The Budapest Protocol (43 page)

Partners of German companies in the United States were considered especially important, which is not surprising, given that before the United States entered the war in 1941 there were extensive links between the American and German business establishments, especially in the oil and chemical industries. Many of those deals were negotiated by John Foster Dulles and his brother Allen Dulles, who were partners in the immensely powerful law firm of Sullivan and Cromwell. John Foster Dulles later served as Secretary of State under President Eisenhower. During the Second World War Allen Dulles was the U.S. intelligence chief in Berne, the capital of Switzerland. He later served as Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

I was given the Red House Report in 1996 while I was researching my book
Hitler’s Secret Bankers
,
which investigated the extent of Swiss economic collaboration with the Nazis and the role of Swiss banks in laundering looted Nazi gold and financing the Nazi war effort. The report was one of numerous intelligence documents declassified and released in the United States after Jewish organizations such as the World Jewish Congress and others filed Freedom of Information Act requests. The intelligence reports poured out, revealing a secret history of economic warfare—and, perhaps, future planning. It is a curious feeling to hold a reproduction of the Red House Report in your hand. The papers are typewritten, the edges of the letters fading. The language is dry, factual, without adjectives. For the purposes of
The Budapest Protocol
I simply switched the meeting to the fictional Hotel Savoy. But beyond a novelist’s caprice are more fundamental questions: Did the meeting take place; did the Nazis plan a fourth, economic Reich, or as the document records, “a strong German empire”? And did they build one?

Some things we do know. There is still a hotel called the Maison Rouge in Strasbourg. The Swiss connection, outlined in the Red House Report, was crucial. Allen Dulles was friends with Thomas McKittrick, an American banker. McKittrick was the president of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland, from 1940 to 1946. The BIS was, and still is, the bank for central banks. During the war the BIS was the main contact point between the Allies and the Nazis for post-war economic planning. Declassified US intelligence documents reveal that McKittrick was an asset of Dulles’s, known as codename 644. McKittrick was in regular contact with senior Nazi bankers who travelled to Basel from Berlin and passed information from them to Allen Dulles. McKittrick negotiated deals with German industrialists to guarantee their profits after an Allied victory, in exchange for their cooperation. Harry Dexter White, a close aide of Henry Morgenthau, the U.S. Treasury secretary, described McKittrick as “an American president doing business with the Germans while our American boys are fighting Germans”.

Harry Dexter White and his colleagues were closely monitoring the outflow of German capital, much of which was going to South America. In July 1944 White told a meeting of Treasury officials that funds were pouring out of Germany and that the Nazi leaders were preparing to flee the country or have their properties confiscated. “They bought estates and industries and corporations and there is evidence that the German corporations have been buying into South American corporations in the expectation of being able to re-establish themselves there after the war.” Just as the Red House report outlined, this outflow of capital was being run through middle-men and front companies. The cloaking operation was extremely complex, White told his colleagues. “They are working through first, second and third fronts, so it’s pretty hard to trace it without having all the data available.”

The level of detail in the Red House report, the strong endorsement of the reliability of the source in the report’s covering letter, the fact that it was sent to the secretary of state, and most of all, that the plans outlined in the report fitted in with known Nazi policy objectives mean that the meeting almost certainly took place. It’s also noteworthy that the Nazi industrialists met in Strasbourg, the capital of the French province of Alsace, on the German border, where Germany had traditionally had strong economic interests. The Red House Report was definitely read in high places.

In his 1946 book,
Germany Is Our Problem
, Henry Morgenthau advocated a deindustrialized Germany, in part to break the economic power of the German industrial conglomerates that had financed and profited from the Nazis, most of which soon rebuilt themselves and even now remain household names. It seems Morgenthau knew of the plans for a new economic empire outlined in the Red House Report and the plans to export capital. “These funds will be at the disposal of the Nazis in their underground campaigns (but the industrialists will be repaid by concessions and orders when the Party candidates come to power),” he wrote. “Two Swiss banks through which operations may be conducted were named and the possibility of acquiring a Swiss dummy at five per cent was noted.”

