Erickson was ushered through the munitions factory, a museum exhibiting plaster casts of prisoners’ deformities, the canteen and the library. It’s doubtful he saw the crematoria and the five gas chambers on this trip, but on the drive back to Göring’s estate, Erickson brooded over the brutality of the “model camp,” the contrast between the slave camp and the splendors of Carninhall. “To say that I was dumbfounded was putting it mildly. [Dachau] was full of awful impressions that I lack the words to describe.”
As soon as he arrived back, Erickson protested to Göring about the brutality he’d witnessed. Göring exploded, yelling so loudly “that one could have heard his voice in Berlin.”
“They’re lying!” the Luftwaffe chief cried. “That cannot be true. I know nothing of it. Get out!” Then: “What were you doing there anyway?” It was clear to Erickson that Göring knew what was happening at Dachau. The American left the lodge and returned to Berlin.
If Erickson had entered the war by a side entrance—brought in because of a family dispute—the death of Anne-Maria and the tour of Dachau brought him close to its core realities. Anne-Maria forced him to grieve for a victim he’d come to love, a single death in the midst of a huge war. And Dachau opened his eyes to the Nazi’s agenda in its full industrial scale. After experiencing both, to think he’d once contributed to the cause must have been like bitter ashes in Erickson’s mouth.
The American returned to the hunt. After one seven-day trip, he produced a list of 16 different targets, both oil and manufacturing sites. From a 1944 report:
Annedorf: rebuilt as a synthetic plant after the demolishing of the Leuna plant at Halle. The plant does not lie exactly at the Annedorf station but it is about 15 km north of Merseburg quite close to the railroad on the route Halle-Annedorf. The plant is on the left side of the railroad, and is gigantic … They are installing smoke-screen devices, very small and look about as follows [Erickson included a sketch of the devices].
Bruks: outside of Prague. Plant is producing about 150,000 tons. Is intact. Bombing poor.
Lütskendorf: The only really big plant for gas and oil – built during the war. Very badly damaged. Finished products destroyed. Only about 20 percent of plant now in operation. Does not pay to rebuild.
Köln: New Robot base 25km NE of city on the property belonging to Brockhause. [The “robot” was the V-1 unmanned rocket that terrified London]
Sigmaringen: Home of the Vichy government. Laval and Petain both alive in the castle of Count Hohenzollern (who is imprisoned under suspicion that he has something to do with the 20th of July plot. Laval has his office in a schoolhouse quite close by. Happened incidentally to see him. The Vichy government is training and equipping a French army there.)
The flights to destroy these plants were among the most dangerous assignments any enlisted man could get in World War II. Bombardiers tried to attain their targets as flak burst around them and the sky turned a greasy black from German smoke pots and exploding oil tanks below. Accuracy was low: attacks on the mammoth synthetic plant at Leuna hit their target only 5.1 percent of the time when guided in by radar. Tactical mistakes compounded the problems: American strategists convinced the Air Force generals that larger payloads of smaller, 300-pound bombs were more effective than the huge 2,000 to 4,000 pound high-explosives that the British favored. They were later proven wrong. The error meant that American crews had to repeatedly bomb the same refineries again and again to knock them out of production.
The Luftwaffe, rarely seen over France or the rest of the occupied Europe, took to the air in large numbers to protect the refineries, shooting down the American and British planes at a steady clip. Half of the Air Force’s casualties, including 26,000 dead, were suffered by the Eighth Air Force, the “Mighty Eighth,” who flew most of the missions at Erickson’s targets. Between June and August, 1944, the Eighth lost 1,022 heavy bombers, half of its fleet, and 665 of its fighters. An American briefing officer, after detailing a daily mission for one bomber crew, offered them this advice: “Consider yourself dead.”
Faced with the destruction of the synthetic plants, Albert Speer pulled 350,000 men from other assignments and ordered them to repair the facilities at all costs. The “successful prosecution of the war,” Speer informed his Commissioner General for Emergency Measures, pivoted on the “reconstruction of these plants.” The refinery at Leuna had a 5,000-strong team simply for fighting fires after the raids. Special oil tanks were made with concrete liners to protect them from flying shrapnel; blast walls were built around compressors and the other key components that kept the plants running. The workers in the Berlin ministries began hearing a new motto from the War Production department: “Everything for oil.”
