 
### Ausgleich

### Scales of Justice

by

James Whitesell

PUBLISHED BY:

James Whitesell on Smashwords

Ausgleich

Copyright © 2014 by James Whitesell

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### Table of Contents

Foreword/Editor's Note/Introduction

Lake Susquah

Chapter 1 Operation Gomorrah

Chapter 2 Operation Hannibal

Chapter 3 Nuremberg 1945

Chapter 4 A Baby Is Born

Chapter 5 Dresden 1945

Chapter 6 Russian Atrocities In the East

Chapter 7 Sam Jones

Chapter 8 General Freiherr von Wittendorf

Chapter 9 Cap Arcona

Chapter 10 Master Sergeant Caldwell

Chapter 11 Rheinwiesenlager

Chapter 12 Hedgehopping

Chapter 13 The Trial

Chapter 14 The Pole
Epilogue

Bibliography

About the Author

Sample Chapter

### Ausgleich!

### Scales of Justice

by

James Whitesell

### Editor's Note

Skeptics are invited to view a scholarly work on the WWII east German maelstrom by the widely respected United Nations human rights activist, Alfred de Zayas. His book is available to read online without charge at https://archive.org/details/A-Terrible-Revenge. A second available online book is a compendium of witness statements published shortly after WWII by Sudeten survivors, _Documents on the Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans_ , available free at www.wintersonnenwende.com. LEMO, Lebendiges (Living) Museum Online, has many online wartime documents in German. Also available are the German Federal Archives which contain thousands of corroborating documents and photos relating to what the Germans called, and still call, Die Vertreibung.

The Expulsion.

### Author's Foreword

One of my earliest childhood memories, which will resonate with me for the remainder of my days, is of my grandmother's heartbroken sobbing over the shiny flag-draped coffin of her son, an American airman killed in the skies over Europe and brought home after the end of WWII. Linda Bongiovanni, who kindly supplied the survivor's accounts from the Sudetenland in this book, was herself once stunned as a small child to see her own grandmother collapse into tears. The grandmother was looking at an old photo. Of her daughter, Linda's aunt. A Sudeten German aunt that Linda never knew because she died in the horrific Allied maelstrom that engulfed the Germans of the east at the end of WWII. This pair of grandmothers tell us something all of us should take to heart.

Grief does not know national or ethnic boundaries. Grief does not take sides.

Nor does tragedy.

### Introduction

Sections of this work are closely based on multiple sources of professionally documented history. These sections are noted as such by italics in the chapter headers and the sources are cited in the bibliography. They are the skeleton of this work, the words of history. Not so with a second group of sections, many of them graciously provided by British Columbian Linda Bongiovanni & Scriptorium. These sections--totally in Italics--are more than mere word scratchings of carefully vetted history. They are first person flesh and blood accounts by witnesses and survivors of the horrors in the German east that were put to paper during, just after and, for some, long after, the end of WWII. (The survivors' quotes are repeated here as they were printed, without editing.) Together the history--the skeleton, and the survivor's accounts--the flesh and blood, are the palette on which is word-painted this work of historical fiction. Ausgleich. A German word which means, roughly, a balancing of the scales.

The bulk of this book's chapters are fictional. In a narrow sense. The specifics are fictional. The characters are fictional. The theme is fictional. Not so the underlying matrix of the book. Some, perhaps many, will resist believing it, but Ausgleich rests in a well documented rock solid intimacy on actual historical events. There is an hoary timeworn axiom that the victors write the history books. True enough. In ancient times.

And in times not so ancient.

### Ausgleich

by

James Whitesell

_"Yes! For three weeks the war had been going inside Germany and all of us knew very well that if the girls were Germans they could be raped and then shot. This was almost a combat distinction......"_ Nobel Laureate Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago.

### Lake Susquah

1972

California's Governor Ronald Reagan did it again. Turned a reporter's sharp question around at a news conference and made it a joke. Good enough to make the lead story on network TV the evening before. They were chuckling about it. Two of them. Native Americans. They liked Reagan's wit but otherwise paid little attention to the politics of the outside world. As usual, the two were up early. It was one of those thickly fogged early mornings on Lake Susquah's big bay, evocative of both the spooky and the mystical. The men, lean and hard-muscled cousins who grew up together fishing and hunting in the bounteous Pacific Northwest, often rose before dawn to begin their day with the quiet serenity of fishing the bay. For reasons long lost to tribal memory the locals called it Weeping Woman Bay. Whatever the history of the bay, fishing in its mist shrouded early morning waters settled their spirits and prepared them for the remainder of their day. Shifts in the din and hustle of the Nations power plant. It was a lifestyle tradeoff, but they were comfortable with it. Literally. Where so many Native Americans struggled to survive, they had reliable and comfortable livings. They, at least, had found a reasonable middle ground between the past and the present. They still had the quiet ancestral bay to fish. And a sturdy fourteen foot fiberglass boat with a fifty horse Johnson outboard to fish it. Their octogenarian grandfather, a retired high school teacher who twenty years earlier walked out of the classroom onto the golf course and never looked back, had a word for it that he thought nicely fit their lifestyle. Which is what they named their boat.

Synergy.

They were trolling near the shore, close to the submerged piles of rocks by the lake's access ramp where the lunkers liked to lurk, when it happened.

"Hey!" One of them suddenly said, lulled out of his sleepy early morning reverie by a stout jarring jerk on the line. He was instantly alert, scrambling for solid footing and grabbing a firmer hold on the fishing rod that was bent so far over that the tip was in the water. He'd hooked something big. And heavy. But. Wait. Something was wrong. The heavy weight was inert. There was no active resistance to his line. He looked in puzzlement at his cousin and began to pull it in, puffing with the exertion of tugging on the heavy weight. Whatever it was, it sure as hell was no fish. Not a live one, anyhow. Probably a chunk of floating deadwood. As the heavy object slowly emerged from the mists next to the boat on the foggy lake, the curious expressions drained from both men's faces and were replaced with shock. This was no chunk of deadwood. It was dead, all right. But not wood.

It was Jaroslav Svoboda

### Chapter 1

### Operation Gomorrah

In German the word Hamburger means someone from the city of Hamburg. In America the word is often used in a variety of allusive and sometimes joking ways. The end of July and the first part of August in 1943 were a very long way from anything remotely related to any kind of joke to the inhabitants in the German city of Hamburg. The British Royal Air Force, with the assistance of the American 8th Air Force, launched a series of air raids on the city. Operation Gomorrah. The allusion to the Biblical Gomorrah was no accident. The intent of Operation Gomorrah was no less than to wipe the German city of Hamburg from the map. Operation Gomorrah was the most successful large city raid to that point in the overall British strategy of area bombing. Otherwise known as morale bombing. Bomb the bloody hell out of the Germans, so the thinking went, and they'd lose stomach for the war and sue for peace. And that means intentionally bombing--and killing--civilian noncombatants. There was just one problem with the strategy. Not that it didn't kill hundreds of thousands of Germans and destroy the architectural heritage of an entire people. It did that. Over and over and over. It obliterated much that was Germany.

But it didn't knock the Germans out of the war.

At first only the intent was there. To destroy the German cities and knock Germany out of the war. The intent but not the means. Not until the summer of 1943. By then the actual mechanisms of destroying German cities were in place. British scientists, working hand in hand with military specialists, developed a system of bombing that used a combination of immense hordes of small incendiaries and hundreds of large, blockbuster bombs. The big bombs blew down walls, cratered streets and opened up holes in buildings where the clouds of incendiaries could enter and ignite.

It was a hot and largely rainless summer in 1943 Hamburg. Early July. The city was tinder dry and ripe for combustion when the Allied bombers appeared overhead. The bombs fell in multitudes of incendiary metallic hail. Fires by the thousands flared up all over the city. The big bombs hampered German fire fighters by blocking streets with rubble, disrupting communications and destroying fire fighting equipment. To make things even more difficult for the German fire fighters and rescue workers some of the big bombs had delayed time fuses on them. Which caused even more disruption when the firemen and rescue workers were caught in the blasts of the time delayed bombs and the would be rescuers were added to the horrendous toll of victims.

But something else happened on the night of the big raid in early July of 1943. Something even the British and Americans didn't expect. The first human caused fire storm. The combination of the extremely dry weather, the relative lack of firewalls in the construction of the city and the mixture of bombs engendered a man made conflagration that even the bomb crews flying overhead realized was something new to history. The many small fires combined into a raging inferno that flared hundreds of feet into the air, consuming the oxygen in the city, which in turn sucked oxygen in from adjacent suburban areas and created typhoon strength winds that scooped human beings up and hurled them into the firestorm as though they were no more than mere bits of leaves in an autumn gale.

Thousands of the city's residents thought they were safe in the strongly built cellars under many of the city's buildings. In previous air raids that was true. Not in the Hamburg fire storm. In some places the cellars became so hot the people inside were roasted alive. In others all the oxygen was consumed and the cellar dwellers died either from lack of oxygen or from poisonous combustion gasses. Those that tried to escape found the asphalt of the streets had melted and caught on fire from the intense heat. They were trapped to be either roasted alive or burned to death. Many of the adult corpses were shriveled to the size of an infant.

When Operation Gomorrah ended Hamburg was a twisted heap of rubble and metal filled with dead. Quite literally a dead city. A million people fled Hamburg for safer locations all over Germany. But not all. When the Allies invaded Normandy on D Day the total Allied dead that day amounted to about 4500 men. In Operation Gomorrah the Hamburg dead were ten times that many. Almost all of them civilians. Many of them children. Thousands of them. Children. Dead children. Roasted. Asphyxiated. Burned alive. Thousands more children, many already sent off to safer parts of Germany before Operation Gomorrah, were still alive. Alive, but without parents. Orphans. Orphans with memories. Who would one day grow up.

And for some, at least, time would not heal.

### Discomfiting History

"Woe to the Germans, woe to the Germans,

thrice woe to the Germans, we will liquidate them!"

_Attributed to Czech Premier Edvard Beneš by Sudeten German victim_ M. v. W.

At the end of WWII the Czechs, who wanted to get rid of their unwelcome and troublesome German minority since they'd been dumped on them by the Versailles Treaty of WWI, set about to do just that. But not the land where the Germans historically lived. Nor the towns or farms or the mines or the factories or the businesses. The Czechs didn't want to get rid of them. It was the people they didn't want. Their exiled premier, Edvard Beneš, a devious man disliked and distrusted by many of those among the Allies who knew him, but who still was undeniably effective in political machinations, had repeatedly cajoled his fellow Czechs in London radio broadcasts to get rid of the Germans once and for all. The _German Problem_ of the Czechs was scarily reminiscent of the _Jewish Problem_ of the Nazis. Both were cynical euphemisms for ethnic cleansing. Make no mistake. The fate of the Germans of eastern Europe could not begin to approach that of the Jews. But it was just as horrific for those Germans unlucky to be in the path of the maelstrom. And they were legion.

At war's end Beneš returned to Czechoslovakia exhorting his fellow Czechs to ethnically cleanse Czechoslovakia of the Germans once and for all. Anti-German hysteria gripped the Czech body politic. The Germans. Get rid of them once and for all. Kill them. Expel them. Anything that worked. Just get rid of them. And they did. In scenes that were grim mirror images of the human displacements the Nazis perpetrated, three and a half million Czech Sudetenland Germans would be kicked out of their homes, often in a very barbaric way, and expelled from their ancestral lands. It was done, especially in the chaotic days of the first half of 1945, with a viciousness that equaled and often surpassed much of the vengeful Allied vindictive treatment of Germans over the German speaking lands. Many thousands among the German Sudetenlanders met their deaths at the hands of the Czech revanchists. Thousands of them directly. Hands-on directly. Murdered. Executed. Raped to death. Succumbed to beatings and torture. Many others indirectly, through starvation, untreated epidemics, suicide brought on by utter despair and, finally, exposure to the unkind elements that first laid low the very young and the very old before decimating the rest.

 Ústí nad Labem

It was and still is a pretty place. The town in the Czech Republic called  Ústí nad Labem. Just a few kilometers from the German border. Closer to Dresden than to Prague. The town sits in a photographer's dream of a location, an eyeful of a scenic spot snuggled in the folds of the rolling timbered mountains of the Bohemian Highlands on the Elbe River where it meets the Bilina. Which is what  Ústí nad Labem means in Czech. The meeting of two rivers. Its population is an eclectic mixture of peoples brought in at the end of WWII, among them Roma as well as Czechs. The town was once part of Bohemian Sudetenland, the German speaking portions of pre-WWII Czechoslovakia. Its name then was Aussig an der Elbe. A German name. A German town. An area long German in language and culture. For hundreds of years. German. An area annexed to Czechoslovakia against the will of the German inhabitants by the tragically myopic vindictive Versailles treaties at the end of WWI. In 1938 the Nazis marched into the Sudetenland. Aussig came under German control and was annexed to the Third Reich. Most of the residents, bitter over the oppression, both real and imagined, of the German minority of Czechoslovakia by the Czech majority welcomed the change.

At first.

As in so many other places, the Jews of Aussig an der Elbe disappeared into the concentration camps. They were the first casualties of the war. Many more would follow. Political dissidents and those who, for whatever reason, displeased the Nazis were soon tossed into the camps. Almost all the men of military age were drafted and sent off to war. Few returned. And then hundreds more of the residents in what was then Aussig died in mid-April 1945 when the Allies bombed the town, one among the hundreds and thousands of questionable acts by the Allies at war's end when so many cities, towns and villages were obliterated and hundreds of thousands of civilians killed when everyone knew the war was almost over. After the bombing the last of the German troops retreated from Aussig and the Russians and their Slavic satraps entered. The Russians and then the Czechs took political control of the German town. A new Dark Ages descended on the Germans of Aussig and the rest of the Sudetenland. Rapes by the tens of thousands, unnumbered murders, brutal beatings, an avalanche of robberies. It was just the beginning. Worse would soon follow. Total disenfranchisement. Assets--homes, farms, businesses, factories--ripped from the owners' hands and redistributed to non-Germans. And, finally, the expulsion of the surviving Germans from their ancestral homeland, the Sudetenland. And not just the Sudetenland. In all as many as fifteen million Germans in eastern Europe suffered the same fate. No one will ever know how many, but probably somewhere between one and two million of them died either directly or in direct consequence from the expulsions.

And all this while the Allies were trumpeting to the world their righteous triumph in the unfolding of the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials.

The Massacre at Aussig

Ill-treatment and murder of German workmen _  
_Reported by: Max Becher  Report of December 14, 1946  (Aussig)

An ammunition dump exploded on July 31st, 1945, in a suburb of Aussig. The Germans were blamed for this and the Czechs used the excuse for an attack on them. Aussig lies on the left bank of the Elbe, and the factory where I worked, Georg Schicht-Schreckenstein, on the right bank. There is one bridge connecting the two sides. After work, at 4:30 that afternoon, we were searched for weapons both on leaving the factory and again at the bridge. Once on the bridge we were not allowed to turn back. On the Aussig end we were received by hundreds of Czechs, armed with clubs and iron bars. I received several serious head injuries, whilst my companion, a 67-year-old foreman, had his skull smashed in. I learned later that his body had been thrown into the river and washed up 10 miles downstream. Then I was told to carry the body of another man whose head had been smashed in, to a dump near by. On my return they said it would be my turn to be killed. I was forced to take off my jacket and to wipe up the pool of blood, while I was struck from all directions. I managed to get away, but a Czech followed and attacked me. He was carrying a heavy club and with it injured me severely. He did not stop until, as I suppose, he thought me dead. When I regained consciousness two Czechs helped me to a house, where the German inhabitants notified the Red Cross. I was taken away on a stretcher and was lucky enough to be admitted to the hospital at ten o'clock that night. This saved my life. The following were my injuries: 3 ribs broken, left arm broken, 6 head injuries, requiring 23 stitches. My left arm, which I had used as a shield against the blows, was so swollen that the fact it had been broken was not discovered until two months later, during the course of an x-ray examination. I stayed in hospital from July 31st to October 20th, 1945, and had to continue treatment at home from October 20th to November 19th, 1945.

As a result of my injuries I still suffer severe attacks of dizziness when I move my head and look upwards, and from pains in the ribs when doing manual labour or during changes of the weather.

Aussig

On July 31, before the Nuremberg Trials began and only a few weeks after the war ended, a mysterious explosion that may have been an accident but more likely was a deliberate provocation by Czech saboteurs, possibly Communist provocateurs, triggered a massacre of the German inhabitants of Aussig. Several hundred? A thousand? Perhaps two thousand. Perhaps more. And that wasn't the end of it for the Germans of Aussig. Within a year most would be brutally kicked out of the homes their families had occupied for hundreds of years. Many would soon die from the privations of homelessness.

No one was ever convicted of war crimes for the Aussig massacre. It was kept a secret until after the Communist Czech government fell in 1989. After the Velvet Revolution of that year Czech premier Vaclav Havel's government admitted that the massacre happened. A plaque was put in place in the town to commemorate the tragedy. But plaques do not bring back the dead. Nor do they bring any kind of justice. No one was ever convicted for the massacre, although the man behind the massacre was known. His name? Bedřich Pokorný. A Czech who had been in the Czechoslovakian Secret Service and had a murky past and an equally murky future.

### Aussig Eyewitness

The explosion on July 30, 1945 _  
_Reported by: A. U.  Report of February 8, 1951

[Due to various circumstances the author of this report was in the position to give an authoritative and objective account of the explosion and its terrible consequences:]

About 10 o'clock on the day in question I walked into the center of the town. As soon as I entered the busier streets, I discovered both in the former Dresdener Strasse and in the Schmejkal Strasse that the soldiers of the notorious Svoboda-army were attacking the Germans wearing their white armbands, driving them from the sidewalks and even knocking them down. I asked what was going on and learned that during the night the Svoboda-army had arrived at Aussig.

Judging by events in other regions of the Sudetenland I immediately guessed that now rough times would come for the Germans of Aussig and of the whole district.

I arrived at the station just as about 300 persons left the train coming from Prague; they were suspicious-looking people between 18 and 30 years of age and I had the impression that they were convicts released from a prison.

At half past three in the afternoon I sat in my apartment when there was a terrific bang. At that moment I thought that a cupboard had fallen over in the next room. I looked into it, but could find nothing. I then assumed that an explosion must have occurred and went up to the roof. There I noticed a large cloud of smoke rising behind the Marienberg. Several smaller explosions followed. I immediately ran downtown - not wearing my white armband, which proved lucky for me. The hunt after the Germans had begun. Soldiers of the Svoboda-army and individual Russians took part in it. These brutes had equipped themselves with all sorts of makeshift weapons such as fence-posts, crow-bars, shovel-handles and so on. With these they struck down all those who spoke German or wore the white badge. I had the impression that the perpetrators were not Czechs from our own district, but those who had left the train in the forenoon. My impression was strengthened by the fact that they had helped themselves to any instruments at hand to improvise their weapons.

I walked through the streets of the town for about two hours; what I saw during that time was dreadful. Of course, I could not say a word, since that would have exposed me as a German.

The factories closed at 3 o'clock in the afternoon and the Germans who worked in the Schicht-works had to use the bridges over the River Elbe in order to get home. The most savage groups therefore were active near these bridges, in the vicinity of the marketplace and the railway station. Even women with babies in perambulators were shoved into the river and then used for target practice. The shooting did not stop until none of the women rose to the surface any longer. Other Germans were thrown into the big water-tank on the market-place. Whenever one of them rose to the surface, the Czechs would push him down again and keep him under water with long poles. Only at 5 o'clock in the afternoon a number of Russian officers appeared and tried to clear the streets. Uniformed Czechs helped them in doing so. Loudspeakers announced the curfew in Czech. On July 31st, a printed poster was issued, announcing that the Germans were not allowed to be in the streets after 6 o'clock in the afternoon, the curfew for the Czech population began at 8 o'clock p.m.

In the evening of July 30 the dead were collected at three places and then taken away in trucks. About 400 corpses were counted at all three collection points. How many may have been collected elsewhere and the number of those who floated down the Elbe cannot be established. Not even the most informed members of the National Committee were able to make an estimate.

Nor was the Aussig massacre Bedřich Pokorný's only war crime. And not his first. He was the man behind the Brno--Brünn--Death March where, again, the victims were ethnic Germans.

Brno/Brünn

The war was barely over. The end of May. 1945. In Brno--German Brünn--Pokorný's men rounded up the twenty or more thousand Germans of the town, allowing them only to bring whatever they could carry, and marched them the thirty miles to the Austrian border. The Germans of the town had already suffered from the typical Russian treatment of Germans when they entered a German area. Beatings, rapes, murders, executions, looting on a massive scale. Bad enough. But the forced march to the Austrian border, made by old people, women and children, left a trail of dying people unable to keep up. And when they reached the Austrian border the Russians, who controlled the adjacent part of Austria, refused to accept them. The exhausted Germans were forced into detention camps without food, water or medicine. They died by the hundreds. Eventually the emaciated survivors were deported to Germany. The blood of many hundreds of Germans was on Pokorný's hands.

### Brünn

Death march to Pohrlitz _  
_Reported by: M. v. W.  Report of February 22, 1951

I still remember very well the proclamation made by Beneš, broadcast from Kaschau two or three days before the arrival of the Russians in Brünn. I understood all he said, since I speak Czech fluently. I will never forget his solemn vow: "Woe to the Germans, woe to the Germans, thrice woe to the Germans, we will liquidate them!" It was on April 25, 1945, about 4 or 5 o'clock in the afternoon, when scenes of fraternization between the invading Russians and the Czechs took place in the streets. In the evening I returned to my apartment and was able to witness how the public rape of German women, beatings, ill-treatment and abuse brought the entire German population into a state of great agitation and danger.

The next morning all Germans had to report for work in accordance with the notices posted on public advertising pillars. I was assigned to the St. Anna Hospital, the men having found out that I was a Red Cross nurse. First I was given only the most menial tasks. Only through the intervention of a Czech physician who had been active in this hospital for a long time was I reinstated as a Red Cross nurse, but even then I was only supposed to go on duty in the air-raid shelter, a cellar to which all the German patients of this big hospital had been moved. In this cellar they lay on bare palliasses without blankets or pillows, and without any medical care. No medications were available for these patients. The cellar was only scantily illuminated by a little lamp and all I could do for these gravely ill people was to help them by applying wet rags or giving them water. Already on the second or third day of my activities in this cellar, human beings dreadfully mutilated, beaten half-dead and tortured almost to death were brought in. All I could give them in the way of assistance, however, were consoling words because I had no drugs whatsoever. The great dying began. All those who had been brought in from the Kaunitz College died almost without exception, and such cases came in without pause. I remember the following cases in particular:

The first to die was a man who had been brought in on the point of death with a horrible injury in the area of the genitals. I could not ascertain his name, as he regained consciousness only for a few moments before he died, and could only briefly reply to my question: "How did you get this terrible injury?" He answered: "I was kicked for having formerly sold vegetables to the Gestapo." With these words he collapsed and I could not elicit any further information before he died.

I also remember another case, that of Mr. Venklarczik, a solicitor, 63 years of age, living at Stiftgasse, Brünn. The man was delivered into the hospital and recounted the following incident: under a threadbare pretext partisans dragged him into the camp in the Kaunitz College and thrashed him there so violently that his back was one gaping wound. He was then forced to thank his torturers for the dreadful ill-treatment. In a semi-conscious state he was taken up to the third floor. In his panic he attempted, during a moment when he was not being watched, to bring his life to an end by jumping through the window. He was saved, however, by a lush tree underneath the window. Instead of being killed, one of his kidneys was torn loose. When he was brought in his excrement and urine were pure blood. It was not until a second German was delivered with his arteries cut through that I saw a physician for the first time in this cellar-camp full of wounded. The reason was that the man who had tried to commit suicide by cutting the arteries should be brought back to consciousness by a blood-transfusion in order that he might be executed later while conscious.

The physician, a Czech himself, examined Venklarczik, the unfortunate man, and was shocked to see the marks of the atrocious maltreatment and said, "But you didn't get this from your jumping out of the window, did you?" The seriously injured man did not dare to accuse any Czech by answering, as that would have meant the death sentence for him.

There is a further case which I remember: a saleswoman from Brünn, Wiener Strasse, had been brought in. She was about 50 years of age and completely unconscious. She was carried to the darkest comer of the basement, where a group of partisans, including a GPU-commissar, who was a Czech, ill-treated the unconscious woman. I was ordered to undress her, after which the Czech commissar intended to bring her back to consciousness with brutal kicks. I also remember that the Czech commissar then told a nun that the reason for the woman's ill-treatment was that she had stolen a Russian uniform complete with decorations. I myself was forced to give the dying woman a series of Coramin injections in order to get her back to consciousness. But all efforts were in vain, her condition was past all hope. Again and again the commissar returned, cursing her in the most inhuman manner, calling her a pig, a German sow, a German whore, bastard and so on, and giving me the order to bring her to speak by means of artificial respiration. I myself wished her nothing but a quick death, for I imagined what they would have done to her if she had really regained consciousness. It seemed that this woman had refused to allow some man to have his way with her and had defended herself. In revenge she had been dreadfully abused. However, she had had the opportunity to take poison, from which she had sunk into unconsciousness. When she died shortly after midnight, the commissar entered the basement and kicked her from the straw pallet with his boot, furious that she could no longer speak.

Let me also recount the following case of Schlesinger, an innkeeper from Brünn, Neugasse district. He was the owner of a restaurant. Among his guests had been both members of the Nazi Party and also, of course, Czechs. For business reasons he had decided to become an inactive member of the Party. On these grounds this rather weak man 40 years of age was now forced to do hard labour, in particular to carry heavy sacks, accompanied by horrible mishandlings. Since he frequently collapsed under the weight and was forced by blows to continue, he finally contracted a rupture of the wall of the stomach, having formerly suffered from stomach ulcers. After his delivery into the hospital he was operated on without anesthetic and submitted to a stomach resection. I found the man screaming and crying in my ward. He implored me to give him something to relieve his pain.

I decided, although being apprehensive myself, to ask at the Surgical Ward. Upon my arrival there I explained the case to the nun (who was about 60 years of age and the nurse in charge) and received the following answer: "I can hear him screaming but he'll get nothing from me - we don't have anything for Germans, just as you didn't have anything for us." When I remarked that during my eleven years of work as Red Cross nurse at the hospitals in Felsberg and Brünn I had never heard of a single case of a Czech to whom assistance had been refused, the nun yelled back at me: "Don't pontificate here, a German will get nothing - tell him that!" When I answered that I did not dare to tell him that, she replied that she would do so herself. Actually, a few minutes later, the head nurse of the Surgical Ward went to the basement and shouted at the patient as he writhed in agony: "You ought to be ashamed of yourself, you are a superman and roar like an animal! You won't get anything, we don't have anything for you!" The sick man clasped his hands and asked for help for God's sake. When she again refused, he said: "Then give me some poison so I can put an end to this suffering!" The same moment a partisan ran up to the bed and shouted: "It would just suit you, you swine, to take poison and so escape the gallows. The moment your wound is healed you'll be hanged. The gallows are waiting for you!" The man was in actual fact dragged away during the night of the sixth day and from what I heard from Schneider, a partisan, he was hanged in the Kaunitz College.

In order to cloak the fact that they had been murdered, it was customary to deliver persons murdered on the streets to the hospital, in the basement, so that they would be registered as though they had died in hospital.

### Brünn

Death March and Concentration Camp:  
an Old Woman's Account _  
_Reported by: M. K.  Report of July 4, 1950

On May 30, 1945 at 8:30 in the evening Czech authorities notified us that we would have to leave our house and home within half an hour and would only be allowed to take with us what we could carry by hand. I had two old women, 70 and 75 years of age, living with me in my house and they had already gone to bed. I asked the Czech men to please let the old women sleep. And for that, I was to be beaten up. Five minutes before nine o'clock we were driven with blows from cudgels out into the street, and for starters we then had to walk 25 kilometers by foot. Everyone from the old age homes, hospitals and children's clinics - everyone was thrown on the streets and had to walk with us. Many people collapsed on the way. We were not allowed to help them get up, otherwise we were beaten ourselves. The old women who collapsed were shot on the spot by the representatives of Czech authority, and when old men broke down, Czech boys about 14 years of age were called over and had to trample on the men's heads until they were dead. The bodies were then stripped right away and the clothes put on the accompanying Czech carts, and distributed among Czech gangs.

In the night it rained heavily but we had to march on nonetheless. Many people could not do it. The stretch of about 45 km which we had to walk is virtually paved with dead. At the end of the march we were locked into barrack camps. As camp leader the Czech chose a woman who had once been married to a Jew. Together with this camp leader a Czech doctor made daily visits to the barracks, and the two of them gave the sick and elderly prisoners pills. Every day people died like flies in these barracks. From 7 o'clock in the morning until 6 in the evening two men were kept constantly busy carrying corpses on stretchers to a place about 30 meters away, where the bodies were thrown into a pit. As soon as prisoners died they were stripped and their clothes were distributed among the Czechs. Our rations consisted of a four-pound loaf of bread every five days per 25 persons. That's all we got for the three weeks we spent in this camp. Early in the morning each day the young people were fetched by gendarmes to work on the surrounding farms, and were able to get some extra food there. But the old people starved to death. One thousand and seven hundred dead are officially recorded for these three weeks.

Outside the barracks a pit had been dug and a bar was placed over it, which we had to sit on in order to answer the call of nature. Sick people, approximately 450 of them, were housed in one of the barracks. In this barrack a bathtub was set up in the middle, which the sick had to use as a toilet. The tub was not emptied until it was full to overflowing. It was never cleaned, and so the stench in the barrack was unbearable.

In one barrack a young mother of four children, the youngest of which was three years old, suddenly died. The Czech physician who came to do the post-mortem barked at the dead woman's sobbing mother: "What are you howling for, you German bitch, at least one more German pig has kicked the bucket!" Once a Czech commission of five men came to determine if our rations were adequate. Only the doctor and the camp leader were interviewed, and these two people told the commission that all the camp inmates received milk and butter in huge quantities! Even though all of us unanimously denounced this as a lie, the commission chose to believe the doctor and the camp leader, and it was not until later that we found out how a Czech newspaper had announced how exceedingly well we were being taken care of.

Then we were taken another 45 km away into a different camp, where we were given horse meat from dead horses to eat. The meat was crawling with worms. I myself had to wash the meat out. I washed the meat in 4 buckets of water and was still not able to get them all out. Nonetheless the people ate it, they were so hungry. In this way we held on to our bare existence for all of 8 weeks. Only now was it possible for some people to sneak out of the camp and flee across the border to Austria.

The farmers of the Lower Austrian farmsteads cared for us with touching devotion until we had regained our strength enough to move on to Vienna.

Russians came into the women's camps on a daily basis to rape the women. Even an 80-year-old woman was raped in our camp, as well as a 7-year-old girl. I myself spent three nights sleeping over top of a 15-year-old girl because her mother had begged me to protect the girl. The Russians showed up every day by 7:30 and stayed until 2 o'clock at night.

Every day the Czechs went around to the camp inmates and collected money, with promises to protect us from the Russians in the evening, and to lock the camp so no Russians could get in. Punctually at 7:30 these same Czechs escorted the Russians in and showed them which of us they should rape. And it went on like that every day. From time to time different Czechs went around to collect the money because no-one believed the others any more.

One day it was announced that those of us prisoners who had relatives in Austria might cross the border unmolested. They were given a document to enable them to cross the border. Everyone had to pay a certain fee for it. The people lined up in droves to get a border-crossing permit and to be discharged. In the evening these people returned to the camp and told us that at the border the Czechs had taken away even the very last of their possessions, and that they had had to sign a statement saying that they were leaving Czechoslovakia of their own free will, that they had been taken care of with tender loving care, and that the Czechs had even escorted them to the border. Once they had signed that, they had been whipped and beaten back to the camp.

During the Prague Spring of 1968 Bedřich Pokorný, the Czech architect of the Aussig and Brünn atrocities, was found hanging from a tree in a forest outside the town.

The official cause of death was suicide.

### Jaroslav Svoboda

To Charlie Twofists, who lived on the shore of Lake Susquah, all the flashing lights on the squads and emergency vehicles reminded him of the light show he'd seen at a rock concert in Seattle. He didn't have clue one over what the hell was going on, but he knew he'd find out soon enough. His cousin was an EMT and likely among the throng of cops under the light show. A couple of dozen yards from where the first responders and cops clustered around Jaroslav Svoboda's body was the dead man's fishing boat, still perched on its trailer at the access ramp. The pair of Native Americans who had discovered the body and brought it to shore were still there and being interviewed for the third time. Each interview by a different agency. The tribal police, the local city police and the county sheriff's department. Locations like this one were always a pain in the ass. It was within the county. But also on the fringe of the reservation and on the edge of the city limits. That usually meant some--occasionally heated--disputations about jurisdiction. But this one was different. It wasn't who wanted it. It was who _didn't_ want it. No one. The tribal police wanted no part of it. Neither did the county. So, more or less by default, the city somewhat reluctantly became the investigating agency. A reluctance that would last no longer than it would take for the city's pair of detectives, who had just pulled up in their unmarked Ford and were walking towards the knot of people surrounding Svoboda's corpse, to eyeball the body. The recognition was instant. This man was no stranger.

" _Good God_ ," the older of the two muttered, "it's Jerry. Jerry Svoboda." Silence for a long minute as the detectives soaked in the crime scene. Then a voice.

"It looks like a robbery gone bad," muttered Ted Melville, as he stared down at the pallid battered corpse of Jaroslav 'Jerry' Svoboda. "Somebody ambushed him out here when he was about to go fishing. Guy tried to rob him. Jerry fought back. The perp went ballistic and beat him to death and threw him into the water." Melville was the town's senior detective, a saturnine man who had dark bags under his eyes so big his boss joked he could use them as extra pockets. The expression that resided on Melville's face was more than his usual dismay at the human condition over another senseless death. Melville knew Svoboda. A friend, not a close one, but still a friend. Jerry Svoboda was one of the regulars at Melville's weekly Thursday night poker game in a basement room he'd renovated into what he puckishly referred to as his man cave. A cave, however, agreeably equipped with a wet bar with plenty of refreshments for those so inclined. And most, especially the cops after another long day peppered with encountering the seedier side of humanity, were definitely so inclined. The second detective, Cathy Chen, just two weeks into her promotion to a detective slot and prudently keeping her mouth shut, only nodded. But there was doubt in her eyes. A doubt, as Melville immediately noticed, plain to see.

"You don't read it that way, Detective Chen?" Melville said in a tone suspiciously close, at least in Chen's mind, to patronizing. "Not as a robbery gone bad?"

"I don't know, sir," she answered, staying tactically non-committal. "I don't have enough information to make any kind of assessment." Surprise painted her youthful face as Melville nodded agreement.

"You're right, Cathy. Absolutely. I was just bouncing my first impression off you to see how you'd figure it." A slight smile touched his face just as the blush touched hers. "First impressions, I have found all too goddamn often, are sometimes worst impressions."

"Which means what?" Cathy replied in her tactically neutral voice.

"It means we start digging and see what we come up with." Just then another figure loomed into the circle of cops staring down at the corpse. The large, paunchy and usually jovial presence of Police Chief Joe Trammel. Chief Trammel wasn't feeling anywhere near jovial right now. He knew Jerry Svoboda, too. Trammel was another of the regulars at what he called Melville's Retro Good Old Boys Poker Club. Which was in tongue-in-cheek as it gets, since two of the poker regulars were women. One a veteran police sergeant, the other a boondocks game warden from Fish & Wildlife.

"What a goddamn shame," Trammel said in a subdued voice after a long moment of staring at the bag of flesh and bones that was Jaroslav Svoboda only a few hours earlier. "After all he went through. To be murdered by some thug. And probably over something stupid like a few crummy dollars." Later, after the boss left, Chen asked Melville what Police Chief Trammel was talking about.

"What did he mean?" She said. "By all he went through."

"Jerry was a political refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia." Melville replied.. "Escaped from a prison camp and made it across into Austria, where he went to the American consulate and asked for political asylum." Cathy was momentarily stunned.

"Refugee? Political asylum? That sure sounds heavy."

"Even heavier, from what I heard." Melville replied. "He was tortured in the prison camp. Like something out of the Dark Ages."

"He escapes something like that and now some scumbag lowlife wannabe robber murders him when he's doing nothing more than going fishing. An utterly pointless tragic death." Cathy said, thinking she was following Melville's train of thought. Wrong train.

"Maybe so," Melville said in that maddening mysterious tone of voice he sometimes got that irritated the hell out of her. "And maybe no."

Neither of them knew it, and would never know it as the case eventually became one more shelved box in the cold case room, but 'the maybe no's' won that one hands down. Political refugee Jaroslav 'Jerry' Svoboda's history went far deeper than that of a political refugee from Communist Czechoslovakia. He was a conservative, true enough, and that made him an enemy of the Communist State of Czechoslovakia. And they did throw him in a prison camp. And they did torture him. But it was mere chaff in the wind compared to the hell Jaroslav Svoboda visited upon the Germans in the Sudetenland at the end of World War II.

Svoboda fancied himself a patriot and a Czech nationalist and even a folk hero in his zeal to rid Czechoslovakia of the hated Germans. Svoboda was one of Bedřich Pokorný's sycophants. Svoboda was a common Czech name and Jaroslav was no relation to the famous General Ludvík Svoboda who led the Soviet Czech Army into Czechoslovia at war's end, though he tried to give the impression he was. Jaroslav had long lived in Brünn, knew many of the Germans of the town and had coexisted with them for years. He nevertheless volunteered--probably to curry favor with Pokorný--to 'supervise' the Brünn death march where the dispossessed German population were forcibly expelled from their homes in the Sudetenland. He wasn't really any kind of boss or official, though he acted like one, and Svoboda's idea of supervision almost immediately proved so sinister that those Germans who knew him could hardly believe it. From his first steps beyond the watching eyes on the outskirts of Brünn, on the way to the Austrian border, Svoboda began to persecute his former townspeople. Before their shocked eyes an evil metamorphosis, spawned out of some dark unsuspected netherworld in Svoboda's being, took possession of the man. The formerly diffident, even obsequious, Jaroslav Svoboda became a monster.

Survivors would never, could never, forget him. As the old and infirm fell by the wayside as the death march staggered towards the Austrian border, Svoboda urged other Czechs to kill the stragglers.

"Shoot them. Stab them. Bash them with your rifle butts," he was heard to say by one of the survivors, a Sudeten German woman who was also fluent in Czech, as the gruesome spectacle played out on the road to Austria. "No one cares how you do it. Just get rid of them. Kill the German swine. Do whatever you like. They must go. All of them. Out of our homeland. One way or another." During the death march Svoboda was several times seen to stalk along the stumbling files of terrified Germans, pick out one who he disliked for God knew what twisted reason, and pull that luckless soul from the struggling throng. One of them was a German doctor that Svoboda had worked for as a menial. Svoboda hated the German because other Czechs respected the doctor but looked askance at his lowly crude self. Svoboda made the man suffer so much even some of the rough-edged Czechs were disgusted at his brutality.

The same Czech-speaking woman survivor, as well as three other survivors who would later make their own statements about the Brünn death march, saw him start with each victim by screaming at the doomed person, then begin to beat him, all the while yelling vile anti-German expletives at the battered German, until the victim fell to the ground. He continued kicking the hapless victim until the person ceased moving. Then he would turn to one of the other Czechs and say "take care of him the way all these German swine deserve." Once he was seen to pull the lethal trigger himself. On the German doctor he had resented for years. And the survivors were certain that the doctor wasn't the only German Svoboda killed that gruesome day.

After the death march reached the Austrian border and was turned back, the surviving Germans were huddled into a ruined factory and left to starve to death. No food. No medicine. No shelter. No bedding. Often not even any water. The weaker among the Germans began to die almost immediately and the Germans continued to die in their hundreds and, finally, thousands, before the pitiful remnants were shunted off to Austria to spend the rest of their lifetimes trying to understand their betrayal.

A death march and a death camp were not enough to sate Jaroslav Svoboda's bloodthirst. While the Germans were being starved in the death camp Svoboda would sometimes stride into the camp and pick out a cowed German to torment. He took them into what the Czechs called their interrogation room but which the Germans called the torture room. He, and Svoboda was certainly not the only Czech who did this, would demean and berate the hapless Germans while beating them with whatever was handy--fists, chunks of lumber, wooden clubs, iron bars, rubber truncheons. Not all the Germans survived these sojourns into the so-called interrogation room. And even that wasn't enough for Jaroslav Svoboda. Nearly every night he'd go into the camp and pick out the prettiest girl he could find to beat and then rape. Or rape and then beat. At least one of them never came back. Another succumbed to her injuries, breathing her last on a filthy lice riden pallet in the death camp.

All of the other detainees were permanently damaged--emotionally, physically, mentally and perhaps worst of all, spiritually, by the bestialities of Svoboda and the many like him who tormented the Germans in their captive misery. The Czech speaking German woman who left her vivid account of the death march for posterity to read, should posterity ever care to read about atrocities _against_ the Germans, was one of those Svoboda chose to rape. And more than once. She made a vow to herself during that gruesome time. If, somehow, she survived this hell on Earth there was something she had to do. Something that had to be done. She would find a way. She _had_ to find a way. The German doctor that Svoboda had singled out to torture and murder on the death march? He was more than one among many of the German victims of Svoboda's savagery. Much more.

He was her father.

Jaroslav Svoboda must be made to pay for his war crimes.

And one day, finally, far away on the shores of Lake Susquah, he did.

### General Freiherr von Wittendorf

East Prussia

General Freiherr von Wittendorf was born in 1905. Too young for WWI. But not for his father and uncles, nor the father and uncles of the woman who would one day be his wife, Maria von Kalinske. They all served as officers in the Kaiser's Imperial German Army. Military service was a matter of honor and duty to the Junker aristocracy of East Prussia. It was unthinkable to shirk from it. Even von Wittendorf's maternal uncle, Lothar von Kalinske, a Lutheran minister, served as a regimental chaplain in France during the war and was wounded three times by enemy shell splinters. Others were not so lucky. One of von Wittendorf's uncles died in the mud at Passchendale. A cousin of his father was in Baron von Richthofen's squadron in France when his Fokker aircraft failed in mid air and plummeted to earth. He had no parachute. And a maternal uncle was captured in Russia and never heard from again. Freiherr's own father, Oberst Graf Lothar von Wittendorf, received a serious stomach wound at Belleau Wood and very nearly died. It was three full years before he recovered sufficiently to resume the life of an active country squire in East Prussia. There were many empty places in the Lutheran churches in East Prussia where once sat proud and sturdy Prussian men. But it was nothing compared to what would come hardly a generation later. WWII. The Holocausts. Plural. The one well known in the mainstream history books. And others not so well known in the mainstream history books. One of them warranting barely a mention to those who win the wars and write the history books.

The holocaust that engulfed the Germans of the east.

### Chapter 2

### Operation Hannibal

The Titanic. Though now over a century into the past, the tragic story of the sinking of that grand luxury liner, the largest ship afloat in 1912, still lingers in the public consciousness. More than 1500 people, 2/3 of those on board, perished in the frigid waters of the North Atlantic. Another Atlantic ocean memory locked in the public mind from the first half of the 20th Century is the heroic evacuation by the British Navy---at the cost of nearly three hundred sunken craft of all types--of a third of a million Allied troops from the beaches of Normandy at Dunkirk. Only a generation after the Titanic, the heroic successful British effort in less than a fortnight in May and June of 1940 to evacuate hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk is one of WWII's most remembered events. Though the public memory might now be fading, it is firmly ensconced in the pantheon of the collective heroic British historical memory. Never to be forgotten so long as there is a Britain to remember.

There was a second WWII evacuation of even greater magnitude than Dunkirk. Operation Hannibal. Operation Hannibal? You won't find bunches of English language library books about it, though it dwarfed the British Dunkirk operation. And part of Operation Hannibal was the sinking of the vessels, Wilhelm Gustloff, General von Steuben and Goya. Maritime disasters that, like Operation Hannibal to Dunkirk, far exceeded the Titanic disaster (or the sinking of the Lusitania in World War I.) Why is there so little in the public historical mind said about Operation Hannibal? Or the sinking of the maritime vessels Wilhlem Gustloff, General von Steuben and Goya? Though Operation Hannibal went far beyond Dunkirk in its operational effectiveness? And the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, the General von Steuben and the Goya went far beyond the tragedies of the Titanic or the Lusitania? So why such little public knowledge. Why? Because they were German. The Germans lost the war. The victors write the history books.

Including the lists of what should be remembered.

The horrors of the Russian colossus as it rolled over East Prussia were, unbelievable as it seems, even worse than what is recounted below from a Prague ethnic German. It was Genocide. Throughout the eastern German speaking communities. Genocide.

The fate of German women in 1945 _  
_Reported by: Helene Bugner  Report of June 7, 1946  (Prague)

From the 5th of May, 1945 onwards, the Germans in Prague were not allowed to leave their apartments. On May 9th I was knocked about by the janitor in my apartment, then, without luggage, led away in order to take part in the work of removing the barricades in the streets of Prague. My labour group consisted of 20 women, among them some 60 to 70 years old. We were in the charge of Professor Zelenka. When we stepped out of the house, Professor Zelenka handed us over to the mob with the following words: "Here are the German bitches for you." Calling us German whores, the mob forced us to kneel down and then our hair was cut with bayonets. Our shoes and stockings were taken off, so that we had to walk barefoot. With each step and at every moment we were inhumanly beaten with sticks, rubber truncheons etc. Whenever a woman sank to the ground, she was kicked, rolled in the mud and stoned. I myself fainted several times; water was poured over me and I was forced to continue working. When I was quite unable to do any more work, I received a kick in the left side which broke two of my ribs. During one of my fainting fits they cut a piece of about 4 square cm (about 0.6 square inches) out of the sole of my foot. These tortures lasted the whole afternoon. Among us were women far advanced in pregnancy and nursing mothers, who were ill-treated in the same way. In the course of 3 or 4 days one of the women had a miscarriage.

In the evening we went home. I was so disfigured from the maltreatment and tortures which I had suffered that my children no longer recognized me. My face was crusted with blood and my dress reduced to blood-stained rags; two women living in our house committed suicide in despair, another woman became insane. Our bodies were swollen and covered with black and blue marks, and all of us had open head wounds. Since none of us was able to move, we were kept in custody in a small apartment in our house for three weeks. During this time we were subjected to unendurable mental tortures by threats that our children would be taken away from us and that we should be deported to Siberia.

Three weeks later we were sent to the camp at Hagibor. There were 1200 persons lodged there in four barracks. All fell sick with hunger dysentery, for the diet consisted of a cup of thin water-gruel twice a day for children and for the grown-ups a cup of black coffee with a thin slice of bread morning and evening and a watery soup at noontime. The privies could be used only three times a day at certain hours, although everybody was suffering from dysentery. There was forced labour for everybody. Each evening the labour groups returned to the camp badly beaten up. Medical care was completely lacking. A German doctor, who was also a prisoner, did what was possible, but he had nothing, neither medicaments, bandages nor the most common instruments, as for instance a clinical thermometer; thus women who arrived at the camp with bullet wounds or other injuries had to remain virtually without medical attention. Epidemics of measles, scarlet fever, whooping-cough and diphtheria broke out, which could not be dealt with.

One day we were ordered to line up for roll call. We had to stand in the open air for seven hours, while a terrific thunderstorm with hail and a high wind, which unroofed two barracks, burst right over our heads. The very same day we were transported from the station in open coal wagons, which were in a bad state of repair. The space between us was so small that there was hardly room for us to stand. At 3 o'clock in the morning we arrived at Kolin while it was pouring rain. At Kolin we were lodged in the heavily damaged school. Two women died of exhaustion while marching from the station to this school. During the march we were struck repeatedly with rubber truncheons until almost everybody was bleeding. Next day we were taken from the school to the building of the Czech Red Cross. The Czech Red Cross nurse admitted groups of Russian soldiers to the camps each night and called their attention to several attractive women and girls, who were raped, sometimes up to 45 times a night, in the most inhuman and barbarous way. One could hear their desperate cries for help during the whole night. Next morning some of them showed the marks of bites on their faces, their noses were bitten off and they were lying there without any medical care, for in this camp also no professional medical attention was available.

After several days I was sent together with 45 other women, among them a woman with 6 small children, to a Czech estate, in order to work there. Here we stayed for 3½ months until all of us, including myself, broke down from exhaustion and debilitation. Receiving the same kind and the same amount of food as at Hagibor, we had to do the hardest agricultural work, even on Sundays. The children received the same food as the adults, without one drop of milk, so that three out of four died. All the children under a year old had already died in the camp in Prague.

While we were working we were watched by armed guards, who abused and tormented us every day. Became of my fractured ribs I was unable to do any work where I had to bend forward, therefore I hoed the turnips in a kneeling position. While I was working the guards would insult me and strike me. When my child, like the others, got scarlet fever and I implored the foreman to get the doctor, he simply told me, "The Národní výbor has ordered that Germans should not get medical attendance."

Every night the villagers sent groups of Russian soldiers to our lodgings, who raped the women. For 3½ months we lived in this way, working hard from sunrise to sunset, constantly mistreated and insulted, with no food worth mentioning, the children without control or care, scabby and full of lice, we ourselves delivered over to Russian soldiers during the night. Cleaning facilities were nonexistent, since we were not even allowed to have a pail. Besides vermin we all suffered from all sorts of open, festering wounds. I had one festering boil next to another on my right hand, the hand with which I had to work.

A doctor, who was one of our fellow prisoners, explained to me that he was not allowed to accept exhaustion as grounds for incapacity for work, otherwise he himself would get into very serious trouble. As a consequence of my fractured ribs I contracted pleurisy and was sent to Prague, in order to be transferred to Germany. When I arrived in Prague, the transfers had already been suspended and I stayed in a camp there until Christmas. The camp was so crowded that none of the inmates had enough room to lie down.

We and our children had to sleep in a squatting position on the bare floor, without straw, while the Czechs who had been interned were lodged in two barracks furnished with beds. Whenever foreign observers visited the camp, they were only taken into these two barracks.

The sanitary arrangements beggared description. Often there was no water for three days. Children and adults contracted scurvy of the mouth and festering abscesses. Oozing exanthemas, tuberculosis, spotted typhus, smallpox and children's diseases broke out. Every child had rickets. Women gave birth to children while wearing the same dresses and underwear they had been wearing for months. Most of the infants died. Only a few mothers were able to feed their babies.

In the camp at Prague there was a dark cell. Inmates of the camp were confined there for quite minor offences for as long as three days, without food.

As a result of an intervention by the British Embassy, by whom I had been employed as secretary for 12 years, I was released and sent to the town of Asch at Christmas 1945.

I am prepared to swear to the truth of these statements.

# Revenge

# Soviet propaganda spewed a constant stream of venom at the soldiers of the Soviet armies invading the German provinces. Revenge! Retribution! Avenge the evils perpetrated by the Germans in the Soviet Union. Evils that were all too ghastly real and have been well documented in the mainstream history books. The reaction to those evils, spurred on by official Soviet propaganda, was to spawn a second set of ghastly evils that are often barely mentioned in the mainstream history books. The revenge taken on the Germans by the invading Soviets. A widely respected United Nations human rights activist, Alfred de Zayas, who has both a PHD and a Harvard Law School degree, was the first to recount this second set of barbarities and be widely read in the West. De Zayas' intent was not to diminish in any way the horrific magnitude of the Jewish Holocaust. His intent was to document that another holocaust, against the Germans, had taken place and, although known to Western leaders, had been almost universally ignored. The reason? The victims were the hated Germans A concept eerily reminiscent of the racist Nazi view on the Jews. De Zayas' publications also include investigations of other human rights outrages, such as in Armenia and Yugoslavia.

# In his book, A Terrible Revenge, witness statements from among the many thousands on file in German Federal Archives are translated into English. Here is an excerpt from one of them, a report by a German Army captain, Hermann Sommer, when the Germans recaptured the Königsberg suburb of Metgethen after the Soviets had occupied it for three weeks.

# Metgethen

A number of troop companies reported to the fortress commander the discovery of several mounds of corpses situated quite close to one another. The commander, General Lasch, ordered a commission to investigate these discoveries. The commission reported that many similar piles of bodies were strewn throughout the area; but in two cases there were virtual mountains of bodies made up of ca. 3,000 women, girls, children and only a few men. A special commission of doctors, forensic investigators and foreign journalists was formed to establish identities and the circumstances of the deaths. The work was made difficult by the fact that the Russians had poured gasoline on the mounds of bodies and attempted to burn them. Nevertheless many of the dead were photographed. The pictures graphically showed the often savage circumstances under which these people had been murdered. On the basis of these pictures and of the reports made by the forensics team, the conclusion was drawn that the victims had been beaten and stabbed; in very few cases were persons killed by a shot to the base of the skull. A large number of bodies had the breasts cut off, the genitals stabbed through and were disemboweled..

The aftermath of the Soviet genocidal avalanche through the German speaking lands was recorded by American diplomat George F. Kennan, who later would be the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.

" _The disaster that befell this area with the entry of the Soviet forces has no parallel in modern European experience. There were considerable sections of it where, to judge by all existing evidence, scarcely a man, woman or child of the indigenous population was left alive after the initial passage of Soviet forces; and one cannot believe that they all succeeded in fleeing to the West... The Russians... swept the native population clean in a manner that had no parallel since the days of the Asiatic hordes."_

### Operation Hannibal

### II

By the last quarter of 1944 even the diehards in the German government were lucidly aware of what would happen to Germans in the eastern part of the Reich when the Russians broke through the German defenses. That had already been all too clearly and brutally demonstrated. The list of atrocities would go on and on for months--and, in places, even years--in a numbingly unending series of horrors. German propaganda made the most of the atrocities, of course, but the hard, bitter fact remained that they were real. All too terrifyingly real. As word spread among the German population panic galloped close behind. Escape! Flee! Get away from the Russians! But.....but how?

At this critical juncture in WWII, when most of the Germans in the path of the lethal vengefulness of the Russian colossus could have been safely evacuated to the west, the Nazi functionaries were at their bloody minded worst. Here was where many of the Nazi political leaders committed some of the worst of the war crimes of WWII. Not against captive, conquered peoples. Their own people. Germans. By refusing to allow the civilian population to evacuate in time these Nazi bastards, these strutting self-important opportunists and rabid ideologues, condemned millions of German civilians to the horrors of being overrun by the marauding Russians. And these same self important Nazi so-called dignitaries, contemptuously called by the German citizenry Golden Pheasants--Goldfasanen--because of their strutting in their gaudy uniforms, often were the first to sneak away to relative safety in the west.

One of the worst was Erich Koch, the Gauleiter of East Prussia, who refused to evacuate the civilian population and condemned the people of East Prussia to a literal hell on Earth, which resulted in an estimated quarter million civilian deaths, while cowardly sneaking away himself into hiding in western Germany where he would not be arrested until four years after the war. He was sent to Poland and years later tried as a war criminal. The sentence was death, but his ill health prevented it from being carried out. Imprisoned, but alive. The Nazi party stalwart who preached Hitler's philosophy of no surrender that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands, but himself cowardly ran away, lived on another forty years after the war and died of natural causes at the age of 90 in a Polish prison.

Hitler, ever more warped of mind, was the worst of the worst, refusing to allow evacuations, exhorting the entire German nation to fight to the death, condemning millions of his countrymen to death, rapine, robbery, beatings and slave labor while he remained safely encapsulated both in his mental fantasy world and his bomb proof bunkers and then finally, at the end, as did so many unnumbered thousands of other Germans, took his own life.

### Dönitz

Not all German leaders were as insensate or fanatical--or hypocritical--as Hitler and his Golden Pheasant toadies. Among these were Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz and his subordinates, General Admiral Oskar Kummetz and Rear Admiral Konrad Engelhardt. These men, along with many other German military officers and officials, recognized the dark horrors looming on the eastern frontiers of the Reich and took great risks in going against Hitler's belief that mass evacuations were unacceptable defeatism. A label that could, and often did, have lethal consequences for Germans of that dark national time. As the Russian Army launched its monstrous final offensives and cut huge numbers of German soldiers and civilians from escape by land, Dönitz, with the direct involvement of myriads of others, launched Operation Hannibal. There was some military sense to it, since evacuation of trapped combat troops could allow them to be redeployed elsewhere. Hitler resisted even that sensible idea, believing to the very end in his no retreat, fight to the last man philosophy. Whatever the deluded and possibly insane Hitler might have thought, the Grand Admiral and the other overseers of Operation Hannibal knew full that the vast majority of the evacuees were not soldiers, but civilians. Before it was over close to two million German soldiers and civilians were evacuated by sea where they would soon surrender to the western Allies and be largely free from the horrors of the Russians. And not just the Russians, but also their fellow vengeful Slavs. In the east the embittered twice betrayed Poles, and to the south and east, the chauvinistic opportunistic Czechs and the vicious Serb partisans. Not all the Slavs wield the hammers of revenge. Not even a majority. But enough. Enough to create a German holocaust. Millions of other Germans would not be so fortunate as the evacuees. They were overrun by the Russians and the other Slavs and the survivors filled the post war German archives with their individual tales of horror. It was as bad or--difficult as that might be to imagine--even worse than the supposedly fanciful tales of the utter barbarity circulating among the panicked Germans as the Russian juggernaut grew near. Many books have been written since, by far the most originally in German, about what happened to the Germans of the east. But there are some in English for those curious enough to look.

### Frieda Wedhorn

The document below is an excerpt from a family history site, Many Roads, from the days of the Vertreibung about a member of the family, Frieda Wedhorn.

The public domain web source is http://www.many-roads.com/2012/03/19/the-wedhorns-vertreibung/.

Frieda was one of the many civilian ethnic Germans incarcerated by the Poles and Soviets and used as slave laborers in concentration camp conditions as draconian as those of the Nazis. Only a minority survived. It would be a cruel fiction to say she was one of a lucky minority, yet Frieda was in fact one of that much abused minority. The first part of Frieda's story deals with the arrival of the Soviets, her rape by them and the robbing, abuse, disenfranchisement, murder and scattering of her family. The following is what happened to her after what was already a brutally harrowing experience.

Following Frieda Wedhorn's capture and incarceration by the Soviets in March/Apbril 1945 near Elbing, Westpreußen, she was transported by truck to Insterburg, Ostpreußen. From there, she was transferred to a cattle car on a train for her journey into the Soviet East; this trip took about two weeks. While traveling through the 'new' Poland, Soviet troops had to "protect" the German women on the cattle train from the attacks of marauding Poles.

_It became increasingly cold as the train moved Eastward. Every morning, the Soviet minders had to break ice off the train cars in order to open the doors and remove the corpses of the freshly dead German women/ prisoners. The rations for the captive German women consisted of hard bread, dry cheese and a bucket of water for drinking. There were only a few survivors by the time the train arrived at the Gulag._ _(Notes: The actual location of Frieda's incarceration remains unknown.)_

What is known with respect to Frieda's internment time and deportation is that she was incarcerated in two different labor camps and one POW Camp. The first labor camp was several hundred kilometers east of Moscow. In this camp, German women were forced to do heavy labor such as the manual unloading of coal from trains. Half of the approximately 800 German women in this camp died within the first six months that Frieda was interred. After about 12 months (perhaps in early 1946), Frieda was transferred to a second camp (Gulag). Her transfer was accomplished partly by train and partly by forced march. We know this happened in winter because Frieda recalls that she was forced to walk across the frozen Volga river. At the second camp, Frieda was forced to pile peat moss and/or still wet bricks for drying before they were fired. For a short time period, she was incarcerated in a third Gulag, this was a German POW camp where she cared for wounded and injured German soldiers. The conditions in each of the camps were horrific.

Shortly before being released in 1947, the few surviving German women, including Frieda, were forced to sign an unintelligible (to them) Russian document. Frieda remembers that the few survivors joked, they had probably just signed their own death sentences.

In the end, Frieda came away from her two plus year ordeal with a single document; it looks something like a birth certificate and is written in Polish. Every other material possession of Frieda Wedhorn was lost. Still somehow, she managed to escape with her life. She finally arrived and was released to a West German reception camp in Frankfurt/Oder in 1947.

Freida Wedhorn was but one of hundreds of thousands of ethnic German women to suffer similar fates. Many, if not most, did not survive to tell of what happened. But some did. Enough for the world to know. Freida's account is a skeletal, synopsized one. Many of the survivors' accounts--and there are tens of thousands of them in various archives, including the German Federal Archives--go far beyond the superficial to ghastly detail in what happened. The details are there. The individual cruelties visited upon the Germans by many thousands of otherwise ordinary seeming Slavs of the east. Names of some of the victims. Descriptions of the mass rapes, of the beatings, the robberies and repeated humiliations and degradations. Names and locations of the prisons and death camps where they were held. Even names of individual torturers. Despite the possibility of inflated claims and imperfect memories, there is such an avalanche of corroboration available that there could be doubt about what had happened. In the West only a handful listened. And even fewer cared. But in 1944-5, in the eastern German lands, as the Russian colossus loomed, there was hardly a sapient soul unaware of what loomed on the near horizon. One word was on everyone's mind. Escape! And for those many who didn't? Freida Wedhorn's fate. And worse.

Much worse.

### Operation Hannibal to the Rescue

Beginning in January, and continuing on until several days after the war officially ended in May, many hundreds of German ships of all sizes and descriptions, from fishing boats to former cruise liners to massive German Kriegsmarine (Navy) ships made repeated trips in the Baltic to ports still held by the German Army but cut off from the European mainland by the final great Soviet offensives. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers, many of them wounded, and probably well over a million civilians were evacuated through the dangerous waters of the Baltic to relative safety in northwestern coastal Germany or occupied Denmark. As many as two million people in all, snatched from the vengeful jaws of Russian retribution.

The evacuation was not without cost. German soldiers fought to the end to keep the ports open so that the evacuations could continue. Many died. The rest were captured. And, Russian captivity fully as brutal as German captivity had been to Russian prisoners of war, close to half of the German POW's would die in the camps. For the remainder of the refugees who had not been able to get on the evacuation ships in time a literal hell approached as the Russian spearheads burst upon them. Mass gang rapes, torture and execution of German soldiers, individual and mass murders. People rounded up, often with the men separated and led off to never be seen again, the young women loaded onto railway cattle cars eerily reminiscent of the Jew's fate a few short years earlier and perhaps in the very same railway cars. Most were not sent to extermination camps. At least not in the direct sense. They were sent to slave labor camps to work in factories, mines, farms, railways, where disease, malnutrition, maltreatment and the lack of medical care would kill many, if not most. After a year or two or five the emaciated survivors were repatriated to Germany. The German archives are also full of their melancholic, tragic recollections. Frieda Wedhorns by the tens of thousands.

There were also many losses at sea during Operation Hannibal. The evacuation did not go easily. Russian planes, Russian submarines and aerial mines laid by British aircraft sank many of the ships, killing thousands of evacuees who very probably were at the very moments just before their death rejoicing in relieved exhaustion at having escaped the Russians at almost literally the last moment. Instead they went by the thousands to watery deaths.

Over 150 German ships, from tiny to huge, were sunk by the Russians and the British.

The worst of these were the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, General von Steuben and Goya. A single Russian sub, the S 13, captained by Alexander Marinesko--who as the son of a Romanian father and Ukrainian mother, wasn't even a Russian--within a short ten day span in late January and early February of 1945 sank both the Wilhelm Gustloff and General von Steuben. A few torpedoes from the S 13 and at least 12,000 people went to their graves, a sizeable percentage of them, especially on the Wilhelm Gustloff, non combatant civilians. Later, in April, the Goya was sunk by the L-3, a Soviet mine laying submarine captained by a Ukrainian named Konovalov, who after the war found himself in the peculiar position of captaining a captured German sub in the Soviet submarine fleet and would one day be an admiral. As many as 7000 people, soldiers, many of them wounded, and civilians died on the Goya that grim April day in 1945.

Yet, thanks to the efforts of the German admirals organizing Operation Hannibal, along with the thousands of courageous sailors and civilians who actually manned the evacuation vessels, close to two million people were spared the horrors of Soviet revenge.

Admiral Karl Dönitz was among those in the top German leadership charged at the Nuremberg war trials. He was sentenced to ten years in prison. After he was released he wrote two books in his last years while living quietly in north Germany. Despite Operation Hannibal, the German government would only grant the former Grand Admiral a captain's pension. The Nuremberg trial labeled the former admiral a war criminal. And perhaps he was.

But not to the two million Germans he helped save.

### Alexander Marinesko

The fate of the captain of the lethal Soviet sub, the S-13, Alexander Marinesko, was predictable in the ruthless and uncompromising authoritarianism of the bloodthirsty Stalinist era Soviet Union. Future Nobel Laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and future Russian human rights activists Lev Kopelev, himself a Jew, found that dissenting in the Soviet Union, including remarking on Soviet brutality in East Prussia, quickly landed them in the Soviet Gulag. Marinesko's fate was not quite so dire, but he was something of an eccentric personality, possibly a non-conformist, who was prone to drinking, and was booted out of the Soviet Navy not long after the war ended. Ostensibly because of his drinking. Over the years he was gradually rehabilitated, the bulk of his reinstatement coming just before his death in 1963. In 1990 the Russians posthumously named him a Hero of the Soviet Union.

Was he a hero? Was he a war criminal? Nobel Laureate Günter Grass, himself with direct personal experience in the nebulous realities of wartime from being drafted into the Waffen SS and years later attacked for that by well fed armchair critics, put the idea into public print. He wrote a novel, Crabwalk, a fictional depiction of the sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff, portraying it as another of the great tragedies of the war. A tragedy. Not a war crime. A tragedy. The weight of historical hindsight likely validates Grass' viewpoint. The Wilhelm Gustloff, the General von Steuben and the Goya were all enemy ships during wartime, not marked as hospital ships, and as such reasonable targets for Russian submarines even had the Russians abided by the proscription against attacking marked hospital conveyances, which they didn't. That does not mean the Russians were not aware that large numbers of civilians were aboard the ships. Who knows what misgivings they might have had? But one fact remains that no amount of historical research can gloss over. Among the people who died on the Wilhelm Gustloff. Of those who drowned in the icy waters of the Baltic that frigid January night. Among the dead were children. Lots of children.

At least five thousand of them. Five thousand children. Screaming. Crying. Terrified. Drowning. Thousands of them. Utter horror. The ship's lights failing. Water streaming in. Adults screaming and crying like the children. And then, finally, silence.

Perhaps the Soviet sub S-13's captain, Hero of the Soviet Union Alexander Marinesko, knew he had killed five thousand children.

Which would be one hell of a damn good reason to dive into a liquor bottle.

### The Soviet Pilot Who Didn't

In the website LEMO, Lebendiges Museum Online, Manfred Bresler, who was a 12 year old youth in Breslau in 1944, fifty-five years later recounted his experiences as one of the millions of Germans who took to the roads west to avoid the horrors of the Soviet onslaught. He survived, and among his recollections was of a Soviet pilot who was the warrior antithesis of the Soviets who repeatedly attacked refugee columns. The young Bresler watched as a Soviet ground attack aircraft dropped down to target a German flak emplacement and make the beginnings of an attack approach. But then the pilot suddenly pulled away when the pilot apparently realized that numerous curious children had gathered around the German gun. The flak gunners themselves, as was the German military's policy of using teenagers to man flak guns, were likely little more than children themselves. They would all live for at least one more day, thanks to a Soviet who eschewed killing children. And if the pilot's unit commissar learned about it?

He probably would have made an immediate one way trip to the Gulag.

### Nuremberg

1945

The trials were held in Nuremberg. The reason? The obvious symbolism of the city being the site of the infamous Nuremberg Nazi mass rallies? Shove it down their goddamn arrogant murdering Nazi bastard throats? That might have been the popular conception, but it wasn't the primary reason. The first choice was Berlin, the capital of Nazi Germany. Especially for the Russians, who wanted to vaunt their victory in the very lair of the beast, their venomously reviled fascist enemies, the Nazis. But bombed out Berlin had no useable infrastructure to house the inmates and the necessary nearby court and support facilities. So the choice fell to the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg. That city, like all German cities and towns, was a bombed out pile of rubble. The imposing monumental Palace of Justice building had somehow largely escaped the bombing that pulverized the cities and towns and even villages of Germany and not at all coincidentally entombed more than a half million German civilians the Allies didn't even bother to euphemize as collateral damage.

Work crews set out to prepare an enormous courtroom, complete with balcony, that looked more like an austere auditorium than a courtroom. It was an austere, imposing place. Everything about it was grim and daunting. Surrounded by white helmeted MPs, twenty two of the most notorious prominent Germans deeply involved in the war, all of them labeled Nazis whether the political label fit or not, were housed in an adjacent prison and paraded every day to sit in the prisoners' dock. Some were civilians who were involved in the wartime economy. Some were diplomats. Some were military, army generals and navy admirals. Some were high ranking Nazi party officials, or from the Gestapo or the S.S. Only one of the top Nazis was among them. The Nazi top echelon, Goebbels, Hitler, Himmler, were all dead by suicide. Hitler's mistress cum new bride, Eva Braun, celebrated their honeymoon by dying with him. Fanatical Josef Goebbels went so far as to poison his own children before committing suicide with his wife. Heinrich Himmler tried to disguise himself and escape, but was caught and poisoned himself with a hidden cyanide capsule. Only Hermann Göring remained, a man who was once a war hero, seriously wounded in action, a fighter pilot ace in WWI with close to twenty victories who won the coveted _Pour le Mérite._ An award, known as the Blue Max, which was roughly equivalent to the American Medal of Honor.

Yet this highly decorated war hero embarked on a caliginous postwar path that led him to be second only to Hitler in the Nazi pantheon of evil. From war hero to war criminal. An undeniably bright man, with an IQ of 138 as measured by a German speaking American psychiatrist, he did not believe he was a war criminal, nor did he believe the Allies had any legal basis for trying Germans as war criminals, and was at times even eloquent in his defense. The Tribunal however was unconvinced and sentenced him to be hanged. His request to be shot, as befitted the soldier he considered himself to be, was denied. He somehow managed to obtain a cyanide capsule and killed himself in his cell before the sentence of death by hanging could be carried out. Many more trials were to follow. Some in Nuremberg. Others all over Europe. Many a German--and many a German ally--met the hangman or a firing squad in the first years after the end of the war. Even more never set foot in a courtroom and met their deaths at the hands of local lynch mobs. Many, perhaps most, deserved their fate. Many others managed to escape. And still others were overlooked intentionally because they had some value to the occupying powers. No one was about to hang the German rocket scientists. They were far too useful for something as obtusely minor as retaliatory justice. At Nuremberg, despite the high blown ideals the Allies espoused on justice and personal responsibility, even justice itself was relative. Hang Göring. But, using very questionable methods, Operation Paper Clip brought Werner von Braun and hundreds of other German scientists and technicians to the U.S. to build rockets for the Americans. Practicality trumped justice. Ironically, it was the Germans who long ago coined the word that best described it.

