Nazi Gold Read online

  There, for the moment, the matter rested. The meeting in the mountain hut broke up and most of Pfeiffer’s officers made their way back to wherever they called home. Pfeiffer, his adjutant and Rauch, unobtrusively dressed as wood-choppers or forestry workers to avoid drawing the attention of the Americans to themselves, vanished completely – exactly where is still a matter of conjecture. Neuhauser believed that Colonels Pfeiffer and Rauch had set off for Munich to report to the Bavarian government that the Reichsbank treasure was intact, safely concealed and ready to be handed over when the time came. This may well have been their original intention – Colonel Pfeiffer was to declare, subsequently that he tried no less than four times to make contact with the Bavarian government with this purpose in mind. But in the chaos immediately following the American occupation there was no Bavarian government in existence to report to, and the two colonels were obliged to make themselves as scarce as they could, while they awaited developments in the intensely uncertain and volatile conditions that now prevailed in the towns and countryside of defeated Germany.

  But they did not lose contact with the vast fortune that had been buried at their behest on the heights overlooking Lake Walchen. On Pfeiffer’s orders Captain Neuhauser – equipped with binoculars, tent, blanket, rucksack, sausages, meat, fat and dry bread – continued to maintain his solitary vigil on the Klausenkopf, sometimes sleeping in the mountain hut, sometimes roaming about the area, but never losing sight of the treasure caches or the Forest House down in Einsiedl, where a red eiderdown flung from an upstairs window would warn him that the arrival of the Americans was imminent.

  While the key figures in the concealment of the Reichsbank reserves succeeded in evading the enemy until the moment they voluntarily gave themselves up, a good many weeks later, their political and military superiors, who had authorised the dispersal of the contents of the Berlin Reichsbank in the first place, managed to evade arrest only briefly and were soon rounded up and incarcerated. Almost the last significant objective to be taken by the Allies in Germany in World War Two was the small Alpine resort of Berchtesgaden, set amongst some of the most magnificent scenery in the whole of southern Germany. On the heights of the Obersalzberg overlooking the town, Hitler had built his famous Alpine retreat, the Berghof, and established virtually a second capital for the Nazi élite of the Reich. Believing that the Berchtesgaden area was to form the command centre and inner citadel of the National Redoubt, the Allies had viewed the prize of Hitler’s mountain sanctuary in the south as being almost as great as that of his capital, Berlin, in the north, and they took its capture seriously. On 25 April the British had bombed the cluster of top Nazi villas and SS bunker installations on the Obersalzberg, badly damaging not only Hitler’s luxury Alpine domicile, but Goering’s, Bormann’s and Albert Speer’s as well. On 5 May the departing German guard force, in virtually the last scorched-earth action in the war, set fire to the Führer’s home and damaged it still further. By the time the Americans finally stormed the place later that day, Obersalzberg had not only been bombed by the Allies and burned by the Nazis but looted by the local populace for good measure as well. Even so, the GIs found Hitler’s knick-knacks still on the mantelpiece, his favourite armchair by the fire and his nightgowns stored in the linen cupboard. Around the establishment they found vast stocks of arms, ammunition, wine, linen, chocolates, contraceptives, china and gramophone records. The next day they found Hitler’s top aides in the environs and his top generals on the road. The Americans collared the lot, souvenirs and suspects alike.

  Berchtesgaden was surrendered to the Americans by the only important local official left in the town – the Landrat (or Prefect), Karl Theodor Jacob. One of the first Nazi VIPs to be apprehended after the surrender was Walther Funk, the Economics Minister and Reichsbank President. Like many desperate top Nazis who were able to foresee the inevitable end of the war, Funk had been drunk for months. He had fled to Berchtesgaden from his home near Bad Tölz on 1 May, bringing with him the two bars of gold which had been found in the stove of the officers’ mess at the Gebirgsjäger Training School at Mittenwald, and the three bags of foreign currency which his aide, Dr Schwedler, had removed from the currency caches at the Klausenkopf shortly after the burial of the treasure. On Funk’s arrival at Berchtesgaden, the two gold bars (worth $30,000 then) and the three bags of currency (containing US $87,000 and £10,000 sterling) were handed over to Karl Jacob, the Landrat. Jacob passed them on to the head of the Berchtesgaden Savings Bank, then took back one bag containing $60,000 and a total of $7,120 out of one of the other bags. This money was never recovered. It is possible that Funk had some of it, since $3,300 was found in his possession when he was arrested by the Americans a few days later, but suspicion falls most heavily on Karl Jacob. As a result of an investigation into this affair by the Munich CID the facts of Jacob’s case were submitted to the Public Prosecutor’s Office at the Bavarian Upper Regional Court, but no further enquiries could be made, since the police were advised that any possible criminal activities brought to light would fall under the Statute of Limitations. At that time Dr Jacob was once again Landrat of Berchtesgaden and by the time of his death a few years ago he had become President of the Savings Bank in Munich and one of Berchtesgaden’s wealthiest land and property owners.

