The Butchers of Berlin (52 page)

In the 1980s I spent long periods in what was then West Berlin and was again intrigued by the sense of recent (and current) history, far more than when in Britain. Germany made
a point of emphasising its clean break from 1945 (which turned out to be not true at all), compared to us Brits limping on, dragging the coattails of the past behind (when in fact the Labour
government of 1945 probably offered the cleaner break). On one trip to Berlin I happened to take a book called
The Last Jews in Berlin
. As Primo Levi later wrote, we all knew about the
trains, which featured in every account, and what happened next, but I knew nothing of the before. I was reading some theory too, particularly an essay on politics by Gilles Deleuze, which
considered history in terms of lines of migration and pointed out that life always proceeds at several rhythms and speeds. This variable offensive is no more apparent than in times of war. Later, I
was equally struck by Don DeLillo’s remark that history comes down to people talking in rooms.
The Last Jews in Berlin
blurred all the usual boundaries, to reveal a world of often
impossible moral complexity and uncomfortable truths: how, for example, part of the twisted genius of the Third Reich was the way it solicited the cooperation of those it wished to destroy, first
with the deportations and later in the camps. Both were the work of petty clerks as much as anyone, a bureaucratic nightmare out of Kafka. They were stark times, but the shading was infinitely
complex.

The persecution of Berlin’s Jews took place often right in the familiar heart of the city.
The Last Jews in Berlin
described a vanished world that remained horribly recognisable
even as it was being twisted so out of shape: the city map remained the same as it had when Alfred Döblin wrote his street-specific 1929 masterpiece
Berlin Alexanderplatz
(except many
street names had been changed to glorify the new regime). And then there were the Catchers. I’d had no idea that some Jews were turned by the Gestapo into agents to hunt down those that had
gone underground. The most notorious of these was the glamorous Stella Kübler. At the time,
The Last Jews in Berlin
was the only reference to her that I could find. Yet vestiges of her
lingered in the streets I found myself in: Kübler’s beat scoured the theatres, cafés and bars of a part of Berlin I knew quite well. Down the years, her turning and betrayal
retained a grim fascination when posed as the question: how would you or I have behaved under the circumstances?

Another book read at the time was Heinz Höhne’s
The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS
, which was the first time I came across
the SS having its own equivalent to Internal Affairs, with reference to an investigative judge named Morgen who was put to weeding out corruption and sadism in the camps. As Höhne noted:
‘It was an absurd spectacle; one or two “unauthorised” murders of Jews were investigated – by a whole squad of SS legal experts – inside the extermination camps where
thousands were being murdered daily.’ Morgen remained as much an historical obscurity as Stella Kübler; subsequent information adds little to the half-dozen pages offered by Höhne.
The question remains unanswered whether he was a hypocrite or a man of conscience, or both. (The generous explanation might be that he did what he could, not without risk to himself, when most did
nothing. Realising that any personal protest against state-sanctioned murder would go unheeded or punished, he took the more prudent and probably the only practical tactic of prosecuting individual
transgressors within the interpretation of dishonour and the law.)

Details from both these books and other reading lodged in the memory: that the Gestapo used civilian removal vans (with a Jewish name) to transport their prisoners; that until
1943 those to be deported were summoned by private letter and reported voluntarily with their permitted baggage allowance to fill in their forms; that the Gestapo was suspended for corruption and
an SS team from Vienna was brought in to instigate a mass roundup of remaining Jews. (Elsewhere, and perhaps most extraordinary of all, I read that free bottled mineral water was given to staff in
Auschwitz. Mineral water in a death camp! In England we’d pretty much had to wait until the 1980s and the deregulation of the stock exchange when those coming into the financial sector from
abroad demanded it. It took me years to stumble across the answer to the German story. The SS, covert but not particularly effective capitalists, had expanded into the soft-drinks market because
Himmler thought Germans consumed too much beer and wanted to make the price of nonalcoholic drinks more competitive, so the SS ended up secretly owning most of the Third Reich’s mineral water
market, far more than was needed to achieve price leverage. For me, this sort of digression seemed much more revealing of the way things really worked than half-a-dozen volumes of traditional
history.)

