“The worldview of these men allowed them to, actually demanded that they, kill millions of people in order to guarantee the purity of their people’s blood. And it is not possible to accept that the defendants will now try to wriggle out of these charges like cheap crooks in a provincial court. It is a ghostly experience to see with what servile eagerness these cynics of the will to power, these fumigator executives of racism outdid themselves in lending a helping hand to the judicial process when they had to assign responsibility to a former brother-in-arms and present themselves as victims of misunderstandings. It was absurd and repulsive to watch these ever faithful, upright citizens with their miens of injured innocence and gestures of insidious hostility, with their attempts at self-justification by citing orders they had received and official duties they had had to perform as a matter of course. So that Jewish prosecutors, beside themselves with fury, despair, and mortification, were suddenly playing devil’s advocate, using arguments taken from Nazi ideology merely to attach to their defendants some small degree of freedom in having chosen to commit their crimes—and thus give them a final shred of human dignity, thereby rescuing the dignity of the court, which dignity threatened to dissolve in the miasmas of cadavers and the stale, stuffy smell of petit bourgeois order recipients and program executors.

“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.