Axel Reinhard could not put off a formal reaction indefinitely. So he sought to frame it with some knowledge of Plekhov’s character and sensibilities. He adopted the formal address that Plekhov had used.
“Captain Plekhov, I’m afraid you have got the wrong man. I work for the firm of Heidl & Sons and we have undertaken, in recognition of our obligations as faithful citizens, to construct your prisoner of war camp. But the — other — what you speak of — would not be an enterprise in which we would,” he sought a formulation as unprovocative as he could come up with, “deem ourselves competent to engage in.”
Now Captain Plekhov did bring the vodka to his mouth, swallowing it down at once. “You just finished saying that Heidl & Sons undertook to construct a prisoner of war facility because it acknowledges, how did you put it, your ‘obligations.’ Well, the extermination camps are a part of government policy, and in time of war, government policy must prevail, eliminating such flexibility as, in less stressful times, the government might indulge a firm of civil engineers.”
Axel was baffled. What if he were to say, quite simply, that he could not engage in an activity that Christian tenets prohibited. Would he not hear back, simply, that the Third Reich dealt with state, not church, matters?
He did not want to ask questions about what was in prospect for Joni that would require Captain Plekhov to plead the — rightness? justification? — of the Reichspolicy. He would not elicit from him the fearful language of Hitler and Himmler and Goebbels and Streicher explaining the need for a “final solution” to the Jewish question.
He’d need, simply, to say — no.
“You will have to get another engineer.”
“Ah but Axel, that is not so easy to contrive, given the terrible wartime scarcities. Besides which there is no living human being as familiar as you with the work that has already gone into the construction of our camp.”
Axel would simply need to say it again. He struggled to keep his voice down. “Captain Plekhov, the answer is no.”
“We had to consider that contingency”
He stood up and looked out the window, turning his back on Axel.
“I have in my briefcase a letter from Glucks confirming your commission to proceed with the construction I have outlined.”
Axel waited to be told what the alternative was.
Plekhov was silent. But finally he turned.
“If you decline, you will be arrested for sedition. You will be tried, and hanged.”
Plekhov turned to the door and opened it to the darkening light. He turned his head back. “You should reflect, Axel, that others have had to come to terms with life as it is lived. In greater Germany. In the year of Our Lord, 1942.”
He closed the door.
Chapter Sixteen
August 1945
Second Lieutenant Sebastian Reinhard showered gratefully in the bachelor officers’ quarters at Camp Gordon. He wondered idly whether he would ever again leave the state of Georgia. He had had basic training at Camp Wheeler in Macon, then Officers’ Candidate School in Columbus, and now another camp in Georgia, Camp Cordon in Augusta. An important difference: He was now a trainer, not a trainee; an officer, not an enlisted man. A better life.
But that hardly shielded him, he reminded himself in the hot shower, from hour after hour of hot grimy work overseeing the recruits’ essential training as infantry soldiers. On this point Sebastian had been instructed thoroughly, at basic and infantry school. He had mastered, as well as could be done without combat experience, the infantry soldier’s discipline. Lieutenant Sebastian Reinhard, Army of the United States, just over one year earlier inducted in Phoenix and sent across the continent to begin military life.
Why does the army do such things ? Pick you up in Arizona — which is next door to plenty of infantry training centers in Colorado, in neighboring California, and in Texas — and send you on an endless trip, cramped sardine-style aboard a troop train to Georgia, at the other end of the country? Well, he supposed, some ledger somewhere must have informed G-l (the personnel division of the army) that Camp Wheelers inventory of trainees was less crowded than others’. It wasn’t worth it, as a rule, to try to figure out why this or that happened in the army. At least they won the fucking war, he said to himself, turning off the shower, applying his towel, slipping it around his hips, and setting out down the hall to his room — “Hi, Felton” — he passed by a fellow-officer. “Yeah, water’s plenty hot. Everything’s hot at Camp Gordon.” Lieutenant Felton Horchak, a towel around his own waist, nodded. “And the twenty-miler is next week.”
