by Scott Palter
Heydrich was intrigued. Finance was always an issue, especially on orders of finished goods and minerals from Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the like. “Go on.”
“We gave the Americans a group of extraterritorial warehouses and docks at Danzig. However, we have restricted their ability to spend money beyond this guarded zone. We were worried about a dual-currency situation promoting black marketeering and other vices. That’s still a problem, but we can minimize it by our usual methods. Currently they exchange the dollars for marks. The rate of exchange is fixed by us and is – shall we say – less than market rate. This in turn limits the desire of ship crews to spend money, and of American relatives of Europeans to send dollars. I propose we cease doing so. Let the dollars circulate freely at whatever rate the traffic will bear. Indeed, I further suggest we tell their American cousins that they can send dollars via some form of safe packet or money order system. The Poles and Jews may get dollars they can use to improve their standard of living. We allow Hoover’s people to bring over banknotes which get mixed in with ours, and thus slide past the banks when we deposit them to our national accounts in Zurich and Geneva. It will, of course, also provide a guide on how badly we have depreciated our own currency and how civilians rate our chances of final victory.
Heydrich was decisive on one change. “SS accounts, not national.”
Schellenberg was content. Operation Bernhard was now official. It was best to have a new name, to avoid confusion with the old operation and the unfortunate end of its predecessor. His next steps would be fix the serial number issue, restarting work on British pound notes in various low denominations, and then initiating work on Soviet ruble notes. Fiat money was just paper, after all. It had value based on states and armies.
1400 local time; 1300 CET
28 August 1940
Camp Gorlov, near Tobruk, Libya
Peiper found the installation. The gate guards seemed almost indifferent to his travel orders. They called HQ, and Major Gorlov appeared and welcomed Peiper in. Being welcomed by an obviously Slavic officer was for Peiper a shock. Meeting the rest of the command group was even more of one. Major Schwabe and Hauptmann Bats had virtually ignored him, the latter focusing on his vehicles. Bats started cursing in a strange mix of English, German, Italian, and something Peiper could almost swear was Yiddish. Had ordered one of Peiper’s drivers to move the vehicle to a repair bay with a pit. Bats had then ignored his rank to drop down into the pit like a mere technician. Apparently, the defects in the vehicle’s suspension were both obvious and, to Bats, alarming. Fortunately, Peiper had brought along the French technical specifications and maintenance manuals. Bats didn’t read French, but Schwabe did. Schwabe also spoke proper civilized German. He was obviously an educated man. He also seemed able to channel Bats away from his nonstop complaining.
Peiper was served a decent lunch with the command staff. The cooking was some weird blend of European and Asian. Spicy but quite tasty. Far better than one should expect from a field unit in Africa. The new cook was some Indian with British connections, whom the unit had commandeered in Malta. Strange war. Schwabe explained over the meal that Bats proposed a wholesale rebuild of the suspension and certain other features. He also claimed to be able to install radios. Bats would have to absent himself for a week to get the parts made in Naples. He was also going to be recruiting more mechanics. Peiper asked how could new parts be acquired outside channels this way. When the table stopped laughing, he was informed that this unit was the Reichsführer’s pets. A quick telegram from German port HQ in Naples to Berlin should produce the proper authorizations. Peiper mentioned that his wife was socially friendly with Frau Heydrich. The unit commander, Oberst Strauss, had Peiper dictate a brief telegram to his wife that would also be sent by Bats from Naples. Strauss seemed to Peiper to be an opportunist, but one who could advance Peiper’s prospects. Perhaps this would work out after all. Peiper had been an ambitious young man before his near-death experiences.
1440 local time; 1340 CET
28 August 1940
Camp Gorlov, near Tobruk, Libya
Mary the cook cleared the lunch dishes with the aid of her two oldest children. She had been born Hindu, and named Madhubala, in Bengal. She had taken up with the aging British corporal as a way of helping ease her father’s crushing debt burden. Her family had no money for a dowry, so marriage wasn’t an option. Her Mom had died some years back, but her grandmother and two aunts had convinced her father that selling her as a concubine to the Irishman would mean more money over a few years for the family than what the pimp from Calcutta was offering. She had kept the soldier’s house, laundered his clothes, and warmed his bed through to and past retirement. She had also given him three half-caste children. He gave her some cash, all of which went to her family.
He never formally married her, but allowed her to take his name, becoming Mary Collins. It hadn’t been love or any silliness like these Westerners professed to believe. It was simply a comfortable, working household. She had of course taken his faith, becoming Mary the Catholic instead of Madhubala the Hindu. For Mary it was just new rituals to learn, the same way she had learned his language and style of cooking, had learned how to properly iron and starch his uniform. The gods had a million names and many times that number of avatars. Even the new Christian God had three selves, a divine virginal mother who had also borne her earthly husband other children, plus an endless multitude of saints and angels. Mary focused on ritual and holidays. Theology was for priests.
