Nuremberg

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  There were page after page of clippings and photographs and explanatory notes written by hand. He turned a page that showed a picture of Alois Steiner, guest conductor for the millennial celebration. He recalled the same picture at the restaurant in Munich. Here now was a favorable critical review of the millennial concerts, praising the “young American Jewish conductor.” A few pages on, a society notice: Herr Alois William Steiner has become betrothed to young Henrietta Leddihn , daughter of the Symphony’s concertmaster .

  Sebastian had known about Oma’s first marriage but never remembered hearing his name. He had known about the death from pneumonia, so soon after the wedding, of the musician Oma had married. He hadn’t known that her first husband was Jewish.

  He turned more pages in the sturdy big book and came upon the telegram — Oma in Rochester to her mother in Munich. The telegram from Henrietta Steiner disclosed that she was pregnant. It was pasted on the page and under it the jubilant words of his greatgrandmother. “ So eine Freudel — What great joy ! A grandchild is coming /” The telegram was dated April 10, 1901.

  A few pages later, he stopped to read the clipping in the Rochester paper about the pneumonia plague. It was dated August 22, 1901. One passage in it had been underlined, in his great-grandmother’s characteristic red ink. “ Another death from the pneumonia outbreak , recorded yesterday , was that of the conductor of the Rochester Symphony , the promising Alois Steiner. ”

  Three pages later he read the telegram from Henrietta to her mother dated January 6, 1902. A BEAUTIFUL LITTLE GIRL, I WILL CALL HER ANNABELLE.

  And a few pages after that, the social note from the Rochester paper recording the marriage in March of “the widow Henrietta Steiner to the prominent American businessman, Roderick Chapin.”

  He put the book down.

  Roderick Chapin was not his grandfather .

  Alois Steiner was his grandfather. Never mind that he was dead when his mother was born.

  Alois Steiner was Jewish. That meant that he, Walter Sebastian Reinhard, was — Jewish.

  One-quarter Jewish.

  Under the German code, he was: Half-Breed Second Degree.

  His mind swirled in wonder, speculation, projection, bitterness, indignation. Mostly wonder. As a Half-Breed Second Degree in Hitler’s Germany he would have been exposed to the same treatment handed out to other...Jews. The treatment Amadeus handed out to — two hundred and fifty-five thousand Jews. Mostly Jews.

  Amadeus!

  So Amadeus was right . So he, Sebastian, was part Jewish. He “ looked part Jewish” What does “part Jewish” look like ?...On the other hand, why shouldn’t he look part Jewish? Alois Steiner, Jew , was his grandfather.

  He put away the scrapbook carefully; sat on the sofa, and stared down at the carpet, letting the wild tumblers in his mind go round and round.

  Chapter Forty-Three

  March 1946

  The moment had arrived. The challenge was electrically there: to argue persuasively the postulates of the war crimes trial against the challenges of the defense. It had to be more than an autarchic recital of its self-constituted authority. A critical legal and moral world was tuned in. It would not do simply to adduce the Charter of the London Agreement to justify the trial. The Charter was in fact the governing instrument, but the prosecutors had to accept the burden of persuading the moral community of the rightness of the proceedings.

  The defense attorney for Karl Doenitz was in place. Admiral Doenitz had served as chief of naval operations for Germany, devotedly following orders received from the Fuehrer. These directives had specified the conduct of naval operations, and called for sinking at sea survivors of German submarine operations.

  Herr Kranzbuhler bore himself with assurance. He was manifestly pleased with the suspense he created when he solemnly advised the court that he wished to introduce an affidavit filed by Doenitz’s U.S. counterpart, Admiral Chester Nimitz.

  The objection from prosecutor Jackson was instantaneous. “Mr. President, nothing that Admiral Nimitz has to say could have any bearing on the guilt or non-guilt of the defendant Doenitz.”

  Lord Lawrence spotted the danger. He advised the defendants counsel to stand by while he conferred with his colleagues.

  The judges, interpreters at hand, huddled together and spoke in whispers.

  “They’re going for tu quoque , obviously,” Lord Lawrence said, pursing his lips.

