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PHILLIP KERR: TELLING STORIES WE NEED TO HEAR

Posted By Ruth King on June 26th, 2011

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By PHILIP KERR

As the author of eight mystery novels on Hitler and the Nazis, I’m sometimes asked why I choose to write about this subject. Hasn’t the time come when, in a tidy phrase beloved of Tony Blair, we should “draw a line” under the war and move on? Indeed, the question was once put to me rather more directly in Berlin by a German publisher with whom I was having dinner. “You’re not a Jew,” he said. “What’s it to you, what happened 60 years ago? Why do you want to keep on bringing up the past like this?”

Photo by Roger Viollet/Getty ImagesIn the dock: Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Joachim von Ribbentrop, Wilhelm Keitel (front row), Karl Dönitz, Erich Raeder and Baldur von Schirach (back row) in 1945 during the Nuremberg trials. American psychologist Gustave Gilbert talks to Göring.

It’s certainly true that I have no personal stake in any of this. I was born in Edinburgh in 1956. My father was too young to fight in the war. None of my relations died in a concentration camp. I’m not Jewish, as the German publisher so politely noted.

And yet it seems to me that the Nazi revolution was the most important event in world history since the Protestant Reformation and that we’re still living with its consequences—and will be for quite a while longer. The fact is that I can’t understand why more mystery novelists don’t write about the Nazis. It always seems much more interesting to me to write about a murder that takes place against a background that includes the crime of the century, if not the millennium. This time and place provides me with a fantastic resonance—a huge echo that magnifies every little thing I write and often leads me where I never expected to go. An echo that, as T.S. Eliot said, “travels down a passage we did not take, towards the door we never opened, into the rose garden.”

Well, if not a rose garden in this case, something full of thorns anyway. I first started writing about and researching the subject in the mid-1980s. And to this end, a Jewish-American friend, Allen Reichmann, kindly arranged for me to meet with his father, a plumber and a survivor of Auschwitz. We drove to the family home in Washington Heights in northern Manhattan, where Mrs. Reichmann had prepared dinner. After we’d eaten, I listened with fascination as Mr. Reichmann explained how he and his brother had moved through the Reich, from one camp to another, installing luxury bathrooms in the homes of senior SS officers, including one Josef Mengele. That’s almost a novel in itself. (They liked avocado-colored bathroom furniture.)

Mrs. Reichmann was no stranger to plumbing or persecution either. Forced into hiding in Holland, she lived for two years in the lavatory of a Dutch friend before making her escape on a boat to South Africa. When their stories were concluded, my friend Allen had tears in his eyes and not for the reasons you might expect. Somewhat reproachfully he said to his parents: “How come you never talked about this before? How come I had to wait for Phil to come here before you told me any of this stuff?”

“You never asked,” joked his father. “Besides,” he said, rather more serious now, “I wanted Phil to hear my story simply because he’s not my son. Because the people who try to deny that Jews were gassed at Birkenau might be more inclined to believe him because he’s not a Jew. The more non-Jews there are who hear these stories from the people who lived them the better, I think.”

This was before the existence of Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation, of course. Nowadays we live in a world where testimonies like those of Mr. and Mrs. Reichmann are recorded on film for the future use of historians. But Mr. Reichmann’s words have always stayed with me and, to some extent they have been one of my guiding principles as a novelist writing about this period.

I did a postgraduate degree in German jurisprudence and discovered to my horror how many German lawyers, jurists and judges had been at the sharp end of Nazi genocide in Eastern Europe. I wanted to understand what it was like not just to be a Jew living through this period but also to be a German, to be a Nazi. I wanted to understand how a civilized people—especially lawyers (assuming you think they’re people)—could do what they did to other people merely because they were Jews.

Research about Nazi Germany hasn’t always been so easy or as comfortable as pot roast with the Reichmann family. When I first started writing about the period, there wasn’t anything like the enormous number of books on the subject that there are today. Between the end of the war and the reunification of modern Germany in 1990, original source material about the Nazis was hard to come by, especially in Germany. Books tended to be about Hitler, the Holocaust or the war itself, and there was very little socioeconomic history that might reveal life as lived by ordinary Germans.

All this has changed, and lately one feels like the man who has waited for an omnibus only to find several dozen arriving at the same time. Did I say several dozen? In the U.K., a staggering 850 books about the Third Reich were published in 2010, up from a hardly moderate 350 in 2000.

And many of them are notable contributions to the study of the Nazis, including Roger Moorhouse’s “Berlin at War” and Erik Larson’s excellent “In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin.”

The summer sees the publication of two important histories that deserve to be read in tandem: Frederick Taylor’s “Exorcising Hitler: The Occupation and Denazification of Germany” and Gerald Steinacher’s “Nazis on the Run: How Hitler’s Henchmen Fled Justice.”

