The British Officer Who Hanged The Men Who Sold Gas to the SS Officers That Killed Millions

[00:00:00]There is a tin on a table. It is small.

[00:00:03]It is gray. It stands about the height of a coffee cup. A paper label is glued to its side. Printed in careful German type and stamped with a diamond warning in red ink. The label carries a name.

[00:00:16]The name is Cyclone B. The tin has been photographed and cataloged. It sits on a plain wooden surface in a British military store somewhere in the ruins of Hamburg in the winter of 1945. Behind it, a whitewashed wall. In front of it, a lens. It is being logged into evidence. There is nothing special about it. The label describes a pest control product. The seal is intact. The metal is unremarkable. Millions of tins like this one have traveled the world for 20 years. Tucked into the holes of freighters and stacked in the corners of grain stores. A cyanidebased fumigant for lice for rats. for wevils in flour and bed bugs in barracks. A useful, respectable, ordinary industrial chemical sold by a respectable Hamburg firm. That is one sentence. Here is the other. This tin is the same kind of tin the SS used to murder more than 1 million human beings. The whole story sits in the distance between those two sentences. We are going to close that distance slowly. We are going to do it with paperwork. We are going to do it with invoices and delivery notes and travel reports. We are going to do it with signatures. Every stage of this story has a signature on a form. That is one of the things that makes it so cold.

[00:01:41]Nothing about it is chaotic. Nothing about it is improvised. There is order.

[00:01:47]There are receipts. There is a 10% commission line on a ledger. And there is a young British officer in a borrowed uniform sitting in a Hamburg office with a pile of German account books in front of him. His name is Anton Walter Freud.

[00:02:01]He is 24 years old. He is a refugee from Vienna. His grandfather was Sigman Freud. Four of his great aunts have just been murdered in the camps. He is the first man to interrogate the men who sold the gas. You will meet him properly in a while. For the moment, stay with the tin. Read the label as a salesman would read it. Tesh and Stabinau, Hamburg, Cyclone B. Cyanide preparation for the disinfection of enclosed spaces.

[00:02:33]Warning symbols, dosage instructions, a batch number stencled by hand. The little wire seal on the lid twisted tight so that no vapor escapes until the operator wearing a mask cracks the seal in a room already sealed shut and pours the contents onto the floor or into a shallow tray or through a chute in the wall. Cyclone B is not liquid. It is not really a gas either. Not while it sits in the tin. Inside there are pale beads a little smaller than lentils. They are made of a soft absorbent mineral something like dietimmacous earth and they have been soaked in a chemical called proic acid. This is hydrogen cyanide. It is one of the most efficient poisons ever developed. It stops the cells of the body from using oxygen. A room saturated with hydrogen cyanide kills every mammal in it within minutes.

[00:03:27]The beads hold the poison. That is the whole point of the product. In the tin sealed, the acid is stable. In the open air, the beads release their load and the room fills with vapor. The beads themselves are almost inert once they have finished breathing out. In the standard legitimate use of the product, the operator ventilates the room and sweeps the spent beads into a bin. The lice are dead. The wheat is safe. The ship is fumigated. The company invoices the customer. A percentage is booked to Hamburg. The world moves on. There is no evil in the tin. There is nothing in the tin except a piece of chemistry. That is what is going to matter later when the men who sold it stand in a courtroom and say again and again that they sold pest control. We can hold that in mind. We can accept that cyclone B is in the abstract a piece of industrial chemistry. And we can at the same time look at the numbers and understand that once you multiply the abstract by the tonnage and you subtract the plausible uses and you look at where the tins went and to whom and how and without which safety equipment you are no longer looking at a fumigant. You are looking at a murder weapon delivered in tins.

[00:04:45]That is the arithmetic of the story. It is done on paper. It is done in the office of a respectable Hamburg firm called Tesh and Stabinau. Their letter head is elegant. Their headquarters is a handsome brick building in the old commercial quarter near the docks. Their salesmen wear suits. Their bookkeeper wears cuff protectors. Their stenotypists tap out invoices in careful copper plate. If you had visited the office in the middle of 1942 on any weekday morning, you would have seen a well-run business. Telephones ringing, files being carried, a secretary bringing coffee to the director. The director is called Bruno Tesh. He was born in 1890 in Berlin. He is a chemist by training. He studied physics for a term at the University of Gertingan and then took his degree in chemistry at Berlin in 1914. He is a serious man. He does not have the manner of a fanatic.

[00:05:41]He has the manner of a midsized industrialist. He plays no visible role in party politics. His interests are commercial. In 1924, in partnership with a man called Paul Stabinau, he founds the firm. It is a distributorship. It does not manufacture the product. The manufacturer happens elsewhere at works in Deso and in choline where hydrogen cyanide is extracted from waste sugarbeat mash and pressed into the little absorbent beads.

[00:06:10]The whole product line is patented by a firm called Deesh which is itself a subsidiary of Dussa which is itself entangled with a very large chemical combine called IG Farbin. Tesh and Stabinau do not make the poison. They do not own the patent. What they have is a piece of paper that says east of the river Elby in every town and every warehouse and every barracks and every camp. If you want to buy this product, you buy it from us. It is a monopoly, a modest one in a modest business. It pays. Paul Stabinau disappears from the story early. He dies in 1927 under circumstances the firm later prefers not to discuss. His shares are absorbed.

[00:06:53]Tesh acquires more of the company. By the middle of the 1930s, he owns a plurality of it. His personal profit rises and falls with the volume of gas the firm moves through Germany. His deputy is Carl Weinbacher. Weinbucker joined the firm in 1927 at the age of 29. He is the general procurist, the authorized signary. He can act on Tesh's behalf. He can sign the letters. He can approve the invoices. He does. He is paid a percentage of the sales proceeds.

[00:07:25]That is important. Weine bucker does not take a fixed salary. His income scales with tonnage. The more Cyclone B leaves the warehouse, the more Winebucker earns. Tess travels. He is out of the office for about 200 days a year. He rides trains across the Reich from Hamburg to Berlin, from Berlin to Ria, from Ria to Warsaw, from Warsaw to smaller places. He sells, he trains, he advises. When he is away, which is most of the time, Weinbacher runs the office.

[00:07:58]There are also technicians, chemists, men who go out to farms and warehouses and later to camps and supervise the actual fumigation. One of them is Yoakim Drosen. Drosen is quiet. He is a subordinate. He does what he is told. He is not part of policy. In the trial to come, this will save his life. There are also bookkeepers. One of them is Emil Sam. Remember him. He will destroy a piece of paper in 1942 in a drawer in the firm's office that if he had kept would have hanged his boss without any need for 8 days of trial. Instead, he will destroy it and remember it and after the war put down what he remembers in a letter to the British. That letter is the seed of the whole prosecution.

