Legacy of War

by Wilbur Smith

  What von Meerbach did not know was that his fears were justified. Dr Goldsmith had indeed been born Yonatan Goldschmidt in Vienna. His family, like many upper-class Austrian Jews, had intermarried with their Christian equivalents over the centuries, which accounted for Yonatan’s colouring. His father, who was a psychiatrist, had seen which way the wind was blowing and in 1932 had taken his family from Vienna to London, swiftly establishing a successful practice in the North London suburb of Hampstead. The family had made both their family and given names more English. The children were sent to good schools and emerged entirely assimilated into the culture of their new land.

  Jonathan was at university when the war broke out. He qualified as a doctor in 1943 and joined the Royal Army Medical Corps, serving with distinction on the Italian front. He had become a proud, patriotic Briton, and intended to return home in due course to work in the newly formed National Health Service. And yet, he was equally proud of his Jewish heritage and played an active role in the Jewish community in Cape Town.

  He was one of a small number of trusted men who had been summoned to a private meeting and informed that the Israeli government had reason to believe that a former high-ranking SS officer called Konrad von Meerbach, who had taken an active part in the creation of the Reich’s death camps, was living under an alias in South Africa. They were also informed that von Meerbach might have chosen to settle in the Cape, to be under the wing of a prominent National Party politician, with whom he was known to have a connection. A detailed description of von Meerbach was provided, along with a short background briefing of his life and personal characteristics.

  The man they were looking for was distinguished by a powerful, thick-necked physique, possibly now running to fat, and red hair, which would be turning grey. He was a man accustomed to power, a bully who enjoyed the ability to intimidate and belittle.

  As a qualified doctor, who was also the son of an eminent psychiatrist, Jonathan Goldsmith saw these traits displayed in Michel Schultz. And as Schultz gave an expert, albeit boastful account of the transformation his company could work on the Jaguar, Goldsmith noticed he spoke with an upper-class Munich accent and recalled that the briefing on von Meerbach had included the information that his family owned a company that specialised in engine manufacturing.

  Having concluded that he might be dealing with a man who had helped the Third Reich murder six million of his co-religionists, Jonathan Goldsmith found it hard to keep smiling and conclude his business. He held his nerve, agreed to the work and cost suggested by ‘Michel Schultz’, and handed over his car.

  Mr Schultz graciously rang for a taxi. When it arrived, Goldsmith bade Schultz farewell and told the driver to take him to Groote Schuur Hospital. A minute later, as they were driving away, Goldsmith informed his cabbie that he wished to be taken to the offices of the Carmel Shipping Company in the Port of Cape Town. There he met with the company’s proprietor, Manny Ishmael, who had invited him to the meeting at which the von Meerbach manhunt had been discussed.

  ‘I think I found him,’ he said.

  Ishmael was seventy-three years old. He was still as sharp as a tack, but experience had taught him not to rush to hasty conclusions.

  ‘You walk into a garage and meet a fat goy with red hair and a German accent . . . and this makes him von Meerbach?’ He gave a world-weary sigh. ‘We should all be so lucky.’

  Goldsmith gave his reasoning in more detail. Ishmael conceded a little ground.

  ‘You may be right. My father was a baker from Slutsk, Byelorussia. I don’t know from Munich accents. If you tell me this man had one, why should I argue? I will call my contact in Pretoria. Let him decide.’

  Manny Ishmael’s contact was nominally a First Secretary at the Israeli Embassy. Like Joshua Solomons, he was an officer of the Central Institute for Coordination. The Hebrew word for ‘Institute’ is ‘Mossad’, the name by which the organisation would come to be known. When word was passed on to the institute’s headquarters in Tel Aviv, its director, Reuven Shiloah, determined that this lead was worth following up.

  Joshua Solomons considered sending a team to Cape Town to photograph Michel Schultz, so that a definitive identification could be made. But he realised there was an easier solution. He contacted Jonathan Goldsmith and asked him to undertake a simple task.

