Nuremberg

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  At the entrance off the broad street, flaunting surviving oak trees lush with summer leaves, a half-dozen boys and two or three girls clamored for patronage. The biggest boy, maybe twelve, shouted out to call attention to his baggage trolley. Two small wheels, probably appropriated from a baby carriage, had been affixed to the end of a wooden platform, and a serviceable cart was made.

  The negotiation was done rapidly and the bags loaded on. They were off to track G7. On the way, the boy quarreled with his companion, and finally agreed to let him wheel the trolley the last half of the walk, across the station’s huge waiting room choked with scaffolding, building materials, and luggage and boxes, soldiers coming and going.

  “Hold it!” Albright motioned to the two boys. “Where can we buy — ”

  Sebastian spotted the makeshift kiosk and pointed over to it. Albright motioned the boys to follow.

  Arriving, the taller boy asked, “Can you buy something for me and my brother to eat, Herr Oberleutnant?”

  Albright didn’t reply. At the kiosk he bought bread and ham and cheese and two bottles of German wine. He handed the brother whose hands were free a loaf of bread and a half kilo of cheese.

  They walked past the imposing engine toward the railroad cars. That engine showed no traces of war strife. It wheezed its strength and eagerness for work and began its whistle screech as the two lieutenants climbed up the steps of a passenger car, grabbing the bags from “Mickey” — as the boy porter introduced himself, after accepting gleefully the twenty-five pfennigs and the package of food — and taking two empty seats halfway up the length of the car.

  “I forgot to ask,” Albright said. “Were you ever in Nuremberg? Back then?”

  Sebastian shook his head. “Did I miss anything?”

  “Only one of the most beautiful cities in the world.”

  “You took care of that, didn’t you, Harry?”

  “Did my best, Sebastian. As you can see, our bombers didn’t neglect Hamburg. We didn’t spare any German city just because it was beautiful and historic. Only Prague and Paris had immunity.”

  They opened a bottle of wine, removing the aluminum drinking cups from their gear.

  Chapter Twenty

  Nuremberg, September 1945

  Army orders had both officers reporting for duty to the Palace of Justice. The Palace was pretty much the only show in town, a huge compound which, along with the adjacent Grand Hotel, all but uniquely survived the devastation of Nuremberg. The ancient city with its hard-bitten military defenders finally yielded to the American Third and Forty-fifth Infantry Divisions of the Seventh Army, but surrender came only after bloody door-to-door fighting over a period of five days.

  “Maybe they figured that since Nuremberg was the holy center of the National Socialist Party it ought to be the last to surrender,” Sebastian commented, in awe. He leaned over in his seat in the jeep to view the rising sun’s illumination of the redstone castle rock and the profile of what appeared to have been a medieval castle wall. Seated in front, alongside the MP at the wheel, Albright answered in German, “It’ll be the last city our Nazi bigwigs will ever see, I’d guess.”

  Replying in German, Sebastian asked, “Why are you using the mother tongue all of a sudden?”

  “Because what’s ahead is supposed to be a trial. Not summary executions. I don’t want to give our eighteen-year-old driver here any bad ideas about American justice. He might write his mother. Or the New York Times .”

  He laughed and then, back in English, said, “We’re on the Konigstrasse. That’s the main street. Or was. Still is, I guess. See over there?” He pointed. “That was the dominant structure of the city, the Kaiserburg, the imperial palace. Just to one side is the house where Albrecht Durer lived and painted. He died in 1528. How? do I know that? I went to school two blocks from there and Herr Hermenjat would have beaten me even harder if I had ever forgotten Durer’s dates. Besides, my father worshiped him.”

  “Well that’s not so unusual, is it? Sort of like worshiping, oh, Michelangelo.”

  “My father was an artist, by the way. A mosaicist. But, most important in this day and age, he was a Jew. Obviously I’m not going to be able to show you any of his surviving work, because probably there is none. He did a lot of restorations...He would have had plenty to restore in Nuremberg, 1945. Like the whole city. He could begin here these days by learning to lay bricks. Never mind mosaics.”