Maybe the weather will cool off, Sebastian thought. On the other hand it hadn’t cooled off in Georgia in August of last year. Georgia just went from very hot before September to very cold after October. The twenty-mile hike wearing full field equipment was the last ordeal of the eighteen-week basic infantry training cycle. It meant eight hours of marching (ten minutes’ rest the first hour, five minutes’ rest each of the succeeding seven hours). As platoon leader he would not be lugging the sixty-pound field pack the trainees were burdened with, nor the nine-pound M-1 rifle; and he’d wear a thin plastic helmet liner instead of the heavy steel combat model and he would carry the slimmer backpack without all the components of a pup tent. The carbine strapped over his shoulder weighed only eight pounds.
But otherwise the long march was identical to what he had endured last year at Camp Wheeler, before his selection for officers’ training had dispatched him to Fort Benning.
Dressed — khaki pants, khaki shirt, name tag (no tie), gold lieutenant’s bar on his shirt, shoes shined — he walked down the stairs to the officers’ common room. The Georgia sun was not quite through with its victims, at 1730, and it was hot in the common room, too, though removed from the sun. He walked to the bar and nodded at Jenkins, the orderly.
“Usual Coke, Lieutenant?”
Sebastian nodded and pulled a five-cent piece from his pocket. He had quite a few nickels, he thought contentedly, earning now $150 every month — augmented by the monthly $25 check from his grandmother in Phoenix. That plus a second $25, the money order from his mother in London. The monthly check had begun when, as an enlisted man, he was receiving only $50 in monthly pay. He had tried, when commissioned, to stop it.
“Dear Mama, don’t send me any more money. Use it for — let me see, what can you hope to buy in London, 1945? The answer to that in U.S. military language would be — dead Nazis.” He crossed out the two words, then scratched over them, in an attempt to make them illegible. “You can buy things at the PX, of course. So can I. Cigarettes are 10 cents and the Reader’s Digest is 15 cents. Mama, would you like me to send you — never mind. I can’t send you anything you can’t get yourself. So I’ll just send you lots of love. I won’t tell you anything more about infantry life because there isn’t anything more to tell you about infantry life different from what I’ve been telling you now for...fourteen months, ever since I was drafted! Fourteen months plus ten months since you left Oma and me that sad day. I know you can’t tell me what you have been working on, but I can — but I love you too much to tell you about my fascinating long hikes in Georgia sands and snaking under barbed wire when live tracer ammunition is firing over you, and doing a forced march at five the next morning, oh, aren’t you jealous , dear Mama? And just think of it, they didn’t need me in Japan to close down that theater, all they needed was an atomic bomb. In Oma’s last letter she didn’t say anything on the subject of dropping an atom bomb on a civilian population. Guess she gave up protesting, though when they did bomb Munich, that letter was blistering ! Dumb question, do you have any idea when you’ll be back? Dumb question #2, do I have any idea when I’ll be out and free to go back to school? I’ll show you mine if you’ll show me yours. That’s a play on a dirty joke. Ask the chief of intelligence about it. XXX Sebby.”
He hadn’t dwelled on the question he had pondered, the killing of one hundred thousand Japanese civilians with a single bomb. Well, we d
id that to the Germans, too. He wondered about what he had read in Time magazine about critics who said that the bombing of Dresden had no military justification. Personally, he had to admit, he was very glad that the bomb had been dropped at Hiroshima. It lessened dramatically the likelihood that he would have to practice firing bullets not at targets, but at human beings. He admitted there was a moral question out there, as the writer in Time had maintained — the whole question of war crimes. But he wasn’t a theologian, he comforted himself.
He sat with his Coke at the card table and talked with Felton and shuffled the cards for their customary presupper game of Russian Bank. Jack Yardley, coming into the room from the hall, spotted him. “Seb, there’s an envelope for you on the board at the CC’s. I’d have pulled it off, but I wasn’t sure you’d be here.”
