Anyway, fast forward to the end of the war, and the issue of how much gold was left.
Netzeband, being both a well-trained and conscientious cashier, and aware that being responsible for the gold and currency meant it would be his head on the block – literally – if every penny didn’t get to wherever it was going, made a detailed inventory of the cargo. This inventory, known as the Netzeband Report, has been a central tool for treasure hunters ever since.
Netzeband listed the cargo as 10 tons of gold, which was to be shipped south in three trucks. This gold was in the form of 770 ingots in 385 money sacks – two ingots to a bag, with paper currency stuffed in as well. Printing plates for banknotes also went along with them.
When the convoy reached the Alps – specifically a checkpoint in the village of Forhund, near the town of Garmisch – the two Georgs were somewhat disappointed in their hopes of finding the gateway to a secure fortress. Instead, the officer in command, Major Possinger, told them that the region was in fact full of refugees displaced by Allied bombing. He sent them to the Alpine Division base at Mittelwald, which is apparently known as the violin capital of the world. The Alpenkorps base there was commanded by a Colonel Franz Pfeiffer.
There, the gold was unloaded into the Officers’ Mess. Colonel Pfeiffer took command of it and decided that it must be hidden. Pfeiffer decided to hide the gold from everybody, not just the Allies. He then put the convoy and its cargo under the orders of a Captain Rüger, who took Netzeband and the trucks to the nearby Alpine village of Lake Wachensee. Not, you’ll notice, Lake Toplitz.
The first thing Rüger did was to have the money loaded back onto the trucks and moved to a more secure space than the Alpenkorps’ dining room, in which everybody could eye it up and think about how to grab a share. Taking Netzeband with him, Rüger moved the gold to the small village of Einseidel, at the southern end of the lake. At Einseidel is a three-storey alpine storage building called ‘The Forest House’. This had been built around the turn of the 19th century, for the farmers and villagers of the area to store supplies and equipment over the winter.
Rüger and Netzeband first put their valuable cargo in the hay loft of the Forest House. At this point, Georg Netzeband thought his job was done, and his responsibility for the gold and currency had been discharged. Unfortunately, this wasn’t quite the case.
While the Reichsbank funds were being stashed in the Forest House, other trucks carrying more gold and currency were arriving at Mittelwald. These trucks were sent by the SS, the Abwehr and the Foreign Ministry. How much gold, cash and other valuables were among these shipments isn’t known, because Colonel Pfeiffer doesn’t seem to have been much interested in keeping records that could be used by the Allies. This worried Georg Netzeband, as this other treasure was being mixed in with his cargo when stored at the Forest House, which meant the total hoard now did not match his inventory. Worse still, Pfeiffer consistently refused to give Netzeband a receipt for delivery of his cargo, which meant he would be held responsible for any discrepancies. Since there were now undocumented cargoes turning up at Mittelwald, there were definitely discrepancies aplenty.
Meanwhile, the villagers around Wachensee began to get restless as April 1945 drew to a close, as they heard rumours about gold being stored and hidden in the area. By 26 April, all the gold that was coming had arrived, and Colonel Pfeiffer began having his men move the hoard to a series of hiding spots in the mountains surrounding the area. Witnesses reported seeing mule trains laden with crates being led up Mount Steinriegel and Mount Klausen-Kopf on that date and returning in the morning unladen.
Although the local villagers reported that the mules were escorted by ordinary conscripts, later interrogations of the Mittelwald personnel after Germany’s surrender showed that these men were actually the highest officers on the base, dressing down in rank to disguise themselves. Led by Captain Rüger, they spent three nights transporting the hoard to a number of caches on the mountains. According to Rüger’s interrogation at the hands of US forces, the officers moved the 770 gold ingots brought by Netzeband from the Reichsbank, the 96 bags of Allied currencies from Munich and 56 crates sent to Mittelwald by the SS, Abwehr and Foreign Ministry. These crates consisted of 36 crates of gold ingots and coinage, and 20 crates of other materials – probably documents. This treasure was placed in several specially dug pits, three metres square, the sides lined with wooden planks, at various points amidst these mountains.
