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“I like to think it’s because he’s a good intelligence officer, but his being a Jew also has a lot to do with it.”
Fortin made a Come on gesture with both hands.
“For one thing, when they hang Göring and company, he wants the German people to know they’re being hung as criminals, mass murderers, not because the Jews won the war and are extracting vengeance.
“That’s the Jewish angle. As an intelligence officer, Cohen thinks Brigadeführer Franz von Dietelburg, whom we know was deeply involved—an apostle, so to speak, in Himmler’s new religion—is the guy running Odessa.”
“Very interesting.”
“What comes next is my scenario. Cohen doesn’t even know that I was coming here.”
“You don’t want him to know? Why not?”
“I didn’t say that. What I was trying to get across is that my scenario didn’t come from Cohen.”
“I would be more interested if it had, but let’s hear it anyway.”
“I think Co
usin Luther is a disciple in the new religion.”
Fortin said nothing.
“Think about it, Jean-Paul. We now know that he didn’t desert from the SS as the war was ending. He was sent here by Odessa, possibly even by von Dietelburg himself.”
“My opinion is that your cousin Luther is an opportunist. He joined the Légion des Volontaires Français contre le Bolchévisme to avoid being sent to Germany as a laborer, not because he had anything against the Communists. And then he did the best he could to please his German masters.”
“He was, in other words, what we Americans would call a born-again German?”
“Yes. In one of our conversations—we were talking about his treason—he said that his father was responsible for his problems. He said that after World War One, when Strasbourg became French, his father could have elected to keep his German citizenship, but instead opted to be French.
“He said that if his father had not ‘betrayed’ his German blood, he would be a prisoner of war, not a traitor.”
“My mother thinks of herself as German, ex-German,” Cronley said. “As an American, I never even thought much about my German blood until I saw what the Germans did. Now, when I think about it, I’m a little ashamed about it. That people ‘of my blood’ could do what the Nazis did.”
“I’m still ashamed that so many Frenchmen were crying ‘Better Hitler than Blum’ just before the war started, but I don’t think Luther Stauffer thought of himself as a German. If he had, instead of deserting, he would have gone to Berlin with the French SS Division Charlemagne and died fighting for the Thousand-Year Reich.”
“You ever wonder where that came from, ‘the Thousand-Year Reich’?”
“From Josef Goebbels, the propaganda minister. It has a nice ring to it.”
“It also fits what Himmler was trying to do. Did. Start a new religion that would last a thousand years. A religion that sanctions the elimination of the Untermenschen so that the Aryans own everything.”
“And you and Cohen believe this? All of it, including the religious devotion to it?”
“Yeah, we do.”
“You may be on to something,” Fortin said. “Just before the war was over, and anyone who could find his derriere with both hands had to acknowledge the Germans had lost, we captured—”
“Who’s we?”
“General Leclerc’s 2e Division Blindée. I was the G-2.”
“I thought division G-2s were colonels. What did you do to get demoted?”
Fortin glared at Cronley and then shook his head in resignation.
“Just outside Strasbourg, we captured a dozen Frenchmen wearing the uniform of the Charlemagne Division. When we interrogated them, we got nothing. They stuck nobly to name, rank, and serial number. And they didn’t seem frightened.
