Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion (29 page)

Once there the Norwegians broke the seal on the wagon, removed the cases, and carried them to the
Galathea
, where they placed them in the ship’s armored room. The ship’s paymaster received the key, and Haslund provided him with a receipt to sign that read, “Received from the Norwegian Government Ministry of Finance, represented by the Norwegian Finance Minister Oscar Torp, the following parcels containing gold bars and/or gold coins: two hundred cases, each weighing approximately 45-50 kilograms (100-110 pounds).” The receipt further stated that the cases were “to be shipped via an English port and safely forwarded to the Bank of England.” The commander of the
Galathea
signed it.
³¹

Back in the mountains the situation was getting worse. Fredrik Haslund first decided to get rid of the two chests that contained currency and bank documents. He gave them to a Norwegian couple with orders to deliver them to Finance Minister Torp, who was then in Molde with the rest of the cabinet. While waiting for news that another load of gold could be put on a second British vessel, Haslund sought to round up trucks in case the rail link were cut. Five days passed, but still no new messages arrived.

Finally, the group received word that it was no longer safe to remain in Romsdalshorn. They should move the remaining gold out of the railroad area. The Germans would soon be marching down the valley.

An officer in a nearby transportation unit rounded up twenty-five trucks and drivers to make the transfer. It took all night to load the remaining 1,322 boxes and barrels. An armed guard was placed on each truck, and the group departed, traveling in a half-mile-long convoy. Haslund and Grieg rode in the lead car. The two men had almost reached Åndalsnes, when three German planes began dropping bombs and strafing the trucks. Following instructions issued before the caravan had left, the vehicles stopped on the shoulder of the road. The men scurried to get under cars and trucks, hoping that the Germans would run out of ammunition and leave. The attack lasted about an hour, but no one was killed.
³²

The Norwegians got back in the vehicles and continued to the port. More German planes arrived just as the convoy entered Åndalsnes. Their main target was a torpedo boat in the harbor, but bombs were also falling close to the trucks. Miraculously none took a direct hit. Because of the heavy fighting, it was decided to go to the harbor in Molde, which was thirty-five miles away. The cargo would then be loaded on the British cruiser
Glasgow
along with the king and cabinet. The convoy continued the trip over unpaved country roads. Late in the day, it reached Åfannes, where a ferry captain offered to take them across the fjord. Haslund did not want to risk doing that in daylight, so the men waited for nightfall and went on two ferries. The crossing took six hours. The convoy finally reached Molde just before dawn. The trucks stayed just outside the city limits, while the leaders made a phone call to Minister Torp to get new instructions. The drivers and men by now had been traveling forty-eight hours without sleep.

The boxes of gold were put in a temporary holding location in the cellar of the Oscar Hansen clothing factory under a concrete floor topped with heavy planking. The next day German bombs fell constantly, with some even landing on the textile plant. The gold, though, was safe. Four trucks that had been damaged on the trip had to be abandoned, but Hansen was able to get two replacements to carry the load.
³³

Early in the morning of April 28, British General P.G.T. Paget received orders from London to evacuate his troops out of Central Norway in order to concentrate their efforts further north. At 5:00 A.M. he informed General Ruge, the commanding Norwegian officer, of the British decision. The Norwegians were already unhappy with the disappointing support they had received from the British. When he heard the news, Ruge said bitterly, “So Norway is to share the fate of Czechoslovakia and Poland. But why? Why withdraw when your troops are unbeaten?” He then turned around and walked away. After cooling down, Ruge went back, and told Paget, “But these things are not for us to decide, general. We are soldiers, and have to obey.”
³⁴

While the final war drama was being played out, the men with the gold convoy bunked down in Molde at a junior high school, where they stayed from the morning of April 26 to the afternoon of April 29. Guards watched over the gold. At one point a fire broke out and spread to houses nearby. The small unit of men fought the flames and rescued some containers that held gold coins.

