Novelist of life in Nazi-run Europe

Hans Keilson, a German-born psychoanalyst who won literary fame at the very end of his long life when two of his long-forgotten works of fiction, set in Nazi-occupied Europe, were republished to great acclaim, died on Tuesday in Hilversum, the Netherlands. He was 101. Dr. Keilson, a physician by training, published his first novel at 23. That book, “Life Goes On,” offered a dark picture of German political life between the wars, reflected in the troubles encountered by Max, a Jewish store owner modeled on Dr. Keilson’s father, a textile merchant. It was banned by the Nazis in 1934.

Two years later Dr. Keilson emigrated to the Netherlands with his future wife, Gertrud Manz. He began a new novel, “The Death of the Adversary,” about a young Jewish man’s experiences in Germany as the Nazis gain a grip on power, but he put the manuscript aside after the German occupation of the Netherlands in 1940 forced him to live in hiding in Delft. His experiences provided the material for the novella “Comedy in a Minor Key,” about a Dutch couple who shelter an elderly Jew who dies of natural causes. After disposing of the body carelessly, they too must go into hiding. The novella was published by a German-language Amsterdam press in 1947, the same year Anne Frank’s diary was released. “The Death of the Adversary,” which Dr. Keilson resumed writing after the war, came out in Germany in 1959, and a stilted English translation appeared in 1962. A brief notice in The New York Times described it as a “novel of suspense.” Although the novel sold well and Time magazine named it one of the top 10 books of the year, along with works like Nabokov’s “Pale Fire” and Katherine Anne Porter’s “Ship of Fools,” Dr. Keilson slipped into literary obscurity. He wrote no more fiction, he later said, because he believed that he no longer had an audience.

In 2007 Damion Searls, a literary translator,chanced upon "Comedy in a Minor Key" in an Austrian bookstore's sidewalk bargain bin and mounted a successful campaign to resurrect Dr. Keilson's works. In 2010 Farrar, Straus & Giroux  reissued "The Death of the Adversary"  which was translated to English by Ivo Jarosy in 1962.Mr. Searls's translation of "Comedy in a Minor Key," was also published in Britain by Hesperus Press. The novelist Francine Prose, in The New York Times Book Review, declared both works masterpieces and their author a genius. “Rarely have such harrowing narratives been related with such wry, off-kilter humor, and in so quiet a whisper,” she wrote. “Read these books and join me in adding him to the list, which each of us must compose on our own, of the world’s very greatest writers.” 

After his first novel was banned, his publisher, Samuel Fischer, told him to leave Germany as quickly as possible. His future wife, a graphologist, had also sensed impending disaster. After Dr. Keilson showed her a sample of Hitler’s handwriting in 1935, she said, “He’s going to set the world on fire.”

Great Escape

Jack Harrison: wartime bomber pilot and Stalag Luft III PoW [London Times obituary]

An RAF bomber pilot who was shot down in 1942 on his first raid over enemy-occupied Europe, Jack Harrison became part of the team that planned and executed the “Great Escape” from Stalag Luft III in 1944.

The breakout, from the camp in Silesia in March 1944, was the culmination of more than two months of feverish tunnelling, which involved the digging of three tunnels, christened “Tom”, “Dick” and “Harry”, the longest of which, Harry, was eventually selected for the attempt.

On the night of March 24, in the bitter Silesian winter, Harrison was 98th on the list of 200 PoWs who were lined up to crawl through Harry, surface from the tunnel outside the perimeter wire and get to the cover of the dense pine forests that surrounded Stalag Luft III. In the event 76 prisoners had made it through the tunnel when, as bad luck would have it, one of the guards outside the perimeter wire momentarily left the path he was supposed to be patrolling on sentry duty in order to attend to the wants of nature. He stumbled into the open exit hole and fired a warning shot into the air.

As pre-arranged, those who were still in the tunnel got out and returned to their huts, destroying all the documents that had been forged to give them cover for their attempt to get to coasts and frontiers. Only three of those who escaped from the camp made it back to the UK. Two Norwegians managed to get to the Baltic coast and thence by boat to neutral Sweden, while a Dutchman escaped through France and Spain. The remaining 73 were recaptured.

The Great Escape was to have a tragic sequel. Enraged by the audacity and scale of the attempt from one of the Reich’s most inaccessible PoW camps Hitler ordered, in defiance of the laws of war, that an example should be made of the Stalag Luft III escapers. Of those recaptured 50 were shot by the Gestapo on his orders, a crime depicted in the film The Great Escape (1963), directed by John Sturges and starring Steve McQueen, Richard Attenborough, Charles Bronson and Donald Pleasance.

[Ed: one of the all-time great films. A favourite. But, Bronson gets mentioned and James Garner doesn't?]


Jack Harrison was born in 1912 and was teaching Latin at Dornoch Academy in Sutherland when the Second World War broke out in 1939. Called up into the RAF he was posted to Bomber Command after basic pilot training and commissioned as a flying officer. His aircraft was hit by flak on his first operation, an attack on the Dutch port of Den Helder in November 1942.

