All in all, the hearing of witnesses went smoothly, with the exception of Mother s outbursts, as well as those of the witness Rosi, who tearfully affirmed again and again that she would remain true to her “comrade, Konrad Pokriefke.” Because proceedings in juvenile court are closed to the public, they were not held in chambers where effective speeches could be delivered. But then the presiding judge, who sometimes allowed himself little jokes, as if he wanted to introduce some levity into the deadly earnest background of this trial, gave my son an opportunity to illuminate the motivation for his deed, which Konny was all too glad to do, and at length, in an impromptu speech.
He began, of course, at the beginning, that is, with the birth of the later Landesgruppenleiter of the Nazi Party. Highlighting his organizational accomplishments in Switzerland and declaring his victory over tuberculosis “a victory of strength over weakness,” he proceeded to sculpt a likeness of a hero. Thus he found an opportunity to celebrate, at long last, the “great son of the capital city of Schwerin.” If the public had been admitted, approving murmurs might have been heard from the back rows.
When he reached the point where he dealt with the preparation and execution of the murder in Davos — Konrad soon abandoned his notes and quoted materials — he stressed the legal acquisition of the weapon and the number of shots that had been fired: “Like me, David Frankfurter scored four hits.” My son also established a parallel to the motive that Frankfurter had articulated in the cantonal court, but expanded the statement: “I shot because I am a German — and because the eternal Jew spoke through David.”
He passed quickly over the trial before the cantonal court in Chur, although he did say that he, in contrast to Professor Grimm and Party speaker Diewerge, did not believe Jewish instigators had been involved in the crime. For reasons of fairness, he added, it had to be said: like him, Frankfurter had acted “solely out of a personal sense of necessity.”
After that Konrad offered a fairly vivid account of the state funeral rites in Schwerin, even providing information on the weather — ”light snowfall” — and did not omit a single street name from his description of the parade. Then, after an excursus on the meaning, mission, and accomplishments of the NS organization Strength through Joy, which even the patient presiding judge found tiresome, he came to the laying of the ship's keel.
My son obviously enjoyed this portion of his speech to the court. Using his hands, he provided the statistics on the ship's length, breadth, and draft. And in connection with the launching and christening of the ship by the “martyr's widow,” as he called her, he took the opportunity to exclaim reproachfully, “Here in Schwerin Frau Hedwig Gustloff's house was illegally expropriated after the collapse of the Greater German Reich, and later she was driven from the city!”
Then he began to speak of the inner life of the christened ship. He provided information on the reception and dining rooms, the number of cabins, the swimming pool on E deck. Finally he summarized, “The classless liner Wilhelm Gustloff was and remains the living expression of nationalist socialism, a model to this day, and truly exemplary for all times to come!”
It seemed to me that my son was listening to the applause of an imaginary audience after that last exclamation point; but at the same time he must have noticed the gaze of the judge, stern and warning him to cut it short. Relatively quickly, as Herr Stremplin might have said, Konny came to the final journey and the torpedoing of the ship. He characterized the appallingly large number of those who drowned and froze to death as a “rough estimate,” and compared it to the far smaller number of victims of other ship sinkings. Then he gave the number of survivors, expressed gratitude to the captains, skipped over me, his father, completely, but mentioned his grandmother: “Present in this courtroom is seventy-year-old Ursula Pokriefke, in whose name I bear witness today,” whereupon Mother stood up, white hair blazing and the fox around her neck, and took a bow. She, too, seemed to be appearing before a large audience.
As if Konny wanted to put an end to the applause audible only to him, he now assumed a very matter-of-fact tone, expressing appreciation for the “valuable attention to detail” manifested by the former pursers assistant Heinz Schön, and regret for the continuing destruction, during the postwar years, of the Gustloff wreck by divers searching for treasure: “But fortunately these barbarians found neither the Reichsbank gold nor the legendary amber room…”
At this point I thought I saw the all-too-patient judge nodding in agreement; but my son's speech sped on, as if under its own steam. Now he talked about the commander of the Soviet U-boat S-13. After his long imprisonment in Siberia, Aleksandr Marinesko had finally been rehabilitated. “Unfortunately he could enjoy the belated honor for only a short time. Not long after, he died of cancer…”
Not a single accusatory word. Nothing along the lines of what he had posted on the Internet about “subhuman Russians.” On the contrary, my son surprised the judges and the juvenile magistrates, and probably even the prosecutor, by asking his murder victim Wolfgang Stremplin, as David, for forgiveness. For too long he had portrayed the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff on his Web site exclusively as a case of murder of women and children. Thanks to David, however, he had come to realize that the commander of S-13 had properly considered the nameless ship a military target. “If there is any guilt to be assigned here,” he exclaimed, “the supreme command of the navy, the admiral of the fleet must be indicted. He allowed a large number of military personnel to be put on board along with the refugees. The criminal here is Dönitz!”
Konrad paused, as if he had to wait for unrest and shouts in the courtroom to settle down. But perhaps he was searching for words with which to conclude. Finally he said, “I stand by my deed. But I ask the high court to recognize the execution I carried out as something that can be understood only in a larger context. I know: Wolfgang Stremplin was about to sit for his university qualifying exams. Unfortunately I could not take that into consideration. A matter of greater import was, and is, at stake. The regional capital Schwerin must honor its great son at long last. I call for the erection of a memorial on the southern bank of the lake, in the place where I honored the martyrs memory in my own way, a memorial that will remind us and coming generations of that Wilhelm Gustloff who was treacherously murdered by Jews. Just as the U-boat commander Aleksandr Marinesko was finally honored as a hero of the Soviet Union a few years ago with a monument in St. Petersburg, it is imperative that we honor a man who gave his life on 4 February 1936 so that Germany might finally be freed from the Jewish yoke. I do not hesitate to say that there are likewise reasons on the Jewish side to honor the medical student who gave a signal to his people with four shots — by means of a sculpture either in Israel, where David Frankfurter died at the age of eighty-two, or in Davos. Or just a bronze plaque, that would be okay too.”
Finally the presiding judge pulled himself together: “That will do!” Silence settled over the courtroom. My son s explanations, or rather his outpouring, had not remained without effect; but his speech could not affect the severity or leniency of the finding, for the court must have recognized the coherent insanity floating in the flood of his speech, delusional notions that had been subject to more or less convincing analysis by experts.