Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  Another idea put forward by Pfeiffer – Hubert von Blücher believes it was passed on to him by the Bavarian industrialist, Arnold Rechberg – was that as the gold and the money was German capital it should be preserved and turned over to a big German refugee welfare organisation. But Hubert himself was dubious about such high-flying notions. ‘I heard all this,’ he recollected later, ‘while going in and out and looking after our relatives staying in the house. With my ingrained sense of realism it all seemed utterly unrealistic, and also a bore. I was sure that all the money was registered and accounted for somewhere in the Reichsbank records and therefore the whole notion was nonsense. It was, as I saw it, hot money. The more selfless and vague the whole thing became the more attraction it seemed to have. Probably it was some way of off-loading the guilt feelings that had filtered over from the past, some form of self-purification process. But these people were bear hunters who simply did not have the bear . . .’

  Hubert’s contribution to the debate was to go after the bear. One wild idea attributed to him during this period involved landing an American flying boat on Lake Walchen, loading it with the currency and gold, and flying it to Switzerland under the pretext of being part of a geological expedition. Mathias Stinnes was convinced that most of the people involved had no intention of using the treasure for their own purposes. Pfeiffer himself had complete trust in the von Blücher brothers, for he knew that they came from an absolutely honourable and trustworthy family with an impeccable pedigree.

  Then, after a few days, a scheme began to take shape.

  6. The Money Baggers

  The scheme was simple in conception but arduous in execution. It involved walking at night all the way to the Walchensee, which was 25 kilometres distant; climbing up the Klausenkopf, which was over 1,000 feet above the level of the lake; digging up the currency in the holes, which were six feet deep; sorting out the foreign currency, which was stuffed into a total of 89 bank bags; selecting the more desirable bank-notes (e.g. American dollars and English pounds) from the less desirable (e.g. Italian lire and Egyptian pounds) out of countless thousands contained in the sacks; repacking the selected notes into rucksacks and reburying the rejected notes in the caches; then trudging the 25 kilometres back to Garmisch-Partenkirchen whilst still under the cover of darkness. The whole operation had to be carried out in the utmost secrecy and extra care taken to avoid mobile American Army patrols on the country roads and prying German neighbours in the streets of the town. In case the two ex-Colonels, Rauch and Pfeiffer, met anyone on the way they agreed to pass themselves off as a former corporal and a lorry driver. But though there was a strict sunset to sunrise curfew in force at the time, they walked the long distance to the Klausenkopf several nights without being challenged. In this respect it helped enormously, of course, that the von Blücher villa was such a safe house, ideally situated on the very edge of Garmisch – and on the Walchensee side at that – thus obviating any necessity to walk through the streets of the town, with its busy concentration of American garrison troops.

  The final report of the Munich CID confirms the nature of this operation, while limiting its scope. ‘The former head of the Gebirgsjäger School in Mittenwald, Colonel Pfeiffer,’ ran the report, ‘and the former Adjutant of the Reichsminister Lammers, Storm Troop leader of the SS and First Lieutenant of the City Police Force, Rauch, in about the middle of May 1945 handed to Lüder von Blücher, latterly an officer in the Gebirgsjäger School, Mittenwald, and who lived with his brother and parents in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, two rucksacks full of American dollars and English pound notes.’ Mathias Stinnes, unlike the detectives of the Munich CID, was actually in Gsteigstrasse at this time and recalled that the operation was carried out on a much larger scale. ‘Every night,’ he related afterwards, ‘Pfeiffer and Rauch used to walk from Gsteigstrasse to the Clausenberg [Klausenkopf] and back, returning with sometimes two rucksacks each, filled with pound notes and dollar bills. We used to call them the Two Mules.’

  The rucksacks were brought into the kitchen at 38 Gsteigstrasse, where their contents – dollar and sterling notes from one to a hundred – were emptied on to the floor and sorted. ‘After each of these nightly trips,’ Stinnes continued, ‘we would start counting out the money. Hubert von Blücher soon became seriously ill with trench gums, caused through moistening his fingers with saliva while counting the bills. We then invented another method of counting. We used to weigh the bills and pack them into parcels of 1 kilo each. When dealing in these sums it certainly did not matter if the parcels differed by 10 or 20 dollars.’ In fact, Lüder von Blücher later confirmed that neither he nor Hubert knew the exact amount of dollar bills that had been brought into the house. There were thought to have been millions of them, but the brothers never had the time or the opportunity to count such a quantity precisely. Many of the greenbacks, they noted, were very old and very used.

