One of Schellenberg’s partners in his effort to secret wealth was none other than Count Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish Red Cross dignitary who thus far holds a respected place in the world’s history books. He was dispatched by the U.N. in 1948 to Jerusalem to help broker a peace agreement during the First Arab-Israeli War. Israelis promptly denounced him as a Nazi collaborator, and gunmen executed him in a roadside ambush. Was the killing retribution for the Count’s wartime collaboration with Schellenberg and perhaps others yet unknown? A new and important avenue of historical exploration beckons. New York Times
Chapter 11
“If, in any shape or form, Dr. Kempner should be mentioned as a protector of Becher’s, the author and publisher [Sie und Er] will have to bear the consequences.”
— Robert Kempner, American Prosecutorial Team, Nuremberg
Kurt Becher—The Only White Sheep in the Black SS?
Like so many of his comrades, SS Standartenführer (Colonel) Kurt Andreas Ernst Becher was feeling the heat in early May 1945. Spring had arrived weeks earlier, but the rising mercury was not what was bothering him. In fact, Austria was still in the grip of a cold snap and deep snow blanketed much of the country. The uncomfortable warmth Becher was experiencing came from within. Some who knew him would call it a guilty conscience. Was his inner voice tugging at him, reminding him of deeds wished undone? Perhaps. Others might hold his growing level of stress was the result of a clear conscience that only wished more could have been done to save the trapped souls under his charge.
The prospect of unconditional surrender was looming. Soon, very soon, he would have to answer to Allied and Jewish authorities for his wartime activities. The instinctive desire for self-preservation in every human being had been guiding Becher’s every move for months.
Constructing an alibi-strewn dossier and an image of a savior of Jews became one of the immediate priorities of his life.
The only question now was whether he could pull it off.
The Allies were mopping up the last remaining pockets of organized German resistance when Kurt Becher drove up to the ominous gates of Mauthausen, a concentration camp in Austria. He had a specific purpose in mind for the visit; he only hoped he was not too late. Once inside he sought out Dr. Nicholaus Mosche Schweiger, an inmate who had lived within the barbed wire enclosure for a long while. Dr. Schweiger had been a member of the Relief and Rescue Committee, an organization founded by Dr. Israel Rezsö (Rudolph) Kastner ostensibly to help European Jews escape the clutches of the Nazis. Some had slipped away to freedom; many more had not. Becher knew both Schweiger and Kastner well. Both had negotiated with him for Jewish lives during Becher’s tenure in Budapest.
Dressed in the distinctive black uniform of the SS, complete with tall black leather boots and a sidearm, Becher approached Schweiger. The sight of an SS officer was anything but uncommon in occupied countries; the only uncomfortable consideration was the purpose of the visit. Rarely did the SS make social calls. To Schweiger’s surprise, this meeting proved the exception. The Mauthausen mission was to free Schweiger. Becher’s benefaction was delivered with one eye on his ambiguous past, the other on an uncertain future. The doctor accompanied Becher to his car where, to his surprise, several boxes of gold and jewels were presented to him. Freedom, even in May 1945, came with a price: the safe transport of the fortune to Dr. Kastner in Switzerland. Becher also asked Schweiger to write out and sign a letter attesting to the fact that his wartime activities had permitted large numbers of Jews to escape from Hungary, and thus certain death. Before they parted Becher asked Schweiger for one last request: Would he send a card to his Budapest lover, Graefin Hermine, so she would know that he was still alive? “Since you have been in a concentration camp for such a long time, maybe you don’t remember how to treat a lady,” he added. “Don’t forget to send flowers!” His Budapest whore would get good wishes and flowers; his wife and child received bombs and starvation rations in war-torn Berlin.1
