The Monster and the Lamb - The Atlantic

In the days of Hitler Germany’s collapse, a short item on an inside page of the New York Times caught my eye. It ran somewhat as follows:<br>Reinhold Hensch, one of the most wanted Nazi war criminals, committed suicide when captured by American troops in the cellar of a bombed-out house in Frankfurt. Hensch, who was deputy head of the Nazi SS with the rank of lieutenant general, commanded the infamous annihilation troops and was in charge of the extermination campaign against Jews and other “enemies of the Nazi state,” of killing off the mentally and physically defective in Germany, and of stamping out resistance movements in occupied countries. He was so cruel, ferocious, and bloodthirsty that he was known as “The Monster” {Das Ungeheuer) even to his own men.<br>It was the first time since I left Germany in the winter of 1933 that I had heard or seen Hensch’s name. But I had thought of him often. For I spent my last evening in Germany in the company of the “Monster.”<br>A year earlier, in the spring of 1932, I had realized that I was not going to stay in Germany with the Nazis in power. An old friend had come to visit me in Frankfurt, where I then lived. We spent the evening together talking out our fears for the future. And then suddenly I heard myself saying, “One thing I do know, Berthold: if the Nazis come to power I shall not stay in Germany.” I had not, I think, given conscious thought to the decision till then. But the moment I heard myself say this, I knew that I had made up my mind. And I also knew that I had become convinced in my heart that the Nazis would come into power.<br>I had arrived in Germany in 1927, after graduating from the gymnasium in my native Austria. I was at first a trainee-clerk in an export firm in Hamburg; then, fifteen months later, I moved to Frankfurt as a securities analyst in an old merchant bank which had become the European branch of a Wall Street brokerage firm. That job came to an end in the autumn of 1929 with the New York Stock Exchange crash, and I was hired as a financial writer on the Frankfurter General Anzeiger, an afternoon paper, somewhat similar to the Washington Star or the Detroit Free Press both in circulation and in editorial policy. Two years later, as a senior editor, I was put in charge of foreign and economic news. And since the paperdid not believe in overstaffing—there were altogether only fourteen or fifteen writers, reporters, and editors to turn out a forty-eightor sixty-four-page paper every weekday and Saturday—I also wrote three or four editorials a week and ran the women’s page for almost a year while the regular women’s editor was sick.<br>In addition to my jobs, I enrolled in law school at Hamburg and then at Frankfurt. By 1931 I had my doctorate in international and public law. Even before that I had been teaching in the law faculty as a substitute for the elderly and ailing professor of international law who had become a good friend. And though still in my early twenties, I was in line to be appointed Dozent (lecturer) at the university—the first and biggest step up the German academic ladder.<br>I had also begun to write outside of my newspaper job. Two unbearably learned econometric papers—one on the commodity markets and one on the New York Stock Exchange—were written while I was still at the bank, in 1929. They were both as wrong as they could possibly be. The premises were “self-evident,” the mathematics impeccable, and the conclusions asinine, something even now by no means unknown in econometrics. But the papers were published in a prestigious economic quarterly. My doctoral thesis came out as a book. And I wrote a fair number of magazine articles on economic and financial topics, not one of which, fortunately, is still available.<br>My realization that I would leave the country upon Hitler’s coming to power did not, of course, stop my work. I did hope against hope after all, it was not entirely wishful thinking in 1932 to believe that the Nazi wave was cresting; the Nazi vote actually did fall with every successive election. And so I continued to work on the paper, teach international law and international affairs, and write for magazines. I even began to look around for another job, for I had outgrown the Frankfurter General Anzeiger. I almost immediately got an offer from the leading paper in Cologne to take charge of foreign affairs, including politics, economics, literature, and culture. And I was assured that with this appointment I could easily get a lectureship at Cologne University or at the neighboring university of Bonn.<br>But at the same time I began to prepare for leaving. I kept the offer from Cologne alive, but I did not act on it. I dragged my feet on the lectureship even though the international-law professor urged it on me. I was officially a graduate assistant; in this capacity I ran many of the meetings of the international-law seminar and substituted for the professor in teaching his...