Krueger's Men Page 3
The SS was not drawn from graduates of the top class of Germany’s fine technical universities but was composed largely of dropouts, brawlers, and opportunist academics with odd ideas that suited the times. Using scraps of philosophy and fake science, these professors helped cook up a dog’s dinner of political thought that Hitler and his cronies hoped would make them salonfähig, a word normally used by those acceptable in the salons of polite German society to describe those they would exclude.
Until the rise of Hitler, Berlin had been the most modern city in Europe. Half a century before, Mark Twain compared it to Chicago for its energy and invention, and the newly unified German nation had hustled itself into the modern world, applying discoveries in electricity and chemistry that became known as the second industrial revolution. (The British powered the first with steam.) Germany led the world in preventing disease through public health. With its theories of the physical universe, Germany produced a scientific culture that built precision machinery we now would call high technology. A few hundred yards from Wilhelmstrasse, Europe’s first traffic light was erected at busy Potsdamer Platz.
But Hitler ignored, perverted, and even rejected the war’s genuine scientific opportunities. The jet engine, at first dismissed as unnecessary for long-range bombers, would be approved by Hitler too late to give his Messerschmitt 262 fighters a chance to reconquer the skies from the Allies. Rockets were envisioned only as last-chance weapons of vengeance, again too late to do much good beyond spreading terror when they exploded at random in London. And fortunately for the future of Western civilization, Hitler also vetoed the development of atomic weapons because he thought his enemies would be thoroughly blitzed by the time he could have his own nuclear bomb, which would be too expensive to build anyway.
Instead, the Nazis were suckers for win-the-war gimmicks of the kind that tend to attract inferior intellects and bullies. For example, the German leadership did not follow, and probably would not even have understood, the intense debate within Britain about how to pay for the war. The great economist John Maynard Keynes’s widely read pamphlet on the subject advocated carefully calculated tax increases, low interest rates, and forced saving to avoid the inflation that had doubled Britain’s prices during World War I. Keynes also opposed rationing as an infringement on the liberty for which the war was being fought. But Hitler was more attracted by the blade of the sword than its handle, even after the postwar inflation that had impoverished the German bourgeoisie. Germany was rationing goods, but the shops offered little except shortages. Because there was no money to tax away, the Nazi solution to paying for the war was to steal it or print it, and they did both.
It was only fitting that an important participant in this fantastic scheme to bring down British finance was the man who fired the first shots of World War II, Alfred Naujocks, an SS major who served as Heydrich’s errand boy as well as the whipping boy for his mistakes. While still an engineering student in the Baltic naval port of Kiel, Naujocks became an energetic Nazi Party brawler; his body carried many scars, and his nose had been smashed out of shape by the Communists. Heydrich had been the boss of the storm troopers in Kiel, so when the ambitious Naujocks arrived in Berlin, he became the point man in what we would now call the dirty tricks department of Heydrich’s security service. That department was as bad as anything the “low, dishonest decade” of the 1930s produced, to apply the famous phrase of the English poet W. H. Auden, who himself frequented the Berlin demimonde in the Weimar years. Naujocks organized the assassination of an anti-Nazi broadcaster in Prague and in October 1939 served as the muscle man in the kidnapping of two British secret service officers at the Dutch border. (He expropriated their luxury sedan, which he loved to drive at high speed.) In the greatest exploit of his career, Naujocks gave Hitler his flimsy excuse to invade Poland, killing concentration camp prisoners dressed in Polish uniforms to make it appear that they had attacked a German radio station near the Polish border. When his life story was later written up, Naujocks blessed the bombastic title, The Man Who Started the War. Amoral, thuggish, and partly educated, he was the kind of enterprising hit man who is indispensable to any gangster enterprise, the Nazi Party included. Heydrich and Naujocks were emblematic of a society that had gone off the rails, exalting racism and even death. All members of the SS wore a belt-buckle badge inscribed, “Meine Ehre heisst Treue” — My honor is [my] loyalty. Not even religion or ideology was implied, only loyalty to Hitler and fealty to orders from above.
Heydrich had made Naujocks commander of the security service’s technical section, which also put him nominally in charge of a brothel known as Salon Kitty at Giesebrechtstrasse 11, just off the Kurfürstendamm, then as now Berlin’s fashionable avenue of shops and restaurants. The place was under the daily supervision of Arthur Nebe’s criminal police and catered to diplomats, providing girls who were multilingual employees of the SS. The customers’ conversations were recorded for any useful intelligence, and their passports seized in order to be forged while their pants were, literally, down.
Naujocks’s technical command put him in charge of the Nazis’ first counterfeiting factory. Its headquarters were located at Delbrückstrasse 6A in a leafy residential neighborhood known eponymously as Grünewald, in the Charlottenburg district just west of downtown Berlin and less than a mile from Salon Kitty. Set in a large garden, the grand stone mansion, with rooms lined in wooden wainscot, was a former SS training center that now turned out incriminating documents like the ones in the Tukhachevsky affair — false passports, identity cards, miniature cameras, portable radio transmitters, and much of the other paraphernalia essential to any secret service.* Naujocks was not technically qualified to supervise a meticulous operation for the duplication of British currency, although readers of the inspired account of his exploits are led to believe that he devised it and supervised it closely. What he really did was to cut red tape with great speed since his operations were known to have Hitler’s backing.
