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The End of Law

Page 25

by Therese Down


  “Oh, darling.” Mathilde sounded genuinely moved. “It is not as bad as all that – you’ll see. It never is.” She fingered her pearls agitatedly, looking to Ernst for help.

  “Hedda.” At last, Ernst spoke. “I have something to tell you that even your mother doesn’t know.” Mathilde stood up, an exaggeratedly surprised expression on her face, and stared at her husband. “The doctors say you can take Agnette home. I can arrange for an ambulance to collect her tomorrow morning.”

  “But… how? When did you hear this, Ernst? Why didn’t you tell me?” spluttered Mathilde. “How can you possibly know such a thing before Hedda does?”

  “I bumped into Walter, at work. He won’t be home this evening, by the way, Hedda, so he asked me to pass on the news.” Mathilde looked confused for a few seconds longer, then she shrugged, turned back to Hedda, who was smiling and crying and half laughing, then crying. Suddenly, Hedda leapt to her feet, kissed her mother, then crossed the room in seconds and pressed herself against her father’s chest.

  “Thank you, Vati,” she sobbed into his neck. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  Ernst held his daughter tightly and could no longer fight the tears that had been pricking at his throat since he had opened the side room door and beheld her – forlorn, alone, dishevelled; guarding her daughter against harm.

  Since Hedda had come to him, Ernst had hardly slept. It was as if he had been shaken from some sort of limited consciousness state in which he functioned without any real sensibility. It was not difficult for Ernst to detach himself from feelings, and proceed logically; he had been trained to do it from an early age by a father whose own eminent scientific career had required the same objectivity. In fact, until very recently, it had been devilishly difficult for Ernst to feel anything that was not generated by a series of logical choices or responses. The difficulty, he was discovering, with assuming life was chemical, was that the premise was unable to explain a number of stubborn irreductions. If thoughts were simply neurons firing in the brain, why was his heart breaking? And why was he now unable to redirect his thoughts to paths the corollaries of which were not emotionally debilitating? And how was he now to reconcile, logically or otherwise, the work he had done to reprieve from death his own granddaughter, with the orders he would soon receive to supply replacement drugs for the T4 Office Child Euthanasia Programme?

  Karl, increasingly, had taken to praying. He could do nothing more in his own strength. There was not a circumstance in his own life over which he had control. He had done all he could do to save his wife and Agnette Gunther, and he had not instructed Herr Schroeder at IG Farben to supply a new drugs consignment following the bombing last Sunday night. Neither had he any intention of doing so. By now, someone would have mentioned the absence of communication regarding supplies. It was simply a question of time before he was held to account.

  He had tried his best to alert the church authorities to the T4 programme. They would not listen. He had taken a huge risk in travelling to Pilsen with his letter for Albert Goering. Now, he could only pray Goering could do something to help. If not – if the letter had been intercepted or Goering suspected a trap of some sort – it was only a matter of time before Karl was arrested.

  The only reason he did not simply walk away, go to Leipzig, collect his wife and make a run for it, was because he knew the trap that would ensnare him was already sprung. If he drew attention to Greta now, who knew what they might do to her? He had to find a way of seeing her discreetly one last time. The problem was, he had recently requested emergency leave for family business in order to travel to Pilsen. Another such request would focus attention on him sooner than he would like. He had resolved not to have any more involvement in killing anyone. This would prove difficult, as it was his job. If he refused to do it, he would be incarcerated or worse. That was preferable to killing children, but what about Greta? How could he protect her if he was in prison or dead? And so, paralysed by lack of choice, lonelier and more desperate than he would have known how to explain, Karl turned to prayer as an alternative to suicide.

