Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  The convoy stayed only long enough to take on board the 94 bags of foreign currency taken off the trains and to receive instructions about the next destination. No definite destination for the Reichsbank treasure had been worked out before it was shipped from Berlin, although it had been hoped that when the gold and currency reached Munich it could be stored in the so-called ‘Bormann Bunker’; but Bormann refused permission and new plans had to be hastily worked out. By the evening of 19 April the treasure was on its way again, bound for Peissenberg, near Weilheim, some 80 kilometres south of Munich, where it was thought a secure hiding place could be found in the tunnels of the local lead mine.

  At this stage the treasure was believed to consist of:

  365 bags, each containing 2 bars of gold, the whole weighing nearly 9 tons and worth over $10,000,000

  9 envelopes containing records of the gold:

  4 boxes of bullion

  2 bags of gold coins

  6 cases of Danish coins

  94 bags of foreign exchange

  34 printing plates (for Reichsmarks) and a quantity of banknote printing paper (enough for 100,000 bills)

  When the convoy finally reached Peissenberg the mine manager advised against stowing the treasure in the mine. The shaft was already waterlogged, he explained, because recent air raids had cut the electricity supply and put the pumping machinery out of action. While the treasure was off-loaded for temporary storage in a building on the mining estate, Schwedler telephoned Funk for new instructions. It was agreed that the banknote printing plates and the paper ought to be returned to Munich. The rest of the consignment, Funk suggested, should be driven down to a small town called Mittenwald in the Bavarian Alps near the Austrian border, where the barracks of the Gebirgsjägerschule – the Mountain Infantry Training School – was located. Funk considered the commander of the school, a certain Colonel Franz Pfeiffer, to be a completely trustworthy Wehrmacht officer who was ideally placed to assume responsibility for the treasure and make arrangements for its concealment in the mountainous regions surrounding Mittenwald.

  So on the afternoon of 21 April – while Reichsbank officials Netzeband and Will returned to Munich with the banknote printing plates and paper – the nine tons of gold bullion, the boxes of gold coins and the voluminous hoard of foreign currency were once again loaded on to the Opel-Blitz trucks for the final stage of their journey to the south, this time under the baleful eye of the remaining Reichsbank official, Januszewski.

  The convoy trundled on past unending streams of refugees and over bridges with demolition charges already in place. On the winding road to Kochel the drivers refreshed themselves from bottles of brandy, champagne and wine and admired the spectacular mountain scenery, so different from the dead flat countryside around Berlin. At the foot of the Kessel Mountains they refuelled with the last of the petrol from their jerrycans, and at Urfeld they passed a group of evacuated Berlin children who waved cheerily when they recognised the lorries’ Berlin registration plates. Burping champagne bubbles and breathing deeply of the clean Alpine air in the relative peace and security of the south, the Reichsbank treasure party were glad to be clear of the doomed capital. They did not know then that none of them would ever return there.

  In the meantime the trains Adler and Dohle continued to battle their way to Munich along a railway line incessantly bombed and strafed by marauding enemy planes. (They eventually arrived on 27 April after two whole weeks on the line.) Whenever the trains stopped, which was often, Rosenberg-Lipinski and his companions seemed to have run a complicated shuttle service between Adler and the various Reichsbank branches in Bavaria, handing out German bank-notes on the one hand and juggling in a complicated way with the potentially more valuable foreign exchange on the other. On 21 April, 13 sacks of foreign exchange and five boxes of valuables were taken from Adler and driven by car to the Munich Reichsbank. On the same day the 11 bags of foreign currency left in Regensburg were transferred to the Munich branch. On 22 April, when Adler was held up on the north bank of the Danube, the tireless Rosenberg-Lipinski picked up the 14 sacks of foreign currency which had been deposited in the Munich bank the day before and drove out to Lindau at the eastern end of Lake Constance. When Rosenberg-Lipinski returned, he brought with him 25 boxes containing 100 bars of gold bullion which had been stored in the Konstanz Reichsbank, as well as the 24 sacks of foreign currency with which he had set out. Eleven of these sacks were duly checked into the Munich branch. But one sack (containing SS foreign funds) was retained by Rosenberg-Lipinski ‘for certain reasons’ which he did not enlarge upon, and the remaining 12 sacks were not logged in by the bank. Not long afterwards both they and the sack ‘retained’ by Rosenberg-Lipinski had vanished. So had the five small boxes (which may have contained some of Himmler’s private papers) originally taken from Adler with the 13 sacks of currency. Though part of the missing 12 sacks were destined to turn up again, neither Rosenberg-Lipinski’s sack nor the five boxes were ever heard of again.

