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Grey Wolf Ch.1-5
DID HITLER--CODE NAME "GREY WOLF"--REALLY DIE IN 1945? GRIPPING NEW EVIDENCE SHOWS WHAT COULD HAVE HAPPENED… When Truman asked Stalin in 1945 whether Hitler was dead, Stalin replied bluntly, "No." As late as 1952, Eisenhower declared: "We have been unable to unearth one bit of tangible evidence of Hitler's death." What really happened?
The Escape of ADOLF HITLER S I M O N D U N S TA N AND GERRARD WILLIAMS STERLING and the distinctive Sterling logo are registered trademarks of Sterling Publishing Co., Inc. Copyright � 2011 Simon Dunstan, Gerrard Williams, Spitfire Recovery Ltd. Project sourced through Greene Media Ltd. (firstname.lastname@example.com) For picture credits, see page tk. Book design and layout: Buoy Point Media (www.buoypoint.com) FRONTISPIECE: Hitler, late 1920s, in Bavaria with one of his German Shepherds. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. ISBN 978-1-4027-8139-1 (print format) ISBN 978-1-4027-8933-5 (e-book) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dunstan, Simon. Grey wolf : the escape of Adolf Hitler / Simon Dunstan and Gerrard Williams. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4027-8139-1 (alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-1-4027-8933-5 (e-book) 1. Hitler, Adolf, 1889-1945--Death and burial. 2. Hitler, Adolf, 1889-1945--Exile. 3. Heads of state-Germany--Biography. I. Williams, Gerrard. II. Title. DD247.H5D76 2011 943.086092--dc22 2011014763 Distributed in Canada by Sterling Publishing c/o Canadian Manda Group, 165 Dufferin Street Toronto, Ontario, Canada M6K 3H6 Distributed in the United Kingdom by GMC Distribution Services Castle Place, 166 High Street, Lewes, East Sussex, England BN7 1XU Distributed in Australia by Capricorn Link (Australia) Pty. Ltd. P.O. Box 704, Windsor, NSW 2756, Australia For information about custom editions, special sales, and premium and corporate purchases, please contact Sterling Special Sales at 800-805-5489 or firstname.lastname@example.com. Manufactured in the United States of America 2 4 6 8 10 9 7 5 3 1 www.sterlingpublishing.com Contents Dramatis Personae . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Treatment of Ranks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiii Abbreviations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xiv List of Maps . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xv Preface . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xvii Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xix PA R T I : the nazis triumphant 1 Fueling the Beast . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 2 The Turning Tide . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 4 3 The Brown Eminence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 4 The Rape of Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 5 Nazi Gold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 6 Eagle's Flight and Land of Fire. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 PA R T I I : the hunters 7 Red Indians and Private Armies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62 8 The Hunting Trail to Paris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 9 Cash, Rockets, and Uranium . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 10 The Fog of War Chapter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 11 Raiders of the Reich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 12 Bormann, Dulles, and Operation "Crossword" . . . . . . . . . . 1 1 5 13 "Wo bist Adolf Hitler?" . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 PA R T I I I : 14 The Bunker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 The Flight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Gruppe Seewolf . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Argentina--Land of Silver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PA R T I V : 18 The U-boat Landings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 To Patagonia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Adolf Hitler's Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21 Greedy Allies, Loyal Friends .............................. 22 Departures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Ghosts in the Shadows ................................... Acknowledgments . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Notes ............................................................ Bibliography and other sources. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Picture Credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 PREFACE We never wanted this story to be true. It was originally intended to be a quixotic but thoughtprovoking "conspiracy theory" television documentary. However, extensive research in Argentina, Poland, Germany, Great Britain, and the Canary Island of Fuerteventura produced a compelling dossier of details--backed up by the testimonies of many eyewitnesses--that told a completely different story from the accepted "history" of World War II. In the words of Winston S. Churchill, "History is written by the victors." Never has this been more true than the untold account of Hitler's escape from the ruins of the Third Reich in April 1945. The horrifying reality, we believe, is that at the end of World War II the most evil man in the world, Adolf Hitler, escaped from Germany and lived out his life in Argentina--and that his deputy, Reichsleiter Martin Bormann, and Heinrich "Gestapo" M�ller, a key figure in the planning of the Final Solution, also escaped justice and joined him there. Equally disturbing is the evidence that America and Britain facilitated the flight of hundreds of erstwhile Nazis, such as the rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and the sadistic torturer Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon. Both were employed by U.S. government agencies in the postwar years while others were allowed to avoid prosecution and flee to the far corners of the world. [1] Even as this book goes to press in the summer of 2011, a ninety-one-year-old Ukrainian, Ivan "John" Demjanjuk, was convicted as an accessory to the murder of 28,060 Jews in the Sobibor death camp in Poland some sixty-eight years after the event. For years he lived a comfortable life as an autoworker for the Ford Motor Company in Cleveland, Ohio, before being extradited to Germany in 2009 for trial as a war criminal. [1a] There is no concrete forensic evidence that it was Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun who died in the F�hrerbunker--no eyewitness to the moment of death. The famous "Hitler Skull" fragment held in Moscow for decades has finally been DNA-tested. It is that of a woman under the age of forty and it is not Eva Braun. There is also no absolutely accepted forensic evidence for Martin Bormann's supposed death; in 1998 German officials claimed that a skeleton buried near the Reichstag matched the DNA of an elderly relative of Bormann's, who remains nameless; the cremated ashes of the remains were scattered at sea. Bormann's family refused to accept the findings. Meanwhile, the bones found in M�ller's grave, when exhumed in 1963, were found to be those of three other people. We show for the first time that the "last official pictures of Hitler," with Artur Axmann and his Hitler Youth on March 20, 1945, are actually of Hitler's double. Modern science has proved beyond reasonable doubt that the man in the film and still pictures of the event, although bearing a striking resemblance to Hitler, was in fact not him, but one of several CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 2 doubles. Alf Linney, professor of medical physics at University College London and a noted facial recognition expert witness, reviewed the picture for us and is convinced that it is not Hitler. Hitler was not alone in his use of plausible stand-ins. Stalin had numerous doubles; Churchill at least one. Field Marshall Bernard Montgomery--"Monty"--used one in a successful ruse to mislead the Germans about his movements prior to D-Day in 1944. Magicians have known the trick for hundreds of years. People expect to see what they are shown. It's called sleight of hand. Martin Bormann carried out the most incredible trick in history on April 28, 1945. The Reichsleiter replaced Hitler with the double from the March 20 appearance. An actress from Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels's cinematic "stable" of film actresses--aided by the best makeup artists the Reich could find--stood in for Eva Braun. The look-alikes took their places in the F�hrerbunker as Hitler and Eva made their escape. Bormann carried on the charade for two days until he was sure that the real Hitler was safe. He then staged the fake double suicide of Hitler and his new bride and then callously had Hitler's double and his bogus bride murdered, almost certainly by "Gestapo" M�ller. The escape route into the Berlin subway system is still there. There are similar tunnels in London from the cellars of Buckingham Palace and 10 Downing Street, the residence of the British prime minister, to the London Tube, which would have been used by the British royal family and senior members of the government and military if London had ever fallen to Nazi invaders. The Associated Press and Reuters reported the testimony of the pilot Peter Baumgart, who flew the couple out of Berlin along with Eva's brother in-law, Gen. Hermann Fegelein, extensively from Warsaw in 1947. But researchers have ignored this until today. Having worked for both of these illustrious press agencies as a lifelong journalist, Gerrard Williams knows how difficult it is to get copy onto the wire. It passes through many subeditors in an exacting process before it can end up in a newspaper column. Newspapers around the world carried the story, although curiously no one ever followed up with Peter Baumgart and he simply disappeared from history after his release in 1951 from Warsaw's Mokot�w Prison (also known as Rakowiecka Prison). Historians have preferred to accept the "masterful" account of British historian, Oxford professor, and former intelligence officer Hugh Trevor-Roper, which insists that Hitler committed suicide in the F�hrerbunker on April 30, 1945. It was vital to the Allied cause that Hitler should be demonstrably dead, to allow a new Germany to emerge from the ashes of the old. Trevor-Roper's work, which was published in 1947 as a book called The Last Days of Hitler, is intrinsically flawed, from the testimony of Hanna Reitsch--"Hitler's favorite pilot"--who denied ever meeting Trevor-Roper or saying what he quoted of her, to Hitler's Luftwaffe adjutant, Nicolaus von Below, who later stated that he had lied to the Oxford don CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 3 and had a good laugh every time he saw his lies repeated. Hitler's chauffeur, Erich Kempka, was interrogated repeatedly but subsequently admitted in 1974, "I told American and British interrogators just about anything or everything I thought they wanted to hear" [2] Accepted as fact, Trevor-Roper's book has never been out of print. The acclaimed historian--who in 1983 identified the pathetic "Hitler Diaries" forgeries as real--had created his own sophisticated "forgery." He had never been given access to those Germans who had been in the bunker and were captured by the Soviets while trying to escape Berlin; these escapees were subsequently held prisoner, some for many years. Similarly, Trevor-Roper received only written accounts from those held by the Americans. All were anxious to save their own skins and invariably related whatever their captors wished to hear--that Hitler was dead. There are other much better descriptions of the final days; the account by James O'Donnell in his 1978 book The Bunker is a thorough investigative report, with interviews from all the surviving people. But O'Donnell, like Trevor-Roper, was fooled by one thing. The corpses that were said in the accepted "history" to be taken up to the garden and burned were not those of the two main actors in the appalling final death throes of the Third Reich, but their doppelg�ngers. Hitler's double was likely an unfortunate stand-in named Gustav Weber, but the name of Eva's lookalike may never be known. They will go down in history as the world's unluckiest body doubles. Stalin never believed Hitler was dead, insisting at the Potsdam Conference on July 17, 1945, that he had escaped--probably to "Spain or Argentina." Stalin's top general, Marshal Georgi Zhukov, said on August 6, 1945: "We found no corpse that could be Hitler's." [3] Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower stated publicly on October 12, 1945, "There is every assumption that Hitler is dead, but not a bit of conclusive proof that he is dead." [4] He told the Associated Press that "Russian friends" had informed him that they had been "unable to unearth any tangible evidence of his death." One U.S. senator went as far as offering one million U.S. dollars for proof of Hitler's death. It has never been claimed. Uncovering Hitler's escape has not been simple. Our New York agent, Bill Corsa, gave us what seemed to be the best analogy for this work. He described it as similar to the tracking of an animal; you never get to see all the traces left and sometimes there are gaps where the trail seems to go cold, but if you persevere you will pick it up again until you find the final lair. For the authors, the trail began in Buenos Aires in Argentina in 2006 and led us later to the windswept beaches of Patagonia and the city of San Carlos de Bariloche in the foothills of the Andes, where, to our amazement, no one we talked to seemed surprised at all that Hitler had lived there after the Nazi defeat in 1945. Prior to this research, two Argentine CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 4 investigators whom we met, Capt. Manuel Monasterio and Abel Basti, had followed and uncovered trails of many "sightings" of Hitler in Argentina. Capt. Monasterio published his book, Hitler Died in Argentina, in 1987, and although he admits he made part of it up--to avoid trouble with the Argentine authorities at the time--he insists that the most salient points are true. Much of Basti's work is more difficult to accept. Basti's website and books carry a picture of a man alleged to be Hitler in old age. It was sent to him by an unidentified source who had found it on the Internet. Basti presents this photo as proof of Hitler's survival. The same expert who spotted the March 20, 1945, fake has checked the photo scientifically for us. Although superficially an aged look-alike, the facial features do not stand up to scrutiny; it is not Hitler. The same is true about a passport alleged by Basti to be that of Martin Bormann. Of Uruguayan origin and issued in Genoa, Italy, it was in the name of Ricardo Bauer--a known alias of Bormann in the postwar era. It carried a thumbprint and a picture of a man who looked superficially like Bormann. We had the print checked against Bormann's known fingerprints from the Interpol files by a police expert, and we had the picture tested. Neither belonged to Hitler's faithful right-hand man. However, video interviews with eyewitnesses filmed in the 1990s while Basti was working for �mbito Financiero, one of Argentina's most respected daily newspapers, are compelling. It is the words of these witnesses, on a tape given to us by the paper's editorial director Ricardo D'Aloia, that have contributed to the findings published in this book. In over twenty research trips to Argentina, a beautiful country full of wonderful people, one thing has always surprised us: everyone we spoke to about the possibility of Hitler living there after the war believes it was eminently possible and in many cases definitely true. It is often dropped into conversation quite innocently. On one investigative trip, we were in the city of C�rdoba planning a foray to the dilapidated Hotel Viena on the shores of Mar Chiquita, a large inland salt lake. We asked the young receptionist at our hotel for the best route from Argentina's second city to Mar Chiquita. Without knowing why we were going to Mar Chiquita, she took our map and politely showed our interpreter the best route to get there. After we had finished with the map, she said to us, "Oh, you must try the fish--it's sea fish in the middle of Argentina! And then if you're bored you can visit the Hotel Viena where Hitler and his wife used to stay after the war." Similar stories greeted us throughout our trips. On April 20, 2007, we were in San Carlos de Bariloche smoking cigarettes outside the town's casino. A man in his seventies approached us and asked for a light and then, somewhat incongruously, if we were South African. Explaining that Gerrard was Welsh and Simon English, we asked him where he was from. "Chile," he replied, explaining that he ran a fish-farming business there. We offered CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 5 him a cigarette and commented that Bariloche felt very German--there were a lot of German speakers everywhere, much of the food, architecture, and culture was Germanic, and many of the street names were in German. He replied that the place was full of Nazis, particularly tonight, the anniversary of the F�hrer's birthday. He should know, he said; his father was the gauleiter (Nazi Party regional leader) of Hamburg, Germany, and when Hitler visited Hamburg he would always stay at their home. With a cheerful auf Wiedersehen, he then walked off into the night. We had scores of similar encounters in the deepest reaches of Patagonia, but that is a story in itself. There is no proof that Adolf Hitler and his "wife" Eva Braun killed themselves in the bunker, and yet the wider world has always believed this. Not everyone seems to have taken it as fact: the Federal Bureau of Investigation under Director J. Edgar Hoover kept files of