The Human Pool (8 page)

FRANKFURT

To:
[email protected]

From:
[email protected]

Date:
Wed, 10 May, 18.06

Subject:
Top Nazi

I talked with Karl-Heinz Strasse and will see him again tomorrow at ten. He is nibbling, hasn't bitten. I am sure he will talk in full, but for the mo only to me as I come with the endorsement of Siegfried. Will try and film/tape him tomorrow and later, when he feels comfortable, you could come and take over.

Everything he told me sounded like a man rehearsing his story. He hinted there are already people prepared to pay a lot of money.

He remains vague about what exactly he was doing in 1942/43. This is what I have been able to work out in terms of rough chronology. He was in the SS and had cavalry connections. One of his main jobs involved buying horses, which required him to travel. He won the Iron Cross, which he showed me, on the Russian front. From what I can tell he was in Russia in 1941/42 and after that became a staff officer and possibly some sort of spy.

The point he is quite specific about is how he was recruited at the end of the war as an intelligence officer by the Americans, and later worked for the CIA, as did a lot of Nazis. On the cold war his memory is date accurate. Anything before 1945, he'll fudge and change the subject while dropping enough hints to suggest he would go on record if a deal were done.

Strasse is also hanging around with the guy who recruited him into U.S. intelligence in 1945. I'm not sure what he is doing in Frankfurt. Says he's on holiday.

Strasse travelled to Switzerland a lot during the war. He showed me pictures taken there of him with the spook just mentioned. His name is Hoover and my guess is he too would have a tale to tell.

There's a third man in the Swiss photo, and Strasse is currently very exercised about him. Name of Willi Schmidt. Whatever they were all up to in the war, the three were pretty tight. Schmidt died in 1945—Hoover says he was there when it happened—except now Strasse is claiming Schmidt is alive and calling himself Konrad Viessmann. Interesting mystery.

Strasse's photo album is varied and includes a questionable range of contrasts. Peasants in some flat place (Byelorussia, who knows?). Strasse in SS uniform and death's head cap, possibly compromised by the train trucks in background. Lots of equestrian stuff which backs up the horse-buying story. Lederhosen: alpine R&R. After the war there are pictures of him in Cairo. The CIA guy Hoover is there too in a picture which Strasse says shouldn't have been taken. (They're out in the desert somewhere.) There are also photos of Strasse with a Muslim leader I'd never heard of, who was pro-Hitler during the war and living in Berlin, and afterwards went to Egypt. In Berlin this leader was looked after by the SS, hence pix of him with Strasse, I presume. What I didn't know was that the SS ran a Muslim division. (I knew they had Ukrainian volunteers.) I was confused by the racial implications until Strasse made the connections: Hitler didn't much like Arabs, but Himmler was an admirer of the Muslim warrior—i.e., ganging up against the Jews and the British. There are also photos of Strasse with Roman Catholic Croatian churchmen. At some point during the war he was in Budapest because there are pictures of the city. He didn't say what he was doing there. Strasse is an infuriating mixture of secretive and indiscreet. He seems to have been in contact with everyone.

Strasse is very excited about something that's happening. This may be an old man's fantasy but towards the end of the meeting he was hinting that he isn't a spent force and the foundations of an alliance put down in the war would soon pay off!

Oh yes, and the Willi Schmidt/Viessmann guy has something going with Kurds in Turkey because they burned down his chemical factory, to do with bad drugs being dumped in refugee camps.

ZURICH

THE CAB TOOK ME FROM
Frau Schmidt's, in a district showing signs of aspirations to change, up into the hills behind the university where the old money lives. Grey stone gives way to red brick, greenery and high walls, and the dead Sunday silence of Swiss discretion. It was like being back in the centre of what Fitzgerald called ‘the great Swiss watch'.

Betty Monroe's old house dates back to the early part of the last century and reveals little to the street. The house, with its quiet lawns, freshly mown in Betty's case, stand behind iron gates. A short sloping drive emphasises its grace and superiority, two qualities reflected in Beate von Heimendorf herself (milky skin, soft blue veins, blue blood pulsing through them).