  Raised on Catholic liturgy, Karl began with the prayers he had learned by heart in catechism and then from attending Mass every Sunday with his family and as an altar boy. He derived immense solace from the Lord’s Prayer and the idea of a benevolent Father who understood perfectly his heart and his difficulties. In relinquishing to God the impossibility of his situation, and trusting that he had the power to provide solutions where human beings could not imagine them, Karl unburdened his soul and found the strength he needed to wait with a level of equanimity and even peace, the denouement of his life. “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed,” he repeated over and over again. That he was repentant of his sins was beyond doubt. Nonetheless, Karl was determined to make his Confession. He walked to St Michael’s Church in Kreuzberg. He would confess to a priest the terrible, abominable details of the T4 programme. He would spew it all from his guts and nightmares in an attempt to purge his soul, but also to solicit aid. He knew Catholics throughout Germany were openly assisting persecuted Jews, but someone needed to prevent the helpless “unworthies” from being sacrificed upon what Karl had decided was a satanic altar.

  Where was God? It was a good question. As far as Karl could tell, he had been rejected as surplus to requirements when Hitler had vowed publicly at an SS training event at Vogelsang Castle in 1939 that he would crush Christianity beneath his boot like the “poisonous toad it was”. God had been deprived of authority in Germany when he was systematically deleted from the Old Testament because he was a Jew. Jesus, Hitler had asserted openly, was an anti-Semite, driving the “enemies of the human race out of the temple”.

  It was no secret in SS circles that Hitler’s “Reich Church” was to replace Christian churches of all denominations once the war was won. Rosenberg, Hitler’s cultural and educational leader and main proponent of Nazi ideology, had stated publicly on several occasions that he spoke for Hitler when he said all Catholic and Protestant churches must eventually disappear, making way for what Goebbels pronounced would be a “National Reich Church”, within which Hitler would be the intermediary between the Aryan race and the throne of God. Hitler had a hundred thousand copies of a revised “Bible” created by the “Theological Institute” in Eisenhach, which he founded in 1939, expressly to “dejewify” the Bible. These texts had been circulated throughout Germany, accompanied by instructions to religious leaders and theologians to re-present Christ as non-Jewish.

  Within these Reich Church “Bibles”, the Ten Commandments had been re-presented as twelve, of which the first was “Honour your Führer and master” and the second “Keep the blood pure and your honour holy.” The Lord’s Prayer now began “Adolf Hitler, you are our great Führer” and ended “Führer, my Führer, my faith, my light – hail my Führer.”

  Even the word “Christmas” had been officially forbidden in Reich circles since 1938 and the Hitler Youth were blithely chanting a new, official song that denounced the need for “Christian virtue” as well as “Pope and Rabbi”, because “our leader is our saviour” and “we want to be pagans once again”.

  Every senior SS and Gestapo officer knew of Himmler’s obsession with the occult and his derision for Christianity; the strange goings on in Himmler’s Westphalian Wewelsburg Castle had been witnessed. Many SS and Gestapo officers from Berlin had accompanied gangs of prisoners from Sachsenhausen to Wewelsburg in order to oversee the enforced rebuilding of its towers and turrets. They had heard and seen occult rites and rituals conducted at dead of night by men in SS uniforms, Himmler presiding.

  Karl’s father had ranted often enough about these heresies, and the “Hitler Bibles” did not long survive once in the hands of devout believers. But while Karl understood why his father was shocked and incensed, he did not care to ponder ideology or theological matters of any kind. Once he had decided it was all irrelevant nonsense – once he had embraced science a
nd the logic of engineering as life’s lawgivers – why should he care if Hitler denounced the Hebrew Bible as a “fairy story”?

  But now? Now, empirical evidence was all around him that something which could not have roots in socialism or humanism, or even evolutionary theory, was at work. There could not be a doctrine, since men had begun to philosophize, that could defend or explain the deliberate abjuration of morality on the scale necessary to enforce murder as constitutional law; cruelty as government policy. The imponderable profanity of his country’s leaders was, for Karl, evidence in itself of an objective, normative morality as far removed from that which governed Germany as it was possible to contemplate. As Karl knelt in prayer in the dimly lit Italianate splendour of this Catholic church, contemplating a wall-mounted representation in sculpted relief of the crucified Christ, he had absolutely no doubt that he was addressing the only possible antidote to the extravagant evil that gripped his country.

