The Return of Lanny Budd

by Upton Sinclair

  There were seven ‘repeater’ stations strung out along the line of those cables, and at each of these the Americans had a little compound with a house to live in. The Americans lived in the upper storey of the house and the Russians lived underneath—signal men and M.V.D. agents, the Russian Secret Police. They watched every move the Americans made, and they invaded the American quarters for inspection at any hour of the day or night. They even objected to the bathroom being locked, and when the Americans put on locks the Russians broke them. The house had a fence around it enclosing a yard less than fifteen feet square, and the Americans were not allowed outside the yard unless accompanied by a Soviet guard. If something went wrong with the cable and a man rushed out to fix it in a hurry, that man would be arrested and spirited away, and then an American officer would go to the Soviet authoritities to demand his return and they would profess to know nothing about him, even though he was in the same building at the time. On more than one occasion the Americans had found means to spirit the man away; on other occasions the man had never been seen again.

  Krichevsky said, ‘They are never going to rest, Mr Budd, until they’ve shut off those cables. In fact I don’t think they’ll rest until they have driven us out of Berlin’.

  ‘I doubt if they will go that far’, replied Lanny.

  But the other wanted to know, What would we do if they were to shut off the roads as well as the cables? ‘Do we have the right of access to Berlin in the agreements we made with them’?

  Lanny didn’t know about that. He said, ‘We have a law that the ownership of land carries with it the right of access to it. But of course the Reds may say they have different laws from what we have. Anyhow, I don’t think we’ll let ourselves be driven out without a fight, and I’m sure we won’t let our people be starved there’.

  X

  Lanny paid a visit to the Treasury Building, where Turner of the Secret Service gathered several of the section heads to hear the art expert tell what he had observed of the doings of Germans and Russians, and his impressions of Monck and Morrison and the others with whom he had been working. When this session was over Turner remarked, ‘If you have an hour or two to spare I will show you something interesting’.

  Lanny said his time was his own, and the official took him into a separate room where there were a number of small tables, each with a chair, in front of a curious-looking apparatus. It had the appearance of a metal hood with a large opening in the front. A bright light was switched on at the top, and it shone down through a couple of glass plates and on to the sloping floor of the hood. It was an apparatus for the comfortable reading of microfilm. Turner took from his pocket an envelope containing several thin strips of celluloid. There were tiny photographs on the strips, each about the size of a postage stamp; when a strip was slipped on rollers between the glass plates a light passed through it and down to the floor of the hood, and there was a page, bright and clear for reading, the size of a book with large type. You could sit comfortably and read the page, and when you had finished you pushed the little celluloid strip an inch or less to the right and there was page two, and so on.

  The strips were labelled ‘Himmler money—Sachsenhausen’. Turner explained that it was a confidential report by Scotland Yard, giving the results of a study of material in the records of the Nazi S.D., the secret police of the Hitler regime; also from interviewing prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp who had worked in the enterprise of manufacturing British money. The report filled some thirty pages, and it took Lanny a couple of hours to read it carefully and make notes.

  A story the like of which had never been in the world before, and might never be again—unless it should happen that the records of the Soviet secret services should be opened to inspection in the same way. With German foresight and thoroughness the whole country had been searched for expert engravers, printers, and technicians of every sort having to do with the manufacture of paper money. Only Jews had been chosen, the evident intention being to exterminate them when the job was done and thus to bury forever the truth about the enterprise.

  These unfortunate experts were not invited, nor were they hired at high salaries; they were arrested and sentenced to the Sachsenhausen camp, north of Berlin. Once inside they were assigned to Block 19, a special enclosure carefully fenced off and kept from all communication with the rest of the place. Compared with the other prisoners they were well treated; there was no torture, they had good food and did not suffer from cold. They were under the charge of the S.S., the Schutzstaffel troopers, who treated them politely and even made friends; they got up a drama, in which some of the S.S. took part, and you might have seen the S.S. commander taking part in table-tennis games. But they were never permitted to speak to anyone from outside or to communicate or receive communications. When one became hopelessly ill with T.B., he was taken outside, shot, and burned in the crematorium; later on in the war, some of those brought in were wounded and crippled men, but all were required to work and were held responsible for doing perfect work. There was only one penalty and one kind of punishment—death.

  ‘Sonderkommando Himmler’ was the name of this group. It was continually increased in size, until at the end of the war there were a hundred and forty technicians working. They manufactured not merely paper money, but every kind of forged paper that could be of use in the German struggle: stamps, stamped envelopes, war bonds of Tito-Broz, identity cards for American and British airmen, passes for Russian police units of the N.K.V.D., identity cards for spies in Algiers, Russian and Swiss passports, United States certificates of nationality, Red Cross notepaper, passport stamps for all the European states, rubber stamps for all diplomatic offices, reports on legations from foreign agents, and so on without end. In command of the enterprise was Heydrick, chief of the Security Police, and when he was assassinated in May, 1942, Ernst Kaltenbrunner took his place. R.H.S.A. were the initials of the enterprise, meaning Reichs Headquarters of the Security Amt, or Bureau.

