More heads were yet to roll as the Americans, acting on Turicum’s tip-offs, pulled in everyone they could lay hands on who had been embroiled in the Reichsbank operation. In the last week of May Reichsbank officials George Netzeband, Friedrich Will and Emil Januszewski, who had been involved in the affair since they left Berlin with the gold convoy, finally came to the attention of the CIC detachment in Mittenwald. The three officials had been living quietly in Mittenwald ever since they discovered that the speed of the Allied advance had cut off their return route to Berlin and that they could not regain the capital either by air or overland. Netzeband and Will were staying in a guesthouse where Netzeband had often spent holidays in the past. Januszewski – ostracised, perhaps, because of his colleagues’ suspicions about his role in the disappearance of two gold bars – had had to find separate accommodation where he lived apart. Inevitably all three bank officials became the object of curiosity, if not suspicion, after the American occupation of the town. ‘After some while, I had the impression that we were being shadowed,’ Will later testified to the Munich CID:
Various attempts were made by plain-clothes police, to find out something about us. When these efforts produced no results, a member of the Secret Service, a Dr Bentz, turned up one day. Despite our protests a search of our rooms was carried out, after Herr Netzeband and I had been subjected to an interrogation lasting several hours. When this produced no results either, Dr Bentz confronted us with Herr Januszewski. He had been interrogated likewise, but in his case – strange to say – no search was carried out. In pouring rain we were then taken to the mountains, where we were supposed to reveal the place where the assets were buried. This foray was fruitless, too, since we ‘could not locate’ the spot.
In fact, Will did know where the cache was situated, but like Pfeiffer he was determined not to reveal the German reserves to the American conquerors. With Netzeband he had written out an account of the Reichsbank treasure affair on pieces of old newspaper which they had hidden under a pile of coal in the cellar of their guesthouse. This, too, he kept from the investigators. Back in Mittenwald the Reichsbank officials were placed under local arrest pending further interrogation and for the time being the investigators turned their attentions elsewhere.
The occupants of No 38 Gsteigstrasse had already experienced several close encounters with the US Army of Occupation. In an extensive search and arrest operation about the middle of May, virtually every house and apartment in Garmisch-Partenkirchen had been raided by squads of American soldiers, and the high-class homes in Gsteigstrasse were not exempt from this process. By the time the search party knocked on the door of No 38 the von Blücher brothers were ready for them. From an upstairs window a rope-ladder reached down to the ground to provide a quick getaway. Bank-notes that had not yet been buried in the ground were rolled in a saddle blanket and hung out of an attic window. When the Americans combed through the house, they found nothing and departed empty-handed. When they returned, it was under very different circumstances indeed.
Hubert’s behaviour must have become a matter of growing concern for Colonel Pfeiffer, and perhaps also for Colonel Rauch and Mathias Stinnes. He was a young man of great intelligence and exceeding charm and vivacity. The trouble was not just that he sailed very close to the wind – everyone in post-war Germany did to some extent, it was a necessary requisite of survival. But he also flew very close to the sun. He had a nose for the main chance, a talent for ‘organising’ that was exceptional even by the standards of Germany in 1945. He quickly perceived that for the deprived citizens of occupied Germany the American military was for the foreseeable future the source of all privilege, wealth and power. With his cosmopolitan upbringing and his realistic view of human nature, he also very quickly perceived that the American military were not objects of awe, God-like creatures dispensing democracy, justice and other high-minded abstractions among the abject survivors of totalitarian tyranny, but men like other men.
Even while he was salting away the foreign exchange of the Third Reich in his tomato beds, Hubert von Blücher was taking the first tentative step towards co-operation with the American Army of Occupation in areas of mutual interest. He began to collect unused headed notepaper and blank official printed forms wherever he could find them – from individuals, military government departments and companies – and these he would use to apply for travel permits, petrol, curfew passes and other privileges. Less than two weeks after the German surrender he did something even more remarkable. On 21 May, the very day that Turicum completed its secret report on the gold and currency affair, Hubert set off from No 38 bound for Austria with an American convoy.
It seemed that Hubert von Blücher or one of his friends was still the proprietor of a deposit of wine and grappa in the South Tyrol, Austria. The only way to realise this asset was to bring it across the border to Garmisch – and the only way to do that was to enlist the aid of the only organisation running any kind of trucking service, at that time, namely the US Army. With the help of Mathias Stinnes, Hubert established contact with a certain 1st Lieutenant Folke R. Anderson, Third Army. At 8.30 on the evening of 21 May, a Monday, the G-2 of the 21st Tank Battalion phoned Corps G-2 to tell them that Anderson would be reporting for instructions to Divisional Headquarters in Garmisch with four trucks that were being made available for the transportation of documents. The trucks duly set off, with Hubert von Blücher on board as guide, but what they brought back was not documents but a number of barrels of wine and eight barrels of grappa, 100 litres to each barrel, from the Tyrolean depository.
