Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  Walter Snyder appears to have been the first agent to be put on the Reichsbank case after General Patton’s intervention. It seems that the Provost Marshal for Third Army (in whose office some of the Reichsbank gold and money had been stored at Bad Tölz) had referred the matter to the CID Chief for Third Army, who in turn had passed it up the line to his superior, the CID Chief for European Command, Lieutenant-Colonel Eugene Smith, who had handed the matter down to the CID unit nearest to the scene of operations – the 13th CID Detachment at Munich. Walter Snyder, one of the 13th CID’s best agents, able, honest and a good German speaker, was sent to Garmisch to conduct a preliminary investigation. He was joined in the autumn of 1945 by a team of German detectives borrowed by the 13th CID from the Munich Police Department. Acting as Police Liaison Officer in Munich, co-ordinating all activities between the Germans in the Munich Police Department and the Americans in the CID, CIC, Military Police and Military Intelligence, was Sergeant William C. Wilson. It was through Wilson that the case was referred as it progressed and through him that the Munich detectives forwarded their report to the CID at the end of their investigation. It was to Wilson that Snyder confided his private impressions of the case.

  There could have been no more crucial investigation into the Reichsbank affair than this one, for the corpse was still warm, so to speak, and the evidence still scattered around. The names and whereabouts of the people principally involved with the treasure in one capacity or another were already known. None of these people had yet vanished or gone to ground; all could be easily located for interrogation. Motives, evidence, suspects – all were still fresh and to hand. Vital preliminary spade-work had been done by Brigadier Waring and the local CIC and – theoretically at least – their findings were available to the American and German CID now probing the case.

  In Bill Wilson’s opinion no one ever knew more about the Reichsbank business than Walt Snyder and his CID chief, Gene Smith, who were first-class men. And yet – next to nothing came of it all. The mountain laboured and brought forth a mouse. Snyder blamed it on ‘too many fingers in the pie’, with CIC, CID, Military Government Public Safety Branch and Special Branch all claiming an interest. Sadly, neither Snyder nor Smith can tell us more now. Snyder was shot and killed in May 1948 while working on a different case and Smith died in an air crash a year or two later.

  One can only surmise what else went wrong with the Garmisch investigation. The greatest handicap was not knowing how much gold and currency was supposed to have gone. The FED was still a year and a half away from discovering that its Reichsbank currency account was short to the tune of some $2,000,000 in foreign exchange. The investigators do not seem to have followed General Patton’s instructions to hand over ‘those civilian bastards’ in order for the CID to ‘find out what happened to the rest of this hoard’. Instead they concentrated on only the one part of the Reichsbank treasure for which they could find a finite figure and a tangible exhibit – the $404,000 or so dug out of the von Blüchers’ garden and taken away by General Patton’s own personal interpreter, Captain Fred S. Neumann. Since they could find no trace of any deposit corresponding to 404,000 American dollars, the investigators came to the conclusion that it was this which comprised the missing portion. This was perfectly understandable, given the circumstances, but it was the wrong track and would lead nowhere.

  The investigators seem to have ignored the facts already on file in Third Army headquarters at Bad Tölz concerning the strange circumstances in which certain enemy subjects – Rauch, Warth, Schreiber and Groeger – were known to have handled large quantities of foreign currency shortly before the American MPs made their recovery. Though Rauch and Warth were arrested and interned by the CIC during the course of the investigation – they were both picked up at the same time and place at the end of November 1945 – they were only confined because they fell into the SHAEF Automatic Arrest Category as known or suspected Nazis and SS men, not because of the Reichsbank investigation, and they do not appear to have been interrogated about missing US dollars while in internment. If the investigators turned up any details of a deal over American dollars between Rauch and certain Americans in Third Army – and there must have been one – they left no record of them.

