Krueger's Men (19 page)

Bernhard Krueger had a somewhat less adventurous retirement. He gave various versions of how he eluded capture and made his way home to Dassel, near Hannover, hiding for eight days until one of his children called out, “Mama, there’s a strange man in the closet.” He finally turned himself in to the British occupation authorities on November 25, 1946. They were waiting for him: Krueger’s card in the British file of wanted Nazis listed his offense as “Forging Foreign Currency–Passports.”

The British held Krueger for slightly more than a year. Already embarrassed by the enormity of what he had done to them, they never breathed a word of his existence, not even to George J. McNally or other U.S. Secret Service agents who were working closely with them in their own hunt for forged dollars. The British also never charged Krueger; forging enemy currency was no war crime. They turned him over to the French early in 1948, who were also ready for him. While Krueger was still a fugitive, Captain S. C. Michel of French intelligence had accurately described his activities and concluded: “Very clever but will probably give up all information if caught especially if convinced it will save his hide.” Krueger said the French secret service offered him his old job of forging passports — for them. Unlike the British, they threatened him with murder charges for the four prisoners killed for illness, meanwhile attempting to recruit him as he sat in Wittlich prison in the French zone of occupation. But Krueger declared he had had enough of forgery, and the French dropped the charges when they released him in November 1948.

Returning as an engineer to the factories of Chemnitz was out of the question: the city was in the Soviet occupation zone (it was renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt in 1953). In 1955, Krueger was discovered by the official census working as a storekeeper near Hannover. He had to undergo a denazification process, during which he made a fairly clean breast of his wartime counterfeiting exploits, although he stressed that he was only a “technical consultant.” Several former prisoners later declared that they either testified or sent affidavits in his support. He was exonerated after a brief hearing. For their own propaganda purposes, the Communist government of East Germany pursued him during the 1960s as a murderer of the four prisoners, but the charges had to be filed in West Germany and were dismissed. Krueger eventually found work as a salesman, uncoincidentally at the Hahnemühle paper plant.

Shortly before Krueger’s death in 1989 at the age of eighty-three, the marine explorer and biologist Hans Fricke of the Max Planck Institute took him in a miniature submarine to the depths of the Toplitzsee. The vessel’s searchlight picked up piles of pound notes still preserved beneath the oxygen line. Krueger stared in amazement and, according to Fricke, uttered the old slogan, still freighted with the code words of Nazi Germany,
Alles für Fürher, Volk, und Vaterland
— “Everything for the fuehrer, the people, and the fatherland.” Sobs obscuring his German inflections, Krueger blubbered: “I did everything I could [and] after the war they treated me like a scoundrel” in German, a
Lump.
Self-pitying and unrepentant to the last, he was like so many Nazis who looked straight past the catastrophe they had helped create and valued only their own efforts and their own suffering.

Not a trace remains of the original Reichsfinanzministerium, where the whole thing started — not even on the present-day guideposts to Wilhelmstrasse erected along this historic avenue. Number 61 would have stood just above Leipziger Strasse; the space is now occupied by featureless office buildings and a stylish building housing the embassy of the Czech Republic. The RSHA headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Strasse (which has been renamed Niederkirchnerstrasse after a Communist heroine who parachuted into Russian-occupied Poland and was captured by the Nazis and killed in Ravensbrück) was still a pile of rubble overgrown with trees and shrubs sixty years after its destruction. An attempt to preserve the Gestapo’s torture cells as a reminder of its terrors has been stymied by a typically German dispute over the meaning of the nation’s past and how to memorialize it.

In one of the many accidents of history that have created today’s Berlin, with its layers stripped bare like those of a geological fault, the RSHA ended up just inside the Allied zone of occupation. Its torture cells stood hard against what would become the boundary marked by the infamous Berlin Wall, remnants of which are visible from the Gestapo site. In what was East Berlin, street names and numbers along Wilhelmstrasse were scrambled by the Communist authorities. Today, the neighborhood is filled with working-class apartments occupied by families with Slavic and Turkish names. But at the corner of Wilhelmstrasse and Leipziger Strasse stands a huge, utilitarian building of Nazi construction that served as Hermann Goering’s Air Ministry (some officials there were part of the Russian spy network known as the Red Orchestra). Until reunification in 1990, it housed ministries of the German Democratic Republic, then the organization responsible for privatizing state-owned Communist industry. When the German government moved to Berlin at the start of this century, the building became the seat of the nation’s Finance Ministry. Along one side remains a singular historical artifact: a long, colorful mural in the style of socialist realism depicting smiling workers and farmers, determined bureaucrats and technocrats, all united under a sign carried by one group of marchers proclaiming
“Sozialismus.”

