Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  ‘My impression then and now,’ Eckles recalled, ‘is that the hiding places were in the rock fences and under the many hay sheds that are along both sides of the road between Garmisch and Oberau. Later Major Rawley pointed out some of the spots where he had gotten the money along this road. He told me that Colonel Pfeiffer seemed to be confused and had difficulty in being certain just where to look for the money. They were out all night and came in after daylight with a two-and-a-half-ton truck full of United States currency.’

  Colonel Pfeiffer had been very careful not to betray to the Americans any of his compatriots and would-bc colleagues involved with the Reichsbank currency. Though he had revealed the whereabouts of dollar caches all along the Garmisch-Oberau road he had not led the Americans to the large caches concealed at either end of it – one at Klaus Bremme’s farm at Gut Buchwies, in Oberau, the other at the von Blüchers’ house at 38 Gsteigstrasse in Garmisch. Nevertheless, the amount of money that had been picked up that night was prodigious.

  ‘Several million dollars were recovered, I was informed at the time,’ Eckles stated. ‘I cannot remember the exact amount now. The money was all paper bills, all denominations of United States currency. Some of it was old large-sized paper money that had been replaced by our government with smaller bills several years before. The back of the truck was piled high with paper currency.’

  Although Colonel Eckles could not recall the total value of his haul, his assistant, Major Rawley, who actually picked up the stuff, when contacted in California in 1978 not only confirmed Eckles’ account of the recovery but estimated that it totalled in the region of seven to eight million dollars.

  Since handling money – especially money in such huge quantities – was outside Colonel Eckles’ sphere of responsibility, he was very anxious to get rid of the project. This was not as easy as he had expected. ‘In the morning, after the recovery of the money, it never occurred to me that we would have a problem disposing of it. I had known our Division Finance Officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Raymond St Clair, for several years and was certain that he would take it off our hands. Imagine my shock when he informed me in no uncertain terms that the recovered money had nothing to do with the United States Army and that he would not touch it with a ten-foot pole!’

  Bill Eckles was in a dilemma. If the American Army would not accept the money, who would? There was only Military Government. Military Government was a curiously amorphous organisation which, while being military (as its name suggested), was somehow not army, in that it concerned itself with civil affairs rather than tactical tasks. Eckles trundled his truckload of dollars over to the Burgermeister’s office at the Rathaus (Town Hall) in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, which was the office of the local Military Government Officer. There he tried his luck with the Town Major, a certain Major Kenneth McIntyre, one of the more extraordinary members of that extraordinary caste of latter-day proconsuls and eccentrics of Military Government which ruled the US Zone of Germany, fitfully but absolutely, in the immediate post-war period.

  Kenneth Asa McIntyre, 37, a former diesel engineer from Wisconsin, had been seconded from the 132nd Ordnance Maintenance Battalion to duty with the 10th Armored Division’s Provisional Military Government Detachment on 5 May. Now, barely a month later, he was in the unforeseen position of having thrust upon him a quantity of dollar bills that filled up the back of an Army lorry and would today be worth in the region of up to $70,000,000. McIntyre made an indelible impression on Colonel Eckles.

  ‘He was a likeable guy,’ he remembered, ‘but very naive and stupid. I am sure there was skulduggery in Garmisch in those days and I am afraid that McIntyre was weak as water and he probably succumbed to some of the temptations that came his way.’

  I recall [Eckles continued] that he had a tremendous set of flat silver [tableware] which he said he had gotten from some home in Garmisch and belonged to the Nazi Bormann. No telling what this silver service was worth. He told me that he planned to keep it as a souvenir and asked me what I thought about it. I advised him to get rid of the set without delay and to get a receipt for it from whomever he turned it over to. Everyone in Garmisch knew he had the silver.