reports on every sighting of Hitler into the 1960s; the relevant Argentine ones are to be seen in this book. However, many of the FBI's files on Hitler and Eva Braun after the war have not been released, and the same is true of those of the British security services. It should be remembered that Bormann's ruse fooled almost everyone and that Hitler subsequently lived among fellow Nazis and collaborators, many of them also on the run for war crimes. The government of Juan Domingo Per�n--and the Per�ns themselves--benefited massively from the influx of looted money as well as German experts and scientists. Argentina is a huge country--about the size of the entire United States east of the Mississippi River--and in 1945 there were fewer than 20 million people. Today there are still only 42 million--slightly more than the state of California--approximately 3 million of whom are of German origin. It was easy for Nazis to lose themselves in places where being German was completely normal. Why did none of the world's intelligence organizations or the Israeli government continue searching for Hitler? The simplest answer is, "Why bother? He was dead." To their lasting shame, the Allied Powers employed numerous Nazi war criminals for their supposed knowledge of the Red Army and Soviet capabilities in the emerging Cold War of the late 1940s. Men such as Klaus Barbie, the Butcher of Lyon, were hired by Western intelligence agencies for years after the war: an inconvenient fact that was suppressed for decades. Most proved to be of little value in the Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union. Equally troubling, many Nazis were allowed to find new lives in North and South America as well as Australia under government-sponsored emigration schemes in return for their services. [4a] In the case of Israel, the young Jewish state was surrounded by enemies, and its overriding priority was simply survival as a nation. As an indication, the most comprehensive history of Israel's formidable intelligence services runs to 634 pages, yet only three pages are concerned with Nazi hunting in South America. [5] Mossad's eventual capture of Adolf Eichmann came only after repeated requests from concentration camp survivor Lothar Hermann in Argentina [6], CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 6 whose daughter had dated one of Eichmann's sons. Hermann had been trying to get both the German and Israeli governments to investigate for a number of years. It has now been proved-- after a lengthy court battle in Germany--that the West German intelligence service knew that Eichmann was in Argentina--indeed, knew his address and his pseudonym of Ricardo Klement--as early as 1952, eight years before he was seized and taken to Israel, where he was tried and hanged. [7] West Germany under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer had good reason to remain quiet on the matter. Adenauer's chief of staff, Hans Globke, had not only helped to draft the 1935 antiSemitic Nuremburg Laws but had also worked with Eichmann in the Department for Jewish Affairs. Any revelations by Eichmann during his trial in Jerusalem would have been extremely embarrassing to West Germany, since many other government posts, both federal and local, were held by former Nazis who had been cleared of complicity in the Third Reich after a perfunctory "denazification" program in the late 1940s. Many of the most odious Nazi war criminals had found employment in the CIA-funded and SS-dominated "Gehlen Organization," led by former Nazi general Reinhard Gehlen. Indeed, to the British intelligence services the Gehlen Organization was known as the "Gestapo Boys." Such an organization had little vested interest in revealing the whereabouts of other high-ranking Nazis around the world. On the front line of the Cold War, what the West Germans knew, so did the United States and Britain. What other details lurk in the still-secret files of the Gehlen Organization; the forerunner of the West German foreign intelligence agency, the BND? [8] We may never know. If Eichmann could have been a considerable embarrassment, what would the fact of Hitler's, Bormann's, and M�ller's survival do to the West? The world was a dangerous place in the days of two diametrically opposed nuclear-armed superpowers, and Argentina was not high on the intelligence-gathering list of the Soviet Union or the United States, let alone Israel. On the other side of the world, away from important "spheres of influence," Hitler was able to live out his life helped, hidden, and harbored by Per�n's fascist friends and thousands of die-hard Nazis who fled to South America after the war. But probably the most telling comment in our hunt for Hitler and the U-boats that brought him and his stolen loot to Argentina came from the-then Argentine minister of justice and human rights, Se�or Hannibal Fern�ndez. As we left his Buenos Aires ministerial office in 2007 after a lengthy interview, he politely shook our hands and said, "In 1945, in Argentina, anything was possible." He was right. [NOTE: FINAL BOOK WILL NOT HAVE FOOTNOTE NUMBERS IN THE TEXT, ALL ENDNOTES WILL BE REFERENCED BY PAGE NUMBER AND PHRASE.] CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 8 Introduction "Who controls the past controls the future."--George Orwell, 1984, 1949 There is an old saying in police work that applies to most crimes--"Follow the money." When Adolf Hitler returned from the Western Front to Munich ten days after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, his bank account contained the sum total of 15 marks and 30 pfennigs--the equivalent of less than two U.S. dollars. [1] Despite a public persona of austerity and selfless service to Germany, Hitler was the wealthiest man in Europe by 1945. His fortune was based on plunder and extortion. From the earliest days, Hitler attracted monetary contributions from German nationalists and industrialists anxious to counter the threat of communism in the weak and decadent Weimar Republic in the aftermath of World War I. Once Hitler became chancellor in 1933, Germany embarked on a massive rearmament program to reconstruct the German armed forces, denied by the humiliating Treaty of Versailles of 1919 at the conclusion of World War I.. Germany soon became an attractive prospect for capitalists in America and Britain keen to make profits and to create a strong Germany as a bulwark in Central Europe against the threat posed by the communist Soviet Union. For many years, Hitler's closest and most loyal acolyte was Head of the Party Chancellery and Reichsleiter (Reich leader) Martin Bormann. Since Hitler was totally disinterested in administrative matters, Bormann soon ran the F�hrer's day-to-day diary and his personal affairs. As an astute businessman and bureaucrat, Bormann quickly devised numerous schemes to enhance revenues both for the Nazi Party and Adolf Hitler himself. Long before today's soccer and basketball players realized the value of their image rights, Bormann raised a levy on every use of the F�hrer's likeness, from posters to postage stamps--Hitler personally obtained several pfennigs (pennies) for every stamp issued throughout the Third Reich. Similarly, Hitler received a bounty on every ton of steel and barrel of oil produced by the grateful industrialists making fortunes from German rearmament. Both Wall Street and the City of London (London's financial district) were eager to invest in the resurgent German economy despite the excesses of the Nazi regime, and this collusion continued even after war was declared in September 1939. The Nazi war machine bulldozed all before it in the victorious days of the blitzkrieg campaigns of 1939�41 that reached from the Atlantic Ocean to the gates of Moscow. Most of the nations of Europe were crushed beneath the Nazi jackboot and the tracks of the all-powerful panzers. Once occupied, these countries were unmercifully plundered of their wealth and cultural heritage to feed the coffers of Nazi Germany and satisfy the greed of its corrupt leadership. Between them, Adolf Hitler and Field Marshal Hermann G�ring acquired the most extensive and CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 9 valuable art collections of any individuals ever in history. Similarly, the national treasuries of the occupied countries were looted of their gold bullion and coinage to pay for the raw materials necessary to sustain Germany's war effort. First and foremost, the Nazi Party was a criminal organization and its hierarchy acquired much of this wealth for its own dubious ends, let alone the gold and money extracted from the victims of the Holocaust before they were butchered in the gas chambers of the death camps. Large quantities of gold and precious gems were processed through the neutral countries of Switzerland, Sweden, and Spain, with considerable individual fortunes secreted in the numbered accounts of Swiss banks. There is an old German saying that "Money does not bring happiness unless you have it in a Swiss bank."[2] By 1943, Martin Bormann realized that the war was lost and the Nazi Party doomed to extinction. He instituted Aktion Adlerflug (Project Eagle Flight) to smuggle gold bullion, gems, and other valuables out of Germany to safe havens around the world, especially in South America. The amount of money was staggering. There was to be no repeat of the Treaty of Versailles, when Germany was stripped of all its possessions and wealth. At the same time, Bormann devised Aktion Feuerland (Project Land of Fire) to secure a safe refuge for the Nazi leadership. The chosen bolt-hole was in the depths of deepest Patagonia in Argentina. The price was high, but Nazi gold was a powerful inducement. Argentine gold reserves grew from 346 tons in 1940 to 1173 in 1945--a sum of some $1.4 billion. Brazil's grew from 50 tons to 346 in the same period--an increase of $350 million. As a comparison, the cost of gold in 1945 was $37 an ounce: it is now, at this writing, $1,360 an ounce. Similarly, the purchasing power of the U.S. dollar in 1945 was approximately twelve times what it is today, so all sums quoted in this book must be multiplied by at least a factor of ten to appreciate their true value. By 1944, the Western Allies were poised for the invasion of northwest Europe with the largest amphibious landings in history on the coastline of Normandy in France. The Allies were well aware of the superiority of German military technology, from the Tiger 1 heavy tank to the Messerschmitt 262 jet fighter, as well as the world's first ballistic missile--the V-2 "Vengeance Weapon." Similarly, the Allies were highly fearful that the Germans might develop the first atomic bomb. Evidence of the extermination of the Jews and other minorities was becoming apparent, as was the plunder of Europe's wealth and famous works of art. Accordingly, the Allies created a host of elite Special Forces units to address each of these problems. Teams of warriors and experts, such as 30 Advance Unit, Monuments Men, TICOM, and the Alsos Mission, were at the vanguard of every Allied army to uncover German military technology, loot, and hidden treasures. Their work was so secret that their extraordinary exploits can be revealed only now after many years hidden in classified documents. These elite units were crucial in the defeat of Germany, and with the subsequent emergence of the Cold War their roles became integral in the struggle against communism. Their quest for Nazi weapons and research projects proved CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 10 invaluable in the postwar space race and the development of intercontinental ballistic missiles, advanced submarines, and biological warfare agents. With defeat looming, members of the Nazi hierarchy, such as Reichsf�hrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, tried desperately to achieve a separate peace with the Western Allies, whereby the democratic powers would join forces with Germany to fight the threat of communism as the Red Army rampaged through Eastern Europe. Most of these peace feeler forays were conducted through neutral countries with agents of the British Secret Service, MI6, or the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The main OSS center in Europe was in Switzerland and run by Allen Dulles, later director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) between 1953 and 1961. From his offices in Bern, Dulles coordinated hundreds of agents, including several Nazi diplomats, across occupied Europe. In early 1945, Dulles was in direct communication with various Nazi factions and Wehrmacht generals to arrange a separate peace in Italy and Austria in order to shorten the war and end the suffering of millions. To the end, Bormann was determined to save the looted wealth of Germany for his own nefarious ends and to sustain a select band of Nazis following military defeat and the fall of Berlin. Massive funds were channeled abroad while large stashes of bullion and stolen artworks were hidden underground in deep mines across the Third Reich. These were primed with explosives for demolition, which Bormann considered preferable to allowing them to fall into the hands of the Bolshevik hordes. But to Bormann, the artworks were also a bargaining tool. It seems evident that Bormann offered the OSS a Faustian pact: the fruits of one thousand years of Western art together with the secrets of Nazi Germany's advanced military technology in exchange for the escape of one man--Adolf Hitler. The alternative was the total destruction of the jewels of Western civilization. This was the key to Aktion Feuerland. The deal was done and on the night of April 28, 1945, the plan was put into place. Grey Wolf was on the run. CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 11 Grey Wolf The name Adolf derives from the Old High German for "noble wolf." From early on, Adolf Hitler used the nom de guerre of Wolf. It was a title he used throughout his life. His first mistress, Mitzi Reiter, called him Wolf and it was as Herr Wolf that he was introduced to Eva Braun. To intimates such as the Wagner family, heirs of composer Richard Wagner, he was known as Uncle Wolf. As Hitler became more famous, he had the surname of his younger sister Paula changed to Wolf so that she could live quietly in Vienna while running an arts and crafts shop; she was buried as Paula Wolf at Berchtesgaden when she died in 1960. Hitler's yacht was called Seewolf (Sea Wolf) and his personal plane Fliegende Wolf (Flying Wolf). His field headquarters in East Prussia was the Wolfschanze (Wolf's Lair); in the Ukraine it was Werwolf (Werewolf), while for the battle for France it was the Wolfsschlucht (Wolf's Gorge). Among the most potent of Hitler's weapons during World War II were the wolf packs of U-boats that preyed on Allied shipping. Uboats themselves were known as grey wolves and we believe it was in a U-boat from a wolf pack codenamed Gruppe Seewolf that Hitler escaped to Argentina, where he spent his declining years as the proverbial Grey Wolf. CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 12 CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 13 Part I THE NAZIS TRIUMPHANT German troops goose step through Warsaw, Poland, September 1939. CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 14 Chapter 1 Fueling the Beast AT THE BEGINNING OF OCTOBER 1942, the Third Reich was at the zenith of its success. The empire occupied by Hitler's armies stretched from the Arctic Sea of northern Norway all the way south to the deserts of North Africa, and from the Atlantic coast of France eastward to the Volga River, deep inside the Soviet Union. On the North African front of the Wehrmacht (German armed forces), Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Deutsches Afrika Korps was poised on the border of Egypt for a final offensive to capture the Suez Canal--the vital jugular vein of the British Empire. On the Volga, Gen. von Paulus's Sixth Army was fighting its way yard by yard into the city of Stalingrad in savage street fighting. If the Suez Canal and Stalingrad were to fall to the Germans, then the oil fields of the Middle East and the Caucasus would be theirs for the taking, fueling the German war machine with the essential lifeblood of warfare to sustain itself for decades. [1] Meanwhile, the ships from Canada and the United States carrying the fuel, the munitions, and the very food that beleaguered Britain needed to sustain itself after three exhausting years of war were being sent to the bottom of the Atlantic in appalling numbers by German submarines. From their bases on the Atlantic coast of France, Adm. Karl D�nitz's U-boats ranged out to gather in "wolf packs" astride the western sea-lanes. Since January 1940, British experts at the Government Code and Cypher School at Bletchley Park had been increasingly successful in cracking intercepted German signals traffic generated by the "Enigma" encryption machine, producing the stream of priceless top-secret intelligence--code-named "Ultra"--that would give the Allies an extraordinary insight into the intentions and capabilities of Hitler's armed forces. Nevertheless, it was May 1941 before the capture of an Enigma machine and its operating manuals from a U-boat allowed the breaking of the Kriegsmarine (German navy) codes. For a while, British antisubmarine successes had increased encouragingly, but, in February 1942, a modification of the Enigma code-setting system--code-named "Shark" by Bletchley Park--once more denied the Royal Navy its invaluable access to D�nitz's operational orders to his U-boat commanders at sea. [2] The cost of this denial was about to be demonstrated yet again. ON THE EARLY MORNING of November 2, 1942, a convoy designated SC-107, of forty-two ships eastbound out of New York, was approaching the "Black Pit"--the seven-hundred-mile gap in the mid-Atlantic where shipping could not as yet be protected by Allied