The Secret Agent (6 page)

The plan was simple but cunning. It would rely not on the fluctuations of German industrial strategy or the political machinations going on in Berlin, but on something more ancient and durable: greed. Erickson had come to see many of his German contacts not as ideologues, but as normal businessmen chasing money and power. “I found out that they were interested in what was in it for them.” In that way, it was a counterpart to Erickson's earlier brainstorm about Nazi wives.

The scheme was built around a business deal. Erickson would go the German legation in Stockholm and make them an offer. Since German oil plants were being bombed, why not build a huge new refinery in Sweden? (What he didn't mention, of course, was that the plants were being attacked because he'd given Bomber Command the coordinates.) He would make the arrangements, grease the wheels with the Swedish government and even get a syndicate of local businessmen to help finance the $5 million project. Germany would ship the crude oil to Sweden through pipelines; Erickson's factory would then refine it and ship high-octane gasoline back to Germany to fill the panzer tanks and Mercedes trucks. The Allies would never bomb a factory located in neutral Sweden.

Erickson prepared a prospectus for the refinery, detailing who would pay for the factory, where the technical equipment would come from and how the profits would be split. He forged a series of memoranda and minutes from meetings that had never happened, detailing how the deal had been hashed out, down to the questions and objections of the imaginary Swedish investors. Then he drew up the final document: an agreement to build the Nazi refinery, signed by several vice-presidents of the Swedish national bank, as well as some of the richest and most influential industrialists in the country. The OSS vetted the names, making sure none of the businessmen had made any anti-Nazi statements that would cast doubt on their role in the deal. The document was a sham, but it was necessary to convince Himmler the project had been green-lighted in Stockholm.

The agreement was the product of everything Erickson had learned over thirty years in the oil business. It could have fooled John D. Rockefeller. But there was a problem. No industrialist or banker in his right mind would sign on to such a deal; in fact, Erickson didn't even bother asking them. Instead, he forged their signatures. He brought a copy with him and left another at the American legation for safekeeping. The imaginary deal had taken two weeks to flesh out.

Erickson arranged a meeting with his contacts at the German legation. He warned them that if the deal became public, “the signers would deny any and all knowledge of the plan.” This was to prevent the Germans approaching the real people whose signatures were on the papers, in an attempt to confirm the plan's details.

At first, the reaction was frosty. “Some members of the legation thought the proposition was the work of some fool.” But Erickson by now knew a great many SS officers in Berlin and they were the actual targets of the scheme. To lure them in, he'd built in an unusual feature: Himmler and his top officers would hold a stake in the refinery. Not only would they get access to an unbombable oil plant, they'd actually own a part of the business. “It meant that Nazi party would have a certain amount of capital in their account,” Erickson said, “if something went wrong in Germany.”

At one point in the negotiations, Erickson was called away to the phone. The voice on the other end told him to pick up a copy of
Trots Allt
, one of the leading leftist newspapers in Stockholm. Puzzled and a bit anxious, Erickson excused himself from the meeting and rushed out to find a newsstand. When he picked up a copy of the newspaper, he felt a wave of nausea. The full story of the fake deal was there on the front page. Erickson had been exposed.

The OSS tracked down the source of the story. The American legation, out of solidarity with conquered Denmark, had hired a group of young Danish refugees to work as office boys. One of them spotted the fake document and, thinking it was evidence of Swedish treachery, stole it and smuggled it to a member of the Danish underground. From there it was sent to
Trots Allt
, which promptly published a story complete with a list of the industrialists and bank officials who'd “signed” the document. Erickson's name, which was already blackened by his association with the Nazis, was now whispered with revulsion in the streets of Stockholm. Not only was Erickson doing business with the Third Reich, not only had he turned Prince Carl into a fascist,
he was now going to build a Nazi oil plant inside Sweden
.

The industrialists and bankers were outraged. Luckily, Erickson had had the foresight to warn the Germans that this is exactly what would happen. Under tremendous pressure from the Swedish press, Erickson flew to Berlin to sell the deal, now hanging by a thread.

After checking into the Hotel Eden, Erickson took a taxi to 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse. The building still filled him with dread, its reputation as the last station for spies and saboteurs still fresh in his mind. He was escorted to Himmler's office and greeted the Gestapo chief like a long-lost friend. After snapping out a crisp “Heil Hitler,” he launched into his pitch, detailing the secret Swedish agreement to build the plant. He presented Himmler with a full-color poster he'd had printed up for the trip. It showed tankers traveling the waters between Sweden and Germany, filled with oil and gas for the war effort. Underneath the illustration was the deal's slogan, worthy of Madison Avenue: “Meeting Halfway.”