Realpolitik.

### The Mass Executions in the East

United Nations human rights investigator Alfred de Zayas wrote a number of books about atrocities and other wartime subjects. One of his books is an examination of the Germans' own war crimes investigators, _The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945_. Unsurprisingly, the thrust of the War Crimes Bureau was to document atrocities committed against the Germans and other peoples. And, this probably surprisingly to most, de Zayas found the War Crimes Bureau--with the whopping caveat that they didn't do much investigating of war crimes committed by Germans--to be relatively accurate and objective. The following is an excerpt about the German military's entrance into the Ukrainian city of Lvov and the discovery of Soviet atrocities.

"In the early hours of 30 June 1941 the Polish-Ukrainian city of Lvov was occupied by the 1st Mountain Division of the German 49th Army Corps. There was little resistance, since Soviet troops had already abandoned the area. The intelligence section of the 49th Army Corps observed in its first report, dated that same day: 'According to the account of Major Heinz, commander of a battalion of Regiment 800, thousands of brutally murdered persons were found in the Lvov prisons. The 1st and 4th Mountain Divisions are hereby ordered to assign journalists and photographers to cover these atrocities. The chief military judge of the Corps and the liaison officer of the Foreign Office with the High Command of the 17th Army have been sent to Lvov to carry out in-depth investigations."

De Zayas' book continues to document the Lvov and other massacres in considerable detail. Corroborating information is available in other sources, as well, though even today there are shrill voices seeking to deflect blame away from the guilty. On all sides.

### Juggernaut

The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June of 1941 caught the Soviets unprepared. They were forced to retreat. And as they retreated, from eastern Poland, the Ukraine, the Baltic countries, they faced what was euphemistically called a logistical or a political problem but was something far more sinister. Tens of thousands of political prisoners and other detainees were being held in NKVD prisons in those countries. What to do with them? The solution was typically Soviet.

They murdered them.

When the German armies overran the areas in eastern Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltics they began to discover places of mass executions where the huge numbers of corpses were as likely to still be unburied as to be in dumped into hastily dug mass graves. The city of Lvov was one of the worst. The haste of the NKVD executions meant that there were some survivors. And numerous other local witnesses, many of the Poles and Ukrainians having little love for the Russians. The Germans sent in investigators from a variety of sources. Local German military divisional judges, judicial operatives from other government agencies and the official Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau--as well as observers from non-German nations--to document what they had discovered in Lvov and other sites of mass executions.

Depositions were taken from numerous witnesses, both then and at later American and other post war investigations into Soviet war crimes. The depositions are numbingly hair raising. Numerous witnesses described courtyards filled with bodies, cellars with bodies stacked on top of each other half way to the ceiling and in at one least instance almost all the way to the ceiling. From cells and cellars, courtyards and mass graves, the bodies were removed by the thousands. Thousands and thousands and thousands. Grieving relatives tried to identify the dead. Many were too disfigured or too decomposed to be identified.

Many of the dead were tortured before being killed. As happened so many other places, eyes were gouged out, ears sliced off, breasts cut off, genitals mutilated. Scenes like these, some with a small number of victims, others with huge number as in Lvov, were repeated all over Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltics.

At the Nuremberg trials the Soviets attempted to hide their own NKVD's Lvov murders by lumping them together with the massacres actually perpetrated by the Nazi extermination units. And in so doing tried to claim the Germans had committed the Lvov massacres.

But there were those who knew the real truth of things.

### The Verdict

Enunciating carefully, the chief jurist pronounced the verdict with irrevocable judicial finality.

"The consensus of the court, sir, is that you are guilty as charged."

The courtroom was silent. Closely watched by the other four judges of the court, the chief jurist continued, in a solemn, sepulchral tone that befitted the occasion like the expensive kid gloves the accused wore in the cold Montana winters. "The sentence," the judge continued,

"is......Death."

The response from the accused? There was none. The man standing before the court was a mere surrogate. The accused? He wasn't there. He was in America. Seven thousand kilometers away. Effecting the death sentence at such a distance would be difficult. Difficult, but not impossible. No....

Not impossible.

### The San Joachim Valley of California

1974

"Good morning, my sweet little friends," a thick bodied, swarthy man, dappled in the first muted rays of dawn, said in a soft voice as he stared out at the long, straight rows of grapevines. "Time to wake up and get busy."

Armenian-American Haig Poochigian was up with the sun, already busy puttering and fussing and worrying among the linear rows of vines in his sprawling vineyards. Two generations earlier his family settled here, Fresno County in California's immense San Joaquin Valley. Half a world away from his family's ancestral home in Turkish Armenia. A home and a village violently ripped from them in the 20th Century's first great genocidal cataclysm that spawned the Armenian Diaspora. The family--those that survived--ended up half a world away in a dry mountain-ringed place reminiscent of Armenia. Typical of many Armenians, he hated the Turks with a preternatural intensity. Even more so when they refused to admit and accept guilt for what they had done to the Armenians. It was like the Germans denying the Holocaust. Ethnic cleansing, they called it now. Cleansing? Who dreamed up that stupid word? It was mass murder! Haig angrily shook his hands at the heavens when he thought of the bastard Turks and what they had done.

"Turks! Bastard Turks! Murdering bastard Turks!" Words that were as certain as winter snow in the nearby Sierra Nevada to rocket out of his lips at the first mention of any kind about the Turks. And he was very far from being alone in that opinion among the large Armenian population of California. Haig would be the first to tell you.

Time does not always heal.

The Poochigian survivors and many other Armenian refugees built a new life for themselves in the San Joaquin Valley. Mainstream media often called the San Joachim America's breadbasket. This time the mainstream media mostly got it right. Within a mile of Haig's place, besides the seemingly endless rows of grapevines, there were almonds and pecans, walnuts and pistachios, oranges and grapefruit, lemons and limes. Farther up the valley was the rich botanical tapestry of the colorful fields of the commercial flower growers. Along the flanks of the coast range to the west were huge tracts of cotton and fields of almost every imaginable species of vegetables stretching far to the north and south. There were alfalfa fields, huge diary farms, even feet lots. Cattle ranged the chaparral slopes cascading in descending waves of mountainsides from the towering Sierras to the east. It was a gorgeous Eden of a man made bounty. Haig sniffled and coughed, spitting at the ground. The towering mountain ranges on both sides of his farm--the coast ranges to the west and the Sierra Nevada to the east--were only dimly visible despite their close proximity. There was trouble in paradise. The valley was among the most polluted places in the United States. Haig could hardly even see the goddamn mountains. Poochigian, who was a long way from being reticent, would some mornings look to the east and west, see nothing but a gray haze and then spit violently at the ground.

"Goddamnit! Mountains where the hell are you?"

There was no answer.

Poochigian was a specialty grape grower. Not table grapes. Nor wine grapes. He grew raisin grapes and this was a crucial time for his crop. The grapes had been picked by a hard working itinerant crew of Mexican farm workers and laid out to dry in the paths between the rows of grapevines. The valley was an arid place in the summertime and, improbable as it sounded, farmers like Haig depended on that seasonal aridity. Not for crop growth, of course. Their grapes were irrigated by one of the human's race's greatest water management projects. It began with impounding the melt water from the huge winter snowfalls in the nearby Sierras and parceling the precious water out to the farmers and communities in the valley below. It was all measured, controlled, planned, an immense latticework of canals and subterranean manmade plumbing lying below and within the verdant fields. It was all controlled. Planned. But unplanned water? An out of season heavy rainstorm while the raisin grapes were drying in the sun could ruin a crop in a few minute's time. Poof! All too often rot and mildew could grab a foothold in the rain soaked raisins and eventually ruin the crop. A year's labor gone in a few minutes thanks to a freak rainstorm and a disastrous concatenation of all the wrong factors. Haig, and all the other raisin grape farmers, kept a hopeful eye on the sky and prayed for a succession of sunny, rainless days. Most years that's what happened. But he still watched the sky with a weather eye.

And that's when Haig saw the airplanes.

They were hardly unusual in the valley. Besides private and commercial aircraft, and a handful of crazy daredevil crop dusters Haig caustically referred to as "nutcases," there were also military aircraft. From Mather Air Force Base to the north, or the Edwards and China Lake bases to the south. Sleek F-16's often swooped low over the valley and still sometimes caught Haig's brother, WWII veteran Sabor Poochigian, in an unguarded moment, triggering a flashback that sent him diving for cover. But this was different. Haig was searching the sky for any hint of a buildup of rain clouds when he saw a small private plane flying to the north. As he watched a second small private plane came into view and rapidly closed on the first. It got closer and closer and Haig's curiosity turned to shock. The planes were so close that he yelled out in an unconscious reaction of hopeless impotency--

" _Look out!_ " Then, as Poochigian watched in a mixture of astonishment and horror, the first plane burst into flame and plummeted to the ground. " _Oh, God, oh God, oh God_ ," Haig muttered over and over as he ran to his house to call the Sheriff's Office.

He didn't see the second plane peel off and fly back to the south.

### Fresno County Sheriff's Department

Betty Johnson was almost beside herself. Her period had come on strong and she was on the edge of a migraine. She almost took a sick day, but decided she should save her sick days for an unforeseen emergency. Like when her eight year old son fell out of an orange tree in the back yard and cracked his spine. Frickin' daredevil kid. Thank God he turned out OK. No paralysis. With that in mind, Betty decided to save the sick day and grumpily went off to work at her dispatcher's job with the Fresno County Sheriff's Office. She walked smack into a growing chaos. The airplane crash that Haig Poochigian saw was seen by other people. Lots of other people. No sooner had Betty sat down to her switchboard than the phones began to ring. And ring. And ring.

"Jesus," she muttered under her breath. "Did everyone in the whole goddamn county see this goddamn plane crash?"

Betty quit counting the phone calls after the first dozen.

### Deputy Heraclio 'Buddy' Gonzalez

"What?" Buddy said, frustrated. "Don't you speak some English? My Spanish ain't so hot." Buddy Gonzalez was the first Fresno County Sheriff's deputy to reach the crashed airplane. The fires of hell, was Buddy's first thought when he saw the inferno of the burning aviation gas from the burst fuel tank. It was burning so fiercely there was zero chance of survivors. When Buddy pulled up in his Fresno County Sheriff's cruiser there were a half dozen Mexican farm workers already there. They were working in an almond orchard less than a hundred yards from where the plane crashed. The Mexicans rushed to the crash site and several of them tried to get to the plane and pull loose the occupants. The flames were just too intense. Anyhow, Buddy figured, common sense told anyone who saw the crash that there wouldn't have been a snowball's chance in hell of any survivors even without the intense fire. As Buddy stared at the blazing hulk of what had been only a few minutes before a sturdy Cessna 172, he knew something else. He damn well wasn't gonna climb into any kind of airplane anytime soon.

### The FAA

Guido Portelli got the call while he was midway through a bowl of Wheaties and tangentially watching TV news coverage of rioting in Greece. He wasn't paying much attention. Weren't those fractious Greeks always rioting over something or other? They were damn near as impossible as his own ancestral people, the Italians. Not that Portelli believed the volcanic Mediterranean temper was something to be ashamed of. He thought it gave depth and color to their ethnic identity. He laughed at some callow remark a blow-dried TV reporter said about the Greek rioting, then glanced at his watch. Another ten minutes and he'd be heading off for his job in the Sacramento office of the FAA. The voice on the phone put an abrupt end to whatever plans he had for the day.

"Hey, Guido, man," Tim Harmosek said to his sometimes friend and long-time co-worker. Guido squinted at the sound of the voice. There was a touch of something vaguely suspicious in Tim's tone that Portelli couldn't quite identify. Smart ass? Smugness? But, knowing Tim, it was more likely some kind of angle. "Got one down near Fresno," Harmosek said. "Boss says this baby is yours." Guido's gut rumbled. And not from the Wheaties. Storm clouds were popping up on the workday horizon.

Portelli was at the crash site less than two hours later. One thing was already clear enough. Tim Harmosek had dodged this crash, knowing what Portelli, as did Deputy Gonzalez two hours earlier, immediately realized. This was going to be one tough son of a bitch to figure out.

But none of them could even begin to imagine just how tough it would be.

The FAA folks were mostly seasoned pros. They had their share of locked in sinecure seekers, like all government agencies did, but learned to live with them by deflecting them into the more menial parts of the job. The pros soon figured out what the plane was and who was in it from a flight plan filed in Los Angeles County. The FAA main office in Sacramento was soon on the line to Guido. The caller? Tim Harmosek.

"Cessna 172. Tail number N571B," Harmosek said, reading from his cursive scratchings on a legal pad among a scattering of papers on his desk. Guido glowered as Harmosek spoke, still pissed at Tim dodging the bullet on this crash. It should have been his turn to cover it. "Plane is owned by a guy named Swillington. Frederick Swillington. Some kind of big shot. Has his own company. He filed a flight plan to Sacramento from L.A. County and took off from a small private airfield. Looks like he was alone." Harmosek paused for a moment while he deciphered his notes, his handwriting at times only barely legible, especially when, like today, he was writing in a hurry. Portelli had a good idea why Harmosek halted. He'd seen him puzzling over his own handwriting plenty of times.

"Having trouble with reading Sanskrit again, Tim?" He said with a noticeably sardonic tone. "Forget your Rosetta Stone today?" Harmosek, however, was so enmeshed in trying to read his notes that he either didn't hear or ignored Portelli.

"Got it!" He suddenly said, more to himself than to Guido, and continued with his investigative findings.

"The plane never arrived and the FAA air controllers out of the Sacramento airport figured out that must be the plane that crashed. One of them saw the plane disappear from the radar screen. She also saw a second plane and watched as it turned and flew to the south. Then that plane, too, fell towards the ground and disappeared from the radar screen. But it reappeared, then disappeared again. Engine trouble? Did it crash?" Harmosek sounded genuinely puzzled. He wasn't. His theatrical side sometimes elbowed in on the job to "liven things up," as he would put it. He continued. "Before a search could be initiated a Los Angeles air traffic controller saw a small plane suddenly appear on the screen from the north, disappear, then reappear again and fly directly into Mexico. Both air traffic controllers figured out what had happened. The little plane had been trying to fly under the radar. Almost certainly to avoid detection. Hardly unusual this close to the Mexican border. Smugglers did it often--as you well know, Guido man. But with one great big caveat. All of them were flying north." Harmosek paused again, for touch more of his dramatic emphasis.

"But this plane was going _south_."

### Swillington

Cedric Swillington was CEO and chief financial officer of Swillington Medical, an HMO--Health Management Organization--that served a group of clinics and hospitals and their employees throughout central and southern California. And making the big bucks. The son of Dust Bowl refugees from Oklahoma who came to California full of hope and found only a hard life of prejudice, tent cities and grueling work in the farms and orchards, he went off to harrowing combat in WWII and came back with the survivor's zeal to do something meaningful with his life. He'd acquired an iron-willed determination to succeed. And he did. His GI bill got him an accounting degree and then an MBA. He started working for a California agribusiness corporation and soon became a rising star. But being some company's rising star wasn't what he wanted and he eventually left to start his own business. He had done well. Swillington was a millionaire with his own private airplane, a business office and a luxury condominium in southern California and a fifteen hundred acre ranch in the Bitterroots of Montana where his wife and kids lived away from the congestion and pollution of southern California.

His elderly parents, salt of the earth folk who still looked and talked like the Dust Bowl Oklahoma farmers cum hardscrabble California Okie farm workers they were, could hardly contain their pride in their eldest son's success. Even if they didn't have the first notion over how the hell he had done it. His mother had always thought Cedric a slow and inept youth who probably wouldn't make it through high school. She was wrong.

Dead wrong.

The crash recovery crew arrived and gathered up the Cessna's burned carcass after first doing a thorough on site crash scene examination. A flatbed took the wreck to a FAA warehouse in Sacramento where a crash forensics team would set in to work on it. The remnants of Cedric Swillington were gathered up by the Fresno County Coroner's office and taken to the morgue where a pathologist would examine the fetid pile of charcoal that had so recently been the successful millionaire entrepreneur, Cedric Swillington. After the remains were definitely identified as Swillington's, the local police department where his next of kin lived would have the grim task of notifying the family of the death. A dour Bakersfield police officer for his parents, a lanky Native American deputy sheriff for his wife and children in Montana. The sad news was passed to the family late that same night.

The following morning the first phone call surprised Guido Portelli more than anything else ever had in his entire life. Even that long past but still numinous summer evening when everyone's favorite babe, cheerleader and homecoming queen Carmelita Hermosa, went down on him in the back seat of his old Chevy and opened Guido's somewhat virginal eyes to a whole new world. The voice on the phone was the Fresno County pathologist, Dr. Sanjay Patel. And what he had to tell Portelli damn near knocked the FAA investigator off his chair.

_"What_?" Portelli said, not believing what he'd heard. "You said _what_?" Dr. Patel was expecting Portelli's surprise. His voice was patient. But with more than a hint of bemusement.

"I think you heard me correctly, Mr. Portelli. I said that the corpse from the plane, Mr. Swillington, wasn't just the victim of a plane crash and a fire. Patel paused a moment, carefully enunciating his words so as there could be no mishearing of his findings.

"Swillington was shot. Three times. In the back, shoulder and head."

" _Shot?_ " Portelli exclaimed. "Shot? But how? Someone pumped some bullets into him as the plane burned?" Now even Dr. Sanjay Patel sounded perplexed.

"No, Mr. Portelli. These were not postmortem wounds. He was shot before the crash and fire." Guido Portelli sat straight up in his chair.

"You mean he was shot in the airplane?" Patel nodded his head in a slow, pensive affirmation as he spoke into the phone.

"You're the investigator," the doctor said. "But it sure looks that way to me."

Guido Portelli didn't get much sleep that night.

Then came the second phone call, early the following day. Blair Goodsell, the hotshot FAA technical analyst who was always pulling rabbits out of his forensics hat with no little flair--between Goodsell and Harmosek Guido was bombarded with plenty of co-worker drama--was taken aback at Portelli's lack of surprise.

"Guido! Didn't you hear me? I said somebody machine gunned that airplane and shot it down. Good God, man, doesn't that shake you up some? Who the hell would ever have expected it?"

"Me," Guido replied, "for one. The pathologist told me the guy had been shot in the airplane. I figured that's what brought it down." Goodsell, who usually would have been peeved if one of his histrionic moves was outflanked, was instead stunned.

"Shot? The guy was shot? Inside the airplane? Jesus, Guido. It was like a fucking old fashioned dogfight in the skies right over the fucking middle of California."

"Not quite," Portelli answered. Goodsell's eyebrows raised quizzically.

"How so, man?" Portelli's voice sounded thoughtful.

"I don't think one of the dogs even knew he was in a dogfight." A pause. "This was an ambush." Another pause. "Like they used to say in the old west, a bushwhacking. But this one was in the sky, not in the bush."

" _Sweet Jesus!_ It's like a murder mystery," Goodsell said, whistling softly.

"A fucking murder mystery up in the wild blue yonder right over our fucking heads!"

### The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau

Counterintuitive as it may sound to eyes and ears accustomed to the mainstream history publications about WWII, the German government established its own war crimes investigative agency at the beginning of WWII. It was officially known by the German tongue twister of a name, Wehrmacht-Untersuchungsstelle für Verletzungen des Völkerrechts. Or, roughly paraphrased into English, the War Crimes Bureau. Though there will be many, conditioned to disbelief of Nazi era publications because of the pervasiveness of Nazi propaganda, who will doubt this, the War Crimes Bureau was reasonably objective and professionally competent, thorough and accurate. The Bureau was staffed with trained lawyers, judges and investigators, not a bunch of untrained half-assed Nazi ideologues. The head of the Bureau, Judge Johannes Goldsche, who was deputy chief of the Bureau's predecessor in World War I, had little use for Hitler's thugs and refused to join the Nazi party. Under his leadership the Bureau remained one of the few institutions in Nazi Germany not to be seriously manipulated by the Nazi party. Goldsche and his associates approached with objective open minds investigations into the incendiary subject of war crimes.

The intent of the Bureau was to investigate and document war crimes. Both by and against Germans. Repeat. Against Germans. Possibly with the further intent of prosecuting war criminals after the war was over. A war which Germany would have to have won for the trails to go forward. Germany lost the war and there were no international war crime trials conducted by the Germans of Allied war crimes.

Prosecuted or not, a huge body of evidence was accumulated by the War Crimes Bureau, the vast majority of it having to do with Russian atrocities. There were very few reports of atrocities in the early years of the war with the West. That changed with the invasion of Russia. The reports of Russian atrocities almost immediately flooded the offices of the German War Crimes Bureau. There were, as the history books so clearly have shown, numbingly numerous and horrendous atrocities committed by the Germans. There can be absolutely no excuse or justification for the German war crimes. Their massive war crimes are indisputable. They have been thoroughly and repeatedly examined in both the professional and popular media. Atrocities committed by the Germans.

But not the atrocities _against_ the Germans.

Severe maltreatment of German soldiers  
returning from Russian captivity _  
_Reported by: Emil Hulla  Report of August 21, 1946  (Brünn)

On June 23rd, 1946, I arrived at Brünn together with 88 prisoners of war, belonging to a transport which was returning from Russian captivity. At Brünn we were whipped by three Czech soldiers and two railway-men in the most atrocious manner. They beat us severely with wooden clubs. Then we were forced to lie down on the ground, and they trampled on us. One man was maltreated so badly that his bowels evacuated themselves. Two others were ordered to lick up the excrement. We had to box each other's ears and were beaten by the Czechs at the same time. We were all of us in poor physical condition, mostly suffering from scrofula, since we had been released on account of sickness from Russian prison camps. From Brünn we were taken to the Kurim camp.

### Chapter 4

A Baby Is Born

Germany 1946

She died the following morning, holding tight to her empty breast the tiny premature baby boy who pushed her weakened body over the edge and beyond recovery. Just two days later she would have reached her sixteen birthday. When that day came her mother, her aunt and her surviving little sister were still crying. The baby was still alive, but only by the thinnest of margins. It was a grim time to be a German.

Even grimmer to be a German woman.

### Buffalo Soldier

### 1976

George Washington Carver Caldwell was a local hero. At least to the black folk where he had his family roots in Virginia. He was the grandson of Old Dominion antebellum plantation slaves and hardscrabble raised on a played out small farm in rural Fairfax County. He had his first and only run in with the local law when he tore down a replica Confederate battle flag on a nearby cemetery that was the final resting place for a score of Rebel dead. He was only fifteen at the time. The black folk cheered. The white folk jeered. Under the weather eye of the Roosevelt administration the Old South was already beginning a glacial but nevertheless inexorable change. He got only a vitriolic scolding from an aging juvenile court judge. A generation earlier it would have gone much harder on George Washington Carver Caldwell. And two generations earlier it might well have ended with him dangling from the thick limb of a stolid hickory tree. But this was 1940 and the country's eyes were on far more weighty subjects than a kid ripping down a Confederate flag. That was an old war. A new one was on the horizon.

Hardly a year later the war left the horizon and landed on America's front step at Pearl Harbor. Caldwell tried to lie about his age and enlist in the Army, but his mother found out and marched down to the recruiting station red hot with maternal rage. It was the first time the young New York recruiting sergeant had a righteous tongue-lashing from an irate black Southern mother. He took the lesson to heart immediately. When George Washington Carver Caldwell finally did hit the age of eighteen, the recruiter--by then it was a new man, but he had been warned about Caldwell's mama--made damn sure Caldwell was in fact of legal age to enlist. It was mid-1943 and the war was half over. But the heavy combat in Europe had yet to begin and Caldwell managed to get himself assigned to the segregated 761st Tank Battalion. He sometimes drove and other times manned the cannons and machine guns of the battalion's Sherman tanks. He fought in the last battles in France, at the Battle of the Bulge and in the invasion of Germany, ending the war with General George Patton's 3rd Army in Austria. With the coming of peace, Caldwell was assigned to an occupation unit stationed near Bamberg, Bavaria. Six months later he went home to an America that was far less enthusiastic about black veterans than the white ones. Still, the returning black veterans had proved their point. They could fight just as well as the whites. It wouldn't be long before President Truman permanently desegregated the American military.

Caldwell remained in the newly integrated Army for twenty-five years, serving in the Korean War and again in Viet Nam. He retired from Fort Huachuca, an old Indian-fighting post in far southeastern Arizona that Caldwell was proud to say had once been garrisoned by the famous all black Buffalo Soldiers units, and continued to work intermittently at contract jobs on the base. He spent much of his spare time on a passion he discovered later in life. Hiking and camping. His children were all grown and well into their own adult lives and his beloved wife Martha gone from a rare form of bone cancer. Even his last pet, a gray-muzzled lame and nearly blind German Shepherd he called Patton, had died. There was nothing to bind Caldwell to his home and he was frequently gone for several days at a time. On a lovely sun-spangled September morning in the year 1976 he once again prepared to set out to hike the mountains.

He never came back.

### Spelunking

Jesus Maria Villarubias was a rarity among the Mexicans. Some among them who knew the man were flabbergasted by his seemingly frivolous hobby when so many of them lived a hand to mouth existence that left them little time or energy for anything beyond daily survival. Jesus Maria Villarubias was an avid spelunker. A cave snooper. Whenever he could grab some free time from his managerial job with BancoMexico in the copper mining town of Cananea--just a short drive into Sonora from neighboring Arizona--he headed out to the rugged mountains along the northern Sonora and Chihuahua border looking for caves to explore.

Sometimes Jesus would cross the border at one of the Sonora border towns, usually Nogales or Naco, or, less frequently, at Agua Prieta. Sometimes he'd even cross over and take the interstate on the Arizona side to far off San Luis to snoop the caves and try to grab some photos of the mountain goats in the Kofa Mountains hard by the California border. Jesus had studied in the United States at the University of Arizona in Tucson and had many American acquaintances, including a few close friends. One of them, towering William 'Too Tall Bill' Sando, was a forestry graduate from the U of A and worked as a ranger in the vast Coronado National Forest that encompassed a host of mountain ranges in Southern Arizona. Despite his lanky height, Bill was also a fervent spelunker and he and Jesus often met in both Arizona and Sonora to head off into the mountains looking for caves to explore. Or, in their words..

"Do some spe-lunkin'."

"Hey, Jessie," Too Tall said into the phone. "Got a new one for you." A calculated pause to stimulate Jesus' interest. "An _unexplored_ cave."

" _Unexplored_!" Jesus shot back. "When do we leave!"

"As soon as you can make it," Too Tall answered.

That was all Jesus needed. The intriguing phone call from Bill fired up Jesus' spelunking soul and hurtled him into excited action. Two days later, on a cloud-flecked early December morning, he drove his Mexican Volkswagen through the dusty impoverished little town of Naco and through the border crossing that led into the Arizona town of the same name. Arizonan Naco wasn't as bleak as its Mexican twin, but its better days were long past. Shabby and shuttered old west style buildings lined the street in mute testimony to faded glory. Jesus knew the history of the town, especially the Mexican side. It had once been a wide open wild west town, with an international railway crossing, a main street full of cantinas and bordellos and restaurantes, where the miners and ranchers and farmers and other excitement seekers from the nearby U.S. towns of Bisbee and Tombstone and soldiers from Fort Huachuca came to recreate and fornicate. There had even been a huge battle there during the Mexican Revolution in the early 20th Century. Supposedly the first time in history a bomb was dropped from an airplane happened during the Naco fighting. Now it was all past. The town was somnolent. Or so it seemed. They were still in the shadows. But they were there. In the musty dim corners of the cantinas. In the ramshackle ejidos among the cottonwoods lining the north flowing little San Pedro River. In the pinyon and juniper shaded canyons of the towering San Jose Mountains that loomed over the town. The narcotrafficantes. They already were gathering. They smelled money. Their eyes and then their feet followed their noses.

North.

Jesus knew about the trafficantes. All Mexicans did. It was part of life in Mexico. And could he blame them, condemned to poverty the way so many were in the plutocratic oligarchy of supposedly democratic Mexico? Besides, they intentionally maintained a low profile and kept to themselves. Ordinary Mexicans had little direct contact with them, or at least with their illicit activities, although almost everyone knew of someone who was involved. And, so long as things continued that way, with the trafficantes staying below the cultural radar, everyone just ignored them and looked the other way. Ne modo. Never mind. At least for now. And for the future? It was still the future.

That was the general attitude. But a sapient few among them already sensed the seething malevolence that lurked just over the smuggling horizon.

And they were terrified.

Jesus drove through Naco and turned west towards another towering mountain range, the Huachucas. A new town, once simply called Fry but now renamed with the synthetic chamber of commerce inspired Spanish name of Sierra Vista--the area was part of the Gadsden Purchase from Mexico and never was settled in the old days by either Spaniards or Mexicans--was spreading along the flanks of the historic range. Here was Fort Huachuca, an old Indian fighting fort. Here was the San Pedro Valley, part of the home range of the Chiricauhua Apaches of Cochise and Geronimo. Here was the famous old west town of Tombstone. Here was the heart of the old west. And here was the new town Sierra Vista and the new west. And here also was the Sierra Vista ranger station.

Too Tall Bill was waiting.

"You ready, pardner?" Too Tall Bill drawled as he grabbed his friend's hand in the parking lot of the ranger station. "Fer some good ol' spe-lunk-in'." Villarubias grinned back at his old college buddy.

"Andale, pues, Hombre! Get yer gringo butt in gear."

And they did.

They drove north on Highway 92 in Bill's battered old Ford pickup, past the town of Sierra Vista, too new to have the patina of time and character, past a peculiar scattering of chaotically scattered dingy low buildings called Huachuca City and into the wide degraded grassy rangelands of the San Pedro Valley. Mountain ranges ringed the valley. The San Joses to the south in Mexico, the Mules and Dragoons to the east, the Huachucas to the west and, finally, a smaller, lower mountain range with dramatic plunging bluffs called the Whetstones, again on the western flank of the valley. As Bill's pickup climbed a long rise a spectacular view opened up all around them. Jesus was staring out to the east towards the Dragoon Mountains where long ago the Apache chief Cochise was secretly buried by his people. Sando startled him out of his reverie when the lanky ranger started talking.

"I was up here hunting on my day off last week," Bill said to Jesus, without looking away from the road ahead. "I kinda lost track of time and before I really noticed it twilight was falling fast." He glanced over at Jesus. "You know how durned quick it can get dark when the sun drops behind the mountains." Jesus shook his head and grunted agreement. He'd been caught by surprise by those abrupt sunsets more than once. After the first time he never failed to have a working flashlight with him when he was out stomping the boondocks. Everyone in the desert Southwest knew it was not a good idea to be stumbling around in the dark in rattlesnake country

"Anyhow, Jessie," Bill continued in the slow and easy Texas drawl he'd inherited from his state-swapping parents, "I was just about to head back to my truck when I saw a strange sight close to the flank of the mountains. Something was rising out of the ground. Christ, I thought to myself at first, it's a goddamn wild fire. But then I looked closer. And looked again. What was it?" He reached an elbow over and tapped Jesus in the side. "This was no fire. It was bats! That's what it was. Bats! Not thousands, like in some spots in the mountains. But still a hefty number." Recognition lit up Jesus' spelunker's eyes. Bats coming out of the ground? Had to be a cave. Jesus looked intently at Bill, speaking in the English he had perfected at the University of Arizona years earlier. A questioning look at Sando seeking the confirmation that he knew had to come.

"Cave?" Sando slapped a hand on the pickup's steering wheel.

"Yep! I went there the next day and double checked. A cave all right. Didn't go in, thought I'd wait and do it with you. Has a very small opening. But sure as hell a cave big enough to hold a bunch of bats."  
"This cave," Villarubias asked. Did you know of it being there before? Bill turned and flashed a grin at his old college buddy. "No." A bigger grin. "And neither had anyone else. Without giving away the exact location, I did some checking. No one knew of a cave anywhere near there." One more grin, one fully as broad and gleeful as the time he'd come back to their U of A dorm room after a date with voluptuous Magdalena O'Rourke, the exact details of which he refused to reveal but which Jesus didn't have to rack his brain much to figure out.  
"We got ourselves a gen-u-ine virgin here, buddy. A previously unknown and unexplored cave!" Bill's grin looked as though it was planted permanently on his face.

"Ausgezeichnet!" Responded Jesus in the German of his Austrian grandfather who emigrated between the two World Wars.

"Ausgeewhatzit?" Sando said, planting a puzzled look on his face. Jesus reached over and good naturedly whacked Sando on the shoulder.

"You know damn well what it means. We both took German at the U of A to fulfill our language graduation requirements."

"Oh!" Sando said, acting surprised. "There is that." Then he reached over to tap on Jesus' shoulder. "You already knew German." Another tap on the shoulder. "You never opened a book and still pulled down an 'A', you sneaky Mexican devil."

"Gringo Pendejo." Jesus muttered. A tongue in cheek epithet that needed no translation

They took the basic gear with them. Ropes. Protective clothing. Spelunking helmets with lamps attached. Flashlights as backups to their helmet lamps. A small shovel and a handful of other tools. And a camera. Bill went first, pretzeling his angular body through the narrow opening. The compactly built, agile Jesus, captain of the U of A's soccer team in his senior year, came right behind him. At first they blinked at the contrast in brightness. A shaft of light coming through the small entrance swallowed in the darkness of the cave, their helmet lamps playing drunkenly on the interior as they regained their footing, the utter blackness beyond. They couldn't see any bats. But they could smell the distinct acidic odor of bat guano. And something else. Another odor. One they couldn't quite identify. The narrow entrance of the cave almost immediately opened into a large cavernous room. They stepped into it, carefully, mindful that there might be some dusty bit of archaeological or historic interest lying, untouched for decades, centuries or even millennia, on the cave floor. Both men had found Native American artifacts on earlier spelunking expeditions in northern Chihuahua. Jesus's helmet light danced on the ground before him with the motion of his walking. It bounced over something that didn't seem to fit with the dusty pebbled cave floor. He stopped, swinging his helmet back to where he had seen the anomaly on the cave floor. The light stopped, settled on the object, and stayed there. Jesus Maria Villarubias froze in place, speechless, staring at the shape on the ground.

George Washington Carver Caldwell was no longer missing.

### Cochise County Sheriff's Department

Grant Wilson hailed originally from Staten Island, where the mixed race Grant--white father, black mother--was a disinterested scholar but kept his grades up enough to letter three years running, the last year as an all conference linebacker, on his high school football team. Grant loved New York's excitement but he didn't love either the congestion or the climate. After a couple of years at a community college he did a three year enlistment as an Army MP and ended his hitch as a military policeman at century-old Fort Huachuca in Cochise County in the scenic highlands of southeastern Arizona. Grant loved the place from the first day he got there. The wonderful abundance of sunny days, the mild winters that were more like long and lazy Indian Summers to his winter raised New York sensibilities, the towering mountain ranges that still were home to bears and mountain lions and the broad grassy valleys stalked by noisy ranging gangs of the small wolves they called coyotes. It was a whole different universe than the one he'd been raised in back on Staten Island and he wasn't about to go back to the crowded and cacophonous urban world that held his childhood memories. He took his discharge at Fort Huachuca and joined the Cochise County Sheriff's Department. He was a man who had found the place he was meant to be and damn well intended to stay there.

Eight years later he was the department's senior investigator and a sergeant on the short list for lieutenant. When the call came about a body in a cave south of Interstate 10, he was the closest investigator to the location, just a few miles away in the fading old railway town of Benson investigating a series of burglaries just outside the city limits. He hit the accelerator of his unmarked Crown Vic, pulled onto the interstate to the Highway 92 turnoff and sped south on the narrow two lane potholed blacktop road that led to the town of Sierra Vista and beyond. Within ten minutes he saw the flashing lights of the marked squads that had initially responded to the call, plus two of the cash-strapped Benson Fire Department emergency response vehicles. One of them an ambulance that, in the words of the EMT who drove it, "is so far over the goddamn hill the hill is nowhere in sight."

A few more minutes and Deputy Wilson was at the location where the body was found. He didn't know yet whether it would be a crime scene or not. But he did know one thing immediately when he squeezed through the narrow entrance into the cave and went over to shine his flashlight on the face of the corpse. This man was no stranger. He knew him. It was Caldwell, an acerbic retired MP sergeant he'd met years ago at Fort Huachuca. What was he doing here in this isolated, unmarked cave? He'd heard Caldwell was an inveterate hiker. Had he fallen into the cave, broken a leg and not been able to get out? What the hell had happened to him? And what killed him? Suddenly Sergeant Wilson let out a loud involuntary gasp.

He had just noticed the chains and shackles.

### Abel Gutierrez

Abel Gutierrez was born in a timeworn ejido of ancient one room adobes where both indoor plumbing and electricity were known only through the tale-spinnings of infrequent travelers. The Twentieth Century was already into its third decade but the little scattering of humble dwellings called Santa Isabel seemed to have gotten stuck in the portal into the Nineteenth. It was a primitive place. Poor. And drab. The village. Not the scenery. The rugged flanks of the Sierra Madre Occidental loomed over their poor little settlement. The dark towering peaks seemed to hang over the village with a sense of menace that was not always merely fanciful. But those same intimidating jagged mountains--whose peaks were so often lost in the clouds--also graced Santa Isabel with the basic necessities of life. Water shed from the clouded mountaintops came down in dependable streams to sate the thirsts of the villagers and their animals and irrigate the fields of corn and beans, tomatoes and green vegetables. There was bountiful wood from the thick pine and oak forests for heating and cooking, building and making tools. But the mountains were far more than just a source of water and wood. Wildlife abounded. Wolves and bears still lurked in its canyons, mountain lions prowled the peaks and even the legendary tigre--the jaguar--was believed to still prowl the deepest mountain fastnesses. The people of the village said with utter seriousness that a remnant of the legendary Apaches lived on in the mountains, as furtive and as reclusive as the legendary jaguar. The jaguar was more than just a legend. Abel had twice seen the bodies of the huge cats killed by ranchers avenging their lost cattle.

And the Apache? No more than a good yarn to spin at a communal campfire? Abel did not know. Not until years later, well after he finished his residency at the University Medical Center in Tucson, when he met an old man named Diego during a visit to relatives of his new bride in the northern Sonora town of Bavispe. Just by chance overhearing a comment about a passing man by a pair of elderly Mexican women, Abel stopped and politely asked them a question. Did they just refer to the limping gray-haired man disappearing around a corner as an Apache?

"¡Si!" Both adamantly said in near unison, their dark eyes unreadable in the deep shade of an awning over the storefront of the busy Farmacia del Centro Abel had just left. One of them adding "El Viejo es Apache. ¡Por Cierto!" And so it was with other older people in the town he asked about the man. They all were insistent that Diego was an Apache, yet, like the two women outside the Farmacia, they all left him with an unsettling feeling of something left unsaid. Could there be truth to the legends of his childhood in Santa Isabel? A few more questions and he learned where the old man Diego lived.

With a bag of carne asada tacos from a nearby street vendor and a six pack of cold Tecate from a corner mercado in hand, Abel found the man sitting in a ancient battered armchair outside his squalid dirt-floored adobe hut absently puffing on a hand rolled cigarette. Abel was not a man easily surprised, but he was startled at the way the old man acted as though he was expecting him. The old man motioned at Abel to pull up a second ancient battered chair leaning against the crumbling front of the adobe house. The caps popped off two of the cold Tecates and both men drank deeply. Each took a taco. Abel gradually realized it was a fine autumn afternoon and he was on vacation. The perpetual need to hurry, to do something productive, to be busy, faded. He lost track of time as he drank a Tecate, then started a second one along with a second taco. Almost as an afterthought he eventually got around to inquiring if the Apache rumors were true. The response at first was in a language Abel did not know but guessed had to be Apache. Then the old man switched to Spanish.

"Si, Joven," he replied in a tone Able couldn't quite identify. He was an Apache, Diego said. "Nde," he added, saying that was what the so called Apache's name for themselves really was. And he provided enough details to convince Abel he was telling the truth. As a boy he was in a tiny band of Bedhonke Apaches--the people of Geronimo--in the mountains very near to where Abel was born. A party of ranchers guided by what was probably a Tarahumara Indian burst upon their little camp, all wildly blasting away with their rifles and pistols and shotguns. The tiny band of Apaches exploded into flight like a covey of startled quail. Diego ran the wrong direction and right into a hulking Mexican rancher who grabbed him and held him fast. Diego never did know what happened to the others in his little band. Except for his mother. He saw her body where the rancher had shot her down as she tried to flee. The same rancher who had killed his mother took Diego home with him to be raised as a Mexican and as a Catholic. The Catholic part beckoned to a need in Diego's soul and he embraced the religion. But he never forgot his true origin and refused to consider himself a Mexican. His eyes danced with hate when he mentioned the Mexican rancher who raised him in a kind of cultural servitude. The same man who had murdered his mother. The man Diego had long vowed he would one day kill. Abel didn't ask the old man if he had carried out his vow.

He could see the answer in his eyes.

Why had the memory of the bitter old Apache come to him now? Odd. No, it wasn't so strange at that. Not after he had been called to the unnamed cave near Benson to examine the body of George Washington Carver Caldwell, then performed his usual meticulous forensic autopsy at the county pathology lab. A mind had been at work here. A calculating mind. One perhaps with a motivation not so different as the bitter old forcibly Hispanicized Apache, Diego.

Deputy Grant Wilson blinked in astonishment at Gutierrez' ironic pronouncement.

" _Starved?_ " Wilson said. "Starved to death? This is what killed Master Sergeant Caldwell?"

Doctor Abel Gutierrez nodded his head slowly, thoughtfully, still bemused by his findings.

"Yes, Grant. I'm convinced of it. Somebody grabbed the guy, shackled him in that isolated cave and gradually starved him to death." Dr. Gutierrez paused, shaking his head again in the same bemusement. "And he took his time about it. Made it last longer by giving him enough water to prolong the starvation until Carver's body finally gave up the ghost."

"Jesus," Wilson said softly, his booted foot tapping on the cold laboratory floor in an unconscious habit that kicked in when he was perplexed. "Never seen anything like this before, Abe. Most killings are stupid knee jerk outbursts by stoners or drunks. But this...." Abel nodded again in affirmation at what he knew Wilson was thinking.

"Somebody had one hell of a grudge against Master Sergeant Caldwell."

### Chapter 3

Nuremberg _1945_

Article 6

The world watched in rapt interest as the Nazi war leaders' trial in Nuremberg began. American Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson was the lead American prosecutor. Jackson was a brilliant lawyer, one of the last on the Supreme Court to not be a graduate of a law school. Ironically, some of his wife's ancestors were Germans. He also was involved in a bitter feud with another Supreme Court Justice, Hugo Black, a feud which probably kept him from being named the next Chief Justice of the Court.

The Nuremberg trials began on August 8th, 1945, just a few short months after the war ended. Some would say it was a rush to judgment. Others would say it wasn't soon enough.

Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal read thus--

ARTICLE 6

The Tribunal established by the Agreement referred to in Article 1 hereof for the trial and punishment of the major war criminals of the European Axis countries shall have the power to try and punish persons who, acting in the interests of the European Axis countries, whether as individuals or as members of organizations, committed any of the following crimes.  
The following acts, or any of them, are crimes coming within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal for which there shall be individual responsibility:

(a) Crimes against Peace: namely, planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression, or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances, or participation in a Common Plan or Conspiracy for the accomplishment of any of the foregoing;  
(b) War Crimes: namely, violations of the laws or customs of war. Such violations shall include, but not be limited to, murder, ill-treatment or deportation to slave labor or for any other purpose of civilian population of or in occupied territory, murder or ill-treatment of prisoners of war or persons on the seas, killing of hostages, plunder of public or private property, wanton destruction of cities, towns, or villages, or devastation not justified by military necessity;  
(c) Crimes against Humanity: namely, murder, extermination, enslavement, deportation, and other inhumane acts committed against any civilian population, before or during the war, or persecutions on political, racial, or religious grounds in execution of or in connection with any crime within the jurisdiction of the Tribunal, whether or not in violation of domestic law of the country where perpetrated.

Leaders, organizers, instigators, and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a Common Plan or Conspiracy to commit any of the foregoing crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any persons in execution of such plan.

As the Allies were preparing the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, and as the trials were actually taking place, the war crimes in the east continued unabated. Unabated and ignored.

Because this time the victims were Germans.

Kaunitz College _  
_Reported by: Josef Brandejsky  Report of August 31, 1946  (Brünn)

I spent five months in the Kaunitz College in Brünn (from May 5 to October 5, 1945) and was beaten there several times every day. This maltreatment cost me my teeth. Our rations consisted only of watery soups and raw potatoes. For 17 days we received no bread at all. On our arrival, my comrade, who had an injured foot and yet also had to stand up against a wall for 24 hours, was killed by kicks to the stomach and neck, as punishment for holding on to me in order not to fall over. In the barrack the walls, ceiling, floor and mattresses were soiled with blood, because the inmates were beaten bloody every night. One night five of our number were beaten to death in my barrack. Often we were chased from our pallets at night, forced to crawl on all fours and to bark like dogs. At the same time Czech soldiers beat us. Many of the inmates suffered from dysentery. The facilities were utterly insufficient. Our barracks were always locked up, and we had to use buckets to answer the call of nature.

Kaunitz College  
Reported by: Katharina Ochs  Report of August 31, 1946  (Brünn)

For two months (from May 2nd to June 30th, 1945) I was in the infamous Kaunitz College where I witnessed the most atrocious cases of maltreatment. Several thousand Germans were imprisoned there. It was almost impossible for the Germans to walk downstairs normally, since Czechs were standing on every landing and kicked them down. People were also killed. On one occasion I myself was beaten so severely that I was unable to move for days. I still suffer from pains in the back as a result. As a former Red Cross nurse I was ordered to the German ward of the Anna Hospital for three months. Appalling conditions prevailed there. For those who suffered from diarrhoea there was no diet available, the bed linen was in rags and was only changed once a month. There was no cooking-stove, the water was unfit for drinking. No possibility existed for boiling the water, nor was there any possibility of procuring some tea for the patients from a Russian kitchen. For the most part the sick were brought in too late from the camps, so that the majority of them died. The food was completely insufficient and the patients were forced to pick refuse out of the dustbins. They were chiefly suffering either from malnutrition or from the consequences of tortures, for example, broken jaws, festering wounds and so on.

### Chapter 5

### Dresden

1945

Michael Haslick, awarded the Victoria Cross and later knighted by King George VI for his wartime service against Germany in WWII, took a medical retirement from the Royal Air Force in late 1946 with the rank of lieutenant colonel. Haslick never fully recovered from wounds received during the massive air raid on Dresden in early 1945. As a newly promoted major Haslick piloted the lead pathfinder airplane that directed the concentrated bombardment of incendiaries and explosives that set Dresden ablaze and destroyed what was left of the historic medieval city and its priceless architectural treasures and works of art. The firestorm that engulfed Dresden was neither the first nor the biggest of the firestorms that incinerated German cities in the war. But it was the best known and caused a huge number of casualties. And, coming at the very end of the war, it was also by far the most controversial. No one really knows even the approximate number of Dresden residents who died in the firestorm, but estimates range from 20,000 upwards of 50,000. Mostly civilians. Women, children, old men, refugees from the east, forced laborers, prisoners of war and a smaller number of government functionaries and some members of the German military.

Haslick was well aware of the hell that would follow the intense bombing of the city. He had already been on raids that created firestorms in other German cities. He had no doubt that civilians by the thousands would die horrible deaths in the fire. He even went to his commanding officer, General Sir Allen Smythe-Nesbith, with his concerns. What was the point of destroying the old city when Nazi Germany was clearly about to disintegrate? General Smythe-Nesbith sat bolt upright at his ornate antique wood desk, his eyes as cold and as unreadable as the North Sea his naval ancestors had ranged, and stared unblinking at Haslick. A flicker of amusement seemed to touch his face and then vanish so quickly that it almost seemed as though it hadn't been there.

"Michael," the general began in a voice surprisingly gentle. "Of course the war is almost over. Everyone knows that," he tapped hard with his knuckles on the solid top of the polished antique Victorian desk. "Except for those imbecilic Nazis thugs who got us all into this bloody mess in the first place." A genuine anger came onto the general's face. Smythe-Nesbith might have seemed like a typical imperious Englishman in the classic British Empire mold, but he was not an insensate man. He lived every day with the decisions that would send still more British young men to their deaths in combat. He wanted the war to be over and the dying to stop.

"A horrific raid like this one will finally get those bastards' attention and make them realize any further resistance is pointless." He paused and his steel gray North Sea eyes rested on Major Michael Haslick's ruddy face. "This Dresden raid will save far more lives over the next weeks than will be lost in the raid itself." He stopped, looked intently at Hazlick, and then uttered the words that the major had been dreading from the moment he strode into the Smythe-Nesbith's office in the newest wing of an ancient castle in the Scottish lowlands. A castle commandeered for the war effort by the British government at the beginning of the war. And a castle that, somewhat ironically, in peacetime belonged to a relative of Major Hazlick's mother.

"Michael, if you wish to be relieved of this mission, I can reassign you and find a replacement lead pathfinder aircraft." Another flicker of amusement, or perhaps a dark whimsy, brushed the general's stony countenance. "The lead pathfinder is a prestigious, coveted honor in the RAF. Undoubtedly there will be plenty of volunteers to replace you." The general was aware of the implications of what he had said and looked closely at Major Hazlick. He was quite certain what the major's response would be. It could be but one. Acquiescence. He was quite right.

Haslick had no choice. To refuse would mean the end of his military career. But it also went against his aristocratic sense of honor and duty, his family having served honorably for over two hundred years in the far flung British Empire. In America, Africa, Australia, India and China. There was a Haslick at the sack of Washington. And at Waterloo and Omdurman and Verdun and many more. Whatever their private opinions were, all steadfastly faced their duties and responsibilities as officers in the British military. As General Smythe-Nesbith so clearly understood, Haslick was duty bound to remain the pathfinder. Ironically, his military career would nevertheless end prematurely when flak from a German 88 anti-aircraft battery lacerated his body just as he was turning back towards England at the end of his mission over Dresden. For the rest of his life Sir Michael walked with a pronounced limp and frequent bouts of a persistent dull pain. He felt not a whit of self pity. It was but a trifling punishment for the hell he had visited on the people of Dresden.

Haslick held a secret close to his aristocratic breast, one he had rarely intimated to another human being. As Michael Haslick flew the pathfinder airplane over Dresden he knew he could misdirect the bombing and largely miss the sprawling city below, saving thousands of lives. Later, in whispered, alcohol-fueled conversations in corners of dark barrooms in the nights after the bombing other pilots and bombardiers very privately said they intentionally missed Dresden with their bombs, thinking it was senseless to bomb the city so close to the end of the war. With some, he was sure, it wasn't true, but conjured up to distance themselves from the horror inflicted on Dresden and the intense public disapproval of it in Great Britain. Others, though, and he could see it in their eyes and their expressions, Hazlick was certain were telling the truth. They actually had misdirected their bomb loads. He thought about doing that himself at all the way from taking off from the RAF airfield in Scotland to arriving over Dresden. He could misdirect a good many bombers to drop their bombs away from Dresden. What should he do? What would he do? In the end he did what any Haslick in the two centuries of proud Haslick government service would have done. He followed orders. He did his duty. The bomber stream following Hazlick arrived in the skies over Dresden.

And dropped their lethal loads directly onto the doomed city.

Thousands of people died that April spring day in 1945. A horrific firestorm engulfed the city. It was no accident. British scientists and military strategists spent countless hours perfecting the lethal mix of bombs and incendiaries that created firestorms. The Dresden holocaust was intentional. Dresdeners by the tens of thousands died that day. More thousands would later die either directly or indirectly as a result of the bombing. But not all the residents of Dresden perished. Thousands more somehow survived. And among them were many who remembered the long, deadly strings of bombers overhead that brought horrific deaths to their friends and their city. Some tried to blot the memories from their minds. But not all.

No, not all.

### The American Prisoner

One of the survivors was a young man, hardly more than a boy, who was an American soldier captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and held prisoner in Dresden. His impromptu prison was in an underground slaughterhouse and meat locker the Germans called Schlachthof Fünf. He was a third-generation German American who would later go on to be a famous writer. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. His book, named after the English translation of his Dresden prison, Slaughter House Five, was published in 1969 during the height of the Viet Nam war. A time, Vonnegut said in an NPR radio interview late in his life, when America's leaders were finally exposed for what they were and the truth could finally be told about what war was really like in World War II. Very unlike the whitewashed fiction of war movies featuring Hollywood stars like John Wayne and Frank Sinatra. Albeit supposedly a work of fiction, Slaughter House Five in reality shredded the western smoke screen of what the Allies did in Dresden and, by extension, too many other places. A beautiful city destroyed. Centuries of history, of culture, gone. Cellars and streets full of civilian dead. Vonnegut and other American prisoners of war were pressed into grim service in removing the entombed dead. German survivors of the firebombing, bitter beyond measure at the men who flew the Allied bombers that brought death to their beloved city, cursed and threw stones at the American prisoners as they burrowed through their grisly funereal duty. There were too many to bury. A pointless destruction and a barbaric slaughter in Vonnegut's acute mind. Which made him a lifelong pacifist.

And Vonnegut was far from being the only survivor who remembered.

### Haslick

In later years Michael Haslick was not often visited with nostalgia for his birthplace in the depressing gray foggy damp of the English coast. The only major exception was when some prying bottom feeding left wing journalist catering to the tabloids wrote a sanguinary piece on the Dresden raid prominently featuring Haslick among others as being two faced Januses--one muckraking journalist's very words. One Janus face, that of a war hero. The other that of a war criminal. Otherwise, on those infrequent moments when he did think of England the trigger was likely a random sensory tickle. The throaty roar of a Rolls Royce on a New Zealand roadway. The accent of another expatriate Englishman. A piece about England in the Auckland Herald. The one subject sure to send his mind leaping back to England was mention of the war. That invariably would set his mind to wandering the past, though the memories of the war years could hardly be described by a castrated lukewarm word like nostalgia. The friends lost, the families shattered, the sight of the burning cities of Germany below and the grim knowledge of what that meant, the long and painful recovery from his own wounds. Wounds that plagued him to this day with recurrent bouts of pain from bits of shrapnel embedded too close to his spine to be safely removed by the surgeon's knife. If for no other reason than the shrapnel near his spine the war would ever be with him.

Right up until the day he died.

### Dresden

1945

The City Below

Uwe Schlegel entered his teens on a foggy day in early February. The bitter cold of the past month was gone, pushed out by a sharp stinging wind that made everyone irritable. They were in the middle of the second week of the trek. His family, in their ancient but strongly built and still sturdy farm wagon, was only one in a seemingly endless horse-drawn caravan of panicky refugees fleeing Upper Silesia before the advancing Russians. A birthday? No one had the heart for any kind of celebration. Not Uwe's mother, nor his grandmother or grandfather or his two aunts and three cousins. Not even his younger brother Max, who in happier times was always ready for a party. Not even Uwe himself. They were all enshrouded in a pallor of dread. Everyone was too scared to think of anything but getting away from the Russians. The horror tales of those who had been overrun by the Russians and later managed to escape or been rescued by German counter attacks had loosed a creeping fear that spread like a deadly cancer through the civilian population. The soldiers, the veterans of the Eastern Front, had long known what the Russian advance would mean to the German civilians. The soldiers mostly kept their tongues among the civilians, not wanting to terrify them any more than they already were. But when the Russians drew near the darkly bitter expressions on the soldiers' faces when they urged everyone to flee was more than enough. By now everyone knew what lay ahead when the Russians came. Gang rape. Executions. Torture. Looting. Beatings. Starvation. Privation. Impoverishment. Slave labor camps. And for many, many Germans of all ages, political persuasions and both sexes, it would ultimately mean one thing. The ultimate One Thing.

Death.

Brüx _  
Reported by: Dr. med. Carl Grimm  Report of December 3, 1950_

### An Epidemic of Suicides

During those first days of the revolution I was stopped on the street by a drunken member of the Czech militia; the moment he found out that he knew me and that he cherished kind feelings towards me, he sent me to the criminal police for registration. By this accident I became a German subsidiary police doctor of the Czech criminal police, as they were just then looking for a doctor and I lived opposite to the police station. My task as police doctor consisted of the post-mortem examinations of the German suicides, and in this capacity I examined several hundreds of suicides during the months of May, June and July. Thus I became a direct witness of the epidemic of suicides among the German inhabitants of Brüx.

_It was a dreadful_ _danse macabre_ _. The unusual post-mortem examinations in such numbers affected me so deeply that I was completely exhausted the evenings. The climax of all these post-mortem examinations were the suicides of whole families or of all the residents of a house - the aforementioned epidemic of suicides during the months of June and July; one day I saw 16, another day 21 bodies of suicides lying side by side in the mortuary of the municipal cemetery. I was profoundly moved by the suicides of old personal friends, whom I saw again under these terrible circumstances. I found my friend Koupa, with whom I had gone swimming in the bathing establishment on the castle hill for many years, dead of gas-poisoning in his apartment at Goethe Strasse together with his girlfriend. My friend Peil, in whose store I had bought all my books, I discovered hanging in a house on Josefs-Promenade with his arteries severed. I was most of all affected by the suicides of whole families and on each occasion I was struck by the solemnity and care with which they had been carried out. During the first days of the epidemic I discovered a family in Kirchengasse, mother, daughter and little son, all of them dead by gas poisoning. They lay side by side on the floor, covered with a blanket, on which the dead dachshund lay curled up. The daughter had a crucifix and the portrait of her fiance on her breast. Murschitzka, the Provincial Inspector of Schools, I found in a barn on the castle hill, together with his family; father, mother, their three children and the grandmother lay side by side on the floor of the barn, all of them shot in the temple, only the father, as the last one, had shot himself through the mouth. Kletschka, a druggist, and his family I found in their apartment at Seegasse, the two children dressed in black lay on their beds, each of them with a cross and flowers on their breast, the grandmother, too, lay composed on her bed surrounded by a cross, picture and flowers; the father had fallen in a cramped position over the bed, on which the mother was extended, her corpse still warm. The revolver was clenched in her hand, for this mother had shot her children, her mother, her husband and finally herself. I saw three fine old people, an elderly man and two ladies, hanging from the cross-bar of a window; the old man in evening dress, flanked by the two ladies in black silk. As far as the medical aspect of the suicides was concerned, I was interested in the various types of death, about which I thought a great deal. In almost no case was the suicide effected by cutting of the arteries; the severity of the pain and the time taken by this method caused all attempts to end life in such a way to be given up. The suicides committed by shooting were in the minority and occurred only during the first days, for later on the Germans were forced to surrender their weapons. The suicides by gas poisoning, too, remained a minority and were also only possible at the beginning, since the Czechs later cut off the gas supply. The overwhelming majority were suicides committed by hanging. This_ _danse macabre_ _of the hanged was dreadful. They hung from trees, girders, wall-hooks, windows, door-posts; some hung free in the air, some touched the ground with the tips of their toes, some hung with bent knees and one or two were even in a kneeling position. At the beginning it seemed incredible to me; one would think it should be easy for a person standing or kneeling to free his head from the noose. But, in fact, one is unable to do so; the reason being that immediate unconsciousness is caused by the cutting-off of the blood supply to the brain; death from suffocation by the blocking of the windpipe comes about later on._

Since the figures of the suicides had generally been fantastically overestimated, I found it necessary to get objective evidence and asked a German employee of the Czech funeral institution to make an extract of the cases of suicide for the months of May and June. They amounted to 150 each month. Due to the fact that the town of Brüx had 30,000 inhabitants, of which there were 20,000 Germans, this figure of 300 suicides for the two months is equivalent to 1½% of the German population of Brüx. On the basis of this figure I estimated the total number of suicides for the whole period at 600 to 700, i. e. over 3% of all the Germans. This coincides with the figure which I learned later on for the Sudetenland as a whole.

### Uwe Schlegel

Few people outside of Germany knew of the mass suicides among the German civilians as the Russians approached. The Junker aristocracy in East Prussia nearly vanished from deaths in combat, execution in the purges after the attempt on Hitler's life and finally, as the Russians overran East Prussia, from death at the hands of the Russians or, very, very frequently, by suicide. Whole families died together. Increasingly, as the final end approached and even the last of the fanatics had to accept reality, suicide became common even among the soldiers. Better a quick bullet in the head than torture or a slow death from starvation and/or disease in a Russian prison camp. No one knew it then, but many more Germans had been captured at Stalingrad than had been thought. Some estimates say close to 100,000. And of all those German soldiers captured at Stalingrad only a pitiful haggard few, less than 6000, would ever return to Germany. One of those who didn't return was Uwe's father, Peter, a Landser in the doomed Sixth Army of Field Marshall Friedrich von Paulus. He was among those who trudged off in the bitter cold and snow in captivity to vanish forever in the nebulous vastness of Soviet Russia.

Death. An abstract concept to most kids in ordinary times. Not to Uwe, or his peers. These were not ordinary times. So many of the young men he knew, from school and church and the sports clubs, and from the farms and nearby villages of the coal mining corner of Upper Silesia that had been his home, were gone. Dead or vanished in the war. He lost count of the times he saw a grieving wife, parent, grandparent, sibling or sweetheart sobbing at the news of yet another young man's death at the front. And death came even closer on the trek west as the ailing and malnourished infants and infirm aged started to die off. His tiny cousin Inge was among the first. But the privations of the long trek--the cold, the hunger, the weariness, the fear--in the depth of winter was only the beginning. It got worse. Low flying lethal Russian Stormovic ground attack aircraft, grimly nicknamed Schlächter--slaughterer--and Der Schwarze Tod--the black death--by the German soldiers, would fly over and bomb and strafe the fleeing columns, even though it had to be obvious to the low flying pilots that they were civilian refugees. Twice Uwe's refugee train passed the remains of other refugee columns that the Russian planes had massacred. The first was bad enough. The smashed wagons and dead horses and pools of dried blood lay on the roadway. The second annihilated refugee column was a sight seared forever into Uwe's memory. The destruction of the horse drawn column of refugees just ahead of theirs was so close that they could see the faces of the pilots in the attacking Stormovics when they flew low overhead. Minutes later Uwe's column climbed a forested hill and as they descended it and wound around a bend in the road they saw the devastation wrought by the Russian fighters. There were the smashed wagons and dead horses as in the first destroyed column. But here were also the dead and the dying and the screaming wounded. Small children blown apart, women with their heads smashed by bullets, old people eviscerated by shrapnel. Body parts, legs, arms, heads, entrails, strewn all over the roadway and even impaled in the branches of trees bordering the roadway. For many years after when Uwe would close his eyes to sleep he would again see the body of a headless girl of eight or nine hanging upside down from a branch of a linden tree. Uwe's refugee train did what they could for the survivors and continued on with renewed haste and deepened fear, always with an eye on the sky for more Russian planes. West. Always west. A way marked not by milestones but by gravestones. It was a grim time. But what lay ahead was beyond grim. And what was ahead? It has many names. Golgotha. Ragnarök. Götterdämmerung. Armageddon.

Hell on Earth.

"Where can we go?" Uwe's mother Lotte had asked her own father, Hermannn, as they readied to leave their Silesian home. Hermannn Landes, an aging man who lost a leg and one eye in World War I at the vast slaughter ground euphemistically called the Battle of Verdun. The crippled aging man had already seen his share of horrific sights and knew full well the panicked tales of Russian brutality were not just more Nazi propaganda. His eldest son Ulrich, home on convalescent leave from the Eastern Front, took him aside and whispered quietly what to expect from the Russians. The old man listened with the veteran eyes of the survivor of Verdun and even then began to make his plans. They would go west until they met the advancing armies of the British and the Americans. Under them there would be no such barbarity as with the Russians. That was the goal. But where to go at first?

"Dresden," he told the tiny fretful band of family members. "The Red Cross has named it a sanctuary city. It won't be bombed." And so they went to Dresden. As did more than a half million other refugees from the east. The sanctuary city, the capital of Saxony, the cradle of German culture known throughout Europe as the Florence of the Elbe, an ancient, graceful city of wonderful old buildings dating to medieval times. A city above the rabidity of a Europe gone mad. A city for the ages. A city that in the latter war years was a haven to the sick and the homeless and the desperate. It was packed full of refugees. More than full. Overflowing. They were everywhere. They slept in all the homes, all the buildings, in the parks and the streets and the railway station and the fields and woods outside of the city.

And so the weary Silesian clan went the last miles toward the city to join the vast crowds of refugees that huddled together in a city already bursting its overcrowded urban seams. The sanctuary city. Dresden. Everyone knew the war was lost and nearly over. They would rest in the sanctuary city and then continue west to meet the Americans and the British. But for now they were safe in the city. Dresden. The sanctuary city.

Uwe's youthful innocence was long gone before the survivors of the trek wearily arrived in Dresden amid the stirrings of spring and the promise of safety and shelter. It was February 11, 1945. Dresden. A city with only two more days to live. On February 13, Shove Tuesday, and the next day, Ash Wednesday, Dresden would be obliterated from the face of the earth with merciless furor. Again death came from the sky. Not from the low flying Russian Stormovics. This time death came from high up in the February sky. Three major air raids, two British and one American, by more than a thousand bombers dropped their lethal mixture of explosive and incendiary and block buster bombs, creating the infamous Dresden Fire Storm that would incinerate many thousands of civilians, at least 20,000, perhaps as many as 50,000. Possibly even more. No one knew how many died. Just that there were many thousands of them.

The sanctuary city became a mass crematorium.

Uwe's family made their way to the home of a cousin of his mother, Hilda Schweigert, on the outer edge of Dresden. There they were welcomed and what little the Schweigert family had they shared with the Silesian refugees, whose provisions were nearly exhausted. The next day they rested and on Shrove Tuesday some of the neighborhood children made a half hearted attempt at the traditional celebrations of the season. Then, around 9:00 in the evening, the wailing air raid sirens brought everyone back to the reality of the war. Together with the Schweigerts, the Schlegels hastened to the solidly built cavernous basement that served as an air raid shelter for the inhabitants of the apartment bloc above. The bombs thundered and shook outside as the British bombers pounded the doomed city. Then it was over. Finally. stunned, but still all unhurt, the two families cautiously climbed with dozens of others out of the basement shelters to see what damage had been done. They were shocked. The upper stories of the apartment bloc, including the Schweigerts' home, were gone. In the distance the entire core of Dresden was an inferno of flame. As they stood amid the rubble, dazed and uncertain of what to do next, staring at the awful conflagration glowing in the center city, it happened again.

The second wave of British bombers loomed in the skies above them.

There was hardly time to react. The bombs fell everywhere. Instantly the entire block was in flames. People were screaming and running for whatever shelter they could find. An incendiary bomb hit a small group running for cover and turned them into shrieking human torches. Others in the street tumbled into inert heaps when exploding bombs filled the air with lethal metal splinters. The Schweigerts and the Schlegels stumbled and tripped and scrabbled in panic through the chaos towards their basement shelter. Before they could reach the entrance a British bomb fell directly into the entrance and exploded, blocking the passage. Another bomb hit and Uwe was thrown into the air and knocked unconscious. When he regained consciousness his mother was hovering over him, crying so disconsolately that an obsidian cloak of dread crept into his soul. They were in a dark place, another shelter in a different building they had managed to reach in the tumult above. His one-legged grandfather, though clumsy with his awkward prosthesis, had picked up Uwe and managed to carry him to safety. As Uwe's awareness returned, he wondered about his mother's crying. Then he noticed that most of the family members were not there. His grandmother, his aunts, his cousins. And Max. Max! His little brother. Max. Where was he? He sat bolt upright, suddenly filled with fear. "Max," he said in a weak voice tinged with panic. "Wo ist Max?" Where was his little brother?

"Tod," his somber faced grandfather said. "Max is dead. And the others. Only the three of us remain." The aging grandfather's eyes were beyond sadness. They seemed somehow far off. And they were. Revisiting what he thought could never happen again, the sanguinary days on the Verdun battlefield a generation earlier. "Dead. All dead." A weary, dispirited shrug. "And all of the Schweigerts, too." He returned his gaze to look at his grandson and even then Uwe understood on a visceral level that the look in his grandfather's eyes was gravid with grief for the German people and probably for all of the rest of humanity, as well.

After the second raid all of the city of Dresden was an inferno. They climbed out of their shelter to look. Just a few hundred yards away the flames soared high. There was a great roaring and rumbling as Dresden died before their eyes. "Armageddon", Grandfather Hermannn said in a distant, far off voice. "Die Götterdämmerung." But there was little time for the awful enormity of it to sink in. The flames were rapidly coming towards them and they had no choice but to flee.

"I want to see Max," Uwe said. "One more time. To say goodbye." The two other survivors had seen what the bombs had done. Uwe's mother and grandfather wouldn't let him go to see the mutilated bodies of Max and the others.

"Come, Uwe," his grandfather said. "We must go. Now." Uwe resisted and they had to forcefully pull him away, all three of them sobbing, as they scrambled through the ruins to make their way on foot out of the city. Finally, exhausted, they stopped to rest in a wood that crowned a small hill. From there they could see almost the entire city in flame. A sight never to be forgotten. Together with hundreds of other survivors they fell wearily to the ground and tried to sleep. All night long the little wood was filled with the soulful weeping of the bereaved and the moaning of the injured. The dawn brought a scene from hell, as the dark clouds boiled above the burning city in its death throes. They could see the roads out of the city clogged with survivors fleeing the holocaust. To their horror, allied warplanes came swooping down. British? American? Russian? It made no difference to the fleeing masses. Were they machine gunning the survivors? They couldn't tell. Not at this distance. Though bitter experience made them all too aware of what it would be like if the airplanes were strafing the fleeing Dresdeners.

And that was not all. One air raid was yet to come. The bombers appeared out of the western sky, looking somehow to Uwe's young eyes like a flock of distant geese flying in a precise migratory formation.