aircraft. Closing in on the convoy were thirteen U-boats of Gruppe Veilchen (Group Viola). At this time many Allied naval assets had been diverted far south to take part in Operation Torch, the invasion of French North Africa. Convoy SC-107 was protected only by Canadian Escort Group C4, with just one CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 15 destroyer and four corvettes. Under the cover of darkness and bad weather, two U-boats slipped through the widely stretched cordon of escorts and maneuvered into attack positions. Cdr. Baron Siegfried von Forstner's U-402 fired a salvo of torpedoes at a range of four hundred yards and one struck the freighter SS Empire Sunrise amidships, damaging it badly. It would later be finished off by Lt. Cdr. Horst Uphoff's U-84. Lt. Cdr. Herbert Schneider's U-522 also penetrated the escort screen and sank no fewer than four vessels. By dawn, Gruppe Veilchen had sunk eight ships and damaged two more. The U-boats then slipped away to avoid detection but had to remain on the surface in order to keep up with the convoy. [3] Throughout the following day, convoy SC-107 tried to evade the wolf pack by changing course whenever fog or snowstorms provided any fleeting cover. Soon after the early sunset of November 3, U-89 (Cdr. Dietrich Lohmann) slipped into the center of the convoy and launched five torpedoes. Two of them struck their targets, including the convoy commodore's ship, the 5,318-ton SS Jeypore, laden with ammunition. Around midnight, U-132 (Lt. Cdr. Ernst Vogelsang) unleashed a fan of five torpedoes toward the starboard flank of SC-107. Three ships were hit. Thirty minutes later one of these vessels, carrying munitions, exploded with such ferocity that surface ships some six miles away felt the blast and U-boats at depths of two hundred feet were jolted by the shock wave--indeed U-132 and her crew were never heard from again. [4] On November 5, a Royal Air Force B-24 Liberator long-range bomber of No. 120 Squadron arrived overhead and further naval escorts from Iceland rendezvoused with SC-107. When U-89 was damaged by air attack, Gruppe Veilchen broke off the battle. It had won a significant victory: in all, fifteen merchantmen out of forty-two were sunk and four damaged, for a total of 107,958 tons of shipping lost. During the month of November 1942 alone, a total of 730,000 tons of Allied shipping was sunk. During the whole of 1942, the Allies lost an estimated 1,661 ships and 6.5 million tons of cargo to U-boat attack. [5] About 87 U-boats were sunk but 238 new boats were commissioned and that year saw D�nitz's fleet increased from 91 to 212 boats. [5a] Famously, British prime minister Winston Churchill wrote, "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril." He declared, "On their defeat hung the outcome of World War II." [6] IF THE COSTS OF A WORLD WAR in blood and misery are almost incalculably huge, so they are in treasure--but for the lucky and the farsighted, vast deficits also create vast opportunities. The terms imposed on Germany by the Treaty of Versailles after her defeat in World War I were draconian. Articles 231 to 248, the "war guilt" clauses, stipulated that Germany alone bore complete responsibility for the war and therefore must pay immense reparations to France, Belgium, Britain, and other countries. The sums involved amounted to 132 billion gold marks ($31.4 billion). When Germany defaulted on payments, the French and Belgian armies occupied CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 16 the Rhineland. The mark collapsed and the economy was saved only by massive loans through Wall Street and other international banks. In August 1924, the Dawes Plan brokered by the U.S. government imposed a moratorium on reparations and provided a $200 million loan to allow German industrial reconstruction. This elegant solution allowed American money to finance German industry through loans, whereby the German government was able to make reparation payments to Britain and France and they in turn were able to repay America for the loans they had incurred to finance their colossal military expenditures during World War 1. In the decade between 1921 and 1931, international banks provided Germany with some 27 billion marks in loans while the Allies received some 19.1 billion marks in reparations. Created in 1930 specifically for the task, the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel, Switzerland, staffed by representatives from all the participating nations, supervised the process of reparations. [7] Two of the American corporate lawyers who were actively engaged in the flow of funds from the United States into Germany were brothers named John Foster and Allen Welsh Dulles. They worked for the prestigious New York law firm of Sullivan & Cromwell. They acted for business clients wishing to invest in German industry or to enter into partnership with established companies. The Dulles brothers, scions of a patrician East Coast family with a tradition of public service, had enviable background experience [8] and contacts for this role. Their uncle was Robert Lansing, who had been U.S. secretary of state under President Woodrow Wilson. During World War I, Allen had served as a State Department attach� in Berlin, Vienna, and Bern in neutral Switzerland, gathering intelligence on the Central Powers. At the invitation of "Uncle Bert" Lansing, both the Dulles brothers had been members of the U.S. commission at the Paris Peace Conference (1919�20) that had culminated in the Treaty of Versailles. [9] American corporations such as the Aluminum Company of America (Alcoa), DuPont, International Business Machines (IBM), General Motors, International Telephone & Telegraph (ITT), the Ford Motor Company, and General Electric made significant investments in Germany. Joint enterprises were created to exchange technical innovations and to divide market shares around the world. This led to the merging of existing German companies into powerful and influential conglomerates, such as Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie (IG Farben), which was founded in 1925. [10] IG Farben was a market leader in the manufacture of chemicals, dyes, pharmaceuticals, explosives, rubber, and a host of other products--indeed, IG Farben was the prototypical "military-industrial complex." In April 1929, Standard Oil of New Jersey joined forces with IG Farben to develop a hydrogenation process for converting coal to oil. Again, American money funded the research and development in Germany while the world markets were to be shared between the two companies. In return, IG Farben promised to provide the technical specifications for its new "buna" process for the production of synthetic rubber, a vital strategic CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 17 resource for both countries. As America's stake in Germany expanded, so U.S. government officials were less inclined to support the repeated demands for reparations by France and Britain, for fear of jeopardizing American investments. EVERYTHING CHANGED WITH THE WALL STREET CRASH of 1929. That October, America's financial system collapsed and the world was plunged into the Great Depression. With its mountain of international debt and its weak and unstable political institutions, Germany's Weimar Republic was especially vulnerable. In 1929, the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP or Nazi Party) boasted just 120,000 members. As the economic situation deteriorated, the party's popularity grew as a strident force promising the frightened petite bourgeoisie protection against hunger, anarchy, and the perceived menace of communism. In the elections of 1932, the Nazis won a majority of seats in the Reichstag (Parliament) with a popular vote of 37.3 percent. As a result, Adolf Hitler became Reichskanzler (national chancellor or prime minister) on January 30, 1933. During that month the Dulles brothers were in Germany on behalf of clients of Sullivan & Cromwell, both American and German. The latter included IG Farben, Robert Bosch GmbH, and Vereinigte Stahlwerke AG (United Steelworks), which was run by the leading German industrial families of Fritz Thyssen and Friedrich Flick. The steel magnate Fritz Thyssen had been a major contributor to Nazi funds during the 1932 elections. In early 1933, the Dulles brothers met Hitler to determine business prospects under the prospective government. Hitler's determination to embark on a massive rearmament program provided even more opportunities for America to do business in the Third Reich. Later, at a Berlin reception given by Thyssen, Allen Dulles met Martin Bormann, an ambitious Nazi bureaucrat assiduously seeking favor with the F�hrer. He later recalled that Bormann was not the "grubby, uncivilized man" he had been led to expect: "He was soft-spoken and direct, but while he talked to you his eyes continued to keep watch on Hitler and those surrounding him. I felt he was a man of strength who might one day best his more colorful rivals in the Nazi hierarchy." It was a remarkably prescient observation. [11] Within weeks of Hitler's appointment as chancellor, an attempt to burn down the Reichstag building gave him the excuse to rush through emergency legislation suspending civil liberties, freedom of the press, and regional autonomy. The last multiparty election, held on March 5, 1933, returned the Nazi Party with 44 percent of the vote. The first concentration camp for political prisoners was opened on March 22, at Dachau near Munich. On the following day, an enabling act was passed that allowed Hitler to rule Germany by decree as an unfettered dictator. In an irony too gross to need stressing, the act's full title, Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich, literally meant "The Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation." [12] CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 18 In the same month, Franklin D. Roosevelt became the thirty-second president of the United States. The country was still mired in the Depression. America's focus turned inward as President Roosevelt launched his "New Deal" with a raft of legislation and executive orders to promote jobs for the unemployed and recovery for the economy. Germany followed suit with a program of public works, including the construction of an extensive arterial highway system known as Autobahnen. The autobahns also had a significant military purpose, as they greatly enhanced the vital process of rapidly moving supplies and equipment from the interior of Germany to support military forces on the country's frontiers in time of war. However, because rearmament was the major priority in German industry there were very few automobiles on the new highways, despite Hitler's pledge to manufacture a car for the people--the Volkswagen. The Ford Motor Company and General Motors were happy to fill the gap in the market. [13] Henry Ford greatly expanded the supply of components sent from America to the Ford Motor Company AG in Cologne, and between 1934 and 1938 its revenues soared by 400 percent. The Nazi regime was so impressed that the company was officially recognized as a German rather than a foreign-owned firm; as Ford-Werke AG it became eligible for government contracts. Since 1936, when Hermann G�ring was appointed head of the Four-Year Plan to prepare the German economy for war, rearmament had shifted into high gear. Just prior to the occupation of the Czech Sudetenland in October 1938, when Ford-Werke AG was unable to meet the demands of the Wehrmacht for military trucks, Ford Motor Company dispatched vehicles from America to Cologne in kit form to be assembled during extra night shifts. Hitler was a great admirer of Henry Ford. For his services to Nazi Germany, in 1938 the American magnate was presented with the Grand Cross of the Order of the German Eagle, the Third Reich's highest civilian award for which foreigners were eligible, of which only fourteen were ever awarded. [14] Another recipient of the German decoration in 1938 was James Mooney, the chief executive of overseas operations for General Motors, who was awarded the Order of the German Eagle, First Class. In 1931, General Motors had acquired Opel, Germany's largest automobile manufacturer, in its entirety. By 1935, Opel AG of Russelsheim was producing more than 100,000 cars a year and almost 50 percent of the new trucks in Germany at a plant in Brandenburg. [14a] The most important of these products was the range of trucks known as the Opel Blitz (Lightning)--which would in fact be the Wehrmacht's most numerous workhorse during the victorious years of blitzkrieg. By the late 1930s, car production for the masses was no longer a priority. In addition to truck production, many Opel factories were converted to the production of Junkers Jumo aircraft engines and the complex "pistol" detonators for naval torpedoes such as those that sank the ships of convoy SC-107. CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 19 FORD AND GENERAL MOTORS were only two of the foreign companies that invested heavily in Germany and thus ultimately aided the Nazi war effort. Oil was always to be the Achilles' heel of Hitler's war machine. [15] During the 1930s, the British-owned Anglo-Persian Oil Company (later British Petroleum, or BP) and the Royal Dutch Shell conglomerate were extensively involved in oil refining in Germany, while the British tire company Dunlop had extensive investments in the German rubber industry. There was already a fine line between taking advantage of sound business opportunities and aiding the possible future enemy. The Ethyl Gasoline Corporation (owned jointly by General Motors and Standard Oil) developed a critical additive to increase the octane rating of aviation fuel. It was against the specific wishes of the U.S. War Department regarding the transfer of strategic materials and technical knowledge that an agreement was reached between IG Farben and Ethyl Gasoline; production began in 1935 at a jointly owned factory, IG Ethyl GmbH. This product was of immense value to the Luftwaffe (German air force) in boosting the performance of its aircraft engines--some of which were built by a subsidiary of General Motors, fitted to airframes made of metals manufactured by Alcoa, in aircraft using radios and electronic equipment built by ITT, and flying on fuel derived by the hydrogenation process funded by Standard Oil of New Jersey. These were the aircraft that would devastate Guernica, Warsaw, Rotterdam, and Coventry. As Britain fought for her life in 1940, some 300 American companies continued doing business as usual with Germany, and they did not automatically stop even after Germany declared war on the United States on December 11, 1941. In that year, 171 U.S. corporations still had over $420 million invested in German industry. It was only after the promulgation of the Trading with the Enemy Act of 1942 that most companies ceased direct business with Germany, but the profits to be made from the trade in oil and other strategic materials were still too tempting for some. The cartels created in the aftermaths of World War I and the Great Depression were now more powerful than many governments, and these international corporations were so deeply intertwined that national identity became increasingly opaque. [16] This would be a major factor in the later German execution, under the direction of Martin Bormann, of Aktion Feuerland-- Project Land of Fire. ON THE SAME DAY THAT CONVOY SC-107 was first attacked by Gruppe Veilchen, a minor diplomat left Washington, D.C., bound for the American legation in Bern, Switzerland. Like the capitals of the other neutral European countries--Lisbon, Madrid, and Stockholm--Bern was a hotbed of espionage and multinational intrigue. The American diplomat's circuitous journey took him by air to the Azores and then via Lisbon and Madrid to the border of Vichy France; he arrived in neutral Switzerland two days after Operation Torch put Allied troops ashore in Algeria and Morocco on November 8, 1942. The American was the aforementioned Allen Welsh Dulles CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 20 and his appointment was as the special assistant for legal affairs to Ambassador Leland Harrison. His real role was as the head of the newly formed Special Intelligence branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)--in effect, America's master spy inside Nazi-occupied Europe. Within weeks, Swiss newspapers were declaring that Allen Dulles was "the personal representative of President Roosevelt, charged with special duties"--a thin veil of euphemism for espionage. [17] At the outbreak of war in September 1939, the United States had no central foreign intelligence service that reported directly to the executive office of the president in the White House. The original U.S. government code-breaking operation had been run by the MI-8 section of the State Department, but that had been shut down in 1929 by Secretary of State Henry Stimson with the comment that "gentlemen do not read each other's mail." [18] Each of the armed services had its own intelligence branch, as did the State Department, but coordination of information was almost nonexistent before the creation of the Joint Intelligence Committee on December 9, 1941, two days after Pearl Harbor. As a case in point, when American cryptanalysts unraveled the intricacies of the Japanese diplomatic cipher known as "Purple," neither the U.S. Army's G-2 Signals Intelligence Service nor the U.S. Navy's Office of Naval Intelligence OP-20-G section was willing or capable of cooperating in the decryption of this vital intelligence source. [18a] Such was the interservice rivalry that the army exclusively decoded material on even days of the month and the navy on odd days. Similarly, the world itself was divided up into spheres of influence that were specific to a particular service. Thus the U.S. Navy