Monsters without remorse

KATE Winslet deserves endless prizes for her portrayal of Hanna Schmitz, the former concentration camp guard in The Reader. Few recent films have used such a gripping emotional narrative to raise profound questions about morality during and after World War II. Normally war movies portray heroes and villains and give the audience the satisfaction at the end that the good guys won. The Reader does the opposite. There are no heroes, only dilemmas and excuses.

The dilemma is for the 15-year-old boy who falls in love with Schmitz, an older woman in a German provincial town in the late 1950s, unaware of her dreadful past. The excuses are for Schmitz, who during the war just happens to have transferred from a production line in a Siemens factory to employment on another production line to systematically eradicate millions of Europeans because of their race and religion.

Wrapped up among the excuses for Schmitz, the illiterate Auschwitz mass murderer, are the bigger excuses for the German people who were all victims of the Nazis, both during and after the war.

What many people don't realise is that Schmitz's character is partly based on Hermine Braunsteiner, a Nazi monster whose life and trial are deftly sanitised to suit the author's and filmmaker's purpose.

Sixty years after the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals and when nearly all the murderers are dead, the truth about Germany's reintroduction of slavery and persecution into 20th-century Europe has become blurred by convenient myths. The worst, perpetuated by The Reader, is that the Schmitzes - the 135,000 Germans involved in mass murder - were fallible, uneducated human beings whose fate could have been shared by any of us.

The question directed at the audience is whether anyone can be sure they would not have done the same as Schmitz during the Nazi era by working in Auschwitz or any other extermination camp. Just how can we be certain of standing on the moral high ground? This pernicious question suits the modern German cultural elite and their uninformed sympathisers. As the post-war Germans quite rightly shrug off any sense of personal guilt, they have introduced moral equivalence into German culture.

The Allies' carpet bombing of Germany, especially Dresden, the barbaric behaviour of Soviet soldiers as they fought towards Berlin and the forced evacuation of millions of Germans from eastern Europe in 1945 are cited by some Germans as placing their country on the same moral level as the Allies.

The recently completed official German history of the war by the authoritative Military History Research Institute in Potsdam declares that most Germans during the war were aware of the extermination of the Jews and the vast majority believed the Jews deserved their fate. The Allied bombing of German cities, according to the Potsdam study, is viewed as the same level of crime as the Nazi extermination camps.

Put simply, moral equivalence is the German extermination camp commander saying to the Jewish inmate: "You've got your problems and I have my problems." The German's problem is to obey his orders or else. So the murderer and the Jew are equal victims of the same orders. But "or else" is the mendaciously contrived dilemma in the film. What compulsion did Schmitz and the mass murderers endure to transform themselves from law-abiding citizens into sadistic executioners?

In The Reader that issue is posed during Schmitz's trial. The scene is eerily realistic. In the public gallery the former lover watches Schmitz's questioning by the judge.

During the exchanges the boy, who has become a law student, grasps her secret. While they lay in bed years ago, Schmitz had demanded that he read long passages from literary books. Innocently, he had agreed, realising only during the trial that she had concealed her illiteracy.

The question for the judge is whether Schmitz wrote a report about the death by burning of female prisoners locked up for the night in a church hit by an Allied bomb. (Note that an Allied bomb has hit a holy church, killing innocent women whom the Germans had spared; the Germans no longer ask why the women were in the church in the first place.) Clearly, the illiterate Schmitz could not have written the report but, suffering lifelong shame about her secret, she prefers to admit to her guilt and take the punishment rather than suffer the embarrassment.

To conceal the same dilemma, at Siemens she apparently volunteered to become an Auschwitz guard. The portrayal of the transition from factory worker to mass murderer as seamless - Siemens one day, Auschwitz the next - justifies the notion of Schmitz as victim, a convenient fantasy for Germany's new soothsayers. "What would you have done?" she asks the judge, who is made to look discomfited when posed the test of moral equivalence.

All those issues are bogus, raised by some Germans to avoid the fundamental discovery described by the Potsdam history: that in 1945 most Germans felt no guilt but only regret for their personal losses and the country's humiliating surrender.

