The Mechanic

by Alan Gold

  ‘There were sudden new taxes on Jews who wanted to emigrate to Palestine. Having almost no money left, and unable to sell our property for anything like the price it was worth because our Aryan German neighbours knew they could take advantage of our situation, the only place we could move to as a family was Berlin, where we’d heard things were just a little bit better for Jews. And indeed they were. Göbbels was openly ridiculed in the streets, the SA were booed. There were local laws and ordinances forbidding the wearing of the SA uniform. Marches were banned. Berliners hated Hitler, which is why he made it his headquarters … to rub their noses in it.

  ‘When we moved to Berlin, my father and mother began to see things from a new and more pleasant perspective. It seemed as though the rise of Hitler and the Nazis was a local phenomenon, that he was some southern bully boy and he and his kind were confined to Bavaria and the areas of the south of Germany, centered around Munich. Oh, we read about the electoral successes of the Nazi Party, but Berlin never voted for him … and that was good enough for us. So we made the decision not to emigrate, but to allow the German peasant people in the South to have their fill of Hitler and his crazy speeches and his insane rallies, and we knew that soon it would all settle down. We Jews had seen his type a dozen times before in the thousand years we’d been in Europe. Men like Hitler, all puffed up with hot air. They caused problems for us, then after a couple of years, their mania would die out and we Jews would just wait for the next anti-Semite to stand up and tell the people that we’re the cause of all the problems of the world.’

  The young man was starting to become distressed, so Sherman said, ‘Why don’t we take up your story when you’re interned in Auschwitz? On what date were you sent there?’

  ‘I don’t know the exact date. You see, the Jews of Berlin weren’t all rounded up until fairly late in the war. We were part of the final round-up which took place at the beginning of 1943. I’m sorry I can’t be more accurate, but the days all seemed to blend into one another. We seemed to spend our days and nights desperately looking for somewhere to live. Because of the British bombers, many houses were destroyed, so all the Jews were moved out of their apartments so that they could be given over as accommodation for Aryan Germans, and there were always Jews on the streets with suitcases looking to rent anything, just for a roof over their heads.

  ‘But then the Gestapo suddenly picked us up off the street and we were taken to concentration camps. I was taken to Auschwitz. I was separated from my parents. I’ve not seen them since. My sisters and I were taken to Leverzowstrasse Synagogue, and we were forced to sit in the freezing cold of the bombed-out building for three days before they put us on a train. I was separated from them in the train … in the cattle wagons … and I haven’t seen them since. I think they were sent to another concentration camp, but I don’t know.’

  Gently the prosecutor asked, ‘When did you first see the accused, Wilhelm Deutch?’

  Neimann looked at Deutch for only the second time since he’d been in the witness box. His mouth seemed to grow thin with contempt. ‘Because I was healthy, I was allocated to him because of the drainage work which needed to be done. There were three of us in the gang. We worked with inferior tools, and were worked without break from early morning till midday when he was forced to allow us to leave our work and go for some soup.’

  ‘Forced? Could you tell the court what you mean by that.’

  ‘I mean that he would have worked us all day and all night had he not been forced to allow us some small amount of time to eat. That man would have happily allowed us to drop dead from exhaustion. I worked in the factories and in the compound, but the work I did for that man was the worst of all, because he was relentless, he never let us rest even for a second.’

  Theodore Broderick glanced over to his client, who sat there impassively, taking the occasional note, shaking his head while listening intently to the evidence. Broderick wondered what was going through his mind.

  Counsel for the prosecution continued, ‘What work did you do?’

  ‘I dug. I used a pickaxe and a shovel. And when the wooden handle broke because we were digging into rock, he made me scoop up the rocks and stones with my bare hands.’

  ‘What else?’ asked William Sherman.

  ‘One day, a friend of mine, someone whom I’d known in Berlin before the war, was digging near to a sewage pipe which led into the open ditches outside the wire of the compound. Deutch told him to be careful where he dug. My friend was careful, but he was exhausted. So tired, I … he … he was so exhausted he could hardly stand, let alone swing a pickaxe. But with every ounce of strength left in his body, he lifted the axe and brought it down; but it bounced sideways off a piece of rock, and the point entered the sewage pipe. It was nothing very bad. It could easily have been repaired by another length of pipe.