was charged with intelligence-gathering in the Pacific region and Far East while the U.S. Army was entrusted with Europe, Africa, and the Panama Canal Zone. The whole of continental America, including Canada, the United States, Central America (except Panama), and South America, was the responsibility of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under J. Edgar Hoover. On July 11, 1941, with war looming, [19] President Roosevelt created the first civilianrun agency tasked with gathering foreign diplomatic and military intelligence worldwide. The first director of this Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) was one of Roosevelt's old classmates from Columbia Law School, William J. Donovan. A recipient of the Medal of Honor in World War I, "Wild Bill" Donovan was a successful Wall Street lawyer who had traveled extensively in Europe during the interwar years, meeting several foreign leaders, including Adolf Hitler. On a mission from Roosevelt in July 1940, he had been given extraordinary access to Britain's leaders and security agencies, including the secret code-breaking establishment at Bletchley Park. After America's entry into World War II, there was a thorough reappraisal of the U.S. armed forces and particularly the intelligence services that had failed to forewarn of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Accordingly, the COI was split. Its propaganda wing, the Foreign Information CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 21 Service, passed to the new Office of War Information, while the remainder became the Office of Strategic Services, coming directly under the control of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff--a group of high command staff newly formed of necessity but not formally established until 1947. The OSS was created, under Donovan's directorship, by a military order of June 13, 1942. Now with greater access to military support and resources, the OSS was given equal status to the other armed services. Its principal roles were to gather military, diplomatic, and commercial intelligence, to conduct psychological warfare, to support friendly resistance and partisan movements in Axis-occupied countries, and to launch covert operations, both in Europe and in the China-Burma-India theater. Donovan immediately set about obtaining new recruits for the OSS. As happens so often with elite organizations, among the many highly motivated men and women attracted by the prospect of adventure were a significant number drawn from the higher echelons of society. These volunteers included Morgans, Mellons, Du Ponts, Roosevelts, and Vanderbilts--indeed, the OSS soon achieved such a cachet that it was dubbed "Oh So Social, Oh So Secret." The service also attracted several left-wing sympathizers, such as the German immigrant and Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse. When challenged, however, Donovan responded forcefully, "I'd put Stalin on the OSS payroll if I thought it would help defeat Hitler." One of the first recruits was Donovan's old friend and collaborator Allen Dulles, who had formerly been his head of operations in the COI. [19a] ON OCTOBER 30, 1942, a week before Allen Dulles arrived in Bern, the badly damaged German submarine U-559 (Lt. Cdr. Hans Heidtmann) was abandoned by its crew under the guns of the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Petard off the coast of Egypt. A British officer and two seamen swam across and risked their lives to clamber down inside. Two of them were dragged down to their deaths when the U-boat sank, but a sixteen-year-old canteen assistant named Tommy Brown survived--and with him, vital operating manuals for the latest four-rotor Enigma machine. This act of sacrificial courage won for Bletchley Park the means to begin breaking, on December 13, 1942, the Shark codes that had defied the cryptanalysts since February. Their success was far from immediate and for months they could only decrypt U-boat signals after long delays, but by September 1943 they would be producing Ultra intelligence at their former speed. At the outset, the British were reluctant to share such sensitive information with their American counterparts in the OSS, but in time their cooperation gave birth to a massive signals intelligencegathering organization that became one of the great Anglo-American achievements of the war. [20] CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 22 Chapter 2 The Turning Tide ALLEN DULLES ONCE WROTE, in a letter to his mother: "Bern is the diplomatic and spy center. . . . I now hobnob with all sorts of outlandish people--Czechs, Yugoslavs, Albanians, Montenegrins, Ukrainians. . . . There is a chance to do as much here as if one were shooting personally a whole regiment of Bosche [sic]." That letter was dated Christmas 1917, when Dulles was twenty-four. A quarter of a century later Dulles was once again in Bern at Christmas, back in the business of cultivating "all sorts of outlandish people." [1] He had reached Switzerland just in time. On November 11, 1942, the Germans retaliated for the halfhearted French resistance to the Allied landings in North Africa by occupying the remainder of France, previously ruled by Marshal P�tain's Vichy government. Thereafter, all France's borders were sealed. Switzerland was now a vulnerable island, surrounded by Nazi and Italian Fascist territory. This made the task of communicating with London or Washington much more difficult. All diplomatic mail ceased, all telephone lines and radio communications were monitored, and Dulles lacked the staff for efficient encryption of messages. Originally, "Wild Bill" Donovan had asked Dulles to go to London to coordinate between the OSS and British intelligence. Dulles had demurred and instead suggested that he set up a Special Intelligence station for the OSS in Switzerland. His motives were mixed. Obviously, he knew the city and the country well and he spoke very passable German. On a personal level, Bern held much more attraction than blitzed London for a bon vivant who enjoyed fine food and wines and the company of young women. Furthermore, Switzerland was the nexus of clandestine business and banking activities in occupied Europe. As a successful lawyer for Sullivan & Cromwell, Dulles was well qualified to monitor such activities both for the U.S. government and for his corporate clients. But above all, Bern was the ideal location to conduct espionage. It provided Dulles with what he later described as his "big window" into the Nazi world. [1a] Dulles was often to be found taking lunch at the Theater Caf� or dining at the Hotel Bellevue Palace, where foreign diplomats and Swiss officials liked to congregate and exchange gossip or intelligence. At the age of fifty, he had the air of a college professor, with his tweed jackets, bow ties, and briar pipes, and his easy charm made him congenial company. He had time for everyone, whatever the time of day--he had vowed never to miss another Lenin. In his own words, his open attitude had the result of "bringing to my door purveyors of information, volunteers and adventurers of every sort, professional and amateur spies, good and bad." [2] At night, he held court in the book-lined study of his comfortable residence at Herrengasse 23, offering a discreet welcome to any furtive visitor wishing anonymity. CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 23 Despite his talent for being all things to all men, however, Dulles did have considerable antipathy toward the British. After leaving Princeton in 1914, he had briefly worked as a teacher in India, where he had acquired a visceral loathing for the British Empire--a sentiment shared by many in the American establishment. The British intelligence community, for its part, was somewhat suspicious of his casual manner and lavish lifestyle, but, as professionals, both parties were willing to cooperate when their interests coincided. Even so, as Dulles later recalled, he was never averse to "putting one over the Brits." [2a] DULLES SOON ACHIEVED some notable successes. After the occupation of Vichy France, all the local agents of the Deuxi�me Bureau (French secret service) agreed to work with him provided that they were financed by the OSS. Dulles thus enjoyed a constant flow of intelligence from occupied France that would be much prized by Allied planners during the preparations for the Normandy landings and the subsequent liberation of Western Europe. He learned of the existence of Hitler's program to produce "Vengeance Weapons"--the V-1 and V-2 missiles--and when this information was combined with intelligence from Polish and Scandinavian sources and the RAF Photographic Interpretation Unit, it allowed the RAF to bomb the German research and testing facility at Peenem�nde in August 1943 (see Chapter 8). Allen Dulles was a master at cultivating people as potential spies across all sectors of society and nationalities. His sources included diplomats, financiers, clergymen, journalists, and intelligence agents from around the world. At one end of the spectrum, he gained information from the bargemen plying the River Rhine through Germany and Switzerland. At the other, he met regularly with Carl Jung, the famous Swiss psychiatrist who provided psychological profiles of the Nazi leadership and applied his innovative concept of the "collective unconscious" to an analysis of the German people. However, it was Dulles's contacts with disaffected Germans that proved the most profitable. Not the least of these was Fritz Kolbe, a senior diplomat in the Reich Foreign Ministry who was code-named "George Wood" by the OSS. Kolbe was rejected by the British as an obvious plant. Dulles cultivated him assiduously and, over time, obtained some 1,600 Foreign Ministry policy documents that gave invaluable insights into Hitler's war plans and the Third Reich's international relationships. Among the intelligence provided by Kolbe was a highly detailed sketch of Hitler's field headquarters in a forest near Rastenburg, East Prussia (presentday Ktrzyn, Poland)--the Wolfschanze or Wolf's Lair--including the exact locations of the antiaircraft defenses and the buildings used by G�ring and Goebbels. Although Hitler spent a large proportion of his time at the Wolfschanze during the war, the Allies did not bomb it once. [3] CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 24 On January 15, 1943, Dulles was visited by an old acquaintance, Prince Maximilian Egon zu Hohenlohe-Langenburg, whose Liechtenstein passport allowed him to travel the world unimpeded. The prince had innumerable contacts with high officials across Europe, especially in Berlin, and most notably with Reichsf�hrer-SS Heinrich Himmler, who orchestrated his meeting with Dulles. The proposition that the prince wished to float before Dulles was simple, if startling: in the name of civilization, Himmler's SS would eliminate Hitler, after which Germany would join forces with the Western democracies in a global war against Soviet communism. True to his methods, Dulles allowed himself to appear interested but made no commitment, keeping his options open for future dialogue with the SS and the Nazi hierarchy. Among his other SS contacts was an Austrian aristocrat, SS Captain Reinhard Spitzy, who was SS adjutant to Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Spitzy subsequently served with the Amt Ausland/Abwehr im Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (Foreign Affairs/ Supreme Command of the Armed Forces or OKW), or Abwehr--the German military intelligence organization, headed until February 1944 by the formidable Adm. Wilhelm Canaris. However, it was through the German vice-consul in Zurich, Hans Bernd Gisevius, that Dulles gained a channel to the Abwehr. Canaris, known as the "Old Fox," had been the head of the Abwehr since 1935 and was one of the most enigmatic figures of the Third Reich. Fluent in several languages, he had been involved in intelligence work throughout his long naval career. He was a brilliant spymaster but he also ensured that his closest colleagues were not members of the Nazi Party. Since before the outbreak of war, Canaris had been active in the resistance movement of Germans attempting at first to frustrate and then to overthrow Hitler--a group known to the Gestapo as the Schwarze Kappelle (Black Orchestra) and to the OSS as "Breakers." [4] Canaris, like Heinrich Himmler, sought to discover the probable attitude of the Western Allies if and when Hitler was removed or killed. Canaris needed to know what support might be forthcoming for the conspiracy itself or in the political aftermath once the deed was done. Mindful of Dulles's proclivities, he directed one of his resident agents in Switzerland, Halina Szymaska, the widow of a Polish officer, to develop a relationship with the American. Providentially, she was Canaris's close companion during his visits to Switzerland, so pillow talk proved beneficial to both sides. [5] Szymaska was also Canaris's liaison with British intelligence--it was through her that Canaris had informed the British in late 1940 of Hitler's plans for the invasion of the Soviet Union. However, Canaris's attempts to sound out Washington and London about a possible future for a Germany without the F�hrer came to nothing. Neither leadership was willing to support any resistance movement inside Germany or any plot to kill Hitler and neither had any sympathy for conspirators whom President Roosevelt dismissed as "these east German Junkers." [5a] CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 25 For months, the British code-breakers at Bletchley Park had been deciphering Dulles's cables, and the transcripts were in the hands of the British Foreign Office's Secret Intelligence Service or MI6. In disparaging reports, Dulles was described as "a Yankee Doodle Dandy blowin who has little to provide in real intelligence" and "seems to get too excited about small successes." [6] But one MI6 officer took a different view of the transcripts--the British traitor Kim Philby. He immediately dispatched a report on Dulles's activities to his controller in Moscow. The response he received was clear: Dulles and his informers must be discredited-- Moscow was paranoid about any possibility of the Western Allies negotiating a separate peace. Some time thereafter, Dulles received a telegram from his superiors in the OSS: "It has been requested of us to inform you that `all news from Berne these days is being discounted 100 percent by the War Department.' It is suggested that Switzerland is an ideal location for plants, tendentious intelligence and peace feelers, but no details are given." [7] Dulles was mortified that policy-makers in Washington were dismissing his intelligence-gathering operations, and when he discovered the part played by MI6, his distrust of the British intensified. He became determined that his future operations would exclude any meaningful British participation. Nevertheless, he continued building up his web of contacts across Europe and in the Middle East. Bern remained an important center of OSS operations in Europe and Allen Dulles remained at the center of the web. OPERATION TORCH, THE ANGLO-AMERICAN INVASION of French North Africa, began on November 8, 1942, when 100,000 Allied troops landed in Morocco and Algeria against spasmodic French resistance. Under the command of Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, the landings were a complete success and a ceasefire was arranged on November 11--the same day that Hitler responded with the occupation of Vichy France. Operation Torch coincided with the first major British land victory of the war, at El Alamein on the Libyan-Egyptian frontier, where Gen. Bernard Montgomery's Eighth Army inflicted a major defeat on Rommel and forced his Afrika Korps into headlong retreat. As the New Year of 1943 dawned, the German forces in North Africa were confined to a diminishing enclave centered on Tunisia, with the British Eighth Army advancing from the east and the U.S. Fifth and British First armies from the west. Heavy fighting would continue over the following months as the German-Italian Armeegruppe Afrika fought to the last, but surrender became inevitable. On May 12, 1943, a last radio message was transmitted: "All ammunition spent. Weapons and equipment destroyed. In accordance with its orders, the Afrika Korps has battled on until it can fight no more. We shall rise again." The message signed off with the Swahili battle cry that had been adopted by the Afrika Korps--"Heia Safari!" (roughly translating as "Tallyho!"). In this last African campaign, some 60,000 Axis soldiers had CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 26 died and 240,000 went into captivity. Despite the brave words about rising again, the German troops dubbed this disaster "Tunisgrad."