Krueger's Men (15 page)

Smolianoff was sentenced to two and a half years in prison. Miassojedoff, picked up in a Berlin dragnet, drew a three-year term, which he serenely passed painting frescoes on the prison chapel. Both emerged impenitent. In March 1936, Smolianoff was arrested again, this time in Berlin for passing ten-pound notes, and sentenced to four years. When he had finished serving his time, the war was on, the concentration camp system was writing the rules of German conduct, and Smolianoff was thrown into Mauthausen as an “incorrigible criminal.” This death trap — in prison slang
Mord-hausen,
“death-house” — had been designed as a penal camp for “antisocial elements.” A Jew, a Russian, and a criminal, Smolianoff needed no three-strikes law to seal his doom. Yet he was saved by Germany’s traditional bureaucratic turf battles, which had impeded even the organization of the final solution. Once a prisoner entered the German criminal court system, the judges refused to yield any of their prerogatives to the Gestapo upstarts. Yes, Smolianoff was a marked man, but he had been branded the property of the judicial bureaucracy and not the murderous Gestapo.

Even Mauthausen’s commandant had to bow to the court’s authority. Instead of assigning Smolianoff to the lethal quarries that surely would have made short work of him, the forger was designated the camp’s portraitist. And when Krueger finally located the man he so badly needed, Smolianoff came bearing the Mauthausen commandant’s recommendation as a fine artist. Loyal to a fault, Smolianoff also never broke with his mentor. As his home address he listed the Vaduz residence of one Malvina Vernici, Miassojedoff’s lifelong companion who sat out the war with him in Liechtenstein.

So there in Block 19 appeared a man with a truly charmed life. Smolianoff’s new comrades and even his chief jailer must have hoped that some of his luck would rub off on them.

Hauptscharfuehrer Kurt Werner, the stiff-necked chief of the SS guard who had succeeded the feckless Marock and Weber, explained to Smolianoff it had been decided that the prisoners had already manufactured enough pounds. Now, Werner told the Russian prisoner, they would produce dollars. Smolianoff was then introduced to Jacobson and Levi, who confided that the phototype process was not working. They took the newcomer through the tropical heat of the rooms where the gelatin plates were prepared, a process about which he knew nothing. “We have to produce better work, because if we do not succeed, we are all finished and will be killed,” Levi moaned.

The next day, Smolianoff was ushered in to a kindly reception from Krueger. “Well, here you are,” the Nazi said. “We have been waiting for you to arrive from Mauthausen. I wonder that you are still alive after long years there.” Krueger pulled a hundred-dollar bill from his pocket, a real one, and confirmed that the project to counterfeit dollars was in trouble. What they needed, Krueger said, was a deft and artistic hand to retouch the imperfect negatives. “Do you think you could do that?” Smolianoff assured Krueger that he could, whereupon Krueger spilled out an unprecedented monologue for any SS officer with power of life and death over his prisoners:

“I know that you are all in fear of death, but if you do your work right, I can promise you that nothing will happen to you — as long as I am chief. Inside this barbed wire you are no longer Jews to me. You are my fellow-workers in the fight for the new Europe. Victory is ours. Now we go to work. Do everything to prevent me from falling on my nose in front of Himmler. For if you disappoint me or fail, you will die together with me. All my hope is based on you.”

When Smolianoff was returned to the company of Jacobson and Levi, they agreed it was hard to judge exactly what the man they called “the chief” was trying to accomplish. Surely, they reasoned, he could have dredged up a good set of etching tools and a press somewhere in Germany. And surely Smolianoff was not the only competent artist-etcher in all of the Third Reich. As a specialist in the process, Jacobson assured them that no matter how carefully they worked, it would result in a smeared version of the sharply etched strokes that characterized American currency. Although Levi was more hesitant to believe it than the other two, they began to suspect that Krueger was not in quite such a hurry as they had thought.

Nor were they the only ones who thought so. Krakowski had carefully observed Krueger conducting Ernst Kaltenbrunner on a lightning tour of Block 19, declaring all the prisoners “top experts in the field” but chattering incessantly to prevent the SS chieftain from questioning them, and especially from showing off a huge press for printing serial numbers on each bill. (It had been brought from Berlin with great difficulty and mounted on a heavy concrete slab, but no one had ever been able to get it to work properly.) What did impress Kaltenbrunner unreservedly was the huge pile of pound notes stuffed into the camp vault. “Incredible!” he declared. “This must be more notes than in the Bank of England.” What they could not determine, Krakowski said, was whether “Krueger intended to save us out of the goodness of his heart, or if he was trying to save his own neck.”