The treasure was buried just in time, as the US Army turned up at Major Possinger’s checkpoint on the road into Garmisch on 30 April, just a day after the treasure burial was completed. Possinger told the Americans that that the region was full of refugees, and persuaded them to call off a bombing raid that would have flattened the town. Far from being an impenetrable fortress, Garmisch actually was just about the easiest town in Germany for the Allies to take, as the populace were more than happy to hand over the running of the town and get back to a peacetime way of life.
Since the Allies were already chasing down Nazi Germany’s resources, and the local populace had witnessed parts of the hoard being taken into the woods and mountains, the Americans quickly brought in one of their special ‘Gold Rush’ teams of searchers to interrogate the personnel who had been taken prisoner from the Mittelwald Alpenkorps base.
Georg Netzeband, under interrogation, maintained that he didn’t know the final location of the treasure. Colonel Pfeiffer disappeared for several weeks, but in the meantime his officers, including Captain Rüger, had been questioned and had spoken about some of the locations in which the gold and currency were buried.
Rüger was put in the care of the 55th Pioneer Battalion, who collected his mountain gear from his billet, and took him up Mount Steinriegel so that he could lead them to the loot, which he did. He took them to three caches on the mountains Steinriegel and Klausen-Kopf, where the soldiers dug up 728 gold ingots. This is indisputable – they took pictures of themselves goofing around with the gold bars, and you can easily find them on the Internet.
These were all from Netzeband’s cargo of 770 ingots. So, what happened to the remaining undocumented crates from the SS, Abwehr and Foreign Ministry, and the 96 bags of Allied currency from Munich?
According to a death-bed confession by one of Pfeiffer’s Alpenkorps lieutenants, Pfeiffer and a few other officers returned on the night of 29 April and removed the 96 bags of currency to a new hiding place on a third mountain, away from both Steinriegel and Klausen-Kopf. They left Netzeband’s gold where it was because it was too heavy for them to spirit away on their own. Since all the caches on those two mountains were thoroughly swept clean by the 55th Pioneers, it’s logical to assume that the other crates not from Netzeband’s cargo were also hidden on a third mountain.
They then met on Klausen-Kopf and agreed to tell any American interrogators who asked about the missing cash that the SS had taken it south to Tyrol.
Colonel Pfeiffer stayed at large in the woods for several weeks before turning himself in and sticking to the story about the SS taking any remaining treasure to the Tyrol. Despite this, he was somehow able to bribe US troops with dollar bills. The ordinary American soldier was earning a mere $20 a month for his troubles, so it’s unlikely that he was getting large sums of dollars from them. However, if he had, say, 96 sacks worth of US banknotes to play with … After the war, he lived quite comfortably in Argentina for many years, before retiring to Germany in the 1980s. He died in 1994.
So, 770 ingots were buried, but only 728 were recovered, leaving 42 ingots unaccounted for. Plus 36 crates of gold and 20 crates of who-knows-what.
Part of the reason for Lake Toplitz becoming associated with the gold is probably because the Netzeband Report listed printing plates and currency among his cargo, and printing plates and (counterfeit) currency were found in Lake Toplitz in 1959. However the plates and fake Allied currency dumped in Toplitz had come not from the Reichsbank in Berlin, but from Operation Bernhard, which had originally operate
d from Sachsenhausen concentration camp, but had been transferred to Mauthausen in Austria – not far from Lake Toplitz – in early 1945.
Toplitz had been used as a naval testing station for mines and torpedoes and suchlike throughout the war, and so was judged a suitable secure location to dump the equipment from the counterfeiting operation. (The personnel, all concentration camp inmates, were transferred to Ebensee concentration camp to be murdered, but a revolt at the camp saved them.)
