A Crime in the Family

2

On a Sunday in the spring of 2008 I went to Rechnitz for the first time, to find out what my aunt really had to do with the crime. I arrived in Vienna first thing in the morning, on the night train from Zürich, hired a car, and drove past woods and vineyards; the grapes on the vines were still small and hard. Rechnitz is no beauty spot, there’s not much more to it than a main street, lined to right and left by low-roofed houses with narrow windows, curtained to keep out prying eyes. There is no town centre, no market place, and the castle that the immensely rich industrialist and art collector Heinrich Thyssen left in his will to his daughter Margit, our Aunt Margit, no longer stands. In 1945 the Russians bombed it when they marched into Austria, whereupon the inhabitants left, taking all the furniture, the pictures and the carpets with them. The Refugius association organizes an annual commemoration service for the murdered Jews. Songs are sung and prayers said at the Kreuzstadl, a historic ruin on the way into the town that is now preserved as a memorial. The speeches made in 2008 repeated that the crime must never be forgotten. I stood a little way to one side, knowing no one there, and looked around. The sun was shining, dandelions were in flower, the grass was ankle-high and still a little damp. Somewhere under it, 180 skulls lay buried. In spite of many years of searching for it, the mass grave has not been found to this day.

The night between 24 and 25 March 1945 is bright with moonlight. A party for Nazis and their hangers-on is being held in Margit Batthyány-Thyssen’s castle in Rechnitz in the Burgenland district, near the Austro-Hungarian border. Members of the Gestapo and local Nazi bigwigs, like SS-Hauptscharführer Franz Podezin, like Josef Muralter and Hans-Joachim Oldenburg, are talking to members of the Hitler Youth and the castle staff, while they drink sparkling wine. The National Socialists know that the war is lost and the Russians have already reached the Danube, but that is not allowed to cast a pall over the festive atmosphere. It is eight in the evening. At the same time, about 200 Jewish forced labourers from Hungary are standing on Rechnitz railway station. They have been working on the construction of the south-east rampart, a huge fortified line of defence intended to run from Poland by way of Slovakia and Hungary to Trieste and hold back the advancing Red Army. At nine-thirty in the evening, the truck driver Franz Ostermann tells some of the Jews to get into his truck, and after a short drive hands them over to four SA men, who give the prisoners shovels and tell them to dig an L-shaped pit.

The Hungarian Jews begin digging; they are tired and weak, the ground is hard, there is much drinking and dancing in Aunt Margit’s castle. About nine o’clock, SS Hauptscharführer Franz Podezin receives a phone call. The party is so noisy that he has to go into the next room to take the call, which lasts less then two minutes. Podezin concludes it by saying, ‘Yes, yes!’ and adds, ‘What a bloody mess!’ He tells Hildegard Stadler, head of the local branch of the League of German Girls, to take about ten to thirteen of the party guests into another room. ‘The Jews from the railway station,’ he tells them, ‘are sick with typhoid fever and have to be shot.’ No one demurs. Karl Muhr, the ordnance officer, hands out guns and ammunition to the guests. It is just after eleven o’clock. Three cars are ready in the castle courtyard; there isn’t room for the whole group, so some walk. It isn’t far.

I phoned my father. ‘You knew Aunt Margit was there that night,’ I told him, ‘and you knew about the massacre, too.’

‘Yes.’

‘But did it never occur to you that she might have been involved in it?’

‘Is this an interrogation?’

‘Only asking.’

‘I never thought there could be any connection between the party and the massacre, no, not the stuff they’re saying in the papers these days. Wait a moment.’ He coughed, and I heard him take a cigarette out of its packet.

‘You smoke too much.’

‘How’s the little one?’

‘She’s getting her third tooth and crawling. How come you never discussed the war with Aunt Margit?’

‘What would you have expected me to ask her? Can I give you a little more wine, Aunt Margit? Oh, and by the way, Aunt Margit, did you ever shoot any Jews?’

‘Yes.’

‘Don’t be naïve. Those were courtesy visits. We used to talk about the weather, and she pulled various members of the family to pieces. “Rotten seed,” that was how she described the Thyssens and the Batthyánys, she thought they were all out of their minds. “Rotten seed.” It was her favourite saying. Do you remember that tongue of hers?’

