Schreiber's Secret (31 page)

On production of their press passes, Mark Edwards, Danielle Green and Dieter Müller had undergone the usual security checks before being allowed in through the main entrance. Along with barristers, clerks, court workers and witnesses, they were made to enter a Perspex cylinder, half of which closed behind them. The other half opened only when the pressure pad on which they were standing had registered their weight.

“Beam me up, Scottie,” Edwards had mouthed as Danielle waited for him to gain entrance. A police officer had then instructed them to pass through a metal-detector before they were body-searched. Given the
all-clear, they made their way to No. 1 Court, the venue for all the great murder trials of the century. Edwards had been there on many occasions, but for Green and Müller it was a new experience. The court was still empty and it was this fact, perhaps, which made it all the more imposing. The veneered oak edifice was indeed huge compared to other courts.

“We’ll be sitting here,” said Edwards, “in front of the jury and facing the barristers. “Personally, I think it’s a lousy position, but ours is not to reason why. In line with the jury, at the end there, to the right of the judge’s dais, is the witness box.
The thing with the canopy and the microphone. That big raised area is the dock. So, when we take our seats, the dock will be on our right, the jury behind us, the witness box, judge and Clerk of the Court on our left and the barristers facing us. Frankly, I think they get a better all-round view up there.” He pointed to the gallery where relatives and friends of the accused and members of the public would soon throng.

“Not room for many people up there, is there?” said Müller.

“About twenty-six,” Edwards replied. “Thirty at a pinch. It’s usually first come, first served.”

“My parents and Auntie Becky won’t be among them, though,” said Danielle.

“They’ve decided to let me be their representative.”

Almost before she had finished speaking,
their attention was distracted by the sight of Nigel Blomberg and his assistant, Brian Jones, sweeping into court. Wigged and gowned, the counsel for the prosecution looked purposeful and determined. Within minutes Blomberg’s adversary, Sir John Scrivener, had arrived with his entourage. Then came the rest of the press, who also took up many overflow benches. When most were seated, Henry Sonntag was led into the court and up the short flight of steps to the dock, which was about forty feet from the judge’s dais. A court officer sat a few feet from the defendant and on his right. A tremendous hubbub erupted as the public gallery began to fill.

Danielle stared at Henry Sonntag. The accused was dressed in a Charcoal-grey suit and subdued blue tie. He sat motionless, eyes seemingly fixed on the judge’s dais. She thought he looked extremely aristocratic. However hard she tried, she still suffered ambivalent feelings towards the man.

Mr Justice Pilkington, an elfin-faced man of advanced years, was still in his chambers, toying with the ermine collar on his scarlet robe. He loved murder trials. Lurking behind his somewhat benign countenance was the steel that had made his reputation. The appendage “hanging judge” in a land without capital punishment was indeed an accolade that struck fear into most defence counsels. But the judge knew that Sir John Scrivener, QC, was not one of them. Henry Sonntag’s counsel was unfazed by the reputations of others and was about as good a representative as the defendant could hope for.

The courtroom buzzed again as ushers delivered seating instructions to latecomers. Some seasoned court reporters were making a spectacle of themselves by vying with each another for the best places.

With the court packed to the rafters, attention was diverted to the members of the jury filing in. Eight men, four women. One of the men was West Indian and one of the women was of Asian appearance. Otherwise the jurors bore the usual attributes of the English: pale and stodgy complexions with a tendency towards obesity.

“Silence! Silence! Please be upstanding,” bellowed the court usher, a tall man with a thin moustache.

There was much shuffling of feet and the usual nervous coughing and spluttering as Mr Justice Peregrine Pilkington entered from a door leading directly to the judge’s dais. He nodded sagely. Those for whom the court tended to be a familiar habitat responded by bowing to their learned arbiter. Pilkington turned towards the jury. He had already told both counsel that he would ask its members whether any of them had lost relatives in a concentration camp.