Cicero the Spy squandered everything he received. Money went to mistresses, ex-wives, and children. Elyesa Bazna did try his hand at sensible businesses such as used cars, a construction partnership, and a luxury Turkish ski-and-spa resort near Bursa. But even as the first of five floors was being built, a supplier whose bills had been settled in pound notes sent them to his Swiss bank, which bounced them after consulting the Bank of England. Ruined, Bazna spent years defending himself. Criminal prosecutions were abandoned, but civil suits were pursued and he had to repay his victims. Even a concert of classical songs he gave to acclaim by audience and critics ended in financial disaster; his creditors seized the evening’s takings. In desperation he turned to the German consulate in Istanbul for reimbursement or a pension. A junior official demanded written proof of his services to Germany and then threw him out. Bazna persisted and in 1954 wrote Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the founding statesman of the Federal Republic of Germany. In a servile, pleading letter to this confirmed anti-Nazi who had publicly apologized on behalf of the nation for “unspeakable crimes,” Cicero could not have come up with a more inappropriate justification for wartime spying: he said he did it out of sympathy for Germany. The German Foreign Ministry rejected his claim outright.

For five years, the British succeeded in hushing up their worst wartime security breach. The Foreign Office’s top career diplomat, Sir Alexander Cadogan, confided to his diary in 1945 that “Snatch, of course, ought to be court-martialled.” But Ambassador Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen drew only a private reprimand and then — the old boys protect their own — was awarded a plum post as ambassador in Brussels to enjoy its delicious cuisine while postwar Britain lived on iron rations. In 1950, Ludwig Moyzisch, Cicero’s SS handler, published his memoirs, and the lid blew off. In a statement to Parliament of only forty-five words, the government had to admit through clenched teeth that the story was true.

Darryl F. Zanuck bought the film rights from Moyzisch, and Joseph Mankiewicz’s brilliant film
Five Fingers
quickly followed in 1952, starring James Mason as Cicero, which is mainly how he and his story are remembered, if at all. But as with most Hollywood productions, the real-life story was considerably more mundane than the screen version. Bazna did not even receive a payoff in the traditional form of a consultant’s fee. The production cost of the movie was about $1 million in real money — slightly less than the face value of the counterfeit pounds paid to Cicero.

Later, Bazna tried writing his own story and sought a collaborator in Munich, who in turn demanded confirmation from Moyzisch that Bazna had been Cicero. Brought together, they sized up what life had done to them in the sixteen years since the war ended. Bazna recalled: “We felt no particular sympathy for each other. Our great adventure had rewarded neither.” In vain, Bazna continued pursuing the West German government, suing for 1.7 million marks. He was working as a night watchman in Munich when he died in 1970 at the age of sixty-six, a humble Turkish
Gastarbeiter
in the country to which he had both given and lost everything.

But perhaps no greater loss was suffered than by the Bank of England. The most precious resource of any central bank is confidence in the money it issues, and the Nazis undermined it even from beyond the grave. They forced Britain to issue new five-pound notes with a metallic thread to help detect counterfeits, and what was worse, the Bank had to admit why. This was done in a press release on October 18, 1945, that blamed the “forgery of high sum Bank of England notes in Germany during the war.” Even before the war ended, stories persisted that the British were buying up the counterfeits at a rate of one real fiver for two fakes. This was probably too good to be true, but the story demonstrates the widespread recognition of the dilemma facing the Bank.

