 
Dackerl

by Michael Buergermeister

Copyright Michael Buergermeister

Smashwords Edition

Chapter One

Had the Nazi Reinhold Nierlich murdered my father? It was impossible to tell. It wasn't even clear whether the man in question was really called Reinhold Nierlich at all. Perhaps his true name was Hannes Planek. Perhaps it was something entirely different. I simply couldn't tell. The only thing I knew for certain was that his code name was "Dackerl"

I realized that Professor Wittgenstein, my teacher in Cambridge, was right: uncertainty reaches down into the roots of everything.

Professor Wittgenstein taught me that for a solution to be found a problem has to be looked at in the correct fashion. I couldn't tell though what the correct fashion in this particular instance was.

It is not merely a question, my professor stated, of what is to be said about a particular issue but how one talks about it to begin with. One always has to learn a particular method, which is then applied. But what was the particular method in this case? Again I wasn't sure.

I had just turned twenty when I learned of my father's death. I immediately broke off my studies in Cambridge and journeyed to Vienna to exact my revenge.

The only thing I knew for certain was that my father had been involved in an investigation of a drugs cartel. Had he been killed because his investigation had been too successful or because he'd been opposed to the Nazis before, during and after the war? His fiercely anti-Nazi stance was well known and he'd frequently been viciously denounced as a traitor.

My father had sent both my mother and I to England in 1938 and had continued on to Hollywood, where he'd earned a living as a screenwriter. He'd been persuaded to return to help his native country by a famous film director, Fritz Reimann, and had been killed as a direct consequence of this act of folly.

As I caught the train to Vienna I couldn't help but think of my sister, Judith, who'd disappeared. There were rumors that she'd returned to Vienna. I suspected that this was the real reason my father had returned to that particular city. He'd come to look for her. The job of tackling the drugs trade had only been the ostensible reason. Of course these concerns were intertwined. My sister was a drug addict.

When I saw her in London Judith complained of being a "mere refugee" who everyone detested. "Our loss of home (the word she used was: "Heimatlosigkeit"), is not merely social and intellectual, it is artistic too." The sadness of the war had quite paralyzed her. Her one comfort was laudanum.

She was tired of being treated as an outsider and was bored of being asked whether she really wanted her own country to lose the war.

She railed against Germans, calling them boorish (ungehobelt), stupid (stumpfsinning) and mad (verrueckt). They were wholly without reason or politeness. It was their mixture of brutality and hysteria that made them the scourge of civilization. She avoided them like the plague.

As I stared out the window I thought of London during the war. I remembered its perennial mist mingled with tufts of smoke from burning houses. I thought of the traffic jams caused by streets being blown up and the desolate ruins where squares had once been. I recalled how the old, red bricks had been reduced to powder. The scenes reminded me of a builder's yard.

Once I went, together with my sister and a mutual friend, to Buszards where we ate turkey and pancakes. We discussed whether civilization had come to an end. "Of course", the friend opined, "one's true life is in ideas. "My sister, I recalled, had been depressed. "We live without a future," she lamented with a melancholic tone in her voice.

On another occasion I invited her to Cambridge where I put her up in the Bull Hotel. In the evening we had a curious dinner of haddock and sausage meat followed by marmalade and spiced buns at Newnham College.

A don said that this war was better than the last, which we both considered a curious observation, to say the least.

My sister stated that it would be better if the invasion came. Then there would be an end to the perennial uncertainty, which she could no longer stand. "At least it would put an end to our misery," she muttered. She'd been bombed out in London and now led what she termed a "vegetable existence". She was only able to salvage a fraction of her books and furniture.

When the siren went off she no longer paid it any heed. She complained that she was going mad and was forever hearing voices. She feared she wouldn't be able to get over it. It was quite impossible for her to think clearly anymore. The war had driven her quite insane.

My sister told me of how, while on the train from London, she watched haystacks blazing on the Downs.

I could sympathize with her emotional swings, her moments of despair followed by apathy. I could understand how, for many a night, she'd been close to suicide. Only the thought of friends and former lovers kept her alive. We debated, in all seriousness, whether it was better to live or to die.

London in winter, during the war, was no pleasant affair. The buses didn't run, the trains were hours late or lost entirely, the pipes were frozen, the electricity frequently failed and newspapers only arrived in the afternoons. The Black Out was murderous while prices were forever rising. My sister lived in a particularly miserable flat, with mouldy carpets and water oozing from the bricks.

The cups rattled in her hand during the raids while the windows shook. She complained that she couldn't sleep for thinking of them.

We occasionally retreated to the National Gallery, which had been emptied of its pictures, in order to listen to Stravinsky's "Petruschka", to the Globe Theatre, where we were entertained by a performance of "The Importance of Being Ernest" or to the cinema where we watched "The Philadelphia Story."

We discussed the merits of "The Grapes of Wrath" or "Ninochka" as well as the performances of Fonda and Garbo. We read "Malte Laurids Bruegge" or "Les Enfants Terribles" and chatted about the ideas of E.M. Forster or T.S. Eliot.

My sister envied me on account of the fact that I'd been sent to England at an early age and been educated there. Writing and speaking English was, for her, pure torment. She found her own texts appalling and was quite miserable as a result. She worried that she'd never be able to make a living as a writer.

She was in despair, close to tears, and strained to breaking point. The excess of work and excitement hadn't helped. Nor had her abuse of Benzedrine for that matter.

Her exile had now lasted three years. When would it end? Would it ever do so? Austria had grown stranger, more distant and she herself had grown more indifferent toward it. At the same time her anxiety had increased. She needed a home, a place to call her own. She was homesick for Vienna.

My sister said that she felt sadness beyond expression. The political situation made her uneasy and depressed. She also had money worries and debts. Her desire for death had become palpable and she'd felt quite frozen by her loneliness. The collective catastrophe had plunged her into utter despair while death had become a friend to her.

We discussed suicide in my gradually darkening room should Hitler land. What point was there in waiting, my sister opined? It was better to turn on the gas oven now and get it over with. For this reason she always carried opiates.

The French were beaten, the invasion was imminent and we'd most probably be killed or interned as fifth columnists or put in a concentration camp, along with all the Jews, should the Germans actually land. The Germans would appoint a pro-consul while the English government would undoubtedly flee to Canada.

I told her that the war was mere bombast. It couldn't possibly last with the same intensity. It was just like an illness that had to run its course. The sad truth is that one obsesses about war but after a while the faculty of feeling dismisses it and one becomes quite indifferent to it all. When not appalled or frightened one grows quite bored with the entire affair.

Of course the war had driven many mad, I conceded. There were those raving, like drunkards, claiming all Germans were devils and that every single one of them should be killed.

There was also a flood of patriotic speeches and there were insane rumors of Germans dressing up as nuns. There were also innumerable horror stories. Of men dying from sheer shock rather than actual wounds or of them shooting themselves as planes swooped down from above.

Every newspaper and every radio program churned out the same dreary drivel with the same emotional falsity, all worked assiduously at weaving the same myths and illusions. Real feeling was parodied. I was tired of how every paper, every broadcast rose to the same mock-heroic strain. It was all, I had to confess, quite appalling.

The worst thing about the war, my sister said, apart from her feelings of pressure, danger and horror, was the sacrifice of pleasure. Margarine was rationed while meat was bad and scarce. This meant that all she had every evening was egg or fish. She was bored and appalled. For hours she just sat waiting for a bomb to fall and put an end to her misery.

There were though moments of poetry among the darkness such as the thick clumps of crocuses in her garden, the daffodils that hadn't as yet opened and the searchlights at night but they were seldom. This is what had saved her.

The most extraordinary thing was that one was alive at all, my sister once remarked. "One still struggles and dreams. One still has wishes and thoughts." Of course she sought to save herself in mechanical activity, meaningless love affairs and with the help of laudanum or Benzedrine. Was it really her world that was falling apart, she once asked me? She was no longer sure.

How could war be prevented? What had been the cause of this particular catastrophe? Had our family done enough to stop it? All these questions plagued her.

We discussed Eliot's idea that the business of a poet is to preserve tradition. Literature, Eliot opined, is not consecrated by time; it is beyond time.

For Virginia Woolf, I explained, novels are like music. There is such a mass of detail that the only way to hold a work together is by abstracting it into themes. Virginia Woolf tried to state them in the first chapter, brought in variations and developments and then made them all heard together. She ended by bringing back the first themes in the last chapters.

Once my sister had been blown out of her bed by an explosion. She had taken shelter in a church and had sat on a hard, cold seat. She cradled a small boy, a complete and utter stranger, an orphan, in her arms, and felt ashamed of her cowardice. Whenever a bomb fell she felt like jumping up and running out into the street.

When she emerged the next morning she noticed how the faces of the people were set and their eyes bleary. A man in his pajamas wheeled away a barrow full of books while another walked slowly down the empty street.

The house next door was reduced to a pile of bricks. Scraps of cloth still hung to a bare wall while a looking glass swung in the wind.

A bookshop was entirely destroyed, a hotel gutted while a wine shop wholly without windows.

Some people stood at the tables while others cleared away heaps of blue-green glass. Others tore off fragments left in the frames. A cinema was torn open, the stage visible, while decorations swung to and fro.

Then the siren went off again. Cars stopped, people started running while horses were pulled out of their shafts. The sound of planes loudened. There were distant pops, the whistling of bombs and then thuds. Windows started to shake.

She looked up and saw a plane shot down before her very eyes. There was a flash of light and a burst of thick, black smoke. Then the plane was gone. It had vanished, as if into thin air.

One of the bombs hit a gas main and there was a cloud of thick, grey dust. Another hit a church where she'd taken shelter the night before. Its organ was thrown out onto the road.

There were heaps of glass, running water and a great gap where some offices had once been.

I told my sister about my meeting with Stefan Zweig. He explained that art has its own form of development. It isn't straight, slow or purposeful like the sciences. It is a wrestling and unfolding of antithetical forces, a struggle, which only later generations can decide is worthwhile or not.

Art always grows out of tensions and conflicts with other works of art. When a work of art blossoms it creates seeds for further, perhaps contrary works.

He also told me about Rainer Maria Rilke and how shy he was. He preferred to hide his intimate life and seldom betrayed his true feelings in public. He was one of the most inconspicuous people Zweig had ever met. One never noticed him, whether in a train carriage, a restaurant or a concert. This was partly due to his decision to wear simple clothes. The reason he refused to let his picture be published was because he wanted to be able to observe more freely.

He was also a man who preferred to listen than speak. He was never arrogant, overbearing or one to persuade anybody of anything.

What he detested most of all was loudness and boorishness; a loud person was a torment while he feared curious admirers like the plague.

Yet he was always able, regardless of where he lived, to turn the environment around him into something unique and personal.

I also told my sister about my meeting with W. H. Auden. For Auden, I explained, there were three options. One can manipulate objects, such as farmers, engineers and scientists do, manipulate people, such as politicians, teachers and doctors do, or manipulate one's own phantasy, such as artists do.

The goal of everyone, he told me, is to live without working. If one hasn't inherited or stolen money one must persuade society to pay one for doing what one likes.

Once my sister returned home to find a heap of rubble. The only objects remaining were an old basket chair and a piece of luggage. A single window in a glass door still hung upright. Otherwise everything was bricks and wood splinters. There was just litter, glass, black, soft dust, plaster powder and books strewn all over the floor.

She told me that she had felt a sense of exhilaration at losing everything. It had come almost as a relief. Now she was free to start from scratch and she was free to go wherever she pleased. It was at that point that she started talking about returning to Vienna after the war.
Chapter Two

Vienna had changed much since those dreary days in 1938, when I'd last seen the city. Smashed tanks rusted where elegant cars had once parked, exhausted women rummaged through piles of rubble while half-naked, forlorn looking children peered hopelessly into dismal, empty shops.

People gathered at stations to see whether their husbands, lovers or brothers had returned. Maimed veterans, an empty boot or an empty sleeve carelessly flung over their shoulder, hobbled around on crutches.

The only thing I had was the address of a police station, which had first notified me of my father's death. It was in the Fuhrmanngasse in the Josefstadt and was not a pretty sight. Drunken, cruel, brutal looking policemen beat prisoners and laughed about it afterwards. I couldn't help but think that these were the men responsible for Auschwitz. Without such police neither the concentration camps nor the Gulags would ever have been possible.

The hideous, foul smelling man in charge, Inspector Kurt Furz, was like a monster from hell. He told me that he was unable to help me with my enquiries. I was hardly surprised. Given the disgusting state of the place it was a miracle that he got anything done at all.

Shortly after arriving in Vienna a friend working for British Intelligence told me that some Nazis had been picked up. They had a solid lead. They were about to get the notorious killer. They were close to catching Dackerl.

I hurried over to the British sector of Vienna, to the thirteenth district, Hietzing, to find out more. The British headquarters was located in what had once been Hotel Schoenbrunn, close to the palace and the park.

The fact that I'd worked for British Military Intelligence translating recordings made of German POWs meant that I could come and go at will. A friend told me that there was a significant crackdown on Nazis. It was the biggest operation to date.

Lists had been drawn up and raids were being made on a nightly and daily basis. Occasionally scattered shooting could be heard in the city. Some Nazis put up fierce resistance but most, as a rule, went peacefully and rarely resisted. They knew the game was up.

It would take a while before there'd be any information about Dackerl, I was told. My stay in Vienna, my friend said, would be considerably longer than I'd initially expected.

I was staying at Hotel Astoria, close to the opera, and the only people I talked to for days on end were an Austrian professor of physics, a Danish aristocrat, who worked as a journalist, and a charming young Russian lady in whom I immediately fell madly in love.

Olga was the fourth child (and third daughter) in a family of five. Her parents, Prince – and Princess –, had left Russia in the spring of 1919. She'd grown up as a refugee in Germany, France, and Lithuania, where her father's family had once owned property. Before the war she'd worked as a secretary at the British Legation in Lithuania.

She and her sister Anastasia were spending the summer with a childhood friend of her mother's, Countess –, in the latter's country home, Schloss –, in Silesia when the war broke out.

At the time the rest of the family were scattered all over Europe. Her parents and younger brother Vladimir were in Lithuania while her elder sister Elena was in Rome. Her eldest brother, Pavel, who suffered from tuberculosis, was stuck in a sanatorium in Switzerland.

Olga and Anastasia moved to Berlin with just enough money to survive for three weeks.

They were allowed to stay in a large flat close to the Kurfuerstendamm but only used one bedroom, one bathroom and the kitchen so as to avoid having to employ a maid.

The sisters could only bathe on weekends, were continually cold and had little to eat. The situation went from being dramatic to catastrophic when their mother and brother Vladimir arrived with merely forty dollars between them.

Eventually, with their money just about to run out, Olga managed to get a job with the Drahtloser Dienst (D.D.), the news service of the Reichs-Rundfunk Gesellschaft (R.R.G.) while Anastasia managed to get a job with the Auswaertiges Amt (A.A.), the German Foreign Ministry. Neither were paid well: merely 300 marks a month, of which 110 were deducted for taxes.

Olga spent her days translating endless articles, mostly vituperative, which were so involved as to be completely incomprehensible. Her boss was so disagreeable that she had to restrain herself from pushing him out of the window.

She had to get up at 5.30 each morning and returned at around 6 p.m. while Anastasia worked between 10 a.m. and 8 p.m.. As a consequence they rarely saw one another.

Thankfully the sisters were successful at persuading their mother and brother to leave for Rome. The trip was not without mishaps: their brother Vladimir ended up in Warsaw, with the luggage, tickets and passports, while their mother arrived in Vienna with nothing at all.

They eventually got to Rome but only after a few things, such as their mother's Faberge enamel frames and Vladimir's clothes, had been stolen in Venice.

Whenever she had free time Olga shopped for food, which invariably meant waiting in long queues. Everything was rationed. Shortages were so severe that her colleagues took to stealing toilet paper out of the office.

There was little to eat so she was forced to live off yoghurt, which wasn't as yet rationed and porridge. Breakfast, lunch and supper were pretty much the same.

One of her tasks at work was typing up monitored recordings of the BBC, which nobody else in Germany was supposed to even know about. Once a colleague left a sensitive document at a restaurant and nearly had a nervous breakdown as a result; he feared immediate execution with an axe.

Even after both sisters got a raise their pay remained paltry. Both earned merely 450 marks a month. 100 went to the family in Rome, 100 was necessary to repay debts while 200 went on taxes, food and transportation. This meant that they only had 50 marks for their personal expenses, clothes and mail.

The miserable state of affairs wasn't helped when their father arrived from Lithuania with just two dirty handkerchiefs, his shaving things and a shirt. He'd been forced to flee while travelling and hadn't had a chance to go home.

The Soviet invasion of Lithuania rendered her passport invalid and Olga became effectively stateless.

Life was not improved by the British air raids, which began in August 1940. They meant that Olga only got three hours of sleep a night.

Once, at a garden party, as she stood watching a bombing raid over Berlin, Olga couldn't help but admire its beauty. The next night she got into her sister's bed and hugged her with all her might. Occasional flashes lit up the room while the noise was quite simply appalling. The planes flew so low that she imagined them to be directly above her. On another occasion she was so tired she simply slept through it all; she heard neither the sirens nor the bombs nor the all clear.

At one party a friend fell apart and started screaming that he couldn't take it anymore. He had to be wrestled to the floor. A shot rang out and he was very nearly killed.

A few nights later the alarm sounded just when Olga was starting for home. She hurried to a friend's where they listened to records until two in the morning. After that she set off for a second time. The sirens began to howl once more and at Kurfuerstendamm a policeman shoved her into a cellar. There she sat on a cold floor and shivered for hours. When she emerged she saw that two ambulances had collided. Those who'd survived the bombing had perished in the accident.

It didn't help to know that her favorite aunt had been killed by a bomb in London. She'd been riding on a bus at the time.

For a while Olga sought shelter in a well-arranged cellar but after the cellar pipes in a neighboring building burst and all the occupants drowned she began to distrust cellars.

What saved her sanity was the occasional holiday, such as at Schloss – in Westphalia, which was filled with fine pictures, good furniture, excellent books and surrounded by a moat and charming wooded hills.

Olga was able to get up a 10 a.m., spend her mornings writing letters, her afternoons chatting, reading or going for long walks and her evenings gossiping by the fire.

Once, on her way to a castle in Bohemia, it crossed her mind that she might well have left the electric iron on in the kitchen. After a brief moment of anxiety she dismissed the thought.

When Olga returned from a thoroughly relaxing weekend Anastasia was furious. The iron had indeed been left on. Not only had it been left on, it had burnt its way through a shelf and had landed on the stove. A flame had been slowly creeping up the wall when Anastasia had arrived.

In September 1940 Olga and Anastasia were forced to move to a smaller flat in the Hardenbergstrasse, between the art academy and the zoo. It consisted of a small sitting room, a bedroom, a bathroom and a tiny kitchen.

Occasionally Olga would go to the opera in Unter den Linden, which was close by. Other times she'd dine with her sister, and her sister's fiancé, prince –, at Hotel Adlon, which was a stone's throw away from the opera.

The fare at the hotel, which was paid for by prince –, made a welcome change to the red cabbage, white cabbage, codfish, stonefish patties, and potato dumplings she was forced to eat at the office canteen.

In January 1941 she got a job at the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry. The hours were irregular, the office was cold and dark but the atmosphere congenial.

She was inundated with translations and book reviews, which meant that her eyes were forever strained.

One of the few distractions was the Hess affair, when Hitler's deputy was captured after landing in England. He was rumored to have been involved in peace negotiations.

Innumerable jokes did the rounds: "There are no new reports of any German ministers flying to England", "Goebbels and Goering are still firmly in German hands", "We've long known that the government was crazy, what is new is that they openly admit the fact", Churchill to Hess: "You're a lunatic?" "No, just his deputy".

In the course of the Russian campaign, which began in June 1941, Olga lost some of her closest and dearest friends. The campaign was, she said, "a beastly affair." Neither side took prisoners while all the rules of war were completely and utterly ignored. On not a few occasions her lack of enthusiasm was met with ire.

In September 1941 Anastasia married her prince charming and the couple went to Spain for their honeymoon. Her mother and brother Vladimir stayed in Berlin and the latter moved into the flat in the Hardenbergstrasse.

The demands of war meant that the quality of the food in the office canteen deteriorated quite dramatically. By 1942 the only way Olga could eat properly was by going out every night, which proved quite exhausting.

Occasionally she found time to escape to the country but even there she wasn't spared the indignity of the occasional raid.

Once, while reading in bed in a palace, she heard the sounds of planes overhead. The flak of the neighboring town opened up and all hell broke loose. A full moon lit up the moats while searchlights swept the sky.

Olga leaned out of her window and, for a brief moment, was caught up by the beauty of it all. She ran down the corridor and bumped into her hosts, who were rushing to save her. They all took refuge in the courtyard while a servant scurried around, opening up the windows.

An hour later, after everything had quietened down, she heard a terrific bang and found herself hurtling through the air. A bomb had landed miles away but was so huge that it swept her off her feet.

The difficulties of travelling in a war-torn country meant that journeying to a wedding seemed completely out of the question. Olga was, however, despite all her reservations and doubts, persuaded to do so. She spent hours poring over timetables in order to figure out how to get there. It would take her literally days to reach her destination.

To her surprise the first carriage she got into was completely empty. In the Ruhrgebiet, the industrial heartland of Germany, most towns had been reduced to ruins. Only the cathedral was still standing in Cologne while little was left of Mainz. She was appalled at the ghastly havoc that had been wrought.

Olga changed trains at Frankfurt and was crammed for hours into a toilet with three other girls. After changing twice more she finally reached her destination.

The castle in Bavaria was perched on top of a rock and she was somewhat surprised to find herself being conveyed up to it in a lift. She'd expected to be driven up in a horse and carriage and thought she'd meander up slowly on some fairy-tale-like winding path.

The family was at Mass so there was nobody to receive her. Olga hoped to get some sleep but the organ in the castle chapel was so loud that it prevented any thought of doing so.

She soon caught sight of her friend, Harald, the bridegroom, who escorted her along endless corridors, upstairs, downstairs, and upstairs again. Eventually they reached the so-called "children's wing", where Olga finally met the bride.

Young men, brothers and cousins of the bride, kept coming up to her to be introduced.

At lunch, in the so-called "Ancestors' Hall", she met the hostess, the bride's mother, who was delighted she'd made it after all.

Olga was given a tour of the castle, which had as many cellars and attics as rooms. It was so vast that she was perpetually getting lost and was forever having to call for help.

As the castle filled up with guests in the course of the evening it began to remind her of a hotel.

On the day of the wedding itself the stunning dresses of the ladies and imposing attire of the men contrasted with their mad, somewhat undignified rush for the bathroom. There was only one on each floor.

The ensuing chaos and the fact that Olga got lost once more, and couldn't find either her hat or her short green dress, meant that she was nearly too late for the wedding itself.

The procession commenced precisely at 10 a.m., with the guests first, then the bridal party and the families of the bridal pair last. As it wound its way out of the castle, across the courtyard, down the wide ramp and into the church, it was hard for Olga to believe that she was actually living in the middle of a war.
Chapter Three

The first man I visited in Vienna was an old family friend: Gregor Konigsberg, a Jewish scholar of Islamic art, who'd somehow, quite miraculously, managed to survive the war.

