Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion (62 page)

On April 12, the Berlin Philharmonic gave its last performance of the war in the capital. Albert Speer, the closest person Hitler had as a friend, had organized an event for the Nazi hierarchy. Speer told the orchestra to leave Berlin immediately after the concert, which ended appropriately with the finale to Wagner’s
Götterdämmerung
. Even at that catastrophic moment, however, Berliners, who are famous for their humor, were saying that the optimists were learning English and the pessimists were learning Russian.
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Just over a week later, Hitler on April 20 celebrated his fifty-sixth birthday at his Berlin bunker with his ministers and cronies, but after the maudlin celebration many of them headed out of the capital with their own plans.
Sauve qui peut
. Speer went to Hamburg, Göring to Bavaria, and Himmler headed north in hopes of starting talks with Swedes about a brokered peace. After the birthday celebration, Göring told Hitler he was leaving for Obersalzberg in Bavaria. The Führer replied simply, “Do what you want.”
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A latecomer to the war was Hungary, which the Germans had invaded in March 1944 after Hitler received news that his long-time ally was seeking a deal with the Allies. Nazi control on the ground, though, did not change much. With the Wehrmacht in retreat, the Nazi
SS
had set up a major program to collect Jewish valuables, including gold, currency, paintings and rugs. The Hungarian government estimated they were worth $350 million at the time, although others said it was less than half that. All the goods were packed onto the forty-two-car train that started moving north into Austria on the night of March 29-30.
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It was called the Hungarian Gold Train. First French and then American troops captured the train, and the property was eventually put under U.S. army control. Much of the valuables disappeared, and Americans were charged with stealing it. High-ranking officers reportedly took plenty of things for their private collections. The case dragged on for years, even in American courts, and ended with no one totally satisfied.

A second Hungarian gold case involved the country’s central bank bullion. The Hungarian National Bank decided to move its personnel and the country’s thirty-two tons of gold out of Budapest and sent it west by train toward the advancing Americans. The destination for the bank officials was the town of Spital am Pyhrn in Austria. Two hundred Hungarian policemen and 500 bank employees were there to guard the stash, but most of all to make sure that they surrendered to the Americans and not the Soviets. Bank officials sent messages to the American forces telling them that they were holding it in the cellar of an old monastery that was guarded by a Hungarian Royal Police unit. When Patton’s Third Army arrived in Spital am Pyhrn, it took over the national treasure without a fight. A Hungarian colonel also handed over the historic Holy Crown of Hungary or Crown of Saint Stephen, the country’s most precious object, to an American colonel. It was later decided not to put the Hungarian gold into the general pot of Nazi gold to be dealt with after the war. Instead American military officials with great fanfare returned it to the Hungarians in August. It consisted of 2,669 gold bars on a train that Allied forces claimed had been Eva Braun’s private car that carried it to Budapest. It was widely believed that the delivery was really made to better relations with the Soviets, since Hungary was going to be in Moscow’s zone of influence, and so they were really turning the gold over to the future communist rulers of Hungary. St. Stephen’s Crown, though, was not included in the transfer.
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Perhaps the most bizarre episode in the chaotic days at the end of the war involved some Yugoslav gold. Nazi occupiers in April 1941 had installed the Ustaša, a revolutionary movement with German support, to head the Independent State of Croatia. Post-war intelligence reports said that the Ustaša had anywhere from $600,000 to $35 million in Nazi gold. The organization had its own army that terrified the countryside with a brutality that shocked even Heinrich Himmler. The Croatian State Bank had just under one ton of gold in Switzerland, which was handed over to Marshal Tito, the new ruler of Yugoslavia, in July 1945. It had an additional ton in a Swiss bank, and that was also turned over to the new government. On the night of May 7-8, 1945, and with the end in sight, the Ustašas reportedly grabbed a quarter ton of gold from the Croatian State Bank and then set off in two directions. Some of them left in a truck headed for Austria. The vehicle broke down near the small town of Wolfsberg, where Ustaša officers broke open a case and handed it to comrades trying to escape. Then they reportedly turned over the rest to a Franciscan monastery run by a fanatical Catholic group that had strong ties with the Vatican. The Croatian Roman Catholic priest Krunoslav Dragonovi
allegedly took it to Rome in July and turned it over to the pope. The Croatian delegation at the 1997 London Gold Conference insisted, “These facts exclude any possibility that the NDH (Ustaša) gold was stored in the Vatican.”
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The cache of Yugoslav bullion has since been lost in claims and counter claims. Emerson Bigelow, a U.S. Treasury official with connections to American intelligence groups, on October 21, 1946 sent a message to the U.S. Treasury Department saying that “approximately 200 million Swiss Francs was originally held in the Vatican for safekeeping. According to rumor, a considerable portion was sent to Spain and Argentina through the Vatican’s ‘pipeline,’ but it is quite possible this is merely a smokescreen to cover the fact that the treasure remains in its original repository.” That has been called the “Bigelow Report,” but is actually only a three-paragraph note that reads more like gossip than solid intelligence. The following year, William Gowen, an agent of the Office of Strategic Services, sent a message to Washington saying that the gold had been sent to the College of San Sirolamo Degli Illirici, which is located within the walls of the Vatican. Swiss banks supposedly helped with the transfer. That again was never verified. There is no doubt, though, that the Vatican and the U.S. Army Intelligence Corps helped some Ustaša leaders escape to Argentina.

