The Matchmaker of Kenmare (44 page)

I lingered outside churches and watched the congregations emerge with the young soldiers in their uniforms being welcomed, thanked, and applauded. If there had been a band playing, the people would have danced in the streets.

Back in the apartment, and still alone, I listened to the radio and heard a news announcer mention the names “Malmédy” and “Peiper” and “Dachau.” As I remember it, my note to Kate told her, “I’ll be gone for a while.”

The Malmédy Massacre, as it’s now known, became one of the most infamous atrocities of war. Neither side, Allies or German, consisted wholly of angels, but in the age-old systems of conflict, “our” atrocities are better known than any of the incidents “they” suffered.

We had indeed heard the massacre, Kate and I. At least I’d heard it—I don’t know if she was hearing anything at that moment, except the blood rushing through her own brain and the roaring of her life in her ears.

I knew that something awful had happened. First, a shout echoed up to us. A harsh voice smashed the high air. A gunshot came next; the single middleweight crack echoed. Another shout, a second shot. Then silence. Next, a scream. Then, gunfire stuttered for longer than I want to tell, death with a metal stammer.

My groin tightened into a knot. Kate stared. At me. Not down the valley. Too afraid.

The machine gun stopped. And now it got worse. For the next five, ten, fifteen minutes, the old folds of the Ardennes echo to pistol shots. One at a time.

I remember a mental image, an impression—that a stream of slime and liquid filth had been poured on my head and had begun to slide down my bare face and naked body like a veil. Was I wearing clothes in this vision? I can’t tell and it doesn’t matter. My ears were telling me that I was listening to something particularly revolting, and that’s how my imagination responded.

Everybody knows the facts of Malmédy—how Peiper’s colleagues took hundreds of American prisoners of war. The deliberate confusion of authenticity had done some work, and the Allied soldiers weren’t quite sure what was going on, who was American and who wasn’t.

Before we got there, Peiper’s soldiers, the ones we’d been with, saw what turned out to be a small unit of an American artillery battalion, which, carrying only small arms, was trying to link up with a large U.S. division coming through from the River Meuse. The Germans opened fire, took out the vehicles at the front and the rear of the American column, and the Americans surrendered.

By then, Peiper himself (it was said in his defense) had moved on, just as his officers herded their newly taken prisoners into a field, where they joined other American servicemen who had been captured a few hours before.

In the freezing cold, the Americans stood there, unaccustomed in any way—militarily, culturally, emotionally—to defeat or prisoner-of-war status. One of them made a run for it. A German soldier shot him down. Disturbance bordering on panic spread through the American boys, and in their movements they gave the impression that they were all about to make a run for it. The Germans opened fire.

Most of the Americans went down under heavy machine-gun fire
from close quarters. A few individuals escaped through the woods—they told their story when they got through the enemy lines to their own camps.

Eighty or so men had been in the group shot at close quarters; not all died, some played possum, trying to look dead in the snow. When the heavy firing died down, individual German officers and soldiers moved through the prone bodies and put a bullet into every head.

That night, the heaviest snow of the winter came in, to a height of some feet, and covered all the bodies. As you’ve seen, I know about that snow. But I can still hear the shots and when I first read of the massacre at Malmédy, I was able to reconstruct the pattern of gunfire in my head. That awful music still played in my brain when I went to Peiper’s trial at Dachau in May 1946.

I didn’t go into the carnage yards of the camp itself; I couldn’t, didn’t have the emotional muscle at that moment. Besides—and this is the excuse I made to myself—the cleanup gangs were still working there. Instead, I did what I had come to do—I went and sat in those spiritless rooms where they held the military courts.

An officer outside the door asked me why I had come to Dachau.

I said, “I’m trying to find out what happened to a friend.” When he asked if my friend had been an American serviceman, I replied, “One of the best.”

Later, I reflected that I’d spoken without thinking, and I’ve always had a belief that what I say spontaneously is what I truly believe.

I asked the officer, “What’s your role?”

“Back home I’m a lawyer. So I’m assisting one of the defenders here.”

