Nuremberg

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  Sitting alongside Albright, Sebastian, for an hour or two, took in the arguments being made by U.S., British, and Soviet prosecutors, after which he repaired to his little office with its typewriter and mimeograph machine and dictionary and, by now, twenty file cabinets. There he would resume his work on German-language affidavits, records, and archives.

  The interrogation of Amadeus had been suspended for an interval. Sebastian was instructed by Captain Carver on what especially to look for, and after a while he needed no day-to-day guidance. Carver, meticulous but dogmatically antibureaucratic, came to trust the young man who learned his job so quickly and accepted his workload without complaint. When Sebastian came upon long stretches of reports or memoranda or affidavits that he judged routine, he would not go to the pains of translating them word for word. Instead, he’d write a few paragraphs of paraphrase and attach them to a folder. To it he sometimes appended a three-by-five card with a personal note, which Captain Carver would be expected to discard after reading. This character — Sebastian was describing one Obersturmfuehrer (First Lieutenant) named Heinrich Lichtman — did extra , unreported work at Joni and beat up his prisoners before sending them up to the gas chamber . I hope you can keep him alive for a while . I’d like to go to college , then law school , then come back and prosecute this one myself . — Again , seat of the pants , boss , I think Humbolt here is telling the truth . The mathematics don’t work . The camp couldn’t have handled the claimed volume . Must have been terribly disappointing .

  Sometimes Captain Carver would ask for more detail. Sebastian had begun his mission with an almost exclusive concern for the life and work of Kurt Amadeus, especially at Camp Joni, but the focus on Joni implicated another Nuremberg defendant, Governor General Frank, who exercised civil authority over the region. Hans Frank reigned from nearby Cracow, where Amadeus, among other duties, had personally supervised the forced-labor construction of Franks personal bunker. Sebastian nurtured a great yearning to travel, some day, to the area. A twelve-hour train trip from Berlin to Cracow and then the forty miles to Lodz and then to the site, to view Camp Joni and see with his own eyes where it all took place. He wondered how many years would go by before such a trip, through 500 miles of Soviet-occupied territory, would be possible.

  He wasn’t clear how much of Joni still existed today, December of 1945, ten months after the last Jew there had been killed. In March and April, the final two months of the war, and on into the summer until approximately the same time the war crimes trial began, reports from the Russians were to the effect that Joni was being used as a prisoner of war camp for German soldiers. But then, in October, Sebastian saw the report that Joni was “being destroyed.” It was confusing.

  There were almost daily communications, at headquarters in the Palace, coming in from one or another Soviet desk, whether in Moscow, Berlin, or (most frequently) the Soviet command at the Palace itself. One of those bulletins contradicted the earlier bulletin: Camp Joni would continue in use (until further notice) as a POW facility. Sebastian thought more about it, and brought it up with Albright one day. Might he at some point during the trial find himself free to travel the 500 miles? Not inconceivably, he might wangle some kind of a commission from Captain Carver to travel to Cracow and Lodz to do research. Harry threw cold water on the idea. “The Soviets permit a U.S. officer to just amble into Soviet Poland and look around? Moonshine, Reinhard.”

  Sebastian didn’t know what Camp Joni looked like, as of December 1945, but he could have drawn a fairly detailed diagram of how it looked a year ago, when Amadeus was still its commander. After reading a thousand intracamp memoranda he could compose a detailed picture of Camp Joni in his mind. He knew the camp’s layout almost by feel.

  Tuesday morning, while U.S. Assistant Prosecutor Thomas Dodd was addressing the tribunal on the subject of the organizational guilt of the SS, Sebastian closed his eyes. He conjured up the neatly designed row of ten barracks; the kitchen, the SS quarters, the hospital, the railroad terminal building. Then, at the southwestern end, the gas chamber and crematorium, housed in gray concrete, the large smokestack jutting up from one end, which gave up into the Polish air traces of the ashen remains of the wretched men, women, and children whose final portal this had been.

