The Wind Chill Factor

by Thomas Gifford

  Further discreet inquiries revealed that Kruger was in fact in constant contact with what were known, in certain circles, to be the headquarters of the international Nazi movement in Madrid. Steynes knew that Madrid was the European center of the reborn movement, that its vaults were crammed with money gotten out of Germany long before the war ended.

  From Madrid, the Nazis operated and funded special departments for Africa, Pan-Europa, and Latin America, as well as for a general unit called the International of Nationalists, a propaganda organization with arms in nearly every nation in the Western Hemisphere. By 1951 a secret UK report had indicated that the perimeters of the IN stretched from Malmo and Helsinki to Tangier and Cairo to Rome and Buenos Aires and Dallas. From Madrid came the funds which were carefully reinvested throughout the world—and Hans Kruger was a messenger, a courier, a functionary, moving about the globe from one museum or private collection to another, dealing in old masters and new Nazis.

  Oskar Eugen Lober/Kruger was only one of many. Most were in import-export businesses; many were employed by German automobile manufacturers who were quite naturally seeking new international markets. Behind the curtain of legitimate business organizations, the Nazis moved vast sums of money from area to area, feeding the new party, building it up wherever the climate was receptive.

  The dossiers piled up on Cat Island.

  Dr. Johann von Leers. Anti-Semite inciter to riot.

  SS Colonel Otto Skorzeny. Scarface Skorzeny, almost seven feet tall.

  Luftwaffe hero Hans Ulrich Rudel.

  SS Colonel Oskar Eugen Lober. Art lover.

  In January of 1953, Lober/Kruger was one of a delegation of ex-SS officers and principals of the Condor Legion who gathered in Cairo to meet with Haj Amin el Husseini, once the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem and longtime Hitler loyalist and personal friend.

  At the conclusion of the week-long conference, Lober/Kruger retired with three of his co-conspirators to a private home in an elegant Cairo suburb. The night before they were to return to Spain, they were visited by two quiet-seeming gentlemen who produced Bren guns and executed them without much deliberation. The house was then burned to the ground and the crime was never solved.

  Sir Ivor Steynes had brought his first subjects to the bar of his own rather primitive brand of justice.

  After his first long-distance success, Steynes began to step up the pace. With Dawson at his side he wheeled his way back to Germany to observe the Nazis who were beginning to make themselves heard, and rather loudly at that. The illegal NSDAP (National Socialist German Workers Party) was officially winked at, and as early as 1951 claimed more than a quarter of a million members. In Lower Saxony at the same time another neo-Nazi party, the Socialist Reichs Party, polled 367,000 votes—more than 10 percent of the total. And Steynes was there, Dawson behind, watching their rallies, hearing the speeches.

  It was familiar ground, the straight Nazi line and the people loved it. The war had been lost only because of treason. There had been no atrocities. The gas chambers at Dachau had been built and stocked with corpses of Allied victims after the war. Count Wolf von Westarp, former journalist and SS officer, flailed his one arm against the unjust peace. Major General Otto Ernst Remer screeched insults at the British and Americans; and one of the SRP leaders, a Dr. Franz Richter sitting in the Bundestag, turned out to be plain old Fritz Roessler, a Nazi official from the good old days.

  When the SRP was banned it merely gave the Nazis more grist: through the back door, they said, we will infiltrate all existing institutions. You will not know who we are but we will very soon control the economy, the government, the military. They called it “the cold revolution, a revolution carried out quietly from the top.” Ivor Steynes listened and the dossiers grew.

  The Adolf Hitler Action Group

  The Deutsche Reichs Party

  Wilhelm Meinberg

  Gustav Schroer

  Adolf von Thadden

  Herbert Freiberger

  The simple fact of the matter was that the SS had effectively returned to power in peacetime Germany. Whether you called them ODESSA or the Bormann Brotherhood, or Die Spinne, as Steynes called them, it was the remnants of the SS once again obeying a handful of masters.

  For years, unchallenged and undetected, Steynes had gone about his business: the execution of surviving Nazis. Killing people, he explained to us, was singularly simple business once you had the proper apparatus. The idea was to have either no discernible motive at all—or a motive so obvious and commonplace that you, the murderer, are indistinguishable from all the rest. Many people wanted Steynes’ victims dead. How many victims? Only a very small percentage of the Nazis available. Steynes modestly deprecated his efforts. Just a beginning, on the average ten a year, just over two hundred.

