The Dead Man in the Bunker

Martin Pollack

The sins of the fathers have dominated my reading this year. The Dead Man in the Bunker is the story of Austrian journalist Martin Pollack's quest to discover and understand his father's role in the war. His father was Gerhard Bast. Pollack never knew him, something which appears to be a relief to the author. That's because Bast was a lawyer in the SS. Bast's role in the persecution of Jews and other minorities turns out to have been relatively well documented and Pollack has little difficulty following the paper trail of execution orders and other papers which followed Bast across wartime Germany.

In the first half of the war Gerhard Bast helped round up Jews and process executions. In 1944 he managed to father a baby (Pollack) with another man's wife and accidentally shot and killed a beater on a hunting trip. In the twisted logic of the Nazis these were serious misdemenours and help to explain his relegation to frontline killing duty in the east. By the end of the war he was commanding a mobile death-squad in Ukraine and Slovakia.

After the war Bast went on the run. We learnt at the beginning of the book that his body was discovered filled with bullets in 1947. Pollack makes us wait to the end to discover the how and the why. It turns out to have been a banal death: not the retribution the SS man deserved.

In fact Dr Gerhard Bast was an unremarkable war criminal. It may not be what Pollack intended but what really grabbed me was the sense of the kinds of people the rest of his family were. His grandparents were tremendously pro-Nazi. His mother was kindly and loving and a Nazi supporter. His stepfather, a gentle and cultured man utterly unlike Bast, was an anti-Semite.

After the war the Nazi period was seldom discussed in Pollack's household but no one in the family ever conceded that there had been anything wicked in National Socialism. These were ordinary, intelligent relatively sophisticated Austrians. They were people who had supported Hitler and who after the war got back on with getting on with their lives. They had committed no crimes and had taken no active part in the war. Yet, though they mourned the dead man in the bunker, their beloved Gerhard, they seem to have understood nothing of the catastrophe they, like millions of other Germans and Austrians, had brought upon themselves.