by Chris Petit
Only when he took off his cap, after milking his dramatic entrance and its effect on me, did I recognise him. I had not seen Karl-Heinz in uniform before. He made fun of my surprise as he sat down and casually put his immaculate boots on the table. He offered me a Balkan Sobranie cigarette. They were a present from Father Draganovic, he said. Of my obvious confusion over how much he was supposed to know, he remarked, ‘You wouldn’t be in Zagreb if it weren’t for me!’
Karl-Heinz was all knowing smiles. ‘I think you may find that Father Draganovic will turn out to be a friend to all of us yet’. And he was right: at the end of the war Draganovic was active in the Vatican in assisting the safe passage of many of Karl-Heinz’s colleagues out of Europe.
Karl-Heinz also proved well acquainted with my chickpeas. Unfortunately, they had been reassigned, he said. When pressed he sounded tetchy. ‘Anti-guerrilla Muslim forces, if you must know.’ I told him what Buvier had said about chickpeas.
He assured me that my trip would not be wasted. Produce would be made available to us, and the matter was being given priority. Father Draganovic had issued a statement saying that charitable donations to the needy would lead to considerable dispensations in the next world. Herr Veesenmayer, an economist as well as a diplomat, was studying the problem.
Thus I got my first inkling that co-operation over aid was one way of facilitating this other secret alliance Draganovic was servicing.
Our meeting lasted as long as it took to chain-smoke three Balkan Sobranies. Karl-Heinz stubbed out the third, looked at his watch, stood, clicked his heels ironically, gave me a lackadaisical ‘Heil Hitler,’ and was gone, leaving me to work out that my arrest had been for the sole purpose of allowing us to speak in private. Again I realised I had a lot to learn.
Buvier was doing some spying of his own, and being less than discreet about it, as I learned when I went through his belongings. After telling myself that such precautions were necessary. His copy of the International Christian Press, published that March in Geneva, contained a report, which Buvier had underscored in ink, noting the extent of persecution of Orthodox Serbs in Croatia. As Father Draganovic had indicated, his aim was to turn the country into a full Catholic state by 1952, and to that end Orthodox churches had been seized and their priests assassinated. Several hundred thousand Serbs had already been killed. The persecution was endorsed by the archbishop of Sarajevo, whose sermons asserted that the struggle against evil should not be carried on ‘in a noble manner and with gloves’. Cardinal Stepinac personally approved the efforts of the Ustashi, whose policies were succinctly summarised by its leader’s remark that ‘blood will be shed and heads will roll’. The Germans, still finessing their own policies, watched with interest.
It was hard telling Buvier that I had been snooping among his possessions. My excuse was that I had been detained by the Ustashi, and, as I was responsible for his safety, it was my business to make sure he was not carrying anything that might compromise him. I could see he thought less of me, but he agreed to destroy the article. ‘I no longer understand the world,’ he said.
Dry old Buvier. There were few I misread more than him. He was one of only a handful of men I have met who possessed real courage.
We made several trips to Zagreb over the next months as the aid supply line was set up. Veesenmayer, who was, as he put it, ‘always popping in and out of Zagreb’, was helpful when it came to scrounging rolling stock and train schedules from the Croatian railways. Veesenmayer was a schedule fanatic. He was making a scientific study of train timetables, he told me. Like Draganovic, Veesenmayer developed the habit of taking me solicitously by the arm when we talked, which I came to interpret as a sign of my necessary compromise. I was not altogether naive, though it wasn’t until Budapest that the exact nature of his work became apparent.
In Zagreb, Veesenmayer used Red Cross wagons for the transportation of crates of his own, marked fragile. We reached an agreement that they would be unloaded en route. Later, in Budapest, Karl-Heinz told me they had contained paintings. Veesenmayer was acting as intermediary between Hitler himself and his art adviser, who lived in Zagreb of all places. The crates were always accompanied by three armed Germans dressed as civilians who reminded me of those in Dakar, poorly disguised spies.
