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  Nine hundred and fifty Flying Fortress bombers with an escort of 575 Mustang fighters roared over Berlin that morning. One thousand and three had taken off for Berlin from their bases in England, but 25 had had to divert to targets of opportunity and 28 turned back. (On the same morning 362 B-24s of the 8th USAAF had come in the same bomber stream but stopped short at Magdeburg, where they bombed the synthetic oil installations.) They came in at 26,600 feet, so high above the ground that they looked at first like tiny glistening points of light, in formations like perfect triangles, tiny clear-cut patterns, remote and unattainable, vapour trails streaming behind them from all four engines. Steadily they droned on high above the city in an endless stream that stretched back in a line across almost the whole of Western Europe to the Zuider Zee, and small sooty smudges erupted in their midst and blossomed into tiny round black clouds of flak as the 1,200 anti-aircraft guns, pounding away all over the city, tried to get their range and height. In intensity and accuracy this was the most fearful flak concentration yet encountered by the 8th Air Force and as the raid developed one or two planes in each formation were hit and seen to fall. Now and again the planes dropped white markers and what looked from the ground like tiny marbles – high explosive bombs, fragmentation bombs, incendiary bombs, incendiary clusters and mines.

  Berlin was a bomb-aimer’s delight. A very broad artery 15 miles long known as the East-West Axis, rebuilt by Hitler in 1938 for his victory marches in the early months of the war, led straight as a die to the very heart of the city, the Brandenburg Gate, clearly visible because of its conspicuous position even from 20,000 or 30,000 feet up. In this central area of the city the key buildings stood out prominently because of their size – the Reichstag, the Reich Chancellery, Goering’s huge Air Ministry, the Propaganda Ministry and other principal government ministries on the Wilhelmstrasse. Eastwards from the Brandenburg Gate ran the Unter den Linden, which was virtually an extension of the East-West Axis. Four blocks to the south of this avenue another prominent edifice stood out clearly – the Reichsbank, the heart of Nazi Germany’s banking system, the citadel of its national treasure, and a tempting target to any plane which had completed half its run across Berlin and not yet dropped its bomb load. Bombing visually in good conditions with the city centre laid out sharp and clear as a map beneath them, the Americans dropped 2,265 tons of bombs in the heaviest bombardment Berlin had experienced in the war to date.

  The city was ravaged. Houses were sliced through like a knife through a layer cake, whole blocks reduced to a pile of bricks no higher than a man, whole streets turned to rubble from which came the cries of the trapped and the dying in cellars blocked by mounds of immovable concrete. The bombing had been so intense that railway locomotives weighing 200 tons had been lifted bodily off the rails and the air was full of charred paper from eviscerated offices to a height of 1,000 feet. Roads were blocked by collapsed buildings and yawning bomb craters, severed water mains gushing like geysers and rescue teams everywhere digging frantically through hot masonry. The fires burned so fiercely that bodies were glued to the surface of the streets by tile heat, white hot sparks shot hundreds of feet into the sky, rivets exploded like bullets and brandy detonated in the cellars with the force of a Panzerfaust. There was the smell of air raid everywhere – an overpowering unmistakable stench of compacted earth, thick smoke, acrid brick dust, charred wood, spent cordite, burst sewers, musty cellars and escaping gas. When the steel doors of the bunkers were unlocked the survivors emerged blinking to a vision of Armageddon, a medieval picture of hell fire. A thick pall of smoke hung over the city to a height of 20,000 feet. Blue-black columns of smoke, lit by flickering tongues of orange-yellow flame, obscured visibility to a few yards ahead. Olive-green dust and whitish plaster-rubble covered the streets several feet deep and when it started to rain this turned to a sticky paste.

  It was so dark in the centre of the city that no one noticed when evening fell. Photographs taken during the day look as though they had been taken in the middle of the night – the steel-helmeted fire-fighters of the Luftschutzpolizei silhouetted against the flames consuming the smoking ruins in the Alexanderplatz; the dome of the French Church streaming with fire and smoke like a gigantic Olympic torch; above the unscathed Kaiser Friedrich Museum a dust cloud towering as monstrous as a Saharan sand-storm. A Swedish journalist filed the first press report of the raid:

  Indescribable scenes occurred in Berlin on Saturday [he wrote] when American bombers launched the heaviest attack of the entire war. When the attack came – at a time when the Russians were advancing into areas where many Berliners had their weekend cottages before the war – it quickly became apparent that the ARP was seriously disorganised and short of staff. Only a very few fighters went up. The undermanned fire brigade had great difficulty in fighting the gigantic fires. Many Berliners were so shocked by this last visitation that they refused to emerge from their shelters.