  What was left of the money Funk brought to Berchtesgaden – the gold bars, the English pounds and 19,840 American dollars (see Chapter 13) – and was handed over to the American military authorities when they took over the area on 5 May. This money, too, seems to have vanished, and official records confirm that the Foreign Exchange Depository in Frankfurt, to which all captured money and valuables were supposed to be forwarded, did not receive the currency, from Berchtesgaden, nor the gold. The gold does seem to have been shipped up the line to Munich, where it was stored in a bank vault under American control for some while, but it was always officially listed as missing by both the FED and the Land Commission for Bavaria, and in the end seems to have disappeared altogether. One of the officers of the American Military Government detachment which was initially involved with the Reichsbank gold and currency in Berchtesgaden was a young captain by the name of Melvin W. Nitz, who was later Military Governor of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

  All this was largely unknown to Funk, however, who was taken prisoner near Berchtesgaden by the Seventh US Army on 6 May as he was trying to get away from the place with the evacuating German troops. Funk was just one of the 2,000 important military and political prisoners held by the Americans at Berchtesgaden during and after the last days of the war. Of the Berchtesgaden Nazis only Goering succeeded in making a temporary getaway – he was not captured till 9 May when he was found stuck in a traffic jam in the Austrian Alps. Notable prisoners held with Funk included the Reich Chancellery Secretary, Dr Lammers, who had been in Berchtesgaden on what he called ‘a brief vacation’ and, according to his captors, ‘looked like a typical German tourist’; Hans Frank, former Governor-General of Poland; Julius Streicher, Hitler’s leading Jew-baiter; Robert Ley, the alcoholic former Labour Minister; Hitler’s sister-in-law, his stenographers, his cook, barber, private secretary and personal physician, Dr Morell; Himmler’s wife and 15-year-old daughter, together with his mistress and her two children; the family of Albert Speer, the Minister of War Economy, Field Marshal Kesselring; SS General Gottlob Berger, Chief of the SS Main Office, who had seized 12 sacks of foreign currency from the Munich Reichsbank three weeks previously; and Ernst Kaltenbrunner, Chief of the RSHA, who had authorised SS General Spacil’s gun-point robbery of the Berlin Reichsbank vaults on 22 April.

  Kaltenbrunner, the No 2 in the SS, and overall head of the much-dreaded secret police (Gestapo), security service (SD) and military intelligence (Abwehr), was captured at his home at Alt Aussee, in the Tyrol, where he had sought refuge in the last days of the war. He had tried to disguise himself by shaving off his moustache. But he was an unmistakable figure – a huge man standing nearly seven feet tall, with massive shoulders, huge arm
s, a head like a crag, thick square chin and a long scar from an old motor car accident prominently etched down one side of his face. An excitable alcoholic and chain smoker, this terrifying giant – until a few days before the absolute boss of the world’s most dreaded secret police force – was soon spotted and brought in. Positive identification of Kaltenbrunner was complete when his mistress, Countess Gisela von Westrop, ran up and impulsively kissed him as he was led into custody.

  Kaltenbrunner had been caught with a great deal of weapons, ammunition, candy and counterfeit American dollars in his possession, and in the gardens of the Villa Kerry, his headquarters at Alt Aussee, the Americans unearthed 75 kilos of gold coins and a number of gold bars. Kaltenbrunner would have had access to far more valuables than this, of course. As Chief of the RSHA he would have been one of a handful of men who knew the true state of the accounts of the very substantial but non-accountable funds (what the British Secret Service termed ‘unvouchered funds’ for which no details are given) of the SS secret intelligence service, the Abwehr, and their present whereabouts – including the loot snatched by Spacil from the Berlin Reichsbank and flown to Salzburg a few weeks previously. But Kaltenbrunner’s interrogation at the hands of the Allies never went into this area and whatever knowledge he had about it died with him on the gallows at Nuremberg in the following year.

