Secret and Suppressed: Banned Ideas and Hidden History (51 page)

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How long did you stay in Madrid?

Three or four days that time. At the end that first time, we were getting along very well. He said, “Would you mind checking on somebody for me?” I had mentioned some of the people I had known in this business and when I mentioned this one man, B….

B. is writing technical books for historians and people interested in what badge went with this uniform, etc., and was going to write a book about Otto. “You check on him for me,” and I said okay. I went back to the United States and spoke with B. and [I] said, “You know, I was speaking with Otto and he’s not terribly pleased about what you’re doing.” B.’s attitude was basically, “Let Otto go screw himself if he doesn’t like what I’m doing — we have a contract.” Otto’s contention was that he wasn’t living up to his contract. So I said, I’ll let Otto know.

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To get back to Madrid, by the end of that first afternoon, or thereabouts, what did you feel about him?

I’d known from the history I’d read about him that he prided himself on many things, one of them that he could speak very good English — he cannot — he does get stuck on things and you don’t correct him, you just go along with it. I thought he certainly had a great deal of confidence. Certainly, all the times I’ve seen him, up to and including the last time [January 1980, Paraguay], he seemed very healthy. He smoked a tremendous amount, mentholated American cigarettes. I had … from the duty-free shops … a bottle of Wild Turkey. I brought it along as a ‘hello’ present. He said, “Let’s try it out.” This Spanish maid always attended to him, and whenever he wanted something it was like he was giving a military order during a massive barrage. Full volume on his voice: “GLASSES. ICE.”

If you want to put it on a personal basis, he really loves Wild Turkey, [is a] real chain smoker, loves good food and loves girls. He loves war movies and he really thinks Burt Lancaster is something else, and I’m certainly not going to tell him Burt Lancaster’s Jewish. Otto is a genuine Jew-hater. He loves hunting. I’ve suggested that he come hunting in the United States. Obviously he knows it could be done, but no. I think it’s more personal than fear. Personal dislike.

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The Organization and the projects, is this his continual focus? Or does he have a life aside from the Organization?

No, he’s very involved with the Organization. He doesn’t really have all that much of a recreational life. He compartmentalizes everything. His fun mode, it’s all having a great time, enjoying himself, but he can [snaps fingers] turn it off just like that.

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How did you feel about him as a human being?

Very forceful personality. It was very hard despite his gruff personality to picture him as being the kind of person that did his more well-known activities during the war. He said that the only time he’d ever been frightened was when he was on the Russian Front. He had a car and driver at this time which was unusual for a Lieutenant in the SS. This would date it around 1941-42, early Russian Front. He said that they came under a barrage of Russian rockets. They pulled over to the side of the road and he jumped out of the car with his driver and was lying by the side of the road. He was hit, by a stone fragment — I don’t think it was a steel fragment or he’d have been dead. He evidently was injured there and put on convalescent leave, and he said that really shook him. After that nothing seemed to frighten him, but that did.

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What I’m asking is…

He’s not the kind of person you’d want to go out and have a beer with.

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Was the forcefulness something you enjoyed, or was it repelling?

Oversimplifying it — I didn’t think it was good manners. From the very first he has to be in control of everything and everyone.

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You obviously found him interesting to some extent, you talked a lot, but you felt uncomfortable with him because of this overbearingness?

Not totally. Like if I’d want to talk about, say, some part of his war experience, he didn’t like that. Not that he was afraid of [talking about] the war experience, but because I had suggested it or somebody else suggested it, he was very definite: “NO!” He dominates the situation. It wears thin very quickly. I’d personally thought, the way we were getting along, how did I get involved? Well, you have to start somewhere. I had perhaps a crazy idea, but no one had really done anything effective against them. I had decided that this person, or these people and their actions were repulsive to me. I’d looked at, certainly, Wiesenthal and his work, and various Jewish people and what they had certainly done, at the War Crimes Trials, and no one had really been terribly effective. They were dealing with front men, dealing on a plane [of]: “Did this man kill a prisoner of war?” Very flamboyant and maybe makes for good reading and excites the people, but what were the real root causes of this?

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You had expressed a desire for meeting him [Otto Skorzeny]. Was this in conjunction with military collectables, or did you have some idea of pursuing this course of harming them, or was it just curiosity?

Mostly [curiosity], although there was the possibility of getting collectables from him. Curiosity and business. I knew he had his uniforms, they all have their uniforms, and I’d spoken to some American collectors and they mentioned that the SS had a white dress uniform, something really amazing, everything in reverse, the black is white and the white is black. Basically a formal outfit for very very formal occasions, and I knew he had his — of course they all do, the top ones, they still do. Degrelle has one. American collectors said if you can get one, name a price for them. So I asked him about them, and I asked him about his medals, and I tried to do it as delicately as possible. He said that the medals stay with me and when I die they’re going to go to the family. Many people had written him, and the few that had actually seen him had made open overtures about buying those things. He had to think that I was getting into that, so he probably thought ahead, and to avoid embarrassing me or causing me any trouble, he said, “No, I wouldn’t sell anything I have. I’m not selling them.”

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Let’s get back to this second or third meeting. I assume you mentioned this great uncle [of yours who had been in the German Army].

I mentioned it as a matter of interest. From the first time I’d noticed he had a lot of books, virtually any and every book that in any way even remotely alluded to German military or economic actions, devolving before, during or after World War II; this man has the books. He also has the standard
Dienstalter, alterlists,
a directory, broken down, SS, Luftwaffe, Army, Navy.

