Death at Nuremberg Read online

  It was surrounded by fences topped with concertina barbed wire, and guarded by soldiers wearing the shoulder insignia of the 1st Infantry Division. Their web belts and the leather pistol holsters attached to them were white, and they wore highly polished combat boots, into which their trousers had been “bloused,” and plastic helmet liners also painted white.

  They were passed into what was now obviously a compound without trouble after Casey Wagner, who was driving, flashed his CIC credentials at the sergeant in charge of the striped pole across the road.

  And they found the building that housed the Office of the Chief United States Prosecutor without trouble. Getting into the building required that they each show identification. Once inside the building, the trouble began.

  A 1st Division captain and a sergeant sat behind a counter.

  Cronley extended his CIC credentials and announced that he was there to see Justice Jackson.

  “That’s Mr. Justice Jackson,” the captain said.

  He consulted a loose-leaf notebook and then announced, “You don’t seem to be on the appointments schedule, Mr. Cronley.”

  “I don’t have an appointment,” Cronley replied. “But I’m expected.”

  “If you were expected, you would be on the appointments schedule,” the captain said.

  “Tell you what,” Cronley said, “why don’t you call Mr. Justice Jackson’s office and tell them I’m here?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

  Cronley took out his DCI credentials and showed them to the captain.

  “Get on the goddamn phone, and now!”

  —

  They were marched, escorted by two 1st Division sergeants, down a long corridor and passed through a door under a sign reading CHIEF UNITED STATES PROSECUTOR.

  There a man in his late twenties wearing pinks and greens with triangles on the lapels sat behind a desk.

  “What’s this all about?” he asked. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Cronley, and I was led to believe Mr. Justice Jackson expects me.”

  “If that were so, I’d have been so informed.”

  An interior door opened. A fiftyish, trim man in a dark business suit stood there.

  “Am I interrupting anything?” he asked.

  “Sir, my name is Cronley.”

  “They just bullied their way in here, Mr. Justice.”

  “Well, Ken,” Jackson said, “consider yourself lucky to be alive. Mr. Cronley’s reputation precedes him. Please come in, Mr. Cronley.”

  “Sir, may I bring my deputies with me?”

  “Why don’t you leave them here with Ken while we have a private word? Would that be all right?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jackson waved him into his office, closed the door, and then signaled that Cronley should take a seat on a leather sofa against the wall, behind a small table.

  “Coffee?” he asked, and then without waiting for a response, bent over the table and poured coffee into two cups and then sat down beside Cronley.

  “I knew you were coming, Mr. Cronley, because I had a telephone call from General Seidel. You know who I mean?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “He said that he had just heard that you were being assigned to the trials and thought I should know something about you, and then went on to tell me that you, quote, were a poster child for Too Big for His Britches, end quote, and that, quote, that would be amusing were you not a dangerous loose cannon with two much authority for a twenty-two-year-old. End quote. Is that true?”

  Oh, shit!

  “General Seidel is not one of my admirers, sir.”

  “I mean about you being twenty-two years old.”

  “I’m twenty-two, sir.”

  “Neither the President nor Admiral Souers mentioned that when they called me about you. The President said I needed protection, and that I was going to have it whether or not I wanted it, and he was sending me the best man he knew to protect me, and I should do whatever he—you—told me to do. Sid Souers said that you managed to get Colonel Mattingly back from the Russians when everybody else had written him off as lost, and that I should pay attention to what you had to say about my personal security. Inasmuch as I have had the privilege of the friendship—the close friendship—of the President and the admiral for many years, it wasn’t hard for me to accept their opinion of you, rather than General Seidel’s.”

  Cronley didn’t reply.

  “What’s the problem between you and General Seidel, Mr. Cronley?”

  “Sir, how much do you know about the formation of DCI?”

  “The President told me he had realized, just about as soon as he’d ordered it, that shutting down the OSS was a mistake. He said there were several reasons, including that everyone pressing for its dissolution wanted to take over its missions. And so he was establishing DCI and putting Sid Souers in charge.”

  “Sir, does ‘Operation Ost’ mean anything to you?”

  “Oh, you know about that, do you?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. The President gave responsibility for that to DCI-Europe. And until three days ago, I was chief of DCI-Europe.”

  “And what has that to do with your problems with General Seidel?”

  “General Seidel and Army G-2 generally think DCI is a threat to their turf and want to either take it over or abolish it. I was—am—in their way.”

  “So you know all about Operation Ost? Including what a threat it poses to the President?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I am having difficulty understanding—no offense, Mr. Cronley—why such a responsibility would be handed to a twenty-two-year-old captain. And also how you got to be a captain at twenty-two.”

  I have to tell him, Cronley thought.

  And did.

  —

  “So you know Generalmajor Gehlen?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There are those who believe Generalmajor Gehlen and his entire staff should be here, in cells next to Hermann Göring, Rudolf Hess, Field Marshal Alfred Jodl, and the other senior Nazis awaiting trial, like Martin Bormann, but he seems to have dropped off the face of the earth.”

  “Yes, sir, I know.”

