AUTHOR’S NOTE
DR. MAX MERTEN was arrested in an Athens court during Arthur Meissner’s trial for war crimes and property pillage in the spring of 1943. Queen Frederica of Greece (herself a German) questioned Merten’s prosecution, asking if “this is the way Mr. District Attorney understands the development of German and Greek relations.” When he was held in Averoff Prison on remand, the West German government strenuously protested his arrest. Two years later, on February 11, 1959, Merten went to trial accused of murder, property pillage, gold coins expropriation, and other war crimes against Jews. The president of the court, one Colonel Kokoretsas, excluded the attorneys for the Jewish community of Salonika from presenting evidence in court; only individual Jewish plaintiffs were allowed to testify, thus diminishing the true scale of the crime against Greece’s Jews. Merten pleaded not guilty to all of the charges and his defense was paid for by the federal government of Germany. On March 5, 1959, Max Merten was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to twenty-five years in prison. After serving just eight months Merten was freed by Prime Minister Konstantinos Karamanlis in a general amnesty on November 5, 1959. In March 1960, an “economic agreement” was signed between Greece and Germany stipulating the sum of just 115 million marks (about $26 million) to be paid as reparations. A laughable amount of money, given all that Greece had suffered. Germany also agreed to provide separate sums as “loans” to Greece. Max Merten returned to Germany, where he received substantial damages for the period he’d spent in jail. He provided written evidence during the Eichmann trial in 1960 although he did not attend, and he died in 1971 or 1976. He never returned to Greece.
After serving with the SS, ALOIS BRUNNER probably worked for German intelligence before traveling to Egypt in 1954, where he was an arms dealer. Later, he moved to Syria and may have worked for the Syrian intelligence services of Hafez al-Assad. The exact nature of his work is unknown. In 1954 he was condemned to death in absentia in France for war crimes committed at Drancy. In a 1985 interview with a German magazine called Bunte, in Damascus, Brunner was unrepentant about his work for the Nazis. The Israelis tried twice to kill him, and failed. As a result of a letter bomb in 1961, he lost an eye and the fingers on his left hand. He died in 2001 or 2010, depending on which source you believe. At the time of his death, he was the most wanted Nazi war criminal in the world. He was buried in Damascus.
DR. HANS GLOBKE gave evidence both for the prosecution and the defense at the Nuremberg Trials. He left office in 1963, following attempts by the federal government to influence the Eichmann trial; material that exonerated Globke was fed direct to the Eichmann prosecutors by the BND. Globke died in 1973 but not before he was honored by Konrad Adenauer with the War of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. He remained an active adviser to Adenauer and the Christian Democratic Union right up to his death.
All of my information about MUNICH RE comes from the company’s own website which, to its enormous credit, makes no secret about the company’s wartime history. It states that Munich RE’s chairman in 1933, Kurt Schmitt, was appointed Reich Minister of Economics and, on the strength of his convictions, Alois Alzheimer joined the Nazi Party, the only other member of MRE’s board to do so. MRE did indeed insure the barracks and “operations” at Auschwitz, Buchenwald, Dachau, Ravensbrück, and Sachsenhausen. After the war, Schmitt and Alzheimer were taken into custody by the US military. Neither faced charges, although other board members were given prison sentences. Alois Alzheimer became chairman of MRE in 1950 and directed the company until 1968. If only all German companies were as open about their pasts as MRE! As far as I am aware, the chairman of Munich MRE was no relation to the more famous Alois Alzheimer who gave his name to a type of presenile dementia.
In 1960 Der Spiegel published excerpts from Merten’s deposition to the German authorities, which claimed that various members of the Greek government and their relations were informers during the Nazi occupation and had been rewarded with businesses confiscated from Jews in Thessaloniki. Some of these same figures successfully sued Der Spiegel in 1963.
Following a coup in 1967, GREECE was ruled by the military—the so-called Regime of the Colonels—for a period of seven years. Thousands of communists were imprisoned or exiled to remote Greek islands. Many were tortured. After the restoration of democracy in 1975, Greece applied to join the EEC and successfully acceded in 1981. The country joined the Euro in 2001, having faked the figures required to qualify for entry; since then, the country has buckled under the weight of debts the European Central Bank seems unwilling to forgive.
The GOLD of Thessaloniki’s Jews has never been recovered. In 1945 vast quantities of Nazi gold were moved from the Reichsbank in Berlin to Switzerland for “safekeeping.” In a book called Nazi Gold (1984), by authors Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, it was estimated that this gold would be worth approximately ten billion dollars on today’s market. Of course, anyone who has seen the movie Kelly’s Heroes (1970) knows that the gold was stolen by Clint Eastwood and Telly Savalas.
In 2003 KONRAD ADENAUER was voted the greatest German of all time by viewers of German television station ZDF.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Philip Kerr’s Bernie Gunther novels have been national bestsellers and finalists for both the Shamus and Edgar awards. He is the recipient of the British Crime Writers’ Ellis Peters Award for Historical Crime Fiction. As P. B. Kerr, he is the author of the young adult series Children of the
