Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion (22 page)

The Polish gold by now was spread out all over the country. The largest amount was in Brest, but there was also some in Lutsk and still more was in Zamo
. The new goal was to get all of it to the village of Sniatyn, a Jewish
shtetl
on the border with Romania that was also a rail crossing point between the two countries.

Soldiers and central bank employees poured over maps to determine the best routes to take and set up strict rules for the operation. The buses and trucks would travel only at night since in daylight they would be easy targets for German planes that controlled the skies. Two drivers were assigned to each truck, and they would alternate periods of driving. Vehicles were instructed to travel in a tight formation at the speed of the slowest one. There was plenty of light from the moon that had been full on September 9. The convoy would stop at daybreak and park in a wooded area until it was dark.

The first gold train left Brest. During a stop in Dubno, an ancient town famous for its castle, Polish military officials took seventy crates containing four tons of gold off the train, saying that they needed it for some unknown eventuality such as buying weapons abroad. At about the same time, a train left Zamo
also heading to the Polish-Romanian border. The convoy of buses, trucks, and cars left Lutsk under the leadership of Floyar-Rajchman.
²⁰

On September 11, the fleet of trucks and buses reached a large but very old bridge over the Siret River, the border between Poland and Romania. The load capacity for it was one ton, but the loaded vehicles each weighed about twelve tons. The last thing the leaders wanted to do was to have to pull trucks from the water below. They finally decided to send just three trucks across to test the bridge. It then took them three hours to get all the trucks to the Romanian side.
²¹
One of the members of the group had a short-wave radio and picked up transmissions among Soviet agents who knew about the gold and were desperately trying to find it. Meanwhile, German planes bombed an area that the Poles had recently passed.
²²

After setting out the overall strategy, Koc on September 11 departed for Romania, arriving there the next day. He went immediately to see the Polish ambassador, who was in talks with Romanian government officials. While the trains, buses, and cars were heading toward the border, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs formally requested that the Romanian government permit the gold to pass travel through its territory and also provide a train to make that happen.

With the Polish high command continuously retreating, the war was worsening by the hour. By September 12, the top military leaders were in Młynów near the Romanian border, and their southern front was on the verge of collapse. In addition, the Poles feared that the Soviet Union would enter the conflict at any moment.

War refugees were overflowing the village of Sniatyn. Fate, though, was for once smiling on the beleaguered Poles. On the evening of September 13, the first gold train arrived in Sniatyn. Two hours later, the one from Zamo
pulled into town with more bullion. Later that day, the convoy from Lutsk also arrived. With the exception of the four tons handed over to the military, all of the Polish national treasure was now in the same place ready to move into Romania.

By then, Koc and the Polish ambassador in Bucharest had worked out a deal that allowed the gold to be transported through Romania. A bridge separated the two countries, and the plan was for Polish engineers to drive a train to the other side of the bridge, where Romanians would take it over and transport it to the Romanian-Turkish border. Matuszewski feared that the bridge might have been sabotaged, but finally decided to risk everything and load all 1,208 crates of gold onto the train. The job took four hours, with policemen, railroad workers, soldiers, and bank employees all helping.

At half-past midnight on September 14, the gold train began creeping across the bridge into Romania. There were no glitches, and the cargo immediately departed on an eighteen-hour trip to its next destination: Constan
a, a Romanian port on the Black Sea.

The Germans, however, were still determined to get the gold. The ambassador in Bucharest sent a telegram to Berlin saying that Koc had arrived in the capital and incorrectly reported that he had tried to deposit the gold at its national bank. “The Romanian government gave no permission,” the ambassador cabled. The next day, the German Foreign Ministry instructed their ambassador in Bucharest to tell the Romanian government that allowing the Polish gold to pass through the country would be “considered a heavy violation of the neutrality policy.” That same day, the Romanian government finally closed its border with Poland. On September 18, the German ambassador sent Berlin a message saying, “The minister of foreign affairs promised me that no further transportations shall be permitted to leave Romanian borders.”
²³

When everyone else was settled, Floyar-Rajchman went back to Poland to pick up the four tons of gold that the National Defense Fund had been holding to buy weapons since that looked increasingly unlikely, given the rapid advance of German and Soviet forces. He had to dodge attacks from both German and Soviet troops, who had invaded Poland on September 17 to claim their part of the dismembered country. Just before the Soviets took over Sniatyn, Floyar-Rajchman and his team arrived and picked up the gold. It was impossible to load it onto a train because enemy air attacks had destroyed the local railroad station. So Floyar-Rajchman and his men went to the town of Kuty on the Romanian border, where the Polish army had established its last defensive outpost in the country. He and his team finally slipped fifty-one boxes holding three tons of gold into Romania on two trucks, a bus, and a car, which took it to the Polish embassy in Bucharest. The men and the gold arrived there at 2:00 in the morning of September 24. Romanian troops, though, were waiting for them in the courtyard and seized the gold. The Bucharest government kept it for the rest of the war on the pretext that the proceeds would be spent on the care of the Polish refugees now in the country.

The British had been closely watching the Polish gold saga from a distance in hopes that it could be kept out of German hands. When the Poles asked if Britain could help get their national treasure to France, London sent instructions to its embassy in Bucharest to find a ship large enough to carry the heavy cargo. Few vessels were available, but on the afternoon of September 14, the British vice consul in Constan
a hired the
SS Eocene
, a 4,000-ton tanker that had been transporting oil from Baku on the Caspian Sea to Greece. Socony-Vacuum Oil, the forerunner of Mobil Oil, had chartered it, and the captain was the Englishman Robert E. Brett. Almost immediately, he received two telephone messages. One was from the German ambassador protesting the transportation of the gold through Romania. The second call was a warning about air attacks. At about 10:00 that night, the vice consul instructed Brett to move his ship to a new berth and keep “full steam up,” so that he could depart on short notice.
²⁴

Just after midnight, the train with the Polish gold arrived at the new dock. Since the vessel had no mechanical cranes to move the heavy material, bank employees and local longshoremen started moving the 1,200 cases onto the
Eocene
. The tanker was not designed for carrying such heavy boxes, which had to be stored wherever possible. In addition to the cargo, twenty-seven passengers, including six women and two children, came aboard. Most of them were Poles who had helped bring the gold to Constan
a.

By 7:15 A.M., the cargo was finally loaded; but by then six members of the ship’s original Romanian crew had deserted out of fear that the vessel would be attacked.
²⁵
It took several hours to find replacements, and Captain Brett had to pay them hefty bonuses to take on the risky job. Finally just after 4:00 P.M., the
Eocene
pulled up anchor and headed at full speed for Istanbul, Turkey. As he departed, the captain stayed as long as he could in shallow waters so that if a German U-boat attacked, the ship’s cargo could still be rescued.

German diplomats in Bucharest were outraged when they learned that the
Eocene
had departed. At 5:30 that afternoon, they sent a cable to Berlin saying, “It has been confirmed from Constan
a that the English tanker
Eocene
sailed in empty on 14 September and then set out towards Istanbul. There were fifty Poles on board and fourteen freight cars, three of which contained the gold.”