The Family (22 page)

That had already been tried. Europe in 1947, the year of its coldest winter in decades, remained a rubble of roofless buildings and bridges into thin air. “At night,” one German American returnee wrote in his journal, “you see ever so often the dim sky
through
the walls of a building: the filigree of chaos. Then it seems beautiful in a weird way and you forget that houses are good only when they protect people from rain and cold.”
³⁹
That thin line of indigo was a stronger barrier to hostilities than the “iron curtain” Winston Churchill had warned of.

Senator Wiley wanted total war. Take the men of Hitler’s old panzer divisions, bless ’em under Christ, and point ’em toward Moscow. Abram’s German point man, Otto Fricke, wasn’t so bloodthirsty; he merely wanted twenty-five rearmed German divisions to slow the Russian invasion he saw coming. “What Do We Christians Think of Re-Armament?” was the theme of one of Fricke’s cell meetings in 1950. They were conflicted, tempted to take “malicious joy that the ‘Allies’ are now forced to empty with spoons the bitter soup that has been served by the Russians.” The judgments at Nuremberg had dishonored the Wermacht, and the dismantling had insulted and robbed Germany’s great industrialists, Krupp and Weizäcker and Bosch—all well represented in Fricke’s cells. By all rights they should stand down, refuse to rearm, let the Americans defend Christendom from the Slavs. But there it was: Christendom. They were Christian men, chosen not by a nation but by Jesus himself to lead their people into the “Order” God revealed to them in their prayers. “To accomplish these tasks,” the Frankfurt cell concluded, “the state needs power and this powerfulness is indispensable for the sake of love.”
⁴⁰

But the Russian blitzkrieg wasn’t actually coming. The Soviet Union quickly realized its interests were best served in Western Europe by parliamentary democracies, in which communists untainted by collaboration could seize power without a shot fired. Or so Stalin thought. Across the continent in those cold, hungry days, middle- and upper-class conservatives regained the power they’d lost to the fascist rabble. They were not, however, militarists, at least not of the operatic breed. The Germans did rearm under Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the most pious politician in all of Europe, but much more than militarization, Germany threw itself into
making
the tools of Cold War. It was the nonpolitics of Krupp and Hirs, quiet men who knew how to hold on to money not properly theirs, that conquered Western Europe as Hitler never had.

“I am modernizing my factory,” Baron Ulrich von Gienanth, Zapp’s old Gestapo colleague, boasted to one of Abram’s aides in 1952.
⁴¹
He had 800 workers in his employ, he went on, men organized according to Christian principles. And he was opening a new factory in Switzerland. His ICL brother-in-Christ, Baron von der Ropp, a “prophet” according to Abram, provided men such as von Gienanth with a new Christian management theory. Von der Ropp, before the war a Prussian propagandist for a “greater” Germany, was a Christian nationalist who had resented Hitler’s cult of personality—a vulgar parody, he thought, of the Christian destiny for Germany proclaimed by Martin Luther. In a stroke of luck, he had been banned from public speaking just before the war’s end, and on that thin moral basis reinvented himself, like Gedat, as an instructor of boys.
⁴²

Von der Ropp specialized in young working-class men, or “the Stirred,” as he referred to those distracted by “social problems” from the masculine model of Jesus. On one hand, von der Ropp’s religion was straightforward American fundamentalism, remarkable only for the thoroughness with which he transplanted it to German soil. But he also anticipated the middle-class fundamentalism of the American future, the point at which Abram’s upper-class religion and the popular front would converge. A geologist by training, he preached that “too much science” would lead to “intellectual shallowness,” a foreshadowing of the claims of today’s fundamentalism, intellectually critical and anti-intellectual at the same time. He taught that the poor, with their demands for government services—which he understood as a failure to trust that God would provide—were “the adversaries of the church.” But not through their own doing; rather, absent some modicum of prosperity, they were too bitter to properly appreciate Christ’s providence. This, in essence, was the faith that would thrive in future decades, when both the cell group and the megachurch became staples of evangelicalism, the microscope and the telescope of American fundamentalism. It certainly did not take hold in Germany; but it evidently made an impression on Abram.