Back in Garmisch the deal was completed: six barrels of grappa for Lieutenant Anderson, the remaining two barrels and all the wine to von Blücher and Stinncs for resale. The grappa was then decanted into bottles and put on sale to soldiers at the US garrison at a big ‘Schnappsnacht’ party held in one of the villas. ‘Never in my life have I been so tight,’ Mathias Stinnes recalled of that occasion. ‘On a hot summer morning I was sitting in Gsteigstrasse filling bottles. Only sucking the rubber pipe to make the liquor run was sufficient to do me in. That night you could not have found a single soldier in Garmisch who had not drunk his fill. A single werewolf (thank God there weren’t any) could have killed a lot.’ According to Stinnes they allegedly made tens of thousands of marks and dollars out of the Schnappsnacht grappa transaction.
Hubert von Blücher had returned to Garmisch-Partenkirchen from the Tyrol on 22 May, the same day that his brother’s fellow officers in the Reichsbank treasure burial were arrested. The events of 22 May and the week following sent considerable frissons of alarm through the busy household of dollar-diggers and money-baggers at 38 Gsteigstrasse and contrived to put a sudden and permanent brake on their self-appointed task of exhuming the Reichsbank foreign currency reserves. It was bad enough that an American Army intelligence officer had climbed up the mule track on the Steinriegel and stared down into the gaping, albeit empty, burial hole in which the currency had first been stored. But it was pure disaster when three of the officials who had delivered it and six of the dozen or so men who had buried it were arrested by the Americans for interrogation. For the first knew how much was put in the holes and the second knew where the holes it was put in were. Between them they knew all and could reveal all. At 38 Gsteigstrasse it was considered not beyond the wits of American Army Intelligence to put two and two together and come up with an answer that was, for all practical purposes, approximately four. For Colonel Pfeiffer must have been pressingly obvious that the time had come to show a pair of heels that were as clean as circumstances would allow. To linger would be to court imminent arrest. The clear air and the free life of Austria beckoned from the other side of the mountain ridges dividing occupied Germany from liberated Austria. But first there was some unfinished business to settle. The good colonel bade a precipitate farewell and slipped down the hill and was quickly gone. Ever a resourceful man, he was to return before long as a French Army adviser – and according to a few local gossips, dress
ed in the uniform of an officer of the Chasseurs Alpins.
7. Finding’s Keeping
The leading tracker and senior scout of the posse of international fiscal gumshoes who now began to hound Colonel Pfeiffer up and down boggy Alpine trails and craggy woods, in and out of spa towns and lakeside resorts, bank vaults and military police cells, PW compounds and the homes of known relatives and friends across the length and breadth of Bavaria, was a 39-year-old British staff officer from London with an ill-fitting uniform and impeccable manners by the name of Brigadier Michael Henry Frank Waring.
A product of a top-drawer English Establishment background which included Winchester School, the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich, the Royal Artillery and the Indian Army Staff College at Quetta, Brigadier Waring was everything every German expected an Englishman to be. In the first place, his trousers were amazingly baggy. In the second place, he was tall and reserved. In the third place, he was a gentleman – a typical, downright, old-fashioned English gentleman. His correctness and unfailing courtesy commanded the respect of almost every German with whom he came in contact. Captain Neuhauser’s mother was to recall that he was the only Allied officer ever to have shown her any manners or courtesy. The well-connected Hubert von Blücher remembered him as ‘a highly cultivated man, with perfect manners’. Only the unfortunate Colonel Pfeiffer was destined to form a starkly contrary impression of this totally English brigadier.
Because of his unfamiliar uniform, his red collar patches and red staff officer’s cap band, the Germans sometimes mistook Waring for a general and sometimes for a colonel.
The confusion was understandable, for British Army staff officers were not a common sight in the American Zone of Germany. Whatever brought Brigadier Waring to Bavaria in the first place has never been disclosed. During the last months of the war he had served as the War Office representative on a committee of the European Advisory Commission – an inter-Allied policy and planning body responsible for advising on post-war European problems and for working out the Occupation administration of post-war Germany. At the end of the war Waring was appointed as one of the liaison officers at SHAEF engaged in setting up what was to become the Control Commission for the British Zone of Germany. It was a somewhat vague appointment and Waring was to confess later that at the time of the Reichsbank affair he did not really know what he was supposed to be doing or even who his boss was. When he was contacted by telephone at his home in Zimbabwe a few weeks before his death in September 1978, Brigadier Waring stated that he had become involved in the Reichsbank investigation solely by chance and on a purely informal ad hoc basis. ‘I had been down in the Garmisch and Mittenwald area on quite different business,’ he explained, ‘when I received instructions to switch my inquiries to the matter of the missing Reichsbank funds, acting in collaboration with American Army Intelligence. It proved to be a very odd business indeed.’
