The Human Pool (17 page)
Authors: Chris Petit
Nelly Kapp was secretary to the local SS man in Istanbul. Betty encouraged me to âmake myself available' to Nelly, who was mending a broken heart. Istanbul was a slack posting, and, at Betty Monroe's instigation, I played afternoon tennis with Nelly and her sporty but dull friends who were all part of an Abwehr crowd of low-grade officials.
I failed to mend Nelly's broken heart, which she refused to talk about, but, instructed by Betty, I entertained her and her friends with stories of freedom and democracy, of American friends and Zurich jazz. Nelly once said to me, a remark whose significance I missed at the time: âI have a friend who likes jazz.' She kept asking if I was trustworthy, and she eventually committed herself by telling me that two of her Abwehr friends wished to defect. Would I help?
I asked Bandi. He contacted Palestinian Jews for whom he couriered, and they organised the defection through Syria to Cairo.
Nelly wanted to get out, too, and persuaded me to leave with her. By then I was staying a week at a time in Istanbul, and in wartime intimacy was quickly achieved. I remember Nelly's brightness in an otherwise grey life of subterfuge. Nelly in colourful print dresses buying food in the market, splashes of dappled sunlight through the stall awnings, like the patterns of her dress. Nelly strolling. Strolling was an activity unknown to me. Strolling equalled peacetime, equalled a woman, equalled the casual purchase, all those things I had never had.
The defections started early in February 1944. The couple went first, followed by other Abwehr employees happy to leave and with intelligence to sell. News of the defections was slow to reach Budapest. Bandi had misgivings. He was sure that the resulting scandal would harm the Abwehr's standing, and he had good relations with them. âThe last thing we want is to have to deal with the fucking SS!'
Little did he know. Karl-Heinz's diary contained the laconic note: â10.02.44. The Abwehr defections are having the desired effect. The Reichsführer informs me that the Abwehr will be disbanded.
All duties will be handed over to the SS
[Karl-Heinz's emphasis]. The final transfer of power will take several months in order to preserve what some wit has called “the delicate lines of communication”. Things really could not be turning out better!' A further note makes the object even clearer: â11.02.44. Canaris fired! The thought of him shafted is almost too much for the Reichsführer. As our armies retreat the Reichsführer expands. Departmental
lebensraum! Now we shall have Budapest to ourselves!
I happened to bump into Willi straight after Bandi. When I told him I was thinking of getting out with Nelly, he bought me a drink and wished me luck. âSee you after the war,' he said, making out we were both men of the world, with an ironic, casual half-salute by way of farewell.
The night before I was due to return to Istanbul, I was arrested by the Hungarian secret police and questioned about my association with Bandi Grosz and others, including Willi. I was held over the seventh and eighth of February. Nelly was due to leave on the eighth. I heard later she delayed until the ninth. I didn't get there until the fourteenth, still feeling lucky at being released. I had put my arrest down to chance. Random pickups by the Hungarian police were frequent, especially of those they suspected of intelligence connections. What I refused to accept was that it might have been Willi's doing, with my connivance, given what I had let slip. I had not told Nelly of my own double role. I was also ten years younger than she. (The casual streak of misogyny, mistaken for adventurousness.)
â¢Â   â¢Â   â¢
Beate surprises me not at all by possessing the same sharp mind as her mother. She understands the difference between running and being run, understands the nature of collusion, and of collaboration in its different forms, comfortable and uncomfortable. She appreciates my denial of, and identification with, Willi Schmidt, and my misgivings becauseâperhaps as with Willi, tooâmy deeper involvement began earlier than I had thought or had been led to believe.
Beate asked, quite reasonably, what I thought I had been doing and accepted my answer that I was not sure, beyond being involved in the tentative opening approaches by various enemy parties, ultimately answering to Reichsführer Himmler or Allen Dulles, with Willi the wild card.
That Reichsführer Himmler would want to communicate with Dulles Beate took as a given. She also understood that Himmler needed to find someone who was not a representative of official Allied policy. âI can see', she said, âhow the straightforward motive must be the hardest to read.'
She found inconsistencies intriguing. She thought they were largely deliberate as they gave everyone the leeway to lie, perhaps even to themselves. When I told her that she had a very clear understanding of how self-deception was necessary to the process, she looked as though she was about to say something but left it at a wry smile.
She was also capable of remarkable foresight. âOf course', she remarked, âthe obvious way to have kept Dulles in line would have been blackmail.'
