The origins of THE RAT MACHINE— a novel of mine being reissued by Polis Books concerning the CIA and the Italian Mafia— was born one rainy afternoon while I was reading THE RISE AND FALL OF THE THIRD REICH by William Shirer—a famous history of that Horror Time, a time I think still resonates today. You have no further to go than to hear the daily threats of thermo-nuclear war pitched at Russia coming from important people in the Trump administration to take you back to those ugly pre-war years when Hitler was Time Magazine’s (1938) man of the year.
I am the type who reads footnotes, and I came across one that afternoon on page 1096 of Simon & Schuster’s 1990 paperback edition of Sherir’s work that changed my life: Shirer says in that footnote that 129 American prisoners of war were executed by Jochen Peiper’s 1st SS Panzer Division Near Malmedy in Belgium on December 17th during the Battle of the Bulge. It’s known now as the Malmedy Massacre.
Shirer goes on to say that the German officers responsible for the summary executions— a war crime— were later tried at Dachau Prison. Ironically Dachau was used by the Allies after the war to conduct trials of lesser known war criminals. Here is part of Sherir’s footnote:
“The trail before an American military tribunal at Dachau in the spring of 1946 had a curious denouement. Forty-three SS officers, including Peiper, were condemned to death. Twenty-three to life imprisonment and eight to shorter sentences… Then a hue and cry arose in the US senate, especially from the late Senator McCarthy, that the SS officers had been treated brutally in order to extort confessions. In March 1948 thirty-one of the death sentences were commuted and in January 1951, under a general amnesty, John J. McCloy the American High Commissioner commuted the remaining death sentences to life imprisonment. At the time of writing all have been released.
Yes, you should read it again. I read Sherir’s footnote several times before I got up feeling sick. [My wife’s uncle had fought at the Battle of the Bulge and I felt a direct connection.]
McCloy, who worked closely with Allen Dulles, and enjoyed a box seat next to Adolf Hitler at the 1936 Olympic games in Berlin, also granted the convicted war criminal Alfried Krupp Von Bohlen und Halbach head of the Krupp business empire, enriched by the war, a pardon after only four years in prison. Keep in mind that Krupp had used slave labor during the war and hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children—Jews, Russian prisoners of war, French civilians (my French translator’s grandfather one of them) in short all manner of Europeans etc.— had died directly as a result of being worked to death by the Krupp Corporation in pursuit of profit and in support of Germany’s elites’ enthusiastic behind-the scenes defense of Hitler and the Nazi party in the early years before the war. In fact, there would have been no Adolf Hitler, no Holocaust, no WW2, probably no Cold War, without the German One Percenter’s years of support for Mr. Hitler.
Mr. Krupp had a fuse factory at the death camp at Auschwitz. So, in fact, he profited from the Holocaust directly. Instead of swinging for his crimes, of which he was convicted at Nuremburg, Krupp went on to have a distinguished career in West Germany managing to keep the Krupp empire intact after it had been ordered to be broken up for its complicity in war crimes.
The use of Nazi officers—especially SS officers— by the Allies after the war goes much further than Operation Paper Clip, unfortunately. Many of the SS officers released after the war were used by the Allies in Europe, by America in Latin America (Klaus Barbie) and even by the French in Vietnam. I tried to tell some of this story in The Rat Machine.
The Rat Machine was also my attempt to bring to the novel what the TV has done so well of late: the limited series. I wanted to tell a multi-layered story, the way I might had I been writing a TV series.
If you do read the book I hope you think of my wife’s uncle, a twenty-one year old American kid from Nebraska who faced the Wehrmacht along with a lot of other kids—and won! He came home and painted murals of men and women enjoying drinks in a fantasy barroom in the basement of his home but he never married. He died, oddly, in the winter on a country road not too dissimilar to the one where the Marmedy Massacre took place.
-Kent Harrington
San Rafael