“Thanks, Jack. Hmm, where else, except here, would I be? Is there an opening tonight at Radio City Music Hall?”
“No. But the movie they’re showing at our place is Captain Eddie , and I’m going. Terrific dogfights and stunt shots, I’ve heard. You guys want to go? After chow?”
“Count me in,” Felton said.
“I’ll probably go, too,” Sebastian said. “But first I’ve got to check the bulletin board. I haven’t been there. It might be I’ve pulled Duty Officer tonight. Hope not. Midnight’s not my favorite hour to do duty.”
The envelope was there, a message from the battalion commander. Sebastian was instructed to report to regimental headquarters at 0900 the following day. “We have made arrangements with Captain Hand to get a substitute platoon leader to meet your platoon,” the order said.
He thought to show his message to Felton, but decided not to. He told Felton only that an appointment had been scheduled for him. He stopped. He thought suddenly — could it be personal news that was to be given him? If his mother had died in London, how would they pass the word along to her army son? By telegram? Annabelle Reinhard, after all, was in government service, however secret. Would this call for special personal treatment, if that was the unbelievable news? Would somebody in the army be delegated to break the news to him personally? Mama dead ?
He would try to put in a long distance call to his grandmother, just in case she had had word.
“Sorry,” Sebastian said to his friends sitting about the lounge. “I can’t go to the flicks with you. I have to put in a call to Phoenix. God knows how long I’ll be standing in line. I figure two, three hours.” They walked off together to the mess hall.
*
He was there as ordered. The long flat building east of the parade ground had been constructed before the First World War and suppurated with age — paint peeling on the entrance door, windows stuck open. The right quarter of the building had fresh unpainted wood, patchwork wartime maintenance.
He was early, and scrutinized the information board on which, twice a day, world news bulletins were posted. His eyes turned searchingly for news with military implications that bore on him. General Douglas MacArthur had made a statement in Tokyo. He reported smooth progress in arranging for the military occupation of Japan, announcing that “a drastic cut” in the number of troops originally thought to be required in the Pacific Theater could now safely be predicted. Within six months — Sebastian read on, eagerly — the number of U.S. troops required would be “not more than two hundred thousand.” Sebastian had celebrated, with a dozen other platoon leaders, the recent night of V-J Day. A great national victory, but celebrated also as meaning that they probably would not have to risk their lives fighting their way to Tokyo, island by island.
On the other hand...He looked up from the bulletin board reflectively. Since he’d be stuck God knew how long in the army in Georgia — Macon, Columbus, Augusta — he might actually welcome duty in Japan. Another news bulletin on the board was especially heartening: Undersecretary of the Army Robert Patterson testified before a Senate committee that the army was demobilizing at the rate of ten thousand soldiers per day and expected to have discharged six million by the first of July 1946. But, Secretary Patterson had said, he saw no prospect of the elimination of the draft.
Sebastian did some quick arithmetic. As of the day he was drafted, August 10, 1944, how many men were there in the armed forces? He frowned. Certainly more than six million. That meant it would be only after July 1946, at the rate of ten thousand per day, that he could hope to be released. He didn’t have enough seniority to be included with the first six million men qualifying to go home.
There was a second bulletin from Tokyo. Imperial Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko — Sebastian pitied the reporter responsible for writing down that name and bearing the responsibility for correct spelling — said at his very first press conference in Tokyo that the Japanese war and navy ministries would be abolished and democratic processes broadened. Without giving details , he read, the Prime Minister said the Japanese themselves already have started to punish war criminals . He denies that the Emperor is a war criminal saying he was led into the war by the Cabinet .
Everybody will say that kind of thing, Sebastian thought.
He looked at his watch and then walked through the doorway to the duty officer sitting behind the long counter. He spoke to a master sergeant.
