1
THE STOCKHOLM DEAL
Though he’d 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.1 The magnificent art deco skyscraper dominated the Loop, stretching its gray limestone neck above the din of taxi horns and the haze of locomotive smoke from LaSalle Street Station. Janus was the managing director of Eximport Associates, a firm in the business—as its name suggested—of exporting and importing. Eximport’s inventory was nothing especially fancy: “hardware, office equipment, household supplies, drugs, cosmetics, and other lines,” its opening announcement in the Chicago Tribune had said.2 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, Baldji’s 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 wasn’t 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.3 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 didn’t have greenbacks, only Swedish kronor. In postwar Europe, that currency was unstable, and Janus wouldn’t touch it. What to do? Janus’s shipment had already left America, and he risked red ink if he didn’t come up with something. That’s when the buyer suggested a trade.
“What do you have?” Janus asked.
“An automobile,” said the Swede.4
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.5 Still, even a top-of-the-line convertible like a Cadillac Series 62, priced at three thousand four hundred dollars, didn’t come close to the money Janus was on the hook for.
“I’m not interested in a car for thirty-five thousand dollars,” Janus countered.
“It’s not just a car,” said the man on the phone, pausing. “It is Hitler’s.”6
Adolf Hitler’s 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 1¼-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 Hitler’s 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, Janus’s 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. Janus’s older brother struck out on his own. His mother returned to Greece. A now-teenage Janus had few prospects—until 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 he’d 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.7 Could Hitler’s 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? Wouldn’t Americans want to see the prized possession of the despot they’d just defeated?
“Hitler’s car would be a great attraction to make money for charity,” Janus later recounted—“and, incidentally, to get my investment back and even make a profit.”8 Surely he could sell the car for a tidy sum, especially once he’d 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 affair—though, 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 he’d 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 didn’t know his name had seen his work. Skouras was president of 20th Century–Fox, one of Hollywood’s “Big Five” movie studios. He was rich, powerful, and, as Damon Runyon once put it, “a good man to have as a friend.”9
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 Janus’s 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 work—first 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.
An executive like Skouras could be anywhere in the world at a given moment, but he spent a great deal of time at Fox’s New York headquarters at 444 West Fifty-sixth Street, which is where Janus most likely found him.10 Fox’s East Coast offices filled a redbrick edifice that loomed over the tenement blocks of Hell’s Kitchen, a grimy neighborhood of gangsters and longshoremen, which was an unlikely backdrop for the varnished opulence of Skouras’s corporate lair, itself bigger than most New York apartments. With his hair slicked back like Errol Flynn’s and his face almost as handsome, the pinstriped potentate sat behind a desk the size of a piano, a slab of beige marble sunken into its cabinetry. Behind him, below a map of the world pinned with the location of every Fox satellite office, stretched a long credenza jammed with family photos and telephones.11
Spyros Panagiotis Skouras had fled Greece for America at seventeen with two brothers and empty pockets. Yet within four years, using pooled savings from their wages as hotel waiters in St. Louis, the young brothers—“the greatest family act since the Medicis,” Skouras would later say—managed to buy their first theater.12 By 1926, Spyros Skouras was the most formidable operator in the Midwest, with thirty-seven movie houses under his control. He took over theater operations for Warner Bros., then Paramount. The merger between Fox and Twentieth Century Pictures had been his enterprise and had made him into a magnate. Though Skouras still spoke with an accent thicker than a lobby carpet, he was renowned as a passionate and convincing orator. He was also tempestuous, mercurial, and capable of arguing conflicting viewpoints at the same time.13 Callers to Skouras’s third-floor office never knew what they were going to get when in audience with the “tiger of motion pictures,” as journalist Jim Bishop would call him, but just like sitting in the front row of one of Skouras’s old movie palaces, they could at least be assured of a good show.14
When Skouras picked up the phone, Christopher Janus—“Chreese,” as Skouras pronounced his first name—explained his export deal gone bad and then posited his idea of accepting this Hitler car in lieu of American dollars. No sooner had Janus uttered Hitler’s name than Skouras hit the roof.
“You must be out of your mind! Chreese, are you crazy?” Skouras shouted into the phone. “You want to get involved with that monster Hitler? What will people say? Do you want to ruin your reputation?”15
Scolding of this sort was a Skouras trademark. Just a few years later, playwright Arthur Miller—treated to a Skouras tirade in this very office—would observe how the movie executive “worked over many an actor and director with his persuasive mixture of real conviction, paternalism, and the normal show business terrors of bad publicity.”16
And such tactics usually worked. But when Skouras realized his failure to sway his young friend, he downshifted to a more practical line of reasoning. “Who is going to pay to see Hitler’s automobile?” Skouras challenged. “He is the worst person who ever lived.”
Janus spoke up to agree: Hitler was the worst person who’d ever lived. But, Janus added, he wasn’t taking up with Hitler (who’d been dead three years, in any case); he was only interested in his old car—and solely as a business venture.
Skouras couldn’t get his arms around such a preposterous idea, and he didn’t try. “Take the Swedish kronor and play roulette at Monte Carlo,” he said. “Your chances of success are infinitely better.” Then Janus heard the line go dead. Spyros Skouras had hung up.
The truth of the matter was that Janus’s mind had been made up before he’d even called Spyros Skouras. “When we ask for advice from a friend,” Janus later explained, “we often really want them to agree with us.”17 That Skouras didn’t agree perhaps deprived Janus of some added assurance, but that was about all. The older man’s warnings about the trouble the car would bring had been sensible, but Janus didn’t seem to have heard those. He picked up the phone and called the man in Stockholm back.
Yes, he would take Hitler’s car.
