The White Horse was leased in those days to a remarkable and short-lived woman by the name of Zenta Hausner, who was destined to play no small part in the making of the Garmisch legend. In due course she was to earn the sobriquet amongst the American press in Germany of ‘Garmisch Nell – the Queen of Hearts’, and amongst the Germans of Garmisch the no less evocative nickname of ‘die Königin der Nacht’, the Queen of the Night. At the end of the war Zenta was 35 years of age, an attractive woman by all accounts, with a full figure and a shock of bright red hair, a long track record in the business and an overriding ambition to achieve riches and luxury in a world singularly lacking in either.
Frau Hausner’s past was not greatly more salubrious than her future. She had been born in October 1910 in Mühldorf, a small Bavarian town on the River Inn, the daughter of a well-to-do brewer. She was a pretty girl, and a pushy and ambitious one. By the age of 18 she had already become the owner of her first establishment – a beer tavern in the city of Munich. Two years later she came to the notice of the police when she tried to shoot herself in Munich’s most fashionable hotel, the Vier Jahreszejten, following the break-up of her love-affair with a well-known violinist. Fortunately she was interrupted, with a pistol at her breast and a scratchy record playing a weepy violin solo – ‘Das Lied der Sehnsucht’ (Song of Yearning) – on the gramophone. Zenta survived her heartbreak and was thus granted a stay of execution for 17 more years.
With the profits from her tavern the youthful Zenta bought a restaurant in a respectable spa town in Lower Saxony, and married a motor racing driver by whom she had one child, a daughter. After her divorce in 1938 she moved back to Munich, where she ran a nightclub and bought and managed the Hotel Post near Munich railway station. During one of the mass air raids on the Bavarian capital in 1944, Zenta’s hotel was bombed and destroyed and in compensation she received from the Nazi government 30,000 Reichsmarks. With this money she removed herself to unscathed Garmisch-Partenkirchen just before Christmas 1944 and rented the hotel-restaurant ‘Zur Schranne’. This hotel was situated next to the office of the Kreisleiter, the head of the Nazi local government, and inevitably became a popular venue for local Nazi dignitaries, who used the restaurant as a meeting place and held elaborate parties there during the evening. The entire community, it was said, regarded Zenta’s restaurant as a disgrace to decency. Zenta Hausner herself was considered to be an ardent Nazi sympathiser and was known to have been the mistress of Gauleiter Giesler, the Nazi Gauleiter of Bavaria. According to the post-war Landrat of Garmisch, it was only because of her connections with the local Kreisleitung that Zenta was granted the lease of the ‘Zur Schranne’ at all.
All of this should have been rather a handicap to Zenta Hausner when the war to extirpate Nazism ended in an Allied victory and the occupation of Germany. But it was not. Like hundreds of thousands of other Nazis or Nazi sympathisers in Germany, this lady of fortune escaped retribution by taking advantage of the moral ambivalence of the occupation regime. Though the punishment of Nazis and the total eradication of Nazism was one of the main post-war goals of the Allied occupation governments in Germany, in practice the process was snarled up by almost insuperable administrative difficulties and bogged down in the quicksands of human reality – the social, sexual and financial rapport that developed between victors and vanquished, and the mutual satisfaction of private need and greed between the Allied soldiers and the German civilians.
In order to continue her career as a restaurateur in Garmisch, Zenta Hausner had her eyes on the White Horse. But when she applied for a licence she was refused on the grounds of her previous affiliation and connection with Nazi organisations and officials. There was only one way out, it seemed, and that was via an American officer’s heart. Frau Hausner was a comely woman and only a week or two after the end of the war she had already caught the eye of a certain US Army captain called Korner – ‘one of the most unglorious representatives of the occupation powers on German soil’, according to one who knew him in those days. Later that summer Captain Korner was appointed Commandant of a local Civilian Internment Camp for suspected Nazis and became an influential member of the American military establishment in the town. Their liaison seemed almost preordained. Frau Hausner wanted the White Horse Inn and Captain Korner wanted Frau Hausner. Ergo, Captain Korner would get her the White Horse Inn and he would have Frau Hausner.
