Lanny was turned over to Dr. Stahmer and his assistants, and he told them the same story he had been telling Hitler and Göring for so many years: that he was a lover of peace who had been trying in his feeble way, first to prevent World War II, then to mitigate its fury and to end it as quickly as possible. Owing to his wealthy father’s influence, he had been able to travel in wartime, and secretly to enter Sweden and Switzerland and from there go into Germany. He had paid many visits to both Göring and the Führer and had carried messages for them to influential persons who, like himself, considered the war to be madness and a crime against humanity.
Did the shrewd German lawyers swallow all that? Lanny would never know. Dr. Stahmer’s conferences with his client were supposed to be secret, and no doubt he asked Göring what were the chances of this American’s being sincere. The determining factor must have been the fat man’s desperate need, but perhaps his vanity played a part also; he liked Lanny, and it would be hard for him to believe that Lanny didn’t really like him. As for the matter of Solomon Hellstein and what Lanny had seen in the Berlin prison—that, he could guess, wouldn’t come into Göring’s mind. Der Dicke had done so much blackmailing and robbing, he had ordered so much plundering and killing, that the details couldn’t all find room in his memory. If he recalled the episode, it would be as a joke; he had taken it that way, and Lanny had pretended to take it the same way. What, between two aristocratic Aryans, was a little whipping administered to the backside of a fat old jüdischer Schweinehund?
V
So a surprise witness was called: Mr. Lanning Prescott Budd took the stand and the oath. He gave his residence as Edgemere, N. J., his occupation as art expert. He told how this occupation had carried him all over Europe, and how he had purchased a number of paintings from Göring, and others for the Führer, prior to the war. He had used what influence he possessed to prevent the war, and he testified how Göring had tried successfully to prevent it in the autumn of 1938, and had expressed regret in 1939. He told how, visiting his old friends in the spring of 1941, Göring had confided to him how distressed he was over this long-drawn-out war. Göring had begged Lanny to intercede and try to prevent it, and Lanny had talked to the Führer about it.
Herrlich! Wunderschön! The two rows of prisoners beamed on this elegant, smooth-spoken gentleman, the friend of their cause; all but poor Rudi, who stared perplexed, as if trying to recall where and when he had seen that face. Foxy Grandpa Schacht spread his mouth in a wide smile; the last time he had seen Lanny he had blown the son of Budd-Erling to an elegant luncheon at the Herrenklub in Berlin, including Kiebitzeier—plovers’ eggs—and had smoothly tried to engage him in the program to have the Allies go easy on the western front and let Hitler put the Russians out of business. Franz von Papen also beamed, remembering Lanny from Vienna—he never forgot anybody, or any of the million details of his long life of intrigue. Keitel and Jodl beamed; they hadn’t liked seeing an American in the Berghof, but now his testimony suited them.
Dr. Stahmer had agreed not to ask any questions beyond the time of America’s entry into the war. To have brought it out that an American had been dealing with the enemy would have been distressing to the American’s important father, and moreover would have discredited him with the judges. So the defense rested, and one of the junior American counsel took over the witness, the one to whom Lanny had told his whole story and who had an elaborate set of typewritten questions in his hand.
VI
“Mr. Budd, will you tell the court when you last had a talk with Hermann Göring?”
“Yes, sir. I was permitted to interview him at Kitzbühel the day after his surrender, last May.”
“I mean your last talk with him prior to his surrender.”
“That was in the autumn of 1943 at his Karinhall estate.”
“You were there as a guest?”
“I was.”
“Will you explain to the court how an American citizen could be in Germany after your country was at war with Germany?”
“Yes, sir. For many years I had been posing as a Nazi sympathizer, and I had convinced Göring and Hitler and others of that.”
“But it was not true?”
“No, sir. In reality I was a confidential agent of President Roosevelt, traveling into Europe and getting information for him.” You could feel the rustle of excitement in the courtroom at that statement. Lanny’s eyes moved down the double line of the prisoners, noting the expressions of consternation and dismay. The blood began to rush into Göring’s usually pasty face, until it was a dangerous purple—dangerous to the fat man. Their eyes met, and Lanny did not turn his away.
