The Trial of Fallen Angels

by James Kimmel, Jr.

  Yet the scare also had the effect of soothing Tad’s wounded ego, for Barratte’s lack of emotion in the marriage could now be explained by reasons other than his own inadequacies. He had married a fraud, and perhaps much worse, so it was he who pressed for a divorce even as he purchased his fourth new automobile in as many years with tainted Rabun money. Of course, Barratte would have divorced Tad eventually, just as Amina had divorced George Meinert. When Tad hinted that he might seek custody of Ott, however, she threatened to destroy him. He knew she could and agreed to give her custody. One week after Ott’s twelfth birthday, Barratte packed their things and moved from their home beside Tad’s insurance office in New Jersey to Amina’s small mansion in Buffalo to face the allegations of the lawsuit and restore her family’s name.

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  THE LAWSUIT AGAINST Amina and Barratte Rabun was not initiated lightly by my mother-in-law. Out of profound gratitude for the risks that Amina had taken to protect her family during the war, Katerine Schrieberg-Wolfson had decided not to follow through on the threat made by her former lawyer, Robert Goldman, to sue Amina and Barratte at the time of Ott’s birth, in 1974. But twelve years later, I, as a freshly minted lawyer married to Katerine’s only son, Bo—who was a rightful heir to the Schrieberg fortune—convinced her to reconsider.

  I argued that the Rabuns not only had stolen Katerine and her brothers’ inheritance—which perhaps could be overlooked, because Amina had saved them from certain death—but also had stolen the inheritance of their children and grandchildren. Justice could not so easily overlook this wrong. These future generations were entitled to a share of the estate created by their ancestors—just as future generations of Rabuns were entitled to a share of the estate created by their ancestors.

  I also pointed out to Katerine that we would not be harming Amina financially by seeking to recover the value of these assets. Amina was wealthy in her own right as an heiress to the Rabun fortune and as a successful newspaper publisher. Reparations for the Schrieberg assets would have little, if any, effect upon her lifestyle, which had been lavish in comparison with the way Katerine had been forced to live without a similar inheritance. And I assured her repeatedly that we would be suing Amina and Barratte Rabun in name only. It was Otto Rabun, Amina’s uncle, who as a member of the Nazi SS had taken the Schrieberg’s assets. We would carefully draft our complaint to identify him as the wrongdoer, not his niece or daughter. After further prodding and encouragement by Bo—to whom the prospect of receiving a sizable inheritance had increasing appeal—Katerine finally relented.

  Bill Gwynne and I promptly initiated the lawsuit, naming both Amina and Barratte as defendants. Bill was a master, and I watched in awe, helping him behind the scenes. From a torrent of Hague Convention subpoenas, we obtained from German archives and private files copies of contracts signed by Amina’s father for the construction of the crematoria at Auschwitz and Majdanek. Equally damning, we obtained a copy of a patent issued in 1941 to Amina’s father for an improved crematorium design, first installed at Auschwitz, that utilized better airflow management, ash-removal conveyors, and new refractory materials to elevate temperatures and increase capacity. In the accompanying technical drawings, Amina recognized the shape of the brick sandbox built by her father for her and Helmut. This vulgar resemblance, and the photographs of thousands of cadavers in the camps, haunted Amina’s dreams the rest of her life.

  Although these documents bore no direct legal relevance to our claim for recoupment of the value of the Schriebergs’ theaters and home, they made sensational copy for the press, immediately turning the case in our favor. We had carefully focused our allegations upon Otto Rabun as promised, but Amina and Barratte Rabun, as the living children of Nazis, became the target of public derision and outrage. Soon the publisher of the award-winning Cheektowaga Register was being tried in the media as a war criminal—and Jewish groups were calling for a boycott of her bloodstained newspaper and the bloodstained books of Bette Press.

  Katerine was horrified, and furious with Bill and me for allowing this to happen. But there was no way to put the genie back in the bottle, and Bill was unapologetic. Things happen in the heat of battle, he explained, and there is sometimes collateral damage. Amina and Barratte could have at any time spared themselves public embarrassment by simply doing the right thing and offering to settle the case years ago when Mr. Goldman wrote his letter inviting a negotiated resolution. We had done everything we could to avoid embarrassing them.

