Authors: Michael A Kahn
Bearing Witness (31 page)
This is a novel. A work of fiction. It opens with the usual disclaimer about resemblances to actual persons, and well it should. There is no Conrad Beckman. There is no Herman Warnholtz. Nor, for that matter, was there ever a Death's Head Formation in the United States, at least to my knowledge. But there was one in Germany, a Nazi division known as the SS-Totenkopfverbände, and they were indeed in charge of the concentration camps. So, too, there was a Die Spinne, consisting of former SS officers, and by all accounts it did survive Hitler's fall.
There was no Harold Roth, but there were undercover agents just like him, and the reports they filed on the American Nazi movement in St. Louis during the years before World War II still exist. In researching this novel, I spent several spooky afternoons paging through those yellowed archives. I read about the St. Louis chapter of the German-American Bund, with its headquarters in a two-story building at 2960 Oregon Avenue called the Clubhouse. I read an undercover report describing the celebration of Hitler's birthday there on April 20, 1937, where Anton Kessler, fürer of the local storm troopers, introduced the guest speaker, Walter Kappe, propaganda chief of the Cincinnati chapter of the Bund. Herr Kappe posed the following question to the cheering audience: “Why shouldn't the Gentile majority of St. Louis, defending itself against the Jewish Anti-American subversives, disfranchise Jewish voters, put them in the class of wards of the nation, and segregate them on reservations just like we did to our Indians?”
There was a Hitler Youth Camp, which opened on July 4, 1938, near Stanton, Missouri, and there was a Deutsche-Horst family summer camp near Meramec River off Lemay Ferry Road. The July 23, 1939, issue of the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
did indeed have a headline that read:
10 ST. LOUIS BUND LEADERS
HAVE GONE TO GERMANY
And the article that ran beneath that headline is exactly as quoted in this novel. In the fall of 1939, Fritz Kuhn, national leader of Bund, did indeed travel to St. Louis to address a group of local storm troopers at the Liederkranz Club. The words he said there appear in this novel.
And so on and so on.
Although I know of no Conrad Beckman and I know of no Herman Warnholtz, I wouldn't be surprised if their doppelgängers are among us. As Rachel said, sometimes we seem Time's captives, running nowhere forever on ancient treadmills.
I hope she's wrong.
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