The Human Pool (20 page)

The Jews came under any other business. Himmler discussed them politely, didn't call them Yids or Kikes. The Führer had approved a policy of exchange, Himmler said, which they were pursuing. Himmler called Karl-Heinz by his rank and full name, and he said he had already made successful negotiations towards an adoption of this new policy and was in discussion with the vice president of the Zionist Organisation in Budapest which was trying to raise money for sixteen hundred Jews to buy their train tickets out of Hungary. Himmler asked Karl-Heinz what the German cut for the deal was, and was told ten percent.

(When I asked Karl-Heinz afterwards if the train was for real rather than another way of extorting money, he looked hurt. ‘If it was just the money, there's nothing to stop us from taking it.') In addition, Himmler said, an agent for the Zionist Relief and Rescue Committee had already been sent to Istanbul to offer one million Jewish lives in exchange for supplies and ten thousand trucks, to be used ‘only on the Eastern Front'.

Dulles nodded politely. He didn't use the word
ransom,
just said that he thought this was a judicious move under the circumstances. He considered it would be advantageous to involve Jews as much as possible in these new discussions. Dulles offered a secure courier service, run by Jews. He added that, given what was at stake, Jews proved the best messengers. Dulles didn't call them Yids or Kikes, either, but there was a ghost of a smile between them.

The meeting lasted no more than a couple of hours. Dulles drank, Himmler didn't. His open bottle of beer remained untouched. Both men were clear-sighted and precise. I left believing they were right about how things would play out, and they would get away with it. Himmler clicked his heels on departing, but refrained from saluting. Karl-Heinz winked at me behind his back while Himmler and Dulles shook hands. ‘A pleasure to do business,' mumbled Himmler in English. ‘Likewise,' said Dulles.

After they had gone, Dulles sat down and loosened his tie. He looked at me as if he was figuring to what extent I was trustworthy. This must have been a calculation that went through his head quite often. We were supposed to return to the house near the border for the night, but Dulles had other plans. He wanted to stay in the inn and told me to fix rooms. He also wanted to eat downstairs in the restaurant. I questioned the wisdom of this. ‘Fuck it, Joe. Just fix it,' he said. ‘I'm in so deep, what does it matter? I just want to sit with ordinary folk tonight.' This was rich coming from Dulles, not known ever to have given a thought to them before.

We ate downstairs. The restaurant was emptying, but the bar was still full. The kitchen was closed, but we were offered what was left: a large hunk of pork with sweet cabbage. Dulles asked me to sit with him and then proceeded to ignore me. The restaurant was dark wood and candlelit and looked like it had been standing for hundreds of years. Dulles ate greedily and drank two bottles of wine to my one, followed by several schnapps. He ate with his napkin tucked into his shirt collar and gnawed on the knuckle, eating with his hands. After he was done, he belched and said, ‘Pardon me, and not a word to Mother, Joe.'

ZURICH/BUDAPEST, 1944

BY THE TIME OF THE
Liechtenstein conference, I knew pretty much all there was to know about Dulles's financial activities. Thanks to Karl-Heinz's banker mole, I had embarked on what Naomi would call a steep learning curve.

Dulles worshipped at the masonic and occult altar of money, and was intimate with all its transubstantiations. In the banker's words, it was both a sacred and a profane process. ‘The miracle of money laundering is like anything else,' he said. ‘It depends on who you know, and Mr Dulles knows a lot of people.'

There was his brother, for a start. As early as 1923, John Foster Dulles had been involved in working out a complicated system by which Germany borrowed from U.S. banks to pay off its war loans. Dulles worked in his brother's law firm from 1926 and went on to make huge profits from investments in Nazi Germany.

I watched Karl-Heinz using an expensive Mont Blanc fountain pen to write down what I told him, a fragment of which survives: ‘…deals include arrangements between IGF [I.G. Farben] & Standard O[il] of N.J. Farben = 2nd largest shareholder in Standard Oil after J. D. Rockefeller…. Rockefeller controls United Fruit, a Dulles client, which continues to trade with the Third Reich, as does Standard Oil.'

Even Karl-Heinz, who did not surprise easily, was astonished by the volume of Dulles's investment in the Third Reich, in excess of a billion dollars on behalf of clients, most of them tax-shelter deals from the 1930s. Karl-Heinz translated this into a year's budget for the German war effort. ‘Imagine,' he said, ‘a billion dollars invested in the Third Reich during the American Depression. Think of the legal fees!'

