Krueger's Men (24 page)

59 “vital to us if we weren’t to be closed up”: Lovell, 24.

60 only one known to have been put in writing: Bloom, “Uncle Sam,” 352, 356.

61 to stay on the lookout for counterfeit dollars: Ulius L. A. Moss, in an OSS interoffice memo to Major David Bruce, October 13, 1942, forwarded the request of the U.S. Secret Service to “get all reports possible on enemy counterfeiting of occupied or other nations’ currency.… The Secret Service fears an eventual flood of counterfeit American money.” NARA, RG 226. Major David K. E. Bruce, then director of the U.S. Secret Intelligence Branch, later director of the OSS in London, was a political patrician who later became a distinguished postwar American ambassador to France, West Germany, and London.

61 Copeland, who believed that this great: Bloom, ibid., 352–53.

61 an Army Air Force major: Major Clifford H. Pangburn, letter to Major General William J. Donovan, July 6, 1944, accompanied by memo “General Plan for Morale Operations Against Germans as Holders of Cash,” NARA, RG 226, M-1499B, reel 221, frame 32,043 (first located by Paul Wolf).

61 Reddick, the master printer, could feel the wartime pressure: Bloom, ibid.

C
HAPTER
5: T
HE
C
OUNTERFEIT
C
HAIN OF
C
OMMAND

63 “the greatest counterfeiter the world has ever known”: “I Was the World’s Greatest Counterfeiter,” by Bernhard Kruger (
sic
) as told to Murray Teigh Bloom. Bloom, an experienced reporter and World War II counterintelligence agent, met with Krueger more than a decade after the war, having already made himself an expert on counterfeiting and published a minor classic on the subject,
Money of Their Own.
He interviewed Krueger and chose to turn his notes into a first-person account under Krueger’s name for greater impact (and tabloid sales). Later Bloom posed more detailed questions, to which Krueger replied in German. They were never cast into narrative form, but the two kept up an extensive correspondence in the hope of making a film. Bloom has kindly allowed me to view and quote from the surviving fragments, which cover Operation Bernhard during only the first year of Krueger’s involvement. These have been translated by Ingeborg Wolfe and are referred to in these notes as “Krueger fragments,” with the pagination referring to the copies of the original German pages in the author’s possession.

63 described him as slightly bowlegged: PRO WO 354/26, Judge Advocate General’s Office, Military Deputy’s Department: War Crimes, Europe, Card Indexes of Perpetrators, Witnesses and Accused, Second World War, Box: Kruber-Lamschultz, 1942–48.

63 peered into the camera for his mug shot: PRO WO 309/1772, Judge Advocate General’s Office, British Army of the Rhine War Crimes Group (North West Europe) and predecessors: Registered Files (BAOR and other series) Detention Report 208 449, Bernhard Friedrich Walter Krueger. He was arrested at 8 p.m., November 26, 1946, and photographed three months later.

63 “It was technical perfection”: Krueger interview filmed in 1984 and included in the German television documentary
Der Fluch des Toplitzsees
(The Curse of Lake Toplitz), broadcast on ZDF in 2003.

63–64 Born November 26, 1904: Krueger’s birthplace was Riesa, Germany, and his parents were Franz and Wella Marx Krueger. NARA, RG 242, A-3343-SSO, roll 217A. Krueger’s SS number was 15,249, his NSDAP number 528,739. His thick SS file is devoted almost entirely to disciplinary action involving a drunken episode at a restaurant in Stettin in 1938 (
Lebenslauf
), which did not impede his rapid promotion in a service known for its brawlers and sadists.

64 constructing locomotives out of concrete: Speer,
Inside the Third Reich: Memoirs,
268.

64 By profession an engineer of complex textile machinery: The details of Krueger’s career — broadly confirmed in Bloom’s articles — are contained in a dossier on Krueger compiled immediately after the war by United States, British, and French intelligence as part of a fuller description of Operation Bernhard. Judging by the spelling and military abbreviations, the dossier was written by an American official attached to Supreme Allied Headquarters in Paris, but the most complete version was located in the Swiss Federal Archives in Bern: E4323 (A) 1988 Band 73 F11.1 (Appendix “A 1”). A slightly shortened version on a different typewriter is in the U.S. National Archives (RG 260, box 451, 950.31) and carries an anonymous handwritten notation “From the report of Capt. [S. C.] Michel, French Army.” Michel was probably with the U.S. Counterintelligence Corps detachment of the 80th U.S. Infantry Division, which is credited in the postwar report with doing “elaborate work” on the investigation.

65 forwarding packets of French identity cards: Krueger to Naujocks, 23 November 1940, NARA, RG 226, entry 155, box 2, folder 13.

