[Perhaps it can be assumed that the conference at the Chancellery had to do with the Reich’s need for hard currency and the plausibility of the Krausser report with reference to that need. Subsequent events suggest that Bormann ordered von Geyr to proceed to organize a search for the reputed gold treasure.]
The key figure in the investigation was Krausser, who as head of Einsatzgruppe “E” had unearthed the first references to the Kolchak cache. Heinz Krausser was thirty-nine, a veteran of the First World War on the Western Front; in 1920 he had joined an anti-Semitic organization sponsored in part by exiled Russian monarchists, and in 1927 he enrolled in the Nazi Party, when he was a foot patrolman on the Munich police force. Several years later, when the SS was organized under Himmler, he was absorbed into it as a drill instructor with the rank of captain.
Krausser’s zealous anti-Semitism, his combat background, his youth, and his cynical if not fatalistic sense of Realpolitik made him stand out even among his SS comrades. It was not surprising that Krausser was selected to lead one of the new Einsatzgruppen murder battalions in the Russian campaign of 1941.
The official photographs show a thin man of moderate height with a prominent triangular nose, eyes hidden under bony brows, a surprisingly full sensuous mouth and a veined bald skull. (Evidently he had begun to lose his hair in his early twenties and had elected to shave his skull thereafter.) His black-collared tunic conceals the double-lightning SS tattoo on his forearm but one can be sure it was there. He wore the long black cavalry boots of an officer and the Death’s Head insignia on his high-crowned, black-billed garrison cap, which in the photographs is invariably clenched at his side by the pressure of his elbow. His letters from the Eastern Front—to von Geyr and to his sister (he had no wife)—indicate that he was a highly demonstrative man dominated by crude passions.
He was filled with vitriol toward “the Jewish vermin” and “these Russian swine” but at the same time he was very sentimental about Christmas and wrote long maudlin passages—how he missed the candle-lit windows, the decorated trees, the laughing children. In 1942 he was nearly forty years old but his letters home are the letters of youth: callow, unsophisticated, cynical but with a fatalism that left no room for compassion, even toward himself.
Demonstrably a sadist, he doubtless looked forward keenly to his own violent destruction at the hands of infuriated would-be victims. Twice in his letters to von Geyr* he expresses surprise that the sheeplike prisoners do not at least make an effort to overwhelm their German murderers-to-be, whom they outnumber by factors of hundreds to one.
Despite his masochism and fatalism he was ambitiously an opportunist. He declared it was one of his keenest hopes to make Battalion “E” the most “successful” of all the Einsatzgruppen (that is to say, to murder more Jews than any other Group murdered) in order to bring himself to the Führer’s grateful attention. Evidently Nirvana to Krausser was to stand at attention while the Führer in person pinned a medal on his tunic.*
“I never met this Krausser but I knew his kind. I knew these instruments of Germany’s glorious historical mission to cleanse the world of Jews. They were mediocre men you know, not great fire-breathing villains twisting the ends of their mustaches. They were utterly ordinary. In all of them you saw a great self-pity—they wanted someone to sympathize with the distasteful job they had to do. Once I overheard two SS Leutnants talking, complaining, and then a Stürmbannführer, a major, came into the place. He had heard some of what they were saying.
“He said to the two subalterns, ‘You don’t like your orders, do you?’ And then there was a pause, nobody said anything, and afterward the Stürmbannführer continued, ‘You don’t like your orders, but you will obey them. If you were Russian soldiers you probably wouldn’t. Which is why we are winning and they are losing.’
“They were always pouring sentimental tears for their own exile—from their wives and children at home, from German food and German this and that. Always they sought excuses—those pious patriotic euphemisms they used in order to convince themselves that mass murder was not a crime.
“At this time there were a number of national units that helped the SS assassinate Jews. These were guard units mainly. The Slovak Hlinka Guards, the Croat Ustasa, the Ukrainians and the Rumanian and Bulgarian Fascisti. Now I went from Palestine into Europe by way of Italy in the end of nineteen forty-two. I was sent from Palestine, I was in the Mossad then. I had been provided with papers and uniforms which identified me as a Gestapo Ortsgruppenleitung with the military rank of Hauptmann. You know it isn’t true that the Gestapo wore those civilian overcoats and trilby hats with the brims turned down. In military areas the Gestapo wore uniforms just like all the other Germans. It was the grey Wehrmacht uniform. The boots and headgear were black like the SS, including the scuttle helmet, but the long leather coat was brown.
“My papers had been prepared by the Mossad. We had discussed my identity at great length.
“It was decided I should appear as a Nazi bureaucrat, inspecting the Eastern Front with orders to report on the efficiency of the Totenkopfverbanden. Those were the sentry units which guarded prisoners and disposed of the mass dead and that sort of thing. Essentially they did the work that was too menial for the heroes of the Einsatzgruppen. You see in this way I was protected from too close contact with the SS officers who commanded the Einsatzgruppen. Those people—like this Krausser—were naturally very suspicious, and if they thought I had been sent to spy on them, I’m sure some of them would have sent angry inquiries to Berlin, demanding to know what this meddlesome Gestapo Hauptmann was doing interfering with them. Obviously I couldn’t afford that sort of inquiries. So I was sent to examine the efficiency of these subordinate groups—the Croats and Slovaks and Bulgarians and so forth. That was my cover.
“Of course there was no Israel then. We had no official standing in the world. As you know, Roosevelt and the others found the Zionist cause suspect and contemptible. But our people were being slaughtered. The world knew this, but chose to ignore it—to pretend it wasn’t happening. You would read in the American press about the heroic resistance of the brave Russian people but you didn’t read much about the Jews dying by the tens of thousands.
“In Palestine we also knew it was happening. But like everyone else we had only hearsay evidence. The purpose of my trips into the Soviet Union during the war was to bring out real evidence.
“It was not feasible for us to infiltrate the camps in Germany itself. The security in those camps was very tight. It is quite true—although one is tempted not to acknowledge this—that many Germans who lived quite near the extermination camps actually had no inkling of what went on inside.
“At the time of my first journey they had not yet devised the death chambers, the Zyklon poison gas. The only gassing was done with gasoline exhausts in mobile vans. There were a few such vans in Russia but most of them were in Poland. In Russia the murders were done in the open, mainly by gunfire or flamethrower. There was no great amount of security to circumvent. For the most part, the Einsatzgruppen didn’t mind having spectators around. It gave them an opportunity to share their shame.
“I cannot use words to describe myself at that time—my state of feeling. It would be useless. To speak of these things at all, one must be utterly factual, utterly emotionless. It was not the first time I had betrayed my people—I had turned my back on them in the war twenty-five years earlier, I had denied I was a Jew. Now I went into Hitler’s world in the guise of Gestapo.