Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  DuBois’ papers from SHAEF and 6th Army Group headquarters were of impeccable pedigree. But they did not spare him from the angst every travelling serviceman felt when he was overtaken by night in former enemy territory: fear of missing a decent billet and a square meal, fear of being stranded homeless in the ruins, the umbilical cord to his alma mater, the all-embracing military system, severed till morning. It was evening and dark when DuBois got to Munich. Like Frankfurt and Stuttgart and just about everywhere else Munich had been flattened by air raids – 74 of them in all – and 50 per cent of the city, the historic home of the Nazi Party and the venue of Hitler’s earliest meetings and political battles, now lay in ruins. ‘The devastation of Munich was different from that of other cities,’ recalled one visitor at this time, the writer James Stern. ‘Munich’s ruins looked like a million overturned garbage carts multiplied in size as many times.’ There was no street lighting and the black, rubble-lined streets of gutted shells and tottering walls bore no names. At nightfall an eerie silence fell over this wasteland. The only sounds that could be heard were the gnawing of the rats emerging from the sewers. Great and fine buildings stood still like fossils in the moonlight as if they had fallen into ruin during millennia of time. During the hours of daylight Army MP signboards pointed out unit locations in a hundred different directions, but it was easy to get lost in the back streets and arrive late to be told: ‘All available billets are full. Red Cross – or bivouac in the station yard.’ DuBois and his party were lucky to squeeze in – the Financial Officer in the Munich Military Government had not been expecting them until next morning.

  On 10 May the hard questioning began. Twenty-eight Reichsbank officials who had reached Munich from Berlin on board the special trains Adler and Dohle had been held under guard by T Forces. Among them was one man who knew a great deal more about the disposition of the missing Reichsbank treasure than he was initially capable of revealing to his interrogators. This was Mielke, who had actually been down to Mittenwald when he brought an extra 25 boxes of gold bullion to the Kaserne and afterwards listed all the treasure as it lay in the Forest House at Einsiedl waiting to be taken up to the mountains for burial. ‘Mielke,’ DuBois reported after the interrogation, ‘was very uncertain about the facts and it was necessary to repeat some questions a number of times before he could give a clear statement. He appeared to have been shell-shocked. He was not certain whether the other gold at Mittenwald was 50 or 75 bags or perhaps there was even more.’

  Mielke’s condition was a familiar one. at that time. Half the streets in Germany were full of such people – most middle-aged, with dazed, apathetic faces, a past that was dead within them and a future for which they had no thought whatsoever. Mielke’s confusion may have been aggravated by the state of his conscience also, for he knew only too well that of the $120,000 he had brought back to Munich from Einsiedl on Funk’s instructions, $5,000 had gone astray – and only he knew where. But in spite of his pathetic condition Mielke had revealed enough. From him Lieutenant DuBois had learned the crucial names – Mittenwald, Einsiedl, Pfeiffer. His next step was obvious. That afternoon he set out for Garmisch en route to the Kaserne and the Forest House – and hopefully the tracks of the Gebirgsjäger colonel who seemed to lie at the heart of this mysterious matter.

  The next morning found him in Mittenwald. The Casino at the Kaserne where the treasure had first been stored was now being used as a hospital for German officers, but an old man who had worked there for years recalled that boxes and bags had indeed been stored there until about eight days before the Americans arrived, when they were transported by truck on two trips to Einsiedl. At the Forest House DuBois confronted the forester, Hans Neuhauser, and his wife and lodger, the Serbian girl Vera de Costra. They all agreed the treasure had been brought there, they all agreed that it had been stacked in the store-room at the back, and they all agreed that it had been taken away again. But by whom? And to where? Neuhauser senior trotted out the well-rehearsed line that had been agreed by Pfeiffer’s men up at the Klausenkopf but for just such an emergency. Neuhauser attributed the disappearance of the Reichsbank treasure to the action of everybody’s universal bogeymen, the SS. The SS took the stuff away (without Colonel Pfeiffer’s permission), he said, when the Americans occupied Wallgau, which was only six kilometres away down the Mittenwald road. ‘Neuhauser professed to have little knowledge of the bags and boxes,’ DuBois noted in his report, ‘because he did not like to butt in wherever he thought the SS were concerned.’

