Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion (27 page)

On September 27, 1939, the day Warsaw fell, Hitler told the heads of his three military services that he wanted to open his next offensive in the west as soon as possible. The initial objective was to conquer the Low Countries of Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg, but that objective was soon enlarged to include northern France. This was the same area where German forces in World War I initially had great success, but then got bogged down in trench warfare and eventually lost the war. Hitler remembered those days with both agony and anger. He vowed that this time it would be different.

Hitler issued Führer-Directive Number Six on October 9 for the invasion of the four countries, expecting that it would be launched in only a few weeks. Just ten days later, General Franz Halder, the chief-of-staff of the German army high command, presented the first draft of the operation code-named Case Yellow. Hitler wanted to begin the offensive on November 12, 1939, the day after the signing of the humiliating armistice ending World War I. Hitler stated that his objective was to conquer “as much territory as possible in Holland, Belgium, and northern France to serve as a base for the successful prosecution of the air and sea war against England and as a wide protective area for the economically vital Ruhr.”
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The invasion date, though, kept slipping, and on the morning of January 10, Army Major Hellmuth Reinberger was carrying Wehrmacht plans for the invasion on a flight from the Loddenheide airport near Munster to Cologne, which then had to make a forced landing in Vucht, Belgium. He had been specifically ordered to take the train to avoid just such an accident, but he flew so that he could spend some extra time with his new wife. In a panic, the major tried to burn the secret documents and nearly set himself on fire in the process. When the Belgians discovered the contents, they quickly distributed them to officials in Holland, France, and Britain. Hitler was livid when he learned what had happened, but he might not have been all that unhappy because he had never thought highly of the original plan.
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Upon further reflection and pressure from his naval commander Admiral Erich Raeder, Hitler changed his mind and decided to invade Denmark and Norway first in order to eliminate the possibility that Britain could use those countries in the future as a forward base in a conflict with Germany. When British forces stopped a German vessel in Norwegian waters and searched it, Hitler was more determined than ever to neutralize the two Nordic countries. On February 19, he ordered new plans be drawn up for the invasion of the two Scandinavian countries. The code name was
Fall Weserübung
(Case Weser Exercise) after the Weser River in northwestern Germany.
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The area was also important to Nazis war plans because it was the gateway to high-quality Swedish iron ore, which came from the Kiruna area in the far northern part of the country. Germany had to import large amounts of iron ore because of the low quality of its own, which was not weapons grade. Admiral Raeder, the head of the navy, later wrote, “Swedish ore for steel was the heart of our war economy and without which our armament industries would have died overnight.”
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There were only two ways for Germany to transport the Swedish ore to the
Vaterland
. One route was via the Swedish port of Luleå in the Baltic, but that was frozen from December to May. The second was via the Norwegian port of Narvik, which was open all year long. The Nazi war effort, Raeder argued, could not rely on getting iron ore only half the year via Luleå. Germany therefore needed to control the port of Narvik.

Generals Wilhelm Keitel and Alfred Jodl recommended that Hitler appoint General Nicholaus von Falkenhorst, a member of an old military family, to command
Weserübung
. He had served during World War I in Finland as a military advisor helping the Finns fight the Russians, which gave him experience fighting in the Nordic area. He had also been successful in the Nazi invasion of Poland. At the time, he was commanding an army corps stationed in the Rhineland town of Koblenz. Hitler and Falkenhorst met for the first time on February 21, and the Führer talked with him only about his experience in Finland.
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After a brief talk, Hitler ordered the general to return at 5:00 that afternoon with a plan to occupy Norway. The Germans lacked proper maps of the country, so Falkenhorst went to a nearby bookstore and bought a Baedeker travel guide. As he said later, he had “to find out just what Norway was like. I didn’t have any idea.” The general quickly saw that his biggest challenge was going to be Norway’s long 1,500-mile coastline. After working up his plan at the nearby Kaiserhof hotel, Falkenhorst returned to the Führer at the scheduled time. His proposal was similar to one a naval taskforce had already made, and Hitler appointed him to lead the operation.

