Krueger's Men (7 page)
Once his course was set, there was much to organize. First Krueger negotiated with his SS group leader, not quite successfully, to obtain guards with temperaments that were stable enough to follow his lead in handling the special prisoners he would later choose. He visited Sachsenhausen, located about twenty miles north of Berlin near the town of Oranienburg, to view the barracks set aside for housing the men and machinery of Operation Bernhard. Then, several days later, he visited Delbrückstrasse 6A, which stood only a few blocks from Schellenberg’s office, to inspect the abandoned rooms that were filled with the detritus of Operation Andreas and held its late-model printing presses, soon to be shipped to Sachsenhausen for the successor operation bearing his own name.
He found the heavy machinery carefully covered with tent canvas, and a film of fine dust on the tables used to dry the counterfeit Bank of England notes. He pulled the shrouds from the largest hulk and found a steam press, still carefully greased. To the left stood two presses for stamping alphanumeric serial numbers on the newly printed notes. Next to the entry stood a large, bulky safe, which he hoped would contain technical data and other records to advance his own operation. He swung open the heavy steel door. On top was a deep shelf filled with packages of bundled notes in orderly piles. Below, in some disarray, were wire gauzes for making watermarks. Some spelled out “Bank of England.” A few had been handled carelessly and bent out of alignment. Other devices contained only groups of numbers and letters. Krueger also found five copper plates for printing notes of £5, £10, £20, £50, and £100. They seemed to be in good condition, so he moved them to an upper shelf.
Then he extracted one of the counterfeit notes from its package. “‘Bank of England — the Sum of Ten Pounds,’ it read in a very pleasant, curvaceous, fine-lined, chiseled script,” Krueger recorded. “By the smoke of a cigarette, I examined the false note carefully, held it against the light to look at the watermark. Holding the paper with my fingertips, I tore it a bit. Since I had no way to compare it with an original note, I folded the Andreas note and shoved it back into the bundle, reconstituting the complete amount of notes.”
When he examined page after page of documents, he mainly found long lists of useless numbers on pages initialed by Albert Langer. What he most hoped to find were orders or records explaining why Andreas had been shut down; he wanted to avoid his predecessor’s mistakes. But he found no such papers. “I was convinced there had been none and could not have been… Everything emerged from oral orders, like those I had received a few days earlier.”
It was years before scholars discovered the only written evidence of any order from the Nazi leadership for Operation Bernhard, and even that was oblique. In Himmler’s personal daybook, his entry for July 16, 1942, reads:
“Pfundnoten zunächst Verwendung genehmigt”
— Pound notes authorized for use for the time being. The entry does not stipulate what use was to be made of the notes, where they came from, or even whether they were real. But it seems certain that the feared chief of all Nazi security services was referring not just to the production of counterfeit notes that he had again set in motion, but to a grander strategic plan to finance the secret schemes of the SS. The unique place of the SS in the Nazi system helps explain why the abortive plan to print counterfeit pounds was revived.
From the moment Heinrich Himmler took command of Hitler’s bodyguard of 280 men in 1929, this timorous, bespectacled, yet heartlessly cold individual began building it into a paramilitary police force. Its mission was the detection and ruthless repression of uprisings in the rear echelons, animated by the stab-in-the-back myth that Germany had lost World War I because domestic upheavals forced the frontline fighters to surrender when they were supposedly on the brink of victory. With Hitler in power, Himmler single-mindedly pursued his goal of building the SS into an
über
-state within the Nazi state. SS men were not just the Hollywood caricature of the sadistic brute — although they certainly were that — but something as unparalleled in history as Nazism itself: a political army. It was not to be like the Red Army, which was a military arm of the state with political commissars, but a disciplined party force pledged to defend Hitler’s blood-ideology and not just Germany’s territory.
