Krueger's Men (16 page)
Suddenly they noticed one guard whisper to another. He rose and headed toward the guardroom, where Stein and Pick were stooped down trying to find the BBC wavelength on the radio. Bober spotted the guard and was prepared: at his signal, Blass switched harmonies to a shrill, discordant note, as if a key on his accordion had stuck. The intruders managed to conceal themselves in the guardroom shadows, and the show went on. As the guard slithered back to his seat, the curtains parted to disclose a blowup of a dollar bill, roughly three by six feet. Two tiny windows in the bill swung open and out popped the heads of Levi and Groen, singing:
Es geht alles vorüber, es geht alles vorbei;
Nach jedem Dezember, folgt wieder ein Mai.
Es geht alles vorüber, es geht alles vorbei;
Es kommt ja ein schöner Mai, und dann sind wir frei.
Everything passes, gone this will be;
After December, May we shall see.
Everything passes, gone this will be;
One lovely Maytime, we shall be free.
This was a popular song of the time, but the last line was the prisoners’ own daring adaptation of the more benign original:
Und zwei die sich lieben, die bleiben sich treu.
And we two who are lovers will ever stay true.
Even Krueger smiled, and his chief disciplinarian Werner had no choice but to join him. What came next was all boffo. A prisoner carrying a Chamberlain umbrella confided he had unfurled it to escape by plane to beautiful Berlin from the horror of bombed-out London, only to land in the famous Block 19. “The Bank of England was only a piggy bank compared to this,” he boasted to deafening applause — as Pick and Stein sneaked back in. (They waited until after the show to spread the news of the headlong Nazi retreat before the Red Army.) The onstage gibes continued: at Uncle Sam and his dollars, John Bull laying an egg, and in one skit — passing right over the heads of the Nazis — Levi sitting behind a table full of fake passports as he declared: “We make everything for the
chaserim.”
This Yiddish word, a gross and racist insult, means “swine” — unclean, repulsive, forbidden.
Afterward, in the light of day, the prisoners realized they might be pushing their luck. Krueger lost his cool when Jacobson insisted the dollar counterfeits were not yet ready. “Not yet!” Krueger imitated his Dutch-accented, guttural German: “Well, then,
when,
Cherr Chacobson?” Jacobson shrugged and repeated the problems of matching subtle greens and complex ornamentation. Smolianoff meanwhile was heard boasting that he was working on a fifty-dollar bill “better than the genuine one… my life’s masterpiece.” On another occasion, sliding into what might nowadays be diagnosed as Stockholm syndrome, he said: “It’s nice to know one has made something real before it all goes up in smoke.”
Finally the senior prisoners brought the stragglers to their senses, warning that their deliberate search for the perfect counterfeit bill was endangering the lives of all. “Leave your work with the magnifying glass and finish the job,” one declared. “Prepare a superficial example if you can’t do any better.” Under such peer pressure, they could no longer maintain the pretense of quarreling. Within two days they had printed what Smolianoff judged a “pretty fair copy of the back of a hundred-dollar bill.”
Werner immediately telephoned Krueger, who arrived from Berlin within two hours. Across a table the Dollar Group spread fifteen genuine greenbacks with their fake demonstration bill mixed in. Without a magnifying glass, it was hard even for the forgers themselves to distinguish the counterfeit. Krueger stood before the table studying the array of bills, fearful of making a mistake but probably thinking he would. He finally pointed to one bill — a real one. “We were delighted, he was ecstatic,” Smolianoff recalled. Krueger immediately returned to Berlin and presented Himmler with the half-completed hundred-dollar bill as evidence of his team’s great progress. That night the barracks heard Himmler was pleased and had ordered them to get on with their work.
The very next day, the Dollar Group turned to the front of the bill. This time they skipped the intermediate step of enlarging the negative for Smolianoff to refine the copy of the engraved face of Franklin. He worked directly on the negative that would be placed directly on the gelatined glass plate. Placing it under a strong light, he picked up a fine needle and, head bent close, began the ceaseless scratching of fine lines to duplicate the original century-note. The guards checked every hour to ensure that he kept at it. He also had to make tiny pinholes in an attempt to match the complex structure of the paper.
