Krueger's Men (28 page)

163 had been staging musical evenings: Nachtstern, 146–51; Kors, 85–89; Groen interview; Burger, 185–90.

166 “Well, then,
when,
Cherr Chacobson?”: Edel, 145; Nachtstern, 165.

166 Smolianoff meanwhile was heard boasting: Nachtstern, 156, 169.

166 brought the stragglers to their senses: Exactly who belled these headstrong cats is unclear. Smolianoff told the whole story to Whitaker, the U.S. Secret Service agent, in his interrogation, p. 5. He said the message was brought by “the eldest” of the prisoners but did not name him, and the list of prisoners does not make clear who that was. The oldest on record is one Georg Jilovsky, a Prague painter born in 1884, whose Sachsenhausen number is not recorded and was not prominent enough to figure in any other account. More likely it was Artur Levin, the chief printer from Berlin, who at fifty-six was only a few years younger. Smolianoff was also approached by Kurt Levinsky, a thirty-six-year-old Viennese, who in chatting with him around the chessboard warned that the dollar bill “had better be finished quickly” (Nachtstern, 169). Whoever it was, as Smolianoff confirmed to Whitaker, the Dollar Group changed course immediately.

166 with their fake demonstration bill mixed in: Burger (p. 170) writes that two dozen forgeries were printed from which the best were selected, and then another two hundred by the night shift. Smolianoff speaks of only one bill, but even if Burger is correct about the work in his print shop, they had nevertheless completed just one side of the bill before Krueger arrived, an important detail Burger omits.

166 “We were delighted, he was ecstatic”: Bloom, 259.

167 to counterfeit $1 million worth of bills a day: Burger, 170.

167 He summoned the printer: “76628.” Memoir of Chaim Shurak, in the Holocaust Museum at Kibbutz Lohamei Hageta’ot, Israel. Courtesy of his daughter, Tova Ze’eli. The title “76628” was Shurak’s Auschwitz number.

168 “He laughed maliciously”: Nachtstern, 170.

C
HAPTER
12: T
OWARD THE
C
AVES OF
D
EATH

169 stiffened as they heard Krueger’s Mercedes staff car: Nachtstern, 171–73; Krakowski, 172; Smolianoff interrogation by Whitaker, 5; Jacobson statement, 2. Burger (p. 214) gives a more unsettling version in which the order is issued not in February but on March 13, rescinded as the prisoners start packing up, and then reissued a day later. Burger also makes no mention here of Krueger, although the other memoirists do. Perhaps he was standing by the version he gave the Czech Interior Ministry’s investigators late in 1945, or perhaps the Communist Party functionaries who ran Czechoslovakia for more than forty years were forcing on him their habit of rewriting history. While this kind of revisionism usually appears convoluted and opaque to outsiders, it appears that in this case their motives — like Julius Mader’s in East Berlin — were to mention Krueger’s undisturbed existence in West Germany as support for the Communist argument that their enemies in Bonn still harbored unpunished Nazis. This they certainly did, but far bigger fish than Krueger.

169 The next morning they began the brutal job of packing up: Smolianoff interrogation, 5. Operation Bernhard material and men: Burger, 215; Krakowski, 173, who gives the final day of packing as the Jewish holiday of Purim, which in 1945 fell on February 27. Krakowski gives the total number of boxcars as fifty, with twenty prisoners to a car and intelligence material from Friedenthal filling most of the other freight cars. Nachtstern, 175, says there were fifty men to a cattle car.

170 In silent horror, the SS guards: Krakowski, 174.

170 the train rolled through Prague: Burger, 215–16; Nachtstern, 175.

171 the killing quarries of Mauthausen: Krakowski, 175–85; Smolianoff interrogation, 5–6; Nachtstern, 177–78; Max Groen, notes provided to the author by Anne Makkinje.

172 (footnote)
Musselmann
was camp slang: Herman Langbein,
Menschen in Auschwitz
(Vienna: Europaverlag, 1972), 114. Quoted by Robert Jay Lifton in
The Nazi Doctors
(New York: Basic Books, 1986), 132.

173 load everything into about sixteen freight cars: Harry Stolowicz, interviewed September 7, 1945, McNally Report.

173 In the basement of the camp brewery: Fritz Kretz, manager of the oxygen works, and Hermann Weidner, chief engineer, statements to U.S. and British investigators, July 13, 1945, 430th CIC Detachment, Appendixes B and C to McNally Report.

174 As at Sachsenhausen, the counterfeiters: Smolianoff interrogation, 6; Nachtstern, 179–82; Jacobson statement, 2. His estimate of £180 million burned and £10 million dumped in the water is likely exaggerated. Only Burger alone (p. 222) writes that the Spaniards were veterans of the International Brigade and that they kept up their morale by singing Spanish songs with guitar accompaniment. This seems unlikely, but during the Cold War there were political reasons for mythologizing this largely Communist unit, which had few if any Spanish troops.

