The commercial attaché, Foreign Service Officer Grade 15 Wilhelm Frogger, turned out to be just what Obersturmbannführer Karl Cranz expected him to be.
He had, of course, read Frogger’s dossiers—both of the foreign ministry and the Sicherheitspolizei—in Berlin immediately after the unfortunate business on the beach of Samborombón Bay. He also—just before going out to Estancia Santa Catalina with von Wachtstein and von und zu Aschenburg the night before—had ordered Untersturmführer Schneider to get from the safe the dossier on Frogger that Oberst Grüner had been keeping on him in Argentina.
All of these showed Frogger to be a fairly ordinary career civil servant, perhaps a little less intelligent than most. Cranz somewhat cynically decided that Frogger’s rise to Grade 15 had more to do with his having joined the Nazi party early on. And even more cynically, he had decided that Frogger had joined the party more because he was from Munich, where the Führer had first begun to achieve success, rather than because he had seen National Socialism as the wave of the future.
Frogger and his wife had three sons, all of whom had become Wehrmacht officers. Two had died in the service of the Fatherland, one early in the war in Belgium and the second in the early days of Operation Barbarossa, the invasion of Russia. The third had been captured while serving with Rommel’s Afrikakorps.
As Frogger had worked his way up the foreign service ladder, he had been stationed at half a dozen embassies, none of them as important as Buenos Aires, and until Buenos Aires, always as the Assistant or Deputy This Or That, never the principal, even when he had been in Leopoldville, in the Belgian Congo. There he had been a deputy counsel, which, Cranz had decided, probably meant he had spent most of his time dealing with the maintenance of the German World War I military cemeteries in what had been, before the Versailles Conference, Germany’s African Colonies. He had been assigned to Argentina— probably to get him out of the way while important things were being done— in April of 1940.
There had been no objection by anyone when Frogger and his wife had been placed in the unofficial Not Likely To Be Traitors column with Fräulein Ingebord Hässell.
When Cranz went into Frogger’s office, he immediately decided that Frogger was precisely what he had thought after he’d read his dossiers.
Physically, he was a plump little man who wore what was left of his hair combed over his bald dome. He also had a neatly trimmed square mustache under a somewhat bulbous nose. Cranz wondered if that was because Frogger thought it made him look masculine or sophisticated, or whether he had grown it in emulation of Adolf Hitler.
They exchanged Nazi salutes.
“His Excellency has told you I am to assume your duties, Herr Frogger?”
“Yes, he has, Herr Cranz.”
“There is more to that than appears,” Cranz said. “With the caveat that this is a State Secret and therefore be shared with no one, I hereby inform you that to carry out a mission that is none of your concern it has been decided at the highest levels that an officer of the SS be assigned secretly to the embassy here, and that he assume your duties as the means to carry out his mission in secrecy. I am SS-Obersturmbannführer Cranz.”
“It is an honor to meet you, sir. How should I address you?”
“As Herr Cranz, please.”
“How may I be of assistance, Herr Cranz?”
“I confess I have absolutely no knowledge of your duties. Why don’t you tell me what they are?”
Frogger thought the question over for a long moment before replying, “The basic role of a commercial attaché, Herr Cranz, is to foster commerce between the Reich and what we call the ‘host country.’ In normal circumstances, I would be doing whatever I could to encourage the Argentines to purchase, for example, Siemens radios and phonographs, Leica cameras, Mercedes-Benz trucks and autos, et cetera, and at the same time facilitating the purchase by German businesses of what Germany needs, mostly foodstuffs, wool, and leather, at the lowest possible prices.”
He looked at Cranz for an indication that Cranz understood him.
Cranz nodded.
Frogger went on: “In the present circumstances—”
“You mean the war?”
“Yes.”
“Go on.”
“I was thinking just the other day, Herr Cranz, that what I have become in the present circumstances is a ‘purchase facilitator.’ ”
“Which means?”
“In the present circumstances, Germany has very little to offer for sale to Argentina. Our industry is devoted entirely, as I’m sure you are aware, to production to bring us to the final victory as soon as possible. At the same time, Germany’s need for foodstuffs, wool, and leather is so great that, if we were able, we would take their entire production.”
“Why aren’t we able?”
“The Americans, primarily, and, to a lesser degree, the English.”
“I don’t think I fully understand.”
“It is a rather complicated problem, Herr Cranz.”
Cranz made an impatient gesture.
