“And when we come back from the prison,” Cohen said to Rasberry, “I am going to tell Father McGrath all I know about the new Nazi religion. If you want in on that—let’s call it a lecture, for want of a better word—you’re welcome.”
“Thank you. The more I hear about that, the more it worries me.”
“Colonel, could I sit in on that lecture?” Ginger asked.
“Why would you want to?” Cohen said.
“Two reasons. My late husband and I were given a tour of the prison six months ago. And . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“And what?” Cohen said.
She looked at Cronley.
“It’s time, Jimmy, that we publicly fess up.”
“I was coming to that,” Cronley said.
“Confessing to what, for God’s sake?” Cohen said, impatiently.
“Colonel, Fat Freddy Hessinger told me how you helped his friend get through all the bullshit the Army gave him to protect him from designing women.”
“And so . . . ?”
“I was hoping you’d do the same thing for me . . . For me and Ginger.”
After some thought, Cohen asked, “You actually want to marry Super Spook, Mrs. Moriarty? After all you’ve gone through?”
“Not only marry him but also know what he’s up to. Beginning with this Nazi religion Himmler was trying to set up, which I know Jim is very involved in trying to figure out.”
Cohen nodded thoughtfully.
“I’ve been saying all along that the more people who know about it, the better. So, okay, Mrs. Moriarty, you can sit in.”
“Thank you.”
“And you, Super Spook, can talk to Sergeant Major Feldman about getting permission to marry. I got the credit for helping Fat Freddy’s friend, but Alex did most of the work for me. He’s genius at cutting through the damn red tape.”
Cohen pushed a button on his phone and almost immediately the door to the outer office opened. A trim, dark-haired male in his early thirties with an earnest face stood in the doorway. He had on a well-pressed uniform bearing the stripes of a sergeant major.
“Yes, sir?”
“Sergeant Major, when we are finished here, Captain Cronley requires your expert assistance, much as you provided Freddy Hessinger, in getting him to the altar as quickly as possible. We don’t want him bursting into flames.”
“Yes, sir . . . Flames, sir?”
Cohen grinned, then explained, “When I asked Father McGrath what he thought of the impending nuptials, he said Christian scripture tells us it’s better to marry than to burn.”
“I’ve heard that, sir,” Feldman said, grinning.
“And, Sergeant Major, shortly I’m going to deliver my lecture on Saint Heinrich the Divine. While I’m doing so, (a) I am not available to anyone but Justice Jackson and (b) you will prepare a copy of my notes for Captain Dunwiddie. He will use them to deliver the lecture to everybody at the Mansion.”
“Yes, sir.”
Cohen turned to Cronley. “And what are your other plans, Super Spook, after speaking with Sergeant Major Feldman?”
“First, to get Heimstadter over to the Mansion, and then I’m going to talk to Standartenführer Müller.”
“Good luck with that,” Cohen said. “Give Colonel Rasberry and me ten minutes to talk to the OD at the prison and then have at it. You and Ginger can speak with Feldman in the meantime. Meeting over until the lecture.”
[THREE]
Twenty minutes later, Colonel Cohen took the chair behind his desk. Father Jack, Ginger, and Tiny Dunwiddie filed back into the office. Cohen motioned for everyone to sit down, and said, “Super Spook on his way to the Tribunal Prison?”
“Yes, sir,” Dunwiddie said.
“Did my sergeant major get all he needed, Ginger?”
“Yes, he said he did. Thank you.”
Cohen nodded as he pulled a polished wooden box about eighteen inches long and a foot wide from a bottom drawer of his desk. He put it on the desktop and opened it.
“If I use this thing, I will have to sit here during my lecture, but I have decided that the best way to do this is to presume no one knows anything and to start from square one and make a record of what I say.”
“What is that thing?” Father McGrath asked.
“Sort of a Dictaphone. But instead of mechanically cutting a groove on a plastic whatchamacallit, it electrically records what’s said on a wire.”
He held up a reel and then attached it to the device. He then turned in his chair and plugged an electric cord into a wall socket.
