Brown, like many young men in such circumstances, replied that it was too early to make plans for the future. He had another year or so to serve, and when he was discharged he would have to find a job. Of course he loved her, he promised, and had every intention of marrying her, but for the moment it was not possible to make any firm plans.
Bellezza was not to be put off. She was tired of Benevento, and Earl Brown was asking too much to expect her to sit around placidly waiting for him to turn up for a night's dalliance every two months. She wanted to go to Salzburg with him.
He protested: "But I'd have to ask Dominic, and I guess he'd have to check with Jim Milano. I don't know at all what they'd say."
"Why do you have to ask them at all? Why not just take me? I could hide in your truck."
Brown was appalled. He protested that they would never get away with it, that they would be discovered and she would be sent back in disgrace. She was unmoved.
"Why can't I stay with you in Salzburg?" she asked. He had to admit that there were frequent visits to the enlisted men's barracks. There was a rule that, to keep up appearances, women were admitted only after dark and had to leave before dawn, but Brown conceded that the rule was seldom enforced. He insisted that he must consult Dominic, but in vain. Bellezza played her trump: either he promised to take her with him to Salzburg, or she would go back to her sister immediately.
Earl Brown capitulated, and the next day, when he and Del Greco set out for home with their load of liquor, Bellezza was comfortably ensconced among the bottles in a nest of blankets Brown had contrived for her. They drove west to Naples and then headed north toward Rome. Somewhere along the road Bellezza banged on the back of the cab and demanded that they stop. She needed to use a bathroom.
Astonished and enraged, Del Greco demanded an explanation. Sergeant Brown explained, with a careful mixture of contrition and impudence.
"It's Bellezza. You remember her. She insisted on coming to Salzburg on a visit, and I couldn't say no to her. I'm seriously thinking of taking her back to the States with me when I'm discharged, and I thought it was time she saw the world."
"But what on earth is Jim going to say? What about her papers? I'll bet she hasn't anything that would get her across the frontier, let alone let her stay in Austria. Anyway, she can hardly speak English."
Brown turned supplicating. "I thought you could help her. You know all about arranging false papers, and it shouldn't be too difficult to set Bellezza up."
"And what about Jim? What do you suppose he's going to say?"
"I guess that's a bridge we'll have to cross when we get there. How about it, Dominic?"
Del Greco had nothing of the regular officer about him, and Earl Brown was an old friend.
"Well, okay," he said. "First of all, we have to find a rest stop for the girl. If we don't have any papers for her, we'll have to hide her away again when we hit the border." He was rewarded by a brilliant smile from their passenger, who now moved into the cab of the truck. She sat between the two men on the long drive home, ducking back among her blankets for the border crossing and for their arrival in Salzburg.
Earl carried her off to his room in the hotel the enlisted men used, and Del Greco delivered the booze to the Civilian Censorship Detachment's supply room. He had originally come to Austria with that unit and had set up his laboratory there, with funnels, hoses, bottle-cleaning facilities, and, of course, a large supply of demijohns. When he had been transferred to the Operations Branch, he had left all his equipment in the Censorship supply room, keeping full control of it. No one in Censorship objected: they, too, benefited from his "spiritual trips."
Del Greco was always helped on these occasions by a temporary, unpaid supply officer, Louie Strubel, one of the most useful and colorful people in Salzburg. He was tall and slim, dressed elegantly at all times, and wore a monocle. He looked every inch the ambassador, which was not surprising: his father was a German diplomat who had been posted to Sofia as consul general, where he had married a Bulgarian woman. Strubel had been born there and had spent the first twenty years of his life moving from city to city as his father's diplomatic career dictated. Those postings had included London, and Louie had spent three years in an English school.
Later in life, he had become an exporter of bananas from the Canary Islands. His chief market had been North Africa, and he had spent the first part of the war in Algiers. He had left for Europe shortly before the Allied invasion. Milano and his friends could never get him to explain how he had managed to live out the rest of the war in Germany and Europe without being conscripted. Whenever they asked, he avoided answering, replying merely that it was too dull a story to relate. It may be that he had kept a Bulgarian passport for those occasions when he was in Germany and a German one to use in Sofia. At any event, he had been in Bulgaria until the Russians were at the gates, at which time he had prudently withdrawn. At the end of the war, he had been in Salzburg. He had acquired a large collection of stamps, especially those issued by Germany and its allies and satellites, and he had opened the first stamp shop in town. Dominic Del Greco and Jim Alongi were both avid philatelists and had soon met Strubel.
