The Secret Agent by Stephan Talty Page A

Every morning new bodies for burning in the ovens were stacked outside. Dachau became the model for every concentration camp in the Reich, and the Germans showed it off with pride.
    Erickson was ushered through the munitions factory, a museum exhibiting plaster casts of prisoners’ deformities, the canteen and the library. It’s doubtful he saw the crematoria and the five gas chambers on this trip, but on the drive back to Göring’s estate, Erickson brooded over the brutality of the “model camp,” the contrast between the slave camp and the splendors of Carninhall. “To say that I was dumbfounded was putting it mildly. [Dachau] was full of awful impressions that I lack the words to describe.”
    As soon as he arrived back, Erickson protested to Göring about the brutality he’d witnessed. Göring exploded, yelling so loudly “that one could have heard his voice in Berlin.”
    â€œThey’re lying!” the Luftwaffe chief cried. “That cannot be true. I know nothing of it. Get out!” Then: “What were you doing there anyway?” It was clear to Erickson that Göring knew what was happening at Dachau. The American left the lodge and returned to Berlin.
    If Erickson had entered the war by a side entrance—brought in because of a family dispute—the death of Anne-Maria and the tour of Dachau brought him close to its core realities. Anne-Maria forced him to grieve for a victim he’d come to love, a single death in the midst of a huge war. And Dachau opened his eyes to the Nazi’s agenda in its full industrial scale. After experiencing both, to think he’d once contributed to the cause must have been like bitter ashes in Erickson’s mouth.
    The American returned to the hunt. After one seven-day trip, he produced a list of 16 different targets, both oil and manufacturing sites. From a 1944 report:
Annedorf
: rebuilt as a synthetic plant after the demolishing of the Leuna plant at Halle. The plant does not lie exactly at the Annedorf station but it is about 15 km north of Merseburg quite close to the railroad on the route Halle-Annedorf. The plant is on the left side of the railroad, and is gigantic … They are installing smoke-screen devices, very small and look about as follows [Erickson included a sketch of the devices].
    Bruks
: outside of Prague. Plant is producing about 150,000 tons. Is intact. Bombing poor.
    Lütskendorf
: The only really big plant for gas and oil – built during the war. Very badly damaged. Finished products destroyed. Only about 20 percent of plant now in operation. Does not pay to rebuild.
    Köln
: New Robot base 25km NE of city on the property belonging to Brockhause. [The “robot” was the V-1 unmanned rocket that terrified London]
    Sigmaringen
: Home of the Vichy government. Laval and Petain both alive in the castle of Count Hohenzollern (who is imprisoned under suspicion that he has something to do with the 20th of July plot. Laval has his office in a schoolhouse quite close by. Happened incidentally to see him. The Vichy government is training and equipping a French army there.)
    The flights to destroy these plants were among the most dangerous assignments any enlisted man could get in World War II. Bombardiers tried to attain their targets as flak burst around them and the sky turned a greasy black from German smoke pots and exploding oil tanks below. Accuracy was low: attacks on the mammoth synthetic plant at Leuna hit their target only 5.1 percent of the time when guided in by radar. Tactical mistakes compounded the problems: American strategists convinced the Air Force generals that larger payloads of smaller, 300-pound bombs were more effective than the huge 2,000 to 4,000 pound high-explosives that the British favored. They were later proven wrong. The error meant that American crews had to repeatedly bomb the same refineries again and again to knock them out of production.
    The