“Siemens invented it. One of the technical teams the Army was running found about a hundred of them in a Siemens plant in Hesse. I heard about it, then promptly stole twenty of them.”
He flipped several switches, examined several dials, then placed its microphone to his lips.
“Testing, one, two, three . . .”
He then flipped several more switches. With remarkable clarity, his voice came from the speaker: “Testing, one, two, three . . .”
“Amazing!” Father McGrath said.
“The Thousand-Year Reich Lecture at fourteen-oh-five hours, 18 April ’46,” Cohen said into the microphone. “Okay, here we go.
“In 1933, Heinrich Himmler started looking for a castle near Paderborn where, legend had it, a fellow named Hermann der Cherusker had, in 9 A.D., won a decisive battle against the Romans, thus saving the German people from being absorbed into the Roman Empire.
“On November 3, 1933, Himmler visited Wewelsburg Castle and decided that same day to lease it for a hundred years and restore it so that it could be used as an educational and ceremonial center for the SS.
“Sometime around 1936, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, started referring to Germany as the Thousand-Year Reich. And said it was, indeed, going to last a thousand years.
“Most people outside Germany thought it was a ludicrous boast from somebody who worked for a lunatic with a funny mustache who had started calling himself Der Führer.
“They were wrong. Hitler and company were dead serious. They intended to make Germany a pure Aryan state—the mission, Himmler said, was ‘the extermination of any sub-humans, all over the world, in league against Germany’—which would rule the world for a millennium. To accomplish this, they started by opening the first concentration camp, Dachau, outside Berlin in 1933. In January 1937, Himmler gave a speech in which he said, ‘There is no more living proof of hereditary and racial laws than in a concentration camp. You find there hydrocephalics, squinters, deformed individuals, semi-Jews: a considerable number of inferior people.’”
McGrath said, “When did they start—what do I call it?—the Nazi religion?”
“At the moment, Father Jack, I have the pulpit,” Cohen said, “which means you sit there and listen while I deliver the lesson for today.”
McGrath raised his eyebrows, then nodded.
“In February 1945,” Cohen continued, “Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Yalta. I was number two on Roosevelt’s security detail. My boss ordered me never to let him out of my sight, and I did my best not to. This gave me the opportunity to hear many of their conversations, both public and private.
“In one of these private conversations, between Churchill and the President, the question of what to do with the leaders of Germany came up. I still haven’t made up my mind whether they were serious or not, but Churchill proposed shooting all Nazi leaders on the spot when and where found. To which Roosevelt replied, ‘Winston, we can’t shoot all of them. What about the top forty thousand?’
“That conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Stalin, and they dropped the subject of how to deal with the Nazis.
“I am Jewish, if I must point that out. I’d already seen photos of what the Nazis had done to my coreligionists and concluded that my relativ
es in Germany were no more, so I was naturally in support of Churchill’s idea.
“I came home from Yalta and, several days later, was promoted to colonel, which rarely happens to Jewish boys with an ROTC commission from the City College of New York who had gone on active duty as second lieutenants in December 1941.
“I also had come to conclude that Franklin Roosevelt was a very sick man and, possibly because of his condition, had given away the store to Joe Stalin, who I had already concluded was one dangerous son of a bitch.
“The day after I was promoted, I was flown to SHAEF—Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force—then in Rheims, France.
“On April 12th, Roosevelt died, and Harry S Truman become President. The same day, I was named chief of CIC Forward, probably because we were already in Germany and I was the only senior Counterintelligence Corps officer who spoke German fluently.
“When, after the surrender, SHAEF moved from Rheims into the I.G. Farben Building in Frankfurt, my boss, Brigadier General Homer Greene, had me to dinner. As we were having a couple of belts afterward, I said something flippant about Churchill having the right idea. Rather than rounding up the Nazi brass and putting them in cells at Nuremberg to be given a fair trial before hanging them, we could save a lot of money by shooting them when and where we found them.