The occupation of Denmark was not originally part of
Weserübung
. It was included later because German military leaders wanted to gain control of airbases in northern Denmark in order to facilitate airborne attacks on Norway. Air Force Marshal Hermann Göring also insisted on having a larger role for his Luftwaffe. Falkenhorst and his staff easily agreed.

On February 29, Hitler approved Falkenhorst’s final battle plan, and the following day put out a four-page war directive. Only nine copies were made. The first sentence said that the objective was to occupy both Norway and Denmark, while the second sentence gave the rationale: “This would anticipate English action against Scandinavia and the Baltic, would secure our supplies of ore from Sweden, and would provide the Navy and Air Forces with expanded bases for operations against England.” The attack on Norway was renamed
Weserübung Nord
, while the one against Denmark was
Weserübung Süd
. For the first time in military history, the German attack on Norway would involve army, navy, and air force units. Hitler wrote in the order: “It is of the utmost importance that our operations should come as a surprise to the Northern countries as well as to our enemies in the West. This must be kept in mind in making all preparations.”
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Attacks on the two countries were to take place simultaneously down to the minute. The paratroop landings at the civilian airport on the outskirts of Oslo were to be made at precisely Weser Hour plus 185 minutes. A top priority was to capture the Danish and Norwegian kings, Christian X and his younger brother Håkon VII, their governments, as well as the gold stocks of both countries. Deception was a major part of the planning. All the ships in the German flotilla sailing north were given dummy British names that were to be used in wireless communications with Norwegian officials in order to conceal their true nationality until the last possible moment.

By March 20, Falkenhorst had finished his planning and was ready to go to war. The only thing left was to set a date and time for the invasion. The navy wanted to launch it during the period of long, dark nights, when units would have the maximum natural protection while ships and troops were transported north from German ports. The afternoon of April 2, Hitler and his top military officers conducted a final review of the war plans. Hitler decided that Weser Day would be April 9, a week later, with the invasion beginning at 5:15 A.M. Berlin time.

It was widely known in European central bank circles by this time that capturing gold was an integral part of Nazi invasion strategy. In December 1939, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway held talks about protecting their national treasure, which they called their “golden inheritance.” They all agreed to ship large amounts to the U.S. Denmark was in the greatest danger since it shared a border with Germany, so it sent as much as possible and as fast as possible to New York. A first shipment departed in December 1939, and by the end of the month, one-third of the country’s bullion was in the U.S. The pace continued in the new year, and on February 13, 1940, two thousand bags of gold arrived in New York City aboard the
SS Randsfjord
. Just six days later, another two thousand bags landed on the
SS Trafalgar
. The Danes had the Federal Reserve melt down 20 million Reichsmark worth of gold coins that they owned into bars. The last Danish shipment arrived in early March, and by then the Bank of Denmark vault was empty. The government gave Henrik Kauffmann, Copenhagen’s ambassador to the U.S., full authority over the gold.
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The Norwegians had also been diligent in protecting their gold. Nicolai Rygg, the director of the country’s central bank, devised a detailed plan that included both sending it abroad and protecting what remained at home. After the Nazi invasion of Poland, the bank began shipping bullion out of the country, largely to the New York Federal Reserve. By January 1940, more than 170 tons, seventy-one percent of the country’s entire holdings, were outside the country. The remainder was kept in Oslo because of a government rule requiring it to be legal backing for the country’s currency.

Rygg lobbied government leaders to reduce the amount of gold that had to be kept in Oslo during a time of crisis. The law was finally approved on April 8, the day before the invasion. He also ordered the construction of three bombproof vaults in different parts of the country where the metal could be stored. One was near Oslo, one was in Stavanger on the west coast, and the third was in Lillehammer, 112 miles northwest of the capital. Construction on the Lillehammer vault was only completed in January 1940.

