Armageddon_ A Novel of Berlin - Leon Uris [39]
“The Jews are lucky to have so many good German friends,” Sean said. “So there we have it. No one knows anything. Factory foremen who didn’t know they were using slave labor ... people working on the river front who didn’t even see the slaves being marched over every day ... doctors, nurses, professors at the college who didn’t know their colleagues were at the ‘research center’ in the concentration camp ... no one saw the trains coming in to Ludwigsdorf. ... It really never happened.”
“Why did they keep these records?” Dante asked.
“Because, in their warped logic, it is a basis to legalize and justify the murder in Schwabenwald. Of course we will never know how many of those poor people from outside Germany were denied even a death certificate.”
“We did not know,” Count Ludwig said to Sean.
“The record to date is perfect. Twenty-nine people out of twenty-nine interrogated so far did not know. Twenty-two of them had good friends who were Jewish, and twenty-four had nonpolitical Nazi affiliations to hold their jobs.”
“You can not blame us for the work of a single madman. Klaus Stoll was insane, obviously.”
“You might be interested in knowing that Schwabenwald was merely one of many of the same. Here’s a few more names that have just come in. You read English. Read it.” He handed him the paper.
Graf Ludwig read the dispatch from headquarters ... Dachau ... Ravensbruck ... Buchenwald ... reports from the Russian front indicate that in Poland ...
“In God’s name, Major. We are a civilized people.”
“God’s name has been used rather freely in the last few days.”
“You cannot blame an entire nation for the doings of a handful of Nazis.”
Sean grunted a small ironic laugh. There were stacks of files on his desk. He found the one he wanted, opened it, and walked to the count. There were photographs of the City Hall Square of Rombaden in another day. All the buildings—City Hall, the college, hospital, museum, and even the cathedral—were covered with swastika buntings. A long row of brown-shirted SA men stood with tall, thin-tapered torches leading to a grandstand where thousands more in black shirts and death’s head insignias held swastika standards. There were tens of thousands more in Hitler Youth and SS uniforms holding the Nazi salute. And there were thousands more who could not jam into the square listening over loudspeakers in joined barges on the river. It seemed as though not a person could be missing from Rombaden’s population. Some women cried in ecstasy at the sight of the Fuehrer. Blown-up segments of the photographs identified the three Von Romsteins and Father Gottfried and almost all of those other “nonpolitical” Nazis.
All of this had taken place outside the window of Sean’s office, where now the dead from Schwabenwald were being taken out of Marienkirche.
Masses, screaming ecstatic masses. Hear the drums! Hear his voice! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil! The trumpets and the marching boots.
“Is that what you call a handful? Is that a handful in the square?”
“These pageants were designed to inflame the lower classes. Masses anywhere in the world are obsessed with uniforms.”
Sean slammed his fist on the table. “But they don’t go insane when they get in a crowd like Germans do!”
“Major, I tell you that Schwabenwald is the work of a few people. You saw for yourself how completely hidden and guarded the place was. It was a word spoken of only in whispers.”
“The smell. Was it smelled in whispers? During the spring and early winter you have south winds. What happened when the smell reached Rombaden? We have twenty-six answers. Ten of them had no opinion about the smell, five thought it was a leather factory, four a fertilizer plant, one a chemical plant, and eleven didn’t smell a thing. What did you think about the smell?”
Ludwig Von Romstein twitched in the first visible sign of discomfort Sean had seen.
“You are chief benefactor of the Medical College and of the Research Center. You entertained those doctors in Castle Romstein. You gambled with them at the Kurhaus. Did they