Nuremberg

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  “Just a little.”

  “Well add to that little this: Robert Jackson is a hell of an eloquent guy. He has a terrific advantage over lawyers — like me. He didn’t go to law school, so they never had a chance to teach him how not to write. He writes plain English. Great English. English English. Anyway, he’ll be the opening gun.

  “As of yesterday Jackson hadn’t absolutely decided who to start in on, but almost certain!} it will be Hermann Goering. As far as the public is concerned, never mind the internal feuding, he was Nazi #2. We’ll go after him on all four counts.”

  Sebastian looked up.

  “You’re not familiar with the war crime counts?”

  “They weren’t in my folder. But I’m sure I can find them.”

  “It’s surprising they aren’t etched in stone outside the Palace.” Carver liked to stretch out his legs and brace his hands behind his full, blond-flecked hair. “We can move quickly past Counts One and Two — there’ll be time to study up on them when we get around to interrogating Hans Frank and Albert Speer — I didn’t draw any of the preliminary work on Goering. That’s Major Guinzburg who’s handling that. Nice touch — Guinzburg’s an observant Jew.” Carver changed his voice, rendering his idea of a New York accent. ‘No questioning today , Reichsfuehrer . It’s Saturday . ’ Anyway, we’ll have Goering up on all four counts . Count One is conspiracy to wage wars of aggression , Count Two is crimes against peace . What Count Two really amounts to is the activation of Count One. You plan Count One, you do Count Two. That’s the simplest way to put it, get it?”

  Sebastian nodded his head and made a note.

  “But let’s get on to Amadeus. What a name! Maybe he’s a descendant of Mozart. Music’s gotten worse ever since Mozart, maybe there’s a biological reason for that. Yes, then there’s the other two counts.”

  Captain Carver let down his legs and picked a sheet of paper from a folder. “They’re only one sentence each. ‘Count Three: War Crimes ; particularly those crimes involving the maltreatment of prisoners of war in breach of international agreements . ’ No problem there, where Amadeus is concerned. Did the material you went over give the number of Russian POWs gassed at Joni?”

  “No. But the resumes I read seemed to agree on two hundred fifty thousand.”

  “That’s smelly. Has the sound of convenience. Too round a number.”

  “Yes sir. But there are a couple of affidavits here that say that General Amadeus worked hard to meet his quota — to kill the people who were sent in — but that he gave orders to his staff not to exaggerate his — Camp Joni’s — record in the reports sent in to Himmler.”

  Carver snarled. “There’s a strain of real integrity there. ‘ I won’t report killing two hundred fifty - five thousand people when I’ve only really killed two hundred fifty thousand’ But how many of the victims were prisoners of war?”

  “On that point there’s confusion. We have records of shipments from the eastern front in 1945 and 1944. I’d think forty thousand Russian prisoners going through Joni would be right, according to what I’ve read. Most of the POWs were sidetracked to Auschwitz. What we don’t know is how many of those forty thousand actually arrived at Joni. A lot died en route. But one Russian interrogator got to one of the SS guards in charge of the gas section who said his records showed over twenty-two thousand POWs. No way to verify that, on the other hand. The Russians hanged that guy.”

  “Okay. Give me a memo using the round number. Write, ‘in excess of twenty thousand.’ We’ll see how Amadeus reacts to that.”

  “The memos I prepare for you — are they supposed to be clipped onto the affidavits?”

  “Put them in a marked, separate folder. You want a Coke?” Without waiting for an answer, Carver rang his corporal to bring two Coca-Colas.

  “So we’ve got Count Three in our sights, we move on to Count Four.

  “‘Count Four: Crimes Against Humanity ; such as murder , extermination , enslavement , deportation , and other inhumane acts against civilian populations . ’ There certainly is no problem there, right?”

  Sebastian nodded but didn’t look up from his note-taking.