He pointed out that he would not want any of them to suffer undue hardship because of revelations that might be made in the case. One glance at the jury
told Danielle that he needn’t have bothered. There wasn’t a Jewish face among them.

The
jury were duly sworn in.

The counsel for the prosecution rose sharply. Adjusting his wig, he shuffled a few papers and then paused deliberately until there was complete silence in the courtroom. The opportunity for histrionics was non
-existent, for he was obliged by protocol to remain standing in one position. In an English court the voice and the power of the word was everything. He had been taking lessons in sound-bites, although he believed these were more suitable for television than a courtroom.

Blomberg had read many books and countless newspaper articles on the Holocaust since being appointed to the case. He felt confident that his opening speech would condition the jury to accept the prosecution’s case. The barrister oozed confidence. After all, he was a Jew himself. And he was a Jew who believed with all his heart that Henry Sonntag should be incarcerated for the rest of his wretched life.

Thus, in stentorian tones and with a degree of self-righteousness, did Nigel Blomberg present his opening speech. He began by outlining the charges against Henry Sonntag. The court was hushed as he delineated the terrible crimes perpetrated against Joe Hyams and Howard Plant.

“Members of the jury,” he continued, “the prosecution invite you to consider each charge separately, and you must bring in verdicts relating to each allegation separately. In order to convict any defendant of any charge, you must be sure of his guilt. We submit that in this case you can be so sure.”

Blomberg paused to allow the legal gobbledygook to sink in. He then proceeded to forestall any defence argument about trying both cases at once.

“The prosecution say, members of the jury, that you are entitled to look at the circumstances of one death and find in these circumstances support for the allegations that they make in the other. In other words, that when you consider the murder of Howard Plant, the circumstances of that killing are so strikingly similar to the killing of Joseph Hyams that you can be sure, beyond reasonable doubt, that the same man committed both murders.”

Again Blomberg hesitated. He hated spelling it out chapter and verse. It bored him. He could not wait for the fireworks that he knew would erupt when he reached his main theme.

“And who is that man?”

All eyes looked towards Henry Sonntag. The defendant sat rigid in the dock, his features as impassive as a rock face.

“A good question, members of the jury, as you will soon be made aware. That man was the man whom the manservant of Plant heard making the death threat; that was the man whose suitcase was packed as if he were ready to make a hasty retreat; that was the man whose home was full of Nazi memorabilia, including SS daggers; that was the man who called himself Henry Sonntag. We say, in this particular case, however, that he is not. That he is indeed somebody else.”

A murmur ran around the courtroom.

“Order,” shouted the judge. “Order. I demand that there be silence in this court.”

The disturbance subsided quickly. So far, so good, thought the counsel for the prosecution.

“Therefore,” he continued, “in the evidence that we propose to call before you, we intend to show three things: one, that he was the man that murdered Plant; two, that the man who murdered Plant must be the same man as the man who murdered the taxi driver; and three, that that man is a man not named Sonntag but, for reasons best known to himself and which will become fully apparent to you, a man who chooses to live under a subterfuge. The subterfuge of calling himself Henry Sonntag when, in fact, he is a Nazi war criminal named Hans Schreiber.”

“Order. Order,” cried Mr Justice Pilkington as uproar broke out in the public gallery among those who had not been privy to all the machinations of the case. “I shall have order.”

It was a full minute before order was restored. Blomberg, having decided to sit down, rose sharply on a glance from the judge. Now would follow the most electrifying part of his speech, a speech that he had practised thoroughly. “May it please you, my Lord,” he said, acknowledging the judge’s request to continue. He then turned to the jurors. “Members of the jury, upon you
is the onus of deciding the guilt or innocence of the man who stands accused before you of two of the most bestial crimes in the annals of homicide in this country. Indeed, as I have stated, the manner in which the victims were murdered conjures up the worst excesses of Nazism. Remember the Nazis, members of the jury?” If not, he was about to enlighten them.

Blomberg waited for heads to nod. He knew that at least three-quarters of the jury had been born after the war. He just hoped they had learned something about the Holocaust, or had at least see
n
Schindler’s Lis
t
.