  Having successfully drawn one red herring across the trail, Neuhauser proceeded to draw another. Since the road to the north of Einsiedl, like the road to the south, was in American hands, the SS trucks must have driven off down the only other road still open, a dirt road skirting round Lake Walchen eastwards towards Jachenau. ‘Lt DuBois hesitated to continue the reconnaissance to Jachenau,’ DuBois wrote in his report, referring to himself, like Julius Caesar in his war memoirs, in the third person, ‘because a number of German soldiers had already been seen in the woods near the lake and it was thought desirable to secure additional guards before proceeding.’ Henriette von Schirach (the wife of Hitler’s former Youth Leader and Lord Mayor of Vienna), who moved into Jachenau subsequently, confirmed the fact. ‘The forest was infested with hungry soldiers,’ she remembered, ‘who had fed on nothing but brandy.’ These soldiers almost certainly included some of the men from the Gebirgsjäger Training School whom Colonel Pfeiffer had dismissed in that area a week or so previously. Fourteen German soldiers and two mules had been seen recently on a mountain summit near the Klausenkopf, along with eight others on a neighbouring mountain pasture. Probably they were waiting for the military situation to settle down after the ceasefire before making their bid for home. Whoever they were they were not entirely harmless. Only a few days previously a mother and her thirteen-year-old daughter had been gunned down in cold blood on the Jachenau road by a group of soldiers lurking in the woods. ‘Werewolf’ partisans were still thought to be a real threat to the Allies in the first weeks following the end of the war, and Lieutenant DuBois was not serving in the role of a combat soldier. He returned to Munich, all in one piece but empty-handed, having located neither the treasure’s hiding place nor the men who had been responsible for hiding it.

  DuBois made a breakthrough when he got back to Munich, however. The bomb-happy Mielke had collected his wits somewhat while the Lieutenant was away and, rummaging around, had come up with an inventory that he had made of the gold and currency that had been stored in the Forest House at Einsiedl while he was there. The gold totted up to over ten million dollars’ worth and the currency to over five million dollars’ worth, including more than two millions in actual US dollar bills. Lieutenant DuBois now knew that the object of his quest was the equivalent of a king’s ransom – a treasure trove worth by today’s valuation a colossal $128,500,000. That alone made further pursuit of the target worth while. On 13 May the Lieutenant set off to the south again, this time in search of the bigger game, and with a task force comfortingly augmented by an extra truck and an additional three armed guards to accompany him.

  By lunchtime DuBois was in Bad Tölz, enquiring for the whereabouts of Dr Walther Funk, who until recently had been living at his luxurious 22-roomed home, the Bergerhof, on his rich farming estate at Hechenberg, eight kilometres out of town. Funk, DuBois felt sure, could help solve the answer to the conundrum. But Funk was not there – the Bergerhof was shortly to be requisitioned by General Patton – and nobody knew where he was. They knew where his wife was, though – she was living with the Bürgermeister in Bad Tölz. DuBois wasted no time. He banged on the Bürgermeister’s door and demanded to see Frau Funk. Where, he demanded of the startled lady, was the Reichsbank treasure that had been taken to Mittenwald? And where was the Reichsbank President, her husband, Funk? The lady did not know where the treasure was; in fact she had never heard of it, so she claimed. But she knew where her husband was. She had just heard on Radio Munich (the Mili
tary Government radio station that had only started broadcasting the previous day). He had been taken prisoner by the Seventh Army at Berchtesgaden and was locked up in an American prison somewhere.

  Liaison between the myriad units composing the huge complex that made up the US Army in Germany was not always very swift or very sure. Though Funk was now a prisoner of the Americans it could prove a formidable task for DuBois to discover exactly which Americans had him in their custody. Now approaching the three-thousandth mile of his quest, the Lieutenant immediately turned his little T-Force convoy eastward and headed for the Austrian border and the town of Salzburg where he hoped that G-2 at 15 Corps, which had its headquarters in the town, could provide a clue to the Reichsbank President’s whereabouts within the Corps area. G-2 did indeed know where Funk was. He was being held in the Seventh Army Interrogation Center at Augsburg, a city 40 miles to the north-west of Munich and in exactly the direction from which DuBois and his party had just come. Nothing daunted, the party retraced their steps. They were to cover more than 300 kilometres before the day’s work was done.

