Authors: Dan Simmons
“Wiesenthal was disappointed, but he agreed to continue his search for any scrap of information which fit my description of the Oberst. Fifteen months later, only a few days after I had received my degree, a letter arrived from Simon Wiesenthal. In it were photostated copies of
Section IV Sonderkommando Sub-section IV-B
pay vouchers for
Einsatzgruppen
‘Special Advisors.’ Wiesenthal had circled the name of an Oberst Wilhelm von Borchert, an officer on special assignment to
Einsatzgruppen Drei
from the office of Reinhard Heydrich. Clipped to these photostats was a newspaper clipping Wiesenthal had retrieved from his files. Seven smiling young officers posed for their picture at a special Berlin Philharmonic performance to benefit the Wehrmacht. The clipping was dated twenty-three, six, forty-one. The concert was Wagner. The names of the smiling officers were listed. The fifth from the left, barely visible behind the shoulders of his comrades, his hat pulled low, was the pale countenance of the Oberst. The name in the caption read Oberleutnant Wilhelm von Borchert.
“Two days later I was in Vienna. Wiesenthal had ordered his correspondents to research the background of von Borchert, but the results were disappointing. The von Borcherts were an established family with aristocratic roots in both Prussia and East Bavaria. The family fortune had derived from land, mining interests, and exports of art objects. Wiesenthal’s agents could find no record of the birth or christening of a Wilhelm von Borchert in records going back to 1880. They did, however, find a death notice. According to an announcement in the
Regen Zeitung
dated nineteen, seven, forty-five, Oberst Wilhelm von Borchert, only heir to Count Klaus von Borchert, had died in combat while heroically defending Berlin from Soviet invaders. Word had reached the elderly count and his wife while they were staying at their summer residence, Waldheim, in the Bayrische Wald near Bayerisch-Eisenstein. The family was seeking Allied permission to close down the estate and to return to their home near Bremen for memorial ser vices. Wilhelm von Borchert, the article went on to say, had received the coveted Iron Cross for valor and had been recommended for promotion to SS Oberstgrup penführer at the time of his death.
“Wiesenthal had ordered his people to follow any other leads. There were none. Von Borchert’s family in 1956 consisted only of an elderly aunt in Bremen and two nephews who had lost most of the family’s money in poor postwar investments. The huge estate in East Bavaria had been closed for years and much of the hunting preserve there had been sold to pay taxes. As well as Wiesenthal’s limited Eastern Bloc contacts could tell, the Soviets and East Germans had no information on the life or death of Wilhelm von Borchert.
“I flew to Bremen to speak with the Oberst’s aunt, but the woman was far gone into senility and could recall no one in her family named Willi. She thought I had been sent by her brother to take her to the Summerfest at Waldheim. One of the nephews refused to see me. The other, a foppish young man I caught up with in Brussels as he was on his way to a spa in France, said that he had met his Uncle Wilhelm only once, in 1937. The nephew had been nine at the time. He remembered only the wonderful silk suit his uncle wore and the straw boater he wore at a jaunty angle. He understood that his uncle had been a war hero and had died fighting Communism. I returned to Tel Aviv.
“For several years I practiced my profession in Israel, learning, as all psychiatrists do, that a degree in psychiatry merely qualifies one to
begin
learning about the intricacies and foibles of the human personality. In 1960 my cousin Rebecca died of cancer. David urged me to go to America to continue my research into the mechanics of human dominance. When I protested that I had access to adequate materials in Tel Aviv, David joked that nowhere would the spectrum of violence be more complete than in the United States. I arrived in New York in January of 1964. The nation was recovering from the loss of a president and preparing to drown its sorrow in adolescent hysteria at the arrival of a British rock group called the Beatles. Columbia University had offered me a one-year visiting professorship. As it worked out, I would stay on there to finish my book on the pathology of violence and eventually to become an American citizen.
