The Secret Agent: In Search of America's Greatest World War II Spy 9781626811652, 1626811652

Table of contents :
The Secret Agent
Copyright
Introduction
Texas
Stockholm
The Blacklist
Cover
The Prince
Berlin
The Bergius Process
Moabit
The Brooklyn Bridge
The Certificate
The Mighty Eighth
Aftermath
Fame
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The Secret Agent In Search of America’s Greatest World War II Spy

by Stephan Talty

Copyright Diversion Books A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp. 443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004 New York, NY 10016 www.DiversionBooks.com Copyright © 2013 by Stephan Talty All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. To contact the author, email [email protected]. For more information, email [email protected]. First Diversion Books edition October 2013 ISBN: 978-1-62681-165-2

Introduction Late one evening, in the spring of 1944, as World War II raged across Europe, a tall, handsome, middle-aged American man was crouched in the bomb shelter of a Mercedes-Benz factory in northern Germany, listening to the drone of heavy bombers in the earthy air. From the deserted streets of Stuttgart, the keening of the air raid sirens echoed down into the factory’s basement, momentarily blotting out the sounds of aircraft. High above, hundreds of B-17s from the United States Eighth Air Force were preparing to drop several tons of high explosives on the roof of the plant where Eric Erickson was huddled with a group of terrified Nazi engineers. Had the day gone according to plan, Erickson wouldn’t have been in the factory at that unlucky hour. He’d been scheduled to inspect the plant earlier in the day, alongside its manager, a fat, florid German in his forties. Their meeting had been delayed by a surprise visit from a group of Nazi officials that worked for the Minister of Armaments and War Production, Albert Speer. Erickson had been forced to wait in the factory manager’s anteroom for hours while Speer’s men checked and rechecked production numbers, totaling up every jeep and transport truck the plant was contributing to the war effort. To make amends for the inconvenience, the Mercedes manager had invited Erickson to

dinner in his office. The German didn’t get to meet many Americans, and he was fascinated to find one roaming the country as the five-year-long war was reaching its crescendo. Erickson repaid the man’s hospitality with a Gavopaket, a food package containing real coffee, as rare and valuable as gold dust in wartime Germany. As they finished the coffee and lit up two of the American’s fine cigars, the air raid sirens began to wail. Erickson had followed an odd path to the factory in Stuttgart. His German friends knew him as “Red,” a raffish, Brooklyn-born oilman who’d betrayed his country and helped the Nazis find oil for their tanks and planes. Erickson was a risk-taker and a storyteller. He’d been all over the world and could charm men and women alike in Japanese, French, English, Swedish or German. Best of all, the American was a fine Nazi. By smuggling Swiss chocolates and bottles of gin and whiskey from his homeland of Sweden, Red had become a favorite of the German elite. Hermann Göring invited him to go shooting at his estate near Berlin. The architects of the Final Solution saved him a seat in the capital’s finest restaurants. Erickson kept in the pocket of his suit a rare führerangelegenheit, a pass signed by his friend, Heinrich Himmler, allowing him to travel unescorted throughout the Third Reich. Erickson had been a roughneck in the Texas oil fields. He’d been the All-American boy on the Cornell University campus. He’d built a small oil empire and, in turn, had become the kind of playboy who rubs elbows with Errol Flynn at the Hotel du Cap and winters in the South of France. He was funny and charming, and no one looked better in a tux.

But to some, Eric Erickson was also one of the most despised traitors of the war – a profiteer, a soulless Nazi collaborator. He used a brilliant mind for petrochemical production to help the Third Reich develop the most precious commodity of the war: a miracle product, perfected by Nazi scientists, known as synthetic oil. By 1944, the German High Command faced a problem that endangered the Reich’s war machine. The dilemma mystified everyone from Himmler to the Führer himself. The liquid that kept the Wehrmacht running, which the Nazis produced in a system of hidden plants and refineries spread out across the National Socialist empire, was in short supply. The Nazis were running out of oil. Albert Speer, a former architect whom Hitler had put in charge of Germany’s industrial output, complained to the Fuhrer that every time he got a synthetic oil plant up and running after an attack, the Allies, “with uncanny timing,” would bomb it again. The Germans were taking enormous pains to hide their petrochemical facilities from Allied reconnaissance, but it wasn’t working. The biggest plants, such as the enormous complex at Leuna, were too large to camouflage, but many of the smaller ones were cunningly disguised or buried underground. Visitors were strictly monitored. Passes were hard to come by. How were allied bombers getting the locations of the top-secret plants? Eric Erickson knew the answer. In fact, he was the answer. “Red” wasn’t a traitor; he was an American spy. Even as he appeared to be helping the Nazis win the war, the secret agent had

been sending detailed reports, at the risk of his own life, to Allied Bomber Command in London. He’d become a Nazi to defeat the Nazis. Now, high above the Mercedes factory, USAAF bomber squadrons began releasing their 500-pound bombs—painted bright red and yellow so the “toggleiers” in the planes following could spot them and release their own. A flock of warheads appeared in the night sky, spinning and tumbling, dropping silently toward the factory. In an instant, the American felt compression waves press through his body as the high explosives slammed through the factory’s roof and smashed into the pipes and compressors, turning them into arrowheads of hot shrapnel. The sound was tremendous. Deafening. Walls and rafters were blown away. Dust and sediment showered down from the shelter’s roof and settled into the folds of the American’s expensive suit. Erickson believed he was going to die, and the irony of the situation wasn’t lost on him. He was going to be blown up by a bomb that he’d directed to its target. As he waited, Erickson could hear the manager muttering something under his breath. “Verfluchte Amerikaner.” Damned American. Erickson, too, cursed in the darkness. Now I am my own victim, he thought. He knew that his death would mean death for many Allied soldiers—airmen like the ones flying above him that night, who didn’t even know he existed.

Chapter One

Texas The third son of Swedish immigrants, Eric Erickson was born in 1898 and grew up in the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York—just a few blocks from the grand vistas of Eastern Parkway. His father, Fritz, owned a jewelry shop, “F.W. Erickson, Jeweler and Watchmaker,” at 146 Ralph Avenue in nearby BedfordStuyvesant. Eric was raised the middle of five children in a cramped, two-story house on Sterling Place. It was here that he learned a man must have a mix of ambition and brawn to get what he wants in life. In 1916, the year Erickson graduated high school, there was one place a bright but under-educated young American in search of fortune would have turned. Not Wall Street. Not the gold fields of the Klondike. East Texas. Thirteen years earlier, in a dull-as-spit town called Beaumont, deep inside the salt dome that became known as Spindletop, drillers had discovered the richest oil strike in American history. Not since the California gold rush of 1849 the prospect of wealth seemed so promising. Men could hitchhike to Texas and, if they staked the right claim, become fabulously rich in the blink of an eye. “There really were poor Texas boys who discovered gushing oil wells and became overnight billionaires,”

writes historian Bryan Burrough. After a few years, Spindletop, which pumped out an astonishing 100,000 barrels a day, had combined with the derricks on nearby plots to produce more oil than the rest of the world’s fields combined. Five hundred companies sprang up in Beaumont, including Texaco and Gulf Oil. In a matter of a few years, America had become the world’s largest oil producer. With dreams of remaking his destiny, Eric Erickson said goodbye to his parents and caught the first train south. He got off in Beaumont, swallowed a choking breath of heat and dust, and found himself in a new landscape, a dry coastal plain transformed into something unique on the North American continent outside of the oilfields of Pennsylvania. At night, Beaumont was a purgatory of fire and shadow on the flat land: the harsh lights of the saloons and lean-tos and makeshift brothels fed off the wells’ unwanted natural gas. Beaumont was an ersatz community of drifters, whores, oil sharks, and the sunburned farm boys who worked the wells, young men very much like Erickson. After work there wasn’t much to do but get drunk and brawl in the streets. The sun rose early and withered the land. Outside the window of Erickson’s tiny room, black iron derricks, like giant insects, stood in rows against the big Texas sky. Twenty-four hours a day the high-pitched whoosh of the flare stacks reached Erickson’s ears. He would hear that sound continuously for months, even in his sleep. A tough-minded young man who rarely accepted “No” for an answer, Erickson quickly found work as a roustabout. The foreman had asked Erickson just two questions before hiring him: “What’s your name?” and “Who is your next of kin?” Nothing else mattered

in Beaumont. Every man, regardless of his age or where he came from, had come to Texas to get rich or die trying. The pay was good—five dollars a day when the average worker was making far less—but the job was fantastically dangerous. One roughneck called his job “torturesome work”: slathered in foul-smelling oil, slogging through knee-high mud, wrestling oil-slicked pipes into position, lungs scarred by exposure to the “sour gas” (hydrogen sulfide) produced at the wellheads. The men were tough, physical specimens, and working in 110-degree heat didn’t cool tempers. Occasionally, Erickson would see a knife fight between crew members. In later portraits, Erickson’s nose appears to have been broken. He never said where it happened, but Texas is as good a guess as any. Without a grubstake from his family to buy a claim, Eric was one of the thousands of young men sucked into the boom, most of whom lasted only a few years before the lifestyle ground them down. Wildcatters struggled to repeat the success of Spindletop, and most failed. When Texas began to dry up, Erickson headed toward Oklahoma in search of steady work. While the roughnecks around him spent every penny they earned on women and whiskey, Erickson carefully saved his money. He still dreamed of going to college in the Northeast and strolling across the campus quad with a geometry textbook in one hand and a coed on another. Soon he was promoted to line-walker, patrolling the pipelines, looking for leaks and washouts. Walking and riding from Ohio to Bayonne, New Jersey, Erickson saw new refineries cropping up to feed the country’s insatiable thirst for oil. Soon he was working as an assistant supervisor of the refinery in

Oklahoma, a shirt-and-tie position took him off the derricks and put him on the plant floor. But the life of a company man bored him. Like the wildcatters he’d met in Beaumont, when it came to the oil business, Erickson wanted everything or nothing. In 1917, Erickson was accepted to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Happy to be away from the strenuous workdays in Oklahoma, Erickson threw himself into his engineering courses. He received a bid from the exclusive Beta Theta Pi fraternity and played halfback on the Big Red football team, switching to baseball in the fall. His football teammates nicknamed him “Red,” after the Viking Explorer, “Erik the Red.” He was a talked-about figure on campus—older, tougher and more charming than the boys he was surrounded by. By the end of 1917, the war touched close to home. Erickson’s oldest brother, Henry, was sent to France as a private in the 315th Infantry, which was part of the division that later distinguished itself at Monfaucon during the battle of the Argonne Forest. Nearly 117,000 Americans died in the Great War, and Henry saw action up close, while Eric could only read about it in dispatches from the front. The brothers exchanged frequent letters—growing up Henry had always been his favorite sibling. In their letters, they mentioned the war, but they also talked about poetry and Cornell baseball. “If your eye is as good as it used to be,” Henry wrote Eric, “and your arm is as strong as ever, I don’t see any reason you shouldn’t land a job on the team.” There’s a discernible touch of hero-worship in Henry’s letters to his younger brother. In another letter, Henry wrote about his newborn son: “We dug up a picture

the other day of when I was about 8 months old–you can hardly tell the difference between … you, the baby and me.” As the war raged on, Erickson tried to stay focused on his studies. Still strapped for money, he was getting up at four o’clock in the morning to study and to run his very own startup: selling insurance to his Cornell classmates. (Henry suggested that Eric peddle subscriptions to the Saturday Evening Post as well). Two years later, in 1921, Erickson walked across the stage at graduation and received his degree. At 23, he’d already lived more than many men twice his age. And the wanderlust that had once driven him from Brooklyn to Texas to Oklahoma was beginning to itch again.

Chapter Two

Stockholm In the early 1920s, the world’s appetite for oil was growing. The Texas boom had flooded the market with cheap oil, which gradually shifted the course of the world economy. “The battlefields of World War I established the importance of petroleum as an element of national power,” writes the oil historian Daniel Yergin. “The internal combustion machine overtook the horse and the coal-powered locomotive.” Agriculture shrank as a percentage of gross world product, while manufacturing grew. Machines that ran on oil – tractors, gas ovens, factory boilers – boomed and gave birth to their own industries. Cars were a leading indicator of the shift: in 1900, there were 8000 in the United States. By 1921, there were 10.5 million. The new availability of oil began to transform militaries, as well. Warships switched from coal to oil, and generals phased out cavalry battalions in favor of tank-led divisions. After college, Eric Erickson hitched his career to the only business he knew: petrochemicals. He was hired as a salesman by Standard Oil, founded in 1870 by John D. Rockefeller, and transferred first to Shanghai and then Yokohama, Japan. He began

traveling the world selling crude to emerging economies, constantly in search of the next deal. Across the ocean in Berlin, now a dirty and haunted metropolis, another young man, born ten years before Erickson, was also thinking about how oil was reshaping the world. Adolf Hitler was convinced that “an economy without oil is inconceivable,” and that Germany, which had little, needed to find a way to obtain more. Only then could the fast, modern and mechanized army that Hitler envisioned be built. “To Hitler, [oil] was the vital commodity of the industrial age,” writes Yergin. “He read about it, he talked about it, he knew the history of the world’s oil fields.” Though Eric Erickson and Adolf Hitler would never actually cross paths, as early as the 1920s the two men were on trajectories that would bring them very near to each other. Erickson had gambled his life on making a fortune in the oil game, and Hitler was in search of the magical elixir of the modern mechanized army: an inexhaustible supply of fuel.

The American moved easily in the fraternity of oil men. In Japan, he left Standard Oil and went to work for the Texas oil pioneer, Joseph “Buckskin Joe” Cullinan, founder of the Texas Company (later Texaco). Even in the rough-hewn oil industry, Cullinan had a reputation for abrasiveness. He was considered one of the hardest men ever to work the fields. In 1902, when a fire erupted at Spindletop, Cullinan took charge of the firefighting operation and barely slept for a week, scorching his eyes and searing his lungs as he struggled to extinguish the flames. When the fires were out,

Cullinan collapsed, slept for a spell, then conducted business from his hospital bed, his eyes bandaged shut. Erickson matched Cullinan’s drive. He rose quickly in the company. Cullen was so impressed that, in 1924, he promoted Erickson to the head of the office in Erickson’s ancestral homeland of Sweden. But a Swedish law at the time dictated that any head of a company must be at least 35 years old. Erickson was only 27, so he quietly added eight years to his age. The new executive had more urgent problems than his birth year. The Swedish operation was losing money fast. Employees were stealing from the company, and Russian competition was driving down the price of oil. Erickson put a stop to the theft, introduced new management techniques and slowly pulled the company out of the red. “I have been working many nights, Saturdays and Sundays,” he wrote Henry back in the States. “It’s a hell of a lot of work.” By April, 1926, the Swedish office had had its best month ever, selling 1.1 million barrels of oil, an increase of 33% percent over the year before. “Cullinan was pleased,” he wrote his brother. “[And] wait until he sees May and June.” But “Buckskin Joe” only pushed his protégé harder. He sent a man from the New York office, “a former clerk,” Erickson wrote waspishly, who didn’t speak Swedish and didn’t know how the business was run, in order to “spy” on Erickson. “The thing is so absurd, they make me wonder if they are in their right mind,” Erickson wrote. Stockholm was expensive, and by the mid-1920s, Henry and Eric were both feeling financial strain. “I am not sure I’ll be able to keep up the payments as we are finding it a little tough going,” Eric wrote his brother on May 26, 1926, about one of their investments.

