Treasure of Saint-Lazare

by John Pearce

  A tall SS officer stood up from his only chair, folding a newspaper. He had stubbed out a Gauloise in the souvenir ashtray from Toulouse that had sat untouched on the table for six months.

  “May I see your ausweis, please?” The officer, a major from the insignia he wore, was not unfriendly. His French struggled under the dead weight of a heavy German accent.

  “Not a bad fake, but a fake nonetheless,” he said, shifting to German and returning the papers. “You were hard to find. It was only when I went to see your mother that I learned the name you are using now. How did you become Eric Kraft?”

  “Long story, but there are people in the South — on both sides — who would like to do me harm. Eric Kraft was the name of a cousin on my mother’s side. He was killed in 1940 but his body was never recovered and officially he is still alive, as you can see.”

  “Creative. You are going to need all that creativity and more.

  “I am Major Steinhauer and I serve in your uncle’s headquarters in Cracow. You are to return there with me. He needs you for a special mission and I don’t believe he trusts anyone outside his family.” A thin smile.

  “I took the liberty of packing everything I found. It fit easily into your small suitcase.”

  “I don’t have much. No one does,” Eric responded.

  “Then let’s go. My car is around the corner. We will go to the Hôtel Wilhelm, where you will receive new papers and a uniform. We will be together every minute until we reach Cracow.”

  “Do you mind telling me what is going on?”

  The major smiled a second time and said, “You’ll become Lieutenant Eric Kraft of the SS, on assignment. We will return together to Poland, and there your uncle will explain your duties further.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Either way you go into a German uniform, which you should have done the instant you left the Milice. If being a lieutenant isn’t your taste, you can be a private. You will still go to Poland, except that as a private you’ll go in a troop train and fight the Russians. It would not appeal to you. I know. I have been there.”

  “Do you have orders for me?”

  “I have better than just orders. Here is your authorization to travel anywhere you wish within the Reich and to call on all units of the German military for any help you need.” He held up a sheet of heavy paper covered in dense Fraktur script at the top, French at the bottom, and headed Laissez-passer. It was signed,

  Heil Hitler!

  Hans Frank

  Obergruppenführer SS

  Governor General of Poland

  The next day they sat sweltering in a Wehrmacht train rattling east toward Germany. The trip passed in a blur of wounded soldiers evacuating in panic ahead of the Allied invasion forces, plus a few officers and sergeants on administrative missions. They changed trains first in the heavily fortified border zone near Stuttgart, then again in Dresden, where they mounted an ancient six-car train pulled by a wheezing steam engine from the Great War.

  The first part of the trip was uneventful because all the cars bore large red crosses on their roofs, but the train from Stuttgart was unmarked. Within the last month, Major Steinhauer said, American and British Mustang fighters had begun strafing trains as they returned from bombing missions deep inside Germany.

  “But where is the Luftwaffe?” Eric asked.

  “It’s not very effective any more,” the major answered. In fact, the newly aggressive tactics of the fighters had nearly eliminated the Luftwaffe as an effective defense, with the exception of some of the new and very fast Messerschmidt jets, which had the speed to strike and run before the Mustangs could respond. Even so, some of them were shot down.

  Two hours out of Stuttgart the train came to a sudden stop in the middle of an open field and the engine whistle sounded an evacuation alarm. Eric and the major jumped hastily from the first car and ran for a ditch 100 yards away. From there, they saw two silver Mustangs with bright red tails blow up their engine with machine-gun fire, sending shrapnel flying far over their heads, then fly off toward their airbases in western France.

  “There is a rumor that all the Mustangs with red tails are flown by noirs,” the major said as they waited for a second attack. “That can’t be true. The Jew Roosevelt might want it, but the officers of the American Army would never allow it.”

  They waited twelve hours for a repair crane and replacement engine, then resumed their trip.

  Finally, after four days of interrupted sleep and meals of cold sausages, the old train came to a halt in Cracow’s main station, shabby after five years of war, with damaged engines and freight cars scattered about the yards like a child’s building blocks. But the tracks were clear.

  The town swarmed with replacement soldiers on their way to fight the Russian army, threatening from the east.

  “We’ll walk,” the major told Eric. Each picked up his single bag and they set out toward the looming brick hulk of Wawel Castle, a mile away toward the river.

  A guard saluted as they approached its imposing main door. Eric offered his laissez-passer, which the guard looked at carefully. The major said, “Please tell the Governor-General I have returned with his nephew, who awaits his instructions.”

  “Sir, I have orders to take you to him as soon as you arrive. Please follow me.” He turned and led them up the stairs. At the top Eric heard him tell another guard “… the Governor-General’s nephew…” and the door opened immediately.

  The second guard beckoned for them to follow and led up a broad staircase to a double door, where a lieutenant sat behind a table. Soldiers stood at attention on both sides of the door. The lieutenant took the laissez-passer, then picked up a red telephone, waited several seconds, and said, “Sir, your nephew has arrived.” He then stood up and signaled to one of the guards, who opened the door and with a nod indicated they should enter. Several men waiting on benches — Eric spotted at least one general — glowered as they went in.

