Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  On 17 October The Times carried an advertisement offering a £20,000 reward to anyone who could provide evidence that Operation James Bond did not take place. Joining forces once again with Frank Kane of the Sunday Times we decided to mount a determined campaign to totally discredit this clever and plausible confidence trick. Ian Sayer and Frank Kane interviewed Creighton at his London home. His response to the 120 detailed questions we put to him left us in no doubt that we could easily establish that Creighton’s book was a complete fabrication. The following day we became the first people to take up the challenge for the £20,000 offered in The Times. Outlining our case, we asked that in the event our challenge proved successful the reward should be paid in equal amounts to the Holocaust Educational Trust and the Wormhoudt Survivors Fund (this was a fund established by the authors and Jeff Rooker to benefit the survivors of the British PoW massacre ordered by SS General Wilhelm Mohnke in May 1940, as described in our book Hitler’s Last General). The Daily Telegraph and The Times both provided coverage of our challenge the following day. We pointed out that existing contemporary government documentation established beyond doubt that the only gold consigned by Switzerland to Allied control was the $58 million transferred to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York in 1947 for the account of the Tripartite Gold Commission. ‘You will therefore appreciate,’ we wrote, ‘that the transfer of the gold and other Nazi assets (as described in Op JB) by the Swiss to the British and American authorities for the purposes of restitution did not take place.’ However, we had not reckoned with the small print in the reward notice. One of the key conditions of the reward was that the evidence tendered had to be ‘direct and first hand’. In practical terms this meant that we would have to produce all the key individuals who had been involved in the Swiss/Allied negotiations so that they could be cross-examined in court if so required. As all the participants were long since dead we could not meet the condition and our claim was rejected.

  In the following month, meanwhile, it was announced that one and a half tonnes of gold in the Bank of England was being handed over to Albania by the Tripartite Commission. This, of course, triggered the mechanism for the distribution of the remaining looted gold to the various European claimants. However, immediate entreaties from the World Jewish Congress resulted in a temporary stay of execution as the US, French and British governments debated this immensely sensitive issue.

  The first few months of 1997 were quiet on the Nazi gold front save for the March publication of Blood Money – The Swiss, the Nazis and the Looted Billions, a detailed account of the Swiss Bank scandal by Tom Bower. Like many other journalists Bower appreciated the value of the words – The World’s Greatest Robbery – (the subtitle of our own book) to describe the Swiss scandal, and when his publishers decided to use a more catchy title for the heavily publicised US edition, they borrowed the main title of our book – it was called Nazi Gold! Despite this, Nazi Gold remains the authentic story of the World’s Greatest Robbery, as any copy of the Guinness Book of Records will show. Back in 1981 we had been approached by Bower, who as a young BBC Panorama producer was extremely interested in acquiring the documentary TV rights of Nazi Gold.

  On 6 May 1997 newly appointed British Foreign Minister Robin Cook announced that Britain was to host an International Conference on Nazi gold in London. The primary purpose was to decide on the ultimate disposition of the five and a half tonnes of looted gold still held by the Bank of England and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on behalf of the Tripartite Commission. The wider aims of the conference were to evaluate the historical responsibility of those handling Nazi gold and to examine the Allies’ record in dealing with the matter. This announcement coincided with the publication of the US Department of State report (authorised by President Clinton) entitled US and Allied Efforts to Recover and Restore Gold and Other Assets Stolen or Hidden by Germany during World War II. This document became known as The Eizenstat Report after its co-ordinator Stuart E. Eizenstat, Under-Secretary of Commerce for International Trade and Special Envoy of the Department of State on Property Restitution in Central and Eastern Europe.

  Despite its unambiguous title and the tremendous resources allocated to its preparation, the 207-page report carries only eight and a half pages dealing with what is termed ‘US Army Involvement with the Acquisition, Accountability, and Security of German Monetary Gold and Related Assets Following World War II’. At least a third of these pages is represented by footnotes. The section opens with one and a half pages mainly concerning the US Army’s capture of the Merkers cache. The only reference to any discrepancies is found in the concluding paragraph.