  Two thousand Berliners died in the great raid of 3 February – almost one for every ton of bombs – and 120,000 were made homeless. At least one returning bomber crew expressed anxiety about the civilian casualties they had inflicted, writing in their log book: ‘Berlin, Saturday, barrage flak, weakening as each group went over. No damage to ship. Visual! 5 x 1,000 pounders. Shacked women and children.’ Whole districts were flattened, and the bombs had scored several notable hits. One was the Gestapo headquarters in the Prinz Albrcchstrassc, which was set on fire. Another was the People’s Court, where the Court’s President, the infamous Nazi jurist Dr Roland Freisler, was killed. Freisler was the man who had tried and sentenced to death hundreds of suspects accused of complicity in the 20 July plot on Hitler’s life the previous year. That cataclysmic morning of 3 February he was crushed to death by collapsing beams in the air raid shelter beneath the courtroom, still clutching the file of one of the plotters, Fabian von Schlabrendorff, whom he had been about to cross-examine before the air raid suddenly interrupted the court proceedings.

  Hitler’s Chancellery did not escape unscathed. The morning after the raid Martin Bormann, the Party Secretary and ‘Hitler’s Mephistopheles’, wrote to his wife in Berchtesgaden describing the damage:

  I have just this minute taken refuge in my secretary’s office, which is the only room in the place that has some temporary windows. Yesterday’s raid was very heavy. The Reich Chancellery garden is an amazing sight – deep craters, fallen trees, and the paths obliterated by a mass of rubble and rubbish. The Führer’s residence was badly hit several times. The new Reich Chancellery was also hit several times and is not usable for the time being. The Party Chancellery buildings, too, are a sorry sight. Telephone communications are still very inadequate, and the Führer’s residence and the Party Chancellery still have no connection with the outside world. To crown everything, in this so-called Government Quarter, the light, power and water supply is still lacking! We have a water cart standing before the Reich Chancellery, and that is our only supply for cooking and washing up! And the worst thing of all is the water closets. These Commando pigs use them constantly, and not one of them even thinks of taking a bucket of water with him to flush the place.

  From this evening I am apparently to have a room in the bunker in which to work and sleep . . .

  The greatest damage in Berlin was caused in the area around the Tempelhof railway station, but other important targets were hit, among them – a fact of great significance in the story of the Great Reichsbank Robbery – the Berlin headquarters of the Reichsbank itself.

  The Reichsbank was a solid, grandiose, turn-of-the-century edifice, as big as the Old Chancellery and almost as big as the Reichstag, and it took twenty-one direct hits to demolish it on the morning of 3 February. It is not clear whether the entire bomb load of one B-17 fell on the headquarters of the Third Reich’s banking and financial interest – Flying Fortress bombardiers claimed they could ‘drop bombs into a pickle barrel from four miles up’ using their advanced Norden bombsights – or whether the building suc
cumbed to a series of hits from a number of different bombers during the course of the raid. What is certain is that to the 5,000 employees of the bank huddled in the basement bunker where they had taken shelter it seemed that the end of the world had indeed arrived. The walls of the cement cavern in which they were entombed wobbled like cardboard, a choking cloud of white dust fell from the ceiling, the lights went out and women screamed with terror or wept continuously as the bombs exploded directly on top of them and walls and floors collapsed on to the basement roof. Amazingly no one was killed when the bank was hit, though the Reichsbank’s President, Dr Walther Funk, was to admit afterwards: ‘It was only by a miracle that I was able to reach the surface from this deep cellar together with 5,000 other people.’

