Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  The theft of the gold bullion recovered by Albert Singleton in June 1945 is not an entirely open and shut case. There are curious features – the absence of guards on the trucks, the informality of the recovery, the unusual telegram from divisional headquarters to a relatively lowly sergeant confirming that the gold had reached Munich safely. And there remain a number of unanswered questions. What exactly did Singleton’s gold hoard consist of? What was its provenance? Who was the SS general who tipped off the Americans about the 25 boxes? Was it – as it might seem logical to assume – the same General Strack whom Sergeant Singleton arrested in Mittenwald and carted off to the internment camp in Garmisch once the general had finally divulged the whereabouts of the hoard which was allegedly his responsibility? If, as Singleton says, the gold reached the Munich Bank – how, and through whose hands, did this immensely valuable consignment of exceedingly heavy metal disappear into thin air?

  It would seem reasonable to suppose that the 25 boxes of gold bullion whose existence was revealed to US Army interrogators by an SS Lieutenant-General were the same 25 boxes of gold bullion that were brought down from Konstanz (which was in imminent danger of falling to the French Army) to Munich and from there to Mittenwald for concealment in the mountains above Lake Walchen. Since there is no record that the 25 boxes of gold bullion were ever recovered intact from the mountains by the US authorities, it seems equally reasonable to assume either that they were never found or that they never reached their proper destination. But was this the gold that Singleton found? His gold was not in boxes or any other kind of container. The 100 bars contained in the 25 boxes would not have formed a pile as large as the one Singleton found, which measured three foot by three foot by three foot (if his memory is correct). Nor would 100 bars weighing 1.25 tons need two two-and-a-half-ton trucks to carry them away.

  Perhaps a clue to the riddle lies in the figure of General Strack. It would be tempting to assume that this general, who appears to have been responsible for the gold hoard which was recovered by Albert Singleton, was the same general who tipped off the Americans about the 25 boxes of bullion hidden in the same area. It is clear, however, that no such person was in command of the Reichsbank treasure operation over the heads of Colonel Pfeiffer and Colonel Rauch. There was indeed a General Strack – Karl Strack – though he seems to have been Wehrmacht (Panzer Grenadier), not SS. There was also a Nazi Foreign Office official by the name of Dr Hans Strack, former head of Section Pol II in the Political Department of the Ribbentrop Bureau and from 1943 German Consul-General in Klausenburg, Hungary. By a curious coincidence, this individual was picked up in Kohlgrub on the same day as Major Braun and the other Mountain Infantry officers involved in the Reichsbank treasure affair. On the day previous to Dr Strack’s arrest, 24 boxes of gold bars and coins worth some $1,893,680 were turned in to VI Corps and deposited at the Reichsbank in Innsbruck. These boxes had been found by the Americans at Füssen, a town in the Allgäu to the west of Garmisch, and on being opened were found to be marked ‘Foreign Office, Berlin’. If Consul-General Strack was in fact Singleton’s ‘General’ Strack, the possibility exists that the gold found by Singleton was of a similar provenance to the Füssen gold and was not Reichsbank gold and not SS gold but Foreign Office gold, part of the huge gold stock known to have been in the possession of Ribbentrop’s Ministry before the end of the war.

  At the time, of Singleton’s gold recovery next to nothing was known about the disposition of German Foreign Office gold stocks and nothing at all about a special gold fund called the ‘Ribbentrop Gold Fund’, a secret gold hoard in the German Foreign Ministry in Berlin, over which Reichs Foreign Minister von Ribbentrop had retained personal control. The ‘Ribbentrop Gold’ consisted initially of Belgian gold bullion of the same provenance as the Reichsbank gold, supplemented later by several tons of gold coin from the Banco d’Italia. The first that was heard about this was during the course of the trial of the Nazi ‘diplomats’ at Nuremberg – the so-called Wilhelmstrassen-Prozess – in 1948.

