The Furred Reich (18 page)

“What’s the matter with it?” The lapine asked, but Hans barely registered the woman’s speech.

“…Well?”

Finally he looked up from the parchment.

“Nothing’s wrong. It’s just that I can see the path I’ve taken.”

“Oh? And where are you headed to?”

“Well. I was headed toward The Cottonwine Lands, but I now see that isn’t possible. Where are we on this map?” He asked.

The woman pointed to a forested blot on the map in the south and eastern part of the North Continent.

“Ah, and, what’s here?” Hans placed his index finger on the middle part of the North Continent. According to the map, here were no cities there, only hills, woods and meadows broken up by various blue fingers.

“Huh? Why there? What’s so special about that place?” The old lapine asked.

“Well, it’s the middle of the North Continent,” Hans shrugged, “and, uh, the middle is a good place to be.”

“Well,” she replied, “If you want to go to the middle, avoid the woods to the north. Nothing but wolves. They’ll tear up a lone human. And don’t let the spotted cats find you. You’ll never get away. Stay south, pass through the mountains here, then go straight north.”

“Thank you so much for helping me.”

“And here,” She pulled out a whole loaf of wheat bread from the cupboard. “I shouldn’t give you this, but it’s a long journey where you’re going and you’re too skinny as it is.”

“Thank you Grandma. I think I can make it on this.”

Hans bid her and the boy goodbye, and made his way out to the meadows. The cow mooed loudly at Hans one last time. On his way out he stopped to take a drink at the wooden trough, then turned his back on the village and set out alone once again.

Counsel

Without warning, a titanic crash rocked the packed Dachau War Crimes courtroom, and Jochen found himself jumping from the witness chair, tackling his American defense counsel to the floor before a falling piece of cement could land on the American’s head.

“What the hell’s going on here?!” Jochen shouted in English.

“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me!” The American responded in an accent that, even now, faintly told of cotton fields and plantation homes.

“They’re coming for you! The werewolves are!” The American continued.

Automatic machine gun fire went off and a chorus of screams could be heard from the bleachers just a couple feet away from them.

“You’ve got to help us get out of here!” Jochen tried to shout over the screams.

“The hell I do! That’s treason!”

“They’re going to slaughter us anyway. We never had a fair chance! You know that! Just give us a chance to make it out of this!”

The middle-aged, American military lawyer hesitantly looked down and pressed the handle of his Browning HP…

Six weeks earlier

There was a stern knock on the cast iron door and Jochen stood at attention as he was required to do. A skinny, chestnut-haired man with a soft face entered the room. The man was accompanied by a guard and a Jewish-looking translator.

“Joachim Peiper?” He asked in a voice as soft as his face.

“Jawohl.”

“I’m Colonel Willis Everett Jr., the counsel for yourself and the other defendants.”

The translator repeated Everett’s words in German. This ‘attorney’ was probably another one of Perl’s tricks. Perl had done everything he could to get whatever false confessions from Peiper’s men over the last few weeks. Nevertheless, Jochen had something for his new ‘lawyer,’ Everett.

“I have something for you.” Jochen responded in the Colonel’s language.

“I didn’t know that you spoke English,” Everett said, “but if you could please respond in German it will be easier for both of us.”

Everett handed the paper to his translator and repeated the contents aloud to himself.

“Anton Motzheim; beaten for an hour to extract a confession. Paul Zwigart; rope placed around his neck, kicked in the genitals, mock death sentence, to get confession. Hans Siptrott; strangled until unconscious to get a confession.”

Everett read four others, looked on squeamishly, and cautiously took off his spectacles. There was an awkward pause between the two men.

“Uh… Have all of the men reported to you?”

“No. Only two. I haven’t spoken to all of these men.”

The colonel stood up.

“I will talk to the rest of them. Thank you.”

The three of them left and shut the thick door behind them.

Jochen shook his head and lay back down to stare up at the concrete. He had no faith that Everett would do anything, but Jochen was going to do everything he could do to help his men, even though they were turning on each other. It had been six weeks since he and the others were transferred to Dachau for their trial, a trial which was set to begin at some unknown time.

