The Chosen Ones (50 page)

Atonement
   The sentence in the separate trial of Anna Katschenka was announced in April 1948. She was condemned to eight years in prison with the additional punishment of three months’ hard labour every year. She was to do her time in Maria Lankowitz, a women’s prison near Graz. The prison housed more than three hundred inmates who had to sleep in cells shared between up to twenty prisoners at a time. The cells lacked toilets and running water. The only source of warmth was a big stove in the middle of the room which was only sparingly supplied with fuel, even in the winter. Of course, tightly packed human bodies give off their own warmth. During the first few months, before her cell was changed, she had nowhere to keep her personal belongings and nowhere to sit except on her bunk. The prison board did not encourage differentiation
between inmates on grounds of their offences. Women who had been served more than year-long terms for theft, fraud or falsification of official documents sometimes shared cells with murderers on life sentences. For a while, Anna Katschenka was courted by a younger woman who had poisoned and killed her own daughter. To look at, this woman seemed ordinary enough. She kept clean and neat, was always polite and respectful, if perhaps a little distracted at times. If spoken to, she inclined her head and smiled enigmatically with her eyes fixed on the floor or a nearby wall. Her interest in Katschenka was quite rational: she had read about the Steinhof trials and was simply keen to know how Katschenka and her colleagues had ‘gone about doing it’. They never shared a cell, which was just as well, because Anna Katschenka soon came to dread her like the plague. The woman was a curse that had taken on human shape. Katschenka tried her best to avoid having to pass her in the corridors and always left the prisoners’ canteen as soon the poisoner turned up. She even went to the length of formally asking to be moved to the so-called Labour Building where prostitutes and drug addicts were held. Later on, she withdrew inside herself and deliberately avoided all contact with people, warders and fellow prisoners alike, and stayed silent unless ordered to speak up. She was haunted by a recurring image of herself
alone
on the defendant’s seat. Again and again, other details from the trial proceedings also came back to her mind. Officially, the prosecution’s case was not just against her but also her colleagues in pavilion 15: Maria Bohlenrath, Erna Storch, Emilie Kragulj and Cläre Kleinschmittger. But she had been given to understand that the police had failed to find and arrest any of them, despite extensive searches. What would have happened if she hadn’t returned to the hospital that day? What would have happened if she had stuck to her original witness statement regardless
of Illing and Türk’s confessions and washed her hands of the accusations, insisting, as had Marianne Türk, that what she had done only amounted to carrying out orders given by others. After all, decisions about treating or not treating were made in Berlin and not in the clinic at Spiegelgrund.
I only did my duty
. Now and then, she forced herself to go even further back in time: what if she hadn’t applied for that post at Spiegelgrund with Jekelius? But at that point, her speculations had to stop. There had been a war on. If she couldn’t earn, what would her family have lived on? She was her father’s supporting arm, her mother’s map of the world. She felt now that, by being locked up, she had let her patients down and betrayed her responsibility towards them. The days went by, and the years, each day being added onto the previous one like a small cog in a wheel that moved a tiny little bit closer to the end of her prison term. All the while, another bigger wheel, whose cogs made it move in the opposite direction towards her own ageing and death, seemed to drive her deeper and deeper into darkness. The burden of punishment never became lighter but instead ever more impossible to endure. Altogether, she was to spend four years, five months and eight days of her life in prison, including the time in police cells. Throughout, she who had spent her professional life watching and judging others had to put up with being watched herself, having every aspect of her body and personality measured and weighed, scrutinised and analysed. Her lawyer’s application for parole led to her being subjected to a wide range of medical examinations in April 1950. The records show that her already sparse hair had thinned further and gone grey. Her body, always a little on the sturdy side, had swelled and hardened. Katschenka cannot stand being touched by strangers and bursts into tears easily. She is said to suffer from cyclical attacks of depression and these pronounced mood swings, together with her
enhanced sensitivity and marked secretory activity, were considered by the examining doctor to be symptoms of excess thyroid hormone production, which would also fit with her irritability. From the application for parole, it is also clear that Katschenka has gained exceptionally high approval ratings for good behaviour. She works as an assistant in the prison hospital and is praised by the doctors for her ‘diligence and sober attention to detail, her willingness to help at all times and her gentle and sensible manner’. She is allowed to leave the prison in December 1950, but her release is conditional and the remainder of her sentence has been changed into a five-year-long trial period. She is now allowed to look for real work and manages to land a job after about six months of applying: the post is in a children’s hospital, the St Anna Kinderspital on Kinderspitalgasse in Wien’s 9th Bezirk. Now she can work with children, the kind of nursing she loves better than any other, as she has claimed in her witness statement and parole application. But the St Anna Kinderspital is a private hospital. Her position in the city healthcare system was lost the moment she was sacked from Spiegelgrund. A permanent post, with the possibility of a payout on retirement of what she had saved for her pension, is out of her reach unless she becomes fully rehabilitated. So far, all her applications have been refused. In September 1956, when a last application has again been turned down, she appeals in a letter to the Minister of Justice, Otto Tschadek, pleading that he should intervene on her behalf:

Also this last application is refused. Anna Katschenka is never rehabilitated. Sixty-one years old, she dies in Wien in February 1966.

