by Jeff Sharlet
Such men are only a few of those whom Abram helped, and by no means the worst. There were Zapp and von Gienanth, there were “little Nazis” Abram championed for U.S. intelligence positions, and there were big ones: Baron Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler’s first foreign minister, and General Oswald Pohl, the last SS commander of the concentration camps, among them. For those beyond hope of blank-slate reinvention, Abram and his web of Christian cells pled medical mercy (von Neurath, sentenced to fifteen years for crimes against humanity, was released early in 1953; Abram took up his case upon learning from von Neurath’s daughter that her father, classified as a “Major War Criminal,” was receiving less than exemplary dental care in prison) or expediency (it was unjust, they felt, that Pohl, who while imprisoned by the Allies wrote a memoir called Credo: My Way to God—a Christ-besotted path that did not include acknowledging his role in mass murder—should be left wondering when he would be hanged).35
When occupation forces charged Abs with war crimes, he offered a novel defense. He did not deny what he had done for Hitler; he simply declared that he had done it for money, fascism be damned. He would gladly do as much for the Allies. And so he did, a task at which he so excelled that he would come to be known as the wizard of the “German Miracle.” His past was forgotten—a phrase that must be written in passive voice in order to suggest the gentle elision of history in the postwar years, undertaken by those eager to see a conservative German state rise from the ashes, a sober son of Hitler’s fatherland that would inherit the old man’s hatred for one radicalism but not his love of another.
When, in 1982, the Simon Wiesenthal Center delivered to the public a massive case detailing Abs’s crimes—among them the looting of the Third Reich’s riches on behalf of Nazis fleeing to South America—Abs, not long retired from his spot at the helm of the Deutsche Bank, must have felt a sense of annoyed déjà vu. Would the world condemn his financial machinations for the glory of the Reich? Then it must also reject those on behalf of capitalism’s easternmost bulwark in Europe, America’s most crucial ally in the Cold War, the Federal Republic of Germany: a nation in which the past became the crass obsession of “materialists,” those who preferred brute “memory” to more modern, more spiritual affairs.
“HUMILITY BEGETS POWER,” Congressman Clyde Doyle of California preached at a prayer meeting convened by Abram to consider the problem of “reconciliation” as V-Day approached. Let us take the gentleman from California at his word. Let us suppose that the politicians Abram gathered to dedicate themselves to the “suffering” of the German people—men such as Senator Alexander Wiley, the Wisconsin Republican who’d declare even Kennan’s muscular manifesto “panty-waist diplomacy”; Senator Homer Capehart, the Indianan who became the most vocal defender of former fascist “rights” after the war; Representative Walter Judd, the ex-missionary from Minnesota; and Representative O. K. Armstrong, a jolly Missourian who thrilled to the sound of Bavarian oompah bands—were true believers, humble and powerful and eager to be of service for their suffering brethren.36
Consider Capehart, a Hoosier who’d invented the mass-production jukebox. “The embodiment of Senator Snort with his vast paunch and triple chin, a large cigar fixed permanently in his round face, Senator Homer Earl Capehart was a cartoonist’s dream,” the South Bend Tribune would later eulogize him. Capehart was no Nazi; he was a Christian, a spiritual warrior, a red hunter, a vice president of Abram’s organization, and a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations. Like Abram, Capehart only wanted to soothe the heartache of the most broken.37 “The first issue” of the postwar situation, Capehart declared in a 1946 broadside against an unspecified “vicious clique” within the Truman administration, “has been and continues to be purely humanitarian.” Capehart spoke of the “tragedy in Germany”—the rubble of Berlin, the empty stomachs of Hamburg—with such pathos that one might be forgiven for mistaking which side he had been on. Subsequent generations of neo-Nazis have done just that, endlessly recycling his speeches. “Those who have been responsible for this deliberate destruction of the German state”—he meant not the policies of the Reich itself but Morgenthau’s short-lived plan to “pastoralize” the fatherland into a second infancy—“and this criminal mass starvation of the German people have been so zealous in their hatred that all other interests and concerns have been subordinated to this one obsession of revenge.”38
To Frankfurt and Berlin, Senator Snort and Abram and the Fellowship of the Senate dining room sent new suits, so that the Germans could dust themselves off and emerge from the rubble clothed like gentlemen, and overcoats to protect them from the chill of a nation that burned what was left of its furniture to stay warm. What do you need? Abram asked Fricke, promising to take up any matter in the Senate dining room. “Though I hardly like to say it aloud,” Fricke wrote back, “shoes.” So Abram gathered donations and sent shoes.