The dream Erickson first entertained in 1914, while sitting on the Texas-bound train headed for the Beaumont fields, was slipping from his grasp. His marriage to a Swedish native named Elsa - “a girl who [speaks] English, having lived in South Carolina, welltraveled, a good sport, the companionable type” - only increased the pressure to perform. In 1926, he took the plunge he’d been preparing for since the Texas oil-fields. He gave up his salary and went independent, risking his savings on starting a small petroleum company. Erickson built the firm using his skills as a salesman and a punishing work ethic, then sold it off to one of the majors. He immediately took the profits and started another company. It was a strategy that any American oilman would have recognized: Maximum risk for maximum reward. “Each well, whether successful or unsuccessful,” said William Mellon, founder of Gulf Oil, “provided the stimulus to drill another.” After a few years, Erickson sold his latest venture and doubled down, plowing the money into the construction of an oil terminal in Stockholm. When the terminal was completed, tankers from South America or the Middle East began to dock and unload their oil, which Erickson sold to the Nordic and central European markets. At the start of the 1930s, the Third Reich was rising to power in Germany, and Erickson was building yet another oil company, which he named Pennco. He and Elsa spent their summers in the bay town of Krokek. During the rest of the year, he traveled widely to negotiate oil contracts – from Teheran to Bucharest to Tokyo. When Stalin needed a Westerner to supervise the building of a refinery in Baku, Erickson was tapped for the job. He kept and rode

a stable of expensive horses, gambled in the South of France and owned a swank apartment in the fashionable Ostermälm neighborhood of Stockholm. Erickson had earned a life of fancy dinner parties, well-cut suits and fine English silver. These were the rewards of a long, often bitter struggle. He was content. How was he to know that war would soon change everything about his beautiful life?

Chapter Three

The Blacklist On a map of Europe, Sweden is poised like a dagger above the northern border of Germany. But by the mid-1930s, it was the larger country that began to pose a danger to its smaller, neutral neighbor. Adolf Hitler was transforming Germany into an economic and military powerhouse. He frightened his neighbors with chest-thumping aggression and talk of lebensraum, or “living space,” code words for the Reich’s territorial expansion in the East. As the leading industrial producer in Scandinavia and home to high-grade iron-ore mines, the Swedes suspected that the country lay squarely in Hitler’s sights. For Erickson, Germany’s resurgence in the 1930s meant fat profits, as he exported and imported petrochemicals to and from Germany. He may not have agreed with Hitler’s racial policies, but he was a businessman in a ruthless industry. “I hated Hitler and everything he stood for,” Erickson would later say, and his war record backs him up fully. Still, in the beginning, he didn’t mind making a fortune off the Reich. Erickson’s business ledger for Pennco shows that in 1939 he cleared a profit of 2.75 million Swedish kronor. A very conservative estimate of that figure in today’s dollars would be $10 million. After

twenty years in the oil business, Erickson was raking in astonishing sums. A Texas-sized dynasty wasn’t out of the question. As his star rose, Erickson became part of an informal circle centered around the American Embassy in Stockholm. Two men there made an especially strong impression on him: Laurence Steinhardt, a Jewish-American diplomat who’d served as Minister to Sweden in 1933, and his successor in Stockholm, Fred Sterling. “Steinhardt asked me to keep my eyes and ears open to anything that could be of use to the Allies,” Erickson remembered. “And Sterling mentioned that to his way of thinking the most important way of getting to the Nazis was to deprive them of oil.” But for now, it was just talk. America, like Sweden, was still neutral. Germany invaded and occupied Denmark and Norway in April, 1940 and Finland allied itself with Hitler. Sweden was essentially surrounded by the Reich. The country was a hostage to its own geography. By careful concessions and the use of delaying tactics, Sweden maintained its neutrality, which it had prized since the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815. But its ports were blockaded by both sides and its freighters and tankers were attacked on the open seas. King Gustav V appeased Hitler by supplying his military with essential products: ball bearings, wood, food, ships and iron ore, which made up 30 percent of Germany’s imports, and by opening up its northern borders to the Reich. Inside Sweden there was no stigma attached to doing business with Hitler. It was even considered patriotic. Most Swedes understood that if they withheld essential war supplies from Germany, the Reich would invade.

Erickson’s non-German business suffered. Fuel was a main target of the British embargo, grouped with ammunition, explosives and other items as “absolute contraband.” Swedish imports of petroleum products plunged by 88 percent between 1938 and 1944. Cut off from Western markets, Germany became the only game in town. And Erickson was hardly alone in doing business with the Reich: much to the fury of the British, Standard Oil of New Jersey was supplying the Luftwaffe with tetraethyl lead gasoline for the Messerschmitt planes that were bombing London. The oil business had always been amoral. The product went where the price was highest. Even after the West imposed a boycott on trade with Germany, Erickson scored contract after contract with the Nazis. Perhaps the profits were so fabulous he couldn’t walk away; perhaps he saw it as a matter of survival. Erickson had come of age in an industry with a highly specific vision of success and failure. “For a great many, the oil business was more like an epic card game,” said William Mellon, founder of Gulf Oil, “in which the excitement was worth more than the great stack of chips … None of us was disposed to stop, take his money out of the wells, and go home.” Walking away from the game made a man “worthless as teats on a bull.” The American was placed on the Allied blacklist of war collaborators. His greed had become a source of embarrassment to his family back in America, especially to his closest sibling, Henry. One day in 1942, Erickson received a letter from his brother, who was now working for the War Production Board. Henry’s son, the boy who, at eight months, had looked so much like his father and

uncle, had joined the Army and was training to fight in Europe. (There were, in fact, two of Eric’s nephews in the services: Lt. William Erickson of the Marines Ordinance Division and Corporal Henry Erickson of the 191st tank battalion, which would later fight its way across the Rhine at Aschaffenburg.) In the letter, Henry told Eric how mortified he was that his own brother was betraying his own country to help a dictator responsible for the deaths of so many, including, potentially, his own nephews. Henry cut off all contact with his sibling. “He would have nothing to do with me,” Erickson recalled. The letter from Henry pained him deeply. Pacing in his Stockholm apartment, Erickson recited his defense. Henry didn’t understand the oil business. The industry, like arms-dealing, was beyond right and wrong. If I don’t sell to the Reich, someone else will, he thought. Henry hadn’t been in Texas. He hadn’t absorbed the winner-take-all ethos of the oilmen. Eric had and it had changed him. Nor did Henry understand Sweden, a country under direct threat of invasion from the Third Reich. Trading with the Nazis wasn’t only socially acceptable, it was necessary. Even King Gustav V was doing it! The United States itself had only recently joined the economic blockade on the Nazis, in December 1941. Up until then, Dupont and Lockheed and other companies had been supplying the Reich with millions of dollars’ worth of war material. How could Henry condemn him when American businessmen were just as guilty? Erickson desperately tried to convince himself that his arguments were right. He brooded over his memories of Brooklyn

—the teeming house on Sterling, the sandlots, his parent’s gratitude toward the country that had taken them in. The prodigal son, he must have yearned once again to make his family proud. Slowly, the flaws in his defense became clearer. His arguments were tactical. Henry’s were moral. Days later, his defense collapsed, and Erickson was filled with remorse. No matter which way he looked at it, he had been collaborating with the Nazis. Instead of writing Henry back, Erickson left his apartment and hurried to the U.S. Embassy. He asked to meet with Wilho Tikander, the Finnish-American chief of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) mission in Scandinavia. Once in Tikander’s office, Erickson begged to be taken off the blacklist. Tikander knew about Erickson, a big man in Stockholm, his lucrative oil deals with the Reich a matter of public record. The OSS chief wasn’t inclined to help a businessman who’d gotten fabulously rich off the war. “All you have to do,” Tikander said drily, “is quit doing business with the Germans.” It was a simple solution, and, even better, it was exactly what Henry had asked him to do. But his brother had accused him of high crimes, and having his name removed wasn’t going to appease Erickson’s shame. He needed to show Henry and his family and everyone else that they’d underestimated his capacity for atonement. “I want to go further,” Erickson told Tikander. “I want to go to Germany.” Erickson volunteered to become an Allied agent. His target would be the Nazi oil industry. Henry had accused him of being small and greedy, so he would reply with an audacious gamble.

Beyond the rightness of the work—helping to defeat Hitler—it was the size of the bet that appealed to Erickson. There was one other thing: He’d accept only $1 for his services. His detractors thought he’d gotten rich off blood money, so Erickson would work for practically nothing. After a thorough interrogation, Tikander allowed Erickson to audition as a spy. He put the oilman in touch with two diplomats at the embassy, Walter Surrey and Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Sweden Herschel Johnson. These men, along with Tikander, would be Erickson’s link to the OSS and Allied Bomber Command. Together they outlined a mission that would send Erickson all over Germany and central Europe to locate the sources of the magical elixir with which Hitler was obsessed: the synthetic oil plants. Erickson’s response to Henry’s letter would be stark: either his redemption or his death.

Chapter Four

Cover To fool the enemy, Erickson needed two things: acting skills and entree. A Brooklyn-born Nazi wasn’t going to be an easy sell. He’d attended one of America’s finest universities, his brother had fought the Germans during World War I, and most of his wife’s family spoke out against the Nazis. Erickson was going to have to convince the people of Stockholm and beyond that he’d sincerely converted to fascism. His survival depended on it. In the early 1940s, Stockholm was an insular city whose social life still revolved around age-old traditions. Local worthies wore silk top hats to public gatherings, and it was almost de rigeur to own a boat and sail the archipelago. But the capital was undergoing a schizophrenic reaction to the war. Pro-Nazi parties openly advocated for a Hitler-friendly government, their rallies in the local concert halls drawing thousands of supporters. At the same time, many Swedes were firmly against Hitler and the Nazis. The country had given asylum to some 8,000 Danish Jews destined for Berkinau and Auschwitz, and did its best to protect them throughout the war. King Gustav V sent letters to Berlin, pleading with the Reich to treat its Jews more humanely. Many Stockholmers wanted England and its allies to win the war. One

popular joke said that “when it rains in London, Stockholmers immediately pull out their umbrellas.” There were clear social and political boundaries between the two camps, and in the early ‘40s, Eric Erickson was inching farther and farther across the invisible line that separated the liberals of Stockholm from the Hitlerites.

In the beginning, to build his new identity and to spread his name among the German expat community, the spy orchestrated several small deals with Berlin businessmen living in Sweden. He attended receptions and parties at the German embassy—glittering affairs where he chatted up luminaries like Wilhelm Kortner, a highranking official who was rumored to be the personal representative in Sweden of Heinrich Himmler. Before long Erickson could be spotted at Stockholm’s best restaurants, giving Hitler salutes to his new friends as they joined him for dinner. He was heard laughing at their viciously anti-Semitic jokes (including the ones that referred to Jews as Judesvin, or “Jewish swine”) and making unconscious “slips” where he revealed a growing enchantment with Mein Kampf. Erickson always made sure that these slips happened with one or more Germans in earshot. It was not until one of his new Berlin friends sponsored him for membership in the German Chamber of Commerce that Erickson’s pro-Nazism became more than a rumor. Erickson showed up at every meeting. He listened intently to the speeches and tried to understand how Nazis saw the outside world; how they spoke and flirted and did business; what they valued and what they despised.

He was especially fascinated by the Gestapo men that came through Stockholm and enjoyed long, leisurely dinners with their fellow Germans. “Some of the SS men were rather decent people,” Erickson remembered, “except for the fact that they believed in Hitler and all that he stood for: murder and treachery.” Though entry into German circles came relatively easy, Erickson sensed there was something missing in his performance. Every imposter needs a prop, not just to fool his enemies, but for his own immersion in the role—a kind of psychological totem. One afternoon, Erickson went shopping at an art store in Stockholm, browsed the aisles, and returned home with a package under his arm. He unwrapped his purchase and carefully mounted it above the fireplace in his study, where his new friends were sure to see it. Once it was up, Erickson stepped back to eye it from across the room. The edges were straight. The glow of the fire flickered across the oiled surface, lending the object a lambent warmth. Erickson smiled. It was perfect. The portrait of Adolf Hitler would hang in his study until the end of the war.

