It was of course possible that the enormous disbursements to Heydrich had included money that Heydrich had quietly slipped to Himmler; that way there would be no record of Himmler’s involvement.
Three months later, however, after Himmler had neither requested money—not even mentioned it—nor asked about the status of the confidential special fund, von Deitzberg was forced to conclude that Himmler not only knew nothing about it, but that Heydrich had gone to great lengths to conceal it from the Reichsprotektor.
It was entirely possible, therefore, that Himmler would be furious if he learned now about the confidential special fund. If the puritanical Reichsprotektor learned that Heydrich had been stealing from the Reich, he would quickly conclude that von Deitzberg had been involved in the theft up to his neck.
When von Deitzberg brought up the subject to Raschner, Raschner said that as far as he himself knew, Himmler either didn’t know about the fund or didn’t want to know about it. Thus, an approach to him now might see everyone connected with it stood before a wall and shot. Or hung from a butcher’s hook with piano wire.
They had no choice, Raschner reasoned, but to go on as they had . . . but taking even greater care to make sure the ransoming operation remained secret.
No one was ever selected to replace Heydrich as Himmler’s adjutant. But Himmler gave von Deitzberg the title of “first deputy adjutant” and a week later took him to the Reichschancellery, where a beaming, cordial Adolf Hitler personally promoted him to SS-brigadeführer and warmly thanked him for his services to the SS and himself personally.
Von Deitzberg immediately arranged for Goltz to be promoted to sturmbannführer, and Raschner to hauptsturmführer. And he arranged for both to be sent to Buenos Aires. The risk of someone new coming into the Office of the Reichsprotektor and learning about the confidential special fund seemed to be over.
All of this had been going on simultaneously with Operation Phoenix.
Phoenix was of course the plan concocted by Bormann, Himmler, Ribben trop, and others at the pinnacle of the Nazi hierarchy to establish a sanctuary for senior Nazis in South America, from which they could rise phoenixlike from the ashes of the Thousand-Year Reich when the war was lost.
It had been no trouble for von Deitzberg to arrange for Standartenführer Goltz to be sent to Buenos Aires as the man in charge of Operation Phoenix. That posting conveniently placed him in a position to be the confidential special fund’s man in South America.
By then, curiously, there actually was a problem with the financial success of the fund. There was far more cash floating around than could be spent—or even invested—without questions being raised. It followed that the confidential special fund’s leadership—von Deitzberg, Goltz, and Raschner—decided that setting up their own private version of Operation Phoenix was the natural solution. After all, von Tresmarck was already in place in Montevideo; it would pose no great problem for him to make investments for the confidential special fund. He was already doing that for Operation Phoenix.
And then there were the blunders. Von Deitzberg took little pride in being able to recognize a blunder when one occurred. Or an appalling number of them.
The first had been the failed assassination attempt on the American son of el Coronel Jorge G. Frade. When it became known that Cletus Frade—who had ostensibly “come home” to Argentina—was in fact an agent of the Office of Strategic Services and whose purpose in Argentina was to turn his father against Germany, the decision had been made to kill him. His murder would send the message to the man who almost certainly was going to be the next president of Argentina that even his son could not stand up to the power and anger of the Thousand-Year Reich.
But that hadn’t worked. Young Frade, clearly not the foolish young man everyone seemed to have decided he was, killed the men sent to kill him. His outraged father then had loaned his pilot son an airplane with which young Frade located the Spanish-flagged—and thus “neutral”—merchant ship that had been replenishing German submarines in Samborombón Bay. Soon thereafter, a U.S. Navy submarine had torpedoed the vessel and the German U-boat tied alongside.
Von Deitzberg never learned who among the most senior of the Nazi hierarchy had ordered young Frade’s assassination. And because that attempt had failed, no one was going to claim that responsibility.
They were, however, obviously the same people who had ordered the second blunder, the assassination of el Coronel Jorge G. Frade himself. The intention there was to send the message to the Argentine officer corps that just as Germany was prepared to reward its friends, it was equally prepared to punish its enemies no matter their position in the Argentine hierarchy.
