Armageddon (13 page)

“Hitler brought us to this.”

“It was Hitler’s fault. Hitler and the crazy Nazis.”

“We did not know.”

“Hitler’s fault.”

“We did not know.”

“We did not know.”

“We did not know. How could we know?” asked Herr Himmelfarb, the district recorder.

Sean and Dante Arosa glared at the bureaucrat coldly.

“You must believe me,” he repeated.

“Himmelfarb. How long have you been the Landkreis recorder?”

“Since 1924,” he said proudly. “January 4, 1924.”

Dante lifted a huge ledger and handed it to him. “What is this?”

“Death records of Schwabenwald.”

“They were found in the basement.”

“
Ja
. I put them there for safekeeping.”

Dante took the ledger back and opened the cover. “This is your handwriting?”

“Ja.”

“Your entries?”

“Ja.”

“Herr Himmelfarb. We have fourteen more ledgers like this one.”

“Thank goodness. I thought they might have been lost.”

“Recording 116,000 death certificates issued from Schawabenwald Concentration Camp.”

“Ja. That would be correct. Fifteen ledgers, 116,000 deaths recorded.”

“Of these, 110,000 are listed as either heart failure or natural causes.”

“Ja.”

“What is meant by ‘natural causes’?”

“I have no idea,” Himmelfarb answered.

“Did it ever occur to you that there was something strange about being handed a thousand death certificates because of heart failure in a given week?”

“I had no thoughts about it one way or the other. My job is merely to see if the certificate is legal and then record it.”

“It never entered your mind that mass murder was being committed?”

“I beg of you, Lieutenant. I am a mere civil servant I do not have opinions. My duty is to keep records and that is all I do. Just keep records.”

“Herr Himmelfarb!” Dante shouted with rising wrath, “were you a member of the Nazi Party?”

“Ja. I was a member. Please remember that my position was nonpolitical. Strictly nonpolitical.”

“You wore a uniform?”

“Ja.”

“With swastikas on it?”

“Ja.”

“You attended Nazi Party meetings?”

“Ja, of course.”

“Nazi rallies?”

“But we all had to attend meetings and rallies. Even on my day off I had to attend whether I wanted to or not.”

“Did you want to?”

“Never!”

“But you did attend them.”

“What choice did I have? Look, Lieutenant, I had very good Jewish friends, even.”

“What happened to them?”

“I don’t know. They disappeared.”

“Did you ever inquire what happened to them?”

“One did not do that.”

“Did you offer them help before they disappeared?”

“It was too dangerous, but I felt very badly when they were taken away.”

“But you were a party member, right?”

“Don’t you understand, Lieutenant? I joined the Nazi Party for only one reason ... to keep my position.”

Dante had reached the boiling point. Sean held up his hand. “Save your breath, Dante. O’Toole!”

The orderly tumbled into the office.

“Lock him up.”

Dante flung up his hands in frustration. “How many have we talked to today? Twenty? Thirty? None of them say, it was my fault. None of them say ... forgive me. ‘I joined the party to save my job.’ ‘I had a good friend who was a Jew.’ ‘Strictly nonpolitical.’ ”

“The Jews are lucky to have so many good German friends,” Sean said. “So there we have it. No one knows anything. Factory foremen who didn’t know they were using slave labor ... people working on the river front who didn’t even see the slaves being marched over every day ... doctors, nurses, professors at the college who didn’t know their colleagues were at the ‘research center’ in the concentration camp ... no one saw the trains coming in to Ludwigsdorf. ... It really never happened.”

“Why did they keep these records?” Dante asked.

“Because, in their warped logic, it is a basis to legalize and justify the murder in Schwabenwald. Of course we will never know how many of those poor people from outside Germany were denied even a death certificate.”

“We did not know,” Count Ludwig said to Sean.

“The record to date is perfect. Twenty-nine people out of twenty-nine interrogated so far did not know. Twenty-two of them had good friends who were Jewish, and twenty-four had nonpolitical Nazi affiliations to hold their jobs.”

“You can not blame us for the work of a single madman. Klaus Stoll was insane, obviously.”

