Kolchak's Gold

by Brian Garfield

  “At first Krausser refused to listen to my brother’s pleas for a hearing. He had heard Jewish pleading before, he was not interested. But Maxim did get the ear of an amused junior officer, a Waffen SS Hauptmann.

  “Maxim implored this Hauptmann to persuade Krausser to spare the village. In return for the lives of the Jews, my brother offered to tell the Nazis where to find the gold we had buried for the Admiral.

  “I have said my brother acted as if he assumed the gold was still where we had hidden it. Perhaps he did not believe that any more than I did; perhaps he only wanted to make the Germans believe it.

  “Now I am on uncertain ground. I cannot describe the sequence of events, only the possibilities.

  “It is likely, to me, that this Hauptmann was unimpressed by my brother’s wild story. But perhaps he repeated it at the evening mess, and perhaps his fellow young Hitlerites agreed that there was probably nothing to it—a desperate lie by a cowardly Jew trying to save his skin—but if there were any truth at all in Maxim’s story, it was possible they would find themselves in serious trouble for failure to report it.

  “A hypothesis. A report goes to the Oberst—Krausser. Krausser feels there is probably nothing to it, but it cannot hurt to listen to the Jew—the story sounds entertaining.

  “I know from Zalmanson that my brother was granted an audience with Krausser that night. I do not know what was said; one can guess.

  “My brother is earnest, compelling. Perhaps he begins by demanding the lives of all surviving Russian Jews in return for leading the Germans to the gold. Krausser replies caustically that even if this fantasy has truth in it, the gold is hidden a thousand miles beyond German lines in the deep heart of the Soviet Union. What good is this to the Third Reich?

  “But Maxim is adamant—persuasive. Krausser hears him out. Finally Krausser probes: an offer. If what Maxim says proves to be true, the villagers will indeed be spared. His promise, on his word as a German officer.

  “Not the villagers, Maxim insists. Consider the value of this hoard. Billions of Reichsmarks. Billions. All the Jews who are still alive must be spared.

  “The village, Krausser says. Only the village. Gold is not that important. Important but not that important.

  “Now Maxim sees that there is no hope of gaining a wider reprieve. The shtetl, only the shtetl. Yet Maxim knows about German honor. He insists that he be given a guarantee of safety for the villagers from a higher, more responsible official than Krausser. He picks a name out of the air, a name he has heard—General von Bock’s name because von Bock is known, even to his enemies, to be an honorable old-fashioned soldier.

  “A guarantee in writing, personally signed by von Bock. Only then will he reveal the location of the gold.

  “Now it goes through Krausser’s mind that he could torture this Jew and make him talk. But he is impressed by Maxim. Maxim is a very big man, powerful. His eyes are calm and level. He has lived with torture half his life—the torture from within. He will not break easily. It would take a long time and the results are never guaranteed: men under torture have willed themselves to die. In any case it would take time and these SS do not have a great deal of time. The Nazis are always in a hurry. There are other villages: Jews to kill.

  “My brother gains a temporary reprieve. In the morning the villagers queue up for registration. The twelve hundred and seven men, women and children are stripped of their valuables and ordered to wear Star of David armbands at all times—and then they are released to go home.

  “Krausser allows an appropriate interval to pass and then in due course a written guarantee over General von Bock’s signature is presented to my brother by Herr Krausser. Two or three army command orders, bearing von Bock’s signature, are shown to my brother so that he may be sure the signature is genuine.

  “Krausser speaks with feigned anger, talking very fast, insisting that my brother realize that the reprieve remains only temporary until it is ascertained whether his story is true. Until that time the shtetl remains in jeopardy, and only if the gold is found will the Jews be spared. In the meantime the village must consider itself collectively under arrest and subject to the strictures of Nazi martial law.

  “Actually what has transpired in the interval, one must assume, is a series of communications between Krausser and General von Geyr, between Krausser and other officers, and between Krausser’s superiors and Berlin.* Krausser was not an educated man—I doubt he had any Russian history, I doubt he knew whether there ever had been a Czarist treasury, let alone what happened to it. Confirming those details of Maxim’s account which could be proved must have taken some part of this time.