Harrison was forced to ditch in the sea off the Dutch coast and was captured by the Germans. After being held in a number of camps he was sent to Stalag Luft III at Sagan, one of Germany’s largest PoW facilities, holding almost 10,000 air force officers from the RAF, US Army Air Forces and other Allied air forces. During the preparation for the Great Escape Harrison, one of the camp’s gardeners, was among assistants to the plan’s mastermind, Squadron Leader Roger Bushell, helping to dispose of dirt from the tunnels.

[That is a great scene in the film, when they bring the dirt out to the garden.]

The first 30 of those chosen to make the escape attempt were selected for their fluent German, which would give them the best chance of avoiding detection while attempting a “home run”. The next 70 had all worked on one or other of the tunnels and were acquainted with the conditions, and the last 100 were chosen out of a hat from 500 volunteers.

Harrison had acquired a working knowledge of German, though he was by no means fluent, and was to adopt the guise of a Hungarian electrician working for the German engineering company Siemens. He was in Block 104 waiting for the call to the tunnel when the remainder of the escape had to be aborted. He quickly burnt his forged identity papers and got out of the disguise he was to have escaped in. He remained at Stalag Luft II until the camp was evacuated as the Red Army drew near the eastern frontiers of the Reich.

When the war ended he returned to his wife, whom he had married in 1943, and resumed his teaching career, moving in 1958 to Rothsay where he was appointed director of education for the Isle of Bute. He retired in 1975.

His wife, Jean, predeceased him and he is survived by a son and a daughter.

Jack Harrison, wartime bomber pilot and Stalag Luft III PoW, was born on December 18, 1912. He died on June 4, 2010, aged 97

Nuremberg Nazi Tribunals Prosecutor

* REMEMBRANCES
* APRIL 22, 2010, 10:22 P.M. ET

Whitney Harris : 1912-2010
Prosecutor of Nazis at Nuremberg Tribunals


By STEPHEN MILLER

Whitney Harris prosecuted Nazi war criminals at the postwar Nuremberg tribunals and represented the prosecution at the hanging of 10 convicted war criminals on Oct. 16, 1946.

Mr. Harris, who died Wednesday at age 97, was one of the last surviving members of the team of Nuremberg prosecutors. He later wrote a legal history of the tribunal, "Tyranny on Trial." The trials broke new legal ground by establishing categories of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

Washington University in St. Louis



At Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945, Mr. Harris investigated crimes against humanity by high-ranking Nazis. He elicited from Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess an estimate that "at least 2.5 million" victims had been murdered in the concentration camp, mostly Jews. (Most historians accept a lower number.)

"Hoess was a very unimpressive individual, he looked like a clerk at a grocery store, he didn't look like a big Nazi or murderer or anything like that, but he was responsive to my questions," Mr. Harris said during a 1995 visit to the Nuremberg courtroom, on the 50th anniversary of the trials. Among other atrocities, Hoess under interrogation took credit for introducing Zyklon B, normally a pesticide, as the killing agent in gas chambers.

Described by author Joseph Persico as a "Navy officer and lawyer whose film-star handsomeness belied a serious character," Mr. Harris was raised in Seattle and said he attended law school because jobs were scarce during the Depression. After practicing law in Los Angeles for a few years, he joined the Navy as an officer during World War II.

After the German surrender, he was posted to Europe, where he became assistant to Robert Jackson, the chief U.S. prosecutor at Nuremberg and an associate justice on the Supreme Court. It was Mr. Jackson who in his opening statement called the Nuremberg tribunal "one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason."

Working in the Palace of Justice at Nuremberg, Mr. Harris set to work collecting documentary evidence against Erst Kaltenbrunner, the head of Reich security, including the Gestapo secret police, at the end of the war.

"I did not have the slightest idea of the scale of the genocide," Mr. Harris told Der Spiegel magazine in 2005. "We didn't have much solid evidence when we started."

In the course of his investigation, Mr. Harris discovered and interrogated SS Gen. Otto Ohlendorf, head of Einsatzgruppen D, who admitted on the stand that his soldiers had conducted 90,000 executions of men, women and children, mostly Jews, in the Ukraine and Crimea.

Mr. Harris also assisted in Mr. Jackson's cross-examination of German air force chief Hermann Goering, who was sentenced to death but managed to take cyanide in his cell the night before the execution. Mr. Harris attended the executions of Mr. Kaltenbrunner and nine others as the representative of Mr. Jackson.

After the war, Mr. Harris taught law at Southern Methodist University and then became a corporate attorney for Southwestern Bell Telephone Co. He also had a private practice and was a member of the Supreme Court bar.

He was a founder of the Committee of Former Nuremberg Prosecutors for a Permanent International Criminal Court.

"These were evil men, and what they did was our task to expose, and we did get the evidence, and we were able to do so," Mr. Harris said during the 1995 Nuremberg trip.