by Peter Watson
The blonde in the back introduced herself as Elisabetta and her companion as Inge. She had a much deeper voice and, as the journey progressed, showed herself as the more dominant of the two. Inge, or more probably Inge’s bosom, got them the lifts but then Elisabetta took over.
They were, it transpired, art students at Munich University who had just been north to see some medieval paintings that had recently been excavated at a church in Lübeck. They were, naturally, very interested when I told them I was with the ARU, and, as it happens, they had read about my recovery of the Holy Roman Crown Jewels. Inge’s field was medieval painting—which is why they had been to Lübeck—but Elisabetta, like me, was interested more in architecture, churches and monasteries mainly.
Inge and Elisabetta are not central to my story, but I enjoy recalling our encounter. Our joint interest in art led all three of us into bed together the next morning in Munich—the only time I have enjoyed the favors of two women or of lesbians. And, I also mention them because of something Elisabetta said that night in the car, something that was to prove vital much later on.
Our escapade made me arrive very late in Salzburg and got me off on the wrong footing with my new commanding officer, Major Maximilian Hobel.
2
The major could have been more welcoming, though, in fairness to him, I didn’t exactly hurry to report. To begin with, I was feeling pretty happy about my good luck in meeting Inge and Elisabetta. I was also aching with hunger, lovemaking having taken the place that day of breakfast. And it was, in any case, such a golden day when I parked my car on the Franz Josef Quay, overlooking the Salzach River, and so close to lunchtime, that I sauntered in the sun across the cathedral square to where I could see a small brasserie. There I tasted my first saibling, the fish recommended by Frank Wren, and sank three, or maybe it was four, glasses of beer. So, by the time I strolled into the local offices of the recovery unit, across the river on Schwartzstrasse, it must have been 2:30 in the afternoon and I suspect there was beer on my breath.
“I expected you this morning, Wolff!” Hobel squealed. “First thing. What happened? Just because you’ve been written about in the newspapers doesn’t mean you can come and go as you please. I repeat—what happened?”
If I had told him the truth I doubt whether it would have improved the situation. Hobel was a small man, in all senses. He was bald and fat and, as if that was not already horrible enough, he had a squeaky voice and viscous, bulging eyes that seemed dangerously big for their sockets. I quickly realized that Hobel was the type of person who was happy only when he was unhappy. Nothing could please him, certainly not the kind of morning I had just spent with Inge and Elisabetta. I made up a story.
“I was stopped by the police, sir. The German police.”
He sucked in air, like a puzzled goose.
“Yessir. Because of my car. I have a fairly new BMW, a convertible. Major Wren gave it to me yesterday—temporarily, of course, until he can get another jeep for me. But it’s an unusual model and, as I say, fairly new. It used to belong to an SS officer who has disappeared so it’s perhaps not surprising that the police thought I had stolen it. Anyway, I was stopped near Ingolstadt and it took hours to convince them that the car really did belong to me.”
It was extraordinary how, once you were embarked on a lie, it took on a life of its own. You didn’t have to make it up; it was as if it was there, waiting to be uncovered, like the smooth sculptures embedded in one of Michelangelo’s rough pieces of stone.
Hobel was looking at me in a strange way, staring fixedly, as if I had just told him Hitler was alive, after all, and living happily ever after with Eva Braun in South America.
“You … have … a BMW …” he choked. “A brand-new … convertible. All to yourself.” It was clear that it would not be easy to get on the right side of Maximilian Hobel. He had taken a dislike to me from the moment he set eyes on me, and over the next few weeks nothing I did pleased him. I soon gave up trying.
Still, while he was busy being jealous about my good fortune with the BMW, at least he seemed to have accepted my excuse for being so late. It was not mentioned again.
He pressed a button on his desk and a woman sergeant stuck her head around the door.
“Lucy, tell Lieutenant Hartt to step in, please.”
The commander looked back to me. “You’ll share an office with Hartt. There’s a desk in his room that you can use and he is the officer most familiar with the von Zell affair.” I judged his accent as somewhere out Chicago way. He lifted his feet onto the desk between us. “They say you’re a crack interrogator, Wolff. You’d better be. Mrs. von Zell is one tough lady. She’s been interrogated three times already and there’s been no progress. The last guy came back convinced that she has no idea where her old man is. It’s a mess.” Hobel uncrossed and recrossed his legs, loosening his tie at the same time. “I understand General Eisenhower is personally interested in this case?”