  “But what he’s given us, in an intelligence sense, is worth the President allowing him . . . hell, ordering that he be allowed to vanish?”

  Before Cronley could frame a reply, Jackson added, aloud but as if he was speaking to himself, “I can’t believe I’m asking that of a twenty-two-year-old captain.”

  And then, as if he had heard what he had said, he added: “Again, no offense intended, son.”

  “None taken, sir. Sir, when General Gehlen surrendered to Colonel Wallace—”

  “Who?”

  “Colonel Harold Wallace, sir. Then of the OSS and now chief, DCI-Europe. The man I told you was looking over my shoulder when I was chief in case I fuc—didn’t perform as expected.”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “When he surrendered to us, General Gehlen was two jumps ahead of the Sicherheitsdienst.”

  “Who had heard that he wanted to switch sides?”

  “The Sicherheitsdienst didn’t know about that. What they wanted to do was take him, and his staff, to the Flossenbürg concentration camp and hang him and his deputy, Oberst Ludwig Mannberg, beside Admiral Canaris for their role in the attempted assassination of Hitler.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Jackson said. “But I heard that when we liberated the Flossenbürg camp, they found Admiral Canaris’s naked body still hanging from the gallows on which he had been hung two weeks before.”

  “I heard that, too, sir. My point is that General Gehlen and most of the members of Abwehr Ost were not Nazis. Quite the opposite.”

  “Most, but not all?”

  “Not all. The ‘Russian’ we swapped for Col
onel Mattingly, Major of State Security Venedikt Ulyanov, had once been SS-Brigadeführer von Deitelberg, a Nazi on Gehlen’s Abwehr Ost staff. Gehlen had gotten rid of him by assigning him to the Sixth Army at Stalingrad, where he changed sides.”

  “Incredible,” Jackson said. “And while I really would like to continue this conversation—and we will, later—let’s turn to a subject really dear to my heart, my personal safety.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Am I really at some risk? Or are Sid Souers and the President being overly cautious?”

  “I don’t know how much of a risk, sir, because we don’t really know why the Russians started the kidnapping, or what they hope to accomplish. But they are kidnapping or trying to kidnap people, and I think that means you are at risk, sir.”

  “And how do you propose to protect me?”

  “I think the best way to do that is to get the Army—the 1st Division—out of the picture. They don’t know what they’re up against. The CIC—General Greene’s CIC—is already charged with the basic security of the trials, sort of supervising the soldiers from the 1st Division . . .”

  “And making sure Göring and his friends stay in their cells.”

  “Yes, sir. Sir, that really breaks down into two functions. One, which I think the Army can handle, is physically keeping them in their cells or from breaking out of them. The second part of controlling the bastards—”

  “I like to think of them as ‘the accused,’” Jackson said. “You know, ‘innocent until proven guilty.’ I find that difficult, but I think it is incumbent upon me to think of them that way, and treat them accordingly.”

  “Yes, sir. I was about to say that the second part of keeping the accused in their cells and from causing trouble, or have them harmed—”

  “Have them harmed? By whom?”

  “For example, sir, by Mossad, or other Jews. Or by some Odessa Nazis still on the loose who are afraid of what the accused might say to save their skins.”

  “Mossad? The Zionist intelligence service?”

  “They are determined that the Nazis not escape punishment.”

  “You sound as if you’re familiar with Mossad?”

  “Yes, sir, I am. More accurately, General Gehlen is. I’ve only met one of their agents.”

  “The current wisdom around here is that Odessa is a myth, like the ‘National Redoubt’ the SS was supposed to have had at Berchtesgaden.”

  “Sir, Odessa exists. We just caught two really bad SS officers Odessa was trying to sneak out of Germany and through France into Spain.”

  “Two questions, Mr. Cronley . . . or do I call you ‘Captain Cronley’?”

  “That’s your call, sir. Most of the time I don’t wear my railroad tracks.”

  “Why not?”

  “People are not surprised to see somebody my age wearing civilian triangles. They often look curiously—”

  “At someone your age wearing ‘railroad tracks’?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “People are going to look curiously at you for just being here. How are you going to handle that?”

  “Sir, one of the ways we’re going to try to keep you safe is for you to add a translator to your personal staff. One of the men I have with me, Maksymilian ‘Max’ Ostrowski, is a former Free Polish Air Force fighter pilot. He speaks German, Russian, French, and a couple of other languages.”

  “How is he at protecting people?”

  “He was the same thing as a lieutenant in the PSO—the Provisional Security Organization—when he saved the life of one of my sergeants by killing the NKGB people who were trying to . . . I don’t know, make contact with a mole, or kidnap or murder one of us in Kloster Grünau.”

  “Kloster Grünau?”

  “It used to be a monastery. It’s near Schollbrunn in the foothills of the Alps. The Vatican turned it over to us. It’s where we had General Gehlen until we got the Süd-Deutsche Industrielle Entwicklungsorganisation Compound up and running.”

  “Why did the Vatican do that?”

  “They had people they wanted to get out of Europe and to South America. We had the means to do that. I’m told Mr. Dulles made the deal.”