“It was in November of 1964 that I decided to stay in the States. I was visiting friends in Princeton, New Jersey, and after dinner they apologetically asked if I would mind watching an hour of television with them. I owned no television of my own and assured them that I would enjoy the diversion. As it turned out, the program was a documentary commemorating the first anniversary of President Kennedy’s assassination. I was interested in the program. Even in Israel, obsessed as we had been with our own priorities, the death of the American president had come as a great shock to us all. I had seen photographs of the president’s motorcade in Dallas, been touched by the oft-reproduced picture of Kennedy’s young son saluting his father’s coffin, and had read accounts of Jack Ruby’s murder of the probable assassin, but I had never seen the videotape of the actual shooting of Oswald. Now the documentary showed it— the smirking little man in a dark sweater, the Dallas plainclothes officers with their Stetsons and quintessential American faces, the heavyset man lunging out of the crowd, a pistol shoved almost into Oswald’s belly, the sharp, flat sound which reminded me of white, naked bodies falling forward into the Pit, Oswald grimacing and clutching his stomach. I watched as police officers grappled with Ruby. In the confusion, the television camera was jostled and swept across the crowd.
“ ‘My God, my God!’ I cried out in Polish and leaped to my feet. The Oberst had been in that crowd.
“Unable to explain my agitation to my host and hostess, I left that night and took the train to New York. Early the next morning I was at the Manhattan offices of the network which had aired the documentary. I used my contacts at the university and in publishing to gain access to the network’s films, videotapes, and what they called outtakes. Only in the few seconds of tape I had seen in the program did the face in the crowd appear. A graduate student I worked with kindly took still photographs from the network editing monitor and blew them up as large as possible for me.
“Viewed that way, the face was even less recognizable than during the second and a half it was on the screen: a white blur glimpsed between the brims of Texas cowboy hats, a vague impression of a thin smile, eye sockets as dark as openings in a skull. The image would not have served as evidence in any court in the world, but I
knew
it had been the Oberst.
“I flew to Dallas. The authorities there were still sensitive from the criticism of the press and world opinion. Few would speak to me and even fewer would discuss the events in the underground garage. No one recognized the photographs I showed them— either the one taken from the videotape or the old Berlin news photo. I spoke to reporters. I spoke to witnesses. I tried to speak to Jack Ruby, the assassin’s assassin, but could not receive permission to do so. The Oberst’s trail was a year old and it was as cold as the corpse of Lee Harvey Oswald.
“I returned to New York. I contacted acquaintances in the Israeli Embassy. They denied that Israeli intelligence agencies would ever operate on American soil, but they agreed to make certain inquiries. I hired a private detective in Dallas. His bill ran to seven thousand dollars and his report could have been distilled into a single word: nothing. The embassy charged me nothing for their negative report, but I am sure that my contacts there must have thought me mad to be searching for a war criminal at the site of a presidential assassination. They knew from experience that most ex-Nazis sought only anonymity in their exile.
“I began to doubt my own sanity. The face that had haunted my dreams for so many years had clearly become the central obsession in my life. As a psychiatrist, I could understand the ambiguity of this obsession: burned into my consciousness in a Sobibor death chamber, tempered by the coldest winter of my spirit, my fixation on finding the Oberst had been my
reason to live
; erase one and the other disappears. Acknowledging the Oberst’s death would have been tantamount to acknowledging my own.
“As a psychiatrist I understood my obsession. I understood, but I did not believe my own rationale. Even if I had believed it, I would not have worked to ‘cure’ myself.
The Oberst was real. The chess game had been real
. The Oberst was not a man to die in some makeshift fortification outside Berlin. He was a monster. Monsters do not die. They must be
killed
.
“In the summer of 1965, I finally arranged an interview with Jack Ruby. It was not productive. Ruby was a sad-faced husk of a man. He had lost weight in prison and loose skin hung on his face and arms like folds of dirty cheesecloth. His eyes were vague and absent, his voice hoarse. I tried to draw him out of his mental state that day in November, but he would only shrug and repeat what he had said in interrogations so many times before. No, he did not know that he was going to shoot Oswald until just before the act was performed. It was an accident that he was allowed to enter the garage. Something had come over him when he saw Oswald, an impulse he could not control. This was the man who had killed his beloved president.
