The Mechanic

by Alan Gold

  She’d examined the records, looked through old telephone and city books and maps, searched the census and other rolls, spoken to archivists, sought help from willing historians and librarians and document specialists who had helped her uncover the musty annuls of old Berlin. She’d walked down streets, spoken to old Jews who remained, spoken to elderly people in the legal fraternity, in the judiciary, in commerce and economics, trying to find someone who, however vaguely, remembered the Family Gutman and their connection to pre-war Berlin. But nobody remembered. And she was left wondering whether Hitler had, indeed, won his battle to eliminate the memory of European Jewry.

  There were dozens of Gutmans in the directories and archives. But none which fitted the family history or the description so insubstantially written by Joachim in the early parts of his autobiography.

  ‘Why?’ she eventually asked Dorothea Elchor, a middle-aged archivist with the Council for the Records of the German Jewish Community in the Leipzigerstrasse in the Mitte District of Central Berlin. ‘Why is it that a prominent Berlin Jewish family, the father a judge of all things, can suddenly have disappeared off the face of the earth? Not a single record, not a solitary document which says that the family even existed. Okay, so if Joachim’s father had been a nobody, maybe that I could understand; but a lawyer, for God’s sake … a judge. Before the war, his name would have been in newspapers or on some sort of record …’

  Dorothea nodded in agreement. ‘You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But you’d be wrong. It wasn’t only books the Nazis burned, or synagogues on Kristallnacht. They made a frantic, mechanical effort to nullify Jewish existence. Any synagogue which they found was burned, and its holy books and scrolls and records burned with it. Newspaper offices, many of which ridiculed the SA and the SS in the early days, were torched along with all their records. They put totally inferior, and often stupid and brutish, Nazi professors in charge of university departments which were once run by Jewish professors, and the Nazis made great political capital of destroying what had gone on before … same with the Nazi judges who replaced the Jewish judges. Chasca, you can’t begin to imagine the methodical and systematic way in which Hitler and Göbbels and the rest of them made Germany Judenfrei.

  ‘Does it surprise me that your search has been so unsuccessful? No. In fact, I’d have been surprised if you’d found anything.’

  She could tell that Chasca, whom she’d first met a week ago as an enthusiastic and eager young American woman on a mission, was becoming burdened down by failure. Americans had such an expectation of success, their entire ethos being based upon their ability to do anything … just throw sufficient money or time or energy at a problem, and it’d be solved. But now Chasca was learning the reality of the thousand years of the Jewish European experience … that Jewish survival had been so much a matter of resilience and even good fortune; that money and time and energy were valueless against the waves of hatred which periodically swept across the troubled continent.

  Jews had risen to astounding heights of influence and intellect and wealth in Europe; yet every hundred years or so, their entire edifice was knocked down by some madman who wanted to rise above the common herd. She could have named them like a litany of horrors, but where to start? At the Crusades, or Martin Luther or Richard Wagner or Friedrich Nietzche or the pogroms or the Freikorp or the rise of Nazism? And that was only Germany; Russia and Poland and the Ukraine and most other European countries had their own litanies of sustained and systematic anti-Semitism to remember.

  So how could she help this lovely young American girl who was so earnestly trying to resurrect the forgotten memory of one hapless German, wrongly hanged at the end of the bloodiest and most vile war in history? She reached over the desk and grasped her hand. ‘Perhaps we’re starting at the wrong point, my dear. Perhaps you should be going to the family of the hanged man, Wilhelm Deutch. Maybe they might know something. It’s possible that this survivor, Joachim Gutman, contacted the family Deutch after the war, and they might be able to give you his whereabouts.’

  Chasca smiled and nodded in agreement.

  Prison Cells beneath the Palace of Justice

  Nuremberg, Allied Occupied Germany

  June, 1946

  Wilhelm felt himself shrinking. Physically, bodily. As though the cell in which he spent his days and nights was growing larger by the day. Odd, when he was on trial with the others, he felt bigger than his cell. He felt tall and muscular. Because he felt the security of comradeship. And as a big man, he faced his prosecutors squarely, in the unity of the oppressed; he would live and die with those who had been part of a common experience.