  Bizarre that the room in which the victims were made to disrobe lay in the center of that building. From that room Amadeus’s charges walked, or were made to walk — or crawl — into the gas chamber at one end. When the heavy, airtight door closed and the gas-slaughter proceeded, twenty-one minutes were counted: Everyone would be safely dead then. But now — Sebastian forced himself to focus on the building’s odd design — the bodies would have to be physically removed. That was the work of the Sonderkommandos — conscripted Jews — who came in and opened the iron door on the stench. Their job was to transport the corpses (800 of them at a time fitted into Joni’s gas chamber) back across the same room in which, a half hour earlier, they had disrobed — on into the crematorium, where four corpses, one after another, fitted onto each of the four steel belts that conveyed them into the molten heat, producing ashes which in due course were emptied into the Vistula, which wound its sleepy way by the camp, a half kilometer away.

  The arguments in the courtroom carried on. Two weeks went by. A certain restlessness crept into the Palace of Justice.

  *

  It was appeased by the Christmas break, awaited with breathless eagerness by the entire cadre at the Palace. Sebastian had plotted his ten-day leave step by step. He would take a train to Frankfurt, another to Paris. He would spend the night and board the Eurostar train to Calais, and then take the ferry to Dover. Two more hours by train and then the Underground (his mother, Anna-belle, had sent him a tiny route map). He would go from Charing Cross to Baker Street Station. He’d be at 22 Heath Street some time early in the afternoon. “I don’t care what time, Sebby,” his mother had said excitedly in their phone call. “I’ll be waiting for you on Sunday, December 23rd. Oh my darling Sebby, it’s been more than two years! Twenty-nine months — ” Sebastian had leaned into the telephone to permit him to lower his voice when speaking out his affection for his mother. The bank of six telephone units in the Palace lobby was crowded. Two enlisted men were close behind him, waiting their turn.

  Departing Nuremberg, he felt a strong stirring of impatience with the entire judicial process. The day before he set out for London, the Stars and Stripes reported that two Japanese had been convicted by an Australian military court at Wewak, New Guinea. Lieutenant Takehiko Tazaki was charged with eating flesh from the body of an Australian soldier. A second military court at Morotai found Captain Tokio Iwasa guilty of bayoneting an Australian airman. It all appeared endless.

  He needed to assault himself over and over again with the same question most of his colleagues were asking: What was the alternative ? Sebastian Reinhard knew in great detail what Kurt Amadeus had presided over at Camp Joni, and a great deal, in recent weeks, about the awful rule of Hans Frank. And then, up an echelon or two in the hierarchical ranks, there were Goering and SS #2 chief Ernst Kaltenbrunner. And over there in another division of the hierarchy, the generals and admirals and diplomats and munitions makers. The whole despicable lot. But did he, frustrated by the judicial process, feel that, if left alone and given the authority, he’d he willing to take a pistol from his pocket and fire it at the head of Amadeus? It vexed him that he could not imagine making himself do this, he explained to his mother in her tiny, cozy flat off Portland Place.

  “There’s something creepy-crawly inside most of us that says you can’t shoot somebody unless you’re in combat or — unless some...body...some official has condemned him to death.” Perhaps it was that reservation that reassured him that he could never have accepted service in the SS. Perhaps he had his bloodlines to thank for this.

  His mother had listened to her son for the better part of an afternoon and now, after serving him the best she had managed to put together from what she could buy at the PX, plu
s the Virginia ham Henrietta had sent her for Christmas, she listened again, and heard the descriptions of Camp Joni and the prisoner, Kurt Waldemar Amadeus, and reflected gratefully on the relative aridity, after the death of her husband Axel, of her own experience, decoding transmission after transmission of directives from sundry command posts in the Reich to sundry officials in Germany, and in the conquered territories.

  “Funny, Mama, that we’d both be spending our time translating German documents into English. Only you have an extra step to travel. You have to go code to German, then German to English.”

  She smiled her broad smile and poured another glass of wine. “It’s not like translating Goethe. One folder I spent maybe two weeks on was abruptly declassified. So I sent it to Oma. Dear mother. She wrote back wondering why I was spending that kind of time decoding and translating a long official document on revising laundry procedures in military camps.”

  Sebastian brightened at the mention of his grandmother. “I had a letter from her a couple of weeks ago — ”

  “Did she mention Munich?”

