Nazi Gold Read online

  Also by Douglas Botting

  Humboldt and the Cosmos

  The Second Front (1981)

  Aftermath in Europe (1985)

  In the Ruins of the Reich (1985)

  Gavin Maxwell – A Life (1983)

  Also by Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting

  Hitler’s Last General (1989)

  America’s Secret Army (1989)

  About the Authors

  Ian Sayer’s interest in Nazi Gold was first aroused by the Guinness Book of Records’ account of the greatest robbery of all time. A transport executive and one-time truck-driver and insurance clerk, Sayer began his research at Christmas 1974. During the next nine years his enquiries as an unofficial private investigator led across three continents and resulted in several hundred hours of recorded interviews and forty feet of files containing over 50,000 documents. By the end he had not only assembled one of the largest private archives of original World War II documents in the country but had cracked the secrets of Nazi gold.

  Douglas Botting is a writer whose previous books reflect his interest in travel, exploration and 20th-century war. He has accompanied expeditions to Socotra, the Sahara, the Amazon and Arctic Siberia, and was an exploration film-maker for the BBC’s World About Us. He became a full-time writer with the publication of his highly praised biography, Humboldt and the Cosmos, in 1972, and in more recent books – The Second Front and Aftermath in Europe – he has pursued his interest in wartime and post-war German history. He is at present engaged on a biography of Gerald Durrell.

  In 1964 the Sunday Times assigned its Insight Team the task of tracking down the Nazi escape organisation ODESSA and the source of its seemingly unlimited funds. Later the team made their resources available to the authors of Nazi Gold, along with the investigative talents of a number of senior journalists.

  NAZI GOLD

  The Sensational Story of the World’s Greatest Robbery – and the Greatest Criminal Cover-up

  Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licenced or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  Epub ISBN: 9781780574271

  Version 1.0

  www.mainstreampublishing.com

  First published in Great Britain by Granada Publishing 1984

  Copyright © Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, 1998

  All rights reserved

  The moral right of the authors has been asserted

  First published in Great Britain in 1998 by

  MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING COMPANY (EDINBURGH) LTD

  7 Albany Street

  Edinburgh EH1 3UG

  ISBN 1 84018 785 9

  This edition, 2003

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Herbert Herzog

  Contents

  Introduction

  Authors’ Note

  Acknowledgements

  Part One: The Robbery

  1 The Destruction of the Reichsbank

  2 The Flight to the Redoubt

  3 The Burial of the Treasure

  4 In Quest of Gold, Silver and Foreign Exchange

  5 The House on the Hill

  6 The Money Baggers

  7 Finding’s Keeping

  8 Losing’s Weeping

  9 Opportunists of the Worst Order

  10 The Men from the Villa Ostler

  11 A Hole in the Bucket

  12 The Boys from the CID

  13 The Reckoning

  Part Two: Corruption and Cober-up

  14 The Collapse of a Great Army

  15 The White Horse Inn

  16 Over the Border

  17 The Inspector General Calls

  18 The Reinhardt Memorandum

  19 Death of a Red Princess

  20 The Cover-Up

  21 The End of the Affair

  Epilogue

  Sources

  Bibliography

  Introduction

  The robbery of the German Reichsbank, the State Bank of the Third Reich, in 1945 was not only the biggest robbery in history but for many years the least known to the world at large.

  The Nazi era inspired almost as many myths of gold and treasure as the buccaneer days of the Spanish Main – myths of SS loot at the bottom of Alpine lakes, of sunken U-boats stuffed with jewels, of Rommel’s gold buried beneath the Libyan sands. A few of these legends have a basis in fact – as, for example, those surrounding Lake Toplitz in Austria. Millions in counterfeit English pound notes were recovered from this deep lake in the Tyrol some years ago, and at the time of writing more mysterious treasure chests have been sighted on the lake bed, lying beside the wreckage of a German aircraft, whose pilot has remained perfectly preserved in the highly saline water. Probably it is to Lake Toplitz that most people’s minds turn at the mention of Nazi treasure. But Nazi Gold is about a very different kind of treasure, and its subject is a story which has lingered for years in the half-light of rumour and speculation – the disappearance of millions of dollars’ worth of gold and currency from the Reichsbank reserves buried somewhere in the mountains of Bavaria.

  In the chaos of the German collapse at the end of the Second World War, and in the administrative confusion of the American occupation that followed, such facts as were known about the loss of part of the Reichsbank reserves were largely ignored, and belated efforts by the American military and German civil authorities to put two and two together in the post-war years were dogged by ignorance of what had gone missing, by lack of co-ordination between investigative agencies, and by the total disappearance of key witnesses from the scene.

  The first public utterance on the subject of Reichsbank treasure seems to have been an article by Henriette von Schirach (the wife of Hitler’s former Youth Leader) entitled ‘What Happened To The Reichsbank Gold?’, which appeared in the now defunct picture magazine, Wochenend, in 1950. This article at least posed the right questions, even if it did not actually answer them, and it seems to have provoked the Munich CID of the Bavarian Police to carry out their own investigation into certain aspects of the case. But even they had only limited facts at their disposal, and they were unable to bring any prosecutions and never made their report public.

