Discern the intriguing War Crimes Investigations: Hear about the beginnings of the war crimes investigations in Paris. Learn from an investigator about the true extent of Nazi evil and the challenges of bringing justice to the perpetrators.
CHAPTER 23
WAR CRIMES
The next day, Bunts and Kathy went to Reims in search of the footlockers. At the train’s transportation headquarters, the Sergeant told them, “Come back tomorrow. The plane they were on will be back by then.”
Kathy hitched her musette bag onto her shoulder, and turned to walk toward the leave center. Bunts dropped her musette bag beside a bench and sat down to wait.
“He said to come back tomorrow,” said Kathy. “Let’s check in at the leave center.”
“Nope. I’m leaving.” Bunts strummed her guitar, her old refrain, “I’ll Be Seeing You.”
“You want to go without your footlocker?
“Yup. I don’t care if I never see it again.” She strummed and hummed, “In all the old familiar places...”
“You lose a footlocker of clothes and you don’t care? Winter’s coming. You will need that lovely long woolen underwear. Doesn’t anything bother you?”
Bunts smiled her quiet, passive smile. “I will be with Tex soon. I’m getting married. I do not intend to be wearing olive drab underwear.”
Bunts had endured the war without any scars. She was seemingly untouched. She survived with a strong steadiness that did not get disturbed. The war was over. She would now resume her life as though nothing had happened.
“I’m glad to have known you,” said Kathy. “I’ll see you sometime. Should I wait with you for your train to Le Havre?”
“I don’t mind waiting by myself. A few minutes, a few days…it’s been years waiting now. Good-bye, and good luck to you.” She dreamily strummed her guitar as Kathy walked away and waved goodbye.
Kathy left her musette bag at the leave center, and walked over to the SHAEF Headquarters. Captain McClain always had interesting news. Captain McClain was not in her office. Walking down the hallway, Kathy stopped at an open door marked “WAR CRIMES INVESTIGATING TEAM.” There would be something interesting in that room.
The room was an old-fashioned, dark-wood-trimmed schoolroom. The children’s desks had been replaced with consul’s tables and a judge advocate’s bench. Behind the tables sat uniformed officers and testifying civilians stood in front. A brown-haired captain waved his horn-rimmed glasses toward Kathy, inviting her in. He offered her a chair beside his table.
She listened all afternoon to testimony about the oats and cattle the Germans had taken. When court recessed, Kathy turned to the consul. “Thank you for inviting me in.”
“You are welcome to listen. This office is working to prepare for the war crimes trials that will be held in Nuremburg, Germany.”
“Thank you. Today I learned something. I had thought France’s starvation was because men were fighting instead of plowing. Does this mean babies starved because the Germans took the food?”
“There were many complicated reasons for starvation. We’re trying to estimate how much to blame on a by-product of war, poor distribution—and how much to the grabbing Germans. Crop production was reduced about 10 percent. That itself couldn’t cause the extreme starvation. The Nazis took two thirds of the production of Belgium and Holland. We’re estimating now what they took from France. So far, we’ve traced over eight million tons of French oats that went into Germany, and we’re not done.
“They must have known that the Belgians, the Dutch, and French would die if they took the food.”
“Of course. And Poles and Czechs and Slavs would die. The Nazis wanted them to die. Kill off the inferior races and populate the world with the Master Race. When starvation didn’t kill them fast enough, the Nazis shot them. When shooting them wasn’t fast enough, they built extermination camps. At Auschwitz alone they could efficiently kill 6,000 a day, mostly Jews. If you can believe their bragging, they exterminated three or four million, which was a more certain way of getting rid of people than starvation. Some camps used gas and others killed by shooting. They killed them so fast that getting rid of the bodies became a problem. They couldn’t cremate more than 6,000 bodies a day so their murdering was limited to 6,000 a day.”
“Why? Why? How could they hate so much to do such a thing?”
“If you believe that only blue-eyed blond Germans are worth living, you kill off black-haired dark-eyed people so they won’t contaminate the stock. If you do keep a few black-haired people as slaves, you sterilize them so they can’t reproduce.” His eyes looked at her dark eyes. “You’d have been exterminated.”
“I saw the patients from Dachau. I sort of thought, I wanted to think, they just ran out of food, and I didn’t try too hard to find a more sinister reason.”
“Starvation was planned from the beginning. Read Hitler’s Mein Kampf. The Nazis were radically evil,” he said.
“During war all men are driven to evil. Even our wonderful American GIs are doing some rotten things,” Kathy said.
“You resist believing that depth of their evil. Who can comprehend four million exterminations?” He took off his horned-rim glasses and rubbed his eyes. Then he pointed his glasses at Kathy. “I can show you the difference between the Nazis systematic evil and rotten things the American GIs did. After dinner, we’ll go to an M.P. station. I’ll show you.”
Kathy forgot that she had determined never again to go out with man who was a stranger. This man was interesting, though, and she had lost her appetite for dinner.
The MP station looked much like a Chicago precinct station, but a little cleaner. A Sergeant was behind a high desk, a wooden railing dividing the room from battered wooden benches for waiting. Kathy and the consul sat on a bench and watched and listened. MPs brought in American soldiers. French civilians came in with complaints—charges of disorderly conduct, drunken brawls, knife fights, drunken shooting, accidents, robbery and rape.
Kathy said to the consul, “I never thought the Germans could have been worse than this.”
“If this were a German court,” said the consul, “the civilian who complained would be put in jail, and the Nazi soldier would go free. The whole idea was that every non-German existed only as slave to the Germans. Therefore, the Germans could commit no legal wrong against an occupied country. They frowned on German intercourse with non-German races. This was not because of any respect for the women but because they didn’t want to breed impure stock.
“Anything they wanted, they took. Anything. No one could complain and live. They took 137 freight car loads of art treasures.”
“And I thought art had been buried so bombings wouldn’t shatter it,” Kathy said.
“Some was. The point is that the Germans were masters, and we were to be slaves. Our investigations get nastier and nastier. We nice Americans can’t believe the depth of their evil even when we see the German records. They proudly recorded their mastery over inferior scum.”
He took off his glasses, looked directly at Kathy and said, “There’s one compensation. This war was worth fighting. Certainly, Hitler had to be stopped—stopped with guns, not words.”
“Was there a time that words, that reason...” Kathy said.
“Perhaps. The shocking thought now is that if any group in Germany, or the French or British or Americans, had stood staunchly against Hitler in the beginning, he could have been stopped. People in Germany believed Hitler’s promises, and were blind to the evils he imposed. This is original sin personified. Each person selfishly seeing only what he wanted, and blindly ignoring the greater evil, to his own eventual destruction.”
The consul had exposed the radical evil of the Nazis. Kathy faced it, reluctantly, unable to find excuses or reason for it.
Thank you for reading my blog. I hope you enjoyed Chapter 23 and found the exploration of these difficult themes both engaging and thought-provoking. Your continued support is greatly appreciated, and I look forward to sharing more of this journey with you.
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