Of a husband for Beate there is no sign. Just her Mercedes was parked outside. I was as tongue-tied as a teenager. I am attracted to Beate von Heimendorf, in spite of having about as much chance as any tongue-tied teenager. Less, because such impulses are considered unseemly, dirty even, in a man of my age. The attraction was intensified because she was a little breathless when she answered the door.

Her mother's papers weren't where she thought they were, in the garage, and didn't appear to be in the house, either, she said. The house was absurdly large, she went on, and they could be anywhere. We were standing in the hall. There was an expensive wooden floor, good furniture, and, through the open door to the living rooms, a view of cultured trees.

‘I hate this house,' Beate announced unexpectedly. She doesn't live there and isn't sure what to do now her mother is ill. It would feel like a betrayal to sell it, she said, while Betty remained alive. She herself keeps a small apartment in town. I asked if a husband went with it. Not really, she said. It was hard to tell if the silence that followed was an invitation to further comment. She changed the subject back to her mother's missing papers, which she was sure had been in the garage. I suggested we take another look.

Garage
was the technically correct term in that it had been designed partly for cars, but there was a whole small apartment above, once presumably the chauffeur's quarters. It was here that Beate thought the papers should have been. One wall was lined with shelves full of box files, but none contained the relevant documents.

Beate does not look the forgetful type. A cleaner comes in twice a week, she said, and there are a couple of gardeners. Either the papers have been mislaid, like she said, or they have been taken, but I had no wish to alarm her. She thought it possible that the secretary, who comes in twice a month to deal with her mother's affairs might know what had happened to them. She seemed relieved when I agreed. The explanation sounded plausible. Beate pressed her hands together. Her wrists, like her ankles, were slender and elegant. ‘However, it's not all bad news.' Inasmuch as she is capable of sounding skittish she did. ‘I have found one set of documents in Mother's desk relating to your friend Herr Schmidt.'

I followed her to her mother's study, continuing to admire her ankles as we went upstairs. The study was large and well appointed, overlooking the garden. The shelves and panelling were beech. There was a day bed for afternoon naps, or daytime lovers, and lots of framed old photographs. Beate showed me the papers, typed on a translucent and waxy paper. They looked like carbon copies. I could smell her perfume, which was light and clean. We were standing close; I felt the ache of desire. It was pathetic, I told myself. The woman was showing me her mother's papers, that was all. Our eyes met briefly and gave out confused signals. ‘Look,' she said, ‘these papers are marked
secret
. We probably shouldn't be looking at them.' She laughed and said she thought her mother was probably very indiscreet. I read a lifetime of self-imposed inhibition into that remark.

She made me a gift of the papers, or at least a copy of them. We both seemed to be aware that they were a surrogate for a different sort of transaction. The encounter felt like a botched coda to a Truffaut movie, about thirty years too late.

There was a photocopier in a room downstairs. We stood in silence for a small age listening to the humming machine warm up. I watched the sweep of the green light under the cover as it copied each page, Beate's hands pressing on the lid. ‘I suppose the fact that they are confidential papers doesn't matter now,' she said. ‘I'll look again for the rest. There were boxes of them. I can't think where they have gone.' She looked at me and smiled and asked what I planned to do with the rest of my stay. I said I wasn't sure.

‘Footloose and fancy free, as my mother used to say. That's the best way. If you come to Zurich again, be sure to look us up.'

She phoned for a taxi, and we spent the time it took to arrive standing outside. Beate showed me the garden, and we made conversation about the house. For her it had always been for grown-ups and not somewhere she had been comfortable growing up. I had the strange feeling that if we went back indoors we would see the ghost of Beate as a child. ‘Is something the matter?' she asked. The taxi arrived before I could answer. We shook hands, then she leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek. It was an impulsive gesture, rather than standard Continental politeness, of a sort that I suspect she is not often given to.

ZURICH
, 1942
SECRET MEMO TO
A
LLEN
D
ULLES