The Enemy of My Enemy

by W. E. B Griffin

  “That’s it?” Cronley said.

  “For now, this—I mean, the four duffels—is it. We’ve been through everything, best I can tell. We’re still looking, using hammers to hunt for hidden passages. But, so far, no tunnels. This place appears to have been a safe house of sorts, a bunker separate from the main complex nearby where that warrant officer had those Nazi farmworkers.”

  “Wynne,” Cronley furnished. “Who devoutly believed he’d cleared the bastards. So far we’ve identified eleven of them as Nazis. It would surprise me not one bit that they knew about this damn bunker.”

  “Take a peek in the bag,” Lomax said. “It’s impressive.”

  Cronley squatted next to the duffel. He pulled on its heavy brass zipper, and the bag’s big mouth slowly spread open wide. Inside was a huge tumble of neat, thick stacks of currency, what appeared to be mostly Swiss francs.

  “My God,” Serov said. “That easily could be fourfold what the briefcases held yesterday.”

  “Yeah,” Cronley said, nodding. “But what the hell is this?”

  He pushed aside the stacks of banknotes. In the middle sat a sack made of crimson velour that Cronley thought could pass as the same material as heavy drapery. It had red-and-black drawstrings with tassels that could be drapery cording. He tugged the sack upright and was surprised at its bulk. He figured that the contents had to weigh at least ten pounds.

  He then pulled at the edge of the velour fabric, loosening the drawstrings. The sack slowly opened.

  Inside, he found smaller flapped pouches of a black velour, at least twenty of them, each clearly containing an object more or less thumb-sized.

  He picked up one, held it over his open palm, and shook the pouch until the flap opened.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “What is it?” Major Lomax said, looking at the heavy ring of gold Cronley rolled in his palm. “A skull ring? What’s the significance of that?”

  * * *

  —

  A pair of M8 light armored cars moved into position—one to lead, one to bring up the rear—as Cronley lifted the last of the four black duffel bags into the back of the jeep that Father McKenna had brought.

  “I’ll drive,” Cronley said as he moved in behind the steering wheel.

  He signaled the driver of the lead M8 to move out. The trooper at the .50 caliber Browning braced himself as the six-wheeled armored car began rolling.

  Serov nimbly jumped up on the jeep’s rear bumper and hopped in back with the duffels. Father McKenna stepped into the front passenger seat just as Cronley revved the engine and dumped the clutch. The jeep lurched forward.

  “Where to?” the priest said, his voice raised to be heard over the whine of the engine.

  “First, the Nazis who worked for Wynne on the farm. Then maybe—probably—Burgdorf and von Dietelburg. They had the briefcases of cash when we caught them. They have to know what happened to the rest of the goddamn death’s-head rings, if you’ll pardon my French, padre.” He paused, then added, “Or they don’t. Or won’t say. Only thing I know right damn now—and this is not to be disseminated—is that I don’t know. But I want the others to come looking. And when they do, we’ll be waiting. Our work is not done.”

  SIX MONTHS LATER

  [TWO]

  The International Military Tribunal

  Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany

  23 October 1946

  Captain James D. Cronley Jr., Directorate of Central Intelligence, entered the gymnasium through its main double steel doors. The overhead lighting of the enormous space, where only a week earlier the prison guards played basketball games on a regular basis, was significantly less bright than usual.

  Ahead, in the middle of the wooden floor, stood three gallows—two for continuous operation, the third as a backup—that had been hastily erected. Their ominous silhouettes in the dimmed light stood spare and stark: wooden scaffolds painted black, each with thirteen steps leading up to a platform. Above the platform, suspended by a pair of posts, was a crossbeam dangling a thick rope with a four-coil “cowboy” noose fashioned at its end. The gallows were designed for a five-foot drop through a trapdoor in the platform floor. Wood panels painted black covered the front three sides below the platform, shielding the drop area from view, and a dark canvas curtain covered the fourth on the back side.

