16mm of Innocence

by Quentin Smith

  Beside her was the fresh mound of rocky soil piled on Mother’s grave, his grandmother in reality, but in every other sense of the word his mother. Dieter placed an arm on Otto’s shoulder and squeezed twice.

  “I am so sorry, Otto,” Ingrid said, tears once again dripping soundlessly down her cheeks.

  Otto drew breath slowly to suppress a shudder of deep–seated emotion. “It wasn’t your fault.”

  Dieter nudged Otto and drew his attention to the mound of earth on Mother’s grave. “Look!” he said.

  On top of Mother’s grave, crawling out of a bunch of shrivelled lavender, was a hairy black scorpion with yellow legs. It stopped, tail poised in the air, ready to strike. Otto held his breath. Ingrid emitted sucking sobs as Otto drew her closer with his left arm.

  “You know, Otto,” Dieter said. “If it hadn’t been for the scorpion, you wouldn’t be here with us today.”

  Otto acknowledged this to be a sobering analysis of the tragedy and nodded, unable to take his eyes off the fearsome creature.

  “Surely, even our family is better than no family at all,” Dieter said.

  Otto felt himself surrendering to the immense emotion churning within him.

  “What are you going to do?” Dieter asked.

  Otto shrugged and sniffed away tears. He didn’t know how to respond. What should he do?

  “Take my advice, Otto, and keep this to yourself. Let it be our secret,” Ingrid said in a calm and measured voice.

  Epilogue

  Frans retired two weeks after closing the case of the child’s body discovered at the Adermann House on Bülow Street. As most people in Lüderitz had long forgotten or never even known Inez, Otto assumed it must have been simple to pass the child off as having been hers. After all, life went on – no–one was affected and the Adermanns were gone. It did, however, leave Otto feeling somewhat hollow, because officially he was dead; he did not exist; he was merely an imposter.

  But as a direct consequence of this benign outcome Ingrid, Dieter and Otto each inherited their equal share of the Adermann estate.

  Otto took a languid mouthful of Aberlour and savoured it on his tongue.

  “What are you drinking for?” Sabine asked, sitting down beside Otto on the rattan snug in their orangery, placing her hand on his.

  “I’m thinking about Dieter,” Otto said.

  He felt Sabine squeeze his hand and push her fingers between his. He gently tightened his grip on her hand, savouring the delicate floral scent of her presence.

  “It was nice that Ingrid joined you at his funeral,” she said, “and good to meet Bernie as well. They seem very happy.”

  “I’ve never seen her happier,” Otto said.

  Much to Otto’s surprise, eleven months after Mother’s funeral Ingrid married Bernie Kaminsky, a wealthy Jewish tycoon on Manhattan’s upper east side. Otto was disappointed not to have been invited to the nuptials, though he acknowledged that it was probably a low–key affair, given that it was not Bernie’s first marriage and most certainly not Ingrid’s either. Otto hoped that she had found a sense of inner peace, at last.

  Looking up at the oak beam lattice, he smiled wryly.

  “What is it?” Sabine said.

  “I’m sorry Dieter never met Bernie. I think he would have liked him.”

  “Isn’t it odd that you three never met up again after your mum’s funeral?” Sabine said.

  Otto nodded and savoured more Aberlour. It was indeed odd, and also disappointing. An opportunity lost, he felt. They had at least begun to exchange birthday and Christmas cards anew after Mother’s funeral, kept in annual contact and even spoke on the phone occasionally. But he and Ingrid had not met up again until one week ago, at Dieter’s funeral in Hong Kong in November 1994. Dieter had wasted away, along with most of his friends, from the new plague: AIDS.

  But despite his regret over their failure to reconnect as siblings, Otto was massively relieved that Father’s past as a Nazi criminal at Neuengamme never became public knowledge, and did not live to haunt the remaining members of the family. Ernst Adermann’s ignominious background had successfully died with him and was blown to oblivion by the offshore winds on Shark Island, never to be heard of again.

  Otto’s most difficult decision was whether or not to tell Sabine, her parents and his children the truth about who he really was, or what had happened in the sequestered little community of Lüderitz in the year that he was born. At first this gnawing deceit festered within him like an ulcer, because he feared the unanticipated consequences of an inconvenient truth. But with time the normality of his family’s unchanged existence soothed his conscience and he grew comfortable with the lie.

  “I was thinking… after Dieter’s funeral,” Sabine said, straightening with a look of sudden intensity on her face, withdrawing her hand and clasping them together in her lap.

  “About what?” Otto said.

  “Did they never identify the body in the garden?”

