Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  The whole operation was remarkably successful. In his memoirs the French C-in-C, General Béthouart, described it in glowing terms. ‘After a period of some weeks,’ he wrote, ‘6,000 to 7,000 men were demobilised in this way, many tons of arms and ammunition were recovered and the whole situation completely cleared up. An atmosphere of friendship and co-operation was established between my officers and Colonel Pfeiffer’s team, which not only enabled us to bring the operation to a satisfactory conclusion but augured well for the future. It was one of the first operations carried out jointly by the French, Austrian and German military. Because of it an alliance of an entirely new nature was born.’

  The Americans were not included in the list of credits. Though the French observed their agreement with Pfeiffer to the letter, the Americans did not. At first they had said they would agree to go along with the French plans, but later they decided to back out. ‘This accounts for my dislike of the Americans,’ Pfeiffer declared years afterwards. ‘They nearly caused me to betray my comrades, which would have been disgraceful and would have pursued me for the rest of my life.’ After the French had demobilised a batch of German troops from the mountains and assembled them in readiness for repatriation – some of them had already crossed the border into Germany – the Americans suddenly announced that the whole operation had been vetoed by SHAEF in Frankfurt. ‘Fortunately I was able to disperse the German soldiers again,’ Pfeiffer related afterwards, ‘or they might have been locked up in camps by the Americans and I would have been responsible. We got round it by giving the soldiers private addresses to report to in the French Zone of Austria, without reference to the Americans.’

  In the meantime, while Colonel Pfeiffer’s operation in Austria was still in its early days, two of his erstwhile colleagues on the German side of the Tyrol decided to make a move. By now they doubtless knew that the Americans had discovered the main gold cache and had hauled off a large quantity of dollars following Pfeiffer’s tip-off in Bad Tölz. These incidents left Captain Neuhauser and Colonel Rauch in a somewhat precarious position. If they still had any cards to play, it was time to play them now.

  9. Opportunists of the Worst Order

  First to creep out of hiding was Captain Neuhauser. After six weeks living alone among the trees like some latter-day Bavarian Ben Gunn, the young Gebirgsjäger officer must have begun to wonder what purpose he was now serving in life. The Serbian girl, Vera de Costra, evidently wondered the same thing and had finally drifted away to join the great stream of human flotsam bobbing this way and that across the wasteland of defeated Germany (it is thought she later emigrated to Argentina). At first American CIC men kept calling at the Forest House, looking for his father. Day after day they had come to question his mother and the evacuee family Forstreicher. But now the captain’s home was abandoned and its hearth grown cold. His father languished in a prison camp and his mother had sought refuge with relatives in a distant town. The plank floors of the Forest House echoed to the boots of foreign soldiers, bogeymen like Brigadier Waring in his baggy pants, and rowdy GIs forever masticating gum.

  Captain Neuhauser’s appointed task was supposedly to stand guard over the official reserves of the German State, the surviving wealth of the nation. The task did not generate much job satisfaction. From time to time, in the day or the night, on foot or in jeeps, a group of Americans or a group of Germans would come up the mountainside and probe around with sticks or mine detectors and dig up a load of gold or bank-notes and then disappear back to civilisation with their haul. There was little Neuhauser could do about it. He could hardly shoot them. The caches were so widely dispersed it was not possible to keep an eye on all of them all of the time. Holes would appear in the ground, like oblong bomb craters, as yet another cache vanished behind the captain’s back. It was all very unsatisfactory. In his hut on the Klausenkopf Hans Neuhauser munched his way through his Knackwurst, or sat in a sunbeam, whittling sticks and contemplating a future as blank as a map of Antarctica.