  “Now everything the Germans learn tends to support the authenticity of Maxim’s story. In time, as we know, an expedition was sent to look for the gold. But in the meantime.…

  “The village had been spared, it appeared. The Spandaus had been dismounted from their tripods. The main body of Krausser’s force had moved on to some other slaughtering ground. According to Zalmanson, a platoon of Waffen SS under the combined command of an SS Leutnant and some sort of Gestapo official was left to maintain German order in the shtetl.

  “Krausser himself would reappear from time to time—at intervals of four or five days—to meet with his Leutnant and, two or three times, in private with Maxim. Maxim never told anyone what was said in these conferences. The villagers knew he had saved them somehow, but no one was able to persuade him to explain it—not even Zalmanson.

  “Rather than indicating relief and triumph, my brother became morose and despondent and would not speak to anyone except in grunts. He withdrew completely into himself.

  “Late in September the fall rains came, and then an early winter.”

  “I never saw this von Bock document. Zalmanson did not see it either. Certain things he said were what led me to believe it must have been produced by Krausser. Besides, I knew my brother’s thinking—his way of thinking. I’m sure there must have been such a written guarantee. Zalmanson said that my brother had intimated that von Bock had personally decided to spare the shtetl. Maxim wouldn’t have made that up.*

  “I have good reason to suspect, however, that to whatever extent this letter existed, it must have been a forgery.

  “On October fourth, late in the day, Krausser’s battalion returned to the shtetl. They came in motorized sleds, the big ones that carried thirty men each. I can remember the grating roar of those machines crossing the valleys of the Ukraine a year later.

  “Krausser did not arrive with the force. The SS men posted themselves in the town and said nothing—not a single word—to the inhabitants. No questions were answered. There were several incidents, Jews being knocked down in the snow and trampled, that sort of thing. After dark the Germans became steadily more belligerent, although they still did not speak to the people except to bark obscenities or arrogant orders at them.

  “You must recall the mentalities of these necrophiles. This village had been denied them for weeks—they singled it out for special hatred. During the night several Jews were murdered by the SS swine. The corpses were left in the streets, mutilated horribly. Zalmanson told me of the naked severed arms of a small boy lying shriveled in the slush, and an old man’s head impaled on a staff before the old synagogue.

  “Zalmanson knew what these things portended; he went around to the poultry farm and tried to persuade my brother to join him and many others in attempting to escape in the night.

  “My brother refused to go.

  “One can spend hours speculating on his reasons, and many more hours recounting the details of the flight which Zalmanson described to me, but there’s no point in it. My brother stayed, he wouldn’t budge. Zalmanson and perhaps eighty others crept away in the night. He himself was with a party of eight, of whom he was the only survivor in the end—the seven others were killed by the winter, or the Germans, or the Cossacks.…

  “I have no further firsthand reports of what happened in the shtetl. I do not know wh
ether Krausser arrived and took charge of the slaughter personally; I suspect he must have, he wouldn’t have missed that. Undoubtedly they followed the usual pattern.

  “My brother undoubtedly protested. Equally undoubtedly, once he saw the hopelessness of it, he did not resist. In a way I’m sure he welcomed his death.”

  German documents indicate that Standartenführer Heinz Krausser was relieved of his command of Einsatzgruppe “E” temporarily, on October 7, 1942, and given a special assignment.

  A set of RSHA travel orders from Himmler’s office in Prinz Albrecht Strasse sent Krausser to Kiev, apparently for a meeting with Gruppenführer Otto von Geyr and others.

  A new unit was established on paper with the designation Jagdsonderkommando Ein, reflecting the crude sense of humor of—probably—Himmler; Jagd means “hunt” but Goldjagd means “gold rush”; an SS Sonderkommando was defined as a probe unit assigned to special duties. Krausser, with no promotion in rank, was placed in command of Jagdsonderkommando Ein.