Haslund at last received a message to move his cargo to the main Molde pier by 10:00 P.M. The
Glasgow
would be arriving with two destroyers as escorts. One ship was going take the Norwegian cabinet members, top civil servants, and the country’s king and crown prince to Tromsø, the country’s northern-most city. The captain was insistent that the ship had to leave at 1:00 A.M. so it could be clear of the coast before it was light. Allied and German forces near there were fighting the fiercest battle of the invasion. Tromsø would be the Norwegian government’s last stand on national soil. German attacks on the city and harbor continued relentlessly. Finance Minister Torp, who was following the fate of the gold from a villa outside the city along with Ole Colbjørnsen, a director of the Bank of Norway, agreed that the bank official should accompany the gold to London.
³⁵

Trucks carried the remaining gold to the Apotekderkaien dock in Molde, where it was transported in two small ships to the
Glasgow
. Colbjørnsen tried counting them as they arrived on board, but eventually the system broke down. Just lugging the fifty-pound boxes onto the ship was enough work. King Håkon watched from the bridge as the Norwegians carried boxes up the steep gangplank. A young British sailor suggested that they grease it with soap so that the boxes would move more easily.

The process, though, was taking too long, and the Norwegian gold team decided that they had to drive the remainder through the burning city directly to the ship. Four trucks carrying ten tons of gold each then weaved their way down a small road. Just as they were reaching the dock, a German plane began dropping bombs. British sailors aboard used the cruiser’s fire hoses to spray a path for the trucks through the fire. From the deck of the
Glasgow
, Colbjørnsen realized all the gold could not be loaded, so he ran down the gangplank and yelled to Haslund, “Fredrik! You’ll have to get the rest up north as best you can!”
³⁶

Then Colbjørnsen scrambled back up the gangplank, the last man to get on board. Sailors cut the mooring lines holding the ship to the dock, and the
Glasgow
slowly pulled out of the Molde harbor with twenty-eight Norwegians, including the king and crown prince, plus twenty-three tons of gold on board. Anti-aircraft guns blasted away at German aircraft still determined to sink the vessel, and much of the quay was now on fire. The
Glasgow
, though, avoided a direct hit.
³⁷
Back at the dock, Fredrik Haslund made a quick check and discovered that he still had some 18 tons of gold. Someone tried to cheer him up by saying that saving at least half a loaf was better than nothing, but that didn’t give him much consolation.

Earlier the Norwegian gold team had learned about the
Driva
, a 330-ton steamship that hauled passengers and freight among the islands on Norway’s west coast. It was currently docked at a pier on the other side of the city, and the captain was willing to help the war effort. The trucks again made their way through piles of war debris and the stench of burning human and animal flesh to the dock where the ship was moored. The totally exhausted soldiers immediately loaded the remaining gold onto the
Driva
. German planes continued to drop bombs, but no damage was done. The vessel left the harbor as fast as possible with the remaining gold aboard.

The next day, Haslund set out to round up more fishing vessels and located two similar, but smaller, ships to help with the job. While on his scouting trip, he learned that a German plane had attacked the
Driva
. It was now beached north of Molde on the island of Visnes. Its bow had gotten stuck in the sand. The quick-thinking captain, though, refloated the ship by moving the heavy gold to the stern and then headed toward the ferry landing in the fishing port of Gimnes for repairs.
³⁸

Haslund realized that the Germans were now attacking every ship in sight. Local police urged him to use small fishing boats known as puffers to transport the gold further north. They normally carried four to six fishermen and poked along at the rate of just six to eight knots. Their great advantage was that they could travel at night and slip between islands without German airplanes spotting them. Haslund quickly located five puffers, the
Heimdal
,
Bard
,
Leif
,
Gudrun
, and
Svanen
. The two-hundred-and-sixty boxes of gold were then divided equally among four of the vessels and loaded in complete darkness. Guards traveled in the last fishing boat, so they could rescue a gold boat if it got into trouble. A local official gave the little armada’s captains a detailed route for how to go from island to island.
³⁹

At dawn on May 1, the puffers left the harbor. They stopped frequently, but had no contact with local residents to protect the secrecy of their mission. The gold team tried to ignore rumors, which were rife. Haslund decided that if the Germans stopped them, he would hide the gold on an uninhabited island or sink the vessels in shallow water.

