Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion (63 page)

Reichsbank officials led the operation to get as much as possible of the nation’s remaining riches to Bavaria. Officials found two freight trains, the
Adler
(Eagle) and the
Dohle
(Jack Daw), and assigned eighty employees to accompany the valuables to Munich. When the two trains were hooked together at the Lichterfelde-West train station, only half of them were on board. The rest were taking their chances and staying in the capital. The trains carried 25 boxes and 365 bags of gold, millions of dollars of foreign currencies including British pounds and American dollars, plus 500 million Reichsmark, 200 packets of blank paper, and 34 boxes of printing plates to make even more German currency. The foreign money came largely from Göring’s
Devisenschutzkommandos
. Hans Alfred von Rosenberg-Lipinsky, a bank board member, directed the whole operation. There now remained in the bombed-out Reichsbank headquarters only 2.5 tons of gold.
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The next day, Walther Funk also left Berlin along with August Schwedler, an
SS
officer and also a Reichsbank board member. They departed in a car driven by Funk’s chauffeur, Bernard Miesen, who brought along his wife and three children. The group pulled out of Berlin at five o’clock in the afternoon on April 14 and joined a caravan that ultimately included six trucks carrying gold and other goods. In total there were fifteen people. They traveled through the night, arriving in Munich at 11:00 the next morning. Funk did not stop there, though, going instead to his country home near the village of Bad Tölz.
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During the next few days, the driver took Funk and Schwedler on several trips around the area so that they could get the lay of the land and decide where to hide the gold. They first went to the Reichsbank office in Munich, which was located on Briennerstraβe, one of the four royal boulevards in the heart of the city. There they discussed plans to protect the gold that would be arriving soon. They also went to Berchtesgaden to meet with Hans Lammer, who had escaped from Berlin by claiming poor health.

The Reichsbank gold train from Berlin to Munich quickly turned into a nightmare. Because of both mechanical problems and the war conditions, it crept through Dresden and the spa town of Marienbad. The wagons were a tempting target for Allied bombers, and the leaders of the convoy feared they might lose the whole shipment. When the gold train pulled into Freising, a town just north of Munich, the entire city and the railroad station were on fire. One wagon broke down and had to be replaced. The train eventually split into two units, with the
Dohle
remaining behind for repairs. Some of its cargo was off-loaded into trucks that headed for Munich. Traveling was slow because the roads were filled with dead cattle and horses as well as fleeing refugees. Trucks also had difficulty finding gasoline. One of the shipments that arrived finally by truck included twenty vehicles that carried four thousand gold bars.
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The early choice for a place to store the gold was a coal mine in Peiβenberg, a small town about sixty miles southwest of Munich. It had an extensive network of caves dating back to the seventeenth century. Schwedler decided to check it out while waiting for the trains to arrive. Their driver took him and three Reichsbank staffers to Peiβenberg, where they met with mine officials and inspected the facilities. They found water in several of the tunnels and realized that this was not the site to store their bullion, much less the paper currency, which would quickly become waterlogged. Schwedler took three mysterious bags with him into the mine, but then returned with them to the car. He went back to Funk’s mountain hideaway to discuss the situation with the bank president, who by then was drinking heavily. They agreed that Peiβenberg was not the place to store the gold.
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Lt. Colonel Rauch, who had already been in Bavaria for a while, had decided that the best temporary location for the gold was the barracks of the
Gebirgsjägerschule
(Mountain Infantry School) in Mittenwald. This was a village located at the foot of the North Tirol Alps sixty miles south of Munich and near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, the mountain resort that had been host to the 1936 winter Olympics. The poet Johann Wolfgang von Göthe once described Mittenwald as a “living picture book.” The
Gebirgsjäger
was an elite light infantry unit and part of the
Waffen–SS
. Members wore a distinctive Edelweiss insignia on their sleeves and caps. The commander of the Mittenwald troops was Colonel Franz Pfeiffer, a war hero and recipient of the coveted Iron Cross.

