A Kind of Woman

by Helen Burko

  “Do you believe, Mrs. Mathilda Krause,” Claude emphasized the name Mathilda while stealing glances at Jacob and at the jury, “that little children who can hardly talk, babies, old people, and sick people can be enemies of the state? Couldn’t you understand that? Didn’t you see and ask why they imprisoned babies? What was their crime?”

  “I don’t say that little children were enemies, but if they had been educated by their parents, who were enemies of the Third Reich, they also could have been enemies in the future. It could be why they were killed, if it’s even true that they were shot on purpose. I don’t know of any instances in which SS men shot children.”

  “Didn’t you kill wolf cubs when you were hunting, when you knew they would grow up to be wolves and a danger to the flocks of sheep?”

  “No, animals are innocent!”

  “And children? Babies? Old people? Pregnant women?”

  “I don’t know. I love animals.”

  “What is an animal, in your opinion?” Claude asked as he looked at Jacob with a smile.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But you went to school once and learned zoology, didn’t you?”

  “I graduated from a school for linguistics.”

  “So, a school for spies. How do you describe a human?”

  “I don’t know; I haven’t thought about it. But every person is a human!”

  “So tell me, Miss Mathilda, is a Nazi, a member of the Gestapo, also human?”

  “Every man is a human.”

  “Please answer the question… Yes or no!”

  “Yes, of course!”

  “And is an animal also human?”

  Mathilda remained silent. Her eyes flashed.

  “If you refuse to answer, I conclude you agree that an animal is also a human.”

  “I didn’t say that. That’s absurd!”

  And then the prosecutor attacked her again, which brought gales of laughter from the spectators. “Perhaps you can explain to me, Mathilda Krause, why you disguised yourself as a Jewish woman?”

  “Because I thought it was the right thing to do at that moment.”

  “Wasn’t it because you thought it was the way to save your life?”

  “I don’t hate Jews! My husband is Jewish!”

  Loud laughter.

  “I know that. But did you marry the man who is defending you in this trial because you loved him or because…”

  “Objection! Objection!” Jacob rose quickly. “This has no connection to the trial!”

  “I regret that it has—it has a connection to the heinous actions of the accused.” The prosecutor gave Jacob a jeering look of contempt, which made the camp spectators very happy.

  “Jewish women lived with Aryan men to save their lives!”

  “Can you compare the tragedy of the Jewish women in those terrible days when they were in danger of being shot without a trial to the present when hundreds of Nazis go free for lack of evidence against them?”

  “There are things far worse, Mr. Claude Alrist and Mr. George Devoe!” said an agitated Jacob. “You are turning the Holocaust, one of the greatest tragedies in history, into a comedy! Your witty, evil questions that you use to influence the jury aren’t necessary for a jury already influenced. What’s the meaning of this game? Everyone knows what Nazism is, but…”

  “You, too, Mr. Barder, asked foolish questions!”

  “I asked them because I wanted them to appear in the protocol!”

  “And I, too, want my questions to appear there!”

  They continued to argue for a few moments more. The spectators heard and weighed the exchange of words between Claude and Jacob, who interrupted each other in the argument until the judge called them both to order and again warned the lawyers to follow the ethical laws of the court.

  The judge ruled in favor of the prosecution and allowed the questions. Mathilda sat listlessly in the chair. In answer to Claude’s questions, she replied, “I don’t know,” or “I don’t remember,” or “I’m not guilty!”

  The two lawyers almost came to blows when Claude asked, “Tell me, Mrs. Mathilda Krause, or Rachel Kimmelman, or Rachel Barder, how could a German woman like you, a member of a superior race as you call it, marry a Jewish man and have sexual relations with him? Isn’t that profaning your race?”

  “Objection! Objection!” Jacob swiftly intervened. “That is a provocative question asked only for one reason!” He pounded the table with his fist. “How does that have any bearing on this trial? You, Mr. Claude Alrist, are continuing to turn this into a farce to entertain the jury, to win their approval, to reap publicity from this trial—which is one of tragedy for millions! I won’t allow such a performance! I won’t allow it!”

  The judge called Jacob to order several times, and after he had calmed down, he called a recess.

  After the recess, the judge first gave a short speech to Jacob. He announced that the prosecutor couldn’t consider his feelings as the vulnerable husband of the accused. He asked the prosecutor to proceed.

  The prosecutor repeated his question.

  Mathilda answered, “I love my husband with all my heart, and I don’t think there is any difference between him and my lover, Karl Krackel.”

  Loud laughter.

  “You mean you see no difference between your Gestapo lover and your present Jewish husband?”

  “They are both men!”

  “Do you think your lover could have loved a Jewish girl before you?”

  “In Germany, there were many mixed marriages. I don’t know if he ever loved a Jewish girl or not.”

  “And maybe he was of mixed blood?”

  “No… Impossible. He was a pure Aryan.”

  “Maybe his great-great-great grandfather was of mixed blood?”

  “I don’t know about that. No, he was a pure Aryan!”

  Questions such as these were incessantly rained on Mathilda by the prosecutor. Mathilda, in spite of her self-confidence and because of Jacob’s defense, was made to look absurd by this inquiry. She looked pathetic sitting on the witness stand.

