War Crimes
MATUS, VICTORINO
War Crimes William F. Buckley's historical fiction. BY VICTORINO MATUS Even the name of Nuremberg has a frightening ring. The medieval city was home to princes, painters, and the Meistersingers....
...Amadeus responds casually: "You speak, Lieutenant Reinhard, as if the case against the Jews was only a—what shall I say?—a peculiarity of the Führer...
...Still, there is a demand for soldiers who speak fluent German, and he finds himself assigned to help conduct the Nuremberg trials...
...The necks of many of the criminals didn't immediately snap...
...The novel also shows with a fine clarity what was ultimately at stake— what British justice Sir William Norman Birkett described as "a duel to the death between the representative of all that is worthwhile in civilization and the last surviving protagonist of all that is evil...
...Leave your wife and son aboard the ship as it prepares to set sail...
...Wilhelm Keitel, chief of the high command of German armed forces, twenty-eight minutes...
...Buckley's characters, both real and fictional, are intensely personal...
...It turns out General Amadeus has knowledge of Axel Reinhard, and what he reveals to Sebastian will forever haunt him...
...The family is torn apart and Sebastian and his mother must live in the hope that Axel will eventually escape...
...Chief of Staff Alfred Jodl, eighteen minutes...
...It was simply that the Führer had the courage to act on the anti-Semitism of most Europeans...
...These were the reasons the Allies in 1945 chose Nuremberg as the symbolically powerful site for the most important trial of the twentieth century— that of twenty-four of the highest-ranking leaders of Nazi Germany (a number reduced to twenty-two by the ill health of one prisoner and the suicide of another...
...The defendant for whom Lieutenant Reinhard has specific responsibility is General Kurt Amadeus—the Nazi who was commandant of "Camp Joni," an abominable Vernichtungslager where approximately two hundred fifty thousand prisoners, mostly Russian POWs and Jews, perished...
...But with the eleven war criminals, the operation went far from smoothly...
...Those trials are the subject of Nuremberg: The Reckoning, William F. Buckley Jr.'s fifteenth novel...
...Sebastian and Amadeus develop an eerie relation...
...Goring escaped the hangman altogether by using a vial of poison that many suspect was given him by a sympathizing American officer...
...But the more time Sebastian spends with Amadeus, the closer he gets to finding out the truth about his own father...
...The creation of the International Military Tribunal, with judges from the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union, was unprecedented...
...By the time Sebby is old enough to serve in the U.S...
...Sergeant John Woods, the hangman, had presided over 347 executions prior to Nuremberg...
...For a sense of just how much Buckley has written, readers can consult William F. Meehan's new William F. Buckley Jr: A Bibliography—an extremely daunting list of everything the founder of National Review has published since his 1951 classic God and Man at Yale...
...Although Kurt Amadeus and Camp Joni are fictional, Nazi commandants were in fact brought to Nuremberg to testify on the workings of extermination sites...
...The story opens in Hamburg 1939, a few days before the German invasion of Poland...
...Army, the war is winding down...
...And on it goes...
...Nuremberg: The Reckoning is a good read, historically accurate, and seamless in its weaving of two stories into one giant web that connects characters past and present, while dealing with larger issues of moral responsibility and the nature of humanity...
...When the young lieutenant asks, "Did you consider it a part of your duty to inquire why being Jewish meant being an enemy of the Third Reich...
...Rudolf Hoss of Auschwitz, for example, admitted that "at least 2,500,000 victims were executed and exterminated there by gassing, and burning, and at least another half million succumbed to starvation and disease, making a total dead of about 3,000,000...
...Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop dangled for seventeen minutes...
...But if Axel, a gifted civil engineer, thought he could evade the Gestapo, he was mistaken...
...And it was there in 1935 that the infamous Nuremberg Laws were drafted—laws that officially deprived Jews of their basic rights not only as German citizens but as human beings...
...The one thing Buckley glides over is how the hangings were botched...
...Of course that is not the case...
...His name will be honored after our victory...
...Whitney Harris, a counsel to chief prosecutor Justice Robert Jackson, explains that "Hoss made his confession, not in philosophical justification of what he had done, but simply as the explanation of a loyal member of the Party—a follower of Hitler and Himmler...
...An agent confronts him and offers a deal: Work for the Fatherland and you and your family will not be prosecuted...
...But in the 1930s it was also home to the notorious Nuremberg rallies, where Adolf Hitler gathered his minions and extolled the greatness of his thousand-year Reich...
...Sebby's demeanor of fairness relaxes the SS general, allowing him to be more candid (and chillingly so) about his thoughts on the Reich...
...Annabelle and Axel Reinhard and their thirteen-year-old son Sebastian are preparing for a trip to America, where young "Sebby" will attend school...
...Nuremberg: The Reckoning is steeped in history but is not bogged down by the complexities of international law...
...No government had ever been tried in a court of law for crimes against the whole of civilizaVictorino Matus is an assistant managing editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Four years later, they receive a letter stating that "Herr Axel Reinhard is a casualty of the war for the defense of the Fatherland...
...So shocking was his testimony that even the ruthless former governor general of Poland, Hans Frank, said, "That was the low point of the entire trial, . . . that is something that people will talk about for a thousand years...
...But the Allies were intent on treating the Nazi party not as a legitimate political entity but as a criminal conspiracy, one that waged wars of aggression on peaceful neighbors and violated international treaties by maltreating prisoners of war and civilians...
Vol. 7 • June 2002 • No. 38
