Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion (61 page)

About midnight the group finally headed for bed. Patton went to a nearby van, where he slept. He had forgotten to wind his watch, so he turned on the BBC to get the time. The broadcaster was just announcing that President Roosevelt had died. Patton returned to the others and told them. The three generals talked until 2:00 A.M. about what this might mean for the conduct of the war.
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Back at Merkers, Bernstein was still interrogating Reichsbank officials and others who might know something about the shipments of gold and art. He finally had his first opportunity to question Albert Thoms, who had left the mine with Frommknicht on foot the day the Americans marched into the village. The two Germans had hoped to get back to Erfurt. They had been walking along a road when G.I.s in jeeps drove up to them. The two ran into the forest and separated, but Thoms was eventually captured. In his questioning, the Reichsbank employee was evasive and provided some false information. He denied, for example, that the gold was stolen. The German also initially said that deliveries of concentration camp gold had started only recently. They actually had begun in August 1942. When presented with conflicting evidence, Thoms began changing his story and eventually became a valuable source of information, although he often still stretched the truth. He admitted leaving Berlin with records of the gold shipments, but claimed he had shipped the documents back to Berlin or that Frommknicht had destroyed them, adding that he was with him when the records were burned. The records later turned up in Merkers. Thoms remained vague and evasive during numerous interrogations and for years to come about his role with the captured gold.
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Bernstein spent most of his time preparing for the shipment of all the treasure, both gold and art, to Frankfurt. Before starting the operation, he had a preliminary inventory made of the gold, other metals, and currency. It indicated that in addition to the Reichsbank bullion there were 62 bags of Italian gold, 2.8 billion Reichsmark, and 711 bags of American $20 gold coins.
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At 7:30 in the morning of April 14, thirty-two ten-ton trucks arrived from nearby Mainz to transfer the gold and art to Frankfurt. Soldiers began taking bags out of room #8 at 9:00. Jeeps had already been moved down to the bottom of the mine, so that G.I.s only had to get the goods onto trailers that jeeps pulled to the surface. Then the contents were loaded onto trucks. Four crews consisting of both enlisted men and officers did the work. Bernstein set up a system of checks to make sure no one pocketed a brick of gold, although that would have been difficult given a bar’s weight. An officer and a soldier stood at the door of the vault, and the senior person called out the contents as they were taken out the door and put on a jeep. The enlisted man wrote the number on his sheet, which became the shipping ticket. It then went up a shaft, and an officer accompanied the gold as it moved from the vault door to the top of the shaft. When it reached ground level, the jeep was checked again before one of two crews of fifty soldiers working in shifts loaded the cargo onto a truck. The names of the driver, the assistant driver, and the guard plus their army serial numbers were all listed on the sheet.

Bernstein hovered over the whole operation like the bride’s mother at a wedding. During the night and until the trucks had left Merkers, air patrols flew over the site. Bernstein later bragged that it took his group less than a day to load all the gold, while the Germans had spent four days to handle just the first shipment. The trucks were loaded to the max, and one had broken down shortly after being filled but was quickly replaced. Before departing, the colonel made another inventory of the eleven thousand bags, boxes, and cases, in particular the 8,037 gold bars. The loading was finally finished at 7:45 A.M. on April 15. Fifteen minutes later, the trucks departed with a five-platoon escort for Frankfurt.
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Bernstein accompanied the cargo in an armored vehicle and sent some of his staff ahead to Frankfurt to make sure everything would be waiting for them upon arrival. The trucks took a direct route to Frankfurt, traveling only a few miles before getting on one of the Reich’s prized
Autobahnen
. The convoy exited the highway just before entering the bombed-out city and then turned into the bank property from Adolf Hitler Straβe, arriving in Frankfurt at 2:00 P.M. The cargo then went through the same inventory control as it had in Merkers, and unloading was only finished the next day at 3:30 P.M.