  Carver went on. “‘Murder,’ yes. Though we may run into problems of definition here. Stick somebody into a gas oven, are you murdering him, exactly? Or just exterminating him? We don’t want Amadeus wasting a lot of time with that kind of thing. So much for murder. Enslavement. I’ll have to decide whether to recommend to Colonel Amen that we also go for enslavement. You’ve got the names of survivors?”

  “Some. According to the wrap-up account by the Russian captain, I guess those who were able to walk left as the camp was burning down. Most were too sick. They waited a few hours, and then the Russians arrived.”

  “What is the longest time any of the survivors actually spent at Joni?”

  “Three of them had been there when it opened. That means from April 1943 to liberation day, February 1945: twenty-two months.”

  “How come they were still alive?”

  “Doesn’t say.”

  “I’ll think about that. We can certainly call that enslavement, twenty-two months. But extermination is our big deal. How do you say extermination in German?”

  “ Vernichtung .”

  “Is there a euphemism for extermination?”

  “No. They use Vernichtung . Vernichtungslager is an extermination camp.”

  “He’s not going to try to fiddle with the word, I’d guess. The defense they’ll be using...There are two defenses. Amadeus won’t use the first. The first is what we call the tu quoque defense. You know about that?”

  Sebastian shook his head. “I know the Latin words, but not what they mean as a defense argument.”

  “The Latin comes in literally as, ‘And you, too . ’ We translate it, around the shop, as ‘ So’s your old man .’ They’ll be using that defense a lot, and that was anticipated at London. You know how they handled that problem?” He leaned his head back and grinned mischievously. “Well, they simply laid out the ruling that the court would not admit tu quoque , either as disqualifying, or mitigating. The Nazis will say: Sure, we and the British, and the French shot some prisoners! Well, so did the Russians .

  “We didn’t always rescue survivors from sub attacks? The Americans didn’t rescue survivors from sub attacks .

  “We engaged in imperialism? You people invented imperialism .

  “We singled out the Jews? Americans singled out the Indians .

  “The court, as I said, by its charter is instructed not to acknowledge that category of arguments, though that doesn’t mean they’re useless. The press will play them up. And the legal gang will, too, the people who say we are making ex post facto laws. Between you and me, I think that’s formally correct. But from another perspective, we are enlarging the compass of the law.”

  “We do have the problem of having a Soviet judge on the tribunal, right, Captain?”

  Carver looked hard at Sebastian. “I asked you a couple of days ago, on the Communist business — leave it alone. You sounded pretty well informed on Soviet practices.”

  “Captain, it wasn’t just my grandmother who told me about the Communists. I’ve read Time magazine since 1940, and that was during the Hitler-Stalin pact. Everybody knows about Stalin and about his concentration camps and how they handle prisoners.”

  Carver wheeled his chair around. “Look. The only way we can get through this is just to eliminate from our minds the psychological problem of a Soviet judge participating in the tribunal. Just don’t think about it . All we need to think about — and to explicate — to the judges — and to the world — is what the defendants and their emissaries did . That’s it . Everything. Fuck tu quoque .

  “The big defense Amadeus and some of the others are going to use is: ‘We were only following orders.’ That is the tough one because there isn’t much precedent working for us. Our counter line is: Doing what you did was illegal . Germany was a partner to some treaties on the conduct of war. A
nd some acts were forbidden — ”

  His voice trailed off. “Anyway, at a purely documentary level, I’m going to be asking Amadeus to prove that he was instructed to do some of the things he did.”

  “Even though we know he was instructed to do them?”

  “Yes. I know. They weren’t capitalist entrepreneurs, these people. But a lot of them got into the spirit of the idea and went substantially on their own, acted on their own. You have accounts in your file, they’re in English — I remember from scanning the file — of executions, that kind of thing. Amadeus isn’t going to come up with orders from Himmler that instructed him to execute individual prisoners.”

  “I understand. Captain, how does the routine go, I mean, the interrogation?” He grinned. “Or do you want me to save that question for Chief Landers?”

  Carver laughed.

