CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Landespolizei [Bundeslandt State Police] Kriminalpolitzei, Detective Branch, Wittelsbachstrasse. 3, Ludwigshafen am Rhein, late evening, August 28, 1962

Oberwachtmeister [Senior Constable] Eberhard Zimmerman, Schäfer’s working partner, and Hilda Weiss-Krüger, the most experienced and well-respected analyst/secretary in the Kriminalpolitzei forensic sciences division, had a breakthrough after a grueling twelve-hour day. Both officers were sure they would go blind from the eyestrain after pouring over the prodigious amount of documentation Chief Schneider had delivered by courier from headquarters in Wiesbaden.

Unable to contain themselves, they interrupted Lieutenant Schäfer’s late evening lunch—leftovers of a sandwich he started at lunch the previous day. He was weary but happy, because he, too, had made a breakthrough which would send him on what he hoped would be a productive search.

“Horst!” Zimmerman called out to his boss in a burst of enthusiasm. “We hit a great lead!”

“All right, Eberhard, you and Hilda go first; then I will tell you my little success.”

“We have a list of four names that Leopold Boehm in the FIU [Financial Intelligence Unit] here in Ludwigshafen gave us; they are his paid confidential informants. Their specialty is informing on former Nazis, especially the SS; and Kriminalkommissar Boehm says these people—one of whom is a woman—know a great deal about the inner workings of modern-day ODESSA. They are all risk takers, and informing on the SS and ODESSA is very much a risk; so, they expect to be paid handsomely.”

“I know Leopold. We talked about our decision back when we were first approached whether we would go SiPo or stay Kripo. We both knew that our careers would never amount to much, but we have both been able to sleep nights. He knows as much as anyone in Germany about organized crime since it is so money-driven,” said Schäfer.”

Hilda added, “Leopold was willing to arrange a meeting with all four of them—separately, of course; so, Eberhard and I scheduled meetings all over Ludwigshafen for tomorrow morning.”

She grinned in triumph and with the knowledge that she and Eberhard had scored a serious point in the ongoing one-upmanship battle with their usually successful lieutenant.

“So, what have you got, boss?” Eberhard asked.

“I only have one name, but it came from Chief Schneider himself. He called me this afternoon. This is a man that the headquarters office knows all about and has considerable leverage over. In exchange for information about anything going on in the organized crime world here and abroad or about the ODESSA, the entire Kriminalpolitzei turns a blind eye to his very lucrative enterprises that include human trafficking, gambling, illicit drug trafficking, prostitution, and a host of white collar crimes. The chief thinks it is a good trade and said he would make the arrangements for us to interview him if we promise not to use anything he tells us against him, and he never gets connected to any arrest that might take place as a result of the information he shares.”

“Who do we go after first, Horst?”

“Let’s flip a coin.”

Eberhard laughed out loud. He had been through this several hundred times—long enough and often enough that it had become a tradition and a standing joke.

Horst smiled back, extracted a coin, flipped it, and gave it a quick glance as it sat out of range of Hilda and Eberhard.

“Heads,” he said. “I win. We go and see my hot prospect first.”

Eberhard laughed heartily, but Hilda looked like she had been violated.

“Hey,” she demanded, “I didn’t get to see that! What I did see was a magician’s trick. That’s not fair.”

Horst pushed the dorsum of his hand towards Hilda and smiled, “See—heads.”

She gave him a stern look which she could not maintain and started to laugh with her two male partners.

“How come I think I have just been had?” she said.

Both men shrugged and gave her an affectionate smile.

§§§§§§

Suite 2212, Haus Cumberland Office Building on the Kurfürstendamm Avenue between Bleibtreu and Schlüterstrasse, Charlottenburg, Berlin, August 29, 1962, three o’clock in the afternoon.

Horst, Eberhard, and Hilda were fully aware of the activities of the Rebscher crime syndicate of which the man they were to meet—business executive Herr Kohler—was a leading executive. West Germany did not have a fully professional international criminal organization in comparison with the Allies. However, the Rebscher German crime syndicate profited significantly from their loose connection with the Sicilian and Russian Mafias, the Camorra, the Triads, and the Yakuza. They were tolerated by those better-established organizations because they provided a conduit into the newly growing German economy and assisted in helping the other syndicates gain a toehold in a new market.

On their own, the Rebschers became rich as partners of the ODESSA, with all of the Third Reich’s hidden treasure at the ODESSA’s disposal when needed. Those monies allowed the legal front company, the WestBerlinImportExport GmbH Corporation to prosper by pursuing a legitimate export business involved in the moving of commodities such as motor vehicles, machinery, chemicals, electronic products, electrical equipment, pharmaceuticals, metals, transport equipment, foodstuffs, textiles, rubber, and plastic products. The ODESSA and its remaining secretive SS officer directors reaped a very acceptable harvest from the twenty percent portion of the company’s profits which reverted back to them. Neither the ODESSA nor the corporation were likely to be forthcoming about their own involvement, but Chief Schneider assured his Kripo squad from Ludwigshafen that a trip to Berlin would be useful.

The three Kripo officers were shown to comfortable handcrafted leather swivel chairs in the sumptuous conference room of WestBerlinImportExport GmbH Corporation. Stellvertretender Direktor [Deputy Director] Heinrich Kohler entered the room within minutes. He was a tall, handsome, Aryan gentleman—every bit the personification of the ideal German mensch envisioned by the leaders of the Third Reich. Kohler was all blond, blue-eyed, authoritarian, and unquestionably in charge of the proceedings about to take place. He was dressed in the latest Parisian fashion—custom-tailored, conservative, charcoal gray, form-fitting, three-button silk and wool blend suit, crisply starched white shirt, and hand-knotted bow tie. His black shoes gleamed with a shine applied that morning. Horst thought he was nearly a clone of Chief Schneider Graf von der Lippe.

