The Human Pool

by Chris Petit

  Eichmann, that dull fanatic to the last, calls me behind my back ‘the officer in kid gloves’. Absolutely. Those of us who can see far enough ahead have always remained gentlemen, anticipatinga time when we can lounge about in hotel lobbies with a clear conscience.

  Eichmann is the other ‘negotiator’, the public face to my private deals. He is the most blinkered man I know. As long as things at his end are in order and he believes that he has done everything to facilitate his clients—I have heard him call them clients!—then the process is, so he manages to convince himself, a civilised one. My God! They will go to their deaths crammed into cattle cars while he argues niceties with the Jewish Council who are as bad as the rest at pulling the wool over their own eyes and everyone else’s. The Hungarians can’t wait to get on with the job of shovelling the Jews onto their trains.

  03.04.44. The first big air raid and of course the Jews are blamed, with talk of reprisals already, so many lives for each Christian one lost.

  08.04.44. Wisliceny, over cocktails at the Astoria: Deported Jews will be made to write a postcard from a destination called Waldsee where they will report everything to be fine. The postmark, to which a lot of thought has been given, is to suggest an image of a lakeside holiday camp! The cards will be sent by SS courier to the Jewish Council for distribution to relatives and friends: Wish you were here.

  Drunk, Wisliceny calls Eichmann a ‘ponderous bureaucrat’ and ‘an arselicker’, who is forever moaning on about his transportation headaches. Wisliceny does a good impersonation of the crooked smile and insistence on the stock phrase: ‘You and I are as chalk and cheese,’ which is just how Eichmann would put it.

  Eichmann honestly thinks of his work as helpful exercises in scheduling. His other skill is table tennis. He talks of organising a league! The light and airy—and modern—quarters in which they are based up in the hills of Buda appear so harmlessly suburban that it is impossible to believe that anything too awful could issue from them.

  Wisliceny tells me that at the first meeting, half the unsuspecting Jews turned up with their bags ready to be deported. The bribable Wisliceny boasts that he is being heavily courted. The Jews prefer him to Eichmann, who indulges in a rather unctuous pretence of identification with his victims, of wishing to understand their problems. Wisliceny is the master of the soft-pedal. His simple request for blankets and mattresses soon led to a free auction of mirrors, typewriters, and paintings, many of which now adorn his apartment on the river. A request for a piano resulted in eight.

  The Jews rely on hope in what is a hopeless situation.

  12.04.44. Identify and isolate, the same old story. The Jewish Council is happy to provide lists of everyone to the Ministry of Supply in the misguided belief that its request is about the fair allocation of food. Yellow Stars of David are now worn by Jews. There has been much finicky insistence on the correct size of the star. A washable armband version is apparently in preparation. Hope is a strange creature.

  29.04.44. Eichmann’s mind is entirely one-tracked, all the way to Auschwitz (the first departure was yesterday). He detests my being in Budapest because it interferes with what he thinks of as the clarity of his orders. ‘We are not hereto barter’, he told me. But, Adolf, we are. It’s the only way we are going to get out of this war alive.

  He alternates between the chipperness of a man who is having the time of his life—good posting, comfortable surroundings, the satisfaction of working with a team that knows how to do its job, an air of social confidence that wasn’t there before—and the sad-clown smile of someone who suspects the writing might be on the wall, if only he could read it. (It’s in Hebrew, Adolf.) Eichmann’s fate—and I suspect even he is starting to realise it—is bound up with that of his victims. In theirs lies his own. When all the Jews are gone, he’s out of a job. He feels unappreciated and undervalued. He suspects that everyone regards him—the most vital cog in the entire machine—as small fry. He knows that behind his back he is called ‘the travel agent’.

  Ransoms, deals, negotiations, all are anathema to Eichmann. He fails to understand that it’s time for a new trick and not the same old one. It’s getting a bit late for that. He fails too to see that the new trick will be the far harder one of how we made the Jew not disappear. How we saved the Jew, how a few master conjurors managed that.

