[ONE]
The Mansion
Offenbach Platz 101
Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1205 16 April 1946
“Where are we going?” Father McGrath asked as the lead car pulled off Offenbach and stopped before the twelve-foot-tall, sheet-metal-covered gate in the Compound’s fifteen-foot-high wall.
“This place used to belong to the local Gauleiter,” Cronley replied.
“The governor?” Ginger said.
“Yeah, the Nazi asshole in charge,” Cronley said. “Now that he’s in the Tribunal Prison, he doesn’t need this place anymore, so I took it over.”
The gate slid open and the convoy drove inside.
“Very nice,” Ginger said as the Mansion came into view.
“The Gauleiter lived well. Twenty-eight rooms, a swimming pool, and a sauna.”
“What are we going to do here?” Ginger asked.
“After we pick up fresh bodyguards, and Casey Wagner, we’re going to the Tribunal, where I will introduce Father McGrath to Colonel Cohen. He will arrange a tour of the Tribunal for you while he’s talking to Father McGrath about Saint Heinrich the Divine and his new religion.”
“Welcome back,” Tiny Dunwiddie said. “How was Strasbourg?”
“Believe it or not, Fortin actually bought us dinner,” Cronley said.
“Will wonders ever cease?”
Cronley looked at Wagner.
“Casey, are you up to speed on the escape?”
“Yes, sir. As soon as I got here, Mr. Justice Jackson sent for Captain Dunwiddie and me and let us read that message—the report of the Prison Escape Committee—that he sent to President Truman.”
Cronley nodded. “So, what happens next is, we start talking to people. Starting with SS-Brigadeführer Heimstadter and Standartenführer Müller. I have a gut feeling they’re the ones who staged the escape originally planned to get out. And, in that regard, I got one of my famously brilliant ideas as I walked in here just now.”
“Uh-oh,” Dunwiddie said.
“Thank you for that expression of confidence, Captain Dunwiddie. But hear me out so you can stop shaking your head in resignation. I’m betting that one of them, probably both, were frequent guests of the Gauleiter here in the Mansion. It might be helpful to have one of them, Brigadeführer Heimstadter, see for himself how things have changed since the glorious days of the Thousand-Year Reich.”
“You mean bring them here?” Wagner said.
“I think if the brigadier was taken from his cell without warning by several of our ugliest Polish agents—ones speaking nothing but Polish or maybe Russian—then brought here and installed in my windowless bedroom overnight, all that might serve as an inducement for him to talk to us tomorrow morning.”
“You’d have to take all of your furniture out of there,” Wagner said after a moment’s thought, “and put in a GI bed—a cot would be better—and nothing else, except a bucket for a toilet. Maybe strip him naked and give him a blanket to wear.”
“And that is why some people call him Super Spook Junior,” Dunwiddie said, drily. “Casey not only agrees with Jim’s wild ideas, he’s also full of ideas of his own on how to improve them.”
“So, what the hell is wrong with my—and Casey’s—ideas?”
“Well, for one thing, what makes you think Colonel Cohen is going to let you take Heimstadter out of prison?”
“He didn’t become chief of U.S. Counterintelligence for the Tribunal by not recognizing a clever idea when he hears one,” Cronley said. “And if he doesn’t give me Heimstadter, I’ll go to Jackson.”
“Who is going to say, especially after he hears Cohen has turned you down, ‘No way.’”
“There’s one way to find out,” Cronley said. “Let’s go. You, too, Tiny. I have a task for you that will require all your wisdom and expertise.”
“Really? What might that be?”
“I’ll tell you later.”
[TWO]
Office of Colonel Mortimer Cohen
International Tribunal Compound
Nuremberg, American Zone of Occupation, Germany
1355 18 April 1946
“Inasmuch as Justice Jackson would be subject to criticism if it came out that he had known Colonel Rasberry and myself had permitted Super Spook to take Brigadeführer Heimstadter out of the Compound,” Colonel Cohen announced after some thought, “I think we have to invoke the Hotshot Billy Principle regarding this problem.”
