The regime sank into a megalomaniacal and repressive autism with no end in sight. Informers were everywhere. In December 1942 children were taken from their parents’ care because they refused to make the Hitler salute at school. Prisons and camps were filling up. There was a risk at any moment and on the slightest pretext of being “taken away.”
One evening, in fact, strangers knocked brutally on Fritz’s door. “Open up!” they said harshly. Fritz had no choice. He already saw himself in the cellars of the Gestapo. In fact, it was only two minor local officials in charge of antiaircraft defense who ordered him to darken his windows more thoroughly, nothing more serious. Nevertheless, daily life had become a perpetual nightmare. The sinister shadow of Plötzensee prison hovered over the city. In this fortress near the great industrial warehouses of Berlin, extra butchers’ hooks had been installed in December 1942 to be able to hang several people at once without wasting time.
6
ALLEN DULLES
Bern, spring 1943
The quiet city of Bern, capital of the Swiss Confederation, seemed barely touched by the events in Europe and the rest of the world, but it was impossible to guess from mere appearances how the city was swarming with activity. Fake diplomats were putting together embryonic counteralliances, and professional spies of all nationalities and all political persuasions had set up their headquarters there. Bern was the privileged place for thwarting the enemy’s stratagems, trying to foresee the ends and the means of the opposing camp, and exchanging false rumors for true secrets.
Switzerland was not only a nest of spies, but also, thanks to its status as a neutral country in the heart of Europe and at the gates of the Reich, the best extraterritorial platform that could be imagined. This had been even truer since November 1942. With the occupation of the southern zone by the Germans, France had been closed off to the Allies. Switzerland had become the only base for observation in the heart of Europe, planted like a triangle between Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and occupied France.
A mysterious figure had been living since November 1942 in a handsome old house in Bern, located not far from the cathedral, at Herrengasse 23. He could often be seen walking rapidly, the pockets of his coat full of hastily folded newspapers, between the railroad station and his downtown house. He liked the neighborhood, with its medieval fountains with multicolored sculptures, its sidewalks beneath arcades, and its ancient paving stones. From the windows of his large apartment on the ground floor of a building that had four stories, he had a magnificent view of the mountains of the Bern Oberland.
In the morning, to get to his office on Dufourstrasse, in the embassy district, he crossed the Kirchenfeld bridge over the Aare (a metal bridge forty meters above the river). At noon, he had lunch at the Theater Café, where the waiters seemed to know him very well. He could very often be seen at the Hôtel Bellevue, where foreign diplomats met Swiss politicians for dinner. Most of the time he went on foot. But sometimes he could be seen in the back seat of a Citroën driven by a personal chauffeur, and smoking a pipe. He was a tall man, with a mustache, who wore glasses with rather thick lenses that made him look like a college professor. He dressed in corduroy, flannel, or tweed. He usually wore a bow tie. Elegant without being stiff, he had a habit of wearing his hat toward the back of his head, which gave him an air of studied negligence. Some people thought he was English. In fact, he was an American.
Allen Welsh Dulles was officially the special assistant for legal affairs of the U.S. ambassador to Switzerland. The son of a Presbyterian minister, a member of the East Coast establishment, this 1914 Princeton graduate knew Europe remarkably well. In 1917 and 1918 he already was an attaché at the American embassy in Bern charged with gathering intelligence about Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Balkans. He then spent a few months behind the scenes at Versailles during the treaty negotiations, with other young diplomats who had recently graduated (most of them from Princeton), whom President Wilson liked to have around him. Dulles felt all the more at ease in these surroundings because Robert Lansing, the secretary of state, was his uncle, and because his grandfather, General John W. Foster, had held that post a few decades earlier. During the negotiations, and in the years following the restoration of peace, the young Allen W. Dulles had traveled extensively through France and Germany devastated by the war. He was convinced that a solid alliance between the United States and Germany would make it possible to create a solid rampart against the spread of Bolshevism.
Although he had given up a diplomatic career to become a Wall Street lawyer, Allen Dulles had continued to be of service to the State Department. In 1933, in the course of a diplomatic mission to Germany, he had met Hitler in person. Although he felt nothing but disgust for the Nazis, Dulles was a friend to Germany.
In November 1942, Dulles was back in Bern. At the last moment, he had crossed through France from Spain, just when the German troops were seizing the southern zone. He had been able to reach Switzerland only through the providential assistance of a not overly scrupulous French customs agent who had not informed the Gestapo of his passage. Once there, Dulles had not attempted in the slightest to conceal his arrival or especially hidden the nature of his work. In the Swiss press, an article presented him as the “personal representative of President Roosevelt,” charged with a “special duty.” From then on everyone knew that Mr. Dulles was a key figure in American espionage in continental Europe. In fact, he had been appointed by the Office of Strategic Services, the American intelligence organization that had just been established by President Roosevelt in June. Oddly, the publicity around his name did not trouble him in the least, whereas it irritated some of his English counterparts, who were a little suspicious of this “dilettante” intruding on their preserve.
Dulles’s notoriety and his natural charm, but also the rather substantial financial resources he had at his disposal, meant that large numbers of people came to see him. Everyone who had information to offer (or to sell) came to knock at his door. Every night, after curfew, shadows slipped furtively beneath the arcades leading to his house, and left through the back garden, which sloped steeply toward the River Aare, hidden from prying eyes. Among these night visitors were double agents, manipulators, charlatans. Over a drink, Dulles listened to them more or less attentively. He usually put people at ease by seating them before a fire, and let them talk while he stirred the embers and smoked his pipe. “The Swiss knew very well that their country was the scene of all manner of intrigues; agents of the secret service, spies, revolutionaries and agitators infested the hotels of the principal towns”: this description of the country in 1914 by Somerset Maugham in Ashenden applied to Bern in 1943. Dulles had enough confidence in his own instincts to be able to sort out the true from the false.
His mission was to gather all the intelligence possible about occupied Europe, particularly about Germany, but also relating to France, Italy, and other countries allied to the Reich. Among other things, he had been asked to “establish and maintain contacts with underground anti-Nazi movements in Germany.” Dulles personally would have liked to provide active assistance to those movements, but he could not because of a lack of political support in Washington.
The British were of course his privileged interlocutors, even though some old intelligence veterans complained about his casual manner. He was considered an eccentric, but they recognized his talent. The French agents of the Deuxième Bureau in Bern were all prepared to work for him since the Vichy regime, in November 1942, had lost its last illusions about its sovereignty. The French agreed to be financed by the OSS in Bern, which helped them send intelligence to the authorities of Free France, now based in Algiers. Within a very short time, Dulles thus had an excellent observation network at his disposal in occupied France. The Poles also offered him their services: Dulles soon made the acquaintance of Halina Szymanska, the widow of a Polish officer based in Bern, who was the mistress of Admiral Canaris, chief of military intelligence (Abwehr). Not infrequently, when Admiral Canaris wanted to “let slip” a piece of intelligence intended for the Allies, he confided a secret to Mme. Szymanska (for example, in June 1941, Hitler’s imminent invasion of Russia). Several diplomats from Axis countries stationed in Bern, wishing to establish relations with the Allies, also became preferred sources. Baron Bakach-Bessenyey, the Hungarian envoy, was notably among them.