Chapter 5

Merkers, Germany, 1945

 

 

I liked Françoise; I liked her a lot. Strictly speaking, I should have stayed away from her because indigenous personnel were off-limits. But I didn’t care. Anyway, the way I chose to interpret the order she was not indigenous because she wasn’t German. And it was my job to fraternize with anybody who could supply me with intelligence of interest to Patton’s headquarters. If I saw fit to fraternize with a displaced person by the name of Françoise Jardine, then it was in the line of duty and my own business.

I call her displaced, because at first glance she appeared to be one of the vast numbers of Hitler’s conscripted who were uprooted and transported to Germany. But in reality, she was far from one of them; she might even be classified as a Nazi sympathizer. You might say she was, once you got to know her and to understand why she was in Germany. But like I say, I didn’t care.

The thing that struck me as being rather odd, though, was where she and her sister were quartered. Then, too, maybe it wasn’t all that strange when you consider she had a sponsor. If her new nephew’s father was an officer in the Waffen SS, then you might expect she would be living in some place besides a barracks without heat or running water. I quickly discovered there were plenty of those, after driving around Merkers looking things over.

I tried to stay away from her, but it was difficult. As I told you earlier, I knew I was going to succumb to temptation a few minutes after she sat on my lap in the Jeep. I knew the next time I saw her I would only appear to be engaged in army business. But I wasn’t going to let my two sergeant friends and her sister suspect my real intentions.

Our medics kept Murielle for a few days before turning her loose. Since she couldn’t walk the mile or so to her quarters, carrying her new baby, I volunteered to give her a ride home. It’s not that I am such a nice guy; I wanted to see Françoise again and to learn where the two of them were living.

As we pulled up to her apartment, I saw our other Jeep parked out front. I had no way of knowing whether it was Carl or Eric who was inside. Murielle shrugged her shoulders, meaning she had no idea either. I looked at Murielle and she looked at me, but neither of us spoke.

I carried the baby. As we started climbing the stairs to the second floor, Françoise standing at the top of the landing met us. I wasn’t invited in. I figured only one of them was there; otherwise, she would have invited me to at least bring the baby upstairs. I took this as a bad omen for me. I never considered that one or both of my men had the same idea I had. I couldn’t fault either of them; but I must say I didn’t like it. I handed the baby back to Murielle, telling Françoise I would return to talk to her in a couple of hours.

I started my conversation as though she was being formally interrogated. And maybe she was; if I gave myself the benefit of the doubt. But I knew what I really had in mind. What I didn’t know was where it was all going to lead. I told myself my interest in her was the same as Carl’s or Eric’s, because none of the three of us had been close to a pretty woman since we left England. But my attraction to her was more–much more–and it worried me.

“Françoise, how did Murielle meet Kurt Steinmann?” I had come back later, giving whoever was with her time to find something else to do. Among other things, I wanted to talk to her about Steinmann and what exactly he had been doing in Bavaria.

She had shown me the other mines near Merkers, as she promised. Unfortunately, I had to take Carl and Eric with me on our excursion and Françoise had spent most of the time in the back seat with Eric. I had yet to spend any personal time with her.

There were three mines we visited that day. Two of them were small and appeared to be empty. We found some new Wermacht uniforms and several crates of shells in the third, but no treasure.

In answer to my question about where Murielle met Steinmann, she said: “They met in Paris, shortly after the surrender.”

“What was he doing in Paris?” I asked. She had an odd expression on her face as though she might be ashamed to tell me.

“You have to understand what things were like for us a few years ago when Hitler marched into France. But first you have to understand, the War you have been fighting is really an outgrowth of World War One. It supposedly ended in 1918, but it did not. There was just a lull of a few years before it started up all over again.

“Marshall Petain, the hero of Verdun in the first one, became incensed with Winston Churchill for not supporting him against the invading Germans in this War. Petain wanted air support against the overwhelming army of German tanks descending on Paris. But Churchill knew if the RAF was drawn into combat so far from their home bases, they would be all but annihilated, because they would have been sitting ducks, low on fuel, trying to get home after only a few minutes over the interior of France. Petain, on the other hand, saw it as just one more refusal to come to his aid. Britain had refused to help him at Verdun in the First War. And still being angry, he surrendered the French Army and Navy and allied with Germany against Britain.”