  The public attacks generated by the lawsuit stung Amina and Barratte deeply, but they also had the effect of drawing the cousins together after years of separation. The two women had been through far worse together during the war, and in facing this new common threat they found again the mutual love and trust for each other that had sustained them during those terrible days, weeks, and months after Kamenz. Plus, now there was Barratte’s twelve-year-old son, Ott, to consider. Amina’s refusal to bear children meant that he was the only hope for a future generation of Rabuns. As a sign of reconciliation, Barratte asked Amina to be Ott’s godmother. She joyfully accepted, becoming Ott’s Nonna Amina.

  With the survival of the family at stake, the cousins held each other close and faced the storm. In interviews and editorials, they explained how Amina had saved the Schriebergs at great personal risk; how the purchase of the theaters had been for fair value at the time, giving the Schriebergs the money they desperately needed to survive; and how just a few hundred yards from where the Schriebergs lived under her protection, the Soviets raped Amina, Barratte, and Bette and murdered their family. But coming from the mouths of the accused, these stories did little to change public opinion. Amina and Barratte Rabun were tried and convicted not for wrongfully withholding the Schriebergs’ money, about which no one in the public seemed concerned, but, symbolically, for perpetrating the Holocaust itself.

  The final devastating blow to Amina and Barratte Rabun, however, did not come directly from the lawsuit filed by Bill Gwynne and me. It came instead from Amina’s once loyal secretary, Alice Guiniere. Seeing her demanding employer now as a monster who needed to be stopped, Alice recounted to the local U.S. attorney a mysterious visit to her employer’s office one day by a Mr. Gerry Hanson. Alice also produced the discarded U.S. passport bearing Mr. Hanson’s daughter’s new identity with the incorrect birth date, and galley proofs of four passports bearing his, his wife’s, and his other children’s new identities, collected from a waste bin in the print shop of Bette Press. She explained that she had retained these documents because something didn’t seem right at the time.

  An investigation was quickly launched and a grand jury handed down indictments. Standing before a press conference, the U.S. attorney revealed Gerry Hanson’s true identity as Gerhard Haber, an accused war criminal and international fugitive, and announced that Amina Rabun and Albrecht Bosch were being charged with obstruction of justice, harboring fugitives, and forging official documents, for which they each could be sentenced to thirty years imprisonment.

  With all energies turned to the criminal defense, Amina’s lawyer telephoned Bill Gwynne with an offer to settle the civil litigation. In light of everything that had befallen Amina, and everything that had happened in Kamenz, Katerine Schrieberg-Wolfson instructed us to accept the offer immediately and end the litigation—for forty percent of our original demand.

  In Amina’s final editorial as publisher of The Cheektowaga Register—a position from which she resigned on the day she was arrested—Amina pointed out that for assisting the Schriebergs in Germany in much the same manner that she had assisted the Habers in the United States, she could have been shot. “No good deed ever goes unpunished,” the editorial concluded, “but whether a deed is good or bad appears to turn not on the nature or quality of the deed itself but rather the amount of hatred that exists for those who are its intended beneficiary.”

  —

  THE ROLE OF Amina Rabun as godmother had suited Ott well. She became the fairy godmo
ther who could afford Ott the luxury to be who he wanted to be—and to love him without condition and guide him gently along the path of his dreams.

  Nonna Amina encouraged Ott but never insisted. When he showed no interest in playing baseball, football, or hockey (a heresy in a city just one bridge-length from the Canadian border), she did not pressure or prod. When Ott showed an aptitude for music, Nonna Amina purchased for him a piano and retained the services of a private instructor. When he showed a fascination with birds, she erected for him a small aviary behind the garage of her house. Although he was a bit old for it, she read to him nightly, in German and English, and took him to museums, aquariums, amusement parks, and movies. She also brought him to her office at the newspaper on Saturday mornings, as her own father had done in Dresden. There, her friend Albrecht Bosch—who had moved out of the mansion after taking a new male lover—showed Ott how to print books and cards, and how being “different” need not necessarily mean being lonely and unhappy.

