The Human Pool (16 page)

ZAGREB, 1943

THE REICHSFÜHRER HAS APPROVED THE
establishment of a Croatian Muslim division. This has led to a few expressions of surprise in the name of racial purity, but the Reichsführer is steadfast in his admiration of the Muslim warrior. He views them as akin to the British Gurkha. It also keeps his eminence the grand mufti of Jerusalem happy. The mufti, currently resident in Berlin where he is regarded by the Führer as something of a joke, is tolerated for his propaganda value. His trips to Zagreb to exhort the Muslim troops seem to fire them up sufficiently.

The region seethes with age-old feuds and hatreds. The Croatians seem predisposed to private melancholy and savagery. Zagreb is full of German technical advisers who express private doubts. The government is a ramshackle affair, run by a bunch of bloodthirsty puppets with large wives who wear frightening floral prints and hairdos which suggest that Zagreb is in need of a decent salon. Church sermons on good and evil are taken literally, crude Catholicism dished out by clever men who understand the power of superstition. Fanatical priests drive their congregations with an enthusiasm not seen since the Spanish Inquisition. They certainly do the job. Their followers indulge in Red Indian savageries. Croatian bloodlust amounts to a crude approximation of the church's cannibalistic practices. My God! All that throat cutting and skull crunching! It was too much even for Veesenmayer, and he had been responsible for it in the first place!

Veesenmayer, with his slide rule and graph paper, wishes to turn death into a science. Before the war he worked in communications. He hints to me that he has use of an American collating machine, a prototype donated by the Yankees, which has revolutionised his work.
^*
His dream is to create an assembly line, a process of distribution and dispatch that functions in a clean and modern way, at no inconvenience to the German citizen.

I am thankful that my trips to Zagreb are intermittent. The Hotel Milan is insufficient compensation, and the town's third-rate architecture looks like a job lot bought only with military parades and troop movements in mind. The main square is too big for anything other than public executions. Those here on long postings complain that there are too many priests at social functions and that the women are as unpredictable as the men.

A year ago the Reichsführer asked me to make certain enquiries as he sought to extend what he calls ‘his channels of communication'. I understood him to mean that he thought the usual Vatican lines had become too clogged, or compromised by Canaris and the Abwehr, the German foreign service, which the Reichsführer detests and mistrusts. The Vatican had become, he said, like a bazaar with priests auctioning meetings between diplomats and the usual international riffraff.

I can say we have succeeded beyond expectation. New friends have been made, and Draganovic, whose influence is considerable, is being used only by us. Although the Croatians are not discreet, it seems that their churchmen are, and the large cupboardlike confessionals in the city's ghastly cathedral are as good a way as any of conversing in privacy. My confessions are so long that anyone observing would be left wondering at the extent of my transgressions. The Reichsführer is pleased, he tells me. It is vital he has access to what he calls ‘wider opinion'. But he frets about security and already wishes me to find another means, having decided that the Croatians are too easily compromised. He recommends Budapest. He thinks we shall be there before too long.

It transpires that Buvier was not only resistant, he was active in gathering reports on civilian killings—this according to Willi Schmidt. I wonder if it was he who told Veesenmayer, which raises the question of whether Willi is selling information to Veesenmayer when he is supposed to be working for me.

It has been decided that van Hover will go to Budapest. I have taken pains to reassure him that he remains an important link in an invisible chain, and that my patronage could be important to the success of his Red Cross work, which will require a more flexible approach than the one adopted by the late Buvier.
^*

*Elsewhere in Karl-Heinz's papers there appears the following margin note, an apparent reference to Veesenmayer: ‘The genocide hot-shot fooled everyone afterwards into thinking he had been a diplomatic cipher. He worked before the war for German subsidiaries of U.S. companies, including ITT and Standard Oil. The speed and efficiency with which he did his wartime roundups was aided immeasurably by the secret weapon of the extermination programme, the equivalent in many respects of the Allies' decoding machine. He was at the forefront of the technological revolution, with his punchcard system provided by American IBM. For all his smooth cocktail party talk in Zagreb, he was there for two reasons: to get the Jews out of Croatia and to ensure that the Croatian fascist militia stayed in power. The point about men like him is that they were having the time of their lives. They all knew what was going on, and also knew on which side their bread was buttered.'