Perhaps, too, on von der Ropp’s fellow aristocrat, Baron von Gienanth. The two would have met often at Abram’s private conventions of Germans and Americans. The difference was that von der Ropp, never a Nazi official, could travel and spread his ideas at Abram’s international meetings. Von Gienanth was bound to the Fatherland. This, he complained to Abram, was an impediment to reconstruction. He’d wanted to attend a conference in Atlantic City with further ideas of expansion in mind. Would the American military really say that a man of his stature would blemish the boardwalk? He was on a list of undesirables, he had learned from certain connections—probably ICL men within the occupation. This would be “understandable,” he thought, if he had been a communist. “But I don’t see any sense in including people of my attitude”—ex-fascists ready to make common cause with the United States.

Among the many testimonies von Gienanth collected on his own behalf was a letter from an American diplomat’s wife who insisted the baron had not been a Nazi so much as an “idealist.” Eventually, von Gienanth had believed, “the good and conservative element of the German people would gain control.” Fascism had been like strong medicine, unpleasant but necessary to what von Gienanth had always believed would be the reestablishment of rule by elites like himself. “In the coming years of reconstruction,” his advocate wrote, “such men will be needed who can be trusted.”
⁴³

Abram contacted the Combined Travel Board that decided on which former Nazis could be allowed to leave the country. The baron was needed, Abram insisted. There were high Christian councils to be held in The Hague. “Expedite the necessary permit.”

Should that argument prove inadequate, Abram hired von Gienanth’s wife, Karein, as a hostess on call for Americans traveling on Christian missions. She was an American citizen, though she’d spent the war with her SS officer husband. Now her American passport was being threatened. Abram saved it. That summer, he sent the baron and his wife a gift of sorts: a congressman from California, to be a guest on the baron’s estate. The following winter Senator Frank Carlson visited. “As you know,” Abram advised Karein, “he is one of the closest friends and advisors to Eisenhower.”

A “serene confidence has filled me,” she replied, “as to President Eisenhower’s guidance by God.” That summer, her husband flew with her to England, his passport evidently restored.

T
HE
C
ASTLE OF
the Teutonic Order sits on the eastern edge of a small island in Lake Constance, a Bavarian gem at the intersection of Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. Shaped like a fish, the waters are emerald, sapphire, and amber, depending on the time of day. The island itself, called Mainau, is even more dazzling, the “island of flowers,” a botanical garden formed according to the whimsy of the Swedish princes who have lived within this fortress for generations. Since the nineteenth century they have been collecting blossoms and butterflies for their retreat, and, most of all, trees, giant redwoods and cedars from Lebanon and palms, more palm trees, surely, than in all the rest of Germany combined, gathered from around the globe.

The crest emblazoned on the castle is a bristle of swords and spears and gray flags that resembles a charging, heavy-tusked bull elephant with a purple crown between his great ears. But the castle itself, raised in 1746 on the ruins of older castles, celebrated as an ideal of the architectural style known as Southern Bavarian baroque, looks like a giant cake made of pale orange sorbet. Its walls are smooth and creamy, its windows like the ornamentation of sugar cookies. “You would have liked the surroundings,” Abram’s chief representative in Europe, Wallace Haines, wrote him in June 1951. Haines had just presided over an international meeting which Abram’s health had prevented him from attending. Mainau, he gushed, was a “fairy island,” and the conference, judging by his letter alone, might have been something out of a fairy tale: flowers sculpted into the shapes of strange creatures, great candle-lit halls, “divine services” in the chapel, ornate and glittering as a Faberge egg’s interior.
⁴⁴

The first meeting at Castle Mainau had taken place in 1949, the same year the Allies allowed Germans to begin governing themselves again. The 1951 meeting was planned to mark what Abram considered the complete moral rehabilitation—in just two years—of Germany. Abram wanted the Americans to go to them, a grand contingent of senators and representatives. Gedat, now the unofficial leader of the German organization, was thrilled. But when word came that official duties in Paris prevented the American delegation from attending, he was furious. There was more bad news. Chancellor Adenauer, Gedat’s keynote speaker, was called away to a crisis. And Abram himself, slowed down by more bad health, would not be there. His representatives could take notes.
⁴⁵

“For our God is a consuming fire”—Hebrews 12:29—was the conference’s theme. What did this mean? “God is the God of power,” said one of the first speakers. God is
not
the God of ethics, of morality; God is great, God made this order and chose its leaders. Prince Gottfried Hohenlohe opened the meeting on a Thursday evening. “God gave me my place in the world,” he told 150 assembled worthies, a statement not of pride, in his mind, but of humility, a modesty shared by his audience, men and women now trained for several years, through weekly cell meetings, in Abram’s religion of key men and destiny.

