Fortune and Glory

by David McIntee

There are also some records mentioning ships; Section 119 of The Rule of the Templars, circa 1187, mentions the Order having ships at Acre (but annoyingly doesn’t give descriptions or numbers). The records of the port of La Rochelle also do show that the Templars exported wine by ship from there. (They owned many vineyards in the area at the time.) It was, however, usual for the military Orders to charter ships from their captains, rather than own them outright, and the ships exporting wine were simply hired. Overall there’s no way to know how many ships the Templars owned outright, even if we could tell how many they used. That said, we know that Henry III of England hired a Spanish Templar ship (called The Great Ship, which suggests the Templars didn’t stay up for long hours thinking up ship names) in 1224, which he later bought outright. Since the Templars in Spain were willing to part with it, presumably they did own enough others for their purposes. However, it was also possible for countries to assign ships to the Templars if they needed a Templar naval trip – for example in England it was a duty of the Constable of Dover Castle to give them a ship.

  The surviving records and tales of Templar maritime activity don’t show much skill or experience in the matter. When King James I of Aragon asked the military Orders to send warships to accompany him on a Crusade in 1269, the Templars sent only one ship, and its rudder broke. The Templars didn’t follow the normal naval practice of carrying a spare rudder, and so had to borrow one from the king’s own ship, much to the disbelief and annoyance of his crew. There are also reports of Templar ships being famous for not carrying enough drinking water for their voyages.

  The first mention of a war ‘fleet’ comes in 1292, when Pope Nicholas IV ordered both the Templars and Hospitallers to build up fleets of warships. The following year, the Templars teamed up with Venice to send a battle fleet to protect Cyprus. The Templars contributed two war galleys. You read that right: two.

  The actual Templar records of their fleets don’t survive intact, but those of the other military Orders at the time do, and show, for example, the Hospitallers owning only four ships. It’s logical to suppose that that the Templars would have had a similar number. So, there may have been 18 ships in the Templar port at La Rochelle on that day, but we can safely say that at least 14 of them will have simply been hired.

  So why didn’t the king or the Inquisition go after the fleet that de Chalons mentioned?

  Because they knew he was talking rubbish. They had already impounded and inventoried the contents of the Paris Preceptory and, in actual fact, even de Chalons had only mentioned the taking of 50 horses and the personal fortune of Hugues de Pairaud. A far cry from a huge hoard looted from the Holy Land and then smuggled out of Paris.

  WHERE IS IT NOW?

  Basically, most of it will have been returned back into the medieval economy in trade, in purchases, and when former Templars joined other Orders. It was standard for personal possessions to be tithed to an Order by a member of it, and the various Orders also did exchange regalia from time to time.

  The idea that every piece of bling the Order owned would be lumped together in a single hoard is based on a number of logical fallacies. Even if the Templars had, say, 18 ships, and they all sailed before the arrests, there has never been any evidence to suggest that any of them had a treasure cargo. Even if one or more of them had, there’s nothing to say they all sailed for the same destination. In fact, if the Order loaded multiple ships with valuables – be it gold, jewels, relics, or documents – in order to keep them out of the hands of the French king’s men, it would have made a lot more sense if they scattered to different destinations. Putting all your eggs in one basket is never a good idea when you know someone is dead-set on taking the basket.

  What we can be pretty certain of is that it’s not in the various places that popular culture tells us to expect to find it in.

  Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland is a complete blind, because it wasn’t built until 150 years – that’s six generations of any Templar family at the time – after the Order ended. Worse still, as far as that bedtime story goes, the legend that it was built by descendants of a Templar called William Sinclair is untrue. There was a William Sinclair involved with the last days of the Order, but not as a Templar; in fact he was one of the blokes who testified against them at their trial. That makes it pretty unlikely that he would have had his descendants keep Templar secrets in any way, let alone an overly elaborate way.

  The Church of Mary Magdalene in Rennes-le-Château was excavated in the late 1950s, by the way. A skeleton was found, but no sign that anything had ever been cached there.

