In Search of Klingsor. Jorge Volpi

halfway through the war, while working at the Institute for Advanced Study, Bacon decided to enlist in the army. He was sent to England to make contact with the British scientists there, and in 1945 he joined the Alsos mission, led by the Dutch physicist Samuel I. Goudsmit, who was responsible for archiving all available information relating to the German scientific program, and to the Germans’ work on the atomic bomb. He was also the official who ordered the capture of the German physicists who were working on it.

      Once his tour of duty was over, Bacon could have returned to the United States, but he chose to continue working as a scientific consultant to the Allied Control Council, the entity responsible for governing Occupied Germany. Finally, in early October of 1946, a few days after the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg handed down its sentences to the Nazi defendants, Bacon was summoned by the Office of Military Intelligence to review some of the documents from the trial archives. From this research he would produce a report illustrating the points he felt most relevant to his assigned task of searching for the inconsistencies in the war criminals’ testimony. Of his report, one small detail emerged which caught the attention of his military commanders.

      On July 30, 1946, in the main hall of the Palace of Justice in Nuremberg, seven German organizations went on trial: the Nazi party leadership; the cabinet of the Reich; the security police, known as the SS; the secret police, known as the Gestapo; the Security Service, or SD; the Storm Troops, or SA; and the Military High Command of the Third Reich. In the weeks leading up to the trials, the tribunal announced that the trial proceedings were to be broadcast throughout Germany so that anyone who had been affected by any of the accused groups might step forward and offer his or her testimony. More than 300,000 responses flooded the Palace of Justice. From this pool, 603 members of these organizations were brought to Nuremberg to testify. In the end, the court admitted the testimony of some 90 people—mostly pertaining to the SS—who had refused to commit dishonest actions in the fulfillment of their duties.

      One of these testimonies caught the attention of the U.S. Intelligence Services. During this process, a little man named Wolfram von Sievers, president of the Society for German Ancestral Heritage (and, as was later discovered, the head of an office of the Ahnenerbe, the SS office of scientific investigation). Von Sievers was an extremely nervous witness; during his long hours sitting on the witness bench, he never stopped rubbing his hands, and his cheeks were perpetually drenched in perspiration. He stumbled over his words, repeated certain phrases over and over again, and, as if that weren’t enough, he was also a stutterer, which further complicated the jobs of the extensive network of simultaneous translators who, for the first time in history, performed their task in the courtrooms of Nuremberg.

      While being interrogated by one of the Allied prosecutors, Von Sievers made the first in a series of controversial declarations. According to an agreement signed by the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler, the SS regularly sent skulls of “Bolshevik Jews” to Von Sievers’s laboratory so that he might perform experiments on them. When Von Sievers was asked if he knew how the SS obtained those craniums, he replied that they came from the prisoners of war at the Eastern Front, who were assassinated specifically for this scientific research. The prosecutor pressed on: “And what was the objective of your ‘research’?” Once again Von Sievers stumbled over his words, incoherent and stuttering. Finally, after persistent pressure from the judges, he gave in and delivered a long, wildly digressive speech on phrenology and the physical development of ancient civilizations, covering everything from the Toltecs and Atlantis to Aryan supremacy and mystical shrines like Agartha and Shambhala. More specifically, however, he explained that his own task had been to establish the biological inferiority of the Semitic people, to become intimately familiar with their physiological development over the ages, which presumably would enable him to ascertain the best way to eliminate their defects.

      When he was finished speaking, Von Sievers looked like one of the skulls he claimed to have been studying, and his hands were now trembling uncontrollably. The prosecutor, however, was getting fed up; he had only interrogated Von Sievers to prove that the SS and the Nazi regime in general had indeed committed atrocities. He certainly hadn’t intended this to be an exposé of the repulsive scientific investigation undertaken by Von Sievers, who, it turned out, would one day be tried and convicted for crimes against humanity.

      “Where did you obtain the funding for this research, Professor Von Sievers?”

      “From the SS, as I have already stated,” he stammered.

      “Was it common procedure for the SS to commission you to perform this type of research?”

      “Yes.”

      “And did you say that the SS provided the financing for it?”

      “Yes, directly.”

      “What do you mean when you say ‘directly,’ Professor?” The prosecutor sensed that he had finally hit upon a lead that might actually get him somewhere.

      Von Sievers attempted to clear his throat.

      “Well, all the scientific research undertaken in Germany first had to be cleared by the supervision and control centers of the Research Council of the Third Reich.”

      The prosecutor had hit the nail on the head. This was exactly what he wanted to hear. The Research Council, just like so many other dependencies of the Third Reich, fell under the supervision of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering.

      “Thank you, Professor. That will be all,” the prosecutor concluded.

      Von Sievers, however, added one more rather unexpected statement which, by order of the judges, was stricken from the record at the defense lawyers’ request. Nevertheless, the statement did appear in the transcript Bacon received from the Office of Military Intelligence, and the lieutenant studied it closely, as it was highlighted in red ink. It said: “Before any funds could be released, each project had to be approved by Hitler’s scientific adviser. I never did find out the identity of this person, but according to rumor, it was a well-known figure. A man who enjoyed a prominent position in the scientific community, and who operated under the code name Klingsor.”

      A few days later, on August 20, the courtroom was packed, a sure sign that Hermann Goering, the Great Actor in this theater of justice, was to make his appearance. He arrived dressed in a white jacket—in his glory days, he had been known for wearing this uniform. Ruddy-faced and volatile, Goering was the heart and soul of the trials. Acerbic and straightforward, he had that special kind of impertinence that comes from years of giving orders without ever hearing a single protest. He faced his interrogators as if he were dictating his memoirs. In his best moments, he displayed an acidic, penetrating sense of humor, and in his worst, he was like a caged monster, ready and waiting to take a bite out of anyone, even Otto Stahmer, his own defense attorney. Stahmer was responsible for directing this short scene:

      “Did you ever issue an order to carry out medical experiments on human subjects?” he asked. Goering took a deep breath.

      “No.”

      “Are you acquainted with a Dr. Rascher, who has been accused of performing scientific research on human guinea pigs at Dachau, for the Luftwaffe?”

      “No.”

      “Did you ever issue an order authorizing anyone to carry out unspeakable experiments on prisoners?”

      “No.”

      “As president of the Research Council of the Reich, did you ever order plans for the development of a system of mass destruction?”

      “No.”

      Sir David Maxwell-Fyfe, the British prosecutor, rose from his seat.

      “You were a great pilot,” he said courteously, “with an impressive service record. How is it possible that you cannot remember those experiments, which were performed so as to verify the resistance of the uniforms used by the air force?”

      “I had many tasks to attend to,” Goering explained, with the same civility as his interrogator. “Tens of thousands of orders were issued in my name. Justice Jackson has accused me of having ‘fingers in every pie,’ but it would