Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  One day officers from the CIC Detachment Headquarters in Miesbach, near Schliersee, broke into the house of Pfeiffer’s mother, a lady in her sixties, ransacked the place and took her off to be interrogated about her son’s movements and any gold or currency he might have brought into the house. When Pfeiffer got to hear of this he drove at high speed up the hill to the CIC HQ and in a fury banged on the door to protest at his mother’s arrest. At first the Americans would not open the door, but simply closed the shutters. So Pfeiffer banged again and this time the CIC man opened up, grabbed Pfeiffer, took away his car keys and led him off to the cells. But he got no farther than a cell door. At that point he pulled out his trump card – his official accreditation with the French Army. ‘I told them to check it out with Third Army,’ he recounted later, ‘and they let me go again. Next day they released my mother as well.’

  A more serious confrontation was to come. Some time towards the end of July, when the Tyrol demobilisation operation was at its height, Waring tried a ruse. He arrested three more of Pfeiffer’s former officers, and hoped that Pfeiffer, with his deeply ingrained sense of loyalty and responsibility towards his men, would rise like a trout to the fly. Pfeiffer did. With a confidence born of his good status among the French military, Pfeiffer decided to confront the English brigadier and argue his case for the release of his men. Through Captain Sauteau, of the French Army, he re-established contact with Captain Neumann of the Third Army, and Captain Neumann in turn sounded out Brigadier Waring. Not long afterwards Waring arranged a meeting with Pfeiffer in Innsbruck. The discussion centred on the question of a safe conduct for Pfeiffer into the American Zone and the release of his officers in return for certain favours. It seems that at least the safe conduct was promised by Waring – if not actually forthcoming.

  Pfeiffer had had no reason to love the British any more than the Americans. To him they were simply two sides of the same coin. He had seen many of his comrades blown out of the sea by the Royal Navy at Suda Bay during the Battle of Crete and narrowly escaped death himself at British hands. But it was perhaps in the serene and beautiful surroundings of peacetime Garmisch-Partenkirchen that the colonel’s aversion for the British took a distinct turn for the worse. Not even two world wars had entirely dimmed the stereotype of the English officer and gentleman which had been so carefully inculcated amongst the German populace for the best part of the century. In spite of all evidence to the contrary, Colonel Pfeiffer, like most of his fellow-countrymen, still believed that an Englishman’s word was his bond and that fair play was the order of an Englishman’s day. As a former member of the German Officer Corps, Colonel Pfeiffer had a great respect for the concepts of duty and honour, and expected other officers, even enemy ones, and undoubtedly English ones, to respect the same virtues. In Innsbruck Waring had agreed to give Pfeiffer a safe conduct into the American Zone of Germany. So Pfeiffer’s shock when Brigadier Waring threatened to have him arrested was severe indeed. Even 37 years later, his outrage when he recalls Waring’s perfidiousness and unfair play is barely restrained.

  ‘General Waring broke his word to me,’ Pfeiffer was to recall with considerable vehemence. ‘He had locked up three of my officers, including my adjutant, in the cellar of his villa in Garmisch. I wanted to explain to him that the men he had arrested had nothing to do with the gold business so I went there to get them released. To be on the safe side I asked for a safe conduct and to make sure I asked Captain Sauteau to come with me.’

  Waring was at the Villa Ostler, formerly the large and sumptuous residence of the Chief Architect of Bavaria, a Herr Ostler, but now in the hands of the American intelligence community in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. When Pfeiffer arrived there he walked straight into the trap which Waring had sprung for him.

  ‘Waring straightaway began to ask about gold – had I hidden any gold anywhere? Then an American brought in an empty old suitcase which I had left in the Forest House before the gold was buried. I was asked, “How had that got there?” Then I was asked, “What about the documents?” The American produced an old map of the Russian campaign I had brought back as a souvenir and which was found in the suitcase. Perhaps they thought it was a map of the gold holes.’

  Waring, it seemed, was dissatisfied with Pfeiffer’s answers under interrogation – as well he might be, for at this stage the Allied recoveries from the Reichsbank reserves bore little relationship to the Reichsbank gold and currency inventories in Waring’s possession.