The poster revealed the deal's psychological strategy. The OSS believed the Germans would see the Sweden deal as a propaganda win for their side. Building a new refinery in a neutral country would show that the Reich was doing business as usual, expanding its industrial footprint into the Nordic region, thinking ahead. It would imply that the
Germans were still confident they would win the war. In mid-1944, the Allies were unaware of the delusional nature of Hitler's leadership. (Hitler by then had banned nearly all negative military reports from his underlings.) Purely by accident, the plan aligned with the psychological atmosphere inside Germany's ruling clique.

Himmler smiled and studied the poster, while Erickson chatted with the Reichsführer about one of his obsessions: horses. Erickson had learned through his sources that Himmler wanted to breed steppe-horses that would eventually replace cars as a means of transport. It was a mad fantasy, part of the Nazis' utopian vision for postwar Europe. But Erickson flattered him anyway.

Himmler, his head bent over the poster, nodded. “You know, Erickson,” he said. “You Swedes are the archetype of the Nordic race. It's people like you that I want to be working with.”

Erickson thanked him. But if Sweden were the true home of the Aryan race, why not build a factory there? Himmler took the bait. He suggested the American meet with German engineers to talk plant design. To Himmler's surprise, Erickson declined. He told the Gestapo chief that in order to pull off the deal, he needed to travel to the best oil facilities in Germany and see what the country's real needs were. Only then could he build the right kind of factory.

Himmler nodded, then called over one of his assistants and gave orders that Erickson would be permitted to travel—and here he emphasized—“alone.” The assistant quickly typed up a document and handed it to the American. It was a pass that allowed the bearer to travel throughout the Third Reich and inspect any factory or plant. The Nazis would even provide a car, driver and fuel coupons. Erickson looked at the paper in astonishment:

The Chief of the Security Police and the SD, Certificate:

“Herr Eric Siegfried Erickson is traveling to undertake urgent business conferences in the interests of t
he Reich. … Herr Erickson is well known to us. Secret police security regulations in regards to restricted areas are to be waived on his behalf.”

This was the moment Erickson had been working toward for years. He could hardly believe his luck. “It guaranteed that I was above suspicion.”

Soon after getting his all-Germany pass, Erickson made a research trip to the capital and stayed, as usual, at the Hotel Eden. The trip was another plant-finding mission and, though the usual dangers existed, the American saw no cause for alarm. His driver picked him up at the hotel, as he always did, and began navigating Berlin's crowded streets. After a few minutes, Erickson looked out the window and realized that, instead of taking him to a factory outside the capital, the driver was heading toward the inner city. Erickson stared in confusion at the unfamiliar landmarks.

The car pulled up to the gate of an enormous brick building. It was surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence with guard towers at each corner. Erickson's heart raced.

Moabit prison.

“It's over,” he thought. “They know who I am.”

Erickson escorted inside the prison, a huge complex that housed as many as 3,000 prisoners at any one time. “I was ushered into a large conference room which faced the prison courtyard,” he remembered. His escort left him alone, and closed the door. Through a window, the spy could see out into the courtyard. He spotted a gallows in the center, empty nooses dangling down. For the second time on his mission, Erickson prepared himself for death. “I was left alone for six or seven minutes, but in that time practically everything that I had done in my life passed before my eyes.”

Soon his escort reappeared and led him from the conference room and down into the courtyard. Erickson was surprised to find about forty other people sitting there on benches, facing the gallows. The scene struck Erickson, despite his rising anxiety, as bizarre. It was as if he had been invited to a theater to watch a play.

He took his seat. A group of men appeared. They marched, under guard, from their cells. Erickson studied the faces of the prisoners as they shuffled in, dressed in drab prison uniforms. He took a deep breath, and exhaled. There was no one he knew.

Then a second batch of inmates, including some women, entered. With an electric shock, Erickson spotted a familiar figure. The chestnut-brown hair. The thin, elegant neck. It was Anne-Maria.

She looked at Erickson, then quickly turned away. She took her place in line and was marched with the others up the gallows steps.

“It's hard to portray what goes on in the mind of one who is about to witness the execution of a person so near,” Erickson said, of the experience. “It was agony.”

Erickson watched in shock. “It was horrible. I couldn't show any sentiments or how sad I was.” Even as his mind whirled, he couldn't help thinking that Anne-Maria had confessed his part in the OSS mission. “I felt certain she'd given me away. I didn't know if I was next.”

