In mid-December of 2007, I received an email from someone going by the name Marcus Horn. He reached out to me because, at the time, I had a small print-on-demand publishing business. Mr. Horn had come across my recently established website, www.orrbooks.net, and wanted to know if I’d “be interested helping him publish a non-fiction manuscript” entitled “Code 507”. That’s all he included in this query, so I wrote back, asking for a synopsis, author bio, and the current status of the manuscript.
His response was unusual. Clearly, he wasn’t used to or fond of communicating by email. I chalked it up to his age, which, judging by his brief bio was 79 or 80.
Mr. Horn wanted to know if I would help him publish a series of encoded messages that had been given to him by a friend in Germany, where he had been stationed during the Korean War. This unnamed friend was from Pennsylvania, which seems to have been the reason why my website caught his attention. The connection? I live in the city his friend came from.
My first thought was that someone was playing an elaborate practical joke. At that time, I had one close friend whom I had gotten one over on pretty good. “Surely”, I conjectured, “this was payback”. For this reason, I copy-pasted the header of the email from Marcus into one those websites used to trace IP addresses. If this was a joke or just some weirdo who gets his kicks from querying small publishers, this search would reveal the email’s geographic origin.
The result was unexpected. The email had apparently been sent from somewhere close to Missoula, Montana.
Out of pure curiosity I asked Marcus to send the first three chapters of the manuscript in the body of his next email.
Later that same day, Marcus responded that he “had to send the whole thing” because he didn’t know how to do what I had requested. He could send me what he had, a Microsoft Works document. He tried to explain why my seeing only part of it couldn’t possibly help, writing something like, “If you can’t read any of it, you can’t read any part of it. That’s a waste of time”.
Once again, he asked me if he could send the Microsoft Works attachment. He did not have Microsoft Word.
Although the initial suspicion that this was a practical joke had been ruled out, the weirdo angle wasn’t. But why would someone go through all this trouble just to crash the computer of a small POD publisher? Revenge? No. That made no sense. At the time I had three clients. I had never even rejected a single manuscript submission.
I admit to being wary of the possibility of downloading an attachment and getting a computer virus, nevertheless I consented.
Approximately six hours later Marcus delivered what he promised, along with a lengthy explanation of what it was and why he was desperate to do something with it. “Code 507” had been in his possession for decades.
Since the original emails are gone, as my email was attached to my now defunct orrbooks.net domain, the following are the points Marcus made, based on some notes I took:
Marcus was in the US Army, and stationed at Göppingen, Germany, in 1953.
His aforementioned friend had “met up with some former Gestapo agents while on leave”. He referred to this friend as “Ed”, but later admitted that Ed was not his friend’s real name.
Ed made initial contact with these former Gestapo agents on an off base excursion at the “Crown Inn in Ulm”. [Note: I found a Wirtshaus in Ulm called “Krone”, which is the German word for crown. This place was definitely in business back in 1953. There is one other restaurant in the area that might fit Marcus’ description, called the “Gasthaus zur Krone”.]
Ed went off base a second time to meet these characters in “Fishback, in the southernmost part of Germany”. [Note: Since there is no “Fishback” in all of Germany I can only speculate that Marcus meant “Fischbach”. If he did mean Fischbach, there are three towns in Germany with that name. Two of the three are not “in the southernmost part of Germany”, leaving only the possibility of a small village on Lake Constance, located a couple miles west of Friedrichshafen.]
After the second meeting Ed returned to the base and told Marcus about a booklet of 66 encrypted messages that these shady characters were peddling and that he had obtained through some incredibly adept trickery.
These former Gestapo agents claimed that the encoded messages contained “priceless information.”
Ed asked these men if they had decoded the messages. They had not. They related how it had come into their possession. It had been handed off to them in Munich the summer of 1945 by a man claiming to be Martin Bormann’s former aide, and going by the name “Postin”. Postin said the Americans were closing in on him and passed the codes on to the Gestapo agents. He instructed them to get it to an estate in “Fishback” for safe keeping. They were told to turn it over to a contact. However, this contact never showed and the two ex-SS men hid the booklet and successfully blended in with the local population for years. [Note: Martin Bormann’s adjutant had been tasked with smuggling Hitler’s Last Will and Testament out of Berlin at the close of the war. He managed the seemingly impossible feat of getting out of Berlin, which was completely surrounded by the Soviets at the time. He was supposed to deliver this document to the newly convened Dönitz Government in Flensburg, but ended up in Bavaria, going into hiding. This adjutant’s name was Wilhelm Zander. It is widely reported that Zander used the fake name “Willi Paustin” while attempting to evade capture in Munich.]
“Ed” was not a US spy in intelligence, but apparently after he was propositioned to pay an exorbitant sum for this code booklet, he turned the tables on the scammers with the bluff of the century. He pretended to be with US Army CIC (Counterintelligence Corps) and threatened them with immediate arrest. Without a weapon, Ed convinced them that they were under surveillance and that armed agents were waiting just outside. However, he was willing to “strike a deal”. ‘Agent’ Ed offered these guys roles as his ‘special informants’. They would be allowed to go free under three conditions. First, they must agree to exchange personal and contact information. Second, they must turn over the booklet of encoded messages. Third, they must report to him every month, at a given time and place, and continue to report on similar leads and finds.
Ed related this incredible story to Marcus and showed him the code booklet. They speculated about what it might reveal, if only they could decode it.
Ed went off base two more times for clandestine meetings with his ‘special informants’. He left the code booklet with Marcus the first time, which resulted in his being beaten to an inch of his life and being threatened with future assassination unless he returned it. He agreed. and was let go on the condition that he personally deliver it.