To begin with, they had bought stamps. But then they had discovered that Strubel had an uncanny ability to find things. All the usual trade patterns had been broken down by the war, and a man who could find his way through the ruins to lay his hands on that multitude of goods the U.S. Army needed was a treasure beyond price. He could locate glass, silver, porcelain, souvenirs, furniture new and antique; he could find masons, plumbers, and carpenters; he could discover tools and supplies, dressmakers and the fabrics and materials they needed to work. It was all most extraordinary, and the Americans also discovered that his researches, which extended throughout all the Western zones of Austria, could be greatly helped with a supply of booze.
This explained Strubel's presence in the supply room when Del Greco set about emptying his demijohns of booze into variousshaped bottles. It was all part of the trade pattern of postwar Europe. The operation took place the day after the return from Naples. Del Greco and Strubel spent a profitable morning. Strubel went forth with a few bottles to use for marketing purposes. Del Greco stashed away the rest in the appropriate bins, and his task ended there-though he had no doubt that he had not heard the last of Bellezza.
Jim Alongi, whose duties included a monthly inspection of the barracks, soon discovered Bellezza. He urged Del Greco to report her presence to Jim Milano before she was exposed, but for nearly a month Del Greco avoided the hard necessity. At last he could ignore her no longer. Everyone in the unit knew about her, and it was only a question of days before Milano heard of this new addition to his charges. Besides, Bellezza was being indiscreet. Alongi marched in to Del Greco one morning and announced: "I'm off to tell Jim about Bellezza. You'd better come too-or else you can wait for five minutes for Jim to haul you up."
When they entered Milano's office, Del Greco confessed, "Jim, I've done something dumb I ought to have told you about before."
"Does that mean I have to put on my chaplain's dog collar? Bless you, my son, for confessing. Now, what's the story?"
"When we came back from Benevento on the last booze run, Earl stowed away his girlfriend in the back of the truck. She didn't emerge until we were halfway home. I stupidly allowed her to come on to Salzburg, and she's been here ever since, living in the barracks. I guess I fell for it because he said he wanted to marry her and take her back to the States."
Then Alongi took up the tale. "I should have told you about this before, Jim, sorry. Anyway, things are coming to a crisis now. Bellezza has been cheating on Earl, and it's only a matter of time before he finds out."
Milano listened to all this with astonishment. Now he learned that not only was there an Italian girl hiding out in the unit, she was also spreading her favors around. "You're sure of this?" he asked.
"Yes, she's been seeing one of the other guys when Earl's not there. He's even given her a
watch from the PX, which she wears when Earl's away."
Wristwatches were among the greatest treasures of postwar Europe. There was none available anywhere outside Switzerland, and a girl who managed to get her boyfriend to give her one was doing exceptionally well. Conversely, a watch would often buy the favors of the most virtuous lady. Bellezza, evidently, was far from virtuous.
"So brother Earl's a cornuto, as they say in Naples. Serves him right. Dominic, you should never have let her come along. You should have put her on the first train back to Benevento just as soon as you found her.
"Anyway, the thing is to ship her right back where she came from. We won't tell Earl about her playing around. Dominic, would you call Earl and tell him to come in to see me, and I'll try to talk some sense into him. I hope I don't have to tell him about his horns."
A few minutes later, Brown appeared, sheepish and embarrassed.
"I guess it's about Bellezza, Jim," he said. "I suppose you've heard the whole story."
"No, Earl, I haven't. You seem to have got into a first-rate mess, so why don't you tell me how you propose to get out of it."
"Well, you see, I was really thinking of taking her back to the States and marrying her. That's why I let her talk me into bringing her here. But after a month with her, I've changed my mind. She's not the girl I want to marry, and I just want to get her back to Benevento."
