chocolate. 'Did you really have a contact with the German generals before the war?' I asked Jeff with curiosity. 'You remember, when you would have prevented the whole thing if the Foreign Office man hadn't fobbed you off with teacakes.'
'Sure I had.'
'Was it Gerda herself? I often thought so.'
'No, but you know him. Herr Fritsch.' I frowned. The name meant nothing. 'The manager of the brewery, who always wore a wing collar.'
'But he was a nonentity!'
'He'd have liked you to think so, for safety's sake. He'd dropped the 'von'. He was related to Werner von Fritsch, who was Army Commander in Chief before Hitler got rid of him in the spring of 1938. He resigned after some homosexual scandal had been cooked up by the Nazis. Who knows? If they'd taken me seriously in London, you and I might be sitting here now amid scenes of peace and prosperity.'
I was still mystified over Jeff's urgency to see me. 'I'm flattered you drove all this way,' I told him.
'You needn't be. It's a matter of business. I came to Munich with a specific purpose. To ask if you'll work for me again.'
'But I've already got a job. I'm going to be a professor.'
'Professor'!' He did not hide his contempt.
'Besides, I can't possibly move to the States. For domestic reasons.'
'The job isn't in the States. It's right here in Germany. I'm restarting operations in a big way. You think I'm crazy?'
'Of course I do. Germany's just a scrap heap from the North Sea to the Alps. They're even talking of demolishing what's left of the factories and turning the country into the biggest farm on earth.'
'Sure. But Germany can't go on being the poor-house of Europe for ever. Germany's a country with a future. Look what's happened already. We re-established the Lдnder, putting back the calendar to the peaceful days of little kings and cuckoo-clocks before Bismarck. We found enough Weimar politicians who'd somehow kept out of trouble under Hitler-there weren't any left alive who'd stood up to him. We even put up Communists, for God's sake. Then we let them have elections, back in 1946. Nothing like starting training in democracy early.'
'Hitler was democratically elected,' I reminded him.
'He would not be elected again. When your guts are ripped out, you're in no mood to try charging the enemy. Listen, it's going to be like this. The Four-Power Council has been deadlocked for months. Right? The Russians would like to extend Communism to the Rhine, we'd like to extend Democracy to the Vistula. Those are two impossibilities. So the Russians will eat their share of the Germans like cannibals. We shall invite our share to sit down and halve the goodies. The western Lдnder will have to combine into a new Republic sooner or later, just to face up to the Russians.'
The German orderly in a white jacket brought our steaks. 'And that German technology!' Jeff murmured admiringly. 'I suppose you knew the US division of your FIAT collected 200,000 pages of trade secrets from Leitz Optical alone? And 600,000 pages on dyes, synthetic rubber, plastics and so on from I G Farben? Truman has ordered the information sold to US industry at nominal prices. Our FIAT had a budget of almost four million bucks, but I reckon it was money well spent. You British didn't really get into it,' he admonished me. 'I guess it's your old trouble. War is OK, but trade is ungentlemanly.'
I asked what the job would be. 'Organizing my interests. I trust you. You speak German. You know the Germans.'
'Can't the Germans organize themselves?'
'They couldn't under the Nazis. Hitler's organization was terrible, just a lot of overlapping agencies all at each other's throats, with no directives but a vague idea of carrying out the Fьhrer's will. I expect they'll improve on it when they haven't to worry about a knock on the door at four in the morning. The salary could be about what your Prime Minister gets, old man.'
'I'm sorry. But I'd rather stay at home in the British Empire.'
Jeff looked exasperated. 'What British Empire? Roosevelt wanted to see the end of it, and he did. You British have ended the war with no money, no power, and no influence. Only thousands of millions of coloured people who want to see the back of you as soon as possible. And you're putting up a statue to Roosevelt in Grosvenor Square. That's gentlemanly to the limit!'
Like most Britons, I still did not see the truth which Ainsley had prophesied in his club. Nettled, I said, 'Well, we still count in Europe.'
'The whole of Europe's now just little kings and cuckoo-clocks. There's only two powers in the world, the Russians and us. And we've got the bomb.'
'Besides, I'm getting married,' I added as an unanswerable objection.
'I thought you were married?' Jeff grumbled.
'I got divorced. I'm marrying that girl with the soldier's gas mask I brought to the Savoy. The one who married a close friend of mine. It's all very gentlemanly.'
'Think it over. Telephone me in New York if you change your mind.'
'Honestly, I'd rather be a professor.'
Jeff grunted. Suddenly remembering, he took out his pocket-book and handed me a newspaper cutting. 'Did you ever come across that guy in Wuppertal?'
The cutting came from a recent _New York Times,_ headed _German 'Scientist' Gets 5-year Term._ It was a short, bald story of Count von Recklinghausen, a rocket engineer from Wuppertal, who had been cleared of Nazi guilt by the Allied Control Commission and been flown to America with several hundred other scientists. He was in trouble through selling New Yorkers shares in his non-existent family engineering business, and found to be neither a count nor a scientist but a journalist from Hamburg with a police record for swindling. He had apparently reached the United States through forged documents and exploiting the rivalries between various Allied organizations. I hoped that Rudi's flattering letter from Hitler was a forgery, too. I decided to post the cutting to Greenparish anonymously.
'What shall we do for the rest of the evening, old man?' Jeff asked me. 'Go find some women wrestling in mud?'
I left early the next morning in a US Army jeep for Nьrnberg. I was going to renew another old acquaintance.
Since the previous May I had been following the trial of 23 top men from I G Farben. It was an all-American show, in the Nьrnberg Palace of Justice, where the Nazi bosses had been tried expediently, if not entirely logically. I recognized the courtroom at once from the photographs in the newspapers during 1946. To the left of the dock was a booth for three or four young men and women, the interpreters, every word spoken having to pass from microphone to earphones, through their heads. To their left stood the witness chair, opposite it across a dozen yards of bare floor the desks of the lawyers. Facing the dock, raised well above it, sat the four American judges in their black gowns-Shake, Moms, Herbert and Merrell. Everywhere stood armed American military policemen in their white-painted steel helmets, the 'snowdrops' who had become as familiar in a hundred grimy and remote British towns as the bobby.
I spotted Hцrlein at once among the dark-suited prisoners. Fourteen years of war and 28 months of imprisonment had scarred him less than I expected. He was then 65, he had lost some weight, and when he turned his head I noticed that he had shaved off his moustache. He still wore his round glasses.
The Court was Military Tribunal Six, the trial the United States of America v Karl Krauch _et al._ I had seen a copy of the indictment in London. Through Archie, our affairs being _very _gentlemanly indeed. But his marriage was dead, and he was relieved to keep the divorce between friends. He would have found some stranger intruding into Elizabeth's affections deeply hurtful.
The charges were sweepingly formidable. The first count was the planning, preparation, initiation and waging of wars of aggression and the invasions of other countries. The second, plunder and spoliation. The third, slavery and mass murder. Four, membership of the SS. Five, conspiracy to commit crimes against the peace. Professor Hцrlein escaped only count four.
I had timed my arrival at Nьrnberg for Hцrlein's own turn to face the music. That was Thursday morning, December 18, 1947. I found quickly that he had an excellent German counsel, Dr Otto Nelte. His first point to the judges was of Hцrlein's relative ignorance about his fellow-directors' business. 'The administrative structure of I G
