THE LAST WEISS

by Rolf Richardson

  Those ghosts from the past, Irma, Hilde and Fräulein Schwarz had been easily resurrected. Others were more difficult to find. Group Leader Gustav Wallisch had simply vanished. Irma told me that he and his lady wife had been in residence until almost the end. Then, suddenly, they were gone. No warning. No explanation. Except an envelope containing one month’s payment in advance for their room. Typical Wallisch. The perfect guest until the end. If it was the end...

  As for ex-Gauleiter Richard Frunze, everyone knew where he was. He was serving time. But not for much longer, they said. He was too valuable a commodity to leave rotting in jail.

  The allies had started their scramble for German brains even before the guns fell silent. Although the Russians probably won on sheer numbers, the USA had landed the prize scalps of Von Braun and his Peenemünde colleagues. The space race had actually started on the Baltic. American rocket science was largely German. The fact that these scientists had colluded in the use of slave labour was brushed aside. Military and commercial advantage had trumped morals.

  Defeated politicians had no such advantages. Indeed, no value at all, except as examples to future generations. So the full panoply of Nazi evil was paraded at Nuremberg and the worst offenders hanged. Most of the rest received lengthy jail sentences.

  The gauleiters were the second tier of the elite, ranked only a little below the very worst Nazis. All were personally selected by Hitler and answerable only to him. They included Goebbels and Terboven.

  To get a feel for the sort of men chosen to be the Führer’s top administrators, let’s look at their various fates. Of the forty-three who were gauleiters at the end of the war, eleven committed suicide, three fell in the end battles, and twenty-seven were arrested by the allies; leaving only two unaccounted for, possibly stowing away on a slow boat to Rio.

  The twenty-seven who had been caught were subjected to the full force of the law, which executed a further seven. Of the rest, eleven died in custody, an astonishingly high number. The records are sparse on how or why these deaths occurred – settling of old scores perhaps – but they leave us with this statistic: of the forty-three gauleiters alive near the end of the war, thirty-two were soon dead. It would seem that gauleiters were an unpleasant breed, who got what they deserved.

  However, there are exceptions to every rule and Richard Frunze was an exceptional gauleiter. He must have started off, like the others, determined to force through the Nazi dream, come what may.

  But ‘come what may’ could cover a multitude of sins. Unlike ‘einsatzgruppen’, the task forces specifically formed to kill the reich’s enemies, murder was not on a gauleiter’s job description. He could indulge in a little killing if he wanted to. Nothing to stop him. The Führer allowed people a lot of leeway once he’d appointed them. So how a gauleiter ran his ‘gau’ depended on personal style.

  Richard Frunze must have got the results he wanted without resorting to extreme measures, because his de-Nazification court could find nothing to justify a lengthy punishment. However, no gauleiter could emerge from the reich’s wreckage entirely blameless, so he was handed a short prison sentence.

  Which was reduced even further when a new factor came into play.

  The western allies were determined not to repeat the errors of 1919, when their draconian treatment of defeated Germany had led, within twenty years, to another war. This time there was to be no impossible-to-repay reparations bill. No retribution. In 1945 the focus was on rebuilding. Marshal aid poured billions into a shattered Europe. Which was then told to get on with it. The allies would help, of course, but this was essentially a D.I.Y. job. Germany rebuilt by Germans.

  Fine in theory, but there was one practical problem. The cream of German management was dead: killed during the war. Or, in the case of top scientists, seduced by dollars to work in California, or frogmarched by the Soviets to somewhere east of the Urals to build Sputniks.

  The Germans had a much more relaxed attitude to wartime misdemeanours than their victim countries or the allies, so it wasn’t long before they were scouring the prisons to see whom they could get back to work. Amongst them was Richard Frunze.

  As the only gauleiter to have emerged alive and without excessive blemish from the preceding shambles, Frunze was a pearl without price. He was now in his late forties, the prime of business life, with at least another two decades of productivity ahead of him. Vastly experienced, he knew everyone that mattered. Frunze was set free in early 1948. Next day he joined the board of Volkswagen.

  If it’s true that you make your own luck, then Richard Frunze was the best manufacturer of luck I ever met. Not only did he emerge from the Nazi cesspit almost smelling of roses, he now chose the key moment to throw in his lot with Volkswagen.

