Krueger's Men (17 page)

The main road past Ebensee penetrated the mountains, passing through Bad Ischl, over the Pötschenhöhe Pass at more than 3,000 feet, and on to Bad Aussee, another 30 miles beyond Ebensee. At Bad Aussee, a winding spur leads off to the left, first to the Grundlsee and finally the Toplitzsee, both lakes fed by melting snows and underground springs from the Totes Gebirge — the Death Mountains. Toplitzsee, the smaller and more isolated of the two lakes, is in effect a water-filled ravine roughly a mile long and as deep as the height of London’s Big Ben. Its isolation and depth made it an ideal naval testing station for U-boat equipment, torpedoes, and the most advanced German rocket. (Fired from the deep, this rocket was eventually developed by its American captors into the nuclear missiles fired from Polaris submarines.)

Back at Redl-Zipf, four heavy Lancia and Mercedes trucks with carrying capacities between five and ten tons were loaded up. More followed later. They carried Operation Bernhard’s crated machinery, possibly some of the SS files, and the coffin-size boxes of counterfeit notes, each containing bills with a total face value of up to £200,000. About May 2 or 3, the trucks started heading south at a grinding pace. Some got only as far as Ebensee, where part of the load was dumped in the Traunsee. Some made it over the snowy pass to the Toplitzsee, where crates covered with metal were unloaded and sunk. Ropes attached to the crates snaked up through the water and were attached to empty rockets that floated just below the surface, marking the location of the counterfeit treasure beneath.

Not all the trucks made it. Probably not by accident, one 700-pound case of notes fell into the hands of an SS officer named Grabau. He was later forced to surrender the money, which eventually ended up with Counterintelligence Corps (CIC) investigators of the U.S. Army. A pair of civilian drivers, Hans Kraft and Josef Zadrappa, veered far off course, dodging American patrols. Their truck broke down, and they found themselves at Pruggern, where one crate popped open. Out spilled gold and silver coins, real American dollar bills, jewelry, and watches, all of which were eventually retrieved from the mud and handed over to the CIC, the vanguard of a vast Allied operation to uncover Nazi war crimes. Crates of machinery and counterfeit notes were dumped in the River Enns. Some wooden crates swelled in the water and burst, releasing pound notes to float downstream with the current. Austrian villagers found some and used them as toilet paper.

Their equipment gone and their production carted away, the Redl-Zipf prisoners meanwhile were searched once again for loot prior to their next transport. (Abraham Jacobson, the master phototype printer, courageously managed to smuggle out a fifty-pound note in the lining of his shoe.) At first Hauptscharfuehrer Werner was able to commandeer only one truck, possibly two. All the prisoners were to be conveyed from Redl-Zipf to Ebensee in successive loads. They jostled among themselves to be last aboard, hoping there would be no room and the stragglers could buy more time. With his pistol, Werner beat as many as he could into the first load. Before leaving, the prisoners warned their comrades that if the truck did not return with a red cross marked on the side as a sign of their survival, they should resist the next transport with all their might. Fifty-six prisoners were jammed into the back. Moishe Nachtstern, as his comrades called the Norwegian printer; Max Groen, the Dutch café habitué; and Adolf Burger, the dour printer, found themselves hustled into the first load. Two guards armed with submachine guns sat on the roof of the cab, and four more were posted at each corner in the rear.

The truck set off from Redl-Zipf with Werner sitting next to the driver, shouting at him to go faster. The driver leaned on his horn to scatter the refugees trudging away from the battlefront. Along the shoulders lay exhausted soldiers of the Wehrmacht. Most had thrown away their weapons.

In the rear of the truck, the suspense quickened as it approached a sign reading
Mauthausen
and took a different route. Groen shouted “Bravo!” A guard told him to shut up. They passed another sign, this one reading
Gmunden
and pointing the way toward Ebensee. Groen urged the others to make a run for it if the truck turned the wrong way. He argued that it was better to risk being shot at and possibly missed than face the certainty of being shoveled into the gas chamber.

