Nazi Gold Read online

  von B: No comment.

  Q: Why should you have three Army records? It’s a remarkable thing to have.

  von B: No comment on that.

  Q: I mean, these documents are fairly clear. They indicate that you entered the Service, that you were invalided out, that you went into hospital with a heart complaint and that you were then recommended for discharge from the Army a few months later. There’s no record of you having any further military service.

  von B: I tell you there’s a second record, and that says I was assistant to the military attaché at the German Embassy in Helsinki. That’s the second.

  Q: When was that?

  von B: From 1942 to 1944.

  Q: Well, there’s no record of your being in the Air Force.

  von B: OK. There is.

  Q: Well, it’s not traceable, put it like that.

  von B: It is.

  Q: Why should you have three records?

  von B: I’ve told you – there’s no comment on that.

  Q: I mean it’s not normal. You said earlier German records are very good and very reliable and very correct. German officials don’t make mistakes.

  In fact, available records show that Hubert served in the German Army in the 2nd Battalion of the 7th Reconnaissance Unit and that by the spring of 1944, after leaving the forces on medical grounds, he was working as a probationary assistant film director for Berlin-Film on a production entitled Eines Tages . . . (One Day . . .). He seems to have had a talent for cinema (to blossom after the war in Bavaria and America), for Berlin-Film informed the Reich Film Board that the director ‘would like to work again in the future with Herr von Blücher, since he was very pleased with the latter’s performance’. Perhaps it was as a film-maker that he subsequently came to fly with the Luftwaffe, for it is to the third of his wartime careers, his Luftwaffe one, to which Hubert von Blücher referred in his own account of how he came to Garmisch-Partenkirchen at the end of the war. This account, too, gives a good idea of the flavour of the man, his raciness, humour – and perhaps inventiveness:

  I turned up in Garmisch from Berlin [he recalled]. I was travelling in an Opel Admiral automobile belonging to a Japanese general who at that time was Japanese ambassador in Berlin. The Opel Admiral had a laissez-passer and we brought the Japanese general’s two German secretaries with us. I had left my flat at 49 Hagenstrasse in the Grünewald area of Berlin, which had been completely destroyed in the bombing. I possessed nothing in the world. Everything was burnt to a cinder. The Japanese general lived in a house four doors away from my flat and on the other side live SS General (Obergruppenführer) Lorenz, whom I shall never forget because he had two of the loveliest daughters I had ever seen. He’s the only SS general whose house I tried to save from burning down. One of the girls, Jutti, married a Count Kinkelbusch, who owned one of the biggest wine businesses in Germany, and the other daughter, Rosemarie, married Axel Springer, the newspaper publisher. I was in the German Air Force then, the Luftwaffe. I was flying bombers, Junkers 88. It is a period I do not like talking about. My heart had a fault that made me black out, my eyes did not register certain colours in a turn at 4Gs. (I am still a keen pilot and until six months ago I was still flying Lear jets and helicopters and T33s with the Bundeswehr.)

  When I turned up during the night at Garmisch, Pfeiffer and Rauch were both sitting together upstairs in the house in Gsteigstrasse. They had been discussing the situation for a couple of hours. It was all news to me. They asked a question. What would I do about the shipment – the Reichsbank reserves from Berlin?

  According to Hubert, he is referring here to the time immediately preceding the burial of the reserves in the mountains above the Walchensee in late April. Three weeks later, in mid-May, the same question was as urgent and problematic as ever. Fifteen million dollars in gold and currency still lay undetected on the slopes of the Steinriegel and Klausenkopf. It could not remain there, unused and useless, until the end of time. Nor could it be allowed to fall into the hands of the enemy, the Americans. Or rather, it would be a tragic waste if it did. But what should be done with it? The government to which most of it belonged, the Third Reich, no longer existed. There was no other German government to replace it and no prospect of one for decades to come, or so it seemed. When the shipment had first arrived in Mittenwald it had been said the treasure was to be kept for a future government of Bavaria. But where was that government? Colonel Pfeiffer was later to claim that he and Colonel Rauch had tried no less than four times to make contact with such a body, but in vain.

