Death at Nuremberg
Page 20
“What I’m trying to do, Captain Cronley, is keep my husband alive.”
“At what price?”
“Excuse me?”
“Have you considered what would happen to your husband’s career if he goes to General White?”
“What I have been considering, Captain Cronley, is what’s very likely to happen to him, I mean losing his life, if he stays in the DCI. Doing God only knows what incredibly dangerous things.”
“If Lieutenant Winters goes to General White, the general will do one of several things. In my judgment, he’ll tell Lieutenant Winters that when a good officer is given an order, he salutes and says, ‘Yes, sir,’ and carries out that order to the best of his ability. Not tries to get out of it because his wife wants him to. And he was ordered to the DCI.”
“Because you asked for him. And for Bonehead. And we know what happened to Bonehead, don’t we, Captain Cronley?”
“Yes, we do. I think it’s entirely likely that General White would call me and tell me Lieutenant Winters was in his office, asking to be relieved of his assignment, and asking me what I know about it.
“And I would tell him what I know, that he’s there because he wants to do what his wife wants him to do. And I think General White would ask me what I think he should do. Then I would be forced to say that I don’t want anyone in DCI who doesn’t want to be there. And that if General White doesn’t take him back, I will see that he’s transferred elsewhere.”
“So?”
“How long do you think it will take for General Winters and General . . . whatever his name is . . . your father . . . to learn what’s happened to their son and son-in-law? For the story of your husband trying to use family connections to get out of an assignment his wife didn’t like to make its way, via the Officers’ Ladies Intelligence Network, around the Army establishment? The Regular Army establishment?”
“You sonofabitch!”
“As an Army brat, you should know that an officer’s lady should not call her husband’s commanding officer a sonofabitch. And now, having concluded counseling you, I will say, good morning, Mrs. Winters.”
“What the hell do you want me to do?”
“You’re an Army brat. Figure it out yourself.”
Cronley turned and walked out of the house.
Well, I gave it my best shot.
Which probably fucked things up more than they were already fucked up.
[FOUR]
Hôtel Maison Rouge
Rue des Francs Bourgeois 101
Strasbourg, France
1305 24 February 1946
Commandant Jean-Paul Fortin was sitting where Sergeant Henri Deladier told Cronley he would find him, having lunch with Captain Pierre DuPres in the Maison Rouge.
When Fortin saw him, he righted one of the upside-down glasses on the table and poured wine into it.
“Sit down, James, and have a glass of wine while you tell us what you did to lose your job.”
“You heard about that, huh?”
“I’m a senior officer in the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, I hear a lot of things. Are expressions of sympathy in order?”
“No, my Colonel. And I’m surprised that a senior officer in the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire believes everything he hears.”
“As I have told you many times, I am but a lowly commandant, not a colonel.”
“I’m surprised that you have risen as high as you have. You lack an essential requirement for someone in our business. You’re a lousy liar.”
Fortin stood up and went to Cronley and embraced him.
“When I heard, James,” he said, “I was distressed that I’d never see you again.”
Deladier also rose and embraced Cronley.
The Frogs are always kissing each other, so why am I touched by this?
“Are you hungry?” Fortin asked, and without waiting for an answer, called for a waiter.
—
As Cronley cut his first bite from the grilled pork tenderloin that had been quickly laid before him, Fortin asked, “So what happened, mon ami?”
“I am now in charge of security for Judge Biddle and Justice Jackson at the War Crimes Trials in Nuremberg.”
“That’s not your basic area of expertise, is it?”
“President Truman and Justice Jackson are old friends. The President decided he needed more protection than the CIC sitting on him was providing. He selected me.”
“That must have been flattering for a very junior captain.”
“I went right out and bought a bigger hat.”
“So it wasn’t a demotion?”
“DCI-Europe is being tripled, quadrupled in size. It can no longer pretend to be commanded by a very junior captain.”
“So Colonel Wallace took over?”
“And I think was very happy when the President ordered me, and my people, to Nuremberg.”
“Henri de Vabres introduced me to Colonel Cohen . . .”
What? He knows Morty Cohen?
“Who?”
“The French chief judge. He is concerned with the safety of the prisoners. He wanted me to have a look at what Colonel Cohen had set up.”
“That must have been flattering for a lowly major.”
“Henri and I served together during the war. He speaks very highly of Cohen, and I was impressed with him. Not charmed. Cohen is a difficult man. But I could find no flaw in what he’d set up to protect the prisoners, and their judges.”
“Colonel Cohen was not pleased when I told him what I had been sent to Nuremberg to do.”
“Then I suggest you be careful, James. Colonel Cohen—I say this with admiration—is not the sort of man a very junior captain should annoy.”
“Truth being stranger than fiction, Jean-Paul, Morty Cohen and I have become chums.”
“That I find hard to believe. First that he would allow a man known to be—what is it General Seidel calls you? ‘A dangerous loose cannon’?—to get close to him, and second that you would believe that his offered friendship did not have an agenda.”