When I reported back to Willi, he quizzed me most about Buvier. I stuck up for Buvier, and it was only after his death that Willi showed me one of Buvier’s secret accounts of Ustashi atrocities. How it had come to be in his possession Willi never said. He wanted to know if I had ever met Pavelic, the Ustashi leader, who was in the habit of displaying baskets of plucked eyes to diplomatic guests. Even Willi, who liked to make a point of being worldly if not cynical, wondered at that.
In fact, the Nazis were not as unflustered as they made out. Karl-Heinz’s papers contained the following undated note: ‘Germans prefer their atrocity cool. It should be more systematic, with steps taken to disguise each stage, especially from the victims. German anti-partisan activities, as they are called, are fine for summer sport, but the psychological toll is incalculable. The process needs to be more technical—more of a business—especially now that the Reichsführer has been a (shaky) witness to the more direct method. Always sensitive to the pressure it puts on the men, he is determined to find a more orderly way, controlled by regulation and office, and suited to the talents of administrators.’
I kept the existence of Veesenmayer’s crates secret from Buvier. It was hard for him to accept that the help and aid we were being offered were rigged. It saddened him even more when we returned to Geneva with a potential supply line and were hailed in triumph. After a particularly fulsome set of congratulations, Buvier’s eyes watered, and everyone looked away, thinking he had been overcome by embarrassment, a quality not usually attributed to him.
Karl-Heinz Strasse
ZAGREB, 1943
THE REICHSFÜHRER HAS APPROVED THE establishment of a Croatian Muslim division. This has led to a few expressions of surprise in the name of racial purity, but the Reichsführer is steadfast in his admiration of the Muslim warrior. He views them as akin to the British Gurkha. It also keeps his eminence the grand mufti of Jerusalem happy. The mufti, currently resident in Berlin where he is regarded by the Führer as something of a joke, is tolerated for his propaganda value. His trips to Zagreb to exhort the Muslim troops seem to fire them up sufficiently.
The region seethes with age-old feuds and hatreds. The Croatians seem predisposed to private melancholy and savagery. Zagreb is full of German technical advisers who express private doubts. The government is a ramshackle affair, run by a bunch of bloodthirsty puppets with large wives who wear frightening floral prints and hairdos which suggest that Zagreb is in need of a decent salon. Church sermons on good and evil are taken literally, crude Catholicism dished out by clever men who understand the power of superstition. Fanatical priests drive their congregations with an enthusiasm not seen since the Spanish Inquisition. They certainly do the job. Their followers indulge in Red Indian savageries. Croatian bloodlust amounts to a crude approximation of the church’s cannibalistic practices. My God! All that throat cutting and skull crunching! It was too much even for Veesenmayer, and he had been responsible for it in the first place!
Veesenmayer, with his slide rule and graph paper, wishes to turn death into a science. Before the war he worked in communications. He hints to me that he has use of an American collating machine, a prototype donated by the Yankees, which has revolutionised his work.* His dream is to create an assembly line, a process of distribution and dispatch that functions in a clean and modern way, at no inconvenience to the German citizen.
I am thankful that my trips to Zagreb are intermittent. The Hotel Milan is insufficient compensation, and the town’s third-rate architecture looks like a job lot bought only with military parades and troop movements in mind. The main square is too big for anything other than public executions. Those here on long postings complain that there are too many priests at social function
s and that the women are as unpredictable as the men.
A year ago the Reichsführer asked me to make certain enquiries as he sought to extend what he calls ‘his channels of communication’. I understood him to mean that he thought the usual Vatican lines had become too clogged, or compromised by Canaris and the Abwehr, the German foreign service, which the Reichsführer detests and mistrusts. The Vatican had become, he said, like a bazaar with priests auctioning meetings between diplomats and the usual international riffraff.
I can say we have succeeded beyond expectation. New friends have been made, and Draganovic, whose influence is considerable, is being used only by us. Although the Croatians are not discreet, it seems that their churchmen are, and the large cupboardlike confessionals in the city’s ghastly cathedral are as good a way as any of conversing in privacy. My confessions are so long that anyone observing would be left wondering at the extent of my transgressions. The Reichsführer is pleased, he tells me. It is vital he has access to what he calls ‘wider opinion’. But he frets about security and already wishes me to find another means, having decided that the Croatians are too easily compromised. He recommends Budapest. He thinks we shall be there before too long.