When Schweiger agreed with his terms, Becher left Mauthausen and the pair drove back to his house in Weissenbach, a few miles north of Altaussee. He was there when the war officially ended. As an SS officer he knew he was subject to automatic arrest. He was not disappointed. On May 18, 1945, several CIC agents arrived in Weissenbach and apprehended Becher and a few of his comrades without incident. All were hauled away to Internment Camp No. 5. The agents fanned out and searched the premises. One entered a bedroom. When he knelt down and looked under a bed his jaw probably dropped open in disbelief. Like fiery dragons of myth and lore, Becher had been sleeping atop a king’s ransom. The agent pulled out solid gold in the form of four plates and eight bars weighing more than twenty pounds. Platinum plates, platinum wrist watches, two hundred and six diamond rings, diamond earrings, and bracelets and much more. The whole cache required four pages just to inventory. Dr. Schweiger, who had remained behind when Becher was sent away, told the agents “he was liberated from a concentration camp by Becher.” He, too, was in possession of a large amount of English pound notes. All of the seized valuables were turned over to Lieutenant Colonel Homer Keller, Property Control Officer of Salzburg. The loot was assigned the property number S3.3002 SA. In his report, which was filed in Bad Ischl, the arresting CIC agent noted that “Becher was in charge of transferring Jewish goods from Hungary … [he] is a very dangerous subject in this respect.”2
On May 20, Becher was transferred to Ried, and three days later entered the prominent Natternberg Prisoner of War Camp in Bavaria, halfway between Passau and Regensburg. Weeks would pass before the obligatory interrogation all SS members endured. To his discomfort and dismay he was one of the higher ranking SS officers in custody there, a prominence he could have done without. Somehow he had to turn that to advantage, and he set about doing so right away. He made sure his military bearing was always perfect, his person always well groomed, and his manner always polite. Somehow he managed to keep his fitted uniforms, made in all probability by a Jewish tailor in Budapest. Throughout his stay in Natternberg, Becher steadfastly maintained to anyone who would listen that he had labored ceaselessly to save Hungarian Jews. Even the morally self-assured American guards grew to admire him. On one occasion they even allowed him to jump into their jeep for the short ride to Deggendorf, where he dined with them in the Officer’s Mess. Salutes were occasionally exchanged. Something was seriously wrong in Natternberg.3
One month after his capture CIC agents located another large cache linked to Becher in the nearby Austrian village of Bad Ischl. The Americans had arrived just in time to prevent the treasure from being appropriated by an unnamed French officer allegedly assigned to George Patton’s Third Army. The fortune consisted of several hundred gold coins, including 132 Swiss 20-franc pieces. Other rumors about Becher also bubbled to the surface. According to Hungarian mechanic Joseph Lakatos, the bulk of the Manfred Weiss art treasures (probably looted by Becher) were stored in the underground tunnels at Redl Zipf, the same location the Nazi counterfeiters had used to hide some of their illegal product at war’s end. Hungarian government officials in Budapest and the Hungarian Minister for Foreign Affairs made a request for competent American authorities to investigate the report.4
On July 5, 1945, investigators finally got around to interrogating Kurt Becher. He knew he could not lie about the basic and verifiable facts of his existence. So he did not. Yes, he admitted, he was born in Hamburg in 1909, and he was a member of the SS and of the Nazi party. Yes, he had served on the Russian Front and during the last year of the war had been stationed in Budapest, Hungary, where his duties including acting as a purchasing agent. And what about his actions there, asked the agents? His association with the SS or NSDAP seemed of little concern to them. Their focus instead was his behavior in Budapest and how he came into possession of so much wealth—at best, a poorly understood matter. The Americans, as Becher grasped it, were unclear about his war record. The proud SS man stood to his guns, stuck out his chin, and proudly recounted his wartime activi
ties in Hungary. Or at least some of them.
