69 German Diaries
Annika and I step into a cozy living room. A leather couch sits on a checkered rug, covering wide-planked hardwood floors. Shelves full of books line the walls to either side of a brick fireplace, and a cup of steaming tea sits on the coffee table in front of the couch. I’m mesmerized by the hominess of it all.
“Are you okay?” Hannah asks me. I can see her clearly now in the light of the living room. She’s a wiry woman, maybe thirty, with bright brown eyes and yellow hair pulled tightly into a bun.
“I—I was—”
“Raised in the sixth circle of hell,” Annika says. “So was I, but in a nicer neighborhood.”
Hannah smiles sadly and closes the sliding door. “Come upstairs,” she says. “Before we talk, you two need showers and clean clothes.” It was true, I smelled awful. Annika’s T-shirt and pants are smeared with dirt, her hair a tangled mess. We’ve had other things to worry about, I guess.
On the second floor, Hannah disappears into a bedroom—Annika and I glance apprehensively at one another, both wondering, I bet, if she’s going to return with a machine gun and mow us down. But she comes back out with a pair of jeans, boxer shorts, socks, a button-down shirt, and some running shoes. “My ex-boyfriend’s,” she says. “He’s about your size.” She hands me the pile and points me toward a door down the hall.
“Thank you very much,” I say, clutching the clothes to my chest.
“You can use the shower in my bathroom,” Hannah tells Annika. “While you two clean up, I’ll gather up a few things.”
In the bathroom, I shrug off my hospital gown and step into the shower. I turn the water on super hot and let it stream onto my head and run down my face. So this is what a hot shower feels like. I’m actually shaking from the pleasure of it and stand beneath the scalding flow for I don’t know how long. Then I realize I don’t have time for this. What am I doing? The Freaks need me now!
I quickly wash with soap that, miraculously, doesn’t feel like sandpaper, and lather my head with shampoo for the first time. Then I dry off with a towel that doesn’t feel like steel wool. After dressing quickly, I head downstairs to find Annika sitting on the fireplace couch with Hannah beside her. A large black plastic crate with a white lid sits on one end of the coffee table, accompanied by tray of fruit and delicious-looking pastries.
“There he is,” Hannah says when I join them.
“Sorry I took so long,” I say, sitting cross-legged on the floor. I take a donut, and after my first bite, tears spring to my eyes. This is now the best thing I’ve ever tasted.
“Annika told me about her father and your…stay at the group home,” Hannah says. “I am so sorry for you both, and I hope I can help. As you know from the Reddit thread, I wanted to learn the truth about my family’s past—because my mother would never tell me anything about our extended family, only that we were related to some horrible people. I desperately wanted to believe that wasn’t true.”
“Are you Jewish, Hannah?” Annika asks.
“No,” Hannah replies. “Why do you ask?”
“I don’t think I am either,” Annika mutters to herself. Then, more loudly, she says, “So, we’re guessing you never wrote that thesis.”
“I did not,” Hannah confirms. “A few weeks after I wrote that post, a man came to my door. He said he was a lawyer who had been hired to protect the interests of parties he chose not to name. He told me, in no uncertain terms, that if I pursued the line of inquiry I had proposed online, I would be buried in lawsuits that would ruin my life.”
“My father’s standard operating procedure,” Annika says grimly.
“So I dropped it,” Hannah explains. “At least until I found this.” She gestures toward the crate, and our eyes turn to it. It suddenly looks like a treasure box.
Hannah removes the lid of the crate and lifts out an old leather-bound book tied with a lavender ribbon. Annika and I lean over to look inside the crate: it’s full of similarly old books.
“I was trying to get things in order when my mother was dying from cancer last year,” Hannah tells us. “I found this crate in the attic and asked her about it. There are sixty-nine of these journals altogether, diaries with dated entries, all written in German. My mother, too weak from chemotherapy to lie anymore, told me they had belonged to her mother, who kept them even though she was too frightened to find out what they said.”
Hannah unties the ribbon and opens the journal. She shows us a black-and-white photograph tucked inside the front cover. It’s of a young man in an old-fashioned suit and a young woman in a long black skirt and blouse. They’re standing in front of a domed brick building festooned with Nazi flags. The couple beam happily, holding up their clasped hands to reveal wedding bands. A heart had been drawn on the photograph around the man’s face, and an X has been drawn on the woman’s ring finger. Hannah flips the photo over and shows us some scrawled writing in German, along with a date: 10/10/33.
“I got the inscription translated,” Hannah tells us. “It says: Oskar and Gerti Adelsberger. First day of classes at the University of Gottingen.”
