“Minus the unflattering adjectives, yes, Mr. Speaker, she does,” Jerry answered. Sure as hell, Sam Rayburn didn’t miss much.
“All right, then. Say your say, and after you’re done we’ll ease back to the business at hand. It won’t matter one way or the other.” The Speaker of the House sounded indulgent. He knew the kinds of things Representatives had to do for their constituents.
He might not miss much, but he missed something that day when he didn’t quash Jerry Duncan before Jerry was well begun.
“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” Jerry said once more. “I want to know why the United States Army, the mightiest army in the history of the world, hasn’t been able to stamp out these German fanatics. I want to know why we haven’t been able to hunt down this Reinhard Heydrich, who seems to be the brains of the outfit. I want to know why upwards of a thousand servicemen have been killed in Germany since the so-called surrender. And I especially want to know why the War Department is doing its level best to hide all these deaths and to pretend they never happened.”
Members of his own party applauded him. Democrats jeered. A couple of them shook their fists. “President Truman knows what he’s doing!” one man shouted.
“You’re soft on the Germans!” another Democrat added.
“I am not!” Jerry said indignantly. “When we try those thugs we capture, I hope we shoot them or hang them or get rid of them for good some other way. And I expect we will. That has nothing to do with why we’re wasting so many lives in Germany. It has nothing to do with why we can’t stop the insurgency, either. What are we doing in occupied Germany, and why aren’t we doing it better?”
“Sellout!” that Democrat yelled.
“Isolationist!” someone else put in. The minute the Japs hit Pearl Harbor, isolationism became a dirty word.
Bang! Bang! Bang! Speaker Rayburn plied his gavel with might and main. “The House will come to order!” Bang! Bang! “Mr. Duncan, how do you propose to find out what you want to know?” You don’t really care, Rayburn’s words implied. You’re just making political hay.
Jerry pretended not to hear that. If you didn’t notice, you didn’t have to react. He simply responded to what Rayburn actually said: “Questioning some War Department officials would make a good first step, Mr. Speaker.”
“You think so, do you?” Rayburn rasped a chuckle. With a large majority in both House and Senate, Democrats controlled who got questioned. The Speaker made it plain he didn’t aim to let anybody ask the War Department anything inconvenient or embarrassing.
Shrugging, Duncan said, “You can pull a rug over a pile of dust, but the dust doesn’t go away. It just leaves an ugly lump under the rug.”
Bang! “That will be quite enough of that,” Sam Rayburn said. “Now, returning to the bill we were actually considering…”
Sam Rayburn didn’t want to look at the lump under the carpet. Neither did Robert Patterson, the Secretary of War, even though his department had done most of the sweeping that put it there. And Harry Truman really didn’t want to look at it, and didn’t want anybody else looking at it, either.
Well, too bad for all of them, Jerry thought. It’s there, and they put it there, and I’m damn well going to tell the country about it.
Reinhard Heydrich was a thorough man. When he realized he would have to fight a long twilight struggle after the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS went under, he prepared for it as best he could. He studied English and Russian. He’d never be fluent in either one. But, with a dictionary and patience, he could manage.
English should have been easier. It was German’s close cousin, and used the same alphabet as Heydrich’s birthspeech. But he found himself understanding the Soviets much more readily than the British-to say nothing of the Americans.
Soviet authorities reacted to the holdouts much as he’d expected. Deportations, executions, brutality…That all made sense to him. It was the way he would have attacked the problem were he running the NKVD. It was the way the Reich had attacked the partisan problem in Russia and Yugoslavia. The Germans hadn’t done so well as they would have liked, and Heydrich hoped the Soviets wouldn’t, either. But it was a good, rational approach.
The Americans, on the other hand…
On his desk sat a three-day-old copy of the International Herald-Tribune. The patriot who’d put the paper in a secure drop had circled a story on an inside page in red ink. Heydrich had already read the piece three times. He knew what all the words meant. He even understood the sentences-individually, anyhow. But the story as a whole struck him as insane.