  After the raid the bank building itself presented the same dismally shattered aspect as much of the rest of the smoking city: pyramids of rubble, exposed offices, broken furniture, wash basins hanging by their pipes, windows without glass in leaning walls, smouldering door frames, charred papers smoking in the drizzle. As bank workers picked over the remnants of files and archives, the bank directors considered their unprecedented predicament. The presses used for printing German bank-notes had been destroyed. Worse, with the walls of the temple, as it were, rent asunder, the treasure of Hitler’s Reich, the wealth of the nation, the assets, deposits, reserves, gold and precious metals, cash, currency and bonds which Germany required to continue the war and to survive the peace, lay vulnerable and exposed. The raid of 3 February had left the Reichsbank’s vaults and strongrooms and their priceless contents intact. But it would only require one more raid and a few more bombs for a large part of the concentrated wealth of Nazi Germany to go up, literally, in a puff of smoke and be lost for good.

  As the State’s own bank, the Reichsbank was the leading bank of Germany and one of the great banks of the world, resembling in certain respects its larger and more august peer, the Bank of England. Like the Bank of England, it involved itself in a curious mixture of governmental and private financial affairs. It handled Reich financial transactions on a worldwide basis, carried out large-scale manoeuvres such as foreign exchange control, manipulated exchange rates and tariffs and provided the finance for the government ministries. Like the Bank of England, the Reichsbank was obliged to buy gold at a fixed minimum price and declare its rates in gold; and it acted as the keeper of the country’s gold reserves and lender of last resort. Unlike the Bank of England, however, the Reichsbank also operated as a High Street clearing bank for ordinary German citizens, providing a banking service for private depositors at 100 main banks and more than 4,000 smaller banks throughout the country.

  In 1939 a State decree placed the Reichsbank directly under the control of Adolf Hitler. Soon afterwards the President of the Reichsbank, Dr Hjalmar Schacht, and most of his fellow directors lost their jobs in an argument with Hitler over the financing of the German war programme. Hitler replaced Schacht with a more compliant economist, Dr Walther Funk, who became both Reich Minister of Economics and President of the Reichsbank, Funk’s first job was to sack most of the remaining top executives of the bank, except for the Senior Vice-President, Emil Puhl. Puhl was a banker of the old school; he stood for good order and had long been convinced that the war was lost and the regime doomed – but refused to do anything about it out of loyalty to the ‘Herr Minister’. Puhl became Funk’s acting deputy and the man who actually ran the Reichsbank, for Funk himself knew next to nothing about banking and achieved the distinction of having never attended a single meeting of the Bank’s Board of Directors.

  It was Puhl who, as the war progressed, extended the functions of the Reichsbank to embrace activities organised along peculiarly Nazi lines, including the acquisition of monetary loot from conquered nations and from exterminated persons. Soon after the outbreak of the war the German national gold reserves, already substantially increased by the acquisition of Austrian gold holdings following the Anschluss, were significantly augmented by forcible acquisitions from abroad. The Nazis took $2,596,608 of gold from the gold reserves of the Czech National Bank, and $32,200,000 from the National Bank of Hungary. They looted part of the gold reserves of Albania, Holland, the USSR and other countries overrun by the victorious Wehrmacht, and after the conquest of France they stole $225,900,000 worth of gold, comprising part of the Belgian national gold reserves, which had been deposited in the Banque de France for safekeeping by the Belgian government. The Belgian gold was taken to the Reichsbank in Berlin and resmelted. Each bar was then stamped with the letters RB (for Reichsbank), the German eagle, the retrospective date 1938, and its weight to three points of decimals. Later, when the Germans were forced to withdraw from southern Italy in the face of the advancing Anglo-American forces, they took with them $100,000,000 in Italian gold, which also ended up in the Reichsbank’s reserves. At the height of the Nazi conquest of Europe the gold reserves held by the Reichsbank were estimated to total as much as $772,636,253 – by today’s values the equivalent of $6,490,144,525 – much of it looted from the subject nations of Europe, though the exact figure was never known for sure. (For these and other relative values see the Authors’ Note on p.15.) Not all of this gold was kept in the headquarters bank in Berlin, for part of the gold reserves had been distributed to various Reichsbank branches (known as special storage points) throughout central and southern Germany in 1943. But Berlin remained the main holding branch for Reichsbank bullion.