  Another reason I remember McIntyre is that he asked me several times to submit recommendations to our G-1 (Personnel Officer) for him to receive the Silver Star and the Bronze Star for heroic deeds he had done. I couldn’t imagine how he could have done anything like this as he was always in the Division rear echelon. I was not a witness to the heroic acts and therefore could not sign the descriptive write-ups. Later, I heard that he had written-up the so-called events, signed them himself and submitted them through channels. He received the medals, I guess in July.

  McIntyre’s German secretary, Sieglinde Odorfer, was located in 1976 in Munich, where she was living with her husband, the first post-war president of Bavaria, Dr Hans Ehard. She recalled that Major McIntyre was (in her opinion) very intelligent but also possessed of a weak character. She recollected very clearly that one day a large quantity of dollars, some of which had been dug up, were indeed brought into her boss’s office. They were contained in a single sack and when they were counted under guard they totalled ‘no more than a million dollars’. But this was just one sack. If the dollars recovered by Major Rawley and Colonel Pfeiffer filled the back of a truck, as Colonel Eckles claimed, they would not have amounted to a single sack-load worth ‘not more than a million dollars’, but a number of sack-loads worth a great deal more.

  So at the beginning of June 1945 a very large number of US dollars were turned over to a man who had already acquired a large hoard of looted silverware and forged his own citations for bravery medals. At the end of July, by which time the dollars had vanished from sight for good, this man was charged with soliciting and receiving an award for a heroic deed which did not take place. ‘The accused is charged with the 95th Article of War,’ the Division Judge Advocate declared, ‘with wrongfully procuring an Oak-leaf Cluster to the Bronze Star Medal on the basis of a citation not founded on fact and also of wrongfully procuring a Purple Heart Medal on the basis of a personal certification of fact known by him to be false.’ In August, in lieu of trial by court-martial, McIntyre tendered his resignation from the Army ‘for the good of the service . . . and under other than honourable conditions’.

  On 30 August McIntyre’s immediate superior officer wrote to the Commanding General of the 10th Armored Division in Garmisch with a somewhat ambivalent announcement: ‘Major Kenneth A. McIntyre is not accountable or responsible for any public property or funds in this organisation.’

  This should have been the finish of McIntyre in Bavaria. But oddly enough it was not. When the 10th Armored Division sailed home to the States in early September 1945, the disgraced McIntyre did not sail home with it. Instead, the day after his duties with the Military Government Section terminated, he was appointed as Chief Machinery and Equipment Officer first to the G-5 Section of General Patton’s Third Army and then to Military Government Detachment in Munich under the command of Colonel Roy Dalferes. This same Dalferes, as Acting Chief of Staff, G-5 Section of Third Army, was the officer who arranged for millions of dollars’ worth of foreign exchange recovered from the Third Army area near Einsiedl to be transported to the Currency Section for Germany located at Frankfurt. The records show that the millions of dollars handed over to McIntyre in his office in Garmisch were not among those that had been transported and were never checked into the vaults of the FED in the Frankfurt Reichsbank building.

  It was extraordinary enough that McIntyre should remain in the employ of the US Army in Germany until December 1945, five months after he had been required to resign the service. It is even more extraordinary that McIntyre should, after being returned to the United States, be recalled to service in the US Army in Germany the following March – by which time, up to his old tricks again, he had thought fit to enquire whether or not the Army authorities had received orders for his promotion to the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel! Once again Major Mc
Intyre took up the position of Chief Machinery and Equipment Officer, this time at the headquarters of the 3rd Military Government Regiment, Office of Military Government for Bavaria. Not until July 1946 – more than a year since he had taken delivery of up to eight million dollars in US notes which later vanished, and nearly a year after he had tendered his resignation from the Army – was Kenneth McIntyre finally relieved from active duty. Then he was booted home, without terminal leave, mustering-out pay or travel expenses.

