Nuremberg

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  *

  Sebastian waited outside the audio booth. In his briefcase were two folders he’d reread the night before, in anticipation of his meeting with Amadeus.

  Albright didn’t show up until 0925. He greeted Sebastian cheerily and accosted the combination lock outside the booth. “Come on in. But don’t talk to me until I do my checklist.”

  Facing them was a long switchboard with plugs and toggle switches and sockets. Albright put on his earphones and tested the connections, one after another. He got on the intercom with the lighting engineer in the booth next door. “You set for the session coming up, Jim?” Sebastian saw him nod at the reply. “Okay. I’ve got my hands on the screen’s sound amplifier. The narrative is in English and we’ll play the sound good and loud. The interpreters’ stations all check out.”

  He put down the headphones. It was 0945. Through the glass overview window they had a clear view of the courtroom. On the far left was the door the judges would file through. Immediately in front of the judges were the secretaries’ tables. Their job was to come up with whatever documents were requested by the bench. Behind them sat the bank of stenographers accommodating three languages. To their right, the lectern from which the master of ceremonies would officiate. Behind the lectern, in a longitudinal row, the prosecutors’ tables, French, Soviet, American, and, closest to the judges’ row, British. Behind the prosecutors was the press row, which ran from wall to wall. The VIP spectator gallery began behind the press, and at the far end of it, on the judges’ end, the elevated platform for the movie projector. The projection would be on a screen at the end of the courtroom, opposite, above the witness stand. The defendants would be looking left to view it, the judges, looking right.

  The view of the courtroom from the sound cockpit was not complete. Albright had to imagine the rightmost six rows of spectator seats. But, looking down, he could see the two tables at which the defense counsel sat. Sebastian had a clear view of the defendants themselves.

  “Harry, you got any binoculars here? I’d like to train them on Amadeus.”

  “Yup.” He reached into a drawer. “Now listen, Sebastian. We’ve got a few minutes. And the judges are always late, anyway. The prisoners will be seated on time. Everybody else will be a little late. And the judges, I guarantee you , won’t come on in till 1010.”

  He leaned forward. “I’ve been thinking about the Grand Hotel problem and I have an idea. I’ve found two rooms. Actually, three rooms, counting the cellar. Kind of messy, they need a little fine tuning.”

  “Is there a third party?”

  “Well, yes. And she is the love of my life. She’ll be the love of your life, too, if you go along. If we quit the Grand, we get the GI housing allowance, which is fifty-five bucks per month, each. My lady will let us have the two rooms for fifty bucks. That’s for both rooms. We clear sixty bucks! And we can plow a part of that into making the rooms, well — more comfortable. Fancier. Now when you see them — ”

  But the defendants were now filing in. Amadeus occupied his regular seat, third from the far right, first row. Directly on his right, Ribbentrop. On Ribbentrop’s right, Goering. On Amadeus’s left, Hans Frank. To Frank’s left, Albert Speer.

  Albright donned his earphones and leaned over to the microphone. He flicked a toggle switch and spoke to a fellow technician. “Judges lined up ready to go?...We’re going to be on time today? Well, not quite.” He motioned to Sebastian to put on his earphones. He reached over and flicked a switch: Now Sebastian was hearing what everyone in the courtroom heard. The silence was immediate when the marshal banged down his gavel and called out, “ Rise for the honorable judges .”

  After the judges had sat down, attention focused on Navy Commander James Donovan, standing at the lectern.

  “May it please the tribunal,” he began, “I refer to document number 2430 PS. It is a motion picture. It is labeled ‘Nazi Concentration Camps.’ It was compiled from motion pictures taken by Allied military photographers as the armies in the west liberated areas in which these camps were located.”

  Commander Donovan informed the court that the documentary had been assembled at the direction of General Eisenhower, and that the production of the film had been done by Ceorge Stevens. “He is, gentlemen, a leading director in Hollywood. When the film was made, he was serving as a lieutenant colonel in the army.”

  Donovan was ready. He pointed a finger up to the lighting booth adjacent to Albright, and then to the projection room.