  ‘But Deutch looked down into the hole and saw the excrement seeping out of the pipe, and went crazy. Insane. He screamed and shouted and pointed. He picked up a rock that was at his feet and threw it into the ditch we were working in. It hit my friend on his head, and he fell down into the hole which was slowly filling up with raw sewage. I was beside myself with terror. At least the guards were controlled in their fury. Deutch was … I don’t even know the word. He was insane. He was screaming, ‘Fucking Jew. I’ll kill you for that, fucking Jew.’ And then he ran away. Disappeared. I tended to my friend’s wound as best I could, and we started to climb out of the ditch. I got out first in order to help my friend, but then I saw what had happened. Deutch had run over to one of the guards and was pulling the man towards the trench. He was shouting hysterically. When the guard got here, I was already out of the ditch, but Deutch pointed to my friend who was staring up with a look of such fear on his face. I knew what was going to happen. The guard took out his machine-gun and shot my friend. He emptied a machine-gun into him. His body … sort of … well, it came apart. There were bits of his body not attached, if you see what I mean …’

  The judge looked at the witness in astonishment, as did the prosecuting counsel and Theodore Broderick. It wasn’t so much the language which the witness was using, as the utter, dead, emotionless way he was speaking. It was as though he was describing a shopping expedition. His total lack of emotions spoke more eloquently of the way in which the Nazis had destroyed the humanity of life than almost anything which Broderick had yet heard in his time in Germany.

  Without noticing the astonishment of the court, as though he were refreshing his memory of some nondescript event, the witness continued, ‘Deutch made me get back in the ditch and pull out the pieces of a man who I used to know.’

  The court was in total silence. Broderick stole a glance at Deutch, who was still scribbling notes, like a forensic examiner. Softly, Sherman asked the witness, ‘Do you have anything else you would like to add?’

  Neimann thought for a moment and muttered a barely audible, ‘Yes, an hour later, I was repairing the pipe, and Deutch was talking to me in a completely calm voice, chatting amiably about the unusually mild weather we were having for that time of the year. It was as if nothing had happened.’

  The irony wasn’t lost on the court. William Sherman turned to Theodore Broderick, and said, ‘Your witness.’

  Theodore Broderick sat there for a long moment, agonising about his next move. Then he pushed his numbed body to its feet and said in a low and husky voice, ‘I have no questions for this gentleman.’

  His decision not to cross-examine the young man was more a question of respecting his suffering than of defending his client. But he judged he would do more harm to Deutch by trying to deny what the witness claimed to have seen with his own eyes. In the absence of contradictory evidence, it would be Deutch’s word against that of the victim, and right now, that was a no-contest. At the start of the day, Broderick had asked Deutch what he knew of this witness, but his client said he couldn’t remember him. They’d discussed the evidence which Neimann was going to give, and Deutch said he knew of no s
uch incidents. Yet Deutch was scribbling away in the dock, writing some sort of rebuttal. But rebutting what? Evidence so damning against his character that, in the absence of contradiction of the facts, no mitigation was possible.

  So Broderick determined that he would wait for the gale to blow over, in the hope that he could mute its effect by calming words when it came his turn to present a case.

  It was the eighth witness, though, a young woman, who caused Theodore Broderick the greatest concern of this trial, and who probably did Wilhelm Deutch the most damage. So many witnesses during so many Nuremberg trials recounted tales of utter horror that their effects were at times numbing. The catalogue of mass evil was so damning that individual cases of base behaviour often failed to move the judges. But Hannelle Cohen told a story of a different order.

