The selection of the major Nazi war criminals had taken months. They were, of course, not the original inner circle, but with the suicides of Hitler, Goebbels, and Himmler, these men represented the best-known Nazis. Finally, finally, Alfred Rosenberg had entered the inner circle. True to character, Göring, Hitler’s second in command, tried to take control of the group, using a seductive twinkle or a bullying glare, and soon many deferred to him. The prosecuting team, disturbed by the prospect of Göring influencing the testimony of the other defendants, quickly took steps to separate Göring from them. First, they ordered Göring to eat alone during lunch breaks on trial days, while the other defendants sat at tables of three. Later, to minimize Göring’s influence even more, they enforced stricter solitary confinement for all defendants. Alfred, as always, declined to participate in the few remaining social opportunities available—during meals, on the walks to the courtroom, or whispered comments during proceedings. The others did not conceal their dislike of him, and he reciprocated fully: these were the men he considered responsible for the failure of the noble ideological foundation he and the Führer had so carefully fashioned.
Image copyright Omer Tamir. Permission granted under Creative Commons/ No Derivative Works license.
A few days into the trial the entire court viewed a powerful film made by American troops when they had liberated concentration camps. Nothing, not a gruesome detail, was omitted: the entire court was stunned and revolted by the screen images of gas chambers, the crematorium ovens crammed with half-burned bodies, mountains of decaying corpses, huge mounds of articles taken from the dead—spectacles, baby shoes, human hair. An American cameraman trained his lens on the faces of the defendants as they watched the film. Rosenberg’s white face registered horror, and he immediately looked away. After the film, he insisted, in concert with all of the Nazi defendants, that he had had absolutely no idea of the existence of such things.
Was that true? How much did he know about the mass executions of the Jews in Eastern Europe? What did he know of the death camps? Rosenberg took that secret to the grave. He left no paper trail, no definitive proof. (Even Hitler’s signature never appeared on a document related to the camps.) And, of course, Alfred never wrote about the camps in the Beobachter, since explicit Nazi policy forbade any public discussion of the camps. Rosenberg was quick to point out to the court that he had declined to attend the momentous Wannsee Conference in January 1942, attended by top Nazi bureaucrats, during which Reinhard Heydrich vividly described the plans for the Final Solution. Rosenberg sent his assistant, Alfred Meyer, in his stead. But Meyer was his close associate for many years and it is inconceivable that the two never spoke of Wannsee.
On the trial’s seventeenth day, the prosecution presented as evidence a four-hour movie, The Nazi Plan, compiled from various Nazi propaganda films and newsreels. The film began with clips from the Leni Riefenstahl film The Triumph of the Will, in which Rosenberg, preening in his elaborate party uniform, provided pompous narration. Alfred and the defendants did not conceal their enjoyment of this brief trip back to their time of glory.
When other defendants were being cross-examined in the courtroom, Alfred was inattentive. Sometimes he sketched faces of courtroom figures; sometimes he turned his earphones to the Russian translation of the proceedings, smirking and shaking his head at the plethora of errors. Even during his own examination, he listened to the Russian translation and publicly protested the many mistakes of interpretation.
Throughout the trial Rosenberg was taken far more seriously by the court than he ever had been by the Nazis themselves. Many times the court described him as the leading ideologue of the Nazi Party, the man who drew the blueprint of European destruction, and Rosenberg never once denied these charges. One may imagine Göring’s mixed responses: scoffing at Rosenberg’s presumed importance in the Third Reich and, on the other hand, snickering at Rosenberg’s obliviousness to the fact he was driving nails into his own coffin.
During his long defense testimony, Rosenberg’s evasiveness, pedantic tone, and complex language greatly irritated the prosecutors. Unlike Hitler, they were not taken in by his pretense at profundity, perhaps because the Nuremberg lawyers had the advantage of IQ test results administered by the American psychologist Lieutenant G. M. Gilbert. Rosenberg’s 124 IQ placed him at the median of the twenty-one defendants. (Julius Streicher, editor in chief of Hitler’s favorite newspaper, placed dead last at 106.) Though Rosenberg maintained his well-practiced superior smirk, he no longer fooled anyone into thinking that he thought deeper thoughts than they could comprehend.
