Dry Bones

by Peter Quinn

  In Heinz’s case, the paper trail is extensive and damning. We are in possession, for example, of direct correspondence dated 2/12/44 from SS-Standartenführer Wolfram Sievers of the Forschungs-und-Lehrgemeinshaft das Ahnererbe to Himmler that states: “The war in the east makes it imperative we proceed expeditiously with the study of the Jewish race. By procuring the skulls of Jewish-Bolshevik Commissars, who represent the prototype of this devious and degenerate subspecies, we have the opportunity to produce a definitive document as well as mount a convincing scientific exhibit that will stand the test of time. I have already been in discussions with Dr. Karsten Heinz, an eminent racial researcher on staff at Auschwitz, who is convinced that he now has the materials at hand to establish an organic link between Judaism and Bolshevism.”

  The interview was conducted in Heinz’s prison cell, a spare space that he keeps fastidiously neat. It contains a bed, desk, and two chairs. He was dressed in gray military jodhpurs, heavy gray woolen socks that reached up to his knees, black leather slippers, and a long-sleeved quilted undershirt.

  Of stocky build and no more than five feet and three or four inches in height, Heinz is in full possession of his mental faculties. He displays a self-confidence that quickly shades into arrogance, a pronounced indication of the melding of his superego with that of the Third Reich. It is clear the operation of the superego supports rather than opposes the id’s desire for self-aggrandizement. A sadistic opportunist who is devoid of sympathy for his victims and dedicated to his own survival, he clothes his actions in terms of scientific idealism and admits no direct role in mass murder. His capacity for narcissistic rationalization in support of justifying his actions is limitless.

  INTERVIEW: When Maj. Bassante and I entered with a stenographer, the prisoner remained seated at the desk. I informed him both the Major and I spoke fluent German, but he indicated his preference for speaking with us in English. I told him that since the stenographer needed to be seated and I would be taking notes, I required his seat at the desk. (Maj. Bassante indicated his preference for standing.)

  He quickly transferred himself to the bed. The smirk he had been wearing since we entered briefly gave way to a hurt look, which I surmised was less from my insistence on taking his seat than my failure to preface his last name with his rank (SS-Hauptsturmführer) or the honorific of “Herr Doktor.”

  KH: If that is your wish, Colonel Thomas.

  WT: It’s an order.

  KH: I’m a soldier who has always followed orders. That is the nature of our profession, is it not?

  WT: You are also a doctor who took an oath “to do no harm.”

  KH: As well as a soldier, I’m a scientist. The ethics of the scientist are not the ethics of the layman. Our work involves enlightenment, not sentiment. It is sometimes our duty to experiment on the few in order to serve the health and well-being of the many.

  WT: You were an early member of the Nazi Physicians League, were you not?

  KH: I joined in 1934 when it was clear the Party had taken full control of the government. The older members—der alte kämpfer—resented us newcomers, but I realized no significant research could be done except under the auspices of the Party. Most of my colleagues reached the same conclusion, as did most engineers and scientists interested in aeroplanes and rocketry.

  WT: Was it for scientific reasons you joined the SS?

  KH: More than any other institution, the SS recognized the medico-biological basis of the state. I felt it was our best hope for building an enduring bulwark against Bolshevism and a despotism of untermenschen.

  WT: As a member of the SS, you participated in the T4 Program, did you not?

  KH: Could you be more specific?

  WT: The Reich Work Group of Sanatoriums and Nursing Homes, which operated out of the Chancellery at Tiergarten 4—the T4 Program authorized by Hitler at the start of the war to carry out the mass murder of the chronically mentally ill.

  KH: Oh, gnadentod—the business of mercy death—was widely discussed. The eminent American physician Foster Kennedy proposed a similar idea.

  WT: But it was carried out in Germany.

  KH: I have no knowledge of that.

  WT: Your signature has been identified on more than 2,000 evaluations as obergutachter [senior expert] at the psychiatric institution at Hadamar. In every case you recommended death.

  KH: I recommended nothing. I certified evaluations made by subordinates.

