Krueger's Men (8 page)

And so they journeyed to Sachsenhausen. Krueger paused to consider the inherent contradiction of the Nazis’ universal camp motto wrought in iron letters over the stone gate:
Arbeit Macht Frei
— Work Brings Freedom. He knew this was a lie, indeed that life would turn out precisely the opposite for those he would choose from the eighty candidates the camp commandant put on display for him at a roll call in Block 19.

As Krueger approached, he heard the command “Hats off!” and saw eighty pairs of hands being held stiffly against the trouser seams of the blue-and-white-striped uniforms. He had never before come so close to the wretched truth of Nazi rule. The tension and fear were evident in the prisoners’ faces as he inspected the men slowly, Petrich at his side.

“How old are you?”

“Sixty years.”

“Your profession?”

“Paper expert.”

“Where do you come from?”

“Eichenberg in Bohemia.”

“Why are you here?”

“I am a Jew.”

“Step forward.”

And so Krueger began the methodical work of selecting the men on whom the future of Operation Bernhard depended. They had no idea what they were being selected for at this roll call, but they immediately noticed something different: Krueger addressed them by the formal and polite German
Sie,
instead of the familiar and demeaning
du
reserved for children, servants, Jews under the Nazis, and indeed all other concentration camp inmates except recalcitrant German pastors and prominent politicians from occupied countries held hostage there.

Down the line he walked, selecting a professional engraver in precious metals, a banker, a paper salesman, even a Polish doctor to help maintain his workforce. Contrary to Krueger’s expectations, he found four men from the building trades — two carpenters, an electrician, and a mason — several specialists in the graphic arts, and four printers.

“Where did you work?” Krueger asked one printer.

“At various Berlin firms.”

“Do you want to join the others?”

“Yes, sir, Herr Sturmbannfuehrer.”

“Join the others.”

He finally picked thirty-nine inmates instead of his planned thirty, mainly middle-aged men, about half from various graphic trades, including a well-known Berlin fashion photographer, Norbert Levi. There was even a tall, slightly grotesque drifter, a half-Jewish
Mischling
who looked like a clown and agreed to Krueger’s suggestion that he was a joker by nature; such a person would help keep up morale. When Krueger reported the results, the commandant said: “Four printers! Excellent! I hope they can print what you want.” Still, no one in the camp, not even the commandant, had the least idea what was happening, and neither Krueger nor Petrich told them. Petrich doubted he could succeed with printers who had no experience working with high-quality inks and who had probably ground out “cheap lottery tickets, store advertisements, calendars, business stationery, calling cards for teenagers.” Krueger reproached him: “Think, be patient, do your duty and have a strong will.” The optimistic SS engineer said he knew Jews from civilian life who had fought bravely for Germany in World War I, so why couldn’t these Jews become good printers? Moreover, he continued, “The prisoners are most likely not dissatisfied with the opportunity of landing in a secret printing plant and will work doubly hard to remain in it. Operation Andreas was easier. They just drafted the required experts out of their positions without asking the owners of their companies whether they liked it or not.” He did not need to remind Petrich of the fiasco that followed.

The SS guard Marock insisted from the start that Krueger was too soft on his charges, especially since they were Jews. “Prisoners should be handled firmly. They are used to it,” the SS quartermaster sergeant told Krueger. What none of the others seemed to realize was that the usual Nazi ways would not work here. Krueger was not just looking for craftsmen and specialists, but individuals of intelligence and dexterity whom he could train and organize for the various interlocking tasks of engraving, printing, sorting, and counting that were essential to the success of the operation bearing his name. Hairdressers, for example, were not chosen for their skills or ancestry, but for their nimble fingers.

