Nuremberg: the Reckoning Paperback - 2003 - 1st Edition

CHAPTER ONE

Hamburg, August 30, 1939

His eyes lingered longer than usual on the headlines as he walked by the corner newsstand, the summer leaves of the overhanging oak trees brushing down over the canvas awning that protected the papers and magazines and cigarettes of the little kiosk from summer rains. Today, no headline especially arrested his attention. There was nothing beyond the run of diplomatic crises he was now numb to-England denounces German threats to Poland...Poland asserts its independence...Great Britain and France pledge aid to Poland if attacked...Moscow signs nonaggression pact with Berlin. Nothing new; nothing brand new-this last, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact was already a week old. Axel tried to close it all out of his mind.

Past the stand, turning right on Abelstrasse, Axel Reinhard was only three blocks from his apartment. He gripped hard the handle of his briefcase and looked fleetingly at his watch.

Back at the office there had been a bon voyage party. Franz Heidl, the senior partner of the engineering firm, had invited a half-dozen colleagues of Heidl & Sons, and also Debra-always-the office manager, to the tenth floor partners' meeting room. They had come to the boardroom at 1900, as bidden ("Please to be prompt!") to have a brandy and wish Axel a happy holiday in America (As you know, the invitation read, Axel is taking a month's leave to accompany Annabelle and their son Sebastian to New York. Young Sebastian will be going to school in America.).

"Heinrich and Fritz Hassler-" Herr Heidl called for silence, tapping lightly on the cognac bottle with the back of his fountain pen. "-phoned in their regrets. I don't need to tell you, Axel, about the press of work at Heidl & Sons. Fritz sends his compliments and Debra, who couldn't be with us, sends her..." he raised his brandy glass and paused for emphasis, "her love!" There was a murmur of appreciation (Debra, Hassler's secretary, was seventy years old; Axel was not yet thirty-six). "Be sure and tell that to Annabelle when you get home tonight. She may refuse to sail with you!"

Axel, looking down on his short, bald boss, accepted the toast with a smile and a little bow of his head, his abundant dark hair insufficiently tended. "I'm surprised Debra didn't send her love to my son. After all, Sebastian is almost fourteen."

"Is he also a lady-killer?" Heidl's leer was theatrically contrived, and the company laughed.

"What school in America are you sending him to?" Heinz Jutzeler, the youngest of the engineers in the room, wanted to know. Jutzeler had spent three years in Washington when his father served as cultural attaché for Chancellor Hindenburg, in the last days of the Weimar Republic. Though he had returned to Hamburg at age thirteen, Jutzeler fancied himself something of an expert on America.

"He will go to school in Phoenix. Phoenix-" Axel assumed a professorial air and began with a word or two in an exaggerated British accent "-iss the capital of Ahr-isohn-a." He ended the imitation and, in his native, idiomatic German, told his colleagues and well-wishers (more properly, he reminded them: Like almost every German in the professional class, the engineers at Heidl & Sons were well-grounded in geography and history) that the state of Arizona had been incorporated into the United States in 1912, that Phoenix was the state's capital, that to the south of it lay Mexico, to the east, New Mexico, to the west, California.

"Why did you and Annabelle choose Arizona?"

"My mother-in-law-my generous mother-in-law-has property there and will superintend Sebastian's education after Annabelle comes back here to us."

The silence was considered, though nobody gave voice to the reason for it. Why would a thirteen-year-old with a U.S. passport hurry to return to Hamburg, Germany, in 1939?

Jutzeler broke the silence, harking back to the subject of Arizona. He liked to frame his remarks in the practical coin of his trade. "For the benefit of my colleagues, Phoenix, Arizona, would be, traveling west from New York, about the same distance as Moscow, traveling east, is from us here in Hamburg. Now that Herr von Ribbentrop has made a pact with Comrade Stalin, we must all expect, one day, to visit, as tourists, the Communist land we were taught so diligently to scorn-"

"Heinz!" Axel's face contorted with derisive pain. "No no no! Moscow is much closer. From here to Moscow by train-two days, one night. To Phoenix from New York, three days, two nights."

"You may be right. Just my impression..."

"You get back when, Axel?" Germaine, the heavyset archivist, her eyeglasses hanging below her neck, wanted to know.

"In one month," Axel said. "Don't let them muck up the Rohrplatz Tower while I'm gone." There was laughter. Herr Heidl beamed with pride, taking a folder from a shelf alongside and opening it to exhibit an artist's sketch of the Rohrplatz Center in Hamburg's industrial zone, scheduled for completion in three months; perhaps, with the hectic construction schedule in Germany, in time for Christmas.

A quarter of an hour later, after downing a second brandy, Herr Heidl said that he couldn't speak for everyone in the room but he, as senior partner in Heidl & Sons, had more to do, before finally going home, than merely drink brandy with his colleagues. "We all know that engineers are not exactly busy in America, never mind the vigorous economic policies of Mr. Roosevelt's New Deal," he jibed. "But unemployment certainly isn't a problem in the Third Reich. Lieber Axel, may God be with you."

Axel shook Herr Heidl's hand, and then the hands of the others, who had got the signal that the party was over. He kissed Germaine lightly on her ample forehead and returned to his office at the other end of the floor to pick up his meticulously packed briefcase. A raincoat over one arm, he stepped into the freshly painted hallway and rang for the elevator. At the desk in the entrance hall he initialed the register and wrote down the hour. The one-legged clerk nodded at him. "Heil Hitler."

"Heil Hitler," Axel responded.

Copyright © 2002 by William F. Buckley Jr.

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PRAISE FOR NUREMBERG

"Inventive and absorbing."--Los Angeles Times

"[Buckley] presents the trials as something beyond ordinary politics."--The New York Times Book Review