by Chris Petit
Another book read at the time was Heinz Höhne’s The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS, which was the first time I came across the SS having its own equivalent to Internal Affairs, with reference to an investigative judge named Morgen who was put to weeding out corruption and sadism in the camps. As Höhne noted: ‘It was an absurd spectacle; one or two “unauthorised” murders of Jews were investigated – by a whole squad of SS legal experts – inside the extermination camps where thousands were being murdered daily.’ Morgen remained as much an historical obscurity as Stella Kübler; subsequent information adds little to the half-dozen pages offered by Höhne. The question remains unanswered whether he was a hypocrite or a man of conscience, or both. (The generous explanation might be that he did what he could, not without risk to himself, when most did nothing. Realising that any personal protest against state-sanctioned murder would go unheeded or punished, he took the more prudent and probably the only practical tactic of prosecuting individual transgressors within the interpretation of dishonour and the law.)
Details from both these books and other reading lodged in the memory: that the Gestapo used civilian removal vans (with a Jewish name) to transport their prisoners; that until 1943 those to be deported were summoned by private letter and reported voluntarily with their permitted baggage allowance to fill in their forms; that the Gestapo was suspended for corruption and an SS team from Vienna was brought in to instigate a mass roundup of remaining Jews. (Elsewhere, and perhaps most extraordinary of all, I read that free bottled mineral water was given to staff in Auschwitz. Mineral water in a death camp! In England we’d pretty much had to wait until the 1980s and the deregulation of the stock exchange when those coming into the financial sector from abroad demanded it. It took me years to stumble across the answer to the German story. The SS, covert but not particularly effective capitalists, had expanded into the soft-drinks market because Himmler thought Germans consumed too much beer and wanted to make the price of nonalcoholic drinks more competitive, so the SS ended up secretly owning most of the Third Reich’s mineral water market, far more than was needed to achieve price leverage. For me, this sort of digression seemed much more revealing of the way things really worked than half-a-dozen volumes of traditional history.)
In the back of my mind, Kübler and Morgen twinned, as two contrasting individuals faced with an extreme moral dilemma. How had they reacted? Had they cared? Kübler apparently not; like many others afterwards she sought only to portray herself as a victim. So, again, what would you or I have done in their place? For myself, I suspected I knew the uncomfortable answer, being drawn to figures of transgression and disgrace. A third book read during my Berlin sojourns, picked up on the strength of its title alone, was Black List Section H, the autobiographical novel of renegade Irish author Francis Stuart, recounting his extraordinary life, which culminated in Berlin during the war, teaching at the University and broadcasting anti-British propaganda, for which he was lucky to escape later with his neck. Stuart lived a life of some privilege while Kübler was scurrying around the same part of town looking for people to betray; therefore the geography of their very different lives almost intersected. To have read Stuart’s book in Berlin was to have a very clear sense of a past returned to haunt, and of lives lived during wartime, much of it still retrievable. Black List Section H remains a valuable documentary on the city’s civilian history in 1943 when all eyes were turned elsewhere.
I never particularly had it in mind to write about Berlin at the time. I had made two films there, which satisfied my curiosity. I had also written what was ostensibly a London Soho novel, Robinson (1993) that was in fact based more on the experience of Berlin, which in the late 1970s and early 1980s offered enough distractions to test the border zones of anyone’s identity. I later met Francis Stuart, who talked of the importance of drift in life, but not of how deep the currents were in which he had swum.
My novel The Psalm Killer (1996) had started off by asking the questions (after chancing across the term Ordinary Decent Criminals): what was the role of ordinary crime in sectarian Northern Ireland, and what percentage of police work was devoted to it? The questions were quickly overtaken by research, which, in terms of what was gifted, revealed a gold mine of mind-boggling paramilitary and intelligence complexity. But years later I found myself asking a variation of the same questions about Berlin during the war. What would have happened if an individual murder victim was Jewish, at a time when they were all deemed expendable? Who, if anyone, would have been assigned to investigate? I remembered Morgen. More to the point, I remembered that Morgen, after a mysterious interlude of punishment that had him sent to fight in Russia, had been just as mysteriously recalled to Berlin to work in the financial corruption section of the Criminal Police. He was told to sit on his hands and not cause trouble, advice he promptly ignored by investigating the commandant of a concentration camp for financial misdealing.
As with The Psalm Killer, the story became more complex than the simple questions that had provoked it. I thought again of persecution happening in familiar surroundings, and how soul crushing it must be to find where you lived all your life turned into an alien hostile space. More specifically, The Last Jews in Berlin told of a young Jewish woman, Ruth Thomas, whose ‘designer clothes and patterns were not only well regarded in the garment industry but earned […] badly needed foreign currency from sales abroad.’ The book suggested other strands: secret trading between a parish worker from the Church of Sweden and the Gestapo, to free certain people from the SS – to ‘buy them back’ – then hide and eventually export them; reference to a people-smuggling operation using furniture crates belonging to a Swedish diplomat; mention of a Chinese forger and a female Hungarian fortune teller; an account of the demonstration at Rosenstrasse, and how Jews married to Gentiles and therefore legally protected were arrested in error, hence the protest. (One possible reason for their arrest, which was not gone into, is considered in Chapter 31.) Above all there was the depravity of Stella Kübler, who at the height of her activity was just twenty years old and known as the ‘blond ghost’. She and her partner between them were said to have accounted for over 2000 Jewish arrests.
