“Well, see, I’d visited some very pleasant resort spots in ’45—Belsen and Dachau, to name two. And I was around even earlier, when the Nazi organizations—the Gestapo, the SS, the Reich Cabinet, the OKW—were great big things. I saw what they could do. And I got to really hating them. Everybody did. And it was such a strong hate, see, that maybe it was this that kept the people going. As long as we could despise those symbols, with their black uniforms and swastikas and shiny boots, we could go on fighting them. As long as we could believe that they were inhuman, soulless creatures of absolute evil, we could hope for victory. Actually, we didn’t see much more of the Gestapo or the Storm Troopers than the kids at home did in the movies. But the German propaganda boys were doing a great job, a great job. They kept telling us that they weren’t human: they were super­human. They were the Master Race.

“So it didn’t even occur to me, or anyone else, that these guys were real people who got hungry and lonely sometimes, who got colds in their noses and farted at parties. No muddled thinking there, boy. No confusion. Just a nice, steady hatred building up. And, of course, the same thing—even more so—was happening with the Japanese. God knew they weren’t real people!

“Anyway, I went to the trials feeling the way you do in the last reel of a Western, where the villain is going to get his guts shot out by the hero. I wanted to watch those bastards crawl and whine and cry . . .”

Driscoll turned left and pointed the car down the long, crowded Los Angeles freeway.

“I wanted to see them get it, too. But something went wrong, Linker. I arrived at the courthouse, and I couldn’t find a single goddamn monster. Not one. All I could find was a bunch of tired, scared, neurotic old men. Ribbentrop was getting roasted by a smart-ass lawyer, and I thought that was swell, because Ribbentrop deserved it if anyone did; but the more I watched him, the more human he got. Even GÖring, the most hated of them all, the one we used to dream of boiling in hot blood—he wasn’t a monster, either. Shifty, shrewd, unctuous; yes. But mostly just nuts. Just crazy.

“A couple of weeks went by and suddenly the trials began to lose their meaning. The people, all the outraged people whose families had been broken up, even they started to get bored. They started feeling almost sorry for these poor misguided bastards. Poor Ribbentrop, you know, he’s way too old to sit there and get pounded by that lawyer. Somebody ought to get him a drink of water, or something!