  * * *

  —

  Cronley quickly started across the gymnasium floor, coming to a stop at the rear of more than twenty people, standing somber and silent, before the gallows.

  “Sorry I’m late, Colonel,” he said, softly.

  “Sergeant Woods, with his usual efficiency, was about to start without you,” Colonel Mortimer Cohen, U.S. Army Counterintelligence Corps, said drily.

  Even in silhouette, Cronley could easily recognize the hangman, U.S. Army Master Sergeant John C. Woods. The thirty-five-year-old Kansas native was damn-near infamous. He always wore a dirty and wrinkled uniform, its master sergeant stripes barely attached with a single thread stitch at the corners. He shaved irregulary and never shined his scuffed boots. Cronley, once in passing, had what he considered the misfortune of being introduced to him—the moment made all the more memorable by Woods’s crooked yellow teeth and a halitosis that almost triggered Cronley’s gag reflex.

  Woods bragged that he got away with flaunting anything he wanted because, he said with a foul grin, “I’m the only hangman in the European Theater.”

  Colonel Cohen told Cronley, “But you haven’t missed the grand finale, for want of a better expression. Or perhaps that one is fitting. Burgdorf and von Dietelberg are scheduled as the last two today.”

  * * *

  —

  A week earlier, on October 16th, Cronley had stood with Cohen and the twenty-odd other witnesses, an international mix—British, French, American, Soviet—of civilians and military officers who had served during the Tribunal.

  When Cohen earlier had asked if he wished to be there, Cronley practically came to attention and replied, “Colonel, I consider it my bounden duty to bear witness to the conclusion of what many have called history’s greatest trial.”

  After nearly a year of trials—which began with an hours-long moving speech by Justice Jackson, the chief prosecutor for the United States—the verdicts finally were handed down.

  Those on trial had been charged with four counts: Count 1, participation in a common plan or conspiracy for the accomplishment of a crime against peace; Count 2, planning, initiating, and waging wars of aggression and other crimes against peace; Count 3, war crimes; and Count 4, crimes against humanity.

  The majority of those found guilty were sentenced to be hanged, while others faced imprisonment.

  Cronley felt particularly compelled to see Reichsmarshall Hermann Göring, who had been found guilty on all four counts, hanged after Colonel Cohen, on the eve of the first executions, had brought up the fact that many of those sentenced to death were complaining.

  “How the hell can they complain?” Cronley said. “The court said Göring was—I can almost recite this from memory—‘almost always the moving force, second only to his leader’ and ‘the leading war aggressor, both as political and military leader.’ Not only that but he admitted to his heinous crimes. To repeat, how the hell can he complain about his death sentence?”

  “Not about the sentence of death,” Cohen said. “Rather, the method. Göring wishes to protect his military honor. He said he would have no problem being taken out and shot—a soldier’s death—but that to be hanged was, quote, the worst possible thing for a soldier, unquote.”

  “Seems to me all the more reason to string the bastards up,” Cronley said.

  There were others, Cohen said. Among them: Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel—Oberkommando der Wehrmacht chief, guilty on all four counts—and Generaloberst Alfred Jodl—his deputy who signed
orders for the summary execution of Allied commandos and was found guilty on all four counts and sentenced to death—had demanded a firing squad. Admiral Erich Raeder—guilty on the first three counts and sentenced to life imprisonment—petitioned the Allied Control Council “to commute this sentence to death by shooting, by way of mercy.”

  “All have been denied,” Cohen announced, looking down at a sheet on his desk and reading from it. “The Tribunal spelled it out: ‘They have been a disgrace to the honorable profession of arms.’ And ‘these men have made a mockery of the soldier’s oath of obedience to military orders. When it suits their defense, they say they had to obey; when confronted with Hitler’s brutal crimes, which are shown to have been within their general knowledge, they say they disobeyed. The truth is, they actively participated in all these crimes, or sat silent and acquiescent . . .’” Cohen paused, looked up at Cronley, and then added, “And Göring is scheduled to be hanged first tomorrow.”

