Allied aviators pounded railroad tracks, storage tanks, pipelines and oilfields. Saboteurs mined the Danube, where most of Romania’s oil was shipped through on its way to Germany. By the middle of May 1944, weeks before D-Day, the bombing had reduced Romanian oil exports by 44 percent. Germany was being slowly starved of foreign fuel and was forced to improvise. The Wehrmacht began converting its trucks to burn wood alcohol instead of gas, but by mid-1944 had managed to change over only one-fifth of its vehicles. Increasingly, the synthetic plants were Germany’s last, best hope.
By 1944, Erickson had become irreplaceable to the Allies. His reports began to seriously affect not only the course of the conflict but its outcome. The war on Hitler’s oil would come down to two things: bombers and spies. Erickson was the only OSS agent who had any real chance of finding the hidden refineries.
His access to the refineries was still severely restricted. He, Prince Carl and the men from the embassy spent many nights in Stockholm’s Club 49, sipping brandy and pitching ideas on how to get into the remaining plants. In one plan, Erickson would volunteer as a consultant to the German oil industry and travel the country offering advice to plant managers struggling to increase output. In another, Erickson would go to one of his German oil-magnate friends and ask to freelance. That way he’d avoid the national bureaucracy. He could visit factories all over central Europe, in the service of friends. But Erickson’s contacts in Germany controlled specific sections of the oil market. If he became an adviser to one company, he could visit only their plants. What he needed was unfettered access to every synthetic plant.
During one break in the conversation, Prince Carl offered, rather endearingly, to embark on a national tour of oil facilities. His “royal presence,” he claimed, would boost the morale of the workers. It sounded farcical: Carl in his royal blue tunic nodding as a German slave laborer explained how a compressor worked. But the idea had potential: Germans were still in awe of the Swedish prince.
After a few minutes, Erickson shot the plan down. Himmler had recently turned against aristocrats. He wanted to found a new race of nobles, a Herrenvolk, or “master race,” that was loyal to the Waffen SS and would become the new imperial core of the Reich and administer Germany for a thousand years. With aristocrats in disfavor, sending Carl to Germany was simply too risky.
Finally, late one night, Surrey and Tikander came up with an idea. At first, Erickson thought the plan was so outrageous that he doubled up with laughter on hearing it. “It sounded so fantastic that both the Prince and I took it more or less as a joke.” But, after a few minutes, and once the laughter had died down, Erickson was able to see how brilliant—albeit dangerous—the plan actually was. The spy would be responsible for selling it to the Germans, and so he examined it from every side, trying to find a fatal flaw. But gradually he became convinced it could work. He even gave it a name. The boy from the boroughs of New York City would dedicate his mission to city that made him.
He called it “Selling the Brooklyn Bridge.”
The intended target would be Heinrich Himmler. The men toasted, drained the last fingers of whiskey, and parted ways into the starlit night.
Chapter Ten
The Certificate
The plan was simple but cunning. It would rely not on the fluctuations of German industrial strategy or the political machinations going on in Berlin, but on something more ancient and durable: greed. Erickson had come to see many of his German contacts not as ideologues, but as normal businessmen chasing money and power. “I found out that they were interested in what was in it for them.” In that way, it was a counterpart to Erickson’s earlier brainstorm about Nazi wives.
The scheme was built around a business deal. Erickson would go the German legation in Stockholm and make them an offer. Since German oil plants were being bombed, why not build a huge new refinery in Sweden? (What he didn’t mention, of course, was that the plants were being attacked because he’d given Bomber Command the coordinates.) He would make the arrangements, grease the wheels with the Swedish government and even get a syndicate of local businessmen to help finance the $5 million project. Germany would ship the crude oil to Sweden through pipelines; Erickson’s factory would then refine it and ship high-octane gasoline back to Germany to fill the panzer tanks and Mercedes trucks. The Allies would never bomb a factory located in neutral Sweden.