Far from the propaganda picture that has passed into history of a flawlessly organized war machine that ran Panzer divisions and death camps with equal efficiency, we may take it from Hitler’s most exhaustive biographer, Ian Kershaw, that virtually all power centers in the regime were ceaselessly engaged in bureaucratic empire-building, Himmler’s no less than any of the others’. Hermann Goering’s four-year economic plan ran counter to Walther Funk’s financial ukases. The aristocratic military command was also at daggers drawn with the Nazi Party, whose members the Prussian generals rightly regarded as scum. So were their rival intelligence services. Working at cross-purposes was the norm.
Himmler’s security services were also chronically short of money. Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick, Himmler’s sworn enemy from the 1920s, kept him so strapped for cash that before the war, SS recruits had to buy their own uniforms. Many of his opponents within the Nazi Party feared that one day Himmler or his henchmen might, with only the flick of a finger, use their unchallengeable powers of arrest and detention on their political rivals. But he deftly slipped his enemies’ financial leash. He loved imaginative but untried projects and had started out in life as a breeder of prize chickens (the enterprise failed). As Reichsfuehrer SS, Himmler put his organization into business for itself. By 1939 the SS was running four companies: one used concentration camp labor to manufacture bread-making machinery and cutlery; another managed forests and farms; a third produced SS uniforms at the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp; and the largest turned out brick and granite for the grand reconstruction Hitler was planning for Berlin. (According to Albert Speer, Hitler’s architect and later his minister of war production, the bricks were useless because the SS employed a new process that failed, and the granite cracked because the slave laborers were ill-trained and badly led.) Cash was also donated by forty wealthy businessmen styling themselves Himmler’s
Freundeskreis
(Circle of Friends). On August 27, 1943, for example, the list of donors included the three major German banks, steelworks such as Flick, Rheinmetall, and Siemens Electric. The biggest corporations each had given 100,000 reichsmarks. They neither sought nor received an accounting of their monthly contributions, although Himmler personally checked on their attendance at regular monthly meetings.
So ambitious was Himmler for power that the money went into his organization and not his own pocket; his personal cash shortage remained chronic. In 1942 he had to beg for a loan of 80,000 marks in Party funds to buy a house for his pregnant mistress and secretary, Hedwig Potthast. Meanwhile, the SS acquired more than forty businesses. The profits equipped, trained, and fielded thirty-eight divisions operating as shock troops, sometimes independent of the military high command. SS funds also underwrote the plan to murder Europe’s Jews, which was code-named
Aktion Reinhard
in memory of Heydrich and actually diverted resources from the war effort.
But there was one particularly weak link in the financial structure of the SS. Aside from stolen gold, most of which passed through a special Reichsbank account, none of these enterprises earned the foreign currency that is essential to the reach of any espionage service if it is to find useful information. Looted gold from the central banks of conquered Europe would soon run out, and most of the wealthy Jews of France, Belgium, Holland, and Czechoslovakia were being squeezed as dry as their German brothers. In the East, almost all Jews were as poor as their own governments. By the start of 1944, when the SS death camps were in full and monstrous operation, wedding rings pulled from the fingers of Jews, gold and diamond jewelry ripped from their necks, and gold crowns yanked from the mouths of their murdered bodies yielded only 178 million reichsmarks ($70 million at the wartime rate of exchange). That had to be deposited in a special Reichsbank account, and even Himmler suspected that millions more had been stolen by his own men.
Precisely who had the idea of reviving the operation to counterfeit English pound notes is not certain — such things rarely are — but all evidence points to Schellenberg. He ran the SS foreign intelligence service in direct competition to the Abwehr, the espionage arm of the German military which also regarded itself as a state within a state; the Abwehr was headed by Heydrich’s old mentor and then rival, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris. Heydrich took Schellenberg to lunch with Canaris the day before he gave his protégé command of SS foreign intelligence. The junior guest was eventually to swallow the senior when the Abwehr was absorbed by the SS.
