Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  In fact, the money was duly passed up the line to Munich in the proper way, and Captain Snedeker received an official receipt for it. The precise value of this second recovery amounted to $50,905 and included the 405 English pounds recovered from the von Blüchers’ garden a few days previously.

  The third and final recovery from the von Blücher house – the $104,956 taken by Captain Neumann on 24 August – was in fact handed over to Captain Snedeker at the Military Government office in Garmisch. The second and third recoveries seem to be referred to in a Third Army Weekly Intelligence Report at this time: ‘Money Cache. A total of $152,000 in US currency, part of the Reichsbank reserves, was uncovered in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 25 August. Money has been turned over to Military Government Garmisch-Partenkirchen.’

  After a recount which brought the grand total of foreign currency recovered from 38 Gsteigstrasse to £405 and $407,235 – not the $404,840 stated in the receipt given to the von Blüchers – the third recovery was transferred like the first and the second to the Military Government in Munich. Written in longhand on the receipt given to Snedeker on 1 September was the name ‘von Blücher’.

  So far everything had been done by the rule-book. The recovered funds had been sent through normal channels to the proper authority, all correctly accounted and signed for. The next step, too, was perfectly in order. The $104,956, like the two previous deposits (Nos 7 and 14), was transferred by the Military Government to the Land Central Bank in Munich, and there deposited as Deposit No 18 by the Currency Section, Financial Branch. And there they stuck, and from there, in the course of time they vanished – like virtually every other component of the Reichsbank treasure that had been deposited in that particular cranny.

  The correct procedure for the handling and shipment of recovered funds was well known to the finance officers of American military government in Bavaria. All gold and silver bullion and coin, precious metals, gemstones, jewels, foreign exchange and other valuables recovered by tactical units were bound by Occupation regulations to be turned over to the fiscal and property control section of the nearest Military Government Detachment, and from there shipped up the line via the Regional Military Government Detachment for Upper Bavaria to the Chief of the Finance Division in Munich. There the recovered funds could be held for safekeeping in the vaults of the authorised Military Government bank, the Land Central Bank (which served the banking needs of American Occupation authorities) until such time as arrangements could be made to ship the funds in question to their next destination – the Foreign Exchange Depository (FED) in Frankfurt.

  Even the FED – from which deposits had about as much chance of escaping as light from a black hole in space – was not home base. The gold held in store there was earmarked for the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold, in Brussels, while the US currency was destined for the Federal Reserve Bank in New York, to which all US dollar currency recovered in Germany and stored in the FED was finally shipped in January 1949.

  The various American authorities in the chain stretching from the Military Government office in Garmisch to the FED in Frankfurt were perfectly conversant with the correct procedure for the transmission of funds. This is proved by the history of two shipments – a wooden box containing £35,000 in notes and 15 bags of silver coins that had belonged to dead British airmen. These items were passed on from the Garmisch Military Government to the FED in July 1945 via the Regional Military Government in Munich in a copybook transaction which turned out to be virtually unique.

  But no shipment of recovered Reichsbank assets sent from Garmisch through normal channels was ever to get through to its proper destination in Frankfurt. Indeed, only one of the recoveries of Reichsbank treasure made in the following month in the Garmisch area ever reached the FED. This was $4,000 found by Lieutenant Roger Ernst, US Army, while hunting for hidden documents in the vicinity of the Klausenkopf currency caches in the second week of August. This little hoard (probably part of the $5,000 which disappeared from the $120,000 Mielke delivered back to the Munich Reichsbank in April) only got through to the FED because Lieutenant Ernst inadvertently by-passed the normal Garmisch-Munich channels. He had placed the dollars in a box containing recovered German documents and they later turned up in the Berlin Document Center, and were passed on from there to the Frankfurt FED. It follows that if funds recovered at one end of the transmission line did not eventually wind up at the other – at the FED, or, failing that, the Federal Reserve Bank – the inescapable conclusion must be that the funds had disappeared at one or other of the intermediate staging posts. In the case of the Reichsbank dollar currency recovered in the Garmisch area in August 1945 that staging post was not the first, or even the second. Captain Neumann did not make off with over $400,000 as has been believed for the best part of the last forty years – though this does not prove he did not make off with anything. Still less did Colonel Pfeiffer, or the von Blücher brothers, or their associates Mathias Stinnes and Klaus Bremme. Where the dollar hoards recovered by Captain Neumann – and not just those, but the gold bullion recovered by Sergeant Singleton, and in all probability the millions of dollar bills recovered by Major Rawley, and other assets – were finally blocked and eventually vanished was at the penultimate stage of their ordained progress ‘through channels’ – in Munich.

