He had given some thought to the question and had developed a peculiar point of view. He had lied to the Nazis wholesale, over a period of a decade and a half; but that had been because it was a matter of life and death for his country. This trial would be a matter of life and death for only one individual, and Lanny didn’t think he wanted to lie in such a case. If the counsel asked him the question outright he would tell them the truth and then they probably wouldn’t use him. The American prosecutors accepted his decision and said that if it happened that way they would call him as their witness.
III
The trial was going on every day, and the lawyers gave him a pass to the visitors’ gallery, from which he could look down upon the scene. The spacious room was on an upper floor of the rambling old Palace of Justice—courthouse to an American. It was quite elegant and had been refitted in a way that had never before been known in any courthouse of the Old World or the New. In glass-enclosed booths sat four expert translators, wearing telephone headsets and having microphones in front of their lips. No matter in what language the testimony was given, it was at once repeated in the four languages of the trial: English, German, French, and Russian. Wires carried it to the judges, counsel, defendants, and even correspondents for the big news agencies. All that anyone had to do was to press one of four buttons, and he would hear the proceedings in the language of his choice. Testimony was limited to “dictation speed,” and was taken down by stenographers in the four languages, so that errors in translation could be revised later. Before this ten-month trial would come to its end two hundred witnesses would have been heard and more than five million words have been taken down and printed.
Along one wall, in front of the windows, was a high platform with a long desk for the eight judges, two from each of the Big Four nations. The Russians wore military uniforms, the others wore judicial robes, and all had the flags of their countries behind them. In the main part of the room, in front of the judges’ bench, were recorders and clerks. At one side, behind a barrier, sat representatives of the world press. Along the wall opposite the judges was the prisoners’ dock, on which the twenty-one accused men were seated in two rows. In front of them, on the main floor level, were their attorneys, who were permitted to communicate with them—but if they wished to pass them anything they had to hand it to one of the American military police. A row of these, with white helmets, white buttons, and white belts, stood behind the defendants. All were clean-cut young soldiers, picked and trained, and each watched his assigned man with the eyes of a hawk. Since Ley had fooled them by hanging himself in the toilet with strips torn from a towel, they were doing their best to make sure there wasn’t another “escape” via that route.
IV
To the son of Budd-Erling the most interesting sight in the room was the prisoners. For nearly a quarter of a century he had watched them on the stage of history, and many of them he had met in their homes or their offices, on political platforms or in military headquarters. Hitler wasn’t here, nor Goebbels, nor Bormann, who was being tried in absentia; but all the other “greats” were in these two rows.
Der Dicke was now reduced in weight by about seventy pounds, but not improved by it, because where there had been bulges in his face and neck there now were many wrinkles; he wore an air officer’s gray uniform without any decorations or insignia, and to anyone who knew him that made him look almost naked. He had been gradually disaccustomed to his drugs, so he looked alert and watched the proceedings intently. He occupied the number-one seat, the front row at the right, nearest to the press and the visitors’ gallery, and it was evident that he was doing his best to keep in the limelight. He made faces by way of silent comment on the scene, tried always to catch the eye of any judge, and braced up and looked impressive whenever a camera was turned upon him. There were no flash bulbs, for the scene was periodically illuminated by floodlights, and photographers hovered behind glass windows, like ghosts that nobody saw. Posterity would have pictures as well as text!
Göring had been the Number Two Nazi; Number Three had been Rudolf Hess, so he had the next seat. Poor Rudi, who Lanny had fooled with fake spiritualist mediums and other devices! The P.A. had last seen him in a military hospital at Abergavenny, near the Welsh border, and Lanny had pretended to have bribed the guard, thus gaining Hess’s confidence. Later the Number Three had had his own turn at fooling; he had pretended to have lost his memory but had succeeded only with himself. He had developed a case of genuine recurrent amnesia; it was off again, on again with his memory, and he seemed to be back and forth across the borderline of insanity.