  It was evident that by mid-May Pfeiffer was having a rough time of it, living in the open, sleeping under trees, supplies and morale running low, nerves on edge, the future as aimless as his present solitary wandering. In his fortieth year, Pfeiffer was no longer in the prime of youth; and with his war wounds and his rheumatism he was no longer in the best of health. In the day the sun and the rain beat down on him. At night the Alpine cold chilled him to the marrow. Pfeiffer himself called it the life of the partisan. With the war over, it was more like the life of the outlaw. His name had been posted and the Americans were looking for him everywhere. Lieutenant DuBois, the sheriff at the head of the posse, had been checking him out at all his old haunts – the Kaserne, the Forest House, the Bergerhof, even as far away as Salzburg. Well-placed informants had disclosed the whereabouts of his next of kin – his wife at 10 Riedelstrasse in Bad Reichenhall, his mother at Neuhaus, near the Schliersee.

  It was a desperate life and one which could not be continued indefinitely. Almost immediately after Lieutenant DuBois had abandoned his preliminary reconnaissance in the quest of Nazi gold, silver and foreign exchange – the timing was probably coincidence – Pfeiffer decided to emerge from hiding and seek help from the only source available to him: the von Blücher family. Lüder von Blücher was recontacted and his offer of assistance was gratefully accepted. Once again the Colonel pushed through the wooden portico at 38 Gsteigstrasse and stepped into the security of a safe house and the warmth and comfort of a civilised household. Almost immediately afterwards he was asked to step out again.

  For 38 Gsteigstrasse was bursting at the seams. Bedrooms and day rooms alike had been turned into dormitories, and there were people sleeping in the bath, under the kitchen table and at the top of the stairs, outside in the wood shed and in the summer house, anywhere where a human being could curl up in a little space he could call his own. It was the time of the great flight from the east. The mass exodus of German civilians from the eastern provinces had begun as soon as the Red Army had crossed Germany’s eastern border in the New Year and continued ever since. The Germans in the east had fled in their thousands, millions, to escape the vengeful Soviet invaders. Young and old, rich and poor, they struggled into an already torn and blasted wartime western Germany carrying what they could salvage of their worldly goods by whatever means they had at their disposal – horse cart, wheelbarrow, bicycle, human back. Many had nowhere to go and were wiped out en masse when they were caught in the open streets in the great air raids on Berlin, Dresden and other cities. A fortunate few from the better-connected stratum of society had friends and relatives in the west. The Blücher tribe was one such group. The landowning members of the tribe had begun arriving with their households at the house in Gsteigstrasse as the Red Army began its onslaught in Silesia. They had been given open house and by May, according to Hubert, 70 of these family refugees had taken shelter there. Under the circumstances, there was precious little room in which to accommodate Colonel Pfeiffer, who was not family, whatever else he might be. On 20 May the von Blücher brothers decided to enlist the help of their nextdoor neighbour, Mathias Stinnes, who now lived at No 40 Gsteigstrasse.

  Mathias Stinnes, a member of one of Germany’s richest families, was – according to Hubert von Blücher – the product of a left-hand marriage by Hugo Stinnes Sr, one of Germany’s leading pre-war industrialists, head of the vast Stinnes Combine which included the Rhine-Westphalian Coal Syndicate an
d the other Stinnes coal, steel, shipping, newspaper and hotel interests in Germany, as well as two industrial corporations in the United States. Mathias’ father had been the prototype Ruhr business tycoon who regarded the State as an appendage of his own interests and politics as an extension of economics by other means. Extremely right-wing, Hugo Stinnes had been one of Hitler’s main supporters in his earliest days and one of the earliest financial backers of the Nazi Party. After his death in 1934 his business ran into financial difficulties and was liquidated in the following year. A new company was formed under his eldest son, Hugo Stinnes Jr – Mathias’ elder brother – with the Stinnes family retaining forty per cent of the shares. During the Second World War, Mathias’ brother, an outspoken opportunist, controlled a vast industrial complex which became one of the most important components of the armaments and engineering industries that built the war machine of the Third Reich.