  “We’ll go to a room — which room, Landers will tell us — in the prisoner wing on Friday. Amadeus will be seated, his handcuffs removed. There’ll be two armed GIs, guards. I’ll be here” — he pointed opposite to his desk. “You’ll be there” — he moved his finger to the right. “A stenographer — when we want one — will be there.” He moved his finger to the left. “Then I ask a question. You put my question into German.

  “Amadeus answers in German.

  “You put that into English.

  “I ask the next question...Reinhard, have you ever taken part in a court martial?”

  Sebastian cocked his head slightly. “No, sir.”

  “I’ve done millions of them. But never before conducted any in a foreign language. I’m not looking forward to that.”

  He drew in breath deeply, and got up from his chair. Sebastian followed suit. Carver looked him in the eyes. Carver seemed burdened by the load of work and the tight schedule. Sebastian saw a hint of helplessness in his eyes.

  “I’ll try to help out, Captain.”

  George Carver stiffened up. His self-confidence was back.

  “I’ll be counting on you. Get back to the file. International Military Tribunal vs . Kurt Waldemar Amadeus . See you around, Sebastian.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Nuremberg , September 1945

  Sebastian and Harry met in the hotel lounge as they did every night. After a week or ten days they found themselves inched by the steward, who had taken on the responsibility of inducting Sebastian into the world of sherry, nearer and nearer to the bar. They were soon being treated like old patrons. And today they were seated right up by the bar, among the specially chosen.

  Harry Albright said he had had a hell of a day. “Hans Waldheim, the German specialist I told you about, is a terrific sound expert, but he wants to do things according to his own priorities. But Colonel Andrus has his priorities, and what Der Kommandant said to me was a) Albright, fix it so the judges — that’s eight people, Sebby, the four judges and four alternates — can hear the prosecutor in their own language, b) fix it so the defendants can hear in German what the prosecutor is saying. Then, c) fix it so there will be ten four-language earphones for the press, and forty three-language earphones for spectators. Odd figure, forty-three. But the colonel doesn’t explain things like that.

  “So my guy Hans has the diagrams made up and we go to work but — of course — there’s a shortage. This particular shortage is of language-switch units, and who do you think Hans gives priority to on the units we have on hand? The judges?”

  “No. Let me guess. The press?”

  “Not even that. The spectators . Well, so, I mean, it’ll all get done, even though the colonel has moved one target date forward, as you people know, to October 15th. There’s no way we can be ready by then. Thank god other enterprises are also behind, like even the carpentry for the trial room — hell, you people are behind, too, aren’t you?” Harry asked.

  “On my particular guy we haven’t even started, though I’ve done all the preparation. Tomorrows the big day.”

  “You get to lay eyes on Wolfgang Amadeus?”

  Sebastian pursed his lips. “Yes, he’s supposed to show up. I’ve seen four photographs of him, at different ages. His eyes are the same in all of them, sort of suspicious. He has a long face, long Aryan nose. Good-looking guy. You know — I think I told you — he’s only thirty-six years old.”

  “Fourteen years older than me,” Harry said.

  “He got off to an earlier start.”

  “Speaking of earlier starts, Sebby, what do you say we get out of this place? Seven straight dinners at the Grand Hotel is a lot of dinners at the Grand Hotel.”

  “You got any ideas?”

  “I’ve done a little asking around. I made only one stipulation: It had to be out of bounds and against regulations. Otherwise we’d find ourselves in a mini-Grand Hotel, and the grand Grand is better than a mini-Grand.”

  “Okay. Let’s go. But I got to watch it. Big deal tomorrow.”

  *

  They walked out of the hotel. It was the last day in summer, September 21. They strolled in the direction of the setting sun.

  “A year ago in London, eight months before V-E Day, they ended the official blackout,” Albright reminisced. “That was a big big day. Ending five years of blackouts.” He pointed down the darkening street. “When the twilight goes, it’ll look like a blackout here, electricity’s that rare.”