  But that had suddenly been taken away from him. He had been cut adrift and was now alone on a strange and uncertain sea. Since his trial had been truncated, and he was to be exposed to a sole spotlight with its merciless beam illuminating him and him alone to the world, he had lost weight at an alarming rate.

  His appetite had disappeared. He only touched food occasionally, and then as soon as he put some soup or some bread in his mouth, it tasted bitter, and he felt uncomfortable in his knotted stomach. He was tall and thin by nature, although in his middle years, he had begun to put on a stomach. Now his clothes were sagging on his bony frame, his face looked gaunt whenever he had the privilege of seeing himself in a mirror, and he was shocked by the way in which his hair was coming out in clumps on his comb. He had always enjoyed ruddy health; been a sportsman, enjoyed the activity of a full and often outdoor life. Even at Sachsenhausen and Auschwitz, separated from his wife and children, he’d kept up his physical fitness by regular games of soccer with the other staff. He’d even exercised his manhood with a particularly willing and adventurous Jewish girl seconded to him from the brothels. She exercised those parts of his body which soccer left untouched.

  But what worried him was that he might be suffering from the growth of a cancer. He told the guards that he needed a doctor; they told him that the doctors were all busy looking after the victims of the Nazis and there were none to spare on bastards like him.

  He told his lawyer that he might be suffering from a malignancy, but the lawyer at first took it for a metaphor for the party to which he had once belonged. It was only when he explained about the weight loss that the lawyer treated it seriously and called for medical attention.

  The doctor had given him a thorough examination, and, in the absence of bleeding or internal pains or any other external signs, he’d said that he was probably suffering from anxiety, and that it was no wonder considering he was facing trial for his life. Wilhelm demanded a more thorough examination, an X-ray. The doctor laughed. ‘Nearest X-ray machine is London. We’ve bombed every medical facility in this country out of existence. Anyway, it’s odds on you’ll follow your colleagues to the hangman’s noose, so there’s no point in treating you with any medicine other than that which will ensure you hear the judge’s verdict.’ And with that, the doctor packed up his bag and left Wilhelm to contemplate the Hippocratic Oath. Not even a bottle of tonic for the Nazis.

  In the afternoon, a week before his trial was due to start, he was called to a meeting with his lawyer. He entered their interview room with what enthusiasm he could muster. In his cell, he felt weak and dissipated. Walking in the exercise yard, always on his own now that his former colleagues were being hanged, he felt as though he was ambling through a sort of intermediary state; neither of living nor of death. Was this Purgatory?

  But when he entered the room, a metamorphosis seemed to take charge of his body. He was here for a meeting with his lawyer, something he’d done a number of times in the past … yet this time, things felt different. Possibly because he was nearing the time of his trial, possibly because a resolution was about to take place, possibly because if he was to be hanged, then his suffering would soon be over. He didn’t know the reason, but as he walked into the dull prison interview room, he suddenly felt charged with life, with purpose.

  In the beginning, when he’d felt betrayed
by the truncation of his collective trial, he had been utterly resistant to the elegant American. He knew that this was all a sham, that he was going to be found guilty, and he would determine his own way of making peace with the World and with his maker. And the American had tried the use of reason and persuasion. All the lawyer’s gestures were those of empathy, of a desire for the truth to out and an acquittal made before God or whatever spirit imbued the heart of the German. But beneath the patina of understanding, of the desire to find out what really happened, Wilhelm knew with an absolute certainty that the American lawyer loathed him, felt defiled in his presence. He tried to keep secret his utter contempt for Wilhelm and all those like him, falling back on arcane philosophies of life. But Wilhelm knew just as certainly that the American was there for some inner personal benefit, and whether Wilhelm hanged or not was a matter of total indifference.

