“They scan an imaginary horizon. He turns them to the right, they sweep across the stunned heads of the attorneys, who are looking at him, and across the tables of the prosecutors and their astonished miens to his right, across the barrier separating the public, from which hundreds of pairs of eyes are staring at him—but what they seek lies far beyond, outside this room, far outside this building, guarded like a military camp, and beyond Nuremberg, shamefully bombed and flattened, and beyond Germany, covered with silent lunar craters, and beyond Europe, smashed and shattered, and perhaps even beyond this planet, which the mange of mankind has so dreadfully attacked and violated. And while they search, his saurian head speaks, and his sullen and exhausted little voice says that the important information which he has to communicate and which they have been trying to hinder him from communicating concerns matters that the initiated have long been aware of, but that have not been made sufficiently accessible to the general public. During the great show trials in Russia, the press pointed out the incomprehensible self-accusations of the defendants and expressed the suspicion that these self-accusations could have been obtained only with the aid of drugs. Nevertheless, it still has not gotten around urbi et orbi that certain pharmaceutical preparations, in the form of injections or tablets, are able to transform the most solid character into a toy with no will of its own, a malleable tool for any intention whatsoever.

“Now, all at once, the suspense of sensation crackles in the room. All past events suddenly become more present. The light of the neon tubes becomes harsher. The nightmare mood becomes more intense in the small courtroom, which is almost boudoir-like, intimate, after nine months of horror-filled proceedings. Reality becomes real.

•

“This is now transmitted telepathically throughout the gigantic honeycomb of the Fürth Palace of Justice. Outside, the corridors and the other cells are alive. All at once, the termite hill teems. Even the most out-of-the-way nooks and crannies have been alerted that something is happening in the magically charged core cell, where, throughout these months of tenacious exposure of atrocities, horror has gradually become boring and indignant gestures have become bleak. At the same time, a sense of frustration has developed, arousing a universal wish for something extraordinary to happen, no matter what, no matter how, no matter to whom—merely to end the awful stagnation of horror, to stir it up, to bring the salvation of movement. No matter what might happen—the personal appearance of Hitler, still alive and remorsefully declaring his readiness to turn himself over to the Nuremberg judges; or the entrance of a host of angels, opening the prison cells with flaming swords, because the prisoners are innocent—even the most fantastical thing could happen so long as it occurred as an occurrence and released the events here from their state of static being.

•