"Look, Opa," he said, pointing at the sky. "Geese." His grandfather slowly shook his head, tears in his eyes, and remained silent. He knew that it was what Uwe's young heart wanted to see, a happy sight from the old life. But soon the tiny fragment of pleasant memory on Uwe's face collapsed as the geese morphed into bombers, human wrought weapons platforms that carried death in their metal bellies. The American bombers came on Ash Wednesday to bomb the ashes of what had been Dresden. The inconsequential little wood on the crest of the hill overlooking Dresden became a military target, intentional or not. The bombs fell.

When it was over Uwe was an orphan.

### The Nobel Laureate

An old man of 83, in a sanitarium near Dresden for a lung infection, watched in stunned horror as the Allied bombers arrived overhead that February day in 1945 and his beloved Dresden died before his eyes. The man was Gerhard Hauptmann, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1912. These are a few of his words of mourning:

"Whoever had forgotten how to cry, learned again at the destruction of Dresden. I stand at the end of my life and envy my dead comrades, who were spared this experience."

This same man, a Nobel Prize winner, was ordered by the Russian conquerors to be expelled from his native Silesia along with all the other native Germans. No exceptions. Not even a Nobel Prize winner. He died before the Russians could expel him. His living body, that is. They still refused to allow him to be buried in his native Silesia.

Even his zinc coffined corpse was expelled from a German Silesia that was gone forever.

### Michael Hazlick

Michael Haslick was at the height of his successful career as a senior financial planner with the Commerce Bank of New Zealand. He was Oxford educated, with an MBA from Yale in the United States he earned just after the war. A year after getting his MBA Michael emigrated to New Zealand to start a new life, hoping that a geographical change would help him to forget the war. And it worked. Mostly. The memories faded with the years. But at times they came back, still jarringly vivid. Airplanes blowing apart in midair, bodies hurtling through space. The screams of men over the radio as their doomed planes plummeted to the earth. The man killed in his aircraft, young Fred Littlejohn, who had so wanted to be a veterinarian in his rural Northumberland village after the war, the two other lads gravely wounded by German flak, the somber sight of the empty beds in the barracks after the worst of the raids. Smoke billowing thousands of feet into the air from the burning cities of Europe far below as their bombs burst upon the cites and towns, railways and harbors the airmen all knew were filled with civilians. Men, women and children. And not just German. French, during the Normandy invasion. And Dutch and Belgian, Danish and Norwegian, Czech and Slovak, as the allied Armies advanced on the crumbling German Wehrmacht. Lives snuffed out as easily as a man stepping on a cockroach--and all done from among the clouds two or three miles above the surface of the Earth. The once powerful German Luftwaffe was a mere shadow of its former self and no more troubling than a gnat to a charging tiger. In those last violent crazy days it gave a man a strange and frightening sense of power as the bombs were loosed from on high. It still shocked Haslick to remember that there had been some--too many--among his mates who actually liked that sense of power and the destruction it wrought far below.

Michael Haslick left the Commerce Bank of New Zealand one rainy September afternoon and went to the old Bentley he painstakingly maintained with his own hands. He ducked inside to get out of the rain and inserted the key into the ignition. As the switch turned and a contact sound foreign to the Bentley clicked, Michael Haslick might have understood what was happening. It didn't matter. There was no time to react. He was nearly vaporized in the powerful explosion that blew the Bentley into a thousand pieces scattered over a hundred yard stretch of what had been a quiet tree lined boulevard.

Much as one of his own bombs from so long ago might have done in Germany.

### A Survivor

The paragraph below is a fragment from the testimony of Donauschwaben survivor Justina Hoffman from Alfred Maurice de Zayas' book, A Terrible Revenge--The Ethnic Cleansing of the East European Germans.

_On October 1, 1945, the whole camp had to assemble, more than 8,000 people. Mothers with small children, the sick and the invalid, old people and cripples, all of us were shipped off to extermination camps at Gakovo, Krusevlje and Ridjica, where several thousands starved to death. Since I was still among able bodied, about 1500 of us, they kept me back at Sekic. On January 27, 1946, I decided to escape. My son had already been dead since September among several other 14-16 year old boys. My husband had been deported_.

### The Donauschwaben

They were called the Donauschwaben. Danube Swabians. Ethnic Germans, many from German Swabia--Schwaben--who had immigrated in the 17th and 18th Centuries to central Europe as the imperial Ottoman Turks were gradually beaten back. Most lived near the Danube River in what had been the old Austro-Hungarian Empire but now were mostly in Croatia and Serbia, with more in Slovenia, Hungary, Romania and some in Bulgaria. There were probably close to million and a half Ethnic Germans scattered through central and south central Europe Their fate at the end of WWII was possibly the most draconian of all the horrors visited on the eastern Germans. Around half of those in Yugoslavia fled ahead of the advancing Russians and Serb armies. Theirs was by orders of magnitude the wise choice. The ethnic Germans who didn't flee faced the usual orgy of rape, looting, beatings and murders. And that was just the beginning. Mass executions of German and Croatian prisoners of war. In one of the most disreputable acts at the end of WWII the British Army received the surrender of German Army Group E in Austria and then turned some of the prisoners, some reports saying as many as 150,000 of them, over to the Serbs and Russians. They called it reparations but what it actually meant was that German prisoners were to be used as slave labor. In direct violation of the spirit of the Allies' own list of war crimes at the Nuremberg Trials. And that wasn't the worst of it. At the Yalta Conference American President Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Churchill agreed with Stalin's request that all former citizens of the Soviet Union who were captured by the western Allies would be turned over to the Russians. Since even the Soviet soldiers who were captured by the Germans were treated as traitors by allowing themselves to be captured, the fate of those who fought alongside the Germans was sealed. It was a death sentence. The eastern Slavs who wore German uniforms, Ukrainians, Poles, Russians, Cossacks, and others, were either immediately shot or sent to die slow deaths as slave laborers.

The fate of the Croatian soldiers and civilians handed over to the Serbs was sealed in doom the minute the Serbs got their hands on them. The Serbs had been persecuted and massacred by the Croatians during the war. Now it was their turn to be the persecutors. Or, to put it more accurately. Executioners. The Serbs murdered the Croatian prisoners by the thousands in scenes reminiscent of the Nazi Sonderkommandos. The Germans' fate was not much better. They were brutalized, tortured, many executed, and the remainder literally worked to death as slave labor. Close to two thousand of the troopers of the surrendered SS Prinz Eugen Division, a German division made up of drafted central European ethnic Germans and an SS division itself guilty of numerous atrocities during the mutually barbaric fighting in the Balkans, were slaughtered after the British turned them over to Tito's Communist Partisans. The survival rate of German Prisoners of War in Yugoslavia was the lowest of all German prisoners of war in all nations. Only a fraction would survive.

And not just the soldiers. Using collaboration by some of the Donauschwaben with the invading Nazis as an excuse, almost the entire civilian ethnic German population was enslaved by Tito's Communists. They were stripped of everything. Their civil rights, their citizenship. their farms and businesses and villages. And not secretly or covertly. By law. Laws passed by the Tito Communist government. Some went to slave labor in the Soviet Union where the majority would die. Others were used as slave labor in the new nation of Yugoslavia under conditions that were among the worst of all the slave labor camps of the entire WWII epoch. The majority of them died, either from execution, starvation, overwork, exposure or untreated disease epidemics. Those who could not work, the very old, the very young and the infirm, were held in death camps where they were starved and decimated by disease. The survivors were exiled in their own final diaspora. The Donauschwaben ceased to exist after WWII. And they died in conditions that were mirror images of those the Allies were charging the Germans with at Nuremberg. But with one difference. One very big difference.

There were no war crimes trials for the extermination of the Donauschwaben.

At least not any official ones.

### Zoran Marić

Zoran Marić was but one drop in the flood of displaced persons after World War II. Zoran was a Serb, from what was once the multi-ethnic and multi-national region of Vojvodina in the Balkans. Though no one really believed him, he was fond of telling his friends in his new rural home in Manitoba that he was a relative of Albert Einstein.  
"My grandmother's cousin was married to him at one time. Their kids are my second cousins," Zoran would claim. It was a lie wrapped around the actual fact of Einstein once having been married to a woman whose maiden name was the same as his name. Marić. And that was enough for Zoran to spin his tales. Usually over a friendly glass of vodka at Benevic's Tavern. A place that was the proverbial wide spot in the road. It was straight south of Winnipeg and only a few miles north of the Minnesota border. But, as Benevic himself would often say. "Even wide spots in the road need a place to drink." And so it was at Benevic's.

Benevic was a third generation Serb who had no personal knowledge of hte horrendous events in the Balkans during the Second World War. Almost the entire family of his grandfather's generation immigrated after the old Austro-Hungarian Empire fractured after World War I and they didn't care to be forced to live under the rule of the detested Hungarians. Two generations later Zoran Marić, having heard about the Serbian settlement in southern Manitoba from other displaced Serbs, made his appearance. He told everyone in the farming country around Tolstoi that he left Serbia at the end of World War II because he couldn't stand any more of the ethnic hatred and violence between the Serbs, the Croats, the Slovenians, the Albanians, the Hungarians and the Bulgarians and even the Russians.

"What kind of a world was that?" He would say to the row of occupied bar stools at Benevic's on a Friday or Saturday evening. "Everyone hating everyone else just because they speak a different language or go to a difference church?" No one argued with him. Their own ancestors had fled Europe for similar reasons, as well as from various iterations of suppression: political, ethnic, religious, economic, sexual, social. Many of the bar stool folk were also Serbs, most members of the locally numerous Benevic clan. Others had Scandinavian roots. Swedes, mostly. And a mixture of others of European origin. The local First Nations folk did not frequent Benevic's Tavern. They did not feel welcome. They were not mistaken, a fact that some of the more reflective among their elders found darkly droll. The discriminatory shoe was now on the other foot--as translated very roughly from the Ojibwa tongue into English.

Besides the locals there was the occasional visitor from the heavily German settled areas just to the west. Among the more recent arrivals to the German settlements were a number of survivors among the Donauschwaben. One of them, Henrik Losch, stopped at Benevic's one Saturday evening on the way back from dropping off a truckload of shelled corn at a nearby grain elevator. It'd been a long day and he decided he'd stop for a glass of beer at Benevic's. Although Benevic was a Serb, Losch had nothing against him or his family. The Benevics left Serbia long before the horrors of World War II. As Losch nursed his beer he stared curiously at Zoran Marić as the Serbian refugee talked about the dark days of World War II.

Suddenly the bar's alcohol tinged ambiance was shattered as everyone at the bar jerked and turned to stare as Losch suddenly began to loudly cough and sputter, having gasped in astonishment at the same moment as he swallowed a gulp of beer and inadvertently detoured the beer to the wrong destination. And not without cause. Damn good cause. Losch had just recognized Zoran Marić.

And he sure as hell was no innocent harmless refugee.

Losch was among the hundreds of German men rousted out of their homes in October of 1944 in an ethnic German town in Serbia by Tito's Communist partisans. Over two hundred of the German men were executed on the spot, even old men and boys. Losch and the surviving captives were loaded onto trucks and hauled off to be shipped to Russia in cattle cars as slave laborers under horrific conditions in a nickel mine. He was one of the handful who survived and was eventually repatriated in 1947 to Yugoslavia and immediately expelled to West Germany. From there he made his way to Canada and a new life in a new land. But the past was just that. Past. Or at least he thought so until that Saturday evening perched on a barstool in Benevic's Tavern. At that numinous moment his mind was far away from a Manitoba barstool. He was remembering the Tito Communist partisans who murdered his relatives, friends and neighbors in Serbia that evil October day in 1944. Losch's mind's eye was again seeing a Serb, a local Serb known to them in their village, who paraded in front of the throng of cowed German prisoners and berated them as cowards and traitors and scum and then started the killing when he emptied his pistol into a trio of Germans in the front row of the captives, one of whom was Losch's cousin. This Serbian murderer was the same man that Losch now saw a world away in Benevic's Tavern in the fecund prairies of Manitoba. Zoran Marić. Losch left the tavern without finishing his beer.

The next say Losch gathered a handful of other Donauschwaben survivors for the most intense conversation any of them had had since the chaos of the war years. A Serbian war criminal in their midst! Right here in the Manitoba farm country! But what to do? The Communist government in Yugoslavia refused to even admit the atrocities happened, much less prosecute anyone for war crimes. Nor would any other government prosecute them. War crimes trials for atrocities committed _against_ Germans were almost nonexistent. Again. The same question. What do to?

They talked far into the night.

Zoran Marić's tragic death the following week during Manitoba's deer season remains unresolved by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to this very day. "So cold," in the irreverent colorful tongue of RMCP Corporal T.J. Lamedeer, "it has icicles." Marić's killing was generally considered to be a tragic hunting accident. Likely when some unknown and obviously unskilled deer hunter mistook Zoran's brown jacket for the coat of a deer. The shooter was never identified. He was probably some clueless office type from Winnipeg and might not even have been aware he had mistakenly shot a person and not a deer.

But, then, maybe it really wasn't a mistake.

### Chapter 6

### Russian Atrocities in the East

Ask any person with historical knowledge from the eastern European countries of the Ukraine, Poland or the Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia or Estonia about WWII war crimes and you will be likely be very surprised. You won't just hear about the Holocaust or the Nazi war crimes. You also hear about the Russians.

A hell of a lot about the Russians.

As soon as the Russians moved into the Baltics, the Ukraine and eastern Poland they began to round up anyone who might be considered anti-Soviet. Intellectuals, professionals, politicians, policemen, military officers, college professors, local and national leaders. First thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands and then millions of peoples of questionable loyalties to the Soviet system, inside and outside of the Soviet Union, were deported to distant places like Siberia and Azerbaijan. And done in a brutal way that meant death for thousands of them.

And this was not all. Those the Soviets considered to be direct threats to their ideology and control were executed. Again, thousands of them. In Latvia. In Estonia. In Lithuania. Many thousands more in the Ukraine and Poland.

When the Nazis and Soviets signed a non-aggression pact, invaded Poland from both east and west and divided up Poland between them, the Soviet NKVD was unleashed on the Poles. They interned close to twenty thousand Polish military officers, police officers, civilian officials and members of the intelligentsia and other potential opponents to Soviet rule. The Soviet secret police, the NKVD, took these captives to several camps and systematically executed them. The best known of these locations is in the Katyn Forest a few miles from the Russian town of Smolensk. Local residents later described how truckloads of the doomed arrived in the forest to be layered in mass graves. Day after day for weeks the trucks came.

The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941 and the Soviets evacuated the area around Smolensk. The occupying Germans first heard allegations about the massacre of Polish officers from captured Soviet prisoners. They also began to hear persistent local rumors from the area of Katyn about the massacres and eventually decided to investigate their validity. It was early 1943 before the Germans discovered the mass graves. They brought in forensic experts from various nationalities and non-German observers, including American and British POW's, to verify what they had found. Clear evidence of a horrendous war crime perpetrated by the Russians. Though not publicly acknowledged, the Allies were aware of the massacres that same year. The Russians denied their involvement and only finally admitted culpability in 1990 after the fall of the Soviet system. Even then the Russian investigation was half hearted and resulted in no indictments.

At the Nuremberg War Crimes Trials in 1945-6 the Russians not only denied responsibility but were so blatant that they actually blamed the Germans for the Katyrn massacres. The Soviet prosecutors attempted to have Germans tried for the Katyn murders by the War Crimes court . Not this time. For once the western nations couldn't turn a convenient blind eye to reality. Not when they already knew the truth.

The Katyn massacre was one Soviet lie even the diffident Allies couldn't swallow.

### The Scales of Justice

Tilted and Untilted

The world already knew of the massive crimes the Nazis had perpetrated on the peoples of Europe. The International Tribunal spelled them all out in detail. No one doubted the culpability of the Nazis in war crimes. Even some of the Nazis admitted it. The Nazi regime and the German nation were excoriated in the Tribunal and in world opinion. It was the righteous vengeance of the wronged. It was absolutely justified.

And also absolutely hypocritical.

Those same victorious Allies taking the moral high ground in the Nuremberg Trials were committing or allowing to be committed the very war crimes they were trying the Germans for. At the very same time the Nuremberg Trials were being held. Many were aware of what was happening, that central and eastern Europe were buried in an entirely new avalanche of war crimes. Many knew. Very few of the allies or the rest of the world cared. Why? Because this time the victims were Germans. But there were those who cared. The Germans, of course, and a handful among the Allies. Almost all of them were fatalistic. Many Germans passively accepted the world's judgment of the collective guilt of the German people. Others refused to swallow the bitter pill of collective guilt but were powerless to do anything beyond chafe impotently against the hypocrisy of the Allies. The Allies. The Americans and English, whose bombers crushed entire cities and killed over a half million German civilians. The Russians, who murdered and raped their way through eastern Germany. And the others, the Czechs and Poles and Tito's Communists who did the same as the Russians and worse. The Germans watched with dulled senses as the Allies condemned their entire race, put thousands of Germans on trial and executed many hundreds of them.

But there were a determined few who went beyond the mere passive acceptance of national humiliation. They did not excuse the atrocities and barbarities of the Nazis. Far from it. They roundly applauded the Nazis being hauled to court to face the justice they so richly deserved. But the scales of justice were tilted heavily towards the victors. What of the myriad war crimes committed by the _victors_? Was there no justice for them?

No.

Not in the larger sense. The victors don't just write the history books. They also make up the lists of war criminals. Even Air Marshall Sir Arthur "Bomber" Harris, the architect of the ruthlessly conducted British intentional area bombing of civilians in the German cities, once said that if the Germans had won the war he probably would have been put on trial as a war criminal. Which was meant not as self incrimination but a somber commentary on the nature of warfare. A similar observation was made by American Major General  Raymond Hufft after he once ordered his troops to take no prisoners. At any rate, the Germans didn't win the war and the list of war criminals was written by the victors. There would be no Nuremberg style trials for Allied war criminals.

That was the larger sense, the macro view. The scales of justice were tilted in favor of the victors. And perhaps rightly so. But on a smaller scale, the scale where a discrete individual was personally involved in a war crime where he or she made a clear choice? This was different. Here was the possibility of justice for the losers. Not on the monumental global scale of the Nuremberg trials. But on the small, human sized scale. Yes. A small scale. Very small.

One at a time

### Ethnicity

### Victims and Perpetrators

At the beginning of World War II central and eastern Europe were a crazy quilt of ethnicities and nationalities. Germans and Hungarians in Czechoslovakia. Germans in Poland. Ukrainians in Poland. Poles in the Ukraine. Germans in Alsace in France. The mixture of nationalities held true for Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria, and especially in Russia and the Balkan states that would form the new nation of Yugoslavia after the war. The various national minorities were simmering ethnic caldrons of cancerous bitterness that WWII would metastasize into a dozen raging ethnic infernos. Germans by the millions were barbarically brutalized all through central and eastern Europe by tens and even hundreds of thousands of otherwise seemingly ordinary citizens in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and by the invading and occupying Russians. A large body of evidence has since accumulated on the atrocities committed _against_ the Germans and is available for anyone who cares to inform themselves of what happened.

But not just the Germans. The Poles and Ukrainians massacred each other as well as the Germans. Jews who somehow survived the concentration camps and returned to their former homes in Poland and elsewhere were not welcomed and plainly urged to leave. Many went to Palestine, others elsewhere. In the new nation of Yugoslavia some of the ugliest atrocities occurred. The ones against the Germans were fully as draconian as the Nazis had been. Germans murdered, raped, put into death camps, men and women forced into slave labor camps in Russia where most would die. And the Croatians, who had allied with the Germans, were massacred by the Serbs in the tens of thousands.

The Poles and the Czechs and the Yugoslavs were vindictively murderous. All had death camps for ethnic Germans that often were the same camps the Nazis had used. And the conditions were as bad, in individual cases even worse, than in the Nazi camps. But the worst, in numbers at least, were the Russians. Millions of German women raped and thousands of them subsequently killed. Many thousands of other murders and summary executions. Many hundreds of thousands of Germans forced into slave labor camps. At least a million German prisoners of war dead in the Russian POW camps. Unnumbered thousands of German soldiers taken prisoner never made it to the POW camps. The lucky ones, many thousands of them, were shot. Other were bestially tortured by having their eyes poked out, their ears sliced off, fingers and hands and feet chopped off, their stomachs cut open and intestines jerked out, their genitals ripped off and often stuffed in their mouths. And this was not Nazi propaganda, though the Nazis did not hesitate to use the Russian barbarities in their shrill propaganda. The relatively objective War Crimes Bureau conducted extensive professional investigations into the war crimes and documented them. They had not at first believed the allegations of bestiality from the front line troops. But they were. True. Over and over and over again in a soul crushing avalanche of human barbarity on the Eastern Front.

These were all bad enough, but the worst was yet to come. Something almost without precedent in modern European history, and certainly without precedent in its vast scope. With the explicit conscious complicity of the Western Allies, from 12 to 15 million Germans were uprooted from their former homes in Poland, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Romania, Hungary and the eastern provinces of Germany itself. They lost everything. Homes, farms, businesses, all their personal assets. And they were often robbed of what little they had left as they were being expelled from their homelands. The Poles, the Czechs and the Serbs, tens upon tens of thousands of them, were the most brutal on the level of individual callous barbaric acts. And, in this monumental epic human disenfranchisement, between one and two million of the expellees would die either directly or as a consequence of the expulsion. In German it was--and is--called Die Vertreibung.

A whole new grim host of non-Nazi war crimes were taking place in central and eastern Europe. At the very same time the Nuremberg War Crimes trials were taking place.

A few did speak up about the maelstrom to the east.

No one listened.

### Justice. Too little. Too late.

The Kleidovka camp: report about the trial of Jan Kouril  
before the jury court of Karlsruhe  
Excerpt from "Die Brücke", edition of June 10, 1951  (Brünn)

Last week the Karlsruhe Jury Court sentenced the Czech citizen Johann Kouril to 15 years in prison for the crimes he committed against German citizens and Sudeten Germans during 1945 and 1946. The 39-year-old accused was found guilty of having killed the Sudeten German Kaleus with a blow from a spade, of having participated in a joint fatal attack on the accountant Beinhauer, and of 28 further counts of inflicting minor or major bodily harm on the internees in the Brünn camps of Kleidovka, Kaunitz-College and Juliefeld. In his Reasons for Sentence the Chairman of the Jury Court emphasized that the Court had acquitted the accused in every one of those cases for which no eyewitnesses were available, but that no mitigating circumstances could be found for his crimes even if it were taken into consideration that he had committed them in a time of [political and social] upheaval.

This Karlsruhe Trial, which was observed with great interest both at home and abroad, was the first to go into the gruesome events that took place in Czechoslovakia and some other countries after the German surrender. Unnoticed by the world public \- which at the time was horrified and outraged by the news of the mass murders committed in the German concentration camps - another tragedy took place which rivaled the other in terms of brutality. When the first news and eyewitness accounts of it leaked across the borders, they seemed just as unbelievable and exaggerated as the reports about the German camps had seemed. And just as some of the German people still refuse to believe the extent of the tortures and mass murders reportedly committed in the "Third Reich", a large part of the world public also refused to acknowledge the full extent of the 1945 catastrophe as a fact.

And so the significance of this trial is not so much that one of the guilty was brought to justice, but rather that these events - even though they are only a small sample - was for the first time ever investigated and confirmed by a court.

Probably the trial was possible in the first place only because the accused came to West Germany not for political reasons but for personal motives. In the course of his "activity" in the camps he fell in love with a captive German girl, which he later wanted to marry. But since he was unable to secure residence rights for her in Czechoslovakia, he followed her to West Germany.

In 1949 an inmate of an IRO Camp offered to sell a Munich dentist some loose gold. When the dentist met with the seller, he recognized him as Johann Kouril, the former deputy commandant of the Kleidovka Camp, who was trying to turn a bag of broken-out teeth and [dental] bridges into cash. Later, Kouril, who was living unregistered in the Baden town of Spöck, was seen by Sudeten expellees and reported to the public prosecutor. In the course of the investigation more than 200 people came forward who had been imprisoned in the camps in question. Kouril was unable to claim even one witness for the defense from the list of names shown to him. Under questioning, the witnesses related atrocities such as were committed at all times when sadism and man-hunting were turned into patriotic and religious duty.

Kouril was the terror of the camp. On his orders the prisoners were beaten, trampled and tortured. The prisoners were forced with beatings to drink buckets filled with urine and blood. They had to dance naked for the entertainment of the guards. On one Czech national holiday, prisoners were strung up and pulled up and down on a gallows. Others were branded with a red-hot iron. In the interrogation quarters one witness was shoved face-down into a toilet bowl while having to sing the German national anthem. The former gravedigger of the Kaunitz College camp testified that during his work in that capacity he had had to take away the bodies of approximately 1,800 Germans who had been hanged and beaten to death, among them 250 soldiers who had been handed over to the Czechs.

The accused denied all the crimes he was charged with and merely admitted to first one, then three and finally one-hundred slaps in prisoners' faces. His standard reply was: "The witness is telling tales. He must be insane, I don't even know him." "The witness is undermining himself with his own lies." "The statements of this witness are a disgrace," etc.

It is interesting, but not surprising, that Kouril's defense attorney tried to excuse his client's actions with the same arguments also used by Gestapo people etc. who were charged with crimes. According to him, Kouril should be considered a victim who blindly obeyed his government's orders. The public prosecutor agreed that the attitude of the Czech government at that time had been the cause of the German suffering, but added that the accused was not charged with political acts but rather with crimes for which the legal systems of every nation provide severe penalties.

In the main, the Court agreed with the public prosecutor's view. The trial, said Chairman Dr. Ernst, had revealed the sufferings of an ethnic group that was supposed to be exterminated over night. However, the blame must not be placed on the entire Czech people, for it had been the mob, the rabble, that had descended on the Germans. However, he added, one must also consider that some individual Germans, by virtue of what they had once done to the Czechs, bore some blame for the events in Czechoslovakia after the surrender.

The accused, who by his own admission had not been harmed in any way under the German regime, was no Czech patriot; rather, he had offered his services as slave driver in order to prove his nationalist inclinations after the fact. A person of sadistic and cruel disposition, he got pleasure from the bloody deeds that took place in the Czech internment camps. Concentration camps are despicable in and of themselves, but when they are additionally turned into sites where brutality is free to run rampant with impunity they can only be described as a disgrace to humanity.

### The Soviet Veterans

Wasyl Horobets, a Ukrainian small town plumber who was a veteran of the Soviet army in World War II, was enjoying his yearly vacation in a Crimean Black Sea resort on the outskirts of Yalta. Horobets had the doubly unfortunate habit of drinking too much on vacation and, flying from that inebriated state with the sureness of an arrow launched from a medieval English longbow, opening his mouth and blurting out whatever thoughts rolled off his tongue into expletive-larded words. He was sitting in a sidewalk cafe with an open view of the white capped waters of the Black Sea with two other Ukrainians. Both were also Soviet army veterans of WWII. All three from the same combat support unit in Koniev's First Ukrainian Front Army. A unit that was impressed into a front line combat unit in the last days of the war as the Soviets were combing rear areas to replace their enormous combat losses. That relatively brief time in the front line was the main reason they were sitting in the warm sun and sea breezes of the Crimea. The life expectancy of a front line Soviet soldier was measured not in years but in months and weeks and even days. These three were among the lucky ones who survived.

At a table a few feet away sat two other men of the same age group. Since everyone in their age group had to be veterans, Horobets called over to them.

"Hey, comrades! What unit were you in?" One of the two, a ruddy six foot redhead whose unnaturally extended right leg telegraphed that it was a prosthesis, undoubtedly an unwelcome life long souvenir of the war, answered in a barely comprehensible Ukrainian.

"Not speak Ukraine," he said. Wasyl Horobets shrugged and returned his attention to his old comrades and the large bottle of a tangy homegrown Ukrainian alcohol, pertsivka, that occupied center stage on their beachfront table.

Their tongues loosened by their fourth friend, Mr. Pertsivka, the three old comrades let their minds travel back to the last days of the war. Those few short weeks on the front lines that they would milk for every war story they could in the years following. But not everything. There were some memories that remained private. Very private. Only shared with a very, very few. Like old comrades. A select group of old comrades.

Old comrades who had been _there_.

Wasyl looked again at the pair of foreigners sitting near them, decided they wouldn't understand what he was saying even if they could hear him, and was about to let the words roll thoughtlessly off his drunken tongue. But Anton spoke first.

"Do you remember when we went into that German town?" Said the older of the three, Anton Lysenko. Who, like the other two, was a teenaged commune wheat farmer from the Ukrainian steppes who was impressed into the Soviet Army as the Russian counteroffensives gained momentum and reentered the Ukraine after the retreating Germans. "What was the name of it?"

"Goldap," replied the third of the Ukrainian veterans, Borysko Bondarchuk. "Something like that."

"Yes, that was it." Wasyl interjected. "Goldap."

"Just inside East Prussia," Anton said.

"The first German town we encountered," added the third middle aged veteran, Borysko, who big-bodied and robust, dwarfed the diminutive Wasyl. "The officers told us to behave like soldiers," he continued. Then, with a wink, "but the commissars urged us on to take revenge. We could do just about anything and there would be no punishment," repeating, "we could do anything."

"And we did," said Wasyl with a throaty laugh. "And then some!"

Sitting at a table a few feet away, far enough to make ordinary nearby conversation largely inaudible, were the pair of middle aged men of the same vintage as the Ukrainians. They were veterans, too. But not of the Soviet Army. They were drafted into the German Army during World War II and now lived in the so-called People's Democratic Republic of East Germany. They called themselves Communists, which was a wise thing to do in Communist East Germany. And they had once actually been dedicated Communists. But the war, which they had no choice but to serve in, and the barbaric behavior of the invading Soviets when they overran their native Silesia and their heavy-handed authoritarian rule over East Germany had stripped them of any enthusiasm they once had for Communism.

Though it is not discussed much in the mainstream history books, thousands upon thousands of anti-Russian Ukrainians served voluntarily in the German Army during the war. Since the two Germans sitting at the nearby table had spent time in the Ukraine before the war and spoke some Ukrainian, they were assigned to a newly formed Ukrainian unit as part of the German command structure overseeing the new unit. Both of them were sergeants--Feldwebels--at the company level, and by necessity became fluent in Ukrainian. The profane, colloquial Ukrainian of the youthful combat soldiers. Which was what the three Soviet veterans were speaking. Since pertsivka has a volume enhancing effect as well as a tongue loosening one, the Germans were able to hear and understand most of what the Ukrainians said.

The more they heard the darker their expressions became.

"Do you remember how those German bitches screamed when we took them?" Wasyl said in his unwarily loud alcohol fueled voice. "How they begged us to kill them?" Anton's voice wasn't as loud. But, to the two Germans pretending not to listen, loud enough.

"Yes. And you took care of that, didn't you?" Borysko interjected with a sly grin on his face. "Put those German bitches down once and for all!"

"They'd be producing no more little Nazi bastards," said Anton in his own too loud alcohol haze. "We put an end to all of them."

"But, that old woman," Anton said to Wasyl. "How could you take that old hag? She was so ugly."

"But she was a German," Wasyl snarled. "No mercy for Germans. None of them. Not for the men. Not for the women. Not for the old."

"And not even for the children," Borysko said with a touch of disapproval. "I didn't like what you did to those little children, Wasyl. Yes. We killed their parents. We made them orphans. But we could have raised them as Ukrainians." Wasyl was quick with his answer.

"They were still Germans. Bad blood. Even the children." All three Ukrainian veterans nodded in drunken agreement. They all knew it back then. The Germans. They had to die. All of them. And all too often, though it did not sit well with many of the soldiers, that meant the children, too.

The two Germans continued to listen as the Ukrainian war veterans, their voices now grown lower as the gruesome memories were dredged up and colored their words with the stygian memories they could share with no one but their fellow culpable wartime comrades. All Germans knew about the Soviet atrocities in the east. Though largely unreported and even the miniscule amount that was reported received with massive disinterest in the west, to the Germans it was their own holocaust, the individual and collective stories repeated time and again in somber voices throughout Germany. But this was different. This time the war criminals were not anonymous. They had faces. And, the two Germans would soon attempt to learn. Names. And addresses. And then the two Germans heard something that would have a profound effect on all of their futures. The three Soviet veterans agreed to meet, as they did every year, at the same place again one year hence on the same date as now, May 9th, the date the Ukraine celebrated as the end of World War II. And they mentioned something else that further riveted the attention of the listening Germans. The 18th Guards Rifle Division. The name of the Soviet unit they were with on the Eastern Front when they entered Goldap.

A year later, as promised, all three again converged on the same sunny spot on the Black Sea on the outskirts of historical Yalta. They had not a hint of the other events that had happened in that year. How dossiers with their photos, names and addresses, along with affidavits from the two Germans, secretly crossed the Iron Curtain and were delivered to a comfortable villa in northern Bavaria. How their public admissions of guilt were presented to a secret court and five black-robed judges weighed the testimony both pro and con. How it was confirmed by discrete inquiry with agents inside the Communist Bloc that the Soviet unit the three men were in did actually enter Goldap, East Prussia, on the day of the well documented atrocities. In the end they were adjudged as war criminals. They made clear personal choices to perform those hideous atrocities in Goldap. The sentence was death. It was carried out quietly. In the Crimea. On the Black Sea. The engine of the tourist boat the three were on mysteriously exploded and the boat sank into the Black Sea. The only survivor was the fishing boat captain. A man who had patriotically volunteered to give them a free trip. It was, after all, the May 9th holiday celebrating the end of World War II, and the three men were Soviet Army veterans of the war.

Though he had a new manufactured Ukrainian identity, the tourist boat captain in fact had a German mother and a Ukrainian father and was one of the legion of Ukrainian nationalists who fought with the Germans in World War II. He had a very personal reason for joining the German Army. The maniacally paranoid Russians arrested his German mother as an enemy alien and exiled her to Siberia where she died within a few months. His mother was totally disinterested in politics and a threat to no one. Yet they still spirited the harmless woman away to Siberia. Her son considered her death in the frigid vastness of Siberia to be an intentional act by the Soviets. In a word:

Murder.

It just so happened he was in the same unit as the two Ukrainian speaking Germans.

Life is full of coincidences.

### Feodosia

Feodosia is a picturesque Black Sea resort town on the Crimean peninsula. Though the place has changed ethnic hands numerous times over the long centuries, the population is today mostly Russian speaking. In another one of his ruthless and deadly ethnic cleansing mass deportations, Stalin uprooted most of the native Tatars during and after World War II. Also known as Feodoysia, it is a place of contrasts. An abundance of trees, flowers in summer, towering mountains and shimmering sea views, ancient ruins of castles and citadel walls, decaying villas, upscale tourist hotels, pastel shaded buildings, red tile roofs, ugly sprawling factories, lavish lifestyles juxtaposed to struggling impoverished neighborhoods, mineral springs and mud baths, fishing boats and marinas stretching out into the Black Sea, sandy and pebbly beaches alongside mountainsides abruptly plunging into the sea. In the summer months it resonates with recreating gaggles of tourists mostly from the countries of the former Soviet Union. Winters are relatively mild by harsh Ukrainian and Russian standards, but cold enough that the tourists stay home and the town recuperates somnolently until the warm months return.

The history of the town stretches far back in time, even beyond the intrepid 6th Century BC Greek colonists whose name for the town, Theodosia, echoes plainly in the modern name of Feodosia. The town had many names and many masters down through the long colorful--often the color of blood--centuries. Greeks, Huns, Mongols, Genoese, Turks, Poles, Ukrainians, Russians. Some claim that the Black Death that terrorized Europe in the 14th Century entered the European continent through the Port of Feodosia. There is an historical anecdote that during a 14th Century siege of the town by Tatars the besiegers were themselves attacked by the dreaded Black Death, the bubonic plague. The Tatars were said to have catapulted corpses of victims of the Black Death over the citadel walls of Feodosia (then called Kaffa) to infect the defenders and hasten their demise. Several shiploads of citizens from the stricken city fled to Genoa where they inadvertently introduced the Black Death to the core of the European continent that resulted in the pandemic that depopulated huge areas of Europe. Or so the story goes. It may be true. Or it may be fiction. The Black Death pandemic, however, was the pathogenic antithesis of fiction.

Feodosia was destroyed more than once over the bloody centuries, most recently in World War II. There is a modern monument in the town to the Jews murdered by a Nazi extermination unit at the end of 1941. There is no monument to the second massacre, one that followed by only a matter of weeks the murder of the Jews. The Russian speaking population of the Crimea and of Feodosia would not tolerate it. The reason? The murderers? They were soldiers, sailors and marines. Germans? No. Russians. The victims? Jews? No. Some of the victims were captured German soldiers. Others of the victims were so called Russian collaborators, who were little more than medical personnel in the local hospitals impressed by the Germans to care for their wounded soldiers. And the rest? Who were the victims of the second massacre in December of 1941 in Feodosia? Germans. The wounded. Hundreds of them. Ripped from their hospital beds. Most were murdered outright. But not all. In the grim realities of war on the Eastern Front perhaps those who were butchered outright, brutal as it was, might have been the fortunate ones. For others it was worse.

Far worse.

The German tide was still rolling over the Soviet Union. They entered Feodosia in November of 1941. Not long that after the bulk of the troops were withdrawn for other operations and a skeleton force left behind along with the wounded and otherwise incapacitated. The Russians, who still had their Black Sea fleet intact, counterattacked from the sea and the outmanned and outgunned skeleton force of German infantry was hastily evacuated. Everyone but those whose wounds were too serious to travel was evacuated. Around 200 German wounded had to be left behind in the care of a handful of medical personnel. Other Germans were unlucky enough not to make their escape before the Russians rolled over the town and were made prisoner. All but a few would eventually be murdered. And those few, along with locals from Feodosia, would live to tell what happened when the Russians took the town.

Almost immediately a group of drunken Russian marines went to the hospital and began tossing wounded Germans out the second story windows. Others were dragged outside and murdered with bayonets and axes. Still others were thrown over a seawall onto the beach were Russians battered their brains out. In some of hospitals the wounded were immediately shot. In some, however, they were first tortured and mutilated. Ears and tongues cut out, eyes gouged out, fingers and toes cut off, genitals sliced off and stuffed in the mouths of the doomed Germans. Some of them were so horribly disfigured that their faces were unrecognizable. Then came the order to kill all the Germans captured in the town. The remaining wounded and the unwounded prisoners of war were shot or bludgeoned to death. The Russians were probably in a hurry because the German Army was again threatening Feodosia. Possibly that made them sloppy. Whatever the reason, a handful of the German soldiers survived the executions to tell what had happened when the Germans retook the town the following day, less than a month after the Russians had rolled over it. That was when the returning Germans found out what had happened to some of their wounded captured in the town. The Russians had laid them on the beach in the frigid winter weather, stripped them of their clothing, poured water over them. And left them to slowly freeze to death.

No one was ever charged with a war crime over the massacre in Feodosia.

### Colonel Bertram Krestchman

Colonel Bertram Krestchman left the Army in 1946. Unlike some among his fellow officers whose prewar lives were little more than fading memories, he had no interest in staying in the military and making it a career. In plain fact never had. Illinois native Bertram Krestchman had political ambitions and his calculating mind recognized that when everyone was going off to war he damn well better get some military experience to further his political career. His older brother--Hiram Ulysses Kretschman--was an admiral who ended the war with two stars and had arranged for the younger Krestchman's commission as a major in the neighboring state of Indiana's National Guard. Bertram Krestchman was a graduate of the College of Law at the University of Illinois Champagne campus and a prominent lawyer in his home town of Bloomington, Illinois. In those days that was more than enough education and experience to justify commissioning him as a National Guard major in the Guard's 38th Infantry Division.

The 38th was then undergoing training before deployment to the Pacific. Kretschman, acutely aware of his German ancestry that he had once been outspokenly proud of, felt as though he had a personal responsibility to confront his wayward distant cousins and force Germany to return to what he blithely called civilized behavior. Hidden beneath that stated desire was an unstated one. The subsurface Bertram Krestchman was deeply drawn to see what the vaunted German military machine was really like. The world did not yet know of the horrific deeds of the Nazis and Krestchman, despite his proud American nationality, still felt a certain Germanic pride at the Wehrmacht's military prowess. He wanted to see it first hand. So he hatched his plan. He picked up his phone. And dialed a familiar number.

"This is Admiral Kretschman," Hiram Ulysses Kretschman said into the phone at his desk in Foggy Bottom in D.C. "How may I help you."

"How about a transfer to the European theatre, H.U.", answered his younger brother, Bertram. "Do you think you can pull that off for me?" H.U. grinned and waggled his head. He knew his younger brother well and already suspected this was going to happen. There was little he wouldn't do for his younger brother, going back to when their mother died while they were still preteens. It wasn't such a leap, anyhow. Bertram was an experienced lawyer and there was a need for lawyers in the rapidly expanding military along with a host of other skills. He managed to get Bertram promoted to lieutenant colonel and transferred to an officers' replacement unit. From there he went to Europe shortly after D Day and was assigned to the Judge Advocate Corps in General George Patton's 3rd Army.

It was a heady experience just being in the famous General George Patton's victorious Third Army, even though Krestchman was a rear area desk pilot of a soldier who had little first hand experience of the war. Patton was America's answer to the famous German tank general, Erwin Rommel. Krestchman had a few close calls, all from friendly fire or accidents, but for one. One cloudy January afternoon somewhere close to the border of Germany and Czechoslovakia a single Messerschmitt Bf 109 dove on the convoy he was riding in, severely wounding the driver of his jeep and sending slivers of glass from the shattered windshield into the colonel's shoulder and arm.

He returned to duty less than a week later with a sore arm and a Purple Heart medal that sure wouldn't hurt his reputation when he got back home to Bloomington. Bertram Kretschman's political ambitions coveted a war record that would win votes from an American population that had experienced four years of war and was chock full of returning veterans. Being a veteran of the European campaigns of General George Patton's renowned 3rd Army was impressive. So was being a colonel. The Purple Heart magnified his resume even more. There remained just one last ingredient to his recipe for a wartime record that would make him a shoo-in for election to higher office back home. But it was going to be a tough one to pull off. Bertram Krestchman, lawyer and small town politician, who had never fired a shot in combat and who had no military leadership experience, wanted a combat command.

Bertram's older brother, Hiram, the two star admiral in the newly constructed Pentagon, again came through for his younger brother. The admiral was a close friend of General George Patton's chief of staff. But the Admiral was career military, and knowing full well that throwing an inexperienced commander into a combat situation was utterly foolhardy, they worked out a compromise. Lieutenant Colonel Kretschman would be promoted to a full colonel and given command of an armored battalion, but only with an experienced adjutant as his second in command. And--this being the bedrock key to the assignment--only when the fighting was all but over.

Colonel Bertram Krestchman became commander of an unattached armored battalion a few weeks after the ending of the Battle of the Bulge. But the fighting wasn't quite over. There was some unexpected stiff combat when elements of the battalion encountered a small unit of recalcitrant diehard SS troopers.

"Germans! SS!" Kretschman blurted out when the battalion command post--CP--radio crackled to life and informed the CP, including the commanding officer, Colonel Bertram Kretschman, that the battalion's forward reconnaissance platoon was under attack. Panic was in Kretshman's face, though he tried like hell to hide it. But then the experienced adjutant, Major Corelli, leaned next to Krestchman and whispered into his ear.

"I'll handle it. That OK with you?" Even the radio operator noticed the palpable relief that flooded Kretschman's face. Though Kretschman was the battalion commander, he had the sense to let his veteran adjutant direct the combat operations. In the end the reckless courage of the SS soldiers was no match for the tanks and armored cars of Krestchman's battalion and the Americans broke the SS unit and scattered the survivors. Hardly an hour after the short-lived combat ended a red-faced captain came stomping angrily into the CP tent. It was Captain Timothy O'Rourke, a Catholic priest who was the unit's military chaplain.

"Colonel!" The red faced priest started, "your men just murdered a half dozen German prisoners. I was there! I begged them not to do it, but they shot them anyway!" He paused for moment to take a deep breath. "You have to do something, Colonel!"  
"Were they SS troopers?" Kretschman asked, unsure how he should deal with this.

"Yes," Captain O'Rourke answered. "SS. But they surrendered. And at least two of them were wounded." That did it. SS. Kretschman made up his mind.

"Write a report on this Captain, including all the pertinent details, and submit it to me. And ASAP!" Captain O'Rourke hesitated for a moment, somewhat surprised at Kretschman's quick decision, which was not what he expected. Then he came to attention and saluted.

"I will do just that, sir. And immediately!" With that the priest wheeled and stomped back out of the CP tent. Kretschman, who was no combat soldier but was a clever lawyer, turned to his adjutant, Major Corelli.

"When that priest brings that report make sure it comes directly to me and that no one else sees it." Colonel Kretschman had been hearing horror stories of SS brutality even before the Army Air Force C 47 that brought him from England made a jarring landing on the European continent at a hastily constructed airfield outside of Paris. Krestchman's political instincts kicked in. Investigating what was very likely a reflex action by worn down combat troops would not win him any friends--or recommendations--in the military. There was no way he was going to have it investigated.

"And Major," Kretschman said in a low voice to his adjutant. "After that priest brings back his report see about getting him transferred to another unit." He looked levelly at Major Corelli, who already had a firm grasp on what the sly Colonel was up to.

"And have that transfer effective immediately!"

Corelli's face darkened, but he remained silent. Major Corelli had zero sympathy for SS troopers. That, however, did not mean he condoned shooting unarmed prisoners. But he was career military and taking issue with Kretschman's actions would likely be a career buster. Anyhow, he told himself, they were SS. The same fanatical bastards who murdered a bunch of American prisoners during the Battle of the Bulge.

As a matter of fact, they weren't. The Waffen SS--the soldiers, not the Algemeine SS who were the worst of the worst--was made up a numbingly wide variety of soldiers from nearly a dozen nations and ethnicities. And not all of them were volunteers. The SS was given the authority to draft ethnic Germans from outside the political borders of Germany. The six SS troopers executed by Kretschman's soldiers were all from the Banat in what would become Yugoslavia and were drafted into the SS. All they wanted to do was survive the war and go back home. They would not survive the war. Even if they had there would have been no home to go back to. The Serbs, like the Czechs, got rid of their German minority and did it with a brutality and viciousness even worse than the Russians.

Soon after that the Colonel's armored battalion joined in the rush through southern Germany and towards Czechoslovakia, Krestchman receiving yet another minor shrapnel wound. He said it was shrapnel from German artillery, though in truth it was more likely from an errant American artillery round. It bled profusely, but turned out to be so minor he was sent back to his unit after the aid station dressed it. Not good enough to be what combat soldiers considered to be a million dollar one. The soldiers considered a million dollar wound to be one that was bad enough to get them permanently out of combat but not so bad as to be permanently disabling. This wound had a whole different meaning to Kretschman. For Kretshman his second 'combat' wound was a powerful talking point in his election campaign when he got home. Combat command in General George Patton's 3rd Army. Two purple hearts. Not one. _Two._ He could already see the campaign ads in his political mind's eye.

Colonel Kretschman's unit was among those racing to liberate Prague when the political decision was made to stop the American troops and let the Russians take the city. Many among the Americans, Patton preeminent, were disgusted. For the German citizens of Prague mere disgust was an ephemeral bit of smoke before the real hell the Russians and the Czechs would visit on them.

### Prague

Prague-Theresienstadt, maltreatment of old women _  
_Reported by: Anna Seidel  Report of July 4, 1947

I am 67 years old, the widow of an engineer, and have lived in one and the same house in Prague XVI-Smichow, at Hollergasse 16, for 40 years. In all those years I never once had the slightest quarrel or difference of opinion with anyone, neither in everyday matters nor in terms of politics, which is something I was never active in, in any way. Nonetheless four civilians (partisans) armed with fixed bayonets dragged me from my home at 3 o'clock on May 9. In the corridor four elderly women stood with their faces to the wall, "hands up", with a man armed with a rifle standing behind each. They included Frau Kogert, 67 years old, the widow of a senior engineer, Frau Arbes, 70 years old, the widow of a professor, and her daughter, all of whom lived in the surrounding houses. We were led to the suburb of Radlitz, into a factory where we were deprived of everything, truly everything we had on us: money, papers, jewelry etc. We were maltreated, kicked in the back and beaten so badly that for weeks afterwards we were black and blue all over. Our hair was brutally chopped off, then they painted black swastikas on our foreheads, poured several buckets of cold water over us, loaded us onto a truck, where we had to remain in a kneeling position, and drove us like that slowly through the streets while still continually beating us. At the same time we had to shout: "My jsme Hitler-kurvy" = "We are Hitler-whores," and if we didn't shout this loudly or convincingly enough they landed further blows, ever harder, on us - on helpless and defenseless old women! In this way we finally arrived at the police headquarters, where we had to spend all night in the yard in our wet clothes. The next morning we were taken to the prison in Pankratz, where we had to stay for four weeks. After that they carted us in open coal wagons to the "Small Fortress Theresienstadt", where we spent an entire year locked up behind barred windows and forced to do heavy physical labor: entraining coal on the railroad, also lumber, furniture, clearing barracks, cleaning overflowing toilets whose doors could hardly even be opened any more, and doing duty without any protection or sanitary measures in undescribable conditions in typhus barracks. All of this was done in striped prison garb, which we had been given immediately upon arrival after we had had to strip totally naked and to throw our clothes onto a big pile, of course never to see any of them ever again!

The martyrdom inflicted on the men was horrifying (they had to roll around and crawl in sharp gravel and if they did not do it vigorously enough they were tormented with kicks). And it was horrible to see how the people died left, right and center! Our rations consisted of two cups of watery soup per day, usually none or only very few potatoes, 200 g bread, and bitter black coffee. Only at the very end did we receive a little sugar and margarine, which made us conclude that our release was imminent, which was the correct conclusion since our deliverance came in mid-May.

I am ready and willing to take this my report on my oath at any time before the appropriate authorities.

Blood bath in the Scharnhorst School concentration camp _  
_Reported by: Hildegard Hurtinger  Report of November 6, 1946  (Prague)

_I have lived in Prague since 1923, with the exception of a five-year period from 1938 to 1942, d_ _uring which time I lived in Teplitz. On May 5, 1945 a Czech mob took me from my home and, beating and clubbing me all the while, dragged me by the hair some 500 meters into the Scharnhorst School, where I was robbed of everything so that all I had left were my stockings and the dress I wore. I was immediately interrogated by a Czech commissar, a woman, and accused of having sent 16 Czechs to die in a concentration camp - in 1942, at a time when I was not even in Prague. Every time I denied an allegation I was slapped about the head. Then I was taken into so-called Separation, where I and my fellow prisoners, men and women, were brutally maltreated. At night all inmates were repeatedly called out into the yard, and groups of 10 men, women and children were counted out - among them my two brothers and their families - and shot before the eyes of the other inmates. My brother's youngest child was only 5 months old. Then the rest of us had to dig graves, strip the bodies, and bury them. At other times as well, day or night, the guards would take random shots at the prisoners. Thousands died in this way. One such time a bullet grazed my neck. I stayed where I lay under the corpses for a whole day and night because I did not dare get up. Then Revolutionary Guardsmen stepped over the bodies and blindly stabbed any who still lived with their bayonets. My left hand was impaled in the process._

In Separation we got nothing at all to eat. Children were given spittoons as 'meals'. Those children who refused them were beaten. Armed Czech women dragged pregnant prisoners from the cells and out into the yard, where they stripped and beat them, then stuffed them into latrines and beat them until their bellies burst. I myself had to help carry off the bodies of the women who had died that way. For many days at least ten women died in this way every day. During the day groups of six to eight women were taken to work in St. Gotthard Church. There we had to kiss the dead bodies that were already rotting, pile them up, and clean the church floor of the blood that ran there by getting down on our knees and licking it up. A Czech mob supervised this work and beat us. This went on for days. I also saw how candle flames were used to burn swastikas into the palms of German men, among them engineer Färber from the German-Czech Technical College.

On May 20 we were led to Wenzel Square where German boys and girls, and soldiers too, were hung alive by their feet from lamp posts and trees and, in front of our very eyes, were doused with petroleum and set on fire. I myself had to stay at the Scharnhorst School until September 20 of last year. The brutalities went on the entire time, without respite. Then I was transferred to Pankratz, from where I was sent to work at the Philipps Factory in Prague. On November 6 of last year I was brutally beaten with a rubber truncheon by the camp leader there because I had expressed a wish to go to church, as it was my wedding anniversary. - Later, our treatment improved considerably, as did our rations.

### Colonel Kretschman

Kretschman fumed, ranting angrily, after his battalion was ordered to not go into Prague and share in what was certain to be the joyous liberation of the city. As the unit was halted, bitter and frustrated, a German civilian was brought to Krestchman's command jeep with a report about a Nazi concentration camp that had not yet been liberated.

"Nur sechs Kilometer weg," the middle aged, crippled German man said. "Mit Gefangene." A man, Kretschman noted, missing an arm and very likely a veteran of the First World War. The translator was a German speaking sergeant, a second generation German-American who, though he did not know it yet, lost most of his German relatives either in combat or when the Russian hordes descended on their Silesian homeland.

"This man says that there is a concentration camp only six kilometers from here. And that there are still prisoners being held there." It would soon turn out that the place was one of the numerous sub camps collectively called Mauthausen. The crippled German pointed the way.

"A camp!" Kretschman exclaimed. "With prisoners still in it!" He turned to his adjutant. "Mount up, Major. I'll lead the way. We're about to become liberators!" Major Corelli put his hand gently on Kretschman's shoulder and softly spoke into his ear.

"Colonel," he began, trying to sound calm and patient although he had long ago had enough of Kretshman's combination of arrogance and military ineptitude. "Best to send the reconnaissance platoon first. That's what they do. This may be a trap."

"A trap?" Kretschman replied, incredulously. "This late in the war? What the fuck point is there in that? Kretschman, despite his education and status, was prone to profanity. Especially when he was agitated. "They all have to know the fucking war is over and they've lost."

"We're still foreigners on their turf. Invaders, from their viewpoint. Best to be cautious." Kretschman came very close to dismissing Major Corelli's cautions. He wanted to rush in at the head of his troops and liberate the prisoners. They might even be fellow Americans held by the Germans as POW's. But the steely determination in Major Corelli's gaze made him hesitate.

"Colonel," Major Corelli said in a tightly controlled voice, trying not the betray his contempt for Krestchman's blatant military incompetence. The adjutant had won his promotions on the battlefield, not in a back room at the Pentagon. "After you order us forward, and it turns out to be a trap," he continued, knowing full well Kretschman's political ambitions, "you'll be blamed and your military career will be over." It didn't take Krestchman long to figure out that the same would also be true of his political plans. A fast moving reconnaissance patrol of jeeps and armored cars was sent out. Major Corelli was right. It was an ambush. The patrol managed to break off and flee, but left a smashed jeep and disabled armored car on the road behind them. No one was killed, but a half dozen American soldiers were wounded, two seriously.

The Americans were back in a military twinkling with a powerful force of tanks and armored cars. The Germans, who had been waiting in the woods bordering the road with tank-killing Panzerfausts when the exploratory patrol arrived, were gone, the all important element of surprise lost. The Germans were a long way from the tough soldiers of the regular army. They were only a local Volkssturm company made up of invalids, old men and boys too young for the army. Gone, too, was the aging German cripple who lured the Americans into the trap. An embittered man who had lost both his sons in the war and his daughter and her children in the horrific Hamburg firestorm. They were gone, but the concentration camp wasn't. That part of the German civilian's story was true. There was a concentration camp. One of the Mauthausen subcamps. And, after probing patrols found all the guards had fled, Colonel Krestchman led his troops into the camp, standing up in his jeep and with an Army photographer in the back seat taking pictures. This was _really_ going to seal his political future. He stood in his jeep excited at the jubilant welcome the liberated inmates were sure to give him. And with a photographer taking pictures of it! Or so he thought. Until....

"Oh....oh...... _oh, my God!...."_

His excitement didn't last fifty feet into the camp. What he saw there so wrenched his soul that the slumbering but still extant pride in his German ancestry imploded into a black hole of disgust. As he drove past the haggard bags of bones that were human beings, and the piles of rotting corpses, Colonel Bertram Kretschman cursed the land of his ancestry and all those who called themselves German. Perhaps because, in some convoluted way, his own Germanic heritage brought him shame beyond all the others staring at the horrors of the camp, he had an instant and permanent hatred for Germany and all things German.

A hate that he would carry with him to the grave.

### Witbold Schrülen

In a few intensely compacted epic months of unparalleled national tragedy that no German then of a sapient age could ever forget, Witbold Schrülen underwent what was then an all too common metamorphosis. In the autumn of 1944, despite mandatory participation in the Hitler Youth, he was still at heart a skinny naive schoolboy living on a dairy farm just outside of the city of Aachen, a city that once was a residence of Emperor Karl Der Grosse--a Germanic Frank known in the west by the French rendering of his name, Charlemagne. As the Allied armies approached the German border and the bombing and hedgehopping aircraft attacks grew into a furious maelstrom, Witbold was among the many thousands of inhabitants of the Aachen area hastily evacuated to Bavaria. There the dispassionate long arm of the Nazi bureaucracy found him and drafted him into service in the Reichsarbeitsdienst, the National Labor Service. And then, so quickly he hardly had time to adjust to the radical change of being a free-spirited boy to the regimentation of being in the National Labor Service, when the last reserves of German manpower were desperately being scraped together from what had not yet been committed to the meat grinder of the Eastern, and now, Western, Fronts, Witbold Schrülen found himself wearing the uniform of a soldier. He was put in a newly created division, the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Reichsarbeitsdienst( RAD) Infantry Division.

Though it had several thousand men and boys assigned to it, the division was largely a fiction. A cruel fiction, since the Machiavellian Nazis who created it knew full well they were condemning them to death in a lost cause. Composed of cadets, auxiliaries, youth from the Labor Service, the boys and old men of the Volkssturm, untrained and poorly equipped, they were little more than sacrificial victims to the fanaticism of the Nazis. The fanatics thought that if Germany was to die, then its men--and boys--were to die with it. And they did. In their doomed unnumbered thousands. Untrained, poorly armed, some with archaic captured French rifles and little ammunition, they were sent in to die along with the last of the soldiers. Those German officers who refused to accept the last pitiful scrapings of German manpower and commit them to pointless deaths in battle were themselves subject to court martial and immediate execution. In those last months the Nazis were at their most ferocious. Those who tried to evade going into the Volkssturm, a last ditch hodgepodge national militia of mostly old men and boys, were caught and strung up from the nearest lamp post or tree branch. The lamp posts of Berlin in its final days were grotesquely festooned with German males hung by the roving groups of Military Police and SS execution squads. Woe to the soldier caught by them without written orders or a pass or a very convincing tongue.

In the end the Beast was eating its own young.

Witbold was issued an obsolete French bolt action rifle and a mere handful of bullets, along with a pair of Czech grenades. Though by then all Germans knew that the end was approaching, Witbold no exception, the full impact of it only hit him when he saw the drawn and fatalistic faces of the invalided and convalescent wounded veterans ordered back into active service by the pitiless Nazi manpower bureaucracy. They, and other veterans scrounged from the last of the schools and rear area installations, were to provide the leadership and veteran core that would be the backbone of the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Infantry Division. None of the veterans were deluded by the fiction of a division of untrained and poorly armed boys and old men having any real military significance. But they obeyed, most knowing it would probably mean a pointless death in combat. Nazi or not, many remained staunch German patriots. And for the undecided and the wavering? There was always the lurking reality of the roving death squads. The invalids, convalescents, worn out veterans, old men and boys, were now actors in the final act of the Nazi pageant. Richard Wagner had unknowingly predicted it. It was the Götterdämmerung. Twilight of the Gods. The day was at hand when the old gods, resurrected and brazenly flaunted by the Nazis, would die in the flames of their own warriors' keep. There were many among the Germans who, finally, realized it. And there were many, far, far too many, who would die along with the old gods totally irrespective of whether they had ever believed in them or not.

Witbold was yet but a lad barely sixteen, his elastic young mind still reeling from the accelerated transformation from schoolboy to soldier in just weeks. A few months earlier he carelessly hiked on the forested paths around Aachen and flirted with the pretty girls of his neighborhood. Now he was in a recycled uniform one size too large for him and wearing a pair of clumsy and uncomfortable boots. At least the steel helmet fit and the pair of Czech grenades offered some protection. The French rifle had long lay in disuse and the bolt action very difficult to work. A one-armed sergeant took a look at the weapon and shook his head gravely. Although the sergeant didn't say as much, Witbold concluded the weapon would be useless in combat. The one-armed sergeant, a man who in a forever vanished civilian life was a baker in Silesia, lowered his voice and spoke directly to Witbold's ear.

"When we go into battle, take a weapon from one of the dead." A long, veteran's sigh.  
"Lord knows there'll be plenty of them." As he made to leave, he had one last suggestion.

"The Russian burp gun is the best. If you see one of those, grab it as quick as you can!"

As the one-armed sergeant walked wearily away, Witbold had a sudden intimation that the man would soon be dead. It was a huge underestimation by several orders of magnitude. Many of the men and boys, the crippled and weary veterans, of the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn RAD Infantry Division would never see their homes again. Some in combat. Others, many, far, far too many, in Russian death camps.

Friedrich Ludwig Jahn was a 19th Century German who was shocked by the humiliation of German troops by Napoleon Bonaparte's armies. He became a nationalist and founded a movement that melded physical fitness and gymnastics with nationalism. He was a German patriot in the Nazi pantheon of German heroes preceding National Socialism and seemed a perfect namesake for the newly created division. The Nazis either overlooked or didn't know that the real Friedrich Ludwig Jahn was an iconoclast and a free thinker who often ran afoul of the German authorities in his own time. And in the time of the Nazis? He would have been one of the first to disappear into a Nazi concentration camp. The Nazis were not only good at deluding others.

They were even better at deluding themselves.

The division was attached to General Walther Wenck's 12th Army which was to the west and south of Berlin. The 9th Army of General Theodor Busse was to the east of Berlin and already nearly battered to bits by the Russian juggernaut closing in on the German capital. Though the fanatics around Hitler were ordering Wenck to join the battle for Berlin, General Wenck was well aware of his realities and focused instead on trying to rescue the remnants of Busse's 9th Army. He advanced as far as he could and waited for the 9th Army to break out. A pitiful remnant did finally manage to escape inside the defensive ring of the Wenck's 12th Army, but there was a horrific slaughter of those who failed to escape at the Brandenburg town of Halbe near Berlin. There as many as fifty thousand Germans, civilians as well as soldiers, were massacred by the Soviets in the Germans' desperate attempts to escape the hell of Soviet captivity. The slaughter was so great that the skeletons of the massacred were still being found in the forests around Halbe even into the 21st Century.

Among the haggard survivors who did manage to escape to the arms of the 12th Army were a group of female Luftwaffe auxiliaries. One of them was Witbold's older sister, Karin. She knew that her brother was in the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn RAD Infantry Division and when she heard that the division was nearby, went to try to find him as the 12th Army and the rescued survivors of the 9th Army began to retreat to the west to surrender to the Americans and the British. Just before the retreating Germans reached the eastern banks of the Elbe, she found Witbold. His division had not seen much combat after all, General Wenck and his remaining veterans immediately recognizing the folly of putting them against the Russians. But the division did suffer casualties, a few from the little combat they saw, but by far the most from artillery and attacking aircraft. In those few days Witbold saw more than enough carnage to weigh down his soul for the rest of his life. Refugee trains of horse drawn wagons machine gunned by low flying aircraft, comrades disemboweled by shrapnel from Soviet artillery. The terror of the shrieking Katushkas, the so-called Stalin Organs. Whole squads vaporized by high explosive bombs loosed by enemy dive bombers. The mutilated dead, the wounded crying for someone to help them, the worst of the wounded begging someone to shoot them. Karin had seen that, and worse, in the breakout from Halbe. Corpses lay in bloody mangled heaps in the streets of Halbe and nearby she saw where the Russians had overrun a field hospital full of German wounded and murdered everyone, including the doctors and medics. There were no female nurses among the bodies. Karin hoped they had escaped. But she intuited their fate was far worse. With such images still in their young minds there were few words exchanged between brother and sister as they waited through the nail biting hours for their turn to cross the Elbe.

"We must go home, Willi," Karin said to her younger brother, her arm wrapped around his shoulder. "And try to forget."

"Ja, so..." Witbold stuttered, still in a state of nervous collapse and shock from all the horrendous sights that left him physically and emotionally shattered. "Tr...tr...try.....to forget." Even as he said it he knew he would never forget. Could never forget. How _could_ you forget these horrendous images that would not leave him, even in an exhausted sleep that always ended in nightmares? Karin, still the big sister, pulled him tightly to her side.

"We can only try, Willi," she said softly. Though, like Witbold, she didn't think it would ever be possible to forget. The sight of the massacred wounded soldiers in the first aid tent at that moment again flashing through her mind.

"Try.....to......forget," she said again. Then both fell silent as they waited for their turn to cross the river into whatever lay ahead for them in a ruined, chaotic Germany that would itself never really forget.

The soldiers, most of them, were much like the general population in Germany. After the ignominy of the national humiliation of the Versailles peace treaty of WWI, then the crushing hopelessness of the Great Depression, National Socialism brought work and dignity and hope. The people, and the soldiers and the millions who would soon make the unknowing fatal one way trip to be become soldiers, went with the cultural flow. Especially when they realized all too clearly what going against the flow would mean. But the war came and in a brace of years the historical flow reversed itself. Prosperity and national pride morphed into a raging storm of death and destruction and a rendering of the fabric of the German nation. For the soldiers, like most Germans, National Socialism's credulity crumbled along with the irreplaceable cultural heritage of the German cities bombed to bits by the American and British bombers. There were certainly fervent Nazis left among them, though their numbers had ebbed greatly over the last years of the war, lost in battle along with the rest of the doomed generations of German men of fighting age. Others among the fanatics, more and more of them as defeat became inevitable and Germany was blasted into rubble, lost heart in National Socialism. That didn't mean there weren't German patriots among them. They were legion. Belief in National Socialism was not synonymous with patriotism, though to outsiders it might not seem so. The soldiers were patriots who cherished their people and the German nation and bitterly resented the way other nations had for centuries tried to grind the German peoples down. And, in that bloody spring of 1945, it was happening once again. As so many times in the past before the rise of the German nation, the motherland of the German tongue was pulverized into bloody remnants. Its priceless monumental heritage, in some places even dating far back to the distant Roman past, was all gone, scattered into broken fragments along with the bloody body parts of the humans dismembered by the same bombs.

But the patriots, who were little different from patriots in most nations on God's earth, and who had fought honorably for their nation as all patriots in all nations did, subsumed by the fantasies of their leadership, would find themselves branded with the mark of Cain. To the conquering armies, they were all Nazis. Not patriots. Not German nationalists. Not even ordinary men drafted into the military who were in the end fighting to protect their homes and families. They were all Nazis. And, once the concentration camps were found, whatever small compassion or empathy the conquerors had for the Germans evaporated. All Germans were guilty. All German soldiers were the same, be they SS guards at a concentration camp or combat soldiers. It made no difference. They were all Nazis. Their uniforms made them all war criminals.

And the conquerors would exact a terrible revenge.

Execution of 18 prisoners of war on August 9, 1945  
Reported by: Eduard Flach, lieutenant colonel (ret'd.)  Report of March 6, 1950  (Prague)

I am a former Lieutenant Colonel and was Chief of a Pay and Allowance Office of the Luftwaffe. I was 58 years old when I fell into Czech captivity in Prague on May 6, 1945. Together with some 600 other German soldiers, also prisoners-of-war, I spent the time of my captivity in the labor camp Roudnice on the Elbe River, in the "Benzina Plant", a large industrial facility formerly belonging to the Organisation Todt. I wish to state the following facts for the record:

In the evening of August 9, 1945 we had to line up in the parade square outside the barracks and take off our shirts. An investigative commission had arrived from Prague in order to examine the POWs to see if they had been members of the SS. 18 men were discovered, among them several prisoners who had been drafted into the Waffen-SS without their own doing. The tattooed "a", the sign of membership in the General Waffen-SS, was only found on a few, and some of these had already left the SS.

These 18 POWs now had to stand side-by-side facing a wooden barracks. And now, before our very eyes, the Czechs committed what I can only describe as a very brutal crime against those defenseless prisoners. The Czech guards and soldiers beat the pitiable victims on their bare backs with iron bars and rifle butts until they collapsed in bloody heaps. When the prisoners lay on the ground moaning, the Czechs stood them up again and dumped cold water on them. To this day I recall vividly how the fingers of some of the prisoners were smashed with rifle butts; this maltreatment, unparalleled in my experience, lasted for about 2 hours, until the onset of dark. Then we were allowed to withdraw, and the unconscious prisoners were dragged away to the soldiers' camp, which was separated from the prison camp itself by a barbed-wire fence, and there they were abused some more and finally shot. Still that same night, the stripped-naked bodies were thrown into a drained former reservoir and buried in shallow pits. The next day we had to begin to fill in the pit. When this task was finished several days later, we were able to observe how the Czech guard teams used the filled pit as a football field. I am convinced that the families of these 18 POWs, who were tortured to death without any sort of trial, are still totally in the dark about the tragic fate of their husbands, sons etc., since we and the camp administration were strictly prohibited from making any notes about what we experienced during our captivity.

The fact that during our stay in the Roudnice camp we former German POWs not only had to do hard physical labor for utterly inadequate rations but were also looted of everything we owned and received no POW pay or any other compensation for the work we did - unlike the policy practiced by the Americans and British - is something I just want to mention on the side.

On February 12, 1946 I was to be released, and was sent, severely ill, to the transfer camp Prague-Motol. But my release still took until June 8, 1946. After I was finally released I had to spend several years in medical care, to undo some of the damage to my health caused by the inhuman treatment I had suffered at the hands of the Czechs. I am prepared at any time to take this report on my oath.

It was common among the Germans to believe that they would be treated more humanely by the British and the Americans. And that was often true, especially in comparison to the vengeful vitriol of the Slavs. But there were exceptions. Yes. Exceptions.

Even among the Americans.