Milano professed to be sympathetic and understanding. "If that's your decision, Earl, then I'm sure it's the right one. What you must do is put her on a train for Benevento-and you can buy the ticket. Dominic can give her a passport. I think I'd better tell her the news. She won't argue if I order her home."
"Well, thanks, Jim. It's really good of you to tell her yourself. I was trying to nerve myself up to sending her home, but I didn't fancy breaking the news."
"One last thing: if you ever do anything as crazy as this again, I will personally break your neck."
An hour later, Milano's secretary brought in the famous Bellezza. She sat demurely on a chair opposite his desk, her knees pressed together, her feet tucked neatly under her chair. She was completely composed and evidently knew what was coming. They spoke, of course, in Italian.
"Are you going to send me back to Italy, Major?" she asked. "That's right, signorina. There can't be any question, and no delays. Earl and Captain Del Greco will take you down to Bolzano and put you on the next train to Naples. You can get a bus from there to Benevento. They'll give you the price of the ticket and pocket money for the journey."
"Thank you, Major. I'm sorry for all the trouble I caused you."
"That's all right, Bellezza. Just be on that train-and buona fortuna."
First thing the next morning, Brown, Del Greco, and Bellezza departed from Salzburg for the long drive down to Bolzano on the Italian side of the frontier. They arrived in time to put her on the evening train for Rome and Naples, and she and Brown said a fond farewell. Del Greco noticed that as they left her, and as she settled into her seat, she produced a most elegant wristwatch from her purse and strapped it on.
Jim Milano's tour in Austria ended in July 1950, and before he left he wound up the Rat Line (see Chapter 20). Six months later, it was reopened by his successors for one last client. The client was Klaus Barbie, a German officer, a Nazi, who was wanted in France for war crimes. Using the Rat Line for such a man was a complete break with the rules Milano had set. He had made sure that no Nazis, no war criminals, no former members of the SS, the SA, or the Gestapo could use it to escape Europe. With the one exception of the Nazi woman, Trudi, who had persuaded a Soviet officer to desert, the line had been used exclusively for refugees and deserters from the East.
Barbie had been head of the Gestapo in Lyons, France, during the occupation. He had murdered hundreds of people and deported hundreds of Jews to Auschwitz. At the end of the war, he had escaped arrest and then managed to ingratiate himself with American counterintelligence agents in Germany, giving them valuable intelligence on Communist agitators there. In 1950, the French were closing in on him. His American protectors, wanting to conceal the fact that they had employed a war criminal, sent him down the Rat Line to safety in Bolivia.
Thirty years later, when he was at last arrested and extradited to France, the fact that the Americans had protected him after the war and used his services was revealed. There was a great public outcry and a government inquiry. Jim Milano, who until then had known nothing of the Barbie episode, was brought out of obscurity to testify, and the history of the Rat Line became public.
Barbie had become police chief in Lyons in 1942. Earlier in the war, in 1940 and 1941, he had participated in the first anti-Jewish operations in the Netherlands. He had then joined the SS and had taken part in the invasion of the Soviet Union. The mass slaughter of Jews by special units of the SS had begun then. These experiences had served as ample qualification for the post of torturer and intelligence officer in France. His task in Lyons had been to fight the French Resistance and to deport Jews to the death camps. He had been highly successful in both occupations. His greatest coup was infiltrating the highest councils of the Resistance and arresting Jean Moulin, General de Gaulle's chief representative in France and the greatest hero of the Resistance, in July 1943. In an excess of sadism over operational requirements, Barbie had himself beaten Moulin to death without extorting any useful information from him. (In 1964, Moulin's ashes were buried in the Pantheon in Paris.)