As Commandant of the Internment Camp, Korner had become experienced in reaching accommodations of this sort. Like many members of the American Military Government in Germany he was more German than American and seems to have had difficulty in determining where his patriotic loyalties lay. Born and brought up in Germany, he had emigrated to the United States in the ‘thirties. Allegedly Korner brought with him to the States a large sum of money which he had misappropriated from a Wehrmacht unit with which he had been serving before his defection. Korner’s military records are missing from the appropriate US Army archives in the US, so nothing of his career is known until he surfaced in Garmisch at the end of the war as a German expert in the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps and thus fatefully crossed the path of ‘Garmisch Nell’.
What is known is that Captain Korner abused his position at the Internment Camp to make a personal profit out of the inmates, most of whom were known or suspected Nazis. Korner’s business was selling Persilscheine, or Persil certificates, to the highest bidders. A Persil certificate was a whitewash document, generally bogus, which officially cleared the bearer of complicity in Nazism during the Hitler era. It was one of the most highly prized items on the German black market – and one of the most expensive. What Korner peddled were not, as it happened, bogus papers but genuine official discharge papers, properly signed but wrongfully issued. Some of the Germans who were released in this way were such notorious Nazis that they were later rearrested, and the process would begin all over again. Whenever Korner found he had run out of bidders he merely recruited more by the simple expedience of having a man arrested ‘on suspicion’. Through professional go-betweens Korner would then get in touch with the prisoner’s relatives and fix a price that would secure his release. The payment was almost obligatory in those circumstances, for there was no habeas corpus and a man could be held ‘on suspicion’ for an indefinite period, irrespective of whether he was guilty or innocent. Such was the man who aspired to Zenta Hausner’s bed, who became in quick succession her lover, her confidant and her business partner, and who played such a decisive role in the beginning – and the end – of her peacetime career in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
With a man like Körner on her side, Zenta’s difficulties with local German officialdom were quickly solved.
Captain Korner bulldozed his way through the opposition. German advisers to Garmisch Military Government were fully aware of Frau Hausner’s activities during the war and knew that her Fragebogen contained false statements about her Nazi connections. One of them even threatened to see to it that Hausner left Garmisch with only a suitcase in her hand. Against such opponents Captain Korner was both bullying and dismissive. In his capacity as CIC officer at the CIE he had personally screened Frau Hausner, he emphasised. He could confirm that she was ‘OK’, so how dare they bandy false information? How dare they cause the lady offence? ‘Why don’t we keep mum about the past?’ he hinted conspiratorially. ‘Between us we could rule Garmisch.’ So the lease was granted. The White. Horse Inn was now in Zenta Hausner’s hands to make of it what she would.
What Zenta made of the place probably confirmed everybody’s worst fears. The underlying function of the White Horse – the source of its future notoriety – was not what any official had had in mind. But there was no doubt that Frau Hausner knew her job and was an excellent businesswoman. Both professionally and privately she was everyone’s idea of ‘the hostess with the mostest’. She was charming and personable. She was easy on the eye and easy to get on with. She was a cheerful, jolly soul – lustig in the Bavarian manner – and she laughed a lot and helped other
s to laugh in a gloomy and uncertain world. And she was as generous as she was shrewd. Diners in her restaurant did not have to produce their ration cards to get a meal; in the White Horse, it was said, gibt es alles ‘ohne’, everything is ‘without’. If one of the Herren did not have enough money with him to pay the bill, no matter – she gave him credit ‘on the slate’, and entered his name and the amount of his debt in her little black notebook.