### The Race for the Elbe

The war was in its last days. Germany was destroyed. The Nazis had reawakened the old gods and the mythical age of heroes, celebrating them in the admittedly stunning romantic pageantry of the Nuremberg rallies. In the end, as in the old sagas, the mythical heroes were defeated and annihilation followed. And, true, the renewal following the death of the old gods predicted in the sagas would one day come. A reborn democratic Germany would rise Phoenix-like from the ashes. But not now. Now only ashes remained. It was all over. The Landsers of the bloody, battered remnants of the 9th and 12th Armies were of a single mind. The Russians. Don't let the barbarous Russians capture them. Everyone knew what that meant. Many among them, veterans of the vicious fighting on the Eastern Front, had seen first hand what capture by the Russians would mean. Torture. Execution. Or a slow death of starvation from forced labor in Russian concentration camps that would claim more German soldiers' lives than the total war dead of the American, British and French combined. The Russians had murdered millions of their own people and the world was silent. Who could care if they did the same to the hated Germans? Led by their 'boy' general, the youngest general in the German Army, Walter Wenck, the defeated soldiers of the 12th Army, along with the rescued remnants of the 9th Army and other units fleeing the Berlin debacle, followed by a crowd of scores of thousands of panicked fleeing civilians, had but a single thought. The Russians. They couldn't fall into the vengeful hands of the murderous Russians. They had to get to the river Elbe and cross over to the west where the American and British armies were and surrender to them. Ignominy a second time in but a generation's time for a defeated German Army. A bitter pill. But far better than the fate of those who were overrun by the Russians. The vanquished have few choices. None of them good.

Had the Russians not concentrated the bulk of their forces on the taking of the German capital, they might not have made it. That, and the determined rear guard defense put up by seasoned German combat troops, bought enough time. They made it to the Elbe and the American and British armies accepted their surrender and agreed to the soldiers crossing the Elbe into captivity. But not the civilians. Perhaps out of a lack of understanding, perhaps out of a lack of the requisite means to deal with a hundred thousand refugees, or perhaps out of utter callousness, the Allies refused to let the German civilians cross the river with the defeated soldiers. But then the Russians came and commenced firing and continued to fire even when they hit American positions. The Americans pulled back from the river and most of the panicking German civilians were able to cross the Elbe before the Russians arrived in force. No one knew the exact numbers, but around a hundred thousand German soldiers--almost half of them unarmed--and at least that many civilians, possibly two or three times that number, crossed the Elbe out of the reach of the vengeful Russian Bear.

Or so they thought.

Finally their turn came and Witbold and Karin were across and safely into an American prisoner of war camp at Ferchland. They sat down on a muddy hillock in the middle of the throng of captured Germans and began to regain some small measure of hope for the future, even talking about returning to their home near Aachen and wondering if the farm had survived the fighting. They already knew that the city of Aachen was, as almost all of the German cities and towns and even many of the villages, little more than heaps of ash and rubble with unnumbered entombed dead beneath. The two were sitting in silence, mentally, physically and emotionally exhausted by the horror of the past few days.

And then, impossible as it seemed, the horror was back.

American Army units roared up to the camp and surrounded it. Jeeps, tanks, armored cars, infantry units. An American colonel stomped into the prisoner of war compound with a platoon of hard-eyed American MPs armed with Thompson submachine guns.

"Who here speaks English?" The American colonel demanded in a harsh tone. A nearby German Luftwaffe captain lifted his arm.

"I do, Herr Oberst," the captain said with a hint of sarcasm. The American colonel missed the sarcasm. Or maybe he just ignored it. There were other things on his mind.

"Tell whoever is in command among you Krauts to get his Nazi ass up here and report to me immediately." He stomped his foot on the ground to emphasize his point. "And I goddamn mean RIGHT NOW!" Even as the sound of his boot stomping on the mud faded--sending a spray of mud onto the boots of three of his MP's--a straight backed man in a wrinkled and dirty uniform, looking very weary but still dignified, walked up to the colonel. He stopped a few feet away from the American colonel and saluted him with a military--not a Nazi salute, which he had always personally detested.

"I am General Freiherr von Wittendorf," he said in an Oxford-educated English voice as weary as his appearance. "Ranking officer in this camp." The general noted with no little irony that the name plate on the American officer's uniform was Krestchman. Undoubtedly a descendant of the German diaspora of the last centuries. But, the general was sure, with little nostalgia for the ancestral homeland. The general was quite correct. Far more than even he would have imagined.

"I am at your service, Colonel Kretschman," the general said in the same even voice. "You are the victors. We are the vanquished."

Colonel Kretschman was at first taken aback by the dignity and aplomb of the general, even in defeat. But then he remembered the general was a 'von', one of the imperious aristocrats Kretschman's German-born grandfather cursed as arrogant stutters who treated the common people with feudal disdain. The colonel stared directly into General Freiherr von Wittendorf's eyes with a hatred even men a dozen feet away could clearly see.

"Well, _general von_ , this unit liberated a concentration camp at Mauthausen. God knows war is bad enough. But mass murder?" There was fire in the colonel's eyes as well as his voice. "You have lost any claim you might have had to decent treatment as prisoners of war. You are all murderers! You are all guilty! The _entire_ fucking German race is guilty." General Freiherr von Wittendorf could easily have bested Colonel Kretschman in a verbal bout on a level playing field. This was no level playing field. It was more like a pit with the general in the pit and the colonel standing on the edge above.

"We are soldiers, Colonel," the general replied in an even tone, resisting the rising anger inside. "That is all. We are not murderers. No more than any soldiers." An incisive look at the colonel. "Including yours."

"Bullshit!" The colonel replied hotly. "We didn't murder thousands of people in concentration camps."

"Neither did we," the general replied. "Your bombers murdered hundreds of thousands of noncombatants when you bombed our cities," the general replied, his own anger beginning to show in his voice. "Does that make you and your men war criminals?" A pause "We are soldiers. We had nothing to do with the camps. We are little different from you. Our country called us to fight. The same as you and your country. We had little choice but to serve." The colonel grew red in the face and was unable able speak for a few moments.

"That was war!" He finally blurted. "What you Nazis did was pure murder." The general's reply was as quick and sharp as a rapier in the hands of his ancestors in the distant days of the Teutonic Knights.

"I repeat. We had nothing to do with the camps, Colonel. We were--and are--just soldiers. As yourselves." The angry flush remained on the colonel's face.

"Bullshit, you fucking Nazi Prussian bastard. Enough of this crap. I'm here to tell you that we are going to turn you over to the Russians across the river." He turned and swung his arm in a full circle around the prisoner of war camp.

"You are surrounded by American soldiers with the memory of Mauthausen fresh in their minds." A wolfish smile spread across the colonel's face. "They'd like nothing better than to have a reason to open up on you."

Some of the German prisoners standing nearby had some knowledge of English. As soon as they heard the Americans were going to turn them over to the Russians a low murmur began among the thousands of German prisoners and swelled to a tumultuous crescendo of outrage. All of the effort to escape the Russians, the days and nights of struggle and horror, the lost comrades, the slaughter at Halbe, all was for naught? The colonel took a step backwards in astonishment at the furor of the Germans. The squad of MP's raised their Thompsons and glanced nervously around them.

"Colonel," General Freiherr von Wittendorf said through clenched teeth. "Have you no concept of what the Russians do to German prisoners? You are sending many of these men to their death. The best they can hope for is being sent to a Soviet forced labor camp with little hope for survival. Over a million captured Germans have already been executed or died in the Russian camps." The years of combat, the aristocratic distaste for the Nazis, the bitterness of all the murdered fellow officers after the patriotic attempt to kill the monster Hitler, the long, long list of friends and relatives lost in battle. A country in ruins. A people crushed. The proud heritage of German culture bombed into smithereens. And, now with the rape and obliteration of his East Prussian homeland going on even at this very moment?

General Freiherr von Wittendorf gathered his weary body to its full height and his spirit to its full dignity and looked Colonel Krestchman straight in the eye with such ferocity that Krestchman actually blinked.

"Remember this moment for the rest of your life, Colonel. In this place, at this time, at this moment, it is you who are the murderer." The general riveted Colonel Kretschman with his piercing angry eyes and hurled the words with such intensity that Colonel Kretschman rocked back on his heels. " _A murderer and a war criminal!_ " Those Germans nearby who could understand broke out into a cheer and when the words were quickly translated the cheer became a roar. Colonel Kretschman blanched, stepped back and almost reached for his .45 sidearm, making his platoon of MP's even more nervous. An MP captain stepped to his side and whispered something in Krestchman's ear. He slowly relaxed his grip on the .45.

"Prepare your people to move back across the river to the Russians!" He snapped, still smarting at the insult from the German. "You are all going to be turned over to the Russians. Every goddamned man of you." By then Witbold and Karin had moved close to the muddy ground, churned to a thick liquid by the thousands of passing boots, where the straight backed Prussian General von Wittendorf confronted the American lawyer and politician turned soldier, Colonel Kretschman. Having relatives who emigrated to America after WWI to a new life as wheat farmers on the North Dakota prairie, Witbold had been fascinated by English ever since his cousins came on a visit from America in the mid-Thirties. He studied the language since he wasn't much more than a small child. His battalion commander in the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn RAD Infantry Division volunteered Witbold to his superiors for use as a translator, should the need arise. Witbold stepped out from the crowd of Germans and spoke directly to Colonel Krestchman.

"Colonel. Sir. Please. You cannot send the women with us to the Russians. Do you not know what they will do to them?" At that moment the general spoke again, his face aflame with fury.

"Make no mistake, Colonel," he said, then turned towards the platoon of MP's and spoke loud enough for them to hear. "You should all know this. The Russians have been doing this since they entered German soil. They take all the women and gang rape them. Over and over. Sometimes, when they are finished, they shoot them. We have heard this many times over from the lips of refugees who have seen this first hand." His voice rose again, louder, as he glared at Colonel Kretschman.

"Do you also wish to be remembered as the man who sent dozens of women to be gang raped and murdered?"

Colonel Kretschman's hand went for his sidearm again and this time the MP captain had to physically restrain him from pulling the weapon free of its holster. The captain said it in a low voice, but loud enough for the MP's, the general, Witbold, and a handful of English speaking prisoners to hear.

"Colonel," the captain said. "For God's sake, man! Think! You can't do this. There are too many witnesses. You'd face a court marital for certain." The captain guided Colonel Kretschman's hand away from his holster flap and gently pulled at him to move away. Reluctantly, the colonel moved, but even as he did he was already thinking about how he would bring his own court martial against the captain for insubordination in face of the enemy, a very serious offense. As he turned to leave the compound he barked one last command over his shoulder.

"Get your people ready. They're all going to the Russians. Immediately!" Then he wheeled to stare with unveiled hatred, first at General Freiherr von Wittendorf, and then the impudent fucking skinny kid who had dared to confront him. " _And that includes the women!_ " Kretschman snapped angrily before turning to stomp away through the barbed wire gate of the compound, the MP's backing up behind him, nervous eyes scanning the outraged Germans, their Thompsons off safety and pointed at the crowd. At the gate the colonel turned one final time to stare icily at the Germans. Witbold glared back with a intensity even beyond that of the general. No words were exchanged. The acidic glares were enough.

It was a moment so luminously frozen in time that even time itself would never forget it.

A few hours later they were in the hands of the Russians on the east bank of the Elbe. Before they crossed the river some of them, those who still had hidden weapons, chose to use them either to attack the Americans and die fighting or on themselves. A few others committed a different kind of suicide by attacking the American guards with their bare hands. They might have been the lucky ones. The Russians immediately executed several hundred Germans on the spot, mostly SS and Panzer troops whose uniforms were similar to the SS and were often mistaken for them. The women and girls were pulled away by Russian soldiers while their officers silently watched. The women's screams could be heard across the river by the American soldiers standing there in semi-befuddlement. For many of them, as they listened to the gunshots they knew had to be executions, and the screams of the women being raped, they began to lose their belief in the inherent goodness and rightness of the American cause.

Witbold Schrülen lost far more than that. His sister was jerked from his arms and, when he tried to resist, he was beaten to the ground with rifle butts as Karin was dragged away screaming by a platoon of filthy Russians who gang raped her the entire night. The next day she feigned unconsciousness until she saw her chance. As several other of the savagely ravaged haggard girls watched in stunned alarm, Karin crept up to a drunken sleeping Russian and managed to slip his bayonet loose from its scabbard without waking him. Then she violently stabbed him to death as the pent up range inside her exploded. As other Russians nearby shook themselves out of their drunken stupor and started towards her, she turned the bayonet to her breast and drove it into her heart with the explosive rage that consumed her. One of the girls who was a horrified witness, and who knew both Witbold and Karin, managed to get the news to him of what had happened.

The next day the survivors were marched off to captivity where the majority of them would die in slave labor camps in the Soviet Union. Witbold was among the minority who survived, somehow living through two years of working under draconian conditions in a coal mine in what had been German Silesia but now was part of Poland. The Russians were bad enough. The Poles were worse. But he survived. In 1947 he was released. One gray early winter day, a leaden sky spitting hard grains of snow, he walked into the farmyard of his family's dairy farm. To his surprise, after seeing so much utter devastation everywhere in Germany, the farm was still there. The house. The barns. The cows. Even the orchard. But not the family. These people were strangers. His family was gone. Neighbors told him his family fled as the fighting grew very near. They didn't return. He never found out what happened to them, though he thought it likely they lay in a mass grave somewhere nearby, machine gunned by a diving Mustang or blown to pieces by an American artillery burst. Vanished without a trace was a story told millions of times over in Witbold Schrülen's Germany. He couldn't keep count of the times other survivors sadly bemoaned their own vanished loved ones. More wasted lives in a world gone mad. His family was gone. He was certain. They would have gotten word to him somehow if they were alive. There was no word. They were gone. But he never forgot them.

And he also never forgot that day on the Elbe River. Nor the American colonel with the German name. Krestchman. He was a murderer, responsible for his sister's death and those of more than two dozen of his friends in the Russian camps. And the thousands of other dead among the Germans condemned by Krestchman to death at the hands of the vengeful Russians. And the girls, ravished so brutally that even most of those that survived the rapes later died in the Russian camps.

When Witbold finally was released he built a new life for himself in Bavaria, earned a university degree in journalism in München and went to work for a Bavarian news service as an investigative journalist. That was when he learned that many American and British commanders had been pressured by the Russians to turn over surrendered German troops to them. The vast majority were well aware of what that would mean and flatly said no, even some who were ordered to do it and refused, infuriating the Russians and at some places almost set the two sides to fighting. That iced it in Witbold's mind. Colonel Kretschman's act was not just one more dark chapter among many in the widespread brutality of the war. His actions went a step beyond. He was directly responsible for the decision that resulted in thousands of deaths. He made the fatal decision. On his own spiteful volition. Colonel Kretschman was a war criminal. But a war criminal on the victorious side. And the victors wrote the rules on who the war criminals were. There were no Nuremberg Trials for Allied war criminals. Witbold could not accept the dual standard that sent Germans to the gallows but let Americans and Russians walk free. He vowed never to forget that American colonel. The name was burned deeper into his memory than the engraving on the Walther P40 automatic he'd hidden away as a war souvenir. The colonel. The bastard. The murderer.

Kretschman!

### Grischino

### 1943

Grischino is a town in the eastern Ukraine. In early February of 1943 the Russian 3rd Tank Army broke through the German defenses and overran the town. A week later the German 7th Armored Division retook Grischino and discovered a scene of horrendous massacre. What they found is recounted in Alfred de Zayas' book, the _Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945._

The sworn deposition of Sergeant Wilhelm Asche:

"When I arrived at the northern exit of the town of Grischino, I saw there, lying on the road, the corpses of 10 German soldiers. They wore only pants, and their identification tags were still around their necks. The skulls of the corpses had been flattened, apparently by blows with heavy instruments. The skulls had been reduced to about 1/3 of their usual breadth....Later, on the way from Grischino to Anenskaja, I saw hundreds of corpses of German soldiers.....piled up on the street. All corpses were naked.....Almost all of the bodies manifested mutilations...the nose and the ears had been cut off many of them. Other bodies had their genital organs amputated and stuck in their mouths."

And from the deposition of Sergeant Bruno Bonkowski:

"On 24 and 25 February 1943 Lieutenant Wusterack and I.....saw a courtyard in which 10 to 15 men of the Todt Organization had been laid out in rank and file and executed....in the vicinity of the military cemetery I saw in a house corpses piled up 1.5 meters high....they had been horribly mutilated.....outside a field hospital I saw a great many bodies, wounded soldiers who evidently had been carried out of the hospital and left outside to freeze....in a house close by I saw seven or eight dead women, Red Cross nurses, communications assistants and girls dressed in brown and gold uniforms....probably they were all raped by the Bolsheviks since they were lying on their backs with their legs spread wide."

Close to six hundred people were murdered in Grischino by the Russians. Hundreds of German soldiers and German civilian workers, nearly a hundred Italian soldiers, and smaller numbers of Romanian and Hungarian soldiers and Ukrainian volunteers. German investigators were hastily brought to the area and took numerous depositions from the few survivors, German soldiers who were first on the scene and local Ukrainian witnesses. The Grischino massacre was well documented. To no avail.

Like Feodosia, no one was ever charged with war crimes for the Grischino murders.

### Chapter 7

### Sam Jones

### 1944--and after

Sam Jones was a genuine _Hoorah Sam!_ American war hero. Combat veteran of North Africa and Italy. A wounded survivor of the disaster at Kasserine Pass in Tunisia, lightly wounded during the invasion of Sicily, almost drowned off the blood drenched Anzio beachhead when the LCI landing craft he was in was violently rocked by a near miss from a German 88 and Sam was catapulted into the water. He was lucky. Or, as his religiously minded mother fervently believed, his patron saint was on duty that day. The water he plunged into was just over five feet deep. Sam was an inch under six feet tall and survived. Others on the landing craft behind him were thrown into deeper water. The heavy equipment they carried were death sentences that carried them straight to the bottom. Sam survived, only to be severely wounded months later in the tough bitter fight up the spine of Italy against Feldmarschall Albert 'Smiling Albert' Kesselring's determined German veterans.

Sam won a battlefield promotion to second lieutenant after single-handedly destroying an Italian pillbox and two German machine gun nests in the rugged mountains of central Italy. His unit was pinned down. Unable to move. They couldn't advance. They couldn't retreat. Trapped. Dead meat if the Germans launched a counterattack. But Sam's mind wasn't on anything military. _Survival._ His attention was solely riveted on making himself a human pancake onto the stony ground behind a small boulder that was just enough cover to keep him in the world of the living. He glanced to the side just as his closest buddy, Jerry McHugh, took a ricocheting machine gun slug smack in the middle of his chest and collapsed into a twitching corpse not two feet from Sam. Jerry McHugh, who dreamed of returning home from the war, going to Ag College at the University of Colorado, then taking over the family farm and turning it into a cornucopia on the Colorado high plains. No more. Jerry McHugh, and his dreams, were dead. Then something snapped in Sam Jones. He went blank. Like walking into a thick fog bank back home in the hills of Brown County. He was gone into a berserk rage. Sam never did remember his heroic actions beyond a bloody chaotic blur that was like an out of focus video clip with a mostly unintelligible sound track punctuated with hurled expletives, thundering explosions, the crack of rifle fire and the staccato hammering of automatic weapons. When it was over--and he had no concept of the time involved--Sam's grenades had blown apart the half dozen Italians in the enclosed space of the pillbox--fascists who had made the fatal mistake to continue fighting alongside the Germans after the Italian government had signed an armistice--and shredded the Germans in the machine gun nests. Two Germans were still alive when Sam's berserker rage started to fade and he had a fuzzy memory of what happened next.

There were no survivors.

Sam might not have remembered much of his heroic rage, but the soldiers he saved sure as hell did and didn't waste any time to let the rear area brass know. Thanks to a tough company commander who had himself won a battlefield commission in the fighting in Tunisia in the North African campaign, the medal went directly to Sam, the front line soldier. Not, as so often happened to the eternal saturnine disgust of the front line soldiers, to the officers behind the lines who routinely padded their military bone fides with dubiously earned medals and a razor sharp eye honed on career advancement.

Sam ended the war with a chest full of medals. Bronze star. Silver star. Three purple hearts and a firmament of tiny metallic shards of shrapnel in his body to permanently punctuate the physical reality of his sacrifice. Every 4th of July he held the place of honor in the patriotic parade in Nashville. Not in Tennessee. Sam's Nashville was in hilly Brown County in southern Indiana. He was the town's preeminent citizen and a source of civic pride. Almost no one disputed that fact, though there were more than a few who envied him--and even a couple of bitter Viet Nam veterans who flat out resented Sam Jones' iconic status as a symbol of the 'good war.'

But there was more to the Sam Jones story than that.

As it would turn out, far more.

### Sheriff Dick Stanger

Nashville, Indiana

Dick Stanger's office was in the same town. The picturesque little 19th Century town of Nashville, a community incorporated in 1872 and the county seat of lightly populated Brown County. He was the elected sheriff of the county nestled in the rugged hills of the south central part of Indiana. Pretty country. Scenic country, the thick mature second growth forest hiding the damage that a short sighted rapacious over cutting of the forest had caused a century earlier and where the hilly forested terrain made farming little more than bare subsistence. There was an ecological collapse in the county from over timbering and exhausted farm lands resulting in a depopulation as people packed up and moved out to whatever promised land beckoned on the horizon. There were more people in Brown County in 1890 than in the year of 1970 when Dick won his last election. It was always an isolated area, settled in the middle 19th Century by people from the border states of the upper south who lived hard pioneer lives a generation or two beyond most of the other Indiana counties. After the ecological crash and depopulation it was what contemporaries would call an undeveloped area. That same lack of development made the place a tourist favorite. Especially with the establishment of a state park and the preservation of a sizeable chunk of the rugged area's natural beauty. The tourists came by the tens and hundreds of thousands every year. They came from all over, down from Indianapolis and up from Louisville and far beyond, to hike the forested hills and recreate in Brown County State Park, the largest of Indiana's parks. Sheriff Stanger, who was born into a very different Brown County before the age of tourism, was midway through his third term of office. He'd been a boy during the Second World War and envied his older brothers and uncles and their friends going off to the great adventure of the 20th Century. Most of them came back home in one piece and Dick grew to a vigorous young manhood drenched in five years' of tales and anecdotes about the war. His envy ripened along with repeated telling of the tales.

But then came Korea. Even though the outbreak of the Korean war seemed strange as hell to him, Dick wasn't about to miss his chance at a great adventure. He told the recruiter he was 18, when he had actually just turned 17, joined the Army before the war that was not officially a war--euphemized as a police action--was even a week old. Dick hit the Korean dirt in time for the Inchon landing and the heady march north to a certain victory that morphed overnight into defeat and the grim days of retreat when hundreds of thousands of Chinese came storming across the Yalu. The Chinese fought them to a stalemate and he came home to a confused America that didn't welcome the returning soldiers with the same grateful exuberance that the WWII vets received. Not nearly so bad as the disgraceful humiliation of the Viet Nam vets he would see in a little over a decade later. Somewhere in between. Like the stalemate in Korea itself. A kind of a limbo. Stanger had been through a similar hell to that of the WWII vets and was sometimes a touch jealous of the grateful homecoming they received. Korea was the forgotten war. And there was always the underlying gnawing reality of Korea being a war that America didn't win. A draw maybe. A stalemate. But not a win. Somehow there was a undercurrent of recrimination. A war America didn't win? That was...was....well....it was just flat out.....

_Un-American_....

Stanger admired Sam Jones. He was a hero from a past time, a hero from a good war. A war where our side was unmistakably the good guy side in a black and white World War II. The perfect dichotomy of good versus evil. How could you think otherwise when you saw the jaw dropping newsreels taken of the horrendous barbarities of the Nazi extermination camps? But then Sheriff Stanger would think of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the shades of gray would start to permeate into the black and white good vs. evil archetype of WWII. Were there really any good guys in any war? Could such a thing really even be possible? At least that was what the literati and the philosophers might say, or the editorial journalists in their offices in New York or San Francisco or Washington DC. That was where Sheriff Richard Ewell Stanger drew the line. Maybe they were right in their detached Olympian omniscience. But to those who where there, the grimy, stinking boots on the ground grunts like himself? He knew better. War brought out the bad in people. No goddamned doubt of that. He'd seen it all too many times with his own bloodshot eyes. But he'd also seen the opposite. There were good people. Lots of them. And plenty of untold humane acts where the bright light of the species shone fitfully through the fratricidal darkness. The hoary veterans' tales of his youth were gone like the tattered mists in the hills of Brown County before the breaking of an autumn dawn. He now knew the reality of war. The bad. But also the good. Yes. Improbable as it sounds. The good.

Even in a war.

Lieutenant Sam Jones was his personal human icon for the precious metal of humanity distilled in the crucible of war. Sam Jones was the literal persona of good in the good vs evil of WWII. Jones rose above himself to offer up his own mortality as the price for saving his buddies. The buddies survived. And, "...by the grace of God," the regimental chaplain said when Jones got his Silver Star, so did Sam Jones. Sam came home to a hero's welcome that men like Dick Stanger could only dream of.

Home. Nashville, Indiana. Nashville was once a picture post card of a quaint 19th Century town. A languid place in a beautiful verdant countryside of broad-leafed forests, sweetwater streams and a scattering of struggling small farmsteads nestled amidst the rugged tree-crowned hills. A place where man's reawakening stewardship preserved the second growth forests and brought back to abundance the white tailed deer and the wild turkeys. Like many other visually charming towns in America with a palpable architectural flavor of past, supposedly gentler, times, it had an art community. In Nashville's case, one that stretched back to the early part of the 20th Century, before the days of the artsy colonies favored by the postwar tourists. An Art Colony. At least that's what the chamber of commerce called it. Sheriff Stanger and many of the locals considered them to be unwelcome outsiders and, especially in recent years, commercial opportunists, who were destroying the homey old time fabric of Nashville's community life. They did bring jobs and money into the town. True. But the tradeoff? During the warm season and holidays the town was inundated by hordes of tourists, many of them foreigners. When Sheriff Stanger was a boy he couldn't walk down main street without knowing almost every single person he passed. Even the small group of newcomer artists back then smiled and waved back. Now, as often as not, he could walk down main street without seeing a familiar face. That's the way it was this day. A parade of strangers. A knot of rubber necking tourists ambled past him, chattering in Italian, following a tour guide who had only been in Nashville a couple of months. Yet this outsider, who was lamely trying to hide his Chicago accent, was passing himself off as a local historian.

"This is progress?" Sheriff Stanger muttered to himself as he passed the gaggle of chattering Italian tourists with their ersatz tour guide and thought of the changes that had come to his home town. The Sheriff unconsciously reached down to tap the butt of the Smith & Wesson .357 wheel gun riding in a polished leather holster on his right hip.  
"Progress?" He resisted the urge to spit at the ground.

"Bull shit!"

### Sam Jones

The Years Pass

Sam Jones was a natural story teller. Some called him Brown County's very own 20th Century Mark Twain. Together with his ghost-writing journalist cousin Irma Swinton from Indianapolis he put out a book on his WWII experiences just as the war was ending. His third purple heart was for a nasty leg wound that took him out of the war for good and sent him home while his old unit was still grimly battling Smiling Albert Kesselring's determined German veterans up the mountain spine of the Italian mainland. A sage publisher coupled a speaking and book signing tour with the publication of the book. It so happened that it was just when the American public was boiling with outrage at the horrors uncovered in the Nazi death camps. Lieutenant Sam Jones, a purple-hearted war hero, still in uniform, with a wounded leg and a bad limp and leaning on a cane, was an instant public relations hit. He was a good guy. _We_ were the good guys. Sam made enough money from his book and speaking tour to buy a home and open up his own business in Nashville. He used his GI bill to go to newly accredited Stockwell's Insurance Institute in nearby Bloomington where he trained in various aspects of the insurance business. He breezed through the tests for insurance agent, insurance adjuster and broker. In little more than a year and a half he opened up his new business on Nashville's main street. The name? Sam Jones Soldiers Insurance.

By then his limp had disappeared.

The years passed and turned into decades and Sam's kids grew up and started having their own kids. Over those passing years Sam Jones prospered. The remnants of the old rural way of life were fading into little more than yellowed old photos and concomitant dimming memories. The hardscrabble farms and humble dwellings of the country were sold off as their inhabitants moved to big cities for the promise of a better life. Sam bought as much property as he could afford and became the long serving president of the Brown County Chamber of Commerce. Jones was nobody's fool. He was quick to see the changes sweeping over America as the returning veterans went to colleges and trade schools on the GI bill and the American middle class exploded into the burgeoning suburbs. All that new money? And leisure time to boot? Everyone with a new car in the garage? With many of the big cities of the east, middle west and upper south within driving distance? It was clear as a bright spring day to Sam Jones. The old rural economy of Nashville was fast disappearing. How to replace it? Then he thought of the sprawling Brown County State Park, Indiana's biggest and most visited park. That thought jumped to a synaptic coupling with the image of the charming archaic little town of Nashville. Suddenly an idea blitzed into Sam's brain and brought a wide grin to his face as he slapped his sides in what he was absolutely certain was an epiphany. Of course! That was it!

Tourism.

### The Enigma

1976

It muddied Sheriff Dick Stanger's thinking no little those infrequent moments when he gave it much brain time. The man he'd idolized as a war hero was also the prime mover in the Chamber of Commerce campaign to turn quiet, friendly little Nashville into a shallow tourist attraction. It had tattered their old way of life and that left Stanger conflicted about Sam Jones, though the war hero had the clear upper hand in the Sheriff's mind over the Chamber of Commerce booster. Then in an instant everything changed and Nashville's world was turned upside down and inside out. Sheriff Dick Stanger was smack in the middle of what he'd read that WWII British Prime Minister Winston Churchill once referred to as 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma'. Or, bluntly, as Sam's profane brother Ned would put it, "....one big fucking mess."

Lieutenant Sam Jones, war hero, community leader and prime mover in Nashville's economy, disappeared sometime after Sheriff Stanger had grumbled about the ersatz tour guide and the chattering Italian tourists. Stanger saw Jones leave his office on main street at almost the same time. In the hours after that Jones vanished. He never made it home for supper that night. Poof. Gone. Without a trace.

Until two days later. Sam Jones got the a call from Deputy Bennie Jenkins. A call that would jar his world nearly as much as the long ago sudden appearance of hordes of Chinese soldiers streaming across the Yalu and completely changing the character of a war that Sam and his soldier buddies thought they'd won.

"Sam," Deputy Jenkins said in an uncharacteristically stressed tone of voice. "We found Sam Jones." A short pause. " _He's dead_. You better get the fuck out here and check this out." Bennie Jenkins was a Viet Nam vet who'd survived Tet in '68 and sure as hell not prone to overreacting. Sheriff Stanger was out the door in less than a minute. He almost literally leaped behind the wheel of his Ford squad, lit it up and squealed out of the courthouse parking lot, his eyes glued to the road ahead and his foot threatening to shove the accelerator through the floorboard. And not with so much as a glance at either the speedometer or the speed limit signs as he raced for Jenkin's location.

Despite the deputy's saturnine intimations of what he would find, Sam nevertheless went pale over what he saw. A hiker found Sam Jones' crumpled corpse lying on a bloody scattering of moldy waterlogged black oak leaves in front of a long abandoned moss-covered dry stone wall. The place was in a thickly wooded isolated hollow five miles east of town. Jones had been shot to death. There were freshly gouged chips in the rocks of the stone wall. " _Bullets,"_ Stanger said in a whisper, lightly touching at the freshly made bright chunks in the mossy old rock wall. "Bullets did this." He stared down at Sam Jones' body, his head, arms and legs already stiffened into unnatural odd angles from rigor mortis. Sheriff Stanger ran it over in his mind. Someone had stood Jones up against the stone wall before he was shot. A thought rocked Stanger on his mental heels. Outrageous as it sounded, a single word planted itself in the front of his mind and mentally screamed at him. _Execution!_ Jesus! He and Deputy Jenkins exchanged stunned wordless glances. How could this be? In boondocks Brown County?

Somebody had executed the war hero Sam Jones.

A few days later Sheriff Dick Stanger was sitting at his desk in the Brown County Courthouse in the county seat of Nashville. Stanger was at a loss. Who would want to murder Sam Jones? Especially in a calculated execution style killing? It was crazy. Flat out goddamn crazy. There were no leads, no suspects, no forensic evidence that lead anywhere. He asked for help from the Indiana State Police and the far more extensive law enforcement resources at their disposal. The Sheriff might have been not so politely brushed off had the victim not been a WWII war hero and community leader with friends and connections in the state corridors of power in Indianapolis. The Indiana State Police agreed to throw their considerable investigatory, scientific and forensic weight into the unsolved murder of Sam Jones. So far, to no avail. They came up with nothing. The only bit of evidence they turned up that got Sheriff's Stanger's interest was the forensic lab's peculiar finding that the lethal bullets were what the surprised ballistics lab concluded were probably 6.52 mm Italian slugs. The kind used by the Italian Army in WWII. Jones himself must have had plenty of exposure to 6.52 mm slugs in the fighting with the Italians in North Africa and Italy. _Christ Almighty_ , Stanger muttered.

That really wrapped the puzzle up into an even tighter mysterious enigma.

It was nearly a week after they found Sam Jones' corpse when the phone call came. Departmental dispatcher Alice Jones, a second cousin of Sam, took the call.

"Brown County Sheriff's Department," she began in a long practiced superficially polite but plainly officious voice. "How can I help you?" A few words from the man's voice on the line shattered her uneventful day and sent Alice's eyebrows rocketing upwards.

"I have some information for the sheriff." The voice said. "About Sam Jones' murder."

"I'll patch you right in to the Sheriff," Alice said in a shocked voice, her face flushed with excitement. Sheriff Stanger picked up the phone.

"Yes," he said in a distracted voice, his mind still dwelling on the bizarre conundrum of Sam Jones' murder. "This is Sheriff Stanger," he said, adding, unconvincingly, "and how can I help you?" He was caught completely off guard by the hoarse-voiced reply

"It's the other way around, Sheriff," the man said. "Maybe I can help _you_. My name is Bernard Tipton, _Lieutenant Colonel_ Bernard Tipton, retired after thirty-two years in the United States Army, and this is about Sam Jones. I read about his murder in the New York Times and it's been preying on my mind ever since." He paused, saying, "can you hear me clearly, Sheriff?" Stanger was so taken aback he at first stammered.

"Ah....ah....yes.... _yes_. I can hear you just fine. Please....please go on." Tipton continued.

"I was an enlisted man then and served with Sam in Italy. I was there when he won his Silver Star during one of the battles around Monte Casino." The hoarse voice paused, coughed to clear his throat, then continued. "There are some things I think you need to know about Sam, Sheriff. Can I meet you someplace? Someplace neutral and unofficial?" Stanger's body remained physically seated in his chair. But his mind was leaping around the room in unbridled excitement. Did he want to meet with this guy? Did the Sheriff have clue one what the hell had happened to Sam Jones? Damn right he wanted to meet him!

" _Absolutely!_ Name the time and place," the Sheriff replied, gravid with interest, desperate as he was for any leads or clues to the puzzling murder of the war hero and community leader Sam Jones.

### Tipton

Lt. Colonel Tipton flew out of New York the next morning. Sheriff Stanger drove up to Indianapolis in his own car, a six-year old gunmetal gray Chevy Impala that needed a paint job, and met Tipton at the airport. The two men drove to a nearby busy Perkins Pancake House and settled into a booth in a far corner out of earshot of any nosy prying patrons. The thought of food never touched the mind of either man. Each ordered only coffee, bringing a hooded-eye response from the middle-aged waitress whose daily struggle to survive depended heavily on her tip money. Sheriff Stanger pulled a twenty dollar bill out of his pocket and put it on the table.

"It's yours," he said to the waitress, the look on his face that of a man who'd known hard times himself. The waitress smiled, touched his shoulder lightly and kept their coffee cups and water glasses filled until the two men left a half hour later.

Colonel Tipton noted Stanger's gesture and nodded in a dawning recognition of Sheriff Stanger's character. And with no little relief, confirmed in his opinion that this Indiana country sheriff, a Korean War combat veteran as was the Colonel, was the right person to talk to. As soon as the waitress left, and looking around to make sure no one could hear him, Tipton edged towards revealing the reason why he was there. Colonel Tipton looked to Sheriff Stanger the way he envisioned a colonel should look, like in the movies, not like most of the ones he'd served under in the Army. He was tall, taller than Sam's muscular five ten. This guy was ramrod straight, well over six feet, lean but still at least two hundred pounds, with short steel gray hair and eyes to match. And the eyes were what grabbed Stanger's attention. They were.....what? How would the Sheriff describe them? Sad? No. Not sad. More than that. Melancholy. That was it. The Colonel's disconsolate mood was mirrored in his eyes. There was nothing ordinary or routine or official about this man. Not now. Something arcane was behind the melancholy. Sheriff Stanger was about to find out just what it was. And he already knew it would very likely redound in his being with seismic intensity. There had to be one hell of a good reason for this guy to fly out from New York to meet him.

"Sheriff," Tipton began, with a quietly spoken resolute voice without a trace of yesterday's hoarseness, "this is just between us. Off the record. Permanently." He stopped, looked evenly into Dick Stanger's eyes, his own bushy gray eyebrows arching as he spoke. "Nothing in writing. No recordings. Understood?" Sheriff Stanger nodded a sage affirmation.

"Understood," he said with granitic finality.

And then Lieutenant Colonel Bernard Tipton, retired after 32 years in the United States Army, risen Phoenix-like from the ranks as a drafted Nebraska farm boy buck private in WWII to retire as a Lieutenant Colonel after serving in the grim butchery of WWII, in the political confusion of Korea and, finally, in the nearly hallucinatory days in Viet Nam. And of all the buried experiences of that time, so many of them painful and often horrific, this was the most secret of the secret, the unspoken knowledge that gnawed at his gut for over thirty years, that haunted his dreams but fled to the fringes of awareness every morning at dawn. The final step beyond the penultimate. The last unburied skeleton still to be laid to rest.

And so he began, Lt. Colonel Tipton, U.S. Army, recently retired, huddled in rapt bond with Sheriff Richard Ewell Stanger of Brown County, Indiana. Over steaming cups of coffee in a Perkins Pancake House with chattering work-a-day locals oblivious to the intense scene in a plastic-seated booth so physically near--and yet so far. From a comfortable and safe overfed world in an Indiana pancake house to a danger drenched Italian mountainside where gaunt eyed soldiers tried to choke down C Rations. Colonel Tipton eyes began to blink. Slowly at first. And then faster....

His eyes had gone back. Back to WWII. Back to the unburied memories.

"It wasn't long after Sam Jones received his battlefield commission." Tipton began. "I was a corporal in Lieutenant Sam Jones' platoon. Jones was beside himself with anger, pacing, kicking at the loose rocks on the ground." A flicker of a smile momentarily slipped past the melancholy on his face. "One of the rocks Sam booted flew up and hit Cliff Davidson smack on the nose. Cliff was a real pain in the ass guy, always bitching about something, and that little rock bouncing off his big honker really set him off. Even Sam had to laugh at that, stressed as he was." Then the smile was gone. The melancholy was back. Reality was back. Too much reality, Stanger thought, looking at the drawn features of the otherwise dignified and handsome man. Tipton continued.

"But Sam still did what he was ordered to do. He was really pissed. We all were. We had a new battalion commander who was one of those career builder types who wanted to make a name for himself, and never mind the casualties it cost. He ordered us into a narrow valley even the greenest replacement knew was a goddamn textbook setup for an ambush. It was. The Germans had the same textbook." Another short pause as the waitress revisited their coffee cups.

"Almost immediately we came under sniper fire from a hidden enemy in the rocks above the platoon's exposed position. It got worse. One of those lethal rapid fire German Machinengewehr 42s--an MG 42 machine gun--opened up from high in a jumble of rocks behind us and cut off any hope of retreat." Tipton lowered his voice and leaned closer to Sheriff Stanger.

They were pinned down, Tipton told Sheriff Stanger in his low voice, and helplessly endured what **s** eemed like endless hours of galling sniper fire. The German snipers were well within the 1000 meter range of their deadly accurate Karabiner 98k rifles fitted with precision Zeiss telescopic sights. One after another Sam's men pitched over, most stone dead, a few of them still alive, gravely wounded, moaning and sobbing and calling for someone to help them. Some tried, but the snipers were waiting, and the would-be good Samaritans, too, became casualties. Among them Cliff Davidson. whose complaining days were over. Permanently.

"A man can only take so much before he snaps," Tipton said with a voice that Sheriff Stanger well knew was the voice of experience. "And this was way beyond too much." Sheriff Stanger, deflecting for just a moment into his own memories, nodded in grim agreement as Tipton's mind grabbed onto the events of that bloody day and put them to words that could never truly convey the grim events that lay behind them.

The panicky and increasingly desperate platoon leader Sam Jones hastily gathered a squad of desperate volunteers to go on what they all thought was likely a suicide mission to flank the snipers' positions. "I was one of the volunteers," Tipton said. "Not that any of us had any choice. It was either do something that could get us killed or stay where we were and die one at a time anyhow." He surprised Stanger by slapping the table. " _Some choice!_ " Another grim knowing nod from Sheriff Stanger. He'd been there, too.

The pair of German snipers saw the flanking movement and hastily scrambled away higher up the mountain side. The German machine gun crew, under the same orders as the snipers to fight a series of delaying actions as they withdrew up the mountain side to the main German positions, also retreated up the mountain. Unaware that the snipers and the machine gunners had retreated, Jones' squad continued with their flanking movement, surprised that they encountered no resistance. A hundred yards. No resistance. Another hundred yards. Still no resistance. Then they spotted a single Italian soldier who popped up, saw them at the same moment they glimpsed him, and vanished as abruptly as a prairie dog diving into its hole back in Tipton's boyhood home on the Nebraska prairie. The squad spread out and made a cautious leapfrogging combat approach towards where the Italian had disappeared. There, just beyond the huge boulder, was a reinforced concrete Italian command and logistics supply bunker. Communication to the bunker was cut off and the men inside were as unaware of the orders to retreat as they were of the close proximity of the American infantry.

At the approach of Lieutenant Jones and his eleven men, all of them with jangled nerves and most of them still enraged by the galling sniper fire of just minutes earlier, an Italian officer came out of the bunker nervously waving a white handkerchief. Following him came a parade of unarmed men with their hands thrust as high above their heads as their shoulder joints would allow.

"All they wanted to do was surrender," Tipton said in a voice growing increasingly gravid. He swore he could hear some of their joints cracking as terrified enemy soldiers tried to grab the sky overhead, the Italians to a man at that moment almost certainly regretting they'd chosen to continue fighting alongside the Germans after the Italian government signed an armistice with the Allies. Tipton was a seasoned veteran. He saw at once that these were support troops, not combat soldiers. They had no stomach for a fight and were plainly only interested in surrendering to the American soldiers. There were thirty-two Italians, many of them from a single small village outside of Rome, three Italian officers, and two Germans, one an Italian-speaking sergeant from the Tyrol, the other an artillery liaison officer hailing from ill-fated East Prussia. When the prisoners bunched up outside the bunker, Lieutenant Sam Jones, still livid with anger at his battalion commander and wildly agitated by the casualties inflicted by the snipers, lined up the prisoners against the rocks and concrete of the bunker wall and ordered his men to form into a firing squad.

"Line up, weapons ready!" He barked to his men. "Face the prisoners!"

Some of his men balked. Others tried almost hysterically to determine if these men were the actual snipers, but their languages were mutually unintelligible, the one bilingual Italian-American among Jones' soldiers among the first to be killed by the snipers. The Americans were yelling in English, the Italians and Germans hollering and pleading in their own languages. Confusion and agitation and anger and fear boiled into a flash point and the part of Sam Jones that had made him a war hero and brought him a battlefield commission showed it had a dark side.

"Commence firing!" A wild-eyed, vengeful Lieutenant Sam Jones ordered his men to start shooting and pulled the trigger on his own M-1 carbine that he was agitatedly waving at the prisoners Some of his men refused to shoot. Others began firing. Some reluctantly. Others with an enthusiasm fueled by the memory of their dead and dying buddies in the rocks only a few hundred yards away.

"I would not do it," the retired colonel said. I knew these were not the Germans who'd killed and wounded a third of the platoon." Bernard Tipton was one of the soldiers, there were just three of them, who refused to shoot the unarmed men.

When the prisoners saw what was about to happen many of the them exploded into a hysterical scrambling gallop that was a literal run for their lives. Most were gunned down immediately and the rest hunted down and executed by Lieutenant Sam Jones and Sergeant Diego Rodriguez. Many years later, while assigned to the Pentagon, a curious Lieutenant Colonel Tipton very discretely unearthed a secret investigative report about what had happened long ago on that Italian hillside. Three of the prisoners escaped, two Italians and one German, who, though all were seriously wounded, made it back to their own lines to report the massacre of the prisoners. The Germans and Italians contacted the International Red Cross in neutral Switzerland with a report of the incident and demanded that the Allies be notified of the atrocity and investigate it. Even General Patton eventually heard about the murders, but had his attention on far more pressing issues and chose to ignore it. General Omar Bradley was of a different mind. He refused to overlook the murder of prisoners of war and pursued an investigation that resulted in a court martial of Lieutenant Jones, Sergeant Rodriquez and the other seven men who had done the shooting.

Like the show trials at Nuremberg following the end of the war, it was a long way from being a fair and impartial judicial proceeding. They were after all the good guys in this war. This was only a tiny blip on the good guy radar. An anomaly. All but one were exonerated based on the explosive emotions spawned by the deadly sniping they'd endured. There was no question that a war hero like Lieutenant Sam Jones could be convicted of war crimes. His trial was really over before it even started. Sergeant Rodriguez, who had seen his two of his closest friends killed by the German snipers and was still blind with rage, had urged the soldiers on to shoot the prisoners and taken the lead role in the actual shooting and hunted down and executed several fleeing POW's, including two wounded men, was found partially culpable, but only of the minor offense of dereliction of duty. His punishment? He was demoted to private. Two weeks after the courts martial his voice was forever stilled when he fell in combat, the one voice that might have told the world the truth about Lieutenant Sam Jones. All the other survivors in the platoon would never forget Sam Jones' justifiable actions in what they thought had saved their lives and kept their mouths shut about the massacre on that Italian mountainside. Including Bernhard Tipton.

Until now.

Sheriff Dick Stanger sat immobile, frozen in place, ashen faced, at a complete loss trying to absorb the worldview shattering thought that the war hero he had idolized from his teenage years was also a war criminal. A war hero _and_ a war criminal? The good guys in the Good vs Evil war were tarred with the same brush as the bad guys? How was it possible? The sheriff could not begin to put words to the avalanche of thoughts and emotions surging through him. And then Bernhard Tipton said something that shook Dick Stanger right down to the very core of his being. And stayed there.

"Rodriguez was a proud man," he said, "and my friend going way back to boot camp. We were close. He was bloodthirsty, but a hell of a fighter. Tough as nails and filled with a kind of machismo that made me think of the old Spanish Conquistadores. He was a direct descendant of a line of hardy frontier Mexicans who took on the Apaches on their home ground and held their own when they came out of Chihuahua to pioneer in New Mexico long before George Washington saw his first cherry tree. He had a strong sense of dignity and purpose and felt that he had been unfairly singled out for punishment." Tipton shot Stanger a piercingly intense look.

"Rodriguez was hot as hell and kept saying he was only following orders." Another piercing look. "Lieutenant Sam Jones' orders." Tipton seemed to suddenly shrink into himself. "That much was true, Sheriff. I know. I was _there_."

Then Tipton wagged his melancholy head slowly from side to side, as though that somehow would make the thought go away. It didn't. "Rodriguez had intended to make the military a career. No more. The court martial blew that all to hell. Rodriguez was very vocal in saying he was going to go high up the chain of command with the real story of what happened and demand a thorough reinvestigation." Another pause. Another slow wagging of the head. "If Diego Rodriguez is going down," he told me and everyone else who would listen, "then so is the guy who ordered the killings. Sam Jones." Tipton stared at Stanger with an expression that reached into somewhere very deep in the man's inner core. A place the conscious mind attempted to pretend did not exist. "Rodriguez was dead the next day. Officially, he was just another soldier killed in action." Another pause. The anguish was so plain to see on the old soldier's face that a woman eagerly attacking a stack of blueberry pancakes at a nearby table caught a clear look at his face. Her fork froze in midair as she stared in astonishment at Tipton's expression. It was exactly like the expression that froze on her sister's face when she learned her Special Forces son was killed in the fighting in the A Shau Valley in the Viet Nam War.

"Dick," Tipton said softly. "I saw Rodriguez' body. He was shot in the back." A short pause, a sigh, then his facial expression went slack and his whole body oddly reminded Dick Stanger of a balloon slowly deflating. "And I'm pretty sure that Sam Jones did it." Another long pause while a range of dark emotions marched across the old soldier's face.

"I was up for promotion to sergeant and Sam Jones was pushing battalion for my promotion. I kept my tongue and convinced myself I had to keep my silence until I could come up with some hard evidence to back up my suspicions." Stanger thought that the Colonel's eyes might be glistening with a hint of moisture, but the middle-aged widowed waitress who revisited their booth to refill their coffee cups had no such doubts. She was absolutely certain of the beginnings of tears in the sad eyes of the distinguished looking gentleman in the booth she was waiting on. She was tempted to pat him reassuringly on the shoulder, but saw her boss watching them and thought better of it.

Tipton continued as she walked away.

"My military career was starting to take off and I pushed Rodriguez and Jones into the back of my mind." Tipton's hands were trembling. From the stress of the memories. But also from a mild side effect of the drugs he was taking after being diagnosed with prostrate cancer earlier that month. "That was almost thirty years ago, **"** Tipton continued. I never said a word about it." A different look in his eyes, one any veteran priest would have instantly recognized.

"Until now."

### bookmark

### Chapter 8

### General Freiherr von Wittendorf

General Freiherr von Wittendorf trudged off with his command through the muddy prisoner enclosure on the west bank of the Elbe to the edge of the river, glumly waiting as the shuffling forlorn column made it's reluctant weary way across the partially damaged bridge to a dark future in Russian captivity. The general did not have to go. He almost certainly could talk his way out of being sent to the Russians by offering intelligence to the Americans. Or he could try to slip away into a nearby wood amidst the turmoil in the compound. Several others had done just that. But most were soon captured and at least two men shot to death by the vengeful Americans with the memory of the Mauthausen camp still fresh in their soldiers' minds. Von Wittendorf's final choice was that, as did so many others, he could take his own life. Imprisonment by the Russians was not a personal option to the Prussian General. But there was more at stake than just his own mortality. Much more. Even in imprisonment, von Wittendorf remained what he had been through the war. A general. A leader. Of soldiers. _His_ soldiers.

Over the long blood drenched years of the war his soldiers had repeatedly risen to challenges few other armies had ever experienced. There were not many of them left. But for them, and all the others who had the misfortune to be born in Germany at the wrong time now huddled apprehensively in the muddy prisoner of war compound, he felt a profound responsibility to stay with them and see this apocalyptic drama through to its conclusion. Though seemingly aloof, and despite his aristocratic bearing, he stayed close to his soldiers and paid careful attention to their needs. Unlike most of the American and British generals, the German fighting generals commanded from the battlefront. Nearly seven score of them paid for it with their lives. Another four score were executed by Hitler for the crime of opposing the Nazis, many of them acquaintances of von Wittendorf and three of them his close friends. Had he not been in a hospital recovering from wounds suffered from a strafing Russian fighter bomber, he might have been one of the executed in the vengeful Nazi bloodbath following the unsuccessful attempt on Hitler's life. He certainly sympathized with the attitudes of the plotters. A great many of the professional German military knew full well that Germany was on a path that could only end in the destruction of the homeland. Especially after the allied invasion of France they realized that the war was lost and many among the professional officer corps wanted it ended before Germany was totally destroyed. In June of 1944 they tried just that with the attempt on Hitler's life. Retribution was swift and merciless and the German officer corps lost many of its best remaining officers to Hitler's purges. Even the iconic Rommel was not immune. The Gestapo came to question von Wittendorf in his hospital bed and concluded the incapacitated general could not have been involved. The general, who was only semi-lucid from the morphine that dulled his constant pain, was unable to say anything to dissuade them of that opinion even had he wanted to.

Von Wittendorf was separated from his soldiers as soon as he crossed the Elbe into Soviet captivity. He was sent to a Russian prisoner of war camp designed specifically for high ranking officers. Colonels and generals. Their treatment was far better than the ordinary soldiers received and only two of the officers died, one of them from a heart attack, the other a suicide. The Russians questioned von Wittendorf and the other officers for days on end, using German-speaking ethnic Volga Germans--transplanted to Russia far back in the time of Catherine the Great--as interpreters. They spoke an evolved German dialect the officers found at times impossible to fathom. Misunderstandings and miscommunications were common. At first. But each group gradually learned to understand the linguistic peculiarities of the other. That was when the officers learned to their surprise that the Volga German interpreters were recruited from Soviet concentration camps. After the war started, Stalin considered them to be a security threat and forced nearly the entire million plus Russian German population into inner exile to camps where, as in almost all the camps in the east, many of them died. Before the war the Volga Germans had considered themselves ethnic Germans but Russian citizens. They were not interested in German nationalism. Now they were no longer interested in Soviet or Russian patriotism, either. Their only real interest was in somehow finding a way to get out of Russia. In fact, a generation later many of the survivors did manage to leave Russia, most to Germany.

The translators and the officers became increasingly friendly. Too friendly. When the Russians finally caught on that their translators were themselves suspect, they replaced them with Russians who had learned German either at school or while living in the German speaking countries. This group of translators had been assigned to the highest ranking German captives, and to the investigation of the last days of Hitler and of those around him. The questioning by the new group of translators continued, more formal, but still not anywhere near the brutality and neglect so many of the common soldiers experienced. The Russians were intent on learning all they could about German tactics and strategy, organization and transportation. Many of the officers were made to write treatises on their war experiences and tactics or on their various fields of expertise. With the passing of years even the formal Russians became almost friendly, especially the combat veterans among them. The German officers sensed that the Russians had sucked all the knowledge they could out of them and had no further use for them. Could their release not be far off? It was. For some. The first of them left in 1948. Freiherr von Wittendorf's turn came in 1949. He walked out of the camp once again a free man and was put on a train along with other returning German prisoners of all ranks. The mood was mixed, for they had little doubt of the stark realities they would encounter. A ruined country, shattered families, foreign occupiers. Only when they were once again on German soil would they allow themselves some small modicum of rejoicing. And even then, for those who went to Communist East Germany, the joy would be short-lived. They had left one of the shadings of imprisonment for another one.

General Freiherr von Wittendorf had no home to go back to. Not even one in ruins or one under the crushingly oppressive East German Communist dictatorship. His East Prussian homeland had ceased to exist. Part of it was in Russia, the other in Poland. The remaining German population was violently expelled, hundreds of thousands of them dead. Murdered, died of exposure, lost to lethal epidemics and starved to death. Very few remained. The ancestral estate of the von Wittendorf family was divided up among dozens of families in the Polish version of a communist collective. The Russians did allow him to visit his former estate before he moved on to what was left of Germany. The general had become friendly with a sympathetic Russian colonel from the camp, himself a former prisoner of war. Like many of the hundreds of thousands of other returning Russian POW's he was at first mistreated by the paranoid doctrinaire commissars upon his liberation. Their distorted reasoning--as ordered by none other than Stalin himself-- being they were traitors for allowing themselves to be taken prisoner. A twilight existence and death in the Gulag was looming in the colonel's future. But a high ranking close friend in the Communist hierarchy heard of his plight and intervened to 'rehabilitate' him.

The colonel was saved from the Gulag, but had lost all confidence in the Russian Communist government. In the captured German general he found a kindred soul. As a farewell gesture he managed to arrange a pass that carried enough high ranking official clout to get von Wittendorf by the stolid Russian and hostile Polish authorities. The general had picked up a working knowledge of Russian in the camp and was able to communicate with the Russians and Russian-speaking Poles he encountered at the train stations and on the trains as he made his way back to what had been East Prussia. He climbed down from the train at the closest station, the former German station name replaced by a unfamiliar Polish one, but the General recognized it by the surviving surrounding buildings and countryside. He grabbed up his single rucksack and walked the last ten kilometers. As he trudged down the dusty lane that angled off the main road to his former estate, he climbed a small hill and stopped at its top. There it was. The ancestral estate of the von Wittendorfs. Three hundred years of history. Even more, going back to the days of the Teutonic Knights. An estate that generations of his forebears had worked so hard to build and maintain. Tears came to the general's eyes. The manor house was gone. Burned to the ground, he would later learn, by a band of drunken Russian Cossacks that stole everything that seemed to them worthwhile and destroyed the rest. The fertile ground lay partially fallow, the rest poorly tended. The barns and the stables were still there, though they were shabby and in need of repair. Shirts and pants and skirts flapped in the wind on clotheslines strung outside two of the barns. People were living in them. The general hesitated. Did he really want to see more? Part of him wanted to just turn around and leave. But another part, the stronger one, drove him on. He began to walk down the slope towards what had been his home. His mind pictured the wonderful expanse of the verdant estate in days past.

But his eyes saw the present.

As he drew closer he saw the figure of a woman stop by one of the barns. She had seen him. The woman recognized the general's distinct loping gait. He'd lost it in the first years of close confinement but been able to resume walking in the last, more lenient, year of captivity. The woman stared. Took a few steps toward the general's approaching form. Stopped again. Stared again. They she threw her arms high and began to run towards the general. By then he knew who it was. Dyta. The red-cheeked Polish country girl who had grown up with the von Wittendorf's, eventually becoming nursemaid to the children and integral to the household's daily functioning. By the time the war came she was considered by all the von Wittendorf's to be part of the family. She ran to the general and the general, despite his aristocratic reserve, also started to run. Their bodies slammed together and they embraced. The woman was crying. The General trying not to.

Dyta Shlotenka was 3/4 Polish, her maternal grandfather a German named Widmer who taught her some of his native language. With that linguistic foundation, and after the years with the von Wittendorfs, she was fluent in German. Dyta was frantic with joy at seeing the general, which spoke plainly of how life must be under the current managers of his expropriated estate. She was far from being alone among the Poles in her disdain for Communist Poland. The unspoken words, impounded during the last years of foreign rule, broke loose and gushed from her mouth. What the Russians had done to East Prussia. What Communist rule was like. What had happened to various neighbors and townspeople. The woman, still young, unmarried and childless despite being a pale blond beauty that drew many a man's eye, begged him to take her with him to Germany, even though she was an ethnic Pole. She held his right hand in both of hers, her eyes imploring. "Please," she pleaded. "This place is no longer my home."

"I will try," the general said. And he meant it. "But, Dyta. Bitte. Please. Tell me of my family." The woman seemed to freeze, her pupils wide, her breathing suddenly rapid. She slumped to the ground and sat there, hunched over. Then she began to cry. The cry became a weeping and the weeping became a wail. Even the General's rigid control of emotions, long a characteristic of Prussian nobility, cracked. Tears welled in the corners of his eyes and ran down his hollow cheeks. Dyta tried to speak, couldn't, tried again. The general already knew the outlines of what had happened here, but he wanted to hear the details from someone who was there. An eyewitness. Dyta.

"Please, Dyta, Please. Try to tell me." Despite himself, the ramrod straight general's body bent as though walking into a stiff breeze along his beloved Baltic sea coast. He sat down beside Dyta and took her hand. "Tell me everything, Dyta. I have to know." Dyta tried twice more to talk and couldn't. She broke down into a weeping wail each time. Finally, red eyed and pallid, she had cried herself out enough to be able to talk.

"The Russians were close," she began in a weak, cracking voice. "People were coming and going to the estate for days. They all had tales to tell. Some of them were wild gossip. But some were first hand accounts. You could tell by their ashen faces, and especially the eyes. Oh, General, those sad, sad eyes!" She stopped, took a deep breath that sounded more like a gasp, then resumed her mournful recounting of what happened when the horror that lay in the sad, sad eyes she spoke of arrived in flesh and bloody reality at the von Wittendorf estate.

"The Russians were going to destroy German Prussia. There would be no more Germans. They raped all the women, some girls not even of an age, and old women. Men who tried to resist were shot. Entire families were shot. Whatever Germans survived would be forced out of their homes and sent west to what was left of Germany after the war." She paused, wiping at her brow, the memories flooding back to her. "Those were the things they were saying." Another pause, and a searching look that the general thought might contain some hidden meaning. Censure? Perhaps even a kind of condemnation? Had he not served in the war that had brought utter disaster to all?

"I learned much of this later," she continued in a wavering voice, "but this much we did hear then. The Russians were killing off the Prussian aristocrats. They were a mortal enemy of communism and the root of German militarism. The Prussian aristocracy had to be wiped out." The general nodded his head in comprehension. Word had filtered even into the Russian camps of what had happened in East Prussia. Hundreds of thousands of ordinary Germans fled before the Russians, hoping for some small sliver of a remnant life in the west. Many of the aristocrats saw it differently. They were the landed gentry, the lords of the land and the rulers of the province. Take away their lands and their status and their power and what did they have left? Many could see little future and chose to end their lives on their ancestral estates before the Russians arrived. It was common for entire families to commit suicide. A mother or a grandmother or grandfather would rather shoot the girls and young women of their family than see them ravished and debased by the Russians. The women accepted their fate, bitterly, but stoic in the end. Many in fact pulled the triggers themselves, there being few men left to do it. Horrific scenes galaxies beyond the paper tragedies of novels or the shallow bombast of the stage were repeated over and over throughout East Prussian and other eastern German speaking lands. The General squeezed Dyta's hand again.

"My family, Dyta," what of them? I know they are dead. But...but....how." Dyta's hands began to shake and her face grew ashen. The general's heart sank. This was going to be worse than he thought. Dread seized him with such intensity that the fighting general who was once known to the combat soldiers under him as Der Stahlgeneral--the general of steel--began to shake with foreboding.

"Your father called a family meeting with everyone who was here. I was the only staff person left. All the others ran off and we had to milk the cows and tend the animals ourselves. That last morning your father, Oberst Graf Lothar von Wittendorf, called us into the main house from our chores. He held nothing back from the family of what to expect from the Russians and said each could make their own choice. They could join the refugees and try to escape. They could stay and hope for the best when the Russians came. Or...." Dyta started to break down again and it was a full minute before she managed to control herself enough to speak coherently. "Or," she continued. "They could commit suicide." She stared blankly at the general. "They discussed it among themselves and I was shocked to see them so calm when we knew that the end of our world would arrive at any minute." She stopped and stared at the general, unsure if she should continue. He stared back at her wordlessly, the muscles in his jaw twitching. Then, slowly, sadly, he nodded at her to go on.

''But just then the Devil came. Shells and bullets started flying all around and before we knew it the Russians were in the house." The general blanched. He had not expected this. No. God, no. _Not this._ His mind flashed back to the German girls turned over to the Russians at the Elbe and how they screamed all night long. Dyta looked hard at him. "Do you really want me to go on?" General von Wittendorf hesitated, then nodded with a severe gravidity far beyond what Dyta had ever seen on his face before. He already knew. But he had to hear it from someone who was there. The eyewitness.

"Yes, Dyta," he said weakly, his voice cracking. "Go on. I have to know." The Polish woman put her face in her hands, shook her head, then looked with a profound sadness at the General.

"They were drunk. A bunch of soldiers. I don't know if there were any officers. The soldiers immediately grabbed your daughters and your wife and even your mother and began to rape them, one after the other, on and on and on. Your father and little Hans tried to stop them and they beat them to the ground with rifle butts and then shot them both even as the women were being raped. Before their eyes. They were all screaming and crying. They even raped me, despite my not being German and my pleading to them that I was Polish. Hours went by. The bodies of your father and little Hans were already changing color and looking stiff. I think by then some of the women were already dead. Raped to death. At least one was still alive. I could hear her moaning." Dyta's eyes filled with tears and she broke down into sobs again. The general took her chin and gently lifted it so they he could look into her eyes.

"And then?" The general said in a voice so strained it was barely audible. "And then...what?" Dyta took his hand in hers and the force of the memory brought a surprising strength to her grip as she squeezed von Wittendorf's hand. More tears formed at the corner of the general's eyes.

"When they were done they shot everybody. Everybody but me. One of them was Polish and he heard me screaming in Polish and stopped the others from shooting me." She stopped and stared blankly into the distant fields. "He was the same man I saw raping your daughter Maria and beating your father to the ground with a rifle butt. Then he raped me, too, and told me I should thank him for saving my life."

"Where are their bodies?" The General finally said, his voice little more than a whisper.

"No one knows," Dyta answered, again with tears streaming down her cheeks, "the Russians took them away in one of those panje carts of theirs." She looked at the general with the faraway eyes of someone who has seen too much. Eyes that the general himself had seen hundreds, possibly thousands, of times in others during the war. "They just threw them on the cart like so many sacks of dung and left."

"No idea to where?" The general managed to say, though he, thinking of the hell his family went through, was teetering, for the first time in his entire life, on the very knife edge of breaking down.

"We think a mass grave somewhere nearby." She added through her tears. "I don't think you would ever find it, even if you tried." She then straightened up and looked at the general with what was almost a savage expression.

"There is no more East Prussia. The Russians and the Poles destroyed everything." Everything!" She repeated bitterly.

" _Even the graves_."

For a long time General Freiherr von Wittendorf was silent. The tears fell but there was no sound beyond his labored breathing. Then the general rose, his spirit crushed, promised Dyta he'd try to bring her to the west, embraced her for a long while, then slowly, but with gathering briskness as he walked away, forever left the place that had been the home of the von Wittendorfs for three hundred years. He did not even stop one last time to take a final look back. Less than a year later he made good on his promise and brought Dyta to the west under the pretext that her German grandparent made her an ethnic German subject to repatriation to Germany. He even found her missing sister who had been sent to Germany as a forced laborer during the war. When the Russians arrived they raped the women among the forced laborers even though they were Russian or Polish. She was so revolted by the so-called liberators that she refused repatriation and remained in Germany and slipped away from the Russian zone of occupation. The general arranged for the sisters' reunion. The sisters embraced with an intensity such as only survivors of those days could understand. And they remained inseparable for the rest of their lives.

General von Wittendorf, as a member of the professional German army reaching back before the days of Hitler, an aristocrat who had held the Nazis in disdain and had never joined the Nazi party, easily found work with the revived German government as an administrator of veteran affairs. He was one of those who argued to include the members of the Waffen SS as veterans eligible for pensions. The general knew the Waffen SS units had for the most part fought honorably as soldiers and were not the same as the murderers of the concentration camps, despite their unschooled lumping of all SS veterans as war criminals. The Western Allies never could comprehend the mutual war of extinction that was the Eastern Front and made barbarous conduct on all sides as common as stars in the nighttime Russian sky. There were certainly war criminals among them. Many of them had already faced justice. But there were war criminals on all sides. There were atrocities on all sides. And that was the problem in the general's eyes. The German war criminals were punished. But what about the Americans? What about men like Colonel Krestchman, who had intentionally sent men to their death and women to rapine and death? Or the barbarous so called ordinary Russian soldiers who raped and brutalized the von Wittendorf women and murdered his entire family? They faced no war crimes trials. And what those barbarous Russians did to his family was repeated thousands of times over throughout the conquered German lands in the east. Very, very few of them ever faced any kind of punishment beyond the slap on the perfunctory wrist.

The general was fully in agreement that the Nazi war criminals should be brought to justice. Good God! How could he possibly not be? They had ruined much of Europe and destroyed Germany. But what about the others? The Americans? The British? The Russians, _especially_ the Russians. There were no war crimes trials for them. Then the General remembered that day on the Elbe when so many of his command were condemned to death and rapine. And the skinny English-speaking boy in the ill-fitting uniform who had the courage to confront the blustering American Colonel Kretschman. Such behavior in the German or Russian Army would have sent the boy straight to a firing squad or a rope strung over the nearest tree branch or lamp post. But the boy had the courage to face evil and name it for all to hear.

And that was when the ideas began to take shape in the general's mind.

### Ausgleich

General Freiherr von Wittendorf retired after more than a decade in the Veterans' Bureau of the West German government in Bonn. He was still a solid, athletic and vigorous man when the world's attention shifted once more, this time to distant southeast Asia and a new American led war. But the general's mind was not dwelling on the new U.S. overseas military misadventure. His mind dwelled where it would remain for the rest of his days on God's bittersweet Earth. WWII. And the war criminals. Not the ones who were tried and convicted. Not even the fugitive Nazi war criminals still successfully hiding from the long arm of justice, most in South America. Let the Israeli Mossad hunt them down and visit upon the murdering Nazi SOB's the retribution they so richly deserved.

The general's mind lingered elsewhere. On the war criminals who would never be tried because they were on the winning side in WWII. Where was the justice? The Nuremberg Trials were show trials and a mockery of genuine judicial process. They were revenge trials, pure and simple, despite their earnest proclamations to the contrary. Not that the general sympathized with the Nazis put on trial. They were the malevolent beings who had started it all and led Germany to a Biblical scale devastation no one of them would have dreamed possible when the war began. Those Nazi bastards deserved what they got when the Americans swung them from the gallows, even if the trials were shams. But the general, most of whose horrific personal wartime experiences were not perpetrated by the murderous Nazi fanatics but by the Allies, could not pry his mind loose from many war criminals going free simply because they were on the winning side. It was not justice. It was a perversion of justice. Something had to be done to balance that perversion into something at least approximating justice.

But....how?

In his years in the German Veterans' Bureau, crammed into a tiny dank office in the West German capital of Bonn, General von Wittendorf held on to the slim hope that some arcane legal way, some undiscovered iteration of the judicial process, could be found to bring the Allied war criminals to justice. The dank office at least had a window and the general spent many a pensive moment gazing out the window in thought while a new city rose Phoenix-like from the ruins of WWII Bonn. Many of his German colleagues shared similar views, but even the most truculent revanchist holdouts finally conceded that, in the resigned words of von Wittendorf's friend and co-worker, Hans von Fichte, "....war ein Hoffnungsloser Fall." A hopeless case. Not only did the victors write the rules, von Fichte glumly continued, enough time had gone by that everyone was reluctant to reopen the old wounds. There were new allies. New enemies. And new policies. What Germany's famously pragmatic founding father, Otto von Bismarck, referred to as Realpolitik. The politics of reality.

