Death at Nuremberg Read online

  Above the ground floor were two more tiers of cells. Outside them was a fragile-looking metal walkway with a railing. Two even more fragile-looking bridges, one on the second tier, the other on the third, connected the walkways.

  There were no soldiers peering into the upper-level-tier cells, and as he followed Cohen down the twenty-foot-wide corridor between the cells, Cronley thought, Now is not the time, but when we get out of here, I’m going to ask Cohen to explain this to me. Who’s in the upper-level cells, and why are GIs standing outside the ground-floor cells and not the ones above?

  —

  Colonel Cohen stopped before one of the cells and told the PFC standing next to it now—suddenly standing at rigid attention in the presence of a colonel—“Open it up, son.”

  The PFC first put a large key in a lock and turned it, then moved a heavy wooden slide away from a slot in the door frame. Then he pushed the door inward.

  Cronley saw the cell was about twelve feet wide and maybe twenty feet long.

  Cohen waved him in.

  A very tall, trim man—Cronley judged six-feet-four, maybe a little taller, and about 210 pounds—rose to his feet from a narrow bed, the thin mattress of which was covered with a U.S. Army blanket. He was wearing a sleeveless gray underwear shirt, black breeches, and thigh-high black boots. A double red stripe with a black middle ran down the center seam of the breeches, identifying the wearer as a general officer. There was a scar, looking to Cronley like evidence of a bungled operation, on his left cheek.

  So that’s what a sword fight/car accident does to you.

  Kaltenbrunner looked at Cronley with mingled curiosity and disdain.

  “Mr. Cronley, this is the former chief of the RSHA, former Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei und Waffen-SS Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner,” Cohen said.

  “And may I ask who this gentleman is?” Kaltenbrunner asked in good English.

  Cronley held out his DCI credentials. Kaltenbrunner examined them as if he was reluctantly doing Cronley a favor.

  “And what might I do for the Central Intelligence Directorate?” Kaltenbrunner asked, then added, “Whatever that is.”

  “I’m surprised you don’t know what the DCI is,” Cronley said, in German. “But to answer your question, my superior told me I should take a look at you.”

  “Which superior would that be?” Kaltenbrunner asked, in German. “The admiral or President Truman?”

  “Colonel Cohen has led me to believe that the way things work around here is that we ask the questions and people like you answer them, if not often truthfully.”

  “So you have a question, or questions, for me?”

  “Not at the moment. Possibly, even probably, later. But not at the moment. Right now all I’m doing is having a look at you. My superior, my Führer, if you like, asked me to do that. He wants me to tell him what being face-to-face with you and Göring is like.”

  “You mean President Truman?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “And what is it like?”

  “We’re back to who gets to ask questions and who doesn’t,” Cronley replied.

  He turned to Ziegler and asked, still speaking German, “Seen enough, Augie?”

  “There’s not much to see, is there?” Ziegler replied, in German.

  Cronley turned and walked out of the cell. He saw for the first time the sanitary facilities. A tiny, doorless cubicle held a toilet—no seat—and above it a small washbasin and a stainless steel mirror. Ziegler and then Cohen followed him out.

  “Close it up,” Cohen ordered, and then when the door had been closed and locked, asked, “Göring?”

  “No,” Cronley said. “Not now. I told him I was going to have a look at Göring. When he finds out I didn’t—and I’m sure he will—he’ll wonder why.”

  “You are devious, Cronley. I say that with admiration,” Cohen said.

  When they left the cell block, the lieutenant who had signed them in was waiting for them with the clipboard to sign them out. A sergeant and a PFC were standing behind him holding the pistols they had surrendered. The actions were racked back, and the magazines had been removed.

  “This is yours, Colonel,” the sergeant said, as the PFC handed him the pistol and the magazine he held. “Who gets the .45 with the fancy rubber grips?”

  “That’s mine,” Ziegler said, taking the pistol and its magazine from him. The sergeant then handed Cronley his pistol and its magazine.