Meanwhile, Eisenhower was becoming convinced that the attacks were weakening the still-formidable Wehrmacht. “We were most anxious to continue the destruction of German industry, with emphasis on oil,” he wrote in Crusade in Europe. “General Spaatz convinced me that as Germany became progressively embarrassed by her diminished oil reserves, the effect upon the land battle would be most profound and the eventual winning of the war would be correspondingly hastened.”
In the industrial heartland of the Ruhr, Erickson guided 1600 planes to the benzol plants which produced the fuel for the terrifying V-1 and V-2 rockets, obliterating them. By 1944, the facilities at Leuna had been bombed “at least 25 times with thousands of bombs” and were “a total wreck.” Erickson began hearing from his contacts in Germany about the onslaught. “The Americans and the British know more about the oil plants than I can believe,” one told him. Another admitted that “the precision of the bombing is one of the most remarkable things that the German army has witnessed.”
While visiting one plant, Erickson learned that Joseph Goebbels had recently visited to cheer up the workers, depressed by the constant bombardment. The American made note of which buildings had survived and what they contained; he touched compressors and other machinery melted by the heat of the fires; he watched as the Slavs and doomed Jews worked feverishly to repair the plant. One manager of a refinery pulled Erickson aside and complained, “The damage… is unbelievable.” The ripples from the bombing spread outward through the industries that needed oil to make their products: chemicals, rubber, munitions. The same hydrogenation plants that were turning coal into fuel were also producing the compounds – synthetic methanol, synthetic ammonia and nitric acid—used in high-explosive bombs.
The destruction inevitably changed the Nazis’ strategy for the war. In early, 1944, the German High Command, along with most of Europe, suspected the Allies were planning an invasion of Europe later that year. To stop it, Göring had always envisioned waves of Luftwaffe fighters attacking the enemy battalions in the days and weeks after the amphibious landing. As rumors of an impending D-Day swept Europe in the spring and summer of 1944, he contemplated transferring some of his planes to Calais and the coast of France. But after a great deal of thought, Göring decided against it. “No such transfer was possible,” wrote the historian Chester Wilmot, “because … the American offensive against the synthetic oil plants … made it imperative to concentrate the greatest possible strength for their defense.” In fact, the planes were flowing in the opposite direction. In late May, just weeks before the Normandy invasion, Göring was forced to pull six of his best fighting squadrons from Air Fleet III, stationed in France, and fly them back to Germany.
The U.S. Eighth Air Force bombed the targets relentlessly. By the end of 1944, only three of Germany’s 99 refineries were producing oil, largely due to the work of Eric Erickson and the crews of the B-17s and Liberators. On June 30th, only weeks after D-Day, Hitler received an urgent message.
My Führer:
If we do not succeed in protecting the synthetic plants and refineries better than in the past, an unbridgeable gap will appear in the fuel supply … By September it will no longer be possible to cover the most urgent necessary supplies for the Wehrma
cht.
Heil Hitler.
Signed,
Albert Speer
(Reichsminister of Armaments and War Production)
Hitler had one last attack planned: a surprise battle he believed would turn the war’s momentum towards Germany. When the Battle of the Bulge erupted on December 16, 1944, the Allies were caught unawares. The German forces pushed the Allies back in a dangerous thrust that snapped the front lines in key sectors. But, as the American G.I.’s dug in and fought back, it became clear that the Führer had miscalculated. He couldn’t get sufficient numbers of his reserve troops to the front. “They could not be moved,” one German commander complained after the war. “They were at a standstill for lack of petrol—stranded over a stretch of a hundred miles—just when they were needed.” Even Winston Churchill, ensconced in the cave-like War Rooms underneath Parliament, could see the effects that the raids were having. “Oil production and reserves dropped drastically, affecting not only the mobility of their troops, but also the activities and even the training of their air forces … At long last our great bombing offensive was reaping its reward.”