I interrupted her to ask a question: “Yes, but we Americans stepped in and saved France in those dark days of the First War. As I recall, Britain had her hands full on the Somme and was unable to help Petain. Why was Petain so angry, then?”

“I suppose what you say is true,” she said, “but the fact still remains, he had not gotten over his feelings of betrayal by the British. And now here it was being repeated all over again.

“After Petain surrendered, he established a provisional government at a city called Vichy in the south of France. He appointed an administrator, who was a German collaborator, by the name of Pierre Laval as our new leader. This did not sit well with a minority of our population, who branded them both traitors to France.”

“How did you feel about what he did?” I asked her. I was interested in whether she, too, was a German collaborator or whether she had ended up in Germany because her sister had gone with Steinmann, and she didn’t want to stay behind in occupied France.

“I was no different than the majority. Those who joined the exiled General Charles deGaulle in England were few and far between. Likewise, it was a small number of people who stayed behind and resisted the Germans. As I said, the vast majority of the French supported Petain.

“France was tired of war, and we did not want another long protracted conflict with Germany. We could not afford to lose another generation of our young men.

“I was quite young myself, in those days,” she went on to say, “and I was interested in other things besides politics. But the older members of my family were glued to the radio nightly, listening to the news. They were very apprehensive at the rapid rise of Adolph Hitler. At first, they were afraid of him and of the nationalistic spirit, which he had revived throughout Germany. But as they watched Germany transition from a nation mired in debt and unemployment to one with a stable currency and economy, they changed their minds about him, as did most of the others we knew.

“We were all impressed with his new German government, and we wearied of the seeming inability of our democracy to solve our problems. We longed to have a dictator of our own; we wanted similar changes in France. Also, there was another large segment of our population who believed communism was the wave of the future. Petain saw an alliance with Germany as the best way to stop this creeping Russian political influence. So you can see, we were a fractionated people; indeed, it was said by some authorities that a civil war would have broken out in France a few months after her surrender if it had not been for the German occupation….”

I broke in to say: “I have been with a few of the forward elements entering your towns, and the people turned out to welcome us with open arms. How do you reconcile this with your statement that the vast majority of people supported Adolph Hitler?”

“Have you seen the picture of Hitler taken standing alongside Petain, immediately after the occupation?” she said, a little miffed that I would question her. “But as soon as the fortunes of the Fuhrer began to change, so did our people. By the advent of the Invasion, there was hardly a Frenchman who was not pro-Allies and against the occupiers. We could see the handwriting on the wall and wanted no more of Hitler. Almost the same thing happened with Mussolini in Italy.”

“Françoise, I can see a need for the Gestapo, and of course, the regular army, the Wermacht, as occupiers. But I’m not sure I understand why the SS was in Paris.” I did, but I wanted her to talk more about Steinmann and less about recent history. As I saw it, he was the key to more treasure in Bavaria. And I didn’t want her to stray too far from the subject. What she had been telling me was interesting, but I was running out of time. And as I said, I came to see her for personal reasons as well. And I didn’t want to spend the rest of the afternoon talking about politics and the War.

She had apparently not made her point yet and wanted to continue on. I didn’t stop her. “When I told you we French allied with Hitler, I meant that literally. From the outset we fell in with the goals of National Socialism. And of course, one of those was the eradication of world Jewry. This had been a more or less hidden agenda in France. But once the Germans descended on us with their message of hatred for the Jews, we fell right in step with them; we hated Jews, too, because it was German and the thing to do.

“I never personally hated Jews,” she said. “In fact, I could not see how they were going to pollute the Aryan blood line. I did not even know what that was, but I was soon to find out from Kurt.

“Where did he meet your sister?” I asked

“I don’t remember,” she said. “It might have been in the Bois or on the Champs, I don’t know. We used to go walking on Sunday, and there were many German soldiers who were always trying to pick her up. I was, of course, sent along as the duenea, and they weren’t interested in me.”

“Not then, maybe. But I expect they are now.” That was the boldest I had been to date. I could tell she was still innocent by the way she looked at me. I almost thought she blushed.