The Nazis always placed high importance on economic assets hidden in neutral countries and their potential use in the future. In November 1945, the British section of the Allied Control Commission for Germany found a secret circular written in September 1939 by the German Economics Ministry. It contained instructions to all German Foreign Exchange Control Authorities (Devisenstellen) on how to protect and camouflage their assets abroad. The instructions were considered “state secrets” and only forty copies of the memo were made. Point II/1 on the camouflage of foreign enterprises instructs:

It is of great interest that the camouflage be effective and successful in order to enable these companies to act as far as possible as bridgeheads for German trade in the future. The camouflage the companies must undergo is to be carried out in such a manner that they can
be authenticated as independent foreign enterprises
. [emphasis in original]

The document continues:

The actual influence in the new foreign firms must be secured by effective
economic
and
personnel
measures. Special attention is to be paid to the
selection of persons
for appointment as managers of the newly created foreign firms. . . . Of course any participation of
Jewish
foreigners in camouflaged German firms has to be avoided.

All of this perfectly accords with the plans laid out in the Red House Report. Seventy years after Dr. Scheid and the Nazi industrialists met at the Maison Rouge hotel, the record of their discussions still makes for intriguing, if not unsettling, reading.

Czigex, the genetically engineered drug to render Romany women infertile, is a product of the author’s imagination. Coercive sterilization of Romany women is not. In February 2009, a Hungarian Romany woman finally won an eight-year legal battle for compensation after a coercive sterilization. The woman, known as AS, had been sterilized by doctors at a hospital in a small town in eastern Hungary. Her case was taken up by the European Roma Rights Center, which is based in Budapest, and represents an important victory for Romany human and reproductive rights.

Ms. AS was admitted for an operation to remove a dead fetus in January 2001. She was asked to sign forms giving her consent to this, and to sterilization. However, the doctors did not explain the procedure, the risks, or the consequences to her of being sterilized.

Hungary and its neighbors are now members of the European Union, which brings responsibilities to treat all citizens equally. AS’s legal victory follows a decision by the Hungarian government in 2008 to amend the Public Health Act to ensure that all patients give informed consent to sterilization. But for many in the region, especially among the notoriously conservative medical professions, modern notions of equal rights do not extend to the Roma. The practice of coercive sterilization predates the change of system in 1989 and reaches back to the Communist and Nazi era. It is one of the most radical examples of the institutionalized discrimination that the Roma face: the removal of the right to reproduce.

Even in the early years of the twenty-first century, there were numerous reports of coercive sterilizations in Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. I have met several victims myself. In February 2003, together with my friend and colleague Peter Green, I traveled to a small village near the city of Presov, in eastern Slovakia. We were investigating reports by human rights and Roma activists that dozens of Gypsy women had been sterilized without their consent. What we found was both shocking and profoundly depressing: levels of poverty and deprivation usually seen in the developing world and a clearly delineated, officially sanctioned—if not orchestrated—de facto policy of apartheid between the Roma and their neighbors.

The non-Roma half of the village was clean and tidy, its spacious houses built of brick and concrete and painted white. The Roma were confined to drafty hovels of wood and earth, which they had built themselves, on the outskirts of the settlement. They had no heating, electricity, gas, water, or proper sewage disposal. Barely clothed children scampered through mud and ice, and dogs nosed around household waste. The Roma lived like this not because they wanted to, but because the local council refused to register them as residents. With no recognition of their status—especially important in the post-Communist countries’ Kafkaesque bureaucracies—officially, they did not exist. They could not vote in local or national elections. Their children could not go to school. The local council refused to provide any municipal services. There was even a separate wooden church for the Roma to worship in.