“I showed him the photographs of the Oberst. He shook his head tiredly. He had known several of the Dallas detectives and many of the reporters on the scene, but he had never seen this man. Had he felt anything
strange
just before he shot Oswald? When I asked this question, Ruby lifted his tired, basset-hound face for a second and I saw a flicker of confusion in his eyes, but then that faded and he responded in the same monotone as before. No, nothing strange, just fury at the thought that Oswald should still be alive while President Kennedy was dead and poor Mrs. Kennedy and the children were all alone.
“I was not surprised a year later in December of 1966 when Ruby was admitted to Parkland Hospital for treatment of cancer. He had seemed to be a terminally ill man even when I had interviewed him. Few mourned when he died in January of 1967. The nation had expiated its grief and Jack Ruby was only a reminder of a time better forgotten.
“During the late nineteen sixties I became more and more involved with my research and teaching. I tried to convince myself that in my theoretical work I was exorcising the demon which the Oberst’s face had symbolized. Inside, I knew better.
“Through the violence of those years, I continued to study violence. Why was it that some people could dominate others so easily? In my research I would bring small groups of men and women together, strangers assembled to complete some irrelevant task, and inevitably a social pecking order would begin to be established within thirty minutes of the group’s creation. Frequently the participants were not even aware of the establishment of a hierarchy, but when questioned, almost all could identify the ‘most important’ member of the group or the ‘most dynamic.’ My graduate students and I conducted interviews, pored over transcripts, and spent endless hours watching videotapes. We simulated confrontations between subjects and figures of authority— university deans, police officers, teachers, IRS officials, prison officials, and ministers. Always the question of hierarchy and dominance was more complex than mere social position would suggest.
“It was during this time that I began working with the New York police on personality profiles for hom i cide subjects. The data was fascinating. The interviews were depressing. The results were inconclusive.
“What was the root source of human violence? What role did violence and the threat of violence play in our everyday interactions? By answering these questions, I naïvely hoped to someday explain how a brilliant but deluded psychopath like Adolf Hitler could turn one of the great cultures of the world into a mindless, immoral killing machine. I began with the knowledge that every other complex animal species on earth had some mechanism to establish dominance and social hierarchy. Usually this hierarchy was established without serious injury. Even such fierce predators as wolves and tigers had precise signals of submission which would immediately end the most violent confrontation before death or crippling injury ensued. But what of Man? Were we, as so many assumed, lacking this instinctive submission-recognition signal and therefore doomed to eternal warfare, a type of intraspecies madness predetermined by our genes? I thought not.
“As I spent years compiling data and developing premises, I secretly harbored a theory so bizarre and unscientific that it would have ruined my professional standing if I had so much as whispered it to colleagues. What if mankind had evolved until the establishment of dominance was a psychic— what some of my less rational friends would have called a
parapsychological
— phenomenon? Certainly the pale appeal of some politicians, that thing the media calls
charisma
for want of a better term, was not based upon size, breeding ability, or threat display. What, I surmised, if in some lobe or hemi sphere of the brain there were an area devoted to nothing else but projecting this sense of personal domination? I was more than familiar with the neurological studies suggesting that we inherited our hierarchical sense from the most primitive portions of the mind— the so-called reptile brain. But what if there had been evolutionary advances—
mutations
—which endowed some humans with an ability akin to empathy or the concept of telepathy but infinitely more powerful and useful in survival terms? And what if this ability, fueled by its own hunger for dominance, found its ultimate expression in violence? Would the humans who manifested such an ability be truly human?
“In the end, all I could do was theorize endlessly about what I had
felt
when the Oberst’s force of will had entered me. As the decades passed, the details of those terrible days faded, but the
pain
of that mind rape, the revulsion and terror of it, still sent me gasping out of sleep. I continued to teach, to research, and to move through the gray realities of day-to-day life. Last spring I awoke one day to realize that I was growing old. It had been almost sixteen years since I had seen the face on videotape. If the Oberst were real, if he were still alive anywhere in the world, he would be a very old man by now. I thought of the toothless, quaking old men who were still being revealed as war criminals. Most probably the Oberst was dead.