The League of Night and Fog

by David Morrell

  “How could a Jew be an SS officer?”

  “Your father wasn’t a Jew, and you’re not either! Your real family name is Rodenbach! Your father’s first name was Otto! Yours is Karl!” Chavez took documents from the packet. “That officer’s picture appeared on SS identification records and on immigration forms when he came to Mexico. The face is the same, though the name is different. Government authorities will soon be told who he really is! The United States authorities will also be told, and as both of us know, the United States bolsters its relations with Israel by pretending indignation toward Nazi war criminals.”

  Rosenberg couldn’t move. “Who told you these things?”

  “You don’t expect me to reveal my sources.” Chavez spread his arms in a gesture of goodwill. “But I wonder, how much are you willing to pay for me to neutralize my information, to assure the authorities there’s been a mistake?”

  Rosenberg wanted to vomit. Blackmail never ended. It only bought time. But time was in limited supply. It would last only as long as his money did. He thought of the cargo in the ship headed toward the Mediterranean and what he assumed now was certain disaster.

  “How much do you want?” he asked.

  The glint in the captain’s coal-black eyes didn’t reassure him.

  3

  St. Paul, Minnesota. William Miller feigned a polite smile of greeting as he crossed the cocktail lounge and approached the man in the left rear booth.

  On the phone, the man had said his name was Sloane. He was with the Associated Press, he claimed, and wanted to talk about Miller’s father.

  Now Sloane imitated Miller’s smile of greeting, stood, and extended his hand.

  They surveyed each other.

  “Somebody sent you what?” Sloane asked. “On the phone, you said something about filth.”

  “You’re really a reporter?”

  “Cross my heart.”

  “Shit.” Miller swallowed, disgusted at himself. “I’m sorry I lost my temper when you called. I thought for sure you were involved.”

  “That’s why we’re here. To talk about it.” Sloane gestured toward the booth.

  They sat across from each other. Sloane was in his mid-thirties, short, heavy-chested, with dark thin hair and intelligent eyes. “What do you mean by filth?” he asked.

  “Photographs.”

  “Of?”

  “Nazi concentration camps. Corpses. Ashes.” Miller massaged his forehead. “God. My father disappeared. Then somebody painted a death’s head on the bottom of my swimming pool.”

  “Death’s head?”

  “Now you show up …”

  “And you assumed …”

  “Well, wouldn’t you assume? My wife doesn’t know about the photographs.”

  “Slow down,” Sloane said. “What you’re telling me connects with why I contacted you. I’ll give you my side, and we’ll see what we come up with.”

  “Credentials.”

  “What?”

  “You’re an AP reporter. Prove it.”

  Sloane sighed and pulled out his press card.

  “Anybody can have a card printed up,” Miller said.

  “There’s a phone number. The AP central office.”

  “And anybody can hire a voice to claim he’s in the AP office.”

  “Right. And I bet you’ve got all kinds of fascinating theories about the JFK assassination. The UN’s controlled by drug dealers. Satan’s responsible for heavy-metal rock.”

  Reluctantly, Miller laughed.

  “Good,” Sloane said. “As long as you can laugh at yourself, you’re in control.”

  “Sometimes I wonder. You said you wanted to talk about my father. Why?”

  “I have contacts in the Justice Department. It’s what you might call a symbiotic relationship. I do them a favor, write stories that bolster their public image. They do me a favor, let me know when they’re working on something I can use.”

  “I still don’t understand. What does the Justice Department have to do with my father?”

  “Someone sent them documents that made them decide to investigate him.”

  Miller clutched his drink so hard he feared the glass would break. “This gets more and more insane.”

  “And since your father disappeared, I figured the only other person to talk to is you.”

  For several moments, Miller didn’t speak.

  “Okay,” he said wearily. “Give it to me all at once. Worst case. Bottom line.”

