Death at Nuremberg

by W. E. B. Griffin

  “And what, I have to ask, does military government think about that?” Cronley asked. “The CIC detachment in charge of protecting the Tribunal taking over Castle Wewelsburg two hundred odd miles away?”

  “They are curious and I suspect displeased. But so far General Greene has been able to keep the situation under control,” Cohen replied. “As I said, the rings are gold. Twelve thousand rings represent a lot of gold.

  “One scenario is that as soon as the rings got to Wewelsburg, they were melted down and turned, so to speak, into pocket money for Himmler and friends. The upper ranks of the SS were filled with crooks. Reinhard Heydrich, for example, was cashiered from the Navy for conduct unbecoming an officer and a gentleman. And then there’s that business of ransoming Jews from concentration camps.”

  “What?” Ziegler asked.

  “Super Spook, since you know about that, you have the floor,” Cohen said. “Until I return from the restroom.”

  “What if I have to go, too?”

  “You will have to control your bladder until I return. Rank hath its privileges.”

  When the bathroom door was closed, Ziegler asked, “Boss, what was he talking about?”

  “SS officers, or people working for the SS, would go to rich Jews in London, or New York, wherever, and tell them for a price Uncle Max and family could be taken from Dachau or some other concentration camp and moved to Argentina.”

  “How did they manage to do that?”

  “I got this from El Jefe and Cletus Frade,” Cronley said. “What happened was Major Freiherr Hans-Peter von Wachtstein, the acting military attaché at the German embassy in Buenos Aires—”

  “Von Wachtstein? The SAA pilot we saw in Berlin when we were getting Mattingly back?” Ziegler asked incredulously.

  “One and the same. Hansel tipped Cletus—the OSS—when a German submarine was going to show up at Samborombón Bay south of Buenos Aires carrying some people—SS types—they wanted to smuggle into Argentina, plus chests full of English pounds, Swiss francs, dollars, and gold and jewels.

  “It was part of Operation Phoenix, building a sanctuary for high-level Nazis. The plan was that if Germany lost, they would make their way to Argentina, wait until things cooled down, and then rise—phoenixlike—from the ashes of the Third Reich.

  “Anyway, when the sub arrived, Clete, and a bunch of gauchos from his estancia, all ex-soldiers, were waiting for it. They grabbed the sub and everybody around. The prisoners were then interrogated. By us and by an Argentine officer, Bernardo Martín, who ran—still runs—BIS, the Argentine OSS and FBI combined.

  “Cutting to the chase, the SS guys quickly started to sing like canaries.”

  “Really? They caved right away?” Ziegler asked.

  “Apparently, after watching one of their number being dragged feetfirst across the pampas behind a gaucho on a horse,” Cronley explained, “they became cooperative. The BIS has interesting interrogation techniques.

  “Anyway, they fessed up all the details of Operation Phoenix, plus all the details of the ransom operation.

  “The way that worked was once the ransom had been paid, a couple of mid-level—the equivalent of field-grade officers—SS officers would go to a concentration camp and tell the SS commandant that they had come for prisoners So and So, who were to be interrogated in Berlin.

  “They would then take them to Spain, where they would be loaded on neutral ships bound for Argentina.”

  “So the OSS was able to shut down the scam?” Ziegler asked.

  “No. The decision about what to do about it went all the way to the top, to President Roosevelt. Roosevelt decided that if we shut it down, all the Jews in the concentration camps would end up in the ovens. Thousands of them. So it ran until the end of the war.”

  “Jesus,” Ziegler said. “What happened to all the Phoenix money on the sub?”

  “Most of it wound up with Tío Juan, but Clete told me he suspected El Jefe took a finder’s fee from it before Tío Juan got his hands on it.”

  “‘Tío Juan’?”

  “Juan Domingo Perón. He likes to be called ‘Uncle Juan’ by Don Cletus Frade, his godson.”

  “I didn’t know that Perón was Frade’s godfather,” Cohen said as he slipped back into his chair.

  “I thought you said you were CIC and knew everything,” Janice said.

  “I thought you said you wouldn’t ask questions.”

