Nuremberg

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Captain Guernsey made his way to Judge Parker and whispered an urgent request: Would he, at toastmaking time, now an hour overdue, please substitute for Justice Jackson? That would mean there’d be the required two U.S. toasts, Chief U.S. Judge Francis Biddle assuming the senior burden. Judge Parker told Captain Guernsey that the idea of toasting the Soviet revolution ran against the grain —

  “Sir, just say something nice about the Russian people, that’s all.”

  All right. There was no alternative.

  Other toastmakers worked their way around the problem of making a direct toast to the revolution of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. The British prosecutor, Maxwell Fyfe, spoke about the great deeds of the Red Army. Judge Biddle did a hymn to the Russian people, but left room for Judge Parkers ensuing reference to the Russian civilians who had faced such arduous years.

  The wit and grace of deputy French prosecutor Dubost itself became a toast. He ended his speech by saying: “ La France est connue comme le pays de la revolution . Nous pouvons l’avouer sans rougir. ” Interpreters were busy explaining the pun to the Russians. Monsieur Dubost had said that the French were historically the country of revolution and therefore could hail the Russian revolution without any need to blush — rougir (turn “Red”). Judge Parker was glad to get home. He marveled at the Russian host at his own table who, in the course of the evening, consummated a total of twenty-five toasts.

  But a month later it wasn’t a ritual national feast day, it was a special visit to Nuremberg by the Soviet Deputy Foreign Minister and delegate to the United Nations, the sinister Andrei Vishinsky. This terrible man had presided over Stalin’s show trials before the war, a close study of which had generated the report of the commission headed by U.S. philosopher John Dewey, exposing the Soviet trials as bloody frauds. Judge Parker’s adult life had been devoted to the integrity of the judiciary, and it had especially offended him, in 1939, that what amounted to political executions had been presented to the public as judicial exercises.

  Parker knew that Jackson was committed to acting out the resolutions of the London Conference by the simple expedient of ignoring Soviet crimes against humanity. But, riding in the car on their way to the party, he now confided to his senior colleague, Francis Biddle, that he thought it quite unnecessary that a reception for the infamous Vishinsky should be hosted by the American prosecutor.

  “Oh well,” Biddle said, “these things happen. Nothing of notice will get said.”

  But something of notice most definitely had been said, as it turned out. The antecedent toasts at this Nuremberg party had been what had become routine — glasses lifted to the ideals of justice for war criminals, on which objective the guests could routinely agree. But the toast by Vishinsky turned out to be much more. “I propose a toast to the defendants,” he said, and waited as, glasses in hand, the guests also waited: “ May their paths lead straight from the courthouse to the grave. ”

  Judge Parker put down his glass and stared hard at Biddle. This was judicial infamy.

  That night he wrote to his wife in North Carolina and told her about the evening. “I hope to heaven Vishinsky’s toast is not reported to the press. The indifference to it — by Biddle, by Jackson, by just about everybody — dramatizes the relativist overlay of Nuremberg. I think we are doing, here, the right thing, but we find ourselves accessories to a great imposture — the Soviets as qualified judges of the behavior of other countries’ war crimes! I’m not sure I’m glad I accepted this assignment.”

  But the next day, having thought about the whole picture, Parker was dutifully at his station, sitting alongside the four principal judges and the three other alternate judges as the prosecutor recounted the history of Camp Joni.

  Listening to the evidence, Judge Parker renewed his private conviction that such as Amadeus should go straight from the courthouse to the grave. Though he must of course be willing, as a matter of judicial rectitude, to listen to the defense of Amadeus, undertaken — in this case — by his brother. The young Amadeus struggled to do his duty, and indeed, to serve as his brother’s keeper.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  March 1946

  Sebastian didn’t need to be prompted by Harry Albright. He was there at the sound control booth promptly on the morning of March 8. Hermann Goering versus Robert Jackson. Nazi Germany versus the Allied Powers.