Schellenberg’s memoirs devote a chapter to the achievements of his cadre of technicians, but Operation Bernhard is dismissed in less than two pages. Perhaps he feared a postwar demand for restitution; but more likely, he was still bitter about the restraints placed on his schemes by his masters. Toward the end, he wrote vindictively in his memoirs, many of the counterfeits were “wasted as a result of unrealistic fantasies and brain waves of the [Nazi] leaders.”
Secrecy was essential to the revived counterfeiting operation lest the British discover its significance (they were aware of the plan, but not the size of it). Equally important, Himmler and Schellenberg had to hide any expansion of the SS espionage service, first from the German economic ministries but above all from the Abwehr. Military intelligence already had its own expert forgery staff of twenty engravers and graphics specialists. Schellenberg had to develop his own shop if the forgers and their product were to remain under his control and not be dumped on the British Isles. By 1942 it would have been treason, or at the very least a grave affront to Goering, for anyone to say that the Reichsmarschall could not mass enough planes to send paper banknotes fluttering down over England, and no one was willing to take that chance. But it was the truth and Schellenberg knew it: Goering’s Luftwaffe was not even able to resupply German troops fighting for their lives at Stalingrad during the winter of 1942–43, when they were surrounded and lost the decisive battle of the war. Schellenberg could therefore safely insist that the pound notes were being printed to scatter over England — the perfect cover for the scheme to finance his own nascent foreign intelligence service.
Keeping secrets was easy in wartime Germany. Basic Order No. 1 of January 11, 1940, stipulated that “No one, no office, no officer, may learn of something to be kept secret if he does not have to have knowledge of it for official reasons.” When Krueger’s money factory at Sachsenhausen was up and running, he was supposed to deliver the best notes in person to Schellenberg’s office in Berlin. It is doubtful he was told what Schellenberg intended to do with the money, but that was not his concern. His task, no more and no less, was to get presses rolling as soon as possible. To accomplish this he had to contact high-quality German manufacturers of paper and ink while recruiting and training a workforce of experienced prisoners.
The following directive soon went out from Germany’s main concentration camp administration, signed by Lieutenant Colonel Hermann Dörner. He was the chief of the RSHA technical division, successor to the erratic and often uncontrollable Alfred Naujocks, and he operated in a very different style indeed. Dörner, age fifty-three, was of medium height, with a strong neck and roundish face topped by thinning blond hair, and conducted himself in a stately manner befitting his rank.
Business Administration Main HQ
Oranienburg, 20 July 1942
Group D-Concentration Camp
D II/1 Ma. Hag.
Subject: Report on Jewish prisoners
To: commanders of KL Buchenwald, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen
You must inform me immediately about all Jewish prisoners who are from the graphic arts. Specialists in paper, or any other skilled worker (e.g., hairdresser).
These Jewish prisoners may be of foreign nationality, but they must have a knowledge of German. Send me names and nationality by 3 August 1942.
Chief of Office D2
Dörner
by order SS Obersturmfuehrer
To ensure a wide choice, two more appeals were circulated, one on Dörner’s deadline day of August 3, and the next on August 11. The Nazis could not have imagined who and what they would find among the Jews.
I
NGATHERING OF THE
E
XILES
A
ufstehen!”
In the darkest hour before the dawn, that daily wake-up call ended the restless sleep of every prisoner in every freezing, louse-infested hut across the constellation of Nazi concentration camps during the dozen years of Hitler’s Reich. Whether weary, ill, or even dying, each miserable inmate had to tumble instantly from a wooden bunk and run, not walk, to the camp’s central square, there to stand silent, motionless, and utterly vulnerable for the ceremony of roll call in the
Appellplatz.
The humiliating ritual was designed to demonstrate the absolute power of the SS over their prisoners’ very existence. Some prisoners keeled over and breathed their last, robbing the SS of their prey as they paced wordlessly up, down, and across the mute rows, sometimes doubling back to review those who thought they had been passed over this time, weeding out the weakest with a death sentence through a curt nod or one horrifying word,
Raus!
