The Family (21 page)

Is this a clue to the actual date of Gedat’s repentance? In 1935, apparently still searching for synthesis, Gedat gave a speech in which he declared that “God ordered hunters to chase Jews to where God wants them.” Two years previous, he had welcomed the new regime as the kind of full-strength disinfectant needed to rid Germany of “materialism,” a concern that plagued him well into his postwar years. Gedat may have hoped that the Christian wing of National Socialism would triumph over its pagan mirror image.
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When it did not—the two strands of fascism remained intertwined throughout Hitler’s regime—Gedat turned against Hitler as a false prophet, a man bent on usurping Christ’s rightful place at the head of the nation. Gedat took his totalitarianism seriously, could not stand to see it reduced in the personality of this uncouth little Austrian. He did not believe the problem with Jews was racial. It was biblical. He did not believe in a master race; he believed in a master class of key men from all nations. For this, Hitler banned him from speaking and even imprisoned him, and then “materialists” shadowed him with accusations. Yes, Gedat was a victim.

Would Abram join the materialists? Fricke wanted to know. Was Abram consumed by the “spirit of vengeance,” the “spirit of Morgenthau,” as Germans had taken to calling the tough policies of the Jewish American secretary of the treasury, the strongest advocate of denazification? Germans like Fricke struck a delicate balance with such implicit accusations. Allied justice equaled vengeance, they suggested, and vengeance was the stuff of the Old Testament. Putting their meaning more plainly would have been disastrous; even Abram would have recoiled, in 1948, from a German who blamed the Jews for his current troubles. Abram preferred the positive approach, the New Testament, New World, American method: reinvention. He called it
reconciliation.
To argue for anything else, he’d insist—to demand justice—was un-Christian.

What did Morgenthau really want? No more than accountability. Not every German was a “willing executioner,” as the historian Daniel Jonah Goldhagen puts it—indeed, many were themselves executed—but the Third Reich was not something imposed on an innocent German nation, as Abram and other American fundamentalists believed, but something it had brought about.

“It should be brought home to the Germans,” declared a directive from the Joint Chiefs of Staff delivered to Eisenhower in April 1945, “that Germany’s ruthless warfare and the fanatical Nazi resistance has destroyed the German economy and made chaos and suffering inevitable and that the Germans cannot escape responsibility for what they have brought upon themselves. Germany will not be occupied for the purpose of liberation but as a defeated enemy nation.”
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This attitude, believed millions of Germans, was the true crime against humanity. They had said they were sorry; would the Americans behave like Bolsheviks and Slavs—purveyors of “Asiatic nihilism,” as one of Fricke’s political allies wrote Abram—and refuse to forgive? “The world is playing a very dangerous game with the German people,” wrote Fricke, “if that repentance is not accepted.”
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Abram replied immediately. The charges against Gedat had come from the liberal Federal Council of Churches. Not worth a dime. “I responded by pointing out how natural it would be for a man in Germany to look with hope to any aggressive leadership that could unite the forces against the Communistic infiltration…I am thrilled with the progress that is being made in Germany.”
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G
EDAT WAS AMONG
the least tainted of the men that Abram and Fricke, and later Gedat himself, gathered into prayer cells to help forge the new West German state. But they
were
repentant men, this they testified to at every session. Repentant for what? It was hard to say. Every one of them claimed to have suffered during the war years. Men such as Hermann J. Abs, “Hitler’s banker” and a vice president of Abram’s International Christian Leadership (ICL), German division; Gustav Schmelz, a manufacturer of chemical weapons; Paul Rohrbach, the hypernationalist ideologue whose conflation of Germany with Christianity, and most of Europe with Germany, had inspired the Nazis to understand their war-hunger as divine; and General Hans Speidel, who had accepted the surrender of Paris on behalf of the Führer in 1940, insisted that he had never believed Hitler, had been forced into his arms by the Red Menace, had regretted the unfortunate alliance with such a vulgar fool, a disgrace to God’s true plan for Germany. They had done nothing wrong; they, too, if one gave it some thought, were victims.

Perhaps some of them were. That is one of the many clever strategies of fascism: persecution belongs to the powerful, according to its rules, both to dole out and to claim as the honor due martyrs. Abram did not ask questions; he simply took out his washcloth and got busy with the blood of the lamb. He scrubbed his “new men” clean. Did it work? Abs, “Hitler’s banker,” became “Adenauer’s banker,” a key figure in the West German government’s financial resurrection. Schmelz kept his factory. Rohrbach wrote on, authoring tributes to Abram’s International Christian Leadership in the
Frankfurter Allgemeine
.