“It is worth considering”, he continued, “that never since the dawn of history had the world witnessed such a campaign of extermination as that perpetrated by the Nazis in the Second World War. This was not an explosion of religious fanaticism; not a wave of pogroms, the work of incited mobs running amok or led by a ringleader; not the riots of a soldiery gone wild or drunk with victory and wine; not the fear-wrought psychosis of revolution or civil war which rises and subsides like a whirlwind. It was none of these.”  Blomberg had practised his speech and the timing of its pauses to perfection. He counted off five seconds in his mind before continuing.

“No, members of the jury, this time an entire nation was handed over by a so-called legitimate government to murderers organized by the authorities and trained to hunt and kill, with one single provision, that everyone, an entire people, be murdered – men and women, old and young, healthy and sick, everyone, without any chance of even one of those condemned to extermination escaping his fate.”

The counsel for the prosecution paused again to ascertain the effect his words were having upon his audience. There were a few stifled coughs from the gallery, but the jury remained rapt.

“After they had suffered hunger, torture, degradation and humiliation inflicted on them by their tormentors to break them down, to rob them of the last shred of human dignity, and to deprive them of any strength to resist and perhaps of any desire to live, the victims were seized by the agencies of the state and brought from the four corners of Hitler’s Europe to the death camps, there to be killed, individually or in groups, by the murderers’ bullets over graves dug by the victims themselves, or in slaughterhouses constructed especially for human beings. For the condemned there was no judge to whom to appeal for a redress of injustice; no government from which to ask protection and punishment for the murderers; no neighbour on whose gate to knock and ask for shelter; no God to whom to pray for mercy.

“It is in all this that this last campaign of extermination differs from all the other massacres, mass killings and bloodshed perpetrated throughout history, such as the annihilation of defeated tribes in ancient times, the slaughter of conquered peoples by the Mongols, the wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Chmielnicki pogrom of 1648, the massacres of Greeks and Armenians at the hands of the Turks at various times, even the more recent massacres in Bosnia.”

Blomberg allowed a few seconds for his compacted history lesson to sink in. The silence was music to his ears. He then continued, the power of his baritone voice rising inexorably as he sought to press home the enormity of the Nazi crime.

“The Holocaust visited on the Jews is different from all these earlier massacres in its conscious and explicit planning, in its systematic execution, in the absence of any emotional element in the remorselessly applied decision to exterminate everyone, but everyone; to the exclusion of any possibility that someone, when his turn came to be liquidated, might escape his fate by surrendering, by joining the victors and collaborating with the
m, by converting to the victors’ faith, or by selling himself into slavery in order to save his life.

“The prosecution shall seek to prove, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that on two nights in November last, the most brutal excesses of the Nazi era were visited upon two Jews, by the defendant, a man ostensibly living as a Jew. However, we shall seek to prove that the defendant is indeed an impostor; that he is a man who has lived a lie for nigh on fifty years and that, in a racist frenzy, he carried out these brutal killings in the same fashion in which he dispatched his victims in the notorious Small Fortress of the Nazi camp at Theresienstadt. In the course of this trial in which he stands accused of two murders in the United Kingdom, we shall seek to prove that the defendant is indeed the so-called Beast of the Small Fortress, an SS officer who has the blood of many more men on his hands. In order to do this, we shall bring forward two witnesses who suffered at the hands of this man. Indeed, we shall seek to prove that the
identity of one of them, a man strikingly similar in physical appearance to him, was stolen by the defendant in order that he could create a cover for himself as the Nazi empire crumbled. What better surety for survival at war’s end than to pretend to be a Jewish victim? Even to the extent of having plastic surgery in order to resemble that victim, a man, members of the jury, a man whom he had believed he had executed. During the course of this trial, we shall seek to prove that not only did the man who calls himself Henry Sonntag murder Mr Hyams and Mr Plant, but that the man before you has the blood of many other Jews on his hands.”