  Jackson came in high on the wings of his soaring declamation at the outset of the prosecution’s case: “ The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated , so malignant , and so devastating , that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored , because it cannot survive their being repeated. ” His antagonist, Hermann Goering, had matter-of-factly assumed the role of Nazi successor; the primary living representative of the Third Reich.

  And of course Goering, at the outset of the trial, had pleaded not guilty. Goering, by his own accounting, was therefore:

  — Not guilty of plotting with others to wage wars of aggression;

  — Not guilty of initiating and waging wars of aggression;

  — Not guilty of war crimes involving the maltreatment of prisoners of war;

  — Not guilty of crimes against humanity;

  — Not guilty or responsible for murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation.

  “Of course.” Sebastian ventured to Albright as he was conducting his sound checks, “we’ve had witnesses and documentaries for four months that establish all of those things about Goering.”

  “Yes,” Albright said, “ — no, you got full volume on right now, Giovanni .” He reached over and slightly rotated a dial at the far end of the control panel. “ That any better ?” he asked the operative by the interpreters’ stand. “ Gut . Sure those documents are there and have been displayed, and everybody knows what’s in them, and if you work backward, Sebby, you have six million dead Jews — somebody had to kill them, and that seems to me a Count-Four crime, pure and simple. And you had aggressive wars — Poland and Norway didn’t invade Germany — Count Two. To initiate an aggressive war you obviously have to conspire to wage it, because paratroopers do not materialize from overhanging clouds the minute the chief of state decides to invade a country, so there you have Count One. What did I forget?”

  “Count Three. Go twiddle your dials, Harry. You’re forgetting important things. Count Three is war crimes — ”

  “ — yeah. Hold on.” He leaned into the microphone. “I got you . They’re all miked in now.” To Harry he said the judges were on their way. Almost immediately, Sebastian saw them filing in.

  A minute later, Goering was on the stand. Sallow, after the loss of fifty pounds, his neck loose in his shirt collar, his prison uniform droopy, he was nevertheless, in manner, always imperious. Robert Jackson, middle-sized, middle-weight, his hair still a youthful brown, his eyeglasses tilting just slightly down on his nose, looked determined, his eyes focused sharply on his prey.

  *

  Jackson’s opening question was the subject of a hundred conversations that night at the Palace, in the Grand Hotel, and in pressrooms at Nuremberg, Chicago, and Sydney.

  “You are perhaps aware that you are the only man living who can expound to us the true purposes of the Nazi Party and the inner workings of its leadership?”

  Goering ate that up. “I am perfectly aw are of that.”

  A wrong psychological note had been struck. After four months’ increasingly fulsome display of materials reviewed and testimony heard, the chief prosecutor seemed to be saying that only a confirmation of the case against the Nazis by Hermann Goering would suffice to establish the criminal nature of the Nazi enterprise.

  It got worse. Within what seemed like mere minutes, Goering’s dialectical prowess had apparently unsettled Jackson. He found himself asking Goering about practices in the early days of the concentration camps when Goering exercised direct authority over them. Jackson’s question baffled everybody: “Was it also necessary in operating this [concentration camp] system, that you
must not have persons entitled to public trials in independent courts? And you immediately issued an order that your political police would not be subject to court review or to court orders, did you not?” As Goering attempted to decipher the question, Jackson cut him off, demanding a simple yes or no.

  Assistant prosecutor Telford Taylor would later remark that the question obviously could not be answered yes or no, requiring as it did an explication of several issues. Were all arrestees barred from public trials? Were all camp inmates so barred? If so, was it “necessary” that they should be? What orders did Goering actually issue, and for what reasons?

  But the most humiliating point came when, discussing prewar events on the Nazi calendar, Jackson asked whether the German remilitarization of the Rhineland on March 7, 1936, had been planned long in advance.

  Goering replied, “At most, two to three weeks.”

  Whereupon Jackson triumphantly produced the record of a meeting of the Reich Defense Council on June 26, 1935, a full ten months before the Rhineland question, which called for “preparation for the liberation of the Rhine.”

