by Philip Kerr
“You haven’t finished telling me why I’m being naïve about Max Merten. Why would Merten go along with a scheme like the one you’re suggesting? Why would he risk going to prison for the rest of his life?”
“He may be in on the conspiracy, or not. I’m still unsure of how far his complicity in the scheme goes. But there’s certainly no risk of him spending the rest of his life behind bars. If you were a real insurance man you’d price that risk at next to zero. And my explanation would once have been simple enough for anyone to understand. But nothing about this whole affair is simple anymore. Not since the Treaty of Rome was signed.”
“You’ll have to explain how the EEC is the least bit relevant, Rahel.”
“Would it surprise you to learn that the person who signed the Treaty of Rome with Konrad Adenauer was Professor Walter Hallstein?”
“That name rings a bell. I seem to remember Schramma mentioning him back in Munich.”
“Hallstein was a member of several Nazi organizations and, after the war, a close business associate of Max Merten. Walter Hallstein will be the first president of the commission of the European Economic Community.”
“I still don’t see how this is relevant.”
Rahel Eskenazi smiled. “I told you this was complicated. Sometimes I’m not even sure I understand it all myself. And I haven’t even started. You see, Greece has already applied to join the new EEC. However, my German sources tell me that Adenauer and Hallstein will certainly veto Greece’s application unless Max Merten is released. Meanwhile my Greek sources tell me that Greece will defy them and put Merten on trial regardless, but that following his conviction and sentence he will be sent back to Germany before serving any time. In return for his freedom and a general amnesty for other Germans, Adenauer and Hallstein will not only approve and fast-track the Greek application for membership in the EEC, but they will also approve a two-hundred-million-dollar loan to Greece by the German central bank. A loan Greece does not expect to have to repay. Although I’m not so sure the Germans think that. It’s their belief that membership in the EEC will be more than enough compensation. You’ve no idea how financially advantageous this new economic community can be to all who are in the club. But especially Germany. No one stands to benefit as much as your country. Or to suffer as badly as Greece if Germany turns its back on her. What, for instance, do you think would happen to all that valuable tobacco that Greece exports to Germany?”
The bandit queen finished her whiskey and snapped her fingers for two more like one who was used to being obeyed. A former military colonel, she’d said. I didn’t doubt it. She finished one cigarette, lit another, and leaned back in her armchair. Her arms were almost the same color as the mahogany woodwork and probably just as strong. Easy enough to imagine her fighting Arabs, I thought.
“You may think you’ve done a good deed by handing Merten over to the Greek authorities,” she said, “but I’m afraid it’s our considered opinion that he always planned to be caught.”
“But what about Brunner? You’re forgetting he killed three people in pursuit of that gold.”
“I doubt anyone in the BND expected Brunner to put in an appearance down here. That was where the plan went badly wrong, as plans often do. As for the gold itself, I seriously doubt there was ever more than a million dollars’ worth of gold on that boat. A half share of a million dollars is not chump change. Certainly enough to interest a rat like Alois Brunner. But it’s nothing like the hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth that was sent back to Germany in 1943. It was one thing to steal from the Jews but tell me, honestly, as a man who used to be a detective with Kripo, do you think the likes of Eichmann, Brunner, and Merten would ever have had the courage to steal from the SS? Those who did and were caught risked being sent to the camps themselves. Isn’t that so?”
“Now you come to mention it, that does sound a little unlikely.”
“Take my word for it, this whole thing was a put-up job designed to mislead the Greek government into thinking the West Germans don’t have a single ounce of that gold, that it really is lying on the bottom of the Aegean Sea in some secret location that only Max Merten knows about. And that there’s no point in asking the Germans for the gold back because they know nothing of its whereabouts. Neat, wouldn’t you say?”
“If it’s true.”
“I don’t suppose we’ll ever be able to prove any of this. But we might hurt a few of the principal players. Adenauer’s state secretary Hans Globke, for example. Yes, we might make some trouble for him. It was Globke who promulgated the Nuremberg Laws, and who was the most capable and efficient official of the Nazi Ministry of the Interior. His participation in the so-called Reich Citizenship Law is a similarly irrefutable fact. Think of that for a minute, Christof. One of Hitler’s leading Jew murderers has a hand on the helm of the West German state. He is without doubt the prolonged arm of the chancellor and his most intimate confidant. But worse, this means that when Adenauer takes a holiday, Globke becomes the de facto federal chancellor of Germany and the nearest thing to Martin Bormann that there exists today. Which brings me to the question I wanted to ask you. Are you going back to Munich now?”
“Yes.”
“Then my question is this: When you get back to Germany, when you’re ready, will you help us get Hans Globke?”
“What do you mean by ‘get’? Don’t you mean murder? There’s a strong rumor your people ran down and killed Globke’s Nazi boss Wilhelm Stuckart in 1953.”
“I mean get by any means necessary.”
“I don’t know why you think I can help get a man like that, and in that way.”
“I’m asking because I sense in you the need to do something to atone for your country’s sins. For your own, perhaps. I don’t know but I think that’s why you helped Lieutenant Leventis to get Max Merten, isn’t it? Because you have a conscience about what happened here?”
