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  He only narrowly missed getting hold of what was then the most sought-after document in the world. Among the people Maxwell interviewed was Major Willi Johannmeir, Hitler’s former adjutant. Johannmeir had been in the bunker in Berlin with Hitler on the day he’d committed suicide. Not only had he witnessed and signed Hitler’s will, but he was also believed to be in possession of a copy of it.

  There had been three copies in all. Hitler had intended that two should be passed on to his successor, Admiral Dönitz, while the third – Johannmeir’s – was to go to Field-Marshal Ferdinand Schörner, Commander-in-Chief of the German army. Arrested before he could reach Schörner, Johannmeir refused to say where his copy was hidden unless he was promised his freedom. As Maxwell had neither the authority nor the inclination to do a deal, a senior officer, Hugh Trevor-Roper – later Lord Dacre – was sent out from London to take over the interrogation.

  It’s not clear what promises Trevor-Roper gave, but Johannmeir swiftly had a change of heart. Together, they drove to his house late one night, where Johannmeir fetched an axe and with some difficulty – the ground was frozen solid – dug up a bottle from his back garden. Inside was a rolled-up copy of Hitler’s will.

  In February 1946, Maxwell was promoted to captain and transferred to Berlin. In June he became a British citizen. By then he had also been reunited with his two surviving sisters. Having arranged for them both to come to England, he paid for Sylvia, then sixteen, to attend a boarding school in Somerset, and Brana to move to America, where she had several cousins. Along with his new passport, Maxwell was rapidly acquiring some new airs and graces. On leave in London, he went to a dinner dance at the Regent Palace Hotel off Piccadilly Circus. There he bumped into a man called Lou Rosenbluth, who had served with him in the 1st Czech Division – before the War, Rosenbluth had been goalkeeper for the Slovak national team.

  The two men had last seen one another six years earlier on the beach at Sète waiting to be evacuated from France. ‘I looked around and there was this captain with a swagger stick in his hand,’ Rosenbluth recalled. ‘I jumped up. I was so pleased to see him just like I had been when I saw he was going to get on the ship at Sète.’

  But the Maxwell that Rosenbluth remembered was not the same Maxwell who now peered down his nose at him. ‘In a posh accent, he said, “Don’t I know you from somewhere?” I got so annoyed. I was so pleased to see him, and he says that to me. I said to him, “If you don’t remember – don’t bother”, and I sat down. I often think about it. Maybe I was sensitive because of the young lady I was with, but he must have known who I was.’

  On 11 March 1946, Betty gave birth to a son, Michael Paul Andre Maxwell. As soon as he heard the news, Maxwell wrote her a letter whose tone suggests his new starchy manner wasn’t confined to Lou Rosenbluth: ‘First, let me congratulate you from the bottom of my heart. And secondly, let me tell you that I love and worship you beyond anything that you might imagine.’

  Berlin had now been divided into four zones: the French, the British, the Russian and the American. Fluent in Russian, English and French, Maxwell could easily pass from zone to zone without attracting attention. As he’d proved before, he also had a natural bent for subterfuge. All this made him a highly prized asset as far as British Intelligence was concerned.

  Rumours that Maxwell had spied for the British, the Russians or later the Israelis – and possibly some combination of the three – would dog him for the rest of his life. Always, he swatted them aside. Yet it’s plain that Maxwell was involved in espionage work for the British while he was in Berlin. He even boasted about it to another old Berlin hand, Geoffrey Goodman, later to become a Daily Mirror journalist.

  ‘One of my secret jobs was to find out what the Russians were up to, stripping East German industries,’ Maxwell told Goodman. ‘We knew there were plans in Zhukov’s office. [Marshal Georgy Zhukov was the Commander of the Soviet Occupation Zone in Berlin.] My job was to get hold of them. I had a close friendship with a Red Army colonel who knew the set-up and the combination of the safe.’ One night the two of them broke into Zhukov’s office and photographed the documents, before replacing them.