It transpires that Buvier was not only resistant, he was active in gathering reports on civilian killings—this according to Willi Schmidt. I wonder if it was he who told Veesenmayer, which raises the question of whether Willi is selling information to Veesenmayer when he is supposed to be working for me.
It has been decided that van Hover will go to Budapest. I have taken pains to reassure him that he remains an important link in an invisible chain, and that my patronage could be important to the success of his Red Cross work, which will require a more flexible approach than the one adopted by the late Buvier.*
*Elsewhere in Karl-Heinz’s papers there appears the following margin note, an apparent reference to Veesenmayer: ‘The genocide hot-shot fooled everyone afterwards into thinking he had been a diplomatic cipher. He worked before the war for German subsidiaries of U.S. companies, including ITT and Standard Oil. The speed and efficiency with which he did his wartime roundups was aided immeasurably by the secret weapon of the extermination programme, the equivalent in many respects of the Allies’ decoding machine. He was at the forefront of the technological revolution, with his punchcard system provided by American IBM. For all his smooth cocktail party talk in Zagreb, he was there for two reasons: to get the Jews out of Croatia and to ensure that the Croatian fascist militia stayed in power. The point about men like him is that they were having the time of their lives. They all knew what was going on, and also knew on which side their bread was buttered.’
*Karl-Heinz makes no specific reference to the death of Buvier, apart from a single note in faded pencil: ‘B died, which saves us the bother. V not happy at all with what he had been told about B, who was not quite the dry old stick he looked. V rather cast down by the news. He was keen to try out the gas used in the euthanasia programme for what he called a personal experiment. He talks too of a gas truck being delivered, now they are no longer required in Poland.’
Hoover
BUDAPEST/ISTANBUL, 1943–4
BUDAPEST WAS AN OUTPOST CITY, pleasured and pleasurable before the Germans came in 1944. Its edge was reminiscent of Lisbon. Willi always said Budapest should have been a port—and it was like a sailors’ town without the sailors. Being one of the few capitals in central Europe not enemy occupied in 1943 contributed to its air of licence and exemption. Hungary’s position as an increasingly uneasy ally to the Nazis, its proximity to Balkan intrigue, and its own taste for theatrical politicking acted as a siren lure to the flotsam and jetsam of wartime Europe. Where Zurich was smug in its neutrality, Budapest was given over to illusion, ritual, and plotting. It was a tragedy waiting to happen.
Willi Schmidt, drawn to the hedonism of Budapest, wangled a transfer on family business and declared himself up for a good time. Those early Budapest days saw Willi at his lightest. I could see almost nothing of the calculation described by Sol and Jean-Pierre. Willi played the entrepreneur, promising local jazz bands Swiss contracts (which never materialised) and enjoying the free drinks and impressionable young women that went with it. The darker side was there, but well in the background. Willi’s family firm had outlets in Budapest, run by a Jewish concern that saw no contradiction in belonging to a parent company which had bought Jewish firms off the Nazis at knock-down prices.
For another of his innocent rackets Willi had me copying and distributing bootleg prints of the latest Hollywood movies, brought into Switzerland by American couriers and transferred to Hungary on Red Cross transport. After local use they were sold on by Bandi to the Germans. As an example of how things came to work, the new Cary Grant movie, first seen by me at a private screening in Budapest organised by Willi, was sold two weeks later to a high-ranking German diplomat. ‘He knows you,’ said Bandi. It was Veesenmayer, the plenipotentiary from Zagreb, temporarily resident in Budapest. Veesenmayer, according to Willi, went on to sell the print to Dr Goebbels for twice what he had paid for it.
This invisible chain struck me as significant without being able to say why. It was Bandi who pointed out that these channels would later serve for clandestine diplomatic negotiations. They were the first signs of people wanting to talk.
