Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O. Hirschman (39 page)

The incident was the basis of a celebrated trial—celebrated not because it was exceptional, but because it was the first Allied war crimes trial, and a test for how jurists were going to handle captured commanders. For Hirschman, it was an important event because, as luck would have it, the army assigned him to be Dostler’s translator, an ordeal that would leave him distraught. “In principle, I hate the work of interpreting but in this case this might be interesting. I think,” he warned Sarah, “that you will read about it in the papers because it will be a big spectacle because it is the first trial of this sort against someone so high up.”
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Albert was right, but he never imagined that he might be part of the spectacle. Dostler was accused of violating the regulations attached to the Hague Convention of 1907 and long-established laws and customs of war. His case lasted from October 8 to 12, 1945, and his legal counselors did their best to test the mettle of Allied prosecutors. It was, indeed, a showcase trial and all sides knew it. The courtroom was packed every day with reporters and onlookers. Flashes went off as the defendant entered and left. “I am the most photographed man in Rome,” Albert quipped. If the academy and economic intelligence wouldn’t have him, “I may look good enough to pass through all this and be picked up by a studio’s talent scout.”
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It turned out to be an “interesting, but exhausting” ordeal for the interpreter, who had to convey word by word each exchange of the defense and prosecution. Dostler’s defense “was incensed” and started by challenging the jurisdiction of the US Military Commission in Rome, a condition of the Geneva Prisoners of War Convention of 1929, which gave prisoners the basic right to be tried by a legally sanctioned court. The proper tribunal should have been a court martial. This challenge was eventually dismissed. Then they argued that Dostler was following Hitler’s orders. But prosecutors had detailed evidence and affidavits—thanks in part to the resistance of junior officers ordered to do the killing—chronicling Dostler’s command and instructions and pointed out that, unlike Dostler, who sat stoically in a chair before a panel of judges, enjoying defense lawyers and a translator, the American SI agents got no trial and no hearing. Wearing combat uniforms and possessing military identification, they could not be mistaken for anyone other than soldiers and
were thus protected by the provisions of the Hague Convention. Even if Dostler were following Hitler’s commands, they did not apply to soldiers. The defense claimed that the uniforms could not be so easily identified and added that as the fifteen were all Italian speakers, these were Max Corvo’s men. Moreover, Dostler could not confirm that they were in fact US servicemen when he gave the execution order. In the see-saw, the SI uniforms were exhumed and eye-witnesses testified they knew they were American soldiers. The case for Dostler’s guilt appeared to be sealed. As the trial neared completion, Dostler elected to testify in his own defense. He climbed into the witness box to explain that in 1933 all officers of the German Army had had to take a special oath of obedience to the Führer and thus had to comply or face their own execution. The translator stood nearby, mediating words. The prosecution grilled him—did he know of any case in which an officer was executed for disobeying an order? He did not. There were some moments that shocked the translator, as when one of Dostler’s witnesses, a fellow German commander, testified that “I would like to add that the accused, in spite of his outward appearance, is a soldier with a heart.” Hirschman was aghast. But the “absolutely Kafkaesque conceptions on the part of the superiors,” did not sway the judges. The pronouncement: guilty of war crimes.
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We do not know what passed through Hirschman’s mind as he sat through the five-day trial. He was, like many court officers, voiceless in a room that hinged on carefully poised words. His letters to Sarah, on account of the censorship, are silent. No doubt, he had to focus on getting the correct translations for the defendant to enjoy the benefits of fairness, so that in the course of the hearings his attention was tightly coiled with the exchanges between the lawyers, judges, and witnesses. While the transcripts leave Hirschman out of the proceedings, the visual images of the courtroom remind us that the two—General Dostler and Private Hirschman—sat side by side in stiff wooden chairs whispering into each others’ ears like colluders. It seems ironic that the person who did by far the most talking in the courtroom was Hirschman himself, though the words he uttered were never his own. Here was a man who had fought his entire adult life against everything the stern-faced German general stood
for, compelled day in, day out to sit inches apart as the linguistic guardian of his rights. One can scarcely imagine what went on behind his subdued visage. Did he think of the Berlin he had lost? Did he think of the baby daughter he did not know? Did he think of Eugenio, gunned down by fascist thugs nearby?

One record we have of Hirschman’s sentiments during the trial is his response to the sentence. Dostler and Hirschman were asked to stand before the judges. The latter wore his dark green uniform and khaki tie; the former wore the full scarlet-trimmed regalia of a Wehrmacht general, his hands slightly clenched as he awaited word. Major General Lawrence C. James read the verdict “with agonizing slowness,” observed the
New York Times
reporter at the scene, because “a GI interpreter standing beside him had to translate each phrase into German.” The interpreter “turned pale as he had to utter the death sentence” to the German general’s face. The courtroom, packed with spotlights, reporters, Allied soldiers, and several hundred Italian observers, watched in frozen silence as he trembled through James’ order that General Dostler was to be shot to death by musketry. In the hush, a visibly shaken Corporal Albert Hirschman of Berkeley, California, left the scene without a word.
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The next day,
The New York Times
printed a front-page story of the sentencing and featured a photo of General Dostler conferring with his legal counsel, with his interpreter in the middle. Sarah, who knew nothing of her husband’s doings was shocked when she unfolded the paper in California to find the grainy black-and-white photo of Albert tête-a-tête with a Nazi general. Whatever international sensation the story was meant to cause was overwhelmed by her personal amazement. As she read how the interpreter went pale, she also breathed a sigh of relief that the war had not destroyed her husband’s sensitivity.

