Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion (23 page)

Without realizing that the Polish gold had already left Romania for Turkey, German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop sent a cable to his ambassador in Bucharest with instructions that it be passed along to the government. The dispatch read: “I draw your attention to the fact that if the Polish gold actually finds itself within Romanian territory, the Romanian government should have it confiscated and secured.”
²⁶

After departing Constan
a, Captain Brett sailed south along the coastline toward Istanbul. On September 16 at 3:30 P.M., the
Eocene
dropped anchor in the port of Kabataç in the middle of the Bosphorus, which connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Ocean. Directly ahead of the ship was the German embassy, flying a large swastika flag. A German yacht soon began circling the ship, taking pictures from every angle.

No one was sure how the Turkish government would handle the situation. Both sides in the war were leaning on Turkey to join it in the war, so Brett told harbor authorities that the ship was in transit. Fifteen minutes after landing, he contacted the British consul-general in Istanbul and learned that only he would be allowed to leave the ship. The Poles had to remain on board, although local Polish officials could come out to meet them.

With the British now determining the fate of the Polish gold, the first proposal was to transfer the cargo to a British or French warship and take it to either London or Paris. The Turks vetoed that plan. The only other alternative was to send it overland by train across Turkey and the French-controlled Levant, the colonial name for the region of Syria and Lebanon, to Beirut. From there it could be shipped to France.

Two hours after the
Eocene
landed, the Polish consul in Istanbul arrived with the news that the Turkish government had agreed to let the cargo be transported across its territory to Beirut. The consul also suggested that it be deposited temporarily in a local bank. Matuszewski rejected that suggestion. It was staying on board. The consul also passed along a rumor that Germans were attempting to buy a Greek boat so that they could ram into the
Eocene
and sink both the vessel and its cargo.

It took Matuszewski and the others two days to work out all the details. The final issue was payment. The Turks were demanding that the Poles pay the equivalent of $30,000 in Turkish lira before the train could leave the country. They would not accept any other currency or even payment in gold. The Poles were not carrying that kind of money, but the local ambassador’s wife suggested asking Archibald V. Walker, the wealthy Middle East representative for Socony-Vacuum, who had that kind of cash on hand. Walker agreed, and the ambassador wrote him out a receipt.
²⁷

The next afternoon on September 20, the
Eocene
pulled up anchor and moved to Istanbul’s majestic Haydarpa
a Terminal, where during the evening the gold was offloaded to a train that consisted of a dining car, two sleeping cars, and nine baggage wagons. Late that evening, the passengers left the ship and boarded the train. Captain Robert Brett then returned to his routine life in Kabataç.

Two days later, the Polish gold train in the evening reached the Syrian border, where a French military unit took over responsibility for it. The trip went smoothly and quickly, until it arrived in Riyak, a no-man’s-land between Syria and Lebanon, where the gold had to be unloaded once again to go from a standard to a narrow-gauge train. With that mission accomplished, the new train started up again, traveling through a pine forest that was a pleasant change after the barren Turkish desert. The Poles soon saw the lights of Beirut in the distance. The shipment arrived there on September 23, and went directly to the harbor, where the cruiser
Émile Bertin
, the fastest ship in the French fleet, was waiting to take the gold.
²⁸

The city and the port were swelteringly hot, which may have been the reason why Matuszewski soon got into an argument with Gabriel Puaux, the French high commissioner for Syria and Lebanon. He wanted all the gold immediately loaded aboard the
Émile Bertin
so that it could depart for France before the German submarines knew what was happening. The vessel, he explained, was the fastest warship in the world and could make a rapid getaway. Its commander, Robert Battet, was ready to leave. Matuszewski disagreed, saying that they should split the cargo into two shipments to reduce the risk of losing everything in one sinking.

