A RINGING TELEPHONE would have awakened Rolf had he not lain in bed all night next to Klara, awake and fully dressed. It did wake Klara up, and she nudged Rolf and told him to grab the little noisemaker and either answer it or throw it out of the window. Rolf wanted to oblige his wife on the throwing request, even though the window was closed, but his body didn’t share his ambition, and had only enough energy to allow him to pick up the receiver.
“Wundt,” Rolf said.
“This is Brüning, calling from the court clerk’s office. We need you in court.”
“For what?”
“The trial. The Birnbaum gang trial. It’s started.”
“Already?” Rolf worked himself up to a sitting position. “What do you need me for? You surely don’t want me to testify.”
“Just get here now. Weissengel, Himmler, and Heydrich are here, and I’m not representing our side alone. Get down here.”
Kriminaldirektor Brüning hung up. Rolf gingerly returned the receiver to its cradle atop the phone. Klara rolled over, “Who got killed?”
“Five or ten Jewish boys.” Rolf took to his feet. Until he had actually been called upon to rise, he’d had no idea how exhausted he really was. There was a bathroom with toothpaste, a toothbrush and a comb around here somewhere. Ah, yes, next to the closet. Right. He staggered in and fumbled for the light switch.
“When?”
Rolf stepped back out of the bathroom. “When what, dear?”
“When did they die?”
“Later tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.”
To say that the Palace of Justice was Munich’s most gorgeous building was, perhaps, an exaggeration. Tastes, as Rolf knew, varied. But aside from his fondness for Neo-baroque styles and large glass domes admitting sunlight to spectacular areaways, Rolf saw the building as a symbol of a thing worth preserving, the thing he’d come back to Germany to protect after the war. Of the four postwar options — the other three being revolution, reaction, and the ridiculous — the preservation of justice had seemed the most worthwhile of pursuits. If the world had lost its mind in the first war, Rolf wanted to be among those people who’d find it again. This building, when Rolf first saw it, became the physical manifestation of the hopes Rolf once read in Sidney Carton’s last reported thoughts about “just judges and honorable men”.
Not that any of that mattered in room 253, which Rolf entered to find the trial of Birnbaum et al already in progress. Just outside of the courtroom, on benches, sat what Rolf took to be the condemned boys’ families. Fathers, mothers, siblings, grandparents. Off from the rest sat Lazlo’s mother. She eyed Rolf as she might have eyed an earwig in her salad. Inside, the gallery was full of black and beige uniforms, Death’s Heads, and swastikas. Helmut looked back from his spot, and waved Rolf over. Rolf took his seat next to Helmut and after a nod hello turned his eyes toward the show.
Rolf suppressed a look of shock at seeing, at the bench poring over a file, Xaver Helperin. Rolf had seen him only in newsreels or heard him on the radio. This was one of the ringmasters, and occasional dancing bear, of Otto Thierak’s three ring circus, the People’s Court. Rolf looked over at the defense table, where eight slack, exhausted young Jewish boys sat with their bored-looking defense advocate. You’d have a better shot if the judge were the Queen of Hearts. Rolf checked the courtroom’s corners and, yes, cameras on huge tripods glared at the proceedings.
Rolf nudged Helmut and whispered, “What’s Helperin doing here?”
Helmut appeared ready to shush Rolf, but instead replied, “The Ministry of Justice sent him specially. They don’t want another Reichstag fire.”
Helperin shut the file with theatrical flair. A middle aged and unattractive man whose receding hairline made him look older than his forty-one years (Rolf reminded himself that he was only two years younger), Helperin surveyed the courtroom as a conductor might his orchestra. In a tenor rasp so powerful the court’s benches trembled, Helperin intoned the name: “Lazlo Birnbaum!”
Lazlo, with the help of one of the bailiffs, pushed his chair back, stood up, and lurched toward the bench, his leg irons jangling as he shuffled. Trembling, with slumped shoulders, Lazlo craned his neck to face his executioner.