*
Other departments prepared samples of letters, devised serial numbers, and copied the official government seals on the obverse of the bill. Everyone pitched in to save their own lives, paradoxically aware that success could also lead to their extermination. After a week with little sleep, Smolianoff found his eyes were red and almost swollen shut, but the bill was nearly ready. Werner soon transmitted an order from Berlin for the men to counterfeit $1 million worth of bills a day. By now, late in February 1945, Auschwitz had already been captured by the Russians, Dresden obliterated by the Royal Air Force, and the armored columns of General George S. Patton Jr. were ready to roll across Germany. The prisoners knew that the final battle for Berlin was about to begin, and that these dollars could only be Nazi getaway money. For they had not been totally cut off from the outside world. From time to time, they were able to pick up foreign radio broadcasts, and even Werner suspected it. He summoned the printer Chaim Shurak to ask if his suspicions were correct. Shurak confirmed that they were.
Werner reproached him sternly: “Do you know what the usual punishment is for this?”
Of course Shurak knew, but what did he have left to lose? He told Werner: “We are already sentenced to death. And in any case, who can tell what we have already heard?”
Werner backed off, warning Shurak that it would be better if the guards simply didn’t know about the secret broadcast sessions.
A few days later, Stein rushed into the barracks with frightening news. Werner had just informed him that Berlin had ordered the plant to be liquidated. “He laughed maliciously as he told me,” said Stein.
Only Krueger could save them now, and he was nowhere to be seen.
T
OWARD THE
C
AVES OF
D
EATH
L
ike dogs anxiously listening for the telltale step of their master, the prisoners stiffened as they heard Krueger’s Mercedes staff car pull past the gate in the fence surrounding Blocks 18 and 19. They peeked out, saw him conducting what looked like a relaxed conversation with Smolianoff, and felt at least a temporary sense of relief. Krueger then strode in and spoke to his men: “Upon my suggestion, our superiors in Berlin have decided to move the plant to a safer location. Our work is too important to have a stray bomb land here and stop it.” He continued to address them respectfully as
Meine Herren
and pledged his protection to those who remained devoted and loyal. His attitude and speech allayed their anxieties somewhat, and Smolianoff’s explanation was decisive: “We are now going to start printing dollars in such quantities that Wall Street will have to look around for some other business.”
That night the prisoners divided up their Red Cross packages for a minor feast, with some extra tidbits for the master forger whose work on the hundred-dollar bill was extending their lives. The next morning they began the brutal job of packing up. The useless numbering machine was dismantled and crated along with the rest of the heavy equipment. The more delicate dollar plates, although still incomplete, were packed more carefully for use in the next camp. Pound notes were put into waterproof crates shaped like coffins and sealed with metal straps. Each packing case weighed about 200 pounds. Loading everything into freight cars during a day and a half was truly backbreaking work. Additional cars carried sealed boxes from the RSHA espionage workshops at Friedenthal. The prisoners themselves, now numbering about 140, were herded into cars equipped with benches and openings allowing them to peer out through iron bars. If asked even by a German general what they were doing, the prisoners were ordered to reply that it was none of his business.
The trip to Berlin alone took four hours, more than three times longer than the regular suburban express. Their rations consisted of sixteen slices of bread for a journey of four days to an unknown destination. With halts for air raids and delays for track repairs, their food was soon exhausted. What they spied through the bars as their train of about fifty cars crawled south from Oranienburg, and February turned to March of 1945, was a wasteland of destruction. When they passed through Dresden, the city was still smoldering a fortnight after the murderous Allied firebombing of the night of February 13–14. In silent horror, the SS guards regarded the historic destruction of this jewel of German Baroque. The blackened wreckage finally demonstrated that Hitler’s great Reich was inevitably heading toward collapse. Viewing the grotesquely twisted steel remains of the great railway station, Avraham Krakowski thought of the biblical destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. He and his comrades rejoiced.
Late the next afternoon the train rolled through Prague. Oskar Stein eagerly took in the sights of his hometown as the train passed the main station and a full view of Wenceslas Square. As they sat on a siding for two hours in an industrial suburb, Morris Gottlieb, a carpenter, spied his own apartment building and silently pondered the fate of his wife and three young children. Other prisoners from Czechoslovakia crowded around the windows, watching their fellow-citizens going quietly about their business and the red-and-white streetcars taking them home. One woman threw them a piece of bread, and even though it fell short, the Czechs especially cried at this display of human feeling, the like of which none had seen for years nor expected, even in their own Golden City.
As the train dragged south, down the Danube valley, old hands recognized that they were heading toward the killing quarries of Mauthausen in northern Austria, where blocks of stone were strapped to human backs and hauled up steps of irregular heights, to be floated downriver on barges to Vienna. In the dark of night, the train ended its 600-mile journey at the station several miles from the camp.
