Richard Gordon: THE INVISIBLE VICTORY

The German orderly in a white jacket brought our steaks. 'And that German technology!' Jeff murmured admiringly. 'I suppose you knew the US division of your FIAT collected 200,000 pages of trade secrets from Leitz Optical alone? And 600,000 pages on dyes, synthetic rubber, plastics and so on from I G Farben? Truman has ordered the information sold to US industry at nominal prices. Our FIAT had a budget of almost four million bucks, but I reckon it was money well spent. You British didn't really get into it,' he admonished me. 'I guess it's your old trouble. War is OK, but trade is ungentlemanly.'

I asked what the job would be. 'Organizing my interests. I trust you. You speak German. You know the Germans.'

'Can't the Germans organize themselves?'

'They couldn't under the Nazis. Hitler's organization was terrible, just a lot of overlapping agencies all at each other's throats, with no directives but a vague idea of carrying out the Fьhrer's will. I expect they'll improve on it when they haven't to worry about a knock on the door at four in the morning. The salary could be about what your Prime Minister gets, old man.'

'I'm sorry. But I'd rather stay at home in the British Empire.'

Jeff looked exasperated. 'What British Empire? Roosevelt wanted to see the end of it, and he did. You British have ended the war with no money, no power, and no influence. Only thousands of millions of coloured people who want to see the back of you as soon as possible. And you're putting up a statue to Roosevelt in Grosvenor Square. That's gentlemanly to the limit!'

Like most Britons, I still did not see the truth which Ainsley had prophesied in his club. Nettled, I said, 'Well, we still count in Europe.'

'The whole of Europe's now just little kings and cuckoo-clocks. There's only two powers in the world, the Russians and us. And we've got the bomb.'

'Besides, I'm getting married,' I added as an unanswerable objection.

'I thought you were married?' Jeff grumbled.

'I got divorced. I'm marrying that girl with the soldier's gas mask I brought to the Savoy. The one who married a close friend of mine. It's all very gentlemanly.'

'Think it over. Telephone me in New York if you change your mind.'

'Honestly, I'd rather be a professor.'

Jeff grunted. Suddenly remembering, he took out his pocket-book and handed me a newspaper cutting. 'Did you ever come across that guy in Wuppertal?'

The cutting came from a recent _New York Times,_ headed _German "Scientist" Gets 5-year Term._ It was a short, bald story of Count von Recklinghausen, a rocket engineer from Wuppertal, who had been cleared of Nazi guilt by the Allied Control Commission and been flown to America with several hundred other scientists. He was in trouble through selling New Yorkers shares in his non-existent family engineering business, and found to be neither a count nor a scientist but a journalist from Hamburg with a police record for swindling. He had apparently reached the United States through forged documents and exploiting the rivalries between various Allied organizations. I hoped that Rudi's flattering letter from Hitler was a forgery, too. I decided to post the cutting to Greenparish anonymously.

'What shall we do for the rest of the evening, old man?' Jeff asked me. 'Go find some women wrestling in mud?'

I left early the next morning in a US Army jeep for Nьrnberg. I was going to renew another old acquaintance.

Since the previous May I had been following the trial of 23 top men from I G Farben. It was an all-American show, in the Nьrnberg Palace of Justice, where the Nazi bosses had been tried expediently, if not entirely logically. I recognized the courtroom at once from the photographs in the newspapers during 1946. To the left of the dock was a booth for three or four young men and women, the interpreters, every word spoken having to pass from microphone to earphones, through their heads. To their left stood the witness chair, opposite it across a dozen yards of bare floor the desks of the lawyers. Facing the dock, raised well above it, sat the four American judges in their black gowns-Shake, Moms, Herbert and Merrell. Everywhere stood armed American military policemen in their white-painted steel helmets, the 'snowdrops' who had become as familiar in a hundred grimy and remote British towns as the bobby.

I spotted Hцrlein at once among the dark-suited prisoners. Fourteen years of war and 28 months of imprisonment had scarred him less than I expected. He was then 65, he had lost some weight, and when he turned his head I noticed that he had shaved off his moustache. He still wore his round glasses.

The Court was Military Tribunal Six, the trial the United States of America v Karl Krauch _et al._ I had seen a copy of the indictment in London. Through Archie, our affairs being _very _gentlemanly indeed. But his marriage was dead, and he was relieved to keep the divorce between friends. He would have found some stranger intruding into Elizabeth's affections deeply hurtful.

The charges were sweepingly formidable. The first count was the planning, preparation, initiation and waging of wars of aggression and the invasions of other countries. The second, plunder and spoliation. The third, slavery and mass murder. Four, membership of the SS. Five, conspiracy to commit crimes against the peace. Professor Hцrlein escaped only count four.

I had timed my arrival at Nьrnberg for Hцrlein's own turn to face the music. That was Thursday morning, December 18, 1947. I found quickly that he had an excellent German counsel, Dr Otto Nelte. His first point to the judges was of Hцrlein's relative ignorance about his fellow-directors' business. 'The administrative structure of I G Farben was so decentralized as to render it virtually impossible for an individual member of the board to be informed of the activities of the others,' the lawyer insisted. The judges were not overimpressed.

'Ever since 1933, Professor Hцrlein was in opposition to the Party,' Dr Nelte asserted. 'Especially to Streicher, who supported the fanatical adherents of treatment by natural remedies in their attacks upon pharmaceutical firms. Moreover, he became a victim of a campaign of defamation, because he took part in the fight for freedom in the field of science against the plans of Hitler and Gцring to prohibit vivisection for scientific purposes.'

I did not think the judges were impressed with this either. But it rang true to me. The Nazis were fervent health cranks. That Hitler was appalled by vivisection was another paradox matching that being untangled before me.

It was strange next to hear the lawyer refuting the charge I had first heard from Colebrook in 1935-of I G Farben withholding the sulpha drugs from the world until certain that the lining of its pockets was safely sewn up with patents. 'Through the discoveries made in the Elberfeld works, which were organized and managed by Professor Hцrlein,' he declared for good measure, 'every year millions of human lives were saved, and through drugs like the antimalarial atebrin, health restored to hundreds of millions of human beings.'

Then he came to the Zyklon-B.

The defence was simple. Hцrlein did not know what was going on. Degesch was a subsidiary company of I G Farben at Frankfurt, its full title Deutsche Gesellschaft fuer Schaedlingsbekaempfung. But Hцrlein did not know that Degesch was supplying Zyklon-B to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. He did not know that Zyklon-B was for the gassing of human beings. Hцrlein was admittedly a member of the Degesch Verwaltungsrat-its management committee-but several links were missing in the chain of evidence. 'The assertion that the management committee knew of the business transactions involving Zyklon-B is unsupported. No transcript of such meetings has been submitted, no evidence has been introduced to prove that Hцrlein had obtained knowledge of it in any way whatever. He did not take part in any meetings of the management committee at the critical time. He did not receive reports disclosing that Zyklon-B had been supplied to Auschwitz or the terrible use made of it at Birkenau.'