  ‘You may find this sickening. But if it helps get justice for the dead . . .’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Goldsmith replied. ‘I spent two years practising battlefield surgery. It takes a lot to sicken me.’

  A few days later, Goldsmith went to collect his car. Michel Schultz offered to accompany his customer while he took the Jaguar for a spin, just to check that everything was in order. When they returned to Schultz Engineering, Goldsmith thanked Schultz for doing such a fine job, praising him, sincerely, for the improvement in the Jag’s performance. He opened his medical briefcase, took out a Leica IIIf camera and took a couple of pics of the car, which had also been cleaned and polished to a dazzling sheen. He handed the camera to one of the mechanics and invited Schultz to join him beside the car.

  Schultz hesitated. ‘I do not like to have my photograph taken,’ he said. ‘The camera is not my friend.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be shy, old boy!’ Goldsmith said with public school heartiness. ‘Tell you what, let’s make it a team photo, get all the chaps who worked on her into the picture, eh?’

  The mechanic holding the camera thought this was a splendid idea. He waved to three of his colleagues, and they hurried over with such eagerness that Schultz could hardly refuse to oblige them.

  He stood next to Goldsmith with his employees on either side, resplendent in their Schultz Engineering boiler suits. As the man holding the camera was about to shoot, Schultz turned his head away from the lens, then back again when he heard the click. The mechanics gave a ragged cheer, grinned at one another and the group by the car broke up.

  ‘I took three,’ the man with the camera said, handing it back to Goldsmith. ‘Just to be safe.’

  Schultz was already walking back to his office. He did not hear the photographer’s words, any more than he had heard the camera’s clicking, for the noise his men were making had drowned it out.

  Goldsmith took the undeveloped Kodachrome film to Manny Ishmael. He had it couriered to Pretoria. There it was placed in the diplomatic bag to Tel Aviv.

  Before he left Ishmael’s office, Goldsmith said, ‘Word of advice for your people. If Mr Schultz really is Konrad von Meerbach, he drives an exceptionally fast car. If he tries to make a run for it, they’ll have a hell of a job trying to catch him. But thanks to the efforts of Schultz himself, my Jag is one of the few jalopies in Cape Town that’s powerful enough to keep up with him. If you think it might come in handy, please don’t hesitate to ask.’

  Ishmael grasped his hand and said, ‘Sheynem dank, Yonatan. I will make sure that whatever happens, you will get it back again as good as new.’

  Four days after the pictures were taken, Joshua Solomons had three colour transparencies sitting on his desk. He took them to a briefing room equipped with a projector and a screen. In the first image, most of the men were looking directly at the lens. Only Schultz’s face was too blurred to make any identification.

  Joshua swore under his breath. But it occurred to him that a man who did not want to be identified might turn his head when he knew a picture was being taken.

  But you didn’t know about these, did you? Joshua thought as the second and third shots flashed up on the screen. These were less formal. Some of the men were laughing. Others had turned to one another. Their faces were less clear. But Schultz, believing the threat had passed, had relaxed. He had turned his head so that he was looking straight into the camera.

  ‘That’s him!’ Joshua exulted.

  He had prints made from the transparencies and took them to Reuven Shiloah, with other, historical pictures of Konrad von Meerbach as comparison. Shiloah agreed that the resemblance was pronounced.

&n
bsp; ‘But we need to know for sure. Ask the brother.’

  Joshua and Gerhard met at the same café in Mombasa. They talked for almost an hour, but the key business took no more than a few seconds. Joshua opened a brown paper envelope, extracted the two images and handed them over.

  Gerhard grimaced. He leaned back and looked up at the sky as he recovered from the shock of what he had seen. He pushed the prints across the table, face down. He turned away again, fighting to control a storm of emotions.

  Joshua had seen other men and women react this way: concentration camp survivors who gazed again on the faces of their tormentors.

  ‘My father told me what your brother did to you,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to make you look at him again.’

  Gradually Gerhard relaxed. He drank some coffee, watched the world walk past the café.

