Kolchak's Gold (32 page)

The request for a labor battalion indicates that by that date—December 24—the Germans had located the right mine. Now they were ready to have the roadbed and track repaired so that they could move their train close to the mine in order to load it. But Krausser's requisition of heavy lorries and a caterpillar-tread front-loader was not made until Januray 5, 1944—an indication that the repair of the railway took nearly two weeks.

On January 8 the construction equipment—the lorries and bulldozer—were winched onto flatbed cars coupled to Krausser's train; that same day, the labor battalion was released to return to its former duties. Indications are that the Germans transported the members of the labor battalion back to Zima aboard the train, dropped them off, loaded the digging machinery onto the train, and left Zima for the return trip to the Sayan mining district—all on the same day, January 8.

On January 15, 1944, Krausser's train was cleared through Krasnoyarsk (the principal marshaling yard of the Yenisey-Sayan district); it was now on its way out of the area, en route to Omsk and the Ural Mountains. Checked off against the train were bills of lading alluding to ore samples, construction materials and six goods-wagonloads of “leaden ingots” billed for delivery to an ammunition factory near Stalingrad. One assumes the Germans had simply painted the gold bullion with grey metallic paint, disguising it as lead—a rather bemusing trick of alchemy.

The train drove westward at a steady rate of 250 to 300 miles a day, receiving priority routing through the crowded switching yards and depots of Anzhero-Sudzhensk (January 17), Novosibirsk (January 18), Barabinsk (January 19), Omsk (January 21), Petropavlovsk (January 22) and Chelyabinsk (January 25).

It is at Chelyabinsk that the main lines divide and scatter. Krausser's train moved west into the Kuibyshev along the Moscow line as far as the junction near Ufa, then branched south to the city of Kuibyshev and then southwest on a dogleg to Orenburg and Uralsk in the Kazakhian People's Republic. The line goes west from Uralsk and crosses the Volga at Saratov. [The distance to Saratov along this indirect route was more than 1,100 miles from Chelyabinsk but] the
Jagdsonderkommando
train covered it in a little less than three days—an indication of the urgency the Germans must have felt by then. Villagers along the right-of-way must have been awed by the sight of such a train highballing westward, powered by one huge steam locomotive at the front and another at the rear. Undoubtedly this haste must have drawn attention the Germans would prefer to have avoided, but by this time Krausser must have learned about the alarming conditions at the front; hence the train's acceleration. The
Jagdsonderkommando
and its booty were suddenly caught up in a desperate race against time.…

5.

WAR'S END

In 1942 Zhukov stopped the German
blitzkrieg
on the doorstep of Moscow and destroyed the myth of German invincibility.

On war maps the battle lines moved relentlessly westward. For 1944 Hitler committed two hundred combat divisions to the Russian Front but it was pointless.

By the beginning of 1944 the Germans were being driven rapidly out of the Crimea and the southern Ukraine. Marshal Vatutin had pushed the Germans west out of Kiev in 1943 and by January the Germans were in full retreat toward the Polish and Rumanian borders; the German lines fell back almost a steady two miles a day during the first four months of 1944, at first wheeling back on a hinge at Odessa but then pulling back almost in parallel unison after Odessa fell to the Reds.

The collapse of Odessa left the Germans with only one Black Sea harbor to sustain her naval force—Sebastopol—and Hitler ordered that Sebastopol be kept open at all costs. In the meantime, Heinz Krausser's planned primary route—into Kiev—had been stoppered by the Russian advance: the Red Army stood astride the railway and there was no way to get a train across the front lines, as there might have been if the city were still contested.

It left only the Crimean alternative; and the Red Army had already regained a foothold on the peninsula.

Krausser's train, at the end of January 1944, was in a race with the Red Army to reach Sebastopol. The route von Geyr and Krausser had worked out is probably the route Krausser intended to follow: cross the Dnieper at Alexandrovsk; down through Melitopol, then across the steppes to Taganach; then over the railroad bridge onto the Crimean isthmus, and thence across Crimea into Sebastopol.

What happened to the Germans at Sebastopol is a matter of record; what happened to Krausser, his train and his
Jagdsonderkommando
is not.

Sebastopol was the Nazis' Dunkirk. The city had been leveled in the early months of the war; but the harbor was intact and the German Black Sea navy used the port as its principal base, mainly for the purpose of intimidating the vacillating Turks and supporting the German war effort in Greece.

After the fall of the southern Ukraine, the Crimean peninsula was cut off from overland communication with Germany and the use of the German Black Sea navy as a support unit in Greece became impossible because the navy had no access to supplies from Germany. Nevertheless Hitler seemed more preoccupied about the possibility that the Turks might enter the war against him than he was about the fact that the Russians were already destroying his armies. At least that is the commonly accepted historical explanation for his maniacal—and evidently pointless—defense of Sebastopol. It is possible [although there is no proof yet] that one reason the Führer needed to keep the port open was his expectation that
Jagdsonderkommando Ein
would still manage to break through the Russian encirclement somehow and deliver into German hands the billions of Reichsmarks' worth of gold which by now must have assumed the proportions of a magic talisman in Hitler's deranged thoughts. (Clearly it was far too late to
buy
a victory.)

The German
Festung Sewastopol
did not manage to match the Russian record for withstanding a siege.

The Russians took Sebastopol in four days. Total German losses were in excess of one hundred thousand.

When the city fell on May 8, 1944, there was no sign of Heinz Krausser, his
Jagdsonderkommando
, his train, or Kolchak's gold.

The clues are cryptic.