  WT: There are witnesses who place you at the ceremony at Hadamar, in late 1941, marking the cremation of the 10,000th victim of gnadentod.

  KH: My interest was in research, not injections.

  WT: But you knew about fatal morphine-scopolamine injections?

  KH: The theoretical possibility was discussed as a humane method of ending the misery and suffering of the terminally ill. I never injected anyone.

  WT: What about the gassings?

  KH: At Hadamar?

  WT: Yes.

  KH: This is the first I’ve heard of such a thing.

  WT: What about your role at Auschwitz?

  KH: I obeyed the orders I was given.

  WT: Were you aware it was a vernichtungslager—an “extermination camp”?

  KH: Auschwitz was the size of a city. It encompassed several camps. I was aware of the terrible conditions, but given the wartime conditions and food shortages on the Eastern Front, along with the well-known proclivities of Poles and Jews for the unsanitary, a high mortality rate from disease was inevitable.

  WT: Did you participate in ramp duty?

  KH: What do you mean by “ramp duty”?

  WT: The selection process carried out by camp doctors among Jewish arrivals.

  KH: No, I never participated in any alleged selections of Jewish arrivals.

  WT: Were you aware of such a process?

  KH: I concentrated on my assignment in racial science, an area of inquiry shared by British and American scientists going back to Francis Galton, Richard Dugdale, Madison Grant, and many others. I was ordered by SS-Reichsführer Himmler and Wolfram Sievers to prepare a collection of specimens that might support—or at least suggest—an organic basis for the relationship between Jews and Bolshevism. I carried out the legally authorized orders of my superiors. It was not my place to refuse.

  WT: By “specimens,” you mean Jewish inmates and Russian POWs?

  KH: Spies, traitors, saboteurs, or common criminals—murderers, rapists, and the like—selected for sonderbehandlung [special treatment] in view of their crimes.

  WT: Did you participate in their demise?

  KH: Their bodies were delivered to me after trial and execution.

  WT: How were they executed?

  KH: In order to ensure their integrity as research specimens, they were given phenol injections directly into the heart

  WT: You knew nothing of mass gassings?

  KH: I kept to my business. I never witnessed any alleged gassings.

  WT: You were resident in the camp during May and June of 1944, were you not?

  KH: I was, yes.

  WT: You had no idea that Jewish deportees from Hungary were being gassed at the rate of up to 12,000 a day or that the crematoria at Birkenau were working overtime, spewing ash over the entire camp?

  KH: As I said, Auschwitz covered a vast area. It was not uncommon for people in one area of the camp to be unaware what was taking place in another. I know nothing of these supposed excesses allegedly visited on the Jews by elements within the SS.

  WT: There are witnesses who say you systematically tortured prisoners in pursuit of Soviet military intelligence.

  KH: What witnesses?

  WT: Subordinates.

  KH: Inmates?

  WT: Yes.

  KH: It’s all self-serving drivel! Many inmates were eager to cooperate. They couldn’t do enough to ingratiate themselves. Indeed, if Auschwitz was the so-called death camp some allege, it sounds to me as if they should be indebted to me for their survival.

  WT: After
Auschwitz was evacuated, you were transferred to Mauthausen, were you not?

  KH: Oh, yes, but only for a very brief time.

  WT: Were you aware of the interrogation and torture of American POWs undertaken by Commandant Franz Ziereis?

  KH: I was assigned to treat those infected with typhus—inmates as well as guards. An epidemic was raging in the camp. I never came across any Americans.

  WT: Did you assist in the torture and execution of Dr. Gerhard Schaefer?

  KH: I never heard of such a person. I’m a physician, not an executioner. If I might add, I answered these same questions this very morning during an extensive interview with an American intelligence officer.

  WT: Who was that?

  KH: Someone I presume you know: Lieutenant Colonel Bartlett.

  WT: Did he identify his unit?

  KH: The Strategic Services Unit.

  WT: I’m unfamiliar with it.

  KH: Well, it’s being reorganized into the Central Intelligence Group, with a mandate to counter Soviet operations.

  WT: I’ll make it a point to contact him.

