I discovered that there had been a lengthy legal battle towards the end of his life, over his possible extradition and prosecution, but Pinochet continued to protect him. A friend passed on a documentary, Images of Dictatorship, which contains footage of the Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld chanting outside Rauff’s house in Santiago in the early 1980s: ‘Expulse der Nazi Rauff!’ Later there is footage of Rauff’s funeral, with leather-coated thugs saluting as his coffin is lowered, ‘Heil Hitler! Heil Rauff!’
*
Because of the Ruhr background to the Saurer sequence in Shoah I had originally assumed that Saurer was a German company. However, Lanzmann told me, when we met some years ago, that they’d come across the Saurer lorry which appears in Shoah quite by chance. He’d been returning with his crew from filming in Switzerland one day, when they noticed the Saurer lorry driving behind them, and so they began to film it. Subsequently that footage was intercut with the Ruhr footage sequence to link it conceptually to Germany’s military-industrial complex.
There was little information available on the company when I started my research in the mid-1990s. I telephoned the German Chamber of Commerce but drew a blank, I pursued business libraries and transport magazines, but found nothing. Finally, via a journalist at the Financial Times, I discovered that Saurer was in fact a Swiss textiles manufacturing business based at Arbon. They had diversified into lorry manufacture in the early part of the century, I was told, but had reverted to their core business of textiles machinery in the 1970s or early 80s.
Eventually I tracked down a Swiss phone number, made a call, and was eventually connected to a Herr Mickelson, the Saurer finance director and also, it seemed, the unofficial company historian. I explained that I was undertaking research into the vehicle manufacturing aspects of Saurer, and asked if a company archive existed. He sounded guarded: no, there isn’t a formal archive, but he knows some of the history. Anyway, what particular angle of research was I pursuing? I muttered something about ‘general’ research and asked him some questions relating to when they started manufacturing vehicles. He told me that Saurer itself was founded in 1853 as an iron foundry just outside St Gallen, but soon after established itself in textile manufacture and moved to Arbon. The first cars were produced in 1898 and the last lorry in 1983. He told me that the lorries were produced in Arbon and at a subsidiary factory at Olten. Finally I asked whether they had exported many of the lorries and to what countries. There was another pause:
‘What years are you referring to please?’
‘Well, I’m quite interested in the period from the 1920s through to about 1950.’
Another pause. ‘Just a moment, I have some papers here, but not very much for that time, only maybe ten or twenty sides.’
‘Would it be possible for you to send me copies of what you have there?’
‘But I need to know what kind of information you require.’
‘Is there any information on exports during this period?’
‘Almost nothing – there’s just a couple of lines in an annual report saying that there is export to South America, Germany, England – that’s all.’
At this stage I decided to be more direct, which was probably a mistake. ‘I’d heard something about Saurer supplying lorries to the German government in the war years, but I don’t know whether this is true. Could you shed any light on this?’
A sigh of exasperation. And Herr Mickelson’s tone changed dramatically, suddenly impatient. ‘Yes, well, this is what I thought you wanted from the beginning. I can’t give you information on this. It’s all currently being investigated by a federal commission in Bern. There’s going to be a report on the war years. I can’t tell you anything more.’
Afterwards I reflected on the conversation. The most intriguing aspect for me was that reference to the ‘couple of lines in an annual report’. The invisibility of history, the hundreds of thousands of people who had been asphyxiated in Saurer lorries, reduced to this. In the weeks that followed I attempted to track down reliable information about Saurer’s role in the Holocaust, but repeatedly met dead ends. The Wiener Library, usually such a fine resource, had nothing at all on Saurer, though it did hold some material on Walter Rauff. Frustrated by how little new information I had gleaned, I decided the only real option would be to go to Arbon directly and see what could be found on the ground.
And so now, a few months on, we’re here – our little train rattling along by the lake towards a little town …
*
Yesterday was invaluable, learning some wider historic context about Switzerland and the war: we were staying in the little town of Neuchâtel with a former student of mine, an economic historian, who specialises in the relationship between Swiss regional and national banking. If this makes him sound dull I have done him a great disservice. He has an anarchist’s quickfire wit and a bubbling energy. He was intrigued to hear about our research, and over the course of the day he gave us a detailed overview of Switzerland and the war years, and in particular the activities of the Bergier Commission, the government body that had been established in the late 1990s to investigate three main aspects of Switzerland’s wartime role – banking (Swiss banks and their relationship with Nazi Germany); refugees and their wartime treatment by Switzerland (including the shameful story of the repatriation of refugees to Axis-occupied Europe); and Swiss industry in the war years, with a particular focus on the arms and chemical industries. He was able to give us mini biographies of all the historians on the commission, their past fields of study and even their political bias. He didn’t know so much about Saurer, except that he thought the Swiss post office and some other government agencies used to use their trucks and lorries. They were supposed to be ‘very reliable’.
J. is leaning out of the train window, and he shouts that we’re finally arriving in Arbon. We get our rucksacks down and wait by the door. A slightly neglected feel to this northern part of the country. Far from the new buildings and affluence of the urban landscape we’d passed through earlier today, Zurich and Zug, the wealthy centre of Switzerland, this part looks down-at-heel in comparison, almost shabby. Something unreal about being here thirteen years after seeing Shoah and first hearing the words of that memorandum spoken. We’re pulling into the station, not knowing what we’re going to find. Not knowing if there will be any trace of the lorries, or the vehicle manufacturing. And then J. shouts to me to look – on the other side, just beyond the station:
That distinctive blue and white logo, with the strange gable and the little window. And on the other side of the station as we get off the train, these vast sheds, decaying, roofs caved in, and I know immediately, instinctively, that these were the assembly sheds, these were the buildings where the lorries had been manufactured. We walk down to the lake shore. There is a large bronze bust of Adolph Saurer, son of the founder of the company, Franz Saurer.