Kolchak's Gold

by Brian Garfield

  Under those conditions it isn’t surprising that any rumor of billions of reichsmarks’ worth of gold bullion, no matter how far-fetched, would trigger an eager response among the leaders of the Third Reich.

  In the Alexandria archives I found several directives from General Franz Halder, Hitler’s army chief of staff, to von Paulus and Guderian and other field commanders in the spring and summer of 1942, indicating Hitler’s avid interest in the Soviets’ treasure vaults in the Ural Mountains. I found one top-secret memorandum from Halder to OKH Headquarters Rostov, requesting a feasibility analysis for implementing a coordinated parachute and armored raid into the Urals. The memo suggested a meeting between von Paulus, Guderian and one of Goering’s visiting Luftwaffe generals; the suggested plan was to drop a parachute commando that would break open the Russian mountain vaults while one of Guderian’s crack Panzer units made a run across the Volga to rendezvous with the parachute team. Then the Soviet and Spanish treasure would be brought out of the USSR aboard armored troop carriers and tanks.

  I found no record of any such meeting taking place, nor did I find any reply to this memo. One can guess what such a reply would have contained. The distances were far greater than Hitler seemed to imagine (and the pipe dream has an unquestionable flavor of Hitler about it; clearly it wasn’t Halder’s idea—he was too level-headed an old soldier). There was no possibility of getting an armored column that far behind Russian lines, nor was it likely that a paratroop invasion would have cracked the well-guarded Russian vaults. In fact I found no evidence that the Germans had any decent intelligence of the location, let alone the defenses, of the Soviet gold vaults.

  In any case nothing came of it, but I did find a fair number of OKH directives urging the Wehrmacht to drive across the Don and the Volga in a spearhead aimed at the Urals. The gold vaults were mentioned several times among the various strategic reasons for pursuing this dubious plan. (The German army did in fact reach the banks of both rivers, but never crossed them.)

  Then on September 12, 1942, Halder directed von Paulus to “proceed with an investigation” of the “reported Tsarist gold”—its validity, location and accessibility. In the light of later discoveries I decided that this directive was only supplementary to investigations that were already under way by Gestapo and SS officials, but this Halder cipher was the first reference to Kolchak’s gold I had come across and I felt a disturbing excitement.

  Halder and the Fuhrer had a falling-out at about that time; Halder was relieved of his position as chief of staff on September 24 and was replaced by General Kurt Zeitzler, an arrogant youth from the Western Front who removed the last vestiges of Officer Corps dignity from the high office and became nothing more than a rubber stamp for Hitler. From that point forward in the history of the Third Reich, up to Guderian’s replacement of Zeitzler, the records of the C-of-S become much less enlightening and it isn’t surprising I didn’t find any further references to the gold in Zeitzler’s files. Very little of any importance went through his hands; for all practical purposes Hitler became his own chief of staff.

  My next encounter with the gold was in a dispatch from Waffen SS Standartenführer Heinz Krausser which had been forwarded to Himmler in Berlin over the countersignature of Gruppenführer Otto von Geyr, with endorsements by various SS Sturmführeren and an Obergruppenführer. The dateline—September 13, 1942, Poltava—placed the writer in a town that had recently fallen into German hands on that date; and von Geyr, to whom it was addressed, was at that time in Kiev headquarters on the staff of a Waffen SS combat division. Krausser, the writer, evidently was a full colonel in command of a battalion of killers, Einsatzgruppe “E,” and therefore it was clear that von Geyr was not Krausser’s direct superior officer; both were members of the Waffen SS but there was a vast distinction between combat soldiers and Einsatzgruppen.

  The Einsatzgruppen were battalion-strength (700 to 1,000 men) units of Gestapo, SD and Waffen SS commandos. They were originally under the direct control of Reinhard Heydrich and had been trained in the techniques of annihilation at a police academy on the Elbe at Pretsch. They had been indoctrinated chiefly in master-race ideology and the methods of genocide; the stated purpose of these murder battalions was the extermination of Jews in the conquered territories, under the authority of the Führer’s order of March 3, 1941, that the Jewish Question was to find its Final Solution in mass executions.

  Krausser’s dispatch was attached to a dim carbon copy of a summary battalion report over his own signature which coldly spelled out the massacres of several thousand Russian Jews and summarized the incredible fact that over the past year this single Einsatzgruppe had murdered more than three hundred thousand Jews.* Krausser’s letter expressed pride in these accomplishments, mentioned that he hoped von Geyr was in good health—evidently they shared in-laws in common or were otherwise distantly related—and went on to explain in some detail the information he had unearthed concerning the Czar’s gold treasury.†

  Krausser’s dispatch was several pages long. It covered, without much detail, the removal of the Czar’s gold from Omsk by Admiral Kolchak and the subsequent decision to hide the gold in an abandoned iron mine along the Siberian trakt. Krausser was not specific in naming the sources of this information; he used some such phrase as “Our interrogations have produced the possibility.” He then went on to say he had no way to evaluate the truth of this information but in view of the tonnage of gold involved, he thought it might be wise to bring it to von Geyr’s attention. The implication was that von Geyr had access to certain ears in Berlin; evidently Krausser was as paranoid as most of his kind and distrusted his own immediate superiors, who were people high-up on the SS staff.