  03.05.44. Anti-Semitism seems to affect the Jews as much as anyone. Hungarian Jews are quite happy to see alien refugee Jews removed. There are rumours all over the city that the deportations will soon begin in the countryside. As we sit around the polished mahogany negotiating table with the refined and extremely well-bred members of what is a charming family, you can see the question in their eyes: Where will they draw the line? My appeal is that of one gentleman to another. They have my word. This is probably as good as given, seeing that both the Führer and the Reichsführer are in agreement about the negotiations. The Hungarians will be hopping when they discover that the business has been lifted from under their noses. In the past we have always been generous with local Jewish assets, which (by and large) have gone to the country in question.

  05.05.44. Today we viewed the Weiss family’s art collection. It contains a particularly fine El Greco, an indifferent Tiepolo, and a Gauguin that would no doubt be viewed as too decadent for today’s taste: I have to confess, I have my eye on it. We move into tricky areas here. The museums are after the said works on the grounds that they should remain in Hungary. But already I think that the family feel these masterpieces would be better appreciated elsewhere. The word family has become like a talisman. What we are talking about is an industrial complex employing over 40,000 workers, as well as there being other enterprises.

  15.05.44. Our negotiations reach their delicate conclusion. In the case of the Weiss family we are also talking about the rescue of Jews, which these days is a radical notion as Eichmann and his crew race ahead; Eichmann: ‘We are getting into the swing of things’. Meanwhile, we are discussing a twenty-five-year lease of all assets with the family Weiss. This is how we shall get around the matter of the paintings. With the expiry of the agreement everything reverts back to the family. We have conceded their foreign currency to them. I am bending over backwards, thinking of my own references. We reach a generous private arrangement as to what money they can take with them, and our cut as trustees is only five percent of the gross income of the concern.

  17.05.44. The family has signed! The Hungarians will protest that their sovereignty has been overridden. My lawyers are studying the problem. The Hungarians will use the National Bank to try to block the takeover as it must approve any foreign purchase of Hungarian securities. Some smarty-pants has decided that the answer is for me, and selected others, to declare ourselves legal residents, to which end papers are being drawn up. My slight worry is that when this is all over the Hungarians might use that as an excuse to extra-dite me to stand trial in Budapest. The Hungarians are vindictive, and, as lovers of theatre and opera, are fond of their trials.

  For the moment they are as keen as mustard to co-operate. Even Eichmann is impressed by the speed and relish with which the Hungarians have gone about their business. The local colonel in charge has set himself up in the hills, to be closer to Eichmann’s team, and his town office calls itself International Storage and Transportation Inc. This is the kind of thing the Hungarians fall over laughing about in their drink.

  18.05.44. Dinner last night with Willi S. He seems to be in his element, showing an almost clinical curiosity for these strange days. He told me he started out wanting to be a doctor, which I can believe. He seems interestingly modern and ahead of his time, an amoral moral diagnostician, much like our friend in Bern from whom I suspect he has learned a lot.*

  19.05.44. Bombs again. The British this time. We have soon learned to tell the difference between their Lancasters and the American Flying Fortresses. Another reason to remove the Gauguin from Budapest to safety elsewhere. The family is now quite in agreement, and is already thinking in
terms of the future. They get everything back in 1969. You can see them calculating, thinking that isn’t so long. Let’s hope the Führer doesn’t change his mind and decide to put them on the train after all.

  *Elsewhere Karl-Heinz hints that Hatz was run jointly by Dulles and the SS to discredit both the Istanbul OSS and the Abwehr. A visit by Hatz to Canaris, head of the Abwehr, was used by the SS to implicate Canaris in the Hungarian plot to break the German alliance. Of Bandi and Hatz’s release, Willi remarked to Hoover, ‘This is highly unusual in itself.’ Arrest by the SS was more usually on a permanent basis.

