He led us into a small chamber and showed us a trapdoor that matched the flooring perfectly and could not be spotted unless pointed out. “In case of any trouble, you go down there and wait for my call.”
“Are you expecting any trouble, Herr Weber?” Karl asked.
“I am expecting trouble twenty-four hours a day,” Weber replied casually. “It goes with the job. Down in the cellar you will find another exit. It is concealed behind an old cabinet and it leads to the lake.”
“You’ve got a private Fuehrerbunker here, Captain?” Karl remarked jokingly when we had returned to the living room.
“And a better one than the Fuehrer had,” Weber con-ceded. “My bunker has safety valves.”
From his desk he lifted up a small model of a powerful speedboat. “At the end of that corridor behind the cabinet there is the lake and a grown-up sister of this baby here. She can do seventy kilometers per hour.”
It- was past midnight when the one-time U-boat commander returned. He was not alone. The stem-looking, middle-aged, silver-haired man who accompanied him shook hands with us but did not introduce himself. After a few words of mutual courtesy, he took a small green notebook from his pocket and spoke to us crisply and without preliminaries.
“State your rank, serial number, division, and last station, please.”
We told him and he made some notes. He questioned us for some time, then exchanged glances with Weber and nodded. “It will do!” He handed us two long yellow envelopes. They contained Swiss birth certificates, identity cards, and other related documents. “You will also find there five hundred Swiss francs, along with an address. Herr Weber will take you across the lake and you will report at the given ad-dress as soon as possible. Good luck!” He left immediately afterwards.
“I guess you are all set up,” Weber remarked with a grin as we examined our new papers. They were perfect. “Skipper,” I told him, “if you weren’t here and I didn’t know you, I would think we had just passed a Gestapo interview. Who was that gentleman?”
“You should not be inquisitive, Hans,” was his only answer.
The given address turned out to be a small Renaissance villa near Zurich. On the polished oak door was a brass plate: H.M. Dipl. Engineer. A little white-haired old lady opened the door for us. “The Herr Engineer isn’t home yet but please come in. We are expecting him at any moment now.”
She did not even ask who we were or why we were coming. Nor did Herr Engineer later. He merely drove us to a magnificent mansion overlooking the lake. “Pension Particuliere” an inscription read.
“You will be staying here for a while,” he informed us. “Room and board are all paid for but you may give small tips.”
“Who is paying for all this?” Karl blurted out.
“Why should you care?” our host snapped. We had noticed the moment he spoke to us that he was a born Swiss.
The madam of the establishment, a tall, energetic woman in her mid-fifties, was no more talkative than the Hen-Engineer had been. She wore a long pearl necklace with a golden butterfly glinting above her small breasts. Playing with the necklace she said, “You will find many other gentlemen here, some of them coming, others leaving. None of them staying for very long and none of them paying much attention to names and stories. You have had a difficult time, so now relax. Walk in the city, play tennis in our park or chess in the library, but ask no questions. And something else,” she added as the maid came in to take us upstairs, “if you have cameras, please deposit them with our clerk. You are not allowed to take pictures within our establishment. I hope you understand.”
We understood.
Three weeks later, Eisner and Schulze arrived. They had gone through the same routine. “My kids are dead. A bomb hit their school last April,” Bernard stated. “My wife is the whore of an American sergeant.”
“There is a two-hundred-foot pond where my home used to be,” Erich said. “My family is listed as “missing” since December forty-five. They seem to be missing all right.”
He glanced about the magnificent reception hall. “What about this joint here, Hans?”
“It’s the Prinz Albert Strasse turned into a chess club,” Karl remarked before I could answer. His reference to the former Gestapo center in Berlin made us smile. “You enjoy life and ask no questions,” he went on. “Be glad that you were accepted in the family. You’ll meet many dignified, middle-aged gentlemen at the breakfast table. We don’t know who they are but they weren’t sergeants in the Wehrmacht, that is sure.”
“I see,” Schulze nodded. “We’ll try to abide by the rules.”
“I am afraid that you will have to leave Switzerland,” the police officer in civilian dress informed us. “We are under strong diplomatic pressure. Our authorities might be willing to overlook transit passengers from Germany but they are not happy about your documentary arrangements.”
I had already noticed that many of the “guests” had departed during the past ten days.
“When are we supposed to leave and to where?” Eisner wanted to know.
“There is no need for you to panic,” the officer replied with quiet benevolence. “Let us say… in twenty days?” Then he added reassuringly, “Your papers are still good for any country except Switzerland. The world is large.”
“You know what?” said Eisner after the police officer departed. “I have the notion that someone somewhere is holding this entire Swiss outfit at bayonet point. And hang me if it isn’t the Gestapo!”
“The Gestapo is dead as a doornail,” Schulze snorted.
“Dead, my aunt Josephine. You won’t see any of those guys hanged. I wonder if the boss of your Josef Weber back in Konstanz was one of them. His face seemed familiar enough to me but I can’t put my finger on him.”
“Who cares?” I asked.
3. THE BATTALION OF THE DAMNED
The old vaulted gate with the Tricolor fluttering overhead was open and inviting. At last, at the end of an odyssey across half of war-torn Europe, we were safely hidden—or so we thought. In a way we were indeed safe, but far from being hidden. Our bogus passports, identity cards, and birth certificates would not fool the French for long. Our meticulously prepared cover stories had been accepted, but only in the spirit of the Foreign Legion’s ancient tradition: Ask no questions about a man’s background, one is always fit enough to die. The short farewell speech of Major Jacques Barbier had made that quite clear.
“Your papers say that you are coming from Holland, Poland, Switzerland, and only God knows from where else. You should not think that we have swallowed all this German sauerkraut. You are nothing but Nazi canaille—all of you. Professional killers who just cannot stop shooting or who prefer a bullet to the rope. In Indochina you may do some more killing and receive all the bullets you want. Whether you perish or survive is of little importance to us. You belong to this army. You are wearing its uniform. But remember, we have no illusions about your allegiance to the Tricolor. All you’ve wanted was to cheat the hangman and you’ve succeeded, at least for the time being. But you should not be too overjoyed, for death is going to be your constant companion in Indochina.”
The departure of the Japanese from Indochina had created a dangerous vacuum there which the postwar French Army could not readily fill. The British forces were about to quit, and the veteran troops of General de Gaulle were needed at home to prevent anarchy and a threatening Communist takeover in Paris. The prewar colonial army had been much humiliated by the Japanese and its survivors had but one desire left: to return home as fast as possible. If the colonial empire was to be preserved, France urgently needed a large number of skilled fighting men. The Foreign Legion had welcomed everyone willing to serve under the Tricolor—including the onetime “Nazi canaille.”