CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

UBS [Union Bank of Switzerland], Rue des Noirettes, 35 Centre des Acacias 1227 Carouge, Genève, Switzerland, September 28, 1954

Michaele and Jacob decided to take only one vehicle to POW Camp 63 in order to avoid creating interest in their activities. They moved the trucks into Heinrich Schläger’s large dairy barn and covered them with tarpaulins. All eight men loaded into a modified troop truck which now passed for on of Heinrich’s dairy delivery vehicles. With three men in the front seat, there was room for the five ODESSA men who had assisted with the retrieval of the Schlosskirche treasure and the efforts to keep the secret thus far, and for eleven more men in seats and perhaps six more standing in the truck’s rear compartment. It would be crowded—especially with the weapons and ammunition—but it would be quite possible, and they might need a fairly large fighting force if things went badly.

The weather conditions were favorable—light rain, heavy clouds, and fog. There were very few cars or trucks in Brienne le Chateâu and even fewer pedestrians at that time of night. Jacob parked the truck half a mile from the eastern fence of the POW camp and cautioned the ODESSA men to be silent. He and Michaele retraced their path from the truck to the camp used the night Michaele was extracted. The mud was thick and cloying and made the going difficult, but the sound of the rain and the sound insulation of the mud made the two men as quiet as rabbits. They were no more visible than the bushes along the stream bank.

Per their prearrangement with US Army Corporal Jimmie Clemmons, they each carried an ingot of pure gold. They had arranged for him to appear at the exit point in the fence every night between two and three a.m. The arrangement was built on the two prime movers of trust: the expectation of reward, and the guarantee of retribution. Clemmons knew the ODESSA operatives could destroy him in two ways: assassination or exposure to his superiors, which would be as sure an assassination as if he had been shot in the head.

It was two-fifteen, and the corporal was as good as his word.

“Treasure,” Michaele whispered from the darkness on the outside of the fence.

“The men are ready,” Corporal Clemmons responded with the established reply.

Michaele and Jacob stood up from where they had been lying on the bank of the stream and walked up to the fence. A bush artfully camouflaged the area in the chain-link fence that had been cut to let Michaele out when he had left to go to the Schlosskirche. The two men made sure the man talking to them was indeed Corporal Clemmons.

Then Michaele said, “Surprised to see me, Corporal?”

“I have to admit that I am. Surprise me again.”

He helped the two men edge their way through the opening in the fence.

“Where are our people?”

“A whistle away.”

Michaele and Jacob put their gold ingots at the corrupt corporal’s feet. He gave a whistle that sounded almost exactly like the extravagant song of the Bavarian wood lark. In a few moments, eight specters slowly moved up to where the three men were standing by the fence. Four of them were the original “Gebirgsjägers”: Antoine Duvalier, Serge Alain Rounsavall, Hugues Beauchamp, and Jérôme Christophe Mailhot. Berthold Küppers–the farmer–had earned his place by his suffering alongside the Gebirgsjägers and because the ODESSA vouched for him. There were three men who were unknown to Michaele.

“Who are these three?” Michaele asked Antoine suspiciously.

“SS. Not from the 33^rd, but loyal men. I vouch for them. Meet Clause Fischer, Willibald Movius, and Gerhard Jungermann—all officers who fought to the end.”

Michaele remained dubious and uneasy, but he shook their hands.

“Jacob, go back to the truck and bring one more ingot for Corporal Clemmons. We will cross the fence as soon as you get back,” Michaele ordered.

Jacob was through the fence in half a minute and disappeared into the blackness of the soggy night. He was back in twenty minutes out of breath and stinking from the fetid canal. He handed an ingot through the fence to Clemmons, who accepted it and nodded. He turned his back on the fence and stood guard as the eight men made their escape. He had more than kept his word. He had seen to it that all of the men had received good food while Michaele was gone, and they appeared considerably healthier than previously. None of the men looked back. Clemmons pushed the edges of the cut chain-link fence together and pulled a few branches of the bush into place to hide the opening. It took him four anxious trips to get his ingots back to his secret stash. Only then he allowed himself a stiff jolt of Jim Beam and a quiet laugh. He knew that the camp was going to be shut down in a month, and he already had a signed and dated discharge from the Army. He was officially a short-timer and soon to be a very rich civilian. His plan was to lay chilly for the next month and keep safe.