  Amina and Ott thus became best friends, and she shielded him from his mother’s excesses. Consumed by the past and what might have been, Barratte insisted that Rabun men should make their living excavating dirt and pouring concrete, and have their fun hitting each other on fields and killing animals in the woods. Ott’s inability to live up to that standard was a constant source of disappointment to her.

  The criminal indictment of Nonna Amina exploded inside Ott’s life like a bomb. In an instant, he lost his dearest companion and was forced to endure his family’s humiliation alone in a school where, as in all schools, mercy is in short supply. What little compassion that remained at home in Barratte was depleted quickly by the ordeal of defending her cousin and operating the newspaper in her stead. Ott’s only other potential source of support, his father, had remarried and was already expecting another child with his new wife. The time between visits to New Jersey grew longer and longer until there was nothing left but time.

  Ott turned in on himself then, to a mostly silent world narrowed to manageable proportions and insulated from causes, effects, and accusations. He emerged from this place only as necessary, to respond to his mother when her threats became real, to scribble answers to exam questions that demonstrated a grasp of concepts and numbers that went well beyond that of his classmates, to correspond weekly with Nonna Amina and visit her once each month at a prison for women near Rochester.

  But imprisonment turned Nonna Amina into a different woman from the doting godmother whom Ott had adored. Devastated by the betrayals of Katerine Schrieberg, Alice Guiniere, and nearly everybody else in her life; disgraced by her father’s Nazi past; despised by the public; scorned, jailed, and nearly bankrupted, Amina Rabun became bitter and morose, and began displaying the symptoms of clinical depression.

  A small ray of hope for Amina, Barratte, and Ott appeared when the U.S. attorney offered Amina a plea bargain that would set her free in three years instead of thirty—on the weekend of her sixty-seventh birthday, to be exact. In exchange, she would be required to disclose everything she knew about the organization used by former Nazis to escape capture. This would mean handing over her close friend and advisor Hanz Stössel to the Israeli Nazi hunters.

  The prospect of performing such an act of treachery appalled Amina. It was not that she believed Nazis were guiltless or deserving of special protection. Rather, Amina held the more radical belief that all people deserved compassion and somebody must start somewhere. For the sake of that naive idea, she had risked her life to help a Jewish family when they were being persecuted and, later, a Nazi family when their turn had come. Had she shown favoritism? But Amina Rabun had suffered a great deal in her life, far more than most. Spending the rest of her life in a prison was too much to ask, even to protect a dear friend to whom she owed everything. Ott was growing up quickly, and she wanted to enjoy time with him. She wanted to put her past behind her once and for all. She had paid enough of a price to protect others. It was time to protect herself. And so she accepted the plea bargain.

  On the basis of Amina’s grand jury testimony, Hanz Stössel was arrested while on vacation in London and extradited to Israel. He lost his home, his family, his law practice, and his fortune. He died of pneumonia in an Israeli jail cell less than a year later.

  —

  ALTHOUGH HANZ STÖSSEL preceded Amina Rabun in death, he bided his time in Shemaya. When Amina finally died, Hanz Stössel was chosen to present her soul at the Final Judgment.

  I had watched the trial of Amina Rabun with righteous indignation, incensed by the obvious conflict of interest and the fact that Hanz Stössel had presented only half of her case. But my reservations about the unfairness of the trials in Shemaya faded when I was assigned to represent the soul of Ott Bowles.

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  Among the many things I learned from rummaging around in my murderer’s memories was that it was the perceived injustice of Nonna Amina’s imprisonment that first caused him to embrace his family heritage. Strangely, surprisingly, I felt a momentary touch of empathy for him as I relived these moments of his life.

  Ott Bowles’s letters to Nonna Amina in the penitentiary quickly became interviews for the story of the redemption of the Rabuns of Kamenz that he was writing in his mind. He begged her to recount in the smallest detail the lives of their fallen family, beginning with Joseph Rabun, the patriarch and founder of the company that bore his name and that had been a source of such pride and, now, disgrace. Amina resisted Ott’s inquiries at first, finding the memories too painful to explore. But Ott was persistent, and gradually Amina opened up, discovering that writing about her past was an effective therapy for the deep depression into which she had fallen.

