Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion (39 page)

At noon that same day, Admiral Bonham Carter went aboard the
Émile Bertin
to have lunch with Battet. The French officer had ordered his ship’s kitchen to prepare a special meal that would show off his country’s culinary achievements. As an extraordinary lunch passed in front of the two officers, the mood improved. There was less confrontation, and the two veteran naval officers talked candidly. Finally and unexpectedly, Bonham Carter told Battet that his ship could leave the port. He added, “Get out fast.”
²⁷

With neither a pilot boat nor a tug to help it depart, the
Émile Bertin
at 6:00 P.M. pulled away from the dock and turned south toward Martinique. Sailors aboard the French ship quickly noticed that the British heavy cruiser
HMS Devonshire
was following. Battet responded by pushing his ship’s speed up to thirty-four knots and left the slower vessel in his wake. The British ship was short of fuel, and the next morning it turned around and headed back to Halifax.

The
Pasteur
, which had received orders to follow the
Émile Bertin
, did not leave the harbor. The British seized the luxury cruiser and used it as troop ship for the rest of the war under the British flag.

On June 23, the British war cabinet discussed the French gold that was on its way to Martinique. According to the report of the meeting, “The Prime Minister emphasized the importance of getting possession of these two ships [
Béarn
and
Émile Bertin
] and the gold that was aboard.” It also said, “We could announce that we should keep the gold in trust for the French Empire, but that they must not fight for it.” The cabinet ordered the
HMS Dunedin
to proceed at full speed to Martinique, where its captain was to make contact with the most senior French official to “get him on our side.” The cruiser was also instructed to keep the French ships within sight. If the vessels stayed in Martinique well and good, but if they moved, the
Dunedin
should follow them so that they could be intercepted. The war cabinet feared that they might slip across the Atlantic and land at Dakar.
²⁸

The
Émile Bertin
docked safely in Martinique on June 25. Waiting for its arrival outside the harbor was the
Dunedin
, which was soon joined by the
HMS Trinidad
. The two ships then set up a blockade. The French vessel would not be going anywhere without the British.

Two hundred fifty Senegalese troops unloaded the 255 tons of gold and moved it two-and-a-half miles to the military installation Fort Desaix. It took four days to complete the transfer. The cargo was placed in three vaults, where 300 soldiers guarded it. Boxes and bags holding the metal had deteriorated during the trip south because of heavy rain and high humidity, so the French commander ordered new wooden containers made.

The situation in Martinique remained tense for several months. The U.S. considered the Caribbean to be its backyard and part of its zone of influence. Washington quickly made its interests known. Admiral John Greenslade, the U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, twice visited Fort-de-France, and on the second trip told French Admiral George Robert, whom Pétain had named the High Commissioner of the French Antilles, that neither French ships nor the gold could leave the island without American permission. U.S. vessels also joined the British in guarding the entrance to the Martinique harbor. The French later decided that if either the Germans or the Allies attempted to take over the gold at Fort Desaix, they would sink it in 1,000 meters of Caribbean waters.

The French Admiralty sought to get as many ships as possible to Martinique. Just after 8:00 P.M. on June 24, it sent out a message to all its vessels at sea and to naval installations saying that hostilities between France and Germany and Italy would end at thirty-five minutes after midnight French summer time. Less than a hour later, the navy sent a special message to the
Jeanne d’Arc
and the
Béarn
, which were then in the middle of the Atlantic: DO NOT TURN OVER TO ANYONE INDUSTRIAL CARGO WITHOUT FORMAL ORDER STOP. It was too late; their gold was already in Canadian hands.

At 6:07 A.M. the next morning, the French Admiralty sent out another cable: ORDER TO BEARN AND THE JEANNE D’ARC PROCEED TO FORT-DE-FRANCE STOP ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT STOP. The two vessels did not reply, so the following day, another message went out: THE FOLLOWING IS A REPEAT AND A CONFIRMATION STOP ORDER TO BEARN AND JEANNE D’ARC TO PROCEED TO FORT-DE-FRANCE ACKNOWLEDGE RECEIPT STOP. This time the message got through. The two ships quickly turned around and checked their fuel levels to make sure they had enough to make it to Martinique. The captains calculated that if they traveled at only twelve knots they could reach their destination with a little fuel oil left.
²⁹

France soon had a small flotilla docked in the Martinique harbor, and in short order there were also 2,500 French sailors on the island. In addition to the three former gold ships there were nearly thirty smaller French vessels. The
Béarn
was there with about one hundred airplanes that it had picked up in Halifax but never delivered. A short distance away on the French island of Guadeloupe was the cruiser
Jeanne d’Arc
. The war was over for the French sailors and their ships, and the American Navy was now carefully watching the situation in Martinique to make sure that the gold did not move.
³⁰

As Nazi armies in the dark days of May 1940 marched across Western Europe conquering nations at will and grabbing as much gold as they could to finance their future conquests, even Vatican City, the city-state enclave within Rome that is the international headquarters of the Roman Catholic church, became desperate to safeguard its gold.

American presidents over the decades often had an uneasy relationship with the Vatican. The United States has a strong history of separation between church and state, and that made the men in the White House uncomfortable dealing with an institution that combines them. Anti-Catholicism in the U.S. was strong at times, such as during the Know-Nothing Movement in the mid-nineteenth century, which attempted to stop the flow of Irish and German immigrants. The papacy and the U.S. government, in fact, had not had official contact from the fall of the Papal States to the Kingdom of Italy in 1870 until 1933, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked James Farley, his former campaign manager and then postmaster general, to see if he could normalize relations. He visited Rome in 1933, and met with Pope Pius XI.

