Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  ‘Certainly not!’ retorted an affronted Funk.

  The American interrogators were obviously well briefed, because they were very specific in cross-questioning Funk about the movement of gold in Bavaria.

  ‘Did you ever send gold from Berchtesgaden to Mittenwald?’ one of them asked Funk.

  ‘No.’

  ‘What was in the eleven cases you sent from Berchtesgaden to Mittenwald? You know that you sent these boxes. The driver said that he was ordered by Dr Funk.’

  ‘I don’t know anything about these boxes,’ Funk replied. ‘I never had any boxes sent from Berchtesgaden. There must be some error. There has been no gold in Berchtesgaden.’

  Funk had already conveniently forgotten that with his own hands he had brought 50lb of gold bullion from his home at the Bergerhof to Berchtesgaden at the beginning of May.

  Lieutenant DuBois, meanwhile, had been getting little farther forward, and by 17 May his quest for the missing Reichsbank treasure was drawing to an end. He had followed up Funk’s suggestion that the treasure might be cached in lead mines in the Lake Walchen area, but it proved a fruitless and tiresome undertaking. North of Wallgau the reconnaissance party discovered that four bridges along the road had been blown and this necessitated a walk of four miles before they reached the only likely mine. There was nothing in the mine buildings and the mine itself could only be reached by a narrow and hair-raising catwalk across the swirling River Isar. DuBois declined to cross over the river by such a precarious contraption. In his view it was most improbable that heavy loads of gold could have been manhandled across the river in that direction and he turned back to Mittenwald and the comforts of the Post Hotel.

  Herbert DuBois appeared to have drawn a blank. Somewhere in this region of mountains, valleys, caves and mines lay 15 million dollars’ worth of gold and currency. And somewhere round about lurked men who knew exactly where. DuBois had done his utmost but he had tracked down neither treasure nor treasurers. From Mittenwald he tried to make a phone call back to base at Sixth Army Group in Heidelberg. But the line was down and he was advised to drive on to Innsbruck and make the call from there. The line was out of order there too and DuBois had no choice but to send a cable asking for further instructions from SHAEF, In the meantime he pondered the crucial question. If there was one man who could provide the answers he wanted, that man was Colonel Pfeiffer. But neither the intelligence officer with the 10th Armored detachment in Mittenwald nor G-2 at 10th Armored headquarters in Garmisch had any record of any prisoner of war of that name in their custody. Nor was there any trace of him in Innsbruck or Salzburg.

  So where was Colonel Pfeiffer?

  5. The House on the Hill

  Colonel Pfeiffer, it will be remembered, had dismissed his troops with the words ‘Gott behüte euch!’ (God be with you) soon after the Americans had entered Mittenwald, and then sent his officers home after a final meeting at the forest hut on the Klausenkopf near Lake Walchen. After that he had simply disappeared. For the best part of a month his whereabouts were unknown to all but a handful of individuals, and accounts of his movements are contradictory and suggest that at times he seemed to be in two places at once.

  This is hardly surprising. It was a chaotic period. There was no proper government and no fully established order. Colonel Pfeiffer was a fugitive intent on avoiding the usual fate of the German Officer Corps at this time – internment as a prisoner of war. He left no tracks and kept no records of his movements. Perhaps this is why his memory, which was able to recall in minute detail his bloody experiences during the last five years of war, grew so vague when it came to the first month or two of peace. Perhaps, like half the German race, he lived through this period of defeat and disintegration in a dull state of traumatic shock. ‘I don’t like to remember those bad times,’ he was to explain later. ‘I had all sorts of things to worry about. The world was collapsing all around me. I didn’t know what the next day would bring, or the day after that, or the day after that. As German soldiers we were despised and hated by everybody – even by our own people. I slept rough under the trees. I didn’t know what was happening or where I was going.’

  According to Pfeiffer’s own account, the first few weeks saw him living the life of a partisan, wandering in the woods from place to place, like many other German soldiers in the region of the National Redoubt at this time. Possibly it was during this period that Pfeiffer and Rauch, who were still in touch with one another, tried to report to the authorities in Munich concerning the matter of the Reichsbank reserves – the dates cannot now be exactly determined.

  At some stage in May, Colonel Pfeiffer abandoned the partisan life, and shook the mud of the Bavarian Alps from his feet. There has been some speculation as to where exactly he directed his steps next. According to one statement made later by Pfeiffer himself, he set off for the Austrian Tyrol on his own after dismissing his troops at Walchensee. According to a subsequent statement, he went to stay at his mother’s home near Schliersee. According to another statement, he. eventually made his way by bicycle to Bad Reichenhall, near Berchtesgaden in Eastern Bavaria, using a fake American pass, and there rejoined his wife in their family home.

