Krueger's Men Page 11

  One day in 1943, Felix Tragholz, a prisoner from Vienna, was dressed up in civilian clothes, handed a briefcase with one thousand counterfeit pounds, and driven under guard in a staff car at high speed to the Reichsbank in Berlin. There he was ordered to pass the pounds to the tellers under pain of death if he even hinted at the nature of the test. Every note was accepted as genuine. Soon Krueger appeared before the prisoners waving another fake bill and declaring with pride that it had been accepted by English banks. (More likely it was one of the batch that had been passed in Berlin.) “Look at this, gentlemen. Congratulations on excellent work. I’m proud of you, gentlemen. We are going to expand the plant.” They had won a further reprieve from the gas chamber, and a jubilant Krueger had won their grudging respect. “One would think he had already been appointed Governor of the Bank of England,” Max Bober wisecracked.

  As new recruits arrived, most of the men went on twelve-hour shifts starting at 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. so production could continue around the clock. It reached its peak in midsummer 1943, when more than 100 workers produced an average of about 650,000 notes a month, until about mid-1944. Six flatbed presses, including four of the latest Monopol Type 4 models with special registering apparatus and manufactured under special wartime priority, spewed out five-, ten-, twenty-, and fifty-pound notes. (Krueger stopped there because he knew that hundred-pound notes would always be examined closely, probably too closely.) Each press had two pressmen. The walls of the room were lined with wooden crates full of blank paper awaiting watermark inspection, and the tables were piled high with half-finished notes whose massive presence some prisoners found overwhelming. The room was sectioned into areas for cutting, aging, and sorting — Reisserei, Altmacherei, and Sortirei. The printed sheets were laid on a drying rack, then torn into four individual bills with a steel ruler and stacked in bundles of one thousand. Then the sides were roughed up with metal rasps to imitate the deckle edge.

  A double line of prisoners with intentionally dirty hands aged the bills artificially by rubbing, folding, and puncturing them, writing English words on them with English ink, and stamping the names of English banks on the reverse side to manufacture a life history for each bill. At first little notches were also torn away along the side at specific levels for different denominations to mimic a method used by bank tellers to speed counting the bills, but that was discontinued after Krueger realized this was not English but Continental practice. Finally the bills were placed in a press to smooth them out before they were inspected and classified according to the quality of the counterfeit, perhaps the prisoners’ most important and demanding task.

  Each note was placed on a wooden box containing two harsh electric bulbs covered by a translucent glass pane. A real pound note was sometimes placed on the light box next to the counterfeit for comparison, flaws and all. Each man had to perform a meticulous inspection of five hundred bills a day, thus allowing an average of slightly less than two minutes for each one. The inspectors were initially on seven-hour shifts to forestall eyestrain, but as the pace of production intensified, they worked ten hours a day. It was a grueling test of nerve and eyesight, since each prisoner-inspector was held accountable for missing any flaws, which could be literally the size of pinpricks. Paradoxically, that served the counterfeiters well because these tiny blemishes could be obliterated with the prick of a pin. Such scars were normally inflicted on genuine notes by British bank tellers, who for generations had bundled up notes with straight pins. It was particularly useful for obscuring blemishes in Bloody Britannia; usually her glance was clear, but if it was not, a note could be upgraded with a pinhole by stabbing her in the eye.

  One day a nearsighted SS sergeant named Apfelbaum who normally delivered paper from the factory was standing in as a guard. Apfelbaum had the habit of warning the prisoners that nothing escaped his sharp eye. Curious, he wandered past the inspection station of Isaak Glanzer, a Czech veteran of Block 19. Glanzer began boasting that the counterfeits were superior to the real thing because of the prisoners’ keen ability to spot flaws. “We have to see that the lady [Britannia] is properly centered in her oval. As we say in the trade, the lines in the watermark must not swim, or sit too high on the note, either. The Bank of England can permit that, but not us,” he lectured the guard, going on about the secret dots as he pointed to the fiver on his light box. “The Bank of England issues notes much worse than this. As a whole, sir, counterfeit notes are much more perfect than the genuine.” Fortunately, an air raid siren interrupted Glanzer before the sergeant had time to realize how preposterous were his boasts and slap him down.

  Moritz Nachtstern had learned all the peculiarities of the bills in the engraving room and was transferred to the inspection room to teach the newcomers. “Do you notice that cut in the letter f and those three dots?” he asked a recruit, pointing precisely to some of the deliberate faults that the Bank believed to be utterly unknown to outsiders. “Those are the things you’ve got to watch for when you sort. You have to watch carefully how this watermark is placed. This note is perfect. Study it. Put the notes with faults in a separate bundle. Turn the good ones over to the foreman.”

  Sometimes tiny splinters of wood or fiber were embedded in the paper and had to be scraped away carefully with small knives. The success or failure of this surgery determined whether a note passed inspection as a perfect specimen. Oskar Stein, who ran the countinghouse as office manager and head bookkeeper, advised his charges: “Don’t hesitate to use the knife. Even if you ruin a few bills, it won’t matter because we have plenty of the stuff. When in doubt, always place the note in a lower category.”

