Officer is well suited for interrogation of high-ranking prisoners of war, in which endeavour he has obtained good results. An able, conscientious officer capable of independent action in his specialised field.
Captain Neumann made a remarkable impression on the observant Hubert von Blücher.
He went about everywhere with a dog whip [von Blücher recalled]. And at this time he had no dog. I think he carried it because he had real inner neurotic fears. It was nothing like a normal officer’s cane. It was a plaited whip which had a sort of psycho association with it. Very remarkable indeed. He also had two pistols and was generally excessively armed.
I could tell at once that he was, how shall I say, quite clearly a Jew. One can’t say Israeli, because Israel didn’t exist at that time. I would say he was a classic Jew. I don’t mean in his outward appearance. I mean intellectually. Highly intelligent, a very gentle man, a very educated man, athletically intellectual, a gentle intellectual. And he was an Israeli even then in the sense that he was a man with ideas of a Jewish state.
One evening he came to see us, privately. All of us were there – me, my brother, Klaus Bremme and Mathias Stinnes. We talked a lot about various religious persuasions and very soon the conversation got a lot more relaxed. And now we come to the only story I have never told anyone in all these thirty or forty years since it happened. That is why I asked Mr Löwernstern, my legal representative, to be present and to record the whole conversation on tape. Captain Neumann had an idea, for which he tried to gain my support. He said that so much injustice had been done to the Jewish people that they were going to be given their own Jewish state in Palestine. His idea was to send the Reichsbank money in our garden in Garmisch as a donation towards this new State. He said that nothing would be more just than that this money should be used to build up this new State. It was all to be done on a grand scale. A flying boat from the International Red Cross in Switzerland was to land on Lake Walchen and from there fly with the money to Palestine where it could be handed over to the Zionist leaders.
In a sort of way we found it no bad solution, though not a very practicable one. What the International Red Cross had to do with the foundation of Israel I simply could not comprehend. But the scheme appealed to my young mind. I considered it a productive new start. My brother was quite different from me. His reaction was, ‘Let’s get rid of the stuff, we must start to build up again, get the factories working.’ He was impatient. But I was not at all interested in what you might call the Bavarian solution.
It never occurred to me for a second that Neumann might perhaps have put up this idea in order to keep the money for himself. The last six months had been so filled with realities that were so utterly improbable that there was really nothing improbable left that could happen. Personal property had acquired a completely new meaning. Personal property meant survival. But capital, the idea of financial capital as a concept when everything in our world had been lost, or disappeared, simply had no meaning any more.
Looking back, Neumann’s scheme was probably intended as the right sort of medicine for us ‘Prussians’ – a sort of foretaste of what was to come. There was a lot of Jewish Schmonzes [bullshit] about it. But it was very persuasive at that time – we were all starved of everything that had any real meaning.
Neumann’s alleged scheme was, of course, fantastical. But it was, perhaps, a typical product of the peculiar circumstances of that time. The captain’s first priority, however, was to help see to it that the treasure was actually got out of the ground – what was to be done with it was another matter. So, on the very first night after the meeting at 38 Gsteigstrasse, as soon as the late-setting summer sun had gone down behind the high peaks, the treasure retrieval operation swung into action.
During the night of 1/2 August a squad of American soldiers of the 10th Armored Division, accompanied by Hubert von Blücher, raided Klaus Bremme’s farm, ‘Gut Buchwies’, at Oberau where he and his brother had buried a cache of dollars from the Klausenkopf currency holes in May. More than two months had passed since then and to Hubert’s acute embarrassment he now found that in the darkness of the night he was unable to identify the particular haybarn-cum-toolshed in which the dollars had been concealed.