An SS officer dropped the rope over Anne-Maria's head and pulled it tight around her neck. Erickson wanted desperately to look away, but there were SS officers walking up and down the aisles, studying the audience's reaction. “I felt they were testing me, using the execution as a means to make me confess about the operation.” An officer approached the set of portable steps under Anne-Maria feet—there was no trap door—bent down, and jerked it away.

Erickson watched as his lover's body swung on the end of the rope, struggled for a few moments, and went still. Convinced this was a macabre SS trick, he remained stoic. His escort then took him out of the courtyard and drove him back to the hotel.

Erickson went to his room and locked the door behind him. He was chilled, deeply anxious.
What was the meaning of making me watch that? What do they have on me?
The Gestapo wasn't prone to idle theatrics. They'd brought Erickson to the prison for a reason; he just couldn't figure out what it was. The spy quickly packed up his things, called a taxi and headed to the airport. Another shock awaited him there: after studying his papers, German security agents told him that he couldn't leave Germany.

This had never happened to him before. It was clear the SS wanted to keep him in the country, either to study his reactions to the execution or to finalize the arrangements for his arrest.

After a few days, Erickson was allowed to leave Berlin. He flew back to Stockholm emotionally exhausted. He couldn't ignore the obvious: he was under suspicion. There was no other explanation for the invitation to Moabit. But this realization came at a crucial time: the bombing of the oil facilities was finally being ramped up and Erickson was the only spy in the Allied program that could produce the needed target lists. He felt an obligation—to himself, to family, and to his native country—to see his commitment to the end, no matter his status with the Gestapo.

“Hitler was a lunatic,” he wrote. “I wanted to crush him.” In the weeks after the execution, images of Anne-Maria would flash into Erickson's mind, unbidden. At times, he felt responsible for her death. At others, he felt sure he would follow her to the gallows.

With his new pass, Erickson began traveling all over central Europe, from the western German border to Prague. It was around this time that he was caught in the Mercedes factory in Stuttgart, as the Americans bombed it. Erickson barely escaped. Despite the near miss, he was gathering huge amounts of classified information on plant locations and capacities, manufacturing sites, anti-aircraft batteries, even the effectiveness of previous bombing runs.

One day Erickson was invited to Carinhall, Hermann Göring's hunting estate northeast of Berlin. Carinhall was a secluded, wooded expanse where the Luftwaffe chief could relax and indulge himself as the “State Forestry and Hunting Master of Germany.” The architect, Werner Marsh, the same man who designed Berlin's Olympic Stadium for Hitler, installed a small but luxurious hunting lodge on the estate, which was enlarged when Carinhall became Göring's official summer state residence. The new wings included a bowling alley, a movie theater, a room for the master's hunting trophies, a beer pub and a room dedicated to Göring's beloved model train, which was 321 feet long and complete with miniature airfields and German fighters. Nearby was an immaculate tennis court, a shooting range, housing for Göring's doctor, security and thirteen firemen who watched over the property, as well as a mausoleum for his first wife, a Swedish divorcee.

When Erickson arrived at Carinhall, one of Göring's chief adjutants invited him on a long drive. “Arrangements were made for the trip—to where I did not know.” They drove for hours until finally they wound up at Dachau, a concentration camp in Upper Bavaria, near Munich. Erickson had heard people “whispering about such places,” but this was his first confirmation that the camps were real.

Dachau was an enormous, stinking, typhus-ridden work camp and death factory surrounded by an electrified barbed fence. Perhaps 30,000 prisoners were shot, beaten, tortured, worked to death and cremated inside its ovens during the years 1933-1945. Among its 69 barracks, there was a “Priest Block” that housed ministers who'd defied Hitler and another that housed the victims of medical experiments. Every morning new bodies for burning in the ovens were stacked outside. Dachau became the model for every concentration camp in the Reich, and the Germans showed it off with pride.

Erickson was ushered through the munitions factory, a museum exhibiting plaster casts of prisoners' deformities, the canteen and the library. It's doubtful he saw the crematoria and the five gas chambers on this trip, but on the drive back to Göring's estate, Erickson brooded over the brutality of the “model camp,” the contrast between the slave camp and the splendors of Carninhall. “To say that I was dumbfounded was putting it mildly. [Dachau] was full of awful impressions that I lack the words to describe.”

As soon as he arrived back, Erickson protested to Göring about the brutality he'd witnessed. Göring exploded, yelling so loudly “that one could have heard his voice in Berlin.”

