Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion (47 page)

The Germans at first were unaware that the French had moved large stocks of gold to the Caribbean and Africa. Paris officials led them to believe that in the last days of the invasion they had sent it all to North America. Slowly, though, they began to learn about what had happened from Paris civil servants in a strategy that was later labeled collaboration. Five weeks after the fighting stopped, on July 19, 1940, an irritated Hemmen handed over a six-point questionnaire to Bréart de Boisanger, demanding information about the whereabouts of all French gold on June 22, the day of the armistice. The Nazis specifically demanded to know what had happened to the gold of Poland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Holland, Norway, and what they called the “former Czechoslovakia.” The French dragged out the process as long as they could, but finally supplied the information, admitting that some of the gold had been sent to Dakar.
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French civil servants have a well-earned reputation for being brilliant negotiators, and they now masterfully obfuscated in order to avoid turning over any gold that was still under their control. The Vichy French also sought to win German understanding by saying that they did not want it to fall into British hands. Hemmen, though, kept pressing for the return of the bullion to mainland France. Bank officials then argued that it was much too dangerous to send it anywhere by ship, but the Germans said they would send Luftwaffe planes to pick it up. The Vichy French rejected that offer on the grounds that the risk would be even greater if it were shipped by air.

Both the French and the Germans were by then concerned that General de Gaulle and his small military force might set up a base in Africa and capture the gold in Thiès, only forty miles by train from Dakar, and only eighteen miles as a plane flies. It was also less than twenty miles from sandy beaches, where Allies troops could land.
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At a meeting of the Wiesbaden group on September 12, Hemmen ordered the French to give him “as soon as possible” a detailed report about the location of all French, Belgian, and Polish gold. The German also demanded that all the bullion be transferred further inland to a more secure location.

Bréart de Boisanger responded eight days later. He informed the Germans that he was so concerned about the gold’s security that France was already moving it to Kayes, a town known as the “pressure cooker” because of its extreme heat. It was about 300 miles from the coast, so a naval rescue operation was impossible. The city was then in Senegal, although today it is part of Mali. It was an important transportation center at the point where the Dakar-Niger railroad line met the Senegal River, and shipments could thus be made by boat, road, or rail. The city’s real appeal to the French, though, was its isolation. A train from Dakar ran only three times a week and took eighteen hours. River travel was difficult in the dry season, and virtually impossible in the wet months.

The French banker still strongly objected to the German proposal to send the gold to Europe, insisting that it was safer to leave it where it was. He pointed out that the British were now stopping and inspecting Vichy warships at sea. Hemmen again replied that he could send German planes to pick up the valuable cargo. The Frenchman answered just as passionately that it wasn’t feasible to ship 100 tons of gold by air. Hemmen said he had at his disposal twenty or thirty planes, and later even suggested sending a convoy of trucks overland from Kayes to Algiers and then flying the bullion to Marseilles. The French answered every German suggestion with a counter-argument, and the standoff dragged on.
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German and Vichy concerns about the British and de Gaulle were correct. In late September 1940 they attacked Dakar. The two groups had different goals. The British were worried that the Nazis would take over the port of Dakar, which juts out into the Atlantic Ocean from the hump of West Africa. That would have been an ideal location from which to launch submarine warfare against the Allies. De Gaulle, on the other hand, was looking for a place to establish a base in Africa to rally French forces to his cause.

They also both shared an interest in the tons of gold the French had sent to Africa. Polish and Belgian officials in London had already told the British about it. Churchill in a letter to General Jan Smuts, the South African Prime Minister, wrote, “Besides the strategic importance of Dakar and political effects of its capture by de Gaulle, there are £60 or £70 million Polish gold wrongfully held in the interior.”
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A squabble soon broke out in London among French, British, Belgian, and Polish refugees about what to do with the gold once it was captured. Everyone had his own idea about how to spend it. They finally decided that the British would use it to purchase American war materiel for the Free French forces.