  ‘General Waring told me I had to stay, that I was under custodial arrest,’ Pfeiffer continued. ‘This was in complete breach of his agreement not to arrest me. Captain Sauteau was so angry when he heard him say this that he took his revolver from its holster and threw it into the corner of the room. He demanded that if I was going to be arrested then he should be arrested as well, and then he demanded to he put in touch with Third Army so that he could lodge a protest.’

  Colonel Pfeiffer was clearly under considerable pressure at this juncture. The Special Interrogation Unit had at long last got this elusive figure in their grasp after three months of searching for him. They were unlikely to let him go again before they had wrung from him every drop of information he possessed about the fate of the missing Reichsbank treasure. It is true that Pfeiffer had already led the Americans to a substantial hoard of dollars along the Oberau road in early June. But the investigators knew that a great deal more was still unaccounted for – Rauch’s testimony alone was sufficient to indicate that. It was therefore necessary to threaten Pfeiffer in order to force him to co-operate a second time. That is why Waring and his team refused to release Pfeiffer’s fellow officers and threatened to imprison Pfeiffer himself. Pfeiffer was to complain that this was a breach of Waring’s word of honour. He obviously did not sufficiently appreciate the power of life and death which the Allied authorities then possessed over the citizens of occupied Germany and in particular over the former officers of the Wehrmacht. And he clearly overestimated the extent to which he, a German colonel, could hold out against the representatives of victorious armies who had almost limitless freedom to do almost anything they liked with him.

  ‘I suffered a lot of disappointment in human beings as a result of all those events to do with the Reichsbank treasure,’ Colonel Pfeiffer was to complain later. ‘The whole thing is ein bischen peinlich – it hurts me to think about it.’ For all his French passes and American laissez-passers the German colonel was completely at the mercy of the Allied investigators.

  One eye-witness has left an account of a final meeting at the Villa Ostler which provides a clue to the outcome of Pfeiffer’s uncomfortable encounter with Waring. This eye-witness was one of Pfeiffer’s former brother officers from the Gebirgsjäger, Captain Hans Neuhauser.

  Hans Neuhauser, it will be remembered, had been incarcerated in the police cells at Garmisch after prolonged interrogation at the hands of the special investigators. Then, six weeks after he had given himself up to the Americans – which would make it about 7 August if his calculations were correct – Neuhauser was hauled out of the cells for the last time by the little blonde interpreter he had met at a previous interrogation in Mittenwald.

  ‘Wohin jetzt?’ Neuhauser asked her as he emerged blinking and down-at-heel into the streets of Garmisch. ‘Where to now?’

  ‘You’ll soon see,’ snapped the little blonde.

  Together they drove to the prison of the Amtsgericht (the District Court) where they collected Colonel Pfeiffer’s former second-in-command, Major Rupert Braun (who had been in US Army custody ever since May on account of his participation in the Reichsbank treasure burial). Then they carried on to the Villa Ostler.

  In a room of this large and well-appointed residence were gathered all the old familiar faces. Besides Neuhauser and Braun there was Colonel Pfeiffer – looking very prosperous, Neuhauser thought, and boasting a motor car – along with his adjutant, and the mysterious Colonel Rauch, the scraggy English ‘General’ (Waring), the ‘Ami-Obersi’ (the American C
olonel), Peter the Polack of the CIC, an interpreter, and others. It was clear to Neuhauser that this was not to be another interrogation. Something had happened since he had been thrown into the cells the last time. The confrontation over the Reichsbank business appeared to have been resolved in some way. Colonel Pfeiffer, sitting hatless with the light gleaming on his broad, balding head, acted as spokesman on the German side. He explained that the gold and currency had been handed over to the Americans and that in return the Americans had agreed to treat all the men who had been up on the Klausenkopf and were at present in custody as prisoners-of-war and not werewolves, and to set all the people involved in the Reichsbank affair free.

  In other words, Pfeiffer had done a deal.