It took forty hours to load the artworks onto twenty-six ten-ton trucks, and one hundred POWs helped with the work. Three loads of paintings left with the gold, and the rest departed later in a separate convoy. The second shipment, which was dubbed Task Force Whitney, left Merkers at 8:50 A.M. on April 17. It arrived at the Reichsbank building the same day at 1:00 P.M. and unloading started at 3:30. Bernstein used the same control system for the art at both ends of the trip as he had for the gold. After everything was in place, the U.S. army installed an anti-aircraft emplacement on the roof of the bank building, the entire block was surrounded by barbed wire and a Sherman tank was stationed in front. After all, the gold there was now the richest hoard in the world outside of Fort Knox.
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The gold was also unpacked and weighed again. There were a total of 4,100 bags of bars each weighing 55 pounds, and 3,000 bags of coins topping the scales at 81 pounds each. A note from Bernstein to General Clay on August 19 set the value of the gold at $262,213,000. In the report he said that an additional $32 million had been discovered in Austria that belonged to Hungary.

After the bullion had been moved to Frankfurt, General McSherry called Bernstein and told him that General Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s Chief of Staff, wanted five gold coins to make into medals for President Roosevelt, even though he was now dead, Prime Minister Churchill, British Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, General Eisenhower, and Army Chief of Staff General George Marshall. Bernstein said that was a rather unusual request since Eisenhower’s headquarters had issued strict regulations against looting.

The order, though, was then cancelled. McSherry later explained to Bernstein what had happened after the phone call. He said the two generals were on their way to the Frankfurt bank to pick up the five gold pieces, when McSherry explained what tough security Bernstein had put in place to prevent looting. After driving a little further, Smith told the driver to turn around and go back to headquarters. When Eisenhower and Clay heard about it, they also nixed the idea.
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While directing the movement of the gold and art, Bernstein also put into place an operation to pick up some of the gold the Reichsbank had moved to its regional offices around Germany. Bank and mine officials had told him that large amounts of bullion and foreign currencies were located there, so Bernstein and a small task force at first went to seven nearby locations. From bank records, he knew that 241 boxes had originally been sent from Merkers to regional Reichsbank offices. In Weimar, the first stop, the Americans interrogated the bank staff until 3:00 in the morning and learned that 25 bags of gold had been shipped there on April 2, but had then been moved again. The bank in Apolda had initially received 40 bags of gold, but those were returned to Berlin on April 7. Nuremberg got 15 bags of bars on April 1, but officials said it had been moved to Halle for safer keeping.

Bernstein asked to have an infantry regiment help him track down the riches. He knew it was going to be a difficult job, going from location to location over badly damaged roads. The army brass, however, said it could not afford to that many men away from their primary job of fighting the war. He and his group were able to commandeer only a couple of jeeps. Thoms, who had originally been hostile to the Americans, was now cooperative and went along on the search.

They had some success:

• Forty bags of gold had gone from Weissenfels to Halle, where another sixteen boxes were found. Two contained both gold and $2 million in American currency.

• They found eighty-two bars of bullion in each of the Zwickau, Eschwege, and Coburg branch offices.

• Officials in Erfurt said they had received eighty bags of gold, but it had been moved on April 4 to an unknown location.

• At the Reichsbank office in Plauen, American soldiers blew off the door of a vault where they found thirty-five bags of gold that had been deposited in April 1944 for Heinrich Himmler, the head of the

. His coin collection was also there, and some for the bags contained $20 gold coins.

The search for additional gold lasted until June. Fourteen tons were eventually recovered and sent to Frankfurt in seventy-eight shipments.
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The picture that emerged from the long search of Reichsbank offices and interrogations shows how the once mighty German central bank in the last days of Hitler had collapsed. On April 30, Director Rudolf Himpe at the Coburg bank, for example, admitted to Bernstein’s men that just before American troops occupied the area, he had buried forty-one bags of gold, weighing just over a ton, under a chicken coop and a pile of manure in a friend’s garden a mile from the bank. High-ranking officials such as Reichsbank President Funk and Foreign Minister Ribbentrop in the last days of the war traveled around the country with bags of gold and currency. Officials placed their last best hope in gold, and as late as the 1960s, NATO troops on patrol found Nazi gold in the Bavarian forest.
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During the late spring and summer of 1945, officials from several countries arrived in Frankfurt and tried to identify property that had been stolen. French and Belgian officials were particularly anxious to determine whether the gold the Belgians had given the French for safekeeping in 1940 could be found. Unfortunately, the Nazis had smelted down much of it along with Dutch and Italian gold and then restamped it with predated markings. Much had been sold to Switzerland, and it was now very difficult to determine the original owner.