“Kurt spent a lot of time at our house; Murielle and my father liked him. The three of them spent endless hours talking about how a greater Germany was going to make a better world. Kurt practically worshipped Adolph Hitler. And he was not a bit bashful about extolling the virtues of the Fuhrer to anybody ready to listen. In fact, that was his job when he first arrived–I mean, indoctrinating various worker groups and students of all grades at our schools. You understand, of course, that in the beginning the Waffen SS was charged with the task of furthering Nazi doctrine by propaganda if possible–but by force if that became necessary. It was the force I objected to. However, in the case of my sister and family, force was not necessary. Then, too, food was hard to come by and Kurt always showed up with groceries and a huge salami or bratwurst. And he always seemed to have a couple of bottles of fine wine with him. I figured he was not only an officer, but one who associated with those in high places. He seemed to be able to get anything or do just about anything he wanted to do.”

“I know, but what was he really doing in Paris. I mean he was not there to teach political science to students, was he?” I asked her, appearing naïve.

“Oh, no!” she said, the smile gone now, replaced by a frown. “His task was much grimmer than that, I am afraid. And here you should pay close attention to what I am going to tell you. I know this to be a fact; but I have never told anyone what he told Murielle.”

“What did he tell her?” She had my undivided attention now; the gold in Bavaria could wait.

“There are American airmen in Buchanwald!”

“What’s Buchanwald?” I asked.

“It is an SS death camp like Dachau to the south of us, only much worse, according to Kurt.”

“You mean like those in Poland? Like the one at Auschwitz the Russians have reported finding?”

“Yes. Let me start at the beginning; you are getting confused.”

 

At almost the exact same time she was telling me this story, Patton was personally entering the camp at Buchanwald. A few days earlier, an element of his Third Army had discovered Ordruf, one of the notorious satellites to that place. Patton was notified of the horror, his men had encountered and he didn’t believe them. It was like the last War, he said. Germany had committed atrocities, but nothing to live up to the Hearst newspapers’ accounts. This, he said, was the same thing as in 1918. For the longest time, Patton had been in denial about reports coming from the Russians about Auschwitz. Such a thing as death camps was too horrible to contemplate and, therefore, it must all be just a rumor, an exaggeration. But when his officers insisted he come and see for himself, he did just that. But first, he invited Bradley and Eisenhower to accompany him.

When my radio dispatch reached his ears that American officers were prisoners there or had been, Patton was beside himself. His anger had been mixed with shock and a deep sadness. But now he became furious and he wanted action. Better than that, he wanted revenge.

Patton had just been shown hundreds of bodies stacked like cordwood waiting to be cremated. Thousands more, who were nothing but skin and bones, were lying side by side waiting to die. He was inspecting a warehouse full of naked bodies when he got the word from me through General Earnest that American airmen had been imprisoned in that hellhole. He never questioned what I told him. He was prepared to believe almost anything of the Germans now. He could take no more. He walked out of sight of the others and became physically ill, and then he asked Eisenhower if he could be excused. He said he wanted to get on with the War.

Eisenhower flew into a rage at this news and what he was looking at. He ordered General Earnest to round up all the residents of the towns of Buchanwald and Ordruf and to parade them through the camp. He had a battery of journalists and photographers on hand, taking pictures of the townspeople standing next to piles of corpses. He made sure there was no one who could later say it never happened or that it had been staged or that they never saw anything. He told one group of journalists it was for the benefit of German grandchildren, and to show the American fighting man what he had been fighting for, in case he was still in doubt.

Word had gotten to Eisenhower months before that some of his soldiers were reported as saying they didn’t personally have anything against the Germans. He turned to Bradley, saying: “Well I guess this will take care of that problem.”

Immediately, he began to dole out rations to those who were the worst off. Then he issued a formal statement: “I have seen one of the death camps for myself, and it’s much worse than the world has been led to believe.”

General Eisenhower issued an order to his senior aide to find out from his medical people what the minimum number of calories was to sustain life. Then he ordered all German prisoners to be fed just that amount and no more.

Our forces had cordoned off an area upstream of the Remagen bridge for a hurry-up confinement area for prisoners. It had none of the facilities of a Geneva Convention camp. It was a makeshift, crowded, muddy, vermin ridden hole. Unfortunately, most of their veterans returning from combat were in poor health, and thousands died within a few weeks as a result of the imposed living conditions and General Eisenhower’s diet restrictions.

 

According to Françoise, Steinmann knew about our aircrews at Buchanwald. In fact, it was the real reason he was stationed in Paris. The French Resistance had set up a network to find and extricate downed flyers from France back to England. The Gestapo knew about it, but so far had little luck in bringing much of it to a halt. Finally, it became Steinmann's job to set up a counter-intelligence group to penetrate the Resistance and to capture American and British flyers.