  While the men ultimately responsible for the former contents of the Reichsbank in Berlin – the President of the Reichsbank Funk, and the Chief of the RHSA, Kaltenbrunner – were securely under lock and key, the custodians of the Reichsbank treasure in Bavaria had effectively gone to ground and disappeared almost without trace. But only a day after Funk’s arrest a hue and cry was raised in SHAEF which was destined to track the treasure down to within a mile of its hiding place and, for the moment, posted Colonel Pfeiffer as temporarily one of the most wanted men in Germany.

  During the planning for the Allied invasion of Europe, SHAEF planners in England had foreseen a future need for teams of experts in a variety of fields to carry out special investigations in Germany immediately behind the vanguard of the fighting troops. In February 1945, on the eve of the main advance into Germany, SHAEF’s G-2 (Intelligence) Division created a Special Sections Sub-Division to co-ordinate the operations of these specialist teams, which had been grouped under G-2’s control.

  These teams – known as T (Target) Forces – were many and various. Some were composed of boffins in uniform whose mission was to comb German plants and laboratories for scientific and industrial secrets on anything from plastics to shipbuilding, V-weapons to poison gas, synthetic oil, supersonic wind tunnels and patents on research and development projects likely to be of value to the world in general and to the Allies in particular. There was the Enemy Personnel Exploitation Section, whose task was to pick the brains of German scientists and economic and industrial experts, including the 450 experts from the rocket development programme (Werner von Braun among them) who had been captured and brought to Garmisch for interrogation before being shipped across to the USA. There was the Top Secret Alsos Mission, charged with investigating German progress in the production of a German atomic bomb. There were the Goldcup teams, whose task was to uncover any intact parts of the German government and archives. There were groups of psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists and poets who had been sent to examine the German mind and German society for clues to the cause of the German phenomenon of Nazism. There were the Strategic Bombing Survey teams investigating the effects on the German war economy of the strategic bombing campaign (which was soon seen to have been a disastrous failure and one of the great miscalculations of the war).

  Parallel with the scientific and technical agencies were others scouring the ruins of the Reich for prizes of a different kind. The Allied Monuments, Fine Arts and Archaeology Commission, composed entirely of officers who were art historians, museum curators or archaeologists in civilian life, searched cellars, caves, dungeons, bunkers and flak towers for works of art looted by the Nazis from all over occupied Europe. The Decartelization Branch sent businessmen and fiscal experts to burrow through countless tons of files and unravel the intricate business dealings of the big banks and the giant industrial and financial combines such as I. G. Farben, the House of Krupp and United Steel which had subsidised Hitler and the Nazi military machine. Finally, the Gold Rush teams, under the direction of the Deputy Chief of the Financial Branch of SHAEF, Colonel Bernard Bernstein, travelled the length and breadth of Germany tracking down leads to the real Nazi treasure – all the SS loot and Reichsbank gold, silver, foreign currency and other valuables that had not been captured by the Americans in the Merkers Mine in April.

  The closing balances of the Berlin Reichsbank’s Precious Metals Department prior to the German collapse showed that their official gold reserves totalled $255.96 million. Of this $238.49 million (93.17 per cent of the German State gold reserves) had been captured by the Americans at Merkers on 6 April. Of the $17.47 million still left, $3.5 million had been retained in Berlin, and the remaining $14 million was known to have been kept in special storage in various provincial branches of the Reichsbank in central and southern Germany. These special storage points were the principal targets of the Gold Rush teams.

  The gold rush had begun on 19 April and proceeded at full tilt for the rest of the month and into May. In two weeks the Gold Rush teams covered 1,900 miles checking Reichsbanks all over American-occupied Germany and following up every clue and rumour as to the previous whereabouts of the gold and its subsequent movement. The main reconnaissance party was headed by Colonel Bernstein himself and included Commander Joel H. Fisher and Lieutenant Herbert DuBois. They were aided in this whirlwind task by a man named Albert Thoms, the Chief of the Precious Metals Department at the Reichsbank in Berlin and former deputy to Emil Puhl, the Reichsbank’s Vice-President and de facto head. Thoms was taken along by the Gold Rush people to help identify the hiding places in their searches and prise necessary information out of provincial Reichsbank employees.

