Pandora's Curse

HAMBURG, GERMANY

It was with an unnatural stillness that Klaus Raeder sat in the conference room. His breathing barely made an impression against his suit coat, and his eyes blinked at long, regular intervals. When the phone next to his elbow chimed, his hand made a graceful gesture to pick it up, almost as if he’d paused between rings. In fact, he’d remained motionless for more than an hour.

“Yes, Kara?”

“The board members are here, Herr Raeder. Shall I show them in?”

“Please.” Raeder pressed a button on the console built into the blond wood conference table, and the heavy drapes over the large picture windows swept closed, obscuring the view of the Alster River far below.

His secretary opened the door and stood aside for the six members of the board whom Raeder had called in this afternoon. He ignored them as they took their seats. “Kara, has Gunther Rath returned yet?”

“He got back from Paris about an hour ago.”

“Tell him I want to see him after we are finished here.”

“Yes, sir,” the secretary replied.

She closed the door behind her, and Raeder turned his head to regard his guests. At the far end of the table sat Konrad Ebelhardt, the seventy-year-old chairman of the board. Next to him was Anna Kohl, the daughter and only living relative of the company’s founder, Volker Kohl, whose portrait stared down from behind Ebelhardt’s back. The others were of little consequence to Raeder. Certainly they were wealthy and powerful, but they took all of their cues from Konrad and Anna.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen. Good afternoon, Anna.”

“How are you, Klaus?” the elderly Anna Kohl asked. “How are Eva and the children?”

“She’s taken them to the lodge in Bavaria for the summer.” There was a twinge of loneliness in his voice. “The boys have been looking forward to it.”

“Will you be joining them?” she persisted.

“I’m planning on a weekend visit in a week or so.” He poured water from a carafe and took a long sip to discourage her from asking any more personal questions.

Raeder folded his hands in front of him, waiting while Anna asked the others about their lives. He wasn’t deluded by her interest. Anna Kohl was as tough as any of the men at the table with the possible exception of Raeder himself. She couldn’t care less about the board members. The spinster had nothing in the world except the company that bore her name.

“I saw the quarterly projections,” Konrad Ebelhardt said to end the idle chatter. He was broadly built with a heavy stomach and a blocky head. He spoke with the deliberation of a Prussian officer. “With our capital reserves as low as they are, I don’t like that we are so dependent on getting the Eurofighter’s avionics contract. If that deal falls through, we will be in a vulnerable position.”

“The announcement for who will be supplying the next-generation computers for the Eurofighter is still a month away, but we have been assured that Kohl’s electronics arm will be building them,” Raeder stated in such a way that Ebelhardt knew not to ask anything further. The board members wouldn’t want to know what their president had done to secure the multibillionmark contract.

“Does that mean we can forget about the French attempt to underbid us?” asked Reinhardt Wurmbach, Kohl AG’s chief legal counsel.

“Their bid is thirty percent higher than ours,” Raeder said. “I’m going to increase our own bid price to cut that gap to ten percent. We’ll still get the contract and squeeze another two hundred million marks from NATO.”

“Do we have Herr Rath and his trip to Paris to thank for this information?”

Raeder allowed a tight smile, knowing it was expected of him. “My special-projects director was instrumental in learning the amount of the French bid.”

“Nothing too illegal, I hope.” The lawyer tried to make light of industrial espionage.

The president of Kohl AG said nothing. In his devotion to the company’s fiscal strength, very little was beyond his scope, and he would not make jokes about his business practices. An uncomfortable silence stretched for ten seconds. Wurmbach stripped off his glasses to avoid Raeder’s stare but he could not hide his bitterness toward the man financial magazines called Überkind. Superboy.

When Kohl’s previous president announced his retirement eighteen months ago, Reinhardt Wurmbach had worked tirelessly to become his replacement. It was to be his reward for twenty-seven years of loyalty. And yet Anna and Konrad had passed him over in favor of Raeder, an outsider who had amassed a personal fortune buying up marginal companies in the former East Germany and making them profitable in record time. The sting of reporting to this handsome forty-year-old interloper was something Wurmbach had not come to grips with. And yet he couldn’t fault the growth Kohl, one of the fifty largest companies in Europe, had enjoyed in Raeder’s brief tenure.

“You all know why I wanted to see you today,” Raeder said to cut the silence. The six members present represented the core of the board and sixty percent of the company’s stock. Collectively, they were Kohl AG. “You are all aware that we are the largest company in Germany yet to cooperate with the reconciliation commission seeking financial compensation for Holocaust survivors and their families. You also know that pressure to turn over documentation for the company’s wartime activities is mounting.