  “I’m a woman and we get to change our minds.”

  “Point taken. Will you wait until the lecture is over?”

  “Sure, Morty.”

  “The second theory vis-à-vis the missing twelve thousand gold rings,” Cohen began, “is that they were taken to a cave near Wewelsburg Castle, and then the mouth of the cave was blown closed. We so far have been unable to verify this.

  “As I said, Wiligut was promoted in 1936 to SS-Brigadeführer, and with Himmler’s blessing undertook a number of projects, some of which made sense, and some which were . . . for lack of a better word, insane.

  “Wiligut supervised the building by concentration camp inmates—again, no Jews who would contaminate the premises—of an SS-Stabsgebäude, a staff building, and a Wachgebäude, a guardhouse, at Wewelsburg. The North Tower was rebuilt, and a safe for Himmler was placed in the basement of the West Tower. We don’t know what was in it. When the castle fell into the hands of the 83rd Armored Reconnaissance Battalion, 3rd Armored Division, on April 3, 1945, the safe was open and empty.”

  “Insane projects?” Janice asked.

  “I will take that question,” Cohen said. “Men can change their minds, too, Janice. Many of the modifications Wiligut made to the castle had to do with the number twelve. Himmler apparently wanted to reincarnate the Knights of the Round Table.”

  “As in King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table?” Cronley asked.

  “A German, or Teutonic, version thereof. If you didn’t spend all of your time in university reading naughty novels, perhaps you read something about them? How many of them there were, that sort of thing?”

  “Actually, Colonel, sir, what stuck in my mind was that Sir Lancelot, one of the twelve knights, got caught fooling around with Guinevere.”

  “I remember that, too,” Ziegler said. “Diddling the King’s wife was a no-no for a supposed-to-be-pure-and-noble knight.”

  Both earned withering looks from Cohen.

  “In Nordic mythology,” he went on after a significant pause, “there were twelve æsir—sort of gods, including Odin and Thor. When Himmler re-formed, enlarged, the SS, he set it up with twelve departments—SS-Hauptämter. What I have been thinking is that Himmler wanted the castle to serve as the stage for a Nazi version of the Knights of the Round Table. In this scenario, Himmler designated twelve senior SS officers as the knights of his round table.

  “What I do know is that the number twelve played a major role in Wiligut’s design of the North Tower. Inside it, between 1938 and 1943, Wiligut built two rooms, the Obergruppenführersaal—SS Generals’ Hall—and the Gruft.”

  “Gruft?” Ziegler asked.

  “Vault, as in burial vault,” Hessinger clarified.

  “Their ceilings were cast in concrete and faced with natural stone,” Cohen went on. “And he made plans for another hall on the upper floors. They wanted the North Tower to be the Mittelpunkt der Welt—the center of the world.”

  “Morty, sweetheart, this is all for real, right?” Janice asked.

  “Yes, it is, Miss Johansen. In the vault, which is held up by twelve pedestals, he had a swastika placed in the center of the ceiling. A gas line leading to the center of the floor was almost certainly going to fuel an eternal flame.

  “In the Hall of the Obergruppenführers, there are twelve pillars and niches—the latter probably intended for the eventual interment of Himmler’s latter-day knights. There is also a sun w
heel with twelve spokes.”

  “What’s a sun wheel?” Cronley asked.

  “What looks like a wheel, with the sun in the center,” Cohen explained. “In this SS religion they were starting, the sun was the ‘strongest and most visible expression of God.’”

  “They were actually expecting people to take this new religion seriously?” Janice asked.

  “I think, to some degree, that’s exactly what happened. That’s what is so frightening.”

  “You want to explain that?”

  “I’ll be happy to, but please let me finish first.”

  “Go ahead, Morty, baby.”

  “If I didn’t mention this before, we have learned, credibly, that upper-level SS officers, mostly general officers, would gather secretly at various places in Wewelsburg and there conduct rites of some sort. Religious rites. Or quasi-religious.”

  “Sounds crazy,” Cronley said.

  “Unfortunately, they were dead serious,” Cohen said. “But speaking of crazy, did you ever hear of the Inner World of Agharti?”

