A Song of Shadows

by John Connolly

  The car started up. The woman put on her sunglasses. He could not tell if she was watching him or not. He raised his hand, although it was a hesitant gesture. He thought that this, too, was what an honest man would do.

  Extradition was a complicated business. First of all, the German government would have to be convinced of its obligation to accept him: as of now, there was no German warrant for his arrest. The Germans were also notoriously reluctant to allow former Nazis back into Germany. If they accepted a suspected war criminal from the United States, and then failed to follow through with their own investigation and an effort at prosecution, then they risked being branded a safe haven. But Baulman believed that a deeper psychological malaise, a national illness, underpinned the Germans’ reluctance to act. It wasn’t stated publicly, and it was possible that even those involved in such matters were either unaware of it or chose not to acknowledge it, but they were all simply waiting for the last of the old Nazis to die, so that their crimes could safely be consigned to history. As long as they lived, they remained a marker for old evils waiting to be called in, an embarrassment to the new Germany. Nobody wanted to be reminded of their continued existence.

  But set against this was the acknowledgement that time was running out for prosecutions. With every week, every month, that passed, the possibility of bringing old men and women to justice grew slimmer and slimmer, and so the pressure on the authorities to act when evidence of wrongdoing was discovered grew commensurately greater. The Americans were particularly diligent in their efforts, although such things were relative. In a little over three decades the Americans had managed to file legal proceedings against no more than 140 or 150 former Nazis, resulting in the expulsion of fewer than half of those involved through extradition, deportation, or voluntary departure. Over twenty more had died while their cases were still pending, and it was decided not to continue proceedings in the cases of that many again because of ill health.

  Yet even the Americans were compromised. After all, their counterintelligence services had recruited former Gestapo officers, SS veterans, and confirmed collaborators in an effort to bolster their own anticommunist efforts. They helped Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, flee to Argentina in return for his cooperation. They permitted Mykola Lebed, the Ukrainian sadist and Nazi collaborator believed responsible for the murders of an unknown number of Jews and Poles, to work for American intelligence in Europe and America until the 1980s. And that was without mentioning the former Nazis who were given safe haven on the grounds that they were fleeing communist persecution in Europe. No, the Americans were in no position to point a finger at anyone.

  Baulman wondered if the young woman from the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section knew any of this, or cared about it if she did. When he watched her on the news, he saw in her the fanaticism of the true zealot. Her actions might have been linked to personal ambition, but she was also convinced of the justice of her cause: these were evil people, and they deserved to face the full force of the law for their crimes. Baulman knew that this was part of the fascination that the young had with the Second World War. It appeared to have no nuances, no gray areas. There were only good guys and bad guys. The bad guys even wore black, and decorated their uniforms with skulls. How much easier could they have made it for others to brand them as evil?

  When he had first heard mention of the Human Rights and Special Prosecutions Section, Baulman had not been aware of what it was. He was familiar with the old Office of Special Investigations, which had spent so long hunting his kind, until natural mortality caused it to seek other targets – war criminals from the former Yugoslavia, from Rwanda – to salve its collective conscience. He knew that the hunters had not gone away, although he had somehow missed the fact that, in 2010, the OSI had been merged with the Domestic Security Section to form a new unit within the Justice Department’s Criminal Division. It just showed, he supposed, how lax he had become, how certain he was that he had escaped their notice and would see out his last days in peace.

  Baulman made himself a cup of hot chocolate and stood at his kitchen window. The birds were picking at the bird feeder. He could usually spend a contented half hour watching them, but not now, not today. He turned and leaned against the counter. An open connecting door led into the living room. He could see the couch on which the woman and the man had sat, their file of papers on the old chest that he used as a coffee table, copies of documents sliding across it as they probed his story. Should he have called a lawyer? He was not being charged with any crime. The woman had stressed this. They simply had questions for him. No, he did the right thing in not insisting upon counsel. An honest man would defend himself. An honest man would have nothing to hide.

  Where had this come from, he wondered? Why now?

  The answer came in the news report later that evening. Fuhrmann had left the United States for Germany, but Engel had not traveled with him, said the reporter, ‘due to poor health.’

  Baulman did not believe it.

  Engel had talked.

  23

  Toller was driving. Demers was on the telephone to her superiors in Washington.

  ‘What do you think?’ said the voice of a deputy director.

  ‘It’s him,’ said Demers. ‘But I think he was waiting for us to come. I think he’s always been waiting.’

  It is an unpopular point to make in some circles, but both the best and worst thing to happen to Nazi hunting was Simon Wiesenthal. Wiesenthal was, in many ways, a kind of fantasist: his various memoirs contradict one another, and it is likely that he lied about some of the details of his early life, including his professional qualifications as an architect, and his many brushes with near-death during the Holocaust. One of his most famous sketches – the murder of three Jewish prisoners by a firing squad at Mauthausen concentration camp, their bodies slumping against the stakes to which they had been tied – was plagiarized from a Life photograph of the execution of three Germans by American forces. He exaggerated his role in the capture of Adolf Eichmann, the architect of the Final Solution, to the extent that he told stories about wrestling Eichmann into a ditch during his capture in Buenos Aires in 1960. In actuality, Wiesenthal had been in Europe at the time, and was convinced that Eichmann was in hiding in Cairo. Although he did nothing to deny credit for helping to capture more than 3000 former Nazis, his actual achievements in that field can be counted on one hand – two, if one were being generous. His exaggerations and inconsistencies provided valuable ammunition to his enemies, including neo-Nazis and Holocaust deniers.

