Europa Blues

34

ANTON ERIKSSON WAS born in 1913, in a small town called Örbyhus to the north of Stockholm. At the age of twenty, he enrolled as a student at the university in Uppsala and, after reading a range of subjects including medicine, German and anthropology, transferred to the grand old university town’s most famous independent institution: the State Institute for Racial Biology. The institution had been founded in 1922, the very same year the Swedish Social Democrats had recommended the forced sterilisation of mentally handicapped people on the basis of ‘the eugenic dangers inherent in the reproduction of the feeble-minded’. It was the world’s first institution for the study of eugenics and later served as a standard for Kaiser Wilhelm’s Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity and Eugenics in Berlin.

The Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Eugenics was, in turn, an important precondition for the Holocaust. Though its roots were, of course, much deeper. The early twentieth century had been a time of great change – Sweden was transformed from an agricultural to an industrial society – and in times of upheaval, the need for a scapegoat always arises. The Jews were an obvious choice, since they could just as easily be accused of bolshevism as of capitalism and anti-patriotism – it was simply a matter of choosing which.

Racial thinking of this kind was also linked to the popular science of the time: anthropology and genetics. The Swedish Society for Eugenics had been founded in 1909, and there was also an international society of racial biology which met regularly to discuss how best to produce an Übermensch. When they held their grandiose world congress in London in 1912, none other than Winston Churchill had been the chairman. In 1918, a professor from the Karolinska Institut in Stockholm had suggested that a Nobel Institute of Racial Biology should be established, but the time was not yet ripe. In 1921, however, a motion supported by representatives from each of the governing parties was launched, advocating the founding of the State Institute for Racial Biology. The motion was passed by a large majority in Sweden’s Riksdag, and the institute opened on New Year’s Day, 1922. At its head was Herman Lundborg, with seven staff and an annual budget of sixty thousand kronor.

Herman Lundborg believed that the Nordic race was superior to all others, and as the years went by, he became increasingly drawn to anti-Semitic standpoints. The institute was also influenced by Lundborg’s fondness for Germany. He invited a number of Germans to give lectures at the institute, among them Hans F. Günther, who would later become the Nazi ideologue in all matters racial. When the State Institute for Racial Biology held its world congress in New York in 1932, Herman Lundborg was there, as was much of the American upper class, with families like the Kelloggs, the Harrimans and the Roosevelts at the centre of it all. The chairman of the meeting was Ernst Rüdin, a man who would, in just a few short years, be at the fore of Hitler’s extensive programme of sterilisation.

By that point in time, the State Institute for Racial Biology in Uppsala had started to stagnate, despite its firmly rooted international reputation. The annual budget had been lowered to thirty thousand kronor and Lundborg was becoming increasingly untenable as head of the institute. In 1936, he was replaced by Gunnar Dahlberg, a man who, to a certain degree, changed the direction of the institute, with its focus shifting from racial biology to human genetics and social engineering. This shift eventually culminated in the now-notorious programme of forced sterilisations carried out on many of Sweden’s mentally handicapped citizens.

Anton Eriksson’s involvement with the institute came towards the end of Herman Lundborg’s tenure. He had a great deal of sympathy for Lundborg’s eugenic and anti-Semitic thinking, and when Dahlberg took over Eriksson regarded the change in direction as a betrayal of Lundborg’s legacy. Medical and surgical-orientated racial biology was what interested him.

In the material from Weimar, they found a short text written by Anton Eriksson which had been published in the pro-German Aftonbladet tabloid in the spring of 1936. In the article, Eriksson attempted, using an utterly clinical line of reasoning, to prove the biologically determined inferiority of Jews. As evidence for his thesis, he made use of Herman Lundborg’s famous sketches of human profiles.

In early 1937, Anton Eriksson left Sweden to study in Berlin. The last mention of him suggested he was involved with Kaiser Wilhelm’s Institute of Eugenics and that he had been admitted to the internal officer training line within the SS.

Then it all went quiet for the talented young man from Örbyhus. Very quiet.

Kerstin Holm and Paul Hjelm read through the file together. They were utterly silent and there was no distance between them.

They could feel Sweden’s history changing before their eyes. Who had told them about this when they were at school? Who had told them about their humane, neutral, Nordic country’s dark inheritance?

No one.

The black hole in the space-time continuum was starting to fill up.

And the spanner in the works, the fundamental error in their thinking, was fast approaching.

Time was starting to right itself.

Not least thanks to Arto Söderstedt’s remarkable new information from Odessa.

They had seen nothing so far which suggested that Anton Eriksson, on his way to becoming an SS doctor, would have felt regret or suffered pangs of conscience over what he had done. To the contrary, he seemed more likely to be the ‘ice-cold scientist’ mentioned in Leonard Sheinkman’s diary.

Tormentor number 2.

So why would this rationally driven, methodically working anti-Semite leave behind damning evidence of the Pain Centre in Weimar? No photographs, of course – but plenty of material.

Why?

There was just one plausible explanation.

He had had a sure-fire exit plan.

‘When does Leonard Sheinkman’s diary end?’ Kerstin asked.

‘Twenty-first of February 1945,’ Paul replied.

‘And when did the Americans arrive in Weimar?’

‘Buchenwald was liberated on the eleventh of April.’

