Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion (52 page)

On July 2, the Council of People’s Commissars approved the evacuation of Lenin’s body. Senior Major Dmitry Shadrin of the secret police was given the job of handling the details. Stalin signed the resolution. Another order, signed by General Spiridonov, specified that Lenin was going to Tyumen, a town 1,100 miles east of Moscow. The document also stated that the shipment included the leader’s heart as well as the bullet lodged in his body in an assassination attempt. Lenin traveled aboard a super luxury Pullman-style train, pulled by Joseph Stalin Locomotives that had Stalin’s name emblazed across the front. There were only three wagons, one for the body and the other two for scientists assigned to protect it and security guards. According to legend, Stalin came to see the body the night before it left and said solemnly, “Under Lenin’s banner, we won the civil war. Under the Lenin banner, we will defeat this wily enemy.”

The body left Moscow the next day aboard the climate-controlled train that was also equipped with special springs to avoid any damage to the corpse. No one except the operation commander knew the final destination. The honor contingent maintained its same mausoleum ritual of changing guards every two hours. The train arrived after a flawless voyage on the morning of July 7. The body was transferred that evening to an old school building in the center of town that had been turned into an agricultural college. The honor guards continued their duties.
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Soon after Lenin’s body went east, Plant No. 171, the country’s only facility for making chemically pure gold by turning imperfect metal into pure gold to be used in ingots, was also moved. Beria took personal charge of that operation. The plant was moved using several trains to the city of Novosibirsk, which is known as the capital of Siberia. Along with it traveled 600 engineers and workers to operate the facility. The first rail cars arrived on July 21. Eventually 118 railroad cars were needed to complete the job. Within months it was back in operation, producing 300 tons of gold annually.
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While the evacuations of the most valuable properties went smoothly, things were not going nearly as well on the battlefield. On June 27, the same day that the Politburo decided to ship the national treasure east and a week after the invasion had begun, an angry Stalin and his four closest aides, Beria, Molotov, Georgy Malenkov, who handled Communist Party personnel matters, and Anastas Mikoyan, the People’s Commissar for External and Internal Trade, went to see generals Timoshenko and Zhukov. Minsk, a city of 300,000 and capital of Belarus, was on the brink of falling, which happened the following day. The strain of the last few days by then had gotten to Stalin, and he lashed out at Zhukov, “What kind of chief of staff panics as soon as the fighting starts, loses contact with his forces, represents nothing and commands nobody?” The general was so crushed that he left the room in tears. Stalin seemed only more disgusted and told Mikoyan, “Lenin left us a great state, and we’ve shitted it away,”
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although Stalin himself was largely to blame for the lack of military preparedness. His massive purge of the military only three years before had left the army both weakened and dispirited. No one, though, dared mention that.

There are no records of Stalin making phone calls on June 29 or 30. He holed up at the Kuntsevo Dacha just outside Moscow. Kremlin aides telephoned and left messages to call back, but he never did. The dictator led a hermit’s existence at the facility in the middle of a forest. He worked out of one room and slept on the sofa surrounded by telephones and books.

On June 30, Molotov called the other Politburo members to a meeting in his Kremlin office and proposed that a new state body be established to run the war effort. The group easily approved the measure. It would later be called the State Committee of Defense. The Presidium of Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R., the Council of People’s Commissars of the U.S.S.R., and the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union all quickly approved it.
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The inner circle of communist leaders then left for Stalin’s dacha, arriving there at 4:00 P.M. When they walked in, Stalin was slumped down in an armchair. Bulganin later said that his pockmarked face was haggard, and he appeared gloomy.
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Mikoyan confirmed that in his memoirs. Stalin looked at his guests and almost in a mumble said, “Why have you come?” He may well have thought they were there to arrest him.

Speaking for the group, Molotov said they had decided that the government needed a new structure to concentrate power and run the war.

“Who should head it?” Stalin asked.