“Do you know why you are here?” Helperin asked.
“Yes.”
“You are here because, according to the words that came from your own polluted Jewish mouth, you violated a young German girl, is that not right?”
“Um…”
“Is that not right?” Helperin's voice could have etched steel. “Yes or no, you degenerate little bastard! Yes or no!”
“I…”
“Yes or no!”
“Yes.”
“Yes.” Helperin drew out the s as if he were the first puff adder ever appointed to the bench. “You raped her, didn’t you? You couldn’t resist the chance, you and your filthy kike friends. Rapists! Torturers! And was not the carving in her chest, the carving you made with your own two hands a call for your fellow subhumans to do likewise? Was it not a call to them to murder Aryan girls? Answer!”
“Yes,” Lazlo replied.
“Yes.” Again with the long ‘s’. “Can you think of any reason, any at all, why you shouldn’t die for these provocations against the German people? Can you make any kind of case for leniency even though you showed none to that defenseless young girl?”
Rolf heard from Lazlo’s position the sound of weeping. Lazlo bent forward slightly. The bailiff stepped forward and put his hand on Lazlo’s shoulder to steady him. Helperin kept on. “You weep. You weep before justice. What are those tears of yours trying to tell me? Do you regret your evil acts, Lazlo? Has your conscience finally caught up with you?” Would they really show this film in the newsreel? Rolf checked around the gallery. Everyone seemed frozen, as if they were witnesses to a car crash. Were even the Death’s Heads squeamish about this? He could almost hear them thinking praise be that which makes us hard, holding the sentiment as a votive.
“No.” Helperin sneered. “You have no conscience and no soul. You’re only crying because you see justice coming for you, and you know her revenge will be terrible and swift. Even now you know that you’ll never see the sun rise again. I, in the name of justice, will see to that right now. Lazlo Birnbaum, I sentence you to death by guillotine, sentence to be carried out by 1500 hours today. Take him out.”
As Lazlo absorbed what was happening his knees gave way. The bailiff caught him under his arms, preventing him from hitting the floor. He dragged the cringing, weeping wreck of Lazlo Birnbaum out the side door.
“Shlomo Grunwelder!” Helperin shouted.
Shlomo, a heavy set boy with a large bruise on his cheek and a hang dog expression, wet himself on the way to the dock, something that allowed Helperin a chance to gloat and taunt for what felt like an hour. How Helperin’s voice, this sharp and evil rasp, could sustain such pitch and volume for so long defied any of the explanations Rolf could devise. Helperin was the Enrico Caruso of invective. This court, Helperin’s concert hall, was designed as the culmination of the torture these boys had suffered during the last few hours. Confession-Humiliation-Decapitation: such was the order of action in the Palace of Justice. Helperin’s bench was the stage on which the ritual drama of Aryan domination of the subhumans was to be enacted for the delectation of the elites and the edification of the lower orders. This was how pure blood dealt with impurity.
One by one they went. When it was over, Rolf wanted to run home, or to run anywhere really; but Helmut said to him, “I’ll give you a lift to Stadelheim. We can’t not be there.”
“Why?”
Helmut’s voice dropped to a near whisper. “We have to show we’re as hard as them.”
Rolf felt the words No, you have to show you’re as hard as them rising to the back of his throat. He arrested them before they slipped past teeth and lips. He knew that Helmut could still stop his exit visa, and never had Rolf been so eager to get one. He just had to hang on a few more hours. Besides, how could he complain?
According to legend, the room where Ernst Röhm collided with half a dozen bullets was ten meters above the spot in the prison yard where Rolf stood next to Helmut, Weissengel, and Heydrich. Even Hitler had, at one time, been held in custody here. How many lines of history intersected at this point?
Rolf had never attended an execution before; not even the Dresden Vampire’s. He objected to public executions for the same reason medieval puritans condemned bear baiting; less out of concern for the health of the victim than out of a fear for the moral health of the viewer. Rolf feared that he’d enjoy seeing the Dresden Vampire hang, that he’d find pleasure and satisfaction in the crack of his neck, the kicking of his legs, the dribbling of urine and feces out of his cuffs. He did not fear deriving joy from today’s proceedings.
