“I was used to them well before the war,” Dieter answered with a dismissive wave of his hand.
“Before the war?”
“Because I was a prison guard,” Dieter answered. He leaned back so far in his chair that its front legs lifted off the floor. “We executed God knows how many.”
“Executing criminals before the war wouldn’t get you shot now,” Danforth said pointedly.
“They weren’t all criminals,” Dieter said. “Unless you call some kid handing out pamphlets a criminal.”
“Are you talking about political criminals?” Danforth asked.
“Reds, mostly,” Dieter said. “One day you Americans will be sorry we didn’t kill them all.”
Danforth was getting nowhere with this and knew it, and so he decided to do as he had been trained to do, take one small piece of information, presumably innocent, then have the prisoner expand on it.
“You were in Berlin before the war,” Danforth said as he glanced at Dieter’s folder.
“Yes.”
“Is this where you worked as a guard?”
“Yes.”
“At Stadtheim?” Danforth asked.
“No. Plötzensee.”
Danforth’s gaze lifted. “Plötzensee?”
“In the suburbs,” Dieter added with a shrug. “It’s mostly blown up now. But it was a busy place before and during the war.”
Danforth gave no sign that the very name Plötzensee was like a hook in his skin.
“Busy with executions?” he asked.
“Yes.”
Danforth decided to test Dieter’s veracity. “These executions, they were by firing squad?”
“No,” Dieter said. “They put up a gallows later.” He chuckled. “But before that, can you believe it, Captain? We had a . . . what’s the word in English? A Fallbeil.”
“A guillotine,” Danforth said.
“That’s it, yes: guillotine.”
“When were you at Plötzensee?” Danforth asked.
“From June of 1936 until the war began,” Dieter answered. “That was in ...”
“September 1939,” Danforth said.
Dieter nodded.
“And you participated in executions during this time?” Danforth asked.
“Yes.”
“How many?”
Dieter shrugged. “Many. I don’t remember. I walked them to the room, that’s all. But that won’t matter, they’re going to kill us all. It’s going to be a big show.”
Danforth worked to keep his tone entirely even despite the storm building within him. “These prisoners that you ... walked, were there any women?”
“Sure.”
“Do you remember any of them?”
Dieter grinned. “A man always remembers the women.”
Danforth faced him stonily. “Who do you remember?”
“There were only two,” Dieter answered. “Benita von Falkenhayn. She was the daughter-in-law of some big shot on the general’s staff. A wild one. Divorced the big shot’s son and got into bed with a Polack spy.” He shrugged. “They killed her with an ax. Like some English queen.”
Catching his breath, Danforth asked, “And the other one?” “She wore thick glasses, the other one,” Dieter answered. “Not very attractive, I must say.” Her unattractiveness seemed to make her life less dear to Dieter. “She was the first woman they used a guillotine on. Another Red. I don’t remember her name, but they called her Lilo.”
“What was her crime?” Danforth asked.
“She wouldn’t stop being a Red,” Dieter answered. “Probably other things as well, but I don’t remember what they were.” He leaned back again and released a slow, relaxing breath. “That’s all. Just two women, like I said.”
“Just two?” Danforth asked. “Are you sure no other woman was executed while you were at Plötzensee?”
Dieter looked at Danforth closely. “Someone you knew, Captain?”
“She was dark,” Danforth said sternly. “She had very curly hair.”
Dieter shook his head.
“You’re sure you never saw a woman like that at Plötzensee?” Danforth asked emphatically. “In the yard or in the cells?”
Dieter dropped forward in his chair. “No.”
Danforth’s mind was working feverishly to determine if Dieter’s testimony, or even his memory, could be trusted. “Anna was her name,” he added. “She might have been called Anna Collier, or maybe Anna Klein.”
“Klein?” Dieter asked. “She was a Jew?”
Danforth’s gaze turned as lethal as his tone of voice. “She was an American,” he said.
Dieter briefly searched his memory for a moment, then he shrugged. “No,” he said. “There was never an Anna Klein.”
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
There was never an Anna Klein.
It was obvious that these words had brought Danforth to a strange precipice, or perhaps to a doorway that had opened onto an unexpected land.
“If Dieter was right, then Anna had never been taken to Plötzensee Prison,” Danforth said. His tone was now uncertain, as if he were still feeling the aftershocks of this discovery. “And she certainly hadn’t been executed there.”
“So you must have wondered who Clayton’s sources had been for this information,” I said.
“Very good, Paul,” Danforth said. “Yes, that would have been the question. Who were they? And why had they told him what they did?” He shrugged. “Unfortunately, Clayton was still in the Pacific, fighting his way south on Okinawa. And so I went to Plötzensee Prison to see if I could find any record of Anna having been there. It was in the Soviet sector, and the Russians were completely out of control, ripping the plumbing out of the walls, toilet bowls, and sinks, and loading everything onto trucks.” He waved dismissively. “But it was Germany they were destroying, so as far as I was concerned, the Russians could have a free hand.”
“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 Scheffler, was coming to Nuremberg in order to pursue her career as a photographer. Scheffler ended up taking an apartment in the same building as Katzenberger’s office, 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 Scheffler was an Aryan, and the Nuremberg laws expressly forbade this kind of association.”
Once alerted to official interest, Katzenberger and Scheffler 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 Scheffler 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 imposed 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 depart-ment-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 bafflement 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 something 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 official when I ran into him. Working for the prosecutor’s office. A nothing. A rat sniffing 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 bee
n.
“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.”