The Strasbourg Legacy, page 2
“Don’t ask me, Masao. Just figure out its worth and transfer it when I tell you.”
“But that’s at least twenty million dollars worth there.”
“Just add it up right. I want nothing to go wrong for either you or me.”
“What are you afraid of?”
“I’m not sure …”
The door opened and a tall man, stiffly erect, entered quickly. Without a word he handed Onishi a scrap of paper, faded by the years. It was Lottman’s receipt for the gold, signed by Colonel Kantaro Onishi on March 11, 1945.
He kept looking down at it, not doubting its authenticity, just shocked at seeing it again.
“Is that adequate proof?”
Onishi brought his gaze back to the stranger, who had a noticeable crescent-shaped scar over his left eye.
“It is, yes of course. That’s all I needed.”
“Good. This other paper has instructions for delivery of the money overseas. I expect the exchange within thirty days.”
Fuchida glanced at the orders and nodded.
“Thirty days is fine.”
“Then it’s settled.”
“Of course.”
The man turned abruptly and disappeared from the vault.
Onishi slumped into a chair and rubbed his chin slowly. Then he reached for the receipt from twenty-eight years before, lit a match, and touched it to a frayed end of the paper. As he watched, Erich Lottman’s signature and his own blackened and vanished into ash.
On January 11, 1973, a messenger arrived in a Zurich bank, presented identification, and was led to a numbered deposit box. Fifteen minutes later he left carrying more than three million dollars in a black Gucci briefcase. Within a matter of hours, he had landed in Munich, where the first portion of Kantaro Onishi’s treasure began to circulate.
3
Doctor Wilhelm Alt was well pleased with himself. The American couple answering his ad had just agreed to rent the upstairs apartment for double what any German family would pay for accommodations in Kronberg. At the front door he shook hands with the husband and waved farewell as the couple walked down the narrow steps to the street. When they drove away toward Wiesbaden he noticed another car moving quickly into the vacated parking place. A man wearing a dark topcoat got out and looked intently up at him.
“Herr Doctor Alt?”
“Ja.” Alt instinctively started down to meet him. “Can I help you?”
The figure had moved under a streetlight and waited until the doctor came close.
“I’m sure you can. Josef asked me to talk with you.”
“Josef, Josef who?”
The man thrust a photograph at him and Alt adjusted his gold-rimmed bifocals to look. The picture was of a uniformed man, perhaps thirty-five, and he was smiling. Alt knew that smile immediately because of the triangular gap between the front teeth. “Mengele,” he groaned, and his visitor took him gently by the arm and helped him into the front seat of the car. Alt was trembling while the man went around and got in on the driver’s side.
“Relax, doctor, I just came to give you a job.”
“A job?” Alt’s voice was lifeless.
“Tomorrow you fly to Berlin to identify a recently discovered skeleton. You are to confirm it is Reichsleiter Bormann.”
Alt’s mouth opened in amazement, but the other man’s voice was now harsh, commanding.
“It’s all arranged. Your reputation as a pathologist will help seal the verdict.”
“Is that all you want?”
“Is that all?” The stranger roared with laughter. “My friend, at the moment, it’s everything.”
He handed the doctor an envelope and reached across to open the door. “A little something for your troubles, too.”
Alt stumbled onto the sidewalk and watched dazedly as the car eased away from the curb and went around a corner. Mounting the front steps slowly, he wandered on into his study and sat down at the desk. Across from him the wall clock chimed nine times and he absently followed the moving pendulum. Back and forth, back and forth, just like Mengele’s riding crop at that siding in Auschwitz; right to the labor barracks and a little more life, left to the gas chambers and ovens of Birkenau.
Alt suddenly noticed his reflection in the glass front of the clock case. He had always prided himself on his still-dark brown hair, but it distressed him to see how it was receding in front and thinning badly on top. The harsh lines around his eyes and on his cheeks only confirmed his depressing diagnosis. I’m shriveling up from age, he thought as he poured some cognac and sipped it sadly.
