confiscating money of millions, interfering with the people’s freedom.”
Rudolf Hess cadaverous, craggy-brow’d, ashen face, deep sunk eyes like two black holes, pouring out spate of words, often incoherent, spoken at such speed he often had to pause for breath. Nudged by Göring and Ribbentrop to shut up. “It was my pleasure that many years of my life were spent working under the brightest sun which the history of my people had known for a thousand years. I regret nothing.If I was now at the beginning, I would act as I did, even if at the end I knew I would meet death on a funeral pyre.”
The old waiter, flat-footed and exhausted, who sometimes wore the ribands of the Boer War and the 1914 Star, was waiting.
“Mutton hotpot is off, sir. There’s whale-meat casserole.”
“No thanks. I’ll have the sausages and mash.”
“Sausages all gone, sir. There’s the main dish available. Hotpot à la Carlton.”
“What’s that?”
“Mainly offals, sir.”
“I’ll have Carlton hotpot, please.”
Albert Speer, former Armaments Minister, did not defend himself but devoted his statement to the horrors of the next war. “The war ended with radio-controlled rockets and aircraft developing the speed of sound, submarine torpedoes which could find their own targets, atom bombs, and chemical warfare. Through the smashing of the atom the world will be in a position to destroy one million people in New York in a matter of seconds.” For the rest, a few were unrepentant. Funk and Saukel broke down while protesting innocence. Frank and Fritsche admitted guilt. “I did not know of Hitler’s crimes,” sobbed Funk, former Reichsbank President. “Had I known of them I would not be here.”
Ribbentrop put the blame for the war on Hitler. “Foreign policy was determined by another before I knew of it” he averred, while some of his fellow-prisoners removed their head-phones. “I devoted twenty years trying to prevent a war by removing the evils of Versailles. Never did this policy embrace plans for world domination.”
A member coming into the room sat beside Phillip. He was a professor, appropriately dressed in short vicuna jacket and striped trousers. His head was large and partly bald, he had eyes that stared as though he had meditated much. Half-Spanish, half-Italian , he had been naturalised British for many years, and fought as a young man in a county regiment during the Great War. Since then he had become a physicist, Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the leading ‘back room boys’ of Professor Lindemann, the ‘grey eminence’ of Churchill during the war.
Phillip’s upheld paper had been casting a partial shadow on an unused space of tablecloth. An electric light in another direction overlaid the shadow with a second shadow from a silver flower-bowl in the centre of the table. The double shadow was darker,he vaguely wondered why before lowering the paper out of consideration for the professor next to him.
Frank, former Governor-General of Poland. “Hitler is the chief accused here. We turned from God, and were doomed. It was not technical hitches and shortages which lost us the war; God pronounced judgment on Hitler and his system, which we, our minds turned from God, served. More and more it degenerated into a political adventure, without truth or conscience.”
“But the terrible deeds committed by our enemies, which are still going on, particularly in Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia and the Sudetenland—all these atrocious crimes against humanity, which have been carefully kept out of this trial—have long ago expunged any guilt our people may have incurred.”
The flat-footed waiter, sensitive, delicate, aware of life’s end—everything was beyond him—put a plate before Phillip, having first polished it with a napkin; then he brought a small casserole dish of offal stewed with grey potato slices.
“I don’t think I’m very hungry. Would you mind?”
“I can take it back,
Rudolf Hess cadaverous, craggy-brow’d, ashen face, deep sunk eyes like two black holes, pouring out spate of words, often incoherent, spoken at such speed he often had to pause for breath. Nudged by Göring and Ribbentrop to shut up. “It was my pleasure that many years of my life were spent working under the brightest sun which the history of my people had known for a thousand years. I regret nothing.If I was now at the beginning, I would act as I did, even if at the end I knew I would meet death on a funeral pyre.”
The old waiter, flat-footed and exhausted, who sometimes wore the ribands of the Boer War and the 1914 Star, was waiting.
“Mutton hotpot is off, sir. There’s whale-meat casserole.”
“No thanks. I’ll have the sausages and mash.”
“Sausages all gone, sir. There’s the main dish available. Hotpot à la Carlton.”
“What’s that?”
“Mainly offals, sir.”
“I’ll have Carlton hotpot, please.”
Albert Speer, former Armaments Minister, did not defend himself but devoted his statement to the horrors of the next war. “The war ended with radio-controlled rockets and aircraft developing the speed of sound, submarine torpedoes which could find their own targets, atom bombs, and chemical warfare. Through the smashing of the atom the world will be in a position to destroy one million people in New York in a matter of seconds.” For the rest, a few were unrepentant. Funk and Saukel broke down while protesting innocence. Frank and Fritsche admitted guilt. “I did not know of Hitler’s crimes,” sobbed Funk, former Reichsbank President. “Had I known of them I would not be here.”
Ribbentrop put the blame for the war on Hitler. “Foreign policy was determined by another before I knew of it” he averred, while some of his fellow-prisoners removed their head-phones. “I devoted twenty years trying to prevent a war by removing the evils of Versailles. Never did this policy embrace plans for world domination.”
A member coming into the room sat beside Phillip. He was a professor, appropriately dressed in short vicuna jacket and striped trousers. His head was large and partly bald, he had eyes that stared as though he had meditated much. Half-Spanish, half-Italian , he had been naturalised British for many years, and fought as a young man in a county regiment during the Great War. Since then he had become a physicist, Fellow of the Royal Society, and one of the leading ‘back room boys’ of Professor Lindemann, the ‘grey eminence’ of Churchill during the war.
Phillip’s upheld paper had been casting a partial shadow on an unused space of tablecloth. An electric light in another direction overlaid the shadow with a second shadow from a silver flower-bowl in the centre of the table. The double shadow was darker,he vaguely wondered why before lowering the paper out of consideration for the professor next to him.
Frank, former Governor-General of Poland. “Hitler is the chief accused here. We turned from God, and were doomed. It was not technical hitches and shortages which lost us the war; God pronounced judgment on Hitler and his system, which we, our minds turned from God, served. More and more it degenerated into a political adventure, without truth or conscience.”
“But the terrible deeds committed by our enemies, which are still going on, particularly in Silesia, Pomerania, East Prussia and the Sudetenland—all these atrocious crimes against humanity, which have been carefully kept out of this trial—have long ago expunged any guilt our people may have incurred.”
The flat-footed waiter, sensitive, delicate, aware of life’s end—everything was beyond him—put a plate before Phillip, having first polished it with a napkin; then he brought a small casserole dish of offal stewed with grey potato slices.
“I don’t think I’m very hungry. Would you mind?”
“I can take it back,
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