Schutzstaffel (SS)

The Schutzstaffel (SS) stands in E. L. Doctorow's City of God as the institutional engine of the Holocaust, the force that transforms the Kovno Ghetto into a laboratory of terror and then erases it. The novel never treats the SS as an abstraction; it is embodied in the person of S.S. Major Schmitz, the commandant and "executive of all terror," whose signature appears on every order that strips the ghetto's Jews of their possessions, their dignity, and finally their lives. Through the testimony of Sarah Blumenthal's father, a former ghetto runner, the SS emerges as an organization whose power rests on the perverse intimacy of surveillance and surprise, and whose legacy extends into the postwar decades as a legal and moral wound that the novel's characters struggle, and fail, to close.

The Machinery of Terror in the Kovno Ghetto

The SS's presence in the ghetto is defined by a ritualized pretense of common humanity that the Jewish council must maintain to survive. Sarah's father recalls how the council was forced to "subscribe" to this fiction "if we hope to outlast them," treating the SS officers "as if they are human" and acting as "the caretakers of madmen who must never be told they are" mad. The organization's chief officer, Schmitz, is described by Sarah's father as "that jackal who runs things," a man who delights in surprising the ghetto's inhabitants "above and beyond the fact of our systematic slavery." The monthly meetings with the Germans, in which the council would "make a formal protest" and "apply moral suasion to these ungovernable forces of terror," are revealed as hollow performances, with the council's voice "uncharacteristically leaden, toneless." The SS's power is thus not merely physical but psychological, a calculated campaign to break the spirit of the ghetto through the constant threat of arbitrary violence.

The SS's reach extends into the most intimate corners of ghetto life. The tailor Srebnitsky, a central figure in Sarah's father's testimony, is commissioned by Schmitz himself to create a custom-made uniform, an honor that the tailor accepts with bitter irony. Sarah's father watches as Srebnitsky cuts patterns from "a thick bolt of luxurious material of a rich charcoal color and remarkable pliancy," transforming a wire mannequin into "an S.S. officer in the process of realization." The boy is troubled by this enterprise because it "violated the rule to remain anonymous as possible, to do nothing to stand out," understanding that "if his skill with the needle had made him useful and kept him, and me, alive, it also raised the possibility of death." The logic of the ghetto, he reflects, ensures that "there was no simple proposition that did not contain its opposite." When Schmitz arrives to collect his uniform, he comes in a black Mercedes sedan, "the awesome luxury of another world," with a squarish cab, a long low-slung engine hood, a chrome radiator grille, and huge silver headlights that shine "brilliantly, apparently untouched by slush and snow and soot." The driver, an enlisted man in S.S. uniform with a holstered pistol, polishes the car with a rag, and the boy is drawn not by the car's luster but by "the heat rising from the engine." The scene captures the SS's dual nature: the cold, gleaming machinery of German civilization and the casual, brutal power of its enforcers.

The Hanging of Srebnitsky and the Logic of Defiance

The SS's capacity for terror reaches its apex in the execution of Srebnitsky. After the tailor is accused of raising his hand against a German officer, he is dragged to the gallows, his legs apparently broken, his hands "mangled protuberances covered with dried blood." Sarah's father watches as the police lift him up the steps, tie his hands behind him, and slip the noose over his head. At the last moment, Srebnitsky "seemed to come out of his agonized stupor," lifting his head and seeing the scene before him clearly, "appreciating its magnitude" and reading "his glory into it." The boy sees "a mad triumphant light" flash from the tailor's eyes before the stand is kicked away and his body swings from the neck, the life gone from him "almost instantly." An S.S. man hangs a crudely lettered sign around the corpse's neck: "This Jew dared to raise his hand against a German officer." The boy initially believes Srebnitsky had used his scissors to stab the commandant, so great was his rage, but he later concludes that the tailor "must have understood the disaster that would befall the ghetto were he to kill the man." What Srebnitsky accomplished, the boy reflects, was "specifically self-sacrificial, a modulated act of defiance as deft and precise as his tailoring." The SS ordered the body left hanging on public display for twenty-four hours, an impiety that an Orthodox rabbi found intolerable. The hanging becomes a defining image of SS cruelty and of the possibility of resistance within the ghetto's impossible constraints.