In 1944, Albert Speer engineered nothing less than a miracle: production of tanks and airplanes peaked in the early and middle parts of the year, an astounding feat considering the bombardment that the Reich’s factories were undergoing. But, at the same time, Germany’s fighting capacity was actually declining. At the Battle of the Rhine, a new speed limit of 17 mph for German military vehicles was imposed to save gas; oxen were used to pull tanks up to the front lines. “[Soldiers] were abandoning their tanks and motor vehicles all over France,” a U.S. Army report concluded, “fleeing on foot, rescuing what equipment they could with horses, or surrendering in droves.” A lack of aviation fuel caused the Luftwaffe to become largely irrelevant outside of Germany by the middle of 1944, leaving them unable to attack the thousands of troops coming across the beaches of Omaha and Utah. Because of a lack of aviation fuel, the skies over Europe belonged to the Americans and the British. Their Mustangs and Spitfires flew over the occupied territories, hammering German emplacements, destroying bridges, blowing up supply trains and attacking troop transports.
Huge numbers of German troops were surrendering every month because of a lack of oil. In the Ruhr industrial valley alone, 325,000 German troops waved the white flag. In February, 1945, German production of aviation fuel totaled just 1000 tons, one half of one percent of what it was the year before. Hitler had championed the idea of mechanized war years before and it had given him victory after victory on the continent of Europe. But as the Allies drove toward Berlin, that very concept of battle demanded fuel that Germany no longer had.
The oil war was over, and the Allies had won.
Chapter Twelve
Aftermath
The best estimate we have for casualties resulting from World War II is that 35 million people died in the conflict. Without Erickson, that toll would have gone higher, perhaps much higher. “More fuel would have bought the Germans more time,” writes Daniel Yergin. If one considers the Battle of the Bulge alone, with sufficient supplies of gas the Wehrmacht would have sown chaos behind for days or weeks longer than the thirty-one days the battle lasted. They would have killed and wounded thousands more Allied soldiers. The Nazis wouldn’t have won the war, but they would have exerted an even more brutal price in losing it.
Sir Arthur Harris, the head of the Allied Bomber Command, had at first resisted the Oil Campaign, as it came to be known. But he would later admit his mistake. He called the operation “a complete success … what the Allied strategists did was to bet on an outsider, and it happened to win the race.” The German war ace and commander of the Fighter Force, Adolf Galland, admitted that that the bombing raids were “the most important of the combined factors which brought about the collapse of Germany.” Speer seconded that analysis. Even Hermann Göring agreed: the campaign had proved “the utmost in deadliness.”
As the war in Europe ended, there was a curious footnote to the search for the synthetic plants. In 1945, twenty-three Americans who’d been anxiously waiting for the armistice flew in from London and began combing the ruined industrial sites of Germany. They were led by a strapping sailboat enthusiast named Dr. W.C. Schroeder, whose official job was as a researcher at the U.S. Bureau of Mines; in reality, he was America’s leading expert on synthetic oil, with several patents to his name. The other men were scientists, chemists and executives from the major American oil companies: Standard Oil, Texas Oil, Gulf, the companies that had either been founded in Beaumont in 1901 or had grown into global companies as a result of the discoveries there. The team’s secret mission had been authorized by the Joints Chiefs of Staff.
American scientists, despite years of effort, had been unable to develop a high-grade synthetic oil for use in vehicles; the stuff that lubricates your car engine today was unknown in the America of the ‘40s. Synthetics, because they potentially freed countries from foreign dependence on oil, were a top military and industrial objective for the U.S. and its competitors. The American team was in Germany to find out what the Nazis were working on before anyone else could. The men were thorough, close-mouthed about the mission, and well-funded. Two years before, Congress had authorized $30 million for a five-year synthetic development program.
