The disgruntled innkeeper shook her head as she hobbled over to a nook
next to a small dark dining room, switched on the lights, and turned on
a large red metal coffeemaker.
The dining room was small but comfortable. Several large curtainless
windows, which in the daytime probably gave diners a beautiful view of
the forest in which the auberge was nestled, were utterly black. Five
or six round tables were covered with starched white tablecloths and
already set for breakfast, with juice glasses and coffee cups and metal
trays heaped with brown sugar cubes. Peter sat down at a table for two
against the wall, near the window. Ben sat across from him. The
innkeeper, foaming a pitcher of milk in her nook, was staring at the two
of them, as people so often stared at identical twins.
Peter moved aside the plate and the silverware to make room for his
elbows. “You remember when that whole thing erupted over the Swiss
banks and Nazi gold?”
“I sure do.” So that’s what this was about.
“That was just before I moved here from Africa. I followed it pretty
closely in the newspapers there I guess I was particularly interested
because of Dad’s time in Dachau.” There was a sardonic twist to his
mouth now. “Anyway, a whole cottage industry suddenly sprang up.
Lawyers and other shysters who got the bright idea to take advantage of
elderly Holocaust survivors who were trying to track down their
families’ missing assets. I think I told you I read somewhere about an
old woman in France, a survivor of the concentration camps. Turned out
she’d been bilked of her entire life’s savings by some French scumbag
lawyer who said he had information about a dormant Swiss bank account
belonging to her father. The lawyer needed money, though, up front, to
do the investigative work, take on the Swiss bank, all that bullshit. Of
course the old lady paid an amount like twenty-five thousand dollars,
her entire savings, money she needed to live on. The lawyer vanished,
along with the twenty-five thousand. That got me worked up I couldn’t
stand hearing about a defenseless old lady being taken advantage of that
way and I contacted her, offered to look for her father’s Swiss account
for free. She was understandably suspicious, having just been ripped
off, but after we talked awhile she gave me permission to go ahead and
look. I had to convince her I had no interest in her money.”
Peter, who had been staring at the tablecloth as he spoke, now looked up
directly at Ben. “Understand, these survivors weren’t motivated by
greed. They were seeking closure, justice, a connection to their dead
parents, to the past. Money to get by on.” He turned to glance at one
of the windows. “Even as a legal representative of the old lady, I had
all kinds of trouble dealing with the Swiss bank. They said they had no
records of any such account. The usual story. These god damned Swiss
bankers it’s amazing, they’re such anal-retentive record keepers, they
keep every damned scrap of paper since time began, but now they’re
saying, Oops, they happened to lose a bank account. Uh huh, right. But
then I heard about this security guard at the bank where the lady’s
father opened his account. The guard had gotten fired because he
stumbled onto a shredding party bank employees destroying heaps of
documents from the forties in the middle of the night and he rescued a
pile of documents and ledgers from the shredder.”
“I vaguely remember that,” Ben said. The innkeeper came over with a
tray and sullenly set down a metal pitcher of espresso and another one
of steamed milk, then left the dining room.
“The Swiss authorities didn’t like that. Violation of bank privacy, all
kinds of sanctimonious bullshit. Never mind the shredding of documents.
I tracked the guy down, outside of Geneva. He’d kept all the documents,
even though the bank was trying to get them back, and he let me go
through them to see if there was any record of the father’s account.”
“And?” Ben was tracing patterns on the white tablecloth with the tines
of a fork.
“And nothing. I didn’t find anything on it. Never did, by the way. But
in one of the ledgers I found a piece of paper. Pretty eye-opening. It
was a fully executed, legally valid, notarized and certified
Griindungsvertrag-articles of incorporation.”
Ben said nothing.
“In the waning years of the Second World War, some sort of corporation
was established.”
“Some sort of Nazi thing?”