As Erickson made progress in his transformation into a Nazi, he was failing miserably as a secret agent. Talk at parties and Chamber of Commerce meetings was spiced with references to Göring and Hess, but no introductions were forthcoming. There were tantalizing references to new oil plants being built in Germany, but few specifics. Erickson tried to pursue the leads but got nowhere; the diplomats and businessmen who’d become his

friends turned out to be too far from the action. Erickson realized that his real work was in Berlin and not in this distant, frozen capital. It became increasingly difficult to keep up the charade of being a Nazi. Erickson had already destroyed his good name, and for what? He was a non-factor in the war. He hadn’t passed a single bit of actionable intelligence to the Allies. He traveled to Germany occasionally, but met only with his old contacts, who let him tour the same refineries over and over again. He couldn’t get meetings with the officials who controlled the major oil contracts. Without those contracts, he had no excuse to visit the factories. And without those visits, he couldn’t tell the Allies where to bomb. Erickson didn’t give up. He showed up religiously at pro-Nazi dinners at popular Stockholm restaurants, where he soaked up the latest Wehrmacht gossip—who in the High Command was up and who was down, whose wife had a drinking problem or difficulty keeping her dresses on—while trying to ignore the disapproving gazes of former friends. The American had time on his hands to parse the reactions of his ex-pals, and he found the varieties of disgust fascinating. Some Swedes looked at him in horror, believing he’d fallen under the spell of Mein Kampf. They spotted him and quickly looked away, the blood draining from their faces. But the more sophisticated of his former friends would often catch his eye and offer a discreet smile or a nod. It took a few weeks for Erickson to figure out what was happening; eventually, he heard a piece of gossip that explained those lingering glances. These men weren’t fooled. Erickson was no National Socialist. Instead, they believed, Erickson was carrying out the long-range plot of

ingratiating himself with the Hitlerites in case of a German invasion of Sweden, or a Nazi victory in the war. If either of those things happened, not only would Erickson be protected, he would vault to the top of the Swedish oil business. Erickson found the stares of these highly intelligent men–which said, I almost wish I could do what you’re doing, old man–harder to take than the stricken looks of those who considered him a monster. He grew depressed. His mission felt spectral; he seemed to be an actor in a one-man play with no audience. More than once he thought of quitting. Tikander and the American handlers were carefully monitoring his progress, but they had other pressing business, sources that were actually producing information. Erickson followed his own instincts, receiving little guidance from the OSS as he built his cover identity. He wondered why he’d received no specific instructions. At one point, months into his mission, a letter did arrive by messenger at his Stockholm apartment, with no return address. Erickson opened the envelope: “Erickson: The deal you discussed with Laurence seems to be going nicely. The commission arrangement you suggested is acceptable: five per cent to yourself and two percent to each of your two associates. This is to assure you that we have been moving ahead at our end and are keeping track of all developments with keen interest. We expect it to prove profitable for all concerned. Keep up the good work and count on our full cooperation …

Best wishes, Richard” The American smiled, feeling a surge of gratitude. The message appeared to be an ordinary note from a business contact, one of the dozens he received monthly as the owner of his company. But he’d never met “Richard,” and doubted he even existed. The letter was a cleverly-worked message from the OSS, telling him they approved of his work. If it had been intercepted, no one except Erickson and the man who sent it would be able to glean its true meaning. Erickson read the note again, then took it to the fireplace and tossed it into the flames. For a brief moment he felt like a genuine spy. Every few months, he received another note from Richard, telling him that “the deal” was progressing nicely. Twice his phone rang and a man with an American accent identified himself with the same code-name. He told Erickson to proceed, and to remain patient.

Chapter Five

The Prince To catch Berlin’s eye, Erickson needed a partner, someone who could provide entree to the powerful cliques that controlled German business. Soon he and the OSS settled on a possible candidate: Prince Carl Gustaf Oscar Frederick Christian Bernadotte, nephew of King Gustav V and brother-in-law of Belgium’s King Leopold, the bloody-minded imperialist of the Congo. The prince was a striking young man in his late 20s, already making a name for himself as a bit of an oddball, a thrill-seeker, and a libertine (many of Erickson’s friends were playboys in the old-world, “I-own-a-chateau-in-the-Côte-d’Azur” sense). Prince Carl—his family called him Mulle—was the youngest child and only son born to Prince Carl of Sweden and Princess Ingeborg of Denmark, scion of a family that had ruled Sweden since 1818. He stood fifth in line to the throne. Carl was almost but not quite movie-star handsome, with a long aquiline nose and slicked-back hair in the style of Errol Flynn. In school, he studied business, became fluent in Esperanto, and served as an officer in a cavalry company. In his teens and early 20s, Carl developed a reputation for wildness. “There were traditional princely incidents of motor accidents following erratic driving,” said the UK Telegraph

diplomatically, implying either that Carl liked to drink or was just plain reckless. He was impulsive, perhaps a little spoiled, and not afraid of stirring up controversy. Later in life, he and a friend marched into the headquarters of the Stockholm Criminal Investigation Department to report they’d just seen a “flying saucer.” Carl and his friend, a film director, were driving along when the UFO lit up the sky with a burning light. The prince immediately stopped the car and opened the door to listen. His report, which caused a sensation, was “instantly classified” and the Swedish General Staff launched an investigation into the matter. They concluded that the prince and his friend had seen a fireball, if they’d seen anything at all. By the time he was being considered for the Erickson plot, Carl had managed to get himself barred from any consideration of becoming king, due to his misadventures in love. In 1933, the prince had set out on a trip around the world. During his port of call in the Netherlands, he was rumored to have fallen for Princess Julia, heir to the Dutch throne, whose family was desperate for a Protestant male groom to take the reins of state. The feeling was mutual. But something broke down, either the romance itself or negotiations between the two families. The relationship ended and in 1937. The prince then sealed his fate by marrying a divorcee, the daughter of the Master of Ceremonies at the ancient Swedish court. Because his bride was a commoner, Prince Carl had to relinquish his claim to the throne. Like King Edward VIII before him, Carl had traded the crown for love. He would go on to divorce his wife and remarry twice more: once to a builder’s daughter, and finally to a maid.

Despite his eccentricities, Prince Carl was widely admired by the Swedish people. His “adventurous spirit and total lack of pomposity” was a relief from the remote, austere figures of King Gustav V. In recruiting him, the OSS must have reasoned that a more sober and well-established royal might not have been available to impersonate a Nazi. The prince quickly agreed to join the plot, and the OSS began spreading rumors that he was not only a black sheep of the King’s family, but a Hitler sympathizer. They carefully chose the time and place for the prince’s coming-out party: one afternoon at the veranda cafe of the imposing five-star Grand Hotel that looks out over the Prussian blue waters of Lake Mälaren. Erickson invited Carl for lunch with a group of his German friends. Stockholmers gaped as the prince sat down with the crème de la crème of the city’s pro-Nazi elite and began chatting about some of his favorite things: horses, sailboats, skiing. It was, for right-thinking Swedes, an omen and a disgusting spectacle. One man at a nearby table called over a waiter and asked to be moved away from the Prince’s group. In one stroke, Erickson become not only a collaborator, but a corrupter of Swedish nobility. But in espionage terms, it was a coup. Together, he and the prince began courting local Germans, looking for a way into Hitler’s inner circle. Watching the Nazis mingle, boasting loudly of what was happening back in the home country, the spy realized something that would prove essential to his mission: The Nazis were very, very vain. “I wouldn’t have been able to do it without Carl,” Erickson said, “because we found out

quickly that the Nazis loved the idea of dining with royalty. They were snobs, but most of them didn’t come from the fine Germany families. When I helped them get their names in the papers, saying they were seen with So-and-So, they were very happy. So they fell for Carl straight away.” To that end, Erickson began playing to the Nazis’ egos, inviting them to the city’s hotspots, where he arranged for the prince to drop by their table for a glass of whiskey. “It always seemed that when we had these lunches, some photographer would always come by at the right moment, and a picture was taken showing the prince with his new friend.” The SS man would hurry back to Berlin with the photo tucked in his leather suitcase: The prince, the charming American businessman and the Nazi, their smiles loosened by several glasses of Glenlivet. But the masquerade came at a price. With every German friend he made, another Swedish one dropped away, muttering curses. When he showed up at his favorite restaurant, Bellmansro’s on Djurgården Island, people turned their backs on him. “When we went out, nobody wanted anything to do with us.” Stockholm was tense. Norway and Denmark had been occupied, an invasion of Sweden was a real possibility and reports of atrocities involving Jews and political prisoners trickled in over the radio waves. So Erickson and his royal consort were, understandably, snubbed wherever they went. “It was very unpleasant,” he remembered. Especially for a bon vivant like Erickson who could never resist a party. Perhaps the biggest obstacle to Erickson’s transformation into a pseudo-Nazi was his best friend, Max Gumpel. Gumpel was a wealthy, two-time Olympian who’d twice medaled in water polo

before going on to build a sprawling construction empire. Like Erickson, Gumpel was a playboy. He owned several motorboats, and was often seen cruising up and down Stockholm’s waterways. He even dated Greta Garbo before she moved to Hollywood. Garbo liked him so much that she would stay with him on trips home to Sweden. Gumpel thought the world of Eric Erickson. He’d helped Erickson build a refinery for his company, and the two had formed a deep bond. “I had a very real and esteemed impression of your morals and honesty,” he wrote to Erickson. “Your thoughts were always clear and filled with high and honest ideals.” Unfortunately for the spy plot, Gumpel was a Jew. When Erickson began to inexplicably change into a fascist, heiling the Nazi officers from the terrace of the Grand Hotel, Gumpel was appalled. “I thought he would go crazy,” Erickson said later. The issue came to a head one evening when Erickson invited Gumpel to dinner with an entrepreneur named Lenshoek, a famously stylish man-about-town who also happened to be one of Denmark’s most prominent Nazis. Erickson and Gumpel listened as Lenshoek spoke glowingly of the Wehrmacht, how admirable its officer corps was, how unstoppable its momentum. Gumpel went ash-pale. He began arguing with the Dane, who announced that the Nordic countries “could not govern themselves and needed a Führer.” Hitler, he said, “was ordained to be the high ruler of a united states of Europe.” A year earlier, Erickson would have called Lenshoek a fool and cut him dead. But now, with Gumpel watching, he nodded approvingly at the idea of Hitler ruling Sweden and the rest of

Europe. Gumpel was speechless. He couldn’t believe that Erickson was siding with the Germans. “Do you know how fucked up this all is?” he whispered to Erickson. After the dinner, the two friends walked home together and Gumpel promptly tore into the American for his betrayal. But Erickson could say nothing. If Erickson was to be a secret agent, he had to horrify Gumpel. Should the American oilman and the Jew remain close, the Germans would never believe that Erickson was on their side. The spy had to sacrifice his Jewish friend in order to convince the Nazis he was genuine. “Max,” Erickson said, “whatever you hear or think, all I ask is that you believe in me.” It was the most Erickson could say without risking the mission. The two didn’t talk for the rest of the war.

The break with Gumpel was painful, but far worse was to come. His wife, Elsa, who thought she’d married a successful, charming, liberal businessman and had expected a life of parties and backgammon in Stockholm, was now living with a fascist. Elsa had no idea why Erickson had changed so drastically. “She didn’t know a thing about what I was doing.” Nevertheless, Elsa shared his fate as an outcast. Her friends and family turned on her and she was shunned in the streets and boulevards of Stockholm. Soon she was exhibiting signs of extreme nervous tension. Unable to bear the public hatred of almost everyone she knew, and horrified by Eric’s new friends, Elsa was slowly becoming unstable.

The American had no choice but to send his wife to an asylum. Elsa would be in and out of the place for the entirety of the war, and the two would divorce in 1949. After their split, Erickson rarely talked about her. Perhaps it was simple guilt, or maybe the mad wife didn’t go with the triumphant nature of the story. Perhaps he knew, if he’d trusted her, she could have come out of the war a different, far healthier, person. Even as his personal life fell apart, Erickson faced stiff resistance from the Nazis he was trying to bamboozle. Many of them were suspicious of Erickson’s sudden transformation. “A few of the higher-up Germans said to me, ‘Erickson, I don’t believe a word that you say. You’re an American and always will be.’” The spy looked around for a way in. He was already widely despised in Stockholm. His friends had turned their backs on him. He couldn’t possibly make himself any more hated in his adopted country than he already was. How could he convince the Nazis he was one of them? “It was difficult,” Erickson said of this time in his life. “I began to think the whole mission was all a bit meaningless.”

On his trips to Berlin, Erickson began to notice the scarcity of luxuries in the capital. Due to the economic blockade, there was little but essentials in the shops: meat, wheat, perhaps milk, but little else. He thought about it for weeks and decided to try to use the blockade in his favor. On his next business trip to Germany, he stuffed his luggage with embargoed items unavailable in Berlin and delivered them to the homes of his German friends—not to the

husbands whom he was courting, but to their better halves. “I would bring silk stockings, gin, whiskey and champagne and give them to the wife,” Erickson said. “That was the best strategy I ever came up with.” It wasn’t only the Scottish whiskey and the stockings that mattered to the German wives. It was fact that Erickson was willing to risk fines and even jail time for people the West regarded as depraved. By smuggling a few things to brighten his friends’ lives, he demonstrated to these women that he genuinely cared about them and their families. Erickson was a link to the outside world, to Paris and London and memories of the things they enjoyed before the war. The manners, the implied concern, as much as the gift, mattered. “When the husband would come home,” he remembered, “the wife would say ‘That man can be trusted.’” Finally, in late 1942, the work paid off. Erickson was invited to Germany to pitch some oil deals to the Reich. He made reservations to fly from Stockholm to Berlin and notified his OSS handlers about the trip. They were delighted. The scheme was beginning to take hold. After months of ingratiating himself with the pro-Nazi elite, Erickson’s cover was firmly established. He was a leading pro-German businessman in an industry that the Reich needed to win the war: oil. He’d recruited a partner in the scheme who had strong connections to the Swedish royal family. He’d advertised his willingness to get the Germans the hydrocarbon products they needed, no matter the personal cost.

On paper, he was a hot prospect. But Berlin wasn’t Stockholm, and the American knew more rigorous tests awaited him.

Chapter Six

Berlin On his departure date, Erickson packed his bags with the usual embargoed goodies, said goodbye to his wife and drove to the airport in Stockholm. He checked his luggage and proceeded to the gate. He showed his ticket and boarded a small propeller plane to Berlin. The other passengers on board were well-dressed, in suits and dresses, a business crowd in a time when flying was still an upper-class thing. Just before the plane taxied to the runway, two men in street clothes enter the cabin. They spoke briefly with the stewardess, their eyes scanning the rows of passengers. “Which one of you is Eric Erickson?” one called out. Erickson, startled, motioned them over. Was Elsa ill? Or was there a problem at Pennco? “I’m Erickson,” he said. “What can I do for you?” “You’ll have to come with us.” “Come with you?” Erickson replied. “Who are you anyway?” The men flashed their badges: Swedish police. Erickson protested that the plane was leaving in a few minutes. The undercover officers told him that they’d hold the plane for him, if they decided to let him back onboard.

“What?” said the hot-tempered Erickson. “What sort of damned idiocy is this?” The men grabbed Erickson’s luggage and escorted him down the aisle. The reason for such a public humiliation was clear to the spy: the Swedish government couldn’t openly oppose Germany. It was simply too powerful. But the Swedes, who had no idea the American was in fact a secret agent for the Allies, could make it known how much they despised collaborators. Erickson was taken to a border patrol office, where he was strip-searched and cross-examined. The police even took out some of the expensive cigars he was bringing as gifts for highranking Nazis, and broke them apart, perhaps to see if he was smuggling microfilm or other secret information. Erickson was a powerfully built man, and in the tiny interrogation room, he nearly lost his composure. He demanded to know why he was being treated like a criminal, but the police refused to answer. The confrontation nearly became physical. Finally, after twenty minutes, Erickson was escorted back to the plane and allowed to fly to Germany. After the war, the OSS confessed to Erickson that they’d set up the whole thing. Tikander and the Americans had called the Swedish police and reported that a suspicious character was betraying the state and should be searched thoroughly before being allowed to fly to Berlin. They didn’t, however, inform Erickson. “You couldn’t have reacted the way you did if we’d told you that you were going to be questioned,” Tikander said. “We had to do it, especially when we knew who was on the plane with you.”