  After the notes had been stacked and roughly counted in the kitchen they were systematically repacked into every kind of non-metallic container that came to hand – culinary vessels for the most part, including earthenware jars, casseroles, jugs, pickling jars and pots of every description. These containers were then wrapped in waterproof material to preserve the contents from the damp and buried in the garden – a few in the small garden at the front of the house, most in the vegetable plots in the large expanse at the back. Hubert von Blücher’s recollection of this operation was somewhat different. He contends that only one large parcel of notes containing about half a million dollars, wrapped in gutta percha fetched from the Mountain Infantry Training School and tied up by Pfeiffer and Rauch, was buried in his garden at Gsteigstrasse – in the tomato bed, to be precise. But he concedes that similar parcels were also buried elsewhere. One way or the other, the reburial of the notes was carefully thought out. As Mathias Stinnes commented: ‘No mine detector would ever have found them.’

  It was decided that sufficient money was buried in the garden at No 38 to buy an army and that the rest should be dispersed to other hiding places. Between Garmisch and the village of Oberau, 10 kilometres north of Garmisch, lay the broad, flat, grassy valley of the Loisach. Thickly dotted over this valley were numerous diminutive log cabins, with inward sloping walls and roofs weighed down with rocks, which were used to store hay for cattle feed in winter. Under these hay barns along the Oberau road were hidden a number of currency bags. One day the von Blüchers approached a local acquaintance of theirs, a former German officer by the name of Klaus Bremme, a 32-year-old Berliner. A tall, good-looking, well-mannered and intelligent man, fluent in languages, Bremme had taken up residence with his Argentinian-born wife, Chiquita, at a large farm at Oberau.

  The von Blücher brothers [Bremme related subsequently] asked me if I could provide a good hiding place for a hoard of dollars on a farm, called ‘Gut Buchwies’, at Oberau, where I was staying at that time. Their argument [that these dollars would later be used for helping wounded soldiers] struck me as being both good and honest, so I agreed to help them. I indicated a little hut, about 500 metres from the main house, which was used only by a seventy-year-old labourer for his small louls or for hay.

  One day the von Blücher brothers came to the main house at ‘Gut Buchwies’ and informed me that they had that morning hidden a portion of the dollars, packed in wooden cases, in the hut I had shown them. Another portion of the dollars, they said, had already been concealed in the garden of their own house. (They never mentioned gold or any other cash to me.) We went together to inspect the hut, and I still remember pointing out that anyone entering the place would be bound to notice the freshly turned earth. So the spot was covered over with grass, etc. in a way that no one could find it accidentally. The von Blüchers never told me how many dollars were contained in the wooden cases, nor did I ever personally set eyes on them.

  To deter any inconvenient American intrusion, Bremme posted an OFF LIMITS sign he had ‘borrowed’ from the US Army at the front of the house and draped a large Argentinian
flag from the top of it.

  According to a statement made by Bremme in 1978 he was also required to assist the von Blüchers in the physical transportation of the currency to Gsteigstrasse. Though he never actually counted the amount of dollars he transported by bicycle and motor car from Oberau, some sources estimate that the total amounted to some four to five million dollars. The fact that Klaus Bremme was married to an Argentinian lady was a distinct advantage here. Because Sweden was then the consular representative for Argentina in Germany, the couple were able to obtain Swedish registration plates for the car Bremme had brought to Oberau. These plates bestowed a rare privilege on Bremme as a German citizen in those days, for he was permitted by the American authorities not only to own a car but to drive about and above all to purchase the necessary petrol – a priceless commodity. One day Hubert von Blücher approached Klaus Bremme to ask another favour: could he give a tow to a brown, two-door DKW car (of the type known as Reichsklasse) that had broken down in the woods near the Walchensee and bring it back to 38 Gsteigstrasse? Bremme obliged. Several times along the road to Garmisch they were stopped by American military patrols, but every time the Swedish number plates on Bremme’s car and his own excellent command of English got them through. Bremme left the DKW in the grounds of Hubert’s house. A week later he was furious to learn that the boot of the car had allegedly been stuffed full of pound notes and dollar bills. (Hubert von Blücher, it should be noted, does not concur with this account. He believes that the car was not a DKW but an Opel Kapitän which belonged to Bremme himself and that it contained not foreign currency but a sub-machine-gun and a large quantity of ammunition which Bremme had carried with him on a drive back to Bavaria through partisan country in Italy. Such a cargo would have been an even more risky one to transport, for the possession of firearms was strictly forbidden under Occupation law, and the penalty would have been severe indeed.)