The White Horse offered warmth, hospitality, conviviality and escape. In the simple, Bavarian crypt-like room, the Schnapps flowed, music played, the conversation swelled and the fug of black-market Virginia tobacco-smoke thickened. All kinds of people came to Zenta’s Nachtlokal for a night out and a respite from the realities of post-war Germany – civilians and soldiers, Germans and foreigners, nice girls and tarts, the good, the bad and the ugly. And amongst them, seated in a huddle in the darker corners, their earnest discussions submerged under the noise and the fug, were the men who bestowed on Zenta Hausner’s night haunt its quintessential reputation – the wheeler-dealers. Businessmen manqué, banned by occupation law from the pursuit of legitimate commerce and trade, they used the White Horse like an industrial club or a commodities exchange, covertly manipulating the underworld forces of supply and demand in Garmisch and Upper Bavaria, and busily operating the black market by means of a primitive but complex system of barter in contraband and under-the-counter goods of every description: furs, diamonds, petrol, motor cars, salt, cognac, optical equipment, insulin, sewing-machine needles and anything that could be turned for a quick profit. A Garmisch journalist who was Zenta’s close friend later recalled: ‘Over the tables, wagon loads of coal, alcohol and petrol were bought and sold. A great deal of money was also made by buying and selling diamonds and opium. Gradually all those people who could be considered respectable stopped going to the White Horse.’ One of the most active racketeers was Zenta’s manager at the White Horse, a man known to everyone as Charlie. In the past Charlie had achieved the unusual distinction of being thrown out of the Hitler Youth and obtaining a fraudulent discharge from the Wehrmacht in wartime. In post-war Garmisch he emerged as a big-time black-marketeer, morphine addict and local thug – ‘a bad and very dangerous guy’, in the words of one who knew him.
For the big-time operators, Zenta Hausner – who was a big-time operator herself – made available the inner sanctum of her own private quarters. Above the nightclub she had a small apartment looking down on the river: a modest sitting-room with four chairs and a round occasional table, a bedroom with a double bed and a kitchen and bath. Here, after the club had shut for the night, she would invite a few close friends or business partners for a nocturnal poker party or other entertainment. Here, too, she would confirm her latest deal and embrace her latest lover, for there were others besides Captain Korner, though he was her most constant.
What helped to make the White Horse the most notorious dive in Garmisch – and Garmisch itself, in the words of American Counter Intelligence, ‘the worst concentration of international gangsters in post-war Europe’ – was the easy access to foreign borders (Switzerland, Austria, Italy) and the extraordinary size and variety of valuables of all kinds that had been dumped and cached in the area as the tide of war receded. For in addition to the Reichsbank reserves, the Abwehr funds and the war-chest of the Brandenburg Division, large stocks of military and strategic materials of all kinds had been abandoned throughout the Werdenfelser Land – platinum, uranium, heavy water, morphine, cocaine, precious metals, jewels, and much else besides. These abandoned dumps were soon discovered and ransacked by local racketeers and formed the basic stock-in-trade of the big-time black-marketeers and international smugglers operating out of Garmisch.
The fate of some of these valuables we have attempted to describe already. Portions of the remainder came to the attention of the authorities from time to time. Ten cases of platinum, for example, which were said to belong to the Italians, arrived in Mittenwald too late to be properly hidden and had to be buried under a manure heap in the backyard of Joseph Veit, the local hunter who had been asked to find a hiding place for Funk and other Nazi VIPs in April 1945. After the Americans had occupied Mittenwald, Veit handed over the cases of platinum to a couple of officers who were carrying out a house-to-house search, obtaining a receipt from them in return. On a number of occasions during the next few months several American CIC officers called on Veit and demanded to know what he had done with the platinum that had been placed in his charge. On each occasion Veit showed them his receipt and the CIC investigators went away puzzled. It seemed to Veit that either there was a total lack of co-ordination between the different departments of the US Occupation or the ten cases of platinum (like a portion of the Reichs bank treasure) had not reached the right hands once they had been recovered by the Americans.
Much of the uranium went missing, too. The uranium, in the form of small cubes, had been stockpiled by the Germans during the war at their atomic bomb research station in the foothills of the Kreuzeck, one of the heights above Garmisch-Partenkirchen. With the approach of the American Army the entire stock of uranium cubes was loaded on to lorries, driven down to the River Loisach, and tipped into the water. One day later in the summer – not long after the first A-bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima on 6 August 1945 – a group of children paddling in a shallow stretch of the river chanced on some of these metal cubes lying among the rocks in the river bed. To their delight, they found that when they struck the radioactive cubes against a stone they emitted a flash about a foot long, like a magic lighter-flint. Naturally the children took a few of these strange cubes home with them and showed them to their parents, and it was not long before the astonished adults worked out what it was they had found.
