Chapter 43 Change of Plan #2
“So when did you actually see him again?” Alix asked. “Grandpa? It’s funny—I always thought of him like that, like he was born old. I never imagined him as a young man. How old was he when he wrote that?”
“Nineteen,” I said.
“He seems older,” Sebastian commented.
“A serious mind,” I said, “and a great deal of responsibility. To answer your question, I saw him a few months after he wrote that letter. When he came to Nuremberg.”
“Wait, how?” Ben asked. “If he was in Austria, and about to go to Japan?”
“Dropping the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that’s how,” Sebastian said. “Which ended the war in Japan.”
“Oh,” Ben said. “But they still didn’t let them go home?”
“Wait,” I said. “Next letter.”
August 20, 1945
Dear Dad,
It’s strange not being able to talk to you and Mom, or able to celebrate the end of the war with you.
I imagine you two at the Concordia Club with the Goldbergs and the Lowensteins, raising a glass of champagne and talking about your sons coming home, looking forward to the day when you can take down the blue stars from your windows.
At least I hope they’re looking forward to that.
You haven’t told me about any of your friends’ kids buying it out here.
I hope that’s because they haven’t, not because you don’t want to upset me.
I sure hate to think about any of them going west, but I guess it’s not realistic that everybody would come home safe.
That’s morbid, you’re thinking, and not celebratory enough, but this thing has taken a lot out of people.
I don’t even know how to explain it. Some of the guys are jumpy.
Twitchy. They can’t sleep, and every Jeep backfire makes them hit the deck.
The CO reassigns the guys like that so they don’t have to carry a weapon, now that we’re not in battle.
Smart of him. The strange thing is, it seems worse now than when we were actually fighting.
The way I’d put it is—when you’re right in the thick of it, you don’t have time to develop any complexes or anything.
You don’t think, you just act, because if you don’t, you’ll die.
Maybe afterwards, when your mind has time to sort of catch up, you go a little loopy, because the stuff you’ve seen is too much to deal with, at least for a while.
Probably it gets better with time, I don’t know.
Don’t think that I’m in trouble that way!
I’m still OK. Most guys are OK. Quieter, probably, and maybe with more on their minds than your average 19-year-old, but they haven’t gone around the bend.
It’s not necessarily the skinny intellectual types like yours truly who have the worst problems, either.
Seems like the big burly guys, the ones who’ve always been tough, get it worse.
Maybe that’s because they’re not used to being scared, I don’t know.
Anyway—we did celebrate all right the day Japan surrendered!
It felt like a bigger deal than when our own war ended.
Partly because we weren’t exhausted like we were back then, and hadn’t lost any of our own recently, and partly because now, it’s actually over.
I mean going-home over, all-the-way over, and that makes a difference.
Although they have this point system for demobilization—they have to have some way to make it fair, I guess, and there are only so many troopships—and guys like me who joined up in 1944 are going to be at the end of the line.
There’s been some grumbling about that, but what are you going to do—that’s the Army.
I’ve got something to tell you along those lines that you’re not going to like, or maybe you will—I’m not sure which. I’m going to put it in the form of a conversation, because that’s what it was.
It started when I got called into the CO’s office.
We’d just got word that we’d be sticking with the supervising-POWs work until the Army thought up something better for us to do—painting all the rocks in camp white, maybe—so I couldn’t think what it was about.
I’m not much of a troublemaker. So after the initial salute and so forth, when I’m standing at ease in front of his desk—the Army doesn’t care for men sitting down when talking to a superior officer—he says, “I understand you’ve done a good job for us, Sergeant.
Not so much as a radio operator, though you’re adequate, but doing a fair amount of German translation, and some Yiddish. That right?”
“Yes, sir,” I say, wondering what the heck this is about.
“Well, I’ve got a request here,” he says, holding up a piece of paper that he of course doesn’t let me see, “for your transfer back to Germany.”
“Our unit, you mean, sir?” I ask, wondering, first, why he’s telling me—colonels don’t normally give their orders sergeant by sergeant—and second, why on earth we’d be heading back to Germany while the POWs are still here.
I’m also thinking that I’d prefer to serve someplace that hasn’t been bombed into oblivion, although my preferences carry exactly zero weight.
“No,” he says, “not your unit. You specifically. You’re being promoted to Staff Sergeant, too. Congratulations.”
I’m swearing inside now, as you can imagine. My family left Germany. For that matter, so did I. Why would I want to go back, especially now? It’s not like it’s going to be any kind of Jewish vacation destination anytime soon.
“Sir?” I manage to say.
“Nuremberg,” he says, and puts the paper back down on his desk, folding his hands over it.
“Nuremberg, sir?” I repeat blankly.
He sighs and rubs his eyes behind his glasses.
I don’t imagine commanding a unit over here has been a lot of fun, either.
“The U.S. Government,” he says, “in its infinite wisdom, has agreed with the other Allied powers to hold a series of criminal trials at Nuremberg, the prosecution team and judges to be provided from all four nations. In case you’ve forgotten, that’s the U.S.
, the Soviet Union—though they’re no kind of experts on justice—Britain, and France. ”
He pauses, and I say, “Criminal trials, sir?”
“War crimes,” he says. “Committed by the top brass. The defense counsel will be German, so it’s fair, and more importantly, so it looks fair.”
“That doesn’t seem usual, sir,” I venture to say. “After a war. At least I’ve never heard of it.”
“That’s because it’s never happened before,” he says. “The idea is that ‘there oughta be a law,’ so they’re trying to make some. You’ve heard of the United Nations?”