  It is unlikely that Colonel Pfeiffer went far during the first few weeks of May. In the conditions then prevailing it would have made little sense to have attempted to do so. Bad Reichenhall was a long way away, situated some 300 kilometres distant by Alpine road at the far eastern end of the Bavarian Alps. For a German in 1945 a motor vehicle and petrol were virtually unattainable commodities – unless the person concerned was especially privileged for one reason or another (as Colonel Pfeiffer was later to be). Travel over any distance along open roads was a fraught undertaking for Germans at the end of the war, and they ventured forth only at their peril. Everyone in uniform or of arms-bearing age was being rounded up by the Occupation troops and thrown into prisoner of war cages to await screening. The Allied soldiers in the early stages of this operation were for the most part the same front-line tactical troops for whom the SS and the concentration camp at Dachau were still fresh memories, and in the first half of May these soldiers were not excessively fond of Germans and could still be trigger-happy when the occasion demanded. Moreover, the road to Bad Reichenhall was particularly menacing, for it led past the US Third Army headquarters at Bad Tölz and other Army posts bristling with jeeps and half-tracks and armed GIs. To avoid them by travelling at night and off the beaten track over such a distance was a formidable proposition and it did not make much sense to tackle it if there was somewhere more convenient to go.

  Colonel Pfeiffer himself is as vague in the matter of time as he is in the matter of place. On different occasions he has portrayed himself as leaving the Walchensee at the beginning of May, almost immediately after he had dismissed his troops; as spending several weeks of May wandering around the mountains before making good his departure; and as seeing out part of May in an American Army prisoner of war camp in Austria, before being released by the French. It is possible that these apparently conflicting activities are in fact all different stages of a continuous process, dismembered and scrambled by the quirks of a fading memory.

  It is most unlikely that Pfeiffer strayed far during the first week of May. The shooting war was not yet over and the entire region was streaming with American combat units fanning out along the highways and byways as they consolidated their physical occupation of the surrounding territory. To have broken cover under those circumstances would have invited inevitable captivity, or worse. Nor is it likely that Pfeiffer, if he had any sense, would have ventured far in the second week in May, the mopping-up and settling-down period immediately following VE-Day, for then the US occupation administration would have been in a state of some flux and confusion as combat formations adjusted to peacetime duties, civil affairs staffs moved in and the multifarious units of a vast and complex army were redeployed to new roles in new stations. It was a logical and recognised procedure among certain high-ranking Germans –
those who had goods and services to offer and deals to strike with the occupation forces – to allow time for the first wave of front-line troops to move on and the second and third waves of rear-echelon divisional and army staffs to come up and establish more permanent administrative headquarters. Major-General Reinhard Gehlen, for example, the former head of the Soviet intelligence section of the German General Staff, remained in hiding in the Bavarian Alps until 20 May before making contact with the Americans and handing over his priceless intelligence archives on the Soviet Union and its armed forces – the original basis of post-war US secret intelligence about the USSR. It could be argued that Colonel Pfeiffer, who as custodian of the Reichsbank reserves had been dealt a trump card almost as precious as General Gehlen’s, might have been tempted to play his hand along much the same lines. The confusion in the days following the cessation of hostilities was no time to strike a bargain with the enemy over the matter of Nazi gold and other treasure.

  In the immediate post-hostilities period Austria, though regarded in a more friendly light by the Allies as a liberated rather than an occupied nation, was not much more tempting than Germany as a place in which to surrender one’s freedom to the enemy soldiery. If anything the confusion on the Austrian side of the Mittenwald pass was even greater than on the German side. Like Germany, Austria had been divided into four zones, one for each of the invading Allied armies. Unlike Germany, the occupation of these zones by the armies allocated to them proved a chaotic and unco-ordinated process. The Russians overran part of the British Zone in the south-east and were reluctant to budge from it. The Americans, instead of entering Austria from Italy to the south, entered from Germany to the north and began the occupation of their zone (the provinces of Salzburg and Upper Austria) with military government personnel trained for the wrong country, for Germany instead of Austria. The French, invading the country from the direction of Lake Constance in the west, found the Americans already ensconced in the Tyrol, which was meant to be part of the French Zone. It took time for this confusion to be sorted out and for the right armies to take up their right positions in the right places. For a short while, therefore, Innsbruck and other townships in the Tyrol remained in the hands of the Americans, who carried on with their usual practice of throwing all former members of the opposition, whether in uniform or out of it, into the nearest POW pen.

  This would undoubtedly have been Colonel Pfeiffer’s fate if he had strayed over the mountains into the Innsbruck district at this time. Indeed, in one of his various testimonies Pfeiffer claimed that this is exactly what happened. But there were people of his acquaintance who were to claim that at this time, around the middle of May, Colonel Pfeiffer was actually still in Bavaria – to be precise, in the home of one of his officers in the attractive and well-to-do Alpine resort of Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

  The house in question was the Haus Hohe Halde, No 38 Gsteigstrasse (Hill Rise would be the equivalent English name), a leafy, quiet and secluded road rising steeply at the extreme south-east edge of Partenkirchen in the direction of Mittenwald and the Walchensee. The houses in Gsteigstrasse, solid, detached structures put up in the pre-war years within ample and seduded gardens, exuded an air of discreet, almost rural exclusivity appropriate to the standing and prosperity of their owners. No 38, situated on the crest of the road as it climbed out of the town, enjoyed magnificent views south over a green valley and forested slopes towards the jagged ridges and snowy peaks of the Wetterstein mountains. The house was less a mansion than a villa: two floors and an attic under a broad Bavarian roof, approached from the road through a splendid hand-carved wooden gateway of some antiquity; a small porched entrance beneath a white-walled front pierced by four unusual little decorated oval windows, like ornamental niches or holy shrines high on a street wall; a swimming pool on the lawn at the back, facing south and catching the sun and the breathtaking views. A nice place, worth a not very small fortune now, and in the summer of 1945 especially desirable and entirely suitable as an ark of refuge from the swirling turbulence of war and defeat.