  Soon, the Palace of Justice loomed ahead, east of the other surviving edifice, the Grand Hotel, eerily intact. The surrounding rubble and remnants of walls distorted with holes where windows had been, the concentrated desolation on all sides, gave the sense of a huge fortress that had survived a long and bloody war finally outlasting a besieging army.

  The proportions of the Palace were astonishingly large. Stone building after stone building, some standing four stories high. The gabled roofs were marked with insets of small windows, themselves with gables, unburnished now. They would find, once inside, impressive, complex, endless corridors and high ceilings and hundreds of rooms of every size. It wasn’t surprising that U.S. Justice Robert Jackson’s advance scouts had recommended the Palace of Justice as the central facility for the great trial.

  Meanwhile, everyone checking in faced a thorough security examination, as if the guards, having trouble reorienting themselves as victors, were intuitively guarding against infiltration by members of the besieging army.

  The old enemy were indeed outside, half-starved, spread out around the walls of the Palace in greater Nuremberg; but then some of them — their leaders — were within the Palace, in cells, monitored twenty-four hours a day by jailers looking through slits in the cell doors, a naked overhead light on, day and night. There, in individual cubicles, were the twenty-four most prominent Nazis the conquerors could lay their hands on. Hitler and Goebbels and Himmler were dead, unhappily at their own hands. The surviving leadership cadre were preparing, and being prepared, to face the first International Military Tribunal in history.

  The driver unloaded his large file box, packed for the journey, on Sebastian’s left, the box he had been dispatched to the railroad station to fetch, picking up his human cargo, the two lieutenants, as fellow soldiers of opportunity. “We can leave your gear in the back, Lieutenant,” he said. “Do you know where you’re billeted? Probably the Grand.”

  Neither of them did know where they would be quartered. Carrying only the canvas satchels that served them as briefcases, they followed the MP to the main entrance. East of the administrative building with its hundreds of offices, away in a sealed-off building, was the gray-stoned prisoner compound. In the months to come, Sebastian and Harry Albright would become experts on the site, experts also on the targeted officials, and on the ambitions of the judicial and moral imaginations that had come together, after the war, determined to affirm a need to write into the empty spaces of international law a fresh covenant: that war crimes were definable. And punishable as criminal behavior.

  *

  There was considerable bureaucratic routine for those checking in for duty at the Palace. The new arrivals needed to be processed for their security passes, photographs taken, rosters checked. By noon they had their passes and fresh orders. Sebastian would report to the prosecutor’s office in the south wing, Albright to G-3 at the central courthouse. For housing, like most of the military personnel not accommodated in the Palace itself, they were assigned rooms in the Grand Hotel. They went out to the patient MP driver, contentedly smoking a cigarette and listening to the jeep’s radio tuned to the armed services station. The driver was told to deposit the bags, securely identified, at the Grand Hotel checkroom. They walked back through the main entrance, showed their passes, and set out in search of their separate departments in the separate wings. ‘They resolved to meet in the hotel lobby at 1830.

  “The Grand used to be a pretty fancy place, Sebastian. Hitler had a private suite there. Viel Glueck ! Auf Wiedersehen .”

  Chapter Twenty-Oner />
  Nuremberg, September 1945

  Following faithfully after the long-gaited WAC sergeant, Sebastian arrived at the Palace’s main hall. Passing by the large atrium, one end of which was now a reception area, Sebastian thought back on childhood visits, hand in hand with his mother, ogling exalted structures in the great buildings and museums around Hamburg. Here at the Palace, in the main hall, were extravagant touches of opulent public design. Burnished wood, myriad carvings and paintings, marble arches working their decorative way around large oval windows. The great Palace of Justice had miraculously escaped the bombs. Could this have been the protective design of the bomber dispatch center in London? Ridiculous thought ! But fun to think it: the Palace made to survive the war in order to facilitate the trial of the warmakers!...No, the Palace’s survival was plain luck.