Elsewhere, the forger Schönhaus, mentioned by Gersten to Sybil in Chapter 46, was an actual forger who escaped from Berlin and years after wrote a memoir, The Forger (2007), with material on the Jewish art school scene, social life in general and a chilling encounter with Kübler, a friend from student days, who set up his arrest then, perhaps out of fondness, changed her mind. (It is the only record I could find of any humane gesture on her part.)
Morgen keeps his name, mainly because I felt I was chasing the man himself, and wanted to join up the dots of what there was, rather than trying to create a facsimile. In the context of an historical fiction it is sometimes more appropriate to speculate in the shadow of lives lived rather than just make stuff up. Francis Stuart got changed to Francis Alwynd, being not so much a portrait as an interpretation of cultural anomaly. Anyway I took liberties and, besides, Stuart had had the last word on himself in Black List Section H. The location of the slaughterhouse was nicked – there is no other word – from Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, one of the great novels on Berlin or any other city; it was far too good not to appropriate. The affair between Sybil and Lore owes something (quite a lot, actually) to the memoir Aimée and Jaguar by Erica Fischer, which tells of a housewife and mother of four who fell in love with a young Jewish woman.
I no longer remember where I read about an army surplus store being looted after the air raid, or cattle stampeding in the street, or there being photographs of the drowned in the reception area of the Criminal Police building. These are the kind of details you can’t make up and, it is hoped, make the difference for the reader between theatrical brushstroke and something coming alive.
It could be argued that research is less interesting these days with more or less everything available at the press of a button. Previously obsc
ure information – such as the Jews being forced to pay for their own transportation – is now instantly and universally available on Wikipedia. That said, the bulk of this research came from hard print, and more particularly footnotes, which often prove more illuminating than the text and remain unavailable on the Internet, being the product of proper scholarship.
For their general use, the following books and reference maps, in no particular order, were helpful:
Berlin 1910–1933 by Eberhart Roters (Wellfleet Press, 1982); Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic Surgery by Sander L. Gilman (Duke University Press, 1998); Ilse’s Berlin: I Was There – 1926 to 1945 by Ilse Lewis (Authorhouse, 2011); Hitler’s Berlin: A Third Reich Tourist Guide [1937] (WPC, 2008); Berlin Allied Intelligence Map of Key Buildings [1945]; Pharus-Plan Berlin 1940 (reprint, 2013); A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin: The Chilling Story of the S-Bahn Murderer by Scott Andrew Selby (Berkley, 2014) with material on serial killings, appropriated by Stoffel; ditto Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany by Maria Tartar (Princetown University Press, 1995). Peter Adam’s memoir, Not Waving But Drowning (Andre Deutsch, 1995), has a section on growing up half-Jewish in wartime Berlin; Spandau: The Secret Diaries by Albert Speer (Collins, 1976) mentions the Horcher’s restaurant story, as do The Goebbels Diaries 1942-3 edited by Louis P. Lochner (Doubleday, 1948) which has an aside on the Nöthling scandal; Eva’s Berlin: Memoirs of a Wartime Childhood by Eva Wald Leverton (Thumbprint Press, 2000); Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany by Marion A. Kaplan (OUP, 1998); What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany by Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband (Basic Books, 2005); Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans by Eric A. Johnson (Basic Books, 2000); Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and The Final Solution in Poland by Christopher R. Browning (Penguin, 2001); Germany Turns Eastwards by Michael Burleigh (Pan, 2002); Male Fantasies Volume 2 by Klaus Theweleit (Polity Press, 1989); The Gestapo: Power and Terror in The Third Reich by Carsten Dams and Michael Stolle (OUP, 2014); Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny by Edward Crankshaw (Greenhill, 1990); History of the SS by G.S. Graber (Hale, 1978); Behind the Steel Wall: Berlin 1941–43 by Arvid Fredborg (Harrap, 1944), in which a Swedish journalist reports from Berlin; The Wartime Broadcasts of Francis Stuart, 1942-1944 ed. Brendan Barrington (Lilliput, 2000); The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS by Heinz Höhne (transl. Richard Barry, Secker & Warburg, 1969), but specifically essential for introducing Morgen, as noted.