In May 1945, Eisenhower’s office asked the U.S. Treasury and the Bank of England to send experts to conduct an official audit of all the gold in Frankfurt. Five experts, three Americans and two British, spent four months assessing the treasure. Their work took several months and examined the Merkers haul closely. Eight bags of rare gold coins had been set aside because it was believed that their numismatic value was probably higher than their gold content.
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Bernstein on September 6 sent his military bosses a thirty-page summary of his work recovering gold entitled “Report on Recovery of Reichsbank Precious Metals.” It is the most comprehensive study of the American gold findings in Germany up to that date. It showed that they had captured $238.5 million in gold at Merkers and an additional $14 million at other locations, mainly Reichsbank offices. In addition, there was $270,469 worth of silver, 35,000 ounces of platinum, and small amounts of the platinum group such as palladium, whose value still had to be determined. The value of the concentration camp gold, though, had not yet been appraised. Bernstein proudly stated that the Americans had recovered 98.6 percent of the Nazi gold.
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The final estimated value of all the gold caches made that same day set the value at $256 million.
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Bernstein’s statement was a bit chest beating. He had no way of knowing how much gold remained undiscovered. The Germans had certainly moved it all around the area they occupied, and there was no way to know whether a few gold coins or a random bar was not stuffed under someone’s bed. Charges were later made that some American soldiers had taken gold from Merkers as war trophies. One bag of Dutch gold guilders that arrived at Frankfurt, for example, had been ripped open, and 340 coins were missing. Art expert Robert Posey, one of the Monument Men, wrote his wife on April 20, 1945 that he had seen American soldiers filling a helmet with $20 gold pieces. He wrote that it was so heavy that he couldn’t lift the helmet. He claimed that he had refused to take any, and those went back into a sack. Posey claimed the gold was worth $35,000. The U.S. Army later made an investigation into missing gold coins, and Bernstein was questioned about it on April 24, 1945. But no one was ever charged.
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When the Soviet army captured Berlin, General Serov from Zhukov’s staff liberated the ruins of the Reichsbank. Major Fedor Novikov ordered the vaults to be opened, where Soviet troops found just 2.4 tons gold, twelve tons of silver coins, but millions in banknotes from countries the Germans had occupied. The Soviets may have also picked up gold in Reichsbank branch offices in eastern Germany on their way to Berlin, but they never told their Allied partners. In the end, Moscow captured an estimated $4.3 million in Nazi gold.
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The gold that Albert Thoms and other Reichsbank officials evacuated to Merkers in the dying days of World War II constituted the largest amount still in Nazi hands. It represented, though, only one-fifth of the bullion that the Nazis looted from European central banks over the course of the entire war.

By the spring of 1945, the Third Reich was all but finished. The German people, though, still had to suffer through Hitler’s operatic self-conflagration of their country. Following the failure of the Ardennes offensive of December 1944, the Nazi military was a burnt-out case, and the regime’s leaders sleepwalked their way into history. Soviet armies moved slowly but relentlessly from the east, destroying everything in their way and raping women with abandon, while the Americans and British attacked from the west with less brutality. A useless fire bombing in February leveled the historic cultural city of Dresden, the Florence on the Elbe, and left 25,000 dead. On Sunday, April 1, Goebbels wrote in his diary, “This is the saddest Easter Day I have ever had in my life. From all corners of the Reich news causing fresh anxiety floods in through the day. A prolonged series of air raids has wrought fearful devastation in the Reich during the last 24 hours.”
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