He was dressed elegantly, with blazer, silk shirt, necktie and cane and lived in a spacious, airy apartment in Vienna's eighth district, its Josefstadt.

I told him what had happened to my father and he turned away, as if physically repulsed by the news. He looked down to the ground with a sad, knowing expression and sank back into his comfortable armchair.

I asked him about his life under the Nazis. How had it been possible for them to come to power? What had life been like under their rule? Above all else: how had he managed to survive?

After some short, somewhat perfunctory enquiries about mutual acquaintances and after consuming a large number of extremely strong cups of coffee and some extremely sweet cakes, he commenced his long and sorry tale.

"In January 1933" he began, "I was tormented by problems surrounding the house I was building. In addition to that: I had money worries. I wasn't earning as much from my books as I once did. I was in debt."

"Once the Nazis came to power that January I wasn't only confronted with problems resulting from the frost: all of a sudden I was unable to borrow. My wife, Anna, had a wild determination to build the house. Her determination to do so intensified by the hour. Her despair at our inability to do so grew with each passing day."

"One of the first consequences of the new laws, or more exactly: new directives, was the loss of our housekeeper. My maid quit her job once she realized I'd no longer be able to keep her. I was annoyed at the amount of banal housework that had to be done as a result. All the heating, dusting and drying were extremely demanding and involved precious hours that were lost."

"My work on Islamic art in the Usbek Empire between 1500 and 1700 (Did you know by the way that the Russians only first captured Tashkent in 1865 and Samarkand in 1868? Half of the subjects of the Tsar weren't even Russian!), was going exceedingly badly. All I had left were my lectures."

"I was tormented by the lack of time: I had to heat, wash, and go shopping. I felt completely worthless and utterly superfluous."

"What did it matter whether I left one or two books to posterity? It was all mere vanity on my part."

"Bitterness, depression and shame flooded me whenever I considered the political situation. I was angry at the way everybody was blind or ran for cover the moment the Nazis attained power. Nobody dared stand up against the state of terror. Everything fell apart without a fight."

"I remember the violence, the propaganda, the torchlight processions, the Swastikas, and the deranged roar of Hitler on the radio."

"The Reichstag burned eight days before the election. It was perfectly obvious that the Nazis had done it yet nobody dared say a word."

"Then came the house raids, the murders and a whole array of prohibitions."

"A revolution took place, a party dictatorship emerged while the opposition disappeared from the face of the earth."

"Of course we were told, initially at least, that nothing would happen to the Jews. Nobody dared say a thing. Everyone was frightened. My left arm began to ache and I started contemplating death."

"One friend, from whom I'd least expected it, declared his enthusiasm for the new regime and parroted banal cant about "unity", "progress" etc., with remarkable, pious devotion in his eyes. His wife, by contrast, was more pragmatic. Everything, in her opinion, had gone wrong and a new approach was needed."

"The friend's hypocrisy, pretense and obsequiousness disgusted me. I resolved to have nothing more to do with him ever again."

"Each day brought more naked violence, breaches of the law, criminal edicts and barbarous convictions."

"I couldn't escape my feelings of disgust and shame. Everybody seemed to have crawled away or trembled with fear."

"The new measures were insidious: an office was created to combat Bolshevism, Jewish lawyers were forbidden, Jewish judges were dismissed while academics reached new lows of dishonor, intellectual dishonesty, and ideological conformity."

"In schools teachers worried about losing their jobs. Nobody trusted anybody anymore."

"There were Swastikas everywhere, from toothpaste to children's toys while an atmosphere of fear dominated everything one did. It was reminiscent of the Jacobin terror. One didn't fear for one's life but one did worry about one's daily bread and one's freedom."

"Again and again the government threatened the Jews. The atmosphere was oppressive. Nobody could breathe freely anymore. Nobody could speak or write an honest word."

"The atmosphere was reminiscent of the Middle Ages. I thought we were on the verge of a pogrom."

"I felt more shame than fear, shame at Germany. I'd always thought of myself as German and had always believed that Germany in the Twentieth Century was different from Rumania in the Fourteenth. I was wrong."

"Everything was hopeless and meaningless. I had the impression that a catastrophe, an explosion was coming, and that we, the Jews, would pay for it."

"All I'd considered inimical to Germany: brutality, injustice and hypocrisy, now flourished. My wife was in despair."

"The pressure reminded me of the pressure of the war in 1914-18 but this time around there was no rule of law. There was merely terror, tyranny and despotism. I began to hate the collective."

"Friends, who had no other means of making a living, lost their posts. A Jewish doctor, a distant cousin of mine, was taken out of his surgery and beaten to death."

"Each speech by the chancellor, the ministers and the commissars was filled with clumsy lies, hypocrisy, and cliches."

"I quickly realized that it would be quite impossible to wash away the shame. I had no trust in Germany or, for that matter, in humanity anymore."

"I was tired of life yet had no particular wish to die. On the contrary."

"It was difficult for me to believe in my work on Islamic art in the Usbek Empire between 1500 and 1700, which I began to doubt would ever see the light of day."

"In April, three months after the Nazis had come to power, I planted seven cherry trees, ten gooseberry bushes and managed to put a fence around our land. I passionately forced myself to believe in the project of building the house, if only for the sake of my wife, but didn't always succeed in actually doing so."

"If one was merely 25% Jewish one was considered "artfremd", foreign to the species. It was like Spain in the Fifteenth Century. Then it was a matter of religion but now it was a more a question of zoology and business."

"Every day there were new atrocities. People were arrested and tortured. A Jewish lawyer I knew in Chemnitz was kidnapped and shot."

"Every worker and employee who was not "national gesinnt", nationally minded, could be fired and replaced by one who was."

"I was surrounded by the fear of slaves."

"Anna was in despair. Her nerves were shot through. She frequently suffered nervous breakdowns. No morning passed without her waking up crying."

"I grew lusterless, dull-edged and almost indifferent to all the misery around me. I could think no further than one day at a time."

"I was surrounded by complete and utter helplessness, cowardice and fear."

"Those who beat people to death for no reason went unscathed while those who spoke of these atrocities were punished."

"I thought at the time that my heart wouldn't be able to bear such affliction."

"I wasn't able to swallow properly, I suffered from hoarseness, and had pains in both my arm and shoulder."

"It was a time of being constrained on the telephone and of reading between the lines of the newspapers."

"In May a friend left for Palestine. He took 15,000 Marks and abandoned his child. The joke of the day was: "Are you coming to Palestine out of conviction or from Germany?""

"I was content if Anna was simply able to wake up without crying and was able to sleep soundly at night."

"Although I suffered from heart trouble I didn't go to a doctor. My fear of death was paralyzed by sorrow."

"In October a second friend left for Palestine. We listened to what he had to say but I didn't like it. 200,000 Jews lived together with 800,000 Arabs in a territory the size of East Prussia."

"We considered moving to Palestine but realized that we'd be exchanging one form of narrow nationalism for another."

"I became conscious about how useless I was, a relic of "High Culture", and how ill equipped I was to survive in a primitive environment. I couldn't even teach foreign languages. My friends were able to adapt and get jobs abroad but I wasn't. I could only live and die in Germany."

"I was ordered to give a Nazi salute at the university but refused to do so. My colleagues ignored the fact and simply nodded as before. Others were not so fortunate. A truck driver I knew was fired. Anyone who failed to salute was labeled an enemy of the state."

"I was told that I'd get a loan from the bank but was then refused. I was worried that Anna wouldn't be able to survive without the house."

"Working on my book gave me considerable joy but the task seemed boundless and hopeless. I could neither believe that I'd actually write it nor that it would ever be published."

"In the autumn a friend was released from a concentration camp. He'd been screamed at like a dog and had been forced to crawl and beg for his food. I grew more and more pessimistic about my future."
Chapter Four

To my surprise and consternation I received a telegram one fine morning from Fritz Reimann. The desk clerk in the lobby couldn't believe his eyes.

"Is he related to the famous film director Fritz Reimann?" he asked with incredulous voice. Every minute he was visibly more and more in awe of my semi-divine presence. "It is the famous director Fritz Reimann," I replied with cavalier air.

I was invited for cocktails at Imperial, which, thankfully, is not too far removed from the Astoria. A bellhop picked me up from the palatial lobby of Imperial at six and led me up to the magnificent suite at the top of the hotel, which was then being occupied by Mr. Reimann.

I knew from my father that Reimann had the reputation of being a cruel despot and an egomaniac. Nevertheless I was intrigued to actually meet him.

A servant opened the door and I was left for a moment to study the room. Books, papers and manuscripts were stacked or scattered everywhere. Card tables had been set up to catch the overflow. There were books on world affairs, novels, nursery tales, folk songs and a Bible alongside potted orchids, a collection of pipes, boxes of cigars and expensive looking chocolates.

"Your father told me that you write screenplays." Reimann said as I entered. He was signing something on behalf of a deferential but smart looking secretary. Reimann himself was old school elegant with a blue striped silk shirt, Tweed jacket and navy corduroy trousers.

I couldn't help but notice the scar on his cheek and the brutal look in his eye. He looked more like a boxer than an effete artist. There was nothing remotely poetic or dreamy about him. He had the air of a man who'd clawed his way to the top. I had the impression that he'd have no compunction at all about trampling on rivals if need be or indeed: killing them if it happened to be expedient. He was the personification of the "world as will", to paraphrase Schopenhauer, and I wasn't sure whether I liked him or not. There was something profoundly repulsive about his manner.

On the surface Reimann was all charm, ease and sophisticated elegance. He invited me to sit down in an exceedingly comfortable armchair and asked me about my scripts. I told him that they were mainly murder stories.

"I assume that you like your Martini dry. This, by the way, is a real Martini with real Nouilly Pratt vermouth." He handed me a cocktail while sipping a cup of coffee himself. He walked about, creating a semblance of order, organizing texts, which might otherwise have gone astray.

"Criminals are fascinating, are they not? This is why I have made so many movies about them. It is so easy, even for the most law-abiding citizen, to become a criminal, don't you think? One false step, the abyss opens and there is no turning back. As they say: the devil never sleeps."

"Perhaps criminals are just the ones who surrender to the urges we all feel. They are a little braver or a little weaker or simply a little more foolish than the average."

"They lack imagination or are too insensitive to the consequences of their actions. The only real difference is between thought and deed. And there is a further and more important distinction: the criminal is the one who actually gets caught."

"It is foolish to judge or condemn a murderer. He is, in reality, no different from you or I. I sincerely hope you give expression to this in your screenplays. I am most anxious to read them."

A secretary took him aside and there was a short, whispered conversation. Something displeased him. There was a look of disgust on his face. It was quickly replaced by the most charming of smiles. He turned his hard gaze to me once more.

"What exactly are you doing in Vienna by the way? Shouldn't you be in Cambridge studying philosophy, as your father would have wished?"

He picked up a book, studied it and made a note on a small scrap of paper. He looked out the window and turned his back to me.

"Have you come to Vienna, Hamlet-like, to exact your revenge? Don't you think it rather sentimental? Wouldn't it be better to leave such matters to the police? Have you ever caught a criminal? There is a difference, you surely understand, between reading about such matters in the newspapers and reality. Of course the newspapers are highly amusing. I use them to get ideas for my stories. But really, can one trust them?"

He turned away from the window and back to me before making a gesture halfway between dismissive contempt and accusation.

"Do you think yourself a latter-day Siegfried or a cowboy in a Western? Do you really think you, and you alone, will be able to track down the perpetrator and kill him?"

"I know you didn't, thanks to your father, have to serve in the army. But how many of those around you did? You are at a serious disadvantage. Life in Europe is cheap. I warned your father that this might happen. He refused to listen."

"I thought it was your idea that he should come back to Vienna."

"No, I assure you, you are quite mistaken. That was von Stroheim's misguided notion, not mine. Would I be one to care about this tawdry affair about drugs? What do I care about drugs?"

"I understand that your sister has disappeared. Unfortunate affair. Nobody seems to know what happened to her."

"Your father told me that there were rumors that she'd returned to Vienna after the war. She had grown homesick. She thought that she could be of use here. I sincerely don't know why. This city is a depressing wreck isn't it? And to think of how beautiful it once was!"

"I remember Vienna before the First World War. And I remember returning to it, wounded. I remember the hospital where I recovered. That is where I wrote my first film script. It involved the figure of Death."

"What you have to examine, when writing your screenplay, are causes. Why do people act the way they do? That is the question. Why are they weak, why strong? Why do they keep repeating the same mistakes? What are their patterns of behavior?"

"A director should be a kind of psychoanalyst. He has to know life. He has to know the straights of life. He has to have experience."

"The director must help the actor discover the character to be created. He must help him understand the spirit and foundation of his role."

"The director must awaken a figure that the actor wasn't even aware of. The figure is always buried deep within the actor."

"A director shouldn't tell the actor what to do. That, my boy, is the business of the actor, and the actor alone. One must never force an actor to work against his or her instincts."

"The actor must either be able to play the part or he or she must have the characteristics of the part. One must utilize the personality of the actor, not work against it."

"When I write a scene I see the figures. I see their faces and their movements. They become animated in the darkness and I let them roam free."

"What I strive for is to create an emotion, nothing more."

"For me making a film is like a drug. I couldn't live without it. Only when making a film do I forget the world. Only when making a film am I completely happy."

"Young directors often make the mistake of confusing film with theatre but film is not theatre, it is the image of movement. Every motion of the camera must have a justification. It has to express something. There also has to be a sense of rhythm. A love story has to have a different rhythm to that of a thriller."

"The reason I show things from the view point of the protagonist is that the audience identifies with him and the reason I suggest is because this involves the imagination and feelings of the audience more deeply."

"What interests me is the struggle against the inevitable, the fight against destiny, the fight against fate. One might not be able to escape but one resists nevertheless."

"Occasionally the strong-willed are able to change fate but such instances are rare. What one must do, and always do, is to fight. Society is forever out to devour the individual."

"How do you in England say it? It's not winning that counts, it's playing the game. That is what film is about: playing the game."

"Of course one must convey ideas to an audience but one should never forget that film is an industry. It could be an art but it isn't. At the same time, and somewhat paradoxically: by killing the art one invariably kills the industry too. One is inextricably intertwined with the other. It has sadly become much more important to make money with pictures than to make pictures that make money."

"This is what neither the Germans nor Austrians understand and this is why I have just decided to abandon the co-production I am currently working on."

"The Austrian bureaucrats are ignorant, petty, and provincial. They are wholly without sensitivity, fantasy or intelligence. The Germans on the other hand are merely Nazis. They are obsessed with saving money and they lie, cheat and betray without the slightest hesitation. Their behavior is quite simply insufferable."

"I have trouble sleeping. Can you sleep? My God, how I envy you! Even if I manage to count sheep I can never get them to jump over the fences!"
Chapter Five

Walter Schachner, the physicist living in my hotel, was forever debating the merits of Kant as opposed to Schopenhauer. How was life to be valued, if at all? This was a question, which plagued him. We live, he told me, in a world of illusions, secrets and lies.

He said that that which is necessary follows from a sufficient reason. The murder of my father could be regarded as an example of such.

Of course, he added: contingency is the opposite of necessity. Every random act is merely relative.

In the real world, where accident alone occurs, every event is necessary in relation to its cause. On the other hand, it is accidental in relation to all the other things with which it coincides.

He spoke about the uncertainty and doubts that beset even the greatest of scientists.

"The beginning of quantum theory is connected with a well-known phenomenon which is by no means one of the central themes of atomic physics," he told me one day, as we sat down to supper at the hotel.

"Any piece of matter that is heated begins to glow. It becomes red or incandescent."

"Since it's a simple phenomenon, it was, for a long time, assumed that there was a simple explanation. After all: there were laws of radiation and heat. Attempts to explain this phenomenon however brought very serious difficulties indeed."

"When the late, great and somewhat tragic figure of Max Planck (one of whose sons fell at Verdun, the other was murdered by the Nazis and whose daughter died in childbirth (what use are all the memberships of academies, medals and prizes if one's family is exterminated?)), began work in this field he tried to shift the problem from radiation to the radiating atom. This shift failed to remove the deeper difficulties but it did make the interpretation of the empirical facts considerably easier."

"In the summer of 1900 Curlbaum and Rubens made very precise measurements of the heat radiation spectrum. When Planck heard of these results, he attempted to illustrate them by means of simple mathematical formulas."

"One day, Planck and Rubens met in Planck's home for tea and compared Rubens' latest results with a formula that Planck had developed. The comparison showed a complete match. Planck's law of heat radiation was born."

"This discovery, however, only marked the beginning of the actual theoretical research work for Planck."

"What was the correct interpretation of the new formula?"

"From his earlier investigations Planck could translate the formula into a statement about the radiating atom (the so-called oscillator). He found that the oscillator couldn't change its energy continually but could only absorb individual energy quanta. It could only exist in certain states or at discrete levels of energy."

"This result was so different from anything known in classical physics that, initially at least, Planck refused to believe it. After intensive work however he came to the conclusion that there was no other alternative."

"He said that he'd either made a discovery as significant as Newton's or had failed miserably. There was no in-between."

"By nature conservative he wasn't happy at the revolutionary implications of this new idea and was decidedly unhappy when he published his quantum hypothesis in 1900."

"I must confess that I too hate revolution. I have unhappy memories about revolutions. That is why I hated the Nazis and escaped Germany before the war."

"1918 was also a kind of revolution. Emperor Karl went and we became a republic."

"The dismemberment of the empire was a disaster, also for me, personally. I'd been appointed to read theoretical physics at Chernivtsi. That was no longer an option. Chernivtsi was no longer part of Austria. It was in what is now termed Czechoslovakia."

"Instead of teaching physics I began to read philosophy, especially Schopenhauer."

"Schopenhauer's morality remains unmatched. The greatest injustice, in his eyes, is dishonesty. Perhaps everything invariably goes sour when people begin to lie."

"Schopenhauer is of the opinion that actions are of moral value only if they are without selfish motives; immoral actions invariably spring from selfishness. An act is only moral if it's sole purpose is that of helping others. This is why a servant can be happier than a king. This is why saints are ecstatic. This is why people give to charity; it gives them joy."

"There are three basic motive springs of human action: egoism (the care for one's own well-being), cruelty (the wish to harm others), and compassion (the care for the well-being of others)."

"Moral actions are only those that result from compassion. Therefore compassion is the basis of morality. Righteousness and love of humanity are the source of all virtues."

"The simplest and purest expression of ethics is: Don't hurt anyone; rather help everyone, as far as you can."

"The moral depravity of the world proves that the motive for good can't be very powerful. The open acknowledgement of this state of affairs is made difficult by the fact that one's utterances are hindered and concealed by the legal order, bourgeois honor, and courtesy."

"Yet Schopenhauer's ideas are based on a paradox. On the one hand: the intention alone determines the moral value of an act. It's not a maxim, a dogma or a work, but the attitude that's meritorious."

"The action of a man, as far as the ethical content is concerned, is related to feelings, not concepts. It proceeds from character, not reason. The actions of man are the most important and serious object of philosophy, because in them the character, the will, manifests itself."

"On the other: not only is the character of man innate and unchanging, he often remains unclear about his own motives. He might believe he's doing something for purely moral reasons, but in reality it's out of fear or faith in certain dogmas that lead him to do so. At the same time some of his noblest actions can be explained by religious reasons."

"Because we can never know the true motives for an action, we can almost never judge the actions of others, and seldom judge our own morality."

"No one is empowered to judge another or to deal out retribution. That is why the current Nuremberg Trials are such a farce. Are those who pulled the strings behind the scenes, the international bankers and industrialists, the monopolists and oligarchs being punished? No, of course not."

"They all profited: IBM (without whom the thousands of concentration camps weren't possible), IG Farben (who utilized the workforce of Mauthausen), Ford (who benefited from Buchenwald), BMW (who was served by Dachau), Krupp, Siemens, Agfa, Volkswagen, Zeiss etc. etc. as well as Standard Oil and Royal Dutch Shell, who kept the armed forces of both sides running, are all guilty as hell. And that is to name but a few."

"The whole war was just like a theatre production, full of sound and fury, with one real purpose and one purpose only: to maximize profits for a select few."

"Of course it had other functions too. It was aimed at securing the social structures of society and at culling the population."

"Are those who gave the order to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki facing trial? No, of course not. Humanity is on the brink of extinction, but nobody dares say a word."

There was an especially stern look in his eyes as he uttered these words and I was in fact forced to question my intentions. Was I right in seeking vengeance? Was this ultimately a selfish, immoral act? I asked about the scientist's experiences after the First World War.

"The main consequence of war for the Viennese was hunger. That was how the victorious Entente punished us."

There was, once more, a disagreeable look in his eye. This time it was bitterness.

"Everyone in Austria went hungry, except of course, those on the farms. When our poor mothers and sisters asked for a few eggs, butter, or milk in return for jewels, silver or expensive clothes they were mocked as beggars. One could count oneself lucky if one occasionally ate potato goulash."

"We lived in a large apartment in the First District, which belonged to my mother's father. He was however, like the rich tend to be, so petty and mean that he refused to provide any electricity."

"We had to heat, cook and light with gas, which became a problem after the war, when we were only permitted to use a cubic meter a day."

"We had a shop, which sold oilcloth and linoleum, on Stephansplatz, which went bankrupt on account of the war."

"The economic disaster weighed heavily on my father, who increasingly fled into his study of botany. He was a phylogeneticist and experimented with the help of microtomes and microscopes. It was he who taught me science."

"After the war we saw the signs: the nasal bleeding, the blood rashes in the retina and water in the legs, but couldn't afford a doctor. My father was too proud and too foolish to contact a friend, a famous professor he knew; he wouldn't hear of it."

"I fled into my work at the physics institute and wedded. It was my form of escape."

"1920 brought inflation. It further depreciated our bank capital, which was too small to lead a decent life anyway. I was forced to sell my father's microscopes and microtomes, his library of precious books and our Persian carpets."

"I was over thirty and still didn't earn a thing. The situation grew serious. My mother's father turned us out of the flat. We simply couldn't pay the rent anymore."

"I knew I couldn't stay in Austria. Those now making all the decisions were corrupt, incompetent imbeciles."

"So I took a job in Germany, and effectively abandoned my mother, who died shortly thereafter."

The next evening the scientist resumed his recounting of the origins of Quantum Theory.

"It took five years before the next step was taken; this time by Albert Einstein. Einstein applied Plank's ideas to two new problems."

"The first was the so-called photoelectric effect: the emission of electrons under the influence of light. Experiments had shown that the energy of the emitted electron doesn't depend on the intensity of light but only on the color or, more precisely, on the frequency or wavelength of light. This couldn't be interpreted on the basis of the previous radiation theory."

"Einstein assumed that light from so-called light quanta, consisting of quanta of energy, move like small corpuscles through space. The energy of a single light quantum should be equal to the product of the frequency of the light and Planck's constant."