  If you want to have a reasonable chance to find some Templar goodies, the places to look are the vicinity of Templar Preceptories, but probably not on the actual grounds of the Preceptories, as this would be the place the king’s men will have focused their search upon.

  What you need to do is find yourself a Templar who survived the dissolution of the Order and returned home. Find out where this person lived, and search on the lands of his family estate – because if he snatched a bag of coins or artefacts on the way out the door, or was entrusted with them to take care of, he will have buried them on his land, just like everybody else did back in the day.

  There are doubtless pieces of the Templar treasure – at least in the form of gold and silver coinage and ingots held by the Order – still out there, but there’s no evidential reason to assume it would all be together in one hoard. It’s going to be scattered across Europe in personal holdings cached by former Templar members. Most of them, however, simply transferred over into other Orders, especially the Hospitallers. So, really a lot of individual Templar possessions will have ended up belonging to them, and trying to search for it in Templar locations will set you onto a trail to nothing from the start.

  THE OPPOSITION IN YOUR WAY

  The main obstacle to your search is basically popular opinion, as all it offers is misleading disinformation. That and the fact that the Order’s area of operations and influence was so wide – there could be a little pot of Templar coinage almost anywhere in Western Europe, the Mediterranean, or the Middle East.

  As for the big haul – the opposition you’ll face is its lack of actual existence. The Templars simply weren’t the rich secret society in 1307 that modern populist pseudo-history tells us they were.

  NAZI GOLD

  WHAT IS IT?

  Basically, gold bullion.

  Of course the Nazis looted plenty of other treasures as well – artworks, jewels, precious metals and so on – plenty of which is still missing, but much of which has been recovered or whose fate is at least known.

  Bullion is a more intriguing treasure because it’s a mix of both looted gold, traded gold from foreign banks before the war and the country’s own gold reserves. For the most part when the phrase ‘Nazi gold’ comes up what is being referred to is the national gold reserves held by Nazi Germany’s central national bank, the Reichsbank, rather than looted gold – but it’s often difficult, if not impossible, to separate the two.

  HOW MUCH IS IT WORTH TO YOU?

  It’s difficult to put a price on what Nazi gold may be out there, simply because nobody’s quite sure how much of it is still hidden and awaiting discovery, and also because the Nazi government back in the day outright lied about how much they had to start with.

  That said, it was estimated in 1997 that they had looted about $8.7 billion worth of gold in total, and any time the subject comes up in the news media, the figures quoted tend to be in the half a billion to a billion pounds range ($0.75 billion–$1.5 billion).

  Those figures are probably over-optimistic, however, as the largest recovered Nazi gold hoard – found at Merkers in 1945, amounted to 100 tons, or about half a billion dollars today, and this is generally thought to have been almost half of the country’s total gold holdings. Another 40 tons or so have been discovered in various places over the years – mostly in 1945 – which would leave at least another 60 tons or so floating about somewhere, waiting to be fo
und. At the same value per ton, that would come to around $300 million, or £175 million.

  THE STORY

  In 1945, the war is clearly over for Nazi Germany. Their forces are retreating back into the mountains and forests of the Fatherland, while the Russians press them from one side, and the British and Americans from the other.

  As they retreat, they take with them all the material that they don’t want the Allies to get their hands on – weapons, ammunition, documents about who did what in the Holocaust, cash printing plates and the country’s gold reserves – quite apart from all the art and treasures they had looted from conquered peoples over the previous decade.

  The Reichsbank gold wasn’t the only Nazi gold hidden at the end of the war, but it is the central treasure that’s still missing, and some of that other gold from elsewhere was added to it during its journey.

  In April of 1945, the President of the Reichsbank – a man named Funk – and Nazi Reich Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, agreed to send the gold reserves of the bank south, to prevent it falling into Allied – and especially Russian – hands.

  Funk put the bank’s Chief Cashier, Georg Netzeband, in charge, while Goebbels assigned a police escort headed by Georg Kruger. Kruger also brought his daughter along, to get her out of the soon-to-be-overrun-by-vengeful-Russians Berlin. The two Georgs were given orders to take the loot south to Bavaria, but these orders were not particularly specific about exactly where.