“Raus!”
shouted the guards. Krueger’s crew were stripped, deloused, and searched for any scrap of counterfeit currency — possession of which would have brought instant death. Everyone was given a new prisoner’s card with a Mauthausen number that wiped away his Sachsenhausen identity with its unique privileges. They could see the camp chimney spewing evil smoke and could smell the repellent odor of burning flesh hanging in the damp air.
Then they were marched up a steep hill, the younger ones helping their faltering older comrades, to Block 20. Some who had previously been at Mauthausen cried out when they saw the number. Block 20 was a way station for criminal prisoners en route to the gas chamber.
The building’s walls were spattered with fresh bloodstains. There were bullet holes in the side slats. Hauptscharfuehrer Werner appeared in the doorway to explain. The previous occupants were Russian prisoners who felt they had nothing to lose by trying to escape. Those who were not fast enough for a merciful death on the electrified barbed wire were finished off by machine guns. “So now you know what happens if you are foolish enough to try to escape,” snapped Werner, slamming the door.
The forgers were issued damp and moldy mattresses, but hardly anyone slept. The next day, the younger prisoners unloaded the heavy machinery into warehouses near the railroad station. They were stored next to mounds of potatoes and dried peas that the hungry prisoners dared not touch on pain of death. Up the hill to the barracks they lugged the coffins stuffed with first-grade counterfeit notes and crates holding the more delicate material for the dollar bills. The SS guards shouted for speed:
“Schneller! Schneller!”
Even worse was the sight of about a hundred
Musselmänner,
prisoners whose spirit had already been worked to death, their emaciated bodies soon to follow.
*
Their clothes were torn from them as they were piled one atop the other, more dead than alive, and loaded into trucks for the gas chamber. Smolianoff, hardened against such atrocities during his earlier years at the camp, was more sanguine than his fellows. “It’s impossible to set up a printing plant in this place,” he observed. “I could have told you that before. But let them worry about it. Meanwhile, we are gaining time.”
For about three weeks the prisoners did little except wait for Krueger and hope that he was in Berlin arguing for his project to continue to the bitter end. Food packages had been stopped, and the watery camp soup offered little nourishment. Krakowski managed to conceal a tiny stock of grain he had swiped from another freight car while their train was stuck on a siding on the slow trip down from Sachsenhausen. On the evening of March 29, observing the rituals with great deliberation, he ground the wheat into about half a pound of flour, kneaded it into a paste with water, and baked it into matzoh in the small barracks stove for the first night of Passover. More than a dozen prisoners shared this meager bread of affliction as they crowded into the washroom for a seder. They chanted the Haggadah in a whisper, lest the guards hear this ancient celebration of freedom and its climactic cry, “Next year in Jerusalem.”
Two days later the order arrived to pack up once again. It took another week to load everything into about sixteen freight cars, most of them uncovered. The prisoners were packed upright like a tight stand of poplars into two open cars without space to fall if anyone fainted, which some did. Thus on April 23, they made the long day’s journey to their next and, they feared, final destination.
The camp was at Redl-Zipf, an Austrian village with an old brewery, lying about 60 miles south of Mauthausen by rail on the freight line through Frankenburg. Redl-Zipf was one of Mauthausen’s sixty subcamps, but was kept so secret it was referred to only by its code name, Schlier. The town was nestled in the foothills of the Austrian Alps, midway between Mozart’s home base of Salzburg and Hitler’s birthplace near Linz, the city projected as the site of his grandiose museum of world art, all stolen. The forested, lake-filled mountain ranges had been chosen as a last redoubt by hard-core Nazis determined never to surrender, partly because they knew what retribution awaited them. Hitler himself disdained the idea because this archdemagogue knew he could never govern from a mountain hideout. He clung to the vain hope that a holdout
Alpenfestung
would split the West from the Russians and allow him to survive by making a separate peace.
In official communications, Redl-Zipf and its 1,500 prisoners did not exist, because the camp was part of the secret production line for the V-2 rockets that had been raining down on London and Antwerp in another of Hitler’s final gambles. In the basement of the camp brewery, oxygen was produced for the rockets. The propulsion chambers were machined in huge underground tunnels that had been blasted out of rock with entrances large enough to accommodate a truck. Two dozen workers and their chief engineer had been killed in an explosion during tests the year before. Because of the danger, the underground factory was manned by slave laborers, all dispensable if another rocket should accidentally explode.
