Chapter 42
The doorman greeted Lizzie, and she stepped inside and followed him into the main entrance of the bank. She knew the way to Brunner’s office, but he insisted on escorting her to the door, where he knocked and announced her.
Brunner was waiting for her, white-faced and pacing by the window when she entered.
‘Good morning, Herr Brunner.’
‘Good morning, Miss Gale. Thank you for coming.’
They both hesitated, waiting for the doorman to leave and return to his post. Fortunately, they met no one else along the way, and Brunner’s secretary wasn’t at her desk.
‘Are you well?’ Lizzie asked.
Brunner approached her and dropped his voice. ‘I gave my secretary the day off, and my partner is on business in Zurich. It’s now or never.’
Now Lizzie understood why he had been so precise in his invitation, asking her to arrive on this day, at this time.
‘What do I need to know before we begin?’ she said, her breath catching in her throat, knowing she was about to walk the esteemed Swiss banker and her trusted informant into an act of treason.
Brunner produced a bottle of schnapps and waved it at her as he poured two shots. ‘You’ll need this to fortify you.’
‘That bad?’ she asked.
His eyes were pools of fear, and he didn’t reply, but knocked back the liquid in one gulp. He bent his head and whispered in her ear. ‘You brought the camera? You can’t remove anything from the vault, so you’ll have to get everything like that.’
Lizzie’s heart hammered as the tension grew. There was a lot riding on this vault, and she hoped she could find what they needed. If the diplomatic pouch hadn’t delivered the precious ledger copies, whatever she could photograph today was all London would receive. ‘How long will I have?’
‘As long as you need. No one is around to interfere, but obviously the quicker you can get in and out, the better. Take your time, though, as this must be our last exchange. Too many eyes are on me, and I can no longer trust Hauser.’
Brunner headed for the door, and she followed, touching her waistband to check that the camera was in place.
They left his office and threaded through the quiet corridors, down several flights of marble steps until they reached what must have been the basement.
The lighting was dimmer and the air cooler than above ground, and there were no windows.
Brunner hunched near a steel door set deep in the wall, and entered a combination she couldn’t see, but heard it click open with a creaky groan.
They stepped inside, and the heavy door locked behind them under the pressure of Brunner’s hand, and then he led her through yet another door and ushered her inside the vault, closing the door once again.
They were locked behind metres of solid steel which, as long as they could escape, was reassuring for what she was about to do.
No one could just stumble in like she had feared when she tried to envisage the vault.
Tom had assured her that Swiss vaults were secure affairs and once they were in there, it would be safe.
He had been more concerned about her being watched on the way in and out of the bank, but she’d told him she hadn’t noticed a shadow on her lately.
Her eyes took time to adjust as Brunner switched on the light, and she could see clearly again.
Floor-to-ceiling shelves lined every wall, stacked with leather-bound books and rows of neat metal boxes she presumed must contain valuables, as well as lidded storage cartons for documents.
How would she know where to start, and she whispered her question to Brunner, who looked at her as if it was up to her now.
The sealed room was chilly and lacked air, and a slight sense of panic gripped Lizzie, but she steadied herself. This was her moment, and she must maximise every second. Soon she would be back outside in the bright afternoon sunshine.
The vault was essentially a secure storeroom, and Brunner moved to the other side. After keying in more codes, he opened a giant safe in a wall next to a tall set of shelves. ‘Take photos of this,’ he said. ‘A picture is worth a thousand words.’
Lizzie closed the gap between them and peered into the safe.
It was stacked with gleaming gold bars, wads of Swiss bank notes, and tall piles of gold and silver coins in cases.
She’d seen nothing like it outside of a fairy tale, but then, she’d never entered a bank vault before.
‘Isn’t this normal for a Swiss bank?’ she asked, wishing she knew what to identify as evidence of collaboration with the Nazis.
Brunner nodded. ‘Yes, of course, we store gold, but look at the ownership certificates marking the batches.’
Lizzie knelt on the floor and followed his instruction.
Her fingers reached for what she recognised as a pile of certificates, and she flicked through them, scanning the German names before placing them on the stone floor and removing her camera from her waistband.
Clicking, she photographed each one and took photos of the gold bars and the money too.
‘Are you holding this gold for individual members of the Reich?’
Brunner nodded his head slowly, almost reluctantly. There was no going back for him now. He’d opened the vault to a British agent, and she saw the fear in his eyes.
‘You’re doing the right thing,’ she assured him. ‘I promise I’ll keep my word, and your courage won’t go unrewarded.’
Brunner’s mouth formed a tight-lipped smile, but his expression was one of desperation, like a drowning man.
As Lizzie searched through the vault, it occurred to her that no matter how much he cooperated with her; he knew his bank had spent years assisting the Nazis in their gross financial plundering of Allied assets.
It must be frightening to be in his shoes.
How might it have been to find herself on the other side of this war as a German citizen?
Would she too have been fooled by Hitler’s propaganda and willingly participated in his regime?
Jack believed that looking the other way and staying silent in the face of such evil made one almost as implicated as taking an active role.
Young, idealistic minds were easily seduced, she knew that, and in that second, a rush of gratitude surged through her.
If she were to die in this war, fighting to defeat the Nazis, it would have been a short life well lived.
Brunner locked the safe and directed her to another area where he lifted down box after box for her to sort through.
She snapped photographs of incriminating correspondence with Reichsbank officials and Reich bankers that proved the extent of the commercial deals between them.
The evidence was irrefutable that this was not a one-off transaction, but an engineered operation of systematic laundering of Nazi-looted gold of all types and sources.
It was the repeat routing of proceeds through the banking system to fund Germany’s aggression since before the war began.
This proof showed that the Swiss knowingly broke their official declared neutrality as a matter of routine, and it would open them up to investigation.
