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 Plotzensee 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.
