The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  IV

  This time Lanny was put up at one of the hotels the military had taken over. Monck came to his room. There was no chance of dictaphones or spies in this place, so they did not have to go for a walk.

  The intelligence man reported, ‘There has been no word from either Fritz or Anna. The reason I have called on you has to do with Kurt Meissner. He made you a pledge that he would give up all anti-American activities. He has been breaking that pledge right along. The fact that he made it gives us a hold over him, and we mean to come down on him and come down hard’.

  ‘You’re really sure he’s been breaking it, Monck’?

  ‘We know it positively. We have a man who has got into the Bund. Of course you mustn’t say a word about that to anyone. The group is active, and they are men who will stop at nothing. It amounts to a conspiracy, and we cannot permit it to go on spreading’.

  ‘The passing of counterfeit is still going on?’

  ‘The outfit has been moved to Hungary, and we have no certainty that Kurt is still connected with it. He has taken up a better-paying line of activity—treasure hunting’.

  ‘I guessed as much from your letter; I had read Treasure Island as a boy’.

  ‘I assumed that you would have. There is quite an extraordinary situation in the Alpine Redoubt, as the Nazis called it—one that will provide material for the writers of adventure stories for the rest of time, I imagine. You know how diligent the Nazis were in accumulating treasure. They confiscated everything the Jews had and everything their political opponents had, and when the Allied armies were advancing they loaded it into trucks, and whole treasure trains came up into the south-eastern mountains. They buried it in caves and in salt mines—you were in the salt mines at Alt Aussee and saw it’.

  ‘I was more interested in the art works’, Lanny said. ‘That was my business. But I looked into a few chests full of gold vessels and jewels. I remember one chest full of teeth that had gold fillings—you don’t forget a sight like that.’

  ‘They knocked the gold teeth from the mouths of millions of Jews’, said this man who had been working as a secret agent against the Nazis all through the war and before it. ‘They took off the finger rings and tore the earrings from the corpses before they threw them into the crematories. And when they saw that we were coming toward their Alpine Redoubt and realised they couldn’t defend it, they took the chests full of treasure and sunk them in the lakes; they buried them in the crypts of churches, and in the forests, and even under the paving in public plazas. No one can state the amount, but I would wager there must be fifty million dollars’ worth of treasure of one sort or another hidden in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps’.

  ‘Make it twice that’, said Lanny. ‘Fifty million might go for Göring alone. He carried a whole trainload that we caught near Berchtesgaden’.

  ‘Well, now they are digging it up, a little here and a little there, and a lot of the top people and their wives are living in luxury on it. Kurt Meissner is in on it’.

  ‘I had the idea he would think it was a matter of honour not to use such wealth for his personal needs’.

  ‘You’re mistaken. The way they figure it, they have to live, and if they’re working for the cause they are entitled to a living. They dig it up and take it away, hidden in trucks; they get it to the ports and carry it to Spain or the Argentine, and invest it in great estates and business enterprises—there’s been a lot of scandal about it and squabbling among the top people. They have accused some of their former chiefs as grafters, but the answer is, What is the use of letting the wealth lie idle? Why not put it to work and make money for the cause? They send back part of the income, and it’s being used to print and circulate propaganda—the kind of stuff that Kurt Meissner is writing, and that they believe is inspired’.

  ‘I’ve heard we are getting a lot of the treasure ourselves’, said Lanny, and his friend replied, ‘We get tips and send a party and find the stuff, or sometimes we find we are too late. There will be shots up in the hills at night, and we go and find a hole dug in the ground, and the digging tools lying about, and a lot of blood. They carry off the wounded and the dead, but they leave the tools because it wouldn’t do to be caught with them. I suppose they tie weights to the bodies and dump them into the lakes’.

  ‘A nice line of activity you’ve picked out for me’, said Lanny with a smile, not altogether of amusement. ‘No doubt the government can use the money, but I’d rather pay my share in the form of taxes’.