Françoise told me he jumped into this new job with gusto. Here was finally something he could get his hands on–something that would make a real contribution. He told Murielle and her father at dinner one night that he was elated with his new assignment. Furthermore, he said, it was guaranteed to keep him in the Paris area near Murielle for some time to come. Françoise remembered that particular night as one of the happiest for her family. But the idea of capturing young Allied flyers and sending them to a probable death was repugnant to her, especially when Kurt explained in such livid detail how it was all going to work.

Kurt told them the old prison near Fresnes, on the outskirts of Paris, was to be used as temporary housing for these prisoners of war. There, the Gestapo would extract all the information he wanted about the Underground and the Maqui, by legitimate methods if possible, but by torture if it wasn’t. Once in the hands of the Waffen SS, the Germans no longer considered them to be under the protection of the Geneva Convention.

Steinmann explained that when they were through with them at Fresnes, if they were still alive, they would be shipped to one of the death camps. There they would be systematically worked to death for the good of the Fatherland. But she said it was obvious there wasn’t going to be any distinction made between them and Jewish prisoners, because they couldn’t afford to have any survivors who had witnessed the atrocities committed at Fresnes.

She said the three of them sat and discussed the horrors of Kurt’s new plan as though they were talking about cattle. It was at this point she started becoming disillusioned with the New Reich. And she realized then her family were traitors to France.

The following day we continued our discussion. I told her there must have been a mistake, because Patton’s troops found no Americans at Buchenwald.

It was then Françoise told me a curious story. Murielle said Kurt told them a Luftwaffe officer had earlier made a routine courtesy call at Buchenwald. He said one of the American prisoners, who spoke German, and at the risk of his life, stepped forward and blurted out that he and some sixty-five aircrew members were being held there. The Luftwaffe flyer said nothing; what could he say under the circumstances? But Kurt expected there might be trouble. It was obvious the Luftwaffe wanted to transport them to one of their Stalags; the reason being that if the word got out, the Americans and British might also ignore the Geneva Convention’s rules and take reprisal on thousands of German fliers in English and American prisons. They could not afford to start a war within a war. She then went on to tell me how the Luftwaffe came back in force with trucks and troops and made the SS give them up. She said, according to Kurt, this had occurred two months earlier.

Steinmann had advised the camp commander to shoot the Americans when he suspected the Luftwaffe officer might return. The commandant considered doing so, but he was afraid the War was going to end in an unconditional surrender. He was afraid they would hang him for such an offense. Kurt told Murielle they were all going to be hung, anyway, if they ever fell into Allied hands. He told her that he had personally shot several flyers he caught trying to escape at Fresnes; it was an object lesson to the others. That was another reason he wanted to shoot them all, because their comrades could identify him later.

Françoise wanted to talk some more. She wanted to continue to tell me about Buchanwald. It was as though she needed to let loose for the first time, to release all her pent-up emotions. She knew so much and had said so little that she felt guilty, as though she had played a role in it all. Where Murielle had been in love with Kurt and approved of everything he’d done, Françoise was more or less an innocent bystander. She wasn’t, of course, but there was nothing she could have done to change a thing. Objection to Kurt and his business would have alienated Murielle, and might even have brought the wrath of the Gestapo down on her head. So, in the end, she said nothing and acted as though she approved, which she didn’t.

We had been talking about Kurt and Murielle and how they first met, and how she ended up leaving France to come to Germany. “He was a few years older than Murielle–about your age now.” With that comment, she smiled, and I confess I started to feel warm all over. I liked her. She was young and pretty, and she was smart, sharp, and well informed.

When I first met Françoise, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the circumstances of her daily life might have jeopardized her innocence. But now sitting across from her, listening, I put those thoughts out of my mind, simply because she had had Murielle and Steinmann to look after her. And of course, Steinmann now thought of himself as a member of the family and he treated her as though she was his younger sister. Any soldier caught in a compromising situation with a young French girl, who was under the protection of a rising SS officer, was axiomatically headed for the Russian Front. I suspected it would have been a brave Aryan lothario, indeed, who paid her any more attention than to say guten morgen.

A funny thing happened to me while listening to her story. My mind began to wander; my sinful thoughts had vanished. And I found myself entertaining others that were not only downright honorable, but might well have been born in heaven.

