Robert Klara - The Devils Mercedes: The Bizarre and Disturbing Adventures of Hitlers Limousine in America

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For David, who liked this one

Though hed read philosophy at Oxford, strung for The New York Times, and slipped into wartime Egypt as an emissary for the State Department, no experience in his thirty-six years could prepare Christopher Janus for what lay at the other end of an ordinary telephone call on a summer day.

It was June of 1948, and Janus was in his office at the Chicago Board of Trade building. But with the war over, Europe rebuilding, and American consumption surging by double digits, it was a good time to be buying and selling almost anything.

Eximport itself was only two years old, though its founder, a Turkish-born entrepreneur named Milton Baldji, had spent thirty years in international trade. In contrast, Baldjis junior partner was green. True, Christopher Janus had traveled the world and even once lunched with philosopher-poet George Santayana in Rome, but he had never run a business. This day Janus was on an international call patched all the way through to Stockholm. It was one of his first deals, and it wasnt going well.

A few weeks earlier, Janus had exported thirty-five thousand dollars worth of machinery (auto parts, mainly, including a large shipment of ball bearings) to Sweden. Bildels AB, the firm that had bought the parts, had agreed to pay Janus in dollars. Now that the note was due, however, it was clear that Bildels didnt have greenbacks, only Swedish kronor. In postwar Europe, that currency was unstable, and Janus wouldnt touch it. What to do? Januss shipment had already left America, and he risked red ink if he didnt come up with something. Thats when the buyer suggested a trade.

What do you have? Janus asked.

An automobile, said the Swede.

Janus considered. He did need a new car, and there was a long waiting list for them. Scrambling to retool its factory lines after years of armaments production, Detroit had only recently begun introducing new models. I was tempted to accept the car for that reason alone, Janus admitted later. Still, even a top-of-the-line convertible like a Cadillac Series 62, priced at three thousand four hundred dollars, didnt come close to the money Janus was on the hook for.

Im not interested in a car for thirty-five thousand dollars, Janus countered.

Its not just a car, said the man on the phone, pausing. It is Hitlers.

Adolf Hitlers car. The man was not speaking of a Volkswagen. The automobile in question was a limousine, specifically, a custom-built 1941 Mercedes-Benz Grosser 770K model W150 open touring car. It was twenty feet long, could carry eight passengers, and, with its 1-inch bulletproof windows and armor plating, tipped the scales at nearly five tons.

To this heady piece of information, the offer wholly out of left field, the young Chicago broker could say but one thing: He would call back.

* * *

That an automobile that had belonged to the most notorious and despised man of the twentieth century would end up as collateral in a ball-bearing deal out of Chicago was, if anything, the product of incredible odds. And yet, in his memoirs, Janus does not confess to a feeling of surprise in being offered Hitlers car. Perhaps it was merely because wheeler-dealers (and in time, Janus was to become a very good one of those) do not betray their emotions. Or maybe it was because Christopher Janus was accustomed to long odds already. It was, for instance, no small miracle in the first place that Janus was in Chicago with money in his pocket and a tailor-made suit on his back.

His family had come to the United States from Greece in 1910, settling in Montgomery, West Virginia, where his father had found a factory job. The Januses relative stability lasted only until 1918, when another visitor from the old world, the Spanish flu, slipped in the door. Within weeks, Januss father, sister, and younger brother were dead. The three surviving family members headed north in 1926, settling in Montclair, New Jersey. But without a breadwinner, it was clear they could not keep going. Januss older brother struck out on his own. His mother returned to Greece. A now-teenage Janus had few prospectsuntil Dr. and Mrs. George Biggs, a well-connected local couple of considerable means, took an interest in the polite, dark-haired boy who could read Plato in the original Greek. The Biggses gave him a stipend, a place to stay, and pulled a few strings. By 1932, Christopher Janus was on his way to Harvard.

This Algeresque deliverance would later lead Janus to say that hed lived life with an angel on his shoulder, one always on the lookout for the right opportunity to steer his way. Another stroke of luck had been meeting his wife, Beatrice, a beautiful heiress whose father, Jeffrey R. Short of the J. R. Short Milling Company, had set them up comfortably in Chicago. Could Hitlers old Mercedes be still another opportunity? Janus had a feeling that it was. An idea had occurred to him during that difficult telephone call: What if he took the limousine and put it on a tour of the United States? Wouldnt Americans want to see the prized possession of the despot theyd just defeated?

Hitlers car would be a great attraction to make money for charity, Janus later recountedand, incidentally, to get my investment back and even make a profit. Surely he could sell the car for a tidy sum, especially once hed succeeded in getting the newspapers to write about it. In the years just prior to his joining Eximport Associates, Janus had done stints as a daily reporter and later as a copywriter for the ad agency J. Walter Thompson. He understood the value of publicity and how to create it.

But the life-changing patronage of Dr. and Mrs. Biggs had also taught Janus something else: the value of knowing the right people and of soliciting their advice. Janus suspected that bringing such an ignoble automobile to the United States would be no small affairthough, on this spring day of 1948, he had no inkling of just how massive and messy an affair it would become. I wanted to discuss the project with people who knew show business, he later recalled. And so right after hed hung up the phone with the man from Stockholm, Christopher Janus called Spyros Skouras.

Though his name is largely forgotten now, in the late 1940s Spyros Skouras was one of the most influential tastemakers in the United States. Even those who didnt know his name had seen his work. Skouras was president of 20th CenturyFox, one of Hollywoods Big Five movie studios. He was rich, powerful, and, as Damon Runyon once put it, a good man to have as a friend.

That Janus even knew a mogul like Skouras was, once again, the work of his angel. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Janus was one of millions of American men who made tracks for the nearest recruitment office. But the sight in Januss left eye was poor, and the navy sent him away. Dejected, Janus cast about for other ways to help with the war effort. He found them in fund-raising workfirst for the families of men off fighting in the navy, and next for Greece, whose citizens were literally starving under Nazi occupation. It was his work with the Greek War Relief Association that introduced Janus to influential business leaders of Mediterranean descent, among them Milton Baldji, with whom he would work at Eximport Associates, and Spyros Skouras, whose telephone number he now dialed.