  The conclusion finally arrived at by the CID in 1945 was that Captain Neumann and a Master Sergeant from the Finance Office had made away with the missing dollars. ‘They had considerable testimony to back up their conclusion,’ one US Army CID agent recalled. At a subsequent inquiry a senior officer from the Inspector General Division declared that he was ‘unable to obtain any proof of delivery to the Finance Department or to the Central Depository of German Funds’ of Nazi assets for which Neumann had signed a receipt. When Neumann himself was subsequently confronted with the CID conclusion, he does not seem to have provided a satisfactory explanation – why not must remain for ever a mystery – and though he was not formally charged by the American authorities, he fell under a towering storm-cloud of suspicion, which lingered for years.

  While the German Police CID in Munich had been looking into the currency aspect of the case, Walt Snyder had been trying to check up on the gold. Aware, perhaps, of discrepancies in the subsidiary gold cache discovered in the hills above Walchensee – of boxes of gold coin being dug up where German records indicated that gold bullion had been buried – Snyder came to the conclusion that there had probably been two gold shipments down to Mittenwald, one of bullion and one of coins. But that was about as far as he could go. The FED could provide no leads. It is doubtful whether anyone had thought to tell him of the 10th Armored Division’s order authorising Sergeant Singleton’s bullion recovery from the gold bunker near Mittenwald, or of the two alleged OSS agents who drove off with the contents loaded on two 2(1/2-ton trucks, never to be seen again. All he could do was pursue rumours and false clues laid by over-optimistic informants. One informant sold the CID a map of the area where the missing gold was supposed to be buried – near Füssen – but all they ever dug up was a golden dinner service belonging to a private family. Another informant announced that the missing gold was buried near Goering’s palace at Valhalla, but when the cache was exhumed it amounted to no more than a small collection of coins and a rather large cellar of vintage French cognac. As for the rumours, they grew wilder and more fantastic by the day:

  A group of US officers bribed Swiss border guards and took the gold to Switzerland.

  A group of US officers who were sympathetic to the Zionist movement turned it over to members of the Zionist underground.

  A group of US officers smuggled it to Italy where exiled Mafia types used it to set up a narcotics smuggling racket.

  The Nazi underground got it and it wound up in South America.

  By Christmas 1945 Walt Snyder had been pulled off the Reichsbank case. Almost six months were now to pass before the CID again turned their minds to the matter of the Reichsbank currency and gold. Meanwhile a set of papers on the Snyder investigation was deposited more or less unread in a safe in the CID headquarters of Third Army, which had now moved from Bad Tölz to Heidelberg. It was there that the new CID Chief for Third Army, Captain Charles I. Bradley, found them when he took over the job in May 1946. Bradley recalled later:

  I had all this stuff in the safe. I had money and everything else when I took over. There was a whole bunch of stuff about some Germans, you know, that said they came up to the Americans and that they knew where there was a lot of money buried and if they gave them some of it, and American passports, they’d tell them where it was. The money was gotten together and then about 130 million – 120 – disappeared. And nobody paid any attention to this, so I went to G-2 [Third Army military intelligence] and talked with them and let them read it, and I said: ‘Who do you want to carry the ball on this? Do you want Intelligence to carry the ball or do you want the Criminal Investigation Division?’ They said: ‘You carry the ball. If there is anything of an intelligence nature – cut us in.’ So I went ahead and got the 481st CID
to get on it. The case concerned the Reichsbank gold – the stuff they moved out of Berlin. I thought it was fantastic. I don’t know what happened to the rest of that money either. It’s kind of peculiar you know.