“What, precisely, was your status?” continued the questioner.
“I was known as Presidential Agent 103. I was also known to several of the top men in the OSS, including General Donovan.”
“For how long did you have that status?”
“From the summer of 1937 until the day of the President’s death.”
“And you made reports to him during that entire period?”
“Yes, sir. My last report was numbered seventy-one. I made a total of eleven trips into Germany for him—some of them long stays. I also made trips to North Africa, Italy, and Palestine, and I traveled with him to Yalta.”
“You were paid for your services?”
“I was supposed to be a dollar-a-year man, but I never saw the dollar. The President entrusted large sums to me, to be used for secret work, and what I had left I turned over to the OSS after the President’s death.”
“How did you explain to Göring and Hitler your ability to travel to Europe in war time?”
“I told them that I was using my father’s influence. My father is Robert Budd of Budd-Erling Aircraft.”
“But that statement was not true?”
“No, sir. My father did not know what I was doing.”
“Did Göring and Hitler pay you money?”
“They offered to, several times; but I told them I did not want money, I was doing what I did for love of the National Socialist cause.”
“And they accepted that?”
“I tried my best to make it plausible, and so far as I could judge I was successful until the very last, when apparently Himmler got some information about me. I was warned and got out of Germany by way of Italy. The OSS had a naval seaplane pick me up from a fishing boat in the Adriatic Sea.”
VII
This was a story—and a sensation. You could see the correspondents bent over their scratch paper, busily taking notes. If you had a reasonably good imagination you could see the headlines in the afternoon newspapers all over two American continents: MILLIONAIRE’S SON TRICKS HITLER AND GÖRING: ROOSEVELT AGENT GETS SECRETS, REJECTS BRIBE—this because the next question concerned what Göring had offered him. Lanny’s reply was, “The choice of any of his paintings up to a value of a million dollars, provided that I would get him the blueprints of the new Budd-Erling jet fighter.”
The cross-examination continued, and the witness told what Göring had said about his reasons for not desiring war in 1938 and 1939, the fact that his Luftwaffe wasn’t ready; also why he had opposed the attack upon Russia, because one enemy at a time was enough, and by taking Gibraltar and crossing to North Africa the British could have been shut out of the Mediterranean. “Then it wasn’t any motive of humanitarianism?” asked the lawyer, and Lanny replied, “In the years that I knew Göring, from 1933 to 1943, I never heard him mention any such consideration, except to jeer at it as delusion and fraud.” Poor old fat man, they could see him pulling furiously at the telephone cord—as if he were pulling out the tongue of the witness.
“Just what did Göring tell you about his ideas of international morality, Mr. Budd?”
“He told me many times that there could be no such thing and it was nonsense—Quatsch—to talk about it. Dog would eat dog, and there was no way to prevent it. Economic forces were entirely beyond human control, and nations would fight whenever they thought
they were strong enough to win. He talked a great deal about ‘fate,’ and he meant by it this inability of an individual to control his own desires and of a nation to control its politics. He was certain that the German people we’re incapable of democracy, and that if National Socialism were ever destroyed some other form of military government would take its place almost at once.”
“When did you first meet Göring, Mr. Budd?”
“I met him very soon after the Nazis came into power. I happened to know the family of Johannes Robin, the Jewish financier. My sister married his elder son, Hansi Robin, the well-known violinist. I had frequently been a guest on Johannes’s yacht, and when I learned that the Nazis had seized him I went to Berlin to try to intercede. I appealed to Goebbels in the matter, and to my surprise I received a call from Oberleutnant Furtwängler—he has since become General-Major. He was a member of Göring’s staff and requested me to call on the Hauptmann, as Göring then was, at the official Residenz. I did so, and Göring told me that Johannes was accused of having plotted to take money out of Germany. I pointed out to him that Johannes was about to take a yachting trip—I had been invited to go along—and a man could not travel in a yacht without cash.