A US Army firing squad executed Dostler in the Aversa Stockade in the morning of December 1. He was the first German general charged, tried, sentenced, and executed by the Allies for a war crime.

Hirschman’s work was done. Due to ship out from Naples in December, he had about six weeks free from duty. He packed his bags for a voyage to recover the pieces of his shattered European past. This did not include a return to Berlin; Germany still evoked too many bitter memories. The first stop was Paris, and his old hotel on rue Turenne. To his delight, the owner had kept his trunk, and Albert rejoiced when he found his old copies of Gogol and Kafka—“above all my 3 Pléiade volumes of Diderot, Voltaire and Rousseau.” He was delighted to find his favorite coat! Perhaps to remind himself of old times, he moved into the hotel for ten days.
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The owners had a big party for him with all the maids and doormen. He confessed to Sarah that he felt “guilty” for being in the city they both loved but without her. “Never since our separation have I had such a desire to walk and chat with you. It is not fair, quite simply, that you are not here.” Most of his time was spent rekindling acquaintances from before the war, especially should he and Sarah move forward with plans to return to Europe. He paid a visit to his old boss and advisor from the Institute of Economics, Robert Marjolin, who had returned from Washington, where he had represented Charles de Gaulle, and was quickly establishing himself as a major force in the Ministry of Economics in charge of foreign trade. In the little time that Albert had, he and Marjolin had lunch and dinner several times with Marjolin’s wife, an American artist. They discussed extensively the problems of postwar economies and the reconstruction and European trade. The conversations helped motivate Albert to return to Washington to play a role in the American side of the reconstruction effort as a kind of transatlantic partner with Marjolin; the gaze returned to the future. He retrieved his mother’s jewels he had safeguarded in a bank and paid a visit to the Dupuy boys, for whom he was once a German tutor; they were much grown up by now and on their way to distinguished careers in their own right. He scoured the bookstores of Saint Michel (“without much result”); Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir were “impossible to find,” especially Sartre “for whom there is a cult here … like Sinatra,” he joked, “which illustrates well the difference between the two countries.” He also helped himself to the late-fall servings of oysters, “which I adore more than ever.”
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Hirschman and Dostler.

He sold the bulk of his books to Gibert Jeune, where he had once procured his
livret
, the manual on universities in France in 1933, and shipped the most prized volumes in his trunk back to the United States, said goodbye to Paris, and set off for London to see a mother whom he had not seen since Dostler and the Nazis had seized control of Germany almost thirteen years earlier. There must have been a lot of apprehension; while Hirschman had worried about her and sent regular remittances, his letters had been few and far between, and one of the issues that needed resolution was where Mutti would go. Eva had moved with her husband, Harold Roditi, to New York, and Ursula was presumably going to move to Rome. Albert was still not sure of his eventual whereabouts.

The visit lasted only a few days and confirmed all his worst fears about his mother. Their conversations were strained and degenerated quickly. “In brief,” he reported, “she became intolerable, and I would have liked to strangle her for many reasons.” It was decided that Mutti should go to Rome and be with Ursula, though as Albert noted, this was hardly an easy choice because Ursula got on with her mother no better than Albert did. But with four daughters, she could use all the help she could get. With this settled, he bid a sad goodbye to his mother and returned to Rome to prepare to be shipped out.
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Albert with nieces in Rome, late 1945.

By the middle of November, Ursula reached Rome; brother and sister finally met. The occasion was filled with joy, relief, endless conversations, as well as endless older-sister advice. There was also a surprise: Ursula was pregnant once more. “It’s madness,” Albert wrote to Sarah, “but in the end it’s like that.” Albert took special pleasure in displaying his newfound driving skills (thanks to Sarah) and took his elder three nieces, Silvia, Renata, and Eva, for spins around the Italian capital in his jeep. He also arrived loaded with chocolates and sweets piled in cartons used for packets of Camel cigarettes. This was not a war he wanted to end on a bad note. A photo of Sergeant Hirschman, dressed in civilian clothes, has
him playing with his nieces, enjoying the role of the generous American uncle having fun, not the German exiled intellectual, French economist, or Italian resistor.
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Behind the façade, Hirschman was not without worries. What would he do back in the United States? Should the family return to Italy as Ursula was counseling? How was he going to support his family? But he was eager to be reunited. “The last few days,” he wrote to Sarah from Rome shortly before leaving, “I have been filled with doubts if I can stand not being back in the United States and not being able to see Katia any more.
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Hirschman’s war—which had begun, for all intents and purposes in 1932—was over by the winter of 1945. Almost exactly four years after his first crossing from Europe to America, he went to Naples and boarded a troop carrier. Back in the United States, he was sent to Fort George Meade in Maryland, where he was honorably discharged for reasons of demobilization and awarded the World War II Victory Medal and an Honorable Service Lapel Button for World War II. Hirschman tucked these away for posterity.