  The recovery of the great dollar caches along the Oberau road benefited neither the Americans nor Colonel Pfeiffer as much as either party had hoped. For the former never actually managed to hold on to the money and the latter never totally succeeded in getting his name scratched from the wanted list or the gold and currency investigators off his back. But considering that Waring and his team were still trying to track him down at the very time he was in the hands of Third Army intelligence, it was extraordinary that Pfeiffer came out of the episode with anything at all. ‘With the Yanks at that time,’ he explained later, ‘the right hand often did not know what the left hand was doing.’

  Third Army kept to their side of the bargain and let Pfeiffer keep his freedom in return for the currency he had located for them. A laissez-passer, valid for the French Zone of Austria and prepared in conjunction with the French Army of Occupation, was issued to him via a Captain Fred Neumann, a member of Third Army Counter Intelligence Branch (CIB) and Patton’s personal interpreter, of whom Pfeiffer was to see more in the near future. For the moment it seemed that Pfeiffer’s troubles over the Reichsbank reserves were at an end. Armed with his laissez-passer he set off unmolested for Austria. In mid-June 1945 he found accommodation for himself and his wife in a house in Seefeld, a small town on the Mittenwald road a few kilometres north of Innsbruck in the Tyrol, where he was soon very thick with the French, the only one of the Allies to treat Colonel Pfeiffer with the respect to which he felt entitled.

  Tyrol province in June 1945 was an occupation zone in a state of considerable confusion. It had been assigned to the French but conquered by the Americans. Now the Americans were preparing to pull out and hand the territory over to the French. Though the handover did not officially take place until 13 July, the run-up had begun some weeks before and the second half of June saw an interim period of mixed American-French administration. It was doubtless during this period that Franz Pfeiffer’s more soldierly virtues as a distinguished field commander of mountain troops came to the attention of one of the Allies’ senior mountain warfare specialists – General Antoine Béthouart.

  General Béthouart had graduated from the same class at the French Military Academy as General de Gaulle. Before the war he had studied mountain warfare techniques in Norway and commanded a brigade of Chasseurs Alpins during the ill-fated Norway campaign in 1940. Later he served as head of the French Military Mission to the United States and as a Corps Commander in the Allied campaign in Germany. At the end of the war Béthouart was Commander-in-Chief of the French forces in the French-occupied Zone of Austria, and it was in this capacity that his attention was drawn to the former Gebirgsjäger commander, Colonel Pfeiffer.

  One of the innumerable problems confronting General Béthouart in post-war Austria was the presence on Austrian soil of a vast number of foreign nationals, many of them former members of the Wehrmacht. Half a million refugees from many different countries milled aimlessly about the towns and DP camps in a ceaseless quest for food and shelter. Many thousands of German soldiers had been thrown into PW pens by the Americans, only to be released as soon as the French arrived and have their numbers added to the great tide of displaced human beings sweeping through Austria in every direction. There were, besides, many thousands of German soldiers who had not been made captive at the end of the war and, armed and increasingly desperate, still roamed at large through the region. Remnants of disorganised and isolated German units that had been cut off in the mountains and forests while the towns and valleys down below were being occupied by Allied forces, they had abandoned their vehicles and scattered into the wilds, finding shelter in mountain huts, on the alpages, or even in the forest. Anxious and uncertain about what was happening in their own country, not daring to go down into the valleys for fear of being taken prisoner, they obtained food from the local populace either by theft or by dint of force. They were not werewolves, merely fugitives; but they gave rise to the rumour of werewolves, a source of potential panic among the local population and a considerable nuisance to the occupation forces.

  To have combed out these fugitive soldiers would have required a massive operation in such thickly forested and mountainous terrain and might have led to a renewed outbreak of fighting, even though the war was over – especially as the French would have had to use French Moroccan troops, who had a reputation for brutality in the early days of the occupation. Then a simple and convenient solution presented itself. General Béthouart, in his account of the French occupation, La Bataille pour L’Autriche, takes up the story.