  The major came to attention before the desk and saluted. “Herr Governor-General, I am pleased to have found your nephew.”

  “Thank you, major. Please wait outside.”

  Eric had not seen his uncle Hans since he was a schoolboy ten years before, and thought he looked worn. He had less hair, much less than Eric’s own father, who had a full head of lush brown hair at the same age. He could not easily identify the changes in his uncle, who still had the close-set eyes and pinched mouth of a small-town accountant but somehow looked meaner and at the same time soft and round-faced. He did not look like a man with life-or-death power over ten million people.

  “So,” he said. “You are Eric Kraft. Did you have a problem with the Frank name?”

  “Uncle, the Frank name would have got me killed. I was attacked by a colleague who wanted to excuse his old teacher from deportation and my leg still suffers from the stab wound he gave me. My mother sent me to a friend who created the new identity for me. Major Steinhauer says it’s a good fake. Of course I would prefer to use my mother’s name, and yours. I was pleased when she took it back after my father died.”

  Hans Frank signaled to Eric to sit down. “And the old Jew. Was he deported?”

  “I saw to that, Uncle.”

  “Good.”

  Frank had a reputation throughout the Reich for his zeal in purging Jews from the rump Poland that was now called the General Governate, the four districts that had not been absorbed directly into the Reich. Legend held that the governor of Czechoslovakia had once posted a sign announcing the execution of seven Jews, and Frank had responded with scorn that if he put up posters for every seven Jews he killed there would be no trees left in Poland.

  Hans Frank sat still behind his large oak desk. As he waited, Eric looked around the room, his eyes stopping first at a painting hanging on the wall behind his uncle.

  “Do you like that, Eric? I believe I shall call you Eric, so we can avoid confusion.”

  “It’s very pretty.”

  “It’s much mor
e than pretty. It is one of the great treasures of western civilization, and it was wasted on the Polish peasants. It is called ‘Lady with an Ermine’ and was painted almost 500 years ago by Leonado da Vinci. One day, after this war is won, it will hang in the Führer’s grand new museum in Linz, to honor his birthplace and one day his memory. In the meantime, he has entrusted it to me, along with several others like it.”

  Frank had swiveled around to look at the painting. He stretched his hand to his right as he turned back to face Eric. “The one over there is a Rembrandt.”

  He turned the other direction and pointed to a smaller painting. “Do you recognize that one?”

  Eric stared a minute at the exquisitely framed painting that hung to the right of the door. “It looks familiar.”

  “And so it should. It hung on the wall in that gallery where you worked for a month after you started.”

  Eric did not understand Frank’s fascination with the paintings. Within the family he had the reputation of a single-mindedly political Nazi, perhaps slightly more refined than the criminals and street brawlers who had filled the party’s ranks before 1933, but only because he was educated — a lawyer who had Hitler’s ear and, in fact, had been Hitler’s personal lawyer. Rumors said he fought bitterly with the other old lions of the party leadership, especially Göring, the obese Luftwaffe chief.

  “Nephew, I am telling you all this not because I want to educate you about art. It’s too late for that. It was too late long ago, since my poor sister failed to develop an appreciation for beautiful things. She even married a Frenchman, although on the one time I met him he did appear to be cultivated. I’m glad you have grown up in the warrior tradition of our German ancestors.

  “What I am about to tell you is top secret. More, it’s Führergeheim.”

  Eric nodded. He remembered that his mother thought her brother Hans was pompous and vain, and so far he’d seen nothing to convince him she was wrong. She said you could tell by his language — as he’d risen in the party and then the government it had become more and more bureaucratic. Eric understood now what she had meant.

  Frank continued, “I have been charged by the Führer with putting aside resources for the future in case they are needed. You must never repeat that, because you would be charged with defeatism and certainly shot if it got to the wrong ears, but our Führer recognizes that we must have a fallback plan and he has entrusted part of that to me. I assume he has also asked other senior commanders to do the same, maybe all of us. They will no doubt send assets different places, some of them inside Germany. But I consider that too risky.”

  Eric’s task, he said, would be to take a truck of art and gold back to Paris, where it would be hidden by a trusted collaborator until the end of the war. If Germany won in the end, the treasure would be there for the taking. If not, the Allies would quickly make friends with a new Germany and the treasure would still be there to finance the next incarnation of the Reich.

  “You might call it the Treasure of the Fourth Reich, but I wouldn’t say that outside this room.”

  As Frank droned on, a glimmer of understanding turned slowly into a frightening realization that this was not the rescue of the Reich but the rescue of Hans Frank, who after the war would have a fortune waiting for him in Paris. He nodded dumbly, struggling to keep his face blank as he began thinking of ways his uncle’s plan could benefit himself as well.

  Frank pressed a button on his desk and the lieutenant appeared at the door. “Sir?”

  “Please ask Major Steinhauer to come in.”

  Frank told Eric that Major Steinhauer was in charge of preparations for his journey and would see that he had new identity papers and uniforms. He should be prepared to leave in two days.