  Before the war. he learned, the Palace of Justice had served as the regional German appellate court. The glitter of other days shone through the distracting shabbiness of its current appearance and the disorder of internal arrangements. Boxes of olive green file cabinets piled high against one wall; clerks, military and civilian, clustered about improvised work surfaces, some of them great, massive wood desks, others, mere card tables joined together; a dozen typewriters clacking away metallically. The identical sound, he thought, he’d have heard if what was being typed out were names of passengers to be boarded onto the next death train.

  On down through the long hall they walked, emptying into a narrower corridor with enclosed offices on the right. Deposited by the sergeant at a waiting room, Sebastian was motioned to sit on the plain wood banquette that made its L-shaped way around what had most recently been a picnic lunch. There was plenty on the table left over.

  Sebastian awaited a summons from a Captain Carver, who was to be his boss. He hadn’t eaten since the coffee and roll at the railroad station, what seemed many hours ago. Seated, his instinct from his year in the infantry moved him: Take every opportunity you have . To sleep, to cat, to piss. He plunked two slabs of cheese on a slice of bread and slapped a second slice over it. A mouthful of sandwich was in his mouth when he heard the voice to one side.

  “You Reinhard?”

  Sebastian turned to the tall figure, the collar of his shirt open, but the double silver bars of an army captain plainly visible.

  “Yes sir,” he managed to say.

  “Finish your sandwich.”

  The captain, a man in his thirties with angular features and traces of blond in his hair, sat down on the banquette at the other end, leaned back against the wall, and raised his long legs, stretching them almost to where Sebastian was sitting.

  “It’s been a long day. Every day is a long day. You’ll find out. I’ve looked at your dossier. Your German is red-hot, it says. That’s good. We’ll be relying on that when we visit our targets” — he motioned to the east, the prisoner wing. “You want to know anything about me?”

  Sebastian smiled “Sure, Captain.”

  “I graduated from the law school at the University of Wisconsin in 1935, was nicely settled, practicing in Sheboygan when a world war broke out. My wife and two kids are still there. I was drafted, commissioned, and sent to practice law in the JAG. I was an army prosecutor in London and then in France in 1944. You’ll hear about it from somebody else if I don’t tell you myself, so I may as well do it: I was the prosecutor at the trial of Private Slovik. The only U.S. soldier ever executed for cowardice. Now I’m here to help string up some people on the other side. You married?”

  “No sir.”

  “You been briefed on the do’s and no-can-do’s here?”

  “I got a mimeographed sheet when I checked in. I haven’t had a chance to read it very carefully” — he pointed to his satchel where he had stuffed the folder.

  “Well, let me see, where to begin?...There’s no fraternizing permitted. There should be another word for what you can’t do. We can use a little French — do not cherchez la femme . I don’t speak three words of German. But you get the idea?”

  Sebastian nodded.

  “And don’t get caught up in the black market. They’d kill for dollars out there,” he waved his finger in a circle to denote the city outside “And probably would, if they could get away with it, now that they’ve had to stop shooting at us from trenches. Go ahead with the cheese.” Captain Carver liked Sebastian’s smile — boyish — why not? What would one expect in a nineteen-year-old? But he thought he saw some cunning there. Captain Carver was himself cunning. Was Sebastian wondering how he’d ever get time enough, away from prosecutorial duties to give chase to other quarry? “You finished eating? Come on into my office.”

  It was small. The large table was covered with folders marked in green ink. Sebastian sat on the proffered chair and looked over at the wall.

  “Looking for my law library? Well, let me tell you something. ‘There is no library for what we’re up to. I mean, the IMT — that’s the International Military Tribunal — is something brand new . This is September 8th? Exactly one month ago, in London, the Four Power people signed what’s called the London Agreement. It included a charter for an International Military Tribunal and an agreement on general procedures. Our people and the Brits, once we got around the suggestion — Churchill was for it — that we just line up the bastards on a convenient wall and shoot them — insisted it should be a trial. A trial as in common law. Indictments, witnesses, defense counsel, et cetera, et cetera. The French wanted to use the Napoleonic approach — they’re guilty and then you hear them out. The Russians, they wanted a show-trial — you know, a Soviet specialty.” He interrupted himself. “Come to thank of it, maybe you don’t know. Why should you know! Do you know anything about Soviet history? Soviet practices? Not that you have to know about these things, actually, in connection with what you have to do — ”

  “My grandmother — she was Austrian — was — is — very anti-Communist. My mother and I got quite an orientation from her. She — she defended the early Hitler on that account.”