And the following works proved especially useful: The Last Jews in Berlin by Leonard Gross (Simon & Schuster, 1982) for reasons stated; Berlin at War by Roger Moorhouse (Vintage, 2011) has good detail (the filthiness of the food), plus Nöthling, Horcher’s and Rosenstrasse; The SS Dirlewanger Brigade: The History of the Black Hunters by Christian Ingrao (transl. Phoebe Green, Skyhorse, 2011) has much on the psychology of atrocity and terror, referred to by Morgen in Chapter 52; Aimée and Jaguar by Erica Fischer (Bloomsbury, 1996) cf. p.107: ‘girls were having pornographic pictures taken by Schmidt the photographer’; A Social History of the Third Reich by Richard Grunberger (Penguin, 1974) especially chapters on corruption, consumption, women and youth; Swing Under the Nazis: Jazz as a Metaphor for Freedom by Mike Zwerin (Cooper Square, 2000) and Different Drummers: Jazz in the Culture of Nazi Germany by Michael H. Kater (OUP, 1992) have fascinating material on jazz as a dissident but absorbed culture, with mention of a nightclub with telephones for calling between tables, as well as names (Mike Hidalgo, Kurt Widmann) featured in the book; Francis Alwynd’s jazz ramblings in Chapter 10 would have come from these sources; The Berlin Diaries 1940–1945 by Marie ‘Missie’ Vassiltchikov (Pimlico, 1999) offers a most detailed and impressive account of cosmopolitan life in wartime, the more fascinating for being from a woman’s perspective, albeit elevated, as she was a white Russian émigrée. Vassiltchikov notes once the bombing started women took to wearing scarves instead of hats. She has a tiny cameo, appearing in Chapter 34 (‘Schlegel had met her; a princess, no less, achingly beautiful’); Eternal Treblinka: Our Treatment of Animals in the Holocaust by Charles Patterson (Lantern, 2002); The Taste of War by Lizzie Collingham (Penguin Press, 2012): lots on pigs, and see especially the chapters ‘Autarky and Lebensraum’, ‘Herbert Backe and the Hunger Plan’ and ‘Genocide in the East’; Animals in the Third Reich by Boria Sax (Yogh & Thorn, 2013 reprint) cf. p.54: ‘The Sacrificial Pig’; Jews in Nazi Berlin by Meyer, Simon and Schütz (Chicago Press, 2009) includes a thorough chapter on ‘Snatchers’, the Berlin Gestapo’s Jewish informants, pp.249–267, with photographs of Kübler, who survived the war. She was sentenced to ten years of imprisonment by a Soviet military tribunal, then went to West Berlin where she was convicted for serving as accessory to murder but did not serve her term. She committed suicide at the age of 72 in 1994. The Forger by Cioma Schönhaus, (transl. Alan Bance, Granta, 2007) has much detail on the life and business of underground forgers.
In terms of fiction, Alfred Doblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (transl. Eugene Jolas, Penguin, 1978 edition) presents the slaughterhouse on a plate, in an astonishing documentary sequence (in an astonishing book) that spares no detail: ‘hot steaming blackness, black red’. The slaughterhouse complex still exists, much knocked about, partly flattened, with some of the remaining buildings renovated into the usual retail parks and apartments. What that does to their feng shui one cannot imagine. Shed 27 is still there, derelict, with a relief carving of the head of a stone pig in the wall. Nobody nails Berlin better than Döblin, in terms of actual mapping and psychogeography, and if The Butchers of Berlin introduces any new readers to him then the exercise will have been worthwhile. The debt is (grudgingly) acknowledged by having Sybil read the book, which remains unnamed, although its hero Franz Biberkopf is in Chapter 23. Francis Stuart’s Black List Section H (Southern Illinois University Press, 1971), as mentioned, formed the basis of Francis Alwynd’s story, although the encounters with Sybil and Lore have no factual base. It was more the details and observations of Stuart’s life in Berlin that were appropriated (the ‘non-crease, unsoilable, turtleneck jersey’ that gave him an un-Central-European air) and the fact he spoke English in Berlin throughout the war, almost without comment. Although, in retrospect, there was no reason for an Irishman not to be there at that time, as a neutral, Stuart’s presence remained startling, and, for the purposes of this story, he seemed to belong with other real-life conundrums, such as an SS man in Internal Affairs and a woman who cruised the city looking to betray her own people. For the before and after of the period dealt with, and on Germany and Germanness, I reread Sybil Bedford’s A Legacy (Penguin Classics edition, 2005) and Walter Abish’s How German Is It (New Directions, 1979).
The following should be thanked for their help and/or hospitality during the writing of this book: Christopher Roth, Jeanne Tremsal, Georg Diez, Gabriele Mattner, Arno Brandlhuber, David Pirie, Liz Jobey, Lynda Myles, Richard Williams, Jennifer Potter, Iain Sinclair, Stanley Schtinter, and especially my agent Clare Alexander, for setting up and driving the project on, publisher Ian Chapman for having me back, Jo Dickinson for her clear advice and editing, and particularly Emma Matthews, for having to live with it.