When Albert completed his stint at the Pilsen factory, he became ‘responsible for the production of peacetime goods in order to ensure that Skoda would not lose their market for post-war times’.1 Albert dealt with a wide range of commodities – ‘locomotives, diesel motors, electric motors, cranes and even whole sugar refineries’ – which were ‘sold in exchange for foreign currency’.2
He was forced to lock horns with the Nazi-appointed chairman of Skoda’s executive committee, SS Standartenführer Doctor Wilhelm Voss. Albert thought that Voss was ‘absolutely unfitted for the job’, and also said that they ‘often had personal differences’.3 During the spring of 1942, only weeks before Heydrich’s assassination, Voss promised Himmler that Skoda would ‘meet with all the wishes and special wishes of the Waffen SS’,4 which included mountain howitzers, rocket launchers, mortars, machine guns and automatic rifles. But that July, Albert Speer gained jurisdiction over the armaments industry in the province. Voss became a frustrated onlooker as Skoda’s output immediately increased.
Managers were given greater freedom. The company, and enterprises linked to it, formed their own production chain, a ‘ring’ of manufacturers. This system was replicated across the Reich with startling results. In one year Speer managed to double the production of tanks and cut in half the construction time for submarines. Even so, Himmler set about subverting his authority. In October 1943, the SD formed an economic intelligence unit to infiltrate Speer’s organisation. The former architect was increasingly vulnerable as factories became reliant on the concentration camp inmates the SS provided.
Nevertheless, at least until 1944, Albert conducted business in a slightly less fractious working environment, especially after General Karl Bodenschatz, Hermann’s ‘personal friend and intimate’, became trustee of Skoda. Albert ‘used to see him about once in every six months’,5 either in Berlin or Prague. Bodenschatz generally agreed with Albert and ‘always followed his advice after he had consulted with the experts’.6
Albert also had other business interests. The Anglo-Prague Credit Bank had been set up on 1 April 1922 to resolve debts on international loans. In 1938 it financed and structured the deal that temporarily stopped Hermann getting 56 per cent of Skoda. Acting again for Skoda, the bank bought out the Czech government’s shares in Zbrojovka, the armaments firm which Albert’s friend, the resistance agent Karel Staller, worked for. The bank raised the money with assistance from the Czech explosives firm Explosia, which ICI had a stake in. Both were connected to Albert’s associates from Vienna, Bickford-Smith and Major Short, purveyors of the Bickford fuse, whose enterprise Albert shepherded through the war.
Given his familiarity with those close to the Anglo-Prague Credit Bank, it was a logical step for Albert to become ‘representative and supervisor of the branch offices . . . in Bucharest, Belgrade, and Sofia’. Then, when ‘Berlin ordered the parent office of the bank in Prague to be dissolved, and the branch offices incorporated into the Deutschebank and the Dresdner Bank’, Albert ‘postponed the liquidation for a year, and he even maintained the Bucharest branch up to the end’.7
* * *
Albert’s official activities for Skoda turned him into a travelling salesman, primarily operating in Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, and Greece. Mutually suspicious and nursing territorial grievances, these countries shared some basic characteristics: authoritarian, anti-Communist regimes that granted democratic rights only on sufferance; a majority that still worked the land – just 11 per cent of the Romanian labour force was in industry, over half Bulgaria’s GNP came from agriculture; an elite of major landowners and industrial magnates in a sometimes uneasy alliance with the church and the armed forces, facing internal and external threats; and a heavy dependence on their trade with the Reich.
Albert dealt directly with royalty and heads of state who were used to doing business with the Goering family, having received Hermann as a frequent guest since his first trips to the region in 1934–5. Facing spiralling inflation, shortages, collapsing infrastructure and constant pressure to devote all hands to the Nazi war effort, they welcomed any kind of commerce that benefited the civilian market.