  The detailed gold and currency inventories of the FED and the Federal Reserve Bank between the beginning and the end of United States rule in Germany reveal that none of these valuables from the Reichsbank reserves and related sources were ever deposited in their respective vaults in Frankfurt or New York. The gold and currency shipped up the line to Munich in the summer of 1945 was left stranded high and dry at the mercy of the officers who had virtually absolute control over them – the Chief of the Finance Division of OMGB and his immediate subordinate, the Chief of the Enforcement and Investigation Branch, Property Control.

  It was not only recovered funds from Garmisch that were swallowed up when they reached Finance Division in Munich. It will be remembered that some of the Reichsbank treasure from Berlin, including two gold bars and a sizeable quantity of foreign exchange, was diverted from Mittenwald to Berchtesgaden at the end of April, and that some of it disappeared soon afterwards in the hands of Landrat Jacob. What was left – the two gold bars (part of the original shipment of 730 bars from Berlin) and a bag containing $19,840 – was stored in the Berchtesgaden Savings Bank (Sparkasse) under the control of the local Military Government Detachment.

  On 12 August 1945, following the usual procedure, this consignment was passed on to the Munich Land Central Bank, where the gold bars and US dollars appeared as Depot No 10 on a list of valuables held for the FED by the Bavarian Military Government authorities in Munich. But this consignment never reached the FED; the two bars of gold were not passed over to the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold, nor did the $19,840 form part of the US currency shipment sent back to the USA in 1949. Two weeks later, on 28 August, the 10,000 English pounds still left in Berchtesgaden were handed over for forward transmission to Munich. Like the rest of the assets emanating from Berchtesgaden, the 10,000 English pounds, which were entered as Depot No 15 in the Land Central Bank in Munich, do not appear to have reached their proper destination.

  Even more extraordinary was the fact that, just three weeks after the two bars from Berchtesgaden had been delivered to Munich, the Finance Division at HQ US Group Control Council issued a 31-page report classified SECRET entitled Report on Recovery of Reichsbank Precious Metals which indicated, inter alia, that the two gold bars in question were actually missing. The report was very detailed and very thorough. It showed that subsequent to the Merkers recovery 41 million dollars’ worth of Reichsbank gold had been recovered by the US military and the Gold Rush team. This left 3,500,000 dollars’ worth of Reichsbank gold unaccounted for, made up as follows:

  50 bars never heard of after evacuation from the Weimar branch of the Reichsbank in April 1945


  40 bars left in the Berlin Reichsbank at the time of the shipment to Merkers

  147 bags of coin originally in the Magdeburg Reichsbank

  2 bars ‘lost somewhere in the chain of evacuation from Erfurt to Wallgau’

  (meaning while in German hands in April)

  The report clearly established that the two bars were originally part of the shipment of 730 bars from Berlin; it gave their precise weight (24,790.4 kilos), and it even quoted their bar numbers (41919/41920). Yet for all their thoroughness and for all their grasp of detail, the Finance Division people of the US Group Control Council – a devoted team of specialists with all the resources of the US Army behind them – were unable to locate two gold bars held in official US custody since 12 August 1945 in a bank vault run by the Finance Division of their own Military Government almost on their own doorstep in Munich. By October 1948 the FED seemed to have accepted that the two gold bars had gone for good, and in a handwritten reply to a FED request for information regarding Reichsbank gold which had not been recovered, Albert Thoms, former head of the Reichsbank’s Precious Metals Department, listed these two bars along with the bullion and gold coins lost when the Russians overran the Reichsbank vaults in Berlin.