Using all of his famous eloquence, Churchill, in a talk with de Gaulle, painted a glorious scenario: “Dakar wakes up one morning, sad and uncertain. But behold, by the light of the rising sun, its inhabitants perceive the sea, at a great distance, covered with ships. An immense fleet! A hundred war or transport vessels.” Free French envoys land and go directly to the resident governor-general, while overhead French and British planes drop leaflets saying that they had come in peace. Only a few shots would be fired before surrender. Then de Gaulle and the governor-general would dine together and toast to the final victory.
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Reality turned out totally different. The invasion was a debacle. The British provided few ships; the French offered few soldiers. De Gaulle had to arrive in Dakar on a Dutch vessel. The Allies did not realize that the Vichy French had quietly sent a squadron of its own ships through the Mediterranean to reinforce Dakar. The ensuing confrontation turned into a battle between Vichy French and Gaullist French forces.

The weather also turned against the invaders. Africa is supposed to be nothing but sunshine, but the Franco-British forces arrived in a thick fog on September 23. Following Churchill’s script, de Gaulle’s representative landed with a letter for the local governor-general. But instead of welcoming him, the port commander arrested him. Then a fierce French vs. French battle broke out. Vichy loyalists in a Dakar fort bombarded Allied ships in the harbor. The
Richelieu
, a French battleship sent there to keep it out of Nazi hands, joined in the fight against the British and Free French. De Gaulle attempted to land, but scrubbed the operation when the British could not guarantee him air cover. As the general wrote in the his memoir, “Decidedly the affair was a failure.” There were reports afterwards that the proud general was so depressed that he considered suicide.
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The Germans at the Wiesbaden talks were also interested in the 254 tons of French gold that had been sent to Martinique. Both sides had learned through the press that Americans and French representatives had reached an agreement not to ship it back to France. The Germans demanded that be done, and the French initially replied that they knew nothing of such an arrangement. Later they had to admit that there was such an understanding, but insisted that it had nothing to do with the armistice between France and Germany since the decision was taken before the cease-fire.
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At a meeting of the Wiesbaden group on October 10, 1940, Hemmen demanded once again that steps be taken to get the Belgian gold out of Africa. Although he and the Vichy French constantly referred to it as the Belgian gold, it also included the ninety cases of Luxembourg bullion. Hemmen announced that the Germans would initially make five planes available for the operation, and each flight would carry two or three tons. He presented the French with a schedule that would finish the project in two months. The Vichy representatives immediately protested the use of German planes in a French colony. The Nazis were by then exasperated at all the foot dragging.
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While Bréart de Boisanger continued to stall, Hemmen went around him to Pierre Laval, who ran the Vichy government on a day-to-day basis under Marshal Pétain. Laval was the most conciliatory top French official, and he had Pétain sign the agreement to move the Belgian and Luxembourg gold to Europe. No one from those two countries signed the accord. Georges Janssen, the head of the Belgian bank, was ill, which may have been true or it may have been a diplomatic illness since he didn’t want to acquiesce under duress. Two Nazis who ran the Belgian central bank’s daily operations approved the agreement in the name of Belgium and Luxembourg. The final accord specified that the French National Bank “accepted” responsibility to restore to Belgium the gold “in the state in which was received.” The plan was to send it from Kayes to Marseilles, where it would be taken to the local French bank office. Germans would then take control of it and send it by train to Berlin. The first shipment of 2.4 tons left Kayes by air on November 4, 1940, on a flight that took it to Agadir, Morocco, and Oran, Algeria before landing in Algiers. It finally arrived by air in Marseilles on November 6 and was then quickly shipped to the Reichsbank in Berlin. Belgian gold was later sold to a variety of Germany’s gold partners: a total of 109 tons went to Switzerland, thirty tons to Romania, three tons to Turkey, and one-third of a ton to the German embassy in Bucharest.