  At 9 o’clock on the morning of 14 May the junior Lieutenant at last confronted the former Nazi Minister on the subject of Nazi gold. Funk had not been in custody long enough to lose much weight and he was still chubby and round – a small, ugly, bald, gnome-like little man with a drooping lower lip and the melancholy eyes of a born clown. He was less of a clown than a juggler, however, a financial juggler of some talent who had negotiated the great industrialists’ sponsorship of the Nazi Party before the war and helped finance the German war machine during it – and within the year was to stand trial in Nuremberg accused of hoarding in the Reichsbank vaults tons of tooth gold torn from the mouths of the concentration camp dead. Funk’s health was already beginning to crack up when DuBois saw him that morning. He had contracted VD when he was thirteen and had endured bad health ever since – nervous disorders, diabetes, cardiac trouble, bad migraines. He was already heading for a nervous collapse and proved a fearful, compliant and willing interviewee. He told DuBois all about the Reichsbank shipment from Berlin, the attempt to hide the treasure in a lead mine and the handover of the gold and currency to Colonel Pfeiffer at the Mittenwald Kaserne. What he could not tell the American Lieutenant was where the treasure was now. Perhaps it was in another lead mine near Mittenwald, he suggested, but he did not really know. DuBois was dubious. ‘It should be stated,’ he recorded in his report, ‘that no pressure was exerted on Funk whatsoever and it is quite possible that he knew more than what he stated.’

  The encounter with Funk produced one tangible result. A notebook had been found in Funk’s possession with the name and address of one Josef Veit scribbled in it. Veit was the professional hunter who towards the end of April had been approached by Colonel Rauch with a view to finding a forest hideaway for Funk and other Nazi VIPs. Clearly, he was a man who might well throw more light on the Reichsbank treasure business. So shortly afterwards Veit was rudely awakened by a loud banging on the front door of his house in Mittenwald. It was nearly midnight and when he opened the door he found an American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) officer standing there. The officer wore no badges of rank and spoke fluent German with a thick Bavarian accent.

  ‘Sagen Sie die Wahrheit, sonst . . .’ said the American threateningly. ‘You tell the truth – or else . . . Do you know Funk?’

  ‘Nein.’

  ‘Have you been in contact with him?’

  ‘Nein.’

  In a sharper tone of voice the American warned Veit to tell the truth. The American strode into the house and Veit told him all he knew about his encounter with Colonel Rauch and his plan to hide Funk in the mountains.

  ‘Wissen Sie was vom Gold?’ the American asked. ‘Do you know anything about the gold?’

  ‘Only from a comrade who drove two loads of gold, first to the officers’ mess, then to the barracks and then to Einsiedl.’

  ‘That’s where I’ve come from.’

  ‘Where is the gold?’ Veit was naturally curious to know.

  ‘In the lake,’ the American told him.

  ‘Where did you get my name from?’ Veit asked.

  ‘Out of Funk’s diary. I interrogated him tonight.’

  Funk was interviewed twice again about the Reichsbank reserves. At both interviews Funk was joined by Hermann Goering who, as Head of the German Four-Year Plan, which directed Nazi financial strategy, had been nominally Funk’s superior in the sphere of economics in the Third Reich. Like Funk, Goering was also held initially in detention at the Seventh Army Interrogation Center in Augsburg. He was quartered in a working-class block in the suburbs of the city where he had a primitive living-room, an adequate bedroom and an extremely small kitchen, but no lavatory or bath – a deliberate humiliation. By now the former Reich Marshal, Chief of the German Air Force, Hitler’s one-time nominated successor, and war criminal No 1, had been stripped not only of his decorations – his Pour le Mérite (the German First World War equivalent of the VC or the Congressional Medal of Honour) and his Grand Cross of the Iron Cross with Swords and Diamonds – but also of his Field Marshal’s baton, his gold shoulder tabs and even his diamond ring. The Americans had originally kept him at Augsburg to interrogate him about his huge collection of looted art treasures, and they had been very quickly impressed by the intelligence, wit and cunning of this normally slothful, drug-addicted Nazi leader. On the last day of his confinement at Augsburg, a week after DuBois’ visit there, Goering was brought along to Funk’s second interrogation in the hope that he might shed some further light on what was now known as the matter of ‘Gold Bullion hidden in the Alps’. But in the event the ex-Reich Marshal, who was undergoing cold turkey treatment for his codeine addiction and was more preoccupied with his own withdrawal symptoms than someone else’s treasure, contributed little and it was Funk who did most of the talking.

