Nuremberg

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  He paused again. “Now there are twenty-three...this is going to mean altering schedules a whole lot.” He sat down, then bolted up from his chair at the thought of what immediately needed doing. He adjusted his shirt collar, stuffed the folder marked SCHEDULE into his briefcase, and turned abruptly to Sebastian.

  “Oh yes.” He put down the briefcase and grabbed two bulky folders from the shelf. “Here. Take these to wherever you’re billeted — Grand?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “We’ll have a desk for you here tomorrow. Go make yourself real familiar with this guy” He slapped the back of his hand on the folder. “I’ll check with Justice Jackson on what will be the new schedule. I’d guess we’ll begin interviewing our man maybe as soon as Friday. He is a tall assignment, this one.”

  “Who’s that, Captain?”

  “ That is Brigadefuehrer Kurt Waldemar Amadeus. See you tomorrow.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  September 1945

  Sebastian waited for Harry Albright in the Grand Hotels grand lobby. It greatly needed restoration, suffering as it had from heavy use in the war years. Only those repairs absolutely required to maintain the hotel’s essential appearance had been undertaken.

  But the luxurious appointments were all basically there, some of them hidden under drop cloths. There were plentiful sofas and armchairs, coffee tables and heavy glass cocktail tables supported on ornate wrought iron, once brass, now an oxidized green. The upholstery was heavy, the twenty-foot-long curtains, held aside by gilt tiebacks, sagging from their own undusted weight. Columns stood on both sides, eight sets of them on the window side, their appointments in marble. The Grand Hotel’s lobby was designed to please the eyes of guests who, in the old days, elected to make their entrances by walking down the sweeping staircase, though of course the grand salon also pleased those who emerged from the solid mahogany elevators. The staff was mostly Bavarian, though it was Colonel Andrus of the Palace of Justice, very much an American, who made the critical decisions.

  Colonel Andrus, Sebastian reflected, was in charge of just about everything in town. Burton Andrus gave no quarter. He had begun his army career in the First World War and stayed on in the regular army, so that now he had completed his second world war. Andrus had commanded the detention center at Fort Oglethorpe, where soldiers guilty of grave crimes were housed. He wore, always, a green helmet liner, styled after General Patton’s, whom Andrus idolized. When he was asked to take on the IMT assignment, Andrus told Army Command that he would absolutely need to exercise supervision over the Grand Hotel, which he regarded as an auxiliary to the Palace. He had surveyed the scene and made his demands.

  To coordinate the entire compound he needed control of essential auxiliary facilities. He would have to maintain efficiently the war criminals, which meant exercising and feeding them; provide working quarters and food services for the prosecution staff and their witnesses, many of these also under lock and key; allocate rooms for file storage; arrange for the intricate forthcoming simultaneous translations; revise the great courtroom of the Palace so that, when the trial started, it could efficiently accommodate defendants, prosecutors, judges, press, and spectators. “I cannot do all that,” he had said, in his direct fashion, to the Berlin High Command, “without command authority at every vital quarter. At the Grand Hotel we are after all talking about 200 rooms.” He was given the master key to this property, a spoil of war, for as long as it was useful to the conquering armies.

  Harry, his hair still wet, greeted Sebastian. “You got your own shower?” Sebastian asked.

  Yes, Albright assured him. Indeed he had found the assigned room entirely adequate. “Maybe it was used for Hitler’s valet when he stayed here. Maybe they kept a little Jew in a cage there to keep him happy. You got to take care of the help.”

  Sebastian was a little startled by the language. He made no comment. He said simply, “Your room must be the same as mine. Let’s have a drink. I’m going to order sherry. I’m not sure I ever had sherry.”

  “You’ll like it,” Harry said.

  “Henrietta — my grandmother — liked it, but I didn’t drink yet, when I was living at home. The lieutenant who first met us at the desk this morning was just going off duty when I was taking off for the hotel. We walked over together. He told me our guys discovered almost an arsenal of sherries in the Nazi HQ, just off the Furtherstrasse. They brought it all to the hotel. Join me?”

  Albright nodded; he’d go along.