“Two questions, Mort,” Colonel Rasberry said, glancing at Captain Cronley before turning to Cohen. “One, do you really think this is a good idea?”
“I’m fresh out of other ideas. How about you?”
“Point taken. Two, who is Hotshot Billy?”
“Lieutenant Colonel William W. Wilson. He is General White’s twenty-five-year-old aviation officer. He believes—as does General White—that he became a light bird eighteen months or so ago when his West Point classmates were hoping to make captain before the war was over—”
“He made light colonel at twenty-four?” Rasberry interrupted, his tone one of disbelief.
“Yes, he did. And he attributes this to applying what has become known as the Hotshot Billy Principle. To wit: When you must have permission to do something you know is right and you have good reason to believe that the officer with the power to give you such permission is going to say ‘Hell, no,’ do it anyway, as success washes away all sins.”
“My God! And I. D. White goes along with this?”
“Indeed. He and Billy, without asking the permission they know would be refused, are hard at work trying to establish what they call Army Aviation. Their argument is, light aircraft provide mobility on the battlefield, and when the Army Air Forces becomes a separate service next year, they don’t want it to control mobility. Ergo sum, the Army needs its own airplanes, its own air force.”
“Interesting,” Rasberry said.
“So, turning to Super Spook’s idea, are you willing to stick your neck out and walk over to the prison with me and tell the OD that Super Spook will be taking Brigadeführer Heimstadter out of the prison overnight?”
Rasberry considered this.
“Okay,” he said, finally.
“You heard ‘overnight,’ right, Jim? You have twenty-four hours from now to get him back in his cell.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Both of you.”
“And when we come back from the prison,” Cohen said to Rasberry, “I am going to tell Father McGrath all I know about the new Nazi religion. If you want in on that—let’s call it a lecture, for want of a better word—you’re welcome.”
“Thank you. The more I hear about that, the more it worries me.”
“Colonel, could I sit in on that lecture?” Ginger asked.
“Why would you want to?” Cohen said.
“Two reasons. My late husband and I were given a tour of the prison six months ago. And . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“And what?” Cohen said.
She looked at Cronley.
“It’s time, Jimmy, that we publicly fess up.”
“I was coming to that,” Cronley said.
“Confessing to what, for God’s sake?” Cohen said, impatiently.
“Colonel, Fat Freddy Hessinger told me how you helped his friend get through all the bullshit the Army gave him to protect him from designing women.”
“And so . . . ?”
“I was hoping you’d do the same thing for me . . . For me and Ginger.”
After some thought, Cohen asked, “You actually want to marry Super Spook, Mrs. Moriarty? After all you’ve gone through?”
“Not only marry him but also know what he’s up to. Beginning with this Nazi religion Himmler was trying to set up, which I know Jim is very involved in trying to figure out.”
Cohen nodded thoughtfully.
“I’ve been saying all along that the more people who know about it, the better. So, okay, Mrs. Moriarty, you can sit in.”
“Thank you.”
“And you, Super Spook, can talk to Sergeant Major Feldman about getting permission to marry. I got the credit for helping Fat Freddy’s friend, but Alex did most of the work for me. He’s genius at cutting through the damn red tape.”
Cohen pushed a button on his phone and almost immediately the door to the outer office opened. A trim, dark-haired male in his early thirties with an earnest face stood in the doorway. He had on a well-pressed uniform bearing the stripes of a sergeant major.
“Yes, sir?”
“Sergeant Major, when we are finished here, Captain Cronley requires your expert assistance, much as you provided Freddy Hessinger, in getting him to the altar as quickly as possible. We don’t want him bursting into flames.”
“Yes, sir . . . Flames, sir?”
Cohen grinned, then explained, “When I asked Father McGrath what he thought of the impending nuptials, he said Christian scripture tells us it’s better to marry than to burn.”
“I’ve heard that, sir,” Feldman said, grinning.
“And, Sergeant Major, shortly I’m going to deliver my lecture on Saint Heinrich the Divine. While I’m doing so, (a) I am not available to anyone but Justice Jackson and (b) you will prepare a copy of my notes for Captain Dunwiddie. He will use them to deliver the lecture to everybody at the Mansion.”