The eight filthy sopping-wet escapees joined their comrades in the back of the truck and kept silent except for a short exchange of whispers which passed for introductions and greetings. Jacob drove back to the Schläger dairy farm and rousted the drivers into action. It was four in the morning when they pulled out of Brienne le Chateâu and set their sights on Geneva. Their first goal was to get out of France, return to Bavaria, and to cross the border into Switzerland from the contested Lake Konstanz area—hopefully without ever having to stop at a border crossing between Germany and Switzerland. To do so, they kept to the back roads and traveled only under cover of darkness which extended the time of their transit by one hundred percent and their level of anxiety by nearly the same degree. They stopped only once, which was as the daylight hours appoached.

The men and their trucks were hidden on a farm run by two brothers with ODESSA ties. At the farm in the outskirts of Konstanz, Baden-Wurttemberg—near where they had obtained their forged documents two days previously—they were all able to clean up, put on fresh clothing—standard south German farm wear—and to eat two hearty rural German meals. At dark, they left with full bellies and high hopes that their ordeals were almost over.

Master Sergeant Nathan Lee Howard, USA sat in his jeep smoking a Camel and relaxing into a long night of watching the web of back ways into and out of Switzerland used by smugglers and Nazis wanting to avoid the official border crossing station outside of Konstanz. His unit consisted of fourteen men–including himself–and all of them considered the assignment a barely necessary nuisance during the waning months of the Allied occupation of Germany. It was boring, and that was a good thing. He had spent nearly ten years off and on in the American occupation forces of Germany and Austria with sporadic periods of violence from escaped POWs, ODESSA militia, and smugglers. Things were quiet now; and all he had to do was last out one more month; and he would go home to Iowa and full retirement. He considered himself lucky not to have been called up during the Korean conflict and to have been posted to that godforsaken backwater. Retirement could not come a day too soon.

There were three vehicles in the unit—his jeep, an FV 106 Saladin light armored car, and a 1952 Alvis FV603 Saracen, a heavily armored car (sixteen inches of RHA—Rolled Homogenous Armor). The Saladin and the Saracen were both holdovers from the Brits, and a comfort to his men because they were reliable and formidable. The men were distributed with four in the Jeep, four in the Saladin, and eight in the Saracen. They were separated two miles apart on three potential alternate roads used by the illegals.

Despite the lack of recent action in the area and the absence of violent encounters, the unit was almost comically over-armed with two AAT-52 [Arme Automatique Transformable Modele 1952] general purpose machine guns, eight Enfield wartime .303 Bren Guns, eight Remington M870 combat shotguns, M-1 Garand service rifles—one for each man with six spares, Smith & Wesson SW Model 29 [.44 Magnum] handguns—one for each man with six spares, and six crates of M-26 and M-61 fragmentation hand grenades. Every spare square foot was packed with ammunition for the weapons. The men called their arsenal being “loaded for bear.” Master Sergeant Howard thought they had enough to start World War Three.

The six ODESSA converted army trucks laden and slowed down by the heavy burden of treasure they carried lumbered along the rutted and rocky gravel road four miles away from what they calculated would be the Swiss border. François Caussidière—their Swiss contact and fixer—had arranged for a map of the area and general instructions for the farmer to give the ODESSA men and promised a unit of Swiss Defense Forces to be at the crossing—which did not have a formal customs post—in case of a challenge by Americans, Germans, or French occupation forces on the lookout for escaping Nazis. That was helpful; but the closer they got to the putative border line, the more heightened their expectation of danger was.

Antoine—ever the pessimist and always overcautious—ordered a halt at a crossroads three miles from the border. Caussidière’s map showed the roads all leading to the same point; so, Antoine decided to send the trucks on three separate approaches. If one truck was intercepted, the others would get through.

Michaele touched Antoine’s arm and whispered, “I think we need to send out scouts—one for each route.”

“I agree. Let’s send two men down each road for two miles and then return and report. If the Americans are closer than two miles from the border, we can make an all-out run for it. Tell them to stay in the tree lines and be as quiet as bunnies.”

The six men moved silently into the fringes of trees along the roads and were out of sight within minutes. Antoine and Michaele remained behind with the rest of the men to guard the precious cargoes in the four trucks. The wait was agonizing. Every minute they expected to hear the rattle of gunfire which would signal a potentially lethal end to their quest.

The first four men returned in half an hour to report that they had seen nothing. Everything was clear. After another nail-biting thirty minutes, the last pair returned out of breath.

