Victor...who lost the first round!

In 2006, when "Directive 19", Harker managed to scare up a bit of local publicity for it. He did a long interview with a local journalist in Delaware, the neighbouring state to Harker's home in New Jersey on the Eastern Seaboard. However, not only was that journalist - Victor Greto - a newspaper journo, but he was a webjourno too, and because of that, Harker's first public persona is preserved in amber. Here's that article .

No apologies for it being long, mates - it tells you ALL about "Directive 19" better than I could!

But THIS is where it all starts. From here on - blood starts to flow!

Paul Harker had to keep reminding himself -- the old man sitting across the dining room table was a monster. Eighty-year-old Rolf Otto Schiller did not look like one, and his banter about the weather diverted Harker from the task at hand - compiling the memoirs of a former Nazi SS legal affairs officer. After the pleasantries, Schiller's demeanor would change."Where did we leave off?" he would ask. "When I ordered the liquidation of the Bialystok ghetto?"In the book, Schiller admits helping to implement the "Final Solution" by ordering the deaths of Jews, gypsies, Communists, homosexuals and other "enemies of the Third Reich" - and killing many of them himself.

Accused by a Polish war tribunal of helping to slaughter more than 150,000 people, Schiller was convicted in 1947 for causing the deaths of 2,711. He served 30 years in Grudziadz prison in Poland.

Schiller - who died in 2004 - called himself a criminal, says Harker, 39, a Newport writer who corresponded with him for years. But Schiller argued that his actions were legal, based on Nazi laws, including "Directive 19," the official administrative designation for a death sentence."The laws of the Reich were very clear, and I had acted well within the parameters of legal command," Schiller states repeatedly.

It took nearly seven years from the time they first corresponded, but Harker recently published Schiller's memoir, "Directive 19: The Memoirs of SS turmbannführer [storm unit leader] Rolf Otto Schiller" (Outskirts Press, $24.95). None of the money goes to Schiller's estate; $3 of each sale goes to the upkeep of Allied and German military cemeteries."His story is a story that needs to be told in light of the Holocaust denials that are going on," Harker says.

Rabbi Michael Beals of Beth Shalom in Wilmington says publishing an ex-SS officer's memoirs is a double-edged sword."I hope people will read it and be disgusted," Beals says. "It proved these things happened, unlike people, like Mel Gibson's dad, who deny it ever happened."But the other side of the sword, he says, is that "Other people are crazy people -- we call them meshugganahs -- who will read things like that and want to copy them. That's always a cause for concern."Beals says it's important to know Harker's intent."If the reason is to glorify it, we should be rightly appalled," Beals says. "But if it's to expose the revisionists, it's a good thing. He's being a servant on the truth, and putting a spotlight on history."

Aging SS officer frail but intense

Harker met Schiller in 2000 in Füssen, Germany, at the mountainous southern tip of Bavaria near the German-Swiss border. At Schiller's home, vases of flowers, books and large plants cluttered the living room.On the fireplace mantel stood an 8-by-10 black-and-white photograph of the young, blond-haired Nazi wearing a crisp gray uniform.Schiller was a member of the SS, an elite Nazi unit of soldiers fanatically loyal to Adolf Hitler. Among others, he served under concentration camp commander Rudolph Hess and Adolf Eichmann, the chief architect of the "Final Solution."Six decades later, Schiller wore a rumpled, light-brown pullover sweater. A full head of white hair crowned red-blotchy skin, freckled with age spots.None of this dimmed the man's intense blue eyes."Here was a man who worked for Eichmann and played chess and tennis with [Reinhard] Heydrich [an SS chief and governor of Bohemia and Moravia].

How often do you get to hear someone of his experience say what he has to say?" arker says. The desire to record Schiller's memories proved irresistible for a historian."I thought I was sitting in on something powerful," Harker says. "Every vacation I got from my job, I was saving to go to Germany."The increasingly frail old man often used a wheelchair to get to the table where he and Harker compared trial transcripts against Schiller's memoirs to double-check the facts.Harker visited Schiller 14 times, until Schiller's death at 84.