  The Gold Rush turned up all sorts of treasure hoards – and even found some gold. At the Halle branch on 20 April the recce party found 64 bars of non-Reichsbank gold and 65 bags of foreign currency which included $1 million in US currency. At Plauen the vaults of the local branch were found to be buried under the rubble of the bombed-out bank building and one of the keys to the multiple lock was interred with the body of the cashier under the debris of his bombed-out apartment. Since it would take several days to dig his body out and retrieve the key, the Gold Rush team were forced to resort to dynamite to blast their way into the vaults of the Plauen bank. They were rewarded by the discovery of 35 bags of gold coins (including a million Swiss francs and a quarter million US gold dollars) deposited by the SD security service for the Reichsführer SS, Heinrich Himmler. On 27 April the team learnt of the location of 82 bars of gold bullion in the branch at Aue, still in German hands and heavily defended, and at the Magdeburg branch the next day they turned up over 6,000 bars of silver and nearly 500 cases of silver bars weighing a total of 90,000 kilos (or over 88 tons) belonging to the Magyar National Bank of Hungary and representing Hungary’s entire silver reserves. At Eschwege on 29 April they found 82 gold bars and at Coburg on 30 April they dug up another 82 gold bars from under a chicken coop, a manure heap and a back garden where they had been buried by the bank’s director. In the Nuremberg branch on 1 May they found more gold again – 34 cases and two bags of non-Reichsbank gold weighing 1,000 kilos.

  All these valuables were shipped up to Frankfurt, where they were stored in the vaults of the Reichsbank building serving as the Foreign Exchange Depository (the FED), the strong point of all valuables recovered by the Allies in the territories of the former Great German Reich. Throughout the last two weeks of the war armored convoys carrying recovered loot and Reichsbank gold located by Gold Rush teams and combat troops alike – including a prodigious 32 million dollars’ worth of gold belonging to the National Bank of Hungary found in a
freight train in a mountain siding at Spital am Pyhrn in the Austrian Tyrol – streamed back to Frankfurt from places as far away as the Czechoslovak border. ‘With something tangible like looted gold to take in hand,’ reported one eyewitness of this extraordinary toing and froing, the Chief of the Decartelization Branch, James Stewart Martin, whose office was next door to the FED in Frankfurt, ‘the combat commanders were doing a job that would make the Brinks Express Company turn green. A truckful of bullion would arrive, not in an armored car with some armed men but escorted by half-tracks with machine-guns and one or two light tanks with artillery . . . The half-billion dollars or so of valuables accumulating in the vaults downstairs was secure from burglars. The entire block around the Reichsbank was behind barbed wire and sandbagged machine-gun nests. There were anti-aircraft emplacements on the roof and a Sherman tank and crew sitting in front of our door.’

  Of all the big buildings of Frankfurt – a city which before the war had boasted a remarkable number of very big buildings – only two had escaped the bombing intact. One was the Frankfurt Reichsbank. The other was I.G. Farben in the industrial suburb of Hoechst, comprising the administrative headquarters and the chemical plant of one of the largest chemical combines in the world – the manufacturers, among other means of destruction, of the Zyklon-B poison gas used in the gas chambers of the Nazi death camps, and the super poison Tabun and the super-super poison Sarin, a tiny droplet of which meant instant death. Many people expressed surprise that these prominent targets, representing the biggest bank and the biggest business in the city, should have escaped destruction during the 20 air raids on Frankfurt in which over half of the city centre was destroyed and the rest of the city flattened into mile upon mile of utter desolation. The Cathedral where the kings of the Holy Roman Empire had once been crowned, the little inns with their carvings and paintings, the old quarter and most of the other monuments to the old times before Bismarck, the Kaiser and Hitler had been burned or obliterated. The ruins of Frankfurt were now so vast that the US Army-issue street maps served as little more than compass directories. In these ruins the inhabitants lived like troglodytes in cellars and caverns hollowed out of the rubble, without water, sewerage, electricity, gas, telephones, mail or any form of transport, not even bikes. And yet the colossal steel and stone Farben main building – a Nazi edifice of the New Order, a giant filing cabinet loaded with hundreds of tons of papers and records of the Farben empire, one of the largest buildings in the world and one of the single most important bombing targets in Germany – was unscathed. Not a single bomb had fallen on it and hardly a window had been cracked or a file or a shelf disturbed in the two-day battle that had raged around the building before the city fell.