Willi’s arrival in Budapest coincided with a complex jigsaw of political favours snapping into place, which enabled Red Cross supply lines to operate with increasing efficiency. Perhaps Willi’s coming had been responsible for the change. Aid and relief quickly became a form of laundry, and with Bandi and Willi a lot got rinsed. Their contraband travelled in Red Cross crates, indistinguishable apart from a discreet red spot on the corner of the lid, to make identification easier for Willi’s men when unloading. What was in them hardly mattered. They were just part of the racket.
Bandi taught Willi his basic philosophy, which was to play all ends against the middle. Whoever taught Willi to keep his mouth shut, it wasn’t Bandi, who was, by his own reckoning, ‘as unreliable as an old queen’. He gossiped about all his dealings, especially those with the German foreign service, the Abwehr, which was considered cosmopolitan and indulgent by Nazi standards. ‘They employ a Jew like me, for Christ’s sake!’ Bandi said, convulsed. Since his conversion to Roman Catholicism, he constantly invoked the name of the son of God.
Bandi also represented emerging Jewish groups in Budapest keen to establish contact with similar organisations in neutral Istanbul. As for his business with the Abwehr, it was the contradiction that proved the rule. ‘Everywhere there are Jews going up in smoke, and the Abwehr pays me because it wants to find Jews it can talk to! It’s a crazy world!’
Bandi’s indiscretion, I came to realise, was a form of insurance. The more he broadcast his dealings, the more compromised everyone became and the more immune he felt. It was not a view shared by Willi, who said, ‘Why doesn’t someone just shoot you?’
‘They all need me too much,’ said Bandi, with too much bluster.
Willi bet Bandi a substantial sum that the SS would be running Budapest within a year. He was quite adamant. As he said it, I had a clear memory of Wisliceny smiling at me in Zagreb when describing himself as a technical adviser.
It was Willi who first mentioned Eichmann’s name that same night as one of the main organisers of the Jewish deportations. Eichmann, according to Willi, was the German officer who had refused further offers from Hungarian fascists to take more Jews, citing transportation difficulties. Eichmann’s was not a name anyone knew at the time, which meant that Willi was remarkably well informed. Teasing, he once said to me: ‘You and Eichmann are in the same business, more or less. You have both been given the train set to play with.’ It was one of Willi’s favourite quotes, from Orson Welles. Willi was a big film fan, Citizen Kane his favourite movie. His reference was to my recent promotion to co-ordinator of transport for relief goods, Budapest.
That summer we were Eichmann’s social precurso
rs, staying in the Astoria, which would become a Nazi headquarters. Budapest would prove the undoing of the incorruptible Eichmann, who took its hospitality at face value. Like him, Willi—to a much lesser extent myself, and Bandi not at all—went hunting and riding with the local aristocracy. Those I met were keen for Swiss contacts, to discuss the possibility of charitable work in exchange for Red Cross identity cards, which would give them the chance of a safe exit if the Russians or the Germans came, as many were now sure they would.
Bandi’s bet with Willi was based on his belief that the empireminded Hungarians—‘We’re nearly fucking Austrians!’—were too afraid of Communism to stand by its German alliance with the Russians on the advance. ‘We tried it once,’ said Bandi, ‘and it was a disaster, for Christ’s sake! I tell you, the Amis will be in Budapest before the Nazis.’ The wager was somewhat unfair, given that Bandi was probably already in secret discussion with Hungarian intelligence about the matter.
Willi made one of the few overt references I can remember him making to the subject when he said, ‘It’s about more than that.’ He argued that the Nazis were bound to come because Hungary retained one large plum, a large portion of Europe’s remaining Jewry.
‘As well as its gypsies and pederasts,’ added Bandi, gloomy and in his cups. Budapest was one of the few places in Europe where gipsy musicians still played. Then he rallied briefly and thumped the table. ‘No. The Krauts have bigger fish to fry than Hungary’s Jews.’
‘Not with men like Vesenmayer in town. They are only here for one reason,’ said Willi.