"The other problem was the specific heat of solid bodies. The usual theory led to values for specific heat, which were in agreement with experiments in the high temperature range but were much higher than the observed values at very low temperatures. Einstein again showed that this behavior of solid bodies could be understood by applying Planck's quantum theory to the elastic vibrations of the atoms in the solid body."

"Einstein's version of quantum theory led to a description of light that was completely different from that of Huygens. Light could be interpreted either as an electromagnetic wave movement or as individual "light quanta" or "energy packets" moving through space at high speed. But could it be both? This question Einstein deliberately left open."

"In the meantime, the experiments of Becquerel, Curie, and Rutherford had yielded more clarity on the structure of the atom. In 1911, Rutherford deduced, from his observations on the passage of alpha rays through matter, his famous atomic model."

"The atom consists of an atomic nucleus that is positively electrically charged and contains almost the entire mass of the atom. Electrons circle the nucleus in the same way that planets circle the sun."

"The chemical bond between atoms of different elements is explained as an interaction between the outer electrons of neighboring atoms. The chemical bond has nothing to do with the atomic nucleus."

"The atomic nucleus determines the chemical behavior of the atom only indirectly by its electrical charge, since it determines the number of electrons in the neutral atom."

"However, this model couldn't explain one of the most characteristic properties of the atom, namely, its enormous stability."

"No planet system that followed the laws of Newtonian mechanics would ever return to its initial configuration after the collision with another such system. But a carbon atom, for example, will remain a carbon atom, even after collision with other atoms or after being chemically interacted with other atoms."

"The explanation for this unusual stability was given by Niels Bohr in 1913; he simply applied Planck's quantum hypothesis to the Rutherford model."

"If the atom can change its energy only by discrete energies, the atom must exist only in discrete stationary states, the energy of which is the "normal" state of the atom."

"For this reason the atom will eventually fall back into this normal state after some kind of interaction."

"Bohr was able, by means of the application of quantum theory, to explain not only the stability of the atom, but also, in some cases, a theoretical interpretation for the line spectra emitted by the atoms upon excitation by electric discharges or heat motion."

"His theory was based on the combination of classical mechanics with quantum conditions. In doing so he destroyed Newtonian mechanics."
Chapter Six

Of all my neighbors in the hotel the most secretive was the Danish journalist. I remember his wry smile, ironic laugh and mocking gaze. He refused to tell me what he was working on and was forever making cynical remarks. He was positively amused when I told him that I was seeking the man who'd murdered my father.

"Do you know how many have died in this perfectly pointless war? And you want revenge? In times like these? Are you crazy? In this country alone two-hundred-and-seventy thousand women have been raped; in this city alone: eighty-seven thousand."

"In Yugoslavia there are three hundred thousand orphans, in Berlin fifty-three thousand and in Czechoslovakia forty-nine-thousand. And you talk of revenge?"

"The Viennese live on eight hundred calories a day, in Budapest: five hundred while sixteen thousand have just died of hunger in the Netherlands."

"Rotterdam, Coventry, Royan, Le Havre, Caen, Hamburg, Koeln, Duesseldorf, Dresden and Minsk are no more. And you talk of revenge?"

"You know Nietzsche was right: It isn't always good for one's health to know too much. What price is the knowledge you seek? Such knowledge is extremely dangerous. You might well end up dead yourself."

"Why do you really want to dig deeper? Will it make you any happier? Everybody will think you're a fool. And what does the truth ultimately matter? Will it bring your father back to life? No, it's better to let sleeping dogs lie."

He refused, adamantly, to help me. I was forced to rely on the aid of British Intelligence and the Austrian police. With a heavy heart I set off once more for Hotel Schoenbrunn.

My friend, David, at British Headquarters told me that I could attend interrogations and I'd have free access to all the relevant documents. In return I'd have to write up reports about what I saw and translate on behalf of British Intelligence.

I was tasked with the job of translating the journals, letters and diaries of those Nazis who'd recently been captured. I was told that this could provide useful leads in the hunt for Dackerl.

One day I got a call. The police had got some information about a man by the name of Erwin Graf. He was, David told me, a comrade of Nierlich/Planek.

Was Erwin Graf, like Nierlich/Planek, a drug smuggler or was he an assassin? Had he been responsible for my father's death?

The friend at British Intelligence gave me Erwin Graf's diary from 1941. I was asked to translate it. It related to the German attack on Russia in 1941: Operation Barbarossa. At the time Graf had been an officer serving with the Waffen SS.

"I predict," Graf wrote in June 1941, "that in four to five weeks the Swastika will be flying over the Kremlin wall in Moscow. It's no secret how, if and when our unbeatable army will reach Moscow. It's merely 1,000 kilometers away. We'll rely on our Blitzkrieg. Attack, attack and attack again. We'll hurl fire, gun-powder, iron, bombs and grenades at the Reds and they'll flee."

"The Plutocrats, Jews and Bolsheviks are all against us but in Russia National Socialism will triumph once more."

"We're quicker than the Reds with our preventative war. We know how important this is."

A day later he noted: "The tension is climaxing. Today, the 21st, I was given the task of reconnoitering the other bank of the Bug, the river that flows between us."

"We disguised ourselves as peasants, with straw hats, smocks and pitchforks, prowled through the meadows, located the positions of the enemy guns and caught the Russians by surprise."

He wrote to his wife: "Think of our Leader and think of the greatness of our future. Our children will one day applaud this time."

On the 22nd of June 1941 he wrote: "We're firing our artillery and the whole of the Russian border is ablaze. This is a tremendous experience. There is a racket all over the place."

"The fire is so intense that I can't observe the impacts. I watch as one of our dive-bombers gets hit by our own fire and crashes."

"It rumbles and thunders as if the world were coming to an end."

"As it dawns we dismantle our tents and telephone-system and prepare to move out. The batteries continue to fire as our combat-vehicles roll forward. Our infantry attack the Russian bunkers."

His first experience of the offensive was sobering. "Before us are two villages, ablaze. The villagers are caught by surprise. They haven't had time to flee. A three-year-old child lies on the ground, its skull cut in two."

"The women come out of their houses and stare at us silently. One can see the terror written on their faces." A day later he wrote: "My tongue is hanging out in the burning heat of the midday sun. On the right, half-hidden by a cloud of dust, is a column. Is it Russian or German? Nobody knows. Nobody knows who is shooting at whom."

"Around us is scattered the detritus of war: gasmasks, a wild assortment of equipment, traces of blood, dead horses with their intestines hanging out, and a dead Russian behind a howitzer."

"A column of hundreds of tanks: small, medium, big, passes by."

"We only have half an hour to eat. The infantry are groaning under the weight of their burden. This is hardship. Just as they think they can fall, exhausted, into a field of rye they get the order to return the way they came. Then, in the evening, we move on."

"As it dawns we find ourselves freezing on the side of a road."

"We arrive in a town but the commander in charge can't tell us a thing about the current situation. Most of the officers are young and inexperienced. They have no idea about what they're doing."

"Badly wounded Russians lie in the train station. Nobody helps them. One holds his intestines between his knees and smokes a cigarette."

"The next town along the road is merely a heap of ashes. The only thing still standing is a single chimney."

The following day he wrote: "Our tanks cannot move. They've run out of petrol."

"Shells impact behind a village. The momentum of our assault has thrown the Russians back. With what obstinacy do they fight! Since 1939 we've been used to an enemy who is quick to yield. Now, for the first time, we've met an opponent who actually puts up fierce resistance."

"The officers fight to the last. We have to kill them in their foxholes, one by one."

"We're not accustomed to this form of warfare. This morning we found members of our reconnaissance patrol who'd been captured by the Russians the night before."

"Their sexual organs had been cut off while they were still living, their throats had been cut and their noses and ears had been cut off. We've grown serious, anxious and frightened as a result of this shocking discovery."

"The Russians are not merely barbarous, they're perfidious and treacherous too. They attack from the front, the side and the rear."

A day later he discovered a Polish mansion in the midst of a forest.

"I pass by some strange, rare, old trees, with a scattering of spruce among the pine stocks. The main palace is an elongated baroque building in a large English garden."

"One can see traces of the older, original buildings, plant beds in symmetrical patterns, lawns and a long, lime tree-avenue. There are pavilions with mansard roofs and an orangery."

"The area is summery and silent. It is far removed from the hell of war."

"The town, which dates from the Renaissance, still has fortifications from the time of Vauban, with walls, ditches and redoubts."

"The town hall, with pink façade and slim, baroque tower, dominates the market."

"The main square, with its arcades and onion domed churches, has the unity of renaissance design. Its buildings have portals, inscription plates, moldings, and ornamented arches. In the niches are busts, statues and reliefs."

The next day the march eastward continued.

"Our infantry walk through a cornfield when they're shot at from behind."

"One of the men calls out: "Stop firing! You're firing at us!""

"The firing doesn't stop. They looked around but fail to locate the enemy."

"Finally they find a wounded Russian soldier who, although mortally wounded, continues to fight."

"We are lying behind a burning house next to a mill and are being shot at from all directions. We don't know where to return fire."

"As the shooting finally ends the troops move forward. They're exhausted, having gone for three days without either sleep or proper food."

"It's humiliating, given the destruction that has been wrought and the lamentation of the peasants, to ask for milk but I have no other option."

"The heat is suffocating. The battalion has just gathered in a village and everyone is taking off their clothes to bathe (the first time in three days!) when we get the order to march eastwards."

"The heat is exhausting and the men are nearing their limits."

"When we finally stop for an evening meal I immediately fall asleep."

"The next morning I realize that a number of columns are now rolling parallel to our own. This makes us an easy target for the Russian bombers. Many men are wounded or killed as a direct result."

"The roads are congested with traffic and it has become impossible to move forward."

"I decide to ride on a motorcycle but it takes an age to reach the front. At the tip of the column I learn that our whole division has been encircled."

"It gets dark and as I move forward it isn't clear whether our troops are shooting at Russians or one another."

"I reach my commanding officer who has decided to request help."

"We return to headquarters but can't walk on the roads. We have to make a huge detour."

"We hear shooting but have no idea what is actually going on."

"Just in front of our headquarters we bump into a group of Russians lying in the grass. They're former tank crews whose tanks have been destroyed. Mueller is wounded by a grenade and goes missing. We never find him again. After a brief fight the Russians withdraw."

"The headquarters is chaotic. A Russian tank column has hit us head on. Had it not been for the fact that a few of our tanks were being repaired and were able to engage the enemy the Russians would have captured our headquarters."

"There were even German Communists among the attackers, the majority in civilian clothing! Even women and children were involved in the attack!"

"Everything is burning around us: Russian trucks and German fuel tankers. We have to wait for the dawn before help can arrive."

"Nobody at the rear seems to feel responsible for our plight while the commander of the division is doing some personal reconnoitering."

"The advance is moving agonizingly slowly; only a few meters at a time. There are four columns parallel to one another. There are shot up tanks and vehicles scattered everywhere on the road. It's impossible to overtake. The dust and severe heat are unbearable."

"We have orders to advance 150km but how will that be possible under these conditions?"

"We study the maps and figure out how to do it. We are pressed for time. The command wants to throw us in the direction of Moscow."

"We hurry on, on an unfamiliar road but it is dark and we can hardly see where we're going. I suddenly see a huge crater in the middle of the road and call for my driver to turn right; too late."

"The car hits the right rim of the crater, overturns, and comes to a halt in the mud and water at the bottom of the hole. I am trapped underwater. I cannot move. The windshield frame presses against me."

"I can move neither forward nor backward. The windshield frame presses against my breast. I think to myself: it is my time to die. It is perfectly clear. There's no escape. If only there wasn't this mud! I manage to hold my breath. I used to practice this as a swimmer. To be able to breathe air once more! Just once! How meaningless this all is. How pointless."

"Once more I pull myself together. Once more the desire to live gives me the power of motion."

"How this iron pushes against my breast! Were it not for this iron!"

"I push away the mud with my hands and feet. Slowly, inch by inch, I move forward."

"The effort is insane. The mud is getting into my mouth."

"I push against something soft that gives way. It must be the driver. My senses begin to fail."

"There's no longer pressure on my breast. I feel a rush of ecstasy. I no longer know what is up or down. My heavy coat and boots drag on me. Suddenly I breathe air! I hold my head above water."

"I fall back and no longer know what is happening. I think I am dead."

"But no. My comrades spot my head bobbing above the water and succeed in pulling me out. I throw up next to the crater. My mouth is full of mud."

"My comrades succeed in rescuing two others but are powerless to help a third: my driver."

"A tractor pulls the car out of the crater. We can finally recover the body of the missing man."

"It takes a while to find clothes I can change into. Everything is filled with mud. Finally I am given some overalls and am driven away to a doctor. My breast hurts, my hair is still stuck together, my face covered in mud, and my nose and ears filled with dirt."

"Early in the morning. Mist hangs above the meadows, mixed with smoke from the artillery shells. The morning sun is bright. It is a good thing that the weather is so beautiful. If it were to rain!"

"We stop at night at 8 p.m.. Around us are white flares proclaiming: "Here we are". There is the sound of machine guns, rifles, anti-tank fire and mortars."

"To our right an attack on the Russian positions starts. We move slowly forward through fields of cornflowers, poppies and forget-me-nots. Somewhere a wounded Russian cries out for his beloved."

"The next morning we are shot at from the cornfields we'd passed through the night before."

"I am first able to get to sleep at two in the morning. I lie in a barn. After three quarters of an hour I am woken up. It is only with considerable difficulty that I am able to climb down the ladder. We then move a mere five hundred meters down the road. There I sleep under the birches."

"The sun shines on the blue river while frogs croak in the swamp. Our artillery moves forward in a cloud of dust. We study the riverbank where our troops move forward. Clouds of dust hang over the endless column of vehicles. Chaos seems to reign supreme."

"In the morning I am woken at a quarter to five. A Russian force of up to sixty men is trying to break through. The battle lasts two hours and results in the complete and utter annihilation of the Reds."

"Of my men both Jansen and Huth have been wounded and Friederich has been killed. He was shot in the breast."

"The worst thing is that Lehmann, that fine, honest lad is no more. While breaching the enemy's position he was hit by a shell. He was killed instantly."

"We find a dead Russian woman in uniform. I'm told that she led the Russian attack. When the situation grew hopeless she and the others shot themselves rather than risk capture."
Chapter Seven

I read through the documents I'd received as I waited in a café. My first feeling was one of disappointment. This wasn't what I'd expected. I was told by David, who arrived with another bundle, to cheer up. One had to do the best one could under the circumstances. Perhaps there was a hope of catching Dackerl after all. If we were to do so then these men were the key.

David was in an eloquent mood and spoke about the difficulties he was confronted with. It was his duty, he explained, to turn Austria into a bastion against the Reds. The Communists currently ran over three hundred factories in the east of the country and the Russians were forever kidnapping those officials who happened to displease them. He was worried about the spread of their subversive influence.

The Foreign Office, he explained, had long been unsure of what, exactly, it wanted to do with Austria. It could become independent, as it had been between 1918 and 1938. It might be left as a part of Germany or it could become part of a Danube confederation. Perhaps its eastern half might be joined with such a confederation while its western half could be given to Germany and Switzerland. There was speculation of bringing Italy, Hungary and Austria together into one single state. Many thought Austria was simply not a viable unit and not a few feared it might fall under Soviet control. The problem was: the Foreign Office wanted to maintain a strategic barrier between Italy and Germany. More important still: Stalin wanted an independent Austria. This was the reason there was going to be one once the Occupation ended. It was his job to prepare for that day: day X.

"The Amber Route, which once passed through Austria, linked the Baltic and the Mediterranean. The Alps and Danube link the East and the West. Austria has always been one the principle paths for both trade and migration. It has drawn musicians from the German north, the Italian south and the Slavic east. Yet for all this, or rather because of it: Austria has always been extremely vulnerable. This is why it has always sought security in broad European combinations, whether the Holy Roman Empire or the Holy Alliance. It is no coincidence that the Pan European movement started here before the war."

Of course Austria had always been a bulwark against the East, he opined. It had, after all, started out as one of Charlemagne's colonies. At that time the threat had come from the Avars. One of its first names had been the "Avarian Mark" and it constituted the middle Danube from the River Enns to Wienne. This was where German Franks, alongside a flotsam of other tribes, had settled.

"The German speaking provinces, roughly fifty miles north and south of the Danube, became the core of the hereditary lands. The dynasty collected dukedoms, bishoprics and counties yet the Habsburgs never became kings of Austria. They were never elected and never crowned as such. They were simply Archdukes of Austria. This was despite the fact that Austria formed the feudal and military center of their realm. The empire was always a family of nations but never a single state and for centuries power in Austria was split between Vienna, Graz and Innsbruck."

After he left to continue turning Austria into a bastion against Communism I resumed my reading.

Erwin Graf, who was born on 11.9.1919, in Konstanz am Bodensee, a German citizen, living in Hardegg, Lower Austria, former SS-Sturmfuehrer (lieutenant) with the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, had been in prison, due to suspicion of being a Nazi, since 22.11.47.

He was thought, with the help of Hannes Planek, a.k.a. Reinhold Nierlich, born on the 21.7.1920 in Herrnbaumgarten, Mistelbach, Lower Austria, address unknown, to have obtained fake documents.

Planek, a.k.a. Nierlich, was a leading member of the Nazi underground in Upper Austria and Salzburg, who, under the leadership of Dr. Kurt Roessner was involved in the liberation of prisoners of war and the furnishing of fake documents.

After Graf, together with a certain Franz Wurm and Mathias Neumeister had fled from the POW camp at Haid near Linz in April 1946 they were furnished with fake documents by Planek a.k.a. Nierlich. This led to the suspicion of them being underground Nazis.

A number of others had also been involved in providing fake documents, all of whom were in prison in Vienna (in the Rossauerlaende) and all of whom had been arrested at 3p.m. on the 12th of February 1948.

They included Christine Kaiser, trainee lawyer, employed at the district court of the first district, born in Vienna on the 8.3.1916, roman catholic, single, Austrian citizen, resident in Vienna's 3rd district, Gaertnergass 13/8, Mathias Neumeister, baker, born in Vienna on 24.10.1924, Austrian citizen, roman catholic, single, resident in Vienna's 18th district, in the Schulgasse 21, and Berta Maria Theresia Neumeister, trainee, born on the 3.8.1927 in Suessenbrunn, Lower Austria, Austrian citizen.

They all had contacts with Planek a.k.a. Nierlich, knew of his whereabouts, knew that he was subversive and had failed to inform the authorities about him.

Among the first documents I read was the interrogation of Mathias Neumeister at 2p.m. on the 24th of March 1948. The questioning was continued on the 2nd of April.

Neumeister said that Graf hadn't gotten the papers from him. Graf had always told him that he was an Austrian. He, Neumeister, wasn't politically active and had never had anything to do with the Nazi Party.

He'd been drafted and transferred from the Hitler Youth to the Waffen SS in 1942 but wasn't conscious of having committed any crime. After being confronted by Graf he stated that he'd say, in a court of law, that he, Graf, had claimed to be Austrian.

On the 24th of March, at 2.30 p.m. Berta Maria Theresia Neumeister was interrogated. She declared that she was innocent of any offence. She was, between 1943 and 1945, a member of the BDM, Bund Deutscher Maedel (League of German Girls), was a Scharfuehrerin, a troop leader, and was responsible for nine girls. She'd been fifteen at the time.

She'd helped organize evenings for the Homeland and the making of Christmas presents. From the BDM she was transferred to the NSDAP, the Nazi Party. She was merely a candidate. She got to know Wurm and Graf through her brother. All three had fled from a prison camp and had stayed with the family. She didn't know of any political activity on their part. At any rate she had nothing whatsoever to do with it. It was correct that her mother and she had provided Graf with an ID in April or May 1946. That Graf had used fake documents was unknown to her.

On the 24th of March 1948, at 3.30 p.m., Christine Margarete Kaiser was questioned. Unlike Neumeister she was responsible for two sisters: a twenty-one year old, who was suffering from a lung disease, and a seventeen-year old, who was still at school. She herself was forty-two. The interrogation continued on the 2nd of April.

She said that she knew Neumeister from a dance school. She didn't know Graf well. She only knew him on account of the fact that he'd been in contact with their lodger Hans Planek. This must have been between March and July 1946. Planek had told her that he was a National Socialist but didn't need to register.

She didn't know much about him and no longer had any contact with him. It was true that she'd given Planek her own documents, as well as those of her sister and her father, but she denied having any knowledge of him using them to obtain false documents for Graf. In addition to that: she wasn't guilty of any activity on behalf of the NSDAP. She wasn't one of the "illegals" (those who'd joined the party when it was still banned). However, she was granted an illegal number on account of her activity on behalf of the BDM. At the end of December 1942 she'd been kicked out of the party.

She was accused of Rassenschande (racial defilement) with Friederich Moritz Popper von Podragi. The investigation was discontinued but she was still thrown out of the Party.

On the 2nd of April 1948, at 1p.m., Erwin Graf was interrogated. He declared that he was German and had never been an Austrian citizen. After being released from a POW camp in Haid, near Linz he stayed with Neumeister in Vienna. He used falsified documents, which he'd obtained from Planek. In August 1946 he moved to Hardegg with the help of Gertraude Bartel. The court in Linz had condemned him to six weeks incarceration on account of the forgery of his documents.

When confronted with Neumeister he admitted to having pretended to be an Austrian. He didn't want to run the risk of being accused of being a foreigner. It was unclear whether he'd be handed over to the Russians or not.

According to the Nazi documentation Christine Kaiser had indeed been a member of the Nazi Party, with the membership number 6,328,824. She'd been a member since the 1st of May 1938. She'd also been a leader of the BDM between 1936 and 1938. Between June and December 1938 she was a candidate and a member of the Party between December 1938 and December 1942. There were other documents, which asserted that she'd been involved in the BDM since 1931 and had "proven her dedication during the period of prohibition". She'd even been punished with six weeks imprisonment on account of the fact in 1937.

The only thing that could be found against Neumeister was an index card showing he'd volunteered for the SS unit 6/11 (6th SS Mountain Division Nord, a unit formed in February 1941 as SS Kampfgruppe Nord (SS Battle Group North)).

His sister, Berta Maria Theresia Neumeister, on the other hand, had been a member, between March 1944 and April 1945, of the Nazi Party. She'd been seventeen at the time.

Erwin Graf, the student allegedly born on 11.9.1919 in Bregenz, resident in Hardegg No. 57, Lower Austria, was, according to him, registered by the police in Mauer, Vienna, between May and July 1946. He was an Obersturmfuehrer (lieutenant) of the Waffen SS and had fled, together with Neumeister and Franz Wurm, the camp in Haid near Linz in April 1946.

It transpired that he was registered as being a lodger in the Schulgasse in Vienna's eighteenth district between 8.5.1946 and 19.7.1946. On the 19.7.1946 he'd registered himself in Hardegg an der Thaya, on the Austrian border with the Czech Republic, not far removed from the town of Znaim.

Research revealed that his ID was based on the documents of a certain Johann Kaiser, who'd died on the 27th of September 1945. Graf's name was nowhere to be found. A copy of the document had been made on the 9th of May 1946.

