The Austrian: A War Criminal's Story

by Ellie Midwood

  “Nobody, I hope.” I gave her a dirty look. “But on the other hand, it depends solely on the people inside the chancellery.”

  I grabbed my gun and service dagger, pecked Melita on the cheek and told her to wait for me.

  “And don’t you dare get dressed!”

  “You won’t be that fast!”

  “Yes, I will!” I laughed back at her and rushed down the stairs.

  I was extremely fast and efficient this time. And unemotional, which was the most important thing. I gave orders with cold detachment, demanding absolute subordination from the excited young SS men, both mine and Heydrich’s, who still followed my orders before his. He wasn’t here after all, and I was, and I doubted that any of them would want to cross a guy with my stature and my face.

  Hours later it was all over with, and I was standing at attention before Reichsführer Himmler and other high ranking officials, who just got off the plane in a small airport near Vienna in the cold spring morning.

  “Reichsführer, the Austrian SS are ready and awaiting your further orders,” I said instead of a greeting and rose my hand in the usual salute.

  Himmler saluted me back, gave me an approving smile and shook my hand. I swear that I could hear Heydrich grinding his teeth behind Himmler’s back. I smiled at him charmingly, and he responded with a withering stare. I couldn’t care less about his sentiments now. I won this biggest and the most important round, and had secured my position as the trustworthy and reliable leader. No one would overthrow me now. Sepp Dietrich, passing me by, patted my shoulder in the most affectionate manner. I could tell how proud he was by the progress he had seen in me, from the clueless and inexperienced young man he had noticed in the overcrowded hall, to finally making it into the upper realm of the Party hierarchy.

  I was proud of myself as well, especially in the next few days, when parade followed the parade, and I was amongst the officials overlooking it. I was always right behind Reichsführer’s shoulder, in my new Brigadeführer’s uniform and overcoat, after Himmler promoted me for my devotion and excellent service and had awarded me with an SS sword that I was proudly displaying on my left hip.

  I was proud of myself for another reason as well. I and my five hundred SS men executed the will of our whole country, which had been longing to join the German Reich for years now. The excitement of the cheering crowds, with which they were welcoming their northern neighbors, throwing flowers at the cars and kissing the marching soldiers, was overwhelming. My fellow Austrians were singing national hymns and saluting their new leaders with tears of happiness in their eyes, and I made it possible.

  The Führer arrived as planned, to observe for himself the unification of his Austria, where he was born and raised, and his new German Reich, which favored him much more than his own land of origin. No one talked about it really, but he entered the German army during the Great War because the Austrian one refused his application as they thought him to be too sickly. I was ashamed to even think of it now, following my Führer with my gaze wherever he went. Someone leaned to him and whispered something, and he turned around, looked straight at me, and I suddenly felt absolutely paralyzed, not able to even blink from all the emotions flooding my head. Someone nudged my back slightly and told me to walk over to him, maybe Dietrich, but I wasn’t sure of anything at that point. I managed the longest several steps in my life, saluted my Führer the best I could and froze at attention.

  He had hawk’s eyes, cold, focused and unblinking, and I for the first time felt the power of that hypnotic stare on myself. And then he smiled at me, and I thought that he had the kindest and sincerest smile, like the sun piercing grey clouds to bathe the earth in its warmth and eternal love; that’s exactly how it was for me, stemming from the blind faith that I had in him then. I would have died for him that very minute, if he had asked me to. But he didn’t. Instead, he shook my cold, sweaty hand, and patted my shoulder just like Dietrich had not that long ago.

  “I’ve heard many good things about you, Brigadeführer Kaltenbrunner,” he said in an unusually mild voice, which I never expected from him. “Thank you for your assistance with this wonderful, fateful event. The great German nation is finally reunited, and will be forever in debt for your service. The Reich and its people will be celebrating your name for many upcoming years.”

  _______________

  Nuremberg prison, April 1946

  “The German people will be condemning your name for many upcoming years, defendant, for all the atrocities and bloodshed you started, when you handed your own country to the monstrous Nazi government,” Colonel Amen spit out every word, strangely reminding me of the old pastor in my native Reid, who would promise eternal condemnation with the same readiness as my American prosecutor did. Only I didn’t believe in hell anymore. Or in justice. Not even in life. I was tired. Very, very tired.

  I was barely listening to him and all the papers he was reading out to the court. It was boring and pointless. The whole process of justice was a circus, one big circus, and I refused to jump through their rings, which infuriated them even more. I easily refuted all my participation in the Anschluss, simply because all the paperwork was taken care of in the very first few days after the event. Reichsführer knew who to make a convenient scapegoat for all the dirty work, and how to make his celebrated favorites, me included, look like innocent leaders, who were handed the power by the obedient people themselves, with no violence involved whatsoever. I told you, Herr Amen, you wouldn’t prove anything.

  He lost this day, and I was escorted back to my cell. It was even worse, because I knew that the rest of the evidence they had against me, fabricated or not, would slowly wrap the invisible noose around my throat, every new witness throwing another loop over it, every testimony, even if unsupported, to strangle me slowly until the real executor finished off what they had started. I lay down on my cot and stared at the ceiling.

