The Fires of Lilliput

by Michael Martin

  Strauss heard the train now. The whistle, the grinding metal on the track.

  “I bought a new whisk broom today, and a scrub brush for the toilet—the gypsy girl who cleans was complaining and a traveling salesman visits the camp every few weeks.”

  Strauss paused when he heard another motor. He stopped the tape. He listened to gears grind as a truck mounted a shallow hill past the metal moat. He heard men bleating and carping, the motor growling and fighting. Strauss put down the microphone and stood up and turned to the window. He spread the plant’s leaves apart. He saw a flat bed truck staked on its sides piled high with white naked bodies. He saw guards yelling at kapos and the driver waving his arms from the cab window. He watched the driver floor the pedal and the engine scream and the truck lurch forward and then stop. He watched the guard order the driver, Number 108679, out of the cab. The driver stepped down and stood. The guard yelled and un-strapped his sidearm. The driver saw the gun and dropped to his knees. The guard pointed to the engine with the gun. He pointed to the cab with the gun. Strauss let the leaves close. He went back to the microphone and started recording again. He heard a sidearm’s sudden clap and a familiar soaring echo.

  Thirty

  In 1066 at Hastings, England, William of Normandy murdered Harold, son of Godwin, the earl of Wessex. Crowned King of the English by a saint—the dying and pious King Edward the Confessor—William the Norman became William the First, King and Conqueror, who terrorized his subjects into submission and imposed the Norman feudalism that had its origins two hundred years earlier, in the harsh governance of the Vikings.

  In 1067, an outpost on the road from Kiev to Polotsk in Belarus became a town called Menesk, likely named for a heroic giant who used his superhuman strength to repel invaders. War and ruin were woven into the town’s subconscious fabric. The unknown author of the Russian epic, The Lay of Igor’s Host, described a battle in 1067 on the banks of the Nemiga River as “a vicious and senseless massacre after which Menesk was destroyed, its men murdered, and its women and children enslaved.” Like the Jewish Golem, the legend of the hero Menesk comforted the psyche of an exhausted and embittered people.

  The conquering hordes brought a babble of languages that turned Menesk into Minsk. By the end of the 15th century, Minsk became a craft and trade hub that joined Poland as one of the largest Jewish centers of Eastern Europe. Two centuries later, Minsk passed to Russia in the second partition of Poland. The Nazi invasion drove a third partition of Poland that delivered Minsk into German hands.

  On July 3, 1941, Minsk became the administrative center of Reichskommissariat Ostland. Generalreichskommissar Wilhelm Kube ruled the German-occupied Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania), Belarus, and eastern Poland. Operation Barbarossa dismantled a Jewish community that comprised almost forty percent of the city’s population. The rape of Minsk was complete with the creation of a Jewish ghetto that with one hundred thousand persons rivaled any in Europe.

  SS-Obersturmbannführer Franz Strauss was transferred from Berlin to Minsk on July 4, 1941—the day after Germany took formal control of the city. He arrived to oversee the removal of the largest art collection in Eastern Europe.

  “I find it ironic that we have invaded and conquered this city, which found its existence in the first year after the Norman Conquest at Hastings,” Strauss wrote in the first letter to his wife Greta. “Himmler, after all, considers himself a direct descendant of the original Norsemen.”

  The sun was bright and bare on Rakovskaya Street, where Strauss sat on the steps of a cathedral while his men gathered and mulled before roll call and inspection and the daily duty assignment. He opened a notebook and drew a pierced heart in the Russian Orthodox style. He started daydreaming. London, London, oh London—how wonderful she was in the summer, and how he missed her. He had met his wife there, fallen in love there, and become a man in an enclave of learning under melancholy skies that settled his soul. He put aside his daydream and wrote in script My Separation and in flowing longhand, started a letter.

  “Gretty, I am charged for the next weeks with reopening the Cathedral of St. Peter and Paul. Himmler insists it be reopened because the Bolsheviks closed it in 1917.”

  A bona fide member of the Schutzstaffel, Strauss was careful and thankful—all he did was inspect museums and synagogues while grunts loaded paintings and statues into gray trucks. When he felt like it, Strauss decided which art stayed and which art—always the worst examples of a particular form—would be relocated for the pleasure of Reichsführer Himmler or Field Marshal Goering. He made these decisions on days that were too muggy to stand in the sun, or too soggy to stand in the rain.