  Broderick had read the transcript of her evidence, but the concrete words on paper denied the rawness of the emotion to which he was witness when Hannelle Cohen told her story in the courtroom. For a half hour, Hannelle, sobbing, grasping a handkerchief and sitting with her head bowed in shame, was led through her evidence by William Sherman, the prosecutor. She told of how she was selected for the brothel at Auschwitz by the guards. It was because of her breasts. They were still firm and full. Stripped naked, she had been forced to run past the guards and the camp doctors for an initial appraisal, prior to being shorn of her hair. She told the usual story of the various lines at the induction point into the camp, the left-hand columns of the sick or the elderly or the very young, and to the right-hand columns of stronger, younger people. Those who went to the left were never seen again; those to the right usually lasted between three and six months.

  But Hannelle had always been an attractive young woman. In her home town, Bonn, she’d once been selected by a local newspaper as a ‘face of Modern Germany youth,’ one of a dozen young teenage girls who typified nationalism and beauty. Later in her life, as a captivating twenty-two-year-old just before the war started, she’d had a portfolio taken by a local photographer who’d tried to seduce her, saying she was one of the most exciting models he’d ever photographed.

  And four years later, she was again selected, this time as a whore, the plaything of the guards in a concentration camp called Auschwitz. She told the court that as she ran naked past the jeering, cat-calling guards, she tried to think of the wonderful experiences of her life till then; but when she came to the end of the line, and the naked women were selected for the various barracks, a short and unshaven Polish camp guard stinking of the smell of the unwashed, grasped her firmly by the arm, and pulled her in his direction. ‘You’re lucky,’ he had told her. ‘You’ve been selected to be a hure by the Lagerfürher. Now all you have to do is to use your body, and you’ll live like a fucking queen. Your days will be free, and you’ll only work nights. Like all Jew whores.’ She told the court that never would she forget the guttural laugh as he said it.

  In many ways, she said, her life came to an end at that moment. But there were a couple of things which made her existence somehow better than that of the other women who weren’t selected to be whores, but were sent for slave labour. For example, she told the judge, she didn’t have to wear the dreaded Holzschube, the wooden shoes which caused so much pain and damage to feet of the other inmates; nor did she have to become a ‘Klauenmädchen,’ a woman who stole food from another prisoner to survive—stealing food was the greatest crime that one inmate could commit against another and was never ever forgiven. No, one of the advantages of working in the brothels was that they were well supplied with food. The guards and the favoured kapos didn’t like skinny women. Like Christmas geese, they were fattened to make them more appetising.

  The prosecutor asked her what were the conditions the women such as her had to endure while working in the brothels. And she told him. She spared him no details. She told him of the indolent days when she and the fifty other women would sit around in the brothel house, talking about their nightmare. And they would wait in increasing horror as the clock inexorably marched on towards evening, when the guards would return from their work details, and they would want to unwind with slave sluts. Then, when they heard the guards and the inmates returning, the women would go back to their cubicles in their rabbit warren, and wait for the door to be thrown upon. They had no choice. And they would have to service eight or ten men a night. Every night. Even on the Jewish Sabbath, and the Christian day of rest. Even when one of them, still occasionally menstruating, would be bleeding down her leg; even when one of them fell pregnant and before her forced abortion and subsequent sterilisation.

  Sometimes, Hannelle said, she would be forced to entertain—yes, they used the metaphor, ‘entertain’—SS guards as well as Ukrainians and Poles and others who were not in the SS. Others, such as the mechanic who was on trial; or lesbian guards; or kapos; or blockführers, or on occasions, even selected prisoners who had done special favours for the SS, or who had given information for which this was their reward.

  How did Hannelle remember entertaining the mechanic in particular, out of all the hundreds of faceless, nameless men she’d been forced to have sex with? Perhaps, said William Sherman, she could look at the defendant and reassure herself that he was, indeed, the man who had caused her so much grief. The witness remained silent for some time, hardly having the strength to lift her eyes. She clutched a handkerchief in her hands, her knuckles white with anger. Slowly she lifted her head from staring into her lap, and looked across the gulf of the courtroom, across the void which separated them.

  She gave an imperceptible nod. The prosecutor apologised for causing her additional grief and asked her, for the sake of the court record, to answer the question with a yes or a no.

  She nodded again, as though incapable of saying the word. But then, looking at the prosecutor and the defense counsel, and the judge and the dozen or so other observers of her misery, she said softly, ‘Yes. I know that man. I knew him many times. Like a farm animal, I serviced him.’