The Liquidation of the Ghetto and the Loss of the Runner's Cap

The SS's final act in the ghetto is its liquidation, an event that Sarah's father experiences as his "last mission as a runner." He recalls hearing "distant German voices coming up from the bowels of the viaduct" while standing with Josef Barbanel at an open cistern, and Barbanel's flat pronouncement: "Well that is that." Soon after, "truckloads of troops were coming across the bridge," and the boy runs "for all he was worth" to warn the council, but it does not matter. The news blares from loudspeakers "in that terrible bureaucratic language of theirs," giving the inhabitants fifteen minutes to gather their belongings. Soldiers run down the streets, burst into houses, club people who do not move fast enough, and set buildings afire, all "by the directive of Commandant Schmitz." The boy cannot see as much as he can hear: people screaming, crying out, shooting. In the chaos, he loses his runner's cap with the military brim, and only realizes it when the boxcar doors are swung shut and the bolts slammed into place, leaving him in blackness, furious that he cannot lift his arms to check. The cap, once a source of pride and privilege, becomes a symbol of the childhood that the SS destroyed.

The liquidation is the culmination of the SS's systematic cruelty, but it is also the moment when the organization's power begins to fray. The boy is herded into a boxcar with other survivors, wailing and calling out to one another in the darkness, demanding to know "what was the meaning of this outrage." But the boy knows the meaning. The SS has succeeded in its final, terrible objective: the destruction of the Kovno Ghetto and the murder of its inhabitants, including Barbanel and Greta Margolin, who "were not to survive the destruction of the ghetto." The archive that Barbanel so meticulously compiled, hidden in the earth of Eastern Europe, becomes the only testament to the lives the SS erased.

The Postwar Pursuit of Schmitz and the Failure of Justice

The SS's legacy extends far beyond the ghetto's destruction, into the postwar decades and the novel's present. The pursuit of Schmitz becomes a central thread of the narrative, a quest that ultimately ends in frustration. Sarah's father, now an elderly man in a care home, has spent years trying to prove that a man living under the assumed name Helmut Preissen is in fact the ghetto commandant. His letters to the United States Department of Justice and the Simon Wiesenthal Center document a case that never quite closes. Two 1977 articles from The New York Times describe a deportation hearing in which three people testify that the man in question is Schmitz, but his lawyer "shoots down their testimony," dismissing the witnesses as "elderly, easily befuddled." The defendant testifies that he is Helmut Preissen, an ex-corporal who only did guard duty in the ghetto for three months before being shipped to the Russian front, and the judge finds in his favor. The Wiesenthal Center agrees with Sarah's father that Preissen is "almost certainly Schmitz," but without convincing documentation, the case cannot be reopened. The Department of Justice is less agreeable, its lawyer "somewhat defensive about his handling of the case."

The novel's protagonist, Thomas Pemberton, takes up the cause, flying to Moscow and penetrating the KGB to recover the Barbanel archive, which he hopes will contain documentary proof of Schmitz's identity. The chest is impounded at JFK Airport until a Justice Department attorney can be present when it is cracked open, as customs insists it must be. The unsealing is a scene of intense emotion: Sarah watches as the customs man pries off the hasps, the sound of splitting wood making her wince "as if her father's history is seeping into the room." The inspectors find packages wrapped in oilskin, sheaves of paper bound in twine, booklets, manuals, folders, rolled-up blueprints, diagrams, stapled documents, and envelopes, each labeled in "a small, neat Yiddish script." They open every packet, run their hands along the inner walls, and conclude there is nothing of interest to them. But Pem and the attorney find the diary, covering three years from 1941 to 1944, and reams of documentation, including orders signed by Commandant Schmitz. The archive also contains forbidden photographs, including one of "seven little boys in front of a wood cabin," standing at attention in military-school caps with stars on their breasts, "looking into the camera in the full knowledge of death." Sarah finds her father in the first row.

Despite this evidence, justice is never served. At a party late in the novel, Pem tells the narrator: "We found out yesterday the son of a bitch died two months ago." The man who ran the ghetto, "Schmid, Schmitz, whatever the fuck his name was," died in his sleep in a home in Yonkers. "We had him good and nailed, too," Pem laments. "He never had to stand up in court and let the world take a look at him for what he was." The SS's commandant escapes accountability, dying peacefully in an American nursing home, a final irony that underscores the novel's meditation on the limits of legal closure. The archive, so painstakingly preserved, so desperately recovered, cannot undo the SS's crimes or force the world to confront them in a court of law. The organization's legacy is one of unpunished atrocity, a wound that the novel refuses to let heal.