Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion (21 page)

In August 1939, just before the German invasion, the Polish Central Bank owned 87 tons of gold. Of that just over three-quarters was located in the country. $36.4 million was at the central bank headquarters in Warsaw, and the rest was in regional locations: Siedlce $15.1 million; Brest, $7.6 million; $5.7 million in Zamo
; and $3.8 million in Lublin. Abroad it had $4.8 million at the Bank of France, $12.1 million with the Bank of England, $2.2 million at the U.S. Federal Reserve, and a small amount at the Société de Banque Suisse.
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The Free City of Danzig on the Baltic, a product of the World War I peace settlement, was a city-state independent of either Poland or Germany, although it was contiguous with both. It consisted of the city of Danzig plus 200 surrounding villages and also had its own central bank. Beginning in 1934, the Bank of Danzig started shipping its gold to the Reichsbank in Berlin. On September 4, 1939, its account was closed, and the four tons of bullion was added to the Reichsbank’s holdings.
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The declared German gold holdings looked as if they were very low, but in reality were still holding strong enough, thanks to the stolen Austrian and Czech bullion. On September 1, 1939, Germany had declared reserves of 28.6 tons but hidden gold of 82.7 tons. In addition, it had 12.1 tons in regional German banks, 99 tons of Austrian gold, and 43.3 tons of Czech bullion. The total came to a comfortable 265.7 tons.
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The first two days after the war broke out, Polish central bank officials were confident that the nation’s army would stop, or at least slow, the invading German forces. The distance between Berlin and Warsaw was more than three hundred miles. Nonetheless, the Polish government on September 3, decided to send 13.5 tons of gold east one hundred miles to an ancient military fortress in the city of Brest. At the same time, the bank’s staff also began packing up the rest of the Warsaw gold plus other valuables so that they could be moved quickly. Blaring air-raid alarms often interrupted the work, and staff members had to scramble to take refuge in the bank’s main vault.

At 11:00 P.M. on September 3, the first five shipments left the central bank’s office for Brest in buses that belonged to the State Printing office. With the war deteriorating for Poland by the hour, bank officials ordered that 15.1 tons located in its branch office in Siedlce, the largest concentration outside Warsaw, also be shipped to Brest. That same night, Treasury Minister Stanisław Sadkowski instructed the bankers to prepare to send all the gold in Warsaw to a destination in the east that was still to be determined. Officials quickly finished packing the bullion into wooden crates and then waited for instructions.
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On September 5, the Polish government decided to evacuate Warsaw and move to Lublin one hundred miles southeast of the capital. Foreign diplomats followed them out of the capital. The Polish army took control of whatever remained of the country’s telegraph and telephones, trains, cars, and gasoline.

That night, the central bank president and four members of the board left Warsaw in automobiles, carrying the last remaining gold. Before departing, bank official Stanisław Orczykowski made a detailed inventory of the gold that had been packed. He ended his memo: “The vault is empty. Not even one bar is left inside.”
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The treasury ministry that same day, finally ordered the central bank to ship all its valuables in Warsaw to the central bank’s branch office in Lublin. Colonel Adam Koc arrived at the Polish bank’s headquarters to take over responsibility for the operation. With a bald head and owlish eyes behind rimless glasses, the slender Koc was both a military and a political veteran. Born in 1891 in Suwałki in the Polish part of the Russian Empire, he became politically active while a student at his trade school and a member of a combat-and-rifle club. After graduating from military school in 1912, he joined the fight for Polish independence. His
nom de guerre
was Witold. By 1915, he was a courier in Scandinavia for General Piłsudski. Koc was wounded in September 1916 and taken prisoner, but was released in April 1918 and returned to the Polish military headquarters, where he took on increasingly important military jobs. He served as deputy minister of the Treasury from 1930 to 1936 and was later elected to the Polish Senate in 1938. He was also a board member of Warsaw’s Handlowy Bank.
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Koc’s first stop after receiving his new assignment was to go to Warsaw’s Paderewski Park, the capital’s large forest area, where ten buses from the Polish National Railway and the Warsaw bus company plus two trucks were waiting. The vehicles, though, badly needed repair, and he immediately ordered Lt. Andrzej Jenicz to take care of the ailing vehicles. Koc next went to the Bank of Poland, where he met with Managing Director Władysław Bryka and director Leon Bara
ski, who showed him that the gold had already been packed and was ready to be shipped.
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Koc decided for security reasons to use fifteen buses to transport the gold so that the cargo was less likely to attract attention amid the flood of refugees trying to go south. In addition, it was put in ordinary packing boxes to make it less conspicuous. They were secured with steel bands. A few carefully selected people were chosen to travel in the buses to add to the camouflage. Koc ordered that the buses travel mostly at night without headlights. The destination was Lublin, one hundred miles southeast of the capital.

