been one of five sentenced to life in prison. Another four doctors had been sentenced to terms of imprisonment ranging from ten to twenty years. Seven had been acquitted. At his trial, Gerhard Rose had justified his actions, arguing that it was reasonable to sacrifice 'a few hundred' in pursuit of a prophylactic vaccine capable of saving tens of thousands of lives.
Rose had been assisted by a number of other doctors including Eric Gruen and Heinrich Henkell, and a nurse-kapo called Albertine Zehner.
Albertine Zehner. That was a real shock. But it had to be the same girl. And it seemed to explain a great deal that had been a mystery to me. Engelbertina Zehner had been a Jewish prisoner turned kapo and nursing assistant in the medical block at Majdanek and Dachau. She had never worked in a camp brothel at all. She had been a nurse-kapo.
Gruen's file described him as being still at large, a wanted war criminal. An early investigation into Gruen's case by the legal officer of the 1st Ukrainian Front and two legal officers from the Soviet Special State Commission had come to nothing. Statements from inmates at all three camps, and F. F. Bryshin, a forensic medical expert from the Red Army, were provided.
The last page in the file was the record of file protocol, and this, too, provided a surprise for me, for here I found the following note:
Khristotonovna returned with a glass of hot Russian tea on a little tin tray. There was a long spoon and little bowl of sugar lumps. I thanked her and turned my attention to Heinrich Henkell's file. This was less detailed than Gruen's. Before the war he had been involved in Aktion T4, the Nazi Euthanasia Program, at a psychiatric clinic in Hadamar. During the war, as a Sturmbannfuhrer in the Waffen-SS, he had been deputy director of the German Institute of Military Scientific Research and had seen service at Auschwitz, Majdanek, Buchenwald, and Dachau. At Majdanek, he had assisted Gruen in his typhus experiments, and later, at Dachau, his malaria experiments. In the course of his medical research he had amassed a large collection of human skulls of different racial types. Henkell was believed to have been executed by American soldiers at Dachau, following the camp's liberation.
I sat back heavily in my chair. My loud sigh brought Lieutenant Khristotonovna back to my side. And she mistook the lump in my throat for something other than feeling sorry for myself.
'Tough going?'
I nodded, too choked to say anything for a moment. So I finished my tea, signed the protocol, thanked her for her help, and went outside. It felt good to be breathing clean, fresh air. At least until I saw four military policemen come out of the Ministry of Justice and climb into a truck, ready to patrol the city. Four more elephants followed. And then another four. I stayed in the doorway, watching from a safe distance and smoking a cigarette until they had all gone.
I had heard about the Nazi doctors trial, of course. I remembered the surprise I had felt that the Allies should have seen fit to hang the president of the German Red Cross--at least that is until I read about how he had conducted sterilization experiments, and forced Jews to drink seawater. A lot of people--most people, including Kirsten--had refused to believe any of the evidence presented at the trial. Kirsten had said that the photographs and documents presented during the four-month-long trial had been faked in a grand sham to humiliate Germany even more. That the witnesses and victims who had survived had all been lying. I myself had found it all hard to comprehend--that we, perhaps the most civilized nation on earth, could have done such appalling things in the name of medical science. Hard to comprehend, yes. But not so hard to believe. After my own experiences on the Russian front, I came to believe human beings were capable of an unlimited degree of inhumanity. Perhaps that-- our very inhumanity--is what makes us human most of all. I was beginning to understand what was going on. I still had one question about what Gruen and Jacobs and Henkell were up to. But it was the kind of question to which I had a good idea where to find the answer.
When the last IP vehicle had set off from outside the Justice building, I walked onto Heldenplatz, the great square of green that faced onto the Ring. Ahead of me was the New Palace, also occupied by the Russian army, and decorated with a large picture of Uncle Joe. I passed through an arcaded walk and onto a cobbled square that was home to the empty Spanish Riding School--the horses were all safe from Russian appetites--and the National Library. I went inside the library. A man was polishing a wooden floor as big as a football field. The library itself was chilly and, for the most part, unused. I approached the main desk and awaited the attention of the librarian, who was busy writing a catalogue card. The sign on her desk said 'Inquiries.' But it might just as easily have said
'Yes?'
There was a blue rinse in her gray hair and her mouth was as severe as a geometry box. She wore a white blouse and a double-breasted navy blue jacket. She reminded me a little of Admiral Donitz. There was a hearing aid attached to her pocket. I bent toward it and pointed at one of the marble statues.
'Actually, I think he's been waiting rather longer than I have,' I said.
Just for that she showed me her teeth. They were better than the Russian woman's. Strong-looking, too. Someone had been feeding her meat.
'Sir,' she said crisply. 'This is the National Library of Vienna. If it's laughs you want, I suggest you find a cabaret. If it's a book, then maybe I can help you.'
'Actually, I'm looking for a magazine,' I told her.
'A magazine?' She uttered the word as if it were something venereal.
'Yes. An American magazine. Do you keep American magazines here?'
'Sadly, yes, we do. Which magazine was it that you were looking for?'
'
'Follow me, please,' she said, getting up from behind her woodpaneled redoubt.
'I'd be delighted to.'
'Most of what we have here is from the collection of Eugene of Savoy,' she said. 'However, for the benefit of our American visitors, we do keep copies of
'Then I guess it's my lucky day,' I said.
'Isn't it just?'
Five minutes later I was seated at a refectory table staring at the magazine Major Jacobs had not wanted me to see. And on the face of it, it was hard to see why. On the front was an open letter written by the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff to the American people. And when I turned the pages it was full of patriotic war effort and wholesome American smiles, as well as advertisements for General Electric, Iodent, and Westinghouse. There was a nice picture of Humphrey Bogart getting married to Lauren Bacall, and an even nicer one of Himmler taken minutes after he had poisoned himself. I liked it better than the one of Bogart. I turned some more pages. Pictures of an English seaside resort. And then, on page forty-three, what I presumed I was looking for. A short article about how eight hundred convicts in three American penitentiaries had volunteered to be infected with malaria so that medical men could study the disease. It was easy to see why Jacobs might have been sensitive about such an article. What the American Office of Scientific Research and Development had done in prisons in Georgia, Illinois, and New Jersey looked very much like what SS doctors had done in Dachau. Clearly, the Americans had hanged men for what they themselves had done in their own prisons. It was true that all of these convicts were volunteers, but then Gruen and Henkell might easily have argued the same excuse. Engelbertina, or Albertine, was probably the proof of that. Reading this story in
I found a copy of Lange's medical dictionary and, looking up the symptoms of malaria and those of viral meningitis, discovered that the two illnesses produced several symptoms that were more or less identical. In the Bavarian Alps, where mosquitoes are not exactly common, it would have been all too easy to have passed off several dozen men dying of malaria as an outbreak of viral meningitis. Who would have suspected it? All those German POWs had been used for medical experiments. Just like eight hundred American convicts. Not to mention all those people at Dachau and Majdanek. It seemed hard to believe, but experiments on human beings, for which