  ‘Later when some military authorities suspected that there may have been some pilferage of the Merkers cache because of broken bags of coins and currency an investigation concluded that all reasonable security measures had been exercised.’

  In a footnote to this section of their report the agency team cited an article in After the Battle magazine (Issue 93, August 1996) as the source for their account of the recovery of the Merkers assets. We found it hard to believe that the team were apparently unaware of the several hundred pages in Nazi Gold which specifically relates to US Army involvement in exactly the area they were interested in. Since they were obviously aware of After the Battle magazine, it is curious that they did not refer to Issue 31 which contains a nine-page article entitled ‘Nazi Gold’. This article, written in conjunction with Sayer and Botting, contains the basic facts which later evolved into Nazi Gold.

  In the next section of the Department of State report, entitled ‘Establishment and Operations of the Foreign Exchange Depository, it is stated that from the time of the initial discovery of the Merkers cache to the final disposition of the remaining assets held by the FED in 1950, two issues dominated everything that happened at the former Reichsbank building in Frankfurt: maintaining security of the assets and compiling a complete inventory of everything that the Army was securing there.

  In June 1945 a team of experts from the Bank of England and the US Treasury arrived in Germany to evaluate precious metals, gems, foreign currencies and securities held by the US Army. The resulting seven-page report – ‘The Howard Report’ – became a primary reference document in conducting subsequent inventories and evaluation of the holdings in the FED. In a footnote the State Department commented: ‘The Howard Report was the only contemporary document found (aside from infrequent IG and CID investigation reports) which casts a shadow on the Army’s handling of the captured assets.’ Readers of Nazi Gold will be familiar with some of those ‘infrequent IG and CID investigation reports’ but the State Department dismissed them as irrelevant in a single sentence. ‘A complete accounting history,’ the report continues, ‘appears to have been maintained for each shipment and its component parts from arrival at the FED in April 1945 to its final disposition in 1948.’

  In the concluding section of its report, entitled ‘Distributing the Gold Recovered from Germany’, the State Department explained that by the end of 1948 the Foreign Exchange Depository was preparing to go out of business. After December 1950 the FED ceased to exist. Its few remaining assets consisted of unclaimed personal items, some platinum bullion, German securities and an odd assortment of foreign currency and industrial diamonds. Albert Thoms, the man responsible for shipping the Berlin Reichsbank assets to Merkers, was one of two men who accepted custody of the FED’s remaining assets, the Eizenstat report concludes.

  So, according to the State Department in 1997, there was no gold bullion left in the FED before it was closed down – and had there been we would assume that Albert Thoms would have noticed it and informed the FED accordingly. Presumably there was no currency left in the FED either, for it is also hard to believe that the FED would have handed over to the BDL (the bank for which Thoms was now a representative) hundreds of thousands of genuine US dollars and British pounds.

  Accepting that the Eizenstat report was accurate, therefore, we were understandably concerned once again
with the ultimate disposition of the two gold bars, the $426,866 and the £10,405. Since the Eizenstat report was prepared by the State Department we were curious that they had not fallen over their own 14-year investigation into the missing two bars.

  A call from GMTV’s Gary Curtis to discuss the announcement of the forthcoming London Conference on Nazi gold and the simultaneous publication of the Eizenstat report led Sayer to question the US government’s integrity in supporting the ongoing embarrassment of the Swiss before putting their own house in order. Sayer went on to recount the story of the State Department’s 14-year investigation. We had always regarded this issue as a ‘test case’. Solving this, we believed, would establish our credibility and hopefully lead to a full enquiry into the other, more serious discrepancies detailed in Nazi Gold. Despite the fact that these new developments in the Nazi gold saga were too heavy to carry on GMTV the mystery of the missing bars had captured Curtis’ imagination.

