“He told me he had been on the staff, as a driver, of SS-Brigadeführer Franz von Dietelburg, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s adjutant—”
“That’s one of the men who just escaped?” Ginger said.
“He and General der Infanterie Wilhelm Burgdorf,” Cohen replied, “formerly SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Burgdorf.”
“Sir,” Dunwiddie said. “I don’t understand.”
“Toward the end of the war, Tiny, SS bastards like Burgdorf decided they would rather be treated as POWs than SS when we caught them, so they got themselves discharged from the SS and commissioned at an equivalent rank in the Wehrmacht. When I heard about this, I went to Justice Jackson, told him about it, and suggested he rule from the bench that these phony soldiers be tried as SS officers.
“He turned me down. He explained that it would be illegal because the Nazi government had the same right as we did to commission anyone in any rank they wanted to. He told me, ‘A friend of mine, Walker Cisler, the president of Detroit Electric, was recognized as the guy who knew all there was to know about power grids.
“‘Eisenhower wanted him to perform two critical functions. First, to identify the key points in the French and German power grids so they could be bombed. Second, to restore the grids as quickly as possible after we took back the grid area. So he had Cisler directly commissioned as a full colonel. Walker went off to war, knowing so little about the Army that they had to assign a major to teach him how to salute, et cetera.’
“Anyway, the sergeant told me he had been assigned to drive Sturmbannführer Heinz Macher from Berlin to Wewelsburg Castle. They had a truckload of SS troopers with them. They traveled at night because, by then, American fighters were roaming over Germany, shooting up anything on the Autobahn.
“He said he had heard Himmler tell Macher he was to tell SS General Siegfried Taubert, who was in charge of the castle, to remove ‘sacred’ items and the contents of ‘my safe,’ then head for the Austrian border and, ultimately, to Italy. Macher would then blow the place up.
“SS-Truppführer Johann Strauss now had my full attention. Despite him looking like Super Spook’s brother, Ginger, he wasn’t nearly as smart, and I decided he was telling me the truth.
“So, I started asking myself why an SS generalmajor was guarding an old castle in the middle of nowhere. What was Himmler’s safe doing there? What was in the safe? Sacred items? What was the point of blowing up the castle?
“Strauss then told me that when they got to Wewelsburg, General Taubert was long gone, Himmler’s safe was empty, and he didn’t know anything about sacred items. The place was being ransacked by the locals.
“He said that Macher then told him and the SS troopers that as soon as they blew up the castle, they were on their own. It turned out there weren’t enough explosives—all they could find was a bunch of tank mines—so all they managed to do was knock down the southeast tower and the guard and SS buildings. Then they tried, unsuccessfully, to burn down the castle.
“Macher got in his staff car and, driving himself, took off. We caught him at the Italian border. He’s now in the Darmstadt SS prisoner enclosure.
“So I asked Johann Strauss how come he was the only SS enlisted man we caught. Why he hadn’t taken off with the others.
“He said that he had thought it over and decided (a) that he couldn’t get back to Berlin; (b) that because the war was almost over, it would be safer to stay at the castle and wait for the Americans to come; and (c) that he would surrender to them, which he did.
“It was obviously a canned speech, one he had practiced until he was sure he had it right. His eyes told me he was lying.
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“‘Johann,’ I said, ‘the next time you lie to me, I’ll have you shot.’
“Blushing like a schoolboy caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Johann finally confessed he was looking for the gold Totenkopf rings. He dug in his pocket and came up with one, which he put on his finger and more or less modeled for me. I wasn’t sure he did so in arrogant defiance or shame, or neither. But as I looked at the ring and saw the SS skull insignia, I knew it was important.
“At this point, Vito, who hadn’t uttered a sound, said, ‘Colonel, that’s a Totenkopfring.’
“I had no idea what it was or its significance. Vito told me that it goes back to the early days of Nazism, when Hitler really needed a bodyguard. The communists weren’t the only ones trying to kill him.
“There had been, since 1921, something called the Sturmabteilung—acronym SA—which was an organization of thugs headed by a man named Ernst Röhm, an old buddy of Hitler’s. Its primary function was to brawl with the communists, and others, at political rallies.
“They had acquired, on the cheap from war surplus, a large stock of brown shirts, which they wore as uniforms. They wore whatever trousers they had. Understandably, they were called the Brown Shirts.
“Both Hitler and Himmler began to suspect that Röhm wanted to take over the Nazi Party, so they kept an eye on him. Although the SA was supposed to protect Hitler, both at rallies and in his private life, Hitler and Himmler were coming to the conclusion that Röhm didn’t have his heart in the latter and, if true, having the SA close to Hitler protecting him also gave Röhm the opportunity to assassinate him.
“So, in 1929, Himmler formed a special bodyguard for Hitler. It was called the Protective Element—Schutzstaffel in German, SS for short. Himmler recruited three hundred men for it. And, from the very beginning, they had to be ‘true Germans.’ The term ‘Aryan’ would not come into common use until later.
“In 1933, Hitler and company really started after the Jews, beginning with an official one-day boycott of their shops. Next came a law forbidding kosher butchering. Two years later, the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship and prohibited Jews from voting in parliamentary elections.
“This pretty much came to a head in 1938. Among other things, a law was passed requiring all Jews to carry identification cards. On October 28th, seventeen thousand Jews of Polish origin, most of whose families had been living in Germany for generations, were arrested with the intention of deporting them to Poland. When the Polish government refused to admit them, they were interned in so-called relocation camps on the Polish frontier.
“And all this came to a head on November 9th, which has become known as Kristallnacht, referring to all the broken glass and debris on the streets of Berlin and other cities. Much of it came from storefront windows of some seventy-five hundred Jewish-owned businesses. But some came from the thousand-plus synagogues that they burned. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps—among them, Dachau.
“And then Hitler and Himmler decided to take advantage of all the hullabaloo that Ernst Röhm’s SA thugs were causing to solve another problem they had. They sent the Schutzstaffel all over Germany looking for Röhm. They found him at a country inn—in bed, naked, with a handsome boy. As homosexuality was a real no-no for Nazis, they took photographs of them in flagrante delicto, then shot both lovers on the spot. That ended the problem of Röhm wanting to take over the Nazi Party.