Читать книгу In Search of Klingsor - Jorge Volpi - Страница 9

When Lieutenant Francis P. Bacon, former agent of the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, and scientific adviser to the U.S. forces stationed in Germany, arrived at the Nuremberg train station at 8 A.M. on October 15, 1946, nobody was there to greet him. Gunther Sadel, officer of the counterintelligence unit attached to Brigadier General Leroy H. Watson, chief of the North American forces, was to have picked up Bacon and taken him to the gallows where the Nazi war criminals were to be executed. But when Bacon alighted from the train, Sadel was nowhere to be found. The train station was virtually empty.

Bacon waited for a few moments but quickly lost patience and asked two military policemen guarding the train depot what was going on. Nobody knew. A sudden silence fell upon them. Aside from a few railway workers—mainly POWs—whose job was to keep the train tracks in working condition, nobody there seemed to move an inch. In the distance, Bacon spotted a couple of officers and, a bit farther on, the railway station manager, but he figured they wouldn’t be much help. His only option was to walk to the Palace of Justice.

Bacon was furious. The autumn wind blasted against his face. The streets remained deserted as ever, as if people were still expecting air raids. Offended and annoyed, Bacon didn’t even bother to gaze at what remained of the city. At one time, it may have been the cradle of the great Meistersänger and, until recently, the proud home of the Nazi headquarters, but the war (and eleven Allied bombing raids) had reduced it to a city in ruins. Little piles of stones now lay where churches once stood; houses and buildings were now nothing more than minor, annoying obstacles in Bacon’s path—all these things well-deserved losses that were hardly worth mourning. Not far off—though it hardly even crossed his mind—was the museum that had once been Germany’s most important, as well as the house where Albrecht Dürer lived until his death in 1528. Now, of course, both were reduced to ashes and rubble.

As far as Bacon saw it, Nuremberg was nothing more than one of the hateful Nazi havens where thousands of young people had flaunted their gray shirts, waved their banners emblazoned with eagles, and brandished their giant torches with pride. There, they had paid homage to Hitler and venerated the swastikas which, just like prehistoric spiders perched upon their little eggs, crawled along the red ribbons that hung down from the public buildings of Germany. Every September, Nuremberg had been host to the Nazi party’s annual festival, and in 1935 the Führer chose this city as the site from which he would enact his anti-Semitic laws. Nuremberg, in addition, was also the repository of the Reichskleinodien and the Reichsheiligtümer, the ancient imperial heirlooms—and symbols of Nazi power—that he had stolen from the Hofburg in Vienna after the annexation of Austria. The celebrated Lance of Longines was among these treasures, all of which eventually became emblems of Aryan authority. As far as Bacon (and the International Military Court) was concerned, tears of sorrow and shame should be shed over the Jews who perished in Auschwitz, Dachau, and other concentration camps—not the justified punishment of one of the bastions of the Third Reich.

Bacon was on the verge of turning twenty-seven, but from the moment he arrived in Europe, in February of 1943, he had made a concerted effort to appear older, stronger, and more imposing than he was. He wanted to wipe the slate clean of all the weakness that had tortured him so in the past and which, to some degree, had forced him out of the United States. He could no longer even try to be the same respectable, reasonable, sincere man he had been before. By accepting this mission—and giving up his job as a scientist at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton—he could not only exercise his desire for vengeance but also prove to himself that he was now a new man. He was determined to prove that he was on the side of the winners, and so he exhibited not even the slightest morsel of compassion for the defeated.

From a distance, Bacon was barely distinguishable from the handful of American soldiers patrolling the area: dark brown hair worn in a military-style haircut, pale eyes, and an angular nose which he rather liked. He fancied himself as a man who wore his uniform with panache (actually, he was a bit stiff), and he went to great pains to display his various decorations, despite the physical discomfort they produced. Upon his shoulder he bore a bulky military backpack that contained almost all his earthly possessions: a few changes of clothing, some photographs (which he hadn’t dared look at since leaving New Jersey), and some old copies of Annalen der Physik, one of the more important journals in his field, pilfered from some or other library he had passed through.

