The lost Nazi

WEDNESDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 2015
The Weekly Screed (#709)

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.”