The team spread out across Germany, fording rivers where the bridges had been blown out and traveling across a moonscape of craters and vanished cities, populated by hungry, embittered survivors. The Americans visited every oil plant and refinery they could find, interviewed the surviving workers and managers, retracing Eric Erickson’s steps across the Reich. They believed that the Germans had failed to produce usable synthetic oil, but they had to be sure. The team found plans at many of the synthetic plants, most of them now in ruins, inspected what machinery had survived, collecting reams of information along the way. Eventually, several tips led them to a 13th century castle in Reelkirchen in northwestern Germany. Outside the castle walls, they found a group of urchins playing with rolled-up balls of paper, which turned out to be schematics for machines used in classified synthetic processes. And across a fetid moat and inside the castle itself, they stumbled on six rooms filled to the ceilings with memos and blueprints that told the tale of Germany’s synthetic breakthroughs.
The Americans were dumbfounded. The Nazis, it turned out, had been years ahead of the Allies in their work, reliably producing lubricating oils and fuel for both automobiles and planes. It was something the rest of the industrialized world hadn’t even dreamt was possible.
“Our discoveries in Germany were of immense value in terms of national security,” announced Edward B. Peck, a technical advisor to Standard Oil. “They eliminated … years of work.” The Saturday Evening Post quantified the discovery. “We added 25 years of experience to our own knowledge and have caught up in the keenly competitive world race for synthetic liquid fuel development. The government wants private industry to benefit immediately from information which could be of use in the prosecution of the war against Japan.”
No definitive link between the secretive mission and Eric Erickson has ever been found. But Erickson worked for both Standard Oil and Texas Oil in the ‘20s, and it’s difficult to believe his detailed coordinates of the synthetic plants, which were available to the Joint Chiefs of Staff through the OSS, didn’t help lead to the discoveries in Reelkirchen and elsewhere. Or that the stated aim of the mission – to beat Japan to the production of synthetic oils and safeguard American lives – wasn’t combined with dreams of the immense post-war profits that could be gained from the German breakthroughs.
After the war, the Bureau of Mines converted a surplus Army ammonia plant in Louisiana, Missouri into a hydrogenation facility, using the information discovered in Germany. The plant, hard on the banks of the Mississippi River, was able to produce high-quality gasoline from coal at a competitive, but slightly higher, price than the domestic, drilled gas on the market. Pre
sident Truman’s energy advisers believed a fuel shortage was coming, and in 1948, James V. Forrestal, the Secretary of Defense, pushed an $8 billion synthetic fuel program that would vastly expand the Missouri experiment. But Big Petroleum – led by Standard Oil of Indiana – stepped in, realizing that they’d lost control of the “synfuel” mission to the government, thereby endangering their profits. They objected vociferously to the idea of expanding the synthetic fuel program. That resistance, along with cheap new imports from the Middle East and South America, effectively killed the project, and the Missouri plant closed in 1953. The dream of national energy independence, pursued by the Third Reich, uncovered by Erickson and imported to America, was over.
As for the spy himself, only a few people on the Allied side knew about his role in the Oil Campaign, but they were unequivocal in their praise. “There is little doubt that Erickson achieved one of the truly great espionage coups of the war,” said the OSS’s Wilho Tikander. Erickson himself didn’t talk about what he’d done. When writing about the mission in the post-war years, he would typically say something like, “It was my privilege to serve the Allies in a small way.” He collected his $1 in salary from the Allies and that was that. While other heroes were being lionized in the American press and writing their memoirs, Erickson, like most spies after their work has been completed, stepped back into the shadows.
Chapter Thirteen
Fame
After the armistice with Germany, the United States embassy in Stockholm announced that it was having a celebratory luncheon at the five-star Grand Hotel. The guest list included prominent Swedes, diplomats and expats: the people who’d been rooting, secretly or not, for the Allies to win. The Jewish construction magnate Max Gumpel was among the invited guests. When all the attendees were seated, they noticed there were two chairs still sitting empty. A few moments later, the U.S. Minister to Sweden stood up and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce out honored guests.” From a side room, side by side, Prince Carl and Eric Erickson emerged. There was an audible gasp.
The Secret Agent Page 7