Rear Admiral M.F.L.F. de Carpentier, the commander of the fleet, agreed with Matuszewski, and it was decided that three-quarters of it would go on the
Émile Bertin
. The rest would follow later. On the evening of September 23, three hundred men loaded 886 crates of Polish gold onto the cruiser. The project took three hours.
²⁹

French naval regulations did not allow civilians on board a warship, but an exception was made so that two Polish central bank employees, Tomasz Ku
nierz and Władysław Bojarski, could accompany it on the voyage to France. Bojarski was watching a crane lift crates of gold and lower them into the ship’s hold, when a French sailor suddenly shouted to him to get below deck. When he arrived there, he saw that a net carrying several crates had ripped, sending the containers crashing down and breaking open. French sailors stood in stunned silence looking at the gold bars. They had never been told about the ship’s new cargo. A French boatswain quickly told the sailors to get to work nailing the boxes back together. Bojarski watched in the miserable heat below deck until the job was completed.

Near midnight on September 23, and with its lights blacked out, the
Émile Bertin
headed out to sea. Its destination: the Toulon naval base on the French Mediterranean coast. The ship left on a zigzag course in order to make it harder for U-boats to attack. With French sailors manning anti-aircraft guns and mid-range artillery, the departure went smoothly. Once the ship was out to sea, the commanding naval officer in Beirut sent a message to his superior that the Poles had refused to send all the gold on one ship, so eighteen tons still remained there. It would have to come later. West of Malta, the
Émile Bertin
passed two convoys going in the opposite direction.

The two Poles bunked in the cabin normally reserved for Admiral Jean-François Darlan, the commander of the French fleet, and his wife, when they were on board. The guests also ate in the officer’s mess and were delighted with the French cuisine and the wines that were served. Commodore Battet, on the other hand, remained on the bridge for the entire voyage, even eating his meals and sleeping there.

The French officers and crew grew nervous when the ship approached the Italian coast near Sicily. Everyone on board worried that German U-boats might be stationed there, but nothing untoward occurred. The
Émile Bertin
reached the French coast at sunrise on September 27. A small scouting plane took off from the deck to make a reconnaissance flight, but immediately went into the sea because the strong morning sun had temporarily blinded the pilot. The ship’s crew quickly pulled both the pilot and plane out of the water. In Toulon, Commodore Stanislaw Lasocki, the Polish naval attaché in Paris, welcomed the ship, its passengers, and the gold to France. The ship’s cargo was temporarily stored in the base’s armory.

On October 2, two French cruisers,
Épervier
and
Vauban
, left Beirut for Toulon under the command of Commodore Chardenot with the remaining 205 crates and 93 bags of Polish gold. A Bank of Poland official was on each ship, which arrived safely in Toulon on October 6.
³⁰

After all the gold had landed, it was sent by armored train to the Banque de France’s regional office in Nevers, three hundred miles northwest of Toulon. On October 18, Zygmunt Karpi
ski and Stanislaw Orczykowski, two Bank of Poland officials, inspected and counted all the crates and bags of gold at Nevers. The gold was exactly the same amount that had left Sniatyn, Poland on September 13. Only the three tons that Floyar-Rajchman and his men lost to the Romanians at the Polish embassy in Bucharest, were missing.

Pierre-Eugène Fournier, the governor of the Banque de France, offered the Polish bankers two options for storing their gold. It could be handed over as an earmarked account, the popular way central banks held foreign bullion, or he would give vault space at no cost in one of their branches. In the latter case, the Poles would have total responsibility for it. They selected the second option. The Polish government-in-exile sold eight tons of the bullion to the Banque de France in order to obtain money to run this new set of operations.
³¹

A total of 70 tons of Polish gold had been shipped out of Warsaw in the early days of September 1939. All but the small amount left in Poland or confiscated in Romania had safely reached France. The long saga of the Polish gold, though, was far from over.

At the end of World War I, several new nations were on the map of northern Europe. Three of them were called the Baltic States, and they were Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. The fourth was Finland. None had been independent prior to the war. The Russian Empire had ruled Latvia for nearly two centuries. Lithuania had been incorporated into either Poland or Russia. Estonia had been part of Denmark and Sweden. Finland had been part of the Kingdom of Sweden from the thirteenth century to 1809, and then most of the Finns became citizens of an autonomous part of the Russian Empire. The czar then ruled the area as its Grand Duke.