2
THE SCREWBALL OF WINNETKA
Janus could have had the car transported to Illinois, but he was so eager to see it that he “went to New York personally from Chicago to receive it,” he later said.1 June 28 was a humid Monday, the bleary skies threatening rain. Well turned out in a striped necktie and lightweight summer suit, Janus found his way to Pier 97, where West Fifty-seventh Street ended in a splay of cobblestones in the shadow of the West Side Highway. Beyond the tall brick archway of the Swedish American Lines’ headhouse, the 11,650-ton MS Stockholm pulled at her mooring ropes as she bobbed gently in the eddies. The white paint of the ship’s 525-foot hull bore a striking contrast to the black iron shed of the pier, sticking out like a bony finger into the foul-smelling bilge of the Hudson.
Since the Stockholm could make only 19 knots, her crossing had been slow. Coupled with the time it had taken to load the car in Sweden, Janus had waited three long weeks for this moment, when his prize automobile would be hoisted from the ship’s cavernous belly.
Janus looked around and realized that many of the men on the dock were not waiting for the ship’s passengers but for him. “Word had gotten out that there was an American who had bought Hitler’s car,” he recalled, “and when I arrived at the 57th Street pier to pick it up, I was greeted by no fewer than 20 reporters and cameramen.”2 Janus suspected that someone at the Swedish American Line had tipped off the papers, but he was not upset. If publicity is what he wanted for his car, it might as well start now.
Possibly because so many reporters were present, Janus was invited to come up to the forecastle, where the whitewashed cargo cranes moved like giant insect legs above the chain lockers and acres of teak decking. The Stockholm’s forward hatchway lay open to the sun, hoisting cables disappearing into the inky darkness of the well below.
Janus watched as the drum winches began to turn. It took a long while for the derrick to pull the Mercedes all the way up, for the car had crossed the Atlantic at the bottom of the No. 1 cargo hold, far down on D deck and well below the waterline. No passengers were permitted this far forward in the vessel, only freight and crew. Hitler’s limousine had crossed the ocean in the company of the postal workers and the kitchen boys, whose bunks lay on the other side of the bulkhead.3
The car’s windshield appeared first, its thick greenish glass braced by heavy strips of chromed steel. Seconds later, a wedge-shaped grille rose into view, fronting a narrow hood that looked longer than a bowling alley. Slowly, the rest of the titanic limousine emerged from the hold, the hoisting ropes netted around the car’s fat tires straining to lift the burden. The car was nothing less than a monster—seven feet wide, and nearly as long as the front of a tenement house. The 1941 Mercedes-Benz now floating in the humid harbor breeze weighed as much as an Asian elephant, as much as two thousand red bricks, as much as the clock mechanism for Big Ben.
Even as it dangled in space, the phaeton looked like it was lunging forward, its bulbous fenders slipping over the tires like panther paws, the fat chrome exhaust hoses snaking out of the engine before diving below the running boards. In the full sunlight, Janus could see that what at first looked like a big black car was actually a deep, dark blue. August and imperious, sleek and sinister, this limousine, he was assured, had been the pride and joy of the most hateful man the century had yet produced. And now it was his, all his.
The crane whirred and lifted the Mercedes over the Stockholm’s gunwale. The dockers pulled at the ropes to keep the limousine’s right front fender from grazing the pier shed, whose reflection danced ominously close in the car’s glossy paint. When the crane finally landed the tires on American asphalt, Janus pulled open the limousine’s leaden door and climbed in. He obliged the photographers by sitting on the back of the driver’s seat and waving. He seemed either giddy or overwhelmed. It was probably both.
“What did you pay for the car, Mr. Janus?” asked a reporter.
He wouldn’t say.
“What do you plan to do with it?”
“I don’t know what I am going to do with it,” Janus said.4
He looked down at the car’s dashboard, an ivory-white field of forty chrome dials and switches. The steering wheel was as big as a life preserver. The shifting rod, a stalk of glistening black steel, jutted out of the transmission below the floor, its eight-ball-size knob etched with the boxy footprint of the car’s six speeds—five forward, one reverse. It must have occurred to Janus then that he had no idea how to operate the goliath beneath him.
Janus slipped down and attempted to start the car, but the engine would not turn over. He had no way of knowing it, but it took seven steps to start the engine of a Grosser Mercedes 770K, and this one also had a hidden master switch behind the instrument panel to foil intruders.5 The impasse left no alternative: Stevedores ganged up and began to push the Mercedes toward the headhouse. His media moment over, Janus made a quick exit in hopes of finding license plates, gasoline—plenty of that, since the Grosser had a fifty-two-gallon tank—and, of course, someone who could teach him how to drive his new car.
Fortunately for him, help wasn’t far away. Zumbach Motor Company on West Fifty-third Street was the official Mercedes-Benz agent for the United States. Its mechanics would, he hoped, know what to do with a custom-built armored touring sedan. All Janus had to do was get the Mercedes down to Zumbach’s garage. Someone conscripted an old Buick, which managed to tow the recalcitrant limousine a few blocks downtown.6
* * *
The next morning’s newspapers had a field day with the story, especially the details about the automobile’s construction. The bulletproof glass was “thick as a cheese sandwich,” the car so big that Janus had to “make sure Hitler [wasn’t] in it.”7 The Los Angeles Times called the hulking limousine “a getaway car that would be far beyond the wildest dreams of a prohibition era gangster—and the former property of the arch gangster of all time.”8
Even in a city like New York, stories this unusual didn’t happen every day. It was enough to stir the editors at The New Yorker from their high-culture perch on West Forty-fourth Street. Philip Hamburger, from the magazine’s Talk of the Town department, tracked Janus down to ask if he might have time to give a few of his colleagues a spin in this big car of Hitler’s—say, in Central Park? Of course, Janus said.