  “ Exactly ! She said I should maneuver to convict anyone — Alle! — who had been involved in the bombing of Munich. ‘And it doesn’t matter whether they’re Germans or Americans. They should all be hanged.’”

  Sebastian stopped and, looking up, said, “I guess everybody has somebody he’d like to hang. I’ve got my Amadeus.”

  “‘Amadeus,” Annabelle repeated the word. “What a name for such a man. Amadeus : God-love. Love-God.”

  “ Amo , amas, amat — “ Sebastian put on the look of a dutiful schoolchild giving his lines. Annabelle chimed in. Together they completed the conjugation of the basic Latin verb, to love: “ Amamus , amatis , amant .”

  They giggled, and Annabelle leaned over and kissed her son on his curly brown hair.

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Nuremberg , January 1946

  Two days later, the phone rang in his office. It didn’t ring often but whenever it did, Sebastian was glad for the interruption. Whoever was calling, on whatever subject, it got him relief from the tedium of translation. When it was Albright on the line, the call promised to yield five minutes or more of courthouse gossip. When it was Captain Carver, it meant fresh instructions or comments on previously done work.

  Sometimes when the trial was going on Harry would ring from his listening aerie. He did so now. “Tom Dodd says he’s going to show a documentary on the death camps tomorrow. Otto Stahmer is objecting. So would I, if I was Goering’s attorney. Those films aren’t going to be much fun to look at, but I think you ought to see them when they’re shown. I’ll tell you tonight what the ruling is, though it’s pretty much predictable. How’s your protégé doing with his kid-attorney? Hey listen, Sebby, I’ve got an idea. I won’t tell you about it now. Maybe tonight. Maybe not till tomorrow night.”

  “Sounds mysterious.”

  “ Pluck the mystery from my heart — you think you’re the only war-crimes regular who reads books all the time? That’s Hamlet , Sebastian.”

  “I thought it was Dick Tracy. Hang on, someone’s at the door...Well I’ll be damned. That was a guy from Carver’s office, says Carver’s been trying to reach me on the phone but it’s busy. I get about one call a day and — never mind. I’m going to hang up.”

  He dialed the assistant prosecutor.

  “Sebastian? Listen. Get here in a hurry. Young Amadeus is on his way. He says he has a message from — the prisoner. He’s coming to tell me about it. Then he made a sort of oddball request. He wants you there to serve as interpreter. Which is fine, but there are one or two other interpreters around, like maybe fifty. I said okay, I’d get you. So come on up here.”

  “Yes sir.”

  *

  George Friedrich Amadeus arrived, as directed, at Room B-442 and was led in by the pool secretary who did duty for Captain Carver and two other prosecutors. Amadeus was dressed exactly as on the first day. He took a seat and turned his head not to Carver, but to Sebastian. Sebastian attempted diplomatically to compensate for this by tilting his head to one side, sufficiently to make it imaginable that the new defense counsel was addressing not him, but the prosecutor.

  “My client has authorized me to communicate something to you on the absolute promise of secrecy from the other prisoners ”

  “Yes,” Carver said, anxiously.

  “My client has decided, subject to several considerations, to give thought to changing his plea.”

  George Carver stared at Amadeus. To Sebastian he said, “Tell him to say that again.”

  The interpretation was the same.

  “Ask him what ‘changing his plea’ means, exactly, in German.”

  Amadeus replied that, in German, changing a plea of not guilty meant entering a plea of guilty .

  To Sebastian, without revealing in facial expression his excitement, Carver said, “Sebby, this is like the end of the world!” Then, to Amadeus: “What are these considerations your client is referring to?”

  “He wishes unlimited time, before his turn comes on the dock, to consult with Lieutenant Reinhard.”

  “Ahh. Yes. And what else?”

  “If he decides to change his plea, he wishes to be called to the dock after Herr Speer has been heard, not before.”

  “Yes. And what else?”

  “If he decides to alter his plea, he must be protected against any further physical contact with the other defendants.”

  “Yes. And then...”

  “If he decides to alter his plea and is condemned to death, he wishes to be shot rather than hanged.” Herr Amadeus’s facial expression was unchanged.

  Carver paused. “Is that the list?”