His only noteworthy position in Budapest, he declared, was his position on the staff of SS Sturmscharführer (Major) Dieter Wisliceny, deputy to Adolf Eichmann, from March until December 1944. But their activities had nothing to do with mine, he adamantly insisted. Thousands of Jews were alive today because he had arranged for them to flee Hungary for Switzerland and Portugal. He had been in contact in St. Gall with Saly Mayer, the head of the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities, and Roswell McClelland, an American diplomat representing the War Refugee Board and the personal representative of the now-deceased President Franklin Roosevelt. The entire purpose of these missions was humanitarian, explained Becher. The former SS officer showed his moxie by producing a copy of the letter from Dr. Schweiger documenting his testimony. And the wealth discovered in his home after the war? He had no explanation for how the gold and jewels ended up beneath a bed in the house he occupied. After all, many people came and went during the war’s final days.5
Becher continued telling anyone who would listen—and even some who would not—how well he had treated Hungary’s Jews. It was the same boastful story in Natternberg, and later in Budapest and eventually, Nuremberg. His jailers and some of the Germans in custody gave him the nickname “Juden-Becher.” Some unnamed American went even further. Becher had stood up to the Nazi-sponsored Holocaust in the face of substantial personal danger. He was, claimed the soldier, “the only white sheep in the black SS.” But Becher’s SS colleagues knew better. SS Standartenführer (Colonel) Eugen Steímle, a former power figure in the Einsatzgruppen squad (and thus a prominent war criminal), laughed when he heard of Becher’s new nickname. “When it became known in Nuremberg that the Americans called Becher the only white sheep in the black SS,” he said, “a tremendous roar broke out in the cells of the Nuremberg prison, it seemed so grotesque!” Few German prisoners were about to inform the Americans about the man now in their custody. Ultimately they were all in the same boat, and who knew what information Heinrich Himmler’s trusted former officer had up his sleeve about their own activities? Silence was the safer course of action.6
On October 3, 1945, Becher was transferred to the camp in Oberursel, near Frankfurt. A few weeks earlier American authorities had sent a notice to the Hungarians that Becher was in custody and that he may be of interest to them. To Becher’s dismay they took the Americans up on the offer and he was shipped to Budapest on November 3, 1945. The Hungarians had a different take on the Hamburg native than his Allied jailers and they moved against him with breathtaking speed. Before the end of the year he was sitting in the dock for war crimes. Unfortunately little is known about this trial. The Communists purged their archives in 1948 and again in 1956. As a result, much of the internal documentation of Hungary’s World War II history is simply no more. We do know that Becher continued denying having anything to do with the killing of Jews. In an effort to cleanse himself through association he sung the praises of his relationship with Dr. Wilhelm Billitz, the former Manfred Weiss manager who had died a mysterious death in 1945 while in Becher’s company in Vienna. “I had a close men’s friendship,” he testified, “and therefore I was attacked by Hungarian as well as German persons of high standing ….In connection with this, I should mention that, because of this, personal and social connections with other Hungarians and Germans were ruined.” The story was a bald-faced lie spun from whole cloth. Becher had no social relationship with Billitz and had never even seen the inside of his home. Mrs. Elisabeth Billitz testified she only saw Becher twice—once in her husband’s office, and again when she passed him on the stairs leading up to the factory office. Her husband, she explained, never spoke of Becher in a way that led her to believe an enduring friendship existed. What Becher did not reveal was just as telling. Not a word was mentioned about how Billitz had tried to sabotage the dismantling of the Weiss factory or that he had been forced at the point of a gun to accompany Becher to Vienna. Without these key bits of testimony Billitz looked like a collaborator in the eyes of many Hungarians. Of course Becher had contact with a large number of Jews—that was unavoidable given his duties as Himmler’s industrial thief. But the story dovetailed nicely with the public relations framework of lies Becher constructed around himself. Apparently the Hungarian judges decided they did not have enough evidence to convict Becher.7
