Chapter 9: "The Final Solution"
The author's dialogue with Hitler continues in a format appropriate to its dramatic293 nature
GOLDBERG: I take it you're referring to the Holy Land?
HITLER: "Holy" or not, since the beginning of recorded time even the Bible makes it clear that, not unlike Moronia, the Middle East has turned out to be more trouble than it was worth for those who conquered it.
GOLDBERG: Or thought they did!
HITLER: Whatever the case may be—and despite the damage done to my desires for symmetry294—I have used a fourth color to signify this region's special status as a semiautonomous Zionist state.
GOLDBERG: Semiautonomous?
HITLER: As a protectorate of the Third Reich, of course.
GOLDBERG: Of course.
HITLER: An arrangement similar to that we now have with the Vichy government of France.
GOLDBERG: Ah.
HITLER: But the question you should be asking yourself is: Why would Adolf Hitler create a Zionist state when, according to every word he has uttered or written since his student days in Vienna, he is an ardent—some might say "fanatical"—antiSemite?
GOLDBERG: As a matter of fact that question has crossed my mind.
HITLER: The answer is really very simple.
GOLDBERG: I thought it might be.
HITLER: Because by doing so I will, as they say, be killing 2 birds with 1 stone. And a pair of very troublesome birds at that! First: The establishment of a Zionist state solves Germany's Jewish Question. With a homeland of his own no self respecting Jew will have any desire—or excuse—to remain as a secondclass citizen in someone else's country. For those who think they can trade their racial pride and heritage to continue exploiting our German hospitality no matter how unwelcome they are, we will pursue a policy of forced but humane repatriation.
GOLDBERG: With all respect, Herr Chancellor, that sounds like—
HITLER: Before you start throwing any of your selfrighteous stones at this "typically heartless Nazi scheme" of mine, Herr Ambassador, let me remind you that similar proposals were entertained and even advanced by such eminent "humanitarians" as the Great Emancipator, Abraham Lincoln, to solve America's Negro Question.295
GOLDBERG: Touché.
HITLER: Secondly: By giving the Jews hegemony over their Arab neighbors; with our political and military support they will put a lid on any hopes the Muslim extremists harbor for repeating their Moorish chapter of European history. Not only would such a containment policy be impractical to orchestrate directly from Berlin, I will have far more important fish to fry in reversing a decline of Western Civilization accelerated by the egalitarian pie-in-the-sky preachings of that Socio Economic Messiah, Karl Marx, and his bolshevik disciples. Well, then. Now that this added inducement of mine has been fully explained I will be happy to answer any questions you might have concerning what was already a more than generous proposition when one considers the territorial advantages now enjoyed by Germany and Japan.296
GOLDBERG: I have only 1 question, Herr Chancellor—
HITLER: Which is?
GOLDBERG: Are you kidding me?
HITLER: Was ist dieser "kidding?"
GOLDBERG: It means: Are you pulling my leg—putting me on—joking.
HITLER: Joking? About what?
GOLDBERG: All these "advantages" you and the Japanese are supposedly enjoying.
HITLER: What do you mean "supposedly enjoying?" The swastika is flying from every flagpole in Europe. Britain's Asiatic Empire is about to be annexed by Japan. And your 7th Fleet is resting at the bottom of Pearl Harbor!
GOLDBERG: Excuse me, Herr Chancellor, but there are a few thorns missing from that rosy picture you're painting.
HITLER: Such as?
GOLDBERG: Such as: The sun may be setting on Britain's Empire but England remains alive and kicking. A strategic fact of which the Luftwaffe was made painfully aware in the skies over that sceptered isle.
HITLER: The Battle of Britain was just that—one battle. In a war Germany will have no trouble winning when the Russians are kaput.
GOLDBERG: Speaking of which, thornwise, the wheels of your Operation Barbarossa Blitzkrieg seem to have come off on the outskirts of Leningrad, Moscow and, of course, Stalingrad.
HITLER: I'm sure your military experts have told you it is only a matter of time before the Soviets are either crushed by our war machine or collapse under the weight of insurrectionary pressures building among those freedomloving Russians we have already liberated from the yoke of Stalin's tyranny.