  Expert engravers made the plates. The handmade paper was manufactured outside and came in sheets of four. There were four Monopol printing machines; five-, ten-, twenty-, and fifty-pound notes were made. When the printing and drying were done, the sheets were not cut but torn with rulers. This tearing was done in the Reisserei, and then the notes were taken to the Sortierei, where experts with electrical apparatus studied each note, and they were held responsible for this delicate task. First-class product went to the German legations in foreign countries; second-class product went to secret agents; the third was reserved until later, to be used in Britain after Germany had conquered that country.

  Several of the notes were pinned together, that being the British practice. If tiny faults were observed in the notes care was taken to put the pins through those faults. One corner was religiously torn off because that was the way the British did. There were processes to soil some of the notes so that they wouldn’t look too new. Careful records were kept of everything, and these showed that a total of 134,609,945 British pounds was printed. The records showed also that in the spring of 1944 they had begun the manufacture of United States notes made by a phototype printing process. In all, they tried two hundred and twenty experiments before they got this to their satisfaction, and by that time the war was coming to an end—and not in the way they had planned.

  XI

  When the invading armies showed signs of bursting through, the whole Sonderkommando Himmler was loaded into a caravan and transported to the concentration camp at Mauthausen, which is on the Danube River. They thought that was safe; but presently Patton’s armies were approaching there, so they fled to the little village of Redel-Zipp. They had barely got their machines set up and ready to start work again when the mechanised raiders were reported nearby, so everything split up in confusion. The machines were taken out and dumped into a lake; the bales of money disappeared in this direction and that. The hundred and forty Jewish technicians were loaded into trucks and started on what they knew wa
s to be their last journey.

  But as it happened two made their escape, and the others started arguing and pleading with their guards. Since two had escaped the secret was out, and what was the good of killing the rest? The Americans were coming and they didn’t approve of wholesale killing of innocent people; it might well be that they would hang all the S.S. men who did the murders. Moreover, there was money involved, and not all of it counterfeit. There had been genuine American and British money used in making imitations and comparing the finished product. The experts had managed to hide a lot of this; one man had a bundle of it wound up in a ball of string. Why shouldn’t the guards share in this and scatter to their homes? This was the way the story ended, and this was how it came about that British agents had been able to locate both Jewish workers and S.S. guards and get the detailed stories for their official report.

  The most curious thing in the report, at least from the viewpoint of Lanny Budd, was the effort the Germans had made to prepare against exposure of this nefarious enterprise. The office of the Herr Doktor, Lanny’s old friend Jüppchen Goebbels, issued a manifesto charging the Allies with the very crime his own gang was committing. In December, 1942, at the time of the American and British invasion of North Africa, the Nazi propaganda bureau gave out a story headlined, ‘Algiers Flooded by Forged Banknotes’. The story first appeared in a Rome paper, to the effect that the British had brought forged Algerian banknotes with the expeditionary force; the Bank of England had printed them and high officials of the government had issued them to British soldiers. Five-franc notes, all new in packets, labelled ‘Emis en France, série 1944’.

  Lanny had heard these reports in North Africa and had wondered if they could be true. Now he called Turner’s attention to the matter, and Turner said, ‘It was a regular Nazi technique, and the Soviets have taken it over. Any time they give out reports that Americans have been violating the laws of war, using poison gas, germ warfare, or what have you, you may be sure the Soviets are doing it or getting ready to do it’.

  XII

  Lanny intended to see the President but learned that he was away on a brief vacation. He reported to the White House and waited at his hotel for orders, and the secretary phoned him that the President desired him to talk with Under-Secretary of State Acheson. So Lanny took a taxi to that part of the city derisively known as ‘Foggy Bottom’, where ‘State’ had inherited a big building from ‘War’. There he was introduced to an elegant and courteous gentleman, a Yale man and Harvard lawyer, wearing a little moustache like Lanny himself. They had never met before, but they accepted each other at the first glance and understood each other after the first sentence; for Dean Acheson was an ardent advocate of the Truman Doctrine, which was in substance that the free world was not going to let itself be gobbled up or even eaten in small nibbles. Dean Acheson took no stock in the notion that the rearming of Turkey and Greece might result in war with the Soviet Union; on the contrary, he was quite certain that failure to rearm them might result in their being eaten—though he was much too well bred a person to be aware of any pun in connection with their names.

  Lanny gave an account of what he had learned about Soviet doings in and around Berlin. He told of the incessant stream of abuse which Radio Berlin was pouring out upon its three former allies, especially the most powerful of them, imperialist America. Lanny knew that it was the War Department that had issued the directive forbidding R.I.A.S. to criticise the Soviets; but he was venturing to guess that ‘War’ would heed the opinion of ‘State’ on the policy. He made his suggestion that the time had come to reconsider this matter. Rigid correctness was apparent in every detail of the appearance of Dean Gooderham Acheson and in every syllable of his speech; the Soviets were our allies, he said, and the Germans our conquered foes, and the order of the day was courtesy to the former and a dignified reserve to the latter. ‘To make a formal change in our attitude toward our former allies is a grave step indeed, and we are bound to hesitate before taking it. We have entered through the proper channels our diplomatic protests to one after another of these Soviet actions. Sooner or later they become known to our people through the press and also to the peoples of our allied countries. It takes time for public opinion to change; and you know that while it is the duty of administrators to lead the public, we cannot go too far in advance of it and so lose contact with it’.