  As the days passed the opposition began to draw closer. The Americans sent out patrols to scour the mountainsides and search the huts. One day they came to Neuhauser’s hut on the Klausenkopf when he was out. Thereafter he kept away from the hut as much as possible and took to sleeping in his little army bivouac tent, or in the undergrowth, or in makeshift beds made out of hay. There were moments of excitement, close encounters of the wrong kind, to break the monotony of his simple al fresco life. Once he came face to face with two strangers in the woods, a swineherd and a farmer’s son. Though they were fellow Germans he was frightened they might betray him, but he acted as normally as the circumstances allowed and neither of the men gave him away. On another occasion he was horrified to see a dog lead an American, who was stalking deer in the woods, to his rucksack concealed in the undergrowth, but the American showed little curiosity in the find, and left it where it was and moved on. Then one day Captain Neuhauser had a visitor. Toiling up the track to the prearranged rendezvous spot, the Klausenkopf hut, came the perspiring figure of a former fellow-officer in the shape of Colonel Pfeiffer’s one-time adjutant, who had come to give the loyal Neuhauser his last orders. He was to give himself up.

  The adjutant’s role in the Reichsbank treasure affair has always been underrated. In fact he seems to have served as a link man between the scattered members of the syndicate of officers who maintained an interest in the Reichsbank treasure after the American occupation: Pfeiffer, Rauch, Braun, Neuhauser, the von Blüchers. Pfeiffer has always contended that he made a special point of keeping himself properly informed about any developments to do with the Reichsbank reserves and was constantly in touch with the principals. To this end, the adjutant moved with impunity about the country, still acting as Colonel Pfeiffer’s de facto adjutant even though the war was over, and serving as a vital go-between purveying information and passing on orders between the interested parties.

  According to Neuhauser, Pfeiffer’s adjutant came to tell him that the gold had been dug up, Colonels Pfeiffer and Rauch were in American custody, and he might as well move on. In reality, not all the gold had been dug up and Pfeiffer and Rauch were not in American custody. The adjutant almost certainly had a different message to deliver. The cause of the message – the reasoning behind it – we can only guess at but the effect of it was self-evident.

  Neuhauser and Rauch were to give themselves up to the Americans, as simultaneously as circumstances could permit. They were to give the same pre-arranged statement to the Americans, relate the same cover-story, divulge the same information about the treasure – 350 bags and 20 boxes of gold – and strike the same deal: their personal freedom in return for revealing the location of the caches. It is not difficult to deduce the reasoning behind this move. If they were to use their knowledge of the Reichsbank treasure in order to reach an accommodation with the American authorities, they would need to act swiftly before the Americans stumbled on the treasure on their own. It was now two months since the treasure had been buried. If they left it much longer the time would come when they would seem in Allied eyes to be more culpable than co-operative in the matter. And since some of the reserves had already been removed there was doubtless an element of fear behind their joint move.

  Neuhauser’s surrender was the easiest to arrange. He had merely to report to the nearest American unit, whereas Rauch, a rather bigger fish, proposed to contact General Patton’s Third Army HQ some distance away at Bad Tölz, a more difficult thing to arrange. Neuhauser was therefore the first to give himself up. In his own words he ‘türmte über Berg and Tal’ – ‘scarpered over hill and dale’ – in the direction of Fall, a tiny hamlet on a minor road some 20 kilometres east of Wallgau. Neuhauser chose Fall ‘because I happened to be in the mountains near there’. At Fall he surrendered to the 574th AAA Battalion. The report of the battalion’s own intelligence officer provides the clearest narrative of the incident:

  On 23 June 1945 Lt Chatel of B Btry was contacted at Fall by a German Captain, who s
tated that he wished to surrender to the American authorities, and that he had certain information that he wished to give to the Americans. It was arranged by Lt Chatel to meet this officer at Fall in the office of the Bürgermeister at 1330 hours on 24 June. The meeting took place and through a German interpreter the Captain stated that he wished to advise an American Colonel of the whereabouts of some gold or other stuff of value which had been cached at a place known to him. It appeared from the Captain’s talk that he wished to contact the Colonel of some American Unit which he had last heard of as being stationed at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, at a PW camp or enclosure there. He appeared not willing at that time to give his information directly to Lt Chatel. So at about 1400 or 1500 hours on the 24th the German Captain, Lt Chatel, T/4 McDonald and Pfc Zuberg (the last named acting as interpreter) in one jeep followed by Captain Thayer, T/Sgt Nightingale and Cpl Fumagalli in another jeep, drove down to Garmisch-Partenkirchen. There at the PW enclosure it was learned that the particular officer whom the German Captain had in mind had left that location, if he had ever been there. In order to expedite the matter it was suggested that the German Captain be asked to disclose the location of the cache to Lt Chatel and Capt Thayer. This he consented to do, asking at the same time whether he would be held at a PW enclosure for long. It was his desire, he said, to get back home as soon as possible, and so he said he would appreciate anything that Captain Thayer and Lt Chatel could do to assist him in getting an American clearance as quickly as possible. The request was met by the statement that everything that could be done through proper channels would be done for him, that the PW screening authorities would be told of whatever help or co-operation that he gave, that they would also be told that he, the Captain, had surrendered himself to the Americans, through Lt Chatel. This was actually the case. It might be stated here that the German Captain had no American Army Discharge, and had only his SOLDBUCH.