  Mathias Stinnes was therefore born into a world of almost limitless wealth and power. Yet despite this privileged jumping-off point there was evidently something odd about the man which prevented him from capitalising on his advantages. In spite of the vast wealth he had inherited through his family, the considerable financial contribution he had personally made to the funds of the SS, his wide-ranging social connections, his personal talents and high-minded patriotism and loyalty to the Hitler regime, he never participated in the running of the Stinnes business and never rose above the rank of private soldier throughout the war. This was not for want of trying. As early as 10 October 1939, when the Second World War was little more than a month old, the 29-year-old Stinnes had sent an extraordinary letter to the SS Central Chancellery in Prinz Albrechtstrasse in Berlin in which he put forward a plan, based on his own first-hand knowledge of English geography, to assist in a future German invasion of Britain. In his letter Stinnes wrote:

  If consideration were to be given to attempting a landing in England, I should like to draw attention to the following.

  North of London, the River Ouse flows into the bay called ‘The Wash’. In a section of the Ouse Valley, the land is lower than the water level of the river and canals. This is the area of the so-called ‘Downs’.

  In the event of a landing attempt, the area north and south of ‘The Wash’ could well come under consideration, if any thought were being given to the east coast being a possibility. A force of parachutists would be sufficient to destroy the dykes and put this region under water.

  Stinnes then contributed a second idea for the furthering of the German war effort – the establishment of a pro-Hitler regime in Great Britain.

  As we know [he wrote] the British Government gives as one of its war aims the destruction of the ‘Hitler-regime’. It would perhaps be advantageous for us to turn the tables on them and from our side demand a change of government in Britain. I might mention that the Duke of Windsor still enjoys great popularity in Britain even today, and a propaganda effort in that direction would have all the more chance of success in that there exists in Britain organised opposition parties which are dissatisfied about his resignation. I should add that I am pretty well acquainted with British conditions, since, I studied for two years at Oxford, worked for two years in a British firm [in Berlin], and have often visited the country in the meanwhile, as well as meeting officers of the British Navy practically every summer in the Mediterranean.

  I hope I have been of use to you with these suggestions.

  Heil Hitler!

  The SS were uncharacteristically inefficient in responding to Mathias Stinnes’ war-winning plans. It was seven months before the letter eventually got to the Reichsführer SS Heinrich Himmler’s desk, by which time the Luftwaffe was gearing itself up for its air assault in the skies over England and plans for the German invasion that Stinnes had foreseen were reaching an advanced stage. Himmler would have been well aware of the debt which his own SS and the Nazi Party and war machine owed to the lavish backing of the Stinnes industrial complex. On 17 May 1940, Himmler’s Personal Staff acknowledged receipt of Stinnes’ letter. At the same time the Reich Security Police and SD headquarters in Berlin were asked to check out Mathias Stinnes’ credentials.

  It seemed that the rigidly conformist bureaucrats of the SS oligarchy had difficulty making head or tail of Stinnes’ faintly eccentric and dilettante upper-class individualism. In 1934 he had joined the motorised SS in Berlin, then joined the Mittenwald Company of the SS as a Senior Private. From 1935 to 1938 he worked for the local SD headquarters in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and continued to contribute substantial sums of money to the SS central funds. He was not a member of the Nazi Party but in the company of foreigners, particularly the British, he always presented himself as a National Socialist. He also voluntarily placed himself at the disposal of the German Intelligence Services on several occasions. In 1935, for example, he travelled to Moscow to attend a medical conference with a cousin, a well-known physiologist in Britain, and subsequently toured the Soviet Union with him. ‘From this journey,’ reported the Berlin SD, ‘he brought back a mass of photographs of, inter alia, military items, which on his own initiative he duly put at the disposal of the Intelligence Services.’ During the 1936 Winter Olympics, held in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Stinnes again made himself available to the Intelligence Services, ‘for tasks where his knowledge of several foreign languages made him useful’.