“You might be interested in knowing that Schwabenwald was merely one of many of the same. Here’s a few more names that have just come in. You read English. Read it.” He handed him the paper.

Graf Ludwig read the dispatch from headquarters ... Dachau ... Ravensbruck ... Buchenwald ... reports from the Russian front indicate that in Poland ...

“In God’s name, Major. We are a civilized people.”

“God’s name has been used rather freely in the last few days.”

“You cannot blame an entire nation for the doings of a handful of Nazis.”

Sean grunted a small ironic laugh. There were stacks of files on his desk. He found the one he wanted, opened it, and walked to the count. There were photographs of the City Hall Square of Rombaden in another day. All the buildings—City Hall, the college, hospital, museum, and even the cathedral—were covered with swastika buntings. A long row of brown-shirted SA men stood with tall, thin-tapered torches leading to a grandstand where thousands more in black shirts and death’s head insignias held swastika standards. There were tens of thousands more in Hitler Youth and SS uniforms holding the Nazi salute. And there were thousands more who could not jam into the square listening over loudspeakers in joined barges on the river. It seemed as though not a person could be missing from Rombaden’s population. Some women cried in ecstasy at the sight of the Fuehrer. Blown-up segments of the photographs identified the three Von Romsteins and Father Gottfried and almost all of those other “nonpolitical” Nazis.

All of this had taken place outside the window of Sean’s office, where now the dead from Schwabenwald were being taken out of Marienkirche.

Masses, screaming ecstatic masses. Hear the drums! Hear his voice!
Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
The trumpets and the marching boots.

“Is that what you call a handful? Is that a handful in the square?”

“These pageants were designed to inflame the lower classes. Masses anywhere in the world are obsessed with uniforms.”

Sean slammed his fist on the table. “But they don’t go insane when they get in a crowd like Germans do!”

“Major, I tell you that Schwabenwald is the work of a few people. You saw for yourself how completely hidden and guarded the place was. It was a word spoken of only in whispers.”

“The smell. Was it smelled in whispers? During the spring and early winter you have south winds. What happened when the smell reached Rombaden? We have twenty-six answers. Ten of them had no opinion about the smell, five thought it was a leather factory, four a fertilizer plant, one a chemical plant, and eleven didn’t smell a thing. What did you think about the smell?”

Ludwig Von Romstein twitched in the first visible sign of discomfort Sean had seen.

“You are chief benefactor of the Medical College and of the Research Center. You entertained those doctors in Castle Romstein. You gambled with them at the Kurhaus. Did they discuss their experiments? Did you know your good money was going for a hundred castrations and ovarectomies a day! From Castle Romstein you can see the village of Ludwigsdorf, is that not correct?”

There was no answer.

“Is that not correct!”

“It is correct.”

“Your servants and your farmers trade and live in Ludwigsdorf. You go to your church in Ludwigsdorf. It is the traditional family church. What did you think when trainloads of open gondola cars passed through Ludwigsdorf filled with corpses? Well, goddammit, what did you think?”

“All of us knew to close our eyes, our ears, and our mouths if we wanted to stay alive.”

“What did you think about your factory being operated by slave labor for six years? They were marched over the bridge every day in front of the whole goddamned city! What did you think?”

“I was told what to manufacture, what my quota was. I took the labor that was assigned to me.”

“You and Hermann Goering were flyers together in the First World War. Did you or did you not use your personal friendship to obtain contracts for airplane motors and V-2 rockets?”

“As a businessman I am no different from any businessman anywhere in using my contacts ...”

“And taking the Nazi Blood Order Honor.”

“I was not in a position to turn down a Nazi decoration. It would have been suicide for me to refuse.”

“So your brother Kurt was used as the Nazi front for the Von Romstein family and conveniently committed suicide.”

“My brother made the decision on his own. I believe your concept of justice excludes guilt by association.”

“Let’s examine the association. Brother number one, mayor. Brother number two, chancellor. Brother number three, Nazi Gauleiter. Let me ask you, Count. In your capacity as chancellor and benefactor what did you do about the smashing of the windows of Jewish shops, the burning of their synagogues, the stealing of their fortunes, beatings in the streets, murder at Schwabenwald?”