No record of Graf could be found in Austria. Confronted with this fact he switched his story and said that he was in fact born in Konstanz am Bodensee and not Bregenz, on the other side of the lake, and consequently a German citizen. The two cities were merely miles apart but the short distance made all the difference in the world.

There was speculation as to whether Graf was an escaped criminal and doubts as to whether his real name was Graf.

Graf claimed to have lived in Freiburg im Breisgau, Konstanz am Bodensee and Basel before he'd joined the SS. The police consequently sought more information about him from these municipalities.

On December 10th 1947 he'd told the police that he was a German citizen. He was born in Konstanz am Bodensee and not Bregenz as he'd initially claimed. He hadn't lied about his date of birth, confession or marital status. His parents, he claimed, had passed away. His father was a teacher who'd gone missing in Normandy in 1944. His mother and wife had died, he asserted, in a bomb attack in Berlin on the 21st of March 1944. He'd studied law in Freiburg and, after three semesters, had volunteered to join the Waffen SS. He'd served with the Leibstandarte "Adolf Hitler" and had attained the rank of Sturmfuehrer (captain).

During the war he'd served on the front line. The highest decoration he'd received was the Deutsche Kreuz in Gold (German cross in gold) but hadn't been honored by the Party. He was captured at the end of the war and escaped from the POW camp in Haid, which is close to Linz, on the 2nd of April 1946.

During the war he got to know Gertraud Bartel, who visited him in the camp. She hadn't known his exact identity. He told her that he was, on account of his Swiss-like dialect, from Vorarlberg.

After his escape he spent a month in a hut in the mountains. From there he went to Amstetten, where he claimed that he was an Austrian returning from the war and got documentation. He used the documents to travel to Vienna, where he registered and received food stamps.

Because he needed an ID he went to a Dutch officer he knew who worked for the CIC (American Counter Intelligence Corps). The Dutch officer gave him fake documents and a fake ID. Graf said he didn't pay for them and the Dutch officer knew everything about his situation.

He worked for farmers close to Hardegg, attended lectures at the university and lived with his betrothed: Gertraud Bartel, in Hardegg 57, prior to his arrest.

He didn't know how the Dutch officer managed to obtain the fake documents; he was simply grateful to have them. The Dutch officer, he told the police, was over six feet tall, blond and had a round face.

The police investigation resulted in the discovery that Franz Wurm, who, together with Graf and Neumeister, had escaped the POW camp in April 1946 had been imprisoned between the 2nd and 12th of December 1946, after which he'd been turned over to the Americans.

Christine Kaiser was interrogated at 3pm on the 11th of February 1948. She said that she'd completed her studies as a lawyer but couldn't get her doctorate on account of the fact that she'd been accused of Rassenschande (racial defilement). After the liberation of 1945 the fact that she was a registered National Socialist meant that she was, once more, denied her doctorate. She nevertheless began to work for the court in Vienna in February 1946.

She'd had a relationship, since 1937, with a certain Friederich Moritz Popper von Podragyi, who, according to the Nuernberger laws, was a Geltungsjude (a Jew who was descended from two full-Jewish grandparents).

She'd been an athlete before 1938 and a member of both the Viennese Athletic Sports Club as well as the Wandergruppe (hiking group) Neuland. Both organizations were taken over by the BDM in 1938. She didn't leave the BDM and wanted to marry her fiance.

She applied to register with the Nazi Party in June 1938 and claimed that, on account of her membership of the group Neuland, that she had in fact been an illegal member prior to 1938.

She didn't get an ID but she did have to pay membership dues. In the meantime an investigation had been started against both her and her fiance due to Rassenschande (racial defilement).

Her relationship to Popper von Podragyi led to harassment and unpleasantness. She was sent to work in a coal mine in Styria. She was then sent to Prague, in 1942, was arrested by the Gestapo and then sent back to Vienna. There she was imprisoned until April 1943. Her relationship to Popper von Podragyi ended in the autumn of 1945.

After her father died she became the legal guardian of her sister: Anna Maria. She lived, with her mother, her two sisters and a lodger called Beatrix Homolka, in the flat in the Gaertnergasse, which consisted of three rooms and two kitchens.

All her personal documents and the documents of her family were in five portfolios in a side drawer of her desk. The drawer wasn't closed because it was impossible to lock it. In the winter of 1945/1946 all the documents disappeared. A large part of them were recovered by the police and returned to her.

In February 1946, while waiting in line for a ticket to a movie, she got to know Hans Planek. He was small, thin, with a distinctive face, blond hair, a large mouth, thin lips, spoke a cultured German and was between twenty-five and twenty-six. They began to chat and Planek told her that he was looking for accommodation. He said that he was working for a transport company.

A few days later Planek visited her and soon everything was arranged. The rent was set at thirty schillings a month. Between April and July 1946 Planek spent up to three days a month as a lodger. In August 1946 he wrote that he no longer needed the room.

Once he brought an unkempt man, who he introduced as an acquaintance, but she couldn't remember his name.

Her relationship with Planek was friendly but by no means intimate. She'd once told Planek about her father and how there'd been a police investigation of him on account of the theft of some wood. Planek asked how old her father was when he died, whether he was Viennese and whether she still possessed any of his documents. He told her that he wanted to help a comrade.

She asked whether he'd helped one of the men she'd met. He said that they hadn't yet been registered. She assumed that they hadn't been registered because they were Nazis sought by the police.

He once mentioned that he'd been a member of the NSDAP but on account of his age no longer needed to register. They avoided discussing politics.

She made copies of her father's death certificate, and other documents. She didn't give them to Planek but it was certainly possible that he'd stolen them. He seemed trustworthy and had been left alone in the flat countless times.
Chapter Eight

I walked with Olga through the park of Schoenbrunn and went to the palace, which had recently been reopened. The bomb damage was still visible. Why the Allies had bombed both the palace and the Gloriette, a pavilion on the hill behind it, was a mystery to me.

"One of the worst things about the war" she told me "was that one could trust nobody."

"My poor mother, you can imagine her shock. She was staying with a childhood friend, Countess – in Silesia and was saying nothing particularly offensive when the Count reported her to the Gestapo! It was a miracle that she didn't end up in a concentration camp! Can you believe it? How disgusting and dishonorable is that? How could he possibly have had the gall to treat a guest and a friend of his wife in such a fashion?"

"Of course my mother got into trouble for denouncing German policy in Russia. She was right but it did make her enemies. The Gestapo took affront and she wasn't allowed to leave the country."

"They didn't like the fact that she tried to organize relief for the Soviet prisoners of war either."

"Of course my mother is a complicated person. When she first arrived in Berlin, in September 1941, she was still convinced that the German invasion of Russia would result in a mass uprising against the Communist system. At that time she still looked upon Hitler in a favorable light. It took her a while to grasp the fact that he was no different from Stalin."

"Unfortunately for the prisoners of war the Soviet authorities refused to have anything to do with them. They regarded the prisoners as traitors. The International Red Cross therefore couldn't get involved."

"Nevertheless my mother was able to organize some relief, in the form of food, blankets, clothing, medical supplies she was able to obtain from Argentina. The problem was: they couldn't be sent, on account of Hitler's opposition, to where they were needed most. At least some of the POWs though, those in Finland, were saved as a result."

"This activity wasn't entirely disinterested. One of my cousins was a POW in Germany, albeit a French one. He was treated, in contrast to the Soviets, reasonably well. When not interpreting in English, Russian, German, French, Polish and Serbian, he worked as a military doctor. He was simply too busy to have time to escape! He had a secret radio and even enjoyed luxurious food, such as corned beef, sardines, peas, butter and coffee, things we civilians could only dream about!"

"I was bombed out of a succession of flats and it was only through a series of miracles that I survived. Ironically enough I was asked to censor photos showing bomb damage! Yet the bombing was all around us. The bombing was all we talked about at dinner parties. To be perfectly honest: we felt rather like persecuted Christians in the Roman catacombs."

"I hated my job and my mother was forever trying to persuade me to quit and join her in the country. What she didn't understand was that if I did so, I'd immediately have ended up in a munitions factory."

"It was not as though my job was well paid! One of the innumerable problems of living in the Third Reich, and there were many, were the pay cuts. Once one's pay had been cut there was no means of protest or redress. They cut my pay, in November 1942, to 310 marks. Given that my flat cost 100 and another 100 was needed to pay off the furniture, and the cost of heating, telephoning, electricity, laundry, food etc. was high, life didn't get any easier."

"And the work was not only hard: it was positively harrowing. Once I had to translate a report about the Katyn massacre, which was destined for Roosevelt's desk."

"Nevertheless I tried to ignore the war and had the occasional vacation. I remember one holiday in particular, in Kitzbuehel, where I learned how to ski. I was the only one who managed not to thrust a ski stick in someone else's face."

"As the war dragged on the bombings in Berlin got worse and the people more bitter. Once I was followed by a man who gave me to understand that he vehemently objected to my speaking French."

"Gradually the bombing raids intensified. I remember once I went to warn my father. He was teaching two young men and didn't want to be disturbed. I started to pack a few things in a suitcase. Just when I'd finished doing so the flak opened up. Papa emerged with his pupils and we all dashed to the basement."

"We soon heard the planes arrive. They were low and their bombs drowned out the noise of the flak. It felt like they were right on top of us. The house shook, the air pressure was abominable and the cacophony simply appalling. All three doors flew into the room."

"We hurriedly pressed them back into place so as to avoid being hit by showers of glass. I couldn't sit still or eat and felt the need to jump to my feet at the sound of every crash."

"When we emerged the sky was blood red. One could hardly breathe for the smoke. The electricity, gas and water had ceased to function. I tried to sleep but now and again the sound of a crashing building or a delayed time bomb tore me awake. Outside was a firestorm. It sounded like a train passing through a tunnel."

"The next morning, muffled by a wet towel and wearing goggles, I tried to get to my office. The minute I left I was enveloped by smoke while ash rained on my head. Upon reaching my place of work I found that it was gone. Buildings, right and left, came crashing down, throwing up lots of mortar and dust. I panicked and ran all the way home."

"For the rest of the day I wandered through the city looking for friends. I hoped someone might be able to get me out of the town."

"The ex-Polish Consulate, where I had once worked, was burning brightly."

"Outside of one of the Ministry's offices I found some colleagues with sooty faces. The raid had caught them still at work and they'd been there all night. They were now trying to salvage the archives."

"I saw a famous belle, her hair a mess and her make-up running. She sobbed that she'd lost everything. She, like me, was looking for friends. Unfortunately for her the Spanish Embassy had been destroyed and I had no idea where her Spanish friends had gone. When she turned and staggered off I noticed that a huge chunk of fur had been torn from her coat."

"People were wearing the weirdest clothes and the soldiers themselves looked odd. One looked like a cross between a decadent aesthete and a cabaret artist."

"I walked up Budapeststrasse, where people were pulling prams, mattresses and furniture. I passed my favorite antique shop. All the silks and brocades I'd once so admired were now going up in flames."

"To my horror not a single house on the Ost-West Achse had survived. The Hotel Eden was still there but its windows were gone. Their openings were crammed with mattresses, furniture and debris. Three mines had destroyed everything inside but the bar had miraculously survived."

"Opposite the hotel was the zoo, or: more exactly: what remained of it."

"A mine had hit the aquarium and had killed all of the fish and the snakes."

"The cages of the wild animals had been badly damaged, which meant that they had to be destroyed too. The crocodiles had tried to save themselves by diving into the Spree but they'd been captured and shot."

"After the bombing of the complex in the Wilhelmstrasse the Foreign Ministry was thrown into chaos. Nobody knew what was going on. Some said that we were moving to emergency quarters in the countryside while others said that we were destined for the suburbs. Others still asserted that we would be staying in the center of the city."

"Why exactly they'd decided to bomb the diplomatic section off the Tiergarten and the Unter den Linden remains a mystery."

"I remember walking through the Tiergarten. The houses around it were black and still smoking. The park reminded me of a battlefield from the 1914-1918 war. The trees were stark, gaunt and their branches broken. The once famous rhododendrons had all disappeared."

I'd arranged for a guide to give us a tour of Schoenbrunn. He told us that Maximilian II bought the land from the monastery of Klosterneuburg in 1569. At the time it was called Katterburg and was made up of forests, meadows, farmland, orchards, a mill and a dairy. Maximilian decided to create a garden for pheasants, chickens, ducks and turkeys. Occasionally the animals would be driven up onto a stage and shot by Maximilian's guests.

The piece of land was pretty much abandoned by the crown when the court moved to Prague and it attained the name Gatterburg.

Emperor Matthias rediscovered it and rebuilt the residence, which had fallen into a state of decay. It was Emperor Matthias, according to legend, who discovered the "Schoenen Brunnen", beautiful fountain, which would provide the court with water. The spring was first mentioned in 1622. Only decades later was the name Schoenbrunn actually be used.

Under Ferdinand II the palace became the summer residence of his wife: Eleonora von Gonzaga, who passionately loved hunting. It was she who, after her husband's death, developed what, by 1660 was known as Schoenbrunn, and it was she who gave the residence its Italian touch, which it has never truly lost.

After Eleanora died in 1686 Fischer von Erlach, who'd studied sculpture and architecture under Bernini in Rome, was entrusted with rebuilding the residence, which had been rendered uninhabitable by the Turkish invaders. He was in his early thirties at the time.

This project, under Leopold I, came to nothing but under his son: Joseph, who was von Erlach's pupil, the design was finally executed.
Chapter Nine

One day there was an elderly gentleman, an accountant called Albert Goldstrom, visiting Gregor Konigsberg when I arrived at his apartment in the eighth district. At first Goldstrom was cagy and didn't wish to discuss politics but when he did it seemed like a torrent, which didn't wish to cease.

"It wasn't the Nazis who began the rearmament of Germany and the preparation for the Second World War; it was the Weimar Republic. Germany was turned into a military state long before the establishment of the Third Reich. The German war machine was already up and running by 1921."

"Krupp simply started producing in the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden. The foreign companies took over Krupp's patents and were more or less under the rule of the German trust. There was often doubt as to whether a company was Dutch, Spanish, Swedish or simply a disguised German armaments firm."

"Fokker, for example, relocated its factories to Holland, Junkers produced aircraft in its Swedish branch, and Dornier built its planes in a new factory in Switzerland."

"The world famous company Carl Zeiss in Jena for example, whose specialty was optical instruments for military use, founded the new large company Nedinoso (NV Nederlandsche Instrumente Compagnie) in Holland. Its main office was in the Hague while its factories were directly on the German border, in the town of Venlo."

"The economic reconstruction of Germany was greatly accelerated by another special circumstance: the intimate co-operation between the German trusts and the leading financial groups of the United States. They provided the decisive financial support that made it possible for the German armaments industry to get back on its feet."

"There were 171 American firms directly involved in the German economy, with a total investment of 420.6 million dollars. It was not without reason that Sir Josiah Stamp declared in 1929 "the America people has become the owner of Germany.""

"In the interests of truth, however, it must be added that it was, of course, a very small part of the American people, the monopolists, who played the role of owners."

"The list of German companies to which the American trusts gave their good dollars provides a particularly clear answer to the interesting question as to how it was possible that the German war machine became so effective. Chocolate stores weren't favored or for that matter: companies, which produced prams. The dollars all went into heavy industry."

"With admirable certainty the American dollar millions were directed to exactly the same German companies who'd been the supporters of the Hohenzollerns during their preparations for the First World War. It may be appropriate to look a little closer at to whom the money was given to."

"Wall Street syndicate managers, such as Dillon, Read & Co., Harris, Forbes & Co., National City & Co., Speyer & Co., Lee, Higginson & Co., Guaranty Co. of N.Y., Kuhn, Loeb & Co. and Equitable Trust Co., participated in German industrial issues in the U.S. capital market with $826,400,000. Their profits on German loans were not even that big, a mere: $10.4 million."

"The two largest tank producers in Hitler's Germany were Opel, a wholly owned subsidiary of General Motors (controlled by J.P. Morgan), and the Ford A. G., which was a subsidiary of the Ford Motor Company of Detroit. The Nazis granted tax-exempt status to Opel in 1936, to enable General Motors to expand its production facilities. General Motors obligingly reinvested the resulting profits into German industry while Henry Ford was decorated by the Nazis for his services."

"Germany's leading armaments company in Essen received its first large dollar loan as early as December 1924. The two New York banking houses Haltgarten & Co. and Goldmann Sachs & Co. approved a loan of 10 million dollars to reorganize Krupp (and its large foreign companies) so as to circumvent the provisions of the peace treaty."

"But this was only the beginning of Krupp's dealings with American monopolies. Later, Krupp allied itself with the great New York National City Bank. It belonged to the companies that had earned millions by persuading naive American speculators to buy German bonds. The circle around the National City Bank included National Cash Register in Maryland. In co-operation with this company Krupp founded a new company, Krupp Registrier-Kassen, with a share capital of 82 million marks. The American partner took over four-fifths of these shares, enabling Krupp to put its dollars to good use."

"Krupp landed its big coup when, in 1927, it entered into an intimate relationship with a leading company within the Morgan group: General Electric. The two trusts agreed to monopolize world trade in tungsten carbide, a product of Krupp's patents. This alloy (made from tungsten and carbon) plays an important role as a cutting metal in the metal-cutting process and in a number of other processes in armaments production."

"As a result of this deal, the price of tungsten carbide increased from $50 to $153 a pound from 1927 until the mid-1930s. In this way huge amounts of money from the Morgan group flowed into the coffers of the large German armaments company."

"The Morgan group, however, had many irons in the fire. The core competence of General Electric is electrical engineering, and in this field the American Trust joined forces with its German counterparts: AEG and Osram. The two companies divided the market between them and set their own prices. It was not long before the Americans began to directly finance AEG by taking over 30 percent of the share capital of the German company. General Electric's chairman Owen D. Young and four of his associates joined the AEG management, as American representatives."

"Another Morgan company: International Telephone & Telegraph, followed suit and took over, among other things, control of the large German radio company Lorenz AG."

"Then the Morgan group decided to take on the German market for engines and automobiles. Here, the strongest financial group in the US operated with the help of General Motors, which was jointly controlled, as a counterweight to the Ford factories, by Morgan and Du Pont. By investing the enormous sum of 30 million dollars General Motors procured the majority of shares of the largest German car company Adam Opel in Ruesselheim. This development was paralleled by a similar action by Henry Ford. His company founded a German branch in Cologne, the Ford Motor AG Cologne, which had a capital stock of 20 million dollars. Ford itself took over 52 percent of the share capital, while the majority of the German stock went to the group around IG Farben."

"In 1935 General Motors/Opel controlled by 42 percent of total German car production. It was American companies that laid the foundation for Hitler's motorized war in Europe!"
Chapter Ten

The next day I resumed the translation of Graf's diary from 1941: "There are often Russian vehicles who end up in our columns. Whoever notices first throws a grenade into the other vehicle."

"There is an air attack. A bomb lands twenty meters in front of the first vehicle, then eight meters away from me. Two land close by. Everyone takes cover. The air pressure is terrible. "Hey, Lahm, get up! The air attack is over!" Lahm doesn't move. We turn him over; he has fragments in his groin. The forests next to the road burn."

"We drive throughout the night and get little sleep. The nights are short and only dark for three hours."

"Our tanks make rapid progress. Around us are forests full of Russians who attack us in the rear. The front is fluid. The vast terrain full of Russians has to be cleansed at considerable cost."

"The mosquitos make sleeping difficult. We dine on milk, goat's cheese and butter."

"The population flees into the forest. We are attacked by a Russian column from the North. Our discipline fails."

"SS-Obersturmfuehrer Jens Mertsacker came to find out what was going on. It was the middle of the night. He went to the front-line but was shot by mistake. The men thought he was a Bolshevik."

"I study the battlefield in front of us. Roughly a hundred and fifty tanks are scattered in the fields along with hundreds of trucks and other war material. There are large numbers of dead Russians; at a guess a thousand. We are forced to view atrocious images; soldiers steamrolled by tanks."

"As I move through the battlefield I step on something soft. It is a head. Many couldn't get out of their tanks in time and burned to death. They have shriveled to tiny dolls."

"The sun shines above the hilly landscape, which is interspersed with forests. Everything is peaceful."

"We pass through a city, which has been partly burned down. Homeless people huddle together. We relax in a meadow and get the order: "Break until 4.30 in the morning." The rest is desperately needed. Soldiers wash, write, look after their feet and discuss what they'd be doing if there weren't a war on. One would simply drink a beer, the other smoke a cigarette. Nothing more. We set up tents. It starts to rain. A pig is slaughtered. In the evening we get mail. I receive five packages."

"SS Gruppenfuehrer Schmidt visits our camp. He says that the optimism, which dominates the high command, is criminal. The losses, he tells us, have been incredible. Even we, who are in the midst of the action, understand that everything has to be reconsidered. The experience garnered in the previous campaigns is of no relevance whatsoever."

"Wild roses, bees hum from blossom to blossom. Finches and yellowhammers sing. We wait in a roadside ditch and wait. Traffic congestion. This might take a while."

"The number of captured weapons is uncountable. To the credit of the Soviet soldier it has to be said that he fights to the last man and to the death. He refuses point blank to surrender."

"The Russian sniping is wearing our soldiers down and demoralizing them. It is quite unnerving. They lie for hours in the cornfields in the burning sun and the minute one sticks his head up there is a shrill whistle from the trees."

"The mosquitos are quite diabolical. Disgusting. There isn't even water to wash."

"As we carried Oberscharfuehrer Koppel to his grave I became quite aware of how ghastly, cruel and appalling this all is and how terribly we're affected by it. Now I know what life is. How one hangs on to existence, simple, naked existence once one sees how easily it escapes through one's fingers."

"We are lying in woodland in front of a burned down town. There was fighting here yesterday. In the town and its environs are roughly forty Red vehicles, which have been destroyed. Along the street is further evidence of fighting: armored vehicles with charred bodies inside, around them papers and possessions, ammunition crates, artillery pieces, dead workhorses and the occasional Russian who hasn't been buried yet."

"It is a sultry afternoon. The heat is oppressive and one is glad to have a drop of cold tea or coffee left in the canteen. We have more than enough to eat. We have so much that we can't eat it all, so accustomed have we become to hunger."

"Sturmbannfuehrer Drechsler looks battered after his recent experiences. He is in shock and is deeply distressed about what has happened. Oberstuermfuehrer Krieger lies there too. He is badly wounded. He has been shot in both of his legs. Becker has been shot in the stomach. Mayer has been shot through the lung. Hartling has been shot in the shoulder. Koch has been hit in the arm. Long is dead. He was shot in the head. This is all the result of a perfectly pointless battle in the middle of a forest six kilometers away from here. Nothing has been gained by it. I am angered at the waste and the futile sacrifice. The only reason for this disaster is incompetence."

"I lie here in the most beautiful sunshine and refreshing breeze (thank heavens we are able to rest). The cornfields and huge forests murmur, the meadow is green and there is a pretty collection of birches."

"Last night some of our soldiers were shot by snipers."

"The soldiers are roasting and stewing whatever they can get their hands on: chickens, eggs, whatever they can catch. One squad invites me to partake in grilled chicken and omelet. Each receives half a chicken."