“By stalling for as long as we have, public opinion, which had been ambivalent, has shifted away from our company and our products. Our secrecy has had the unintended effect of severely damaging our reputation. Despite a fifty-percent increase in advertising and marketing, sales are down in nearly every division and most strongly in our heavy-construction business. No one is willing to use us until we are out from under the shadow of our legacy.”

“Not cooperating with the reconciliation commission was your idea,” Wurmbach said and others nodded. “Our losses are your fault.”

The outburst had no effect on Raeder. “And it is a decision I stand by. I would not expose Kohl to billions of marks’ worth of lawsuits until I was satisfied that I knew everything the company did before and during the war. For that, I needed the time to study the old records.”

“It’s inevitable we will have to pay something,” Wurmbach stated. “Before the war, Kohl was just a small ironworks company with less than a hundred employees. Our expansion was due entirely to military and government contracts from the Nazi regime. We profited from the bloodshed just like Seimens, I.G. Farben, Volkswagen, and all the others.”

“And after the war we were a collection of bombed-out factories and ruined equipment,” Raeder replied evenly. “What profits we gained during the war were effectively nullified. Despite evidence to the contrary, many believe that we are the same company now as we were before the war and must be held accountable. I needed to know the full amount of our culpability and thus our liability. Putting a few hundred million marks into the collective pot is a lot different than facing an endless number of individual lawsuits worth billions.” He looked down the table at Ebelhardt and Anna Kohl. “It is my risk-management skills that attracted you to me in the first place. You knew a day of reckoning was coming and you hired me to protect you.”

Anna didn’t deny it. “The question is, can you?”

“Yes.” Raeder saw Anna slump in relief. “For the past twelve months I’ve determined our strategy for minimizing the amount of money we will have to pay. I’ve estimated that a payout of two hundred million marks won’t interfere with our long-term growth while satisfying the commission that we are cooperating.”

A wave of murmurs and sighs washed across the table.

“I arrived at that number after a lot of exhaustive research,” Raeder cut through the dissenting voices. “It’s the very minimum we can get away with.”

“Have you prepared documents that we can give them that will lead them to this figure?” asked Konrad Ebelhardt.

“Everything’s ready now. I’ve had Gunther Rath and his staff gather one hundred thousand pages of correspondence, shipping orders, and the like. It’s all original material, carefully edited so that the commission will determine that we should be responsible for paying roughly a quarter billion marks in reparations.”

“You just said two hundred million.”

“We’ll negotiate down to that number after they have made their findings public. They would be suspicious if we didn’t.”

“How much of our wartime activity are we keeping from them?” Anna asked.

“Very little, actually. Kohl certainly did profit from the use of slave labor at a few factories, but the practice was not as widespread as in many other companies. If it weren’t for one project in particular, I would have felt comfortable disclosing everything to the commission.” Raeder noticed the quick glance between Konrad and Anna. He could even read her lips as she mouthed a single word. Pandora.

He paused, waiting to see if Konrad would dismiss the rest of the board. He wasn’t surprised that the chairman did.

“Gentlemen,” Ebelhardt said, looking around the table, “could you please excuse us for a few minutes? Anna and I need to speak with Klaus alone.”

Wurmbach shot Raeder a deadly look as he led the three others toward the door. When they were gone, Anna was the first to speak.

“My father intentionally shielded me from the Pandora Project, Klaus, and I ask you to show me the same courtesy. Please don’t mention specifics in my presence.”

“I can’t believe Volker left any records even remotely connected to Pandora.” Ebelhardt’s face was red with ill-disguised fury. “The damned fool.”

“Konrad! He was my father.”

“Anna, I only read a bare outline of what was involved,” Raeder said, keeping his true sense of horror out of his voice. “Even that little bit was shocking. I have to agree with Konrad. That material should have been destroyed decades ago. God, it shouldn’t have been written down in the first place.”

“We can’t correct past mistakes.” Ebelhardt leaned forward, his sharp eyes boring into Raeder.

“We can bury them though.” Raeder let his statement hang in the air. “All the paperwork linking Kohl to the Pandora Project has been burned but I don’t think that’s enough.”

“What do you propose?”

“I’ve made arrangements to have the original site obliterated and any remaining physical evidence destroyed.”