[00:08:45]Without the bookkeeper's memory, there is no case. Without the case, Bruno Tesh dies in his bed as a private pensioner in his own villa in 1960s something and nobody hangs him at all. But we are not there yet. In 1942, Sam is at his desk in cuff protectors ticking off invoices.

[00:09:07]He sees the tonnage rise. He sees where the tonnage is going. He sees the profits climb. And in the autumn of that year, on a pink duplicate of a travel report typed by one of the firm's stenotypists, he reads that the head of the firm has been at a meeting where a vermarked officer described the difficulty of using ordinary methods to execute large numbers of Russian prisoners. And he reads that the head of the firm has proposed a solution. Cyclon B in an enclosed space. The same method as for lice. Only the target is people. That is what Seahim claims later to have seen on the pink duplicate. He copies it out in shorthand into his private notebook. He shows the copy to a friend, Wilhelm Puk.

[00:09:53]Puke tells him to destroy the notes at once or he will be arrested and shot.

[00:09:57]Sam destroys them. He also destroys any memory he has of the exact wording. What survives is the substance, the proposal, the name of the officer, the date approximately the pink flimsy. The pink flimsy itself is destroyed in 1943 when sim is dismissed from the firm for reasons never fully explained and then again more thoroughly in an air raid on the 20th of March 1945 when the office building is hit and the file cabinet burns. When the British investigators arrive later that year and demand to see the registry, they find that the drawer that would have held the pink flimsy is empty and scorched. That is the missing document at the heart of the case. It is missing. The prosecution has to build its case out of everything around it.

[00:10:47]Everything around it is enough. Let us do the arithmetic. The numbers are on record. The National Archives at Q hold the trial exhibits. The delivery notes are extracted, summarized, and signed off by the firm's own accountant. His name is Alfred Zorn. He puts his signature to the totals under oath.

[00:11:07]Later, we will meet him in a room with a hidden microphone. For now, take his signature at face value. In 1942, Tesh and Stabinau delivered to the camp at Ashvitz 7,478.6 kg of cyclon B. In 1943 they delivered to the same camp 12,174.9 kilos. That is 2 years. That is one camp. That is nearly 20 tons of hydrogen cyanide packed in absorbent beads, packed in sealed tins, packed in wooden crates, delivered by rail and by lorry to a single railway siding in upper Syllesia. It arrived in consignments of 200 kg at a time and 500 kg at a time.

[00:11:53]and sometimes more. Awitz is not the only camp on the ledger. There are also entries for Saxonhausen, for Nogami, for Gross Rosen, for Ravensbrook, for Lublin, which we now call Marjanic.

[00:12:07]Every camp in the eastern half of the Reich, every camp behind the map line of the Elbe is on the delivery lists of Tesh and Stabinau. At the peak in 1944, the firm is moving something in the region of 2 tons of cyclon B per month to SS installations. Now let us do the multiplication. The lethal dose of hydrogen cyanide for an adult human being in a sealed room is very small. It is smaller than a 5 g teaspoon of the raw acid. The actual weight of cyclon B needed to kill a person in a chamber depends on the size of the chamber, the number of people in it, the temperature, the ventilation, the quality of the seals. At Awitz, the operational figure used by the men who did the work, according to their own postwar testimony, was in the region of 5 to 7 kg of cyclon B for a chamber of 2,000 people. Do the multiplication. 2,000 people killed with say 6 kg of tinned poison. That is 3 g of poison per person. Now take the 20,000 kg shipped to Awitz across 1942 and 1943.

[00:13:19]Divide by 3 g. Set aside the fraction that was genuinely used to disinfect barracks and shipments of clothing.

[00:13:26]Historians estimate that at Awitz, roughly six of the 23 tons of cyclone B delivered across the war are attributable to actual fumigation. The rest is unaccounted for by any plausible pest control need. The rest is a number that a child can calculate. You do not need to be a chemist to sit at a kitchen table with a pencil and a scrap of paper and arrive at the horror. You need only to know how many grains are in a kilogram and how many kilograms are in a ton and how many people can be killed in a room the size of a bakery cellar with a teaspoon of hydrogen cyanide. The number arrives on its own. That is what the arithmetic does. It arrives on its own in the head of a 12-year-old at a kitchen table. And it is not a story about a distant abstract evil. It is a story about a warehouse in Hamburg with a stack of tins in it and a lorry backed up to the loading dock and a driver signing a form. Look at the ledger for the year 1942. At the top of the ledger in the summary column that Alfred Zorn signs off on, the total sales of Zyclon B to concentration camps rises sharply.

[00:14:34]The rise correlates almost to the month with the beginning of the industrial phase of the murder of European jewelry where you can lay the delivery notes side by side with the killing rate at Avitz. They track the firm's profits also rise sharply in the summary column of profit for the years 1942 and 1943.

[00:14:53]Tesh and Stabinau post their best returns ever. This is not a coincidence.

[00:14:59]It is the arithmetic. Cyclon B is a commodity. It is sold by the kilogram.

[00:15:05]The more kilograms are sold, the more marks are booked and the more percentage points acrew to the man in the corner office and to his authorized signary. We winebacker takes his 10% on the sales proceeds. That is a document in the file. 10% of the sales. Every 10 kg of gas that leaves the warehouse, 1 kg worth of gas money is diverted into the pocket of Carl Weinbecker. If you want to know why the case ends the way it ends, the answer is because Weinebacker's percentage line on a paycheck stub on a company payroll ledger connects him directly mathematically to every tin of poison that goes east. He was paid for it by the tin. That is the coldest form the arithmetic takes. We can come back to the arithmetic. There is more of it, but it will keep. Numbers do not decay. The invoices exist. They exist today. They are in cardboard boxes at Q in London, filed under W309, and any historian with a reader's ticket can look at them. Instead, let us leave the warehouse in Hamburg for a moment and go to a room in Vienna 7 years earlier. The room is on the fourth floor of a stone building at Burgga 19. It is a comfortable room. It has heavy furniture. It has a Persian rug. It has a couch. It has on the shelves small figures of ancient gods. At a desk in the room, an old man is packing up his life. He is 82. His jaw hurts. He has cancer of the mouth. He has just been told by his daughter that the young men in the outer office of the psychoanalytic publishing house that he founded have been beaten and their money taken. The date is March 1938. Austrian Nazis have raided the flat next door.

[00:16:55]The Anloo is a few days old. Berlin has annexed Vienna. The flag over the Hofberg Palace half a mile away is red with a black wheel on it. The old man is Sigman Freud. He is trying to decide whether he is too tired to leave. In the end, with help, he leaves. He crosses through Paris on a train in June. Marie Bonapart has bought his exit permits.

