“I’m a little slow sometimes,” Bendick said. Then he looked at Boltitz. “Why should I trust you?”
Frade answered for him: “You’ve heard of the failed attempt by Colonel Graf von Stauffenberg to kill Adolf Hitler?”
Bendick looked at Frade, nodded, but said nothing.
“At the time, Kapitän zur See Boltitz was the German naval attaché in Buenos Aires and”—he gestured at Peter—“Major von Wachtstein was the assistant military attaché for air. The day after the bomb failed to kill Hitler, the embassy got a radio message ordering their arrest for high treason.”
“They were involved in the bombing?”
“In the plot of the bombing,” Frade explained, “as were Peter’s father, Generalleutnant Graf Karl-Friedrich von Wachtstein, and Karl’s father, Vizeadmiral Kurt Boltitz. General von Wachtstein was arrested, tried by a people’s court, and hung from a butcher’s hook.”
“My God!”
“Vizeadmiral Boltitz, who worked for Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, the chief of German Military Intelligence, was not immediately arrested, nor was Admiral Canaris. We don’t know where Vizeadmiral Boltitz is, only that the SS was looking for him until the last day of the war.”
“He ran?” Bendick asked.
Frade nodded.
“On April twenty-third—just over two weeks ago—the 97th Infantry Division of the Third U.S. Army liberated the Flossenberg Concentration Camp in Bavaria. They found Admiral Canaris’s naked, decomposing body hanging from a gallows. It had been left there as a gesture of contempt following the admiral’s execution on April ninth for his role in the failed attempt to kill Hitler.”
“Jesus Christ!” Bendick said, then asked, “And these two German officers ran from the arrest order to Argentina?”
“No. What happened—both had been working for me—was that I flew them to Canoas, where they surrendered to the commanding officer. They were then flown to the senior enemy officer interrogation facility at Fort Hunt, outside Washington.”
“If they had been working for you, why didn’t you just keep them in Argentina?”
“Argentina was then neutral. Leaning strongly toward the Axis, but neutral. If von Wachtstein and Boltitz had stayed there, there was a good chance that some Argentine Nazi would learn where they were, tell the German Embassy, and the SS would go after them. Try to kill them.”
“They’d actually do something like that?”
“They already had done something like that. They tried to kill the commercial attaché of the German Embassy, who had deserted his post. Boltitz and von Wachtstein were no longer of any use to me inside the German Embassy, so getting them into a POW enclosure in the States seemed to be the right thing to do.”
“But they’re not in a POW enclosure, are they?”
“No. They are now OSS special agents—show him your ID, Hansel.”
Peter did.
Bendick nodded his acceptance.
Frade went on: “I knew I was going to need them, so last week—on May tenth—I flew to Washington and got them.”
General Bendick looked at von Wachtstein and, shaking his head in disbelief, asked, “And you were the air attaché of the German Embassy?”
“Tell him, Hansel,” Frade ordered.
“Before that,” von Wachtstein said, “I was commanding officer of Jagdstaffel 232—Focke-Wulf 190s—defending Berlin against B-17s.”
Bendick shook his head again and then asked Frade, “They were turned over to you—is that what you’re saying?”
“No, what I said was that I needed them, so I went and got them. I didn’t have the time to deal with the bureaucracy.”
“You just took them from a POW camp on your own authority?”
Frade nodded.
Bendick again shook his head in disbelief.