Karl-Heinz's mistress, Magda, wandered in and out of the room, comfortable with whatever compromises she lived with. Her life consisted of riding, having her hair done, and organising Karl-Heinz's social life. ‘What tricks are you up to now?' she would ask affectionately.

Further scraps among Karl-Heinz's papers include a list of U.S. firms—including International Harvester, DuPont, Ford, and General Motors—that bought directly into German ones and used the profits for investment in requisitioned Jewish firms or German arms production. Karl-Heinz, peering over the top of the spectacles he very occasionally wore, said, ‘So, who paid for the arms that are killing all those young American boys, mmm? It's not a black-and-white world.'

What Dulles invested with one hand he hid with the other. Dulles was the paper-trail king. The banker in the stuffy Zurich apartment had explained how in 1940 Dulles's firm made the Swedish Enskilda Bank the dummy owner of the U.S. subsidiary of Bosch, the German engineering company, and now makers of coffee machines. Including mine in Florida. This act of deception was specifically designed to allow the German parent company to continue dealing with its American subsidiary.

The main inconvenience of the war was that it created borders. Dulles's Swiss operations were largely about undoing those borders, and were for the most part extracurricular. The wherewithal for these clandestine activities was in place long before 1939. The war was almost a sideshow to what was really going on.

It was a world that Beate understood very well from her mother: one of leather-bound address books, a loose association of international contacts with mutual interests—money, mainly—and strategic marriages, all compounded by an understanding of how to work the law.

There was a beauty to many of the moves, and Karl-Heinz taught me to view them with a connoisseur's appreciation. Everything was already in place to facilitate the transfer of money out of Germany. Himmler and Dulles were going to make it disappear from under everyone's noses.

‘Just imagine,' said Karl-Heinz. ‘And no one will be any the wiser.' I suspected that Karl-Heinz's indiscretion was a way of loading me, should he need me as a future character witness. By being involved in the theft of the Third Reich's funds—for that is effectively what it was—he could be seen to be conspiring against the state.

Dulles held several aces. There was Perón, an old client, in charge of Argentina, happy to stockpile Nazi assets and welcome whomever necessary. Another Dulles client, Rockefeller, had South America sewn up after his appointment as co-ordinator of inter-American affairs. This dull-sounding title allowed him to develop his own corporate interests at the expense of the British. The British were overcharged, bullied, and blackmailed so that Rockefeller could increase his market monopoly by using local shell companies which were set up to trade with the Nazis. Co-ordinating committees were run by executives from Standard Oil, United Fruit, and General Electric, all pro-Nazi.

Beate, also with a connoisseur's appreciation of the clandestine, asks, ‘At what point does vested interest become a conspiracy?'

‘When those interests are sustained through illegal means', I tell her. She is quick to grasp that conspiracy is always read as exceptional, supernatural almost, when in reality it is an extension of everyday business. It is how things operate.

Between us we come up with a definition, which Beate writes down, using an old fountain pen of her mother's. ‘Conspiracy is when those affiliations that make up any vested interest become concentrated, usually for short periods of intense effort, to achieve a particular end through underhand or illegal means.'

‘Yes,' she says when she has finished, pleased with our effort.

 

For Dulles, money was the real action. Killing or rescuing Jews was a useful distraction, behind which he could get on with the real work of shifting the money around so no one would notice. His profession was the profession of the twentieth century (oil its lifeblood). A legal background would be the preferred qualification of several future heads of the CIA. Lawyers of similar persuasion to the Dulles brothers went on from Wall Street to work for the government, where they continued to serve their clients' interests. Prescott Bush, grandfather and great-grandfather to future presidents, hired Dulles to conceal assets he had invested in Germany.

As members of a segregated society, these men had no problem with the Germans making the same of theirs. Germany's internal affairs were not their concern.

 

During a summer of intense negotiations, mainly over the fate of Hungary's Jews and then, after the rural clearings, Budapest's, which, in Karl-Heinz's words, ‘kept everyone busy', I retain several mental snapshots of Willi Schmidt, each a little more etched with a sharpness not previously evident. The occupation had hardened him.

Willi to me, in one of his smart café-bars, mirrors on the wall reflecting our murmured conversation: ‘I hear you are moving in interesting circles. Nobody is sure who you are working for.'

The remark hung in the air. I could not tell if this was a threat. Until then I had assumed we were still friends.