  Colonel Cohen closed the action of his pistol, inserted the magazine, and then holstered the weapon. Both Ziegler and Cronley inserted the magazines into their pistols before closing the action, which caused a round to be loaded in the chamber before holstering them.

  “You always go around with a round in the chamber?” Colonel Cohen asked.

  “You know what they say—‘You never need a gun until you really need one,’” Ziegler said. “I interpret that to mean ‘You never need a gun until you really need a ready-to-fire-right-now gun.’”

  “You think that’s worth the risk of an accident with a round in the chamber of the ready-to-fire-right-now gun?” Cohen challenged.

  “If you’re prone to having accidents with a gun, you shouldn’t be carrying one,” Ziegler replied.

  Cohen chuckled. “Point taken. I gather you’ve had experiences with a ready-to-fire-right-now pistol?”

  “Unfortunately,” Ziegler replied. “The only thing good about having to take somebody out is that you’re alive, and they’re not. I was thinking about that just now when we were having our chat with that bastard Kaltenbrunner. What I wanted to do was shoot him in the ear.”

  “‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,’” Cohen quoted.

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” Ziegler replied. “When I was a beat cop, I had to shoot a lot of rabid dogs. In the ear, if I could get close enough, so that they couldn’t bite somebody, or some other dog, and spread the rabies.”

  “Why in the ear?” Cronley asked.

  “You know they’re dead right then, and aren’t going to take anybody with them on their trip to piss on the pearly gates.”

  “You’re a very interesting man, Mr. Ziegler,” Cohen said.

  Yes, you are. And I damned sure did the right thing when I recruited you for DCI.

  “Are you planning on seeing Justice Jackson this morning?” Cohen asked. “And if so, when?”

  “When I get there, if that’s before noon. He told me ‘anytime this morning’ when I telephoned.”

  “So you have time for me to conclude my lecture on Kaltenbrunner, Ernst?”

  “I’d like that, Colonel.”

  “Then I suggest we walk over to the 26th Officers’ Mess. They charge ten cents for coffee and doughnuts. I’ll buy.”

  [THREE]

  “One of the nice things about being a senior officer,” Cohen began, just as soon as they found seats in a corner of the officers’ mess and ordered coffee and doughnuts, “is that junior officers really try to distance themselves from you. That means there will be no ears cocked this way while I finish my lecture.”

  Cronley and Ziegler chuckled.

  Cohen waited until a waiter had delivered their coffee and doughnuts before resuming his lecture.

  “After Colonel Count von Stauffenberg’s bomb failed to take out Hitler in July of 1944, Hitler put Kaltenbrunner in charge of dealing with the miscreants, including the kangaroo trials, which after an unfair trial saw about five thousand officers executed, most often by strangulation as they were hung by piano wire from butchers’ hooks. This procedure was filmed so that Hitler could watch, again and again.”

  “Nice guy,” Ziegler said.

  “This of course placed him even closer to the Führer than he had been,” Cohen went on. “In December of 1944, many, perhaps most, senior SS officers were given commissions in the Wa
ffen-SS.”

  “Why?” Cronley asked.

  “I presume so they would have prisoner-of-war status when they were captured,” Cohen explained. “Kaltenbrunner became the equivalent of a four-star general in the Waffen-SS. And thereafter usually wore that uniform. You noticed the red-striped breeches?”

  Both Ziegler and Cronley nodded.

  “In April of 1945, Himmler named Kaltenbrunner commander in chief of what Waffen-SS forces were left in southern Europe. He divided that command in two. He put Otto Skorzeny in charge of blowing things up—”

  “Skorzeny? The guy that rescued Mussolini from that mountaintop?” Cronley interrupted.

  “One and the same,” Cohen said.

  “I’m missing something here,” Ziegler confessed.

  “Then let me fill you in,” Cohen said. “When the Italians surrendered, Mussolini was arrested—by the Italians—and taken to an Italian ski resort . . .”

  Cohen paused, obviously searching his memory, and then went on: “The Campo Imperatore Hotel, which was on top of Gran Sasso Mountain in the Apennines . . .”