  Barratte, by contrast, was overjoyed by her son’s sudden insatiable curiosity about his heritage, deeming it the first step in fulfilling his destiny to become the savior of the Rabuns. So enthusiastic was she, in fact, and so determined to encourage and assist him in any way, that for Ott’s sixteenth birthday she arranged a ten-day trip to Germany, coinciding with the reunification of the country after the collapse of communist rule and thus allowing them the luxury of freely visiting Kamenz, Dresden, and Berlin.

  They began their tour by paying their respects at the poorly maintained grave sites of the Rabuns in the churchyard outside Kamenz. Here they found Ott’s grandmother, great-grandfather, aunt, and uncles who had been murdered by the Soviet soldiers, and here they stood in awe before the oversized monument to little Helmut Rabun, made from the mangled girders of his school destroyed by the Allies’ bomb.

  As heartrending as this visit was for Ott and his mother, it paled in comparison to the sheer agony, and terror, that overwhelmed Barratte when they reached the ruins of the once grand estate where the Rabuns had lived���and where such unspeakable atrocities had occurred. The anguish of his mother deeply affected Ott. He vowed at that moment to right the wrongs of the past and restore the dignity and glory of the Rabuns, for the first time openly accepting his mother’s mission for him as his own.

  Ott returned home from this excursion a different young man, having discovered the world to which he believed he truly belonged. Unfortunately, most of this world existed only in the past. The silent world into which Ott withdrew himself began filling with voices: the pleas of impoverished German workers after the humiliation of World War I in the 1920s, the empty hypotheses of German intellectuals and the broken promises of German politicians in the 1930s, the strategic decisions of field marshals and the brutal commands of concentration camp guards in the 1940s. While Ott’s classmates raced home from school to watch television or go out to movies, Ott raced to the library to read more about the history of the German people. Like a man starved for food, he gobbled down Germanic texts, histories, biographies, and novels.

  When written words alone were not enough to locate him in the world for which he longed, he began filling his bedroom with its objects: silvery family photographs from Kamenz, a brick from the sandbox built for Amina and Helmut by thei
r father, brittle yellowed papers from the business records of Jos. A. Rabun & Sons. Soon the collection expanded to include memorabilia from the gigantic days of the Third Reich—a red flag with its mighty slashing crosses, maps of Europe depicting what was and what might have been, a highly coveted Hitler Youth armband and cap. When Ott’s room overflowed with these and similar items, he freed the birds and enclosed the aviary, converting it into a small museum and shrine. Instead of going to libraries, he started attending gun shows, where word of a young, well-heeled collector interested in authentic German military gear and weaponry spread rapidly. Soon brokers and dealers were offering their wares, and Ott was arming a small platoon of Aryan mannequins with German bayonets, pistols, rifles, and even some disabled German submachine guns and grenades—all war booty brought home by American troops and sold to the highest bidder.

  Barratte, driven by her own demons, had no possibility of distinguishing family pride from what was becoming, for her son, a dangerous romantic fanaticism. She happily endowed Ott’s hobby, and with it the revival of her early childhood, using the dwindling but still considerable resources of the Rabun family fortune. She also became an active participant with Ott, repairing torn military uniforms, taking Ott to World War II conventions and shows, purchasing rare items as gifts for him, and assuring gun dealers that his purchases were made with her complete consent and fully backed by her credit. Amina, also, to whom Ott presented the entire collection as a welcome-home gift upon her release from prison, could find nothing wrong with her godson’s passion. “How many thousands of boys are fascinated with such things?” she reasoned. “And besides, was it not time to embrace the past and stop running from it?”

  —

  OTT’S COLLECTION OF German war memorabilia, and the notoriety of Amina Rabun, gave him a certain celebrity status as his high school graduation approached. With Amina’s encouragement, he entertained occasional visitors to the mansion—normally just curious teens, but sometimes serious collectors and even museum curators looking to expand their collections. By means of these interactions, and with Nonna Amina’s return, Ott emerged slowly from the fantasy world into which he had withdrawn.