Molotov quickly responded, “You, of course.”
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Stalin may have been testing them to see if a coup was in the works, or he may have been suffering from a deep depression. His hero Ivan the Terrible did that by pretending he was dying to see how his associates reacted. Then he had a miraculous recovery and punished the ones whose actions he didn’t like. Stalin called his aides “blind kittens” and could have been handling them in the same way as the czar. In any case, he got the answer he wanted to hear.

The next day he was back at work in the Kremlin, and on July 3, he finally made his first radio address to his country since the invasion. He dropped some of his normal communist rhetoric in favor of a patriotic appeal to all of his country’s citizens. The new approach was evident from the opening line when he called out to, “Comrades, citizens, brothers and sisters, men of our Army and Navy! I am addressing you, my friends!”
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Russians called the historic battle against Napoleon the Patriotic War. Stalin named this one the Great Patriotic War.

The battle, though, continued to go badly. On July 11, 1941, the Wehrmacht crushed the Soviet Union’s 19th Army near Vitebsk in Belarus and not far from Smolensk, where there was a branch of the Soviet central bank that had a small quantity of gold bars and coins as well as silver. Eight trucks of the treasure were sent along the Old Smolensk road toward the city of Vyazma, but it came under fire and only five of the trucks reached the village of Otnosovo. When a bomb hit one of the vehicles, it exploded and coins and currency flew through the air. It was clear that no one could go any further, so Soviet soldiers burned the currency and buried the coins. Two trucks, which contained four tons of bullion and a half-ton of jewelry, continued until they too were surrounded by Nazi troops.
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Stalin soon gained an unexpected ally in his battle against Hitler. Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt’s international troubleshooter, had just finished a trip to London, where he had met with Churchill to work out details for funneling military aid to Britain. On July 25, Hopkins sent the president a cable saying, “I am wondering whether you would think it important and useful for me to go to Moscow . . . I think the stakes are so great that it should be done. Stalin would then know in an unmistakable way that we mean business on a long-term supply job.”
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The president jumped at the suggestion and instructed Sumner Wells, the acting Secretary of State, to send a message to Stalin saying that the president was sending Hopkins to Moscow in order to talk “with you personally” about how the United States could help “the Soviet Union in its magnificent resistance against the treacherous aggression of Hitlerite Germany.”
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After receiving the go-ahead from Washington, Hopkins asked Churchill to provide a Royal Air Force plane to take him to Stalin. In order to avoid the fighting on the continent, he left on a twenty-four hour flight to Archangel in the far north part of the Soviet Union. From there Hopkins took a four-hour flight to Moscow. A large delegation of Soviet officials greeted him there, but quickly ran into trouble with his name. They called him Garry Gopkins because the Russian letter “h” is pronounced like the English letter “g.”
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Hopkins had two long meetings with Stalin that lasted more than five hours. Following Stalin’s work habits, they began late in the afternoon. The American quickly picked up that he terrified everyone around him. They called him simply the
Vozhd
—the Boss. When Hopkins in the first session quickly asked what his country needed, Stalin rattled off a long list that included aircraft guns, one million rifles, machines guns, aviation fuel, aluminum for airplanes, and more. Stalin added that he was confident that his tanks were better than the best German ones. “Give us anti-aircraft guns and aluminum, and we can fight for three or four years.” He scribbled on a piece of paper his top four priorities and gave it to Hopkins:

1. light anti-aircraft guns

2. aluminum for airplanes

3. 50-calibre machine guns

4. 30-caliber rifles

The aluminum impressed Hopkins, who thought that anyone asking for that was thinking long term and wouldn’t be surrendering anytime soon. In a long report to Roosevelt, Hopkins wrote, “Mr. Stalin expressed repeatedly his confidence that the Russian lines would hold.”
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At a second meeting the two men went over the details of shipping goods via ports such as Murmansk and Archangel in the far north rather than through either the Persian Gulf-Iran route or the Pacific Ocean-Vladivostok one. Stalin was particularly concerned about the latter, fearing that the Japanese would attack his ships. Murmansk, on the other hand, was ice-free all year long, and Archangel could be kept open with the help of icebreakers. At the end of the session the famed
Life
magazine photographer Margaret Bourke-White, who was on assignment in Moscow, popped in and took pictures of the two men. She moved around the office trying to capture the drama of the war moment and became intrigued by the Soviet dictator’s eyes. She said they were the coldest she had ever seen.