[7a] ON THE DAY THAT VICHY FRANCE WAS OCCUPIED, the German Sixth Army's last assault through the rubble of Stalingrad ground to a halt in the appalling conditions of the Wehrmacht's second Russian winter. At the end of their enormously extended lines of supply, ammunition and all other essentials were running short. One week later, on November 19, Gen. Georgi Zhukov launched Operation Uranus with major offensives to the north and south of Stalingrad. By November 22, the Sixth Army was surrounded. Out of bravado or sheer ignorance, Marshal Hermann G�ring promised Hitler that his Luftwaffe could supply the trapped army by air. The daily minimum requirement of supplies needed to sustain the Sixth was 550 tons, but the Luftwaffe rarely exceeded 300 tons and, as the weather worsened, with temperatures dropping to �22�F in mid-January, deliveries diminished to just 30 tons a day. The freezing German soldiers subsisted on a few slices of bread and a small hunk of horse meat daily and were soon suffering from dysentery and typhoid. The fighting continued until February 2, when the last defenders inside the Red October Factory laid down their arms. The German forces suffered 750,000 casualties over that dreadful Russian winter, and of the 94,000 who were captured at Stalingrad just 5,000 would ever see Germany again. [8] The Red Army had paid an immense price for the defense, encirclement, and final recapture of Stalingrad, losing almost 500,000 killed or missing and a staggering 650,000 wounded--to say nothing of a further 40,000 civilians dead. Yet these horrendous sacrifices had bought the Soviet Union a genuinely pivotal victory. [9] For the first time, a whole German army had been decisively beaten and then destroyed on the battlefield. To mark this unprecedented reverse on the Eastern Front, Radio Berlin played somber music for three days, but it would take much longer than that for the German people to come to terms with the catastrophe. The prestige of the Red Army soared, both in the Motherland and in the Western democracies. Basking in the glory of the victory at the city named after him, Stalin grew in stature both at home and abroad-- and his repeated demands for the opening of a second front in Europe by the Western Allies, to relieve the pressure on the Soviet Union, became more insistent. IN JANUARY 1943, ALL THE GREAT POWER LEADERS had been invited to attend a conference in the Moroccan coastal city of Casablanca. Stalin declined, since the battle for Stalingrad was then reaching its climax. Between January 14 and 24, President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill, together with the Combined Chiefs of Staff, met at the Anfa Hotel to decide the future strategy for the war in the West and in the Pacific. Churchill was anxious for the war in Europe to be given top priority and his view prevailed. More resources were to be CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 27 allocated to fight the Battle of the Atlantic, since Britain's very survival and America's ability to deploy armies in Europe depended on defeating the U-boat threat. Despite Stalin's urgings, the outcome of the disastrous Dieppe raid in August 1942 had confirmed that a major landing on the coast of mainland Northwest Europe simply was not feasible during 1943. Instead, once the anticipated victory in North Africa was achieved, Allied forces were to invade first the island of Sicily and then Italy. In order to mollify Stalin, the Western Allies issued the Casablanca Directive, which dealt with the closer coordination of the strategic bombing offensive against Germany by the Royal Air Force and the U.S. Army Air Force. The objective set for the Joint Bombing Program was "the progressive destruction and dislocation of the German military, industrial, and economic system, and the undermining of the morale of the German people to the point where their capacity for armed resistance is fatally weakened." The priority targets were U-boat construction yards and operating bases, followed by the German aircraft industry, the transportation system, and all oilproducing facilities. The USAAF retained its faith in daylight precision-bombing missions against specific point targets while the RAF preferred area bombing by night. This combined Operation Pointblank would condemn Germany to round-the-clock aerial bombardment on an unprecedented scale, testing the will of the German people to the utmost. [10] However, there was one aspect of the Casablanca Conference that did not meet with full accord. President Roosevelt retained a deep disgust for the German military caste that he dismissed as "the Vons," and he would not countenance any sort of deal with a German government short of unconditional surrender. Neither Churchill nor the Combined Chiefs of Staff were at ease with such a strategy, but Roosevelt remained adamant and in this his will prevailed, just as Churchill's had over the planned Italian campaign. Citing the implacable resolve of Ulysses S. Grant--"Unconditional Surrender Grant"--during the American Civil War, Roosevelt required a complete and unequivocal victory over Germany. There was to be no repeat of the armistice that had ended the Great War with German troops still on French soil. Its result had been a widespread illusion during the interwar years that the German army had remained undefeated on the battlefield and that Germany was only forced to capitulate by devious politicians. [11] Objections to the policy of unconditional surrender were advanced by, among others, Roosevelt's U.S. Army chief of staff, Gen. George C. Marshall, and his rising field commander Gen. Eisenhower, on the grounds that it would inevitably increase the resolve of German armies on the battlefield. The intelligence community recognized that the policy would effectively scupper any real dialogue with or support for the resistance movement inside Germany, since its leaders would know that even the death of Hitler would not spare their country from utter ruin and humiliation. As Allen Dulles wrote, "We rendered impossible internal revolution in CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 28 Germany, and thereby prolonged the war and the destruction." [12]Apart from Stalin, the only belligerent leaders whose interests were served by this decision were the Nazi hierarchy. CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 29 Chapter 3 The Brown Eminence AFTER THE STAGGERING SETBACKS of Stalingrad and North Africa, it was vital to galvanize the dispirited German people for a protracted war. Hitler's complete military strategy had been predicated on a short conflict of conquest before the material superiority of his opponents--France and Britain, then the Soviet Union--became overwhelming. The era of rapid victories in 1938�42 had allowed Germany to loot raw materials, agricultural production, and industrial capacity from Czechoslovakia, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the western USSR. These years of pillage had delayed the tipping point after which the imbalance of resources between the Allies and the Axis became at first chronic and then terminal; but they had gained Germany only capital--not a revenue stream--and the point of no return had now been reached. [1] Nazi Germany entered spring 1943 with no coherent overall military strategy to prosecute the war further. The failure of the invasion of the USSR was already obvious for the world to see. In May 1943, due to a combination of Allied technical and operational advances, the monthly losses suffered by U-boats in the Atlantic suddenly tripled. This forced Adm. D�nitz to withdraw his wolf packs from the convoy lanes for three months; they would never recover their dominance. In June and July 1943, the first RAF Thousand-Bomber raids devastated cities such as Essen, Cologne, and Hamburg, and during that summer USAAF daylight raids penetrated deep into Germany to hit industrial targets, drawing Luftwaffe fighter squadrons back from other fronts. In July, the defeat of a new German offensive around Kursk in the Ukraine finally crushed any hope of regaining the initiative on the Eastern Front. Also in July, the Western Allies successfully invaded Sicily, and in September, Italy became the first of the Axis nations to sue for peace. In the coming winter nights the RAF's baleful focus would shift to Berlin itself--in November alone, 400,000 Berliners were rendered homeless. Despite occupying most of Europe, German forces were now wholly on the defensive and trapped in a war of attrition, reduced to waiting, with dwindling resources, for the Allies to unleash new offensives in the east, the south, and the west. Moreover, there was simply no coherent mechanism for addressing Germany's situation. The F�hrer's word was absolute and there was no one in the Nazi hierarchy or the armed forces to contradict him. The German regime's response to the disaster of Stalingrad and President Roosevelt's demand for unconditional surrender was a call for "total war." In a widely reported speech given to the Berlin Nazi Party in the Sportpalast (Sports Palace) on February 18, 1943, the Reich minister of propaganda, Dr. Joseph Goebbels, demanded of his audience and the German people their complete commitment to "der totaler Krieg." Warning that "two thousand years of Western CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 30 history are in danger," Goebbels called for even greater sacrifices in support of the Wehrmacht, the last defenders against the Bolshevik hordes that were threatening the territory and the very cultural identity of Europe. To this end, he called for the full mobilization of the German economy and the German people for the exclusive support of the war effort. On the podium with Goebbels was Albert Speer, Reich minister of armaments and war production. Speer was desperate to put the mismanaged German economy on a proper war footing, but was frustrated by a lack of skilled workers. In the face of ever-wider military conscription and Hitler's reluctance to mobilize Germany's women for the same sort of effort that Britain and America had made, much of industry was dependent upon slave labor from the East and conscripted workers from the occupied countries of Europe. [2] Hermann G�ring, that great collector of titles, had proved equally incompetent in the position of Reich commissioner for the Four-Year Plan as he was in strategic command of the Luftwaffe. Sensing that G�ring--after the failure of his boast that he could sustain the Sixth Army at Stalingrad--was falling out of favor with Hitler, Goebbels and Speer tried to persuade Hitler to dismiss him so they could take over control of the domestic economy for more efficient war production. This attempt soon failed, however, in a welter of other plots. In the turmoil following Stalingrad, pent-up rivalries among the hierarchy came boiling to the surface. Having the ear of Hitler, Party Chief Reichsleiter Martin Bormann suggested that a triumvirate representing the state, the party, and the armed forces be established as a Council of Three with dictatorial powers to control the economy--exactly what Goebbels and Speer were proposing for themselves. They immediately changed tack and now sought an alliance with G�ring and Himmler to thwart Bormann. But Himmler was in a separate plot with Bormann to gain more power at the expense of G�ring. As the controller of Hitler's personal finances, Bormann finessed the plotters by giving G�ring six million reichsmarks to indulge himself away from Hitler's court. In the end, none of these plots succeeded in its object since Hitler was indifferent to such ploys beyond creating divisions among his acolytes. IN THE WORDS OF DR. OTTO DIETRICH, the Reich press chief, "Hitler created in the political leadership of Germany the greatest confusion that has ever existed in a civilized state." [3] The plots and counterplots of 1943 were a prime example of how Hitler exercised his absolute power by fomenting fierce rivalries among his immediate subordinates so that none could ever acquire sufficient power or influence to challenge the F�hrer himself. Indeed, such episodes represent the whole Nazi regime in microcosm. [4] The popular perception holds that the Third Reich was a monolithic totalitarian state that controlled a reluctant population through terror and Teutonic efficiency. While the reign of terror was real enough, the government institutions of the Third Reich were in fact massively CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 31 inefficient, hampered by conflicts of interest and muddled chains of command and absurdly wasteful of money, time, and manpower. Hitler showed little interest in or talent for administration; he preferred to wield power through many competing organizations that owed their very existence to his good offices. In line with his conception of creative chaos, different individuals and agencies were given ill-defined responsibilities in closely related fields of activity in everything from postal administration to weapons development. The price demanded for Hitler's support in the resulting turf wars was total personal loyalty. This might earn supplicants a loosely expressed general directive that they could interpret as endorsing their particular agendas. In pursuit of these rivalries, empire building and bureaucratic obstruction were rife and were deliberately encouraged by Hitler, according to his simplistic view that the strongest would prevail through competition. The architecture of the Nazi state machinery defied all logical explanation. [5] Before the war, the operations of government were nominally entrusted to seventeen ministries, yet the last actual cabinet meeting had taken place in November 1937. On August 30, 1939, the Ministerial Council for the Defense of the State had been formed. It was composed of six of Hitler's closest followers and bureaucrats; this body, chaired by G�ring, could enact laws at Hitler's will. Commissioners were appointed with broadly defined powers within various areas of government activity, but there was no actual machinery for coordinating their work. Worse, there was at every level a divisive duplication of authority caused by the parallel prerogatives of state and Nazi Party functionaries. Virtually every state body was replicated with a party equivalent, with each vying for resources and favor. Heinrich Himmler, as national leader of the SS and chief of German police, was already ruler of the entire security and police apparatus, but his ambitions for expanding his SS empire knew no bounds. The whole machinery of government was interpenetrated by Himmler's practice of awarding parallel SS ranks to functionaries of every kind. Adm. Canaris's Abwehr military intelligence department, answerable to the Armed Forces Supreme Command, was a particular target for Himmler's ambition. Its activities were mirrored by the intelligence and counterintelligence branch of the SS, the Security Service--Sicherheitsdienst. This was commanded until June 1942 by Himmler's deputy, SS and police general Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the Reich Main Security Office. Each agency scrabbled for supremacy at the expense of efficient operations against the common enemy. Canaris and Heydrich, who shared a mutual love of riding and of music, maintained an ostensibly cordial relationship. They sometimes dined together en famille. The cold-blooded killer Heydrich was also an accomplished violinist and he often played for Canaris's wife. When the professional rivalry became too intense, however, Canaris betrayed Heydrich's movements in Czechoslovakia to Britain's MI6. Two parachutists of the Czech Brigade, Jan Kubis and Jozef CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 32 Gabcik, threw an antitank grenade at Heydrich's open-top Mercedes in a Prague street on May 27, 1942. Several fragments and bits of horsehair seat upholstery entered Heydrich's back. He was at first expected to recover from the operation to extract the debris, but the wounds became infected and he died a week later. The death of the central architect of the "Final Solution"-- which he had unveiled at the Wannsee conference that January--led to mass reprisals that killed about 5,000 Czech men, women, and children. AMONG THE ABHORRENT FIGURES at the pinnacle of the Nazi hierarchy, popular history recalls in particular the flamboyant, drug-addicted Luftwaffe commander in chief Hermann G�ring, the occultist security overlord Heinrich Himmler, and the odious propaganda minister and de facto interior minister Joseph Goebbels. In truth, however, the most devious of them all, and the master of palace intrigue, was the relatively faceless party chief Martin Bormann. Hitler's shadow and gatekeeper for much of the Third Reich, Bormann was a figure forever lurking in the background at the F�hrer's elbow. His battlegrounds were the card-index file and the doubleentry ledger. His principal weapon was the teleprinter, through which he issued a torrent of instructions to his ubiquitous regional gauleiters (district leaders). To these party officials, Bormann was known behind his back as the "Telex General." [6] Bormann had come to the Nazi Party relatively late, joining only in 1926, so the Alte K�mpfer ("Old Fighters") who had supported Hitler in the Munich putsch attempt tended to dismiss him. Nevertheless, he held the party membership number 6088 and was therefore eligible for the Gold Party Badge, awarded to party members with a registration number under 100,000. Bormann's first job was to run the relief fund for the storm troopers of the Sturmabteilungen (SA--the party's brown-shirted uniformed part-time activists) who were injured in brawls and riots. He cannily negotiated reduced premiums to the insurance company concerned while at the same time increasing the contributions from NSDAP members by 50 percent; furthermore, the payment of dues was now compulsory, while any payment of benefits was at Bormann's sole discretion. In short order, this scheme raised 1.4 million reichsmarks in a single year--much to Hitler's delight. The F�hrer moved Bormann and the SA fund into the NSDAP proper. Bormann now worked at the Brown House, the party headquarters in Munich, where he aspired to taking over the post of party treasurer from Franz Xaver Schwarz. Meanwhile, he progressed to controlling the finances of the Adolf Hitler Spende der Deutsche Wirtschaft, the "Adolf Hitler Fund of German Business." This AH Fund was originally established as "a token of gratitude to the leader" in order to provide campaign funds and finance for cultural activities within the NSDAP. In reality it became Hitler's personal treasure chest, with revenues gathered from many sources. The most important were the contributions made by industrialists--such as Krupp and Thyssen and of course IG Farben--who were benefiting CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 33 enormously from German rearmament. In essence, this was a