  “No.”

  “It is a world deep under the surface of this world. It’s a common myth, on the order of the Lost Continent. You never heard of it?”

  Cronley shook his head.

  “Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote Tarzan, wrote about an under-the-earth civilization. He called it ‘Pellucidar,’” Hessinger said.

  “It was fiction, right? Fantasy?”

  “Of course,” Hessinger replied.

  “What if I told you that beginning in 1941, the SS began construction in Hungary of a vertical tunnel, sort of a mine shaft, that would eventually be equipped with an elevator that would take Himmler and his inner circle ten miles downward to the Inner World of Agharti? Would you consider that fact or fiction?”

  “Fiction,” Hessinger said.

  “Insanity,” Cronley said.

  “Work on the tunnel went on until November 1944, when the SS ran out of supplies and decided the project would have to wait for the Final Victory.”

  “You’re bullshitting us, right, Morty baby?” Janice asked.

  “Janice, baby, to quote Super Spook, I shit you not.”

  “Incredible,” Cronley said.

  “Not incredible,” Cohen said. “Very credible. I’ve been there. You would be astonished at the size of the mounds of evacuated earth and stone from a hole two and a half miles deep—that’s as far as they got—and, say, thirty feet in diameter creates.”

  “Boggles the mind,” Ziegler said.

  “Let me now turn to what happened to Castle Wewelsburg when the Final Victory didn’t occur,” Cohen went on. “In late March 1945, as the U.S. 3rd Armored Division approached the area, Himmler sent SS Major Heinz Macher, one of his adjutants, to Wewelsburg with fifteen men. His orders were to tell SS General Siegfried Taubert, who was in charge of the castle, to remove, quote, sacred items, end quote, and then blow the place up.

  “When Macher got there, he found that Taubert was long gone. He was captured by us as he tried to get to Italy. We’ve got him in a cell here. He flatly refuses to tell us what he had with him when he left Castle Wewelsburg.

  “Macher couldn’t blow up the castle, as he didn’t have enough explosives. All he had were some tank mines, which he used to take down the southeast tower—the weakest tower—and the guard and SS buildings. Then he tried, unsuccessfully, to burn the castle down.

  “Then he took off and tried and failed to make it to Italy. We caught him, and he’s now in an SS prisoner enclosure in Darmstadt. That concludes the lecture.”

  “How much of this can I use?” Janice asked. “It’s a hell of a story.”

  “You can use all of it, but I suggest that you wait until you see the castle for yourself.”

  “Can I go with you and Super Spook in his illegal airplane?”

  “That would be up, of course, to Super Spook. I was going to suggest that you might wish to sit on your story until we answer some more of the questions that need answers.”

  “Morty, what’s your interest in this, pure curiosity?” she asked.

  “Nazi evil. My feeling is that this Himmler-inspired Nazi religion made greater inroads into the German people than anyone suspects, and is a greater threat to society than most people recognize.”

  “I don’t think I understand,” Cronley said.

  “Most Jews want people like Kaltenbrunner, after a fair trial for the murder of the Jews they slaughtered, hung. Simple vengeance.”

  “What’s wrong with that?” Ziegler asked. “I wanted to put a bullet . . . more than one . . . into his ear.”

  “I think, Mr. Ziegler, that you have a greater understanding of the problem—whether or not you’re aware of it—than most people. You said something to the effect that you shot rabid dogs in the head to make sure they didn’t bite and infect anyone else before they, I quote, ‘got to piss on the pearly gates.’”

  “Now I don’t understand,” Ziegler said.

  “Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, and people like them have already infected the German people with their variation of rabies,” Cohen said.

  “Now I really don’t understand,” Ziegler replied.

  “The way Himmler and his new religion have influenced the German people is that when we hang Kaltenbrunner, the German people will interpret it as the vengeance of the victors—especially Jewish victors, like me—rather than the punishment of a mass murderer. Instead he will be a martyr to the cause—this foul religion—he helped found.