“Yes, sir.”
Cohen turned to Cronley. “And what are your other plans, Super Spook, after speaking with Sergeant Major Feldman?”
“First, to get Heimstadter over to the Mansion, and then I’m going to talk to Standartenführer Müller.”
“Good luck with that,” Cohen said. “Give Colonel Rasberry and me ten minutes to talk to the OD at the prison and then have at it. You and Ginger can speak with Feldman in the meantime. Meeting over until the lecture.”
[THREE]
Twenty minutes later, Colonel Cohen took the chair behind his desk. Father Jack, Ginger, and Tiny Dunwiddie filed back into the office. Cohen motioned for everyone to sit down, and said, “Super Spook on his way to the Tribunal Prison?”
“Yes, sir,” Dunwiddie said.
“Did my sergeant major get all he needed, Ginger?”
“Yes, he said he did. Thank you.”
Cohen nodded as he pulled a polished wooden box about eighteen inches long and a foot wide from a bottom drawer of his desk. He put it on the desktop and opened it.
“If I use this thing, I will have to sit here during my lecture, but I have decided that the best way to do this is to presume no one knows anything and to start from square one and make a record of what I say.”
“What is that thing?” Father McGrath asked.
“Sort of a Dictaphone. But instead of mechanically cutting a groove on a plastic whatchamacallit, it electrically records what’s said on a wire.”
He held up a reel and then attached it to the device. He then turned in his chair and plugged an electric cord into a wall socket.
“Siemens invented it. One of the technical teams the Army was running found about a hundred of them in a Siemens plant in Hesse. I heard about it, then promptly stole twenty of them.”
He flipped several switches, examined several dials, then placed its microphone to his lips.
“Testing, one, two, three . . .”
He then flipped several more switches. With remarkable clarity, his voice came from the speaker: “Testing, one, two, three . . .”
“Amazing!” Father McGrath said.
“The Thousand-Year Reich Lecture at fourteen-oh-five hours, 18 April ’46,” Cohen said into the microphone. “Okay, here we go.
“In 1933, Heinrich Himmler started looking for a castle near Paderborn where, legend had it, a fellow named Hermann der Cherusker had, in 9 A.D., won a decisive battle against the Romans, thus saving the German people from being absorbed into the Roman Empire.
“On November 3, 1933, Himmler visited Wewelsburg Castle and decided that same day to lease it for a hundred years and restore it so that it could be used as an educational and ceremonial center for the SS.
“Sometime around 1936, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, started referring to Germany as the Thousand-Year Reich. And said it was, indeed, going to last a thousand years.
“Most people outside Germany thought it was a ludicrous boast from somebody who worked for a lunatic with a funny mustache who had started calling himself Der Führer.
“They were wrong. Hitler and company were dead serious. They intended to make Germany a pure Aryan state—the mission, Himmler said, was ‘the extermination of any sub-humans, all over the world, in league against Germany’—which would rule the world for a millennium. To accomplish this, they started by opening the first concentration camp, Dachau, outside Berlin in 1933. In January 1937, Himmler gave a speech in which he said, ‘There is no more living proof of hereditary and racial laws than in a concentration camp. You find there hydrocephalics, squinters, deformed individuals, semi-Jews: a considerable number of inferior people.’”
McGrath said, “When did they start—what do I call it?—the Nazi religion?”
“At the moment, Father Jack, I have the pulpit,” Cohen said, “which means you sit there and listen while I deliver the lesson for today.”
McGrath raised his eyebrows, then nodded.
“In February 1945,” Cohen continued, “Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin met in Yalta. I was number two on Roosevelt’s security detail. My boss ordered me never to let him out of my sight, and I did my best not to. This gave me the opportunity to hear many of their conversations, both public and private.
“In one of these private conversations, between Churchill and the President, the question of what to do with the leaders of Germany came up. I still haven’t made up my mind whether they were serious or not, but Churchill proposed shooting all Nazi leaders on the spot when and where found. To which Roosevelt replied, ‘Winston, we can’t shoot all of them. What about the top forty thousand?’