“Oh, he had an agenda, all right. Have you ever heard of Castle Wewelsburg, Jean-Paul?”
“I have heard some frankly absurd rumors.”
“That Himmler was trying to establish a Nazi religion there?”
Fortin nodded.
“All true, Jean-Paul.”
“Nonsense.”
“All true, Jean-Paul. And Colonel Cohen wanted to—has—recruited me to join his noble crusade to cut its head off.”
“If you’re—what do you say?—‘trying to pull my leg,’ I am not amused.”
“I am not trying to be clever, Jean-Paul. I’ve seen the evidence.”
“And what is Colonel Cohen’s interest in this Nazi nonsense?”
“I like to think it’s because he’s a good intelligence officer, but his being a Jew also has a lot to do with it.”
Fortin made a Come on gesture with both hands.
“For one thing, when they hang Göring and company, he wants the German people to know they’re being hung as criminals, mass murderers, not because the Jews won the war and are extracting vengeance.
“That’s the Jewish angle. As an intelligence officer, Cohen thinks Brigadeführer Franz von Dietelburg, whom we know was deeply involved—an apostle, so to speak, in Himmler’s new religion—is the guy running Odessa.”
“Very interesting.”
“What comes next is my scenario. Cohen doesn’t even know that I was coming here.”
“You don’t want him to know? Why not?”
“I didn’t say that. What I was trying to get across is that my scenario didn’t come from Cohen.”
“I would be more interested if it had, but let’s hear it anyway.”
“I think Co
usin Luther is a disciple in the new religion.”
Fortin said nothing.
“Think about it, Jean-Paul. We now know that he didn’t desert from the SS as the war was ending. He was sent here by Odessa, possibly even by von Dietelburg himself.”
“My opinion is that your cousin Luther is an opportunist. He joined the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme to avoid being sent to Germany as a laborer, not because he had anything against the Communists. And then he did the best he could to please his German masters.”
“He was, in other words, what we Americans would call a born-again German?”
“Yes. In one of our conversations—we were talking about his treason—he said that his father was responsible for his problems. He said that after World War One, when Strasbourg became French, his father could have elected to keep his German citizenship, but instead opted to be French.
“He said that if his father had not ‘betrayed’ his German blood, he would be a prisoner of war, not a traitor.”
“My mother thinks of herself as German, ex-German,” Cronley said. “As an American, I never even thought much about my German blood until I saw what the Germans did. Now, when I think about it, I’m a little ashamed about it. That people ‘of my blood’ could do what the Nazis did.”
“I’m still ashamed that so many Frenchmen were crying ‘Better Hitler than Blum’ just before the war started, but I don’t think Luther Stauffer thought of himself as a German. If he had, instead of deserting, he would have gone to Berlin with the French SS Division Charlemagne and died fighting for the Thousand-Year Reich.”
“You ever wonder where that came from, ‘the Thousand-Year Reich’?”
“From Josef Goebbels, the propaganda minister. It has a nice ring to it.”
“It also fits what Himmler was trying to do. Did. Start a new religion that would last a thousand years. A religion that sanctions the elimination of the Untermenschen so that the Aryans own everything.”
“And you and Cohen believe this? All of it, including the religious devotion to it?”
“Yeah, we do.”
“You may be on to something,” Fortin said. “Just before the war was over, and anyone who could find his derriere with both hands had to acknowledge the Germans had lost, we captured—”
“Who’s we?”
“General Leclerc’s 2e Division Blindée. I was the G-2.”
“I thought division G-2s were colonels. What did you do to get demoted?”
Fortin glared at Cronley and then shook his head in resignation.
“Just outside Strasbourg, we captured a dozen Frenchmen wearing the uniform of the Charlemagne Division. When we interrogated them, we got nothing. They stuck nobly to name, rank, and serial number. And they didn’t seem frightened.
“I told my general we had them, and he said he wanted a look. So we marched them from the POW enclosure here. To this very room, which was then General Leclerc’s headquarters.
“As we marched them through town, French citizens of Strasbourg started throwing things—the contents of chamber pots, garbage, that sort of thing. Under the circumstances, one would assume they would cringe. To the contrary, one of them called attention and then gave the order, Vorwärts, marsch! And, backs straight, heads held high, they marched the rest of the way here.
“I confess that I was more than a little annoyed with my countrymen for attacking helpless prisoners, and felt more than a little admiration for what I saw as the maintenance of discipline in trying circumstances.
“When I marched them into General Leclerc’s office, he looked at each one of them and then asked, ‘Why are you Frenchmen wearing German uniforms?’
“Their senior officer, an SS-Hauptsturmführer, the one who had called them to attention, replied, ‘And why are you, a French general, wearing an American uniform?’
“The general was uniformed as I am, in American ODs with French shoulder boards and wearing his kepi.”
“What did Leclerc say?”
“‘If you’re through with them, Colonel, shoot them.’”
“And did you? Without a trial?”
Fortin pointed toward the ceiling.