“I thought this must be a joke,” he told Johannes Klein. “A joke or a trick, one.”
“What does it say?” Klein asked. The veteran Oberscharfuhrer did fine in German, and cared not a pfennig’s worth for any other language.
“It says there are rallies in America protesting the soldiers we’ve killed since the surrender. It says the people protesting demand that the Americans take their soldiers out of Germany so we can’t kill any more of them,” Heydrich answered.
“Fine,” Klein said. “When do the machine guns come out and teach these idiots some sense?”
“That’s what I wondered,” Heydrich answered. “That’s what we did to those White Rose traitors, by God.” He shook his head, still angry at the college kids who’d had the gall to object to the Fuhrer’s war policy-and to do it in public, too! Well, they’d paid for it: paid with their necks, a lot of them, and just what they deserved.
“Of course it is,” Hans Klein said. “What else can you do when a fool gets out of line?”
“The Yankees aren’t doing anything to them. Zero. Not even taking them in for questioning. Madness!” Heydrich said. He added the clincher: “One of their Congressmen is even making speeches taking the demonstrators’ side. Can you imagine that, Hans?”
His longtime comrade shook his head. So did Heydrich. He tried to picture a Reichstag deputy standing up in 1943 and telling the Fuhrer the war was lost and he ought to make the best peace he could. What would have happened to a deputy who did something like that? As near as Heydrich could tell, he wouldn’t just die. He would cease to exist, would cease ever to have existed. He would be aggressively forgotten, the way Ernst Rohm was after the Night of Long Knives.
As usual, Klein thought along with him. “So what are they doing to him?”
Heydrich brought a fist down on the newspaper. “Nothing!” he burst out. “This foolish rag goes on about freedom of speech and open discussion of ideas. Have you ever heard such twaddle in all your born days?”
“Not me,” Klein said.
“Not me, either,” Heydrich said. “I read this, and I thought the Yankees were trying to trick us. But a couple of our people have lived in America. They say it really works this way. Any crackpot can get up and go on about whatever the devil he wants.”
“How did they lick us?” Klein asked. No German asked that about the Russians. Stalin put out a fire by throwing bodies on it till it smothered. He commanded enough bodies to smother any fire, too, which had come as a dreadful surprise to the Fuhrer and the General Staff. But the Americans were…well, different seemed a polite word for it.
After some thought, Heydrich said, “That may be the wrong question.”
“Well, what’s the right one, then?”
“If they really are this naive”-Heydrich still had trouble believing it, but didn’t see what else he could think if the Herald-Tribune story wasn’t made up-“how do we take advantage of it?”
“Ah. Ach, so.” Once Klein saw the right question, he focused like the sun’s rays brought to a point by a burning glass. Like any long-serving noncom, he had a lot of practice taking advantage of officers with more power but less subtlety. His predicament with them was much like the Reich’s with its occupiers. Heydrich waited to see what he could come up with. After a few seconds, Klein said, “We have to keep fighting the Amis-”
“Aber naturlich!” Heydrich broke in.
“We have to
keep fighting, ja.” The Oberscharfuhrer seemed to remind himself of where he’d been before he got to where he was going: “But we should also let them down easy, give them something these people who want to go home can latch on to and use for an excuse so they don’t look like a pack of gutless quitters.”
Like the pack of gutless quitters they really are, Heydrich thought. But Hans Klein wasn’t wrong. The enemy’s morale mattered. Germany had done well with propaganda against the Low Countries and France, then completely botched it against the Russians. Treating them like a bunch of niggers in the jungle wasn’t the smartest thing the Reich could have done. A little late to worry about that now, though. Heydrich leaned forward intently. “What have you got in mind?”
“Well, sir, way it looks to me is, we ought to say something like we’re only fighting to get our own country back again. We ought to let ’em know how much that means to us, and to ask ’em how happy they’d be if some son of a bitch was sitting on their head. And we ought to say we’ll be mild as milk if they just pack up and go away.”