The ploy worked, and the puffers attracted little attention. In the uninhabited Lammevågen bay in the town of Inntian, the bullion was transferred to two bigger and more seaworthy fishing boats, the
Alfhild II
and the
Stølvaag
, and they set off for the port of Sauøy.
⁴⁰
The two skippers were seasoned seamen who knew the coastline as well as they knew the layouts of their own cottages. The local sheriff also arranged for the crews to go overland. Meanwhile, the Germans continued to push the Norwegian and allied troops northward.

Haslund directed the whole expedition from the
Stølvaag
, with Nordahl Grieg acting as his deputy and Hanna Eilertsen as the cook for the crew of four. The
Alfhild II
had six men aboard. By then the nights were getting shorter, so they were sometimes forced to travel in daylight. One day a Germany pontoon plane flew directly over the
Stølvaag
seemingly without noticing it. When they came close to a battle between German planes and British destroyers, the two ships headed for shore, where they hunkered down for several hours. In the middle of the Andfjorden fjord the
Stølvaag
almost ran into a submerging German submarine that was only thirty yards away.

Finally on the morning of May 9, the two vessels anchored in a small bay near Tromsø, and the crews walked into town. After learning that his boss Torp was due there the next day, Haslund wrote out a full report of what had happened. Two days later, the boxes of gold were brought to the Bank of Norway’s office in town and the contents were counted. Everything was present and accounted for. Torp inspected the boats and thanked the crews for their bravery. He also decided to send Haslund to Britain with the remaining gold and asked Nordahl Grieg to go with him as his assistant. The British Consul in Tromsø was instructed to contact the Norwegians when the transfer of gold to the British should take place.
⁴¹

While they were killing time waiting for the British to take the gold off their hands, the cook on Haslund’s ship became sick. A doctor came aboard the
Stølvaag
and diagnosed her as having scarlet fever. Haslund explained that he had also been suffering from fever and a sore throat for several weeks. The doctor said he undoubtedly had been carrying the illness and had infected the cook. The doctor was stunned that Haslund had undergone his incredible ordeal with a walking case of scarlet fever. By then he was no long contagious, and the voyage continued.

Despite the chaos of war and the struggle to keep the gold away from the Germans, Nordahl Grieg somehow found time to write a patriotic poem entitled simply “May 17, 1940.” That is the Norwegian Independence Day, and he read the poem to his fellow countrymen over Norwegian radio from the station in Tromsø. Its most poignant lines:

We fight for the right of breathing

Now, but a day shall be

When Norsemen shall breathe together,

The air of a land set free.
⁴²

The
Stølvaag
was needed for other naval action, so the gold was transferred to the
Alfhild II
on the night of May 19-20. Now all the remaining gold was in the hands of Haslund and Grieg, and one or the other always stayed on board the ship to watch over it at all times.
⁴³

Close to midnight on May 21, the British consul came out to the
Alfhild II
and told Haslund and Grieg to deliver their cargo to the British cruiser
Enterprise
, which was just then dropping anchor in the Tromsøysundet strait. Two days earlier, when the ship arrived with the cruiser
Devonshire
, German planes had attacked them. One bomb fell only twenty-five feet away, but miraculously no damage was done. British sailors quickly loaded the last eighteen tons of Norwegian gold onto the
Enterprise
.

The Germans undoubtedly had no idea of the mission of the
Enterprise
and the
Devonshire
, but on the evening of May 23 Nazi aircraft attacked them at anchor and one large bomb fell again only a few yards away. Later while the cruisers were refueling in the harbor, Nazi planes again bombed the
Enterprise
, but again there was no serious damage. The two ships finally left on the morning of May 24 and received an order to head for Great Britain that evening.