  All the lights dimmed except for those that shone down on the defendants. Colonel Andrus had vetoed turning these off. “Security,” was all he had to say.

  The projector’s beam shone across the room and lit up the screen. And then, for over sixty-five minutes, they saw it all. GIs, wearing gas masks to protect themselves from the stench, maneuvering around bodies stacked like cordwood. An American navy lieutenant, identified as having been captured on an OSS mission behind the lines, described the Mauthausen extermination camp being shown on screen. There were shots of prisoners lugging huge stones out of a quarry on their backs. “Many of these died from exhaustion,” Prosecutor Dodd recounted as he provided the live voice-over. He explained that SS guards would sometimes divert themselves by seizing a prisoner and pushing him back to the bottom of the quarry. He would struggle to climb out again, but often failed, and was there the next day, if not dead, in agony. There were bulldozers shoving moon-white corpses into mass graves. On and on: butchery, torture, starvation, studied dehumanization.

  And the screen went black.

  Sebastian trained the binoculars on the face of Amadeus. His face was without expression, but his mouth was partly open, as if in wonder. Goering, on his right, appeared bored, and put his hand over his forehead, as if to help him pierce the darkness in front and on his right. The interval was only a few seconds. Commander Donovan then showed snatches of film taken from files hidden by the Nazis but unearthed by an OSS team. At a camp near Leipzig, 200 prisoners were seen being herded into a barn. SS men doused the building with gasoline and set it afire. A few prisoners who had worked their way out of the building were mowed down by machine guns.

  Almost two hours had gone by. The marshal banged down the gavel, calling an end to the morning session.

  There were no sounds from the defendants, who filed their way out of the room silently. There were no sounds from press or spectators for a period of almost a minute. Then Sebastian could hear the general murmur of horror, and a ululation from someone in the spectators’ gallery. He turned his binoculars to the right and spotted the woman, shoulders shaking, a handkerchief held to her mouth.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  January 1946

  Sebastian was led down the cell corridor. He had never before set foot in the prison compound. He and the Master Sergeant walked by four cells, in which Kaltenbrunner, Keitel, Jodl, and Seyss-Inquart could be seen through the broad slits in the doors. Having returned from the afternoon sessions, they were seen leaning over their prim desks, two of them, stubby pencils in hand (pens were not permitted — they could be instruments of suicide), two of them reading. Sebastian hadn’t taken in the afternoon session but he had got a grisly briefing about it over the phone from Albright. Harry reported that there had been a legal argument, yet again, over the documentary films shown in the morning. Goering’s defense counsel, Otto Stahmer, argued that having now seen the films, he could say with authority what in his pleadings on Friday he had only been able to surmise, namely that the scenes portrayed had no bearing on the allegations being made against his client. They were designed merely — “I’m quoting his words here, I jotted them down — ‘merely to stimulate appetites of undifferentiated revenge.’” Albright went on, “Then Stahmer said that if the victorious powers were to bring into court those individuals shown that morning engaging in such barbaric activity, quote, ‘Who would raise a hand in protest against prosecuting them?’ Nice try, the son of a bitch. All that slaughter and filth, but the Reichsmarschal
l had nothing to do with it, no responsibility for it — ”

  “Was Amadeus Junior one of the defense attorneys who spoke up?”

  “Yes, actually. His maiden appearance. He began reading what he identified as a monograph by Immanuel Kant — that’s Immanuel K-a-n-t — on the nature of guilt. After about three minutes of Lord Lawrence gaveling him down, the marshal actually approached him on the stand and whispered to him to shut up.”

  “Did he say anything about Amadeus directly?”

  “No. Just the obligatory opening lines about whom he represented.”

  “Did you catch the expression on the face of...Amadeus Senior, when Junior was speaking?”

  “Actually I did look down at him, thinking you’d ask. He seemed to be pleased, kind of puffed up. Probably just biological pride — twenty-seven-year-old kid brother with eight movie cameras on him, plus four luminary judges, plus the entire surviving first rank of the Third Reich. You know something, Sebastian? I wouldn’t mind giving a speech in that theater.”