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Photo by Popperfoto/Getty ImagesALTERED EGO Adolf Eichmann entered Argentina in 1950, using this forged passport identifying him as ‘Ricardo Klement.’

The subject of Mr. Steinacher’s book will be the more familiar, thanks to Frederick Forsyth’s novel “The Odessa File” (1972) and the film version. Having done extensive research in newly opened archives in the Vatican and at the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva, Mr. Steinacher describes broadly how many Nazis escaped justice and Germany, where, as Frederick Taylor shows us, the end-game of the war played out between Europe’s increasingly fractious Soviet and Western occupiers.

As the allies endeavored to administer a continent where the principal cities lay in ruins, the economic base was devastated, vast numbers of people had been displaced and vaster numbers needed to be fed, they also tried to do what many thought impossible: To develop international criminal law at the same time as they applied it. This was a rare moment in history when good men, faced with an obvious evil and feeling the eyes of the world upon them, attempted to deal out a kind of justice in the name of the innocent millions who had died.

As Mr. Taylor shows, this was hardly easy. Not everyone was convinced that justice was at all well-served by its being handed down by the war’s victors. The doubts of Harlan Fiske Stone, the Chief Justice of the United States, regarding the legal basis for putting Nazi war criminals on trial were so strong that he refused to have anything to do with what he called a “high-grade lynching party.” So strongly did Stone feel about the matter that he declined to swear in the American members of the International Military Tribunal that sat in judgment of the surviving Nazi leaders at Nuremberg in 1945-46.

And yet I think that history shows us not only that the war-crimes trials were necessary—how, asks Mr. Taylor, could there have been no judicial reckoning with the Third Reich?—but also that in the main these were properly conducted. All of the accused were allowed legal representation and, given that quite a few were acquitted, the Nazi trials must surely be regarded as fair. Justice was not only done, it was seen to be done.

While reading Mr. Taylor’s very commendable book—which fills an important gap in German history in English previously exploited mostly by novelists—I reflected that America and Britain are surely to be congratulated on having got the administration of postwar Germany more or less right. Not just the trials but the whole process of de-Nazifying the population of a very large country and the success of how the Allies handled a defeated Germany can be seen by anyone who visits Germany today.

And yet the number of Nazis who were brought to justice was shockingly small. In both West and East Germany, the majority were quickly put back into the institutions of government. A good many also escaped, and Gerald Steinacher describes exactly how they managed this in “Nazis on the Run”—only the second authoritative book on the subject, after Uki Goni’s “The Real Odessa” (2002). (Odessa, an acronym for “Organization of Former SS Members” in German, is supposed to have set up escape routes for fugitive Nazis.)

Regular readers in this popular field will know something of how the International Red Cross and shadowy figures in the Vatican helped Nazis to escape from Europe to South America. Fleeing through the Tyrolean Alps to Italian seaports like Genoa, most used identification papers issued by the Red Cross to make their getaway, while many figures in the Roman Catholic Church were knowingly involved in large-scale Nazi smuggling. Priests hid wanted men in monasteries, drove them to safe-houses, gave them food and money, helped them across borders, and finally took them aboard the passenger liners that would deliver them to a new life in South America. Even the Archbishop of New York, Cardinal Spellman, believed that the struggle against international communism outweighed any other considerations; he was one of the principal sources of finance for the Vatican’s relief commission, which repeatedly helped war criminals to escape.

Mr. Steinacher argues persuasively that there was no powerful secret organization called the Odessa behind the escapees. This was nothing more than a myth invented by Simon Wiesenthal to keep the international spotlight on the perpetrators who continued to elude him. Less well-known, perhaps, is the story of how the American intelligence services recruited many SS and Gestapo officers as useful in the new war against the Soviet Union.

One of the worst of these men was Klaus Barbie who, at the behest of the 66th Detachment of the U.S. Counter Intelligence Corps, was “resettled”—an ironic use of the word, given what resettlement had meant for millions of European Jews—in Bolivia, where he worked for the CIA despite its being well aware that he was wanted in France for war crimes.

In 1983, the U.S. government felt obliged to issue a formal apology for its involvement in helping Barbie escape—an early and commendable example of an apology for historical injustice. It remains to be seen when the British and Russian governments will feel similarly moved to own up about and apologize for those Nazi war criminals who were also recruited to fight in the Cold War.

These two books aren’t the definitive word on their subjects—scholarship runs apace—but they do add breadth and depth to our understanding. Speaking for myself, I wish I’d had them 25 years ago when first I started writing novels about the period.

The Nazis show no sign of losing their public appeal; and it is perhaps no surprise that British publishers continue to call books about them “the gift.”

—Mr. Kerr’s novel “Field Gray” was published in May by Putnam.

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