Her soldier was now a prisoner of the Italians. He had retired with her to Malta and been recalled to the colors during the last days before the conquest. That left herself and the children near-destitute on Malta. Then this female officer, Naiomi Saxon, found her running a roadside tea stand outside the Grand Harbor ruins. Mary found the idea of armed females strange, and female officers stranger still. She thought it was a German thing – except it turns out the Germans don’t do this either. Some weird Jewish tribe called Revisionists. Mary thought they would ask her to convert again, but her new master, this Frau Greta, said no. They all say Fräulein, but she was the Major’s wife – so shouldn’t it be Frau? Whatever. Mary was now part of this unit. They let her bring her children. Mary really didn’t care which empire won this war. Her children would not go hungry. It was a pity she could no longer send money home for now. Sooner or later the war would take her to a city where there would be a moneylender who could see to the informal transfers. It had worked that way on Malta.
0600 hours CET
29 August 1940
Ft-Lamy, Chad (now Gaullist)
Philippe Francois Marie Leclerc de Hauteclocque had left de Gaulle in London as Major de Hauteclocque. That had been an instant promotion by what was in fact a rebel movement funded by the British. By rights he was a cavalry captain and staff officer. Here in Chad, he had decided he was Brigadier General Leclerc. The “Leclerc” was an easy decision. Hopefully it protected his wife and family back in France from adverse effects of newspapers mentioning his name. The general’s rank was dictated by circumstances. Or circumstances as seen sitting here in Africa, as opposed to theoretical discussions in London.
Chad had come out for de Gaulle. Much of the rest of Equatorial Africa was likely to follow, but the authorities in Gabon and Cameroun were still loyal to Vichy. The educated blacks were Gaullist, especially those of the civil service. The problem was that the bulk of the rest of the civilized classes were neutral in favor of the winner. The whites and Arabs would prefer not to be forced to make a decision, but if pushed most preferred Vichy. A provisional major did not look like a serious personage, especially when not backed by reinforcements of troops or planes or much of anything. The British had little to send from Nigeria. Besides, British troops would not be well received after the attack on the French Fleet at Oran.
So Leclerc announced that he had arrived with the Second Free French Division. A Second implies that there is a First someplace. A general is
a serious personage. In the meantime, he would organize what mobile forces he had into a new unit that he proclaimed as the March (provisional) Regiment of Chad. In fact, it was a company of black colonial troops and a few hundred volunteers, mostly various sorts of refugees from Hitler. His local confederates said they could mobilize about another thousand tribal levies. These would be untrained men with a few retired colonial NCO’s for stiffening. Some would be armed with black-powder muskets, and most of the rest would have hunting rifles of some sort. It didn’t matter. It was a new regiment joining a whole division. He would work magic until he was actually reinforced … if he was ever reinforced. Napoleon had said the moral was to the physical as three was to one. Vichy’s firm adherents were older men set in their ways. Leclerc proposed to move quickly on Cameroun before they recovered their mental equilibrium.
0800 hours local; 0700 hours CET
29 August 1940
Camp Gorlov, Tobruk, Italian Libya
Lieutenant Colonel “Oberstleutnant” John Marco Karoly Riva Di Salo had arrived a few hours earlier. Now he was taking the handover of his ‘battalion’. Battalion? There had been a hundred and two original “Italian” volunteers, mostly Jews or part-Jews. One was somehow still in Bari, transferred out as too young. Di Salo didn’t think he would miss a small eleven-year-old female with no special skills. That had left a hundred and one who had dropped on Luqa. Over a third were casualties – they had died, or were no longer with the unit from wounds. Some of those might return eventually, but not in time for this campaign. For untrained, mostly underage children, they had been fearless. Eight survivors had been given German decorations, starting at the revived Blue Max and descending from there to mere Iron Crosses second class. The surviving heroes were on a lengthy propaganda tour. This left him fifty-five ‘veterans’ arrayed before him in two ranks. They seemed not really trained in either common military formations, or even how to stand at attention in the proper manner. Oh well, every enterprise begins somewhere.
Di Salo had arrived with a small entourage. There was his Catalan ex-commissar mistress, war booty from his service in Spain. There were half a dozen Spanish Nationalist NCO’s he had picked up as personal retainers during the mixed-division period. Yet Rome had made clear he was a battalion commander. He had been gifted with half a company, but it was to be quickly built into a battalion in fact as opposed to just name. The German publicity offensive after Malta had exalted the courage of the Italian volunteer heroes of Luqa, and of the march to the Grand Harbor under Rommel. The Italian and broader European publics thought this was a picked force of officer cadets, of arditi, rather than a self-selected band of disobedient youngsters who had used chaos and luck to hitch a ride with Strauss and Steiner’s NL company. Indeed, the propaganda painted Steiner’s Jewish Betar as Aryan Saxons from Romania. Di Salo was still laughing to himself at that fantasy. Strauss had explained reality in brutal detail when he had arrived before dawn.