  Peterson was hypnotized by the story. The only sounds were the gulls, the wind, the breakers, the occasional patter of rain, the metallic voice of Colonel Steynes.

  Then, sent by Alistair Campbell, who had acted as an information gatherer for Steynes many times, came my brother Cyril. An outsider asking questions: not an appealing prospect for the Colonel. He wanted to know about Gunter Brendel and his wife. Why had Campbell disturbed Steynes? There was no answer: something he had sensed in Cyril’s urgency had triggered the forbidden impulse.

  And something unprecedented had driven Steynes to share Brendel’s dossier with Cyril. Perhaps it was Cyril’s claim that Brendel’s wife was his sister. And perhaps it was the character of Herr Brendel, whose dossier was thick, whose turn had almost come.

  Gunter Brendel’s history was archetypal, almost too perfect.

  Gunter Brendel’s history could not help reminding you of one of those exercises in which you peer through the wrong end of a telescope: there he was, tracking across the bloody wastes of history, a tiny figure, scurrying past the smoking heaps, the victims, averting his eyes, tweezing his nose closed, scuttling to the next green oasis, leaving it too smoking and in ruins. A microcosm of the rise of National Socialism, never quite dirtying his hands, but his boots caked with the muck.

  In 1938, at the age of seventeen, he reached real, recorded prominence in the Hitler Youth, and that was where Ivor Steynes’ dossier began. During the war he was shuttled from post to post, conducting himself meritoriously at each one. He was attached primarily to command posts, eventually finding himself going from Kesselring to Keitel to Goering at staff level, then to the Reichs Chancellery as liaison to the SS. There were photographs of him, slickly, smoothly handsome with Himmler and Goering and Skorzeny.

  There were letters from those who had known him, testifying to his homosexuality and how it had clearly been of use to him while moving up the military-political ladder. Because, clearly, he was one of those who bridged the gap between the Nazi hierarchy and the professional military caste. By inclination he was attracted to the one, but by birth a near-member of the other. Apparently he’d been accepted by both.

  Somehow, Steynes had come into possession of a series of letters from Martin Bormann to Brendel, friendly notes, surprisingly chummy for what the world knew of Bormann, and formal letters of commendation.

  As the Reich was methodically being blown to bits by the Russians in the last weeks of the war, Brendel was dispatched to the Bavarian mountains to help establish Festung Europe, the final redoubt where the ultimate stand would be made and from which the Werewolves would strike terror into the hearts of the occupying power.

  After one abortive Werewolf raid in which the mayor of a village was murdered and left dismembered on his doorstep as a warning to those who cooperated with the victors, Brendel faded from view and Steynes’ informants lost him. He reemerged in the late forties without a single blot on his official copybook and took his place in the family business. He had officially been recovering from “severe wounds suffered in the service of the Homeland” in a private hospital.

  In the intervening years, through the fifties, he remained a spotlessly respectable businessman, never d
abbling, however slightly, in politics. But Steynes had seen Herr Brendel in the provinces, quietly standing in the shade of village bandstands or lifting a stein in a quiet corner—while the Nazi rallies of the fifties gave proof of the rebirth of the old spirit.

  Grosstreffen. The weekend reunions were called Grosstreffen. Always in provincial towns, the old soldiers and their new admirers gathered together to sing the old songs and hear the old speeches. A Panzer division here, an SS formation there, the Afrika Korps somewhere else. Steynes saw and secretly photographed Brendel, in a heavy tweed suit, the bright Bavarian sun shining in his eyes, as he leaned against an old Mercedes at the Afrika Korps rally in Karlsruhe, September of 1958. He was thirty-seven. He was rich and fit and unaccompanied, apparently unnoticed.

  In Wiirzburg, at a paratrooper outing, Steynes had watched five thousand of the old “Green Devils” go quite mad at the appearance of Field Marshal Kesselring, carrying him about on their shoulders. And Dawson had surreptitiously snapped a photograph of Gunter Brendel slipping into the back seat of the Field Marshal’s limousine early Monday morning, in the rain when the rally was over.

