From Victory ’45: The End of the War in Eight Surrenders, by James Holland and Al Murray (Grove Atlantic, 2025), Kindle pp. 52-54:
While, on the face of it, Wolff appeared to be one step ahead of Kaltenbrunner in his contacts with the Allies, the RSHA chief had been stockpiling immense amounts of cash for a post-war world in which money could well buy him out of trouble. Twenty miles north-west of Bolzano, down a long Alpine valley, lay Merano, a small spa town popular before the war for its mountain sports, which had been home to a number of Jews, most of whom had since been arrested and deported. Since early the previous year, it had also been the headquarters of an outrageous money-laundering operation. In fact, there were warehouses next to Merano’s racecourse now stuffed with boxes full of counterfeit British and US banknotes.
The location of Merano – between Innsbruck and Austria to the north, Switzerland to the east, and with Verona, Lake Garda and Bologna all as local satellites – made the town the ideal place from which to run a money-laundering operation. To launder money, the ability to distribute it and spread it to the four winds was essential, but equally important was to keep the enterprise away from too many prying eyes. Kaltenbrunner was mostly in Berlin, but Merano was surrounded by mountains and isolated. Here another of his creatures could mastermind the entire operation with comparative impunity.
Forging British banknotes had originally been devised by the SD back in 1940, although the counterfeiters initially struggled and by the time of Heydrich’s assassination in Prague in June 1942 the operation had already been wound down. Under Kaltenbrunner, however, counterfeiting British notes was revived as Operation BERNHARD. The aim was no longer to flood the British economy but rather to use the money to finance secret intelligence operations. And this time the counterfeiters were of an entirely higher calibre: Jewish prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp to the north of Berlin who were superb at the art of forging banknotes. By 1943, some 140 prisoners were producing tens of millions of pounds’ worth of notes from six flat-bed printing presses. By May 1944, Kaltenbrunner ordered them to start producing US dollars as well, not exactly for intelligence operations but for his own personal use, whether that might be a last stand in the Alpine redoubt – certainly his cover story – or, more realistically, to accumulate a vast private fund for a rainy post-war day.
Running the laundering of this extraordinary counterfeiting operation was another unscrupulous rogue called Friedrich Schwend, part of the mosaic of corruption, criminality and deceit that marked the Nazi regime. Like Kaltenbrunner, Schwend had been only too willing to cast ideology aside in favour of looking after number one and was proving adept at adapting his skills to self-preservation. Schwend was thirty-eight, a former pre-war car engine salesman and a smooth-talking charmer who had been working for the Abwehr, the Wehrmacht’s intelligence service – rather than the SS-run RSHA – at the start of the war. Repeatedly getting himself into trouble, he was caught out by his superiors selling unauthorized but bogus German U-boat plans to the British for cash, captured by Italian secret intelligence agents, turned back over to the Germans at the Brenner Pass and flung in prison at Klagenfurt in the Austrian Alps.
Kaltenbrunner learned about Schwend from none other than Wilhelm Höttl, who suggested this canny rogue as just the man for overseeing a money-laundering operation. That Schwend had fallen foul of the Abwehr was no disqualification for working for Kaltenbrunner; quite the opposite, in fact. Releasing Schwend from his incarceration, the RSHA boss instructed him to run the entire laundering operation of forged banknotes, giving him, frankly, astonishing levels of latitude so long as he successfully and swiftly spread the notes as far and wide as possible. Incredibly, Schwend even negotiated for himself a 33.33 per cent cut of every pound sterling he brought into circulation.
In very swift order, Schwend established his small operation under the entirely fake name of ‘Stab. 4 Deutsches Panzerkorps’, initially at Abbazia and Trieste before realizing that Merano offered a considerably better, more discreet location. Taking over the Schloss Labers, a grand – but not too grand – villa perched among vineyards on a hill overlooking the town, and protected by a small squad of SS police troops, Schwend got down to building a fortune. With the forged notes he bought houses, hotels, ships, cars and shares in a number of companies. Some of it was used for bribes and he also sent plenty to vaults in Zurich. He developed a dense network of couriers and agents, including Jews. Jack Van Herten, for example, was a Dutch Jew operating under the cover of the International Committee of the Red Cross. In reality, he was smuggling Jews to the Middle East but at the same time passing on laundered money for Schwend. And Schwend also took over those warehouses at the Merano racecourse, hiding counterfeit notes in race boxes that were then distributed to Holland, France, Denmark and elsewhere. It was a huge operation and Schwend was making millions. But Kaltenbrunner was making even more. And right under the nose of the Höchster SS und Polizeiführer in Italy, Karl Wolff.
Far Outliers 