Klein winked at Heydrich. The Reichsprotektor laughed out loud. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. Of course Germany would rearm the moment it had the chance. And of course German physicists would get to work on atom bombs as soon as they could. That sparked another thought.
“As long as they’ve got this fancy bomb and we don’t, they have the whip hand, too,” Heydrich said. “We should tell them we understand that.”
“And we should promise we’d never go after the bomb. We should promise on a big, tall stack of Bibles.” Hans Klein winked again.
And damned if Heydrich didn’t laugh again. After the last war, the Treaty of Versailles said Germany couldn’t have all kinds of weapons. Her top aeronautical engineers designed civilian planes. Other engineers tested panzers in Russia-the Soviet Union was another pariah state. Artillery designs for Sweden, U-boats for Holland…When Hitler decided it was time to rearm, he didn’t have a bit of trouble. If Germany needed atom bombs to get ready for the next round, she’d have them.
“Can we do something like that, sir?” Klein asked.
“You’d better believe it.” Heydrich got up from his desk and walked over to a file cabinet under the Fuhrer’s framed photo. It held a complete run of Signal, the Reich’s wartime propaganda magazine. Signal was a slick product, printed in many languages; people said enemy publications like Life and Look had stolen from its layout and approach. That wasn’t why Heydrich started poring over back issues, though. They’d run an article he could adapt. He remembered it had come late in the war, after things on the Eastern Front went bad. That helped him narrow things down. He grunted when he found the copy he needed. “Here we go.”
“What have you got?” Hans Klein inquired.
“See for yourself.” Heydrich held out the magazine to him. The article was called “What We Are Fighting for.” It showed a wounded Wehrmacht man on one page, his left arm bandaged and bloody, his mouth open in a shout of anger and pain. On the facing page was a closeup of a blond, blue-eyed little girl, perhaps five years old. The two photos summed up exactly what the Reich was fighting for, but text went with them. That text was what Heydrich wanted.
Klein’s eyes lit up. “Wow! Amazing, sir. I saw this, too. I remember, now that you’re showing it to me again. But I never would have thought of it, let alone come up with it just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
“Words are weapons, too,” Heydrich said. “You need to know where you can get your hands on them. Why don’t you go grab yourself some chow? I want to fiddle with this for a while.”
As soon as Klein left, Heydrich sat down again and started writing. He worked in German; he knew he’d make a hash of things if he tried to compose in English. But it would get translated. Other people would suggest changes and add things, too. That was all right. He was fighting again.
VII
In Nuremberg, the city jail was near the center of town. The Palace of Justice-a fancy name for the local courthouse-lay off to the northwest. It had taken some bomb damage. That didn’t surprise Lou Weissberg. In Nuremberg, it was much easier to list the buildings that hadn’t taken bomb damage than to set down the ones that had.
Bomb damage or not, the Allies were going to try the Nazi big shots they’d captured at the Palace of Justice. The American judge and his opposite numbers from the UK, France, and the Soviet Union would give Goring and Hess and Ribbentrop and Streicher and Jodl and Keitel and the rest the fair trials they hadn’t given to countless millions. And then, without the tiniest bit of doubt, most of those goons would hang or face a firing squad or die in whatever other way that extraordinary court decreed.
In the meantime, the Nazis cooled their heels in the Nuremberg jail as if they were ordinary burglars or wife beaters. Well, not quite. They had a wing of the jail all to themselves. They had a lot more guards in that wing than anybody in his right mind would have wasted on burglars or wife beaters.
And the jail was surrounded by barbed wire and sandbagged machine-gun nests and concrete antitank barriers. The pointed obstacles looked to Lou like German designs. They’d probably been yanked from the Siegfried Line and carted back here. In a way, Lou appreciated the irony. The obstacles intended to slow up American and British tanks were now going into action against the krauts who’d made them.
In another way, that irony was scary. Almost six months after the alleged surrender, the occupation authorities needed to stay buttoned up tight to make sure the Germans didn’t liberate their leaders.