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On January 26, 1941, a Belgian official in occupied France sent a coded cable to the top Belgian diplomat in the U.S. telling him what was transpiring. It read: “Janssen health good. Situation bad. Yellow family traveling from Kayes via Algiers and Oran and Marseilles to the German family on Air France. You should retain the French family Yellow in New York. Hope is in you.” The next-to-the-last sentence was a suggestion that Belgium sue the Bank of France in a New York City court to get back their gold. The case was filed in the U.S. because the French had large gold holdings on deposit at the Federal Reserve, which the Belgians hoped would be used to pay them for their losses. The case was eventually halted because it was impossible to get key European officials to New York to testify because of the war conditions. Eventually in 1944, the French government gave the Belgians 198 tons of bullion, the amount that Paris turned over to the Nazis.
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A variety of ways were later used to get the Belgian and Luxembourg gold from Kayes to Marseilles. Transportation took place by truck, ship, air, and railroad. The project eventually took eighteen months to complete. Much of the delay was based on the difficulties of getting the cargo to Algiers. A French official wrote in August 1940, that it was impossible to make shipments over land during the wet season. American diplomats in Africa kept close track of the deliveries and sent reports back to Treasury Secretary Morgenthau in Washington. There was little that the U.S. could do, however, except watch it happen.
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Many of the later shipments went inland nearly four hundred miles by train from Kayes to Bamako, then by large trucks six hundred miles to Gao, and finally in smaller trucks 1,400 miles through the historic town of Timbuktu and the Sahara Desert to Colomb-Béchear in Algeria. Sometimes the bullion was carried on the backs of camels. The last leg of the trip was by train to Algiers. Other shipments went upstream on the Niger River and sometimes ran into drought conditions that had lowered the water level. Local Africans then had to push the boats upstream. As a result of all the complications, trips that were supposed to take days ended up taking weeks. The average shipment to Marseilles at one point lasted three-and-a-half months. French officials told American diplomats about the German demand, and the U.S. officials abroad kept a careful eye on the traffic. There was some discussion about shooting down an Air France plane carrying gold, but that never happened.
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Whether the shipments went by boat to Algiers via Dakar or across the Sahara, they all landed in the Algerian capital, where Air France planes took them to Marseilles. During a flight on February 8, 1941, a British plane attacked four French aircraft carrying gold. Three of them returned safely to base, and the last landed at the Marseilles airport. After that, flights were temporarily grounded, but they eventually resumed, mostly at night. The gold shuttles across the Mediterranean also faced constant fuel shortages since the first priority remained the Nazi war effort and all Nazi planes, ships, and tanks had fuel priority.
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A year after the French-held gold repatriation started, only 2,013 out of the 4,944 boxes of gold had arrived in Berlin, and Hemmen demanded that the job be finished quickly. He demanded that everything should be done by airplane, in order to prevent any more bureaucratic foot-dragging. Finally on June 5, 1942, French officials sent a message to the Armistice Commission announcing, “The transport of Belgian gold is completed.” It had taken 231 flights to transport the cases from Algiers to Marseilles.
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The Germans in February 1941 forced Luxembourg to ask formally for both the French and the Belgians to send their gold to Berlin. By that time, a Nazi
Gauleiter
, a paramilitary officer, was running the Grand Duchy. The Germans paid a nominal price in Reichsmark for the bullion. After the war, German officials claimed that they didn’t owe the country anything because the Nazi government had technically paid for it.

After all the Belgian and Luxembourg bullion arrived in Berlin, it was transferred on September 9, 1942, to fund Göring’s Four Year Plan, although the metal was stored in Reichsbank vaults. The Germans also offered to pay Belgium for its gold with Reichsmark, but the proceeds could only be used to buy German goods. The Belgians would also have to pay all the transportation costs, including getting it out of Africa. Brussels officials refused the offer, sending a reply to Berlin on December 22, 1942, that maintained that the Bank of France’s delivery of it “had been done without the consent or participation of the National Bank of Belgium.” The Reichsbank in July 1943 set a value at 552,378,318.20 RM ($221 million) for the gold. Berlin also stated that if Belgium again refused to accept payment, the issue would be handed over to a German court. Belgium never responded.
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