“That conversation was interrupted by the arrival of Stalin, and they dropped the subject of how to deal with the Nazis.
“I am Jewish, if I must point that out. I’d already seen photos of what the Nazis had done to my coreligionists and concluded that my relatives in Germany were no more, so I was naturally in support of Churchill’s idea.
“I came home from Yalta and, several days later, was promoted to colonel, which rarely happens to Jewish boys with an ROTC commission from the City College of New York who had gone on active duty as second lieutenants in December 1941.
“I also had come to conclude that Franklin Roosevelt was a very sick man and, possibly because of his condition, had given away the store to Joe Stalin, who I had already concluded was one dangerous son of a bitch.
“The day after I was promoted, I was flown to SHAEF—Supreme Headquarters, Allied Expeditionary Force—then in Rheims, France.
“On April 12th, Roosevelt died, and Harry S Truman become President. The same day, I was named chief of CIC Forward, probably because we were already in Germany and I was the only senior Counterintelligence Corps officer who spoke German fluently.
“When, after the surrender, SHAEF moved from Rheims into the I.G. Farben Building in Frankfurt, my boss, Brigadier General Homer Greene, had me to dinner. As we were having a couple of belts afterward, I said something flippant about Churchill having the right idea. Rather than rounding up the Nazi brass and putting them in cells at Nuremberg to be given a fair trial before hanging them, we could save a lot of money by shooting them when and where we found them.
“He shamed me by saying he was surprised I hadn’t figured out Truman’s motive in insisting that we try them before we hanged them. ‘If we simply shot them,’ Greene explained, ‘the German people would decide it was vengeance of the victors, and the bastards would be regarded as martyrs of the Thousand-Year Reich.’ He went on to say that Truman decided they should be exposed to as much publicity as possible as the common criminals—the murderers—they were.
“I admitted to him I hadn’t considered that. And that Truman was right.
“‘Good,’ Greene said, ‘because as of tomorrow morning, you’re in charge of security for the Nuremberg Tribunal.’
“I told him that if it were up to me, I’d much rather catch Nazis than be their jailor. He replied (a) it wasn’t up to me; (b) the Big Red One—the First Infantry Division—had assigned a regiment to guard the Tribunal Compound, and he wanted me to keep an eye on them; (c) that I was now in charge of running down the big-shot Nazis, not Nazis in general; (d) he wanted me, when I had a spare minute, to run down a probably preposterous rumor he’d heard that Himmler had started a new religion; (e) that to accomplish all this, he had organized a new CIC, the Thirty-first, and named me as its commander; and, finally, (f) as soon as I gave him a list of people I would like to have in the Thirty-first CIC, he would transfer them to me.
“So, I came here to Nuremberg and made up a list of people I wanted and sent it off to General Greene. Before the list got to the Farben Building, I got a call from one Vito Carlucci, a big, fat guy from Jersey City. I thought he was going to ask me again to get him transferred to Italy so he could run down the Italian fascists who had killed his relatives. But that wasn’t it.
“He told me, ‘Colonel, I’ve come across something you have to see.’
“‘Tell me about it, Vito.’
“‘Not only don’t I want to talk about this on a nonsecure line, but if I did, you’d accuse me of being drunk or crazy. Or both. Colonel, you have to see this for yourself.’
“So I got in my car, drove to eastern North Rhine–Westphalia, and met Vito in Paderborn. He took me to a battered castle a couple miles outside of town.
“He told me: ‘This is Wewelsburg Castle. An SS-Truppführer—sergeant—we caught told me that Himmler ordered it blown up but they couldn’t find enough explosives. We’re holding him here. Let him tell you the story, then I’ll give you a tour of the place.’
“So they bring the SS sergeant into the office. He told me his name—no fooling!—was Johann Strauss. Johann looked a lot like your fiancé, Mrs. Moriarty. Tall, broad-chested, blond, blue-eyed. A real Aryan.”
“I don’t think that’s funny, Colonel,” Ginger blurted.