  “You’re a goddamn luckful bastard.” A shadow engulfed Strauss. He looked up at the eclipsing form—Wölke, a giant with a crooked face and perfect teeth. “Himmler’s having lunch with you.”

  “Dear God.”

  “What’s Dear God? He likes you.”

  Wölke slipped his fingers together and cracked his knuckles. The pop was loud and Strauss looked at the giant’s hands, thick and doughy like his face, almost leprous, as though he were stuck together hastily with the clay left over at the end of a batch—not enough for two men, but too much for just one. Wölke was born in Munich and raised in the Bronx. When their good German son was offered the part of Golem in a school play, Wölke’s parents took it as a sign that their gilded age was over and left the States a few months before the October crash of 1929. They settled in Berlin. Now Wölke was Himmler’s security chief in Minsk. Himmler’s entourage had been “in country” for two weeks but no one else had seen the Reichsführer.

  “I’m not ready.” Strauss stood and emerged from the giant’s shadow. Wölke looked at the cathedral. The sun peered over the spires.

  “It won’t be bad. He just wants you to tell him about this place.” Wölke said.

  “It puts a new wrinkle in my misery.” Strauss walked toward the front steps of the cathedral. “When do I meet him? Where?”

  “The hotel. He always eats right at eleven,” Wölke said. “You’ve never met him?”

  “Why would I meet him? He doesn’t have time for people like me.”

  “He not only has time for people like you—he has plans for people like you.”

  ATTENTION TO THE MINUTIAE OF THE HISTORICAL record had elevated the great nephew of the famous waltz king, Johann Baptist Strauss the Younger, to a position of esteem in Heinrich Himmler’s court. Himmler became enamored of Franz Baptist Strauss and his pedigree: he was an Oxford-educated historian who resembled his Austrian uncle in his love of music and his serious features. He did not, however, wear a mustache. Strauss was one of only three Austrians at Oxford during a time of tension between the U.K. and Germanic civilization. But he fit in, partly because he laughed at the follies of the “dumb gangsters” who had overrun the German Motherland since the Beer Hall Putsch and Hitler’s twisted creep onto the world stage.

  Strauss’ post-doctoral career began with a spurious bet: Would he or would he not publish a faux treatise entitled Juden Nibelungen: Teutonic Myth and Modern Judaism in the Last Reich. Strauss had no money to pay a lost bet to his post-doc friends, or they to him, so they made the amount uncollectable—a million pounds sterling if the editors at the Journal of Germanic History or the Journal of the Society of Contemporary German Historians accepted his paper.

  The abstract described this high-brow joke on the academic establishment as a “substantive” comparison of Jews to the Nibelungen, a race of evil dwarves that dwelled in Nibelheim or Niflheim—a dark, misty, mythological place immortalized by the subject of Strauss’ doctoral thesis, German composer Richard Wagner. It was an examination, Strauss wrote, of the “historo-psychological” roots of anti-Semitism in 20th century Germany.

  Contemporary Jews, the fake theory asserted, descended from the Old Testament’s King Solomon, from whom they inherited their great wealth. “The king made silver as common in Jerusalem as stones, and cedar as plentiful as syc
amore-fig trees in the foothills.” (I Kings 10:27)

  Likewise, the Nibelungen descended from another legendary king, the Scandinavian Nibelung, who, like Solomon, had amassed an enormous treasury of gold, silver, diamonds, and jewels called the “Nibelung Hord.” Nibelungen legend said “twelve wagons at the rate of three journeys a day could not carry the treasure off in twelve days.”

  Strauss made academic-sounding comparisons between Jews and Nibelungs. Buried in the subconscious German mind, he proclaimed, was the idea that present-day Jewish wealth resembled the ancient Nibelung hoard. He wrote that the God of the Israelites commanded Solomon to build a palatial temple in his honor. “Solomon selected seventy thousand men to bear burdens, eighty thousand to quarry stone in the mountains, and three thousand six hundred to oversee the labor,” Strauss quoted from the Old Testament. “Solomon overlaid the inside of the house with pure gold, and he drew chains of gold across, in front of the inner sanctuary, and overlaid it with gold. And he overlaid the whole house with gold, until all the house was finished. Also the whole altar that belonged to the inner sanctuary he overlaid with gold.” Likewise, Odin, a God of Nibelungen, commanded the giants Fafnir and Fasolt to build Valhalla, the great hall of the Norse Gods, where golden battle shields adorned the roof.