  Among the accused who were tried and sentenced were several who have already featured in the Reichsbank story, including Colonel Rauch’s former boss, Chancellery Secretary Hans-Heinrich Lammers (who got 20 years); SS General Gottlob Berger, who had snatched 11 sacks of foreign exchange from the Berlin Reichsbank shipment in April 1915 (25 years); and Reichsbank Vice-President Emil Puhl (5 years). The Chief American Prosecutor at this trial was Dr Robert M.W. Kempner, who had established his reputation at the trial of the major Nazi war criminals (Goering, Hess, Ribbentrop and other surviving leaders of the Third Reich) which had ended in Nuremberg in October 1946. From the Office of Chief of Counsel for War Crimes in Nuremberg on 28 December 1948, Kempner wrote a highly significant letter to Mr Perry Lankhuff of the Political Division of OMGUS (Office of Military Government, United States) in Berlin:

  In the course of our trial against Nazi diplomats which has just been concluded, it was brought to light that the German Foreign Office had – besides other gold funds – a special Ribbentrop gold fund, in gold bullion, weighing approximately fifteen tons.

  Leads and newspaper accounts from various countries in the Western Hemisphere indicate that unrecovered Foreign Office gold probably in the hands of former German Foreign Office officials is still at work for anti-American purposes.

  Large numbers of former German diplomats who had to do with the Foreign Office gold are still in foreign countries, e.g. Spain, Italy, Ireland, Argentina, Sweden and Switzerland, living well from unknown resources.

  It should be noted that besides other former German diplomats, a brother-in-law of Ribbentrop is living in Switzerland and at least two other German Foreign Office officials who dealt with German gold matters.

  Out of the fifteen tons, about eleven tons of Ribbentrop’s Foreign Office gold, was hurriedly removed from Berlin in 1945:

  1.65 tons to Ribbentrop’s castle Fuschl in Austria (now American zone of Austria). The larger part of this consignment was allegedly turned over to American troops in the neighbourhood of Fuschl. However, German Foreign Office officials stated here in Nürberg that the amount allegedly turned over was less than the amount which was shipped to Fuschl.3

  2. 2 tons to Schleswig-Holstein in the British Zone, allegedly turned over to the British.

  3.3 tons to the South of Germany on the shores of Lake Constance,* an area at that time in American hands. Out of this last amount, two-thirds of a ton were brought over to Berne, Switzerland, in the closing days of the war. This was done in the presence of the son of the former German Minister of Foreign Affairs, von Neurath, who, according to newspaper reports, arrived a short time ago in the Argentine.

  About four tons were sent between 1943 and 1945 to German embassies, notably to Madrid, Spain (one ton), to Stockholm, Sweden (one-half ton), to Berne, Switzerland (three-fourths ton), to Ankara, Turkey (about one ton), to Lisbon, Portugal (an unknown quantity).

  Since I interviewed several hundred German diplomats, including ambassadors, ministers and fiscal and personnel administrators, I know that the summation which I made above is highly reliable.

  But so far as I know there was never any check made whether gold of this amount was ever recovered or whether the amount of Foreign Office gold turned over by German foreign service people to Allied authorities at the end of the war was identical with sums indicated by my investigation.*

  In the course of the trial, I have from time to time pointed out the danger and the problem of this missing gold, but nobody as yet tackled the problem, and with my heavy trial work in Nürnberg, I could not devote much time to it, since no war crime was involved. I feel very strongly that this gold project should not be neglected further in these critical times, in which a large amount of uncontrolled gold constitutes a force for evil and mischief in the hands of unscrupulous opportunists working closely together and located in many countries all over the world.