Warsaw by then was in total chaos, with government officials, diplomats, soldiers, and average citizens all trying to evacuate. Everything moved at a crawl, and Nazi planes frequently strafed the mobs. Ryszard Zolski, a young film director, later wrote: “Most of the people were walking, pushing anything on a wheel or wheels, handcarts or simply prams laden with bundles of clothes, pots and pans, babies and small toddlers.”
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Although the gold convoy had to travel just one hundred miles, it arrived only the next morning. All the crates were immediately stored in the branch bank’s cellar; but the following day the bankers received orders to move again, this time to Lutsk, 130 miles southeast. A few hours after the bankers departed Lublin, German planes bombed the area. Still traveling in buses and cars originally picked up in Warsaw, the convoy again drove through the night. Travel on the treacherous roads was made worse by having to move in darkness. The gold was hidden in forests during the day, and drivers would set off again after dusk. The last stopover was at a village manor. Despite the risk, the convoy of buses and cars arrived safely in Lutsk, and the crates of gold were stored this time in the cellar of the bank office there.
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While the central bank treasure was on the road, Koc recruited two other Piłsudski Colonels to help him with his assignment. The first was Henryk Floyar-Rajchman, who was two years younger than Koc but shared the same experience of growing up in the Polish part of the Russian Empire. Born in Warsaw as Henryk Rajchman, he went into the anti-Russian underground while still a youth, where he took the
nom de guerre
Floyar and later added that to his surname. He was a devoted follower of Piłsudski and served during World War I in one of his units. Floyar-Rajchman left the army in 1931 to enter politics and served as Minister of Industry and Trade from 1933 to 1935. While he only attained the rank of major, he was still considered a Piłsudski Colonel.

Koc also asked Ignacy Matuszewski, who was the same age, to join the taskforce. He had studied philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, the oldest institute of higher education in Poland, as well as studying architecture in Milan. In early World War I, he served in a Russian intelligence unit, but after the Soviet revolution organized a group of Polish fighters in Petrograd who called themselves the Matuszewski Poles. After the Bolsheviks condemned him to death in absentia, he fled to Kiev and eventually joined the new Polish army. While a long-time supporter of Piłsudski, Matuszewski broke with him over economic policy. He left the army in 1927 and from 1929 to 1931 was treasury minister. Matuszewski then edited the daily newspaper
Gazeta Polska
and wrote extensively on political issues, warning of the German threat and advocating increased military spending.

Many central bank officials joined the gold team. Among them were Zygmunt Karpi
ski, the governor, Stanisław Orczykowski, the chief cashier, and twenty-one other bank employees. The three Piłsudski Colonels, though, directed the operation.

On September 9, Koc arrived in Lutsk from Warsaw to explain his plan for getting the national treasure out of the country. Polish leaders had already decided that the gold’s final destination was the French National Bank in Paris, with Romania as an intermediate stop. That was about 150 miles south. The plan was to get the treasure to the Black Sea and then somehow take it to France by ship. Since Koc had just been named minister of treasury, he would have to stay with the government, which was moving frequently around the country as the war situation deteriorated. He appointed Floyar-Rajchman to be responsible for the vehicles, and he discarded useless equipment, stocked up on fuel, and organized the police escorts. Matuszewski was put in charge of protecting the gold after it crossed the border into Romania and getting it safely to France.
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Koc instructed bank governor Karpi
ski to leave the group and travel to Paris as soon as possible to handle matters there. That same day, the Bank of Poland president gave him a document authorizing him “to dispose on his own authority the stocks of gold which are now or will [in the] future be deposited to the account of the Bank of Poland in foreign banks.” In his rush to get out of Warsaw, Karpi
ski hadn’t brought along his passport, so he first had to get a new one in Kremenets, fifty miles to the south, where the Polish Foreign Ministry was temporarily housed. By the time he arrived there it was dark, and the town was under a blackout. Nonetheless he and others worked by candlelight in the cellar of the town’s castle to send cables to Polish embassies in Bucharest and Paris. The French ambassador Léon Noël, who had also taken temporary refuge in Kremenets, suggested that the gold be sent to Paris on French warships traveling first through the Black Sea and then to the Mediterranean.