Crabwalk

Internet site bristles with Grimm quotations and polemical retorts to the admittedly long-winded defense offered by Curti. It seems as though the case is being retried, this time on a virtual world stage before an overflow crowd of onlookers.

Later my research would reveal that my lone combatant owed some of his inside dope to the Volkischer Beobachter. He mentioned in passing, for instance, that when Frau Hedwig Gustloff, dressed in black, entered the courtroom on the second day of the trial, the Germans present, as well as some Swiss sympathizers and the journalists who had come from the Reich, all stood up and greeted her with the Hitler salute; this account was lifted from pages of the “Battle Organ of the National Socialist Movement of Greater Germany.” The VB had a presence not only during the four days of the undeniably historic trial but also on the Internet; the quotations from the stern father's letter to his prodigal son spread by way of the Net also came straight from that Nazi organ, for the rabbis letter — ”I expect nothing more of you. You do not write. Now it will do no good to write…” — was quoted in court by the prosecution as evidence of the defendants heartlessness; the court, however, was probably kind enough to allow the chain-smoker a cigarette or two during breaks in the proceedings.

While the submarine officer Marinesko was either out to sea or on shore Jeave in the Black Sea port of Sebastopol, and presumably spent his three days on land plastered out of his mind, and while the new ship was rapidly taking shape in Hamburg, with riveting hammers setting the tone day and night, the defendant David Frankfurter sat or stood between the two cantonal police officers. He eagerly confessed to the charges. That robbed the trial of any suspense. He sat and listened, then stood up and said: I made up my mind, purchased, practiced, traveled, found, entered, sat down, shot five times. He made these admissions straightforwardly, with only occasional hesitation. He accepted the verdict, but on the Internet he was characterized as “weeping pathetically.”

Since capital punishment was not legal in the canton of Graubunden, Professor Grimm regretfully demanded the harshest penalty available: life imprisonment. Up to the announcement of the sentence — eighteen years in the penitentiary, to be followed by deportation — the online account unambiguously favored the martyr, but after that my Webmaster parted company from the Comrades of Schwerin. Or was he no longer alone? Had that caviler and know-it-all returned, the one who had shown up in the chat room once before? At any rate, a kind of quarrelsome role-playing set in.

The dispute that from now on repeatedly flared up was conducted on a first-name basis: a Wilhelm spoke for the murdered Landesgruppenleiter, and a David assumed the part of the would-be suicide.

It was as if this exchange of blows were taking place in the hereafter. Yet the attention to detail was very much of this world. Each time the murderer and the murderee met, the deed and the motivation for it were thoroughly chewed over. While one of the parties spewed propaganda, proclaiming, for instance, that at the time of the trial there were 800,000 fewer unemployed in the Reich than in the previous year, and declaring enthusiastically, “This we owe to the Fuhrer alone,” the other party reproachfully enumerated all the Jewish doctors and patients who had been driven out of hospitals and sanatoria, and pointed out that the Nazi regime had called for a boycott of Jews as early as i April 1933, whereupon the windows of Jewish shops had been smeared with the hate slogan “Death to the Jews!” Back and forth it went. If Wilhelm posted quotations from the Fuhrer’s Mein Kampfn on his site to support his thesis of the necessity of preserving the purity of the Aryan race and German blood, David replied with passages from The Moor Soldiers, a report by a former concentration-camp inmate that a Swiss publishing house had issued.

The battle raged in deadly earnest, with both sides manifesting grim determination. But suddenly the tone lightened, turned chatty in the chat room. When Wilhelm asked, “So why did you fire five shots at me?” David replied, “Sorry, the first shot was a dud. There were only four entry wounds.” To which Wilhelm responded, “True. But who provided the revolver?” David: “I bought the Ballermann myself. For a measly ten Swiss francs.” “Pretty cheap for a weapon a person would have to shell out at least fifty francs for.” “I see what you're driving at. You think someone must have given it to me. Is that it?” “I don't think — I'm positive you didn't act alone,” “Well, that's true! I was acting on behalf of Jews everywhere.”