  Old-world manners of bourgeois German hotel life hadn’t been bombed out of extinction. The elderly waiter was dressed in a courtly dark blue jacket with brass buttons that stretched up to his matching blue bow-’ tie. He spoke an urbane English. “Dry, sir? Or semi-sweet?”

  What the hell. Sebastian thought, he wouldn’t pretend. “Which would you recommend?”

  The waiter nodded. “I will bring you something nice.”

  “Not too expensive,” Albright broke in.

  “Not too expensive,” the waiter affirmed, bowled, and left.

  “Well, Harry, that was some interruption today, the Robert Ley business,” Sebastian began.

  “I had a personal interest there,” Harry said. “My Papa was tipped off after the Nuremberg Declarations — that was 1935 — that things were looking pretty black for him — and me. Here he was, a Jew, living in — Nuremberg. My mother, too. That made me 100 percent Jude . So, age fourteen, I find myself on a train to Genoa, off to enroll in a young artist’s school — that was the story. My father didn’t even tell me I was going to end up in America. I was looked after, from arrival in Genoa to arrival in New York, by the ship’s bursar, Antonio Sedino. The ship was the Conte di Savoia . Sedino was, is, maybe — that was only ten years ago — my father’s brother-in-law. My hither told me he had hidden some things in the bottom of my suitcase, which was about as big as me, and heavier. When Signore Sedino met my train and took me to the boat he told me to leave the trunk with him after I took my clothes out. He said it would be safer that way — I was sharing my cabin with three Italian artists, mosaicists going to New York to do a big ceiling for a cathedral. St. John the Divine, I think it was. When we got to New York, Sedino drove me to a jeweler. We went into the back room together and with great big scissors he cut open the back of the trunk. ‘There was a ton of gold coins there. My father’s life savings, I guess.”

  “And your mum? — hey, this sherry’s good stuff.”

  “She died in childbirth. A nice old drunken Irish lady in Brooklyn was paid to put me up and send me to school, PS 142. The next round trip of the Conte di Saroia — the circuit took sixteen days — Chief Sedino came by, see how-’ I was making out. he told me my dad was scheduled for a labor camp by the Deutsche Arbeiter Front. Robert Ley must have needed a mosaicist at Dachau. But he took poison instead.”

  *

  The hotel, pending restorations and personnel changes, served only a buffet. To get into the dining room at all you needed not only proof that you were a guest of the hotel, but also supplementary proof that, as a member of the military or of the International Tribunal team, you were authorized to draw on the U.S. rations the Grand Hotel had access to. There was little commercial traffic coming to Nuremberg. The few who came and went were directed to a separate dining room. There they could order the kind of food available to postwar German civilians, scant and starchy.

  The fare at the Grand was heavily tilted to whatever could be cooked using grain or flour: spaghetti, breads, pastries. Fruit was scarce, but tonight the Grand served grapes, prised up from Italy. From the buffet, Albright brought back sausage and sauerkraut, Sebastian a meat stew of sorts. They drank beer.

  “So what are you going to do to justify all the trouble the United States has taken to bring you here?” Sebastian asked. “Nothing to do with bombers, I’d guess. Or are you a witness of some kind?”

  Albright puffed on his cigarette, then spoke through the smoke. “My B-17 was badly winged in March. The crew was hel
d together for a while, waiting for a new plane, or repairs. But we were getting overstaffed, the bombing outfits. ‘The krauts had no fighters left to shoot us down with and their antiaircraft units were slowly being wiped out. So our detachment was sent off to Bassingbourne for reassignment. Somebody poked into my dossier and found out what I was doing before dropping bombs.”

  “Which was what?”

  “We Albrights — my father’s name was Alkunstler — go in for oddball vocations.”

  “A mosaicist and — what?”

