The Devil’s Graveyard Contents Foreword Prologue Welcome The Prison, the Cemetery, and the Executioners The First Circle of Hell – The Post-War, One-Time Killers The Second Circle of Hell – The Post-War, Multiple Killers The Third Circle of Hell – The Allied Airmen Killers The Fourth Circle of Hell – The Unrepentant Killers The Fifth Circle of Hell – The Concentration Camp Killers The Sixth Circle of Hell – The Typewriter Perpetrators The Seventh Circle of Hell – The Hippocratic Killers The Eighth Circle of Hell – The Mass Murderers The Ninth Circle of Hell – The Fiends Conclusion Postscript Appendices – SS Ranks and Selected German and Key Terms Used Bibliography The Devil’s Graveyard – Copyrighted 2016 2 Foreword The Divine Comedy (Divina Commedia) is the title of the epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and his death in 1321. Dante’s original title for the work was “Comedìa.” Another literary figure, Giovanni Boccaccio later applied the epithet “Divina” to the poem, which was not formally published until 1555 by Gabriele Giolito de’ Ferrari. Dante’s achievement is considered by many literary critics to be the pinnacle not only of Italian literature, but also one of the greatest pieces of world literature ever created. The poem’s allegorical vision of the afterlife is a succinct summary of the medieval world-view of Heaven, Hell and faith, as it had developed in the western Christian Church. As a secondary effect, the work helped to establish Tuscan as the standardized Italian language, although at this time Italy was not politically unified but a collection of city states. The Divine Comedy is composed of 14,233 lines that are divided into three parts – Inferno (Hell), Purgatorio (Purgatory) and Paradiso (Paradise.) Each section consists of thirty-three cantos. The work is written in the first person and describes Dante’s journey through the three realms of the dead. The journey is set in the spring of 1300. The Roman poet Virgil, another literary giant, guides Dante through Hell and Purgatory. A woman, Beatrice, takes over these duties and subsequently guides Dante through Paradise/Heaven. At first reading, the work describes Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory and Heaven. More detailed reading, however, leads one to understand that the poem is actually an allegory from a spiritual perspective of a person’s journey towards God. Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 in the middle of the complex politics of Florence, Italy. At age 37, leaders of the Black Guelphs, the political faction in power at the time – who were allied with Pope Boniface VIII – exiled him for life, as Dante’s family had been part of the White Guelphs, mortal enemies of the faction then in power. During his enforced absence, Dante withdrew from political activities and began to conceive what would become The Divine Comedy. In 1304, Dante first went to the northern city of Bologna, but two years later moved to Padua. During this period, he also spent significant time in Pisa. Prince Guido Novello da Polenta invited Dante to move to Ravenna in 1318, and Dante accepted the offer to move to that city. During the next three years, Dante finished Paradiso, and probably died of malaria in 1321, as he returned from one of the prince’s diplomatic missions to the Adriatic city of Venice. Authorities in his adopted city of Ravenna buried him there at the Church of San Pier Maggiore, although a finished tomb was not completed until 1483. Virgil, the co-equal primary character of Inferno, was not known by that name in his real life, but rather as Publius Vergilius Maro. He lived shortly before Christ, born on October 15, about 70 3 BC in Andes, and dying on September 21, 19 BC. Virgil produced three major works: the Eclogues, the Georgics and the epic Aeneid. The Aeneid proved to be Virgil’s greatest success. According to some sources, Virgil traveled to Greece to revise the work, but the trip proved his undoing. After finishing his revisions, Virgil decided to return to his home, but was struck down with a fever near the village of Megara. He was able to cross the Adriatic Sea by ship, but died in the port of Brundisium on the eastern coast of Italy. Virgil left instructions that the Aeneid was to be burned, but Caesar Augustus ordered that the manuscript be saved, and it was published with few changes. Although Dante finished The Divine Comedy just before he died, it did not really gain fame until it was formally published in 1555. From then on, the poem inspired thousands – if not more – of paintings over the next five centuries. Below is Eugène Delacroix’s 1822 painting “The Barque of Dante” showing Dante on the left and Virgil on the right. 