W. IV - Honor Bound 05 - The Honor of Spies

"Jawohl, Herr Gruppenfuhrer."

Raschner was prepared to deal with Heydrich's order. Von Deitzberg realized Raschner had expected Heydrich's reaction.

Raschner showed von Deitzberg the Sicherheitsdienst dossier of a woman believed to pose a threat to the sterling reputation of the SS officer corps.

She was the widow of Waffen-SS Obersturmbannfuhrer Erich Kolbermann, who had given his life for his Fuhrer and the Fatherland at Stalingrad. Officers' ladies in these circumstances were expected to devote their lives to volunteer work for the war effort by working in hospitals, that sort of thing.

If they didn't do what was expected of them, a friendly word from the local SS commander reminded them that their exemption from labor service had ended with the demise of their husband. In other words, either behave or report to the Labor Office, which will find some factory work for you to do.

When Inge--who had been raising eyebrows in Hamburg with her hospitality to young SS officers on leave, not infrequently with two or more at once--was given the friendly word from the local SS man, she disappeared.

She turned up in Berlin, one of the thirty or more attractive young women who congregated in the bars of the Hotel Am Zoo and the Hotel Adlon, where they struck up conversations with senior officers--or Luftwaffe fighter pilots--who were passing through the capital and were able to deal with the prices of the Am Zoo and the Adlon.

The attractive young women were not prostitutes, but they did take presents and accept loans.

Raschner brought Frau Kolbermann to von Deitzberg's office for a friendly chat. Von Deitzberg was drawn to her from their first meeting. Not only was she very attractive, but he thought her eyes were fascinating; naughty, even wicked, a la Marlene Dietrich. He restrained himself, knowing that Reichsfuhrer-SS Heinrich Himmler was not only something of a prude but expected the highest moral standards to be practiced by his officers.

Frau Kolbermann readily accepted the proposition Raschner offered. She said she knew where Uruguay was, had even visited it, and spoke passable Spanish, which confirmed what the dossier suggested: a well-bred woman who'd fallen on hard times.

She was formally introduced to von Tresmarck the next day, became Baroness von Tresmarck two days after that, and was on a Condor flight to Buenos Aires ten days after that.

From then on, things had run smoothly for almost a year. But then they began to fall apart.

On May 31, 1942, Gruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich, "Protector of Bohemia and Moravia," had been fatally wounded in Prague when Czech agents of the British threw a bomb into his car.

Before leaving Berlin to personally supervise the retribution to be visited upon the Czechs for Heydrich's murder, Himmler called von Deitzberg into his office to tell him how much he would have to rely on him until a suitable replacement for the martyred Heydrich could be found.

Von Deitzberg was now faced with a serious problem. On Heydrich's death, he had become the senior officer involved with the confidential special fund and the source of its money--yet never had learned from Heydrich how much Himmler knew about it.

He quickly and carefully checked the fund's records of the dispersal of its money before he had taken over. He found no record that Himmler had ever received anything.

It was of course possible that the enormous disbursements to Heydrich had included money that Heydrich had quietly slipped to Himmler; that way there would be no record of Himmler's involvement.

Three months later, however, after Himmler had neither requested money--not even mentioned it--nor asked about the status of the confidential special fund, von Deitzberg was forced to conclude that Himmler not only knew nothing about it, but that Heydrich had gone to great lengths to conceal it from the Reichsprotektor.

It was entirely possible, therefore, that Himmler would be furious if he learned now about the confidential special fund. If the puritanical Reichsprotektor learned that Heydrich had been stealing from the Reich, he would quickly conclude that von Deitzberg had been involved in the theft up to his neck.

When von Deitzberg brought up the subject to Raschner, Raschner said that as far as he himself knew, Himmler either didn't know about the fund or didn't want to know about it. Thus, an approach to him now might see everyone connected with it stood before a wall and shot. Or hung from a butcher's hook with piano wire.

They had no choice, Raschner reasoned, but to go on as they had . . . but taking even greater care to make sure the ransoming operation remained secret.

No one was ever selected to replace Heydrich as Himmler's adjutant. But Himmler gave von Deitzberg the title of "first deputy adjutant" and a week later took him to the Reichschancellery, where a beaming, cordial Adolf Hitler personally promoted him to SS-brigadefuhrer and warmly thanked him for his services to the SS and himself personally.

Von Deitzberg immediately arranged for Goltz to be promoted to sturmbannfuhrer, and Raschner to hauptsturmfuhrer. And he arranged for both to be sent to Buenos Aires. The risk of someone new coming into the Office of the Reichsprotektor and learning about the confidential special fund seemed to be over.

All of this had been going on simultaneously with Operation Phoenix.

Phoenix was of course the plan concocted by Bormann, Himmler, Ribben trop, and others at the pinnacle of the Nazi hierarchy to establish a sanctuary for senior Nazis in South America, from which they could rise phoenixlike from the ashes of the Thousand-Year Reich when the war was lost.

It had been no trouble for von Deitzberg to arrange for Standartenfuhrer Goltz to be sent to Buenos Aires as the man in charge of Operation Phoenix. That posting conveniently placed him in a position to be the confidential special fund's man in South America.

By then, curiously, there actually was a problem with the financial success of the fund. There was far more cash floating around than could be spent--or even invested--without questions being raised. It followed that the confidential special fund's leadership--von Deitzberg, Goltz, and Raschner--decided that setting up their own private version of Operation Phoenix was the natural solution. After all, von Tresmarck was already in place in Montevideo; it would pose no great problem for him to make investments for the confidential special fund. He was already doing that for Operation Phoenix.

And then there were the blunders. Von Deitzberg took little pride in being able to recognize a blunder when one occurred. Or an appalling number of them.

The first had been the failed assassination attempt on the American son of el Coronel Jorge G. Frade. When it became known that Cletus Frade--who had ostensibly "come home" to Argentina--was in fact an agent of the Office of Strategic Services and whose purpose in Argentina was to turn his father against Germany, the decision had been made to kill him. His murder would send the message to the man who almost certainly was going to be the next president of Argentina that even his son could not stand up to the power and anger of the Thousand-Year Reich.

But that hadn't worked. Young Frade, clearly not the foolish young man everyone seemed to have decided he was, killed the men sent to kill him. His outraged father then had loaned his pilot son an airplane with which young Frade located the Spanish-flagged--and thus "neutral"--merchant ship that had been replenishing German submarines in Samborombon Bay. Soon thereafter, a U.S. Navy submarine had torpedoed the vessel and the German U-boat tied alongside.

Von Deitzberg never learned who among the most senior of the Nazi hierarchy had ordered young Frade's assassination. And because that attempt had failed, no one was going to claim that responsibility.