When Skoda was ordered to stop producing machines that made cigarettes, Albert ‘succeeded in having this order cancelled, and a further quantity of machines were exported to Romania, Bulgaria and Yugoslavia’.8 This may seem insignificant but similar machines were being modified by the Nazis to produce bullets. Even getting six trains for the king of Bulgaria, who was a trained locomotive engineer, was an achievement. The foreign currency earned by Albert was vital for Skoda, and the Czech economy as a whole. By keeping up a steady flow of orders Albert was eating into the factory time Skoda could dedicate to weaponry. Within two years of Albert starting as export director, the amount of its output that went to the Wehrmacht fell by 12 per cent.
* * *
From the summer of 1940, Albert’s main base was the Romanian capital, Bucharest. On arrival he must have felt a strong sense of déjàvu. The city was gripped by a political crisis that was spilling onto the streets. The regent, King Carol, having stamped out the left a few years earlier, was facing a direct challenge from the Iron Guard, a violently anti-semitic, nationalist organisation that mixed terrorism with party politics, and had the covert support of Himmler.
The king’s authority had been severely undermined by hidden provisions in the Nazi–Soviet pact that awarded a third of Romanian soil and over 31/2 million of its citizens to Stalin. The provinces of Bessarabia and Bukovina were occupied by Soviet troops between 28 June and 3 July 1940. King Carol was in no position to offer resistance. Salt was poured into the wound a month later, when he was persuaded by Hitler to grant North-East Transylvania, a hotly disputed region, to Hungary. This further loss of territory, and another 2 million people, inflamed public opinion and gave the Iron Guard a pretext for revolt.
Carol, realising his position was untenable, abdicated on 4 September and handed over power to Marshal Antonescu. The ex-chief of the Army was only able to keep a lid on things by bringing the Iron Guard into his hastily formed government. The Guard were in no mood to cooperate and launched a coup in January 1941. Luckily for Antonescu, he had the full backing of Hitler. The Führer considered him to be ‘of Germanic origin . . . a born soldier’,9 and ‘a man on a big scale, who lets nothing throw him out of his stride’.10 Hitler had nothing but contempt for the Iron Guard, despite their chimeric anti-semitism. He wanted order and stability in the country that supplied most of the Nazis’ oil.
When Ribbentrop informed him that the SD had conspired in the Guardist putsch, Hitler ordered all their agents to leave Romania immediately. Antonescu seized the initiative. On 14 February 1941, 9,000 Guardists were arrested and their ringleaders executed. The marshal banned all opposition parties, ruled by decree, and welcomed Hitler’s upcoming ‘holy war’ against the Soviet Union.
Caught in the cross-fire of this upheaval were the Jews of Bucharest. On 22–3 January, 120 were murdered by Guardists in a local abattoir. Antonescu carried through the anti-Jewish legislation that had been enacted six months earlier, cutting them out of the professions, education and the arts, and began the process of removing their homes and assets. Albert ‘urged all his Jewish friends to leave and afforded them all possible help in the way of passports, visas and money’,11 transferring currency for them to accounts in Switzerland. The Benbassat family had benefited from Albert’s help during the Anschluss when he had got them out of Vienna and to Bucharest. Now he arranged their passage to Lisbon.
As Hitler’s armies invaded the Soviet Union, Romanian soldiers reclaimed Bessarabia and Bukovina. Antonescu branded the province’s Jews enemies of the state and sanctioned a vicious pogrom that took around 8,000 lives in the towns of Jassy and Czernowitz. Between July and November 1941, over 250,000 were forced into makeshift camps across the border in newly conquered Transnistria. By the following summer only a handful survived. The Romanian Army continued the destruction, ably supported by the Einsatzgruppen, as they advanced through Odessa.