  Finally he said, ‘It’s all right. You had to show me. Now tell me, how we are going to get him.’

  ‘I have your papers,’ Joshua said. ‘Marlize married Herman Doll, an architectural draughtsman who visited Belgium to work on the Atlantic Wall defences.’

  ‘So not a man that the Allies would have been interested in.’

  ‘No, just a guy in an office drawing plans of gun emplacements. He went home to Friedrichshafen after the war. You notice I am giving you a job and a home that you can talk about convincingly, if required.’

  ‘Yes . . . thank you.’

  ‘Marlize lives with you now in Germany. You have been saving up for years. Now you can finally afford to visit her homeland, South Africa. It is, of course, unlikely that you will ever have to answer any questions. There is no reason for you to be stopped by the immigration officials, since your wife has dual nationality and your visa is in order. South Africa is not a nation in which citizens are arbitrarily stopped and forced to account for themselves—’

  ‘Unless they are black.’

  Joshua gave a nod of the head to acknowledge the point, then continued, ‘The only circumstances in which this might become an issue would arise from something going wrong. If the operation is blown, or your brother is harmed or even dies, the police might take an interest. If they do, say as little as possible. Ideally say nothing at all. If you are forced to talk, stick to the story of an innocent German tourist caught up in something of which he knows nothing.’

  ‘Have you worked out how the operation will proceed?’ Gerhard asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can you tell me about it?’

  ‘Not yet. At this stage, the less you know the better. But you will be briefed when you get to South Africa.’

  ‘And how would you rate our chances of success?’

  Joshua gave a wry smile. ‘Don’t worry. Gerhard. We are not going to fail. We are going to get your brother, take him back to Israel and make him pay for his crimes.’

  ‘It sounds like Herr Doll is going to have a very exciting holiday in South Africa.’

  ‘I’m certain he will.’

  Konrad von Meerbach did not ask a great deal of Manfred De La Rey. It did neither of them any good to draw attention to their relationship. Nevertheless, he took it for granted that if he contacted De La Rey’s office, his call would be returned.

  Von Meerbach had found himself feeling uncharacteristically edgy and insecure. His encounter with his young niece and nephew had made him feel better than at any time since the collapse of the Reich. The news that Shasa and Centaine Courtney had flown to Kenya had filled him with a tension that was almost pleasurable. His plan was working. He’d provoked a reaction. Now it was just a matter of De Koch telling him that Gerhard and Saffron had arrived in Cape Town. Von Meerbach’s staff at the garage were all good men, whose skill as mechanics was matched by their sound views on racial matters and their physical toughness. He therefore felt confident that when the time came, he would not only have news of his enemies’ presence, but also enough men to keep an eye on them, guard his own home and finally overpower them.

  Whether Gerhard and Saffron came to his house of their own accord, or he found a means of abducting them while they were out and about in Cape Town, they would end up in the same place: von Meerbach’s cellar. It was hidden from public view, soundproof and equipped with everything he needed to help him finish the job. And, oh, how he relished the thought of the suffering he would inflict before he finally finished Gerhard and Saffron off for good, took their bodies down to his boat and then went out to sea to feed them to the great white sharks who patrolled the waters around the Cape.

  But the days and weeks went by, and they didn’t arrive. Von Meerbach was certain that they must be up to something. But what? He could hazard plenty of guesses. Gerhard had displayed Jew-loving tendencies when he helped the Solomons to leave for Switzerland. It was possible, even likely, that he kept in contact with that family. Isidore Solomons, in von Meerbach’s estimation, was the kind of Jew who involved himself in his race’s unending efforts to bend the world to their will, conspiring to bring down great Christian nations and profiting from others’ misfortunes. He would surely be in contact with other high-ranking Jews willing to track down a man who, like von Meerbach, understood their true intentions and thereby threatened the success of their wicked schemes.