  The two bars stored in Munich should have been shipped to the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold. For reasons unknown the Belgians seem to have been deprived of at least 24.8 kilos of monetary gold, and morally if not legally were entitled to compensation for their loss from the US Government, for they formed part of the 11,405 bars of the Belgian gold reserves plundered by the Nazis five years previously. Though the amount in dispute here is relatively small – two bars worth $30,000 in 1945 and $435,000 today – the principle could well be extended to the infinitely greater quantities of gold which disappeared at the same time and under similar circumstances.

  The discrepancies in the gold count were discovered much sooner at the FED than the very considerable shortfall in foreign exchange. A whole year was to pass before FED officials began the laborious task of balancing the account of the Currency Section. Between the late autumn of 1945 and the summer of 1946 the FED seems to have lain almost completely dormant, continuing to act as a repository for the valuables in its possession but doing little else (primarily because of lack of manpower). At the end of July 1946, however, the FED began to stir into life. At last it began to count the paper money in its possession. On 24 July it brought out a ‘Register of Valuables’. A week or so later two officials of the Currency Section, Frank Roberts and his assistant, Rona Geib, began to look into certain odd and puzzling features to do with the currency recoveries of the previous summer.

  On 7 August 1946 Rona Geib paid a visit to the office of the intelligence section of OMGUS in the I.G. Farben building in Frankfurt. The purpose of the visit, according to Rona Geib, was to determine the source of certain valuables in the FED ‘about which we had incomplete details’. Miss Geib was passed on to the CIC Records Section. Three million names were held on file in records, Miss Geib was told. Which names was she interested in? The next day she came back with a list of 16 names. Most of these names were connected with quantities of SS loot which had been recovered and subsequently deposited in the FED. But two of the names were also connected with the fate of some of the original contents of the Berlin Reichsbank vaults. These were General Gottlob Berger and General Josef Spacil, who had between them deprived the Reichsbank of nearly 10,000,000 dollars’ worth of assets at the end of the war. Their appearance on the preliminary list of suspects gave a clear indication that the FED was now settling down to its task.

  The CIC records section produced files on eight of the 16 individuals, including Berger and Spacil, and informed Miss Geib that any of the individuals could be interrogated by making the appropriate arrangements with the Interrogation Center in the I.G. Farben building. ‘Rather unexpectedly,’ Miss Geib reported, ‘I ran into the background of Shipment 31 in the folder of Josef Spacil.’ Shipment 31 consisted of such assets as had been recovered from the $9,000,000 worth of valuables stolen by General Spacil from the Berlin Reichsbank in April 1945. The facts on Shipment 31 alone should have suggested that further inquiries and subsequent interrogation might be desirable. But while Miss Geib was considering the case, the final inventory of Shipment 52A – which included the Reichsbank currency recovered from the Klausenkopf caches in June 1945 – was at last completed. This revealed that everything in Shipment 52A was not quite as it should have been either and that something very odd had been happening to the Reichsbank reserves.

  Things now began to move, albeit slowly. On 12 September the Deputy Director of the Finance Division of OMGUS telephoned the Chief of the FED (Colonel William G. Brey)1 asking for details of the serial numbers of US dollar bills held at the Depository. On 1 November two agents from the Army CID visited the FED to examine the files ‘in connection with an investigation of persons and organisations involved in the finding and delivery of valuables’. On 12 February 1947 Rona Geib was again at the CIC Records Section in the I.G. Farben building. This time she was looking for anything they might have on the financial set-up and dealings of the RSHA. By 7 March matters were drawing to a head. Rona Geib made yet another call at CIC Records, ‘for the purpose of gathering information from G-2 files on certain German individuals connected with various shipments of valuables received in the FED’. These individuals were:

  Josef Spacil (Head of Amt 11 of the RSHA)

  Rosenberg-Lipinski (Reichsbank Director)

