“You’re talking about the Final Solution?”
“In a sense. The Führer correctly believes that the Jews are a cancer on Germany, and that we have to remove that cancer. You understand that, of course?”
“Of course.”
“The important thing is to take them out of German society. In some instances, we can make them contribute to Germany with their labor. You remember what it says over the gate at Dachau?”
“ ‘Work will make you free’?”
“Yes. But if the parasites can’t work, can’t be forced to make some repayment for all they have stolen from Germany over the years, then something else has to be done with them. Right?”
“I understand.”
“Elimination is one option,” Heydrich said. “But if you realize the basic objective is to get these parasites out of Germany, elimination is not the only option.”
“I don’t think I quite understand,” von Deitzberg had confessed.
“There are Jews outside of Germany who are willing to pay generously to have their relatives and friends taken from the concentration camps.”
“Really?”
“For one thing, it accomplishes the Führer’s primary purpose—removing these parasitic vermin from the Fatherland. It does National Socialism no harm if vermin that cost us good money to feed and house leave Germany and never return.”
“I can see your point.”
“And at the same time, it takes money from Jews outside Germany and transfers it to Germany. So there is also an element of justice. They are not getting away free after sucking our blood all these years.”
“I understand.”
“In other words, if we can further the Führer’s intention to get Jews out of Germany and at the same time bring Jewish money into Germany while we make a little money for ourselves, what’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing that I can see.”
“This has to be done in absolute secrecy, of course. A number of people would not understand; and an even larger number would feel they have a right to share in the confidential special fund. You can understand that.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Raschner will get into the details with you,” Heydrich went on. “You know him, of course?”
“I know who he is, Herr Gruppenführer.”
Von Deitzberg knew that Sturmbannführer Erich Raschner was one of the half-dozen SS officers—many of them Sicherheitsdienst—who could be found around Heydrich, but he didn’t know him personally, or what his specific duties were.
“He’s not of our class—he used to be a policeman, before he joined the Totenkopfverbände—but he’s very useful. I’m going to assign him to you. But to get back to what I was saying, this is the way this works, essentially:
“As you know, the Jews are routinely transferred between concentration camps. While they are en route from one camp to another, members of the Totenkopfverbände working for Raschner remove two, three, or four of them from the transport. Ostensibly for purposes of further interrogation and the like. You understand.”
Von Deitzberg nodded.
Heydrich went on: “Having been told the inmates have been removed by the Totenkopfverbände, the receiving camp has no further interest in them. The inmates who have been removed from the transport are then provided with Spanish passports and taken by Raschner’s men to the Spanish border. Once in Spain, the Jews make their way to Cadiz or some other port, where they board neutral ships. A month later, they’re in Uruguay.”
“Uruguay?” von Deitzberg blurted in surprise. It had taken him a moment to place Uruguay; and even then, all he could come up with was that it was close to Argentina, somewhere in the south of the South American continent.
“Some stay there,” Heydrich said matter-of-factly, “but many go on to Argentina.”
“I see,” von Deitzberg said.
“Documents issued by my office are of course never questioned,” Heydrich went on. “Now, what I want you to do, Manfred, is take over the administration of the confidential special fund—I should say ‘supervise the administration’ of it. The actual work will continue to be done by Raschner and his men. Raschner will explain the details to you. You will also administer dispersals; Raschner will tell you how much, to whom, and when. Or I will.”
“Jawohl, Herr Gruppenführer.”
“Raschner has suggested that we need one more absolutely reliable SS officer, someone of our kind, as sort of a backup for you. Any suggestions?”
Von Deitzberg had hardly hesitated: “Goltz,” he said, “Standartenführer Josef Goltz. He’s the SS-SD liaison officer to the Office of the Party Chancellery.”
Heydrich laughed.
“Great minds run in similar channels,” he said. “That’s the answer I got when I asked Raschner for his suggestion. Why don’t the two of you talk to him together?”
