“Klein?” Dieter asked. “She was a Jew?”
Danforth’s gaze turned as lethal as his tone of voice. “She was an American,” he said.
Dieter briefly searched his memory for a moment, then he shrugged. “No,” he said. “There was never an Anna Klein.”
~ * ~
Blue Bar, New York City, 2001
There was never an Anna Klein.
It was obvious that these words had brought Danforth to a strange precipice, or perhaps to a doorway that had opened onto an unexpected land.
“If Dieter was right, then Anna had never been taken to Plötzensee Prison,” Danforth said. His tone was now uncertain, as if he were still feeling the aftershocks of this discovery. “And she certainly hadn’t been executed there.”
“So you must have wondered who Clayton’s sources had been for this information,” I said.
“Very good, Paul,” Danforth said. “Yes, that would have been the question. Who were they? And why had they told him what they did?” He shrugged. “Unfortunately, Clayton was still in the Pacific, fighting his way south on Okinawa. And so I went to Plötzensee Prison to see if I could find any record of Anna having been there. It was in the Soviet sector, and the Russians were completely out of control, ripping the plumbing out of the walls, toilet bowls, and sinks, and loading everything onto trucks.” He waved dismissively. “But it was Germany they were destroying, so as far as I was concerned, the Russians could have a free hand.”
“You hated them that much?” I asked.
“They were dust to me,” Danforth said. “They had killed the only woman I would ever love, along with millions of innocent people.”
I started to speak, but the flash in Danforth’s eyes stopped me cold.
“If the crimes of a people go on through time, then why shouldn’t our revenge?” he asked. He seemed to realize that his arctic chill had frozen me, and to warm the atmosphere, he sat back casually, like a man about to tell a lighthearted fireside story. “Anyway, by the time I was allowed to visit Plötzensee, it had pretty much been cleared out. It had been badly damaged from the bombings. There was a lot of charred brick and rubble, and for a carton of cigarettes one of the Russian guards let me walk around the place.”
I imagined Danforth in his army uniform, a pistol strapped to his side, moving through the blackened ruins, then into the old cell blocks of Plötzensee, where, as he told me, many of the doors had been blown off and left lying in the wide corridors.
He had not been sure what he was looking for, he said, but in his rambling he found what appeared to be the prison’s record room. There were still file cabinets, and he searched through the papers he found inside them for quite a few hours. There were prisoner lists and execution lists, along with the usual detritus of the Nazi bureaucracy, petitions for clemency almost always stamped Denied.
“Most of what I found was of no value to me, but I did discover that at least one thing Dieter had told me was true,” Danforth went on. “He’d even gotten the nickname right: Lilo.”
As it turned out, Lilo was Liselotte Herrmann, a German Communist who’d joined the Roter Studentenbund, the Red Students League, in 1931, participated in all sorts of anti-Hitler actions, and gotten herself kicked out of the University of Stuttgart.
To my surprise, he drew a photograph from his jacket pocket and handed it to me. “This is Liselotte,” he said.
In the picture, Liselotte Herrmann wore a plain white blouse and was holding a small child. She had straight hair, cut very short, and bottle-bottom glasses with thick, black frames, a woman who could not possibly have been mistaken for a dark, curly-haired Anna Klein.
“The child is her son,” Danforth said. “He was four years old when his mother was executed.” He drew the picture from my hand and returned it to his pocket. “Anyway, I went through the records I found — which were by no means all the records, of course; God knows how many had been burned or blown to bits or used for toilet paper by the Russians — but there was no mention at all of Anna. Which meant that although I couldn’t prove what Dieter had told me, I’d found nothing to disprove it, and so for me the mystery of what had become of Anna only deepened.”
“But she’d surely been killed,” I said. “You had to assume that.”
“Of course,” Danforth said. “But a certain kind of devotion— of obsession — demands to know what really happened, and I was stricken in that way, Paul. I simply had to know.”
Danforth’s had been a sad passion, it seemed to me, and clearly a futile one; even now he struck me as a man with much love and no one to give it to.
“You never fell in love again?” I asked.
“No,” Danforth said,
“But surely your love for Anna faded over time,” I said.
“That’s exactly what Clayton believed would happen eventually,” Danforth said. “That in the end Anna would pass into memory, and I would find a way to make a good life without her. Which was why he’d made up the whole business of Anna’s execution.”
“Made it up?” I asked, astonished.
“Yes,” Danforth said. “As he admitted after the war. He’d done it because he believed that I would never stop looking for her if I thought she was alive. It was the action of a friend for the benefit of a friend, he said. Then he asked me to forgive him, and I did. It was as simple as that.” He shrugged. “To save a man from a fruitless passion, I’d probably do the same. After all, a passion can die. But not a mystery, Paul, unless you solve it.” He smiled softly. “Odd, though, that the next clue would find me working on the war crimes trials. On the Oswald Rothaug prosecution. He’d been the presiding judge in the Katzenberger case.”
Leo Katzenberger was a sixty-two-year-old shoe magnate, Danforth told me. He’d lived and prospered in Nuremberg. A friend had written to tell him that his daughter, twenty-two-year-old Irene Scheffler, was coming to Nuremberg in order to pursue her career as a photographer. Scheffler ended up taking an apartment in the same building as Katzenberger’s office, and over the next few weeks, neighbors became certain that the two were having an affair.
“But this was not just some commonplace May-December fling,” Danforth said, “because Katzenberger was a Jew, and Scheffler was an Aryan, and the Nuremberg laws expressly forbade this kind of association.”
Once alerted to official interest, Katzenberger and Scheffler had denied the affair. And since there was no evidence for it other than the speculation of neighbors, the case had been dismissed by the first investigating judge.
“But by then a judge by the name of Oswald Rothaug had gotten wind of the case,” Danforth said. “Rothaug was a rabid Nazi, and he found Katzenberger and Scheffler guilty on no evidence but rumor.”
At that time, the “crime” did not carry the penalty of death. But Judge Rothaug knew that the death penalty could be imposed on anyone who used wartime regulations to commit a crime. A single witness had testified that Katzenberger had taken advantage of the wartime blackout regulations to carry on his affair, and for this, Katzenberger was sentenced to death.