Nazi Gold Read online

  Strictly speaking the idea of an Alpine Fortress was more a creation of American Intelligence than of Germany’s leaders. The first word of such a concept – of a National Redoubt of 20,000 square miles of impregnable Alps in southern Germany, western Austria and northern Italy, with Hitler’s mountain home, the Berghof at Berchtesgaden, in the centre – was put about by a detachment of the American OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in Switzerland. Their erroneous intelligence report was intercepted by the Germans and subsequently exploited by Goebbels for its propaganda nuisance value. Though the word Alpenfestung (Alpine Fortress) was almost unknown in Germany and few German generals had the slightest idea what was meant by it or believed in it if they did, SHAEF intelligence became convinced of its existence and in the American press it was to become an idée fixe. In the Allied Armies there was a growing fear that the Third Reich would hold out for years embattled in the mountains, the Hitlerian regime defended by regular diehard SS formations and a formidable guerrilla army of fanatical partisans called ‘werewolves’. By April 1945 even the Supreme Commander, General Eisenhower, was in thrall to the idea and altered the strategy of the final campaign in Germany by shifting the main thrust of the American advance southwards to deal with it. But in fact, though some of the ministries in Berlin had evacuated some of their staffs and files to the south, and a few defence works had been thrown up at the western end of the so-called Alpine Fortress, the whole thing was more illusion than reality.

  To give Rauch his due, though the National Redoubt itself was a myth, the idea of sitting out the final Götterdämmerung in some Alpine retreat remote from the battle was not outrageously out of step with the times. As long ago as August 1944, at a meeting at the Hotel Maison Rouge in Strasbourg, leading Nazi financiers and industrialists had met to make long-range plans to safeguard Nazi assets from Allied confiscation. Predicting the defeat of Germany, these men arranged for considerable funds and looted assets to be transferred to neutral and non-belligerent countries, including Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Turkey, Argentina and other Latin American states, where the money could be reinvested and held in reserve for a future Nazi Party revival. By the spring of 1945 the SS, increasingly a law unto itself, had been salting away its ill-gotten assets in the Bavarian Alps and the Austrian Tyrol, sneaking concentration camp loot and departmental and personal fortunes in gold, currency and narcotics to hideaways in the area of the proposed National Redoubt – most especially to the region around the Austrian village of Alt Aussee, where the RSHA chief, Ernst Kaltenbrunner (the second most powerful SS leader after Himmler), had his private residence. The RSHA was the Main Security Department of the Reich, the branch of the SS which controlled the Gestapo, the security services and the military intelligence service (Abwehr). The gold and other precious metals in its possession, as well as gems, art treasures, millions of American dollars and lesser numbers of genuine and forged sterling notes were already being hidden all over the mountainous areas of southern Bavaria and northern Austria – at the bottom of mines and lakes, in holes in the ground, in the roofs and under the floors of barns and houses. The mountainous south became a treasure house of the collapsing Reich as valuables of all kinds from all kinds of sources poured down from the hard-pressed north. Recently the RSHA had begun to compile records of assets transported south. Only one document purporting to list RSHA treasure survived the end of the war, but it gives an idea of the sheer size of the consignments being spirited away:

  50 cases of gold coins and gold articles, each case weighing 100 pounds

  2 million US dollars

  2 million Swiss francs

  5 cases full of diamonds and precious stones

  A stamp collection worth at least 5 million gold marks

  50 kilos of gold bars

  All that Colonel Rauch was proposing and Dr Funk seconding, therefore, was that the Reichsbank should jump on the same bandwagon that the SS had already started rolling, and get their assets out of the capital – as a purely precautionary measure, of course – while the going was good. In practice this meant that the flight of Nazi gold and other valuables would follow two parallel – and on occasion confusingly intertwined – migratory paths southward to the Bavarian mountains and Austrian Tyrol, one stream consisting of SS (including RSHA, SD and Abwehr), Foreign Office and other reserves, the other of Reichsbank reserves. Rauch always insisted he was no more than a middleman in this operation and that his motivation was patriotic duty rather than personal self-interest. It is not clear whether it was now or later that he first perceived that the more portable and negotiable portions of the Reichsbank reserves could be put to other uses than the ones he had first proposed.

