Death and Honor

[THREE]

Office of the Commercial Attaché Embassy of the German Reich Avenida Córdoba Buenos Aires, Argentina 1105 13 July 1943

The commercial attaché, Foreign Service Officer Grade 15 Wilhelm Frogger, turned out to be just what Obersturmbannführer Karl Cranz expected him to be.

He had, of course, read Frogger’s dossiers—both of the foreign ministry and the Sicherheitspolizei—in Berlin immediately after the unfortunate business on the beach of Samborombón Bay. He also—just before going out to Estancia Santa Catalina with von Wachtstein and von und zu Aschenburg the night before—had ordered Untersturmführer Schneider to get from the safe the dossier on Frogger that Oberst Grüner had been keeping on him in Argentina.

All of these showed Frogger to be a fairly ordinary career civil servant, perhaps a little less intelligent than most. Cranz somewhat cynically decided that Frogger’s rise to Grade 15 had more to do with his having joined the Nazi party early on. And even more cynically, he had decided that Frogger had joined the party more because he was from Munich, where the Führer had first begun to achieve success, rather than because he had seen National Socialism as the wave of the future.

Frogger and his wife had three sons, all of whom had become Wehrmacht officers. Two had died in the service of the Fatherland, one early in the war in Belgium and the second in the early days of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. The third had been captured while serving with Rommel’s Afrikakorps.

As Frogger had worked his way up the foreign service ladder, he had been stationed at half a dozen embassies, none of them as important as Buenos Aires, and until Buenos Aires, always as the Assistant or Deputy This Or That, never the principal, even when he had been in Leopoldville, in the Belgian Congo. There he had been a deputy counsel, which, Cranz had decided, probably meant he had spent most of his time dealing with the maintenance of the German World War I military cemeteries in what had been, before the Versailles Conference, Germany’s African Colonies. He had been assigned to Argentina— probably to get him out of the way while important things were being done— in April of 1940.

There had been no objection by anyone when Frogger and his wife had been placed in the unofficial Not Likely To Be Traitors column with Fräulein Ingebord Hässell.

When Cranz went into Frogger’s office, he immediately decided that Frogger was precisely what he had thought after he’d read his dossiers.

Physically, he was a plump little man who wore what was left of his hair combed over his bald dome. He also had a neatly trimmed square mustache under a somewhat bulbous nose. Cranz wondered if that was because Frogger thought it made him look masculine or sophisticated, or whether he had grown it in emulation of Adolf Hitler.

They exchanged Nazi salutes.

“His Excellency has told you I am to assume your duties, Herr Frogger?”

“Yes, he has, Herr Cranz.”

“There is more to that than appears,” Cranz said. “With the caveat that this is a State Secret and therefore be shared with no one, I hereby inform you that to carry out a mission that is none of your concern it has been decided at the highest levels that an officer of the SS be assigned secretly to the embassy here, and that he assume your duties as the means to carry out his mission in secrecy. I am SS-Obersturmbannführer Cranz.”

“It is an honor to meet you, sir. How should I address you?”

“As Herr Cranz, please.”

“How may I be of assistance, Herr Cranz?”

“I confess I have absolutely no knowledge of your duties. Why don’t you tell me what they are?”

Frogger thought the question over for a long moment before replying, “The basic role of a commercial attaché, Herr Cranz, is to foster commerce between the Reich and what we call the ‘host country.’ In normal circumstances, I would be doing whatever I could to encourage the Argentines to purchase, for example, Siemens radios and phonographs, Leica cameras, Mercedes-Benz trucks and autos, et cetera, and at the same time facilitating the purchase by German businesses of what Germany needs, mostly foodstuffs, wool, and leather, at the lowest possible prices.”

He looked at Cranz for an indication that Cranz understood him.

Cranz nodded.

Frogger went on: “In the present circumstances—”

“You mean the war?”

“Yes.”

“Go on.”

“I was thinking just the other day, Herr Cranz, that what I have become in the present circumstances is a ‘purchase facilitator.’ ”

“Which means?”

“In the present circumstances, Germany has very little to offer for sale to Argentina. Our industry is devoted entirely, as I’m sure you are aware, to production to bring us to the final victory as soon as possible. At the same time, Germany’s need for foodstuffs, wool, and leather is so great that, if we were able, we would take their entire production.”

“Why aren’t we able?”

“The Americans, primarily, and, to a lesser degree, the English.”

“I don’t think I fully understand.”

“It is a rather complicated problem, Herr Cranz.”

Cranz made an impatient gesture.

“First of all, it is a question of shipping, Herr Cranz. Our Kriegsmarine is unfortunately not able to protect our shipping. Which means we have to ship in neutral bottoms. Spanish, French, and Portuguese, primarily. Sometimes Swedish. And recently, we have had to make sure that merchandise owned by Germany is not aboard a, say, French ship.”