Over 300,000 Jews were still alive in the historic heartlands of Romania. On 12 October 1942 Antonescu, citing his promise to protect ‘the Jews in the Old Kingdom’, refused to deport them as well. According to him, the Jews of Moldavia, where he grew up, were ‘native’ Romanians. The Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina were aliens who existed outside the nation, tainted by the Soviets’ brief occupation and their alleged enthusiasm for Communist rule: ‘Even before the appearance of Soviet troops, the Jews of Bessarabia and Bukovina spat upon our officers . . . and when they had the chance beat our soldiers to death with cudgels.’12
Antonescu’s motives were hardly noble. He could see which way the war was going. His beloved army awaited its fate outside Stalingrad. Peace feelers had already been extended to the Allies via diplomatic contacts in Lisbon and Istanbul. He was under considerable pressure from members of the royal family, the government, church leaders and prominent figures in business and industry.
At Nuremberg Albert claimed that, ‘By personal intervention with Antonescu of Romania he alleviated the fate of thousands of Jews there.’13 It is highly probable that Albert added his voice to the protests. He exercised leverage over an administration run by technocrats and civilian experts. His influence can be measured by the fact that ‘He forced the Romanian government to pay their unpaid debts to Skoda in 1943 to the sum of 400 million crowns.’14
Albert worked closely with the Resita group, Romania’s largest industrial corporation, run by the Jewish magnate, Max Anschnitt. Suspected of having Communist sympathies and links to the Soviet Union, Anschnitt was arrested by King Carol for denying him a commission on a deal and kept in prison by Antonescu for being a Jew. However, under the auspices of the HermannGoeringWerke, which had added Resita to its portfolio, he was released and placed back at the helm. Anschnitt donated huge sums of money to organisations helping Jews escape deportation.
* * *
The experience of war on Albert’s patch differed sharply between the countries allied to Hitler and the ones occupied by him. In Greece, the Wehrmacht, working hand in glove with Krupps and IG Farben, ransacked the economy with devastating results. Thousands lost their jobs, prices rose fast, and a poor harvest triggered a full-scale famine that claimed over a quarter of a million lives during the winter of 1941/2. Hermann’s Four Year Plan office refused to send any grain from the Reich to prevent the crisis. The black market took over. By 1944 bartering had replaced money. Throughout the country partisans fought an extensive and damaging campaign against the Nazis, who responded with increasing levels of indiscriminate violence. Meanwhile Greece’s Jews, concentrated in Salonika and numbering around 75,000, were shipped to the death camps. Only 10,000 survived.
Yugoslavia was a bubbling cauldron of partisans, Nazi reprisals, ethnic hatred and civil war. In Croatia the Ustasha sowed its killing fields with Jews, gypsies and Serbs. Tito’s Communist guerillas and the royalist Chetniks fought the Nazis and each other. During 1939–41 Skoda had produced a lot of weapons ‘for Yugoslavia and for the Soviet Union’, so when the Nazis invaded the company already had links with the emergent resistance. Skoda’s chairman, Hromadko, made regular trips to Belgrade, where he was able to ‘pass confidential news to the Allies’, and arrange funding ‘for the support of the independence struggle’.15
The Nazis were naturally suspicious. The SS man, Doctor Voss, ‘had the chairman watched during his travels abroad’. When Voss’s spy broke his leg, ‘This task was given to Albert Goering’. Albert had no intention of carrying it out: ‘He waited for the chairman at the train station or else the airport and after a short time he gave him unlimited freedom of movement. In that way he allowed him to pursue his resistance activities.’16
The Bulgarians committed to Hitler on 1 March 1941 but from the start, the king and his ministers sought to limit their participation in the war. They were content to let their troops occupy neighbouring Macedonia, but fearful of sending them to the Eastern Front. Communist partisans were soon troubling the capital Sofia. Despite the usual gamut of anti-semitic laws there was little enthusiasm for the Final Solution. When the SS demanded that Bulgaria’s 49,000 Jews be collected and put on trains there was widespread opposition. Sixty-three eminent figures presented their objections to King Boris. Again, Albert had the chance to express his opinion in person, after all he had got the king his trains. On 10 March 1943, Boris drew a line in the sand: no deportations. However, Macedonia’s Jews were not spared – 11,400 were sent to Treblinka from where only 70 returned.