  “Kaltenbrunner?” The guard, who was on duty by my cell door today, called out to me through the small window in the door. “How are you feeling?”

  “I’m tired,” I replied, not even making an effort to move my head. “I want to go home.”

  “You know that you can’t go home.”

  “I know. It’s just an expression.”

  “Oh. Well, you have a visitor. Do you want to get up?”

  “Who?” I asked without much enthusiasm. I didn’t even feel like talking to Dr. Goldensohn now.

  “Some OSS officer.”

  I quickly sat up on my cot, looking at the guard.

  “American?” I smiled, my heart beating faster in the hope of seeing agent Foster, who had seemed to forget about my existence recently. It was only a couple of months since he last visited me, but to me it felt like several years.

  “Sounds German to me,” the guard replied, looking over his shoulder. “He’s signing in the book right now. He’ll be right here.”

  German? I frowned, pondering when the OSS suddenly decided to start hiring Germans to work for them. Meanwhile, the guard opened the door and let in a man, who I never expected to see in a million years. Heinrich Friedmann. Annalise’s husband. My former subordinate and the man she left me for.

  He stepped inside warily, a little unsure of my reaction. I slowly got up and couldn’t help but smile at him, the faint reminder of the old days of the Reich glory, when we both wore our uniforms and the heart of the nation was still beating, when my own heart was still beating.

  “Friedmann,” I said quietly, as if tasting the long forgotten name once again. I smiled at him and offered him my hand. He shook it readily and then suddenly pulled me close and hugged me tightly, without saying a word. I wrapped my arm around his neck and grabbed his shoulder with all the strength I had left, restraining myself the best I could from shedding a tear. They all probably called me the biggest cry baby here anyway.

  “You lost a lot of weight,” he finally uttered, looking at me with concern. He was still immaculately perfect, hair to hair, only sl
ightly greyer on the temples from when I last saw him. My hair, on the contrary, remained as dark as night, as if out of some stubborn defiance, or maybe because I didn’t worry as much in my life as he did. I drank all my troubles away, and turned them into smoke. I pretended not to care. Looks like it worked.

  “Don’t they feed you here at all?” he asked again when I didn’t reply, still studying my face closely. I be damned, but I missed this bastard.

  “They do. I’m not really hungry most of the time.”

  I offered him a chair, but he preferred to sit right next to me on my cot. He threw a look over his shoulder and warned me to address him as Hermann Rosenberg, as it was his new identity, given to him by the OSS office. I nodded and asked him about my son. Or his son, I should probably say. The boy had never even seen me and most likely would never see me.

  “He’s fine, walking already. Running even.” The warmest smile touched his lips as he said that. “He’s absolutely wonderful. The most adorable little kid.”

  “Will you take good care of him?” I asked him quietly, clutching the blanket in my fist behind his back. Everything was twisting inside in agony from the sudden realization, hitting me like a train going full speed: No, I will never see my son. Never. I will die without holding him even once in my arms. I could swear that I physically felt my own heart bleeding inside my chest, that’s how much it hurt.

  “Of course I will,” he promised with all seriousness.

  I managed a nod. I knew he would. He was a good man, unlike me. He wouldn’t break his word. He would raise him as his own and love him as his own, even though that child would forever be a reminder of what I’d done to him and his wife. I didn’t dare ask about her.

  Friedmann suddenly stirred and pulled a folder from under his woolen overcoat which he held in his arms.

  “I brought you some papers. This is all I could get, but it should be of some help. I collected them as evidence when I was working in the OSS headquarters in Berlin, right after the capitulation had been signed. I don’t even know why I started collecting them, but I just thought that it might be useful if they do capture you.” He looked me in the eyes, frowning, and sighed. “Why didn’t you run, Ernst? Why did you stay in Austria?”

  I thought that I probably shouldn’t answer that, and I shrugged uncomfortably with one shoulder, and then gave him a small smile. “Your wife dumped me, and I didn’t see the point to go without her. I wanted to die in my native Austria.”

  “She didn’t dump you. She stayed in Berlin to protect you. How far would you go and where would you possibly hide in South America, first with a pregnant woman and then with a newborn child?” He shook his head slightly. “She thought you’d have enough brains to run alone and then find her when everything gets more or less quiet. But no, you decided to go down with the music and die pompously at the hands of the OSS. And look where it led you.”

  “Did you come here to yell at me? I have Dr. Gilbert, Dr. Kelly and Colonel Amen do that job perfectly well.” Even my usual sarcasm, which I always used as a sort of protective mechanism, sounded pitiful now. “At least yell at me for sleeping with your wife in the first place, and not for my decision of how to end my worthless life.”

  “I’m not yelling at you,” Friedmann said softly. “She’s crying all the time, that’s all. I would much prefer her to be with you, in some Argentinian jungle for all I care, but not like that. It’s really heartbreaking, the two of you.”

  We both went quiet for quite some time, until I finally broke the heavy silence again.