From certain angles she resembled her mother, the sense of throwback uncanny. A wormy part of me thought, If not the mother, at least the daughter. I took this uncharitable nugget as a sign of my recovery.
She asked, âHow much can these moves be predicted, and how much are they chance?'
I wanted to ask her the same question, only with reference to us. If conspiracy is an affiliation of silences, then she and I must be conspirators. I want to reach out, want to brush against her accidentally, want one of us to drop our reserve, but I am out of moves for the moment.
ZURICH
I HAVE OFFERED MOTHER'S
postcard from Istanbul as the sole piece of evidence of her trip. Not so. She noted approvingly in her diary that Nelly Kapp's heart was broken swiftly but effectively by Willi Schmidt in an intense two-week affair during which he posed as a German trade official whose sudden disappearance Nelly was led to believe was the result of defection. That Hoover's role had been to encourage the seed of defection already planted by Willi. That the Abwehr defections were planned as part of a larger strategy whose purpose Mother does not reveal. Of her own stay in Istanbul, she remarked (of Hoover?): âEach night I sucked him dry.'
Of Bandi Grosz, she wrote, âEveryone has plans for Mr Grosz!'
Â
I remind Hoover of my mother, which is not what I want for the basis of our alliance. With Mother today I saw nothing of the woman Hoover sat with in Istanbul on a terrace overlooking the Bosphorus.
I try to avoid the subject of my mother with Hoover. The irony is that the more he reaches for the truth, the more I am obliged to lie, to protect her. I hate her legacy and my obligations to it, hate my circumspection which prevents me from being honest.
I understand completely how it would be possible to live life in wartime in the conditional. I recognise the world Hoover talks about, with its emotional checks and balances, and deceptions. These are things familiar to me in a different context: a world of doubt and deferral, where, in a sense, the present does not count, where hope and fear discount any sense of now. Each evening we sit in Mother's study, trying to catch the moment, Hoover exhausted from each day's immersion (the word he uses) while I think of the tangled briars around my heart, and everything I want to and cannot give. I move with a sense of physical trepidation when I am near him. He is old as well as older, and I cannot tell if I would succumb or flinch were he to become intimate.
Each night before going to sleep I wonder if I should not stay. Instead I drive home, a model of bourgeois propriety, and read Mother's papers for half an hour, making my own reluctant excursions into her past, realising that I am putting myself in her position, of being several moves ahead of him. Better that he never knows. I tell myself that I am shielding him rather than Mother. Sometimes the truth is better left unsaid.
The weather continues to be miserable, the city a grey wash. Everything feels as though it is in the wrong time. Even the leaves look as though they should not be out in such a beastly climate.
I followed Mother's instructions and sent the letter as she asked while she was still well. The respondent's name is Mr Ballard. Mr Ballard came to the museum, and we talked.
Very occasionally Hoover mentions his wife. Tonight he told me a story about how they had gone to see a film on his daughter's recommendation and they had to leave almost straight away because he was feeling sick. He said it had taken him a long time to identify its correct cause as revulsion. The film had contained a severed ear, found in the grass, and brought back memories of the Ustashi lieutenant in Zagreb. He had never returned to see the film, but discovered after his wife had died that she had gone back the following day with a man who may or may not have been her lover.
I am not sure what to make of the story or of what he meant when he wrote (I had not meant to look): âI entertain the fantasy, given whose daughter she is, that she might be my interrogator and, despite the softness of our surroundings and her manner, that this is my final debriefing.'
BUDAPEST, 1944
19.03.44. We arrived quietly this Sunday morning before church bells in a dark column a mile long and met with no resistance. The Hungarians, so uppity until now, have capitulated without a murmur.
21.03.44. Let's all gang up on Fatty Goering! The secret negotiations I am here to conduct for the takeover of the Manfred-Weiss steelworks will give the SS its own industrial power base. In exchange the owning familyâwhich is, unfortunately for it, Jewishâwill be allowed to emigrate, after agreement over its various donations, leases, and agency fees. Until the dotted line is signed, neither the Hungarians nor Goering are to know.
22.03.44. Loose ends to tidy. The Hungarian intelligence officer Hatz will be recalled to Budapest, arrested, and questioned (by me). Likewise Bandi Grosz. Both to be released once they understand what their roles are. Hatz to be allowed to resume duties as a staff officer on the condition that he volunteers for service on the Russian front(!). Grosz is on standby.