The room felt damp and dark, despite the tall windows and the hot day outside, despite the spheres of lights, despite the vast and glowing American flag above the judges’ bench. Damp and dark? Maybe I was thinking of the word
dank
, and had confused it with the language, because all around me I heard the word
danke
spoken over and over; German for “thank you.” Danke: a dank room. That must be it.

“Danke,”
said the prosecutor’s translator.
“Danke,”
said Colonel Willis Everett Jr., the appointed defense counsel.
“Danke,”
said a prisoner against whom the evidence didn’t stack up.
“Danke,”
murmured my wolf.

I looked at him again, the man I’d come to see. He looked different
now from the rainy, cold morning when he terrified me, though he still had his composure. His name still puzzled me: The Germans called him “Jochen,” the Americans said “Joachim,” and sometimes not even that, because for the purposes of the trial, the number around his neck had become his name: “Forty-two.”

Did he, I challenged myself, look like a wolf? If he continued to let that beard and mustache grow he would have a trimmed oval of hair around his mouth and chin; he’d look like an Austrian doctor. I suspected that he would maintain the beard beautifully, because I could see how he kept his strong hair parted and firm, a neat man of, I could guess, significant personal discipline.

That first time I saw him, I remarked to myself on how pristine he kept his uniform despite all the mud and weather. How old was he? A year younger than I, I would learn, born 1915, aged thirty-one. Dear God! And the things he had done—or they said that he had done. No marks of torture on him, though, no matter what the chatter has been.

I must answer my own question. Did he look like a wolf? No. Would he look lupine if and when that beard grew? Maybe. He didn’t have to look like a wolf, though; I’d already seen him in action and now had my impressions vindicated by the word
CRIMES
on the great banner above the entrance.

It had taken me almost four weeks to get to Dachau, but I’d felt that it was the least I could do. The proceedings had already begun, with rows of accused men seated in such an orderly fashion that my mind began to play with the words
arranged
and
arraigned
.

Other neat ranks of chairs overflowed with members of the public. In the later weeks, they ceased to come and listen in on a matter that had happened eighteen months earlier, and many hundreds of miles north, in the Belgian countryside.

“May I make notes?” I asked my officer.

“Where are you from?” he whispered, and when I told him he said, “My mother’s from Limerick.”

He held the door open and urged me to keep edging back along the crowded passageway; he then went to his table and sat beside Willis Everett, the lawyer whose name became synonymous with an extraordinary performance of defending law. It took me long minutes to ease myself up along one side, to a point where I could look into the faces of the accused men—and, no surprise, I saw Peiper first.

When a uniformed court official called out the number forty-two, in English and German, Peiper stood up, respectful as a convent girl. Hands straight as knives by his sides, he nodded four times in response to four points being made from the bench to his interpreter. He said
“Danke”
each time. And then, to the bench directly, he said with impeccable pronunciation, “Thank you. I understand clearly.”

In my peripheral vision, I saw through the window the rows and rows of neat roofs in the main camp, and beyond them the barbed-wire crowns of thorns that formed the fences.

I began to make notes—and I see now that I remarked at length upon “the force of the American defending counsel” and “the focus, the intentness of Joachim Jochen Peiper Number Forty-two,” who, in a matter of shorthand minutes, became “JJPNFT” in my notebook.

After his courteous exchanges, JJPNFT was permitted to sit again. He crossed one leg over the other knee and looked around, as people do in court, searching for friends. He saw me—and after a tiny effort of recollection he recognized me, with a half-nod and a half-smile. Was there a hint of surprise too in his look? Perhaps. When he looked at me I couldn’t hold his gaze.

Later I did; indeed I looked at him without a flinch, and he with his piercing eyes, he was the one who broke the link.

When the proceedings adjourned, I waited and approached the friendly officer whose mother came from Limerick. Willis Everett had begun a deep conversation with a member of the bench.

We strolled outside, to the camp gates, and I asked, “What are you here? Are you still a soldier or are you a lawyer again?”

He laughed. “Fair question. I’m both, I guess. But you know what they say: There’s only three kinds of people in the world—good, bad, and lawyers.”