The chief American counsel, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Robert J. Jackson, wrote, “It was Rosenberg, the intellectual high priest of the ‘master race,’ who provided the doctrine of hatred which gave the impetus for the annihilation of Jewry, and who put his infidel theories into practice against the Eastern Occupied Territories. His woolly philosophy also added boredom to the long list of Nazi atrocities.”
In his collected letters Thomas Dodd, American executive trial counsel (and father of Senator Christopher Dodd), bared his feelings about Rosenberg: “Two more days are gone. I cross-examined Alfred Rosenberg this morning and think I did an adequate job. . . . He was most difficult to examine—an evasive lying rogue, if ever I saw one. I actually dislike him—he is such a faker, such a complete hypocrite.”
Sir David Maxwell, the chief British prosecutor, commented, “The only evidence presented is the claim that Rosenberg wouldn’t hurt a fly and that the witnesses have seen him not hurting flies. Rosenberg was a master of euphemism, a bureaucratic pedant, whose seemingly endless sentences snaked about, intertwined, and stuck to each other like overboiled spaghetti.”
And the closing statement of the Russian chief prosecutor, General Rudenko, ended with these words: “In spite of Rosenberg’s efforts to juggle with historical facts and events, he cannot deny that he was the official ideologist of the Nazi Party; that already a quarter of a century ago, he had laid the ‘theoretical’ foundations of the fascist Hitlerite State, which during this whole period morally corrupted millions of Germans, preparing them ‘ideologically’ for the monstrous crimes committed by the Hitlerites.”
Rosenberg had only one possible effective defense—that his Nazi colleagues had never taken him seriously and that all the policies he proposed in the occupied eastern countries were entirely ignored. But he had too inflated an opinion of his worth to admit publicly his own insignificance. Instead, he chose to meander evasively hour after hour. As one Nuremberg observer put it, “It was no more possible to grasp what he was saying than to grab a handful of cloud.”
Unlike the other defendants, Rosenberg never recanted. At the end he remained the sole true believer. He never repudiated Hitler and his racist ideology. “I did not see in Hitler a tyrant,” Rosenberg told the court, “but like many millions of National Socialists, I trusted him personally on the strength of the experience of a fourteen-year-long struggle. I served Adolf Hitler loyally, and whatever the party may have done during those years, I supported that too.” In a conversation with another defendant, he defended Hitler even more emphatically: “No matter how often I go over everything in my mind, I still cannot believe there was a single flaw in that man’s character.” He continued to insist on the correctness of his ideology: “What has motivated me the last twenty-five years was the idea of wanting to serve not only the German people, but the whole of Europe—in fact the whole white race.” And shortly before his death, he expressed the hope that the idea of National Socialism would never be forgotten and would be “reborn from a new generation steeled by suffering.”
October 1, 1946, was judgment day. The court had met 218 times and for the previous six weeks had been adjourned while the jurists engaged in prolonged deliberations. On the morning of October 1, each defendant learned, in order of their seating, the verdict of the court. Three defendants—Schacht, von Papen, and Fritzsche—were acquitted and offered immediate freedom. The rest were found guilty of
some or all of the charges.
That afternoon each defendant learned his fate. Alfred was the sixth man to face the court: “Defendant Alfred Rosenberg, on the Counts of the Indictment on which you have been convicted, the Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.”
Ten other defendants heard the identical words: Göring, Von Ribbentrop, Keitel, Kaltenbrunner, Jodl, Frank, Frick, Streicher, Seyss-Inquart, and Sauckel. Martin Bormann received his death sentence in absentia, and the remaining seven were sentenced to varying periods of imprisonment.
The executions were set for early morning on October 16, 1946. After the sentencing, a military guard stood outside each cell observing the prisoner around the clock through a small opening in the cell door. On the day before the executions the defendants could hear the sounds of hammering as three gallows were constructed in the prison courtyard.