“He shamed me by saying he was surprised I hadn’t figured out Truman’s motive in insisting that we try them before we hanged them. ‘If we simply shot them,’ Greene explained, ‘the German people would decide it was vengeance of the victors, and the bastards would be regarded as martyrs of the Thousand-Year Reich.’ He went on to say that Truman decided they should be exposed to as much publicity as possible as the common criminals—the murderers—they were.
“I admitted to him I hadn’t considered that. And that Truman was right.
“‘Good,’ Greene said, ‘because as of tomorrow morning, you’re in charge of security for the Nuremberg Tribunal.’
“I told him that if it were up to me, I’d much rather catch Nazis than be their jailor. He replied (a) it wasn’t up to me; (b) the Big Red One—the First Infantry Division—had assigned a regiment to guard the Tribunal Compound, and he wanted me to keep an eye on them; (c) that I was now in charge of running down the big-shot Nazis, not Nazis in general; (d) he wanted me, when I had a spare minute, to run down a probably preposterous rumor he’d heard that Himmler had started a new religion; (e) that to accomplish all this, he had organized a new CIC, the Thirty-first, and named me as its commander; and, finally, (f) as soon as I gave him a list of people I would like to have in the Thirty-first CIC, he would transfer them to me.
“So, I came here to Nuremberg and made up a list of people I wanted and sent it off to General Greene. Before the list got to the Farben Building, I got a call from one Vito Carlucci, a big, fat guy from Jersey City. I thought he was going to ask me again to get him transferred to Italy so he could run down the Italian fascists who had killed his relatives. But that wasn’t it.
“He told me, ‘Colonel, I’ve come across something you have to see.’
“‘Tell me about it, Vito.’
“‘Not only don’t I want to talk about this on a nonsecure line, but if I did, you’d accuse me of being drunk or crazy. Or both. Colonel, you have to see this for yourself.’
“So I got in my car, drove to eastern North Rhine–Westphalia, and met Vito in Paderborn. He took me to a battered castle a couple miles outside of town.
“He told me: ‘This is Wewelsburg Castle. An SS-Truppführer—sergeant—we caught told me that Himmler ordered it blown up but they couldn’t find enough explosives. We’re holding him here. Let him tell you the story, then I’ll give you a tour of the place.’
“So they bring the SS sergeant into the office. He told me his name—no fooling!—was Johann Strauss. Johann looked a lot like your fiancé, Mrs. Moriarty. Tall, broad-chested, blond, blue-eyed. A real Aryan.”
“I don’t think that’s funny, Colonel,” Ginger blurted.
Cohen ignored her.
“Once this six-foot-something, two-hundred-pound SS sergeant got a good look at this five-foot-eight, one-hundred-forty-five-pound Hebrew colonel, his face whitened. And he began to sing like a canary.
“He told me he had been on the staff, as a driver, of SS-Brigadeführer Franz von Dietelburg, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s adjutant—”
“That’s one of the men who just escaped?” Ginger said.
“He and General der Infanterie Wilhelm Burgdorf,” Cohen replied, “formerly SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Burgdorf.”
“Sir,” Dunwiddie said. “I don’t understand.”
“Toward the end of the war, Tiny, SS bastards like Burgdorf decided they would rather be treated as POWs than SS when we caught them, so they got themselves discharged from the SS and commissioned at an equivalent rank in the Wehrmacht. When I heard about this, I went to Justice Jackson, told him about it, and suggested he rule from the bench that these phony soldiers be tried as SS officers.
“He turned me down. He explained that it would be illegal because the Nazi government had the same right as we did to commission anyone in any rank they wanted to. He told me, ‘A friend of mine, Walker Cisler, the president of Detroit Electric, was recognized as the guy who knew all there was to know about power grids.
“‘Eisenhower wanted him to perform two critical functions. First, to identify the key points in the French and German power grids so they could be bombed. Second, to restore the grids as quickly as possible after we took back the grid area. So he had Cisler directly commissioned as a full colonel. Walker went off to war, knowing so little about the Army that they had to assign a major to teach him how to salute, et cetera.’