On their third meeting Raschner had another suggestion to offer. They needed an absolutely trustworthy man—someone with sufficient rank to keep people from asking questions about what he was doing—to handle things in Uruguay. And someone who could be sent there without too many questions being asked.
“Does the Herr Obersturmbannführer know Sturmbannführer Werner von Tresmarck?”
Von Deitzberg did know von Tresmarck, didn’t think highly of him, and told Raschner so.
“He does follow orders, and he would be absolutely trustworthy,” Raschner argued.
“Absolutely trustworthy? What do you know about him that I don’t, Raschner?”
Raschner had laid an envelope filled with photographs on the desk. They showed Werner von Tresmarck in the buff entwined with at least ten similarly unclad young men.
“Because the alternative would be going to Sachsenhausen wearing a pink triangle on his new striped uniform,” Raschner explained unnecessarily.
When von Deitzberg went to Heydrich with the idea, he thought the probable outcome would be von Tresmarck’s immediate arrest and transport to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Homosexuality was one of the worst violations of the SS officer’s code of honor, topped only by treason.
Heydrich surprised him.
“I can see a certain logic to this, Manfred,” Heydrich had said. “Von Tresmarck would certainly be motivated to do what he was told and to keep his mouth shut about it, don’t you think?”
“That’s true, Herr Gruppenführer.”
“Tell you what, Manfred. See if Raschner can come up with a female in similar circumstances we can marry him to. Make the point to her that if she can’t make sure that von Tresmarck keeps his indiscretions in Uruguay behind closed doors, both of them will wind up in Sachsenhausen.”
“Jawohl, Herr Gruppenführer.”
Raschner was prepared to deal with Heydrich’s order. Von Deitzberg realized Raschner had expected Heydrich’s reaction.
Raschner showed von Deitzberg the Sicherheitsdienst dossier of a woman believed to pose a threat to the sterling reputation of the SS officer corps.
She was the widow of Waffen-SS Obersturmbannführer Erich Kolbermann, who had given his life for his Führer and the Fatherland at Stalingrad. Officers’ ladies in these circumstances were expected to devote their lives to volunteer work for the war effort by working in hospitals, that sort of thing.
If they didn’t do what was expected of them, a friendly word from the local SS commander reminded them that their exemption from labor service had ended with the demise of their husband. In other words, either behave or report to the Labor Office, which will find some factory work for you to do.
When Inge—who had been raising eyebrows in Hamburg with her hospitality to young SS officers on leave, not infrequently with two or more at once—was given the friendly word from the local SS man, she disappeared.
She turned up in Berlin, one of the thirty or more attractive young women who congregated in the bars of the Hotel Am Zoo and the Hotel Adlon, where they struck up conversations with senior officers—or Luftwaffe fighter pilots�
��who were passing through the capital and were able to deal with the prices of the Am Zoo and the Adlon.
The attractive young women were not prostitutes, but they did take presents and accept loans.
Raschner brought Frau Kolbermann to von Deitzberg’s office for a friendly chat. Von Deitzberg was drawn to her from their first meeting. Not only was she very attractive, but he thought her eyes were fascinating; naughty, even wicked, à la Marlene Dietrich. He restrained himself, knowing that Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler was not only something of a prude but expected the highest moral standards to be practiced by his officers.
Frau Kolbermann readily accepted the proposition Raschner offered. She said she knew where Uruguay was, had even visited it, and spoke passable Spanish, which confirmed what the dossier suggested: a well-bred woman who’d fallen on hard times.
She was formally introduced to von Tresmarck the next day, became Baroness von Tresmarck two days after that, and was on a Condor flight to Buenos Aires ten days after that.
From then on, things had run smoothly for almost a year. But then they began to fall apart.
On May 31, 1942, Gruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, “Protector of Bohemia and Moravia,” had been fatally wounded in Prague when Czech agents of the British threw a bomb into his car.