“An armored vehicle and about eight or nine Amis parked in the middle of our road. When we watched for a few minutes, another one showed up. The two teams talked for a couple of minutes, then split up. We don’t know where the larger of the two armored cars went exactly, except it was to the north,” reported Clause Fischer.

Antoine took less than half a minute to decide.

“First three trucks go south; and Michaele, Clause, and I will go up the middle. Try not to get into a shooting match until the very last minute if you can.”

“You want us to move slow or fast, Gruppenführer?” asked Willibald Movius, who was to drive the lead truck of the group of three.

“Good question, Sergeant. Let’s move out slowly at first and keep the noise and dust down to a minimum, then go as fast these crates will go if an attack comes.”

“Ja wohl, Mein Führer.”

Willibald was a dyed in the wool Nazi who considered the loss of the Third Reich to be ony a temporary setback. He had his sights set on the upcoming Fourth Reich, and considered Antoine and the Gebirgsjägers to be the last best hope for realizing that ambition. He knew that this small group of dedicated Nazis would be the nucleus of the new Germany and for worldwide domination—Hitler’s prophetic dreams would be accomplished by these pioneers. He was none too bright, which made him an excellent choice for a follower. That he was entirely amoral was another plus.

He had the look of a Bavarian farmer—inexpressionate facies, vapid eyes covered by Coke bottle bottom-thick spectacles, nondescript nose and lips, and a small round symmetrical head. He was overweight and had a prominent neck wattle to go along with his belly which protruded over his belt line. His arms and fingers were short and pudgy. He had bow legs from childhood rickets. He tended to wear the same set of clothes—a peasant tunic over baggy pants and ankle-high surplus Wehrmacht boots—almost every day. Antoine presumed that he had several interchangeable outfits. The idea that he wore the same single set of clothes all the time was more than his Prussian sensibilities was prepared to accept.

Clause Fischer was shorter and squatter than Willibald. Although he was actually brighter than his old friend, he had little to say; so, he was usually considered to be even less intelligent than Willibald. He had much the same bodily habitus in general, one that did not inspire confidence in the idea that he was strong, or quick, or soldierly. That would be to underestimate the man. Claude could move with alacrity and with surprising endurance when it was required of him, and he had remarkable strength when he put his mind to a task. He was as much of a killer as any of his SS comrades and had a record of killing which made him a good friend and a bad enemy. His face was duller, fuller, and more vacuous in appearance than Willibald’s; and he was every bit as much of a follower. His only claim to being better than Willibald was that his clothes were of a better quality, variety, and fit. He usually wore olive drab Bavarian hunting clothing which was durable and as attractive as clothes could be on a man with a physique as unremarkable as his.

Gerhard Jungermann was a tall fit man who wore either farmer’s clothes, or—like many former German soldiers—wore his old uniform without any rank designation or insigniae. He was efficient and relatively intelligent, which made him an asset to the Gebirgsjägers. Despite his height of six feet four inches, he had the build of a muscular shorter man. He had the telltale pockmarks of childhood small pox, and his right leg was somewhat smaller than his left as a sequelae of his having had polio as an adolescent. His face was deeply lined with natural furrows in his cheeks, a deeply dimpled, nearly cleft chin, and forehead lines earned from hatless years in the sun. His only nod to fashion was that he had a series of colorful tee-shirts he had purchased from a displaced Indian merchant who had had to flee from Berlin to Ellingen, Bavaria, as the Soviets closed in on the city at the end of the war. Gerhard wore a different, rather gaudy, shirt under his open uniform shirt every day.

Jacob Bunnemann was the least likely of the men to be considered a fighter. He had been a baker for the SS and still retained his rotund baker’s figure. His apparent obesity was real, and did not hide large muscles. His benefit to his fellow conspirators was that he was bright and resourceful. He was very good at maths, subjects in which he had excelled in school. He had been held in a favored status in his SS unit because he could always come up with a decent meal for them, even when they were on the move. He had established a small bakery business on the side, but like his friends had subsisted on what his meager farm could produce. His shirt strained to cover his bulk; his pants had to be held up by suspenders; and his shoes were slip-ons because he could not reach down far enough to lace up boots. He did not cut a dashing figure, and he did not care.

The engines of the vintage trucks were noisy even at a slow rate of speed. It could not be helped. They traveled at one mile an hour, slow enough that two men were able to go ahead of the convoy as scouts. The three trucks made it to the point that they could see some moonlight glinting off the vehicles and weapons of the Swiss soldiers across the border. They stopped off the road in a sparse grove of evergreens and waited.