Inside one of the hovels we met Zita. She was twenty-three, and like many Roma, illiterate. Like almost all Roma women, she dreamed of a large family. For Roma, the family is of supreme importance, the axle on which their world turns. During the Nazi Holocaust, which the Roma call the “Poraymus” or great devouring, Roma families furiously resisted being separated. The Nazis decided it was easier to let them live—and die—together. They even had their own family compound in Auschwitz, from where some were selected for medical experiments. In early 1998 Zita gave birth by Caesarean section to her second child, a daughter. Still groggy, Zita was presented with a piece of paper to sign by a nurse. She told us: “They gave me a paper to sign, but I don’t know what it said because I cannot read or write. I was in pain after the operation. My signature is three crosses and I signed with that. After the operation, a nurse came and explained that I will not have any more children. I felt very bad. I started to cry.”

Zita’s case mirrors that of AS in Hungary and is typical of a policy of coercive sterilization of Romany women, according to investigators from the Center for Reproductive Rights, a New York–based human rights group. The center’s report, based on a three-month investigation, was published in March 2003. It detailed about 110 cases of coerced or forced sterilization in Slovakia as well as a policy of medical apartheid. Roma women were segregated in wards, waiting rooms, toilets, and washing and dining facilities. They were often subjected to verbal or physical abuse and were denied access to their medical records. Their hospital files were often stamped with an
R
. Many Roma women are vulnerable, poorly educated, and have no concept of their legal rights. Zita’s husband, Krystian, told us: “I know one hundred percent that she has been sterilized. I lived with her for eight years and now, five years after that operation, she cannot have children. They think the Roma are devils and they can do what they want with us.”

We also met Maria, who, like Zita, can no longer conceive. Maria, then twenty-nine, was also illiterate and has seven children, which is not uncommon in Romany families. Before giving birth in early 1998 by Caesarean section, she, too, was handed a form to sign. “They put a pen in my hand, took my hand, and helped me to sign the paper. They didn’t tell me what I signed. I had an operation, but I don’t know exactly what it was. Now I have found out that I cannot have children. I started to ask what was going on, but I do not speak Slovak very well and I don’t know how to ask a Slovak doctor what has happened to me.” Medical records held by Barbora Bukovska, a lawyer and human rights activist, confirm that Maria was sterilized at the age of twenty-four.

From the village we traveled to Presov hospital to hear the other side of the story. A doctor there showed us a grisly catalog of photographs of stillbirths and deformed fetuses. These were the reason why the hospital carried out so many Cesarean sections and sometimes had to remove wombs and ovaries as well, he argued. Dr. Marian Kisely, the head of obstetrics, told us that they had never sterilized a Roma woman against her will. “It is always done for medical reasons and with the agreement of the patient. There were cases when we had to perform an emergency hysterectomy because the mother’s life was in danger.”

As a new young democracy, then about to join the European Union, Slovakia was and is sensitive about its image. Forced sterilization of an impoverished minority was not the public profile it sought. Questions were being asked in international organizations, by human rights groups, and an embarrassing fuss was being made. But in Slovakia, like its neighbors, old Communist-style reflexes still prevailed. The Romany women asked us to neither print their surnames nor even the name of the village for fear of retribution from the state. We had already heard several stories of how agents of the Slovak secret service had harassed activists for bringing supposedly bringing the country’s name into disrepute. Some officials even threatened the activists with prosecution for failing to report a crime, that is, the sterilizations, on time to the police. What was bringing Slovakia’s name into disrepute was not the activists, but the failure by the new democratic government to stop the decades-old policy of sterilizing Romany women.

As the case of AS shows, Slovakia has no monopoly on ill-treatment of the Roma. Similar scenes of poverty and squalor can be found across post-Communist Europe, from the Baltics to the Balkans. In Hungary around 7 or 8 percent of the country’s ten million people are Roma. Here too many live in conditions of grinding poverty and endemic unemployment, exacerbated by the global economic recession and the slowdown in the construction industry, where many Roma formerly worked.