Chance meeting sparks project

Although he always wanted to be a writer, Harker's publishing of Schiller's memoirs seemed unlikely.The son of a Coast Guard officer, Harker was born in Corpus Christi, Texas, in 1966, grew up near Oakland, Calif., and moved at age 15 to Pottstown, Pa., where his mother's family lived.He enlisted in the Army at 17 in the hopes of becoming a journalist in Europe. Instead, he was assigned to medic duty in Central America. After leaving the military, Harker completed an undergraduate degree in medieval history at Penn State. After he married in 1993, he moved to Cape May, N.J., where he worked as a counselor.

Harker's collection of medieval artifacts eventually led to his meeting with Schiller. A friend's daughter, spending the year as an exchange student in Europe, saw similar medieval artifacts in the home of the German family where she was staying and mentioned that Harker was a historian.The head of the family asked if Harker would be interested in the memoirs of her father, Dieter Olaf Hoffman, an SS officer who died in 1983. This piqued Harker's interest, and the woman mailed Harker Hoffman's memoir.While trying to find people who knew Hoffman, Harker came into contact with another former SS officer named Karl Werner von Metzger, who also was working on his own memoirs.Von Metzger, who now plans to publish his memoirs with Harker, mentioned another officer, who directed Harker to Schiller.Harker began corresponding with Schiller in 1999.

During a face-to-face conversation, Schiller told Harker that history is written by the victors.Schiller wanted a turn."This man had a unique perspective," Harker says. "It's horrible, but it's told in a candid, matter-of-fact and brutal manner. It's a side you just don't hear."Schiller first job after enlisting in the SS in 1938 was overseeing prisoner affairs at Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. That's where his memoir begins."I decided whether you lived or died," he writes in his opening line. "That was my job ..."What follows are hundreds of pages of atrocities meticulously detailed in a tone that is chilling and curiously bureaucratic.At Sachsenhausen, Schiller witnessed executions, calling them difficult to watch -- at first. But one soldier told him it "was like learning to eat raw clams on the shell. 'The first few are difficult. The rest become easier.' "By 1939, Schiller had arranged the executions of more than 500 prisoners. It was getting easier, and it was only the beginning.

Photographs document horrors

After the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939, Schiller was appointed SS chief of police for the town of Porajów, where he executed hundreds of local partisans and Jews. He transferred into a combat unit to gain frontline experience, photographing the invasion of France and the Netherlands as part of his job.The pictures, most of which he gave to Harker, have never been published. Among them are photographs of off-duty soldiers playing with rabbits and others posing with friends. There are others as well -- of battles, hangings and mounds of dead bodies.Reassigned to Berlin, Schiller
became an advocate for the "Final Solution" -- overseeing firing-squad executions. Along with other Nazis, he argued that the Reich should use gas -- Zyklon B -- for mass executions to lessen the stress of soldiers charged with executing prisoners. In his memoirs, Schiller also includes poignant glimpses of the pain of prisoners, crying as they watched the execution of friends and family and realized their own fates."His request was that he didn't want an editor getting ahold of it so they would choose what he had to say," Harker says.

An outlet for veterans' stories

Harker's experience compiling Schiller's memoir convinced him to begin a business helping veterans publish their memoirs.Through a Web site, Mad Dog Memoirs, he solicits war veterans' memoirs for publication -- regardless of what side they were on.Currently, he is working on five other projects, including an American soldier's account of his Korean War experience and WW II memories from Japanese and German soldiers.

