At first Goudsmit had thought he had all the documents of this small laboratory. But then doubt seized him—there wasn’t enough about Heisenberg’s own atomic experiments. Plötzen vowed that he didn’t know anything about secret papers, and it was quite possible that Heisenberg hadn’t trusted him. One of the other physicists was persuaded over to the American side and revealed the curious fact that the documents had been sealed in a large can and buried in the latrine of the outhouse used by the scientists. The GI Joes didn’t relish the job of rescuing that treasure and showed their sentiments by depositing the can under the open window of the room where Professor Goudsmit spent the night.
In the morning it was cleaned and opened up, and there were the real secrets. They were sealed again and taken to Heidelberg to be shipped to Washington. Thousands of such treasures were pouring into that center, and thousands of scientists of all specialties were waiting to study them and decide if any immediate use could be made of them. The half-dozen German scientists were put into cars and taken to Heidelberg for a very special and polite sort of internment, which consisted of living in a steam-heated villa and having long technical conversations with their former colleagues—American, British, and French.
XIII
Colonel Pash proposed to head a small task force to dash into the Alpine Redoubt and grab the much-wanted Werner Heisenberg. They would avoid Munich, which had not yet fallen but might be falling at this very hour. Lanny saw in this the quickest way to get where he wanted to be, so he offered to go along, and the military officer, who had been diverted by the story of Lanny at Urach, replied, “Sure thing!” They were taking only two cars and half a dozen well-armed men, including a young lieutenant named Hayes. They would be crowded if they captured their man, but Lanny said he wouldn’t object to having Germany’s greatest physicist sitting on his knees. Photographs in Heisenberg’s office showed an amiable and not too large person with somewhat unruly hair.
Lanny had captured the Swabian town of Urach, and now he was going to capture the Bavarian town of Urfeld. The syllable “Ur” means aged, having to do with one’s remote ancestors; it is a difference between America and Europe that on the old continent the most delightful summer resorts may have buildings and history going back five or six or more centuries. In many valleys along the northern Alpine slopes are lovely little blue lakes, and Munich is fortunate in having a score of them within easy reach. There couldn’t have been a pleasanter motor trip; only two or three shots were fired at them, and they might have taken great numbers of prisoners if they hadn’t had more important work in hand.
They traveled fast, not stopping for anything. They cut up into the foothills to avoid Munich. They had passed not far from Dachau, but had no way of knowing what had happened or might be happening there. Americans had found it difficult to believe the atrocity stories, but now that they were liberating one after another of these packed concentration camps they were horrified by the conditions they found.
XIV
They raced into the small town of Urfeld, on the Walchensee, a lake three or four miles long, at the head of that River Isar which flows through Munich, and down whose clear green waters Lanny had once been floated on a great raft, in company with a score of Nazi Bonzen, a picnic party with baskets of Leberwurst sandwiches and a cask of beer. That had been in the days of “Munich”—in the special sense of the name which history will always remember. Lanny had motored through this pleasureland, enjoying the good life which fate had assigned to him.
Now he and his party came with no little trepidation, not sure what kind of welcome they would get. The war was coming to its anticipated end, but many men were still dying every day, and nobody could guess in what remote valleys the fanatics of the Redoubt might be hiding, or through what forests the “werewolves” might be sneaking. The ancient German legend of men who sometimes turned into wolves at night was deeply rooted and was now being used to inspire terror in the population, in much the same way as the hooded Ku-Kluxers had done in the American South after the Civil War.
The little T-force had no trouble in locating their quarry. He was a dignified gentleman, very conscious of his scientific standing. He had, of course, no idea what progress the Americans had been making in the esoteric field of atomic fission; he took it for granted that what he knew must be far ahead of what anybody else in the world knew—it had been that way in so many branches of science. The news that they had been to Hechingen and had found his uranium and his heavy water and his can full of atomic secrets must have seemed to him like the invasion of ancient Rome by the barbarians from the northern forests. When he was told that he would have to accompany the task force to Heidelberg where his colleagues were interned, he yielded politely, since there was nothing else he could do.
While preparations for departure were under way an amusing incident took place. Two high SS officers presented themselves. They had learned that American officers had arrived in town, and it did not occur to them that the Americans might have come without an adequate force. The SS men stated that they had six hundred troops up in the mountains; the snow was deep and they had little food, and, recognizing that the war was over, they desired to surrender. Very gravely Colonel Pash agreed to accept the surrender and specified the spot at which the Germans were to present themselves.
At this moment the young lieutenant happened in. Perhaps he failed to grasp the situation, or perhaps he was one of those persons whose wits do not work quickly. He blurted out, “But we are only seven men!”
Colonel Pash answered quietly, “Our troops will be here in an hour or two, and that is before these gentlemen can get back.” He sent the enemy officers away, and the tiny T-force hightailed it out of Urfeld to find a larger American force and send it up there.