It turned out that the pilot on the flight was Count Carl-Gustaf von Rosen, nephew of Hermann Göring, chief of the Luftwaffe. As the plane descended into Templehof airport in Berlin, Erickson gazed out his small window. Down below was something he’d never seen at Templehof: row after row of trees partially disguising the runways. Planes were hidden under the trees and the hangars roofs were painted to look like shrubbery. The new look of Templehof wasn’t for show. Berlin was protecting itself from Allied bombers. Erickson hailed a taxi to a meeting with the German bureaucrats in charge of the Reich’s oil contracts. Berlin looked dingier, more menacing. Buildings he remembered as being crisp and white on his last visit now turned a grimy face to the world. Baroque landmarks were draped in camouflage netting. Streets teemed with Gestapo men in their black uniforms, and Erickson saw Wehrmacht troops in light-green wool and steel helmets packed into the backs of transport trucks, one after the other streaming down the highway. Civilian traffic was light, which indicated to Erickson that wartime gas rationing was already in place. There were even signs that the early bombing raids were having an effect: Erickson caught quick glimpses of streets that had been roped off, with mounds of rubble and half-demolished buildings visible in the distance. The meeting didn’t go well. The officials were friendly enough, but dubious about the whole project. They were concerned with richer prospects, especially the synthetic oil facilities where German scientists were making huge strides in turning coal into

fuel. He chatted up the functionaries, but they couldn’t give Erickson what he truly wanted: access to the plants. Discouraged and uneasy, Erickson returned to the Hotel Eden. A few minutes after he’d arrived, the black phone on the bedside table rang. It was the front desk. An officer of the Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsfuhrers (SD), the intelligence arm of the SS, was waiting for him downstairs. Erickson told the clerk he’d be right down. His heart was pounding rapidly. If the SD had found out his secret, he was bound for one of the concentration camps, such as Oranienburg, which specialized in secret agents and saboteurs. Hitler, who despised spies (even his own), had directed that any secret agents be given a special distinction at the guillotine. They were turned face-upwards and forced to watch the blade descend toward their neck. Erickson took the elevator down, spotted the SD officer in the lobby and was ushered into the back seat of a Mercedes. His escort sat beside him, with two more officers up front. The black Mercedes swung through the half-empty streets. How do they know who I am? Erickson asked himself. He thought back on his time in Stockholm. Had someone seen him with the American diplomats? Was he being watched in Sweden? The SD men said nothing. Erickson’s throat grew dry as he watched the driver heading toward the city center. The car pulled up in front of a gigantic, gray stone building, five stories high. 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse had been built as an extension of Berlin’s Museum of Decorative Arts, but it now housed the offices of the Concentration Camps Inspectorate, which controlled Auschwitz and the other camps. Another state agency was

headquartered there as well: the Gestapo. Hundreds of suspected spies and saboteurs had disappeared into its interrogation rooms and prison cells. The Gestapo had built a bureaucracy at 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse that specialized in the extraction of usable information. First, the prisoner would undergo an interrogation under blazing white lights, where the SD officer would slap, kick and thrash them. If the information wasn’t forthcoming, a torturer was brought in. Whipping was the preferred technique and the Gestapo employed guards who specialized in it. The guard sometimes used a whip dipped in water or petroleum jelly, as they bit deeper into the skin than a dry one. The prisoners were often tied to a table and beaten until they were unconscious. If the suspect still wouldn’t talk, fingernails were torn out with pliers. If even that failed, truncheons, rifle butts and clubs embedded with rusty nails were brought in. Erickson, who knew about No. 8, grew pale. He was hurried out of the Mercedes and up the stone stairs. As he waited, uncertain of what exactly was happening, his papers were checked carefully by SD guards, his briefcase searched. He was led up the interior stairwell and ushered into the office of Heinrich Himmler, the bespectacled chief of the Gestapo and one of the prime movers behind the Final Solution. Himmler was the son of a middle-class teacher from Munich, raised in a devout Catholic household. He’d been radicalized in his early 20s as the hyper-inflation of the Weimar Republic ended his hopes for a university degree and tipped Germany into political and economic crisis. Himmler had been with Hitler since 1923,

when the Nazi party numbered only a few thousand. He was the Führer’s right hand man. Himmler was also a brilliantly efficient purveyor of terror. It was from this building that orders for the rounding-up and execution of Jews, gypsies, Slavs and resisters of every stripe were sent out daily to the far corners of the Nationalist Socialist empire. Outside of the prisons of Moabit and Plötzensee, there was arguably no more dreaded space in Berlin than the one Erickson was entering. The secret agent took in the scene. “It was incredible,” he remembered. “There were bodyguards everywhere.” The office itself was enormous. If you ignored the portrait of Hitler hanging behind the desk, just like the painting in Erickson’s study back in Stockholm, the room was “just what you might expect to see in any American office of [an executive]–Oriental carpets, some photos of Himmler’s friends.” The furniture was made of the heavy, dark, polished wood that upper-class Germans favored. Erickson had been in and out of suites like this for most of his life. It was all so eerily familiar. Himmler sat behind his desk. The Gestapo chief was in profile, turned to face a well-coiffed woman sitting on a stool, holding the Reichsführer’s hand in hers. Himmler was getting a manicure. Erickson was annoyed. Nothing irritated him more a man who treated himself to such pampering. The American walked purposefully toward the large mahogany desk. With his poor vision, receding hairline and weak chin, Himmler exuded the unthreatening manner of an American businessman—a member of

the Indiana Rotary, perhaps. He was dressed smartly in a lightgreen Wehrmacht uniform and, to Erickson, looked “more like a small town teacher than the head of the SS.” Erickson braced for a confrontation. But instead of accusing him of working for the Allies, Himmler stood and pumped his hand vigorously, telling the astonished spy, “I’ve just heard that you have many enemies in Sweden because you believe in us.” Himmler had heard of Erickson’s trouble trying to get out of Sweden. Seated a few rows behind him on the plane, Himmler explained, were two SS officers returning from a business trip. They’d witnessed his humiliation at the hands of the Swedes. Only a true Nazi, the officers were convinced, would have been singled out for such abuse. Erickson couldn’t believe his luck; the Gestapo boss was treating him like a celebrity. “They seemed to have faith in me.” The OSS had known all along that the Nazi officers were going to be onboard that flight. They were the audience for the show the Americans had staged. Erickson sat down in a leather chair and chatted easily with Himmler as the manicure continued. Finding the Gestapo chief “smart” and pleasant in person, he relaxed and made his pitch for oil contracts. Himmler demurred, saying he would consider the offer, but that there were hundreds of businessmen who wanted the contracts, and Erickson would have to compete with them. After thirty minutes, the secret agent left the meeting without a deal but encouraged by his reception.

The next day one of Himmler’s assistants, Baron von Löw, asked Erickson to stop by his office for some question. Von Löw began to grill him about his whereabouts for the last twenty-five years. “I was asked where I was on a certain date in 1916, 1918, 1921 and so on.” Erickson’s felt a cold chill zig-zagging up his spine, but managed to give the correct answers “with a laugh.” (Later, when he’d gotten to know the Gestapo officer better, Erickson asked him the reason for those odd questions. It turned out that German intelligence knew he’d gone to Cornell and had written the alumni department in Ithaca, asking where their letters to the graduate had been sent in those particular years. Then they’d cross-checked those cities with the answers the American had given. “Only a German with their sense of tabulating every piece of information could have thought of that one.”) Von Löw quickly changed the subject. “Why are you, an American so eager to do business with us, when …” He slid a newspaper, a copy of Joseph Goebbels’ rabble-rousing newspaper, Der Angriff, across to Erickson. The headline read: “PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT WANTS GERMANY DESTROYED.” Erickson frowned. “This has nothing to do with me,” he said dismissively. He argued that he was a Swede, an Aryan by birth, and a businessman. He admired the Germans for rebuilding their country after the devastation of World War I. His American roots, Erickson argued, were irrelevant. What about Mein Kampf, his interrogator asked. And the occupation of Norway? What if the Reich invaded Sweden, would Erickson approve of that? And would he be willing to go to back to America and lobby for German interests?

Von Löw switched topics quickly, looped back and approached from a new angle, trying to rattle Erickson. The American needed to tread carefully. His cover was a businessman eager to make money off the Reich, not a Jew-hating fanatic. Having rehearsed his answers for months in Stockholm restaurants, he now coolly parried the questions, answering yes to some, no to others (he didn’t think going back to America as a known war collaborator would be a good idea). The spy maintained his poise, though his heart was pounding and he felt short of breath. Von Löw finished the questioning without drawing blood. The Gestapo man nodded, and the American was dismissed. Erickson left Berlin knowing he’d made progress. The Germans now believed he was a persecuted Nazi who wanted to do make money off the Reich. And he’d won the trust, at least for the moment, of the second most powerful man in Germany.

Chapter Seven

The Bergius Process At the time of Erickson’s visit, Himmler and the rest of the German leadership were acutely aware of Germany’s oil problem. The country had few domestic deposits and, even in the pre-war years, relied heavily on exports. For example, in 1938, a typical peacetime year, Germany consumed a total of 44 million barrels of oil. Twenty-eight million barrels were imported from overseas, which meant that the Reich could produce domestically only 29.5 percent of the oil it needed, long before the panzer tank divisions and Luftwaffe air patrol created massive new demands for fuel. By 1944, Germany would more than quadruple its consumption to 209 million barrels per year. The huge disparity in what Germany produced and what it consumed was a persistent worry for Hitler and the High Command. When it invaded Poland in 1939, Germany had only 15 million barrels in reserve. A May 1941 study estimated the country would run out of fuel by August of that year. In an era before fuel-efficient engines, armies could go through a lake of gas in the blink of an eye. Take the medium-sized German Panther tank, used from the middle of 1943 to the end of the war. The Panther sported a Maybach V-12 engine that got about a third

of a mile per gallon on good roads, and even less than that when it was crashing through French hedgerows. That’s one-third of a mile for every gallon in its 190-gallon tank. If you multiply that one statistic across the entirety of the far-flung German war machine, it’s clear that the Third Reich was burning a staggering amount of fuel. It’s no wonder that Hitler was obsessed with oil, and had been for years. The Führer understood that a mechanized army lived and died on the black stuff. Without it, his panzer divisions would be stuck in muddy Belgian fields away from the front lines, his fighter planes would be grounded in Berlin, and his vision of a thousand-year empire would be over before it began. There were three ways Germany could obtain enough oil to run its armies: conquest, alliances or science. At the beginning of the war, Germany relied largely on the first two strategies. The invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941, was partially driven by Hitler’s desire to capture the rich deposits in the Caucasus, and his 1940 pact with General Ian Antonescu gained him access to the highly productive Romanian fields. Hitler also plotted to tap the Middle East’s reserves by sending General Rommel and his Afrika Korps to Egypt and Libya in February 1941. At the same time, satellite states were being starved of heating oil and gasoline. On July 23, 1942, Göring wrote Hans Frank, the Governor-General of Poland, ordering him to slash supplies to the civilian population so that the Wehrmacht’s needs could be met. The third part of the strategy, which involved finding new ways to produce gas domestically, was left to Germany’s scientists and petrochemical industry. Hitler had met with the executives at one chemical conglomerate, I.G. Farben (which later produced Zyklon-

B, the lethal gas used in the extermination camps) as early as 1932, and demanded they increase the amount of synthetic oil the country produced. As coal and petroleum are both composed of hydrocarbons, the Germans had developed four different methods for extracting fuel from coal, which they had in abundance. The most promising, hydrogenation, produced gasoline with a high octane rating of up to 72, essential for delivering power to the internal combustion engine. The technique was first perfected by the German chemist Friedrich Bergius in 1913. In the Bergius process, bituminous coal is ground down and dried before a catalyst – tungsten, nickel oleate or other substances – is mixed in. The substance is then pumped into a reactor and subjected to hydrogen and extreme heat, eventually producing a mixture of heavy oils, medium-weight oils and gasoline. Once the scientists had perfected the Bergius process, industrialists built synthetic plants in the Ruhr, central Germany and Silesia, which began producing thousands of gallons of fuel a week. No country, even today, has been able to match Germany’s wartime production of synthetic fuel. The Bergius process offered the Third Reich the promise of a permanent supply of oil and gas. Hitler and his lieutenants believed that, if they could protect the synthetic plants, they would be able to wage war on the Allies for as long as they chose. But the opposite was also true: if the synthetic plants were put out of commission, Germany would quickly run out of fuel, a fact well known to Albert Speer, the Minister of War Production. “Speer lived in mortal fear that the Allied air chiefs would target Germany’s perilously grouped synthetic plants,” writes aviation

historian Donald Miller. Speer later confirmed this. “The planned assault …,” he wrote, “caused the greatest anxieties about the future conduct of the war.” If Speer had known about Eric Erickson, his anxiety would have increased considerably.