*
24.03.44. The Jews are finding a voice. They are sniffing around Wisliceny, having heard that he takes a bribe (unlike Eichmann). Up to a point. He tends to pocket the money and go back on his word. Fifty thousand dollars he walked away with in Slovakia, and still the trains rolled. They have offered him two million dollars for a guarantee of no ghetto or deportations, with a down payment of $200,000, based on the Slovak precedent. Once my current negotiations with the Weiss family are over, I shall leapfrog Wisliceny and present myself as the best person for the Jews to talk to. By then I will be able to show them that I am a man of my word.
29.03.44. The Weiss family is very understanding, grateful even for its unique position of being allowed to barter its future. It has loaned me two large town houses side by side on Andrassy Street to make my job easier. Of course, the family suspects a trap. They all fear they will betaken away and shot once they have handed everything over. It takes all my considerable powers of persuasion to convince them that we are, as the English would say, âplaying with a straight bat'.
Eichmann, that dull fanatic to the last, calls me behind my back âthe officer in kid gloves'. Absolutely. Those of us who can see far enough ahead have always remained gentlemen, anticipatinga time when we can lounge about in hotel lobbies with a clear conscience.
Eichmann is the other ânegotiator', the public face to my private deals. He is the most blinkered man I know. As long as things at his end are in order and he believes that he has done everything to facilitate his clientsâI have heard him call them clients!âthen the process is, so he manages to convince himself, a civilised one. My God! They will go to their deaths crammed into cattle cars while he argues niceties with the Jewish Council who are as bad as the rest at pulling the wool over their own eyes and everyone else's. The Hungarians can't wait to get on with the job of shovelling the Jews onto their trains.
03.04.44. The first big air raid and of course the Jews are blamed, with talk of reprisals already, so many lives for each Christian one lost.
08.04.44. Wisliceny, over cocktails at the Astoria: Deported Jews will be made to write a postcard from a destination called Waldsee where they will report everything to be fine. The postmark, to which a lot of thought has been given, is to suggest an image of a lakeside holiday camp! The cards will be sent by SS courier to the Jewish Council for distribution to relatives and friends: Wish you were here.
Drunk, Wisliceny calls Eichmann a âponderous bureaucrat' and âan arselicker', who is forever moaning on about his transportation headaches. Wisliceny does a good impersonation of the crooked smile and insistence on the stock phrase: âYou and I are as chalk and cheese,' which is
just
how Eichmann would put it.
Eichmann honestly thinks of his work as helpful exercises in scheduling. His other skill is table tennis. He talks of organising a league! The light and airyâand modernâquarters in which they are based up in the hills of Buda appear so harmlessly suburban that it is impossible to believe that anything too awful could issue from them.
Wisliceny tells me that at the first meeting, half the unsuspecting Jews turned up with their bags ready to be deported. The bribable Wisliceny boasts that he is being heavily courted. The Jews prefer him to Eichmann, who indulges in a rather unctuous pretence of identification with his victims, of wishing to understand their problems. Wisliceny is the master of the soft-pedal. His simple request for blankets and mattresses soon led to a free auction of mirrors, typewriters, and paintings, many of which now adorn his apartment on the river. A request for a piano resulted in eight.
The Jews rely on hope in what is a hopeless situation.
12.04.44. Identify and isolate, the same old story. The Jewish Council is happy to provide lists of everyone to the Ministry of Supply in the misguided belief that its request is about the fair allocation of food. Yellow Stars of David are now worn by Jews. There has been much finicky insistence on the correct size of the star. A washable armband version is apparently in preparation. Hope is a strange creature.
29.04.44. Eichmann's mind is entirely one-tracked, all the way to Auschwitz (the first departure was yesterday). He detests my being in Budapest because it interferes with what he thinks of as the clarity of his orders. âWe are not hereto barter', he told me. But, Adolf, we are. It's the only way we are going to get out of this war alive.
He alternates between the chipperness of a man who is having the time of his lifeâgood posting, comfortable surroundings, the satisfaction of working with a team that knows how to do its job, an air of social confidence that wasn't there beforeâand the sad-clown smile of someone who suspects the writing might be on the wall, if only he could read it. (It's in Hebrew, Adolf.) Eichmann's fateâand I suspect even he is starting to realise itâis bound up with that of his victims. In theirs lies his own. When all the Jews are gone, he's out of a job. He feels unappreciated and undervalued. He suspects that everyone regards himâthe most vital cog in the entire machineâas small fry. He knows that behind his back he is called âthe travel agent'.
