A Right to Plunder

by Brendan O'Neill

  Emil’s love of the violin and the lessons he took with the neighbourhood teacher who he addressed only as ‘Robert’, ensured his sanity throughout the years of turmoil and deprivation. Robert had brought his playing to a new level and Emil was now an accomplished talent. Through Robert’s connections at the Music Academy, Emil had been invited to perform for the entrance committee. He was expected to play a piece from an opera of their choice. He had no idea what they would choose but as he was permitted to play with his own violin, he was confident that he would impress them even though their standards were very high. The three-member interview board made up of one woman and two men were well acquainted with musical talent. When Emil eventually stood in front of the panel of assessors, he was initially overwhelmed by the size of the concert hall he was standing in. It was cavernous in its size and being empty, the acoustics were accentuated. Emil had never played in public prior to this day but his belief in himself and the encouragement of his tutor banished all of his nervous disposition and trepidation.

  Standing on a fixed dais in front of the panel, Emil was handed a score from La Traviata. The anticipation was palpable and concerned silence seemed to permeate the auditorium. As he began to play, the committee visibly relaxed as they heard his delicate playing and sensitive interpretation of this difficult piece. They looked at each other and smiled.

  Emil played for a further hour at the request of the panel, but their assessment had ended after the first minute. The remainder of the session was purely for their indulgence and enjoyment. They loudly applauded. He had won their hearts and a coveted place in the Academy.

  TWENTY SEVEN

  PRAGUE: 1945

  “I am a princess and I live in a fairy-tale land”, had been the enthusiastic statement of Lina Heydrich in late 1941. It was now April 1945 and her ‘fairy-tale' existence was drawing to an end. The long line of buildings that Maria had glimpsed, hidden behind a copse of trees, housed around one hundred and twenty inmates from the concentration camp at Theresienstadt. These prisoners were kept in inhuman conditions in stables only fit for animals. They were made to work fourteen-hour days with minimum food rations and guarded at all times by SS men. On his deathbed, Reinhardt Heydrich had advised his wife to go back to Fehmarn, the island in the Baltic where she had been born and where her parents still lived. Three years on, her options were becoming limited. In February 1945, she had written to her parents:

  “At the moment I wouldn’t know where we would be safer than right here. To fall as other women do is out of the question for me. By my decision to remain here after Reinhardt died, I made a political commitment. I am what I always was, perhaps the only woman in political life who has not disappeared into anonymity through the death of her husband. It is therefore pointless to do what others do. If we lose the war, the Russians will know where to find us and liquidate us. There will be no pardon for anybody who was active nationally or bandied himself about. Either that or the British and Americans will come and with them, the Jews. With our Jewish laws, we burned our bridges. The Jews will also be able to get us all. We all know this”. She went on to write, “I have things to take care of, and my work, and that is the important thing. Above all, I have a clear conscience. My people depend on me even today they work reliably and willingly. I have made a success of the concern. Work was all my life, together with a great belief in our quality, our purity. If fate does not recognise the German people then there is no justice, and life on this earth has no pleasure”. [1]

  Two months after writing this letter, Lina decided that it was time to flee the estate. Informed military sources advised her that the Russians were making rapid gains in the east. Soviet forces had captured Vienna on the 13th of April and a major assault was being launched on the city of Berlin. It would only be a matter of days before the estate was overrun. Maria and Anna had been happy and secure living in this parkland setting. Each morning they had gone out horse-riding and when pheasant shoots were organised on the estate, they were invited to take part. It was an idyllic existence, far removed from the memories of war-torn Berlin and the sacrifices of the population.

  However, by early April, it was obvious to even the most committed National Socialist, that the war was lost. Each evening, the family, consisting of Lina, her remaining three children, Maria and Anna, along with some of her loyal servants, gathered around the wireless crystal set and heard the rantings of Goebbels from war-torn Berlin. Ever the propagandist, he was still exhorting the remaining old men and young boys to resist “the Mongolian hordes” and referring to the city of Berlin as the new front line.