  “And I will be there.”

  * * *

  —

  Not an hour later, Cohen answered his ringing office phone.

  “Jesus Christ!” he said, slamming the receiver back in its cradle.

  He looked at Cronley as he jumped to his feet.

  “Some son of a bitch apparently just granted Göring’s last wish. That bastard bit a cyanide capsule that had been concealed in a jar of hair pomade . . .”

  * * *

  —

  Early the next morning, at 0100 hours, Cronley stood next to Cohen in the group near the three gallows.

  They turned when they noticed that there was some motion at the foot of the wooden steps to the first gallows. Master Sergeant Woods could be seen walking behind it. He soon returned, followed by two soldiers leading another man, who, dressed in black silk pajamas, was almost invisible in the shadows.

  Cronley noticed on Woods’s hip was a long-bladed knife in a scabbard and wondered if it was one more of the hangman’s quirks.

  “That’s Joachim von Ribbentrop,” Cohen said, in a low voice.

  Cronley glanced at his watch. It showed eleven minutes past one.

  The former foreign minister for Hitler had his hands bound and manacles on his feet.

  “He can thank his pal Göring for that,” Cohen said. “Before that son of a bitch took the coward’s way out, the Tribunal was going to allow as a courtesy that they be unbound.”

  Except for the sound of footfalls on the wooden stairs, the room was eerily silent as von Ribbentrop ascended to the platform and stood with the thick rope dangling before him.

  Master Sergeant Woods placed a black hood over the condemned man’s head, then slipped the noose over that. He adjusted the rope knot against the neck, then could be heard asking von Ribbentrop something. It was unintelligible. And if there came an answer, it went unheard by Cronley, who then watched as the hangman, forcing himself to walk erect, shuffled to the lever and without ceremony yanked on it.

  The door in the floor opened—BAM!—which reverberated through the gymnasium, and von Ribbentrop dropped through the opening, his entire body unseen as the hangman’s rope snapped taut.

  Woods then shuffled to the wooden stairs and down them.

  Cronley, without at first realizing it, automatically began silently reciting the Lord’s Prayer:

  Our Father, Who art in Heaven, Hallowed be Thy name; Thy kingdom come; Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil . . .

  Cronley heard the heavy footfalls of Woods ascending the steps of the second gallows and raised his head to look as he finished the prayer. For the kingdom, the power, and the glory are Yours now and for ever. Amen.

  Two minutes later, Field Marshal Wilhelm Keitel entered the gymnasium. The guards escorted him to the second gallows.

  Remembering Keitel’s cruel crimes, Cronley heard words from the prayer again in his mind: . . . Deliver us from evil.

  Woods casually double-checked the noose knot as Keitel, with a look of defiance, stared straight forward. Woods then slipped on the hood and noose.

  As the knot was tightened, Keitel loudly declared from beneath the hood, “I call on God Almighty to have mercy on the German people. More than two million German soldiers went to their death for the Fatherland before me. I follow now my sons—all for Germany!”

  Without a word, Woods shuffled to the lever.

  BAM!

  After some ten minutes had passed, there appeared beside the gallows two doctors, an American and a Soviet, who each carried a stethoscope. They disappeared behind the canvas curtains of the separate gallows.

  There then came a deep commanding American voice—Cronley didn’t see him but recognized that it was that of Brigadier General Homer Greene, chief of Army Security Agency Europe—who announced that it was now permissible to smoke.

  A glow grew above the witnesses as at least a dozen flames came from Zippo lighters and wooden matches. Master Sergeant Woods lit a Chesterfield as he came down the wooden stairs.

  After a moment, Cronley detected an unexpected but familiar odor above that of the cigarettes and the sulfur of the matches.

  He leaned in toward Cohen, and said, “That smell?”