And Speidel? He was a special case, a coconspirator with Rommel in the attempted assassination of Hitler, the “July Plot” of 1944. There was something almost American about him; like Buchman, like Barton, he considered Hitler’s racial policies a distraction from his really good ideas. For this ambivalence, the Allies rewarded him: he served as commander in chief of NATO ground forces from 1957 to 1963, when Charles de Gaulle, unpersuaded of his reconstruction, insisted on his ouster.
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Such men are only a few of those whom Abram helped, and by no means the worst. There were Zapp and von Gienanth, there were “little Nazis” Abram championed for U.S. intelligence positions, and there were big ones: Baron Konstantin von Neurath, Hitler’s first foreign minister, and General Oswald Pohl, the last SS commander of the concentration camps, among them. For those beyond hope of blank-slate reinvention, Abram and his web of Christian cells pled medical mercy (von Neurath, sentenced to fifteen years for crimes against humanity, was released early in 1953; Abram took up his case upon learning from von Neurath’s daughter that her father, classified as a “Major War Criminal,” was receiving less than exemplary dental care in prison) or expediency (it was unjust, they felt, that Pohl, who while imprisoned by the Allies wrote a memoir called
Credo: My Way to God
—a Christ-besotted path that did not include acknowledging his role in mass murder—should be left wondering when he would be hanged).
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When occupation forces charged Abs with war crimes, he offered a novel defense. He did not deny what he had done for Hitler; he simply declared that he had done it for money, fascism be damned. He would gladly do as much for the Allies. And so he did, a task at which he so excelled that he would come to be known as the wizard of the “German Miracle.” His past was forgotten—a phrase that must be written in passive voice in order to suggest the gentle elision of history in the postwar years, undertaken by those eager to see a conservative German state rise from the ashes, a sober son of Hitler’s fatherland that would inherit the old man’s hatred for one radicalism but not his love of another.

When, in 1982, the Simon Wiesenthal Center delivered to the public a massive case detailing Abs’s crimes—among them the looting of the Third Reich’s riches on behalf of Nazis fleeing to South America—Abs, not long retired from his spot at the helm of the Deutsche Bank, must have felt a sense of annoyed déjà vu. Would the world condemn his financial machinations for the glory of the Reich? Then it must also reject those on behalf of capitalism’s easternmost bulwark in Europe, America’s most crucial ally in the Cold War, the Federal Republic of Germany: a nation in which the past became the crass obsession of “materialists,” those who preferred brute “memory” to more modern, more spiritual affairs.

“H
UMILITY BEGETS POWER
,” Congressman Clyde Doyle of California preached at a prayer meeting convened by Abram to consider the problem of “reconciliation” as V-Day approached. Let us take the gentleman from California at his word. Let us suppose that the politicians Abram gathered to dedicate themselves to the “suffering” of the German people—men such as Senator Alexander Wiley, the Wisconsin Republican who’d declare even Kennan’s muscular manifesto “panty-waist diplomacy”; Senator Homer Capehart, the Indianan who became the most vocal defender of former fascist “rights” after the war; Representative Walter Judd, the ex-missionary from Minnesota; and Representative O. K. Armstrong, a jolly Missourian who thrilled to the sound of Bavarian oompah bands—were true believers, humble and powerful and eager to be of service for their suffering brethren.
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Consider Capehart, a Hoosier who’d invented the mass-production jukebox. “The embodiment of Senator Snort with his vast paunch and triple chin, a large cigar fixed permanently in his round face, Senator Homer Earl Capehart was a cartoonist’s dream,” the
South Bend Tribune
would later eulogize him. Capehart was no Nazi; he was a Christian, a spiritual warrior, a red hunter, a vice president of Abram’s organization, and a member of the Committee on Foreign Relations. Like Abram, Capehart only wanted to soothe the heartache of the most broken.
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“The first issue” of the postwar situation, Capehart declared in a 1946 broadside against an unspecified “vicious clique” within the Truman administration, “has been and continues to be purely humanitarian.” Capehart spoke of the “tragedy in Germany”—the rubble of Berlin, the empty stomachs of Hamburg—with such pathos that one might be forgiven for mistaking which side he had been on. Subsequent generations of neo-Nazis have done just that, endlessly recycling his speeches. “Those who have been responsible for this deliberate destruction of the German state”—he meant not the policies of the Reich itself but Morgenthau’s short-lived plan to “pastoralize” the fatherland into a second infancy—“and this criminal mass starvation of the German people have been so zealous in their hatred that all other interests and concerns have been subordinated to this one obsession of revenge.”
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To Frankfurt and Berlin, Senator Snort and Abram and the Fellowship of the Senate dining room sent new suits, so that the Germans could dust themselves off and emerge from the rubble clothed like gentlemen, and overcoats to protect them from the chill of a nation that burned what was left of its furniture to stay warm. What do you need? Abram asked Fricke, promising to take up any matter in the Senate dining room. “Though I hardly like to say it aloud,” Fricke wrote back, “shoes.” So Abram gathered donations and sent shoes.