Solitary confinement made his spirit grow strong, but his body grew week and atrophied. Regarding the outside world, all Peiper and the others had to go by was rumors; rumors such as a manhunt for Hermann Goering of all people. One would think Goering would be hard to miss. Fritz Kramer, Sepp Dietrich’s chief of staff, who sat in a cell adjacent to Jochen, once laughingly told Jochen about a rumor that Dietrich was in fact leading an underground resistance, and that their former division leader was planning to attack and break the men out at the eleventh hour.

Weltanschauung

Willis Everett Jr. never planned on defending those who murdered American soldiers, yet here he was. Willis’ father, a New England carpetbagger who settled in Atlanta at the end of the Civil War, took on his son as a partner in his law firm after Willis finished school with only mediocre grades. Age kept Willis from service during the war, but a lingering feeling of guilt compelled him to enlist toward the end. Willis was too old to be a soldier, but at least he could share in the sacrifice, even though this long assignment was straining his marriage back home.

Constantly he’d write home to his wife with assurances that he wasn’t fooling around with French or German girls. He promised his sweetheart that he’d make it all up to her once he got back home, but that was another matter.

Willis’ assignment was to the famous Malmedy Massacre trial. Floodlights filled the gray interior of the War Crimes Tribunal, which was actually a converted hall within Dachau concentration camp. Today, judges sat behind a bulky wooden table with the Stars and Stripes looming in the background. The witness chair sat in the middle, and both counsels sat on a deck facing the witness chair. Behind that deck, the 72 defendants of the SS-Leibstandarte were already seated in the bleachers. In unison the defendants turned their heads as Everett came in.

He’d spoken to each of the SS men individually, yet he couldn’t help being a little taken aback when all 72 of them were together. Even from a distance their eyes all spoke of sacrifice and death. Today the judges would hear from defendant number 41, Joachim Peiper. In all his time interviewing the SS defendants, Everett realized that each of them looked up to Peiper, who was the commanding officer for all of them.

Everett was able to speak with commander Peiper only one week before the trial. Peiper spoke of disturbing allegations. He’d handed Everett a list of seven men, which detailed their interrogations. Despite the men’s solitary confinement, all the defendants had roughly the same story to tell.

There was no time to personally interview all 72 defendants. That was probably by design. In fact, since arriving in Dachau, the prosecutors blocked every attempt at discovery, particularly discovery on interrogation methods.

Everett told his recently-arrived translator from New York, Herbert Strong, to make a questionnaire and distribute it to the SS men. As Everett feared, he found almost all of the soldiers had been tortured.

There surely was a massacre of American prisoners at Malmedy, and the Leibstandarte did it, but this was hardly a trial. The methods going on here were un-American, and would tarnish the United States’ image if word of ever got to the press. Even more than that, the whole situation ate away at Willis, personally. He believed in justice, and this wasn’t it.

Up until today there had been several witnesses for both sides. Two Americans who survived the massacre gave two different stories: One story of the Waffen-SS marching American prisoners against the barn and machine gunning them while laughing, and another of American soldiers fleeing for the woods and getting machine-gunned while trying.

Everett and the defense first called up Hans Hennecke, one of three SS defendants that would take the stand. Everett showed Hennecke his own confession.

“Hennecke, do you remember signing this?”

“Yes. I wrote this statement on March 13, 1946.”

“And this statement contains the truth, doesn’t it?”

“It is a pack of lies from beginning to end.”

“Why did you sign something that isn’t true?”

“Because Lieutenant Perl said that he would be my defender in the trial, and swore his word of honor as an American officer. He told me that signing that was the only chance to save my neck, and I had been told two days ago that I would be hanged. Is that not understandable?”

“Hennecke, in all seriousness, you believed that Perl would be your defender?”

“Yes, certainly!”

