The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  ‘Lanny, I can only assure you that I have nothing whatever to do with the Nazi centres abroad’.

  ‘Don’t say any more, Kurt. I have examined the dossier dealing with your activities and your associates. I came to Berlin this time because R.I.A.S. wanted my help in broadcasting. It just happens that I have an intimate friend who is in the Intelligence service, and he told me confidentially of the status of your case. I begged for just time enough to come and see you—if my request hadn’t been granted the Military Police would have been here now’.

  ‘Lanny, this is monstrous!’

  ‘I think what you’ve been doing is monstrous, Kurt. You gave me your word of honour that you would do nothing contrary to American interests. I had no right to count upon your friendship, but I thought I had the right to count upon your honour’.

  There was nothing Kurt could answer to that, and he didn’t try. ‘You can’t send us back’, he declared. ‘The Russians wouldn’t take us’.

  ‘Don’t count on that’, advised the other. ‘All the Army need do is to tell them what you know, and the Reds will take you and get it out of you. They use methods we can’t use’.

  ‘I’ll die before I tell them anything, Lanny’.

  ‘I know; but you won’t die until they’re through with you, and they learned a lot of Hitler’s own arts. But what you really ought to be thinking about is your children, who will be put in the Red training schools and turned into perfect little robots, worshipping portraits of Stalin as big as a house. You know what that training is, because Hitler took it over’.

  ‘What is the point, Lanny? Have you come here to gloat over me?’

  ‘That is the last thing on earth that would cross my mind. I came because I still have in me the memory of our old friendship and the pledges we made to each other. I’m still clinging to the idea that I might be able to touch your deeper self and bring back to life the Kurt I used to know’.

  ‘If I have changed, Lanny, it is because I have learned what the world is like—how evil it is, and what harsh measures are necessary to control it’.

  ‘There’s no use in our arguing about the National-Socialist movement, Kurt. I know what you think, and you know what I think. The point is, so far as your lifetime is concerned, National Socialism is dead. You have to take your choice between Stalin’s measures, which are the harshest of all, and American measures, which are comparatively mild and lamblike. Do you want to go over to the Reds, or do you want to come over to the “Amis”?’

  VIII

  Such was the proposition. There followed a long silence. Lanny knew that Kurt had a lot to think about and gave him time. It was a last call, and the Neo-Nazi must have realised it. Finally he asked, ‘Just what is it you propose for me to do?’

  ‘The last time I made you a proposal it was that you would live in Western Germany and do nothing to oppose our efforts to establish a democratic government here. Now the terms are harder: you are to go to A.M.G. and tell it everything you know about the counterfeiting industry, the methods of marketing Himmler money, where the stocks are, and the plates and the presses’.

  ‘I can tell you right now, Lanny. It has all been moved to Hungary, and there is nothing left in Germany’.

  ‘All those quantities of British pound notes? And the paper stock?’

  ‘Every scrap of it’.

  ‘And those we now find being circulated here?”

  ‘They must be brought in by people I know nothing about. I have had nothing to do with it for some time’.

  ‘And the presses on which your Nazi “Words” are printed?’

  ‘My friends have carefully kept me from knowing anything about it’.

  ‘And the men who are running the enterprise here?’

  ‘You’ve already told me that you know their names, Lanny. You’ve told me that you know everything’.

  ‘I mean everything in the sense that we know what you have been doing. I don’t mean that we know all the names; and it doesn’t mean that we know the location of all the Nazi-buried treasure your friends have been handling’.

  ‘You are seeking that treasure?’

  ‘Of course we are seeking it. Part of it belongs to private individuals, and where we can identify it we return it to them. We have done it with a couple of hundred thousand works of art of various kinds. The gold and the coins and the jewels that cannot be identified belonged presumably to the Nazi government and are to be divided among the occupying governments. Wouldn’t your government have sought such treasures if you had won the war?’

  ‘And wouldn’t you have tried to keep them hidden if you had lost the war?’

  ‘Certainly, Kurt. But if you are defending the Nazi government you can go back where you came from—to East Germany. My proposition is that you come over to the American government. If you do that you tell us what you know. What became of those twelve cases that were recovered from the Grundlsee?’

  ‘I assure you I know nothing about them’.

  ‘You only poison your chances when you go on telling me falsehoods, Kurt. We know that they were brought here to Tegernsee and that Heinrich Brinkmann had charge of the job. If you don’t know where they are you can easily find out, and that is part of the price you have to pay. You have to help us find it, and you have to help us find other stuff that we are looking for’.

  ‘If I did that, Lanny, I wouldn’t survive a week’.

  ‘If that’s all that’s worrying you, it’s a simple proposition; the Army will keep you safe. You can be our prisoner, and we’ll take the blame for having wrung it out of you’.

  IX

  Again a long silence, and it was as if Lanny could look into the soul of his boyhood friend and see the duel going on between his pride and his concern for his family.