  Goering commented languidly that the wording Jackson had used, “the liberation of the Rhine,” was odd, inasmuch as the German words spoke of the “ clearing of the Rhine .” The document, Goering explained with mock patience, said nothing at all about militarizing the Rhineland . And “the Rhine” — he spoke as though to a schoolboy — is the river running through the Rhineland and yes, at that conference the need to keep the river clear was discussed. Basic directions had been given for military mobilization in the event that war should break out at some point in the future ; rudimentary strategic safeguards.

  Jackson attempted recovery. “The preparations you speak of were of a character which had to be kept entirely secret from foreign powers — ”

  “Yes” Goering said. “I do not think I can recall reading beforehand the publication of mobilization preparations of the United States.”

  Jackson called on the court to rebuke Goering’s words as irrelevant and tendentious and evasive. Lord Lawrence agreed that Goering’s reference to American mobilization plans was “irrelevant,” and that his answer ought not to have been made. But he quietly rejected Jackson’s appeal to forbid Goering from answering questions put to him in such language as Goering elected to use.

  Jackson would not give up ground. He suggested that the tribunal’s latitudinarian rulings had the effect of permitting the defense to run away with the trial. He went so far as to say that the court should be aware that “outside of this courtroom is a great social question of the revival of Nazism, and that one of the purposes of the defendant Goering — I think he would be the first to admit — is to revive and perpetuate it by propaganda from this trial now in process.”

  Goering’s defense counsel rose to his feet in surprise and indignation.

  Sophisticated observers were flabbergasted at the very suggestion that the revival of Nazism could be thought an objective of Hermann Goering, at trial in a clearly hopeless attempt to prove himself not guilty of myriad acts in which he had been shown complicit. “Even physically,” commented one experienced reporter, “Jackson cut a poor figure. He unbuttoned his coat, whisked it back over his hips, and, with his hands in his back pockets, spraddled and teetered like a country lawyer. It was sad.”

  Suddenly Harry poked Sebastian in the arm. “Hey, guess what ! Birkett just whispered to Lawrence for God’s sake to close this session down! ”

  And indeed Lord Lawrence did just that. He announced simply, “Perhaps we had better adjourn now at this stage.” Rising, he gave no time for comment from prosecution or defense.

  The other judges rose with him as the marshal banged down his gavel, adjourning the session. The eyes of everyone trained on Hermann Goering. His self-satisfaction radiated in flushed cheeks and the defiant composure of his famous face.

  Sebastian stared at him. Goering was now removing his headphones. He brought them from his head and, holding them between thumb and forefinger, stretched his arm out to the right. Without turning to see whether anybody was there to take them, Goering dropped them, as he might have dropped a used napkin, and strode back to join his fellow defendants, the faces of most of them alight with pride and pleasure over the performance of their onetime Reichsmarschall.

  *

  Hermann Goering’s case took up twelve days of court time. When it was done, on March 22, the court made an announcement. The defendant Goering had been allowed to give his evidence “without any interruption whatever, and he has covered the whole history of the Nazi regime from its inception to the defeat of Germany. The tribunal does not propose to allow any of the other defendants to go over the same ground in their evidence except insofar as it is necessary for their own defense.”

  “Maybe well be home for Christmas,” Harry, stopping by Sebastian’s office, said. Sebastian was at work at his desk, numbly digesting and translating the seemingly endless supply of documents. “Send me a postcard when you get home. I can’t imagine ever leaving Nuremberg. Fucking Nuremberg.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  March 1946

  The telephone call was from Chief Landers. “Lieutenant, you’ve had a couple of pieces of mail down at the post office — one of ’em’s been there a week, it came registered, the corporal there said.” Teasingly, he asked, “Do you want him to mark it Addressee Unknown and send it back?”