Ransoms, deals, negotiations, all are anathema to Eichmann. He fails to understand that it's time for a new trick and not the same old one. It's getting a bit late for that. He fails too to see that the new trick will be the far harder one of how we made the Jew
not
disappear. How we saved the Jew, how a few master conjurors managed that.
03.05.44. Anti-Semitism seems to affect the Jews as much as anyone. Hungarian Jews are quite happy to see alien refugee Jews removed. There are rumours all over the city that the deportations will soon begin in the countryside. As we sit around the polished mahogany negotiating table with the refined and extremely well-bred members of what is a charming family, you can see the question in their eyes:
Where will they draw the line?
My appeal is that of one gentleman to another. They have my word. This is probably as good as given, seeing that both the Führer and the Reichsführer are in agreement about the negotiations. The Hungarians will be hopping when they discover that the business has been lifted from under their noses. In the past we have always been generous with local Jewish assets, which (by and large) have gone to the country in question.
05.05.44. Today we viewed the Weiss family's art collection. It contains a particularly fine El Greco, an indifferent Tiepolo, and a Gauguin that would no doubt be viewed as too decadent for today's taste: I have to confess, I have my eye on it. We move into tricky areas here. The museums are after the said works on the grounds that they should remain in Hungary. But already I think that the family feel these masterpieces would be better appreciated elsewhere. The word
family
has become like a talisman. What we are talking about is an industrial complex employing over 40,000 workers, as well as there being other enterprises.
15.05.44. Our negotiations reach their delicate conclusion. In the case of the Weiss family we are also talking about the rescue of Jews, which these days is a radical notion as Eichmann and his crew race ahead; Eichmann: âWe are getting into the swing of things'. Meanwhile, we are discussing a twenty-five-year lease of all assets with the family Weiss. This is how we shall get around the matter of the paintings. With the expiry of the agreement everything reverts back to the family. We have conceded their foreign currency to them. I am bending over backwards, thinking of my own references. We reach a generous private arrangement as to what money they can take with them, and our cut as trustees is only five percent of the gross income of the concern.
17.05.44. The family has signed! The Hungarians will protest that their sovereignty has been overridden. My lawyers are studying the problem. The Hungarians will use the National Bank to try to block the takeover as it must approve any foreign purchase of Hungarian securities. Some smarty-pants has decided that the answer is for me, and selected others, to declare ourselves legal residents, to which end papers are being drawn up. My slight worry is that when this is all over the Hungarians might use that as an excuse to extra-dite me to stand trial in Budapest. The Hungarians are vindictive, and, as lovers of theatre and opera, are fond of their trials.
For the moment they are as keen as mustard to co-operate. Even Eichmann is impressed by the speed and relish with which the Hungarians have gone about their business. The local colonel in charge has set himself up in the hills, to be closer to Eichmann's team, and his town office calls itself International Storage and Transportation Inc. This is the kind of thing the Hungarians fall over laughing about in their drink.
18.05.44. Dinner last night with Willi S. He seems to be in his element, showing an almost clinical curiosity for these strange days. He told me he started out wanting to be a doctor, which I can believe. He seems interestingly modern and ahead of his time, an amoral moral diagnostician, much like our friend in Bern from whom I suspect he has learned a lot.
*
19.05.44. Bombs again. The British this time. We have soon learned to tell the difference between their Lancasters and the American Flying Fortresses. Another reason to remove the Gauguin from Budapest to safety elsewhere. The family is now quite in agreement, and is already thinking in terms of the future. They get everything back in 1969. You can see them calculating, thinking that isn't so long. Let's hope the Führer doesn't change his mind and decide to put them on the train after all.
*Elsewhere Karl-Heinz hints that Hatz was run jointly by Dulles and the SS to discredit both the Istanbul OSS and the Abwehr. A visit by Hatz to Canaris, head of the Abwehr, was used by the SS to implicate Canaris in the Hungarian plot to break the German alliance. Of Bandi and Hatz's release, Willi remarked to Hoover, âThis is highly unusual in itself.' Arrest by the SS was more usually on a permanent basis.
*Elsewhere Karl-Heinz remarked, presumably also a reference to Dulles: âThe Reichsführer still cannot believe that someone as senior as “our man O” has been so adventurous in his dealings with us at a time when everyone else is bending over for Uncle Joe and the Ivans. The Reichsführer, eyes agleam, has asked more than once, “Are you sure he is someone we can work with? It's not a trick?” I assured him it was not. I have identified “our man O's” driving force. Greed.' The reference to Dulles as âour man O' was apparently a joking one to the letter
O
being the only thing standing between the SS and Dulles's OSS.