  Stein, formerly a Prague businessman who went by the Czech name of Skala, counted and indexed the notes in a ledger as if they were real; his is the most reliable record of almost 9 million separate notes with a face value of £134 million that were ultimately produced by Operation Bernhard. Stein maintained four separate categories that provide an important key to the shifting priorities of the enterprise. The most perfect notes were placed in the first category, to be sent to German spies in foreign countries or delivered to them to pay their contacts and sources. These were of such high quality that they could be safely used in England, although they rarely, if ever, were. The second grade was almost indistinguishable from the first by Allied and even some British experts because of only minor errors. A third category had more serious flaws, but flaws that nevertheless might be found in real pound notes. They were sent to foreign and especially neutral countries where the Nazis bought raw materials for their war machine. The fourth class was at first piled into a strongroom to be flown over England later and released; hence they were called Abwurf, the German word for “air-drop” — in full, Abwurf aus der Luft. But as that founding idea receded with the huge Luftwaffe losses, the SS passed these notes, too. (They were later declared “good enough to fool anyone but an expert” by the chief American investigator, himself a Secret Service agent.) Last came the spoiled notes — Ausschuss (rejects) — that were either returned to the paper factory for pulping or burned at the camp. Felix Tragholz, in civilian life a professional ceramicist, was given the job of incinerating the paper. The smokestack was fitted with a filter, lest even a charred scrap be found and give the game away.

  By the late spring of 1944, Krueger had stopped mentioning the plan to ruin the British economy, instead stressing secrecy above all: “You are collectively responsible for seeing to it that no one shall ever find out what is contained in those boxes and what is being done here… Your assignment is nothing more and nothing less than the manufacture of enemy bank notes.” But when the printer Adolf Burger arrived in 1944, he recalled, Krueger did not bother to conceal the principal purpose of his operation: “We must pay our agents well and respect their wishes to be paid in dollars or British pounds. They shall have them. They will never realize that they are being paid in counterfeit pounds; they believe the money is genuine.”

  Every Saturday, Krueger picked up the week’s outpu
t from the camp and drove it to SS foreign espionage headquarters in Berlin; by 1944 production was so heavy that his briefcase would hold only the first-class notes. Some of the rest were shipped directly to German commercial attachés in Norway and Denmark (overruling economics minister Walther Funk’s prohibition against distribution in occupied countries) and to neutral nations such as Spain, Portugal, Turkey, and Switzerland. The fakes were sent in pale green linen envelopes, their four flaps folded over into a packet 9½ by 11½ inches and sealed with wax. Although they were addressed by the prisoners and marked SECRET in red letters, Himmler himself was named on the envelope as the sender.

  Krueger certainly did not go unrewarded. Exactly how much money he skimmed will never be known, but the prisoners always gave him twenty first-class notes from each new series “for his personal use.” This type of corruption, only a shadow of what was to happen to the huge Operation Bernhard output, was endemic throughout the SS. Auschwitz was a plum SS assignment not just because it was a noncombatant post but because it offered opportunities for enrichment by theft from the hundreds of thousands of arrivals carrying gold watches, jewelry, pound notes or dollar bills, and diamonds sewn into their clothing. These valuables were catalogued and sent to Berlin, but the loot was skimmed so widely that the guards’ lockers were searched, and some were disciplined by transfer to frontline duty. For the prisoners with the gruesome job of sorting the clothes, the prize was food the victims had carried with them. In the sardonic humor of the camps, the area where goods were sorted was known to guards and prisoners alike as “Canada” — a place rich in natural resources.

  With Krueger’s money factory humming, the counterfeiters’ main concern was simply to stay alive as long as they could and survive the always latent SS sadism. The elderly Artur Springer was caught dozing over his inspection box one hot summer day. Sergeant Weber crept up behind him, fired his pistol to awaken and frighten him, then stuffed him into a full field uniform with gas mask and helmet, forcing him to work in that stifling getup for two hours. Outside, Weber’s comrade Marock zoomed in circles on a noisy motorcycle, spitting pebbles against the side of the barracks.

  Such behavior was typical of the two petty tyrants, who enjoyed taunting their charges and, more often than not, extorted items from their food parcels. Sven Hoffgaard, a Mischling Danish bank teller, realized he had been diverted to Operation Bernhard by the guards so they could loot his Red Cross parcels. Marock slapped around a hunchback from Poland named Leib Italiener when he arrived because the sergeant thought the new prisoner was lying about his incongruous name. Italiener took a while coming to terms with the total incongruity of the place itself, wondering whether it was some front for the anti-Nazi underground and fearing he would never be equal to the task. He decided he could live through it somehow, taking things philosophically: “Time is only a concept. Life is the only real thing.”

