The Man with the Iron Heart

“Well, what’s the right one, then?”

“If they really are this naive”-Heydrich still had trouble believing it, but didn’t see what else he could think if the Herald-Tribune story wasn’t made up-“how do we take advantage of it?”

“Ah. Ach, so.” Once Klein saw the right question, he focused like the sun’s rays brought to a point by a burning glass. Like any long-serving noncom, he had a lot of practice taking advantage of officers with more power but less subtlety. His predicament with them was much like the Reich’s with its occupiers. Heydrich waited to see what he could come up with. After a few seconds, Klein said, “We have to keep fighting the Amis-”

“Aber naturlich!” Heydrich broke in.

“We have to keep fighting, ja.” The Oberscharfuhrer seemed to remind himself of where he’d been before he got to where he was going: “But we should also let them down easy, give them something these people who want to go home can latch on to and use for an excuse so they don’t look like a pack of gutless quitters.”

Like the pack of gutless quitters they really are, Heydrich thought. But Hans Klein wasn’t wrong. The enemy’s morale mattered. Germany had done well with propaganda against the Low Countries and France, then completely botched it against the Russians. Treating them like a bunch of niggers in the jungle wasn’t the smartest thing the Reich could have done. A little late to worry about that now, though. Heydrich leaned forward intently. “What have you got in mind?”

“Well, sir, way it looks to me is, we ought to say something like we’re only fighting to get our own country back again. We ought to let ’em know how much that means to us, and to ask ’em how happy they’d be if some son of a bitch was sitting on their head. And we ought to say we’ll be mild as milk if they just pack up and go away.”

Klein winked at Heydrich. The Reichsprotektor laughed out loud. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d done that. Of course Germany would rearm the moment it had the chance. And of course German physicists would get to work on atom bombs as soon as they could. That sparked another thought.

“As long as they’ve got this fancy bomb and we don’t, they have the whip hand, too,” Heydrich said. “We should tell them we understand that.”

“And we should promise we’d never go after the bomb. We should promise on a big, tall stack of Bibles.” Hans Klein winked again.

And damned if Heydrich didn’t laugh again. After the last war, the Treaty of Versailles said Germany couldn’t have all kinds of weapons. Her top aeronautical engineers designed civilian planes. Other engineers tested panzers in Russia-the Soviet Union was another pariah state. Artillery designs for Sweden, U-boats for Holland…When Hitler decided it was time to rearm, he didn’t have a bit of trouble. If Germany needed atom bombs to get ready for the next round, she’d have them.

“Can we do something like that, sir?” Klein asked.

“You’d better believe it.” Heydrich got up from his desk and walked over to a file cabinet under the Fuhrer’s framed photo. It held a complete run of Signal, the Reich’s wartime propaganda magazine. Signal was a slick product, printed in many languages; people said enemy publications like Life and Look had stolen from its layout and approach. That wasn’t why Heydrich started poring over back issues, though. They’d run an article he could adapt. He remembered it had come late in the war, after things on the Eastern Front went bad. That helped him narrow things down. He grunted when he found the copy he needed. “Here we go.”

“What have you got?” Hans Klein inquired.

“See for yourself.” Heydrich held out the magazine to him. The article was called “What We Are Fighting for.” It showed a wounded Wehrmacht man on one page, his left arm bandaged and bloody, his mouth open in a shout of anger and pain. On the facing page was a closeup of a blond, blue-eyed little girl, perhaps five years old. The two photos summed up exactly what the Reich was fighting for, but text went with them. That text was what Heydrich wanted.

Klein’s eyes lit up. “Wow! Amazing, sir. I saw this, too. I remember, now that you’re showing it to me again. But I never would have thought of it, let alone come up with it just like that.” He snapped his fingers.

“Words are weapons, too,” Heydrich said. “You need to know where you can get your hands on them. Why don’t you go grab yourself some chow? I want to fiddle with this for a while.”

As soon as Klein left, Heydrich sat down again and started writing. He worked in German; he knew he’d make a hash of things if he tried to compose in English. But it would get translated. Other people would suggest changes and add things, too. That was all right. He was fighting again.

VII

In Nuremberg, the city jail was near the center of town. The Palace of Justice-a fancy name for the local courthouse-lay off to the northwest. It had taken some bomb damage. That didn’t surprise Lou Weissberg. In Nuremberg, it was much easier to list the buildings that hadn’t taken bomb damage than to set down the ones that had.

Bomb damage or not, the Allies were going to try the Nazi big shots they’d captured at the Palace of Justice. The American judge and his opposite numbers from the UK, France, and the Soviet Union would give Goring and Hess and Ribbentrop and Streicher and Jodl and Keitel and the rest the fair trials they hadn’t given to countless millions. And then, without the tiniest bit of doubt, most of those goons would hang or face a firing squad or die in whatever other way that extraordinary court decreed.

In the meantime, the Nazis cooled their heels in the Nuremberg jail as if they were ordinary burglars or wife beaters. Well, not quite. They had a wing of the jail all to themselves. They had a lot more guards in that wing than anybody in his right mind would have wasted on burglars or wife beaters.

And the jail was surrounded by barbed wire and sandbagged machine-gun nests and concrete antitank barriers. The pointed obstacles looked to Lou like German designs. They’d probably been yanked from the Siegfried Line and carted back here. In a way, Lou appreciated the irony. The obstacles intended to slow up American and British tanks were now going into action against the krauts who’d made them.

In another way, that irony was scary. Almost six months after the alleged surrender, the occupation authorities needed to stay buttoned up tight to make sure the Germans didn’t liberate their leaders.

If they somehow did, that would give the United States a godawful black eye. All the same, Lou wondered how much Reinhard Heydrich wanted to have to do with men who might have the rank to order him around. Somebody like Goring wouldn’t be able to resist trying. And Heydrich, damn his little shriveled turd of a soul, was managing just fine by himself. Anybody who tried to jog his elbow might come down with a sudden and acute case of loss of life.

Lou eyed the jail again. “Fuck,” he said softly. Despite all the barbed wire and the antitank barriers and the machine-gun nests and the swarms of jittery dogfaces manning the position, somebody’d managed to stick one of the fanatics’ new propaganda sheets on the wall.

Shaking his head, Lou walked over and tore the sheet down. It was what Europeans used for typing paper, a little taller and a little skinnier than good old 8¹/₂? 11. Lou had seen English and German versions of the propaganda sheet. A printer was giving the fanatics a hand. If the occupation authorities caught him at it, he’d be sorry. Lou snorted under his breath. That didn’t seem to worry the bastard one whole hell of a lot.

This was the English version. It was obviously translated from the German, translated by somebody better with German than with English. WHAT ARE WE FIGHTING FOR? it said: smudgy type on cheap paper.

What Germans desire to acquire by victory is the fulfillment of the idea that an individual shall be respected for his own self. This is what makes life worth living for us.

“Assholes,” Lou muttered. The Nazis had sure respected Jews and Gypsies and Russians for their own selves, hadn’t they?