174 nothing was ever printed at Redl-Zipf: Stolowicz, McNally Report; Jacobson statement. Georg Kohn and Jack Plapler to British interrogators, PRO FO 1046/269. Kohn and Plaper are also the source for the statement that banknotes were burned around the clock — in their words, “day and night.”

174 two Nazi civilians from Berlin buried crates: Fritz Schnapper, Operation Bernhard printer, interviewed September 5 and September 25, 1945; Richard Luka, interviewed October 8, 1945, McNally Report.

175 Krueger as saying it would continue “in hiding”: Krakowski, 189–90.

175 Putting his arm on the shoulder: Nachtstern, 132. In Smolianoff’s version to Whitaker (p. 6), Krueger appears twice, first to give the order to break camp, then to order the prisoners to break open the boxes of third-class notes and burn them, while the first- and second-class notes were carried away on trucks. Smolianoff would be unlikely to stress to an American interrogator how closely they came to counterfeiting dollars. But in a memoir written when he was safely back home in Norway, Nachtstern would feel no such constraint.

175 both a Swiss driving license: Stolowicz, McNally Report. He said he knew Krueger had Swiss and Paraguayan passports. All documents probably had been forged in Krueger’s own shops.

175 suspected mistress, Hilda Moeller: Smolianoff, who calls her Krueger’s “girl-secretary” (p. 6), was one of the few to talk privately with Krueger on his last day with the prisoners. Bloom, 259, describes her as “an attractive 24-year-old blonde with an arresting, high-cheekboned face” who worked as an artist at RSHA headquarters in Berlin. But her name is not listed in the June 1943 internal telephone directory (
Fernsprecherzeichnis
) of the security police. Krueger is listed at Extension 220. NARA, RG 242, microfilm T-175, roll 232.

175 had warned his lieutenants (or so he said): Krueger, “I Was the World’s Greatest Counterfeiter,” part 2.

176 the general direction of the SS flight from Redl-Zipf: Nachtstern, 182–83; Burger, 226; Groen interview; Krakowski, 192; Smolianoff interrogation, 6. Once again, it is uncertain whether there was only one truck to make several trips, or two trucks in relay. Smolianoff remembers three. Among these understandably panicky recollections, Nachtstern’s seem more reliable because they were recorded close to the event and not under police interrogation.

176 a dumping ground for about 15,000: Goetz,
I Never Saw My Face.

176 and the most advanced German rocket: NARA, RG 72, entry 116: Reports of NTE/Europe, 1945–1946, box 12: serial 1470, U. S. Naval Technical Mission in Europe Technical Report No. 500-45, German Underwater Rockets (October 16, 1945). The report is based in part on interrogation of Dr. Determann, director of underwater research at the Toplitzsee Naval Research Laboratory, who became a primary source of information for investigators into what happened at the Toplitzsee in the last days of the Third Reich.

176 four heavy Lancia and Mercedes trucks: Statement by Hans Kraft, truck driver, and statement by Engineer [Viktor] Doubrava, July 13, 1945, to detectives Minter and Chadburn, Appendix D, McNally Report. A copy of the latter was given to the U.S. 430th CIC Detachment, also working on the case. Doubrava was a district partisan leader who showed the investigation team to a number of the local sites for abandoned or buried Bernhard material. Other versions, none contradictory but necessarily slightly different given the confusion of those final days, can be found in a number of the memoirs and interrogations already cited. Smolianoff, for example, counted “approximately 10–15 trucks with trailer.” Sem and Mayer’s account, which was based partly on Burger’s testimony, says some crates contained Operation Bernhard’s account books and “secret archives” of the Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service), the alleged existence of which was to become a postwar bone of contention (p. 21). In his book (p. 225), Burger says the papers were driven away during the night of April 28 aboard two military vehicles carrying about forty crates. Out of all this slightly variant material, I have tried to piece together as coherent and factual a story as possible.

177 used them as toilet paper: Bloom, 263.

177 a fifty-pound note in the lining of his shoe: Jacobson statement, 3.

179 flying at half-staff, marking Hitler’s suicide: Krakowski, 192. Hamburg Radio announced Hitler’s death after 10 p.m. on May 1, Hitler having committed suicide in his Berlin bunker at 3:30 p.m. on April 30. Shirer,
Berlin Diary,
1350.

180 its engine had finally broken down: Burger, 230; Nachtstern, 182; Krakowski, 205; Kors, 24–28; Groen interview. Groen’s account of the march was based on what he was told by his friend Dries Bosboom.