  ‘I am convinced,’ Funk told his interrogator, ‘that they have hidden the gold in a cave.’

  ‘Was it bullion?’ the interrogator asked him.

  ‘Only gold bullion . . . there was also some foreign currency. I do not believe Pfeiffer knows anything about the location. I would stake my right hand on it that the gold was not stolen. They have dug it in so well – I do not know where. They told me that it was in a lime pit, and all you have to do is take it out. At first there was no intention of digging it in; they were only to guard it.’

  ‘How much gold was there – ten million?’ the interrogator asked Funk.

  ‘Ten tons,’ Funk corrected him.

  ‘How heavy is such an ingot?’

  ‘Usually 20 kilogrammes, but there are also smaller ones – 10 kilogrammes.’ Then suddenly Funk’s exasperation – with the gold, with his own predicament, with life in general – seemed to boil over. ‘To think,’ he exploded, ‘that this bank manager handed these things over to the Wehrmacht!’

  For the first time Goering spoke. ‘It is not surprising,’ he said soothingly but unhelpfully, ‘in times like these.’

  ‘Is it in Mittenwald?’ the interrogator persisted.

  ‘It must be down there,’ Funk answered.

  ‘In a cave?’

  ‘Yes,’ pontificated Gocring, who had no means of knowing. ‘Schwedler must know about it.’

  That day Goering and Funk were transported as prisoners of war to Camp Ashcan, the internment centre reserved for topmost Nazis, including those to be tried as major war criminals at Nuremberg. Ashcan was then housed in the 90-room Palace Hotel at Bad Mondorf in Luxembourg. The Palace was a long, low, white, once modestly fashionable resort hotel, now totally surrounded by a high-banked wire fence covered from top to bottom with a greenish-yellow camouflage cloth and guarded everywhere by sentries with machine-guns. It was an unusual prison in that it was much easier to get out than to get in. Visitors seeking admission would be told by the Sergeant of the Guard that they would need ‘a pass from God and someone to verify the signature’. Ashcan was run by a rather overbearin
g US Army jailer, Colonel Bertram C. Andrus, who was to serve as chief warder at Nuremberg from August onwards. There was also a British counterpart at Ashcan, called Camp Dustbin, near Frankfurt, which was reserved for more technical prisoners; some of the accused men, like Speer, Schacht and Funk, were candidates for both places.

  In Ashcan Funk and Goering joined all the other surviving dignitaries of the late Great German Reich. They were fed on prisoner of war rations, usually US Army C and K rations, and each given a room which possessed one hard chair and one canvas cot with two blankets but no pillow. Because of his great girth Goering was given the special privilege of a double mattress to cover his single cot and he spent much of his time lying on it, his vast body sagging over the edges, while he endured the torment of drug withdrawal. He was not a very helpful source of information about the matters he was supposed to have been responsible for, such as Luftwaffe operations, let alone the esoteric matter of the Reichsbank gold, and he gave whatever answers he thought would be most likely to please his interrogators and to close the interview as speedily as possible. Nor was Funk much better. He too was suffering from withdrawal symptoms – from alcohol addiction in his case – and like Goering displayed an astonishing ignorance of his own special subjects, such as the German economy and the business of the Reichsbank. In exasperation their interrogator was forced to resort to sarcastic abuse, no doubt echoing the disillusion of one astonished Allied visitor to Ashcan, who remarked on leaving: ‘Who’d have thought we were fighting the war against a bunch of jerks?’

  ‘Our investigation of foreign exchange can be explained only in terms of the complete panic and stupidity of the German personnel,’ the American interrogator berated Funk and Goering. ‘The chief personnel were concerned with finding comfortable billets in mountain resorts and watering places and did not seem to give a damn about the records and activities of the Ministry. We found that the Party left Berlin and went to Bad Salzungen but they left there leaving their records behind, and moved back towards Berlin, and then they scattered north and south. When they got north they went in the finest hotels of Hamburg and didn’t do anything. Those that went south went to Bad Wiessee, a very beautiful place on the Tegernsee, and did nothing. Some of them landed up in a small town of about 250 population, and there they are tending pigs. Is that the way that the evacuation of the Department of Foreign Exchange was planned?’