Then the truck came to a fork in the road. Werner stuck his head out of the cab to speak to a soldier directing traffic. The prisoners could hear the words
Mauthausen
and
die Amerikaner.
The truck turned south, racing around the curves along sharp ravines offering majestic views of the forested valleys and snowcapped peaks of the Austrian Alps, its human cargo more fearful, at least for the moment, of accidental death on the winding road than the diabolical plot to dispose of them. The truck negotiated almost impossible roads to reach Ebensee in less than three hours. The first load of prisoners was dumped out and immediately locked up in a wooden SS bathhouse just outside the camp. SS guards manned the doors, machine guns were trained on the barren building, and it was further surrounded by an outer ring of Hungarian soldiers.

Back at Redl-Zipf, Abraham Krakowski had been awakened at 5:00 a.m. and stood waiting in place outside the barracks for more than four hours. However bone-weary his body, his spirit was aloft: The Nazi swastika was flying at half-staff, marking Hitler’s suicide, which had been announced the night before. Krakowski missed the first truck but made the second, which pulled out at about 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday, May 1. Because of engine trouble, it carried only thirty-five men, as well as the meager belongings of the men in the first truckload. When they asked about the machinery, they were told they would find out when they got to Ebensee. These prisoners in the second truck at least knew where they were going, but they had no idea what awaited them there.

They arrived at Ebensee toward dusk and were reunited immediately with their comrades in the crowded bathhouse. Along the way, Krakowski, strengthened by the advice of a young Hassidic comrade, had recited the original Hebrew of the 91st Psalm 91 times: “A thousand may fall on your left side, ten thousand on your right, but it shall not reach you. You will see with your eyes, you will witness the punishment of the wicked.” It seemed possible.

But what had happened to the last few dozen of their coworkers? The men in the bathhouse knew that Werner had made one final trip to retrieve them from Redl-Zipf. His orders were to kill every last one of the prisoners, not just most of them, to ensure that all would carry the secrets of Operation Bernhard to the grave.

In fact, when the truck returned to Redl-Zipf, its engine had finally broken down, perhaps sabotaged by motor oil poured into the gasoline tank. Another rumor claimed that the driver, fearful of yet another breakneck trip over the dangerous roads, had joined his comrades and fled. Werner could not drive the truck alone because the prisoners would have pounced on him at the wheel. But he remained fanatically determined to gather all his prisoners under one roof for definitive slaughter, so if he could not get them to Ebensee by truck, they would go on foot.

Looking around, Jacobson counted thirty-eight in this last batch of Redl-Zipf prisoners — twenty counterfeiters and the rest Spaniards. One of those in the last batch was his fellow-Dutchman Dries Bosboom, Max Groen’s buddy when the two young café crawlers were arrested in Amsterdam for breaking curfew. The two had remained together through every one of the camps.

The thirty-eight started out late that same day, Werner urging them on with fewer threats of violence than usual. Instead, he turned to Jacobson as the senior prisoner:
Sag das die Leute weitergehen. Es wird nichts passieren. Die Kameraden sind doch oben.
“Tell the guys to go on. Nothing will happen. Their comrades are farther ahead.” No one believed him but they slogged on, helpfully slowed by the older prisoners who were winded by the steep hills. Werner urged them on again:
Leute, es ist ja gar nichts los. Die Kameraden nach oben.
“There’s absolutely nothing wrong, guys. Your comrades [are] farther ahead.” These exhortations carried more menace than they might have in another context, and their effect was precisely the opposite from what Werner had intended. No one had any reason to hurry toward his death. The Spaniards also helped set a measured, deliberate pace.

