Kolchak's Gold (31 page)

A set of RSHA travel orders from Himmler's office in Prinz Albrecht Strasse sent Krausser to Kiev, apparently for a meeting with
Gruppenführer
Otto von Geyr and others.

A new unit was established on paper with the designation
Jagdsonderkommando Ein
, reflecting the crude sense of humor of—probably—Himmler;
Jagd
means “hunt” but
Goldjagd
means “gold rush”; an SS
Sonderkommando
was defined as a probe unit assigned to special duties. Krausser, with no promotion in rank, was placed in command of
Jagdsonderkommando Ein.

At this point Reinhard Gehlen's branch of the Abwehr—the German secret intelligence network—was incorporated into the operation, along with the captured ordnance section of Field Marshal von Paulus' headquarters battalion. The purpose of the former was to provide intelligence, false documentation and training for the members of
Jagdsonderkommando Ein;
the purpose of the latter was to provide uniforms and equipment from captured Russian sources.

It is mentioned in Krausser's dossiers that he spoke Russian, although there is no indication of the degree of his proficiency. All the others who were assigned to his
Jagdsonderkommando
were Russian-speaking Germans.

The actual operating force numbered three officers, nine noncommissioned officers and seventeen enlisted men.

These personnel were drawn from SD,
Ordnungspolizei, Sicherheitspolizei
and line-Wehrmacht units; they were specialists in varied fields, the one common denominator being their knowledge of the Russian languages. Among the members of
Jagdsonderkommando Ein
was a disproportionate number of automatic weapons experts, railroad men and commando-demolitions specialists.

One of Krausser's two lieutenants was a former civil engineer with a background in earth-moving operations. The other had been recruited from his post as deputy commander of the railraod marshaling yards at Dresden; in civilian pre-war life he had been a locomotive driver and had spent four months working on the Trans-Siberian Railway during the period of nonaggression-pact
detente.

The recruiting and training seems to have taken a surprisingly long time—months, stretching nearly into a year. One might suspect unusual inefficiency among these Germans; however, a closer examination of the documentary record implies several contributing factors.

Like most military intelligence operations, the Abwehr was a far poorer performer than its progaganda would have us believe. Its reports from Siberia, as relayed to von Geyr and Krausser, were woefully skeletal; evidently its personnel in Siberia was almost nil. Krausser kept demanding more details about railroads and defenses in the Sayan district and along the route from there to the Crimea; he kept getting long-winded gobbledygook which boiled down to, “We don't know, we're guessing.”

Furthermore, a minor smallpox epidemic in Rostov—where the unit was in training—killed off three members of the
Jagdsonderkommando
and evidently these men's specialties had been vital to the plan, so that everything had to stop and mark time while three replacements were found and trained.

After that, Hermann Goering had to be brought into the plan at top level in order to justify Himmler's request for long-range air penetration of Siberia into the Baikal border area, and evidently Goering thought the whole plan idiotic and it took time for Bormann and Himmler to change his mind.

Of the various delaying factors, however, none was so important as the crucial lack of intelligence provided by the Abwehr. Krausser insisted, in a series of dispatches that range in date from March to October 1943, that there was no possibility of success if the operation had to be undertaken blind. He insisted on specific intelligence of the defenses and transport in the area: particularly, he needed to know the exact details of operating schedules along the Trans-Siberian, and the exact disposition of repair and marshaling yards in the vicinity. The need for this information becomes more obvious the more one understand the nature of the
Goldjagd
plan. (That was its code name, inevitably.)

From the outset it is clear that von Geyr, more than any of the others, fully comprehended the magnitude of the logistical problems. The gold might or might not be where the Jew had said it was; but there was a good chance—every piece of intelligence suggested the Jew's story was true. Himmler probably reasoned that even if it proved false, the most he could lose would be twenty-nine men; in terms of odds, the potential reward was well worth the cost and risk.