The general reluctantly had to accept that no legal means or established processes would ever bring the Allied war criminals to justice. It was when the general finally accepted that harsh fact, and after he strode out of the Veteran's Bureau glass paned door for the last time and threw it open with a finality so vigorous that the door's panes of glass shook in synchronous agitation, that he began to flesh out the details of his plan. The victors would not prosecute their own war criminals? Then, so be it. There were other ways for justice to balance the scales. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. His disciplined, orderly military mind uncoiled and made the quantum leap from legal to extralegal. The general's thoughts were in ferment, gestating the particulars of his plan. He already had a name for it. Ausgleich. It translated into English roughly as equalization. At his modest but cozily comfortable retirement villa outside of the northern Bavarian town of Bamberg the general sat back in his chair and teased over the word in his mind. Ausgleich. Equalization. His Junker grandfather would have put it more bluntly. In Biblical terms. Auge um Auge. An eye for an eye _._ Too blunt a term for his grandson. He preferred one not so obviously revanchist. So that was it. Otto von Bismarck would have agreed. The general's brainchild would be known simply as....Ausgleich. Ausgleich. Equalization.

A balancing of the scales.

In early 1944 a Prussian uncle of General von Wittendorf, Erich von Kalinske, moved his family from the constantly bombed hazards of living in Berlin to the relative safety of the then uninhabited little family villa outside of Bamberg in the north of Bavaria. The middle aged von Kalinske, who as a young Leutnant in the German 8th Army in East Prussia lost his right foot and part of his left hand at the battle of Tannenberg fighting the Russians in the First World War, was still a civilian. Von Kalinske, who had planned on a military career, was invalided out of active service and for the last fifteen years worked at the Ministry of Defense in Berlin. After settling his family into the Bamberg villa, but before returning to Berlin, the cautious and prudent von Kalinske, who knew full well that Germany would be invaded by the Allies, had the cellar of the villa expanded and strengthened to provide shelter for his family when the fighting inevitably arrived in Bavaria. Von Kalinske himself was long gone, vanished in the chaos of the last days of the Battle of Berlin. His family was gone, too, moved on to a new life in the Canadian province of British Columbia where Frau von Kalinske had relatives. They were all gone. But the expanded and reinforced cellar was still there, the villa having devolved to General von Wittendorf's ownership, and the sturdy capacious cellar refurbished and put to a new use Erich von Kalinkse couldn't have conceived of in his wildest flights of fancy. As a courtroom.

Ausgleich's courtroom.

### Vassili Makarovich Kononov

Vassili Kononov was a Russian partisan fighter in WWII. He was the only Russian partisan, and one of a mere handful of WWII Soviets, to be charged with war crimes. And even then he was not charged by the Russians, or the Soviets, but by the Latvians. And not for war crimes against the Germans, but against Latvians.

The convoluted history of WWII gets no more convoluted than that of Latvia. The country, which won its independence from Russia only in 1920, at the beginning of WWII was invaded by the Soviets with the clear Soviet intention of permanently absorbing Latvia into the Soviet Union. Many thousands of its citizens were arrested and deported to the Soviet Union. Thousands more, among them the leading citizens of the country and those opposed to either Communism or Russian imperialism, were murdered. When the German Wehrmacht drove back the Soviets most of the wartime Latvians welcomed the invading Germans as liberators. Tens of thousands of them served in the German military and many thousands more worked with and cooperated with the Germans in various ways. The Latvians of that day, as the Latvians of today, feared being swallowed whole by the Russian Bear and disappearing from history. So they often chose the lesser of two evils. In this case, the German over the Soviet. But not all of them chose the German side. And there was also an ethnic Russian minority in Latvia to further convolute the already turbulent and turbid Latvian WWII reality.

In May of 1944 Vasilli Kononov led a detachment of Soviet partisans into a small Latvian village called Mazie Bati. Their orders were to find, detain and try a group of Latvians believed to have aided the Germans in detecting and killing a dozen Soviet infiltrators earlier that year. The small band of partisans under Kononov detained some of the Latvians of Mazie Bati and apparently conducted some kind of drumhead trial. After which they executed them. Nine of them. Six men. And three women. One of the women was in the final states of gestation and close to giving birth.

Latvia remained under Russian control until the breakup of the Soviet Union and finally regained its independence in 1991. The war years were long gone but there were those in Latvia with long memories. The massacre at Mazie Bati had not been forgotten. A newly independent Latvia brought war crimes charges against Vassili Kononov, who still lived in the country. There were a series of war crimes trials and appeals, with Kononov convicted, then released on appeal, then convicted again. During his trials the Russian government actively supported Kononov and treated him like a war hero, not a war criminal. Russian President Vladmir Putin offered Kononov--who was an ethnic Russian but still a Latvian citizen--Russian citizenship. Kononov accepted and was again honored by Putin with personal greetings on the occasion of his 80th birthday. In the end, the only Russian partisan charged with war crimes in WWII spent only handful of years in prison and lived the age of 88. He died in 2011. 67 years after the nine Latvians he murdered lost their lives.

When Konovov died the Russian president sent a telegram to his family honoring him as a war hero.

### Ausgleich

After WWII ended there were many thousands of German veterans and former officials who communicated with each other in clandestine contacts kept secret from the Allies and Germans too cozy with the occupying powers. Many were Nazis. Most were not Nazis, not in the accepted western sense of being xenophobic fanatics. They were men trapped by the mass insanity of their times and forced into some level of participation, like it or not. They were German patriots who refused to accept the idea of collective national guilt over the Nazi atrocities and tried to maintain some level of dignity and respect in their German nationality and Germanic ethnicity. After the big name Nazis were caught and tried, the Allies, particularly the Russians and their captive nation sycophants, conducted witch hunts for lower level Germans who often were little more than ordinary men trapped by the tidal wave of National Socialism. Germany's top fighter pilot ace, Erich Hartmann, was captured by the Americans and turned over to the Soviets who prosecuted him for war crimes that even the Russians later admitted were spurious. Yet he still spent ten years in the Soviet Gulag. At the same time, among the scores of Russian fighter pilots who strafed the long trains of horse drawn carts they knew were only fleeing civilian refugees, killing and maiming thousands, few, if any, were ever accused, much less tried, for war crimes.

It should be no surprise that the German patriots refused to cooperate with the witch hunts and often went so far as to protect and hide many of the fugitives. There were some among the fugitives whose crimes were so great that they were pariahs--men such as Josef Mengele, Alois Brunner and Klaus Barbie--and only the unrepentant hardcore Nazis would have anything to do with them. Others were borderline cases that the patriots helped, choosing to give them what many of the Allied war crimes trials didn't--the benefit of the doubt. Because of that some genuinely culpable war criminals did escape capture. But many others who were mere functionaries--often grudgingly or even unwillingly--in the Nazi juggernaut were helped to new lives under new identities. The loose underground network of patriots had no real central identity, though outsiders spoke seriously of secret Nazi conspiracies with names like Der Kameradenwerk or Die Spinne or Der Führungsring which were, if anything, crazy mixtures of fantasy and reality. Der Kamaradenwerk was the one closest to reality, though it remained little more than a loose ephemera of a constantly shifting confederation of mostly like-minded patriots. There were exceptions of course. A least a few were genuinely culpable war criminals who managed to keep the facts of their wartime atrocities secret. But the great preponderance of the veterans were men, and women, who were prisoners of their time, and their guilt lay in being born at the wrong time in the wrong place.

General Freiherr von Wittendorf used his sub rosa connections in this labyrinthine subterranean world to search out other Germans with like minds to his. Gradually he accumulated a list of names. The list grew longer. Then, shorter, as some were crossed out. But longer again, as more names popped up from among the many millions of German survivors of WWII, almost all of whom had their own hairy horrific tales to recount. At the same time, building on the list, the general was accumulating a second list.

The very first name on the second list was Colonel Bertram Krestchman.

General von Wittendorf gathered a small inner circle of close confidants around him. Men who had held positions of power and influence and who had never actually been Nazis, though two did join the National Socialist party under duress. They were chastened by the examples of others who refused the pressure to join the Nazi party and faced the implicit and explicit Nazi threats against dissenters. The lucky ones got away with just being booted out of their professions and excluded from most interactions with their fellows beyond the merely personal. One of those who wasn't so lucky found himself in a drafty old castle in Austria imprisoned with other prominent people, mostly Germans and Austrians, the Nazis were hesitant to execute without direct proof of disloyalty. Even the savage Nazis had limits to what they could do. This man, Professor Klaus Gerber, joined von Wittendorf's inner circle as a kind of balance, a moral and ethical counterweight. Von Wittendorf reasoned that he who had the courage to refuse to sign a pact with the devil would not flinch from confronting the excesses of Ausgleich.

There were five judges. General Freiherr Von Wittendorf, the chief jurist. Professor Karl Gerber, who besides formerly being an imprisoned opponent of the Nazis, was a lecturer in physics at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University at Frankfurt am Main. Former Luftwaffe pilot and Eastern Front ace, Major Heinz Gutmann, who was with the Luftwaffe's Research Bureau and was a recognized expert on aerial warfare. Gutmann was so outraged by the prosecution and imprisonment of his close friend, the premiere German fighter pilot ace of the war, Erich Hartmann, on trumped up Soviet war crimes charges, that it was impossible to dissuade him from _not_ joining the court after von Wittendorf contacted him. Another of the judges was Judge Reinhard Kaufmann, a peacetime lawyer and judge who was drafted into the Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau during the war, where he investigated and adjudicated numerous cases of war crimes _against_ the Germans and was one of the German judges who investigated the Russian massacre of German wounded at Feodosia in the Crimea. Kaufmann needed no convincing of the realities of Allied war crimes. And, finally, Erika von der Heide, a lawyer in Munich and a relative of Field Marshall Günther von der Heide, who committed suicide in 1944 when he was implicated in the plot to kill Hitler.

Verdicts were valid with a simple majority. General von Wittendorf was convinced that enough balance existed among the five judges that a 3-2 guilty verdict would be fair. He also recognized the distinct possibility that some of the guilty might go free when the balance tilted the other direction into a 2-3 not guilty verdict. And in fact that did happen seven times in the dozen years the secret court was in session. Four were retried when new evidence was uncovered, Ausgleich choosing to not recognize the legal concept of double jeopardy because of the difficulty in obtaining verifiable facts and testimony. Of the four two were two reversals to a guilty verdict, though two others were exonerated through further research and dropped from the court docket permanently.

The preponderance of the verdicts were less controversial. They were mostly convictions, since pre-trial investigations eliminated the shakiest cases. 4-1 guilty verdicts were the most common, with Professor Gerber or lawyer von der Heide casting the dissenting voices. Twice there were 1-4 not guilty verdicts and once a 0-5 not guilty verdict. That trial was conducted under pressure from a very powerful German politician who had lost most of his family in the war and wanted someone to hang for it. The man he accused turned out to have not even been in the vicinity when the politician's family was machine gunned in the family car by a hedgehopping Mustang. The accused pilot actually flew into the area a few minutes later and was himself ambushed and shot down by a Messerschmitt Bf 109. He managed to bail out and spent the rest of the war as a prisoner in a German Stalag. The politician, who was himself interned in a concentration camp during the last year of the war, after ordering his postwar staff to research his family's death, later made the unjustified logical leap that the captured pilot was the killer. He was unhappy with the verdict, though von Wittendorf was able to convince him that retaliation against the innocent was the opposite of the essential thrust of Ausgleich's purpose. The politician grudgingly agreed to continue his clandestine support of Ausgleich and its goals--including its methods.

But that case was unique. Most of the trials ended in guilty verdicts. Guilty. But what about the sentence? Each guilty verdict was followed by a second sentencing hearing. The options of an extralegal criminal proceeding were limited. The death penalty was not an insurmountable obstacle. Assassinations were relatively straight forward. But what about penalties that fell short of the death sentence? Imprisonment was not realistic. That required an infrastructure they didn't have or established ones that would never cooperate. What was left? Public disclosure of the convicted individual's war crimes? Some less than lethal injury to the person? Damage to his property? None of it was practical, outside of public disclosure of a person's wartime crimes. And even that was problematical. The totalitarian control over the media in eastern Europe eliminated any possibility of public notoriety. And in the west, reticence to admit that they could be as guilty of war crimes as the Nazis was almost universal. Few among the media would even entertain the idea of publishing condemnatory articles against their own soldiers. Ausgleich agents, already hamstrung by their necessarily remaining anonymous, attempted to get articles printed several times. In Australia, England, France, Canada and the United States. Only one came close to being printed and even that one was quashed by the newspaper's editor before it was printed.

Ausgleich eventually settled on trying only the most egregious cases, ones that would likely warrant a death penalty. With no other options, what was the point? But then Erika von der Heide had an idea for those cases that fell short of the death penalty. No media would publicize the court's findings. But what of the individuals themselves? They knew the truth. Why not send anonymous factual reports of their war crimes directly to them? They would then be their own judge and jury. And copies could also be sent to their wives, their parents, their adult children, their employers. Even to local newspaper publishers who, though they wouldn't print such serious allegations from an anonymous source, might be motivated to dig deeper. Erika became the lead jurist in preparing factual war crimes reports for the anonymous forwarding to the various war criminals and the unlucky selected others. Her lead investigator? A man who needed no motivation. His wartime personal experience was all the motivation he would ever need. The man was personally recruited by General von Wittendorf after no little difficulty in locating him. Who was this man? He was the same young man who so brazenly confronted the American Colonel Kretschman that evil-drenched day on the Elbe.

Witbold Schrülen.

At first Ausgleich remained incomplete. There was a courtroom. Five judges. An investigative team headed by Witbold Schrülen and fellow journalist, the sole survivor in his family of the Dresden firebombing, Uwe Schlegel. Lists of potential defendants and witnesses. Numerous contacts in the general population who provided assistance of various kinds. Yet, if this was to be a court, there had to be both a prosecutor and a defense attorney. Finding them was going to be difficult, especially a defense attorney. Difficult. But not impossible. General von Wittendorf was a resourceful man.

And a determined one.

### Fritz Meineke

Fritz Meineke was a hot shot liberal attorney in pre-war Berlin. He was short and rail thin, his longish dark blond hair as often as not disheveled, with startling bright amber eyes that telegraphed the acuity of his legal mind that laid low many a courtroom adversary. Until the Nazis came and jerked the level from the legal playing field and tilted it towards the romantic ugly nonsense of National Socialist Ideology. From their earliest beginnings, Fritz Meineke cast a wary eye at the Nazis. He was one of the first to recognize how dangerous they really were. As the National Socialists consolidated their stranglehold on Germany they wasted no time in putting their mark on the court system. An outraged Meineke, as did most of the German legal profession, initially resisted the decline of the rule of generations of established law into fiat by a twisted political ideology. At first. As conditions worsened in Germany more and more of Meineke's colleagues backed away from opposing the Nazis.

Those who were not there often facilely disdain the German opposition's temerity. But for those who were there the Nazis made their point in their signature brutal fashion. _Opponents beware!_ No one could help but note with gut crunching alarm the regular disappearance into concentration camps of prominent dissenters and the subsequent invective heaped upon them. The survivors sought, with varying degrees of success--and the concomitant tawdry handmaiden of tacit complicity--an accommodation with the totalitarian beast of the new Germany. Those who didn't faced a grim future. Three of Meineke's friends met that dark future when they were officially discredited and disenfranchised as they were swallowed into the black hole of the concentration camps. When Meineke could no longer hold his tongue and brashly spoke out against the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis, his fate was sealed. He would soon follow the others into the camps. It was only a matter of time. Sooner rather than later.

Meineke chose a different option over the physical death of a concentration camp or the moral death of complicity. His intense lucid mind looked into the future and saw utter disaster looming ahead for Germany. But for now? The Nazis were too powerful, too well entrenched, too vindictive to challenge. The German people were seduced into complacency by the surface appearance of prosperity and stability Hitler had brought to the destitute German nation. Too late would they realize their folly. Germany would need to rebuild after the national cataclysm Meineke saw coming. Fritz intended to be one of those who would help in rebuilding a new, non-totalitarian Germany founded on democratic principles. The Berlin lawyer had already sent his wife and three children on what was superficially an extended vacation with relatives in Sweden, where Meineke's mother was born. Once the family was safely in Stockholm, Meineke slipped across the Danish border, boarded a train to Copenhagen and from there to the Danish port of Helsingor where he took a ferry to Sweden. A few months later the war broke out in September of 1939 when Germany invaded Poland. A half year later the German military invaded both Denmark and Norway. The German lawyer, fearing that Sweden would be next, had his family packed and ready to leave on a moment's notice on whatever neutral ship was in Stockholm's harbor. Their destination would be England and the large anti-Nazi German expatriate community in London of both Jews and non-Jews. But, as it turned out, for whatever reason, the Germans didn't invade Sweden. Meineke remained in Stockholm. Throughout the war the dissident German lawyer maintained discrete contacts in Germany through neutral Sweden. Germany never did invade Sweden.

But Meineke still kept his bags packed.

Fritz Meineke's father, like so many others of his generation, was a semi-invalided WWI veteran. As a young man he was a strongly built light-haired man with the same startling amber hue in his eyes as his son. No more. Major Otto Meineke never fully recovered from a surprise mustard gas attack in the labyrinthine trenches of the Verdun battlefield. His hair turned gray almost literally overnight after he was gassed. The bitter irony, lost neither on the father nor the son, was that the Germans themselves had launched the attack when a sudden wind shift brought the gas back onto the unprepared German lines. After the war Otto recovered enough to be able to continue his career as an engineer in the coal mines of the Ruhr basin, but he never regained the sturdy vigor of his youth. Still, he was not a bitter man. So many among his WWI comrades were killed in the war or suffered horrendous wounds that tormented them for the rest of their lives. Many did not survive the war for more than a few years. Others, plagued by a life of constant pain, became addicted to the siren painkiller that was the scourge of wounded survivors of the American Civil War a half century earlier. Morphine. And some, addicts as well as non-addicts, worn down from years of pain and the isolation of the invalid, eventually chose to end their lives of misery in what the Germans called Freitod or Selbstmord. Suicide. Hardly a year went by that the elder Meineke didn't attend the glum teary funeral of a veteran, be the waxen parody that of a comrade, friend, neighbor or business associate.

Unlike his son, Otto Meineke was disinterested in politics. Actually, more than just disinterested. Politics and politicians disgusted him. The utter stupidity of governments nearly ruined the Germany of his youth and sent millions of young European men to pointless deaths. It wasn't until the German Army marched off to invade Poland that Otto Meineke took serious notice. Like his son, already in exile in Sweden, Otto Meineke could see nothing but disaster ahead for Germany and the German people. It would turn out to be worse--far, far worse--than the murky future he envisioned in the early days. It would go beyond disaster. Ahead lay utter catastrophe. As the war ground into it's final months to Meineke's mind it was, simply, the end of everything. He did not care to live to see what, if anything, lay beyond.

As the war intensified, Otto Meineke was transferred to the synthetic oil plant at Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr Basin. It was a dangerous place to be. In the early spring of 1943 the Allies launched a six month bombing campaign designed to bomb into insignificant bits of rubble the industrial capacity of the mighty Ruhr Basin. Allied bombers fell in flames by the dozens and German civilians died by the thousands in the infernos of the burning bombed cities. The elder Meineke had to remain at his job, indeed his Germanic code of personal honor demanded it, despite the bombing, but he was adamant in insisting his wife and his widowed mother and aunt go to live in Aalen, a small town of no military significance near Ulm that could not be a target of the bombers. Meineke stayed on the job, spending much of his time in cramped, stinking bomb shelters, right up until a column of mud-spattered American soldiers came wearily marching in to Gelsenkirchen. He survived a war for the second time in his life. He survived. Others were not so lucky.

By the spring of 1945 American airplanes were bombing Aalen and other nearby small towns and villages. On April 17th the Allied bombers appeared over the town of Aalen. When they flew away a few minutes later many of the town's inhabitants were dead. Among them were Meineke's wife, mother and aunt. When the elder Meineke learned of his family's death in a pointless air raid at the very end of the war on a defenseless target of little or no military significance, the normally phlegmatic man flew into a rage and bitterly vowed vengeance. Against the Nazi bastards who had led Germany to literal ruin. And also the Allies whose bombs were weapons of terror and mass murder every bit as lethal as the brutal Nazis.

Fritz Meineke returned to Germany in the summer after the war ended in May of 1945. Meineke knew the future Chancellor of West Germany, Willi Brandt, who was also in exile in Sweden. Meineke also made contacts through their Stockholm embassies with the western Allies, his intention being to work with them in postwar Germany to rebuild the nation. Labeled as a 'good German' because he was a dissenter and an expatriate anti-Nazi, the American occupiers soon put Meineke to work vetting the credentials and Nazi pasts of other Germans applying to work with the Allies in the new Germany.

But then Fritz Meineke's world fell to pieces, much as Germany itself lay in shattered pieces everywhere. He found his father and learned of his mother, grandmother and great aunt's death in the pointless bombing of Aalen. The fate of his younger brother Karl lay in that vast nebulous world of the millions of Germans euphemistically labeled as missing. Missing, but still there was hope. It was known that millions of German prisoners were being held by the victorious allies. Karl was missing. But his mother, grandmother and aunt were all dead. That was the first blow. The second came when a young Panzer veteran from Fritz Meineke's younger brother Karl's tank crew found him at his office in the American occupation zone. In the German Army, among only his closest comrades, Karl often spoke of his older brother, predicting that when the war was over 'Fritzie' would return to Germany and become an important politician. When the young veteran, who walked with a pronounced limp and noticeably favored his oddly canted right arm, saw a newspaper article with Fritz' name, he knew he had to be Karl's older brother. The young German tank crewman thought Fritz should be told about Karl's fate. He made his way to Meineke's cramped office in a basement corner of one of the few buildings relatively undamaged by bombing. Meineke looked up when there was a timid knock on the door.

"Ja," Meineke said. "Wer ist da?" Who's there? A young man hardly beyond twenty pushed the half open door wide and clumsily limped in. His body seemed to tilt to the right and Meineke puzzled over it for a moment before he realized that the young man's right leg was shorter than his left leg. Then he noticed that the youth's right arm stuck out from his body at an odd angle. He didn't need to see the haunted look in the young man's eyes to understand who and what he was seeing. A veteran.

"Please," Meineke quickly said. "Sit down." The young man thankfully eased his awkward body into a chair. He was of average height and build, with auburn hair, thick eyebrows of the same color and coffee brown eyes. He was dressed in marginally shabby clothes, not at all unusual in postwar Germany where there was a shortage of everything. An inquisitive look from Meineke. "Do you seek employment?" The young man slowly shook his head.

"Nein....nein. No." He paused for a moment. "I should first tell you who I am," he continued. "My name is Hans Riedel..." He paused, seemed to gather both his thoughts and his courage, then raised his gaze to look directly at Fritz Meineke's curious face. "I bring news of your brother, Karl." Fritz Meineke's amber eyes came alive with a glow like the aurulent chunks of genuine amber he pried from pine trees during his carefree rambles on the Baltic coast long ago. His body could not resist the urge to leap to his feet and lean towards young Riedel.

"Karl! Karl! What of him? Where is he?" Riedel's somber expression stopped Meineke cold. That look could only mean one thing. Like the majority of Germany's young men, Karl Meineke was dead. Fritz slumped back into his chair, fighting back the tears that were building in eyes that had gone suddenly cold. All Fritz knew was what his father had told him. Karl was called into the Arbeitsdienst and then went to the Army, where he trained as a tank crewman. That was all Fritz' father knew of his youngest son. He had vanished in the maelstrom of the Western Front and they didn't know whether Fritz was dead or alive.

Until now.

"How," Meineke said in a hollow voice. "How did he die?" Young Riedel grew obviously uneasy, his gaze bouncing off the books and pictures and stacked papers of Meineke's tiny office. "You work for the Amis? The Americans?" Riedel finally said. Meineke was taken aback.

"Ach......ja....but...why do you ask?" Riedel returned his gaze to Meineke. He might be a young man and uncomfortable with what he had to do, but he was a combat veteran of the German Wehrmacht who had seen more death and destruction and misery in his months of combat than entire regiments in less bloody times. He was no coward. He just didn't like what he had to say.

"Herr Meineke," Riedel said, determined to get on with it. "I don't think you will like what I have to say. But I owe it to Karl, and to his family, to tell you what happened to him."

With a mind gone to a place both far away and yet near, and a husky, troubled voice as he struggled with the memory, he told how their Tiger tank was disabled by dive bombing American fighters during the retreat after the Battle of the Bulge.

"The Amis and their airplanes were like devils to us," Hans said, his eyes looking at Fritz but seeing instead his own memories, his hands weaving in imitation of the swooping American airplanes. "Immer so. Immer so. Always flying over. Always attacking us. One of their bombs disabled our Panzer's driver side tracks. Not so much that we couldn't move, but much slower than normal. We fell behind the retreating German Army and finally could go on no more." For a moment his eyes reconnected with Fritz and an ironic expression touched his face. "Out of gas! Can you imagine that? A powerful weapon like a Tiger tank useless because of no gas." The brief ironic memory was gone as quickly as it had come.

"No more petrol and nowhere to get some. We were cut off from the German retreat, and almost out of ammunition." Hans suddenly scowled and looked as though he wanted to violently spit at the ground. "The fanatics would have said stay and fight to the death. There were no fanatics among us. The days were long gone when German soldiers willingly threw their lives away for Hitler and for a Greater Germany." A sardonic look at Fritz. "If those days ever really existed. "So, Herr Meineke, we were only six young men, the five of us in the crew and a wounded infantryman we picked up, hardly more than boys, and had only one desire in common. To survive the war. We climbed out of the tank and were about to decide whether we should just wait for the Americans and surrender, or follow the tracks of the retreating Germans. We were going to vote on it and go with the majority." Hans Riedel, an old man in a young man's body, grew sullen, even angry.

"Before we could finish the Amis came. An American Sherman tank raced around a bend in the road only a hundred yards away. The choice was made for us. We all raised our hands high and yelled out in German and English that we were surrendering. They could not have mistaken our intention to surrender. None of us were holding weapons. The Sherman tank stopped," Riedel continued, his voice grown thick and difficult to understand with choked up emotion. "But then the machine gun inside the Sherman tank started firing. Our Tiger crewmen were cut down where we stood. Some of us were dead. Not me. And not Karl. He stood back up, his hands still held high above his head, and yelled as loudly as he could in both English and German that we were surrendering." Young Riedel couldn't help himself. He started to softly weep. "And then," he said, choking on the words, "and then. Then, oh, God, then that goddamn American machine gun opened up and Karl fell heavily by my side. Dead. They murdered him!" Riedel stopped, his face pallid from the memories, and stared woodenly at the floor. "I was shot up, too, but alive. I feigned death as the American tank followed by a dozen more tanks and halftracks rolled by without even stopping." After a few moments Riedel related what Fritz was already wondering. Why he was sitting before Fritz Meineke in an office and not long dead like Karl Meineke and the other Tiger crewmen.

"I laid there. I don't know how long. An hour? Less? Along came more Amis. Trucks. Not with soldiers. Supplies. Maybe gas and ammunition for the tanks ahead. The last of the trucks stopped and two Americans climbed out of it. I thought, oh God, now they're going to finish the job their American buddies started. Hans, I thought to myself, you are going to die." He stopped and a strange expression creased his face. "They did not come to kill me. They came to loot. They climbed into the tank, took whatever they thought worth stealing, then climbed back out and started going through the pockets of my comrades. When they came to me and rolled me over I involuntarily groaned."

The Americans had found Hans Riedel.

"Hey, Hermann," said PFC Andy Swenson to his buddy, Corporal Hermann Swenk. "This one is still alive." The other American, himself a second-generation German American who had no great enthusiasm to be fighting his ancestral kin, came over and knelt next to Hans.

"Kannst du mich  hören?" He said to Riedel.

"Ja.....ja....." groaned Riedel. Swenson grabbed Swenk's shoulder.

"Come on man, let's get out of here. We got stuff to deliver to the tankers."

"What about this man?" Swenk answered. "He's still alive. He might make it."

"Leave him," Swenson shot back. "He's gonna die. Like his buddies here. Come on. Let's go." He tugged at Swenk's shoulder again. Swenk didn't move.

"You go on. I'm not leaving this man. I'm going to get him to an aid station." Swenson, who wasn't as hard hearted as he liked to sound, and who wasn't burdened with the grim and too often ruthless memories of the veteran combat soldier, shrugged.

"I knew you'd say that. OK. Let's get him to an aid station."

The two of them carried the wounded German to their truck and Schwenk spoke in low tones to the wounded Riedel as they drove, translating into English for Swenson what the wounded German was saying. In a few minutes they pulled up to an American aid station, got out of their truck and carried Riedel to the open flaps at the entrance of the expansive aid station tent. And that was when the second miracle happened, at least that was the way Hans Riedel would see if for the rest of his life.

"This Kraut is SS," said a swarthy medic who was triaging at the entrance to the aid station and saw Riedel's black uniform. "No goddamn way we're going to treat an SS bastard." It wasn't German-American Hermann Swenk who grabbed the medic's arm and angrily put his face inside the comfort zone of that of the startled medic's. It was Andy Swenson, an easy going--almost to the point of phlegmatic--Norwegian-American from the prairie country of western Minnesota where his family raised potatoes and sugar beets. And children, Andy being one of nine kids in the Swenson family. Intentionally letting a wounded man die was nowhere to be found in the Norwegian-American moral heritage of the Swenson family.

"This guy ain't SS. He's out of a tank. Panzer. Look at his insignia. Not SS." Then Swenson thumped a fist off the startled medic's chest. "He told Schwenk here," he nodded at Hermann, who was almost as startled at Swenson's outburst as the medic, "that one of our own tanks gunned the Panzer crewmen down." He drilled the medic with hot eyes. " _After_ they had surrendered!" Just then one of the medical doctors heard what was said and stepped forward.

"Take him inside," he said to the triage medic, adding, "we're in the business of saving lives, not taking them!" The medic, grumbling and cursing under his breath, grudgingly complied.

The other American medics and doctors saved Riedel's life and he was back home in Germany sooner than many of the captured German soldiers who spent months and years in a captivity that often was often little more than a brutal slave labor.

Fritz Meineke sat slumped and ashen faced after Hans Riedel finished his account of Karl Meineke's death. He was silent a long time. Finally he spoke.

"But why? Why would the Americans murder surrendering German Panzer crewmen? Outside of their tank, and unarmed, they could be no threat at all." Riedel's answer was quick. He'd had many long hours in hospital beds pondering the same question.

"Perhaps," Riedel said without great conviction, "it was because our uniforms as Panzer crewmen at a distance could be mistaken for SS uniforms." Meineke pondered that thought for a moment. Very possibly could be true. But then his facile legal minded snapped shut like a trap catching a wild animal. His fist thumped hard on his desk.

"But it is still cold blooded murder!"

Why had the Americans murdered the surrendering Germans? Perhaps, as the young crewman thought, because the uniforms of Panzer crewmen were similar to SS uniforms and the Americans thought they were SS troopers. What difference did it make, Meineke thought. It was still murder. His mother. His grandmother. His great-aunt. And now his only brother. From that moment on Fritz Meineke secretly shared his father's oath of vengeance. Against the Nazi bastards.

And also the Allied bastards.

Years later Fritz Meineke joined the inner circle of Ausgleich.

As the lead prosecutor.

### Tom Smith

Tom Smith had dual citizenship. German, by his birth in Lübeck as Thomas Schmidt, son of a German seaman, Marco Schmidt. American, the son of a American woman, Claudia Poston Schmidt, living in Germany with her German husband. In Germany he was Thomas Schmidt, in America he went by the Anglicized version of the name, Tom Smith. Three months past his tenth birthday his parents split and eventually divorced. It wasn't a hostile divorce. The cultural differences between Germany and the United States had eventually driven them apart. Claudia was homesick. Her German husband didn't want to leave his family or his ancestral homeland and she didn't want to stay. With a heavy heart, Marco Schmidt helped Claudia pack up Tom and waved from the pier as they climbed the gangplank onto a steamer in the Lübeck harbor for the voyage over the frigid cobalt blue waters of the North Atlantic to America. As the ship pulled away from the pier, Marco Schmidt tried hard to hide the tears smearing his face. His son, bent over a railing on the ship's upper deck, didn't try to hide his tears.

Even Claudia was weeping.

She took Tom back to live in her hometown of Virginia Beach. Within a year she remarried another sailor, an American named Lute Jonsen. The American sailor was an open minded man who himself was bilingual, speaking the Danish of his parents as well as English, and he encouraged Tom to keep up his German language skills and to stay in contact with his German relatives. He did, twice going to Germany for an extended stay with his father's family. Lute also began teaching young Tom Danish. When Tom graduated from high school he was fluent in both English and German and was nearly as fluent in Danish. He won a scholarship to nearby George Washington University and then to the University's law school. He did his lawyer's cap and gown walk on a lovely spring day of blooming cherry trees and warm sun. It was 1939. An ominous year. 1939. The year when the world slipped over the edge into bloody chaos.

Not a good year to be a young man of military age.

Tom's proud German father, Marco Schmidt, came to America for his son's graduation and invited Tom to come to Germany for another visit. The idea didn't sit well with most of Tom's American friends and relations. Several of them warned Tom in very dire terms about going to Germany when war seemed imminent, but the youthful confidence of the newly minted lawyer would brook no timidity.

"Tom, Tom," his mother begged. "Don't go to Germany. Please. Not now. It's too dangerous."

"Not so dangerous yet, Mom," he replied with a reassuring grin and hug. "Maybe soon. "But not yet." That was it, and his mother knew it. Once her stubborn son made up his mind it wasn't likely to change.

Just after he passed the Virginia bar exam--easily, on his first try--he boarded a transatlantic sea plane for the exciting trip on the legendary flying boat to Europe. Tom understood that another great war would probably soon set Europe into flames. That was why he went when he did. He wanted to see it and his large German extended family while it was still possible.

It was by far the most fateful decision of his life.

The idea was sound. The timing wasn't. Tom Smith was still in Germany when German troops--including one of his cousins--marched into Poland. War. When Tom Smith decided he'd better leave while he still could he found that the German immigration authorities considered him to be a German citizen named Thomas Schmidt. Since he still had his German citizenship, and was of draft age, he wouldn't be allowed to leave the country. Discrete queries by his relatives ascertained that renouncing his German citizenship would very likely have him considered a traitor. At best he would end up in a concentration camp. At the worst he would face a firing squad or the hangman.

Tom Smith AKA Thomas Schmidt was trapped.

Tom Smith wasn't long out of D.C.'s George Washington University of Law, but he was a long ways from the cloistered classrooms. In more ways that one. As a recent graduate he had no real experience as a lawyer. To the German manpower allocation authorities who examined his credentials what was even more relevant was that he was trained in American law, not German or even English law. America was still neutral in the war and this German-American recent law graduate could be of no use to the German Army's legal branch. That hardly exempted him from military service. The Battle of Britain was still raging over London when Tom got the dreaded official letter he knew was as inevitable as the nightly rant of Nazi bullshit propaganda on German radio. When he reported for induction a thorough German military manpower specialist discovered that Tom spoke nearly fluent Danish. Since he had an advanced degree--American degrees were far from uncommon among the German officer corps--he was commissioned as a Leutnant. After his initial training at an officers cadet school at a shady, meticulously manicured century old Wehrmacht installation near Chemnitz in Saxony, he was posted to the German occupation office in central Copenhagen as a junior liaison to the Danish government.

He could hardly believe his good fortune, hearing as they all did the hair-raising whispered accounts of the horrors of the Eastern Front. Thomas Schmidt had an easy time of it, remaining in Copenhagen until just before the city of Hans Christian Anderson was emptied of its German occupiers in 1945. His war experiences were far different from the vast majority of Germans in the Wehrmacht during World War II, and he firmly believed himself untainted by the whispered evils that even the omnipresent Nazi thought police were unable to stifle. He kept as low a profile as he could because of his dual citizenship between Germany and America. He told almost no one of the fact of his having dual citizenship because of his mother's nationality, though he did freely admit to living in the United States before the war. That was hardly unusual. Thousands of Germans lived in America during the 1930's, some, like Tom, from mixed nationality families, others as students or simply young people seeing the world.

Among the Germans wanderlust was far more than just a word. Even during the Great Depression there were wandering Germans knocking about on the busy thoroughfares and the dusty back roads of the world. More than a handful of the wanderers were trapped in far away places when the war started. Some were promptly plunked into camps and interned as enemy aliens. Because of that most would survive the war unscathed. Very unlike their brethren at home in Germany.

After the war ended many of the internees made their way back to Germany. There they saw what had become of the enchanting centuries old architectural heritage of their homeland, the soaring castles, the Gothic churches and cathedrals, the ornate theaters and sprawling hospitals and monumental public buildings, the ancient old towns of winding narrow streets lined with ancient half-timbered houses. Gone. Reduced to huge mounds of rubble, of charred wood and chunks of stone, broken bricks and twisted metal. The German survivors staggered around in ragged clothes, half-starved, with blank faces and empty eyes. The wanderers were stunned into mute astonishment. They hadn't gone through the gradual pounding down of the country through the long years of war. When they left, Germany was thriving and robust, the people exultant in their newfound prosperity and national self respect. That was then. But now, on coming home, everything was gone. Almost all of them broke down and wept when they first saw what had happened to their homeland. Many turned around and left to find a new home somewhere else in the world.

No such option for Tom Smith/Thomas Schmidt, recently promoted to Hauptman--captain--in the German Army. Smith's war experience was turned inside out from the Germans interned in foreign lands. He was a German-American caught in Germany by the war. And there was another part to Tom's wartime world that separated his reality from that of the German internees. He had worn the uniform of America's enemy. Tom couldn't go back home to the United States. Not now. Maybe never. In America he could well face far worse than mere internment.

As the war ground down to its inevitable conclusion, Tom Smith had to coldly face up to his choices. Not really choices, at least with any positive permutations. All were unmapped roads leading into darkness. He understood that he was just another hapless ordinary person swept up by the epic forces unleashed in WWII, little different from many millions of others. But there was one difference between him and the others. One very big difference. He had resisted formally renouncing his American citizenship, against the universal advice of his German coworkers and relatives and even the few Danes he came to know well in Copenhagen. His American citizenship was too dear for him to renounce. He simply couldn't bring himself to do it, despite the urgings of his friends. As German defeat loomed ever closer, Tom didn't waste much time lamenting the losing hand fate had dealt him. He had some hard choices to make. Face the Americans and possibly be branded a traitor as an American who wore an enemy uniform in time of war, which was punishable by death. Or do what so many others, non-Germans and Germans alike, were doing. Try to disappear into the churning human chaos of postwar Europe. But first, in a faint hope that he knew was almost certainly doomed, he made preliminary queries of the Americans through both the Swiss Red Cross and Danish contacts with Sweden. The answers rifled back like a one two mental knockout punch. He was a traitor. Mitigation was unlikely.

Tom's choice was made.

He joined the roiling, nebulous mass of fugitives and displaced persons, disappearing before his unit marched across the Danish border to surrender to the Allies. The Americans already knew who he was. As Tom's unit arrived at the American camp, a squad of very somber looking MP's lead by a dour American major questioned the unit about Smith's whereabouts.

"Schmidt," a sour faced German-speaking American MP Captain said to every single man in Tom's former occupation unit. "Wo ist Thomas Schmidt?" Where is Tom Smith?

"Weiss nicht," was the universal reply. I don't know. And it was no lie. None of them knew. Nor, if they had, would they have told the Americans where he was. Far too many people had already paid heavy prices for just being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Tom learned about it months later when he clandestinely contacted a German friend from his Copenhagen unit who gave Tom his postwar contact address when they parted in Denmark.

"They were looking for you, Tom," his friend, Werner Biebermann, said in the good English he had learned at the University in prewar Köln. "And they sure as hell did not look friendly." He grasped his comrade's arm. "You were wise to disappear." A pause and a laser of a look from Biebermann, as he drew a finger across his throat in a cutting motion. " _Very goddamn wise."_

The title of a book he had read by one of his favorite American authors, Thomas Wolfe, You Can't Go Home Again, was far more than a literary allusion to Tom Smith.

He really _couldn't_ go home again.

The relationships between the Danes and the Germans, at least in the first years of the war, were far more congenial than in much of occupied Europe. Tom made many friends among the Danes and even had a casual relationship with a Danish woman. Denmark was not a destroyed country like Germany, and Tom would have preferred to stay there. His Danish was good, good enough to function in Danish society, but not quite good enough to pass for a native. There was an avalanche of self-righteous collaborationist recrimination going on in Denmark, so he slipped into Germany where his fluent north German accent attracted no unwanted attention.

Tom's sailor father, Marco Schmidt, was drafted into the Kriegsmarine, the German Navy, and was among the crewmen of the Bismarck who were interned in Argentina after the legendary sinking of the fabled German battleship. He survived the war and would eventually return home, though Tom was unaware of his father's survival for months after the war's end. Among his father's numerous north German kin, almost all the young men were either dead or in prison camps, the only exception being his cousin Alois, who was invalided out of the Wehrmacht after losing a leg at the epic battle of Kursk in Russia. Others among the family, civilians, had died or were injured in air raids. The surviving German relatives, bitter at Germany's fate and at the merciless bombing of civilians, were united in hiding Tom from the Allies. He moved frequently among them.

Of all the Allies, the British were the least vengeful against the defeated Germans. Ironic, to the Germans, since the British had spawned the bombing campaign that had incinerated German cities and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The British were quick to justify the bombing, pointing out that Hitler had let the evil genie out of the air war bottle when he ordered the bombing of civilian targets at many places, including Rotterdam, Warsaw and London. But, still, perhaps mindful of the utter devastation the British visited on Germany, they were as lenient in peacetime as they were ruthless during the war. A German soldier in the French or American occupation sectors was liable to be detained and sent off to a forced labor camp. The Brits did that too, but not as extensively, nor as brutally as the Americans or especially the vengeful French. And in the Russian sector? The Russians didn't just grab men, soldiers and civilians, and send them off to slave labor camps. Women, compounding the degradation of being repeatedly raped, were sent off with the men to the forced labor camps. Many of them never came back.

Tom Schmidt was in the British sector, near his birthplace of Lübeck, where his aunt and uncle lived with their two surviving children. The eldest son, Jens, was the same age as Tom and looked enough like him to be his brother, if not his twin. Jens, like so many of his generation, disappeared somewhere in Russia and was officially designated as missing. Tom assumed his cousin's identity and managed to escape detection by the occupiers, claiming he had been in a Russian prison camp and been released because he was too ill to work. At least one British detention officer was not fooled, but the ruined cities of Germany and the starving mass of the population convinced him that there had already been enough punishment. Too much. He looked the other way and let Thomas Schmidt go his very relieved way.

And that way led to a whole new life under a new identity. With that new identity and new name he built a new life in the ruins of postwar Germany. He earned a law degree from a German university, married, opened a law practice in Munich. And then, years later, the old life that he thought was long behind him, came back. It began with a mysterious voice on the telephone at his Munich office after the receptionist forwarded the call to Smith, completely unaware of what was about to happen.

"Hallo," the deep male voice on the phone said, "wer is da?" Puzzled, Tom Smith answered with his now long established postwar name. What came next literally rocked Tom back in his chair.

"I would like to speak," the voice said in English. "With Tom Smith. Otherwise known as Hauptman Thomas Schmidt." All color drained out of Tom Smith's face. Before he could say anything else, the voice continued. "Meet me at the Hunziger Kaffeehaus in one hour. I already know what you look like and will motion at you to join me." And then the connection was broken and the mysterious voice in the phone was gone. Tom's first thought was blackmail. Someone had found out about his past and was going to try to shake him down.

"I'll be damned before I'll pay anyone blackmail," Tom muttered to himself in a low growl as he slammed his phone so hard onto its receiver that the receptionist in the outer room jumped out of her chair to go see what had just happened. Which was not so surprising, considering that the receptionist was also his bookkeeper, financial advisor and, not so coincidentally, his wife. Tom had never lied to her, she knew about his true identity, so he told her about the phone call. Her reaction was identical to Tom's.

"Erpressung!" Blackmail! She was even more irate than Tom.

Blackmail or not, Tom had to show up at the coffee shop. How else would he have any idea who or what he was dealing with? What he encountered was in a whole different universe from what he was expecting. The man waiting for him was former German Army General Freiherr von Wittendorf. And what von Wittendorf had in mind had nothing to do with blackmail. He wanted Tom Smith to join Ausgleich.

As the defense council.

Von Wittendorf had Smith's background double checked and, always prudently cautious, double checked again. What followed absolutely astounded Tom Smith. A mind-blowing conversation over cups of strong coffee and sweet Bavarian pastries as the former general outlined the goals and methods of operation and how he envisioned Ausgleich to operate. He ended by asking Tom to join Ausgleich as the defense attorney, but told him to take some time to think it over before making his decision.

"I'll call you again in a one week's time," the former general said just before he left. "You can tell me then what you decision will be."

The following decision making week was an intense and nerve wracking one. Tom discussed it over and over with his wife. The deciding factor was Tom himself. He was no war criminal, yet the U.S. government officially considered him to be one. A traitor who wore the uniform of the enemy in wartime. If it could happen to Tom, why not also to others? He thought such people at the very least deserved a competent defense. When the general called one week later Tom was ready with his answer.

Ausgleich had achieved what seemed impossible. A reasonably objective attorney for the defense. And an American, at that! Tom Smith--Thomas Schmidt--had himself a new avocation.

As the defense attorney in Ausgleich's secret courtroom.

### The Twins

Post WWII Italy. Identical twins Guiseppe and Alessio Lombardi grew to a hungry manhood in the physical and cultural ruins of a bombed out village an hour's walk from the outskirts of Rome. A bankrupt country. A bankrupt people. An already poor people plummeted into a grim doggedly pervasive poverty. That was bad enough. There was worse. The Fascists and the partisans, many of them Communists, launched witch hunts throughout Italy, especially in the north, for collaborators and war profiteers in what was in many respects a class war. Peasants against landowners. Factory workers against factory owners. Commoners against aristocrats. Conservatives against communists. Executions were daily occurrences. A constant terror reigned in people's lives. Who would be next? All too often the real reason behind the executions had more to do with personal grudges than politics.

And even that wasn't all. The soul grinding poverty of the population, bordering at times on literal starvation, turned a large percentage of the female population into what the comfortable and well fed naive' would call prostitution. A word from an alien world that was but a empty bit of ephemera to these women. Selling themselves to almost anyone, in particular the relatively affluent Allied occupation soldiers including those of America's Greatest Generation, was the difference between survival and starvation. Especially those with small children. The Lombardi brothers were no exception to this somber reality. Though they never actually saw it, they knew their mother, Carmen, a very good looking woman almost up until the day she died, was among the women selling themselves when she walked to Rome three or four times a week and always brought back something to eat or small amounts of money in different currencies. The American dollar always the most valued on the black market. She had no choice. Everyone was trapped in the hunger of the times. There was no one to help. No government assistance. No husband. Her husband, Mario, never came back from the war. Carmen did the best she could and at least once a week brought home a bar of chocolate for her sons. The twins soon learned not to ask questions. To what point? They knew. They all knew. Everyone knew. How could they not?

Times were hard.

Mario Lombardi never came home. But one of the soldiers in his unit, Cesare Magnone, a childhood friend of Mario's who, like many of the men in their village was in the same Italian Army unit, did. Come home. And Cesare had a tale to tell that incinerated what little positive was left in the already grim world the Lombardi family lived in. Their husband and father, Mario, did not fall in battle as did over a quarter of a million Italian soldiers. He was murdered. In cold blood. Not by the Germans. Not by partisans. By Americans, or so Cesare claimed. Americans? But. But. How was that possible? _Americans?_ How could that be?

This was not mere rumor. Cesare had good reason to know the actual facts. Damn good reason. He was _there_. Cesare was one of the lucky ones. Mario Lombardi's old childhood buddy and fellow soldier in an Italian Army communications platoon was one of three wounded men who escaped one grisly day on a hillside near Arezzo when an American officer ordered the execution of the captured Italians and Germans.

The Lombardi twins grew to a hungry adulthood. Their overworked and diseased mother died far too young. There were no antibiotics, and no money to buy them even if they were available, in the early post war years to treat the venereal diseases most of the Italian prostituting women contracted. Her early death only compounded their anger over what had happened to their father. As they grew older time did not leaven their anger. Like an untreated wound that becomes septic, the brothers grew increasingly bitter. Where was the justice? Their mother, dead at 40, a victim of the privation of the war. Their father, surrendered, a prisoner of war, was instead murdered. And by the Americans! The Americans? How could that be?

Then, one day, Luis Schmidt, a visiting Tyrolean German accompanying his Italian wife originally from the Lombardi's neighborhood, heard the story of the Lombardis from a family friend. Schmidt, a bilingual non-Reich ethnic German, was impressed into the SS and saw far too many gruesome barbarities on all sides in the Ukraine, Greece and Serbia during the war years. He was not skeptical like so many others. On the contrary. He was all too aware of the barbarities otherwise seemingly normal humans were capable of. His interest was aroused and Schmidt, who spoke Italian as well as German, went to meet them. As soon as the brothers sat down to cups of strong Italian espresso at a corner cafe' outside of an ancient building near their home, and recognized the calm and serious minded manner of the Italian German, they knew. Something profound had just come over the horizon of their mundane blue collar worlds. And it had. One that would change their lives forever. The Lombardi brothers would not go to their graves as old men with nothing but trifling memories of unremarkable lives.

"Not," as the slang of the American soldiers would put it, "by a long shot."

That afternoon the three of them knocked on the door of Italian war veteran Cesare Magnone.

A few days later the Italian German, Luis Schmidt--there were many thousands of German speakers in the historically German South Tyrol in the far north of Italy--returned to his home near the Austrian border. Almost the first thing he did was to contact Uwe Schlegel, a German war crimes investigator he met through a close friend of his, also a north Italian Waffen SS veteran. A man who had himself been contacted as a witness in another war crimes investigation. Not war crimes investigation in the usual sense. Schlegel, and those he worked with, were not investigating German war crimes. The were investigating crimes _against_ the Germans. Allied war crimes. The next week Uwe was in the Tyrol and talking to Luis Schmidt, the Italian German SS veteran, over a bottle of Italian wine and a tray of a spicy flat breads slathered with olive oil the cafe' proprietor proudly declaimed came from his own family's orchard.

"I believe this man to be telling the truth," Luis Schmidt said in measured tones to Uwe. "There is the ring of experience to his words," Schmidt's face took on a hooded expression, "and, frankly, Uwe, I am a man to know about such things." A pause, the hooded look, if anything more hidden, " _too many_ of such things." Uwe Schlegel knew not to ask why.

"I should talk to this man," Uwe finally said after Schmidt finished with his description of the Italian Cesare Magnone and his tale of a wartime atrocity. "Will you accompany me as an interpreter?" Schmidt nodded affirmatively. "But first," Uwe added, "I must do some research. Then we will go see him." Again, a nodded affirmation from Luis Schmidt. But that did not end the meeting. They ordered lunch and casually finished their bottle of wine. And why not? They knew all too well that life was short and fickle and one should grab life's little pleasures, such as a glass of wine or a stein of beer, when they could. They finished their leisurely lunch, then went their separate ways. Guido Schmidt to his nearby home in the Italian Tyrol. Uwe Schlegel back to his base in Munich.

Even as he was riding the train back to Munich, mulling over the outlines of the allegations of the cold blooded murder of German and Italian prisoners of war by Americans, Uwe Schlegel's mind was already planning out the steps of investigation. In the beginning, based on his earlier frustrated investigations, he had no great confidence it would turn out to be factual. Too many times allegations of war crimes he investigated had little or no substance. At least none that were discoverable. This time, however, there were old newspaper reports of the murders and mentions of a court martial. Uwe dug deeper and found what he was already beginning to suspect he'd find. The court martial exonerated the murderers, though the actual facts of the murders were largely undisputed.

"Noch einmal"--here we go again, Uwe uttered as he learned the results of the court martial, then mouthing softly in a sardonic voice what was an unofficial Ausgleich mantra. "The victors have two sets of rules. One for the losers. The other for themselves." He was now certain that the Americans had looked the other way and let war criminals go free. In this instance there was a single man responsible. The man who gave the orders to the platoon of Americans who did the killing. It was their platoon leader, a lieutenant. But this was still not enough proof for Uwe. He needed more.

The next step for Uwe was to go to Italy and interview the Lombardi brothers and, through them, find the survivor of the massacre. He took the train, as much for the chance to ride through the spectacular Swiss Alps as for the convenience of the travel. In the train station at Bologna he was joined by Luis Schmidt, the Italian German Waffen SS veteran. Schmidt was more than eager to help. How could he not? Schmidt's own brother, also drafted in the Waffen SS, was summarily executed by Serbian partisans after he was captured, and Schmidt didn't need to be prodded to agree to accompany Uwe as his interpreter. Near Rome they met the Lombardis. The brothers then took them to meet Cesare Magnone. The middle-aged and balding Italian veteran, one of the three survivors of the massacre, was so overwhelmed that someone would actually try to bring some justice to the murders of his friends and fellow soldiers on that Italian hillside that he began to weep. With Cesare Mangone the memories had not faded with the passing of the years.

"After all this time," he said through his tears. "Someone is trying to bring the murderers of my friends and comrades to justice?" "It's hard to believe. You.....you really _are_ going to find the murderers and bring them to justice?" Schmidt translated the Italian into German. Uwe didn't need a translator for the reply.

"Si," he said. Yes.

Uwe's next step was to corroborate Magnone's story. He found the name of the surviving German, Andres Goske, in the German Foreign Office's wartime official protest about the massacre. Efficient German record keeping--some thought, too efficient--made the man not so hard to find. He was still alive and living in Ulm. He was as surprised as Cesare had been over the interest in what he had long ago cynically accepted as the fate of the losers. But, and this is what finally nailed it for Uwe Schlegel, Andres Goske corroborated in considerable detail what Cesare had told him.

"You're going to do _what?_ " The incredulous German veteran said in astonishment, unable to process what Uwe had just told him. "You're investigating the murders on that Italian hillside? To what point?" A cynical look all German veterans knew all too well came onto his face. "You know damn well it'll go nowhere." A bitter, scathing look. "We're the scum of the earth. Germans. No one will care."

"There are those who care," Uwe replied in an earnest voice, his determined expression as hardset as the concrete under their feet.. "And I am one of them." He paused, dropping his voice to a near whisper.

"You still cannot bring justice," Goske said, cynically. "No matter how much you care."

Schlegel's look was so intense that Goske blinked in surprise.

"No justice?" Schlegel said in a low, resonant voice. "Don't be so sure." He leaned close to Andres Goske, the emotive force of his chilling words drilling through the veteran's cold skeptical reserve, driving into that place inside the veteran's being where dwelled the visceral knowledge no man should have and convincing him that Uwe Schlegel was goddamn dead serious. The words rattled out of Uwe's mouth like projectiles from one of the machine pistols the German veteran had used during the war.

" _We have our ways_......." Uwe said. Goske looked closely at the fire in Uwe's eyes. And had not one doubt that Uwe was serious.

Dead serious.

Uwe had one more stop before he turned this case over for prosecution. He took the train again to visit the German Federal Archives in Freiburg. The files of the German War Crimes Bureau, captured at the end of the war, held in secret in the United States for twenty years, then declassified and returned to the Germans in the late 60's, were there. In Freiburg Uwe found further confirmation of the what the former Italian and German soldiers had told him. The German War Crimes Bureau was notified of the incident, investigated it, documented the results and filed a formal protest with the International Red Cross over the murders. A protest, the war already fast coming to its grim conclusion, that went nowhere.

That same week Uwe sat with the court's prosecutor, Fritz Meineke, over a pitcher of dark beer in a dark corner in a dark Rathskeller in München--Munich. Meineke had just sat down after Uwe contacted him and requested a meeting. A thick folder was in Uwe's hands.

"I've been to the Federal Archives again, Fritz," he began. "My last stop in this investigation. This time the rumor was more than rumor. It's fact." He handed the file to Meineke. "Now it's your turn."

That was it. The court had another high priority case on its docket. Like all the others, a war crimes case. The defendant? The American lieutenant platoon leader who ordered the murders. And where and what, exactly, was this court? It was unusual. No. More than that. It was unique. It hovered in that nebulous place where the lines were drawn. Between victor and vanquished. Between legal and extralegal. Between impotence and action. This was no ordinary court in any kind of mainstream. The name and location of this court? Secret. Only a very few knew the name of Ausgleich and even fewer its location. The name of the defendant, who would be tried in absentia?

Sam Jones.

After the secret verdict was announced, followed by the sentence, the Italian Lombardi brothers were contacted and given detailed instructions.

Including round trip airplane tickets to the United States of America.

### Sheriff Dick Stanger

Sheriff Dick Stanger dropped retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Tipton at the arrivals concourse at the Indianapolis airport and headed back towards Brown County. He thought it was better to keep things low key and avoid notice by using his personal vehicle, a six year old Chevy that needed a paint job but that the Sheriff, a handy shade tree mechanic, kept in excellent mechanical condition. Indiana was a condensed and densely populated place, compared to vast stretches of America to the west, and it was only an hour's drive from the bustling modern metropolis of Indianapolis to the quaint historical feel of his hometown of Nashville and the pleasant scenic views of nearby undeveloped Brown County Park. He had a pair of choices for the drive home. Which to choose? Interstate 65? Or Indiana 135? The freeway was longer but faster. Travel time was a tossup. Attitude and frame of mind made the difference. Most motorists would choose the freeway because of the continuity and speed. No speed zones, no towns, no two lane roads on Interstate 65. That wasn't for Sheriff Stanger. At least not today. He liked the feel of driving slower, past fields and through small towns and feeling the pulse of ordinary daily life. The reassurance that life really was the same, really did go on, that nothing had changed--

But the knot in his gut kept saying otherwise.

What an innocuous place, he thought as he drove south, an ordinary Perkins Pancake House almost within spitting distance of the uninspiring Indianapolis airport, for something that was a universe away from being innocuous. Stanger was a close study of human behavior after three terms as a sheriff and he had no problem with Colonel Tipton's credibility. No doubt about that in the Sheriff's mind. Lack of doubt did not translate into lack of thought. The Sheriff felt like his brain was going to implode from the avalanche of thoughts that were bombarding him. Not just thoughts. Also images. God, the images. Images that were all too real because of his own wartime experiences. Horrific extrapolated images. Of Sam Jones ordering the murder of prisoners of war. Of those doomed men begging for mercy and being shot down at Jones' orders. Of Colonel Tipton's tortured expressions. And the most upsetting image of all. Of Sam Jones murdering one of his own men. How could he reconcile that image with those he had of Sam Jones as an affable community spirited local businessman and town leader. How? Damn! Damnit! Goddamnit! It wouldn't compute. Once, then a second time, he had to pull off the highway during his drive back to Brown County and sit in his parked car while he tried to sort things out in his overworked brain.

As he sat in his car at an unpaved pullout on the state highway, slumped back against the head rest, his mind churning with all kinds of thoughts, a Johnson County squad pulled up next to him, driver's side window facing Stanger's. The county officer, long time Johnson County Deputy Sheriff Edgar Liston, rolled down his window. It wouldn't be the first time he'd found a drunk passed out in his car in this dusty pullout. A favorite of the local drinking crowd, Tom's Tavern, was only a couple of hundred yards up the road.

"Too much to drink, pardner," he said, already glumly thinking ahead to the rigid procedures he had to go through with a DUI. He didn't much like busting people for DUI's. In the old days they'd take the keys from the drunks, get someone else to drive their car or even give the drunk a ride home. Everybody knew everyone else then. That was in a vanished small town America that hordes of newcomers had overwhelmed. No more low key police work in small town America. Modern America was an unforgiving America and Deputy Liston had no choice but to go by the book. He didn't like it. But he also didn't like the spike of lethal and near lethal accidents the influx of newcomers brought with them. So he made the DUI busts. There was no choice. The old days were gone. And this looked like a possible DUI, all right. Old car. Needing a paint job. Driver slumped in the car. Tavern just down the street.

"Hey," Deputy Liston said, the volume turned up on his voice. "Did you hear me?"

The slumping body in the car sat up, turned to look at Deputy Liston and rolled down the window. Deputy Liston's endocrine system jump started when he recognized the face in the old Chevy. Christ! Was he going to have to bust Sheriff Stanger for DUI? Which would be the absolute opposite of a win/win situation. Lose/lose, with Liston as much the loser as Stanger.

"I know what you're thinking, Eddie," Stanger said in a tired voice. "I haven't been drinking. Just been a bad day." He leaned out the window and exhaled sharply at Liston so he could tell there was no alcohol on his breath. "A really bad day," Sheriff Stanger said. Deputy Liston let out a long sigh of genuine relief.

"We've all had those, Sheriff," he said, the sigh of relief echoed in his voice. "Anything I can do for you?" Sheriff Stanger slowly shook his head and Liston could see that what he had first thought were bloodshot eyes, as in a drinker, were really the strained eyes of someone who was had been crying. He knew better than to say anything.

"Thanks, Eddie," Stanger said with a disconsolate voice, adding what would make Deputy Liston wonder for a good while after that what could be having such a wrenching effect on the famously unflappable Sheriff Stanger, "there's nothing anybody can do." Then he started up his old Chevy, slipped it into gear and slowly drove off. Deputy Liston sat in his squad and silently watched him go.

"God be with you," he said softly as the Sheriff disappeared around a bend in the road. "You sure look like you need it." And he did.

By the time Stanger made it back to his home just outside Nashville he knew what he would do. Nothing. The murder of Sam Jones would remain a mystery. What good could it possibly do to dredge up the realities of Sam's past when the man was already dead and buried? Why shatter the innocent lives of his wife, kids and grandkids? Sometimes, the Sheriff thought grimly to himself, there's damned good reasons why buried secrets should stay buried.

Though he wasn't much of a drinking man, Stanger poured himself three fingers of Jack Daniels, drank it down and poured himself three more. A half hour later he laid back in his favorite easy chair and fell into a deep sleep. Although he had a turbulent night of dreams, his memory never could quite bring them back. Just glimpses. Ominous mountains. Winding back roads. Broad dark rivers. But he did remember the hangover.

In more ways than one.

### Chapter 9

### Cap Arcona

### 1945-2045

_Der_ Lübecker Bucht-- _Lübeck Bay_

Among the hundreds of ships large and small in Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz' Operation Hannibal--the little known but massive rescue operation that safely ferried close to two million soldiers, wounded and civilians from eastern Germany to the west--were a pair of once handsomely appointed luxury ocean going liners. The Cap Arcona and the Deutschland. With luxurious accommodations reminiscent of the doomed Titanic, the Cap Arcona made the run from Germany to South America dozens of times before the outbreak of WWII. The Deutschland also made numerous cross ocean voyages before the war. Both ships were commandeered by the German Navy after the outbreak of hostilities. Both were used in the prosaic role of floating barracks at Gotenhafen in East Prussia for most of the war. In 1944 the advance of the Russians brought the two shoreline reposing vessels back to active maritime life. Both ships were again commandeered and used to ferry troops and refugees away from what bitter experience had already shown to be the barbaric horrors the arrival of the Russians would mean. Together the two ships saved close to one hundred thousand souls from the savage revenge of the Russians.

A ray of positive hope in an otherwise roiling maelstrom of the brutal barbaric negatives of WWII? At first, yes. But, then, in the end, no. In fact, one behemoth of an apocalytic no. These two ships of salvation were about to do a historical 180 and become ships of doom. Both ships would later be sunk in one of the greatest maritime tragedies, not only of WWII, but in all of history. A maritime disaster that dwarfed the famous Titanic sinking in lives lost and eclipsed it in total tonnage sunk. The violent sinkings of the Cap Arcona, the Deutschland and a smaller ship, the Thielbek, with the concomitant deaths of seven thousand onboard human beings, in the cold shallow waters of the Baltic in Lübeck Bay in May of 1945 was little known beyond those immediately involved. Little known to the wider world not, as in the case of the Wilhelm Gusthof, the General von Steuben and the Goya, because the dead were Germans and therefore afforded little or no public sympathy. Not this time. The vast majority of dead of the Cap Arcona and the Thielbeck? They weren't just Germans. Not this time. They were prisoners. Inmates.

From Nazi concentration camps.

The Cap Arcona and Thielbeck were overloaded with inmates transferred at the end of April 1945 from the nearby Neuengamme concentration camp system and several other camps. A fourth ship, the Athen, a smaller vessel as was the Thielbeck, was used to transfer the prisoners from the docks to the ships. The Cap Arcona and Thielbeck lay inert at anchor, worn out from hard years of service and inadequate maintenance and were no longer of use on the open ocean. Which was why they were chosen to be used as floating prisons. Many of the prisoners were Jews, but there were many others. Political prisoners of numerous nationalities and a great many Russian and Polish prisoners of war. Close to ten thousand of them in all. Nearly three quarters of them would die on May 3rd in Lübeck Bay not far from the docks of the town of Neustadt. Did the bloody minded Nazis intend to sink the ships with the doomed trapped prisoners to 'get rid of the evidence' as they were doing all over German occupied Europe as the Allied armies advanced? A very strong probability and likely what the Nazis and the SS had in mind. The Nazi political boss of Hamburg, Gauleiter Karl Kaufmann, later claimed the prisoners were to be sent to neutral Sweden. Seemingly an outrageous self serving cynical lie, it really wasn't so outlandish. In fact thousands of concentration camp inmates had already been rescued by the Danish government and the Swedish Red Cross and sent to neutral Sweden in an operation that was called the _White Buses_ after the white painted Swedish buses that transported them on land.

Kaufmann undoubtedly knew about that and used it in an effort to avoid responsibility in his war crimes trial. Wherever the truth actually lay, the Nuremberg judges apparently thought Kaufmann wasn't one of the truly evil Nazis. He only spent a handful of years in prison for war crimes and would live on a free man for a quarter century after the end of the war. Others among the Nazis and SS present at the time of the ships' sinkings, who were not so lucky in the war crimes trials, said that the intent, as ordered by Himmler himself, was to sink the ships with the inmates on them. Would they have done it, with the end of the war so close and the British Army only a few miles away? A mute question. They didn't get the chance. The bitch goddess of fate dropped the hammer of perversity and brought a cruel end almost no one could have anticipated.

They were so close to the end. To liberation. So very, very close. The ten thousand. Survivors. Already, of the hell of the camps, of the forced marches to the sea, of the inhumane conditions aboard the ships. Survivors. Ten thousand survivors. Three days earlier the monster Hitler committed suicide, the very next day the German Armed Forces in northwest Germany would surrender and three days after that would come the final unconditional surrender of Germany and the end of WWII in Europe. And, just a few kilometers away, the British Army was already in nearby Lübeck. On the literal very edge of liberation seven thousand of the ten thousand concentration inmates would die a doubly tragic death. The first part of the tragedy was the deaths themselves so close to liberation. The vast majority of the seven thousand died under the guns of attacking aircraft. Whose aircraft? German? Russian? Neither. That was the second part of the tragedy. The killers were the pilots of several squadrons of Typhoon IB fighter bombers.

Aircraft of the British Royal Air Force.

There is an old saying that the fog of war obscures the realities of events. The events of the third day of May in 1945 in Lübeck Bay are no exception. Even relatively objective witnesses can see the same thing and draw entirely different conclusions. And when the witnesses are enemies in a long drawn out bitterly contested war? It should be no surprise there are wildly differing accounts of what transpired. But what led up to is not in dispute. The Athen, which was still a functioning vessel, was used to ferry the prisoners to the Cap Arcona and the Thielbek. The actual state of the Deutschland is unclear, but apparently it was being refurbished as a hospital ship. At any rate, though a nonfunctional vessel like the Cap Arcona and the Tielbek, it did not receive any of the prisoners. Close to five thousand concentration camp inmates were on the Cap Acona, along with six hundred or more Germans--SS, crew and various German Navy units. The Thielbek had around two thousand people on board, mostly concentration camp inmates, the rest their SS guards and ship's crew. The Athen also had close to two thousand people on board, but the exactly nature of what was transpiring at the time of the attack is uncertain. Some sources say that the captains of the Cap Arcona and the Thielbek, already heavily overloaded, refused to accept any more people on board. Those sources also claim that the civilian German captains of these ships at first refused to allow their ships to be used as prisons, but were forced by the SS to acquiesce. Whatever the reason, the Athen remained dockside with its two thousand prisoners when the squadrons of British Typhoon IB fighter bombers swooped in. The Athen was the only ship of the four to survive. And most of the concentration camp inmates that survived that May day in 1945 were onboard the Athen. Lucky for them. Far worse than unlucky for the other prisoners on the Cap Arcona and the Thielbek.

Despite everyone knowing the war would be over in a matter of days, if not hours, the Typhoon squadrons were under orders to attack German shipping in the Baltic. And they did. British Air Force Typhoon IB aircraft from several squadrons attacked the Cap Arcona, the Deutschland and the Thielbek in Lübeck Bay. All three ships sank. The waters of the bay were shallow and the Cap Arcona caught fire and capsized but did not entirely sink below the waves. The fires burned for hours and there is little doubt that many of the four to five thousand concentration camp inmates aboard were burned alive or asphyxiated by the smoke. Others, already emaciated and frail, managed to get into the water but drowned, enervated by hypothermia in the frigid 46 degree water. Miraculously, it was said, though that word seems wildly inappropriate given the horrors of that day, between three and four hundred of the Cap Arcona inmates survived to be liberated by British troops not long after.

The crew of the Deutschland abandoned the ship when the attacks first began and the British sank an empty ship and caused few, if any casualties, on the Deutschland. Not so with the Thielbek. Like the Deutschland, it was shattered in the British air attack, but it was far from empty. It sank almost immediately, taking all but a few dozen of the two thousand people on board the ship to their deaths. Inmates, SS guards, crew. On the Cap Arcona of the four to five thousand concentration camp inmates on board hardly a tenth would survive the attacks and the immediate slaughter afterward.