"We wait for our orders. Finally we're told that we're moving out the next day. We're all relieved. It means that we can spend a whole day swimming in a gorgeous lake. I lie in the sun and get a tan."

"Tanks, trucks and equipment lie scattered. Around us are craters fifteen meters wide and four meter deep. Tanks are sometimes in the middle of them."

"We rest after crossing a bridge. We lost three men today, not as a consequence of battle but rather exhaustion: Erich Kleff from Ulm, Joachim Maier from Lueneburg, and Otto Nigbur from Pommern."

"We come across a village in the middle of the night. It has only been partially burnt down. Dead horses are scattered all over the place. My quarters are a school."

"I listen to the men. One is curious as to whether his child has started to walk, another whether his dairy cow has begun to calve while a third speculates about the question of holidays. The longer they march the duller they get. All they seem to be focused on are the boots in front of them. Occasionally one hears a soldier muttering about suicide. It is at this point that rest is to be recommended. A bit of food, a bit of sleep, a bit of relaxation and the mood of the troops returns to normal."

"Rows and rows of graves, topped with helmets, flank the road. Close by are graves of Russians. Upended or burnt out tanks, cars, trucks and dead horses are scattered everywhere. A line of prisoners walks by."

"Our supplies of food and water have been delayed. We haven't had anything to eat or drink for days."

"Bitter fighting at close quarters. The Russians are next to impossible to get out of their foxholes. Today we've suffered five dead and twenty-four wounded."

"I am stunned by the fields of tiger lilies and dahlias, and the lush, wild gardens with acacias."

"A village has been wholly abandoned by its inhabitants. Starving cats and dogs roam free."

"A pause at the side of the road at 8 p.m.. Roadsides, farmyards, forests, barns, that is where we linger, linked by roads, uphill and downhill, in clouds of dust."

"We get going at 3 a.m. but have to wait three hours for a bridge to be built. Our vehicles are not used to such poor and dangerous roads."

"Ripe fields, good, heavy earth. Beautiful poppies and vineyards."

"We eat cherries in a garden. The troops in front have left little for us."

"Wild flowers in fields of rye."

"Ravines, slopes, hills, fields with winding, ascending paths. A wonderful sunset; the whole of the western sky is pink and golden."

"The moon is full. A beautiful, cool, clear night."

"A column passes by made up mainly of French vehicles such as Renaults. Supply trucks drive quickly or slowly or simply get stuck in congestion."

"The dust gets everywhere. Even the strongest combs break when one attempts to comb one's hair. My nose is permanently clogged with dust."

"We pass some burnt out houses. There is an appalling stench of corpses."

"It has turned wet and cold. The tent, the blankets and the clothes are damp. I feel crushed. Although exhausted I am unable to sleep."

"Breitner has been shot in the breast. I am in shock. Pale, with confused eyes, he lies, having collapsed on the ground. There is only a small bullet hole. The exit wound is considerably bigger."

"Hoettges has been shot in the stomach and thigh."

"We have found some captured comrades in a cellar. They have been chained, and their ears, tongues, noses and genitals cut off."

"I see the casualty statistics for the first time. 38,809 have been wounded (including 1,403 officers), 11,822 have been killed (including 724 officers) and 3,961 are missing (including 66 officers). That makes a total of c.54,000, which represents 2,15% of our total strength (2.5 million). This is merely early July (the 3rd). Two weeks into the campaign. How long will it last? Can we sustain such losses?"

"As I reach my unit I notice that something is wrong. Everybody is standing around with their heads in their hands. I ask what has happened. Standartenfuehrer Schwarzenbeck has suffered a nervous breakdown. I go to his room. Schwarzenbeck is there. He is sitting in the dark and babbling nonsense. He is completely gaga. He threatens to shoot his fellow officers. I see that he is completely insane. I order a doctor to be called. The doctor gives him an injection and sends him to a field hospital."

"Our armor has suffered heavy losses. One unit has merely one tank left. The Soviets let us get extremely near before firing at close range. Sometimes they build their tanks into houses. They are impossible to see."

"In the afternoon I look for my unit. It is at the front. The enemy artillery is hammering it. Everyone has a foxhole. If one hears the whistle of a shell one runs for cover."

"The sun is burning out of a clear blue sky. In addition to that: the ruins around us are giving off heat. Even the water from a sweaty helmet tastes good."

"Smoking tree stumps, shot up vehicles, shredded airplanes, burnt out tanks, torn corpses of horses, dead soldiers with their eyes wide open."

"We move in a northeasterly direction. My car gives up on me. I ask a comrade to tell headquarters. My car has to be picked up and brought to the workshop. Our infantry march by. I expect to wait just a few hours. I can't just abandon the car."

"I push the car out of the column to the side of the road with the help of a few soldiers and try to repair it. It is noon. The sun is high. Our units, companies, battalions and baggage train pass by. Nobody is interested in the stranded officer. Nobody offers to help."

"At roughly five the last of the infantry passes by. Soon there is nobody to be seen for miles around."

"I feel not only frightened but completely abandoned. My canteen, which I'd filled with coffee, is empty while my rations are gone. To my left is a small hill. Behind it is a deciduous forest. To my right are fields with stacks of hay. In front of me is a small village. It consists of ten thatched cottages. Civilians hurry. Behind me is the land we have "conquered". But what does that mean, if anything? We have only "conquered" a road. Who knows what is going on in the forests?"

"I am growing more and more thirsty."

"I decide to go to the village. I take a pistol and a carbine. Both have the safety catches off."

"I reach the well, which is situated in the middle of the village. Five women, three old men and five children wait there. I indicate that I would like some water. One of the women understands immediately and lets down a bucket. I ask one of them to taste the water on my behalf. They do so. My canteen is filled to the brim."

"It is night, dark, and the moon is full. I am frightened. It is difficult to control my sense of panic. I tremble for fear and cry like a child."

"I have decided to camp next to the haystack but am unable to sleep. If the enemy comes I am finished."

"I wake at three. The cool of the morning refreshes me. I wait and grow angry at my comrades and commanding officers for having abandoned me. There is no one I can trust. There is no one I can depend on. I begin to hate the war. Why am I here? It is perfectly meaningless, a complete waste of time and energy. What is to be gained? Nothing."

"I wait the whole morning. At eleven a truck from the workshop arrives to pick up the car. They tell me that they only got the order an hour ago. Who is to blame for this fiasco?"

"Some comrades are pleased to see me, most are indifferent. Nobody asks a question, offers an apology or even an explanation. I am bitter but say nothing. Something within me has broken. I no longer believe in my comrades, my unit, or this war."
Chapter Eleven

After a fair stint of translating I returned to the other documents concerning Graf and his friends.

Various drugs, such as a morphine painkiller: Eukodal (2 boxes) and morphium (11 ampoules) were found in the apartment of Neumeister.

In February 1948 he told the police that he belonged to the Hitler Youth (since 1938) and was transferred from there to the Waffen-SS in 1942. He was acquainted with Graf from the Haid concentration camp near Linz. He knew Graf was from Bregenz but couldn't give any details about his past. They'd never talked about it.

Before Christmas, 1945, all prisoners of war were to be released from the camp. As Graf had no parents, he and Neumeister agreed to reside for a certain time in the latter's parents' apartment in Vienna. Beforehand he'd gained his parents' written consent. Graf escaped from the camp in the spring of 1946, came to Vienna and lived with his parents for several weeks. At this time he, Neumeister, wasn't in Vienna.

This seems to have been a lie. A moment later Neumeister changed his story.

He was indeed in Vienna at the time. He'd been given eight days' special leave by the American guards. He'd introduced Beck to his family and had returned to the camp. As he later discovered after his release, Graf had left in an unknown direction. He'd stayed just two months.

After his return, in late 1946, Graf visited him at his parents' home and told him that he was living in Hardegg on the Thaya, Lower Austria. He didn't give him any details about his life or his occupation.

About every three months Graf visited him and the last time they talked together was in the summer of 1947. From his circle of acquaintances, he only knew a Miss Bartel, who lived in Urfahr. Miss Bartel often visited Graf in prison, and once or twice she visited Neumeister, in the presence of Graf, in his parents' home. He couldn't provide any information about the procurement of documents for Graf.

At the same time the police questioned Neumeister's sister Berta Maria Theresia Neumeister.

She went to school in Vienna, first to a church school in the Gentzgasse and subsequently to a primary and secondary school in the Anastasia-Gruengasse. Then she attended a school for economics in Vienna, in the 14th district, in the Breitenseerstrasse. This school was run by the NSDAP and was dissolved in 1945. From 1945 to July 1947 she went to a school for home economics in the Wilhelm-Exnergasse in Vienna's 9th district.

From August to September 1947 she was a waitress in Traunkirchen, Upper Austria (hotel "Post"). From Traunkirchen she travelled with her sister Dorothea, who worked as a hotel volunteer in the same hotel for two months, via Salzburg to Tyrol, where they had a 2-week holiday in Zillertal (Finkenberg). Their mother had donated the holiday on account of their good behavior.

They travelled to Innsbruck for one day and then to Vienna, via Salzburg. In October she went to Gloggnitz for a week. After that she continued on to Upper Austria (Traunkirchen, Gmunden, Traunkirchen, Ischl). Then she returned to Vienna. On October 23, 1947, she began her employment at the Rudolfinerhaus, in the Billrothstrasse, where she still worked.

In 1943 she joined the BDM, where she later became a Schaftfuehrerin in 1944.

In the summer of 1946 Franz Wurm and Erwin Graf came to the family from a POW camp. They were both registered with the police. She hadn't known Franz Wurm before then. She'd only once brought a letter, which a person unknown to her (no veteran) had brought to her family, to Wurm's father in the first district, Schellinggasse (she couldn't remember the exact address). Later she frequently visited Wurm's father.

In the summer of 1946, she'd gone with Graf to Burgenland to pick cherries.

She didn't know where he lived. He'd moved away in the autumn of 1946. She'd once seen Franz Wurm in a streetcar (line 60, direction Hietzing) and had seen Graf in the spring of 1947. He'd given her a ticket for the Viennese fair. They didn't speak at the time. He'd always been extremely taciturn.

When asked if she knew Hans Planek, she said that she knew a Hans but didn't know if his last name was Planek or not. She'd last seen him in the autumn of 1946.

The next to be questioned, also in February 1948, on the 13th to be precise, was Josefa Neumeister, born on 30.11.1919 in Bad Voeslau bei Baden.

She'd served as a nurse for the Red Cross in Naples in 1941 and then in Vienna until the end of the war.

She'd spent four years in primary school, four years in secondary school and had spent two years studying sewing. She'd become a seamstress but also worked for her family.

She claimed that it was she who'd brought the morphine and eukodal home from a German ship shortly before the German capitulation.

When she visited her brother, who was in the POW camp in Haid near Linz, she got to know a prisoner of war who was presented to her as Lieutenant Graf. She personally never bothered about his political past. She only knew that he didn't have any parents and was from Vorarlberg.

In mid-April 1946, her brother returned home from the war and a few days later Erwin Graf and Franz Wurm appeared in the apartment. Her brother introduced both into the family. Graf and Wurm tried to persuade her parents to let them stay for a couple of weeks. She didn't know how the police registration took place or which personal documents were involved. With Graf, it was self-evident that, given the fact that he didn't know whether his parents were alive or dead, he could stay. Wurm, on the other hand, appealed to the fact that the flat of his father, a lawyer, had suffered bomb damage. He therefore felt compelled to find quarters elsewhere.

As a result Wurm stayed for about six weeks and Graf about eight weeks. Wurm was very much out and about while Graf remained largely in the apartment. Wurm probably traveled to Linz and Graf to Hardegg. After the departure of Graf in the summer of 1946, he visited the family about five times at intervals of three or four months.

Asked about Miss Kaiser, she admitted that she knew her only from phone conversations. To her knowledge, she'd asked after her brother maybe three or four times on the telephone. She once told her, Josefa, that she was going dancing and that she should tell her brother, who she termed: "Mr. Matti". She wasn't aware of the fact that Kaiser had visited her brother in her parents' home and she couldn't give any details about her. She also didn't know that Mr. Graf or possibly her brother visited any POWs or former members of the German army. A Hannes Planek or Reinhold Nierlich never visited them and she couldn't remember that this Hans had been mentioned in any conversation with Graf.

The two copies of "Mein Kampf", as well as the ink eraser and SS-dagger, which were secured in the apartment, belonged to her. Her sister, Therese, received one copy as a present when she got married, while the second copy of "Mein Kampf" was given to her by a patient.

She'd bought the ink eraser in 1938 but had never used it. She took the dagger at the same time as she took the medication from the ship. She wanted to keep the dagger in her parent's shop as possible self-protection. The rail tickets found weren't hers and possibly belonged to her sister. She couldn't give any information about the acquisition of identity cards for Erwin Graf, Franz Wurm or her brother as she hadn't been involved in the matter. Wurm asked her to act as a witness of identity but she'd declined to do so. As far as she could remember her sister Berta had signed the application form twice, once for her, Josefa, and once for herself, Berta.

A few days later, on the 18th of February 1948, Berta Neumeister was interrogated once more.

Graf, she said, often left Vienna and possibly travelled to Upper Austria. He once told her, or more exactly: she once overheard him say, that he wanted to study law. She also suspected that Graf had a sister but didn't know where she was. She could assert with certainty that Graf's family didn't support him financially. Her brother helped him out financially.

A person named Hanns Planek, alias Reinhold Nierlich, was completely unknown to her. She didn't know anyone who was nicknamed "Dachshund". She had never traveled to Upper Austria in the company of Graf and her brother and couldn't have visited the aforementioned Planek in Wels.

She admitted signing twice as a witness for the identity card for Franz Wurm, once for herself and once on behalf of her sister. She couldn't say why she'd done so.

She also signed the application form for Erwin Graf. She couldn't say much about Graf, other than he'd arrived, together with Wurm, at their home in April or May 1946. He'd stayed for a while; she couldn't remember how long.

He was very taciturn and didn't say much about his past or his attitude toward the current regime. Franz Wurm lived with them because he'd quarreled with his father.

She didn't know about the acquisition of the identity cards or about the personal documents involved. She was most certainly not present when the identity card application was filed.

A day later Christine Kaiser was interrogated. She said that she'd got to know Mathias Neumeister at a dance but couldn't remember when and where. She denied that he'd been in the company of Planek at the time.

It was quite possible that Neumeister had visited Planek in her apartment and that he was introduced to her.

When she got to know him, at the dance school, she didn't associate him with Planek. She'd probably met Neumeister for the first time in the autumn of 1946.

A loose acquaintance had developed between her and Neumeister, which was only ever related to dancing. He asked her to inform him if she wanted to go dancing.

She called four or five times at the apartment of the Neumeisters. There had always been an unknown female person who'd answered the phone. As a result she'd met Neumeister twice at different dances. In addition to that, she'd met Neumeister coincidentally in various dance schools or events, possibly also in Huebner's Kursalon. She believed that she saw Neumeister for the last time in early 1947, possibly also in the summer of 1947.

They never discussed politics and he never mentioned the names of Graf, Wurm or Planek. She also believed that Neumeister didn't know about Planek's stay in her apartment between April and July 1946. In any case: she never told him about it.

After being presented with the photographs of Erwin Graf and Franz Wurm she said that she'd never seen them before. She couldn't remember whether either had visited Planek in the Gaertnergasse 12, in Vienna's 3rd district.

She disputed knowingly giving Planek her father's documents or making copies for him at the district court. Nevertheless she had occasionally given him documents so that he could obtain rations.
Chapter Twelve

That night I had the most terrible nightmares. I heard voices, the voices of those I'd spied on. When at university one of my professors had suggested that it would be advisable for me to prove that I wasn't a Nazi. To do so, I should do some work on behalf of British Intelligence. My job consisted of spying on POWs in British captivity. I would have to listen in on their conversations and then record exactly what I'd heard. The experience was quite harrowing and traumatized me for years afterwards.

The voices, completely dislocated in time and space, now haunted me in my sleep. They seemed to echo in my very room.

"On the second day of the war with Poland, I had to bomb a railway station in Posen. Eight of the sixteen bombs fell into the city, into the midst of the houses; I had no joy in that. On the third day I was indifferent and on the fourth I delighted in it. It became my special pleasure to hunt soldiers through the fields."

"Did you make attacks over England during the day?"

"Yes, over London, thirty meters high, on a Sunday. It was quite stormy and they had balloons. I was the only one. I dropped my bombs on a station and then attacked the barracks at Aldershot. The headline the next day read: "German Raider Shoots Into Streets." My team was pleased, of course. They shot everywhere."

"The civilian population?"

"Only military targets."

(Laughter)

"I had a two-centimeter cannon installed at the front of the plane. When we flew low over the streets, and when cars approached, we turned on the headlights. The people in the cars thought that we were an oncoming vehicle. Then we cleansed the streets with our cannon. It was a lot of fun."

"We once made a low-level attack on Eastbourne. When we arrived we saw a big castle. There was a ball going on. There were lots of ladies in elegant dresses and gentlemen in hats and tails. The first time we flew by we did nothing. The second time we attacked."

"My squadron nicknamed me "the Professional Sadist". I attacked everything – cyclists, buses, trains, women, children, prams... Once I even sank an old steamboat. That was a lot of fun. Another time I attacked Ashford. There was a rally in the market square, with lots of people, speeches and so on..."

"A small German detachment was sent to a village in Russia. The entire unit was wiped out. The next day a punitive expedition arrived. There were fifty men in the village. Of these, forty-nine were shot. The fiftieth was let loose and instructed to spread the word about what had happened."

"In Poland they gave soldiers the day off so they could attend the executions. 25 to 50 were executed daily. The prisoners stood on a stool and had to put their heads through a noose. The one behind them then had to push the stool away with the words: "Brother, you don't need that stool."

"There were partisans in a village in Russia. It was clear that we had to raze it to the ground. There was a guy called Brosicke, from Berlin. He led every one he saw behind a house and shot them. That guy was just twenty years old or nineteen and a half. Later we put beer bottles filled with gasoline into the huts and threw hand grenades behind us. Everything burned. The roofs were just made out of straw. Anyone who tried to escape, women or children, got killed. That was a lot of fun."

"In Italy, in every place we went, our commanding officer always said: "First of all, bump a few off!" I can speak Italian so I was given the job of translating. He said: "We'll get rid of twenty villagers and then we'll have our peace and quiet. After that nobody will get any silly ideas."

"How did he choose them? Indiscriminately?"

"Yes, just twenty men. He said: "Come here," and all twenty were lined up in the market square. Then a couple of comrades came along with some MGs and - rrr - rum - they were all dead. He really, really hated Italians."

"In France we once caught four terrorists. A woman came to us. She said that there were terrorists hiding in a house on the outskirts of the village. We immediately sent a squad. She was right. There were four terrorists there, all playing cards. We arrested them and later shot them."

I awoke in a cold sweat. My head was spinning. How was all this barbarity possible? How could it be so easy to become a murderous animal? Was man inherently evil?

I thought about the task I'd set myself: finding Dacherl. Even if I didn't do so it seemed to be a fascinating philosophical exercise. Everyone interviewed seemed to be lying for some reason or other. Some out of fear, some to protect their families, some out of shame, and some out of naked self-preservation. Was lying under such circumstances permissible or not?

Would I lie if need be? Would I be willing to kill in the same way that the soldiers and airmen had done so? So why was I looking for one murderer if I was surrounded by so many? What did it mean: to murder? Half of Europe had become involved in crime, in one way or another. Who was I to demand justice? Was I not just a little ridiculous, as the Danish journalist had once asserted? I couldn't help but think that Nietzsche was right: it's not always good to know too much.

On account of my inability to sleep I resumed my translation of Graf's diary.

"On a Russian country road. I look directly ahead. It looks miserable. To my left and right are telegraph poles and wires. The dirty green grass is powdered with dust. It's white and dead. We have been travelling day and night. Over 100km. Due to the full moon it was never completely dark. Suddenly tracers can be seen in the sky. We grab our helmets, jump out of our vehicles and run into the fields. Two Russian fighter planes drop bombs and then fire at us. After half an hour they return. I lie on my back in a cornfield and admire the fireworks."

"The landscape has become quite beautiful. There are forests and small streams. I see fields of oats, flax and buckwheat. Many fields are covered in weeds and make a very poor impression."

"We are provided with new quarters at midday. They are former military training facilities, which once belonged to the Communists. In the stables I find ponies, saddles and a wagon."

"In a neighboring building I see three ugly and dirty women. A translator tells me that one of them wants to sleep with me. Of course I refuse. I am much too much attached to my wife. I haven't as yet heard a word from her. Who knows what has become of all my letters?"

This is where the diary for July ended. I looked around and found another one. It started in December.

"I will never forget the cold snap on the night of the 4th and the 5th. We were alerted at midnight and rushed outside. It was so cold we could hardly breathe. It was minus fifty degrees Celsius. Nobody had expected this. We simply couldn't stay outside but at the same time all of the houses were full."

"The Russians have moved onto the offensive and we are paralyzed. Our military machine has ceased to function. Neither our vehicles nor our weapons are designed for these temperatures. The planes can't fly. The motors don't work. The same applies to the tanks. They have become quite useless. Our artillery has frozen, as have our machine guns. It is a disaster. We have no option but to retreat. We aren't used to this. Psychologically speaking it is very difficult indeed."

"I cannot remember the retreat. I suddenly had a high fever and was wrapped in blankets. I was put on a tractor where I froze. I lost track of time. I heard shots, orders and cries. I lost interest in everything. Once I pushed my blanket away from my face. There were sick and wounded all around me and at the rear of the tractor the dead were piled high."
Chapter Thirteen

The next day I went with the physicist Walter Schachner to the collection of antiquities in the imperial palace, the Hofburg. He wanted to show me the Ephesus collection.

On the way I couldn't help but think of the sayings of Heraclitus, who'd been a native of Ephesus.

"It is impossible to step into the same river twice. We are and we are not. Beginning and end coincide on the periphery of the circle. It is the same to be alive and dead, awake and asleep, young and old. The cosmos wasn't created by any of the gods or by man; it has always been, is, and always will be fire. At night, man lights a light for himself. Dying, his sight is extinguished. Character is destiny. Donkeys prefer hay to gold. War is the father of all things."

As we walked up the steps of the museum Schachner told me about the Temple of Artemis or Artemision as it was known. It was rebuilt twice and was accounted one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The first temple was destroyed by flooding, the second by arson, and the third was buried and forgotten.

Antipater of Sidon compared it to the hanging gardens of Babylon, the statue of Zeus by Alpheus, the colossus of the Sun, the pyramids, and the tomb of Mausolus. When he saw the house of Artemis though "that mounted to the clouds, those other marvels lost their brilliancy". He said: "Lo, apart from Olympus, the Sun never looked on aught so grand".

The temple was lost in the mists of time until it was rediscovered and dug up by John Turtle Wood and David George Hogarth at the turn of the century.

