I swam across the Rhine [he recounted to us] and was picked up on the other side. I had been told that I could come to Switzerland to start studying. No problem. We had many friends on account of my father’s profession. You probably know this from your own family. However, I simply could not get an exit visa. It was simply too difficult. It had to go via Berlin and the Allied Control Council, goodness knows what else. So I decided to do without one. I watched the sentries and frontier guards for three hours and then swam over. One had learnt that sort of thing since the age of nine – we had been brought up as soldiers.
So there I was, over on the other side, looking quite obviously like a German, wearing a sopping wet suit of clothes, and I marched into a café where – and I regard this as the most spectacular personal coup of my life – I managed to borrow the money for a telephone call to Oerlikon. And then a great big beautiful motor car arrived with a driver and every luxury, as if it was the Pope that was being picked up, and into this car crept a wet, shivering little chap, clutching a receipt for 2 Francs 50 for the telephone call, which the chauffeur had settled on my behalf. Apart from that he refused to exchange a single word with me.
Then I entered a house, a veritable palace, the home of my father’s friend. It was like coming home on vacation, as a pedestrian, from hell. Unimaginable.
I began by exercising horses every morning, as I had no work permit in Switzerland, and no passport, and in any case it was difficult at that time as a German. The final incident of this whole affair came during my Swiss period. An Englishman and an American came to see me. They had obtained official permission from the Swiss to interrogate me. At that time I was at the Eidgenössische Hochschule – the Swiss Federal High School. They came in, accompanied by the Swiss police, and demanded, ‘Where is Captain Neumann?’ I answered their questions. If one leaves Germany without an exit visa, as I had done, it is best to be somewhat careful. And that was the last I heard about the whole business.
Only once in the next ten years – for a brief period of two weeks – did he visit Germany again. This was four or five months after he had gone to Switzerland, he recalled, when he heard that his mother was seriously ill and it was feared that she might die. His return to Germany was necessarily illegal, the German explained. ‘I could not get an entry permit into Germany from Switzerland because I never had an exit permit from Germany in the first place. I did receive a Swiss “Letter of Safe Conduct”, but I could not travel to Germany with this because there was no official body in Switzerland which would stamp a visa on it for me. So, being then a physically active person, I said (speaking in English): “Same way out as in – input equals output.” And so I swam over again, into the French Zone, got a few lifts, walked a few yards – and was home again.’
By a curious coincidence it seems that the same day the German was discharged from prison, his friend the American major was honourably separated from the US Army, ostensibly in order to study in Switzerland in accordance with the GI Bill of Rights. That day, or the next, he too arrived at the Swiss border, bringing with him the attractive German girl who was soon to become his wife. Some said that the Garmisch resident and the American major crossed over the border together. There is no evidence for this but it is known that for a while both of them shared the same house at 50 Aarbergergasse in Berne, a very desirable residence in the centre of the town, where by a curious coincidence they were joined at one stage by the Swiss Secret Service man – an advocate and doctor of jurisprudence called Armin Läderach – with whom they had had strange dealings when they both lived in Garmisch. Later the German was best man at the American’s wedding in Berne in June 1947. At the end of September both men left Berne, the German for foreign parts, the American (with his wife) for a small lakeside town near Lucerne, where he studied law for a few months before finally returning to the States in March 1948. An important stage in the story was at an end.
16. Ober the Border
The next episode in the story was partly triggered off by and partly revolved around a character with whom we have already made a fleeting acquaintance in an earlier chapter. This was the Polish DP and one-time member of the former circle of Hubert von Blücher – Ivar Buxell. An unusual person by any standards.
Ivar Buxell was a man of many parts, some overt, some covert, many mysterious; but by far his greatest part was that of professional survivor. Outside of the Allied forces, only a tiny minority of survivors in Germany rose above the morass of suffering humanity to profit from the chaos in which they found themselves. These were the true survivors, the masters of the survival game. They came not just from Germany but from all over central and eastern Europe, wherever war and conquest had destroyed the normal fabric of society. Such people were the Artful Dodgers of the post-war world, men and women whose special attributes – be they social, professional, financial, sexual or linguistic – enabled them to exploit the opportunities and lucky breaks that arose out of the extraordinary disarray of the time. One such survivor was Ivar Buxell.