Out!
All prisoners had already passed through the dehumanizing initiation of being stripped of their last few miserable possessions, every stitch of their clothing, and their dignity by having their head and pubic hair shaved. Finally, they had been stripped of their very identity by being given a number by which they were always addressed. “Naked, alone, and unknown,” in the words of Primo Levi, the great laureate of Auschwitz, each prisoner would be issued a striped uniform and hat that were no proof whatever against any weather. Their wooden clodhoppers blistered instead of protecting their feet, or froze them with a mixture of ice and sand that no one dared move to shake off as they stood, motionless and fearful.
Avraham Krakowski, a pious young Polish accountant, survived a typical roll call shortly after he was immured in Auschwitz. The prisoner serving as block warden barked at his charges to remove their caps. Immediately, they did, and the warden reported: “Six hundred and fifty-five prisoners. Ten dead!” The SS man reviewed the rows, counting the living and also counting the dead. Krakowski recalled: “We were the lucky ones. The count checked out. The
Appell
was finally over. If it had not checked out, we would have been made to stand, as later we often were, an entire day without food in the rain or the freezing weather.”
So it went every day among those few who survived after their train pulled alongside the platform at Auschwitz, the epicenter of this industrialized genocide. They ran a gauntlet of snarling dogs and guards who flicked them along with whips. At the end of that infamous ramp, SS doctors plucked almost all the camp’s 1.5 million victims to be gassed and cremated immediately. The few survivors knew that it would only be a matter of time before they, too, went “up the chimney,” in the unforgiving slang of the camps.
There were forty-five separate installations spread out around Auschwitz, of which the three principal ones were the eponymous camp headquarters, where Polish and other political prisoners were interrogated, tortured, and executed; the gas chambers and crematorium, which were linked to the huge holding and slave labor camp at adjoining Birkenau; and nearby Monowitz, the IG Farben synthetic-rubber plant where Primo Levi labored during the final winter of the war, and which never produced a single tire.
But it is still necessary to distinguish, as indeed the German language itself does, between the
Vernichtungslager
— extermination camps whose names are etched in modern memory as Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka — and the more numerous slave labor camps such as Ravensbrück in Germany, Natzweiler in Alsace, and Mauthausen in Austria. Treblinka, for example, was a pure death factory, occupying less than a square mile of Polish farmland, where 900,000 Jews were murdered, 99 percent of them within two hours of their arrival. “Keep in mind,” said Franz Suchomel, an SS sergeant at what was supposed to be a model camp, “Treblinka was a primitive but efficient production line of death.” But at Mauthausen, prisoners were systematically worked to death, carrying rocks up from the place where Vienna used to quarry its paving stones. Contributing to the torture were 186 steps of deliberately uneven heights and dimensions.
The prisoners were not exclusively Jews. Within days of Hitler’s coming to power in 1933, thousands of the Nazis’ political opponents were “concentrated” in cellars, makeshift lockups, and local jails, where they were kicked or beaten to a pulp, or worse. As Prussian interior minister, Goering demanded a bureaucratic structure for political terror. A punishment camp for Communists and Social Democrats was established in a disused brewery in the town of Oranienburg. Dachau was established near Munich, Buchenwald near Weimar. The Oranienburg camp soon grew into the much larger Sachsenhausen, a camp with special status and history. It was built in 1936 by its own inmates, the first one conceived after Himmler took full control of the police throughout Germany and therefore seen as a model of the SS goal of total subjugation. Sachsenhausen was set on a flat, sandy plain at the edge of the town, for whose inhabitants it soon became a principal source of employment. The headquarters and inspectorate of the entire concentration camp system also established itself there, along with Gestapo interrogation and torture chambers that were moved from increasingly crowded premises in Berlin. It was at Sachsenhausen that the prisoners for Operation Bernhard were to be assembled.