The writers met him at Zumbach Motors, whose tall brick garage loomed between Sixth and Seventh Avenues. There they found the ebullient Chicagoan beside his Hitler car, now sufficiently gassed up and otherwise mechanically readied. “I haven’t had so much excitement since I was voted the Blue Ribbon Baby of Charleston, West Virginia,” Janus told his visitors. Janus was also savoring his perverse triumph over the much-hated waiting list for new cars from Detroit. “I’ve been trying to get an American car for eighteen months,” he said. “Took me only thirty days to get Hitler’s.”9
By now Janus had had time to do some exploring inside the car, and he showed the visiting writers some of what he’d discovered: In the passenger-side door was a secret compartment (in all, the car had thirteen of them) for a Luger pistol. A sheet of armor plating, covered in leather, could be raised behind the backseat with four hundred turns of a crank. Three additional seats folded down just behind the driver, bringing the total accommodation to eight passengers (“or four Görings,” The New Yorker quipped).
Zumbach Motors was supposed to have given Janus driving lessons, but he wasn’t confident enough to take the wheel yet. Presently, the garage’s mechanic slipped into the driver’s seat and started the engine. The eight cylinders purred low and softly. The men piled in, and the limousine pulled out onto Fifty-third Street, hooked onto the avenue, then headed north to Central Park.
“My wife is a little suspicious,” Janus told his passengers. Word of the Hitler car had reached the buttoned-up suburb north of Chicago where the Januses lived. “She thinks I’m getting to be known as the screwball of Winnetka,” he said.10
One thing Janus didn’t mention to his guests was that many members of the public didn’t share his gee-whiz attitude toward his new car. He’d first noticed this fact the previous day. As the stevedores swung the Mercedes from the dankness of the ship’s hold, some began jeering at it. One of the booing wharfies was a man named Paul Purpi, who’d survived his four years in the Wehrmacht, emigrated to America, and didn’t much appreciate a reminder of der Führer in his new home. Reporters took note, and some had made it the lead of their stories. The following day’s Chicago Tribune ran the headline HITLER’S CAR BOOED AND HISSED AS IT REACHES NEW YORK.11 Now again, as Janus and his guests rolled around the leafy, curving lanes of Central Park, “everybody seemed to wave at us,” he said, “although some people booed as well.”12
In short order, the car’s appearance would also reawaken very recent memories of American men who’d been in the European theater and, with those memories, all the familiar venom for Hitler. “Your sweatful reporter took more than a passing interest in the arrival here of Hitler’s car,” scoffed International News Service columnist Bob Considine, who’d reported out of Germany during the war and remembered GIs capturing an armored Mercedes-Benz in its final weeks. “I took a ride in it once upon a time,” Considine wrote. “Hitler wasn’t with me. He was detained somewhere suffering from a slight case of suicide.”13
Janus took the derision in stride. Still, it was a taste of what he’d gotten himself into by purchasing an automobile associated with a figure so despised. A strange aura seemed to hang about the big car. As the shiny steel beast prowled the lanes of the park, The New Yorker writers couldn’t help but remember Leni Riefenstahl’s infamous footage of Hitler standing straight as a matchstick behind the windshield, giving the Roman salute to delirious crowds spilling over the curbstones of Nuremberg. But now Hitler was dead, Germany’s cities lay in ruins, and history’s deadliest war was already three years in the past. During the surreal drive in the park, there were “no crowds, no salutes, no heils,” said the magazine. “It was a funny feeling.”14
Janus’s earlier insistence that he had no idea what to do with the car wasn’t really true. Clearly, he was just baiting the hook for more publicity opportunities. Within hours, he had them. Offers came in from one Hollywood star, a movie studio, a Chicago gangster, and two circuses to buy the car outright. Janus turned them all down. Then came an invitation to put the car on short-term exhibit at Rockefeller Center. Janus accepted.
* * *
The Museum of Science and Industry was part of what tourist brochures advertised as a “full day’s entertainment” in Rockefeller Center.15 Nested in the lower floors of the RCA Building, the tallest of the complex’s fifteen limestone towers, the museum was a quirky place that touted “discoveries, inventions, and developments of the scientific world.”16 Its marvels included push-button aroma machines, lightning generators, and, during the war years, an enormous—and presumably defused—bomb that boys could straddle and ride like a pony.17 Despite the glamour of neighboring Radio City Music Hall and an exhibition space designed by Edward Durell Stone, the museum’s “scientific” attractions often swerved suspiciously close to the stuff of traveling sideshows, making Rockefeller Center’s conservative management wary. A bubble-gum-chewing contest proposed for 1948, for example, got the kibosh for being “very offensive.”18 But Hitler’s high-tech Mercedes—“the most famous used car in the world,” as it would be billed—was deemed a good thematic fit.19
It was not, however, a good physical fit. Because the exhibit space lacked a freight elevator, the only way to get the Mercedes up to the museum’s second-floor concourse was to remove the plate-glass window at 60 West Fiftieth Street and hoist the five-ton limousine in. The operation took place on or around June 8, when an enormous crane anchored itself just across from the Music Hall’s vestibule doors, closing off the entire street. At the foot of the RCA Building, beneath the heavy neon marquee proclaiming the Rainbow Room restaurant and the NBC studios, ordinary New Yorkers lacking the money to dine in the former and the status to enter the latter watched as the boom threaded the limousine through the opening. Museum president Robert P. Shaw was watching, too, uneasily. “By hoisting the car into the building,” read his sheepish memorandum to Mr. Rockefeller, “considerable public attention and unnecessary agitation on the part of Rockefeller Center was created.”20
Still, given the fiscal straits that the museum was in (Rockefeller Center had been jacking its rent yearly since 1945), Shaw was probably all too happy to book a headline-generating attraction like the Hitler Mercedes.21 Janus most certainly was. The exhibit gave him his first chance to try out his business plan of deploying the car for the benefit of charity—in this case, some four hundred war orphans enrolled at Athens College, an American school in Greece. During the war, the Nazis had appropriated the college’s campus and burned its books for fuel, leaving it a blackened shell when they retreated. Janus made the most of his opportunity, handing over this bit of prepared copy to the Rockefeller Center Press Office: “Hitler’s armored automobile is more than a vehicle owned and used by the most wicked and infamous tyrant of all time. The fact that the car has now come to the greatest free country in the world makes it a symbol that free men always win out, and that bad characters, whether dictators or common hoodlums, cannot long shield themselves behind armor plate, bulletproof glass or iron curtains.”22
That “iron curtain” bit was a reference to Winston Churchill’s recent characterization of the Soviet Union’s partitioning of Europe—a muddled reference at best, given that Hitler had loathed Communism and the Soviet land grab had started after the war’s end. But why split hairs? Janus’s purple prose had shrewdly grouped America’s new Cold War foe together with its former wartime one and achieved something singular: In just a few lines he’d managed to elevate his car from a dented war relic to a teachable lesson in democracy, American moral certitude, and the evils of the Fascist state. Simplistic and reductionist, sidestepping the question of how dubious it was to gawk at a mass murder’s automobile in the first place, Janus’s marketing touch fearlessly anointed a visit to the car as a wholesome pledge of patriotism.
