Cronley set the Storch down on what was the deserted airfield’s only runway, and then taxied to a small, two-story control tower. They had just about reached the tower when two Ford staff cars appeared.
I didn’t see them when I passed over the field, which means they were hiding somewhere.
What’s that all about?
When they had climbed down from the Storch, Cohen walked quickly to the control tower building, opened the door, and went inside without saying a word to the four men wearing triangled ODs who were now standing by the staff cars.
“Why do I think there’s a functioning pissoir in there?” Cronley asked.
None of the four men replied.
“My name is Cronley, and this is Colonel Serov of the Red Army.”
Again, none of the men replied.
Cohen came out of the building several minutes later.
“Well, let’s get in the cars,” he said.
“Who’s going to sit on my airplane?” Cronley asked.
“It’s perfectly safe here.”
“On a deserted airfield? And where am I going to get gas for my airplane?”
“That’s the first time that’s come up,” Cohen said.
“That’s because I didn’t know we were headed for a deserted airport.”
“What kind and how much gas are you going to need?”
“Three jerry cans of regular gas.”
“Levinson,” Cohen ordered, “you will stay here and protect Mr. Cronley’s airplane. And when we get to the castle, you, Davis, will procure three jerry cans of gas and get it out here.”
Two of the men said, “Yes, sir,” in chorus.
Cohen motioned for them to get in one of the staff cars. He got in the front passenger seat, and Cronley and Serov got in the back. They started off, and the second car followed.
“Colonel, are we going to have time to see the Hermannsdenkmal?” Serov asked.
“The what?” Cronley asked.
“Ivan, I thought we were on a first-name basis,” Cohen said.
“And so we are, Mortimer.”
“‘Morty,’ please,” Cohen said. “No, I don’t think we’ll have time today. Sorry, Ivan, I have to get back to Nuremberg before 2100.”
“So it did survive the war?” Serov asked.
“Oh, yes,” Cohen said. “Maybe if you talk nice to Cronley . . .”
“I always talk nice to James.”
“He’ll fly you up here one day and you can have a look at it.”
“At what?” Cronley asked.
“It’s an enormous statue of Arminius, a.k.a. Hermann der Cheruskerfürst. The Germans put it up around the turn of the century. It’s near Detmold in the Teutoburg Forest.”
“The guy who won the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest?”
“One and the same. He became the poster boy for German nationalism. Many Germans are named after him, including Hermann Göring. There’s even a statue of him in New York City, called the Hermann Heights Monument.”
“And there’s a statue of him in New York City? Come on, Colonel!” Cronley said incredulously.
“To use your indelicate phrase, Jim, I shit you not. It was erected in 1897 by the Sons of Hermann, a fraternal organization of German Americans in New York. That fraternal organization evolved into the German-American Bund, which you may recall used to hold meetings, complete with swastikas and enthusiastic singing of ‘Deutschland über Alles’ in Madison Square Garden. And on the Missouri River there is a town, Hermann, also named for the winner of the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“Probably. But it’s never too late to repent. Isn’t that true, Ivan?”
“So I have been taught,” Serov replied. “Saint Luke tells us ‘joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repents, more than over ninety and nine just persons.’”
What’s with this sonofabitch?
First, he goes way out of his way to get those guys Claudette shot full Russian Orthodox funerals, including the right tombstones, and now he’s quoting Scripture.
His mouth went on automatic.
“That doesn’t say anything about being too late to repent, Ivan.”
“No, but it allows me to think there was joy in heaven when this sinner repented, hopefully before it was too late.”
Christ, he said that with a straight face!
Is he serious about being a Christian?
That’s hard to believe about a senior NKGB officer.
“Diverting this theological discussion to something more appropriate to our visit to Castle Wewelsburg,” Cohen said, “may I point out the Germans seem to have a deep affection for their heroic noble forebears, often attributing to them something very close to divinity?”
“Are you suggesting that Himmler thought of himself as divine?” Serov asked. “Or royalty?”
“I don’t think royalty, perhaps because he didn’t have a son to whom he could pass his crown. But divine? After you take a good look at Castle Wewelsburg, you tell me if you think it’s possible he was trying to set himself up as the founder of a new religion.”
“You do?” Cronley asked.
“Why don’t you wait until you see the castle and then ask yourself that?”
“Political regimes are, relatively speaking, easy to topple,” Serov said. “Religions are not, as Stalin and Beria have learned to their chagrin.”
And that doesn’t sound as if you’re unhappy that they’ve failed.
Is he actually a Christian?
Or is the sonofabitch just trying to make us believe he is, for God only knows what reason?
“How’s that going, Ivan?” Cronley asked. “Have Stalin and Beria stopped trying to rid the Soviet Union of the ‘opiate of the masses’?”
“They’re still working on it.”
“And do you think they’ll eventually succeed?”
“No,” Serov said, with finality.
[FOUR]
“And there it is,” Cohen said, pointing out the windshield.
Cronley looked and saw a massive building at the top of a tree-covered hill. At one end, atop a round corner, was a domed tower. At the other end there was a much larger round corner. If there had been a domed top, it was now gone.
