Nuremberg

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  By the end of January they had assembled and stored in the hallway outside the cellar room the basic tools they needed — hammer, saw, sawhorse, file, paint, varnish. The windows were now nicely painted and, as required, rebuilt, both in Albrights outer room where Sergeant Red had worked and in the room Teresa had surrendered to Sebastian when she moved herself down to the cellar room.

  Assembling the material necessary for making curtains and shelves proved remarkably easy and cheap. A block-long thieves’ market of sorts lay just off the market square, exhibiting the fruit of hours and days of foraging Germans of all ages. Beginning only weeks after the bomb smoke had lifted, they had combed the rubble and pulled away doorknobs and carpets and toilet seats and curtain rods and kitchenware. “Gee,” Harry said after their first tour of the market, “you could furnish a whole house for a hundred bucks.”

  The radio, fabricated in 1938 by Heinze Electronics, was plugged in, and it was grand and cozy to get news and music right there in the ample-sized living room/dining room/bedroom. Harry thought of getting a record player for Teresa’s birthday, which fell on the same day as George Washington’s, but the problem would then be to get a supply of records to play. There were not many of these at the market. Shellac 78 rpm records burned in the fires after the bombings. But there was the beginning of a library taking shape at the Palace. Clerks and lawyers and army officials borrowed on a lending basis from the growing supply, playing popular and classical music in barracks and apartments and hotel rooms.

  “It’ll be a while, getting our own record player,” Harry said resignedly, snuffing out his cigarette. “Teresa, how about stealing me some fresh undershorts from your laundry? I spilled paint on mine.”

  “Why don’t you try painting without shorts?” Sebastian said, grinning.

  “I’ll have to try that. When I do, Sebastian, don’t look.”

  The language spoken at Musikerstrasse was German when Teresa was present. When she was gone, off to work, or doing something outside the house on whatever mission, they spoke to one another in English. Sometimes, when she was elsewhere in the house, seated in the living room in anticipation of the increasingly resourceful suppers brought up by Teresa, they would shift away from German to English. The day before, when she had left the room with the dirty dishes, Sebastian asked, “Did you ever find out what unit her husband fought in?”

  “No. I’ve never asked her. The picture of them at their wedding was in her room, framed, but she took it down after I started keeping her regular company. It’s in a drawer in her bureau. I studied it. Handsome guy, looked about eighteen years old — he was only nineteen, as a matter of fact. From the collar bars I could see he was a lieutenant, but I couldn’t make out the insignia.” Teresa returned with the precious coffee, slim blue ribbons attached to her braided hair. “One day I will learn how to speak English,” she said, pouring the coffee. “But now there is no time. Perhaps after we are finished creating our palace.”

  Sebastian went early to his room and picked up The Thurber Carnival He had brought the book from the library at the Palace, and it brought laughter. The same library stored an estimated two hundred thousand files documenting the murderous reign of Adolf Hitler and records of what he had made men do in his name. It was wonderful that Thurber was also there.

  *

  On Monday, just after Teresa left, Harry complained to Sebastian that he was having pains in his back. The Saturday before, they had gone by bus with Teresa to the Alpenpark with a picnic basket. It was a fairly steep hill they had taken on, with its slick rock surface, but Sebastian hadn’t remembered any complaint from Harry when at one point he slipped and fell. He had picked himself up with agility.

  “Maybe you need to get an x-ray. Something might have gone out when we were climbing.”

  “Maybe it’s that fucking chair I sit in hour after hour at the control booth. It’s straight-backed, did you notice?”

  “You’d better check with the infirmary.”

  *

  On Wednesday, in mid-afternoon, the telephone rang in Sebastian’s office. “I got to see you.” Harry’s voice was off pitch.

  “Come on down.”

  “Can’t.” He spoke hurriedly. “Keitel’s record is being read out, and there’s an interpretation going on from Russian. Just don’t leave without me. I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

  At 1600 Sebastian was curious. Normally, sessions ended by 1530. He rang Chief Landers, who had a private wire to the courtroom. “Chief, tell me, is the trial still going on?”