I nodded. “He signed my orders.”
“Well, it’s not Ike you have to worry about, wonder boy. It’s flabby Maxy Hobel, right here in this room. I’m not a professor of this, or a doctor of that, I’m a soldier, Wolff, a professional soldier. I don’t have a smart job to go back to, now that the war is over, like you and your fancy friends. I shall stay in the Army and hope for another war. But not, God forbid, as a major. And, if I don’t make colonel fairly soon, I never will. Which is where you come in. I wanted this case all to myself … a little rough stuff with Mrs. von Zell or her son and this Nazi would appear in no time.” Hobel clicked his fingers and kicked over a mugful of pencils on his desk. “A pushover. That’s the way to deal with Nazi scum. That’s what they understand. But no. The general read about you in the paper, how you had ‘persuaded’ a couple of old men in Nuremberg to tell you about those crummy jewels. And now my promotion depends on you. Well, I want results—fast! You—we—are going to bust this case. We are going to find von Zell, recover these damn precious coins—if there are any left—and everybody is going to hear about it. You can keep all the medals you earn; I just want a promotion, and I’m going to get it. We’ll be winding up here soon, so this is my last chance. I give you fair warning, Wolff—as long as you are making progress, you’ll get my support, but the minute you run into sand, I drop you and go my own way.”
How long this onslaught might have continued, God only knows. Fortunately, it was interrupted by the arrival of Hartt. Here at last was someone I could warm to. Samuel Hartt was tall, around six-two, thickly built and slow-moving, with bunches of prematurely silver hair sprouting from his scalp. He wore gold-rimmed eyeglasses that always seemed about to fall off his nose. When I was a boy I always imagined that God looked like Sammy Hartt.
Hartt was a legend in the Army and I had been looking forward to meeting him. He was Jewish, extremely learned, spoke all sorts of languages and had a fine sense of history. As an American Jew he felt he had to abandon his job in the family publishing firm and enlist in the anti-Nazi cause. But—and this is what had made him famous—he also knew, from his reading of history, that there was money to be made from wars, that the people who stayed quietly at home, besides leading safer lives, often profiteered from the more predictable economic changes that took place during war. When he joined the Army, Hartt had therefore made sure he was posted to communications where he could get his hands on the wire machines. Wherever he was stationed he formed two alliances, two sets of contacts. One set was comprised of the journalists who were at the front, wherever the fighting happened to be. These contacts ensured that he kept in direct touch with the way the war was going. He knew what was censored and what wasn’t. The second set were army types in New York who were well placed to talk on his behalf to stockbrokers in Wall Street.
He had started in a small way at first, buying shares in railroads and cinemas. But he had been right: the railroads had been necessary to move things around and cinemas were popular, before television, as carriers of visual news. They pro
spered and Hartt made money. This profit, so the legend ran, was plowed back into shipyards and canning as it became clear just how long the war would last. He made more money. So much so that the people around him, even his superior officers, began to pay attention to what he was doing. Soon he was playing the stock market with the paychecks of entire companies. He had his setbacks, as when he moved into bricks just before the battle of Berlin. This struggle had delayed the end of the war by some considerable time and shares in all industries that might have been expected to pick up after the cessation of hostilities had suffered heavy losses. But, in general, Hartt did even better at the end of the war than earlier. He foresaw the official report in October 1944 which predicted heavy control of exports and imports for a while in postwar Europe and kept out of those industries. In a particular stroke of genius he foresaw the decline of natural rubber and the development of chemical synthetics, stimulated by the war effort. He had stayed out of the vogue for concrete ships (a disaster) but had bought into paper, anticipating the enormous growth of bureaucracy, and into a British currency-printing firm, anticipating the demand for bank notes.
The irony was that Hartt, though a millionaire back home, was still only a lieutenant.
Without waiting to be introduced, he extended his hand and smiled. “Welcome to Salzburg and congratulations on the Crown Jewels recovery. A great piece of work.”