He decided, just before Cohen turned on a narrow road and he lost sight of the castle, that the larger round corner had to be the North Tower.
After winding through the trees, they came to the castle. The North Tower was now on the right, connected to the Left Tower by first a two-story structure, and then a three-story structure.
Leading to a tunnel in the center of the two-story structure was sort of a bridge. Two Provisional Security Organization guards armed with Thompson submachine guns stood at the near end of the bridge beside a large wooden sign in German and English: RESTRICTED AREA—ABSOLUTELY NO ADMITTANCE.
Cronley just had time to idly wonder what rank in the Free Polish Forces the guards in shabby dyed black U.S. Army overcoats had once held when he realized the bridge was over what, in bygone times, had been the castle’s moat.
They found themselves in a courtyard. There was a three-quarter-ton weapons carrier, two jeeps, and a staff car parked close to the corner of the courtyard, close to a door leading to the interior of the building.
There were at least fifty or sixty five-gallon jerry cans—Cronley thought a weapons-carrier load—stacked near the door. What are they doing with all that gas?
Cohen led them into a building and then into a makeshift kitchen. There were two middle-aged women tending two U.S. Army field stoves, and there was a Cannon heater, glowing red, in a corner of the room.
“As soon as I have a cup of coffee,” Cohen announced, “the tour will begin. Help yourselves.”
“Colonel, you said you were CIC an
d know everything,” Cronley said, as he filled a china mug.
“So?”
“So tell me about that Cannon heater. Is that a trade name, or was it intended to heat cannons?”
“You’ve got me. I’ve been wondering about that myself, for lo these many years.”
“It never occurred to me,” Serov said, “how uncomfortable a castle must be in the winter. How do your men put up with it? Do they live here? Or?”
“They live here with stoic devotion to a noble cause.”
“The Nazis didn’t apply that legendary German technology to make this place comfy in the winter?” Cronley asked.
“They spent a fortune doing just that. But after Sturmbannführer Heinz Macher tried and failed to blow up the castle, he tried, with some success, to burn the insides. And after that, he told the local citizenry they were free to loot the place. Which they did.”
“What happened to Macher?”
“I thought I told you. He was captured with Himmler. Originally, they sent him to a prison camp for Less Important SS officers in Darmstadt. I arranged to have him brought to Nuremberg.”
“Charged with what?”
“We don’t have anything on him that we can charge him with. Being Himmler’s adjutant is not in itself a war crime, nor is trying to destroy a castle. I was thinking that maybe, just maybe, being surrounded by people who are going to hang, especially since he believes the victors are taking revenge, might make him cooperative, and he would fess up to what happened to the contents of Himmler’s safe and all those golden Totenkopfrings. So far, all he’ll give me is name, rank, and serial number.”
“Maybe a charming young officer who is not, as Ivan put it, either a Russian or of the Hebrew persuasion, and who speaks German with a Strasbourg accent, could get to him.”
“Why do I think you know just such a person, James?” Serov asked, chuckling.
“And why do I think it’s worth a shot?” Cohen said. “Finish your coffee, gentlemen, your tour of what’s left of the Nazi version of Saint Peter’s Cathedral is about to begin.”
[FIVE]
The Bar
Farber Palast
Stein, near Nuremberg
American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1930 22 February 1946
When he walked into the bar, Cronley saw a faintly familiar face on a tall, thin, middle-aged major of infantry sitting alone at a corner table, but he couldn’t remember his name, or where he had seen him before.
“Let’s take a table,” he said to Serov, Cohen, and Casey Wagner, who had driven them from the airport. “I’m about to quickly have several belts of Jack Daniel’s and I don’t want to fall off a barstool.”
“Something bothering you?”
“And you know what: Castle Wewelsburg.”
“Red Army officers such as myself pride themselves on impassiveness in all situations,” Serov said. “Having said that, I will tell the waiter to bring a bottle of Jack Daniel’s.”
“You, too, Ivan?” Cohen said.
“I had the feeling that we were as close to absolute evil—perhaps hell itself—as we are ever going to be in this life.”
Well said, Ivan.
But from the guy who tried to kidnap Claudette and Flo?
And kidnapped Mattingly and then kept him chained to a chair?
So I would give him Colonel Likharev and his wife and children so that he could show NKGB officers what happens to NKGB officers and their families if they try to switch sides?
Serov was as good as his word. When the waiter came to the table, he ordered, in fluent German, “Please bring a bottle of Jack Daniel’s immediately. On my tab.”
Cronley saw that Wagner was all ears.
But smart enough not to ask questions.
The Jack Daniel’s was quickly delivered.
Cronley opened the bottle and, ignoring the silver shot dispenser, quickly poured whisky into glasses, half filling them.
“Inasmuch as you have to drive Colonel Cohen to wherever the hell he’s going, you don’t get no booze, Casey,” Cronley said.
“I understand, sir.”
Cohen, Serov, and Cronley wordlessly touched glasses and then took healthy swallows from them.
“I guess I should have raised that glass to your people at the castle,” Cronley said. “Christ, imagine having to live there.”