  The words cut through the court. ‘I remember when he first came to visit me. He selected me. He told me that he’d been to look at all the other girls in the brothel, all the other hures, but he decided that he wanted me. As though he was bestowing a favour on me.’

  ‘Are you absolutely certain that it was the defendant Wilhelm Deutch who used your … services?’ the prosecutor asked diffidently.

  Gaining strength, she said, ‘Oh yes. I know him. I will never forget him. You see, the others were brutes. Animals. They just used to get me to lie down, then take off their trousers and undergarments, and they’d force me to have sex with them. All kinds of sex.’ She bit her lip and struggled to continue. ‘Sex with all parts of me. Some of them liked to smack and hurt me. Some liked to see the look of terror in my face. But him,’ she said, pointing to Deutch, ‘he was different. He was truly terrifying. He was so horrible. In my nightmares, it’s him I remember above all others.’

  ‘Would you tell the court why?’

  ‘The others just used me. I was an object to them. And as the months went by, I came to terms with the fact that I could live with being just an object, at least until the war was over, or until I died of a disease or the men grew tired of me and complained, and then I’d be thrown into the gas ovens, spent and exhausted.

  ‘So to protect myself for as long as possible, I simply used the technique which the older women … those who had been there longer than me … used. I locked myself up in my mind and wouldn’t let them through. All they were using was my body. But him,’ she said, now looking at Deutch, her face twisted in hatred and repulsion, ‘he knew what I was doing. He even told me so. He knew that when he was in the cubicle, and I was servicing him, giving him oral sex or other kinds of sex, he knew that I wasn’t there; that only my body was there. And he didn’t like it. He wanted to possess me. Totally. He wanted all of my attention, for me to know that when he was inside me, he was in complete control. So he used mind techniques to get inside my brain. He tried to
unlock those parts of me which I didn’t want to unlock if I was to remain sane. He wanted to get to know me. He pretended to want to understand me. To empathise with me. To assure me that he had a wife and a daughter and that he didn’t normally do this sort of thing. But I knew that it was all a lie,’ she said.

  She was barely able to be heard in the court. Nobody, not even the judge, was willing to interrupt her story to ask her to speak up. She looked at the judge and realised that she’d lapsed into virtual silence. She took a sip from a glass of water and apologised to the court. The judge, Jonathan Parker, smiled at her and encouraged her to continue, if she was able. She said she was able to carry on, coughed, and then turned and faced Wilhelm Deutch.

  Her face was a mask of confusion. At first, she frowned, then she screwed up her eyes in hatred … but then, slowly, a smile of superiority etched itself into her thin lips, because she realised that her nemesis, her hated German client from the master race, was now impotent, was now the one trapped in the cubicle, and she could expose his most private and shameful actions to the whole world, just as he had once been in control of her.

  Hannelle continued. ‘He understood exactly what I had to do to stay sane, and he was determined to add to my suffering by denying me the privacy of my mind. He was the most cruel and terrible of all the men I serviced.’

  ‘And why,’ asked the prosecutor, ‘did you find this particularly difficult? Why did you find the defendant’s behaviour worse than that of the men who beat and terrified you?’

  Now, in her mind, she was back in the cubicles, Hannelle was thinking thoughts which had been buried for the year since she’d been liberated from Auschwitz by the Russians. Now, revisiting what she had become, she began to lose control. Sipping a glass of water, Hannelle fought back tears.

  Softly she struggled to answer the question. ‘Because the SS guards and the Ukrainians and those other men who used you … those men you could deal with. Those animals, you could shut out of your mind. With them, you only felt physical pain when they thrust their … their …’ she couldn’t bring herself to say the word ‘… you felt pain and fear. But you knew it would be over as soon as they’d finished their sex. As soon as they’d emptied themselves into you, you knew that the pain would stop, at least until the next man burst through your door. You somehow managed to close your mind to the fact that these were men. You thought of them as mindless machines. You became a machine yourself. It was the only way you could survive.