  So much so that, later, in a routine call with Press Association’s Diplomatic Correspondent, Charles Miller, he raised it. A few minutes later Miller was on the phone to Sayer and by 3 p.m. on 8 May the press Association (the UK’s leading news agency) had combined our story of the missing bars with news of the publication of the Eizenstat report. Headed ‘Briton Urges US to Come Clean Over Looted Nazi Gold’, the wire report underlined our claims of US government hypocrisy. As the story developed, US officials referred the Press Association to the State Department. Later, a spokesman for Eizenstat said he ‘knew nothing about a State Department investigation into allegations of American forces stealing Nazi gold’. He continued: ‘There may be additional lingering questions that may require further investigation, but I am not familiar with this so I cannot speak about it.’ And there the matter ended – but only for three hours.

  The same day at 6 p.m. the Bank of England issued a press release which was immediately picked up and run by all the news agencies including the Press Association. Ostensibly, the Bank’s release was to announce the exact amount of gold it was holding on behalf of the Tripartite Gold Commission, who had authorised the disclosure. However, one paragraph was of special interest to us.

  ‘In addition to the gold mentioned above, the Bank also holds on behalf of the Tripartite Commission a further two bars, totalling some 797 ounces which were transferred from the Deutsche Bundesbank in September 1996. These bars bear the refining stamp of both the Prussian State Mint (1938) and Degussa (1956).’

  The significance of this announcement was entirely lost on the media. We immediately contacted the Bank of England who kindly sent us a copy of their background notes to editors which was available to support the original press release.

  We were riveted by what we read on the final page.

  The two bars with Nazi markings held in the Bank are a special case, since they were transferred from the Bundesbank last year. They had been recovered by US forces in Germany in 1945 and delivered to the then Reichsbank offices in Munich, where they were held on a special closed deposit. The Bank became aware of their existence in 1988.

  The bars were transferred to the US Government, as a representative of the TGC (Tripartite Gold Commission), in September 1996, in accordance with the 1946 Paris Agreement on Reparation from Germany. The TGC then deposited the bars in the Bank. The Bank has been told that the return of the bars was delayed after 1988 because of problems in finding a mutually acceptable formulation on the technical question of liability. This was an issue resolved between the Bundesbank, the German Federal Government and the TGC. The Bank is simply the custodian of the bars for the TGC.

  It is thought the missing bars may be the two referred to as having disappeared just after the war in a book called Nazi Gold, by Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting. The two bars are the only bars held by the Bank that have Nazi markings.

  The Bank of England was correct. The missing bars were the two we had referred to as having disappeared just after the war, but more importantly they were also the two bars whose disappearance we had persuaded the State Department to investigate 14 years earlier. The bank had actually received them on the 3 October 1996 barely three weeks after Frank Kane of the Sunday Times had been told by State Department Assistant Legal Adviser Ely Maurer that their investigation was ‘ongoing’. Why then did the State Department, who for two years had been expounding the virtues of openness, not advise either the Sunday Times or the authors that the gold had been traced? Moreover, why did the Bank of England on behalf of the TGC (effectively the British, French and US governments) announce the recovery of the bullion three hours after the Press Association had carried our story of the State Department investigation. After all, the gold had already been in their custody for seven months. Upon making further enquiries of the Bank of England, Deutsche Bundesbank and the TGC we learned that nobody was either able or cared to offer any explanation as to what had happened to the gold in the intervening 50 years since we had traced it into US custody.

  Four days later we wrote to Ely Maurer at the State Department requesting information on the status of the gold from the point it left US custody in Munich until it turned up in the Bank of England in 1996, several decades later. We also expressed surprise that we had not been thanked by anyone for being instrumental in the recovery of the gold. We heard nothing until sometime later we learned that Ely Maurer had collapsed and died in his office only weeks after receiving our letter. His successor finally wrote to us on 21 July explaining that Maurer’s death ‘apparently took place before he was able to reply to your letter concerning the gold bars’. ‘Unfortunately,’ he continued, ‘the loss of Mr Maurer’s deep historical knowledge of this issue makes it impossible, as a practical matter, for us to respond to your request for additional information concerning the status of the two gold bars between 1948 and 1996. We suggest that you contact the Bank of England or Mr Emrys Davies, Secretary General of the TGC.’