  The number of endorsements on the Krausser dispatch indicated clearly that it had been read with interest by a number of officers, going up the chain of command from von Geyr. The last endorsement was that of a member of Himmler’s staff; I no longer recall which officer it was.

  Obviously the intriguing thing about the Krausser dispatch was that it spelled out in remarkable detail the exact location of the iron mine where Kolchak had hidden the gold.

  The description in Krausser’s letter was uncannily similar to the description Haim Tippelskirch had given me; Haim and I had spoken mainly in German and even the phrasing of Krausser’s directions was very much like Haim’s. Even if Haim hadn’t told me his own version of the German episode, I should have guessed that the Krausser information could only have come from a survivor of the Kolchak expedition.

  * It is still in the Ural vaults; only recently have Spanish and Soviet ambassadors in Paris begun to discuss the possibility of Moscow’s returning the gold to Madrid. In mass and value it is almost identical to the Kolchak treasure. (From Bristow’s notes.)

  * The text, from Bristow’s files, reads as follows:

  EINSATZGRUPPE “E” REPORT NO. I761

  9 SEPTEMBER 1941

  “Area now reported cleared of Jews. During period covered by this Report, 11,692 Jews (adult), 6,843 Jews (adolescent), 273 Partisans, 18 felonious criminals, 310 Communist functionaries shot. Up to 8 Sept. 1941, therefore, Einsatzgruppe ‘E’ has dealt with 329,241 Jews in all.”—Ed.

  † The Krausser dispatch is not among Bristow’s files; neither, evidently, did he have it at hand when he was writing the above passages. Therefore either it was stolen from his files in New Jersey or, more likely, he had it with him in Sebastopol and lost it there along with most of the materials he gathered in Russia in early 1973.—Ed.

  The fall and winter of 1972 were disagreeably grey and rainy in the Northeast. It was a dreary time of record rainfalls, and after the Presidential election and its post-mortems there were no urgent topics of conversation around the capital. Of course this was before the Watergate revival. I was seeing a good deal of a gangly cheerful divorcée whose name it would be pointless to mention here. Nikki was on my mind almost constantly although it had been a year since we had last seen each other.

  In L
ambertville around the end of November I had a phone call from Washington. It was Evan MacIver. I was surprised to hear from him; I’d seen him four or five times at parties in the course of the past year but we hadn’t much to say to each other. He called to suggest we have lunch the following week; he named a time and a restaurant. I don’t recall the conversation; in substance he said he had something of interest to discuss with me and he made it intriguing enough for me to accept the invitation.

  It was the middle of the week. Heavy rain had brought traffic to a crawl and I was late getting to the restaurant. MacIver was watching for me; he got my eye and waved me to his table and I found him spooning the skin that had formed on his cup of hot chocolate. When I sat down my nostrils informed me there was whiskey in the chocolate.

  It was one of those mock-Polynesian restaurants with jungle décor where middle-class women in absurd hats took a lunch break from their holiday shopping; this was the week after Thanksgiving and the Christmas boom had started. Waiters were serving sweet potent concoctions in imitation coconut shells with drinking straws. I ordered a Bloody Mary to keep MacIver company.

  He looked rumpled and jowly but there were traces of the old raffish humor in the lines that exploded from his eye-corners. “Well Harry, just between us suspicious characters, how are things going?”

  For a while we reminisced about campus days—the bad food in the university cafeteria, the Japanese restaurant he’d taken me to once where I’d gagged on raw fish, the J. D. Salinger stories and Castro and the banning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Powers U-2 incident, and the swap of Powers for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. Memoirs which dated us both, and which led—as if by aimless free association—to the subjects of intelligence and espionage. MacIver was pretty good, he was at ease and casual; but the invitation had been his and I had let him guide the conversation and I was aware that it probably was no accident he led us to that point. Each for our own reasons we were interested in espionage but clearly his motives were more specific than that.

  I found something vaguely edible from the menu; it was not until we were drinking coffee after the meal that MacIver began to come to the point.

  “Well then how’s the little Sabra?”

  “Nikki?” I gave him a closer look. I hadn’t spoken to him about Nikki at all since the night I’d first met her. Yet he knew.

  There was a crafty gleam of guile in his eyes; I was meant to see it. “You do keep in touch, don’t you?”

  Suddenly I was determined to know what he was getting at. I contrived to look curious.