GOLDBERG: Maybe you're right. But that's cold comfort to all those German boys on the Eastern Front who must spend another 3 or 4 months waiting for that wishful thinking to become a reality in their summer uniforms. As for America's 7th Fleet—the sneak attack launched by your Japanese partners was anything but a roaring success since: None of our aircraft carriers was sunk. Which—as I'm sure your military experts have advised you—is the only statistic that really counts in a modern era of naval warfare where battleships have become obsolete. In the final analysis, however, the outcome of World War II won't be decided by the events unfolding at Singapore, Corregidor and/or even Stalingrad—but rather by what's happening on the assembly lines of Detroit, Michigan and Akron, Ohio and in the aircraftplants, steelmills and shipyards of Seattle, Washington, Santa Monica, California, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Brooklyn, New York. Not to mention those endless fields of wheat, oats, rye, cotton, beans, corn, potatoes and livestock stretching from the Mississippi Delta north to the Canadian border and west to the Pacific coast. All of which, by the way, are several thousand miles beyond the reach of your Panzers and Stukas—
HITLER: Even if—for the sake of argument—everything you say is true: How many American boys will perish before your wishful thinking becomes a reality?
GOLDBERG: I'm only making the point, Herr Chancellor, that your motives for ending the war you declared on us aren't quite as "altruistic" as you would have me believe them to be.
HITLER: And by doing so, Herr Ambassador, you've made it plain you're obviously not the "babe in the diplomatic woods" you're trying so hard to make me believe you are! So. Now that this little masquerade of ours is over we can get down to the real business before us. Which, as I see it, is to prevent our 2 great nations from mutually destroying themselves over a dispute that can be settled with this box of paints—[Having produced a set of watercolors from a shelf under the drafting table HITLER removes the tinted map to reveal another—black & white—copy beneath it.] As a matter of fact I've had some reservations of my own over conceding the entire Western Pacific to the Japanese. Or did you have some other starting place in mind for reconfiguring what was always just a more or less rough sketch of my New World Order? There might, for instance, be some negotiating room for an AngloAmerican presence in the southern half of Africa—[HITLER leans over the map with a paintbrush poised expectantly for GOLDBERG's decision on where the line dividing German- from AngloAmericanAfrica should be drawn.]
GOLDBERG: Once again, sir, I must preface any counterproposals I might make by stating I am not authorized by my government to officially represent its views—or those of its allies—on ending the war you declared on the United States. Having said that, and under the provisions of the Atlantic Charter, I believe the following terms are the only ones by which the hostilities between us can be terminated peacefully, to wit: Germany, Japan and Italy must relinquish all the territories they presently occupy beyond their 28 June 1919297 borders.
HITLER: Who's kidding whom now, Herr Goldberg? Not only are you asking for Germany's unconditional surrender but a repetition of the martyrdom she suffered at the hands of her British and French persecutors!
GOLDBERG: I suppose I am. But to make amends for the past mistakes we might have made—and in recognition of this peace overture of yours—I think it's possible those aforementioned borders could be adjusted in Germany's case to include the Rhineland, Sudetenland and perhaps even the Danzig Corridor.
HITLER: No, no, no. You'll have to do better than that. I'm not about to renegotiate the diplomatic victories I won fairly and squarely against the British and French!
GOLDBERG: I'm not asking you to.
HITLER: But you just said—
GOLDBERG: I'm afraid the offer I just made to you is—or would be if it were actually being tendered by the Atlantic Charter signatories—nonnegotiable.
HITLER: I see. [Rather than unleashing the tirade GOLDBERG expects, HITLER calmly strides to one of his filing cabinets and returns with a document marked "FOR THE FÜHRER'S EYES ONLY," which he places on the drafting table.] Well, since those carrots of mine haven't persuaded you, maybe this stick will! [Hitler's "stick" turns out to be Heinrich Heydrich's AGENDA FOR THE 20 JANUARY 1942 WANSEE CONFERENCE WHERE THE PLANS FOR SYSTEMATICALLY DEJEWIFYING EUROPE WILL BE FINALIZED. As GOLDBERG slowly reads this document to himself HITLER paces back & forth across the stage—anticipating what he is confident will be the triumphant outcome of having played his trump card. But the suspense finally gets the better of him.]298 Surely a man with your superior analytical talents needn't read every last word of fine print on a piece of paper to grasp its meaning!
GOLDBERG: Speaking of words, you just took them right out of my mouth!
HITLER: What words?
GOLDBERG: The ones you used when describing the Versailles Peace Treaty, the Weimar Constitution, the Geneva Convention, the League of Nations Charter and the Munich Pact as "nothing more than scraps of paper."