Unhappy, distracted wretch, who had soared to such glory, and who had pulled off what was perhaps the most sensational individual stunt of the war, his flight to Scotland. He had really thought he could carry on negotiations with the heads of the British government and persuade them to make a deal with Adi Schicklgruber—who had never kept faith with any man an hour longer than it suited his purposes. Hess had helped him write and had edited a book defending that sort of tactics; and here he sat in the prisoners’ dock, with only a little hair on his head and a little flesh on his features, and dark eyes that seemed to be peering out from two caves.
V
Lanny’s eyes moved on down the row. At the Nummer Zwei’s left who should it be but Joachim von Ribbentrop, champagne salesman who had bought his title from a distant aunt. Now he bore more resemblance to a pack peddler in the slums. The brashness was gone out of him, he was cowed and wilted, forgot to comb his hair or adjust his tie; his counsel worried because his story kept changing from day to day. Lanny Budd had never known him well, for he had been far too important a personage to bother with the playboy son of an American millionaire.
Next to him was Kaltenbrunner, head of the Security Police, the man who had carried out the extermination of the Jews; tall, thin, pale—never had there been a more mild-looking murderer of millions. Then came Rosenberg, the party philosopher, who had made a religion out of racial superiority; nervous and commonplace, he might have been a bookkeeper sitting on a high stool in the back part of your office. And next to him Frank, the butcher-governor of Poland. This bloody-handed one had recanted his Nazi creed; he had become a Catholic convert and was having “apocalyptic visions”; he repented his sins and made voluble expressions of penitence. Who but God could know if he meant it?
Next in that front row sat the vilest, so vile that none of the others would have anything to do with him: Streicher, the party’s number-one Jew-baiter, who had turned his own obscene imaginings into tales about the hated helpless race. Lanny had seen him stride about the streets at the Parteitag, carrying a riding whip in imitation of his adored Führer. Now he was dirty and greasy, and his cruel face sweated freely when he was afraid—which was often. Placed next to him was Funk, president of the Reichsbank, a fawning little man who was sober now but had rarely been so in the happy old days. He protested to everybody who came near him that he had never known that among the treasures brought to his vaults were bushels of gold teeth knocked from the mouths of Jewish and Polish victims of the gas chambers.
Finally, at the end of the row, that tall turkey cock in trousers, the onetime president of the Reichsbank, who had never spoken to Dr. Funk in the ten years since Funk had taken his place. Dr. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht had been born in Brooklyn and named for a great American; he had come back to tell the land of his birth the wonders of Nazism, trying to raise money for Hitler as he had so triumphantly done after World War I. Always he sat aloof and haughtily erect; he was a businessman, a financier, and expressed amazement and incredulity that he should be herded here with criminals. Lanny Budd could have testified that he had become completely disgusted with Hitler—after he had been fired; in Lanny’s presence he had besought Robbie Budd to help him get the presidency of one of the great New York banks, to which his genius undoubtedly entitled him. He still had the red face, knobby forehead, and disagreeably wide mouth; but he looked queer without the five
-inch stiff white collar he had affected in the days of his glory.
The second row included two Wehrmacht officers, Field Marshal Keitel and Colonel-General Jodl, who had been the Führer’s house pets, to to speak, his personal generals who always said yes to everything. They paid for that glory now by being held responsible for his military crimes. Lanny had met and cultivated them at Berchtesgaden, and he saw that they were among the few prisoners who were dignified. Junker tradition sustained them; they were sure that nobody had the right to assume authority over them and they looked with contempt upon anything an enemy could do. Victors always did what they pleased, and to call it justice was mere Anglo-Saxon hypocrisy. Of the same opinion was Grand Admiral Raeder, also Grand Admiral Doenitz, who had taken Raeder’s place in command of the Navy. The admirals wore plain dark-blue suits, and a correspondent remarked, “They look like discharged streetcar conductors.”