  As for the 25 boxes of bullion which Rosenberg-Lipinski had brought from Konstanz, it had always been intended that they should be added to the main body of Reichsbank assets despatched south from Munich. But when Rosenberg-Lipinski eventually arrived at the Peissenberg mine to hand over the 25 boxes on 22 April he found that the treasure and trucks had moved on, They had disappeared somewhere into the Alps, but where he did not know.

  April 22nd was a significant date in the development of the Reichsbank story, for on or about that day a collective shudder seems to have gone through the uppermost echelons of the SS in Berlin. The original impetus may have come from Reichsfiihrer SS Heinrich Himmler himself, who was even then deeply involved in the secret surrender negotiations through emissaries of the western powers. It certainly became apparent in the office of Ernst Kaltenbrunner by that day that Berlin was indeed lost, that whoever did not get out at once, and whatever was not taken out at once, was destined to stay, trapped inside the tightening Russian ring.

  The immediate cause of the reverberations of 22 April could be found in the erratic behaviour of the Führer during the preceding two days. It had always been understood in the Reich Chancellery that when Berlin became militarily untenable all the bunker people (Hitler, his closest ministers and aides and their staff and families) would decamp en masse to the relative security of the second ‘capital’ in the south – the mountain retreat on the Obersaltzberg above Berchtesgaden, the hypothetical command centre of the so-called National Redoubt. Responsibility for the move rested with Martin Bormann and as the days went by and the situation in Berlin worsened he became increasingly anxious that the transfer should be made as soon as possible. To the bunker secretaries he indicated that the Führer’s fifty-sixth birthday on 20 April would mark the end of their stay in Berlin. Some of the domestic staff had already gone to Obersaltzberg with instructions to get Hitler’s house, the Berghof, ready for immediate occupation. Hitler’s chauffeur had been told to prepare for the journey and a list of the entire motorcade – private cars, trucks, buses, armored vehicles – had been drawn up, along with the allocation of seats.

  There was very little time left. The Americans had reached the River Elbe in the west. The Red Army was sweeping across the Oder and Neisse rivers in the East. When the Americans and Russians met, Germany would be cut in half and all overland connections with Obersaltzberg would be severed. General Patton’s tanks were advancing deep into Bavaria. The Ruhr and Rhine and the great ports of the north were invested by the British. The French had taken Stuttgart and were sweeping south-east towards the Alps. For Hitler and his entourage in Berlin there was no longer any refuge in the east, west or north-west, and the Russian encirclement of Berlin was almost complete. The need to move south was imperative. On 20 April Himmler left Hitler’s bunker for the last time and Reich Marshal Goering, together with various lesser Nazi officials and sections of the army and air force staffs, departed for Berchtesgaden, expecting Hitler to follow shortly.

  On the af
ternoon of Hitler’s birthday Bormann intimated that the departure was scheduled for 22 April at the latest. He told the secretaries to start packing their bags. He advised Hitler’s valet and cook to get the Führer’s wardrobe and pantry ready for departure. In his notebook he wrote: ‘Ordered departure of advance party to Salzburg.’ With the Russians already shelling the south-bound autobahn the only way out now was by air – and then only by flying at night.