And it worked. Word spread quickly, and New Yorkers flocked to the museum. When Spyros Skouras had argued that nobody would pay to see Hitler’s car because Hitler was “the worst person who ever lived,” he overlooked a small but critical truth of human nature: Hitler’s being the worst man who’d ever lived would be the main reason people would pay to see his car.
After handing over their thirty-cents admission, visitors filed up the broad white ramp and found the huge car below the museum’s rotunda, cordoned off by stanchions and rope. One of those visitors was Mrs. Michael Yanik, who shook her head in disgust as she peered at the long, gleaming automobile—one, the accompanying placard explained, that had belonged to Adolf Hitler. “Huh,” she said. “He might have had inch-and-a-half-thick windows and armor plate, but it didn’t stop us none from getting him.”23
Her husband nodded his assent. “I’d rather ride in my Ford anyhow,” he said.
But other visitors were impressed by the machine. A man named Albert Reiger told a reporter from the United Press that he didn’t care “if the devil himself” had ridden in the Mercedes. “It’s a beautiful job,” he said. “I wish I owned it.” Nearby, a man in his twenties, named D. E. Ward, whistled long and low as though he were admiring the curves of a bathing beauty and not a Mercedes. “Know what my ambition is?” he volunteered. “To stand up in the front seat of the car, just on the spot Hitler stood. Wonder what I’d feel like.”
Standing nearby was Allen Bailey, at the exhibit to represent Athens College, which would receive the proceeds from the exhibit to pay the tuition of students whose parents had been murdered by the death squads of Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s Schutzstaffel, or SS. Bailey, overhearing Ward, sadly shook his head.
While the public’s reception was mixed, the car had no trouble attracting a paying audience, and its thirty-day residency on Fiftieth Street was a huge success. Before the crane returned to lift the big Mercedes back out the window on the second week of August, one hundred thousand people would come to see it. Most were ordinary citizens. Some, like the comedy actor Roland Young, were famous. One was not even human.
A surviving publicity photo shows four children piled into the limousine’s backseat below a cluster of balloons. Behind the steering wheel is TV host Bob Smith and, standing in the right front passenger seat—Hitler’s usual spot—was none other than Howdy Doody.24
* * *
Though it had only been in the country for a few weeks, a powerful mythos was developing around the car, a mixture of fact, embellishment, and supposition. That the limousine weighed five tons, boasted an engine capable of 230 horsepower, and had been obtained in a business deal gone awry—that much was provable.25 But Janus had also been playing it a bit loose with his facts, probably in an effort to patch over what he didn’t know or to make a good story better.
Newspapers reported, for example, that Janus’s car could hit a top speed of 130 mph. If a ten-thousand-pound armored limousine could go that fast, it should have been world news: The fastest production car on the planet, Jaguar’s two-seater XK120, strained to hit 132.26 Published stories also proclaimed that Janus’s Mercedes hadn’t just been owned by Hitler but had been personally designed by him, too, purportedly to “whiz the dictator over Germany.”27 That Hitler was hardly an automotive designer, and generally used trains or airplanes to cover long distances, did not intrude upon these savory details. Nor did the fact (one Janus would soon discover) that the car risked blowing out its tires if the speedometer needle crept much past 50 mph.28
In time Janus would also maintain that the car was Hitler’s “pet limousine,”29 and that he had used it “to go with Eva Braun, his mistress, from Berlin to Berchtesgaden,” a reference to the alpine retreat in Bavaria where Hitler had built a house.30 How an ordinary American businessman was privy to such detailed information about Hitler’s romantic life was anyone’s guess.
But most confusing was the car’s origin story. Janus insisted that the big Mercedes “was used in parades and other ceremonial functions for Hitler.”31 But he also explained to the papers that Hitler had given the car to Carl Gustaf Mannerheim, the brilliant military leader and father of modern Finland, as a seventy-fifth-birthday present.32 Mannerheim, Janus continued, had sent the car to Sweden when the Soviets attacked his country, which was how he’d eventually obtained it.