Again the pendulum caught his eye … left, right … Mengele … Auschwitz … left, right … twenty-eight years and yet they had found him, had waited until he would be useful again. Even though he had changed his name at the end of the war, had made a totally different life for himself, they had been watching him all the time, and then they pounced. Pounced as they had in the old days, on the pitiable refugees that fell out of cattle cars and formed shapeless lines on the railroad platform. Mengele was almost always there, examining Jews from all over Europe, even checking their teeth as though they were horses, before flicking the crop one way or the other. And Wilhelm Alt, then Heinz Linge, had been there beside him, making notes when Mengele found interesting specimens for future analysis. For Josef Mengele was not just a doctor in charge of disposal; he fancied himself a scientist and used Auschwitz as an experimental station for his passion, the study of twins.
Alt refilled his glass with cognac. Like those eight-year-old Hungarian boys, one crying because he had scraped his knee and it was bleeding, Alt had taken out a handkerchief and cleaned the wound while the boy stopped sniffling and looked gratefully up at him. And then Mengele had called for the twins and Alt followed them into the immaculate offices, where they disappeared into the testing area, holding hands. Two weeks later, Mengele handed Alt some papers and he typed a fifteen-page report on Mengele’s findings about two Hungarian Jews, aged eight, who had been dissected after fatal injections of cyanide. Alt cried that day, and that night he borrowed a horse and rode wildly across the fields. But he was back at his desk in the morning and never once thought of asking for a transfer. At times the stench from the crematoria made him drink himself to sleep. Frequently he found excuses to avoid roll calls at the siding.
When the Russians came, Alt ran away with the refugees, and he had forged a new life for more than a quarter century. But now it was over, for they had found him, again, had evidently always known where he was. The clock chimed ten, and Alt rose unsteadily, and went into the bathroom. Pouring a glass of water, he stared into the mirror at his pale, sagging face and thought sadly that he really should have gotten a toupee. Then picking up a bottle of sleeping pills, he went on into the bedroom and sat in a chair by the fireplace.
Incredible how they had traced him. And now all his career was worthless, because he would have to compromise his integrity again for those people. Alt looked around the comfortable room, at the framed photos, affectionately inscribed—photos taken over the years with young men from his hiking club. With a sigh, he turned away and his gaze settled on the envelope the SS man had given him. The doctor got up, retrieved it from the table, and tore it open. He was holding a neatly banded packet of American bills, ten thousand dollars in all.
Alt sat down and counted the money slowly. He stacked it in twenties, fifties, and hundreds, then swooped it all into a pile in front of him. At least his new companions were generous men. And might be again, it occurred to him, if they needed his special services. He put the sleeping pills back in the bathroom cabinet and began to pack for the trip to Berlin.
Ever since he had returned from a Russian POW camp in 1955, Horst Clemens had followed a precise daily schedule. Each morning at seven, in his garden apartment in Bad Homburg, he wrapped a wine-colored silk robe around his still-lean body and made himself a breakfast of croissants and black coffee. By eight-thirty he had trimmed his graying Van Dyke beard. At nine, armed with a carved walking stick, he started hiking through the heavily forested city park, and promptly at twelve emerged near the waterfall by the old castle. At twelve-thirty he was settled into his favorite chair at the corner table of the dining room in the Hotel Dreesen, where he ate alone. Except for Tuesdays, that is, those magnificent hours when he and four other former members of the Wehrmacht used the same corner table as a strategy board, where they laid out maps and refought battles from Thermopylae to Normandy. Horst was always the recognized leader in these seminars, though heated arguments raged around some of his conclusions. His credentials were impeccable when it came to military affairs. One of the most decorated combat engineers in the German army, he was a legend for his battlefield exploits. On this Tuesday, Clemens had prepared well; for more than an hour he dissected for his comrades the tactics employed by both armies at the Marne in 1914. While he lamented von Kluck’s stupidity in moving the German right wing east of Paris instead of sweeping west of the city, he could not help but praise the flexibility of the French army under Joffre, which had confounded the rigid German order of battle. “Flexibility, gentlemen, is something the Wehrmacht needed badly when things went sour from 1942 on, particularly in Russia.”