"The Artemision was probably created due to the abundance of fresh water in the vicinity. It remains an oasis for animal and plant life. This abundance undoubtedly inspired the idea of building a temple to the goddess of Nature. There are countless representations of her, such as Pornia Theron, the goddess of animals. According to some the cult of Artemis was started by the Amazons."

"Before the town was called Ephesus it was known as Apasa and was the capital of Arzawa. The cult of Artemis is much older than the Greek colony, which was founded by Androklos, son of the King of Athens in 1,000 B.C."

We passed a Theban Sphinx tearing a boy apart, a battle against the Parthians, Heracles slaying a Centaur, a bronze statue of an athlete, an Ionian capital, busts of Homer, Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius, and a model of Ephesus with its Olympieion, stadium, square of Verulanus, theatre, agora and gymnasium.

"The beauty of the Greek culture was that it was whole and undivided. Of course the Greeks had their differences. That is not what I mean. What I mean is that they didn't impose limitations on thought or force knowledge into watertight compartments. Thus the atomists were well aware of the moral implications of their ideas."

"There were those who once believed that science could, in principle at least, reduce all events in space and time to processes that were fully accessible and readily understandable to physics. But at the beginning of this century the first shocks – quantum theory and the theory of relativity – shook science to its very foundations." "Space and time were once seen as the stage on which objects moved and interacted. The relativity theory of gravitation however showed that the distinction between actor and stage wasn't appropriate at all. Where there'd been division there was now unity. Space and time had become a space-time continuum."

"On the other hand, quantum theory told us that the individuality of the elementary elements was only of limited significance. The question of identity had become blurred. This meant that it wasn't merely difficult to follow a certain particle. The very concept of identity itself was inadmissible."

"Particles showed the characteristics of waves; the more compressed they were and the slower they moved the more pronounced this resemblance was. The greater their resemblance to waves the greater their corresponding loss of individuality."

"The implication of all this was that there was no longer a barrier between observer and observed. It was truly revolutionary."

"The roots of all this lay in ancient philosophy. In this tradition it had always been easier to discuss ideas and remedy errors."

"A prejudice is more easily recognized in the primitive, naive form in which it first appears, than as the sophisticated, ossified dogma it later becomes."

"The theory of relativity abolished Newton's concepts of absolute space and time, in other words the concepts of absolute rest and absolute simultaneity. It also toppled force and matter from their thrones. Quantum theory has, on the one hand, made atomism almost limitless but has also brought it to a crisis."

"Of great importance in the natural philosophy of the ancients was the reliability of the senses. The senses occasionally "deceive" us. When a straight rod is half obliquely immersed in water it appears bent while honey tastes bitter to the jaundiced."

"It's not so long ago that scholars were content to distinguish between what they called the "secondary" properties of matter, color, taste, smell, and their "primary" properties, such as expansion and movement. Yet the theory of relativity showed that space and time were merely artificial constructs. If anything had "primary" properties it was color, taste, and smell."

"Of course the reliability of the senses leads to much deeper questions. These questions, which were well known to the ancients, are very much of relevance today. Is our effort to create an image of the world merely based on sensory perceptions? What role does the mind play? Is this image of the world ultimately based on pure reason?"

"During the triumph of experimental physics in the nineteenth century, every philosophical view with a tendency toward "pure reason" was treated with contempt. That has since changed. Einstein, for example, has a strong sense of the simplicity and beauty of ideas."

"The conflict between the rational and empirical is not new. Parmenides was one of the first to develop a decidedly anti-sense, a priori view. His world contained very little. It consisted of just one thing: that which exists in contrast to that which doesn't exist. There could be no spatial dimension or time beyond this One. This One was omnipresent and eternal. There could be no change and no movement because there was no empty space into which the One could move. It was already everywhere."

"He was of the opinion that being and thinking is the same, thinking and saying is the same and thinking and the reason for the thought is one and the same thing."

"What he meant was that the material outer world is not to be considered a given reality. Reality is subjective thought. The outside world is a product of sensory perceptions, an image created in the thinking subject by means of a "delusion". His was ultimately a poetic attempt to unite the spirit, the world and the deity."

Protagoras on the other hand regarded sensory perceptions as the only things that counted and the only solid foundation upon which to base an image of the world. For him all sensory perceptions were equally valid, even if they were altered or distorted by fever, illness, drunkenness or insanity.

Protagoras was a humanist who believed that man was the measure of all things. He fought for universal rights, a just social system, civil equality and democracy.

"With regard to the gods, he couldn't know whether they existed or what they might look like. For him, too many things stood in the way of sure knowledge. The matter was too dark and life was too short."

"Democritus believed in rigid, immutable corpuscles in empty space. They moved in straight lines, collided and rebounded. It was these corpuscles or atoms that produced all the tremendous variety observed in the material world. He believed that the truth is shrouded in mystery, that we cannot know reality and in fact know nothing."

"The doctrine of the Pythagoreans was that "things are numbers". Soul, justice, opportunity had their numbers or "were" numbers. For example, square numbers (4,9,16,25...) had to do with righteousness, which was especially identified with the first of these numbers, namely with the number 4, next to unity."

"This was probably based on the idea that this number can be divided into two equal factors."

"A nice parable of the relationship between soul and body comes from the Pythagorean school, probably from Philolaos: the soul is a harmony of the body. It belongs to it in the same way that sounds belong to the musical instrument that produces them."

"The interesting thing about the Milesian School: Thales, Anaximander, Anaximenes, which followed shortly after Pythagoras, was that it was principally in the service of practical applications such as mapping, shipping and land surveying."

"Thales assumed that the world could be understood and the subject was no longer of significance. This elimination of the subject became a habit of thought, which lasted for centuries. The Ionians were so blissfully unaware of how strange and unnatural this was that they tried to incorporate the subject into their worldview in the form of a soul. For them the soul was either very fine, airy and mobile or a ghostly structure that interacted with matter."

"Of course vitally important was the fact that the circumstances were favorable to the development of free, sober, intellectual thinking."

"The area didn't belong to a big state or empire, which tend, as a rule, to stifle free thought. It consisted of a large number of small, independent and prosperous republics or tyrannies. More often than not they were ruled by the brightest and the best, which rarely ever happens. Nor was the area under the yoke of an organized church. There was no hereditary, privileged priestly caste, which invariably feels threatened by new ideas."

"The Ionians were a seafaring people who traded between the coasts of Asia Minor, Phoenicia and Egypt on the one hand, and Greece, southern Italy and southern France on the other. An exchange of goods, one has to add, has always facilitated the exchange of ideas."

"Industrial inventions, technical innovations, means of transport, aids for navigation, the construction of harbors, wharves and warehouses, and the creation of facilities for water supply all stimulated thought."

"The Ionians had little time for gods, spirits and demons but rather regarded the world as a complicated mechanism that runs according to eternal, inherent laws. This has been the basic attitude of science up to the present day."

"What drove them was curiosity. The first requirement for any student of nature is curiosity. One must have a sense of wonder and be obsessed with discovery."
Chapter Fourteen

One day a mysterious American turned up at the hotel to visit the Danish journalist. The Danish journalist seemed extremely upset and angry that the visit had been in broad daylight.

As I passed his room I could hear him shouting at the American. It was unsafe, it was foolish; he was risking both of their lives. Nobody was safe in Vienna. Nobody. If the Russians didn't get him, the Americans would and if not they then it would be the British.

I was intrigued and the first opportunity I got I engaged the new American in conversation. He was open and perfectly ready and willing to tell me both his name and his entire story.

Born at the start of the First World War Robert Leacock had always known war. The descendant of generals, presidents and secretaries of state, brought up in a twenty-room mansion with three sisters, a dozen dogs and half a dozen ponies, a champion swimmer, and a keen scholar he attended one of the most prestigious colleges in the country: the Virginia Military Institute in Lexington, Virginia.

His father, for all his wiles as a lawyer and all his experience as an officer, was utterly naive when it came to investing on Wall Street and in 1929 he was stripped of all his wealth. Not only did he lose his own money through speculation but he lost his wife's money too.

Leacock's mother, the daughter of a millionaire, was forced to keep the family going on a modest income as a librarian. She took in boarders to make ends meet. His father was obliged to withdraw from the country club while he himself left the Virginia Military Institute. Instead of studying he pumped gas. As a favor to his father he was given the job of a gas salesman and travelled all over the country.

As a young man Robert told himself that he wouldn't lie. He wouldn't waver from the truth for second. He was to keep to this promise but it would cost him dear. He was filled with self-doubt, worries and anxieties and found life alternately boring, baffling and terrifying. He dreamt of sailing off to Asia.

At times he grew homesick and at others he longed for escape from the city, the hard streets and the company of tradespeople.

Once Robert had saved enough money he left for Alaska where he worked at a salmon cannery and studied at university. He began to work, much to the chagrin of his father, as a reporter.

In 1938 he made it to Shanghai on a Japanese freighter carrying scrap iron. Just before he embarked his mother, who'd divorced his father, informed him that the house had burned down.

He was hired by the Shanghai Evening Post and bought a Remington portable.

After six months he grew restless and travelled the Far East before ending up in Europe on the brink of war in 1939, where he managed to get a job with the New York Herald Tribune in Paris. A day after the war broke out he married a fellow American in Normandy.

In June 1940, after France had capitulated, the New York Herald Tribune transferred him to New York, where he worked as a desk assistant.

After Pearl Harbor he signed up for the Air Force but failed the eye test. After that he got himself contact lenses and signed up with the Navy instead. He was sent to Guadalcanal.

To his horror all he found there was a jerry built corrugated-steel hut, a temporary airstrip of perforated steel strips, fifteen light planes and merely a hundred and twenty Marines.

While sleeping one night he was attacked by a Japanese soldier with a knife. The Japanese soldier was killed but Leacock would suffer from nightmares for the rest of his life.

Only in the spring of 1943 and only because he'd contracted malaria was he given leave and sent to a hospital in Australia.

To his surprise the Herald Tribune decided to turn him into a war hero. As a result he was awarded the Purple Heart. In 1944, after being promoted, he was discharged and sent home. Ashamed of receiving naval retirement pay he donated the money to a scholarship fund for African Americans.

Although successful as a reporter he was plagued by nightmares; his wife had to resort to tying his hands to the bedposts at night. He also had a serious accident on his bicycle due to the malaria.

Once the war was over both he and his wife grew restless once more. They went to China as foreign correspondents for the Los Angeles Daily News.

After China they went on to Europe and the Middle East. Their intensive work schedules, professional rivalries and innumerable infidelities destroyed their marriage and in the autumn of 1946 they divorced.

Before their divorce papers had even come through Robert found himself in Greece. The British had decided to impose their puppet: the avaricious, self-absorbed and muddle-headed George II on the Greek people.

The new regime was made up of corrupt, venal, incompetent old men. They were completely out of touch with reality, had antiquated ideas, and proved weak and indecisive. All they could obsess about were Greek territorial claims on their neighbors.

British soldiers killed peaceful Greek demonstrators, Greek policemen perpetrated atrocities against Greeks, old women and babies were rounded up and banished to islands while whole villages were punished on account of "subversive activities". Anyone who didn't toe the line was bitterly attacked as a "Communist" by the Royalist press.

The country was plunged into civil war as a consequence of these brutal and repressive policies. Those who'd struggled against the Nazis took to the hills and fought the new oppressors with an ever-fiercer determination.

The strategic importance of Greece rather than any purported Communist threat (Stalin was opposed to Communist involvement in the uprising and refused any support) proved decisive. Both the Americans and British poured in men, money and supplies to help shore up the corrupt Royalist regime.

Robert's dreams were haunted by images of Greek children with their thin bodies and big eyes. He didn't know a single Greek who could earn their living if they didn't happen to be in the government or involved in the black market. When a former Nazi collaborator became Prime Minister he was outraged.

He switched to Palestine and reported on the Zionist campaign of terror, first against the British and then against the Palestinians.

When, in May 1948, the Zionists seized control of much of the country they began driving the Palestinians off their own land.

In Safsaf, Zionist soldiers gathered men and women into different groups, bound the hands of fifty or sixty villagers, shot them, and then buried them in the same pit. They also raped several women from the village.

In Lod, more than a hundred people took refuge in a mosque. A Zionist rocket launcher destroyed the building, which collapsed on them. Their bodies were subsequently burned.

In Deir Yassin the Irgun and Lehi terrorists went around the village stealing chickens, radio sets, sugar, money, and gold. Each terrorist walked about the village dirty with blood and proud of the number of persons he'd killed. Over a hundred civilians were massacred.

Yet Leacock wasn't allowed to report on what was really happening. He resigned in disgust and travelled to Vienna. He wanted to see something of Central Europe before returning to America, where he planned to teach journalism.

One of the ideas he was toying with was going to Hollywood and becoming a scriptwriter. Thus I wasn't too surprised when I noticed how, over time, both he and Fritz Reimann became quite inseparable.

If one went to the Loos Bar (or American Bar as it is known) at night one was guaranteed to see Leacock listening to the director with an awestruck expression on his face. I too spent an awful lot of time there.

"One day Herr Goebbels of the Propaganda Ministry" Reimann once recounted, "orders me to come to his office. He asks me if I am willing to take over the entire German film industry. Imagine! It is vast! What a responsibility!"

"I say: yes, Herr Minister, of course Herr Minister. What an honor, Herr Minister. But the minute I leave the office I head for the train station. Fortunately I have my papers with me. At the station I look around. Where are the trains headed? And I decide there and then, quite spontaneously: Paris. Why not? Gay Paris! So I board a train for France. I have no time to attend to my collection of books and paintings or my fortune. That is all quite impossible. I have to leave everything behind. Everything!"

"At first it was not much fun in Paris but I realized at the same time that I had become fat and lazy. Everything had become too easy. Success is not healthy for the mind, the body or the soul, my dear boy. My life had lacked challenges and this was most definitely a challenge, was it not?"

"Of course my biggest handicap was the language. My French was good but it was by no means simple to convey my ideas exactly. And I had so loved the German language. It was and still is my language."

"It was all quite exhausting, trying to understand, searching for the right word and forever having to look up words in a dictionary. My French was lousy and that fact frustrated me."

He spoke about his family and his background. His father had been an architect and he himself had studied painting in Vienna, Munich and Paris. He'd served with the Austrian Army in World War One and had been wounded three times. While in hospital he'd started to write stories and scenarios. His first job had been with Decla in Berlin.

"What we make is information disguised as entertainment. One shouldn't depress people. One has to be constructive. I am forever racking my brains with ways to avoid the audience getting bored. Nothing is worse than a bored audience! That spells disaster! What is important is people's emotions. How will the audience react? This is the million-dollar question. One has to like and respect an audience. When I work I translate emotion. My films express what I have seen, learned and felt. A director is like a psychoanalyst. He has to be able to get under the skin of the audience."

"How can I tell what I want to and still interest the masses? Movies are for the people. It is the contemporary art form. But in Hollywood experimentation is not always welcomed very warmly." He smiled.

"Of course many of my topics are serious. Modern man has forgotten the meaning of life. He works not to enrich his soul but for material objects. As a consequence he is a living corpse."

"Modern man has no time for real love. He simply wishes to go to bed with someone, to merely satisfy his desires. That is all. He is in fact quite frightened of love and is positively terrified of any responsibilities."

"Another equally weighty topic is the question of destiny, the individual fighting against circumstances, the perpetual war against the gods. Today we have no choice but to fight against laws that are unjust."

"Preaching is not an option, for a whole variety of reasons. One has to look for themes that are universal. Everybody needs love. Everybody lies to themselves. Everybody is capable of talking themselves into something. When is love infatuation, when is it just sex and when is it but a game, an illusion? So many toy with love because they have too much leisure time on their hands and simply don't want to be bored."

"For a long time I thought I was in love, that my love was eternal, but we grew apart. At the start we had the same interests: culture, music, books, film etc. but life is full of little surprises, isn't it? Time changes everything. Of course, for many, love is more about comfort than anything else. After all, who wants have to do the cooking? It was sad for me though when my wife became a Nazi. I knew we'd divorce. It was merely a question of when."

"There are times when I think Don Juan wasn't a philanderer, merely a perfectionist. He was always looking for the perfect counterpart. This is by no means easy. If one loves one wants to share, everything. One has a deep need to communicate everything one experiences, the good and the bad."

"Of course in directing, like in love, I am forever dissatisfied. I feel strongly about each line, the acting, the architecture and each movement of the camera."

"I prepare for weeks in advance. I make copious notes and innumerable plans. I know exactly what I want. I suffer, physically, if I cannot do something the way I want it. I never compromise. Never. Of course this doesn't make one very popular." (He smiled again.)
Chapter Fifteen

Although I was growing increasingly bored with the case I returned to the files about Graf and his colleagues.

On the 19th of February 1948 Mathias Neumeister was interrogated. Initially he stuck to his statement of the 11th of February that he'd received eight days of special leave from the camp. Then he reversed it, admitting that he'd in fact, alongside Graf and Wurm, escaped. He denied that the Americans had a right to detain him.

As to Hannes Planek, he'd handed him, Neumeister, a package in the spring of 1947, and had asked him to give it to a certain person in the 17th district. Otherwise, he hadn't spoken to him and didn't know where he was.

Asked if he knew a certain Christine Kaiser, he categorically denied doing so. When confronted with her testimony however he admitted knowing her and said that he'd met her at a dance in the 18th district. He said their relationship was limited to dancing. He hadn't known that she too knew Planek.

He visited her about four or five times in her apartment in the third district. The last time was in January 1948. He knew nothing about the procurement of documents by Miss Kaiser for Planek, which were to be forwarded to Graf. They'd never spoken about the latter.

He denied having visited Planek in the company of Graf in 1946. He also denied the accusations on the part of Graf that he'd visited Planek in a farmhouse near Scharten, and that he was the only one who knew about Planek's whereabouts.

At the end of April 1946, he, Wurm and Graf went to a photographer in Hietzing to get passport photos. Afterwards he got an identity card. Wurm and Graf were responsible for getting their own identity cards and he, Neumeister, had no idea about which documents they'd used to do so. He asked his sisters Berta and Josefa, to sign the application forms of Wurm and Graf as identity witnesses. At that point in time he believed that Graf was an Austrian citizen who'd been born in Bregenz.

Graf told him that he was from Bregenz, his father was a doctor, he'd got married in Berlin and that his wife had died in a bomb attack. In 1940 he'd joined the military, was deployed with various front divisions, and finally became SS leader. He didn't know though that he'd been a member of the so-called "Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler".

He added that, in respect to Christine Kaiser, the purpose of his visits to the apartment of the Kaiser family was Grete, not Christine Kaiser.

When Margaretha Kaiser was called in for questioning on the 20th of February she denied knowing Neumeister. When shown a photo of him however she admitted that she did in fact know him but didn't know his name.

When confronted with Neumeister in person she admitted that she did in fact know him. He'd visited her frequently and they'd gone for a walk in Stadtpark in May 1947. She assumed that he'd visited the family on her account. She said that she'd denied knowing him because she was engaged and didn't want to acquire a bad reputation. She denied that Planek had been at the dance school Irmler and that it was he who'd introduced her to Neumeister. Although he'd been a lodger in their flat she'd never actually met him.

The last time that Neumeister had visited he'd stayed for an hour and had discussed what she would do for a job. They never discussed politics or mentioned the names Planek, Graf or Wurm. They hadn't discussed any documents. She knew little about Neumeister's past; he'd told her that he'd served in a mountain regiment. She'd met him four or five times outside her own apartment.

In April 1946, Hannes Planek alias Reinhold Nierlich (nickname "Dachshund"), together with Graf, Wurm and Neumeister, stayed briefly at a mountain hut in "Totengebirge". There they found refuge after their escape from the SS camp at Haid near Linz. It was Planek (Nierlich) who put Graf and Wurm in touch with Kaiser and it was he who first broached the question of forging the documents. In the summer of 1946 Neumeister was arrested for clandestine opium trafficking. Neumeister got the opium from Planek.

On the 28th of November 1947 Gertraud Bartel was questioned. A sports teacher, born in 1920, she lived in Hardegg (Thaya).

She joined the BDM immediately after the coup d'etat in 1938. In the summer of 1938 she was appointed "Untergausportwaerterin", which meant that she was put in charge of sports in the area of Mistelbach. Later, she had to do work service. Between the autumn of 1940 and summer of 1941 she attended the University of Vienna, where she studied philosophy and physical education.

In the spring of 1946, she got to know Erwin Graf during a ski tour in Goisern. A certain Wurm was in his company. Wurm was now living with her sister in Urfahr. Until June 1946 she'd lived in Urfahr together with her parents. Graf often visited her. To her knowledge, he was living in Vienna at the time. She didn't know what he did. She knew nothing about his past life. She was only aware that he was born in Bregenz, on Lake Constance. She didn't know who his parents were or whether he had any relatives at all.

When she moved from Urfahr to Hardegg in June 1946, Graf came to her and told her that he wanted to study in Vienna. He told her that he was attending various lectures but couldn't say which. She also didn't know what he did for a living.

The next to be questioned was Gertrude Schmidhofer, a welfare worker, born in Linz in 1924 and resident there.

She'd lived with her parents in Urfahr, Leonfeldnerstrasse 98d, until 1944 and then moved to Linz-Ebelsberg, where she currently lived.

The Bartels, including their two daughters: Leonie and Gertraud, lived in the same house in Urfahr. She was befriended with both daughters.

She was aware of the fact that Gertraud Bartel had already met the SS man Erwin Graf during the war and corresponded with him. This acquaintance continued after the war and Graf and Bartel stayed in contact when the former was in an SS internment camp in Steyr.

Bartel asked Schmidhofer to accompany her to the camp, where she visited Graf, and she was there several times. There she saw Wurm but had no contact with him. The SS camp Steyr was dissolved and the internees were transferred to the Haid camp near Linz. Bartel visited it but she, Schmidhofer, was never there. In March 1946, Trude Bartel came to Schmidhofer's apartment and told her confidentially that the SS Obersturmfuehrer Erwin Graf, together with a few other SS-men, wanted to escape from the camp.

She asked her if she could find a suitable hiding-place for Graf and his friends. On April 2nd, 1946, SS officers Graf, Wurm, and a certain Neumeister escaped from the camp. A few days before Gertraud Bartel had found a possible hiding place in a mountain hut near Hinterstoder.

Trude Bartel traveled to Steyrling on April 3rd 1946, and met with the SS-men. Schmidhofer also came, as was agreed and the group met her at Steyrling station. Unfortunately the alpine hut where they'd planned to stay was occupied but they managed to find a substitute.

They only stayed a few days before finding more suitable accommodation elsewhere. They told the owner, a farmer, that they were on holiday. They stayed there until after Easter.

Graf, Wurm and Neumeister often talked about their future. Graf was a bit arrogant and domineering and there was consequently a lot of conflict between the three men. He and his beloved Gertraud Bartel, who bowed to his every whim, were in charge of everything. None of the men discussed politics. Neumeister wanted to return to Vienna to work in his father's bakery.

Graf and Wurm, to her knowledge, didn't have a permanent place of residence and were either to be found in Vienna or Linz. In December 1946 Wurm was arrested by the CIC and held at Camp Orr. Since then she'd spoken with neither Graf nor Bartel. She had had certain intimate relationships with Wurm but they were only of short duration and she was no longer in contact with him. To the best of her knowledge he was living with Gertraud's sister, Leonie.