What’s the point of digging up the past, we must learn to look ahead
    There’s a kind of forgetfulness, Adrian Ziegler says, that isn’t the same as failing to remember but makes you feel that your brain has gone numb. Believe you me, he says, I’m very familiar with that kind of forgetfulness. I’ve suffered from it all my life. You do things as if life is just a meaningless backdrop, and nothing of what other people say or do to you matters. Not even the very worst or most horrible events really get through to you. You might call it ‘not remembering’ or you begin to think that you don’t understand the meaning of your own acts. Can an entire country be in the grip of that kind of forgetfulness? Heinrich Gross was on the run from the collapsed Eastern Front, made a failed attempt to cross the river Elbe and was captured by Soviet soldiers. That was in May 1945. He then spent more than two years in a Soviet prison camp at Kohtla-Järve in northern Estonia. The camp held almost fifteen thousand POWs but had only twenty doctors. Gross realised that he could be seen to be useful and the camp bosses soon came to appreciate him as a keen and trustworthy doctor. He was allowed to study Russian in his spare time. When he returned to Austria in December 1947, a recently released POW, the court proceedings against the three principal defendants in the Steinhof trial were already completed. Doctor Illing had been condemned to pay the maximum penalty and was executed by hanging on 30 November 1946. Doctor Hübsch was freed and Doctor Türk sentenced to ten years in prison. Heinrich
Gross knew that he would have to face the court and made some half-hearted stabs at lying low, but was found and arrested after only a few months. However, despite Anna Katschenka’s witness statement naming Doctor Gross as one of the superiors who had ordered her to kill the children, deaths that she had herself been condemned for, the
Volksgericht
of Wien sentenced Gross to spend just two years in prison. The guilty verdict was promptly challenged in a higher court, which declared the entire
Volksgericht
trial invalid due to technical errors. Unlike Doctor Türk, who could not appeal against her verdict because she had admitted in interviews that she had acted knowingly and with intent to kill – as Türk had stated:
On the rare occasions when the child in question failed to respond normally to the sleeping drug, I would administer an injection of Modiscop
[a combination drug of two morphine-based compounds and scopolamine],
usually, say, three to four ampoules, a dose that led to death within twelve hours
– Doctor Gross admitted to nothing, neither acts nor intentions. Gross knew all about death by natural causes as well as the other kind and, as far as he was concerned, the children cared for at Spiegelgrund had died from natural causes, that is to say illness, inherited or acquired. Anyone could read that in the case notes. Pneumonia, for instance, was the most common cause of death. Certainly, if certain sedatives or hypnotics like Luminal, for argument’s sake, were given in excessive doses it could lead to symptoms similar to gastrointestinal disorder, as had been described in some of the children. However, many diseases are also associated with such symptoms. Doctor Gross, unlike Anna Katschenka, never contradicted himself and maintained an aura of composed, somewhat arrogant vagueness throughout the proceedings. He admitted only to things that could definitely be pinned on him, ignored everything else, and made a show of regarding whatever was presented as ‘evidence’ of his
alleged wrongdoing as no more than a ragbag of isolated items, all capable of different interpretations depending on your perspective. He also consistently talked down his own contributions as a doctor at the institution:

In May 1951, all further proceedings against Doctor Gross are cancelled, the accusations against him withdrawn and he is free to carry on in his old career. Which he does, with immediate effect. During the next two decades, he publishes very frequently in medical journals. His publication list runs into hundreds of articles concerning neurological defects and appropriate diagnostic methods. In 1959, Gross and colleagues publish an article in the
Vienna Journal of Neurology and Related Specialisms
(
Wiener Zeitschrift für Nervenheilkunde und deren Grenzgebiete
) that is entitled ‘Concerning Major Malformations of the Cerebral Ventricular System’. It is a study of common pathological changes of the fluid-containing spaces of the brain, with an attempt at explaining how these defects could come about. In his introduction, Doctor Gross informs his readers that he bases his research on having been offered
access to the remarkable collection of good-quality anatomical specimens kept by the autopsy unit at the healthcare institution Heil-und Pflegeanstalt ‘Am Steinhof
’. This archive of hundreds of preserved brains
is probably the greatest and most wide-ranging collection of its kind available anywhere in this country.
