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Vast sums were sent to Argentina, some through normal banking channels but most in great secrecy by submarine. The U-boats also carried crates of currency, gold, and diamonds and other precious stones. Senior SS officers were sent to Argentina—some of them legally, accredited as diplomats, but again most of them secretly infiltrated by submarine—to purchase property where senior Nazis would be safe from Allied retribution.
The Allies learned of OPERATION PHOENIX and tried, without much success, to stop it. Their concern heightened as the war drew to a close. They learned that when Grand Admiral Doenitz issued the cease hostilities order on May 4, sixty-three U-boats were at sea.
Five of them were known to have complied with their orders to hoist a black flag and proceed to an Allied port to surrender, or to a neutral port to be interned. There was reliable intelligence that an additional forty-one U-boats had been scuttled by their crews, to prevent the capture of whatever may have been on board.
That left between seventeen and twenty U-boats unaccounted for. Of particular concern were U-234, U-405, and U-977. They were Type XB U-boats—minelayers, which meant that with no mines aboard they could carry a great deal of cargo and many passengers for great distances.
There was credible intelligence that when U-234 sailed from Narvik on April 16—two weeks before the German capitulation—she had aboard a varied cargo, some of which was either not listed on the manifest at all or listed under a false description. This included a ton of mail—which of course almost certainly hid currency and diamonds being smuggled. It also included Nazi and Japanese officers and German scientists as passengers. And something even more worrisome: 560 kilograms of uranium oxide from the German not-quite-completed atomic bomb project.
It was only logical to presume that U-405 and U-977 were carrying similar cargoes.
A massive search by ship and air for all submarines—but especially for U-234, U-405, and U-977—was launched from France, England, and Africa, and by the specially configured U.S. Army Air Forces B-24 “Liberator” bombers, which had searched for submarines since 1942 from bases in Brazil.
The searches, of course, were limited by the range of the aircraft involved and, as far as the ships also involved in t
he searches, by the size of the South Atlantic Ocean once the submarines had entered it.
There were some successes. Submarines were sighted and then attacked with depth charges and/or aircraft bombs. While it was mathematically probable that several of the submarines were sunk, there was no telling which ones.
The concern that the U-boats that—either certainly or probably—had uranium oxide aboard and were headed for Japan was reduced of course when the Japanese surrendered on September 2, 1945.
But that left Argentina as a very possible destination.
I
[ONE]
Aboard U-405
South Latitude 41.205 degrees, West Longitude 65.114 degrees
In the San Matias Gulf, the Coast of Argentina
0430 6 October 1945
“Let me have a look, please,” SS-Brigadeführer Ludwig Hoffmann said to Fregattenkapitän Wilhelm von Dattenberg, captain of U-405, who was looking through the periscope.
Hoffmann’s tone suggested it was less a request than an order. Hoffmann, a diminutive, intense forty-five-year-old, was superior in rank to von Dattenberg. If they had been in the Kriegsmarine, Hoffmann would have been a vizeadmiral.
Von Dattenberg, a slim, somewhat hawk-faced thirty-four-year-old, stepped away from the periscope eyepiece and indicated to Hoffmann that it was his.
Five months earlier, SS-Brigadeführer Hoffmann and fifteen other SS officers—two SS-standartenführers, a rank equivalent to kapitän zur see; six SS-obersturmbannführers, a rank equivalent to von Dattenberg’s; and seven SS-sturmbannführers, a rank equivalent to korvettenkapitän—had come aboard U-405 at Narvik, Denmark, with five heavy wooden crates.
And at least once a day since then, Fregattenkapitän von Dattenberg had very seriously considered how he might kill all of the Nazis, who carried orders signed by Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler himself.
Right now, he genuinely regretted having missed all of his opportunities to do so because each time he had come up with a plan, he realized that it would have endangered his crew. After all he’d been through with his sailors, he had no intention of doing that.
“I can’t see a goddamn thing,” Hoffmann snapped.
“The sun hasn’t come up, Herr Brigadeführer,” von Dattenberg said. “And there’s not much to see. As you know, this location was chosen because of its isolation.”
Hoffmann did not directly respond.
“But I can make out the shoreline,” he said. “Why are we so far offshore?”
“If we move any closer to the shore, Herr Brigadeführer, we would run the risk of going aground and tearing our bottom.”
“Then how are we going to get ashore?” Hoffmann asked.