Shortly after the Himmler meeting, Erickson received some good news. The incident at the airport had given the American an edge on his competition. The Germans were offering him a contract for 500 tons of oil. He accepted immediately. Erickson began working Berlin as a second-story-man would work a posh Monaco hotel. He got in touch with his contacts in the oil business and toured their facilities, noting every new compressor and extra storage tank. He endeavored to be seen at all the right places in the capital, in the company of the right people. Evenings found him at parties or lavish dinners, his eyes twinkling, hoisting champagne flutes with the German elite. He danced with the wives of Nazis, swinging through dance floors crowded with officers in crisply tailored uniforms and women wearing their best pre-war French frocks, along with gems from the boutique of Emil Lettre, famous Berlin goldsmith and jeweler. During the parties, silk stockings and bottles of gin emerged from Erickson’s bags and were handed to the doyennes of Berlin society with a sly quip. The OSS had other agents, German ones, inside enemy lines passing information to their handlers. Erickson encountered one fellow spy at a high-society party where he fished for new contacts

among the black-clad Gestapo and the brown-shirts of the SD. The elegantly-dressed woman was accompanied by none other than Lenshoek, the Dane who’d infuriated Erickson’s friend Max Gumpel months earlier. Lenshoek introduced his companion as AnneMaria Freudenreich. Erickson bowed slightly and studied the German woman as he chatted with the couple. From the way the Dane stuck close to Anne-Maria, Erickson was sure that Lenshoek was trying to maneuver her into bed. Erickson could see why. Anne-Maria was a dark-haired German beauty, elegant and a bit haughty. She intrigued the American. Her conversation sparkled; she radiated waves of “energy and vivacity.” Though he he’d been married for fifteen years, Erickson fell in love almost immediately. “I was infatuated with her. She was a dream of a woman.” Anne-Maria was engaged in an even more dangerous game than Erickson. Born in Germany to a land-owning family, she’d been educated in Britain and France and counted the rich and powerful among her friends. She was a confirmed monarchist who made it clear to Erickson that she harbored “a very firm hatred toward the Nazi party.” Like the American, Anne-Maria was playing a part: her background gave her entree to parties where Germany’s most powerful men drank and gossiped. She made friends with Hitler’s officers, asked seemingly innocuous questions, then passed on the information to the OSS. “She told me she couldn’t stand Hitler and his excesses,” Erickson said. “She insisted that he was destroying the German nation, that he had brought shame and hate upon her people.” Erickson and Anne-Maria became lovers. Whenever Erickson went to Germany, he would meet her in rented room, bringing

“love gifts” chosen specially for her in Stockholm. Anne-Maria sent him photographs, including one informal shot of her in a floral dressing gown where she’s leaning back, smiling happily, as she brushes a spray of flowers away from her face. Along with photos, the couple exchanged love letters through the heavily censored German mail system. This came at a time when the SD, the internal German intelligence agency, had thousands of workers checking mail and tapping phone lines in search of traitors and saboteurs. For the most part, Erickson was a scrupulous agent. He took risks, but only the ones he needed to. He’d been especially patient in building his cover story in the early years of the war and had deftly brushed aside the Gestapo’s questions on his background. But when it came to Anne-Maria, the American seemed to abandon everything he’d learned about tradecraft. The CIA and most other spy agencies forbid their field agents from getting involved with each other or with their sources (unless they’re trying to blackmail them). Intelligence handlers even frown on their agents being seen together in public. That’s the point of dead drops and other secret methods of communication. If two assets have any kind of relationship and one of them is caught, the other is in immediate danger. By falling in love with each other in Berlin, Erickson and Anne-Maria were doubling their chances of dying in a concentration camp.

On his return from Germany, Erickson rushed home to his apartment in Ostermälm and wrote up a report of everything he’d learned, relying almost completely on memory. (It was too

dangerous to carry notes within Germany.) His reports were terse and included details on tank and airplane factories as well as oil plants. From one of his communiques: Böhln: Refinery outside of Leipzig in operation, with new gas wells. Korn-Neubruk: A few miles outside Wien. This is a small new plant for the new Vienna Basin. Intact on October 18th. There are other plants in this area finished and one under construction. Berchersgrend: This place is apparently not to be found on any map, since it’s in a new suburb between Berlin and Jüterbog. The plant is manufacturing turbines for the new plane. Plant is a tremendous size, and is very well concealed in the woods. Around it there is double-wire fencing about 2.5 meters. About 8000 workers in three shifts. Estimated capacity by the end of the year, about 2400 turbines. The new plane has no propellor, speed 720km/hour. Witnessed trial flights as both Ludwigshafen and Friedrichshafen. It was risky for Erickson to be seen entering the American embassy or passing the report to Surrey and Johnson at a Stockholm restaurant. There were too many German spies lurking in the city. Posters that Erickson often passed on his way to his apartment showed a tiger painted in pinstripes of yellow and blue (the national colors of Sweden since 1275) and the slogan En svensk tiger, which meant either “A Swedish tiger,” or “A Swede stays

silent.” The poster was a warning to Stockholmers to avoid talking to foreigners, who could be serving enemy governments. Instead of using public spaces, Erickson arranged to meet his handlers in one of the Stockholm apartments the Americans rented for the purpose, with codenames like “Club 49.” There he passed on his notes and sketches of the plants. Soon the reports were being couriered to Washington, with copies to Allied Bomber Command in London.

Chapter Eight

Moabit Erickson traveled to Germany month after month, ferreting out more plants and passing their coordinates to the OSS. Evenings, in his Ostermälm apartment, he would tune his radio to the BBC for the world news bulletin and listen all the way through. In the morning, over coffee, he would scan the pages of the Ordinari Post Tijdender, the Stockholm newspaper, looking for reports of bombing raids on the targets he’d discovered. But as 1943 wore on, there were few, if any, attacks on oil targets. Instead, the BBC announcers listed the latest cities to be targeted: Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Berlin (he thought inevitably of Anne-Maria). When he returned to Germany, he visited the same refineries whose locations he’d passed to Bomber Command, and found them unmarked, running smoothly, producing oil and gas for the Wehrmacht. Erickson grew increasingly frustrated. He’d infiltrated the small circle of industrialists that owned the oil refineries and plants, even visiting some of the secret locations, always with an escort. (Foreigners were not allowed to travel alone through Nazi Germany; an SS guard had to accompany the American at all

times.) But Erickson wanted to see and report on every plant in Central Europe. And no one was being granted that kind of access. The situation inside Germany was tense; Erickson could sense it in the strained faces he passed on the streets and in the bitter gossip of his Nazi friends. He read story after story about the capture of saboteurs, lethal suspicions between the intelligence agents of the SD and their rivals at the Abwehr. Arrests were made en masse. Dozens of Allied spies were put to death at the Bavarian concentration camp known as Flossenbürg, which specialized in espionage cases. Between 1943 and 1945, the People’s Court sentenced 7,000 people to death on one of the twenty gallows that the Reich had built across Germany, or at the Berlin guillotines, where one execution could be carried out every three minutes. That fall, Berlin’s Plötzensee prison was hit by an Allied bombing raid, which damaged the prison walls and destroyed the jail’s only guillotine. To prevent escapes, on the nights of September 7th and 8th, 186 prisoners were hurried to the gallows in groups of eight and hanged. Berlin had the air of a city under psychological siege. Erickson, too, felt his thoughts turning increasingly paranoid. The Gestapo was hunting its enemies in the streets of Berlin, and his exposure to arrest increased with every trip. Stockholm offered little relief. Erickson continued to be a social leper there; the cheery, closeknit life of dinner parties and Christmas gatherings that he and Elsa had known was over. Perhaps Erickson’s almost frantic work schedule–he would make between 30 and 40 trips to the Reich in the war years–was dictated not only by his hatred of Hitler, but a bitterly sad home life. He suffered from ulcers. He could never

relax completely, not with his wife’s deteriorating mental condition a constant reminder of what he was putting her through. At times, Erickson felt he was falling apart himself. “Next time I take a job like this,” he joked to the prince, “I’ll take some psychoanalytic treatments first.” He also worried constantly about Anna-Marie. Erickson would later portray himself to interviewers and journalists as a smiling automaton that experienced no fear. But in reality, he was constantly tensed for disaster. Berlin was crawling with the black-uniformed officers of the Gestapo; as he passed them on the street, Erickson would flinch a bit inside, wondering if this was the man who would arrest him. He’d built an everexpanding network of Germans willing to feed him information, but his success also meant there were more and more people who could betray him. Even as Erickson grew depressed about the lack of raids on his targets, the Germans were showing increased confidence in him. He was called to Berlin, where the officials expressed their gratitude for the work he’d done and rewarded him with a contract for one-third of the lubricating oils delivered to Sweden. But the Reich was still keeping him far away from its most prized assets. It was time to try a new approach.

In 1943, the war was beginning to turn toward the Allies and Erickson had a rare view of what the German people were thinking and feeling. His reports contain fascinating details on the mood inside Germany and the mindset of its rulers. In one, he noted a crackdown on thought crimes:

About 10 days before he left for Sweden, Goebbels gave a talk over the radio in which he mentioned that it would not only be the people that did not take part in the war but also the ones that did not believe in the ultimate victory for the German government that would be sentenced to death. Another: No one is allowed to quote any of Hitler’s earlier statements which showed him to be wrong, especially his quotation from 1940 that Russia was definitely finished … Any such quotation can end with a death sentence. … Erickson witnessed the effects of the war on ordinary Germans. He saw them dressed in grimy rags lining up for bread; he listened sympathetically to fathers and mothers in railroad stations talk about their dead sons. He was invited into many Nazi homes, where he comforted the wives and played with the children. He liked some of these people, and they trusted him. Many of them were kind to him, and deceiving these people made Erickson feel “like a skunk.” One day, while traveling on a train from Berlin to Ulm, a German city situated on the River Danube which had been strafed by Allied fighters, Erickson watched five civilians die. After returning to Sweden, Erickson begged Allied Bomber Command to target only supply trains. “Bomb the railroad tracks and stations and bridges as much as possible but not the civilians in the trains

… I personally do not believe this is worth the hatred that is arising from such methods.” Close observation led to tactical refinements. One key insight came after talking with countless Germans in the course of his travels: The common people … due to propaganda believe that some miracle at the last moment will save Germany. The masses believe what Goebbels says about Germany being a country of slaves if they lose … [But] the business people and the bankers are quite convinced that Germany has lost the war, and might just as well give up before the country is ruined. If Germany’s elite knew that they were going to lose the war, couldn’t the Allies offer them a deal? Erickson consulted with his OSS handlers, who agreed to his idea. He would take Prince Carl to Germany (“it felt good to have him along”) and begin a new phase of the operation. Erickson would begin to reveal to the Germans he trusted that he was working for the Allies. He would then offer them immunity if they would reveal the locations of the synthetic plants. On their next trip, Erickson parted ways with the prince and headed to Hamburg to meet with oil executives he was hoping to bring over to the Allied side. He spent the night in the northern city and returned to Berlin the following day. Upon his return, Erickson stopped at Gestapo headquarters at 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse. His papers were checked and he headed up to the

office of his friend and contact, Baron van Löw. The officer’s face was grave. “Prince Carl has been arrested,” he said. Erickson had to steady himself. It felt as though the marble floor had disappeared beneath him. “What the devil for?” he said. “For listening to the BBC.” On September 3, 1939, the day England declared war on Germany, the Reich had declared that listening to the British service a crime punishable by death. Unfortunately for the prince, while visiting some friends in Berlin, one of them had turned on a radio tuned to the station. Now Erickson’s co-conspirator was in Moabit prison, where many resistance figures were held and executed by the Gestapo. (In 1945, the Christian martyr, Klaus Bonhoeffer, would die there.) Though some considered Moabit to be one of Berlin’s more pleasant jails–the food was edible and there was even a thinly-stocked library–for political prisoners and those suspected of undermining the Nazi state, the place was notorious. Erickson protested. Surely, laws meant for Germans didn’t apply to foreign dignitaries! Perhaps Prince Carl was unaware that listening to the BBC was a crime? The service was highly popular in Sweden, and he probably thought nothing when it was turned on. Wasn’t there a way to get him out? Erickson knew he had to get Carl released before he was interrogated. The prince was a socialite who’d grown up in castles and expensive restaurants; he was hardly the type to withstand serious questioning by the SD. He begged von Löw to intervene,

but the Gestapo officer refused. It was an SD matter now, and in Berlin’s treacherous world of competing state agencies, a game that could quickly become lethal, von Löw wasn’t prepared to risk his own safety. Prince Carl would stay in Moabit until the BBC matter was thoroughly investigated. The words sent tremors of panic through Erickson. He asked to use the telephone and called one of Prince Carl’s friends, a distant relative of Hermann Göring. Erickson explained the situation and asked the friend to call the Reichsmarschall immediately. Erickson hung up and waited. He could hear footsteps in the halls, soft voices from other offices, the distant clack-clack-clack of typewriters, but no screams or sounds of petroleum-soaked whips. The torture at 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse was carried out floors below, in the basement. Finally, the phone jangled. Good news: his contact had managed to get hold of Göring and the Luftwaffe chief had instantly seen the diplomatic implications of arresting a nephew of the Swedish royal family. A call had been made to Moabit and Prince Carl was to be released. On hearing the news, Erickson felt a wave of relief wash through him. The prince had made a simple mistake, and yet it had nearly cost them everything.

At business meetings and parties, Erickson and Prince Carl now put their new plan into motion. They began to take the wives of oil executives aside and chat casually about the state of Germany. “I was very careful with who I dealt with,” Erickson said. “I [had to

be] sure that they hated Hitler and Himmler and the rest, and I found these things out through their wives.” If their husbands cooperated, Erickson would give the owners signed letters attesting to their good works, which would guarantee them better treatment in a post-Hitler Germany. “They had nothing to lose,” Erickson said. “If Hitler won, they could destroy the guarantee. If Hitler lost, they could produce the document and show that they’d helped.” Erickson did many dangerous things during the war, but this might have been the riskiest. If one of his sub-agents contacted the Gestapo, he would have been arrested immediately.

Erickson began and ended his trips to Berlin with Anne-Maria, stolen moments of pleasure and intimacy within an increasingly grim city. Allied air forces were turning the capitol into rubble. In rooms rented under fake names they talked and held each other and made love. They discussed their fears, but were hopeful about their future together. When there was nothing left to say, Erickson would turn on the radio and they would listen to music until night fell. In Berlin their affair would have to remain a secret. They were never to be seen together in public. In this way, in self-imposed reclusion, the two spies lingered for a day or two at a time until Erickson left for a refinery in Ruhland or a synthetic plant in Magdeburg, or Zeitz, or Politz or Merseburg-Leuna. When they were apart, they sent letters in which they could only hint at their true feelings.

“I’ve received your love letters of the 12th and 14th,,” AnneMaria wrote in her elegant, backward-sloping hand. “Thank you. If I have not written to you a long time, I still think of you often. Dearest Eric, I have great troubles and much suffering at the moment. How I would like to write you all about it, but I cannot. The thought that strangers are reading these lines is terrible for me. If you come back to Germany, I’ll tell you everything. Signed, your Anne-Maria.” Even though she never put down in ink her deepest worries, and only hinted at the things she didn’t want the censors to know, the letters were mistakes. Not only was Anne-Maria revealing her intimate relationship with Eric, she was admitting she had things to hide, which could only arouse the SD’s suspicions. Another: “My dear Eric! To my great joy and surprise I received on Friday, your gifts of love with coffee and chocolate. It is touching, and sweet that you thought of me again.” The letters lay in the archives for years after Erickson’s death. In them, the war and Anne-Marie’s mysterious “suffering” seem claustrophobically near. Her fingers had touched the heavy stock, folded it. Something of her personality, or some part of who she was as a person, was traced in the script. She’d dropped these letters in a Berlin mailbox seventy years ago and walked away. Each letter would have been read by an SD analyst. The functionary would a one or two line report of the letter’s content before resealing the envelope and authorizing its delivery to Stockholm. All of it—the love affair, the carelessness, the famous efficiency of the German clerk—would play a part in Anne-Maria’s endgame.

