Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion

The Incredible Story of

How the Nazis Stole Europe’s Bullion

PEGASUS BOOKS

NEW YORK  LONDON

To Curt Prendergast, my first boss at
Time
magazine. In the summer of 1966, he asked me to investigate what happened to Belgium’s central bank gold during World War II. That started my long interest in this dramatic saga.

Maps are not to scale, and intended only for reference to show the movement of gold throughout Europe during the specified time periods.

MAJOR CHARACTERS

PROLOGUE

1   •  THE GLITTER OF GOLD

2   •  SPANISH PRELUDE

3   •  ADOLF HITLER’S ARGONAUT

4   •  FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT’S ARGONAUT

5   •  HERMANN GÖRING GRABS CONTROL

6   •  THE CLUB FOR CENTRAL BANKERS

7   •  AUSTRIA BECOMES THE FIRST EASY PIECE

8   •  AN INSIDE JOB AGAINST CZECHOSLOVAKIA

9   •  MUTINY AT THE REICHSBANK

10 •  POLAND’S LONG ODYSSEY

11 •  NORTHERN LIGHTS GO OUT

12 •  THE WORLD’S FORT KNOX

13 •  DENMARK AND NORWAY FALL QUICKLY

14 •  ITALY CRUSHES ALBANIA

15 •  HOLLAND FALLS IN FOUR DAYS

16 •  BELGIUM AND LUXEMBOURG TRUST FRANCE

17 •  THE FALL OF FRANCE

18 •  THE VATICAN’S SECRET GOLD

19 •  ESCAPE TO CASABLANCA

20 •  BRITAIN ON THE BRINK

21 •  DESTINATION DAKAR

22 •  BALKAN DISTRACTIONS

23 •  THE SOVIET UNION STARES INTO AN ABYSS

24 •  MELMER GOLD

25 •  DRAGGING EVERYTHING OUT ITALIAN STYLE

26 •  PARTNERS IN GOLD

27 •  THE ALLIES FINALLY CRACK DOWN

28 •  RICH DISCOVERY IN A SALT MINE

29 •  THE GÖTTERDÄMMERUNG OF GOLD

30 •  THE END OF A SORDID TALE

EPILOGUE

APPENDIX I: STATISTICS OF NAZI GOLD

APPENDIX II: PARTNERS IN GOLD

APPENDIX III: POST WAR

ENDNOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ILLUSTRATIONS

INDEX

, Belgian Central Bank official who in May 1940 rescued millions of dollars of his country’s currency and attempted to do the same for its gold.

, president of the Bank of Italy 1931-1944.

, staff member of Treasury Secretary Morgenthau and then financial aide for General Dwight Eisenhower. He directed the gold recovery operation late in the war.

, president of the Bank for International Settlements (1935-1937).

, Captain of the

, which rescued the Polish gold in September 1939.

, the U.S. ambassador in Paris in 1940, who helped get a large share of the French gold to the U.S.

, the deputy governor of the Bank of England, who directed British gold shipments.

, British Prime Minister from 1937 to 1940.

, British Prime Minister from 1940 to 1945.

, Benito Mussolini foreign minister and son-in-law.

, one of the leaders of the Polish gold evacuation program.

, president of the Bank of France in May 1940 and directed the rescue of the French gold.

, president of the Reichsbank from 1939 to 1945.

, Minister of Propaganda for Nazi Germany from 1933 to 1945.

, second most powerful man in the Third Reich after Hitler. He was head of the Luftwaffe and the Four Year Plan that prepared the country’s economy for war.

, Finance Minister of Belgium in 1940, who directed the country’s gold rescue.

, President of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, 1928-1941.

, Directed the Norwegian gold rescue, carrying the first shipload all the way to the U.S.

, dictator of Germany from 1933 to 1945.

, trouble-shooter for President Roosevelt, who went to Moscow in July 1941 to meet with Stalin about sending the Soviet Union military aid.

, president of the Central Bank of Belgium from 1938 to 1941.

, heir to the throne of the Netherlands in 1940.

, New York Federal Reserve vice president, who handled gold operations.

, the head of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery.

, a regional French National Bank official who played a major role in rescuing French gold.

, one of two men who directed the evacuation of Polish gold from Warsaw to France.

, president of the Bank for International Settlements during World War II.

, Polish Central Bank board member who traveled with his country’s gold to Dakar in 1940 and also helped rescue it there in 1944.

, Secretary of the Treasury and close confidant of President Roosevelt from 1933 from 1945.

, fascist ruler of Italy from 1922 to 1943.