I mentioned this man and he said, “Go get the book there.” “Okay.” He says, “NO — GET UP RIGHT NOW AND GET THE BOOK!” I got up and went over to the library and, “Not that volume, that one over there.” If I didn’t pick the right volume, he’d get very annoyed. It’s not my library, how do I know? I finally got the right book, checked it out and sure enough, there’s the name, Otto Barth, I believe it was Lieutenant General, German Army of course, Eastern Front. He’d been captured by the Russians, had been held until the general amnesty of 1955, released and died. His wife — he says, “Now, I want you to take down the address and see her. This is the proper thing for you to do.” You know, relatives and all that sort of thing. I said, “Okay.” He says, “NO, TAKE IT DOWN! HERE’S THE PAPER…” The more you present problems, the more he gets annoyed.

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Where did she live?

Erlangen.

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Did you go to see her?

No.

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Was there any change in relationship after he had gone through this?

That seemed to be, in retrospect, very good. Maybe I didn’t have relatives in the SS, so that wasn’t perfection — he was a general in the army, regular army, just a soldier — willing to overlook that fault.

It must have been the second time I had been to Madrid, I checked into the Luz Palacio and I saw these cars I mentioned, near his house, move off when they saw me coming out. Paranoid or not, I felt that something was very wrong, and realized what I was getting into. I was still very fearful. I walked away from his house. He had never had a cab or a car meet me, I’d have to go walk out and hail one. I got the cab back to the hotel and barricaded the door. In all future meetings, coming to Madrid, I would take the train in, meet him a day, and I wouldn’t check into a hotel. I would get on the train, in the evening, go up to the Spanish-French border, get on a return train and get back in the morning, so I’d be on the move at all times in public. That got a little wearing after a while.

Which leads me to another interesting situation. He [Otto] asked me to carry some instructions, and they had to be written… highly unusual. Usually things are not written down. That’s why the standard types of documentation people expect don’t really exist, to any great extent. It was “I want you to take this file — take it to an address in Stuttgart.” I took the train. France, no problem, through Switzerland, no problem, up to Geneva, got on a train there into Salzburg from Geneva, Salzburg, Austria. This was very late at night — one, two in the morning. No one’s around, maybe two or three people, and you have to go through German customs station there on Austrian soil, after you leave Salzburg station. “Open your suitcase.” I had all these papers that he’d given me, and I was laughing and going through my mind, “What’s going to happen here? I’ll just play it cool…” and he sees the papers.

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What was the nature of the papers?

Mostly private correspondence, some very personal messages he didn’t want to go through the mail. On top of it, he had given me a photograph of himself, just after he was captured. It shows Otto in his uniform before he had been disarmed or had the medals or badges removed, and it was lying on top of the papers. Two German customs men opened it up, they look at the papers, they look at the picture, they knew what it was, obviously, they closed it up and said, “Go.” No problems — that was the end of the examination.

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When you left, obviously, some situation of trust had been established. Was there anything other than checking on B. that he had asked you to do on his behalf?

Many people ask me what do you do, and I answer, well, I’m interested in investments, stock market and things like that. He was very interested in that. He asked me about some of the things I had done. It was almost like he was testing me, on certain companies. I went through the questions — they were superficial questions, none of them of real importance — but the fact that I could answer these questions about certain companies, he seemed to like that.

Initially it was put to me, oh we don’t know too much about that here, could you get these things for me? Find out about this company? I remember the very first was ComSat, the first private communications satellite system, and he was interested in investing. I got that information. I will say that a number of things put me in his good graces, for instance, initially on the B. thing. I reported back what B. had said and what B. was doing, and I said I’d have to have some more papers, and he even gave me a copy of the contract he and B. had…

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You bid your farewells and came back to the States. You knew of B. because of the book he had written on war memorabilia…

I met B. and had a discussion with him, the one I described earlier. I met with a man at a brokerage office, Merrill Lynch, who was handling my account. I asked him to get me whatever he could on ComSat, that I was interested in investing in it. Give me an in-house report for clients of Merrill Lynch, and each brokerage house does this. When I went back [to Madrid] the next time I brought it to him.

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In between visits
,
you had a correspondence with Otto about B….

There was a tremendous amount of correspondence about B. I realized that B. was dealing from the bottom of the deck and selling to both sides. As far as Otto was concerned, he was giving information to Otto, as far as various intelligence matters, I don’t know what. I knew he was giving photos. He was one of the people who were extracting files from the National Archives, and most of what the National Archives had was not even catalogued, so virtually anything could be missing and no one would know it was missing. At the same time, he was informing to American Naval intelligence; why I don’t know. I know what he boasted to me… He had to realize I was going to tell Otto what he said, and maybe this was just his way of thumbing his nose at Otto, thinking that Otto didn’t really have much to say or do about it.

Evidently he was well protected with the people he was dealing with in the United States, so he thought he had nothing to fear. When I got back to Otto, I hedged and hemmed and hawed and I said, “Otto, I don’t like to tell you this, but I don’t have any proof.” “NEVER MIND — TELL ME, I’LL DEAL WITH IT.” So I told him. That this man was selling to American intelligence, information about Otto. Period. That he had every intention of taking advantage of Otto on the book and not paying Otto anything.