Cohen ignored her.
“Once this six-foot-something, two-hundred-pound SS sergeant got a good look at this five-foot-eight, one-hundred-forty-five-pound Hebrew colonel, his face whitened. And he began to sing like a canary.
“He told me he had been on the staff, as a driver, of SS-Brigadeführer Franz von Dietelburg, Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s adjutant—”
“That’s one of the men who just escaped?” Ginger said.
“He and General der Infanterie Wilhelm Burgdorf,” Cohen replied, “formerly SS-Brigadeführer Wilhelm Burgdorf.”
“Sir,” Dunwiddie said. “I don’t understand.”
“Toward the end of the war, Tiny, SS bastards like Burgdorf decided they would rather be treated as POWs than SS when we caught them, so they got themselves discharged from the SS and commissioned at an equivalent rank in the Wehrmacht. When I heard about this, I went to Justice Jackson, told him about it, and suggested he rule from the bench that these phony soldiers be tried as SS officers.
“He turned me down. He explained that it would be illegal because the Nazi government had the same right as we did to commission anyone in any rank they wanted to. He told me, ‘A friend of mine, Walker Cisler, the president of Detroit Electric, was recognized as the guy who knew all there was to know about power grids.
“‘Eisenhower wanted him to perform two critical functions. First, to identify the key points in the French and German power grids so they could be bombed. Second, to restore the grids as quickly as possible after we took back the grid area. So he had Cisler directly commissioned as a full colonel. Walker went off to war, knowing so little about the Army that they had to assign a major to teach him how to salute, et cetera.’
“Anyway, the sergeant told me he had been assigned to drive Sturmbannführer Heinz Macher from Berlin to Wewelsburg Castle. They had a truckload of SS troopers with them. They traveled at night because, by then, American fighters were roaming over Germany, shooting up anything on the Autobahn.
“He said he had heard Himmler tell Macher he was to tell SS General Siegfried Taubert, who was in charge of the castle, to remove ‘sacred’ items and the contents of ‘my safe,’ then head for the Austrian border and, ultimately, to Italy. Macher would then blow the place up.
“SS-Truppführer Johann Strauss now had my full attention. Despite him looking like Super Spook’s brother, Ginger, he wasn’t nearly as smart, and I decided he was telling me the truth.
“So, I started asking myself why an SS generalmajor was guarding an old castle in the middle of nowhere. What was Himmler’s safe doing there? What was in the safe? Sacred items? What was the point of blowing up the castle?
“Strauss then told me that when they got to Wewelsburg, General Taubert was long gone, Himmler’s safe was empty, and he didn’t know anything about sacred items. The place was being ransacked by the locals.
“He said that Macher then told him and the SS troopers that as soon as they blew up the castle, they were on their own. It turned out there weren’t enough explosives—all they could find was a bunch of tank mines—so all they managed to do was knock down the southeast tower and the guard and SS buildings. Then they tried, unsuccessfully, to burn down the castle.
“Macher got in his staff car and, driving himself, took off. We caught him at the Italian border. He’s now in the Darmstadt SS prisoner enclosure.
“So I asked Johann Strauss how come he was the only SS enlisted man we caught. Why he hadn’t taken off with the others.
“He said that he had thought it over and decided (a) that he couldn’t get back to Berlin; (b) that because the war was almost over, it would be safer to stay at the castle and wait for the Americans to come; and (c) that he would surrender to them, which he did.
“It was obviously a canned speech, one he had practiced until he was sure he had it right. His eyes told me he was lying.
“‘Johann,’ I said, ‘the next time you lie to me, I’ll have you shot.’
“Blushing like a schoolboy caught with his hand in the cookie jar, Johann finally confessed he was looking for the gold Totenkopf rings. He dug in his pocket and came up with one, which he put on his finger and more or less modeled for me. I wasn’t sure he did so in arrogant defiance or shame, or neither. But as I looked at the ring and saw the SS skull insignia, I knew it was important.
“At this point, Vito, who hadn’t uttered a sound, said, ‘Colonel, that’s a Totenkopfring.’