This remained the tenor of their Internet dialogue for the next few days. No sooner had they finished each other off than they began bantering back and forth, as if they were friends fooling around. Before they left the chat room, they said, “See you, you cloned Nazi pig,” and, “Take care of yourself, Jewboy!” But the moment a surfer from the Balearic Islands or Oslo tried to elbow his way into their conversation, they would turn on him and drive him away: “Beat it!” or “Come back later!”

Apparently both of them played Ping-Pong, for they were great fans of the German champion Jorg Rosskopf, who, David mentioned, had even defeated a Chinese champion. Both declared their allegiance to fair play. And both revealed themselves as history mavens, willing to admire each other for newly uncovered information: “Terrific! Where did you find that Gregor Strasser quote?” or, “That's something I didn't know, David — that Hildebrandt was booted out by the Fuhrer for leftist deviation, then reinstalled as Gauleiter when the good old Mecklenburgers stuck up for him.”

They could have been taken for friends, they went to so much trouble to work off their mutual hatred, like a debt. When Wilhelm lobbed a question into the chat-room — ”If the Fuhrer brought me back to life, would you shoot me again?” — David answered promptly, “No, next time you can blow me away.”

Something was dawning on me. Already I was letting go of the notion that a lone Webmaster was skillfully engaging in ghostly role-playing. I had fallen into the clutches of two pranksters who were deadly serious.

Later, when all those involved swore they hadn't had a clue and made a big show of being appalled, I said to Mother, “The whole thing seemed odd to me from the beginning. I was wondering why young people today would be fascinated by this Gustloff and everything connected with him. I realized right away that they weren't a couple of old farts frittering away their time on the Internet, I mean has-beens like you…”

Mother didn't answer. As always when something came too close for comfort, she made her I'm-not-home face, rolling her eyes to the point of no return. She was convinced in any case that a thing like this could happen only because for years and years “you couldn't bring up the Yustioff. Over here in the East we sure as hell couldn't. And when you in the West talked about the past, it was always about other bad stuff, like Auschwitz and such. Lordy, lordy! You should've seen how they carried on in the Party collective that time I just mentioned something positive about the KDF ships — that the Yustloff was a classless ship…”

And that brought to mind her mama and papa, and their trip to Norway: “My mama just couldn't get over it that the passengers all ate in the same dining room, simple workers like my papa, but also government employees and even top brass in the Party. It must've been almost like what we had in the GDR, only even nicer…”

The idea of a classless ship was a real hit. I assume that explains why the dockworkers cheered like crazy when the new ship, eight stories high, was launched on 5 May 1937. The funnel, the bridge, and the compass platform had not yet been added. All of Hamburg came out to watch, countless thousands. But for the christening only ten thousand Party members, personally invited by Ley, could get up close.

Hitler’s special train pulled into Dammtor Station at ten in the morning. From there an open Mercedes drove him, saluting with his arm sometimes outstretched, sometimes flexed, through the streets of Hamburg, to wild cheering, of course. From the Landungsbrucken a motor launch carried him to the shipyard. All the ships in the harbor, including the foreign ones, had hoisted flags. And the entire KDF fleet, made up of chartered vessels, from the Sierra Cordoba to the St. Louis, lay at anchor dressed to the topmast.

I won't bother to list all the formations lined up, all those who clicked their heels in salute. Below the christening platform swarmed the shipyard workers, cheering as he mounted the stairs. At the last free election, only four years earlier, most of them had voted socialist or communist. Now there was just the one and only party left; and here was the Fuhrer in the flesh.

Not until he was on the stand did he encounter the widow. He knew Hedwig Gustloff from the earliest days of the struggle. Before the failed march to the Feldherrenhalle in Munich in '23, which ended in bloodshed, she had served as his secretary. Later, when he was imprisoned in the fortress of Landsberg, she had gone looking for work in Switzerland and found her husband.

Who else was allowed on the platform? The manager of the shipyard, Staatsrat Blohm, and the head of the works organization, a man called Pauly. Of course Robert Ley stood next to him. But other Party bigwigs as well.