  The record was copious. At reunions of the Gross Deutschland, the Viking, Das Reich, and the Death’s Head divisions Brendel was spotted. Not by reporters, not by the public, but by Dawson and Steynes. Another snapshot: Brendel in dark glasses, raincoat, umbrella above, turning away from the hidden camera, behind him a banner nailed to a building, the huge initials LAH—Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler.

  The guard regiment whose sworn duty was the protection of Adolf Hitler. The Treuegefolgschaft: the loyal followers. They met in Verdun to reminisce, to search for missing comrades, to acknowledge once again that “they were ready to do their duty for the Fatherland.”

  And Brendel was there in the rain, turning to the young woman at his side. Blond, eyes wideset and clear, an eager smile on her face as she looked up at her new husband. I searched the fresh young face for a clue. Surely, it was Lee. It had to be Lee. Men had died because it was Lee.

  But suddenly, listening to the rain drum on the windows of the lighthouse turret as it had beaten down on Gunter Brendel’s black umbrella, suddenly I could not feel so sure. It was a very pretty blond girl. But was it Lee?

  Dawson laced our coffee with brandy and Peterson coughed. No wisecracks: he had fallen under the otherworldly spell Steynes had been weaving. These were not the babblings of a nut case—these were documents, bits and pieces of Martin Bormann and Gunter Brendel and the Nazis past and present. And Steynes was not finished. His hand was white and cold. We all held our coffee against our palms to stop the chill. Steynes opened another thick folder, spread it across the plaid blanket on his knees.

  There were, he explained, several organizations devoted to smuggling the biggest Nazis out of Germany. ODESSA, the old SS group, had been one, and Die Spinne had been another. Die Spinne—the spider—had been immensely more effective, but it had worked in unison with ODESSA and HIAG, as well, another SS organization whose initials stood for the German “mutual assistance.”

  Two major escape routes had been open to the Nazis. One, through the Alpine Fortress, flew captured American planes out by way of Switzerland and Spain, then on to Africa and Egypt. The other was termed Project North and was operated by Die Spinne closest to Sweden. This was the U-boat route. It was saved for the most prominent transportees and it was the method by which Die Spinne got Martin Bormann to South America. Gunter Brendel had helped to coordinate Die Spinne’s activities inside Germany. It was Die Spinne, Project North, which got Eichmann to Argentina … got Alfried Kottmann to Argentina long before the war ended.

  I felt almost physically the tumblers clicking in my brain. The names, the men, the paths which had seemed connected only by my brother Cyril’s search and death were tightening like the drawstrings of a purse. But what was being choked off, locked inside?

  “Did Brendel run Die Spinne, then?” It was Peterson: he punctuated the question with a sneeze into a sodden handkerchief and actually apologized.

  “No, Brendel didn’t run it,” Steynes said. “He might be considered the vice-president in charge of traffic. He delivered the bodies to the transport branch and went back for more.

  “The man who had overall responsibility for Die Spinne wasn’t even a German. He was quite young then, a soldier of fortune, an adventurer, not even a Nazi. Utterly apolitical, I assume, his type always is. He was a technician, a skilled and clever fellow I’ve been told, though I never had the pleasure of meeting him. He was, of all things, an Englishman. But then we are supposed to be a calm race, good with details—”

  “His name?” I asked.

  “Martin St. John,” Peterson said.

  Steynes’ head swiveled sharply. “No grass growing under your feet, I daresay.” His eyes bored into Peterson: a dark smile stung the corners of his tight, ridged mouth.

  “St. John?” I said.

  “A guess,” Peterson said, reaching for his brandied coffee with one hand, feeling for his handkerchief with the other. “Who the hell else is left in this puzzle, anyway? Everybody keeps turning up again and again, if you’ve seen him once, you’re sure as hell going to see him again. Thus, St. John—the man who got Kottmann out before the roof gave in on all of them.”

  “Perspicacious, indeed,” Steynes said against a sudden howl of wind. Fog rolled around us. “Martin St. John was, indeed, Die Spinne. The Spider. And you,” he said, turning to me, “have had him buy you your lunch in Buenos Aires. Die Spinne. …” He mused into a fist for a moment, blowing into it. “The man who got Bormann out of Germany. …” He motioned to Dawson. It was time to leave the tower. Slowly, following Dawson and his burden down the twisting stairway, we slipped into the fog that clung to Cat Island.

