Dry Bones (17 page)

KH
: As well as a soldier, I’m a scientist. The ethics of the scientist are not the ethics of the layman. Our work involves enlightenment, not sentiment. It is sometimes our duty to experiment on the few in order to serve the health and well-being of the many.

WT
: You were an early member of the Nazi Physicians League, were you not?

KH
: I joined in 1934 when it was clear the Party had taken full control of the government. The older members—
der alte kämpfer
—resented us newcomers, but I realized no significant research could
be done except under the auspices of the Party. Most of my colleagues reached the same conclusion, as did most engineers and scientists interested in aeroplanes and rocketry.

WT
: Was it for scientific reasons you joined the SS?

KH
: More than any other institution, the SS recognized the medico-biological basis of the state. I felt it was our best hope for building an enduring bulwark against Bolshevism and a despotism of
untermenschen
.

WT
: As a member of the SS, you participated in the T4 Program, did you not?

KH
: Could you be more specific?

WT
: The Reich Work Group of Sanatoriums and Nursing Homes, which operated out of the Chancellery at Tiergarten 4—the T4 Program authorized by Hitler at the start of the war to carry out the mass murder of the chronically mentally ill.

KH
: Oh,
gnadentod
—the business of mercy death—was widely discussed. The eminent American physician Foster Kennedy proposed a similar idea.

WT
: But it was carried out in Germany.

KH
: I have no knowledge of that.

WT
: Your signature has been identified on more than 2,000 evaluations as
obergutachter
[senior expert] at the psychiatric institution at Hadamar. In every case you recommended death.

KH
: I recommended nothing. I certified evaluations made by subordinates.

WT
: There are witnesses who place you at the ceremony at Hadamar, in late 1941, marking the cremation of the 10,000th victim of
gnadentod
.

KH
: My interest was in research, not injections.

WT
: But you knew about fatal morphine-scopolamine injections?

KH
: The theoretical possibility was discussed as a humane method of ending the misery and suffering of the terminally ill. I never injected anyone.

WT
: What about the gassings?

KH
: At Hadamar?

WT
: Yes.

KH
: This is the first I’ve heard of such a thing.

WT
: What about your role at Auschwitz?

KH
: I obeyed the orders I was given.

WT
: Were you aware it was a
vernichtungslager
—an “extermination camp”?

KH
: Auschwitz was the size of a city. It encompassed several camps. I was aware of the terrible conditions, but given the wartime conditions and food shortages on the Eastern Front, along with the well-known proclivities of Poles and Jews for the unsanitary, a high mortality rate from disease was inevitable.

WT
: Did you participate in ramp duty?

KH
: What do you mean by “ramp duty”?

WT
: The selection process carried out by camp doctors among Jewish arrivals.

KH
: No, I never participated in any alleged selections of Jewish arrivals.

WT
: Were you aware of such a process?

KH
: I concentrated on my assignment in racial science, an area of inquiry shared by British and American scientists going back to Francis Galton, Richard Dugdale, Madison Grant, and many others. I was ordered by SS-Reichsführer Himmler and Wolfram Sievers to prepare a collection of specimens that might support—or at least suggest—an organic basis for the relationship between Jews and Bolshevism. I carried out the legally authorized orders of my superiors. It was not my place to refuse.

WT
: By “specimens,” you mean Jewish inmates and Russian POWs?

KH
: Spies, traitors, saboteurs, or common criminals—murderers, rapists, and the like—selected for
sonderbehandlung
[special treatment] in view of their crimes.

WT
: Did you participate in their demise?

KH
: Their bodies were delivered to me after trial and execution.

WT
: How were they executed?

KH
: In order to ensure their integrity as research specimens, they were given phenol injections directly into the heart

WT
: You knew nothing of mass gassings?

KH
: I kept to my business. I never witnessed any alleged gassings.

WT
: You were resident in the camp during May and June of 1944, were you not?

KH
: I was, yes.

WT
: You had no idea that Jewish deportees from Hungary were being gassed at the rate of up to 12,000 a day or that the crematoria at Birkenau were working overtime, spewing ash over the entire camp?

KH
: As I said, Auschwitz covered a vast area. It was not uncommon for people in one area of the camp to be unaware what was taking place in another. I know nothing of these supposed excesses allegedly visited on the Jews by elements within the SS.

WT
: There are witnesses who say you systematically tortured prisoners in pursuit of Soviet military intelligence.

KH
: What witnesses?

WT
: Subordinates.

KH
: Inmates?

WT
: Yes.

KH
: It’s all self-serving drivel! Many inmates were eager to cooperate. They couldn’t do enough to ingratiate themselves. Indeed, if Auschwitz was the so-called death camp some allege, it sounds to me as if they should be indebted to me for their survival.

WT
: After Auschwitz was evacuated, you were transferred to Mauthausen, were you not?

KH
: Oh, yes, but only for a very brief time.

WT
: Were you aware of the interrogation and torture of American POWs undertaken by Commandant Franz Ziereis?

KH
: I was assigned to treat those infected with typhus—inmates as well as guards. An epidemic was raging in the camp. I never came across any Americans.

WT
: Did you assist in the torture and execution of Dr. Gerhard Schaefer?

KH
: I never heard of such a person. I’m a physician, not an executioner. If I might add, I answered these same questions this very morning during an extensive interview with an American intelligence officer.

WT
: Who was that?

KH
: Someone I presume you know: Lieutenant Colonel Bartlett.

WT
: Did he identify his unit?

KH
: The Strategic Services Unit.

WT
: I’m unfamiliar with it.

KH
: Well, it’s being reorganized into the Central Intelligence Group, with a mandate to counter Soviet operations.

