Krueger's Men (33 page)

¹
*This former den of thieves was torn down in the 1980s and, in another bit of the irony that bur-nishes almost every turn of this tale, was replaced by an agreeable three-story condominium that sits next to a private Jewish primary school at Delbrückstrasse 8. It caters to the children of prosperous Russians who migrated after the fall of the Berlin Wall. The school is guarded against neo-Nazi skinheads and kidnappers by a polite German policeman patrolling outside its high fence, and inside by an aggressively rude Israeli security man who excludes all unknown visitors.
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²
*A wrinkle in this story has been repeated so often it has become part of the mythology: Naujocks and Langer realized — or perhaps learned from spies — that the Portal factory economized with used rags or even mailbags, so Delbrückstrasse supposedly solved its problem by distributing rags to factories for use as machine wipes, had them returned to be washed, and then put them into the stewpot to produce the proper tint. This is not confirmed in any archive.
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³
*Steinbeck received the prize in 1962 for literature, sharing the platform at Stockholm with Francis Crick, James Watson, and Maurice Wilkins, who shared the science prize for deciphering the genetic code.
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⁴
*The designation works out as follows: VI refers to the foreign intelligence section of Himmler’s RSHA (Reich Central Security Office); other sections were the Gestapo and similar internal security agencies. F refers to the group: A was Administrative, B Western Europe, C Russia, and so on. F was Technical Support. Each group was divided into desks, and Desk 4, headed by Krueger, was responsible for forgeries and photography.
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⁵
*Fritz Lang’s classic film
Metropolis
(1927) portends such camps in its dystopian vision of a sleek, modern city with underground workers organized as mere numbers, performing assembly-line tasks clocked by a machine without a human in sight, and run aboveground by a pitiless and tyrannical megalomaniac prepared to bring the whole operation down on his head rather than surrender power to anyone else. Germans thus imagined all this while it was brewing: regimented, dehuman-izing technology and spies following even the boss’s family.
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*The author’s wife was one of a half-dozen survivors of her Jewish kindergarten class of twenty-two, in part by dissembling her faith while hidden in a Catholic convent school. One night in 1942, German trucks sealed off the street where her family lived in Antwerp. Troops started at one end, systematically rousting out the inhabitants house by house. The trucks were filled up with doomed Jews by the time the Nazis reached No. 18 and were driven away. Her family lived at No. 22. The next day she, her parents, and her baby brother went into hiding. Just a few weeks before, her fa-ther, the pillar of the family who eventually saw them through the war, was walking across town when he stumbled across a police roundup. Suddenly an ordinary German soldier hissed: “Run, Jew, the Gestapo is here.” That anonymous act of grace, for which the soldier risked much and could expect no reward on this earth, helped save four lives.
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*Could von Papen have been thinking of the quotation from the Roman orator that forms the epi-graph of this book? Perhaps. He had a military and not a classical education, but the historical Ci-cero’s description of money as “the sinews of war” was a phrase known to cultured people like the German ambassador and was in fact used (in quotation marks) in one of the many letters received by the British government urging it to dump forged reichsmarks on Germany.
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*In the 1940s, U.S. banknote paper was half-linen, half-cotton, and milled to withstand pressure of 65 pounds per square inch. It had to remain whole after being folded 2,000 times. It also had a transparency standard of 35 percent when the bill was held up to the light. Under the microscope, tiny pinholes were actually visible. Operation Bernhard’s paper suppliers could hardly match those specifications, and certainly not under extreme wartime conditions, so Smolianoff made fine pin-holes in the demonstration bill in order to approach its level of transparency.
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*
Musselmann
was camp slang, variously spelled. Authorities on camp behavior agree that its origin lies in the German word for “Muslim” because, in the words of the German writer Herman Lang-bein, “when one saw a group of them at a distance, one had the impression of praying Arabs.”
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¹⁰
*This proved a boon to some of those who had banked on the pound remaining a pound after the war. In 1942, Leo Strawczynski, a Belgian Jewish businessman of Polish origin, had converted most of his assets into pound notes, stuffed them into a bottle, buried it near a bench in a forest outside Liége, and fled with his family to hide in unoccupied France. When they returned in 1945, he dug up the bottle and presented the rotting remnants of the notes to the bank. He got back enough to start up again and eventually to buy a car.
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