The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. David Talbot

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СКАЧАТЬ evasion of the gallows proved wise. The following morning, the ten remaining men who had been sentenced to death filed one by one into a gymnasium adjacent to the courtroom, where three black-painted wooden scaffolds awaited them. With its cracked plaster walls and glaring lighting, the gymnasium—which had hosted a basketball game just days before between U.S. Army security guards—provided a suitably bleak backdrop. The chief hangman, a squat, hard-drinking Army master sergeant from San Antonio named John C. Woods, was an experienced executioner, with numerous hangings to his credit. But, due to sloppiness or ill will, the Nuremberg hangings were not professionally carried out.

      The drop was not long enough, so some of the condemned dangled in agony at the end of their ropes for long stretches of time before they died. Field Marshall Wilhelm Keitel, Hitler’s war minister and the second-highest-ranking soldier after Goering to be tried at Nuremberg, suffered the longest, thrashing for a full twenty-four minutes. When the dead men were later photographed, they looked particularly ghoulish, since the swinging trapdoors had smashed and bloodied their faces as the men fell—another flaw, or intentional indignity, in the execution process.

      Julius Streicher, defiant to the end, screamed a piercing “Heil Hitler!” as he began climbing the thirteen wooden steps of the scaffold. As the noose was placed around his neck, he spat at Woods, “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day.” The short drop failed to kill him, too, and as Streicher groaned at the end of his rope, Woods was forced to descend from the platform, grab his swinging body, and yank sharply downward to finally silence him.

      After the first executions, the American colonel in charge asked for a cigarette break. The soldiers on the execution team paced nervously around the gymnasium, smoking and speaking somberly among themselves. But after it was all over, Woods pronounced himself perfectly satisfied. “Never saw a hanging go off any better,” he declared.

      The hangman never expressed any doubt about his historic role at Nuremberg. “I hanged those ten Nazis … and I am proud of it,” he said after the executions. A few years later, Woods accidentally electrocuted himself while repairing faulty machinery at a military base in the Marshall Islands.

      The sectors of Germany occupied by the United States and its allies tried to quickly forget the war. Hollywood musicals and cowboy adventures—and their escapist German equivalents—flooded the movie theaters in West Germany. But in the Soviet-controlled East, there was a cinematic effort, though generally party-directed and heavy-handed, to force the German people to confront the nightmare and its consequences. In the early postwar period, there was a barrage of such dark movies, known as Trümmerfilme, or “rubble films.” One of the more artful rubble films, Murderers Among Us, grappled disturbingly with the Nazi ghosts that still haunted Germany. Produced in 1946 by DEFA, the Soviet-run studio in East Berlin, Murderers Among Us was directed by Wolfgang Staudte, a once-promising young filmmaker who had made his own moral compromises in order to continue working during Hitler’s rule. Staudte’s film reverberates with guilt.

      In the film, Dr. Hans Mertens, a German surgeon who had served with the Wehrmacht, returns to Berlin after the war. The city is a monument to rubble; it seems to have been deconstructed stone by stone, brick by brick. Staudte needed no studio back lot or special effects. Demolished Berlin was his sound stage. Dr. Mertens, who wants to forget everything he has witnessed during the war, wanders drunk and obliterated through the city’s ruins. But his past won’t release him. He comes across his former commander, Captain Bruckner, a happily shallow man who, despite the atrocities he ordered during the war, has returned to a prosperous life in Berlin as a factory owner.

      “Don’t look so sad,” Bruckner tells the doctor as the two men pick their way through the rubble one day in search of a hidden cabaret. “Every era offers its chances if you find them. Helmets from saucepans or saucepans from helmets. It’s the same game. You must manage—that’s all.”

      Dr. Mertens’s bitterness deepens as he observes Berlin being profitably revived by the very men who destroyed it. One day, fortified by drink, he comes across a lively nest of vermin, scurrying about in the rubble. “Rats,” he says to himself. “Rats everywhere. The city is alive again.”

      By the end of the film, Mertens has emerged from his drunken anesthesia and has begun to consider a path of action. How do you make a better world after a reign of terror like Hitler’s? Should he kill a man like Bruckner? Should he try to bring him to justice?

      Murderers Among Us ends on a hopeful, if fanciful, note. Mertens imagines Bruckner behind bars—no longer looking smug, but stricken. “Why are you doing this to me?” he screams, as images of his victims float ghostlike around him.

      When the movie was produced, the first Nuremberg trial was still under way, and it looked to the world as if justice would indeed prevail. But as the years went by, a surprising number of men like Bruckner not only escaped justice but thrived in the new Germany. Thanks to officials like Dulles, many Bruckners shimmied free from their cages. The rats were everywhere.

       4

       Sunrise

      Allen Dulles’s most audacious intervention on behalf of a major Nazi war criminal took place in the waning days of the war. The story of the relationship between Dulles and SS general Karl Wolff—Himmler’s former chief of staff and commander of Nazi security forces in Italy—is a long and tangled one. But perhaps it’s best to begin at a particularly dire moment for Wolff, in the still-dark early morning hours of April 26, 1945, less than two weeks before the end of the war in Europe.

      That morning, soon after arriving at the SS command post in Cernobbio, a quaint town nestled in the foothills of the Italian Alps on the shores of Lake Como, Wolff was surrounded by a well-armed unit of Italian partisans. The partisans had established positions around the entire SS compound, a luxurious estate that had been seized by the Nazis from the Locatelli family, a wealthy dynasty of cheese manufacturers. With only a handful of SS soldiers standing guard outside his villa, Wolff had no way to break through the siege and his capture seemed imminent. As chief of all SS and Gestapo units in Italy, Wolff was well known to the Italian resistance, who blamed him for the reprisal killings of many civilians in response to partisan attacks on Nazi targets, as well as for the torture and murder of numerous resistance fighters. If he fell into the partisans’ hands, the SS commander was not likely to be treated charitably.

      At age forty-four, the tall, fair-haired, blue-eyed Wolff carried himself with the supreme self-confidence of a man who had long been paraded around by the Nazi high command as an ideal Aryan specimen. A former advertising executive, Wolff understood the power of imagery. His climb through the Nazi Party ranks had been paved by his Hessian bearing, his imperial, hawk-nosed profile, and the erect figure he cut in his SS dress uniform. Himmler, the former chicken farmer, drew confidence from Wolff’s suave presence and fondly called him “Wolffie.” The SS chief made Wolff his principal liaison to Hitler’s headquarters, where he also quickly became a favorite.

      Hitler enjoyed showing off Wolff at his dinner parties and made sure that the SS-Obergruppenführer was by his side during the war’s tense overture, when German forces invaded Poland and Hitler prepared to join his troops at the front. “To my great and, I openly admit, joyful surprise, I was ordered to the innermost Führer headquarters,” Wolff proudly recalled as an old man. “Hitler wanted to have me nearby, because he knew that he could rely on me completely. He had known me for a long time, and rather well.”

      But in April 1945, encircled by his enemies at the СКАЧАТЬ