Erickson prepared a prospectus for the refinery, detailing who would pay for the factory, where the technical equipment would come from and how the profits would be split. He forged a series of memoranda and minutes from meetings that had never happened, detailing how the deal had been hashed out, down to the questions and objections of the imaginary Swedish investors. Then he drew up the final document: an agreement to build the Nazi refinery, signed by several vice-presidents of the Swedish national bank, as well as some of the richest and most influential industrialists in the country. The OSS vetted the names, making sure none of the businessmen had made any anti-Nazi statements that would cast doubt on their role in the deal. The document was a sham, but it was necessary to convince Himmler the project had been green-lighted in Stockholm.
The agreement was the product of everything Erickson had learned over thirty years in the oil business. It could have fooled John D. Rockefeller. But there was a problem. No industrialist or banker in his right mind would sign on to such a deal; in fact, Erickson didn’t even bother asking them. Instead, he forged their signatures. He brought a copy with him and left another at the American legation for safekeeping. The imaginary deal had taken two weeks to flesh out.
Erickson arranged a meeting with his contacts at the German legation. He warned them that if the deal became public, “the signers would deny any and all knowledge of the plan.” This was to prevent the Germans approaching the real people whose signatures were on the papers, in an attempt to confirm the plan’s details.
At first, the reaction was frosty. “Some members of the legation thought the proposition was the work of some fool.” But Erickson by now knew a great many SS officers in Berlin and they were the actual targets of the scheme. To lure them in, he’d built in an unusual feature: Himmler and his top officers would hold a stake in the refinery. Not only would they get access to an unbombable oil plant, they’d actually own a part of the business. “It meant that Nazi party would have a certain amount of capital in their account,” Erickson said, “if something went wrong in Germany.”
At one point in the negotiations, Erickson was called away to the phone. The voice on the other end told him to pick up a copy of Trots Allt, one of the leading leftist newspapers in Stockholm. Puzzled and a bit anxious, Erickson excused himself from the meeting and rushed out to find a newsstand. When he picked up a copy of the newspaper, he felt a wave of nausea. The full story of the fake deal was there on the front page. Erickson had been exposed.
The OSS tracked down the source of the story. The American legation, out of solidarity with conquered Denmark, had hired a group of young Danish refugees to work as office boys. One of them spotted the fake document and, thinking it was evidence of Swedish treachery, stole it and smuggled it to a member of the Danish underground. From there it was sent to Trots Allt, which promptly published a story complete with a list of the industrialists and bank officials who’d “signed” the document. Erickson’s name, which was already blackened by his association with the Nazis, was now whispered with revulsion in the streets of Stockholm. Not only was Erickson doing business with the Third Reich, not only had he turned Prince Carl into a fascist, he was now going to build a Nazi oil plant inside Sweden.
The industrialists and bankers were outraged. Luckily, Erickson had had the foresight to warn the Germans that this is exactly what would happen. Under tremendous pressure from the Swedish press, Erickson flew to Berlin to sell the deal, now hanging by a thread.
After checking into the Hotel Eden, Erickson took a taxi to 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse. The building still filled him with dread, its
reputation as the last station for spies and saboteurs still fresh in his mind. He was escorted to Himmler’s office and greeted the Gestapo chief like a long-lost friend. After snapping out a crisp “Heil Hitler,” he launched into his pitch, detailing the secret Swedish agreement to build the plant. He presented Himmler with a full-color poster he’d had printed up for the trip. It showed tankers traveling the waters between Sweden and Germany, filled with oil and gas for the war effort. Underneath the illustration was the deal’s slogan, worthy of Madison Avenue: “Meeting Halfway.”
The poster revealed the deal’s psychological strategy. The OSS believed the Germans would see the Sweden deal as a propaganda win for their side. Building a new refinery in a neutral country would show that the Reich was doing business as usual, expanding its industrial footprint into the Nordic region, thinking ahead. It would imply that the Germans were still confident they would win the war. In mid-1944, the Allies were unaware of the delusional nature of Hitler’s leadership. (Hitler by then had banned nearly all negative military reports from his underlings.) Purely by accident, the plan aligned with the psychological atmosphere inside Germany’s ruling clique.