The grotesqueness of the situation only struck me when I came to dig the stuff up [Hubert recalled]. There were six haybarns in the vicinity and I didn’t know in which one the stuff was buried. I searched for a long time but I could see the hopelessness of the situation. To make matters worse I had what you could call a whole opera cast with me – CIC, CCC, CIO, COP and heaven knows what else, plus a couple of Englishmen from the Treasury and a couple of Frenchmen from the Sûreté. Since it was filthy cold weather, cold and rainy, I could not make too heavy demands on everybody’s patience, so I suggested they should fetch my brother, who was sitting at home upstairs practising getting his fingers working again. My brother knew where it was; he had been given a better description than I had and as an infantryman he knew better how to pinpoint things on the ground – tree here, house there, and so on. So he came and joined up with me and I asked him, ‘Listen, where is all the stuff?’ and he told us, ‘It must be here, and here – now, if we take a bearing . . .’ And so we found it.
The Americans tore the hut down and beneath the floorboards discovered a cache of wooden boxes containing a total of $400,000 in dollar bills (worth $19,580,000 now). From Oberau the money was transported to the Divisional HQ in Garmisch, where it was turned over to Captain Noel Hinrichs and Captain James H. Knight for processing and delivery to the ‘proper authorities’ (as they were euphemistically called). The event was considered sufficiently noteworthy for an official photographer to be sent to record the scene. The resulting photo reveals the two officers and a sergeant checking through piles of dollar bills stacked by denominations on an ordinary kitchen table in an extremely untidy room. In the background are two big steel safes, one surmounted by a tin hat, the other by a cheap alarm clock pointing to ten to one. Outside it is still dark and the streets of Garmisch are unlit. A week later an official acknowledgement of the retrieval was contained in a Third Army Secret Intelligence Report. Yet in spite of the official photograph and the official report the $400,000 recovered from Klaus Bremme’s farm never did reach the ‘proper authorities’. Nor did most of the other foreign exchange recovered during the days that followed in the region of Garmisch Partenkirchen.
The first that Klaus Bremme knew about the midnight raid on his farm was the sudden appearance of Brigadier Waring and friends on his doorstep during the course of the morning. Waring, whom Bremme remembered only as a ‘British general’, brought with him another officer in British uniform, the little blonde interpreter who had helped interrogate Neuhauser, and a military map of the locality which had been taken from Lüder von Blücher the day before. Waring believed that certain spots marked on this map had some special significance to do with the Reichsbank treasure but wanted to check with Bremme whether they perhaps had some other meaning which he did not know about. In a letter written from Buenos Aires in 1956, Klaus Bremme recalled his encounter with the indefatigable ‘General’ Waring very clearly:
The general stayed for about two hours, while we had a most interesting talk. Evidently he wanted to collect impressions of people who had lived through the war on the other side. I still remember that, while the woman officer was very short-tempered and anti-German, the General calmed her down on various occasions and continued the conversation in a very gentlemanly way. I do want to make special mention of this, because I never met another Allied officer who behaved in such a fine and straight way as this general, whose name I unfortunately do not remember.
The same afternoon, after Waring and his team had left, Bremme bicycled over to the von Blücher house in Garmisch. There he was informed that the American CIC knew all about the Reichsbank consignment and about the dollars hidden by the von Blüchers in Gsteigstrasse and Oberau, and they had come and collected it all. In fact, the Americ
ans had not collected all of it, only a part. What happened was this. At four or five in the morning of 2 August, only a few hours after they had led the Americans to the currency cache at Oberau, the von Blücher brothers took Captain Neumann into the garden at 38 Gsteigstrasse and showed him the tomato bed where back in May they had hidden a gutta percha bag full of dollars.
It was still dark and the brothers were obliged to disinter the money by the light of candles – batteries for torches were then unobtainable. ‘It was just as if you were digging up an Easter egg you had buried in the garden for your son,’ Hubert recalled. ‘There was hardly any earth covering it. A few scrapes with the spade and there it was. Captain Neumann picked it up and carried it into the house and into the room where the fireplace was. Six of our Silesian relatives were sleeping on the floor there. Captain Neumann placed the bag in front of the fire and said he would have it picked up by the Military Police the next day.’ Next morning the two jeeps, with four MPs in the first one and Captain Neumann in the second, came and fetched the money.
