Chapter 6

San Angelo, Texas, 1950

 

 

We had been sitting in this joint outside of town most of the afternoon while Lucy listened to me talk. Of course I left out the personal stuff involving Françoise.

It was one of those places you find all over the Southwest where they have a string band and crowds pour in after dark. The music is Texmex, although Mexicans are seldom in attendance. And any one of them foolish enough to venture in for any reason might find himself virtually in enemy territory. These places, and I suspect this one is no different from all the others I have known, is rough and downright dangerous if you’re a stranger and insist on having a few beers and then start shooting your mouth off. And for a southerner like myself, from another part of the South, well, I might just as well have been a Yankee or a Mexican.

Lucy had asked me about the Waffen SS. And I confess I knew very little about them at the time I met Françoise other than that we had the utmost respect for them as soldiers, but not as human beings. When we were in their area of operations, our intelligence briefer was the first to let us know. Always, we were warned of the stiff resistance we could expect from the Wermacht when the SS was behind them. That’s one of the reasons they put them there in the first place. Regardless of how badly things were going for the regular army, they were afraid to retreat. The SS were far more ruthless with retreating Wermacht troops than we ever were.

The poor reputation of the SS in this country started at the Bulge, where they took several hundreds of our soldiers prisoner and then summarily shot them. Of course, if you talked to Russian soldiers from the Eastern Front, they would have told you this was a common occurrence. I mean, we are just now coming to understand the extent of the atrocities they committed among prisoners, and among the Russian population as a whole.

“Who were these people anyway that you should be so darned scared of them?” She wanted to know.

I knew she was like most Americans. That is, she had heard about the SS but had not paid much attention to what she had heard. Others, particularly Americans of German extraction, were in a mind-set, which came to be called psychological denial. That is, the stories about their atrocities among the Russian population were like the death camps; they were just too hideous for comprehension. No human being was capable of treating other human beings the way they treated civilians on the Eastern Front. It just was not believable, so it was mostly denied.

I felt that way in the beginning. But then I was to change my mind as the War came to a close, and the truth slowly began to emerge.

To me the SS is little more than recent history now. But I still have a need to justify my taking of the diamonds from Merkers. A long time ago I settled with my conscience, but I’m a long way from convincing Lucy that it wasn’t a crime. And if I can’t do that, then there’s going to be a hole develop in my plans rather rapidly. Maybe if I could convey exactly how we felt about the SS while sitting in the Merkers tunnel that night, she might understand.

There we were with unknown millions of Reichsbank and stolen Waffen SS loot right in front of us. No, it was more than stolen; it was taken by force by the most ruthless hoard of soldiers since the ancient Khans. And we were afraid our army was going to give it back, not to the rightful owners, who were mostly dead, but to a fund to restore the society of a people who were responsible for siring these very monsters in the first place.

If I could answer her question as to who these men were, if I could show her in some small way what they were, then maybe she would see it as we had. There’s one thing for sure; I have no intention of giving any part of it back–I have made up my mind to that. I want Lucy, but I want the diamonds, too. They say money is not everything in life. But I figure it’s mostly poor people who go around saying it. I have been poor, and I have been rich. But between the two, I decided long ago that rich was much better than poor. However, like George Patton, I would have split up the gold between the combat veterans of Third Army, that is, if I could’ve stolen it and gotten away with it. But I still would’ve kept the sack of diamonds for the three of us. Under my plan, there would have been no need for any International Tripartite Commission to decide who owned the treasure which, incidentally, as of this date, has proven virtually impossible to determine.