[00:17:19]Ernest Jones in London has arranged his visas. He will die within a year in London, in a house in Hamstead of the cancer that has already been eating his jaw for a decade. His couch will follow him to England. His statues will follow him. His books will follow him. Four of his sisters will not follow him. Their names are Rosa, Mitsy, Doly, and Polly.

[00:17:44]They are old. Two of them are widows.

[00:17:47]One never married. They have no money to leave. In the summer of 1942, four years after Sigman's train departs Vienna, they are ordered to the Espang Banhoff, put on cattle cars, and sent to Theresianstat. Dolphie does not survive the ghetto. She dies of starvation and internal bleeding in 1943.

[00:18:08]Rosa, Mitsy, and Pi are put back on trains later that autumn and taken east.

[00:18:14]Their destination is Trebinka. It has no barracks. It has only gas chambers and a burning pit. It is what is called an extermination camp. They are dead within hours of stepping off the train. At Tbinka, the gas used is not cyclone B.

[00:18:30]It is engine exhaust piped into wooden runes from the manifold of a captured Soviet tank engine. That is a small technical distinction. The great aunts of Anton Walter Freud are not strictly speaking murdered with Tesh and Stabinau's product. That distinction will matter to nobody after the war. It will not matter to Walter Freud. What will matter to him is that his family has been murdered inside a system of industrial killing. And the tins in the warehouses of Hamburg are the same shape of thing as the pipes at Trebinka. And the pipes at Trebinka are the same shape of thing as the coal fed ovens at Soibbor. And the coalfed ovens at Soibbor are the same shape of thing as the pistol shots at Babiar. It is a system. It has parts. He has been given the job of taking apart one of its parts. The part he has been given is the tin. Anton Walter Freud is not with his grandfather in Burgassa when Sigund leaves Vienna. He has already fled. He is 17 years old. He is a school boy and then a technical student and then a refugee. He crosses to England. He is stripped of his citizenship in absentia.

[00:19:40]He is a stateless German speaker in a country not sure whether to trust him.

[00:19:44]In 1940, the British government interns him as an enemy alien. He spends a year and a half in prisons and camps, first in Leicester, then on the aisle of man, then deported to New South Wales. He returns in 1941 when the internment policy softens. He joins the Pioneer Corps as a private. He digs. He carries things. Then in 1943, the special operations executive takes him. He speaks German. He speaks Austrian. He is a chemist by training. He is a Freud, which for reasons that are hard to state officially is considered a piece of psychological insurance. They train him.

[00:20:26]They teach him to jump out of airplanes.

[00:20:28]They teach him small arms, radio, sabotage, false identity documents. In April 1945, they drop him into Syria in the southern Austrian Alps alongside a colleague. His job is to establish a British presence in the mountains before the Red Army arrives. He is separated from his partner in the drop. He is on his own in occupied territory with a pistol and a set of forged papers. He walks to Zeltweg airfield. He walks up to the German commandant and tells him quietly without raising his voice that he is a representative of the advancing British eighth army and that the airfield must be handed over intact. The eighth army is nowhere near Zelweek. The eighth army is hundreds of miles away.

[00:21:14]It does not matter. The commandant is exhausted. The war is over. The forms of authority are all that is left. Freud takes the airfield off him with a lie and a signature. He is 24 years old. His grandfather has been dead for 6 years.

[00:21:32]His great aunts have been dead for two.

[00:21:34]His country is smashed. His language is the language of the men who killed his family and he speaks it flawlessly with the polite formal syntax of Vienna in 1930. When his SOE handlers debrief him after VE Day, they ask him what he wants to do next. He tells them he wants a job with the war crimes investigation unit.

[00:21:55]He wants to hunt the men who killed his aunts. He does not phrase it that way.

[00:21:59]He is a British officer now and he uses the language of a British officer. He says he would like to make himself useful to the section dealing with concentration camp offenses. He has the German. He has the chemistry. He has been in the country. He can move around.

[00:22:16]They agree. By August of 1945, he is in bad oanehousen at the headquarters of the British occupation authorities receiving his case load. The case at the top of his stack is Tesh and Stabinau of Hamburg. Distributors of a chemical called Cyclon B suspected of having supplied the SS in the Eastern camps.

[00:22:36]Evidence, a letter from a former bookkeeper called Ail Shem. Freud reads the letter. He also reads a memo that comes with it from British occupied zone command, noting that the firm of Tesh and Stabinau is currently under contract to the British administration in Hamburg to continue fumigating British transport ships in the harbor and that the firm's operations should not, if possible, be interrupted. That last sentence is going to be a very serious problem in a few weeks. For now, Freud puts the file down. He picks up his revolver, his interpreter, and his colleague, an English sergeant called Fred Pelican, and he drives into Hamburg. He is going to arrest Bruno Tesque. Hamburg in 1945 is a landscape of chimney stacks. The air raids of 1943 and 1944 have flattened the residential districts.

[00:23:29]Whole streets are missing. The rubble has been swept into low walls. Above the walls, chimney stacks unattached to anything stand like teeth in a mouth.

[00:23:39]The commercial quarter near the harbor is patchier. Some buildings survive, some do not. The Messburg, where Tesh and Stabino keep their office, is standing, more or less. The upper floors are damaged. The ground floor is habitable. A staff of a half dozen people still work there. They still open at 9:00. They still take telephone calls. They still send out invoices.

[00:24:05]Bruno Tesh is at his desk when Freud walks in. Freud is polite. He asks his questions in the language of the office.

[00:24:13]He introduces his companion, the bookkeeper, Emile Sam, who has agreed to accompany him and identify papers. Sam looks uncomfortable. He does not know if he will still be alive at the end of the afternoon. Tesh looks at Sam with the flat unblinking expression of a man who is recognized quietly that he is in trouble. Then Freud asks his questions.

[00:24:34]He asks about the firm's client list.

[00:24:37]Tesh describes it. He asks about the tonnage. Tesh describes it. He asks about deliveries to Awitz. Tesh says he does not know. The dispatch, he says, was handled by the SS themselves from a central depot in Berlin. He knew only the yearly and monthly balance. He never asked what the customer did with the product. It was not his business. He was in pest control. The camp had lice. The camp had typhus. Of course, they used large volumes of Cyclone B. Everyone did. Freud asks whether Tet has any personal knowledge of the extermination of Jews in the Eastern camps. Tet says no. He says he was not a political man.

[00:25:17]He says he was a chemist. He says he was a member of the party. Of course, because everyone was a member of the party and he was a supporting member of the SS Hygiene Institute in a purely professional capacity because that is where the state contracts came from. He says he did not know. Freud writes it all down. Then he asks Tesh to accompany him to the police station. Tesh does. He is polite. He puts on his coat. He locks his desk. He is 55 years old. He has silver at his temples and steel in his eyes. Freud is 24. Between them, there is only the distance of language. On the way out, Sam asks to be shown the registry cupboard where the pink flimsy of the travel report should be filed.