65 obtain and forge passports and other identity papers: “German Police–Germany,” NARA, RG 65, Class File 65-47826-294, section 12 (4 of 4), box 50 (declassified in 2003). In Schellenberg’s memoir,
The Labyrinth,
364, he tells the story of an Allied interrogator who refused to believe he had never visited the United States, showing Schellenberg an American passport in his name, complete with visas. Stumped momentarily, Schellenberg remembered that Krueger’s technical department had presented him with this fake passport in 1943 as its first perfect product.

65 designated Section VIF4: Kahn,
Hitler’s Spies,
262.

65 visited military intelligence posts in unoccupied France: SFA, E4323 (A), “Part I,” p. 3.

65 Krueger was summoned “on an urgent matter”: Krueger fragments, 1.

66 The seventh child of a Saarbrücken piano manufacturer: Background and description of Schellenberg from Kahn, 255–61.

66 “the better type of people”: Schellenberg,
Labyrinth,
3.

66 foreign economic intelligence flowed in: Kahn, 92.

66 Its arrest wish-list of 2,820 individuals indicated: Schellenberg,
Invasion 1940,
xxvi, 175.

67 Schellenberg’s office, although deeply carpeted: Schellenberg,
Labyrinth,
214–15.

68 As Krueger entered Schellenberg’s lair: Krueger fragments, 1–5, describing the encounter and exchanges with Schellenberg.

69 Far from being elated: Krueger fragments, 6–10, 36–38. Krueger, “I Was the World’s Greatest Counterfeiter,” part 1, June 8, 1958.

70 “the narrow gate between duty and crime”: Krueger, 1984 ZDF interview.

71 he visited Delbrückstrasse 6A: Krueger fragments, 49–52.

72 In Himmler’s personal daybook: Himmler,
Der Dienstkalender Heinrich Himmlers 1941/2.

73 ceaselessly engaged in bureaucratic empire-building: Kershaw, 313.

74 He loved imaginative but untried projects: Speer, 144.

74 Cash was also donated: Baron Kurt von Schröder, letter to Himmler, submitted in evidence at the Nuremberg trials; copy of newspaper account of the “Friendly Circle” forwarded to the chief of the U.S. Secret Service, NARA, RG 87, box 69, folder 109, Germany through 1937.

75 had to beg for a loan of 80,000 marks: Höhne, 421–22.

75 yielded only 178 million reichsmarks: Milton Goldin, “Financing the SS,” 9. (Reichsmarks are converted at the official — and notional, as well as artificially high — rate of 40 U.S. cents.) See also Taylor and Shaw, 202, 218.

76 “wasted as a result of unrealistic fantasies”: Schellenberg,
Labyrinth,
367–69.

76 Goering’s Luftwaffe was not even able to resupply: Reitlinger, 233.

76 the perfect cover for the scheme: In his extensive postwar interrogation, Schellenberg barely mentioned the plan to dump the counterfeits on Britain and concentrated on how they were otherwise employed. NARA, RG 226, Schellenberg OSS IRR Personal XE001752, Appendix VII, “Financial Affairs of the RSHA and Amt VI.”

77 The following directive soon went out: A photo of the original is published opposite p. 82 in Mader,
Banditenschatz.
Mader, who had contacts with the propaganda and security services of the former German Democratic Republic, wrote the book to draw attention to Nazi criminals — former forgers, including Krueger — still living in the West. He cites many Western publications, but to make his book more credible, the Stasi presumably supplied him with some Nazi documents in its files, and this would have been one of them.

77 signed by Lieutenant Colonel Hermann Dörner: Although the name
Dörner
is illegible in the printed copy of the order, it was certainly signed by Obersturmbannfuehrer (Lieutenant Colonel) Hermann Dörner, chief of the technical division of foreign intelligence. SFA, E4323(A) 1988 Band 73, F11. See Part IV, “List of Personalities.” See also Burke,
Nazi Counterfeiting,
7; Sem and Mayer,
Report on Forgery in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp,
9. The latter is based on extensive interviews by Czech police immediately after the war.

78 two more appeals were circulated: Mader, 214.

C
HAPTER
6: I
NGATHERING OF THE
E
XILES

80 Avraham Krakowski, a pious young Polish accountant: Krakowski and Finkel,
Counterfeit Lives,
122; Krakowski, author interview, Brooklyn, N.Y., November 10, 2002.

81 Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka:
Auschwitz: Inside the Nazi State,
part 2, Laurence Rees, writer/producer, aired on the Public Broadcasting Service in 2005.

81 “Keep in mind”: Suchomel in Claude Lanzmann’s film
Shoah
(1985).