Although it was not his intent (and he would not have cared anyway) Becher’s claim of a close friendship with Billitz during his trial in Hungary hurt both the image of the dead man and the living widow. Elisabeth Billitz was the one who suffered as a result. Many now looked upon her as the wife of a traitor. Following the war the she took a job with the Hungarian Equestrian Organization. She lost her work and was questioned extensively by the police when her employer learned she had met Kurt Becher and the Eichmanns during the war. Later, when she tried to scrape out a living driving a taxi the communists took away her driver’s license. Not until 1956 was she left alone to earn a meager existence as an insurance agent. She knew her husband had accumulated a substantial bank account in Switzerland before the war with money earned through a partnership he had set up with a pipe-making factory in South America. The information for the account was with her husband in his briefcase when he left with Becher for Vienna. She never gained access to the account. Perhaps the money still resides in a Swiss bank account; or, more likely, someone found the information inside Billitz’s briefcase and took possession of it.8
Kurt Becher narrowly escaped the hangman’s noose in Hungary, but his problems were only beginning. As he soon learned and probably long suspected, the Allies were now beginning to consider him a war criminal. The Americans had clamored for his return from Budapest to Oberursel so they could prepare a case against him for crimes committed at the Melk Concentration camp, a sub-camp at Mauthausen. Although Melk was not a death camp, it was a slave labor operation that resulted in the death of several thousand people. A large, new and advanced gas chamber and crematorium were built there in early 1945—stark evidence the Nazis intended to turn the camp into an extermination facility; only the end of the war prevented their use. Becher later claimed he did not visit Melk until the end of April 1945. He also insisted that the first concentration camp he witnessed on the inside was Bergen-Belsen on April 10, 1945. It looked like he would have an opportunity to present his case when the Americans got their hands on him again on January 8, 1946, when the Hungarians shipped Becher back to Oberursel.
There, he was grilled over a period of two weeks by Lieutenant Richard A. Gutman, an Allied interrogator who quickly grew to despise the former SS officer. “When Becher was brought to me the first time, I only knew that he was an imprisoned SS-Officer,” explained Gutman. “Only as such did he interest me.” On March 26, Gutman had Becher transported via jeep to the jail at Nuremberg. “During the trip, he suddenly sprang to attention, while seated, and addressed me by my military rank, and thanked me respectfully for [agreeing to] keep him in isolation,” recalled Gutman, who had inserted Becher in isolation because he simply could no longer stand his constant bragging about how many Jews he had saved. According to Gutman, Becher told him that the “isolation” had given him the opportunity to think about all the horrible events that had taken place. Gutman remembered the moment clearly. It was “an illustration of the fact that people like Becher either attack you or squirm at your feet. It is the Master-Slave concept; when they know that they are no longer the master, they act like a slave—at least as long as it is to their advantage.”9
The Becher case, in particular, bothered Gutman for the rest of his days. As he later put it,
After several interrogations and in Becher’s writings of his life’s story, I learned about his background and close relationships with Himmler and Eichmann, and about his activities in Hungary. I remember the interrogations (which lasted 2 weeks) and many details very well, because they were among the most important of my charge. They never satisfied me, because I could not prove my inner con
viction that this man was a war criminal. I have to underscore that the interrogations were only short interviews, to determine whether the prisoner was of interest for the International Military Court in Nuremberg. It was not my duty to investigate the war criminals, for which I didn’t have the necessary staff, nor the time and equipment. But in all those years since 1946, I have questioned myself, if I didn’t neglect bringing a notorious criminal to justice.10
Matters continued to look bleak for Becher when in late April 1946 the Americans prepared “List Number 8,” an updated accounting of those men the United States considered to be war criminals. Kurt Becher’s name was prominent on the register, a man noted as being “wanted by the United States for murder.” The American Army did not place someone on a list of war criminals for murder without careful consideration and just cause. The prosecution of someone in a concentration camp court case was a very serious matter. Curiously, Becher was added to the list after he was interrogated repeatedly by Lieutenant Gutman, who specifically recollected that he was not sure whether Becher was a war criminal or not. If Gutman did not recommend Becher for indictment, who did? We don’t know. We do know that a lack of personnel, the general chaotic situation in postwar Europe, and the ongoing Nuremberg trials of the major war criminals made it difficult to move against second or third tier men like Becher. And so he and hundreds more like him sat in custody awaiting their turn at the bar of justice.
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