The final letter in the archives dates to the latter part of 1944. Anne-Maria wrote: “My love! May all your wishes come true in 1945. I always think of the beautiful and happy hours we spent here in Berlin. When will you come again?”

Chapter Nine

The Brooklyn Bridge By 1943, Hitler’s quest for an oil empire had been dealt two paralyzing blows: the defeat at Stalingrad that stopped his push to the enormous fields at Baku, and the collapse of Africa Korps, which closed off the vast reserves under the Middle Eastern deserts. Germany was thrown back on her own resources. The only significant supplies of fuel they could count on were the amounts they extracted from coal. “Synthetic fuels would be at the heart of the frantic effort to sustain the machines of war,” writes the oil historian Daniel Yergin. The German field marshal Erhard Milch summed up the situation this way: “The hydrogenation plants are our most vulnerable spots; with them stands and falls our entire ability to wage war. Not only will planes no longer fly, but tanks and submarines also will stop running if the plants should actually be attacked.” As early as 1940, in “Western Air plan 5(c),” the British had identified German oil plants as a major target. Many analysts believed that the facilities should be the top priority. But the head of Bomber Command, the ever-controversial Sir Arthur Harris, wasn’t one of them. Instead, Harris and Churchill’s war cabinet pushed for the bombing of major German cities in order to

devastate the Reich’s industrial centers and strike at German resolve. The British Air Staff wrote: The ultimate aim of an attack on a town area is to break the morale of the population which occupies it. To ensure this, we must achieve two things: first, we must make the town physically uninhabitable and, secondly, we must make the people conscious of constant personal danger. The immediate aim, is therefore, twofold, namely, to produce (i) destruction and (ii) fear of death. The city-first policy was also revenge for the blitz that had ravaged London in the early days of the war. “They sowed the wind,” Harris remarked. “And now they are going to reap the whirlwind.” Meanwhile, German scientists were making huge strides in perfecting the Bergius process that transformed coal into oil. Between 1940 and 1943, production of synthetic fuel doubled. By the early months of 1944, the plants were supplying the Wehrmacht with 57 percent of its oil, and a startling 92 percent of aviation fuel. German oil conglomerates, such as I. G. Farben, banished all Jews from their boardrooms; they imported slave workers ghettoes and concentration camps in the East (with the help of the SS) and ramped up production. To get the most out of the new workforce, Farben built a synthetic fuel plants next to the crematoria at Auschwitz. By 1944, a third of the workers at the synthetic plants were slave laborers.

With the exception of a few sporadic raids, the Allies’ bombing strategy had left Nazi oil plants largely unscathed. “Oil, which was Germany’s weakest point,” wrote the British historian Basil Liddel Hart, “was scarcely touched.” Erickson was risking his life to get targets for the American B-17 bombers and the British Lancasters, but the planes were being diverted elsewhere. Germany was winning the oil war. Even when an Allied plane found its target, the Reich had a vast army of forced-labor conscripts—starving, diseased, dressed in rags, but desperate to survive—who would rush to fix the damage once the bombers had disappeared. One factory had at its disposal 30,000 Jews, political prisoners and other enemies of the Reich on call for emergency repairs. It was General Carl Spaatz, commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Force in Europe, who forced a change in Allied bombing strategy. After concluding that the focus on cities, communications and industrial sites had been largely ineffective, on March 5, 1944 Spaatz wrote a memo to his commanding officer, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, proposing that the synthetic oil industry become the first-line target of the American bombers. The British immediately objected. They wanted the French railroad system attacked, in preparation for D-Day three months later. But Spaatz argued forcefully that synthetic fuel production could be reduced by fifty percent within six months, and that to protect the facilities the Luftwaffe would be forced into the air, where their planes could be destroyed. Eisenhower sided with Spaatz. On May 12, 1944, 935 bombers and their fighter escorts flew over Germany and dropped their

payloads on a series of synthetic plants, among them the enormous I.G. Farben facility located at Leuna. Hearing the initial reports of the bombings, Albert Speer requisitioned a plane and flew to Leuna, where he walked among the shattered oil tanks and melted pipes. “I shall never forget May 12th,” he wrote after the war. “On that day the technological war was decided.” He then boarded the plane and flew to Hitler’s headquarters to deliver the bad news. “The enemy has struck us at one of our weakest points. If they persist at it this time, we will soon no longer have any fuel production worth mentioning.” Allied aviators pounded railroad tracks, storage tanks, pipelines and oilfields. Saboteurs mined the Danube, where most of Romania’s oil was shipped through on its way to Germany. By the middle of May 1944, weeks before D-Day, the bombing had reduced Romanian oil exports by 44 percent. Germany was being slowly starved of foreign fuel and was forced to improvise. The Wehrmacht began converting its trucks to burn wood alcohol instead of gas, but by mid-1944 had managed to change over only one-fifth of its vehicles. Increasingly, the synthetic plants were Germany’s last, best hope. By 1944, Erickson had become irreplaceable to the Allies. His reports began to seriously affect not only the course of the conflict but its outcome. The war on Hitler’s oil would come down to two things: bombers and spies. Erickson was the only OSS agent who had any real chance of finding the hidden refineries. His access to the refineries was still severely restricted. He, Prince Carl and the men from the embassy spent many nights in Stockholm’s Club 49, sipping brandy and pitching ideas on how to

get into the remaining plants. In one plan, Erickson would volunteer as a consultant to the German oil industry and travel the country offering advice to plant managers struggling to increase output. In another, Erickson would go to one of his German oilmagnate friends and ask to freelance. That way he’d avoid the national bureaucracy. He could visit factories all over central Europe, in the service of friends. But Erickson’s contacts in Germany controlled specific sections of the oil market. If he became an adviser to one company, he could visit only their plants. What he needed was unfettered access to every synthetic plant. During one break in the conversation, Prince Carl offered, rather endearingly, to embark on a national tour of oil facilities. His “royal presence,” he claimed, would boost the morale of the workers. It sounded farcical: Carl in his royal blue tunic nodding as a German slave laborer explained how a compressor worked. But the idea had potential: Germans were still in awe of the Swedish prince. After a few minutes, Erickson shot the plan down. Himmler had recently turned against aristocrats. He wanted to found a new race of nobles, a Herrenvolk, or “master race,” that was loyal to the Waffen SS and would become the new imperial core of the Reich and administer Germany for a thousand years. With aristocrats in disfavor, sending Carl to Germany was simply too risky. Finally, late one night, Surrey and Tikander came up with an idea. At first, Erickson thought the plan was so outrageous that he doubled up with laughter on hearing it. “It sounded so fantastic that both the Prince and I took it more or less as a joke.” But, after a few minutes, and once the laughter had died down, Erickson was

able to see how brilliant—albeit dangerous—the plan actually was. The spy would be responsible for selling it to the Germans, and so he examined it from every side, trying to find a fatal flaw. But gradually he became convinced it could work. He even gave it a name. The boy from the boroughs of New York City would dedicate his mission to city that made him. He called it “Selling the Brooklyn Bridge.” The intended target would be Heinrich Himmler. The men toasted, drained the last fingers of whiskey, and parted ways into the starlit night.

Chapter Ten

The Certificate The plan was simple but cunning. It would rely not on the fluctuations of German industrial strategy or the political machinations going on in Berlin, but on something more ancient and durable: greed. Erickson had come to see many of his German contacts not as ideologues, but as normal businessmen chasing money and power. “I found out that they were interested in what was in it for them.” In that way, it was a counterpart to Erickson’s earlier brainstorm about Nazi wives. The scheme was built around a business deal. Erickson would go the German legation in Stockholm and make them an offer. Since German oil plants were being bombed, why not build a huge new refinery in Sweden? (What he didn’t mention, of course, was that the plants were being attacked because he’d given Bomber Command the coordinates.) He would make the arrangements, grease the wheels with the Swedish government and even get a syndicate of local businessmen to help finance the $5 million project. Germany would ship the crude oil to Sweden through pipelines; Erickson’s factory would then refine it and ship highoctane gasoline back to Germany to fill the panzer tanks and

Mercedes trucks. The Allies would never bomb a factory located in neutral Sweden. Erickson prepared a prospectus for the refinery, detailing who would pay for the factory, where the technical equipment would come from and how the profits would be split. He forged a series of memoranda and minutes from meetings that had never happened, detailing how the deal had been hashed out, down to the questions and objections of the imaginary Swedish investors. Then he drew up the final document: an agreement to build the Nazi refinery, signed by several vice-presidents of the Swedish national bank, as well as some of the richest and most influential industrialists in the country. The OSS vetted the names, making sure none of the businessmen had made any anti-Nazi statements that would cast doubt on their role in the deal. The document was a sham, but it was necessary to convince Himmler the project had been green-lighted in Stockholm. The agreement was the product of everything Erickson had learned over thirty years in the oil business. It could have fooled John D. Rockefeller. But there was a problem. No industrialist or banker in his right mind would sign on to such a deal; in fact, Erickson didn’t even bother asking them. Instead, he forged their signatures. He brought a copy with him and left another at the American legation for safekeeping. The imaginary deal had taken two weeks to flesh out. Erickson arranged a meeting with his contacts at the German legation. He warned them that if the deal became public, “the signers would deny any and all knowledge of the plan.” This was to prevent the Germans approaching the real people whose

signatures were on the papers, in an attempt to confirm the plan’s details. At first, the reaction was frosty. “Some members of the legation thought the proposition was the work of some fool.” But Erickson by now knew a great many SS officers in Berlin and they were the actual targets of the scheme. To lure them in, he’d built in an unusual feature: Himmler and his top officers would hold a stake in the refinery. Not only would they get access to an unbombable oil plant, they’d actually own a part of the business. “It meant that Nazi party would have a certain amount of capital in their account,” Erickson said, “if something went wrong in Germany.” At one point in the negotiations, Erickson was called away to the phone. The voice on the other end told him to pick up a copy of Trots Allt, one of the leading leftist newspapers in Stockholm. Puzzled and a bit anxious, Erickson excused himself from the meeting and rushed out to find a newsstand. When he picked up a copy of the newspaper, he felt a wave of nausea. The full story of the fake deal was there on the front page. Erickson had been exposed. The OSS tracked down the source of the story. The American legation, out of solidarity with conquered Denmark, had hired a group of young Danish refugees to work as office boys. One of them spotted the fake document and, thinking it was evidence of Swedish treachery, stole it and smuggled it to a member of the Danish underground. From there it was sent to Trots Allt, which promptly published a story complete with a list of the industrialists and bank officials who’d “signed” the document. Erickson’s name, which was already blackened by his association with the Nazis, was

now whispered with revulsion in the streets of Stockholm. Not only was Erickson doing business with the Third Reich, not only had he turned Prince Carl into a fascist, he was now going to build a Nazi oil plant inside Sweden. The industrialists and bankers were outraged. Luckily, Erickson had had the foresight to warn the Germans that this is exactly what would happen. Under tremendous pressure from the Swedish press, Erickson flew to Berlin to sell the deal, now hanging by a thread.

After checking into the Hotel Eden, Erickson took a taxi to 8 Prinz Albrechtstrasse. The building still filled him with dread, its reputation as the last station for spies and saboteurs still fresh in his mind. He was escorted to Himmler’s office and greeted the Gestapo chief like a long-lost friend. After snapping out a crisp “Heil Hitler,” he launched into his pitch, detailing the secret Swedish agreement to build the plant. He presented Himmler with a full-color poster he’d had printed up for the trip. It showed tankers traveling the waters between Sweden and Germany, filled with oil and gas for the war effort. Underneath the illustration was the deal’s slogan, worthy of Madison Avenue: “Meeting Halfway.” The poster revealed the deal’s psychological strategy. The OSS believed the Germans would see the Sweden deal as a propaganda win for their side. Building a new refinery in a neutral country would show that the Reich was doing business as usual, expanding its industrial footprint into the Nordic region, thinking ahead. It would imply that the Germans were still confident they would win

the war. In mid-1944, the Allies were unaware of the delusional nature of Hitler’s leadership. (Hitler by then had banned nearly all negative military reports from his underlings.) Purely by accident, the plan aligned with the psychological atmosphere inside Germany’s ruling clique. Himmler smiled and studied the poster, while Erickson chatted with the Reichsführer about one of his obsessions: horses. Erickson had learned through his sources that Himmler wanted to breed steppe-horses that would eventually replace cars as a means of transport. It was a mad fantasy, part of the Nazis’ utopian vision for postwar Europe. But Erickson flattered him anyway. Himmler, his head bent over the poster, nodded. “You know, Erickson,” he said. “You Swedes are the archetype of the Nordic race. It’s people like you that I want to be working with.” Erickson thanked him. But if Sweden were the true home of the Aryan race, why not build a factory there? Himmler took the bait. He suggested the American meet with German engineers to talk plant design. To Himmler’s surprise, Erickson declined. He told the Gestapo chief that in order to pull off the deal, he needed to travel to the best oil facilities in Germany and see what the country’s real needs were. Only then could he build the right kind of factory. Himmler nodded, then called over one of his assistants and gave orders that Erickson would be permitted to travel—and here he emphasized—“alone.” The assistant quickly typed up a document and handed it to the American. It was a pass that allowed the bearer to travel throughout the Third Reich and inspect any factory or plant. The Nazis would even provide a car,

driver and fuel coupons. Erickson looked at the paper in astonishment: The Chief of the Security Police and the SD, Certificate: “Herr Eric Siegfried Erickson is traveling to undertake urgent business conferences in the interests of the Reich. … Herr Erickson is well known to us. Secret police security regulations in regards to restricted areas are to be waived on his behalf.” This was the moment Erickson had been working toward for years. He could hardly believe his luck. “It guaranteed that I was above suspicion.”

Soon after getting his all-Germany pass, Erickson made a research trip to the capital and stayed, as usual, at the Hotel Eden. The trip was another plant-finding mission and, though the usual dangers existed, the American saw no cause for alarm. His driver picked him up at the hotel, as he always did, and began navigating Berlin’s crowded streets. After a few minutes, Erickson looked out the window and realized that, instead of taking him to a factory outside the capital, the driver was heading toward the inner city. Erickson stared in confusion at the unfamiliar landmarks. The car pulled up to the gate of an enormous brick building. It was surrounded by a black wrought-iron fence with guard towers at each corner. Erickson’s heart raced. Moabit prison. “It’s over,” he thought. “They know who I am.”