The two completely different sets of printing plates and currency were then conflated in the minds of those investigating missing Nazi loot.
Other sites seem to have been used by retreating Nazis during the last stages of the war.
In the Czech Republic, in 1962, an intelligence officer named Helmut Gaenzel went undercover in prison for three months to eavesdrop on jailed Nazi general Christoph Klein. According to Klein, crates were brought by train to the vicinity of the town of Štĕchovice.
Three hundred French and Russian prisoners were used to unload the crates and transfer this cargo to a series of tunnels known as ‘The Snake’. The silence of these prisoners was then ensured by their being by 11 SS soldiers – who, in turn, were shot by General Klein’s driver, just in case any of the prisoners had let anything slip to them.
The location of ‘The Snake’ is rather vague, but groundpenetrating radar suggests there are earthworks under a field on the outskirts of town, which had been used as a landing strip during the war. The Czech government, however, is of the opinion that the field is more likely a mass war grave, and refuses to allow permission for any excavation, as they don’t want to either disturb a war grave or upset descendants of whoever might be in it.
There was also an SS barracks and mess hall in Štĕchovice, linked by a bridge over a narrow gulley. The wife of one of the SS officers there was witness to another set of crates being hidden away in this gulley. According to her, the gulley was filled with crates, including several tunnels branching off it. She did not see what was in the crates, but, of course, treasure hunters immediately jumped to the conclusion that mystery crates = Nazi gold. In this case, two of the tunnels have subsequently been discovered, but the boxes and crates found therein were all filled with weapons and ammunition, not treasure of any kind.
It is most likely that this material was intended for use by an insurgent/guerrilla campaign after Germany’s surrender, which never actually materialized.
Štěchovice isn’t the only potential site for Nazi gold in the former Sudetenland of the Czech Republic, however.
In the town of Ziproc, the local castle was built in the 12th century on a hill made largely of jasper, and its dungeons were expanded in the 17th century. Jasper is a natural enhancer of radio waves, so in World War II the SS made full use of this by making the castle a headquarters and listening post, from which they could monitor Allied radio traffic, as well as having better signals for their own communications with Berlin and other occupied areas.
At the end of the war, you guessed it, crates were brought in but never left. Nobody thought much of this at first, and the Czech military took control of the castle in 1947. In 1993 the military left, selling the castle to a private owner. One of the first things the new owner did was to get some of the plumbing fixed and, during the process, the plumbers discovered not just some hidden tunnels in the dungeons, which had been concreted over by the SS, but some boxes stashed in the castle well. The boxes turned out to contain SS weapons and documents, and the occasional grenade-related booby-trap, which failed to go off after 50 years underwater.
There are still other booby traps in the well, and groundpenetrating radar shows there are also still unopened tunnels under the castle. It’s unclear how old these tunnels are, as the 17th-century dungeon itself was only rediscovered in the early 2000s.
WHERE IS IT NOW?
By ‘it’, the question is: what’s the best place to look for the 42 ingots remaining from Netzeband’s cargo? Or, more accurately, the best place to look for 40 remaining ingots.
You see, in 1996, two of them turned up in – wait for it – the Bank of England. Basically, the only way they could have got there is if someone had deposited them in a bank somewhere, and they had consequently been used in an international gold swap – a common procedure from the beginning of the 20th century onwards, in which national central banks swap gold back and forth in order to show that they meet central reserve ratio requirements. This is a standard procedure recognized as normal by the International Monetary Fund, but is essentially cosmetic in nature.
At some point, someone swapped these ingots into the Bank of England to make the Bank of England’s gold reserves look as if they were at the right levels. At first it was suggested that the bars had been some of the Czech bank gold from 1938, but the serial numbers stamped on them turned out to be part of Netzeband’s consignment, meaning they must have come in after 1945. This means some people at at least two national banks have been rather naughty in transferring Nazi gold around Europe instead of shunting it to the clearing system to determine rightful ownership.