The next round of drinks arrived and the bandit queen snatched one of the glasses off the tray and started drinking it before the other was even on the table. But she waited until the waiter was gone before she continued speaking:
“I know that’s an emotive word, ‘atonement.’ In Judaism this means the process of causing a transgression against God to be forgiven or pardoned. So perhaps it’s blasphemous of me to take it upon myself to offer you that chance, Christof. But that’s exactly what I’m doing. A chance to do something good with what’s left of your life. Israelis and Jews—there are plenty of them I can get to work for the Institute. None with the experience I need. What I really need are a few Germans who aren’t Jews. Germans with a conscience. Germans like you who are in respectable jobs, and who have some background in intelligence. That’s you, isn’t it? You’re not quite as innocent about these things as you like to pretend.”
I nodded. “It’s a long time since I felt innocent about anything.”
“Then take it from one who knows all about collective guilt. I’m a Jew. We’ve been paying for the death of Jesus Christ for two thousand years. Well, I certainly don’t believe we could or should even try to atone for that particular fairy story. But I do believe that an individual can help to atone for something that happened not much more than a decade ago. An individual like you, perhaps. Someone who could help to influence the future of his own country and the new moral order for the better.”
“Those are grand words for a small man like me.”
“Make them yours, Christof.”
“You really think Max Merten will walk free?”
“Not today. But before the end of the year, yes, I’m more or less certain of it.”
I thought for a moment. It’s not unusual for intelligent people to end up working in intelligence; some of them are very intelligent indeed; but I was struck by the bandit queen’s great perception—by the way she seemed to see straight through the hard carapace to the part of me that was a man with a vestigial
conscience. It was almost as if somehow this Israeli spy chief had, like some Hebrew prophet, managed to spy into the very depths of my soul. I answered her carefully before shaking her hand again.
“I’m not sure how I can help you get Hans Globke. But I think I can help you get someone else.”
* * *
• • •
I CAUGHT A TAXI up the Acropolis, to see the Parthenon up close and touch it as I might have touched a valuable holy icon. After all the tea towel prints and plaster model copies of the temple I’d seen I hadn’t expected the real thing to be as impressive as it turned out to be. Had it been as refined a piece of architecture to those poor ghosts the ancient Athenians as it was to us living mortals now? I couldn’t see how not—how it wouldn’t always have been viewed as one of the premier works of man and no less of an achievement now because it was substantially ruined, perhaps more of an achievement, for did this not remind every man of his own temporal fragility? There’s nothing like a Greek ruin to make you feel like reading one of those old books by Plato or Aristotle.
Built as the temple of Athena, it became a Christian church in the fifth century AD and, for a while, in spite of its amorphous, pagan origins, it was even an important destination for Christian pilgrims. I wondered if they’d really cared all that much what God was called. Or what the hymns were, silent now, once sung by those high priestesses of Athena. Surely what mattered to them more was this perfect celebration of the immortals. It was certainly what mattered to me. I was hearing voices all right.
Following the Ottoman conquest, this anonymous stone glory was a mosque for more than two hundred years, until 1687, when it was heavily fortified and turned into a gunpowder magazine with the result that the Venetians turned up and bombarded it with cannon, and the Parthenon was partly destroyed, perhaps the first sign of where science would one day lead us. But somehow it had survived all that. And since 1832 the Doric ruins had been the most important cultural site in Greece, which was why I was there now, I supposed, with an hour to kill before Garlopis took me to the airport, and feeling unexpectedly moved, like one of those Christian pilgrims, perhaps. There were plenty of tourists around, most of them Americans and Japanese from the real world of salaried salesmen and menu-making housewives, but I expect I was one of the few who were there who saw the front façade of the Parthenon and felt homesick for my real home, which was in Berlin. With neoclassical buildings such as the Brandenburg Gate, the New Guardhouse memorial, and the National Gallery, Berlin had more Greek revivals than the cult of Dionysus and knew more than one thing about destruction, too. By the time the Red Army had finished its own brutal pagan handiwork, the old island of Berlin and its Parthenon copies looked much more like the original than anyone except Stalin would ever have wished.
Walking quietly around and through this petrified forest of columns and the epic affirmation of what man was capable of, I could also reflect on perhaps the other major lesson of the place, which, at least for me, was that anything and everything could change, even something as great as the Parthenon.
And if that, then why not Bernie Gunther?
It seemed that when things from the past looked to every cynical eye as if they’d been irreparably destroyed they might yet have a future. A different future but, perhaps, a no less important one. Like Gunther, parts of the Parthenon still looked hopelessly beyond repair; the causeway leading up to the façade was a builder’s yard of fallen pediments, damaged metopes, and broken columns; perhaps the Parthenon would take as long to preserve and repair as it had ever taken to build. Longer, perhaps, since preservation always moves at a slower, more reverent pace than construction. But I decided you could either complain about the cultural vandalism of the Turks and the Venetians, hope that someone else better qualified would one day get around to fixing the place up a bit or, perhaps, you could find a crane, pick up some of the marble stones, and erect some scaffolding yourself.
