CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Schlosskirche [Palace Church], Ellingen, Bavaria, August 22, 1954

Antoine and Michaele waited by the camp fence during the darkest hours of August 20—from midnight to two a.m.

Michaele fidgeted, then after more than two hours of silent waiting, he finally whispered, “Do you really think he’ll come, Antoine? We don’t know the man that well.”

Antoine whispered very quietly, “Obersturmführer [SS-Senior Storm Leader] Jacob Friedrich Bunnemann has three very important reasons to come and to give us every assistance. First—my friend—he has been supplying us black market luxuries through this very fence for as long as we have been here with the blessing of the ODESSA. Second, he has been promised a very great deal of money for the help he will provide—five percent of the Schlosskirche treasure. Third, he knows that we know he was with us during the last days of the Battle of the Führer Bunker. He escaped because we helped him and got captured as our reward for that bit of foolish charity. We can reverse his good fortune in the blink of an eye. All we need to do is to supply what we know to the Soviets who keep peeking through the concertina wire. His life would be hell on earth, and he is not about to take that risk just because he is a trifle fainthearted right now. He’ll come.”

Michaele shrugged his answer, and they waited another fifteen minutes.

“Hsst,” came a short soft signal.

“Hsst, hsst,” Antoine replied.

No one further away than ten feet could have heard the two sounds or differentiated them from the ambient diverse sounds of the night.

“Antoine?”

“Oui.”

“It is I, Jacob. I have a truck on the gravel road just across the canal. I’m afraid Michaele will get a bit wet.”

“He won’t melt, my friend. He’s ready. You know who we are. We always keep our promises, Jacob. Do right by us, and you will be rich beyond your wildest dreams. Betray us, and….” He let the rest of the sentence hang.

“I would never betray you. We are brothers.”

“Indeed,” said Antoine. “Farewell, Michaele. We will next meet in our homeland. We will be rich as Croesus, and our sufferings will be over. I trust you with my life, my brother.”

“And I, you.”

Jacob whispered harshly, “We only have a few minutes. We have to hurry. Come on, Michaele.”

Antoine and Michaele embraced and saluted each other with the Hitlergruss, then Michaele disappeared through a hole cut in the wire of the camp fence.

The water in the canal moved almost imperceptibly and was fetid and cold. Michaele and Jacob pushed through the greasy water and struggled up the embankment, slipping and sliding on the heavy wet grasses. They lay face down on the edge to catch their breath.

Jacob was overweight by fifty pounds, soft and pudgy after ten years of life as German “civilian who had never been in the war”, was “never a Nazi, and, most certainly, never in the SS [The Schutzstaffel (German), Protection Squadron (English)].” Had a passerby asked any German in 1953 if he or she had been a Nazi or if he or she knew anyone who had been a Nazi ever, the answer would not only have been “No,” but the tone of the answer would have suggested that it was a ridiculous question since no one except those actually tried, convicted, sentenced, and served their sentence—i.e. the great leaders of the Party—was ever a Nazi. What a silly and offensive question! Jacob had a pockmarked, puffy, and red face owing to a prodigious capacity for fine German and Austrian dark lager. He walked with a moderate limp from a shrapnel wound received during the Battle of the Bunker in reality, but which had morphed into an industrial accident in the chaos after the war.

Jacob was short, thick—in both body and mind—and easily fatigued. However, he had real value because he knew former Nazis, movers and shakers of the ODESSA, and the back roads from the Moschendorf Transit and Release Camp on the border of Austria and Hungary to their destination in Ellington, Bavaria. He adjusted his hat. His one nod to vanity was that he wore a small-brimmed construction worker’s cap all of the time—even in bed—because he was as bald as a bowling ball.

He took a deep breath and whispered to Michaele, “We have about two hours of complete darkness left; so, we have to hurry. You are lucky you have me as a guide; you would never make it to the rendezvous point without someone who knows every inch of this area.”

“And who expects to be amply rewarded when this was all over,” Michaele said silently to himself.

For purposes of secrecy and security, the two men hiked along obscure paths in wooded areas to Steiermark, hampered by Jacob’s inability to keep up the pace and his need to take a breather. The second time they took what Michaele considered to be an unnecessary rest, and Jacob lit up a Spud cigarette which he—like many Bavarians—obtained at discount prices from American GIs, Michaele grabbed him by the lapels and slammed him up against a tree.

“No more smoking, you wheezing blimp! Someone may see us, and you can’t breathe well enough for us to make it to where we have to go tonight in time if you keep fighting for breath.”

Jacob whined, “But, you don’t understand, Michaele, I have to smoke. I need to smoke—calms my nerves.”

“You can have nerves when we get there. Now, get going. Worry about me. Do you understand that? I am your worst worry; so, don’t upset me.”