  Landers said yes.

  “Any idea for how much longer?”

  Landers pulled out one telephone jack, inserted another, spoke a few words, and got back with self-satisfied dispatch to Sebastian. “Lieutenant, Judge Lawrence has just led the honorable judges out.”

  “Thanks, Chief.”

  Ten minutes later Harry opened the door. He was disappointed to see the stenographer there, but then saw that Cyrilla Hempstone was packing up. She bade the lieutenants good night.

  Harry Albright sat down wearily on the extra chair.

  “Sebby, I’ve got syphilis. They’re going to have to do a spinal tap and give me sulfa shots.” He pointed in the direction of his groin. “I’m poisoned down there. For maybe six weeks, the doc said.”

  “Harry...Teresa?”

  “I couldn’t believe that. It must have been that fucking hooker at Marta’s back in September.”

  In other circumstances, Sebastian would have commented on the expletive. He said instead, simply, “What are you going to do?”

  “A sergeant in our detachment is going on furlough for two weeks beginning tomorrow. I can have his space in a joint apartment he lives in. But I can’t go home. Couldn’t possibly talk to Teresa. For tonight, I’ll be sleeping on the couch in the sergeant’s pad, then I get his room for a couple of weeks. Oh shit. What should I tell her?”

  “Well, Harry, I can tell her you’ve been arrested for war crimes.”

  That brought a pained smile. “Come with me, I need a drink.”

  *

  Much later, after the dinner hour, Sebastian set out in the cold for Musikerstrasse, hoping the bus would come by. It didn’t. It was very cold. When he arrived, he was ready with the official story.

  The translation device in Stuttgart had gone screwy, he told her. Lieutenant Albright was sent to take care of the situation...Wasn’t certain how long it would take...Might have to spend a few days...Sebastian would pack a bag and the army would deliver it to Harry the next day.

  Teresa sighed. She said warily that it would be lonely without Harry there. But soon her face brightened. “We can try to make up for his being away.”

  Sebastian nodded and sat down at the dining room table for some cold meat and potatoes. Later, they played a game of dominoes and drank a beer.

  Poor Harry.

  Poor Teresa? Sebastian wondered. If she hadn’t infected Harry, had Harry infected her?

  Chapter Forty

  February 1946

  The formal greetings were, as ever, spare. General Amadeus began by asking whether Sebastian had listened to the arguments made by his brother in the courtroom the afternoon before. George Friedrich Amadeus had raised his hand to question the testimony of Auschwitz commander Rudolf Hoess, not to be confused with Nuremberg defendant Rudolph Hess, who had been brought to the war crimes courtroom from his own jail cell in Landsberg to testify.

  He had not heard the other Amadeus, Sebastian said. “I did hear the Hoess testimony. I would have stayed on if I had known your brother would be arguing.”

  “He said very interesting things, George Friedrich, but profoundly wrong, I thought. He was taking the usual line: We defendants are to be excused because of the rigidity of the command structure under the Fuehrer.”

  “Nobody questions that command structure, General.”

  “I do. It is the ideologists mystique. Book-people, lawyers especially, assume that the man in command of the whole i
s in command of all of its parts. Let me tell you that Rudolph Hoess was absolutely correct — I know — when he testified that at Auschwitz a great deal went on that he personally disapproved of, but that it is simply impossible to impress the commanders will on everyone who, theoretically, works for him.”

  “Are you saying that it was that way at Camp Joni? That things were done there that you didn’t approve of? Other things, I mean, than just trying to wipe out a whole race of people?”

  “Yes, I am saying exactly that. I have never expressed admiration for Rudolph Hoess, except as a genocidal technician with over one million gassings to his credit. But I am prepared to believe that he did not order killed everyone who was killed at Auschwitz.”

  “General, how is it possible to load one thousand people into a gas chamber without knowledge of it by the camp’s Kommandant?”