After Hobel’s welcome I was grateful for that. “Thank you,” I said. “I understand we shall be working together.”
The major chipped in. “Sammy, I’ve explained that you know more about the von Zells than anyone, and I’ve also explained that I want results fast.” He addressed me. “You’re supposed to be the interrogator, Wolff. But Sammy here is the fixer. He knows his way around Austria better than you know the smell of your own sweat and almost as well as he knows Wall Street. The government, the railways, the economy, who was who in the war—he knows it all. So use him. He can save you time.” He turned back to Hartt. “Where’s the file, Sammy? The sooner Wolff sees it, and gets on with the job, the better.” No first names where I was concerned.
“It’s on my desk, sir. All ready.”
Hobel scraped back his chair and stood up. “Do you have any plans yet, Wolff? Ever been involved in anything similar?”
I shrugged. “Let me read the file before I answer that.” I walked to the door and opened it. Hartt and I saluted and he closed it behind us. He rolled his eyes at me but, being the diplomat he was, said nothing. Instead he led the way down a short corridor.
I recall that the Salzburg offices were in an old clinic building—a new one had been erected a few years before, farther out of town. So there was an elevator, originally intended for invalids too sick to walk, but which was, in those days, something of a luxury for ordinary workers. The smell of surgical spirit, or whatever it is that hospitals smell of, percolated through the entire building. It came as no real surprise, therefore, to find that Hartt and I shared an office that had been a small operating theater. It was a green room, not large, with a window which looked through into a small cubicle, presumably what once had been the preop room where the surgeons washed or the students observed. Above us, against the ceiling, were a number of very large, extremely bright chrome lights, reminiscent of the headlamps I had on my car. Underneath the lights, where the operating table would have been, were two desks, back to back.
A thick, potato-colored folder lay on one of the desks. Hartt waved me to the other.
“Practicalities first—oh, and may I call you Walter?… Good. You have rooms at the Goldener Hirsch Hotel. It’s one of the nicest here, discreet, with an excellent restaurant and very central. We have an arrangement with them so leave the paying to me, then you can settle up later. You get your gas for the car from the commissary of the military government, quoting our number, which is here.” He handed me a slip of paper with twelve digits typed on it. “Don’t lose that, whatever you do. It will also help you make collect calls to this office when you are traveling around. Next, if you are here, mess night is Wednesday, tonight. Worth attending since the food is good and the wine better still. The liquor is plentiful both before and after, and it’s the best way to catch up on all the news. If you want to go tonight, I’ll pick you up at the hotel and introduce you to everyone.”
“Fine,” I said. “I’d love to. Thanks.”
He pushed the potato-colored folder across. “You must know you are the fourth person on this case. The others have all failed miserably and have run into a brick wall with this von Zell woman. She’s obviously a real toughie—either that or she really doesn’t know where her husband is. Don’t ask me, I’ve never met her. Anyway, look through this stuff, then we can talk again about how you want to proceed. I’ve got some chores to do this afternoon, so I’ll leave you to the preliminaries for a bit.”
Before he disappeared he brought me some coffee. Hartt had a fetish I immediately loved him for: he hated mugs. Everyone had mugs in the Army, for coffee, tea, chocolate. All, that is, except Sammy and then me. He thought cups and saucers much more civilized and so did I. To this day I never use mugs if I can possibly help it.
Sammy left and I opened the folder, unbuttoning my tunic. There was quite a bit to go through: typed reports in English, copies of letters in German, official receipts, photographs. But Hartt or someone else had pieced together the main documents in chronological order and I had no trouble following the details of the story I was to come to know so well.
3
It appeared, from what I read, that the gold coins—two thousand and more of them—had been “collected” during the war from a number of Austrian monasteries, beautiful, baroque sites such as Kremsmünster, Klosterneuburg, Hohenfurth, St. Florian and Wilhering. Names I was familiar with from my history books, but places I had yet to visit. The coins, as I said earlier, had been selected by Hitler’s art experts to form the nucleus of the coin collection in his projected Führermuseum in Linz.