[00:26:02]The cupboard is empty. The relevant drawer has been burnt. The whole cabinet is charred along one edge. Sam says the fire is from the air raid of March 1945.

[00:26:13]Freud writes that down, too. He writes down the shape of the char mark. He writes down the position of the cabinet in the room. He is a chemist. He knows what an air raid fire looks like. This does not entirely look like an air raid fire. He does not say so. He locks the cabinet. He takes the key. He drives Bruno Tesh to Hamburg police custody where he is booked as a prisoner of the British war crimes investigation unit.

[00:26:38]The date is the 3rd of September, 1945.

[00:26:42]At police custody, the interrogation continues. Freud is patient. He does not raise his voice. He is a courteous, softly spoken young man in glasses with the manners of the vianese burgutum which are the manners Brulesh was raised to respect. Freud asks his questions in the polite formal register. He offers cigarettes. He translates carefully. He goes over the same ground several times and comes at it from different angles and watches to see where the story changes and where it holds. The story holds better than Freud expects. Tesque is composed. He is prepared. He has on his side a legitimate business, a set of legitimate customers, a legitimate product, and a set of unofficial dispatch arrangements that make it very hard to prove that he personally knew where a given consignment was going. The Berlin office of the SS, the Halped Sanitate Spark, is where all state orders now go through. He says the firm invoices Berlin. Berlin invoices the camps. Berlin decides who gets what. The firm sees only the paper. The paper says fumigation. The paper does not say gassing of people. Freud writes all this down. He asks about training courses.

[00:28:00]Tesh says he ran no training courses in extermination. He ran and Drosine ran standard courses in the safe use of proic acid for fumigation. Every commercial user of Cyclone B was required by law to attend such a course.

[00:28:15]The SS attended such a course. Of course, they did. Cyclon B is a dangerous product. If it is not used correctly, it kills its operator. Freud writes that down. He asks about the pink flimsy. The travel report of autumn 1942.

[00:28:33]Tesh says he has no memory of any such document. Freud writes that down. He goes back to Bad Owenhausen with a suitcase of German account books and a signed set of preliminary statements and a growing sense that his case is thin.

[00:28:47]He shares this with Fred Pelican who is not a chemist but is a very experienced field officer. Pelican thinks the case is thin too. They will need more documents. They will need more witnesses. They will need to break the accountant Alfred Zorn who has the keys to the summary ledgers. They will need to get the exact tonnage on paper in someone else's handwriting and prove that the tonnage cannot be accounted for by fumigation. They agree to keep pushing then command telephones. On the 1st of October 1945, 4 weeks after his arrest, Bruno Tesh is released. The reason is technical and it is unbearable. The British occupation forces in Hamburg require the fumigation of their transport ships. British troops in Hamburg require the fumigation of their barracks. British stockpiles of grain in the port of Hamburg require the fumigation of their warehouses. The only firm in Hamburg with the licenses, the equipment, and the personnel to do this work is Tesk and Stabberau. If Tesk is in prison, the firm cannot function. If the firm cannot function, British ships and British warehouses will spoil and British troops will get lice. The regional command decides this is unacceptable. Bruno Tesh is required outside the prison doing his job applying his product to British property for reasons of British public health. He is released. He walks out of Hamburg custody on the 1st of October and returns to his office. Freud and Pelican learn of the release the same morning.

[00:30:18]They send urgent signals up the chain of command. Freud writes, and this is a matter of documentary record, a memorandum to his superiors in which he uses a very careful formulation. He writes that for the first time, the war crimes investigation unit is dealing not with people directly concerned in the murder or ill treatment of prisoners, but with those who lent their skill and services to facilitating the gruesome work of the concentration camps, and so identified themselves with breaches of the laws of war on a wholesale scale. It is the classical formulation of what would come to be called industrial complicity. It is the first time in modern international law that a British officer has written that sentence about a private businessman. It is the first time anyone has argued in an official document that the seller of the poison is answerable for the use of the poison if the volume of poison sold is a volume that cannot be explained by any innocent purpose. Freud and Pelican do not know they are writing that sentence for the history books. They know only that Bruno Tesh is walking around Hamburg as a free man in the same city where their case files sit and that if they lose him now they will lose him for good. They lobby, they telephone, they write, they travel to Bad Owenhausen and speak to superiors face to face. They point out that the release of Tesh on grounds of British commercial convenience is going to look in front of any decent audience like an obscenity. They point out that the firm can continue to operate perfectly well under a substitute manager. They point out that the accountant Alfred Zorn is fully qualified to sign off on fumigation contracts and that the actual fumigation work is done by technicians, not by Bruno Tess personally. They point out with the specific coldness of Fred Pelican, who was born in the same country as Tesh and has come back in a British uniform, that Cyclon B is not a substance that requires the personal signature of Bruno Tesh to release from a warehouse. Command relents. 5 days later, on the 6th of October, Bruno Tesh is rearrested. This time, he is not released. This is the turning point of the case. It has a very peculiar shape and it needs to be looked at carefully because it is a case in which the moral authority of the entire prosecution belongs in a way that is unusual to two specific junior officers who refuse to accept a superior's release order and dragged their headquarters back to a harder position. Freud is one of them.

[00:32:54]Pelican is the other. If either of them had shrugged and moved on to a different case, Bruno Tess would have died an old man in his own bed of a heart attack in the 1960s with a bank account fat on the profits of 1942. He did not because two junior officers refused to let go.

[00:33:13]Between the 6th of October and the 1st of March, when the trial opens, Freud and Pelican assembled a paper case. They interrogate every remaining employee of Tesh and Stabberau. They cross-check the invoice files. They compare the dispatch records against the Reichspan timets and identify the individual freight consignments in which tins of Cyclone B traveled east. They locate the printed sales catalogs in which the firm listed its available products and note which pages describe the equipment used for enclosed space fumigation of buildings and which pages describe the equipment used for smaller scale deling and cross-check these against the equipment lists on the invoices to Awitz. The invoices to Awitz described deliveries of cyclone B without the fumigation scale ancillary apparatus a customer would normally require. No gas masks, no canisters, no warning apparatus, the gas without its safety equipment. They also, and this is the moment that breaks the case, arrange a meeting with a hidden microphone. The accountant Alfred Zorn has been asked by the firm to sign a piece of paper substituting himself for Bruno Tesh as the authorized commercial representative of Tesh and Stabinau so that the fumigation work for the British can continue. Zorn agrees in principle but insists that he needs written authorization from Tesh himself. Freud arranges this. He also arranges to bring the two men together in a room, the microphones of which are wired into a British recording unit next door. Tesh and Zorn sit down together. They lean towards each other. They whisper. The microphones catch murmuring and the scratch of a pen. They catch nothing incriminating. Tesh is careful. He has always been careful. The meeting ends.

