The lost Nazi
by David Benjamin
PARIS
— The report is sketchy, as usual. A Parisian living somewhere on the
Left Bank went to his cave, or wine cellar, to fetch a bottle. He
discerned there a furtive figure — a shadow, really. It flickered across
the edge of his vision and vanished into the vast network of tunnels
beyond the cave, the great underground cemetery of the poor people of
Paris, known as the Catacombs.
The witness only thinks he saw
someone. There were no marks or footprints. The bottle’s empty cradle
contained a single coin. But the witness wasn’t sure if he might have
taken the bottle upstairs and uncorked it a week, or a month, before.
The coin might have been there all along, misplaced and unnoticed.
This
scantly reported incident revived one of my favorite Paris mysteries,
the weird case of the lost Nazi. The legend dates from the battle to
liberate Paris in August 1944, when — it is said —German soldiers chased
several Resistance fighters through the Left Bank streets of Denfert-Rochereau.
The rebels fled through a secret entrance to the Catacombs, which
served as a Resistance hideout during the Nazi occupation. The most
daring of the Germans followed them — and disappeared. Like many
careless explorers before, he apparently got lost among the Catacombs’
more than 200 miles of tunnels. They had begun as limestone quarries but
were turned into an ossuary for more than six million dead Parisians.
After
the war, that chase through Denfert-Rochereau was forgotten. But in the
next two decades, sightings of a subterranean shadowman, a spectral
glimpse in the gloom, kept haunting the back pages of Paris journals.
These dubious tales came often from residents whose cellars adjoined the
Catacombs. But engineers and workers renovating the quarries also spoke
— timidly and infrequently — about an underground wraith who came to be
known as le Nazi perdu, “the lost Nazi.”
The lost Nazi gradually evolved into a French equivalent of those Japanese soldiers,
left behind on remote South Pacific islands, who went on hiding in the
jungle and fighting World War II twenty or thirty years after Japan’s
surrender.
But in 1957, researchers at the Freie Universität
Berlin issued a report responding to the Parisian stories, It verified
that virtually every Wehrmacht soldier assigned to Paris in August 1944
was accounted for — either killed, captured or evacuated — by the German
high command. All but one.
His name, according to the report, was Willi Knorber. Despite his Parisian nom de guerre,
he was probably not a Nazi. The German records reveal that he was from
the bleak and sunless cliffside village of Mossfurt in Lower Saxony, and
was drafted into the Hitler Youth in 1942 at age 13. Willi then became
one of the child soldiers pressed into the Wehrmacht as Hitler became
desperate for manpower. Willi’s been listed officially as “missing in
action” since August 20, 1944.
Willi Knorber was just the sort of
rural bumpkin in Paris who might stumble into a subterranean labyrinth
and never find his way out. The Catacombs are a great, death-whispering
sanctuary so deep and so serpentine that they could hide a scared, lost
boy-soldier from a man-eating world long enough and safely enough to
make a hermit’s life seem to him, by and by, like Heaven under earth.
Even after the Knorber file emerged, tales of le Nazi perdu were dismissed as Paris’ version of alligators
in the New York sewers. Harder to ignore were reports from Left Bank
denizens about stolen wine, purloined potatoes, the disappearance of a
moth-eaten blanket or a jar of fig preserves from the family cave.
Early on in these “burglaries,” coins of 10, 5 or 50 reichspfennigs were left behind at the scene of the crime. When these coins ceased to appear, believers in le Nazi perdu
logically suggested that Willi had just used up all his change. Then
the coins returned, in currencies German, French, American, Japanese
and, lately, euros. There was, of course, no way to trace them to purses
and rucksacks “lost” by tourists in the Catacombs.
About 20
years ago, sightseers began to talk of a haunting figure among them in
the tunnels. He was gaunt and funereally pale, dressed raggedly, as
quiet as the skulls and bones all around. His witness, often, would turn
to peer more closely, only to see no one. He vanished as suddenly and
silently as he had appeared.
Finally, there’s the story of little
Patty Brill, the American seven-year-old who — several years ago —
wandered into one of the Catacombs’ thousand side-tunnels, triggering
parental panic, a Muslim abduction scare and 20 hours of searching by
everyone from the Paris cops, to the Sapeurs et Pompiers of the fire department, to a cabal of secret cataphiles
who in defiance of authority use the limestone underground as both
nightclub and cathedral. Patty, when she suddenly reappeared, said she’d
been led, hand in hand, by a tall, stooped “old guy” who spoke softly
in an odd language and slipped her somehow through a locked gate into
the main passageway. A further manhunt found no sign of the “old guy.”
As
a journalist most of my adult life, I’m inclined to scoff at legends
like Willi Knorber, the lost Nazi. But I’ve been a romantic since I was
Patty’s age. So, I prefer to think that Willi, a boy thrust bewildered
into the Third Reich meatgrinder, muddled, in the endless tunnels of
Paris, into a separate peace. He found there a way to survive and,
perhaps, to atone. He was able to wall away the horror that brought him
to Hitler’s darkened City of Light.
With Paris as his roof, he has eluded the barbarity and carnage that
signifies the human condition since the summer day when Willi tumbled,
like Alice, into the rabbithole.
I like to think Willi’s still
among us, a leathery codger with neither politics nor philosophy, still
nicking the odd bottle of Medoc or Muscadet (and leaving a euro). He’d
be nestled in a passage where no one else has set foot for 200 years,
since that last monk genuflected on the cobblestones, crossed himself
and deposited the last anonymous skull in the vast and trackless “Ossuaire Municipal de Paris.”
Wednesday, February 18, 2015
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