The Man with the Iron Heart

upon a time, and shabby demobilized soldiers labored side by side. Everybody was skinny. The ration was supposed to be up to 1,500 calories a day, which wasn’t saying much. You’d lose weight doing nothing on 1,500 calories a day. Doing hard physical labor…

Considering what the Germans had done in occupied Europe, Lou had trouble working up much sympathy. He suspected the Red Army men in the Russian zone found it even tougher.

Howard Frank was also eyeing the skinny krauts. “Now if we sent everybody who looked at us sideways off to a camp-”

“We’d be just like the Russians. And just like the Nazis,” Lou finished for him. “But we’re not. Hell, we can’t even keep our own guys here.”

“Last GI in Germany, close the door on your way out,” Frank agreed. “Gotta admire Congress, don’t you?”

“God must love idiots, or He wouldn’t have made so many of them,” Lou said, which might have been an answer or might not.

“Yeah, but how come so many of ’em got elected?” Frank said. “You ready to go back to the States yet?”

“A lot of me is. I’ve been away from my family way too goddamn long-I mean way,” Lou said. “Hate to leave feeling like I didn’t do my job, though. If I could punch Heydrich’s ticket before I climbed on a plane or a boat or a unicycle or whatever the hell…”

“I got a picture of you on a unicycle. I got a picture of you back in the hospital after you fall off the fuckin’ unicycle, too,” Frank said. Lou Weissberg, not the most graceful of men, maintained a dignified silence.

During the war, there’d been a German propaganda photo of a soldier raising the swastika flag over the ruins of Stalingrad. That didn’t quite work out for Hitler’s crew. Right before V-E Day, Stalin got his answer: a photo of a Red Army man planting the hammer and sickle on the Reichs Chancellery in Berlin. The Wehrmacht gave up a few days later, and everything was supposed to be hunky-dory from then on out.

Well, theory was wonderful.

Getting into the Russian zone to see the Chancellery wasn’t easy. You had to clear a checkpoint, sign a log, show your ID, and get patted down. You also had to talk to a Red Army lieutenant who spoke American English like a native and probably was one.

“Okay-youse guys are legit,” the guy said: a turn of phrase Lou heard all the time from New Jersey high- school kids in his English classes. The Red Army soldier went on, “We gotta keep our eyes open, y’know? Damn Fascist hyenas try and pull all kinds of sneaky stunts.”

“Sure,” Lou said. He’d heard that hyena line, too-mostly from people who read the Daily Worker. It came from Russia there, and it came from Russia here.

If anything, the Russian zone in Berlin looked worse than the American zone. It was the eastern part of the city, and the part where the fighting had been heaviest. The labor gangs here were guarded by Russian soldiers with submachine guns that looked as if they’d been made in somebody’s basement. For all Lou knew, they had.

The Chancellery and the other fancy buildings from which the Nazis had run the Reich were all smashed wreckage. Lou took out a Brownie and clicked away. “These’ll remind me they got some of what was coming to them, anyhow,” he said. He wasn’t the only Allied soldier photographing the ruins, either. Amateur shutterbugs nodded to one another, all probably thinking the same kinds of thoughts.

“Americans? You have any money? You have any cigarettes?” The guy who asked spoke Yiddish, not German. He rolled up a sleeve on his frayed shirt to show a number tattooed on his upper arm. He’d lived through the death camps, then. His face was all nose and staring eyes. Even now, more than two years after he’d been liberated, he looked as if a strong breeze-hell, a weak breeze-would blow him away.

“Here, buddy.” Lou handed him a pack of Luckies and five bucks and half a D-ration chocolate bar he had in a jacket pocket.

Major Frank was similarly generous. “Beat it,” he told the displaced person after giving him stuff. “Somebody’ll knock you over the head if you hang around.”

“Thank you both. If I still believed in God, I would ask His blessings on you,” the DP said. He disappeared like a cockroach vanishing down a crack in the floor.

“If I still believed in God…” Lou echoed, in Yiddish and then in English. It sounded just as bad either way. But when you’d been through what the DP had, when millions of people who went into the camps came out only as smoke from a crematorium chimney, when God-if there was a God-sat there and watched without doing anything…The Chosen People? Chosen for what? For this? Lou had done his best not to think about it. If you did think about it, how could you go on believing?

Lou started to ask Howard Frank about that. Then, seeing the look on the other Jew’s face, he didn’t. Frank was wrestling with the same demons. When you did start to think, how could you help it?

One way was to stop thinking about it. They got their chance, and in a hurry. Other beggars had seen them give to the Jewish DP. They might have marked themselves with the brand Sucker. Hungry people in threadbare clothes converged on them from all directions, hands outstretched, voices shrill and desperate.

Yes, they all needed food. Yes, they were all broke. But there were too many of them for two U.S. Army officers to help much, even if they stripped themselves naked. Lou wasn’t inclined to do that anyway. That almost all the beggars were Germans did nothing to endear them to him any further.

Major Frank said, “No.” So did Lou. Then they said, “Hell, no!” Then they said, “Go away!” Finally, it was, “Fuck off!” And Lou wondered if he’d have to draw his sidearm to show he meant business.

Before he did, a couple of Russian soldiers came over to see what the yelling crowd was all about. That got the beggars moving. Did it ever! They didn’t want the Russians to pay any special attention to them. Oh, no!

The Russians understood bits of German. Lou explained what had caused the fuss. “Stupid to give to a German,” one Russian said.

By the look on his face, he wouldn’t have been impressed had Lou told him he’d given to a Jew. Lou didn’t try. He just spread his hands and said, “Ja, sehr dumm.” That gave the Russians nothing to chew on. Having broke up the crowd, they went on their way.

“Ain’t this fun?” Major Frank said.

“Oh, boy.” Lou nodded. “Some fun.”

Vladimir Bokov didn’t know a single NKVD man who wasn’t nervous. Twice now the United States had failed to try the leading German war criminals. The first failure had cost the court building and most of the jurists who would sit in judgment on the Nazis. And the city of Frankfurt hadn’t recovered from the second, nor would it for years.

So it was up to the Soviet Union to do things right this time around. It was up to the Soviet Union to give the thugs who almost overran the world what they deserved. High time for that. Long past time. And if everything went well, the USSR would get the credit for doing what the USA couldn’t.

But if things failed to go well, the USSR would get the blame. Marshal Stalin had made one thing unmistakably plain: he did not wish the workers’ paradise to be seen as blameworthy in any way. If blame accrued to the Soviet Union, blame would also accrue to the men who should have kept the trial running smoothly. Stalin’s blame.

Would accrue to the NKVD.

No wonder Bokov was nervous. No wonder his colleagues twitched if anyone looked at them sidewise, or even if no one did.

They’d found what had been a minor municipal courthouse still standing near the eastern edge of the Soviet zone in Berlin. Most of the buildings around it had already been leveled. They’d finished the job for a kilometer around in all directions. And they’d fortified that two-kilometer circle in ways that would have made the Soviet generals who planned the fieldworks for the Battle of Kursk jealous.

The best estimate-given by people who had reason to know such things-was that it would cost any enemy 250 tanks or a couple of divisions of infantry to batter through those fortifications to the courthouse. And that was