The frigid water around the sinking ships was filled with people who managed to escape to the water. Almost all of them SS, crew and prisoners from the Cap Arcona. German boats put out into the bay to rescue the survivors. They picked up Germans from the SS and the crew, but not the concentration camp inmates. So the story goes. And it continues on to say that the SS shot the prisoners in the water both from the ships and from machine guns set up on the shore. Inmates who made it to shore, the narrative further says, were killed by the SS on the spot. The fog of war again obscures the truth of this, though it seems likely that at least some of it is true. Though it is hard to fathom why the SS would be shooting people in the water from ships that were sinking or firing from shore when a large proportion of the people in the water were Germans. But there is little doubt that at least some concentration camp inmates who made it to shore where summarily executed, and not by just the SS. What this narrative--coming from the Allied version of events--doesn't say is that the British Air Force Typhoon pilots attacked the swimmers with cannon fire. Which in itself is in almost all instances a war crime.

One of the Typhoon pilots, Allan Wyse, would recount later that "We used our cannon fire at the chaps in the water . . . we shot them up with 20 mm cannons in the water. Horrible thing, but we were told to do it and we did it. That's war."

No one suggests that the British pilots knowingly attacked ships loaded with concentration camp inmates or knowingly attacked swimming inmate survivors. The pilots had no idea that the ships were loaded with concentration camp inmates or that many of the swimmers were inmates who'd escaped the sinking ships. Some accounts state that the British thought the ships were loaded with SS officers trying to escape to occupied Norway. The recent revelations at that time about the SS death camps, as well as reports of the lynchings of captured Allied pilots, reportedly inflamed the British pilots further. There would be no mercy for the SS bastards, either on the ships or in the water.

The problem was, they weren't SS.

And what follows is what really compounds the Cap Arcona tragedy to the level of the absolutely monumental The British were informed at least the day before the May 3rd attacks by the Swedish Red Cross that the ships were carrying concentration camp inmates, not SS officers fleeing to Norway. That information somehow didn't find its way to the pilots. Other British squadrons reportedly spotted the ships in Lübeck Bay but refrained from attacking. The reasons apparently being that the war was so close to ending, the ships below were not under steam, and the severely war depleted maritime fleet could use all the captured ships it could grab. It is also very likely that British intelligence, which had cracked the German codes and been able for some time to read German signal traffic, was aware of the presence of the inmates on the ships. True? Untrue? The British response is in itself eloquent. Eloquent in its silence.

Whatever the actual facts surrounding what was very likely a colossal lethal blunder and possibly history's single greatest friendly fire incident, the British government had an immediate and definitive response. Secrecy. It sealed as Top Secret all wartime military records of the Cap Arcona disaster beginning immediately. In 1945. And how long were the records of the Cap Arcona disaster to remain sealed? Until 2045.

_One hundred years_.

In another of the war's bitterly tragic ironies, a German ship was pressed into temporary service in 1943. For a German film. The subject? The sinking of the Titanic. The ship chosen as the stand in for the Titanic?

The Cap Arcona.

### Chapter 10

### Master Sergeant Caldwell

Deputy Sheriff Wilson Investigates

So, Deputy Sergeant Grant Wilson, thought. Forensics came up with nothing usable. Either in the house or in the cave. So where to go now in the southeastern Arizona bizarre murder of retired MP Master Sergeant George Washington Carver Caldwell? Check Caldwell's phone records, his bank accounts, his credit cards. Interview Caldwell's friends and acquaintances, places he frequented, organizations he belonged to. And also his neighbors. OK. Neighbors first. Maybe someone saw something.

Wilson parked his unmarked county cruiser at the edge of Caldwell's neighborhood. A quiet neighborhood of modest but comfortable and well kept homes. Old enough to have good sized trees and bushes. Almost all of the houses were constructed of concrete blocks--slump blocks--in the shape of adobe bricks, giving the homes a lower cost reasonably close appearance to traditional Southwestern adobe construction. In the first door knocking home of the day an aged Hispanic man answered the door. He was another of the area's retired veterans. In the age group that usually meant the U.S. government had sent them to at least two, possibly three, wars. WWII, Korea and Viet Nam. Hardly unusual in this town, which was full of retired military. The easy going ambiance of the town, with its pleasant climate and spectacular mountain views, was an easy choice for retiring veterans. Plus there were the benefits conferred upon retired military available to them on the nearby military reservation, Fort Huachuca. A commissary, a pharmacy, a hospital, a gym, recreational activities, and more. And usually at discounted rates for retired military. Wilson was a veteran, too, though not retired military. Assignment to Fort Huachuca was what brought him to the town in the first place and the natural beauty and pleasant climate of the area what made him stay. And something else. A something far more rare in America than one would hope. The town was a melting pot of races, of intermarriage, of mixed race kids. Wilson, himself the offspring of a black mother and a white father, liked living in a place where people--the blacks as much as the whites--didn't throw barely concealed disapproving glares at his mixed race self.

The dark skinned Hispanic man, who looked like a black to those who didn't know him but considered himself Hispanic, came to the door. At his side was his light skinned wife, who was a refugee from the massacres of Croatians at the end of WWII. Unlike many places in racially charged America, they didn't think twice about a mixed race cop knocking at their door. Did they have any idea what happened to their neighbor, retired Master Sergeant Caldwell? The Hispanic man, Tomas Bueno, did. And his answer was a very long way far from anything that Wilson might have expected.

"Aliens got him," Bueno said. "That's what happened to Caldwell. The aliens got him." Wilson let fly an obvious skeptical eye roll. The man noticed. "Oh! Not that kind of alien. That's bullshit." He pointed to the south. To Mexico, which was only a few miles away. "That kind of alien. They stole his money, probably ransacked his house for food and weapons, then kidnapped him, took his car and dumped him somewhere where they thought nobody would find him."

"And you know this how?" Deputy Sergeant Wilson said in a forced polite tone.

"It's what they do," the man answered with finality, as though that explained it.

"Thank you for your help," Wilson said diplomatically. Diplomacy a skill a deputy learns early on in his or her career if they want to stay in it for any length of time. "If you hear anything else, please let me know." He handed the man a business card, without pointing out that Caldwell's Ford Bronco was still parked in his open-sided car port, and went to the next house on the block. He knocked. And knocked. And knocked again. The retired guy next door, Tomas Bueno, the Puerto Rican Hispanic who was none too fond of Mexican aliens, yelled from his house next door.

"They're not home. They went to Tucson for the U of A game." Wilson waved thanks and moved on to the next house. He didn't have to wonder whether the occupants there had gone to the U of A game or anywhere else. The lady of the house, Asami Winslow, a slender and lively tiny woman who met her GI husband in Tokyo during the American occupation of Japan after WWII, was out in her yard trimming her oleander bushes. When she saw him she was at first worried. There had been several daylight burglaries in the neighborhood lately. All the locals thought it was illegals coming across the border, though Wilson was pretty sue it was a bunch of high school dropouts that hung out around the town's bowling alley. When she saw the badge on Wilson's belt, he was in plains clothes as usual, she relaxed.

"Hello, officer," she called out cheerily as he approached. "Can I get you a soda or a glass of water? You look thirsty." Wilson was thirsty, all right, for a cold beer, not for a soda or a glass of water. "No thanks," he said politely. "You have heard about Mr. Caldwell's death?" She nodded and signed. "I am investigating it. Is there anything you noticed in the days before he disappeared that you thought unusual?" The answer was more than Wilson expected. Actually, one hell of a lot more.

"Oh, yes. There was that stranger. A tall black man. Late twenties at least. Maybe thirty or so. With his hair dyed blond. He drove up in a van of some kind. George met him on the sidewalk. They shook hands and then went indoors. That was the last time I saw George. I went inside and took my afternoon nap. When I got up, and looked outside, the van was gone."

"Did you notice what kind of van it was?" Wilson said, already pleased with the information she'd already given him and not expecting an aging Japanese American housewife to have clue one about vehicles.

"A Ford. E-Series. Econoline. Light tan, maybe off white. Looked fairly new. Arizona plates." Wilson's mouth might not have actually dropped open in astonishment, but in his mind it sure did. She grinned at him. "I worked for the Ford dealership for nearly twenty years." Then she gave him another solid clue to follow up. "I'm pretty sure it was a rental." At that revelatory moment Wilson came the closest he ever had in his long career of interviewing potential witnesses to spontaneously grabbing Asami Winslow into an enveloping bear hug of deputy sheriff gratitude.

### Greta

1945

Her name was Greta Kiesling She was just fifteen, blond, green eyed, ruddy and whippet lean from the rugged outdoor life and too few calories during the long march west. Her family fled their ancestral home in a mixed rural and suburban area on the outskirts of Königsberg in East Prussia ahead of the advancing Russians. Everyone had heard the tales of murder, rape and looting the vengeful Russian soldiers were visiting on the civilians as they advanced into German territory. Millions of Germans fled ahead of the Russian terror. Greta's family among them.

Like almost all the others, Greta's family arrived in the west with only what little they had been able to carry with them. Despite their penury, they considered themselves among the lucky ones. At first. They arrived in a western Germany already overflowing with refugees with neither the housing to shelter them nor the means to feed them. Nor did the locals welcome them. They spoke a different, at times difficult to understand, dialect. Their traditions were different. Their attitudes were different. Even their clothes were different. With everything already in short supply, food, shelter, clothing, medicine, there was not enough to go around even before the refugees. Many, if not most, of the western Germans did not view the refugees as fellow Germans in dire need. They were a plague to them, unwanted competition for scarce resources. It was not a pleasant time for either the west Germans or the refugees.

The end of the war did not bring stability or security. Starvation stalked the land. The victorious allies were at first vindictive and refused the Germans the basic necessities. Food was scarce. Medicine even scarcer. Living conditions were dank, crowded, unhealthy. The desperate Germans resorted to every conceivable means to somehow scrape up enough food to survive. And that meant all too often that the German women gave their bodies to the randy young Allied soldiers in exchange for the necessities of life. Sex for food. Sex for clothing. Sex for medicines. Sex for just about anything. The gold standard of post-apocalyptic Germany.

Sex.

George Washington Carver Caldwell was not yet twenty-one. He was young, healthy, virile. He was not slow in realizing the new gold standard of a ruined Germany and did not linger in his randy youth to grab the opportunity. It was the dream held dear in black men's hearts for generations. Sex with white women. Sex to show their manhood. Sex to show their equality. Sex to avenge the long emasculating years of white masters hauling off pretty young black slaves to their beds. The tables were turned. Or, rather, the beds were turned. Now the black man was on top.

Of course the white soldiers did exactly the same thing as the black ones and hardly gave it any deep thought at all. The urgings of young loins are not inclined towards moralizing. But food and shelter and medicine were not the only thing in short supply. So were the means of birth control. And German women by the tens of thousands became pregnant. In the west at least somewhat voluntarily as a result of the gold standard of sex. But in the east far more often the pregnancies were the result of rape. Abortion was widespread. Unwanted children even more so, especially those spawned by Russian rapes. In the west the mulatto illegitimate children faced uncertain futures, though it was said that at times some among the black American soldiers were more sympathetic towards the shattered German people than their white fellow soldiers. The blacks had plenty of first hand knowledge about being downtrodden and suppressed. Many of them treated the Germans decently. Many didn't. Caldwell was one of those who didn't. He wasn't mean or brutal. He just flat out didn't give a damn what happened to white people. For that matter, he didn't much care about what happened to any people. Blacks included.

George Washington Carver Caldwell was adamant. He wanted the willowy virginal Greta. And he would pay dearly for her. There were no German men to protect her. Her father and uncles and older brother had all gone off to the war and disappeared in the maelstrom. Two would eventually return, but only after years of forced labor in coal mines. Her grandfather and grandmother had both died from exposure while they fled East Prussia. Only her mother, aunt and two younger sisters remained. Her mother and aunt violently resisted Greta's selling herself to the young black American soldier. Both went to him and volunteered to take her place. Caldwell laughed in their faces. It was Greta. He wanted her. The willowy blond virgin. Greta felt she had no choice. The American soldier Caldwell promised to feed the family, get them warm clothing, medicines and a better place to live than the drafty old Army barrack they shared with forty other refugee families. So Greta gave herself to the American. She became pregnant almost immediately.

George Washington Carver Caldwell hardly noticed. He had his conquest. A young white virgin. That was all he wanted. He soon turned his attention to other available German women and forgot Greta and her family. The promised food never materialized. Nor did the clothing or the medicines or a better place to live. Winter came and Greta's youngest sister came down with a cold which turned into the flu and then that great killer of previous generations that had returned with a vengeance, pneumonia. But the great killer had been laid low by modern medicine. Penicillin. A medicine the Americans had in abundance but nearly impossible for ordinary Germans to obtain. Germans by the thousands died in those first months after the war because they had no access to medical care. One of the many punishments the vengeful Americans visited upon the surviving German population. What in the contemporary America or Britain would be only a curable illness in Germany would often mean death. Greta's younger sister, Maria, was fading closer to oblivion with each passing day without treatment.

By now at the edge of her third trimester the obviously pregnant Greta went to see Caldwell to beg him for the medicine to save her sister. Caldwell demanded she first have sex with him. She had no choice but to comply. Caldwell told her to come back the following day and he would give her the medicine. Greta returned the next day. Caldwell was gone. Rotated back to the United States that very morning. He left no medicines for Greta's sister. Less than two weeks later Greta's youngest sister died. Two months after that, her frame stripped of healthy flesh by slow starvation, Greta gave birth to a frail, premature baby boy. The boy survived. She did not. Greta died the next day. George Washington Carver Caldwell became a permanent legend in Greta's family. They called him Der Schwarzteufel.

The Black Devil.

### Las Vegas

The year 2010

Wilson was an old man now. Retired, with the final rank of captain, from the Cochise County Sheriff's Department. Also retired from a second job as head of security for a southern Arizona construction company that was plagued by thefts until Wilson took over the job. The experiences of more than twenty years as a cop left him unsurprised when the leader of the theft ring turned out to be his predecessor in the head of security job. Wilson was visiting his grandson, Tom, in Las Vegas where Tom was a Las Vegas metropolitan police officer. And, like his grandfather, a military veteran. And not a "milk and cookies tour in Germany" as he joked with his grandfather. Tom was a veteran of the Iraq war. And, he was quick to point out, ".....sure as hell no rear area MF'er. "

Grant and Tom were genetic proof of the old adage that grandfathers and grandsons are natural allies. They'd been best buds since Tom was a toddler. Not that Tom's father, Mike, Grant's son, minded. He was best buds with both of them. But he was in Seattle where he, a good sized chip off the Wilson block who was also an Army veteran, was a hotshot police detective. Grant and Tom, and Mike when he could get free of his overly demanding job, traded cop stories and soldier stories. Invariably over pitchers of ice cold draft beer in a quiet corner of a local cop bar. Grant was talking about his initial investigation long ago in the baffling murder of Master Sergeant George Washington Carver Caldwell.

"So this Japanese-American lady," Grant says, laughing. "Lays on all this technical car stuff even I wasn't all too familiar with. And I was a pretty good shade tree mechanic back in the day before the computer age took a chain saw to the shade tree." He took a long drink from a beer stein. "Anyhow, she gave me a solid lead. A thirtyish tall black guy with died blond hair in a rented Ford Econoline van." He laughed again. "Actually, that was one hell of a solid lead."

"Anyhow, there was nowhere in Cochise County that rented out Ford Econoline vans. That meant I had to go to Tucson. Not that far really. Not much over an hour's drive." He stopped when a young dark-skinned woman came up to their booth, leaned over and whispered something in Tom's ear. Tom grinned.

"OK. See you then." Grant grinned at his grandson.

"I remember those days," he said with genuine nostalgia, adding, "that girl has so many curves she should be wearing speed limit signs." A grin. "Dangerous curves ahead."

"Doesn't take much remembering for me," Tom said through a smirk. "Especially when it hasn't even happened yet. Anyhow, gramps, go on with your story."

"So I called all the places in Tucson that might rent Ford Econoline vans. There were four of them. I grabbed a county ride, headed up to Tucson and starting hitting them one by one. The first two bombed. But I got lucky with number three." Both men's head swiveled as they unconsciously paused to watch--they were after all normal men with normal testosterone levels--another curvaceous body pass their booth. Their heads reswiveled to their genetic face to face and Grant continued.

"It struck me as being kind of on the seedy side when I walked in the door. Not real clean. Disorganized feel to the place. Anyhow, I asked the guy behind the counter a question that in 99.9 percent of instances would be met by stares as blank as the brick wall of your great grandfather's outhouse." Tom grinned as he chewed over the great grandfather outhouse remark, thinking that it was another of Grant's tactical questionable memories. But Grant's mind was nowhere near great grandpa's outhouse. He was once again walking into the sleazy car rental business in an old and rundown part of Tucson. And he remembered the look of recognition on the counter man's face when he asked him the question.

"Have you rented out a Ford Econoline van in the last few weeks to a black guy with dyed blond hair?" Grant said to the guy behind the counter. A counter guy who was twice as black as Grant's mother, who was already a moonless midnight shade of black.

"Did I ever!" The guy said. "Imagine! A black guy dying his hair blond. I mean, man, that is fucking ridiculous. I said to him, blood, what is with this blond shit, where is your black pride." Then the rental clerk got serious. "This guy, he was no American. He had some kind of foreign accent. And he got really angry with me. For a minute there I thought he was going to jump over the counter and have it at me. And, believe me, Deputy, he was a big guy. Then he surprises the shit out of me. 'I am blond,' he says. 'Like my mother.' Then he really lays the surprises of all surprises on me. 'I am no black,' he says, 'not like you. No matter what you think.' Then, with hard eyes like I have never seen, and I grew up rough, he says 'I could _never_ be black like you Americans!' "

"And then what?" Grant asked.

"And then I thought I'd better get rid of this crazy assed motherfucker, and quick. Which I you can bet your cop black ass I fucking A did!"

"You must have a record of the rental," Grant said. "I'd like to see it." The rental counter man got uneasy.

"Well, ah, I'm not sure I can do that. I think keeping records private is company policy." He stalled a little longer, then, "I'd better call the manager." He picked up the phone, punched an interoffice number, and spoke softly into the receiver. "Hey, boss. There's a cop here. I think you better talk to him." He hung up and almost at the same moment he said 'he'll be right here' a door opened behind them and a middle aged white man at least one hundred pounds overweight, and looking to Grant like a heart attack waiting to happen, came lumbering towards them.

"Lemme see your creds," was the first thing he said. Grant, who was wearing the street clothes of a detective, pulled out his badge and police credentials. The fat man looked at them and then snorted. "Hell, you're not even local. Cochise County. You got no authority here. Take a hike."

"My brother is a Tucson cop," Grant said. "I can get a warrant before you take your afternoon nap." Grant leaned towards the fat man. "And maybe also bring along a city inspector to do a safety check on your rental vehicles at the same time." That got the fat man's attention. "This is a murder investigation, bubba, and we don't fuck around with guys like you who get their big fucking egos in the way. How does an obstruction of justice charge sit with you?" That did it. In less than a minute Grant was looking at the rental record of the big blond black guy with the foreign accent.

"Your brother wasn't a Tucson cop," Tom said, an involuntary chuckle sending a dribble of beer out the corner of his mouth. "He never left Long Island. And I'll bet great grandpa didn't have a brick outhouse, either." Grant chuckled, too.

"You learn to improvise," he said, grinning. "Anyhow, the rental record was a dead end. The guy gave a name that turned out to be phony and an address in Chicago that turned out to be a parking lot. The rental car company knew he was using false information. I'm sure of that. Like I said, the place seemed sleazy. So when someone rents a van for cash for a full month and turns it in after less than three weeks without asking for a refund, they aren't asking any questions."

"So," Tom says. "It was a dead end, after all." His grandfather smiles back at him.

"No, as it turned out, it wasn't. They van had been cleaned, rented out again, returned and cleaned again. I didn't think I could convince my boss to get a warrant to haul in the van to the forensics lab, especially on shaky evidence in a different county. So I got verbal permission from the fat man and I did my own search of the van. My first impression of the place was right. These rental company guys were sloppy and didn't do a good job of cleaning it. I found a crumpled up piece of paper stuck under one of the floor mats."

"And?" Tom said, now hooked in his grandfather Grant's story.

"And it was an airport receipt." He stopped to take a pull from his beer stein and not so coincidentally added a touch of suspense to his story. "From Frankfurt. In Germany."

"So this blond headed black guy was a German."

"And," Grant continued, now as wrapped up in his memories as his grandson was in the telling of them, "George Washington Carver Caldwell was stationed in Germany for three years."

"Let me guess," Tom, who was after all a cop like his farther and grandfather, said. "This blond black German was born during the time that Caldwell was in Germany."

"Give the man a Havana Cigar!"

"Havana cigars are contraband. They're illegal."

"You're off duty, Tom," Grant said.

"Where's the cigar?" Tom shot back. There was no cigar.

But they did order another pitcher of beer.

### Greta's Son

### 1946

They named him Hermann, after the legendary German war chief whose warriors defeated an invading Roman army in western Germany in the time of Christ. A victory, some German historians maintained, which kept the Germanic tribes from being Romanized as the Celtic tribes of Gaul had been.

Hermann was a sickly infant. His mother Greta died in childbirth in the family bed in the corner of a drafty old army barrack that was their home for nearly two years after the end of the war. No mother. No mother's milk. Hermann's grandmother, great aunt and aunt, who believed themselves the last survivors of their formerly extensive East Prussian clan, did everything they could to keep the boy alive. The old phrase of beg, borrow or steal was an everyday reality for them. Providence--a providence with a dark side, as was everything in Germany in those days--saved Hermann. A young mother in the barrack lost her infant in a botched childbirth by an inexperienced woman trying to be a midwife. She was so desolate that she was about to take her own life when Hermann's grandmother approached her. Would she use her mother's milk to keep another infant alive? The woman agreed instantly. It was a decision that saved Hermann's life and probably also the young mother who lost her own child.

After two years a miracle happened. Greta's father and uncle, former soldiers in the German Army, the Heer, came home from Russian imprisonment. They, unlike many of their brethren, had survived the hard years as slave laborers in a coal mine in what was only two years earlier the German province of Schlesien--Silesia. Hermann might be the bastard son of a black American who, they all believed, was an evil man, but he was the last of the family's males to carry on the Kiesling family name and was raised as a German. And from Hermann's earliest memories until well into his manhood the story was told and retold and retold again. The story of the black American who had let Greta and her little sister Maria die. He could have saved them, had he done what he promised. But the food, the lodging, the clothing, the medicines, never came. He had lied. He knew all along what he intended to do. Did not that make him a murderer every bit as much as someone who put a gun to a person's head and pulled the trigger? The family, unanimously and vehemently, thought so. Getta's second little sister, Hanna, like Hermann, survived the hard times and also grew to adulthood with the stories of the evil black American who had murdered Greta and the youngest sister, Maria. He killed them. As sure as if he had put a gun to their heads. The American. George Washington Carver Caldwell. Der Schwartzteufel.

The Black Devil.

### Cochise County, Arizona

1975

Wilson Investigates

Deputy Sheriff Grant Wilson was a sergeant in a county sheriff's department. He was well versed in his world and a damn good cop in that world. But a murder that reached all across the United States from Arizona and then to Europe and Germany? That was a giant leap for him and a whole new world he had to tread his way through. Like that maze he cavalierly sallied into in England when he was stationed there for a few weeks years ago. Or that time he went blithely hiking out to see the remains of the old Indian fighting Fort Bowie on the fringes of the Chiricahau Mountains hard by the New Mexico border. It turned out to be farther than he thought. When night slammed shut on him with the abrupt finality of the desert sunset he made three discoveries. The first was that the path was next to impossible to see in the dark. The second was that his flashlight didn't work. The third was to always check his flashlight batteries in the future. Like trying to find his way on that faint desert trail from Fort Bowie, Grant was damn near literally stumbling in the dark with the Caldwell murder. But he'd still give it his best shot. That was what he thought. Sheriff Berwell 'Bud' Egan thought otherwise. Grant had just stepped into Sheriff Egan's office to talk it over with him.

Egan was sitting, looking self satisfied and smug, in his spacious office decorated with mementoes of his career. Degrees and certificates and awards he'd earned were framed on the walls. Photos of him in Viet Nam as a military advisor to the Vietnamese before the tumultuous ill-fated American intervention were on another wall. And the rest of the photos were of him and various politicians. The Sheriff's absolute favorite the photo he got of himself and Ronald Reagan at a regional law enforcement convention when Reagan was testing the waters for a run at California's governorship. Sheriff Berwell 'Bud' Egan was a political animal. He was sheriff because he was plugged into the local money and power crowd. And how was he as a sheriff? In the words of the former sheriff, Tony Antonini, who was a solid law enforcement professional, "Egan would need a Crime Scene for Dummies instruction manual and the accompanying video to know how to work a crime scene. And there would still be a 50-50 chance he'd fuck it up." Which meant that Sheriff Berwell 'Bud' Egan wasn't always a whole lot of help to working cops like Grant.

Sergeant Wilson detailed to Sheriff Egan all the facts of the Caldwell murder. The strange location of his body, the bizarre nature of his death, the black German with blond hair who was the last person known to have been seen with him. The three week van rental, the airport receipt from Frankfurt and the strong possibility, even probability, that the mysterious blond black German and Caldwell had a direct connection to when Caldwell was stationed in Germany at the end of World War II.

"OK," Egan said, knowing more than he cared to divulge from his own experience in Saigon about GI's and local women, "so you're saying that Caldwell knocked up some German broad and this was their kid?" Grant, somewhat surprised at Egan figuring it out so fast, dropped a positive nod at him. "And now," Egan continued, "you're gonna ask for the cash strapped Cochise County Sheriff's Department to pony up the bucks for you to go to Germany?" Before Grant could answer that he had no such idea, the Sheriff continued. "The settling ponds at the treatment plant will freeze solid on the 4th of July before that'll happen, bucko. You can damn well take that to the bank." Sheriff Egan might not amount to much as a sheriff, Grant was thinking, but he had to admit the guy did have a knack for colorful allusions. Probably came in real handy when he schmoozed with his politician buddies. But, back to the point of his visit.

"Sheriff, I hope you know me better than to think I'd pull something like that. What I have in mind is making contact with authorities in Germany to see if we can track this guy down." Sheriff Egan's eyes narrowed and he shot an irritated look at Wilson.

"Do you know anything about this guy, Caldwell," he said with a sarcastic tone. "I been asking around. The guy was an asshole. Full of himself, An arrogant bully when he was an active duty MP. Hardly anyone had a good thing to say about him. And now you want to squander our department's scant resources on a jerk like this?" Wilson sure as hell didn't say it, but damn well was thinking how the department with the scant resources nevertheless was able to come up with the bucks to send Sheriff Egan to plenty of law enforcement conventions. A suspicious percentage of which were in Las Vegas.

"The man was _murdered_ , Sheriff," he said, trying hard not so show his irritation. "In our county. We're cops. Did I miss something, or aren't we supposed to investigate his death?" Egan didn't like the tone of Wilson's voice. But he also knew the man was a hot shit investigator who'd more than once solved crimes that the local big shots were putting a lot of pressure on the department to get solved. The fact was he needed Wilson a lot more than Wilson needed him. Especially since a contact in Arizona's highway patrol, the Department of Public Safety, made a comment that very much sounded as though DPS would like to hire Wilson away from Cochise County.

"OK. OK. So check it out. But keep the costs down. No lengthy phone calls to Germany. No overtime. And keep up with your other cases." Egan was done with Wilson and his face showed it. His mind was back on the speech he was going to give to the county Rotary Club later that week.

"Got it?" He said with finality.

"Got it, Sheriff," Grant said as was already turning to head out the door. "I'll keep you posted."

"I still say the guy was an asshole," Egan muttered as Wilson disappeared around a hallway corner. "Who the fuck cares if the jerk is dead?"

There was at least one person who cared. Deputy Sheriff Sergeant Grant Wilson, and it had absolutely nothing to with Caldwell's character and everything to do with Wilson's principles of professional and personal responsibility. He already had decided he'd go to Germany himself if he came up with a lead solid enough to warrant the trip. He didn't expect the department to pay for it, nor did he think they should pay for it. No way. He'd buy the ticket on his own dime, take a week or two of his many hours of use it or lose it accrued leave time the bosses couldn't deny and grab a flight to Germany solely on his own. If, and this was one hell of a big if,....

There was a solid reason to make the trip.

Deputy Sergeant Wilson interpreted Sheriff Egan's diffident but nevertheless positive go ahead on the Caldwell case to mean he could use official law enforcement channels to made inquiries in Germany. Grant was a U.S. Army military policeman when he was stationed in Germany during his soldier days and had a few ideas about how to pursue it. But it was going to take some research before things congealed enough for him to make the Germany jump. He re-interviewed the Japanese-American neighbor of Caldwell and the black counter man at the seedy rental company in Tucson. He didn't get much. He already knew the suspect was black with blond hair, was tall and muscular and spoke English with a thick accent that very likely was German. He did get two more facts from the counter man at the rental agency--who was still smoldering over a black who took such strident exception to being called black. Where was the pride? He might not have said anything to a white detective, but he opened up with the mixed-race Wilson. This foreign guy was an oreo cookie with blond frosting, he said. And, inadvertently giving Wilson a couple more clues, the irate counter man snapped "Mr. Oreo had devil white man blue eyes and lisped like a little kid." Wilson figured it wasn't worth the trouble to try to explain to the counter man that the suspect might have black skin but he was not an American and, Wilson was pretty certain, thought of himself as a German who happened to have black skin. Black skin, Wilson was also beginning to believe, the man considered an unwanted genetic heritage from a deadbeat father. A father, Wilson was also thinking, that he might have come all the way from Germany to kidnap, shackle in a secret cave and leave there to starve to death.

Las Vegas

2010

"I had a lot to learn. To figure out. I was pretty much flying blind," Grant said to his grandson over their second pitcher of cold draft beer. "Things were so much different then. No DNA. Primitive forensics. No whiz bang crime scene units. A lot of fingerprints not yet digitized into AFIS. The computer age was still in it's infancy. There was no internet or world wide web where we had whole libraries literally at our fingertips. It was old fashioned police work."

"Oh, come on, Gramps, you're not going to go into one of those we were better cops back in the day lectures, are you? I hear it all the time at the union meetings where the retired guys like to drone on about how hard it was and how good they were."

"Hell, no!" Grant said emphatically, knowing that his grandson wasn't personally accusing him of anything. "I would trade the tools of today in a split second for what we had back then. Damn! What we could have done with the DNA technology of today! And, imagine this. No computer keyboards with spell check. We had manual typewriters. Even the electric ones were a big pain if you weren't an accurate typist. No AFIS. No CODIS. No NDIS. I am in no goddamn way nostalgic. We wasted a lot of time on rudimentary stuff that today's technology has for investigative openers. It was a big pain in the ass. Today I could check the databases, go on the internet, find the appropriate offices in Germany, send a message--even getting it translated on line--in only a couple of minutes." He took a long pull from his ersatz German beer stein, had a sudden thought, held it up and stared at it. Then he held the stein over his head and read the country of origin marking. "Shit. Chinese. I have a shelf of the real deal, German steins I brought back from Germany, at home."

"I know, Tom said. "Dad used to tell me how he'd sneak one of them, fill it with a bottle of beer from the refrigerator while both you and mom were away at work, and sit in the back yard and drink it. Then he'd throw the bottle in a neighbor's trash can, wash the stein, put it back, brush his teeth and gargle some of that strong mouthwash you used and smile at you when you came home."

"That explains that shit-eating grin on his face," Grant said. "I always wondered about it."

Tom laughed out loud. So did Grant. Though in fact he had long ago figured it out.

"Dad didn't know I did almost the same thing with his beer stein, only I put bourbon and coke in it instead of beer."

"Did you ever tell him about that?"

"Yeah," Tom said. "A few years ago. And you can guess what he did." Grant waggled his head. He sure did.

"He cracked up."

"Yep," Tom said, chuckling. "Like father like son like grandson. Must be hereditary." Grant only nodded, though he was remembering how he'd sneak into the basement closet where his own father kept his open bottles of booze and grab swallows right out of the bottle. And he had absolutely no doubt that if Tom had his own son the kid wouldn't just be sneaking booze. He'd be snooping through the family medicine cabinet for something that would give him a buzz.

"Progress," he unconsciously said out loud.

"What?" Tom said. Grant waggled his head.

"Nothing. Just the wandering mind of a geezer."

"When I get to be a geezer I sure hope I have a wandering mind like yours."

Which was good for a laugh and another hefty pull on their respective Chinese ersatz German beer steins.

### George Washington Carver Caldwell

1975

It was mid-morning. He'd finished packing his gear for a hiking and camping trip in the mountains. That was when the phone rang. George Washington Carver Caldwell, a retired United States Army military police master sergeant who was among the first black Americans to rise in the post WWII integrated Army and wasn't one bit reticent in announcing that self-congratulatory fact, almost didn't pick up the phone. He didn't have any close friends and the phone rarely rang. Especially since his wife passed away. When the phone rang it was likely to be just another goddamn telemarketer. It wasn't. The phone call was the beginning of an accelerating continuum that would lead to what was easily the greatest surprise of his life. The phone call?

"Hello," a thick accented voice said. "I am your son." Carver's black face went nearly white. He didn't have a son.

Or at least _thought_ he didn't.

The son from nowhere actually was from somewhere. Germany. He had a thick German accent. Caldwell blanched. Germany! He was just a young soldier then and sated his carnal desires with the post war German women who were willing to jump in bed with damn near anybody to survive in those desperate hungry times. The numbers of the American soldiers who availed themselves of those sexual opportunities were legion. And so were the babies that resulted. It was damn sure possible, Caldwell was thinking, that one of them was his.

"Can I come to see you? I am already in your town," the voice on the phone said in a thick German accent. "I am calling from a petrol station near the entrance to your military post." Caldwell had been about to head out on another of his camping trips. He was tempted to tell whoever the hell was on the phone to go away. It was probably a prank one of his disgruntled old Army troops was pulling on him. But. But. What if this guy really was his son? He knew for a historical promiscuous German fact that he sure as hell could be.

"OK," Caldwell said. "Come on over. Got the address? Need directions?"

"I can find it OK," the thick accented German voice said, not mentioning that he had long known the exact location of Carver's home. "I come right over." Ten minutes later a Ford Econoline van pulled into Carver's driveway. The driver was a tall and handsome muscular man, with Caldwell's skin color and kinky hair, the hair however blond and his eyes blue. Color the hair black and the eyes brown Caldwell thought as he watched the man climb out of the Econoline, and he was damn near a dead ringer for Caldwell in his youth. He knew it instantly.

This man _really_ was his son.

The thoughts came at him like the hard pellets of sleet when he was working the gate at Fort Richardson in Alaska during his military police days. A son? A son you have never seen? A grown son you have never seen? What do you say to him? How do you greet him? A hug? A handshake? The dark-skinned German solved Caldwell's dilemma for him. He held out his hand. Caldwell took it, at first hesitantly, then with considerable vigor.

"Come in, come in," he said. "I think we have a whole lot of things to talk about." The dark-skinned German nodded.

"Ja," he said in a German word that had long ago made its way into the American vocabulary. "Much to talk." Asami Winslow **,** the Japanese-born wife of another retired American soldier living across the street from Caldwell, was trimming bushes in her yard and saw the Econoline drive up, the tall man climb out of it, shake hands with her neighbor and then both go into Caldwell's house. That was the last she saw of Caldwell. That was the last anyone saw of Caldwell.

Except for the dark-skinned German who said he was his son.

Caldwell shut the door behind them. There was no one else in the house. Caldwell's wife had died two years earlier, yet another of the legion of cancer deaths, and his two daughters lived in Tucson and were well onto lives of their own. Even Caldwell's last pet, his beloved German Shepherd he named Patton, had to be put down a few months earlier. Caldwell was alone. Which the dark-skinned German already knew.

"This must be schwer...er, ah, difficult for you," the German said. "Aber--oh, you don't know German. But, I say, now that we are in privat (pronounced as in the German) let me give my father the big hug." The German embraced Caldwell. The American, caught off guard, at first was reluctant, but then dropped his reserve.

"OK, what the hell, give your old man a hug." They hugged. One hell of a hug, Caldwell was thinking, a real bear hug. This guy is strong as an ox. And then he felt it. Something stung him, something sharp, where his neck met his right shoulder. He recoiled, pushing the German away.

"What was that? What did you do?" Then he saw the syringe in the German's hands. And a very strange look on his face. Caldwell was already starting to feel woozy.

"What have you done? You....you.....aren't really my son, are you?" The same strange look remained on the German's face.

"In the blood, Sergeant Caldwell of the United States Army, I am the son." He leaned forward and his voice was a hiss. "But in my world I am the enemy." He leaned ever closer.

" _Blood_ enemy."

That was the last thing he remembered. Everything started to fade away and Caldwell slid to the floor.

He woke up in the cave.

### The Cave

George Washington Carver Caldwell groggily regained his consciousness and slowly opened his eyes. His first impression was not a visual one. It was the smell. Dank. With the humid smell of mildew, like in the sticky Virginia summers of his youth. And something else, something acidic. Like urine, but at the same time not like urine. An odor unfamiliar to Caldwell, but instantly recognizable to spelunkers as the distinctive odor of bat guano. Then, moving slightly, he felt something on his leg even before he tried to stand up. Something heavy. He reached down to touch it. Something hard. Metal. Like a handcuff. No. A shackle. His hand crabbed out from the shackle to discover that their was a chain attached to the shackle _. Good God!_ This was like something from the tales his family in Virginia told of the bad old slavery days. Then it hit him. Some goddamn redneck nutcase racist bastard was fucking with him. But, before he could process that thought any further, he remembered. His son. The German. The syringe. And, in a burst of unwelcome clarity, it came to him. He knew. Who the mother of the German was. And remembered what he had done in those early days after the end of World War II. Caldwell understood with the veteran's clear minded gravidity what was happening. George Washington Carver Caldwell, retired from the United States Army, the veteran of three wars, WWII, Korea, Viet Nam, was a prisoner. Of a German. The next thought blitzed into his head and left him dazed. Good God. In a very real way he was not just a prisoner. Not exactly a prisoner of war.

But damned close.

Caldwell's eyes gradually adjusted to the darkness in the cave. He was not alone. A man was sitting a few feet away. Gradually he discerned the outlines, then the details of the man's profile.

"So. You're my son. Was your mother than young German girl? The blond one. As I remember she was pregnant when I rotated back to the United States. I never heard anything from her after that. Was she your mother?"

"Who?" Hermann said.

"That German girl. The blond one."

"You mean Helga?" Hermann said.

"Yes. Yes. That's the one. Helga." Then, thinking he had to find a way to talk himself out of this, he tried to be friendly. "So. How is she? Obviously she raised a fine son."

"I would not know this," Hermann said in a cold voice.

"Wouldn't know? What the hell does that mean?"

"It means my mother's name was _not_ Helga!" At that moment Hermann wanted to grab a rock up from the rubble on the cave's floor and crush the bastard's skull.  
"Miststück! Bastard! Schwarzteufel! You do not even know her name! It was Greta! Greta Kiesling!"

"It was a long time ago," Carver countered, trying to talk his way out of whatever the hell was going on with this crazy German. "The memory fades with time."

"Only those who live have the memory to fade." Hermann's voice was so ominous that Carver was certain he was facing his death at any moment. "She dies giving me birth. I had no mother."

"Oh. I'm sorry," Caldwell said. "I didn't know." That same ominous voice was at him instantly.

"How _would_ you know? You left. Abandoned her. You were not a man of honor. You did not meet any of your promises. No food. No shelter. No medicine. My Aunt Maria dies of Pneumonie because you do not give the penicillin you promised. And mother dies because of the hard hungry days of her, her, ah....I do not know the English word. In German we say die Schwangershaft, the time of carrying the baby. And all this time of the baby carrying my mother grows weak and sick because of a bad place to live, little food, no medicine. Nothing of what you promise ever comes. She dies." Then the voice dropped into a chilling menacing tone and Carver was absolutely certain the German would kill him right then and there. He didn't. Not yet.

"You are murderer, Caldwell," Hermann said. "You murder my mother. You murder my sister. You had a trial in the German courtroom. Guilty! Sentence? Tod! Death!" A short pause. "And me, I bring the sentence to you." This is it, Caldwell thought. He's going to kill me now.

"But the court says to me. You choose. How. How to bring justice to your dead mother and sister." Hermann swung his arm in an arc in the cave they were in. A cave he had found in old records that were buried away in the early 20th Century and forgotten. A cave no living person knew about. Except Hermann. And, now, George Washington Carver Caldwell.

"This is das Lebensende, Caldwell. The end for you. I will not, kann nicht, ever call you father. You are evil. Der Schwarzteufel, that is what we call you. And you will die in this cave. Alone. Slow. Slow, like my aunt dies when you did not give the penicillin to save her life. Slow, like my starving mother fades to a skeleton with your child in her and you do not help."

"But.....but......I didn't know any of this? How could I know?"

"Whether you knew or not is nichts--nothing. You did not care." Hermann suddenly rose to his feet.

"They die because you do not care!"

Hermann stood in silence for what seemed to Caldwell like a god-awful long time. What was this Nazi bastard of his going to do? Bash his head in with a rock from the cave floor? Take a knife to his throat? Or maybe stab him in the stomach and watch as he slowly bled to death. Or maybe he'd take a length of wire or rope and strangle him. Whatever it was, Caldwell's mind wasn't dwelling on the way he would die but on ways he could counter the Nazi bastard's moves and defeat him. He, Caldwell, sure as hell hadn't survived three wars by sheer luck. Some luck, of course, actually plenty of luck, but also by thinking smart and putting thinking smart into action. And he'd saved other men's lives, too. Like that time in Viet Nam when he sensed a VC ambush, based on his accumulated knowledge of their tactics and methods of operation and what the patrol was telling him over the radio, and redirected the company's patrol with an urgent radio message just before they entered the open end of a classic Viet Cong inverted L shaped ambush that would have wasted the fucking clumsy idiots. So he was an asshole who exploited the vulnerable German girl Greta and her family. Not that he wasn't alone in that kind of behavior. Still, didn't all the good he had done in his life counterbalance the bad? At least even things out? Which is what he was going to try to explain to this guy who might be his blood kin but in reality was his blood enemy. Though the bare knuckle truth was that Caldwell never did much care for anyone, except for his wife and kids, and what he did in the Army was far more professional responsibility rather than any kind of compassion or empathy. The fact was he didn't give a rat's ass about Greta or any other German, back then or today, including this blood kin shithead who was bound and determined to kill him. But that didn't stop him from trying to dissuade--meaning bullshit--Hermann from killing him.

"This all happened long ago," Caldwell said, breaking the silence. "I was just a kid. I didn't know better. A lot of us were like that then. Some a lot worse than me. If could go back, I'd do everything different."

"To be young is not the excuse," Hermann shot back in his thick accented but correct, it at times awkward, English. "You can not excuse when you are letting people die, as you with my mother and aunt did. All you care about is your selfish person and you kill my mother and aunt. That can nie--never--be forgotten." He leaned closer to Caldwell.

" _Or forgiven_." Hermann suddenly straightened and Caldwell thought that the death blow was about to come. It didn't. Hermann turned and headed towards the cave entrance. As he began to climb out of the cave Caldwell, confused, yelled after him.

"Where are you going?" Hermann didn't bother to look back as he climbed out of the cave, but Caldwell heard what he said and wondered over it in the long days that followed. Where was Hermann going? His answer but a single word.

"Home."

### Wilson Investigates

### 1975

Wilson made his inquiries to Germany. The odds of getting something were about as likely to connect as a Hail Mary pass by a near sighted quarterback. Seemed impossible. But he tried. Was there any way to trace a tall, muscular German man of about thirty with a speech impediment who had black skin, blond hair and blue eyes who had traveled from Frankfurt to the United States somewhere within a few weeks of the late summer and early autumn? Probably to Tucson, Wilson figuring that the town where he rented the van was also where he landed in the U.S. Maybe directly, maybe on an air shuttle from the much busier airport at Phoenix, which might show up on a ticket bought in Frankfurt. A very long shot. A needle in a goddamn haystack long shot. Then, much to his utter astonishment, he got a response from a German federal policeman who in turned put Wilson in contact with a German investigator. A man named Uwe Schlegel. And, even more to Wilson's astonishment, Schlegel, who spoke good English, told Wilson over the phone that he thought he had actually identified the mysterious blue-eyed, black-skinned, blond-haired German with a speech impediment. However, Schlegel said, puzzling the Cochise County deputy more than a little, since Wilson had no forensic evidence to identify the man Wilson had to come to Germany, specifically to Munich, to question the man and determine whether he was in fact the man he was seeking. The German authorities, Schlegel insisted, would not act without a positive ID from a reliable source. And that would come from Wilson interviewing him, determining if he believed him to be the man, then taking a photo and faxing it to his coworkers in Arizona who would show the photo to Caldwell's neighbor and the guy in the car rental business in Tucson. Why couldn't the Germans take the photo and send it to Cochise County? They could not do it without the German version of a warrant, Schlegal said, and they did not have enough evidence to justify the warrant.

"You must come here," Schlegel insisted. "There is no other way."

It might have been a coincidence, and it might not have been, but Grant Wilson's American airlines jet touched down at Frankfurt just in time for Wilson to take the train to Munich when Munich's Oktoberfest was roaring into oompah full swing. Uwe Schlegel met him at the airport with a friendly handshake and gave Grant an absolutely perfect welcome--from Grant's viewpoint--when he took him straight to a noisy beer garden filled with raucously celebrating semi-blitzed Germans. The terrific welcome didn't last past the second stein of pungent German dark beer when Schlegel quietly informed him they were going to a secret location and Wilson had to be blindfolded.

"What?" Grant said, incredulous. "Blindfold me? What the hell is going on here? Is this some kind of bad joke you're pulling on the gullible American? Why....."

"Do you want to talk to this man, or not?" Schlegel said. "It's up to you. This is a secret location that must remain secret. If you don't want the blindfold, I take you back to the airport and you go back home." That did it. Schlegel had him. He sure as hell hadn't come all this way only to turn back at the eleventh hour. Especially since he was paying for this trip with his own hard-earned money. Sheriff's deputies, even sergeants, notoriously underpaid for their work and the expenses of a round trip ticket to Germany damn near emptied his savings account.

"All right. OK. I don't get what is really going on here, but I'll go with the blindfold." Schlegel motioned at Wilson to follow him to the nearby car park where they'd left the early model BMW 2500 Schlegel was driving. Uwe put the blindfold on Wilson and had him lie down on the BMW's back seat just as another man joined them and the two spoke lowly in German. Grant had picked up a smattering of German when he was stationed in Germany, but nowhere near enough to follow what the two men were saying. A few more words exchanged between the Germans and the BMW was moving, first in the jerky stop and go traffic of the city, then in the smooth accelerated tempo of the autobahn. After perhaps an hour, it was hard for Wilson to judge the time without visual clues, the car was again in stop and go surface street traffic for a few more minutes, then pulled into what was probably a driveway and came to a halt. Schlegel switched off the engine and he and the second man carefully maneuvered the blindfolded Wilson through a door and into a building.

"OK, Herr Wilson," Uwe Schlegel said. "Off with the blindfold now." They took it off and Wilson saw he was in somebody's home. Or, as they said in Europe, a villa. "Do you need to use the bathroom before we proceed?" Uwe said. Grant did. Uwe pointed to the bathroom door and Grant went inside. It was an ordinary bathroom, the window too high up to look out of and, like the corridor outside, there was nothing he could use to try to identify the place later, should this bizarre situation get nasty. As Wilson exited the bathroom Schlegel beckoned at him to follow him to another door. The German took the handle, turned it and opened the door.

"Go in, Herr Wilson," he said. "They are expecting you." Grant Wilson stepped forward and walked into a room where he would have the strangest experience of his life. The room he had just entered? _Christ_ , he was like Dorothy landing in Oz. Five people in black robes sat behind a raised dais. Others sat at tables before the dais. A large flag adorned the back wall. A German flag. This sure as hell was not Oz.

It was a courtroom.

"Welcome, Deputy Wilson," said a distinguished looking robust man who, Wilson figured, had his three score and ten already behind him and was very likely a veteran of World War II. Which, Wilson had figured out a while ago, was what this was all about. Something to do with WWII. The man, who remained unidentified to Wilson, was former German Army General Freiherr von Wittendorf. He added in an unthreatening voice. "We have heard of your investigation."

### Las Vegas

2010

The cop bar's music system played a lilting jazz riff in the background. Coltrane, maybe, Grant thought. He drained his beer stein, then continued his tale to his transfixed grandson.

"I was completely taken aback. A courtroom. With judges in black robes and a few others. I had no goddamn idea just what the fuck was going on," Grant said to his grandson. "Tom," Grant said, dropping his voice to what sounded to Tom like a conspiratorial tone, "I have never told anyone about this before." He stared at his grandson. "No one. Never. But I am getting old and God knows how much longer I'll be around. I came to the conclusion a while ago that I should tell this to someone. And that someone would be either you or your dad or both. Since your dad couldn't get away, it comes down to just you." If Tom Wilson had been feeling the effects of alcohol before, he wasn't anymore. His mind cleared in an instant. He knew he was about to have a unique experience. The way it looked, probably a whopper of a unique experience.

"Thank you for trusting me, gramps. I won't let you down."

"I know," Grant replied in the same oddly conspiratorial tone. Which, Tom now recognized, was not conspiratorial. Maybe a distant cousin to that, but something altogether different. His tone was confidential. As in very, very private.

And then Grant began to spin the story of the strangest day in his entire life.

"A courtroom. These German guys brought me into a courtroom. But a courtroom like none other, Tom. A secret courtroom. An extralegal courtroom." He bent forward and said it in with an expression almost as surprised as when he first stepped foot into that courtroom long ago. "And the court had a single purpose. To try war crimes from World War II." Tom Wilson's eyes flashed. World War II?

"I thought they did that at Nuremberg? And the other trials that followed."

"They did, Tom," Grant answered. "With one difference. One very big difference."

"Which was?"

"The Nuremberg and other trials were for German and other Axis war crimes. But this court was inside out from Nuremberg."

"I'm not following you, Grant. Inside out? What the hell does that mean?"

"It means that it was a German court trying Allied war criminals." Tom's face was flushed. And it wasn't just the booze.

" _Allied_ war criminals. Word War II? Why.....why......." Then Tom Wilson caught himself. Hiroshima. Nagasaki. Firestorm bombings. Tokyo, Hamburg, Dresden. Tom was a veteran of the Iraq War. He'd seen enough to know. There was plenty of bad stuff to go around on all sides. But, still.....

"I don't see how that could work, Grant," Tom said. "What authority would they have? Why would the former Allies put up with it?" Then he caught himself again. Of course! "That's why it was secret," Tom blurted out. "But isn't that just a star chamber. A kangaroo court? Vigilante justice. Gotta be illegal as hell."

"Not the way they explained it to me," Grant replied. "Their first principles were these. The victors make up the lists of war criminals. War criminals on the Allied side went mostly unpunished. No legal mechanism existed to try the Allied war criminals. At least none that the Allies were willing to use. The only alternative to achieve a balanced justice was an extralegal court that conducted its investigatory and courtroom business according to established juridical procedures, but by necessity had to do everything in secret. Outside the regular legal channels.

"That still doesn't make it legal," Tom said.

"That's _exactly_ what I told them, Grant replied. "That's when they took a long recess and I went with Uwe Schlegel and the other man, Witbold something or other, to look over their files of war crimes _against_ the Germans and other Axis peoples." Just then yet another eye popper of a young woman passed their booth and this woman, like the first one, stopped to whisper into Tom Wilson's ear. He laughed.

"OK. It's a date. See you then." As the young woman walked away, lean and graceful, her skin a creamy Mediterranean olive and with a thick mane of chestnut hair, Grant shook his head slowly.

"Christ, Tom," do you ever find time to work?"

"Badge Bunnies," Tom said. "Women who like to hang out in cop bars." He shrugged. "Makes it lots easier not having to explain a cop's world to a hot date. They already know the score." Tom threw a knowing look at his grandfather. "You oughta know all about that. "You married another cop. Grandma."

"Not exactly a cop. A juvenile detention officer," Grant said.

"Same neighborhood," Tom said. "Anyhow, gramps, go on with your kangaroo court story."

"The files were translated into English. Formal looking translations carrying some kind of German government stamp. I figured it was the official mark of authenticity of the translations. After I read the files on the war crimes against the Germans I started to change my mind. Some pretty heavy stuff, Tom. Massacres of prisoners. Torture. Mutilation. Gang rapes of millions--I repeat, _millions_ \--of German women, mostly by the Russians. Death camps. Slave labor camps. Sinking hospital ships. Strafing men in the water. Strafing hospital trains and refugees in horse drawn carts. On and on and on. Almost none of the Allied war criminals ever went on trial and most of those few who did go to trial or court martial were acquitted or given a hand slap. Lemme tell ya, Tom, they have one heck of a pile of incriminating evidence." Grant changed the subject, if only tangentially. "All of this is on file with the German Federal Archives and open to the public."

"I'm figuring this all directly relates to Caldwell's death," Tom said, his cop's brain tuned into the substance of his grandfather's narrative. "Did this secret court try him and sentence him to death?" Grant nodded affirmation.

"And you went along with it, Gramps? Christ, how could you? It's vigilante justice."

"You are missing one not so little factor," Grant replied in a peeved tone of voice.

"Which is?" Was the skeptical reply.

"Caldwell was long dead before I heard anything about this court." Then, diving deeper into his memories, the aging but still mentally acute Grant Wilson continued with the events of the strangest day of his life.

"Thousands of refugee and survivor accounts were on file with the German government. The secret courtroom guys had copies of some of them that were also officially translated into English. That's what really got me to thinking. Most of it had to do with the Russians. Christ, they were as bad or worse than the fucking Nazis. But there were western Allied war crimes, too. The British intentional bombing of cities that killed a half million Germans but didn't do squat to end the war. The firestorms created by the bombing which were intentionally engineered to create the horrific firestorms that killed civilians by the thousands."

"OK. OK. I can see that. But how does this relate to one single American soldier like Caldwell?"

"The secret court--they called the court Ausgleich, which is German for something like equalization or balance--realized there could never be governmental level trials for the Allied war criminals like there had been for the Germans at Nuremberg. So they choose to go after specific individuals who made clear choices to commit war crimes yet were never prosecuted."

"Like Caldwell?"

"Yes. And others they had documentation on. An American colonel who willfully turned over thousands of surrendered Germans to be brutalized and murdered by the Russians. An American P38 pilot who machine gunned a marked hospital train and killed dozens of children, German wounded and a couple of nuns. Another American pilot who witnessed the incident filed a report on it, but it went nowhere. No charges were filed against him. Another American officer, an infantry platoon leader, ordered the execution of captured Italian prisoners of war. That one did go to trial. And, though the facts were undisputed, that the Italians were unarmed, had surrendered, were not even combat troops, yet the American lieutenant still ordered the killings, resulted in a conviction that was almost immediately overturned. The guy had murdered more than thirty Italian soldiers, yet he walked free and went home to a hero's welcome." Tom, who by now was seeing his grandfather's view of things, interrupted.

"And Caldwell? What did he do?" Caldwell. Back to Caldwell. The center piece of Grant Wilson's story and the center piece of his entire law enforcement career. Grant launched into the description of how the judges and investigators of Ausgleich explained everything to him after he returned to the courtroom after the long recess when he read through the war crimes files.

"Deputy Wilson," the chief jurist--whose identity, along with the other Ausgleich judges, still remained unknown to Wilson--former World War II German Army general, Freiherr von Wittendorf, began. "We will detail to you the facts of the Caldwell investigation and trial and you may draw your own conclusions." Von Wittendorf then turned to Uwe Schlegel and Witbold Schrülen to explain how Caldwell's son, whose real name, Hermann Kiesling, they also did not reveal to Wilson, first came to Ausgleich with the story of his mother's death. The other members of Hermann's family, his grandmother, great aunt and sister, who had first hand knowledge of the incident corroborated Hermann's allegations against Caldwell.

The pair of German investigators laid out for Wilson, speaking slowly in good, albeit accented, English so that Wilson was sure to understand what Caldwell had done. How Caldwell had used the utter vulnerability of German women after the war--all the men either dead or in prisoner or war camps--to exploit them for sexual favors in return for what to the American and other soldiers were inconsequential but were in fact critical to the starving Germans.

"You must understand, Herr Wilson," Uwe Schlegal said. "In those days we had nothing. Not enough food. Shabby clothes. No medicine. Ruined buildings without heat or electricity.

"He had to scrounge through the Americans' garbage cans to get enough to eat," Witbold interjected, pointing at Uwe. "That is the way it was then."

"And Witbold nearly starved to death in a Russian slave labor camp," Uwe countered, his finger now doing the pointing. At Witbold.

"That was the world the Germans lived in. And it was all old people, women and children. The men were all gone. Either dead in the war or in prison camps." Judge Erika von der Heide, a woman who recent history had made a strident feminist, broke the silence from the judges' bench.

"In the east the German women were raped by the Russians. In the west they were seduced by the Americans and British with promises of food and shelter and medicine." Her eyes bore into Wilson. He was after all an American. And she knew from their background check on him that he had been in the American Army and been stationed in Germany. Even though Wilson had served in a re-emergent Germany years after the end of the Second World War, this had von der Heide's feminist ire inflamed, So much so that she then lapsed into German and Uwe Schlegel had to translate her words.

"Instead of you Americans giving us the bare necessities of life which everyone could see you had in abundance," Schlegel translated, "you forced our women to prostitute themselves in order for them, and their families, to survive." More than a dozen women in Erika's personal world had either been raped by the Russians or forced to prostitute themselves to the Americans. Her fist came down hard on the judicial table, startling a couple of the other judges, but bringing the briefest of smiles to others. Then Judge Erika von der Heide switched back to English.

"And you call yourselves America's Greatest Generation!" Deputy Sheriff Grant Wilson was thinking this would not be a good time to open his mouth. It stayed shut. But not his ears.

"Still, despite the moral decay of your Greatest Generation soldaten," Uwe picked up after Judge von der Heide settled back into a simmering silence. "They did give what they promised. The German women gave them sex. And they gave them the food, the clothing, the shelter, the medicines." Witbold, whose own sister was gang raped and died as a result, stepped forward and stared hard into Wilson's eyes.

"But not this Caldwell. He made the same promises. Food, shelter, clothing, medicine. He took the sex. And from a 15 year old virgin girl! Is that not rape whether it is consensual or not? But worse, Herr Wilson. Much worse. The others. Americans, British, they took the sex but delivered on their promises. But not this Caldwell. He lied. He did not live up to the promises. He made this girl pregnant. Yet gives the family nothing. Nichts. Absolutely nothing. Even when the girl's little sister was dying of pneumonia, this Caldwell again says he must first have the sex, promising medicine for the girl. Again he did not live up to his promise. The little girl died. And so did her sister, Greta, the mother of the man who came to us with this story. Without enough food or any medical care, living in a drafty hovel where everyone suffers from the vermin, sometimes too cold, sometimes too hot, she was little more than skeleton when the boy was born. She died the next day. And even when the Red Cross sent him a letter notifying this Caldwell of the birth of his son, there was no response from him. Nothing." Witbold, remembering his dead sister, was as fired up as Judge von der Heide had been. "Absolutely nothing!"

Caldwell had in fact ignored it. Though Greta's family could not know it, Caldwell didn't even bother to open the Red Cross letter announcing his son's birth and threw it in the trash. He ignored it. Just as he had ignored everything else. Except for the opportunity to bed a fifteen year old blond German virgin.

"We found Caldwell guilty," von Wittendorf said to Wilson. "And sentenced him to death. We also appointed the son as his executioner and told him he could decide whether or not Caldwell should die, and if so, how." The judge leaned back in his chair.

"You know the rest."

### Las Vegas

2010

"So," Tom said to his grandfather. "You decided to let it be. Like that old Beatles song, _Let it be_."

"Not such a old song to me," Grant said with a passing whiff of nostalgia. "I remember when it was new. Anyhow," Grant continued, "I didn't quite buy into it at first. What really made up my mind was when the court took another break and I went with Uwe and the Witbold guy into the kitchen and sat down over a pot of fresh coffee somebody had just made. These two guys, who were investigators like me, and I knew from my own experience they were the genuine article and not some nutcase neo-Nazis, started to open up." A strange expression settled over Grant's face, one Tom couldn't quite figure out. Not sadness. Not melancholy. Maybe, he thought, it was like what the ancient Greeks called the mask of tragedy, though he really couldn't quite get a mental handle on just what the hell that meant.

"God, Tom, the stories these guy told. What they went through. What the judges in the courtroom went through. Uwe was orphaned in the Dresden firestorm. Witbold's sister was gang raped by the Russians and committed suicide because of it. And the head nut in the court, a former German general in the war, a Prussian, whose entire family was murdered by the Russians. His mother, wife and daughters gang raped to death by the Russians, his father and son executed by them, the bodies thrown into a mass grave like so much garbage, their home stripped of its valuables and burned to the ground." He stared dully at his grandson.

"It happened again and again all over the parts of Germany where the Russians and the other Slavs overran them at the end of the war. And then Uwe and Witbold brought out another thick folder. Sweet Jesus! They were photographs. Photographs of the atrocities. Copies of photos taken by the Germans that were filed in the German archives somewhere. Photos of the atrocities _against_ the Germans. It was like a second holocaust, Tom. And hardly anyone in the west said a word. No fucking wonder these Germans were bitter about the one-sided Allied view of war criminals. And no fucking wonder they took the law into their own hands when the Allies wouldn't do squat."

"So, " Tom said in a subdued tone. "You decided to let it go. The murder of Caldwell. Just let it go."

"It was an execution, by order of the court," Grant answered. "That was the way I saw it. Anyhow, it was a done deal. The guy was already dead."

"We're back to your old Beatles tune, then," Tom said in the same subdued tone. "Let it be."

His grandfather nodded, barely perceptibly, a faint, wan attempt at a smile on his aging face as he mouthed the words. "Yes...speaking words of wisdom, let it be, let it be....." His grandson's mind floated back, unwillingly at first, to that day in Falluja in Iraq when they caught the Islamic terrorist, not an Iraqi at all but an Arab from Yemen, who was positively identified by three witnesses as the man who had beheaded three pro-American Iraqis before the horrified eyes of their wives and children. Sergeant Lorenzo Miles, a dark skinned New York native and a career Army man, had discovered the beheaded men and their terrified families. When they brought the captured Yemeni into the American compound Miles stepped up to him and drove his knife into the man's chest with so much force that it broke several of his ribs. No one reported it. Mike Wilson nodded slowly in recognition, and softly repeated what his grandfather had said. "Yes, Grant. There _are_ times...to...just.....

Let it be...."

### Budweiser

Augustus Busch immigrated to the United States before the American Civil War. Like many German immigrants, he was a brewer. He married a woman named Anheuser, the daughter of another brewer, and the brewing company name Anheuser-Busch was born. Augustus was an adventurous and creative sort who looked for ways to improve his product. After the Civil War he traveled to Germany to snoop out new brewing ideas. In the Bohemian town of Budweis he apparently found what he was looking for. He brought his discovery back to America and thus was born Budweiser Beer. An interesting, intriguing, even somewhat charming tale of an enterprising German immigrant.

And nothing like what happened in the Bohemian town of Budweis at the end of WWII.

Maltreatment, rape, murder  
Reported by: A. R.  (Budweis)

On Ascension Day 1945 the entire German population of Budweis was ordered to report to the labour exchange. When my parents and I approached the office we were seized by a group of Czechs, who for no reason began to knock us about. They also spat at us and maltreated us in other ways, then they drove us with kicks and blows toward the gate of the labour exchange, where the guards got hold of us once more and beat us with the butts of their rifles until we could no longer get back up. While we were being mishandled, other German families arrived, among them women with babies in perambulators. The Czechs tore the babies out of the perambulators and threw them into the brook nearby. The women were pushed into the water after them. Whenever a mother with her child reached the other bank, she was again seized, struck and thrown back into the water. This procedure was repeated to the cheers and yells of the Czechs (the majority of whom were women), until the arrival of other Germans diverted their attention. Mrs. Wallisch, a clerk at the labour exchange, was beaten until she was half dead, after which she was forced with blows from rifle butts to lick up the blood off the ground and from the stairs of the labour exchange. The yard looked like a place of execution. Blood was everywhere, men and women were lying on the ground, beaten half to death and horribly disfigured. The rest of the Germans were then ordered to line up, while the sentries stood by with their rifles trained on them; anyone who dared to lean against anything risked a blow. The monk Josef Seidl of the monastery of Budweis was brutally clubbed and whipped for the sole reason that he was German.

The people were divided into different labour gangs and led away by heavily armed guards, while the mob in front of the labour exchange beat them once more. With the gang of labourers to which I had been assigned I arrived at a hospital, where I was told to clear up after the German soldiers who had been there. The sentries kept after us. We had to do the heaviest work and were insulted by being called "German bastards, pigs, whores" etc. In the ward for infectious diseases we had to rip open the old and dirty palliasses and refill them. Unfortunately, while I was working, I stepped on a rusty nail. My foot began to bleed and was extremely painful. Only when the foot got very swollen was I allowed to tie it up, and then only with a dirty old bandage from the refuse heap. Although I was in great pain I had to go on working. They took me to the guard-room, where one of the sentries lanced my foot with a pocket-knife. This operation was repeated the following day. Only when I was at last absolutely unable to walk, the medical officer granted me two days rest.

Once I was detailed, together with other women, to the poor-house and ordered to clear it up. This building was supposed to be turned into a Russian military hospital. There were already Russian soldiers there and, being the only young girl, I was very much molested. An elderly Russian gave cigarettes to the guard assigned to me, after which I received the order to follow him to his room. The Russian was extremely drunk. I refused to drink anything. Then he threw me on his bed and wanted to rape me. I succeeded in pushing him away and jumped out of the window.

When the hospital was taken over by the Czech army, some badly wounded German soldiers were still lying in one room. The Czech doctor entered the room several times without doing anything for them. He once said to his escorting officer: "Are those German bastards not going to die soon? I need the room." Then he suggested that they should be given a helping hand; consequently a soldier who was suffering from a bullet wound in the abdomen received an injection that afternoon and was buried in the yard the very next day. The nurse who told me this also reported that several SS-men, 18 to 21 years old, had been dragged into the hospital, killed in the yard, and buried there.

An inspector by the name of Emil Hacker, who was drunk most of the time and who used to drive us with a whip, once ordered me to wash the dishes. Sitting there with his arms folded, he gave me all kinds of orders. All of a sudden he disappeared and returned with a thin rope, which he whipped through the air. He ordered me to follow him to the attic. He threatened the others with severe punishment if they should dare to follow us. Instead of leading me to the attic, he led me into a sick-room on the third floor, which he locked from inside. While he took off his uniform, he threatened what he would do to me if I cried out. He suggested that I should come every day to his room, in return for which I would be exempted from heavy work. He would also give me some ration tickets for bread. When I told him that I hated him and that I would rather be beaten, he brutally raped me. From that moment on I was forced to do the heaviest work under his command and was constantly molested by him.

My grandmother, an old woman of 73, was seized in her flat by Czech sentries and dragged to her neighbour, one Mr. Schadt. The latter, who had already been beaten so badly that he was bleeding, was now ordered to beat my grandmother. When he refused to do so, he was struck several more times and was pushed down the stairs. In her desperation my grandmother returned home and severed her arteries with a kitchen knife. Some Russians found her, almost bled to death, bandaged her and ordered that she be taken to a hospital. Lying on a stretcher in the hospital, this old woman was called an old whore and spat upon. She was locked up in a windowless cellar. She received no attendance and her wound was not dressed. My grandmother suffered from excruciating pain. My aunt, who stayed with her, appealed to the doctor for help, but he said laughing, "She's only a German", and left. After many requests my aunt at last succeeded in getting a priest, who administered extreme unction. My grandmother died the next day.

Several German girls were imprisoned in the jail. Each day Russians came to the jail and borrowed women, whom they brought back the next morning.

During the horrible times I spent at the hospital I also saw Czech chaplains, attached to the military unit, who stood over us with a gun in their hands and who yet celebrated communion the next day.

### Colonel Bertram Kretschman

Like millions of other American servicemen at war's end Colonel Bertram Krestchman returned home to a grateful nation. Grateful not only that a war had been won, but also that the American economy was booming, the Great Depression was--Thank God!--over and prosperity beckoning to the veterans and their families. It was the American Century and confidence and national pride blossomed along with the economy. No one looked beneath the surface of Kretschman's WWII bone fides. A surface that was indeed impressive. Colonel in Patton's renowned 3rd Army, multiple Purple Hearts, commander of an armored battalion, liberator of a Mauthausen concentration sub camp, with a chest full of the medals officers loved to give to each other. His war record won him an election victory to the state senate over an opponent who was a former Marine who'd fought in several of the bloody island hopping battles of the South Pacific, including Okinawa, but who didn't have the local Illinois money and power crowd behind him. Still, up to election day the race was too close to call. Then the day before the election a Bloomington newspaper published an article claiming that the former Marine had been court martialed for cowardice. It was soon proved to be blatantly untrue and that the newspaper--it claimed--was duped into thinking it was genuine. Too late. By then the election was over. Krestchman won and when the next election cycle came around ran for the Congress of the United States. The phony newspaper article of two years earlier almost did him in, though no one was able to prove Kretschman was behind it. But the incumbent--who unwisely ran for reelection because he couldn't bring himself to give up the percs of being a congressman--was an aging man with a serious heart condition and barely able to campaign. Kretschman won. Not by much. But he won. He served two terms in the Congress, barely scraping by in the second election against another lackluster opponent, and left at the end of last term for a federal judgeship in the district of southern Illinois.

His departure from Congress wasn't as voluntary as he tried to make it sound. A new face rose to political prominence during Krestchman's second term. Ed McGee. A photogenic populist and a genuine war hero who was one of the lucky few who won a Medal of Honor and survived to wear it. Polls showed that he would handily beat Kretschman in the next election. There were those who strongly suspected insider collusion in Congressman Krestchman landing a federal judgeship, but no one was interested enough to try to prove it. Whatever the truth was in the opaque political shadows of Washington D.C., Krestchman got an appointment to the federal bench a few months before his Congressional term expired and announced he would not run for reelection. Outside of his office staff, hardly anyone In Washington D.C. noticed he was gone. "Ambition," one of the staffers wryly noting, "is not the same thing as ability."