  “ I am not talking about that . Obviously Hoess had knowledge of that part of his camp’s operations, even as I did of mine. I am speaking of what one might call incidental brutality, which is different from correlative brutality. Rudolph Hoess recounted my own experience when he testified that even the duty officers appointed by him did not always carry out his orders. And subordinates of the duty officers often acted in their own way. It is incorrect, Herr Lieutenant, to make judgments that do not reflect reality — which is that subordinates can exercise their own wills, giving in to their own impulses. And here is where I think my brother was wrong — ”

  “General, it is known — and there has been testimony on this, though it was not brought up on Monday — that when the new commander replaced Hoess in 1943, he did, in fact, impose reforms.”

  “What do you call reforms, Herr Lieutenant?”

  Sebastian raised his voice a little. “Well, for one thing, General, the beatings stopped. There was testimony on that subject. Some Kapos resisted the order to stop beating the prisoners and they were punished by being shoved back into the ranks. That’s a reform, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, it is — ”

  “What did you do to a subordinate who disobeyed your orders?”

  “I would discipline him.”

  “Would you execute him?”

  “Only if his conduct was seditious. I am endeavoring to make a different point, and not one to which I think you will automatically object, dear Lieutenant. My point has to do with the self-serving insistence by...many of my co-defendants that — that — well, what the argument implies is that only Adolf Hitler was responsible for what you call the atrocities.”

  Sebastian reflected on this. Atrocities ! Was Amadeus here distinguishing between in-camp brutality — inexcusable — and the extermination of six million Jews — understandable? Was he suggesting that in-camp brutalities were to be dismissed as impulsive acts of subordinates? “You are aware of Auschwitz’s ‘ Stehbunker’ ?”

  “I do not know what that is.”

  Sebastian was so surprised by this that he found himself wondering whether Amadeus was now lying. But he had never caught Amadeus up in a falsehood. Kurt Amadeus was without guile. Hideously so.

  “Well, what the Stehbunker in Auschwitz was, General, was an enclosure. A punishment cell. It was about three feet square. As many as five — five — prisoners condemned to punishment were squeezed into the Stehbunker . They were given nothing to eat, nothing to drink. The ceiling was bricked down so that only just enough air got in to permit them to breathe, barely. They were left there until they died. That took three days, sometimes four. Is this the work of Adolf Hitler? Or the work of Rudolph Hoess?”

  “It is, actually, the work of neither. It is the work of the Auschwitz, guards who shoved them into the cell and bricked them in.”

  “But the law we’re looking into here doesn’t hold the guards guiltless, but it does assume, which is reasonable, that the guards were instruments of the Kommandant.”

  “There is a distinction between the camp commander who ordered death by what you call a Stehbunker , and a commander who merely authorized the punishment of a prisoner.”

  Sebastian had spent much time the week before surveying the records of Auschwitz in order to brief Captain Carver, who, in building the war crimes case against Kaltenbrunner, would conduct the testimony of Auschwitz commander Hoess. “General, Auschwitz had an execution wall. It is recorded that more than twenty thousand prisoners were shot there.”

  “That would be a regular execution.”

  Sebastian rose to his feet. The guard turned to him anxiously. Sebastian backed up until he was resting against the cell wall. He caught his breath. “So executions like that are all right ?”

  “I am trying, Herr Lieutenant, to parse questions that explore both legal and moral issues. I presided over — that means that I was Kommandant while the operations took place — the gassing of two hundred and fifty-five thousand prisoners, mostly Jewish. I did not myself shove them into the gas chamber. That was done by others, many of them themselves Jews, the Sonderkommandos , in the brief intervals before their own executions. There are different levels of responsibility that crystallize in a moral ledger. For the sake of convenience, let us stipulate three levels: one , Hitler; two , me; three , the guards. You can string that out as you please. Hitler — Himmler — Glucks — me — duty officer — Kapo — Sonderkommandos — the guard who released the gas pellets into the chamber — ”

  “I know what you are saying, the whole chain of command business. But how are you now disagreeing with your brother?”