  So for a number of nights the fraught and exhausting shuttle continued as the treasure holes on the Klausenkopf were systematically plumbed for the foreign currency reserves of the Reich. It was inevitably a bizarre and equivocal time in the lives of those who were involved. Moving from shadow to shadow through the Alpine summer night, the two fugitive colonels in their civilian Bavarian green shuffled stealthily through the sleeping landscape of the Mittenwald valley, where the only sounds in the stillness were the clanging of cow bells in the darkened meadows, the barking of dogs in the shuttered villages along the road, the odd American jeep changing gear on a distant hill; then up through the woods where only the solitary owl and Wehrmacht deserter – and the ever-loyal Captain Neuhauser – kept lonely vigil among the beech and firs; to the holes in the soft pine-needled mountain earth, where a flashlight revealed the grey sacks nestling cosily like eggs in a dovecot between the timber walls of the Reichsbank cache – lifebuoys in the general shipwreck, the key to a new future, a terrible and irresistible temptation in a world seemingly at the end of its tether. It was a difficult time to forget but an unbearable one to remember: Colonel Pfeiffer claims to have no recollection of it whatsoever, and Colonel Rauch, who was finally traced to a smart apartment block in Graz, Austria, in October 1982, refuses to speak about it at all.

  The Gsteigstrasse-Klausenkopf shuttle was rudely interrupted on 22 May by news that sent shivers of apprehension down several German backs, not least that of Colonel Pfeiffer. The Americans had not let up in their search for the missing Reichsbank reserves following Lieutenant DuBois’ inconclusive report of 17 May, and both the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) and the Financial Branch of SHAEF had persisted with their enquiries. They had been greatly helped by a remarkable little local organisation called Turicum based at Mittenwald.

  Turicum had been formed towards the end of the war as an anti-Nazi underground resistance movement. Its leading light was a German journalist, Dr Hans-Georg Bentz, who had been Deputy Editor in Chief of the Berliner Morgenpost and was later to gain fame as an author of popular story books. Bentz was an unusual and highly individualistic character. During the war he had worked as a secret agent for the Allies in Potsdam. By the time he was removed from his post in Berlin on account of his all too discernible lack of enthusiasm for the Hitlerian regime, he had become a convert to Buddhism. Exiled to Mittenwald (where he seems to have adopted the alias of George Hilt) he had set about forming a resistance cell of like-minded spirits and forging links with similar cells in neighbouring towns. One of his undercover comrades at that time was a Swiss journalist, J.C. Meyer, who had been an accredited correspondent in Berlin until 1944 and hailed from Zurich, which the Romans had called Turicum, hence the code name of the Mittenwald cell.

  There is no record that Turicum actually achieved anything of great consequence during the war but it impressed the Americans enormously after it. Simply actually to be anti-Nazi was impressive enough, but Bentz claimed that he had run a resistance movement in Mittenwald and Garmisch-Partenkirchen as well, and that he had connections with the British Secret Service and even with Churchill himself. The Americans were inclined to turn Turicum to their own advantage as a pro-Allied intelligence-gathering organisation in Upper Bavaria – a kind of supergrass operating in depth inside German society at a level the Americans themselves could not hope to reach. In due course Bentz and his wife and associates were to be installed in some style in Munich at American expense and set to work as informers reporting on shifts of opinion among the various political movements then finding their feet in the newly nascent Bavaria. But at the beginning Turicum, operating out of the local CIC office and from the bar of the Alpenrose Hotel, was set more specifically local problems, almost the first of which was the whereabouts of the Reichsbank reserves and of the men who had been in charge of them.