In December 1947 Graf told the police that he was the son of a professor who'd served in the Austrian army during the First World War. His father had been declared missing in action in Normandy in 1944.

He'd married a German girl called Ilse Donath, who was from Berlin, in January 1944. His wife and mother were killed in an air raid on Berlin on the 1st of March 1944. His mother just happened to be visiting the city. She'd otherwise resided in Karlsruhe. He declared that because his father was Austrian that he too was, obviously enough, Austrian.

He'd unfortunately lost all his documentation on a train in May 1946. It could also have been stolen. He didn't report the matter to the police at the time. A court copy of his documents had been made in the First District. A Dutchman, who he'd known from the camp, and who was employed by the Americans, had helped him obtain the necessary documents. He couldn't remember the Dutchman's name.

He finished school in Freiburg im Breisgau in the spring of 1938 and attended university there, where he studied law until the autumn of 1939 when he switched to the University of Basel. After the outbreak of war he'd volunteered for the Waffen SS.

He was sent to Berlin in January 1940 and finished his training in May. He was then posted to the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler Division. He was subsequently transferred to the officer's training school at Zossen, and fought on the Eastern Front.

He was wounded twice and subsequently sent to the war academy, where he stayed until August 1943. After that he was sent to France. At the time he was an SS Untersturmfuehrer. In October 1944 he was sent to Tucheler Haide, where he was involved in testing new weapons. The service was dissolved and he was sent to a replacement regiment in Prague. The Americans captured him in Pisek.

The Americans, however, handed him over to the Russians. He escaped from the camp. He was captured by the Czechs and handed over to the Russians for a second time. The Russians transported him to Hungary, from where he escaped in August 1945. He came to Austria and the Americans imprisoned him in the camps: Altheim, Ebensee, Steyr and Haid near Linz. He escaped from the latter on April 2nd 1946.

He spent three weeks in an alpine hut at Hintestoder. With him were Franz Wurm, Mathias Neumeister, Gertraud Bartel and Gertrude Schmidhofer.

From there he and Wurm made their way to Amstetten, and, after saying that they were Austrian POWs, received the necessary documentation. They then went to Vienna and stayed in Mauer until July 1946. They were registered with the police there.

He then moved to Hardegg in Lower Austria. He attended a French course in Vienna, didn't complete it and switched to the Academy for Politics and Economics instead. He wasn't though able to register as a student and only attended some of the lectures. At the time he earned his living by working in the countryside, cutting wood.

In February 1948 he changed his story and admitted that he was in fact a German citizen. He hadn't been born in Bregenz but rather Konstanz am Bodensee.

He'd studied law in Freiburg in Breisgau and, after completing three semesters, had volunteered for the Waffen-SS. He'd served with the Leibestandarte "Adolf Hitler" and had attained the rank of Obersturmfuehrer. During the war he was mainly at the front. The highest honor, which he'd received was the German Cross in Gold.

Bartel, who he'd got to know during the war, didn't know his real identity. He always told her he was from Vorarlberg, as he talked with a Swiss dialect.

Since he needed an identity card, he approached a Dutchman he knew, who was at the time working for the CIC. He gave him a certified copy of an original document, which had never existed. He told him that he was an escaped SS officer, wanted to remain in Austria, and needed an Austrian ID. The Dutchman then agreed to provide him with a copy and gave him a finished identity card. At the time of his arrest he was living with Trude Bartel in Hardegg.

When questioned by the police Wurm said his plan was to continue studying law. He didn't know what Graf's plans were. They had had a serious difference of opinion and Graf had refused to help out with the harvest. The Neumeisters had let them stay in their allotment garden in Hietzing. They spent two months there. After that Wurm went to St. Valentin to help out with the harvest.

Shortly after his arrival in Vienna he tried to get hold of an ID card. The youngest Neumeister daughter made enquiries on his behalf. After that he got hold of photos and the necessary documents. He filled out the form and the Neumeister daughter handed it in. After a comparatively short period of time he received his ID card, but he didn't know exactly who'd picked it up. He couldn't say anything about how Graf had got hold of his ID.

Graf introduced him to Planek in the Stadtpark in the summer of 1946 and he also got to know Margarete Kaiser, with whom Planek seemed to spend a lot of time.

In February 1948 Gertrude Schmidhofer admitted that "Dacherl", who was particularly keen to keep his real name and place of residence secret, had in fact visited them in the hut.

"Dachshund", Wurm, Graf and Neumeister had discussed what the future held. Graf was of the opinion that they (by which he meant the National Socialists) should stick together. They had to remain in constant contact with one another and had to be willing to help their fellow political refugees.

She was sure, although she wasn't actually a witness to such conversations, that the men discussed in detail their political future and their activities. Graf and "Dachshund" were of the opinion that women shouldn't be initiated into such things.

In February 1948 Wurm admitted that he'd helped Graf get his ID by lending him his birth certificate. He'd used ink eraser to change the name and the date of birth.

He'd first got to know Planek in the mountains and, once he was in Vienna, visited him and Kaiser in the 3rd district. It was clear that the two were close friends. Wurm was arrested again in December 1946 and held captive until July 1947. The last time he saw Planek was when he visited Bartel in the summer of 1946.

Planek told him that he could be reached at Scharten near Wels. He could always ask for help if he got into difficulty. Gertraude Bartel and Planek knew each other from their school days.

Gertraud Bartel admitted the fact that Planek had visited them in the mountains. It was she who'd sent him the telegram telling him the exact location of the hut.

The last time she'd seen Planek was in Linz in late spring 1947, at the crossing of Mozartstrasse and Landstrasse. She'd been in the company of Graf. Planek was alone. He wore a Knickerbocker suit and a gray leather coat.

They only chatted briefly and discussed trivial matters. She assumed that he was still living in Scharten. He only told a few people his exact address and was living as a so-called submarine.

In March 1948 Graf admitted that his parents were still alive. His father, who'd been born in 1889, was a university professor in Freiburg while his mother, who was born in 1895, was living in Konstanz.

His rank had also been higher than he'd previously stated. He'd been a Sturmbannfuehrer, a major, in the Waffen SS.

He got to know Planek, who was a SS-Standartenfuehrer, a colonel, during the war. Planek had been involved in intelligence gathering on the Eastern Front. Planek knew Bartel from his school days and when he found out that she knew Graf, he asked about him. He learned of the escape and promised to help out with supplies.

Nobody knew where to find him. Planek said that he was able to get hold of forged documents and he'd had the right connections to do so.

When they arrived in Vienna Neumeister presented his father with a fait accompli. He said that his friends had nowhere else to stay and would be sleeping in the flat for a short while. Because there wasn't much space they moved to the family's weekend house in Mauer.

Graf met Planek in the Stadtpark, who in turn introduced him to Kaiser. Graf told her about his difficulties acquiring documents. Initially she seemed unwilling to help.

She helped though by certifying a copy of a document, which Planek had faked. Kaiser and Planek knew each other from Mistelbach, where both had been active in the Hitler Youth.
Chapter Sixteen

I realized that I'd been neglecting Gregor Konigsberg and that there was much I needed to know. Only he and he alone could tell me how this disaster had come to pass.

"The construction of the house was slow. I was told that I'd receive a loan of six thousand marks but this never materialized. When I went to the bank the manager looked at me with a mixture of amusement and pity. It was humiliating but without the house I feared for my wife. In October of 1933 it became clear that we wouldn't be able to move at all. This meant that my wife would remain a prisoner in our apartment."

"The question was how to get through the difficult times with at least a modicum of dignity. This was by no means easy and my health suffered as a consequence."

"Everywhere there was a sense of oppression and resignation but I hadn't entirely given up hope. I was simply adapting myself to the new situation. I had a new role to play."

"There were those who argued for Communism but for me there never was a difference between it and National Socialism. Both were materialistic and both led to slavery."

"I had ever fewer students, which meant that the threat of being made redundant increased dramatically."

"By December I could no longer afford to heat my apartment and there was ice in the bathroom."

"My wife accused me of destroying her life through my hesitancy. She knew that we had to start with the house much earlier. It was sadly true. I had never wanted the house. I started to envy those who'd put an end to their misery by means of an overdose."

"There were at least a few jokes. Which two holidays did Hitler, the good Catholic, create? Maria Denunciation and Maria House Search."

"By June 1935 the campaign against the Jews had become so intense that I became convinced that my good neighbors would soon burn my house down and beat me to death."

"Lunatics ran around the streets, blocking traffic and calling anyone who bought anything in a Jewish shop a traitor. Nobody dared touch them."

"I asked myself in all seriousness whether I belonged to the "Jewish people" but found this notion ridiculous. Of course: there is no "Jewish nation" nor has there ever been one."

"None of my colleagues at the university visited me anymore. I had become a social pariah, a leper."

"The majority of the people were content while a minority regarded Hitler as the lesser of two evils. There was an all-pervasive fear of Communism, especially among the petit-bourgeoisie. They were petrified, like animals in headlights. They feared nothing more than Bolshevism."

"People were willing to tolerate the suppression of their liberty, the persecution of the Jews, the falsification of scholarly truth and the systematic destruction of all morality. Everybody was frightened of losing their daily bread and their lives. They were all appallingly cowardly."

"Yet I asked myself the question: was I any different? I was still in Germany. I was still doing my job. I was no different. What had come over me? Was it stoicism or was it merely apathy? Would there be an end to this regime or would I perish by it? I had led a full life. What more did I want?"

"What was the ruling element? Criminal, monopolistic capitalism closely allied to the petit bourgeoisie. The worst of all were the intellectuals, the academics. They were the most dishonest and despicable of all. I'd gladly have strung them up personally."

"Yet, was I any better? We had come to live, with all our manual labor, in a style which was by no means different from that of the proletariat."

"In October 1936 I was told that I was no longer permitted to use the library. It meant the end of my book project. All my years of work had been in vain."

"I despaired when I realized that Hitler really did express the will of the people but drew comfort from the reflection that one never truly knows what is going on. I began to think that the regime would last for decades, if only on account of the lethargy, immorality and stupidity of the masses. I started to detach myself from Germany, became not a little misanthropic and couldn't help but think I was being punished for the fact that I was a nationalist in the past. I could never trust a German ever again. I felt betrayed and homeless."

"My wife lost weight, grew old prematurely and looked pauperized while the apartment grew dirty, dilapidated and started to fall apart."

"One was confronted with signs everywhere saying: "Jews not wanted". The Jews, one heard, were merely criminals. And the masses believed it. One lady I met even said that she preferred to starve rather than become a Communist. "At least we don't spill as much blood here as the Russians do." This is what the vast majority thought, if they thought at all that is. Most simply didn't care and became no different from brutes. The intellectuals and academics on the other hand simply prostituted themselves and started doing research about the true nature of Judaism and the psychology of the Jews."

"I even had to adopt a Jewish Christian name. I soon realized that we were doomed to slavery and changed within forever. I became a cosmopolitan and a disciple of Voltaire."

"Our apartment was searched for weapons and left in a complete and utter mess. The police went through everything like pigs in a sty and I was told to come to the police station for questioning."

"It was difficult to stay calm under the circumstances but both my wife and I managed to do so. Yet the feelings of disgust, wounded pride and anger were not very far beneath the surface."

"Initially it was simply "questioning" but I was soon arrested and friends advised me to sell up and get out of the country. I wouldn't hear of it. I knew that leaving would mean leaving as a beggar."

"The restrictions such as where and when one could travel became ever more irksome."

"There were rumors that conditions in the concentration camps, such as Buchenwald, were appalling. Between ten and twenty died a day there."

"I wasn't willing to get involved in the criminal enterprise of the Jewish colony in Palestine. It was ridiculous. It was a crime to turn European immigrants into peasants and it was a crime against the Palestinians to impose European immigrants upon them. I disliked Zionism as much as I disliked both National Socialism and Communism. I could see little if any difference between them."

"I made enquiries about getting to either America or Cuba but there were no chances of doing so. The situation was quite hopeless. I realized that I couldn't ever be happy in Germany but at one and the same time didn't want to leave."

"My one comfort was the house and garden with its roses, jasmines, carnations and frostweed."

"Once the war broke out there were renewed restrictions such as the black out. Most assumed that England and France would remain neutral and that Germany would be victorious. One way or another we were headed for a catastrophe. It would be much worse than 1918. I was obsessed by such questions as: would they pick me up that night? Would I be shot? Would I end up in a concentration camp? I discussed with my wife the quickest and best means of suicide. We decided that a shot of morphine was best."

"Once the victories in May 1940 came the populace was intoxicated. The average German believed that Hitler only wanted what belonged to Germany. Poland, they opined, would mainly go to Russia while Czechoslovakia was not capable of independence. Hitler, the masses believed, sincerely wanted peace."

"When I heard that an acquaintance had fallen in battle I couldn't help repress the thought: "But at least I'm still alive."

"I became skeptical of big ideas such as "Fatherland", "National Honor", and "Heroism". And I became skeptical of France, a country I'd once admired. The French hardly defended themselves and willingly turned their country into a totalitarian protectorate."

"Just as the war against Russia broke out I was imprisoned for eight days on account of a trivial matter. I was told by one warder that I'd be able to keep my books and reading glasses but by another that I wouldn't. Chaos and despotism seemed to rule supreme in this dark underworld. It was humiliating having to walk around the whole day without a belt or braces. "My trousers are falling down," I said to myself, again and again."

"I became tormented by the thought of time pressing down on me. My mind kept counting: 192 hours to go, 185 hours to go, 184, 183 etc. etc. Every hour seemed slower than the next."

"While in prison my apartment was searched a second time. My diary was found and I was sent to Dachau."
Chapter Seventeen

One day David came to me with disturbing news. They had found Judith or, more exactly: they thought they'd done so.

The Austrian police had raided the headquarters of one of the most notorious criminal organizations in the city, in the Wolfganggasse, in Vienna's Twelfth District.

They'd found a bundle of letters written by Judith to me. They were letters she'd never sent. She'd written them in German.

It was advisable in such matters, David said, to be discreet. The newspapers love gossip and scandal. He realized that this would come as a blow to the family and he'd do his utmost to keep the family name out of the papers. I thought of my poor mother. She'd literally die of grief. It was bad enough losing her husband in the way that she had.

What was I to say in reply? I expressed my gratitude and numbly took the bundle of letters offered to me. This was indeed a blow. What was I to make of it?

Parallel to my enquiries about my father's last movements in the days preceding his death – I discovered nothing unusual – they were the typical perfectly planned, admirably well-organized series of events – readings, lectures, gala dinners etc. – I had made enquiries about Judith.

People did remember her, albeit vaguely. They recalled another broke refugee turning up in a city full of broke refugees.

She'd been arrested by the police over some trivial offense and had become increasingly antagonistic toward them. She seemed to be waging a one-woman war against the Austrian state. This had led, I now discovered, almost inevitably, to a life of crime. Why had I not understood the hints and knowing looks earlier? It all now seemed perfectly obvious.

The worst of it, I now discovered, was that she'd made common cause with my enemies. She'd thrown in her lot with Dacherl and his crew of villains. She'd become a drug courier and a criminal herself. I was shocked to the core. How was it possible?

Of course she'd always been rebellious and strong-willed but that she would stoop so low? That she'd lead a life of crime and permanent, irredeemable dishonor? This was quite unfathomable for me. What had become of her once indomitable pride? What of her culture and learning? How on earth could she keep such company? How could she sink so low?

I thought back to some of her remarks in London. She'd spoken about the need to reduce expectations and to become more realistic about life. Is that what she meant about being realistic?

I couldn't wait to start reading the letters. Her missives and her actions exposed a side of her character I'd never hitherto known. How was it possible, I asked myself, to live with someone one's entire life and not know her at all? Or at least misjudge them? This was, for me, the real emotional blow. I'd always looked up to if not positively idolized my sister. She was a remarkable personality. Of that there could be no doubt. She was quite brilliant and knew far more than I. Half of what I'd learned, I'd learned from her. She'd taken a lead in all matters and I'd almost invariably deferred to her opinion.

Of course I learned early on that her method of winning arguments was simple. She bludgeoned her opponent with sheer force of personality and overwhelming eloquence. She'd been, from an early age, highly articulate. She'd always been fascinated by language. She'd learned a whole number of foreign languages, only to forget them again. She'd always been willful, had always gone her own way yet had always shown a streak of idealism.

There was a problem I noticed from an early age: she was perhaps overly infatuated with and overly influenced by her own rhetorical skill. Reality ultimately didn't matter. It was only what she herself said that counted. Everything else was irrelevant. To a certain extent: what she said replaced reality itself; at least in her eyes.

This realization was important when approaching her letters, which I read carefully. She really and truly did live in a world of her own. Her life was fiction. She bent reality to meet her emotional needs. Everything was a question of how she represented it or imagined it to be. And her imagination was quite phenomenal. This was somewhat ironic for someone whose sole aim in life had been to be a writer. Her life was her artwork but a failed one, one full of balderdash, downright falsehood, artifice and bombast.

The crimes she'd imagined I'd committed, the character she'd imagined I had, and the actions she'd imagined I'd done, were well and truly beyond the pale. I didn't recognize myself at all or my family or my world for that matter. Everything was warped, transmogrified and distorted in the realm of her imagination. She obviously despised and hated all of us, especially her father, who she wrote of in the present tense. She obviously had no notion that he was dead or that she was working for the man who'd killed him. How ironic this was! Or was there a Freudian angle? Had she wanted her father dead? Was she attracted to the man, albeit unwittingly, who'd killed him? She hated her mother, that much was clear, and she loathed me.

How little we know people I thought to myself, and how skilled they are at hiding their true intent. The letters helped provoke a revolution in my intellectual and emotional universe. I had been so close to my sister. I had loved her so dearly and now she meant nothing to me. She belonged to the dead.

I couldn't help but blame my parents for this outcome. They'd clearly not shown Judith sufficient love or affection. The life reflected in her letters was dark, loathsome and cruel. Every lie and every crime was justified if it furthered her particular ends. And Judith's world revolved solely around her. Everything beyond her was literally beyond the pale and subject to fear. She was frightened of her own shadow and was willing to kill just to be on the safe side. She truly was her own world and her view of life was completely and radically solipsistic.

What was to be done? Was she, who'd dropped into a world of crime, of drug running and murder, irredeemable? Was there really no hope? Should she ever get caught she'd be faced with life imprisonment. Did it matter whether she was caught or not? She was trapped in her world of lies. Her life had become a veritable nightmare. Should I have compassion with her? Should I be willing to forgive? I really wasn't sure. She hardly seemed willing to change and seemed quite hardened in her life of crime. In fact she seemed to thrive on it.
Chapter Eighteen

The first time I realized that someone was trying to kill me was when an Austrian police car tried to run me over. I happened to recognize the officers involved. They were from the Fuhrmanngasse in the Josefstadt and happen to have been chatting to Inspector Furz when I'd entered. They were young, tall and extremely arrogant. One even had a Hitler moustache.

I told the Danish journalist about this incident and he told me not to take it personally: the Austrian police, like the Austrian judiciary, and the entire Austrian Establishment for that matter, was notoriously corrupt. "The pigs have taken over the running of the farm", he said. "This is one of the consequences of the dissolution of the Monarchy. Public service and public morality have gone to hell." The point he was trying to make however was that one couldn't tell who was behind a particular incident. It could be anyone. Anybody willing to pay enough that is. Of course the Nazis were almost certainly involved, somehow.

The joke, he told me, was that those who'd arrested, interrogated, tried and imprisoned Graf, Wurm and Neumeister had all been Nazis themselves. They were simply a little more cynical, a little more ruthless and a little more brutal than the trio mentioned.

Graf, Wurm and Neumeister were merely average Nazis who were somewhat naïve and foolish. They'd believed all the nonsense about patriotism, selflessness, nobility, honor, heroism and the balderdash about the "fight against Communism". They thought of themselves as idealists and this made them easy to catch. They had no idea about how the world really worked, which meant that the cynics invariably triumphed.

The second time I realized that someone was trying to kill me was when someone broke into my room. I had been ill at the time and had told everyone I'd been spending the next few days in bed. Only a few irksome chores that had forced me to leave the hotel had saved my life.

The third time someone tried to kill me was when I was followed in the dead of night. A knife was thrown in my direction. I ran like hell and was extremely lucky. I managed to escape.

I spoke to Olga about my woes. She took the matter extremely seriously indeed, put me in contact with Count – and Baron – and I went off to a couple of villas in the 18th district. They both promised to look into the matter and I felt considerably reassured.

Afterwards I felt somewhat silly about the whole affair. I have no idea why I hadn't expected some form of reaction to my enquiries. After all: I was stepping on not a few toes. Yet somehow I thought that my close connection to British Intelligence would give me a form of impunity. I'd really felt untouchable. How and naïve and foolish I was.

My one comfort was spending time with Olga. "Of course after all the terror bombing," she told me, "people went not a little crazy. I remember one girl in particular. She must have been sixteen. She was standing on top of a pile of rubble and picking up one brick after another. She dusted them down carefully, one by one, as though they were particularly precious, archeological artifacts or something similar. Then she just discarded them. She just threw them aside; one after the other. An old woman told me that her entire family was buried underneath her feet."

"There were milder examples of course such as Tony. He once stopped by and told a horrendous tale. His driver had been killed while he himself had been buried in a cellar. After managing to crawl out, what did he do? He went and bought a hundred oysters!"

"Gradually the country ceased to function. A journey that once took two hours now took twenty. This is why I persuaded my sister, who was lonely and wanted to join us, to stay put in Rome."

"The state of war and the bombing made it impossible to concentrate on anything serious, which was something my parents simply didn't understand."

"Everyone was preoccupied with patching roofs, propping up walls and frying potatoes on upturned electric irons."

"Our night life consisted of wandering around the city in search of something to eat and drink, sometimes successfully but mostly not. If we found a bar it was a miracle if the chandelier wasn't on the floor or there was debris everywhere."

"In January 1944 I was sent to Krummhuebel, in Silesia, along with all the other office personnel. The village itself was perfectly charming. It was on a steep hill, with chalets surrounded by gardens and fir trees. The offices themselves were located at the bottom of the hill so everyone went to work on sledges."

"Living and working conditions were less than ideal. My roommate snored while the space we were given to work in was tiny. I did my best though to archive and organize as best as I could. At least I got a secretary, which was an improvement."

"The problem was that everybody was worried about loved ones in Berlin, which meant that people were forever disappearing in the direction of the capital. When I heard that my flat was damaged I left for Berlin too, which led to my dismissal. Thankfully, after much toing and froing and much hoohah the dismissal was tactfully dropped. Given the general chaos this is hardly surprising. The joke is that I only left for a couple of days. Others left for weeks on end. And they got away with it!"

"One day my precious archive burned down, which gave me plenty of time to improve my skiing!"

"One of the most extraordinary men I got to know at that time was Adam Trott. He was a profoundly civilized man and his thoughts and efforts were focused on values of a higher order."

