The Devil’s Chessboard: Allen Dulles, the CIA, and the Rise of America’s Secret Government. David Talbot
[and] refugee enthusiasts.” He was part of the State Department’s deeply entrenched, high-born culture—a WASP aristocracy that regarded immigrants, particularly those non-Christian newcomers from central and eastern Europe, as socially offensive and potentially subversive. Anti-Jewish attitudes in this insular club were so deeply ingrained that they were reflexive.
Perhaps not surprisingly, then, when young Allen Dulles was serving in the U.S. embassy in Turkey, his first overseas posting after World War I, he fell for the most notorious anti-Jewish fabrication in history. One day the young American diplomat was given a copy of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion by a British reporter who had fished the scurrilous document out of a secondhand bookstore in Istanbul’s old European quarter. The Protocols purported to offer a secret plan for Jewish world domination, and included tales about Christian children being sacrificed for Passover feast rituals and other lurid fantasies. By the time Dulles got his hands on the book, which was the creation of the Russian czar’s anti-Semitic secret police, the document had been widely denounced and discredited. But Dulles took it seriously enough to send a coded report about the secret Jewish “plot” back to his superiors in Washington.
Atavistic ideas about exotic Jewish “outsiders” were still widely prevalent in the State Department in June 1939 as the St. Louis lingered along the Eastern Seaboard, its food and water supplies running low. In the end, the Long faction in the Roosevelt administration would prevail in the debate over the ship. Captain Schroeder was forced to turn his ocean liner around and return to Europe, docking in Antwerp, Belgium, on June 17 after a month at sea, and disgorging the men, women, and children on board to their fates. Less than three months later, Hitler invaded Poland, and Europe went to war. More than 250 of the St. Louis’s passengers would be swallowed by the Holocaust.
As the war began, the struggle to save Europe’s Jews was far from over. President Roosevelt continued to be pushed and pulled by both sides of the increasingly tumultuous refugee debate. Initial reports about the mass evacuations of Jews to death camps in the German and Polish countryside were vague. The State Department bureaucracy bottled up much of the information, so there was a great deal that Roosevelt never saw. Humanitarians like Rabbi Wise desperately sought solid evidence of the Nazi extermination machine, which they knew was essential in order to convince FDR to take decisive action.
This was the desperate situation as Dulles began monitoring European developments—first from his OSS office in Rockefeller Center and later from his post in Bern. Among Dulles’s confidential sources was a German industrialist who was the first prominent figure inside the Nazi domain to provide credible information about the early stages of the Final Solution. The stories that the industrialist brought across the Swiss border were almost too monstrous to believe. The information that began flowing into neutral Switzerland, the listening post for war-torn Europe, should have helped force drastic Allied action. But it did not.
On July 17, 1942, Heinrich Himmler’s luxurious private train—equipped with a dining room, shower, and even a screening room—pulled into Auschwitz, a backwater town in the swampy flatlands of southern Poland. Word quickly spread about the Reichsführer’s unusual visit, soon reaching Eduard Schulte, the chief executive of a major German mining company with property in the area. What had brought Himmler to this forlorn destination? Schulte reckoned that it must have something to do with the rapidly expanding prison camp outside town, where IG Farben had built a factory to utilize the camp’s slave labor.
It is not widely recognized that the Nazi reign of terror was, in a fundamental way, a lucrative racket—an extensive criminal enterprise set up to loot the wealth of Jewish victims and exploit their labor. The chemical giant Farben was at the forefront of integrating concentration camp labor into its industrial production process, with other major German corporations like Volkswagen, Siemens, and Krupp following closely behind. Himmler’s SS empire moved aggressively to cut itself in on the spoils, extracting sizable payments from these companies for providing them with a steady flow of forced labor. Schulte, who was afraid that the rapidly expanding Auschwitz complex would begin to intrude on his own company’s mining properties, immediately took a wary interest in Himmler’s visit.
Schulte himself was not a Nazi, but he had good contacts in those circles. His deputy at the mining firm belonged to the Nazi Party and, in fact, knew Himmler. To ingratiate themselves with the party, the firm’s board of directors had loaned the local Nazi chief a company-owned villa that was located in a nearby forest. It was here that Himmler and his entourage were to be entertained that evening.
When Himmler arrived for the party at the company villa, Schulte was still unaware of the horrific reason he had come to Auschwitz. Himmler was there to witness one of the camp’s new gas chambers, a white brick cottage known as “Bunker 2,” in action. That afternoon Himmler watched as a group of 449 Jewish prisoners, recently transported from Holland, were marched into Bunker 2 and gassed with Zyklon B, the pesticide produced by IG Farben. The execution process took a full twenty minutes, and the victims’ frantic death cries could be heard even through the chamber’s thick walls. Afterward, the bodies were dragged from the building by camp orderlies wearing gas masks and thrown into nearby incinerators. One of the triumphs of German engineering was to devise a convenient incineration process whereby the burning of the corpses provided the heat for the furnaces. Fritz Sander, the engineer who invented the system, later lamented the fact that he could not patent his creation because it was considered a state secret.
Himmler observed the grotesque procedure unfold that afternoon in “total silence,” according to Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Höss. Later on, at the villa, he showed little strain from his day’s chores. The Reichsführer broke from his austere routine by enjoying a cigar and a glass of red wine. In deference to the female guests, the details of his camp tour were not discussed.
Eduard Schulte was sickened when, a week and a half after Himmler’s visit, he finally learned what had occurred during the Reichsführer’s tour of Auschwitz. It confirmed his deepest fears about the Third Reich, a regime he had observed from its earliest days with a growing sense of dread. Schulte had met Hitler in Berlin back in February 1933 at a gathering of industrialists whom the Nazis wanted to shake down for political contributions. After listening to his rambling diatribe, Schulte concluded that Hitler was a dangerous lunatic who would lead Germany to ruin.
There was nothing rebellious or offbeat about Schulte. He was, in nearly every way, a typical specimen of the German bourgeoisie—a hardworking, conservative family man whose only indulgence was a passion for hunting. But he was the type of man who resented the steady encroachments of the Nazi state on his private life. In order to keep his position with the mining firm, he had been forced to join the Nazi-run German Labor Front. Even to maintain his hunting habit, he needed to belong to a state-run hunters club. He fumed when his two boys came home one day in Hitler Youth uniforms, though his wife reminded him it was compulsory and said he was making mountains out of molehills. But in Schulte’s mind, the “brown poison,” as he called it, was seeping everywhere.
It pained Schulte, who had a close Jewish friend while growing up, to see Jews being made scapegoats. He was a tall, outgoing, assertive businessman, but he had a feeling for the underdog that might have been reinforced by his own physical disability. At the age of eighteen, while going to the aid of some railroad workers, Schulte’s left leg was crushed under the wheel of a freight car and had to be amputated. Outfitted with an artificial leg, he continued to get around with vigorous determination for the rest of his life, although with an obvious limp.
When Schulte heard about the unfolding horror at Auschwitz, he knew he had to act. From what he could piece together, the macabre display of German efficiency overseen by Himmler that day was part of an official policy of mass extermination that was now under way in the Nazi empire. The policy had been formally approved earlier that year by the Nazi high command at a conference held on January 20, 1942, in an SS villa on Lake Wannsee in suburban Berlin. The Wannsee Conference, run by Himmler’s ambitious deputy Reinhard Heydrich, laid out a plan for the elimination of Europe’s Jewry through a network of death factories. By lending the proposal a legal veneer, Heydrich assured the complete administrative cooperation of the German