  “Your father’s name is Frank Miller. The theory is, he’s really Franz Müller, a German officer in World War Two. He’s supposed to have been an Obersturmbannfübrer.” Sloane spoke the German haltingly. “In English, that means lieutenant-colonel. During World War Two, Franz Müller commanded a unit in an SS formation known as Einsatzgruppen. They were a special military task force that followed regular Nazi soldiers into newly invaded German territory—Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Russia, for example—where they executed every Jew they could find, shot them where they stood or herded them into pits to make it easy to bury them after the firing squad was finished. Their body count in Russia alone was a half million.”

  “And you’re telling me the Justice Department suspects my father was part of that insanity? A Nazi mass murderer?”

  “They more than suspect. They’re convinced of it. They claim they’ve got proof. And they think your father disappeared because he’d been warned about their investigation. As far as they’re concerned, your father ran from them. Are you all right? You just turned pale.”

  “My whole fucking world’s falling apart, and you ask me if I’m all right? Jesus, I … Look, somebody has to stop this craziness. Just because my father’s name is similar to Franz Müller …”

  “No, there’s more than that. The Justice Department wouldn’t base an investigation on something that tenuous. Your father emigrated here from Germany. You knew that?”

  “Sure. After the war. A lot of Germans did. There wasn’t anything illegal about it.”

  “But did you also know he changed his name?”

  A muscle twitched in Miller’s cheek.

  “My God, you did know,” Sloane realized.

  “Let me explain. I knew. But not the specifics. All he told me was he’d Americanized his name to avoid anti-German feelings here after the war.”

  “Did he tell you he’d been a German soldier?”

  “I don’t have to listen to this crap.” Miller stood.

  Sloane reached out, careful not to touch him. “For sure you’ll have to listen when an investigator from the Justice Department comes around. If I were you, I’d think of this as a dress rehearsal, and while I was at it, I’d think about this. It would do your family a lot of good to be treated sympathetically by the press.”

  Miller hesitated. “Sympathetically?”

  “The past comes back to haunt a family that didn’t even know about the past. I can build an effective human interest story out of that. A story in your favor. Assuming, of course, that you’re telling the truth about your father.”

  “I meant what I said.” Miller sat down. “I can’t believe anybody would accuse my father of—”

  “Accusing him’s one thing. Whether you knew anything about his past is another. You truly believe he’s innocent?”

  “Damn it, yes!”

  “Then answer my questions. Did he tell you he’d been a German soldier?”

  Miller thought about it. “Sometimes, as he got older, he talked about the war. He said, toward the end every male he knew, even kids, had been conscripted. Despite his inexperience, he was made a sergeant and ordered to defend a bridge. When the Allies invaded, he hid till the worst was over and then surrendered.”

  “You didn’t think it strange that a German soldier was allowed to come to America? That was hardly standard procedure.”

  “He explained about that too. German soldiers were placed in POW camps. The Allies didn’t exactly take kindly to them, and none of the German soldier
s knew how long the imprisonment would last. So the trick was, before the Allies picked you up, you had to find a civilian corpse and exchange clothes and identity papers with it. My father managed to get himself placed in a refugee camp, not a POW camp. He lived there for more than a year before some administrator paid attention to his repeated applications and allowed him to emigrate to America. If what you’ve told me is true, it sounds like it was my father’s bad luck that the dead civilian whose papers he exchanged with his own was named Franz Müller. I mean, Franz Müller’s a common German name. There must have been hundreds, maybe thousands of Franz Müllers. But only one of them was this SS hit-squad leader.”

  Sloane drew his finger through a circle of moisture his glass had made. “The Justice Department has photographs of the SS officer we’re talking about. It also has a photograph from your father’s immigration file. The face is the same. Why did he disappear?”

  “I don’t know! Christ, he’s seventy-three years old. Where would he run? The Justice Department’s absolutely wrong about him!”