Arthur Nebe, the police chief who presented the first detailed plan, had ultimately walked out on the operation because Heydrich would not permit him to use the forgers in his confiscated Interpol files. Operational control was given to Dr. Albert Langer, Naujocks’s technical director. Langer, a physicist and mathematician by training, had served in Austria’s code-breaking service between the wars, first for the military, then in the political police. Hitler incorporated Austria into the Reich in 1938, and Langer joined the Nazi Party on May 1 of that year, the very first day he was eligible for membership. Naujocks brought him to Berlin to build a code-breaking machine, or so Langer hoped. Instead, he was put to work the following year building the counterfeiting operation from scratch, probably because he was the type of slightly loopy intellectual favored by the Nazis. Among his papers at his death were not only his account of the counterfeiting operation but a treatise on the role of mental processes in curing cancer and another on the symbolism of Freemasonry. One of his assignments in 1939 was to write an article on English symbolism — from King Arthur’s Round Table to the “Astral-Magic meaning of the Union Jack etc., etc.” Langer, a fragile, thin, bespectacled man who walked with a cane, had only a tenuous grip on reality, but because he was surrounded by so many others with similar obsessions, he fit right in.
Initially “not even a pencil or eraser was available, to say nothing of shops or machines,” Langer wrote in the only official account that survives from anyone who actually worked full-time at Delbrückstrasse. “Naujocks didn’t have the slightest idea about the technical process.” But whenever a machine or material was needed and they could not find or develop it themselves, Naujocks could be depended on to obtain it on their relatively tight budget of 2 million reichsmarks (then officially worth about $800,000, or at least $8 million to $10 million in today’s money).
Langer was supposed to have a scientist’s knowledge of counterfeiting, but the jump from theory to practice was not easy. At first studying secretly at home with the help of his wife
, Langer went through the technical literature of engraving, papermaking, and other skills a forger needs. Then he visited factories and workshops for practical knowledge. This preliminary study took him about a fortnight. As a mathematician and code-breaker, he was confident that he already knew enough about arranging serial numbers to make his manufactured bills plausible when presented at banks. But the numbers were the easy part. His team obtained samples of sterling from the police because the Reichsbank had only a few thousand five- and ten-pound notes in its reserves and needed every one of them for foreign purchases of war materiel. Langer and his craftsmen studied the British paper under a microscope and cut out the notes’ unprinted surfaces to mash up the blank segments for analysis. They discovered the paper was made of a combination of linen and ramie, a lustrous fiber spun from a tough Asian nettle. The Germans grew plenty of flax to make linen, and they found the ramie plant growing in Hungary. They used calf’s-foot glue to stiffen the mash so it could be pressed into paper sheets, following as best they could the old-fashioned manufacturing traditions of the British. These traditions argued for handmade paper, an idea that was hotly disputed by the Nazis because it would slow production. Langer at first proposed handmade sheets large enough to print four bills at once; the alternative was rolling out the paper by machine, which would produce more notes, but at greater risk of detection. With time short, Langer adapted a Dutch machine that shot shredded paper through a sieve. It also left a watermark, a feature of every pound note. He knew that the British crinkled the paper next to their ears to test whether notes were genuine. Once he was satisfied that he had manufactured paper of the requisite thickness, transparency, texture, and consistency, he enlisted testers whose hearing had been sharpened by blindness.
Although the bills now had their own certified British accent, the paper still did not look exactly like British stock. Under the ultraviolet light of a quartz lamp, the standard bank test for suspicious currency in those days, the color of the German paper tilted toward the pink side of the spectrum instead of the British original, which lay somewhere between violet and lilac. Langer concluded that the problem was in the water. Most of the paper was produced to his specifications at the government’s Spechthausen factory at Eberswalde, fifty miles from Berlin, and a small amount from the private firm of Hahnemühle, farther west in Dassel, near Hannover. The British paper, Langer knew, had been manufactured since 1725 exclusively at the Portal family factory at Laverstoke in Hampshire.* Langer used a chemical cocktail to duplicate the water as best he could, thus adjusting the color of the paper to pass his ultraviolet test.
More problematic was the British watermark, which varied in accordance with the alphanumeric combinations designating each issue of notes during the previous twenty years, the serial number of each individual bill, and the name of the man serving as chief cashier of the Bank of England. But when Langer attempted to figure out the precise relationship of these variables, he failed. Duplicating the blurry British watermarks was also no easy matter. The British sieves had been softened by years of use, while the new German copies left more distinct impressions. It took Langer more than a hundred trials to produce a watermark he found indistinguishable from the British.