  “Thank you for the documents.” I shuffled through the papers and suppressed a sad smirk. “Red Cross negotiations, witnesses’ statements… I appreciate it, I really do. Only it won’t mean a thing.”

  My hands dropped lifelessly on my lap again as I stared at the floor. I felt Friedmann’s inquiring gaze on me.

  “They’ll hang me, Rosenberg,” I explained with a soft smile, calling him by his new name, without looking at him. “They told me that when I was still incarcerated in London, long before all this had started. So I already know the outcome of my trial, and thought that you should know too. And please, try to tell her as well, only carefully if you can, so she won’t hope, won’t count on some miracle… Will you?”

  He looked away, biting his lip. I knew exactly how he felt, only for me it was a thousand times worse.

  “I’ll try. Only she’ll still hope. To the very last day she will.”

  “I should have never…” I started saying and swallowed my own words together with tears.

  “Who are you lying to? Yes, you would, even if you knew the outcome and were to live your life from the beginning again, you would still have chosen her over everything else, even though the two of you were never meant to be together in the first place. You two are like a goddamn present day Romeo and Juliette, born into enemy clans, but fall in love despite all the odds and society’s opinion, and prefer the short-lived, but so blindingly bright and sincere way, a most twisted way to love that happens once in a hundred years. And then everybody dies in the end, because those kinds of stories never finish with a happily ever after.”

  This time the both of us choked on our emotions, and I grabbed his hand.

  “You… You watch her close after… Do you hear me? Don’t let her do anything stupid. She has a son to raise!”

  Friedmann nodded several times, squeezing my hand back and quickly wiping his own tears. “I will.”

  “You swear?”

  “I swear. God, of course I swear. How stupid this all is, how…” he tried to catch his breath and looked around my cell, as if looking for some magical exit that would suddenly materialize out of nowhere, and we would be free to go to that other world, where the stories did finish with a happily ever after.

  _______________

  Linz, April 1938

  “And they lived happily ever after, and never died.”

  I closed the book, hoping to find my three year old son sleeping peacefully. The boy though decided to do everything possible and impossible to stay awake.

  “One more,” he asked, blinking the sleep away.

  “We’ve read four already, Hansjorg. Four.” I tried to reason with the child. “It’s time for bed now.”

  I brushed the bangs off his forehead and tucked his blanket in.

  “No, please, just one more,” he begged with his little voice, catching my sleeve.

  “If we read them all tonight, there won’t be anything left for tomorrow then.” I smiled at him.

  “Yes, there will. Just one last one… please?”

  “Don’t you want to go to sleep?” I chuckled kind-heartedly at his efforts to stay awake.

  “He’s afraid to go to sleep.”

  I turned around to see Elisabeth standing at the door.

  “Because every time he closes his eyes, you’re gone again,” she finished her thought with unmasked reproach in her voice.

  “Lisl, you’re not helping.”

  “I’m not here to help you.”

  Usually she hurled all her accusations and scolding at me when we were alone; this time I guess she was so angry that she decided to start fighting in front of our son. I sighed, deciding to ignore her, and turned back to the boy.

  “Hansjorg, Papa has to go check on how grandpa is feeling, alright? But if you promise to go to sleep now, I’ll take you to the park tomorrow morning, how about that?”

  “With rides?”

  “Yes, with rides.”

  “Can I have ice cream?”

  “Ice cream, popsicles, sugar cotton, you can have whatever you want. And I’ll take you to the toy store afterwards, too.”

  He climbed from under the blanket and wrapped his little arms around my neck.

  “I love you, Papa,” he whispered into my ear, planting a shy wet kiss on my unshaven cheek.

  “I love you too, my precious.” I put my son back to bed and covered him once again. “Now go to sleep.”

  He nod
ded, happy with the following day’s arrangements, and fell asleep instantly. I got up from the bed as silently as I could, checked on Gertrude, my nine month old daughter, also sleeping in her crib, and closed the door to the children’s room under Lisl’s hard stare.

  “Bribing your son, hoping that one day of spoiling him would make up for your constant absence, sure, that’s what all good fathers do,” she remarked with obvious sarcasm.

  “All the normal fathers aren’t holding a position as the highest SS official in Austria, and the position of Stats Secretary combined with ten other titles, are they now?”

  “And your point is that it justifies you showing up once every few weeks for one day,” she said, following me down the stairs.

  “My point is I have a lot of important work to do.”

  “That’s all I hear from you all the time! Work! Before you were saying, oh, just wait for the Anschluss, Lisl, after it’ll be all over with. And now you’re busier than ever.”

  “Reichsführer needs my services, what can I do?”

  “Tell him that you have a family to take care of.”

  “He has a family too. They live in Munich, he works in Berlin. Everybody’s happy.”

  “Yes, he lives in Berlin with his mistress and their bastard child!” she exploded, putting both fists on her hips.

  “Lisl,” I warned her with a menacing tone on my voice. It didn’t stop her from raising her voice even more.

  “Is that what you want?! Is that your new plan? Moving away permanently to Vienna and leaving us here?! Or maybe you do have another family there already?”

  “You’re saying such nonsense, Lisl, I swear to God!”