That assassination had been successful. El Coronel Frade died of a double load of double-ought buckshot to his face while riding in his car on his estancia. The results of that assassination, however, were even more disastrous for Germany than the failed assassination of Frade’s son.
The Argentine officer corps was enraged by Frade’s murder. And during the attempted smuggling ashore of the first “special shipment”—crates literally stuffed with currency and precious jewels to be used to purchase sanctuary—from the Océano Pacífico at Samborombón Bay, both Standartenführer Goltz and Oberst Karl-Heinz Grüner—the military at
taché and his assistant who were there to receive it—died of high-power rifle bullets fired into their skulls. Only good luck saw that the special shipment made it safely back to the Océano Pacífico.
Who actually did the shooting never came to light. It could have been the OSS, perhaps even Frade himself. Or it could have been Argentine army snipers sending the message to the Germans that the assassination of a beloved Argentine officer was unacceptable behavior.
It didn’t matter who did the shooting. So far as Bormann, Himmler, and the other senior Nazis behind Operation Phoenix were concerned, Operation Phoenix was in jeopardy. And that was absolutely unacceptable.
And there was more: On the death of el Coronel Frade, his only child inherited everything his father had owned, which included his enormous estancia, countless business enterprises, and, perhaps most dangerous of all, what amounted to his own private army. Young Frade now had several hundred former soldiers of the Húsares de Pueyrredón who had returned to their homes on Estancia San Pedro y San Pablo with their devotion to their murdered commander, el Coronel Frade, intact and now transferred to his son. Including, of course, their considerable military skills.
The fury of the Argentine officer corps over Frade’s assassination had finally gotten through to the inner circle at Wolfsschanze. Von Deitzberg was sent to Buenos Aires, ostensibly as a Wehrmacht generalmajor, to apologize privately to el Coronel Juan D. Perón for the absolutely inexcusable stupidity of Oberst Karl-Heinz Grüner, who had ordered el Coronel Frade’s assassination. Perón had been told that Grüner had already been returned to Germany, where he would be dealt with. Von Deitzberg didn’t mention that it was the bodies of both Grüner and Standartenführer Goltz that had been returned to the Fatherland, and that they had made the trip in the freezer of the Océano Pacífico.
Von Deitzberg installed SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Cranz at the embassy to replace Goltz—officially as a diplomat, the commercial attaché—in running both Operation Phoenix and the confidential special fund, and then he went to Montevideo to check up on Sturmbannführer Werner von Tresmarck and his wife.
The von Tresmarcks met the Fieseler Storch in which Major Hans-Peter von Wachtstein had flown von Deitzberg across the River Plate. Frau von Tresmarck was at the wheel of a convertible automobile, an American Chevrolet. She was just as interesting as he remembered. He realized immediately that he wanted to get her alone, which would not be difficult as he had planned to interview them separately.
He then sent von Wachtstein back to Argentina, von Tresmarck to his home to prepare a report of what he was doing, and he took Inge von Tresmarck to the Hotel Casino de Carrasco. They went first to the bar and then to his room.
When von Deitzberg made his first advance to her, she laughed at him. Enraged, he slapped her face. He had never before in his life struck a woman. Yet he suddenly realized that he had never before in his life been so excited as he was now, looking down at her where she had fallen, and her looking at him with terror in her eyes.
He ordered her to strip. When she hesitated, he slapped her again. The clothing came quickly off. He humiliated her both verbally—he told her that her breasts sagged and that her ugly buttocks—he used the word “ass”—were unpleasant to look at—and then physically. Ten minutes after entering his room, Inge von Tresmarck was naked, on her knees, tears running down her face, crawling across the room to him under a command to take his penis into her mouth.
The incident was the most satisfying sexual experience von Deitzberg could ever remember experiencing.
Von Deitzberg had not quite finished shaving when Maria showed up in his room with his breakfast and Dr. Müller’s herbal medications. First Secretary Anton von Gradny-Sawz came in a moment later as von Deitzberg was gathering his courage to take the first of his three daily doses of chopped garlic in warm water.