  Lanny resumed, ‘You know my ideas, Kurt, and I know yours. I believe that Western civilisation is superior to Stalin’s. We are going to defend Western Germany and try to make it a democratic regime in which the Germans will govern their own country and determine how they want to live. If you consent to help us, really help us, all right; on the other hand, if you want to go over to Stalin you can do it. We won’t torture you, and we won’t brutalise your family; we’ll just let you go where you belong. But, of course, once you’ve chosen you’ve settled it; you’ll certainly never have another chance. What you must get out of your mind is the idea that you can settle down comfortably in our zone of Germany, build yourself a new home and a studio out of stolen funds, and set up a spy centre and propaganda agency to work against us and help Stalin’.

  ‘You know I have no idea of helping Stalin’, said Kurt in a low, bitter voice.

  ‘You are older than I am and you are a highly educated man—you have one of the best brains I know. Therefore it must be assumed that you are capable of realising the consequences of your actions. You know just as well as I that the only thing that keeps Stalin out of Western Germany today is the American Army, pitiful though it is. But it’s enough to make Stalin realise that he’ll have an atom bomb over the Kremlin if he moves against us. That’s the basic fact of this hour, and it’s because we’re civilised people, because we are decent and don’t torture prisoners to wring secrets out of them—because of that you’re sitting here chatting with me on a basis of friendship instead of hanging by your thumbs in a dungeon. That’s the situation, Kurt, and the one question is, Are you willing to help us keep Stalin out of West Germany or are you not? Are you going to reward our decency with lies and treachery, or are you going to give us the loyalty one civilised man has the right to expect from another?’

  Lanny waited, and as Kurt did not answer he added, ‘That’s all I have to say. I’m going away to visit a friend and I’ll be back some time tomorrow for your answer, And don’t think it will do you any good to run away to Italy, because we can certainly find you and arrest you on a criminal charge of profiting from the sale of counterfeit bills. You can’t possibly take the remaining six children, so you’ll know they’
re going back to East Germany’.

  ‘Don’t worry’, said the German coldly. ‘I’ll not run away from them’.

  Lanny experienced one of those waves of feeling which interfered with his sense of duty. ‘I don’t want to be hateful about this, Kurt’, he said earnestly. ‘I came here to appeal to you in the name of friendship. I want you to be a Western man. That is where you belong, and all our old-time memories are calling to you’.

  ‘Let’s not be sentimental about it’, was the reply. ‘This is a harsh decision I have to make’. He got out of the car and said, ‘I’ll have an answer when you come back’. Then he stalked away.

  20 IN FRAGRANTE DELICTO

  I

  Lanny drove to the outlet of the lake and followed the course of the little River Mangfall; he turned eastward, meaning to pay a visit to the Obersalzberg. Hilde von Donnerstein was a good source of gossip, and—who could say?—she might have heard rumours about buried treasure. Also, she had promised to keep a lookout for worthwhile paintings. In return, he had got some groceries from the P.X. in Munich; he would never eat a meal with Germans without taking something along, for they were all living close to the margin.

  He came to her like a breeze blowing from the gardens of Grasse, so she told him; that was where they made the perfumes. He had been visiting the places where she had been happy in the past, Berlin and Paris, London and New York, even Hollywood! He could tell her news of her old friends who had forgotten her and never wrote to her any more. She was living here like a peasant—in the wintertime like an Eskimo, she told him.

  But now it was summer, and they could sit in the sunshine, looking out across a valley to the ruins of Hitler’s Berghof, where only four years ago he had summoned his counsellors and planned the future of his thousand-year Reich. Now he had died and been burned to ashes, leaving only a bad smell behind. But over there a little farther to the east was another set of fanatics and plunderers, the Soviets in their part of Austria, and they showed not the slightest trace of any intention to get out. What did Lanny think? Did they mean war? Were they going to take the rest of Berlin, as everybody said?

  Lanny couldn’t tell her, alas. He said he didn’t think they wanted war, but they wanted a lot of things they surely couldn’t get without war, and it was a question of how badly they wanted them. The decision lay with a little group in the Kremlin, and he had no connections there.

  But he had been to Bienvenu and could tell about the friends on the Riviera—about Beauty’s grey hair with a bluish tinge, and about Marceline’s new baby, and the gout of Sophie, Baroness de la Tourette. He could tell about London and Irma’s devices for not paying income taxes. He could tell about Paris and the strike he had seen and the Rembrandt he had bought. He could tell about Edgemere and the Peace Programme—he was still sending her the little paper. He could tell about Genie and De Lyle and the marvellous fashionable life they were living. All their elegance had been transported to Hollywood. Hilde said, ‘Poor old Europe is a mortuary’.

  Lanny brought in his groceries, and they had a feast. Then they listened to the news over Radio Munich. Presently there was a recording of the ‘Tales of the Vienna Woods’, and they became inspired and waltzed in that large, almost bare drawing room, with Hilde’s invalid sister looking on and laughing with delight. Lanny didn’t ask, but guessed the bareness of the room was due to the fact that they had sold off furniture to get money for food, or perhaps to pay taxes.