Antoine remained in his truck; and Michaele took point, walking about fifty yards ahead.

Suddenly, Michaele whirled about and ran as fast as he could back the truck, waving his arms frantically. Antoine stopped and turned off the engine.

It took a few minutes for Michaele to get full control of his breathing; then, he blurted out, “An armored car, maybe six men milling around it!”

“Arms?”

“I didn’t see any rifles or machine guns. As best as I could tell, they were taking a leak and just had their side arms. What do you want to do?”

“Grab an FN and two bandoliers of ammunition each. The sound of the truck will send them back to their vehicle for weapons that will almost surely outgun us. We’ll use the only advantage we have—the element of surprise.”

Antoine and Michaele set off at a trot, keeping to the cover of the trees along the roadside so that the moonlight would not allow them to be seen by the enemy. They were able to make it to within fifteen yards before they were almost certain to be detected.

“Crawl,” ordered Antoine. “Take out as many as possible by stealth, then we have to kill all of them even though we make a racket that will be heard for ten miles. Go.”

Michaele cut the throat of an Army PFC who was enjoying a leak and a smoke—breaking one of the cardinal rules of combat by allowing the glowing end of the cigarette to give away his position, and the smoke to interfere with his own vision and concentration.

Antoine encircled another American’s neck with his wiry but still powerful left arm, jerked the man off his feet, and shoved a combat knife into his right costovertebral angle, slicing his renal artery in half and penetrating all the way across his kidney. The sudden pain of the knife thrust is well-known by commandoes to have a paralytic effect which prevents an outcry. Even if the man had lived long enough to shout, Antoine’s arm was so tight around his neck that his vocal cords were compressed; and no sound could leave his throat. Both former SS men were able to kill one more man each, which dispatched one half of the force outside the armored car. They regrouped to whisper.

“The rest are too far away for us to get to them without them raising an alarm,” Antoine whispered. “Let’s split up and get them in a crossfire. Wait for my first burst.”

A burst of three shots from Antoine’s FN killed two American noncoms instantly. Michaele killed the remaining two before they could react. Antoine ran as hard as he could to the armed car and pulled open the door. A startled and terrified private stood in the doorway with a grenade in his hand, apparently the first piece of weaponry he could put his hands on. Antoine shot him three times in the chest; and he fell down in the entryway, dropping his grenade. Two more Americans pushed their Garands out the door, but they were too late. Antoine flipped off the grenade clip and tossed it into the interior of the car. One of the Americans fell to his knees trying to get hold of the grenade before it exploded, but he was too late. All he accomplished was to toss the grenade further back into the interior of the armed car as it exploded. Except for the open door, the car was like a heavy metal drum built to keep the force of the explosion inside. In less of a second, everyone inside was dead and scarcely recognizable as human beings.

No words needed to be spoken. Both Antoine and Michaele turned about and began running for their lives back to their truck. Although the truck was heavy and relatively slow, they had the clear advantages of speed and momentum over any pursuers. The pursuers had the added disadvantage of not knowing exactly where the fighting was taking place. By the time they arrived at the scene of the massacre and got their bearings, they were so far behind the ODESSA truck that all they saw was its taillights as it crossed the border into Switzerland. They also saw a strong force of Swiss Frontier Guards surrounding the truck and lining up at the border. The cardinal rule of the Allies was to respect Swiss neutrality at all costs. They turned back.

To their shock, three large German troop transport trucks bore down on them at breakneck speed, coming from two directions. The Americans leaped out of their Jeep and their Alvis FV603 Saracen and formed a skirmish line behind the lightly armored personnel carrier. Clause Fischer and Willibald Movius bore down on the Jeep and smashed it into the only protection available to the master sergeant and his three PFCs. They did not have a chance. The other two trucks pulled up front to side of the Saracen; and the men rolled out firing their FNs, which forced the Americans to keep their heads down. The close proximity of the ODESSA trucks—and the fact that the Americans were not able to set up machine gun posts—evened the odds considerably.

Fischer and Jungermann were killed by an American grenade, and Jacob Bunnemann died when an American staff sergeant courageously ran around the back end of the Saracen and poured half a dozen rounds from his Bren gun. That sergeant and three other Americans were killed and three were wounded. There was still sporadic but ineffective shooting underway when—to everyone’s profound surprise—a contingent of twenty men in Swiss Frontier Guard uniforms swept across the border and pulled up behind the ODESSA trucks.