  It was a brave decision, because the history of the ‘people’s car’ was not encouraging. Before the war Hitler had dreamt up a delightful scam, whereby his subjects were encouraged to pay five marks a week on the never-never for a car in some distant future. The only vehicle ever delivered went – you’ve guessed it – to a certain ‘A. Hitler’. Then came the war and people had other things to think about.

  At the end of the war the VW factory was a wreck, taken over by a Major Hirst, of the British occupation forces, who thought something might be made of it. Within a year, he had worked a minor miracle, producing 1,000 cars a week from his still ruined factory. A proper investment was needed, but no one was interested.

  Motor mogul Sir William Rootes came over from Britain and pronounced the enterprise ‘completely uneconomic’. So Hirst offered the plant to Ford – for nothing. Completely free! Edsel, son of founder Henry Ford, came over from the USA, took one look, and said the place ‘wasn’t worth a damn’.

  So on 2nd January 1948, by default, an unknown German was made managing director of Volkswagen. It was clearly a hopeless case, so he was just asked to get on with it and do his best.

  The man’s name was Heinz Nordhoff. He wasn’t convinced this apology for a factory was a hopeless case. And he wasn’t unknown to Richard Frunze. Because Nordhoff had spent the war managing Opel’s Brandenburg truck division.

  Frunze’s antennae must have twitched; here was an Opel man, a motor man, with a good record for getting things done. The kübelwagen, military version of the VW, had been a reliable little vehicle, so the civil model should surely be worth a punt. The rest, as they say, is history. Frunze had backed the right horse almost before it was born.

  All this passed us by. The event must have been recorded in some inside pages of a newspaper, but we were too busy with our own back yard to notice. Until, some six months later, a fine summer’s day in 1948, a beetle drew to a halt in front of the Gasthof zum Löwen. Blue, split rear window, it was not the sort of VW I’d seen before.

  More interested in the car than its occupant, I didn’t at first notice him. Not until a voice said in my ear, “A long time since I first met you as a champagne salesman...”

  “Good heavens! Gau...”

  His raised hand stopped me. “Please. No ‘G’-word. Not appreciated in the Fourth Reich.”

  “B-b-b… but... what are you doing here?”

  “On a visit. For old times’ sake. Or perhaps I’m not welcome?”

  “Of course you are... er... Richard. Bit of a surprise, that’s all. See if I can rustle up the old gang. Siggy of course. And Irma... well, perhaps not Irma.” Gunter might not be amused to meet his wife’s old flame from the war.

  “Don’t worry, Per, I’ve done my research. Know all about Mr. Irma. I’m the soul of discretion. As Irma will be, I’m sure.”

  “Will you be staying the night?

  “If I may.”

  “As long as you no longer want the honeymoon suite,” I said. Couldn’t resist having a little dig at him.

  “Would I? Honeymoon suites are for one purpose only, and that’s no longer my intention in your lovely gasthof.”

  We had a couple of rooms spare, so I grabbed his overnight bag and showed him into a
room at the back. Far from palatial, but OK.

  “Make yourself at home,” I said. “See if you can find Siggy. If not, help yourself to a beer. Or wine. She made you an honorary barman, remember? Use the ‘stammtisch’, the family table. We’ll meet up again at dinner.”

  “Very kind of you.” Frunze hesitated, unlike him. “See if you really can make it the old gang. Just us and the two girls. With outsiders, like Gunter... well, it wouldn’t be the same.”

  CHAPTER 75

  I don’t know how they fixed it, but it was just the old gang at dinner that night. Irma, Siggy, Richard and me. We’d dragged in a couple of our part-timers to cover for us and managed to have a rare evening off work.

  Four years had not really changed Richard Frunze. No uniform now, of course; a hint of white hairs at the temples, and his face seemed a little less well-fed – probably the result of prison diet. Other than that, the same old Richard Frunze. Who seemed strangely reticent, almost dismissive, about his final few months as gauleiter.

  “Not much to tell,” he said. “Continued to do my job, while everything fell apart. Until one day a chap in a different coloured uniform appeared. We exchanged pleasantries. I gave him the keys to my office. That was that. End of Third Reich.”