  Eric spent most of those days with a mousy captain whose name he never learned. The captain was, or had been until he lost his left arm in Africa, a navigator for a tank battalion, and he took very seriously his duty to find the safest and fastest route across Germany and France for Lieutenant Frank. He had been a mathematics teacher before he was drafted in 1941 and had the teacher’s interest in keeping records, which also made his Wehrmacht masters happy. He vacillated between licking Eric’s boots and pulling rank, but the knowledge that he was instructing Hans Frank’s nephew tipped the balance toward obsequiousness.

  “You’ll have to drive north, around Czechoslovakia,” the gray captain said. The Russians were already threatening and had told the Czech government that any lands they liberate would be turned over to the civilian government. “It’s too dangerous. If you were in a larger group it would be OK, but as a single truck you might be attacked by the partisans. Better to drive a little farther and risk the American airplanes. After a day or two, depending on how far you can go, you’ll have to drive at night and find shelter from the fighters during the day. I suggest the forests rather than army posts, which will be targets.”

  They marked out a route from Cracow northwest to Dresden, then southwest through Nuremberg, bypassing Munich, to Memmingen, the small city where Eric had grown up and where his mother still lived. The 400 miles from there to Paris would be the most dangerous part of the trip, and would have to be driven at night because the Allied air forces had almost unchallenged control of the air throughout France. By the time Eric arrived they might be almost at the gates of Paris.

  “What will I be driving?” Eric asked.

  “A small truck of some sort, probably a two- or three-ton, and probably made in France. A Citroën or Opel won’t attract attention on either side of the Rhine, since we took a lot of French civilian vehicles for our own military.”

  “You can see the results in Paris. The streets are empty,” Eric said.

  The captain leaned over the map table and rubbed his stump. “It still feels like I have my arm, and sometimes it hurts. The surgeons say that will go away eventually, but …” He grimaced in pain.

  “I suggest you avoid the cities and look for food and fuel in the smaller towns. Most of them will have a Wehrmacht post commanded by a lieutenant or sergeant, and your papers will get you anything you need. You’ll leave here with quite a good supply.”

  He paused and straightened up, then put his hand on Eric’s arm. “I know I don’t have to say this, and I hope you won’t take offense, but you haven’t been in Germany in a while. All of us in active service must remember times are very bad for our families. Your papers will see that you get everything you need, but remember never to take everything a farmer has. If we do that, his family doesn’t eat.”

  “I’ll remember,” Eric responded. “I’ve seen some pretty bad behavior in Paris and I don’t want our own people remembering me that way.”

  “Good. Now, if you go directly toward Dresden then pass it to the south you should be safe enough. There are several municipal forests along the back roads, although I don’t know how many of the trees have been cut for firewood.”

  They discussed the merits of trying the autobahns versus the country roads, with the captain advising against the autobahns, especially in the western part of the country.

  “The Allies are now bombing Berlin and the Ruhr from our old bases in France as well as from England, and they have a new long-range fighter escort called the P-51 Mustang. There is no way to defend yourself completely, but if you stay away from industrial areas and big cities you’ll have less chance of being hit.”

  “The P-51. Major Steinhauer and I had to wait 12 hours for a new engine after a pair of Mustangs shot up our train not far from Stuttgart. They are dangerous, although from a distance they look like fireflies,” Eric said. “Is it true that the Mustangs with red tails are flown by black pilots?”

  “It is true, and they are very skillful and dangerous pilots. I suggest you keep far away from them,” the captain said. He rolled the map carefully using his one hand and handed the roll to Eric. “Go with care, lieutenant. The Governor General himself came to give me my instructions, so I know your mission is important to him and to the Reic
h.”

  He looked at his watch. “You have just enough time for lunch, then you are to meet Major Steinhauer and go to the garage to make the acquaintance of your new truck. Heil Hitler!”

  Lunch was a meager affair of one sausage and a small pile of potato salad. The wurst tasted mostly of filler, and Eric avoided thinking about what kind of meat might be in it. He thought the filler might be oatmeal or bread, but more likely turnips. Before he left Vichy he’d heard of the red barrels of dried turnips marked “for prisoners only” that had gone on the deportation trains with the haggard crowds of deportees he and his milicien colleagues had rounded up. Earlier, the food had been better, because the thousands of young Frenchmen drafted for munitions work in Germany were in theory volunteers donating their labor for the good of the Reich and Marshal Pétain. They deserved better treatment, at least until they arrived in the Fatherland, from which many of them would never emerge.

  Thin as it was, lunch was a better meal than he was able to scavenge most nights in the bedraggled cafés around the Hôtel Saint-Pierre. He was grateful at least for that.

  The junior officers’ canteen occupied a high-ceilinged room in the southwest corner of the castle. He asked the old Pole who picked up his dishes how to find the garage, but got only a blank stare in return. He was tempted to lash out but decided it would be too much trouble, and there was a good chance the old man didn’t know in any case. The other lieutenant sharing his table hadn’t known.

  Oh, well, he thought. I’ll just start looking. Someone will know how to get there.

  But as he pushed his chair back, he heard his name.