  But still Hitler would not budge and on 22 April he finally broke down in a paroxysm of anger which terrified all who witnessed it. The cause of Hitler’s collapse was the failure of one of his generals, SS Lieutenant-General Steiner, to carry out his orders and utilise his combined forces (which were largely non-existent) in a last-ditch knock-out blow against the Russians. When Hitler learned that Steiner, instead of attacking the Russians, had abandoned Berlin to its fate and led his raggle-taggle army westwards into American captivity, Hitler began to scream. As his voice rose to a demonic shriek, utterly unnerving to all who were present, Hitler raged at the treachery all around him, at the deceit and corruption with which he was surrounded, at the desertion of his Army and the doom of his mission. Lurching backwards and forwards on his feet, his right arm swinging wildly, his left arm flopping limply at his side, the demented Führer’s face turned chalky white and his body shook as if smitten by a violent stroke. No one had ever seen him lose his self-control so completely. For the first time he acknowledged that the end had come and the Third Reich was doomed. As Hitler’s violent rage subsided he collapsed into a chair. In a trembling voice rent with anguish he declared: ‘The war is lost!’ The Third Reich had ended in failure and there was nothing left for him to do but to die. He would stay in Berlin and meet the end when it came. Others could do what they wanted, those who wanted to leave the bunker could do so, the women could be flown to Berchtesgaden – but he would not go to the south.

  Late on 22 April the majority of the Chancellery staff took off in ten aircraft from four different airfields in Berlin, and on Bormann’s orders the heads of most government ministries and agencies also left Berlin that night. (One of these ten aircraft, a Junkers 352, its take-off from Berlin fatally delayed by airport workers, who were angry that the Party privileged were deserting the capital and threw their baggage off the plane, was still in the air at daybreak and was shot down by the Russians over Boernersdorf in Saxony killing 16 of the 17 persons on board. It was this plane which was supposed to have been carrying Hitler’s private diaries, first revealed to the world in April 1983 and proved to be fake by Federal German experts in the following month.)

  Goebbels now announced in a broadcast: ‘The Führer will die in Berlin.’ When Himmler learned of Hitler’s fateful decision he believed he was at last free of his oath of loyalty to the Führer. It seemed to be the signal for the rats to abandon the sinking ship. From that moment the SS began to grab whatever was its own, and whatever it felt was its due, before it was too late. In this final snatch the Reichsbank proved a convenient target. In Munich the 13 sacks of foreign currency brought back to the bank by Rosenberg-Lipinski, together with a number of parcels that may have contained Himmlers personal papers, were rudely seized by one of the leading SS generals under Himmler – SS General Gottlob Berger, Chief of the SS Main Office. Berger was Himmler’s éminence grise, the architect of the Waffen-SS, and a war criminal who was to be sentenced to 25 years’ imprisonment at Nuremberg (and released after serving two). According to later testimony by General Berger, he was acting directly on Himmler’s instructions, which were to take the money and hide it and burn his personal papers. In any event, the money ended up in ingenious obscurity under the floorboards of a small barn in the grounds of the residence of the Chief Forester of St Johann, a village a few miles from Salzburg. A portion of the money was found after Berger led the Americans to the spot following his capture in May. According to a SHAEF report the sacks were sealed with Himmler’s stamp and contained his personal fortune estimated at $2,000,000 in the currencies of 22 nations. The fortune was not intact, however, for some of the sacks were missing and a later count revealed that the recovery was short to the tune of at least $200,000 – or just over one and three quarter million dollars by today’s values. If the money was taken by Berger – and it is difficult to see who else might have taken it – it was never retrieved.

  On 25 April the Munich bank was hit again by the SS, this time on the rather more narrowly personal initiative of an unknown RSHA official accompanied by a gentleman by the name of Dr Österreich, who removed 85,000 Swiss francs (worth nearly $20,000) from one of the bags of foreign currency brought back by Rosenberg-Lipinski, and then vanished. But the robberies from the Reichsbank in Munich, substantial though they were, were dwarfed by the haul taken by the RSHA by force on 22 April from what was left in the vaults of the Reichsbank back in Berlin.

  On the orders of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, a party of SS troopers under 39-year-old SS Brigadier-General Josef Spacil, head of Amt II, the Budget Administration Section of the RSHA, carried out an audacious robbery at the new Reichsbank headquarters in Berlin, removing at gunpoint jewels, securities and the last remaining foreign exchange assets held in the vault, valued altogether at 23 million gold marks ($9,131,000). This monumental snatch-and-grab of almost all that was left in the Third Reich’s coffers had to be carried out in great haste. Berlin was almost surrounded. The Russians had penetrated the city’s outer defensive ring. The roads to the south were already cut, the airfields were under bombardment and artillery fire raked the city centre. In one of the last planes to leave the beleaguered city, General Spacil took off with his prodigious haul, aimed for a gap in the circle of artillery fire and – like every other Nazi chief who still believed he had a future – headed south for the National Redoubt, leaving the burning capital surrounded by a ring of steel and fire.