  “I want to hear more about that, but I’m hearing so much it’s overloading me. Let’s start again. With what do I call you? How about by your first name?”

  “That would be fine with me, sir. It’s James. Jim. But what do I call you?”

  “It wouldn’t bother me, Jim, if you called me by my first name. But it would bother Ken . . . Ken Brewster . . . the man in the outer office. He was—still is—clerk to Supreme Court Justice Jackson, and takes that role, and Mr. Justice Jackson’s dignity, very seriously. He would have a heart attack if he heard you calling me ‘Bob,’ so that won’t work. Can you live with calling me ‘Mr. Jackson’?”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Jackson.”

  “‘Sir’ would also work. But in Ken’s hearing, ‘Mr. Justice’ would be better.”

  “Yes, sir, Mr. Justice.”

  The two were smiling at each other.

  “Ken’s a very bright—brilliant—lawyer. He was top of his class at Yale. And I really need him around here.”

  Cronley’s mouth went on automatic: “He’s a lawyer and a clerk?”

  “That’s the way the system works, Jim,” Mr. Justice Jackson said, smiling. “Now tell me about my interpreter.”

  “After he whacked the three NKGB guys at Kloster Grünau, I took him into DCI, which proved to be one of my rare good ideas.”

  “You had that authority?”

  “Yes, sir. Or I took it because it was the right thing to do.”

  “And you want him to be my bodyguard?”

  “I want him to be in charge of your security detail. We’re going to cover you twenty-four hours a day. I brought the men to do that with me.”

  “All multilingual former members of the Free Polish Forces?”

  “Most of them. But two of them are German-speaking Pennsylvania Dutchmen. One is a former Criminal Investigation Division agent, and the other one graduated from high school last year. Really bright kid. He came up with how Odessa was moving Nazis out of Germany.”

  “You touched on that.”

  “They were concealing them on the trucks that deliver Stars and Stripes all over Europe. That’s how we caught SS-Brigadeführer Ulrich Heimstadter and SS-Standartenführer Oskar Müller.”

  “Who are?”

  “The guys responsible for massacring the slave laborers at Peenemünde.”

  “I saw the story in Stars and Stripes. It didn’t say what they had done, and I got the impression that alert Constabulary troopers had caught them trying to cross the Franco–German border.”

  That’s his very polite way of saying he thinks I’m lying.

  “Casey—the young Pennsylvania Dutchman—wondered why the Stripes trucks were crossing into France at that remote location. When we learned from the French, from Commandant Jean-Paul Fortin of the DST—the Direction de la Surveillance du Territoire—that a man named Luther Stauffer with known connections . . .”

  I don’t think I should tell Mr. Justice Jackson that Luther is my cousin.

  “. . . to Odessa had been spending a lot of time in that little Dorf Wissembourg, we put two and two together and borrowed some Constabulary troopers from General White and staked them out along the Wissembourg road. The sergeant, First Sergeant Abraham Lincoln Tedworth, in the picture is top kick of the Constab unit that guards Kloster Grünau and the Compound. Tedworth grabbed the bastards because we knew that Odessa was going to try to get somebody through that checkpoint.”

  Major General I. D. White—a stocky forty-six-year-old who had led the 2nd Armored Division to the Elbe River, and then into the German capital after the Russians had been allowed to take Berlin—had assumed command of the Constabulary on 1 Febru
ary.

  “General White and the Constabulary have a connection with DCI?”

  Do I tell him?

  My gut tells me he’s a decent guy, a really decent human being.

  Fuck it! In for a penny, in for a pound.

  “As I understand it, sir, General White has been tasked to support us. Not publicly, of course.”

  “You just said the Constabulary is providing security for your two bases. Isn’t that public?”

  “Tedworth’s people wear Constabulary insignia, but they’re really assigned to what we call the ‘Military Detachment, DCI-Europe.’”

  “How did you get the Stars and Stripes to run the story that an alert Constabulary PFC was responsible for catching those two?”

  “I struck a deal with Janice Johansen of the Associated Press.”

  “And she also . . . cooperated . . . in the story that Colonel Mattingly was in an East German jail for DUI?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Perhaps that’s why General Seidel thinks you’re a loose cannon. My experience has been that any association with the press is dangerous.”

  “I’m aware of that, sir.”

  “We were talking a while back about Mossad, Jim. How does Mossad feel about Operation Ost—or should I say, DCI?—shipping Nazis to Argentina?”

  “I’m sure they don’t like it, but they’re patient. Their primary objective now is to get Zionists out of Russia and to Palestine. That requires money. We’re giving it to them, so for the moment, money talks.”

  “The DCI is giving money to a Zionist intelligence organization? Does the President know about this?”

  “I don’t know about the President, sir, but Admiral Souers does.”

  “Fascinating.”

  “Sir, getting back to Miss Johansen. She got us in the press billet in Farber Castle—”

  “You mean you and your men, or just you and Miss Johansen?”

  “All of us, sir.”

  “That was very nice of her.”

  “We’re friends.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “Obviously, sir, we can’t stay there indefinitely.”

  “Or people would talk, right?”

  “Yes, sir.”