Between midnight and three in the morning, Franz Ostermann makes seven journeys in all from the station to the Kreuzstadl, each time with 30 to 40 Jews in his truck, and hands them over to the four SA men. The Jews are ordered to undress and leave their clothes beside the pit. They kneel, naked, on the edge of their L-shaped grave. Podezin and Oldenburg stand there, fanatical Nazis both. They shoot the Jews in the backs of their necks. As Josef Muralter, a Nazi Party member, pulls the trigger he shouts, ‘You bastards will burn! Traitors to the Fatherland!’ The Jews collapse, fall into the pit, and lie there stacked on one another. More bottles of sparkling wine are being opened in the castle, someone is playing the accordion. Margit is young and likes to have fun, she wears the most beautiful clothes. A waiter called Viktor notices that at three in the morning, when the guests return to the hall where the party is being held, they are gesticulating wildly and their faces are flushed. SS Hauptscharführer Podezin, who has just been shooting men and women in the head, is now dancing with perfect composure.

Not all the Jews were shot that night. Eighteen were left alive for the time being. They were ordered to fill the pit in with earth. They were on grave-digging duty. Twelve hours later, on the evening of 25 March, they themselves were murdered on the orders of Hans-Joachim Oldenburg, Margit’s lover, and buried in a field near the abattoir.

After the war, seven people were prosecuted for committing multiple murder and atrocities, in other words crimes against humanity. They were Josef Muralter, Ludwig Groll, Stefan Beigelbeck, Eduard Nicka, Franz Podezin, Hildegard Stadler and Hans-Joachim Oldenburg. But in 1946 the trial ground to a halt, because the two principal witnesses were murdered. First of them was Karl Muhr, the ordnance officer at the castle. He had handed out the guns that night of 24 March, and saw the faces of those who would fire them later. A year later Muhr was found in the woods with a bullet in his head, his dead dog beside him, and his house was on fire. The cartridge case that the police took away from the crime scene disappeared. The second victim was Nikolaus Weiss, an eyewitness who had survived the massacre by hiding in a Rechnitz family’s shed. A year later, when he was on his way to the town of Lockenhaus, someone shot at his car. It went into a skid, and Weiss died on the spot.

After these two murders, the people of Rechnitz lived in fear of retribution. No one talked. Their silence has lasted to this day. In the seventy years since the crime was committed, the town has become a symbol of Hungary under Austria, with its Nazi past. Any one who mentions Rechnitz is alluding to the suppression of facts.

On 15 July 1948, Stefan Beigelbeck and Hildegard Stadler were cleared. Ludwig Groll was condemned to eight years’ imprisonment with hard labour, Josef Muralter was given five years and Eduard Nicka three years in prison. Podezin and Oldenburg, the ringleaders of the massacre, were on the run. The Burgenland police suspected that they were with Countess Margit Batthyány-Thyssen in Switzerland, living in an apartment not far from Lugano.

Interpol Vienna sent the Lugano police a telegram on 28 August 1948: ‘Risk of the two men going to South America. Please arrest them.’ The order to arrest the fugitives was posted in the Swiss Police Gazette, page 1643, on 30 August 1948, but there was no result.

Summing up at the end of the trial, Dr Mayer-Maly, the Austrian public prosecutor who was supposed to be clearing up the case of the massacre, said that ‘The real murderers have not yet been found.’

I visited Rechnitz for the second time at the end of August, when the grapes were red and the trees in their full summer foliage. I had come to visit Annemarie Vitzthum, aged 89, and probably the last survivor of the guests at Margit’s party.

‘I’d really dolled myself up,’ she remembered. ‘We sat at round tables in the little hall on the ground floor, with the Count and Countess in the middle of the room. Countess Margit looked like a princess–she wore such lovely clothes.’

Men in uniform had kept coming and going, she told me, but she couldn’t remember their names. ‘There was such a commotion,’ as she had also told the public prosecutor in 1947 when she was questioned. ‘Everyone was drinking wine and dancing, except for me, I couldn’t because I was only an ordinary girl, I was the telephonist.’ At midnight a soldier had escorted her home, and up to that point the Countess had not left the castle. Frau Vitzthum had heard about the Jews only later, she said, as we ate her home-made sponge cake with crumble topping. What a terrible thing that was.

