Nuremberg

by William F. Buckley, Jr.

  “I cannot answer that question.”

  Amen was disbelieving.

  “Why?”

  “Client-lawyer privilege.”

  To Sebastian. “Reinhard. Are you certain you have correctly translated Herr Amadeus’s reply?”

  “ Klient - Advokat Privileg . Client-lawyer privilege is what he said.”

  Colonel Andrus opened his mouth. He turned to Amen. “John, what in the hell is he talking about? Client-lawyer doesn’t cover this situation!...Does it?”

  “No. It covers only conversations with his client. You’re not talking about conversations.”

  “Herr Amadeus, lawyer-client privilege has nothing to do with whether you passed contraband to your client permitting him to defy the sentence of the court.”

  “I am not an expert on criminal procedures, but my understanding of the law is that all transactions between lawyers and their clients are privileged.”

  Burt Andrus was mystified, then frustrated, then choleric.

  He turned to Sebastian. “Tell him unless he cooperates he will be taken from this room directly to a holding cell.”

  Sebastian relayed the words, and gave Amadeus’s answer to Andrus. “He says he wishes to consult an attorney.”

  Andrus was speechless.

  The sergeant opened the door without knocking.

  They all looked up at him.

  “Sir, a report from the hospital. The doctor says that the prisoner has been revived and will live.”

  Colonel Andrus was dumbfounded. Recover from cyanide? Was the dose insufficient? Could it have been a different poison? He drew the deepest sigh of relief.

  He turned to Amen, the features of his face sagging with exhaustion. “John. We’re saved. By the bell. What do you say we call it quits. Attend to loose ends...later. It’ll be dawn in a couple of hours.”

  Amen nodded his head.

  “You agree, George?”

  Carver nodded his head.

  To Sebastian. “Don’t think this investigation is over, though. Amadeus is obviously the primary suspect. Tell him to go home but under no circumstances to leave town.”

  Sebastian relayed the message. Then to Andrus, “Okay to go, Colonel?”

  “Yes.”

  Captain Carver addressed him. “Report tomorrow, as usual, Reinhard.”

  “Yes sir.”

  Sebastian left the room.

  Reaching the apartment, he woke Harry.

  Sebastian was pale. “It didn’t work,” he said.

  “What didn’t work? Your alibi?”

  “No. The poison.”

  Chapter Sixty-One

  Nuremberg , October 15-16, 1946

  It was bad enough that what happened next came during the climactic few hours at the Palace of Justice. But worse — incredibly — it happened while Andrus was engaged in what his aide called “the death tour.”

  No one was to know , the Colonel had ordered, until after the condemned were themselves told, when the hour of their death would be. The denial of the appeals on Monday by the Allied Control Council in Berlin was the very final judicial step. The execution of sentences could go forward.

  Anxious journalists, standing by, were caught up in rumors that the executioners were actually setting up shop, as indeed they were. The supervisor of the executions, Lieutenant Stanley Tilles, had been drafted for routine military service in the early days of the war. After V-E Day, he found himself — placed by the Provost Marshal of the Third Army — in charge of executions in Landsberg of war criminals from nearby Dachau. The executioner proper, the official who would place the nooses around the necks of the condemned, was a practiced hangman, his occupation begun in his youth in Texas, where he apprenticed under the regular hangman.

  At Nuremberg they would need three gallows. Colonel Andrus did not wish intervals between executions to take too long. An inordinate hiatus between the first and the twelfth hanging could result in leaks and demonstrations outside the Palace. Each of the condemned would use up twenty to twenty-five minutes. After the drop through the trap door, the not-yet-formally-deceased subject would hang on the rope, legs strapped together to prevent flailing, awaiting final asphyxiation following the broken neck. Sergeant John Woods, the accredited hangman who had executed 347 persons since the start of his career, would do his job on Gallows #1, pull the trap, and walk over to Gallows #2, to which the next criminal would have been led; then on to Gallows #3; then back to Gallows #1, at which point the deceased, shrouded behind the black curtain that enclosed the area under the gallows’ platform, would have been removed, noose still around his neck, photographed, and laid out in the waiting coffin.