  KH: If you’ll permit me to say so, when it comes to intelligence operations, Americans seem not to let their right hand know what the left is doing.

  WT: You’d be well advised to focus on your upcoming trial and leave such matters to the experts.

  Signed: Col. Winston Thomas, M.D.

  Witnessed: Maj. Turlough Bassante

  Date: September 27, 1945

  November 1945

  COLUMBIA CASUALTY & LIFE, LONDON

  DUNNE CHECKED HIS MAIL CUBBY HOPING TO FIND ORDERS TO RETURN to the States. Instead, there was a plain envelope of a type he recognized. On the card inside was the single code word used before D-Day to send operatives to a nondescript insurance office above a tailor shop near the American embassy: BESPOKE. The office housed a transatlantic line to OSS headquarters in Washington supposedly safe from prying by British and Russian allies, Axis enemies, and rivals in Military Intelligence and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Date and time were the only other information included on the card.

  Dunne presumed the office had been closed by war’s end and, if not by then, certainly in wake of President Truman’s order relieving General Donovan of command and directing that the OSS cease operation.

  Word was, Donovan was taken unawares. He shouldn’t have been. At home, his legion of enemies—including all the savagely protective, turf-conscious bureaucracies dedicated to preserving their prerogatives, FBI, State Department, War and Navy Departments, as well as the chorus of Roosevelt-haters led by the McCormick-Patterson press empire—had been hunting for his scalp.

  The Chicago Tribune, which had leaked the top-secret memo Donovan sent to FDR proposing creation of a permanent central intelligence service, ran fire-breathing editorials denouncing Donovan for abetting the establishment of an “American Gestapo” designed to enforce completion of the New Deal’s blueprint for the collectivization of the nation’s economy.

  Most people suspected J. Edgar Hoover as the leaker. Inside the OSS, it was speculated FDR ordered it done to test public reaction to Donovan’s proposal. Rumors flew. Then–Vice President Truman resented that the president barely took note of his existence while treating Donovan as a confidant. The brouhaha made Dunne glad he’d got out of Washington and into the action. The odds of being knifed in the back were substantially less than in the capital.

  Despite the cachet bestowed on the OSS by the press, everyone inside knew to one degree or another the extent of its mistakes, fiascos, bungling, and outright disasters, like the German penetration of Cassia, the code name for the intelligence network in Eastern and Central Europe wiped out in a single stroke. Yet say what you like about the OSS, unlike the Brits or Germans, who had long-established intelligence and espionage operations, or the Soviets, who built theirs without regard for human or financial costs during the Great Terror, Donovan constructed his organization in the middle of a war, surrounded by civilian and military rivals. The wonder was not just that it made a contribution to defeating the Axis but also—more wondrous still—that it got built at all.

  Dunne concluded that the card was probably a practical joke (a lame one at that) on the part of some bored officer in Naval Intelligence with nothing better to do than tweak a friendly (at least most of the time) and now-former competitor. More annoyed than amused, Dunne burned it in an ashtray.

  Two days later a similar envelope with the same message was back in his cubby: BESPOKE. New time and date. He decided to see what it was about. If the message was for real, it must involve wrapping up bureaucratic details. Government organizations and departments came and went, but the paper shuffling never ceased.

  The next afternoon, enjoying the absence of pain in his right ankle—the happy consequence of orthopedic surgery to reset and repair the damage done in Slovakia—he strolled leisurely to the office. The convalescence had laid him up for what seemed an interminable time and delayed his going home, but had proved worth it. He was all healed and awaiting his orders to ship back to the States.

  Nearing the shop, he recalled his last visit, rainy Friday afternoon, June 1944. No doubt about the reason for that summons: The invasion was imminent. That day, he’d arrived twenty minutes early. The slight hesitation in the voice he heard on the other side of the wire might have been caused by a transatlantic technical glitch. It was more likely a sign of the apprehension even the most tested, self-contained soldiers felt now that the long-awaited hour had arrived: “You’re aware of the confidence General Donovan has placed in you. As of tonight, all leaves are canceled. That means everyone … Follow the previous instructions … for … rendezvous … Everyone, Dunne … Is that clear?”