In reality, Bacon had not gone to Nuremberg specifically for the executions. Initially, only thirty people had been granted permission to witness the event, but then General Watson invited him a bit later on, and he accepted enthusiastically. Bacon had been referred to Watson by General William J. Donovan, founder of the OSS and, for a few weeks, special assistant to the U.S. chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, Robert H. Jackson. (Not long before, in the wake of an acrimonious misunderstanding with Jackson, a veteran justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Donovan had been forced to resign for having interviewed Hermann Goering without Jackson’s permission.) Bacon, however, was on a different, perhaps more pedestrian mission: His job was to study the recorded minutes of the copious testimonies relating to scientific research under the Third Reich, and ferret out any and all “inconsistencies,” to use the term favored by his superiors—that is, contradictions in the many statements made by the defendants.

The Palace of Justice was one of the few public buildings in Nuremberg that had survived the wartime bombings, and had recently been restored by Captain Daniel Kiley, a young Harvard architect also under the command of the OSS. Upon reaching the city center Bacon had little trouble identifying the building: Once protected by an ample plaza filled with trees, the large group of buildings featured archways on the ground floor, huge picture windows, and a series of pointed towers. The prison, located toward the back of the building, consisted of four rectangular blocks set in a half-moon, its exterior protected by a high semicircular wall. The Nazi prisoners were housed together in cell block C, steps away from a small chamber that was once a gymnasium but was now a gallows.

It was 9:15 when Bacon finally reached the security guards at the entrance to the Nuremberg military prison. After reviewing his credentials, the soldiers announced that they were under orders to bar all access to the building—most specifically, the gymnasium—until the executions were over. Bacon tried to explain that he had come on General Watson’s invitation, but the guards were impassive, and refused his request to summon Gunther Sadel: “General Rikard’s orders” was their only response.

Scores of journalists swarmed about the scene. Aside from the International Military Tribunal’s official photographer, only two reporters—chosen by lottery—were granted access to the gymnasium. All the others were forced to wait, just like Bacon, for the press conference that would announce the deaths of the war criminals. In an effort to scoop the story, several newspapers had already published early editions. The New York Herald Tribune, for example, had given the news a full, eight-column headline:

11 NAZI CHIEFS HANGED IN NUREMBERG PRISON: GOERING AND HENCHMEN PAY FOR THEIR WAR CRIMES

The executions were scheduled to take place in the afternoon, so Bacon still had a few hours to locate someone who might help him get in. Before anything else, however, he would go to the Grand Hotel, where a room had been reserved in his name. But bad luck seemed to dog his every step; when he arrived at the hotel, the manager declared that there were no rooms available. After patiently explaining that he was there on a special mission, Bacon asked to speak to the supervisor in charge, and a pompous bell captain cleverly rose to the occasion, becoming the de facto hotel manager for a moment, and quickly solved the problem: The hotel had not expected Bacon until the following day, when several rooms would be vacated (“The show ends today, you know?”). Since it was only for one night, however, room number 14—“Hitler’s room”—could be made available.

Bacon climbed the stairs and settled into the immense suite. The luxurious appointments of the Nazi days were long gone, but they were nevertheless the most sumptuous accommodations Bacon had been offered in recent months. Although it did seem like some kind of bad joke that the walls now surrounding him had stood guard over the dead body of Adolf Hitler. Who would have ever thought? What would Elizabeth say? Oh … it was useless to even think about that: For better or for worse, Elizabeth wanted nothing to do with him. Bacon flung himself onto the bed, but it produced an illicit, morbid sensation, as if he were desecrating a sacred space. The idea of urinating on all the furniture crossed his mind, but then he thought better of it: Why should the hotel’s housekeeping staff have to pay for his capricious behavior? He got up and walked into the bathroom. He studied the spacious tub, the sink, the toilet, the bidet. Hitler’s greasy skin had surely rubbed up against all those shiny surfaces. He could just picture Hitler, naked and defenseless, admiring his flaccid member before submerging himself in the water; Bacon could even see the Führer’s defecations, sliding down the hole that he now found himself peering into….

Bewildered, Bacon studied himself in the mirror. Two large circles under his eyes dominated his face; not only had he matured, but he seemed to have grown old. He ran his hands through his hair and, in an attempt to concentrate on something, located one or two gray hairs and decided they were proof of his imminent decline. He was no longer a boy wonder, a child prodigy, or any of those things that had always kept him at the margins of society. As he began to take off his uniform, he mused at how very different it was from the one he used to wear. Trapped within the privileged walls of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, he had very nearly married a woman he didn’t love. There, his life had been a sheltered one, protected from the outside world, just like that of an insect pinned to the inside of a glass case in a museum. His departure from Princeton had been nothing less than a spectacular scandal, but it was also a miracle, a revelation. For the first time ever he sensed that life was a tangible presence that he could feel upon his skin, far from all the desks and blackboards, and the tedium of all those conferences and colloquia. He never would have dreamed that he would derive such satisfaction as a soldier fighting for his country, but now he was certain that he had made the right choice. He would have plenty of time, at some point in the future, to return to the world of science—but then it would be as a hero, not as a fugitive.