In early April, Rygg finalized plans to begin transporting the gold there. The fifty tons of gold was packed in 1,503 wooden crates and thirty-nine small barrels and was ready to be moved. The boxes each weighed between fifty-five pounds and ninety pounds, while the barrels were 175 pounds. Shipments were due to start the following day on April 10.
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Britain’s Winston Churchill, the new First Lord of the Admiralty, also had his eye on Swedish iron ore. He wanted to stop the flow of it by mining the offshore area near Narvik in Norway’s far north. The British cabinet hesitated, but he won support from the new French Prime Minister Paul Reynaud for the plan, and on April 3, the British cabinet authorized the mining and ordered it to begin on April 8. Churchill named the action Wilfred after a cartoon character. A supplementary operation codenamed Plan R4 called for British and French forces to invade four Norwegian ports, Narvik, Trondheim, Bergen, and Stavanger, “the moment the Germans set foot on Norwegian soil, or there is clear evidence that they intend to do so.”
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The German occupation of Denmark went flawlessly. Military historian Douglas Dildy has called the German invasion the “briefest ground campaign on record.” Although anti-Hitler German officers had warned Danish leaders of an invasion, the cabinet refused to mobilize out of fear of precipitating a retaliatory German action. On April 9, at precisely 5:15 A.M., the first invading troops crossed the Danish border just north of Flensburg. The Falkenhorst plan called for a three-pronged attack aimed at the island of Zeeland, the capital Copenhagen to the east, and directly north to Jutland.
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An integral part of the operation was a parachute jump at the military airport at Aalborg. This was to be the first paratroop attack in the history of warfare. Another important objective was to capture quickly both Copenhagen, the capital, and the king, Christian X. The German troopship
Hansestadt Danzig
landed at Langelinie Pier in center city Copenhagen at 6:00 A.M. At nearly the same moment, German planes roared low over the capital and dropped leaflets urging Danes to be calm and cooperate with the Germans. British ambassador Howard Smith wrote in his report on the invasion that the leaflets were “written in a bastard Norwegian-Danish, a curiously un-German disregard of detail.”
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German troops first marched to Kastellet, an old fortress that housed military barracks, which they captured without firing a shot. The invaders then attacked Amalienborg, the royal castle where the king was meeting with his cabinet and top military leaders. Danish guards resisted, and one was killed. Prime Minister Thorvald Stauning and Foreign Minister Edvard Munch then urged the king to halt the fighting. The king asked General William Prior, the commander in chief of the Royal Danish Army, whether he thought “our soldiers had fought long enough.” The general at first replied no. Shortly before 8:00 in the morning, the government broadcast an order over Danish radio not to resist, and at 8:34, the Danish war was over.
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The two top German officials in the country, General Kurt Himer and Minister Cecil von Renthe-Fink, met with the king at 2:00 that afternoon to make sure that he would not try to escape. Himer reported back to Berlin that during the conference the king’s “whole body trembled.” He also indicated that he and his government would do whatever was necessary to avoid further bloodshed. As the meeting was ending, the king said to Himer, “General, may I, as an old soldier, tell you something? As soldier to soldier? You Germans have done the incredible again. One must admit that it is a magnificent work.”
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The German invading force perhaps knew that there would be no gold in Denmark. Two months before the invasion, the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung
, the leading newspaper in German-speaking Switzerland, published an article about the Danish economy that said most of the country’s gold was now stored in New York City. The following month the German press picked that up, reporting that “international high finance” had “abducted” the Danish gold and taken it to the U.S. The article demanded that in the name of the German people it be returned to Denmark.
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Months after he had returned to Copenhagen from the U.S., Carl Valdemar Bramsnæs, the head of the central bank, wrote a long report of this trip that he left in his records. Both its length and detail has surprised historians, who now believe that he wanted to put in writing the decision to ship out the bullion. That way he could explain to German invaders why the vaults were empty. Sure enough, in June 1941, a German diplomat showed up at the Danish central bank office and asked for the Danish gold reserves. He questioned the story that it had been shipped to the U.S. The bank governor was only too happy to show his long 1939 memo.
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