The prisoners’ recollections of Krueger’s selections later at Auschwitz match the tenor and some of the details of his own account. At Auschwitz-Birkenau, Moritz Nachtstern, an anarchist stereotyper who had worked in the print shop of
Dagbladet,
Oslo’s largest newspaper, was told one evening late in 1942 that he and six other printers had been picked out on the basis of the occupations listed on their prisoners’ cards. Presumably the cards were part of the Hollerith classification system the Germans had adapted from a joint venture with the International Business Machines Corporation of the United States. As with all products of that great company, however, the information disclosed by the system was only as good as what had been disclosed to it, a condition later known in the information industry as GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. Nachtstern had been listed as a printer rather than a stereotyper because the clerk had found the name of his occupation too difficult to spell. “Printer” is a generic term often used loosely. Used precisely, it refers to a worker who runs a printing press. A stereotyper is a specialist who makes an impression from the original type and casts the metal plates that are used on the press. The distinction matters mainly inside the print shop or in union negotiations, but in this case Nachtstern correctly sensed it might be a matter of life and death.

When Nachtstern and his comrades arrived a couple of weeks later at Block 19, they found that “not even a cat could have gotten through that barbed-wire netting unscathed.” Krueger, wearing civilian clothes, met them in the small exercise yard outside the barracks.

“Good day, gentlemen. I think you’ll like it here. What’s your trade?”

That first question was addressed to Fritz Schnapper, a German who had arrived with Nachtstern.

“Printer,” he replied, confounded by Krueger’s polite demeanor and formal usage.

“Excellent, sir,” Krueger replied, turning to Nachtstern, who announced his trade truthfully but not without apprehension.

“Ah, stereotyper. Splendid, sir,” mused the Nazi official. “I shall have good use for you.”

Krueger patted a relieved Nachtstern on the shoulder and walked off with a friendly nod.

Around the same time, Avraham Krakowski found himself before Krueger in a line of a hundred prisoners placed in rows of five abreast. He watched Krueger pick Mordka Tuchmajer, a printer from Poland, who asked for his brother to go along so they could stay together, even though his brother was a furniture varnisher. The brother was named David Marjanka, also a Pole, and may or may not have been related to Tuchmajer, who was seven years younger. Nevertheless, Krueger amiably replied, “All right, put his number down, too.” As the line shortened, and men from printing and allied trades were selected, Krakowski reckoned he had been called by mistake. After twenty-five men were picked, Krueger ordered: “Enough!” But then he impulsively decided he needed a few more, and for some unknown reason, which Krakowski attributed to no less than divine intervention, Krueger spotted him.

“You over there, come on up here. I’d like to talk to you.”

Krakowski stood before him.

“How old are you?”

“Twenty-five.”

“What kind of work do you do?”

“I’m an accountant.”

“Let me see your hands.”

Although roughened by forced labor, they remained soft enough to convince Krueger.

“Take down his number, too.”

Krakowski became the thirty-first and last choice; of those thirty-one, nineteen had been selected earlier that morning for the gas chamber.

Adolf Burger, a Slovak, was deeply suspicious when all photographers, retouchers, chemists, and typographers like him were ordered to report. He knew that whenever a call went out for specialists, they ended up with the hardest jobs. But once his number was read out at roll call, he had no choice. Hesitantly he entered the camp director’s office, where an SS officer scanned his personnel card.

“Prisoner Burger?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Trade, typographer?”

“Yes, sir.”

The raw voice turned friendly and, wonder of wonders, the officer put out his hand.

“You are going to Berlin, Herr Burger.” Suddenly he had been transformed back into a human being. “We need specialists such as yourself. You will work under excellent conditions, and things will go well for you. I cannot give you any further information; you will be told everything else upon your arrival. I wish you good luck.”

Max Groen and his boyhood friend Dries Bosboom had been picked up in their native Amsterdam for breaking curfew and were shipped to Auschwitz, where they were among only 38 of their transport of 1,150 souls to survive. One day Dries was asked a curious question by an SS corporal. Had he worked in the graphics industry? Yes, he was a lithographer by trade. At that precise moment the gong sounded for a selection, but before it could begin the corporal stuck his head in the barracks and asked if anyone else had worked in graphics.
“Jawohl, ich!”
shouted Max. He was a newsreel cameraman, but what difference did that make? Dries whispered to Max that he must say he was a litho-photographer, because he could handle a camera, and not a photo-lithographer, because that skill took years to learn.