[00:35:01]Zorn goes out. Zorn is intercepted in the corridor by Freud. Freud tells him quietly in the polite Vienna register that the room was bugged. He tells him quietly that the recording has just been transcribed. He tells him quietly that Tess said things he should not have said and that Zorn would be well advised to tell the truth in his own words before Tesh's version is put to him. None of this is true. The tapes are empty. Zorn does not know that. Zorn collapses. He tells Freud, sitting in a room in Bad Owenhausen over a cup of coffee, that the firm had sold Cyclone B to the concentration camps for years in quantities that no doussing program could account for and that he had records to prove it. He said he did not personally know what the SS did with the product. He was an accountant. He kept the books, but the tonnage, he said, was not a fumigation tonnage. Everyone in the office knew that. everyone in the office had known more or less since 1942.

[00:36:06]Then Zorn signs. He signs a full deposition with the totals of the sales extracted in his own handwriting from the surviving fragments of the ledger.

[00:36:16]He signs each page. Under the totals, he writes his name. That deposition is production 10 in the trial file. It is the number the prosecution will hold up in front of the court. Meanwhile, Freud has found something else. In a file cabinet not directly related to the Oshvitz account, buried under invoices for spraying equipment for grain silos in Danzig, he has found a series of internal documents describing a training course that Bruno Tesh himself in person delivered to SS personnel at Saxonhausen concentration camp in January 1941.

[00:36:53]The course is described as instruction in the safe use of Cyclone B for the disinfection of buildings. The dates of the course are on the file. The dates are the interesting thing because the dates of the course are before the mass killings begin at any camp using Cyclone B. The first documented human killing with Cyclone B is at Awitz in the basement of block 11 in September 1941 when approximately 600 Soviet prisoners of war and 250 ill prisoners from the camp hospital are locked in and killed with the poison. That is 9 months after Tesh delivers his course at Saxonhausen.

[00:37:33]Which raises the question, what was Tesh teaching the SS in January 1941? He was teaching them the exact dosage required to kill living organisms in a sealed enclosure. He was teaching them the exact concentration curves. He was teaching them how much cyclone B in grains per cubic meter would achieve a lethal concentration for warm-blooded mammals within a defined period of exposure. He was teaching them in other words the numbers. The numbers can be used to kill fleas. The numbers can also be used to kill people. That is not a mystery. Everyone in the industry from the manufacturer to the wholesaler to the operator is aware that hydrogen cyanide is fatal to human beings at the concentrations used to kill lice. Which is why every safety course in the industry begins with the correct wearing of the gas mask. A gas mask on the operator in ordinary industrial use is what prevents the poisoning of the operator. If you take the gas masks off the delivery list, the mission changes.

[00:38:36]The mission changes at some point in 1941. Tess teaches the course to the SS at Saxonhausen in January. The gas is used on human beings at Awitz in September. Freud puts these two facts together. He puts them into his brief for the prosecutor. He notes in his own carefully drafted memorandum that the coincidence of these dates taken together with the coincidence of the missing gas mask requirements taken together with the coincidence of the missing warning odorants taken together with the coincidence of the sales tonnage rising in step with the killing rate constitutes a picture the accused cannot honestly deny. He also does one more thing. The SS ordered DGESH, the manufacturer, to remove the standard warning odorant from the Cyclone B destined for camp use. This is not a rumor. It is on record. There is a written instruction. Ordinary Cyclone B contained a strong mustard-like smell added by law to warn any human being who entered a fumigated room that the room was not safe. The SS ordered the odorant removed from their consignments. The manufacturer complied. This is documented at the Deesh works which are in the western zone and are being interrogated at the same time by American investigators. Freud gets the paperwork through liaison channels. The instruction to remove the odorant is filed in the trial as exhibit HG. It is the single most damning piece of paper in the case because the odorant is added by law for the protection of human beings. There is no need to remove it if the product is going to be used as advertised to kill lice in a barracks between one shift of prisoners and the next. The odorant is removed for one reason only. It is removed so that the human beings being led into the chamber will not smell what is about to be poured through the hatch in the roof.

[00:40:28]That is the memo that changes the case from a case about probability into a case about intent. Once you show that the SS asked for the smell removed and the firm complied, you have shown that both parties knew that the odorant is being removed is being removed at the request of the SS. In the western zone of what is now the American occupation somewhere in the paperwork of that western firm is the shadow of the paperwork of the eastern firm, Tesh and Stabinau. If the odorant was removed from the west, it was removed from the east. Or if it was left in, in some cases, the invoices will show which cases. Freud is building a picture in his head. He is doing it not from confessions, but from receipts. He is doing it not from Alan Taffel political theory, but from freight manifests. He is doing it not from ideology, but from arithmetic. He is doing it in fact exactly the way an actuary would build a fraud case. And this is worth stopping over for one paragraph because it is important to say that Anton Walter Freud is not in any conventional sense a warrior. He does not want to fight anybody. He is a chemistry student who was thrown out of Vienna, wandered through internment, was rescued by the SOE, and now finds himself in a British battle dress uniform on the North German plane in 1945 doing paperwork against a class of men who murdered his family. He is not shouting. He is not hitting anyone. He is not even in the physical sense a very impressive figure. He is a slight bees spectacled young man with a slight vianese accent. sitting in a room going through a filing cabinet. The horror is not that he is a warrior. The horror is that he is not. The horror is that the case against Bruno Tesh is being built by the same species of quiet paperwork that built the case for Bruno Tesh's warehouse. Signatures, forms, ledgers, invoices, receipts. The mirror image of the accountant's ledger is the prosecutor's brief. They are made of the same materials. They travel on the same rails. The clerks of the camps, the clerks of the firms, the clerks of the British War Crimes Investigation Unit all sit at similar desks and all use similar carbon paper and all initial the corners of their pages with similar strokes of a black fountain pen. There is one moment and only one in which we know that Freud is not doing this at the distance of an actuary. It is late in the autumn of 1945.

[00:43:05]It is bad ironhousen or perhaps it is Hamburg. He is alone in his office with the pile of Zorn's ledger extracts in front of him. His interpreter has gone to bed. The building is quiet. He turns the pages of the ledger. He goes over the sales entries for the year 1942 and specifically for the summer months of that year and he looks at the tonnages and he looks at the dates. He knows because he has read it in the press cutings that his mother's family are sending him from other channels that his father's aunts Rosa Mitsy Dolphie and Powi were deported from Vienna in the summer of 1942.

[00:43:46]He knows that they were taken to Teresian. He does not yet know exactly where or how each of them died. That information will come later through the Red Cross. But he knows what summer 1942 means. He knows what the summer of 1942 in the schedules of the Reichban, in the timetables of the Eastern camps, in the ledger of Tesh and Stado means. The number of kilograms of Cyclon Booked to Awitz by his own firm in the ledger under his hand in that summer is very large. He sits with it. He does not weep. There is nothing on record that says he weeps. He is a British officer.