They ordered Ed to wrap the booklet up like a cone, held together with rubber bands, inside a bouquet of flowers. He was sternly warned to come alone, by train, to the Island of Lindau. There, he was to walk to the “Bavarian Lion” and wait until a young woman showed up “wearing yellow-toned sunglasses”. She would pretend to be his girlfriend. They were to walk to a local restaurant where she would signal her secret partners after the successful transfer and verification that was the correct booklet.
Over the next three days Ed and Marcus spent every free moment hand copying the blocks of code into the margins of a War Department issued German Phrase Book.
Although Ed was warned to come alone, Marcus took the train to Lindau the day prior and stayed overnight at a pension near the train station. That gave Marcus time to survey the area and find a place from which to observe Ed’s movements the next day without himself being seen.
After Ed’s rendezvous with—as Marcus put it—“a stunning strawberry blonde”, who gave her name as “Mika”, they ate at a harbor promenade café, located close to a fortress-like tower.
Mika left the café after telling Ed to remain there for a quarter hour and not to follow her. She warned him that he was being watched. Of course, she was being watched, too. Marcus saw her board a ferry to Bregenz, Austria.
Marcus saw Mika’s handlers quite clearly. Two men sat on either side of her on the boat and she handed over the flower bouquet to the one wearing a dark blue fedora.
Marcus and Ed rode the same train back to the base that afternoon but took seats on separate passenger cars. They didn’t look at—or speak to—each other until safely inside their barracks that evening.
Marcus made Ed promise that he wouldn’t go off base alone again for the remainder of his time there. Both friends were slated to for transfer back to the United States in May of 1954. Ed kept the promise.
Marcus and Ed remained friends for many years. Periodically, they traveled across the country to be with one another and talk about old times. Of course, they kept this incident in Germany between the two of them. After all, they had broken countless US Army rules and regulations during their brief foray into dangerously harebrained espionage. Nevertheless, they never gave up on trying to decipher the darn thing.
Right before Ed passed away in 1997 he mailed the code to Marcus and encouraged him to not give up on it. Marcus promised he wouldn’t.
That’s why Marcus claimed he contacted me. He hadn’t given up but he also hadn’t made any headway.
He instructed me to publish “Code 507” “as is” and “right away” in the hopes that someone out there might be able to decipher it “before he passed away”. His letter left me with the impression he was terminally ill and only had a few months to live.
I had nothing to lose. Minimal work was involved. I was intrigued and genuinely wanted to help him. For these reasons, I told Marcus I’d help him, pro bono. Of course, it would take a little time. It would probably take a week to format the manuscript, create a book cover, and upload the digital files. Lightning Source was the company I used at the time for printing and distribution. I also let him know that it could take a month before “Code 507” was available online at Amazon.com.
Marcus had never heard the term “crowdsourcing” but that’s exactly what he was proposing. He wanted to publish “Code 507” with the hope of finding someone who could decipher it. It struck me as ingenious. Not only was there no downside to this project for me as a small POD publisher, the potential upside was intriguing. Although deciphering it was beyond Ed, Marcus and me, surely someone out there could do it. I thought, “What if something of great historic importance, or financial consequence, is revealed?” I wanted to be part of that.
My next back and forth with Marcus involved an important question: Should “Code 507” be published as fiction or non-fiction?
He couldn’t see why publishing encrypted messages could be anything other than non-fiction, whereas I favored a fiction designation. To me, publishing “Code 507” as fiction would be a hedge against the possibility that decoding these messages might very well turn up god-awful, libelous lies of some sort. Even worse, I argued, the two ex-SS agents might have been playing Ed for a fool. They were obviously trying to make money. Who’s to say they didn’t just encode an article from a popular girlie or adventure magazine? Unless we took the precaution, such a discovery would make us look like idiots. At least publishing “Code 507” as fiction would save us from the possibility of becoming a laughingstock. Marcus’ insistence that my name be listed as a co-author was a significant factor in the decision to publish the code as fiction, too.
Marcus pointed out that these two Germans didn’t seem to realize the importance of the code book until Ed had tricked them into surrendering it to him. He doubted they’d threaten Ed’s life over an encrypted girlie mag article. Nevertheless, he reluctantly agreed to the fiction designation, and he asked me to get down to business. He wanted to see and approve the book cover and to read and approve the introduction before I uploaded the digital book files to the printer-distributor.
I emailed the requested items to Marcus on December 12, 2007. It is now August of 2016 and I have had no further correspondence, despite emailing him several more times.
I never had a phone number for Marcus, so I couldn’t call him. Of course, that didn’t stop me from trying to find a number or any other way to contact him.
Marcus Horn isn’t/wasn’t likely his real name. I conducted a thorough search, to no avail.
If anyone reading “Code 507” knows/knew him, I’d like to hear from you. Perhaps something included in the introduction rings true to someone out there. The only other biographical detail he gave me was that he was “born on a ranch in nowhere Montana.” I’m fairly confident that he indicated he was born in 1927. He also indicated that the nearest “big city” to where he grew up was Great Falls. This last detail is from memory. It does not appear in my notes. I have been unable to find any record of anyone by that name being born or living in that area.
Sadly, the unavoidable conclusion is that Marcus passed away or was unable to respond due to serious illness or physical incapacity.
For years this project sat idle. Out of respect for Marcus, I’ve decided to publish the entire code and back story for context.
If someone successfully deciphers all of the messages, along with a clear and thorough explanation of the methodology used, and these decodes lead to financial gain, I’m willing to share those profits 50-50 with the first person to do so.