  “Sorry about that, Chief.” Sebastian accepted the rebuke. Normally, Harry checked the post for both of them, but Harry had got out of the habit since his hospitalization. “I’ll pick them up. I’ll be leaving here in a few minutes.”

  Has to be Mama , he reflected. It was probably too soon to hear back from his grandmother in Arizona. Though perhaps the APO address the huge U.S. staff was using had been given postal priority.

  En route to the hotel, he picked up the two letters from the clerk, and noticed right away that one letter was from Henrietta, her trademark green ink on the envelope. He would take the letters to the Grand and read them while waiting for Harry. The day was radiant, a hint of spring genuinely on its way, taking the light later into the evening. At 1830 he could even read the newspaper he brought along without having to edge up toward the wall lamp. He opened, first, the letter from his grandmother.

  “My darling boy,” it began, as ever in German. “Yes. It is all as recorded in my mother’s scrapbook. I thought no purpose served in telling your mother she was not the child of the only man she ever knew as a father. Can you think of any reason why I’d have done differently?”

  Walther Leddihn, that last night at Innsbruck, had confessed to Sebastian that there had been concern in the family over Henrietta’s marrying a Jew. The thought passed through Sebastian’s mind — had his Oma indeed acted on her own? Or had husband Roderick Chapin perhaps chafed at acknowledging the baby as a stepchild, moreover, a stepchild who was half Jewish?

  He turned the page of the letter. “I did discuss with your grandfather — your step-grandfather — the possibility of telling your mother some day, perhaps after she graduated from Radcliffe, the whole story. But then she married your father and went off to live in Hamburg. I was relieved, when the Fuehrer came on the scene, that no one knew her real father was Jewish.”

  Harry walked into the bar and sat down beside Sebastian, signaling to the waiter.

  “Hang on a second, Harry. I just want to finish this letter.”

  “Okay. Lend me your newspaper.”

  Sebastian handed it over and continued reading. “It was completely gone from my mind. But then in 1938, I got the letter from my Papa telling me the Gestapo had been to the house in Munich and had taken his papers and the scrapbooks. And then when they went back to see him, the Nazi official had said to him — I have my father’s letter here, I keep it with my bankbook. This is what my Papa wrote:

  “ The Gestapo man said to me , ‘Your daughter married an American Jew and had a child , who would be half Jewish . And that chil
d later married a German , we know from the wedding invitation in the book . One Axel Reinhard . There is a letter in the book — we have made a copy of it and other incriminating material — with a picture : Herr Reinhard and his half - Jewish wife , your daughter , and a small boy . And an address in Hamburg . We will he looking into that .’”

  Harry was impatiently tapping on the table.

  ‘Hang on, Harry,” Sebastian said. “Yes, sure, I want to know about Rudenko and Goering.”

  “Goering had a great line.”

  “Shut up a second.”

  Harry returned to his newspaper, Sebastian to the last page of his grandmother’s letter.

  “That was in the late spring. I wrote to Annabelle and told her that the European scene was terrible, that she and Axel should bring you to America. She answered that Axel was busy with his work, and happy doing it, that you were doing well at school. Et cetera.

  “I wrote a second time. She replied saying much the same thing...Munich came, and then the invasion of Czechoslovakia and then the British-Poland defense pact. That’s when I wrote again, but this time to your father . And to him I revealed it all, quoting my own father’s letter, and begging him to leave the country. And the next thing I heard from your mother was that suddenly Axel had agreed to take the family to America. She never even suggested she knew why he had changed his mind. And — of course — he didn’t come with you.

  “You are a grown boy, darling Sebastian, and I know how important your work must be in Nuremberg. I cannot prevent you from telling your mother, but I pray you will not do so. Dear Alois. I can hardly remember what he looked like — his name never came up, except that one time, when I told your mother he had died. I told her he died a year before she was born.

  “All love from your Oma.

  “P.S. I have had a letter from Walther, after so very long. And he paid you many compliments, but asks why I didn’t insist you have music lessons. I reminded him that my daughter was in charge of your education.”