  When Colonel Pfeiffer had accompanied Major Rawley on the search for dollar caches along the road between Garmisch and Oberau in early June he had been careful not to lead the Americans to the large caches at each end of the road, one at Klaus Bremme’s farm in Oberau and the other at the von Blücher house in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. For two months Pfeiffer managed to preserve both the anonymity of his friends and colleagues and the security of the Reichsbank foreign exchange which he had placed, in a manner of speaking, in their charge. But the Villa Ostler meeting had changed all that. Under the pressure of the simple equation which the Brigadier had presented to him – tell all or endure indeterminate confinement – Pfeiffer had cracked.

  Colonel Pfeiffer has always maintained that his knowledge of the Reichsbank treasure was very limited. He claims that he never knew the contents of all the boxes and bags of gold, currency and (possibly) jewels that were brought to his Mountain Infantry School from Berlin and that for this reason he never signed an official receipt for them. He also claims that he never knew exactly where the treasure was buried and that he left this side of things to his subordinate officers while he busied himself with the more pressing matter of defending his section of the Alpine Redoubt against the rapidly advancing Americans. All this is very possibly true. It is more than likely that the only treasure cache whose whereabouts was personally known to him was the one whose contents he helped to carry to Gsteigstrasse when he was staying at Mathias Stinnes’ house in May. At any event, it was the remainder of this currency which Pfeiffer chose to reveal to Waring and the Americans at the beginning of August 1945, a few days before the final meeting at the Villa Ostler attended by Captain Neuhauser.

  When the time came for Pfeiffer to point a finger, he pointed it unerringly and unequivocally in the direction of 38 Gsteigstrasse and the two enterprising young men who dwelt there, Captain Lüder and Hubert von Blücher. So it was on 1 August 1945 that, in the army parlance of the time, the balloon went up – or as Mathias Stinnes preferred to put it, the bomb went off. ‘Colonel Pfeiffer, I was told, had gone to the CIC and told them everything,’ Srinnes wrote later, ‘He had been questioned and ordered to hand the money over.’

  Pfeiffer’s denunciation produced a shock wave that stretched all the way from Garmisch to Oberau. The repercussions at Haus Hohr Halde were dramatic, in retrospect even comic opera. Lüder von Blücher was so incensed with Colonel Pfeiffer that he threatened he would ‘punch him on the nose if he ever met him in the street’. Hubert von Blücher remembered the events of 1 August vividly:

  A very funny thing happened. A jeep arrived and stopped in front of our house. We were already occupied by the Americans. A General Baer was our house guest, everything was marvellous. (A lot of American brass were there later – General Truscott, General Patton from Bad Tölz, General Bradley on an inspection – they just came to see Baer, but they sat around our fireplace, it was very interesting.) Well, the jeep stopped. We had a splendid wooden entrance gateway to our property, and I was accustomed to people ringing the bell when they came to the house, or making some kind of noise – I would have understood if they had loosed off a few rounds, Texas style, and we would have opened the gate. But what happened was that a tank rolled up off the roadway and simply overran and flattened our lovely wooden gateway, a completely senseless operation. And this made me angry. Nothing else had made me angry, not even the fact that we had lost the war; but that a beautiful handcarved wooden gateway that was centuries old should simply be mowed down by a tank just for the fun of it, that made me very mad. Then all the men from the jeep appeared at the house. To start with they brought in an electric power plant. For me that was utterly incomprehensible, because of course we had electricity on the mains. They brought in their infrastructure, a generator, before they had asked a simple question. They didn’t even know they would be staying and they brought a generator. Typical US Army.

  And then a second jeep turned up. In it was an English colonel from the Treasury in London [Brigadier Waring]. He was a sort of emergency colonel who had only just put on a uniform. A highly cultivated man with perfect manners. We had no problem as we found we had mutual acquaintances.

  To Hubert von Blücher it seemed that Waring and his colleagues knew all there was to know about the Reichsbank shipment. This was still some way from the truth, but they knew enough to impress the youthful Hubert, for they had been working on the case for nearly three months now and had the advantage of Colonel Pfeiffer’s most recent confession.