But von Geyr's reports and dispatches indicate that he was the first to grasp the obvious logistical difficulties. Gold is unlike paper money, diamonds, and other valuables; it is incredibly heavy. The fact that the Czarist treasury weighed in the neighborhood of five hundred tons was deceptive, because it was a highly concentrated tonnage in terms of size-
vs
.-mass. You could not begin to fill a five-ton lorry with gold. If you did, its axles would collapse instantly. Five tons of gold takes up the space occupied by less than half a ton of crushed rock.

The original Heydrich-Krausser plan evidently was based on the assumption that the entire bullion hoard would fit inside the fuselages of twelve or fifteen four-engine airplanes. In terms of size and space this was true; in terms of weight it was absurd. Such a load would instantly crush the floor out of any airplane, even if such an airplane were capable of lifting that much weight. And the load capacity of even the greatest four-engine bomber or transport was more like ten tons than five hundred; a capacity which had to be reduced still further by the need for extra-range fuel tanks.

Apparently, however, it remained to Hermann Goering to shoot down permanently the idea of flying the gold out of Siberia. He only needed to point out the consequences if even one of the airplanes were to be shot down over Russian territory with its load of bullion.

Other proposals were then advanced, and one by one destroyed by careful reasoning; in the end it was von Geyr whose idea provided the solution. The only reasonable means of getting the gold out of Siberia was to employ the same method of transport that had been used to take it to Siberia in the fist place: the railway.

The track of the Siberian railway from the Sayan district made a relatively straight line west as far as Kuybyshev, whence a variety of switchings from track-line to track-line would bring the train southwest toward the Ukraine. Once in German-occupied territory, it could be driven straight to the Polish border and its contents then transferred to a Western train on the European track-gauge; or—and this was far less desirable on account of the risks—the train could turn south out of the Ukraine, cross the Crimea and deliver its cargo to Sebastopol, thence to be shipped by sea through the Dardanelles. (In 1942, while the Germans still held the Mediterranean, this was a viable possibility; by the time the mission was actually undertaken, it was not.)

In March 1943 the von Geyr plan was settled on. The delay had already amounted to nearly five months. Because the von Geyr plan was clandestine in nature, the training of Krausser's force had to be rigorous and painstaking: every man in the force had to be able to pass as a Russian.

Documenting, equipping and costuming them took more time; not only did they have to look like Russians and talk like Russians, they also had to know enough about their own manufactured backgrounds to satisfy the suspicious, and they had to know enough contemporary Russian cultural history to sound authentic.

Under the coaching of Abwehr agents and various Russian prisoners-of-war, they made steady—but not exceptionally fast—progress in their effort to become Russians, and between the strenuous care of their training and the slow excavation of intelligence of Siberia from the Abwehr's espionage field agents, it was the autumn of 1943 before von Geyr felt confident enough to report to Berlin that Krausser's team was ready for action.

It had been decided that the
Jagdsonderkommando
would travel as a special unit of Soviet Transportation Corpsmen, led by a first lieutenant (the
Leutnant
who had been a locomotive driver) and chaperoned by a Communist Party commissar—a role played by Krausser himself, in the familiar grey choke-collared uniform of the Red Army, with the insignia of a commissar in place of officer's epaulets.

The other lieutenant (the one who had been a civil engineer) played the part of a Russian army engineer officer, also a first lieutenant: again, a role close to his actual status.

The cover-story postulated that Moscow wanted a military survey of the iron mines to determine whether it was feasible to reopen them for wartime production. The expedition would have an air of authenticity to it, and even though everyone in the Sayan knew that the mines were empty of iron, no one would be likely to question the Kremlin's bureaucratic decision to have them reinspected at such a time as this.

Along with the cover story went various sets of forged orders by which the bearers were authorized by the Kremlin to commandeer such rail transport and dispatching priorities as might be needed to transport ore samples out of the district. The signatures on Krausser's phony orders were those of the highest—and thus least-likely-to-be-questioned—authorities: Malenkov and Marshal Zhukov.