Huge stashes of counterfeits were uncovered as Allied troops settled into Austria and Germany. Private Allen Cramer of the U.S. Army was guarding a bridge over the Danube when his buddies discovered a chest full of twenty-pound notes. Immediately they debated whether to carry off a lot if it was real, or only a little as souvenirs if it was phony. They correctly decided a little would do, but even though “we knew it was counterfeit, we somehow felt very rich.” In Frankfurt, U.S. Secret Service agent George McNally was led to twenty-three coffin-size boxes on a German truck, with manifests describing their contents. McNally alerted the British and soon received a phone call from the Bank in London. He described his discovery and heard a gasp over the line. The Bank quickly dispatched the chief of its printing plant, Patrick J. Reeves, described by McNally as “a tall, angular and reserved gentleman.” Reeves dryly reported that on Friday, June 8, 1945, he counted £26 million in counterfeit notes, accompanied by a box of tools to make the plates. He methodically compared the dates, serial numbers, and the Bank’s own code numbers on the bills, calculating that as many as sixteen additional crates might be missing with millions more in false pounds. The vast scale of the operation literally stared him in the face. In McNally’s somewhat more vivid description, Reeves went “from box to box, riffling the notes between his fingers. Finally he stopped and stared silently into space. Then for several seconds he cursed, slowly and methodically in a cultured English voice, but with vehemence. ‘Sorry,’ he said at last. ‘But the people who made this stuff have cost us so much.’”

Reeves was joined by two officers from Scotland Yard’s forgery branch, a chief inspector and a sergeant (appropriately named Minter). They toured the concentration camp complex to which the counterfeiters had been shuttled during their final, uncertain days as prisoners. They discovered the small Redl-Zipf camp had been burned down but were still able to enter its network of tunnels. They began to piece together the jigsaw puzzle of the prisoners’ stories. Then McNally, on behalf of the U.S. Treasury, started asking the British uncomfortable questions: How many counterfeits were produced? What were the losses? Had the counterfeits broken through the barrier of exchange controls into Britain’s home territory?

The questions were passed to Peppiatt of the Bank, who consulted the British Treasury, which in turn joined with the Old Lady, at least in public, to hide what was fast becoming a national embarrassment. (Even bookies at the London dog tracks had stopped accepting fivers.) Instructions arrived from Edward Playfair, a senior Treasury official, to stiff the outsiders: “I am sorry, as I do not want them to think us uncooperative: but this is a very domestic kind of matter. We at home keep such information inside a very narrow circle, and neither divulge it nor seek to obtain similar information from others.” This explanation landed on the desk of Charles A. Gunston, who was on leave from the Bank to serve as chief British financial officer for the Allied Control Commission in Germany. A top scholar at Winchester and Oxford, and a brilliant linguist (German, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and, as a hobby later in retirement, Bardic Welsh), Brigadier Gunston not only understood the situation but could express it in plain English. Next to his instructions to tell this to the Americans — or, to be precise, not to tell them — he wrote in a neat, scholarly hand,
“Let sleeping dogs lie. CAG 14 Sep 45.”

Occasionally those dogs barked, but the principal sound for almost half a century was the silence of an embarrassed cover-up. Even when the Allied Control Commission in Austria wanted to prosecute a gang of seven men for passing false pound notes in 1946, the commission’s Public Safety Branch had to plead with the Bank to release enough counterfeits to present as evidence at the trial. When counterfeit pounds of a new type turned up the same year through the Polish Consulate in France, Peppiatt wrote to Scotland Yard demanding immediate action, adducing “the shocks our notes have taken in recent years and are still taking.” Like an outraged spymaster in a patriotic thriller, the normally restrained functionary proposed: “I am hopeful that you may have available a suitable fellow who could take it up and make a real job of it, i.e., to get at the source of supply which is after all always the real target.” But a foreign consulate presents a delicate target, and Ronald Howe, the deputy commissioner in charge of relations with foreign police forces, proceeded via the more discreet French
police judiciaire
instead of using the more adventurous types demanded by Peppiatt. Howe had also been relieved to learn that the unfortunate Hans Adler, the Austrian counterfeit expert whose services had been disdained by Peppiatt before the war, had survived in the Netherlands. Howe noted, “He will be a most useful contact from our point of view.” Better late than never.