I could not have felt more grateful for the caution my Munich friends had used in withdrawing their money in the way that they did!
The remainder of that story can be quickly told. I contacted my man in Zurich once again and, with the cash complete, we went off to Bern. We met the cashier of a bank who carried the equivalent in Swiss Francs with him. We made the exchange and the Swiss contact man purchased the required amount of blocked German Marks on the following morning.
The German part of the transaction was completed with great speed. The Berlin factory was taken over by the Munich group, the bribe was paid and one of the group went to Berlin to collect the Jewish prisoner who was still held in the Berlin Gestapo jail. However, he failed to get him. Dr Goebbels, he was told, was interested in the case personally and it would be impossible to release the man against the Propaganda Minister’s orders.
Fortunately, one member of the Munich group had gone to school with Gestapo Chief Reinhard Heydrich. ‘I know enough about that bastard to get anything I want from him’ he told us. ‘What’s more, he knows I’ve written it all down and left it in safe hands. He’ll perform. Just you watch.’ He went off to Berlin and re-appeared almost immediately – accompanied by the Jewish industrialist! He had walked into Heydrich’s office and demanded a release order and got it. Goebbels hadn’t heard of the man’s release. When he did soon afterwards it was too late. The victim had left the country.
I myself was taken off the active list for some months during which it became clear that the entire transaction had gone according to plan and that not one of us had been linked to it by the Gestapo.
My confidence swelled, and I wanted action. There had been a feeling of shock every time the doorbell rang at an unconventional hour, but that fear soon wore off. By the time I was sent to Switzerland near the end of 1935 I had started to become careless and overconfident.
My assignment was very simple. I was to meet a guide in Zurich and arrange for him to meet a man, wanted by the Gestapo, near to the Austrian border. It was early afternoon when I left Munich and I would not reach Zurich until fairly late that evening. That would be too late to get hold of anyone who could give me some money and I wanted to go out to dinner and have a few drinks.
I decided to conceal a little extra money so that I would arrive with more than just the permissible ten Marks. A small price list of the cars I was selling seemed to fit the bill. I put two twenty Mark notes inside it and returned it to my wallet. That evening the customs men at Konstanz were in a bad mood. They carefully searched my bag and found nothing. Then they told me to empty my pockets. One of them leafed through the price list and there found the forty Marks!
The first thing they did was to arrest me and put me into a cell, which proved to be very handy. They left me alone for a couple of hours and that gave me time to cook up a story.
I was, I told them later, dealing in second hand cars and had sold one earlier that day. I had left the money at home but must have overlooked the two bills.
They informed me that they would check my story and returned me to my cell. There was no dinner out – in fact there was not even any dinner ‘in’ that night.
Early the next morning I was taken back and interviewed by the same customs officials. They had, they announced, decided to believe my story. I would be subject to one week’s imprisonment, which would be entered in my penal register. However, the matter could also be settled with a fine, payable there and then. This would not be entered anywhere. It would amount to the forty Marks I was carrying illegally plus a further sixty Marks which I had better obtain from Munich by cable.
We understood each other perfectly. I left my passport with them and phoned my mother who cabled me the sixty Marks, which arrived two hours later. Back at the customs, I settled my debt without bothering anybody about a receipt and I was allowed to pass. Luckily, I had run into officials who needed some ready money.
When I returned to Munich and reported the incident to my friends, they frowned. There might be a leakage. Frank had become a known quantity at that border and had therefore ceased to be employable. My ‘resistance’ days were over!
I did not think I had done anything heroic, rather, I thought I had given free rein to two dominating traits of my character which have stood me in bad stead forever after – irresponsibility and adventurousness.
However, I had assisted people who were in great need of help. I felt good about that then and have done ever since.
9. TRUE LOVE AND MARRIAGE
FOR A FEW MONTHS I CONTINUED TO SELL CARS and went skiing and nothing unusual happened, except that occasionally a friend would get into trouble with the Nazis and disappear into a concentration camp, whilst others left the country as emigrants.
Then in the spring of 1936 I met a girl that I had admired from a distance. She lived opposite the garage in the Bauerstrasse where Tony and I were beautifying old cars. She was a beautiful blonde and I would watch her move about in her first floor flat. It appeared that there was no man in her life. I decided to change that. We met and immediately fell in love.
Her name was Maditta von Skrbensky and her father, a Baron, owned estates in Silesia and bred horses in the Rhineland. He was a member of the ‘Herrenclub’ in Berlin, a sort-of political, social, sinister assembly of nobles, industrialists and political grey eminences of Germany who were of considerable importance to Hitler and were tacitly absolved from giving proof of their faith in the Fuehrer through Nazi Party membership.
After every self-inflicted German disaster, the members of the Herrenclub have managed to emerge in remarkably fine shape to get ready for their next vital, patriotic contribution. (The Americans attempted to bring some of them to justice during the so-called Subsequent Proceedings at Nuremberg, where such giants as Krupp[1] and Flick were tried, but their sentences were absurd in the light of what they had done, and their return to wealth and honour was rapid. Alfried Krupp, for instance, was found guilty of crimes which, had he been tried by the IMT, would have meant a death sentence.)
For a girl in Maditta’s position I, a non-Aryan, was therefore the worst possible choice she could make. Although we agreed on this, we continued to see a great deal of each other. We would, we thought, eventually leave Germany and get married abroad.
On making enquiries the replies we received were always the same. We would not be breaking any law and the marriage would definitely be legal. As for other consequences – that was up to the Nazi Party and the Gestapo.
We decided to try. There was however one serious obstacle. In those European countries for which travellers’ cheques could be obtained in Germany a lengthy stay was required prior to the marriage and we could not take with us enough money to cover such a period. The one country in which marriage was possible after only a few days was England and that was financially inaccessible.
However, in February 1937, the problem was solved for us during a skiing trip we had taken to the Italian Alpine resort of Sestriere. There we had met a charming English couple on their honeymoon – Humphrey Sykes[2] and his wife Grizel. When they heard our story they immediately invited us to stay with them in the garrison town of Tidworth in Wiltshire, where Sykes was serving with the 9th Lancers, and they told us we could get married from their house. We accepted gratefully, and details were settled; we would travel to England in April for the sole purpose of getting married.
1
The Krupp Trial (officially,
2
Humphrey Hugh Sykes, born in 1907, was to become a very important figure in Wolfe Frank’s life. He was the son of Major Herbert Rushton Sykes and Hon. Constance Harriet Georgina Skeffington. He married, firstly, Grizel Sophie, daughter of Air Vice-Marshal Sir Norman Duckworth Kerr MacEwen, in 1936, from whom he was divorced in 1948. He married, secondly, Muriel Hooper, daughter of Colonel John Charles Hooper, in 1958. He was educated at Rugby School and gained the rank of Major in the service of the 9th Lancers. He died in 1991 after having travelled from Scotland to the home of Mike Dilliway in Dorset in search of Wolfe Frank’s manuscript and other documents.