He turned on the faucet and waited for the hot water to pour out, but nothing more than a weak stream of lukewarm droplets emerged from the tap. “The Führer wouldn’t have stood for this,” he laughed to himself, and proceeded to bathe with the help of a towel and a freshly opened, pungent cake of soap. When he was finished, he went back to the bed and, before he knew it, fell into a deep sleep, though the unsettling dream he had nearly asphyxiated him: There he was, in the middle of a dark, rainy forest, when suddenly Vivien appeared out of nowhere. Vivien, the young black woman from Princeton with whom he had maintained a secret relationship for so long. Ruefully, he noted that his life was strewn with puddles and potholes; in fact, it seemed to have evolved into something more like a moldy, threatening swamp. In the dream, he tried to kiss Vivien when suddenly he found himself face-to-face with his ex-fiancée Elizabeth instead. “There’s lipstick on your mouth,” she said to him, and proceeded to wipe it off with a handkerchief. “You shouldn’t do that,” she reprimanded him. “It’s bad, very bad.” By the time Bacon managed to extricate himself, it was too late: Vivien had already disappeared.

It was almost three in the afternoon when he awoke. He kicked himself: This was the worst possible thing he could have done. Not only had he neglected his work, but he had done so thrashing about in Hitler’s bedsheets! He quickly put on his clothes, scurried down the stairs, and ran as fast as he could to the pressroom at the Palace of Justice.

A few hours later, he was informed of the news which would soon travel to the rest of the world like an infectious disease. From the crumbling streets of the ancient medieval burgh, the communiqué was sent out that the Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering—the highest-ranking Nazi prisoner sentenced by the International Military Tribunal—had been found dead in his cell a few hours before Sergeant John Woods was to carry out the hanging for which he had been sentenced. According to the rumors, Goering had ingested a capsule of cyanide, a cruel, eleventh-hour joke which allowed him the last laugh over the judges’ decision. “One day there will be statues of me in every plaza and little figurines in my likeness in every home in Germany,” the Reichsmarschall had once arrogantly proclaimed, so certain he was that he would be redeemed in the eyes of posterity. After his death, a stack of letters was found in his cell (number 5, cell block C), all of them written with the same small, precise lettering. The first of these letters explained the reasons for his suicide:

To the Allied Control Council: I would have had no objection to being shot. However, I will not facilitate the execution of Germany’s Reichsmarschall by hanging! For the sake of Germany, I cannot permit this. Moreover, I feel no moral obligation to submit to my enemies’ punishment. For this reason, I have chosen to die like the great Hannibal.

On another sheet of paper, addressed to General Roy V. Rickard, member of the Quadripartite Commission in charge of supervising the executions, Goering confessed that he had always kept a capsule of cyanide close by. He also wrote a letter to his wife: “After serious consideration and sincere prayer to the Lord, I have decided to take my own life, lest I be executed in so terrible a fashion by my enemies…. My last heartbeats are for our great and eternal love.” Henry Gerecke, the Protestant pastor who ministered to the German prisoners, was the last recipient in this small pile of letters. In his note to Gerecke, Goering asked for pardon and explained that the motivation for his actions had been purely political.

The next day, Gunther Sadel told Bacon all he knew about the matter. At 9:35 the previous evening, October 14, the guard had informed the necessary officials that the prisoner was resting peacefully in his cot after Dr. Ludwig Pflücker had administered him a sleeping pill. Just like every night, a soldier was stationed at the door to Goering’s cell, specifically to keep close watch over him until the early dawn; after all, it was to be his last night under prison surveillance. Colonel Burton Andrus, the chief officer of the prison, had suspended all external communications with the outside world as a special precaution. The guards’ only source of outside contact was a telephone line connecting them to the staff at the central offices, who continually updated them, inning by inning, with the score of the World Series, which was under way at the time.

