Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (21 page)

IAN FLEMING, 1960. Fleming, popularly known as the creator of the fictional spy James Bond, was a British naval intelligence officer during the war. 30 Commando Unit (30 CU), which was tasked with gathering military intelligence documents and items of enemy weapons technology before they could be hidden or destroyed, was another Fleming brainchild.

GEN. DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER, Supreme Allied Commander, accompanied by Gen. Omar N. Bradley and Lt. Gen. George S. Patton Jr., inspects some of the paintings from the salt mine stash, April 1945. In February 1945, the bulk of the remaining German gold reserves and monetary assets, including one billion reichsmarks, had been transferred to the salt mine at Merkers. The rest remained in the Reichsbank in Berlin, where it was ransacked by Gen. Ernst Kaltenbrunner in the largest bank robbery in history.

INMATES IN A slave labor barracks at Buchenwald, photographed April 16, 1945, when the camp was liberated by American troops. The concentration camp at Buchenwald provided slave labor for the construction of V-2 rockets at the Mittelwerk underground assembly lines at Nordhausen. Between 20,000 and 30,000 workers died under conditions of the utmost bestiality making Hitler’s vengeance weapons. Of particular note, the prisoner in the second row from the bottom and sixth from the left is Elie Wiesel, the Jewish-American winner of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1986, renowned as a “messenger to mankind.”

Chapter 10

T
HE
F
OG OF
W
AR

WHILE THE ALLIED ARMIES were still rampaging across northwest Europe, creating the deceptive prospect of peace before Christmas 1944, the Roosevelt administration was laying plans for the structure of a postwar Germany. Both President Roosevelt and his longtime secretary of the treasury, Henry J. Morgenthau Jr., were vehemently anti-Nazi and had little regard for the Germans as a nation. For months they had deliberated over a plan for a demilitarized Germany that would never again be able to wage war. The country was to be divided into northern and southern zones that were to be completely “deindustrialized” and turned over solely to agriculture in order to feed the German people on a subsistence level. In Roosevelt’s words, “
There is no reason why
Germany couldn’t go back to 1810, where they would be perfectly comfortable, but wouldn’t have any luxury.” The industrial Ruhr was to be administered as an international zone, with its products benefiting those countries that had suffered at the hands of the Nazis.

The
Morgenthau Plan
was presented to Winston Churchill at the Second Quebec Conference on September 16, 1944. Churchill yielded to no one in his loathing for the Nazis, but he did have an instinctive understanding of history and he dismissed this more draconian repetition of the Treaty of Versailles as “unnatural, unchristian and unnecessary.” However, after the secretary of the treasury extended another line of credit to Britain to the tune of $6 billion, Churchill agreed to consider a somewhat modified version of the plan.

Details of the Morgenthau Plan were soon in the hands of both the Soviets and the Abwehr. Moscow was informed immediately, since the author of the plan was Morgenthau’s deputy,
Dr. Harry Dexter White
—a Soviet spy, code-named “Jurist.” By reducing Germany to an impotent pastoral society, the plan would render the country more vulnerable to a communist takeover in the near future. The information reached Adm. Canaris by a more devious route.
Two of the Abwehr agents
he had activated in Switzerland in 1940 were “Habakuk,” in the Swiss Foreign Ministry, and “Jakob” in the Swiss Secret Service. Both organizations received a mass of high-value intelligence via the Swiss ambassador to Washington, Dr. Charles Bruggmann. Yet Bruggmann was no spy: his source was his brother-in-law, Henry Wallace—who happened to be the vice president of the United States. Wallace was a popular, left-wing New Dealer; privy to many of America’s most important secrets, he was also notoriously indiscreet.

By autumn of 1944, Canaris had long been dismissed as chief of the Abwehr and was being held under house arrest under suspicion of involvement in the July bomb plot against Hitler. Nevertheless, as a German patriot, he was horrified at the prospect of his country being reduced deliberately to abject poverty after unconditional surrender and he quickly passed details of the Morgenthau Plan to Martin Bormann and Joseph Goebbels. The propaganda minister used the information to galvanize the German people to greater resistance, to avoid their country being turned into a “
potato field
,” in Goebbels’s telling phrase.