  Spacil’s plane flew into Salzburg. There the loot was loaded on to a lorry and driven to the town of Burgwies. Here Spacil was met by an SS officer, who reported that the Allies were now so close that further progress would be impossible. Spacil hastily decided to bury the loot. With the help of two reliable agents from nearby villages – a Volkssturm official and a Chief Forester who was also a trusted Nazi official – the loot was buried under the cover of trees on a steep slope barely a hundred yards from the road leading from Taxenbach to the high Tyrolean town of Rauris. Later, more treasure from the Berlin Reichsbank was packed in half a dozen jute sacks and a heavy iron chest and buried in a hole on a wooded mountainside near Rauris.

  General Spacil still had a huge quantity of valuables in his possession for which he desperately needed to find a hiding place. Some of it was distributed amongst surviving Gestapo officers. To any high-standing SS officials he came across he handed out largesse on a grand scale. At Fischhorn Castle he lavished 500,000 Reichsmarks, 2,500 dollars and 1,550 Swiss francs on a certain Franz Conrad, the SS man who had been responsible for requisitioning all the factories and Jewish property in the Warsaw Ghetto. A few days later Spacil handed out a further 500,000 Reichsmarks, 10,000 Swiss francs, 3,000 dollars, 200 Swedish crowns and 40 English pounds – allegedly for back pay due to the 55 men under Conrad’s command. On 26 April he arranged for the disposition of foreign securities and 5,000 carats of diamonds (valued at $450,000 at $90 per carat and worth $1,800,000 on the black market in 1945) and on the following day made a rendezvous with Captain Karl Radl, adjutant to the legendary SS Commando leader, Colonel Otto Skorzeny. Skorzeny was head of Amt VI/5 of the RSHA responsible for sabotage and subversion in western Europe and in charge of various paramilitary units engaged in sabotage, subversion and political warfare in territories under German rule. In 1943 he had become a hero of the German people when, at the head of a band of parachute troops, he had rescued Mussolini from captivity in a remote mountain hotel in the Abruzzi. To Skorzeny’s adjutant Spacil handed over large sums of gold and securities, including 50,000 francs’ worth of gold coins, 10,000 Swedish crowns, 5,000 dollars, 5,000
Swiss francs and 5 million Reichsmarks. On the following day Radl, Skorzeny and a few SS officers, who up till now had been based in a special train in a siding at Radstadt in the Austrian Tyrol, left the train and took refuge up in the mountains. There, in an unknown hiding place, they concealed the huge quantity of valuables that had come into their possession.

  Part of the loot hidden by Spacil was later recovered by the Americans. None of that taken by Skorzeny was ever found. Unlike Skorzeny, Spacil had always hoped that he could, in the event of his capture, barter his knowledge of the Reichsbank treasure in exchange for his freedom. When he was eventually picked up by the Americans and thrown into a PW cage near Munich he attempted to do just that. Disguised as an SS corporal named Gruber he attempted to bribe a Military Intelligence/CIC screening team into giving him a discharge in return for information about the RSHA and the whereabouts of treasure and money ‘formerly belonging to German intelligence’.

  But some of Gruber’s confidants at the camp informed American intelligence that he had not revealed everything. Gruber, they said, was in fact ‘a fanatical Nazi named Josef Spacil who was purported to have information that could lead to the discovery of Hitler’s body and diary, the whereabouts of the gold crown and sceptre of Charlemagne, and other riches. They said he had some poison and any open attempt to arrest him as a Nazi would result in his suicide.’ The Americans decided to play along with Spacil and mislead him into believing a discharge could be bought. Spacil was tricked into furnishing a password and a letter of authority enabling Lieutenant Nacke, of US Army Intelligence, to contact accomplices of Spacil who knew where the treasure was hidden.