At 11 PM on October 15, the night before the executions were scheduled to commence, the guard outside Göring’s cell heard him groaning and saw him twitching in his bed. The camp commander and physician rushed into his cell, but Göring was already dead. Glass fragments in his mouth gave evidence that he had bitten into a cyanide capsule. Hundreds of such suicide capsules had been distributed to the Nazi leaders, but it has remained a mystery how Göring managed, despite multiple close searches of his self and property, to conceal the one that ended his life. The other defendants never learned of Göring’s death. Von Ribbentrop would replace Göring as the first to be called. Guards entered each cell, one by one, called out the prisoner’s name, and escorted the condemned man to the gymnasium, which only a couple days before had been used by American security officers for a basketball game. On October 16, it contained three black-painted wooden scaffolds. Two gallows were used alternately. The third one was unused, there only for insurance. Planks lined the base of the scaffold so that once the hanged man dropped, spectators could not see him struggling at the end of the rope.
Rosenberg, fourth in line, was handcuffed, brought to the base of the gallows, and asked his name. In a soft voice he replied, “Rosenberg,” and, with a U.S. Army sergeant supporting him on each side, he ascended the thirteen steps of the gallows. When asked if he had any last words, his dark-circled eyes appeared bewildered as he looked at the hangman for a few moments and then shook his head vigorously. Each of the other nine Nazis made a final statement—Streicher shouted, “The Bolsheviks will hang you one day.” But Rosenberg went to his death silently. Like a sphinx.
The bodies of Göring and the nine hanged men were placed in coffins and photographed to remove any doubt that they were, indeed, dead. By cover of night, the ten bodies were taken to Dachau, where the ovens were fired up one last time to incinerate their makers. Sixty pounds of ash, all that remained of the Nazi leaders, were scattered into a stream and soon drifted into the Isar River, which flows through Munich, where this saddest and darkest of all stories had begun.
FACT OR FICTION? SETTING THE RECORD STRAIGHT
I’ve attempted to write a novel that could have happened. Remaining as close as possible to historical events, I’ve drawn on my professional background as a psychiatrist to imagine the inner worlds of my protagonists, Bento Spinoza and Alfred Rosenberg. I’ve invented two characters, Franco Benitez and Friedrich Pfister, to serve as gateways to the psyche of my protagonists. All scenes involving them are, of course, fictional.
Perhaps because he chose to remain invisible, remarkably little is known with certainty about Spinoza’s life. The story of the two Jewish visitors, Franco and Jacob, is based on a short account in the earliest biography of Spinoza that described two young, unnamed men who engaged Spinoza in conversation with the intent of encouraging him to reveal his heretical views. After a short while, Spinoza broke off contact with them, whereupon they denounced him to Rabbi Mortera and the Jewish community. Nothing else is known of these two men—not an unwelcome state of affairs for a novelist—and some Spinoza scholars question the veracity of the entire incident. However, it could have happened. The greedy Duarte Rodriguez, whom I portray as their uncle with a grievance against Spinoza, is indeed a historical figure.
Spinoza’s words and ideas expressed in his disputation with Jacob and Franco are largely drawn from his Theological-Political Treatise. In fact, throughout the novel I draw many of his words from that text, from his Ethics, and from his correspondence. Spinoza as shopkeeper is imagined; it is doubtful that Spinoza ever operated a retail business. His father, Michael Spinoza, established a successful import-export business that, by the time Spinoza had entered adulthood, had run into hard times.
Spinoza’s teacher Franciscus van den Enden was a remarkably engaging, energetic, free-thinking man who later moved to Paris and was ultimately executed by Louis XIV for plotting to overthrow the monarchy. His daughter, Clara Maria, is described by almost all Spinoza biographies as a fetching prodigy who ultimately married Dirk Kerckrinck, Spinoza’s classmate in van den Enden’s academy.
Of the few facts known about Spinoza, the most firmly established is his excommunication, and I have accurately reproduced the official text of the ban proclamation. Most likely Spinoza never again had further contact with a Jew, and of course his ongoing friendship with the Jew Franco is entirely invented. I have imagined Franco as a man far ahead of his time, a preincarnation of Mordecai Kaplan, a twentieth-century pioneer in the modernization and secularization of Judaism. Spinoza’s two living siblings adhered to the ban and cut off all contact with their brother. Rebekah, as I have described, did resurface briefly after his death in an attempt to claim her brother’s estate. Gabriel emigrated to a Caribbean island and died there of yellow fever. Rabbi Mortera was a towering figure in the seventeenth-century Jewish community, and many of his sermons still exist.