  Goebbels’s propaganda, however, had been making a big deal out of the Alps in Bavaria being a perfect and impenetrable natural fortress from which to defend the Reich. It must have seemed quite logical to Netzeband and Kruger to head for this great fortress.

  The little convoy went first to Dresden, then through Bohemia to Pilsen, and thence to Munich. They travelled mainly at night, to avoid Allied air attack, and the trucks were sufficiently overloaded that they had trouble traversing some roads. The convoy then reached Munich, where it picked up more financial cargo, to the tune of 96 bags of British and American banknotes.

  It then drove south into Bavaria, and essentially disappeared. Rumours began to fly about where it could have ended up: at the bottom of Lake Toplitz, or indeed any Alpine lake; smuggled out of the country by plane or U-boat; deposited in Swiss banks … The possibilities are many, and almost every town and village in southern Germany, Austria and the Czech Republic eventually acquired a local folktale or two about the SS or other German units hiding crates of loot, either for personal retirement or to fund a potential resurgence of Nazi warmongering.

  PREVIOUS SEARCHES IN FACT AND FICTION

  Searching for Nazi gold, and any other valuables, started in April of 1945, when a couple of Military Police soldiers with the US Army’s 90th Infantry Division stopped a couple of out-of-place French women in the town of Merkers. The women told of how they and other civilians had been drafted in to help stash gold in the local Kaiseroda Salt Mine. The Americans soon had this tale confirmed by other soldiers, and Allied POWs who had been released from local camps and who had also helped move the gold. They then interrogated the highest ranking captured German official on-site, who was actually a director at Berlin’s National Galleries. He was there to look after looted art treasures stored in the mine – paintings were his speciality – but he also knew that gold reserves had been transferred there from the Reichsbank in February. He thought this was the entire reserve, but in fact it wasn’t quite, as Netzeband’s consignment was still in transit.

  Just within the mine’s entrance was found half a billion Reichsmarks in paper currency, in 550 bags. Behind a steel blast door was a 150x75ft vault containing 7,000 bags of around 60lb each of bullion, in ingots and coins (including $17,775,000 in $20 coins). That’s 250 tons of bullion. There were also bales of paper currencies (nearly 100 million French francs, and two and a half billion Reichsmarks), cases of gold and silver teeth, jewellery and other valuables looted from Holocaust victims. The rest of the mine’s 30 miles or so of tunnels and galleries were filled with paintings, statuary and other art from all over Europe.

  Over April, the Americans shipped the gold, currency and art to a surviving Reichsbank vault in Frankfurt, under intense security. It probably goes without saying that it was immediately rumoured locally that one truckload of gold disappeared en route, and people have been looking for it ever since.

  Documents in the mine also set the Allied intelligence agencies on the trail of other caches of loot, in the form of gold and silver bars, other precious metals, another $25,000 in US gold coins, a million Swiss Francs, and another billion or so French Francs. All of these were returned to the Allied clearing centre at Frankfurt.

  Many of the documents also provided a paper trail of where Nazi money had been spent, or siphoned off to, either by the State or by individuals. While vital in itself, that side of things doesn’t involve actual treasure hunting, though.

  In 1946, the US Treasury and the OSS (the Office of Strategic Services, forerunners of the CIA) looked into some of these documents also, and figured out that at the beginning of 1945, the Vatican Bank had snagged over $80 million of Nazi gold in Swiss francs for ‘safekeeping’, though the British military had managed to catch about a third of it on the way across the Austrian border.

  The next big development came in 1959, when a diving expedition to Toplitzsee – Lake Toplitz, in Austria’s Salzkammergut, in the Alps near Salzburg – found a layer of logs hiding something in a layer near the lake bottom. Since the lake was a known Nazi site – it had been used for torpedo testing and suchlike during the war – and since it was common knowledge that the Nazis had gone to a lot of effort to hide loot, it didn’t take long before people started putting those two things together and coming up with the thought of sunken bullion.