  I’ve never discovered whether ‘that really was that’. I suspect it was. Because Richard had an extraordinary ability to focus on the future. Alone amongst the gauleiters, as far as I could tell, he had ditched the past and everything in it as soon as he realised the game was up. Sending Siggy and me to Norway had been part of his new strategy.

  And it was why, as we met again, Richard only came alive when talking about the coming years. Especially his new love-toy, the Volkswagen. Facts and figures came cascading out, most of them incomprehensible. But we couldn’t help smiling. His enthusiasm was infectious.

  When he ran out of steam, it was our turn. Irma told him she had a small boy, with another on the way. Siggy and I already had number two, also a boy to add to little Inger.

  “Let me guess,” said Richard. “You’ve called him Werner. After Siggy’s first husband.”

  Siggy shook her head. “That was Per’s suggestion. But I already have Benni to remind me of Werner. So we called him Gregor. In memory of Granda. Who died in the fight against the Führer.”

  There was an uncomfortable pause, because sitting in front of us was the personal representative of that führer. Richard Frunze. He just nodded and said, “Perfect choice. Gregor was a good man. Another war victim. One I deeply regretted.”

  I believed him. It came back to me vividly: that awful night when, as Gauleiter Frunze, he’d taken the trouble to personally break the news. And toast Gregor’s life in Asbach Uralt. Even then he was a gauleiter on the turn.

  “So we managed to save the last Weiss,” he said.

  “Yes,” Siggy smiled. “You passed him just now on the stairs.”

  “Surely not...!”

  “Children do grow, you know. Benni’s now ten. Going to a proper school. One where they don’t fill their heads with poison.”

  “Yes, Block Leader Weiss, dear Willi, was rather... over-zealous.” He gave us all a long hard, look. No reaction. Siggy and Irma because they didn’t know. I was long practised in denying any Willi knowledge.

  “Don’t suppose we’ll ever solve the Willi mystery,” said Richard. “Not now Gustav Wallisch is gone. It bugged him, I’m sure; one of the few cases he never cracked. Talking of which...”

  He rummaged in a pocket, passed over a card. A postcard. Typical tourist stuff, showing a perfect conical mountain, topped with snow; all reflected in a lake. At the bottom, in small print: ‘Frutillar. Volcan Osorno.’

  “Look at the back,” said Frunze.

  Nice stamp; at the top it said ‘Correos de Chile’; underneath, a twin-engined aircraft – Dakota by the look of it – flying rather too close to some telegraph wires. My old airman instincts bridled. “Low flying. Dangerous.” I said.

  “Never mind the stamp, dammit!” snapped Richard. “Read what it says.”

  I did.

  At the top, in print: ‘Frutillar. Hotel Frieda zur See.’

  Below, in small wriggly handwriting: ‘If you’re ever down this way, do drop in. From an old colleague.’

  “Wallisch?” asked Siggy.

  Frunze shrugged. “Could be. Must be, surely.”

  “But none of it fits,” I objected. “Chilean stamp. German sounding hotel. Picture could be anywhere.”

  “No it couldn’t.” Richard again. “No volcanos in the Alps. I’ve done some research and Frutillar is in the Andes. Big German community. Like the other across the border in Bariloche, Argentina. Very popular now. For obvious reasons.”

  “Hotel Frieda zur See,” said Irma, almost to herself. “I think Wallisch’s wife was called Frieda.”

  “We never discovered her name,” I said. “Never even knew whether they had any children.”

  “No,” replied Irma. “We never knew anything for sure about the Wallisches. But at the back of my mind... ‘Hotel Frieda by the sea’. I think it does fit.”

  “Well, it’s all academic,” said Richard, briskly. “Chile is the other end of the world. Doubt whether we’ll ever get there. Just thought you’d be interested. More to the point, on the way here I called in on an old friend of yours: August Zoller.”

  “August!” Siggy seemed surprised. “You didn’t even know him.”

  “No. But I’m taking a few days off. First proper holiday in years. Thought it’d be fun to see old friends. And friends of friends. I live in Wolfsburg, near VW headquarters, and Zoller’s place fitted in well with a trip to see you.”