Hungary pursued a similar course to Bulgaria. Skoda’s business there was initially limited but grew as the war progressed. When the Nazis threatened to halt the company’s automobile trade with Hungary, Albert intervened: ‘I went all the way up to see Neurath, who was then protector of the country, and I told him it was impossible to stop the export of automobiles . . . and he granted this.’17 Albert was probably aware of Hungary’s efforts to secure peace with the Allies, which gathered urgency after its army was decimated by the Soviets around Voronezh in January 1943. First contacts were made in Lisbon that month. Meetings between British intelligence and Veress, a representative of the ‘Hungarian Government Resistance Group’, continued in Istanbul throughout the summer. Veress returned to Budapest in September armed with two wireless transmitters and a code book. For the next six months he relayed messages until Hitler acted to prevent Hungary’s defection.
The head of state, Admiral Horthy, faced with the threat of invasion, purged the government and filled it with men amenable to the Nazis. Adolf Eichmann arrived in Budapest with a 200-strong task force. Operating out of the Hotel Majestic, they began rapid preparations for the transportation of Hungary’s 700,000 Jews. The first trains for Auschwitz left on 14 May 1944. By 8 July over 434,000 had made the hellish journey. Then Horthy, aware of the Soviet military juggernaut heading towards his borders and swayed by international outrage and diplomatic pleading, put the brakes on. Budapest’s Jews, already being shoved into ghettos and denuded of their rights and their property, were given a temporary reprieve.
Eichmann’s measures reached out to embrace Hungarian Jews living abroad, like Albert’s friend, Doctor Kovacs, whom he had met in Rome before the war. A letter was sent to the Hungarian legation demanding they strip Kovacs of his citizenship. This was the least of his worries. Only a year earlier the situation had seemed so hopeful. Having triumphed in North Africa, the Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943, prompting a coup against Mussolini, who was arrested later that month. On 3 September, as the Allies crossed the Straits of Messina and landed on Italian mainland soil, the new government under King Victor Emmanuel signed an armistice and promptly fled Rome – the Nazis were coming to town. On the 12th German airborne troops liberated Mussolini from the ski resort where he was being held.
These were nervous times for Italy’s Jews, who had so far suffered only relatively mild discrimination. Now it was open season. Doctor Kovacs turned to Albert. He was ‘frightened that his furniture would be requisitioned, and explained his position to Goering. Whereupon Goering gave them a certificate to the effect that all of the furniture in the flat belonged to him.’18 Meanwhile, one of Kovacs’s circle, Vitez Szasz, who had been head of the Hungarian Legation in Rome for over twenty years, saved ‘280 Jews from the clutches of the Nazis, and continued that work’.19 After Kovacs was given sanctuary at the Hungarian Embassy by Szasz, it seems likely they made use of the Swiss bank account opened by Albert in 1939 to finance escape routes.
Though Naples was liberated on 1 October, it would be another eight months before the Allies got to Rome, their advance hopelessly blocked by the German defensive line built around the medieval monastery of Monte Cassino, located high in the central ridge of mountains that divides Italy. The first attacks against this fortress were launched in December. The defenders finally surrendered on 18 May 1944. During that time 7,500 Italian Jews were deported, of whom 610 made it home.
* * *
The demonic energy invested in the Final Solution reached a fever pitch of intensity as the Nazi empire contracted, creating a whirlpool effect that sucked in millions. Though Albert managed to get a few people out of the camps, including a Czech and two Soviet prisoners from Seckenheim, he understood how futile and petty his efforts were when stacked against the enormity of the Nazis’ crimes.