Buxell was in many ways a typical product – and victim – of his age and geography. The vicissitudes of parentage, political frontiers and war deprived him of a single abiding homeland, so that though he was to become a citizen of several states, he was a true native of none, equally fluent in German, Russian, Polish and Spanish, and speaking English, French, Czech and Ukrainian besides. Born a German Bait in Lithuania, brought up in Russia, educated in Switzerland, Buxell had worked as a shipping expert in the Polish Ministry of Commerce in Gdynia and Warsaw until the outbreak of war. But the German invasion of Poland was to reshape Ivar Buxell’s life as irrevocably as it reshaped every Pole’s.
The Nazis provided Buxell with his first big test of survival. The Gestapo decreed that he was not a Pole but a Volkdeutscher of German Baltic stock. He became the partner of a paint factory in Warsaw, manufacturing camouflage paint for the German Air Force on the Eastern Front. At the same time he became a member of the German Military Intelligence (Abwehr) in Warsaw. His loyalty to the German cause seems to have been a matter of convenience rather than conviction, however. While he sported a portrait of Adolf Hitler on his office wall in Warsaw for the benefit of his German business clients, his Polish partner in the office next door sported a portrait of the Free Polish Leader, General Sikorski. ‘I did not care for Hitler,’ Buxell said later. ‘I was not anti-Nazi. I just had an antipathy for Hitler. Most of the Abwehr in Warsaw were anti-Hitler.’ After the war it was rumoured that Buxell had in fact been a double agent, working for both the Abwehr and the Polish Home Army. But he has consistently denied this. ‘I was a member of the Abwehr,’ he affirmed later, ‘but never a double agent. On the contrary, we had an order from our Director to help the Polish and the Jewish people.’
A few hours before the Polish uprising in September 1944, Buxell left Warsaw and headed for Berlin. In February 1945 he made his way to Prague, ostensibly to help activate the anti-Soviet armies of Russian and Ukrainian rebels under General Vlassov and General Shandruk, but in reality to obtain new papers and passes, without which his safety, even his life, remained in jeopardy.
For Ivar Buxell was in a precarious position. He had lost all contact with his headquarters. His old Abwehr documents were out of date. For the sake of his own personal security he turned to the Ukrainian General Shandruk for help. ‘General Shandruk supplied me with all necessary documents as a member of his staff,’ Buxell later recalled, ‘as well as with an order to organise for him in Garmisch a new Intelligence Office. The General and I knew perfectly well long before that all was lost.’ It was, of course, purely a stratagem for survival. There was about as much point in opening an Intelligence Office for a virtually non-existent army in a war with only days to run as there was in opening a zoo or a bank. But Ukrainian papers were better than no papers at all – and Garmisch was a better place than most in which to hole up in the coming chaos.
So, in the early spring of 1945, some weeks ahead of the American 10th Armored Divis
ion, Ivar Buxell arrived in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where he was later joined by his brother Erhard. His arrival was viewed with suspicion by the local Gestapo chief. Buxell recalled him asking: ‘What are you doing here? Are you a spy or something?’ No, Buxell told him, Abwehr. ‘But what are you doing?’ the Gestapo chief persisted. ‘Are you a deserter?’ ‘No,’ Buxell replied. ‘I am with the Ukrainian Division, SS Ausland. Why don’t you ring my Belinda office, telephone number Adele 208, Berlin. My cover is such and such, my code name is so and so.’ All day, Buxell recalled later, the local Nazis in Garmisch tried ringing the number in Berlin. ‘They didn’t know what I knew,’ Buxell recounted. ‘The office had been abandoned.’