  Lieutenant DuBois had first encountered Turicum in Mittenwald at the very end of his preliminary quest. His meeting was brief but useful. Turicum came up with the address of Pfeiffer’s wife and mother – clues which were to lead nowhere, as it happened – and DuBois was duly impressed. He had no hesitation in recommending the organisation to military intelligence for further sleuthing. In a memo to Captain Walter R. Dee, G-2 (Intelligence) Section at HQ 10th Armored Division in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, DuBois wrote:

  1. Am returning to SHAEF today and enclose a report of developments in connection with the gold and foreign notes presumably secreted in this area.

  2. Suggest that you consider this as a high priority target in view of the fact the treasure presumably includes over ten tons of gold and over two million US dollars.

  3. Also suggest that Turicum in Mittenwald be contacted as they are producing information that I do not have time to follow up.

  4. In the event treasure should be located recommend strong guard be posted and request made through channels to SHAEF for appropriate instructions as to removal.

  By 22 May 1945, Turicum had prepared a complete report on the events that took place between the arrival of the Reichsbank reserves in the Kaserne at Mittenwald and its burial in the mountains above the Walchensee. The report was addressed to Lieutenant DuBois at G-5 Financial SHAEF, and copied to DuBois’ successor on the spot, a Lieutenant Kurt Meyer, commanding Military Intelligence Team 474. With the help of evidence from soldiers from the Kaserne who were still resident in Mittenwald (including Pfeiffer’s driver, George Hempfling) and the civilian refugees lodging at the Forest House at Einsiedl (including Herr Forstreicher, the man who had watched the mule train set off into the mountains), Turicum was able to confirm that the Reichsbank reserves (together with other valuables, including a consignment allegedly consisting of gold from Berchtesgaden) had been carried into the mountains by mules and buried there and that most of the Gebirgsjäger officers and Reichsbank officials involved in the operation – with the exceptions of Colonel Pfeiffer and Captain Neuhauser – were still living in the vicinity. Turicum added the rider that the Wehrmacht officers implicated in the gold affair were not Nazis but ‘pure militarists’. For this reason, Turicum warn
ed, they were probably more dangerous than Nazi officers, who were ‘often cowards’. The Wehrmacht officers were ‘discreet men’ who would have to be ‘put under heavy pressure’ if further details about the gold operation were to be wrung out of them. The one exception could be Colonel Pfeiffer, Turicum added. Pfeiffer, who knew most about the gold, might be persuaded to talk more easily.

  The effect of the Turicum investigation was instant. Three American CIC officers arrived at the Forest House to interrogate the refugee guest, Hans Forstreicher, who was bitterly criticised by local inhabitants for the help he gave the Americans. He later explained what had happened. ‘I had no wish to conceal anything from them,’ he related. ‘There was no question of a reward. I told them what I had seen from the mountain, so they asked me to take them up and show them the route the mules had followed. I had no alternative but to guide them. So we went up together to have a look. First, we found a cache full of pistols, binoculars, and ammunition. Then we came to a large area where the earth was all churned up. The hoof marks of mules were still visible . . .’ According to one of the Americans, all around there were signs of dynamiting and other activities.

  Soon afterwards six of Pfeiffer’s officers were arrested by the CIC and thrown into the Military Government gaol or the Rathaus cells in Garmisch for questioning – Major Rupert Braun, who had been in charge of the mule transport; Captain Heinz Rüger, who had been in charge of the motor transport; Captain Otto Reindl, Captain Walter Martl, Captain Karl Lutz and Captain Johann Rauter. On the same day Captain Neuhauser’s father, Hans Neuhauser Sr, the Chief Forester of Walchensee, in whose house at Einsiedl the treasure had been stored prior to burial, was taken into custody. Two days later, the 61st Armored Infantry Battalion recorded in its ‘After Action Report’: ‘24 May 1945 – Sent patrol to search the Military Kaserne Hospital near Mittenwald for weapons, ammunition and a German officer named Col Pfeiffer, connected with hidden gold. Found no weapons or ammunition. Colonel Pfeiffer was not in the hospital.’ A few days later the fervently Nazi mayor and the equally fervent Nazi Chief Forester of Mittenwald – who had been involved in earlier plans to conceal the Reichsbank bullion and such Nazi Parteibonzen as Funk – were arrested by the CTC as threats to security, the latter as a result of his denunciation by the population of Mittenwald.