"I spent more and more time in Berlin. After all: it was where the action was and I became increasingly conscious of the fact that the question of whether one lived or died was simply a matter of luck. If one was lucky one was in a cellar that wasn't hit. If one was unlucky one wasn't. It was really that simple. How often was mere chance the key to my survival! Life itself attained a whole new meaning."

"The terror raids, of course, continued and were simply appalling. Waiting below ground was terrifying. I hated the thought of being buried alive and no one ever being able to find me. I remember standing in a cellar and thinking that the sounds reminded me of an express train thundering overhead. The fear paralyzed me, literally. I was petrified."

"When I returned to Krummhuebel I found it extremely difficult to work. The Allied invasion of France was expected every moment and the Russians were knocking at the door. I lived from day to day and took advantage of every brief moment of relaxation and gaiety that could be found. The war had turned many into embittered animals and I had no desire to become one too."

"Discipline at Krummhuebel became lax and I was able to disappear to Berlin for a few days at a time. When not for pleasure I ended up in Berlin for work. My boss had the bad habit of summoning me and then forgetting about the fact. He was forever trying to realize some completely delusional project or other and seemed to have lost all contact with reality. Sometimes I thought he was quite insane. He didn't seem to realize, although I pointed out this fact again and again, that nearly all our technical staff had been called up. Not only was my boss quite mad, the building I worked in was quite impossible. Half of it had been demolished by bombs while the girls there did little other than play the gramophone."

"The number one topic of discussion of course was how to get rid of Adolf. The man I discussed it most vehemently with was Adam Trott. He was of the opinion that planning for the aftermath was important whereas I didn't. I thought that all that mattered was getting rid of Adolf."

"There was an essential split within the opposition. There were those, such as Helmuth von Moltke, who opined that getting rid of the Nazis would only be a "Kerensky solution". The government would only have been an interim one and it would have had the fatal flaw of being burdened with defeat, which had always been inevitable."

"It was much better to let the Nazis be defeated and to be seen to be defeated. The only sensible thing was to plan for Germany after the war."

"After von Moltke was arrested in January 1944 the other, more vigorous wing of the opposition took the helm. The fact that he'd opposed violence and revolution didn't ultimately help von Moltke. He too perished in the flames."

"I remember that July day, the 20th of July 1944, as if it were yesterday. At first I and a fellow conspirator, called Loremarie, thought Hitler was dead. Count Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, a colonel on the General Staff, had killed him, or so we thought at the time. We were delighted. Then the news came through that Stauffenberg had failed. Hitler was still alive. It was appalling. So many of my friends were involved! What was to happen? It was terrible."

"At first some thought it a trick. Hitler was dead but the Nazis were pretending that he wasn't. The wives of the conspirators worried about their husbands, rightfully so, and the possible fate of their children. How, they lamented, had it come to this? Had it been their fault?"

"The news got worse by the hour. The insurgents had lost control of the radio station while the air force had refused to join the rebellion."

"We listened to the sounds of the panzers from the officer's school marching on Berlin. What would happen? Would there be a civil war, as many feared?"

"Some thought the coup might succeed, even if Hitler were still alive. The news that trickled in in the course of the night however wasn't good."

"At 1 a.m. on the 21st of July Hitler spoke on the radio. I knew immediately that the game was lost."

"The tanks we'd heard the day before rolled back to barracks the next morning, having achieved nothing."

"I realized that I'd have to act the innocent. It was a difficult balancing act. One had to look surprised, concerned but not terrified, which was exactly how I really felt."

"Adam Trott looked, of course, terrible. He feared for his life, and rightfully so. He told me about Stauffenberg, who he termed a wonderful man. He'd been a man of brilliant intelligence, vitality and drive. The reason why he'd been chosen was on account of the fact that he was one of the few plotters who'd frequently been admitted to Hitler's presence. He'd been to Supreme Headquarters with his bomb twice before but each time something had gone wrong. On the third occasion he said he'd detonate it regardless. The strain was simply too much."

"When he failed and was shot Adam was crushed. He lost his closest friend. Not only that: he knew perfectly well that it was only a matter of time before he himself was caught. He wondered out loud whether he'd done enough to prevent this disaster. It was agony, just waiting. Every time a car slowed down we worried it was coming for him. I urged him to flee to Switzerland but, on account of his wife and children, he refused to do so. There was another reason too. He hoped to be able to try again. Many of the conspirators believed that another attempt might be possible. Of course it was only a matter of time before the conspirators were arrested, one after the other. One day, Adam too disappeared."
Chapter Nineteen

The next three weeks I was so obsessed with my hunt for Dackerl that I completely neglected Olga. This was a fatal error on my part.

I traveled to Scharten, to Wels, to Hardegg, to Linz, and every single place I could think of in my pursuit of him.

I also asked for and got permission to interview all the prisoners. They were due for release in the near future. No evidence of involvement in politics on their part could be found. It was decided that they posed no threat to the state.

But all to no avail. Dackerl was not to be found. Again and again I asked myself the same question: were the authorities really searching for him? Why hadn't they acted upon the information earlier? They'd known where he was. Yet they'd done nothing. Why?

Perhaps, I thought to myself, he wasn't my man at all. Perhaps I was mistaken. But no: I interviewed a dozen witnesses to the shooting of my father. It had been in broad daylight and it had been easy to identify Dacherl. All described the exact same person and his description matched perfectly well the one in the files.

Both the military and civil police had done nothing to interfere with the killing. This too was odd. They'd simply looked on passively and not reacted in the slightest. Why? Had they been told in advance? Had they been ordered to stand down? And if so: by whom?

When I returned to Vienna Olga's attitude toward me had changed considerably. She'd found a new object of affection: the mysterious American, Robert Leacock.

He was handsome, dashing, rich and not a little glamorous, I had to admit. He was definitely more dashing, richer, and more glamorous than I was, but that wasn't saying too much.

I had stiff competition and decided to spy on him. This was a highly immoral thing to do, I must confess, but I was half mad with jealousy at the time. Above all else: I was angry with myself for missing my main chance. Had I lost Olga? I wasn't sure. Who was this mysterious American really and what did he want? He too must have his secrets. Everybody has secrets.

I decided to employ the skills, the tradecraft, I'd learnt at British Intelligence and borrowed, surreptitiously some of their equipment. I listened in on the conversation between Leacock and the Danish journalist. This proved a second error. I wasn't happy with what I heard.

I listened without making a sound. Leacock was extremely agitated and almost shouting. I could understand every single word he said.

"It's here in these documents. I got hold of them from this guy I met in Greece, a disaffected British agent. He told me that Hitler had been working for the British all along. The American public must know about this. We were tricked into this war. Even Pearl Harbor was a set up. Only a couple of our ships were destroyed by the Japs; the rest we did ourselves. Here, you have to read this. The Germans called the plan "Testament" and the British: "Winnie the Pooh"."

"First they faked the death of Hitler and Eva Braun. Doppelgaengers were killed and their bodies burned. After locking the doors of the Chancellery they climbed up the concrete watchtower and escaped."

"After a couple of hours in the dark and damp of the U-Bahn system they emerged at Fehrbelliner Platz. There they were met by tanks and armored personnel carriers, who took them to the airstrip of Hohenzollerndamm."

"There they were met by a pilot named Peter Erich Baumgart, who had once been a South African and British citizen. Baumgart flew his passengers to Tonder in Denmark, where they landed on the morning of the 29th of April. Only then did he realize who the party consisted of: Hitler, Eva Braun, Ilse Braun, Hermann Fegelein, Joachim Rumohr and his wife."

"Hitler and Eva Braun flew on to Travemuende, where they boarded a Ju 252, a plane designed for long-distant flight. It was flown by a certain Lt. Col. Werner Baumbach. After a 1,370 mile flight they reached Reus in Catalonia. From there they flew on to the Canary Islands. They then got into a Type IX U-Boat, which was especially stripped down so as to take them all the way down to Argentina. And here you have the FBI report. It's all here, in black and white."

"An Argentinian political refugee told someone, who then passed it on to the LA desk of the FBI, that he was one of four men who'd met Hitler and his party when they landed from a submarine in Argentina approximately two and a half weeks after the fall of Berlin."

"The first sub came close to shore at about 11p.m., after it had been signaled that it was safe to land. A doctor and several men disembarked. Approximately two hours later the second sub came ashore and Hitler, two women, another doctor and several more men disembarked. Hitler was suffering from asthma and ulcers and had shaved off his moustache."

"Altogether fifty passengers arrived. Top Argentinian officials were waiting for them. When day broke supplies were loaded onto packhorses and the party set off for the foothills of the southern Andes. The plan was for Hitler to stay with German families."

If I was eavesdropping on this conversation I was sure that I wasn't the only one doing so. All the secret services were listening to all the hotel rooms in Vienna. Of that much I was sure.

I decided to warn Olga. Her life was in danger. If they were going to kill Leacock they would most probably kill her too.
Chapter Twenty

I went to the Loos Bar, otherwise known as the American Bar, where I knew Olga liked to hang out. Instead of meeting Olga I bumped into Fritz Reimann. He was telling a small man about directing. He waved to me and told me to join them. I decided that it made as much sense to wait for Olga in the bar as anywhere else. She was bound to turn up sooner or later.

Fritz was holding court and indulging in one of his monologues. "One can never know enough. I choose a topic and then I do an immense amount of research. I want to know everything and I mean everything about it. The key question though invariably stays the same: why do people do what they do?"

"I film what I feel. I close my eyes and I see the movements and the faces of my characters. Everything comes to life. Sometimes I direct my imaginary characters and sometimes they send me off in strange and unexpected directions. I devote a lot of time to them before I begin shooting. I need to know everything about them, especially about their past. This is also important for the actor. He or she needs to know everything. This is regardless of whether the information has any direct bearing on the scene they happen to be playing."

"To be able to direct an actor of course one has to understand what makes them tick. One has to be able to both analyze them and feel sympathy for them. One has to be able to get under their skin in much the same way that one has to get under the skin of both the fictional characters and the audience."

"I'm not interested in making stupid consumer products. What I want to do is to show the widest possible audience what the world is really like."

"Of course the director has to know what the world is like to begin with. He has to understand the world and he has to feel at home in the world. He has to feel at home in a sewer and he has to feel at home in a castle. He has to be, in short, an Everyman, a democrat and a humanist. A film has to be a document of life. It has to have the quality of truth. Film is the art form closest to being by the people for the people."

Then the small man with the Austrian accent began his monologue. This time it was exclusively directed in my direction. Fritz Reimann nodded sagely but said nothing.

"I love the movies. All the world, as the great bard once wrote, is a stage. Don't you find that too? Everything is theatre. Have you been to our Burgtheater? If you understand German and if you find the time then you must go young man."

"Unfortunately the Americans destroyed the old building just as they destroyed our old opera house. You see: they want to destroy our tradition, our values, and our independence. But they won't succeed."

"And do you know what the Americans said after they burned the opera house down? It had been a mistake. A mistake! Imagine that! They were aiming for some oil refineries or something or other. I forget that particular lie."

"Do you know what the last opera to be performed was? Wagner's "Goetterdaemmerung". Fitting, don't you think? When the opera house was destroyed the sets of 120 productions and 160,000 costumes were destroyed. What a loss! Unimaginable! Irreplaceable. And why? Because some pig, some boor of a general didn't like our culture."

"Close to the opera house was the Phillipshof, where the Jockey Club was located. It was considered the safest shelter in Vienna, until it received a direct hit that is. Three hundred of Vienna's elite, its creme de la creme perished. Why? What was the point of it? But of course: it was all just theatre, a Wagner opera, a war movie."

"What I like about my friend's films for example, especially his Westerns, is that they don't have good and bad guys: no white hats and no black hats. Everybody is just gray. Everybody is somewhat complicated. There are no heroes and no villains. Everyone has good points and bad points. Nobody is perfect. They are all weak, fallible and capable of sin. But they are all capable of forgiveness too."

"I think one should be willing to forgive one's former enemies but one shouldn't be willing to forgive their lies. I am quite intolerant of their lies. And their lies are everywhere. It seems that they have won. But the truth always comes out sooner or later. The truth invariably triumphs."

"Did you know, for example, that it was the British who started the First World War? I say this not out of hatred but out of respect for the truth. The British started the First World War because they wanted desperately, oh so desperately, to save their oh so precious Empire. They'd wanted their Empire to encompass everyone you see, every man jack of us. Empires, they said, by their nature, have to be universal. But it was bankrupt and threatened to fall apart."

"What was worse: it was threatened by German industrial might and its navies. Germany had acquired the oil the British Navy so desperately needed. The British had to prevent the Germans completing their Berlin-Bagdad Railroad at all costs. It could not be built. It was not permissible. It was a mortal threat."

"So what they did was promise the Serbs a Greater Serbia if they stirred things up a bit and murdered the Thronfolger. What is the English word for that? Oh yes: heir to the throne: Franz Ferdinand. And the Serbs obliged in 1914."

"And lo and behold: the Serbs did indeed get their Greater Serbia once the war was over. Of course half the population perished, but what the hell? Right? And to disguise the fact that it was a Greater Serbia they used a Croatian word for the new entity: Yugoslavia; the country of the south Slavs. How poetic! As always: it's all just theatre, lies, smokes and mirrors!"

"To distract from what was really going on they made a huge fuss about Belgium. But did they really care about "poor little Belgium"? Of course not. It was just a pretext, an excuse, to get directly involved in the war."

"Remember the image of the German gorilla? The whole war was pitched to the masses as a fight against German brutality. And they were fooled."

"Once the war was over and Germany was broken by starvation they prepared for a second one, a war against the German people, a war of annihilation. The "peace" was so complex, inconsistent and full of holes that it made war quite inevitable. It left so many problems unresolved, you see, such as the status of Danzig, that it was only a question of when not if there'd be another war. Everything was vague. Nothing was clear-cut. They postulated principles, such as self-determination, but they didn't adhere to them themselves."

"Thus they did nothing to sanction Italian or Polish aggression or to stop Polish crimes against the minorities in Poland itself. One third of the population weren't even Poles. But the Poles wanted to force them to become Poles at breakneck speed, with a gun pointed at each and every head."

"Who financed Franco's rebellion and prevented the Spanish Republic from defending itself? The British. Why? Because they coveted the Spanish gold. At the time of the Franco insurgency Spain had the fourth largest reserves of gold in the world. And the British did so want those gold reserves."

"Everyone talked about disarmament but Germany alone disarmed. And when Germany tried to rearm, which was only natural given the brutality of the French occupation of the 1920s, what happened? Germany was declared to be "militaristic" and "aggressive". But this was nonsense of course. Hitler simply wanted some of the old colonies back. But this couldn't be tolerated. Nor could his alliance with Soviet Russia. Nor his decision to stop borrowing from the international banks. And this: the third point, proved decisive. You see: when Germany stopped borrowing from the international banks: it prospered. There was an economic miracle, full employment. Why? Because German money stayed in Germany. It didn't go elsewhere. So it was decided to start a war. A week after the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact was announced war was declared. This was the true cause, not the invasion of Poland. What did either the British or French care about Poland? No, the Poles were merely useful idiots. The French told the Poles that they would attack Germany one day after a German invasion of Poland. And had the French attacked, with their massive superiority in men and material they would undoubtedly have won. But they did not attack. Nor did the British. On the contrary: they were preparing to attack the Soviet Union instead!"

"That is why the British encouraged and financed the Japanese in the East. It was all about attacking Russia. And the irony is: the Poles wanted the war. They really thought they could win. Hence their atrocities against Germans living in Poland, which Germany could not possibly tolerate. Hence their attacks on German ships and planes coming to and from Danzig, which no government could tolerate."

"The Americans and British encouraged the Poles in their push for war. For the Americans the matter was perfectly simple. Any war would be fought in Europe and the United States would inevitably, given its industrial strength, emerge victorious. They literally could not lose. If the British won in 1940 they would come in on the German side. If the Germans won in 1940 they would come in on the British side."

"In order to justify intervention the magic of Hollywood was needed. A performance needed to be staged: Pearl Harbor."

"They stopped the supply of scrap metal to the Japanese. This gave the latter two options: to abandon China or to attack Pearl Harbor. And what did they do it with? British plans and not a little American help."

"The Americans knew it was coming. Of course they knew it was coming. How could it have been otherwise? But they did nothing and let 2,000 sailors and soldiers perish."

"It is all a black comedy if one thinks about it. Sadly the truth is not always terribly entertaining, which is why we so rarely see films about it. Is that not true?"

Just when he finished Robert Leacock and Olga turned up. Fritz Reimann and the small man exchanged glances. Reimann nodded sagely in Robert Leacock's direction and the small man immediately understood. The small man made his apologies and got up to leave. I got up too. I wanted to follow him but Fritz Reimann roughly pushed me back down.

"You can't possibly be so rude and insult my guest, Mr Leacock," he said. "That would be unforgivable on your part."

Confronted with such a threat I had no choice but to relent. After all Olga was there to brighten up the night.

In the morning hours it dawned on me. I'd missed my chance. The small man had been Dackerl. I, the fool, hadn't recognized him. It was now much too late. I'd never have such a chance ever again.
Chapter Twenty-one

When Olga, Robert and I left the bar, considerably worse for wear after all the alcohol we'd consumed, I became conscious that we were being observed from two separate vehicles. In one: a truck, were my sister and two men and in a car were Wurm, Graf and two dark figures. I realized immediately that they were there to identify us on behalf of underworld assassins.

I thought back to the meaningful look exchanged between Reimann and Dackerl. Reimann had been waiting for Leacock. He, like me, had now become a target. Olga's life was in danger. She knew too much. A whole gang was planning to kill all three of us.

Fortunately we bumped into a friend of Robert's, who happened to be part of a four-man military police patrol and they kindly offered to escort us all the way home. Their generosity had, of course, more to do with Olga's beauty than anything else but at that moment I couldn't care less. I was well and truly frightened. Robert and Olga on the other hand were blissfully unaware of the dangers surrounding them.

That night I hardly slept. I was sick with worry and fear. What was to be done? The attempts on my life had been half-hearted. Whoever had tried to kill me had intended more to frighten than anything else. In Robert's case however there could be no doubt about how determined his killers would be. He had documents that were extremely explosive. They could literally alter the course of history.

This sobering thought forced me to make a confession the next morning to Olga. Her life was in danger. She immediately went to a friend of hers: Prince Heinrich, a former fighter ace who arranged a meeting in a palace in the Herrengasse.

When I arrived Prince Heinrich glanced at me coolly. It didn't take him long to size me up and he wasn't terribly impressed by what he saw.

"Well it seems that you, who have no military experience whatsoever, are confronted with at least two if not more former members of the Waffen SS. The Waffen SS training was so brutal that not a few died of it. But it did turn them into extremely good soldiers. They are not to be trifled with, I can assure you. This matter is not to be taken lightly." He glanced at Olga.

"From what you've told me" Olga began, "both Graf and Wurm have a number of weaknesses, not least of which is the fact that they're both in love. We have to get hold of their Gertrudes or Gertrauds or whatever their names are. It is they and they alone who'll be able to talk sense into them."

"Yes," Heinrich added, immediately catching her train of thought, "right now they are outlaws, they are acting beyond the bounds of society but they undoubtedly wish to return to normality. You have to provide them with the necessary incentives to do so. I can help arrange the practical aspects but it is up to you to actually persuade them."

"Of course their British masters don't wish them to do so. They want them to stay illegal. This makes it extremely easy to blackmail them. They are frightened of rotting away in prison. We must overcome this fear, which is by no means easy. The British can threaten, at any time, to hand them over to the Russians, which would mean certain death, and they know this."

"I know a lady, a fashion designer," Olga added, "who lives on the Graben. She happens to be looking for two girls: one for her shop and another as an assistant in her studio. Here is her address. Go, speak to her and then find the girls."

I went to the lady on the Graben, who was tall, elegant and extremely attractive. She was very kind and promised to help.

The question was of course: would this work? Was I endangering my life? It was a case of travelling into the lion's den. Tickets would not be a problem. The time of getting to Gertraude Bartel in Hardegg on the one hand and Gertrude Schmidhofer in Linz-Ebelsberg on the other was an issue. I was neglecting my responsibilities and had to work on the train.

Both girls were at home when I knocked on their respective doors and both took a lot of time to listen to what I had to say. At first they were both suspicious and not a little frightened. They were tight-lipped about Wurm and Graf.

They repeated to me what they'd told the police: that neither Wurm nor Graf were mixed up in politics. They were both decent, hard-working, serious young men. All they wanted was to be left in peace and to be able to get on with life.

I told them of the offer of work in Vienna. Both reacted in exactly the same way: their faces brightened. They were clearly bored with living in the provinces. They were fascinated by Vienna on the one hand and the thought of working in the fashion industry on the other. I could see that the idea appealed to both. It was soon time to depart and to let the matter sink in. Sooner or later it would worm its way into their heads.

When I returned to Vienna I felt considerably relieved. I'd won one round of the contest. I was quietly confident that now both Wurm and Graf were no longer a threat. The next question was how I was to deal with my sister and the other assassins. There was still a plan to kill Leacock, of that I was sure.

When questioned as to what to do Heinrich had a simple solution. Both Leacock and Olga had to elope to America. I could see that this idea was as painful to him as it was to me. The notion of not seeing Olga again was perfect agony but neither he nor I could see any alternative.

And this was how the matter was resolved. The question of the documents was also discussed. Heinrich said that he'd arrange a meeting with a neutral mediator, someone who was known to and trusted by both sides.

To my surprise it turned out to be none other than Gregor Konigsberg. I had had no idea that he was working for Dackerl. This thought discomforted me and I was not a little embarrassed about the fact that I hadn't realized this earlier. It transpired that it had been Dackerl who'd rescued Konigsberg from Dachau. Dackerl required his services because the Nazis needed to know about Islam. They wanted to recruit Muslims, preferably of the more radical variety, in their war against the Bolshevik heathens. Much as Konigsberg loathed both the Nazis and their ideology he felt a strong sense of personal gratitude and loyalty toward Dacherl, who had, after all, saved his life. Konigsberg was now, officially at least, in the employ of the Americans, who'd taken up the recruitment of radical Islamic fighters where the Nazis had left off.

When I met him he was good-natured enough and wise enough to be discreet. There would be a verbal agreement that Leacock wouldn't breathe a word about this whole business once he reached America. He'd get a nice job at Harvard (that had already been taken care of) and he'd forget that he'd ever possessed these documents or even been to Vienna. He'd never even mention the name of Hitler ever again.

Those Konigsberg represented had no interest whatsoever in seeing either Leacock or Olga dead; on the contrary. This would cause difficulties. What they wanted was merely the documents. That was all.

And so I delivered the documents to Konigsberg and that was the end of the affair.

Both Olga and Leackock left for America, Wurm and Graf became highly respectable lawyers in Vienna, their wives worked in the fashion industry, the Danish journalist went back to Copenhagen, Walter Schachner won the Nobel Prize and I returned to Cambridge, where I taught philosophy.

One fine day a note from the police in the Fuhrmanngasse was forwarded to me while I was giving a lecture. It stated that my sister's body had been found washed up on the banks of the Danube. Judith was no more.

The End