Reverting to type, Werner occasionally waved his pistol, but his threats began losing force. The accompanying guards themselves began melting away. First one SS man, then another ducked into the woods, as all they saw en route urged their desertion — not Allied propaganda but the stark evidence of Nazi uniforms and weapons already abandoned along the road, ahead of the advancing Americans. Darkness fell, and two prisoners made a break. Norbert Levi, the handsome Berlin photographer, and Eduard Bier, a chemical engineer from Croatia, vanished into the forest while a one-armed guard struggled with his left hand to grab for his pistol, holstered according to SS regulations on his right hip. Hans Kurzweil, the chief of the bindery tried to follow but did not move quickly enough. Werner waved his pistol under Kurzweil’s nose but dared not shoot, lest the remaining prisoners jump him.

Continuing on, the column met a truck loaded with cases of counterfeit notes, and the driver leaned out to warn Werner that American troops were nearby. Then the last two guards deserted. The diminished column resumed its slow if reluctant march under an increasingly powerless Werner, by now their lone captor. Toward the end of the second day, they sat down in the road, accused him of shooting other prisoners, and dared him to shoot them. He backed down, and they dragged themselves toward Ebensee. By Friday, May 4, three days after starting out, they still had not reached their destination.

Meanwhile, the men in the Ebensee bathhouse waited without food or water, some with anxiety verging on hysteria, others with patience and even insouciance. The longer they waited for their missing comrades, the louder became the approaching sound of the liberating cannon fire. In this impossible situation, Max Groen thought to himself, there was nothing he could do except kick off his shoes and go to sleep on the floor. “I have done that at the strangest moments, as if to say that if they plug me, at least they cannot take away those few hours of sleep.” Those awake peeked out through broken glass to see the SS in panic, dragging out desks, filing cabinets, and the files inside them, placing them in a huge pile, and dousing them with gasoline to start a bonfire. Some stripped the SS insignia from their uniforms and headed for the woods. Senior officers changed into civilian clothes and were driven away in staff cars, some with women at the wheel. The prisoners knew that these amazing sights heralded the arrival of the Americans, and that their missing comrades held an invisible ripcord that was somehow keeping them alive. Here was one more perverse result among many: Werner’s determination to kill them all in one fell swoop now protected them. When a young guard let a few prisoners out of the bathhouse for a breath of air, the chief of Werner’s guard force at the bathhouse, an SS sergeant named Jansen, suddenly appeared and screamed at them to get back in, waving his pistol and threatening the gas chamber. They realized he now was as desperate as they were, maybe more so.

Saturday was the prisoners’ fourth day in the stifling bathhouse, Werner’s recalcitrant little band still not having arrived. In midmorning, the door was thrown open.
“Raus!”
shouted Jansen. This was it, they thought — until they stepped out into the sunshine to view an even more amazing sight. Down the hill from the bathhouse waved a handful of roughly made flags, like the ragtag standards of a medieval army. They could see the Russian hammer and sickle, the French tricolor, a white flag with the merciful insignia of the Red Cross. There was not a Nazi swastika in sight. One of the Hungarian guards shouted in Yiddish:
Haynt iz Shabbos; hostu mazel!
“Today is the Sabbath; you’re in luck!” Krakowski didn’t think so because they were still surrounded by armed guards. Almost a mile away stood the main camp, now under control of its former prisoners, flying the rebellious flags of their own liberation.

Half an hour later, Jansen was still conferring with the camp’s new masters, and the counterfeiters were still marked men in their makeshift prison. But a guard threw them an incongruous peace offering, a few cartons of soap. It was clear that things were changing fast.

When Jansen returned, he too had ripped off his SS emblem. They all knew the end was near. Jansen announced that they would be moved into the camp proper and issued a stern if ineffective warning: “Soon you’ll be liberated. But do not breathe a word to anyone about what you have been doing or you will pay with your lives.” As they were marched toward the camp, this handful of prisoners with full heads of hair and motley combinations of used civilian clothing presented a strange sight to the emaciated prisoners with their own striped uniforms and shaven heads. Thousands were milling unhindered about the huge
Appellplatz,
jagged and snowcapped mountains visible in the distance. Inundated by emotion, some were laughing or crying. Others were wandering about in a daze, uncertain of their fate. Just in case, a few of the more vigorous and determined slave laborers had broken into the armory, and random shots rang out.