  And yet …

  Wiesenthal was a driven man, and the justice of his cause is beyond any criticism. He was also ahead of his time in recognizing that, if interest in Nazi war crimes was to be sustained, the news media required not just a story but a legend in all the senses of the word: a figure somehow real yet beyond history, a human being of extraordinary achievement, and, in the language of the intelligence field, a legend in the sense of an identity that is not entirely one’s own. By regularly conjuring up the specters of Josef Mengele and Martin Bormann, the bogeymen of Nazism, Wiesenthal was able to keep the crimes of the Third Reich in the limelight, and allow a little of it to shine upon himself in the process. He was the Man Who Would Not Forget, the Detective with Six Million Clients, the lone hunter with a mission to bring to justice a regime of unquestionable evil. Such an image, such a story, was irresistible to the media, and in helping to perpetuate it – even through the occasional use of tall tales – Wiesenthal performed a valuable service to the world.

  But the reality of hunting Nazis is far more mundane, and its history is largely shameful. In 1942 the United Nations War Crimes Commission was formed by the Allies to create a list of ‘ringleaders’ to be tried for mass murder when the war was over. It took the Commission two years to complete its work, by which point it had come up with a grand total of only 189 names. As if this wasn’t embarrassing enough, it had to be pointed out to the list’s compilers that they had f
orgotten to include Adolf Hitler.

  But the Allies showed little interest in devoting valuable resources to tracking down war criminals in the aftermath of World War II, and even less as the distance from the conflict grew greater. There was no one reason for their absence of drive, although laziness and inefficiency loom large, and later sheer political expediency, for in the fight against Communism, my enemy’s enemy became my friend. German operations on the Eastern Front provided the West with a valuable information bank upon which to draw, and it is common knowledge that German scientists were recruited for the rocket program in the United States.

  Eventually, though, the US was spurred – perhaps even shamed – into acting. The result of pressure from both inside and outside the U.S. was the establishment in 1979 of the Office of Special Investigations, tasked with investigating Nazi and Imperial Japanese crimes of persecution, and removing the perpetrators of such crimes to countries with criminal jurisdiction over their alleged offenses. But the individuals they were pursuing were already beginning to die by 1979, and the OSI – and later the HRSP – were instructed to work ‘as fast as you responsibly can’ to bring their quarry to justice before mortality intervened, a task that was compared to running a mile in four minutes one year, then in three-fifty-five the next, then three-fifty …

  It is a curious fact, but war crimes cases are generally a direct inversion of most standard criminal investigations. The latter begin with a crime and end with a suspect, but war crimes inquiries usually begin with a suspect and end with proof of an atrocity. Names of wanted individuals would be checked against the records of the immigration services by birth date and variations in spelling, since the Cyrillic alphabet offered many possibilities for error or deliberate obfuscation. When hits, or potential hits, came back, the OSI would determine whether the suspect in question was still alive and then, usually through a nonidentifying phone call, check on the health of the person. Once it was confirmed that he or she was still living, and reasonably compos mentis, an OSI investigation number would be assigned, and a team of attorneys and historians would commence pulling apart the details of his or her life. Record checks would be requested from Berlin or the ZS, the Central Office of the State Justice Adminstrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes in Ludwigsburg. These would include, where available – since the Nazis did their best to burn most of their paperwork in the final months of the war – the records of the actions of units of the German military; while individual soldiers and officers might not be named, it was possible to connect a soldier to the crimes of his unit through its presence at a particular location, and its actions while it was there.

  After the justification for a full OSI investigation was established, a file would be opened, and at that point the office would begin to engage personally with the suspect. Originally a letter would be sent, requesting attendance for an interview, which was non-compulsory. But after a couple of years, the question was raised of why the OSI was effectively warning suspects in advance, and from then on ‘knock and talk’ interviews became the standard approach. At first most of those interviewed were surprised to find Justice Department officials – sometimes accompanied by a discreetly armed investigator – on their doorsteps, for the unheralded creation of the OSI had passed by unnoticed. But very quickly the OSI’s existence became common knowledge, and the section was attacked on a regular basis in the newspapers of the Baltic American and Ukrainian communities for allegedly collaborating with the Soviets, to the extent that one Ukrainian American newspaper even published a list of investigators’ names.

  Over the thirty-five years of its existence, the OSI succeeded in winning more cases against suspected Nazi war criminals than all other governments in the West combined. It was, as Marie Demers recognized, still not enough. She had joined the OSI as an intern, and now, despite her relatively youthful looks, had been working with it for over fifteen years, transitioning to the so-called ‘legacy’ Nazi team after the formation of the HRSP. That team now numbered only four attorneys, two historians – Toller was one, despite any appearance to the contrary – and a handful of paralegals, but could draw on additional personnel where necessary.

