Nuevos retos para la Fiscalidad Internacional: la Economía Digital y el Comercio Electrónico

wrecked the German war machine. And one man was responsible

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for that fact, the man who had ensured that Nazi Germany's oil supply dwindled to a mere trickle, a man that the Germans never would have suspected. His name was Eric Erickson.

At the outbreak of World War II, Erickson was a 48-year-old oilman who travelled frequently around the world working out various deals. Like most men in the business, Erickson loved the rough and tumble world of oil. Born in Brooklyn, he had emi- grated to Sweden in 1924 to start his own oil production com- pany. Nicknamed "Red" for his shock of red hair, Erickson was known as a burly, easygoing man who liked nothing better than hoisting a few with his oil industry cronies, exchanging stories about the latest big find in the Persian Gulf.

But the mild exterior concealed an extremely shrewd man who had strong moral convictions. Which is why his friends found it all the more puzzling when in 1939, shortly after the outbreak of the war, Erickson suddenly became something of a pro-Nazi. To their further puzzlement, Erickson, never known for any pre- judice, began to become openly anti-Semitic. He stopped talking to his Jewish friends, and loudly insulted one prominent Jewish businessman in a restaurant. Coupled with his open admiration for Hitler, the transformation struck everybody who knew Erick- son as very strange. They learned to avoid the Erickson home in Stockholm, lest they be subjected to a tirade about the "dirty Jews" and the genius of Adolf Hitler.

There was one group of men in Stockholm who did not find such behavior so strange; in fact, they delightedly watched Erick- son's growing infatuation with Nazi ideology. The men of the SD station at the Stockholm embassy had taken notice of Erickson as he veered suddenly rightward. This offered possibilities: Ger- many had an acute need for oil, and Erickson, one of the world's leading experts on that subject, could prove valuable. A careful, tenative approach was made: would Herr Erickson be interested in helping the Nazi regime? Erickson replied enthusiastically.

And so the bait had been taken. In fact, Erickson loathed the Nazis, but had been instructed to cultivate an image of pro- Nazi to lure an SD recruitment. Some months before, Erickson had been approached by an acquaintance, an American diplomat named Laurence Steinhardt, who was on his way to Moscow to serve as ambassador. Steinhardt, himself an expert on the oil busi- ness, concluded that the war between great industrial powers would be decided in large measure on the issue of oil; the nation that had sufficient oil to fuel its planes and tanks and keep its

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industrial machinery going would be the nation that won the war. Steinhardt proposed a daring plan to Erickson: posing as a pro- Nazi, he would allow himself to be recruited by the Germans as a helpful expert willing to advise the Nazi regime on oil produc- tion. Naturally, that meant Erickson at some point would have to take a look at the German oil production facilities.

And that is what American intelligence wanted to see. Since World War I, the Germans had led the world in the technology of synthetic oil, which involved an industrial process that con- verted coal into oil. It removed a dependency on imported oil— easily cut off in the event of war—although the process was quite expensive. The Americans wanted to know how advanced the German synthetic oil industry was, and, even more importantly, where the plants were located. (The plants were under heavy se- curity, and neither the British nor American intelligence had much information about them.)

Toward the end of 1939, Erickson began to make regular trips to Nazi Germany to consult with oil experts. Blessed with a pho- tographic memory, Erickson remembered every detail he either saw or heard about; following each return to Stockholm, he sat with several State Department aides and repeated it all to them.

Actually, as Erickson discovered, there was not much he could help the Germans with; their synthetic oil industry was very far advanced, to the point where Hitler believed he could fill almost all the petroleum needs of his war machine from the output of synthetic oil plants. To keep the game going, Erickson proposed an idea that delighted SS leader Heinrich Himmler himself: the Swede would construct a huge synthetic oil plant in Sweden, us- ing German capital. Thus, in the event the German plants were damaged or destroyed, the Germans would have a guaranteed source of oil.

As Erickson anticipated, that led the Germans to approve an extensive series of inspection trips to their oil plants, all in the name of Erickson becoming familiar with the German technology that he was to build in Sweden. By 1943, Erickson had a virtually complete picture of the German plants. Concidentally, they be- gan to be struck by persistent American bombing attacks. The bombers not only seemed to know the precise location of the plants, they were uncannily punctual in return bombings when a damaged plant was restored to production.

The Germans did not make the connection between the accurate American attacks and the presence of Erickson at the

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very same plants. Erickson artfully stalled while the Germans pressed him to finish arrangements for the new plant in Sweden; their anxiety was understandable, considering that synthetic oil production was dropping precipitously.

By mid-1944, German synthetic oil production was drying up, and the German war machine was tapping into precious re- serves in order to keep going. Nevertheless, that machine was clanking to a halt: most of the Luftwaffe was grounded for lack of fuel, and there was not enough gas for those Panzer formations that once swept across Europe. By the end of that year, the syn- thetic oil industry in Germany collapsed altogether.

Erickson's mission was over. There was no point for him to make any more trips to Germany, for there was nothing left to bomb. While the Germans hitched up a team of cows to pull their technological wonder, the ME-262, onto an airfield, Erickson was at a large dinner in Stockholm that had been arranged by his American friends. At the dinner, it was announced that Eric Er- ickson was not a pro-Nazi after all; it was only a facade to aid his "great work" on behalf of the Allies. The "great work" remained unspecified, but the important fact was that Erickson now became reconciled with the friends whom he once spurned in the name of perfecting his cover.

With the end of the war, Erickson returned to his oil busi- ness. Praised by Dwight D. Eisenhower as the man who "short- ened the war by at least two years," he shunned publicity. He endured a best-selling book about his role in the war, and later a movie, The Counterfeit Traitor, that starred William Holden in a somewhat exaggerated account of Erickson's work as a spy.

The book and the movie appeared to say everything there was worth saying about Erickson, but there was one secret he took to the grave with him when he died in 1983: a list, given to him by the Germans, of Swedes who secretly had agreed to serve in a Nazi government should Germany invade Sweden. At Eisenhow- er's request, Erickson burned that document to forestall a witch- hunt.