81 the Nazis’ political opponents: See entries in Taylor and Shaw, under
concentration camps, Pohl, SS, Wannsee.
See also Sofsky,
Order of Terror,
28–30.

81 A punishment camp for Communists and Social Democrats: Sachsenhausen details here and below are from Sofsky, 50; Taylor and Shaw, under
Sachsenhausen;
Burger,
Des Teufels Werkstatt,
originally published in Prague as
Ďáblova Dílna,
Prague, 1991, reprinted by Verlag Neues Leben GmbH, Berlin, 2001, 115. (Further references to Burger are to this 2001 edition.) Burger was himself a prisoner, who arrived at Block 19 in 1944; his book also drew on details, maps, and archival photographs in Mader,
Banditenschatz.
The level of assistance offered to Burger by Communist authorities is uncertain. The camp’s few remaining buildings, now part of the Brandenburg state museum system, have their own curator-historian to do research and to guide tourists, schoolchildren, and, as was evident during a visit by the author in 2004, soldiers of the German
Bundeswehr,
lest they forget. An imposing memorial building and a monument to the murdered Russian soldiers were erected by the German Democratic Republic before German reunification. Both were virtually deserted on that visit in favor of a lively and more comprehensive exhibit of camp life in a barracks reconstructed in the style of those occupied by the prisoners of Operation Bernhard and containing some of its artifacts. The dispute between these rival versions of history will no doubt persist, and the camp itself will continue to be a cynosure for the memories, myths, and horrible fascination of this dark period in history. On December 14, 2005, two drunken women, ages eighteen and nineteen, were arrested at the Oranienburg station for giving the Nazi salute and singing a neo-Nazi song as a foreign tour group alighted from the train. The nineteen-year-old, a repeat offender, was sentenced to ten months in prison, the other to a symbolic few hours under Germany’s strict laws banning Nazi symbols.
Deutsche Welle,
December 14, 2005.
www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,1822224,00.html
.

82 Then he decreed that the prisoners’ output: Georg,
Die wirtschaftlichen Unternehmungen der SS,
111, quoted in Höhne, 390.

82 The greatest success proved to be: Sofsky, 177.

83 Another slave group produced a fuselage: R. Antelme,
Das Menschengeschlecht
(Munich, 1987), quoted in Sofsky, 173.

83 each prisoner would yield profits: Quoted in Eizenstat,
Imperfect Justice,
207. A note on p. 374 attributes the statement to “SS Profitability Calculation Regarding Use of Prisoners in Concentration Camps,” quoted in Bernd Klewitz,
Die Arbeitssklaven der Dynamit Nobel
(The Slave Workers of Dynamit Nobel) (Schalksmühle, Germany: Engelbrecht, 1986). The document is also in the U.S. National Archives.

83 At Dora-Mittelbau near Nordhausen: Eizenstat, 205 and note, 374, citing “Quotations Showing Nazi-German Mentality,” U.S. Army document for the Dachau war crimes trial of Kurt Andrae et al., August 7, 1947, in the Friedmann Collection at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C.

83 During the first six months, almost 3,000: Sofsky, 180.

83 more than 3,000 in this
Kommando Speer:
ibid., 176.

83–84 complained that mere extermination wasted: Reitlinger, 259.

85 suitable guards for Block 19: Krueger fragments, 3–5. Krueger recalled his superior as an SS-Gruppenleiter (lieutenant general) named Faustin, but there is no such officer in SS records.

86 Next Krueger summoned August Petrich: Ibid., 25ff.

86 Krueger paused to consider the inherent contradiction: Ibid., 25–35. This description of Krueger’s selection process is also in the same passage.

89 The prisoners’ recollections of Krueger’s selections: Nachtstern and Arntzen,
Falskmynter i blokk 19.
Translated privately, 32–33, 43–50. This prison memoir is based on the notes typed by Nachtstern’s wife as he told her his story shortly after he returned home. A copy of this draft — the original is still in possession of his daughter Sidsel — was then turned over to Ragnar Arntzen, a Norwegian journalist who edited and polished it for publication. Written so soon after the event, Nachtstern’s memoir is probably the most reliable and comprehensive of the prisoners’ memoirs. It is quoted here and elsewhere in this book by permission of Nachtstern’s son, Jan Howard Nachtstern.

89 part of the Hollerith classification system: See Edwin Black,
IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation
(New York: Crown, 2001). These Hollerith numbers were also the basis of the infamous tattoos on the arms of all Auschwitz inmates. Black presents new evidence of the link between IBM and Auschwitz in the German paperback edition of his book. The evidence has also been posted on the Internet at the History News Network and, Black promised, would be included in future English-language editions of his book.