  “He holds everyone under the level of Hitler to be blameless because they are merely executing his orders. In the first place, the chain of command is vulnerable to variations down the line. And then — most interesting here, I think — my own view is that the closer you get to the gas chamber itself, the more blameworthy the agent. You see, Herr Lieutenant, Hitler was a conceptualist. He envisioned a better world without Jews in it. That is a theory — you disapprove of it, of course — and on the stand yesterday, Rudolph Hoess said that, on reflection, he, too, thought it was wrong to gas the Jews. But he did exactly that, gas the Jews, and in doing so he was more guilty than Hitler, because Hitler was an ideologist, Hoess a mechanic. Stalin is more guilty than Marx because it has been Stalin, not Marx, who sends millions to die, millions who are dying as we speak. Dying pursuant to a concept of Marx. And the commanders of Stalin’s concentration camps are more guilty than Stalin, because they do the work; it is they who fit the noose around the neck of the victim.”

  Sebastian, back in his chair, stared down at his stenographic pad, his unused pen in hand. “Does it then follow that you reject your brother’s defense, that only Hitler was guilty? But in rejecting that argument, you’d need to acknowledge personal responsibility. Does that mean that you will be willing to change your plea to guilty?”

  “Not necessarily. That is a tactical decision. What it does mean is that I consider myself guiltier of what you call war crimes than Hitler. And — I hope you can follow me now — my underlings, guiltier than me.”

  Sebastian thought to press his own plea more directly. “Wouldn’t it be consistent with your reasoning that you should plead guilty?”

  “Yes, it would. And I may end up doing just that. I continue to be hampered by my reluctance to associate myself with the whole Jewish performance in which we — you — are engaged.”

  Both men were silent. After a moment, Sebastian rose. “I think I will go now.”

  “Good day, Herr Lieutenant.”

  Yet again Amadeus had the good taste not to proffer his hand.

  Chapter Forty-One

  Late February 1946

  As the days went by, Teresa all but stopped talking about the absent Harry. She had detected that Sebastian had packed up much more for him in clothes and accessories than would be needed for only the two or three days he spoke of. On the evening of the third day, Sebastian informed her that Harry was running into difficulties at Stuttgart. Teresa gave him a skeptical glance. He changed the subject and that night again
they listened to music on the radio and played cards. Teresa, looking down at her hand, said that she had to give some thought to her future. But she added nothing more, resuming play.

  When Sebastian was shuffling the deck for the second round, Teresa got back on the theme. “I do not intend to be a laundress forever, but with my extra salary, and the rental of my apartment. I’m — just — all right for now. Tell me, Sebastian, how — how could I go about getting a better paying job? Doing more interesting work?”

  “Teresa. Everybody in Germany is looking for work that pays in dollars, never mind interesting work.”

  “Is it true that the army has forbidden army personnel to bring their American wives to Germany?”

  “It is. General Eisenhower set the example last May. When the war ended he did not bring Mrs. Eisenhower to Paris. And Justice Biddle is without his wife.”

  “But hardly lonely.” She smiled.

  What could Sebastian say? Everyone knew about the justice’s living arrangements.

  “If there are no women in residence with the married officers, then women are needed, no? To do the work that would otherwise be done by wives?”

  Sebastian turned his head. He let himself smile. “You mean like wash their husbands’ clothes?”

  She smiled. “And other things.”

  “Teresa, we have a weekly newspaper of sorts that goes out to the Palace personnel. It has a little — we call them ‘Personals.’ Like, ‘I want to buy a record player.’ Or, ‘I am willing to give German lessons.’ That kind of thing. I could place an ad in your name, if you wish.”

  “But what would I say in the ad? Especially since no fraternizing is permitted.”

  “You could say that you would be willing to give lessons in German to GIs who wanted to study.”

  “How much money would I ask for? In dollars? Per hour?”

  “I’d have to ask around, see what people are paying to private tutors.”

  “Not much, I’d guess.” She leaned over and kissed him. “You will do that for Teresa?”