  Robert Kempner’s query was forwarded to the FED, and on 3 May 1949 the Acting Ch
ief of the FED, Frank J. Roberts, responded with a statement about the German Foreign Office gold as reflected in the records of the FED. According to Roberts, it was not possible to distinguish the Ribbentrop gold from other Foreign Office gold as far as the FED records were concerned. All that could be stated with complete confidence was that only three recoveries of Foreign Office gold had ever ended up in the vaults of the FED. These were all part of the same shipment, brought down to the Lake Constance area from Berlin on Ribbentrop’s personal orders by Hans Schroeder, Chief of the Personnel and Finance Section of the Foreign Ministry, on about 20 April 1945. The first recovery (listed as Shipment 27A at the FED) consisted of 1.45 tons of gold bars and coins which had been stored at the home of a Protestant Minister in Füssen, southern Bavaria. The second recovery (Shipment 27B) consisted of just under one ton of gold bars hidden in the house of a farmer near Isny, 30 kilometres from Lake Constance. The third recovery (Shipment 27C) consisted of 1.60 tons of gold bars found in the home of a woman living in Lindau, on the shores of Lake Constance. These three shipments to the Lake Constance area totalled a little over four tons, rather than the three tons specified in Robert Kempner’s letter, and comprised the entire amount of Foreign Office or Ribbentrop gold that ended up in the proper place after the end of the war – the gold vaults of the Foreign Exchange Depository in Frankfurt. Of the 6.5 tons of gold allegedly recovered in part from Ribbentrop’s castle, Schloss Fuschl, near Salzburg in Austria, there was no trace in the FED records. All that was known was that $5,000,000 worth of gold had been seized from Martin Bormann’s former aide, Dr von Hummel, as he tried to get away. According to the proceedings of the Wilhelmstrasse Trial at Nuremberg a large part of this gold had been turned over to American troops of the Third or Seventh Army on 15 June 1945. But had it? If so, what had happened to it? As far as the books of the Allied occupation administration are concerned this gold – which in 1945 would have been worth nearly $7,500,000 and nearly $63,000,000 today – appeared to have utterly vanished. This case would seem to have some alarming similarities with the case of the Goldzug, or Gold Train, which also entailed the mysterious disappearance of recovered valuables apparently while in American hands. The Gold Train was found at Bad Ischl, Austria, where it had arrived from Budapest, Hungary, laden with some $3,000,000 of gold, jewels and other valuables which Hungarian Jews had paid to an SS Lieutenant-Colonel, Kurt Becher, in exchange for their freedom (or so they had hoped). The contents of the Gold Train were handed over to the CIC who made a full inventory and then passed them on to officers of US Military Government Property Control in Salzburg. Only $30,000 of the estimated $3,000,000 (worth over $25,000,000 today) was ever handed over to the proper recipients – the Jewish Agency – and in spite of post-war Jewish protests no trace of the remainder was ever found.

  Kempner did not let the matter of the missing Ribbentrop gold rest and in 1950 he decided to lobby the US Congress on this subject. On 12 June 1950 at his behest, Congressman Lindley Beckworth again raised the question of the 6.5 tons of Ribbentrop gold missing from Schloss Fuschl with the Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee of the House of Representatives, and demanded to know whether this, or any other of the Ribbentrop and Reichsbank funds secreted into Switzerland and elsewhere, had been accounted for. But no new information was forthcoming and the matter lapsed into permanent obscurity. As Sir Ronald Wingate, the British Gold Commissioner on the Tripartite commission for the restitution of monetary gold, pointed out in 1959: ‘There may be more gold still hidden in the mountains and undiscovered, and quite a lot of novels have been written on this theme. But the trite saying “Truth is stranger than fiction” seems in the case of the treasure of the Nazis to have some validity.’

  Whether Sergeant Singleton recovered the contents of 25 boxes which had contained 100 bars of gold, or an even bigger gold hoard from a different source, must for ever be a matter of speculation. But the fact still remains that 25 boxes of bullion weighing one-and-a-quarter tons did disappear. And it seems that a further six-and-a-half tons (unconnected with the Reichsbank reserves) were never accounted for.

  The 25 boxes of gold bullion were not the only part of the treasure to disappear without trace from the region of Walchensee that first summer of peace. More gold and a prodigious quantity of paper money was also to find its way into hands other than those for whom it was intended – not always the same hands. To unravel the other parts of the huge collective robbery that was perpetrated on the Reichsbank reserves between the beginning of June and the end of August 1945, we must return to Colonel Pfeiffer, the custodian of the Reichsbank treasure, and a man now sorely tried by the opposing and contradictory needs of doing his duty, protecting his brother officers, and salvaging his own life from the ruins.

  8. Losing’s Weeping

  Colonel Pfeiffer had not been idle while Major Geiler’s Americans and Sergeant Singleton’s Germans were digging up their gold hoards in the mountains south of Lake Walchen. Almost contemporaneously with their gold recovery operations, Pfeiffer was setting in motion on his own initiative a currency retrieval which would yield a treasure trove in dollar bills almost equal to half the value of the huge Reichsbank gold cache dug up by the Americans on 7 June – dollars which were to disappear under mysterious circumstances exactly like Singleton’s gold.