“Welcome. You are here because Chief Schneider asked us to see you. A few ground rules: you may not inquire as to our business except as it directly applies to the search for individuals associated with one Heinrich Rudolf Gajewski, former SS officer whom I understand is deceased. You may only be given information regarding his associates and particularly his actual or putative enemies. A few documents pertaining to the man have been prepared and copied from certain files to which we have access. You may not have access to any other documents, and understand at the outset that no subpoena will be honored that demands more, as per the directive of the chief of the Federal Police of West Germany.

“Any questions?”

“No. Thank you, Herr Deputy Director. What can you tell us about Herr Gajewski?”

“The man was an employee of IG Farben/BASF since 1934. His education was in chemical engineering with a specialization in production of industrial gasses. He became involved in the top-secret manufacture of sarin and tabun gasses which—as you may know—was used in the execution of undesirables. Gajewski was found to have an important skill in personnel management. His principal occupation during the recent war was the procurement of slave labor which proved to be a full-time effort so that his other work in the actual production of industrial gasses became only tangential. Few of the workers who possibly knew him or of him remain available in Germany, as you might imagine. I have here a list of fourteen. The names and addresses are accurate and current.

“His talents were also utilized in the postwar triage of returning German POWs, and it is said that he gained considerable power of life and death over the returnees. In that position, he was susceptible to bribery. If the Germans returned from POW camps in America, France, England, and Russia could not pay the bribes, they were ignored and languished in the camps and succumbed to various causes before final repatriation. Some of those POWs were SS members who were captured by the Russians and had harsh treatment. We have a list of 142 such Germans possibly living in West Germany and another 255 who may be living in the East at present.

There are—as near as we can determine—fourteen men now living in France. They were an interesting subset of SS officers. They were all from the 33^rd Waffen-Grenadier Division of the SS. The remarkable thing about that particular group is that they were all originally French citizens. Even more remarkable is that they were among the few SS troops who fought to the bitter end during the Battle of Berlin against the Red Army. Our listing of those men is only patchy and not nearly as reliable as our listing for German citizens. Every one of them fell into the category of those triaged to remain in the postwar German internment camps. It is to be presumed that they knew of Gajewski and did not regard him with any favor.

“Finally, there were several Russian POWS who encountered this Gajewski as the triage officer. He was especially harsh in his treatment of them. Although he personally murdered or ordered others to murder many of those Russians, most of them are not of interest to your investigation. However, three of the murdered men had strong connections with elements of the Russian mafia—which, in turn, had then and has now a connection with the Soviet government. There are several men who still remember Gajewski with a venomous hatred and might well have wished him great harm. We have a list of those people’s names; but, unfortunately, we do not have addresses or any access to them. You are on your own if you decide to investigate Soviets.

“A remote possibility is that he had to have come into contact and shared secrets with American, British, French, and Russian military officials who no doubt caused unfair and real suffering on the part of some of the German POWs. We have included a complete list of all of the Allied officers and enlisted men who were involved—it numbers well over a thousand names. We have no direct knowledge of connections with Gajewski or who shared diabolical secrets with him and might fear that he could implicate them. However—for what it is worth—you have their names and their whereabouts. Good luck sifting through that large list.

“He returned to Ludwigshafen with the help of ODESSA. In order to obtain his place with the ODESSA operatives, Gajewski murdered two POWS and was able to expropriate their family holdings, a not inconsiderable sum of money. We have spoken with the two families—the Beckenbauers and the Fenstermachers—both from Hamburg. That bit of self-preservation cost both families their fortunes and reduced them to a life as minor tradesmen just able to eke out a humble living. They hate Gajewski with a passion but are of the opinion that he finally died during the chaos of that period.

“Gajewski received the necessary documentation to assume a new life under the innocuous name of Gunther Emil Sondregger. There were two other candidates among the ex-SS officers who were murdered by Gajewski to remove them from competition for the few places the ODESSA could provide in Ludwigshafen. They have a total of six friends from their days of service during the war, and they have not forgotten what Gajewski did to those two men. Although we do not have evidence that they know his new identity, it is not outside the realm of possibility. We include in our list the names and current addresses of those men. As you would no doubt assume, their identities have been radically altered; and they are most secretive. We have quietly contacted them, and they are willing to help in any way they can with the obvious condition that their identities remain secret. Two of them expressed real distress upon learning that Gajewski had been murdered—not because of any sorrow for the man, but because they had wanted to be the agents of a long and painful death for the man. The six names and addresses are available to you; it is unlikely that they have enough information to be useful or to have been the murderers; but you never know.

“Because of his expertise and his ruthlessness, he was assigned to the human resources division of the BASF system. Because of his being included on the Allies’ most wanted war criminal list, he elected to be given a position in the company that was a relatively minor one and one unlikely to attract attention to himself or to the company for harboring him. We have no information on any possible enemies the man may have collected since moving to Ludwigshafen. Have you any further questions?”

The three Kripo officers glanced at each other and shook their heads in the negative.

“None. Thank you, Herr Kohler. You have been very helpful. The lists will give us considerable work, and we would like to get started as soon as possible. Would it be all right if we contact you by telephone from time to time for clarification of details that might come up?”

“It would be my pleasure. I have taken the liberty of writing down my private number. Please be discreet.”

The Kripos nodded their agreement.