  “What account?”

  “Going after the Communists.”

  “Yes, well. Our Fuehrer persecuted the Communists, then made love to them in August 1939, just in time to give him eastern cover so he could invade Poland. And proceed to give half of it to the Communists. Then he decided in June ’41 that the Wehrmacht needed a little more exercise. They hadn’t conquered a new-country for one whole year. So he celebrates the victory over France by invading Russia.” George Carver paused reflectively. “‘That was a heap big mistake for Hitler.”

  Sebastian smiled at the understatement. Carver returned to his own half smile through clenched teeth. “Amazing thing, these dictators, how dumb they can be. So in June 1941 Hitler invades Russia. Four years later he shoots himself . In between there are maybe...forty million people killed. About six million of them by direct — no, indirect — that point will have to be probed in our proceedings — indirect orders from Hitler.”

  “You mean, they’re doubting Hitler gave the marching orders?”

  “No, no, hardly any doubt on that point. Only Hitler gave marching orders, marching orders to the army. What we don’t know for sure is whether he gave the holocaust orders, as they’re calling them, directly.

  “But anyway, back to my minibriefing. So the London Agreement set up what we’re engaged in right now. The Russians wanted to get maximum juice out of the war criminal business. They actually suggested trying the Nazis individually !” The lawyer from Sheboygan, Wisconsin, laughed. “Robert Jackson — Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson — he’s our boss, chief prosecutor — had to use baby talk (I got this from a J. D. Simon, who was actually taking notes) to explain to the Russian general that there is no way you can have individual trials of ten thousand people, or whatever the number is going to turn out to be. So they got together and decided on twenty-four big-name defendants. And you, Lieutenant, you’ll get to know at least one of them very well . So will I. So, eventually, will the four judges.”


  There was pounding on the door.

  “Come in.”

  The door opened. “Captain Carver! Ley is dead .”

  “Robert Ley dead ?” Carver shot upright, lurched forward, and grabbed the corporal by the shoulders. “Dead? Whaddaya mean dead?”

  The corporal stepped back. “He hanged himself. Just behind the toilet. Just out of view of the guard. Sir, Colonel Andrus is going crazy. He’s got armed guards going into each cell, searching every...”

  “Cavity?”

  “Yes sir. There’s gonna be new, tough regulations going into effect — I heard Lieutenant Warfel say — effective tomorrow. Maybe even effective tonight. I knew you had a special interest in that prisoner — ”

  “Yes, I did, Corporal. Thanks.”

  The corporal left. There was silence. Carver walked to a shelf at one end of the room and pointed to folders stretching a quarter of the way across the wall. “And I hadn’t actually finished with him. But I probably got to know more about that sonofabitch than — he was the head of the Deutsche Arbeiter Front — that’s the German Labor Front...” Carver stopped and turned his head to the folders. “Herr Ley had thirty million workers doing what he told them to do, including killing each other.” He stared vacantly at the files.

  He resumed in quieter tones. “I was saying, I guess I know more about him than any ten other people combined. The one hundred first Airborne picked him up less than a week after the Nazis surrendered. He was hiding in a log cabin — guess where? Like three miles from the sacrosanct Berchtesgaden. The Fuehrer’s sacred mountain hideout.”

  “When did he become one of the most-wanted twenty-four?”

  “In London. He was on everybody’s list of top twenty Nazis, number four on the British list. Oh shit. I was looking forward to that one, really looking forward to taking him on. You figure — I know you’re thinking this — what the hell, you figure he’s dead anyway? That’s not the point of this exercise . We want to make a legal case for hanging them. They’d probably all gladly shoot themselves if we passed out revolvers. The point is we should shoot them. There’s a difference between suicide and an execution . And another critical difference , the difference between shooting them and hanging them. Shooting is what you do to, well, bank robbers.”