They had been warned by the recent declaration, and Brunner had listened, but the gold machine churned on relentlessly.
They had been in the vault for well over an hour when Brunner glanced at his watch. ‘We must go soon—we’ve been in here too long already.’
Lizzie saw his complexion was pale and clammy, as though he might pass out. ‘Are you alright, Herr Brunner? Sit down for a minute on that chair in the corner, and I’ll finish up.’
‘There’s one more thing I need to show you before we leave,’ he said.
Lizzie followed him to an area in the corner, and he removed some boxes and set them down on a table for her to see inside. ‘What’s this?’ she said.
‘This is the most awful part of it all. Open them and see for yourself.’
Lizzie’s pulse hammered in her throat, and she swallowed hard as she reached for the first lid, dreading what she would discover.
By the time she’d finished examining the boxes, her cheeks were blotchy, and her eyes streamed with tears. Each gold ingot she saw conjured Liesel and Hannah into her mind, and the terrible fate that would befall them if they were captured by the Nazis.
‘What are you going to do with all these?’ she said, accepting Brunner’s offer of a crisp white handkerchief to dry her wet eyes.
Brunner whispered, ‘We must have processed hundreds of these batches of dental gold, extracted from the teeth of dead Jews. I should have asked more questions, but I’m ashamed to say I was too afraid.
The bulk of the gold laundering transactions are done through the clearing system, but early last year a plainclothes German official from the Reich Economics Ministry, requested a meeting with Hauser and me and he threatened us, saying we had no choice but to accept regular consignments.
The threat was implied, but it was clear, and I was too scared to refuse. ’
‘And Hauser?’
Brunner coughed. ‘Hauser wishes to speed up the process and seems to have no qualms at all. That’s why I daren’t continue. If he learns of my actions, he will report me to the authorities, and I’ll be lucky if I see my family again.’
Lizzie clicked the camera, gathering all the horrifying evidence she could, and she had to tear herself away when Brunner hurried her again. ‘Come on. We must get out of here now.’
‘One more thing,’ Lizzie said. ‘I need to photograph the actual ledger in case the copies you gave me don’t reach their destination.’
Brunner waved his hand towards the gold-embossed ledger and stood at her side as she flicked through the heavy pages.
Lizzie asked him to show her where the entries he’d already copied for her were, and she meticulously photographed them before studying other pages of the huge book.
Her eyes fell to long lists of numbered entries, and Brunner explained they were the foreign exchange transactions for the looted gold.
‘This is how it’s laundered through the banking system. ’
Lizzie gulped. The sheer number of transactions in this ledger for just one Swiss bank in Bern showed what she estimated must be the enormous scale of the laundering throughout Switzerland.
The Nazis were cruel, but they weren’t stupid, and she knew they would have tens if not hundreds of Swiss banks siphoning off their spoils of war for them.
Hitler’s vision of the thousand-year Reich he loved to spout about would take some serious funding.
Recently the Nazis had suffered major losses, and Lizzie guessed they would step up the mass theft, not wind it down.
A few years earlier in Paris, Hannah had infiltrated the Nazi HQ and seen documents about how they were stealing Jewish-owned art in Europe, and a report Lizzie read at Baker Street said the art looting was prolific.
Her blood was like ice flowing in her veins as she digested the full extent of what they were doing.
Hearing or reading about these horrors in an intelligence report or a newspaper was one thing, but seeing the depravity laid bare in front of her own eyes, with gold fillings extracted from murdered Jews’ mouths and melted into ingots, was quite another experience.
The Nazis were overseeing the mass stripping of gold reserves and European assets to line their coffers and finance their military operations.
The goal was the industrialised murder of Europe’s Jews, and others who didn’t meet their perfect Aryan race ideology.
And when they were done with all of that, they intended to rule the world, and Lord knew what would happen to people like her and Jack if they didn’t destroy Hitler’s regime.
Brunner touched her arm again, and his urgency was palpable. She calculated she had enough pictures and names for the Allies to find Switzerland guilty of complicity, one hundred times over. She turned to Brunner and said, ‘Thank you. We can go now.’
Lizzie slid the camera back into the secret pocket in her waistband and prepared to exit the vault.
Her heart raced, and she couldn’t wait to go back to the Legation and report to Tom.
What Brunner had let her see was more than she had dared to hope for.
Val and Jack would be thrilled when she brought them this major haul, and it wouldn’t even matter if the diplomatic bag didn’t reach them.
Her mind whirred with what she would do next, wondering whether to risk carrying the physical copies hidden behind the picture frames across the Swiss border to rendezvous with her getaway plane, or whether she should destroy them immediately.
They were through the first door, and she waited closely behind Brunner as he unlocked the main door, looking forward to emerging into the fresh air when she left the building.
Before Brunner could finish opening the heavy door, it swung open. They both stood there, frozen, waiting to see who would appear.
‘Franz, I thought you were in Zurich.’ Brunner’s voice sounded high-pitched and strangled.
Lizzie hadn’t met Hauser before but recognised his first name. The partner’s eyes flitted from Brunner’s face to hers. ‘Now, who have we here and what the hell is she doing in the secure vault with you?’
They had been caught in the act, and Lizzie knew she had nothing to lose, so she made a stab at an excuse. ‘Herr Brunner was showing me the safe-deposit boxes. The Legation wants me to arrange one.’
Franz’s eyes were still on her, and she didn’t like the look in them. ‘Good try, but I’m afraid I know all about what you’re really doing here, Miss Gale.’
Brunner seemed to snap to attention. ‘I do not know what you mean, but I was just showing Miss Gale out, Franz. I’ll come and see you in your office shortly.’
The partner gripped Lizzie’s upper arm hard and growled at Brunner. ‘Neither of you are going anywhere. Turn around and go back inside.’