  A fire blazed in the dining room when we assembled for dinner. Peterson’s voice had begun to go and his nose was stuffed. He kept pulling in on a Benzedrine inhaler. “Never travel without one,” he croaked. “No goddamn Kleenex, though.” But there was no more complaining about our host’s mental state.

  Dawson had roasted a joint of leathery mutton and we drank a robust claret, slashed our mouths on thick-crusted bread.

  Steynes explained how Die Spinne had moved the cargo across the Atlantic.

  “This is the tricky part,” he beamed, the pleasure of special discovery easing the harshness of his countenance. “Not at all widely known—oh, a bit of random theorizing here and there, but those who knew always make sure to pooh-pooh it. And once again I make no explanation of why I’m telling you all this—I don’t actually know.” He drained his claret, stared into the faint blotch of sediment. “But I slept on it all last night and here it is. …”

  Dawson refilled the glass, attended to ours.

  “Separating myth from reality about Die Spinne is no easy task. General Paul Hausser was the more or less ‘public’ head of Die Spinne, assisted by Hasso von Manteuffel. Few realized that young St. John was actually doing the work. The same kind of confusion surrounds the means by which Die Spinne worked its wonders. And how efficiently. There are those who insist that it existed mainly in theory. Others believe that the Swedish connection or conduit to the outside world was used with some degree of effectiveness. And still others insist that the main exit route was through Spain using captured American Flying Fortresses.

  “The truth includes aspects consistent with all these theories—but they are only minutiae. The real story is somewhat more difficult to fully take in.”

  He motioned to Dawson. “A sweet, Dawson? Do we have an afterdinner sweet? A tart? Would you gentlemen enjoy a tart?”

  “A plum tart with sweet cream,” Dawson suggested. Peterson rolled his eyes at me: his flu had blunted the edge of his impatience. I was immensely tired. My shoulders ached and the claret had precipitated a volleyball game behind my eyes. I wished that it had never started. I was having difficulty assimilating it all, yet I knew my life dangled from Die Spinne’s web, was being pulled up into i
ts mesh.

  My forehead was damp in the fire’s heat. I dabbed it. Dawson placed a huge tart before me. He looked fresh, tireless, cheerful. He gently slapped my back. “Hang on, Yank.”

  Steynes sampled the tart, smiled, wiped cream from his chin, sucked coffee noisily, happily: he was enjoying himself.

  “Certain activities of the northern-based U-boats are well known. After all, as the war was drawing to a close there were approximately four hundred of them at sea. Or able to get to sea. And Admiral Doenitz had ordered his submarine commanders to fight on and never give up. An amazing number of them shared his belief and desire. They simply did not give up once the war ended. After all, the sea is large and was theirs as much as anyone’s.

  “U-977, commanded by Heinz Schaeffer, came out of the Norway-Scotland run and ran for Australia. It was a specially equipped ship, no longer had to surface to recharge its batteries what with the snorkel breathing device. It took fourteen weeks, but he made it to Argentina. And he was only one of many. But, you see, we had ways of knowing rather much of what he was doing. And eventually we picked him up. He wound up in Hertfordshire, actually, but the point is that he got to Argentina in the first place.

  “U-530, under Oho Wermuth, was sitting off the coast of Long Island—yes, Mr. Cooper, Long Island—when the war ended. Two weeks later, he, too, arrived in Argentina.

  “U-239, U-547, U-34, U-957, and U-1000—they were never found. Some evidence indicates they got to Japan, to the northern shore of Massachusetts, to Africa. There were leads as to the human cargo they dropped in various places. But much of it remains mysterious even to this day.

  “But these vessels, while well equipped, were still normal U-boats. Bormann was not taken out on one of these—Die Spinne was using something else altogether, a land of U-boat which we have never officially admitted existed at all. Let me tell you about these rather marvelous things.

  “They were huge, first of all, and their range was incredible. They could go where they wanted.

  “Thirty-one thousand five hundred miles at ten knots—thirty-one thousand five hundred miles.” He smiled at our faces. “A very long way, that.”