183 Some of Ebensee’s slave laborers had already heard: Krakowski, 195–96; Nachtstern, 185, 188; Kors, 26–27; Groen interview; Sem and Mayer, 22; Jacobson statement, 3; Goetz, 71; Tenenbaum,
Legacy and Redemption,
157ff.

184 “Had we arrived about ten hours earlier”: Jacobson statement, 3. This account of their last-minute reprieve is fully confirmed from inside the camp in a statement written by Burger in German, translated by Sergeant Chadburn of the London Metropolitan Police, and dated 8 June 1945, PRO MEPO 3/2400.

184 Sturmbannfuehrer Franz Ziereis, had ordered his subordinate: Krakowski, 211. Probably drawn from the text of Zieireis’s deathbed confession. See
Nuremberg Trial Proceedings,
vol. 11, p. 330, Testimony of Dr. Ernst Kaltenbrunner on Document Number 3870-PS, USA-797, quoting “Confession of Frank [
sic
] Ziereis,” p. 2.
http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/proc/04-12-46.htm
: “According to an order by Reichsfuehrer Himmler, I [Ziereis] was to liquidate all prisoners on the instructions of SS Obergruppenfuehrer Dr. Kaltenbrunner; the prisoners were to be led into the tunnels of the Bergkristall works of Gusen and only one entrance was to be left open. Then I was to blow up this entrance to the tunnels with some explosive and thus cause the death of the prisoners. I refused to carry out this order.” The confession is controversial, and when it was entered in evidence at the Nuremberg trials, all concerned tried to distance themselves from it. Nevertheless, the prisoners uniformly recall that the SS tried to lure them into the tunnels.

184 “Not while I’m here”: Kors, 24.

184 standing on a table to be heard: Samuel Goetz, e-mail to the author, April 2, 2003. Goetz was an inmate of Ebensee.

185 clanked up the highway and into the camp: Notes from Anne Makkinje and Groen interview. Krakowski, 206, says the troops were from the 11th Armored Division, whose historians do not confirm his designation. The U.S. Holocaust Museum and U.S. Office of Military History give units of the 80th Infantry Division credit for liberating Ebensee, although clearly it was the inmates who liberated themselves before the troops arrived to guarantee their survival. Krakowski recalled years later that the troops were “visibly shaken,” but this seems unlikely since elements of the division had already seen far worse at Buchenwald and elsewhere. Ebensee appears to have been the last camp reached by Allied troops.

E
PILOGUE

187 A file of paper two inches thick recording complaints:
Abus de confiance, J. van Harten,
Band G 61, Archives de la Comité internationale de la Croix-Rouge, Geneva (hereafter cited as
Abus
).

187 Van Harten appointed himself: “Red Cross [Does] Not Recognize Italian representative,” published in
Il Tempo,
June 6, 1945, copy attached to letter dated June 16, 1945, signed by Dr. H. W. de Solis, Delegation Chief, International Red Cross in Rome, in
Abus.

187 not only to bona fide refugees: Vincent La Vista, “Illegal Immigration Movements in and through Italy,” report to Herbert J. Cummings, assistant chief of the Department of State’s Bureau of Foreign Activity Correlation, May 15, 1947, NARA, RG 59, Central Decimal File (1945–49), 800.0128/5-1547. This thirty-five-page document, originally classified Top Secret, was compiled by a lawyer serving as military attaché at the U.S. embassy in Rome, perhaps as cover for intelligence work. The report, which details Vatican and International Red Cross complicity in securing travel documents for fleeing Nazis, was made public in January 1984 after an expert on Nazi war criminals, Charles R. Allen, Jr., discovered it.

187 sought help from… the Swiss consul general, Alberto Crastan: La Vista Report, Appendix C, 4.

187 a warehouse with “thousands of things stolen”: Ferris and Bickel.

188 the IRC formally denounced him before Allied headquarters: Telegram, (in French) signed F[rédéric] Siordet, 30 May 1945, and letter, dated May 30, 1945, signed Albert Lombard, vice president of the CICR (International Red Cross), May 30, 1945,
Abus.

188 Van Harten boldly replied to Red Cross directors: “Action for a declaratory judgment,” 8 June 1945, by “J. Lewis van Harten, Merano, Hotel Stefanie” (trans. Fiona Fleck),
Abus.

188 counterfeit pound notes served a historic purpose: Ronen Bergman, two articles in the weekend magazine of the leading Israeli newspaper
Ha’aretz,
“Jacques Van Harten: Collaborator or Hero?” April 28, 2000, and “The Van Harten Affair: New Evidence,” May 19, 2000. It is to the credit of the Schocken family that it has not objected to the publication of these balanced articles (with which the van Harten family at first refused to cooperate) by the distinguished newspaper in which it still holds a substantial interest.