They had been assembled over the centuries by patient monks who were more interested in the historical importance and the artistic qualities of the coins than any intrinsic value they might have because they were gold. The collection included a five-sequin piece of Pope Clement VII, dated 1525 and very rare; there was a Grossone of Alessandro de’ Medici, engraved by Benvenuto Cellini; gold excelentes of Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain; a gold unicorn of James III of Scotland dated 1486, and a guiennois of the Black Prince. There were Venetian oselles, Portuguese marabotins di ouro, shaufthalers from the Tyrol and Carinthia, quintuple ducats from Hungary and Geneva sol d’ors. There were early papal danarii from the eighth century, gold rijders from Holland, portugalösers from Denmark and Royal d’ors of Louis IX.
These were some of the rarer coins which, I read, were virtually irreplaceable. But in all I learned that there were thirty-two cases of coins, a numismatic library of books and manuscripts and twelve folders of documents, correspondence and catalogs. All vanished into thin air.
Together with all the other works of art which were to have been incorporated into Hitler’s spectacular museum, the gold coins had found a wartime place of refuge in the salt mine at Alt Aussee. This mine was deep, and therefore safe. Also, by a miraculous accident, the atmosphere inside the mine was perfect for the preservation of paintings. And it was from this mine that the coins had disappeared a few days before the arrival of the Allied forces in Austria.
The details of the removal of the treasure from the salt mine and its subsequent travels, so far as they were known, had been investigated by the first interrogator, a Lieutenant Falcon. His report was at the top of Hartt’s file. Falcon had established that the coins had been removed from Alt Aussee on April 30, 1945 by Dr. Rupprecht Hohenberg and Dr. Hans Edelmann, curators at the mine. Hohenberg and Edelmann had acted on the orders of Dr. Rudolf von Zell, who, I read, held two positions. He was chief of the collection of coins and armor for the Führermuseum, and also ministerial adviser in the Party Chancellery,
where he was Martin Bormann’s right-hand man. He was so grand that he had no fewer than four secretaries.
I could see then why “our side,” as Wren put it, was so worried about the fate of the coins. At that point Bormann’s disappearance was one of the biggest mysteries of the ending of the war, and if he did indeed have unlimited funds at his disposal, then our chances of catching him were very remote.
Hartt had a coffee machine in the little cubicle adjoining our office and I refilled my cup.
From Alt Aussee, I read, the coins had been taken to Berchtesgaden, where they had arrived the same day and been handed over to von Zell. He had an office there, not far from Hitler’s own living quarters. From Berchtesgaden, the file showed, von Zell had taken the coins to Bad Reichenhall and it was there that they had last been seen in his possession on or about May 6. According to Hohenberg and Edelmann, it had been von Zell’s intention to take the treasure to the southern Tyrol, where he could hide out. But the rapid Allied advance made that impossible and, after May 6, neither the coins nor von Zell had been seen again.
A further interrogation of Hohenberg and Edelmann had revealed the reason for the theft of the coins. With Hitler dead, Bormann had become the natural figure around which fugitive Nazis might rally. The coins provided a convenient gold reserve, an adaptable liquid asset. They were no longer regarded as works of art. This interrogation had also established that when von Zell had traveled from Berchtesgaden to Bad Reichenhall with the coins he had driven in a Mercedes 170. This, too, had vanished.
It was also Falcon who had first established that von Zell’s wife, Konstanze, was living in Mondsee, a small town near Salzburg, with their son, Dieter, aged seven. When she had first been interrogated, Mrs. von Zell had said that she had seen her husband in mid-March 1945, when she had gone to a mountain hut near the Ober-Salzburg in order to be near him during the last days of the Third Reich. However, she maintained that she had in fact seen him but twice in two weeks at that time because he had been so busy moving art treasures. She next saw her husband, she said, a month later, in April, when he took her and Dieter to Krimml, on the Salzach River. There they had stayed under a false name, von Haltern. Finally, Mrs. von Zell admitted receiving a visit from her husband on May 9, 1945, three days after the coins disappeared. But she insisted she had not seen or heard from him since that day. She said that her husband had told her he intended to make his way north, to visit his mother living in Worms, but, as far as she knew, the elder Mrs. von Zell had not heard from her son either.
