by Peter Quinn
“I should warn you that the couple we’re visiting are Germans and doctors,” Anderson said. “They’re in the habit of lecturing. But unlike some of their countrymen, they’re worth listening to.” He led the way up three flights and knocked on the apartment door nearest the stairwell. What sounded like a grunt came from inside. A heavy, jowly man in tweed pants, suspenders draped by his sides, and his white shirt hanging out in front, opened the door. He looked to be in his fifties, but his girth probably made him seem older than he was. He had a head full of closely cropped white bristles and a mustache like the Kaiser used to wear, with the ends brushed up. He and Anderson spoke in German as they went down a narrow hallway into a small living room in which the shades were drawn and the lamps on either side of the couch turned on.
“I should like to introduce you to Dr. Franz Ignatz,” Anderson said.
Franz Ignatz gripped Dunne’s hand. “My friend informs me you’re a detective.”
“A private eye.”
“Like Sherlock Holmes?”
“I don’t smoke a pipe.”
“But Mr. Anderson does. Perhaps he’s Holmes and you’re Dr. Watson!” Franz Ignatz smiled broadly. He spoke with only a slight German accent. In the doorway behind him, which led to the rear of the apartment, a thin woman appeared, a bathrobe pulled tightly around her slight waist. Her silver-veined brown hair was drawn back from her pale, delicate face in a loose braid, partly unraveled.
Anderson made a small bow. “Dr. Ignatz, I’m glad to see you up and about.”
Franz Ignatz took her hand. “Mr. Dunne, allow me to introduce my wife, Dr. Mathilde Ignatz. Unlike her husband, Mathilde is a famous physician, a fellow at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute whose research has often been cited for a possible Nobel Prize.”
“Please forgive my husband,” she said. “He is given to exaggeration. I’m no longer a fellow at the Institute, and I’ve neither won nor expect to win a Nobel Prize.”
“Ach, what do you medical researchers know about the practice of medicine? Where would a doctor be if he couldn’t exaggerate? How could he frighten his patients into taking care of themselves?”
“I’m sure our visitors aren’t here to hear us debate the difference between researchers and practitioners. Would you gentlemen care for some coffee? I was brewing a pot when you arrived.”
Anderson accepted enthusiastically for them both. They sat on the couch. Franz Ignatz pulled up a straight-backed chair so close to Dunne their knees almost touched. Anderson loaded his pipe and lit it. “I’ve spoken to Franz and Mathilde about your interest in Dr. Sparks,” he said.
“Did you know him?” Franz Ignatz asked.
“Met him twice, but only briefly.”
“Long enough to know that he remains among the living,” Anderson said.
“Did you ever talk to the police about him?” Dunne said.
“The police?” Dr. Ignatz clapped his hands on his knees. “The police are worse than useless!”
Mathilde Ignatz laid a tray on the small table behind the couch. She handed around cups of steaming coffee. “Franz, I think it would be easier for Mr. Dunne to understand all that’s involved if you told him how you know Sparks.”
“‘Understand all that’s involved’? That’s something no American can seem to do, at least when it comes to Germany!”
Coffee sloshed about in Franz Ignatz’s cup, spilled into the saucer and overflowed onto his pants.
“Franz, be careful!”
He put his cup and saucer on the floor. “Huns! That’s how Germans were thought of in America, no? The British and French, the world’s two greatest imperialist nations, were excused of any blame for the war. At Versailles, in 1919, it was all laid on Germany. When the end came and the army collapsed and the monarchy along with it, we had looked to America and President Wilson to support the new German republic. Instead, we had ‘Huns’ thrown in our faces. You Americans allowed the chances for lasting peace in Europe and democratic change in Germany to be poisoned by reparations and a humiliating treaty, and then you walked away as if the outcome was none of your concern!”
“Lower your voice,” his wife said. “You’ll disturb the neighbors.” Her green eyes were sunk in dark, sallow-edged orbits.
“To hell with the neighbors!” Franz Ignatz clapped his knees again. “They should hear this too. Once, perhaps, you Americans, Mr. Dunne, had an excuse for your ignorance. Now there’s no excuse! It’s been written down for you in Mein Kampf. Hitler makes no secret of his intents. War against the weak. The vilification of the Jews. Purify the race, whatever the cost. It’s no great mystery, Mr. Dunne, that if Hitler has his way, this marriage of medicine and murder will come about. The only question is when.”
