Otto’s death in Rome, and the numerous reburials, was not something Horst mentioned when we first met, or for some years after. That changed in 2016, three years after the article in the Financial Times, a year after the documentary film. East West Street was published in the spring, and a few weeks later Horst wrote to say that Jacqueline, who was ill with cancer, had died. When we spoke he sounded sad, but also detached, and said that their daughter Magdalena was more deeply affected. In the course of the conversation, he enquired about our work on the papers, and I told him progress was interrupted, as Lisa Jardine had also died, a few months earlier.
In due course, we resumed work on Charlotte’s papers, to honour Lisa. Not long after the conversation with Horst, I had a meeting at the BBC to explore a possible radio programme on international law and its future, during which the commissioning editor asked if I was working on anything else. I mentioned Charlotte’s papers, our quest to decipher the life of a man on the run and his wife’s efforts to help him. ‘It’s a sort of Nazi love story,’ I told the editor, whose interest was piqued. That led to another meeting, and an invitation to pitch for a radio series and a podcast on the story of Charlotte and Otto, a tale of love and death, of disappearance and a Nazi in the Vatican.
Charlotte’s papers were publicly available in Washington DC, at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. We could have proceeded on that basis, yet I felt it important to ask Horst if he wanted to be involved. He thought about it, said yes – it offered a fresh chance to persuade, to explain the essential decency of his father. The radio project was commissioned and a producer chosen, Gemma Newby.
Thus, in December 2016, on an extraordinarily cold day, I travelled to Horst’s castle for the fifth time, in the company of Gemma, our producer, and James, Lisa’s last PhD student, and Lea, a German law graduate who worked as my assistant. Horst welcomed us warmly. The dog, the musty smell, the roaring fire, the kitchen, tea, everything was as it had always been, except that Jacqueline was absent. What was new was a home-baked cake.
This time the focus was different, a conversation about Charlotte’s papers, thousands of pages of letters and diaries and reminiscences which I was becoming familiar with. James, Lea and I, with three other law students, had spent a year going through the material and digesting it. We had a basic chronology – the first thing I do on any case on which I am working is to prepare a detailed timeline – so we knew what was there, as well as the gaps in the documents and our comprehension.
For the first time, Charlotte was centre stage. I had come to understand that Horst’s defence of Otto was largely inspired not by feelings towards his father, but by the love of his mother. During earlier visits, the focus was always on Otto, but now we were interested in a powerful and resolute personality, someone who ‘always succeeded’ in what she wanted, as Horst put it. He spoke with warmth about his mother, a person of energy and engagement, opinionated and strong, someone who was capable of love in her own way. ‘She was really pretty when she was young, a very attractive person.’ He paused. ‘Not beautiful, but attractive.’ He paused again. ‘A special personality.’
Horst described the modest language school she ran in Salzburg at Haus Wartenberg, a place for young people to learn German. Students came from across Europe, the English ones especially fond of her, and she used her handsome son Horst to linger outside the building, to help attract female students. ‘She was friendly,’ Horst recounted, ‘and so was I.’ On her better days, he added, she also had a sense of humour.
This information about the language school was not entirely new. After the documentary film was broadcast, I received a number of communications from former students. One wrote to say he had lodged with Charlotte in Salzburg in January 1961, with his sister, but only learned about the family history, and Otto’s Nazi role, with the documentary, five decades later. The baroness, or Tante Lotte, as Charlotte wished to be addressed, spoke little of the past, a dominant matriarch who once reduced his sister to tears, as recorded in a diary entry from the time. ‘Tante Lotte says unpleasant things … about John and me and I feel furious and think that I should leave immediately,’ the sister wrote. Charlotte apologised, a ‘bit two-faced’, the sister recorded, but did not leave. The reason for the dispute was forgotten, although the brother thought it may have been related to the fact that one of their parents was Jewish.
By then, Horst said, Charlotte was deeply religious, active in a Catholic religious community. She travelled to the Holy Land with a friend, a local priest, and hoped Horst might yet become a bishop or someone important. It never happened. Indeed, none of her children became important, a disappointment. ‘My mother was very strong, and they had this problem with my father, in the background.’