“I had no idea what it was or its significance. Vito told me that it goes back to the early days of Nazism, when Hitler really needed a bodyguard. The communists weren’t the only ones trying to kill him.
“There had been, since 1921, something called the Sturmabteilung—acronym SA—which was an organization of thugs headed by a man named Ernst Röhm, an old buddy of Hitler’s. Its primary function was to brawl with the communists, and others, at political rallies.
“They had acquired, on the cheap from war surplus, a large stock of brown shirts, which they wore as uniforms. They wore whatever trousers they had. Understandably, they were called the Brown Shirts.
“Both Hitler and Himmler began to suspect that Röhm wanted to take over the Nazi Party, so they kept an eye on him. Although the SA was supposed to protect Hitler, both at rallies and in his private life, Hitler and Himmler were coming to the conclusion that Röhm didn’t have his heart in the latter and, if true, having the SA close to Hitler protecting him also gave Röhm the opportunity to assassinate him.
“So, in 1929, Himmler formed a special bodyguard for Hitler. It was called the Protective Element—Schutzstaffel in German, SS for short. Himmler recruited three hundred men for it. And, from the very beginning, they had to be ‘true Germans.’ The term ‘Aryan’ would not come into common use until later.
“In 1933, Hitler and company really started after the Jews, beginning with an official one-day boycott of their shops. Next came a law forbidding kosher butchering. Two years later, the Nuremberg Laws deprived Jews of German citizenship and prohibited Jews from voting in parliamentary elections.
“This pretty much came to a head in 1938. Among other things, a law was passed requiring all Jews to carry identification cards. On October 28th, seventeen thousand Jews of Polish origin, most of whose families had been living in Germany for generations, were arrested with the intention of deporting them to Poland. When the Polish government refused to admit them, they were interned in so-called relocation camps on the Polish frontier.
“And all this came to a head on November 9th, which has become known as Kristallnacht, referring to all the broken glass and debris on the streets of Berlin and other cities. Much of it came from storefront windows of some seventy-five hundred Jewish-owned businesses. But some came from the thousand-plus synagogues that they burned. Thirty thousand Jews were arrested and sent to concentration camps—among them, Dachau.
“And then Hitler and Himmler decided to take advantage of all the hullabaloo that Ernst Röhm’s SA thugs were causing to solve another problem they had. They sent the Schutzstaffel all over Germany looking for Röhm. They found him at a country inn—in bed, naked, with a handsome boy. As homosexuality was a real no-no for Nazis, they took photographs of them in flagrante delicto, then shot both lovers on the spot. That ended the problem of Röhm wanting to take over the Nazi Party.
“Himmler then presented those members of the Schutzstaffel who had assassinated Röhm with Totenkopfrings, which made them sort of an elite within the elite SS.
“The rings proved so popular that Himmler, expanding this elite corps, awarded them to all three hundred original SS members. The SS by then had grown to about fifty thousand and soon would grow even larger.
“Then Himmler established a new tradition. When Schutzstaffel members who had been given Totenkopfrings died, they would take the rings off the corpses and install them in Himmler-provided frames, which then would be given to the families so they proudly could display them on their walls.
“This didn’t last long. As the SS grew like Topsy, so did the awards of the Totenkopfrings. Himmler was passing them out by the bucketful—about twelve thousand by the end of the war.
“The first thing he did was to order the families who’d received framed rings to send them to Wewelsburg Castle—remember, Himmler leased it for a hundred years in 1933 to serve as an SS educational and ceremonial center—where they would be stored for the ages in a ceremonial chest.”
“Twelve thousand rings? Each weighing what?” Dunwiddie asked.
“Depending on who made them, one and a quarter ounces to one and a half ounces,” Cohen said.
Dunwiddie said, “That’s twelve thousand times one-point-two-five—”
“Just shy of a half ton,” Cohen furnished.
“Good God, a thousand pounds of gold rings!” Dunwiddie exclaimed.