He picked up a book lying atop a stack of newspapers and shook it in the air. “It’s in here, Die Rassenhygiene, by Josef von Funke. The American version, Racial Hygiene, was published with the help of the Eugenics Record Office in Cold Spring Harbor. I gave my copy to Mr. Anderson.”
“And I’ve already passed it on in hopes it will help awaken more people to what’s already occurring,” Anderson said.
Franz Ignatz paged through until he reached what he was looking for and handed the open book to Dunne. “There, look at those photographs. Page after page of sick, injured human beings turned into specimens of ‘racial degeneracy,’ a burden on the fit that must be removed. Just past the pictures is the chapter on involuntary sterilization. It was published in America in pamphlet form in 1926, as part of the campaign to introduce the practice into every state. I heard the president of Stanford University speak at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and boast that the state of California performed more involuntary sterilizations than any nation in the world.”
“You see, Mr. Dunne, our German eugenicists are by no means alone,” Mathilde Ignatz said as she took a pack of Mexican cigarettes from the pocket of her robe. The coarse yellow paper flared brightly as she lit it. She sucked in the smoke and sucked again, as though to drag it down into her stomach. “They belong to an international movement that insists there are millions upon millions whose very existence endangers the healthy and fit.”
“Lebensunwertes Lebens,” Franz Ignatz said. “Life unworthy of life. Even before the Nazis took over, it was much discussed. I was a vice minister in the Department of Health in the Weimar Republic when the Depression struck. As financial conditions worsened, the eugenicists gained new influence. They pointed to how America had restricted immigration on the basis of race and practiced compulsory sterilization. They said Germany could do no less and must do more.”
“Let’s not overwhelm Mr. Dunne,” Anderson said. “This is quite new to him.”
“Not all new. I knew a girl once.” He stopped himself from mentioning Maura, his sister. The old code. A reflex. No complaining. No crying. Offer it up.
Mathilde Ignatz rested her cigarette on the saucer beneath her cup. “At the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, some of my colleagues held discussions with the Society for Racial Hygiene. Gathering scientific support for a systematic program of enforced sterilization was part of their agenda. But only part.” She reached over, took the open book from Dunne’s lap, and flipped to the back pages. She marked the place with her thumb and handed the book to him. “See the title of the last chapter: ‘Tötung der Vollidioten.’ In English, ‘Killing the Mentally Retarded.’ This was another topic of discussion.”
“When Hitler took power, all debate ceased,” Franz Ignatz said. “Compulsory sterilization became national policy. I resigned my position before I could be fired. My wife was summarily dismissed.”
“I’m a Jew, Mr. Dunne,” Mathilde Ignatz said. “I was not only dismissed but restricted to treating only those ‘racially diseased’ like myself.” She took a final drag on her cigarette and dropped it in the dregs of her coffee cup. “Forgive us, Mr. Dunne, for our digressions. In all this time you’ve yet to hear about Sparks.”
“I’ll tell you what we know,” Franz Ignatz said. “
I first met him after the war, at medical school in Munich. Though he came from pure German stock, he was an American, a graduate of Yale. At a time when most in Germany were struggling to eat, he was wealthy and well fed. Resented by us students, he was equally a figure of fascination.
“He claimed he was descended from a Margrave who’d been an early patron of the Teutonic Knights. He introduced himself as Josef von Funke and though friendly to almost everyone, save the smattering of Poles and Jews, he became particularly intimate with the members of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Rassenghygiene.”
“The German Society for Racial Hygiene,” Anderson interjected. “Remember, Franz, Mr. Dunne has no German.”
“Of course. I’m sorry. In Europe, nearly every educated person speaks German. Here it is different. The students of whom I speak came to see themselves as the avant-garde of Germany’s world-leading scientific community, a cadre of medical pioneers possessed of knowledge that the rest of the racially fit, including most Germans, were too riddled with the residue of Judeo-Christian moral superstitions to carry into action. They styled themselves the ‘Brotherhood of Hermes Trismegistus,’ evoking the myth of the Greek god Hermes, ‘thrice greatest,’ who bestowed on his adepts the secret of human regeneration.”