  Jesus, Cohen’s just like Freddy Hessinger—a walking encyclopedia!

  “. . . Hitler didn’t know this, where Mussolini was, only that he was being held prisoner, but he decided to try to free him. He personally chose Skorzeny, then a captain in the Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler and a protégé of Kaltenbrunner, to find him.

  “He did. Then Hitler ordered Luftwaffe General Kurt Student, the commander of Fallschirmjäger—paratroops—to stage an operation to rescue him. They landed twelve D230 gliders on a small patch of clear land and seized the hotel without firing a shot.

  “Then Skorzeny flew in in a Fieseler Storch—”

  “A great little airplane,” Cronley interjected.

  “So you have led me to believe,” Cohen said. “May I continue?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And flew Mussolini out in the Storch. To Rome. Then he took him by train to Vienna. He was promoted to major and given the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. Goebbels put his propaganda machinery in high gear and soon Skorzeny was famous.”

  “You said he was a protégé of Kaltenbrunner?” Cronley asked.

  “At first. Later they became quite chummy. Both enormous men. Skorzeny was—is—also over six feet tall and bears Brüderschaft dueling scars. I think Kaltenbrunner both liked him and was aware that some of Skorzeny’s hero publicity sort of shined on him.”

  “I’d like to see this guy,” Ziegler said. “Is he in the slam here?”

  “No, he’s in Darmstadt in a POW enclosure. But let’s take things in sequence.”

  “Sorry.”

  “And remember, there will be a quiz, so pay attention,” Cronley quipped.

  Cohen’s face showed he was not amused.

  “In October 1944, if I may continue—”

  “Aren’t we going off at a tangent?” Cronley interrupted.

  “No,” Cohen said simply, and then went on: “In October 1944, as the Russians got close to Hungary, it looked to Hitler as if Admiral Miklós Horthy, Hungary’s regent, was about to strike a deal with them. So he formed Operation Panzerfaust under Skorzeny to keep that from happening.

  “Skorzeny took a team of SS men to Budapest, kidnapped Horthy’s son, and sent him to Germany as a hostage. Horthy then resigned, which meant no deal with the Russians.

  “Hitler promoted Skorzeny to lieutenant colonel. And then he and Kaltenbrunner came up with another idea, Operation Griffin.”

  “Which was?”

  “Part of what the Germans called Unternehmen Wacht am Rhein and we called the Battle of the Bulge—”

  “During which, for your edification, Augie,” Cronley interrupted, “Captain Dunwiddie rose from corporal to first sergeant and acting CO of Company C, 203rd Tank Destroyer Battalion because all the officers and non-coms were hors de combat, which means dead or wounded.”

  “No shit?” Ziegler asked.

  “Who is Captain Dunwiddie?” Cohen asked.

  “And Sergeant Finney—you’ll love this, Colonel—a CIC agent who had been sent undercover to Company ‘C’ to look for Communist agitators, finally confessed to Tiny he was a CIC agent after getting a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and promotion to corporal.”

  “At the risk of repeating myself, who is Captain Dunwiddie?” Cohen said.

  “He was my deputy when I was chief of DCI-Europe. Interesting guy. He’s old Army. His father is a classmate of General White at Norwich. White is Tiny’s—”

  “‘Tiny’s’?” Cohen interrupted.

  “Great big black guy, six-four-plus, two hundred and fifty pounds plus. He’s General White’s godson. He resigned from Norwich in his senior year and enlisted because he was afraid the war would be over before he got into it.”

  “Did I hear you say a moment ago something about going off at a tangent?” Cohen asked.

  “Sorry.”

  “Back to the Battle of the Bulge,” Cohen resumed. “Skorzeny set up and then executed Operation Griffin. A false-flag mission. He recruited about twenty-five American-English-speaking soldiers from all over the Wehrmacht. Then he put them in uniforms he took away from American POWs and sent them behind American lines in the Ardennes forest.

