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‘I’m going to track a man down,’ he said.
1 This procedure badly burned the corpses but did not destroy the bones. The Russians later uncovered these 80,000 skeletons.
2 The Russian spring offensive of 1944 carried the tide of war so far westwards that the Soviet troops pushed south of the Baltic states and through to the Baltic Sea to the west of them. This cut off the whole of Ostland from the Reich, and led to a blaz
ing row between Hitler and his generals. They had seen it coming and had pleaded with Hitler to pull back the forty-five divisions inside the enclave. He had refused, reiterating his parrot-cry ‘Death or Victory’. All he offered these 500,000 soldiers inside the enclave was death. Cut off from re-supply, they fought with dwindling ammunition to delay a certain fate, and eventually surrendered. Of the majority, made prisoners and transported back in the winter of 1944–5 to Russia, few returned ten years later to Germany.
Chapter Three
WHILE PETER MILLER AND Sigi were asleep in each other’s arms in Hamburg a giant Coronado of Argentine Airlines swung over the darkened hills of Castille and entered final approach for a landing at Barajas airport, Madrid.
Sitting in a window seat in the third row back of the first-class passenger section was a man in his early sixties with iron-grey hair and a trim moustache.
Only one photograph had ever existed of the man, showing him in his early forties, with close-cropped hair, no moustache to cover the rat-trap mouth and a razor-straight parting along the left side of his head. Hardly anyone of the small group of men who had ever seen that photograph would recognise the man in the airliner, his hair now growing thickly back from the forehead, without a parting. The photograph in his passport matched his new appearance.
The name in that same passport identified him as Señor Ricardo Suertes, citizen of Argentina, and the name itself was his own grim joke against the world. For Suerte in Spanish means Luck, and Luck in German is Glueck. The airline passenger that January night had been born Richard Gluecks, later to become full general of the SS, head of the Reich Economic Administration Main Office and Hitler’s Inspector-General of Concentration Camps. On the wanted lists of West Germany and Israel, he was number three after Martin Bormann and the former chief of the Gestapo, Heinrich Müller. He ranked higher even than Dr Josef Mengele, the Devil Doctor of Auschwitz. In the Odessa he ranked number two, direct deputy of Martin Bormann on whom the mantle of the Fuehrer had fallen after 1945.
The role Richard Gluecks had played in the crimes of the SS was unique and matched only by the manner in which he managed to effect his own complete disappearance in May 1945. More even than Adolf Eichmann, Gluecks had been one of the most senior master-minds of the holocaust, and yet he had never pulled a trigger.
Had an uninformed passenger been told who the man sitting next to him was, he might well have wondered why the former head of an economic administration office should be so high on the wanted list.
Had he asked, he would have learned that of the crimes against humanity committed on the German side between 1933 and 1945 probably ninety-five per cent can accurately be laid at the door of the SS. Of these, probably eighty to ninety per cent can be attributed to two departments within the SS. These were the Reich Security Main Office and the Reich Economic Administration Main Office.
If the idea of an economic bureau being involved in mass-murder strikes a strange note, one must understand how it was intended that the job should be done. Not only was it intended to exterminate every Jew on the face of Europe, and most of the Slavic races with them, but it was intended that the victims should pay for the privilege. Before the gas chambers opened, the SS had already carried out the biggest robbery in history.
In the case of the Jews the payment was in three stages. First they were robbed of their businesses, houses, factories, bank accounts, furniture, cars and clothes. They were shipped eastwards to the slave-labour camps and the death camps, assured they were destined for resettlement and mainly believing it, with what they could carry, usually two suitcases. On the camp square these were also taken off them, along with the clothes they wore.
