“Heil Hitler!” he announced conversationally. “You wanted to see me, Herr Ambassador?”
Von Lutzenberger barely acknowledged Cranz’s presence.
“No visitors, no calls, please, Ingeborg,” he said, and then he rummaged in a desk drawer as his secretary left the room and closed the door. Finally, he found what he was looking for—a box of matches—and lit one of them, and then a cigarette.
As he extinguished the match by waving it rapidly, he pointed to a sheet of paper on his desk with his other hand.
“The only person who’s seen that is Schneider,” von Lutzenberger said. “He had it waiting for me when I came in this morning.”
Consular Officer Johann Schneider, a twenty-three-year-old Bavarian, was actually an SS-untersturmführer, the equivalent of second lieutenant. He was the first of his lineage ever to achieve officer status, and the first to receive education beyond that offered by the parochial school in his village.
He gave full credit for his success to Adolf Hitler, Heinrich Himmler, and the tenets of National Socialism. He believed he had been selected for his assignment to Buenos Aires—instead of being posted to one of the SS-regiments on his graduation from officer candidate school at Bad Tölz—because his superiors recognized in him a dedicated officer of great potential.
He was never disabused of this notion by any of his superiors in Germany or Buenos Aires. But the truth was that he had been sent to Argentina because he was a splendid typist. The then-senior SS officer in Buenos Aires, Karl-Heinz Grüner—ostensibly the military attaché, who wore the uniform of a Wehrmacht oberst but was actually an SS-standartenführer—had confessed to Reichsführer-SS Heinrich Himmler that he had had quite enough of menopausal females and needed a classified files clerk who could type as well as any woman and could be told to work all night, every night, without breaking into tears.
A sympathetic Himmler had ordered an underling to see what was available for Oberst Grüner at Bad Tölz, and four days later newly commissioned SS-Untersturmführer Schneider had boarded a Lufthansa Condor in Berlin. Thirty-eight hours later, he reported to Grüner in Buenos Aires.
To keep his new typist/classified file clerk happy—Schneider had immediately
made it clear that he believed his Argentine assignment was to assist Grüner in high-level intelligence activities—Grüner had permitted Schneider to think of himself as an unofficial member—or perhaps a probationary member—of the SS-Sicherheitsdienst, or Secret Service.
Whenever he saw Schneider chafing at the bit over his clerical functions, Grüner ordered him to secretly surveille certain members of the embassy staff, most of them unimportant except for First Secretary Anton von Gradny-Sawz.
This was because Grüner neither liked von Gradny-Sawz nor fully trusted him. He didn’t think men who had changed sides could ever be fully trusted.
Von Gradny-Sawz’s primary—if not official—function around the embassy was what Grüner and Ambassador von Lutzenberger thought of as “handling the canapés”; neither was willing to trust von Gradny-Sawz with anything important, but he was good with the canapés.
As von Gradny-Sawz was fond of saying, his family had been serving the diplomatic needs of “the state” for hundreds of years. The implication was the German state. The actuality was that von Gradny-Sawz had been in the diplomatic service of the German state only since 1938.
Before then—before the Anschluss had incorporated Austria into the German Reich as Ostmark—von Gradny-Sawz had been in the Austrian Foreign Service. The ancestors he so proudly spoke of had served the Austro-Hungarian Empire for hundreds of years.
Having seen the handwriting on the wall before 1938, von Gradny-Sawz had become a devout Nazi, made some contribution to the Anschluss itself, and been taken into the Foreign Service of the German Reich.
Ambassador von Lutzenberger, who understood how sacred the canapé-and-cocktails circuit was to the diplomatic corps, had arranged for von Gradny-Sawz’s assignment as his first secretary. Von Gradny-Sawz could charm the diplomatic corps while he attended to business.
The secret reports on von Gradny-Sawz that Schneider gave to Grüner showed that the first secretary divided his off-duty time about equally between two different sets of friends. The largest group was of deposed titled Eastern European blue bloods, a surprising number of whom had made it to Argentina with not only their lives but most of their crown jewels. The second, smaller group consisted of young, long-legged Argentine beauties whom von Gradny-Sawz squired around town, either unaware or not caring that he looked more than a little ridiculous.
SS-Oberst Grüner was now gone, lying in what Schneider thought of as a hero’s grave in Germany beside his deputy, SS-Standartenführer Josef Luther Goltz. They had been laid to eternal rest with all the panoply the SS could muster, after they had given their lives for the Führer and the Fatherland on the beach of Samborombón Bay while trying to secretly bring ashore a “special shipment” from a Spanish-registered ship in the service of the Reich.
Specifically, both had been shot in the head by parties unknown, although there was little doubt in anyone’s mind that Cletus Frade of the American OSS had at least ordered the killings, and more than likely had pulled the trigger himself.
Schneider had gone first to Ambassador von Lutzenberger and then, when SS-Obersturmbannführer Karl Cranz had arrived in Buenos Aires to replace Grüner, to Cranz offering to personally eliminate Frade, even if this meant giving his own life to do so.
Both told him, in effect, that while his zeal to seek vengeance for the murders of Grüner and Goltz was commendable and in keeping with the highest traditions of SS honor, the situation unfortunately required that everyone wait until the time was right to eliminate Frade.
They told him the greatest contribution he could make to the Final Victory of the Fatherland was to continue what he was doing with regard to handling the classified files, the dispatch and receipt of the diplomatic pouches, and the decryption of the coded messages the embassy received from the Ministry of Communications after they had received them from the Mackay Cable Corporation.
Neither told him that was sort of a game everyone played. The Mackay Corporation was an American-owned enterprise. They pretended that they did not—either in Lisbon, Portugal, or Berne, Switzerland—make copies of all German traffic and pass them to either the OSS or the U.S. Embassy. And the Germans pretended not to suspect this was going on.
Important messages from or to Berlin were transmitted by “officer courier,” which most often meant the pilot, copilot, or flight engineer on the Lufthansa Condor flights between the German and Argentine capitals.
And when these messages reached the Buenos Aires embassy, they were decoded personally by Ambassador von Lutzenberger or Commercial Attaché Cranz, not Schneider. Schneider had no good reason—any reason at all—to know the content of the messages.
Cranz picked up the message and read it:
Cranz looked at von Lutzenberger.
“You said Schneider had this waiting for you when you came in this morning?”