  *Elsewhere Karl-Heinz remarked, presumably also a reference to Dulles: ‘The Reichsführer still cannot believe that someone as senior as “our man O” has been so adventurous in his dealings with us at a time when everyone else is bending over for Uncle Joe and the Ivans. The Reichsführer, eyes agleam, has asked more than once, “Are you sure he is someone we can work with? It’s not a trick?” I assured him it was not. I have identified “our man O’s” driving force. Greed.’ The reference to Dulles as ‘our man O’ was apparently a joking one to the letter O being the only thing standing between the SS and Dulles’s OSS.

  Hoover

  BUDAPEST/ZURICH, 1944

  I DIDN’T KNOW IT THEN, but Karl-Heinz used Willi for my contact. We met down by the river, the day after Willi and Karl-Heinz had dinner (to which no reference was made). Willi seemed out of sorts and I saw for the first time how much of a nocturnal and indoors man he had become. Daylight and fresh air seemed to disagree with him. He had a hacking cough as he told me there was an urgent and highly confidential message to deliver to Dulles.

  Although nothing had been mentioned, relations between us had cooled since my brief arrest by Hungarian intelligence after my confession to him about Nelly. When I asked why he couldn’t deliver the message himself, he sounded snappish. ‘Because I’m Betty’s boy, and Betty is out of favour since this Abwehr business.’

  He was referring to her having had several lovers and intelligence sources in the Abwehr. According to Beate, Betty had complained once to her of losing Dulles’s confidence towards the end of the war.

  Willi also said, ‘This meeting never took place.’

  I travelled to Switzerland the next day on a special emergency pass issued by the SS. Willi had given me a sealed envelope whose contents I was to commit to memory and then destroy. I have no idea if Willi knew what was written in the message. He claimed he didn’t, saying, ‘This is nothing to do with me. I’m only doing it as a favour.’

  • • •

  Dulles was shaking by the time I had finished reciting the message. He asked, ‘What do these people want?’

  I said that I had been told to warn him that his cables to and from Washington were being intercepted. If he wanted proof of that he should refer to the recent one from Washington criticising the quality of his intelligence, which was considered ‘ill informed, inaccurate, and substantially wrong in its details’.

  According to a snippet of Betty’s, dug up by Beate, Dulles had received a tipoff at the end of the previous year that the Abwehr was feeding damaging information about him—‘all damned lies’ according to Dulles—to U.S. Treasury agents. In the light of what has been subsequently learned, the information was remarkably accurate, and provided an extra reason for Dulles wanting to discredit the Abwehr. Of course, this information became available to Karl-Heinz once the SS takeover of the Abwehr was complete.

  Dulles didn’t say much in the way of a response to my message apart from ‘Christ Almighty!’ several times to himself, then: ‘And what the fuck am I supposed to do about it?’

  I said it was recommended he reroute any money transactions through Brussels for the time being and not through Switzerland.

  We then entered the stage of what might be called reckless secrecy, when men like Karl-Heinz and Dulles were prepared to risk everything, and use anyone. I had an uncomfortable image of them dining together openly after the war, grinning survivors, while I lay dead and done in some ditch.

  Karl-Heinz was playing opera on his gramophone when we next met in his lavish private quarters on one of the city’s smartest boulevards. He later told me he was worried about microphone bugs. Karl-Heinz in shiny jackboots, braces, and a silk shirt, ‘on top of his game’ as the sports people say.

  ‘Strictly between us, it’s getting too late to fuck about,’ he told me almost inaudibly. ‘I have a mole in the Swiss banking system. We are moving into a difficult period where nothing should be recorded, only memorised and erased.’

  He asked what I was thinking. I said I wondered if he was working to orders or playing the entrepreneur. The diva hit the high note. Karl-Heinz turned the question around and asked, ‘What do you think?’

  I told him the one thing I had learned was that everyone had a deal on the side.

  ‘And how does that make you feel?’

  ‘Very exposed.’

  ‘Your problem is you’re too honest.’

  The scratch of the needle at the end of the record; sitting in such sumptuous surroundings (requisitioned), I had a clear flash-forward to life among the ruins.

  I was given a time and an address in an unremarkable part of Zurich for meeting Karl-Heinz’s banker.