The Germans' inability to mourn for the victims of the Nazis reflected their overwhelming self-pity.

To suggest that Schmitz, a sadistic thug, would employ an incompetent lawyer and accept long imprisonment to hide the shame of her illiteracy deliberately distorts the murderer's character. By humanising the murderer's dilemma - should I admit to illiteracy and escape long punishment? - the film deceives the audience.

West Germany after 1945 became a sanctuary for Nazi war criminals. Initially, the British Army employed just 12 men to hunt them down. Instead of being punished, the murderers were reinstated in their wartime jobs - in the police, schools, courts, hospitals, industry and government - with the help of the British and American occupiers. Thousands of the worst criminals - scientists who had conducted human experiments or employed slave labourers to build rockets, the intelligence officers who had tortured resistance fighters - were arrested, then employed by the Allies.

Similar protection was rarely the fate of Nazi foot soldiers such as Schmitz. She is the fall guy: used to do the dirty work during the war and to serve as the pawn in Germany's conscience afterwards. Swept up in the initial dragnet, the foot soldiers were imprisoned but soon released and returned to their communities to resume working in factories or, like Schmitz, as a tram conductor. Former mass murderers became law-abiding citizens, carefully avoiding even a parking ticket. They were protected by the shared guilt of most of their neighbours, whose common regret was about Germany's defeat, not the crimes.

Only much later, when the West German conscience required it, was there the occasional show trial such as Schmitz's: again the fall guy.

One consequence of that failure to root out the Nazi virus from German society has been the gradual humanisation of Adolf Hitler. Just as the memory of Napoleon's terror was forgotten once his contemporary victims had died - today he is judged by his love life, his legal code and his remarkable military successes - Hitler is also becoming an object of fascination rather than total vilification. His humanisation, in the same way as Napoleon's, will take generations, but the recent interest in his library and dress code are the first signs of the inevitable. The Reader is another creep in that direction.

Germany's reputation was helped when war crimes trials resumed in the late 1950s. Fritz Bauer, a prosecutor based in Frankfurt, rebelled against the country's institutionalised blind eye to murder.

He led the first prosecution of former Auschwitz guards in Frankfurt. The realisation that the accused were receiving state pensions for their service in Auschwitz shattered a convenient myth about removing the Nazi stain from German society.

In 1960, Bauer's genius identified the location in Argentina of Adolf Eichmann, the planner of the Final Solution, leading to his historic trial in Israel. That, combined with Simon Wiesenthal's book The Murderers Among Us, led to a temporary change in the German mood. The failure to de-Nazify Germany began to disturb German society.

In 1968, amid the students' revolt and the birth of groups such as the Baader-Meinhof gang, intent on murdering former Nazi politicians and industrialists, there was widespread revulsion among the young about the war criminals in their midst. Not only camp guards but also those at the highest levels of Germany's political and financial elite were protected. Discomfited by Bauer's success, other prosecutors began investigating Nazi war crimes. In 1978, as a BBC television producer, I set off on the trail of Nazi murderers. I started filming outside Dusseldorf's courthouse.

Coming towards me, dressed in summer clothes, was a blonde, middle-aged hausfrau. That's her, I said to the cameraman. Before he had time to focus his lens, a handbag crashed over his head and Hermine Braunsteiner's eyes flared. The shock of the woman's attack still lingers.

Ten minutes after she had swept through the doors, I was sitting in the courtroom hearing testimony about her inhumanity in Majdanek, a German extermination camp in Poland. Braunsteiner was a guard whose cruelty was infamous. But with obvious lack of interest, she was doing a newspaper crossword. Looking up, she said to the judge, "What do you want from me?"

Since The Reader opened, attempts have been made to identify the real Schmitz. Bernhard Schlink, who wrote the 1995 novel behind the film, rightly insists she was invented but I have little doubt that Braunsteiner's trial - alongside 15 other defendants accused of murder at Majdanek - was a pertinent influence.

Starting in 1975 and lasting nearly six years, the trial stigmatised German justice as prejudiced and galvanised sympathy for the defendants for their "ordeal" 30 years after the alleged crime.