  The Russian Nikitchenko agreed heartily. He had the clearest reason for objecting to the direction the defense was taking. “We cannot let that kind of thing begin. Otherwise, we will be here for many years.”

  But Judge Biddle resisted. He argued that the language with which the defense attorney pleaded, whatever it was he proposed to display from Admiral Nimitz, could itself affect the court’s ruling on admissibility.

  Lawrence and Nikitchenko, whispering their dissent, clung to their objections. They appealed to the French judge. He said he was not committed on one side or the other on the admissibility of an affidavit by an American military official.

  But Francis Biddle felt strongly enough to plead personal privilege. If any one member of the tribunal did so, on a procedural point at issue, the other judges had agreed to defer to him.

  Lord Lawrence sat back on his chair, upright, and brought down the gavel.

  “The defense counsel may proceed in the matter.”

  Kranzbuhler was proud of his hold, however rudimentary, on English and waved aside the proffered help of an English-speaking aide. He read out in heavily accented tones the affidavit from Chester Nimitz, Admiral of the United States Pacific Fleet, hero of the historic engagement at Midway in 1942.

  “On general principles, the U.S. submarines [under my command] did not rescue enemy survivors if undue additional hazard to the submarine resulted, or [if by any delays entailed] the submarine would be prevented from accomplishing its further mission.” Herr Kranzbuhler declaimed at some length that the affidavit, by the mere force of what it said, transcended formalistic rules of the London Charter disallowing tu quoque argumentation.

  *

  After the close of the afternoon session, junior prosecutors met in a corner of the officers’ mess hall. After recesses, that corner had become a tea or coffee bar for eight or ten of the legal staff. Captain Carver, through the billow of cigarette smoke he disconsolately contended with, declared his disappointment with Judge Biddle’s plea.

  “So what has been planted in front of judges, defense, press, and spectators? Our chief admiral, our great Chet Nimitz, testifies by affidavit” — he picked up the memorandum sheet distributed to prosecutors and press by courtroom clerks minutes after exhibits were filed, and read Nimitz’s words out again.

  “So of course Kranzbuhler is running with it. The position he’s urging is that anything that proves necessary to modern warfare, like abandoning survivors at sea, has got to be accepted as — nothing more than a part of modern warfare. Therefore? Therefore what by older historical perspectives was ruled a violation of Geneva standards, doesn’t apply anymore. So drop Counts three and four against Doenitz.”

  “Right.” A French prosecutor, M. Duharnais, spoke up. He had learned his English as a student at Harrow, where Churchill liked to say he himself had truly learned the language. “And it’s plain to see where the whole defense team will now go. And, God bless them, the buggers will use their arguments in such a way as to appear to be defending primarily Allied action . Instead of saving, which the rule against tu quoque won’t let them do — ‘Well, you people bombed Dresden and Hiroshima’ — they will be saying, ‘We understand why the Allies felt it necessary to stretch the old Geneva rules enough to — ’”

  Carver took the rest of the sentence away from him: “ — enough to bomb Dresden and Hiroshima. It’s a lucky thing we’ve got Doenitz on other counts.”

  “Like what?” the deliberate English lawyer came in. “I’m not up on Doenitz.”

  “Like what? Like applauding the execution of
all Communists in a camp in Austria two weeks before the war ended. In his interrogation he said he had thought the people being executed were spies. Utter, provable baloney. Yes, sure, by the rules, you can execute prisoners if they’re spies. Not if they’re mere POWs. But we can prove that the difference was made plain to him.”

  Conversation turned to the impending courtroom session on Monday. Chief U.S. prosecutor Robert Jackson versus Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, the brightest guy in the dock. “I tried to get a press pass for a guy from New? York doing a documentary on Hitler,” Carver told Duharnais. “No way. Everybody in the world wants to be there for that one.”

  *

  Back in his office, Carver rang for Sebastian. After a few rings he heard a woman’s voice. “Sergeant Hempstone here.”

  “Hemp, this is Captain Carver. Where is Reinhard?”

  “He has gone to a meeting with Amadeus.”

  “Tell him to call me when he gets back.”