  Maxwell also went on a number of undercover trips to Czechoslovakia, then teetering on the brink of a communist takeover – it would become part of the Eastern Bloc in February 1948. According to documents in the Secret Service archive in Prague, Maxwell’s presence in the country soon attracted the suspicions of the Czech Ministry of the Interior:

  File VII/s-2219/2347-4/12-46

  In Prague, 18 December 1946

  Ministry of the Interior received the following confidential notice:

  Maxwell R., intelligence major, former name unknown, formerly a citizen of Czechoslovakia, honoured by the English King, has already been in Czechoslovakia three times as a reporter, covering editorial stories, and KEITH, major, former name Karel Klinger, comes from around Kolín.

  The Ministry of the Interior is requesting an immediate search for the above-listed personnel. If any of them are found in Czechoslovakian territory, they should be monitored. It is mandatory to report to the Ministry of the Interior in the event of their being positively identified.

  Although they made a mistake with his rank, there’s no doubt that this was Maxwell, flying beneath the radar in his former homeland. Nor was it an isolated incident: throughout the 1940s and 1950s, Maxwell carried on making regular undercover trips to Czechoslovakia.

  In October 1947, the Czech embassy in London wrote a secret letter to the Ministry of the Interior: ‘From a totally credible source I learned that Mr Maxwell, director of the European Periodical Publicity and Advertising Co., is a spy agent for the British authorities . . . Mr Maxwell is originally from Ruthenia and his native name is Ludvik Hoch. He is an adventurer of great style and an enemy of Czechoslovakia and the new Slavic democracies in Europe.’

  Another file describes him as ‘very closely linked to the Intelligence Service.’ The file goes on to give a physical description of Maxwell, presumably for the benefit of anyone assigned to follow him. ‘He is a very handsome man,’ the writer noted. ‘Almost a double of the American actor, Clark Gable.’

  For the time being, Maxwell had a new job to keep him busy. In July 1946, he was put in charge of the Public Relations and Information Services Control’s press section at a salary of £620 a year – untold riches in post-war Berlin. Any German who wanted to put on a play, show a film or publish a book had to get permission from PRISC. As the organization’s censor, Maxwell was also responsible for weeding out any diehard Nazis still trying to keep the swastika flying.

  At the same time, PRISC had a wider brief: to reintroduce Germans to the virtues of democracy. One way to do this was to set up a free – or free-ish – press. Der Telegraaf was the first licensed newspaper in the British sector of Berlin. Broadly Social Democrat in tone, it quickly became a big success: within months of its launch it was selling half a million copies.

  Maxwell not only censored the paper’s articles but singlehandedly kept it on the road, making sure it never ran short of newsprint, or printing ink. No one was quite sure how he did this, but they soon learned not to pry too deeply. What was clear was that Maxwell, still only twenty-three, had a genius for bartering, browbeating and generally getting what he wanted.

  Later on in life, he could never pass a spotlight without stepping into it. But at this stage, just like Harry Lime in Graham Greene’s The Third Man, Maxwell seemed to belong in the shadows, slipping quietly from occupied zone to occupied zone.

  Der Telegraaf was owned by a company called Springer-Verlag. Before the war, Springer-Verlag had been the world’s leading publisher of scientific books. Now, along with everyone else in Berlin, the company had fallen on hard times. Soon after Maxwell started work at PRISC, Julius Springer, a cousin of Springer-Verlag’s owner, Ferdinand Springer, paid him a visit. He’d come to complain about how little paper was available for printing books. Maxwell listened impatiently for a few minutes, th
en kicked him out. Incensed, Julius Springer wrote to the Foreign Office, who sent Maxwell a sternly worded letter telling him to be more respectful.

  He chucked this in the bin.

  A few days later Maxwell had another visitor: Ferdinand Springer himself. Distinguished, erudite and urbane – he was known as ‘The Kaiser’ – Springer was everything Maxwell was not. But, much to their surprise, the two men hit it off. Idly at first, then with increasing fascination, Maxwell listened as Ferdinand Springer explained how the company had prospered in its heyday.