The Britannia seal in the upper-left-hand corner, a line drawing of a demure young lady sitting on a throne and surrounded by a classical oval design, proved a similar challenge. The vignette, as numismatists call it, was based on an 1855 drawing by Daniel Maclise, a noted British painter of Victorian times. He gave his subject a girl’s classical innocence, some of which was lost when the Bank’s engravers balanced a crown above her head. At first Langer thought it would be simple to photograph a copy on a zinc plate and etch the lines in acid. He had two cameras, an extendable one with bellows that he had bought and another manufactured by Paul Drews, one of the German precision-engineering firms that were then the envy of the world. The cameraman was a professional named Artur Rau, who photographed five-, ten-, and twenty-pound bills many times over. “But it didn’t work,” Langer recalled. “Hundreds of original notes… were photographed and enlarged (to three times their size)… In each printing none of them looked alike… The first medallions looked in their original size very good; but in the enlargement! The young girl’s face looked like an old woman’s. It was as if it were hexed.”
After weeks of trials, Langer found an experienced engraver in his late sixties named Walter Ziedrich, who made what looked like an exact copy after six attempts. In the photo studio and the etching, engraving, and galvanizing rooms at Delbrückstrasse, copper plates were prepared and mounted on steel to prevent the delicate lines from blurring in the softer metal. Paper was delivered to the ground floor for printing on a flatbed press, then dried and “aged” by machines so the counterfeit banknotes could be bundled and sent for use. Once the presses got rolling, the shop was put under a foreman named August Petrich, a Nazi Party veteran who ran his own printing business. The civilian technicians at Delbrückstrasse arrived in neat work clothes, some even wearing ties. They proudly posed for photographs of themselves engraving and inking the plates, running the presses, and looking dedicated to the German war effort.
Naujocks thought the notes were to be dropped on Britain just before the expected invasion. But Hermann Goering, the chief of the Luftwaffe, knew very little of the plan, which was actually more grandiose in scope. Its code name, if nothing else, supports that view: Andreas-Angelegenheit. This translates literally as the “Andrew Affair” but is more usually referred to as Operation Andreas or Operation Andrew. The reference is to the X-shaped cross of Scotland’s St. Andrew in the British flag, which is overlaid by the cross of England’s St. George. Langer thought that the latter “canceled” the former, obviously not realizing they were meant to join symbolically as Great Britain’s Union Jack. (He ignored the third cross, of Ireland’s St. Patrick.) Although the German original of Langer’s report has not been found, a hurried English translation in 1945 stated: “We wanted to strike through the worth of the pound, thus make its value to nothing.” He explained the basic idea as follows: “Through the production of banknotes a business system [economy] can be ruined, especially if the falsification were so good that it was impossible to differentiate between the counterfeit and the original.” The counterfeiters, he wrote, believed they could help end the war with fewer casualties “through the collapse of Britain’s business.” There is no doubt he was right, at least in theory. If enough counterfeits were circulated to make all pound notes suspect — and it would have taken millions — the British people would have reverted to some primitive form of barter. Even the Bank of England realized that.
It is unthinkable that such a bold plan would have been launched without Hitler’s approval. Langer confirmed that “the Fuehrer personally gave [the] orders.” Others have taken it even further than that, into a realm that is too entertaining to ignore but probably too good to be true. According to the former SS officer Wilhelm Hoettl, Heydrich put the plan in writing and sent it to Hitler. The dictator, Hoettl reported in his 1955 memoir, “minuted in his scratchy hand in the margin of Heydrich’s proposal: ‘Dollars no. We are not at war with the U.S.A.’ and scrawled his name.” This story has been picked up by most authors, but there is no evidence for it anywhere else. Although Hitler’s observation accords with his strategy of surrounding and isolating the United States instead of attacking it from across the sea, writing it down would have been totally out of character — as Hoettl himself admitted. Historians are still searching for Hitler’s written order for the liquidation of European Jewry — also supposedly issued to Heydrich. They will probably never find it. Hitler rarely put any orders on paper; he simply told his adjutants what he wanted, and the orders often got garbled because they were not always clear to begin with. In most cases it was hardly necessary for him to have written anything. His ranting against the Jews, for instance, had been in print since 1925 in Mein Kampf; the book was literally the nation’s bible — at weddings, instead
of a family Bible, every couple in Germany got a copy — the royalties for which were the basis of Hitler’s fortune. All around him were waiting to execute his every whim. If they were not certain of Hitler’s precise command, an educated guess was usually possible.
Thus, when in January 1942 Heydrich held the infamous conference at Wannsee, the Berlin suburb where the Reich Security Service maintained a guesthouse, his purpose was not to approve the final solution to the Jewish problem, for which he probably needed only a few terrible words; it was instead to coordinate the complex and murderous work of fractious, turf-protecting bureaucracies in carrying out a Fuehrerbefehl (leader’s order) and there was only one leader in Nazi Germany. The Finance Ministry conference that had set Operation Andreas in motion in the opening days of the war was another such interagency meeting, through which bureaucracies of all nations put directives in motion. In approving the orders for the counterfeiting operation, just as at Wannsee, only Hitler’s fingerprints are lost to history.