“Do you know who wrote on the photo?” I ask.
“My great-grandmother, Angela,” Hannah says. “She took the picture. She was Gerti’s younger sister by five years, and she was in love with Oskar.”
“How do you know that?” Annika asks.
“I know that because after my mom passed, I spent nearly a year learning German.”
“So you’ve read all the journals?” Annika asks.
“I have,” Hannah confirms. “These diaries were written by Angela. This one, started in 1933, when Angela was fifteen, is the first one. The first entry dates to the day before that photo was taken, the day Oskar and Gerti got married. Angela writes of her devastation that Oskar married her sister instead of her. She writes of how terrified they all were of Hitler and what was becoming of Germany, and how Jewish professors were fired from the universities. She paints a pretty bleak picture of what life was like for them in 1933.”
“So they weren’t Nazis then?” Annika says, relieved. “Just young people trying to survive a terrible time in history?”
“In a very real way, yes,” Hannah says. “Gerti and Angela’s parents died of tuberculosis, so they were on their own. Then, five years after Oskar married Gerti, they had a baby boy, Gerhard—”
“Gerhard!” Annika and I both exclaim. Hannah looks surprised.
“Gerhard was my grandfather,” Annika explains.
Hannah stares in disbelief for a moment, then pulls her into a long hug that brings tears to Annika’s eyes. I turn away to give her a moment of privacy because I can see how badly she longs to make a real connection with this real family member, one who’s alive and right here and not a childish figment of wishful thinking. And who is also not her father.
When Annika finally lets her go, Hannah says, “We’ll have time for that, my dear. But first let me tell you the rest of the story. Angela left school so she could take care of Gerhard while Gerti finished her education. She loved Gerhard desperately but writes in her diary that she also hated him, at times, for not being her own. She was horribly jealous of Gerti, not only for marrying Oskar, but for attending university. Gerti and Oskar both studied electrical engineering. It was very rare for a woman to be allowed to attend university then, but evidently Gerti was incredibly smart.”
“Wow,” Annika says.
“Over the next few years,” Hannah continues, “Angela writes obsessively about Oskar, and how he and Gerti became fascinated with Nikola Tesla. Are you familiar with his work?”
Annika and I both nod, eager to hear more.
“Well, Oskar and Gerti both graduated at the top of their class and, in 1940, after graduate school, they moved to Berlin to work for a company called AEG, an electric company. Over the course of the next few years, Angela divulges some pretty dangerous stuff.”
“Like what?” Annika asks.
“Amid her endless praise of Oskar, she reveals that he, like Tesla, wanted to discover the ultimate energy source, and also like Tesla, not for the good of the Fatherland, but for the good of the world.”
“Wow,” Annika says again. “Oskar could have been killed if that diary had been discovered!”
“It was reckless of her to put that on paper, for sure,” Hannah agrees. “But then the focus of Angela’s diary shifts almost entirely to Gerhard. Oskar and Gerti enrolled him in kindergarten, which began at age three so children could receive a ‘proper Nazi education.’ Angela kept house during the day while Gerhard was in school. She spent most of that time, it seems, worrying herself to death about the child getting brainwashed. And she was right to worry. Within eight months, Gerard was spouting pretty vile things about Jews, parroting phrases he heard at school. Then, in 1944, Oskar and Gerti were both recruited to work on a secret project in France, a secret they either didn’t hide from, or couldn’t keep from, Angela.”
“The Death Ray,” I say.
“Right!” Hannah says. “They left Angela and Gerhard in Berlin and went to France. Angela describes, however, their true intentions, which were to steal the Death Ray technology and give it to the world. In her last entry, dated September 7, 1944, Angela writes of her fear for Oskar and her fear of Gerhard—who was by then, it seems, a proper little monster. Then there’s nothing in the diary for six months. The first entry, when it starts again, was written in Reno.”
“What happened?” I ask. Like me, Annika is leaning forward to hear every word, eyes wide, half of a croissant forgotten in her hand.
“Oskar and Gerti were caught trying to steal data from the Death Ray facility,” Hannah says, “but as they were being arrested, the RAF bombed the building, killing almost everyone, including Gerti. Oskar survived and made it back to Berlin. He, Angela, and Gerhard managed to obtain berths on a boat for America. During the trip, Oskar befriended a fellow German going to Reno to work for Sierra Nevada Power, so they accompanied him. In a matter of months, Oskar had a good job and a home.”
“Amazing,” Annika says. “Did Angela end up marrying Oskar?”