  He’d stopped at a pub. The room was crowded and noisy. Several patrons tried to buy him a drink. He’d put them off as politely as he could and sat alone in a cozy. He’d picked up his drink. The tremor in his hand was barely noticeable. He’d limited himself to two, nursed them slowly, enough to take the edge off, not send him over.

  At closing time, the barman rang the bell and shouted, “Time, gentlemen. Time.”

  The legend stenciled on the door—an inside nod to General Donovan’s alma mater, where he’d made his name as a football star—was the same as on Dunne’s last visit:

  Columbia Casualty & Life

  You Can Rely On Us

  London Bureau Est. 1910

  Though her hair was auburn instead of blonde and cut shorter than that of the woman who’d answered the door on his previous visit, and her lipstick was a deeper, harder shade of red, she could have been the same woman. But if she wasn’t the same person, she was the same type, attractive, early thirties, ready smile, in-charge, friendly without being flirty. Dressed in black skirt and purple silk blouse, she was a welcome change from the prissy British types in buttoned-up, semimilitary tweed suits that made even the young and pretty seem frosty and unapproachable.

  She concentrated on the card he handed her a moment longer than necessary to digest so short a message. “Why, yes, Mr. Dunne, I was expecting you. It’ll take a few minutes to put your call through to Washington.” She handed it back and took his hat. He was in civilian clothes, one of the suits he’d had hand-tailored at Crosby & Lord, not a Savile Row shop but close enough and half the price. Whatever else the OSS had achieved, it would send home a cadre of veterans in well-tailored suits.

  “Can I get you a cup of coffee?” A question he hadn’t been asked on his last visit.

  “I was afraid you’d say tea.”

  “We’re an American company.” She smiled. Teeth straight and white. “I can offer you good strong American coffee.”

  “Maxwell House?”

  She cocked her head with a quizzical tilt. “Is that the only kind you like?”

  “A sentimental favorite. I’ll drink whatever you’ve got.”

  “We keep a special supply of Horn and Hardart’s.”

  “I like it black.”


  “That’s how you’ll have it.” Her accent was American but without any discernible regional twang or accent, a radio voice, generic like her smile, the kind that could sell coffee or insurance or toothpaste.

  She sashayed ahead on a nice set of gams accented by open-toed high heels with ankle straps, Joan Crawford–style. The office was how he remembered it: file cabinets against the far wall; main space occupied by two rows of sturdy, identical desks, three to a row, each with an Underwood, a silent telephone, and its own pile of papers.

  “You came at a good time. The staff will be at a conference all morning. Now if you follow me, I’ll get you set up.” He resisted pointing out that, coincidentally, the staff had been away at a conference during his visit just prior to D-Day. A newspaper was opened on the desk nearest the door, as it had been, he recalled, on his last visit. He glanced down. It was the previous day’s New York Standard.

  She led him to the same small office as on his last visit. On the table against the wall were a telephone and electric teakettle. “No need for this.” She removed the teakettle. “I’ll be back in a flash.”

  He sat at the table. He lit a cigarette and rested it on a black ceramic ashtray with white lettering: THE STORK CLUB.

  On the wall above was a calendar with the logo of Columbia Casualty & Life, woman holding aloft a torch, an obvious imitation of the figure used by the Columbia film studio, probably borrowed by whoever created this set. Next to it was a picture of the late President Roosevelt, black ribbon draped across the top. Been dead six months. In view of General Donovan’s summary dismissal by President Truman and his disbanding of the OSS, it wasn’t likely the new president’s picture would replace the old.

  The presidential face wore a wan smile that couldn’t hide its weariness. Anybody earned the right to look that way, FDR had. Nothing to fear but fear itself. His most-remembered line. But he’d learned differently. Long list of things to fear. Enemies foreign and domestic. Slander. Betrayal. Cerebral hemorrhage. He gave as good as he got. And wore out in the process. His death came as a surprise, but shouldn’t have. Those sad, sagging, tired eyes: dead tired.