  Tilles was pleased with the discretion of his caravan of three trucks that drove into Nuremberg carrying into the segregated gymnasium of the Palace the component parts of the gallows borrowed from the prison in Landsberg. Sergeant Woods had estimated that eleven hours would be required to completely assemble the gallows in the Palace’s gymnasium, now converted into an execution chamber. The Tilles/Woods team of ten men had worked undisturbed, but one Palace guard, noting the long wooden beams being removed from trucks outside, drew conclusions which he related to his special friend at the PX who saved for him, every week, a carton of Kool cigarettes, his favorite. Nothing more was needed to fire the curiosity of the press, so eager for the terminal moment of the vast, seemingly endless, year-long enterprise.

  Everything was ready to go, Colonel Andrus set out on his macabre walk down the corridors along the prisoners’ cells. He began with the first cell at the far end of the top row. It was Frick’s. He informed him that he would be escorted to the gallows before midnight; and proceeded, one by one, to give the same notice to others of the condemned.

  It was while he was still on the top row of cells that the alarm went out. In the bottom row, the guard outside Goering’s door had heard a convulsive sound and rung the alarm. In seconds, a doctor was there, followed quickly by the chaplain. A minute later Andrus was also in the cell, his orderly death march interrupted. His reaction was near hysterical. He ordered guards to link themselves by handcuffs to each of the eleven surviving gallows-bent prisoners. And he bellowed out to the staff that the executions would proceed on schedule , two hours later.

  Hermann Goering’s cyanide pill did not fail him. Because he was the central figure in the Nuremberg proceedings, the German people went wild, as did Colonel Andrus — in his case with utter rage that despite the extraordinary precautions of the prison house, Goering had pulled it off. Hours later, reports flooded in over the radio, notwithstanding the embargo Colonel Andrus sought to impose on the events of Nuremberg, reports of a Germany seemingly united in pride and glee. The old man had outfoxed the whole lot of them ! — Americans, British, French, Russians. This was not a moment for Germans to reflect on what Goering had done to Germany. It was his final ingenuity that was the cause, in their drab lives, for exhilaration.

  It was especially humiliating for Andrus. Not only because of the care he had taken to preserve order and avoid premature publicity, but also because Amadeus’s brush with death had been successfully transformed, on Andrus’s orders, into nothing more than a case of acute indigestion. The press, which had reported an attempt at suicide, could do nothing more with the story. Kurt Amadeus was, after all, alive and back in his cell, and the doctor in the hospital who had looked after him declined to answer any questions. Now Goering was indisputably dead, but by his own hand. If Colonel Andrus could have discovered who had handed him the pill, there’d have been an extra hanging.

  *

  At midnight, as agreed, Harry Albright came by Sebastian’s office. “The whole place is dead. Nothing, nobody, anywhere.”

  “The press?”

  “They’re in the gym, waiting.”

  He pulled a flask from the overcoat he brought under his arm. He looked about and took down two glasses from the bookcase. He poured two jiggers of rum into each of them, handing one to Sebastian, who fingered it absen
tmindedly, then raised it to his lips.

  Harry said nothing for a minute or two. Then, “Are we going to do it?”

  “I guess,” Sebastian said.

  *

  At 0100 they sat in Harry’s control room.

  Albright had done the instrumentation.

  One microphone hung directly overhead at the landing from which the steps descended to the floor of the gymnasium. They heard a voice in German addressing “Your excellency.”

  “That’s got to be Ribbentrop. They’ve restored his honorific. He’d be first, now that Goering is out of reach.”

  They heard a muffled response, and then a second voice, this one speaking in English. “Ready to go, Major.” They did not hear the response, but a few seconds later they could make out the sound of steps. Then there was nothing, for what seemed a full minute. The microphone overhead, lowered for referees when basketball was played or boxing matches conducted, picked up the sound of voices on Gallows #1.

  An American voice gave an order, unintelligible. “An assistant, must be,” Harry said.

  They heard then the sounds of the death party mounting the steps. A voice spoke in German. Did the condemned have a final word?

  The voice of the foreign minister of the Third Reich was hesitant before he said his final words. Then, “God protect Germany. My last wish is that Germany’s unity shall be preserved and that an understanding be reached between East and West.” They could not hear the trapdoor sprung, but could make out the thump of the falling body arrested by the rope.

  Harry miked in the press section. There was whispering...

  Jodl carried himself with military hearing , they learned from soft exchanges overheard. Also Keitel...

  Frank’s manacled hand was gripped by the chaplain in a spiritual gesture ...

  Stretcher made a scene at Gallows #3, spitting out his defiance

  “Which one is that coming down the steps?” a woman’s voice was heard, asking a companion.

  “That’s Kurt Amadeus. The Camp Joni guy.”

  “He’s headed for Gallows #1,” Harry said, simply.