Using war memoirs as a reliable source of historical information is "fraught with problems," says James Brophy, a University of Delaware associate professor who teaches courses on the Holocaust and 19th- and 20th-century Germany."Memoirs are notoriously self-serving," he says, whether they're penned by Richard Nixon, Bill Clinton or Otto von Bismarck, the 19th-century chancellor who unified Germany. "But they are an interesting source for measuring perception, of how people saw the world."In Schiller's memoir, the detailed information -- from the dimensions of mass graves to verbatim conversations -- are "a blend of fact with a hidden heinous agenda that makes this kind of memoir especially difficult to assess," says Brophy.The book has a dual personality. On the one hand, Schiller justifies killing prisoners through
Nazi ideology. Then he offers glimpses of his feelings, from uncontrollably shaking while trying to drink a cup of coffee to crying alone in his office.

Schiller's perceptions reflect his mind-set as a lawyer

Even Schiller's discovery that his own mentally ill father was killed in a "termination station" is told without emotion. His unflagging loyalty to the Third Reich is a major theme. Schiller writes that he held "no respect for the Reich Officers who denied the charges against them while claiming they were only following orders. ... We were the men that conceived and gave the orders."But in the next breath he accuses a West that promised genocide "would never happen again" for allowing ethnic cleansing in Croatia, Serbia, Rwanda and Uganda. In his memoir, Schiller insists he is neither a sadist nor a psychopath. That diagnosis, he writes, "is another attempt to assist an overprotected world in the acceptance and understanding of such horrible and unspeakable acts."Underlying all of his brutality was Nazi anti-Semitism."Jews were not persecuted because they were Jews," Schiller writes. "The Jews were considered enemies of the Reich for many reasons including their illegal seizure and control of German banking, industry, trade, commerce and assets."Schiller's words reflect "the inner workings of an anti-Semite," says Brophy. "We're hearing how technocrats justified their participation in carrying out this bureaucratic genocide."

Story changes publisher's life

After he published Schiller's memoir earlier this year, Harker decided to change his life.Three years after divorcing his first wife and a few months after meeting his fiancée, Tracy Troiani, through an Internet dating service, he quit his job as a counselor in Cape May and moved to Delaware in July.He wanted to devote himself full-time to publishing war veterans' memoirs."What we're trying to do is collect as much information as possible in the shortest amount of time, while also researching and validating the information we're getting," Harker says, especially of World War II veterans."I believe it's important for soldiers to tell their story without heavy-handed editing."People may be offended, he says, "but there is no intent to be offensive, but to record history with truth, and sometimes the truth is extremely disturbing. Ignoring what Schiller did can potentially lead to people not recognizing the signs of such a thing happening again."

Rabbi Beals agrees with that reasoning."As a historian, I agree you need something like this," he says. "But you want to read it in the context of history."Schiller's story still haunts Harker. It may have even haunted Schiller himself, who often told Harker that the sounds of barking dogs reminded him of the guard dogs at the concentration camps. During an exchange of letters in January 2003, Schiller wrote, in broken English, "... it [is possible] to feel the presence of the dead. I know this. ..."Schiller explained that he went back to Auschwitz in 1995 to pay tribute 50 years after its liberation."I felt the dead there. I [could] not enter the remains of the camp. It was as if was there the invisible field of energy pushing me away from the gates. As if a million voices was screaming, 'You does not belong here. Go away!' I remained [outside] fences for the ceremony. I felt it immoral and not proper to go inside. I was not wanted in there by the spirits of those who perished at my doings."But the memoir never expresses that. Nor would Schiller, when pressed by Harker. "We slaughtered our enemies to provide security for our people," Schiller insisted.

Historians estimate that up to 12 million people died in the Nazi Holocaust. More than half of the dead were Jews."He was not repentant," Harker says. "He said he did what he did because he was a loyal patriot and he sleeps well at night. I don't think
he was sorry at all."

Good, eh? Reads bloody well. There's just ONE teensy tiny problem with all that, mates...Victor Greto didn't check well enough...

Neither "Rolf Otto Schiller" not anyone similar ever lived and breathed in Hitler's Germany...he's a figment of Harker's imagination!

Yes - the Holocaust existed, and was TRULY terrible in extent and still reverberates around the world - but Schiller the person is a fake. And so- by default - is "Directive 19"....