  But they had been thrown together by fate and justice, and now, as Wilhelm’s story unfolded, as his confidence increased while offering explanation through narration, as his morale improved through the catharsis of being listened to if not appreciated, he began to welcome a way of defending himself. He gave Broderick glimpses into the life of one of the masters of the concentration camps. He might only have been a mechanic, but he was the chief mechanic and nothing in the camps would have worked without him. Did he use slave labour? Yes, of course. Did he like what he had done? No, not now, not then!

  ‘I’m going through the evidence and there are things which I need to have made a great deal clearer. The prosecution will seek to condemn you as an habitual and irredeemable monster; they’ll say that what happened in Auschwitz with your maintenance of the machinery was a logical extension of your willing participation in the bestiality; that you weren’t just a cog in the machine of the Nazis, but you pulled many of the levers which made the machinery operate. They’ll say that any moral person would have objected despite the consequences. Which means I’m going to have to find something about your earlier work for the Nazis, say at Sachsenhausen, which will disprove their contention. If they lead with the fact that you were a willing accomplice, that you accepted the slave labour you were given without remorse, without compunction, it’s going to make my job difficult. I need to know whether or not you made any attempt whatsoever to alleviate the conditions in which the slaves directly worked for you.’

  ‘Will it make any difference?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Will the judge understand? Can he put himself in the position of a man such as me, a family man with a wife and daughter, a mechanic working happily for a large corporation who was suddenly enlisted into a huge military machine and made to twiddle knobs and participate in things which happen in the middle of a war? An ordinary man wouldn’t consider killing another human being, but put him in a soldier’s uniform, tell him that he’s got to kill an enemy who will kill him if given the chance, and see what the reaction is. The ordinary man turns into a brute, a killer … a soldier.’

  Deutch looked at the patrician American and felt inclined to continue without interruption now that he was explaining what had happened and the circumstances in which it had occurred.

  ‘And the other thing you have to realise is that we were ordered … ordered, you understand … to look upon the inmates not as human beings, but as vermin, microbes, bacteria. I know that this sounds impossibly evil to a man such as you, but since the beginning of the 1930s, all we heard was Adolf Hitler screaming about the Jews and the Slavs being subhumans. He’d passed laws which took away their humanity; we were encouraged to burn their shops, make them pick up horse droppings with their bare hands; we were forbidden to befriend them, marry them, have intercourse with them. For Germans, the Jews lost their essence as people with souls, with hopes and aspirations and rights, and became the effluence which had to be expunged from society to make us safe …’ And then softly, so softly that the translator didn’t know whether or not to translate the words, Deutch said, ‘… just like your Negroes in the American South.’

  Ignoring the last remark, Broderick pinched the wings of his nose. The mechanic had found the very epicentre of the argument he intended to put before the judge; that when judging the arch-criminals such as Göring and Hess and the others, the judicial decision had been a simple one. Those men were guilty of barbarity and the invention of the machinery to commit the greatest evil ever to exist on the face of the earth. So regardless of the circumstances in which their crimes had been committed, the great criminals of Nazism ought to have the full weight of punishment brought down upon their heads. No amount of reflection, no consideration of the environment in which the crimes were committed, could mitigate for the wickedness. It was the wickedness which was punished, not the reasons for it!

  But in the case of the mechanic, he’d been swept up into a sea of evil, and from what Theodore could ascertain, he’d reacted in the way that most people would react in that environment. When all around are sustained by the food of hatred, it’s difficult not to sup from the same vessel. And so the mechanic, by his own account just an ordinary man, had done what was expected of him … He’d made the machinery of evil run smoothly; he’d used those workers who had been given to him, without enquiring whether they were free men or slaves; he’d hit them when his masters demanded they be hit, worked them for the hours which his masters determined that slaves should work.

  All that Theodore hoped was that the judge could put himself into the position of judging the accused man within the environment he was forced to work, rather than viewing the accused as a free agent with the right to determine the working conditions of those in his employ.