Barbie had continued his Gestapo work until the Liberation. He had personally tortured many of his prisoners, often killing them. In April 1944, he had raided a secret Jewish orphanage in the village of Izieu, in the mountains above Lyons, and arrested all the forty-three children there. They had been deported to Auschwitz, where fortyone of them were murdered, together with five of the teachers who were looking after them. He had supervised the trains loaded with French and foreign Jews that were sent east (the last left Lyons a few days before it was liberated). In the last months of the occupation, as Resistance activity increased, he had murdered hundreds of prisoners and led German units into the countryside in pursuit of the maquisards, burning villages and slaughtering their inhabitants. Barbie and the rest of the Gestapo contingent had escaped from the city on August 17, 1944, just before the Americans had arrived, and had destroyed all their files. It had taken several years after the war for the French police to discover Barbie's name and to establish the extent of his crimes. By that time, he had been introduced to the U.S. Army's Counter-Intelligence Corps in Germany and had been hired as an anti-Communist intelligence officer. He helped them by infiltrating local Communist Party organizations and also by spying on the French zone of Germany, on the pretext that France was riddled with Communists and the U.S. Army's security demanded information on their activities.
The French discovered that Barbie was living in the American zone and made repeated efforts to have him extradited to stand trial. The American High Command denied all knowledge of his presence, even though the CIC had produced him several times for French interrogators who were preparing the trial of one of the French traitors he had employed in Lyons. The CIC unit in Bavaria, the 66th, based in Augsburg, informed the American High Commission in Bonn and the army command in Frankfurt that they had lost track of Barbie, and those higher officials took care never to question the lie. The CIC justified its deception with the claim that Barbie was too valuable an intelligence asset to be lost. When this story became untenable, they told their superiors that they had never known that Barbie was wanted as a war criminal. They pretended that his antiResistance activities had been all part of the war effort, and therefore understandable, and denied all knowledge of his actions against the Jews. They offered the same defense twenty-five years later, when the matter was investigated by the U.S. Justice Department. None of their excuses is remotely credible: the Gestapo had been specifically ruled a criminal organization at Nuremberg, and various directives from Allied headquarters and the American political and military command
in Germany forbade all contact with its officers.
In their favor, it can be argued that, at least after 1949, the Western Allies, as a matter of policy, suspended all war crime prosecutions and consciously allowed former Nazi officials, SS officers, judges, and others to assume senior posts in West German government and industry. Nazi judges, who had presided over "people's courts" and ordered the execution of all who opposed Hitler, returned to the bench as honored German judges (none of them was ever tried for his crimes). The advent of the cold war meant that West Germany had to be restored as an ally against the Soviet Union, and the new government had no wish to conduct a protracted and difficult purge of the tens of thousands of Germans who had participated in the crimes of the Nazi regime. Only those directly involved in the death camps were prosecuted, and even that concession to justice was a protracted and largely ineffectual affair. Why, then, should not the CIC in Augsburg avail itself of the services of a junior Gestapo official whose contacts throughout Germany were so good? Indeed, as former SS men were allowed to resume senior positions in German society, the network of comrades became a very valuable source of intelligence-and Barbie's chief use to the Americans was that he was a trusted member of the SS old-boys' network. Furthermore, he was an expert in anti-French intelligence gathering at a time when the Americans greatly feared the dangers of the French Communist Party, one of the organizations Barbie had fought during the war. Last, although Barbie was the "Butcher of Lyons," he was a minor war criminal. There were thousands of more dangerous men on the loose. He was no Eichmann or Mengele. General Heinz Lammerding, who had commanded the Nazi division that wiped out a French village, Oradour-sur-Glane, in 1944, was living openly in Germany despite every effort by France to have him extradited. Why bother with an SS captain who was actually useful to the CIC?
By 1950, this deception was becoming increasingly difficult. Various American officers lied repeatedly to the French about Barbie, first denying all knowledge of him, then pretending that he no longer worked for them and that his whereabouts were unknown. Barbie himself lived in constant fear of arrest. He was by then listed as a war criminal by the German police, and they might stumble across him at any moment: the Americans could try to hide him, but by 1950 they could not protect him from the German police if he were discovered. At this moment, one of the 66th CIC officers paid a visit to the 430th CIC in Salzburg and learned of the existence of the Rat Line. Milano's simple and elegant method of disposing of troublesome "visitors," all of them (except Trudi) defectors from the Soviet Union or its satellites, had been suspended when the CIA began taking over the operations of Army Intelligence, and Milano himself had left Europe. The line could still be used, however. The "Good Father" still had access to travel documents and visas to South America, and the 430th agreed to make him available to their colleagues from Augsburg.
Soldiers, Spies, and the Rat Line Page 27