  At this point Reinhard Gehlen’s branch of the Abwehr—the German secret intelligence network—was incorporated into the operation, along with the captured ordnance section of Field Marshal von Paulus’ headquarters battalion. The purpose of the former was to provide intelligence, false documentation and training for the members of Jagdsonderkommando Ein; the purpose of the latter was to provide uniforms and equipment from captured Russian sources.

  It is mentioned in Krausser’s dossiers that he spoke Russian, although there is no indication of the degree of his proficiency. All the others who were assigned to his Jagdsonderkommando were Russian-speaking Germans.

  The actual operating force numbered three officers, nine noncommissioned officers and seventeen enlisted men.

  These personnel were drawn from SD, Ordnungspolizei, Sicherheitspolizei and line-Wehrmacht units; they were specialists in varied fields, the one common denominator being their knowledge of the Russian languages. Among the members of Jagdsonderkommando Ein was a disproportionate number of automatic weapons experts, railroad men and commando-demolitions specialists.

  One of Krausser’s two lieutenants was a former civil engineer with a background in earth-moving operations. The other had been recruited from his post as deputy commander of the railraod marshaling yards at Dresden; in civilian pre-war life he had been a locomotive driver and had spent four months working on the Trans-Siberian Railway during the period of nonaggression-pact detente.

  The recruiting and training seems to have taken a surprisingly long time—months, stretching nearly into a year. One might suspect unusual inefficiency among these Germans; however, a closer examination of the documentary record implies several contributing factors.

  Like most military intelligence operations, the Abwehr was a far poorer performer than its progaganda would have us believe. Its reports from Siberia, as relayed to von Geyr and Krausser, were woefully skeletal; evidently its personnel in Siberia was almost nil. Krausser kept demanding more details about railroads and defenses in the Sayan district and along the route from there to the Crimea; he kept getting long-winded gobbledygook which boiled down to, “We don’t know, we’re guessing.”

  Furthermore, a minor smallpox epidemic in Rostov—where the unit was in training—killed off three members of the Jagdsonderkommando and evidently these men’s specialties had been vital to the plan, so that everything had to stop and mark time while three replacements were found and trained.

  After that, Hermann Goering had to be brought into the plan at top level in order to justify Himmler’s request for long-range air penetration of Siberia into the Baikal border area, and evidently Goering thought the whole plan idiotic and it took time for Bormann and Himmler to change his mind.

  Of the various delaying factors, however, none was so important as the crucial lack of intelligence provided by the Abwehr. Krausser insisted, in a series of dispatches that range in date from March to October 1943, that there was no possibility of success if the operation had to be undertaken blind. He insisted on specific intelligence of the defenses and transport in the area: particularly, he needed to know the exact details of operating schedules along the Trans-Siberian, and the exact disposition of repair and marshaling yards in the vicinity. The need for this information becomes more obvious the more one understand the nature of the Goldjagd plan. (That was its code name, inevitably.)

  From the outset it is clear that von Geyr, more than any of the others, fully comprehended the magnitude of the logistical problems. The gold might or might not be where the Jew had said it was; but there was a good chance—every piece of intelligence suggested the Jew’s story was true. Himmler probably reasoned that even if it proved false, the most he could lose would be twenty-nine men; in terms of odds, the potential reward was well worth the cost and risk.

  But von Geyr’s reports and dispatches indicate that he was the first to grasp the obvious logistical difficulties. Gold is unlike paper money, diamonds, and other valuables; it is incredibly heavy. The fact that the Czarist treasury weighed in the neighborhood of five hundred tons was deceptive, because it was a highly concentrated tonnage in terms of size-vs.-mass. You could not begin to fill a five-ton lorry with gold. If you did, its axles would collapse instantly. Five tons of gold takes up the space occupied by less than half a ton of crushed rock.

