The Palace of Justice, on Schmerlingplatz, in the Eighth District, was the meeting place for Vienna’s Inter-Allied Command, and the headquarters of the International Patrol. The flags of all four nations flew in front of this imposing building, with the flag of the nation that had temporary police control of the city—in this instance, the French—flying on top. Opposite the Palace of Justice stood the Russian Kommandatura, easily identifiable by the communist slogans and a large illuminated red star that lent the snow in front of the building a wet, pinkish hue. I walked into a grand entrance hall and asked one of the Red Army guards for the office responsible for the investigation of war crimes. Under his forage cap was a scar on his forehead that went down right to the skull, as if his head had once been scratched by something more lethal than a fingernail. Surprised to be spoken to in Russian and so politely, too, he directed me to a room at the top of the building and, with my heart in my mouth, I mounted the huge stone steps.
Like all public buildings in Vienna, the Board of Education had been built at a time when the Emperor Franz Josef had ruled an empire comprising 51 million souls and 675,000 square kilometers. There were just over 6 million people living in Austria in 1949, and the greatest European empire was long gone, but you wouldn’t have known that walking up the stairs of this imposing building. At the top was a wooden fingerpost sign, crudely painted with department names in Cyrillic. I followed the sign around the balustrade to the other side of the building, where I found the office I was looking for. The sign on a little wooden stand beside the door was in German, and it read: “SOVIET WAR CRIMES COMMISSION, AUSTRIA. For the investigation and examination of the misdeeds of the German fascist invaders and their accomplices in the monstrous atrocities and crimes of the German government.” Which seemed to describe it pretty well, all things considered.
I knocked on the door and went into a small outer office. Through a glass wall I could see a large room with several freestanding book-cases and about a dozen filing cabinets. On the wall of the office was a large picture of Stalin, and a smaller one of a plump-looking man in glasses who might have been Beria, the head of the Soviet secret police. A threadbare Soviet flag hung limply from a scout-size flagpole. Arranged along the wall behind the door was a montage of photographs featuring Hitler, a Nazi rally at Nuremberg, liberated concentration camps, piles of dead Jewish bodies, the Nuremberg war trial, and several convicted war criminals actually standing on the trap door of the gallows. It looked as clear a piece of inductive reasoning as you could have found outside a textbook on the general principles of logic. In the outer office, a thin, severe-looking woman wearing a uniform looked up from what she was typing and prepared to treat me like the fascist invader I had of course been. She had sad, hollow eyes, a spectacularly broken nose, a fringe of red hair, a sulky mouth, and cheekbones as high as the zygomatic bones on a Jolly Roger. The shoulder boards on her uniform were blue, which meant she was MVD. I wondered what she would have made of the Federal Republic’s Amnesty Law. Politely, in quite good German, she asked me my business. I handed her Inspector Strauss’s business card and, as if I had been auditioning for a part in a play by Chekhov, spoke to her in my best
velikorruskij.
“I apologize for disturbing you, Comrade,” I said. “This is not a formal inquiry. I’m not here on duty.” All of that was to preempt any requests to see my nonexistent warrant disk. “Does the name Poroshin, of the MVD, mean anything to you?”
“I know a General Poroshin,” she said, adjusting her manner very slightly. “In Berlin.”
“Perhaps he has already telephoned you,” I continued. “To explain my being here.”
She shook her head. “I’m afraid not,” she said.
“No matter,” I said. “I have an inquiry relating to a fascist war criminal here in Austria. The general recommended that I come to this office. That the legal officer in this office was one of the most efficient in the Special State Commission. And that if anyone could help me to track down the Nazi swine I’m looking for, it would be her.”
“The general said that?”
“Those were his exact words, Comrade,” I said. “He mentioned your name, but I’m afraid that I have forgotten it. I do apologize.”
“First Legal Officer Khristotonovna,” she said.
“Yes, indeed. That was it. Once again, my apologies for having forgotten it. My inquiry relates to two SS men. One of them was born here in Vienna. His name is Gruen. Eric Gruen. G-R-U-E-N. The other is Heinrich Henkell. That’s Henkell as in the champagne. I’m afraid I’m not sure where he was born.”