Here in this aristocratic row belonged also Franz von Papen, “Satan in Top Hat” he had been called. He had helped Hitler to power, and later on Lanny had met him in Austria, where he had been intriguing and bullying, preparing the way for the Anschluss. Lanny had a vivid memory of how he bared his teeth and twisted his eyebrows when he was angry. He, like Schacht and the generals and admirals, was astounded to find himself in a prisoners’ dock. He would know how to look elegant in his double-breasted pin-stripe suit, and he would assure his judges that love of country was the only motive that had ever animated him. Only the Russians would fail to be persuaded.
VI
Soon after Lanny’s arrival Göring’s defense began. This had been entrusted to Dr. Stahmer, a well-known lawyer of Berlin, soft spoken and shrewd, with close-cut white hair, a prominent nose, and rather thick lips. He took a fatherly attitude toward his rambunctious client. He was allowed four thousand marks for his services, this being put up by the eighteen prosecuting governments; but Lanny knew that Göring had large sums abroad, including New York and Buenos Aires, and he wondered if arrangements had been privately made. While the lawyer was outlining his client’s case Lanny kept his eyes on the client and saw that he was almost beside himself with nervousness. He would fold his arms but could not keep the pose for as much as a minute; he would try to write notes, but his hands trembled. He kept pulling at the cord of his earphones—such an odd thing, to see everybody in the room looking like a telephone operator!
The first witness was Göring’s adjutant, Bodenschatz, who testified that the Luftwaffe hadn’t been ready in 1939, and how Göring had tried to carry on negotiations with England behind the backs of Hitler and Ribbentrop to avoid war. He told also how Göring had managed to have several of his friends released from concentration camps—but he didn’t mention a young Jew named Freddi Robin. He drew a fancy picture of his chief as a man of humanity, a lover of peace; it was amusing to see the beaming smile on the face of the tiger.
But not so when Justice Jackson started his cross-examination. Apparently the Germans had not been used to American methods, and never could get used to them. The Chief Counsel had buried himself in this cause and knew every detail of it; he rarely had to consult his notes, except when he had a document to quote. Apparently the witness had never considered the possibility that an air force commander who knew that his force was not ready might have some other motive than love of humanity for trying to postpone a war. The witness was forced to admit that Göring’s preparations were all meant for war and that Göring’s speeches had admitted the fact.
Before the ordeal was over the witness had involved himself in a series of contradictions and misstatements, shown by documents which the Allies had captured and which the witness hadn’t known about. His face was red, and the perspiration stood out on his forehead. The same was true of his chief—he pulled at the earphones so hard that his MP had to intervene and tell him to behave himself.
That was the way this trial had been going for months. The prosecution had documents by the ton, for the Germans were the most meticulous makers and keepers of records. Every subordinate wanted written instructions as to everything he had to do; that went into his file, and thereafter it was sacred—he had seldom been able to bring himself to the point of burning anything, even when the enemy was in the streets outside the office building. So, when some office drudge would blandly assert that his chief was a man of love and mercy and had never had knowledge of any suffering inflicted upon the innocent, Jackson would produce an interoffice memorandum ordering that no more children should be sent to the crematoria because the labor shortage was acute and it had been found that children made very docile workers. “How about that, Herr Dreckschnautze?”
VII
There was a week-end adjournment, so Lanny had time to take a long walk with his ex-tutor, out of the sight of ruins and into the lovely countryside of Bavaria. Once you got away from towns little had been touched by war, and the peasants were all prosperous, selling food to the occupation forces at good prices and to the black marketeers at double prices. Some of the women still had the silk stockings their sons had sent them from Paris, and the objets d’art they had got from the well-to-do of Nürnberg and near-by Fürth, site of the great Messerschmitt airplane plant, now bombed completely flat. If you won the peasants’ confidence they would tell you that things had been very good under Hitler. Some of the young men would add, defiantly, that the Führer’s only mistake was that he didn’t win the war. Others would curry favor with any Americans they met, saying that the Nazi swine in Nürnberg jail ought to be drawn and quartered, every one.