[Every time a train stops to take on water or fuel, or switch engines, or be shunted onto a siding to await the converse passage of another train, some yard bureaucrat must make a twitch in his logbook. Railroads everywhere are like that: records are kept of the location of every engine and every railway car at all times because it is the only way for the system to keep tabs on its rolling stock. In wartime some of these regulations were disregarded, and even when they were obeyed the records did not always survive. But each train is assigned a dispatching number which it retains as long as it retains its entity as a
train:
that is, from the time it is assembled until the time it is dispersed and its pieces of rolling stock are used to combine in other trains.]

….
Train #S-1428-CB, 3000 kilos coal.… T #S-1428-CB, north switch 1100 hrs 28 Jan 44.… S-1428-CB held 2325-0118 hhs for priority routing Troop Train V-8339-CJ
.…

The spoor of Krausser's train could be traced from its starting point in Siberia to the marshaling yards of Saratov, at the northerly edge of the Volgograd Reservoir. From that point to the Crimea, however, is a distance of more than one thousand kilometers by rail, and there are several alternate route approaches. The wake of Krausser's train, beginning in February 1944, becomes progressively harder to find.

[This much is revealed by the surviving records:] On February 3 the train passed through the rail junction at Balashov, taking the westerly branch; on February 9 it appeared in the vicinity of Kharkov, heading for Poltava; on February 12 it reappeared at Kharkov, apparently having turned back after Krausser had found out the state of the war front ahead of him. The German lines were now well to the west of Kiev, or some six hundred kilometers west of Kharkov.

The train wasted at least another week in false starts in a westerly direction before Krausser apparently decided he had to give up that attempt and strike out along the alternate route instead—toward the Crimea.

An adamant official in the switching yards at Gorlovka held the train up for two and a half days on account-of priority munitions movements; that this took place is not surprising—Krausser had had amazingly good luck up till then in keeping his train moving—but there is the curious fact that this delay took place on February 28 through March 2, 1944; the train had taken more than two weeks to traverse the three hundred kilometers between those two points. No dispatching records from intermediate stations have turned up in Russian archives. Apparently Krausser had been held up—once or several times—en route to Gorlovka.

One pictures the frenzied desperation with which
Jagdsonderkommando Ein
now faced the passage of every day, every hour. And now, on March 2, the dispatcher at Gorlovka only allowed the train to leave in one direction—eastward. Documents show that “Lieutenant Razin” was ordered to get his train out of the way because of urgent priority trains which were continuously arriving from the north. The train left on the evening of the second, going in the direction of Lugansk, where duly it arrived on March 4—nearly a hundred kilometers farther from the German lines than it had been two days earlier.

No further specific records have turned up. The train disappears at Lugansk, still some six hundred kilometers from the Crimea.

The records of a Red Army Graves Registration team for April 13, 1944, show that eighteen Russian soldiers were buried the preceding day on the outskirts of a deserted Jewish
shtetl
about fifteen kilometers northeast of Rostov, near the Don. Listed among the dead are First Lieutenant Yevgeni Razin and People's Commissar Ivan Samsonov. The names of the sixteen remaining dead are the same, with certain variations in spelling, as the Russian cover-names of sixteen enlisted and noncommissioned members of
Jagdsonderkommando Ein.
Cause of death in the GR team's report is listed as “combat casualties the result of warfare, probably against counterrevolutionary bandits”—a customary euphemism for partisans. [The anti-Communist Ukrainian army was fiercely active in that area during that period.]

The GR report leaves eleven commando members unaccounted for until one examines the attached lists of personal effects found on the bodies. On the body of “Commissar Samsonov” were found the metal Russian identity tags and papers of the eleven remaining team members. [One must conclude they had died in earlier engagements and been buried by the survivors.]

As a result it is clear that the twenty-nine men of
Jagdsonderkommando Ein
were wiped out without exception. [However it is also evident that the bodies were found many miles from the nearest railway track; that it is not possible for twenty-nine men to carry any significant portion of five hundred tons of gold on their persons; and that in any case no gold was reported to have been found on or near the bodies. Furthermore there is no record of the reappearance of the Krausser train
as a train:
that is, as an assembled entity. There are, however, ample records to prove the reappearance of several goods wagons and both locomotives which had been assigned to the train.] Both locomotives appear in an April 17 report from the marshaling yard at Donetsk, where they were used in assembling a munitions train which was dispatched to the front at Korosten. Of the numbered goods wagons, three appeared in April at Makeyevka and two others were incorporated into a heavy-weapons train being assembled at Gorlovka on May 3.

[The conclusion to be drawn from this seems inescapable: Krausser must have removed the gold from the train, hidden the gold, moved the empty train to one of the busy switching yards in South Russia, and abandoned it there, after which he must have concluded that the only recourse left open was to make his way back to Germany and report on his mission, in hopes von Geyr or someone else in higher authority would be able to come up with a new plan for extracting the treasure from Soviet territory.

[The original plan had been to smuggle the train through battle lines by taking advantage of the tactical confusion that had existed in late 1943 in several cities in the Ukraine and South Russia, where portions of the cities—Kiev for example—were in the hands of both armies. Under such circumstances it would have been possible for a train to cross from the Russian-held sector into the German, probably without being fired on. But by February 1944 there were no cities still in German hands except Sebastopol (which was inaccessible to Krausser) and those cities to which rail tracks had been destroyed by bombardment—a fact Krausser must have learned in his several unsuccessful forays west into the Ukraine in January and early February.

[Thus for the second time in twenty-five years the gold of the Czars was removed from a train and hidden. No subsequent Soviet records even so much as hint that there has ever been a suspicion in that country that the treasure may be buried near the banks of the Don in South Russia. The annihilation of
Jagdsonderkommando Ein
guaranteed that no one in Germany could make even a wild stab at the eventual disposition of the gold—not even those like von Geyr who were intimate with the plan to extricate the treasure.]

Erysichthon offended Ceres; in response, Ceres punished him with an insatiable appetite. Finally he ate himself.
*