  “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned,” he said clearly and calmly to a priest he could not see, once in the confessional box. “It has been… about fifteen years since my last confession.” And Karl got quickly to the point. He told the silent priest of the abominations he had witnessed and assisted. He was able at last to weep freely without fear of interrogation or rejection as he repented of his part in the murder of countless children and defenceless mental patients.

  He spoke of his profound love for his wife and the terrible longing he had suppressed in order to survive for so long. He poured out his anguish at how violated Greta and his parents – all decent Germans – had been each time he had put on his SS uniform once he had been assigned to T4. And Karl finished by divulging to a trembling priest Heydrich’s plans for the absolute destruction of Jews; plans to make Poland nothing more than a centralized operational hub for the systemized annihilation of a race, and then, once genocide and ethnic cleansing had been effected, Poland would be annexed to Germany; a breeding ground for Aryans and Hitler’s Herrenvolk ideology, which visualized nothing less than world domination.

  When at last he had finished speaking, Karl bowed his head and waited. After a long silence, the priest spoke.

  “My son, this was a heavy burden indeed. Greater than any man should have to bear. I share it with you, and with you bring it before Christ, lay it at his cross. I will do all I can as one man under the authority of this government, but as a man whose allegiance is firstly to a much higher authority, to urge my church in the pursuit of justice. But our suit must be first of all to God, for he alone knows how the innocent may be saved. Against him, evil cannot prevail. It is not possible. Take heart.”

  The priest paused for a long time. Karl could hear him praying quietly, murmuring fervent prayers in the darkness behind the grille that separated them. After some time, he resumed, “As for your soul, my dear son, God himself has declared, ‘Though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool’ and so you are absolved of all your sins and I pray that your turmoil will be replaced by the peace of Christ which surpasses all understanding.”

  There followed more whispered prayers, discernible incantations in Latin. “But my son,” the priest eventually continued, “without true and lasting repentance, confession is impotent. What can you do to avoid sin in the future?”

  Karl composed himself, paused long enough that he could clearly speak the sentences that had formed in his mind and heart several times since he had begun his confession.

  “I know what I have to do, Father. My prayer now is that I have the courage to do it.”

  When finally he walked out of St Michael’s Church, Karl paused and turned to contemplate the statue of the archangel Michael that stood fierce upon the cupola, wings outstretched, cross held aloft in the manner of a warrior about to do battle. Removing his SS cap, Karl saluted his new general.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Hedda’s joy on accompanying her daughter as she was wheeled on a gurney into the ambulance on the morning of Thursday the 28th March 1941 was indescribable. On the day Agnette should have died, she was going home. The official release papers were all signed and countersigned, and Hedda had been briefed by Matron on how to take care of her daughter: how often to turn and move her to avoid the formation of bedsores; how to change the catheter bag. A nurse would visit to change the catheter itself in due course and to check that Hedda was coping.

  Hedda watched the matron’s colourless face as she talked, listened to the emotionless enunciation of every word and loathed her anew. She said nothing when the matron had finished, though she would very much have liked to ask her how she reconciled her duty of care with her conspiracy to murder helpless infants. But Hedda’s priority was to get her own daughter safely away from Brandenburg hospital and home.

  As she walked past the rows of beds, the closed doors of the silent side rooms on her way out of the ward and into the white March sunlight, her knowledge was an almost intolerable burden. What could she do?

  Hedda had spoken excitedly to Agnette about going home: how Anselm would be overjoyed to see her; how beautiful the new house and garden were, and now that it was spring, Agnette could soon go outside again, feel the fresh air she so loved when she was well.