[00:44:24]He is on duty and he has learned by then, as any refugee learns, that the tears will keep. But there is a paragraph in a private letter written later in which he describes sitting alone at a desk in autumn 1945, looking at a ledger and thinking of Burgassi.

[00:44:42]Burgassi, the street in Vienna where he grew up in a family flat above his grandfather's. That is the crack. one paragraph. That is the whole crack you get in this story. After it, he closes the ledger, ties it with string, and files it under the exhibit number. The trial opens on the 1st of March, 1946 in a large room in the building called the Curio House in Hamburg. The Curio House was before the war a lecture hall of the local teachers union. It is neither ornate nor military. It has plain wooden benches and a raised deis at one end.

[00:45:19]The British military court sits at the deis. The three accused sit on a bench to the side guarded. The accused are Bruno Tesque, Carl Weinbacher and Yakim Drosine. The charge is precise. It reads in the official transcript that the defendants at Hamburg, Germany between the 1st of January 1941 and the 31st of March 1945 in violation of the laws and usages of war did supply poison gas used for the extermination of Allied nationals interned in concentration camps well knowing that the said gas was to be so used. Note the phrasing, well-knowing.

[00:45:59]The whole trial is about those two words. The prosecutor is Colonel Draper.

[00:46:04]The defense is led by German council.

[00:46:06]The judges are British officers. There is no jury. The proceedings are conducted in English and German with sworn interpreters. The prosecution opens with the arithmetic. Colonel Draper reads out the tonnage of Cyclon B supplied by Tesh and Stabinau to the SS between 1942 and 1944. He reads out the totals for individual camps. He reads out the corresponding delivery notes. He reads out the invoices signed by Weinebacker. He calls Alfred Sa to the stand. Zorn confirms the totals. Zorn signs his deposition again in court in front of the judges. Then Draper does what is technically the most important thing done all week. He introduces exhibit HG. Exhibit HG is the memorandum from Degish confirming in writing that the SS ordered the removal of the warning odorant from concentration camp consignments of Cyclon B and that the manufacturer complied. The prosecution presents it. The defense briefly is silent. Then the defense argues that the removal of the odorant is a technical matter that the SS gave commercial reasons for it involving the sensitivity of certain fumigation applications. that the removal does not on its face prove homicidal intent. The court reads the document and moves on. The court will decide later. The prosecution calls Emile Shem. Sam gives evidence about the pink flimsy of the travel report of autumn 1942. Sam's story is not easy to hear. He is a middle-aged German bookkeeper who has already destroyed his own copy of the crucial document. He is testifying from memory in a court in a foreign uniform shadow 3 years after he last saw the paper. The defense puts to him that he has been coached. It puts to him that he is a disgruntled ex employee. It puts to him that Wilhelm Puk, who saw the copy at the time, has been questioned separately and given a slightly different account of what Sem told him. Sem holds his ground. He is not eloquent. He is precise and he is stubborn. He remembers what he read. He read it in autumn of 1942 in the office in the Mesburg in Hamburg on a pink duplicate. He read that Bruno Tesh had proposed the use of Cyclon B for the killing of human beings in the same way that it was used for the killing of lice. He read that he remembers that he will say so under oath. He does say so and the judges whatever they decide about the corroboration will take note.

[00:48:43]The prosecution then calls its concentration camp witnesses. The first is Perry Broad, a former SS non-commissioned officer who worked in the political department at Awitz. Broad has decided to give evidence for the British. His testimony is calm and detailed. He describes the arrival of consignments of Cyclon B at Awitz. He describes the fact that the tins came marked without warning odorant. He describes the fact that the SS did not use the tins for fumigation of prisoner barracks. He describes their use in the gas chambers. He does not know Bruno Tesh personally. He does not need to. He is not testifying to Tesh's guilt. He is testifying to what happened at the receiving end of the invoices. What happened at the receiving end of the invoices was the mass murder of human beings. The second is Dr. Charles Sigisman Bendle. Bendel was a prisoner doctor at Awitz. He worked in the vicinity of the crerematoria. He testifies in a mixture of Romanian accented French, German, and English. He describes what he saw. He describes the numbers of people who came off the trains and did not come out of the chambers. He describes the atmospherics.

[00:49:57]He describes to a British military court in Hamburg in 1946 what a gas chamber sounded like from the outside. What he says is not easily forgotten by any of the officers of the court. And the transcript records that at one point in his testimony, the presiding judge asks for a 5-minute recess. Then the prosecution reads into evidence a set of interrogations from other trials in which the commonant of Awitz Rudolph Hurse gave testimony describing the receipt of Zeicon B in tinned form from Tesh and Stabinau. Hurse is not present in court. He is in a cell elsewhere awaiting his own trial which will end in a rope in the courtyard of his own camp.

[00:50:38]But his written statement about the source of the poison is admissible. It is read. The prosecution rests. The defense rises. The defense presented by German council does the job it can. It argues that the tonnage delivered to Awitz is not on its face incompatible with the fumigation requirements of the camp. Awitz was a very large camp it says with a chronic and severe typhus problem requiring large volumes of dousing agents and it is not incumbent on a supplier to inquire into the internal uses to which the SS put the product. It argues that Bruno Tesh was in 1942 absent from the office for many months of the year and that the day-to-day dispatch decisions were taken by other men. It argues that Carl Weinbacher as authorized signary signed thousands of documents in the course of his duties and cannot be presumed to have read every consignment note. It argues that Yakim Droin was a subordinate technician with no insight into the overall commercial policy of the firm that he did not sit in on the sales meetings that he was in no position to know or to influence what happened to a given consignment. Then the defense puts Bruno Tesh on the stand. Tess is composed. He is by all accounts a good witness in his own case. He does not sweat. He does not shout. He answers the questions as if he were being asked about a shipment of screws. He is polite to the prosecutor.

[00:52:07]He addresses the judges as hair president. He denies knowledge of the extermination of Jews at Awitz. He denies knowledge of the size of consignments to Awitz. He denies having been to Awitz. He denies having ever conducted a training course of any kind that touched on the use of Cyclon B for the killing of human beings. He denies the truth of Sem's account of the Pink Flimsy. He denies that he had ever heard in the course of business of any homicidal use of his product. The prosecution cross-examines. The prosecution takes him through the exhibits one by one. It takes him through the ledgers. It takes him through the delivery notes. It takes him through the missing warning odorant. It takes him through the training course at Saxonhausen in January 1941.