Ludwig stiffened and fumed. The Jews! Always the Jews! What did this idiot know about Jews. Yes, as chancellor I kept them from over-running the staff of the hospital and kept their numbers proper in the Medical College. I guarded against their filthy business ethics. Neither he nor his father nor his father’s father ever had a Jew in Castle Romstein. It was a matter of family honor. There were those few distasteful civic occasions when it was unavoidable to meet a Jew ... but, the Jews did not run the theaters and newspapers and banks as they did in Vienna and Berlin.

“I never condoned,” the count said with slow deliberateness, “Hitler’s program for the Jewish question. We Germans had many Jews of whom we were proud. There must have been a dozen German Jewish Nobel Prize winners. A close examination of my tenure in public life will prove I never went outside the law in the treatment of Jews.”

“You didn’t have to go outside the law. The Nuremberg Laws let you do anything you wished. Is there any crime on the books you can’t excuse or justify, Count?”

“It is well and good for you to hammer questions at me and demand explanations,” Von Romstein burst back in anger, “but I was in no more of a position to rule upon either the legality or the inhumanity of the law than you are of your laws. I am a German citizen and these were the laws and times of my country. Surely, the good Major is aware of the existence of unjust laws against the Negroes in America and surely the Major knows that Negroes are looked upon as subhumans by a large segment of the American people. We Germans did not invent race hatred.”

“We Americans did not invent death factories. That is an exclusive German innovation!”

“If ... if we could perhaps discuss this on a sane level. I can neither explain nor justify with you shouting at me and I should like you to know my position.”

Sean’s anger abated slowly. He told himself to gain control. “Go ahead ...”

“May I sit down?”

Sean nodded. The count asked for permission to smoke. He drew a long puff wondering where to begin. The man opposite him was filled with righteous wrath.

“You must remember, Major O’Sullivan,” Von Romstein opened, “that America has never committed acts for which she has had to answer later. Your behavior has never been judged by a conqueror. You have never had to explain. When you are not involved in the day-to-day living and temper of a times it is easy to ask questions as a casual observer.”

“I’m not a casual observer. The Germans have killed two of my brothers.”

“And I have lost a son. I do not wish to offend you, Major, but you must realize that the House of Von Romstein has borne the responsibility of this Landkreis since long before Columbus discovered America.”

Sean was impressed by the opening gambit.

“I am not going to question your intelligence by defending feudalism,” Von Romstein continued, “but it is a system that we inherited because of the limited opportunities of the land. Feudalism, the landowner and the overseer, breeds a type of tradition and family responsibility foreign to American life. As time passed we outgrew an agrarian economy and we were forced to industrialize or perish. You see, Germany was the last power in Europe to become industrial. When my grandfather made the great transition, it was a mere fifty years ago.

“Once the Machine Works was built, Rombaden tripled in size. Under an agrarian economy life was quite simple. The population was such that everyone had enough to eat. Products made in small factories where traditional arts had been practiced for generations, but ... with heavy industry the District of Romstein, as was the case in most of Germany, was simply unable to produce enough food. This set off a cycle of dependence upon manufactured products to trade in order to import food.

“Germany is a small country with an enormous population. We do not have room to explore or expand. We do not have the natural, God-given assets of America. Germany is poor in natural wealth. Its great asset is the energy and ingenuity of the people. Things here must be orderly. Ambitions must be limited. The factory here must produce in order to maintain enough jobs. If the factory closes, Rombaden does not eat. Unlike America, we have no magic food surplus to draw upon.

“I inherited the Romstein family responsibility at the end of the First World War. I shall not debate with you the good or the evil of the Versailles Treaty. The Allies say Germany did not get enough punishment. We Germans felt it was too severe. From a practical standpoint, the Versailles Treaty closed down the Machine Works and we were not permitted to produce. The people of this Landkreis and in all of Germany were hungry and frightened and there was no work.”

Graf Ludwig Von Romstein snuffed out his cigarette. He was immersed in his memories; the sea of his own words had caught him up. He drifted toward the window that looked down on the City Hall Square, that place of so much history.