“They're lying!” the Luftwaffe chief cried. “That cannot be true. I know nothing of it. Get out!” Then: “What were you doing there anyway?” It was clear to Erickson that Göring knew what was happening at Dachau. The American left the lodge and returned to Berlin.

If Erickson had entered the war by a side entrance—brought in because of a family dispute—the death of Anne-Maria and the tour of Dachau brought him close to its core realities. Anne-Maria forced him to grieve for a victim he'd come to love, a single death in the midst of a huge war. And Dachau opened his eyes to the Nazi's agenda in its full industrial scale. After experiencing both, to think he'd once contributed to the cause must have been like bitter ashes in Erickson's mouth.

The American returned to the hunt. After one seven-day trip, he produced a list of 16 different targets, both oil and manufacturing sites. From a 1944 report:

Annedorf
: rebuilt as a synthetic plant after the demolishing of the Leuna plant at Halle. The plant does not lie exactly at the Annedorf station but it is about 15 km north of Merseburg quite close to the railroad on the route Halle-Annedorf. The plant is on the left side of the railroad, and is gigantic … They are installing smoke-screen devices, very small and look about as follows [Erickson included a sketch of the devices].

Bruks
:
outside of Prague. Plant is producing about 150,000 tons. Is intact. Bombing poor.

Lütskendorf
:
The only really big plant for gas and oil – built during the war. Very badly damaged. Finished products destroyed. Only about 20 percent of plant now in operation. Does not pay to rebuild.

Köln
:
New Robot base 25km NE of city on the property belonging to Brockhause. [The “robot” was the V-1 unmanned rocket that terrified London]

Sigmaringen
:
Home of the Vichy government. Laval and Petain both alive in the castle of Count Hohenzollern (who is imprisoned under suspicion that he has something to do with the 20th of July plot. Laval has his office in a schoolhouse quite close by. Happened incidentally to see him. The Vichy government is training and equipping a French army there.)

The flights to destroy these plants were among the most dangerous assignments any enlisted man could get in World War II. Bombardiers tried to attain their targets as flak burst around them and the sky turned a greasy black from German smoke pots and exploding oil tanks below. Accuracy was low: attacks on the mammoth synthetic plant at Leuna hit their target only 5.1 percent of the time when guided in by radar. Tactical mistakes compounded the problems: American strategists convinced the Air Force generals that larger payloads of smaller, 300-pound bombs were more effective than the huge 2,000 to 4,000 pound high-explosives that the British favored. They were later proven wrong. The error meant that American crews had to repeatedly bomb the same refineries again and again to knock them out of production.

The Luftwaffe, rarely seen over France or the rest of the occupied Europe, took to the air in large numbers to protect the refineries, shooting down the American and British planes at a steady clip. Half of the Air Force's casualties, including 26,000 dead, were suffered by the Eighth Air Force, the “Mighty Eighth,” who flew most of the missions at Erickson's targets. Between June and August, 1944, the Eighth lost 1,022 heavy bombers, half of its fleet, and 665 of its fighters. An American briefing officer, after detailing a daily mission for one bomber crew, offered them this advice: “Consider yourself dead.”

Faced with the destruction of the synthetic plants, Albert Speer pulled 350,000 men from other assignments and ordered them to repair the facilities at all costs. The “successful prosecution of the war,” Speer informed his Commissioner General for Emergency Measures, pivoted on the “reconstruction of these plants.” The refinery at Leuna had a 5,000-strong team simply for fighting fires after the raids. Special oil tanks were made with concrete liners to protect them from flying shrapnel; blast walls were built around compressors and the other key components that kept the plants running. The workers in the Berlin ministries began hearing a new motto from the War Production department: “Everything for oil.”

Meanwhile, Eisenhower was becoming convinced that the attacks were weakening the still-formidable Wehrmacht. “We were most anxious to continue the destruction of German industry, with emphasis on oil,” he wrote in
Crusade in Europe
. “General Spaatz convinced me that as Germany became progressively embarrassed by her diminished oil reserves, the effect upon the land battle would be most profound and the eventual winning of the war would be correspondingly hastened.”

In the industrial heartland of the Ruhr, Erickson guided 1600 planes to the benzol plants which produced the fuel for the terrifying V-1 and V-2 rockets, obliterating them. By 1944, the facilities at Leuna had been bombed “at least 25 times with thousands of bombs” and were “a total wreck.” Erickson began hearing from his contacts in Germany about the onslaught. “The Americans and the British know more about the oil plants than I can believe,” one told him. Another admitted that “the precision of the bombing is one of the most remarkable things that the German army has witnessed.”