  “Kaltenbrunner and his cult have convinced many Germans—perhaps more than half, maybe sixty, seventy percent of them—that Germans—I should say, Aryan Germans—are a superior race. And that there’s nothing morally wrong in protecting that race by eliminating inferior peoples.”

  “You’re saying it was that that sent the Jews to the ovens?” Cronley asked.

  “There was a political element in the anti-Semitism. Hitler needed a political enemy to rally the people to his cause. He convinced the people that the Jews were responsible for the unemployment, out-of-control inflation, et cetera, when it was the somewhat justified French vengeance—through the Versailles Treaty—that had caused it.”

  “And once the German people were satisfied with that explanation for their plight—there was little public outcry against the Nürnberger Gesetze—Nuremberg Laws—of September 1935. Specifically: ‘Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor.’ There were two parts of this law. The Reich Citizenship Law declared that only those of German or ‘related blood’—whatever the hell that means—could be citizens of the Reich, and classified everybody else in Germany as ‘state subjects,’ without citizenship rights.

  “The other part of the law was more specifically anti-Semitic. Marriage between Germans and Jews was forbidden. As was ‘extramarital intercourse.’ So was the employment of females under the age of forty-five in Jewish households.”

  “That sounds nutty,” Ziegler said.

  “Nutty and evil,” Cohen said. “And since German Jews were without rights as citizens, they could no longer be civil servants, or practice medicine or law, or be schoolteachers, et cetera.

  “One would think there would be an enormous public outcry against this, but there was only a negligible protest. I say negligible because the protesters—all bona fide German citizens—were quickly rounded up and placed in ‘detention camps,’ which were quickly renamed ‘concentration camps.’

  “Turning to that—immediately after Hitler became chancellor in 1933, the Nazi Party took over all the police in Germany. Reich Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick and Hermann Göring, who was then Prussian acting interior minister, promptly established the first Konzentrationslager—”

  “Using as a model the ‘reconcentration camps’ the Spanish general Valeriano Weyler set up in Cuba in 1897,” Hessinger interrupted.


  “No shit?” Ziegler asked.

  “Pray continue, Professor Hessinger,” Cohen said.

  “For the obvious reason—I almost wound up in one—I’ve always been interested in concentration camps. And I found it very interesting that a year after the first one was opened, Lieutenant Colonel Teddy Roosevelt and the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry—the Rough Riders—shut it down.”

  “And I’ll bet you’re also going to tell us Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt went on to become President?” Cohen inquired, more than a little sarcastically.

  “Something very much like that happened in Argentina,” Cronley said. “Cletus Frade’s father commanded the Húsares de Pueyrredón, a cavalry regiment. That’s the Argentine version of our ‘Old Guard’ in Washington. Lots of prestige. They got their start when Pueyrredón, who was Clete’s great-great-great—whatever—grandfather, formed gauchos—cowboys—from his estancia into cavalry and chased the English out of Buenos Aires.”

  “Fascinating,” Cohen said. “But if you and Friedrich are through with your little lectures, I would like to continue with mine.

  “The first Konzentrationslager—Dachau—was set up in 1933 by Himmler to hold Germans—including Aryans—who opposed National Socialism. There was no public outcry against this. At the time it was called the ‘Dachau Protective Custody Camp.’

  “Then he started to send what he called ‘racially undesirable elements’ to Dachau. Not only Jews, but Romani—Gypsies—common criminals, and homosexuals. Among the latter were many actors, writers, musicians, and other intellectual types well known, even famous, in Germany. And again there was no outcry.”

  “Maybe because everybody was afraid of Himmler and the SS?” Janice asked.

  “That certainly played a part, but I think it’s also likely that a substantial portion of German Aryans decided, ‘Well, those sort of people are corrupting German purity, such as my own, and deserve what they’re getting.’”

  “That’s a hell of an accusation,” Cronley said.

  “Unfortunately, it’s fair,” Cohen replied. “I’ve come to the conclusion that Himmler saw in the acceptance of what he had done that he could do even more. And even more than he had been doing if he could give the German people, the Aryans, a moral justification for exterminating people. And the way to do that was to give them a new religion. Or at least one that had risen, phoenixlike, from long-forgotten German history.”