  “I graduated from high school in Brooklyn — I did physics and learned from the physics teacher something about electricity. At seventeen I got a job with Hammerstein Radio Services, Inc. One of their jobs was to equip Radio City Music Hall with first-rate amplification. They did the installation, with me tagging along. Then one day I found myself in charge of maintenance. I had to be there, on duty, the whole time the theater was using the screen or the stage. I must have seen Snow White and her fucking dwarfs 300 times, always making sure the sound was just right. I had maybe eighty goes with the Fantasia movie when I was drafted, sent to the army air force. I was always on radio there, right through the bombing raids. I learned a lot about radios.”

  “And now?”

  “I’m supposed to see that everybody over at the courthouse who is supposed to hear something hears it. And, oh yes, in the language he wants to hear it in. English, French, German, or Russian. Luckily, there’s a kraut over here who used to work for Berlin radio, a sound technician. He now works for me. He speaks not one word of any of the languages we’ve got to send out except German. This is a pretty tough assignment. Colonel Andrus — he’d have made a good concentration camp commander — told me I’d have to have the simultaneous translation wiring set up by October 3rd.”

  “You can do that?”

  “No. No way. But after fifteen minutes, I discovered you don’t say no to Colonel Andrus. Fifteen minutes after we started talking was also when he got the news about Robert Ley. I’m only surprised Andrus didn’t put a noose around his own neck when he heard about the suicide. His #1 responsibility is to keep the German prisoners alive until he kills them.”

  They agreed to walk over to work together the next morning at 0800 and went to their rooms.

  Minutes later, seated in his chair, wearing khakis and a T-shirt, the lamp adjusted, Sebastian Reinhard opened the file on Brigadefuehrer Kurt Waldemar Amadeus.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  September 1945

  It was 0820 when Sebastian reached the Prosecutor’s Central Office, reporting, as instructed, to Chief Landers. The warrant officer was at Ins desk and had begun to study his copy of the daily Palace bulletin when his telephone console rang. He leaned down to answer it but as he began to talk, the door of the office directly behind him banged open and a voice called out, “Landers? Landers !” Chief Landers put down the telephone and turned his head toward the open door.

  “You want me, Justice?”

  “No,” the voice was clearly heard. “I want Major Gripsholm but he doesn’t answer his phone. Track him down for me.”

  “Yes sir.” he asked first the caller on the phone, then Sebastian, to wait, and dialed two numbers, unprofitable. He lifted a bulky folder and leafed through mimeographed pages. He dialed again. “Sergeant, this is Chief Landers at Justice Jackson’s office. The Justice is looking for Major Gripsholm. He doesn’t answer his phone or his room number at the Grand. I wondered if he might be with Colonel Andrus?...Yes, well. Yes, I know Colonel Andrus doesn’t like to be interrupted, but you’ll have to get word Major Cripsholm that the Chief Prosecutor.”

  The bell rang again. “Hang on a minute.” The phone transfer was clone. “...Yes sir? I think I’ve located him, justice. Get right back to you...Sergeant? Get word to Major Gripsholm somehow. Yes, I see what you mean. Look, all I have to worn about is” — he cupped the receiver with his left hand but Sebastian had no difficulty in hearing his words — “looking after the Chief Prosecutor, who a while ago was a justice of the Supreme Court and a while before that Attorney General of the United States. He feels he... I understand . Precedence. Yes, yes. Well, get to Major Gripsholm as soon as you can.”

  The chief warrant officer looked up at Sebastian. “Sorry about that, Lieutenant Reinhard.” He looked down at the assignment sheet Sebastian had handed him when the Chief Prosecutors summons had interrupted. “You’re just here, just got here yesterday...I know, I have to find you an office to work in. I hope you have calm nerves. I do. I was a clerk in the New York Stock Exchange when I was drafted and I thought I’d never he rattled anywhere, not compared to back there. But this is something else. Thank god there are separate desks for non-U.S. judges and their aides. All I have to worry about is the Chief Prosecutor, a dozen assistant prosecutors, a hundred interrogators, and liaison with a million French, British, and Russian prosecutors’ desks. That’s all.”

  Chief Landers was enjoying the mute, smiling company of the tall, brown-eyed young lieutenant with the deep Georgia tan and indulged himself further. “It would be a lot different if I could smoke, but Justice Jackson doesn’t like cigarette smoke. You smoke?”