  By the autumn of 1946 the CID investigation had spread its tentacles from Garmisch and Heidelberg to Frankfurt and London. The chief of the 481st CID Detachment, Jack Grindell, had assigned one of his ablest and most industrious investigators – Jack Ketcham, a law graduate and qualified attorney in civilian life – to spearhead the investigation. In October Ketcham accompanied Bradley on a six-day fact-finding mission to London, where they consulted with three British officers who had worked on the Reichsbank case soon after the end of the war, including Brigadier Waring (then at the War Office), an Inspector at Scotland Yard and ‘the Vice-President of the British Electric Company’. In November Ketcham and another agent from the 481st CID, Ward Atherton, a former forest ranger and an honest and competent agent, spent two days poring over the Reichsbank records at the FED in Frankfurt. ‘Ketcham and I were there trying to track down what had been turned in and what was unaccounted for,’ Atherton recalled. ‘I remember that quite distinctly because that was the day I saw the Hungarian Crown of St Stephen, which the United States recently returned to the Hungarian Government.’ Atherton could no longer remember the sums involved, but Ketcham had a rough idea: ‘It was an awful lot,’ he confirmed on the phone from his home in Concrete, Washington State in March 1978. ‘Wagon loads full.’

  Jack Ketcham left the case after three months to join the FBI as a Special Agent. His place in Garmisch was taken over by Ward Atherton. It soon became apparent to him that he was working in a forlorn cause. ‘These things had taken place in June or July of ’45,’ he recounted, ‘so our entire agency was more than an entire year after the facts. And with the dispersal of several million American forces personnel back to the US and out of military service, and no records on where they went and so forth – why, it was extremely difficult for us in the CID. Most of the names that we encountered – people we wanted to talk with and so forth – were long gone. That’s what was so frustrating about the whole matter.’

  The US Army Criminal Investigation Division was strictly concerned with criminal activities by American personnel in the American Army. Though their investigation proved ‘frustrating’, this did not mean that during 1946 no progress had been made by American investigations as a whole. Since the end of the war the American Counter Intelligence Corps had maintained a permanent station in Garmisch-Partenkirchen engaged in monitoring border crossings by outgoing Nazis and incoming Soviet agents. Inevitably the Garmisch CIC became involved in the Reichsbank case, sometimes in parallel with the CID, sometimes in tandem, but generally always from an opposite and complementary point of view – the CIC was more interested in the illegal activities of Germans and other foreign nationals than in Americans.

  It was the CIC that initiated the most direct and aggressive surveillance operation of all the investigations to date. The spearhead of this operation was a Czech-born American member of the CIC Special Squad with a knowledge of languages and a talent for eavesdropping by the name of Lieutenant Leo De Gar Kulka. Kulka had joined the CIC early in 1946 on the strength of his linguistic ability and his inside knowledge of Soviet Russia and its post-war satellites. Seconded to the Special Squad in April he was soon engaged in a Top Secret counter intelligence project, code named Tobacco, monitoring Soviet and Czech espionage in the US Zone and Soviet-motivated subversion in Bavaria. During this time Kulka became something of an expert in clandestine sound-recording techniques, which was probably one reason why he was temporarily taken off the anti-Soviet project and sent down to Garmisch on a one-off bugging operation involving the Reichsbank gold and dollars.

  Kulka recalled later: ‘I was asked whether I would mind going to a place in Garmisch and bugging a house that was empty but would be occupied two nights hence and recording the conversation.’

  I went to Garmisch [Kulka recalled], arrived there late in the evening and was taken past the house in question. I examined it rather carefully, then got myself entry into the building by jemmying the lock, found out what the layout was and then returned. I secured all the equipment I needed for the job and planted a couple of microphones in the living-room, one in the den and one in the bedroom, and then buried wires to a house about half a block away which was secured. I was to monitor any conversation that was going on.

  Well, it seems that everybody got together in the house and there was a lot of conversation. My main purpose was to see that we got the conversation recorded as best as possible on the cumbersome disc and 35mm film equipment which we were using at that time for sound-recording purposes. I do remember the conversation centred around money, dollars, pounds sterling, and a number of times Goering’s gold was mentioned. The specific gist of the conversation was the problem of transporting certain funds. No decision was arrived at, but a few suggestions were duly noted and handed to the CID and CIC.