  ‘It’s not just a question of the money’, said Monck. ‘It’s a question of the use the Nazis are putting it to. We’ll have to get out of this country sooner or later and leave them behind; they have their plans to win over the new generation and prepare for a comeback. You know what the Germans are saying already, ‘We had it better under Hitler”’.

  ‘Yes’, Lanny had to admit, ‘and they did, before he went to war’.

  ‘All the old gang are in on this thing, the wives and the families of the worst war criminals, those we hanged or have in prison now. The families of these men are enjoying themselves in Bavaria. When the income-tax collectors come along they have no explanation of the sources of their fortunes—just a smile and perhaps a bribe. The Strelitz family—you know that wholesale killer—is running an electrical business in Austria with branches all over. When we go to arrest such criminals we find they have been spirited away to Egypt or Morocco or Brazil or wherever, and we know that the money for the trip came from the sale of gold bars on the black market. There are regular operators who travel to Salzburg or Bregenz and buy up the stuff and smuggle it out by way of Italy. Sometimes we catch them with gold vases or pieces of jewellery which we can identify from photographs provided for us by the Rothschild family in Paris’.

  V

  ‘Tell me about Kurt’, said Lanny, and his friend went on with the strange tale of an episode that had occured at Grundl Lake near Bad Aussee several months earlier. A convoy of trucks and cars had arrived there. The men hired boats and went out on the lake and began surveying operations. When they found the right spot they anchored the boats. They went down to the bottom of the lake in diving outfits and attached ropes and began hauling up heavy chests. When the local police asked about it they said they were engineers from the French headquarters in Innsbruck, and of course the local police, being Austrians and a conquered people, couldn’t interfere with what French engineers were doing. They pulled up twelve large chests and loaded them on the trucks and went away.

  ‘Investigation proved that there were no French engineers. It was a crowd of these Neo-Nazis, and we succeeded in tracing the trucks to the town of Tegernsee. We have an exact description of the man who was in charge of the expedition, and we believe that he was Heinrich Brinkmann, who was Kurt Meissner’s top man. We have reason to believe that this is S.S. General Dollmann, one of the heads of Hitler’s Youth Ideological Training programme. We haven’t a doubt that Kurt Meissner was in on that scheme, and he doubtless had to do with hiding the treasure. The money will be used for carrying on his propaganda here and abroad, and we are going to stop it if we can’.

  ‘You want me to try to get that out of him?’

  ‘We hold over him the fact that his admission to West Germany was conditional, and he has broken his pledge; he knows he has broken it, and we don’t have to tell how we know it. It is up to him to tell us where he got the money to build himself a cottage—’

  ‘Oh, he’s built a cottage?’

  ‘A six-room stone cottage, fireproof and very comfortable, and he has a studio nearly finished. That money has come from the sale of counterfeit British pounds, or from some of the Nazi treasure. Either Kurt is going to come clean and tell us all he knows about these matters, or he is going back to the East zone of Germany where he came from’.

  ‘Will the Soviets take him?’

  ‘We haven’t a doubt that they will, and gladly. They have a part of Austria right close to Salzburg, and no doubt there is plenty of tre
asure buried there, and they’d like to get hold of it. They have ways of getting secrets out of people—ways that we are not allowed to use. You can point that out to him, and add that his wife and children will go along with him. The Soviets will take that brood and put them in their schools and make little Reds out of them instead of little Nazis. Personally, I don’t see anything to choose between, but Kurt may, and that is one of the arguments you’ll have to use’.

  ‘That’s a pretty rough job, Monck’.

  ‘You don’t have to be rough—that’s not your line. The reason I’m asking you is because of the prestige you have with him’.

  ‘I doubt if I have the least bit left’.

  ‘You are mistaken, surely. However angry Kurt may be with you, he must respect you in his heart. He knows that you have a faith and are working for it. You believe in social justice, and so did he when he was young. Those things are never entirely erased from a man’s mind. What you have to do is to make him realise that he cannot fool us any longer. He has to make a clean break, and publicly, with the Nazis; he has to come over to us, or he goes back to the Reds’.