HITLER: Does that mean you think my threat to liquidate every last one of Europe's Jews unless we reach an agreement on a New World Order is a bluff?
GOLDBERG: Yes. And, I'm compelled to say: One that goes so far beyond the pale of what is acceptable in even the most uncivilized of diplomatic negotiations I'm tempted to treat it as an insurmountable obstacle to proceeding any further with our discussion.
HITLER: That is for you to decide. But if you do, remember what I say: Even if the rest of humanity never learns what went on in this room, you and I will always know: The blood of all those landsleit299 whose fate you are now sealing will be on Mordecai Goldberg's hands—not those of Adolf Hitler!
HITLER and GOLDBERG remain motionless as the lights slowly fade to black.
† † †
3 & A HALF YEARS LATER—when the horrors of Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belsen-Bergen and Maidenek were revealed to the world—Hitler's words did come back to haunt me as he promised they would! But not because I made what was, under those circumstances,300 the perfectly understandable mistake of believing his threats to exterminate 9 million Jews were a bluff. Moreover, even if I had taken Hitler seriously and arrived at some "provisional" agreement with him to terminate WWII in 1941 it would no doubt have shared the ignominious fate suffered by my aborted 1962 deal with Molotov for ending the Cold War—when, in its wisdom, our State Department refused to accept the fact such a radical turn in Soviet/American relations could have originated in Moronia. No, my dear reader, the disturbing nature of Hitler's "prophecy" arose from an element of truth in it that couldn't be erased no matter how hard I tried to do so. The question which haunted me for more than 50 years—and one that's probably occurred to you—was this:
Why didn't I murder that Most Monstrous Of All Massmurderers301 when there was nothing to stop me from strangling him with my bare hands in a room we alone occupied?302
By stating "there was nothing to stop me" I mean there were no physical impediments. After all, I was 30 years younger, at least 75 pounds heavier and a good 5 inches taller than Hitler. And, when my collegiate GraecoRoman wrestling skills were added to an equation already so unbalanced in my favor, it would have been a simple matter to manhandle him into a fatal choke hold.303 Metaphysically, however, the Assassination Of A Tyrant Issue was much more complex. In addition to the Old Testament's unqualified prohibition against (presumably) all forms of homicide there were the New Testament doctrines of Turning The Other Cheek, Loving Thine Enemies and, most pointedly: Rendering Unto Caesar Those Things Which Are Caesar's And Unto God Those Things That Are God's. A commandment I logically took to mean: Whatever the fate of His Chosen People might be it was indeed God's affair and not that of an innocent—and quite helpless (in spite of his impressivesounding title as American Ambassador)—bystander.304
But the most persuasive of all the arguments I considered against ending Hitler's life on that Christmas night in 1941 was the one advanced by the AntiGreat Man (or "Show Must Go On") School Of Thought, which held that:
History results from the interplay of—for the most part—uncontrollable sociocultural, geopolitical & techno economic factors, and consequently its course can't be "altered." Hence it is that even when the most "irreplaceable" of Leading Men are assassinated by their understudies (or some other wannabe waiting in the wings) the script itself remains changeless. This axiom has been verified time and agin by the futility of such "historymaking" homicides as those committed against Hotta Masatoshi, Inajiro Asanuma, Julius Caesar, Garcia Moreno, Reinhard Heydrich, Galeazzo Maria Sforza, Marcus Aurelius Antonius, Jesse James Strang, Engelbert Dollfuss, Abraham Lincoln, Juan Facundo Quiroga, Jesus Christ, Juan de Escobedo, Faisal ibn Abdel Aziz al-Saud, Caesar Atabegi-Azamis, Bardas, Ali Pasha, Ki Tauyoshi Inukai, Stephen Tisza, Abdulla ibn Husein, Henrick Frensch Verwoerd, Garcia Moreno Gabriel, Sergei Mironovich Kirov, Jean Jaurès, Concino Concini, César Augusto Sandino, Sancho el Fuerte, Dion of Syracuse, Ali Khan Liaquat, Shaka Zulu, Alvaro Obreg—n, Jean Franois Darlan, Grigori Efimovich Rasputin, Sultan Murad I, Luis Donaldo Colosio Murrieta, Antonio José de Sucre, Aga Muhammad Khan, Abdi Rashid Ali Shermarke, Melchior Ndadaye, Xerxes I, Snorri Sturlson, Sigilbert of Austrasia, Piotr Arkadevish Stolypin, Michael the Brave, Bashir Gemayel, Mohammed