  “August... How was he?” Siggy always had a soft spot for the sturmbannführer. Fortunately, I’m not the jealous type. Zoller had been crucial in our plans to neutralise Terboven, so I had encouraged their flirtations.

  “As well as can be expected,” replied Frunze. “Physically fine. Family... everyone OK. But they have a business problem. Sankt Andreasberg is hard up against the Russian zone. Only about three kilometres away. They were very lucky to end up under the British. Although the western powers are working well together, the Russians are a pain. As was to be expected. The border between the Soviet and British zones goes straight through the Harz, so August is cut off from half his natural market. At the moment, he does quite well with British military – they’ve got an absolutely gorgeous place up there – but that can’t last forever. If relations with the Soviets don’t improve, well...”

  “Did he say anything about Norway?” asked Siggy.

  “Indeed he did. In fact, that was the main reason for my visit. Get the lowdown on Terboven’s last days.”

  “I never thought Zoller would do it,” I said. “Defy the reichskommissar.”

  “I don’t think he did either. Sounded pretty mixed up. The Third Reich was built round obeying orders, so Zoller was searching frantically for orders to obey. His boss was not Terboven but Himmler, who by that time was trying to negotiate a separate peace. Like Zoller, he wanted out. Unfortunately, Himmler was flitting all over the place and couldn’t be found. So the sturmbannführer had a simple but brilliant idea. He’d follow an order he was sure Himmler would have given had he known the situation. He told me he’d never have done it had you two not planted the seed first. Especially you, Siggy.”

  “Was this your plan?” I asked. “That I was just the stooge, who happened to be around for getting Siggy into place?”

  He shook his head. “You can’t call what I did a ‘plan’. More like groping in the dark. Your town had made me so welcome, I’d grown rather fond of it. An oasis in a madhouse. So when Block Leader Willi Weiss disappeared, I became mildly concerned. More so when this was followed by the execution of his brother Gregor. I realised that Siggy and little Benni might be vulnerable. At the same time I was becoming infuriated by the antics of what I called the ‘suiciders’, those people set on dragging the whole country down to destruction. They say i
t’s the subconscious that solves such problems. However it happened I don’t know, but suddenly I espied a ploy. Like a gambit on a chessboard. Removing you three to safety might also checkmate Terboven. A ghastly little man. Never liked him.”

  “His secretary, Gerda Hettich, thought the world of him,” said Siggy.

  “Well, there you go. No accounting for taste. As for my ‘plan’, as you called it, you were no stooge, Per. You were a vital part in a... well, little more than a vague idea; an idea which might amount to nothing.”

  “I still wonder what would have happened had we not been there,” I said. “Pressing sturmbannführer Zoller to make Terboven see sense. Would the reichskommissar have chickened out anyway?”

  “We’ll never know,” said Richard. “Anyway, it’s now playtime. How about a spin down the valley in my little beetle!”

  It stood there in the sunlight. Blue, gleaming. The new offering from Volkswagen. The People’s Car. Richard got in the driving seat and fired her up – the soon-to-be-familiar clunkety-clunk from its air-cooled engine. We did a U-turn outside the Gasthof zum Löwen, turned left through the old arch with the twirly spires, down the cobbled hill to the valley floor. Then former gauleiter Frunze accelerated. To show me Germany’s future.

  CHAPTER 76

  GERMANY. MILLENNIUM YEAR, 2000

  There’s been rather a lot of rain the past few days, but now it’s fine. And warm. Summer at the Gasthof zum Löwen. I’m sitting outside, in the town square, enjoying a stein of our best beer.

  We’ve become quite a tourist mecca. Some reviews rate us above Rothenburg and Dinkelsbühl. So plenty of visitors. Almost too many. Mainly, it seems, Japanese, who have a habit of shoving Nikons in my face. I must feature in half the living rooms of Tokyo.

  I’ve just finished writing this account of my early life. I doubt whether the youngsters – by which I mean anyone under sixty – will find time to read it: too busy leading their own lives. But one day they might find it interesting. And Siggy certainly should. It’s really for her. After... what is it... fifty-six years, she might be able to take the truth about Willi. Willi Weiss.