  “Good. You stick with that attitude, and when the Justice Department decides to go public, you can count on a story that makes you look sympathetic. Even if the Justice Department proves its case, you’ll still be presented as an innocent bystander, a loving but misinformed son. On the other hand—I warn you—if you’ve held back, if you’re lying, I’ll turn the story around. You and your family will be part of the conspiracy.”

  “I haven’t lied.”

  “Keep it that way. This isn’t just another story to me. I’m supposed to be objective. What I am is furious. Nazi war criminals are all over this fucking country. I could give you dozens of names and addresses right now. There’s no mystery about them. The Justice Department knows about them. Most are in their late sixties or early seventies. They keep their lawns mowed. They tip the paperboy. They have the neighbors over for barbecues. I could accuse them in front of their friends. It wouldn’t matter. No one would care. Because they don’t make trouble. How could that nice man down the street have done all those terrible things? And anyway all of that was a long time ago. Why dredge up unpleasant memories?”

  “You’re exaggerating.”

  “If anything, the reverse.” Sloane pulled a sheet of paper from his jacket pocket. “Here’s a list from my contacts in the Justice Department. Twenty mass murderers. Jack the Ripper, Son of Sam, and John Wayne Gacy are bush-league compared to this bunch.”

  “And every one of them’s a war criminal?”

  “There are plenty of others. This is just the top of the slime heap.”

  “But if the Justice Department knows who these Nazis are … ?”

  “Why haven’t they been prosecuted? Because after the war American intelligence made a bargain with them. Help us take over your Nazi spy networks and use them against the Russians. In exchange, we’ll give you immunity. Or if you don’t have a bargain of immunity, we still won’t prosecute because your crimes were committed in Europe. To save a lot of diplomatic hassle, we’d just as soon deport you. On the other hand, if we revoke your citizenship, no other country will accept you, so we’re stuck with you. Let’s forget the whole mess. These Nazis will die soon anyhow. At least that was the theory until a few years ago. A group of idealistic lawyers in the Justice Department decided to do something about the government’s lassitude. In 1979, the Office of Special Investigations was formed.”

  “Then something is being done about the men on that list.”

  “Yes, but not enough. There’s no way to be certain about the numbers, but an educated guess is that as many as ten thousand Nazi war criminals came to this country. So far the Justice Department has prosecuted forty of them. Punishment takes the form of denaturalization and deportation.”

  “Against mass murderers?”

  “The murders didn’t take place in the United States. In effect, the only crime they’re charged with is lying about their true identity on their immigration forms.”

  “If the public knew, they’d be outraged.”

  “Would they? In the cases that have gone to trial, the friends and neighbors of the men who were charged wanted to leave the past alone.”

  “Is that the point of your story?”

  “I want to help the Justice Department. If I can rouse the public, maybe the Office of Special Investigations will get more government funding. These bastards—I don’t care how old they are—should all be made to feel the same terror their victims felt.”

  “Including my father?”

  “If he’s guilty,” Sloane said, “yes.”

  Miller matched Sloane’s angry gaze. “I’ve trusted and respected my father all my life. If impossibly the Justice Department is right about him … If he’s what this so-called proof says he is …”

  “You agree he ought to be punished?”

  “Even my father …” Miller felt sick. “Provided he’s guilty, even my father can’t be absolved.”

  4

  Despite five o’clock traffic, Miller managed to reduce a twenty-minute drive to slightly more than ten. The elevator to the fifth floor seemed to take forever. When he opened the door to MILLER AND ASSOCIATES, ARCHITECTS, he saw that his secretary had not yet gone home.

  “How was your meeting, Mr. Miller? Did you get the assignment?”

  “It’s too soon to tell. I want to make some notes, Marge. If anybody calls, I’m not here. No interruptions.”

  “Will you be needing me for dictation?”

  “No, thanks. Go home when you finish what you’re typing.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  He went into his office, shut the door, and leaned against it. How is it possible to know if someone you love is a monster?

