The Man with the Iron Heart

“May I address that point, Mr. Speaker?” Jerry called.

“Briefly,” Rayburn growled.

“Thank you. It seems to me, Mr. Speaker, that the bill we were debating mainly has to do with how best to wind down from the war. That’s what I want to talk about, too, because the fighting in Germany’s gone on and on, even though the Nazis said they surrendered last spring. Don’t we need to wind that down?”

Rayburn scowled at Jerry from on high. Then the Texas Democrat said, “That damnfool woman who led her silly march comes out of your district, doesn’t she?”

“Minus the unflattering adjectives, yes, Mr. Speaker, she does,” Jerry answered. Sure as hell, Sam Rayburn didn’t miss much.

“All right, then. Say your say, and after you’re done we’ll ease back to the business at hand. It won’t matter one way or the other.” The Speaker of the House sounded indulgent. He knew the kinds of things Representatives had to do for their constituents.

He might not miss much, but he missed something that day when he didn’t quash Jerry Duncan before Jerry was well begun.

“Thank you, Mr. Speaker,” Jerry said once more. “I want to know why the United States Army, the mightiest army in the history of the world, hasn’t been able to stamp out these German fanatics. I want to know why we haven’t been able to hunt down this Reinhard Heydrich, who seems to be the brains of the outfit. I want to know why upwards of a thousand servicemen have been killed in Germany since the so-called surrender. And I especially want to know why the War Department is doing its level best to hide all these deaths and to pretend they never happened.”

Members of his own party applauded him. Democrats jeered. A couple of them shook their fists. “President Truman knows what he’s doing!” one man shouted.

“You’re soft on the Germans!” another Democrat added.

“I am not!” Jerry said indignantly. “When we try those thugs we capture, I hope we shoot them or hang them or get rid of them for good some other way. And I expect we will. That has nothing to do with why we’re wasting so many lives in Germany. It has nothing to do with why we can’t stop the insurgency, either. What are we doing in occupied Germany, and why aren’t we doing it better?”

“Sellout!” that Democrat yelled.

“Isolationist!” someone else put in. The minute the Japs hit Pearl Harbor, isolationism became a dirty word.

Bang! Bang! Bang! Speaker Rayburn plied his gavel with might and main. “The House will come to order!” Bang! Bang! “Mr. Duncan, how do you propose to find out what you want to know?” You don’t really care, Rayburn’s words implied. You’re just making political hay.

Jerry pretended not to hear that. If you didn’t notice, you didn’t have to react. He simply responded to what Rayburn actually said: “Questioning some War Department officials would make a good first step, Mr. Speaker.”

“You think so, do you?” Rayburn rasped a chuckle. With a large majority in both House and Senate, Democrats controlled who got questioned. The Speaker made it plain he didn’t aim to let anybody ask the War Department anything inconvenient or embarrassing.

Shrugging, Duncan said, “You can pull a rug over a pile of dust, but the dust doesn’t go away. It just leaves an ugly lump under the rug.”

Bang! “That will be quite enough of that,” Sam Rayburn said. “Now, returning to the bill we were actually considering…”

Sam Rayburn didn’t want to look at the lump under the carpet. Neither did Robert Patterson, the Secretary of War, even though his department had done most of the sweeping that put it there. And Harry Truman really didn’t want to look at it, and didn’t want anybody else looking at it, either.

Well, too bad for all of them, Jerry thought. It’s there, and they put it there, and I’m damn well going to tell the country about it.

Reinhard Heydrich was a thorough man. When he realized he would have to fight a long twilight struggle after the Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS went under, he prepared for it as best he could. He studied English and Russian. He’d never be fluent in either one. But, with a dictionary and patience, he could manage.

English should have been easier. It was German’s close cousin, and used the same alphabet as Heydrich’s birthspeech. But he found himself understanding the Soviets much more readily than the British-to say nothing of the Americans.

Soviet authorities reacted to the holdouts much as he’d expected. Deportations, executions, brutality…That all made sense to him. It was the way he would have attacked the problem were he running the NKVD. It was the way the Reich had attacked the partisan problem in Russia and Yugoslavia. The Germans hadn’t done so well as they would have liked, and Heydrich hoped the Soviets wouldn’t, either. But it was a good, rational approach.

The Americans, on the other hand…

On his desk sat a three-day-old copy of the International Herald-Tribune. The patriot who’d put the paper in a secure drop had circled a story on an inside page in red ink. Heydrich had already read the piece three times. He knew what all the words meant. He even understood the sentences-individually, anyhow. But the story as a whole struck him as insane.

“I thought this must be a joke,” he told Johannes Klein. “A joke or a trick, one.”

“What does it say?” Klein asked. The veteran Oberscharfuhrer did fine in German, and cared not a pfennig’s worth for any other language.

“It says there are rallies in America protesting the soldiers we’ve killed since the surrender. It says the people protesting demand that the Americans take their soldiers out of Germany so we can’t kill any more of them,” Heydrich answered.

“Fine,” Klein said. “When do the machine guns come out and teach these idiots some sense?”

“That’s what I wondered,” Heydrich answered. “That’s what we did to those White Rose traitors, by God.” He shook his head, still angry at the college kids who’d had the gall to object to the Fuhrer’s war policy-and to do it in public, too! Well, they’d paid for it: paid with their necks, a lot of them, and just what they deserved.

“Of course it is,” Hans Klein said. “What else can you do when a fool gets out of line?”

“The Yankees aren’t doing anything to them. Zero. Not even taking them in for questioning. Madness!” Heydrich said. He added the clincher: “One of their Congressmen is even making speeches taking the demonstrators’ side. Can you imagine that, Hans?”

His longtime comrade shook his head. So did Heydrich. He tried to picture a Reichstag deputy standing up in 1943 and telling the Fuhrer the war was lost and he ought to make the best peace he could. What would have happened to a deputy who did something like that? As near as Heydrich could tell, he wouldn’t just die. He would cease to exist, would cease ever to have existed. He would be aggressively forgotten, the way Ernst Rohm was after the Night of Long Knives.

As usual, Klein thought along with him. “So what are they doing to him?”

Heydrich brought a fist down on the newspaper. “Nothing!” he burst out. “This foolish rag goes on about freedom of speech and open discussion of ideas. Have you ever heard such twaddle in all your born days?”

“Not me,” Klein said.

“Not me, either,” Heydrich said. “I read this, and I thought the Yankees were trying to trick us. But a couple of our people have lived in America. They say it really works this way. Any crackpot can get up and go on about whatever the devil he wants.”

“How did they lick us?” Klein asked. No German asked that about the Russians. Stalin put out a fire by throwing bodies on it till it smothered. He commanded enough bodies to smother any fire, too, which had come as a dreadful surprise to the Fuhrer and the General Staff. But the Americans were…well, different seemed a polite word for it.

After some thought, Heydrich said, “That may be the wrong question.”