In the back of my mind, Kübler and Morgen twinned, as two contrasting individuals faced with an extreme moral dilemma. How had they reacted? Had they cared? Kübler
apparently not; like many others afterwards she sought only to portray herself as a victim. So, again, what would you or I have done in their place? For myself, I suspected I knew the uncomfortable
answer, being drawn to figures of transgression and disgrace. A third book read during my Berlin sojourns, picked up on the strength of its title alone, was
Black List Section H
, the
autobiographical novel of renegade Irish author Francis Stuart, recounting his extraordinary life, which culminated in Berlin during the war, teaching at the University and broadcasting
anti-British propaganda, for which he was lucky to escape later with his neck. Stuart lived a life of some privilege while Kübler was scurrying around the same part of town looking for people
to betray; therefore the geography of their very different lives almost intersected. To have read Stuart’s book in Berlin was to have a very clear sense of a past returned to haunt, and of
lives lived during wartime, much of it still retrievable.
Black List Section H
remains a valuable documentary on the city’s civilian history in 1943 when all eyes were turned
elsewhere.

I never particularly had it in mind to write about Berlin at the time. I had made two films there, which satisfied my curiosity. I had also written what was ostensibly a London
Soho novel,
Robinson
(1993) that was in fact based more on the experience of Berlin, which in the late 1970s and early 1980s offered enough distractions to test the border zones of
anyone’s identity. I later met Francis Stuart, who talked of the importance of drift in life, but not of how deep the currents were in which he had swum.

My novel
The Psalm Killer
(1996) had started off by asking the questions (after chancing across the term Ordinary Decent Criminals): what was the role of ordinary crime
in sectarian Northern Ireland, and what percentage of police work was devoted to it? The questions were quickly overtaken by research, which, in terms of what was gifted, revealed a gold mine of
mind-boggling paramilitary and intelligence complexity. But years later I found myself asking a variation of the same questions about Berlin during the war. What would have happened if an
individual murder victim was Jewish, at a time when they were all deemed expendable? Who, if anyone, would have been assigned to investigate? I remembered Morgen. More to the point, I remembered
that Morgen, after a mysterious interlude of punishment that had him sent to fight in Russia, had been just as mysteriously recalled to Berlin to work in the financial corruption section of the
Criminal Police. He was told to sit on his hands and not cause trouble, advice he promptly ignored by investigating the commandant of a concentration camp for financial misdealing.

As with
The Psalm Killer
, the story became more complex than the simple questions that had provoked it. I thought again of persecution happening in familiar surroundings, and how soul
crushing it must be to find where you lived all your life turned into an alien hostile space. More specifically,
The Last Jews in Berlin
told of a young Jewish woman, Ruth Thomas, whose
‘designer clothes and patterns were not only well regarded in the garment industry but earned […] badly needed foreign currency from sales abroad.’ The book suggested other
strands: secret trading between a parish worker from the Church of Sweden and the Gestapo, to free certain people from the SS – to ‘buy them back’ – then hide and eventually
export them; reference to a people-smuggling operation using furniture crates belonging to a Swedish diplomat; mention of a Chinese forger and a female Hungarian fortune teller; an account of the
demonstration at Rosenstrasse, and how Jews married to Gentiles and therefore legally protected were arrested in error, hence the protest. (One possible reason for their arrest, which was not gone
into, is considered in Chapter 31.) Above all there was the depravity of Stella Kübler, who at the height of her activity was just twenty years old and known as the ‘blond ghost’.
She and her partner between them were said to have accounted for over 2000 Jewish arrests.

Elsewhere, the forger Schönhaus, mentioned by Gersten to Sybil in Chapter 46, was an actual forger who escaped from Berlin and years after wrote a memoir,
The
Forger
(2007), with material on the Jewish art school scene, social life in general and a chilling encounter with Kübler, a friend from student days, who set up his arrest then, perhaps
out of fondness, changed her mind. (It is the only record I could find of any humane gesture on her part.)