According to Elsa Moravek, whose family owed him their lives, Albert ‘repeatedly said it was a shame what the Gestapo were doing, and that all the trees of Europe could not hide all the Germans that were part of it’.20 Albert realised that the retribution, though thoroughly deserved, would be devastating: ‘Deep inside Albert was suffering. He was a sincere German and he was scared of the consequences of the war.’21
Yet he remained defiant in public. An arrest order was issued when he called Himmler a ‘lustmerder . . . somebody who likes to kill for fun’. He managed to insult the Nazis’ man in Bucharest, Manfred von Killinger. The SA general invited Albert ‘several times to come to dinner, or come to a lecture, or something of that sort, but I refused . . . One day, one of the counsellors of the Legation . . . asked me why . . . I told him that I would rather sit down with a chauffeur of a taxi than sit down with a murderer, because Killinger was the murderer of Rathenau.’22
Walter Rathenau, a prominent Jewish politician, had been gunned down in 1922 during a wave of attacks orchestrated by a terrorist cell which Killinger belonged to. A former Navy officer who had fought with the Freikorps in Munich during 1919, he joined the SA, survived the Night of the Long Knives and was based at the German Consulate in San Francisco between 1936 and 1938, where he ran an espionage network along the US West Coast. He loathed the kind of people that Albert associated with: ‘If it were up to me, I would douse the entire Romanian bourgeoisie in gasoline.’23
Albert’s remark ‘got back to Killinger, and he was very, very furious, and he denounced me to the Gestapo’. Hermann was alerted and he got Albert out of trouble again, even though he ‘had a terribly difficult time’. The same thing happened when Albert ‘in conversation with some friends, called Hitler the greatest criminal of all times’.24
Albert’s attitude can be summed up by an incident recalled by Jacques Benbassat. One evening in Bucharest, ‘He played the piano and sang some Viennese songs with my father.’ From across the street someone sang back in German, ‘So Albert went to the balcony to see who it was and there were two German officers on a balcony.’ A few words were exchanged, ‘And the Germans asked, “Who are you? What’s your name?” He said “Albert Goering”. They said, “Are you related?” So he said, “Yes, he’s my brother.” So they snapped to attention, “Heil Hitler”, and he raised his glass and he said, “Kiss my arse.”’25
* * *
As the war entered its final year, any semblance of normality clinging to the daily lives of civilians across central Europe and the Balkans was mercilessly stripped away. Infernal chaos, monotonous horror and random slaughter marched hand in hand with disease, homelessness and hunger. After the invasion of Italy, Allied bombers and their stockpiles of incendiaries were within range of Sofia, Bucharest and Belgrade, which soon felt the heat.
The Red Army was coming. Towards the end of the summer of 1944 it launched a massive offensive, entering Romania and Hungary. In Bucharest, on 23 August, Antonescu resigned. Killinger shot himself to avoid capture. The king sued for peace and declared war on Germany. Bulgaria followed soon after. By October Tito’s partisans were on the verge of entering Belgrade and British paratroops were landing in Athens. In Hungary, Horthy tried to jump ship but the Nazis would not release their stranglehold. The Arrow Cross, Hungary’s equivalent of the Iron Guard, assumed power in Budapest and set about murdering Jews. As the world caved in around him, Albert left Bucharest and headed for Prague.
While Slovakia was torn by a massive anti-Nazi uprising, Bohemia-Moravia descended into chaos as resistance fighters, Nazi troops, SS death squads and Soviet soldiers roamed the countryside. Albert’s good friend, Karel Staller, was still performing missions for his controllers in London. During April 1944 he brought the venerable General Luza a microfilm containing a list of questions for him about the likelihood of revolt. Soon after Staller delivered another communiqué which asked Luza to organise and lead an insurrection. However, in October, while heading for the capital, Luza was shot dead in a tavern by local police. On 10 April 1945, the Gestapo dumped his corpse by a deserted roadside.
The Skoda factory at Pilsen had led a charmed life. Despite two major Allied bomber raids in the spring of 1943, each involving over 200 planes, none had hit their target. The company’s armament production peaked in 1944. This dubious achievement did not stop the Gestapo making one last attempt to get Albert behind bars. The final arrest order was issued in Prague on 31 January 1945. Hermann, whose reputation by this point was in tatters, was still able to get Albert’s head off the chopping block, but only just: ‘When I saw him he told me that this would be absolutely the last time he could help me . . . because he had very great trouble getting me out.’26