The Secret Agent by Stephan Talty Read Free Book Online

dismissively. He argued that he was a Swede, an Aryan by birth, and a businessman. He admired the Germans for rebuilding their country after the devastation of World War I. His American roots, Erickson argued, were irrelevant.
    What about Mein Kampf , his interrogator asked. And the occupation of Norway? What if the Reich invaded Sweden, would Erickson approve of that? And would he be willing to go to back to America and lobby for German interests?
    Von Löw switched topics quickly, looped back and approached from a new angle, trying to rattle Erickson. The American needed to tread carefully. His cover was a businessman eager to make money off the Reich, not a Jew-hating fanatic. Having rehearsed his answers for months in Stockholm restaurants, he now coolly parried the questions, answering yes to some, no to others (he didn’t think going back to America as a known war collaborator would be a good idea). The spy maintained his poise, though his heart was pounding and he felt short of breath.
    Von Löw finished the questioning without drawing blood. The Gestapo man nodded, and the American was dismissed.
    Erickson left Berlin knowing he’d made progress. The Germans now believed he was a persecuted Nazi who wanted to do make money off the Reich. And he’d won the trust, at least for the moment, of the second most powerful man in Germany.

Chapter Seven
The Bergius Process
    At the time of Erickson’s visit, Himmler and the rest of the German leadership were acutely aware of Germany’s oil problem. The country had few domestic deposits and, even in the pre-war years, relied heavily on exports. For example, in 1938, a typical peacetime year, Germany consumed a total of 44 million barrels of oil. Twenty-eight million barrels were imported from overseas, which meant that the Reich could produce domestically only 29.5 percent of the oil it needed, long before the panzer tank divisions and Luftwaffe air patrol created massive new demands for fuel. By 1944, Germany would more than quadruple its consumption to 209 million barrels per year.
    The huge disparity in what Germany produced and what it consumed was a persistent worry for Hitler and the High Command. When it invaded Poland in 1939, Germany had only 15 million barrels in reserve. A May 1941 study estimated the country would run out of fuel by August of that year.
    In an era before fuel-efficient engines, armies could go through a lake of gas in the blink of an eye. Take the medium-sized German Panther tank, used from the middle of 1943 to the end of the war. The Panther sported a Maybach V-12 engine that got about a third of a mile per gallon on good roads, and even less than that when it was crashing through French hedgerows. That’s one-third of a mile for every gallon in its 190-gallon tank. If you multiply that one statistic across the entirety of the far-flung German war machine, it’s clear that the Third Reich was burning a staggering amount of fuel. It’s no wonder that Hitler was obsessed with oil, and had been for years. The Führer understood that a mechanized army lived and died on the black stuff. Without it, his panzer divisions would be stuck in muddy Belgian fields away from the front lines, his fighter planes would be grounded in Berlin, and his vision of a thousand-year empire would be over before it began.
    There were three ways Germany could obtain enough oil to run its armies: conquest, alliances or science. At the beginning of the war, Germany relied largely on the first two strategies. The invasion of Russia on June 22, 1941, was partially driven by Hitler’s desire to capture the rich deposits in the Caucasus, and his 1940 pact with General Ian Antonescu gained him access to the highly productive Romanian fields. Hitler also plotted to tap the Middle East’s reserves by sending General Rommel and his Afrika Korps to Egypt and Libya in February 1941. At the same time, satellite states were being starved of