And he arranged passports, so that restricted Germans could travel out of their country. In August 1947, he convened at Lake Geneva a council of nations to befriend the Germans, forgiving Frenchmen and Dutchmen and Czechs and Poles and Britons and a delegation of Americans led by Senator Wiley, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. “Choose two or three promising leaders,” Abram had advised Fricke for the German contingent. The Swiss minister of finance would send the invitations, which the Germans should then take to a certain American in the occupation government, who would see to their arrangements for leaving Germany. At the head of the table Abram placed Alfred Hirs, director general of the Bank of Switzerland and a key figure in Abram’s European calculations. Hirs had credentials. His wife was a Bible teacher in Zurich, and his home was a destination for traveling missionaries. The year previous he himself had sought out Abram. A Youth for Christ missionary would recall meeting Hirs at a “Christian businessmen’s” convention in Washington in 1946, at which Hirs had apparently complained of the tepid temperature of the religiosity on display. Someone steered Hirs to the Christian Embassy, where he found Abram and presumably prayers of a more satisfying fervor.
Hirs was a man in need of consolation. He had come to Washington not to bask in American Christendom’s good feelings but to fight over the spoils of war, and it seemed, then, that he was losing. The Americans were demanding that he reveal the secrets of Swiss banking, and worse, that deposits be returned, not to Nazi depositors—suicides, Argentine exiles, men who would not ask for their money—but to Jews.
“Do you want to take 500 million Swiss francs of gold and ruin my bank?” he screamed at representatives of Morgenthau’s Treasury Department. This sum—500 million Swiss francs in Hirs’s bank alone, 1.25 billion dollars, money to be fought over for the rest of the century—no one in Washington had imagined that Hitler had extracted such a rich vein from the bank accounts, jewel boxes, the jaws of Europe’s Jews.
Back in Zurich, Hirs found more understanding friends. Nathaniel Leverone, the vending-machine king of America, reported on what he learned in Zurich to American bankers and the National Association of Manufacturers. The German guests spoke on the need for solidarity among men of free enterprise if the dollar was to stand as a bulwark against Stalin’s tanks. Christ or communism was the choice they offered Leverone. By Christ, the German contingent meant to imply themselves.
And then there was Senator Wiley, a good friend for a man like Hirs to have. A Republican from Wisconsin, he was a pleasingly round-faced man of sixty-three years, dapper in a tux, and skilled in the use of a hawkish eye and a sly smile. He was, more than anything else, an opportunist: an isolationist before the war when indignant cries of dictatorship—FDR’s, not Hitler’s—could raise a man in the Republican Party, but an internationalist after it, when fighting communism won more votes than keeping our boys safe at home. He enjoyed a pulpit, and he didn’t much care what faith it belonged to. “The Jews and the Arabs,” he once declared, “should settle their dispute in the spirit of Christian charity.” Such a faith had no trouble absorbing Hirs and the Germans, s
ince Wiley was a deep believer in the moral relativism of anticommunism. During the war, he had been an advocate of the Jewish cause, calling for a Jewish “foreign legion” of exiles and Palestinian Jews. Afterward, Jewish gold was of no concern when weighted against the strength of the Red Army. That threat, real and imagined, drove Wiley to distraction. The Russians would rape the womanhood of Europa. In Korea Mao’s Chinese would swarm like ants. In the union halls of Milwaukee honest Americans would turn like werewolves into godless monsters. Everywhere, he thought, communism was about to bubble out of its cauldron. He didn’t want to just put a lid on it; he wanted to blow up the kitchen.