Erickson escorted inside the prison, a huge complex that housed as many as 3,000 prisoners at any one time. “I was ushered into a large conference room which faced the prison courtyard,” he remembered. His escort left him alone, and closed the door. Through a window, the spy could see out into the courtyard. He spotted a gallows in the center, empty nooses dangling down. For the second time on his mission, Erickson prepared himself for death. “I was left alone for six or seven minutes, but in that time practically everything that I had done in my life passed before my eyes.” Soon his escort reappeared and led him from the conference room and down into the courtyard. Erickson was surprised to find about forty other people sitting there on benches, facing the gallows. The scene struck Erickson, despite his rising anxiety, as bizarre. It was as if he had been invited to a theater to watch a play. He took his seat. A group of men appeared. They marched, under guard, from their cells. Erickson studied the faces of the prisoners as they shuffled in, dressed in drab prison uniforms. He took a deep breath, and exhaled. There was no one he knew. Then a second batch of inmates, including some women, entered. With an electric shock, Erickson spotted a familiar figure. The chestnut-brown hair. The thin, elegant neck. It was AnneMaria. She looked at Erickson, then quickly turned away. She took her place in line and was marched with the others up the gallows steps.

“It’s hard to portray what goes on in the mind of one who is about to witness the execution of a person so near,” Erickson said, of the experience. “It was agony.” Erickson watched in shock. “It was horrible. I couldn’t show any sentiments or how sad I was.” Even as his mind whirled, he couldn’t help thinking that Anne-Maria had confessed his part in the OSS mission. “I felt certain she’d given me away. I didn’t know if I was next.” An SS officer dropped the rope over Anne-Maria’s head and pulled it tight around her neck. Erickson wanted desperately to look away, but there were SS officers walking up and down the aisles, studying the audience’s reaction. “I felt they were testing me, using the execution as a means to make me confess about the operation.” An officer approached the set of portable steps under Anne-Maria feet—there was no trap door—bent down, and jerked it away. Erickson watched as his lover’s body swung on the end of the rope, struggled for a few moments, and went still. Convinced this was a macabre SS trick, he remained stoic. His escort then took him out of the courtyard and drove him back to the hotel. Erickson went to his room and locked the door behind him. He was chilled, deeply anxious. What was the meaning of making me watch that? What do they have on me? The Gestapo wasn’t prone to idle theatrics. They’d brought Erickson to the prison for a reason; he just couldn’t figure out what it was. The spy quickly packed up his things, called a taxi and headed to the airport. Another shock awaited him there: after studying his papers, German security agents told him that he couldn’t leave Germany.

This had never happened to him before. It was clear the SS wanted to keep him in the country, either to study his reactions to the execution or to finalize the arrangements for his arrest.

Chapter Eleven

The Mighty Eighth After a few days, Erickson was allowed to leave Berlin. He flew back to Stockholm emotionally exhausted. He couldn’t ignore the obvious: he was under suspicion. There was no other explanation for the invitation to Moabit. But this realization came at a crucial time: the bombing of the oil facilities was finally being ramped up and Erickson was the only spy in the Allied program that could produce the needed target lists. He felt an obligation—to himself, to family, and to his native country—to see his commitment to the end, no matter his status with the Gestapo. “Hitler was a lunatic,” he wrote. “I wanted to crush him.” In the weeks after the execution, images of Anne-Maria would flash into Erickson’s mind, unbidden. At times, he felt responsible for her death. At others, he felt sure he would follow her to the gallows.

With his new pass, Erickson began traveling all over central Europe, from the western German border to Prague. It was around this time that he was caught in the Mercedes factory in Stuttgart, as the Americans bombed it. Erickson barely escaped. Despite the near miss, he was gathering huge amounts of classified

information on plant locations and capacities, manufacturing sites, anti-aircraft batteries, even the effectiveness of previous bombing runs. One day Erickson was invited to Carinhall, Hermann Göring’s hunting estate northeast of Berlin. Carinhall was a secluded, wooded expanse where the Luftwaffe chief could relax and indulge himself as the “State Forestry and Hunting Master of Germany.” The architect, Werner Marsh, the same man who designed Berlin’s Olympic Stadium for Hitler, installed a small but luxurious hunting lodge on the estate, which was enlarged when Carinhall became Göring’s official summer state residence. The new wings included a bowling alley, a movie theater, a room for the master’s hunting trophies, a beer pub and a room dedicated to Göring’s beloved model train, which was 321 feet long and complete with miniature airfields and German fighters. Nearby was an immaculate tennis court, a shooting range, housing for Göring’s doctor, security and thirteen firemen who watched over the property, as well as a mausoleum for his first wife, a Swedish divorcee. When Erickson arrived at Carinhall, one of Göring’s chief adjutants invited him on a long drive. “Arrangements were made for the trip—to where I did not know.” They drove for hours until finally they wound up at Dachau, a concentration camp in Upper Bavaria, near Munich. Erickson had heard people “whispering about such places,” but this was his first confirmation that the camps were real. Dachau was an enormous, stinking, typhus-ridden work camp and death factory surrounded by an electrified barbed fence. Perhaps 30,000 prisoners were shot, beaten, tortured, worked to

death and cremated inside its ovens during the years 1933-1945. Among its 69 barracks, there was a “Priest Block” that housed ministers who’d defied Hitler and another that housed the victims of medical experiments. Every morning new bodies for burning in the ovens were stacked outside. Dachau became the model for every concentration camp in the Reich, and the Germans showed it off with pride. Erickson was ushered through the munitions factory, a museum exhibiting plaster casts of prisoners’ deformities, the canteen and the library. It’s doubtful he saw the crematoria and the five gas chambers on this trip, but on the drive back to Göring’s estate, Erickson brooded over the brutality of the “model camp,” the contrast between the slave camp and the splendors of Carninhall. “To say that I was dumbfounded was putting it mildly. [Dachau] was full of awful impressions that I lack the words to describe.” As soon as he arrived back, Erickson protested to Göring about the brutality he’d witnessed. Göring exploded, yelling so loudly “that one could have heard his voice in Berlin.” “They’re lying!” the Luftwaffe chief cried. “That cannot be true. I know nothing of it. Get out!” Then: “What were you doing there anyway?” It was clear to Erickson that Göring knew what was happening at Dachau. The American left the lodge and returned to Berlin. If Erickson had entered the war by a side entrance—brought in because of a family dispute—the death of Anne-Maria and the tour of Dachau brought him close to its core realities. Anne-Maria forced him to grieve for a victim he’d come to love, a single death

in the midst of a huge war. And Dachau opened his eyes to the Nazi’s agenda in its full industrial scale. After experiencing both, to think he’d once contributed to the cause must have been like bitter ashes in Erickson’s mouth.

The American returned to the hunt. After one seven-day trip, he produced a list of 16 different targets, both oil and manufacturing sites. From a 1944 report: Annedorf: rebuilt as a synthetic plant after the demolishing of the Leuna plant at Halle. The plant does not lie exactly at the Annedorf station but it is about 15 km north of Merseburg quite close to the railroad on the route Halle-Annedorf. The plant is on the left side of the railroad, and is gigantic … They are installing smoke-screen devices, very small and look about as follows [Erickson included a sketch of the devices]. Bruks: outside of Prague. Plant is producing about 150,000 tons. Is intact. Bombing poor. Lütskendorf: The only really big plant for gas and oil – built during the war. Very badly damaged. Finished products destroyed. Only about 20 percent of plant now in operation. Does not pay to rebuild. Köln: New Robot base 25km NE of city on the property belonging to Brockhause. [The “robot”

was the V-1 unmanned rocket that terrified London] Sigmaringen: Home of the Vichy government. Laval and Petain both alive in the castle of Count Hohenzollern (who is imprisoned under suspicion that he has something to do with the 20th of July plot. Laval has his office in a schoolhouse quite close by. Happened incidentally to see him. The Vichy government is training and equipping a French army there.) The flights to destroy these plants were among the most dangerous assignments any enlisted man could get in World War II. Bombardiers tried to attain their targets as flak burst around them and the sky turned a greasy black from German smoke pots and exploding oil tanks below. Accuracy was low: attacks on the mammoth synthetic plant at Leuna hit their target only 5.1 percent of the time when guided in by radar. Tactical mistakes compounded the problems: American strategists convinced the Air Force generals that larger payloads of smaller, 300-pound bombs were more effective than the huge 2,000 to 4,000 pound highexplosives that the British favored. They were later proven wrong. The error meant that American crews had to repeatedly bomb the same refineries again and again to knock them out of production. The Luftwaffe, rarely seen over France or the rest of the occupied Europe, took to the air in large numbers to protect the refineries, shooting down the American and British planes at a steady clip. Half of the Air Force’s casualties, including 26,000 dead, were suffered by the Eighth Air Force, the “Mighty Eighth,”

who flew most of the missions at Erickson’s targets. Between June and August, 1944, the Eighth lost 1,022 heavy bombers, half of its fleet, and 665 of its fighters. An American briefing officer, after detailing a daily mission for one bomber crew, offered them this advice: “Consider yourself dead.” Faced with the destruction of the synthetic plants, Albert Speer pulled 350,000 men from other assignments and ordered them to repair the facilities at all costs. The “successful prosecution of the war,” Speer informed his Commissioner General for Emergency Measures, pivoted on the “reconstruction of these plants.” The refinery at Leuna had a 5,000-strong team simply for fighting fires after the raids. Special oil tanks were made with concrete liners to protect them from flying shrapnel; blast walls were built around compressors and the other key components that kept the plants running. The workers in the Berlin ministries began hearing a new motto from the War Production department: “Everything for oil.” Meanwhile, Eisenhower was becoming convinced that the attacks were weakening the still-formidable Wehrmacht. “We were most anxious to continue the destruction of German industry, with emphasis on oil,” he wrote in Crusade in Europe. “General Spaatz convinced me that as Germany became progressively embarrassed by her diminished oil reserves, the effect upon the land battle would be most profound and the eventual winning of the war would be correspondingly hastened.” In the industrial heartland of the Ruhr, Erickson guided 1600 planes to the benzol plants which produced the fuel for the terrifying V-1 and V-2 rockets, obliterating them. By 1944, the facilities at Leuna had been bombed “at least 25 times with

thousands of bombs” and were “a total wreck.” Erickson began hearing from his contacts in Germany about the onslaught. “The Americans and the British know more about the oil plants than I can believe,” one told him. Another admitted that “the precision of the bombing is one of the most remarkable things that the German army has witnessed.” While visiting one plant, Erickson learned that Joseph Goebbels had recently visited to cheer up the workers, depressed by the constant bombardment. The American made note of which buildings had survived and what they contained; he touched compressors and other machinery melted by the heat of the fires; he watched as the Slavs and doomed Jews worked feverishly to repair the plant. One manager of a refinery pulled Erickson aside and complained, “The damage… is unbelievable.” The ripples from the bombing spread outward through the industries that needed oil to make their products: chemicals, rubber, munitions. The same hydrogenation plants that were turning coal into fuel were also producing the compounds – synthetic methanol, synthetic ammonia and nitric acid—used in high-explosive bombs. The destruction inevitably changed the Nazis’ strategy for the war. In early, 1944, the German High Command, along with most of Europe, suspected the Allies were planning an invasion of Europe later that year. To stop it, Göring had always envisioned waves of Luftwaffe fighters attacking the enemy battalions in the days and weeks after the amphibious landing. As rumors of an impending DDay swept Europe in the spring and summer of 1944, he contemplated transferring some of his planes to Calais and the coast of France. But after a great deal of thought, Göring decided

against it. “No such transfer was possible,” wrote the historian Chester Wilmot, “because … the American offensive against the synthetic oil plants … made it imperative to concentrate the greatest possible strength for their defense.” In fact, the planes were flowing in the opposite direction. In late May, just weeks before the Normandy invasion, Göring was forced to pull six of his best fighting squadrons from Air Fleet III, stationed in France, and fly them back to Germany. The U.S. Eighth Air Force bombed the targets relentlessly. By the end of 1944, only three of Germany’s 99 refineries were producing oil, largely due to the work of Eric Erickson and the crews of the B-17s and Liberators. On June 30th, only weeks after D-Day, Hitler received an urgent message. My Führer: If we do not succeed in protecting the synthetic plants and refineries better than in the past, an unbridgeable gap will appear in the fuel supply … By September it will no longer be possible to cover the most urgent necessary supplies for the Wehrmacht. Heil Hitler. Signed, Albert Speer (Reichsminister of Armaments and War Production) Hitler had one last attack planned: a surprise battle he believed would turn the war’s momentum towards Germany. When the Battle of the Bulge erupted on December 16, 1944, the Allies were caught unawares. The German forces pushed the Allies back in a

dangerous thrust that snapped the front lines in key sectors. But, as the American G.I.’s dug in and fought back, it became clear that the Führer had miscalculated. He couldn’t get sufficient numbers of his reserve troops to the front. “They could not be moved,” one German commander complained after the war. “They were at a standstill for lack of petrol—stranded over a stretch of a hundred miles—just when they were needed.” Even Winston Churchill, ensconced in the cave-like War Rooms underneath Parliament, could see the effects that the raids were having. “Oil production and reserves dropped drastically, affecting not only the mobility of their troops, but also the activities and even the training of their air forces … At long last our great bombing offensive was reaping its reward.” In 1944, Albert Speer engineered nothing less than a miracle: production of tanks and airplanes peaked in the early and middle parts of the year, an astounding feat considering the bombardment that the Reich’s factories were undergoing. But, at the same time, Germany’s fighting capacity was actually declining. At the Battle of the Rhine, a new speed limit of 17 mph for German military vehicles was imposed to save gas; oxen were used to pull tanks up to the front lines. “[Soldiers] were abandoning their tanks and motor vehicles all over France,” a U.S. Army report concluded, “fleeing on foot, rescuing what equipment they could with horses, or surrendering in droves.” A lack of aviation fuel caused the Luftwaffe to become largely irrelevant outside of Germany by the middle of 1944, leaving them unable to attack the thousands of troops coming across the beaches of Omaha and Utah. Because of a lack of aviation fuel, the skies over Europe belonged to the

Americans and the British. Their Mustangs and Spitfires flew over the occupied territories, hammering German emplacements, destroying bridges, blowing up supply trains and attacking troop transports. Huge numbers of German troops were surrendering every month because of a lack of oil. In the Ruhr industrial valley alone, 325,000 German troops waved the white flag. In February, 1945, German production of aviation fuel totaled just 1000 tons, one half of one percent of what it was the year before. Hitler had championed the idea of mechanized war years before and it had given him victory after victory on the continent of Europe. But as the Allies drove toward Berlin, that very concept of battle demanded fuel that Germany no longer had. The oil war was over, and the Allies had won.