Rumours clung to Willi, too. One was that he was working for the Nazi security forces, another that he was helping Jews, yet another that he was involved in the redistribution of their confiscated assets. (Willi said the Jews were making it too easy for the Germans.) He had recently moved into an apartment with one of the best addresses in the city, and said he was renting it from a family which had just moved out.

Willi told me that Budapest was going to be treated as an open city for Jews. Later David told me that this story had been created by the SS to allay fears, which raised the question: How close was Willi to the source?

While Budapest waited at the top of the slide, Willi hung out more often in the Astoria, happy to be seen sitting with all sides, cultivating his notoriety. Willi knew the secrets before they became gossip. He told me that Auschwitz had complained that it could not process the numbers Eichmann was sending and transportations were being kept in sidings until they could be dealt with. Meanwhile those Jews who had tried to buy their way to freedom were stalled in their own siding in Bergen-Belsen, he said, waiting to see if Himmler would change his mind. Willi laughed about how everybody had been made to get off the train and panic set in when they all were invited to take a shower. ‘German sense of humour.' Karl-Heinz said later, sourly, ‘They were just showers.'

Between Willi and Karl-Heinz there developed a rift, which first showed itself as an impatience at any mention of the other's name. Karl-Heinz accused Willi of using Nazi connections to run local fascist gangs and take over Bandi's black-market operations while Bandi was ‘off somewhere'. Willi denied it and said that Karl-Heinz was out of sorts because Bandi being ‘off somewhere' was a peace-seeking mission that was not going according to plan because ‘no one wanted to be friends with the SS'.

Their falling out was over an ‘ideological matter', Willi confessed with an arched eyebrow, well aware that such concerns were usually beyond his consideration. Karl-Heinz had hijacked the Jewish ransom train negotiations from Wisliceny and had tried to up the price to two thousand dollars a ticket; he later settled for a thousand.

Several ‘actor and actress friends' of Willi's had been promised places first by Wisliceny, then by Karl-Heinz, who went back on his word in spite of Willi already having paid Wisliceny. ‘On top of that he was charging a fee for the direct requests, then adding them to the official list and charging again.'

Karl-Heinz remained ironic. ‘I was only obeying orders. Anyway, Willi's full of shit. You want to watch him.'

The day we met, Budapest was getting its first news of a failed plot to kill Hitler—censored by all the usual outlets. Karl-Heinz said, ‘Warn your friends that the deportations will start again.'

 

Were the two connected? I asked. Much later in his papers Karl-Heinz wrote of the July plot: ‘What no one seems to have guessed, even now, was the significance of Bandi Grosz's role. Bandi was the Reichsführer's secret ambassador, through me, and his purpose was to use the Jews-for-trucks business being conducted by the agent for the Zionist Relief and Rescue Committee in Istanbul as a screen for peace seeking with the British (rejected). The great unanswered question was how much the Reichsführer knew of the plot to kill the Führer. Was Bandi put in place in the anticipation that the Reichsführer would, in the event of the Führer's death, be in a position to negotiate a swift and alternative settlement? Coincidentally, or not, the Hungarian deportations were halted some ten days before the assassination attempt.'

At the time, Karl-Heinz dismissed my question, and the one after when I asked if he thought that the assassination attempt was what Herr Kott—as we continued to call Himmler between us—had been referring to when he and Mr Davis had talked about a coup.

Karl-Heinz looked at me. ‘This should not even be thought, let alone mentioned, even between us.'

As he showed me out, he said, ‘They are saying that plotters will be hanged with piano wire and their deaths filmed on Agfa-Gevaert's new colour stock.'

 

I met Dulles the week after the Hitler plot failed. He made no mention of it and didn't seem unduly concerned to hear Karl-Heinz's news about the deportations beginning again. I was in Switzerland, on behalf of Karl-Heinz, who was involved by then in unofficial talks with independent and neutral agencies about extending diplomatic immunity to Hungary's remaining Jews, who were by then concentrated in Budapest.

Dulles said he wanted me in Strasbourg on 10 August. The stated purpose was a conference with the German Red Cross about the reallocation of prisoners-of-war in the face of the Russian advance. I would be contacted.

Dulles in his Herrengasse apartment: I fancied I could smell the trace of Willi's aftershave in his room, grew sure that Dulles was running us in close tandem. Too many people were using me on deniable operations. I was more and more fearful of Hungarian counterintelligence which, piqued by the Germans, was quite capable of taking me off to the Hadik Barracks. I once asked Willi if he was worried. ‘About what?' he said, mystified. ‘I'm Swiss. What do I care?'