This first recovery from 38 Gsteigstrasse is officially documented in the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Military Government Annual Report (for the year ending June 1946) prepared by the then Military Governor, Major Melvin Nitz, as follows:
On Friday, 3 August 1945, the 10th Armored Division reported the finding of a bag containing US $251,374 in currency, which bag was handed to this detachment by which it was transferred to Detachment F1H2 at Munich. These funds had been brought into the Landkreis by the former German Army. [This recovery at Garmisch was actually on the same day as the Oberau recovery – 2 August. The report of the recovery was made on 3 August, as stated.]
A few days later another bag, containing about $50,000, was found in the von Blüchers’ garden and similarly transferred to the Military Government Detachment in Munich. But panic set in when Captain Neumann later returned to the house and claimed that the dollars so far recovered – totalling over $2,680,000 by today’s values – still fell short of the stipulated target and that the von Blücher brothers would be given a few more days’ grace to find the missing money, failing which they would be arrested and sent to prison.
The most fantastic search of the von Blücher garden then started [recalled Klaus Bremme, who had been asked by the von Blüchers to help in the search for the missing dollars]. Neither of them could remember where in the world they had hidden all the dollars in pots and cases, and after a whole day of fruitless searching we decided to dig systematically, metre by metre, right across the garden. And so, from morning till night, we continued for a few days and found a few pots. But still some money was missing. Then, at last, there came a day when one of the von Blüchers found yet another pot crammed full of 100-dollar bills, and the whole missing sum came together.
The total money found during those days was kept in a room in the von Blücher villa, where all three of us slept in order to keep guard on it. I was astonished that the CIC Captain Neumann did not put any armed guards at the villa or over the von Blüchers, as anyone could easily have disappeared with all the money.
Bremme’s surprise is understandable. That the Americans should have left the recovery of the currency to a bunch of former SS or Wehrmacht men over an extended period of time without imposing a round-the-clock guard was quite extraordinary, especially considering that every one of the Germans was palpably suspect of an indictable offence under occupation law – the illegal possession of foreign currency – for which they should now have been under arrest. Yet they were allowed to continue on their own haphazard, unsupervised way, while Captain Neumann visited the villa from time to time to check how the recovery operation was progressing.
By 23 August 1945 enough pots and pickling jars of dollars had been turned up in the von Blücher garden to make a presentable total to give to Captain Neumann. The next day he came to collect them. August 24 was a red-letter day in the story of the Reichsbank treasure. On that day the principal German confederates (Colonel Franz Pfeiffer, Colonel Fritz Rauch, Captain Lüder von Blücher, Hubert von Blücher, Mathias Stinnes and Klaus Bremme) assembled under the same roof – the steep-pitched Bavarian chalet roof of Haus Hohe Halde – with one of the principal Allied investigators and a great pile of American dollars ($104,956 to be precise, worth $934,108 today) on the table between them. On that day, too, these same seven men produced the only document detailing a Reichsbank treasure transaction ever to come to light – a receipt, hastily and badly typed on a piece of flimsy paper, for the total amount recovered from the von Blüchers’ garden, and bearing the signatures of four of the men present. This receipt was to become a famous document in the story of the Reichsbank robbery. It was the one piece of evidence which gave the names, a sum and a date to a quantity of foreign exchange, formerly belonging to the Deutsche Reichsbank and now the property of the United States government, which could be proved to have disappeared. It was the one firm starting point for every paperchase investigation – military, governmental or journalistic – that set off, in the years that followed, in the illusory hope of solving the unsolved mystery of the great Reichsbank robbery. The receipt (typing errors included) read:
24% August 145
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN
Lüder von BLUECHER and Hubert von BLUECHER have turned over to the US Army the following sums of money entrusted to them by Colonel Franz PFEIFFER, former Commandant of the Gebirgsjagerschule Mittenwald Germany. This constitutes the entire amount originally entrusted into them.
