Weary of fighting the establishment from the inside, Renate Hoffman had concluded that the battle was better waged from without. She’d started a small law firm in order to pay the bills but devoted most of her time and energy to the Coalition for a Better Austria, a reformist group dedicated to shaking the country out of its collective amnesia about its Nazi past. Simultaneously she also formed a quiet alliance with Eli Lavon’s Wartime Claims and Inquiries. Renate Hoffmann still had friends inside the bureaucracy, friends who were willing to do favors for her. These friends gave her access to vital government records and archives that were closed to Lavon.
“Why the secrecy?” Gabriel asked. “The reluctance to talk on the telephone? The long walks in the park when the weather is perfectly dreadful?”
“Because this is Austria, Mr. Argov. Needless to say, the work we do is not popular in many quarters of Austrian society, just as Eli’s wasn’t.” She caught herself using the past tense and quickly apologized. “The extreme right in this country doesn’t like us, and they’re well represented in the police and security services.”
She brushed some sleet pellets from a park bench and they both sat down. “Eli came to me about two months ago. He told me about Max Klein and the man he’d seen at Café Central: Herr Vogel. I was skeptical, to say the least, but I decided to check it out, as a favor to Eli.”
“What did you find?”
“His name is Ludwig Vogel. He’s the chairman of something called Danube Valley Trade and Investment Corporation. The firm was founded in the early sixties, a few years after Austria emerged from the postwar occupation. He imported foreign products into Austria and served as an Austrian front man and facilitator for companies wishing to do business here, especially German and American companies. When the Austrian economy took off in the 1970s, Vogel was perfectly positioned to take full advantage of the situation. His firm provided venture capital for hundreds of projects. He now owns a substantial stake in many of Austria ’s most profitable corporations.”
“How old is he?”
“He was born in a small village in Upper Austria in 1925 and baptized in the local Catholic church. His father was an ordinary laborer. Apparently, the family was quite poor. A younger brother died of pneumonia when Ludwig was twelve. His mother died two years later of scarlet fever.”
“Nineteen twenty-five? That would make him only seventeen years old in 1942, far too young to be a Sturmbannführer in the SS.”
“That’s right. And according to the information I uncovered about his wartime past, hewasn’t in the SS.”
“What sort of information?”
She lowered her voice and leaned closer to him. Gabriel smelled morning coffee on her breath. “In my previous life, I sometimes found it necessary to consult files stored in the Austrian Staatsarchiv. I still have contacts there, the kind of people who are willing to help me under the right circumstances. I called on one of those contacts, and this person was kind enough to photocopy Ludwig Vogel’s Wehrmacht service file.”
“Wehrmacht?”
She nodded. “According to the Staatsarchiv documents, Vogel was conscripted in late 1944, when he was nineteen, and sent to Germany to serve in defense of the Reich. He fought the Russians in the battle of Berlin and managed to survive. During the final hours of the war, he fled west and surrendered to the Americans. He was interned at a U.S. Army detention facility south of Berlin, but managed to escape and make his way back to Austria. The fact that he escaped from the Americans didn’t seem to count against him, because from 1946 until the State Treaty of 1955, Vogel was a civilian employee of the American occupation authority.”
Gabriel looked over at her sharply. “The Americans? What kind of work did he do?”
“He started as a clerk at headquarters and eventually worked as a liaison officer between the Americans and the fledgling Austrian government.”
“Married? Children?”
She shook her head. “A lifelong bachelor.”
“Has he ever been in trouble? Financial irregularities of any kind? Civil suits? Anything?”
“His record is remarkably clean. I have another friend at the Staatspolizei. I had him run a check on Vogel. He came up with nothing, which in a way is quite remarkable. You see, almost every prominent citizen in Austria has a Staatspolizei file. But not Ludwig Vogel.”
“What do you know about his politics?”
Renate Hoffmann spent a long moment surveying her surroundings before answering. “I asked that same question to some contacts I have on some of the more courageous Viennese newspapers and magazines, the ones that refuse to toe the government line. It turns out Ludwig Vogel is a major financial supporter of the Austrian National Party. In fact, he’s practically bankrolled the campaign of Peter Metzler himself.” She paused for a moment to light a cigarette. Her hand was shaking with cold. “I don’t know if you’ve been following our campaign here, but unless things change dramatically in the next three weeks, Peter Metzler is going to be the next chancellor of Austria.”
Gabriel sat silently, absorbing the information he had just been told. Renate Hoffmann took a single puff of her cigarette and tossed it into a mound of dirty snow.
“You asked me why we were going out in weather like this, Mr. Argov. Now you know.”
SHE STOOD without warning and started walking. Gabriel got to his feet and followed after her. Steady yourself, he thought. An interesting theory, a tantalizing set of circumstances, but there was no proof and one enormous piece of exculpatory evidence. According to the files in the Staatsarchiv, Ludwig Vogel couldn’t possibly be the man Max Klein had accused him of being.
“Is it possible Vogel knew Eli was investigating his past?”
“I’ve considered that,” Renate Hoffman said. “I suppose someone at the Staatsarchiv or the Staatspolizei might have tipped him off about my search.”
“Even if Ludwig Vogel really was the man Max Klein saw at Auschwitz, what’s the worst that could happen to him now, sixty years after the crime?”
“In Austria? Precious little. When it comes to prosecuting war criminals, Austria ’s record is shameful. In my opinion, it was practically a safe haven for Nazi war criminals. Have you ever heard of Doctor Heinrich Gross?”
Gabriel shook his head. Heinrich Gross, she said, was a doctor at the Spiegelgrund clinic for handicapped children. During the war, the clinic served as a euthanasia center where the Nazi doctrine of eradicating the “pathological genotype” was put into practice. Nearly eight hundred children were murdered there. After the war, Gross went on to a distinguished career as a pediatric neurologist. Much of his research was carried out on brain tissue he had taken from victims of Spiegelgrund, which he kept stored in an elaborate “brain library.” In 2000, the Austrian federal prosecutor finally decided it was time to bring Gross to justice. He was charged with complicity in nine of the murders carried out at Spiegelgrund and brought to trial.
“One hour into the proceedings, the judge ruled that Gross was suffering from the early stages of dementia and was in no condition to defend himself in a court of law,” Renate Hoffman said. “He suspended the case indefinitely. Doctor Gross stood, smiled at his lawyer, and walked out of the courtroom. On the courthouse steps, he spoke to reporters about his case. It was quite clear that Doctor Gross was in complete control of his mental faculties.”
“Your point?”
“The Germans are fond of saying that only Austria could convince the world that Beethoven was an Austrian and Hitler was a German. We like to pretend that we were Hitler’s first victim instead of his willing accomplice. We choose not to remember that Austrians joined the Nazi party at the same rate as our German cousins, or that Austria ’s representation in the SS was disproportionately high. We choose not to remember that Adolf Eichmann was an Austrian, or that eighty percent of his staff was Austrian, or that seventy-five percent of his death camp commandants were Austrian. ” She lowered her voice. “Doctor Gross was protected by Austria ’s political elite and judicial system for decades. He was a member in good standing of the Social Democratic party, and he even served as a court forensic psychiatrist. Everyone in the Viennese medical community knew the source of the good doctor’s so-called brain library, and everyone knew what he had done during the war. A man like Ludwig Vogel, even if he were exposed as a liar, could expect the same treatment. The chances of him ever facing trial in Austria for his crimes would be zero. ”