  Those instances, though, were becoming increasingly rare. The old Nazis were slipping through their fingers one by one, like the last grains of sand held in a fist. The apprehension of Engel and Fuhrmann had been the result of two years of meticulous investigation. In the entire history of the OSI and the HRSP, only one prosecution had ever resulted from a tip-off: that of Jacob Tannenbaum, a kapo at the Görlitz concentration camp who had brutalized his fellow Jews, and was recognized by a former inmate. The reality of their work would have made poor drama.

  It was also hugely frustrating. She had been warned about that on her first day. ‘You’ll require a high frustration threshold,’ she was told, but she really had no idea of what was meant by it, not then. So many had evaded them, and at the lowest points it sometimes seemed that Europeans were engaged in a form of collective denial of responsibility, demonstrating an unwillingness to step up and do their duty that bordered on the shameful.

  And now they had Engel and Fuhrmann, both discovered living about a two hour drive from each other, Engel in Augusta and Fuhrmann farther south in Durham, New Hampshire. Fuhrmann, who had served as a guard at Sachsenhausen, gave his interrogators nothing. He was a serious name, rank, and serial number type. He also had few family ties in the States. Two wives had predeceased him, and one son. He was entirely estranged from his other children, all daughters. The evidence against him was solid, and the Germans were confident of a successful prosecution. Fuhrmann fought the extradition proceedings against him more as a matter of course than anything else, accepting the role that he was required to play without complaint. He lost his appeal with little more than a shrug.

  Engel was different. His wife was still alive, and he had a large family. He was active in various local organizations, and was an advocate for the rights of seniors. His prosecution sent fissures running through his community and even his own family, creating complex, angry divisions among those who believed him guilty, those who blindly declared him innocent, and a strange, gray collective of those who could not make the connection between the lively, jovial old man they knew, and the SS guard alleged to have marched naked men and women to a pit at Lubsko before shooting them in the back of the neck. Somehow they managed to accept the guilt of the younger man while regarding the older as a different being entirely.

  So Engel had battled them all the way. While denaturalization and deportation prosecutions were civil, not criminal, they required prosecutors to reach an evidentiary standard that had been ruled by the Supreme Court as ‘substantially identical’ to the criminal standard of beyond reasonable doubt. With each battle won against Engel, the opposing forces simply moved on to the next field, from district to circuit court, from the Board of Immigration Appeals to the federal appellate system, until finally only the Supreme Court remained, at which point Engel appeared to concede, possibly because he had exhausted his finances. But then came the call from his lawyer, and the offer to name names. Engel would sell out other war criminals in order to remain in the United States.

  The first name he had given them was that of Marcus Baulman. Baulman was not who he claimed to be, according to Engel. No, Baulman was really Reynard Kraus, who had learned his trade with a one-month assistantship to Mengele at Auschwitz before moving to Lubsko. Under Mengele’s careful tuition, Kraus had learned how to euthanize children: an intravenous injection of the barbiturate Evipal into the right arm to put the child to sleep, followed by 10cc of chloroform injected directly into the left ventricle of the heart. The children barely twitched before they died. Now the HRSP wanted Marcus Baulman. They wanted him very badly indeed.

  And Demers was determined to be the one to bring him in.

  24

  Rachel and Sam arrived shortly after Parker finished talking with Walsh. He had spent the intervening time walk
ing, trying to balance the pain it caused him with his desire to spur his body toward a full recovery. He despised how slow he had become almost as much as he despised the biweekly physical therapy sessions designed to help him, not so much for the discomfort they caused but because he hated being surrounded by those like himself. He did not want to see his own weakness reflected in others. He hated the headaches and the medication and the scars and the wounds, and he transferred some of this rage to the streets he now walked.

  He had always struggled with Bangor as a city. Attempts were being made to breathe life back into downtown, but the Bangor Mall had sucked it dry years before, and the damage would always be hard to undo. It was better now than it had ever been before, but it lacked the students and artists who had sustained Portland’s center when the Maine Mall had similarly annihilated the business district along Congress Street.

  Eventually he came to St John’s Church on York Street, built in the mid-nineteenth century to accommodate the hordes of Irish immigrants who had come to the city. He had not set foot in a church since the shooting. He could not say why. He had been raised Catholic, and still occasionally attended mass, but mostly he just dropped by a church if he felt the need to offer a prayer for Rachel and Sam, or simply to think in silence. Now he felt himself drawn to the old redbrick building with its great spire and its ornate Tyrolean stained glass windows, perhaps because it reminded him of St Dominic’s in Portland, one of the oldest and most beautiful churches in the state, until the diocese closed it in 1997. His grandfather had taken him to worship there at Christmas and Easter, when he felt the occasion justified something grander than St Maximillian’s in Scarborough, and so, in Parker’s mind, redbrick churches were associated with his grandfather, and his memories of the old man were entirely fond.