“No. There were a few Nazis involved in it, but the majority of the
principals weren’t even German. We’re talking about a board comprising
some of the most powerful industrialists of the era. We’re talking
Italy, France, Germany, England, Spain, the U.S.” Canada. Names you’ve
heard of, even you, Benno. Some of the real big shots of world
capitalism.”
Ben tried to concentrate. “You said before the end of the war, right?”
“That’s right. Early in 1945.”
“German industrialists were founders of this corporation as well?”
Peter nodded. “It was a business partnership that cut clear across
enemy lines. Does that surprise you?”
“But we were at war …”
“What do you mean ‘we,” Kemosabe? The business of America is business,
didn’t anybody tell you?” Peter leaned back, his eyes bright. “I mean,
let’s just talk about what’s on the public record. You had Standard Oil
of New Jersey basically carving up the map with I. G. Farben, figuring
out who’d get which oil and chemical monopolies, doing patent sharing,
the whole thing. For God’s sake, the entire war effort ran on juice
from Standard Oil–it wasn’t as if anyone in the military could afford
to interfere. What if the company started having ‘production problems’?
Besides, John Foster Dulles himself had been a board member of Farben.
Then there’s the Ford Motor Company. All those five-ton military trucks
that were the mainstay of German military transportation? Ford built
those. The Hollerith machines that enabled Hitler to round up
‘undesirables 1 with such incredible efficiency? All manufactured and
serviced by Big Blue, good of’ IBM–hats off to Tom Watson. Oh, then
there’s ITT– a big stakeholder in Focke-Wulf, the company that made
most of the German bombers. Want to hear something sweet? After the
war was over, it sued the U.S. government for monetary compensation,
given that Allied bombers had damaged those Focke-Wulf factories. I
could go on and on. But that’s just the stuff we know about, obviously
a tiny fraction of what really went on. None of these characters gave a
damn about Hitler. They owed their allegiance to a higher ideology:
profit. To them, the war was like a Harvard-Yale football game–a
momentary distraction from more serious matters, like the pursuit of the
almighty dollar.”
Ben shook his head slowly. “Sorry, bro’. Just listen to yourself. It
all sounds like the usual counterculture rap: property is theft, never
trust anyone over thirty–all that overheated, dated conspiracy crap.
Next you’re going to tell me they were responsible for Love Canal.” He
set his cup of coffee down sharply, and it clanked loudly against the
saucer. “Funny, there was a time when anything having to do with
business bored you stiff. I guess you really have changed.”
“I don’t expect you to take it in all at once,” Peter said. “I’m just
giving you the background. Context.”
“Then tell me something real. Something concrete.”
“There were twenty-three names on this list,” his brother said, suddenly
quiet. “For the most part, captains of industry, as they used to be
called. A few blue-blooded statesmen, back when people thought there
was such a thing. We’re talking about people who shouldn’t even have
known each other–people any historian would swear never even met. And
here they are, all linked together in some sort of business
partnership.”
“There’s a step missing,” Ben said, half to himself. “Obviously
something drew your attention to this document. Something made you pull
it out. What are you leaving out?”
Peter smiled mordantly, and the haunted look returned. “A name jumped
out at me, Ben. The name of the treasurer.”
Ben’s scalp began to prickle, as if ants were swarming over it. “Who
was it?”
“The treasurer of the corporation was a young financial whiz kid. An
Obersturtnfuhrer in Hitler’s SS, to boot. You may be familiar with the
name: Max Hartman.”
“Dad.” Ben had to remember to breathe.
“He was no Holocaust survivor, Ben. Our father was a god damned Nazi.”
CHAPTER EIGHT.
Ben closed his eyes, inhaled deeply, and shook his head. “That’s
preposterous. Jews weren’t members of the SS. The document’s obviously
a forgery.”
“Believe me,” Peter said quietly. “I’ve had plenty of time to study
this document. It’s no forgery.”
“But then …”
“In April of 1945, our father was supposedly in Dachau, remember?
Liberated by the U.S. Seventh Army at the end of April “45?”
“I don’t remember the exact timing–is that right?”