  The original Heydrich-Krausser plan evidently was based on the assumption that the entire bullion hoard would fit inside the fuselages of twelve or fifteen four-engine airplanes. In terms of size and space this was true; in terms of weight it was absurd. Such a load would instantly crush the floor out of any airplane, even if such an airplane were capable of lifting that much weight. And the load capacity of even the greatest four-engine bomber or transport was more like ten tons than five hundred; a capacity which had to be reduced still further by the need for extra-range fuel tanks.

  Apparently, however, it remained to Hermann Goering to shoot down permanently the idea of flying the gold out of Siberia. He only needed to point out the consequences if even one of the airplanes were to be shot down over Russian territory with its load of bullion.

  Other proposals were then advanced, and one by one destroyed by careful reasoning; in the end it was von Geyr whose idea provided the solution. The only reasonable means of getting the gold out of Siberia was to employ the same method of transport that had been used to take it to Siberia in the fist place: the railway.

  The track of the Siberian railway from the Sayan district made a relatively straight line west as far as Kuybyshev, whence a variety of switchings from track-line to track-line would bring the train southwest toward the Ukraine. Once in German-occupied territory, it could be driven straight to the Polish border and its contents then transferred to a Western train on the European track-gauge; or—and this was far less desirable on account of the risks—the train could turn south out of the Ukraine, cross the Crimea and deliver its cargo to Sebastopol, thence to be shipped by sea through the Dardanelles. (In 1942, while the Germans still held the Mediterranean, this was a viable possibility; by the time the mission was actually undertaken, it was not.)

  In March 1943 the von Geyr plan was settled on. The delay had already amounted to nearly five months. Because the von Geyr plan was clandestine in nature, the training of Krausser’s force had to be rigorous and painstaking: every man in the force had to be able to pass as a Russian.

  Documenting, equipping and costuming them took more time; not only did they have to look like Russians and talk like Russians, they also had to know enough about their own manufactured backgrounds to satisfy the suspicious, and they had to know enough contemporary Russian cultural history to sound authentic.

  Under the coaching of Abwehr agents and various Russian prisoners-of-war, they made steady—but not exceptionally fast—progress in their effort to become Russians, and between the strenuous care of their training and the slow excavation of intelligence of Siberia from the Abwehr’s espionage field agents, it was the autumn of 1943 bef
ore von Geyr felt confident enough to report to Berlin that Krausser’s team was ready for action.

  It had been decided that the Jagdsonderkommando would travel as a special unit of Soviet Transportation Corpsmen, led by a first lieutenant (the Leutnant who had been a locomotive driver) and chaperoned by a Communist Party commissar—a role played by Krausser himself, in the familiar grey choke-collared uniform of the Red Army, with the insignia of a commissar in place of officer’s epaulets.

  The other lieutenant (the one who had been a civil engineer) played the part of a Russian army engineer officer, also a first lieutenant: again, a role close to his actual status.

  The cover-story postulated that Moscow wanted a military survey of the iron mines to determine whether it was feasible to reopen them for wartime production. The expedition would have an air of authenticity to it, and even though everyone in the Sayan knew that the mines were empty of iron, no one would be likely to question the Kremlin’s bureaucratic decision to have them reinspected at such a time as this.

  Along with the cover story went various sets of forged orders by which the bearers were authorized by the Kremlin to commandeer such rail transport and dispatching priorities as might be needed to transport ore samples out of the district. The signatures on Krausser’s phony orders were those of the highest—and thus least-likely-to-be-questioned—authorities: Malenkov and Marshal Zhukov.

  Krausser’s detachment carried reams of documents designed to meet almost any foreseeable contingency. The files of Abwehr, Wehrmacht and RSHA records include copystats of billeting requisitions, orders allowing Krausser to commandeer provisions and tools and equipment, personnel orders (with the names left blank) authorizing the detachment to impress civilian workers into labor companies if it became necessary to repair the tracks and roadbeds of abandoned mining railways, and disciplinary authorizations by which Krausser—as People’s Commissar—was empowered to arrest, sentence and even execute officials who refused to cooperate. The latter were designed mainly with railway dispatching controllers in mind; once the train was loaded the Germans wanted to get it across the Soviet Union as quickly as possible.