That had already been tried. Europe in 1947, the year of its coldest winter in decades, remained a rubble of roofless buildings and bridges into thin air. “At night,” one German American returnee wrote in his journal, “you see ever so often the dim sky through the walls of a building: the filigree of chaos. Then it seems beautiful in a weird way and you forget that houses are good only when they protect people from rain and cold.”39 That thin line of indigo was a stronger barrier to hostilities than the “iron curtain” Winston Churchill had warned of.
Senator Wiley wanted total war. Take the men of Hitler’s old panzer divisions, bless ’em under Christ, and point ’em toward Moscow. Abram’s German point man, Otto Fricke, wasn’t so bloodthirsty; he merely wanted twenty-five rearmed German divisions to slow the Russian invasion he saw coming. “What Do We Christians Think of Re-Armament?” was the theme of one of Fricke’s cell meetings in 1950. They were conflicted, tempted to take “malicious joy that the ‘Allies’ are now forced to empty with spoons the bitter soup that has been served by the Russians.” The judgments at Nuremberg had dishonored the Wermacht, and the dismantling had insulted and robbed Germany’s great industrialists, Krupp and Weizäcker and Bosch—all well represented in Fricke’s cells. By all rights they should stand down, refuse to rearm, let the Americans defend Christendom from the Slavs. But there it was: Christendom. They were Christian men, chosen not by a nation but by Jesus himself to lead their people into the “Order” God revealed to them in their prayers. “To accomplish these tasks,” the Frankfurt cell concluded, “the state needs power and this powerfulness is indispensable for the sake of love.”40
But the Russian blitzkrieg wasn’t actually coming. The Soviet Union quickly realized its interests were best served in Western Europe by parliamentary democracies, in which communists untainted by collaboration could seize power without a shot fired. Or so Stalin thought. Across the continent in those cold, hungry days, middle- and upper-class conservatives regained the power they’d lost to the fascist rabble. They were not, however, militarists, at least not of the operatic breed. The Germans did rearm under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the most pious politician in all of Europe, but much more than militarization, Germany threw itself into making the tools of Cold War. It was the nonpolitics of Krupp and Hirs, quiet men who knew how to hold on to money not properly theirs, that conquered Western Europe as Hitler never had.
“I am modernizing my factory,” Baron Ulrich von Gienanth, Zapp’s old Gestapo colleague, boasted to one of Abram’s aides in 1952.41 He had 800 workers in his employ, he went on, men organized according to Christian principles. And he was opening a new factory in Switzerland. His ICL brother-in-Christ, Baron von der Ropp, a “prophet” according to Abram, provided men such as von Gienanth with a new Christian management theory. Von der Ropp, before the war a Prussian propagandist for a “greater” Germany, was a Christian nationalist who had resented Hitler’s cult of personality—a vulgar parody, he thought, of the Christian destiny for Germany proclaimed by Martin Luther. In a stroke of luck, he had been banned from public speaking just before the war’s end, and on that thin moral basis reinvented himself, like Gedat, as an instructor of boys.42
Von der Ropp specialized in young working-class men, or “the Stirred,” as he referred to those distracted by “social problems” from the masculine model of Jesus. On one hand, von der Ropp’s religion was straightforward American fundamentalism, remarkable only for the thoroughness with which he transplanted it to German soil. But he also anticipated the middle-class fundamentalism of the American future, the point at which Abram’s upper-class religion and the popular front would converge. A geologist by training, he preached that “too much science” would lead to “intellectual shallowness,” a foreshadowing of the claims of today’s fundamentalism, intellectually critical and anti-intellectual at the same time. He taught that the poor, with their demands for government services—which he understood as a failure to trust that God would provide—were “the adversaries of the church.” But not through their own doing; rather, absent some modicum of prosperity, they were too bitter to properly appreciate Christ’s providence. This, in essence, was the faith that would thrive in future decades, when both the cell group and the megachurch became staples of evangelicalism, the microscope and the telescope of American fundamentalism. It certainly did not take hold in Germany; but it evidently made an impression on Abram.
