Dan Fesperman: The Arms Maker of Berlin

But here and there were tantalizing glimpses of people and events that Nat knew about, and he paused to savor them. It wasn’t just scholarly indulgence. It was the only responsible way to proceed, lest he miss an obscure but previously unknown connection to either White Rose activities or the Scholls.

Nat was reasonably familiar with the major players of wartime Bern-the spies, businessmen, and diplomats that Dulles and his pickup team of operatives had mingled with. In one folder he spotted a reference to a meeting between Dulles and Gero von Gaevernitz, a debonair German financier who spent the first years of the war shuttling between Bern and Berlin while piling up an impressive hoard of intelligence.

Fearing for his safety, Gaevernitz left Germany for good in late 1941 to take refuge in Bern, where he became a confidant of Dulles. They met almost daily at the spymaster’s ground-floor flat at Herrengasse 23, and Gaevernitz often arranged introductions with visiting Germans willing to pass along information. Switzerland’s wartime blackout made it easy for clandestine visitors, who approached a back entrance via an uphill path through terraced gardens overlooking the River Aare. As an extra precaution, Dulles talked the locals into removing the bulb from the streetlamp that illuminated his doorway.

Dulles’s status was an open secret. That was the way he wanted it, calculating that the best way to join the spy game was to let it be known that he was open for business. It was one reason the British never put much stock in his product. They figured he was being played for a fool. Too bad for them. By war’s end Dulles was an expert at separating fact from rumor, information from disinformation.

He brought to the job a masculine but genteel clubroom manner, puffing a pipe and sipping port during amiable hearthside chats. Considering the privations of rationing, he offered one of the best tables in town. Shucked oysters, perhaps, followed by roast leg of lamb. Nat had seen those items and more on the household cook’s grocery lists, which were on file in a tattered notebook at the National Archives. The cook turned out to be jotting down other items as well, and she was promptly fired when Dulles found out she had been passing information to the Germans.

That was par for the course in wartime Bern-a crowded nest of espionage hatchlings, all crying for their daily feed, then wondering what it was they were really digesting for their masters back home. And Gordon Wolfe, even if nothing but a lowly clerk, had been stationed at the center of it all. That much soon became clear to Nat from the “GW” notations penciled at the corner of several filings. It was eerie to come across his initials, especially while knowing that at the time Gordon was roughly half Nat’s current age. Hard to think of him as an ambitious young snoop after having just seen him at the courthouse, shuffling off to jail.

Nat wondered anew why Gordon seemed so eager for him to do a thorough job. And what was it that everyone really wanted him to find? Or not find, in Gordon’s case. White Rose materials, while interesting, would hardly seem to have much impact on the here and now. And if Nat came up empty, how was that supposed to strengthen Gordon’s hand with the feds? Theft was theft, whether the goods were helpful or not.

Halfway through the first box Nat still hadn’t found anything even remotely connected to the White Rose, not even in the news summaries. But he had noticed a potentially important anomaly. The label on the box’s spine said it contained folders 1-37. A quick count showed that only 33 folders were inside. Numbers 4, 5, 11, and 12 were missing. Was this what Gordon had meant? If so, then where was the missing material, and what was its significance?

Shortly before lunch Nat came across a few items that he figured might someday be useful in his own research. One was a lengthy and colorful account from February 1943 of a visit to Dulles by a German banker, Dieter Elsner. The poor man swallowed so much of Dulles’s port that he ended up facedown in the rear garden-next to a grape arbor, appropriately enough. The cook, presumably more reliable than her turncoat predecessor, helped drag the portly fellow back indoors, where Dulles and she revived him long enough for Elsner to groggily telephone a business associate to come retrieve him.

The associate turned out to be industrialist Reinhard Bauer, whom Nat was familiar with from the man’s prominent role in Germany’s wartime armaments industry. He also became a player in the country’s postwar economic renaissance, partly by switching from tank parts to coffeemakers. Bauer was one of those eager-to-please Hohenzollern blue bloods who had dropped the “von” from the family name to appease Hitler’s mistrust of the aristocracy. But he was never enough of a gung-ho Nazi to attract the attention of war crimes investigators.

Dulles’s typewritten account noted that Bauer arrived at his rear entrance within minutes of Elsner’s phone call, which led the spymaster to believe that the whole evening had been a ruse to arrange an introduction. Bauer showed up impeccably dressed, even though it was 2 a.m., and before they even reached his supposedly drunken friend, Bauer was already offering to share his insights on the German rearmament effort led by Reichsminister Albert Speer. The conversation began with such promise that Dulles summoned an interpreter to the house shortly afterward to help translate, since his German and Bauer’s English weren’t exactly the best. Dulles then assigned the code name “Magneto” to Bauer for use in all ensuing correspondence. It was a decent find for Nat, because up to then he had never come across any evidence that Reinhard Bauer had assisted the Allies. Already the trip was worthwhile.

The odd part was that Gordon had never before mentioned the meeting or Bauer in either his published work or any of their conversations. Yet Gordon had been the summoned translator, and his initials appeared on the memo-a lonely “GW” penciled into the lower left corner.

Nat’s stomach growled. It was one thirty. He had been at it for four hours, and to his surprise he was nearly done with the first box. At this rate, two days might actually be enough to complete the assignment, just as Holland had said. How disappointing.

“Hungry?”

It was one of the agents, who had been babysitting Nat from a seat in the living room.

“Yes.”

“I could get us some takeout.”

“Thanks, but I could use some fresh air. I’ll try the diner.”

“I’ll get my car.”

“Alone, if you don’t mind.”

The man nodded, but looked disappointed. Probably bored out of his mind.

“I have to check your notes before you go.”

“Haven’t taken any.”

“Gotta search you, too.”

He patted Nat down from head to toe, then pronounced him good to go.

To Nat’s relief, no one followed from the house as he departed in the rented Ford. But halfway down the mountain a sedan in a turnout tucked in behind him and stayed on his tail all the way into town. It was a black Chevy, like the ones the feds were driving. He parked across the street from the diner, and the Chevy took a space half a block back No one got out. Maybe they were just making sure he wasn’t visiting Gordon.

Nat took a menu but decided he had better check in with Karen before ordering, in case news of his “disappearance” had spread. He reached for his cell phone, then cursed as he remembered it was still on his desk. The waitress directed him to a pay phone by the restroom doors and changed a few bucks into quarters so he could use it.

Sending Karen off to Wightman had been his ex-wife Susan’s idea, and she had sprung it on him like a trap, by arriving unannounced on his doorstep the day of their daughter’s enrollment. At the time he viewed it as a vengeful prank, payback for years of neglect. But he saw now that it was a gift he hadn’t deserved, a last opportunity to make friends before youthful bitterness hardened into adulthood.