In 1942, with Germany’s military supplies exhausted by the unexpected ferocity of the first winter campaign in Russia, all concentration camps came under the SS Economic Administration, the
Wirtschaftsverwaltungshauptamt,
one of those comically ponderous German titles that help conceal their diabolical purpose.
*
The WVHA’s boss was SS veteran Oswald Pohl, who once had to beg for funds from the Party and was determined never to do so again. He opposed Heydrich’s uncompromising Wannsee plan for the “final” extermination of the Jews, simply because he needed their hands in his SS enterprises. Heydrich had himself figured on working Jews to exhaustion before gassing them but then realized that natural selection might produce a race of Jewish
Übermenschen,
which was, of course, unthinkable. Therefore the essential dispute inside the SS focused on the speed at which to work the Jews to death. Himmler at first favored whipping them to maximum effort because he could always find replacements in the vast pool of both Jews and non-Jews in the conquered territories, especially among the
Untermenschen
in Eastern Europe. Then he decreed that the prisoners’ output be raised “by reasonable (if necessary, improved) food and clothing; prisoners must be encouraged to take interest in the economic enterprise concerned; cooperative prisoners should be held up as an example to the listless majority.” The greatest success proved to be the textile factory producing uniforms at Ravensbrück, which reached 40 percent of civilian productivity, unusually high for a slave labor camp. Another slave labor group produced a fuselage rejected as substandard for Heinkel aircraft, then went right on turning out ten more so their German managers could dodge the draft.
With Teutonic precision, the SS performed gruesome calculations on their slave laborers, reckoning that the average worker lasted nine months. With a daily attrition rate of about 1 percent, each prisoner would yield profits of 1,631 reichsmarks, on top of which the SS could also count on “the proceeds from the rational utilization of cadavers: gold from teeth, clothing, valuables, and cash… plus proceeds from utilization of bones and ashes.” The camp administration meticulously deducted the cost of incineration at two reichsmarks per corpse. The principal profit, of course, came not from rendering the dead bodies but from renting out the live ones to the great industrial combines; those donations by Himmler’s “Friends” were in fact thinly disguised kickbacks. At Dora-Mittelbau near Nordhausen, thousands of prisoners dug tunnels in the rock in 1943 to prepare underground storage facilities for the V-2 missiles that would rain down on London a year later. They lived and slept in the choking dust without water or ventilation. During the first six months, almost 3,000 of 17,000 prisoners died. “Never mind the human victims,” said SS Brigadefuehrer Hans Kammler, the commander of the operation. “The work must proceed and be finished in the shortest possible time.”
At Sachsenhausen it was more difficult to turn human beings into machines because they were assigned to more exacting tasks, such as repairing shoes and watches and recycling captured equipment into raw materials. There were more than 3,000 in this
Kommando Speer,
the largest single unit among the camp’s 10,000 to 15,000 prisoners. It was named after the technocrat Albert Speer, Hitler’s chief of war production, who had complained that mere extermination wasted economic resources. As in all SS operations, corruption was endemic; in 1941 the commandant of landlocked Sachsenhausen had the prisoners build him a yacht, an offense for which he was transferred to Norway. His successor, a more practical man, used the prisoners to conduct grueling tests on experimental shoe soles. Around a track with separate lanes covered in gravel, cinders, sand, concrete, and the like, about 150 prisoners circled daily for a run of about 25 miles to determine the durability of different materials, their backs sometimes weighed down by 33-pound packs of sand or their feet pinched by shoes that were two sizes too small. Such consumer research was relatively harmless compared to the experiments in noise measurements conducted on pistol silencers by Arthur Nebe’s criminal police, which reputedly included shots into the skulls of prisoners.