At that moment Willis felt someone looking his way. He turned around to see that it was Peiper, who nodded at him and turned back to Hennecke. Willis called up two more, but he wasn’t sure how much this would affect the judges, if it affected them at all.

Next, Willis called Hal McCown, a major who was a prisoner of Peiper’s Kampfgruppe for over a week. In a gentlemanly, Southern accent McCown told of how he and 150 other American prisoners were more-or-less treated well under Peiper’s direct command. As Peiper and McCown were about the same rank, the two apparently got on pretty well and talked a lot.

The judges looked like they were getting annoyed at McCown as the major recalled a conversation between himself and Peiper which lasted into the wee hours of the next morning, whereby Peiper explained the “Nazi” philosophical worldview. McCown used a German word for that, but the term was hard to remember.

As good as McCown’s anecdote may have been, this trial was quickly becoming all about Peiper, who Willis knew had to testify if they were to stand a chance at this.

Peiper did, and just then Willis realized this was only the second time he’d spoken to Peiper.

This time they went over everything, including the time Peiper signed the confession that there was a policy of executing prisoners in Ardenne. Peiper claimed he signed it only to take responsibility for his men who were tortured, confused and forced to incriminate one another. Then the prosecutor, Burton Ellis, a thin-mustached tax-attorney in civilian life, flashed Peiper’s confession in front of the defendant’s face to start the cross examination. Everett could feel his heart jump up to his throat.

“Well is that your handwriting? And is that your signature?”

“Jawohl.”

“Well you wouldn’t have signed these if they weren’t true, would you?”

“I already explained to you the situation when I signed them.”

“Well, you told me I thought here earlier that you believed in the sanctity of an oath,” Ellis bellowed out.

“Yes.”

“And now you mean to tell me that now you don’t believe in the sanctity of an oath?”

“I believe in the sanctity of an oath if it’s taken under fair conditions, but not if an oath is taken under the pretext of false facts,” Peiper said with unconcealed disdain.

But Ellis persisted. “In other words, anything that’s damaging would be untrue. And anything that’s not damaging would be true, is that the situation?”

“I already said that I do not care whether some fact is damaging to me.”

Ellis put the confession papers down and stalked his way up to the defendant.

“Well that’s funny, isn’t it? You gave up on the truth when the loyalty of your unit broke down. And now you’re suddenly interested in the truth once again, is that right?”

Peiper ignored Ellis’ presence and looked straight ahead to answer.

“The reason for that, is because today I found out that the comradeship, which I believed to have disappeared, is not an empty illusion. But I clearly see today, that these men only incriminated one another because they were tricked into doing so. That makes it my duty to testify the conditions we were in, so that the German people may learn who we were in all reality. And that for six years we—”

A faint crash rumbled in the distance and the whole procession stopped. The military judge hit his gavel and ordered the translator to repeat Peiper’s words in English. Ellis folded his arms as the words were fed back to him.

“Now were all your men——”

That was the exact moment the explosion happened. It sent every one of the Germans flat onto the floor in a second while the white-capped American MPs looked around in confusion for the source of the blast.

Before Willis knew it, Peiper had tackled him out of the way of a falling piece of stone debris.

“What the hell’s going on here?!” Jochen shouted in English.

“I was hoping you’d be able to tell me!” The American responded in an accent that, even now, faintly told of cotton fields and plantation homes.

“They’re coming for you! The werewolves are!” The American continued.

Automatic machine gun fire went off and a chorus of screams could be heard from the bleachers just a couple feet away from them.

“You’ve got to help us get out of here!” Jochen tried to shout over the screams.

“The hell I do! That’s treason!”

Peiper reached for Willis’ pistol, and the defense attorney grabbed Peiper by the wrist. Malnourished as he was, Peiper shoved Everett into the ground and pinned him beneath his knee.

“I’ll be taking that.” Peiper stood up and quickly put three bullets into the backs of three American guards in fast succession.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?!”

Willis grabbed Jochen’s arm and screamed at him, and Peiper threw his defense attorney across the table when he tried to stop him.