Braunsteiner's story was similar to that of Schmitz. Born in Vienna in 1919, the daughter of a butcher, she was recruited to work in 1938 at the Heinkel factory in Berlin. Soon after, she was recruited for training as an SS guard with the promise of better pay.

After training, Braunsteiner progressed from the Ravensbruck concentration camp in Germany to Majdanek. Survivors testifying in Dusseldorf recalled her wild rages, during which she stamped and whipped women to death. She was nicknamed the Stomping Mare because of her fatal tantrums. One witness testified how she "seized children by their hair and threw them on trucks heading to the gas chambers".

At the end of the war she returned to Vienna, where she was convicted in 1949 for brutality to inmates at Ravensbruck but released in 1950. Aged 31, working as a waitress and a hotel receptionist, she was still good looking and seductive. Her prize was Russell Ryan, an American air force mechanic serving in Germany. They married and set up home in Queens, New York.

By all accounts, Ryan remained enthralled by his wife and unaware of her past until, in 1964, an American journalist acting on a tip-off from Wiesenthal, confronted Hermine Ryan on her doorstep. She immediately confessed to being Braunsteiner.

"My wife, sir, wouldn't hurt a fly," protested Russell Ryan. "There's no more decent person on this earth. She told me this was a duty she had to perform. She didn't volunteer, she was conscripted."

Repatriating her to stand trial in Dusseldorf took nine years. No woman had previously featured in a similar war crimes trial prosecuted by the German government, especially involving Majdanek. Her middle-class lifestyle in New York conflicted with the testimony of her brutality.

The easy transition from the Heinkel production line to an extermination camp, then to domesticity in New York, suggested to the apologists that Braunsteiner, like Schmitz, had no choice, becoming - as Braunsteiner insisted she was - an accidental cog in the murder machine, unable to escape. But the court judged her to have been a committed and fanatical devotee of Nazism, ambitiously seeking promotion by murdering Jews.

On conviction she received two life sentences. Released as a sick woman in 1996, she died in 1999.

In the courthouse it was impossible to equate the middle-aged woman with a uniformed sadist smashing a child's skull against the wall. But during the next 20 years I interviewed dozens of Nazi murderers in Germany and South America. Although all had different ranks, backgrounds and intellects, they all offered the same disarming pose of innocent obedience to orders, ignorance or helplessness about the fate of the Jews and other persecuted races and, uniformly, none expressed genuine remorse.

Near Innsbruck, Austria, I met Karl Wolf, the SS general who accompanied Heinrich Himmler to Auschwitz, who told me the murders were a "regrettable part of Nazi ideology". In north Germany I met Arthur Rudolph, the production manager of V2 rockets, manufactured by slaves in an underground factory near Nordhausen. Hanged inmates were left swinging on ropes for days after their execution to deter others from disobedience. "There was no alternative," he told me with patent sincerity.

In Brazil I met Gustav Wagner, the deputy commandant of Sobibor, an extermination camp where 250,000 were gassed. Wagner's trait was personally to murder about six people before breakfast. He liked to shoot a father and son with a single bullet through their heads.

Like Braunsteiner, Schmitz and all Nazi murderers, Wagner lacked remorse. Like the others, he had been selected by the SS because of his devotion to Nazism and a complete lack of conscience. Like all the concentration camp guards, he was groomed to prove his commitment before being sent to the "front line".

This induction into the murder machine after the initial interviews was carefully controlled and monitored by those responsible for the Final Solution. Repeatedly, Wagner was tested in successive murderous scenarios. Spotted as an idealistic Nazi, he was first sent to a hospital where mentally troubled children were murdered and demonstrated his approval of euthanasia. Next he was sent to a minor camp where inmates were treated brutally. After personally participating in a few murders, he graduated to a bigger camp and only then was considered reliable as a mass murderer in Sobibor. No one who failed this test was punished.

Braunsteiner would have undergone similar grooming and, in reality, so would Schmitz. Both chose to obey orders and become murderers. Quite rightly, both were punished. So, despite its flaws, The Reader has at least resurrected the debate about personal responsibility in a tyranny.