“Why?”

“Because the Americans announced they were going to stop and inspect neutral vessels on the high seas to make sure they were not carrying contraband, by which they meant anything owned by Germans.”

“And they’re doing that?”

“The threat was enough to make the Swedes and the French, et cetera, refuse to take aboard German-owned merchandise. It has been necessary for us to arrange for Spanish or Portuguese, et cetera, firms to purchase, for example, frozen beef, which is then shipped to Spain or Portugal on neutral bottoms. Once ashore in Spain, it can then legally be sold to Germany and sent by rail.

“So one of the things I do, Herr Cranz, is guarantee the sight drafts of, say, the Spanish Beef Importing Company of Madrid—”

“What’s a ‘sight draft’?”

“Something like a check. Payable ‘on sight.’ The Argentine beef producers want their money before they will allow their beef to be loaded aboard ship. So I see to that. Berlin advises me how much the Spanish Beef Importing Company—which we control, of course—is allowed to bid for the beef, and then I—the Hamburg-Argentine Bank—guarantees their sight draft for payment.”

“Berlin advises you? What’s that all about?”

“Because the Americans also bid for the beef, driving the price as high as they can to inconvenience us. It’s sort of a game we play.”

“A game? What sort of a game?”

“At the weekly sale, the American beef packers here, Swift and Armour, enter a bid for so many tons of beef. So does the Spanish Beef Importing Company. Say the Americans enter a bid of fifty dollars per hundredweight. We—the Spaniards—counter with a bid of fifty-five dollars. They raise their bid to sixty dollars, we raise ours to sixty-five, et cetera.”

“The bidding is in American dollars?” Cranz asked incredulously.

Frogger nodded.

“Where do we get American dollars?”

“In Switzerland, primarily. Some in Sweden. Even some in France. We have to pay a premium for them, of course.”

“Of course,” Cranz said bitterly.

“As I was saying, the bidding goes back and forth until one side stops. Recently, frozen beef has been closing at about one hundred five dollars a hundredweight. ”

“Why does one side stop bidding?”

“We stop when it reaches the maximum Berlin has stated.”

“And the Americans?”

“Whenever they want us to have the beef at an outrageous price. They don’t really want the beef.”

“Then why do they bid on it?”

“To either keep us from getting it or to make us pay very dearly for it.”

“And they never take the beef? Win the auction?”

“Oh, yes, Herr Cranz. They take it frequently. Whenever we don’t top their bid.”

“And if they don’t want it, what do they do with it?”

“They—that is to say, Swift and Armour—corn it and tin it.”

“And what exactly does that mean?”

“The meat is treated with brine and then tinned. I’m sure you’ve seen the tins, Herr Cranz.” He gestured with his hands. “One end of the tins is larger than the other.”

“I’ve seen them,” Cranz said. “Let me see if I have this straight. If the Americans win the auction of frozen beef sides, they thaw the sides and then convert the entire side—steaks, roasts, everything—into tinned corned beef?”

“Precisely, Herr Cranz.”

“Doesn’t that make the tinned beef prohibitively expensive?”

“What I believe happens, Herr Cranz, is that the Americans—there is a man at the American embassy, a man named Delojo, who is actually a lieutenant commander in the American Navy and who is the American OSS chief in Argentina—”

“The OSS gets involved in these beef auctions?”

“And in the auctions for leather and wool, everything we want and they don’t want us to have. What he does in the case of the beef is compensate Swift and Armour for the difference between what the beef is worth and what they have paid for it. In other words, if the frozen sides are worth—”

“I get the picture,” Cranz interrupted. “And what do they do with all this tinned beef?”

“They ship it to the United States in neutral bottoms, some Argentine, and then transship the majority of it to England in their convoys.”

“How do you know all this?”

“From my experience, of course. I know about the American OSS man from the late Oberst Grüner. He kept a pretty close eye on the OSS, as you can imagine.”

“And the same sort of thing, you say, goes on with wool and leather?”

“And all foodstuffs,” Frogger said. “The details of the transactions are somewhat different, you will understand, but you will see that you will be kept rather busy.”

Cranz looked at his watch.

“Why don’t we see about lunch?” he asked. “We can continue this conversation while we eat. Is there somewhere close?”

“The ABC is near. At Lavalle 545.”

“And what is the ABC?”

“Probably the best German restaurant in Buenos Aires, Herr Cranz.”

“Sounds fine,” Cranz said. “Why don’t we go there?”

And the first thing I’m going to do when we get back is have Ambassador von Lutzenberger cable the foreign ministry and have the orders sending you home canceled.

I have a job of great importance to do here, and I can’t do it if I have to spend all my time in an auction bidding war against the goddamn OSS over tinned corned beef!