“In the parking lot outside. They died bravely. No pleas for mercy, or anything like that. At the time, I thought I saw a sort of a parallel with the SS execution of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg in the courtyard of the War Ministry after the bomb plot failed. As I understand it, he died bravely, shouting, ‘Long live Germany.’
“Now I see I was right. Von Stauffenberg died believing in his faith, that of the Roman Catholic Church. And the men, the traitors to France, as von Stauffenberg was a traitor to Hitler—like everyone else in the Wehrmacht, he had sworn an oath to follow Hitler to death . . .”
He paused, gathered his thoughts, and then went on: “I now think it’s entirely possible that the men I had executed here believed they would be martyrs to this new Nazi religion. That’s frightening.”
“The more you get into it, the more frightening it gets,” Cronley said.
“What makes you think you can talk your cousin Luther out of it?”
“What you said just now. The bastard is primarily an opportunist. He is far more interested in Luther Stauffer than in being a disciple in the new religion. He doesn’t want to hang.”
“We don’t have enough on him to send him to Nuremberg.”
“He doesn’t know what we have. And I’m going to offer to send him to Paraguay.”
“Paraguay?”
“There’s a colonel there who thinks there’s nothing wrong with National Socialism except Nazis, who he believes fucked it up.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“You ever wonder what happened to the Nazis we shipped to Argentina?”
“I was too polite to ask.”
“Well, we had a bunch of them, and their families. And we couldn’t keep them all locked up, and we couldn’t shoot them . . .”
“Why not?”
“. . . and we couldn’t turn them over to Juan Domingo Perón, who would have kissed them on each cheek and then welcomed them to Argentina. But then ol’ Bernardo—General de Brigade Bernardo Martín, who runs the BIS, the Bureau of Internal Security, which is something like the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire, and is a pal of my pal Cletus Frade and a really nice guy—came up with Paraguay.”
“You are losing me.”
“We send our Nazis to Paraguay. The guy who really runs Paraguay is a colonel named Alfredo Stroessner. His parents were German immigrants. He loves Germany and National Socialism, but doesn’t like Nazis, who, if you were listening, he thinks fucked up Germany. He really doesn’t like Nazis. When he comes across anyone we sent him from Operation Ost who is still holding his breath waiting for Nazism to rise from the ashes—Operation Phoenix—he has them shot. By firing squad. In a public ceremony. Tied to a stake, blindfolded. What’s that phrase of yours? Pour encourager les autres?”
“As incredible as that sounds, I have a strange temptation to believe you.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die, Jean-Paul, Boy Scout’s honor, it’s the truth.”
“Would you really want to send him to South America, or are you just going to dangle that carrot in front of his nose?”
“I really want to send him.”
“Because of the family connection?”
“Yes. I’m hoping that Stroessner will shoot him. Then I can tell my mother that I did all in my power for Cousin Luther.”
“It’s not nice to lie to one’s mother.”
“I’d rather lie to her than have to tell her a friend of mine shot him in the knees and elbows with a .22 and then threw him in the Rhine.”
“Which would have already happened were we not friends. I got nothing out of the fils de pute even after employing my best
interrogative techniques. He resisted me with what I’m now thinking was a religious fervor.”
“Why don’t we go see him, and see if I can talk him into accepting the good life in Paraguay instead of waiting to see what Himmler’s Heaven will provide?”
“I don’t see what either of us has to lose. Capitaine DuPres, would you please call the Sainte Marguerite and have Stauffer taken to an interrogation room? Naked and in shackles. He can have a blanket.”
“Oui, mon colonel.”
“What did Henri call you, Jean-Paul? ‘Mon colonel’?”
“To use my favorite American phrase, ‘Go fuck yourself, mon ami.’”
“Saint Marguerite? Who’s she?”
“That’s where we have your cousin Luther, James. In the loving arms of Saint Marguerite.”
[FIVE]
Sainte Marguerite Prison
Strasbourg, France
1410 24 February 1946
From the outside, Sainte Marguerite Prison looked more like a hospital or a school than a prison, but once they went inside, there were barred corridors and windows and an unpleasant smell.
A guard led them down a corridor through three barred barriers to a small room furnished with a simple table and three wooden straight-backed chairs. There was a lined pad and a pencil on the table.
“Bring him in,” Fortin ordered curtly.
“Oui, mon commandant.”
Luther Stauffer was led into the room a minute later by two guards.
He was naked under a gray blanket. There were shackles around his ankles and wrists. Cronley could see no bruises or other signs of physical abuse.
“Put him in the chair,” Fortin ordered.
Stauffer was shuffled to the chair at the table and sat down in it.
“Wie geht’s, Herr Sturmführer?” Cronley asked.
“And how are you, Cousin James?”
“Well, there are no shackles around my wrists and ankles and I’m wearing a lot more than a dirty blanket to keep me warm, so I’m obviously doing better than you.”
“Are you going to tell my aunt Wilhelmina you came to gloat over me?”