At best, these historical details felt a little shaky. A military leader whose country was attacked might well send his wife and children abroad to protect them—but his convertible, too? And if Hitler had indeed been shopping for a birthday present, why didn’t he give Mannerheim a new car? Yet Janus apparently detected no soft spots in his account. Nor, apparently, did any of the reporters think to ask. So the story stood, for the time being.
* * *
While his car did its part for good causes, Janus returned to Chicago to consider the problem of where and how he’d display his four-wheeled prize locally. Then, it seems, his angel stirred once more. The telephone rang. On the line was Governor Dwight H. Green, inviting Janus to bring his car to the Illinois State Fair. Green told Janus he’d meet him there personally. Was he interested?
There were probably ulterior motives for the call. Since 1941, the governor had pulled the levers of the infamous “Green Machine,” a greasy political apparatus rife with payoffs, patronage, and ties to downstate racketeers.33 The St. Louis Post-Dispatch had been exposing Green for years, and now Democratic reformer Adlai Stevenson was after his job in the coming election. Sponsoring the car would mean good press for a change, and Governor Green needed plenty of that.
Janus liked the idea of bringing his car to the fair, though the invitation didn’t help him solve the logistical troubles of driving his Mercedes from New York to the heartland. It wasn’t just that operating the car was expensive, it was potentially perilous: How many garages stocked parts for a custom-built German limousine? His experiences in New York had also made clear that security would be a good idea, but how was he to arrange for a law-enforcement detail to cover six states?
These questions shadowed the prospective trip, until the fair’s public-relations chief stepped in with a solution: “Why don’t we have the car driven from New York to Springfield and have [New York City] Mayor O’Dwyer give some kind of Freedom Torch as a symbolic gift from the mayor of New York to the governor of Illinois?”34
It was a cheeseball idea. And both politicians went for it.
With Illinois’s highest-ranking official now throwing his weight behind the drive, Janus’s Mercedes would enjoy a police motorcycle escort the whole way. But Governor Green was hardly finished. He ordered up a special set of vanity license plates for the trip that read XX-HITLER, which many interpreted to mean double-crossing Hitler. Not one to miss a publicity opportunity, Janus posed with the dark-blue-and-off-white plates for several newspapers, one of which applied the headline THIS MUST BE DER TAG.35
* * *
Janus decided to retain the Amusement Corporation of America to handle the car’s subsequent tours. Clif Wilson, who cut his teeth as an exhibitor at the 1939 World’s Fair, came aboard as the manager of the Mercedes. In late July, Billboard reported that Hitler’s limousine was “expected to prove a powerful Midway attraction,” not least because it had enjoyed an “avalanche of publicity in newspapers, over the radio, and in class magazines.”36 But the drive back to Chicago was clearly one that Janus wanted to undertake on his own.
The car’s engagement at the Museum of Science and Industry ended on Monday, August 9. Come Tuesday, Janus, now back in New York, was on a tight schedule. He wanted to be on the road by afternoon, but getting the car out of the RCA Building proved every bit as fraught as coaxing it in had been. While the three-thousand-dollar-a-day moving crew tried to wrestle the Mercedes to the window, the five-ton car broke loose and squashed a nearby Baltimore & Ohio train. Fortunately, it was just a cardboard display, but the implication was still amusing: If there was any automobile in America big and mean enough to face down a train, this one was it.37
Before Janus could set off, his car was due down at Times Square for a joint recruiting drive hosted by the U.S. Army and Air Force, which President Truman had made into separate military branches just the year before. While attendees milled around, film star and former vaudevillian Edward Everett Horton showed up in a derby, hopped into the front seat, and mimed a panicked driver at the wheel.38 The photo op over, Janus’s Hitler car had an appointment downtown at city hall for an official send-off from Deputy Mayor John J. Bennett.
The sixty-block trip down Broadway turned into an event unto itself. Janus had invited his old friend, the newspaper columnist Jack Mabley, to come to New York in time to join him in the Mercedes for the big trip home to Chicago. “I was late getting to the car at Times Square,” Mabley recalled, and the backseats were already filled.39 One of the passengers was John Schneider, an eighteen-year-old Manhattan boy who’d just signed up for a “three-year hitch” and was being rewarded with the ride of his life—first down Broadway, and then all the way to Chicago. Schneider’s enrollment was a twofer: The teen told reporters that Peggy Marshall, his “best girl,” planned to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps.40 The United Press hailed that Hitler’s car had been made into a “recruiting steed.”41 For his part, Mabley just needed a ride. He jumped into the only spot still open—the front right passenger seat.
The group set off down Broadway with an escort of Jeeps. Mabley stared through the bulletproof windshield in amazement. Thousands of people had turned out to see the car. Many of them looked at Mabley—who was, he now realized, occupying Hitler’s former spot—and shot him strange looks. The parade was “the nuttiest ride of my life,” Mabley later said. “It was embarrassing.”42
And it was only the beginning. Down at city hall, a crowd of several hundred people gathered as Janus showed off his car to the deputy mayor—the secret pistol compartments, the layers of bulletproof glass, all the gizmos. Then it was time to go. By now Janus had driven the beast a few times by himself and concluded that wrestling with a twenty-foot-long car without power steering was “quite a chore,” as the Chicago Tribune put it.43 So he’d hired Joe Zenber, a mechanic who knew his way around Mercedes-Benzes, to do the driving. And since an eight-passenger limousine was going to be making the 827-mile run to Chicago empty or full, Janus saw no reason not to make a party out of it. Waldo Logan, another Chicago friend, joined the car in New York, as had Charles Raphael, a Wall Street attorney. The fresh-faced Schneider, his wiry frame folded into the backseat, was along in the official capacity as bearer of the Freedom Torch.44
As Tuesday afternoon’s sun lengthened the skyscraper shadows, Hitler’s Illinois-bound limousine purred out of Manhattan with a police escort.