  This one evening, Lina spoke frankly and honestly, ‘’Recently, I had a private visit from the Reichfuhrer Himmler himself. He came here to talk truthfully and frankly with me. He was despondent and said the military reverses we were experiencing could not be overcome. The Fuhrer, he said no longer had a grip on the real world, but had descended into fantasy. The war is lost, my children and friends. Tomorrow we must leave here with all haste and make for Bavaria. Our SS guard will escort us for most of the way until it is no longer safe for them”.

  From the time they came to this idyllic oasis in war-torn Europe, Maria and Anna had asked very few questions. Maria was certain that the threat to her life which she was told about in Berlin from an SS source had been real, and even though Lina had made exhaustive enquiries as to its source, the information had dried up and the trail was a dead end. She had assured Maria that it was most likely someone with a grudge against her brother was seeking to get even for whatever reason because his policies had created many enemies in all parts of Europe.

  Anna was now thirteen years of age and had developed into a precocious teenager. She was tall for her age, her angular features had a unique attraction and her blue eyes reflected an awareness and intelligence beyond her years. She felt that she had lived a number of adventures in her short life. “After Bavaria, where do we go?” She enquired of nobody in particular. “Our ultimate destination is the island of Fehmarn on the Baltic, we will be safe there”. Lina answered. “Once we get to Bavaria, I and my children will be travelling on forged identity papers. If we should be arrested and fall into Allied hands or Russian forces, the name Heydrich must never appear.”

  Anna enquired, “How will we travel?” A tired Lina said, “We have staff cars requisitioned from the SS with sufficient gasoline to get us to Bavaria, in addition, I have slaughtered some sheep and preserved the meat. We will be well prepared for this, our final journey, but we have to be very careful when we meet any road blocks, we will be just distressed women and children. Looking strained and anxious, she went on to say, "The Russian Barbarian hordes are fast advancing. Vienna has fallen to them; soon their tanks will reach Prague. Our beloved Führer is besieged in Berlin by the Jewish-Bolshevik enemy. ‘Unsere mauern urchin, unsere herzen nicht’. ‘Our walls are broken, our hearts no’.

  As they went upstairs for their final comfortable night, nobody noticed the large SS man in the courtyard sending an encrypted message to a suburb of Hamburg, where it was received by a superior ranking officer. It read: ‘Your targets are due to leave the area of Paneske-Brezany in the morning, heading for Bavaria’. There was no reply expected but on the receiving end, in a small upstairs room on the second floor of a pension, in a still intact inner courtyard, the message was avidly read by Alois Brunner who smiled and thought to himself, “The quarry flees towards me now”.

  TWENTY EIGHT

  THE VATICAN: 1945

  Alois Hudal lived in The Vatican. He was appointed Bishop in 1933 and was head of the German church in Rome. The Santa Maria dell’Anima was the main training centre for German students to the priesthood. An ardent supporter of the views expressed at the time which church ideology held, that ‘any contact with Jews was polluting to the larger society, that Jews were perpetual foreigners, a perennial threat to Christians’. He had declared that ‘The Church has always regarded living side by side with Jews, as long as they rema
in Jews, as dangerous to the faith and tranquillity of Christian people'. At the time of signing the Concordat with The Vatican, Hitler had made his position perfectly clear when he said, "The Catholic Church considered the Jews pestilence for fifteen hundred years, put them into ghettos etc. because it recognised the Jews for what they were. In the epoch of liberalism, the danger was no longer recognised. I am moving back toward the time in which a fifteen-hundred-year-long tradition was implanted”.

  Bishop Alois Hudal applauded these sentiments. He had proclaimed in July 1933 that he wished to be a ‘servant and herald of the total German cause’. The Addendum that he had managed to influence when the Concordat was being drafted in 1933 was in his mind fostering the anti-Jewish, anti-Communist stance taken by the Church and the Third Reich at that time. He had subsequently received the golden Nazi party badge for his services to the Third Reich. He published a book in 1937, The Foundations of National Socialism, in which he unequivocally praised Hitler. He had sent a telegram to Hitler congratulating and applauding him on his annexation of Austria to the German Reich in 1938. A close friend of Eugenio Pacelli, later Pope Pius the X11, who had appointed him bishop in 1933, he showed him a virulent hatred of communism and supported a clerical fascism-type doctrine which was also anti-liberalism. He advocated a ‘common ground’ approach between Christianity and Nazism to form a bulwark against Communism and the dangers emanating from the east.