  They knew everything [Hubert continued]. It was exactly what I had foreseen. When Berlin was captured the entire documentation was found in the Reichsbank, all neatly drawn up by an orderly German bookkeeper: how many lorries had been loaded, their registration numbers, names of the people who had taken over the stuff, in which direction, and with what destination they had left Berlin, the progress reports on the journey, what the weight of the load was and how it was packed. Everything very correctly noted. This nice Englishman had all the documents with him. It was the simplest thing in the world to follow up.

  Brigadier Waring naturally insisted on total co-operation from the von Blücher brothers and their associates. He knew all about the foreign exchange reburied at Oberau and in the garden of their house and he insisted on their help to locate the various caches and to dig them up. For reasons of secrecy the recovery would have to be carried out under cover of darkness, the sooner the better – he could see no reason for delaying beyond the coming night. Any information the brothers could give him to facilitate his investigation would count in their favour. Lüder gave Waring a military map of the locality with the caches marked on it – probably those which Pfeiffer had shown to the Americans along the Oberau road in June. Everyone was very nervous and tense.

  Present throughout Waring’s discussion with the von Blüchers was an American intelligence captain who had become closely connected with Waring’s team and had been instrumental in bringing Colonel Pfeiffer to Garmisch to help with the investigation over the last few days. This was Captain Fred S. Neumann (a German name pronounced in the English way – Newmann), Patton’s interpreter and a member of the Third Army CIB (Counter Intelligence Branch). In all previous efforts to unravel the mystery surrounding the Reichsbank affair, including those conducted by the FBI, the CID and the US Army’s own investigative intelligence units, the name of Captain Neumann has always loomed very large in the list of people suspected of complicity in the theft of large quantities of Reichsbank/US Government funds and other crimes. Indeed, he is the only suspect who was actively investigated for suspected misappropriation of funds – in other words, the robbery of part of the Reichsbank treasure. Some people believed that he had simply got away with it, others that he did not actually exist and that the name Neumann was a pseudonym for someone else who was never identified. In fact, Neumann did exist, though he exists no more. He was closely involved with a large portion of the Reichsbank treasure which did vanish and was stolen – to be exact, the portion dug up in the von Blüchers’ garden – and the investigation into the extent of his complicity eventually extended all the way from southern Bavaria to the western seaboard of the United States. So who was this Captain Neumann, chatting volubly in perfect German in von Blücher’s parlour that fran
tic August morning, and what was he really about?

  Frederick Siegfried Neumann was a German Jew by origin and an American citizen by adoption. Born in Hersfeld, Germany in January 1912, he had emigrated to the USA in 1930, was naturalised in 1937 and married an American girl in 1942. When he was 31 he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the US Army Field Artillery and at the end of 1943 was interviewed by Military Intelligence with a view to a transfer to some other branch of the service in which his knowledge of Germany and the German language could be better utilised. The intelligence officer who interviewed him at Camp Shelby, Mississippi, afterwards wrote this assessment of Neumann:

  Subject made an excellent impression on this officer because of his intelligence and education. He is healthy-looking, serious, well mannered and philosophical, and earnestly desires to be transferred to MIS, Office of Strategic Services, or any other branch of the service where his knowledge of the European terrain and the German language can be quickly used. He is willing to volunteer for any type of assignment, no matter how dangerous it may be.

  Neumann was accepted for intelligence work. He served for a period as a Prisoner of War Interrogation Officer, obtained a ‘Secret’ clearance with Sixth Army, and from D-Day to the end of September 1945 served with Third Army as a special counter intelligence officer, though his principal duty was interpreter for the Third Army Commander, General Patton. Three weeks before his arrival at the Haus Hohe Halde in Garmisch his immediate superior, Colonel Oscar W. Koch, Patton’s intelligence chief, had given him an efficiency rating of 5.7 out of 7 (numerical rating) and ‘superior’ (the maximum adjectival rating) in his periodic Efficiency Report, and made this overall assessment of him: