The Shield: a novel (38 page)

The next day after dark the three drove to the Karl Wilhelm Institute on Boltzmannstrasse in Berlin. It was on the other side of the city from their lodgings, but Moshe figured that if they use the car with falsified KRIPO plates, they should be able to move around Berlin safely – just blend into the not too thick night traffic. It took them about fifteen minutes to break into the building through a back door, go to the second floor, and deposit thin packs of typed and handwritten pages in two safes.

The next day, the te
am left Berlin by train. They dumped the car into a lake next to the Wannsee district of Berlin, with no license plates attached. Car theft was not unknown and would raise no particular suspicions. They used a pair of pocket sheet metal shears to cut the false plates into small strips and distributed them among Berlin’s numerous canals. The team had a set of documents identifying them as Wehrmacht soldiers returning to their units in Slovenia. They changed into civilian clothing at Lubliana and, with a set of Italian documents, traveled to Trieste where they boarded a fishing boat waiting to take them back to the Brindisi base.

***

Several days after the Mossad team left Germany a sum of a 150,000 Reich marks was transferred from a Swiss bank to the account of Dr. Walter Gerlach at the Gottow branch of the Dresdner Bank. If it wasn’t for the Gestapo being on the lookout for something unusual, the transfer might not have been noticed. From time to time Dr. Gerlach received large amounts of money as consulting fees. Though 150,000 was twice as much as he had ever received, it wouldn’t have attracted attention. As it happened, the bank routinely reported the foreign currency transaction to the Gestapo and the report ended up on the Potsdam chief’s desk the next day.

The chief of the Gestapo in Potsd
am followed von Tretow’s instructions: he called the office in Berlin and asked to speak to the colonel. After proper identification he was transferred to an assistant. This was the first time the Gestapo man heard that von Tretow had died in a car accident just hours after their encounter. He told the assistant that he called for personal reasons and hung up.

The chief of the Gestapo in Potsd
am was ambitious and decided that the colonel’s demise might have created a great opportunity.

His next move was to ask the International section of the Gestapo to investigate the bank in Switzerland and find out who owned the account from which the money originated. In the meantime there was no time
to lose: if Gerlach became aware of the investigation he might flee or destroy evidence. He decided to act carefully, hopefully without endangering his career. Not being a fool, the chief of the Potsdam office realized that arresting Gerlach for receiving money from Switzerland might be risky – if he was deemed important enough and if there was a legitimate reason for the money transfer. This would mean no promotion or maybe even a demotion for the chief.

When the Potsd
am Gestapo team arrived at the facility in Gottow they were, at first, refused entry. The Wehrmacht was guarding the complex and allowed only people with special passes inside. It took several calls to Berlin and the angry intervention of Mueller, the head of the Gestapo, to get them inside. Mueller intervened just on the principle that the Wehrmacht should not tell the Gestapo what to do and where not to go.

Heinrich decided to start by searching Gerlach’s office. He might find something useful and if he didn’t, no harm would be done to his career.

At first Walter Gerlach refused to open his safe: “The contents are secret and highly sensitive Army research. I can open it only on the orders of the director of the Institute, Dr. Kurt Diebner.”

Diebner agreed to the search – he, at least, was a loyal Nazi. He did order that nothing from the safe leave the building. They had to read the documents in Gerlach’s office.

After almost three hours the Gestapo technical expert examining the documents called his chief: “Sir, I have found a couple of very strange documents. I need you to come here and read them.” He refused to say anything else, which the Gestapo chief knew was a sign of the information being explosive. He was not disappointed. Apparently Dr. Gerlach was in contact with a foreign intelligence service, probably British, and was acting on their behalf. The documents indicated that the whole pretense of making uranium weapons was a British idea to force the Reich to waste precious resources. Gerlach wrote, in his own hand, that the uranium weapon idea was far-fetched and, if at all possible, would result in a weapon after many years and many millions of marks in research. Other documents showed that Diebner, though a supporter of the Party, had agreed to go along with this fraud in exchange for a significant amount of money deposited in a Swiss bank account.

The information was so important that
Heinrich, the Potsdam Gestapo chief, called Berlin to make an urgent appointment with the boss himself. While he was on his way to meet the head of the Gestapo, his team searched Diebner’s safe and the Gottow apartments of both scientists. Diebner’s apartment yielded a piece of paper that was almost overlooked in a superficial search – it was pinned above the top drawer under his desk. The only thing on it was a number and several capital letters.

This information was relayed to the chief via telephone while he was waiting in
Gestapo Chief Mueller’s office. It did not take the Gestapo foreign department very long to identify a small bank in Geneva – the initials of its name were on the paper found in Diebner’s desk. The bank admitted to having a numbered account, but would not give out any details without the appropriate code.

It took another two days for Mueller to get permission to arrest the two physicists and to perform a full scale search of the Gottow facility. The Army objected, but presented with incriminating documents, the Army chief physicist had to agree that closure of the facility and a full search and investigation were a reasonable precaution.

Documents found in Gerlach’s safe indicated that the analysis of the Wolfsburg incident was falsified by Dr. Weizsacker of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute who had made the presentation that claimed Wolfsburg was destroyed by an atomic device.

Further searches at the Institute uncovered an interesting piece of evidence: a report written by
Weizsacker stating that the huge explosion over Wolfsburg had been caused by conventional chemical explosives. He speculated that the explosives, all five or six thousand tons of them, were teleported to a spot about a thousand feet above the Volkswagen plant and then activated. In support of the theory the report cited clear evidence of nitrate residue all over the area. It also pointed out that tiny remnants of steel brackets, covered with a residue of heavy elements, strongly suggesting the use of a quantum teleportation device.

The evidence mentioned in the report was indeed to be found at both the Wolfsburg and Wolfsschanze sites, having been recently spread
at night by a low-flying silent and undetected stealth jet.

The experts within the Gestapo speculated that
Weizsacker had not published his original conclusions but decided instead to claim that the explosion was atomic because he held a patent for an atomic bomb. Even though the patent was shared with the Institute, if the Reich did manage to make the device a reality, the scientist would make a huge profit.

By the end of September, 1941, the Uranium project was over. Hitler told his underlings that his instinct concerning this “Jewish” science was correct. There was nothing to it - the Reich should waste no more resources pursuing it. Teleportation, on the other hand, was a different issue. Heisenberg, an innocent victim of the plot and an expert in quantum physics, was appointed to head the project and instructed “to stop all work on atomic weapons and dedicate all available resources to the development of teleportation
.
” There were not that many resources to dedicate, as the Fuehrer did not trust theoretical scientists and saw no reason to spend significant resources on developments that would not be useful in the ongoing war. Neither Heisenberg nor any of the staff, who knew better, dared to point out that this order was based on pure fantasy. The other physicists did not try to correct the terrible mistake either. No one wanted to put their neck on the block and be associated with proven spies and enemies of the Reich.

***

On September 29, 1941 Amos Nir attended a combined Military Intelligence and Mossad briefing.

“
I think that we are in good shape,” Zvi Kaplan, the Chief of Military Intelligence, said. “It seems from our intercepts that the Nazis dismantled their nuclear effort and have no plans to proceed.”

“
We have done a very thorough job,” added the head of the Mossad. “A number of their leading scientists disappeared in the Gestapo labyrinth and others, like the chief Army scientist who had been a staunch proponent of nuclear development, are silent on this issue. I think we have nothing to worry about. Except if they develop teleportation. That would be interesting.

”
This operation was fairly easy. We have a serious technological advantage, which helps, but the main advantage we have is knowing who is who and what is about to happen. That advantage will be gone soon, since we are changing history quite vigorously. Next time we will have to do much more planning and it will be a lot more dangerous.”

Colonel Hirshson presided over a weekly meeting to assess the progress of Operation Moses. He started the meeting formally: “Today is Thursday, September 30, 1941. I hope that this meeting will not be very long – tomorrow is Yom Kippur. It starts tonight at 5:54
pm. I would like to finish this meeting by 3pm to give everyone time to prepare. “We will start, as usual, with area reports. Ukraine first.”

The young woman responsible for organizing the Ukrainian exodus shuffled a pile of papers: “The evacuation is slow. The devastation from the recent fighting is slowing us down. Trains are running in the western Ukraine, but in the eastern part, including Kiev, the Germans are still working on restoring the tracks. We estimate that about a third of the Ukrainian Jews have already arrived and the rest are eager to come. Obviously living under Soviet rule for several decades has made these people eager to get out. The f
amine of 1932-1933 left them scared and the Communist party purges of 1937 undermined their trust in the party, any trust they may have had left, that is. Our only difficulty right now is moving people to the railways. The urban Jewish population is mostly gone. We have to use local resources – horse drawn carts mostly. The Germans assigned a number of trucks to this project, which helps. I think that we will be done by January, or sooner if the trains start moving again.”

“
The Baltic countries, Belarus and Western Russia next.”

“We are done with about two thirds of Lithuania and Belarus. Our main limitation is the same as in the Ukraine, the availability of transportation. We’re still finding isolated pockets of anti-Zionists, mostly hardcore Communists, that are not willing to leave. My estimate is that once everyone else is gone, those people will reconsider. In any case, this is a very small portion of the population.

“
Latvia and Estonia present a different problem. A large part of the Jewish community there is assimilated and, especially in Latvia, very proud of their German heritage. So far we’ve only been successful convincing the religiously observant and the active Zionists to evacuate. The rest are waiting. I think they’ll leave before too long. The locals are extremely unfriendly and the Germans can’t restrain themselves very well in this environment. We’ve rescued a third as of last Friday. It’s slowed down to a trickle now, but there were not that many Jews there to begin with. At the current rate they will all be moved by December, I think.

“
Thank you. Romania and Hungary, please.”

A middle-aged, tired-looking, bookish man nodded
. “It is slow-going, especially in Hungary. Like Latvia, a large percentage of Jews there are completely assimilated. Since the Horty regime stopped oppressing them as requested by the Germans, we are having trouble persuading the two thirds of the population who aren’t religious or Zionist to move. We were lucky to find a descendant of a famous rabbi from the area – he was of real help. The rest are refusing to leave their comfortable homes. I don’t see how we can force them.

“
We tried persuasion; we even showed them a documentary of what happened in German occupied Poland before our intervention. They were impressed but still decided against trying to persuade their community to leave. The Polish experience doesn’t apply to civilized Hungary was their point of view. Documentaries of transports from Hungary to Auschwitz didn’t have much impact either since the Germans are not demanding Jewish blood.”

No one had any idea how to get the Hungarian Jews to move short of asking the fascist Horty regime to forcibly deport them, so the discussion moved on.
Hirshson made a note to discuss this issue with Yaari and possibly ask Horty to deport the Hungarian Jews.

“
It is different in Romania. There are several famous rabbinical schools there with well-respected leaders. As you remember, you gave us approval to transport ultra-Orthodox rabbis from Israel directly to Romania. That did it. The heads of the yeshivas were convinced and persuaded the observant community to follow. The rest are still hesitating, but I think that they will leave soon: they’re already feeling isolated and scared by the Antonescu regime. We have three German passenger ships taking people directly to Israel. The emigration should be completed by mid-November.”