  Adolf Hitler’s book, Mein Kampf, (My Struggle) outlining his political ideology, was never banned by the Vatican despite its stating that the elimination of the Jews must necessarily be a bloody process. Blatant racism was avowed and in a speech to the Reichtag on 3rd January 1939, Hitler stated that a world war would not result in ‘a victory of Judaism, but the extermination of the Jewish race’.

  Hudal was now devoting his time to assisting those Nazis who sought refuge from the Allied authorities by fleeing justice and seeking safe haven in overseas countries. He had always been a close confidant of the German intelligence agencies, the Abwehr, under Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, and the Reich Main Security Office, RSHA (Reichssicherheitshauptamt). He had been recruited as an informer for this German intelligence organisation and reported regularly to his ‘controller’. He was central to a rabidly anti-semitic group within the Vatican who provided crucial policy knowledge to his handlers in Berlin. He formed a ‘ratline’ escape route using convents and other religious contacts like the Franciscan and Benedictine orders who extended succour to fleeing Nazi’s. The assistance of the Red Cross organisation was crucial in providing the required exit documentation. They had authority to issue passports until 1951.

  With the war all but lost and the Allies sweeping into Germany to meet the Russians in a pincer-like movement, Hudal frequently thought of the Concordat document and its concurrence by the Catholic Church where the aim of the Third Reich was to eradicate Jews from society. The alliance had the common goal to overcome Bolshevism seen as the greater threat to both states. With the death of Heydrich in 1942, he had made enquiries with his SS contacts and found out that all the main Heydrich files were in the Gestapo building at Prinz-Albrecht Strasse, 8 Berlin. When newsreels began to show the liberation of camps in the east, laying bare the rotten core policy of National Socialism, he was confident that the files would probably never surface from the devastation and rubble.

  It was twelve years since the Concordat between the Third Reich and the Vatican was signed. The Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli, the main negotiator and signatory was now Pope Pius X11. In agreeing to the terms between the two states, the Vatican achieved the right to impose new laws on their clergy and gained privileged advantages for schools and institutions for furthering Catholic education. The quid pro quo for these concessions was that the Nazi party would have no opposition from the Catholic Church in pursuit of its political aims. Hitler had never been ambiguous in his plans for European Jewry, their ultimate destruction and annihilation was promoted in all of his major declarations and subsequent laws enacted. The Concordat committed the Vatican to these odious ideals by accepting without equivocation the common goal of both states to oppose Bolshevism and not interfere with these pernicious political policies..

  As Hudal looked out from the third-floor window towards the cobbled courtyards of the Vatican below, he adjusted his heavy-rimmed spectacles. A man now in his late forties with a tendency towards corpulence, he had been effectively ‘sidelined’ by the Vatican hierarchy when it was becoming obvious that Germany was losing the war and his Nazi-supporting views were becoming an embarrassment. There was a scattering of German military personnel from all over Europe and the SS was now identified as a criminal organisation. Hudal had already received a number of clandestine approaches to help secure false identity papers for German officers fleeing Europe to destinations in the Middle East and South America. He could count upon his friends in religion who were willing to assist in emigration to countries who would accept the requisite Red Cross passports. It was particularly galling for him to see and accept that the Communists were already in control of Prague, Warsaw and soon Berlin. He would do everything in his power to assist those men being ostracised and persecuted by the allies who were now conceding territories to the hated communists.

  As he absently pondered a new Russian-dominated Eastern Europe, the phone rang on his leather polished desk. It had been a very busy morning and it was evident that he was the one to give assistance for forged documentation. Wearily, he put the receiver to his ear and in Italian said, “Pronto, Hudal…." The voice at the other end jarred him into sitting upright. It was a heavy husky voice in German with a distinct Austrian accent, which he recognised instantly as being from his own homeland area. “Guten morgen Bishop Alois Hudal, my name is also Alois – Alois Brunner, Hauptsturmfuhrer SS, I am contacting you from Hamburg and I will shortly be travelling to Switzerland and on to Italy where I will be in need of your services and influence in the Red Cross documentation centre”. There was a pause then Brunner continued, “As a fellow Austrian, we have much in common and to demonstrate my good faith, I have in my possession a document from the Concordat of 1933 which I am sure will be of interest to you.”