  “I might not still be here, sir.”

  “Leave a note. I’ll be in the office until...1830.”

  *

  At 1815, Sebastian returned the call.

  “How did it go?” Carver asked.

  “Interesting. He’s always interesting. I’ll type up a memo for you, you’ll have it tomorrow. I got some especially interesting stuff about Governor General Frank and Amadeus’s dealings with him. He had a way of manipulating Frank — and even Himmler. If they wanted to send him more prisoners than he thought he could handle in his own way, he’d find means to maneuver around them.”

  “Something we ought to know when his defense comes up?”

  “Not really. How he did it, mostly, was by effecting delays, pleading this and that and the other. Management, bureaucratic stuff. Nothing there that his lawyer could plausibly suggest was Amadeus’s formula for killing fewer people.”

  “What I called about is Goering. Did you bring his name up with Amadeus? He’s coming up to the dock next Monday.”

  “Yes. Amadeus said that in the exercise yard two days ago Goering looked at him suspiciously, then asked whether he knew that Speer was ‘consorting with the enemy’ — his words. Amadeus said he is confident that the negotiations we’re up to regarding a plea change haven’t leaked. ‘Otherwise Goering wouldn’t be civil to me,’ he said.”

  “Any hint on Goering’s behavior when he takes the stand?”

  “Amadeus just said that a lot of people are counting on him — and” — Sebastian laughed at this — “and Amadeus said that although Goering was a hidden homosexual, he always ‘acted like a man.’ Amadeus told me he had been given a copy, when he was on bunker duty, of Hitler’s order to execute Goering. Amadeus said that was probably the biggest thing Goering has going for him in his defense — that, at the end, Hitler got mad at him.”

  “Okay. And nothing new on changing Amadeus’s plea?”

  “Captain, I don’t ever forget to bring that up. And he always says the same thing — he’s thinking about it. He asked me to tell him what date, approximately, his turn at the dock would come.”

  “If you have an answer to that, I wish you’d tell me , Sebby.”

  “I don’t, of course. I said I thought it too hard to project based on the few defendants we’ve had so far, Doenitz and Kesselring. But then, by agreement with you people, Amadeus is scheduled to come up at Number Eighteen, after Speer, not before him. But that’s got to be two months down the line, don’t you figure, Captain?”

  “Yeah. But here’s a nice dream sequence for you on the ides of March. Next time you see Amadeus, one, you try to persuade him to change his plea; two, he agrees; three, he broadcasts his upcoming plea of guilty; four, all remaining defendants throw in the towel! If one defendant agrees that what he did was a war crime, you’ve got a chief Nazi accepting the premises of the prosecution — and what do you know? — the judges hand down their rulings by — the end of April!”

  “Okay. But if I may, George, you’re getting carried away.”

  “Of course I am. It makes life tolerable at Nuremberg.”

  “But seriously, Captain Carver, sir, can I tell him we’ll shoot him as he wants, instead of hanging him?”

  Carver was silent. He would not confide to the young lieutenant the top-secret decision that had been arrived at on that point. He himself knew it only because he, George Carver, was the keeper of defendant Kurt Amadeus. Only three other persons were party to it: Jackson, Lawrence, and Amen.

  “No, you can’t tell him that. The guys upstairs haven’t ruled. They might put that question to one side until they see what he says on the stand when he changes his plea. See you later, Sebby.”

  “Captain, you want to know something about me you don’t know?”

  “Are you a Communist?”

  Sebastian laughed. “No. But I am a Half-Breed, Second Degree.”

  Carver paused. And then focused on the odd nomenclature from Wannsee. “That says you’re a quarter Jewish? So what?”

  “I just found out. I’m not going to tell Amadeus. But way back in October — you remember? — he said I looked part Jewish.”

  “Yeah, I remember.”

  “Funny, that. Do you think I look part Jewish?”

  “I hadn’t noticed. I’ll look hard next time I see you. What about Hitler? Did he look part Jewish?”

  “That business of Hitler’s mother — grandmother? — has never been proved, has it?”

  “Jackson says Shirer believes it’s true, that Hitler’s grandmother was Jewish.”