* * *
The era of great American road trips—Kerouac’s, Kesey’s, Steinbeck’s—was still several years in the future, but between August 10 and 13, 1948, Christopher Janus and his cohorts would blaze a pioneering (if now-forgotten) trail. And if the six men riding in the Mercedes weren’t exactly larger-than-life figures, the Mercedes certainly was. As Mabley would reflect, “Since this car arrived in America it has provoked a mild sensation.”45
The security escort had been all worked out, and the presence of Zenber was at least moderate insurance against the car’s breaking down. “It won’t break down,” Zenber insisted. “Anyway,” he added, “I’ve got a book called Betriebsanleitung fur Mercedes-Benz Personenwagen”—“Operating Instructions for Mercedes-Benz Passenger Cars.”46 The only trouble, Zenber admitted, was that he couldn’t read German.
At least Janus and Zenber had plotted the route. Motoring out of New York, they’d swing down through Elizabeth and Newark, New Jersey, hook west to Harrisburg, and then take the Pennsylvania Turnpike all the way to Pittsburgh. From there they’d follow the old National Road west through Ohio and Indiana, then on into Illinois. In this, the era before interstate highways, two-lane routes that meandered through the countryside were the only options for the long-distance motorist.
Such roads weren’t safe for the Mercedes to speed on, but the fact didn’t stop the men from speeding.47 Janus was eager to put the machine through its paces and, as the westward adventurers found themselves on suburban roads, here at last was the opportunity. The experience of gunning an armored Mercedes 770K—longer and heavier than any automobile made in America—was heady stuff. The renowned automotive writer Ken W. Purdy was not along for the Chicago trip but would get his chance at the wheel a few months later, and he recounted what it was like to drive the beast: “With hardly a sound from the starter, the big (468-inch) straight-eight overhead-valve engine fires and warms up quickly at 1,200 rpm,” Purdy wrote. “You shove the long gear lever forward and left for first, the clutch comes in like velvet, and you’re off.” Purdy was mesmerized. The shifter was long as a golf club, yet “smooth, oily, and dead silent.” Floating on its independent suspension, the Grosser’s mass rendered velocity imperceptible. “When it’s moving, rolling along in fifth, it hands out a ride quite beyond comparison with anything else on wheels,” Purdy wrote. “The sensation is simply that of a moving house.”48
As Janus and his crew flew down the highway, the speedometer reached seventy-five. Zenber decided to give the supercharger a try. He mashed the accelerator to the floor.
In straight-eight Benzes of this vintage, the sound of the “blower” kicking in was so loud it was known to force other motorists off the road with its “ear-assaulting, scalp-lifting Mercedes scream,” the writer and humorist Ralph Stein recalled, “not unlike that of a lighthouse diaphone at close quarters.”49 Now a creature possessed, Janus’s limousine lunged down the asphalt, its speedometer needle tickling ninety-five as New York State whizzed by, slightly distorted in the bulletproof glass.50
Letting the engine flex its muscles was thrilling. And truly stupid. No sooner had Janus pushed his car to its limit than the tires began blowing out.51 Janus had two spares nudged into the crooks of the fenders, but the car ate them like lozenges. The group had hoped to make Bedford, Pennsylvania, by dark, but there was simply no way. As Tuesday night fell, the famous Hitler limousine limped into a Harrisburg service station, where Janus had all four tires replaced again.52 His gang had made it all of 150 miles.
As things would turn out, stopping at gas stations would become necessary simply for the fluids. The big Mercedes burned a quart of oil every sixty-six miles and gulped a gallon of petrol every four to seven. Station attendants were happy enough to top the car off, but allowing the monster into the garage was another matter. “When we needed some minor service in a town in Pennsylvania,” Mabley later recalled, “they wouldn’t let us drive into the service department because the car was so heavy they feared it would go through the floor.”53
Hunkered down inside the “monster,” as he called it, Mabley began to fire off dispatches for his newspaper.54 His datelines would allow Chicago Daily News readers to experience this peculiar adventure from the safety of their armchairs in Pulaski Park and Lake View. When he couldn’t find a dateline city, he simply filed from “Somewhere in Hitler’s Car.”55
Leaving Harrisburg Wednesday morning, the Mercedes grumbled onto the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Completed eight years earlier, the highway threaded its way through the Allegheny Mountains via seven deep tunnels. Fortunately, the car was superbly equipped for driving in the dark. It had headlights, spotlights, fog lights, parking lights, and flashing red lights, too. Motorists on the road could only stare slack-jawed at the Mercedes, a make not yet common in the United States, lit up like a parade float and about as big as one. “Sooner or later, everything turns up on the Turnpike,” marveled the Bedford Gazette, “—even Hitler’s private automobile.”56
Word of the car’s approach moved faster than the car itself, and throngs of bystanders lined the highway and snapped photos as the group passed. “Whenever we stop for lunch we eat in solitude,” Mabley wrote, “because the restaurants empty when the auto drives up.”57
Sometime on Wednesday, Zenber moved over to let Mabley have a turn at the wheel. “Driving Hitler’s armored auto is like driving a cross between a jet plane, your family bus, and Hook and Ladder 37,” the reporter wrote. The car’s twenty-foot length took getting used to, but the supercharger was great for hills, and Pennsylvania had lots of those. Soon Mabley sunk into the soft leather of the driver’s seat and relaxed. “Swings around corners like your old Ford,” he said.58
Chancy as the road trip must have felt to these well-heeled townies, they were never far from aid. Thanks to Governor Green, the Mercedes stayed in watchful eyes of the cops, who motored alongside and guarded it during stopovers. Since Illinois police had no jurisdiction in New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, or Indiana, the state’s Department of Public Safety sent letters out to the cities along the route requesting “escort and proper protection” for Janus and his Hitlermobile. “Because of the peculiar nature of the vehicle and the reactions it might arouse,” the letter stated, “it is necessary that law enforcement officials co-operate to escort it safely.”59 One state’s troopers would trail the car as far as the state line, then hand it over to the next group of police awaiting its arrival.