As he promised, Lanny took Germany’s greatest physicist on his knees. They chatted on the way, and Lanny didn’t say who he was or that he had been coached on the subject of atomic fission by Professor Einstein. He just remarked that he had had the privilege of knowing Professor Plötzen for some time, and had called several times upon Professor. Salzmann at the Physics Laboratory of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. That caused Heisenberg to open up and say that he took little stock in the talk about the possibility of an atomic bomb, but that there existed a real possibility of the development of atomic power for use in industry; he had been working on this problem, and now that peace seemed near he would be glad to give the world the benefit of the knowledge he had acquired. Lanny said that was the attitude he had been sure a true scientist would take. Colonel Pash listened and must have smiled quietly to himself, for he knew more about what was going on at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and at Hanford, Washington, than had ever been confided to a presidential agent.
13
Walls of Jericho
I
Learning that Munich had been captured that day, Lanny did not ride back to Heidelberg but left the T-force and made his way into the city. This shrine of Nazism was full of memories for him—but he had to travel some distance into it before he could be sure where he was. The heart of the city, a circle about a mile and a half in diameter, was a mass of rubble, hurled out into the streets and blocking them. All the factory districts had been bombed out of existence, also the railroad yards. There had been an attempt at revolution, and the SS troops had been attacked front and rear; so the city had held out only one day, but the Nazis had succeeded in blowing up most of the bridges in their retreat. Nearly half the population had fled, and the rest were in such confusion as Lanny had never seen before.
It was the Seventh Army which had taken the city, having come down from Nürnberg on a broad front in about ten days. Meantime the Third had reached the tip of Czechoslovakia. Presumably having orders to leave that country to the Russians, they had swung south to the Danube and deep into Austria. At all hazards the Americans meant to possess that Alpine Redoubt, and block the enemy’s plans to fortify it. To hold any city requires only a few troops, and the rest w
ould go on, looking for the enemy’s armed forces. That would include six hundred SS men holed up in a snow-filled valley above the Walchensee. This time the six hundred wouldn’t ride into the valley of death, but into a valley of K-rations and warm stoves.
There was so much news in Munich that an assimilated colonel, coming into headquarters of Seventh, could hardly assimilate it. The Hamburg radio blared with solemn fanfare the tidings that on the previous day Adolf Hitler had died in battle for the Fatherland. The crooked little Doktor, Josef Goebbels, had poisoned himself, but his spirit lived on in the solemn official lie. It was several days before the world learned the truth, that the Führer of the Germans had shot himself in the head in the underground bunker of the New Chancellery in Berlin.
Admiral Doenitz had been appointed his successor—but nobody that Lanny met seemed to care about that, since there was going to be nothing left for any German to succeed to. The Allies weren’t dealing with governments, but only with troops that wished either to fight or to surrender. The Russians had broken through the defenses of Berlin and their artillery had been tearing the New Chancellery to pieces when the Führer had at last made up his tortured mind that his cause was lost.
Soldiers had no time to stop and think about him, but an art expert did. Lanny had been taken down into that Führerbunker during an American air raid, and had sat on an overstuffed sofa feeling the earth shake around him but knowing that he was safe under a twenty-foot covering of concrete and steel. An entire house built underground, an office and a hospital, all with every convenience, a heating plant, a lighting plant, an air-conditioning plant, a telephone switchboard, a radio sending and receiving set—Hitler had been prepared to govern all Germany and conduct its many-front war from that safe retreat. He would make his foes take Germany foot by foot—and they had done just that, and in another day would have been standing over his head and smoking him out like a rat in its hole.
II
Wonderful, wonderful, and after that out of all hoping!—Benito Mussolini likewise had been removed from the scene of history. Il Duce of the Italians had been conducting a sort of mock government in the northern part of his country, under the protection of the German Army. When the British and the Americans closed in on him he fled toward Germany, with his latest mistress, Petacci, and a group of his henchmen. The Partisans had caught them, given them a drumhead court-martial, then lined them up against a wall and shot them. That wasn’t enough to express their sentiments concerning this odious usurper; they took the bodies of Duce and girl down to Milan, and from a scaffold in the old Piazza Loreto hung them by chains, feet up and heads down, to be stared at by all the city and photographed for the rest of the world.
Lanny Budd had taken that pair of dictators for his special and personal foes; he had called them two foxes whose brushes he wanted to hang over his mantel. How they died and what worms ate them was no matter; the point was they could no longer torment mankind with their ignorance, their insolence, and their blind lust for power. It was Lanny’s fond dream that the whole people were wiser than any self-appointed leaders; that if they could once get power and manage to keep it, they and the products of their toil would no longer be at the mercy of evil creatures spewed up from the cesspools of society. So long as such existed, so long as they could seize the wealth of great nations and turn them to fanaticism and aggression, they had to be fought—which meant that the adult life of a lover of art and music and poetry had to be turned to spying and betrayal.