About fifteen meters away, lined up side by side, stood three all-metal guillotines. The sun glinted off the blades and the support beams. Standing next to each machine was a prison guard. Near the wall, a film crew signaled that they were ready. Who was supposed to be watching this? They’d never show it in cinemas.
From behind Rolf came the clicks of lock tumblers opening and the squeak of large metal doors. The guards emerged from the dark prison interior with three of the boys. Their eyes widened when they saw the guillotine row, with their coffins, and those of their friends, awaiting them on the ground. One of the boys went limp and started whimpering and sniveling. The other two twisted and struggled against the guard’s grip and their own chains. The guards twisted back, but for a time it seemed as if the boys were at least fighting them to a draw. More guards came outside to aid their fellows. Heydrich shouted, “Break their legs!” And one guard pulled out his club and smashed his boy in his knee, eliciting a cry of agony as the victim collapsed to the dirt. The guard dragged him the rest of the way to the guillotine.
Quickly, they were laid horizontally, and the lunettes closed round their necks. Cries and gibbering prayers mingled with the sound of birds and the whirr of an airplane overhead. Legs kicked. Heydrich nodded. Down came the blades, interrupting an “Oh, God” at the G… The guards lifted the boards the bodies had lain on, spilling them into their coffins. They then collected the heads and tossed them in as if they were tossing in rotten cantaloupes. They shut the coffins, dragged them each to one side, then picked up one of the empties lined up by the cell block walls and set it up to receive its occupant.
Finally, the executioners raised the blades and locked them into position. Blood streaked the blades and dripped from the edges. Guards dragged the next three, Lazlo among them, out. This time all three suffered from weakened knees and had to be dragged, limp and wide eyed, to their deaths. Rolf had heard tales of men, in the trenches, waiting to face the machine guns and the barbed wire and the minefields and the artillery. And, of course, some men came to his prison camp already broken. They’d stare for hours at a time or break into paroxysms of uncontrollable weeping. These thoughts did nothing to help Rolf watch these boys die, but they were the thoughts he had.
When it was over, Heydrich simply turned and, accompanied by two guards, went inside. Weissengel said to Rolf, “You look unhappy.”
“So what?”
“The case is closed, Kommissar. You don’t have to work with me anymore. Shouldn’t that please you a little?”
“I’ll make a note to smile.”
Weissengel stood next to Rolf now. He took a second to watch the guards clean the blood from the blades, then said, “You’d never have made a good SS man, Kommissar. You’re far too soft. These boys were enemies of Germany, of our race, and were murderers besides. They got what was coming to them. In fact, they got mercy. We could have hanged them by short drop.”
“Who is the movie for?” Rolf asked.
“I’m sure I don’t know,” Weissengel said. “It’s probably for research. Some of the bodies are going to researchers for dissection. At any rate, Kommissar,” Weissengel stepped in front of Rolf, blocking his view of the guillotines, “I’d like to say now that I’ve learned a great deal from working with you, and though your emotions are a little raw now, I hope that upon reflection, maybe years from now, you’ll feel the same way about me. Sieg Heil!”
Weissengel’s arm flew up in salute. Rolf returned it crisply, then turned and tapped Helmut. He and Helmut stepped a slight distance away from Weissengel. Helmut said, “What?”
“You’ll facilitate my getting out of here now, right?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks.”
“Don’t thank me,” Helmut said. “Based on your behavior today, I think you’re more a liability than an asset.”
“Fine. Then I’ll just get the fuck out of here.” Rolf marched to the large double doors. He knocked. A guard answered and took him through the cell block and out the front. Rolf couldn’t remember where the tram station was in this part of town, so he asked the guard to tell him. The guard obliged, and soon Rolf was on his way back to Klara.