The S.S. Officer's Armchair

Chapter I

A “Real” Nazi

It all started with the armchair. The chair seemed to offer a way into Griesinger’s subjective life, his taste, relationships, and habits, in a way that his papers could not. From Florence, I had sent a photograph of the armchair to experts, hoping they might shed light on its provenance. Each agreed that it was inspired by the German-born cabinet-maker Michael Thonet, who had invented solid-wood bending in the 1840s. Models of Thonet’s steam-bent laminated armchairs were popular among conservative buyers in the 1930s and 1940s, but by the 1960s they had become less fashionable.¹

I visited Prague within a few months of first speaking with Jana, the armchair’s current owner, hoping to establish where it had been manufactured and what I could of its intended buyer. Griesinger might have transported it from Germany to Prague, or he might have acquired it in the city, following his arrival. It was also possible that the armchair had been confiscated from the home of a Jewish family in Prague or even in Nazi-occupied western Europe, and later shipped east to make up for the furniture shortage affecting newly arrived Reich employees and their families in recently conquered territories.²

At the library of the Museum of Decorative Arts in Prague I trawled through hundreds of architectural and home-design magazines from 1930s Czechoslovakia, each showcasing the latest conveniences of modern living, and in the scenes of living rooms and spaces I came across pictures of chairs that appeared identical to Jana’s. The closest match appeared in collections of the Czech-Jewish designer Emil Gerstel, whose furniture company in Prague was taken over by the Germans in 1940. Gerstel’s designs were expensive. The company specialized in historicist furniture, which corresponded to the tastes of its wealthy clients. To purchase a Gerstel design, clients had to visit the Gerstel shop on the bustling Senovážné Square, a historical site in the heart of Prague’s New Town, peppered with tall symmetrical neo-Renaissance buildings with curving roofs. For those unable or without the time to buy an original, an easy solution was to hand. Gerstel’s neo-rococo armchairs were easy to replicate, and imitation designs flooded the Prague market.³

On a rainy day in May, armed with multiple photographs of the armchair, I arrived in Prague’s Old Town and began to make inquiries. Most of the Gerstel company’s archives were destroyed during the war, and those that survived were lost when private enterprises were later nationalized.⁴ I walked in and out of a dozen showrooms and ateliers.⁵ Local chair-makers and furniture-sellers were divided on whether the armchair was an original Gerstel or an imitation. “Every factory in Prague was churning out hundreds of chairs, just like this one,” the owner of one antique shop told me, as she stood in her doorway and examined the photo.

It is easier to purchase an original Gerstel today than it would have been when Griesinger arrived in Prague in 1943. The city’s antique shops are now full of Gerstel pieces, which are neither rare nor particularly valuable. One restorer explained that the style is now considered simply too old-fashioned. In one antique dealer’s shop I found two chairs identical to Griesinger’s. The shop’s owner was selling the pair for Kč 4,500, the equivalent of £150. It felt natural to prod the top of the cushion gently with my fingers to see whether I could detect anything inside. I handed Karel, the shop’s owner, a photo of Griesinger’s armchair and explained that documents from the Nazi era, covered in swastikas, were recently discovered inside the chair’s cushion. I spoke slowly, pausing for effect as I uttered the word “Nazi.” Karel glanced at the photograph and, after taking a puff on his cigarette, shrugged his shoulders and gave it back to me. His reaction turned out to be typical. Unlike the restorer in Amsterdam, none of the people I spoke to in Prague seemed especially surprised by the chair’s use as a hiding place. “This was Communist Czechoslovakia, for God’s sake,” explained one, “people had a reason to hide things; I find items concealed in furniture every day.” Other than banknotes, all the dealers and restorers I spoke to tend to throw out the items they find. One chair-maker said that he finds hidden letters and official documents from the Communist era in at least one in ten couches or armchairs that he restores. He told me he has never read any. It seemed as if a million paths for potential future historical investigations are being scrubbed from the face of the Earth. What thousands of people had hoped to hide from the regime temporarily, Karel and others like him were erasing forever.

From 1948 right up until the fall of Communism, the people of Czechoslovakia lived under constant surveillance by the totalitarian state. The Czechoslovak secret police, the StB (Státní bezpečnost), monitored the population with vigor. By 1989, in addition to its regular staff of 15,000–17,000 employees, the organization had an extra 30,000 informants on file, tasked with denouncing anyone suspected of acting against the regime. In an era marked by tapping devices and fear-mongering, it is hardly surprising that many ordinary citizens chose to conceal anything that could potentially incriminate them and their families.⁶

While I was in Prague, I also began looking in local archives for evidence of Griesinger’s existence in that city. After a day of endlessly streaming through reels of microfilms at the Czech National Archives, I eventually found a document on Griesinger in a police file. Every newcomer to Prague was requested to register their address and personal information with the authorities. Griesinger’s form disclosed that he first arrived in Prague from Stuttgart in early March 1943, that he was Protestant and that his parents were Adolf and Wally. But Griesinger’s police file also revealed something else: in the documents that he had hidden inside the chair he had concealed an important fact. His wartime passports up to as late as 1944 stated that he was a childless bachelor. But he had married. In his police file in Prague, he confirmed in his own messy handwriting that he had married a woman named Gisela Nottebohm.⁷ Who was he trying to deceive by withholding this information? Whatever his reasoning, Griesinger’s efforts to mislead his own contemporaries remained effective seventy years later: he had pulled the wool over my eyes all too easily.