*Karl-Heinz makes no specific reference to the death of Buvier, apart from a single note in faded pencil: ‘B died, which saves us the bother. V not happy at all with what he had been told about B, who was not quite the dry old stick he looked. V rather cast down by the news. He was keen to try out the gas used in the euthanasia programme for what he called a personal experiment. He talks too of a gas truck being delivered, now they are no longer required in Poland.'

BUDAPEST/ISTANBUL, 1943–4

BUDAPEST WAS AN OUTPOST CITY
, pleasured and pleasurable before the Germans came in 1944. Its edge was reminiscent of Lisbon. Willi always said Budapest should have been a port—and it was like a sailors' town without the sailors. Being one of the few capitals in central Europe not enemy occupied in 1943 contributed to its air of licence and exemption. Hungary's position as an increasingly uneasy ally to the Nazis, its proximity to Balkan intrigue, and its own taste for theatrical politicking acted as a siren lure to the flotsam and jetsam of wartime Europe. Where Zurich was smug in its neutrality, Budapest was given over to illusion, ritual, and plotting. It was a tragedy waiting to happen.

Willi Schmidt, drawn to the hedonism of Budapest, wangled a transfer on family business and declared himself up for a good time. Those early Budapest days saw Willi at his lightest. I could see almost nothing of the calculation described by Sol and Jean-Pierre. Willi played the entrepreneur, promising local jazz bands Swiss contracts (which never materialised) and enjoying the free drinks and impressionable young women that went with it. The darker side was there, but well in the background. Willi's family firm had outlets in Budapest, run by a Jewish concern that saw no contradiction in belonging to a parent company which had bought Jewish firms off the Nazis at knock-down prices.

For another of his innocent rackets Willi had me copying and distributing bootleg prints of the latest Hollywood movies, brought into Switzerland by American couriers and transferred to Hungary on Red Cross transport. After local use they were sold on by Bandi to the Germans. As an example of how things came to work, the new Cary Grant movie, first seen by me at a private screening in Budapest organised by Willi, was sold two weeks later to a high-ranking German diplomat. ‘He knows you,' said Bandi. It was Veesenmayer, the plenipotentiary from Zagreb, temporarily resident in Budapest. Veesenmayer, according to Willi, went on to sell the print to Dr Goebbels for twice what he had paid for it.

This invisible chain struck me as significant without being able to say why. It was Bandi who pointed out that these channels would later serve for clandestine diplomatic negotiations. They were the first signs of people wanting to talk.

Willi's arrival in Budapest coincided with a complex jigsaw of political favours snapping into place, which enabled Red Cross supply lines to operate with increasing efficiency. Perhaps Willi's coming had been responsible for the change. Aid and relief quickly became a form of laundry, and with Bandi and Willi a lot got rinsed. Their contraband travelled in Red Cross crates, indistinguishable apart from a discreet red spot on the corner of the lid, to make identification easier for Willi's men when unloading. What was in them hardly mattered. They were just part of the racket.

Bandi taught Willi his basic philosophy, which was to play all ends against the middle. Whoever taught Willi to keep his mouth shut, it wasn't Bandi, who was, by his own reckoning, ‘as unreliable as an old queen'. He gossiped about all his dealings, especially those with the German foreign service, the Abwehr, which was considered cosmopolitan and indulgent by Nazi standards. ‘They employ a Jew like me, for Christ's sake!' Bandi said, convulsed. Since his conversion to Roman Catholicism, he constantly invoked the name of the son of God.

Bandi also represented emerging Jewish groups in Budapest keen to establish contact with similar organisations in neutral Istanbul. As for his business with the Abwehr, it was the contradiction that proved the rule. ‘Everywhere there are Jews going up in smoke, and the Abwehr pays me because it wants to find Jews it can talk to! It's a crazy world!'

Bandi's indiscretion, I came to realise, was a form of insurance. The more he broadcast his dealings, the more compromised everyone became and the more immune he felt. It was not a view shared by Willi, who said, ‘Why doesn't someone just shoot you?'

‘They all need me too much,' said Bandi, with too much bluster.

Willi bet Bandi a substantial sum that the SS would be running Budapest within a year. He was quite adamant. As he said it, I had a clear memory of Wisliceny smiling at me in Zagreb when describing himself as a technical adviser.