That the institutional source of the fixed brains was Gross’s earlier place of work is clear from the
anonymised case histories that the authors describe in this article and in a later series of scientific articles. In other words, the specimens are the brains and assorted endocrine glands that the senior registrar in charge of autopsies, Barbara Uiberrak, spoke of during the Steinhof trial as ‘exceedingly interesting from a scientific point of view’. She then went on to suggest that, every year, a few of them should be studied, and Doctor Gross obviously followed up on her suggestion. While Doctor Heinrich Gross carries on analysing the cases of the children he had helped to kill, his reputation as a scientist and psychiatrist spreads ever more widely. In 1957, he is appointed as medical director at the Rosenhügel hospital in Lainz. By 1962, he is back in his former doctor’s villa on the Steinhof site and is applying for the directorship of the entire hospital. In 1968, he is offered the post as head of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute’s unit for research into malformations of the nervous system and, at about this time, he also starts out on a long and successful career as a forensic psychiatrist. During the 1960s and early 1970s, the courts consult him almost routinely for his written assessments of many criminals whose mental health is in question. Decisions on sentence tariffs and eventual treatments are based on his judgements. He states himself that, by 1978, he has found time to write no less than 12,000 of these reports. Doctor Gross is widely regarded as knowledgeable, thorough and efficient, and this efficiency of his is particularly appreciated by the courts. Requests never stay for long in his in-tray. And it is in his capacity as forensic psychiatrist that Doctor Gross, one morning in November 1975, encounters one of his former Spiegelgrund patients. It takes some time, though, before he realises just whom he is dealing with.

Crime and Punishment
    But Doctor Gross doesn’t keep his promise. He does exactly the opposite and uses Doctor Illing’s report from 1944 as the basis for what he himself writes about Adrian on the same day as their talk. Already as a child, opines Doctor Gross, Adrian Z proved that his seriously disturbed ability to sustain relationships by betraying and cheating and engaging in various forms of incestuous and homosexual acts. Several placements in foster homes followed until he was admitted to a clinic for paediatric nervous disorders.

He goes on to quote in detail from Illing’s 1944 report, the very same document that he had tried to deny existed during his talk with Adrian:

Adrian Z’s crime consists of receiving 20,000 schilling as a fee for being an accomplice to criminals who had done a major robbery. The court, after consideration of the psychiatric report by Doctor Heinrich Gross, sentences Adrian to six years in prison followed by ten years in a special detention centre for gravely disturbed, recidivist criminals.