  The judge gave the witness over to Jacob, but the judge, the jury, the spectators, and the prosecution were astounded to hear Jacob say, “I have nothing more to add, no questions to ask the accused, and no witnesses to call, because, as I said before, the witnesses of the prosecution were also witnesses for the defense!”

  This announcement was puzzling even to Claude Alrist. On what basis was Jacob building his defense? He wracked his brain for the answer.

  This announcement of Jacob’s appeared the next day in all the newspapers, with each of them explaining it in a different way. Some of the lawyers tried to guess what Jacob had decided to base his defense on and decided he was going to plead that it was an inner urge or an unbalanced mind that caused the Nazis and the SS to kill and torture. Or that the people of the Third Reich who believed in Nazism suffered from a neurosis and all their actions were the imagination of an insane mind, and that Mathilda Krause, the Nazi spy, belonged to that group of diseased minds and was innocent.

  Professor Gottheim, Jacob’s uncle, who was present at the trial, published an article on his psychological observation.

  “To understand what caused the SS to kill innocent people—among whom were helpless children and the aged—we don’t have to look for the explanation in Freud. We have to simply reach the conclusion that the SS and the Gestapo were all people who were sick with the illness that doctors describe as schizophrenia, which is expressed by the person’s reason and emotion opposing each other and also causes paranoia. The person’s intelligence is usually then in the process of deterioration, and the connection between understanding and emotion is weak.

  “Schizophrenia expresses itself in various ways: an illusion of supremacy, or the belief that someone is your enemy and wishes to kill you. The person suffering from this disease can kill one or many people in the belief that these people want to kill him, so his actions are that of self-defense. Usually
, the people who have this sickness appear normal, but the border between reality and imagination is blurred, and this leads to paranoia.

  “The people ill with schizophrenia often hear inner voices ordering them to kill someone, and this causes the patient to lose all restraint and to carry out that order. At that moment, the patient believes he is justified in carrying out the order, because he is defending himself even against children. He sees himself as innocent, and after committing the crime, he is also capable of suicide. The sickness is inherited and affects those of seventeen to thirty. These are people whose ambitions have not been satisfied. Hundreds and maybe thousands in every country and every race suffer from this disease. They don’t appear or act dangerous to society, but any exterior upheaval can make the sickness develop into something dangerous.

  “This is what happened to the majority of the German youth who, day and night, had certain facts drummed into their heads. One, that Germany needed more room to grow. Two, that the German people are suffering hunger and deprivation because of the Jews, the English, the French, the Polish, and other nations that were choking and hounding them, which is one of the symptoms of schizophrenia.

  “The economic catastrophe in Germany on one side and the propaganda about the supremacy of the Aryans on the other side did the job.

  “In the minds of the youth in Germany, there developed, because of these two conditions, ambition and pride, and they saw innocent people as their enemies who wanted to harm them; therefore, they should be killed with the excuse of self-defense.

  “This is the reason so many Nazis and SS Germans killed innocent people and helpless children and aged. It is possible that now, after the war, after the German SS and the Nazis found their satisfaction, they might even feel a certain sort of regret, but that doesn’t wipe out their guilt for the awful crimes that cannot be forgiven.”

  Professor Gottheim’s article caused a furor in law circles whose members began to see Jacob’s decision to defend Mathilda Krause as because he believed she suffered from schizophrenia. The feeling that Jacob was basing his defense on this began to be widespread, even more so after this article was published. There were certain newspapers whose writers believed that, because of this article, he would win his case although the prosecution was raising a ruckus.

  “Nazism is insanity like all other forms of insanity,” was written in a number of newspapers, “but because this insanity is that of a multitude and the cause of numberless tragedies, the matter has to be examined carefully and related to in a different way.”

  One newspaper correctly described the trial as the most sensational one in the history of criminology because there had been cases of murders by madmen but not by such a large mass of madmen. So how should it be judged?

  “Hitler,” the article expounded, “suffered from schizophrenia, and he caused the slaughter of millions, and because of this sickness, also put an end to his own life. Goering, too, had been sick with this disease and therefore put an end to his life in his cell in Nuremberg. Many Nazis, Gestapo, and SS men who are now in the latter stage of this disease might show regret for their past actions. The prosecution did not prove Mathilda killed anyone with her own hands. If not for our laws, we could charge everyone on the same basis that she is being charged, that of aiding a murderer because they belonged to a certain party and spied for them.”

  These articles had a certain effect on public opinion, and many began to see the Nazis in general and Mathilda Krause in particular as pathetic creatures.

  There were people who were afraid that, because of these articles, Mathilda might escape the fate she deserved, and many groups organized a flood of protestations against pity for the Nazis, against compassion for those responsible for the massacre of innocent millions, and against excusing them on grounds of insanity.

  “If the Nazis acted the way they did because of an inner urge, why didn’t they shoot their own wives and children?”