  Sweat trickled past his eyes. An eternal five minutes later, the tapping on the keyboard mercifully stopped. He heard the click of switches on the computer, the indistinct rustle of a dust cloth being positioned over the monitor.

  “Good night, Mr. Miller.”

  “Good night,” he said through the door.

  The tap of high-heeled footsteps. The click of a latch. The snap of the outside door.

  Silence.

  Miller exhaled, relieving the pressure in his lungs, and stared at the combination safe in the corner to his right, where he stored his plans-in-progress. Two days ago, when he’d received the hideous photographs of corpses and ashes, he’d wanted to destroy them. But an intuition had warned him to move cautiously. The photographs were obviously not just a prank. If he destroyed them, he might lose information he’d need later, clues about why he’d been sent the photographs at all.

  Now he wished he hadn’t saved them—for fear of the truth he might find. He knelt, dialed the combination on the safe, and removed the packet of photographs. One by one, he studied the black-and-white sheets.

  Death. Terrible death.

  He’d lied to Sloane, but only in response to one question—and only a part of that response had been a lie. But the lie, even partial, had been out of proportion to all the rest of the truth.

  Yes, he’d answered honestly, I knew that my father came from Germany. I knew he’d changed his name. I knew he’d been a German soldier.

  Yes, a soldier. But Miller was aware that his father hadn’t been an innocent participant in the war, an inexperienced young draftee promoted absurdly to the rank of sergeant. Not at all. His father had been a colonel in the SS.

  As Miller’s father had aged, he’d been drawn increasingly back to the past. On a handful of days that had unexplained personal significance for him—January 30, April 20, November 8—he’d become more and more sentimental. On those occasions, his father had made and received mysterious phone calls. Then late one night, his father had confessed to his son what he did in the war.

  “Yes, I was SS. I followed the Führer’s orders. I believed in the master race. And yes, I believed in lebensraum, the space we needed to expand and flourish. But I didn’t believe in racial extermination. Since we were super
ior, why couldn’t we exist in tolerant harmony with inferior races? Why couldn’t we allow them to serve us? I wasn’t Death’s Head. I wasn’t one of the exterminators. Instead I was Waffen-SS, the legitimate military branch of the Schutzstaffel. I was a decent soldier. I served my country with dignity. That country lost. So be it. History decides morality. Now I live in America. Its citizens call it the greatest nation in the world. So be it. My conscience is clear, and if I had to, I would fight to defend America with the same determination I gave to Germany.”

  Miller had been convinced. War by its nature blurred judgments and clouded values. Yet surely some values remained constant, he hoped.

  His father and other Waffens-SS commanders had managed to escape the aftermath of Germany’s defeat. They’d exchanged identity papers with dead civilians and fled to Bolivia, Mexico, America, Canada, England, Sweden. But they’d remained in touch, phoning one other to remember their heritage, to assure themselves that no matter how severely history had proved them wrong, they were still a part of their country’s elite.

  Just as the sons of the elite had kept in contact. Miller had eventually been drawn into his father’s circle of former friends. He and the sons of those other fathers had pledged to help one another in case their fathers came under attack. On the first of each year, there’d been dues to be paid, twenty thousand dollars per family, a bribe to the one outsider who knew their secret, an insurance premium of sorts, blackmail that guaranteed his silence.

  Now those bribes had proved useless. The pledge among the sons—to stand as one and defend the group—had turned out to be ineffectual. Despite precautions, their fathers had been attacked. They themselves, the sons of their fathers, were also under attack.

  Insanity.

  Let the past rest, Miller thought. The present and the future are what matter. Our fathers aren’t what you think they were. Bring them back. Leave us all alone. You’ve made a mistake. The Night and Fog has to end.

  Yet the handsome young SS officer who gazed proudly from a photograph that Miller couldn’t set down reminded him uncannily of his father. No! My father wouldn’t have lied to me!