  In the meantime, Prime Minister Tony Blair had had his first row with President Clinton over British secrecy about looted Nazi gold. In an interview with the Mail on Sunday on 24 May the President’s ‘point man’ – as the Mail described Stuart Eizenstat – stepped up the pressure by commenting: ‘We see no reason why, right away, all documents which would shed light on the origin and sources of the gold should not be made public. No one can rectify the mistakes of the past but we can make a greater effort.’

  Sharing his beliefs, we decided to take up the gauntlet once again with the State Department. On 6 August Foreign Minister Robin Cook had announced the dates for the forthcoming London Conference on Nazi gold as the 2–4 December. Although the conference delegates were principally the representatives of the 40-odd governments who subsequently attended, there were a limited number of places for non-government organisations and a few academics. Although publicly a great many government institutions around the world would, for various reasons, claim no knowledge of Nazi Gold, in reality the first edition can now be found in the strangest of places e.g. the US State Department, the Bank of England, the Tripartite Gold Commission and the Foreign Office, and it may still be possible to locate one of the 75 copies purchased by the US Army HQ at the Pentagon in the 1980s. Some of the government agencies involved in the Nazi gold saga realised that we had ultimately made a practical rather than theoretical contribution to the pursuit of truth, openness and restitution in the affair. For this reason Ian Sayer was formally invited, on our behalf, to attend the conference as an official independent observer.

  With this in mind we wrote once again to the State Department. We professed incredulity at their suggestion that they were unable to provide the background of the disappearance of the gold bars on the basis that it was all in the head of the recently deceased Ely Maurer. We expressed our position by finding it ‘inconceivable that the State Department have not retained copies of Mr Maurer’s correspondence’. ‘If that is indeed the case,’ we continued, ‘this may very well prove to be a matter of grave concern not only to the governments of Great Br
itain and France but to all the other interested parties (including claimant countries) who may have an interest in the credibility of the US government’s administrative housekeeping in connection with all the relevant gold-related issues which have occurred during the past 50-odd years.’

  We then went on to point out that our continued interest related to our ongoing concern that ‘vast quantities of looted Nazi gold were both lost and stolen whilst directly under US supervision and jurisdiction, in violation of Clauses A and F of the Single Article contained in Part III of the Paris Reparations Agreement dated 14 January 1946’.

  The State Department ignored our letter and a follow-up. Fear was obviously transcending courtesy and gratitude.

  The London Conference on Nazi gold was duly held. As an official observer Ian Sayer was allowed to produce a paper which, although it could not be presented, was made available to the delegates. Entitled ‘Nazi Gold – A Call for Justice’, our paper was seen as highly controversial. In it we highlighted the curious saga of the State Department’s investigation, the US Department of Justice’s curt refusal to investigate the missing dollars and pounds which had sat next to the gold bars, and the more serious discrepancies detailed in Nazi Gold which remain unresolved. In conclusion, we called on the US, British and French governments to co-operate in providing an official report encompassing the following:

  A full and detailed reconciliation, including the origins and ultimate disposition of all monetary and non-monetary gold, captured foreign exchange and Law 53 assets assembled in the Allied Occupation Zones. A full schedule and evaluation of all recorded instances of the recovery of any assets referred to in Section One by combat or occupation troops. A full schedule (incorporating brief reports) of all investigations undertaken by military or civilian agencies within the Occupation Zones involving cases or allegations of misappropriation or loss of any assets referred to in Section One. A review of those assets specified in Section One to ensure that the ultimate disposition of all such assets was made in accordance with contemporary Allied legislation.