Before leaving Berlin to personally supervise the retribution to be visited upon the Czechs for Heydrich’s murder, Himmler called von Deitzberg into his office to tell him how much he would have to rely on him until a suitable replacement for the martyred Heydrich could be found.
Von Deitzberg was now faced with a serious problem. On Heydrich’s death, he had become the senior officer involved with the confidential special fund and the source of its money—yet never had learned from Heydrich how much Himmler knew about it.
He quickly and carefully checked the fund’s records of the dispersal of its money before he had taken over. He found no record that Himmler had ever received anything.
It was of course possible that the enormous disbursements to Heydrich had included money that Heydrich had quietly slipped to Himmler; that way there would be no record of Himmler’s involvement.
Three months later, however, after Himmler had neither requested money—not even mentioned it—nor asked about the status of the confidential special fund, von Deitzberg was forced to conclude that Himmler not only knew nothing about it, but that Heydrich had gone to great lengths to conceal it from the Reichsprotektor.
It was entirely possible, therefore, that Himmler would be furious if he learned now about the confidential special fund. If the puritanical Reichsprotektor learned that Heydrich had been stealing from the Reich, he would quickly conclude that von Deitzberg had been involved in the theft up to his neck.
When von Deitzberg brought up the subject to Raschner, Raschner said that as far as he himself knew, Himmler either didn’t know about the fund or didn’t want to know about it. Thus, an approach to him now might see everyone connected with it stood before a wall and shot. Or hung from a butcher’s hook with piano wire.
They had no choice, Raschner reasoned, but to go on as they had . . . but taking even greater care to make sure the ransoming operation remained secret.
No one was ever selected to replace Heydrich as Himmler’s adjutant. But Himmler gave von Deitzberg the title of “first deputy adjutant” and a week later took him to the Reichschancellery, where a beaming, cordial Adolf Hitler personally promoted him to SS-brigadeführer and warmly thanked him for his services to the SS and himself personally.
Von Deitzberg immediately arranged for Goltz to be promoted to sturmbannführer, and Raschner to hauptsturmführer. And he arranged for both to be sent to Buenos Aires. The risk of someone new coming into the Office of the Reichsprotektor and learning about the confidential special fund seemed to be over.
All of this had been going on simultaneously with Operation Phoenix.
Phoenix was of course the plan concocted by Bormann, Himmler, Ribben trop, and others at the pinnacle of the Nazi hierarchy to establish a sanctuary for senior Nazis in South America, from which they could rise phoenixlike from the ashes of the Thousand-Year Reich when the war was lost.
It had been no trouble for von Deitzberg to arrange for Standartenführer Goltz to be sent to Buenos Aires as the man in charge of Operation Phoenix. That posting conveniently placed him in a position to be the confidential special fund’s man in South America.
By then, curiously, there actually was a problem with the financial success of the fund. There was far more cash floating around than could be spent—or even invested—without questions being raised. It followed that the confidential special fund’s leadership—von Deitzberg, Goltz, and Raschner—decided that setting up their own private version of Operation Phoenix was the natural solution. After all, von Tresmarck was already in place in Montevideo; it would pose no great problem for him to make investments for the confidential special fund. He was already doing that for Operation Phoenix.
And then there were the blunders. Von Deitzberg took little pride in being able to recognize a blunder when one occurred. Or an appalling number of them.
The first had been the failed assassination attempt on the American son of el Coronel Jorge G. Frade. When it became known that Cletus Frade—who had ostensibly “come home” to Argentina—was in fact an agent of the Office of Strategic Services and whose purpose in Argentina was to turn his father against Germany, the decision had been made to kill him. His murder would send the message to the man who almost certainly was going to be the next president of Argentina that even his son could not stand up to the power and anger of the Thousand-Year Reich.
But that hadn’t worked. Young Frade, clearly not the foolish young man everyone seemed to have decided he was, killed the men sent to kill him. His outraged father then had loaned his pilot son an airplane with which young Frade located the Spanish-flagged—and thus “neutral”—merchant ship that had been replenishing German submarines in Samborombón Bay. Soon thereafter, a U.S. Navy submarine had torpedoed the vessel and the German U-boat tied alongside.