“And what was Göring’s response?”
“He called Johannes many foul names, based on his Jewishness, and declared his intention to strip him of every dollar he had in Germany and outside. The proposition I was to take to him in prison was that he was to make over his property in Germany to Göring for the price of one mark for each piece of property, and that he was to be allowed to keep those marks. He was to write checks for every dollar he had abroad, and when these checks had been cashed Johannes and his family would be released. Göring’s phrase was, ‘Naked came he into Germany, and naked will he go out.’ I pointed out to him that Johannes had been a rich man when he had moved into Germany from Holland—I knew, because he had been my father’s business associate. But that didn’t do any good.”
“Did Göring say what he would do if his terms were rejected?”
“He mentioned the tortures to which Johannes would be subjected. Furthermore, he put me under pledge that I would never tell anyone about this matter, and he said that if either I or Johannes violated the pledge, he, Göring, would compile a list of a hundred of his Jewish relatives and friends and make them pay the price. The point was, he was not going to have the good name of Germany slandered in the foreign press; he was going to get the money, but do it secretly.”
“You took that proposition to Johannes Robin?”
“Oberleutnant Furtwängler escorted me to the city prison on the Alexanderplatz, and there in the presence of Furtwängler and two SS men I put the proposal to Johannes. I advised him to accept it, and he did so. The agreement was kept, except that Freddi, the younger son of Johannes, was arrested in Berlin—at least he disappeared, and when I appealed to Furtwängler he pretended not to be able to find out about him; and when I appealed to Göring he made the same pretense. That went on for a long time. I received a letter which Freddi had managed to smuggle out, telling me that he was a prisoner being tortured in Dachau. I tried other methods of getting him out without success. Finally Göring pretended to me that he had learned that my Itzig-friend, as he called him, was in Dachau, and offered me another bargain to get him out.”
“Will you tell us what that bargain was, Mr. Budd?”
So Lanny told the long story of how he had happened to be in Munich, trying to find a way to buy or steal Freddi out of Dachau concentration camp, when the Blood Purge had fallen upon him. He had seen his SA friend Hugo Behr shot, and he himself had been taken to prison. He had spent a couple of weeks in three different prisons; at the end Göring had sent Furtwängler to get him out and had made a hilarious joke of it. “I give him credit for having a sense of humor,” the witness said.
But nobody would have thought it, watching the face of that deflated wretch sitting in the prisoners’ dock and staring at this false friend. Humiliation, anger, and fear were written there for all the world to read, and mixed emotions in all the other faces. Speer and Schacht were glad to see the fat man suffer. Poor Rudi, who was having one of his bad periods, was trying hard to remember where he had seen Lanny before, but he couldn’t even remember what had been said to him the day before. Hans Frank, the murderer of three million Polish Jews, had turned religious, and couldn’t make up his mind whether he was sorry for Göring, or pleased to see him punished for his spurning of repentance.
VIII
Lanny’s story was a terrible blow for the ex-Reichsmarschall, as Colonel Josephus in Washington had said it would be. It was an accusation of extortion and kidnaping, even of murder, since both Freddi Robin and Solomon Hellstein had died as result of their mistreatment. The prosecuting attorney plied Lanny with questions and made him recall everything Göring had said and every detail of the dreadful scene in the torture chamber. Men were whipped there until they were bloody messes, and then they were dumped into another room and left lying there to live or die. Four men stripped to the waist laid on the lashes, and the room stank of dried blood and sweat. For almost twelve years the witness had kept silence, but now he spoke, and to the accused man it must have been like the ghost of Hamlet’s father, or that of Banquo, coming back to demand vengeance.