General Speidel was there, as was Rohrbach the propagandist: There were representatives from the major German banks and from Krupp and Bosch, and there was the president of Standard Oil’s German division. There was at least one German cabinet member, parliamentarians, mayors, a dozen or more judges. A U-boat commander, famed for torpedoing ships off the coast of Virginia, cut a dashing figure. A gaggle of aristocrats, minor princes and princesses, barons and counts and margraves, were intimidated by some of the best minds of the old regime. There was the financial genius Hermann J. Abs, and a fascist editor who had once been a comrade of the radical theorist Walter Benjamin before throwing his lot in with the Nazis.

Wallace Haines spoke for Abram. He stayed up all night before his lecture, praying for the spirit that spoke aloud to his mentor. The Americans, God told him to say, were thrilled with the “eagerness” of the Germans to forget the war. The Americans came to the Germans humbled, he told them. Haines brought proof of their newfound wisdom: a letter of repentance for the sins of denazification signed by more than thirty congressmen including Wiley and Capehart and a young Richard Nixon.

On Saturday night, Theophile Wurm, the former Lutheran bishop of Württemberg, spoke in the White Hall, a confection of gold gilt dully shining by the light of candles. First there was music, cembalo and violin, “old music,” reported one of Abram’s Germans, a former Nazi propagandist named Margarete Gärtner. Blue darkness fell on the lake, and Bishop Wurm began to speak. All felt sacred, for here was a man of deep character. He’d been an early and enthusiastic supporter of national socialism, had helped purge the German church of dissenters, had drawn up lists of the weak, the deformed, the degenerate. This, as Fricke had said, was simply as they “all” had done. But Bishop Wurm was different; Bishop Wurm did not believe in killing. Not more than necessary, anyway. This watery conviction, he thought, made him a “resister.” His identity at the end of the war, when the clock sprang back to zero in 1945,
stunde null,
the Germans called it, was his identity forever. He was the man who wrote Berlin a letter asking the Reich to spare some Jews. “Not from any predisposition for Jewry,” he’d written, “whose immense influence on cultural, economic, and political life was recognized as fatal by Christians alone, at a time when almost the entire press was philosemitic.” No, Bishop Wurm wrote, his version of truth to power, “the struggle against Jewry” was correct; but shouldn’t the Reich first try to convert them?

In the White Hall Bishop Wurm stood before a great window, the snow-covered Alps glowing purple in the dusk. A thunderstorm rolling in over the lake split the sky and boomed through the castle, setting the candles aquiver, silhouetting Wurm when lightning flashed. He spoke of the mechanization of man and the loss of faith in free enterprise, God’s delicate weavings, the idea, the promise, that God helps those who submit totally. The lightning cracked, and Frau Gärtner, Bishop Wurm, the barons and the generals and the captains of industry submitted, totally. “We are children of fear,” Prince Hohenlohe had proclaimed at the meeting’s beginning, but that night, fortified by the spirit of Wurm and electrified by lightning glaring off the lake and over the mountains, their bellies full of warm stories and good wishes from around the world, the children of fear felt like children of God, and for this fine sensation, wrote Frau Gärtner and Wallace Haines and Gedat, they sent their thanks to Abram.

F
OR YEARS
, M
ANFRED
Zapp had been Abram’s harshest correspondent, constantly warning that the “man on the street” with whom he seemed to spend a great deal of time had had enough of America’s empty promises. America had committed “mental cruelty,” he charged, holding “so-called war criminals” in red coats—the uniforms of the Landsberg Prison—awaiting execution indefinitely.