“Not much, sir,” I say. “Just the basic idea. All the countries of the world get together and decide who’s out of line, how to keep the peace. Decent idea, if it works.”
He nods. “You’ve put your finger on the main point. ‘If it works.’ Think of this as a sort of test case. They’re saying, even if there isn’t international law written now that says you don’t invade your neighbor and slaughter civilians, there ought to be, so they’re going to set the precedent.”
“Will there be trials in Japan, too, sir?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says. “But there are going to be trials here, all right. And they’re going to need evidence for that.”
“That doesn’t seem hard to find, sir,” I say. “It’s not like any of it’s a secret anymore.”
“You’re not thinking, Stark,” he says. “It’s a criminal trial. Your father’s a lawyer, I believe.”
“Yes, sir,” I say, wondering how on earth he knows that.
“Then you should know,” he says, “that the prosecutor can’t just stand there and say, ‘Everybody knows you killed your wife. Your neighbor saw you do it, in fact, so we’re going to lock you up until we get around to giving you the chair.
’ No matter how cut and dried it looks, you have to prove it to the judge and jury, right? ”
“Right, sir,” I say. “Evidence. Witnesses and documents and so forth, depending on the crime. My dad does corporate law. It’s mostly documents there.”
“And the Nazis kept documents,” he says.
“They may not have had much humanity, but they sure had organization. There are going to be a whole lot of Americans descending on Nuremberg soon, looking at all that evidence, interviewing all those witnesses. JAG lawyers. Investigators. The U.S. is leading this charge, and we’ll be supplying most of that.
But obviously, those folks don’t all speak fluent German.
They won’t know if a list they’re looking at is of Jews executed in a gas chamber, or General Jodl’s wife’s shopping list. That’s where you come in. ”
“I do, sir?” I say.
“Yes,” he says. “Your country’s asking you to go to Nuremberg and help out.
You’ve got a good head on your shoulders, and you did excellent work in Dachau.
Commended by General Linden. He was the one who recommended you for this duty, in fact.
You’re smart, you’re fluent, and you can handle the tough stuff.
Even got the Silver Star along with your Purple Heart. ”
“Sir,” I say, “I’m no lawyer.”
“And you don’t have to be,” he says.“You just have to interpret for one. Or one of the psychologists, because they’re sending those, too.
Understanding the defendants’ motivations and all that, although personally, I don’t much care about their motivations.
If they did it, that’s enough for me, and you bet they did it. ”
“Which defendants are we talking about, sir?” I ask.
He waves a hand. “Well, Hitler and Goebbels and Himmler killed themselves, unfortunately, and some of the others are missing. Dead, escaped … who knows? But the rest of them that we have in custody, the big boys. The generals, commandants of the concentration camps, territorial governors, the guys in charge of the slave labor program, Goering himself … any number of them.”
“Sir,” I say, “you do realize I’m a Jew.”
“Yes,” he says. “Which presumably means you’re sound. Not going to have your head turned by Nazi ideology and try to join the Master Race. As this would be a transfer into Military Intelligence, that would probably be frowned upon.”
“What makes you think that I’ll be able to keep from killing them myself?” I ask. “Sir,” I remember to add.
“What makes you think that you will?” he asks. Sneaky guy.
“Discipline, I suppose, sir,” I say. “Duty. Also, I’m not that good a shot.”
He smiles, but says, “And yet you took out a grenade launcher and a machine-gun nest in Fürth. Just west of Nuremberg, in fact.” He looks at another paper. “Where you met a German girl who saved your life.”
“Uh …” I say, losing all my cool. “Yes, sir.”
He looks up from the pile. “So presumably you don’t believe every German is evil.”
“No, sir,” I say. “Seems to me that good and evil are distributed around pretty evenly. The problem seems to be when an evil man gets the opportunity to spread his poison without enough people to stop him. Like if Roosevelt had been a Hitler, I suppose. But are there good people in Germany?” I’m nervous, standing here talking to the Colonel, but take some time to think about it.
“Of course there are. There have to be, though I wish I could just hate them all and be done with it. Because they—well, they bought into the whole thing, sir, didn’t they? ”
“Yes,” the Colonel says. “They did. And there have to be consequences for that.”
“How long is this tour, sir?” I ask.
“A year,” he says. “The trial might take longer than that, but after a year, you’ll be rotated out and discharged. Unless you want to stay, of course.” Like that’s going to happen. You know what the number one rule in the Army is? “Never volunteer.”
The good news? I won’t be getting shot at, and I confess there’s a part of me that wants to know why.
These are smart guys. They have to be—this thing took a lot of organizing.
Why did they jump into bed with somebody as crazy and plain evil as Hitler?
This is as much of a front-row seat as anybody could get to watch that question be answered.
Oh, and I have two weeks’ leave starting September 15th, as they won’t need me in Nuremberg yet and will need me just about every day of that year, apparently.
The Colonel suggested I grab a seat on a plane and spend some time in England.
England in September doesn’t sound too bad, does it?
They’re short on food there, too, but not as bad as Germany, and I’ve barely spent a dime of my Army pay.
Nothing to spend it on, and I’m not a good enough poker player to gamble with it.
I know you and Mom may be disappointed. On the other hand, if I’m going to follow in your footsteps—well, you couldn’t possibly find a more high-stakes trial than this one, could you? Not in all the world.
I’ve written this letter over the past three days, in between supervising our POWs. I’m finishing it now in my bunk. Saying goodbye to the guys will be tough, but I’d have been doing that soon enough anyway.
Join the Army and see the world, they say. They never mention that you’ll be seeing the worst things in it.
Love to you and Mom,
Joe