PART TWO
The Fake Nazi
There was an old man in Germany who thought he was a Nazi. He turned himself in to a small court in a town near Nuremberg, and said, “Restart the trials; I should be punished for what I have done.” He seemed to be around the right age, and his name was a fairly common German name—Hoefler—and his first name even more common—Hans—but still, they had records and looked up as many Hans Hoeflers as they could and cross-referenced and found nothing. “Where were you?” they asked him repeatedly. He lowered his eyes. “I was in the room for all of it,” he told them. “What room?” they asked. “The ROOM,” he said. They raised their eyebrows. “Of which room are you speaking?” they said. “There were many.”
“I heard the planning,” he said. “I popped the Zyklon B. I shot rows and rows of people.”
The judge coughed into his fist. Hans broke down crying, begging for forgiveness, and the secretary found herself resisting the urge to pat him on the head, which seemed like the wrong idea altogether. They found a photo of him at the time, sitting with small children in the park as a babysitter for the neighbors; turned out he was then only a child himself, and would never have been allowed in any “room” anyway. He was an old man by the time he showed up at the court, and at his insistence, two clerks who had some extra time on their hands visited his apartment, where they found his jacket pockets stuffed with ticket stubs, and videos, all around his television, of every Nazi movie that one could ever rent or see. When they played one titled The Room, one of the actors delivered Hans’s exact same line about the room. His TV didn’t even work except to show these videos. He owned action flicks, the comic-book film versions, Holocaust epics, documentaries, stories of one regular man in times of horror, and stories of one extraordinary man in times of horror. He could’ve opened a specialized movie store.
They filed their report and sent him home. “You’re just a regular man,” they told him. “Congratulations.”
This Hoefler, he stayed away for a month or so, but then he brought himself back to the court again. And again. He became their regular monthly visitor. The judge enjoyed seeing him, but he was unsure what to do with him, so he telephoned his niece, who was studying psychology and had talked about needing someone to test, and she in turn set up a mock Milgram obedience test for Hans, for her Ethics and History class.
She put Hans in a room in the classic situation, in which he had to shock a victim, played by an actor, with a false electrical current, while a pretend supervisor claimed to assume responsibility for the victim’s screams of pain. She employed various friends from graduate school—the Psychology and Theatre Departments—and in truth, it was one of their most fun collaborations, and led to a very vital discussion the following week about grandparents. The test helped explain why cruelty was so easy to indulge if responsibility was claimed by someone else, but, caught off guard, on a regular workday, as his regular self, Hans Hoefler refused to use the shocking equipment, and he walked out, shaking his head, blinking as if he’d been stunned himself. When he returned to the court, pale as ever, the judge hailed his clerk, who called his niece, who drove over right away and ran in with the video to show Hans the recording of his own decency. Of his own interior strength. It was a slow afternoon, and everyone in the court office stood around the TV, watching him watch, hopeful. “You passed!” crowed the clerk.
Hans, as if deaf, made no sound.
“This is good, Hans,” the stout judge said kindly, the judge who, by then, had grown a strong affection for Hans Hoefler; after seeing criminal after criminal denying his crime, screwing up his or her face and saying, It is not me, I would never do such a thing, here was Hans, scooping up what was not his and cradling it like a child. Hans Hoefler, with his heavy sad eyes, who reminded the judge somewhat of his own father, dead the previous year of complications from a liver transplant.
From his viewing seat in the jury box, Hans gripped the wooden pew and said nothing as he watched himself with no expression on his face. They found him a week later, hanging from a rope in his dingy Munich apartment, with a short note propped on the dresser saying he had to die for what he had done to the Jews, to the Gypsies, to the Poles. He had piles of writing on his desk, next to the note, titled, in careful calligraphy: One Nazi’s Confessions. In cramped handwriting, rigid black ink, Hans had written pages upon pages; he had invented instances, written of places and times that did not exist and heinous acts that had never happened. He was a revisionist but backwards, adding horrors instead of denying them, inserting himself wrongly into true events. He used familiar names and terms—Kristallnacht, Dachau, the “sweet smell”—but the details he used otherwise were often shockingly wrong. He wrote of a hurricane at Dachau. He said in Auschwitz the guards were all named Hans, which seemed like a joke, except that all who knew Hans knew his sense of humor was limited. Was he making fun of us? asked the judge, scratching his head. Of history? It’s not funny, he said, and his secretary said no, she didn’t think so, though she could not explain it either. Hans said that he had rounded up Jews and Gypsies in a church and burned them inside and he could not forgive himself for shooting the ones that flew out the window in an attempt to escape. But someone noted that this was awfully close to the plot of the Wiesenthal classic on forgiveness, The Sunflower, and that that Nazi in question was already named. It took ten minutes to find The Sunflower on Hans’s bookshelf, dog-eared to a beige softness.
Hans’s notes were bound and filed in the judge’s paperwork, the finishing chapter of the Hoefler saga, which had been ongoing for more than four years by that point. “Case closed,” said the judge, with no small pang of regret for having asked his niece to do the Milgram study. He had known that Hans would walk out of the test. He’d been sure of it. But if he’d known that, he should have also known that that kind of empirical evidence on videotape might clash too intensely with Hans’s own image of himself as a murderer, which then might unsettle him enough to lead to something worse, but the judge was never a very good chess player and could not think nine steps ahead. It was tiring and difficult, this judge business.
Since Hans had no friends at that stage of his life, his funeral was attended only by the staff of the court. “If only the rest could be so responsible,” said the auburn-haired secretary to the judge’s clerk as they drank cups of stiff coffee afterward, standing in the coatroom, still in their coats. The world, they agreed, needed more Hans Hoeflers. “Better to commit suicide than kill someone else,” they suggested, but the words sat flat in their mouths as they worked that day. Like soda, unfizzed.
Even if it was true, there was something despicable about valuing Hans’s concave heart, and by the end of the day, the judge’s clerk found herself spurning Hans, and flicking him from her mind like a bug.