The S.S. Officer's Armchair: Uncovering the Hidden Life of a Nazi by Daniel Lee

Author:Daniel Lee [Lee, Daniel]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780316509091
Google: mIBOyAEACAAJ
Amazon: 0316509094
Publisher: Hachette Books
Published: 2020-06-15T23:00:00+00:00

Jutta and Joachim at Hohenheim c. 1939

One of the films showing in Stuttgart that autumn was 13 Stühle (“13 Chairs”), a comedy starring the screen god Heinz Rühmann, in which he played the part of Felix Rabe, an impoverished hairdresser who travels to Vienna to claim an inheritance left to him by his recently deceased Aunt Barbara. Felix is mortified when, upon his arrival, he discovers that his inheritance amounts only to a collection of thirteen Biedermeier chairs, which he is immediately compelled to sell to pay for his ticket home. Having unloaded the collection to an antique dealer, Felix returns to his aunt’s apartment where, on the back of a portrait, he finds a letter telling him that she has sewn her fortune of 100,000 RM inside the cushion of one of the chairs. By the time Felix returns to the shop, the dealer has sold all of the chairs to thirteen individual buyers. In the rest of the film, Felix and the antique dealer scour the city, searching for the chair that contains the fortune.

After its opening night on October 11, 1938, the film screened every day for two weeks at the fashionable Palast-Lichtspiele cinema in Stuttgart, one of the largest and more opulent of the city’s cinemas, which stood on the site of the old Stuttgart train station.24 Even if Robert and Gisela did not see the film, it was well advertised on billboards and in the local and national press: a large announcement on 11 October dominated the fourth page of the Stuttgarter Neues Tagblatt. The plot was common knowledge. I pictured Robert in Prague years later, in fear for his life amid the chaos that accompanied the Liberation in spring 1945. He finds himself clutching his identity papers in his hands, desperate for a hiding place, and remembers Felix’s Aunt Barbara. He hides the papers in the chair and flees the house. It was an absurd but deeply satisfying idea. I set it aside and turned back to the archives.

Griesinger’s move away from a position in the Nazi police or security services in autumn 1937 later proved critical in shaping his first years of war. In summer 1939 Stahlecker, Harster, and Bilfinger—the men with whom two years earlier he had spent every working day—were called up as agents to serve in the SS Security Police. As part of this role, the men were responsible during the German invasion of the USSR for organizing, and sometimes participating in, the murder of hundreds of thousands of Jews. Griesinger’s position in Hohenheim on the eve of the war, which had nothing to do with security, ensured that his war was never destined to follow this route. Despite being given a commissioned SS rank in summer 1939, Griesinger was, at thirty-two, too old to join a specialist SS fighting unit. Instead he was conscripted into a regular Wehrmacht division.25 The torture of mundane army life as a lowly soldier, deprived of a leadership position and with few possibilities for career advancement, plagued the ambitious lawyer and his initial experience of war.

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