The lights went down and the first frames of the documentary footage flickered across the screen. Colonel Andrus watched his prisoners. Hans Frank, governor general of occupied Poland, the lawyer and PhD largely responsible for the murder of the Jewish population there, put a handkerchief to his mouth and gagged. Joachim von Ribbentrop, the former champagne salesman who became Hitler’s foreign minister and pressured foreign states to allow the deportation of Jews in their territories to extermination camps in the east, got up from his chair and walked out of the room. Albert Kesselring, commander of the Luftwaffe invasions into Poland, France, and the Soviet Union, who also led the Battle of Britain, turned white. Hermann G?ring sighed as if bored. Julius Streicher, the schoolteacher who became Hitler’s mouthpiece and encouraged readers to exterminate the Jews, sat on his chair “clasping and unclasping his hands.” When the film was over, no one said a word. A little while later, Walter Funk, the fifty-five-year-old former minister of the war economy and president of the Reichsbank, asked to see Colonel Andrus alone.
Small, overweight, and suffering from venereal disease, this once supremely powerful Nazi Party official twisted his fingers anxiously, while telling Colonel Andrus he had a confession to make. Walter Funk “looked incapable of running a filling-station, let alone a bank,” Andrus recalled. Funk fidgeted nervously. “I have something to tell you, sir,” Andrus recalled Funk saying. “I have been a bad man, Colonel, and I want to tell about it.” Funk started to cry. Then he told Colonel Andrus that it was he who gave the order that all gold in every prisoner’s mouth—in every concentration camp across the Reich—be removed and collected for the Reichsbank’s reserves. Funk confessed that at first he’d “had [the gold] knocked out of their mouths while they were alive, but [realized] if they were dead there was far less bother.” Andrus was appalled. “I had never believed before that such a horrific order as the one Funk was confessing to had ever been given,” Andrus said.
Colonel Andrus told Funk to leave. In his memoir, Andrus wondered what Walter Funk had hoped to gain from his confession; he never got his answer. Whatever motivated Funk that day at Ashcan eventually disappeared. Months later, at Nuremberg, Funk denied that the conversation with Colonel Andrus had ever taken place. Instead, he swore under oath that he had never been connected with orders involving acquiring gold from Jews. “If it was done,” declared Funk, “it has been kept from me up till now.”
Save Funk’s tearful confession, the screening of the Buchenwald atrocity film had no apparent effect on the other prisoners. The men who gagged and left the room had nothing more to say, and the rest of the Nazi high command remained tight-lipped about their crimes. Colonel Andrus grew increasingly frustrated. The prisoners were allowed to sit outside in the Palace Hotel garden, in small groups out of earshot of prison guards. There, Andrus watched Hitler’s closest confidants prattle on among themselves.
“They could sit out in the garden in the spring sunshine and chatter to their hearts’ content,” recalled Andrus. “Undoubtedly they compared notes on the interrogation[s] which went on in sixteen booths every day.” If only G-2 had wired the Ashcan garden for sound. Colonel Andrus got an idea. He made a list of the four men who he believed were the biggest “backstabbers and gossips” in the group. “Those with outspoken views about their fellow Nazis—men ready to blame each other for their own crimes.” G?ring, “verbose,” von Papen, “malicious,” Kesselring, “vain,” and Admiral Horthy, “the Prince of Austria who believed he was better than everyone else,” were chosen. With permission from headquarters, Andrus devised an elaborate ruse intended to extract information from the Nazi prisoners.
The four men were told that they were being handed over to the British for interrogation; that soon they would be traveling to a villa in Germany to be questioned there. In reality, Army Intelligence, G-2, had rented a house located three and a half miles from Ashcan. It was a traditional German-style half-timber house with a high wall running around its perimeter. U.S. Army signal intelligence engineers spent several days running hundreds of yards of wires through the house, under floorboards, behind walls, inside furniture cushions and lighting fixtures. In a final touch, they wired the garden for sound. The engineers burrowed through the backyard garden and attached tiny microphones to a single tree above the sitting area. All wires connected back to a recording machine capable of laying audio tracks down onto gramophone records. This was high technology in the summer of 1945.
At the Ashcan detention center, G?ring, von Papen, Kesselring, and Admiral Horthy were loaded into an ambulance, a common means of transport after the war, and driven away. Black curtains had been drawn across the vehicle windows so the prisoners couldn’t see where they were being taken. For hours, the ambulance drove around in what Andrus called a “circuitous route,” covering fifty miles of terrain but never leaving Luxembourg. When the ambulance pulled up to the Germanic-looking house and unloaded the Nazis, G?ring was thrilled.
“We are at a house I know!” boasted G?ring, assuring his colleagues they had arrived in beautiful Heidelberg. “I recognize the decor on the walls,” G?ring said once inside.