The Quest for Anna Klein

“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 been.

“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.”

“When did you have this conversation?” Danforth asked.

“It was in the summer of 1943,” Teitler answered. “I was only in Berlin for a few days. There was no work in the courts for me, so I went back to Nuremberg.”

Danforth’s pen remained still. “Did he mention the woman’s name?”

Teitler shook his head.

“Did he describe her?”

“No.”

“Did he say anything else at all about her?”

This time Teitler shrugged. “Only that before they chopped off her head, they should shave off her hair.”

Danforth was careful not to allow himself to consider the possibility that this woman might have been Anna. And yet, over the following days, he could not stop thinking about what Teitler had told him. It was like the Spanish idiom for relentless worrying over a single thought: dar vueltas,“ incessant circling.” The prospect had led Danforth to an incessant circling of particular scenes: Anna at their first meeting; Anna strolling among the tombs of Pere-Lachaise. She might have survived until the summer of 1943: this was the thought that awakened him each morning after he returned to Nuremberg following his interview with Teitler, and it was the thought that faded at last with sleep, though only after it had kept him up until nearly dawn.

For the next few days, Danforth went about his work, interviewing others distantly involved in the Katzenberger case, mostly judges who claimed to have had nothing but contempt for Rothaug, whom they described as a clown, a buffoon, a climber, and a toady. Teitler’s tiny clue continued to work like a needle in Danforth’s mind, consuming his every free moment, keeping him in his office until the early hours of the morning going through files, ledgers, accounting books, old newspapers, anything he could find that might hold, however distantly, a clue to the identity of the woman Rothaug had mentioned.

It was three o’clock in the morning, but the man Danforth saw when he glanced up from his desk looked freshly shaved and ready for the new day with none of Danforth’s hollow exhaustion in his eyes.

The man sat down in the chair across from Danforth’s desk. “My name is Edward Brock. I understand you’ve been looking for an American woman who you think was executed by the Germans.”

Danforth nodded.

“I can save you some work,” Brock said. “Her name was Mildred Harnack. She was an American who lived in Germany and spoke and wrote fluent German. She was a Communist, but — get this — she was also a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution.” He drew a paper from his jacket pocket and handed it to Danforth. “The State Department kept an eye on her.” He nodded toward the paper. “Here in a nutshell is what we know.”

Harnack had moved to Germany with her husband in 1929, Danforth read. She’d gotten interested in Communism and later toured the Soviet Union. By 1933 she’d begun teaching English literature at night-school classes in Berlin. Still later she’d published articles in the Berliner Tageblatt and Die Literatur, but the work had dried up once the Nazis came to power. It was then she’d stepped over the line and become what amounted to a Soviet agent, a fact the Gestapo had discovered and for which both she and her husband had been arrested in the fall of 1943. Her husband had been sentenced to death, but for some reason Mildred had received a mere six-year imprisonment, a sentence that was not to Hitler’s liking and which he’d ordered to be reviewed. The review had ended with a predicable result, and Mildred Harnack had been executed at Plotzensee on February 16, 1943-

Most decidedly, Mildred Harnack had not been Anna Klein.

Danforth gave the paper back to Brock. “Thank you,” he said wearily. “You’re right, that will save me a lot of time.”

Brock folded the paper and returned it to his jacket pocket. “Who are you looking for?” he asked. “Because I might be able to help you there too. We have quite a few documents from German intelligence, you know.” He lit a cigarette. “So, who was this woman?”

“Her name was Anna Klein,” Danforth said. “She worked for me before the war. We were in Berlin in August of 1939. She was arrested by the Gestapo. I never saw her again.”

“What can you tell me about her?” Brock asked.

Danforth told him that she was Jewish, that she was in her twenties, small, dark, with curly hair.

“That’s not a lot to go on,” Brock said.