The lieutenant moved quickly out of her chair. The mention of Poroshin’s name had seen to that. I wasn’t surprised. He had scared me when I had known him, first in Vienna and then in Berlin two years later. She opened the glass door and led me to a table, where she invited me to sit down. Then she turned to face a large wooden card index, drew out a drawer as long as her arm, and riffled through several hundred cards. She was taller than I had supposed. Her blouse, buttoned up to the neck, was dun-colored, her longish skirt was black, and her army boots, like the belt around her waist, were as black and shiny as a village pond. On the right arm of her blouse was a stripe indicating that she had been wounded in combat, and on the left two medals. Russians wore actual medals rather than just the ribbons, like the Amis, as if they were too proud to take them off.
With two cards in her hand, Khristotonovna went over to a filing cabinet and started to search there. Then she excused herself from the room and went out a door in the back. I wondered if she was going off to check my story with the Austrian police, or even Poroshin in Berlin, if she would be coming back to the room with a Tokarev in her hand or even a couple of guards. I bit my lip and stayed where I was, diverting myself by thinking of yet more ways in which Gruen and Henkell and Jacobs had played me for a fool.
The way they had taken me into their confidence. The way Jacobs had pretended to be so surprised to see me again. The way he had pretended to distrust me. The way “Britta Warzok” had sent me on a wild-goose chase for no other purpose than to make me believe that an assault occasioning the loss of my finger had been the direct result of asking awkward questions about the Comradeship.
Khristotonovna was gone for about ten minutes, and when she returned she was carrying two files. She laid them on the table in front of me. She had even brought me a notebook and a pencil. “Do you read Russian?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Where did you learn?” she asked. “Your Russian is very good.”
“I was an intelligence officer, on the Russian front,” I said.
“So was I,” she said. “That is where I learned German. But your Russian is better than my German, I think.”
“Thank you for saying so,” I said.
“Perhaps . . .” But then she seemed to think better of whatever it was she had been about to say. So I said it for her.
“Yes. Perhaps we were adversaries once. But now we are on the same side, I hope. The side of justice.” A bit corny, perhaps. It’s odd, but Russian is a language that always brings out the sentimental in me.
“The files are in German and Russian,” she said. “One more thing. The rules state that when you have finished I shall have to ask you to sign a document stating that you have examined them. This document must remain on the file. Do you agree, Inspector?”
“Of course.”
“Very well.” Khristotonovna tried a smile. Her teeth were going bad. She needed a dentist like I needed a new passport. “Can I bring you some Russian tea?” she asked.
“Thank you, yes. If it’s no trouble. That would be very kind of you.”
“It’s no trouble.” She went away, her underskirt rustling like dried leaves, leaving me regretting my earlier unkind thought about her. She was much friendlier than I could ever have supposed.
I opened Gruen’s file and began to read.
There was everything and more. Gruen’s SS record. His Nazi Party record—he had joined the party in 1934. His officer’s commission. His SS record—“exemplary.” The first revelation was that Gruen had never been with the SS Panzer Corps at all. He had never served in France, nor on the Russian front. In fact, he had seen no front-line service at all. According to his medical records, which were sufficiently detailed to mention his missing little finger, he had never even been wounded. Gruen’s most recent medical examination had been in March 1944. Nothing had been overlooked. Not even a slight case of eczema. No mention there of a missing spleen, or any spinal injury. I felt my ears start to burn as I read this. Was it really possible that he had faked his illness? That he wasn’t confined to a wheelchair at all? That he hadn’t lost his spleen? If so, they really had played me like a piano. Nor was Gruen the junior officer he had claimed to be. The file contained copies of his promotion certificates. The last one, dated January 1945, revealed that Eric Gruen had ended the war as an SS Oberführer—a senior colonel—in the Waffen-SS. But it was what I read next that disturbed me most of all, although I was half expecting it after the revelation that he had never been in the SS Panzer Corps.
Born to a rich Viennese family, Eric Gruen had been considered a brilliant young doctor. After graduating medical school he had spent some time in Cameroon and Togo, where he had produced two influential papers on tropical diseases that had been published in the
German Medical Journal.