  On 8/9 April, it seems, Funk and – almost certainly – Bormann attended a meeting with Hitler in the Führerbunker in Berlin to present their case. It was a sticky session. Funk was not Hitler’s favourite Minister, the fate of the nation’s gold bars and bank-notes was not uppermost in Hitler’s mind, nor was that mind in the best of sorts any more. Virtually buried alive in the surrealistic netherworld of the bunker, immured amid the sour odours of rising damp, stale boots and disinfectant in tiny cement catacombs lit by lightbulbs which glared night and day without distinction, the head of an empire that had once stretched from the Channel to the Volga now lived the troglodytic life of a U-boat captain stranded on the ocean bottom, all sense of time, season and weather gone, all contact with the reality of actual events and the actual war fading fast.

  The Führer-figure that presented itself before the three visitors was that of a prematurely aged, sick, hysterical, shambling, broken creature, with bowed head and sunken eyes, trembling hands and a trailing foot – a creature which in its dying moments still clung with feverish intensity to outworn concepts and unrealistic hopes. The idea of moving the Reichsbank reserves out of Berlin was downright defeatism, Hitler snapped. Berlin would not fall, victory was assured, the move was unnecessary. In any case, such a move played into the hands of the nation’s enemies, of the traitors that were everywhere in its midst even now. Once in Bavaria, the Führer argued – not without a glimmer of reason – Rauch might hand over all the reserves to Bavarian separatists who could use the treasure to promote a breakaway Bavarian nationalist movement in opposition to the Nazi regime. (Only three weeks later the Bavarian underground was to rise in rebellion against the Nazis and the Bavarian populace was to welcome the American Army in the streets of Munich with garlands and wine.)

  But Funk’s commonsense reasoning eventually prevailed. The exhausted Hitler wearily conceded a grudging consent to the move. The emissaries of the Reichsbank’s interests were casually dismissed and the Führer returned to the study of his hateful maps and his hopeless war games.

  The closing balances of the Berlin Reichsbank’s Precious Metal Department before the building was destroyed by bombing had shown that the official gold reserves held by the Third Reich totalled $255.96 million. Of this some 93.17 per cent, totalling $238.49 million, was subsequently captured by the Americans after its removal to Merkers, leaving 6.83 per cent, amounting to $17.48 million (consisting entirely of looted Belgian gold) still in German hands in the vaults of various Reichsbanks in central and southern Germany on 8 April. Additionally, the Reichsbank still had in its possession many millions of dollars’ worth of paper Reichsmarks and foreign exchange and continued to act as repository for the precious metal and currency deposits of the Wehrmacht, the SS, the Abwehr and the Foreign Office, which represented a huge but – in the absence of precise documentation – unquantifiable amount of valuables. The minute Hitler gave his assent to the transfer of the surviving Reichsbank reserves to Bavaria, orders were relayed to the Reichsbank branches to make immediate shipment of their remaining gold and currency stocks back to Berlin, from which the entire reserves would then be sent south in one shipment.

  The branch officials made frantic efforts between 4 and 13 April to comply. For some of the more westerly banks that lay in the line of the American advanc
e it was already too late. Eschwege and Coburg fell before the banks could respond to their directive and their gold bullion and other assets passed into American hands. But from branches in towns and cities farther removed from the American thrust – Goslar, Magdeburg, Erfurt, Apolda, Weimar and elsewhere – 780 gold bars were shipped back to the temporary new Reichsbank headquarters in Berlin and preparations were made to send 730 of these bars south at once. Fifty bars (worth $711,000 in 1945) were held back for possible contingencies, along with another 40 bars (worth $567,000) which had never left Berlin in the first place, and many millions of gold coins (valued at $2,156,625). The total value of the 730 bars and gold coins earmarked for shipment to Bavaria was nearly $10 million, and the value of the bars and coins destined to stay was $3,434,625. After the end of hostilities the fate of the former was to remain shrouded in mystery to the present day. The latter was never seen again – at least not by any Westerner.