  II

  There were elegant villas scattered on these mountain slopes, and in the morning Lanny went to look at some paintings. He made notes about them and the prices asked; then in the afternoon he set out on his melancholy errand to the Tegernsee.

  He parked his car a short distance from the house, and Kurt came out. He was abrupt and businesslike. ‘I have decided that it is necessary for me to yield to force majeure. I will agree to abandon all connections with the Neo-Nazi movement from this day forth, and I will keep the agreement’.

  ‘You understand, Kurt, you made that agreement once and broke it. This time you will be on probation. You will have the deportation sentence hanging over you, and if at any time you break the agreement there will be no more parleying and no preliminaries’.

  ‘I understand that’.

  Lanny continued, ‘You must realise that I have no authority to make an agreement with you; I am not an official of A.M.G. I am simply a friend who begged permission to come and put the situation before you. I was told the requirements: that you would come over to our side and give the government all the information you possess about the activities of your movement. A.M.G. will be the judge as to whether you have done that in good faith’.

  ‘I understand’, said Kurt. ‘I am ready to start talking now and tell you what I’m able to’.

  Lanny had brought along a notebook, without much hope of using it. Now he took it out and with his fountain pen made notes while Kurt told about the treasures that had been buried in the Alt Aussee district. They had been put under the care of S.S. Generals Stefan Fröhlich and Arthur Schidler. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, chief of the, S.S. who later was convicted at the Nürnberg trials and hanged, had delivered gold bullion, coins, banknotes, and jewels to a value of over ten million dollars. The total amount of the hoards collected and buried amounted to somewhere between forty and fifty million. On the second of May in 1945 the so-called ‘gold transport Strelitz’ had arrived at Alt Aussee, including twenty-two cases of gold teeth collected by the chief of the death camps. There were the cash boxes of Nazi secret agents in several of the Balkan states, and there was a ‘special action fund’ handled by Otto Skorzeny, the man who had been charged with the task of delivering Mussolini from his captors. There were also great quantities of narcotics, worth more than their weight in gold.

  What had become of all these treasures? They had been dug up in small lots and transported by Nazis escaping into the Tyrol, and from there into Switzerland, and from Switzerland by air to points in the Middle East. That route had been used by Strelitz, and also by those high Nazi officials who had been in charge of the wholesale killings of Jews. These men were now serving on the staff of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was living in the Villa Aida in Cairo.

  Other fugitives had gone by the way of the Brenner Pass to Milan; they had had cars with diplomatic licence plates, and these the Austrian police could not check. Most of them had joined a group known as the ‘Black Hunter’, which had its headquarters in Madrid. This group was under the control of a countess, the former secretary of the German Embassy in Madrid. Lanny said, ‘I met her there’. Otto Skorzeny was prominent in this group, and a relative of Himmler had belonged to it for a time but had gone to the Argentine and set himself up in business.

  This Madrid group was the strongest propaganda agency, and Kurt named a number of its members: a Frenchman, Jean André, who had formerly been a volunteer officer in the Waffen S.S.; also the Belgian Nazi, Leon Degrelle. It was from there that the great mass of propaganda went out all over Europe and South America.

  ‘I know’, said Lanny. ‘I have seen the leaflet containing the letter that General Alfred Jodl wrote to his wife from the Nürnberg prison before he was hanged’.

  III

  Kurt went on to tell about underground cells that were operating in various parts of Germany and Austria and the code names they used; but he did not name any of those men and said he did not know them. Lanny asked, ‘Where is Walter Scheider?’ When Kurt said he did not know, Lanny said, ‘He is reported to be hiding somewhere near Munich, and it seems rather likely that you would know’.

  Kurt replied, ‘I don’t’; and when Lanny asked about Eugen Dollmann, and then about Emil Herzig, Kurt declared that he didn’t know about these either. So Lanny declared, ‘All this is very interesting, and if I were getting up a story for a magazine I might be glad to have it; but when you offer it to our C.I.C. you are just being childish. You name the groups abroad and the men who are in them; all these men are safe from o
ur clutches, and you know it. Our Intelligence people in Madrid and Buenos Aires probably know ten times as much about all this as you do. Even I know that Otto Skorzeny has taken the name of Steinberger and is living in Madrid as a darling of fashionable society. But when it comes to the groups who are operating right here in Bavaria you don’t know who they are, and when I name the head men you don’t know where they are. And yet you have been actively directing one of these groups!’

  ‘That is not correct, Lanny. I have been doing some writing for it. I have been what you might call its intellectual head, but I’ve had nothing to do with its practical affairs’.

  ‘When you have written what you have to say, what do you do with it?’

  ‘I used to turn it over to a man named Johann Josef Schultz, but he took alarm a month or two ago; he departed, and I don’t know where he has gone’.

  ‘And you don’t know where any of the treasure is buried?’

  ‘I really do not. I am told that it has nearly all been taken out of the country’.

  ‘Including the twelve chests Brinkmann took out of the Grundlsee and brought here to Tegernsee?’

  ‘If he did that, Lanny, he did it without telling me’.