  “Oh? What would you say?”

  Harry’s voice came over now in a different pitch. “I think I’d talk about my father’s mosaic studio. How he’d stare down at twenty-seven different colors of blue until he found the one he thought was just right.”

  “What does that have to do with sticking 200 prisoners in a barn and setting it on fire?”

  “It has to do with different approaches to life. Do I really have to explain that to you? Jerk.”

  “No, Harry. You don’t. But I’m not sure it’s something I’m going to be able to bring up at 1600 in my audience of just one defendant.”

  “And one non-German-speaking guard.”

  “And two guards, actually. I’m told one guard will enter the cell with me, and the regular outside guard will be at his post, looking in through the cell door.”

  “Well, good luck, Sebby. I’ll meet you at the Grand, 1800, and we’ll walk over to 301 Musikerstrasse and you can see what great new quarters you’ll have after the Grand kicks us out.”

  “How far is it?”

  “A few blocks.”

  “A few how many blocks?”

  “Figure ten, twelve.”

  “Give us a little exercise.”

  “Good for you, exercise. Those poor, poor...cocksuckers in the prison get only two up-and-downs in their courtyard, once a day.”

  “That’s really terrible, Harry. Isn’t it.”

  “Poor darlings.”

  “Poor darlings.” Sebastian spat into the wastebasket.

  *

  The master sergeant opened the cell door. An accompanying soldier brought in an upright wooden chair. Prison rules allowed only a single chair for defendants, withdrawn at night-chairs, after all, could be dismembered to create weapons. Amadeus moved his own chair back, placing it directly by the pillow of his bed. Sebastian’s chair was placed opposite, next to the recessed toilet and sink.

  The sergeant turned to Sebastian. “Whenever you want, sir, just nod to the guard outside and we’ll open up for you.” To the guard remaining in the cell he said simply: “You can lean back against the wall there, Bradford.” He pointed to the opposite windowless wall.

  Sebastian sat down and withdrew his steno pad from his briefcase, though remembering Carvers counsel to go easy on notetaking.

  “Why do you need a pad of paper to write on?”

  “I don’t, Herr Amadeus — ”

  “Lieutenant, would it derange you to call me General Amadeus? No one else here,” he pointed to one, then the other guard, “knows any German, so they would not notice your breach of prison protocol.”

  Sebastian’s mouth opened slightly. What to do? Violate the prison rules because no one would notice? Would he be rejecting the operative principles of Colonel Andrus and the prison commission if he used the prisoner’s title? If he did so, would that suggest that he was privately out of sympathy with standing formalities? The rules were, after all, appropriate to the treatment of war criminals. On the other hand — isn’t it enough just to hang the guy?

  “ — the reason for the pad, General Amadeus, is that you may be bringing up something which I’d want to relay accurately to my superior — ”

  “Ah, your superior. I understand such language. I was taught to acknowledge my superiors the day I entered service with the SS. I went to the SS — but you will recall this from our interrogatory sessions — after a dispirited year teaching architecture — ”

  Sebastian thought to act other than merely as a human recording device. “Why dispirited , General?”

  Amadeus brightened at the prospect of a colloquy, instead of one more interrogation. “Because in 1932 all of Germany was dispirited. My father died from wounds in the war our Kaiser gave up on, which the victorious powders at Versailles transformed into a deep territorial humiliation. How would you feel if after a war you were required to give up the whole of the western United States?”

  Amadeus actually waited for an answer.

  “Not good, General.”

  “I had used up my mother’s pension paying for architecture school and even there, in the work of our teachers and our most esteemed architects, I could see that demoralization. They tried to make up for it by a massiveness of architectural design. I saw that, and didn’t approve of it aesthetically, but at the same time I was attracted by the idea of a massive national recovery. So when Herr Speer suggested I give up architecture and go to the SS, I found the idea appealing, and then the experience itself, bracing. Spiritually bracing. Are you a Christian?”

  “Yes. My father was a Lutheran, and I studied the Lutheran catechism.”