My own hymns to love were probably forever silent now, but what of it? I was too old for all that malarkey anyway. Elli couldn’t have known it but in a way she’d spared me. Probably we’d spared each other.
And to mark where I had been and to testify to what I still had in me to accomplish, I needed only that place in the new moral order offered by the bandit queen, where a drifting ghost like me could feel like something real again and breathe the dream of true atonement.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
DR. MAX MERTEN was arrested in an Athens court during Arthur Meissner’s trial for war crimes and property pillage in the spring of 1943. Queen Frederica of Greece (herself a German) questioned Merten’s prosecution, asking if “this is the way Mr. District Attorney understands the development of German and Greek relations.” When he was held in Averoff Prison on remand, the West German government strenuously protested his arrest. Two years later, on February 11, 1959, Merten went to trial accused of murder, property pillage, gold coins expropriation, and other war crimes against Jews. The president of the court, one Colonel Kokoretsas, excluded the attorneys for the Jewish community of Salonika from presenting evidence in court; only individual Jewish plaintiffs were allowed to testify, thus diminishing the true scale of the crime against Greece’s Jews. Merten pleaded not guilty to all of the charges and his defense was paid for by the federal government of Germany. On March 5, 1959, Max Merten was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. After serving just eight months Merten was freed by Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis in a general amnesty on November 5, 1959. In March 1960, an “economic agreement” was signed between Greece and Germany stipulating the sum of just 115 million marks (about $26 million) to be paid as reparations. A laughable amount of money, given all that Greece had suffered. Germany also agreed to provide separate sums as “loans” to Greece. Max Merten returned to Germany, where he received substantial damages for the period he’d spent in jail. He provided written evidence during the Eichmann trial in 1960 although he did not attend, and he died in 1971 or 1976. He never returned to Greece.
After serving with the SS, ALOIS BRUNNER probably worked for German intelligence before traveling to Egypt in 1954, where he was an arms dealer. Later, he moved to Syria and may have worked for the Syrian intelligence services of Hafez al-Assad. The exact nature of his work is unknown. In 1954 he was condemned to death in absentia in France for war crimes committed at Drancy. In a 1985 interview with a German magazine called Bunte, in Damascus, Brunner was unrepentant about his work for the Nazis. The Israelis tried twice to kill him, and failed. As a result of a letter bomb in 1961, he lost an eye and the fingers on his left hand. He died in 2001 or 2010, depending on which source you believe. At the time of his death, he was the most wanted Nazi war criminal in the world. He was buried in Damascus.
DR. HANS GLOBKE gave evidence both for the prosecution and the defense at the Nuremberg Trials. He left office in 1963, following attempts by the federal government to influence the Eichmann trial; material that exonerated Globke was fed direct to the Eichmann prosecutors by the BND. Globke died in 1973 but not before he was honored by Konrad Adenauer with the War of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He remained an active adviser to Adenauer and the Christian Democratic Union right up to his death.
All of my information about MUNICH RE comes from the company’s own website which, to its enormous credit, makes no secret about the company’s wartime history. It states that Munich RE’s chairman in 1933, Kurt Schmitt, was appointed Reich Minister of Economics and, on the strength of his convictions, Alois Alzheimer joined the Nazi Party, the only other member of MRE’s board to do so. MRE did indeed insure the barracks and “operations” at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen. After the war, Schmitt and Alzheimer were taken into custody by the US military. Neither faced charges, although other board members were given prison sentences. Alois Alzheimer became chairman of MRE in 1950 and directed the company until 1968. If only all G
erman companies were as open about their pasts as MRE! As far as I am aware, the chairman of Munich MRE was no relation to the more famous Alois Alzheimer who gave his name to a type of presenile dementia.
In 1960 Der Spiegel published excerpts from Merten’s deposition to the German authorities, which claimed that various members of the Greek government and their relations were informers during the Nazi occupation and had been rewarded with businesses confiscated from Jews in Thessaloniki. Some of these same figures successfully sued Der Spiegel in 1963.
Following a coup in 1967, GREECE was ruled by the military—the so-called Regime of the Colonels—for a period of seven years. Thousands of communists were imprisoned or exiled to remote Greek islands. Many were tortured. After the restoration of democracy in 1975, Greece applied to join the EEC and successfully acceded in 1981. The country joined the Euro in 2001, having faked the figures required to qualify for entry; since then, the country has buckled under the weight of debts the European Central Bank seems unwilling to forgive.
The GOLD of Thessaloniki’s Jews has never been recovered. In 1945 vast quantities of Nazi gold were moved from the Reichsbank in Berlin to Switzerland for “safekeeping.” In a book called Nazi Gold (1984), by authors Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, it was estimated that this gold would be worth approximately ten billion dollars on today’s market. Of course, anyone who has seen the movie Kelly’s Heroes (1970) knows that the gold was stolen by Clint Eastwood and Telly Savalas.
In 2003 KONRAD ADENAUER was voted the greatest German of all time by viewers of German television station ZDF.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels have been national bestsellers and finalists for both the Shamus and Edgar awards. He is the recipient of the British Crime Writers’ Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction. As P. B. Kerr, he is the author of the young adult series Children of the Lamp. He lives in London.