  Greed destroyed King Solomon and King Nibelung. The German warrior Siegfried stole King Nibelung’s treasure while the maidens of the Rhine distracted him. Solomon’s seven hundred wives and three hundred concubines similarly distracted him, despite this warning in Deuteronomy 17:16-20: “The king…must not take many wives, or his heart will be led astray. He must not accumulate large amounts of silver and gold.”

  “As Solomon grew old,” Strauss quoted, “his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father had been.” (I Kings 11:3-4)

  Strauss compared the Old Testament Song of Solomon to the Nibelungenlied—the Song of the Nibelungen—a Middle High German epic by an early 13th-century German poet that tells of the Diaspora of the Nibelung and the slaughter that follows, all inspired by the German warrior Siegfried.

  “The Song of Solomon and the Nibelungenlied are both songs of love—one brutal, one poetic,” Strauss wrote. “Their protagonists have the stature of myth—Solomon, David, and Bathsheba; Nibelung, Siegfried, and Brunhild. Each describes a compelling symbol of Diaspora: the loss of a great treasure. Both are stories of synthesis and antithesis—destruction and reconstruction, marathon acquisition and devastating loss.”

  Wagner, Strauss wrote, “immortalized the fall of the house of Nibelung with Der Ring des Nibelungen—the four operas Das Rheingold, Die Walküre, Siegfried, and Götterdämmerung—the Twilight of the Gods.”

  Likewise, “the authors of the Old Testament immortalized the fall of the house of Solomon in the Book of Kings. The two epics represent a cross-cultural continuum, a collective subconscious that repeats an essential legend at various historical intervals.”

  Both journals accepted the paper, leaving Strauss in an embarrassing predicament. He had violated an academic taboo—simultaneous submission of a paper to two or more publications. He had to choose, and in so doing, harm his reputation among journal editors. He chose the more prestigious Journal of the Society of Contemporary German Historians.

  After the paper appeared, several European newspapers interviewed him about his “keen insights into history and myth.” The Chronicle of London called the work a “groundbreaking analysis of the roots of German anti-Semitism, as recounted in legend. Dr. Strauss’ comparison of the Nibelungs and the Jews—the first, a race of dark dwarves and the second, a race similarly caricatured by anti-Semites—posits a subconscious trail that may have led peoples of Teutonic ancestry to their current predicament.”

  That the paper was published surprised Strauss, though he thought most academics fools. That it received any attention beyond the dusty shelves of academe encouraged him to pursue a more serious approach to a similar topic—one that had fascinated him from his first days in Gymnasium—Richard Wagner, a study, Strauss wrote, “in beauty and ugliness of sweeping dimension.”

  Three years later, Strauss had adapted his doctoral thesis into a seven hundred-page history of the legendary operatic genius, for which the media bestowed upon him the title “Wagnerian Scholar.” Wagner: Myth and Man was the only book Adolf Hitler ever referenced by name in a speech, which brought reviews from the New York Times and every newspaper William Randolph Hearst published. The Wagner biography became a worldwide sensation because influential pundits repeated a ridiculous thing about it: the book “shed light on the mind of the Führer.” Hitler considered this “insight” a great international compliment, though he never read more than excerpts from the book.

  In an interview with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, General Patton said he had read Wagner: Myth and Man and agreed that the two men shared a personality trait. “Wagner was a terrible businessman. So is Hitler. That penny-comb mustachioed gas bag would be bankrupt by now if he wasn’t stealing from the Jews.”

  Strauss considered his biography a scholarly study few people outside academe would ever read. When the book became a popular success, Strauss went along with “the biggest joke of these idiots’ careers and the biggest boon to mine,” though he kept his cynicism between friends.