  Certain officers of my staff established contact with the former commandant of the German Mountain Training School at Mittenwald on the borders of Tyrol – a Colonel Pfeiffer – and it occurred to us that we could use this man to sort out the situation for us. Although his training school had been disbanded following the German surrender, he was still able to enlist the services of some of his former officers and NCOs to help him. He knew the region like the back of his hand and was in a better position than anyone to make contact with the Wehrmacht fugitives and communicate our instructions to them.

  A joint paramilitary operation between the soldiers of hitherto opposing armies was an unusual thing and raised some special problems. ‘My officers and I discussed the proposal,’ Colonel Pfeiffer recalled, ‘and we knew it was going to be a tricky and dangerous operation. The dispersed German troops whom we were to seek out and approach personally would inevitably suspect us of acting on behalf of the Allies in order to have them taken prisoner, and this meant that the whole operation was going to be extremely dangerous until the word finally got around as to what it was all about. I don’t know how the thing was cleared by the French at their headquarters in Innsbruck.’

  In fact, not only the French Army in the Tyrol but the American Third Army in Southern Bavaria would be involved, since the majority of the troops demobilised in the operation would have to be repatriated into Germany through Third Army territory. To liaise with Colonel Pfeiffer and work out the necessary details the French Army sent one of their headquarters staff officers, Captain Sauteau, the French agent of the Deuxième Bureau who had been attached to the American CIC as a joint Liaison officer since the early days of the US Forces in England, and who spoke perfect American English as well as fluent German. Through Sauteau the Third Army were in turn put into the picture about the proposed operation and not long afterwards sent Captain Neumann, the Third Army CIB officer whom Pfeiffer had already met in connection with his laissez-passer, to establish contact with him.

  The details did not take long to sort out. ‘I agreed to co-operate,’ Pfeiffer stated afterwards, ‘to make things easier for the soldiers in the mountains to come down from their hideouts. The overriding condition was: an immediate and legally correct demobilisation of the troops without their having to enter a prisoner of war camp.’ The French accepted this condition. Only men who were wanted for war crimes or were known to be diehard Nazis were to be taken into custody. Colonel Pfeiffer would receive no payment for his services, but the French would provide him with vehicles and petrol – his own personal car was a commandeered DKW – together with ID card, ration card and other official documents. He was now officially accredited auxiliary of the Allied Occupation forces, and free to come and go in Germany and Austria as he pleased.

  After the unwelcome intrigue and moral ambivalence of the Reichsbank business, Colonel Pfeiffer must have turned with relief to straightforward soldiering again. Once more he was back in the hills with his old comrade
s-in-arms, doing the sort of job for which he was trained and for which he was mentally and morally equipped. No longer a man on the run but a respected expert in his field with a significant role to play in affairs of government, Colonel Pfeiffer carried out his duties in the service of the French Army of Occupation in Austria for a period of several weeks. He must have enjoyed himself. He was certainly highly successful. Under his overall direction, groups of two or three German or Austrian ex-Army officers, selected from those who had a good knowledge of the area and personal contacts among the inhabitants, set off into the Tyrol and the Vorarlberg. Zone by zone they made contact with the fugitive soldiers, generally through the intermediary of the local populace.

  ‘It was all done by word of mouth,’ Colonel Pfeiffer explained later. ‘A sort of whispering propaganda campaign. The local Bürgermeisters helped to pass the word around. The men were dispersed all over the area. In Tyrol and the Vorarlberg.’ At first Pfeiffer’s efforts were treated with great suspicion by the soldiers, who feared they were being lured into a trap. But they were sick of their futile existence in the wilds, and little by little they were persuaded to give themselves up. ‘They came down individually from the mountains to Innsbruck,’ Pfeiffer explained. ‘It was quite a job. I undertook to produce a curriculum vitae of each man, his name, personal details, who he was, what he had done and so on. On the basis of that the French would then judge whether the man could be demobilised immediately or not. If not, then I would tell the soldier he was on his own from then on. The French Deuxième Bureau had set up an office for the purpose. A French Army MO medically examined the men and then they were given their discharge papers and enough money to get themselves home.’