Mother Night

The afternoon guard is a man Campbell’s age, 48, who spent time in the Auschwitz concentration camp. He came close to being murdered in the gas chambers, having signed up to be a part of the Sonderkommando unit, a specialized group of prisoners who escort other prisoners to their deaths, clean up the bodies of the executed, and eventually are executed themselves. The Sonderkommando unit, he tells Campbell, is called into action through the announcement, “Leichentrager zu Wache,” which Campbell translates as: “Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse” (9). The guard admits to volunteering for this unit after two years, but he doesn’t know why. He suggests Campbell write a book explaining why someone would choose to do so. The guard is ashamed he volunteered for the duty, but Campbell tells him he shouldn’t be ashamed.

The evening guard tells the story of how he joined the Hungarian SS even though he is Jewish, as he despises those who did nothing to save themselves or anyone else when the Nazis took over, people he calls “briquets” (11). He is enthusiastic when he learns Campbell is writing a memoir, though when he reads a transcript of Campbell’s antisemitic broadcasts, he is disappointed, claiming he would have been far harsher. He proudly claims to have ferreted out 14 of his SS colleagues to be executed for leaking information to the Jews—though in fact he was the one leaking the information.

Campbell’s overnight guard observes his restless sleeping and infers that Campbell’s conscience is bothering him. He claims that Campbell is the only man “who has a bad conscience about what he did in the war” (15). Everyone else, including himself, the guard insists, were convinced that they were acting on the side of good. The guard compares Campbell to Rudolf Hoess, who was the commandant of Auschwitz. Hoess slept soundly, despite his direct role in the deaths of millions of Jews. The guard mentions he helped to execute Hoess, buckling his feet together on the gallows. The guard claims this didn’t make him feel anything, as his experience in the war led him to see every act of violence as just another job to do. Later the same day, the guard must buckle his suitcase closed, and remarks that this action means as much to him as buckling Hoess’s feet together.

Campbell reflects on meeting Hoess in Warsaw at a New Year’s party in 1944. At the party, Hoess admires Campbell’s creativity and suggests that they collaborate after the war, as Hoess has lots of stories about Auschwitz. Campbell is in Warsaw at the behest of his boss Joseph Goebbels, head propagandist for the Nazi regime, to write a play about the successful suppression of the Jewish uprising in the Warsaw Ghetto. Campbell titles the play “Last Full Measure,” a quote drawn from Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. He translates the speech for Goebbels, who then passes it along to Adolf Hitler. Both Hitler and Goebbels agree that it is “‘a very fine piece of propaganda’” (19). Campbell then admits that he doesn’t dream of the figures from the Nazi regime. He only dreams of women, his wife Helga, and her sister, Resi. Campbell’s prison guard confirms that he says both their names while he sleeps. He also speaks of New York City, where Campbell says he lived after the war. The guard imagines it must be nice to live there, but Campbell denies this, calling it “‘Purgatory’” (22).

Campbell reflects on his time in New York City, where he lived for 15 years after fleeing the collapse of Nazi Germany. He rents a rat-infested attic in Greenwich village, where he lives until he is brought to Israel for his war crimes trial. Campbell recalls looking from the window of his attic onto a small park he calls “little Eden” (23) and watching children play hide-and-seek. His often thinks of a cry the children used to signal that the game is over and it’s time to go home: “Olly-olly-ox-in-free” (24). Campbell reflects on his own hiding and longs for a similar call in his life.

Campbell loosely details his life preceding his capture at the end of World War II by an American serviceman. He was born in Schenectady, New York in 1916—his father a service engineer for General Electric and his mother an amateur cellist. Campbell’s father was a reserved man who traveled often for work, while his mother, probably addicted to alcohol, distanced herself from him at an early age. At the age of 10, Campbell and his parents moved to Berlin, Germany following a transfer in his father’s work. Campbell eventually became a successful playwright and married a popular actress, Helga Noth, the daughter of the chief of police in Berlin. When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Campbell’s parents left the country, but he and Helga stayed. During the war, Campbell wrote and broadcasted Nazi propaganda as a leading expert on “American problems” (27). Because of his public prominence within the Nazi regime, Campbell was quickly arrested after the war by Bernard B. O’Hare, an American Lieutenant in the Army, who brought him to Ohrdruf, the first concentration camp the Americans had seen. Campbell was shown the atrocities committed there, and he observed six dead prison guards hanging from gallows. As he was pondering the peacefulness of the dead guards, a photographer took a picture of him and O’Hare, who was viciously glaring at him. The picture was printed as the cover of Life magazine and almost won the Pulitzer Prize.

Campbell is not hung with other German prisoners at the end of the war. His position as a secret American agent, using his broadcasts to deliver coded information to the American forces, allows him to escape immediate prosecution. His status as a spy is kept secret, and his handlers help him to escape American imprisonment and disappear, after which he comes to live in New York. Only, once, Campbell explains, does his identity come close to being discovered. While visiting a Jewish doctor, Epstein, who lives in his building, Campbell is quizzed by the doctor’s mother about his own memories from the war and the fact that he shares the name of a Nazi propagandist. Campbell answers her questions evasively, but her suspicions are raised. Her son, however, angrily forces them to drop the issue, saying that the war is over and they should move on.

Campbell recounts his recruitment as an American agent in 1938, three years before America entered the war. He is 26 years old, and a successful playwright, though all his plays are romances and decidedly apolitical. A gruff American, Major Frank Wirtanen, masquerading as an American tourist, approaches Campbell in a park and suggests that he is in a good position to work his way into the Nazi party and broadcast propaganda. Wirtanan believes Campbell will do it because his plays, rooted in Romanticism, suggest he is an idealist, but Campbell rather thinks of it as an opportunity to do his own acting and impress people with how well he can impersonate a Nazi. Wirtanan tells him the American government will disavow all knowledge of his service, and it continues to do so while Campbell is imprisoned in Jerusalem. “Nobody believes in [Wirtanan] but me” (40) Campbell laments, calling the man his Blue Fairy Godmother. The fact that he has not been executed yet is his only proof of Wirtanan’s existence.