A historian might question whether there had ever been in the world a man who bore the weight of more crimes than Hermann Wilhelm Göring—unless it was Hitler, or Himmler, or Streicher. It would have been hard to choose among them, and together they had brought more misery to mankind than any other set of humans you could name. There had been wholesale killers since the dawn of history, and doubtless also in its black midnight, but they hadn’t had such vast populations to work on, or such vast amounts of treasure to destroy, or such wholesale means of destruction at their command. These top Nazis had lived at the apex of human civilization, and they had done the most to hurl it back into chaos and night; and here sat this shivering wretch, this poor hulk of fat and misery, trying to bluff it out, trying to keep up his courage, his pose before both friends and enemies, while forced to sit for ten months alternately listening to the story of the horrors he had wrought and then retiring to a lonely cell to contemplate what he had heard.
Also what he had seen! Early during the trial he had come into the courtroom and been told that movies were to be shown. “Ach, Kino!” he had exclaimed. He had rubbed his hands with pleasure, and even confused Rudi Hess had understood and exclaimed with the pleasure of a child, “Movies, movies!” They had put up a screen and proceeded to show the horrors of the concentration camps and the extermination factories—human bodies, almost skeletons, stacked in great piles, and shoved about by bulldozers; frozen corpses in the freight cars; prisoners being, shot wholesale on the edge of trenches.
And then later, more movies, this time furnished by the Russians, whose sufferings had been the worst of all. The acres of corpses of prisoners left to starve in the stockades; the torture instruments, the mutilated bodies, the raped women and children, the guillotines and baskets of heads, the bodies hanging from lamp posts, the crematoria and gas chambers, the bales of women’s hair, and other sights too horrid to be written about. Some had averted their eyes and taken off their headphones; some had wept, some had fallen ill and had had to be drugged in order to sleep. Dr. Gilbert’s diary recorded Göring as complaining that the Kino had spoiled his show for that day; concerning Lanny Budd’s testimony he remarked that he feared it had spoiled his show for good and all.
For the answer to that all three of them—prisoner, psychiatrist, and witness—had to wait nearly seven months longer, until that monster judicial procedure had ground to its end. When the verdicts came in, Schacht, Papen, and Fritzsche were found not guilty of the crimes charged. All the others were found guilty. Hess, Admiral Raeder, and Funk, head of the Reichsbank, got life imprisonment. Schirach and Speer got twenty years, Neurath fifteen, and Admiral Doenitz ten. The others were sentenced to death by hangi
ng: Göring, Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Rosenberg, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Saukel, Jodl, and Seiss-Inquart—this last the intriguer who had prepared for the seizure of Austria and later had been the tyrant of the Netherlands. Eleven most wicked men, each of whom deserved a thousand deaths if such a thing were possible.
When Dr. Gilbert returned to Princeton University at the conclusion of the executions, Lanny heard the story of their last days. Göring had lost his cockiness and accepted defeat. Said he to Gilbert, “You don’t have to worry about the Hitler legend any more. When the German people learn all that has been revealed at this trial, it won’t be necessary to condemn him: he has condemned himself.” Der Dicke had the satisfaction of cheating the gallows; he had managed to conceal a cyanide capsule, and swallowed it, thus joining Hitler, Himmler, Goebbels, and Ley. The other ten were hanged, very early on a rainy morning, the 16th day of October of that year 1946, on three black scaffolds in the gymnasium of the prison courtyard.
29
Vae Victis!
I
Lanny had been getting airmail letters from home. Professor Einstein had proved a tremendous drawing card; a dozen extra stations had carried his question-and-answer program, some of them without pay. The flood of mail had grown, and two more Methodist and two more Seventh Day Adventists were working. Next week Robert Oppenheimer was to appear, to discuss the world implications of the atomic bomb. The Peace Program was booming.
How was it with peace? Not so good, if you could believe Bernhardt Monck. He was still in Berlin and could not be spared from his duties to come to Nürnberg; he begged Lanny to visit him before returning home. Things were going from bad to worse, he wrote; he was becoming a chronic worrier. For a man who had been facing persecution and death in many forms since before World War I, this was hardly surprising, but he gave such cogent reasons that Lanny decided to take the trip. Surely the capital of Germany was going to be a part of the world’s future problem, and Lanny would get a briefing on the subject by the best-informed German he knew.
O Shepherd, Speak! Page 60