The Illinois State Fair’s publicity people were eagerly awaiting Janus’s appearance, but the man was in no hurry. Janus would stop when he could to let the curious get a closer look at the car while he talked to local reporters. “We achieved fantastic publicity,” he later remembered. “The Hitler car was on the way to becoming known all over the country.”60 While Janus had a decidedly Barnumesque side, it was his common touch that made for good copy. Far from being protective of his Mercedes, Janus allowed the young Schneider to take the wheel. The teenager helmed the colossal car through Cambridge City, Indiana, on the morning of August 12.
Mabley calculated that it had taken the group twenty-one hours of driving to get from Harrisburg to Indianapolis, meaning Hitler’s limousine was barely making 16 mph as an average cruising speed. But that was hardly the only annoyance. It took a cloudburst over Ohio for the men to discover that the car’s windshield wipers did not work. Hastily buttoning down the car’s mohair top, the men found the interior suddenly suffocating. “It is like riding in a hearse with the doors closed,” Mabley groused.
Soon they found the real source of the trouble: Hitler’s seat was—appropriately, enough—hotter than hell. “The best theory is that there is a heater going,” Mabley said, “but no one can find the button to shut it off.” The men began to discuss the possibility that Hitler’s ghost was still in the car.61
Sometime Thursday afternoon, Janus pulled into the fairgrounds in Springfield, Illinois. His group had been on the road for two days. As promised, Governor Green was waiting, sporting a fedora and a double-breasted suit, his big-bellied associates joining the crowd of onlookers. Smiling for the press photographers, Janus took the eighteen-inch liberty torch from Schneider and presented it to Green.
The limousine stayed at the fair for its ten-day run. On closing day, a tiny item appeared on page 36 of the Illinois State Journal: “The radiator cap was stolen from Adolph* Hitler’s automobile now on exhibition at the Illinois state fair. Authorities blamed souvenir hunters for the theft. A $20 reward has been offered for its return.”62
* * *
By the end of September, Janus had owned the big Mercedes for just three months, but the car had already changed his life. The crowds and media attention had thrilled him, as had—perhaps a little less—the crackpots and misfits the machine seemed to draw magnetically. A U.S. Marine veteran had called from California, offering Janus the chance to buy Hitler’s Luger pistol for five hundred dollars (he declined).63 The Lincoln Park Zoo had requested one of the enormous Mercedes tires for its gorilla, named Bushman, to play with. A psychiatrist had called, not to examine Janus but to psychoanalyze the Mercedes. Between forty and fifty calls and letters a day had arrived at Janus’s office, all of them about the car. He’d received two marriage proposals and several dozen letters warning him that “Hitler’s ghost still may be hovering about the automobile.”64 Perfect strangers had sent him presents, often perplexing ones. “The one that mystifies me most,” Janus said, “is the gift of a dozen girdles.”65
But the car had also opened a kind of experiential side door, permitting Janus a glimpse of the postwar human condition that he hadn’t bargained for. Janus would long remember the air force pilot from Syracuse, New York, who’d flown down to New York City the same day he heard about the Hitler Mercedes on the radio. Approaching Janus while the car was parked in Times Square, the airman had explained that he’d dropped some of the bombs that had razed Berlin to the ground. The pilot had never seen Hitler but could not suppress the need to see his car.
There was Don Limburg, a radio announcer in Pasadena, who suggested on the air that Janus send the car to the newly created state of Israel, where it could be converted into an ambulance. Limburg had only been joking, but within fifteen minutes the station had one hundred calls with offers of money to ship the car over.66
And then there was the woman who appeared like a wraith at Janus’s office door. As she approached, she rolled up her sleeve to show him the numeric tattoo that had been etched on her arm at the concentration camp where her parents and brother had died. “Please let me see the car,” she said, her voice heavy with a Hungarian accent. “You won’t understand. But I just want to stand and look at it.”67
“When I asked her why,” Janus recalled, “she said it was a feeling she couldn’t explain.”68
It had taken a while for this particular feature of the automobile to manifest itself. All the while, Janus and the reporters who chased him had assumed that the simple presence of Hitler’s Mercedes on American soil was the story. As the weeks wore on, however, it grew increasingly clear that something else, something ineffable and quite beyond the physical fact of the vehicle—its enormous engine and many hidden features—was drawing people near.
Or keeping them away. Syndicated columnist H. I. Phillips penned an open letter to Janus, warning him, “I am afraid you will not find riding in der Fuehrer’s old car any too comfortable.… There is bound,” he said, “to be a certain aroma in it.… No matter how often you go over the motor you will not be able to get all the swastikas out of the valves,” Phillips continued, adding: “It is bound to be a very noisy car. How could it be otherwise? Even with Hitler dead three or four years we can still hear him.”69
Phillips was one of the few voices in the media to suggest that there was a moral and symbolic complexity to the automobile. It was one that reached beyond the conqueror’s privilege of owning a piece of a defeated foe and touched on a thornier idea: that anything so inextricably linked to Adolf Hitler, even a car in which he may have ridden, was a kind of poison and perhaps something that nobody should own.