It turned out that Bertram Krestschman was not a bad judge. But he wasn't a good judge, either. Mediocre. Lukewarm. Some attorneys liked to try cases before him because he was not a stickler for fine points. Others had the opposite opinion because the fine points were often the determining factor in the often arcane and convoluted world of the legal processes. Bertram Kretschman didn't give the subject much thought one way or the other. He had a lifetime sinecure as a federal judge, didn't have to run for reelection every two years, and had law clerks to analyze cases and hand their findings to him so that he did have a reasonable grasp of the cases before him and the relevant points of law. As the years passed Judge Kretschman presided over several dozen trials and pronounced a like number of verdicts and sentencings.

There was another courtroom that also had Bertram Krestchman at its center. Half a world away. A secret court, its physical location known only to a very few, its existence known to more than a few and suspected in whispered conversations by many others. A court that dealt only in war crimes that could not or would not be otherwise prosecuted. Ausgleich. This court had on its docket an upcoming trail of an American. Who, as almost all of the defendants before this court, would have to by necessity be tried in absentia. Colonel Bernard Kretschman was charged with war crimes for his actions on the Elbe River that day in May of 1945. At first it appeared that he was going to be tried in absentia. But then fate, ever fickle, ever mischievous, ever the bitch goddess, intervened.

A gossip column in a German tabloid with contacts in the travel industry devoted a few lines to mentioning that a United States federal judge and former congressman was vacationing in Germany, adding in the political correctness of the Germany of that day that the judge was a former officer in Patton's Third Army and had been among the liberators of Mauthausen. The judge's name was Kretschman. Bernard Kretschman. As soon as that curious information devolved to some acutely interested people, further inquiries were made that had nothing to with the liberation of Mauthausen but everything to do with an incident on the river Elbe. A special welcome was hurriedly arranged for the vacationing U.S. federal judge.

A very special welcome indeed.

Federal Judge Bernard Kretschman, formerly Congressman Bernard Krestchman, formerly State Senator Bernard Kretschman and formerly Colonel Bernard Kretschman, took an extended vacation, booking a European tour that included the option of a cruise on the Rhine. The memories of the war and especially of the Mauthausen subcamp had not completely left him and he was unenthusiastic about returning to Germany. But everyone told him how much Germany had changed, that it was now a free, democratic country and was the antithesis of the evil Nazi Germany of before. He remained unconvinced. Not so his wife, Hazel She was adamant. Hazel Kretschman knew what she wanted. And that was to see the fabled Rhine castles and villages in what was called the Rhine Gorge. So, despite his dubiety, he agreed to go on the cruise. They were now in the second day of the cruise, the Netherlands behind them and in German territory. Despite himself, Kretschman had to admit it was goddamned scenic. Even if was Germany. They were watching the lingering midsummer sunset from the cruise ship's railing.

"I'm going to go in," Hazel said, twisting to look at her husband. Her husband, the Judge. She was proud of him, even if he was full of himself and not exactly a luminous legal scholar. They'd come a long way together. From poor Midwestern farm kids to Mr. and Mrs. Judge Bernard Kretschman on an expensive Rhine cruise. She was well aware that her husband had a very flexible set of ethics and did some questionable things in his life. Like the phony newspaper article that got him elected the first time. Not that she was an innocent bystander. She'd written the article herself under a pseudonym. And that was a long way from being her only involvement in Bernard's murky, mostly political, machinations. They had decided even before they were took the trip down the marital aisle that the road to the top was likely to be messy. And it had been. But they'd made it. Here they were. Cruising the Rhine on a pricey German cruise ship. They had every right to be smug. Success had its price. But also its rewards.

Let the losers worry about ethics.

"It's getting dark and I'm chilly." She stepped away from the cruise ship's railing. "You coming?" Bernard waggled his head negatively. His mind was wandering the past. Had been since they set foot on the cruise ship in the Netherlands two days earlier. Hazel knew he was revisiting his wartime memories, patted him on the shoulder and turned to head towards their stateroom.

"Don't be too late," she said, nudging him and smiling. "Your Honor."

"I won't be late," he smiled back at her, then suddenly reached over and patted her on the rump. "Be ready for some hot action, baby." That set Hazel to chuckling so hard she thought she was going to lose her balance. Hot action? With Bernard? Not likely. Not for a long time. She stopped laughing. _Hey_. That wasn't funny. It was a long time. A really, really _long_ time. And even in his best days Bernard was nobody's idea of a hot lover. Which was why Hazel had a string of discrete affairs over the years. After all, a woman had her needs....

Hazel went to bed, read for awhile and dozed off during a boring stretch of narrative that couldn't keep her interest. She woke two hours later and looked around her. The lights were still on. No Bernard. She climbed out of bed and went over to look in the stateroom's bathroom. No Bernard. Was he still out at the ship's railing mulling over the distant past? Probably. Silly man. The past was just that. Past. Forget it, Bertie, for Chrissake _. Forget_ it. She wasn't worried about him. Not yet. But she still didn't linger while slipping into her clothes, putting on a jacket against the evening chill, and heading out to where they were chatting quietly by the railing earlier that evening. Still no Bernard. She went to the ship's lounge to see it he was grabbing a nightcap, Bernard often inclined towards grabbing a glass of good Scotch before bed. The lounge was dark. No Bernard. That was it. Now she _wa_ s worried. One too many no Bernards. That set off the alarm bells in Hazel's mind. And they were ringing so loudly everyone within earshot came running.

"Oh, my God!" She shrieked. "He's fallen overboard." She ran in panic, yelling, screaming, crying, which soon brought the ship's duty officer loping towards her.

"My husband," she yelled in her panic. "I think he's fallen overboard!"

The ship's crew instantly went on the alert and began to search the ship while the captain, alerted to the emergency, turned the ship around and retraced their course in case Bernard was in the water somewhere behind them. Still no Bernard. Not on the ship. Not in the water. Later searches of that stretch of the Rhine didn't turn up a body. He was presumed drowned. Hazel returned home in the United States, wondering if Bernard had fallen overboard or if some of those gloomy memories he didn't talk about had triggered off a dark funk that ended with him jumping overboard intentionally. Either way, he was gone. Her first item of business when she got back home was to check Bernard's life insurance policies and pensions. When she took out her calculator and added it up she couldn't help flashing a small smile. A smile at least of relief. Maybe more. His generous Congressional pension devolved to her on his death. Judge Bernard Kretschman might be gone.

But his money sure wasn't.

### Chapter 11

### Rheinwiesenlager

From the first months of 1945 and lasting through September the huge numbers of German prisoners of war that fell into the hands of the Americans were put into what were called PWTE--Prisoners of War Temporary Enclosures. What that meant was that these hundreds of thousands of German prisoners were penned up in open fields surrounded by barbed wire in a series of camps near the Rhine under the most primitive of conditions. The Germans were stripped of their equipment so that they had nothing to protect them from the elements. They lived in a sea of mud, deviled by rain, even flurries of snow, at first without any food, medical care, shelter, water or sanitary conditions. And even when the Americans did bring in supplies they were a fraction of what was needed. For men already weakened by the tribulations of trying to escape the Russians, many of them wounded, the Rheinwisenlager camps became their graves. No one is sure how many of these German prisoners of war died in these camps in the first weeks after the ending of the war, but studied estimates range from 10,000 to as high as 40,000. Thousands of men dead. Partly because of the huge logistical problems in dealing with such large numbers of prisoners. But also partly because the Americans intentionally withheld the necessities of life. Orders were issued that any Germans trying to give food to the prisoners could be shot. General Eisenhower had earlier arranged to have the status of the POW's captured at war's end changed from POW--prisoners of war--to DEF--Disarmed Enemy Forces. Which meant that the Geneva Convention pertaining to prisoners of war did not apply to them. The Americans were not bound to provide for them according to the Geneva Convention and could therefore deprive the German prisoners of adequate provisions without breaking international law. The Red Cross had no right to access and was kept out of the camps until the very end when they were already closing. This also meant that all of these reclassified prisoners of war could be used a slave labor. And they were. In a dozen different countries. Some of them didn't return to Germany for nearly ten years after the war ended. The Americans promised to not hold onto the German prisoners of war for long. And they didn't. But hundreds of thousands of their prisoners were not set free at all but instead transferred to other Allied nations where they often faced a grim future as slave laborers. Many of the emaciated prisoners from the Rheinwiesenlager were transferred to France. The French were far worse that the Americans and often intentionally starved them, resulting in nearly 3 percent of German prisoners of war in French custody dying under the frequently brutal starvation regime of the vengeful French.

And this was just in the west. In the east the fate of the German prisoners of war, and of the hundreds of thousands of German civilians kidnapped as slave labor, was so much worse that it beggared any kind of comparison.

Pankratz, mass graves, mutilations _  
_Reported by: Sebastian Herr  Report of October 14, 1946

_I am an ethnic German from Romania and worked as tailor in the SS Newscasting School in Leitmeritz. In May of last year I wanted to return to Romania, but I was arrested in Prague and incarcerated in Pankratz prison. There, on May 22 last year, I and other prisoners had to dig up the bodies of SS men who had died during the Revolution and had been buried in mass graves. In the process I saw from the dug-up corpses that their ears and noses had be_ _en cut off, their eyes were gouged out and their hands had been scalded. There were 60 of us who had to do this exhumation work, and while working we were beaten so dreadfully that many of us lost consciousness. When we washed up after our work excavating the bodies, we were shoved head-first into the dirty wash water. I have only just been released from Pankratz._

### The Villa

Judge Kretschman's eyes opened slowly. Jesus! A splitting headache. What the fuck had happened? All he could remember was suddenly not being able to breathe and then blackness. Was it some kind of seizure and he'd passed out? God, had he had a heart attack or a stroke? Paralysis? He tried moving his fingers and toes. They seemed OK. But...where was he now? A dark room. He couldn't see much. On a bed or maybe a couch. An unfamiliar room. Not his stateroom. Not anywhere he remembered on the cruise ship.

"Hazel," he called out. "Are you there?" No answer. Then, with a touch of alarm. "Is anyone there?" No answer. Then, with increasing alarm. "Hey. Anyone! Where am I?" Still no answer, though he did hear voices somewhere nearby. He tried to get up and was yanked back down. What the hell? What was this? One of his legs was tied to the bed. Tied to the bed? What in the fuck was going on here? Had he been kidnapped? No one could treat a sitting US federal judge and former congressman like this! It would be a first rate international incident. He yelled. "Goddamnit, do you know _who_ I am? Release me immediately or I'll have you up before a court on kidnapping and assault charges before you can say Heil Hitler!" A door opened and in came, without turning on a light, a tall man. Not old, judging by his easy movements. Not young, judging by the confidence of his gait. The tall man closed the door behind him. He came over and sat down on the bed next to Judge Kretschman. Kretschman cringed and pulled away from him thinking he was going to be attacked.

"Don't....don't....."

"No need to worry about me, Colonel Krestchman," Tom Smith said in perfect English. He then completely astonished Judge Kretschman with his next words and catapulted the Judge into a whole different reality that was to become the axial event of his entire life. Tom Smith leaned closer to the Judge and spoke softly with the same mature balance in his voice as in his movements.

"I am your defense attorney."

Tom Smith stood up, went over to the door and switched on the light. Judge Krestchman winced and blinked, his eyes adjusting to the sudden light. As his vision slowly recalibrated he realized where he was. Christ! He was in somebody's bedroom. And his leg wasn't tied to the bed. It was handcuffed. Tom Smith was already at his side, kneeling, unlocking the handcuff.

"Why don't you get up and move around a little," he said. "Get yourself adjusted."

"Adjusted?" Kretschman said, incredulous. "Adjusted to what? And what is this crap about a defense attorney?"

"It's not crap, Colonel," Tom Smith answered. "Not even the slightest bit. He leaned forward and looked directly into Kretschman's eyes. "You are under indictment and about to stand trial." Believing himself to no longer be in any immediate physical danger, Kretschman started to regain his poise and return to his usual self. Self important and arrogant and, when riled up, profane. "Stand trial? Who the fuck are you and what the hell do you think you are doing?" He paused to reach over and jab a finger into Tom Smith's chest.

"I am a sitting judge on the United States federal bench and a former congressman of the United States Congress! There's no way you can get away with this bullshit!" Tom Smith remained calm. Kretschman looked at Smith. The man he saw with his jaded eyes was an unknown quantity, but nevertheless struck Kretshman as being a dangerous threat. A far cry from the real Tom Smith. Still lean and vigorous, tall and handsome, Smith was a respected humane presence in the courtrooms of Munich. And, also, of Ausgleich. He had learned to maintain his composure. Now was no different, despite the red-faced hostility of the pudgy Kretschman. After all, what choice was there? He was the defense attorney, not the prosecutor. Though at times he wished he was the prosecutor. This was starting to look like one of those times.

"It won't do you any good to rail on, Colonel," Smith said, trying to remain patient. "We need to concentrate on your defense. That's why I'm here." Kretschman stared dumbly at Smith. Was this serious? Or was this guy some kind of nutcase? Or maybe this was really a kidnapping for ransom. Yes. That was probably it. Ransom.

"I can pay you," he said. "How much?" Tom Smith was unfazed.

"It is not a matter of money, Colonel, no matter how much you have." Then it dawned on Judge Kretschman. _Colonel?_ Why does he keep calling me colonel?

"What's with this colonel crap, anyhow. I haven't been a colonel in years."

"But you were at the time of your alleged crimes, Colonel." Kretschman was silent for a long moment, then spoke in a low, stunned voice.

"This is about the war?" Tom Smith nodded, as Judge Kretschman's legal mind kicked into gear, after first mentally cursing his wife for talking him into going on that goddamned Rhine cruise. "Who is charging me, what authority do you have and what am I charged with." Tom Smith stood up, walked to the door and cracked it open.

"It's time," he said to someone on the other side. A moment later Fritz Meineke walked into the room. Fritz was no longer the fair haired young Turk tearing up the courtroom in his younger years. He was well into middle age, almost bald and had the sad eyes of the survivor. Meineke spoke in a British accented English, one of his quartet of languages. German, French, English and Swedish.

"I am Fritz Meineke, the prosecuting attorney, Colonel. And to answer the question you put to your defense attorney, Herr Schmidt, we call ourselves Ausgleich. Our purpose is to redress the imbalance in accountability for war crimes during the Second World War. As you well know, the victors make the rules. This is about the losers. We are not about vengeance. We are not about injustice. Quite the contrary. We are about justice. And balance. We consider ourselves failures if an innocent man is wrongly convicted." Kretschman stamped on the floor in anger.

"This is a fucking kangaroo court," Kretschman spit out. "You can't do this! I demand to be taken to the American embassy!" Tom Smith slowly shook his head. Trying men in absentia was nothing like this. Kretschman was the first American to be physically present in Ausgleich courtroom, which brought some ambivalence into the courtroom demeanor of German-American Tom Smith AKA Thomas Schmidt.

"This is a secret courtroom, Colonel," Tom Smith said. "And it will remain secret. If you are acquitted you will be drugged, taken somewhere else and released. No one will know."

"And if I am not acquitted!" Spit out an outraged Kretschman, still hanging on to denial about what he faced. "Then what?" Fritz Meineke's bushy eyebrows seemed to droop nearly to the top of his eye sockets, his face an impassive mask. But there was no masking the ominous tone of his voice.

"We will deal with that when the time comes."

"This is all bullshit," Kretschman snarled. "I'm leaving." He stomped towards the door, jerked it open and came face to face with a tough looking man who blocked the door. "Out of my way," Kretshman snapped, still holding on to his imperious manner, though a good part of it now was pure bluff. "I'm leaving." The man remained where he was. Kretschman tried to push him aside. He didn't move. Behind Kretschman was Tom Smith's calm voice.

"Colonel, it's no use. You have to accept this. There is no other choice. We must start preparing the defense." Kretschman whirled and glared at Smith.

"Defense? What the fuck for?"

"War crimes." Said both Tom Smith and Fritz Meineke in near unison. That did it. Kretschman's bluster vanished like the fog over the Rhine just--was it still the same day?--this morning. The color washed out of his face. War crimes? War crimes! Him? How? Why? No words came out of his mouth. Only a series of gasps.

For once in his life Colonel Kretschman was so shaken he was unable to utter a single word.

Smith and Meineke left Kretschman in his room, both still speaking in the English they were using with Kretschman. "Give him a little time to digest this," Smith said to Meineke. "Then read him the charges."

"I don't envy you this one, Tom," Meineke replied without a hint of sarcasm. "He's going to be an Arschloch--asshole--to deal with." Smith nodded a gloomy agreement.

"I know. I know," he said in a voice heavy with past courtroom experiences. Then, reverting to German.

"Unbedingt." Which, translated unliterally but directly to the point.

"That's for damn sure!"

Kretschman finally calmed down enough to take a more realistic approach to his predicament. Not fully, though. He still had one ace up his defiant sleeve. Hazel would have the police looking for him at this very moment.

"They're going to find us, you know," he said to Tom Smith after his lawyer had returned to the bedroom where Kretschman was being held. Smith looked at him curiously.

"What are you talking about, Colonel?" There it was again. Colonel. It was starting to grate on his nerves.

"The police. My wife will have reported me missing. They'll be looking for me right now. And," he reached over to jab a finger in Smith's chest again but Smith caught the hand and gave him a warning look, "since I am a sitting U.S federal judge and a former congressman, they'll be tearing your fucking country apart looking for me." Smith said nothing. "Why don't you let me go now, before it's too late? Just blindfold me, or drug me, and drop me somewhere. No one will ever know who you are."

"Colonel," Tom Smith said. "You are deluding yourself. They are convinced you fell overboard and are now searching the river for your body. One of the crew reported seeing you fall. That is the only search that will take place." Unsaid was the very pertinent fact that the captain of the cruise ship, Werner Dietl, was the younger brother of one of the SS troopers forced across the Elbe by Kretschman to be executed by the Russians in May of 1945. Surprise and shock grabbed the Colonel's face as Smith directed his attention to a legal pad he'd placed on the small table in what was in less dramatic times a guest bedroom in General von Wittendorf's Bavarian villa. "Let's get on with it, Colonel," Smith said. "We need to prepare your defense."

"You sound like an American," Kretschman said, suspicious. Though he had to admit the guy looked like a recruiting poster for the SS back in the Nazi days. Tall, blond, blue eyed, handsome, athletically proportioned. But his expression was far closer to benign than it was to arrogant or aggressive.

"Yes and no, Colonel," Tom answered. German-American. American-German. However you want to put it. I have citizenship in both countries."

"Were you in the war?"

"Yes."

"Which side."

"I was a lieutenant, then a captain, in the Wehrmacht. Specifically, the Heer. The German Army."

"Then you are a traitor!" Kretschman snapped. "Fucking traitor. And you are supposed to be defending _me_?"

"There are as many shades of gray as there are human beings, Colonel," Tom replied, not quite as patiently as before. "More to the point, the person on trial here is not me." A very pointed look at Kretschman. _"It's you."_

A few more questions and Kretschman, who after all was a lawyer and a judge, had a better idea of who was defending him. And, more important, why.

"So you can't go home again?" Kretschman said after Smith explained to him how he had been trapped in Germany by the outbreak of the war.

"Not unless there's some kind of amnesty," Tom said. "And that's not looking very likely." Anyhow, it was all irrelevant now. Like the Americans say, water under the bridge. Smith had long past accepted the hand fate dealt him and did the best he could with it. His mother died in a car accident during the war and a letter sent by his uncle in Germany after the war ended to his relatives in America told them that Tom was killed in a bombing attack in the last days of the war. Though his numerous German relatives knew the truth, he thought it best to shed the identity of his dead cousin. He took the identity of another man killed in the war, an anonymous soul from the doomed Banat who had no living relatives--the man's entire home village was massacred by Serbian Communist partisans in yet another of the endless vicious reprisals of the war--then went to a university in West Germany and got a German law degree, married, opened a law practice in Munich and had a pair of lively children. As the defense counsel for Ausgleich he used his former name, Tom Smith/Thomas Schmidt, not the one of his new identity. And he continued as the defense council with Ausgleich for a very personal reason. If he could be trapped into a world not of his choosing, why not others? They couldn't all be war criminals. And, in fact, over the years he had successfully defended--some in pre-trial disclosures and investigations, making a trial unnecessary--a half dozen men and one woman who were either cases of mistaken identity or accused of charges that were found to be spurious enough to cast serious doubt. One of them he still believed was probably guilty. But there was no proof. And wasn't Ausgleich a court of justice and not vengeance?

Kretschman's mind was rummaging through his memories for a wartime incident that could be considered a war crime. Then he had it. Yes. That was it. That fucking Catholic priest who wrote a report on the half dozen SS troopers Kretschman's men had executed. A report that Kretschman never forwarded on up the chain of command. Somehow these nutcases got hold of that report and were going to charge him with war crimes. What bullshit! He wasn't even there when the SS assholes were shot. And he sure as hell hadn't ordered it. There was no way they could prove he did anything more than fail to report the murders of the prisoners. Yes, that was it, Kretshman thought. That's what this is about. He was wrong.

And he was about to find out how very wrong he was.

Fritz Meineke came back in the room, ready to begin the formal proceedings. "These are the charges against you," he said. "That, as the commanding officer of the 361st Armored Battalion of the United States Third Army, and after the surrender of German troops at the river Elbe on May 5th, 1945, you did willingly force more than five thousand surrendered German troops to recross the river into the hands of the Soviets. And you did so after being clearly informed that you were sending many of these men to their deaths and women to be raped and murdered. You however persisted and forced them back across the Elbe River. Subsequent to that over two hundred German SS and Panzer troopers were executed immediately and over three dozen German women auxiliaries dragged off by Russian troops and gang raped, killing at least four of them outright and causing one more to commit suicide and most of the rest to die in Soviet concentration camps. You are further accused of causing the deaths of approximately 2000 of the surrendered German soldiers in the Russian death camps the Soviets put them in by forcing the Germans into the Russians' hands." Colonel Kretschman was momentarily stunned. So that is what this is about! The Germans at the river. He snorted in disdain.

"All this big talk about justice and balance. It's all bullshit. You're just after vengeance. What happened at the river was just one more incident among thousands. The whole goddamn world had gone nuts and I wasn't any worse that thousands of others. It was war, Fritzie! As simple as that. In war people die. I'm no more guilty than half of the whole fucking American Army." A pause while a snide expression slipped onto his face. "And a hell of a lot more than half with your goddamn butchering Nazi bastards." The anti-Nazi Meineke, who lost a half dozen German relatives in the war besides his brother, a brother who was murdered in cold blood by Americans, and saw most of the rest made homeless, couldn't resist.

"You have already put the goddamn butchering Nazi bastards on trial." The irony was plain in his voice and especially on his face.

"Now it's _you_ r turn

Kretschman was in his third day of captivity. He had been in the villa's kitchen twice, allowed to walk in the enclosed garden outside several times, even caught a glimpse into what looked like someone's den and study as he walked past. It was a villa. Not luxurious or ostentatious. But not modest, either. Comfortable. Lived in. Most of his time was spent in the bedroom. It was a pleasant enough room, on the second floor. The first thing he did when he was alone was to look for a way to escape. He went to the pair of windows that looked out onto a dense screen of spruce and pine trees. Evergreens taller than the house. The windows were barred. He went to the bathroom. The window there was little more than a vertical slit and impossible to get through. Though Kretschman did not know it, the bedroom was furnished in a comfortable, pre-war style. Conservative, substantial, tasteful, traditional, typical of the pre-war German aristocracy, with bed, dressers, lamps and tables that were common among them before the war but not so common after it because so much had been destroyed.

"Who does this villa belong to?" He asked Smith, thinking it might give him some information he might be able to use. He had numerous contacts in the American government who, in turn, had contacts in the German government. And this villa, Kretschman was thinking, must belong to someone of influence in Germany. Smith was ahead of him.

"It does not matter, Colonel," Smith replied. "Concentrate on your defense. There is no escaping here no matter what you are thinking." Smith held his pencil ready, hovering over a legal pad. "Now tell me exactly why you believe you are not a war criminal." He tapped on the legal pad with the pencil. "And why you made the decision to turn your prisoners over to the Russians." Kretschman stared at Smith for a long moment. Then, realizing that stonewalling Smith wouldn't do him any damn good, set in to trying to justify his actions that May day long ago on the River Elbe. That was when it began. The nausea. And the fear creeping up his spine that grew stronger as the day grew longer and threw a cloak of dread that crawled slowly over his mind.

### The Courtroom

"Are you ready?" Defense Attorney Smith said. Colonel Kretschman gulped, staggered a moment on his feet, then straightened. They were standing in a basement corridor two floors down from the room where he was being detained.

"Let's get this over with," he said, adding in a fatalistic voice. "One way or the other." The tough looking man who seemed always to be lurking nearby opened a door into a different room. Hans Weitzel, the tough looking man who really was as tough as he looked, was a Munich policeman who as a preteen was one among a handful of survivors in his large family after the Allied Operation Gomorrah Hamburg bombing and firestorm of 1943. He was another of Ausgleich's willing volunteers.

They went into a room Kretschman had not been in before. But others had before him. Others in situations very similar to his. Only a few. Not many. All had the same apprehensive expression that took command of Colonel Kretschman's face as soon as he passed the invisible line separating the rest of the world from the world of the courtroom that now lay before him. Into his mind jumped the jarring memory of a story from his Ancient Mythology class during his pre-law days at the University of Illinois. Of Odysseus facing the twin horrors of Scylla and Charybdis on either side of a seemingly impassable narrow sea passage and having to choose which one to face. Here it was prosecutor Meineke on one side. The traitor Schmidt on the other. And straight ahead was a bunch of somber faced black robed judges. Kretschman was flanked by twin menaces and looking straight head at another. This was even worse that Scylla and Charybdis. He looked at the judges.

"The middle. I'm going right through the goddamn middle," he muttered darkly, loud enough for Tom Smith to hear, befuddling the usually unruffled Smith. _"I'm fucked."_

Smith and Kretschman went into the room and Smith guided them to a table facing a raised dais behind which sat four very serious looking men and one woman who looked even more serious than the men. Standing at a second table adjacent to Smith and Kretschman were Fritz Meineke and one other man Krestchman had not seen before. The man sitting in the middle of the group at the dais addressed Colonel Kretschman. The man, Kretschman thought to himself, at least looked like a judge. Without, however, reflecting whether he, Bernard Kretschman, looked, or had ever looked, like a judge.

"Colonel," the dignified looking man said in Oxford-educated English, "this is the Ausgleich courtroom and we are the judges." He glanced over at Fritz Meineke. "Have the charges been read to Colonel Kretschman?"

"They have, your honor," Meineke replied. The dignified man in the center of the group of judges readdressed himself to Kretschman.

"Do you understand the charges against you, Colonel?" Kretschman's face turned red.

"I'm not a colonel! I'm United States Federal District Judge Bernard Kretschman. You have no authority to try me on anything! This is a travesty of justice! You are no better than the Nazis!" The dignified man was nonplussed.

"I repeat. Do you understand the charges against you?" Tom Smith nudged Kretschman and telegraphed a positive nod.

"Yes....yes.....yes. I understand bullshit just fine. It's all bullshit." Kretschman sputtered. "This is a travesty. A travesty of justice. Trial by a bunch of old Nazis." The woman behind the dais, Erika von der Heide, interjected in heated words.

"We are _no_ t Nazis, Colonel. We are as anti-Nazi as you are!" The excitable Erika thumped both hands on the table in front of her in her sudden agitation, raising the disapproving eyebrows of two of other judges. "And, given what we have all personally been through in Nazi Germany, probably considerably more anti-Nazi that you are!" That caught Kretschman by surprise and he remained silent. The man, who was apparently the lead judge, spoke again.

"Well, Colonel," we shall soon see if these charges are, as you say, all bullshit." Then the dignified older man in the center of the group of Ausgleich jurists stood up. "I must now recuse myself. I have personal knowledge of this matter and have been called as a witness." He then stepped down from the raised dais and briskly walked out of the courtroom. Kretschman watched him go.

"That man....he......he looks familiar." He whispered at Thomas Smith. And he was. They'd met before. In 1945. The month of May. On the banks of the River Elbe. Kretshman was then not yet a congressman, not yet a judge. He was a soldier. He was Colonel Kretschman then.

And he was Colonel Kretschman now.

### Chapter 12

### Hedgehopping

### 1945

The Genesis of the Assassination in the Skies over the San Joachim Valley

They called it hedgehopping. The aim was to shoot up everything that moved on the ground and bring the German transportation system to a grinding halt. Which would put the German war effort into gridlock. No trains and no trucks meant no troops and no war materiel could be moved to the front. That was the aim, and it worked. The problem was that it worked too well. The Luftwaffe had been reduced to an ineffective remnant of its awesome power in the early years of the war. The American fighter planes flew over France and the low countries and finally Germany with utter impunity shooting up everything that moved. It worked so well that the fighters ran out of targets. The Germans didn't dare move during daylight hours. There was little left for the hedgehoppers to strafe. There might have been no targets, but the planes were still there, in ever increasing numbers, and most of the young adrenaline charged pilots were looking for some kind of action. And that was when hedgehopping got out of hand.

It began with little things. A farmer out in his field. A bicyclist on a country road. A harmless picnic by a steam. A horse drawn wagon carrying refugees. War always brings out the slumbering recessives in the warriors and some of those recessives will burgeon into a blood thirsty ruthlessness. Those were the pilots, at first very few, who dove their lethal machines down and strafed the farmer in his field, the bicyclist on a country road, the harmless picnic by a stream, the horse drawn wagon of refugees. They were far enough away, removed from the chaos they created, not to see the blood spattering from the wounds or the shattered bones or the oozing gray matter from cleaved skulls. They could not hear the shrieks of the wounded or the anguished hysterics of the survivors. They could not hear the awful silence of the dead. Anyhow, who cared? Weren't they Germans? And weren't the Germans the enemy? _All_ Germans? The farmer in the field was feeding the German fighting men. The bicyclist on the country road might really be an SS trooper on home leave. The harmless picnic by a stream might really be a bunch of Gestapo thugs taking a day off. The people in the horse drawn wagon might have earlier been brutal overseers of foreign slave labor. Were some innocents also killed? Of course. This was war. Collateral damage to non combatants was as unavoidable as friendly fire casualties. That was the nature of war. Or so the rationalizing went under that convenient euphemism of collateral damage.

### Swillington

Long before Cedric Swillington became a millionaire entrepreneur in southern California he was Lieutenant Cedric Swillington. One of those hedgehoppers in the last months of WWII. He was unique among his fellow pilots in that he had earlier been an enlisted man in one of the first B17 bomber squadrons to land in England as the American 8th Air Force built up enough strength to attack the Germans on their home ground. The British, still bitterly remembering the London Blitz and Coventry, cheered the Yanks on and literally led the way with their lethal bombing raids on German targets.

But that was in the early years of the war. 1942 and into 1943. The Luftwaffe was a powerful adversary, still with a number of surviving veteran pilots, and the bombers had no long range fighters of their own to cover them on the bombing runs. It was a slaughter. An American bombing crew had less than one chance in three of surviving to finish the 25 mission target before rotating home. In Swillington's squadron it was even worse. Only two crews survived. His and one other. Swillington knew many of the men who died. Two of the men on his own crew, a belly gunner named Madigan and a bombardier named Cantonelli, were killed in action. Three others were wounded, Swillington himself taking a red hot chunk of shrapnel in the upper thigh of his right leg while he was working one of the .30 caliber waist guns. Another couple of inches and he would have been one of the castrati and it would have had to be up to his younger brothers to pass on the Swillington genetic heritage. All of the crew suffered some degree of frost bite from flying in unheated airplanes in the frigid cold of 25,000 feet. And every one of them felt naked and vulnerable on every single mission they flew over Europe without fighter cover to protect them.

Swillington rotated back to the U.S. The vulnerability of being in a bomber under attack lodged itself permanently in his mind and he made up that mind that he would go to flight school and become a fighter pilot and turn the tables on the Germans. Swillington was smart, he had a very quick eye and lighting quick reflexes faster than a sizeable majority of pilot candidates. He passed the entry test easily and breezed through flight school. He was a natural. He got back to Europe as a fighter pilot just as the Battle of the Bulge was ending. He cut his fighter teeth on the retreating Germans and was certain he had killed scores of fleeing Germans along with destroying a dozen trucks and at least one tank. The slumbering recessive in Swillington came roaring out of him and he embraced hedgehopping with an unmatched bloodthirsty enthusiasm. Even his fellow pilots were taken aback.

It was in the last week of the war. Germany was destroyed. Hardly a city existed and many of the smaller towns were gone, too. The air war increased in ferociousness in those last weeks and the bombers were razing town after town and killing German civilians by the thousands. After the war the Germans estimated that in the last few months of the war in 1945, from January to early May, over 100,000 German civilians were killed in the bombing. And that was just in the bombing. There were also the hedgehoppers. They were the grim reapers come to harvest the last pathetic remnants of the German bounty. Cedric Swillington was foremost among them.

It was clearly marked as a hospital train. Huge red crosses, unmistakable from the air, warned the American pilots overhead that this was not a military target. The Geneva Convention forbad attacking hospitals, including hospital ships. And hospital trains. It made no difference to the bombers. They dropped their bombs from high in the air onto populated areas and it was up to the Gods of war where the bombs fell. It was no surprise to anyone that the Gods of war did a poor job of defending hospitals on the ground.

But a hospital train was different. There a diving fighter was low enough to the ground to see the red crosses and know it was a forbidden target. Most pilots, German, British, American and Italian, honored the Geneva convention. At least on the western front. But not Cedric Swillington. A moving target was a moving target, red cross or no red cross. Besides, the train might really be a troop train or a munitions train disguised as a hospital train. Swillington was not about to be swayed by that kind of pussyfooting subterfuge bullshit. He pulled his P-51 Mustang into a dive towards the train and as he got closer opened up with the .50 caliber Browning machine guns of his Mustang. He peppered the train, again, then again, and flew off, leaving it dead on the tracks with half of the cars on fire. He would never know that besides having wounded soldiers on it, the train also was carrying hundreds of children, many of them sick and some even lightly wounded, who were survivors of the recent horrific bombings of German cities and towns. Besides a score of severely wounded German soldiers who died in the raid, an estimated forty-five of those children were killed by Swillington's guns or by the fire that engulfed the train after the strafing. A priest and five nuns fleeing the hell of Frankfurt were also hit in the strafing. One nun was killed instantly. Another died the following day. Scores of children and already injured soldiers were wounded. Many later died of their wounds in a defeated Germany that no longer had medical facilities or medicine to treat the injured. Or, for that matter, food to keep them alive. The final death toll of Cedric Swillington's hedgehopping strafing of a German hospital train was over one hundred. Two thirds of them were noncombatants.

Swillington's wingman that day, Lieutenant Tom Szabo, was no faintheart. But he drew the line at shooting up a hospital train and, after some soul searching, felt he had to report the incident. Szabo had already had enough of Swillington when he watched the man strafe a caravan of wagons that was obviously just a bunch of refugees fleeing the maelstrom of the fighting on the front. The report barely made a ripple. The horrors of Auschwitz were just being fully revealed and whatever sympathy there might have been for anything German was gone as completely as had Union compassion for the defeated South after Abraham Lincoln was assassinated at the end of the Civil War eighty years earlier. The blood was up in Allied eyes. Szabo's report was never acted upon and quietly filed away to gather dust for the next thirty years. Szabo himself eventually forgot about it. But there were those who didn't. The priest who watched in disbelief as the American fighter plane dived on the hospital train and began to strafe it. And a handful of the refugee children from Frankfurt who saw their friends and relatives die from the bullets or screaming in terror as they were trapped by the raging fires.

Some things are not forgotten.

Some things must never be forgotten.

### Guido Portelli

### 1975

Like Sheriff Stanger in Indiana and Deputy Sheriff Wilson in Arizona, both of whom he would remain forever unaware of--although in fact intimately connected with them through the lethal actions of Ausgleich--FAA investigator Guido Portelli was determined to find a killer. In this case, the killer of California millionaire businessman Cedric Swillington in a what everyone conversant with it considered a uniquely bizarre aerial execution. But the investigation soon ran smack up against the opaque world of Mexican law enforcement. The aircraft that shot down Swillington's Cessna came out of Mexico. That much was known from FAA radar. But that was it. Portelli wasn't able to garner any information on where in Mexico the plane that shot down Swillington came from, where it landed, or who owned or rented the aircraft. The Mexicans played dumb. Which meant somebody with influence and money either intimidated them or, more likely, bought their silence.

The case remained open, but Portelli was getting nowhere. Then that nowhere took a turn into a different nowhere. One day, more than a year after Swillington's murder, a large envelope was delivered by the local FedEx truck to Portelli's home address on a Saturday afternoon when he was watching UCLA kick ass on USC on TV. He didn't recognize the return address in San Diego, but couldn't miss it being marked Urgent. That got his attention, but what really nailed his interest was the notation below Portelli's address: _Concerning: Cedric Swillington_. Portelli, irritated and frustrated at his lack of progress in finding Swillington's killer, ripped the sealing tape off the envelope but cautiously--he was, after all, a veteran investigator--peered inside. It contained a sheaf of papers. He pulled the papers out, sat down and began to read them. And gradually developed an entirely different view of Cedric Swillington from that of the successful businessman who was the victim of a very bizarre murder. These documents were from years ago. World War II years ago.

This first set of papers were official government documents that, after reading through them, Portelli figured were probably obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. They included the official report filed by Swillington's wingman the day of the strafing attack on the hospital train, Lieutenant Tom Szabo. It was clearly marked as a hospital train, the reporting pilot said, and he radioed Swillington of that fact and said not to attack it. Swillington's reply was that it was a Nazi ruse and the train was loaded with troops and munitions. Despite his wingman's objections, Swillington dove on the train and strafed it. He did a loop and came back and strafed it a second time. The train stopped, several of the cars in flames, and people could be seen running from the train. Swillington swooped down and strafed the fleeing survivors, though, the wingman claimed, they were not in uniform and were almost certainly civilians. Plus, the wingman added in his report, some of the fleeing train passengers were women. And, which really inflamed the wingman, children. And that was all. Just the initial report. No follow up investigation. No court martial. Not even a refutation from Swillington. The wingman's report was swallowed up in the locked down world of officially classified wartime documents.

Portelli finished reading the report and sat stone cold still, his mind in ferment. He got up, went to a cupboard, took out a tumbler and a bottle of Irish whiskey and filled the glass halfway. Then he stared at the half full glass for a moment. "What the hell," he mumbled, and filled the glass almost to the rim. Then he returned to his chair to read the rest of the papers that were in the mysterious anonymously sent envelope.

There were three more of them. The first was an English translation of the official German report on the train incident. It was in fact a hospital train, the German report said. It detailed the specifics of the casualties with typical German thoroughness, but the synopsis put it well enough for Portelli. Over one hundred wounded soldiers, nurses, children and civilians were either killed instantly or died shortly afterwards. The only actual military casualties were four lightly wounded soldiers who were in the process of returning to their units.

The second of the three papers was a translation of a description of the attack by an eyewitness. The priest. He described how the train, which he verified was clearly identified as a hospital train, was repeatedly attacked by a single American aircraft. The third paper was a translation of another witness' account of what happened. One of the children who was wounded in the attack and would years later, as an adult, put to paper his memory of the event. Which he, along with the priest and the official German report, clearly considered to have been a deliberate war crime by the American pilot.

So, Portelli thought after both finishing reading and most of his tumbler of Irish whiskey. That sure as hell explained why Swillington was murdered and also the bizarre way in which he was murdered. It didn't tell him squat about who did it. And Guido Portelli, war crime or no war crime, was still hell bent on finding the murderer. But, as Guido's boss had the irritating habit of saying, intentions do not automatically translate into results. And that was the way it would be. He never did find out who killed Cedric Swillington. The irony was that, in a way, he already knew. It was the wounded child who grew up to become a pilot in the West German Luftwaffe and who as an adult wrote down his recollections of that day in early 1945. That day when the American pilot dove down on the marked hospital train and strafed the railroad car full of children fleeing the bombed cities. That day when both his brothers died in the flames of their railway car strafed by the American pilot, Cedric Swillington. Even now, after all these years, he, the surviving brother could still hear them. Crying.....pleading.....

Screaming.....

### Chapter 13

### The Trial

### Colonel Bernard Kretschman

1976

Erika von der Heide, herself an incisive legal mind and a formidable courtroom opponent, took over the lead jurist's role. Erika was the youngest of the jurists, just entering her teens when WWII ended, but was privy to frequently told and retold lurid family memories of the trial and brutal execution by the Nazis of her great-uncle, Ewald von der Heide-Schiller, after he was implicated in the plot against Hitler. He was tortured and the torturing was filmed for the devil Hitler to watch.

Erika's older brother Werner von der Heide was a young Wehrmacht captain captured at Stalingrad by the Russians. He was one of the small minority, hardly one in twenty of the 100,000 Stalingrad prisoners, to survive captivity and eventually be repatriated to Germany. He came back in 1949 an old man, a broken man, though he was not yet thirty. His health was fragile and Werner was convinced he wouldn't live much longer. He was adamant that someone should leave a record of what had happened at Stalingrad, and what happened to the huge number of German soldiers who were taken prisoner. Erika was so insistent that she be the one to record Werner's recollections that he finally caved in and agreed, despite her youth. Erika managed to get her hands on one of the new generation of tape recorders and recorded every word her ailing brother said. Every day they recorded Erika relived the horrors along with her ailing older brother. Every day they had a recording session Erika was certain Werner was growing weaker. He died not a week after they finished the recording. Erika was certain that her brother, who was a strong and athletic young man when he went into the Army, would have survived had not his health--and his spirit--been broken by the brutal Soviet death camps. What kept him alive when so many others died, Erika eventually concluded after she thought deeply about it in the dark days after his death, was his single-minded determination to record what had happened so that succeeding generations would know. "We were not all Nazis," he said in his final statement. "We were just soldiers......in the wrong army."

Erika von der Heide had profound deeply personal reasons to eschew the widespread western belief that all Germans were Nazis and as such complicit in war crimes. And reasons just as intense for a deep seated hatred of the Nazi bastards who had brought ruin to Germany.

With General von Wittendorf, because of his personal involvement, having to recluse himself, no one doubted that Erika von der Heide was an excellent choice to lead Ausgleich's--admittedly, by necessity, extralegal--judicial proceedings in the war crimes trial of the American, Colonel Bertram Kretschman.

Erika von der Heide gaveled the proceedings open.

"I am Judge Erika von der Heide, chief jurist for this trial. Since the American defendant does not speak German, these proceedings will continue to be held in English. At least in so far as that is possible." She turned to look at Fritz Meineke. "Herr Meineke. Please read before the court the charges against the defendant, Colonel Bertram Krestchman." Meineke repeated the charges against Kretschman." Kretschman listened without comment until Meineke finished, though his jaw muscles were working overtime trying to keep him from exploding in verbal anger.

"How does the defendant plead?" Judge von der Heide said, looking directly at Kretschman though directing her words at defense attorney Thomas Schmidt AKA Tom Smith.

" _Unschuldig_!" Not guilty. Came the loudly voiced reply. And not from the mouth of Tom Smith. From Kretschman. Every one in the courtroom looked in surprise at Kretschman, but it was Judge Professor Klaus Gerber who put it in words.

"You speak German?"

"Damn right, you pompous Nazi bastard," Kretschman snapped back, switching to

English. "My grandfather came from Schleswig. German was my first language at home in America." He shot hostile glances at each of the judges, in turn. "And he told me all about you strutting Prussian aristocratic bastards. You with the von before your names." He stared at Erika. "Like you, Judge _von der Heide_." Erika von der Heide remained cool.

"Why did you not inform us you are a German speaker? It would have made things easier for all of us." Kretschman growled.

"Not for all of us. For you. Not for me. I wanted to hear what you Nazi bastards were really up to. And now I know. This is nothing more than revenge. A lynch mob pretending to be a court. It's a mockery of justice."

"You are not helping yourself any with this outburst," Tom Smith whispered in his ear. "Still your tongue." Kretschman whirled on him.

"Bullshit. You're part of it. All of you are. Why not just cut the bullshit right now. Take me out back and shoot me and get it over with. Plant me in the garden and grow cabbages on my bones. That's what you are going to do, anyhow." Tom Smith grabbed Kretschman's shoulder and pushed him down into his chair.

"Enough, damnit!" And, uncharacteristically for Tom, "shut the hell up. You're ruining any chances you might have." Kretschman said nothing more. But he did mouth the word _bullshit_ as he stared malevolently into Smith's eyes.

"Colonel Kretschman," interjected Judge von der Heide, speaking in English. "Let me make this very clear to you. If you continue to be disruptive we will either restrain you or remove you from the courtroom and try you in absentia." She then leaned forward and spoke in a low, but distinct voice. "And you will lose the opportunity to speak in your own behalf." That caught Kretschman's attention. He knew the Judge was dead serious. Smith had earlier told him that almost all of the court's cases were tried in absentia. Kretschman was an often blunt and callous man, but he was not stupid.

"All right, Judge," he said in a voice tactically less defiant, but underneath nowhere near obeisant. "I will cooperate." All the judges nodded understanding. That didn't mean they wanted Kretschman to cooperate and remain in the courtroom. Trials in absentia were easier and quicker. Every one of them knew this was going to be a difficult trial if Kretschman stayed in the courtroom. One of them even moaned softly when Kretschman made his pronouncement. But they nevertheless accepted it. This was going to be one of the rare face-to-face Ausgleich trials.

And the first, and almost certainly only, of a flesh and blood American.

### The Trial

Phase II

"Colonel Kretschman," Judge von der Heide said after Kretschman's angry outburst lost steam and he grudgingly agreed to cooperate. "We are aware you are also a lawyer and a judge in the American system. We have therefore made some alterations in our judicial proceedings to more closely parallel the legal system you are familiar with." Kretschman nodded without comment, though _big fucking deal_ was on the very edge of his lips. "You are convinced that we are a star chamber, Colonel, but the fact is we are not. We conduct this court with solid legal principles and we do not, I repeat, _do not_ , prejudge defendants. Your fate will depend on the facts as presented to us, not by our own vengeful preconceptions." She stared at Kretschman.

"Are we clear on that, Colonel?" Kretschman was about to snap another sarcastic remark at Judge von der Heide, but defense attorney Smith squeezed his arm and shook his head negatively. "Colonel," von der Heide repeated. "Are we clear on that?" Kretschman nodded in a reluctant agreement.

"Yes," he replied, intentionally not addressing the Judge by her title. "We're clear." The intentional snub wasn't missed by Erika, or any of the others in the courtroom, but she thought it pointless to make an issue of it. The man was on trial for his life. Why quibble over formalities?

"Ausgezeichnet. Excellent," she said. "We will continue this trial in English, so far as possible." Then, turning to Fritz Meineke. "Herr Meineke, would you proceed with the prosecutor's case against Colonel Kretschman?" Fritz Meineke rose to his feet, straightened out the crumples in his suit as best he could and began. It wouldn't be long before Kretschman would be so startled he would loudly gasp in astonishment.

"We call Judge Freiherr von Wittendorf to the stand." Kretschman blanched when he saw the corridor door open and a man enter from outside. What the fuck? The head judge was a witness in his trial?

"Come on," Kretschman shouted out, jumping to his feet. "Your own judge is a witness against me. How do you get impartiality out of that?" Judge von der Heide retained her judicial cool. And why not? She wasn't on trial.

"Colonel, we remind you that further outbursts will result in one of two courses of action. Your being removed from the courtroom. Or the court will restrain and gag you and keep you in place. Either way, you will not be permitted to continually disrupt the court proceedings"

She pointed at Judge von Wittendorf, who had just approached the bench. "Judge von Wittendorf has recused himself from this trial. He will have no vote."  
"That is not very comforting, Judge," Kretschman replied, keeping his voice and manner in check to keep from being booted out of the courtroom. "He's still one of you."  
"Not now, he isn't," boomed Professor Gerber. "He's a witness and bears no more weight in this courtroom than any other witness." Kretschman was not convinced, but he surlily kept his tongue as von Wittendorf was duly sworn in.

"Judge von Wittendorf," Fritz Meineke continued, "is it true that you were physically present at the time of the alleged offenses?" Von Wittendorf, dignified and ramrod straight, cleared his throat before answering.

"I was," he began. "I was at that time a general, the ranking general in the Ferchland prisoner of war compound, and was witness to what transpired." That was when Kretschman loudly gasped. He jumped to his feet.

"You! I remember you now! You were that arrogant Nazi general who threatened me!"

"Sit down, Colonel," Erika snapped. "Or you will be removed from the courtroom or restrained. We will not warn you again!" Kretschman, grumbling to himself, sat down, though in fact what he really wanted to do was charge the goddamn arrogant Nazi general and beat his Kraut ass to the ground. Which, even Kretschman knew, was a singularly bad idea.

"General von Wittendorf," Meineke said. "Would you relate to us the events of May 5, 1945?" The General hesitated, thinking back, recalling the memories. Ugly, bitter memories he would have preferred not to have.

"We had crossed the Elbe River just ahead of the Russians. There were hundreds of thousands of us, civilians as well as soldiers, who had braved nearly impossible odds to escape the vengeance of the Russians and surrender to the more humane English and Americans." A sarcastic glare at Kretschman. "Or, rather, what we _thought_ were the more humane Americans."

"Objection, your honor," Tom Smith interjected.

"What is your objection, Herr Schmidt," Judge von der Heide said in a curious voice.

"We are dealing with facts here, not the whispered gossip of alleged Russian atrocities. The General has no personal knowledge of atrocities." Every set of eyes in the room stared at Tom Smith. Was there a single person of age in all of Germany who did not know about Russian atrocities? Judge von der Heide realized that Tom Smith was doing what a good defense attorney should do. Try to discredit the prosecution witnesses and deflect the trial away from the defendant

"Whatever the facts of that are, Herr Schmidt," Judge von der Heide said in a reasoned tone of voice, "it is not relevant to the issues in question at the moment. The forced return of the German soldiers to Soviet hands. But, Herr Schmidt, trust that we will not fail to deal with the question of Soviet brutality during the course of this trial." Unsurprised, Tom Schmidt sat back down, believing at least a tiny seed of doubt had been planted. A seed that he had every intention of nurturing as the trial progressed.

"Would you continue, General," Meineke said. General von Wittendorf had been staring at Colonel Kretschman, remembering with unwelcome lucidity that day on the Elbe when so many of his command were given a death sentence at the very moment of supposed salvation. He returned his gaze to Meineke.

"I was with the remnants of my command, along with a mixture of other units, among them a contingent of female support staff and Luftwaffe auxiliaries. There were over five thousand of us in the Ferchland compound. We were all tired, dirty, worn out. In fact, defeated. But also grateful that the war was over and we had somehow survived when so many, so very, very many, others hadn't."

"Once again, General, that is supposition," Tom Smith blurted out in another objection. "You supposed that very, very many others did not survive, yet that does not make it fact." Smith's delaying tactic did not fool anyone, and it had the unforeseen effect of instantly irritating everyone in the courtroom, every single one of whom had lost someone in the war. Not so with Kretschman, who was catching on that his defense attorney really was trying to defend him.

"Would you like me to begin counting the bodies I myself saw, Hauptman Schmidt," von Wittendorf said in a sharp edged tone, momentarily forgetting Smith's role in the courtroom in his sudden burst of anger. "Or all the letters I wrote to the families of the men killed under my command?" Smith realized his mistake, though it was a very small one in his mind. The General's credibility was not an issue. The real issue in defense attorney Tom Smith's mind was whether or not Colonel Kretschman had been commanded by higher authority to turn the German prisoners over to the Russians. Or, if not so ordered, then that he did not believe the Russians would exact a murderous revenge upon the returned Germans.

"I withdraw the objection," he said, looking at Meineke. "Go ahead."

"We were huddled in the mud, my few remaining staff members and I among the masses of soldiers. Suddenly the Americans were all around us. Tanks. Armored cars. Infantry in trucks. We had no idea what was going on and did not suspect what was coming." He stopped and looked directly at Colonel Kretschman. The memory of what the American did had not lessened any with the years and his glare was as cold and hard as the frozen ground of his Soviet Siberian imprisonment. "Then the man over there," pointing at Kretschman, "came into the compound with a platoon of American military police armed with submachine guns. He demanded to speak to the ranking German officer in the compound." Von Wittendorf shifted his gaze again to Fritz Meineke. "I was the ranking officer, so I immediately appeared in front of him."

"Objection," Tom Smith interjected again. "How do we know the defendant is the same man as that American colonel from long ago. The General could be mistaken." Before anyone could say anything, Kretschman rose to his feet and tapped on his chest.

"Give it a rest, Schmidt," he said. "I admit it was me there with the General. I have never denied it." Then he sat down, having done exactly what Tom Smith had instructed him to do. It wasn't a matter of whether Kretschman was present or not. It was whether or not Kretschman acted out of malice on his own volition. And that, Tom Smith had decided in their pre-trial discussions, was where his defense would lie. Did Colonel Kretschman deliberately send the German prisoners to their deaths at the hands of the Russians? Tom would do his damndest to show that he hadn't.

Fritz Meineke, however, had other ideas.

"Continue, please, General," he said to von Wittendorf.

"I came face to face with the American Colonel Kretschman and told him I was the ranking officer in the camp."

"Was this conversation in English or German?"

"English," von Wittendorf replied. "I had no idea until just a few minutes ago that this man knows German." A sharp glance at Kretschman. "Though I recognized by his name tag that he had German ancestry." Meineke continued his questioning.

"And what transpired between you and Colonel Kretshman?"

"He told me that the German prisoners in the compound were going to be turned over to the Russians and that we should prepare to recross the river to the Russian positions."

"And what was your reaction to that?" General von Wittendorf's face grew noticeably ashen with the memory of that day on the Elbe, and all the other bloody days during the long war, and, finally, of the horrible fate of his loved ones. His voice was as leaden as so much of his life had been for many years after the murder of his family and the obliteration of his East Prussian homeland.

"There were others among the German prisoners who spoke English, and they quickly translated for the rest what was going on. There was a great uproar in the camp. After all they had gone through, the long years of the war, the breakout from encirclement near Berlin, the lost comrades, those in the rear guard who gave their lives to save the rest, was all now in vain. I--we--were all outraged. Had we still been armed there would have been a bloody battle in an instant and Kretschman's Americans would have learned a hard lesson about German combat veterans." He stopped, slumped momentarily in the despair of the memory, then straightened.

"But we were not armed. Only a few still had weapons. I told the American colonel," the General again pointed at Kretschman in the courtroom, "that the Russians had been exacting a terrible revenge on captured Germans, that at least a million German prisoners had died in Soviet hands, and that he was condemning many of these men--these men who had honorably surrendered to the Americans--to death at the hands of the Russians." A pause while he threw an acidic glare at Kretschman. "We made it clear to him what would happen when we were turned over to the Russians. He could not have doubted that."

"Objection," Tom Schmidt said in a loud voice. "How could Colonel Kretschman have known whether or not the General was telling the truth? It was heresay to him and not credible as direct evidence."

"A valid point, Herr Schmidt," Erika von der Heide said. "We will explore it thoroughly during the course of the trial."

"Was there anything else said between you and Colonel Kretshman?" Meineke asked.

"Yes. After I told the Colonel what would happen if we were turned over to the Russians, and that we were only soldiers such as him doing our duty, he became very angry. He said he had been at the liberation of a concentration camp and had seen the atrocities there." Kretschman, listening intently, unconsciously nodded in affirmation. "Then the Colonel said that war was not the same as deliberate murder in a concentration camp and that Germans, all Germans were Nazis and murderers. When the German prisoners heard what he said there was another terrific uproar in the camp. Kretschman and his military police began to withdraw outside the barbed wire. As he left he yelled at me to prepare my men for immediate transfer to the Russians."

It was now Tom Schmidt's turn to cross examine General von Wittendorf.

"General," Tom Smith began. "We concede almost all of the facts that you testified to. These events really did take place on the Elbe that day in May of 1945. And we also concede that the Russians did in fact exact a murderous revenge on the Germans turned over to them." Both General von Wittendorf and Fritz Meineke looked at Smith in surprise. He was giving that much up that easily? What was he up to?

"But, General, that still leaves the question open of whether or not Colonel Kretschman believed what you said about Russian reprisals. What do you have to say about that?"

"I have no doubt he understood," von Wittendorf said. "I could see it in his eyes. Along with the hate. He wanted us to die. I think because of what he saw in the concentration camp."

"That remains just your opinion, General," Tom Smith replied. "There is no definitive proof that Colonel Kretschman knew what would happen to the prisoners in the Russians' hands. Or that he wanted it to happen. And _that,_ General, _is_ fact." Tom Smith wheeled and returned to the defendant's table. Kretschman patted him on the shoulder when Smith sat down and tried to suppress the smugness that threatened to overturn his glower. He'd seen enough defense attorneys in action to know that Smith was one of the better ones. Hopefully, considering Kretschman's own near future, maybe actually the best.

"Do you have any further witnesses, Herr Meineke?" Judge Erika von der Heide said.

"Jawohl. Ah, yes, I do. I call Witbold Schrülen." The door leading to the outside corridor opened and a middle-sized man who looked to be in his late thirties or early forties walked in. He was a solemn faced man, not handsome, not homely, square jawed, lean, who obviously took care of himself, with light brown hair worn long enough to give him a bit of a roguish look. It was nothing more than a look. Witbold Schrülen was a respected and award winning Bavarian investigative journalist, who, Meineke would soon point out, was also--along with Uwe Schlegel--Ausgleich's primary investigator.

"Mr. Schrülen," Meineke began. "Let us make this known to the court at the very beginning. "You are a court investigator for Ausgleich. Is that not so?" Witbold nodded agreement.

"Ja," he said. "Yes, I am."

"But your appearance now is for an entirely different reason, is that not correct?" Said Meineke.

"That is correct, sir."

"And the reason, Mr. Schrülen?"

"I was also present that day on the Elbe," Witbold said, his gaze slowly turning towards Colonel Kretschman, his eyes hot coals of accusation. "As was that man! That Kretschman! Murderer! Murderer!"

Tom Smith was on his feet. "This is _not_ a twisted Freisler Nazi so-called People's Court, and this man has no right to look and speak to my client in such a vicious manner."

"Agreed, Herr Schmidt," Judge Erika von der Heide said. "Herr Schrülen, we understand your agitation, but you must control you emotions. Is that clear?" Witbold nodded agreement. He should have known better. At least in the courtroom.

"We think Herr Schrülen has good cause for his outburst," Fritz Meineke said. "And we are about to find out why." He redirected his attention to Witbold Schrülen. "Please tell us what you observed on May 5th, 1945, on the Elbe River."

"I was one of the prisoners in the compound and heard General von Wittendorf tell that man in the defendant's dock, Kretschman, that sending the prisoners to the Russians would surely mean the deaths of many of them. I also heard that man, Kretschman, ignore the General's words and order the German prisoners turned over to the Russians." Witbold grabbed Kretschman's eye and held it until the sheer angry force of his glare made Kretschman drop his gaze to the floor.

"I spoke English well then, as now, and I stepped forward to confront Krestchman, telling him that surely he would not send the women among us, who included my own sister, Karin, to the Russians. We all knew the Russians gang raped and often murdered German women wherever the encountered them." The anger and bitterness in Witbold's voice and face was plain for all to see and hear. And at the same moment Kretschman realized who Witbold Schrülen was. He blurted it out

"You....you're the smart assed kid who threatened me along with the General." Witbold did not answer Kretschman directly. He only gave a sharp, angry nod, and continued with his narrative.

"This Kretschman would not listen. He ordered all of us back across the river to the Russians." Witbold at that moment was seized with an impulse to run at Kretschman and kill him with his bare hands. Meineke sensed it and moved so that he was directly between Witbold and Kretschman, motioning with his hands for Witbold to remain seated in the witness chair. Erika noticed it.

"Are you able to continue, Herr Schrülen? We can take a recess until you regain your composure."

"No....no.....I can continue," Witbold said in a tightly controlled voice.

"Please continue, Mr. Schrülen," Fritz Meineke said.

"We went back across the river. I stayed next to my sister. As we crossed onto the far bank of the river I saw the Russians pulling out all the Germans in dark uniforms. SS and a company of Panzer crewmen. They began beating them, chopping at them with their bayonets and knives. Soon the shooting began. I saw at least twenty of them shot down even as they held their hands high in surrender." Witbold suddenly stopped. Tears filled his eyes.

"And then. And then...then the Russians started with the German women. They grabbed my sister. I tried to stop them and they beat me to the ground with rifle butts. I don't know how long I was unconscious. When I woke I could hear the screams of the women, begging the Russians to stop. But they didn't stop. They kept on and on. The shooting of the SS and the Panzer crewmen and whoever else the Russians took a dislike to. The screaming of the women being raped. My sister.....my sister." Witbold lapsed into tears. All eyes were on him. Including Colonel Kretschman, who had never before heard a first hand account of what happened on the far side of the Elbe. Kretschman's expression collapsed into a blank void. "My sister," Witbold said in a bitter voice, staring at Kretschman, "was dead by morning. And she was not the only one."

"What happened to you after that, Mr. Schrülen," Meineke continued.

"We were force marched for several days. Most of the wounded died during the march, along with the weaker men." Meineke pressed Witbold.

"How did they die?" Again Witbold glared at Kretschman. "When they couldn't keep up with the column the Russians either shot them or bashed in their heads with rifle butts. I once saw two wounded Germans who fell by the side of the road have their throats slashed by a Russian." Another glare at Kretschman. "The Russian cursed them in a clumsy profane German as he cut their throats."

"Continue," Meineke urged Witbold. "What happened to those of you who survived?"

"We were loaded onto railway cars. No food. No water. No toilets. We were packed in so tightly it was almost impossible to sit down. Men died standing up. Every morning there were more dead. We finally were unloaded and put into filthy barracks and put to work in what had been German coal mines in Silesia. Our guards were Polish and they were even more brutal than the Russians. There was little food. Little protection against the elements. No medicines or treatment for the sick. Men wasted away into shells of their former selves. About half of us died. I kept the names of 24 men from my unit who died so that I could contact their families if and when I went home." He paused for a moment to wipe moisture from his eyes. "I saw most of the 24 die. And many others. I also was assigned for several weeks to a burial detail and saw with my own eyes hundreds of German prisoners who died in the slave labor camp thrown into mass burial pits, some not even covered over and ravaged by wild animals and dogs. After two years they released me and I returned to Germany. I found most of the families of those in my unit who had not survived the death camps." He glared once again at Colonel Kretschman.

"The war was over. These men should have gone home to their families. Instead they went to Russian slave labor camps and a miserable death far from home." Witbold stood and pointed a finger at Kretschman.

"And _there_ is the man responsible for those deaths. War criminal! Kretschman!" Judge von der Heide rapped on the dais tabletop with her gavel and threw an admonishing glare at Witbold, but said nothing. Colonel Kretschman stared back at Witbold Schrülen, his face pallid, his eyes shocked. He had never faced the reality of what he had done that day on the Elbe so long ago. Until now. Everyone could see that he was shaken.

"Again, I must object," Tom Smith said. "The fate of the German prisoners at the hands of the Russians was no doubt barbaric, but this still does not prove that Colonel Kretschman believed this would happen when he turned the prisoners over to the Russians. We have not one shred of proof that he did."

"Not to you, Herr Schmidt," Witbold snapped angrily at Tom Smith. "But I have no more doubt than General von Wittendorf that Kretschman was fully aware of what he was doing and wanted the Germans to be punished by the Russians." Then he surprised everyone with his next comment. "I saw Kretschman try to draw his sidearm when General von Wittendorf called him a war criminal. A MP officer had to restrain him. The General will corroborate that." Another hot look at Smith. "That clearly shows the intent in Kretschman's mind to punish the Germans."

"Still not proof," Tom Smith replied, though he was by now having some very serious doubts of his own. Defending someone was his judicial obligation, especially when he had no firm idea about the defendant's guilt. But doing it so well that a man he is convinced is an actual war criminal walks free? Still, he didn't have a firm grip on Kretschman's guilt or innocence. And even if he did, and knew Kretschman was guilty, must he not continue to defend him to the best of his ability? Tom Smith couldn't answer that question. It was the dilemma that faced all defense attorneys at one time or another. But rarely, he thought darkly to himself, in a case so monumental that it involved the deaths of thousands of human beings. He looked at Kretschman and wondered. What really happened that day on the Elbe? And the dark thought spawned by wondering about what really happened. Kretschman did send all those men to their imprisonment, execution and death in the camps. And the women to be bestially gang raped and murdered. There was no doubt of that. But.....but....he looked at Kretschman again, more closely. Was it intentional? Smith's gut rumbled.

It was not a good sign.

### The Trial

Phase III

The court was in recess until the next morning. Tom Smith sat in the kitchen, a glass of brandy in his hand, pondering his next moves. No one had yet been able to show with certainty--as the American courts said--guilt without a reasonable doubt. Smith believed he had planted, and now, nurtured, the seeds of doubt in the minds of the jurors. Almost everyone else involved outside of the jurists had no doubts about Kretschman's guilt. But they were irrelevant in Smith's mind. The only opinions that counted were those of the four jurors behind the bench. And Smith believed that the test of guilty beyond a reasonable doubt had not been met by some, if not all, of the jurors. Smith rose and went to Kretschman's room to discuss strategy for the next day.

Midway through their planning, Smith suddenly stopped and looked closely at Kretschman.

"Did you do it intentionally? Did you knowingly send all those people to death and rapine?" Kretschman was stunned. His eyes flashed, his gaze jerked downward and to the side, his face flushed.

"I.....I.....I......was still outraged by what I saw in the concentration camp. I was ashamed of my ancestral people. The Germans. My own blood. I wanted them punished......I wanted the Russians to punish them as the Germans had punished others. I......I.......I......didn't understand how brutal the Russians were. When I did, it was too late."

"And when was that?" Smith asked sharply.

"After they went across the river. The shootings that had to be executions. The screams of the women. We could hear it all, even across the river. Some of my men actually cried." He looked at Smith with bloodshot, sad eyes. "I can't count the times I wished to God I could relive that day and not send those poor souls to the Russians." Tom Smith was silent. He was an experienced trial lawyer. He'd seen a lifetime of dissimulation. Kretschman could be telling the truth.

Or he could be one hell of a good liar.

The following day began as had the first one. Chief Judge Erika von der Heide gaveled the court in session. She looked at Fritz Meineke.

"Herr Meineke, do you have further witnesses?"

"I do, Judge von der Heide," he responded, turning towards the door. "I call Michael Wendig to the stand." The door opened and a middle aged, compactly built casually dressed man with carrot red hair and abnormally large ears approached the witness stand. Kretschman recognized him immediately. Who could forget that fiery hair and those ridiculous ears?

"My God, it's that fucking MP captain! What is he doing here? He's an American soldier?"

" _Was_ an American soldier," Fritz Meineke snapped. "He is now a Canadian citizen and a civilian living in British Columbia." While Kretschman smoldered and muttered _traitor_ under his breath, Wendig was sworn in and duly took his seat.

"Mr. Wendig," Fritz Meineke began. "Is it true that you were present at the Ferchland Prisoner of War Camp on May 5th, 1945?"

"I was," Wendig replied.

"Would you relate what happened that day?"

"I was a captain in the American Army then, commanding a company of military police. Colonel Kretschman ordered me to bring one of my platoons to escort him into the prisoner compound where he demanded that the ranking German officer in the camp come forward."

"Is that man," pointing at Kretschman, "the Colonel Kretschman you refer to?" Wendig suppressed a tiny smile.

"Yes. Older and fatter. But that's him, all right." Meineke then pointed at General von Wittendorf, who was sitting in the front row of the witness seats.

"Do you recognize this man, Mr. Wendig?"

"I do. The German general who appeared before Colonel Kretschman."

"Tell us what happened then," Meineke continued.

"Colonel Kretschman was very angry. So much so that I was afraid he'd precipitate a serious incident with the prisoners. I quietly informed my sergeants to pass on the information to be both careful and for God's sake keep their fingers off their triggers. These men were surrendered prisoners and not the enemy any more. The war was over."

"It was not over yet," Kretschman hissed. "Not for three more days!" Judge von der Heide's harsh voice responded immediately.

"I remind you for the very last time, Colonel Kretschman, to contain your outbursts or be restrained or removed from the courtroom!" Kretschman's face was flushed with anger, but he kept his tongue.

"May I remind the court," Tom Smith said, rising to his feet. "That the comments of Mr. Wendig are opinion, not fact. There is no direct proof that Colonel Kretschman was really angry." Kretschman rose to his feet and spoke very softly and respectfully to the court.

"I was angry, Judge," he said. "I admit it. I'd just seen the Mauthausen subcamp and was shaken by it." He stopped, his drawn expression reflecting his words. "How could I _not_ be?" He then sat down, as did Tom Smith. Though they made no obvious indication of it, they were satisfied. Kretschman's admission was also planned in advance.

"Please continue, Mr. Wendig," Meineke said after Kretschman and Smith sat down and von der Heide motioned at him to resume his line of questioning.

"The Colonel told the General that the prisoners were going to be sent back across the river to the Russians. And he did it in a very arrogant, gruff way. Pandemonium broke loose when the Germans realized they were going back to the Russians. We were, quite frankly, scared the prisoners would rush us. We were only a platoon of MPs and there were thousands of them." He looked at Kretschman. "I whispered to the Colonel to back off on his stridency." He looked over at Kretschman again, his look one of disgust.

"His response? Fuck off, Captain. If you don't have the balls for this I'll find someone else who does." Then Wendig went on to relate the exchange between Kretschman and von Wittendorf, and then the gusty young German boy defending his sister. "When the German general, who was livid at his men being sent back to death at the hands of the Russians and the women to be raped and murdered, called Colonel Kretschman a murderer and war criminal, the Colonel grabbed at his holstered .45 and tried to draw it out." Another hostile look at Kretschman. "I had to physically restrain him."

"Do you think he was going to shoot General von Wittendorf?" Meineke interjected.

"Either Kretschman or the German boy who stared him down. He was burning with anger at both of them."

"Conjecture, your honor," Tom Smith said, again jumping to his feet.

"Your objection noted," Erika von der Heide replied. "Continue, Herr Meineke."

"Is there anything else you recall from that day?" Meineke asked.