Himmler smiled and studied the poster, while Erickson chatted with the Reichsführer about one of his obsessions: horses. Erickson had learned through his sources that Himmler wanted to breed steppe-horses that would eventually replace cars as a means of transport. It was a mad fantasy, part of the Nazis’ utopian vision for postwar Europe. But Erickson flattered him anyway.
Himmler, his head bent over the poster, nodded. “You know, Erickson,” he said. “You Swedes are the archetype of the Nordic race. It’s people like you that I want to be working with.”
Erickson thanked him. But if Sweden were the true home of the Aryan race, why not build a factory there? Himmler took the bait. He suggested the American meet with German engineers to talk plant design. To Himmler’s surprise, Erickson declined. He told the Gestapo chief that in order to pull off the deal, he needed to travel to the best oil facilities in Germany and see what the country’s real needs were. Only then could he build the right kind of factory.
Himmler nodded, then called over one of his assistants and gave orders that Erickson would be permitted to travel—and here he emphasized—“alone.” The assistant quickly typed up a document and handed it to the American. It was a pass that allowed the bearer to travel throughout the Third Reich and inspect any factory or plant. The Nazis would even provide a car, driver and fuel coupons. Erickson looked at the paper in astonishment:
The Chief of the Security Police and the SD, Certificate:
“Herr Eric Siegfried Erickson is traveling to undertake urgent business conferences in the interests of the Reich. … Herr Erickson is well known to us. Secret police security regulations in regards to restricted areas are to be waived on his behalf.”
This was the moment Erickson had been working toward for years. He could hardly believe his luck. “It guaranteed that I was above suspicion.”
Soon after getting his all-Germany pass, Erickson made a research trip to the capital and stayed, as usual, at the Hotel Eden. The trip was another plant-finding mission and, though the usual dangers existed, the American saw no cause for alarm. His driver picked him up at the hotel, as he always did, and began navigating Berlin’s crowded streets. After a few minutes, Erickson looked out the window and realized that, instead of taking him to a factory outside the capital, the driver was heading toward the inner city. Erickson stared in confusion at the unfamiliar landmarks.
The car pulled up to the gate of an enormous brick building. It was surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence with guard towers at each corner. Erickson’s heart raced.
Moabit prison.
“It’s over,” he thought. “They know who I am.”
Erickson escorted inside the prison, a huge complex that housed as many as 3,000 prisoners at any one time. “I was ushered into a large conference room which faced the prison courtyard,” he remembered. His escort left him alone, and closed the door. Through a window, the spy could see out into the courtyard. He spotted a gallows in the center, empty nooses dangling down. For the second time on his mission, Erickson prepared himself for death. “I was left alone for six or seven minutes, but in that time practically everything that I had done in my life passed before my eyes.”
Soon his escort reappeared and led him from the conference room and down into the courtyard. Erickson was surprised to find about forty other people sitting there on benches, facing the gallows. The scene struck Erickson, despite his rising anxiety, as bizarre. It was as if he had been invited to a theater to watch a play.
He took his seat. A group of men appeared. They marched, under guard, from their cells. Erickson studied the faces of the prisoners as they shuffled in, dressed in drab prison uniforms. He took a deep breath, and exhaled. There was no one he knew.
Then a second batch of inmates, including some women, entered. With an electric shock, Erickson spotted a familiar figure. The chestnut-brown hair. The thin, elegant neck. It was Anne-Maria.
She looked at Erickson, then quickly turned away. She took her place in line and was marched with the others up the gallows steps.
“It’s hard to portray what goes on in the mind of one who is about to witness the execution of a person so near,” Erickson said, of the experience. “It was agony.”
Erickson watched in shock. “It was horrible. I couldn’t show any sentiments or how sad I was.” Even as his mind whirled, he couldn’t help thinking that Anne-Maria had confessed his part in the OSS mission. “I felt certain she’d given me away. I didn’t know if I was next.”
