expose the truth about the Third Reich to the entire world, and to ensure that no one can ever justify the kind of atrocities that were committed. Who can deny the horror of the Nazi regime, the gas chambers and the millions of deaths, after seeing all those photographs?”
“But given the situation, do you think the truth will ever come out? The only truth we have is the one we are capable of believing.”
The following morning, Lieutenant Bacon watched from a distance as the dead bodies of the eleven Nazi chiefs—Joachim von Ribbentrop, foreign minister of the Third Reich; Hans Frank, governor-general of Occupied Poland; Wilhelm Frick, governor of Bohemia and Moravia; Alfred Jodl, chief of operation staff of the High Command of the Wehrmacht; Ernst Kaltenbrunner, head of the Reich Main Security Office and second-in-command to Himmler; Wilhelm Keitel, chief of staff of the Wehrmacht; Alfred Rosenberg, official philosopher of the regime and minister for the Eastern Occupied Territories; Fritz Sauckel, plenipotentiary for Labor Deployment; Arthur Seyss-Inquart, Reich commissioner of the Netherlands; Julius Streicher, editor and publisher of the newspaper Der Stürmer; and of course, Hermann Goering, Reichsmarschall and chief of the Luftwaffe and second-in-command to Hitler—were transported in military trucks to the cemetery in Ostfriedrichhof, in Munich, where they would be cremated. He stared at the long caravan of cars and armed guards that followed the trucks. The bodies had been placed in individual sacks, each one tagged with a false name. The Germans in charge of the ovens were told that the bodies were those of American soldiers who had died during the war; it was a precaution the authorities took to ensure that nothing of the cremations would ever resurface in the form of Nazi mementos. For this reason, no one was to associate those ashes with the Nazi leaders condemned to death by the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg.
Almost instantly the oppressive tension gripping the city seemed to lift. The work was finally finished, despite the fact that nobody was satisfied with the results—especially the Soviets, who never hid their displeasure with the course the trials had taken; at one point they even accused the American and English forces of allowing Goering to commit suicide. There were still many minor Nazi functionaries waiting for their day in court, though the eyes of the entire world were not likely to remain as permanently transfixed upon the halls of the Palace of Justice.
But as I said before, Lieutenant Francis P. Bacon had not come to Nuremberg to attend the executions. His mission was of an entirely different nature, having much more to do with his insights and talents as a man of science.
About halfway through the war, while working at the Institute for Advanced Study, Bacon decided to enlist in the army. He was sent to England to make contact with the British scientists there, and in 1945 he joined the Alsos mission, led by the Dutch physicist Samuel I. Goudsmit, who was responsible for archiving all available information relating to the German scientific program, and to the Germans’ work on the atomic bomb. He was also the official who ordered the capture of the German physicists who were working on it.
Once his tour of duty was over, Bacon could have returned to the United States, but he chose to continue working as a scientific consultant to the Allied Control Council, the entity responsible for governing Occupied Germany. Finally, in early October of 1946, a few days after the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg handed down its sentences to the Nazi defendants, Bacon was summoned by the Office of Military Intelligence to review some of the documents from the trial archives. From this research he would produce a report illustrating the points he felt most relevant to his assigned task of searching for the inconsistencies in the war criminals’ testimony. Of his report, one small detail emerged which caught the attention of his military commanders.
On July 30, 1946, in the main hall of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, seven German organizations went on trial: the Nazi party leadership; the cabinet of the Reich; the security police, known as the SS; the secret police, known as the Gestapo; the Security Service, or SD; the Storm Troops, or SA; and the Military High Command of the Third Reich. In the weeks leading up to the trials, the tribunal announced that the trial proceedings were to be broadcast throughout Germany so that anyone who had been affected by any of the accused groups might step forward and offer his or her testimony. More than 300,000 responses flooded the Palace of Justice. From this pool, 603 members of these organizations were brought to Nuremberg to testify. In the end, the court admitted the testimony of some 90 people—mostly pertaining to the SS—who had refused to commit dishonest actions in the fulfillment of their duties.
One of these testimonies caught the attention of the U.S. Intelligence Services. During this process, a little man named Wolfram von Sievers, president of the Society for German Ancestral Heritage (and, as was later discovered, the head of an office of the Ahnenerbe, the SS office of scientific investigation). Von Sievers was an extremely nervous witness; during his long hours sitting on the witness bench, he never stopped rubbing his hands, and his cheeks were perpetually drenched in perspiration. He stumbled over his words, repeated certain phrases over and over again, and, as if that weren’t enough, he was also a stutterer, which further complicated the jobs of the extensive network of simultaneous translators who, for the first time in history, performed their task in the courtrooms of Nuremberg.
While being interrogated by one of the Allied prosecutors, Von Sievers made the first in a series of controversial declarations. According to an agreement signed by the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the SS regularly sent skulls of “Bolshevik Jews” to Von Sievers’s laboratory so that he might perform experiments on them. When Von Sievers was asked if he knew how the SS obtained those craniums, he replied that they came from the prisoners of war at the Eastern Front, who were assassinated specifically for this scientific research. The prosecutor pressed on: “And what was the objective of your ‘research’?” Once again Von Sievers stumbled over his words, incoherent and stuttering. Finally, after persistent pressure from the judges, he gave in and delivered a long, wildly digressive speech on phrenology and the physical development of ancient civilizations, covering everything from the Toltecs and Atlantis to Aryan supremacy and mystical shrines like Agartha and Shambhala. More specifically, however, he explained that his own task had been to establish the biological inferiority of the Semitic people, to become intimately familiar with their physiological development over the ages, which presumably would enable him to ascertain the best way to eliminate their defects.
When he was finished speaking, Von Sievers looked like one of the skulls he claimed to have been studying, and his hands were now trembling uncontrollably. The prosecutor, however, was getting fed up; he had only interrogated Von Sievers to prove that the SS and the Nazi regime in general had indeed committed atrocities. He certainly hadn’t intended this to be an exposé of the repulsive scientific investigation undertaken by Von Sievers, who, it turned out, would one day be tried and convicted for crimes against humanity.
“Where did you obtain the funding for this research, Professor Von Sievers?”
“From the SS, as I have already stated,” he stammered.
“Was it common procedure for the SS to commission you to perform this type of research?”
“Yes.”
“And did you say that the SS provided the financing for it?”
“Yes, directly.”
“What do you mean when you say ‘directly,’ Professor?” The prosecutor sensed that he had finally hit upon a lead that might actually get him somewhere.
Von Sievers attempted to clear his throat.
“Well, all the scientific research undertaken in Germany first had to be cleared by the supervision and control centers of the Research Council of the Third Reich.”
The prosecutor had hit the nail on the head. This was exactly what he wanted to hear. The Research Council, just like so many other dependencies of the