Safe Haven
    Adrian Ziegler’s cell in the prison in Stein an der Donau was not much larger than the solitary-confinement cell in pavilion 9. There was just room for a toilet, a wash-hand basin and, high up on the wall, a barred window which he covered with a blue curtain. He had sewn the curtain himself on an old treadle-powered sewing machine that he kept in a worn, brown suitcase right at the back of the wardrobe. This was how he gradually transformed his appalling, bitterly cold exile into a thriftily and effectively furnished home, full of useful things, though there was no room for anything superfluous. Above and underneath the neatly made bed (if there was one single thing I learnt at Spiegelgrund, he said, it was how to make beds) books were stacked, either in double rows on the shelves or in tottering piles to save space once the shelves were too packed to hold any more. His books were of every kind. He had Thucydides’s
History of the Peloponnesian War
, translated novels by Steinbeck and Conrad, and political biographies, as well as textbooks in social medicine and pedagogics and accounts of the development of modern psychiatry. One treatise that he had become particularly intrigued by was a 1916 essay by Julius Tandler, the well-known Social Democratic spokesman for the rights of the working classes to sanitary homes and working conditions. The essay is called ‘Krieg und Bevölkerung’ (‘War and the Population’) and was one long plea that society must stop supporting the people Tandler called society’s ‘negative variants’ (
Minusvarianten
; Ziegler had underlined the word) or else, if one carried on propping them up, there was a risk that racially inferior traits would be propagated into future generations instead of grafting characteristics such as strength, skill and capacity to survive onto the human breed. I realise now how little I knew as a child at Steinhof, Adrian said later. I never understood how deeply views of this sort had penetrated into every pore of
society and how devilishly calculated and regulated, to the very last detail, the whole system was. How just about all parents were visited by agents from the social services, just as my mother was. And how people who worked in the social service offices, as well as the staff in all children’s homes and hospitals, had to fill in a form for every child that they figured might be flawed in some way or who seemed not to measure up – to whatever standard. And then, these children were simply taken away from their parents. While I was in Spiegelgrund, I had to sit for two weeks alone in a cell like this one.
Einzeln gegeben
, that’s what they called it. It was just routine; the slightest thing that annoyed the nurses could mean that you were punished like that. It’s a fact that I can’t quite remember what I was punished for, only that I, just once, after having spent something like a week, maybe ten days in the cell, I asked if I couldn’t have a book to read or a sheet of paper to write on or anything at all to keep me occupied, but instead of a book or a sheet of paper I got Doctor Illing. And he brought the clapper and was in a furious mood and said that I had no right to ask for anything at all and all I needed to learn was to bend down and obey. He made me stand on all fours like an animal while he flogged me with the clapper. If the punishments really were senseless, if they didn’t keep us locked up in order to do what they said the school was for, which was to educate us, teach us to read and write and behave decently, then what
was
the intention behind it all? Why hit and hit and hit until the child can neither sit nor stand afterwards? What was the point? At least I’m allowed books to read now, he said. Ziegler was regarded as an oddball by his fellow prisoners at Stein, and by the wardens and social workers and other people he came into contact with as well. Nobody else had a cell like his, kitted out like a cross between a haberdasher’s and a library. He was known as a talker who held forth without anybody understanding much of
what he was on about or even picking up what was the meaning of all that talk. The words formed a screen that he held up in front of himself to prevent anyone from seeing and finding out what was buried deep inside. Ziegler was a loner who had learnt to socialise with his loneliness as if it were a kind of company. His face had grown sharp-edged and square, with its strong chin and prominent frontal and cheekbones which made it look almost like a mask, an impression that was emphasised by the broad-rimmed glasses he habitually wore at the time. His skin was coarse and grey as if all the concrete and stone that surrounded him had settled in his pores. But the look in his eyes was frank and curious although, now and then, it could start shifting about and make him seem utterly absent. At these moments, his mouth would keep moving and he became involved in long arguments with many tangled details only to say, suddenly,
I don’t remember, I’ve no memory of that
. He often showed photographs and documents he had collected and stuck carefully into different albums. He showed pictures of his mother (Leonie Dobrosch-Ziegler) wearing her bridal veil. And one of Uncle Ferenc, relaxed on the bare riverbank down by Hubertusdamm, lying on his side with his head supported by his hand. The naked skin on his chest shows under his jacket and is as dark as the skin on his face. The pictures of Adrian’s brothers and sisters show Laura, who looked determined even as a child, with her broad arms crossed and resting on the table the children have gathered around: Helmut clinging onto the back of a chair and the two younger sisters, Helga and Hannelore, sitting on their mother’s lap. Leonie’s red lips almost part in that anxious, cherry-lipped smile that Adrian would so often describe. He also had pictures of the woman he married and later ran away from, Elfriede, and of his daughter Missi. He had laboriously copied each and every one of the letters he wrote to her from prison into a large, black