The highest ranking American soldier still alive, Corporal Dennis Smith, from Tuscaloosa, Alabama, held up a white flag.

“Come out!” the lead Swiss guardsman said. “Leave your weapons and come out with your hands above your heads.”

There were six men able to stand; two of them had minor wounds.

“We have four men in urgent need of medical attention,” Corporal Smith said as soon as he and his men were assembled in front of the ODESSA operatives, former POWs, and the men in the Swiss uniforms.

The leader of the Swiss looked hard into Antoine’s eyes, then into Michaele’s. The two high-ranking former SS officers—former POWs—did not even have to look at each other. They set their FNs to full automatic then raised them quickly and cut the Americans to pieces by firing first from left to right about navel high then by firing right to left at the level of their nipples. It was over in forty-five seconds.

Antoine gave a head jerk in the direction of Serge and Hugues. They walked around to the back side of the Saracen. Six shots rang out, and the two former 33^rd Waffen-Grenadier SS officers, former Soviet, then US, then French POWs returned and took their places in the line of their comrades-in-arms.

The leader of the Swiss contingent stepped up to Antoine and said, “Gruppenführer und Generalleutnant der Waffen-SS Antoine Duvalier, I presume,” and gave a smart Hitlergruss which was promptly and precisely returned.

The Swiss officer repeated his greeting, “Oberführer SS Michaele Dupont, I presume,” and gave a second crisp Hitlergruss to Michaele who responded correctly.

“I am François Caussidière, Swiss national. I believe you have heard of me?”

“We most certainly have, and we owe you our lives. The Fourth Reich will rise out of the ashes; and you will be one of its remembered heroes, Herr Caussidière. It would be difficult to repay you for what you have done and for what you are yet to do today.”

“Ah, Mein Bruder [my brother], that is simple. I get ten percent of what you are bringing in. There are a great many people who have participated and need to be compensated.”

“Fair enough.”

“Then, it is time for us to disappear and to leave it to the Allies to figure out what happened here and how it gets reported.”

François Caussidière was dressed in a cream-colored linen suit, light beige silk shirt, an elegant Chinese red silk tie, and tan lace-up oxfords with a perfect spit-shine despite the lateness of the hour and the inappropriateness of the attire for a potential battle. But then, Caussidière was not a man who got his hands dirty—either literally or figuratively. He had other men to handle such things. The contingent of phony Swiss guards was one such example. He was of a fairly uncertain age—probably middle-aged—with only a few gray hairs beginning to show over his temples. His hair was ridiculously well coifed and recently cut for such an outing, but his hair grooming was an ingrained trait he had adopted so that he could always emenate a persona of importance and wealth. He was handsome in a somewhat dissolute way; he was a connoisseur of fine wine and tested more than his share. He had a fine crisp little mustache and a triangular beard the size of one Swiss franc coin located just beneath the margin of his lower lip. He put out an energetic–even theatrical–level of affability and bonhomie. Its lack of genuineness was not lost on Antoine who studied men by watching their eyes. François’s eyes were cold, calculating, and cruel—the equivalent of probing x-rays—devoid of warmth. His smile never made it to his eyes.

All six ODESSA trucks were drivable, and the former POWs and their newly acquired Swiss friends crossed the putative border into Switzerland with lights on and at full speed. When they were thirty miles inside the border, Caussidière signaled a halt in a large truck farm parking lot. The “Swiss” got out of their vehicles, stripped to their skivvies, and put on civilian clothes. The uniforms were placed in a fifty-gallon barrel holding one gallon of gasoline and set ablaze. The convoy pulled into Geneva at ten in the morning. Caussidière took all of the SS officers to a Turkish bath where they were scrubbed clean, shaved, and received gentlemanly haircuts. They were then taken to a fine men’s clothing store Caussidière owned and outfitted them with fine suits, underclothing, stockings, shoes, shirts, ties, cufflinks, tie tacks, and leather belts. No one who knew any of the men two days ago would have recognized the newly transformed Swiss gentlemen.

Their next stop was significantly grander. They arrived by limousine at Rue des Noirettes, 35 Centre des Acacias 1227 Carouge, Genève—the UBS [Union Bank of Switzerland]—where they were met by liveried valets who escorted them into the top floor offices of the principal investment and savings director. Eight men had been left behind at the offices of Ganoush Enterprises International to guard the treasure trucks as a precaution.