Perhaps, too, on von der Ropp’s fellow aristocrat, Baron von Gienanth. The two would have met often at Abram’s private conventions of Germans and Americans. The difference was that von der Ropp, never a Nazi official, could travel and spread his ideas at Abram’s international meetings. Von Gienanth was bound to the Fatherland. This, he complained to Abram, was an impediment to reconstruction. He’d wanted to attend a conference in Atlantic City with further ideas of expansion in mind. Would the American military really say that a man of his stature would blemish the boardwalk? He was on a list of undesirables, he had learned from certain connections—probably ICL men within the occupation. This would be “understandable,” he thought, if he had been a communist. “But I don’t see any sense in including people of my attitude”—ex-fascists ready to make common cause with the United States.
Among the many testimonies von Gienanth collected on his own behalf was a letter from an American diplomat’s wife who insisted the baron had not been a Nazi so much as an “idealist.” Eventually, von Gienanth had believed, “the good and conservative element of the German people would gain control.” Fascism had been like strong medicine, unpleasant but necessary to what von Gienanth had always believed would be the reestablishment of rule by elites like himself. “In the coming years of reconstruction,” his advocate wrote, “such men will be needed who can be trusted.”43
Abram contacted the Combined Travel Board that decided on which former Nazis could be allowed to leave the country. The baron was needed, Abram insisted. There were high Christian councils to be held in The Hague. “Expedite the necessary permit.”
Should that argument prove inadequate, Abram hired von Gienanth’s wife, Karein, as a hostess on call for Americans traveling on Christian missions. She was an American citizen, though she’d spent the war with her SS officer husband. Now her American passport was being threatened. Abram saved it. That summer, he sent the baron and his wife a gift of sorts: a congressman from California, to be a guest on the baron’s estate. The following winter Senator Frank Carlson visited. “As you know,” Abram advised Karein, “he is one of the closest friends and advisors to Eisenhower.”
A “serene confidence has filled me,” she replied, “as to President Eisenhower’s guidance by God.” That summer, her husband flew with her to England, his passport evidently restored.
THE CASTLE OF the Teutonic Order sits on the eastern edge of a small island in Lake Constance, a Bavarian gem at the intersection of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Shaped like a fish, the waters are emerald, sapphire, and amber, depending on the time of day. The island itself, called Mainau, is even more dazzling, the “island of flowers,” a botanical garden formed according to the whimsy of the Swedish princes who have lived within this fortress for generations. Since the nineteenth century they have been collecting blossoms and butterflies for their retreat, and, most of all, trees, giant redwoods and cedars from Lebanon and palms, more palm trees,
surely, than in all the rest of Germany combined, gathered from around the globe.
The crest emblazoned on the castle is a bristle of swords and spears and gray flags that resembles a charging, heavy-tusked bull elephant with a purple crown between his great ears. But the castle itself, raised in 1746 on the ruins of older castles, celebrated as an ideal of the architectural style known as Southern Bavarian baroque, looks like a giant cake made of pale orange sorbet. Its walls are smooth and creamy, its windows like the ornamentation of sugar cookies. “You would have liked the surroundings,” Abram’s chief representative in Europe, Wallace Haines, wrote him in June 1951. Haines had just presided over an international meeting which Abram’s health had prevented him from attending. Mainau, he gushed, was a “fairy island,” and the conference, judging by his letter alone, might have been something out of a fairy tale: flowers sculpted into the shapes of strange creatures, great candle-lit halls, “divine services” in the chapel, ornate and glittering as a Faberge egg’s interior.44
The first meeting at Castle Mainau had taken place in 1949, the same year the Allies allowed Germans to begin governing themselves again. The 1951 meeting was planned to mark what Abram considered the complete moral rehabilitation—in just two years—of Germany. Abram wanted the Americans to go to them, a grand contingent of senators and representatives. Gedat, now the unofficial leader of the German organization, was thrilled. But when word came that official duties in Paris prevented the American delegation from attending, he was furious. There was more bad news. Chancellor Adenauer, Gedat’s keynote speaker, was called away to a crisis. And Abram himself, slowed down by more bad health, would not be there. His representatives could take notes.45