, finance minister of Spain who arranged the Spanish gold shipment to the Soviet Union during the Spanish Civil War.

, Governor of the Bank of England and the most influential central banker of the era.

, Soviet agent in Spain who handled the Spanish gold shipment to Moscow.

, Italian Finance Minister who gave the order to turn over Italian gold to the Nazis.

, undersecretary of the British Treasury, who directed Britain’s gold evacuation.

, Roman Catholic pontiff from 1939 to 1958.

, vice president of the Reichsbank during the war. He ran the day-to-day operations of the central bank.

, German Plenipotentiary to the Italian Social Republic after the fall of Mussolini in 1943.

, the

who directed the evacuation of the last Nazi gold in Bavaria in May 1945.

, French Premier, 1940.

, Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1938 to 1945.

, president of the United States 1933-1945.

, president of the Norwegian Central Bank in 1940.

, Hitler’s leading economic advisor from 1933 to January 1939, when the Führer fired him as president of the Reichsbank.

, Chancellor of Austria in 1938 when Germany took over the country.

, private architect of Hitler and then Minister of Armaments and War Production from 1942 to 1945.

, dictator of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1953.

, the head of the Reichsbank Precious Metals Department. He directed the movement of Nazi gold from Berlin to Merkers in the spring of 1945.

, president of the Dutch Central Bank in 1940.

, top aide to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, Jr. 1934-1945. White was also architect, along with John Maynard Keynes, of the Bretton Woods Conference, which set up the postwar international monetary system. White was an undercover communist agent during that whole time.

, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, who had overall responsibility for the British gold evacuation.

, queen of the Netherlands in 1940.

, ruled his country from 1928 to 1939.

In early spring 1945, the Third Army of General George Patton, Jr. was rolling across Germany, crushing the dispirited Wehrmacht in its path. His G.I.s had already scored victories on the Normandy beaches, bailed out the Battle of the Bulge, and crossed the Rhine River into the Third Reich’s Vaterland late in the evening of March 22. In a special message to his men, Patton bragged that between late January and late March, “You have taken over 6,400 square miles of territory, seized over 3,000 cities, towns, and villages including Trier, Koblenz, Bingen, Worms, Mainz, Kaiserslautern, and Ludwigshafen. You have captured over 140,000 soldiers, killed or wounded an additional 100,000, while eliminating the German 1st and 7th Armies. Using speed and audacity on the ground with support from peerless fighter-bombers in the air, you kept up a relentless round-the-clock attack on the enemy. Your assault over the Rhine at 2200 last night assures you of even greater glory to come.”
¹

Along the way, the general wrote doggerel verse about warfare such as:

For in war just as in loving,

You must always keep on shoving,

Or you will never get your just reward.
²

On April 4, Patton’s 358th infantry regiment captured Merkers, a village in central Germany about 80 miles northeast of Frankfurt and 180 miles southwest of Berlin. The whole area around there was known for its salt mines. Some of them had thirty miles of tunnels. The area’s dense forests gave it the nickname “the green heart of Germany.” The 358th was in the process of cleaning up pockets of enemy resistance and arresting retreating German soldiers trying to disappear into the sea of refugees. When the G.I.s went through Merkers, they heard rumors that the German Reichsbank had been moving gold there in recent days, but nothing was confirmed, so they moved on and set up a command post in Kieselbach a mile and a half down the road.
³

At 8:45 on the morning of April 6, American military policemen Clyde Harmon and Anthony Klein, two privates first class, were guarding a road, when they stopped a pair of French women entering Kieselbach on foot. They were violating the U.S. army curfew that prohibited civilians from being on the streets. One of the women was obviously well along in her pregnancy. The two explained that they were displaced persons from Thionville in northeastern France and were on their way to a midwife in Kieselbach to deliver the baby. The women were taken to the Provost Marshal’s Office and questioned. Their story seemed honest, and they were offered a ride back to Merkers.
⁴

PFC Richard Mootz, who spoke German, drove them. When the three entered the town, the soldier asked the women about the huge Kaiseroda mine facility that they were passing. Sitting in the middle of a green valley of rolling hills, it looked more like a steel mill than a mine. There were large brick buildings plus bridges and cobblestone streets. It resembled a small village. Smokestacks and a giant elevator dominated the skyline, but they were no longer operating. The women explained that the Germans had recently stored gold and paintings underground there, adding that it took local citizens and displaced people three days to unload the first train. PFC Mootz passed the information up the chain of command to Colonel Whitcomb, the chief of staff, and Lt. Col. Russell, the military government officer.