  The Berlin headquarters were also the principal repository for deposits of currency, gold and other valuables belonging to the German Army (Wehrmacht), the Military Intelligence Service (Abwehr), the Foreign Office, and other affiliated bodies, as well as providing a uniquely macabre banking service for the SS. Early in the war Reichsbank Deputy President Puhl had worked out an arrangement with his near namesake, General (Obergruppenführer) Dr Oswald Pohl, Head of the Economic and Administrative Department of the SS, the department responsible for administering the concentration camps. By this arrangement the Reichsbank would receive and dispose of bank-notes, securities, gold teeth, jewellery and other SS loot shipped from Auschwitz and other extermination camps and the SS would be credited with the proceeds. In 1943 the SS carried out an operation known as ‘Aktion Reinhardt’. They systematically stripped concentration camp inmates of currency, gold coins, jewellery and clothing, and as a result were able to add a total of RM 100,047,000 in foreign exchange (worth $40,357,805) to the SS deposits held in Berlin. Emil Puhl was aided in this patriotic task by being, in addition to the active head of the Reichsbank, a German director of a private international bank in Switzerland – the Bank for International Settlements based at Basle. This gave him the ideal opportunity to act as a fence in disposing of concentration camp gold after it had been melted down into monetary gold bars by the Reichsbank.

  Following the bombing of the Reichsbank headquarters in Berlin, it was on Funk that the decision to authorise the removal of the Reichsbank reserves (and personnel) from Berlin to a place of safety fell, and on his deputy, Puhl, the task of implementing it. The decision was made quickly, even while the smoke hung over the rooftops and the firemen were still dousing the fires. Officials from the most important departments in Berlin would be evacuated to Weimar and Erfurt and run the Reichsbank from there, while the Third Reich’s gold and dollar reserves would be shipped to a new site for safekeeping – a very deep and a very extensive potassium mine at Merkers, in Thuringia, some 200 miles to the south-west of Berlin, and 30 miles south of Mühlhausen, the nearest sizeable town.

  Less than a week after the raid arrangements for the docketing, packaging and transportation of the German State reserves held in the strongrooms of the ruined Reichsbank in Berlin were sufficiently advanced for the first consignment – the currency reserves, totalling a thousand million paper Reichsmarks bundled in a thousand sacks, and a considerable quantity of foreign currency, including over $4,000,000 in US dollar notes – to be despatched to Merkers on 9 February. Three days later the bulk of t
he gold reserves followed. They were worth over $200,000,000, weighed around 100 tons, needed 13 railway flat cars to transport them and 72 hours to unload them and transfer them, in twenty 10-ton trucks, to a special vault designated at Room No 8 deep inside the Kaiseroda Mine. By 18 February the transfer was completed. For the next seven weeks, while the Anglo-American bomber fleets inflicted even more devastating and ever more frequent air attacks on Berlin and the Russian hordes smashed their way towards the eastern suburbs of the capital, the bulk of Germany’s wealth remained securely entombed in a cold cavern hewn out of salt rock half a mile below the Thuringian plain.

  Any sense of security the leaders of the Reich might have felt for the safekeeping of the State reserves soon proved false when the German front in the west began to collapse. On 22 March units of the Third US Army under its charismatic but controversial commander, Lieutenant-General George S. Patton, crossed the Rhine, Germany’s last natural defensive barrier in the west, in a surprise attack at Ludwigshafen. Slicing through weakening German resistance, Patton’s army raced eastwards and on 4 April broke into the Thuringian plain and advanced on Gotha. The Nazi leadership reacted very belatedly to the threat the American advance posed to the State reserves at Merkers. At the last minute Reichsbank officials began a frantic race to remove the entire reserves back to Berlin, but they were handicapped by the speed of the American advance and the partial shutdown of the German railway system due to the Easter holidays. Even by the standards of Nazi administration at the time this was bizarre. When Goebbels heard the news he exploded: ‘One could tear one’s hair when one thinks that the Reichsbahn is having an Easter holiday while the enemy is looting our entire stocks of gold.’ The bank officials soon gave up all hope of moving the gold and concentrated on the paper currency, especially the Reichsmarks, which were in short supply in Germany because of the destruction of the printing presses in the 3 February raid. Four hundred and fifty of the 1,000 sacks of the paper marks in the mine were got away safely, but there was no time to remove the other 550 before the Americans arrived and they were abandoned at the bottom of the main shaft while the Reichsbank officials attempted to make good their escape.