It’s worth pointing out that Phillips’s evocation of Nazi barbarism did not include a specific reference to the Holocaust. Nor, indeed, did any account of the car during this period. The reason is not because Americans were unaware of Nazi atrocities as such. Certainly, the 137,450 Jewish refugees who’d emigrated to the United States were aware of them, and millions of radio listeners had heard Edward R. Murrow report from Buchenwald in April of 1945. But in these immediate postwar years, public discourse about the war’s human toll tended to focus on the killing or wounding of over one million U.S. servicemen above all else.70 In addition, the American popular conception of the Holocaust—the point at which it acquired its capital “H” and was broadly understood foremost as a crime against Europe’s Jewish population—was still several years in the future.71 Indeed, Phillips’s reference to Janus’s Mercedes limousine being used by “Nazi warlords” extended only to their “blueprints for blitzes,” not their genocide.72 Nevertheless, his broader point was clear enough: The personality of Hitler represented a human toll of appalling scale, and Janus, as the possessor of a tangible piece of the Nazi legacy, would do well to handle it with caution if he was to handle it at all.
In that unique custodianship, Janus sometimes succeeded and sometimes he did not.
Some of his exploits, especially viewed with the benefit of hindsight, seem naïve, if not vulgar, as though Janus failed to fully grasp the dark significance of the relic he possessed. When the Mercedes was not out on tour, for example, Janus used it as his family car. He parked it in the Winnetka house’s two-car garage (where it took up both spaces), driving it to the office and the grocery store as though it were Grandpa’s Studebaker and not the former conveyance of the man who’d started a war that killed fifty million people. Jutting out from the front of the limousine’s grille was a large chrome siren, louder than the wolves of hell. Janus found the horn was handy when his car got stuck in traffic. The fears that Janus’s wife, Beatrice, had expressed about him becoming known as the “screwball of Winnetka” were, if anything, prescient. By one account the “abuse” the family took over the car drove her “crazy.”73
Given the dubious nature of the whole enterprise, it’s tempting to presume that Janus may have harbored some secret admiration for Hitler—but nothing in the record suggests as much. Janus openly disparaged “sick individuals who idolize Hitler,” and was personally and painfully acquainted with the toll of racial hatred.74 As a child of Greek descent in the Deep South, Janus had grown up with the Ku Klux Klan—“During the fifteen years that the Janus family lived in Montgomery,” he recalled, “several crosses were burnt in our front yard”—and he never forgot the fear that bigotry bred in him.75 When he’d studied with Santayana in Rome as an Oxford graduate student, Janus was heavily influenced by the philosopher’s promulgation of kindness and tolerance. Janus had also helped Franz Wangemann, a Jew who’d escaped Germany as Hitler rose to power, establish himself in the American hotel business. At a time when socializing with heavily accented immigrants (Jews or otherwise) was hardly fashionable in a Social Register neighborhood like Winnetka, Janus became Wangemann’s close friend. Later, when Janus married, Wangemann—who’d eventually rise to manage New York’s landmark Waldorf Astoria Hotel—paid the tab for the Januses’ weeklong stay at the Greenbrier Resort in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia.76
While the depth of Janus’s involvement with the car was unusual, his devotion to it was not adulatory so much as pragmatic. Having seen the difference he could make in fund-raising for Greece during the war, it seems clear that Janus saw the car largely as a publicity boon and, secondarily, as an excuse for some adventure. “Despite much initial criticism,” he would write many years later, “I took a chance, made the trade, and brought the limousine to America.”77 Thanks to his many connections and having married well, it’s unlikely that Janus worried much about the high cost of keeping the car on the road.78 He was free to experiment and took pleasure in doing so. “My education and my background have taught me that there are many things in life more important than money,” he said. “I have never shied away from the unusual or the unfamiliar. Risk taking, I guess, is second nature with me.”79 He’d put the sentiment more succinctly as he reached old age: “I love to gamble.”80
Yet to chalk up Christopher Janus as just a gambler—a “businessman-philosopher who dabbles in adventure,” as the Chicago Tribune said—would be to underestimate him.81 Unpalatable as some of his antics may have been, Janus’s determination to use the limousine as an engine for charity was genuine and successful. To the war orphans of Greece went the proceeds of the Rockefeller Center exhibit—twenty-five thousand dollars, a considerable sum for the time—and by the fall of 1949, Janus reported that the Mercedes had raised over one hundred thousand dollars.
In time Janus would set up a trust he called the Fight the Dictators Fund, through which he’d distribute the piles of cash that the limousine would generate.82 As 1950 approached, Janus’s Hitler car had traveled twenty thousand miles and stopped in forty cities, and in the following two years it would crisscross the country three times. The hulking automobile stopped at county fairs, rolled in parades, and parked as the guest of local auto dealerships. The admission fees—always voluntary—benefited a staggering array of causes. Janus funneled money to Detroit’s Mercy Hall Cancer Hospital, the Hines Hospital in Chicago, Camp Reinberg’s program for underprivileged children in Cook County, Illinois, and the Welfare Fund of the Variety Club of Washington, D.C. He contributed to the Illinois Police Fund, the American Legion, and the Military Order of the Purple Heart. Proceeds from the car helped poor cancer patients in Detroit and raised a barn on an orphan boy’s farm in Georgia. A young lady in Athens whose parents had been murdered by the Nazis was due to get married; Hitler’s Mercedes paid for her wedding dress.83
Late in his life, when Janus looked back on his exploits with the limousine, he estimated it had raised one million dollars for 150 charities.84 The whole point, he had long before explained, “was to have the car do some good.”85
Copyright © 2017 by Robert Klara