Krausser's detachment carried reams of documents designed to meet almost any foreseeable contingency. The files of Abwehr, Wehrmacht and RSHA records include copystats of billeting requisitions, orders allowing Krausser to commandeer provisions and tools and equipment, personnel orders (with the names left blank) authorizing the detachment to impress civilian workers into labor companies if it became necessary to repair the tracks and roadbeds of abandoned mining railways, and disciplinary authorizations by which Krausser—as People's Commissar—was empowered to arrest, sentence and even execute officials who refused to cooperate. The latter were designed mainly with railway dispatching controllers in mind; once the train was loaded the Germans wanted to get it across the Soviet Union as quickly as possible.

On November 23, 1943, the bogus Russians were flown to a Luftwaffe military airfield near Donetsk, where they were fed lavishly and spent the night in Luftwaffe officers' barracks.

The mission was scheduled to take off at 0430 hours the morning of November 24. The transport was a captured four-engine American long-range bomber, a B-24 Liberator, painted over with Russian markings to resemble the lend-lease aircraft with which the United States had been supplying Russia since 1942. The Liberator model had been selected for several reasons: its range (about 2,400 miles); its ability to fly at altitudes above most antiaircraft capacities; and the fact that many of the American-built planes had been delivered to the Soviet Union over the Alaska-to-Vladivostok Lend-Lease route, so that Siberian soldiers were accustomed to seeing the twin-tailed four-engine bombers overhead.

German antiaircraft batteries in the Donetsk region had been advised not to fire upon a single Liberator with Russian markings during the morning of the twenty-fourth. By the time the plane crossed the front lines into Russian-held territory it would be too high to be hit by antiaircraft bursts fired by either side; portable oxygen equipment had been provided for the twenty-two additional passengers, since the plane had been designed to accommodate a crew of seven.

The plane had extra fuel tanks on board but these would not be sufficient to make a round-trip flight. The pilot and his three-man flight crew had orders to drop Krausser's group by parachute, then turn southeast and attempt to reach the Japanese-held airfield at Huhehot in northern China. If the fuel didn't last, the crew was to bail out and make its way on foot to the nearest Japanese base.

At cruising speed the flight from Donetsk to the Sayan district would take some sixteen hours; the takeoff had been planned with a night parachute-drop in mind. The deep Siberian snow was expected to make for soft landings for the parachutists. They would be dropped from an altimeter height of eighteen hundred meters, which meant their drop to the high ground would measure some two hundred meters or less; a short drop which guaranteed no one would be frostbitten by the frigid air in the drop zone.

The weather went bad, unexpectedly, and takeoff had to be postponed twenty-four hours. A snowstorm then set in which lasted nearly two days, and meteorological estimates of the weather in the Sayan district were disappointing. Krausser had to drop into the right area or risk being isolated in freezing mountain fastnesses; furthermore, the jumpers had to be able to see their drop zone or they risked death in a blind jump. For those reasons the weather in the drop zone was more critical than the weather at the takeoff point, and in the end the Germans had to wait ten days before a favorable forecast allowed von Geyr to give them the go-ahead.

On the morning of December 3, 1943, the
Jagdsonderkommando
took off.

The absence of records to the contrary suggests that the drop was made as planned.
*

Met records show it was a typical Siberian winter: a great deal of snow lie, temperatures subfreezing but not severely so, as they were farther north in the tundra, storms frequent—one or two a week—and high winds the rule.

Krausser's
nom de guerre
was Ivan Samsonov; his railroad lieutenant went under the name Yevgeni Razin. The Red Army mess hall at Tulun issued twenty-eight meal tickets to First Lieutenant Yevgeni Razin on December 8; this may indicate that Krausser (“Commissar Samsonov”) found billeting and meals elsewhere, since he was not an army officer.

The next trace of the
Jagdsonderkommando
does not appear until December 24, when a conscript labor battalion (60 percent men, 40 percent women) was assigned to Lieutenant Razin on temporary assignment. Provisions and camping equipment sufficient for four weeks' work were issued to the labor battalion at Cheremkhovo. The next day, December 25, Razin signed—with an endorsement by Commissar Samsonov—an official requisition by which he commandeered the use of two steam locomotives, seventeen goods wagons
†
and one passenger car. This train was assembled in the yards at Zima, the nearest marshaling area to the Sayan.