The Vatican has kept its silence about the Yugoslav gold story, and no one outside the church knows where it went and how much was involved. The Eizenstat Commission in the late 1990s used all the weight of Washington to break the Vatican’s silence as part of its study of the World War II gold, but church officials steadfastly refused to participate. A lawsuit was also filed in the U.S., but that too could not break Vatican secrecy.
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In the early months of 1945, gold was spilling out all over Germany, with top Nazis grabbing some in the hope that it might help them and their families survive. Many top officials had their private stashes. Joachim von Ribbentrop, who had grabbed tons of Italian gold, sent part of it out of Berlin. Eighty-one sacks were placed in the cellar of Schloss Fuschl, a castle near Salzburg, Austria. More went to the Liebenau monastery just outside Worms and to a castle in Mühlhausen in Thüringen. Some also went to a factory in the village of Gaissau Hintersee in the Salzkammergut area near Salzberg, Austria. Ribbentrop finally sent several tons to Schleswig-Holstein in the north, where he planned to make his last stand. Later, 1.8 tons of coins belonging to the Foreign Ministry turned up near the town of Itzehoe thirty miles north of Hamburg.
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Gestapo leaders had their own stores of gold and foreign currency. Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the number-two man in the
SS
and one of the authors of the Final Solution, in mid-April was named the commander of the German forces on the southern front. He quickly set up his headquarters in the village of Altaussee in the central part of his native country, where he used to ski. He shipped his hoard out of Berlin on a special train in the final days of the war. When American soldiers captured Kaltenbrunner in a mountain lodge, he was carrying papers that identified him as Dr. Unterwegen. He had thrown away his Nazi identification into a nearby lake shortly before American soldiers arrested him.
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His young mistress Countess Gisele von Westrap told the Americans that he had two chests of gold, but she did not know where they were located. Later 130 pounds of gold were discovered near the mansion where Kaltenbrunner had lived. American G.I.s discovered abandoned gold in the strangest places. They found nearly two thousand Austrian gold coins plus bars of gold in an abandoned hay wagon next to a railroad station in a small town in Austria.
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Other
SS
units took some of the Reichsbank’s Melmer gold for their own use. In October 1944, the
SS
moved gold coins worth an estimated $25 million to Bad Sulza near Weimar, and another truckload of gold and foreign currency to Salzburg in late April 1945. Both shipments were to be used for food and bribery by Nazis going to ground. Otto Skorzeny, an
SS
Lt. Colonel sent a staffer to Salzburg to get more money, and he returned to the
SS
headquarters in the town of Radstadt with 50,000 gold francs.
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Germany quickly descended into economic chaos. Since the Reichsbank had a difficult time sending new currency to its regional offices around the country, the wheels of commerce slowed down. Factories ran short on raw materials, and companies could not pay employees. Soldiers were not paid either. Bartering became widespread, as farmers traded milk or eggs for whatever they could get in exchange. With roads and bridges bombed out, traffic moved slowly. The unit known as Organisation Todt, which was building facilities in France for the new V-1 and V-2 rockets that Hitler still hoped would bring victory, had to use gold to keep its operation functioning.

In March 1945, Reichsbank Vice President Emil Puhl was shuffling between the Southern Germany city of Konstanz, where the bank had a branch office, and Switzerland. He was desperately trying to sell Nazi gold to either the Swiss or the Bank for International Settlements. He wrote letters to Walther Funk in Berlin about how it was becoming more and more frustrating to get anything done. He complained about his loneliness and not knowing what was happening to his family, and the pressure the “Anglo-Saxons” were putting on the Swiss to stop gold sales. On March 19, he wrote in a four-page letter, “In general it is much worse that I even imagined in my most pessimistic expectations.” He had stopped at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel before going to the Swiss capital in Bern and wrote that he was “very disappointed” by the situation he found there. President McKittrick, after extensive consultations with the American embassy in Bern, told Puhl he would no longer accept gold from the Reichsbank. That killed agreements to send two shipments to the BIS, one for six tons and one for a ton and a half. The Swiss National Bank, though, was still willing to take bullion despite Allied pressure, but it was not delivered from Konstanz before the the war ended.
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On April 6, Puhl wrote a more upbeat ten-page letter after the Swiss agreed to sign the agreement to buy Nazi gold. He wrote: “It is pleasing to note again and again in all these events how strong the cultural ties are that connect our two countries, even if the political opinion of the broad mass is not in our favor today.” He lamented, though, that he had lost contact with this wife and youngest son who are now in “enemy-occupied territory.”
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Although the Reichsbank had gotten the bulk of the country’s gold out of Berlin in early 1945, there was still a lot floating around the capital at a variety of organizations. Lt. Colonel Friedrich Josef Rauch, who was known by the name Fritz, was the adjutant of Hans Lammers, the head of Hitler’s Reich Chancellery, the center of the Nazi state machinery. A veteran Nazi who had participated in the Munich beer hall putsch and fought in the Balkans, Rauch was relatively new to his powerful position in Berlin. Nonetheless, he convinced Lammers that the government had to get all the remaining valuables out of Berlin before either the Americans or Soviets got there. He proposed sending it to the area of Southern Germany and Northern Austria, a region he knew well since he was born in Munich. Diehard Nazis such as he still hoped to establish there the National Redoubt that Heinrich Himmler had proposed.

The Reichsbank had in Berlin some gold plus plenty of currency and the material for printing new money to keep the economy functioning. Other organizations also had their private war chests. The
Devisenschutzkommandos
of Hermann Göring had plenty of jewelry and foreign currency taken from people in invaded countries. Himmler’s
SS
, which ran the concentration camps, also had its riches. Rauch wanted to move all that south.

Lammers quickly approved the proposal and took the plan to Walther Funk, who was already trying to get the last Reichsbank bullion and currency out of Berlin. Lammers and Funk together took their plan to Hitler, who was now in dark depression in his bunker. He had already decided to die in Berlin, but agreed to let them take the remaining treasure out of the city.