The two colonels decided to store the gold at first in a bowling alley in the basement of the officer’s club. The first shipment of bullion arrived in Munich on the
Adler
and was quickly sent there. Once it had arrived, bank officials who had traveled with it from Berlin immediately did an inventory. There had been 365 bags of bullion when it left Berlin, with two bars in each container. One of the bankers said it was an easy number to remember because it was the same as the days in a year. When officials finished their inventory, however, they were missing one bag. The Reichsbank staff searched the whole area and recounted, but they were still one short. No one could figure out how it could be missing. The controls since they left Berlin had been very strict. Bank officers questioned everyone, including the staff at the school and all who had been on the train. Nothing showed up. A few days later, someone lit a fire in the bowling alley’s stove, and it began to belch smoke. Two bars of gold were wedged in the chimney. Most likely a member of the Berlin staff had planned to come back later to recover the two bars.
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The gold from the
Adler
was still waiting for a long-term hiding place, when the
Dohle
train finally pulled into the Munich-West train station on April 25 with the remaining load. It was too late to move it in trucks to Mittenwald, so it remained there for the night. The next day twenty-five more crates of bullion were moved south by truck.
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All the Berlin gold was now at the
Gebirgsjägerschule
.

A final hiding place, though, still had to be found. Funk met again with Lammers in Berchtesgaden near midnight at the end of April to discuss what was going on with the gold and also what they were both personally going to do in view of the impending arrival of the Americans. This time the central bank president arrived with the three bags that Schwedler had been carrying before. Currency was in two of them and two bars of gold were in the third. Before leaving, Funk turned the sacks over to a local Bavarian official.

Funk, Lammers, and Schwedler finally met at the Berghof and discussed what to do with the gold, which was clearly not safe in the long run at the
Gebirgsjägerschule
. With everything closing in on them, they decided to give Rauch responsibility for taking all the valuables into the mountains and burying them.

Lammers and Funk after that basically waited for Allied forces to arrive, and they were soon arrested. Funk had been drunk much of the time. German soldiers drifted away from their units, as men tried to make private deals by surrendering to the Americans. Skirmishing broke out between
SS
loyalists committed to fighting to the very end and the Freedom Action Bavaria movement, an anti-Hitler group that wanted to get rid of the Nazis before the Americans arrived. The battle for Munich, which had already been badly damaged by bombing, began early in the morning of April 30 and was over by the end of the day. Wehrmacht soldiers received papers stating that they had been legally relieved of duty.

Schwedler, though, stayed on the job. Nearly a week later, he and the driver went back to Mittenwald for more meetings with Pfeiffer and Rauch. Bavaria now was in total chaos, and to make matters worse winter had returned. Temperatures dropped rapidly, and there were six inches of snow on the ground.
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Although the two officers knew that the end was at hand, they decided to move the remaining Reichsbank gold and foreign currency one more time to a safer place than the
Gebirgsjägerschule
. The destination was an area near the Walchensee (Lake Walchen), Germany’s largest and deepest lake. Some fifteen miles due north of Mittenwald, it was a remote location that the Americans would only find later. The two colonels were now in charge of the gold operation. Funk simply waited to be arrested, and Schwedler only rarely checked in on what had happened.

The remaining valuables were worth at least $15 million and consisted of more than 700 gold bars, 34 boxes of printing plates, and 200 containers of blank currency paper. The gold weighed about ten tons, and all the items to be hidden totaled some seventeen tons. No one was any longer conducting detailed inventories.
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One of the officers at the
Gebirgsjägerschule
was the son of Hans Neuhauser, the chief forester of the Walchensee area, who owned a two-story house in the woods a short distance southwest of the lake. He agreed to keep the Reichsbank goods in the family storage room, previously a stable, for a short time before they would be moved to a long-term location nearby. It took three days to transfer all the valuables to the Neuhauser house.
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From there, and with the help of pack mules, the soldiers began re-locating everything up the steep Steinriegel mountain nearby. They moved 364 bags of gold, 25 boxes of it, 96 bags of currency, and 34 packets of blank currency paper. Fearing that the currency and blank paper would not survive being buried in the damp soil, they camouflaged it well above-ground behind logs, timbers, and bushes in a shelter resembling a bunker.