Not content to have uncovered only a single document, I headed the next day to the Archive of the Security Services, which I had heard also contained files of Germans who lived in Prague during the Nazi occupation of the Czech lands. I hoped to uncover Griesinger’s name mentioned in something such as a testimony from a former Reich employee, to help me piece together how he spent his days. When I arrived at the archive, located inside a dated Art Deco building with a dark, grubby façade, I handed the cover page of Griesinger’s police file from the National Archives to the archivist on duty. She took off her glasses to read the document, placing them on top of a stack of old books that she had on her wooden desk. She asked me to wait in a room full of filing cabinets which had a subtle, musky smell while she went in search of a file. The large walls of open shelves contained thousands of files with different-colored jackets. When the archivist returned, she handed me a document in which Griesinger’s name appeared on a list of “German Public Employees in Prague.” Only a few details were typed alongside his name: his date and place of birth, his address in Prague and his role as an employee of the German state government ministry in Prague—most of which I already knew from the National Archives and from the documents in the chair. The final detail, however, contained new information. Alongside his vague employment details, I read that Griesinger was in the SS. He was listed as an SS Obersturmführer (senior storm leader).⁸

The trail of this everyday piece of household furniture had led me to a member of one of the last century’s most sinister organizations: the Schutzstaffel, or SS. Just seeing those two letters next to his name automatically transformed my preconception of Griesinger. The image that I had built up of him was beginning to crack. Until that moment I had thought I was on the hunt for an unremarkable civil servant. I had even momentarily entertained the idea that Griesinger was apolitical. Now it seemed I was on the trail of someone more significant. SS members—recruited only after meeting strict racial, height, and health criteria, and after swearing an oath of allegiance to Hitler—remain associated with the most perverse aspects of the Third Reich. If Griesinger had chosen to join the SS, it was likely that he agreed with the main tenets of Nazi ideology, including, of course, its racism and antisemitism. Griesinger was no longer just the polite, well-educated bureaucrat, dressed smartly in a light-colored suit. Another image, admittedly speculative, began to form in my mind: Griesinger wearing his intimidating SS uniform, beating up terrified Jews on the streets of Stuttgart and Prague. I felt the sheer irony of this SS officer’s most precious documents ending up in the possession of a British Jew.

I had begun this journey to help Jana and her daughter Veronika uncover how Griesinger’s papers ended up inside their family’s armchair. However, the more material I collected on Griesinger from Czech sources, the more my interest in the armchair dwindled. While I still hoped to solve the mystery of Griesinger’s hidden documents, I also wanted to explore more about the SS officer—not only his time in Prague, but who he was at his core, what he had done and why he had done it.

Before Veronika first approached me with Griesinger’s story, I had never studied the SS in any depth. I had always thought that involvement in the organization was a full-time position, one that defined the existence of its members. SS officers, I had believed, wore the black uniform of the organization every day and spent each waking moment terrorizing the local population. Griesinger’s example shows this must not always have been the case. As a lawyer at a government ministry, Griesinger already had a full-time job that had nothing to do with his SS membership. As I delved deeper, I discovered that so too did tens of thousands of doctors, lawyers, and civil servants.

Shortly after learning that Griesinger was in the SS, I traveled to Berlin to see whether I could find his SS dossier. I wasn’t optimistic: two-thirds of the one million SS members’ files were destroyed by Allied bombing during the war. The surviving SS dossiers are held at the Bundesarchiv in the sleepy Berlin suburb of Lichterfelde. As I went into the building I seriously wondered whether my interest in this unknown Nazi was taking up too much of my attention, sending me as it had to another city, one with a less than fifty–fifty chance of having any information. But the possibility of handling Griesinger’s SS dossier was too tantalizing to ignore. In the unlikely event of finding anything, I might have the chance to read his own words, the closest I could come to “meeting” this man, whom I had only known from a passport photo and official documents.

Upon arriving, I discovered to my relief that not only had Griesinger’s SS file survived, but it was available for consultation. The archivists didn’t seem to be in a hurry to fetch the documents from the holdings, but eventually someone handed me the files, on top of which was written: “Dr. Robert Griesinger, SS number: 161,860.” His SS number was etched onto the page in old Gothic handwriting. Griesinger’s immense file contained dozens of letters that he had sent to Berlin, and as I began to read his correspondence from the mid-1930s, I was hearing for the first time his voice in each line. It was a calm and detached voice, devoid of all emotion. After the censor and the SS staff in Berlin, I was probably only the third person to read Griesinger’s words. The letters and reports in the file did not uncover the nature of his role in the SS, as I had hoped they might. It did not expose him as an SS desk killer or a concentration-camp guard. Rather, they were concerned solely with family affairs and his work as a civil servant.