As the weather turned cold, the Allies in the west approached the Rhine, the Russians plundered and raped their way through East Prussia and reached the Oder River, only 50 miles from the camp, and almost every night Berlin itself was being pounded into rubble by Allied bombers. Occasionally the planes dumped their explosive cargo near the camp, and after one raid the lights went out. Sitting in the darkened phototyping room, Smolianoff, Jacobson, and Levi agreed to play for time by continually criticizing each other’s work. The next day, Levi enlarged a photo of a dollar bill, and Smolianoff retouched it. They were both dissatisfied and said so. They did it again, and again. For weeks they quarreled about the color balance, the chiaroscuro, the precision of the engraving, and much else. Each time, they went back to the camera and the drawing board, “always making photographs of every little detail and fighting continually about the work of the others,” Smolianoff said. “Several times the SS had to interfere and separate us because we fought really hard, but they couldn’t [dis]miss us, because all the work depended on what we were doing.”

Levi tried other tricks. He once insisted that the operation could not proceed without “heavy water” — it is most unlikely that he even knew such a thing existed and was used in making atomic bombs — sending away the puzzled SS men and buying more time. The trio could not carry the entire load of deception, so one of the assistant retouchers, a normally insouciant young artist named Peter Edel, diverted Krueger elsewhere. Shocked by his own courage, the twenty-three-year-old told Krueger that in order to draw some very fine lines, they needed a brush made from the fur of the pine marten.

“And what might these be — magic brushes? Where do you get them?” Krueger asked suspiciously.

“Maybe at Spitta and Leutz at Wittenbergplatz. It’s an art shop where I used to…”

“Used to!” he interrupted sarcastically, noting that many more beautiful things in Berlin than art shops had been bombed out. “What is the name of this watercolor brush?”

“They’re called Chinese brushes, Herr Sturmbannfuehrer. Slim ones with bamboo handles.”

“You must be joking. Where do they have to come from — Peking? Am I supposed to send a special commando out to look for Chinese brushes?” A pause for reflection. “But if you do need these things as you say…” Then he turned to his senior staff and the other artist-retoucher, Leo Haas, an anti-Nazi cartoonist from Prague who had done a spell at Auschwitz making diagrams for the notorious Dr. Josef Mengele. “Is that really true, Smolianoff? Would this improve things? Haas, what do you think? Well, Burger? Jacobson, Weil, Leonat? Is he right?”

They all nodded yes, astonished but nevertheless indicating that someone ought to try in Berlin.

“So now you tell me! Am I supposed to know where little paintbrushes should be? These excuses are only delaying things. Why didn’t you tell me at the start? And if I really believe you, where do I get them without actually stealing them?”

Edel thought they might try his home. “I meant, at my mother’s house. My painting equipment should be there. But I’m not sure if it’s still there or if my mother…” Every prisoner wondered whether his home and family were surviving, even by a thread, as they were. “It was just an idea. I thought I couldn’t ask you.”

Krueger then led Edel across the courtyard and confronted him in private.

“Have you written your mother?”

“Yes, sir!”

“Did you receive a reply?”

“No, not yet.”

“Oh, that’s it. All this rubbish about the paintbrush. It was only a pretext for… You know exactly what I mean. Now, no more fibbing.”

Aware from Krueger’s questions that the officer had figured out what was going on, Edel let him ponder without comment. He realized it was a stupid idea after all: Why should this shrewd officer, leading an operation worth millions with a huge arsenal of supplies at his disposal — why should he indulge some prisoner’s silly whim?

Still, Krueger sat Edel down at a desk and typewriter, removed the cover, inserted a sheet of paper, and ordered him to start typing.

“About the brushes?” Edel asked.

“What else?”

Edel had never dreamed his plan would get this far and found the scene utterly unreal. He tapped out the letter with two fingers. Krueger peered over his shoulder as the young artist asked for all his China brushes, especially the smallest, size Number 1 to 0. Edel then extracted the letter and started to write a personal note to his mother. There Krueger drew the line, insisting on a sort of semiofficial request.