So Ivar Buxell was allowed to stay in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. He found accommodation with his family in a large and unusual guesthouse belonging to a Frau Hirth who catered exclusively for famous writers, musicians and aristocrats such as Ernst Jünger, Helen Keller, Richard Strauss and Prince Ludwig of Hesse. The house was under the protection of the Gestapo, and in addition to Ivar Buxell and his wife and three-year-old son a number of other specially privileged foreign families were billeted there, including several fugitive members of the French Vichy Government and the family of Mussolini’s Commander-in-Chief in North Africa, Marshal Graziani. Unlike most of the other guests, Buxell stayed on at Haus Hirth after the American CIC requisitioned the place as their HQ, and thus became familiar with several of the CIC special agents operating in the Garmisch area.
Buxell had come a long way. The years as a maritime expert in the Polish government, a Russian specialist in German Intelligence and (briefly) a German adviser in the Ukrainian Army were now behind him. In his 40th year, at a crossroads in the history of the world, he found himself forced to play yet another role in yet another unforeseen scenario in a land ruled by people from an entirely different continent: the Americans. With his Polish ID card and passport and his Russian and German birth certificates, the Americans did not know what to make of Ivar Buxell. ‘The CIC lieutenant was very confused,’ he recalled. ‘Eventually he decided, solomaically; “you are stateless.” So I became a Stateless Displaced Person (DP).’ Now he was required to play the greatest trick of survival in his life.
Ivar Buxell was formidably equipped for this difficult virtuoso role. He was well accustomed to adjusting to changing foreign regimes, languages and lifestyles. Small, wiry and pixie-faced, with grey hair, blue eyes and a dark complexion, he abounded in a quick, nervous energy, radiated charm, bonhomie and intelligence, and was quick to establish a widespread network of well-placed and like-minded friends who constituted an essential adjunct to the battle for survival. ‘You can only survive in times after war or revolution,’ Ivar commented years later, ‘If you are smarter than the other people. People started to think how to make money and how to live again. We were all criminals . . .’
Ivar joined the local Polish Committee, drawn from the ranks of some 6,000 Polish officers who had been incarcerated in a prisoner of war camp at Murnau, near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and before long he was making regular motor trips to the Swiss border to pick up Red Cross parcels provided for the Committee. The freedom to travel – if only as far as a foreign border – was a highly prized dispensation in Germany after the war and was to prove a valuable privilege for Buxell and his friends in the months to come.
At some point not long after the American occupation of Garmisch, Buxell’s widening radius of local acquaintances finally took in certain individuals with whom his name was to be intimately associated for as long as they continued to live in Garmisch. In due course the black-market and smuggling activities of these men were to come under the scrutiny of the American authorities; and yet, though Buxell was to be subject to the most extreme forms of interrogation then practised in the American Zone of Germany, it was not his name which was to be perpetuated in the folk memory of those wild post-war Garmisch days. This is surprising. For out of all the people engaged in the derring-do of that time, only Ivar Buxell has an investigative file which has survived to the present day.
For reasons which will be revealed later, much of the documentation of the various official investigations mounted in Garmisch-Partenkirchen during the first three years after the end of the war disappeared under mysterious circumstances. What was left resembled archaeological fragments, potsherds and papyri that by chance had survived the ravages of time to prove the existence, if not the totality, of some vanished civilisation. These bits and pieces, culled from various sources and cross-referenced without explanation under Buxell’s name in the archives of the US Army’s Intelligence Agency in Fort Meade, Maryland, give a direct glimpse into the cross-currents of suspicion, denunciation, accusation and counter-accusation that eddied and swirled around Garmisch-Partenkirchen in the murky times following the end of the war.