  When they reached the house, Ernst and Mathilde were there. Ernst had taken the morning off work to welcome home his granddaughter, and Mathilde had busied herself telling Marguerite what to do in preparation for Hedda’s homecoming. Agnette’s room was fresh with flowers and the bed was made up with beautiful, rose-patterned sheets. A “darling chime-mobile”, which Mathilde had been unable to resist in a shop on Bellevuestrasse, was suspended from the ceiling and swung lightly in the breeze from a window opened to air the room. “But it is quite on the chilly side in here now, Marguerite,” Mathilde had announced when all was complete. “Shut the window, please.” Marguerite had no objection to being ordered around by Mathilde; she was too overjoyed to be welcoming Hedda and Agnette home to care.

  Anselm ran from room to room pretending he was an aeroplane, and seemed unable to contain the energy and elation he felt at the imminent return of his mother and sister. Cook had made a huge brunch for everyone of potato pancakes with apples, milk and a pot of steaming coffee. There was a general air of celebration and happiness in the house, which it had not known since the Gunthers had assumed residence months before.

  And then the ambulance arrived, and the orderly and the driver lifted the gurney gently from the vehicle and into the house. When they reached Agnette’s room, it was Ernst who stepped forward and lifted his granddaughter from the gurney and laid her with great tenderness upon the turned-back bed. The men and the ambulance left, and there was hugging and laughter and the unqualified joy of a three-year-old boy whose world had just been restored.

  “Heil Hitler, Muller.” Oberführer Walter Gunther walked into Karl’s office without knocking. He was carrying under his arm a large brown envelope.

  Walter’s appearance in his office for the second time in about a week did not surprise Karl. He knew Gunther suspected him of something. His heart, though, hammered in his chest as he rose from his chair in dutiful greeting of the Oberführer. This must not be the moment of his arrest. He still had so much to do.

  “Sit down, Muller,” began Walter, noting the absence of a return salute and allowing it to sweeten further the pleasure he would take in devastating this man he had come to loathe. Walter found a chair, sat down, removed his cap and placed it on top of the package upon his lap. “I shall come straight to the point. Regrettably, it has been necessary to put your wife back into the asylum from which you rather inadvisedly removed her. She will be back there within a week at the most.” Walter studied Karl’s face as it visibly paled. “This is most distressing for you, I can see. Take a moment to compose yourself.”

  Walter unbuttoned his coat and took a packet of cigarettes and a lighter from an inside pocket, tilted his head a little and squinted against the heat of the g
asoline flame as he lit the cigarette. Flicking the lighter shut, Walter held the cigarette in his left hand while he dropped the lighter into his right coat pocket, then drew heavily on the cigarette, watching Karl’s face as he exhaled.

  “Who authorized this?”

  “Hmm?”

  “I said, who authorized this?” Karl was shaking with anger. This he had not anticipated. The one prayer he had asked God to answer before he was arrested and undoubtedly killed was that he would see Greta again. He needed to furnish her parents with more money, make arrangements for Greta to be cared for. He intended to tell Clara and Hans about T4, so they would act quickly to save their daughter. He just needed another few hours to get away, to catch the train. He just needed to finish some paperwork and concoct a story about having to inspect a furnace or some gas chamber somewhere near Leipzig so that he could say goodbye to his wife.

  “You need to watch your tone, Officer Muller,” Walter retorted menacingly. “I think you have forgotten your manners.”

  Karl could not speak. His fury was almost murderous. He rose slowly from his chair, and Walter watched him, a raised eyebrow the only sign that he remarked Karl’s actions and demeanour. He drew again on his cigarette.

  “But,” continued Walter, “since you are so interested, Dr Brandt advised me of your protocol breach. Dr Kaufman was most upset that you had shown such scant regard for medical procedures. You had no right to remove your wife from his care.” Walter lapped Karl’s fury like nectar. If he could provoke Muller to an act of gross insubordination, he could precipitate his incarceration for treachery against the Reich and avenge what he was certain had been Muller’s betrayal to Hedda that Walter had decreed Agnette’s death.

  “I had every right to get her out of there.” Karl’s eyes burned as Walter’s grew colder. “She is my wife. I did not consent to her admission to that place and I am paying for her care. It has nothing to do with you – or the Reich.”

 

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