“Hence the Hermes Sanatorium,” Anderson said. “A first step in testing how the theory of ‘racial healing’ could be translated into practice, quietly, protected from public scrutiny. The magical healing properties of the caduceus are replaced by the murderous power of a hypodermic.”
Mathilde Ignatz lit another cigarette. “Funke made a stir in 1921 when he published Die Rassenhygiene, with its insistence that the true physician must be executioner as well as healer. Isn’t that right, Franz?”
“Yes. Though much of it was a rehash of The Release and Destruction of Lives Not Worth Living, a far more massive work co-written by a lawyer and a physician who argued that the state should kill defectives, Funke wrote in a more mystical style. He mingled a pitiless program of enforced euthanasia and social Darwinism with a passionate appeal for raising up a race of Aryan übermenschen , or supermen. In the summer of ’23, a nurse in an asylum outside Munich claimed a doctor had dispatched several inmates by fatal injection. The doctor in question turned out to be Josef von Funke. There were charges and countercharges. But it was a confused time in Germany. Inflation was out of control. In November, Hitler attempted his putsch.
“It was reported that Funke was among those who marched with Hitler during the putsch, in 1923, and was at the Feldherrnhalle when the troops opened fire. He supposedly wasn’t far from Heinrich Himmler, locked arm-in-arm with a student and salesman who were both killed instantly. They dragged Funke down with them, saving his life but breaking his collarbone. This is the story he told the doctor who treated his fracture. Whether it was true, I have no idea, but he most certainly used the ensuing confusion to vanish. His disappearance prevented him from being enshrined in the Nazi martyrology of those killed or wounded that day.”
“A pity those soldiers hadn’t better aim,” Mathilde Ignatz, said as she rolled the cigarette between her thumb and forefinger as though it were a bullet, “The fact that Hitler was spared reinforced his belief that destiny is on his side.”
“For his part,” Franz Ignatz said, “Funke returned to America. Here the failed putsch was barely noticed. He built up a practice with an enviable list of patients. I almost skipped over his name when I read the news account of Miss Lynch’s murder. But then I saw his picture. It triggered the connection: funke in English is spark. I still wasn’t certain until I looked up Dr. Sparks in my medical directory and, sure enough, he’d been at the same school as I, and at the same time.”
“Franz and I decided that the facts about Sparks might not be known and could have bearing on the murder. We felt the police should know.”
“I made the call. I said I had information that might be relevant to the investigation of the murdered nurse. Two detectives came to see me.”
“Let me guess,” Dunne said. “One was big and unfriendly.”
“Not so much unfriendly as uninterested. I told him Sparks’s history. He only shrugged and said thousands of German Americans had chosen English versions of their names as a result of the last war. He said the Lynch case was about murder and rape, not politics. ‘Besides,’ he added, ‘we already have the man who committed the crime.’ He didn’t take a single note.”
Mathilde dropped the cigarette in the same cup as the previous one. She coiled a loose strand of hair around her finger. “Several days later the FBI came. They were very polite, unlike the detectives. They questioned me about my immigration papers.”
“It is thanks to Mr. Anderson that we got out of Germany,” Franz Ignatz said.
“I was writing an article on life under the Nazi regime, and the name of Dr. Mathilde Ignatz came up on every list of outstanding scientists who’d been forced into retirement,” Anderson said. “After making her acquaintance, I was able to offer assistance in leaving Germany.”
“Franz and I refused to leave at first. We were convinced Hitler would be tripped up by his vulgarity and ignorance. But he moved from triumph to triumph, and the people gladly followed, even some who’d been our friends. When it became clear my science was as despised as my religion and my people, we decided to leave. My politics, however, caused some difficulties, but Mr. Anderson used his connections to facilitate our departure. We went to Cuba and Mexico, and then to the United States.”
“Mr. Dunne, you should know that my wife was a Communist but made no mention of it when she entered the country.”
“I was a member of the Spartacist League, during the uprising of 1919,” she said. “We hoped at the time to bring about a true social revolution in Germany. I was arrested by the Freikorps.”