  On returning from Garmisch-Partenkirchen just before reaching the Walchensee, and very near to the German Captain’s home, he gave directions to turn off the main road. This was done and the two jeeps and their occupants climbed the hill south of the main road and reached a spot where the Captain directed (WD 685918). After alighting from the jeeps it was seen that there were two rather large holes beside the path. Some gas cape pouches (German) and papers (apparently envelopes) with the Deutsche Reichsbank on them were near the holes. It appeared that some American troops had been in the area (chewing-gum wrappers, K ration boxes, C ration cans, etc). After about 45 minutes searching through the area the German Captain finally located the place where he said the stuff had been buried. He stated that it was hard to find because when he was last at the spot there had been snow on the ground.

  After some digging the first wooden box appeared. These boxes were twenty (20) in number, all the same, size, all about 13 × 11½×7 in. Each box had a flat metal band crossed around it on two sides and the metal bands were sealed. Each box had black letters on it DRB and a number, such as 45, also each box had Kg on it with blue pencilled numerals opposite such as 41.4 etc. Some of these blue pencilled marks had been obliterated, perhaps from the damp or earth in which buried. These boxes were carried to the jeeps and loaded. The German Captain helped not only with the carrying of the boxes to the jeeps, but in digging for them.

  Driving slowly the boxes were delivered to Bn Hq of this Unit and stored under guard inside the S-2 office overnight. Nothing was touched in the way of breaking the seals or tampering with the boxes. The Captain was left with Lt Chatel for the night. And was brought back to Bn Hq for questioning briefly on the morning of 25 June.

  These 20 boxes turned out to be something of an enigma. In a statement to the Munich CID in 1952 Neuhauser recalled that among the Reichsbank assets buried above Walchensee were 100 bars of gold bullion. He would have been referring to the 25 boxes (containing four bars each) brought from Konstanz just before the burial. But the 20 boxes he revealed to the Americans turned out to contain not gold bullion but gold coins weighing 715.87 kilos and worth $805,684 at the official rate of the time (and $6,767,745 today). The confusion between the 20 boxes and the 25 boxes, the bullion and the coin, was to prove a significant one, and the focal point of a continuing mystery.

  There was nothing in Neuhauser’s past which could put him at inordinate risk in Allied hands. Like many of his generation he had been an obligatory member of the Hitler Youth and the National Social Studentenbund. He had joined the NSDAP in 1938 but he was little more than a very small and paper Nazi and he was no war criminal. He did not fall into the SHAEF Automatic Arrest category and, it seemed, need expect no more than a few days or weeks at most in American hands while they drained his brains about the Reichsbank gold and currency.

  Colonel Rauch’s position, by contrast, was very different. As an Obersturmbannführer of the Allgemeine SS, a Haupsturmführer of the Waffen-SS, an Oberstleutnant of the Schutzpolizei, adjutant to Hitler’s Chancellery Secretary, and a member of Hitler’s personal security staff in Berlin, Friedrich Josef Rauch could expect to be thrown into the nearest gaol-house at the first slap of an American hand on his back. Rauch had done well to evade detection and arrest so far. But to approach Patton’s Third Army headquarters direct required caution. If he poked his own head into the lion’s den it would undoubtedly be bitten off. His overture to the Americans would have to be made from a safe distance, at one or two stages removed, through go-betweens who could plead his case and pass on the Americans’ response without compromising his own freedom. To achieve this delicate manoeuvre Rauch engaged the services of a chain of friends and friends of friends to intervene on his behalf. Karl Warth, Helmut Schreiber and Helmut Groeger. Perhaps it is a measure of the man’s wiliness that in the event it was not he who ended up in American captivity but the relatively ingenuous Captain Neuhauser.