Kerstin Holm leaned forward over the table, shoved a portion of snus tobacco beneath her lip and said: ‘So there’s a month and a half between the day Leonard Sheinkman was taken into the operating room to be hung upside down and have a nail driven into his head and the day Weimar was liberated. His brain had hardly been scrambled when he made it out. I mean, he managed to learn Swedish surprisingly quickly, he changed profession from poet to brain specialist surprisingly quickly, and swiftly became a professor and Nobel Prize candidate.’

‘So what happened during that month and a half between the twenty-first of February, when the diary ends, and the eleventh of April, when the liberation took place?’

‘Leonard Sheinkman died, of course,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘The Jewish poet from Berlin died an unbelievably painful death in a cellar in Weimar. Right beneath the cultural heart of Europe.’

Paul Hjelm got to his feet, went over to the computer and started typing.

‘It’s been right in front of us the whole time,’ he said eventually, pointing at the screen. ‘Qvarfordt’s hopeless notes from Leonard Sheinkman’s autopsy. The error in our thinking. “Evidence of cervical spondylosis. Circumcisio post-adolescent. Rheumatoid arthritis, early stage, presenting in the wrists and ankles.”’

‘Circumcisio post-adolescent,’ Kerstin said. ‘Circumcision as an adult.’

‘We got lost in the Latin,’ said Paul.

‘In the confusion of tongues,’ said Kerstin.

They sat in silence for a moment as everything came crashing down on top of them. One by one, the grotesque consequences of their realisation revealed themselves.

Anton Eriksson, the ice-cold Jew-hater and tormentor, had taken part in the experimental torture of the Jewish poet Leonard Sheinkman. The first time had been on 21 February 1945. Perhaps Sheinkman had survived for a couple of rounds, wandering the corridors like a lost soul. Perhaps he had died right away. Either way, he had been long dead when the staff fled the Pain Centre towards the end of March, early April. The ice-cool Eriksson had probably already been aware that the centre’s and Nazi Germany’s days were numbered back in February. He had probably already picked out a suitable victim with whom to switch identities once the war was over. He had picked Leonard Sheinkman, a man who had been the same age as him.

The Jew-hater became the Jew.

The murderer adopted the victim’s identity.

After Sheinkman’s death, Eriksson had kept hold of his papers, those which he had with him. The others he acquired anew. He made sure to tattoo Sheinkman’s concentration camp number onto his arm, and he had made sure to get circumcised. All bases had to be covered. He had known, not least thanks to Sheinkman’s diary which, of course, he had kept, that his wife and son had died in Buchenwald – he had known there was no other family. Perhaps he had even undergone some kind of plastic surgery in order to avoid discovery in Sweden. But it had been ten years and an entire world war since Anton Eriksson had left the country, so the risk of discovery was minimal.

He had arrived in Sweden and completed his language learning in record time – hardly surprising, considering it was his mother tongue. He had also completed his medical education in record time – again, hardly surprising, considering he was already a doctor. He had then become a brain scientist in record time – hardly surprising, considering he had already been experimenting on human brains. And no one had recognised him. He had made it. He had completed his metamorphosis and was now living as a Jew. He went to the synagogue, observed the Sabbath, Passover, Sukkot, Hanukkah and Yom Kippur, and he married a Jewish woman.

The Nazi had started a Jewish family.

None of this needed expressing.

But one thing did:

‘How could he live with it?’

They looked at one another.

‘I don’t think he could,’ said Paul Hjelm. ‘I think he deliberately trained himself to block it all out. I think that Anton Eriksson actually became Leonard Sheinkman. I think he even managed to talk himself into thinking he had written that diary.’

‘But he was reminded of his past twice,’ said Kerstin Holm. ‘The first time was on the fourth of September 1981. He was nearly seventy by that point, when a newly sober Ukrainian Jew without a nose appeared on the threshold of that lovely house on Bofinksvägen, beaming with joy and claiming to be his son. It was madness. He killed him with a kitchen knife. Two brutal stabs, representing the power of his actions, the entire scope of it all. He took the body out into the woods and dumped it by a nearby lake.’

‘The second time was when he felt the presence of the Erinyes,’ Paul Hjelm continued. ‘That was when it all came back with a vengeance. He was forced to turn the page again. He was forced to read the back of the paper, the side he thought he had wiped clean. It was enough to make him visit Franz Sheinkman’s anonymous grave – “Shtayf”. The gravestone had been kicked over, and by neo-Nazis. It must have felt quite ironic. And just then, while he was at the grave, the Erinyes appeared. The goddesses of revenge from the depths of antiquity. Before they killed him using the very same method he himself had used on countless others in the Pain Centre in Weimar, he talked to them. He had probably been confronted by the weight of his guilt by that point and said something along the lines of “finally” or “you took your time”. Just like Nikos Voultsos in Skansen, he took them for real goddesses of revenge. Real Erinyes.’

In both cases, there had been plenty to be avenged.

‘That still leaves the question of what these two examples of revenge have in common. The prostitutes’ revenge on their pimps and the camp victims’ revenge on their tormentors. Where’s the link between them?’

‘We’ll have to see what Professor Herschel manages to scrape together in terms of names from Weimar,’ Paul Hjelm said.

They didn’t say much more after that.

Their words felt rather insignificant.