“True, when Ribbentrop, as third speaker of the concluding statement, was talking, he said something about the incompetence of the court, arrogantly grumbling that if he were to be hanged, he would not formally recognize it. But it’s a bit too late for such protests, and his words go unheeded. They too remain cant. Besides, they sound like everything else coming from him: insolent, presumptuous, and stupid. And anyway, the real sensation has fizzled out: Rudolf Hess’s concluding statement.

•

“Now it’s his turn. He was Adolf Hitler’s deputy. His most loyal vassal. The John among his disciples. Here, he no longer seems to be of this world. He sits there, mentally departed, with a blanket over his legs, like a resident of an old-age home. A military policeman—his face contracted like a bulldog’s by the polished chrome-steel helmet with its tight chin strap—sticks out his junior-officer paws in their full-dress white-cotton gloves and shoves the microphone under Hess’s nose. But, with a motion like he’s brushing away a cobweb, Hess pushes it aside and raises his forefinger like a schoolboy who wants to leave the room.

•

“It is a pathetic little white worm of a forefinger. It rises, timorous and crooked, as if crawling out of a hole in the ground and peering into the hazardous world with a nauplius eye on the fingertip—a dwarf-like harbinger sent out for reconnoitering by its lord and master.

“His head also seems to be emerging from the primal ooze, it too squints perplexed into unknown creation. A saurian head: the weight of the upper skull has squashed the mouth into the flat lower jaw and distorted it into its breadth, hopelessly unsated. Yet this is a tame, a humble saurian. Its eyes are so gloomy with despair as they ogle out of the shadow of its Nietzsche brows, which hang bushily from the socket arches and grow together at the top of the nose as in a criminal’s face; indeed, the eyes exert an almost suction-like effect. One looks into them as into the apertures of two periscopes that are camouflaged for maneuver purposes and that are slowly screwed upward as they turn to and fro, scanning around.

•

“They turn on the pale stalk of a withered neck, which grows out of the now oversized shirt collar; with a male choir singer’s Adam’s apple whipping up and down between baggy skin and sinews, the throat emits a sullenly lamenting little voice. Extremely submissive, this little voice asks the High Court for permission to remain seated during the reading of the concluding statement.

“The black-smocked Punch-and-Judy torso of LORD JUSTICE Lawrence at the judges’ table opposite the defendants’ bar nods paternally as in a puppet theater, his iron-framed spectacles sliding down his nose; with the old-man tremolo of dignified Anglo-Saxon bombast in his voice, he proclaims that the request is granted in light of the defendant’s poor state of health.

“The defendant utters his thanks, audibly touched by such patriarchally strained humanity and, while his periscopes scan an imaginary horizon, he pulls a few sheets of paper from the folds of the blanket slung around his knees, the blanket of a Baltic Sea vacationer. The room is deathly still, the defendant’s fumbling very ponderous. Finally, he’s ready. In a droning voice, Hess begins to read off a text that was obviously prepared by his attorney.