  “That is the list.”

  “I will of course need to consult my superior. Do you wish to ask anything further?”

  “No. I have my office here at the Palace.” He reached into the pocket of his black pants and pulled out a key to remind himself of the number. “I am at C-482.”

  “We will find you, Herr Amadeus. But I cannot tell you how long it will take to rule — to decide upon — your requests. Good day.”

  Amadeus nodded and rose. His head erect, he stood up in his ill-fitting suit and walked to the door.

  *

  Justice Jackson stared at Carver in disbelief. “There’s no possibility there was a misunderstanding, a mistranslation?”

  “None. I had him say it three times.”

  “Jesus Christ. This could change the whole scene, getting Amadeus as a cooperative witness! But there are lots of problems. We’re both lawyers — hell, everybody under this roof is a lawyer — could this court now permit a revised plea of guilty?”

  “I know you can in a military court, Judge.”

  “Well, you can’t on a capital charge in conventional criminal proceedings. That’s correct, isn’t it, George?”

  “That’s what they told us at law school — ”

  “But I’m not sure they addressed that point in London. I’ll find out from Biddle.” He wrote a note. “Oh my god, imagine sharing this information with the Soviets. There are a ton of things here we’ll have to consider. Let me see where he’s now scheduled in the defense roster.” He brought a folder from a desk drawer. “He’s slotted at number seventeen. Speer is in the number eighteen slot. If we went for it, if the whole thing flushes out, we’d move Speer to number seventeen and Amadeus to number eighteen. By the way, what the hell’s the meaning of that request?”

  “Amadeus was a protégé of Speer.”

  “Yeah, I remember. It still isn’t obvious to me why he wants to go after Speer. Hmm...What the hell, this is topsy-turvy’ stuff, but it could be a great development. Lordy, lordy. If we could persuade him to be the first defense guy!...No, that wouldn’t work, that would take too much unraveling of things. Carver, listen. There’s one of his requests that makes no difference to us, the one involving his interpreter, the lieutenant. Reinhard. Let him go in to Amadeus beginning right away. As
often as he wants. That costs us nothing.”

  “What reason do we give to Chief Landers for authorizing those visits?”

  Jackson furrowed his brow. “Yeah. It would be easier bureaucratically if Reinhard was a priest.”

  “Or a psychologist.”

  “Right. Captain Gilbert goes wherever he wants, whenever he wants. We’re going to have to get an okay from Andrus on this. What should we tell him? Eventually, we’ll have to let him in on the big picture.”

  Jackson paused. “I’ve got it.”

  “What’ll it be, sir?”

  “It will be this. Justice Robert Jackson , United States Chief Prosecutor , desires it . Make me up a memo addressed to Landers. The U . S . Prosecutor orders that Lieutenant — what’s his first name? — ”

  “Sebastian.”

  “ Lieutenant Sebastian Reinhard be admitted into the cell of prisoner Kurt Amadeus whenever the prisoner wishes and ” — Jackson broke out into a large smile, interrupting the draft directive — “we mustn’t sound too sycophantic! — whenever the prisoner wishes and Lieutenant Reinhard is available .”

  Carver returned to his office. Once again that morning, Sebastian’s telephone rang. But this call, from Chief Landers, brought dismaying news — had Sebastian not got his notice? No. Notice to what effect? Beginning on January 22, crowding at the Grand Hotel required doubling up by all bachelors. “I hear you, Chief,” was all that Sebastian could say.

  He dialed Harry. “I got the same notice. Shit.”

  They would discuss the ultimatum that afternoon when they met before dinner.

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  January 1946

  Teresa Cadonau walked quickly from her job at the Nuremberg-Furth Enclave laundry in order to arrive at the bakery before the line grew too long, which it always did, late in the afternoon. So that she would be permitted to leave work early, she took to arriving at work at 0730 instead of 0800. The warrant officer in charge of the considerable enterprise thought this reasonable enough — trade a late half hour for an early half hour. There were twenty-two laundresses engaged in doing Third Division camp laundry, some of it by hand because of the shortage of electrical washing machines. The machine factory had been bombed, and reconstruction was taking longer than anticipated.