The main other banks known to have received large amounts of Reichsbank gold are the Swiss National Bank and the Vatican Bank. The former was Europe’s main gold distribution centre for decades, and during the war is known to have received about $440 million in bullion from Nazi Germany (roughly $316 million of which was looted gold, and about $124 million was ‘official’ German gold reserves).
So, the first answer to ‘where is Netzeband’s gold?’ is most likely ‘in a Swiss bank vault’, as that’s where two of the ingots got to the Bank of England from.
The second part of the answer is: In Argentina, or at least in the Argentine economy. Colonel Pfeiffer retired to there after the war, and as he was the last person known to be in possession of any of Netzeband’s consignment, and he lived a more than comfortable life with no visible means of support, it’s a logical and straightforward deduction. That said, he also had been in possession of a large supply of (either real or fake) US dollars, which no doubt also helped.
Finally, in terms of where to look for it out in the field: bear in mind that the known hoards of Nazi treasure – including gold – which have been recovered over the years were all stashed in caves and bunkers; usually salt or copper mines. Such locations are protected from bombing, hard to spot from the air, easy to close up with digging equipment or explosives, and – most importantly – able to be accessed again for the gold to be removed by anyone who knows that it’s there.
So, as a general rule of thumb, any hoards of Nazi treasure – whether Reichsbank holdings or looted from conquered countries and Holocaust victims – are far more likely to be in caves and tunnels, sealed in by engineered collapses, than at the bottom of lakes. The best option in the area would be the old Riedboden lead mine, which closed down in 1903. If you absolutely must look in a lake, then Walchensee, Kochelsee, or Loisach are all at least in the general area of where the Netzeband gold actually went.
The unrecovered crates are, however, most likely to be still buried in their original hiding places on a mountain somewhere between the mountains of Steinriegel and Klausen-Kopf. Good choices of Bavarian Alps to search would be Altlach-Berg, Simmetsberg and Sintelsberg.
THE OPPOSITION IN YOUR WAY
As with so many treasure hunting locations, tourists are always around. In fact there are even Nazi-gold tour routes, for drivers, bikers and even historical and battlefield-themed coach tours. This makes it more practical to go and have a look at these sites yourself, but the disadvantage is that, obviously, despite so many people tramping back and forth, nobody has ever actually found anything more.
There have been death threats made to treasure hunters in various parts of the former East Germany and Czech Republic, but none have been acted upon, and it appears more related to the likelihood of them discovering incriminating documents that name names, rather than to do with nicking gold from any modern-day Nazis. (There are neo-Nazi g
roups who would probably love to lay claim to the loot, but there is no historical line of descent between individual groups in the 1940s and ones today.)
Bavaria and Austria are both very safe areas in terms of crime, though the usual precautions should be taken when travelling. Organised crime – especially from the former Iron Curtain countries – has increased in recent years, but not in any way related to either Nazi gold or the search for it.
In terms of nature, while you’re tramping around the mountains in search of burial locations, there are few to no dangerous animals. Bears very rarely wander into the area, and tend to be shot when they do, leaving the occasional lynx as the only real mammalian predator, and they’re not big enough to attack people. You may, however, encounter wild boar, which can be stroppy (but are delicious), and will see – but are unlikely to interact with – eagles.
The biggest danger, therefore, is in the form of low temperatures above the snow line and the danger of avalanches. You must bear these in mind, and be sure to get proper local and professional advice about being safe in snow and forest.
The other issues to check out are the laws on treasure hunting and metal detecting. Treasure-trove law in Germany has half the find belonging to the finder, and the other half to the landowner – it’s tax-free for both. Searching is allowed in most places, away from historical monuments, but be aware that some areas have been slapped with no-metal-detecting orders, usually because of the amount of World War II ordnance that could too easily be triggered if dug up by an enthusiastic amateur.
Fortune and Glory Page 18
