The Budapest Protocol, page 34
Harry Dexter White and his colleagues were closely monitoring the outflow of German capital, much of which was going to South America. In July 1944 White told a meeting of Treasury officials that funds were pouring out of Germany and that the Nazi leaders were preparing to flee the country or have their properties confiscated. “They bought estates and industries and corporations and there is evidence that the German corporations have been buying into South American corporations in the expectation of being able to re-establish themselves there after the war.” Just as the Red House report outlined, this outflow of capital was being run through middle-men and front companies. The cloaking operation was extremely complex, White told his colleagues. “They are working through first, second and third fronts, so it’s pretty hard to trace it without having all the data available.”
The level of detail in the Red House report, the strong endorsement of the reliability of the source in the report’s covering letter, the fact that it was sent to the secretary of state, and most of all, that the plans outlined in the report fitted in with known Nazi policy objectives mean that the meeting almost certainly took place. It’s also noteworthy that the Nazi industrialists met in Strasbourg, the capital of the French province of Alsace, on the German border, where Germany had traditionally had strong economic interests. The Red House Report was definitely read in high places.
In his 1946 book, Germany Is Our Problem, Henry Morgenthau advocated a deindustrialized Germany, in part to break the economic power of the German industrial conglomerates that had financed and profited from the Nazis, most of which soon rebuilt themselves and even now remain household names. It seems Morgenthau knew of the plans for a new economic empire outlined in the Red House Report and the plans to export capital. “These funds will be at the disposal of the Nazis in their underground campaigns (but the industrialists will be repaid by concessions and orders when the Party candidates come to power),” he wrote. “Two Swiss banks through which operations may be conducted were named and the possibility of acquiring a Swiss dummy at five per cent was noted.”
The Nazis always placed high importance on economic assets hidden in neutral countries and their potential use in the future. In November 1945, the British section of the Allied Control Commission for Germany found a secret circular written in September 1939 by the German Economics Ministry. It contained instructions to all German Foreign Exchange Control Authorities (Devisenstellen) on how to protect and camouflage their assets abroad. The instructions were considered “state secrets” and only forty copies of the memo were made. Point II/1 on the camouflage of foreign enterprises instructs:
It is of great interest that the camouflage be effective and successful in order to enable these companies to act as far as possible as bridgeheads for German trade in the future. The camouflage the companies must undergo is to be carried out in such a manner that they can be authenticated as independent foreign enterprises. [emphasis in original]
The document continues:
The actual influence in the new foreign firms must be secured by effective economic and personnel measures. Special attention is to be paid to the selection of persons for appointment as managers of the newly created foreign firms. . . . Of course any participation of Jewish foreigners in camouflaged German firms has to be avoided.
All of this perfectly accords with the plans laid out in the Red House Report. Seventy years after Dr. Scheid and the Nazi industrialists met at the Maison Rouge hotel, the record of their discussions still makes for intriguing, if not unsettling, reading.
APPENDIX TWO: STERILIZING THE ROMA
Czigex, the genetically engineered drug to render Romany women infertile, is a product of the author’s imagination. Coercive sterilization of Romany women is not. In February 2009, a Hungarian Romany woman finally won an eight-year legal battle for compensation after a coercive sterilization. The woman, known as AS, had been sterilized by doctors at a hospital in a small town in eastern Hungary. Her case was taken up by the European Roma Rights Center, which is based in Budapest, and represents an important victory for Romany human and reproductive rights.
Ms. AS was admitted for an operation to remove a dead fetus in January 2001. She was asked to sign forms giving her consent to this, and to sterilization. However, the doctors did not explain the procedure, the risks, or the consequences to her of being sterilized.
Hungary and its neighbors are now members of the European Union, which brings responsibilities to treat all citizens equally. AS’s legal victory follows a decision by the Hungarian government in 2008 to amend the Public Health Act to ensure that all patients give informed consent to sterilization. But for many in the region, especially among the notoriously conservative medical professions, modern notions of equal rights do not extend to the Roma. The practice of coercive sterilization predates the change of system in 1989 and reaches back to the Communist and Nazi era. It is one of the most radical examples of the institutionalized discrimination that the Roma face: the removal of the right to reproduce.
Even in the early years of the twenty-first century, there were numerous reports of coercive sterilizations in Hungary, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. I have met several victims myself. In February 2003, together with my friend and colleague Peter Green, I traveled to a small village near the city of Presov, in eastern Slovakia. We were investigating reports by human rights and Roma activists that dozens of Gypsy women had been sterilized without their consent. What we found was both shocking and profoundly depressing: levels of poverty and deprivation usually seen in the developing world and a clearly delineated, officially sanctioned—if not orchestrated—de facto policy of apartheid between the Roma and their neighbors.