  Otto did not think he hesitated for long, burying his face in his whisky glass before meeting her sincere grey eyes as confidently as he could, shaking his head nonchalantly.

  “No, they didn’t.’

  *

  Inez Ellenberger died of gunshot wounds with her boyfriend on 27 December 1934 at the age of 25. Her father, Edmond, a French attorney, had forbidden Inez’s relationship with the man because he was a Jew.

  My grandmother, Eileen, was Inez’s older sister and she wrote this tribute in the funeral notice.

  A broken string in memory’s harp

  Is softly touched today.

  Author’s Notes

  Deutsch Südwestafrika (German South West Africa)

  Deutsch Südwestafrika was a German colony from 1884 to 1915. In 1885 a convention was held in Europe to divide Africa amongst European nations at the behest of Bismarck. Borders were negotiated with the Portuguese in Angola and the British in South Africa. By 1888 the Nama and Herero peoples of South West Africa began to resist the continuing confiscation of their lands and cattle by the German colonialists.

  Adolf Lüderitz was the first magistrate of the colony, having been the tobacco merchant who first bought land along the barren coastline in 1882. His successor until 1890, Heinrich Göring, was Nazi Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring’s father.

  In 1915, during the First World War, troops from the British colony of South Africa occupied South West Africa and drove the Germans out. In 1920 a League of Nations mandate handed powers of administration to South Africa.

  The legacy of Nazism has persisted in South West Africa into the new independent nation of Namibia, established in 1990. Reports in the media still proclaim the presence of strong pro–Nazi groups in Namibia, many in Swakopmund, where it is rumoured that some Nazi fugitives have been hiding since 1945. Disruptive behaviour at public meetings, leaflet distribution, protests and racial hate crimes are continuing evidence of right–wing Nazi extremist presence in Namibia to this day.

  Lüderitz

  The Portuguese sailor Bartolomeu Diaz first discovered Lüderitz Bay in 1487 and erected a cross on the peninsula immediately south of the bay. Lüderitz town began as a trading post supporting whaling, guano harvesting and fishing. In 1882 Adolf Lüderitz purchased the coastal land, which was named Lüderitzbucht in his honour when he died on an expedition to the Orange River a few years later.

  Before the Shark Island concentration camp was established it was reported that Lüderitz had only five buildings. As a result of the military presence associated with the camp and the importance of the port during military operations in southern Südwestafrika, the town flourished and grew rapidly.

  In 1909 diamonds were discovered and the resulting rush propelled Lüderitz to unimagined wealth. Kolmanskop was built south–east of Lüderitz as a diamond mining town within the Sperrgebiet or forbidden zone, a vast area with restricted access and tight security that completely surrounded Lüderitz. Stories abound about the lawless and trigger–happy security patrols wh
o ensured that trespassers did not ever return to the Sperrgebiet.

  By the late 1940s the diamond rush was over and Kolmanskop became a ghost town soon thereafter. Diamonds are still mined in both the desert and on the ocean bed, still under strict control, though the Sperrgebiet can now be visited with permits and escorts.

  Today Lüderitz is a thriving little town of 12,500 inhabitants in a precariously isolated location. Trapped in a century–old colonial time warp, it is packed with grand buildings whose charming and incongruous architectural style date back to the early days of German colonial optimism. With diamonds gone, tourism, fishing, nature conservation and rail network links are Lüderitz’s hopes for the future.

  Shark Island Extermination Camp

  Impatient for a solution to the tribal uprisings against German colonial inhabitants in Deutsch Südwestafrika, Kaiser Wilhelm II appointed Lothar von Trotha as governor of the colony. Von Trotha pursued an aggressive and brutal campaign against the Herero and Nama peoples, shooting them, driving them into the desert and poisoning their water holes. Tens of thousands were killed.

  In 1904 the Shark Island Concentration Camp was established on the rocky peninsula of land jutting into Lüderitz Bay. It is now acknowledged as the world’s first Vernichtungslager: extermination camp. In just four years around three thousand men, women and children died in the camp, more than eighty per cent of the inmates.

  Conditions were appalling, food scarce, beatings frequent and medical care non–existent. Racial experimentation was performed on prisoners by the notorious Dr Bofinger. Bodies were decapitated and women forced to boil the heads of their own people before scraping off the flesh with shards of glass. These skulls were transported back to Germany by the crate for examination at elite universities.

  Many surviving photographs taken by German military personnel, showing appalling conditions, tortured victims, physical abuse and soldiers loading skulls into wooden crates, were turned into postcards and sent back to friends and families in Germany.

