It was 1980. I was hanging out at at the Eagle's Nest in the Bavarian Alps near Berchtesgaden. It is a mountaintop chalet Martin Bormann built for Hitler in 1939, a birthday present. I got up there in a brass-plated elevator whose shaft Bormann had driven through the heart of Kehlstein peak at a cost of millions of marks and twelve lives. At Salzburg, just a few alps north in Austria, the Waffen SS was having a reunion that day.
The chalet is a tourist attraction, but no tourists that morning. I was in the deserted snack bar talking with the Waiter. He was a stocky, gregarious German in his 60s, bluff, hearty, and likable. He had excellent English. I asked why the German people had allowed Hitler to kill six million innocent people during the Third Reich. The Waiter shook his head. A man in his position had to be ready for that sort of question, and he had a good line.
"Trains at night... afraid to speak... we knew nothing... couldn't do anything... children hostage... just ordinary... didn't know... couldn't know...," he stopped. He looked at me with a just-between-us smirk and leaned closer. "You have to admit, though," he said, "Hitler was right about the Russians."
I did not reply to the Waiter. Well, I mumbled some pathetic inanities to cover my retreat, away from him and away from there. It was easy. I am not German, and he was nothing to me.
Now, twenty-eight years later, he has most likely gone to his reward, but his spirit lives on. I see the Waiter's smirk everywhere, thin Aryan lips curled in rich subtextual irony, a knife to the bleeding heart of all liberal pieties.
The President wears it just before each bare-faced whopper, sure he is about to eviscerate the pussies once again. Cheney has perfected it, but he's better known for a feral snarl, revealing the beast within. McCain flashes a good-natured version when he thinks he has got off a good one into the teeth of the less manly. It's a Fox News trademark.
It says things like this: "Realistic men, like you and me, don't weep over spilled blood, even though we have to pretend we do. We enjoy the tasty omelet and accept that the eggs must be broken. Innocents must die to get these dirty jobs done. Regrettable, but there you are. Best to move on."
The Waiter was in his 20s in the 1940s. Maybe he had always been the Waiter at the Eagle's Nest. He served the Fuhrer the pallid vegetable messes he favored, slipped Bormann a plate of sausage, poured Himmler a Mineralwasser as he overheard them calmly discuss matters of state. Perhaps he saw the smirk then, and made it his own, a sign that he, too, was a realistic man.
I wish I had kicked the Waiter in the nuts when I had the chance.