Then it was three P.M., which always came too quickly on Tuesdays for Horst Clemens. His friends rolled up the maps, drained their schnapps, and said goodbye until next week. And he was left alone with the empty glasses, his notes on war, and his still-fresh memories of the old days when he was needed and respected.
A bellboy came over. “Herr Clemens, a message for you.” The note said: “Oberst Ullrich will call at six P.M.”
Clemens left the Dreesen in an ebullient mood. It was eight years since the battalion reunion when he had last talked to his commanding officer from the war. He worshipped Ullrich, the man who had taught him the engineering skills that made him so famous in the army. Ullrich, Die Mensch, fearless under fire, a friend who talked him out of taking his own life after his mother and five sisters had been killed in a bombing raid.
Clemens plunged back into his daily routine, entering the forest by the castle and walking briskly now toward home and the contact with Ullrich.
At five-thirty, he entered his second-floor apartment, opened up a bottle of Beck beer, and went over to sit by the phone. A yellow envelope lay propped against it. It had not been sealed or postmarked, just placed there by someone during his absence.
Clemens took out a passbook and an airline ticket. The passbook, made out to him, listed a balance of fifty thousand deutschemarks, deposited that day in the Dresdner Bank. The airline ticket was for a round-trip flight to Cairo. The return date was open; departure time was eight-thirty A.M. on April 30, 1973, two weeks away. As Clemens tapped the passbook against the table in consternation, the phone rang and he looked at his watch: six P.M.
“Oberst Ullrich?”
Clemens heard the voice of his mentor asking whether he had opened his mail.
“Yes, sir, I have, but I don’t understand.”
Ullrich began a detailed explanation.
4
The private screening was being held in a rundown building in the Soho district of London. The screening room itself, however, was elegantly furnished; oriental rugs, Monets and Picassos on the walls. Four men sat in expensive, brown leather chairs. The viewers were all in their fifties, well dressed, neatly manicured.
A microphone crackled and a voice filled the room. “Shalom, gentlemen. I’m sorry to bring you here on such short notice but we have something unusual this time.”
A shaft of light illuminated the screen, there was the click of a slide projector, and a blurred figure appeared. Suddenly the image snapped into focus, revealing a man standing in front of an office building. Another slide filled the screen with his face, squinting through the sunlight at some unseen target.
“Tokyo, November of last year,” the moderator explained. “He stayed at the Okura Hotel for three days. During that time he took one sightseeing trip to the eastern shore of the bay, bought two Nikon cameras on the Ginza, and spent one evening with a girl at a nightclub in Roppongi. On his last day in Japan he stopped at the Nippon Bank for ten minutes, then went out to Haneda and flew Lufthansa bound for Rome. But at Beirut he shook our man and disappeared.”
“Are we supposed to know him?” a man asked from the row of chairs.
“Take a look at the crescent scar just above the left eyebrow.”
“It’s Richter! He’s on the loose.”
“Exactly, Malcolm. Our Johannes Richter from Paraguay, the butcher of Cracow. When he moved from that apartment building in Asunción, we followed him all the way to Tokyo. Now as to why he went there we still don’t know, but beyond that we have to wonder what the hell brought him out of his safe hole in the first place.”
Another slide moved into place and the audience stared at a group of Nazi officers, smiling stonily into a camera.
“The man to Heydrich’s left, the tall one. And now the closeup.” The officer was thin-faced, gaunt almost. His nose was hooked, the mouth pursed. His eyes seemed lifeless, blank.