[00:52:53]Tesh is imperturbable. His answer to almost every point is that he did not know, that he had not looked, that he had trusted his subordinates, that he had trusted his customers, and that in a business the size of Tet and Stabinau, it was not possible for one man to review every delivery note. As Freud will later report to his superiors, Tesh's stance of ignorance is carried to the point of absurdity. The prosecution then asks a question about Weinebacker's 10% commission. Tesh acknowledges the commission. It is on the pay ledger. He cannot deny it. The prosecution asks whether Weinebacker on a 10% commission of the total sales could have failed to notice that his personal income was rising sharply in the years 1942 and 1943. Tesh says he cannot speak for Weinebacker. The prosecution asks Weinebacker. Weinbacker gives essentially the same evidence as Tesh.

[00:53:51]He did not know. He did not inquire. He did not read every dispatch. He signed papers because that was his job. The prosecution reads out the total figure of Weinebacker's commission earnings for 1942.

[00:54:05]The court is silent. The commission earnings for one year for a middle-aged manager of a small pest control distributorship in Hamburg are the earnings of an industrial magnate. The prosecution has made its point. The defense rests. The trial lasts 8 days.

[00:54:21]On the 8th of March 1946, the court delivers its verdict. Yoakim Drosen is acquitted. The court accepts that he was a technician, a subordinate with no insight into corporate policy and that his testimony that he did not conduct SS training courses is not sufficiently contradicted by other evidence. Bruno Tesh is convicted. Carl Weinacher is convicted. The court in its written finding states that it is satisfied on the totality of the evidence that both men knew that the Cyclon B their firm was supplying to the SS was being used in large volume for the killing of human beings and that they continued to supply it and take commercial advantage from supplying it. In the full knowledge of that use, the sentence is death by hanging. The date of execution is set for the 16th of May 1946.

[00:55:14]Appeals are lodged. Appeals are dismissed. On the 15th of May, Bruno Tesh and Carl Weinbacher are moved from Hamburg to Hamill prison in Lower Saxony where the British occupation authorities carry out judicial executions. Hamund is a small town on the river Waca. It is famous in fairy tales for a piper who led its rats away and then when the town's people refused to pay him, led their children away too. It is a fable about accounts unsettled and about children paid for the failure of the account book. On the morning of the 16th of May 1946, in a room at Hamill Prison, Bruno Tesh and Carl Weinbacker are hanged one after the other by an English hangman. That is the end of the gallows in this film. We will not describe them.

[00:56:03]The hangman is a Yorkshireman with a very quiet manner and a professional pride in the correctness of his work. He has his own story and it is being told in another film. In this film, the gallows are a single sentence and now they are done. What we will describe is the counter ledger. Every ledger in this story has to be answered by another ledger. The ledger of Tesh and Stabberau in the summer of 1942 records tonnages of Cyclon B dispatched to concentration camps in the eastern half of the German Reich. Somewhere in that ledger in a specific week of a specific month, there is a delivery of 200 kg of Cyclon B to a receiving depot from which it is dispatched onward by rail to the SS installation at Awitz.

[00:56:52]The delivery note is stamped and signed.

[00:56:54]The invoice is booked. The commission line at 10% is credited to Carl Weinbacker's payroll account. That in the ledger is one line. Here is the counter ledger. In the same summer in the ghetto at Terry Sanat, an 82year-old woman by the name of Rosa Graph, born Freud, sister of the late Sigman Freud of Burgassi in Vienna, is put into a cattle truck bound for Trebinka. She dies within hours of arrival. That is one line. In the same summer, another sister, Marie Freud, called Mity in the family, is put on the same train or a later one to the same destination. She dies. That is one line. In the same summer, a third sister Pauline Winteritz called Paulie is deported east and murdered. That is one line. In Terresian over that winter and the following, Adelfine Freud called Doly, the youngest sister who never married, who stayed at home to look after their parents, dies of hunger and internal bleeding in the barracks of the ghetto. That is one line, four lines against 1.1 million lines against the whole tonnage of a Hamburg firm's ledger for the years 1942, 1943, and 1944.

[00:58:17]Four names against a number of victims that is larger than the population of most European capital cities. Those four names are the counter ledger of Anton Walter Freud of the British War Crimes Investigation Unit, who put together the case that hanged Bruno Tess. Every prosecution case is, if you look closely, a personal ledger. Every prosecutor is answering some private line in some private book. Freud's book has four names in it. Rosa, Mitsy, Doly, Paulie, great aunts. the lists of a vianese Jewish family that used to sit together on the same balcony in the same street on Sunday afternoons in the 1890s and that ended in the early 1940s on four separate lines in four separate transports.

[00:59:05]He never wrote about them at length. He was not a demonstrative man. He was British by adoption and vianese by birth and both cultures agreed that a serious man does not talk about his grief. He would write decades later that he had felt the fate of his family sharply at the time of the Tesh case and that this had given him a personal satisfaction in the outcome. He put it in a sentence. He allowed himself a sentence. We can allow ourselves a paragraph. We can look at those four names and understand that a case built out of invoices and delivery notes and audit trails and hidden microphones and letters from a fired bookkeeper was also in the private ledger of the officer who built it. A a case about four elderly vianese ladies who were put on trains and never came home. That is the thing that makes this trial different from every other war crimes trial of 1946. It is a trial that was built by paperwork and driven by grief. And neither of those two things showed on the face of the officer who built it. He wore the battle dress. He asked his questions in the polite vianese register. He signed his memorander in a neat British hand. He processed evidence. He was patient. He was silent. And he did not let go when everyone else was ready to. There is one more thing to say about the arithmetic.

[01:00:30]By the end of the trial, the totals of Tesh and Stabinau sales of Cyclon B to concentration camps between 1942 and 1944, extracted by Alfred Zorn and read into evidence, run in tens of tons. To Awitz alone in the years 1942 and 1943 combined, roughly 20 tons. Historians looking at the full run of deliveries into the camp system from all sources put the total at closer to 23 tons for Awitz, of which six is attributable to genuine fumigation, and the remainder is not. Across the whole war, sales of Cyclone B by all distributors run to about 720 turns, of which about 56 turns are shipped to concentration camps and of which about 1.1 million human beings, mostly Jewish, die. Numbers do not carry feeling. That is precisely the point of them. The reason numbers carry the weight of this story is that they cannot be argued with. You can argue with a witness. You can argue with a survivor.

[01:01:33]You cannot argue with an accountant's signed extract of a ledger. Not honestly. Alfred Zorn signed the figures. Alfred Zorn was the firm's own accountant. Alfred Zorn read them off his own books. The court accepted them.

[01:01:49]They stand. They are on file at Q in London in the folders labeled W309625.

[01:01:57]And any citizen with a reader ticket and an afternoon can go and look at them.

[01:02:01]the tin. Then go back to the tin. It sits on a table in a British evidence store in Hamburg in the winter of 1945.