And he arranged passports, so that restricted Germans could travel out of their country. In August 1947, he convened at Lake Geneva a council of nations to befriend the Germans, forgiving Frenchmen and Dutchmen and Czechs and Poles and Britons and a delegation of Americans led by Senator Wiley, a member of the Foreign Relations Committee. “Choose two or three promising leaders,” Abram had advised Fricke for the German contingent. The Swiss minister of finance would send the invitations, which the Germans should then take to a certain American in the occupation government, who would see to their arrangements for leaving Germany. At the head of the table Abram placed Alfred Hirs, director general of the Bank of Switzerland and a key figure in Abram’s European calculations. Hirs had credentials. His wife was a Bible teacher in Zurich, and his home was a destination for traveling missionaries. The year previous he himself had sought out Abram. A Youth for Christ missionary would recall meeting Hirs at a “Christian businessmen’s” convention in Washington in 1946, at which Hirs had apparently complained of the tepid temperature of the religiosity on display. Someone steered Hirs to the Christian Embassy, where he found Abram and presumably prayers of a more satisfying fervor.

Hirs was a man in need of consolation. He had come to Washington not to bask in American Christendom’s good feelings but to fight over the spoils of war, and it seemed, then, that he was losing. The Americans were demanding that he reveal the secrets of Swiss banking, and worse, that deposits be returned, not to Nazi depositors—suicides, Argentine exiles, men who would not ask for their money—but to Jews.

“Do you want to take 500 million Swiss francs of gold and ruin my bank?” he screamed at representatives of Morgenthau’s Treasury Department. This sum—500 million Swiss francs in Hirs’s bank alone, 1.25 billion dollars, money to be fought over for the rest of the century—no one in Washington had imagined that Hitler had extracted such a rich vein from the bank accounts, jewel boxes, the jaws of Europe’s Jews.

Back in Zurich, Hirs found more understanding friends. Nathaniel Leverone, the vending-machine king of America, reported on what he learned in Zurich to American bankers and the National Association of Manufacturers. The German guests spoke on the need for solidarity among men of free enterprise if the dollar was to stand as a bulwark against Stalin’s tanks. Christ or communism was the choice they offered Leverone. By Christ, the German contingent meant to imply themselves.

And then there was Senator Wiley, a good friend for a man like Hirs to have. A Republican from Wisconsin, he was a pleasingly round-faced man of sixty-three years, dapper in a tux, and skilled in the use of a hawkish eye and a sly smile. He was, more than anything else, an opportunist: an isolationist before the war when indignant cries of dictatorship—FDR’s, not Hitler’s—could raise a man in the Republican Party, but an internationalist after it, when fighting communism won more votes than keeping our boys safe at home. He enjoyed a pulpit, and he didn’t much care what faith it belonged to. “The Jews and the Arabs,” he once declared, “should settle their dispute in the spirit of Christian charity.” Such a faith had no trouble absorbing Hirs and the Germans, since Wiley was a deep believer in the moral relativism of anticommunism. During the war, he had been an advocate of the Jewish cause, calling for a Jewish “foreign legion” of exiles and Palestinian Jews. Afterward, Jewish gold was of no concern when weighted against the strength of the Red Army. That threat, real and imagined, drove Wiley to distraction. The Russians would rape the womanhood of Europa. In Korea Mao’s Chinese would swarm like ants. In the union halls of Milwaukee honest Americans would turn like werewolves into godless monsters. Everywhere, he thought, communism was about to bubble out of its cauldron. He didn’t want to just put a lid on it; he wanted to blow up the kitchen.