  While the CID investigation was in progress, the story was taken up again by a German journalist, Ottmar Katz, in an article – ‘Where is the Gold from the Walchensee?’ – which appeared in Quick magazine in 1952. Before long this came to the attention of an English writer, William (Billy) Stanley Moss, who began his own private investigation into the Reichsbank robbery and its aftermath. The resulting book, Gold Is Where You Hide It, was published in London in 1956. It was incomplete and in parts misleading. But it was the first attempt at a coherent account of the Reichsbank affair and the first to appear outside of Germany. Indirectly it was to lead to this present more definitive history.

  Billy Moss, author of a bestselling war adventure, Ill Met By Moonlight (an account of his part in the daring kidnapping of the commander of the German Forces in Crete), first stumbled on the Reichsbank robbery through an intermediary – a Polish-born, natu
ralised Briton by the name of Andrew Kennedy. During the war Andrew Kennedy had served as the head of an escape organisation in Hungary, and later as a member of the British resistance organisation, SOE. After the war he lived and worked as a businessman in Germany, forming a wide circle of friends, which included not only Billy Moss but two inhabitants of the Bavarian mountain resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen – Gusti Stinnes and her English husband Eric Knight. It was from Eric and Gusti Knight that Kennedy and Moss first got wind of the story of the Reichsbank treasure.

  Billy Moss laboured under several disadvantages. He was not in the best of health, nor did his financial resources stretch as far as a project of this scope required. Above all, he was denied any kind of co-operation from the United States authorities, whose various archives it was thought might contain vital information about the Reichsbank robbery. Indeed, the US government denied, and have continued to deny, that such a robbery ever took place or that any US Army personnel had any part in it or the events that followed. The archives, the government maintained, possessed no records that bore on such a case. Denied the crucial documentation the investigation needed, Moss’s book was inevitably somewhat skimpy and speculative. Nevertheless, it got commendably near to the heart of the matter, and for nearly thirty years it was to remain the best attempt at a solution to the mystery of what happened to the Reichsbank treasure.

  Soon afterwards the Guinness Book of Records picked up a Reuter message on the story in the Press Association-Reuter files in London and recorded it in earlier editions under the heading ‘Robbery: Biggest Unsolved’. The entry accused officers of both the American Army and the former German Army of taking part in the theft and rightly pointed out that no one had ever been charged with it, though its inventory of what had been taken was wide of the mark. The entry was reprinted in the Guinness book in various forms in every subsequent year (except one), and it was there that the present authors, independently of one another, first came across the spoor of the remarkable events which form the subject of Nazi Gold.

  Douglas Botting, a writer and traveller, first noticed the Guinness entry in 1969 following a visit to Brazil in which he believed that he had discovered the whereabouts of Hitler’s missing Party Secretary, Martin Bormann. Like Moss, Botting got nowhere with the US archives, came to the conclusion (wrongly, it turned out) that the Reichsbank robbery was the product of anti-American propaganda by the Soviet-controlled East German press – an entry to that effect was carried in the 1970 edition of the Guinness book and turned his attention to other themes in immediate post-war Germany.

  Five years later, just before Christmas 1974, Ian Sayer, a transport executive who was born in the year of the Reichsbank robbery, bought his first copy of the Guinness book. His interest was immediately stirred and, with the help of a colleague, Harry Seaman, he immediately embarked on a private investigation of the Reichsbank case – a project which soon became a compulsive quest to find out the truth once and for all. This was easier said than done. Sayer started from zero. He did not even have Billy Moss’s advantage of personal contact with some of the dramatis personae in the Reichsbank affair. He knew none of the real names of the people involved and nothing of the techniques of historical and criminal research, the means of tracing foreign nationals in faraway countries or of extracting sensitive records from military and police departments in such places as Washington, Berlin and Buenos Aires. But he was hooked, and he persevered.

  At first it was a thankless task, days of dour foot-slogging through the Public Records Office and Colindale Newspaper Library, endless hours poring through the international telephone directories. Many people had died in the intervening years, including Billy Moss. But, although he was not aware of this for some while, history proved to be on Sayer’s side. The débâcle of Richard Nixon’s second Presidency and the wreckage of the Watergate cover-up presented Sayer with the first chink in the door, for it led indirectly to the Freedom of Information Act, which provided for a virtual open-sesame to the archives of the US government and to the various departments and agencies of state.