  Colonel Cohen nodded, and turned to quietly reply. “Death by hanging causes the spincter muscle to lose its elasticity.”

  The doctors reappeared, and then each went under the other gallows.

  When they had emerged and individually confirmed to Woods that the hanged men were indeed dead, the general ordered smoking to cease.

  Woods, taking his time to finish his cigarette, then ascended the steps of the first gallows. At the rope, he pulled the long-bladed knife from its scabbard on his belt and with a smooth swing cut von Ribbentrop free. The rope disappeared through the hole.

  Woods then went and tied a new rope with a noose to the crossbeam and then repeated the process for Keitel.

  The bodies of von Ribbentrop and Keitel, draped by U.S. Army blankets and the heads still covered by hoods, were then carried by stretchers to a corner of the gym and placed behind a black curtain.

  When guards escorted Ernst Kaltenbrunner to the gallows next, Cronley saw by his wristwatch that it was now 1:36. Kaltenbrunner, an Austrian, had been chief of the Reich Security Main Office, where he oversaw the mass murders of the concentration camps. Adolf Eichmann, of the Final Solution, and Rudolf Höss, commandant of Auschwitz, had reported to him.

  As Woods readied the noose to be placed over Kaltenbrunner’s head, Cronley expected another outburst of anger like Keitel’s.

  Kaltenbrunner, instead, announced in an even tone, “I have loved my German people and my Fatherland with a warm heart. I have done my duty by the laws of my people and I am sorry my people were led this time by men who were not soldiers and that crimes were committed of which I had no knowledge.”

  As Woods put on the black hood, Kaltenbrunner added, “Germany, good luck.”

  * * *

  —

  Cronley and Cohen had witnessed the trapdoors swinging—BAM!—more than two dozen times before, almost a week later, guards escorted former SS-Brigadeführer Franz von Dietelburg and former SS-Generalmajor Wilhelm Burgdorf to the side of the gallows. As all the others, they both wore black silk pajamas, and had their hands bound and feet shackled.

  Cohen nudged Cronley to follow him.

  “I want our faces to be the last they see.”

  Cohen and Cronley moved beyond the group of witnesses. Cohen stopped within ten feet of the wooden steps of the first gallows.

  The guard with Burgdorf nudged him forward. Burgdorf, with an icy stare, met Cohen’s eyes, then Cronley’s.

  Before Cronley realized it, he blurted, “Do you have any last words?”

>   “Captain,” Cohen said, coldly.

  “Do you?” Cronley pursued.

  “I told them!” Burgdorf said, loudly. “I demand an officer’s honor—death by firing squad!”

  “You, unfortunately, are in no position to demand anything. A firing squad is not an option. I will repeat my question: Do you have any last words?”

  “I did nothing wrong!” Burgdorf barked, then came to attention. “May God bless the Thousand-Year Reich!”

  Cronley looked at the soldiers. “Carry on.”

  Cronley watched as the hangman repeated his casual double-check of the noose knot as it dangled before Burgdorf. Then he put on the hood and the noose and then shuffled to the trapdoor lever.

  BAM!

  Burgdorf’s body dropped straight down through the hole, the slack rope quickly becoming taut.

  There then came a primal groan as the taut rope continued twitching and turning.

  Cronley glanced at the hangman, who revealed a slight grin.

  Does that twitch mean Burgdorf is straining?

  That his neck didn’t snap on the fall?

  He’s strangling . . .

  Cronley then looked at Cohen, who nodded just perceptibly.

  “It’s not the first time,” he said, in a whisper. “Some say it’s caused by the noose coils being intentionally tied off-center.”

  The hangman—with what Cronley suspected was a bit of theater, a look of disgust as he stomped down the wooden steps—went behind the gallows and pushed past the black canvas curtain, disappearing behind it.

  They watched as the rope continued to twitch and turn, then there came a little slack in it, then it snapped taut again. There was no more movement.