Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (6 page)

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.

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
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 attaché 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.

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. 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 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 Führer. 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.

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.”

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. 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 Göring 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.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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 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.

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
.”

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. 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.