WT
: I’ll make it a point to contact him.

KH
: If you’ll permit me to say so, when it comes to intelligence operations, Americans seem not to let their right hand know what the left is doing.

WT
: You’d be well advised to focus on your upcoming trial and leave such matters to the experts.

Signed: Col. Winston Thomas, M.D.

Witnessed: Maj. Turlough Bassante

Date: September 27, 1945

C
OLUMBIA
C
ASUALTY
& L
IFE
, L
ONDON

D
UNNE CHECKED HIS MAIL CUBBY HOPING TO FIND ORDERS TO RETURN
to the States. Instead, there was a plain envelope of a type he recognized. On the card inside was the single code word used before D-Day to send operatives to a nondescript insurance office above a tailor shop near the American embassy:
BESPOKE.
The office housed a transatlantic line to OSS headquarters in Washington supposedly safe from prying by British and Russian allies, Axis enemies, and rivals in Military Intelligence and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Date and time were the only other information included on the card.

Dunne presumed the office had been closed by war’s end and, if not by then, certainly in wake of President Truman’s order relieving General Donovan of command and directing that the OSS cease operation.

Word was, Donovan was taken unawares. He shouldn’t have been. At home, his legion of enemies—including all the savagely protective, turf-conscious bureaucracies dedicated to preserving their prerogatives, FBI, State Department, War and Navy Departments, as well as the chorus of Roosevelt-haters led by the McCormick-Patterson press empire—had been hunting for his scalp.

The
Chicago Tribune
, which had leaked the top-secret memo Donovan sent to FDR proposing creation of a permanent central
intelligence service, ran fire-breathing editorials denouncing Donovan for abetting the establishment of an “American Gestapo” designed to enforce completion of the New Deal’s blueprint for the collectivization of the nation’s economy.

Most people suspected J. Edgar Hoover as the leaker. Inside the OSS, it was speculated FDR ordered it done to test public reaction to Donovan’s proposal. Rumors flew. Then–Vice President Truman resented that the president barely took note of his existence while treating Donovan as a confidant. The brouhaha made Dunne glad he’d got out of Washington and into the action. The odds of being knifed in the back were substantially less than in the capital.

Despite the cachet bestowed on the OSS by the press, everyone inside knew to one degree or another the extent of its mistakes, fiascos, bungling, and outright disasters, like the German penetration of Cassia, the code name for the intelligence network in Eastern and Central Europe wiped out in a single stroke. Yet say what you like about the OSS, unlike the Brits or Germans, who had long-established intelligence and espionage operations, or the Soviets, who built theirs without regard for human or financial costs during the Great Terror, Donovan constructed his organization in the middle of a war, surrounded by civilian and military rivals. The wonder was not just that it made a contribution to defeating the Axis but also—more wondrous still—that it got built at all.

Dunne concluded that the card was probably a practical joke (a lame one at that) on the part of some bored officer in Naval Intelligence with nothing better to do than tweak a friendly (at least most of the time) and now-former competitor. More annoyed than amused, Dunne burned it in an ashtray.

Two days later a similar envelope with the same message was back in his cubby:
BESPOKE.
New time and date. He decided to see what it was about. If the message was for real, it must involve wrapping up bureaucratic details. Government organizations and departments came and went, but the paper shuffling never ceased.

The next afternoon, enjoying the absence of pain in his right ankle—the happy consequence of orthopedic surgery to reset and repair the damage done in Slovakia—he strolled leisurely to the office. The convalescence had laid him up for what seemed an interminable time and delayed his going home, but had proved worth it. He was all healed and awaiting his orders to ship back to the States.

Nearing the shop, he recalled his last visit, rainy Friday afternoon, June 1944. No doubt about the reason for that summons: The invasion was imminent. That day, he’d arrived twenty minutes early. The slight hesitation in the voice he heard on the other side of the wire might have been caused by a transatlantic technical glitch. It was more likely a sign of the apprehension even the most tested, self-contained soldiers felt now that the long-awaited hour had arrived: “You’re aware of the confidence General Donovan has placed in you. As of tonight, all leaves are canceled. That means
everyone
… Follow the previous instructions … for … rendezvous … Everyone, Dunne … Is that clear?”

He’d stopped at a pub. The room was crowded and noisy. Several patrons tried to buy him a drink. He’d put them off as politely as he could and sat alone in a cozy. He’d picked up his drink. The tremor in his hand was barely noticeable. He’d limited himself to two, nursed them slowly, enough to take the edge off, not send him over.

At closing time, the barman rang the bell and shouted, “Time, gentlemen. Time.”

The legend stenciled on the door—an inside nod to General Donovan’s alma mater, where he’d made his name as a football star—was the same as on Dunne’s last visit:

Columbia Casualty & Life

You Can Rely On Us

London Bureau Est. 1910

Though her hair was auburn instead of blonde and cut shorter than that of the woman who’d answered the door on his previous visit, and her lipstick was a deeper, harder shade of red, she could have been the same woman. But if she wasn’t the same person, she was the same type, attractive, early thirties, ready smile, in-charge, friendly without being flirty. Dressed in black skirt and purple silk blouse, she was a welcome change from the prissy British types in buttoned-up, semimilitary tweed suits that made even the young and pretty seem frosty and unapproachable.

She concentrated on the card he handed her a moment longer than necessary to digest so short a message. “Why, yes, Mr. Dunne, I was expecting you. It’ll take a few minutes to put your call through to Washington.” She handed it back and took his hat. He was in civilian clothes, one of the suits he’d had hand-tailored at Crosby & Lord, not a Savile Row shop but close enough and half the price. Whatever else the OSS had achieved, it would send home a cadre of veterans in well-tailored suits.