of Ghor, Marcus Aurelius Nemerius, Justo José de Urquiza, Raziy'yat-ud-din, Huey Long, Mustapha IV, Caius Caesar Germanicus, Khosru II, William the Silent, Umberto I, William McKinley, Venustiano Carranza, Michael Collins, Gabriel Narutowicz, Francisco "Pancho" Villa, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Smith, Alexander II, Peir Luigi Farnese, Humber I, Marcus Livius Drusus, Giovanni Maria Visconti, William Tolbert, Sheikh Mujibar Rahman, Louis de Lorraine, Henri de Lorraine, Mohammed Boudiaf, Grodian III, Alessandro de' Medici, Sanchez Cerro, Darius III Codomannus, Ito Hirobumi, Titus Flavius Domitianus, Okubo Toshimichi, Abd Allah ibn al-Husayn, Flavius Aetius, Albert I, Aung San, Pompey the Great, Ahmed Abdallah, Constans II Pogonatus, Jean Jacques Dessalines, François Camille, Eloy Alfaro, Amenemhet I, Kurt Eisner, Jules Ferry, Amilcar Cabral, Hara Takashi, Li Tzu-ch'eng, Thomas D'Arcy, Brihadnatha Maurya, Karageorge Petrovic, Nasr al-Din Shah, Nizam al-Mulk, Philip of Swabia, Juan Prim, Peter III, P. V. Narasimha Rao, Walther Rathenau, Selim III, Tarquinius Priscus, Istvan Tisza, Albrecht Wenzel von Wallenstein, Butro Ghali, Sanetomo Minamoto, Ulugh-Beg, Nadir Shah, John the Fearless, An Lushan, Sadi Carnot, Philip of Macedon, Ioannes Antonios Kapadistrias, Abraham Lincoln, Khedive Abbas I, James Garfield, Salvatore Maranzano, Jean Jacques Dessalines, Ambrose VIII, Ladislas IV and Thomas à Becket—to name but a few of the "Great Men" whose murders are only footnotes in a Saga (or Greek Tragedy, depending on how one reads it) chiseled into the very bedrock of human destiny.
My already somewhat305 shaken faith in this hypothesis was, of course, shattered completely on 22 November 1963 when, with a $37 rifle and 85¢ worth of bullets, that otherwise perfect nobody named Lee Harvey Oswald put a sudden end to all the plans JFK and I made for converting his first 1,000 days of Camelot into a dynastic fact of American life by crowning himself as King John I on 20 January 1965; during what was supposed to be the inauguration ceremony for his second Presidential term. Whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald changed the course of America's history he radically altered the direction my life took following that dark day in Dallas! Rather than returning to Washington as a "Special Adviser To The President" (while secretly developing our coup d'etat strategy) for the next 30 years I remained stranded in Moronia. A woeful state of personal affairs whose hellish tedium will be fully appreciated as you read the following 6 Books; wherein I describe every 1 of those 10 thousand 9 hundred and 42 days in the most excruciating detail.306
Book 9 Chapter 1 Return to Index
Footnotes
293 Once again, the reader is reminded this "shifting of gears" genrewise shouldn't be construed as substantiating the claims made by some critics that the author is neither a novelist nor an exambassador; but a failed (or "frustrated") playwright.—J. P.
294 Hitler's "symmetry" concerns were more superstitious than aesthetic. Like all who believe in astrology he regarded the number 3 as one specially imbued with magical properties.
295 Whether we like being reminded by Hitler or not, the fact remains his JewishGerman and our AfricanAmerican "questions" do have a lot in common. After nearly 400 years it's becoming obvious America's "Melting Pot" has always been a myth that applied only to the (more or less) lilywhite immigrants from Europe. While a Nazi solution to our persistent racial problem is, of course, unthinkable (whether by genocide or the repatriation to Africa scheme initiated by the American Colonization Society in 1817) it doesn't alter the fact that, in one way or another, since the introduction of slavery most black and white Americans have been engaged in what can only be described as a continuous race riot—no matter how euphemistically we refer to it as "just a family feud," "one of the downsides of living in a free society" or "at least victimwise, an equal opportunity crimewave." Hitler's portrayal of our sainted Great Emancipator as a protoNazi whose postCivil War plans included sending the freed slaves back to Africa was, of course, another of his Big Lies. Nevertheless, according to Samuel Eliot Morrison (The Oxford History of the American People, p.711), "Lincoln, who anticipated the difficulty of making large numbers of free Negroes live amicably with whites, believed that colonization of that race [possibly in Arizona] offered the best solution, and made several fruitless efforts to start it."