Then I went to see Klaus Gmeiner. He was Aunt Margit’s forester, and had been the last person to see her alive. Margit owned 1000 hectares of land in Rechnitz, and came to hunt there every year. ‘She was an excellent shot, she’d had experience of hunting game in Africa. She was very pleased when she bagged an animal, a mouflon or a deer, I never saw her happier.’ In all the years since the war they had never mentioned the Nazi period, said Gmeiner, who like so many in Rechnitz thought Margit was wonderful. He was sure she had nothing to do with the crime, he told me.

‘We went stalking,’ he said of the evening before her death, ‘and she hit a mouflon ram with a well-judged shot through the shoulder.’ He remembered exactly how the animal had staggered twenty, maybe thirty steps towards her, and only then collapsed. He still recollected, he said, how she had complained that evening of all the people who kept begging her for money. ‘That was the last thing she said.’ Next morning she did not appear at breakfast time.

‘How was it in Rechnitz? Did you find anything out?’ my father asked me on the phone. He sounded tired. A few weeks earlier, a little dog had suddenly appeared outside the door of his weekend house on Lake Balaton, a mongrel who refused to move from his side.

‘What’s the dog doing?’

‘Getting on my nerves.’

‘But you like him, don’t you?’

‘Tell me about Rechnitz.’

‘The people in the village called me Count, some of the women almost curtsied to me.’

‘Terrible, all that fuss and bother.’

‘Witnesses say Margit’s husband was at the party too.’

‘In the family it’s always been claimed that he was in Hungary that evening.’

‘Everyone tells a different version of the story: the family say they didn’t know anything and never asked any questions about Margit’s role; the media go to town with headlines about the bloodthirsty Countess; and the people of Rechnitz want to sweep the whole thing under the carpet. To them, Aunt Margit is a saint.’

‘And what do you want?’

3

When I began investigating, I wanted to know what really happened. I searched archives, wrote letters, drew up files, and wondered who in our family knew anything about Rechnitz, and why no one talked about it. I had often heard my grandparents discussing aunts long dead, the quirks of some uncle or other, the former splendour of Hungary, when people still knew how to behave and had good taste. Why did I never hear a word about Rechnitz? Why no mention of that mass grave? I thought I might find a clue in the place where the 180 bodies were buried. It’s possible someone there might talk to you, I told myself, because you’re one of the family.

But then, one winter evening, a chance meeting had many consequences. I was out and about in the city with friends, and in a restaurant we met an acquaintance sharing a table with the German writer Maxim Biller. We joined them, and at some point the conversation came around to Aunt Margit. Biller had heard of her, which surprised me, and he was the first person ever to ask me, ‘And what’s that to do with you?’

The Nazi Countess, as the papers call her to this day, and me?

I hadn’t expected such a question. Absurd as it may sound, I had never yet put it to myself. Strictly speaking, I told Biller awkwardly, we weren’t even related; Margit was a Thyssen who had married into our family. ‘So what’s that to do with me?’ I repeated, playing for time. ‘Nothing, why would it? It’s all so long ago.’

If he were to ask me the same question today, I would have a different answer. Because my focus changed over the course of time. It became less and less a matter of finding out what really happened; I was no longer a journalist approaching the subject from outside, making notes, gathering facts and asking other people questions. Now it was all about me.

I read about associations of grandchildren affected by the war, people of my own age who, because of events seventy years in the past, feel uprooted, disorientated, as if they had been born in a vacuum. ‘They have inherited their parents’ unresolved emotions,’ I read, ‘and now they are trying to break free of the fetters of the past.’ Many would feel guilty for being unable to mitigate their parents’ distress and confusion. I read about some who were too hard on themselves, about the deliberate construction of ideal worlds to compensate for a sense of something lacking. One man wrote, ‘I want to arrive in my own life at last.’ Another asked, ‘What kind of people has our parents’ persistent silence made us?’ I recognized myself in such remarks, although I didn’t want to belong to a community of suffering. I am not the type to join self-help groups.