  ‘He will choose to be a martyr, I’m sure’.

  ‘Maybe so; but there is the question of the children, and that may move him. Either they have to be brought up as free democratic Germans, or they will be little Stalinist monsters. Use your eloquence and try to make him realise it. You can put it up to him that we are doing him a favour because of his friendship with you. You can say you pleaded for it—I think you would have done so if I had told you that we were about to order him and his family turned over to the Soviets’.

  ‘I suppose I would,’ Lanny admitted. ‘Do I understand that I am free to tell him what we know about his connection with the Völkischerbund?’

  ‘Tell him everything—except, of course, about Fritz. Lay all the cards on the table. You can put it up to him that he has broken his word of honour and hasn’t a moral leg to stand on. Knock him down and beat him up’.

  Lanny smiled a wry smile. ‘A man with only one good arm?’ He knew, of course, that it was to be a moral and intellectual beating, and that can be more painful than a physical one.

  VI

  The Army flew its one-time assimilated colonel to Munich. When he had last been there it was half in ruins and many of its streets impassable with rubble; but now everything had been cleared away and the Germans were working diligently at rebuilding. The men Lanny met in A.M.G. were nearly all new—those who had fought the war had gone home to their reward, and a new outfit was learning to know Germany and the Germans. ‘Fraternising’ was now the order of the day, and everybody was letting bygones be bygones—or at any rate pretending to. The genial South Germans were making their good beer again and selling it to the Americans for good marks.

  Lanny would have liked to stay and meet some of his old friends. Some of their palaces and villas were intact, and they had got back their paintings—to live and stay rich in Nazi Germany you had had to make a gift of a painting to Hermann Göring’s collection every now and then, and to do the same thing for Adolf Wagner, the lame Nazi boss of Bavaria.

  The Army provided a car and a tank of petrol, and Lanny set out on a drive of forty or fifty miles through the beautifully tended farming country, climbing gradually into the fir-clad foothills of the Alps. The road climbed to the Tegernsee, a lake about four miles long, a favourite summer resort with many hotels and villas. Because of the housing shortage throughout Germany people were living here all the year round; in summer they rented their homes and slept in barns and haylofts or put up tents.

  Lanny drove first to the humble dwelling of the General Graf Stubendorf. He knew the high regard in which Kurt held this old-time patron, and he had a faint hope of enlisting this patron’s aid. He found the old gentleman in plus-fours and a leather jacket, inspecting the early vegetables in his garden. They sat in the summerhouse, which had been constructed since Lanny’s last visit, and there the visitor told the sad story of the plight into which a great musical genius had brought himself by his refusal to recognise a defeat in war. Lanny said, ‘I gather that you yourself have recognised it, and it was my hope that Kurt might be willing to take your advice’.

  The Graf shook his head. ‘No, Herr Budd’, he answered, ‘I have made up my mind that the future belongs to the young and not to the old. Kurt Meissner must be close to fifty, and that is old enough for him to know his own mind and be responsible for his own choice’.

  ‘As events have shaped themselves’, pleaded Lanny, ‘Kurt has to make a choice between a democratic Germany and a Red dictatorship. Surely there can be no question as to which he should choose’.

  Said the elderly aristocrat, ‘I am not at all sure that other choices are excluded. I understand the devotion you Americans feel to your doctrines of democracy, but I am not convinced that you are wise in trying to impose your system upon us Germans. We do not have two great oceans to protect us, nor do we live in a natural fortress like the Swiss; we live out on open plains where through the centuries hordes of wild horsemen have been able to gallop over us; and now come the steel horses, the tanks. Our only defence lies in our technical skill, our diligence, and above all our discipline and solidarity. Twice you Americans have felt it your duty to come and help the British and the French to wear us down and roll over us. Now you have us on your hands, and you have the task of keeping back the Eastern hordes. Before you get through, I believe that you will have a better understanding of our need for solidarity and discipline. Now, apparently, you think that we are as clay which you can mould to whatever shape you please. Your loyalty to your own institutions is perfectly natural and I respect it, but I am not convinced that you can make us over in your image’.