Virtually nothing is known of Spinoza’s emotional response to being cast out of his community. My depiction of his reaction is entirely fictional but, in my view, a likely response to a radical separation from everyone he had ever known. The cities and houses that Spinoza inhabited, his lens grinding, his relationship to the Collegiants, his friendship with Simon de Vries, his anonymous publications, his library, and, finally, the circumstances of his death and funeral—all these are grounded in history.
There is more historical certainty in the twentieth-century portion of the novel. However, Friedrich Pfister is entirely fictional, and all the interactions between him and Alfred Rosenberg are imagined. Nonetheless, from my understanding of Rosenberg’s character structure and the state of psychotherapy in the early twentieth century, all the Rosenberg-Pfister interactions might have happened. After all, as André Gide said, “History is fiction that did happen. Fiction is history that might have happened.”
As indicated in the prologue, a document (17b-PS) written by Rosenberg’s ERR officer (Oberbereichtsleiter Schimmer), who confiscated the Spinoza library, states that the library would help the Nazis explore the “Spinoza problem.” I could find no other evidence linking Rosenberg and Spinoza. But it could have happened: Rosenberg fancied himself a philosopher, and he undoubtedly knew that many great German thinkers revered Spinoza. Hence every passage linking Spinoza and Rosenberg is fictional (including Rosenberg’s two visits to the Rijnsburg Spinoza museum). In all other ways I have attempted to report the major details of Rosenberg’s life accurately. We know from his memoirs (written while imprisoned during the Nuremberg trials) that he was indeed “set on fire” at the age of sixteen by the anti-Semitic writer Houston Stewart Chamberlain. This fact inspired the fictional meeting between the adolescent Rosenberg with Headmaster Epstein and Herr Schäfer.
The broad details of Rosenberg’s subsequent life are based on historical record: his family, education, marriages, artistic aspirations, experience in Russia, attempt to enlist in the German army, escape from Estonia to Berlin and then Munich, apprenticeship with Dietrich Eckart, development as an editor, relationship with Hitler, role in the Munich putsch, three-way meeting with Hitler and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, various
Nazi positions, writings, his National Prize, and experience at the Nuremberg trial.
I have more confidence in my presentation of Rosenberg’s inner life than of Spinoza’s because I have far more data culled from Rosenberg’s speeches, his own autobiographical writings, and the observations of others. He was, indeed, hospitalized twice at the Hohenlychen Clinic, for three weeks in 1935 and six weeks in 1936, for what were, at least in part, psychiatric reasons. I have accurately reproduced the letter from psychiatrist Dr. Gebbardt to Hitler describing Rosenberg’s personality problems (aside from the fictitious final paragraph dealing with Friedrich Pfister). Dr. Gebbardt, incidentally, was hanged in 1948 as a war criminal because of his medical experimentation in the concentration camps. The letter from Chamberlain to Hitler is cited verbatim. All newspaper headlines, edicts, and speeches are faithfully recorded. Friedrich’s attempts at psychotherapy with Alfred Rosenberg are based on how I personally might have approached the task of working with a man such as Rosenberg.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am grateful to many for reflections and suggestions after reading all or part of this text: Stephen Nadler, Van Harvey, Walter Sokel, the late Rudolph Binion, Rebecca Goldstein, Marianne Siroker, Alice van Harten, and members of the Pegasus writing group. My agent, Sandy Dijkstra, offered unflagging support and guidance. Many thanks to my research assistants, Kate McQueen, Moira van Dijk, Marcel Oden; to Maureen Lilla, who edited early versions of two chapters; and to a host of generous friends and colleagues who responded graciously to my many requests for consultation: Stephan Alder, Zachary Baker, Robert Berger, Daniel Edelstein, Lazar Fleishman, Dagfin Follesdal, Joseph Frank, Deborah Hayden, Lija Hirsch, Daan Jacobs, Ruthellen Josselson, Regina Kammerer, Jay Kaplan, Rabbi Patricia Karlin-Neumann, Molyn Leszcz, Pesach Lichtenberg, Miriam van Reijen, Aron Rodrigue, Abraham W. Rosenberg, Micha de Vries, Ori Soltes, David Spiegel, Daniel Spiro, Hans Steiner, Aivars Stranga, Carlo Strenger, Theo van der Werf, Hans van Wijngaarden, Simona van Wijngaarden-Bota, and Steven Zipperstein.