“There are at least three theories about what happened to the rings when they reached the castle,” Cohen went on. “I don’t know which, or any, of them I believe. The one I do tend to believe is that immediately on arrival, General Siegfried Taubert melted them down and sent them with a trusted flunky to Switzerland to quietly sell what were now untraceable bars of gold.”
“That had to have been dangerous,” Dunwiddie said. “What if von Dietelburg had found out? Or Himmler himself? They’re ruthless.”
“An understatement, Tiny. While I don’t know about SS-Reichsführer Himmler, I’m certain that if Taubert was selling melted Totenkopfrings, then von Dietelburg was getting his percentage. And, for that matter, it seems entirely possible that the whole scheme was von Dietelburg’s idea.”
“You said that there were three theories,” Father McGrath said.
Cohen nodded. “Theory two is that the rings are intact, hidden somewhere in the castle. There are a number of secret places they could be hidden, and I’m sure we haven’t found all of them. Theory three is that Taubert, knowing he couldn’t transport that much weight, moved them to a cave near here, then blew up the cave’s entrance.
“Theory three is what Sergeant Strauss said he believes, which is why he stuck around. So when I got things organized, we started looking for the cave.”
“Got things organized?” McGrath said.
“I took over the castle, Father Jack. Before I finished chatting with Johann Strauss that first day, I sent Vito’s driver off to find a telephone. Six members of Vito’s detachment arrived right after dark. The castle has been under my control ever since, and we have been exploring it steadily. Nobody gets in but my people.”
“Sir, I have to ask,” Dunwiddie said, “what does Military Government think about the CIC detachment that’s in charge of protecting the Tribunal taking over a castle two hundred–odd miles away?”
“They are curious,” Cohen replied, a hint of humor in his tone, “and I suspect displeased. But, so far, General Greene has been able to keep the situation under control.”
“And what have you found?” McGrath asked. “Anything?”
“This is where it gets interesting. I found—not immediately, but gradually, as I found it hard to believe myself—that Himmler was turning the castle into a holy place, into a Vatican dedicated to a religion he was starting.”
“A castle as a holy place?” Ginger said, in disbelief. “That medieval place looks like anything but that.”
“A holy place,” Cohen confirmed. “And it’s a Renaissance castle.”
Ginger nodded.
Cohen went on. “This is the point of the lecture, so pay attention. Enter Professor Karl Diebitsch, an artist—and, to be fair, a soldier; he was an Oberführer in the Waffen-SS—who had designed the all-black SS uniform and served as sort of Himmler’s artist-in-residence. Diebitsch also designed the gold Totenkopfrings.
“Starting in 1934, under Diebitsch’s direction, the plaster on the exterior walls of Wewelsburg was removed to make the structure look more castlelike. They opened a blacksmith operation to make wrought-iron interior decorations. The blacksmiths and the plaster removers were concentration camp inmates, mostly Russian POWs. But absolutely no Jews, as Jews would obviously contaminate the place.
“Officially, the castle was supposed to be turned into a meeting place for SS brass. That was bullshit. From the beginning, it was to be the Church of Saint Heinrich the Divine.”
“How did you come to that conclusion?” McGrath asked.
“Almost as soon as I got a good look at the castle, I saw that there were major changes to it. At first, I didn’t know what, exactly, had been changed, only that clearly there were changes. I later learned that between 1938 and 1943, the Nazis had built two rooms they called the Obergruppenführersaal—the ‘SS Generals Hall’—and the Gruft.”
“Gruft?” Ginger parroted.
“‘Vault,’ as in ‘burial vault,’” Cohen clarified. “Their ceilings were cast in concrete and faced with natural stone. And they had made plans for another hall on an upper floor. They wanted to turn Castle Wewelsburg into the Mittelpunkt der Welt—the ‘Center of the World.’
“What I found interesting is that many, if not most all, of the modifications made to the castle had to do with the number twelve. Himmler apparently wanted to reincarnate the Knights of the Round Table.”
“As in King Arthur’s Knights of the Round Table?” Ginger asked.
“Yes, but a German, or Teutonic, version thereof.”