Chapter Twelve

Aftermath The best estimate we have for casualties resulting from World War II is that 35 million people died in the conflict. Without Erickson, that toll would have gone higher, perhaps much higher. “More fuel would have bought the Germans more time,” writes Daniel Yergin. If one considers the Battle of the Bulge alone, with sufficient supplies of gas the Wehrmacht would have sown chaos behind for days or weeks longer than the thirty-one days the battle lasted. They would have killed and wounded thousands more Allied soldiers. The Nazis wouldn’t have won the war, but they would have exerted an even more brutal price in losing it. Sir Arthur Harris, the head of the Allied Bomber Command, had at first resisted the Oil Campaign, as it came to be known. But he would later admit his mistake. He called the operation “a complete success … what the Allied strategists did was to bet on an outsider, and it happened to win the race.” The German war ace and commander of the Fighter Force, Adolf Galland, admitted that that the bombing raids were “the most important of the combined factors which brought about the collapse of Germany.” Speer seconded that analysis. Even Hermann Göring agreed: the campaign had proved “the utmost in deadliness.”

As the war in Europe ended, there was a curious footnote to the search for the synthetic plants. In 1945, twenty-three Americans who’d been anxiously waiting for the armistice flew in from London and began combing the ruined industrial sites of Germany. They were led by a strapping sailboat enthusiast named Dr. W.C. Schroeder, whose official job was as a researcher at the U.S. Bureau of Mines; in reality, he was America’s leading expert on synthetic oil, with several patents to his name. The other men were scientists, chemists and executives from the major American oil companies: Standard Oil, Texas Oil, Gulf, the companies that had either been founded in Beaumont in 1901 or had grown into global companies as a result of the discoveries there. The team’s secret mission had been authorized by the Joints Chiefs of Staff. American scientists, despite years of effort, had been unable to develop a high-grade synthetic oil for use in vehicles; the stuff that lubricates your car engine today was unknown in the America of the ‘40s. Synthetics, because they potentially freed countries from foreign dependence on oil, were a top military and industrial objective for the U.S. and its competitors. The American team was in Germany to find out what the Nazis were working on before anyone else could. The men were thorough, close-mouthed about the mission, and well-funded. Two years before, Congress had authorized $30 million for a five-year synthetic development program. The team spread out across Germany, fording rivers where the bridges had been blown out and traveling across a moonscape of craters and vanished cities, populated by hungry, embittered survivors. The Americans visited every oil plant and refinery they

could find, interviewed the surviving workers and managers, retracing Eric Erickson’s steps across the Reich. They believed that the Germans had failed to produce usable synthetic oil, but they had to be sure. The team found plans at many of the synthetic plants, most of them now in ruins, inspected what machinery had survived, collecting reams of information along the way. Eventually, several tips led them to a 13th century castle in Reelkirchen in northwestern Germany. Outside the castle walls, they found a group of urchins playing with rolled-up balls of paper, which turned out to be schematics for machines used in classified synthetic processes. And across a fetid moat and inside the castle itself, they stumbled on six rooms filled to the ceilings with memos and blueprints that told the tale of Germany’s synthetic breakthroughs. The Americans were dumbfounded. The Nazis, it turned out, had been years ahead of the Allies in their work, reliably producing lubricating oils and fuel for both automobiles and planes. It was something the rest of the industrialized world hadn’t even dreamt was possible. “Our discoveries in Germany were of immense value in terms of national security,” announced Edward B. Peck, a technical advisor to Standard Oil. “They eliminated … years of work.” The Saturday Evening Post quantified the discovery. “We added 25 years of experience to our own knowledge and have caught up in the keenly competitive world race for synthetic liquid fuel development. The government wants private industry to benefit immediately from information which could be of use in the prosecution of the war against Japan.”

No definitive link between the secretive mission and Eric Erickson has ever been found. But Erickson worked for both Standard Oil and Texas Oil in the ‘20s, and it’s difficult to believe his detailed coordinates of the synthetic plants, which were available to the Joint Chiefs of Staff through the OSS, didn’t help lead to the discoveries in Reelkirchen and elsewhere. Or that the stated aim of the mission – to beat Japan to the production of synthetic oils and safeguard American lives – wasn’t combined with dreams of the immense post-war profits that could be gained from the German breakthroughs. After the war, the Bureau of Mines converted a surplus Army ammonia plant in Louisiana, Missouri into a hydrogenation facility, using the information discovered in Germany. The plant, hard on the banks of the Mississippi River, was able to produce highquality gasoline from coal at a competitive, but slightly higher, price than the domestic, drilled gas on the market. President Truman’s energy advisers believed a fuel shortage was coming, and in 1948, James V. Forrestal, the Secretary of Defense, pushed an $8 billion synthetic fuel program that would vastly expand the Missouri experiment. But Big Petroleum – led by Standard Oil of Indiana – stepped in, realizing that they’d lost control of the “synfuel” mission to the government, thereby endangering their profits. They objected vociferously to the idea of expanding the synthetic fuel program. That resistance, along with cheap new imports from the Middle East and South America, effectively killed the project, and the Missouri plant closed in 1953. The dream of national energy independence, pursued by the Third Reich, uncovered by Erickson and imported to America, was over.

As for the spy himself, only a few people on the Allied side knew about his role in the Oil Campaign, but they were unequivocal in their praise. “There is little doubt that Erickson achieved one of the truly great espionage coups of the war,” said the OSS’s Wilho Tikander. Erickson himself didn’t talk about what he’d done. When writing about the mission in the post-war years, he would typically say something like, “It was my privilege to serve the Allies in a small way.” He collected his $1 in salary from the Allies and that was that. While other heroes were being lionized in the American press and writing their memoirs, Erickson, like most spies after their work has been completed, stepped back into the shadows.

Chapter Thirteen

Fame After the armistice with Germany, the United States embassy in Stockholm announced that it was having a celebratory luncheon at the five-star Grand Hotel. The guest list included prominent Swedes, diplomats and expats: the people who’d been rooting, secretly or not, for the Allies to win. The Jewish construction magnate Max Gumpel was among the invited guests. When all the attendees were seated, they noticed there were two chairs still sitting empty. A few moments later, the U.S. Minister to Sweden stood up and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to introduce out honored guests.” From a side room, side by side, Prince Carl and Eric Erickson emerged. There was an audible gasp. Erickson, too, was unprepared for what he saw. “I was taken aback,” he remembered. “At the tables around us were all the people who hated and despised me because I was a Nazi.” But he simply nodded to his former friends and sat down. There were no speeches or awards given; it was a very Swedish affair, and the Swedes prize understatement. The Minister did, however, let it be known that Eric Erickson had been working with the Allies throughout the war, and that not only the Germans, but Stockholm society at large, had been the victim of a very long con.

In Erickson’s archives, there is only one official piece of recognition from the United States of America, but it’s a significant one. The Medal of Freedom (the predecessor to the Presidential Medal of Freedom) was created by Harry Truman to honor the work of those who helped America and its allies in times of war. It was then and remains now the highest civilian medal that the U.S. government awards to men and women who serve it honorably. Dr. John von Neumann, the great mathematician whose work led to the atomic bomb, received one in 1956. John Foster Dulles got his in 1959. The citation for Erickson’s Medal of Freedom with Bronze Palm reads, in part: “Eric Erickson assisted in the creation and personally carried out one of the most elaborate and successful intelligence schemes of this war. … The cleverness and ingenuity displayed by Mr. Erickson … his complete disregard for his personal safety … and his accurate and detailed reports which furnished the Allies with innumerable targets for bombing clearly demonstrate the most unselfish interest in the Allied cause.” Flying over to the U.S. to receive the medal, Erickson met with Harry Truman at the White House. But very few people knew his name. It took until the late 1950s for Eric Erickson to be discovered. His story appeared in Reader’s Digest, was turned into a book, The Counterfeit Traitor (1958), and a film of the same name starring William Holden (1962). Holden was so dazzled by meeting Erickson on the set that he remarked, “Maybe he should play my life.” The ex-spy appeared on an earlier incarnation of “Nightline,” did a publicity tour, and was invited to dinner with Lyndon B. Johnson. He received fan letters from

people he didn’t know, flirted with women he wanted to get to know, spoke to the Cornell alumni (“Last luncheon of the season – and a thriller!”) and even advised Upton Sinclair, who was writing about the war for his Lanny Budd series of books. He took time out from traveling the world with his friend, Max Gumpel, and gambling in Monte Carlo alongside the likes of Winston Churchill and Daryl Zanuck, to tell his story. The legendary Mike Wallace, later of 60 Minutes, interviewed him (Wallace: “Weren’t you afraid?” Erickson: “I’m not afraid - of anything”) and journalists wrote long features about his life, describing the secret agent as “one of those fabulous international figures who knows almost everyone worth knowing … His horizons are limitless, his knowledge boundless and his manner so genial that after five minutes with him you are sure you have made a friend for life.” Erickson had become the most famous living spy in the world. But the attention evaporated quickly. By 2011, Erickson had been almost completely forgotten. Most World War II buffs hadn’t heard of him; most World War II espionage buffs hadn’t heard of him. Those that recognized his name only knew the movie version of his life, which turns out to be largely faked. Among other things, the filmmakers had added the killing of Gestapo agent in a phone booth and a daring escape through Denmark, neither of which had happened. There remained only a flickering memory of the life of America’s most essential World War II spy, and even that was blurred and warped by time. Some of the lies were clearly Hollywood’s, but other’s came from Erickson himself. For an article in Life magazine from April 27, 1962, a reporter went to the set of the William Holden movie. The

story was supposed to be a puff piece about this new American hero, but it began with a puzzled note. “When he discusses himself and his remarkable works,” the reporter found, “Erickson assumes the old wary habits of a secret agent and become contradictory, evasive, deceptive … When pressed for the correct facts,” the reporter wrote, “he flails his arms and goes into a fidgety dance until, yielding at the end, he remarks quietly, ‘It’s nothing. Either way will do.’” The popular account of certain events in Erickson’s life seemed suspicious, especially with regards to his motivations. In the book, he’s recruited into espionage by the American ambassador to Sweden. In the movie, it’s a case of OSS blackmail.

I’d come across Erickson’s name while researching my book, Agent Garbo, which told the story of another master spy, Juan Pujol. I grew increasingly fascinated by “Red:” here was a World War II agent who possessed a unique trio of qualities: he was important, dashing and, rarest of all, American. But there was no definitive account of his mission to Germany or why he’d volunteered for it. I contacted spy historians, hired a genealogist, tried to locate Erickson’s family (a rumored stepson turned out to have never existed) and combed the records for any mention of his mission in Germany. But it was one dry hole after another. CIA files yielded a single page on the agent: his New York Times obituary. The OSS archives contain a personnel folder under Erickson’s name. The folder is empty except for a Post-It sized note that reads “Blue File” and “Swedish Mission.” The archivists at NARA, the National

Archives and Record Administration in College Park, MD, have been unable to locate the Blue File. Finally, in early 2013, I discovered a cache of the secret agent’s papers locked away in the Riksarkivet Marieberg, the national archives of Sweden, in the capital, Stockholm. It proved to be the Erickson motherlode: boxes and boxes of personal letters, documents, account books, postcards, photographs, business ledgers and certificates dating back to the early 1900′s. They’d lain undisturbed for decades, sitting on a shelf in a modern brick building near the shore of Lake Mälaren, the collected papers of a world-historical enigma. Perhaps the most revealing document in the archives, aside from the letters from Anne-Maria, is a note he wrote to a fellow American over a small matter. Before a trip back to New York in 1962, Erickson called the owner of the building he’d grown up in as a child, 1253 Sterling Place in Brooklyn, now owned by a man named Barnes, a Jamaican immigrant. Erickson wanted to see the place again, to relive the memories of his years as a boy there. The borough was undergoing a wrenching change that saw the old European stock give way to a largely Caribbean population, a change that had brought bitter feelings and even violence. Mr. Barnes made sure that Erickson knew his race, so that there wouldn’t be any unpleasantness when he showed up on Sterling Place. Erickson wrote him a letter before coming to Brooklyn: My dear Mr. Barnes: The reason I am writing this letter is that I want to go on record to thank you not only for your unusually

courteous letter giving me permission to call on you and see the back yard and the home I was born in, but also the manner in which you have spoken to me on the phone. It is strange that one of the most inexpensive and greatest things a man is born with is courtesy and unfortunately, much too few people use it. When you mentioned that you were from Jamaica, I told you it made no difference to me whatsoever. A man’s race, his religion or his color has in my life made no difference to me at all. All that I judge people by is their decency. Best regards, Eric Erickson “Decency” is a very old-fashioned world that conjures up Frank Capra movies and a standard of behavior that has largely disappeared from the world. But it accurately sums up Erickson’s conduct during the war, along with an offhand, masculine grace and ice-cold nerves at the right moments. He paid a price for that conduct. The last photo of Anne-Maria to be found in the Stockholm archives is a glamorous studio portrait, showing her in a dark dress, a black Turkish-style hat and a string of pearls. She looks regal and serene, with only a touch of vulnerability—or perhaps its apprehension—in the dark eyes. “I must confess that if she was alive today,” Erickson said after the war, “she’d undoubtedly be my wife.” On the back of the photo, someone has written in longhand Anne-Maria’s full name, along with the words, “Executed by the Gestapo, Moabit prison.” Erickson carried the picture around with him until his own death, forty years later.

When he toured America for the release of the film, the question that Erickson got most was the one about motivation. Aside from the Hollywood bullshit, why had he really done it, taken all those risks, losing two women he loved in the process? A childhood friend once asked him about it. The spy mulled the question over, his mind eventually returning to the days the two of them had shared in Brooklyn, with the kids of refugees and strivers who’d arrived on Sterling Place from some of the more prominent hellholes of the world. “In my particular case, it was based on the way we were all brought up,” he said. “We were raised to resist tyrants and dictators—and against any and all that used brutality and force to gain their goals.” This was the public answer. There was more to his decision, of course. White-hot shame, ego, a sense of duty, a desire for one last adventure perhaps, something that had the wildness of Beaumont to it. But if not for that letter from his brother, Henry, Erickson’s mission to Germany and all the rest would never have happened. Those words had shocked the comfortable Erickson into things he’d never imagined himself capable of. They had reminded him of who he’d always been: a beloved brother, an American, a decent man.

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