“Sometime around 1936, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, started referring to Germany as the Thousand-Year Reich. And said it was, indeed, going to last a thousand years.
“Most people outside Germany thought it was a ludicrous boast from somebody who worked for a lunatic with a funny mustache who had started calling himself Der Führer.
“They were wrong. Hitler and company were dead serious. They intended to make Germany a pure Aryan state—the mission, Himmler said, was ‘the extermination of any sub-humans, all over the world, in league against Germany’—which would rule the world for a millennium. To accomplish this, they started by opening the first concentration camp, Dachau, outside Berlin in 1933. In January 1937, Himmler gave a speech in which he said, ‘There is no more living proof of hereditary and racial laws than in a concentration camp. You find there hydrocephalics, squinters, deformed individuals, semi-Jews: a considerable number of inferior people.’”
McGrath said, “When did they start—what do I call it?—the Nazi religion?”
“At the moment, Father Jack, I have the pulpit,” Cohen said, “which means you sit there and listen while I deliver the lesson for today.”
McGrath raised his eyebrows, then nodded.
“In February 1945,” Cohen continued, “Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Yalta. I was number two on Roosevelt’s security detail. My boss ordered me never to let him out of my sight, and I did my best not to. This gave me the opportunity to hear many of their conversations, both public and private.
“In one of these private conversations, between Churchill and the President, the question of what to do with the leaders of Germany came up. I still haven’t made up my mind whether they were serious or not, but Churchill proposed shooting all Nazi leaders on the spot when and where found. To which Roosevelt replied, ‘Winston, we can’t shoot all of them. What about the top forty thousand?’
“That conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Stalin, and they dropped the subject of how to deal with the Nazis.
“I am Jewish, if I must point that out. I’d already seen photos of what the Nazis had done to my coreligionists and concluded that my relativ
es in Germany were no more, so I was naturally in support of Churchill’s idea.
“I came home from Yalta and, several days later, was promoted to colonel, which rarely happens to Jewish boys with an ROTC commission from the City College of New York who had gone on active duty as second lieutenants in December 1941.
“I also had come to conclude that Franklin Roosevelt was a very sick man and, possibly because of his condition, had given away the store to Joe Stalin, who I had already concluded was one dangerous son of a bitch.
“The day after I was promoted, I was flown to SHAEF—Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force—then in Rheims, France.
“On April 12th, Roosevelt died, and Harry S Truman become President. The same day, I was named chief of CIC Forward, probably because we were already in Germany and I was the only senior Counterintelligence Corps officer who spoke German fluently.
“When, after the surrender, SHAEF moved from Rheims into the I.G. Farben Building in Frankfurt, my boss, Brigadier General Homer Greene, had me to dinner. As we were having a couple of belts afterward, I said something flippant about Churchill having the right idea. Rather than rounding up the Nazi brass and putting them in cells at Nuremberg to be given a fair trial before hanging them, we could save a lot of money by shooting them when and where we found them.
“He shamed me by saying he was surprised I hadn’t figured out Truman’s motive in insisting that we try them before we hanged them. ‘If we simply shot them,’ Greene explained, ‘the German people would decide it was vengeance of the victors, and the bastards would be regarded as martyrs of the Thousand-Year Reich.’ He went on to say that Truman decided they should be exposed to as much publicity as possible as the common criminals—the murderers—they were.
“I admitted to him I hadn’t considered that. And that Truman was right.
“‘Good,’ Greene said, ‘because as of tomorrow morning, you’re in charge of security for the Nuremberg Tribunal.’
“I told him that if it were up to me, I’d much rather catch Nazis than be their jailor. He replied (a) it wasn’t up to me; (b) the Big Red One—the First Infantry Division—had assigned a regiment to guard the Tribunal Compound, and he wanted me to keep an eye on them; (c) that I was now in charge of running down the big-shot Nazis, not Nazis in general; (d) he wanted me, when I had a spare minute, to run down a probably preposterous rumor he’d heard that Himmler had started a new religion; (e) that to accomplish all this, he had organized a new CIC, the Thirty-first, and named me as its commander; and, finally, (f) as soon as I gave him a list of people I would like to have in the Thirty-first CIC, he would transfer them to me.
“So, I came here to Nuremberg and made up a list of people I wanted and sent it off to General Greene. Before the list got to the Farben Building, I got a call from one Vito Carlucci, a big, fat guy from Jersey City. I thought he was going to ask me again to get him transferred to Italy so he could run down the Italian fascists who had killed his relatives. But that wasn’t it.
“He told me, ‘Colonel, I’ve come across something you have to see.’
“‘Tell me about it, Vito.’
“‘Not only don’t I want to talk about this on a nonsecure line, but if I did, you’d accuse me of being drunk or crazy. Or both. Colonel, you have to see this for yourself.’
“So I got in my car, drove to eastern North Rhine–Westphalia, and met Vito in Paderborn. He took me to a battered castle a couple miles outside of town.
“He told me: ‘This is Wewelsburg Castle. An SS-Truppführer—sergeant—we caught told me that Himmler ordered it blown up but they couldn’t find enough explosives. We’re holding him here. Let him tell you the story, then I’ll give you a tour of the place.’
“So they bring the SS sergeant into the office. He told me his name—no fooling!—was Johann Strauss. Johann looked a lot like your fiancé, Mrs. Moriarty. Tall, broad-chested, blond, blue-eyed. A real Aryan.”
“I don’t think that’s funny, Colonel,” Ginger blurted.
Cohen ignored her.
“Once this six-foot-something, two-hundred-pound SS sergeant got a good look at this five-foot-eight, one-hundred-forty-five-pound Hebrew colonel, his face whitened. And he began to sing like a canary.