  As a citizen of a land conquered by thieves, Strauss was conscripted into an endeavor he labeled “heinously drafted and hopelessly doomed.” He had thought about coming to America or trying to disappear, but notoriety coupled with modest means made such choices difficult. Despite his book’s bestseller status, academic publishing contracts didn’t yield high royalties. Strauss returned to Germany hoping for a desk job where he could wait out the war in relative peace. His low-level fame did afford him a choice: battle or support. He considered support opportunities in every branch: the Luftwaffe; the Wehrmacht; the Waffen-SS. He selected a division of the SS—the RSHA or Reichssicherheitshauptamt. In 1939, Himmler merged the Nazi secret police—the Gestapo—and the Reich’s central intelligence office—the Sicherheitsdienst or SD—into the RSHA.

  Strauss requested and received assignment to RSHA Amter III or Department Three, which replaced the old section C of the SD. Section C had been divided into three subsections, each of which appealed to Strauss:

  C2—Educational and religious life

  C3—Folk culture and art

  C4—Press, literature, and radio

  Section C’s new incarnation—Amter III—took charge of cultural matters in German occupied territories. The RSHA gave Strauss the unusually high rank of Obersturmbannführer, or lieutenant colonel, and shipped him to Minsk.

  THE BALCONY OF THE HOTEL SVISLOCH overlooked a green field that sloped toward the Svisloch River, where a mist hovered white in the early morning and cleared by noon. Strauss heard jackboots clicking in reserved haste on the tile floor beyond the balcony entrance and he stood when the four-man front team walked in, Wölke at the rear. Himmler came a few paces back and alone. Strauss felt unsteady.

  “Herr Reichsführer,” he said.

  “Herr Strauss.”

  Himmler slipped his gloved fingers into Strauss’ waiting palm and grasped his shoulder.

  “It does me good to finally, at last, meet you.” Himmler watched Strauss as the two men sat. There were no others in the room. The security men watched the fields and the river from every side of the balcony.

  “This cathedral we are renovating.” Himmler leaned forward, intimately. “Are we engaged in a fool’s errand?”

  “Not at all, Reichsführer.”

  “What can you tell me about it?”

  “Reichsführer, they call it the ‘yellow church.’”

  “The yellow church?”

  “Yes. I don’t know why. I’m looking into that.”

  Himmler raised his hand and rubbed a small scab on the underside of his left cheek. Strauss saw the glove in the warm room. He caught a sweet and pun
gent smell—perfume over body odor, maybe.

  “And?” Himmler asked.

  “And—it was built in 1613,” Strauss said. “It’s the oldest church in Minsk. Cossacks looted it in 1707.”

  “Cossacks? Under whose orders?”

  “Peter the Great.”

  “Oh!” Himmler nodded.

  “I won’t know much more until we start cataloging.”

  Himmler settled back. Strauss saw perspiration around his forehead.

  “I read your book,” Himmler said.

  “You did, Herr Reichsführer?”

  “You know I did. In fact, you’ve given me two of the best reads I’ve ever had.”

  “I’m faltered—flattered, Reichsführer,” Strauss said. “What, pray tell, was the other?”

  “The other what?”

  “The other read, sir. You said two—two reads.”

  “The thing about the Jews and the little people—the Nibblers.”

  “Oh, oh—you mean Nibelung. Juden Nib-ay-lung.”

  “I love that fucking name. Did you make it up?”

  “Oh no—no, the Nibelung are real, at least in legend.”

  “It’s brilliant to hear that,” Himmler said. “You’ve helped me put some things in perspective.”

  “May I ask how? You’ve piqued me, Reichsführer.”

  An old woman set tea and bread with cheese before them on a tarnished silver tray.

  “Tea. It’s hot for tea,” Himmler said. He leaned back suggestively. Wölke appeared noiselessly. He slipped off the Reichsführer’s jacket. Perspiration pasted Himmler’s long-sleeved shirt to his chest and underarms. He tugged the front and peeled it forward and the shirt burped and billowed.

  “We have in our midst the Nibelungen,” Himmler said. “Juden Nibelungen. That’s what I mean.”

  “Ah,” Strauss said.

  “I am Siegfried. And so are you. And you. And you.” Himmler pointed to his guards. “We are all Siegfried, in the end.”