“The mystery man. August Bleemer. Age then thirty-four. Education Göttingen, Heidelberg. Joined the SS in nineteen thirty-six. Soon one of Heydrich’s pets, he directed the program to eliminate mental defectives within the Third Reich. Bleemer rounded up the retarded, the sickly, and sent them to quack doctors all over Germany and Austria. At euthanasia he was the expert. Our records show he was responsible for killing more than three hundred thousand people, not just Jews, mind you.”
“But we’ve never found a trace of him, Hersch.”
“That’s correct. In nineteen forty-five, Bleemer submerged. While most of his friends left by way of Italy, he may have gone through Spain. A contact thought he saw him hanging around a dock in Cadiz but had no way to make sure. That was in nineteen forty-nine.
“We spent a lot of time looking for him after that. But though we were able to flush someone like Eichmann we had only a shadow in Bleemer. He had a wife in Stuttgart, but she remarried and he never approached her. A daughter moved to Africa and died in the Congo uprising in nineteen sixty. A rumor, nothing more, that he showed up in Cairo for talks with Nasser in nineteen sixty-one. That’s all … but what do you make of this?”
The next slide showed a man sitting on a stage next to a speaker’s rostrum. “The village of Markgröningen, a recreation hall there on the night of May fourth this year. The occasion a rally for the conservative wing in opposition to Brandt. Normal so far, but the man before you is a surprise. Karl Radel, age sixty-four, behind-the-scenes lawyer for various corporations, mainly in contract negotiations with labor. Has several homes, Essen, Dortmund, and a chalet in Lindau on the Austrian border. Up until this moment his politics seemed middle-of-the-road, nothing extreme; he has contributed to many candidates, he has close ties even to Brandt’s group. Lately, however, and this really is one indication, he has been appearing at fund raisings and the like. When he speaks publicly, he stresses two themes … law and order and fear of Communism. He comes out strongly against a deal with Moscow.”
“What’s he heading for from this?”
“No one knows yet. Maybe a plunge into politics in a big way. In the meantime …”
Another slide was up and it showed Radel talking from the rostrum. The picture had been taken from the side of the stage and showed him in profile.
“Anything strike you?”
In the silence the projector clicked on another shot, the original closeup of August Bleemer blended with the latest of Karl Radel.
“The nose, the damned hooked nose. Look at those two pictures.”
“There can’t be two noses like that anywhere,” said someone from the darkened room. “But why didn’t he have plastic surgery?”
“Probably because he thought no one had a picture of him. His SS files disappeared, with all photos. He always stayed in the background, like Bormann, and who knows, he may be vain enough to like it the way it is.”
“That picture of him with Heydrich?”
“That’s the one he forgot. It was taken by Heydrich’s own cameraman and later that day he was driving back to the lab when some underground fighters blew him up with a grenade. With the car in little pieces, Bleemer must have assumed the film was destroyed but it was picked up by a friend and eventually delivered into our hands.”
“How did he get back into Germany? Didn’t you say he went out by way of Spain?”
“He must have gone to South America for awhile but then returned in the fifties. Radel’s dossier shows he spent four years in the Wehrmacht, two on occupation duty in France and two on the Russian front with the Two Hundred and Ninety-fifth Infantry Division. Wounded once, Iron Cross First Class, invalided home in nineteen forty-four, worked as a laborer until cleared by the Allies, then practiced law again. Clean bill of health as we would expect.”
“Well, what do we do? Kill him?”
“You know better than that. After the mess over Eichmann, the Knesset will never approve it. We can’t even make him have an accident until we have the proof about him. For the time being let’s just watch Radel. Maybe he can lead us to bigger fish.”
The lights went on in the screening room and the eighty-fourth meeting of the group had ended. Acting under direction of the Shin Bet, the Israeli intelligence service, these five men pursued a lonely assignment. Though retired officially from active duty, they continued to hunt the people who had been the architects of the “final solution.” But for the five men leaving the rundown building in Soho, it was a source of deep satisfaction, for each of them had a common bond. As sonderkommandos, working under the guns of SS guards, they had pulled members of their own families out of the “shower rooms” at Auschwitz.
