The Cover Age: Nazi Crimes, Chapter 4

For a time, I lost track of Ostwald. I became convinced I found him, once, under another guise, but I was wrong, a fact made clear by an old friend named Holloway. This is what brought me to America, but I had investigated those shores before, before I had ever heard of Ostwald, and in truth, did not relish visiting them again because of it. But I wasn’t to leave them soon. In fact, as it turned out, I never did.

The first visit was in the time of the eugenicists, who in any other age would have been called by their rightful name: Nazis. But this was in the early days of the Reich, when there was no one brave enough to call them what they were, before it was easy, before it became mandatory, and one might dare say, disingenuous.

The celebrity of the times was an aerialist named Roth, who for the first and last time in popular history embodied the perfect Teutonic ideal of blond hair and blue eyes, a fitting confluence of the times, far more than anyone cares admit. One could make history every day in the early days of aeronautics, but Roth had an open invitation to adulation that was suffocating then and has never seriously subsided, except into the silent pages of history.

Later, when I watched Ostwald’s theatrics in Chile, I should have known from the start that something had fundamentally changed, or perhaps reverted, but it was too late before I made the connection, and I would have to endure many years of shame, knowing I had let such a monster slip away from me.

Roth would pose for a picture with anyone. Before movies really took up, pictures were the most coveted medium. One could suddenly become immortal in the blink of an eye. I found myself herded into a group shot with Roth, one of many anonymous Europeans basking in the glow of perfection. In the picture, I’m the only one not looking toward the viewer, my gaze instead inscrutably off to the side, but every time I could stand to look at it, every time it showed up reprinted somewhere to repeat Roth’s glory, I could remember exactly what I had been thinking, and... it’s nothing I can repeat now.

Roth eventually faded into his many pictures, vanishing from public view conveniently at the same time the Reich was held an enemy to mankind.

I was dispatched back home, and then given the Ostwald assignment, but I suppose in hindsight it had already begun...