  He had taken advantage of the time spent in Gestapo Headquarters, Berlin, to look at the extensive card index file system that Heydrich had created. He thought the Concordat document which he’d come across would be a useful ‘bargaining’ advantage if he had to persuade this Bishop Hudal to assist in the exit papers. The document confirmed the Vatican’s acquiescence to the evil ideals of Hitler’s Reich and accounted for the ‘silence’ of Pius X11 throughout the conflict. Brunner thought to himself that Hitler was a master diplomatic negotiator. The Concordat document recorded the fact that 23 million German Catholics were now to be subservient to the National Socialists in their political allegiance and Hitler gave very little in return. This situation had come about by the Catholic (centre) Party voting for the Enabling act, which gave dictatorial power to Hitler as Chancellor. Brunner speculated that once the Jews had been worked to death or liquidated, it would then be the turn of the ‘Slavs’. The continued silence of Pius XII would be guaranteed as the doctrine of atheistic communism was to be opposed as an evil ideology at all costs. It was obvious to the Nazi’s and Catholic Church that the ultimate aim of Bolshevism was world domination. “In exchange,” Brunner continued, “I require first call identity papers to enable me to travel to Syria together with safe passage. The port of Genoa is my preferred choice of exit. I will present myself at your residence in a short time. I do not have to impress upon you the perilous situation which I find myself in, as a result of having served my Fuhrer and Fatherland dutifully for many years under sometimes unbearable pressure to fulfil targets’’. Hudal responded ‘’You will receive sanctuary here and I have many contacts for your required documentation.’’ The conversation ended with Brunner exclaiming ‘’Heil Hitler’’. The phone then went dead. Hudal replaced the receiver and wondered who Aloi
s Brunner was and how he was in possession of the Concordat document. He mopped his brow of a light film of perspiration and knew that he would think of nothing for the next while until he met this unusual man.

  TWENTY NINE

  PARIS: 1945

  Madelaine had followed the progress of Lina Heydrich and her entourage to the outskirts of Prague. Her contact in the SS was convinced that her motive for showing concern for their whereabouts was driven by security for safety as they were close relations of their murdered chief, Heydrich. She had affectionate memories of teenager Anna and her mother Maria and knew that they were in mortal danger when travelling in war-torn Germany. But she really wanted Brunner, and to her consternation, he had gone to ground in the maelstrom of humanity that was now shifting endlessly throughout Europe. She knew that he would be on their trail, but she could not alert her contacts in the SS that she was also looking for him. She was also aware, that even now in the death throes of Nazi Germany, the SS was a paranoid organisation and a wrong hint or misplaced innuendo could lead to a complete shutdown of her existing tenuous link to elicit information. The German soldier, particularly the SS, were indoctrinated to be the ‘carrier of a merciless racial concept'. They were to show no restraint in the quest for dominance.

  She was working ceaselessly in the building over three floors in Rue des Mathurins, sometimes well into the night. She was exhausted but exhilarated by the prospect of restoring normality to her beloved city of Paris. Her expertise was sought by a newly formed organisation called Crowcass, an acronym for Central Registry of War Criminals and Security Suspects, which was intended to identify dangerous Germans posing a threat to Allied peace plans. Their official duties embraced many functions and she co-operated with Crowcass by exchanging information and other agency measures. Ironically, the system used a Hollerith IBM card index machine to tabulate the information received from internment camps with photos and fingerprints; the same IBM system that had facilitated the Holocaust. She was in an ideal position to track Brunner’s movements if he were to surface on any of the detailed lists she received and scrutinised on a daily basis. But despite her intense search, there was never a trace of her quarry among the hundreds of thousands of names supplied.