“Anyway, the sergeant told me he had been assigned to drive Sturmbannführer Heinz Macher from Berlin to Wewelsburg Castle. They had a truckload of SS troopers with them. They traveled at night because, by then, American fighters were roaming over Germany, shooting up anything on the Autobahn.
“He said he had heard Himmler tell Macher he was to tell SS General Siegfried Taubert, who was in charge of the castle, to remove ‘sacred’ items and the contents of ‘my safe,’ then head for the Austrian border and, ultimately, to Italy. Macher would then blow the place up.
“SS-Truppführer Johann Strauss now had my full attention. Despite him looking like Super Spook’s brother, Ginger, he wasn’t nearly as smart, and I decided he was telling me the truth.
“So, I started asking myself why an SS generalmajor was guarding an old castle in the middle of nowhere. What was Himmler’s safe doing there? What was in the safe? Sacred items? What was the point of blowing up the castle?
“Strauss then told me that when they got to Wewelsburg, General Taubert was long gone, Himmler’s safe was empty, and he didn’t know anything about sacred items. The place was being ransacked by the locals.
“He said that Macher then told him and the SS troopers that as soon as they blew up the castle, they were on their own. It turned out there weren’t enough explosives—all they could find was a bunch of tank mines—so all they managed to do was knock down the southeast tower and the guard and SS buildings. Then they tried, unsuccessfully, to burn down the castle.
“Macher got in his staff car and, driving himself, took off. We caught him at the Italian border. He’s now in the Darmstadt SS prisoner enclosure.
“So I asked Johann Strauss how come he was the only SS enlisted man we caught. Why he hadn’t taken off with the others.
“He said that he had thought it over and decided (a) that he couldn’t get back to Berlin; (b) that because the war was almost over, it would be safer to stay at the castle and wait for the Americans to come; and (c) that he would surrender to them, which he did.
“It was obviously a canned speech, one he had practiced until he was sure he had it right. His eyes told me he was lying.
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“‘Johann,’ I said, ‘the next time you lie to me, I’ll have you shot.’
“Blushing like a schoolboy caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Johann finally confessed he was looking for the gold Totenkopf rings. He dug in his pocket and came up with one, which he put on his finger and more or less modeled for me. I wasn’t sure he did so in arrogant defiance or shame, or neither. But as I looked at the ring and saw the SS skull insignia, I knew it was important.
“At this point, Vito, who hadn’t uttered a sound, said, ‘Colonel, that’s a Totenkopfring.’
“I had no idea what it was or its significance. Vito told me that it goes back to the early days of Nazism, when Hitler really needed a bodyguard. The communists weren’t the only ones trying to kill him.
“There had been, since 1921, something called the Sturmabteilung—acronym SA—which was an organization of thugs headed by a man named Ernst Röhm, an old buddy of Hitler’s. Its primary function was to brawl with the communists, and others, at political rallies.
“They had acquired, on the cheap from war surplus, a large stock of brown shirts, which they wore as uniforms. They wore whatever trousers they had. Understandably, they were called the Brown Shirts.
“Both Hitler and Himmler began to suspect that Röhm wanted to take over the Nazi Party, so they kept an eye on him. Although the SA was supposed to protect Hitler, both at rallies and in his private life, Hitler and Himmler were coming to the conclusion that Röhm didn’t have his heart in the latter and, if true, having the SA close to Hitler protecting him also gave Röhm the opportunity to assassinate him.
“So, in 1929, Himmler formed a special bodyguard for Hitler. It was called the Protective Element—Schutzstaffel in German, SS for short. Himmler recruited three hundred men for it. And, from the very beginning, they had to be ‘true Germans.’ The term ‘Aryan’ would not come into common use until later.
“In 1933, Hitler and company really started after the Jews, beginning with an official one-day boycott of their shops. Next came a law forbidding kosher butchering. Two years later, the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship and prohibited Jews from voting in parliamentary elections.
The Enemy of My Enemy Page 9