notebook and then stuck her letter in response on the opposing page. He used to write to her at least once a week. They didn’t meet that often, of course. When they did speak together, they only rarely talked about his childhood and never about his time in Spiegelgrund. He was not unwilling to tell others about Spiegelgrund, but as time went by it became harder for him to find concrete details to catch and hold people’s attention. He said that he increasingly didn’t remember things or that the monotony and uneventfulness he had experienced later in life set everything adrift in his mind. He would revisit certain sensations and events, though. One was seeing Nurse Mutsch’s mane of black hair, that one and only time when she let it down. It had made an overwhelming impression on him. Then, there was the night when Julius Becker had stabbed himself in the belly with a pair of scissors, and the battle of the bullet casings or the period of ‘Pototschnik’s rule’, as he called it. But he remained vague about what happened after his escape, when he spent time with ‘the idiots’ and then with the dying in the gallery of pavilion 17. He did say that he was subjected to one of Doctor Illing’s air-into-the-skull X-rays and described the pain and other side effects extremely convincingly. But the notes in his diary are very unclear and it is impossible to be certain that any such investigation was actually carried out. When his sentence was reduced and he was released from prison, he went out to Steinhof a few times, though it seems that these trips didn’t do much to help him remember more of the past. He walked along the long lateral driveways that extend from the rising track that forms the central axis. In early afternoon, the only sounds are the persistent cawing of the crows and the hollow whispering of the wind as it blows through the canopies of the trees; always the same unchanging wind, wide and calm. Because many of the pavilions are still in use, it is difficult for an ordinary visitor to get
access. On one visit, a pavilion stands empty for refurbishment and Adrian takes the chance to have a look inside. Near the entrance, the corridor has been piled high with old enamelled items, toilet seats and the like, giving off an acidic smell of dust and damp. All the wash-hand basins have been ripped off the washroom walls and only the rust-eaten tap sockets are sticking out from the bare plaster walls. But the long row of shower cabins is still there, and even one of the big tubs where the bed-wetters were dealt with by being rolled into wet sheets and then alternately dunked into the water and lifted up again.
Schlempern lassen
, Adrian recalls that the procedure was called officially. (Nurses Mutsch and Demeter standing on either side of the tub with the leaden weight of the wet body dangling inside the sheet they have stretched between them.) As Adrian remembers it, the doors to the dormitories were equipped with hatches to let the nurses on night duty check that the children were in bed, but in this pavilion at least, the doors are smooth and in one piece. The waist-high band of evil-smelling brown oil paint that he remembers so clearly as running along the lower part of the corridor walls is not there anymore. But the rhomboid pattern of the floor tiles is the same and, at the doors and along the skirting boards, the tiles are so worn that the pattern is fading. And the windows, with their grilles and lockable braces, let in this very special, empty light that has all colour and substance filtered out and leached away. It is a light without shadows or space: a light without memory. In the area around the hospital, the tracks run along their old, accustomed paths, the same tracks where the children marched off to their excursions, with Mrs Rohrbach or Mrs Krämer leading them. Gallitzinberg is also there to be climbed and the air-defence culverts and passages can be examined on old blueprints. On one of the south-facing slopes, hidden behind rough boulders and half-overgrown with
mosses and roots, you can locate the entrance to the entire system, the same entrance through which Baldur von Schirach must have made his way to safety when Wien capitulated in the last days of April 1945. The angels on the top of the mountain are missing, though. They were the children’s guardian angels who, or so Hannes Neubauer insisted, looked exactly like the stone angels that were part of the ornamental façade of the church overlooking the pavilions. When the air-raid sirens screamed at night he’d always thought the sound came from the angels. But only young women, not much older than the boys, worked inside the bare, cement-lined rooms carved out of the rock. They had earphones clamped to their heads and spoke into microphones. Once, when Hannes Neubauer was listening to the radio in Nurse Mutsch’s room, he had heard one of these women speak. She was
Mrs Cuckoo
who, in her cool ethereal voice, told of air raids to come and reported on the damage afterwards. There is a picture of her sitting at her post, a very young girl, perhaps fourteen or fifteen years old, with shoulder-length hair cut with a straight fringe, and a face that radiated scared self-confidence. The wall behind her was hung with abstract-looking maps showing the movements of the enemy planes. If the Allies had bombed just this installation, if only they had known that the Austrian Nazi regime had concentrated their entire air-defence control system inside the mountain, all of it could have been wiped out with one precise hit. One huge blast could have eliminated them all, not only those who were keeping watch around the clock inside the Mountain, but all the sick and retarded, the degenerate and the useless, all these
inhuman
creatures who inhabited the pavilions at the foot of the mountain. No angelic alarm call in the universe could have saved them.