“How do you normally address her?
Mutti, Mutter, Mama,
or what? And how do you normally send your regards?”

It then became obvious that Krueger suddenly realized something damning: If Edel coldly asked only about the paintbrushes, his mother’s suspicions might be aroused to the point of asking uncomfortable questions. Why did her son need his paintbrushes in a concentration camp? And what was really going on there, anyway? Krueger then instructed Edel to ask for his entire painting kit. “Your mother will surely be pleased to learn that you are being so well treated.”

Edel stuttered: “Oil paint. Palette. Easels. Compasses, mixing pots, quills, spray guns?”

“Spray guns, that’s good. We will need them. Write down everything properly, one after another.”

He wrote it down as ordered, a list that his mother actually received and saved, an extraordinary document with its own life and history, yellowing as the years passed.

“KL Sachsenhausen. Dear
Mutti:
Under the instructions of Herr SS Sturmbannfuehrer Krueger” — who at that point showed the young man the double-lightning SS sign on the special typewriter key and expressed no objection to mentioning his name and rank — “I beg you to give the bearer of this letter the following material.” After the list, at the end, he wrote: “Thank you very much for your assistance. Fondest regards from your Peter.”

When Edel removed the long list and folded it, he addressed the letter on the reverse to Frau Margarete Edel, which caused Krueger to question why she did not call herself Sarah, as required of all Jewish women under the Nazis. He explained that his mother was not a Jew.

“Aryan? Even better. I don’t know all these family trees by heart. I thought always that your father was Aryan and she… No, that plays no role for us here!”

Edel bit his tongue. His family name at birth was actually Hischweh; he and his mother both went by her maiden name — but he said nothing. The whole world had been turned upside down — young art students like him had become criminals and criminals had become essential to the functioning of the state. Here was one of Himmler’s own officials playing postman for him, and not just postman, a messenger of life.

In due course, suitcases full of the material did arrive to play its part in the dollar counterfeits, but not without another sarcastic Kruegerism about “magic Chinese brushes.” Meanwhile, Frau Margarete Edel had been frightened out of her wits when the Gestapo knocked at the door of Kurfürstenstrasse 50, Berlin W35. They scolded her for having mentioned Auschwitz in a letter to him they had intercepted when he was still at that most fearsome of death camps. But now she knew he had been transferred and, best of all, that he had so far escaped the gas chamber.

As the pressure of producing more pounds slacked off, and apprehension rose about progress toward acceptable replicas of dollars, the prisoners amused themselves and even satirized their jailers in a way that was unique in the entire network of Nazi camps. From late in 1943,
Die “Moneymakers” von Sachsenhausen
had been staging musical evenings. Their easiest task was, of course, printing the programs featuring their own names. But now the Saturday-night cabarets grew increasingly elaborate and purposeful. At the end of Block 19, packing cases from the paper shipments formed the stage and blankets curtained it off. In the front row sat Krueger and his subordinates, starved for entertainment. Krueger occasionally contributed a barrel of beer. As master of ceremonies, Max Bober welcomed his audience with a flattering and in fact wholly accurate description of “a distinguished group of connoisseurs from all parts of Europe. I daresay that not many artists have ever performed before a more cosmopolitan public.”

The prisoners stirred uncomfortably in their seats lest the SS take offense. Bober, paying no heed, dripped barracks sarcasm as he introduced Hans Blass, a Viennese factory worker with the accordion that the disgraced guard Weber had received — “at least that is what he insisted, as a gift from one of his Jewish admirers.” Blass serenaded them with sentimental German songs and Viennese schmaltz, diverting attention from two Czechs, Oskar Stein and Alfred Pick, who were sneaking toward the temporarily deserted guardroom. The show must go on — indeed
had
to go on. “Three troubadours, Max, Moritz, and Harry” — Groen from Amsterdam, Nachtstern from Oslo, and Stolowicz from Brussels — were brought forward by Bober to belt out that Maurice Chevalier favorite of the Paris cafés, “Valentine.” Groen, the Dutch newsreel cameraman, who had been based in Paris before the war and was a boulevardier par excellence, regarded it as his lucky song and had sung it on the ramp approaching the selection at Auschwitz. He taught it phonetically to Nachtstern, since the Norwegian anarchist knew not a word of French.