Scott Turow - Ordinary Heroes

NOTE: Nearly all of the adipose tissue throughout the body has disappeared, and is diminished even around the kidneys and heart.

The tissues display lack of turgor indicative of severe dehydration. The absence of recent external trauma and only mucus in the gastrointestinal tract would seem to indicate that this man died of malnutrition and dehydration.

s/ Nelson C. Kell Captain, Medical Corps Laboratory Officer

"I received that in June 1945," Bear said, "from your father's doctor friend, Cal Echols, only a few days after the court-martial concluded. Cal had been transferred to headquarters hospital in Regensburg and visited your father often before and after the trial. Since I had been on the lookout for Martin from the start, I had asked Cal to inform me discreetly if he ever heard reports of a one-handed burn victim. My thought was that Martin might seek medical treatment. Instead, this autopsy had come across Cal's desk as the object of considerable curiosity.

"When U. S. troops entered Berlin on May 11, the Soviets had directed the Americans to this body, citing it as another German atrocity. But you'll note the pathologist's conclusion that death had occurred within the last seventy-two hours. The Germans had surrendered Berlin to the Russians on May 2. This man didn't die until a week later. The American doctors suspected that the Russians, not the Germans, had had custody of him."

"The Russians killed Martin?"

"Well, that certainly was how it appeared. After several weeks Graves Registration still had had no success in identifying the remains. But the circumstances of the death, particularly the involvement of the Soviets, spurred continuing interest and finally had led the autopsy to be passed up the line in the Medical Corps. After a good deal of thought, I decided to report this development to General Teedle."

"Teedle?"

"I'd had contact with him now and then. We did not get off on a particularly good foot. I thought he was going to get out of his chair and throttle me during his cross-examination. But Teedle had remained preoccupied with your father's case, regarding it as totally enigmatic. He had let me know that he would always hear me out if I came up with any extenuating evidence. And I'll give Teedle credit. He recognized the prime significance of the autopsy at once."

"Which was?"

"Well, it was hard to believe that the Soviets would have killed a loyal agent, especially by starving him to death. There were many alternatives-perhaps Martin had fallen out with his Soviet masters-but with your father now under a prison sentence, Teedle recognized that the autopsy raised plausible doubts that Martin was a spy. After he turned it over to the OSS, they dispatched a team to identify the body. As usual, OSS wanted to keep the results of its subsequent investigation to themselves, but Teedle would not stand for that.

"As it developed, everything Martin had said to your father about the Alsos Mission was essentially true. OSS had recruited teams of physicists who were racing across Germany, hoping to reach the German atomic scientists before the Soviets. And Hechingen, where the top German physicists had been sent from Berlin, was indeed Alsos' foremost target. There's been a good deal of writing about it."

Out of his folder, Bear handed me photocopied sections from several histories explaining the Alsos Mission, which I scanned. Hechingen was in the sector of Germany where the Free French were leading the combat effort, but because of the atomic secrets that rested with the German scientists, a large American force cut in front of the French without permission and entered Hechingen on April 24, 1945. They seized Werner Heisenberg's laboratory, secreted in a former wool mill on Haigerlocherstrasse above the town center, where they found several of Germany's foremost physicists, including Otto Hahn, Carl von Weizsacker, and Max von Laue, along with two tons of uranium, two tons of heavy water, and ten tons of carbon. Hunting around, the Americans also located the records of the scientists' research secreted in a cesspool behind Weizsacker's home.

"Heisenberg," Bear said, "the foremost physicist in the group, and Gerlach, were missing. Under OSS interrogation, their colleagues soon explained that Heisenberg and Gerlach had fled about ten days earlier, in the wake of a strange incident. A lone one-handed man had been apprehended about to detonate an enormous explosive charge, which would have brought down the brick mill building, killing everyone inside it. The would-be bomber had discarded his dog tags and claimed at first to be French, but when the SS arrived, they identified his uniform, which bore no insignia, except for an oak leaf cluster, as that of an American officer. Given his mission, and the fact that he had slipped into town well in advance of American forces, the SS concluded he could only be OSS.

"The German scientists at Hechingen had foreseen that the Allies, including the Soviets, would want to capture them to learn about their research. This was disheartening on one level, because they knew they were doomed to a lengthy captivity, but they had assumed that whoever caught them-and they much preferred the Americans or the British-was bound to keep them alive in order to absorb their knowledge. The implication of this attempted bombing was far more distressing, since it suggested that the Americans instead were intent on killing them all. Hahn and Weizsacker and Laue decided to remain with their families and accept their fate. But Heisenberg and Gerlach and one or two others literally ran for their lives, only to be tracked down by the Americans within ten days."

Bear's photocopies described Heisenberg's apprehension. Naturally none of the scientists were killed. Instead, as they'd originally anticipated, all were removed to the British intelligence facility at Farm Hall in England, where a lengthy debriefing established that Heisenberg's team was far behind the Manhattan Project.

"And did OSS realize this one-handed soldier was Martin?" I asked.

"Immediately."

"So that was late April, right? Before the court-martial hearing. And did they tell you about this attempted explosion?"

"Not one word. Bear in mind, Stewart, the A-bomb remained America's deepest secret. OSS wouldn't say anything concerning that or Alsosnot to Teedle, the trial judge advocate, or least of all me. But their mania to suppress all knowledge about anything to do with the bomb worked to our advantage. The prosecuting TJA on David's case was a lawyer named Meyer Brillstein, who seemed far angrier at your father than Teedle. One may suppose why. But early on-I'm sure at the insistence of OSS-Brillstein offered to dismiss the capital charge against your father in exchange for David's guilty plea and a mutual agreement not to seek discovery or offer proof of any of Martin's OSS-related activities, aside from those David had witnessed firsthand. Both your father and I saw this offer as the proverbial gift horse, since it meant that the court-martial panel would never know that David deliberately released a suspected Soviet spy. If they had, there's no telling how much longer your father's prison sentence would have been.

"Of course, we can see now that Martin knew much less than he thought he did. He had been briefed for Alsos in London in September 1944, with the idea that he would lead the team of American physicists into Germany. Although Martin necessarily was informed about the German atomic program, in that need-to-know world, no one told him about the Manhattan Project. He had no inkling that the U. S. A. was close to perfecting the bomb on its own, and thus no foresight that in less than four months, Pandora's box, as he called it, would be opened over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Of course, Martin's superiors at OSS became even more determined to keep him in the dark once he began openly expressing doubts about whether a weapon like the Bomb should be in the hands of any nation. By October 1944 he'd passed one comment too many. London decided to pull him in. And Martin decided to defy them.