  Breathing deeply, he said to Wilhelm, ‘I know that brutal things are done in war. What we have to convince the judge of is that there was a spark of humanity in you while the slaves worked for you. That you had no part in the organisation of the slave labour. That you were merely a worker. Now, without putting words into your mouth, what happened in Sachsenhausen?’

  Deutch smiled. ‘If I tell you I was a humanitarian who risked his own life to save those around me, who will believe a word of it? Who will come forward to speak on my behalf? If I did any good deeds, Professor, I’m afraid that they’re destined to be buried along with the mounds of corpses which are rotting in the concentration camps.’

  Allied Occupied Germany, 1946

  From the memoirs of Joachim Gutman:

  I think that the first three months in Sachsenhausen were the most murderous times for me in the entire war. For it was my first introduction to true barbarity. As a Jew growing up in Nazi Germany, I’d known brutality and evil and cruelty; I’d known prejudice and hardship and deprivation. But not barbarity. The Germans were always so proper when they were stabbing you in the back.

  How does that accord with what happened in the streets, with the SA and then the SS and the leather-coated Gestapo pulling people out of buildings and into cars which sped off and you never saw the people again? Or with the Brownshirts and the Blackshirts attacking Jews in shops or on footpaths and beating them? Or making Jews clean up horse droppings with their bare hands and put them into their pockets?

  At the time, I thought it was the ultimate in evil. To see my people denigrated and abused, with ordinary Germans, neighbours, looking on and approving … even nodding in agreement … even laughing. Even joining the Brownshirts and participating!

  But then the rumours about the camps ‘in the east’ began to circulate through Berlin. Killing camps. Mass extermination camps. Camps where human beings—Jews, Slavs, homosexuals, Communists—were rounded up and herded as though they were cattle being readied for the slaughter. Of course we didn’t believe them. Who would? How, we asked sceptically, could a people who had produced Schiller and Bach and Mozart (yes, we included Mozart after the Anschluss) possibly have conceived of factory killings of human beings as though they were pigs or hens? The Nazis were talking about the mass emigration of the Jews from Europe. They were Zionists. They wanted us to
go to Palestine, or Uganda or Madagascar or Zanzibar. They just wanted to see us go and leave Europe Jew-free, not to kill us.

  So my first three months in Sachsenhausen were more than just a time when I tried to survive. They were also a time for me to learn. To learn of the depths to which a people can fall when unchecked, to learn what it means to be deprived of dignity, to learn of the two natures of a single race. And learn I did. Had I not learned, I would have died. But I was young and strong and I quickly adapted to my new conditions. And because of my strength and resolve, I was quickly put into the gangs of slave labourers who were roused at five in the morning by the barracks captain, someone appointed by one of the kapos. The kapos? These were evil specimens of humankind, as bad as the Nazis. They were usually German criminals or Poles, or worse, Jews who had been sent to the camps, but who immediately collaborated with the Nazis to get special privileges. They made sure that we left the barracks on time. We quickly learned that it was in our interests to rouse ourselves from that shallow state which mimicked sleep and run quickly to the barracks door.

  Sleep? How can you sleep when there’s no air in a room, or where the stench of two hundred men makes you want to vomit, or where you sleep three to a wooden bunk filled with straw, or where rats take chunks of flesh from your arms or legs, or where the lice get into your nose and your ears and make your body crawl? Sleep? Well, the moment we heard the doors opening, we painfully struggled down to the freezing cold ground and made for the door. If we delayed, or we were late getting out of the barracks, we were beaten so severely that some of us died.

  Outside in the dim light of dawn—in winter in the freezing cold and blackness which comes before daytime—we were forced to stand in long lines outside our barracks. The kapos stood rigidly to attention, as though they were soldiers on parade. When the Camp Adjutant came to our row, the kapo walked up and down and counted the numbers. If they didn’t tally, the kapo had to explain the difference.