  Von Meerbach wanted to discuss the matter with De La Rey. He had always been sound on the Jewish Question and, with his political allies, was applying the same principles to the subjugation of the Negro race in South Africa. And yet, when von Meerbach rang De La Rey’s office and left a message with his secretary, there was no response.

  Von Meerbach left another message, doing his best to sound casual: this was a minor matter that could easily slip the mind of a government minister with many other more important issues to worry about. Privately, however, von Meerbach was becoming more anxious. Having been in De La Rey’s position himself, as a company boss and senior SS officer, he was accustomed to cutting his ties with underlings who had outlived their usefulness. He found himself on the receiving end and, like any other loyal retainer who has lost their master’s favour, he asked the same questions again and again.

  Why is this happening? What went wrong? What can I do about it?

  His desperation became so apparent that Francesca offered to call Heidi De La Rey to see if she could shed light on her husband’s change of behaviour.

  When the two women spoke, Heidi insisted, ‘Honestly, darling, Manfred’s not said a word to me about Konrad. I’m sure there’s nothing to worry about.’

  Francesca tried to persuade her husband to believe Heidi’s words but he refused.

  ‘Are you so stupid that you can’t see that she’s lying to you? De La Rey dotes on that woman. She knows exactly what he thinks about everything.’

  Von Meerbach had one last opportunity to discover what lay behind his sudden relegation to non-person status. The National Party was holding a fund-raising dinner that week, an all-male affair for prominent members of the local business community. Von Meerbach despised the kind of men who attended these events as jumped-up shopkeepers and factory owners, giving themselves airs of importance. But he bought a table for himself and a few of his staff, gritted his teeth and went along to pick up the latest political gossip in the hope he might just hear something of use.

  After three hours of bad food, worse wine and endless sounding off about the inferiority of the blacks, von Meerbach had learned nothing. He was on the point of leaving when a garage owner called Piet Kronje, with whom Schultz Engineering did a fair amount of business, came up to him. Kronje sidled up close and, exuding a malodorous blend of cigar smoke and pungent fumes of mampoer, the local peach brandy, furtively asked, ‘Hey, Schultz, have you heard the latest news from parliament, eh?’

  ‘What news is that, then?’ von Meerbach replied, wondering how long he would have to endure Kronje’s company.

  ‘One of the top men in the United Party is coming over to our side. It’s all been agreed, they’re just waiting to announce it.’

  ‘How do you kn
ow this?’

  ‘Let’s say a little birdie told me. A birdie who was sitting on his branch by the table when the deal was done.’

  ‘And who is this top man?’

  Kronje looked around to check that no one could overhear him, lowered his voice and said, ‘Courtney . . . you know, the fellow with that eyepatch, makes him look like a verdoem pirate.’

  Suddenly von Meerbach did not have to feign his interest.

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asked. ‘Courtney is the stepson of Blaine Malcomess, United’s deputy leader. That won’t go down well the next time they meet for Sunday lunch.’

  ‘Maybe not, but he’s joining us anyway. I can tell you who brokered the deal – Manfred De La Rey.’

  Now it all made sense. But von Meerbach gave nothing away to Kronje.

  ‘That’s a good story, Piet,’ he said, slapping him good-humouredly on the back. ‘Who knows, it may even be half-true.’

  Von Meerbach did not bother calling De La Rey’s office the following day. He went there himself, at a time when Manfred was likely to be present, barged past the secretary and kicked open the door. Ignoring the shocked expressions of the civil servants gathered to receive their minister’s instructions, von Meerbach jabbed a finger at De La Rey and snarled, ‘I know why you’ve been avoiding me. And I swear to God, I’ll have it all over Cape Town by sunset if you don’t tell me, man to man, what the hell you’re up to.’

  De La Rey looked at him with an intensity that made von Meerbach glad he had never had to face him in the boxing ring. Keeping his unblinking gaze fixed on this intruder into his private space, he said, ‘Please leave the room, everybody. This will only take two minutes.’

  When the office had been cleared, De La Rey said, ‘What’s the meaning of this?’