Stalin’s translator in the talks said after the war that Stalin always had a high regard for Hopkins because “he was the first who came after the terrible blow we got from the Germans.”
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At the suggestion of Hopkins, Roosevelt sent Averill Harriman to handle the follow-up work on getting military equipment to the Soviet Union. Even though the U.S. was still not yet formally at war, the Allied Big Three Powers to fight Hitler were in place.

Following the Hopkins visit to Moscow, Morgenthau’s Treasury Department established its own contacts with the Soviet Union with the help of Harry Dexter White, the Treasury Secretary’s top aide and a secret Soviet agent since the 1930s.
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At his initiative on December 24, 1941, White met with Andrei Gromyko, who was the counsel of the Soviet embassy in Washington and would go on to be his country’s longtime foreign minister. It is not certain, but likely, that Gromyko knew of White’s ties to Moscow, although he did not mention that in the report of the meeting. The two had many more meetings during the war, and White was an open champion of the Soviets within the Roosevelt administration.
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Hitler and German military leaders were delighted with the initial success of their invasion. On July 3, 1941, General Franz Halder, chief of staff of the army, wrote in his diary, “On the whole, then, it may be said even now that the objective to shatter the bulk of the Russian army this side of the Dvina and Dnieper has been accomplished. It is thus probably no overstatement to say that the Russian Campaign has been won in the space of two weeks.”
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Only two months later, however, the situation looked very different. On September 5, another German officer glumly wrote, “No victorious Blitzkrieg, no destruction of the Russian army, no disintegration of the Soviet Union.” Later that month, Göring issued orders to German troops to “live off the land.” In early November, General Guderian, the hero of the Nazi invasion of France, wrote his wife, “We have seriously underestimated the Russians, the extent of their country and the treachery of their climate. This is the revenge of reality.”
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Never in warfare, though, had so many prisoners been taken so quickly. In the three battles in Smolensk, Uman, and Gomel between August and October 1941, the Wehrmacht captured two million Soviet soldiers. Following Göring’s economic directive known as the Green Folder, the Germans instituted a policy of starving the local population. The three-pronged strategy was to kill 30 million people and eliminate the country’s Jews with the Final Solution. Germans would then populate an empty, but fertile land.
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Total victory remained elusive for the Nazis, even though their troops by November 1941 had advanced 600 miles into Soviet territory. The Wehrmacht now controlled most of the industrialized part of the country and nearly half of the population in a region as large as Britain, France, Italy, and Spain combined. Hitler made another fatal mistake on August 21, when he told his commanders that the primary objective was not to capture Moscow, the heart of the nation’s government as well as a major industrial complex, but to seize Crimea and the coal-mining region of the Ukraine, and then circle back to the capitol. By the end of September, the German military had devastated five more Soviet armies and taken 665,000 prisoners, but its forces had lost vital time in getting to Moscow. Field Marshal Fedor von Bock, the commander of Army Group Center, on October 2 resumed the drive toward Moscow. That was more than a month later than originally planned. The code name of the new offensive: Operation Typhoon. He had early success, but still lost some 35,000 men, 250 tanks and artillery pieces, and several hundred trucks. Fuel and ammunition supplies soon ran dangerously low. German forces traveled along the Mozhaisk Highway and were within 40 miles of the capital. The French had traveled that same road in 1812. Panic struck the capital, and people began evacuating the city. Most of the Soviet bureaucracy left for Kuibyshev 500 miles to the southeast. Martial law was declared. Stalin, though, remained in the capital after Zhukov assured him that it would not fall.
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On November 20, Bock moved his headquarters near the front lines. On December 2, German advance troops reached the Moscow suburb of Khimki, fourteen miles from the Kremlin. From there, German officers were able to see the spires of the Soviet capital through field glasses. That, however, marked the closest the army ever got to Moscow. The German High Command two days later decided that Army Group Center was “at present incapable of mounting a counterattack without bringing forward substantial reserves.”
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