It was Willi who first mentioned Eichmann's name that same night as one of the main organisers of the Jewish deportations. Eichmann, according to Willi, was the German officer who had refused further offers from Hungarian fascists to take more Jews, citing transportation difficulties. Eichmann's was not a name anyone knew at the time, which meant that Willi was remarkably well informed. Teasing, he once said to me: ‘You and Eichmann are in the same business, more or less. You have both been given the train set to play with.' It was one of Willi's favourite quotes, from Orson Welles. Willi was a big film fan,
Citizen Kane
his favourite movie. His reference was to my recent promotion to co-ordinator of transport for relief goods, Budapest.

That summer we were Eichmann's social precursors, staying in the Astoria, which would become a Nazi headquarters. Budapest would prove the undoing of the incorruptible Eichmann, who took its hospitality at face value. Like him, Willi—to a much lesser extent myself, and Bandi not at all—went hunting and riding with the local aristocracy. Those I met were keen for Swiss contacts, to discuss the possibility of charitable work in exchange for Red Cross identity cards, which would give them the chance of a safe exit if the Russians or the Germans came, as many were now sure they would.

Bandi's bet with Willi was based on his belief that the empireminded Hungarians—‘We're nearly fucking Austrians!'—were too afraid of Communism to stand by its German alliance with the Russians on the advance. ‘We tried it once,' said Bandi, ‘and it was a disaster, for Christ's sake! I tell you, the Amis will be in Budapest before the Nazis.' The wager was somewhat unfair, given that Bandi was probably already in secret discussion with Hungarian intelligence about the matter.

Willi made one of the few overt references I can remember him making to the subject when he said, ‘It's about more than that.' He argued that the Nazis were bound to come because Hungary retained one large plum, a large portion of Europe's remaining Jewry.

‘As well as its gypsies and pederasts,' added Bandi, gloomy and in his cups. Budapest was one of the few places in Europe where gipsy musicians still played. Then he rallied briefly and thumped the table. ‘No. The Krauts have bigger fish to fry than Hungary's Jews.'

‘Not with men like Vesenmayer in town. They are only here for one reason,' said Willi.

I realised I was in the process of learning one of Betty Monroe's main lessons, that most intelligence work is social and ‘not to do with hanging around in ditches, dear'.

 

Just as Bandi predicted, Budapest became a city of go-betweens, and the different sides showed signs of wanting to talk, even as the civilian slaughter reached its peak. The more prescient Nazis were looking ahead to their alibis. Jewish and Zionist organisations set up in Istanbul and Bandi shuttled between there and Budapest, servicing the emerging local Jewish resistance, while trafficking in the overlapping channels of black market and exchange of intelligence. Both cities became familiar with men like Bandi, Jewish or half-Jewish, criminal or semi-criminal, who counted German intelligence among their clients. It was whispered in back rooms that Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, ran his own Jewish spy ring, which he had transferred to Budapest to keep it safe from the SS. Canaris was known to have cultivated Allied contacts through the Vatican, and there were stories that he was doing nothing to discourage plots to kill Hitler. Karl-Heinz became wary of sharing the Catholic Church as a secure line of communication.

 

Summer drizzle in Budapest; bright morning sun on the Bosphorus. The two cities, Budapest and Istanbul, became part of the same mental zone, indistinguishable under the surface. Bandi and Willi and I travelled between the two often enough to keep separate wardrobes. Willi suave in sharkskin suits, Bandi with what looked like half the night before's dinner spilled down his. According to Bandi, the real reason Willi did the Istanbul run was morphine. Hungarian supplies were running low, as were the Germans', and he planned to sell to the highest bidder, after running it back to Budapest through Bandi's contacts in the Hungarian diplomatic service. But Bandi put about so many unreliable stories to obscure his own dealings, and his fog of disinformation was at its thickest in Istanbul. Istanbul in 1943 became the crucible of the Budapest conspiracy, where Allen Dulles and the SS nudged closer together into an alliance that remains unremarked upon even today. As ever, the key players—Dulles and Karl-Heinz—conspicuous mainly by their absence.