  So the stage was set for the next act. Dr Funk, the nominal President of the Reichsbank, and all the senior officials of the bank’s Berlin headquarters, were ready with bags packed to leave the doomed city for the move south. Huge quantities of paper marks, dollars and other currencies, were packed and stacked in readiness for shipment. Probably it had always been intended that the whole of the reserves – gold and currency alike – should be transported south by train on 13 April. But as some of the gold was still in transit to Berlin on the 13th it was finally arranged that the paper currency and the bank personnel would leave for Munich by train and that the gold would follow by road on 14 April. The idea was for Munich to serve as a base from which to distribute much needed German currency to Reichsbank branches in Bavaria and as a springboard from which the gold, foreign currency and other valuables would be propelled to their final hiding place, as yet to be decided.

  At two different stations in the southern suburbs of the capital – Berlin-Michendorf and Berlin-Lichterfelde-West – two special trains code named ‘Adler’ and ‘Dohle’ stood with steam up, awaiting the signal to go. An air raid was in progress when the operation finally swung into action. Through a gauntlet of bombs and fire, convoys of trucks laden with a greater part of the banknote wealth of the Fatherland made a headlong dash to the waiting trains. It is not difficult to picture the scene – the trucks, sealed and sentried, a steel-helmeted trooper up front, more by the tailgate, the race through the emptying streets, klaxons blazing, the slow to a crawl down endless diversions round smoking craters, bombed-out blocks, thoroughfares choked with rubble and signs reading ‘Achtung! Minen!’, the bombs falling, the shrapnel pattering on the cab roofs like iron hail, the final run for it down Potsdamerstrasse, mouths dry and hearts thumping, the barked orders in the station precincts, Raus! Schnell! Raus!

  The trains waiting impatiently in the southern suburbs between them carried a prodigious quantity of paper money, including 520,000,000 Reichsmarks (valued at $209,762,000) for normal internal currency exchange and – of far greater negotiable value to the Reich and far greater importance to the future development of this story – 146 bags of foreign exchange. At Berlin-Lichterfelde-West, ‘Adler’ (meaning Eagle) was complete with a baggage car which was to hold one part of the Reichsbank’s currency reserves (including 105 bags of foreign currency – 52 of them belonging to the RSHA) and a passenger car which was to accommodate most of the Reichsbank senior staff, including its President, Dr Walther Funk, his assistant Dr August Schwedler and the official in overall charge of the evacuation, Reichsbank Director Hans Alfred von Rosenberg-Lipinski, one of Funk’s right-hand men in the Reichsbank. ‘Dohle’ (meaning Jackdaw), already loading up at Berlin-Michendorf, carried the other part of the Reichsbank’s currency reserves, including 41 bags of foreign exchange, Adler’s role was to distribute much-needed paper money to the nearly dried-up Reichsbank branches in the south of Germany, Dohle’s to replenish Adler as required and transport what was left direct to the Munich Reichsbank, where it would link up with the gold convoy coming from Berlin by road.

  If this was the plan it seems to have misfired. Because of the worsening military situation the trains could not take the direct route from Berlin to Munich via Nuremberg and had to be diverted along a route which swung to the southeast through Saxony and Czechoslovakia. The total distance was some 500 miles and under normal circumstances the journey by train would have taken no more than a day. But in the second half of April, as the Third Reich collapsed on all fronts and Germany’s railway network everywhere was subject to interdiction and delay as a result of bombing from the air, fighting on the land, and priority throughrouting for troop and ammunition trains racing to the front, it took the Reichsbank specials, Adler and Dohle, not a day but a fortnight to reach their destination. And by then a substantial part of the Reichsbank reserves, the gold and monetary treasure of the nation, had been, or was about to be, stolen.

  So the two special trains drew away from the ashen midden of the shattered capital. Their departure did not go unnoticed – even by Western Intelligence. After the trains had gone, a field detachment of the OSS, the US secret intelligence and special operations service, logged the following signal from a secret agent located somewhere in the Reich: ‘Two special trains carrying the Führungstab Oberste Reichsbehörden left Berlin 14 April. These officials are now in Imsterberg, which has been closed to all but Party members. [From copy of the Secret Order].’ (The agent would probably have been a member of the OSS team code named GREENUP which was parachuted into the Tyrolean Alps near Innsbruck, Austria, in February 1945. GREENUP was one of the most successful of the Allied spy teams to penetrate the Third Reich. It formed contacts with the local Austrian Resistance and the remarkable Resistance organiser and OSS agent and courier, Fritz Molden, and transmitted consistently useful intelligence back to base until the team was rolled up by the Germans just before the end of the war – surviving, however, to hand over the surrender of the Tyrolean capital, Innsbruck, to the advancing Americans early in May 1945.)