  Founded more than a century earlier by Ferdinand’s father, Springer-Verlag had published books by most of the world’s leading scientists, including Albert Einstein and Max Born, the father of quantum mechanics. They also published a large range of scientific journals. The beauty of the business was that the books and journals they produced had a captive readership: every library, every university, every scientific institute, wanted a copy. What’s more, the scientists who wrote these books and journals were so thrilled to see their work in print that they scarcely expected to be paid anything in return.

  Ever since he’d been a boy in Solotvino, Maxwell had dreamed of making his fortune. Breaking rocks in South Wales, he’d passed the time by thinking up money-making schemes. His dream was to find a commodity which would be in huge demand after the war, and which he could obtain for next to nothing. Out of nowhere the answer had just landed in his lap: the commodity was knowledge. It was cheap, it was plentiful, and if he chose to set up a similar company to Springer-Verlag in Britain, he would have the field to himself – unlike Germany, Britain had next to no tradition of academic publishing.

  Best of all, there was a ready-made stockpile on his doorstep. No new academic research had been published during the war, and as a result, Springer had a colossal backlog of material. Sixty-three thousand books, along with tens of thousands of journals, had been removed from Berlin and stored in an enormous warehouse a hundred miles away to escape the Allied bombing. There was also a huge amount of scientific research conducted during the war that had never even been printed due to lack of paper.

  It turned out that Springer too had a dream. What he hoped to find, he told Maxwell wistfully, was someone who would transport this backlog of material out of Germany and distribute it abroad – at the time German nationals were forbidden from making large shipments to other countries. Springer was convinced the demand was there. All over the world academics were dying to read about the latest research on the pulmonary system of the flea, or new developments in Metallurgical Thermochemistry. It was simply a matter of sorting out the supply. But so far his efforts had proved fruitless.

  Did he by any chance know of anyone who might be able to help?

  As it just happened, said Maxwell, he might.

  In November 1947, 369 ‘large packets’ were sent from Germany to London. By then, Maxwell had been demobbed from the army and had gone back to England to be with Betty and their baby son. He had also secured worldwide distribution rights to all of Springer-Verlag’s publications. Four months later, 150 tons of books and another 150 tons of journals were loaded on to a goods train and taken to Bielefeld in western Germany. From there, a convoy of trucks brought them to London. These were followed by another enormous consignment of manuscripts – so large that seven railway carriages were needed to transport it from Berlin to Southwark, where the carriages sat in a siding for several weeks beside a pickle factory.

  Among the people Maxwell met around this time was a man called Peter Croxford, who, like him, had recently been demobbed. ‘He was bloody arrogant,’ Croxford recalls. ‘A bit of a mad hatter. That’s what made the most impression on me. I remember we were in a taxi once and he kept barking instructions at the driver. “Go right here!” and so on. I thought, bloody hell, who is this man?’

  When he wasn’t in the back of a taxi shouting at the driver, Maxwell drove around London in an enormous grey Dodge with Barry the German shepherd in the back – he’d had the car shipped out from Germany along with Springer’s books and journals. As Maxwell had already learned in Berlin, it was important to make an impression.

  After six months, he moved premises, to a larger office in Percy Street off Tottenham Court Road. One day he called Peter Croxford with an odd request: ‘Maxwell said could I rig him up with a dummy telephone? He wanted to be able to press a button and his phone would ring. Halfway through a meeting he would press the button. The phone would ring, he’d pick it up and start speaking some foreign language. It was purely for show – so that everyone would think he was much busier and more important than he really was.’

  Where did Maxwell get the money from to set up in business? Certainly not from Ferdinand Springer, who was in no position to fund anything at the time. It’s possible that Maxwell may have saved some of his salary in Berlin, but it could never have been enough to hire special trains and convoys of lorries. And while Betty’s parents were not short of cash, they had no intention of throwing it at Maxwell.