  ‘Yes, Mr Acheson’, said Lanny, ‘I learned that lesson from a great instructor, Franklin Roosevelt. He said to me, “I cannot go any faster than the people will let me”. But sooner orlater we are going to have to make peace with the German people, and they are going to have to make their choice between the East and the West. The Soviets have set out to get possession of the German mind. They have got hold of magnificent radio equipment; they have got the best technical brains that are for sale in Berlin and are doing a first-class job. They feed the Germans music and entertainment with all kinds of propaganda interspersed, including the most vicious and cruel lies about us. All Germany is getting it, both East and West. The world is told that it is the Soviet Union that stands for unity, freedom, democracy, and peace for the German people. Research shows that they have about two-thirds of the Germans as their audience, and we and the British divide the remaining third. We ought to change that, Mr Acheson, and we can do it by letting R.I.A.S. answer the Red arguments and correct the falsehoods day by day as they are told’.

  Said the Under-Secretary, ‘I assure you, Mr Budd, we have been thinking earnestly about the subject. In strict confidence I will tell you that I have hopes that something may be done about it soon’.

  So Lanny went out from the presence, and in the lobby of the building there were young men waiting for him with pads of paper in their hands and eager pencils poised. How they found out about these matters Lanny didn’t know, but he said to them, ‘I cannot tell you anything about what Mr Acheson said to me, but I will be very glad to tell you what I said to him’.

  They settled for that.

  12 THE INJUR’D LOVER’S HELL

  I

  Lanny took a plane to New York, and in order not to disturb the Peace Group he took a taxi from the airport to Edgemere. There was Laurel ready to be locked in his arms; and there was that newly arrived pilgrim from eternity, manifesting its firm intention to stay at this resting place as long as it could. This was Lanny’s third child, but he had never got over marvelling at the strangeness of this method of getting life into existence. It seemed to him messy and precarious, altogether unbelievable, yet here it was. It seemed to him that if he had been consulted in advance he could have devised a number of ways that would have been more safe and convenient. He was one of those of whom the old-time Persian had written; he would have liked to grasp this sorry scheme of things entire and remould it nearer to the heart’s desire.

  Meantime here was this nursling, this bundle of well-rounded flesh, clutching and clamouring, being watched and carefully trained. They had named her after her mother, and she would be known as Baby Laurel; inevitably that would be shortened to Babe, which was not a dignified title, but it would be a long time before she would know it. Among her watchers, now and for the rest of her life, was her little brother, aged five and known as Junior. He was full of delight at the phenomenon and also full of awe; when he asked questions he was not told a story about a stork but about motherhood.

  There were all the members and employees of the Peace Group to be greeted. They crowded into the parlour of the old-fashioned house to hear Lanny tell about what he had seen and learned in Germany. Later on they heard him tell some of it over the radio; nothing about counterfeiting and spying, of course, but all about R.I.A.S., a sort of distant cousin of the Peace Programme. He stated plainly his reason for believing that the Soviets were bent upon making world peace impossible; and that, of course, brought the customary crop of letters from the fellow travellers, including the grower of avocados and winter vegetables in Pahokee, Florida.

  II

  Another lett
er came, marked ‘Personal’ and signed ‘Rotterdam’—that being the city in which Hansi Robin had been born and raised and from which some thirty years ago he had sent his first letter to Lanny Budd. ‘I am twelve’, he had written then, ‘and I practice now a Beethoven romance for violin’. Now Hansi could play everything that Beethoven had written for the violin, most of it from memory. He wrote to say, ‘I want to see you; will telephone at lunchtime’.

  That was the hour when Lanny would be at the house, and it was notice to him to answer the ’phone himself. He did so, and when he heard the familiar voice he said promptly, ‘Okay, name the time and place’. Hansi replied, ‘Lexington Avenue and Thirty-second Street, north-east corner, to-morrow, two o’clock sharp’. Lanny said, ‘Okay’, and Hansi repeated the directions once more and then without another word hung up. They had agreed to take extreme precautions, and it was understood that Hansi was never to ’phone from his house but to take a walk and call from a pay station where he was not known.

  Lanny allowed himself plenty of time; he parked on a side street in the neighbourhood and read a newspaper until a minute or two before the hour. Then he drove around a couple of blocks and exactly on the second arrived at the corner specified. There was Hansi, approaching on a side street, wearing a pair of dark glasses on a hot summer day. The car stopped for a few seconds, he stepped in, and away they went up Lexington Avenue, through the Harlem slums and the wilds of the Bronx, and on out into the country. Hansi sat slumped in his seat, as inconspicuous as possible, and they talked.