The gold was next moved to a still higher location on the mountain near the hamlet of Einsiedel. Deep in the woods, the soldiers dug large holes three- to four-yards long, wide and deep, and added wooden planks along the walls to reinforce the hiding places.
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Since gold does not deteriorate even in moist conditions, no one worried about putting it in the damp earth. They carefully hid the location, putting a tree stump and other pieces of natural debris around the spot where they had dug. A few makeshift booby traps were also put in place. The whole process was not completed until April 30. The printing plates for Reichsmark currency now seemed worthless, so the soldiers took them out in a boat and dumped them into the Walchensee.
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Schwedler wanted to see the gold hiding place and pressed the two colonels to take him there. After walking two hours up the mountain near the lake, they found the hiding spot.

Only a few days later, American forces marched into the Walchensee area, but they had no idea what riches were stored on the mountains near the lake.
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The
Amis
, as the locals called them, immediately started arresting males who looked as if they had just discarded their Nazi uniforms. The G.I.s soon heard vague reports about gold transfers between Munich and the
Gebirgsjägerschule
in Mittenwald. The people who knew what had happened, though, were not talking. When it became known that gold was involved, Allied officers called in help from Colonel Bernstein’s operation. The British also sent a general to assist with the investigation. They worked for weeks piecing together a bit of information here and a piece there. An American officer interrogated Funk about the gold, but he provided nothing because he knew nothing. The Allies were sure that something had taken place near the Walchensee, but they were not sure exactly what or how big was the stash. They also learned that forester Neuhauser had been involved and that Josef Veit, a sanitation worker at the school, and Heinz Rüger, who was on the Mittenwald staff, had helped in moving the gold and currency to the mountains.
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It took a month for the Americans and British to amass enough details about the hidden gold to start a serious search. Finally on June 6, the American and British soldiers accompanied by Veit and some sawmill workers went by truck to the Walchensee. They walked into the forest near the Neuhauser house and then climbed further up to Einsiedl. Eventually they reached near the summit in the crags above the Obernach power plant. The Americans carried metal detectors. The G.I.s knew that the Germans who had hidden the gold had done their work with the help of pack mules, so they followed stool droppings through the woods. They also found hoof marks. For a long time, the men heard nothing but the sound of their boots clomping on the forest floor. Finally the metal detectors let off loud whistles. The group stopped and looked around. Nearby they saw empty wine bottles and discarded food cans.

The group immediately began digging, and they pulled from a hole some heavy bags. The booby traps did not explode. Stenciled on the sack were the words
Reichsbank Hauptkasse Berlin
(Reichsbank Main Cash Desk Berlin) They opened them, and found two gold bars. It was obviously the
Gebirgsjägerschule
gold, so they continued digging until they had searched the whole area. They ultimately found a rich hoard of bags of gold and sacks of currency. They also uncovered blank currency paper and boxes of jewelry.
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The prize, though, was the 364 bags that contained 728 gold bars that the Reichsbank staff had brought from Berlin. American Major William R. Girler and Captain Walter R. Dee signed papers acknowledging that they had received them. The two officers estimated that they contained a total of 9.1 tons of gold. Perhaps as many as one hundred gold bars and all the Swiss francs, though, were missing. The contents of the shipment from Berlin had not been counted in weeks, and there is no doubt that much of it was gone. The Americans believed the locals had taken it, while the locals thought the Americans had. Plenty of the Reichsbank gold had obviously slipped away in the mayhem of war and would never be found. It was later estimated that at least a half-ton of bullion and an unknown amount of currency, which might have included more than $120,000 in American dollars, had disappeared.
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