While visiting one plant, Erickson learned that Joseph Goebbels had recently visited to cheer up the workers, depressed by the constant bombardment. The American made note of which buildings had survived and what they contained; he touched compressors and other machinery melted by the heat of the fires; he watched as the Slavs and doomed Jews worked feverishly to repair the plant. One manager of a refinery pulled Erickson aside and complained, “The damage… is unbelievable.” The ripples from the bombing spread outward through the industries that needed oil to make their products: chemicals, rubber, munitions. The same hydrogenation plants that were turning coal into fuel were also producing the compounds – synthetic methanol, synthetic ammonia and nitric acid—used in high-explosive bombs.

The destruction inevitably changed the Nazis' strategy for the war. In early, 1944, the German High Command, along with most of Europe, suspected the Allies were planning an invasion of Europe later that year. To stop it, Göring had always envisioned waves of Luftwaffe fighters attacking the enemy battalions in the days and weeks after the amphibious landing. As rumors of an impending D-Day swept Europe in the spring and summer of 1944, he contemplated transferring some of his planes to Calais and the coast of France. But after a great deal of thought, Göring decided against it. “No such transfer was possible,” wrote the historian Chester Wilmot, “because … the American offensive against the synthetic oil plants … made it imperative to concentrate the greatest possible strength for their defense.” In fact, the planes were flowing in the opposite direction. In late May, just weeks before the Normandy invasion, Göring was forced to pull six of his best fighting squadrons from Air Fleet III, stationed in France, and fly them back to Germany.

The U.S. Eighth Air Force bombed the targets relentlessly. By the end of 1944, only three of Germany's 99 refineries were producing oil, largely due to the work of Eric Erickson and the crews of the B-17s and Liberators. On June 30th, only weeks after D-Day, Hitler received an urgent message.

My Führer:

If we do not succeed in protecting the synthetic plants and refineries better than in the past, an unbridgeable gap will appear in the fuel supply … By September it will no longer be possible to cover the most urgent necessary supplies for the Wehrmacht.

Heil Hitler.

Signed,

Albert Speer

(Reichsminister of Armaments and War Production)

Hitler had one last attack planned: a surprise battle he believed would turn the war's momentum towards Germany. When the Battle of the Bulge erupted on December 16, 1944, the Allies were caught unawares. The German forces pushed the Allies back in a dangerous thrust that snapped the front lines in key sectors. But, as the American G.I.'s dug in and fought back, it became clear that the Führer had miscalculated. He couldn't get sufficient numbers of his reserve troops to the front. “They could not be moved,” one German commander complained after the war. “They were at a standstill for lack of petrol—stranded over a stretch of a hundred miles—just when they were needed.” Even Winston Churchill, ensconced in the cave-like War Rooms underneath Parliament, could see the effects that the raids were having. “Oil production and reserves dropped drastically, affecting not only the mobility of their troops, but also the activities and even the training of their air forces … At long last our great bombing offensive was reaping its reward.”

In 1944, Albert Speer engineered nothing less than a miracle: production of tanks and airplanes peaked in the early and middle parts of the year, an astounding feat considering the bombardment that the Reich's factories were undergoing. But, at the same time, Germany's fighting capacity was actually declining. At the Battle of the Rhine, a new speed limit of 17 mph for German military vehicles was imposed to save gas; oxen were used to pull tanks up to the front lines. “[Soldiers] were abandoning their tanks and motor vehicles all over France,” a U.S. Army report concluded, “fleeing on foot, rescuing what equipment they could with horses, or surrendering in droves.” A lack of aviation fuel caused the Luftwaffe to become largely irrelevant outside of Germany by the middle of 1944, leaving them unable to attack the thousands of troops coming across the beaches of Omaha and Utah. Because of a lack of aviation fuel, the skies over Europe belonged to the Americans and the British. Their Mustangs and Spitfires flew over the occupied territories, hammering German emplacements, destroying bridges, blowing up supply trains and attacking troop transports.

Huge numbers of German troops were surrendering every month because of a lack of oil. In the Ruhr industrial valley alone, 325,000 German troops waved the white flag. In February, 1945, German production of aviation fuel totaled just 1000 tons, one half of one percent of what it was the year before. Hitler had championed the idea of mechanized war years before and it had given him victory after victory on the continent of Europe. But as the Allies drove toward Berlin, that very concept of battle demanded fuel that Germany no longer had.