The non-Roma half of the village was clean and tidy, its spacious houses built of brick and concrete and painted white. The Roma were confined to drafty hovels of wood and earth, which they had built themselves, on the outskirts of the settlement. They had no heating, electricity, gas, water, or proper sewage disposal. Barely clothed children scampered through mud and ice, and dogs nosed around household waste. The Roma lived like this not because they wanted to, but because the local council refused to register them as residents. With no recognition of their status—especially important in the post-Communist countries’ Kafkaesque bureaucracies—officially, they did not exist. They could not vote in local or national elections. Their children could not go to school. The local council refused to provide any municipal services. There was even a separate wooden church for the Roma to worship in.
Inside one of the hovels we met Zita. She was twenty-three, and like many Roma, illiterate. Like almost all Roma women, she dreamed of a large family. For Roma, the family is of supreme importance, the axle on which their world turns. During the Nazi Holocaust, which the Roma call the “Poraymus” or great devouring, Roma families furiously resisted being separated. The Nazis decided it was easier to let them live—and die—together. They even had their own family compound in Auschwitz, from where some were selected for medical experiments. In early 1998 Zita gave birth by Caesarean section to her second child, a daughter. Still groggy, Zita was presented with a piece of paper to sign by a nurse. She told us: “They gave me a paper to sign, but I don’t know what it said because I cannot read or write. I was in pain after the operation. My signature is three crosses and I signed with that. After the operation, a nurse came and explained that I will not have any more children. I felt very bad. I started to cry.”
Zita’s case mirrors that of AS in Hungary and is typical of a policy of coercive sterilization of Romany women, according to investigators from the Center for Reproductive Rights, a New York–based human rights group. The center’s report, based on a three-month investigation, was published in March 2003. It detailed about 110 cases of coerced or forced sterilization in Slovakia as well as a policy of medical apartheid. Roma women were segregated in wards, waiting rooms, toilets, and washing and dining facilities. They were often subjected to verbal or physical abuse and were denied access to their medical records. Their hospital files were often stamped with an R. Many Roma women are vulnerable, poorly educated, and have no concept of their legal rights. Zita’s husband, Krystian, told us: “I know one hundred percent that she has been sterilized. I lived with her for eight years and now, five years after that operation, she cannot have children. They think the Roma are devils and they can do what they want with us.”
We also met Maria, who, like Zita, can no longer conceive. Maria, then twenty-nine, was also illiterate and has seven children, which is not uncommon in Romany families. Before giving birth in early 1998 by Caesarean section, she, too, was handed a form to sign. “They put a pen in my hand, took my hand, and helped me to sign the paper. They didn’t tell me what I signed. I had an operation, but I don’t know exactly what it was. Now I have found out that I cannot have children. I started to ask what was going on, but I do not speak Slovak very well and I don’t know how to ask a Slovak doctor what has happened to me.” Medical records held by Barbora Bukovska, a lawyer and human rights activist, confirm that Maria was sterilized at the age of twenty-four.
From the village we traveled to Presov hospital to hear the other side of the story. A doctor there showed us a grisly catalog of photographs of stillbirths and deformed fetuses. These were the reason why the hospital carried out so many Cesarean sections and sometimes had to remove wombs and ovaries as well, he argued. Dr. Marian Kisely, the head of obstetrics, told us that they had never sterilized a Roma woman against her will. “It is always done for medical reasons and with the agreement of the patient. There were cases when we had to perform an emergency hysterectomy because the mother’s life was in danger.”
As a new young democracy, then about to join the European Union, Slovakia was and is sensitive about its image. Forced sterilization of an impoverished minority was not the public profile it sought. Questions were being asked in international organizations, by human rights groups, and an embarrassing fuss was being made. But in Slovakia, like its neighbors, old Communist-style reflexes still prevailed. The Romany women asked us to neither print their surnames nor even the name of the village for fear of retribution from the state. We had already heard several stories of how agents of the Slovak secret service had harassed activists for bringing supposedly bringing the country’s name into disrepute. Some officials even threatened the activists with prosecution for failing to report a crime, that is, the sterilizations, on time to the police. What was bringing Slovakia’s name into disrepute was not the activists, but the failure by the new democratic government to stop the decades-old policy of sterilizing Romany women.
As the case of AS shows, Slovakia has no monopoly on ill-treatment of the Roma. Similar scenes of poverty and squalor can be found across post-Communist Europe, from the Baltics to the Balkans. In Hungary around 7 or 8 percent of the country’s ten million people are Roma. Here too many live in conditions of grinding poverty and endemic unemployment, exacerbated by the global economic recession and the slowdown in the construction industry, where many Roma formerly worked.
In 2005, two years after I traveled to Maria and Zita’s village, governments in central and southeastern Europe launched the Decade of Roma Inclusion, at one of Budapest’s glitzy riverside hotels. Much of Mittel-Europa’s great and good was there, including numerous prime ministers and high-ranking officials. There was plenty of grandstanding, fine speeches, and stirring declarations of the need to fight for equality and against discrimination, all of which have had little, if any practical effect. None of Hungary’s post-Communist governments have tried to meaningfully tackle the Roma’s appalling living conditions and lack of economic opportunity. In parts of eastern Hungary, Roma poverty is now so dire that some are reduced to stealing potatoes from their gardens of their neighbors, many of whom are little better off themselves.