Von Deitzberg never learned who among the most senior of the Nazi hierarchy had ordered young Frade’s assassination. And because that attempt had failed, no one was going to claim that responsibility.
They were, however, obviously the same people who had ordered the second blunder, the assassination of el Coronel Jorge G. Frade himself. The intention there was to send the message to the Argentine officer corps that just as Germany was prepared to reward its friends, it was equally prepared to punish its enemies no matter their position in the Argentine hierarchy.
That assassination had been successful. El Coronel Frade died of a double load of double-ought buckshot to his face while riding in his car on his estancia. The results of that assassination, however, were even more disastrous for Germany than the failed assassination of Frade’s son.
The Argentine officer corps was enraged by Frade’s murder. And during the attempted smuggling ashore of the first “special shipment”—crates literally stuffed with currency and precious jewels to be used to purchase sanctuary—from the Océano Pacífico at Samborombón Bay, both Standartenführer Goltz and Oberst Karl-Heinz Grüner—the military attaché and his assistant who were there to receive it—died of high-power rifle bullets fired into their skulls. Only good luck saw that the special shipment made it safely back to the Océano Pacífico.
Who actually did the shooting never came to light. It could have been the OSS, perhaps even Frade himself. Or it could have been Argentine army snipers sending the message to the Germans that the assassination of a beloved Argentine officer was unacceptable behavior.
It didn’t matter who did the shooting. So far as Bormann, Himmler, and the other senior Nazis behind Operation Phoenix were concerned, Operation Phoenix was in jeopardy. And that was absolutely unacceptable.
And there was more: On the death of el Coronel Frade, his only child inherited everything his father had owned, which i
ncluded his enormous estancia, countless business enterprises, and, perhaps most dangerous of all, what amounted to his own private army. Young Frade now had several hundred former soldiers of the Húsares de Pueyrredón who had returned to their homes on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo with their devotion to their murdered commander, el Coronel Frade, intact and now transferred to his son. Including, of course, their considerable military skills.
The fury of the Argentine officer corps over Frade’s assassination had finally gotten through to the inner circle at Wolfsschanze. Von Deitzberg was sent to Buenos Aires, ostensibly as a Wehrmacht generalmajor, to apologize privately to el Coronel Juan D. Perón for the absolutely inexcusable stupidity of Oberst Karl-Heinz Grüner, who had ordered el Coronel Frade’s assassination. Perón had been told that Grüner had already been returned to Germany, where he would be dealt with. Von Deitzberg didn’t mention that it was the bodies of both Grüner and Standartenführer Goltz that had been returned to the Fatherland, and that they had made the trip in the freezer of the Océano Pacífico.
Von Deitzberg installed SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Cranz at the embassy to replace Goltz—officially as a diplomat, the commercial attaché—in running both Operation Phoenix and the confidential special fund, and then he went to Montevideo to check up on Sturmbannführer Werner von Tresmarck and his wife.
The von Tresmarcks met the Fieseler Storch in which Major Hans-Peter von Wachtstein had flown von Deitzberg across the River Plate. Frau von Tresmarck was at the wheel of a convertible automobile, an American Chevrolet. She was just as interesting as he remembered. He realized immediately that he wanted to get her alone, which would not be difficult as he had planned to interview them separately.
He then sent von Wachtstein back to Argentina, von Tresmarck to his home to prepare a report of what he was doing, and he took Inge von Tresmarck to the Hotel Casino de Carrasco. They went first to the bar and then to his room.
When von Deitzberg made his first advance to her, she laughed at him. Enraged, he slapped her face. He had never before in his life struck a woman. Yet he suddenly realized that he had never before in his life been so excited as he was now, looking down at her where she had fallen, and her looking at him with terror in her eyes.
The Honor of Spies Page 36