$404,840.000
405.00 English pounds
The undersigned acknowledges the receipt of the above stated amount.
(Signature) FRED S. NEUMANN
Capt FA CIB
THIRD UNITED STATES ARMY
Signatures of witnesses present during the transaction appear below.
Signatures of witnesses:
FRANZ PFEIFFER (Signature)
FRITZ RAUCH (Signature)
CLAUS BREMME (Signature)
It seems fairly likely that this receipt was typed at the last minute on the von Blüchers’ typewriter in the von Blüchers’ house – probably at the insistence of Colonel Pfeiffer to protect his own interests and those of his associates. Otherwise the document would have been typed on official Third Army notepaper and the spelling mistakes would have been corrected. Indeed, it is such a sloppy document, and its command of English so imperfect, that some have cast doubt on its authenticity and claimed it was forged by the Germans present to cover themselves against any possible criminal charges in the future. Some have even doubted the existence of Captain Neumann himself. It was a common custom in the early freebooting days of the American occupation for US officers to sign receipts for valuables handed over by German subjects with fictitious names, many of them as outrageously implausible as Paul Revere, Davy Crockett, Mickey Rooney and Robert E. Lee. Captain Neumann, it was believed, was a similar such pseudonym of convenience, concocted to disguise the signatory’s real identity and give the officer in question a chance to get away with a little opportunist embezzlement.
Colonel Pfeiffer never doubted the existence of Captain Neumann, of course, but he has always looked rather blank when confronted with a copy of the Neumann receipt. Pfeiffer has always attempted to distance himself from the events surrounding the Reichsbank reserves. He has consistently denied that he was in the von Blücher house on 24 August (or any other time), professed ignorance of the receipt and maintained that his signature could have been a forgery. The motives behind this attitude are not difficult to understand. When it became known that the $404,840 and £405 handed over during the course of August had disappeared, Pfeiffer was put in an unexpectedly invidious position. In view of his previous close involvement with the Reichsbank funds the finger of suspicion, rightly or wrongly, now pointed in his direction, and his signature on the receipt, far from clearing him, now seemed to implicate him in the disappearance of the currency, if only by association. In the absence of any available evidence with which
to exonerate himself, Pfeiffer’s only course was to evade the issue, plead poor memory and deny all knowledge of the matter. If he could not be the attorney, he would play the ostrich. And this he has done to this day.
Klaus Bremme, by contrast, displayed no such diffidence about his signature on the receipt. ‘My signature was refused by Captain Neumann, as I was not implicated,’ he wrote later. ‘But I insisted to sign at least as a witness, because I wanted to be able to prove in the future that I had been present when the total missing sum of dollars had been handed over and could not, therefore, have enriched myself from this source.’
There is no doubt that the receipt was genuine, that the best part of half a million dollars was handed over to Captain Neumann at 38 Gsteigstrasse, that the money was loaded into the back of his car and driven off in the direction of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and that it was never seen again.
So what happened to it?
11. A Hole in the Bucket
When Captain Neumann of the Third United States Army disappeared down the road with the last portion of the $404,000 dug up from the von Blüchers’ vegetable beds, it was still high summer in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the sun burned down out of an Alpine blue sky, and the shortages and austerity of the first winter of the peace – the much-dreaded ‘Hungerwinter’ – were still some months away. The sense of urgency, the devilling for survival, would overtake the inhabitants of the area soon enough. For the moment the von Blücher brothers, on the orders of Captain Neumann, were confined to the house for 48 hours. Hubert von Blücher still remembers the occasion. ‘Of course, saying we were confined to the house on our own property was like saying don’t leave Miami. The sun was shining, we went down to the swimming pool on the estate and lay in the sun, our friends came to see us – you know how it was. After two or three days we went into town again. Everything was forgotten.’
Nazi Gold Page 26