tax amounting to one-half percent of a company's payroll, payable directly to the F�hrer. In its first year alone, 30 million reichsmarks poured into the coffers of the AH Fund. [7] In 1929, Bormann married Gerda Buch, the daughter of a senior party official, and on July 3, 1933, he was appointed chief of staff to the deputy F�hrer, Rudolf Hess. Hess was as uninterested as Hitler in paperwork, so Bormann's skill in turning Hitler's spontaneous verbal directives into coherent orders was invaluable. The F�hrer would comment approvingly that "Bormann's proposals are so precisely worked out that I have only to say `yes' or `no.' With him, I deal in ten minutes with a pile of documents for which with another man I should need hours." [7a] On October 10, 1933, Hitler appointed Bormann as a party Reichsleiter or national leader, making him fourth in the Nazi hierarchy behind Hitler, G�ring, and Hess. The intertwining of party and state authority, as described above, would henceforth give Bormann all the freedom of maneuver that he needed. BORMANN'S ABILITY TO INGRATIATE HIMSELF with the F�hrer was uncanny. He altered his sleeping pattern to coincide with Hitler's and even mimicked his master by eating vegetarian food and avoiding alcohol when they were dining together--although in private he gorged himself on schnitzel, wurst, and schnapps. As one regional gauleiter commented, "Bormann clung to Hitler like ivy around an oak, using him to get to the light and to the very summit." [8] This he achieved after Deputy F�hrer Hess--already a marginalized figure--embarked on his bizarre solo flight to Scotland on May 10, 1941, apparently to seek a peace agreement with opponents of the British government. Hess's departure from the scene allowed Bormann to get even closer to Hitler. He was now entirely responsible for arranging the F�hrer's daily schedule, appointments, and personal business. He was always at his master's side and never took a vacation for fear of losing influence. His reward came in April 1943, when he was appointed secretary to the F�hrer and chief of the party chancellery. The latter post gave him immense influence over the gauleiters who controlled every district (Gau) across the Third Reich. He was now so indispensable that the F�hrer was prompted to say, "To win this war, I need Bormann." [9] He also needed Bormann to control his personal finances. At a dinner party with Himmler in October 1941, Hitler had declaimed, "As far as my own private existence is concerned, I shall always live simply, but in my capacity as F�hrer and Head of State I am obliged to stand out clearly from amongst all the people around me. If my close associates glitter with decorations, I can distinguish myself from them only by wearing none at all." [10] This claim of monkish asceticism was not strictly true. Hitler enjoyed a lavish lifestyle at his Bavarian residence, the Berghof, in the mountain village retreat of Berchtesgaden in Obersalzburg municipality. Besides the Berghof itself, separate villas were provided at Obersalzberg for all the CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 34 notables of the Nazi hierarchy. This compound had all been created for the F�hrer by Bormann and financed from the AH Fund to the tune of about 100 million reichsmarks. [10a] With its splendid views of the Bavarian Alps, the Berghof was Hitler's favorite retreat. This was where he spent time with his mistress, Eva Braun, and entertained foreign visitors and his close and trusted associates--his Berg Leute, or mountain people. As Otto Dietrich would write, "Bormann then assumed economic and financial direction of the entire `household of the F�hrer.' He was especially attentive to the lady of the house, anticipating her every wish and skillfully helping her with the often rather complicated arrangements for social and state functions. This was all the more necessary, since she herself tactfully kept in the background as much as possible. Bormann's adroitness in this matter undoubtedly strengthened his unassailable position of trust with Hitler, who was extraordinarily sensitive about Eva Braun." There was, however, no love lost between Bormann and Braun; behind his back she called him an "oversexed toad." [11] With his brilliant business acumen, Bormann found many ways to bolster Hitler's personal fortune. [12] Apart from the considerable income derived from royalties on Mein Kampf--which, since it was required reading in German schools, sold millions of copies-- Bormann devised a scheme to capitalize on image rights whereby Hitler received a payment for every use of his likeness, be it on a postcard or even a postage stamp. These monies were paid into a separate Adolf Hitler Cultural Fund to support the performing arts and to purchase paintings for the F�hrer's personal collection. By the outbreak of war in 1939, Hitler's annual income was immense, but--thanks to a deal that Bormann had arranged with the authorities--he paid no income tax. Like other Nazi leaders, Hitler had foreign bank accounts, including one with the Union Bank of Switzerland in Bern and another in Holland. These accounts received the royalties earned on Hitler's book sales abroad and, more importantly, allowed him to indulge the one passion in his life besides politics--his obsession with art. CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 35 Chapter 4 The Rape of Europe AS A YOUNG MAN IN VIENNA before World War I, Hitler had nurtured ambitions to be an artist and an architect, despite the fierce objections of his overbearing father, Alois Schicklgruber. In 1907, he applied to the Academy of Fine Arts but failed the entrance examination. Desolated, he applied again the following year but was rejected again, his portfolio winning only a cursory glance. This was a turning point in Hitler's life. Attributing his rejection to the panel of academicians being Jews, he nursed a deep embitterment toward the Jewish race, although, ironically, on the few occasions that Hitler ever sold any of his paintings, it was through the Jewish Hungarian art dealer Josef Neumann. For the next few years Hitler lived a vagrant's life "of hardship and misery," as he later recalled in Mein Kampf. His only solace was found in Vienna's many art museums and the city's deep tradition of classical music. His musical tastes were catholic--Beethoven, Bruckner, Chopin, Grieg, Schubert, Schumann, and even Mahler and Mendelssohn--but his abiding favorite was Richard Wagner and he knew the opera Die Meistersinger von N�rnberg by heart. Hitler gave up painting after World War 1 as his political career progressed, but he retained an illusion of himself as a great artist throughout his life and his interest in architecture never diminished. [1] Once in office as chancellor, Hitler pursued his obsession of "racial purity" with ruthless zeal, in parallel with a breakneck program of centralizing all power in the party's hands. [2] The Nazis' election in 1933 was followed almost immediately by their virtual destruction of the German constitution in response to the Reichstag fire and, on the death of President Paul von Hindenburg in August 1934, by Hitler's assumption of the dual leadership of the Nazi Party and the state as F�hrer (leader)--a coup d'�tat endorsed in a plebiscite by 38 million German citizens. Once parliament and the courts were castrated, the regime enjoyed unfettered power and was free to institute a policy of Gleichschaltung (enforced conformity), consolidating its hold over the nation by the elimination or neutering of any organized bodies that were outside the complete control of the Nazi Party. A spate of decrees revoked individual liberties and rights of association, silenced the media, banned rival political parties and free labor unions, and destroyed the independence of regional governments and the judiciary. The death penalty was introduced for a wide range of politically defined "crimes," and there were mass arrests not only of communist, social democratic, and Jewish activists but also of freemasons, gypsies, homosexuals, and any others deemed deviant in the eyes of Nazi orthodoxy. Most of these pariahs were incarcerated in the fifty concentration camps that were opened during the Nazis' first year in power. CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 36 In April 1933, Julius Streicher, the notorious Jew-baiter and editor of the Nazi weekly newspaper Der St�rmer (The Attacker), orchestrated an economic boycott of Jewish businesses. Dr. Joseph Goebbels, head of the newly founded Reich Ministry for Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, called for the "cleansing by fire" of "un-German" books, particularly those by authors of Jewish background such as Einstein, Freud, Gorki, Kafka, and Marx--and even the works of the revered German nineteenth-century poet Heinrich Heine, whose tragedy Almansor contains the warning "Where they burn books, they will in the end also burn people." On May 10, a crowd of 40,000 watched the burning of 25,000 books in Berlin's Opernplatz. In November 1933 a national referendum showed that 95 percent of the population approved of Nazi policies, even as their rights and freedoms were being systematically destroyed. IN THE HEADY DAYS following their electoral victory, the Nazis concentrated on eliminating political opponents of the center and left. Now they had the opportunity to turn on the Jews. [3] By 1934, all Jewish shops were prominently daubed with the word "Juden" or the Star of David, and storm troopers of the SA frequently hung around outside them to discourage customers from entering. Increasingly, Jewish business people were forced to close down as they lost their livelihood. Soon, German Jews were being forced out of the professions and government employment as doctors, lawyers, teachers, scientists, and civil servants. Shops and restaurants refused to serve Jews and they were banned from public parks, swimming pools, and even public transport. German children were imbued with anti-Semitism during school lessons and even during playtime--the object of a popular children's board game was to render particular areas of Germany Juden Frei or "Jew-free." A major step in the process of "Aryanization" of all aspects of German society was taken on September 15, 1935, with the enactment of the so-called Nuremberg Laws. [4] Henceforth, marriage or sexual intercourse between Jews and Aryans was expressly forbidden, and Jews were deprived of their political rights as citizens. Increasingly, Jews attempted to emigrate to France, Switzerland, and further afield, but they were rarely made welcome and many were refused entry. Out of a total Jewish population of some 525,000, about 170,000 had already left Germany before October 5, 1938, when a decree invalidated their passports. The Swiss insisted that German Jews who needed traveling documents for emigration purposes be reissued passports with a large "J" for ready identification and rejection at the border. Many Jews could not afford the everincreasing cost of emigration. Those who could were not permitted to take any capital with them, and few had any money left after being forced to sell their homes and businesses at greatly discounted prices to pay the Reichsfluchtsteuer ("escape tax"). Dealers in art and antiquities were specifically targeted, and this enforced liquidation of about 80 percent of such businesses in Germany caused a glut on the market and a sharp slump in prices. CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 37 On November 9, racial violence--sparked by the assassination of a German diplomat in Paris by a young Jewish Pole whose family had been deported from Germany--reached new heights. That night Jewish homes, properties, and synagogues across Germany and parts of Austria and the Sudetenland were attacked and burned in the orgy of destruction known as Kristallnacht--"Crystal Night" or the Night of Broken Glass--from the amount of broken glass it left carpeting the streets. At least ninety-one Jews lost their lives; another 30,000 were arrested and largely consigned to concentration camps. The survivors were actually forced to pay the material price of this pogrom. Replacing all the broken windows would cost some 25 million reichsmarks, and since almost all plate glass was imported from Belgium this had to be paid in scarce foreign currency. By now, the avaricious Hermann G�ring was in charge of the "Program to Eliminate Jews from German Economic Life" and he decreed that all Jews remaining in Germany were to provide the Reich exchequer with "atonement payments," totaling 1 billion reichsmarks, to cover the costs of repairing the damage. In addition, any insurance payments made to German Jews were confiscated by the state. [5] KRISTALLNACHT WAS THE CLEAREST WARNING YET to German Jewry of their perilous situation, and, between then and the outbreak of war in September 1939, approximately 100,000 Jews somehow found ways to leave the Reich. Another Nazi legislative novelty was about to suggest that any who were unable or unwilling to do so might find themselves at the mercy of a state prepared to commit mass murder. Among the plague of new legislation enacted in 1933 was a law for the compulsory sterilization of people suffering "congenital mental defects, schizophrenia, manic-depressive psychosis, hereditary epilepsy, and severe alcoholism." Germans were not alone in their enthusiasm for the pseudoscience of eugenics, which in the 1920s�30s was widely espoused across Europe and America in the interests of "racial hygiene." One of its advocates was John D. Rockefeller, the founder of Standard Oil of New Jersey, and it was his Rockefeller Foundation that provided much of the funding for the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, Germany's most prestigious medical school, to carry out studies on "anthropology, eugenics, and human heredity" under the direction of a Swiss psychiatrist and fervent Nazi, Ernst R�din. A mass program of sterilization of both the mentally ill and social misfits, as determined by 220 district "hereditary health courts," was instituted. Among the several hundred thousand victims were such undesirables as convicts, prostitutes, and even children as young as ten from orphanages. By inexorable Nazi logic, the next step was euthanasia or "mercy killing." This program began in 1938 under the auspices of Hitler's personal physician, Dr. Karl Brandt. At first the victims were limited to mentally and physically handicapped children who were killed by lethal injection. But the program was soon extended to handicapped adults and to anyone judged an CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 38 incorrigible social deviant. When lethal injection proved time-consuming and less than efficient, a bureaucracy of murder was established; this was designated the T4 program after the address of its headquarters at Tiergartenstrasse 4 in Berlin. The program was codified in law by decree of the F�hrer in October 1939. At every mental institution false bathhouses were built, where the victims were killed at first by carbon monoxide and later by poison gas. [6] SOON AFTER KRISTALLNACHT, G�ring devised yet more devious schemes from which to profit by forcing German Jews to leave the country. By a decree dated January 1, 1939, all their property and possessions were essentially confiscated by the state. Public Acquisition Offices were set up for "the safekeeping of works of art belonging to Jews," and a subsequent decree demanded the surrender of "any objects in their ownership made of gold, platinum, or silver, as well as precious stones and pearls." This expropriation of Jewish property was the first foreshadowing of the Nazis' future plundering of Europe. After G�ring had made his choice of artworks and trinkets, the proceeds from the loot went directly to the coffers of the AH Fund or the Adolf Hitler Cultural Fund. With such resources at his disposal, Hitler was able to indulge his passion for paintings. [7] The F�hrer's personal taste was bourgeois in the extreme. He loathed all nonrepresentational art and his eye for quality was completely inconsistent. In 1934 he purchased a portrait of his great hero Frederick the Great of Prussia by the Swiss painter Anton Graff (1736� 1813) for the then-considerable sum of 34,000 reichsmarks. It was Hitler's favorite painting and it traveled with him everywhere. As an example of his more prosaic taste, Hitler paid 120,000 reichsmarks to Hermann Gradl, a painter of idyllic landscapes, to make six large oils for the dining hall of the New Reich Chancellery between 1939 and 1941. Their conventional character may be guessed from Hitler's instructions that this commission was to illustrate "the typical appearance of the German Land, in its intertwining of Nature and Culture and its many different guises as Motherland of the German Nation." [8] To adorn the New Chancellery the F�hrer spent nearly 400,000 reichsmarks on other contemporary artworks of very mixed quality. Although he bought for his own collection paintings by Rubens, Canaletto, van Dyck, and Watteau at the behest of his art adviser, Dr. Hans Posse, his favorite painters were actually somewhat obscure German nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artists such as Franz Stuck and Carl Spitzweg, neither of whom has stood the test of time. One of his all-time favorites was Eduard von Gr�tzner, whose particular specialty was portraits of drunken monks. In a conversation with Albert Speer, Hitler declaimed, "Look at those details--Gr�tzner is greatly underrated. It's simply that he hasn't been discovered yet. Some day he'll be worth as much as a Rembrandt." This has not proved to be the case. [9] CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 39 In one of his first acts as chancellor, Hitler ordered the construction of the House of German Art in Munich to display the finest examples of Germanic painting