It was not until seeing Griesinger’s SS file that I learned he was a father. A 1941 document contained details of his children. In addition to a stepson, Joachim, the product of his wife Gisela’s first marriage, it mentioned two daughters: Jutta, born in January 1937, and then another daughter, born in December 1939. There was no additional information about Jutta or her younger sister, whose name I later discovered was Barbara.⁹ If his daughters had managed to survive the war and were still alive, they would be in their seventies. Perhaps they still lived in Stuttgart. The file revealed that in order for their marriage to be approved by the SS, both Gisela and Griesinger needed to produce a family tree to demonstrate Aryan ancestry.

Griesinger’s tree showed that neither of his parents was born in Stuttgart. Wally, his mother, was born in 1884 in Duisburg, a German town twenty-five miles from the Dutch border, where her family had lived for centuries. Griesinger’s father, Adolf, originated from even further afield. Adolf was not born in Germany. He was not even born in Europe. Rather, he was born in 1871 in New Orleans, Louisiana. As I ran my finger up the family tree, I saw that Griesinger’s family, many bearing the names of French noble families, had lived in the American South for generations. His family was not as historically German as I had presumed. Griesinger struggled to complete all the parts of his American family tree. He did not know details of a large number of his American ancestors. He was also without several crucial documents, including his father’s birth certificate and a marriage certificate for his paternal grandparents. His entry into the SS, in the absence of such crucial documents, casts doubt on the reputation of the SS as an organization for the German elite, one that was equipped with a rigorous application process. The authorities apparently took Griesinger at his word when he stated that his ancestors in New Orleans were of desirable racial stock.¹⁰

According to Hitler, all good Germans could connect to their country’s glorious past through their ancestors, who once worked the German land. The Nazis went to great lengths to foster a philosophy of Blood and Soil (Blut und Boden), which promoted Germanic ties to the land, at the expense of the “inferior races” such as Jews, Slavs, or Roma, who it was argued had no historical connection. Griesinger’s American background challenges commonly held conceptions of German identity during the Third Reich. Only one strand of his ancestry could speak to this idyllic portrayal of rural life. It was a little odd that I found out all of these intimate details from information obtained for Griesinger’s membership to a violent paramilitary organization. But the Nazi obsession with bloodlines and progeny made the gathering of all types of emotional, sexual, and family details an imperative of SS membership. Despite its repugnant purpose, documentation assembled for the enforcement of racial purity paradoxically resembles other modes of genealogical research. Using it, we can trace the paths of kinship across generations.

Discovering that Griesinger had ancestors born in the United States, and that he was a father, meant that the Berlin archives produced more questions than they answered. They told me nothing about Griesinger’s war, nor could they shed much light on his day-to-day life as an ordinary Nazi in Stuttgart during the Third Reich. For that, I had to go elsewhere.

The Stuttgart that I encountered seventy-five years after the end of the war bore only a partial resemblance to the city in which Griesinger spent his early life. Like so many German cities, Stuttgart was the victim of intense Allied bombing. Fifty-three Allied air raids destroyed almost 60 percent of buildings in Stuttgart, killing 4,562 people. This included a raid on September 12, 1944 by the 101 Squadron of the RAF, in which 957 were killed and 1,600 injured.¹¹ That night, eighteen-year-old Sergeant David Bernett, my grandfather, was a Special Duties Operator on board a Lancaster bomber. My research assistant in Stuttgart paused as we strolled through the city center and looked suddenly uncertain when I divulged this information. “So, you too have relatives who inflicted pain on others,” she said sharply. While, for me, my grandfather’s raid over Stuttgart was only a minor, if necessary detail of his war record, this was not the case for the people of that city who, decades after the end of the war, are still affected by his seven-and-a-half-hour bombing spree. Until then, as a British Jew, I had never expected that somebody might associate me with a wartime tragedy.

When the French liberators arrived in April 1945, the city was covered in 4.9 million cubic meters of rubble.¹² Responsibility for rebuilding the city center fell to the city’s mayor, Arnulf Klett. His priority, during his thirty years as mayor, was to rebuild the city’s devastated economy, industry, housing, and transport system as quickly as possible. He paid little attention to architectural detail and ignored calls to restore Stuttgart to its pre-war historical Gothic splendor. Instead, over the ruins of the city, a mishmash of raw concrete eyesores and pedestrian zones sprang up.¹³

I spent my first few days in Stuttgart combing through various archival repositories scattered across the region, trying to piece Griesinger’s life back together. Fading papers filed away for more than seventy years shed light on his various transfers and promotions at the Württemberg Ministry of the Interior. I found details of Griesinger’s student days, his salary and the positions he occupied within the ministry until the outbreak of war. Above all, the papers presented the image of an earnest and rather unspectacular civil servant, committed to forging a career under the auspices of the new and untested Third Reich. More so than anything else, the local archives revealed Griesinger’s legal training to have been his greatest asset, propelling him into social arenas that might otherwise have been out of reach.