"Oh, yes. I very great deal. There was a hell of a lot of argument among the officers about sending the prisoners over the river to the Russians. Most of us had heard rumors of the Russians murdering prisoners and raping and murdering women. Of all the officers present, Kretschman's unit, mine, and others, not a single one agreed with his decision to send the prisoners across the river to the Russians. Some of them even said it was murder."

"Did you actually hear this things being said, or was it related to you by others?"

"Most of it I heard with my own ears, including the comment by an infantry major that it amounted to murder."

"That still does not prove that Colonel Kretschman believed the rumors," Tom Smith interjected once again. "Rumors are just that. Rumors."

"True enough, Herr Schmidt," Meineke replied. "But we have established that the other American officers put enough credence in them to argue against sending the prisoners across the river in the hands of the Russians."

"That still does not prove that Colonel Kretschman believed the rumors. It is not definitive proof." A hint of a smile touched Fritz Meineke's face.

"Not definitive proof?" He turned to Michael Wendig. "Please continue, Mr. Wendig, with what happened while you were in the prisoner of war compound." Wendig's memory went back to that day, just after they backed nervously away from the outraged Germans in the prisoners' enclosure.

"Colonel," MP Captain Wendig said in a desperate voice. "You can't do this. It is murder. For God's sake man, think of what will happen to the women?"

"I don't give a damn. They might have been guards in a concentration camp, for all we know. My God, Wendig, how can you defend these people after seeing the concentration camps? They are guilty. The whole fucking German race is guilty!"

"I say it is murder, Colonel, and I am not the only one."

"It's justice, Wendig, and these Nazi bastards have to pay for what they've done. Our Russian friends will see to that! I'm going to roast your ass for insubordination in the face of the enemy. Your career is toast."

"It's still murder," Wendig replied, and angrily turned away and stomped off, refusing to take further part in the involuntary transfer of the surrendered prisoners to the Russians.

"And what happened after that?" Meineke said. "Did he court martial you?"

"Yes. He did. The result was predictable. No other officers spoke up, mostly because they knew Kretschman had powerful friends in the Pentagon and speaking up would be a career buster. Besides which the American people were in no mood to hear about atrocities against the Germans with the documentaries of the concentration camps playing in theaters all over the country. Nevertheless, the Army didn't want any publicity over what Kretschman had done. They dropped the charges against me, while letting me know in no uncertain terms that they could be reinstituted them any time. It didn't matter. My career was over. I got out of the Army as soon as I could and decided it would be a good idea to get out of their reach and moved to Vancouver where I became a Canadian citizen." What wasn't said was that the transcripts of the court martial, unsealed by the Army, perhaps unintentionally, were what lead the Ausgleich investigators to Wendig's home in British Columbia months earlier and prompted the call to him just two days before that brought him--more than willingly--back to Germany to testify in the trial.

Tom Smith rose to his feet. "Is it true, Mr. Wendig, that the United States Army instituted court martial proceedings against you over the events that took place at the Elbe River on May 5, 1945?"

"Yes, bu...." Smith cut him off.

"And yet we are to attach credibility to your words when your own government doubted you?"

"Well, I..."

"That is all, Mr. Wendig," Smith said. "You may step down." Smith might have seemed predictable, even desperate. He wasn't.

Meineke had more evidence. Affidavits stating there were no standing orders to turn German prisoners over to the Russians. Historical documents stating that almost all of the Allied commanders holding German prisoners, when pressed by the Russians, refused to hand over their prisoners. The exceptions were almost all for the non-Germans who had served with or alongside the German military, what the Soviets called traitorous Soviet citizens. Ukrainians, Cossacks, Russians, Croatians, Poles, Tatars. Their fates were even more draconian than the Germans turned over by Colonel Kretschman, and constituted some very black marks on the record of the Allied conduct of the war.

"There is," Fritz Meineke concluded. "No record of Colonel Kretschman being ordered by higher authority to turn the German prisoners over to the Russians. It was his decision, and as we have seen, his decision alone, to send the prisoners to their dark fate.

"That still," Smith countered, "does not prove he knew what would happen."

"We think otherwise," Meineke shot back. "And we believe the court will, too."

It was now time for the defense.

Smith could not call witnesses for the defense. How could he? They were in the secret courtroom of a secret organization thousands of kilometers from Kretschman's home in America. His tactic, therefore, was to recall all the prosecution witnesses and make the point with each of them that what they were saying was conjecture. The only exception was Michael Wendig, and Smith used the fact of Wendig's court martial to malign his reliability. This strategy, however, was not the centerpiece of Smith's overall defense. That would come later with the last witness he would call for the defense. That evening, the court adjourned for the day, Tom Smith sat late into the evening with Colonel Bertram Kretschman discussing in detail the plans for the next day, the final day in court.

Chief Judge Erika von der Heide again gaveled the court into session that final day.

"Herr Schmidt," she said to Tom Smith. "Are you ready to resume?"

"I am, your honor," he said. "I call my final witness." He turned to look at his client.

"Colonel Bertram Kretschman." If this surprised anyone in the courtroom no one showed it as Kretschman rose and slowly walked to the witness chair where he was sworn in.

"Colonel," Tom Smith began, "we are all very well aware of the gravity of this situation, you included." Kretschman nodded gravely, without speaking. "You are charged with knowingly sending thousands of German prisoners of war to their deaths at the hands of the Russians and dozens of women to be gang raped, some of them to death. We contend that you did not then understand the nature of the Russian thirst for revenge, and intend to prove that fact to the court." He bent towards Kretschman and repeated what he had said to him in private two nights earlier, but loud enough for everyone to hear.

"Did you do it intentionally? Did you knowingly send all those people to death and rapine?" It was a prearranged clue. Kretschman did the second act to his reaction from two nights earlier. His eyes flashed, his jowls dropped, his face flushed. His words were paraphrases of before, with genuine supercharged emotion. He was a man fighting for his life and all too aware of potential outcomes.

"I.....I....was....was still so....so.....livid. Shocked. Outraged. By what I saw in the Mauthausen concentration subcamp. The bodies. The piles of bodies. Stacked liked cordwood. And the living. Walking skeletons. Men, women, children. How could this be? The Germans. My ancestral people. How could they do this to other human beings? I was ashamed of them, even of my own German blood. Germans! Germans did this! My own blood. I wanted them punished......I wanted the Russians to punish them as the Germans had punished others in their death camps. But I didn't listen to others. I didn't grasp just how brutal the really Russians were. When I did, it was too late."

"And when was that?" Smith asked right on cue.

"When they filed across the river. I've never seen so many despondent faces. Then, as the last of them were across, it started. Gunfire. Shootings that had to be executions. Then, the screams of the German women. We could hear it all. From our side of the river. Some of my men actually cried. Others looked at me as though they wanted to shoot me." He looked at Smith with eyes there were genuinely tragic. "Oh, my God. You can't imagine the times I wished to good Lord that I could relive that day. Relive it and refuse to send the prisoners into the merciless hands of the Russians." Then, even to Smith's astonishment, Kretschman began to silently weep.

"God," he gasped through his tears, "how I wish I could undo what I did." He looked up at the four members of the court with teary, bloodshot eyes.

"I didn't know what would happen then, but that doesn't make me any less guilty."

_Perfect!_ Tom Smith thought to himself, Kretschman pulled it off perfectly. But at the same time, watching Kretschman perform his grief stricken act a second time, Tom Smith knew deep in his intuitive gut that Bernard Kretschman was absolutely guilty and very likely had no real remorse for what he had done beyond self pity for whatever personal price he might have to pay. But, Smith concluded in his very private thinking, at least he, Tom Smith, had done his best as a defense attorney.

Not that it made him feel any better.

### The Trial

Phase IV

Following Kretschman's tearful performance, the court adjourned as the four jurors huddled privately in an adjacent room. The others in the courtroom filed out to their various destinations while awaiting the verdict. Kretschman and Smith went to the garden and walked, trying to lessen the tension. Others went into the kitchen for a cup of tea or coffee or a glass of Rhine wine. An hour later Hans Weitzel, who functioned more or less as a bailiff, called everyone back into the courtroom. Fritz Meineke took his place at the prosecutor's table, Hans Weitzel standing near the court's dais. Kretschman and Smith sat at the defendant's table. General von Wittendorf, Witbold Schrülen, Uwe Schlegel and Michael Wendig all sat in the observers' section. The four jurors solemnly reentered the courtroom, all present rose as the jurors seated themselves. And, then, for the final time, Judge Erika von der Heide gaveled the court into session.

"To all of you present, and, of course, especially to you, Colonel Kretschman and defense attorney Schmidt, the court wants to make these points." She looked at the jurors each, in turn, nodding approval. "Individually and collectively, we jurors have been involved in many dozens of trials. Our collective experience has lead us to an unanimous conclusion. We accept the testimony of former MP Captain Michael Wendig as reliable." Wendig smiled, feeling at least somewhat redeemed from his military humiliation. Kretschman winced. Tom Smith was impassive.

"Since we have accepted Captain Wendig's testimony as accurate and factual, it is the finding of the court that he corroborates the testimonies of the other witnesses. There can be no doubt that Colonel Bertram Kretschman, against the advice, even entreaties, of his fellow officers, and without direct orders from his superiors to do so, did knowingly send over five thousand German men and women into the grasp of the Russians." Von der Heide again glanced for affirmation from the other judges, which was immediately forthcoming with unmistakably positive nods.

"The court further finds that Colonel Kretschman, though understandably distraught from what he saw in the Mauthausen concentration subcamp, was aware of the barbarity of the Russians against captured German soldiers and their reputation for gang raping German women, did nevertheless, with definite malice, send these Germans to their gruesome fate." Judge Erika von der Heide looked coldly at Bernard Kretschman, who had grown sullen and withdrawn as she spoke.

"It is the unanimous decision of this court that you, Colonel Bernard Kretschman, are, beyond a reasonable doubt, guilty as charged." Kretschman surged to his feet.

"Bullshit. All bullshit. This is nothing but a kangaroo court and you're just a bunch of fucking Nazis who still won't admit your guilt. I'm nothing more than a scapegoat!" Tom Smith grabbed at Kretschman's arm, trying to jerk him back to his seat, but Kretschman pulled his arm free.

"You! You! You're one of them," he snarled at Smith. "Worse. Just like that fucking MP Captain, you're a traitor." Before Kretschman could say anything else Hans Weitzel rushed over, grabbed Kretschman and forced him back in his chair.

"Do you not want to remain unrestrained in the courtroom to hear the sentence we have pronounced upon you, Colonel Kretschman?" Kretschman was about to blast off again but this time Tom Smith, who had done his professional best for Kretschman and got nothing but vilification in return, and had long ago lost patience with Kretshman's posturing, reached over and grabbed him by the throat.

"Stay put, Kretschman, or I'll put restraints on you myself." Kretschman, realizing too late he has just alienated his only ally in the court, slumped disconsolately into his chair.

"Colonel Kretschman," Judge Erika von der Heide said in a tight voice. "The court has already decided that you be present in the courtroom at the time of sentencing. We have agreed that if you continue to refuse to cooperate, we will order you shackled and gagged and then proceed with our findings." She looked at Kretshman, her face almost revealing her dislike for him. "Is that understood."

"Understood," Kretschman answered in a weak voice. "I get to hear you're going to kill me." Von der Heide's raised eyebrows telegraphed what she was going to say. Kretschman beat her to it. "I'll be quiet," he said in the same weak voice. "What's the point not to. This is a done deal." He slumped back into his chair.

"This court has presided over nearly three dozen trials in the last dozen years, Judge von der Heide said. "It has not been easy. We all have lives, jobs, families, responsibilities outside of this courtroom. But we have also had our responsibility to this courtroom." Again she looked from one to the other of her fellow jurists. Again there were nods of approval. "We have concluded that this courtroom, this organization, Ausgleich, has fulfilled its purpose. We have brought justice where there was none. We have balanced the scales. We have brought equality. We also believe that enough has been done to at least cement in place the concept of equal justice for all. It can never be complete. It will always be ongoing. We hope that there will be no need in the future for an Ausgleich. But....perhaps at some point in the future another court, another Ausgleich will be needed. But not this one. This will be our last trial." Everyone except Kretschman already knew it was the last trial, so there were no gasps of surprise. And Kretschman was obsessed with one thing and one thing only. His own fate.

"This court has pronounced death sentences over two dozen times," Judge von der Heide continued. Kretschman blanched. "All but one carried out, that one a natural death before the execution could be effected. Most were Slavs. Russians, Poles, Serbs, Czechs. But you are not the first American. Before you were Sergeant Caldwell, Lieutenant Jones, Lieutenant Swillington. All death sentences. All," Kretschman gulped loudly, "carried out by the families of the victims. Here it comes, Kretschman thought. I'm next. Then Judge von der Heide completely surprised both Kretshman and Tom Smith.

"This court, Colonel Kretschman, believes that there has been too much death and that it is time to end it." This riveted Kretschman's attention and he leaned forward even as Judge Erika von der Heide bent towards him.

"This is what we propose to do......"

### Chapter 14

### The Pole

Uwe Schlegel knocked on General von Wittendorf''s study door.

"Ja," the General responded, looking up from the document he was reading. "What is it?" Uwe, who had returned to the General's villa to finish up the loose ends left after Ausgleich's final session, opened the door and leaned inside with the easy familiarity that ruled their long term relationship.

"Somebody here you should see, General," Uwe said with an urgency unusual in his calm manner of speaking. "Somebody _important_." That grabbed the General's attention. He straightened from his hunched over reading posture and looked with acute interest at Uwe.

"Wer?" Who?

"Dyta," replied Uwe in the same unusually urgent tone. "And she was something of great interest to tell you." It was Dyta, the Polish--actually 3/4 Polish and 1/4 German--apple cheeked peasant girl who grew up on the von Wittenberg estate in East Prussia, became like one of the family--no, became _one_ of the family--nurse maided the family's children and tended to the daily details of the smooth functioning of the von Wittendorf household. And, what riveted her forever to the heart and soul of the General, she was the eyewitness and only survivor of the nexus event of the General's life, the barbaric rape and murder of the von Wittendorf family in East Prussia by drunken invading Russians. The General was able to use his influence and the fact of Dyta having a German grandparent to bring her to West Germany. She was living with her sister in a modern flat purchased by the General in one of the buildings built in Munich to replace those bombed out by the mercilessly thorough Allied bombing of the war.

The General leaped to his feet in an instant. "Bring her in!" She was just behind Uwe, Schlegel knowing full well what the General's reaction would be to this very particular intrusion into his always overloaded work day. A middle aged woman, still shapely and attractive and with more than a hint of the rosy cheeks of her rural upbringing, her blond hair streaked with gray, stepped in the doorway. The General was about to rush towards her to embrace this old friend and memory from those long gone better days. He stopped in his tracks. Her face. She was not smiling. No. And not frowning. It was beyond that. Then he recognized what it was. Anger. A deep, abiding anger. The General at once knew that a dark shadow had just reappeared in his life. There was only one thing that could put such a roiling anger on Dyta's amiable face.

It had to be something about the war.

The General approached Dyta slowly, as she did to him. They met halfway into the room and embraced. Not with joy. With solace. For that went before. And, both intuited whether they consciously knew it or not, what was yet to come. Uwe quietly left the room, softly closing the door behind him. No sooner had the door closed than Dyta lapsed into tears. Tears of frustration. Tears of anger. Tears of bitterness. And tears of revenge.

"Dyta, Dyta, liebe Dyta," the General said gently, trying to be soothing while also anxious to learn what could have caused this outburst of angry emotion. All of their other meetings in recent years had been for the most part joyful. Some tears, of course. How could there not be? Yet still joyful, albeit perhaps partly the guilty joy of the survivor. But this? This was something different. Something that had to be compellingly different. And it could not be good.

"The Pole," she said in a growling voice that reflected her boiling insides. "That devil Pole. I saw him. In Munich. Yesterday." The General was at first taken aback. Pole? What Pole was she talking about? Dyta saw the puzzlement on the General's face.

"The Pole who was with the Russians who came to the manor. I saw him many times after that in the neighborhood near your former estate. He was some kind of official with the Polish Communist government. He was a mean-spirited and arrogant man. All the Poles detested him. They called him Der Führer behind his back." General von Wittendorf's face went white. Mein Gott! _That_ Pole?

"This is the man who raped you and told you should be grateful he saved your life?" Dyta nodded an angry yes. "And who was involved with the rape and murder of my family?" Dyta acknowledged with a shake of her head so violent that a strand of hair came loose from her swept back hairstyle and dangled over her forehead.

"I saw him rape your youngest daughter," she said. "And knock your father to the ground with his rifle butt when he tried to stop him." The General's face went from white to livid. The man who raped his twelve year old daughter was in Munich? "What is his name?"

"Jerzy was his first name. We called him by his nickname, Der Führer. I'm not sure of the last name. Ended with a 'ski'. Started with a 'K', I think."

"Do your know where he is staying or what he is doing in Munich?" The General asked, agitated, his hands shaking.

"He did not recognize me. So many years. And no reason to remember me. Just another face of the many he abused. But I had very strong reason to remember _him._ I followed him to the Stadthofer Hotel. He went inside and didn't come back out. I think he must be is staying there." She stopped talking and stared levelly at General von Wittendorf. No words were necessary. Her intense expression said it all. What was the General going to do about this murdering bastard being within reach?

That was as much information as Dyta had, but more than enough for the bloodhounds of Ausgleich General von Wittendorf had called upon over the years. Ausgleich might have ended its official career, but this called for extraordinary measures. He called Uwe back into the room and told him to take Dyta to the kitchen and get her something to eat while he did some fast checking. Within the hour he learned that a Polish trade delegation was staying at the Stadthofer Hotel. Among them was a man named Jerzy Kowalski, the only one with the given name of Jerzy. It had to be the same man Dyta had seen on the street in Munich near both the Hauptbahnhoff, the main train station, and the Stadthofer Hotel. Then he went to the kitchen where Uwe and Dyta were quietly conversing.

"We have to go to Munich, Dyta," the General said. "You must point this man out to me so I know what he looks like." He turned to look at Uwe, who had a questioning look on his face. The General was going himself? He did not get directly involved in investigations. But this, Uwe was as certain of as he was of anything on God's bittersweet Earth, was an achingly singular exception. "You will drive us, Uwe?" The General said. Uwe was on his feet and going for the car almost before the General's words left his tongue.

Little more than an hour later they were sitting over cups of steaming coffee at a Turkish sidewalk cafe hardly thirty feet from the Stadthofer Hotel's main entrance. The proprietor of the tiny cafe doubled as the waiter and revisited the trio at the table with increasing frequency, asking if they wanted anything more. Uwe understood that the man didn't want, and very likely couldn't afford, one his few tables to be taken over by long term sitters who didn't buy much. Uwe took him aside and quietly gave him an pair of American twenty dollar bills with the admonition that they didn't want to be bothered. The Turkish proprietor put the bills into his pocket, shrugged and said with a wink "I see nothing" and busied himself with preparing baklava and kadayif for the afternoon's sweet toothed customers.

They were towards the end of their second hour watching the entrance when a half dozen men came out, joking loudly and laughing. In Polish.

"There," Dyta said, trying not to stare. "That one in the middle, with the fat belly and a Lenin goatee. With the brown suit that looks like he slept in it. That's him. That's the devil Pole." General Freiherr von Wittendorf looked long and hard at the laughing rotund Pole who had raped Dyta and his 12 year old daughter and beat his father to the ground with a rifle butt. This man, the General promised himself, would never leave Munich. Not alive. But first the General had to make absolutely certain this was the same man from that horrific day in 1945.

"Dyta," the General said in a low voice, "please don't be offended. But I have to make sure. Is there anything else about the man to identify him?" Dyta didn't take offense. This was way beyond something as trivial as being offended.

"Yes," she answered so quickly it surprised the General. "The man has a shriveled arm. The right one." All three of the people at the table, the General, Dyta, Uwe, tried to tell if the man Dyta said was the bastard from the von Wittendorf family debacle. They couldn't tell. They couldn't make out the movements of his right arm. Suddenly the general jumped to his feet and strode rapidly towards the group of Poles standing on the broad sidewalk outside the Stadthofer Hotel. Uwe would have tried to caution him, but the general was on his feet and gone before he could react.

General von Wittendorf strode directly towards the group of Poles and went directly to Jerzy Kowalski.

"Kowalksi?" He said in Russian. "Is that you?" He held out his hand, expecting Kowalksi to extend his. Again, in Russian. "Do you not remember me?" Kowalski's right hand instinctively reacted, but only a few inches. Enough for the General to see the deformed right arm. The right arm dropped back to his side and Kowalski reached out with his left hand to grasp the General's.

"I.....I.....do not recall you," he said in a nearly unintelligible Russian. General von Wittendorf continued chattering in Russian and Kowalski grew increasingly confused. Finally the General threw up his arms in exasperation, apologized in Russian and his own very bad Polish, turned on his heels and walked away.

"Who was that?" Said one of the Poles to Kowalski.

"I have no fucking idea," he replied. "But I think he must be someone from the war." A pause. "There were so many, you know. Those fucking Russians were everywhere. Like lice." That brought chuckles to the Poles who, though in a government dominated by the Communist proxies of the Russians, were none too fond of the imperious Russians.

Soon the laughing Poles were gone and the General and Uwe returned to the General's villa, after first dropping Dyta at her nearby flat.

"I will keep you informed," the General said as Dyta climbed out of the General's older model--but carefully maintained--BMW. "I promise." Dyta leaned over, planted a kiss on the General's cheek, smiled, turned to go and said:

"And you are the man who keeps his promises," she said. "Of that I have never had a single doubt." She was thinking of that day, years ago, when he came to the old estate and found her, found out the bitter truth of what happened to his family, and in an intense volcanic outburst of anger, building within for many years, distorting his handsome features as he hissed out the words she would never forget.

"If I ever find the man responsible for this I will kill the bastard with my own hands!"

That day, Dyta thought to herself as she climbed the stairs to her flat, had now come. For the first time that day, since she caught sight of the devil Pole, her face lit up. If for some unfathomable reason the General did not kill the bastard, he's still die.

Even if she had to do it herself.

General von Wittendorf called upon his wide range of contacts to get the details of the Polish trade delegation's itinerary. And, more importantly, when they would be at the hotel and, the most important, what room Jerzy Kowalski was staying in.

There was a knock at the door. 9:00 in the evening. Kowalski looked up from the book he was reading. The TV was turned off. He didn't understand German and the TV was like a visual Tower of Babel to him. Not that religious imagery meant anything to him. Whatever belief he once had in a God died in the horrors of World War II. Jerzy started to say in Polish "who's there?" Then he thought, if it's the German-speaking staff of the hotel--many of them were actually non-Germans--they won't understand Polish. As the knocking was repeated, Jerzy rose to his feet, clumsily, having had three strong drinks plus being overweight and awkward, and approached the door. He peered through the peep hole. It was a woman. Someone he didn't know. Room service, possibly? He cracked the door open and was instantly surprised by her words.

"I know you from Poland," a nice looking middle aged blond woman said in perfect Polish. "I must talk to you. It's urgent." Kowalski, still surprised but also very curious, opened the door wide. The woman, looking nervously around her, quickly stepped inside Kowalski's room. Before Kowalski could recover from his surprise, two men surged through the door, one of holding a pistol pointed directly at Kowalski's forehead.

"Don't say a word," the blond woman said to Kowalski in a harsh tone far different from the obsequious one of moments before. "He will kill you if you make a single sound." The second man stepped behind Kowalski, grabbed him and held a wicked looking knife to his throat. "And no one will hear," Dyta said as Uwe dropped the pistol to his side and General Freiherr von Wittendorf held the knife tightly against Kowalski's throat and struggled mightily with the overpowering urge to slice the man's jugular then and there.

Nearly an hour passed before, alerted from the lobby that no one was present, the three abductors walked their prisoner out of the Stadthofer Hotel and to a waiting older model BMW that stopped outside the Hotel's door just as they came down the steps. They were joined by Witbold Schrülen, who had immediately responded to the General's request for help that evening, and who was at the Hotel Stadthofer's desk. The regular night clerk snored in a back room from a tall cup of strong coffee lacked with sleeping pills, thoughtfully delivered by the night staff of a nearby all night restaurant. In an instant the BMW, driven by another hastily summoned Ausgleich member, Hans Weitzel, pulled around a corner and they were gone.

Jerzy Kowalski wasn't missed under nearly noon the next day. No one knew what had happened to him.

Well, _almost_ no one.

Ausgleich had officially disbanded after the trial of the American Colonel Kretschman. Its former meticulous methods of investigation and discovery, verification and documenting, were short circuited by the sudden appearance in Munich of Jerzy Kowalski. Was there any choice but to call for an emergency reopening of the Ausgleich courtroom for this totally unexpected occurrence? To do otherwise would mean Kowalski would vanish back behind the Iron Curtain in Communist Poland and be exceedingly difficult, if not outright impossible, to reach. In this case Ausgleich distilled to a single supremely focused individual. General Freiherr von Wittendorf. Kowalski would _not_ escape unscathed. So Ausgleich--the General--took exigent action.

But then had to also very atypically scramble to follow up on the result.

The rest of Ausgleich, learning of Kowalski's identity and out of respect for General von Wittendorf, agreed, albeit not with much enthusiasm, to reopen the Ausgleich courtroom for one last session.

Tom Smith had little time to prepare a defense and did so with great reluctance, knowing the specific nature of Kowalski's war crimes. Smith's long experience with General von Wittendorf had planted a seed of respect that blossomed over the years into a studied admiration. To him von Wittendorf was a flesh and blood symbol of the _other_ Germany, the centuries old civilized, cultured, educated and fundamentally decent one that was subsumed by the terrible epoch of the Third Reich and the insanely barbaric Nazis. Yet this man of dignity and honor had suffered the most horrendous personal losses imaginable in that bastard Hitler's war. His entire family murdered, his property confiscated and his East Prussian homeland scraped clean of its German presence and gone forever to foreign usurpation. Yet Smith was to defend one of the men who had raped and murdered the general's family. The thought repelled him so much he was actually physically sick. But, revolted as he was by it, he'd still do his best to defend the man in the Ausgleich courtroom. The world of a defense attorney was one often bitter to the human taste.

The judges of Ausgleich, equally ill at ease with such extemporized haste, had to scramble to clear their calendars and make their various ways to the Ausgleich courtroom. It was the morning of the third day before they were all assembled and Erika von der Heide--the General again recusing himself--gaveled the court into order. There was a new person in the courtroom, one who by necessity had to perform a dual role. Witness. And interpreter. Dyta. Who, as part of the political maneuvering to get her from Poland to West Germany had changed her last name to that of her maternal grandfather. Widmer.

Jerzy Kowalski was escorted into the courtroom by Thomas Schmidt and immediately pointed his finger at Dyta.

"You!" He said in Polish. "Bitch! You are the one from the door in the hotel."

"Yes," Dyta answered, trying to remain calm. "At the hotel." She couldn't control the intensely hostile look that erupted from within and took command of her features. "And not _just_ the hotel!" Then Kowalski, pointing at the General seated in the gallery, yelled out even louder. "And you! You devious Russian bastard!"

"Not Russian," Dyta said in Polish through clenched jaws. "German. He is German."

"Top of Form

"Niemiecki!" Kowalski spit out the Polish word for German as though it were a vile curse and then launched into a long string of Polish anti-German epithets that Dyta thought better left untranslated to a courtroom full of Germans.

At that moment everyone in the room knew that this was going to be the most unusual, and by far least judicial, of all of Augleich's trials.

Fritz Meineke rose to his feet, looking tired and worn from the abrupt departure away from the perpetually pressing demands of his normal workday. He hadn't had much sleep.

"Mr. Kowalski," Fritz began, reading from a document that both Uwe Schlegel and General von Wittendorf had earlier prepared. "You are before this courtroom and charged with war crimes." Dyta translated Meineke's words into Polish and Kowalski's face reddened as he exploded with vehemence in his native Polish.

"War crimes! Court? What the fuck is this? Who the fuck are you? What the hell is this about?" The venomous words, although in Polish, needed no translation. Meineke continued. "In the month of January of 1945, in the former German province of East Prussia, you, along with a group of Russian soldiers, entered the estate of the von Wittendorf family." Meineke stopped, giving Dyta a change to translate. As she put Meineke's words into Polish Kowalski's demeanor changed. His seemed almost to collapse into himself, somehow looking smaller and thinner, and his face grew pallid. Looking at him not a single person in the courtroom doubted that Kowalski was at that moment realizing _exactly_ what this was about.

"You, Mr. Kowalski, and the Russians with you, then raped all the women in the von Wittendorf household, from children to old women. Some of them were raped to death. Others lived on to suffer even more rapes. You were seen raping a 12 year old girl. You were also observed to take a rifle butt to the head of the household, Graf von Wittendorf, and beat him to the ground. At the same time his eight year old grandson, Willi, was also beaten to the ground. Both of them were shot. Later, after the raping was done, everyone was shot."

After Meineke's words were translated again, Kowalski, certain of his memories of that day when they killed them all and dumped their battered bloody bodies in a garbage pit, whirled on Dyta and said to her in Polish, "Tell them that is only rumor. They have no proof." Then, with a touch more conviction, "ask them. _Where_ is the proof?" Dyta, struggling with increasing difficulty to remain poised, translated that to both the court and Kowalski's defense attorney, Tom Smith. Tom Smith, knowing the facts from the prosecution's hastily arranged disclosures, understood it was hopeless but nevertheless jumped to his feet.

"Correct! Where is the proof? These are just old and worn out allegations from imperfect and fading memories. Where is the direct evidence?" Tom was aware that the General was sitting in the courtroom behind him and undoubtedly troubled by such words coming from a friend and close associate. But he also knew the General understood Tom had to fulfill his role as a defense attorney as best he could. Which was exactly why von Wittendorf had selected Tom for the defense attorney in the first place. In this particular instance, however, Tom's best was doomed to fail, and by a considerable margin. The margin in this case being Dyta. The eyewitness. The survivor. The woman raped by the defendant. The woman who saw with her own horrified eyes General von Wittendorf's family brutally raped and murdered.

"We will get to your point, Herr Schmidt," Erika von der Heide said without noticeable emotion. "Herr Meineke is at this point reading the charges. Your turn will come. And _soon_." She looked sharply at him, knowing that all the Ausgleich judges had been called away from their various important duties without the careful preparation that characterized Ausgleich's methods and couldn't be gone from their outside worlds for long. The trial had to be a fast one. Either than or a continuance and the continued detention of Jerzy Kowalski. Which, Judge Erika von der Heide already suspected, was exactly what Tom Smith had in mind. A prediction that arrived almost immediately.

"The preparations for this trial have been too hasty," Tom said, facing the four judges. "I have had little opportunity to prepare a defense." Fritz Meineke was already rising to his feet as Smith continued. "I ask for a continuance for enough time to prepare this man's defense."

"This man is a Polish government official who has gone missing," Meineke interjected. "There is already an intensive search for him which we cannot long deflect. To hold this man for any length of time threatens to unveil the existence of this court and open us all to retribution of God knows how many different kinds."

"That possibility nevertheless does not guarantee a fair due process for the defendant. I need time."

"You have until tomorrow morning," Erika von der Heide said, after first quietly conferring with the other three judges.

"And that is final!"

Tom Smith had no choice but to include Dyta Widmer in his frenetic attempts at cobbling together some sort of defense. Kowalski didn't speak German and Smith didn't speak Polish. Dyta was the only bilingual German/Polish speaker among the people at the General's Bavarian villa. There were probably other bilinguals that Ausgleich might find, but it would take time and, more importantly and even more time consuming, a careful vetting process. There was, plainly enough, too little time for any of that. So that left Smith with Dyta as his interpreter, which was easily the touchiest situation he had ever been involved with in any discussions with a client, both within the Ausgleich courtroom and in his legal practice in Munich. About the only positive thing Smith could say about it was that at least Kowalski didn't realize who she was and Dyta managed to refrain from telling him. Barely. But she managed.

Kowalski refused to admit his guilt. He claimed that he was not involved with the murder of the von Wittendorf family and was not even there, though he did hear of it from another Pole who did say he was there and described some of what had happened.

"This other man. I saw him in the town," Kowalksi said in Polish to Dyta. "He said he was at the feudal estate of the Prussians. The von......von somethings. With the Russians. And they did bad things to the Prussians. Very bad things. It made me sad to hear it, even if they were Germans." Dyta's hands unconsciously balled into fists as she translated Kowalski's words to Smith.

"Von Wittendorfs," Dyta said through her barely concealed anger. "That was the name of the German family."

"Yes," Kowalski answered. "Now that you say it, I believe that was the name."

"What was this other man's name?" Dyta translated back into Polish for Smith, trying to hide her intense disdain for his dissembling. _Be a man, you bastard_ , Dyta thought to herself. _Be a man, admit what you did and face the consequences._ But those were only her thoughts. And certainly not those of Jerzy Kowalski.

"I never did know the man's name," Kowalksi lied. "He was not a local. He was there for a day or two and then he was gone. I think he was involved with the Russians in some way." Kowalski stopped, thought a moment, then sought to deflect the questioning. "I do know the Russians did a lot of bad things to the Germans all over the countryside in those days." A knowing look that was in fact genuine. "A _lot_ of bad things."

"But not the Poles," Dyta translated to Kowalski. "They weren't involved with the atrocities?" Kowalski shook his head.

"A few. Not many. Every people has its criminals. Like that guy who told me he was there when the Prussian vons were murdered." And that was as far as Tom Smith could get. Kowalski continued to maintain he was not present at the von Wittendorf estate and that this was a case of mistaken identity for that other Pole whose name he didn't know who really was there. Smith and Dyta knew with certainty that these were lies. Kowalski's withered right arm had cemented Dyta's identification with absolutely finality. No reasonable doubt finality. Kowalski didn't know that. Not yet.

But he would soon enough.

### The Trial

The next morning Kowalski glumly preceded Tom Smith into the vaulted basement room, heavily reinforced as a bomb shelter during World War II, that Ausgleich converted into its courtroom. Kowalski looked drawn and pale. He had not slept during the night. He stood alongside Tom Smith as Erika von der Heide again gaveled the court into session. As the assembled group, the prosecution, the defense, the gallery, sat down, Judge von der Heide looked dispassionately at Fritz Meineke. "Are you prepared to begin, Herr Meineke?" Fritz, who had grabbed some much needed sleep and looked far better than the haggard presence of the day before, rose to his feet.

"Yes," he said, addressing the entire panel of judges. "I am ready."

Dyta, who remained by necessity the translator, put the words into Polish for Kowalski. His reaction was a wordless seething.

"As established in the courtroom during yesterday's initial session," Fritz began, "the defendant, Jerzy Kowalski, has pleaded innocent to the charge of war crimes." Dyta translated and Kowalski suddenly lurched out of his dour slump to pound on the table as he yelled out "innocent!" in Polish. Meineke paused until Kowalksi quieted, then continued. "I shall now prove that Mr. Kowalski is in fact guilty." Kowalski spit at the floor and muttered in profane Polish at Meineke when Dyta translated. Smith was mildly surprised when Judge von der Heide did not admonish the defendant for his behavior. Another such vulgar demonstration, the judge promised herself, and she would. But, really, what difference did it make? Everyone in the room knew that, no matter what Ausgleich's verdict was, Kowalski's brief moment on Earth was about to end. The expression on General von Wittendorf's face when he entered the courtroom testified to that fact far more eloquently than mere words ever could.

"I call my first witness," Fritz Meineke said in his well rested normal sonorous courtroom voice. "General Freiherr von Wittendorf." As Dyta translated Jerzy Kowalski's mouth drooped wide, his ample jowls taking on an extra fold, when he saw the man he thought was a Russian come through the courtroom door and approach the judges' dais.

"That man?" Kowalski whispered to Tom Smith. "He really is von Wittendorf?" Dyta quickly translated the answer.

"Yes." She said without further elaboration while Kowalski stared in surprise at von Wittendorf's back as he was sworn in. Meineke began his questioning.

"Your name is Freiherr von Wittendorf, is that correct?" An affirmative nod. "And the rapes and murders alleged to have been caused by the defendant and others were of your own family?"

"Yes," von Wittendorf said in a hard voice, staring icily at Jerzy Kowalski. "My family. My _entir_ e family." Jerzy Kowalski did not avert his eyes. A fucking Prussian blueblood! One of those Prussian bastards who lorded it over everyone, even ordinary Germans. They all got what they deserved. Which was why he was with the Russians at the von Wittendorf estate on that dark day. And why he willingly, no, more than that, enthusiastically, took part in the extermination of that family and what they represented. The long centuries of feudal oppression. He, and others like him, were the true heroes of the war. They swept East Prussia clear of the goddamn strutting aristocrats to make way for the fresh new world of communist equality. What were deaths to the exploitive few compared to a better future for the many? Or so Kowalski told himself he believed at the time. The better future didn't turn out to be the communistic golden age they all expected, but he had done very well himself and now, though he could not or would not see it in himself, as a member of the Polish Communist Elite he was closer in social status to the vanquished Prussian aristocrats than he was to the common people of Poland. He still held onto the time worn old ideas, mouthed the expected shibboleths at the appropriate times and places. Admittedly, with secret doubts--though he gladly accepted the percs of being among the Polish Communist elite.

But he wasn't about to say any of that. At least not yet.

"Herr von Wittendorf," Meineke said, intentionally omitting both judge and general from the address, "were you present at the time of the massacre of your family?" Tom Smith was on his feet.

"Alleged massacre," he said without much conviction. "We have no proof it actually happened." Meineke was unphased, though von Wittendorf was noticeably shaken. Which made Tom Smith all the more uncomfortable with his role of defense attorney.

"Call it an alleged massacre, then," Meineke said. "At least for now." He readdressed himself to von Wittendorf. "If you were not at the von Wittendorf estate at the time of the _alleged_ atrocities, where were you?"

"I was in the German Army, commanding troops who were trying to stop the Russian advance. We were pushed out of East Prussia and lost contact with those left behind."  
"And when did you learn of the so-called alleged murders of your family?"

"While I was in a Russian prisoner of war camp. An officer who was captured in East Prussia was transferred to the camp I was in. He had heard of the deaths of my family."

"I call attention to the court that this is heresay," Tom Smith said, rising once more to his full six feet next to the pallid rotund shape of Jerzy Kowalski. "This proves nothing."

"Perhaps. We shall see, Herr Schmidt," Erika replied, gesturing at the General. "Please continue."

"A German speaking Russian officer who was in the area at the time of the deaths told the captured German officer, Colonel Stadler, who was from East Prussia and knew of my family, that all of the Prussian aristocrats still in East Prussia had been murdered by the Soviets. It was their policy. Get rid of the Junker class once and for all." General von Wittendorf looked over at Tom Smith and Tom had no doubt that the General was reassuring him that he was not offended by Smith's actions as a defense attorney. "We were told by other Russians among our captors that the hard core Communists in the Soviet Union, especially the front line commissars, believed the Junkers of East Prussia were warmongers who had lured Germany into war with the Soviets." The General gave a hard look to Jerzy Kosinski, who glared back at the general with the same hatred in his eyes that was there back on that bloody day in early 1945 on the von Wittendorf estate.

"We also heard," the General went on, "that many of the Junkers in East Prussia, and, indeed many among the general population, committed suicide rather than face Russian vengeance." The General paused, clearing his throat, and turned his gaze towards Fritz Meineke. He was a very disciplined man, yet he was on the teetering edge of blowing any sense of courtroom decorum to leap up and charge the Polish murdering bastard and throttle him with his own hands. Instead he averted his eyes to the friendly face of Fritz Meineke.

"I was in the Russian prisoner of war camp for four years," the general continued. "Over that time others officers were transferred in and others left. The same was true of the translators the Russians used," he paused again and a hint of amusement touched his dignified face, '"many of them were Volga Germans with very thick accents which we found hard to understand. And even among Russians there was a steady turnover. Not all of the Russian officers were hostile to us, in fact I think some of them were actually anti-Communists though they dared not admit it. We gradually learned what had happened in East Prussia. All the Germans were either exterminated or violently expelled to the west. This happened all over eastern Europe. What the Germans still call the Vertreibung. The German towns in East Prussia became Russian and Polish towns with new names and they made every attempt at erasing the very memory of a German presence. The ancestral von Wittendorf estate was parceled out to Poles. There were no more Germans left. East Prussia was gone. Forever."

"What is the point in this, Judge von der Heide?" Tom Smith said, "it proves nothing and even if it did, there is no connection to the defendant, Mr. Kowalski."

"We are just coming to that point," Meineke answered. "Let the General finish."

"During the long years of captivity," General Wittendorf said, "we gradually made contact with friends and distant relatives in Germany and learned what had happened. I already knew that our ancestral home was gone. I also knew that if my family had escaped to the west I would have learned about it through the Red Cross. Since there were no more Germans left in what had been East Prussia, it had to mean that my family was dead. I assumed that, like many of the East Prussian Junkers, they chose suicide over either expulsion or Soviet revenge."

Tom Smith was about to throw out another objection, but the General's words came first.

"So, when I was finally released from the Russian prisoner of war camp I was given permission to revisit my old home to see if there were any traces of my family. I went there and that is when I learned the true facts of the horrible fate of my family."

"This still proves nothing," Tom Smith said. "Where is the proof?" Fritz Meineke pointed at Dyta.

"There. There is the proof. My next witness. Dyta Widmer." The General left the witness stand and seated himself in the gallery. Dyta strode to the witness chair. Behind her, Jerzy Kowalski stared dumbly at Dyta as she was sworn in and took a seat.

"What the fuck is going on here?" Kowalski blurted out. "First a guy who says he's a Russian but turns out to be a German. And now the Polish interpreter is a fucking witness against me? How can this be anything but a sham of a trial?"

"It's the best you're going to get," Dyta snapped back to him in Polish. "And far more than you deserve, you piece of human excrement!" Comments Dyta saw fit to not translate into German.

"Would you please," Fritz Meineke said, "tell us what you know of the events of that day in early 1945 on the von Wittendorf estate in East Prussia?" Dyta responded, first in German, then repeating it in Polish for Kosinksi.

"I was there," she began, staring with undisguised hatred at Kowalski. "I saw the Russians come, rape the women, shoot the men and then the women who still survived. They did not kill me because I was Polish, though I was raped." She pointed a finger at Kowalski as though it were a gun. "By that man there. Jerzy Kosinski, who I also saw rape 12 year old Martha von Wittendorf and beat her grandfather, Graf von Wittendorf, to the floor with the butt of his rife. I will hear their screams and pleas for the rest of my life."

Jerzy Kosinksi was stunned. That Polish woman! It is her. The bitch. That fucking Polish bitch. He remembered. She was there. At the fucking Prussian manor house.  
"I should have let them kill you," he snarled at Dyta. "Bitch. You dirty fucking bitch!" Dyta did translate that. Kosinski didn't grasp it at first, but he had just admitted being present during the murders.

"How do we know this is the same man?" Tom Smith interrupted. "This was a long time ago. Memories fade. Even after only a short time witnesses make incorrect identifications. And after so much time? How do know this is not so?"  
"The arm," Dyta said. "That's how I know for sure. His crippled arm. That and I often saw him strutting around the neighborhood after the war, acting as though he was the lord of the land." She threw an intense look of mixed hatred and contempt at him. "We called him Little Hitler." When she translated that into Polish, along with a few pointed additions of her own, Kowalski leaped to his feet and began to yell at her in Polish. Hans Weitzel was there in an instant, grabbed Kowalski by both shoulders and shoved him back down into his chair.

"Shut the fuck up," he said in German, which Dyta immediately translated into Polish, again with an pithy addition of her own. Kowalski would not be silent. He continued to rant. Judge von der Heide threw a prearranged signal at Weitzel and in a surprisingly quick time--Weitzel was after all a Munich policeman--Kowalski was handcuffed to the chair and a gag fastened over this mouth. He still continued to rant, but the futility of it finally wore him down and he stopped.

"Will you refrain from any further outbursts if we remove your gag?" Judge von der Heide said to Kowalski. His gagged head signaled agreement. Erika motioned at Weitzel and the Munich policeman removed the gag and the handcuffs, expecting him to start yelling again. He didn't. Jerzy decided he's save his words for the right time. And this wasn't it. Not yet. Soon. But not yet.

Tom Smith vainly tried to argue that is could still be a case of mistaken identity, first hand identifications known to be notoriously unreliable, but Kowalski had torpedoed whatever dim chance there was of that argument working when he inadvertently admitted that he was at the von Wittendorf manor house at the time of the murders and, by direct inference, was guilty of raping Dyta and 12 year old Thema von Wittendorf.

Kowalski realized he was doomed. He accepted it. He was going to die. He was ready to make his final statement when they did the inevitable. Pronounced him guilty and sentenced him to death. He would hold forth eloquently, as he had so often done in Polish Communist meetings, and regale the court on how the Germans had exploited the Poles, how the Junkers exploited even ordinary Germans, how they were war mongers who brought disaster to untold numbers of human beings. The scourge of the Junkers had to be ended once and for all. It was brutal and ugly. Of course. But it was something that had to be done. Like the amputation of a gangrenous limb that would otherwise poison the entire body and kill it. There was, Kosinski would say in ending, no other choice but to kill the Junkers and take back the land the Germans had stolen from the Poles. He, Jerzy Kowalski, would not shirk from taking responsibility for the heroic act of ridding the earth once and for all of the plague of the German Junkers.

Then, when he saw both General von Wittendorf and Dyta staring at him with undisguised contempt, something inside him broke loose. He lost control again. Kowalski jumped to his feet and began to yell at the judges in Polish. Judge Erika von der Heide immediately directed Hans Weitzel and Uwe Schlegel to recuff Kosinski to the defendant's chair and put a gag around his mouth again. He yelled and cursed and spit and spewed out a string of curses as the two Germans wrestled him into submission.

Whatever pronouncements and epithets Kosinksi spit out before he was gagged went unrecognized. Dyta, with a completely guiltless pleasure, chose not to translate the devil's last words.

The entire Polish trade delegation returned to Communist Poland later that week. Including one of their number, Jerzy Kowalski, who made the return trip in a condition quite unlike the one when he arrived in Germany. In a coffin. Jerzy, who was known to be a heavy drinker, and occasionally go on binges, had gone on one binge too many. Whatever it was that set him off, Kowalksi went on a days-long binge and ended up passed out on the railroad tracks not far from the Stadthofer Hotel.

The engineer didn't see him until it was too late.

### Epilogue

### 1976

Judge Bernard Kretschman was back in the United States. He was sitting alone in his study in the old family farmhouse in the scenic rolling hills in southwestern Illinois he'd had renovated years ago as a quiet retreat from his busy political and legal life in Illinois and Washington DC. Kretschman had thus far avoided serious interrogation by the FBI, saying he needed time to steady his frayed nerves. They held off for a while because he was a sitting federal judge and a former congressman. But he knew they couldn't be stalled much longer. The television set was on and he was staring glumly at it. Had been for most of the day. Finally, it happened. An obviously excited news anchor interrupted a sports program with breaking news.

"Here, just in to our newsroom, is a video we received of Federal Judge Bertram Krestchman, who inexplicably disappeared two weeks ago and suddenly reemerged a week later without disclosing where he had been. The news anchor turned, as though he were looking at the video, which was in fact projected from the studio's control room onto the television feed. A camera closed in on the video. It was Judge Bernard Kretschman. He was seated, speaking distinctly into the camera.

"My name is Bernard Kretschman. I want to make it clear that I am not making this video under duress and that what I say is in fact the truth. I was formerly an Illinois state legislator and a United States congressional representative and am now a sitting judge on the federal bench in southern Illinois. That is now. A generation ago I was Colonel Bertram Kretschman, commanding the 361st unattached armored battalion of the United States Army in World War II, and was in charge of an American prisoner of war camp on the Elbe River at the very end of the war. And there I made the worst decision of my life. I sent thousands of German prisoners of war into the hands of the Russians, knowing at the time that some of them would be immediately executed, the women would be gang raped and possibly murdered, the rest would go to Russian slave labor camps where many would die. The fact is, hard as it is for Americans to swallow, that I am a......

Bernard Kretschman switched off the television. He didn't want to hear himself admitting to the Greatest Generation and their progeny that he, an American, was a war criminal. Even if he tried to maintain that his confession was made under duress, the very fact of its existence would spawn an endless series of questions. He could not bring himself to face what was sure to follow. The media would be on him even before the video finished playing. Mercilessly. Doggedly. On the phone, at his door. Following him wherever he went. Yelling embarrassing and insulting questions at him. There would be calls for his resignation from the federal bench and for him to lose his benefits as a former congressman. But that was not the worst of it. To have to face his wife, his children, his brother the retired Admiral, other relatives, his friends and colleagues. He simply could not do it. The Germans of Ausgleich had made their point to the American people. Not all war criminals were German. There were also some among America's Greatest Generation. Like Colonel Bertram Kretschman.

Kretschman picked up the Walther P38 semi-auto he took from a surrendering German Army major in 1945 and kept as a personal souvenir from the war. He placed the German handgun on his right temple just above the ear. "God help me," he said in a near whisper.

And then pulled the trigger.

****

The following are some of the sources that underlie the historical skeleton of Ausgleich

### Bibliography

Altner, Helmut _Berlin Dance of Death_ Translated by Tony le Tissler Casemate Havertown PA Softcover 2004

Ambrose, Stephen _D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II_ Softcover Simon and Schuster Touchstone Division New York 1995

Astor, Gerald _The Mighty Eighth The Air War In Europe As Told By The Men Who Fought It_ Softcover Random House Division Dell Publishing 1997

Beevor, Anthony _The Fall of Berlin 1945_ Softcover Penguin Books 2002

Bidermann, Gottlob _In Deadly Combat A German Soldier's Memoir Of The Eastern Front_ Softcover University Press of Kansas Lawrence KS 2000

Buttar, Prit _Battleground Prussia The Assault on German's Eastern Front 1944-45_ Osprey Publishing Ebook 2012

Carius, Otto _Tigers In The Mud The Combat Career Of German Panzer Commander Otto Carius_ Softcover Stackpole Military History Mechanicsburg PA 2003

De Zayas, Alfred _A Terrible Revenge The Ethnic Cleansing Of The East European Germans_ Second Edition Palgrave Macmillan Softcover New York 2006

De Zayas, Alfred The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau 1939-1945 Softcover The University of Nebraska Press 1989

Douglas, R.M. _Orderly and Humane The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War_ Yale University Press Hardcover New Haven 2012

Downs, Jim _World War II: OSS Tragedy In Slovakia_ Softcover Liefrinck Publishers Oceanside CA 2002

Friedrich, Jörg _The Fire The Bombing of Germany 1940-1945_ Columbia University Press Softcover New York 2006

Grayline, A.C. _Among The Dead Cities_ Walker Publishing Softcover New York 2006

Grossjohann, Georg Five Years, Four Fronts A German Officer's World War II Combat Memoir Softcover Ballentinte Books New York 2005

# Jacobs, Benjamin and Pool, Eugene The 100-Year Secret: Britain's Hidden World War II Massacre Hardcover Lyons Press 2004

Kieser, Egbert, _Prussian Apocalypse The Fall of Danzig 1945_ English Translation by Tony le Tissler Pen & Sword Military Ebook South Yorkshire Great Britain 2011

Kurowski, Franz The Brandenburg Commandos Germany's Elite Warrior Spies in WWII Softcover Stackpole Military History Books Mechanicsburg PA 2005

Le Tissler, Tony _Slaughter At Halbe The Destruction of Hitler's 9th Army_ Softcover Sutton Publishing Glouchester England 2007

Lowe, Keith _Savage Continent Europe In The Aftermath of World War_ _II_ Ebook St. Martin's Press New York 2012

MacDonogh, Giles _After The Reich The Brutal History Of The Allied Occupation_ Perseus Basic Books Softcover New York 2007

# Prince, Cathryn Death in the Baltic: The World War II Sinking of the Wilhelm Gustloff Softcover St Martins Press 2014

Taylor, Brian _The Battle Of_ _Königsberg The Struggle For The East Prussian Capital, October 1944 to April 1945_ Ebook Brian Taylor 2012

Trigg, Jonathan _Hitler's Vikings The Story Of The Scandinavian Waffen SS: The Legions, the SS-Wiking And The SS-Nordland_ The History Press Glouchstershire Great Britain Ebook 2012

Tsouras, Peter _Fighting In Hell The German Ordeal On The Eastern Front edited by Peter G. Tsouras_ Softcover Ballentine Ivy Books New York 1995

Von Mannstein, Field Marshall Erich _Lost Victories The War Memoirs of Hitler's Most Brilliant General_ Translated by Anthony G. Powell Softcover Ballentine Books via Zenith Press St. Paul MN 2004

Von Mellanthin, Major General F.W. _Panzer Battles A Study of the Employment of Armor in the Second World War_ Softcover Ballantine Books New York 1956

Voss, Johann _Black Edelweiss A Memoir of Combat And Conscience By A Soldier Of the Waffen-SS_ Softcover The Aberjona Press Bedford PA 2002

Zoepf, Wolf _Seven Days In January With The 6th SS-Mountain Division In Operation Northwind_ Hardcover The Aberjona Press Bedford PA 2001

### Online Sources

### Ships And Sinkings

### Cap Arcona

Cap-Arcona.com Mixed media presentation of the Cap Arcona tragedy

The world's greatest ship disaster: Not the RMS Titanic but the S.S. Cap Arcona.

http://cruiselinehistory.com/the-worlds-greatest-ship-disaster-not-the-rms-titanic-but-the-s-s-cap-arcona/

SS Cap Arcona-- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Cap_Arcona_%281927%29

The Sinking of the Cap Arcona--

http://www.feldgrau.com/articles.php?ID=79

Tragedy Of The Cap Arcona Baltic Sea--

http://www.worldnavalships.com/forums/archive/index.php/t-13395.html

Institute For Historical Review

The 1945 Sinkings of the Cap Arcona and the Thielbek--

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v19/v19n4p-2_Weber.html

### Wilhelm Gustloff

The Sinking Of The M.S. Wilhelm Gustloff--

http://www.wilhelmgustloff.com/sinking.htm

MV Wilhelm Gustloff--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Wilhelm_Gustloff

### Alexander Marinesko--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Marinesko

SS Deutschland (1923)--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Deutschland_%281923%29

### Goya--

### The Sinking of the Goya--

http://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=3360

Operation Hannibal\--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Hannibal

### Operation Hannibal January - May 1945--

http://compunews.com/s13/hannibal.htm

### Evacuation of East Prussia--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evacuation_of_East_Prussia

### Die Vertreibung/Ethnic Cleansing

### Sudeten Germans--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudeten_Germans

### Institute Of Historical Review

### An 'Unknown Holocaust' and the Hijacking of History--

http://www.ihr.org/other/july09weber.html

Königsberg, East Prussia Ethnic Cleansing After WW2

http://canitz.org/ethic-cleansing-after-ww2

### Documents on the Expulsion of the Sudeten Germans

### Survivors speak out. Free Online book.

http://www.wintersonnenwende.com/scriptorium/english/archives/whitebook/

### The Institute for Research of Expelled Germans--

http://expelledgermans.org/

### The History And Removal Of Czechoslovakia's Germans Through expulsion and Discriminatory laws

http://expelledgermans.org/sudetengermans.htm

### Die Flucht der deutschen Bevölkerung 1944/45

### (Flight of the German Population 1944/45)

https://www.dhm.de/lemo/kapitel/zweiter-weltkrieg/kriegsverlauf/massenflucht/

### Pomeranian Genealogy Expulsion from Pomerania

### (Vertreibung von Pommern)

http://www.genealoger.com/german/pommern/pommern__expulsion.htm

 Die Wedhorn Vertreibung (Expulsion)

http://www.many-roads.com/2012/03/19/the-wedhorns-vertreibung/

Alfred de Zayas' A Terrible Revenge online and free--

https://archive.org/details/A-Terrible-Revenge

### Bleiburg Reparations--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bleiburg_repatriations

### The Bleiburg Massacres--

http://www.serendipity.li/hr/bleiburg_massacres.htm

### German Victims-

http://www.germanvictims.com/2013/05/16/allied-war-crimes-post/

### The Destruction of Ethnic Germans and German Prisoners of War  
in Yugoslavia, 1945-1953--

http://www.ihr.org/other/sunic062002.html

### The Journal of History Post WW II European History

### The Sorry Fate of German POWs

www.truedemocracy.net/hj34/20.html

### Vassili Kononov

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vassili_Kononov

### Bedřich Pokorný--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bed%C5%99ich_Pokorn%C3%BD

### Miscellaneous

### Sippenhaft--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sippenhaft

### Operation Keelhaul--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Keelhaul

### Statistics Of Democide--

https://www.hawaii.edu/powerkills/SOD.CHAP13.HTM

### Stalin's War Against His Own Troops

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/Teplyakov.html

### East Prussian Offensive13 Jan 1945 - 26 Apr 1945--

http://ww2db.com/battle_spec.php?battle_id=197

### Text and Photos of Executed German SS--

http://pictureshistory.blogspot.com/2011/01/when-american-and-british-soldiers-went.html

### Allied War Crimes During World War II

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_war_crimes_during_World_War_II

### The War Between the Generals--

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v05/v05p397_Lutton.html

### Günter Grass

The Danzig Trilogy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%BCnter_Grass

### Kurt Vonnegut--

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Vonnegut

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=1426772

### Sites

### Euro Docs Germany: National Socialism and World War II--

http://eudocs.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Germany:_National_Socialism_and_World_War_II

### Zeitzeugen berichten Witness Statements of Historical Events

http://www.collasius.org/ZEITZEUGEN/index.htm

German Federal Archives

http://www.bild.bundesarchiv.de/

### Institute For Historical Review

http://www.ihr.org/

### German Fedeal Archives

http://www.bundesarchiv.de/index.html.en

### About The Author

Ausgleich is author Jim Whitesell's fifth book currently in publication. The first, Border Tales, is a non-fiction journalistic account of the working life of a U.S. border inspector on the Arizona/Sonora border. A book that melds Whitesell's two primary careers, journalist and border inspector. Jim's second book is a mystery/suspense book, The Storm, set in the Huachuca Mountains of southeastern Arizona during the Great Storm of 1982. Subsequently Jim wrote a series--two published so far and a third likely on the way--of fictional very tongue-in-check books, Border Tales Too, about the adventures and--mostly-misadventures of a group of eccentric border inspectors on the CBP mobile enforcement team--the ET--that author Whitesell describes as "being the literary DNA of Border Tales spliced with that of Mark Twain on LSD."

Though raised in Minnesota (which he calls 'The Big Tundra') Whitesell has long lived in the moderate climate of a mountain valley in southeast Arizona. Whenever he feels a tinge of Minnesota nostalgia he opens the freezer door in his refrigerator and sticks his head in it for a minute or two. That does it. So much for nostalgia. Whitesell loves Arizona.

He, however, is none too fond of rattlesnakes.

Jim has more books in gestation.

Here is a sample chapter from the non-fiction book, Border Tales:

### The Potato Chip Load

It was 2315 on August 28th. 11:15 at night, civilian time. The heat had backed off some. But it was still warm. It was always warm at that time of the year in San Luis. If you liked warm, then San Luis was the place to be. And so who came up with the idea of naming a spot in the bloody middle of the heat drenched sea level Sonora Desert after a European saint who had absolutely nothing to do with the place? It would have been more aptly named Oven Town or Thermal or Infernal City. Or, considering the extreme heat of the place, Devil's Home. Hot. Always hot. I was coming to the end of a sweaty always-hot 12 hour shift. We worked lots of those. I was fried. I was tired. There was no way for me to know it for sure, but the smugglers probably knew I was tired, too. Tired, and ready to go home. And also an older man in a young person's job. The smugglers target what they think are the personal weak links--the new, the lazy, the sloppy, the old, the tired. With the midnight shift change less than an hour off, and the inspectors' eyes mostly riveted on the clock rather than inspections, it was a window of opportunity. Smugglers were always looking for windows of opportunity. Some Customs inspectors did the same. I tried to make up for my embarrassingly numerous inspectional failings by figuring out where the windows of opportunity might be. A good man who still lingers gently in my memory, Ron Van Why, a K-9 handler who was part Dutch and part Native American Tohono O'odam and whose career would one day come to an abrupt alcohol fueled end, once said that I stumbled on a lot of loads. Stumble? If so, it was because I intentionally was in the right place to stumble. You might say that I knew where and when to stumble. So, that evening, despite working a hot 12 hour day and being worn down and tired, I was actively looking for a load. It was no secret that the shift change hour was a window of opportunity for the smugglers.

But also for inspectors like me who needed all the windows help they could get.

A lot of us had learned the hard way about the fate of what we thought were good secondary referrals. DTR. Down The Road. The outcome of a referral from primary of what we figured was a pretty good bet as a load car was a blind crap shoot. It depended more on who was doing the secondary inspection than on how good the car really was. On primary we'd assess a car as being a possible load car based on a series of facts and observations that taken together added up to the conclusion that the car was a good bet for a load car. But the reality in secondary was all too often a bored or lazy DTR. After seeing too many of those promising cars released down the road because of lazy, inept, perfunctory or-- _very_ commonly--just plain worn out secondary inspectors, we adopted a different tack. When a promising car came up to us on the primary lanes, we'd give them a serious primary inspection before even sending them to secondary. This proved to be a dandy way to get the attention of the secondary officers. Walking a car back to secondary that you'd already found to be loaded made the point eloquently. Even the biggest duds in the service weren't about to turn loose a car you'd already found to be loaded. It was kind of like an inside the park home run. Except the team you were scoring against was your own.

When one of those promising cars came up to my lane at 11:15 that evening, I gave it a pretty thorough inspection. Part of the tactic I'd been using that late evening was to blow through the cars. That meant I moved the cars through very rapidly, hoping to draw in a load car that assumed a fast moving lane was not a thoroughly searched lane and that the officer working the lane was sloppy and ineffective. When a promising car showed up at the inspection booth, then the fast lane suddenly screeched to a halt and I launched into a thorough primary inspection. That's what happened that evening. I'd blown through the cars until a promising car showed up. I hit the brakes on my lane and started to give the car a thorough primary inspection. This included all or part of the following: checking the bumpers with a mirror; looking to see if the gas tank has been off; checking the back seat and side panels for untoward hardness; looking under the dash with a mirror; checking the ceiling and the floor; and checking the tires. About halfway through the inspection, I started to notice the pickup truck in line behind the car I was searching. I didn't know it yet, but that blue '78 Chevy Silverado pickup next in line...

It was going to be my first--and only--Potato Chip Load.

What I noticed was that the truck didn't move. I spent two or three minutes searching the car in front of it, but the Chevy just sat in my lane. The other open lane, manned by a U.S. Immigration officer, was empty. Now, there was an unwritten rule in Mexico that you pick the fastest lane into the U.S. even if you have to cause a near accident to get into it. The corollary to that was don't let some SOB in a hurry pull in front of you. There were plenty of fender benders that happened because of that. Often the drivers would get into arguments in Customs secondary. Some wanted us to call the police. Police? How could we call the police for an accident that happened in a foreign country or the nebulous no man's land between them? I guess they figured that, since they'd been waiting to get into the U.S., it was a U.S. problem. Anyhow, the fact is it wasn't often that a Mexican driver missed the chance to jackrabbit into a faster lane. Yet this blue Chevy Silverado pickup just sat in my lane for a couple of minutes while I finished searching the car in front of it. And the lane next to me was empty _._ The whole time _._ Empty _._

So I was already eying the Chevy by the time it pulled up. _Almost_ pulled up. The Silverado came forward, but stopped too far back. I couldn't make out the plates in the license plate reader camera. I told him to come forward. He did. Too far. I still couldn't see the plates in the reader. By this time I was getting very interested in this guy. I stepped up to the vehicle's window to take a look at the driver, 26 year old Raul Apodaca. He said he was a field worker on his way to work. Next to him in the truck was a hot lunch and work clothes. Tools were in the truck bed. But it was kind of early for a field worker to be heading to work. They mostly came through after 2 or 3 in the morning. He also was dressed in flip flops and sweat clothes. Not exactly the typical field worker clothing. I took his I-551 immigration document and studied it. He gave me a small, wan smile. Then he took out a bag of potato chips, opened the bag and started to munch on the chips.

Epiphany!

Who the heck would pull up to a primary booth and then pull out a bag of potato chips and start munching away in mid-interview? It had to be an unconscious nervous response to stress. It would happen to me again months later with a guy sucking on a popsicle. That one turned out to be a load and triggered off the memory of this one. And what about this one? The Silverado next to me with Raul Apodaca behind the wheel? I knew it in the intuitive marrow of my ancestral Gaelic border bones. "It's loaded!" I thought to myself. "Gotta be loaded." The realization came thundering into my consciousness. Adrenalin raced through my body. I tried hard to stay calm. I'd learned a hard lesson from past mistakes. Don't let on you _know._ Just let the guy continue to chomp on his potato chips while getting ready to take him down.

I stayed cool. I walked around the vehicle in the typical primary inspectional pattern, in no particular hurry, checking the driver's side saddle tank, the truck bed, the spare (there wasn't any) and the rear bumper as I moved around to the far side of the truck. I pulled out my Buster density meter and placed it over the right rear tire. The Buster read the tire's density on the numerical scale as being in the 80's. 80's! I felt like leaping in the air and hollering like an Arizona Cardinals fan when the team had just threaded the uprights with a winning field goal in the last seconds of the game. Normal tires mostly bustered around 30 or 40. This one bustered in the 80's. Weren't no way this critter _wa_ s _n't_ loaded. I sauntered back around the rear of the Chevy, casually stepped into the inspectional kiosk and called the secondary senior inspector on duty, a retired Marine and part-time cowboy, Dean 'Dino' Morgan.

"Dino," I said quietly into the intercom. "I've got a load out here on primary. Can you come out and give me some backup?" He was immediately on his way.

Meanwhile I had Raul Apodaca turn off the truck and hand me the ignition key. I placed my body against the driver's door so he couldn't get out. This was all done very calmly and quietly, so much so that the Immigration officer on the adjacent lane, the genial redheaded Debbie Nieto, and her backup who was also on the lane with her, Senior Immigration Inspector Cordero--a cool dude who was a Puerto Rican Hispanic and a retired Marine warrant officer--did not have any idea of what was happening.

Soon Dean--who was a two tour Marine combat veteran of Viet Nam--came very warily around the corner from secondary looking like he was expecting a Viet Cong booby trap or a firefight to break out any minute. Dean was on the dramatic side, and this was no exception. Of course he didn't really know what to expect out on primary, so he was acting appropriately. Still, if the driver hadn't caught on yet, he had by now, watching Dean's wary approach. He looked like a miniature Clint Eastwood about to draw down on the bad guys in a local adaptation of a spaghetti western. No matter. There was nowhere for Apodaca to go. I had the truck key and the door was blocked. Dean circled around the Chevy and came up from the rear and together we removed Apodaca, handcuffed him and Dean escorted him to the secondary office. Meanwhile Apodaca had run a rapid fire zero to sixty emotional gamut from nervous to concerned to downright run-rabbit-run scared in little more than a couple of eye blinks. By this time Nieto and Cordero had noticed something was going on. So how could you _not_ notice someone being handcuffed fifteen feet away? They came over to back us up, should the need arise. It didn't.

"No traigo nada," Apodaca kept repeating. He didn't have anything.

But he did.

While Dino took Apodaca into the secondary office, I checked the Silverado some more. All of the tires bustered high. And when tapped they gave a dull thud rather that the usual clear ringing tone of a normal tire. By then I had absolutely no doubt the tires were loaded and went inside and told Dino and the supervisor on duty, stocky Mario De La Ossa–a man who some months later would be paralyzed in a tragic car accident–that the car was loaded and to pat down Apodaca and put him in a detention cell. Then I went back outside to drive the Chevy into secondary. Except it wouldn't start. The starter wouldn't engage the flywheel. Any way you looked at it, this was not Raul Apodaca's lucky day. What would have happened if he'd been cleared to go and tried to start up the truck again on primary? Did he have enough potato chips to cover that eventuality?

The others came over to help and together we pushed the truck back to secondary. A K-9 ran the truck and did not alert, which gave both Dino and Mario De La Ossa pause. No K-9 alert? A couple of you-dumb-ass looks were shot at me. I was after all an unknown quantity having only recently transferred into the Port of San Luis. Then long time border veteran De La Ossa, a short, heftily burly man--who was generally none too fond of gringos and inclined to be skeptical anyhow--checked the tires and finally agreed they indeed were loaded. We cut a tire open and took a sample from the ubiquitous 'green leafy substance' inside. It field tested positive for marijuana. Then we towed the pickup over to the seizure lot.

Pretty soon the midnight shift started to arrive and inspectors Tom Schmunk, Steve Ponce and trainee Ron Mann Jr. helped take off the tires and open them up. We didn't have a tire breakdown tool, so the tires had to be cut open. It was hot, hard work. Even in the middle of the night, it was still the deep Sonora Desert in the heat blasted summertime and the sweat was pouring off us as we worked. There were a total of 79 packages literally crammed into every spare inch inside the tires. The packages were similarly sized and weighed close to three pounds each. I think the smugglers might have used an adobe brick hand press to make the cloned looking uniformly sized packages. Total weight was 241.2 pounds. The packages were all freshly wrapped in brown masking tape. Some of them had circles written on them in black ink or heavy marking pencil. Others had happy faces written on them in the same heavy black ink or marking pencil. Happy faces? For whom? The buyer? The seller? Not any more.

The only happy faces left were ours.

Interestingly, the Chevy Silverado pickup was actually a pretty well done load vehicle. There were no fresh tool marks on the lug nuts, there was a coating of dust over the lug nuts and tires, no indication of recent removal and no visible fingerprints either on the outer facing or inner facing of the mounted tires' exteriors. The truck was a frequent crosser, so as not to arouse suspicion. The driver had a hot lunch in the car with him, which was common among the field workers, and had work tools in the bed of the pickup. The problem wasn't the vehicle. It was the driver. He caved in almost immediately and confessed, saying he was to leave the vehicle in the parking lot of the local Fiesta Mart, turn the vehicle over to 'someone' and walk back to Mexico. He'd been paid $500 to drive the truck across the border. He said he didn't know the name of the person who hired him. Which probably meant he had chosen to keep his mouth shut and stay alive. He was a poor choice as a driver, especially considering the skill with which the contraband had been concealed. Still, he might have made it through.

But for that bag of potato chips.

### ****