The easy part for Italy was to create an actual battalion of arditi. The 592nd would be formed in Tuscany from good fascists bulked up by Hungarian ‘volunteers’. That unit would be directly attached to 7th Panzer Division with a large propaganda unit to extol its exploits. However, the new unit commander did not want the Malta veterans. Hence this second ‘battalion’. Di Salo had been a hero of the Spanish War against the Reds. He’d gone back to London after that service. In many ways he was as much English as Italian. The British were his mother’s people. He’d been schooled there, had achieved success in finance in the City of London. His Spanish service was an adventure that had turned into a three-year crusade. Finance had been a mere profession for him. War had turned out to be his true calling. He’d made a unit out of mixes of Italians, Spanish, Catholic volunteers from elsewhere, and captured Red prisoners.
He thought Italy had been on the wrong side in European affairs, that it should have stayed allied to the West. Il Duce decided otherwise. Di Salo had seen the handwriting on the wall. He and his ‘household’ had left London during the Dunkirk days, headed for Italy by way of Iberia. Once home, he and his father had worked their social network to find him a suitable command. Which led to him standing here looking at fifty-five raw recruits who thought they were veterans. Mentally he shrugged. He’d started with worse when the Arrow mixed units were created. Had led his men to victory on the Ebro. One of the spoils of that victory, ex-company-commissar Coxita Arcau LaTorre, had occupied his bed and made his coffee ever since. He smiled to himself, recalling their first meeting where he had been forced to dispute ownership of her with a platoon of drunken Moroccans. Good warriors, but no sense of discipline.
He'd been promised a free hand with his unit. He’d even been allowed to name it. It was now the Flechas di Malta Battalion. Viva Christo, Rey! He nodded to his veteran sergeants and corporals. Time for them to get to work. His job would be finding more men and equipment.
1100 hours CET
29 August 1940
Chancellery, Berlin
Getting Führer Göring to schedule work before lunch was normally impossible. The Führer preferred his office work for afternoons, leaving him free for his head of state duties at evening events and rallies. This was an emergency. Deputy Chancellor Heydrich had called the meeting on receipt of a long telegraph message from the Moscow Embassy. He started the meeting with the key point. The Soviets had canceled the September peace conference at Brest.
The two generals at the table, War Minister Generaloberst Beck and Head of the General Staff Halder, were nonplussed. Their redeployment of the Wehrmacht to the East was still not complete. Germany had been defenseless in the East when the attack on France had begun in May. It was no longer defenseless, but still had only seventy Italo-German divisions stretched from the Baltic to Romania. There were twenty-five more Romanian ones of uncertain quality, and two halfway-decent Slovak ones. No serious person counted the Hungarian Army at this time. It was a nominal ally under Italian command, but its loyalties were quite suspect after the mini-war earlier this year. Too much of the German depot supply of munitions and other war materiel was also still west of the Rhine, a legacy of the victorious French campaign. The projected East Wall was still a set of pretty engineering plans. At best there were limited disconnected trenches, except in East Prussia where there were out-of-date fortifications from back in the Kaiser’s time. Halder did the speaking for the Army side of the table. He asked what the Soviets were demanding?
Heydrich’s answer startled the other three. “That’s the funny part. Nothing. They have given us Finland as a good-will gesture. They won’t evacuate their base at Hanko, but accept that the Finns are now part of our New Europe. They’ve asked that we limit our garrisons to two corps, and prefer we send mostly Swedes. Yes, that means they are conceding Sweden as well. They want to discuss bases for themselves at the Turkish Straits and on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast, but offer to let us occupy both nations pending this basing agreement. They are also offering to move forward and revise a bit upwards their promised deliveries of oil and grain. The only thing they are asking right now is a joint friendship declaration pending the negotiation of a ten-year non-aggression pact between themselves and Europe. So the question is, what’s the catch?”
It took an hour of discussion for the four rulers to jointly decide to accept the Soviet offer, but upgrade the alert status of the forces in the East. None of them could find a plausible reason for Stalin’s ‘generosity’. Before Heydrich could begin a progress report on the deployment of the Afrika Korps and Second Air Fleet to Libya, Göring announced he was leaving. He’d helped see to the emergency, but felt he had a full calendar that precluded dealing with day-to-day trivia. The generals in turn reduced the discussion of the projected Egyptian campaign to a five-minute summary before telling Heydrich to send the formal report to their staff officers for review. With the Eastern situation in crisis, they felt they had no time to waste on a secondary theater. Heydrich tried to involve them in the French situation, wher
e a colonial crisis was developing in Africa. Beck rudely replied that Heydrich could handle such minutia himself. Use the Foreign Ministry and OKW as needed, and just keep OKH and the War Ministry advised of what had been decided. Unless these decisions involved troop or supply movements, it was a waste of their valuable time. Heydrich bade them a courteous farewell and went back to SS Headquarters on Prinz-Albrecht-Straße. He was not even mildly surprised at their lack of interest in anything outside their narrow sphere.
1200 hours CET
29 August 1940
Franz-Josefs-Bahnhof, Vienna, Austria/Greater German Reich
Colonel Kevin Duffy was finding being a prisoner of war a trifle unreal. He’d been flown off to Sicily with the retired brigadier, whose name he now knew as Alistare-Smythe. He still hadn’t learned the man’s Christian name or history. However, his web of social connections seemed absurdly large.