  The lake is now the most famous of the supposed dumping grounds for Nazi gold, and attracts tourists and treasure hunters from around the world, and has done so for many years. The 1959 expedition, and others since, have recovered interested bits and pieces from the lake, including counterfeit banknotes and the equipment to print currency, plates and printing presses.

  Despite the popularity of the lake among treasure hunters, there has never really been much evidence that any gold was ever sunk in it. Certainly none has ever been found there, despite many people’s assumptions, and many adventure stories – especially in the 1960s and 1970s – being based around the idea.

  In fact it seems to have been Ian Fleming’s Goldfinger which really cemented Lake Toplitz as a depository for Nazi gold in the public subconscious, as the gold bar which Bond wagers in his game of golf with Auric Goldfinger is said to have come from there. Ironically, this identification is given by Smithers, a secretary to the treasury; the same British government department which was actually happy to trade and buy Nazi gold in the run-up to the war – and maybe afterwards, but that’s still to come. Stay tuned.

  Helen MacInnes’ novel The Salzburg Connection also has Nazi gold recovered from there, while the novel and TV series Private Schulz takes a more accurate view by having the characters’ supply of fake British fivers dumped there.

  Oddly enough, the popular action-adventure TV shows of the 1960s especially in Britain, such as The Saint, The Champions and The Persuaders – basically everything made by ITC – tended to mix and match their Nazi gold plots, with each show usually having at least one ‘Nazi gold in Lake Toplitz (or equivalent)’ and one ‘Nazi gold in former mine’ episode.

  The Clint Eastwood movie Kelly’s Heroes takes the far more sensible approach of the Nazi gold sought after by the protagonists being stored in an actual bank.

  Now, it’s true that lots of Nazi materiel was deposited in the lake at the end of the war, but so far this has proved to be munitions, printing presses for banknotes, and British and US currency counterfeited by Operation Bernhard – a project that recruited concentration camp prisoners to forge Allied currency in order to destabilize the British economy. In other words, stuff that was, at
best, of no further use to the fleeing Nazis, and may have been of more use to the Allies, if only as evidence of wrongdoing.

  Materials, in other words, that they could no longer use after the war, and didn’t want the Allies to be able to use. Gold, on the other hand, is something that is always useful and so must be hidden for later recovery.

  THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE

  The Nazis, of course, were quite clever about hanging on to their precious yellow bricks, with some help even from their enemies, because bankers being in a class of villainy all to themselves isn’t a post-2008 phenomenon.

  After the Anschluss and occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1938, the Nazis grabbed the Czech and Austrian national banks’ gold reserves and added them – about $71 million in 1939 value – to those of the Reichsbank. In 1939 they decided to sell off what was then £5.6 million worth of gold to raise currency, and this they did through the Bank of England.

  Some £4 million of the gold went to banks in Belgium and Holland, with the rest sold in London. In 1939, when war broke out, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir John Simon asked the Governor of the Bank of England if they were holding any of this gold. The governor said they held gold at times for the international banking system, and had no need to know who it actually belonged to, honest guv, straight up. At the same time, some of it was already being shipped off to New York.

  Ex-Prime Minister David Lloyd George commented that, ‘Germany had no more right to the gold than a burglar.’ Note how most of this gold ended up in Belgium and Holland. Guess what happened when those countries were overrun by Germany in 1940? Yep, the same gold found itself reclaimed by the Reichsbank again, along with the Belgian and Dutch reserves, which amounted to $223 million and $193 million respectively. Early in the war the Reichsbank also grabbed about $550 million worth of gold reserves from the countries Germany occupied.

  How much the Reichsbank started the war with is, as you see, hard to estimate, as their records show that they outright lied all along, in international banking circles, about how much they had. Then there’s the question of how much they spent running the war – trying to conquer the world is an expensive business. Fortunately for the Nazis, paper money was in proper use. They did most of their purchasing of raw materials with countries like Spain and Portugal, and paid in various currencies. Partway through the war, the Portuguese figured out that about three quarters of it was counterfeit.