Mirrors (72 page)

The manager went home every day at noon, sat with his wife and five children, recited the Our Father, ate lunch, and then went for a stroll in the garden filled with trees, flowers, chickens, and songbirds, never for an instant losing sight of the industry chugging on.

He was first to arrive at the factory and last to leave. Respected and feared, he could appear without warning anywhere, anytime.

He would not tolerate waste. High costs and low productivity made him despair. Lack of hygiene and clutter made him ill. He forgave any sin except inefficiency.

It was he who substituted the lethal gas Zyklon B for sulfuric acid and carbon monoxide. It was he who built crematoria ten times as productive as the ovens at Treblinka. It was he who managed to produce the greatest quantity of death in the shortest possible time. And it was he who devised the best death camp in the entire history of humanity.

In 1947, Rudolf Höss was hanged at Auschwitz, the concentration camp he built and ran, amidst the flowering trees about which he wrote a number of poems.

MENGELE

For reasons of hygiene, the threshold to the gas chambers was an iron grating. There, the attendants wiped the mud from their boots.

The condemned, in contrast, entered barefoot. They entered by the door and left by the chimney, after being dispossessed of their gold teeth, fat, hair, and anything else of value.

There, in Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele carried out his experiments.

Like other Nazi sages, he dreamed of nurseries for growing the super-race of the future. To learn how to eradicate hereditary defects, he worked with four-winged flies, legless mice, midgets, and Jews. But nothing excited his scientific passion like twin children.

Mengele used to give chocolates and affectionate pats to his child guinea pigs, even though most of them turned out to be useless for the progress of science.

He tried to turn several pairs into Siamese twins, slicing open their backs to connect their veins: they died, apart, howling in pain.

With others he tried to change their sex: they died mutilated.

With others still he tried to change their voices by operating on their vocal chords: they died mute.

To beautify the species, he injected blue dye into the eyes of dark-eyed twins: they died blind.

GOD

Dietrich Bonhoeffer is imprisoned in the concentration camp at Flossenbürg.

The guards make all the prisoners watch the execution of three condemned men.

Someone standing next to Bonhoeffer whispers:

“So, where is God?”

And Bonhoeffer, who is a theologian, points to the hanged men swinging in the dawn light:

“There.”

A few days later, it is his turn.

LOVE ME DO

Adolf Hitler’s friends have lousy memories, but the Nazi enterprise would not have been possible without their help.

Like his colleagues Mussolini and Franco, Hitler got approval early on from the Catholic Church.

Hugo Boss dressed his troops.

Bertelsmann published the training manuals for his officers.

His airplanes flew thanks to fuel from Standard Oil, and his soldiers traveled in Ford trucks and jeeps.

The maker of those vehicles and author of
The International Jew,
Henry Ford, was his muse. Hitler thanked him with a medal.

He also decorated the president of IBM, the company that made it possible to track and identify Jews.

The Rockefeller Foundation financed Nazi medicine’s racial and racist research.

Joe Kennedy, father of the president, was the U.S. ambassador in London, but might as well have been the German one. And Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of presidents, was an associate of Fritz Thyssen, who used his fortune to further Hitler’s cause.

Deutsche Bank financed the construction of the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

IG Farben, the giant chemical conglomerate, which later on changed its name to Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst, used concentration camp prisoners as guinea pigs and workers. These slave laborers made everything, even the gas that killed them.

The prisoners also worked for other companies, like Krupp, Thyssen, Siemens, VARTA, Bosch, Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, and BMW, which provided an economic foundation for the Nazi madness.

Swiss banks made a killing buying the gold jewelry and teeth of Hitler’s victims. The gold crossed the border with astonishing ease, while the gates remained hermetically sealed to flesh and blood trying to escape.

Coca-Cola came up with Fanta for the German market smack in the middle of the war. During that period, Unilever, Westinghouse, and General Electric also boosted their investments and profits in the country. When the war ended, ITT received a multimillion-dollar settlement for damages to its factories in Germany caused by Allied bombing.

PHOTOGRAPH: THE FLAG OF VICTORY

Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, February 1945.

Six Marines plant the flag of the United States at the summit of the volcano they have taken after a bitterly fought battle with the Japanese.

The photograph by Joe Rosenthal will become a symbol of the victorious homeland in this war and wars to follow, and will be reproduced by the millions on posters and postage stamps and even on Treasury bonds.

In reality, it shows the second flag of the day. The first, much smaller and hardly appropriate for an epic image, was planted a few hours earlier without any showmanship. And the moment it records as victory occurs when the battle is not yet over; in fact it is just beginning. Three of the six soldiers in the picture will not come out alive, and seven thousand more Marines will die on this minuscule island in the South Pacific.

PHOTOGRAPH: MAP OF THE WORLD

Yalta, Crimean Coast, February 1945.

The victors of the Second World War meet.

Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin sign secret agreements. The great powers decide the fate of several countries, whose people will not learn of it for two years. Some will remain capitalist and others will become communist, as if such a tremendous historic leap could be achieved by a name change decided from outside and from above.

Three people draw a new world map, establish the United Nations, and give themselves veto power, which guarantees they will remain in charge.

Richard Sarno’s and Robert Hopkins’s cameras record Churchill’s impassive smile, Roosevelt’s face already visited by death, and Stalin’s shrewd eyes.

Stalin is still Uncle Joe, but in a movie soon to be released, called
The Cold War,
he will take on the role of the villain.

PHOTOGRAPH: ANOTHER FLAG OF VICTORY

Reichstag, Berlin, May 1945.

Two soldiers raise the flag of the Soviet Union over the pinnacle of German power.

This photograph by Yevgeny Khaldei portrays the triumph of the nation that lost more sons in the war than any other.

The news agency TASS distributes the picture. But before doing so, it makes a correction. The Russian soldier wearing two wristwatches now has only one. The warriors of the proletariat do not loot dead bodies.

FATHER AND MOTHER OF PENICILLIN

He made light of his own fame. Alexander Fleming said penicillin was invented by a microbe that took advantage of the chaos in his laboratory to sneak into a different culture. And he said that the honors for antibiotics should go not to him but to the researchers who turned a scientific curiosity into a useful medicine.