  “Ah! Martin Luther had some pretty good ideas. About the Jews.”

  “They didn’t teach us Luther’s position on Jews.”

  “No, they wouldn’t. The Jews would not like that, not permit that.”

  “General, in America, Jews do not dictate Christian dogma.”

  “The Jews never appear to be dictating anything, except interest terms on their usurious loans.”

  “General, is that what you wanted to talk to me about? Jewish influence?”

  Amadeus looked over at the young, brown-haired lieutenant with the quick tongue and an informal manner he had never seen in a German of that age. “No. But my wish is to engage in a general conversation, so that I can decide whether to alter my plea of not guilty.”

  “And you feel you need to talk about so-called Jewish influence in order to do that?”

  “Clearly. There had to be a reason for the Fuehrer to single out the Jews.”

  Sebastian made no comment.

  “You do realize, do you not, Lieutenant Reinhard — a fine name that, Reinhard. A good German name. I have known Reinhards — that what this exercise is all about is Jewish revenge? As Reichsmarschall Goering said in the interview published in July, just before we all got here, all the other lines of legal argument are barren. All of them. Aggressive war? Every country engages in it. Have you ever been in the Southwest of your own country?”

  “Yes. I went from Hamburg to Arizona. That is my home.”

  “And how did America inherit Arizona? But then, the whole business of adherence to conventions on warfare — I wonder whether George Friedrich will succeed in calling as witnesses some of your submarine commanders who let the crews of stricken Japanese merchant ships drown or be eaten by sharks? No. But all of that is the high price of modern warfare. The most eloquent witness to your idea of legitimate warfare would be a survivor of Hiroshima, except I don’t think there is such a person.”

  “General, I’m not a lawyer. But I don’t have to be a lawyer to see the difference between a Hiroshima bomb and an elimination camp. Like Joni.”

  “Well, of course, I see your perspective. But perhaps you will see my perspective — ”

  Sebastian bit his lip. “We saw your perspective,” he said, “in the films shown this morning.”

  “Yes. They were quite terrible, quite bad. There are unruly peo
ple in the world, including many among the ranks of soldiers. Would you expect any of the defendants to excuse what was shown today?”

  “I can’t see that it would matter — to many of them. Herr Goering — ”

  “Reichsmarschall Goering — ”

  “No. I will do it for you, but I see no need to do it for anybody else.” Sebastian was emboldened to go further. “I would not refer to Hitler as Fuehrer.”

  Amadeus winced. Then, “You are refusing to give concentrated attention to my point, which is that the so-called war crimes trial is a Jewish extravaganza designed to exact revenge. What is your comment about that?”

  “Well, General, I guess my comment would be: If that’s so, why not? The Jews have a lot to avenge.”

  “But then why all these legal formalities? Here I am, trying to decide whether to change my plea. You should know this, Lieutenant, that my innocent little brother is — a Christian. That small ornament on his tie is a cross. It was he who told me to consider changing my plea. To tell you the truth, I had not considered doing anything of the sort. But in conversations with my brother, I suddenly found myself thinking: Well, just as I had a perspective, the perspective that led me to follow gladly and devotedly the perspectives of my Fuehrer, perhaps I ought to try to understand other perspectives, like yours, and my brother’s, and the abominable Justice Jackson — is he by any chance Jewish? I am good at discerning Jewish appearances. Perhaps he is only a half-breed.”

  “What is a half-breed?”

  Amadeus seemed surprised. “You have not seen the minutes of the Wannsee Conference?”

  “No.”

  “That is strange.” He leaned his well-shaped head back, raised his eyebrows, and adopted a didactic tone of voice. “My brother was given a copy, though I have not heard it discussed yet in the proceedings. That is the conference of German officials at which the final solution to the Jewish problem was resolved upon. It was held in January — sometime in January — 1942. Some definitions were set down. A Jew who is married to a non-Jew and has a child creates a half-breed. That is, a Half-Breed First Degree. A Half-Breed Second Degree is the ensuing generation. What, by a different nomenclature, might be called a ‘Quarter-Jew.’”