Chapter 6

On June 6, 1944, at five P.M. London time, Allied planes and gliders sweeping low over Normandy dropped the first contingent of paratroopers on Contentin Peninsula, and the invasion of the German stronghold of Europe had begun. On June 7 the British took Bayeux; Carentan fell on June 13. United States troops captured Cherbourg on June 27. British-Canadians took Caen July 9; Falaise fell to the Canadians August 17. On August 25, French troops, supported by the American forces, entered Paris.

With the breaching of the coast, and the recapture of Paris, the war was forever lost for Germany. The most fanatical could no longer dream of the invasion as being only an enlarged Commando landing force which might possibly be pushed back into the sea. Each day saw a greater number of Allied troops landed on the beaches and rushed to the ever-widening front. Everywhere the forces of the Reich were being pushed back, leaving behind valuable stores and further diminishing the dwindling stocks of ammunition, arms, and foodstuffs needed for successful defense. In the East, the fury of the Russian bear was being unleashed. The ring was slowly closing about the heart of the Reich.

There were, in those curtain-dropping days, many responsible Nazi officials and Wehrmacht officers of high rank who felt that an immediate petition for peace was necessary; surrender on any terms in order to at least salvage a possible base for future growth. Their requests were denied; the suicidal intent of the Führer permitted no deviation. Those who persisted in arguing died a few months before their time. Their coadjutors maintained intelligent silence. Those who fell back toward Berlin were resigned to die for their beliefs, or were merely postponing the inevitable, for the talk of War Crimes trials had already been heard in both London and Washington.

Erick von Roesler belonged to neither camp. After the shocking experience of the Hamburg holocaust, he had withdrawn into himself, living alone with his hate, which had widened to include both the betrayers and the betrayed. When Paris fell, he coldly accepted the fact of defeat and put into practice a plan that had been maturing since the latter days of 1943. The passports and identity cards were not merely correct in every detail; they were authentic. He had obtained them in Paris on leave in February of 1944. On August 26, 1944, he requisitioned a car from the motor pool at Weimar, stationed his own taciturn chauffeur at the wheel, and left Buchenwald for the last time. His sister Monica, laden with the other accounterment necessary for the plan, was met by arrangement in Frankfort, and they sped westward across Germany. Her presence was due less to family loyalty than to the feeling that she might be useful both to his escape and to his future plans.

The highways were crowded with troop carriers and trucks, but despite this they made fair time. The presence of a woman in an official car seemed to excite no undue notice. There were many official cars on the roads those nights, traveling in both directions, and no one was of a mood to question or pay particular attention to their occupants.

They crossed the border at Mulhouse and drove south through Besançon toward Creuzot. Monica had provided sandwiches and wine, and they ate as they drove, throwing their litter carelessly out of the window, as being almost symbolic of their nonreturn. At Montceaules-Mines they stopped to fill the tank with gasoline from cans they had carried in the luggage compartment, and immediately resumed their journey. Just beyond the outskirts of the little town they left the main highway and bumped over a winding road that twisted through the low hills leading toward the Loire. They had been driving eighteen hours when they finally pulled up at their destination.

The ramshackle farmhouse was where he remembered it, abandoned and umninded as per his cabled instructions. Even in those terrifying and confused days the instructions of the SD were properly attended to. They changed clothes in the car and with the help of the driver dragged their stores of potatoes and turnips into the shallow vegetable cellar. When the car had turned about and sped away for the border, they cut small holes in some of the potatoes, secreted their small stock of cut diamonds inside, and replugged the holes. These potatoes they scratched for identification, and buried them at the bottom of the ragged jute sacks. After that they had only to wait for the front to pass them, which was much simpler than attempting to pass the front.

December saw them settled in a refugee camp outside of Paris: M. Jules Richereau and his wife Jeanne. There they stayed for over six months, waiting for papers permitting them to emigrate to Portugal. Erick read in the papers, in black headlines, that Buchenwald had been liberated, and some of the inmates had been transferred to hospitals and camps in the Paris area, but fortunately these were not assigned to the same camps that held rehabilitated French. Monica stayed close to camp; Erick went into the city on very rare occasions, and then only to check on their exit request. The other inmates of their camp considered the couple morose; the aura of hatred that surrounded Erick was visible for all to note. However, since everyone felt the hatred to be directed against the Germans, the strange couple were sympathetically left in peace by their neighbors.

In July of 1945 they were finally notified that their papers were ready, and directed to appear at an office which had been established by the Portuguese Embassy to handle such requests. The office was located in the center of the city, and they made their way there as quickly as possible. The papers were ready; they had only to sign them, get their copies, and leave. On their return to the camp, they passed a long line of ragged people standing forlornly before the Refugee Committee Headquarters; the same long line that had stood there in desperate hope every day for wearisome weeks. The sudden glimpse of a blue-eyed corpse staring blindly in their general direction sent von Roesler stumbling in sudden terrified fright around the corner, dragging Monica with him, expecting every moment to hear a scream of denunciation and the terrible threat of pounding feet. Of all the inmates of Buchenwald, the blueeyed one was probably the only one that von Roesler could remember or recognize, possibly because of that startling contrast between the so-Aryan face perched precariously on top of that Jew-concentration-camp skeleton body. One of the survivors of the Hamburg trip, von Roesler also remembered as he hurried away, suddenly seeing again the flame-scarred wreckage of Hamburg and the tattered, blue-eyed prisoner lining up each morning to go out with the Decontamination Squad. How had that one ever survived? He pulled Monica along roughly, his terror communicating itself to her through the urgency of his sweating hands; the thought of falling into the claws of that mob filled him with nausea. But there was no outcry behind him; they returned to camp, frightened but safe.

They spent almost seven years in Portugal, at a small town called Trafaria, across the Tejo from Lisbon. It was a place where the presence of strangers was not so unusual as to excite constant surveillance. Still, it was safely away from the standard trail of refugees who constantly beat their bewildered way across the world through the portals of Lisbon. His trips to the capital were rare, and then mainly to exchange one of his dwindling stock of cut diamonds for money, an operation that caused neither surprise nor suspicion in that city of international barter.

In Trafaria, he read of the Nuremberg trials, and noted with calm indifference that Eichmann and Bormann had also managed to escape. The details of the depositions and sentences of the others did not interest him; whatever they got, they deserved; they had betrayed the Third Reich. He folded the paper to the sports section and sipped his aperitif as he read of the prowess of Real of Madrid. In February of 1952, they finally became citizens of Portugal, and in March of the same year they emigrated again, this time legally and safely, to Brazil.

The second time that Erick von Roesler saw Brazil was in April of 1952, from the second-class deck of a second-class steamer of the Companhia Su! Americana de Navigaçao. Monica was below in the stuffy cabin, tying their belongings into shabby bundles; he was alone on deck, peering ahead through the early dawn. They crept into Rio de Janeiro through a low fog, as on his first visit; the faint outlines of the tug pulling them appeared ghostly at the ship’s side. Brazil was always my destiny, he thought, his fist tightening against the smooth, damp railing. Here the betrayals shall be punished; here we shall build anew with no mistakes, for we shall base our building on the honest and sweet fact of hatred.

He stared ahead at the city he could faintly hear but not see. Brazil was the same; it had not changed, but Erick von Roesler was older, more bitter, the lines of his face etched in the acid of his thoughts, his hair sprinkled with streaks of white, his tall figure beginning to stoop. I shall never leave Brazil, he thought. Here I shall stay. Brazil has not changed, nor has my hatred on which I live, and on which I shall grow….