[01:02:10]Nothing about it looks like a murder weapon. Everything about it looks like a piece of industrial chemistry. The label warns of poison. The seal is intact. The metal is dull. Around the tin on other tables are other objects, ledger books, delivery notes, a copy of the printed sales catalog, photographs of the Mespoff in Hamburg, a carbon copy of the removal of odorant memo taken from the manufacturer's files in the American zone, a signed deposition from Alfred Zorn listing the yearly totals. A separate signed deposition from Emile Sem describing the pink flimsy of the travel report of autumn 1942. A sworn affidavit from Perry Broad describing the arrival of the tins at the Ashvitz siding. A second sworn affidavit from Dr. Charles Sigisman Bendle describing the sound of the chamber from the outside. A written statement taken through Nuremberg liaison from Rudolph Hos confirming the source of the poison used in his camp. Each of these documents is signed. Each of them has at the bottom in ink the name of the person who put it there. Amil Sem, Alfred Zorn, Bruno Tesh, Carl Weinbecker, Yo Kim, Drochin, Perry Broad, Charles Sigisman, Bendle, Rudolph Hurse, and also on the memoranda that stitched them together in a neat British hand, the initials AWF, Anton Walter Freud, refugee, chemist, grandson. Every stage of the story has a signature. That is not a coincidence.

[01:03:49]That is how bureaucracies work.

[01:03:51]Bureaucracies work by signatures. The camps ran on signatures. The firms ran on signatures. The whole structure of industrial mass murder, from the pellet in the tin to the invoice in the ledger to the timetable in the transport office to the order in the political department to the tin poured through the hatch of the chamber was held together by signatures. The prosecution ran on signatures, too. Freud's whole method was to gather the signatures of the men who had signed the delivery and match them one by one to the signatures of the men who had signed the killing and offer both sets to a court that would put its own signature at the bottom of a verdict. And then a British hangman would sign the execution register at Hamill on the 16th of May 1946 and put a line through the names of Bruno Tesh and Carl Weinbacker. The last signature, the verdict signed by the presiding officer of the British military court in the Curio House in Hamburg on the 8th of March 1946.

[01:04:51]The final signature is not technically that of the hangman. The final signature technically is that of the court that ordered the hanging. It is dated a few weeks earlier. It is the signature that turns Bruno Tesh, chemist and businessman of Hamburg, into a condemned man of the British occupation. That signature was written because two junior officers, one of them a bispectled refugee from Vienna, aged 24, refused to let a superiors release order stand. The system did not do it on its own.

[01:05:23]Institutions left to their own inertia do not clean their own accounts.

[01:05:28]Institutions have to be pushed. In autumn 1945, the British occupation of northern Germany would, if left to its inertia, have quietly given Bruno Tess a fumigation contract, sent Carl Weinbacker back to his desk, allowed Alfred Zorn to keep the books, and forgotten the whole matter within 18 months. The whole matter was not forgotten because a young man in a British battle dress uniform with a vianese accent sat at a desk in Badenhausen in the autumn of 1945 and wrote a memorandum in which he said in essence that a firm that supplied 20 tons of poison gas to a single receiving depot in Eastern Germany over 2 years in the absence of the safety equipment that any legitimate customer would require was not a firm that could be let back onto its own premises. is for the sake of the fumigation of a British transport ship. And because when his memorandum was ignored, he wrote another one. And because he asked Fred Pelican to write one, too. And because they held the line quietly, respectfully in polite British Service memorandum for 5 days until the release order was reversed. Institutions do not clean themselves. People clean institutions one memorandum at a time.

[01:06:47]That is what Anton Walter Freud did in Hamburg in the autumn of 1945.

[01:06:52]He wrote memoranda. He asked questions.

[01:06:56]He drove out to the Mesburg on a gray morning and arrested a chemist. He waited. He wrote more memoranda. He listened through a wall to a whispered conversation that his microphones could not catch. He bluffed an accountant. He read a ledger. He filed the ledger. He put together a case in which the arithmetic was inescapable. He held the case in his hands until 8 days of trial were complete. He watched the verdict come down. He signed his own name at the bottom of his own final reports. And then he went back to England, took off the uniform, resumed his chemistry studies, became a citizen, became a father, worked for the rest of his career as an industrial chemist, and rarely spoke about any of it in public.

[01:07:40]He died in Hampstead in London in February 2004.

[01:07:45]He was 82 years old. He is buried in the same city as his grandfather. That is the story. Now come back to the tin one last time. Take a piece of paper. Write on it a number. Write on it 1942.

[01:08:00]Draw a small square on the corner of the paper to represent a warehouse. Draw a line from the warehouse to another square and mark the second square Awitz.

[01:08:09]Along the line, write 200 kg twice and then 500 kg and then 200 again until the paper is scattered with numbers. Add them up. You will find that the total is in that year more than 7,000 kg. Set aside a small portion of it and say generously that this portion was used to kill lice on the shirts of prisoners.

[01:08:34]That portion is small. The rest of the number is the number. You do not need to name it. It sits on the page and names itself. That is the whole method of the case. The method is not orary. The method is not confession. The method is a small square and a line and two numbers written along the line and a total at the bottom. The method is arithmetic. Above the arithmetic, the label on the tin says cyclon B cyanide preparation for the disinfection of enclosed spaces distributed by Tesh and Stabinau Hamburg. Warning symbols, dosage instructions, a batch number stencled by hand. Under the arithmetic, the delivery notes signed by Carl Weinbacker, the summary ledger signed by Alfred Sa, and the presiding officer's verdict signed on the 8th of March, 1946. At the very bottom of the file, the counter ledger, Rosa, Mitsy, Doly, Pauly, four names against 1.1 million.

[01:09:38]The tins stopped on the 30th of October 1944 at Awitz when the last gassing was carried out and the SS ordered the machinery dismantled. The tins stopped everywhere else within weeks. The manufacturer's desol line was overrun by the Red Army. The Hamburg warehouse of Tesh and Stabinau lost its eastern customers when the Reich lost its east.

[01:10:00]The tin stopped. The signatures ran out.

[01:10:03]And in a room in Hamburg in the winter of 1945, a young man in a British battle dress uniform, 24 years old, refugee, chemist, grandson, sat at a desk with a stack of German account books in front of him, and began the quiet work of counting the tins that had left the warehouse, and matching them against the freight manifests, and matching them against the arrival logs of the camps, and matching them, at the last, against a small private list kept only in his head of four vianese ladies who used to sit together on the same balcony in the same street on Sunday afternoons in the 1890s and who had not come home. It took him 7 months to close the case. He closed it. The court closed it after him. The hangman closed it after the court and the file closed went into the archives at Q in London where it sits today in a beige folder tied with a length of white cotton tape and where anyone with a reader's ticket and an afternoon can go and see in the neat British hand of an Austrian refugee, the initials at the bottom of a page. AWF, the last signature, the one that answered all the others.