“How did you get here?” I asked him, and he told me that he had been part of a detail researching German prisoners of war east of Berlin, finding out who “qualified” (his word) to be charged with war crimes, and escorting them down here to be tried.

“Think about it,” he said. “If Hitler won, Ike and Patton and Bradley—they’d all be on trial here, or some other joint.”

He asked me why I’d come to Dachau and I told him—the entire story, in detail.

I said, “Are you still in charge of the prisoners?”

He said, with a sigh, “I will be until they’re hung.”

“What?”

He said, “That’s what the prosecution will say—that they’re criminals, that they gave up soldiers’ rights when they committed war crimes. They won’t be shot like soldiers.”

I remembered the impromptu firing squad on the streets of Saint-Omer—and didn’t know what to think.

“Could I meet one of them?” I said.

He looked at me. “Can I guess?”

I said, “Peiper.”

He smiled. “He’s the prosecution’s prize. I picked him up myself.”

“There’s a question I have to ask him.”

He said, “Let me clear it with Everett.”

I gave him some more information—Volunder and the bloodstained tunic; he told me about Peiper.

“His English is good, and he was actually one of their best commanders.”

I said, “He seemed cold.”

The officer laughed. “He’s ice on legs, but he’s smart. I got talking to him about what he did in Belgium, his campaign, the battle he fought, and he told me all about it. He damn near got through, and if he did, he’d have been on the coast of Holland before we could catch him.”

“You sound as if you like him?”

“No,” said the sergeant. “But he’s a damn interesting guy.”

“Do you think he’ll answer my question?”

The next day, when the bench had adjourned for the night, the officer gave me a thumbs-up from the well of the court. He then directed me to a small room off the hallway, to which he brought Peiper—who smiled, inclined his head in a not unfriendly way, and sat down.

I began, “Colonel Peiper,” but he cut in.

“Obersturmbannführer Peiper.”

I replied, “I don’t mean any offense, but I just can’t pronounce your German title.”

He began to teach me. “Ober.”

And I repeated, “Ober.”

“Shturmbann. Say ‘shturm.’ ”

I said, “Shturm.”

“Now say ‘bann.’ ”

And I said, “Bann.”

Peiper said, “Say ‘Shturmbann.’ ”

I said, “Shturmbann.”

The young officer stepped in. “Call him Colonel.”

At the insult I saw the icicles flash in Peiper’s eyes. He sat up, rigid and aloof.
A year younger than I
, I thought,
one year younger

“I can tell,” I said, “that you remember me.”

He inclined his head again.

“Did you personally kill Captain Charles Miller?”

Peiper shook his head.

“Did you give the order to have him killed?”

Peiper shook his head.

“But were your men responsible?”

Peiper spoke. “I was leading my men into battle. I could not see what went on behind me.”

I began to say, “But Miller—”

Peiper butted in. “You’re an intelligent man. You must know that a commander cannot see everything.”

I said, “But you set the tone, you made the rules.”

Peiper replied, “Not all soldiers obey all orders.”

I said, “Do you know what happened to Captain Miller? His wife is my dearest friend. That’s why I’m here.”

Peiper said, “I can tell you this much. We did encounter him.”

“Who’s we? Do you mean Volunder?”

He smiled. “You do not need me. You know everything.”

“Is Volunder alive? Can I reach him?”

Peiper spread his arms wide, to say, “I don’t know. And that is truth.”

I said, “That isn’t good enough.”

“Irishman,” said Peiper. “I wasn’t there. Your friend’s husband—he wasn’t tortured as I have been, he wasn’t beaten as I have been. He was a well-trained intelligence operative. That is all I know.”

I said, “Did you give orders to have him killed?”

Peiper said, “That was not my style. And he was the concern of others.”

I said, “What became of him?”

Peiper looked puzzled. “I do not understand you.”

“We’re asking you what became of an American soldier,” snapped the officer.

“We had his papers,” said Peiper. “We needed them for our decoy operation. I think they must have been destroyed in battle. So if he is found—there was no way of identifying his body.”