All of a sudden, someone began calling for Pastor Gerecke’s aid. It was the voice of Sergeant Gregori Timishin: Something was wrong with Goering. The chaplain ran toward the cell of the once plump Reichsmarschall, but when he arrived, he knew instantly that any resuscitation attempt would be pointless. Goering’s face, which had seduced so many thousands of men and women, the same face whose glare had inspired both fear and fury among his captors, was now focused on a spot somewhere far off in the distance. Only one obstinate eye remained open. His rosy complexion had turned greenish, and his body, though twenty-five kilos lighter since his imprisonment, lay like a bale of hay, impossible to move. The cell smelled like bitter almonds. Gerecke took his pulse and said, “Good Lord, this man is dead.” By the time the other members of the Joint Staffs arrived, it was already too late: Out of either cowardice or pride, Goering had foiled them.

Bacon could hardly believe it: At the very last moment, that miserable fiend had gotten away with it. And Bacon was not alone. The general feeling among the Allied forces was one of bitter disappointment, and several newspapers even dared publish the following headline: GOERING CHEATS HIS EXECUTIONERS.

“Where the hell did he get that pill?” Bacon asked Sadel.

“That’s what everyone wants to know,” Sadel responded. “They’ve already launched a full-blown investigation, though for the moment are not pointing the finger at anyone. Andrus is shattered,” he added, referring to the prison director. “A lot of people think it’s his fault, but you know, Goering wasn’t the first prisoner to commit suicide. I don’t think anyone could have prevented it.”

“But Goering! The day before his execution! It’s unbelievable.” Bacon shook his head, incredulous. “Could it have been that German doctor?”

“Pflücker? I doubt it,” said Sadel. “It would have been too difficult. The guards always searched him carefully before he entered each cell, and the pill he gave Goering was only a tranquilizer…. No, the Reichsmarschall must have had it hidden among his things, in the storage room, and someone must have brought it to him.”

“But who would want to help that pig?” Bacon asked, cracking his knuckles.

“Well, it’s not as simple as it may seem. I never had contact with him, but several people have said that Hermann was quite a character. During the trial proceedings not only Germans but Americans actually sympathized with him. He was just too cynical and biting to hate.”

A strange explanation, thought Bacon, especially coming from such a young man like Sadel, who was half Jewish and at age thirteen had been forced to flee Germany to find his father in the United States. Since then, he knew nothing of his mother’s whereabouts or whether she was alive or dead, for she had been forced to divorce his father and remain in Berlin. When he returned to Germany with General Watson, Sadel was given permission to search for her, and when he finally found her, she agreed to be one of the witnesses for the prosecution.

“Tex Wheelis is the prime suspect,” Sadel continued. “He was the officer in charge of the storage room. They say that he and Goering had become friendly, and that he might have been the one to help him. But we want to be able to find out for certain. The men in charge want to put this issue to bed. Their opinion is that it was an accident, and they feel the case should be treated as such.”

“An accident?” Bacon was getting more and more heated. “Hundreds of people worked for months to have him hanged and at the last minute he managed to escape. Was Hitler’s suicide in Berlin another ‘accident’? And what about the Final Solution? Doesn’t that make you feel as if all of this has been useless? That we fought against an evil that got the best of us in the end?”

“The purpose of the trials was to uncover the truth, Lieutenant. To expose the truth about the Third Reich to the entire world, and to ensure that no one can ever justify the kind of atrocities that were committed. Who can deny the horror of the Nazi regime, the gas chambers and the millions of deaths, after seeing all those photographs?”

“But given the situation, do you think the truth will ever come out? The only truth we have is the one we are capable of believing.”

The following morning, Lieutenant Bacon watched from a distance as the dead bodies of the eleven Nazi chiefs—Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister of the Third Reich; Hans Frank, governor-general of Occupied Poland; Wilhelm Frick, governor of Bohemia and Moravia; Alfred Jodl, chief of operation staff of the High Command of the Wehrmacht; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reich Main Security Office and second-in-command to Himmler; Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the Wehrmacht; Alfred Rosenberg, official philosopher of the regime and minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories; Fritz Sauckel, plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment; Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reich commissioner of the Netherlands; Julius Streicher, editor and publisher of the newspaper Der Stürmer; and of course, Hermann Goering, Reichsmarschall and chief of the Luftwaffe and second-in-command to Hitler—were transported in military trucks to the cemetery in Ostfriedrichhof, in Munich, where they would be cremated. He stared at the long caravan of cars and armed guards that followed the trucks. The bodies had been placed in individual sacks, each one tagged with a false name. The Germans in charge of the ovens were told that the bodies were those of American soldiers who had died during the war; it was a precaution the authorities took to ensure that nothing of the cremations would ever resurface in the form of Nazi mementos. For this reason, no one was to associate those ashes with the Nazi leaders condemned to death by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.