Exactly a quarter of a century had passed since Lanny Budd had had the agitator Mussolini pointed out to him in a café in San Remo, being cursed by one of his Socialist followers whom he had betrayed. Later Lanny had been present when Rick had interviewed him for a British newspaper. Still later the American had heard Il Duce bellowing from his balcony and had tried to tell the world about his cold-blooded murder of Matteotti, the noblest personality that Italy had produced in Lanny’s time. Now the murderer was hanging by his feet in the market place, like a butchered pig!
Lanny hadn’t heard of Adolf Hitler quite so early, but had spent half his life in learning about that genius-madman, realizing what a menace he meant to the future, and practicing to deceive him and pick secrets out of his mind. It hadn’t been such a difficult task, for Adi had been an extraordinarily frank liar and cheat. He had put it all into a book, but few outside his own land had bothered to read it. He had adhered steadily to his theory that the bigger the lie, the easier to get it believed. Again and again he had said that he had no further territorial demands upon Europe; each time he had been believed, and each time he had presented another demand within half a year or less. His opponents had been so stupid that you were tempted to say they deserved what they got—if only it hadn’t meant such hideous suffering for tens of millions of innocent and helpless people.
Now the evil pair were dead; but not until they had caused the loss of some thirty or forty million human lives, and an amount of treasure difficult to estimate but that couldn’t have been less than half a million million dollars, a sum so astronomical that the figures brought no realization to the human mind. How many lives and how many dollars would it take to remove the next set of dictators from the world? And where was the statesman who was going to supervise that job? Was it Winston Churchill, immovable arch-Tory, thinking about nothing but the protection of his “Empah” over all the other empahs of the world? Was it General Charles-André-Joseph-Marie de Gaulle, trained militarist keen for his calling and Catholic zealot proud of his superstition? Or was it the kind and modest little man in the White House, who knew Independence, Missouri, and liked to play poker and the piano, but who knew little more than the average high-school student about the manners and immorals, the greeds and insanities, of the old continent of Europe?
III
Lanny stayed in Munich because he knew that Alsos was on the way and that Monuments wouldn’t be far behind; meantime he could scout around and get information for them both. Most of his acquaintances were Nazi leaders who had fled or were in hiding; the Americans were throwing them into jail as fast as they could be caught. This was a convenient place to interview them, because they were badly scared, expecting the mistreatment which they themselves had meted out to captives during twelve glorious years. Most of them were men of no principles, thinking only to save their skins; they knew that the jig was up and fell over themselves in the effort to oblige their captors. It made one a little sick to hear them protest that they had never been “real” Nazis but only employees obliged to obey orders.
Knowing headquarters of both Third and Seventh Armies, Lanny had no trouble in getting a billet and a meal ticket, and permission to go where he pleased. He asked some help from the Seventh on an emergency job; there was a University of Munich, and it had a Physics Department. He got a T-force, consisting of himself and three GIs with a car. Having learned the technique, he took it upon himself to drive up to what was left of the group of damaged buildings on the Ludwigstrasse. Everybody bowed low before American authority. There had been no academic freedom in Germany for a dozen years; from janitors to president they had all trod the goosestep and heiled Hitler. Now they would all heil Eisenhower. The president, a Doktor Walther Wüst, was also professor of Sanskrit and Persian, and director of Scholarship in the Ahnenerbe, a semi-lunatic organization founded by Heinrich Himmler for the purpose of collecting and cherishing knowledge about the ancient Germanic tribes, the forefathers of the “Aryan” world.
It was with the administrative head of the University that Colonel Budd had his dealings. This gentleman was SS Colonel Wolfram Sievers, an especially ardent Nazi enthusiast and propagandist. He counted it a rare good fortune that his name began and ended with S, since this provided him with a unique opportunity to demonstrate his loyalty to his Aryan heritage. The insigne of the SS, worn as their shoulder patch, looked like a pair of parallel lightning strokes, and the outside world in its ignorance had taken it for granted that these strokes symbolized a mil
itary threat; but no, they were the ancient Runic form of the letter S, and so Colonel Sievers of the Schutzstaffel signed his name this way: sievers.
This learned university administrator was obsequious to a conquering officer of co-equal rank and offered to introduce him to the heads of his various departments, which included Genealogy, the Origin of Proper Names, Family Symbols (Sippenzeichen) and House Markings, Speleology, Folklore, and Welteislehre—which meant the important Nazi discovery that the inner core of all the planets and all the stars consisted of ice. Among the correspondence which Professor Goudsmit turned up in this institution of learning was a letter from Colonel sievers to an official lady named Piffl, instructing her to send a representative to Jutland immediately—this in the very midst of a two-front war—because Reichsführer Himmler had heard a report that there was an old woman living in the village of Ribe who had knowledge of “the knitting methods of the Vikings.”