With Mussolini and Hitler on a brutal mission to dominate Europe, Roosevelt realized that the militarily weak democracies were not equipped to block them. On the evening of December 22, 1939, the president telephoned Myron Taylor, a life-long Episcopalian, and asked him to become his “personal representative” to the Vatican. He would have the rank of ambassador extraordinary. The title was chosen carefully so that the president could avoid any political controversy that might have arisen if he gave Taylor the title ambassador. The White House announced the appointment the next day. At the time, thirty-eight nations had representatives accredited to the pope. In a later letter confirming the Vatican offer, Roosevelt wrote Taylor, “I may from time to time request you to serve as the channel of communications for any views I may wish to exchange with the Pope.”
¹

Taylor at the time was one of the most esteemed businessmen in America. After graduating from the Cornell University Law School in 1894, he first practiced law and then went on to a spectacular career as a Wall Street lawyer. He made a fortune by introducing transparent window envelopes. He also bought up poorly run textile companies and created a management process known as the Taylor Formula. In the 1920s, he turned around the then financially troubled U.S. Steel, which at the time was the largest corporation in the world. He won a reputation for corporate enlightenment in 1937, when his company agreed to collective bargaining with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). That made U.S. Steel the first industrial firm to unionize. Taylor served as its chairman and CEO until 1938.
²

Taylor began a new diplomatic career that same year, when he represented the U.S. at a conference at Évian-les-Bains. France wanted to find new homes for the thousands of Jews that Hitler had forced out of Germany by his anti-Semitic policies, but didn’t want to take them all itself. Representatives from thirty-two countries and thirty-nine private organizations attended the meeting. Before it started, Hitler announced that he would let Jews leave Germany for other countries. The U.S. and Britain quickly made it clear that they would not accept large numbers of Jewish refugees, and the conference was widely considered a failure.

When Roosevelt asked Taylor to go to the Vatican, the pope was Pius XII, who had taken up his job only on March 2, 1938. For many years he had been widely touted as
papabilus
, the Latin term Vatican insiders gave to a cardinal deemed to be a potential pontiff. He had served as papal nuncio to Germany from 1917 to 1929 and later negotiated with Hitler the
Reichskonkordat
agreement that sought to protect the church in Germany at a time when the Nazis were waging war on all religions. It was signed in July 1933, only six months after Hitler came to power. Roosevelt met the future Pope Pius XII in the fall of 1936, when he was still known as Cardinal Eugenio Pacelli. On a visit to the U.S., FDR entertained him at his presidential retreat in Hyde Park, New York, and they discussed the European situation.
³

When Taylor left the U.S. for his new assignment on February 16, 1940 aboard the Italian ship
SS Rex
, the president, who was vacationing aboard the
USS Tuscaloosa
, sent him a cable saying, “Good luck happy voyage and write me soon.” Taylor carried with him Roosevelt’s hand-written letter to the pontiff dated February 14, 1940. It stressed their “common ideals of religion and of humanity” and the “reestablishment of a more permanent peace.”
⁴

Once Taylor was in Rome, the pope quickly received him and accepted his credentials. The two had a private forty-five minute session, discussing European politics with a concentration on the future objectives of both Hitler and Mussolini. The pontiff was pessimistic about Hitler’s agenda, while he described Mussolini as “undecided and wavering.” Pius XII added that the Italian public was “opposed to war.” The pope ended the meeting by telling Taylor that he could have “daily access day or night whenever desired.” That same evening a picture of Taylor presenting his credentials to the pope was on the front page of the Vatican daily newspaper
L’Osservatore Romano
. That was quickly followed by a full-page story also on the front page under the headline, “A Program of Liberty, Cooperation and Peace Marks the Constant Relations Between the Holy See and the United States.”
⁵
Italian fascists made a big thing about the non-ambassadorial status of Taylor at the Vatican, calling it an insult to all Italians. So Roosevelt secretly made him a counselor, which had the benefit of giving him both more status and diplomatic immunity.

Taylor met with the pope again less than a week later and also quickly held talks with several other top Vatican officials. In addition, the one-time businessman established a good working relationship with other ambassadors to the Holy See, especially François Charles-Roux, the French representative, and Sir D’Arcy Osborne, the British one. The three soon became close friends. Taylor enjoyed unprecedented access to the Vatican and received a detailed report on the private meeting in March between Pius XII and German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Taylor also earned a reputation in Rome for being a bit stiff. British author Owen Chadwick, in a history of British relations with the Vatican during the war, called him “a rhadamanthine kind of man; not pompous, but he seemed to survey humanity as from a pedestal.”
⁶

By late March, Taylor was getting reports from the Vatican about the threat of a German invasion of the Low Countries within a month. Pius XII also personally warned him of the impending Nazi offensive. The Vatican still hoped that it might be able to stop Mussolini from joining Hitler’s new offensive.

In a cable to Washington on April 20, Taylor reported that he had learned that Hitler would make a surprise attack on the Low Countries before the end of the month. He said that the Vatican’s secretary of state had “earnestly repeated the necessity for speedy action” to stop such a move that “should be taken within two or three days.” The U.S. did nothing, but Secretary of State Cordell Hull on April 25 cabled Taylor saying, “although no action taken, this does not mean it is not carefully considered.”
⁷

At that same time, the Italian government launched a new attack on the papacy. On April 25, Mussolini bellowed, “The Vatican is the chronic appendicitis of Italy.” The government centered its attack on
L’Osservatore Romano
, and the Fascist leader Roberto Farinacci called the paper “the servant of the enemies of Italy and the evident mouthpiece of the Jews.”
⁸
A newspaper he owned called upon readers to beat up anyone found reading the Vatican paper. The paper later wrote, “Judas sold Christ for 30 dinarii. The gentlemen of
L’Osservatore Romano
are ready to do worse.”
⁹