  The first appointment I had to pass up because I thought someone was tailing me. It was during an unseasonably late snow storm, big dry flakes that showed up the silhouettes of the two men. They didn’t seem good enough to be Dulles’s payroll.

  When I told Dulles about being followed, he was concerned they were Treasury Department agents. I didn’t think they were, but I was picked up later by the Treasury and grilled. It wasn’t out of the question that Dulles had made the tipoff himself, to see if I could find out what the Treasury had on him. Nothing that they were telling me, it turned out.

  The Swiss banker was, as he put it, prepared to deal with the devil. He was urbane and ironic and had the same upper-class mannerism as Betty Monroe and Dulles of starting his conversations in the middle. ‘The price of oil is about to take a leap,’ he began by saying moments after we had met. ‘Why do you think that should be?’

  I said I was flattered that he thought I might know the answer.

  The oil companies, he pointed out, were perfectly aware that the Allied armies were about to embark on an invasion of Europe. He said this equably and left me to draw my own conclusion.

  ‘Who provides the oil in the Middle East?’ he asked.

  ‘The Arabs.’

  ‘Whom then would the American oil companies be keenest not to upset?’

  ‘The Arabs.’

  ‘And whom do the Arabs dislike most?’

  ‘The Jews.’

  The man nodded. ‘The Jews are short of friends at the moment. Would you describe your friend Mr Allen Dulles as a friend to the Jews?’

  I said it would be presumptuous of me to call Mr Dulles a friend, or to answer for him.

  The banker smiled patiently. ‘A man of diplomatic skills. What is Mr Dulles by profession?’

  ‘A lawyer.’

  ‘And if Standard Oil of New Jersey were one of Mr Dulles’s main clients, whom would that make him a friend to?’ He didn’t wait for an answer. ‘Let us stop playing games. Mr Dulles is a committed anti-Zionist on account of long-standing legal, banking, and business interests, dating back to his early Istanbul posting. I am quite open about my antagonism. There is acceptable greed and unacceptable greed, and Mr Dulles falls into the latter category. Furthermore, Mr Dulles has large financial interests in the Third Reich, involving many American clients whose German investments he brokered before the war. Does any of this surprise you?’

  It did and it didn’t. The allegations were enough to astound, but by then the hidden motive was an inevitable feature of the world through which I moved. I asked how I could be sure he was telling me the truth.

  The banker said, ‘You can choose to believe me, or you can believe Mr Dulles. Of course, bear in mind that Mr Dulle
s is a thoroughly respected, respectable, and believable character. The likes of Allen Dulles will always get away with things. But Mr Dulles, for all his bonhomie and civilised manners, hates “Yids”, but will go to enormous lengths to disguise it. We are dealing with a far more sophisticated and dangerous enemy than rabble rousers like Goebbels.’

  We were in a stuffy Zurich apartment. The place felt as if it hadn’t been lived in for a long time. The brief snowfall had been followed by several days of heavy rain. We were in a room at the back, overlooking a courtyard. In spite of feeling unoccupied, the heating was on and the place was too warm.

  The banker said: ‘Mr Dulles has been instrumental in building Saudi oil interests on behalf of his American clients, particularly Standard Oil; another oil company, Socony Vacuum, employs many agents from Mr Dulles’s organisation. His interests have long caused him to oppose any policy within the United States government for a Jewish homeland. These interests resulted in an interlocking financial network created by Mr Dulles on behalf of American oil companies, Saudi Arabia, and Nazi business corporations. Many of these interests continue to do cloaked business despite the war. It should not be too difficult for your contact to work out which these companies are. He could start with I.G. Farben.’

  It was the breadth of Dulles’s ambition that astonished me most. I knew him well enough by then to know that he would have acted in the belief that he would get away with it, and regarded himself as sufficiently protected to avoid disgrace or exposure. I had the small consolation of relishing the memory of making him shake from the shock of my news.

  The banker said, ‘Since the start of the war, Mr Dulles’s client, Standard Oil, has been able to overcharge on the price of oil, against the threat of withholding supply, and has been behind the payment of large bribes to Saudi Arabia. And you thought the war was about armies fighting.’