“It poses a strain on them . . .”
“I saw that on their faces when we landed. At the time, I thought it was normal CIC agent behavior.”
“Excuse me?” Cohen asked.
“When I was—I admit briefly—a CIC agent in Marburg, I noticed that the real agents always tried to keep a stone face, so people would know they were serious.”
“That’s called ‘maintaining a serious demeanor,’” Cohen said. “So far as the strain on my people at Wewelsburg is concerned, I first select the more mature of my agents for that assignment, then I ensure that they spend every third week at Berchtesgaden, with their families, if they have families.”
“At Hitler’s ‘Eagle’s Nest’?” Serov asked incredulously.
“No, Ivan. I should have said ‘Garmisch.’ The Army runs a resort there. And then I get them out of Wewelsburg when they seem to have had all the strain they can handle.”
“That place seems more evil to me than even the extermination camps,” Cronley said. “And yeah, I’ve been to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and seen the movies of the others.”
“That was mass murder,” Cohen said. “The point I’ve been trying to get across is that a religion that permits, even encourages, mass murder of inferior people in the name of God is actually worse than mass murder itself.”
“Don’t let this go to your head, Professor, but your lectures and guided tour of Wewelsburg made me a convert to your way of thinking.”
“I didn’t need to be converted,” Serov said. “When I first heard of what was going on at Wewelsburg, I came to that conclusion. However, actually being there . . .”
He left the sentence unfinished.
Cronley picked up the Jack Daniel’s bottle and refilled Serov’s and his empty glasses. When he turned to Cohen’s glass, he saw that it was not only not empty, but that Cohen was holding his hand over it.
“I really have to meet with Colonel Rasberry,” Cohen said. “He has a problem with the jail he’s asked me to help deal with. And while I’m there, I’ll ask him to arrange a chat with Sturmbannführer Macher for you, Jim.”
“Thank you,” Cronley said.
“Aren’t you going to thank me for the tour of Castle Wewelsburg?”
“That would be like me thanking my mother for having taken me to the dentist and having him pull two wisdom teeth. Right now, I wish I had never been in the place.”
“Most of what you’re feeling, I felt,” Cohen said. “Most of it, I suggest, will pass.”
“I think if that feeling of mingled contempt, disgust, and fear completely went away, that would make us lesser human beings,” Serov said. “People in our line of work have to learn to deal with the scum of the earth, and learn not to have them contaminate us.”
Scum of the earth like Polkovnik Sergei Likharev and family, Ivan?
Or, really wild thought, does he mean NKGB scum?
“Good night, gentlemen,” Cohen said. “Come on, Casey.”
“Meet me for breakfast, Casey,” Cronley ordered. “Early—0730.”
“Yes, sir,” Casey said, and then followed Cohen out of the bar.
“As soon as I finish this,” Serov said, holding up his glass, “I’m going to have to leave myself. Are you going to be all right, James? Drinking oneself into oblivion is not wise for people in our business.”
“I’ll be all right.”
“Good,” Serov said. He then raised his half-full glass of Jack Daniel’s and
drained it.
He stood up and said, “A day unfortunately not to be forgotten,” and then walked out of the bar.
I am not stupid enough to drink myself into oblivion. I will slowly finish this one and go to my room, have a shower, and then go to bed, either with good ol’ Janice, or by myself. In either case I will probably later have nightmares about what Castle Wewelsburg is all about.
Cronley was, literally, staring into his empty glass when a voice saying “Captain Cronley?” brought him back to the here and now.
He looked at the speaker and saw it was the major with the familiar face he had seen when he came in the bar.
“You are Captain Cronley, right?”
“Yeah, but how do you know that?”
The major produced DCI credentials, identifying him as Anthony M. Henderson. Cronley now remembered, clearly, where they had met, in the Schlosshotel Kronberg, and who El Jefe had said he was, a War II OSS comrade in arms now in DCI.
“Now I remember you,” Cronley admitted. “Just passing through Nuremberg, are you?”
Henderson smiled. “Harold Wallace sent me down here to see what you needed. I’m DCI-Europe’s new inspector general. May I sit down?”
“Why not? Help yourself to the Jack Daniel’s. I’m through for the night.”
“Thank you. I will,” he said. “Bad day? I couldn’t help but notice you and your friends didn’t look as if you were having a good time.”
“Ask away.”
“Excuse me?”
“Ask the next question. ‘I couldn’t help but wonder who . . .’”
“Consider it asked.”
“What you saw, Major, was me doing just what Sun-tzu recommended. ‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.’ The U.S. colonel was Mortimer Cohen, who commands the CIC at the War Trials. The Russian polkovnik was Ivan Serov, formerly of the NKGB.”
“What was that all about?”
“Major, with all respect, what I suspect is that Colonel Wallace sent you down here to see what I’m up to, particularly what I’m doing wrong.”
“Why would he do that?”
“I think the acronym is CYA.”
“And you think that he would not be pleased to learn what you were up to with Colonel Cohen and Polkovnik Serov?”
Death at Nuremberg Page 16