Almost instantly the oppressive tension gripping the city seemed to lift. The work was finally finished, despite the fact that nobody was satisfied with the results—especially the Soviets, who never hid their displeasure with the course the trials had taken; at one point they even accused the American and English forces of allowing Goering to commit suicide. There were still many minor Nazi functionaries waiting for their day in court, though the eyes of the entire world were not likely to remain as permanently transfixed upon the halls of the Palace of Justice.

But as I said before, Lieutenant Francis P. Bacon had not come to Nuremberg to attend the executions. His mission was of an entirely different nature, having much more to do with his insights and talents as a man of science.

About halfway through the war, while working at the Institute for Advanced Study, Bacon decided to enlist in the army. He was sent to England to make contact with the British scientists there, and in 1945 he joined the Alsos mission, led by the Dutch physicist Samuel I. Goudsmit, who was responsible for archiving all available information relating to the German scientific program, and to the Germans’ work on the atomic bomb. He was also the official who ordered the capture of the German physicists who were working on it.

Once his tour of duty was over, Bacon could have returned to the United States, but he chose to continue working as a scientific consultant to the Allied Control Council, the entity responsible for governing Occupied Germany. Finally, in early October of 1946, a few days after the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg handed down its sentences to the Nazi defendants, Bacon was summoned by the Office of Military Intelligence to review some of the documents from the trial archives. From this research he would produce a report illustrating the points he felt most relevant to his assigned task of searching for the inconsistencies in the war criminals’ testimony. Of his report, one small detail emerged which caught the attention of his military commanders.

On July 30, 1946, in the main hall of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, seven German organizations went on trial: the Nazi party leadership; the cabinet of the Reich; the security police, known as the SS; the secret police, known as the Gestapo; the Security Service, or SD; the Storm Troops, or SA; and the Military High Command of the Third Reich. In the weeks leading up to the trials, the tribunal announced that the trial proceedings were to be broadcast throughout Germany so that anyone who had been affected by any of the accused groups might step forward and offer his or her testimony. More than 300,000 responses flooded the Palace of Justice. From this pool, 603 members of these organizations were brought to Nuremberg to testify. In the end, the court admitted the testimony of some 90 people—mostly pertaining to the SS—who had refused to commit dishonest actions in the fulfillment of their duties.

One of these testimonies caught the attention of the U.S. Intelligence Services. During this process, a little man named Wolfram von Sievers, president of the Society for German Ancestral Heritage (and, as was later discovered, the head of an office of the Ahnenerbe, the SS office of scientific investigation). Von Sievers was an extremely nervous witness; during his long hours sitting on the witness bench, he never stopped rubbing his hands, and his cheeks were perpetually drenched in perspiration. He stumbled over his words, repeated certain phrases over and over again, and, as if that weren’t enough, he was also a stutterer, which further complicated the jobs of the extensive network of simultaneous translators who, for the first time in history, performed their task in the courtrooms of Nuremberg.

While being interrogated by one of the Allied prosecutors, Von Sievers made the first in a series of controversial declarations. According to an agreement signed by the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the SS regularly sent skulls of “Bolshevik Jews” to Von Sievers’s laboratory so that he might perform experiments on them. When Von Sievers was asked if he knew how the SS obtained those craniums, he replied that they came from the prisoners of war at the Eastern Front, who were assassinated specifically for this scientific research. The prosecutor pressed on: “And what was the objective of your ‘research’?” Once again Von Sievers stumbled over his words, incoherent and stuttering. Finally, after persistent pressure from the judges, he gave in and delivered a long, wildly digressive speech on phrenology and the physical development of ancient civilizations, covering everything from the Toltecs and Atlantis to Aryan supremacy and mystical shrines like Agartha and Shambhala. More specifically, however, he explained that his own task had been to establish the biological inferiority of the Semitic people, to become intimately familiar with their physiological development over the ages, which presumably would enable him to ascertain the best way to eliminate their defects.