Although Sachsenhausen was not an extermination camp as such, there was virtually no check on violence. Eighteen thousand Russian prisoners were executed there in 1941 with bullets in the back of the neck. A thousand prisoners were whipped for infractions as minor as a blink of an eye at roll call, every victim ordered to count out each stroke of the lash in his own voice as it flayed open the skin on his back. Others were hung from poles by wire wound around their wrists to be punished or to simply expire. Tens of thousands would die of exhaustion, illness, or execution, especially in the panic of the Nazi defeat.
Outside the camp’s main wall stood small individual stone huts for prisoners held as possible bargaining chips, including the two British intelligence officers captured by Walter Schellenberg at the Dutch border. The inner camp was laid out in a semicircular grid of 56 barracks inside a triangle enclosing 18 acres of the camp’s total of 44. This triangle was delineated by a wall rising almost 9 feet and studded by nine watchtowers armed with machine guns. The barracks measured 200 by 40 feet. With slightly peaked roofs, these blocks — or so they were called, like prison blocks — hugged the ground and were separated by wide spaces to enhance visibility from the principal control tower at the base of the triangle. Just beneath it, in the form of an inner semicircle with a radius of about 350 feet, was the
Appellplatz,
ringed by the notorious running track. On the other side of the triangle’s base, surrounded by a wall of its own, was the camp headquarters. To the right stood a tight rectangle of half a dozen rows of wooden blocks, known as the Small Camp. These were built in 1938 to house Jews rounded up after the
Kristallnacht
pogrom.
In mid-1942, the barred windows of Block No. 19 were painted over, and the building itself, the last one in the first row closest to headquarters, was enmeshed in a barbed-wire netting to await its troop of specialists and their machines. Of course, the camp was also enclosed by the standard barbed-wire fence electrified to 1,000 volts, a standing invitation to suicide for those nimble enough to reach it ahead of the main guard force, who would either be racing to catch them or shooting at them so they could torture them to death instead.
Before Krueger could recruit his Jewish workforce, suitable guards for Block 19 had to be assigned by the SS command. Many guards were wounded veterans, some missing an arm or leg. Krueger had been promoted to Sturmbannfuehrer — major — and his first choice to run the four-man guard room was a ramrod-tall SS-Hauptscharfuehrer, Sergeant Major Kurt Werner, whom Krueger knew as conscientious and incorruptible. Unfortunately, Werner could not be spared, and Krueger had to settle, at least temporarily, for two Oberscharfuehrer — quartermaster sergeants — named Herbert Marock and Heinz Weber. Both had blemished records as cutups, and Krueger shrewdly deemed them unreliable lightweights. The SS general in charge of personnel obviously felt the way to keep Marock and Weber on their toes was to shout at them as they stood apprehensively at attention. He warned them that they must measure up to their challenging but as yet undefined new assignment, or “you will only need to change your jackets.” Whether he meant jackets worn by frontline troops or prisoners was not clear, but either way, he meant to instill fear. This was virtually the only tool in the SS disciplinary arsenal, but it was not Krueger’s chosen incentive.
Next Krueger summoned August Petrich, the master printer for Operation Andreas. Having no idea what Krueger wanted, Petrich had closed his print shop for the day. At first he thought that reviving the mad counterfeiting scheme was a joke. Krueger admitted he had almost thought so, too: “Imagine, graphic artists, engravers, repro-photographers, and so on from Jewish inmates. I find it a unique story. Almost like an April Fool’s joke. Are there really artisans among Jews? I thought they were traders, brokers, capable stock market and business men, experienced doctors and lawyers, and here and there also a police chief.” Krueger informed the equally skeptical printer that it would be his job to train the Jews to use the machinery. In short, at Himmler’s orders he was to teach printing and engraving within six months instead of the usual German craftsman’s three-year apprenticeship. Petrich replied: “Let’s not kid ourselves. It is a very difficult task we have to undertake, and it will cost us a good many gray hairs. It may yet turn out all right, it may not. The prisoners are the principal players.”