Soon afterward, details of the plan appeared in the
Wall Street Journal
; this revelation caused serious divisions within the Roosevelt administration and in corporate America, whose investments in Germany were now at further risk. Both Gen. Marshall and Gen. Eisenhower complained bitterly that German resistance stiffened appreciably, with the result that the front lines became stabilized along the Siegfried Line just as winter was closing in. Roosevelt’s opponent in the presidential election of November 1944, Thomas E. Dewey, said that the Morgenthau Plan was worth “
ten fresh German divisions
” to the enemy. In a cable from Bern, Allen Dulles was
barely able to contain his indignation
at the scheme’s propaganda value to the Nazis:

[The average German] now trembles at the idea of what the foreign workers and prisoners of war would do, when disorder comes, and these millions of aliens are let loose to plunder and ravage the cities and land.… The soldiers at the front, the workers in the ammunition factories, and the inhabitants of the bombed cities are holding out because they feel that they have no choice, and their existence is at stake. The Nazis are profiting by this state of mind for their own purposes.… So far, the Allies have not offered the opposition [inside Germany] any serious encouragement. On the contrary, they have again and again welded together the people and the Nazis by statements published, either out of indifference or with a purpose.

HENRY MORGENTHAU’S TREASURY DEPARTMENT
was also the architect of
Operation Safehaven
. The Bretton Woods Agreement of July 1944, intended to establish a liberal capitalist economic system throughout the industrial nations in the aftermath of the war, had also called on neutral countries to cease the transfer of assets across occupied Europe. In order to choke off the flight of capital from the Third Reich, on August 14 the United States and Britain brought severe pressure to bear on Switzerland to sign a trade agreement that would reduce its dealings with Nazi Germany. Now that the tide of war had turned in favor of the Allies, Switzerland was willing to comply, but in reality, the
process of money-laundering
was so pervasive that little was achieved to halt it. Furthermore, almost two-thirds of Switzerland’s trade was with Nazi Germany and in the midst of a world war it was difficult to judge what was illegal and what was legitimate.

Operation Safehaven was implemented on December 6, 1944, with the aim of tracking the movement of Nazi loot and assets around the world and locating those hidden in neutral countries. However, for Roosevelt and Morgenthau this plan had a wider purpose. They needed concrete evidence of illegality to bring against the major American corporations that had traded with Nazi Germany and those members of the political establishment who were sympathetic to the Nazis: men such as the crypto-Nazi Henry Ford; Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., former U.S. ambassador to London; and John D. Rockefeller Jr., son of John D. Rockefeller Sr., the founder of Standard Oil and advocate of eugenics. Some of these corporations and individuals had tried to undermine the New Deal and destabilize Roosevelt’s administration during the 1930s.

This ambitious operation sought the prosecution as war criminals of all those who ran the Nazi war machine and the industrial concerns that sustained it. Bankers and industrialists such as Abs, Schacht, Schröder, Krupp, Flick, Schmitz, and a legion of others were to stand in the dock of an international tribunal and be judged for their actions. Once they were in open court, Morgenthau would reveal years of intercepted documentation, wiretap evidence, and decrypts of Swiss bank codes and cables, courtesy of Ultra intelligence via MI6. In order to redeem themselves, the defendants would have to reveal their dealings with American corporations such as Ford Motor Company, General Motors, and Standard Oil. All the companies and banks found to have traded with the enemy would then face the full rigor of the law in the United States. It was an elegant plan for revenge, legitimized by the victory of good over evil on the battlefield.

Since Morgenthau was distrustful of both the Justice Department and the State Department, Safehaven was entrusted to a select handful of personnel in the
Federal Economic Administration
(FEA) of the Treasury Department. The president, through the FEA, instructed a new offshoot of X-2 counterintelligence within the Special Intelligence division of the OSS to uncover and collect evidence, particularly in neutral countries, concerning the transfers of Nazi loot and gold. However, this effort required the cooperation of OSS agents already on the ground, and in Switzerland this was problematical—since one of the suspects of Operation Safehaven was Allen Dulles himself, because of his extensive corporate connections and his links with various Nazi groups. Despite this difficulty, the investigation necessarily focused on the gold dealings undertaken by Swiss banks. This became of major concern to Swiss ambassador Bruggmann once he learned of Operation Safehaven through his indiscreet brother-in-law, vice president Henry Wallace. The exposure of the explicit links between Swiss banks and Nazi Germany would be a major potential
embarrassment to the Swiss government
once the war was over; accordingly, the Swiss Secret Service alerted Allen Dulles about the Safehaven investigation into his affairs.