  This was the first breakthrough. With infinite gradualness over a period of months and years, the archives began to yield up their secrets. Though the Department of the Army in Washington continued to deny that the Reichsbank robbery had ever taken place or that American soldiers played any part in the events described in the book, one document led to another, one name led to five more names, until Sayer began to build up a growing dossier of crime, corruption and cover-up in American-occupied Germany after World War Two. In 1976, in order to make a personal search of the National and Military archives in Washington and neighbouring Maryland and Virginia, Sayer set sail for America on the QE2 (he prefers not to fly). He found himself in curious situations that he had not envisaged before – inside the Pentagon, ringing up the CIA, knocking on the doors of the Secret Service, Military Intelligence and a host of other US government and military agencies. The documentation led off on many murky tangents. Often it was heavily sanitised. In certain areas where the records had been deliberately destroyed it dried up all together. This was balanced by Sayer’s discovery of the Defense Department’s computer – the basic means of tracing individuals across a gulf in time.

  Back in England the transatlantic telephone became the medium of contact. The scores of former American Army personnel from the old Bavarian days were located in this way, in places as far apart as Locust Valley in Long Island, Anchorage in Alaska, Concrete in Washington State, Drake Falls in Virginia, Liberty Lake, Hollywood, New York, El Paso, St Petersburg, Fort Worth, and Palm Springs. Almost without exception individual Americans (like US government agencies) were unflaggingly courteous and co-operative. More than thirty years on some could remember little, others were gifted with almost total recall. Most were astonished that the case had been resurrected after so long. All were even more astonished that it should be resurrected by an Englishman. This was tolerantly viewed as a typical example of British eccentricity.

  Ian Sayer’s breakthrough in America was paralleled by a similar breakthrough in Europe. This was made possible by establishing contact (through the goodwill of Billy Moss’s running-mate, Andrew Kennedy) with a former Pole, Ivar Buxell, who was close to the action in post-war Bavaria and had subsequently emigrated to Venezuela. Buxell had remained in touch with old friends from his German past, the hub of a wheel from which radiated many spokes. He was to prove a tireless and unfailingly helpful source of information for many of the events described in this book. From men with a sense of history like Buxell, or William C. Wilson (a former agent in the US Army CID with a remarkable and astonishingly accurate memory of events and personnel) or Tom Agoston (an English newspaperman who first broke the story of the Garmisch affair and led Sayer to the memoranda and correspondence of Guenther Reinhardt, a crucial figure in the later stages of this story), it proved possible to fill in some of the gaps in the official archives and to enliven the historical documentation with more human and anecdotal material than might otherwise have been salvaged from the past.

  The net extended to four continents and to places as widely dispersed as Caracas and Buenos Aires, Harare in Zimbabwe, Rome and Livigno in Italy, Graz and Innsbruck in Austria, and Garmisch and Mittenwald in Bavaria. But it was not all plain sailing. There were times when the project seemed to have run into a brick wall, when months passed without progress and no way forward could be found. As a private individual it was difficult for Sayer to probe official institutions and reconstruct events which had been the subject of a cover-up several decades before. Certain people, not unnaturally, objected to enquiries into their past, and one or two caused difficulties which were potentially embarrassing in the extreme. In March 1981, for example, following a meeting in Innsbruck with a German journalist to discuss aspects of Nazi Gold, Ian Sayer’s name was given to the London Daily Mail by a person or persons unknown as someone who could help the police enquiries into the disappearance and suspected kidnapping of an Englis
hwoman, Jeanette May, in Italy during the preceding winter.

  Mrs May, whose first marriage had been to a member of the Rothschild family, had disappeared with a woman friend while driving through the remote mountain region of Italy in a blizzard in the winter of 1980. Needless to say, Sayer had absolutely nothing to do with Mrs May’s disappearance, nor did he know who had given his name to the Daily Mail, though he had his suspicions. In July 1981 he was interviewed for the first time by two members of the Caribinieri from Italy and two members of the Serious Crimes Squad from London. There the matter rested until the remains of the two women were discovered in the mountains in January 1982. A year later the Italian police reopened the case as one of suspected murder. In March 1983 Sayer was summoned to Scotland Yard for interrogation by representatives of the Italian police, and he was implicated by the Italian press not only in the death of Jeanette May but even in the death of the Italian banker, Roberto Calvi, and the activities of P2 (Propaganda 2), a right-wing Masonic lodge, in articles which would have been hilarious had they not been so blatantly untrue and appallingly defamatory.

  Though Sayer had no difficulty in establishing his innocence with the Italian police, he was left in little doubt that all this had occurred as a result of his involvement with the Nazi Gold project – as a warning, perhaps, not to probe deeper into the affairs of the past.

  In the beginning Ian Sayer had had no thought of producing a book out of his investigations. He had been motivated purely by a spirit of adventure, the thrill of the chase, and a desire to discover the real truth about an episode which, with its dope-peddling, corruption, murder and ‘Third Man’ atmosphere, seemed to contain all the elements of fiction and modern myth. But as the files of archive documents, interview transcripts, court-martial and investigative records and eyewitness correspondence grew until they occupied forty feet of shelving space and over one hundred hours of tape time, it became obvious that they contained historical material of interest to a wider audience and that it should ideally be organised into book form.