  Friedrich Rauch (Lt-Col in Schutzpolizei, Berlin)

  Walther Funk (Reichsbank President)

  Hans Neuhauser (Wehrmacht Captain)

  Someone at last was putting two and two together. The four new names, in addition to that of Spacil, were all individuals who had been closely involved in the fate of the Reichsbank reserves. By 17 March the FED were well and truly in the picture. The Chief of the FED wrote to the Fiscal Officer of OMGB in Munich:

  On 13 April 1945 a large amount of currency held at the Reichsbank Berlin was sent from Berlin to Munich. Much of this currency was subsequently recovered in Munich, Mittenwald and St Johann and brought to the FED where it is still retained. Since there are many discrepancies between the list furnished recently by the Berlin Staatskontor (successor to the Berlin Reichsbank) and the count which was made in the FED, it would be appreciated if you would make inquiries and if possible procure such lists and other records as may have been kept in the Munich Reichsbank regarding the movement of this currency.

  Shortly afterwards – nearly two years to the day after the currency was driven off from the Berlin Reichsbank under a hail of bombs and Soviet artillery file – the FED produced a final five-page report, signed Rona L. Geib and entitled ‘Currency sent from the Reichsbank Berlin to Southern Germany in April 1945’, which reconstructed ‘at least in part’ what had happened to the SS and Reichsbank currency shipped out of Berlin just before the end of the war. For the first time the very considerable discrepancies were listed.

  According to the FED’s findings, about a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of foreign currency despatched from Berlin to Munich on behalf of the SS (including funds thought to have been Himmler’s personal property) had disappeared. The total value of the missing SS currency by today’s values would amount to $2,225,000. The report continued: ‘Regarding the regular Reichsbank currency balance the discrepancies consist almost exclusively of deficits, the most noticeable of which are US dollars, French francs, Swiss francs, Turkish pounds and English pounds.’ The complete list of discrepancies, with their 1945 dollar equivalent, was as follows:

  US dollars 1,164,990 1,164,990

  English pounds 92,004 368,016

  French francs 1,000,000 20,149

  Swiss francs 499,960 116,813

  Turkish pounds 221,650 180,203

  Norwegian kroner 119,900 18,166

  Portuguese escudos 69,000 2,760

  Palestinian pounds 1,700 6,800

&n
bsp; Egyptian pounds 197 814

  Total US $1,878,711

  So at long last it was officially confirmed that nearly two million dollars’ worth of foreign currency had disappeared from the Reichsbank currency caches on the Klausenkopf above the Walchensee – the contents of the 17 bags found to be missing when the caches were discovered by the Americans in June 1945. Together with the missing SS currency, therefore, the grand total of currency missing out of the original shipment from Berlin amounts to over $2,000,000. Immediately after the war many of these currencies, particularly the dollars, would have fetched many times their face value on the black market. By 1998 the equivalent value of the US dollars alone would be $10,368,411 and of the English pounds £1,932,084 (or $3,275,342 if one revalues the 1945 dollar equivalent). The remaining currencies, revalued in dollars on the same basis, would be worth a total of $3,076,774. By 1998 values, therefore, the total haul from the Reichsbank currency reserves (including the SS currency in the Reichsbank’s custody) would he worth $18,945,527 – an immense sum even by the standards of present-day robberies.

  The final page of the FED report was entitled ‘Recommendations’. Though very belated, they were very well founded, and they pointed future investigators – if there were any – in pretty much the right direction. The recommendations were:

  1. That Rosenberg-Lipinski be interviewed to find out what he did with the bag of SS currency he retained.

  2. That Mielke (who still works at the Munich Reichsbank) be interviewed. Why and when did he bring some currency back from Mittenwald to Munich? Also what happened to what was left behind?

  3. That Fritz Rauch (formerly a Lt-Col. in the Schutzpolizei in Berlin) be questioned. Who was the Wehrmacht colonel who with Rauch selected the hiding place for the treasure in Mittenwald? How much currency does he believe was removed from the cache after his first trip to get the currency (27 June 1945)?