“I’m Lieutenant Reinhard.” He handed the sergeant, a large man with a benign face, perhaps fifty years old, the order.
“Yes sir. Down the hall to Room 27. You’re expected.”
His heart began to beat faster as he walked down the corridor. He knocked on the door.
It was opened by an officer. “Lieutenant Reinhard?”
“Yes sir.”
“That is Mr. Heinrich over there. I’m Major Stuyvesant.”
Sebastian shook hands. He was asked to sit down.
Chapter Seventeen
Camp Gordon , 1945
The major spoke without preamble. “Reinhard, you are being considered for a role as an interpreter at the war crimes tribunal assembling in Nuremberg. Are you aware of the International Military Tribunal?”
“Yes sir. I read about it in last week’s issue of Time magazine.”
“We will need to hear you out on a number of points. But let us begin at the beginning.” The lean, prematurely gray major wore a single decoration below his combat infantry badge, the small yet imposing Silver Star, awarded for conspicuous gallantry in action. He leaned over a clipboard and made notes as he spoke.
“Your files show that you were born in Germany, is that correct?”
“Yes sir, Hamburg.”
“And your father was?” The major’s mustache tilted up, in an interrogatory mode.
“A civil engineer. A graduate of MIT.”
“When?”
“The class of 1924.”
“You were born, I see, in January 1926. The records do not show when you left Germany to live in America. We have only that you have a high school diploma from Phoenix Central High School, class of 1944. The dossier lists your father as deceased. We need to know where he died.”
“We don’t know. I don’t know.”
“Was he a military casualty?”
“I don’t know.”
Major Stuyvesant put down his clipboard. “What do you mean, you don’t know?”
“We received notice in July 1943 that he was deceased.”
“Received notice from whom?”
“Headquarters, German War Ministry, Berlin.”
Major Stuyvesant said nothing, but made another note. “Can you give me the text of the death notice?”
“All it said was that the Command regretted informing — my mother — of my father’s death in the service of the Fatherland, and that when victory came, his services would be honored.”
“What were those services?”
“Sir, we don’t know. We had not heard from him since 1941 and that letter revealed nothing.”
“Is it reasonable to suppose that he was doing military or paramilitary work?”
“I think that’s reasonable to assume abou
t everybody in Germany over the age of sixteen. Sir.”
Major Stuyvesant continued his jotting and looked over at Heinrich, a civilian, wearing shirt and tie notwithstanding 100-degree heat only slightly alleviated by the electric fan. “There is no point in pursuing any question at this end without first establishing the most basic question, which has to do with your knowledge of the language. We can assume that you are fluent in German?”
“Yes sir.”
The voice of Mr. Heinrich came in. He spoke now in German with what seemed deliberate speed, designed to test the subject’s language capacity. It was a voice and language that betrayed a hint of hierarchical impatience, of the kind exhibited by schoolmasters and master sergeants and emperors. The interrogation was hardly in the style of Major Stuyvesant. Mr. Heinrich said: “Answer me in full. What was your father’s opinion of the Fuehrer?”
Sebastian was taken aback. He had expected a query that would permit him to demonstrate, simply, his command of the language. Instead he had been given a question that required of him a conclusory account of the great unsettled questions he had lived with ever since, at age thirteen, it dawned on him that mother and son could not wish father success, back in Germany, in the enterprise in which he was undoubtedly involved. But that conclusion had come in bits and pieces, consolidating only some time after the implications of those post-Pearl Harbor days were absorbed. His father’s Germany was at war with his mother’s native America, the country in which Sebastian was now living, had been schooled in, and had been prepared to fight for.
He had no trouble with the German words. His trouble was with the arrangement of his thoughts.
“Herr Heinrich, that question asks me to put in order all the questions I and my mother have lived with since the separation from my father. All I can say is, I am committed to the service of my country, and I have no — ” he stumbled for the word, “no knowledge of — and, no need to learn about — my father’s last years.”
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