Morgen keeps his name, mainly because I felt I was chasing the man himself, and wanted to join up the dots of what there was, rather than trying to create a facsimile. In the context of an
historical fiction it is sometimes more appropriate to speculate in the shadow of lives lived rather than just make stuff up. Francis Stuart got changed to Francis Alwynd, being not so much a
portrait as an interpretation of cultural anomaly. Anyway I took liberties and, besides, Stuart had had the last word on himself in
Black List Section H
. The location of the slaughterhouse
was nicked – there is no other word – from Alfred Döblin’s
Berlin Alexanderplatz
, one of the great novels on Berlin or any other city; it was far too good not to
appropriate. The affair between Sybil and Lore owes something (quite a lot, actually) to the memoir
Aimée and Jaguar
by Erica Fischer, which tells of a housewife and mother of four
who fell in love with a young Jewish woman.

I no longer remember where I read about an army surplus store being looted after the air raid, or cattle stampeding in the street, or there being photographs of the drowned in the reception area
of the Criminal Police building. These are the kind of details you can’t make up and, it is hoped, make the difference for the reader between theatrical brushstroke and something coming
alive.

It could be argued that research is less interesting these days with more or less everything available at the press of a button. Previously obscure information – such as the Jews being
forced to pay for their own transportation – is now instantly and universally available on Wikipedia. That said, the bulk of this research came from hard print, and more particularly
footnotes, which often prove more illuminating than the text and remain unavailable on the Internet, being the product of proper scholarship.

For their general use, the following books and reference maps, in no particular order, were helpful:

Berlin 1910
–
1933
by Eberhart Roters (Wellfleet Press, 1982);
Creating Beauty to Cure the Soul: Race and Psychology in the Shaping of Aesthetic
Surgery
by Sander L. Gilman (Duke University Press, 1998);
Ilse’s Berlin: I Was There
–
1926 to 1945
by Ilse Lewis (Authorhouse, 2011);
Hitler’s Berlin: A
Third Reich Tourist Guide [1937]
(WPC, 2008);
Berlin Allied Intelligence Map of Key Buildings [1945]
;
Pharus-Plan Berlin 1940
(reprint, 2013);
A Serial Killer in Nazi Berlin:
The Chilling Story of the S-Bahn Murderer
by Scott Andrew Selby (Berkley, 2014) with material on serial killings, appropriated by Stoffel; ditto
Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany
by Maria Tartar (Princetown University Press, 1995). Peter Adam’s memoir,
Not Waving But Drowning
(Andre Deutsch, 1995), has a section on growing up half-Jewish in wartime Berlin;
Spandau: The Secret Diaries
by Albert Speer (Collins, 1976) mentions the Horcher’s restaurant story, as do
The Goebbels Diaries 1942-3
edited by Louis P. Lochner (Doubleday,
1948) which has an aside on the Nöthling scandal;
Eva’s Berlin: Memoirs of a Wartime Childhood
by Eva Wald Leverton (Thumbprint Press, 2000);
Between Dignity and Despair:
Jewish Life in Nazi Germany
by Marion A. Kaplan (OUP, 1998);
What We Knew: Terror, Mass Murder, and Everyday Life in Nazi Germany
by Eric A. Johnson and Karl-Heinz Reuband (Basic Books,
2005);
Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews and Ordinary Germans
by Eric A. Johnson (Basic Books, 2000);
Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and The Final Solution in Poland
by
Christopher R. Browning (Penguin, 2001);
Germany Turns Eastwards
by Michael Burleigh (Pan, 2002);
Male Fantasies Volume 2
by Klaus Theweleit (Polity Press, 1989);
The Gestapo:
Power and Terror in The Third Reich
by Carsten Dams and Michael Stolle (OUP, 2014);
Gestapo: Instrument of Tyranny
by Edward Crankshaw (Greenhill, 1990);
History of the SS
by G.S.
Graber (Hale, 1978);
Behind the Steel Wall: Berlin 1941
–
43
by Arvid Fredborg (Harrap, 1944), in which a Swedish journalist reports from Berlin;
The Wartime Broadcasts of
Francis Stuart, 1942-1944
ed. Brendan Barrington (Lilliput, 2000);
The Order of the Death’s Head: The Story of Hitler’s SS
by Heinz Höhne (transl. Richard Barry, Secker
& Warburg, 1969), but specifically essential for introducing Morgen, as noted.