This was the beginning of Garmisch’s great uranium rush. It had not escaped some of the astuter citizens of the town that the basic fissile material of the atomic bomb must have some kind of value on the local black market and they were soon scouring the. river bed in search of this precious new commodity.1 Many of the uranium cubes ended up in Berlin and East Germany, but a number of them – because of the great difficulty of fixing a price for this kind of commodity – remained for some while in the possession of the people who had found them, often with embarrassing results. A local Lothario, who took great pride in his success with the ladies, hid his cube under the seat of his car, and was temporarily rendered impotent (so the story goes) by the radioactive properties of the metal over which he sat each day. Another Garmisch man, a dentist who had hidden a cube in a cupboard of his surgery, found that his X-Ray equipment refused to function properly – until the day he sold his uranium cube.
When the Americans eventually got wind of the business they treated it with the utmost urgency. ‘We had a big hush-hush on it,’ recalled one of the American investigators. ‘The goddamn State Department sent over a couple of spooks and they went up to the river with a guide. I guess they got it all up and put Top Secret on it and headed back to the States with it.’ Several wooden slatted boxes of uranium oxide were recovered, together with two carboys of ‘heavy water’ (deuterium oxide, employed as a moderator in nuclear reaction) and at least 35 loose cubes which were being peddled on the black market in Garmisch. Twenty more cubes were apparently traced to Switzerland but an untold number of uranium cubes – one estimate puts the figure at nearly 700 – were never accounted for, at least not publicly.
Radium was another priceless element that found its way to Garmisch – much to the excitement of some of the White Horse’s more dubious denizens.
The radium affair had begun in the spring of 1945, as the advancing Red Army began its assault on the city of Breslau, the capital of the eastern German province of Silesia. just before the Russians overran the city centre an SS Medical Officer by the name of Major Dr Schneider removed from the medical department of the University building a lead container containing 100 milligrams of pure radium, the rare and extremely expensive white metal which forms the gamma ray sour
ce of medical radiology. Schneider took the radium with him as he fled westward away from the Russians. He still had it with him when he was captured by the Americans and he hung on to it while he languished in the German prisoner of war camp near Garmisch-Partenkirchen. When his former driver, Werner Altmann, also a prisoner of war, became due for release in May 1947, Dr Schneider entrusted the lead box of radium to him. Shortly after Altmann’s release he was offered the job of manager of the White Horse in Garmisch and before long he had become the firm friend of Zenta Hausner as well.
It so happened that the minuscule quantity of radium in Altmann’s possession was worth a majuscule amount of money in 1947. Though the radium weighed less than a one-pence English coin, it was worth some $1,250,000 in 1947, or $11,125,000 today. Inevitably, once it had crossed the portals of the White Horse in Altmann’s arms, its future became the subject of intensive and largely criminal speculation on the part of that establishment’s more venal inmates. The problem with radium in the raw form is that it is difficult to handle, for once out of its protective lead container it emits a dangerous and potentially lethal gamma radiation. It was soon decided that there was nowhere in Germany where the windfall radium could be discreetly and profitably disposed of, and that the USA was the best place to offload it. A plan was drawn up whereby Captain Korner would obtain travel permits and an air ticket to enable his mistress to fly to the States and sell the radium for dollars there in the spring of 1948. So attractive did the scheme seem, and so immeasurable the profit accruing from it, that Altmann was planning to purchase the lease of the White Horse from his share of the proceeds and had even invested in a number of barrels of red wine and some 1,000 litres of brandy on the strength of it and had them laid down in the White Horse cellar. The plan foundered on the unexpected moral probity – or was it perhaps proprietorial jealousy? – of the former SS Major.
Nazi Gold Page 35