  Rauch’s chain of friends were a mixed bunch. The 38-year-old Karl Warth, like his friend Rauch, also fell into the SHAEF Automatic Arrest category as a Captain (Hauptsturmführer) in the Waffen-SS, a member of the SS Führungshauptamt (Amt VI) and a member of the Allgemeine SS since 1934. Like Rauch, Warth had so far succeeded in evading arrest and in the summer of 1945 seemed to be able to come and go as he pleased. His role in the affair seems to have been that of contact man between Rauch and the next man in the chain, an acquaintance called Helmut Schreiber. Schreiber was also a former Nazi but he was not on the wanted list and was suitably ensconced close to American headquarters in Munich.

  Schreiber was a talented man. His occupation was described as ‘actor’ but between 1935 and 1945 he had been actively involved in film production and until 1939 he had been film production chief of Fox Films and Tobis Films. On the intercession of both Hitler and the Bavarian Minister of State, Adolf Wagner, he was transferred to propaganda work at the Bavarian Film Company (Bavaria Filmkunst GmbH) – ‘a firm of importance’, he averred in a letter to a friend, ‘to the war effort’. Schreiber was also a professional conjuror of some distinction, well known in Germany and abroad under the stage name of Kalanag. As President of the Magic Circle of Germany he had had many high-ranking Nazis as friends, including Hermann Goering and Martin Bormann, and for two days in 1942 he had stayed as a guest of Adolf Hitler at the Berghof, the Führer’s mountain home on the Obersalzberg, where he performed several beguiling tricks to divert the Führer from more pressing concerns like genocide and the colonisation of the Slavs. Schreiber was evidently a very good conjuror. Years later his opposite number in England, the President of the Magic Circle of Great Britain, described his talent in glowing terms, ‘Kalanag had one of the finest magical shows I have seen,’ he wrote, ‘and was regarded as a master showman.’

  Schreiber was more than that. A CIC Special Agent who interviewed him in Zurich in 1952 described him thus: ‘Approximately 5’ 8” tall, stout but very energetic, distinguished in dress and appearance, a sharp quick mind, speaks several languages, possesses a keen sense of humour, enjoys looking after himself as a cultured dramatic
artist smilingly bowing to an enthusiastic audience and accepting the hospitality of aristocracy and wealthy friends throughout Europe.’ It is not surprising that such a man, with his aptitude for languages and his talent for ingratiating himself in influential circles, should have soon found profitable employment with the new regime in post-hostilities Bavaria – as interpreter with a Third Army detachment, the 512th Military Police Battalion.

  Schreiber was to claim that there was nothing in his background to disbar him from such employment. Though he had made the acquaintance of many top Nazi officials, he protested that he had never belonged to the NSDAP, and was opposed to its philosophy and the cruel treatment of the Jews under its administration. In fact, his Party number was 7-040-625 and the date of his induction 1 May 1939. There was, as the Americans were to discover, more to Helmut Schreiber than met the eye, another side to his public persona not entirely irrelevant to the course of this story. In a later reassessment of Schreiber’s status, the Director of the Intelligence Division of OMGB (Office of Military Government for Bavaria, Munich) wrote to the Director of Intelligence OMGUS (Office of Military Government, United States, Berlin):

  During the investigation of his background, subject has repeatedly given wrong information concerning his past activities and maintained in his Military Government Fragebogen that he was only an applicant to the NSDAP although documentary evidence from the Reichkulturkammer shows that the subject has been a full-fledged member of the Party. Subject must be considered an opportunist of the worst order who has no convictions whatsoever and does not hesitate to use any method available in order to make himself acceptable to whatever persons are in power at a given time. Files of this Division contain proof that subject person handed names of his competitors over to the Gestapo in order to assure his own position. Subject person has consistently refused to face a German Denazification Tribunal in Bavaria although his case should have been tried in Munich under the provisions of the Law for the Liberation from National Socialism and Militarism. Subject person was therefore declared unacceptable for any position in the Information Media Field during the time that Military Government exercised control over such position.