An SS officer dropped the rope over Anne-Maria’s head and pulled it tight around her neck. Erickson wanted desperately to look away, but there were SS officers walking up and down the aisles, studying the audience’s reaction. “I felt they were testing me, using the execution as a means to make me confess about the operation.” An officer approached the set of portable steps under Anne-Maria feet—there was no trap door—bent down, and jerked it away.
Erickson watched as his lover’s body swung on the end of the rope, struggled for a few moments, and went still. Convinced this was a macabre SS trick, he remained stoic. His escort then took him out of the courtyard and drove him back to the hotel.
Erickson went to his room and locked the door behind him. He was chilled, deeply anxious. What was the meaning of making me watch that? What do they have on me? The Gestapo wasn’t prone to idle theatrics. They’d brought Erickson to the prison for a reason; he just couldn’t figure out what it was. The spy quickly packed up his things, called a taxi and headed to the airport. Another shock awaited him there: after studying his papers, German security agents told him that he couldn’t leave Germany.
This had never happened to him before. It was clear the SS wanted to keep him in the country, either to study his reactions to the execution or to finalize the arrangements for his arrest.
Chapter Eleven
The Mighty Eighth
After a few days, Erickson was allowed to leave Berlin. He flew back to Stockholm emotionally exhausted. He couldn’t ignore the obvious: he was under suspicion. There was no other explanation for the invitation to Moabit. But this realization came at a crucial time: the bombing of the oil facilities was finally being ramped up and Erickson was the only spy in the Allied program that could produce the needed target lists. He felt an obligation—to himself, to family, and to his native country—to see his commitment to the end, no matter his status with the Gestapo.
“Hitler was a lunatic,” he wrote. “I wanted to crush him.” In the weeks after the execution, images of Anne-Maria would flash into Erickson’s mind, unbidden. At times, he felt responsible for her death. At others, he felt sure he would follow her to the gallows.
With his new pass, Erickson began traveling all over central Europe, from the western German border to Prague. It was around this time that he
was caught in the Mercedes factory in Stuttgart, as the Americans bombed it. Erickson barely escaped. Despite the near miss, he was gathering huge amounts of classified information on plant locations and capacities, manufacturing sites, anti-aircraft batteries, even the effectiveness of previous bombing runs.
One day Erickson was invited to Carinhall, Hermann Göring’s hunting estate northeast of Berlin. Carinhall was a secluded, wooded expanse where the Luftwaffe chief could relax and indulge himself as the “State Forestry and Hunting Master of Germany.” The architect, Werner Marsh, the same man who designed Berlin’s Olympic Stadium for Hitler, installed a small but luxurious hunting lodge on the estate, which was enlarged when Carinhall became Göring’s official summer state residence. The new wings included a bowling alley, a movie theater, a room for the master’s hunting trophies, a beer pub and a room dedicated to Göring’s beloved model train, which was 321 feet long and complete with miniature airfields and German fighters. Nearby was an immaculate tennis court, a shooting range, housing for Göring’s doctor, security and thirteen firemen who watched over the property, as well as a mausoleum for his first wife, a Swedish divorcee.
When Erickson arrived at Carinhall, one of Göring’s chief adjutants invited him on a long drive. “Arrangements were made for the trip—to where I did not know.” They drove for hours until finally they wound up at Dachau, a concentration camp in Upper Bavaria, near Munich. Erickson had heard people “whispering about such places,” but this was his first confirmation that the camps were real.
Dachau was an enormous, stinking, typhus-ridden work camp and death factory surrounded by an electrified barbed fence. Perhaps 30,000 prisoners were shot, beaten, tortured, worked to death and cremated inside its ovens during the years 1933-1945. Among its 69 barracks, there was a “Priest Block” that housed ministers who’d defied Hitler and another that housed the victims of medical experiments. Every morning new bodies for burning in the ovens were stacked outside. Dachau became the model for every concentration camp in the Reich, and the Germans showed it off with pride.
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