Horst believed that his mother loved Otto immensely, even if the sense of jealousy and anxiety about his many affairs lasted throughout their relationship. Some letters were missing, perhaps because they contained intimate material, but several documents made clear she entertained the possibility of leaving him. ‘I can’t go on, you have this other lady …’ She stayed with mein Mann – my man – because he radiated energy, was liked by all and was an impressive person. ‘Himmler liked him too,’ Horst added. ‘He really was a big, great personality …’
Charlotte stayed with him while he was alive, and didn’t let go after he died. ‘My father was everything to my mother, she never said a word against him.’ She never remarried, devoting the rest of her life to the defence of his reputation. Although Horst and Charlotte rarely talked about Otto, he recalled that whenever somebody wrote against him she became agitated, ‘very upset’. Stories about Jews, for example, for whose deaths he was said to be responsible, annoyed her greatly. ‘This is impossible,’ she’d say. ‘It’s wrong, it’s a lie.’ She searched for people connected to his past, found them, talked to them, recorded their conversations. ‘You have all the tapes,’ Horst said. There was nothing to hide.
The collected papers of Charlotte Wächter were a private act of memory, but also an expression of advocacy, an effort to cleanse Otto’s reputation. By now I knew that many documents – his work files – were missing, deposited by Charlotte, or perhaps her son Otto, as other accounts suggested, into Lake Zell. I suspected, too, that the letters and diaries were filleted, something Horst occasionally alluded to. His approach, I understood, followed Charlotte’s path, a son’s variation on the theme of the mother, with a different emphasis or nuance. ‘There exists no document he signed to show that he ordered any death sentence,’ Horst would say. He recognised that his attitude was motivated by feelings for Charlotte, that he never really knew his father. ‘I love my mother, I have to do this, because of her.’
His position caused difficulties with other family members. They disapproved strongly of his contact with me, did not appreciate the article in the Financial Times, and disliked the documentary. Increasingly, he was excluded from family gatherings, or ignored when he attended them. Three of his siblings were dead, which left two sisters. Heide lived in Paris with her English husband. ‘He hates everything I do …’ Horst said, with an odd smile, as their son hoped to be a Conservative Member of Parliament. ‘I might damage his future,’ Horst added. Linde, the youngest of the six Wächter children, lived near Hagenberg. The next generation, Horst’s twenty-one nephews and nieces, was ‘dominated’ by nephew Otto, a lawyer, the son of his only brother, Otto junior. ‘Keep away from Uncle Horst’ seemed to be a mantra.
Otto’s side of the family was no less forgiving of Horst’s stance, and desire to engage. Horst’s Aunt Ilse, who appeared frequently in Charlotte’s letters and diaries, was shocked when she learned that Horst worked with the artist Hundertwasser. ‘Impossible,’ she proclaimed, ‘you can’t work for a Jew.’ As a Wächter, what was he thinking? Horst described Aunt Ilse as openly and fanatically anti-Semitic, which had the merit of making Charlotte appear more reasonable. ‘My mother was never like this, not a fanatic Nazi,’ although he accepted she was a Nazi. That, however, was ‘only because of my father’.
At the castle, on that frozen day, we gathered Otto’s final letters, the ones written after the weekend spent at Lake Albano in the company of a person whose name we did not know. Horst was sure the letters would have caused Charlotte tremendous distress, especially the one written on 6 July, in the shaky handwriting.
Together we read the last letters of Otto Wächter, and Charlotte’s, and the two letters written by the Prussian lady, sent to Salzburg after his death. Horst showed us the originals, kept in the glass-fronted cabinet opposite his bed, near the photograph of Otto in his SS uniform, and godfather Seyss-Inquart. He placed one of the letters on the wooden table, picked it up, read aloud. ‘From him I learned about you, the children, everything he held dear in life.’ As Horst read the words he wept, gently and quietly.
‘It’s not true,’ he said.
‘What’s not true?’
‘That my father died from an illness.’
This was the first time Horst suggested his father may have been killed.
What happened?
‘It is best to start at the beginning,’ he said.
‘Time for a schnapps?’ James suggested.
‘Already poured,’ Horst replied, on the rebound.