and sculpture. The task was entrusted to Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party ideologue and chief racial theorist, who was given the grandiose title of "F�hrer's Delegate for the Entire Intellectual and Philosophical Education and Instruction of the National Socialist Party." The fundamental contradiction was, of course, that the Nazi Party was profoundly anti-intellectual and as totally opposed to freedom in the arts as it was to any other sort of independent thinking. Nevertheless, the leadership devoted an inordinate amount of time to cultural matters--as the character Wilhelm Furtw�ngler says in Ronald Harwood's modern play Taking Sides, "Only tyrannies understand the power of art." But Rosenberg's role was twofold; besides finding and glorifying politically acceptable German art, he was to root out all art that did not conform to Nazi ideology or Hitler's personal taste. [10] For fear of losing their jobs, museum directors and curators across Germany were obliged to surrender to the state "purging" committees all works by artists suspected of "degeneracy"-- Cubists, Impressionists, Futurists, German Expressionists, Dadaists--and other "un-German" art. In all, some 16,000 works of art were confiscated from museums across the country. As the new arbiter of artistic merit, Hitler dismissed the works of masters such as Georges Braque, Paul C�zanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso as "twaddle," and a new office was set up to implement his demands in the "unrelenting war of purification." All active artists had to submit their work to this Committee for the Assessment of Inferior Works of Art; any works deemed substandard were confiscated without compensation, and artists who ran afoul of the committee were forbidden to purchase painting materials on pain of imprisonment, thus ending their careers. Many artworks were destroyed; for example, on March 20, 1939, 1,004 paintings and sculptures as well as 3,825 drawings, watercolors, and other items were burned during a practice exercise for the Berlin Fire Department. Predictably, Hermann G�ring turned the situation to his pecuniary advantage. All the confiscated works of art from the nation's museums were stored in a warehouse on Kopernikusstrasse in Berlin, and when G�ring sent his art agent to forage through this Aladdin's cave he came away with a veritable feast of Impressionist paintings, including four by Vincent van Gogh. A single C�zanne and two van Goghs, including Portrait of Dr. Gachet, were sold to a Dutch banker for 500,000 reichsmarks. (In 1990 Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for $82.5 million.) With the money raised, G�ring purchased more Old Masters and his favorite Gobelin tapestries to adorn the walls of his country mansion Carinhall. Following G�ring's example, the other Nazi leaders now profited from the activity of a Commission for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art that released purged artworks onto the international market. [11] Despite their greed, however, the sales of Germany's heritage that were held in London, Paris, and Switzerland from 1937 until early 1939 effectively dumped these CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 40 despised works. Some extraordinary bargains were to be had: a Paul Klee for $300, now in the Museum of Modern Art in New York; a Kandinsky for $100, now in the Guggenheim Museum in New York; and Henri Matisse's Bathers with a Turtle, purchased by Joseph Pulitzer for 9,100 Swiss francs, which now resides in the St Louis Art Museum. [11a] The Austrian Anschluss of March 12, 1938, saw Hitler's native country annexed to the Third Reich, to the rapturous enthusiasm of a large part of the Austrian people. Within hours, every public building was bedecked with swastika flags, while gangs of thugs rampaged through the streets hunting down Jews. Two days later, Hitler made a triumphal progress through Vienna. In the meantime, SS officers were pillaging Jewish homes in search of artworks and valuables. They knew exactly where to look since German scholars had been commissioned to prepare catalogs and inventories of private collections across Europe in anticipation of Hitler's conquests. [12] The art collections of the Rothschild banking family were primary targets; Baron Alphonse de Rothschild was stripped of 3,444 artworks from his Hohe Warte villa in Vienna and his country estate at Schloss Reichenau, while his elder brother Baron Louis lost 919 pieces to the Nazis. All such items were carefully cataloged and photographed and an extensive inventory was prepared before the chosen pieces were transferred to Germany and the residue to Austrian museums. [13] In the month following the Anschluss, Hitler decided to create the greatest art museum in the world in the city of Linz, close to his birthplace. The F�hrermuseum was planned to become the repository for all the great works of art looted during the Nazi wars of conquest-- except, of course, for those pieces diverted to the private collections of Adolf Hitler, Hermann G�ring, and a selected few others of the Nazi elite. ON JUNE 23, 1940, THE DAY FOLLOWING France's humiliating armistice, Hitler conducted a triumphal tour of Paris. He was accompanied by his favorite sculptor Arno Breker, his architect Albert Speer, and several general staff officers, traveling in three G4 Mercedes six-wheel touring cars. Speer recalled that when they toured the famed nineteenth-century Paris Opera house, Hitler "seemed fascinated by the Opera, went into ecstasies about its beauty, his eyes glittering with an excitement that struck me as uncanny." The entourage sped past Madeleine church and the Arc de Triomphe, down the Champs-�lys�es, past the Eiffel Tower, and on to Les Invalides, where Hitler spent a considerable time at Napoleon's tomb, communing with the previous great European tyrant. At the conclusion of his tour of the City of Light, he stated, "It was the dream of my life to be permitted to see Paris. I cannot say how happy I am to have that dream fulfilled today." [14] That dream had cost the lives of 27,074 Germans and left another 111,034 wounded, but Allied casualties in the Battle of France were a staggering 2.292 million. The greatest toll was paid by the French, with 97,300 killed and missing, 120,000 wounded, and 1.54 million captured. CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 41 The latter were doomed to become forced laborers for the German war effort. After this colossal victory, achieved in just six weeks, continental Western Europe lay helpless and ripe for plunder. A galaxy of the world's great art museums had fallen into the hands of the Nazis--the Mus�es Royaux des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and the Louvre in Paris, as well as a host of provincial galleries and private collections. The greatest hoard in the history of military conquest since the time of Napoleon Bonaparte now became subject to the greatest art theft in recorded history. THE TASK OF PERFORMING this grandest of larcenies fell to Alfred Rosenberg and an organization named after him, the Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg f�r die Besetzen Gebiete (Special Staff of National Leader Rosenberg for the Occupied Territories) or ERR for short. Rosenberg's role, defined in a personal directive from Hitler, was to comb every public and private collection in the occupied countries and "to transport to Germany cultural goods which appear valuable to him, and to safeguard them there." France, Belgium, and Holland were the responsibility of ERR Dienststelle (Agency) Western, headquartered in Paris. Within a few weeks, a fabulous body of art had been assembled at the Louvre and the German embassy awaiting a decision as to final disposal. This included twenty-six "Jewish-owned works of degenerate art," comprising fourteen Braques, seven Picassos, four L�gers, and a Rouault, which were retained for "trading for artistically valuable works." [15] Even as his Luftwaffe was fighting in the skies over England during the Battle of Britain, G�ring was scouring the museums of the Low Countries in his insatiable quest for artistic loot. By October 1940, he had lost his "Channel War," and the contemplated invasion of Britain was canceled. On November 3, he consoled himself with a trip to Paris to view the accumulated treasures that had been gathered in the Jeu de Paume museum. [16] The haul was so extensive that it took G�ring two full days to make his choices--mostly French and Dutch masters from the Rothschild and Wildenstein collections. Above all, he craved the painting titled The Astronomer by Jan Vermeer, stolen from Baron Alphonse de Rothschild; but as the F�hrer's collection lacked a Vermeer, G�ring was out of luck. In the pecking order of plunderers, Hitler had first choice through his chief art procurer, Dr. Hans Posse, both for his personal collection and for the planned museum at Linz. The diligent and resourceful Posse wrote to Martin Bormann almost every day, in great detail, about his various acquisitions for the F�hrer and the state of the art market. Second came Reichsmarschall G�ring, and after he had taken his pick, then sundry German museums received the remaining spoils. While the search for Jewish valuables continued tirelessly, with the ready cooperation of officials in Vichy France--even individual safety deposit boxes were opened--the harvesting of conquered Europe was not confined to items of obvious value. In the occupied countries, millions CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 42 more Jews were now at the disposal of the Nazis, to be registered by their national authorities and to await the bureaucracy of genocide. At any time they were subject to deportation to Germany and on to the concentration camps that spread like plague pits across Eastern Europe. At first, Jewish homes were simply abandoned and then ransacked by neighbors, but the Nazis soon realized that this was a waste of resources. However humble and mundane, furniture and household items could be of benefit to the Reich, where the manufacture of most domestic goods was seriously curtailed in favor of war production. Accordingly, the ERR set up another division tasked with expropriating all Jewish belongings once their owners had been dispatched to the death camps. This new organization, known as Aktion-M (Project M) for M�bel (furniture), operated across Europe. Once a Jewish family had been expelled from their home, local police under the direction of the Nazis would arrange for vans to collect all the furniture and kitchen appliances, which were taken to a central repository to await shipment to Germany. The Dutch even invented a word for the process-- pulsen--after the name of the Amsterdam moving company Abraham Puls & Sons, which was employed by the Dutch police for this task. In one year alone, Project M was responsible for the clearing of 17,235 Dutch homes of items totaling loads of almost 17 million cubic feet; these were crated for dispatch to Germany or to the ethnic German populations living in the occupied Eastern Territories. During 1942, 40,000 tons of furniture were also shipped from France to Germany. A report by ERR Dienststelle Western dated August 8, 1944, records that after 69,512 Jewish homes had been stripped of household goods, it took 674 trains with 26,984 freight cars to carry the plunder to Germany. [17] THE NAZIS SYSTEMATICALLY LOOTED artworks--using that term to embrace everything from ceramics to church bells and from sculptures to silverware--from every country they occupied while also inflicting untold destruction on cultural buildings. The Soviet Union lost 1.148 million artworks as the Germans ransacked 400 museums, 2,000 churches, and 43,000 libraries inside Soviet territory. In Poland, some 516,000 individual pieces of art were looted, representing about 43 percent of the country's cultural heritage. [17a] Much of this plunder was intended to reside in the F�hrermuseum at Linz, the symbol of Hitler's artistic vision and the cultural center of the Thousand-Year Reich, which would finally expunge his rejection at the hands of the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. In the meantime, however, the F�hrermuseum existed only in blueprint and tabletop models, and it was essential to protect Hitler's loot from the ever more destructive Allied bombing campaign. [18] Across Germany, numerous repositories were created in cave complexes and salt mines where the appropriate conditions of humidity and temperature could be maintained. Thanks to the meticulous records of the ERR and Dr. Hans Posse, Martin Bormann knew the location of every CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 43 single crate of plunder across the length and breadth of the Third Reich. [19] He was therefore able to inform the F�hrer of the exact whereabouts of any particular piece, should Hitler wish to view or display it at any time. Bormann himself had little interest in the subject, but he realized the potential value of even "degenerate art" on the world market. He arranged for many pieces to be sold at international auctions held in Switzerland; the funds from these sales were deposited in Hitler's personal account at the Union Bank of Switzerland or in a separate account to purchase essentials for the war effort. Unlike other Nazi leaders, however, Bormann never appropriated state funds for his own personal ends. The rewards he craved were power and control. Following the occupation of Vichy France in November 1942, this avenue for art sales closed, since international dealers were unable to visit Switzerland and U.S. customs regulations forbade trading with the occupied countries of Europe. Bormann promptly established bogus art dealerships in Latin American locations ranging from Buenos Aires to Mexico City. [20] Degenerate art was now transported to the Americas from Genoa, Italy, on ships sailing under the flags of neutral countries. Many pieces thus continued to reach the American market, and Bormann had the proceeds from these sales salted away in the Banco Alem�n and the Banco Germ�nico in Buenos Aires. The shipping companies involved included the Argentine firm Delfino S.A. and the Spanish line Compa�ia Naviera Levantina; the latter was purchased by a German front company to make supply voyages under the Spanish flag to the beleaguered German forces in Tunisia during the winter of 1942�43. On their return trips from South America, these vessels brought back much-needed foodstuffs and strategic materials--such as vanadium from Argentina, which was crucial for the production of synthetic fuels. In addition, many crewmen from the Kriegsmarine pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee, who had been interned in Argentina and Uruguay since their ship was scuttled off Montevideo in December 1939, were carried home to Germany. The flow of confiscated art from France to Germany continued right up until the Allied advance was threatening Paris in July 1944. [21] By then, 29 major shipments of artworks had been undertaken since 1941, involving 137 freight cars carrying some 4,174 crates of plunder, comprising about 22,000 objects from 203 different collections. [21a] Similar streams of plunder continued to flow from all the other occupied countries of Europe and from the Soviet Union, and even from Italy after its surrender to the Allies in September 1943. Under orders from their titular chief, the Luftwaffe's Hermann G�ring Panzer Division plundered artworks from Naples and all points northward as the German forces gradually retreated up the length of Italy. This industrial-scale looting provided a massive infusion of funds to the Third Reich and amassed for both Hitler and G�ring the finest individual collections of art ever known. The plundered art was also to become a vital element in the master CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 44 plan that Martin Bormann developed as the tides of war turned against Germany: Aktion Feuerland. CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 45 Chapter 5 Nazi Gold FROM THE TIME THAT HITLER assumed power, rearmament was his top priority, both to reduce unemployment among the German people and to pursue his plans for a short, sharp war of conquest. From as early as 1933, the president of the Reichsbank, Dr. Hjalmar Schacht, created several phantom accounts where gold acquisitions by the Reichsbank were hidden in order to finance German rearmament without alerting the outside world. By the following year, the published gold accounts revealed that the Reichsbank had $80.5 million while the hidden accounts held $27 million. By 1939 this situation had almost been reversed, with published gold reserves down to $28.6 million while the hidden accounts had risen to $83 million. [1] Between September 1, 1939, and June 30, 1945, however, Germany's gold transactions for the purchase of vital raw materials from overseas amounted to the staggering sum of $890 million. The eightfold difference between this amount and the Reichsbank holdings represented the gold bullion and coinage ransacked from every country conquered by the Germans. During the 1930s, Germany was able to attract credit from many foreign banks and countries to underwrite the modernization of its industry and, by extension, the program of rearmament (see Chapter 1). Similarly, up to the outbreak of war, most countries were willing to accept payment for goods and services in reichsmarks, which were then often used to buy manufactured products from Germany. However, once the U.S. Treasury Department severed financial and commercial links with Germany and occupied Europe after December 1941, payment was demanded in more attractive currencies such as British pounds, U.S. dollars, or Swiss francs. But the most attractive currency of all--then as now--was gold. By the end of 1942, following its conquest of most of