  For a number of years this house on the hill had been in the possession of one of Garmisch-Partenkirchen’s most distinguished and respected families, the von Blüchers, whose celebrated antecedent was Field Marshal Gebhard von Blücher, a career soldier who had established the family’s estates in Silesia and as commander of the Prussian Army had contributed decisively to the British victory at Waterloo and the overthrow of Napoleon. In 1945 the head of the Blücher family, Ambassador Wipert von Blücher, was a career diplomat who had formerly been German ambassador in Sweden and then occupied a key diplomatic post in the Nazi hegemony in Europe – that of German ambassador in Finland. At the end of the war von Blücher senior had taken refuge with his wife and daughter in the family home in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, where he was in due course arrested on charges of having conspired to prolong the war between Finland and the Soviet Union. As it happened, the vagaries of war had also brought both of the ambassador’s young sons to the family home in Garmisch as the end of the hostilities drew near – a fortunate turn of events at a time when millions of their countrymen were homeless, lost, imprisoned or vagrant. As the sons of a senior German diplomat and godsons of a famous Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin, both brothers were cosmopolitan young men of the world, experienced and knowledgeable beyond their years, and both were to play leading roles in the story of the Reichsbank treasure and the Garmisch affair.

  The eldest son was Captain Lüder von Blücher, until recently on the nominal roll of officers at the Mountain Infantry Training School at Mittenwald. Lüder was twenty-six at this time, a much-decorated Gebirgsjäger officer who had been seriously wounded at the fighting around the Kuban bridgehead (near the Sea of Azov in Southern Russia) in November 1944. Flown back to Germany in the belly of a Gigant glider transport plane, in which he half bled to death and from which he had to be cut out with a knife, Lüder ended up in the military hospital near the Kaserne at Mittenwald. In view of his wounds he was not required to stay in the garrison town at Mittenwald and was allowed home to convalesce at his family house in nearby Garmish-Partenkirchen instead. Later his advice was enlisted in the matter of the burial of the Reichsbank treasure. That was virtually his last act of duty as a serving Wehrmacht officer. In civilian clothes, Lüder remained in the house in Gsteigstrasse, where he was shortly joined by his younger brother, Hubert, another fugitive from the cataclysm engulfing Germany, and like his brother an anti-Nazi.

  Hubert von Blücher was a truly remarkable young man – a quick wit, a petit esprit malin who thought very fast on his feet. He was only twenty-one but he had many of the qualities of an infinitely maturer man. He was over six feet tall and slim, dignified and aristocratic in bearing, handsome and elegant in appearance, charming and impulsively generous in manners, picaresque in character, and imbued with a self-confidence which sustained him in any situation and a self-sufficiency that precluded any need for close friendship or dependence on others. For all his flamboyance, his wild exuberance, his love of the grand gesture – and of women – he was abstemious in his habits, did not smoke and was almost teetotal, though he could stay up all night at a party without giving his guests the impression that he had been doing anything but drink on level terms with them throughout. Very bright and witty, and passionately fond of intelligent conversation, his aptitude for foreign languages was considerable and the range and depth of his knowledge on many subjects was extraordinary for one so young.

  Hubert von Blücher had been born in Sweden, where his father was then the German ambassador. As a result he was entitled to dual nationality and two passports – a German one and a Swedish Red Cross one – a dispensation which was to prove of the greatest possible use in the post-war period. By his own account his wartime career seemed to have been as manifold and bewildering as his own personality. It has often been assumed that he had spent the latter part of the war working for the Abwehr (German Military Intelligence) in Berlin, a job for which his quick mind,
linguistic ability and cosmopolitan background would have eminently suited him. Hubert himself was supposed to have claimed at one time that he actually finished his training at the Abwehr training school in Hamburg – though he was barely in his twenties, and still ostensibly a civilian. According to his brother, however, at the end of the war Hubert was a civilian employee of the German Newsreel Company, UFA. When questioned about this period recently, Hubert von Blücher hinted at something faintly devious and unorthodox in his youthful wartime past. The interview had its comic moments, but at the same time illuminated the more chameleon-like side of the man’s personality:

  Q: Your military records say that you entered the German Service in December 1942 in Munich and that you were invalided out in May 1944.

  von B: ’43.

  Q: Sorry, ’43. Is that correct?

  von B: No.

  Q: That’s what your Army records show.

  von B: I know. I have three.

  Q: Three what?

  von B: Army records.

  Q: Ah . . . what do the other two say?