  “They misdirected road traffic, tried to blow bridges, that sort of thing. They had some minor successes, but they were quickly rounded up and most of them, after quickly convened field court-martials, were shot. They did succeed in convincing their captors that not only were there more of them than was the case, that some of them were headed, under Skorzeny, for Paris to assassinate Eisenhower. For the next couple of weeks, Ike was reluctant to leave his headquarters at all, and when he did, he was surrounded by a small army of military police.”

  “You have to admire the guts of the Germans who did that. I mean, everybody knows if you get caught wearing the enemy’s uniform, you get shot,” Ziegler said.

  “I’ve thought about that,” Cohen said. “It’s possible they were dedicated Nazis, or even simply dedicated soldiers. I think it was equally possible that they were offered the choice between refusing to obey the order, in which case they would be shot on the spot for disobedience, or taking their chances in the Hürtgen forest.

  “In any event, Hitler was pleased with Skorzeny. He named him an acting Generalmajor and sent him to the East, to command Waffen-SS troops defending Frankfurt-on-the-Oder against the Russians. He did that well enough to get Oak Leaves for his Knight’s Cross. But the Russians took Frankfurt anyway.

  “By then, just about everyone but Hitler recognized the war was lost, but Hitler, and some others, decided to fight to the last man. In mid-April 1945, Hitler ordered Kaltenbrunner—which brings us back to him in my lecture—to reorganize his intelligence agencies as a stay-behind underground net. Kaltenbrunner picked Skorzeny to be in charge of the scorched earth—leave nothing standing the enemy can use—policy, and a fellow named Wilhelm Waneck to both keep an eye on Skorzeny and to set up a program of stay-behind agents.”

  “Two questions, if I may,” Cronley said.

  “Ask away.”

  “‘Keep an eye on Skorzeny’?”

  “Somebody, probably Himmler, but maybe Hitler himself, worried that Skorzeny would have problems with blowing up everything in what was left of Germany. As it turned out, the suspicions were justified. Next question?”

  “Who is Wilhelm Waneck?”

  “I’d really like to know. All I really know about him is that he was very close to Himmler. I’ve seen him identified as both a light colonel and a three-star general. I think—with absolutely nothing even remotely concrete to back this up—that he’s probably running Odessa. He just vanished. He could be looking upward at the grass.”

  “But you don’t think so,” Cronley said.

  “No. My gut tells me he’
s running Odessa. Somebody smart is.”

  “Yeah,” Cronley agreed.

  “Turning to Skorzeny,” Cohen went on. “He realized that the Werewolf operation, fighting to the last man, was nonsense so he turned his considerable talents to setting up escape routes for his friends. Then, on May 16, 1945, he sent a message that he was prepared to surrender, but only to us. He didn’t want to wind up in the hands of the French. When I heard this, I went for a look.

  “I got there—a road a couple of miles inside Austria, not too far from where he was supposed to fight to the death near Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest—about ten minutes before he showed up. They took him to a POW collection point. There something very interesting happened. The protocol was that the first field-grade officer who captured a field-grade or up German would make an on-the-spot decision whether the guy was a soldier, in which case he would be sent to a prisoner of war camp, or a Nazi—on the Look For list or not—in which case, he would be turned over to the CIC.

  “There was a CIC unit there into whose hands the Army promptly turned Skorzeny. Then the OSS showed up, led by a colonel. He overrode the Army major—and the Look For list, on which Skorzeny was close to the top—and said that Skorzeny was to be treated as a soldier, and that his men would take charge of him, and take him to the special POW enclosure for senior officers at Darmstadt.”

  “What was that all about?” Cronley asked.

  “I’ve been wondering ever since,” Cohen replied. “The best answer I have come up with is that the colonel decided that since Skorzeny hadn’t done anything the OSS had done routinely, he was entitled to be treated as a soldier. Fair’s fair, so to speak. The OSS colonel who made that decision was Harold Wallace.”

  “Jesus!” Cronley said, visibly shocked.

  “So Skorzeny has been in Darmstadt ever since, rather than here awaiting trial,” Cohen said. “And now my lecture turns back to SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei und Waffen-SS Dr. Kaltenbrunner . . .”