Europe, Germany had an abundance of gold. [2] The central banks of every occupied country were plundered for the benefit of the Third Reich, starting with that of Austria following its annexation in March 1938. The gold reserves of the Austrian National Bank divulged 200,765 pounds of gold bars and coinage, of which some 49,254 pounds were held in the Bank of England; the total value in U.S. dollars was $102,689,215. Czechoslovakia rendered $44 million; the free city of Danzig, $4.1 million; Holland, $163 million; Luxembourg, nearly $4.858 million; Belgium, $223.2 million; and Italy after September 1943, some $80 million. The amount of gold taken from Greece is not recorded, while that of Yugoslavia was shared between Italy and Germany, some of it being used to establish the Ustase fascist regime in the puppet state of Greater Croatia. Denmark, Norway, and France had made the wise provision of transferring most of their gold reserves to England, America, or Canada before the Nazis invaded. [2a] CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 46 POLAND'S GOLD WAS SAVED by chance and by the indefatigable efforts of Stefan Michalski, the director of the Bank of Poland. In September 1939, he personally escorted the gold via train and truck from Warsaw through Romania and Turkey to Lebanon, where it was loaded on a ship bound for Marseille in France. It arrived in Paris by train in October 1939, just as the Germans were invading Poland. The gold was then moved to the port of Lorient in Brittany and shipped aboard the French cruiser Victor Schoelcher to Dakar in French West Africa (in the region that is now the country of Senegal). After May 1940, Dakar was also the refuge for the residual gold holdings of France and Belgium's reserves; the latter had been transferred to the Bank of France for safekeeping early in 1940. German demands for the surrender of the Polish and Belgian gold under the terms of the armistice with Vichy France met with months of delay and prevarication. Eventually the French agreed to hand over the Belgian gold, but not the Polish, on the grounds that since that country had been carved up between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union it was no longer a sovereign state and could not currently honor the credit France had extended to it previously. [2b] The diligent Stefan Michalski guarded his charge until the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942, when he arranged for a U.S. warship to transport the sixty-five tons of Polish gold to New York to be deposited in the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank. The saga of the Belgian gold was one of the most extraordinary tales of World War II. On September 23, 1940, the British and Gen. de Gaulle's Free French launched Operation Menace, an unsuccessful attack on Dakar to capture the remaining French gold reserves. Before this fiasco, the Belgian gold--comprising 4,944 sealed boxes weighing some 270 tons--had been moved inland by Vichy French operatives to Kayes, where it arrived on September 20. From there it went by train to Bamako on the Niger River and was transported by riverboats and light trucks upriver to Timbuktu and Gao. The long haul across the Sahara Desert was accomplished by camel train to the railhead at Colomb-B�char in French Algeria. Once the gold reached Algiers, 120 aircraft flights were needed to transport it to Marseille. It arrived at the Reichsbank in Berlin in May 1942, after a journey lasting twenty months. [3] ANY GOLD BULLION STOLEN from the central banks of the occupied countries was easily recognized on the international market, due to particular stampings on each gold bar that revealed its provenance. Accordingly, all looted gold was processed through the Precious Metals Department of the Reichsbank, where it was carefully weighed, cataloged, and stored, either centrally in Berlin or in one of some twenty other branches. When necessary, the bullion was resmelted at the Prussian State Mint into new bars that were stamped with pre-war German markings to disguise their true origins. Similarly, all the gold items taken from the victims in the extermination camps, such as gold teeth and jewelry, were either sold or melted down and cast into gold bars by the firm of CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 47 Degussa--Deutsche Gold und Silber Scheideanstalt. The company even had its own smelter at Auschwitz, where it processed on average twenty-four pounds of gold per day: with a hideous symmetry, Degussa and IG Farben jointly owned the chemical production firm Degesch, which manufactured the Zyklon-B tablets used in the gas chambers. The first shipment of prisoners' valuables from the death camps to the Reichsbank was made on August 26, 1942, under the supervision of SS Captain Bruno Melmer. In November 1942, the tenth shipment to the Reichsbank was the first to include dental gold, and the deliveries continued until the end of the war; some seventy-eight in all. The Reichsbank realized the market value of all the bullion and currency, and the proceeds were deposited in a special SS account under the name of Melmer. Funds were then transferred to an account in the name of Max Heiliger; this account was controlled by SS and Police Gen. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the successor to Reinhard Heydrich as head of the Reich Main Security Office, and by SS Gen. Oswald Pohl, the chief administrator of the concentration camps. This became a slush fund for the SS leadership, which made large deposits and investments in Switzerland, mainly through the Bank for International Settlements. [4] Despite its newfound hoards of looted gold, Nazi Germany had no direct mechanism of paying for foreign goods, and the transfer of funds or gold bullion to another country required the cooperation of the international banking community. The solution lay on Germany's doorstep, in the financial institutions of neutral Switzerland, which had been quick to recognize the commercial opportunities of what was happening in Germany. As early as 1934, Swiss banks had introduced a system of numbered bank accounts to guard the privacy of depositors--particularly Jews wishing to move their wealth out of Germany--from the scrutiny of the Nazi regime. Only the most senior bank officials knew the true identities of the account holders. In August 1939 alone, just weeks ahead of the German invasion, some 17,000 transfers were made from Poland for safekeeping in Swiss bank accounts, and once war broke out large numbers of European Jews or their appointed agents came to deposit their savings and valuables in the banks of Basle and Zurich despite Swiss border restrictions to inhibit the entry of Jews. But these Swiss transactions with the prey were small beer compared to the trade in gold that was conducted with the predators. AT THE OUTSET, THE GERMANS FAVORED the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) based in Basel. [5] As already mentioned, this bank was founded in 1930 for the purpose of overseeing the transfer of German reparation payments to various recipient countries under the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, but those provisions were repudiated by Germany in 1932. Lacking any form of governmental control, the BIS was owned and run by the central banks of the member countries, including the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, the Reichsbank, and the Bank of CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 48 England. Its role was "to promote the cooperation of central banks and to provide additional facilities for international financial operations." By its own charter, it was immune from seizure or prosecution even in times of war. It acted as the prototypical world bank, but was run purely for the benefit of its own members. Indeed, it became a useful club where central bankers and their staffs met once a month in the agreeable surroundings of Basel. The membership of the BIS board of management was intriguing. The two principal directors were Hjalmar Schacht, former president of the Reichsbank and Reich economic minister, and Sir Montagu Norman, the governor of the Bank of England. These two were longstanding close friends given to extended walks in the woods together. The chairman was the affable Thomas H. McKittrick, a New York banker-cum-lawyer, whose sympathies with the Nazis were well known. The German bias of the BIS was further confirmed by the presence on its board of the current president of the Reichsbank, Dr. Walter Funk, and his deputy Emil Puhl; Hermann Schmitz, chairman of IG Farben; and Baron Kurt von Schr�der, banker to Adolf Hitler and owner of the J.H. Stein Bank of Cologne, whose most noted client was the SS--accordingly, one of the Stein bank's directors was Gen. Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Baron von Schr�der, himself an SS brigadier, was the director of more than thirty other companies, including ITT in Germany. Schr�der's Bank of Hamburg was affiliated to the J. Henry Schr�der & Co. of London, which acted as the German government's financial agent in Britain from 1938. The latter in its turn owned the J. Henry Schr�der Banking Corporation of New York; this concern went into partnership with the Rockefellers in 1936 to become the Schroder Rockefeller & Co. investment bank, of which Allen Welsh Dulles--the future OSS station chief in Bern--was a director. Such was the fraternity of international banking, united in the belief that business must continue even in the depths of a world war. Up to the outbreak of war in 1939, the BIS channeled funds totaling some 294 million Swiss francs from foreign investors into Nazi Germany, and it continued to assist the Nazis throughout the war. At the time of the German annexation of the Czech Sudetenland in October 1938, the National Bank of Czechoslovakia in Prague held some $26 million of gold in the BIS account held by the Bank of England in London. In March 1939, after the whole of Czechoslovakia had been occupied, the Germans laid claim to this amount for the Reichsbank. The BIS immediately bowed to German demands, but required the agreement of the Bank of England for completion of the transaction, and Sir Montagu Norman duly arranged this. When the Soviet Union tried the same ploy after occupying the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in 1939�40, its claim was refused. DESPITE CLAIMING NEUTRALITY and total probity, the BIS was of vital assistance to Nazi Germany in its quest for strategic resources--such as rubber from Japanese-occupied Malaya, CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 49 paid for with funds transferred to Japan via the BIS. It was Germany's need for essential raw materials that fueled the money-laundering operations of the BIS and the Swiss banks. Coincidentally, some of the most critical resources were to be found in Europe's neutral countries--Swedish iron ore, Turkish chromium, and Portuguese and Spanish wolfram--the latter being essential for the manufacture of tungsten, which was used to make machine tools and armor-piercing ammunition. Both Portugal and Spain were ruled by fascist dictators sympathetic to the Nazi cause. Ant�nio de Oliveira Salazar of Portugal played a canny game, trading with both the Allies and Germany. His regime depended on America for oil and wheat but was willing to sell wolfram by a strict quota system on a cash-and-carry basis that inevitably inflated the cost of the ore--by 1943, wolfram commanded eight times the prewar price, and the Allies alone paid $170 million for wolfram to Portugal and Spain during World War II. While Britain and America paid respectively in pounds sterling and U.S. dollars, Germany was obliged to pay in gold. At the outbreak of the war, Salazar had declared that Portugal would remain strictly neutral and would "adhere to an iron principle--we shall not try to exploit the conflict for pecuniary gain." In 1939 the Banco Nacional de Portugal held 63 tons of gold; by October 1945, its reserves stood at 356.5 tons. [5a] In 1939 the Spain of Gen. Francisco Franco--El Caudillo (The Leader)--was indebted to Germany to the tune of $212 million for its military and financial support during the Spanish Civil War of 1936�39. Although Spain deployed the "Blue Division" of fascist volunteers to fight with the German army against "Bolsheviks" on the Russian Front, it maintained its neutrality with both Germany and the Western Allies. Spain was a ready source of wolfram and other highgrade ores, such as pyrite, as well as lead, mercury, phosphates, and zinc, and foodstuffs, particularly citrus fruits. Germany paid for all of them with gold, manufactured goods, and weapons. Equally important was Spain's role as a conduit for illicit trade with South America, particularly Argentina, which continued throughout the war despite the Allies' illegal naval blockade of the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal, in its turn, provided a similar conduit to Brazil. Both America and Britain placed a high priority on sustaining Spain's neutrality. If Franco joined the Axis powers, then British Gibraltar would inevitably be captured and the western gate of the Mediterranean Sea closed, forcing Allied oil tankers to sail all the way around Africa via the Cape of Good Hope. To keep Franco amenable, the Allies provided Spain with large quantities of grain and petroleum products. Indeed, Spain's complete tanker fleet was kept busy throughout the war transporting oil from Venezuela to Spain, courtesy of Standard Oil and the Texas Oil Company, which charged the U.S. government accordingly. For a simple agrarian society such as Spain, this traffic provided a significant surplus of oil over the country's needs and the difference was sold on to Germany. By the end of the war, Spain had paid off all its debts CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 50 to Germany and Madrid's gold reserves had grown from $42 million in 1939 to $110 million in 1945. PORTUGAL AND SPAIN ESPOUSED fascist ideologies similar to Nazi Germany's. It is more difficult to justify the wartime dealings of a liberal democracy such as neutral Sweden. Sweden possessed a mineral resource that was absolutely vital to the Nazi war machine--iron ore, the key ingredient of steel. Sweden's vast Kiruna-G�llivare mines in Lapland held almost 90 percent of Europe's high-grade iron ore; Swedish ore exports had underwritten the German steel industry for years and continued to do so until November 1944. One of the fundamental reasons for the German invasions of Denmark and Norway in 1940 was to protect the coastal sea-lanes carrying this continuous supply of iron ore, which amounted to some 10 million tons a year. Sweden was also a major producer of the ball bearings that were essential to every modern weapon system. U.S. intelligence calculated that the German war machine would have ground to a halt within six months if denied Swedish iron ore and the ball bearings manufactured by Svenska Kullagerfabriken (SKF)--a company owned by the Stockholms Enskilda Bank. Of the 100 million ball bearings used each year by German war industries, 60 percent were produced in the SKF subsidiary plants at Schweinfurt and Cannstatt in Germany and most of the remainder came from factories in Sweden. All these products were paid for in gold or Swiss francs. During World War II, Sweden received 65.7 tons of gold, including 6.6 tons that came from Holocaust victims. The mechanism was simple. Looted gold was moved to Switzerland in diplomatic bags to avoid Swiss customs regulations and deposited in the Swiss National Bank in Bern, BIS, Union Bank of Switzerland, Swiss Bank Corporation, Cr�dit Suisse, and other financial institutions. These banks then charged commission--commonly 5 percent--for storage prior to dispatch to the central bank of the recipient country. This involved transporting the gold by aircraft, truck convoys, or ship, while insured by Swiss insurance companies. For instance, between May 1942 and February 1943 a series of convoys, totaling some 280 trucks marked with Swiss national flags, conveyed gold bars with a value of up to $400 million across occupied France to Spain and Portugal. During the second half of the war, all the neutral countries came under intense pressure from the Allies not to accept payment for any goods or services in Nazi gold. A senior official at the Swiss National Bank (SNB) came up with an ingenious scheme to avoid such censure. Now the Reichsbank would simply sell its gold to Swiss banks in exchange for currency, usually Swiss francs. This money was then deposited in the account of the recipient country at the Swiss National Bank. The country in question was then at liberty to transfer these funds home or else to buy "cleansed" gold from the SNB--which, of course, took a commission on every transaction. Of the $890 million in gold that financed the Nazi war machine, $388 million was processed CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 51 through the Swiss National Bank and a similar amount, $378 million, through the Bank for International Settlements. [6] Many other Swiss financial institutions benefited from the Nazi connection. Nazi officials and SS leaders secreted untold millions of dollars' worth of gold, currency, and artworks in Switzerland. There, the plunder was hidden in numbered accounts that were immune to scrutiny, thanks to the Swiss banking laws originally enacted in 1934 to give anonymity to Jewish depositors fleeing the clutches of the Nazi regime. As the French writer and diplomat Fran�oisRen� de Chateaubriand (1768�1848) once observed, "The Swiss, neutral during the great revolutions in the countries surrounding them, have enriched themselves on the destitution of others, and founded a bank on the misfortune of nations." [7] CONFIDENTIAL / GREY WOLF UNCORRECTED COPY / STERLING PUBLISHING ALL RIGHTS RESERVED