I always thought marriage was a desirable institution. I also thought it was better to first seek out and find a way to support a family before getting seriously involved with a woman. I had observed that activity outside this pattern often led to difficulty in later life. As far as I was concerned, it increased the already high odds of divorce or of somebody getting themselves hurt.

To date, I hadn’t progressed very far down this royal road to romance. When the War came along, I became more of a will of the wisp than I had been before. And up to a few days ago, I had no idea what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Now, everything had fallen into place. I can do anything I want. I can go anyplace and stay as long as I want; and of course, I’m now in a position to marry anytime I please and to support a wife in grand style. In short: I had taken a quantum leap forward, bypassing a very important step, which was whittling out a career for myself. The diamonds had made me independent. And from the moment we decided to take them, I had all but forgotten about the thing weighing most heavily on my mind since I started school several years ago–the problem of my career or lack of one.

“What was Kurt’s unit doing here is what you really want to know,” she said. “Well, when Hitler saw how the new Vichy government welcomed him, he wasted no time in instituting his final solution to the Jewish problem in France. And do you know what happened? No! Well, I will tell you–and this is something no Frenchmen should ever forget–we helped Kurt and his SS round up other Frenchmen who just happened to be Jews. And in spite of our national motto, ‘Liberte, Equalite, Fraternite,’ we helped them carry our neighbors off to slave labor camps, where they were worked and starved to death just like Jews from other enslaved countries.”

I had been kind of daydreaming as she talked. All of a sudden a crazy thought brought me back from a place warm and comfortable where I had been languishing; in fact, it came sailing through my brain like an express train. You know the kind of thing you keep a secret because it’s just too preposterous to discuss with anybody, not that you would want to. Well, this one flashed through in an instant; and thankfully, it never rattled around much at all before it flew out the other side. But unfortunately it wasn’t gone forever; it would return again and again–how was I going to feel about having Kurt Steinmann, a monster of the first water, for a brother-in-law.

 

It took Bernstein and two of his officers a week to arrange for the storage of the treasure in a bank vault in Frankfurt. And then it took another three days to move it. In the meantime, Bernstein had contacted Manson Eddy and asked his permission to organize a company strength task force for the purpose of ferreting out more hiding places. Based on what Françoise told me, and corroborating statements from displaced persons, there were more. And perhaps they contained other millions in gold waiting to be discovered.

Eddy liked the scheme, as did Patton. But Eisenhower was reluctant to approve of the idea at first. Then he hesitated to agree to the size of the search expedition Bernstein had in mind. Actually, Eisenhower, and to some extent Bradley, believed all Germany’s confiscated loot was stored in the Merkers mine. After seeing it for themselves, they didn’t understand how the country could still possess any more gold. Eisenhower’s intelligence people agreed, and so did the bank officials at the mine. They told him the Merkers treasure was all Germany had left. In fact, they had been trying to figure out a way to get some of it distributed or Germany wasn’t going to be able to pay her troops. Also, a supposedly neutral Sweden had threatened months before to curtail the shipping of any more machine tools, unless Germany took care of the millions she owed in unpaid bills.

I remember Bradley telling the bank guy not to worry too much about paying the troops, because they weren’t going to be in business much longer. And then he added something to the effect that as soon as Patton left Merkers, the last thing on the Wermacht’s mind was going to be their paychecks.

According to my own analysis of Eisenhower’s intelligence reports, the Waffen SS had given up on the Wermacht being able to stop the Allied and Russian advances. That’s why they were hoarding the country’s remaining assets, along with their own stolen loot. They saw their only hope for survival as being a mass retreat to the Bavarian Alps. There, they hoped to fight on indefinitely, forcing an eventual negotiated peace.

They wanted desperately to avoid unconditional surrender, likely to result in them being tried as war criminals and hanged. It was a wild dream of Hitler’s, planned out by the remnants of his most fanatical supporters, who had pledged to die for him. But Patton’s advance caught them before they could put their wild scheme into action, and he stopped them cold. That’s why there had to be more treasure, squirreled up somewhere closer to Bavaria, unknown to all but a few SS officers. Colonel Bernstein agreed with me.

In the end, Eisenhower acquiesced. But he approved of a much smaller organization than Bernstein wanted. He authorized him to proceed with only two Jeeps and two Carryalls, along with my squad and one more. We were ordered to stay behind our lines and to quietly proceed in our hunt without alerting the population. The last thing the general wanted was rioting by millions of starving homeless looking for Nazi gold.