4 Prologue Massive, thick, squatty, gray, with a red-tiled roof the color of dried blood, the Landsberg Prison is of the Art Nouveau design, but its countenance is something medieval, something horrid. With an entrance building three stories high, the two round corner towers are topped with weathered copper onion domes, so common in Bavaria. The copper patina has turned to light green, streaked with black oxidation. The building itself is a depressing gray. The overall effect of the scene is of something from the harsh East, something out of the depths of Asia, where cruelty is a way of life. One-hundred yards away is a small cemetery, known as the Spöttinger Friedhof. On its grounds are row upon row of crosses. Each cross is stark, made of wood and topped by an inverted “V” that looks like a tiny roof. To a German, nothing is out of place; to a foreigner, the crosses appear to be the boney skeletons of scarecrows. A closer examination reveals that most of the crosses have had their nameplates removed. Someone is buried under each marker, but we are not supposed to know whom that might be. The combination of prison and cemetery is linked by history as well as proximity. For six years following World War II, hundreds of Nazi war criminals were confined to the prison. They had been tried and sentenced at other locations – primarily Dachau and Nürnberg – but were transferred to Landsberg to serve anywhere from one year to life imprisonment. Almost 300 had a different fate in store – they would be executed by firing squad or by hanging. Those criminals, whose families did not request their remains, were then buried at this cemetery. These offenders were the worst of the worst. They lynched downed American airmen; conducted painful, horrible medical experiments on helpless concentration camp inmates; and shot tens of thousands of “sub-humans” in the in the snows of Russia. They threw the dead and the near dead into the crematoria ovens and furnaces at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Dachau. The problem in understanding the Nazis and their evil deeds is that the subject is too overwhelming. The normal human mind simply cannot fathom the nature and magnitude of the crimes. Prose, and even photographs, fails to impart the horror of it all. There simply is no adequate technique to lift the mind out of the gore and lead to an understanding of how it occurred. But, wait; perhaps there is such a device. Dante “resurrected” Virgil for his own work – creating his own Deus ex Machina. This “god from the machine” is a literary plot device to solve a seemingly intractable problem by an inspired and unexpected intervention of some new character, event, ability, or object. Depending on how it is done, the device can move the story forward in an unexpected direction or can bring the tale to a satisfying or successful conclusion. 5 Long ago, during my time in Germany I visited the cemetery outside of the prison mentioned above and in a corner of the grounds I found a half-buried hand-written manuscript written in Latin. Almost like a rough draft of a report, it was dialogue between two men not of my own time, but written sometime before. I remembered enough of my reading of The Divine Comedy to know that this document referred to that earlier work. It appeared in this finding that Dante Alighieri may have also revisited the earth in the twentieth century, rather than living here just once seven centuries ago, and he had re-populated his nine circles of Hell with modern men in an updated Dante's Inferno. In The Divine Comedy, Virgil’s official role is a guide for Dante, but he quickly progresses from tour guide to that of personal tutor, liaison, and father figure to the somewhat naïve Dante. Perhaps Dante and Virgil had somehow united a second time from outside the grave and this effort is related to this spot in Germany. There is something quite strange about this area of Bavaria – some thirty miles west of Munich. There is a constant, nagging feeling in the cool air that this location is a portal from one time-period to another. Time travel – at least in an active imagination able to connect the dots – may actually be possible here. This may be disturbing, as the most evil man of the last century – and possibly in all of history – resided here for a while. Adolf Hitler served several years’ incarceration in Landsberg Prison after his failed 1923 putsch. He dictated from his cell room his horrendous Mein Kampf, which stated within its pages his ultimate plan to kill Jews and others he deemed sub-humans. The nearby graves and the prison walls seem to try to pull us back into a very terrible time.