Many Romany schoolchildren are classified as mentally handicapped, even when they are not, are segregated from their non-Romany peers and placed in separate classrooms. The hate against Roma is rising. In August 2013 a Budapest court sentenced three far-right extremists to life imprisonment without parole for murdering six Hungarian Romas between 2008 and 2009. A fourth member of the group received thirteen years for his involvement. The men said they would appeal. Among those killed were Robert Csorba and his four year old son Robika. The gunmen firebombed their house then shot them down as they fled in terror. The deaths of Robert and Robika Csorba in particular caused widespread revulsion and horror. They galvanized public opinion and thousands of mourners attended the funeral of Robika and his father, including representatives of the main political parties.
Not all of the Roma’s problems are due to external factors. Roma society has not adapted well to modernity. It is plagued by thuggish moneylenders who target poverty stricken individuals and provide loans at 100 percent interest, triggering a spiral of debt. The failure to develop a dynamic communal leadership, and social mores that in many families value early marriage and children over education and a career, are increasing the Roma’s marginalization. Many human rights workers or social activists working can recount how bright young Roma students, especially girls, are forbidden from going to college, and are married off while still in their teens.
The growing prejudice against Roma and their worsening social conditions are exacerbating a disturbing sense of disconnection from mainstream society and its laws. In the village of Olaszliszka, northern Hungary, a driver who hit a Roma girl, lightly injuring her, was dragged out of his car by a mob and beaten to death in front of his two young daughters. Understandably, hideous events like the Olaszliszka lynching cause widespread fury and disgust: both at the perpetrators and the failure of the police to protect ordinary citizens.
The beneficiaries of this are the far right in Hungary, which focuses relentlessly on what it calls “Gypsy crime.” The far-right Jobbik party won seventeen per cent of the vote in the 2010 election and is now the third largest party in the Hungarian parliament. Jobbik is even calling for the reintroduction of the Gendarmerie, the national police force that was dissolved after the Second World War. That is unlikely, but it’s increasingly clear that the dire situation of the Roma, growing racism, the worldwide economic downturn, and the Roma’s dislocation from mainstream society are all the necessary ingredients for a social explosion in the making.
APPENDIX THREE: RED HOUSE REPORT
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
Readers interested in further investigating the themes of The Budapest Protocol may find the following works of interest.
Bank for International Settlements, The, The Bank for International Settlements and the Basle Meeting. Basle: BIS, 1980.
Barsony, Janos and Agnes Daroczi, Pharrajimos: The Fate of the Roma During the Holocaust. New York: International Debate Education Association, 2008.
Black, Edwin, IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation. New York: Crown Publishing Group, 2001.
Borkin, Joseph, The Crime and Punishment of I.G. Farben: The Startling Account of the Unholy Alliance of Adolf Hitler and Germany’s Great Chemical Combine. New York: Free Press, 1978.
Braham, Randolph L. The Politics of Genocide: The Holocaust in Hungary. New York: Columbia University Press, 1981.
Fonseca, Isabel, Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and their Journey. London: Vintage, 1996.
Garlinski, Jozef, The Swiss Corridor: Espionage Networks in Switzerland during World War II. London: J. M. Dent & Sons 1981.
Higham, Charles, Trading With the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot 1933–1949. London: Robert Hale, 1983.
Jeffreys, Diarmuid, Hell’s Cartel: IG Farben and the Making of Hitler’s War Machine. London: Bloomsbury: 2008.
Laughland, John, The Tainted Source: The Undemocratic Origins of the European Idea. London: Little, Brown, 1997.
Lee, Martin, A. The Beast Reawakens: The Chilling Story of the Rise of the Neo-Nazi Movement. London: Little, Brown, 1997.
LeBor, Adam, Hitler’s Secret Bankers: How Switzerland Profited from Nazi Genocide. London: Balazs and Schuster, 1997.
LeBor, Adam and Roger Boyes, Surviving Hitler: Choices, Corruption and Compromise in the Third Reich. London: Balazs and Schuster, 2000.
Liegeois, Jean-Pierre, Gypsies: An Illustrated History. London: Saqi Books, 2005.
Linklater, Magnus, Isobel Hilton and Neal Ascherson. Klaus Barbie, The Fourth Reich and the Neo-Fascist Connection. London: Coronet Books, 1994.
Loftus, John and Mark Aarons, Mark, The Secret War Against the Jews: How Western Espionage Betrayed the Jewish People. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994.
Simpson, Christopher, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law and Genocide in the Twentieth Century. Monroe: Common Courage Press, 1995.
Radnoti, Miklos, Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti. Budapest: Corvina, 2002.
Porter, Anna, Kasztner’s Train. London: Constable: 2008.
Szep, Erno, The Smell of Humans: A Memoir of the Holocaust in Hungary. Budapest: Central European University Press, 1994.
Turner, Henry Ashby Jr., German Big Business and the Rise of Hitler. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.