By the summer of 1946 it had begun to dawn on the Garmisch CIC that all was not right in the area. Various rumours and allegations about the fate of some of the Reichsbank dollars had spread round the town and these became linked with other rumours and allegations about illegal border crossing, narcotic trafficking and other serious black-market activities. Some kind of crisis seems to have occurred round about July. By now the CID were tapping suspects’ phones all over Garmisch, and an intercept was put on the phone of Ivar Buxell, on whom American suspicion was increasingly directed. Whether Buxell knew this or not, he began to feel the moment for his own discreet retirement from the scene was growing near. It was not easy to escape from Germany. A year and a half after the end of the war the country was still sealed off from the outside world like a leper colony. But for those in the know escape routes existed just as they had done during the war. The crucial need was for papers – passport, visa, travel and car documents, passes, accreditations and all the rest of the bureaucratic lumber that was required to enable a stateless person to leave an enemy country in the troubled wake of a world war.
Buxell turned for help to another man of the shadows, a former Polish PW from Murnau called Boleslaw Kasimierski (his wartime underground name). For the last year Kasimierski had been making monthly trips to Paris using false papers, purchased for 10,000 marks from a Polish Jew in Munich, which identified him as an officer of the 2nd Polish Corps. Kasimierski’s ostensible purpose for these trips was to search for his missing family, but in reality it was to do business in smuggled cars, jewels and other merchandise with Polish black-market contacts in Paris. From one of these, who had connections with the Polish Military Mission in Paris, Kasimierski was now able to purchase for 51,000 francs three false sets of travel orders – one for himself and one each for the two Buxell brothers – together with two blank car titles and a set of false personal identification papers issued by the Polish military authorities in Nice, France. Equipped with these documents, the Buxell brothers and their Polish friend were now in a position to make their bid for a new life in a new world.
They set off from Garmisch on 7 December 1946. In addition to carrying false Polish papers, they wore false Polish uniforms, with 5-pointed officers’ stars on their shoulder tabs and the designation POLAND and the Polish Corps flash – a pine tree on a square white background – on the upper left-hand sleeve. Driving two cars, a BMW and a Fiat, the three men headed westward towards the French Zone via Füssen and Kempten – ‘the route they generally use on such trips’, CIC Headquarters in Frankfurt reported subsequently. ‘We went in two cars,’ Ivar explained later, ‘I in order to sell one of the cars to raise funds to go to Venezuela. It was too dangerous to carry dollars.’ On 9 December the men left the American Zone, crossed the border safely, and headed north for the French capital.
In Paris Kasimierski and the Buxell brothers parted company. For Ivar it was the first time for years that he had lived in a country that was not under foreign occupation or siege, be it Russian, German or American. He drew a deep breath and rejoiced in the freedom of the streets and cafés of the capital. The respite did not last long. A week after his arrival Ivar a
nd his brother were arrested in their hotel by the French police and thrown into La Santé Prison, then packed to the roof with over 12,000 inmates. The next day they were brought before the examining magistrate, a Bourbon prince, and told they were to be charged with illegal border crossing and illegal sale of a motor car. They were granted bail, but since they had no money left they asked the magistrate for permission to go to the Jewish quarter in Paris under police guard to try and raise the money for the bail. In a highly unusual relaxation of normal judicial procedure, permission was granted and Ivar, escorted by a French policeman, set off on his bizarre quest to the Jewish quarter, a huddle of Kosher cafés, moneylenders and oriental curio shops in the narrow streets of the Marais quarter of the city. Eventually Ivar found a trustworthy person in a café who was prepared to help him even though he was not a Jew. Together they worked out an arrangement whereby the Jew would contact Ivar’s friends in Garmisch and persuade them to send a package of diamonds to Paris, where they could be sold to raise the cash for the bail. Ivar then returned to the clamour and dark of the Santé prison. He was destined to celebrate Christmas there, and New Year.
Four days later the phone rang in the house of his future wife, Nora Rouselle, in Garmisch. A voice spoke from Munich. ‘Your husband and his brother have had an accident. They are in Paris in a “hospital”. You must come to Munich immediately and bring some diamonds with you.’ This was evidently something that could be arranged almost at the drop of a hat – although it was now Christmas Eve. On the day after Christmas Frau Rouselle was able to make the necessary preliminary arrangements.
Nazi Gold Page 37