Waring’s appointment to the case may have been a chance one but it was certainly not an inappropriate one. He had spent the entire war in intelligence work, first in Burma, then in Africa, Italy and north-west Europe, and was thus thoroughly conversant with the ways and means of conducting an intelligence investigation on foreign ground. Nor was he working alone. He formed the British – and senior – element of an ad hoc tripartite Allied team which also included American and French representatives, among whom were an American colonel, a Third Army intelligence captain called Neumann, and a Captain Hugues Sauteau from the French Deuxième Bureau, who was based at Seefeld in the Austrian Tyrol and acted as French liaison officer with the American CIC in Bavaria. By the last week of May 1945, the prolonged mystery of the missing Reichsbank reserves had become so urgent and so vexing that this high-powered investigative team was specially put together with the purpose of taking over where Lieutenant DuBois’ preliminary reconnaissance had left off and finding the solution to the mystery once and for all. The problem was to preoccupy the team for more than three months and in the end the solution was to elude them – though it is doubtful that they fully understood this at the time.
Word that Brigadier Waring was looking for him in due course reached Colonel Pfeiffer by word of mouth along the ex-Wehrmacht grapevine. By now the Colonel was a deeply troubled man. The responsibility for the Reichsbank treasure weighed heavily on his sense of duty and plagued his conscience. The life of the fugitive exhausted his constitution and frayed his nerves. When he received news that he was once again the object of a special search, not by a mere American lieutenant this time, but by a British brigadier whom some called a general, and a whole team of jabbering Frenchmen and Americans, Pfeiffer seems to have come to a decision: he would come in from the cold, make a clean breast of things, and reveal to the Allies all – or, within reason, nearly all – that he knew about the affair of the Reichsbank reserves. Obviously there would have to be a deal. Some advantages would have to be forthcoming – at the very least his own liberty and that of his fellow officers – in return for his revelations. But in this way he could discharge his duty, allay his conscience and perhaps reap some reward. The Reichsbank treasure would be off his back and he would be a free man, in more senses than one.
At the very end of May or the beginning of June 1945, Colonel Pfeiffer began to cast about for a means of getting in touch with the enemy in the person of Brigadier Waring, a devious process which required some careful arranging. While he did so, Brigadier Waring himself moved his centre of operations to Mittenwald, where he and his team set up headquarters in the pleasant surroundings at the comfortable and characterful Post Hotel, one of the oldest coaching inns in Europe.
Eight days after the Reichsbank officials George Netzeband and Friedrich Will were picked up at their guesthouse in Mittenwald and interrogated by Hans George Bentz, of Turicum, they were sent for again and brought before two Allied officers in a private room at the Post Hotel – one an American officer who spoke fluent German (possibly Captain Neumann), the other a British ‘colonel’ (probably Brigadier Waring). For seven to eight hours the two officials were subjected to an intensive interrogation by these two officers, the American doing the talking, the Britisher making copious notes. In order to check whether their stories tallied, each bank official was interrogated individually, turn and turn about, and each was required to write a detailed statement concerning the quantities of bullion and currency involved, the circumstances relating to the handover to Colonel Pfeiffer’s jurisdiction, and the areas where the treasure had been concealed. Netzeband and Will had been in the employ of the Reichsbank for 32 and 35 years respectively and were still determined to protect the interests of their bank and their nation in the face of the enemy. They declined to reveal the whereabouts of the reserves (though only Will knew the exact location of some of the caches) and resisted the grilling as best they could. In the evening they were allowed to return to their lodgings, but they still had to hold themselves at the disposal of the interrogating officers and two days later, on about 1 June, they were picked up again.
This time they were driven once again to the Forest House at Einsiedl. With the forester under arrest and his son still in hiding, the house was now almost empty of its original occupants. Once again Netzeband and Will were escorted up the mule track on the Steinriegel. Once again they went through the motions of looking for the caches, wandering aimlessly through the dense thickets of trees, vaguely kicking at last winter’s leaves and the bumps and hollows in the uneven ground. ‘The search once again looked like proving a great waste of time,’ Friedrich Will states later, ‘since we nichts mehr wüssten (had no further information). However, chance would have it that the British Colonel [Waring] came near to the hiding place, and suddenly we were standing in front of the camouflaged shaft.’ They had reached the original currency cache and Will for one was dumbfounded at what he saw. ‘It had been opened,’ he recorded, ‘and its contents had disappeared. In my opinion the removal of the reserves must have been the work of specialists, otherwise torn labels – and there we
re about 450 bags – or bits of packing material would have been found lying about. It is still not clear to me today how it was possible for this hiding place to have been betrayed.’
What Will did not know, of course, was that the original currency cache had been emptied by the Mountain Infantry officers following Schwedler’s visit to it on 29 April, and its contents reburied in three fresh caches elsewhere in the neighbouring hills. ‘When I stood in amazement in front of the excavated shaft above the Forest House,’ Will continued, ‘the British colonel suddenly asked me whether there might not be other caches and “whether Dr Schwedler had also taken something with him”. From these questions it was clear that the Americans must have gained information from the small circle of people who had taken part in the burial operation. But the six officers who had actually excavated the shaft had long since disappeared; and they might well have fallen in battle. As far as I can see the only explanation lies in the possibility that some forest ranger with ambitions of becoming Chief Forester at Walchensee had watched the excavation of the shaft and subsequently reported it to the Americans.’
Nazi Gold Page 17