  ‘Lieber Herr Graf’, replied Lanny, ‘you pay us too great a compliment when you attribute the discovery and development of democracy to us. It seems to me it is a world-wide movement, an automatic consequence of the spread of education’.

  ‘Many believe that, I know. Education was spread in Germany, and the German people got the ballot and attempted to assert themselves. Surely you know that the Hitler movement was a democratic movement, originating in the lower classes of our society. The National Socialists carried an election, bu somehow that failed to please you’.

  Lanny’s answer was, ‘It is not according to our conception of democracy that a man should climb to power and then kick the ladder from under him. We are hoping that all the world has learned a lesson from the fate of the Third Reich and that the German people will establish a government by popular consent and keep their control over it’.

  ‘As long as I am permitted to stay here’, answered the old man ‘I will watch your experiment with interest; but you must not expect me to take part in it. It must suffice if I retire and refrain from doing anything to interfere with your efforts’.

  So that was that. They chatted a while about common friends and about the art works which the Graf owned and which he had rescued from Stubendorf; he had them in storage—he did not say where, merely that he did not wish to sell any of them. Then he told the visitor how to get to Kurt’s place. ‘It would be a tragedy indeed if you had to take him away’, said the Graf mildly. His tone said, ‘Don’t expect me to discommode myself’.

  VII

  They shook hands and Lanny took his departure and drove to the other side of the lake. There was a little valley, and on a slight rise of the land stood a new stone cottage of moderate size. The studio was off to one side in a clump of trees, and Lanny could see at a glance that it also was built of stone and duplicated the one the Graf had provided in Stubendorf for his court musician. Sounds of hammering came from it. Lanny observed that there was a good-sized garden behind the cottage and several children working there. Presumably school had closed, and few indeed were idling or playing in Germany now.

  Lanny went to the cottage and knocked on the door, and the mother of the family answered. His reception was different from the last occasion. No d
oubt Kurt had told her that it was Lanny who had obtained permission for them to come to this place of peace and security; so the prematurely old woman was all smiles and gratitude.

  She said that Kurt was at the studio, so Lanny walked over to it and found his old friend superintending a carpenter and two fair-haired lads who were helping. Lanny recognised these as Kurt’s second and third sons, and after a brief greeting and a glance around at the work he took Kurt out to his car, where they could be alone and quiet.

  It was not a social occasion, and Lanny stopped for no preliminaries. ‘I have bad news for you, Kurt’, he said. ‘The American Army is going to send you back to East Germany’.

  ‘Herr Gott!’ exclaimed the man. ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘You know what it means, Kurt. You have been breaking your word to the government, doing it systematically and continually’.

  ‘Lanny, you must not say that!’

  ‘Don’t waste your breath, Kurt. The Army has been watching you, as it was their obvious duty to do. They know all about the business of selling counterfeit British pound notes that you and your friends have been carrying on. They know the names of your associates. I have been privileged to read some of the writings which you call das Wort. They know about your activity with hidden Nazi treasure and that you have been shipping it out to the underground abroad’.

  ‘Lanny, I swear to you—’

  ‘Don’t swear to falsehoods, Kurt, because it’s just possible there may be a God, and He wouldn’t like it. I know that you have your faith which you believe justifies what you’re doing. I only point out to you how you make it impossible for me to help, and you make it necessary for the American Army to take action against you. You’re bent on preserving the Hitler legend, you’re helping to establish Nazi centres of propaganda in all the countries abroad. You’re doing it after warning and with full knowledge of the consequences. I can only tell you that our Army authorities are not altogether fools and dupes. We’ve sacrificed a hundred thousand American lives and three or four hundred billion dollars of American treasure to destroy that Hitler dream, and we’re not going to sit back quietly and give you shelter while you build it up again’.