  Stinnes had travelled widely in Europe, made geological expeditions to Germany’s former colonies in Africa, and studied at the universities of Munich, Berlin and Oxford. But nothing he attempted ever seemed to succeed. He never completed his university studies, because the deaths of both his parents, which provided him with a considerable independent fortune, obviated the need to do so. He bought and managed a big farming estate at Hachtsee, in which he invested considerable financial resources, but as the SD noted, ‘it is not expected that it will produce a profit, so Stinnes may soon have to turn his mind to other projects’. Stinnes toyed with a literary career and tried to write a travel book about a journey through Yugoslavia in a canoe, but he got nowhere with it. ‘He busies himself in the field of technical inventions,’ the Security Police noted, ‘but seems so far not to have produced any positive results.’ (Subsequently Stinnes was to produce a grandiose scheme for irrigating the Sahara and claimed to have discovered the cure for cancer.)

  The Berlin SD summed Stinnes up thus: ‘We have no knowledge of anything prejudicial to him in a political sense.’ On the other hand they noted that ‘he may be designated as a “Phantast” [a dreamer, an odd-ball]’. After the war acquaintances of Stinnes were to confide the opinion that he was actually mentally disturbed. ‘He was a very fine man,’ recalled Hubert von Blücher, ‘but he was a neurotic chap; he had a complex, a persecution mania.’

  Mathias Stinnes’ correspondence with the SS was the nearest he ever got to the higher conduct of the war in Germany. By the time he returned home to 40 Gsteigstrasse more than five years later, this rather odd and disappointed millionaire had still not risen above the rank of private and had seen no more of the conflict than the inside of the American and British prisoner of war camps in which he had worked as an interpreter. Only for two brief periods as a student in the Abwehr and the Brandenburg Division (the German equivalent of the British SOE) did Stinnes brush briefly with the cloak-and-dagger world to which his talents and inclinations might have ideally suited him if the military establishment had but perceived them. Unlike some five million of his fellow citizens, however, Mathias was still alive. After a few days’ captivity as a prisoner of war at the end of the war, he was allowed to return home to his villa in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

  He was no longer the very rich man he had once been. The Nazis had taken his farm and the Allies had blocked his bank account. Reichsmarks were almost valueless anyway, and as a German he was not allowed to possess foreign currency, gold or other valuables. He was therefore as needy and as open to opportunities as the next man. His only asset was an attractive and talented wife, by the n
ame of Tucki. Of his return to Garmisch, Stinnes was to recall later: ‘When I arrived back at Gsteigstrasse, the “Gold Affair” had just started. Lüder von Blücher asked me if his former driver might sleep in my house for a few days. Some days later the so-called driver turned out to be Colonel Franz Pfeiffer.’

  With the return of Pfeiffer, incognito, to the world of men, and the reunion of the leading dramatis personae under two adjacent roofs, the fate of the Reichsbank treasure became a matter for even more urgent debate. Everyone contributed their own suggestions, some dotty, most of them honourable, some apparently even philanthropic. ‘Up to this day,’ Mathias Stinnes wrote in a signed statement some years later, ‘I believe in the sincerity of most of the participants.’ The overriding motivation was to keep the German treasure out of the hands of the Americans. Hubert von Blücher remembered some of the idealistic proposals put forward:

  The first scenario was Rauch’s who wanted to set up a new Bavarian State with Colonel Pfeiffer. A crackpot idea. The second idea came from a man with whom I have to be a bit careful, because he is still alive and has an important job. This man was among the German organisational élite in wartime, not with Speer, not with the Wehrmacht, but with the Organisation Todt. He approached my brother and said, ‘Listen, we’ll do something else. We’ll open up a factory in the Black Forest for making artificial limbs for the German war wounded, using local skilled labour. All these wounded will need artificial limbs and no one will be interested in financing such an operation.’ This idea fascinated my brother and he tried to get Pfeiffer interested in it too.

  But Pfeiffer had ideas of his own. Mathias Stinnes remembered one. ‘Colonel Pfeiffer took me into his confidence,’ he recalled. ‘Vast sums of foreign currency and gold, he said, had been hidden. We should try to get this treasure secretly to the Vatican so that the Church, when things have quietened down, would be able to distribute it among war orphans and cripples. I had no doubt that these intentions were serious and honest.’ Pfeiffer’s idea was to rebury the treasure, and wait until the general situation in the area settled down before contacting the Pope via Cardinal Faulhaber, a respected German member of the Vatican.