  As recently as 2011 the University of Freiburg identified fourteen skulls in their anatomical collection as those from Hereros and Namas killed in the Shark Island Concentration Camp between 1904 and 1908. At a ceremony in September 2011 twenty skulls were repatriated to a Namibian delegation at the University Hospital Charité in Berlin, and returned to Namibian soil the following month.

  Lüderitz thrived during the time of the Shark Island concentration camp, growing from a small settlement into a bustling coastal town. Eugen Fischer, notorious Nazi doctor, spent time at Shark Island and examined skulls. He wrote a book, The Principles of Human Heredity and Race Hygiene, which massively impressed Adolf Hitler. When Hitler came to power he appointed Fischer as chancellor of the university in Berlin where he established the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics.

  Josef Mengele, responsible for appalling medical experimentation crimes in Auschwitz, and Hendrik Verwoerd, South African Prime Minister who fully implemented apartheid, were both students of Eugen Fischer.

  Neuengamme Concentration Camp, Hamburg

  Neuengamme was established within the districts of Hamburg by the SS as a sub–camp of Sachsenhausen concentration camp in 1938. It functioned predominantly as a labour camp to service the needs of the German war machine initially, but also carried out exterminations.

  Aside from the main camp, based in the village of Neuengamme, there were a further eighty sub–camps that fell under Neuengamme concentration camp, including four in the Channel Islands.

  Neuengamme was in operation until 1945, when it was liberated and occupied by the British Army. During this time more than half of the estimated 105,000 prisoners perished. Inadequate food, shelter and medical care resulted in outbreaks of pneumonia, tuberculosis and typhus, some of which killed thousands. Prussic acid was used to gas prisoners and lethal injections were also widely employed. Allied air raids were extremely hazardous to prisoners, who were not allowed to use air raid shelters during bombings and were also given the dangerous task of clearing the streets of rubble and unexploded munitions in major cities like Hamburg and Bremen after bombings.

  In the beginning most prisoners were German dissidents, but by the end of the war Soviets, Polish, French and Dutch nationals accounted for eighty per cent of those interned.

  Prisoners were used to construct a canal between the rivers Elbe and Dove, and to dig out clay for the onsite brickworks. Several factories using thousands of prison labourers were established in the camp, notably Walther–Werke, which made weapons and small arms; Carl–Jastram Motorenfabrik, which manufactured parts for U–Boats; and Deutsche Mess–Apparate, which produced fuses for grenades.

  Though Neuengamme initially used the Hamburg municipal crematoria for disposing of its dead, the camp built its own crematorium in 1942 and thereafter more systematically killed prisoners unable to work. In addition it is believed that about two thousand Gestapo prisoners were brought to Neuengamme specifically to be killed by lethal injection.

  Nazi doctors also performed medical experimentation on prisoners in the camp. The Institute for Maritime and Tropical Diseases used prisoners to test methods of countering lice–borne typhus. Dr Ludwig–Werner Haase tested the effectiveness of filters for removing massive doses of arsenic from water administered to prisoners.

  Amongst the most notorious and abhorrent of the medical crimes committed at Neuengamme were the tuberculosis experiments on Jewish children performed by SS physician Dr Kurt Heissmayer, which he undertook as original research in order to obtain a professorship. Twenty children were injected with live tuberculosis bacilli into their blood and lungs. Every child later had the lymph nodes surgically removed from their armpits and were photographed holding one arm above their heads to reveal the scar. All of these photographs survived the war.

  Upon the collapse of the Western Front and with the British Army approaching, orders were received to murder the children. Since its abandonment due to bombing damage, Bullenhuser Damm School had been used by Neuengamme to house prisoners. The children were taken to this school by three guards, a driver and SS physician Dr Alfred Trzebinski, who was Kurt Heissmayer’s supervisor at Neuengamme.

  Trzebinski sedated the children with morphine and they were then hanged from pegs on the wall in the basement. Of those involved in the killings, Neuengamme Camp Commandant Max Pauly, the three guards and Dr Alfred Trzebinski were all found guilty at Nuremberg and hanged in 1946.

  The death register at Neuengamme indicates that more than 55,000 prisoners died in the concentration camp.

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to thank Susanne Annheuser for her invaluable help with the German dialogue, and also Christopher Wakling at Curtis Brown Creative – for helping me to make the most out of this novel.

  *

  My grateful thanks for the invaluable advice on inheritance law of fifty years ago in South West Africa goes to Barry Cloete and Jonathan Latham: any errors of interpretation are mine alone.