As at Sachsenhausen, the counterfeiters took over two isolated sheds, one for their living quarters, the other for their machinery, although nothing was ever printed at Redl-Zipf. The sorting tables took up too much space in the barracks and were moved into Tunnel No. 16. En route, the prisoners crossed paths with other slave laborers for the first time, although they were not permitted to exchange a word. These were Spanish Republican exiles who had been arrested by Vichy France and handed over to the Nazis to help fill the occupiers’ quota of slave laborers. The Spaniards had contacts in the local underground and were able to forage for food. They dropped cigarettes on the ground as a way of sharing a smoke with the counterfeiters. Once they left a bucket of food at the barracks gate, which Werner promptly confiscated. The prisoners began to worry that their SS disciplinarian was trying to break their spirit and turn them into
Musselmänner.
But not enough time was left. Late in April, with the Americans over the horizon, Werner once again issued the dreaded order with his familiar, malicious sneer: “We are going to liquidate.” The prisoners were told to burn all banknotes except those of top quality. They worked around the clock for four or five days, incinerating millions of the fake pound notes that were to have been dumped over Britain. Bundles of money do not burn easily, any more than books, and the prisoners had good reason to be painstaking in their work at the smoking, open-air pits: Werner had warned them that anyone found leaving a single scrap of paper unburned would be shot on the spot. So this time the slow pace was not necessarily purposeful, mainly prudent, but it bought more time anyway. (The prisoners were not the only ones covering their tracks. Behind the barracks two Nazi civilians from Berlin buried crates that probably contained counterfeit notes, along with the bodies of two prisoners who had been shot for illness.)
At last, to their amazement, Krueger arrived in his staff car. To some he looked tired, and for the first time even dejected. To others he seemed to be smiling and relieved. As for the future of Operation Bernhard, accounts are not so much contradictory as ambiguous, with some quoting Krueger as saying it would continue “in hiding,” others that it was all over for him. But to the end, his mode of address was polite and considerate. He told the printer Fritz Schnapper and a few of the other veterans that at that moment their prospects surely were better than his: “Today I am still wearing my uniform. Who knows what will happen in the next few days?” Putting his arm on the shoulder of the man they all called Tovarisch, Krueger concluded, “I regret we didn’t manage to get the paper for the dollar. It would have been such beautiful money. Well, what can’t be, can’t be. Soon you’ll be free again and I wish you all the luck in the future. I have issued orders to have you moved to a place of safety until you are liberated. I shall see you there. Trust me, gentlemen.
Auf wiedersehen.
”
Krueger returned to his car. Later, these men of such precision could hardly agree on the details. Some of the forgers recall that as he drove it away toward Salzburg to the southwest, the vehicle was carrying both a Swiss driving license and Krueger’s beautiful young secretary and suspected mistress, Hilda Moeller. But one thing was certain. They never saw Krueger again.
So ended Operation Bernhard.
The prisoners had been left with no trustworthy evidence of Krueger’s promises. Krueger had warned his lieutenants (or so he said) that anyone now killing Jews, counterfeiters or not, was in effect committing suicide, as Allied troops were fast closing in on them. The SS men had good reason to fear being stood up against a wall and summarily shot, which was what the Russians had been doing to SS prisoners, partly out of revenge for what the SS had done to Russian political commissars. No doubt the SS would have murdered the Allied elite if the situation had been reversed, and both sides knew it.
For about 30 miles, the general direction of the SS flight from Redl-Zipf followed the winding roads and high passes toward Ebensee, the closest Mauthausen subcamp. Ebensee sat in a hollow, shrouded from aerial reconnaissance by trees and surrounded by hills, just below a lake known as the Traunsee. The camp was the center of a network of tunnels even more elaborate than Redl-Zipf’s. Oil was refined and tank and truck parts produced in huge underground chambers blasted out of rock and lined with concrete. Construction had begun in 1943 under the code name Zement — cement — to hide the production of V-2 rockets originally tested and manufactured at the exposed Baltic launch site at Peenemünde. By 1945 Ebensee had become a dumping ground for about 15,000 prisoners death-marched from other camps, including Auschwitz. That gave Ebensee ten times Redl-Zipf’s complement of inmates. Only a third were Jews, and the other inmates, slave laborers from all over Europe, were encouraged to mistreat them.