  If the Allies had but known it, this signal possibly contained their first glimpse of the Reichsbank affair which was later to engage their investigators in a vain quest for the truth over a period of years.

  The journey to Munich was no joy-ride. To move by day was difficult. From sunrise to sunset low-flying American and Russian fighter bombers scoured the countryside for prey, strafing anything that moved on road or rail. At night the trains could carry no proper lights, not even in the compartments, whose occupants often had to make do with candles to see by. The scenes at the halts along the track doused the hopes of even the staunchest optimists. Everywhere were images of cataclysmic destruction and absolute defeat. Station platforms were packed from end to end with rows of wounded, their paper bandages, saturated with blood, dissolving around still gaping wounds. Country roads were choked with refugees fleeing from the Russians, tangled mêlées of horse-drawn carts, bombed cars, old trucks laden with household chattels, prams, pushcarts, wheelbarrows, old men on bikes, intermingled with the raggle-taggle of troops on the move, Hitler Youth, Volkssturm Homeguards, rear-echelon troops looking for their front-line units. Passing through Dresden the Reichsbank officials, long hardened to the piecemeal destruction of Berlin, peered aghast at the desolation of this once beautiful and historic city, now razed to the ground in the course of a non-stop air raid lasting 48 hours which had killed over 135,000 people. The empty shells and windowless, fire-blackened façades of this dead city loomed like a spectre of the imminent future. If anyone on the two trains had entertained any hopes for Germany’s national salvation when they pulled out of Berlin, few could have sustained them after they had passed through Dresden. Germany, it was clear, was doomed. In a few days, a few weeks at most, the nation would perish. And in the havoc that would be bound to follow, to what masters would the present guardians of the Reichsbank treasure owe allegiance? The Soviet hordes? The Anglo-Saxon armies? Some Nazi government in exile or Third Reich caucus in the National Redoubt? But what caucus and what redo
ubt?

  It may have crossed the minds of a few of the men on board Adler, as it hissed and rattled through the narrow corridor of territory that was now all that was left of unoccupied Germany, that in the world following the final collapse there would be no orders to be received or to be obeyed, that for each and every one of them it would be a case of sauve qui peut, and that in that connection the Reichsbank treasure might be, in a manner of speaking, a free for all.

  That at any rate seems to have been the line of thought which wormed its way through the head of the Reichsbank official most directly involved in the handling of the currency reserves on board Adler and Dohle, Reichsbank Director von Rosenberg-Lipinski. On 16 April, when Adler was held up ten miles outside Pilsen, in Czechoslovakia, and the train commander indicated that it would be some time before the journey could be continued, it was Rosenberg-Lipinski who took the initiative and off-loaded 11 sacks of foreign currency belonging to the RSHA and sent them off to Germany by road in a requisitioned truck bound for the Reichsbank branch at Regensburg. As the progress of the trains grew even more tardy and erratic, Rosenberg-Lipinski and his boss, Dr Funk, grew increasingly restless and impatient. Between 18 and 19 April, while the trains were held up again just inside the Bavarian border, Rosenberg-Lipinski ordered 53 bags of Reichsbank foreign exchange from Adler and 41 bags from Dohle to be off-loaded and driven by truck to Munich (in company with Funk and Schwedler) in order to rendezvous with the gold convoy coming down by road from Berlin. (Forty-one bags of foreign exchange belonging to the RSHA were left on board Adler, and 11 more bags of RSHA currency, which had been taken from Adler a few days previously, were still in Regensburg.)

  Compared with the trains, the gold convoy had made good time on its journey south. The convoy of five or six Opel-Blitz trucks belonging to the Berlin Police had left Berlin on 14 April in the charge of Police Lieutenant George Krüger and was accompanied by three Reichsbank officials – George Netzeband (Senior Cashier), Friedrich Will (Senior Clerk) and Emil Januszewski (Senior Inspector). It was followed by Lieutenant-Colonel Rauch making his own way south. The trucks followed much the same route as the trains, via Dresden, Karlsbad and the Bohemian Forest, and by 19 April were safely drawn up outside the front entrance of the Reichsbank building in bomb-ravaged Munich, where they were met by Funk and Schwedler.