  And in a few seconds: “Do you have any last words, Kurt Amadeus?”

  “No,” he said. “Not actually. No.”

  They heard the thump, and then Sebastian’s weeping came, uncontrolled. He imagined at this moment not the scene at the gymnasium, but the scene after a springtime dawn at Camp Joni, his father led from his cell, relieved — the final marginalization of human reliefs! — to see a firing squad waiting for him, not a hangman, thinking no doubt in his final moments of his wife and of Sebastian. And standing — in his mind’s eye Sebastian knew exactly where, at Joni, the occasional execution took place — less than 100 yards from the terrible charnel house he had created — had been forced to create — where one - quarter million Axels , Annabelles, and Sebastian’s had choked to death on the gas dispatched from Joni’s vents on orders of Kurt Waldemar Amadeus, the god-lovingly named Amadeus, detested surely by the God of justice, gone now to a fiery next world in which perhaps he would be sentenced to look in the face all the men, women, and children he had crammed into Sebastian’s father’s crematorium. Add the faces of those others, six million in the other slaughterhouses, eight million dead of enemy fire and allied bombs in the hell of the four terrible years, so modest an attempt at whose requital Sebastian heard now, in the thump that ended the life of the man competent to kill everybody except himself. Sebastian wept on, and all that Harry could think to do was just look away.

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  Acknowledgments

  The libraries teem with books about Germany under Hitler, about the Nazis’ concentration camps, and about the Nuremberg trials. This is, to be sure, a novel, but it tells the story of the trials at Nuremberg. I have been informed (and here and there engrossed) by several of these books, including:

  Death Dealer : The Memoirs of the SS Kommandant at Auschwitz by Rudolph Hoess, edited by Steven Paskuly; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich : A History of Nazi Germany by William L. Shirer; Nuremberg : Infamy on Trial by Joseph E. Persico; Justice at Nuremberg by Robert E. Conot; The Third Reich : A New History by Michael Burleigh; Into That Darkness : An Examination of Conscience by Gitta Sereny; By the Neck Until Dead : The Gallows of Nuremberg by Stanley Tilles; Inside the Nuremberg Trial : A Prosecutors Comprehensive Account (Vols. I and II), edited by Drexel A. Sprecher; The Anatomy of the Nuremberg Trials : A Personal Memoir by Telford Tavlor; Eichmann in Jerusalem : A Report on the Banality of Evil by Hannah Arendt; Adolph Hitler by John Toland; Prelude to Nuremberg : Allied War Crimes Policy and the Question of Punishment by Arieh J. Kochavi; The New Meaning of Treason by Rebecca West; Cracow , published by Krakowska Oficyna Wydawnieza; The Nuremberg Trials by Earle Rice Jr.; Auschwitz , Nazi Death Camp , published by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oswiecim; The Holocaust Encyclopedia , edited by Walter Lacqueur and Judith Tvdor Baumel. I tender my thanks to the authors and their publishers.

  I am very lucky to have attentive and keen-eyed friends who have been kind enough to read the manuscript and make suggestions. I am grateful to editor and translator Sophie Wilkins; to professors Thomas Wendel, Jeffrey Hart, and Chester Wolford; to Christa and Heinz Hary; to my siblings (themselves authors) Priscilla Buckley, Patricia Bozell, Reid Buckley and Carol Buckley; to my wife Pat and son Christopher; to colleagues-in-trade Lance Morrow and David Pryce-Jones; to my oldest friend, the historian Alistair Horne, and the youngest, Erik Cordon; to Ambassador Evan Galbraith, my companion at sea and on land. Wesley Tooke was with me in Switzerland for day by day work on the first draft, during which he tended also to his own novel, Ballpark Blues , published by Doubleday. I must acknowledge Dr. Harry Fiss, who heard mention of this book and wrote asking to see the manuscript, advising me that his own biography was startlingly similar to that of my protagonist, Sebastian Reinhard. He read the manuscript with reassuring approval: “That,” he said, “is exactly how it was at Nuremberg.”

  My agent Lois Wallace read the book, as did André Bernard, my publisher, making suggestions. Kathi George did a splendid job of copyediting.

  In my own shop, I am grateful as always to Tony Savage, whose patience bore him through my seven drafts; to Julie Crane, who read searchingly; to Frances Bronson, who, happily, continues to govern my lit-life.

  And finally, as always, there is Samuel S. Vaughan, my editor. He is, for me, first, last, and always, friend and guide.