Suhren was executed by the French in 1945.
At the handing-over ceremony in the RSHA headquarters in Berlin, everyone admired the beautifully prepared manuscript, and not least a certain SS Lieutenant Alfred Naujocks. This was the man who had carried out the mock attack on Gleiwitz radio station on the German-Polish border in August 1939, leaving the bodies of concentration-camp inmates in German Army uniforms as “proof” of the Polish attack on Germany, Hitler’s excuse for invading Poland the following week.
Naujocks asked who had done the manuscript, and, on being told, he requested the young Klaus Winzer be brought to Berlin.
Before he knew what was happening, Klaus Winzer was inducted into the SS, without any formal training period, made to swear the oath of loyalty and another oath of secrecy, and told he would be transferred to a top-secret Reich project. The butcher of Wiesbaden bewildered, was in seventh heaven.
The project involved was then being carried out under the auspices of the RSHA, Amt Six, Section F, in a workshop in Delbruckstrasse, Berlin.
Basically it was quite simple. The SS was trying to forge hundreds of thousands of British P-5 notes and American $100 bills. The paper was being made in the Reich banknote paper factory at Spechthausen, outside Berlin, and the job of the workshop in Delbruckstrasse was to try and get the right watermarks for British and American currency. It was for his knowledge of papers and inks that they wanted Klaus Winzer.
The idea was to flood Britain and America with phony money, thus ruining the economies of both countries. In early 1943, when the watermark for the British fivers had been achieved, the project of making the printing plates was transferred to Block 19, Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where Jewish and nonJewish graphologists and graphic artists worked under the direction of the SS. The job of Winzer was quality control, for the SS did not trust its prisoners not to make a deliberate error in their work.
Within two years Klaus Winzer had been taught by his charges everything they knew, and that was enough to make him a forger extraordinary. Toward the end of 1944 the project in Block 19 was also being used to prepare forged identity cards for the SS officers to use after the collapse of Germany.
In the early spring of 1945 the private little world, happy in its way when contrasted with the devastation then overtaking Germany, was brought to an end.
The whole operation, commanded by a certain SS Captain Bernhard Krilger, was ordered to leave Sachsenhausen and transfer itself into the remote mountains of Austria and continue the good work. The group drove south and set up the forgery again in the deserted brewery of Redl-Zipf in Upper Austria. A few days before the end of the war, a brokenhearted Klaus
Winzer stood weeping on the edge of a lake as millions of pounds and billions of dollars in his beautiful forged currency were dumped into the lake.
He went back to Wiesbaden and home. To his astonishment, having never lacked for a meal in the SS, he found the German civilians almost starving in that summer of 1945. The Americans now occupied Wiesbaden, and although they had plenty to eat, the Germans were nibbling at crusts. His father, by now a lifelong anti-Nazi, had come down in the world. Where once his shop had been stocked with hams, only a single string of sausages hung from the rows of gleaming hooks.
Klaus’s mother explained to him that all food had to be bought on ration cards issued by the Americans.
In amazement Klaus looked at the ration cards, noted they were locally printed on fairly cheap paper, took a handful, and retired to his room for a few days. When he emerged, it was to hand over to his astonished mother sheets of American ration cards, enough to feed them all for six months.
“But they’re forged,” gasped his mother.
Klaus explained patiently what by then he sincerely believed: they were not forged, just printed on a different machine.
His father backed Klaus. “Are you saying, foolish woman, that our son’s ration cards are inferior to the Yankee ration cards?” The argument was unanswerable, the more so when they sat down to a four-course meal that night.
A month later Klaus Winzer met Otto Klops, flashy, self-assured, the king of the black market of Wiesbaden, and they were in business. Winzer turned out endless quantities of ration cards, gasoline coupons, zonal border passes, driving licenses, United States military passes, PX cards; Klops used them to buy food, gasoline, truck tires, nylon stockings, soap, cosmetics, and clothing, keeping a part of the booty to enable him and the Winzers to live well, selling the rest at black-market prices. Within thirty months, by the summer of 1948,
Klaus Winzer was a rich man. In his bank account reposed five million Reichsmarks.
To his horrified mother he explained his simple philosophy. “A document is not either genuine or forged; it is either efficient or inefficient. If a pass is supposed to get you past a checkpoint, and it gets you past the checkpoint, it is a good document.” In October 1948 came the second dirty trick played on Klaus Winzer. The authorities reformed the currency, substituting the new Deutschmark for the old Reichsmark.
But instead of giving one for one, they simply abolished the Reichsmark and gave everyone the flat sum of 1000 new marks. He was mined. Once again his fortune was mere useless paper.
The populace, no longer needing the black-marketeers as goods came on the open market, denounced Klops, and Winzer had to flee. Taking one of his own zonal passes, he drove to the headquarters of the British Zone at Hanover and applied for a job in the passport office of the British Military Government.
His references from the United States authorities at Wiesbaden, signed by a full colonel of the USAF, were ‘excellent. They should have been; he had written them himself. The British major who interviewed him for the job put down his cup of tea and told the applicant, “I do hope you realize the importance of people having proper documentation on them at all times.” With complete sincerity Winzer assured the major that he did indeed. Two months later came his lucky break. He was alone in a beer hall, sipping a beer, when a man got into conversation with him. The man’s name was Herbert Molders. He confided to Winzer he was being sought by the British for war crimes and needed to get out of Germany. But only the British could supply passports to Germans, and he dared not apply. Winzer murmured that it might be arranged but would cost money.
To his amazement, Molders produced a genuine diamond necklace. He explained that he had been in a concentration camp, and one of the Jewish inmates bad tried to buy his freedom with the family jewelry.
Molders had taken the jewelry, ensured that the Jew was in the first party to the gas chambers, and against orders had kept the booty.
A week later, armed with a photograph of Molders, Winzer prepared the passport. He did not even forge it. He did not need to.
The system at the passport office was simple. In Section One, applicants turned up with all their documentation and filled out forms. Then they went away, leaving their documents for study. Section Two examined the birth certificates, ID cards, driving licenses, etc., for possible forgery, checked the war criminals wanted list, and, if the application was approved, passed the documents, accompanied by a signed approval from Head of Department, to Section Three. Section Three, on receipt of the note of approval from Section Two, took a blank passport from the safe where it was stored, filled it out, stuck in the applicant’s photograph, and gave the passport to the applicant, who presented himself a week later.
Winzer got himself transferred to Section Three. Quite simply, he filled out an application form for Molders in a new name, wrote out an “Application Approved” slip from the head of Section Two, and forged that British officer’s signature.