Jerry told about his job; a strange one, and certainly one that he had never dreamed of when he had been playing around on the Riviera thirty years ago and had met the charming Mrs. Budd and been engaged to give her son a respectable pretense of education. An interesting job, the one here in Nürnberg, but tedious too; you got tired of these deflated wretches with their unresting egotism and unceasing complaints. You looked forward to the day when you would see a row of them dangling by ropes and could be sure that a lesson had been taught that the next bunch of bandits would remember.
Lanny said, “I wonder! Perhaps the next bunch will be sure they are going to win, just as this bunch were.” He went on to tell Jerry what his bunch of anti-bandits in New Jersey were doing, staking their hopes upon an effort to get the nations together and form a government which would have a police force and would put an end to world banditry forever. Professor Urey had been scheduled to talk about it the day that Lanny had left; next week it would be Einstein, and the week after that Stuart Chase, and after that the bunch would be on their own until Lanny got back.
He listened while Jerry described the routine of the prison and the trial. The accused were kept in solitary, each in a single cell with a small opening in the door through which a guard watched him day and night. They talked with their lawyers whenever the lawyers requested it, but always through a close-meshed wire screen and with a guard standing behind the prisoner. Because Göring had dominated all the other prisoners, trying to keep them from making admissions damaging to the regime, he had been relegated to a room by himself at meals—something he took as a terrible indignity. The other twenty were divided into five groups, carefully chosen so that the weak were kept from the influence of the strong. The arrangement had been worked out by Dr. Gilbert, the prison psychologist, on the basis of his knowledge of the evil crew. To hear him tell about the various personalities and the effect of each upon the others in his group was an experience absorbing to the son of Budd-Erling.
The work of guarding the outside of the Palace and the prison was shared in daily turns by the Big Four nations, but inside the buildings everything was American, and the routine had been studied and rehearsed to the last detail. The two buildings were joined by a viaduct walk, and while the prisoners were being marched across some unknown person had thrown a knife at them from a window, so now the viaduct was covered. On the other side was a court, and when the prisoners were getting their exercise there a warning be
ll rang and no office worker was permitted to appear at a window; soldiers with tommy guns stood below, keeping watch, with orders to shoot to kill.
When they went up to the courtroom each prisoner was accompanied by an armed guard, walking behind him. When they entered the Palace they went up in an elevator which the thoughtful Germans had provided long ago; each prisoner entered a little steel cabinet, just big enough, and having a window through which the guard watched him as the elevator carried them to the floor where the trial was being held. The elevator opened directly into the prisoners’ box, and the guard came out first and then let the prisoner out.
“It’s costing a lot of money,” said Captain Pendleton, “but not so much as another war.”
VIII
Lanny was invited to dinner at the prison officers’ mess on the outskirts of town, and there he met Dr. Gilbert, the prison psychologist, a Columbia Ph.D who had been doing Intelligence work during the war. Gilbert was a pleasant-faced man in his early thirties; he knew German thoroughly and had the run of the prison. He would visit the prisoners at lunch, in the courtroom during intermissions, and in their cells after each day’s ordeal. Then he would return to his office and make detailed notes for the future study of Nazi behavior. He was interested in meeting an American who had known Numbers Two and Three in the days of their glory, and he and Lanny spent much time comparing notes. His diary was being kept in secret, but he let Lanny see parts of it. An amazing thing to hear the secrets of the Nazis unveiled and to learn one by one the names of the men who had been plotting against Hitler in Hitler’s own fortress; persons who might have been Lanny’s friends and helpers, if only he had had a hint of their true attitude! Early in this trial the prosecution had put on the stand a high officer of the Abwehr, the Reichswehr’s Counter-Intelligence Service, whose special duty it had been to uncover and arrest enemy agents such as Lanny. To his amazement he learned that not merely the witness, General Lahousen, but also his chief, the head of the Abwehr, Admiral Canaris, had been in the officers’ conspiracy against the Regierung. Canaris, a man of Greek descent, hated and dreaded by all Allied agents, had been secretly suppressing information against the men he was supposed to destroy. He had been aware of widespread officer plots against the Führer!
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