“Unfortunately,” Hannah says, “there was no happy ending for Angela. Things went from bad to worse in America. Her diaries from 1945 onward demonstrate a steady decline. She writes of a terrible guilt for not having adequately supported or loved her sister. She fears, too, that Oskar was becoming obsessed by the electricity experiments he was conducting in his basement. Eventually, Oskar confides in Angela that while in France he discovered that the Nazis were not, in fact, attempting to execute Tesla’s theories on electricity. That was a cover-up for their real investigation, which was into some Jewish mystical mumbo jumbo about godlike Sparks of divine energy.” Hannah shrugs. “I know, crazy. Anyway, Gerhard, who was now nearly eleven, had become an irredeemable little Nazi clone who blamed the Jews for his mother’s death. In 1947, after he was expelled from school for attacking a Jewish classmate with a hammer in shop class, Angela couldn’t take it anymore. She just left. She moved to Fallon, bought a house, and opened a day care. She had a child, my grandmother, Maria, out of wedlock. She recorded entries in her diary until 1960, but she never mentioned Oskar or Gerti or Gerhard or Germany again. Her last entry was a suicide note to Maria, apologizing for not being able to go on. Maria Schmidt eventually married—a man also named Schmidt, funnily enough—and had my mother. My grandmother never mentioned the diaries, and my mother inherited them pretty much the same way I did from her.”
“That’s an incredibly sad story,” Annika says.
“What happened to Oskar?” I ask.
Hannah reaches into the crate of diaries and pulls out a yellowed piece of newspaper from the Reno Gazette Journal, dated 1950. The headline reads Local Man Electrocuted in Bizarre Basement Ritual. Under the headline, the article features a photograph of a basement, not unlike the one we saw on the Wolf’s film, with containers and gauges linked by wires scattered about the room. A large symbol had been drawn in chalk on the concrete floor comprising ten circles, each connected to the other by straight lines. The circles all contained a word in German. The article was brief:
Local electrician, Oskar Adelsberger, was electrocuted while performing bizarre electrical experiments in his basement yesterday morning. Pictured here is his laboratory with the Jewish Kabbalistic symbol known as the Tree of Life drawn on the floor. Authorities have ruled the death an accident.
“I did some follow-up research on Gerhard,” Hannah says, tucking the article back into the crate. “He became a Neo-Nazi and published a white nationalist magazine for years, and he got rich opening—”
“Pawnshops,” I say, remembering the printing press we saw on the Wolf’s film of Gerhard’s basement.
“Right. You two are serious researchers!”
“Do you know anything else?” Annika asks.
“Yes,” Hanna says. “He married someone named Klara Becker, and they both died in an explosion in their home in 1978.”
“Yeah,” Annika says, “We know—”
“Along with their three-year-old daughter, Emelia.”
“What?” Annika and I both gasp.
“It wasn’t in the papers,” Hannah tells us, “but I found a police report about it. They called the accident an ‘incineration incident’ that made positive identification of the bodies impossible. But it said the only survivors of the family of five were two boys: one, William, eighteen, and the younger one, Wolfram, ten, who was left in his brother’s charge.”
“We saw what happened in that explosion,” Annika says. “It was all recorded on an old film. There was no sign of a little girl in that basement.”
“Did the police report say there was damage to other parts of the house?” I ask.
“Actually,” Hannah says, “it noted that no one could explain how such a powerful explosion could have damaged only one section of the basement.”
“That’s why the film could hurt him!” Annika exclaims. “He lied about his sister being killed. But why?”
“Hannah,” I say. “This Jewish mumbo-jumbo stuff about divine Sparks you mentioned. Do you know anything about it?”
Hannah retrieves a book from one of the shelves by the fireplace. Its title gleams in gold across a blue spine: Mystical Secrets of the Kabbalah. “Short answer is no,” she tells us. “The diaries provided the answers to what I was looking for—that my German ancestors were not Nazis, except for Gerhard, of course. I was going to delve into the mystical stuff too, so I bought this book a few months ago. I never read it though. I decided I’d rather had enough of it all, and I wanted to move on with my life.”
“Have you told anyone about any of this?” Annika asks. “I’m guessing you haven’t posted anything online, right?”
“No,” Hannah says, emphatically, “and I haven’t felt the need to. That lawyer may have bullied me out of publishing anything about my family history, but he damn sure couldn’t stop me from learning about it for myself. I know the truth now, and that’s good enough for—Oh my god!” Hannah suddenly shrieks, dropping the book. She’s staring out into the backyard, face drained of blood, petrified. “Is that…him?”
Alarmed, Annika and I turn to see what she’s looking at, and there in the shadows of the backyard, we see the hulking figure of Adolf.
Or what’s left of him.