Willi, relaxed among Budapest's gilt-edged mirrors and red velvet, smelling of eau de cologne and showing a smudge of tiredness around the eyes, with one of his mistresses in tow, a famous actress with brittle eyes and a desperate laugh, both easily overlooked in the face of her extreme beauty. Willi just as easy in Istanbul nightclubs, happy to entertain members of the Turkish secret police, off-duty, making sure of all the options, while being watched by brash American OSS agents trying to cover up their uncertainty, unable to get to grips with old-style corruption.

Bandi glum in Istanbul, drinking sweet black coffee and admitting for once to having a hangover, said to me, ‘It is time for me to confide in you.' Bandi had new clients in Hungarian intelligence who wished him to contact the British on their behalf, but the British wouldn't bite. He complained the Americans were muscling in and he was being forced to use a local OSS agent as a go-between, an untrustworthy Jewish Czech émigré. (An inspection of OSS archives shows that the agent was codenamed Dogwood and Bandi was Trillium, and all other agents were named after flowers, including Jasmine and Iris. I was Daisy.)

Bandi wanted me to talk to Dulles ‘when you go to Switzerland next week'. He gave me his most carefully cultivated guileless look. I had a mental picture of him and Willi whispering together, and a clear sense of them viewing me as a long-term investment, on ice until now.

 

Dulles in Bern, was professorial and waistcoated. He wore sleeve garters on his shirt. He had taken to meeting me with his jacket off and offering me a bottle of beer. Dulles informal, a mark of increasing trust.

Although Istanbul was outside his territory, I sensed my moves connected to something he had in mind. He played with his pipe and congratulated me on my initiative while making it clear I was acting above my station.

‘Mr Grosz is a blabbermouth. He has been in touch with Japanese and Polish intelligence.' I didn't know this. Dulles went on, ‘Tread carefully with that fellow. He has served his purpose.'

 

Among the surprise moves I never could have anticipated was Betty Monroe's unannounced arrival in Istanbul, soon after my return, ‘on holiday,' she said. The only written record of this trip that Beate can find is a postcard sent back to the house we are sitting in, addressed to Beate's father. Betty's broad-nibbed hand suggested an expensive pen and an even more expensive education. She wrote in English: ‘An exhausting trip made worthwhile by this most vibrant of cities. I wish there were more time to explore. The company I'm with is proving very dull! Fond love, Betty.'

Betty on a hotel terrace, immaculate in a white linen suit, wearing redder lipstick than usual and smart tortoiseshell sunglasses, brown eyes just visible behind green lenses. I remember thinking, Anywhere in the world Betty would know how to work the waiters. Betty eyed me up and down as though she might seduce me. (A fact I omitted to pass on to Beate.)

Betty informed me that the Turkish Izmir Trade Fair was being attended by Bandi Grosz and a Hungarian intelligence officer named Hatz. Bandi was passing himself off as a representative of the Hungarian Danube Navigation Company, and Hatz was travelling as an exporter of agricultural machinery. Their contact continued to be the American agent codenamed Dogwood, and another man, described by Betty as a ‘fairly useless' journalist named Coleman.

‘Dogwood is indiscreet,' said Betty. ‘He is also in the business of importing and exporting agricultural machinery so is looking to line his own pockets by doing a deal with Hatz and the Hungarian government.'

Betty wanted me to deal directly with Hatz without anyone knowing. I was to offer him a clean Swiss contact. ‘Yours not to reason why,' she said cheerfully.

Bandi grumbled that he was being cut out but never suspected me. He blamed one of Hatz's main associates, a shipping agent from the well-connected family, of whom he said, ‘He is supposed to be an agent for the OSS, who have him employed at the Socony Vacuum Company, but I know he is a spy!'

The Izmir Trade Fair. The Hungarian Danube Navigation Company. The Socony Vacuum Company. I offer these names—remembered when so many others have been forgotten—as an almost nostalgic example of the kind of level on which most of us operated.

 

The reason for Betty Monroe's appraising stare became clear a day or so later. It wasn't me she wished to seduce. She was calculating whether I was capable of what she called ‘objective intimacy'.

Again I have omitted reference of this to Beate. My refusal to discuss Nelly Kapp throws a shadow over our relationship. Her suspicion is obvious, and I think how ridiculous that a brief affair, because that is what it was, dating from 1944 can be a cause of jealousy. She knows I am withholding, however much I deny it (and I never lied as well as the rest), and her upset makes it even more impossible for me to admit to it.