Sam Bourne - The Final Reckoning

There was something strange about Goldman's narrative, and suddenly Tom realized that he was witnessing an act of ventriloquism. He was channelling the arguments, even the voice, of his long-dead father. He told the story the way it had been told to him. It had been preserved, as if on a reel of quarter-inch magnetic tape, inside his head for nearly fifty years.

‘DIN were repelled by the spectacle of the Nuremberg trial, the pretence that only two dozen men were responsible for this massive, international crime. They had seen with their own eyes the men who had whipped Jews to death for sport, who had herded them onto trains and shot them into pits, the men who had shoved them into gas chambers and then shovelled their bodies into crematoria – they had seen all this, and they knew it was not the work of twenty-four men. It was the work of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions!’

There was no interrupting Goldman now, the words poured out of him in a hot torrent.

‘As the crimes began to be revealed, as people saw the newsreel footage of those mountains of naked bodies, people in the West demanded better. The Russians were executing Nazis by the thousands; people here and in America expected something similar. The Allies felt they had to do something. By the end of 1946, they had jailed nearly half a million Germans, holding them before trial on charges of direct participation in mass murder. There were another three and a half million listed for “significant criminal complicity”. Think of that number: three and a half million. But the United Nations War Crimes Commission drew up another list, made up of all those liable for automatic arrest as former members of the Nazi Party: in the American occupation zone alone the total was more than thirteen million people.’

‘They'd have ended up jailing the entire male population,’ said Tom quietly, a memory of his own now surfacing. But Goldman was listening to only one voice: the one in his head, belonging to his father.

'At last it seemed as if they were going to get justice after all. And not simply by grabbing it for themselves. They had a hard debate but concluded that, if justice was truly on its way, they had no business carrying on as judge, jury and executioner. They decided to lay down their weapons, to disband and go their separate ways, start their own lives. My father and yours came here to London. Some went to America, many to Israel. They believed it was all over. But it was not to be.

He paused, as if remembering himself. ‘Are you fond of statistics, Mr Byrne?’ He did not wait for an answer. 'I am. I like nothing more than a neat table of numbers. My father was the same way. “One number can tell you more than a thousand words.” That's what he would say. There's a table in a book by Raul Hilberg, one of the great historians of the Holocaust. A very revealing table. My father would look at it often. You just put your finger on the column of numbers, move it downward and there you are: it tells you all you need to know.

‘It starts off with the Fragebogen , the “registrants”, those thirteen million or more who were part of the Nazi apparatus. Then you move your finger down a line, to the total number of men charged. And this figure, you notice, is much smaller: just three million four hundred and forty-five thousand one hundred, if I recall. The figure on the next line relates to those who, having been charged, were released without so much as a trial. A blanket amnesty, if you like. It's large, this number: two million four hundred and eighty thousand seven hundred. They just walk away. If you have a head for mental arithmetic, as I do, you can work out that the gap between those last two numbers is just shy of a million. That is the number of Nazis still in the prosecutors’ sights.

'How are they punished? Just look at the table. Precisely five hundred and sixty-nine thousand six hundred of them are fined. The slate is wiped clean with a cash payment. Go down to the next line and you see that a further one hundred and twenty-four thousand four hundred men had to suffer the indignity of employment restrictions. Unfortunately, for certain jobs, being a Nazi mass murderer was an immediate disqualification. The same was true of eligibility for public office. Twenty-three thousand one hundred Nazis were told their political careers were on hold.

‘If memory serves, another twenty-five thousand nine hundred had their property confiscated. I say “their” but this was property acquired through a rather unorthodox route. Those deemed guilty had seen their neighbours in Hamburg or Frankfurt dragged off to the camps, shed a tear – and then ransacked their homes once they were gone.’

Goldman's eyes were bright. 'The table then speaks of “special labour without imprisonment”: I suppose we would call that community service now. Thirty thousand five hundred get that. And nine thousand six hundred are sent to labour camps.

‘If you tot it all up, it leaves about ninety thousand convicted Nazi war criminals who were meant to go to jail for various sentences of up to ten years. But then we look at the very last figure in the table, the most important number of all: “Assignees still serving sentence”. And that figure is,’ he paused, as if expecting a drum roll, 'three hundred.

'Now remember these statistics were compiled in 1949. What this little table is telling us, is that within just a few years of the war fewer than three hundred of those Nazis were still behind bars. Do you see where this is going, Mr Byrne? Out of more than thirteen million men once deemed complicit in the horrors of the Third Reich, we have eleven death sentences at Nuremberg and three hundred men in jail. That's all.

‘And when the West Germans took over responsibility for war crimes prosecutions, they were no better. They convicted, to take just one example, Wilhelm Greiffenberger for involvement in eight thousand one hundred murders – and sentenced him to three years’ imprisonment and three years' “loss of honour” even though the court found he had a role in the deaths of eight thousand one hundred people. I could name cases like that for a week and still not run out. Almost every man convicted melted back into German society. They walked free from those prisons, as if they were guilty of nothing more serious than a parking fine. They were so arrogant, so certain there would be no consequences, they didn't even hide what they had done. They were in the phone book.

‘And this, you see, is the dirty little secret of the Second World War. We're told, over and over again, that the attempted extermination of the Jews was the greatest crime in human history – and yet hardly anybody was punished for it. The guilty men got away with it. It was a crime that was unavenged, a genocide for which there was no reckoning.’

At last, Goldman slumped back in his chair; he seemed exhausted, emptied out, like a medium once the spirit has departed.

Rebecca and Tom sat in silence. It was Rebecca who spoke first.

‘And that's why DIN reformed.’

‘Yes,’ he said softly. ‘In 1952.’

‘And the killing started then. Except now it was all over the world. Wherever the Nazis were hiding. Your dad and my dad.’

Goldman nodded. 'I found one of their lists. I was looking for something else, and I came across a file for his poker club. That was the cover they used: five Jewish men who met on Thursday nights to play poker. My father always said it was a secret society because if their wives knew how much they gambled there'd be hell to pay. So we could never know who was in it. Not even my mother was allowed to know.

‘When I saw the file I had to look. I wanted to know about this secret gambling world of my dad's, a man who did nothing more interesting than sell ladies' outerwear to department stores. Little did I know.’ He gave a rueful smile. 'Inside the file was a wad of foreign currency, several passports and a list of German names, crossed out one by one. I understood immediately. I was twenty years old, I think.