Out of this luggage of six million people, thousands of millions of dollars’ worth of booty was extracted, for the European Jews of the time habitually travelled with their wealth upon them, particularly those from Poland and the eastern lands. From the camps entire trainloads of gold trinkets, diamonds, sapphires, rubies, silver ingots, louis d’ors, gold dollars and bank-notes of every kind and description were shipped back to the SS headquarters inside Germany. Throughout its history the SS made a profit on its operations. A part of this profit in the form of gold bars stamped with the eagle of the Reich and the twin-lightning symbol of the SS was deposited towards the end of the war in the banks of Switzerland, Leichtenstein, Tangier and Beirut to form the fortune on which the Odessa was later based. Much of this gold still lies beneath the streets of Zürich, guarded by the complacent and self-righteous bankers of that city.
The second stage of the exploitation lay in the living bodies of the victims. They had calories of energy in them, and these could profitably be used. At this point the Jews came on to the same level as the Russians and the Poles, who had been captured penniless in the first place. Those in all categories unfit for work were exterminated as useless. Those able to work were hired out, either to the SS’s own factories or to German industrial concerns like Krupp, Thyssen, von Opel and others at three marks a day for unskilled workers, four marks for artisans. The phrase ‘per day’ meant as much work as could be abstracted from the living body for as little food during a twenty-four-hour period. Hundreds of thousands died at their place of work in this manner.
The SS was a state within a state. It had its own factories, workshops, engineering division, construction section, repair and maintenance shops and clothing department. It made for itself almost everything it could ever need, and used the slave labourers, which by Hitler’s decree were the property of the SS, to do the work.
The third stage of the exploitation lay in the corpses of the dead. These went naked to death, leaving behind waggon-loads of shoes, socks, shaving brushes, spectacles, jackets and trousers. They also left their hair, which was shipped back to the Reich to be turned into felt boots for the winter fighting, and their gold teeth fillings, which were yanked out of the corpses with pliers and later melted down to be deposited as gold bars in Zürich. Attempts were made to use the bones for fertilisers and render the body fats down for soap, but this was found to be uneconomical.
In charge of the entire economic or profit-making side of the extermination of fourteen million people was the Reich Economic Administration Main Office of the SS, headed by the man in Seat 3-B on the airliner that night.
Gluecks was one who preferred not to chance his arm, or his lifelong liberty, by returning to Germany after his escape. He had no need to. Handsomely provided for out of the secret funds, he could live out his days comfortably in South America, and still does. His dedication to the Nazi ideal remained unshaken by the events of 1945 and this, coupled with his former eminence, secured him a high and honoured place among the fugitive Nazis of Argentina, whence the Odessa was ruled.
The plane landed uneventfully and the passengers cleared Customs with no problems. The fluent Spanish of the first-class passenger from Row Three caused no eyebrows to be raised, for he had long since been able to pass for a South American.
Outside the terminal building he took a cab, and from long habit gave an address a block away from the Zurburan Hotel. Paying off the cab in the centre of Madrid, he took his grip and walked the remaining 200 yards to the hotel.
His reservation had been made by telex, so he checked in and went up to his room to shower and shave. It was at nine o’clock on the dot that three soft knocks, followed by a pause and two more, sounded at his door. He opened it himself and stood back when he recognised the visitor.
The new arrival closed the door behind him, snapped to attention and flashed up his right arm, palm downwards in the old salute.
‘Sieg Heil,’ said the man.
General Gluecks gave the younger man an approving nod and raised his own right hand.
‘Sieg Heil,’ he said more softly. He waved his visitor to a seat. The man facing him was another German, a former officer of the SS, and presently the chief of the Odessa network inside West Germany. He felt very keenly the honour of being summoned to Madrid for a personal conference with such a senior officer, and suspected it had something to do with the death of President Kennedy thirty-six hours earlier. He was not wrong.
General Gluecks poured himself a cup of coffee from the breakfast tray beside him and carefully lit a large Corona.
‘You have probably guessed the reason for this sudden and somewhat hazardous visit by me to Europe,’ he said. ‘As I dislike remaining on this continent longer than necessary, I will get to the point and be brief.’
The subordinate from Germany sat forward expectantly.