In the office the two Dutch Jews were called before an authoritative SS major whom they found suspiciously well mannered. The major did not give his name and asked a number of questions as if he were interviewing them for a job. When he reached Groen, he asked about his skills in photo retouching. Groen had absolutely no idea what to say. At that moment, he recalled a trashy romance novel on his mother’s kitchen table with two words referring to some obscure reproduction process about which he knew nothing.

“American retouching,” Groen blurted out.

The officer nodded knowledgeably. “Ah, you mean positive retouching.”

In the blink of an eye, Groen’s life had been spared by Krueger, for of course it was he. Max and Dries were put on a train to Berlin with sixty others in a third-class carriage with windows and wooden seats. The mere fact that it was not a boxcar made the ride a luxury.

Not until they reached Sachsenhausen did any of the prisoners know why they were there. Groen, quick and wily, needed little time to discover the purpose of the secret print shop through the classic prison “jungle tom-tom” whose beats he could read so well. He also learned of the fatal sword of Damocles that hung over all their heads. Moritz Nachtstern discovered the purpose of the place from Marock shortly after his interview with Krueger. The boastful sergeant picked up a counterfeit five-pound note in Block 19 and preened before the new prisoners: “We have beaten England in the military field. Now, with the notes, we shall also ruin their economy. They have dropped counterfeit bread-ration coupons over Germany from the air. We shall reply with these notes, until inflation is over them like a storm.”

The idea that a team of printers, graphic artists, and accountants, all bearing the Nazi equivalent of the mark of Cain, would be employed in what might otherwise be a vast criminal enterprise and then disposed of as casually as a herd of cattle, at first seemed no crime at all in the murderous context of a concentration camp. To the prisoners themselves it seemed a blessing, or at least an opportunity to mitigate the harshness of their treatment. The original draft of thirty-nine prisoners, swept into an incomprehensible situation, at first felt humiliated and whispered among themselves: “What will others say when they think of us as counterfeiters?” These were, after all, Jews who had earned respectability in the alien society of pre-war Europe. At first some saw an opportunity for revenge, most forcefully Max Bober, a tough Berlin printer.

With the lights out and the guards withdrawn, Bober argued for the “silent satisfaction” of sabotage by sloppy work in this “swinish operation.” He urged his comrades: “You must not be resigned to allowing a pitiful crown to be pressed on our heads. We now have a weapon in our hands we must use.… We know nothing about whether our wives and children are alive or dead.”

This emotional appeal was countered by the cooler logic of Jaroslav Kaufmann, a Czech dentist, who warned that they would be betting their “whole bankroll” — their very lives. He argued: “The Nazis will need more and more of this bogus money, so they will need us increasingly. If you sabotage, they won’t need us any more and will kill us with this secret.”

Kaufmann won them over. Bober, with his expansive personality, became the barracks major-domo and helped initiate newcomers into the agreed method of survival. Sabotage was never again contemplated until the final days of the war made stalling worthwhile, although even that had its limits.

Krueger had his own nuanced view. He clearly thought of the operation as a soldier’s duty but also an onerous challenge that might endanger himself if he failed. But he was cool enough never to offer a hint of that as he faced his workers for the first time at Sachsenhausen. Mostly, he hoped that the shock and relief of their sudden reversal of fortune would win them over and turn them into motivated, industrious workers. He addressed them in order to introduce Petrich and the two guardroom sergeants and to alert them that he and they alike were working under Himmler’s special orders. He continued:

Those of you who have long and involuntarily been out of professional life because of your incarceration have an advantage, because you will be working with modern, complicated machinery and will first have to learn the techniques under the supervision and guidance of Master Printer Petrich. You will begin with simple printing tasks.

Always remain aware of the proper performance of your tasks. I put the greatest value on smooth cooperation. Practice this within and outside your community. The perspectives of your camp service are different from before. SS Unterscharfuehrers Marock and Weber are responsible for supervising your work. You are always to turn [first] to them. Both are obligated to treat you correctly and are answerable for order in Block 19.