  The money, it transpired, came from an unexpected source. Shortly before his death in 2000, Desmond Bristow, a former Intelligence Officer, spoke about MI6’s relations with Maxwell: ‘It was obvious that Maxwell had been doing odd things for MI6 in Germany, and he suggested we should subsidize him to buy a book business. He effectively became our agent.’ As far as Bristow was concerned, nothing like this had ever happened before, so MI6 must have thought Maxwell was worth investing in. ‘I was certainly not aware of any other case of MI6 buying a business for anyone.’

  However murky Maxwell’s past may have been, the way ahead seemed clear. Imbued with his mother’s sense that destiny had some very big plans for him, he had often discussed them with his fellow soldiers, oblivious to the incredulous guffaws they prompted.

  ‘I am going to go to England,’ he would tell them. ‘To become a gentleman, and a squire.’

  4.

  Difficulties With Pork

  In the early 1950s, Robert Maxwell went into business with a German organic chemist and refugee called Kurt Wallersteiner. Like Maxwell, Wallersteiner had a genius for making deals – and, like him, he wasn’t one to shirk a challenge. A few years earlier, Wallersteiner had been asked by the communist government in China to supply them with a hundred tons of indigo blue dye. But a Chinese official mistakenly added an extra zero to the order, turning it into a thousand tons – almost the world’s entire output of indigo blue dye at the time.

  Undeterred, Wallersteiner bought up every scrap of indigo blue dye he could find and against all odds succeeded in fulfilling the order. This was to have unexpected consequences. When the Chinese army invaded South Korea in June 1950, the British and American troops stationed there found to their astonishment that the Chinese infantrymen were all wearing bright blue uniforms. As a result, they were much easier to spot and shoot. Wallersteiner’s coup was also responsible for the fact that for the next twenty-five years almost everyone in China wore blue.

  Together, Maxwell and Wallersteiner became involved in another deal: they arranged for a large consignment of chemicals to be shipped to Germany in exchange for an assortment of glass, china and textiles. However, the two men calculated they would make more money if they sent everything they received straight on to Argentina. In return, the Argentines would send them 2000 tons of pork bellies.

  Then came a snag. When the meat arrived in England, the Ministry of Food condemned it as inedible; anyone who ate it risked contracting botulism. Maxwell and Wallersteiner managed to ship some of the condemned pork to Holland, where it was immediately sealed in cans, but the rest sat in a warehouse growing mouldier by the day.

  In desperation, they turned to a former Austrian diplomat called Sir George Franckenstein. Before the war, Franckenstein had been the Austrian ambassador in London. A staunch opponent of Hitler, he had taken British citizenship and been knighted by King George VI. Franckenstein was also a noted after-dinner speaker, renowned for his ability to talk off the cuff on a v
ariety of subjects, from early Alpinists to the maternal habits of chimpanzees.

  Although he had since fallen on hard times, Franckenstein had kept in close touch with his former homeland. Maxwell and Wallersteiner persuaded him to approach the Austrian government with what they conceded was a risky plan: Franckenstein was to tell the Austrians that Wallersteiner was an official representative of a country called Oceania.

  The only problem with this was that Oceania didn’t exist – Maxwell and Wallersteiner had made it up. Using all his diplomatic skills, Franckenstein managed to convince the Austrian government to sign a trade agreement with Oceania and take the condemned pork. In return, they received a consignment of prefabricated wooden houses. When these arrived, a show home was erected in High Wycombe, fitted out with electricity as well as plumbing, and unveiled with a great fanfare in the local press.

  It failed to attract a single buyer.

  Fortunately, they had better luck elsewhere. Facing an influx of post-war immigrants, Canada agreed to take all the prefabricated houses they could provide. Meanwhile, the pork that had gone to Holland for canning had been sent on to Germany, where food standards were considerably lower. In exchange, Maxwell and Wallersteiner received several thousand tons of German cement.

  At this point they hit another snag: the British denied them a licence to import the cement. By now even the normally indomitable Wallersteiner was becoming disheartened. But just when all seemed hopeless, they succeeded in selling the cement on to the Canadians, who needed it to make foundations for all their new prefabricated houses. However fraught the deal may have been, everything, it seemed, had worked out in the end.