If they somehow did, that would give the United States a godawful black eye. All the same, Lou wondered how much Reinhard Heydrich wanted to have to do with men who might have the rank to order him around. Somebody like Goring wouldn’t be able to resist trying. And Heydrich, damn his little shriveled turd of a soul, was managing just fine by himself. Anybody who tried to jog his elbow might come down with a sudden and acute case of loss of life.
Lou eyed the jail again. “Fuck,” he said softly. Despite all the barbed wire and the antitank barriers and the machine-gun nests and the swarms of jittery dogfaces manning the position, somebody’d managed to stick one of the fanatics’ new propaganda sheets on the wall.
Shaking his head, Lou walked over and tore the sheet down. It was what Europeans used for typing paper, a little taller and a little skinnier than good old 81/2? 11. Lou had seen English and German versions of the propaganda sheet. A printer was giving the fanatics a hand. If the occupation authorities caught him at it, he’d be sorry. Lou snorted under his breath. That didn’t seem to worry the bastard one whole hell of a lot.
This was the English version. It was obviously translated from the German, translated by somebody better with German than with English. WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR? it said: smudgy type on cheap paper.
What Germans desire to acquire by victory is the fulfillment of the idea that an individual shall be respected for his own self. This is what makes life worth living for us.
“Assholes,” Lou muttered. The Nazis had sure respected Jews and Gypsies and Russians for their own selves, hadn’t they?
We fight for the sake of our own culture, the propaganda sheet went on. If you had invaders ruthlessly occupying your own land, you too would rise up against them. How can a brave folk do anything else?
“Assholes,” Lou said again, louder this time. Tito’s guerrillas, Russian partisans, the French maquis-what did the SS and the Wehrmacht do to real freedom fighters when they caught them? Everybody knew the answer to that one. Lou had seen a photo a German soldier took of a hanged Russian girl maybe eighteen years old. Around her neck the SS had put a warning placard in German and Russian: I SHOT AT GERMAN SOLDIERS.
Once we have once more our own state back in our hands, we solemnly vow that we seek no new foreign conflict. Europe has seen enough of war, the sheet declared, as if Hitler hadn’t had thing one to do with that war and the way the Nazis fought it. All we seek is a fair peace and our own
national self-determination, which is the proper right of any free people.
What kind of self-determination did the Reich give Poles and Scandinavians and Dutchmen and Belgians and Frenchmen and Yugoslavs and Greeks and Russians and…? But Germans had a knack for feeling a shoe only when it pinched them.
Lou started to crumple the sheet and toss it aside. Then he caught himself, even though CIC already had plenty of copies. A major with a double chin was giving orders to some GIs. Lou walked over to him and said, “Major, I just found this stuck to the wall here. How come somebody was able to put it up?”
The major snatched the paper out of his hand, gave it one quick, scornful glance, and barked, “Who the hell are you, Lieutenant, and who the hell do you think you are?”
“I’m Lou Weissberg, Counter-Intelligence Corps,” Lou said calmly. “And who are you…sir?”
By the way he said it, he made the title one of reproach, not respect. The major took a deep breath and opened his mouth to scorch him. Then the man had very visible second thoughts. Even a lieutenant in the CIC might have connections that could make you sorry if you crossed him. As a matter of fact, Lou did. Raising when you really held a full house gave you confidence that showed.
“My name’s Hawkins-Tony Hawkins,” the major said in a different tone of voice. He took a longer look at the propaganda sheet. “You found this goddamn thing here-at the jail?”
“Just now, like I said. Right over there.” Lou pointed. “You’ve got this whole shebang around the building, and I wondered how some Jerry snuck this thing in here and put it up without anybody noticing.”
“Goddamn good question,” Major Hawkins said. “Fuck me if I know for sure, but my best guess is-”
His best guess got interrupted. The explosion wasn’t anywhere close by, but it was big. The ground shook under Lou’s feet. One of the soldiers said, “That an earthquake?”
The Man with the Iron Heart Page 12