Into That Darkness: From Mercy Killing to Mass Murder Read Online Free PDF Page B

conceivably have told Suchomel that he had been an “illegal” because he wanted to secure his position by getting this piece of information around. What it does prove, however, is that both his family and his “troops” had believed him to be not a “conscripted” but a “voluntary” Nazi.
    The deeper he went into his story, the clearer emerged the picture of the fatal fusion between his own character, and the sequence of events.
    “What,” I asked, “was your first specific contact with the Jewish situation in Austria after the Anschluss?”
    “At that time they said that what they wanted was to force the Jews to emigrate – you know, just to leave.”
    “That’s what you thought the policy was?”
    “It was the policy. They had set up a special section of the Gestapo for ‘Jewish Action’ – Section IIB2 – where they established a register of Jews and their property.” (In Vienna this department was headed by Eichmann. All the research into this subject tends to confirm that the ‘Final Solution’ – the physical extermination of the Jews – was not proposed, and probably not even considered except, possibly, in private conversations between Hitler and Heydrich, until 1940.)
    “What did you have to do with Section IIB2?”
    “In principle nothing. I was in the political section, 2C. But you see, I think they knew how I felt. You know, that I wasn’t really with them. Because after the Austrian Kristallnacht * the Gauleiter – Eigruber – called me in and advised me to keep my mouth shut and help IIB2 whenever I was asked.”
    “Didn’t that sound sufficiently ominous to you to indicate that this was the moment to get out?”
    “But you see, it wasn’t ominous then, and it wasn’t a question of ‘getting out’: if it had only been as simple as that! By this time we heard every day of this one and that one being arrested, sent to a KZ [concentration camp], shot. It wasn’t a matter of choosing to stay or not stay in our profession. What it had already become, so quickly, was a question of survival.”
    “So what finally was your first direct contact with whatever it was they were doing about the Jews?”
    “It was after the Sudeten thing: * I was ordered to accompany the chairman of the Jewish Council to Bohemia. They wanted us to check how many Jews were still living there and what they owned in property. Four of us went: myself and one of my juniors, Hirschfeld the chairman – a very nice fellow – and his secretary, a young chap called Hunger.”
    “How did you travel?”
    “Oh, by car.”
    “But presumably you had to stay somewhere overnight. How was that organized?”
    “We stayed together, in a hotel. We ate together. How can I explain? It was all quite ordinary and friendly. As I said, Hirschfeld was a nice man. He had a very difficult job. You see, every Jew who wanted to emigrate forfeited his property. But they also each had to pay a certain sum – it was called a ‘tax’ – in order to get the exit permit. It was Hirschfeld who had to find this money for poorer Jews who didn’t have enough. On that trip he told me lots of stories of the trouble he was having getting rich people to give him money for poorer ones. After that trip, for a long time he’d always come to me when he needed help, because he knew I’d do what I could.”
    “Do you know what happened to him later?”
    “I am not sure,” he said vaguely. “I think somebody said he’d gone to America.”
    Max Hirschfeld, it is true, went to America in December 1939, and lives in San Francisco. He refused to come to Germany to testify at Stangl’s trial and his testimony was taken in San Francisco (this happened in several cases when a witness was unable or unwilling to go to Germany). Mr Hirschfeld confirmed the car trip to Bohemia; or rather, he said there were two such trips, each of them lasting only one day. “We all had lunch together,” he said. “I paid the bill for everybody without being