“How do you know that by going back to” — Ebelhardt glanced at Anna — “by going back there, we won’t give away the secret ourselves? Its location is so remote and has remained undiscovered for more than sixty years.”

“Risk management. Just because we burned our evidence doesn’t mean there isn’t some diary or journal written by somebody involved in Pandora. It could be lying in some musty attic right now, waiting to go off like a time bomb. Our surviving war veterans are all in their seventies and eighties. We can’t chance family members discovering such a written record when they go through their fathers’ possessions. By hiding Pandora from the reconciliation commission now, we have to make certain that even if a diary is discovered, nothing remains to support the story. By destroying the site, all verifiable links to Kohl are severed.”

Konrad looked unconvinced.

“We’re about to lie to the reconciliation commission in order to conceal a despicable crime, and we have to make sure that the lie is never revealed. If the world finds out about Pandora and our involvement in it, Kohl’s bankruptcy will be the last thing on our minds. They would be fully in their right to seek criminal charges against all of us.”

Anna gasped. “Is it that bad? The Pandora Project, I mean.”

“It’s worse than you can possibly imagine,” Konrad answered, placing one of his hands over hers.

“I can make this work,” Raeder stated. “I have to. In the current environment, we are liable for billions in reparations, and if people learned what really happened during the war, the company would lose every customer it ever had. The alternative to covering up Pandora and paying the two hundred million is losing everything. Our ten thousand employees would be out of work. Our shareholders would go broke. It’s not that inconceivable that the shock waves of Kohl’s collapse would severely damage Germany’s economy.”

“It’s not fair,” Anna spat. “Why should we be forced to pay for the sins of our fathers? I was a teen when the war ended. I didn’t force anyone into slavery. I didn’t put anyone into a gas chamber. I’ve done nothing wrong. There isn’t one person left in the company from those days.”

“Other than a few old ladies, none of our shareholders were alive then either,” Konrad added.

“None of us are responsible,” Anna said petulantly.

“It’s been determined that all of us are responsible, Anna,” Raeder said. “How do you think I feel? I have even less to do with this than either of you. My parents were toddlers in 1945.”

When Konrad and Anna hired Raeder, they’d made him aware that Kohl would need to negotiate a settlement with the reconciliation commission, but they had not told him the depths of the company’s Nazi involvement. They had specifically withheld Pandora from him, rightly fearing that he wouldn’t have joined if he’d known. His reputation for ruthlessness in the business world was richly deserved, but what he’d read about in the old files went far into the realm of the obscene. Now, he knew, he was in too deep to walk away. It was a matter of pride. And ego, he thought. Raeder was equally disturbed by what he’d learned about Kohl and by how easily he’d been manipulated. He’d explore this circumstance once he’d gotten the company out of its present crisis.

“What kinds of steps are you taking to destroy the Pandora site?” Konrad Ebelhardt asked abruptly. “And how sure are you they will work?”

“I don’t think you need to know the details, but I assure you that, other than eradicating evidence of Kohl AG’s culpability, we will do nothing illegal.”

“No one will be harmed?”

“No, nothing like that will happen.” Raeder gave a sharp laugh. “My tactics stopped short of physical injury many years ago. Other than a minor setback, my plan is actually nearing the final phase. I bring this up because now is the time we can call the whole thing off and ‘come clean,’ as the Americans say. Thirty million marks have already been spent getting everything to this stage. A small loss compared to what would happen if we tell the reconciliation commission about Pandora. However, that alternative is still open. I can cancel the destruction of the Pandora site.”

He leaned back in his chair, running a hand through his blond hair. By skirting the morality of what they were doing and making this a purely financial decision, Raeder was confident that Anna and Konrad would agree with his plan. Raeder was no more pleased about this situation than either of them and yet he’d cut through the emotions to make the right choice. He had also had a few months to dampen his conscience.

“Do it!” Anna shouted as if she’d been listening to a raging debate in her mind and wanted it to end. She didn’t look at Konrad when she continued, confirming Klaus Raeder’s instinct that she was the real power behind the company. “Destroy whatever remains to link us to Pandora. I won’t allow anything to hurt Kohl.”

“Are you sure, Anna?” Ebelhardt asked. “This is a dangerous gamble.”

“I’m convinced that Klaus is right. Erasing our ties to Pandora is the only chance we have to save ourselves from financial ruin. You’ve made it clear that if the commission learns about it, through our own disclosure or from some other source, we are finished. We have to make sure they never do.”

“Very well.” Raeder nodded. “It will be done.”