Upon his return in 1935, he had joined the SS and been a member of the Interior Health Department, where it was suspected he had been involved in experiments on mentally handicapped children. After the outbreak of war, he had been a doctor at Lemberg-Janowska, at Majdanek, and finally at Dachau. At Majdanek, it was known that he had infected eight hundred Soviet POWs with typhus and malaria and conducted studies of the progress of the disease. At Dachau, he had assisted Gerhard Rose, a brigadier general in the medical service of the Luftwaffe. There was some cross-referencing to Rose. A professor at the Robert Koch Institute of Tropical Medicine in Berlin, Rose had performed lethal experiments on concentration camp inmates at Dachau in pursuit of vaccines for malaria and typhus. More than twelve hundred prisoners at Dachau, including many children, had been deliberately given malaria by infected mosquitoes or injections of malaria-infected blood.
The details of the experimentation made extremely uncomfortable reading. In the Dachau doctors’ trial of October 1946, a Roman Catholic priest, one Father Koch, had testified that he had been sent to the malaria station at Dachau, where, every afternoon, a box of mosquitoes had been placed between his legs for half an hour. After seventeen days he left the station, and it was another eight months before he succumbed to a malaria attack. Other priests, children, Russian and Polish prisoners, and, of course, many Jews, had not been so lucky, and several hundred had died in the three years that these malaria experiments had continued.
For their crimes, seven of the so-called Nazi doctors had been hanged at Landsberg in June 1948. Rose had been one of five sentenced to life in prison. Another four doctors had been sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from ten to twenty years. Seven had been acquitted. At his trial, Gerhard Rose had justified his actions, arguing that it was reasonable to sacrifice “a few hundred” in pursuit of a prophylactic vaccine capable of saving tens of thousands of lives.
Rose had been assisted by a number of other doctors including Eric Gruen and Heinrich Henkell, and a nurse-kapo called Albertine Zehner.
Albertine Zehner. That was a real shock. But it had to be the same girl. And it seemed to explain a great deal that had been a mystery to me. Engelbertina Zehner had been a Jewish prisoner turned kapo and nursing assistant in the medical block at Majdanek and Dachau. She had never worked in a camp brothel at all. She had been a nurse-kapo.
Gruen’s file described him as being still at large, a wanted war criminal. An early investigation into Gruen’s case by the legal officer of the 1st Ukrainian Front and two legal officers from the Soviet Special State Commission had come to nothing. Statements from inmates at all three camps, and F. F. Bryshin, a forensic medical expert from the Red Army, were provided.
The last page in the file was the record of file protocol, and this, too, provided a surprise for me, for here I found the following note:
This file examined by American occupation authorities in Vienna, October 1946, in the person of Major J. Jacobs, United States Army.
Khristotonovna returned with a glass of hot Russian tea on a little tin tray. There was a long spoon and little bowl of sugar lumps. I thanked her and turned my attention to Heinrich Henkell’s file. This was less detailed than Gruen’s. Before the war he had been involved in Aktion T4, the Nazi Euthanasia Program, at a psychiatric clinic in Hadamar. During the war, as a Sturmbannführer in the Waffen-SS, he had been deputy director of the German Institute of Military Scientific Research and had seen service at Auschwitz, Majdanek, Buchenwald, and Dachau. At Majdanek, he had assisted Gruen in his typhus experiments, and later, at Dachau, his malaria experiments. In the course of his medical research he had amassed a large collection of human skulls of different racial types. Henkell was believed to have been executed by American soldiers at Dachau, following the camp’s liberation.
I sat back heavily in my chair. My loud sigh brought Lieutenant Khristotonovna back to my side. And she mistook the lump in my throat for something other than feeling sorry for myself.
“Tough going?”
I nodded, too choked to say anything for a moment. So I finished my tea, signed the protocol, thanked her for her help, and went outside. It felt good to be breathing clean, fresh air. At least until I saw four military policemen come out of the Ministry of Justice and climb into a truck, ready to patrol the city. Four more elephants followed. And then another four. I stayed in the doorway, watching from a safe distance and smoking a cigarette until they had all gone.