  “Defending the Nazis because they were schizophrenic,” wrote one of the past inmates of a concentration camp in pamphlets that were passed out on the street, “smooths the way for neo-Nazism. If even one of the Nazis escapes the punishment he deserves for directly or indirectly aiding in the atrocities and the slaughter caused by the Gestapo and the SS, only a few years may pass before the lunatics, as they are called, and who appear normal, will again kill masses with more skill and talent and have someone find a psychological excuse for them.”

  In this atmosphere, Claude Alrist gave his closing statement accusing Mathilda, and Jacob prepared his closing statement, which was to be given directly after.

  The courtroom was packed, and the police were extra cautious. People came from out of town, from different organizations, from abroad, and even from defeated Germany, which was recovering in record time and had sent a representative to hear the closing statements, especially Jacob’s. Everyone was waiting impatiently for Jacob’s statement, curious to hear what he would have to say in defense of the accused, whether he really would make an insanity plea or maintain that it was the fault of an inner urge.

  Jacob had not said one word in this direction, nor had he invited psychiatric experts to testify on her behalf, and if Mathilda Krause was really suffering from schizophrenia, it was clear it was not Jacob’s intention to dwell on that.

  There were also those who contended that Jacob was the mental case because he was defending a criminal.

  The prosecution’s closing statement, given by Claude Alrist, took a long time. It was written with the help of George Devoe. He made a number of points. “Members of the jury, your honor. This trial is not the trial of only one person, of Mathilda Krause alone, but a trial against all of Nazism which, in the name of its ideology—if you can call such lunacy an ideology as the accused maintains—slaughtered millions of people who they first tortured beyond human imagination.

  “Before I bring you proof of this atrocious massacre that she committed directly or indirectly, I wish to state that Nazism, with Hitler at its head, was supported by the entire German nation. A large percentage of the German people voted these hangmen into office even though they knew what he had written in his book and what his intentions were.

  “My God! What kind of nation is this that watched indifferently his totalitarian journey through the world in order to achieve what he had written in Mein Kampf, which became a prayer book for the Germans? I remember with sorrow how the Germans all stretched out their hands to salute the ‘Fuehrer.’ We say the nation is not to blame, but its leaders, but who was that leader and how did he become their leader if the nation hadn’t wanted him? If the nation hadn’t supported his ideology and his slogans?

  “Don’t any Germans try to persuade me they didn’t know what went on in the camps? Maybe there were a few naive souls, but the nation knew! Didn’t they see with their own eyes whole neighborhoods of Jews arrested and all their property confiscated? Didn’t they see synagogues destroyed? And graveyards desecrated? Did any of the German people hide the miserable refugees like the Danish and even a few of the Poles?

  “And aren’t the wives and mothers responsible for what their sons and husbands did? Can they plead not guilty and say they didn’t know? Why do the Germans now claim the whole thing is a string of lies of the revengeful survivors? I heard Germans say, a day after the war ended, that if they had really killed so many Jews, how is it that so many are still left? Let all the Germans rise out of their houses stuffed with the loot of the conquered nations, and let them go to visit Majdanek, Auschwitz, Mauthausen, and other concentration camps! Let them line up all the widows, widowers, and orphans, all the million cripples, and meet with the pathetic survivors. Let them not try to deny the truth!

  “Of course it’s hard to believe, because who wants to spit in his own face!” Claude read the figures to prove, according to the statistics, the enormity of what the Nazis had done.

  “My God,” said the prosecutor as he stretched out his arms. “Has there ever been anythin
g like this in the history of men? The cannibals and the inquisitors were humanitarians compared with the Nazis!

  “I’m sure that hundreds of criminals will go unpunished because there is no one still living who can point a finger at them. It won’t be long before these Nazis and others like Mathilda will gather believers and form neo-Nazi groups. And so let us not make their punishment light. If we only punished those who killed by their own hand, we would have to let most of the leaders free.

  “I was in a German concentration camp, and I recognize the problem. I saw and heard the head of our camp approach one of the prisoners and give him a rubber truncheon and say, ‘If you don’t beat the others, I’ll shoot you!’ So now tell me, who was to blame?

  “Yes, every Nazi is responsible for the slaughter even if he did not himself shoot or burn! Will all those responsible ever be brought to justice?

  “The war criminals at Nuremberg, where I was sent as an observer, all shouted ‘not guilty.’ They insisted they had only served their country! Can a mass slaughter of human beings—women, children, babies, and the aged—be called serving your country?”

  And now the prosecutor attacked Mathilda personally and analyzed her testimony, her actions as a spy in the service of the SS, her sudden love for Jacob, and her sudden discovery by Hannah Rubin.

  “Mathilda Krause joined up willingly and enthusiastically, first the Hitler Youth and then the SS. She visited the camps, knew what was going on there, added to the misery of the women prisoners, and exploited them without paying for the lessons to go, again as a volunteer, to Russia and help her countrymen to rob, torture, and kill, to continue the dance of the devils and drown the world in seas of blood!

  “Mathilda was convinced Nazism is an ideology and, like all ideologies, must take its toll on human lives. What impudence, what arrogance, and what power-mad self-importance. That’s what all the Nazis thought! Never, for a moment, did they take into account how many innocent lives that ideology would cost. Thirty-five million dead and that many—at least—wounded!