photographs. Fragments of expense reports from 1940 were jumbled in with higher level audits from 1944…or vice-versa. Interrogations from Oslo were discovered alongside copies of transfer orders from Sienna.

  Much smelled of unburnt kerosene. Most appeared as if they had been shoveled up from the courtyards into which frantic SS functionaries had chucked their carefully curated collections that chronicled their twelve-year horror. The Tommy, G.I., or poilu work details cared little about what they dumped into the bins dropped off by a line of lorries. The gooey remains of some Hauptsturmführer’s lunch, defenestrated along with everything from his desk, would ooze through sheaves of paper, driving researchers to smear camphor beneath their nostrils to soften the impact of two years’ aging in uninsulated warehouses.

  The academics and their masters did acknowledge that a higher force held Liebermann’s first loyalty and that he was in their midst at the behest of uniquely powerful sponsors. This received the legendary imprimatur that only military scuttlebutt could confer. Every so often, he would disappear, usually beginning his journey in the back of one of Commissioner Clay’s olive drab Packard limousines. Word had it that the car would drop him at the gates to the great Rhine-Main airbase. Shortly afterwards an unmarked DC-3 would depart and turn west. The reverse would transpire a day or two later, according to the American corporal assigned the sedan’s wheel: another unmarked transport would touch down followed by an MP Jeep depositing Liebermann at the entrance.

  However, as the cadre of researchers discovered, the older man was driven by a desire to uncover a secret greater than the overarching meaning of the SS to history. During the first several months of his internship in the depths of the document hoard, when the others would wend their way through the aisles carved between crates and boxes to spend an evening in the beer halls open to the occupiers, he would be seen bowed over a pile of detritus scraped from the bottom of one case or another. He never joined them in their revels, not because he found walking past fellow Germans begging for food outside of the saloon heartbreaking, but rather because he never left the warehouse. After his eyes would blur and his neck would begin to pain him, he would doss down in a nest he had made, demonstrating a common soldier’s taste in accommodations that ran to warmth, dryness, and, finally, comfort.

  T’was not until the early winter months of 1948 that Madame Liebermann handed little Robard to his mother and advised that she intended to fly from Deauville to her husband’s side across the Rhine. His letters, even though regular as clockwork, seemed to deflect any response to her concerns about his meals. She did have a suspicion that, as an old campaigner, Manfred Liebermann found American “K” and “C” rations washed down with vin ordinare to be sufficient. However, her forty years above the Beach House’s stove stoked her outrage that her man would be forced to eat food that had traveled 3,000 miles from its factory to his stomach

  After his lady wife dragged him from one deep archive by his ear, much to the amusement of his juniors, the Trust rented a second floor flat in one of the few remaining undamaged apartment buildings to be found in the city. There Madame Liebermann set up housekeeping, tasking the resources of the Trust to find ways to keep her pantry suitably stocked.

  Her dinners became legendary and many a Northwestern post-graduate or Oxford don would angle for a coveted invitation. Before long, the Liebermann table grew from a cozy twosome to a boisterous eight or ten, reminiscent of a Heidelberg boarding house.

  Work would be dragged to the Wolfsgangstrasse apartment to be debated and catalogued over endless pots of black coffee and Madame’s pastries. Progress that had been plodding at best now became steady if not blindingly rapid. The warehouse tables overflowing with their mounds became less daunting as the Liebermanns’ hospitality lubricated academic minds.

  Ultimately the breakthroughs, a trickle at first, came and began to sweep away the clouds that had obscured the meanings behind the trove.

  

  Spring had settled deeply into the rises above the Main and had even penetrated the caverns where the researchers toiled. Shirt sleeves and open collars became the uniform of the day. Doors and windows, until now firmly sealed against Hessian winter blasts, were thrown open, relieving the musty fug of damp paper that had permeated every corner of the workrooms throughout the facility. The stacks of crates and lockers had dwindled as the materials were sorted and separated. Revitalized and enthusiastic men, sensing the opportunity to ply their trades—that of interpreters of the past, even if the history was but ten years old—dove into their chosen piles.

  Manfred had, over time, become the defacto feldwebel—staff sergeant—of the platoon of youngsters, each one reminding him of the lost Richter.

  Ach, the Hauptmann took care of the Oberst’s public requirements as Deauville’s Kommandant. Richter made sure that there were no “nails” sticking their heads up high enough to attract Paris’ attention. That would have brought down upon us a squad of those meddlesome men with their spectacles, notebooks, and infernal questions. The Hauptmann would have a quiet chat with the Countess or Miss Lydia. Word would then get to the Maquis and Commandant Maxie. The problem children would mend their ways.

  Richter did the day-to-day while the Oberst would play the delicate political game designed to convince Headquarters that all was well in the seaside town.

  What would those two, the Oberst and the Hauptmann, make of what we are do
ing today? They did their best to act like the Wehrmacht was the only German agency in France in those days, but it was difficult to ignore the Gestapo and SS. Und, here we are trying to remember what many say should be forgotten.

  But, Liebermann could not, would not, forget.

  Chapter XXVI

  Frankfurt am Main, May 24, 1948

  Buried deep in the final stack of cases lately delivered was the treasure for which Liebermann had been waiting. He had been pulled from his warren where he had been poring over stacks of SS personnel records from Gau Schwaben.[lxxvi] In truth, he was thankful to be diverted. The dense mess of reports was beginning to blur into an even more meaningless haze.

  Yet, in the darkest corner of the great storehouse, illuminated now by the ever-brightening sunshine rising over the battered town, a nondescript American packing crate gave up its riches. There, resting in its nest of crumpled reports, was the payoff for which Anubis had been praying.

  The simple case, not much larger than a certain battered tin dispatch box resting in the vault at Cox and Company, did not seem different from others uncovered through the months the men had been at their labors. However, the excitement rose from the fact that the lead box, its soldered seams and wax-sealed clasps still intact, was emblazoned with Reichsführer Himmler’s personal rune. Whatever rested in this ossuary began and ended its life at the center of the Nazi world, its holy of holies.

  As a man driven to avenge a personal wrong as great in its specific nature as the atrocity generally committed by Himmler’s henchmen across a continent, Liebermann’s presence was needed to bear witness to the unveiling of the despised chicken farmer’s darkest secrets. Thus, when the myopic stare of the bespectacled American historian pieced through the haze of German bureaucratese, t’was a welcomed diversion.

  “Ja, was ist los, Herr Doktor Leopold?” Liebermann asked, knuckling the small of his back, already aggravated by decades of sleeping rough and now complaining about his perpetual hunch over his worksurface.[lxxvii]