  So far, so – in a manner of speaking – good. Quite what was meant by Goering’s gold is not clear, and though it would be tempting to guess this might be a misnomer for Ribbentrop’s gold on the part of the men doing the talking or the man doing the listening, the matter must remain uncertain. But at this point in Kulka’s recollections the plot thickens. He continues:

  I remember specifically that I was surprised that the names of certain agents were mentioned who were part of the Garmisch CIC. However, without knowing any of the background it didn’t make much sense to me. I delivered the recordings to the CIC HQ in Munich and I remember one of the agents was a little perturbed that I had got involved in this and kept asking ‘How much did I find out, how much did I find out?’ and I told him really I found out very little but maybe somebody else could make sense of the discs. The recordings were good and clean and easy to understand.

  A year later Lieutenant Kulka was to be involved in a much tougher and rougher investigation into the same matter, where the target this time was none other than Ivar Buxell and the technique of investigation a good deal more intrusive. This incident will be related at a more appropriate stage of the narrative. For the moment it should be said that if Lieutenant Kulka had picked up any idea that certain members of the Garmisch CIC were less than objectively involved in this case, he was probably not far wrong.

  For the aficionados of this case, that small but undiminishing coterie of students of the world’s greatest robbery – ‘The Friends of the Reichsbank’, so to speak – the stakes were greatly raised when W. Stanley Moss’s book, Gold Is Where You Hide It (see Introduction), was published in 1956. For Moss made an allegation which was to colour the case for evermore. Moss’s allegation was a very wild one. According to him, the 728 bars of gold bullion from the Berlin Reichsbank were not recovered by the proper authorities in the summer of 1945 but spirited across the border into Switzerland with American help. We have already proved conclusively that the 728 bars were not stolen but ended up where they were intended – in the FED vaults in Frankfurt – and Moss’s case therefore falls to the ground.

  Hubert’s comment in 1982 was brief and to the point. ‘Utter piffle. Pure nonsense!’ he exclaimed. ‘You have got to get this into your head. Gold, physically, was never seen by anyone in the entire group. Neither touched nor seen.’ The view of one post-war Military Governor of Garmisch, Major Melvin Nitz, was based on more practical aspects of the matter. ‘I have to laugh, you know,’ he commented. ‘Because you know what gold weighs, and you know what a problem it is carrying gold, and you’re talking about moving literally tons of gold. Just how is a person going to be doing something like this, going through border checks and these other things? When I was there the rumour was that the gold had gone. There was no gold. The gold had gone. I wish to Christ I had gotten some – if there had been some.’

  It is a curious fact that neither Major Nitz, nor any other Military Governor of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, nor in all probability any other s
ingle officer in American-occupied Germany was ever in any position to know all the facts or at least have an overall view concerning the fate of the Reichsbank treasure and other assets that had been brought into the area during the last days of the Third Reich. Only now, with official documentation made available from the US archives along with first-hand accounts and other information from other sources, is it possible for a single investigator even to begin to piece together the whole picture. After so many years the picture is necessarily still incomplete. Even so, the final reckoning is astonishing.

  13. The Reckoning

  The fate of the money dug up in the garden of Haus Hohe Halde and carted off in three batches by Captain Neumann can be traced, at least in part, in official Military Government documents that have survived from that time. These clear up the controversy surrounding Captain Neumann, but only serve to deepen the mystery overall.

  As we have seen, the first recovery, totalling $251,374, was safely transferred from the Military Government in Garmisch to the Military Government in Munich.

  The second recovery, described in the Annual Report of the Garmisch-Partenkirchen Military Government Detachment as worth ‘about $50,000’, was initially processed by the Garmisch Military Government Property Control and Fiscal Officer, Captain Charles W. Snedeker, who had a curious story to tell about this particular recovery. In a letter from Chicago dated 4 October 1977 he wrote:

  I believe that it was one of Oscar Koch’s officers that came to my Command Post about 2 a.m. (at my request) to count the money that I had uncovered. The comment he made to me after being asked who knew that I had found the money was: ‘Let’s split it.’ I requested a receipt acknowledging the amount and then turned it into Frankfurt with other valuables.