296 Hitler never mentioned the role Mussolini would play in his New World Order. And judging from the New Orld Order map he regarded Italy as a nothing more than a province of the Third Reich.
297 The date of the Versailles Peace Treaty ending WW I and—among other things, helping to set the stage for WW II—deprived Germany of its prewar sovereignty over the Rhineland, the Danzig Corridor and the Sudetenland.
298 My "delaying tactics" had more to do with the fact I couldn't believe what I was reading than they did with applying the Principles of Super protracted Foreplay to frustrate what Hitler thought would be another "triumph of National Socialist willpower over democratic cowardice" by pinning the blame for his Holocaust on me.
299 Yiddish for "fellow Jews."
300 Which included the unthinkability that, in the middle of the 20thcentury, any government—even the most criminal—would (or could) commit such genocidal atrocities on so vast a scale.
301 Even before Hitler set his Doomsday Machine in motion there was no shortage of reasons for ridding the world of this homicidal sociopath. From 1939 on there were a series of (always inept alas) plots and conspiracies among some of the Third Reich's "good Germans" to rid their fatherland of what they saw as "its greatest enemy." [See The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, pp 905-8]
302 The principal reason Hitler was such a tough target assassinationwise were the airtight security measures taken by his SS bodyguards to protect him in even the safest situations, such as that 1941 Christmas party attended only by the loyalest members of his entourage. Throughout what was advertised as those "familylike festivities" there were always at least a halfdozen uniformed (and who knows how many were posing as servants) blackshirted stormtroopers present—all of them manifestly capable of mowing down anyone who made a suspicious move toward the Führer with their submachineguns. Only that Hideaway of his was offlimits to these Nazi Praetorians. When Hitler invited me into it there was a brief exchange between him and the head of his security detachment over the prudence of being isolated with someone who was such an "unknown quantity." Hitler won this argument, of course, but not without having to pull his rank as "Germany's Supreme Civilian and Military CommanderInChief!"
303 Especially since he was also handicapped by those aforementioned symptoms of premature decrepitude.
304 Of course there were also certain psychological factors I had to contend with. The chief among them being that, like Hamlet, since I'd never murdered anyone before it was possible I might botch my first attempt by thinking too much about the welter of qualms associated with embarking on such a fatal course of action. As for my personal safety, what can I say except that dying for any cause in the bloom of one's youth is a heroic enterprise that shouldn't be undertaken lightly. Nevertheless, had it not been for the reasons set forth above in the next paragraph I was prepared to sacrifice myself for what seemed like the noblest of causes. As things worked out, however, I had a far more important role to play than saving European Jewry—and the 20 or 30 million gentiles who also perished after 26 December 1941. 50 years later nothing less than the survival of the entire human race (as we still know it) would depend on my delivering this NeoEgalitarian Message Of SocioCultural Bliss Through The Gospel Of Born Again Klutzianity In The Form Of A Bestselling Nonfiction Novel.
305 The assassinations of Mohandas K. Gandhi, Count Folke Bernadotte, King Abdullah ibn Hussein of Jordan, Pakistani Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan, Presidents Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, Carlos Castillo Armas of Guatemala and South Vietnam's, Ngo Dinh Diem, King Faisal of Iraq (along with his uncle, Crown Prince Abdullah and Premier Nuri as-Said),ExPremier Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Ceylon's Prime Minister Solomon Bandaranaike, Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molinas and our own Medgar Evers—all of which occurred between January 1948 and June 1963—seemed to me (especially those of Gandhi and Evers) more than mere footnotes to what was becoming an ominous chapter in human history.
306 From the author's "perfectionist" point of view such an ordeal may be unavoidable, but plowing through another 212 pages is a "luxury" you and I can't afford at what in my editorial opinion has become an endurance test whose further prolongation is pointless. Having come this far, ladies, you should be more than ready, willing and—above all—intellectually able to climax all those "orgasmic" expectations the author has been orchestrating since this "literary loveaffair" began. Accordingly, I've taken the bull by its horns and deleted Books 3 through 8 so you can proceed directly to the 9th and final one. Which, by the way, I think you'll find both short and surprisingly sweet!—J. P.