  For Pfeiffer, establishing contact with the American military authorities was now a matter of extreme urgency. ‘The crucial problem in the first month,’ he recalled later, ‘was to make contact with Military Government. I can’t remember what the hurry was but I knew that an English General – General Waring – was looking for the gold, and I knew I was on the wanted list and that he was after me.’ Pfeiffer had few options left open to him. In his own mind – and apparently in the minds of the Allied investigators – he was the man who was above all responsible for the safekeeping of the Reichsbank reserves. But the steady erosion of the gold and currency caches as a result of both private enterprise and official endeavour was not likely to help Pfeiffer’s case when the time came for him to be called to account for the assets in his charge. Nor would he be in any position to use his knowledge of the whereabouts of the reserves to strike a bargain with the new rulers of Germany – for his personal freedom, perhaps, and that of his officers – if there were no reserves left to bargain with. His fears that one or other of his officers in American hands might sooner or later talk were confirmed when Captain Rüger revealed the location of the cache on the Steinriegel containing the 728 gold bars. In any case the original burial of the Reichsbank reserves had been carried out so hurriedly and so carelessly that it had become common knowledge all around the district that there was treasure in the hills above the Walchensee. ‘I was amazed how many people knew about it,’ Pfeiffer admitted later. ‘I thought the whole thing had been a confidential matter but it turned out that it was a complete air bubble. It wasn’t just carelessness. It was more than carelessness. It was betrayal. It was treason against our country.’ Pfeiffer’s highest priority was to pre-empt any major heist of the Reichsbank reserves still hidden in the mountains. There was not a moment to lose.

  Though Colonel Pfeiffer’s ultimate goal was Austria, he does not seem to have established himself there immediately. It is possible that his first port of call after leaving Garmisch was the nearest friendly house along his route – the home of Colonel Rauch at 38 Wallbergstrasse, Bad Wiessee. It is also possible that he put up at his mother’s house at Schliersee, a few miles to the east. It does seem that very early in June he suddenly popped up in the heart of the enemy camp – the nearby Third Army headquarters town of Bad Tolz. The voluntary arrival of this anxious and troubled Wehrmacht colonel in General Patton’s bristling garrison required commendable courage. Pfeiffer was in a bad way and appeared to have no official connections or accreditation. His purpose was absolutely clear, however, and when the Americans finally picked him off the streets, he quickly made it known to them. Colonel William E. Eckles, the 10th Armored Division’s I
ntelligence Officer in Garmisch – the same officer who on the day the Division had occupied Garmisch had taken the telephone call from a German purporting to be Colonel Pfeiffer in Mittenwald – remembered the occasion well:

  I received a call from Colonel Oscar Koch, G-2 of Third Army, at about 8 p.m. in the evening. Oscar and I had been very close throughout the war and we had worked together almost on an hourly basis through combat stages. Oscar told me that the MPs of the Third Army had arrested Colonel Pfeiffer while he was walking around the streets of Bad Tölz. When he was interrogated, Pfeiffer had the audacity to tell Oscar Koch that I was a friend of his and that he had been given the mission of hiding all the monetary reserves of the Munich bank to prevent it being captured by the Americans. The interrogators laughed at him, but he insisted, so Oscar sent him out under guard and to everyone’s surprise he brought in a large amount of dollars and threw it on the table at Army HQ. That is when Oscar called me in. Oscar asked me to take over Colonel Pfeiffer and get him to show us where all the money was hidden.

  Eckles’ recollection of Pfeiffer’s state of mind is particularly clear. ‘Colonel Pfeiffer was a nervous wreck,’ he recalled. ‘The responsibility of having hidden the money preyed on his mind and his particular fear was that the Russians were closing in on him and his money.’ The nearest Russian troops at this time were over 110 miles away and their lines were static – the war had, after all, been over for the best part of a month. At any rate, the Americans were sufficiently convinced by his anxiety and sense of urgency – not to mention his trick of producing large sums of money out of nowhere – that they assigned an officer, Major Roger Rawley (Colonel Eckles’ assistant and subsequent successor at G-2), and a squad of soldiers to go out and bring the rest of it in.