  Sebastian shook his head.

  Chief Landers looked up from the office’s floor layout. “Let’s try B-242 for you. There’s a stenographer has a desk there, one of the pool WACs — Sergeant Cyrilla Hempstone is one valuable lady, an old hand. Across the hall are two other stenographers. I’m talking about German/English. Thank god all the defendants are German. It’s not my job to quarter the German/Russian or German/French stenos. That’s — again — Colonel Andrus. That’s his worry. You got any special equipment you’re going to need?”

  “A typewriter. And a Duden German - English Dictionary . And, you know, paper, a few file boxes.”

  Landers took notes. “There’s plenty of room. These offices were used for German prosecutors and staff right up through to when the bombing began. The German appellate court had fewer and fewer people to prosecute. The Nazis had a way of clearing up backlogs. They didn’t need all that much room for preparing criminal cases against double-parkers. And — am I taking up too much of your time, Lieutenant?”

  Sebastian shook his head vigorously. “No, no, Chief. I appreciate it, I really do.” Sebastian gave his broad smile. “Maybe I’ll come to you when I hit really bumpy problems in interpreting.” Landers liked that. “I’ve picked up just a little German, in the last year. I’d know how to order five shares of AT&T in German — ” The phone rang. “Yes, Major Gripsholm. I’ll put you right through.”

  Sebastian nodded his thanks and left in the direction Landers’s forefinger pointed to. He needed to climb the stairs to another floor, but then soon came across Room B-242. He knocked, then opened the door. The little office was empty, the walls bare except for notices and floor plans Scotch-taped on one side. The nearer desk seemed occupied, a folder or two strewn about. He went to the desk at the other end, opened his satchel, and removed the file on Kurt Amadeus.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Nuremberg , September 1945

  His phone rang. Sebastian froze. Since the day he was commissioned a second lieutenant he had never before answered the telephone while on duty. What was he supposed to say? “Lieutenant Reinhard?” “Reinhard?” “This is Lieutenant Reinhard?” He had to say something. He managed, “Hello.”

  “Reinhard? This is Captain Carver. How you doing on that material?”

  “I’ve got three days of reading behind me, Captain. There’s a ton of footnotes marked but nothing in the accompanying material. And a lot of it is in German. Do you read German, sir?”

  “No. It’s up to you to mark passages you think I ought to have. Then translate them for me. Reinhard, if I had given you all the accompanying material, you’d have needed a truck to get to the hotel. You’ll have access to all that stuff, obviously, as needed. There may be some trick terminology there you’ll need help on. Oh. Before I forget, tell General Amadeus li
ke five seconds after we begin questioning him , tell him that when he uses acronyms he is to say out the letters one at a time , like if he says ‘DAF’ — Deutsche Arbeiter Front — he must say Dee...Aay...Fff. There’s going to be a lot of that kind of stuff.”

  “Who do I get help from on the technical terms. Captain?”

  “Herr Professor Bruno Waldstein. He’s a military historian. A cripple, one-legged — First World War. The Nazis left him alone. He taught at the university here. He’s on full-time call, over the phone, or we can bring him in if you need to explore written material with him.

  “Let’s see, it’s just about time to eat. You know where the officers’ mess hall is? Well, Landers will tell you — he’ll tell you anything you want to know and a lot you don’t want to know. You just might ask him whether Brigadefuehrer Amadeus is guilty; if so, like how guilty? I mean, guilty meriting what? Hanging? Life? Twenty years? — save us a lot of trouble if he just told us...Okay, I’ll cut the bullshit. Come to my office after chow and we’ll dig in.”

  *

  Captain Carver began the conference by taking his telephone off the hook. Sebastian sat down opposite, clipboard and legal pad in hand. He was ready to take notes.

  Carver began. “Of course, just to begin with, lie’s guilty as sin.”

  Sebastian nodded.

  “On the other hand, we’ve got to make our case. At several levels. The case against him, but also a case supporting our propositions on war crimes — that there is such a thing as a war crime. The principal argument at that level will be made by Justice Jackson. You know anything about him? Jackson?”