  Light still seeped through what seemed large peepholes in the devastated structures. A while ago, Sebastian reminded himself, this was an avenue of lights slowly being turned on as daylight diminished. But he had gotten used to the scarecrow profiles of the city. He had to think back on how things looked in cities that had escaped bombing. He thought with awe on the light galaxy in Manhattan the night before he sailed out.

  Albright stopped. “I got an idea. A place, Martas, near the Frauenkirche. I’ve been there. There’s a hole-in-the-wall there, a little food and canned music, then, later on, a live lady. Maybe not completely dressed. What I’m thinking is, Marta’s is over there on Konigstrasse and to get there we’d be walking up past the Palace entrance and around the wall in the direction of the prison compound. I got an itch to see the lights of — ”

  “The big guys?”

  “Yep. I’ve spent a lot of time with the wiring in what’s going to be the courtroom — you haven’t even seen it. They’re constructing a secure walkway from the defendant wing to the courtroom, so nobody can shoot at them while they’re moving the prisoners that — what? — fifty yards? I’m just curious to look at the toughest security building in history. Just want to see what lights, if any, make their way from inside the cells area out to the street.”

  They walked past the billets of the Palace guards and followed the walled perimeter of the old prison. They rounded the north end and found the twilight now gone. “We’ve got to walk all the way around to get to where they are. So? It will give us a little appetite.”

  Following the prison wall they could see the rubble-shattered road. They moved toward the bright streetlight at the southeastern point, at Bernstrasse.

  Albright stopped. His gaze turned slightly to the right. A dim light illuminated the easternmost point of the dark, two-story building.

  “Look over there. But you can’t make out the wire fence on the prisoner balcony — that’s hidden. I haven’t seen it but I’ve studied the electrical diagram. When they come out of their cells to go to their exercise walk or to their mess hall, the wire fence prevents them from committing suicide. Outside the actual cells there’s spotlights shining in on every one of them and one guard each peering in. Since Ley’s suicide they’re not even allowed to keep their hands under the sheets. So much for their love life.”

  “Those are luxury quarters compared to Joni.”

  “I guess these guys have one thing in common with the people dragged into Joni. They both wish somebody would fire a gun through the cell doors and just kill them.”

  “I wouldn’t guess it’s going to be all that clear-cut with all twenty-three of them,” Sebastian sa
id. “Some of them think they’ll be acquitted. Wonder which end of the building is housing my killer? Never mind, I’ll be seeing him soon enough. Harry, let’s get out of here. Let’s go to your Marta’s place.”

  Albright nodded and pointed the way north.

  *

  Marta’s was one capacious room in a building the top half of which had been destroyed. The windows in the bottom floor were blacked out. At the entrance, Marta’s father was stationed. Harry, having been to Marta’s once before, served now as guide. “You can’t mistake him,” Harry said, as, walking briskly, they approached the bar. “He’s bald, benevolent, and always has a beer in his hand.”

  His assignment, Harry explained, was to send out a signal if MPs came to the door. “There’s a bell at his fingertips. When he pushes it, a little alarm goes off at the bar. The stripper, if she’s on stage, takes shelter; the lights brighten and the volume of the music is turned down.”

  Twice, in the eight weeks since the bar opened, the MPs had come in, Marta told Harry. Their examination of the premises had been perfunctory. None of the military patrons (there were about twenty) were questioned.

  Standing at the bar with his beer and a big bowl of chips, Sebastian was himself now listening to Marta’s account of her good relations with the MPs. Sebastian recalled his Latin teacher and the distinction she taught her students between malum in se and malum prohibitum . Descending on Marta’s, the MPs coming in would sniff around for malum in se — a bar sheltering black markets or prostitutes peddling their venereal diseases. Not discerning any, they would conclude that what was going on at Marta’s was just a little bit of malum prohibitum — soldiers off-limits, but what the hell, go ahead and enjoy yourselves, just don’t create a civil disturbance.

  Sebastian and Harry sat at a small table they had to share with two Germans of middle age, already seated. The younger of the two addressed, in German, his beefy companion. He said jocularly, “I guess we’re going to be sharing the table with a couple of U.S. hangmen.”