He made a significant pause, collected his thoughts, then continued. “In Nordic mythology, there are twelve Aesir—sort of gods—including Odin and Thor. When Himmler re-formed and enlarged the SS, he set it up with twelve departments—SS-Hauptämter. So I began to think that Himmler wanted the castle to serve as the stage for a Nazi version of the Knights of the Round Table.
“In this scenario, Himmler designated twelve senior SS officers as the knights of his round table.
“In the vault, the ceiling is held up by twelve pedestals. In the center of the ceiling there’s a huge swastika. A gas line leading to the center of the floor was almost certainly going to fuel an eternal flame.
“In the Hall of the Obergruppenführers, there are twelve pillars and niches—the latter probably intended for the eventual interment of Himmler’s latter-day knights. There is also a sun wheel with twelve spokes. It looks like a wheel with the sun at the center.”
“What, exactly, is the purpose of this sun wheel?” Dunwiddie asked.
“In this SS religion they were starting,” Cohen explained, “they declared that the sun was the strongest and most visible expression of God.
“If I didn’t mention this before, I later learned, credibly, that upper-level SS brass, mostly general officers, would gather secretly at various places in Castle Wewelsburg to conduct religious rites. Or quasi-religious rites.”
“Sounds crazy,” Ginger said.
“Yes,” Cohen said. “Unfortunately, they were dead serious. But speaking of crazy, did you ever hear of the Inner World of Agharti?”
No one replied.
“Edgar Rice Burroughs, the fellow who wrote Tarzan,” Cohen said, “also wrote about an under-the-earth civilization. He called it Pellucidar.”
“But that was fiction, right?” Ginger said. “Fantasy.”
Cohen grunted. “Speaking of fantasy, what if I told you that beginning in 1941 the SS began construction of a vertical tunnel in Hungary, sort of a super mine shaft, that would eventually be equipped with an elevator that would take Himmler and his inner circle ten miles downward to the Inner World of Agharti?”
He paused, looked from face to face, then added, “Would you consider that fact or fantasy?”
“Fantasy,” Dunwiddie said.
“Insanity,” Ginger said.
“Incredible,” McGrath said.
“Yes, one would think all that. Yet work on the tunnel continued until November 1944, when the SS ran out of supplies and decided the project would have to wait for the Final Victory. I’ve been there. You would be astonished at the size of the mounds of evacuated earth and stone created from a hole, say, thirty feet in diameter and two and a half miles deep—that’s as far as they got.”
“It boggles the mind,” Dunwiddie said.
“Let me now turn to what else I learned happened in Castle Wewelsburg,” Cohen said. “They began to stage religious rites there. The first official Nazi religion ceremony was the baptism of Obergruppenführer Wolff’s son, Thorisman—rough translation, ‘Man of Thor’ or ‘Thor’s son.’”
“Thor?” Ginger said.
“The Nordic warrior god of power, strength, lightning, et cetera,” McGrath furnished. “That’s where we get Thursday—Thor’s day.”
“I never knew that,” Ginger said.
“Present at the baptism,” Cohen said, “were SS-Obergruppenführer und General der Polizei Reinhard Heydrich. Baby Thor got a silver christening cup from Himmler himself.”
“Colonel,” McGrath said, “I absolutely have to see this place.”
“I understand. And I want—”
Cohen’s telephone rang. He glared at it.
“And I want your opinion, Father Jack,” Cohen went on, “of where my thinking is going wrong.”
The phone rang again.
He grabbed the receiver and snapped, “Colonel Cohen.”
Moments later, he added, “Good afternoon, Mr. Justice.”
Then he said, “I’m on my way, sir,” and hung up.
He glanced at the others.
“You’ll have to excuse me. I am not sure what’s up, but something damn sure is. And this lecture is obviously over.” Cohen confirmed that by leaning toward the microphone and formally stating, “The Thousand-Year Reich Lecture interrupted at fourteen-forty-five hours, 18 April 1946.”
He looked at the others again.
“It’s quarter to three. I suggest you return to Farber Palast and discuss this among you—in the Duchess Suite, not in the bar. I’ll try to meet you there about half past five.”
He then walked out of his office.