Heinz settled Frau Schimmel’s affairs as best he could. He cleaned out the apartment and donated the furniture to a national charity. He kept the Limoges in accordance with her wishes, although he wasn’t sure what to do with a set of fine china.
In the top drawer of her dresser he had found letters carefully tied with string in small packets. Some from long ago were addressed to a Clara Dubinski. There was a small bundle of letters from Lola Zeff too. They were postmarked Murnau and would probably have made it easy to find her. In the end he burned all the letters without reading them.
Even though Heinz had come to love the woman he knew as Bertha Schimmel, he had also at the same time managed to remain a devout anti-Semite. He accomplished this by means of an ungainly but effective mental somersault. To his way of thinking, the Jews were absolutely responsible for Germany’s woes. But Bertha Schimmel (and Tante Jolesch before her) were the exception. They were decent and loving people.
Such acrobatic exceptions were performed all over Germany, so often in fact that there came to be a word for these exceptional Jews – Hausjude. The house Jew was the one that lived in your building, or the Jew of your acquaintance who was different from all the other Jews. He was generous, or their children were well behaved, or she was kind and gave you strudel. In fact, given all these positive attributes, they probably weren’t even Jews at all.
By doing another similar mental somersault, Heinz also absolved himself of the crime he had committed by deceiving his fellow storm troopers and protecting the old Jew Bertha Schimmel from deportation or worse. If she was a good person (and therefore probably not even a Jew), then it would have been a grave mistake to allow her to be harmed.
Heinz’s mental acrobatics came in handy yet again a few years later, in 1943, when Tomas, having left his leg behind near Stalingrad, came home only to be implicated as a member of the White Rose resistance group. He had been caught distributing leaflets denouncing the persecution and murder of Jews. Tomas had to be innocent, said Heinz (to himself), because he had fought, and been wounded and then been decorated at Stalingrad. It had to be a case of mistaken identity or betrayal by some defeatist or malevolent person, maybe even a Jew. Tomas was a war hero after all. Sending him to the guillotine would be a terrible mistake. He went to the guillotine nonetheless.
Friedrich Grosz
Despite the dismal weather – ice storms and bitter winds from the east – the clearing of the wetlands beyond the camp of trees and stones continued at a frenzied pace. The Dachau directorate had decided that large numbers of prisoners should be used to prepare this area for farming before spring. The prisoners who cleared the fields would then do the farm labor, if they survived. Now teams of prisoners were cutting down trees, hauling them away, digging up their roots, and pulling stones out of the frozen swampy ground.
One morning two SS guards pulled Willi from a crew as they were being marched out to the work site. He was taken to a small windowless stone building adjoining the Juhrhaus, the squat building through which new prisoners arrived. An official car stood by the door. Willi watched his crew disappear though the gate carrying saws and shovels, preceded by kapos, and surrounded by SS guards armed with clubs and machine guns.
Inside the building, which had once been an ammunition storage room, Obersturmbannführer Reinhard Pabst was waiting. He wore the black SS uniform and a heavy black overcoat. It was as cold inside the building as it was outside, and his breath turned to steam as it came from his nose and mouth. He had a pistol strapped on his hip.
The Obersturmbannführer was pacing back and forth. As Willi came in, he stopped pacing and peered at Willi, trying to affect a relaxed stance, his hands clasped behind his back. Willi could see that this man was ill at ease. His body was tense and his breath came in short bursts of steam. Willi had never seen Reinhard Pabst or Friedrich Grosz before, so he wasn’t sure who this man was, although he had his suspicions. Willi stood at attention, waiting for whatever was next.
Since his first Gestapo posting only four years earlier at Humboldt University in Berlin, Reinhard had uncovered one plot after another with skill and cunning. He had brought dozens of traitors to ruin. Dominating these wretched human beings and destroying their lives had become his passion. He believed he had made it into a science. He could not be defeated. Reinhard had taught classes on interrogation and entrapment techniques in Berlin, and had eventually been sent to Munich to teach the Gestapo there as well. Just over thirty years old and already a lieutenant colonel, he was, by all accounts, headed for stardom.
Reinhard had convinced himself, and so explained to his students, that every interrogation should be seen as a life and death struggle between himself and the subject, ignoring, of course, the fact that his victim was essentially helpless and at his mercy. ‘The person you are interrogating is your enemy,’ Reinhard would say. ‘If he is strong, he will try to resist you. For he understands implicitly that resistance is his only hope. And so your objective is to destroy his resistance, and thus to destroy his hope.
‘Without hope, he is nothing. And by hope I do not mean merely his hope for survival. I mean his entire hopeful system of beliefs, the foundation of his existence – Christianity, communism, humanism, whatever it might be. If he is a Christian, you must destroy his belief in Jesus Christ; if he is a communist, you must destroy his belief in communism; if he is a humanist, you must destroy his
