Americans in Paris_ Life and Death Under Nazi Occupation - Charles Glass [101]
His theory was simple. If German troops invaded Iraq from Vichy Syria to support the anti-British coup, they could move on Iran and take Abadan for themselves. Bedaux’s rationale for saving Abadan, he said, had less to do with the war than the peace: ‘I advanced the philosophy of first thinking that to prevent it was continental logic. My idea was that Continental Europe would rebuild after the war only as fast as continental oil could be supplied, and that with its twelve million tons a year, Abadan was the heart of continental oil, continental gasoline.’ He revived the scheme he had presented to Lord Cadman in 1939 to protect the refinery and its Iraqi pipeline by filling them with liquid sand. The Germans, whose experience of Bedauxizing some of their factories had been positive, listened. They discussed it with him in the summer and invited him in November 1941 for planning sessions in Berlin with Albert Speer, the minister of armaments and munitions. With technical experts, Bedaux and Speer went over plans to save Abadan for Germany. Bedaux had already worked it out. Grains manufactured from sandstone, rather than harder natural desert sand, could be liquidized and fed into the pipes to absorb the shock of bombardment. He convinced Speer the operation could be accomplished in three days. When the refinery was finally safe from bombing, workers would need only three weeks to remove the sand. Bedaux later justified his collaboration with the Germans over Abadan: ‘My idea was that in introducing in their minds the idea of preserving, I would remove from their minds the idea of destroying.’ The delay made an Abadan attack less likely, because in the meantime Britain had removed the military junta in Iraq and forced the Vichy French out of Syria and Lebanon.
There were reports that Bedaux offered to sabotage Abadan for the Germans by filling the refinery with sand to render it unworkable. Such an operation would have denied Britain the petrol it needed to confront General Erwin Rommel’s Afrikakorps in Italian Libya. No sabotage took place. Bedaux claimed that no one in Berlin would see him about the Abadan project. His invitation had come through German lawyer Alois Westrick, whom Bedaux had known from pre-war soirées at the American Embassy in Berlin. On arrival, Bedaux checked into Berlin’s Hotel Adlon at his own expense. While Westrick kept him waiting, Bedaux saw an engineer from his old German company. The man told him that productivity in the German firms he advised had dropped by a third since the war began, which he attributed to low morale among the workers. Dr Emil Georg von Stauss, the banker in charge of nationalized companies whom Bedaux had met in 1937, invited him to his country house for a weekend. Back in Berlin, the German Production Ministry asked for his recommendations for the Bor copper mines in Yugoslavia. Bedaux said that the German Bedaux company, which the Germans owned, could deal with it. ‘What about French Bedaux?’ an official asked him. Bedaux became evasive, but promised to look into it. Janet Flanner wrote that Bedaux had ‘pepped up’ copper production at Bor for the Nazis, an accusation he denied.
In Berlin, Bedaux took up the cause of his old friend, Count Joseph von Ledebur. After Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, von Ledebur had been sent to the Russian front. Bedaux used what leverage he had with German officialdom to persuade them that Ledebur was more important to the successful running of the French occupation than as one of thousands of captains in the Russian theatre of operations. Bargaining his expertise for