  “That will sell more copies of his book if it’s true.”

  “Good night. Remember, tomorrows the Sabbath.”

  Sebastian felt better, in the Nuremberg scene, passing the word out that he, a young American — German-American — interpreter was, in a way, one of them, one of the millions they were all there to avenge.

  How would his German father have reacted to the news? That he had married an American woman who was half Jewish . Would it have been news to him? Had Annabelle ever told him that she was the daughter of Alois Steiner?

  Sebastian could speak lightly of the whole matter in conversation with Captain Carver. He could not think lightly of it in reflections of his own.

  Every night, in Teresa’s arms, he wandered whether to take her into his confidence. It wasn’t that his Jewishness was of objective importance. But he needed to talk about the subject, the mystery, the contingencies of the past, his mysteriously dead father — and he relished most the prospect of talking about thoughts recessed in his mind with the beautiful and engrossing woman he lived with.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  March 1946

  Before leaving for Innsbruck, Sebastian had written to his mother. He couldn’t hold it back any longer.

  He told her that he had met the woman he wanted to spend the rest of his life with. He spoke of her beauty and of her care for him, told of her short, unhappy life, her young husband “one more of Hitler’s victims.” He would be inquiring in the weeks ahead to see what provisions were made for American servicemen returning to their country with German wives. “Teresa is a war widow, Mama, but how could anyone blame a twenty-three-year-old German woman because she had a husband in the Nazi military, a man who then died on the war front? You will love her, I know, and needless to say, you will enjoy speaking with her in German. She doesn’t yet know much English.”

  Five days later, after the Innsbruck revelation, he had begun an entirely different letter to his mother. It started out angrily. Briefly into it, he had had a premonition. Could it be that she didn’t know ? He’d ponder again about it.

  He did; and the next day his thinking moved in an entirely different direction.

  As she dusted the growing hook collection, Teresa could see that he was preoccupied. She decided against a game of hearts but did suggest, with a slight tilt of her head, her lips parted to expose her pearl teeth, “ ein baldiges Rendezvous in our love-bed.” Sebastian walked over and gave her a lingering ki
ss. But then he returned to his writing pad. Teresa interrupted him again. She mentioned for the first time in weeks his — predecessor. “Have you heard from Harry?”

  “No. I’m sure he’ll send me a telegram it his mother dies.”

  “Are soldiers allowed to stay away permanently if a parent is sick?”

  “Not permanently. But if the surviving parent is a dependent, and the soldier is the only child, sometimes the army tries to accommodate.”

  “How?”

  “They might transfer him to a camp near his hometown.”

  “What is Harry’s hometown?”

  Sebastian’s mind raced. Had a hometown been mentioned ? “ — it’s somewhere in Wisconsin. I don’t remember exactly where, though I know he was flying to New York.”

  “Everybody flies to New York.”

  “Yes, Teresa. Now I must get back to my letter to my mother.”

  “Is your mother sick? Will you be going to see her ?”

  “Teresa. My mother is forty-four years old.”

  “Some people get sick before forty.”

  He lost his patience. “Yes, and some people get killed before they’re forty.”

  “Like my Gustav.”

  “Yes. Like your Gustav, and whoever he killed before he was killed himself, who was less than forty.”

  Teresa went into the kitchen, carrying the radio, stretching out the long electrical cord. Then she called out: “Will it distract you if I turn on the radio?”

  “No,” Sebastian said, and then stared down at the opening line he had written. “ Dear Mama , Why did you not confide — ” Again his hand stopped. Could it be — was it conceivable? — that Annabelle Linda Chapin herself thought that she was Roderick Chapin’s child?

  He redid the mathematics on his notepad...Fourteen months from Henrietta’s departure from Munich to the telegram announcing a pregnancy...Four months to the death notice...Seven months to the remarriage. Count forward nine months from the first telegram...

  He envisioned Roderick Chapin at the Episcopal church, looking down on the baby Annabelle, a few months old, as she was being baptized Annabelle Linda (Henrietta, wanting some trace of her family name, had anglicized “Leddihn”) Chapin.