THE SS-SCHARFUHRER BABYSITTERS, WHILE LEGIT, ARE OF COURSE SMALL FRY.
BUT SS-STURMBANNFUHRER KLAUS SCHWARTZ -- SS MEMBERSHIP NO. 3,154, NSDAP NO. 10,654 -- IS A VERY BIG FISH. WITH VERY BIG TEETH.
THIS IS ONE OF THOSE RARE APPROPRIATE TIMES ONE CAN INVOKE THAT NEW FIGURE OF SPEECH THAT IT DOES NOT TAKE A ROCKET SCIENTIST TO UNDERSTAND THE IMPORTANCE OF SCHWARTZ HAVING SERVED AS CHIEF ASSISTANT TO SS-STURMBANNFUHRER WERNHER VON BRAUN -- SS MEMBERSHIP NO. 1,254 -- SINCE JANUARY 1943.
THEIR SS RANKS AND MEMBERSHIP NUMBERS ARE HONORIFIC, PERSONALLY MADE BY HIMMLER. AS A POINT OF REFERENCE, HITLER’S RIGHT HAND MAN, MARTIN BORMANN, HAS SS MEMBERSHIP NO. 555, ALSO HONORIFIC AND ASSIGNED BY HIMMLER.
SCHWARTZ, PRIOR TO JOINING VON BRAUN IN JANUARY, WAS HEAD OF RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT AT CHEMISCHE FABRIK FRANKFURT A.G. -- A MAJOR PRODUCER OF AGRICULTURAL CHEMICALS, PARTICULARLY PHOSPHATES FOR PESTICIDES -- FOR THREE YEARS.
CHEMISCHE FABRIK FRANKFURT IS OWNED BY RUHR VALLEY INDUSTRIALIST WOLFGANG KAPPLER, WHO I BECAME WELL ACQUAINTED WITH IN THE EARLY 1930S AT SULLIVAN AND CROMWELL BERLIN. I AM PRESENTLY TRYING THROUGH MY CHANNELS TO REACH KAPPLER TO GET HIS INSIGHTS ON SCHWARTZ. WHEN I KNOW SOMETHING, YOU WILL KNOW.
YOU DID NOT ASK, BUT AS TO SCHWARTZ’S PRESENT WHEREABOUTS, THEY ARE UNKNOWN. HE HAS GONE MISSING, OR AT LEAST NO ONE IS TALKING IF THEY DO KNOW WHERE HE IS. MY SOURCE WILL PROVIDE UPDATES AS AVAILABLE.
I MUST SAY YOU HAVE MY ATTENTION WITH THIS. CAN YOU TELL ME WHAT OUR INTEREST IS IN SCHWARTZ? YOUR LAST MESSAGE WAS QUITE CRYPTIC, EVEN BY OUR HUMBLE OSS STANDARDS.
FONDLY,
ALLEN
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TOP SECRET
* * *
“You know that this,” Stevens said, holding up the message, “is one of those instances where we provided the weapons and C-2 and—”
“I do know,” Bruce interrupted, nodding.
“And not only to Sausagemaker,” Stevens went on, “but to the Sikorski Tourists who smuggled it in as well.”
“Yes. And it was through their pipeline that the SS identity papers were brought back here. And Sikorski fed them to us—after, I’m sure, making detailed copies for himself.”
When Germany invaded Poland in September 1939, Sikorski and his troops escaped through Hungary and Romania while the Polish Navy sailed the Baltic Sea for Britain. The routes of escape were kept open for his men—who, in a respectful nod, called themselves Sikorski’s Tourists—to go back in and support the resistance.
“That we’re supplying them with as much as a stick of chewing gum is something Winant doesn’t have the need to know,” Bruce said. “I’m certainly not going to give him any information that he’d use to rub in Sikorski’s face.”
“How are you going to handle his request, then?”
“By adhering to something that Winant would appreciate, the unofficial maxim of the Corps Diplomatique.”
“I’m confident I can make a reasonable stab at that, but I’ll ask anyway: Which is?”
David Bruce said: “Quote Take no action on absolutely anything today that can be reconsidered tomorrow—or next month unquote.”
Stevens nodded.
“Yeah, particularly with Winant, that would’ve been one of my first guesses,” he said, then looked back at the message.
“The magnitude of this just gets worse by the moment,” Stevens said after a moment.
“Unfortunately so. As Allen rather drily notes, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to connect von Braun’s work with this Schwartz’s.”
Major Wernher von Braun was thirty-one years old, a darkly handsome German of aristocratic heritage. His mother traced her royal heritage to France’s Philip III, England’s Edward III, and Scotland’s Robert III. In his finely tailored suits, von Braun looked more like a well-to-do corporate businessman than the absolutely brilliant scientist that he was.
It was well known that even before the war von Braun had been working on new technology involving rockets—including having discussions with Robert Goddard, the top American physicist—and that he now was making major advances for Adolf Hitler’s Thousand-Year Reich.
The OSS—through Allen Dulles’s source in the Abwehr, the German military intelligence service—had been told that one of von Braun’s projects was running the manufacturing and testing facilities for a range of new, almost secret weapons of his design. The self-propelled flying bombs were being called “aerial torpedoes”—the latest of which were reported to be able to carry a ton of TNT-based high explosive for two hundred miles at more than three thousand miles per hour.