“And tortured,” her husband added.
“But not murdered, as several colleagues were. I stayed in the Party, a largely inactive member, until 1930, when the Nazis began to explode in popularity. The Communists made it clear they were as intent on bringing down the Republic as the Nazis. They thought that if Hitler assumed power, it would be a step forward. I protested that policy, yet I didn’t formally resign, and my husband is correct: I didn’t mention my Party membership when I entered the country. We were afraid of being sent back.”
“Somebody here in Yorkville informed on her,” Franz Ignatz said. “It could have been a Bund member or maybe an active Communist seeking to punish a former comrade who had the audacity to question the Party. The FBI said the omission was a very serious matter.”
“There was more trouble after that,” Mathilde Ignatz continued, playing with the lock of hair, curling it in the same nervous, distracted way as before.
“This time, I’m afraid, it was my fault. I acted on my passions, not my intellect.”
“It wasn’t a question of being at fault. Before we are doctors, we are human beings. It is wise never to forget that, Franz.” She put her hand over her husband’s.
“I posed as a pharmaceutical salesman and went to see Sparks. I saw him as a manifestation of all our misfortunes, and here he was enjoying comfort and success. It was stupid of me. Once I got in to see him, I started yelling and threatened to expose him. He tried to quiet me down, even wrote a check, which I ripped up and threw at him. I left just as his chauffeur arrived, a thuggish-looking Sturmabteilung type. He tried to grab me, but I pushed him aside and left.”
“A Sturmabteilung,” Anderson said, “is a Nazi Storm Trooper. They were the vanguard of Hitler’s takeover but have since given way to the SS.”
“Yes, Mr. Dunne, I’m sorry. Here in Yorkville we often mistakenly assume that everyone understands what is taking place in Germany.”
“I’m learning,” Dunne said. “I had my own run-in with Bill Huber, Sparks’s chauffeur.”
“Huber, that’s him! Unfortunately, my encounters with him didn’t end at Sparks’s office. Several nights later I was on the dais of an anti-Nazi m
eeting at the Moravian Church. A squad of Bundists broke in and a fight ensued. Huber was with them. The lights were extinguished. Several shots were fired. One grazed my neck.”
“My husband barely escaped with his life, Mr. Dunne.” Mathilde Ignatz leaned forward until her head almost touched her husband’s knee. She seemed in pain. “It’s as though we can’t get beyond their reach, even here in New York.”
Anderson made a small smacking sound as he sucked on his exhausted pipe. He relit it. “At that point, I advised the Ignatzes to withdraw from public view. Their lives, I believed, were in danger, and involvements in any violent incident could only aggravate their troubles with the immigration authorities.”
“You didn’t report it to the police?” Dunne asked.
“We didn’t want to bring more attention to ourselves.”
“Sparks tried to hire me to find you. He claimed he was being blackmailed.”
“A lie!” Franz Ignatz stood.
“It’s obvious that Mr. Dunne didn’t take the job,” Anderson said. “Once he located you, Huber would have undoubtedly killed you, then done the same to him. Or perhaps Sparks would have tried to make it seem as though Dunne was the murderer. I suppose there were those in the police who’d have welcomed that.”
“One for sure,” Dunne said.
Mathilde Ignatz pulled the hair so tightly around her finger that the tip turned red. “You don’t believe Sparks is dead, do you, Mr. Dunne?”
“Not till I see the body.”
“I’m glad to hear that. You are free to share with anyone what Franz and I have told you. But, please, no mention of our names. We want to be left out of this. Please.”
“My wife’s family is still in Germany. Two sisters and a brother.”
“We’re trying to get them out of Germany and mustn’t endanger their exit.”
“Mr. Dunne can be trusted to do the right thing.” Anderson knocked the bowl of his pipe on the table for emphasis. “I wouldn’t have brought him if I believed otherwise.”
“We understand that, of course. But time is so short now. It’s as though destiny itself is marching in step with Hitler, as though no one has the will to stop him.” Mathilde Ignatz grimaced and bit her lip. She lit another cigarette and inhaled. Her face relaxed. Whatever pain had seized her seemed to abate.