When he was finished speaking, Von Sievers looked like one of the skulls he claimed to have been studying, and his hands were now trembling uncontrollably. The prosecutor, however, was getting fed up; he had only interrogated Von Sievers to prove that the SS and the Nazi regime in general had indeed committed atrocities. He certainly hadn’t intended this to be an exposé of the repulsive scientific investigation undertaken by Von Sievers, who, it turned out, would one day be tried and convicted for crimes against humanity.

“Where did you obtain the funding for this research, Professor Von Sievers?”

“From the SS, as I have already stated,” he stammered.

“Was it common procedure for the SS to commission you to perform this type of research?”

“Yes.”

“And did you say that the SS provided the financing for it?”

“Yes, directly.”

“What do you mean when you say ‘directly,’ Professor?” The prosecutor sensed that he had finally hit upon a lead that might actually get him somewhere.

Von Sievers attempted to clear his throat.

“Well, all the scientific research undertaken in Germany first had to be cleared by the supervision and control centers of the Research Council of the Third Reich.”

The prosecutor had hit the nail on the head. This was exactly what he wanted to hear. The Research Council, just like so many other dependencies of the Third Reich, fell under the supervision of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering.

“Thank you, Professor. That will be all,” the prosecutor concluded.

Von Sievers, however, added one more rather unexpected statement which, by order of the judges, was stricken from the record at the defense lawyers’ request. Nevertheless, the statement did appear in the transcript Bacon received from the Office of Military Intelligence, and the lieutenant studied it closely, as it was highlighted in red ink. It said: “Before any funds could be released, each project had to be approved by Hitler’s scientific adviser. I never did find out the identity of this person, but according to rumor, it was a well-known figure. A man who enjoyed a prominent position in the scientific community, and who operated under the code name Klingsor.”

A few days later, on August 20, the courtroom was packed, a sure sign that Hermann Goering, the Great Actor in this theater of justice, was to make his appearance. He arrived dressed in a white jacket—in his glory days, he had been known for wearing this uniform. Ruddy-faced and volatile, Goering was the heart and soul of the trials. Acerbic and straightforward, he had that special kind of impertinence that comes from years of giving orders without ever hearing a single protest. He faced his interrogators as if he were dictating his memoirs. In his best moments, he displayed an acidic, penetrating sense of humor, and in his worst, he was like a caged monster, ready and waiting to take a bite out of anyone, even Otto Stahmer, his own defense attorney. Stahmer was responsible for directing this short scene:

“Did you ever issue an order to carry out medical experiments on human subjects?” he asked. Goering took a deep breath.

“No.”

“Are you acquainted with a Dr. Rascher, who has been accused of performing scientific research on human guinea pigs at Dachau, for the Luftwaffe?”

“No.”

“Did you ever issue an order authorizing anyone to carry out unspeakable experiments on prisoners?”

“No.”

“As president of the Research Council of the Reich, did you ever order plans for the development of a system of mass destruction?”

“No.”

Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, the British prosecutor, rose from his seat.

“You were a great pilot,” he said courteously, “with an impressive service record. How is it possible that you cannot remember those experiments, which were performed so as to verify the resistance of the uniforms used by the air force?”

“I had many tasks to attend to,” Goering explained, with the same civility as his interrogator. “Tens of thousands of orders were issued in my name. Justice Jackson has accused me of having ‘fingers in every pie,’ but it would have been impossible for me to keep track of all the scientific experiments undertaken by the Third Reich.”

Maxwell-Fyfe then presented as evidence a series of letters between Heinrich Himmler and Field Marshall Erhard Milch, Goering’s right-hand man. In one of these letters, Milch thanked Himmler for his assistance in facilitating Dr. Rascher’s experiments with high-altitude flights. One of these experiments involved a Jewish prisoner who was flown to twenty-nine thousand feet without oxygen. The subject died after thirteen minutes.

“Is it possible,” continued Maxwell-Fyfe, “that a high-ranking official directly under your command—such as Milch—could have been aware of these experiments even though you were not?”

“The areas under my control were classified in three categories,” Goering explained, almost smiling. “‘Urgent,’ ‘Important,’ and ‘Routine.’ The experiments performed by the medical inspector of the Luftwaffe fell under the third category and did not require my attention.”

Never again was mention made of the scientist whose job was to approve the Third Reich’s scientific projects. Never again was Klingsor’s name mentioned. Goering certainly didn’t bring it up, and Von Sievers himself, upon a second interrogation, denied ever having uttered the name. This one dubious mention was all Bacon had to go on.

The lieutenant slammed the dossier shut.