  Generally the prisoners were let off with beatings or punitive physical exercise for infractions that would have meant instant execution at other camps. The one fatal exception was tampering with the pound notes. A wrinkled little man named Hermann Gütig, a drifter from Frankfurt and a camp clown who was roundly hated for puffing up his own authority as a minor block assistant, burned about two dozen bills after he was demoted, most likely to take revenge on the section where the ashes were found. His crime was soon discovered. He was beaten and whipped by the guards into confessing, whereupon he was hanged. Throughout Operation Bernhard, four prisoners with serious communicable diseases are believed to have been summarily dispatched in order to protect the project from an epidemic. One prisoner, a young teacher from Poland named Izaak Sukenik, was blessed with an intelligent curiosity and a gentle manner, but cursed by an advanced case of tuberculosis. Lying on his bed, he would say, “I would love to live through the end of this, just the end. I would like to know that my life had not been in vain.” For a while he was protected by Dr. Rojzen, who switched test vials of phlegm in the barracks under the nose of an oblivious SS guard. But one day Sukenik spat up blood during a punishment exercise and was X-rayed; he knew that meant his death, which he faced with great courage.

  For any prisoner, a visit to the doctor or dentist was both an ordeal and a risk: an ordeal because prisoners were not permitted anesthetic lest they unconsciously spill their secret; a risk because they never knew whether a medical injection was intended to cure them or kill them. In the prison parlance of Block 19, any shot in the arm could turn out to be a Himmelfahrtspritze, an injection to a heavenly journey.

  In the end, Marock and Weber proved more dispensable than the prisoners themselves. On leave in Berlin, where they bedded the lonely wives of officers at the front, they made the foolish mistake of boasting about their work. Two Gestapo agents in civilian clothes appeared at the camp, roughed them up, and stripped them of their insignia before taking them away. Krueger reported that they had “shown themselves unworthy of the confidence placed in them.” Marock was shot, Weber sentenced either to fifteen years in prison or to duty on the Russian front. The prisoners’ first reaction to their tormentors’ fate was not personal relief, not even classic German schadenfreude, but anxiety that such a gross violation of secrecy might bring Operation Bernhard to a halt. Krueger assured them it would not.

  The prisoners viewed virtually every event, even the good news of the D-Day landings, through the single prism of whether it might induce Himmler to shut down the operation that was prolonging their lives. Incentives to stretch out the work became stronger as the tide of battle turned and liberation seemed possible. The lenient treatment may also have encouraged the few active saboteurs, but no one talked much about such things lest they be overheard. Chief engraver Felix Cytrin’s dogged pursuit of perfection was his preferred form of rebellion: adhering closely to Krueger’s orders in the engraving shop and at the inspection section — to print and pass only the very best notes. Countinghouse manager Oskar Stein found fault with the paper deliveries for minor imperfections. Prisoners in the print shop also performed small acts of sabotage, fouling the rollers to stop the presses temporarily, chipping at the printed letters, or damaging the engraved plates. Abraham Jacobson, who had managed a printing plant before he was arrested as a Dutch underground leader, said his fellow-prisoners were seized by a spirit of resistance, but not to the point of refusing to work. “We agreed, however, to sabotage the orders as much as possible because by doing so we would lengthen our own lives,” Jacobson said. “If the process were shut down, for whatever reason, we knew absolutely for sure that it would be our end.”

  During working hours, the prisoners’ minds were too fully engaged to think of their bleak future, but after they left the hurly-burly of the print shop or the intense concentration of the inspection tables, they were enveloped by a melancholy that was difficult if not impossible to shake. Some diverted themselves with newspapers and magazines; others played practical jokes. Max Bober commandeered the public address system (the guards were in on the prank) and, declaring, “This is England,” announced that the Bank of England knew all about Sachsenhausen and two of the principal counterfeiters, Leo Krebs and Hans Kurzweil. When the two section chiefs heard their names, they paled, and even the guards joined in the laughter at their expense.

  The lugubrious Cytrin declared such stunts were “a mere pretense to drive us completely crazy.” He was certain that one day Berlin would decide it had enough pound notes, and that would be the end of them. Bober’s view was more sanguine: “That won’t happen so soon, so you can rest easy. It’s a long way to Tipperary, as it goes in the song. Plenty can happen before Hitler gets to that stage.” Cytrin could only hope that “if a collapse happens quickly, maybe we here in this block will have a chance, too.”

  If not a constant visitor, death was always a presence. Max Groen, the Dutch newsreel cameraman, thought of Krueger without rancor as “the big chief, a very nice man, softly spoken, but in the back of my mind, I knew that even with his nice undertone, he would se
nd me to the gallows if necessary.” By consensus they looked up to him as “Der Alte” — the Old Man — or sometimes “Uncle Krueger” upon whom they were totally dependent. So life was a presence, too, by the mere chance of their continued survival, even if by a thread. The prisoners confronted an exquisite dilemma in short, emotional bursts, and the debate engaged them all, each in his own way. The intellectuals among the group tended to be more pessimistic and attempted to console themselves by organizing after-hours discussions of classic German authors such as Goethe and Schiller, but the guards put a stop to that. Avraham Krakowski, reproached for not extinguishing his light box lest he violate a prohibition of the Jewish Sabbath, stabbed his knife into a stack of bills out of frustration and anger but also a profound declaration of faith. Krakowski and Isaak Glanzer, another observant Jew, discussed the Torah and prayed together. Glanzer told his younger companion that “we will need divine mercy to get out of here alive. So let’s stick together.”