  But he refused to be drawn. “Well she wasn’t my cup of tea, I can tell you that.” He put his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and I watched it smoulder there. He said, “You know I got interested in something you were talking about a couple of months ago. Where was it, Huddleston’s party? You were talking about that far-fetched Russian gold story you’re writing. Sounded like a hell of a yarn. I’d like to know more about it.”

  “And that’s why you arranged this lunch?”

  “Partly. There was something else, but it can wait. You’re not in a hurry, are you? Am I keeping you from anything?”

  “I’ve got some work to do this afternoon up at State. It shouldn’t take too long—no, I’m not in a big hurry.”

  “State,” he said, and made the connection. “Sure. You’re still pushing for that Russian research visa, aren’t you? Maybe I could help.”

  “You?”

  “Us suspicious characters have a few contacts here and there. That’s our main excuse for existence, you know. I might be able to help pull a string or two.”

  I knew he wasn’t referring to the State Department; he was talking about the “other side”—OVIR and the Russian Embassy—but you had to be circumspect in MacIver’s line of work. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might be in a position to exercise any influence over there; I still had no idea to which desk he was assigned at the Agency in Langley. All I really knew about his position was what little he had told me a year ago.

  He said, “Where is it you’re trying to get to? Moscow?”

  “Moscow and Sebastopol.”

  “You figure to hunt for the Czar’s gold over there?”

  He said it with a smile but he was waiting for an answer and I gave him a truthful one: I was doing a historical research, not chasing wild gilded geese.

  “Well sure, Harry, but the way I’ve heard you talk about that gold, you seemed pretty excited about it.”

  “It’s an interesting yarn. But that’s all it seems to be—a yarn.”

  “What makes you so sure of that? The gold was real enough.”

  “Yes …”

  “And it’s never turned up, has it?”

  “It has, though. The Germans found it during the war.”

  “I thought you were telling Huddleston they found it and then lost it again.”

  “It’s all speculation,” I said. “I’m getting pretty tired of that gold. It’s threatening to become a tail wagging the dog. This job’s hard enough without distractions.”

  “Come off it, Harry. A good strong dose of gold bullion’s just what you need to beef up the book’s appeal. Otherwise who’s going to buy a thousand-page history of the siege of Sebastopol? Who the hell cares about Sebastopol, for Christ’s sake?”

  There was truth in what he said. The story of the gold was dramatic and it was completely new; no other historian had come across it at all.

  He scowled at me. “You won’t sell eight copies of a book on Sebastopol unless you’ve got a hell of a hook on it. Why kid yourself? I was listening to you at Huddleston’s—you weren’t talking about sieges and politics and Panzer battles, you were talking about gold. You’re trying to make yourself feel like an important scholar with all this serious research, but your stuff wouldn’t sell the way it sells if you were just writing textbooks for history department libraries. You’re a yarnspinner, Harry—you’re an entertainer. And now you want to tell me you’ve got your hooks into the biggest money-caper story in history and you don’t want to be sidetracked by it? Harry, I wouldn’t buy that if it came with an American Motors guarantee.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette and beamed at me in triumph. “You know what I think, Harry? I think you get your nocturnal emissions from dreaming you’ll find that gold of Admiral Kolchak’s.”

  “You’re pushing it pretty hard, aren’t you?”

  “Am I? Why should I?”

  “Suppose you tell me.”

  “Tell me something first. Would you think of asking me that question if you didn’t know who my employer was?”

  I saw his point.

  “Okay,” he murmured. “Look, I just think you’re in danger of taking yourself too seriously. You could end up on the wrong track. I think I’ve read every one of your books—I read the first one or two because it was a cheap thrill to say I knew the author, but after that I got to be a fan of yours. I still am. I also think I’m kind of a friend of yours and I hate to see you talk yourself into a mistake.”

  One of the crosses a writer must bear is well-meaning advice from people who know utterly nothing about the craft. But MacIver was leading up to something in his transparently devious way and I let him set his own pace.

  “That lost treasure—that’s the dog, Harry, it’s not just the tail.”

  He blew smoke at his chest. “End of kindly advice. Okay? Still friends?”

  I didn’t think that was the end of it at all. I said, “You said you wanted to talk business.”

  He toyed with the burning cigarette. “I’m sorry, I kind of did this wrong. I can be a bull in a china shop. You’re not in much of a mood to listen.”

  “As long as it’s not another piece of literary criticism.”

  “Why don’t we have a drink?”

  “You talk like a man with bad news.” My mind leaped to his earlier remarks about my visa.

  “Not bad news. A little off-the-record information and some advice, that’s all.
”

  “About what?”

  “You want a drink? I’m going to have one.”

  “I think I’ll pass.”

  MacIver summoned a waiter who took some time reaching us; he didn’t say anything until after he’d ordered another bourbon. Then he plucked the cigarette pack from his shirt pocket, found it was empty, crushed it in his fist and excused himself to hunt for the cigarette vending machine. I saw him intercept a waiter who gave him directions.

  He returned simultaneously with his drink order; he asked the waiter for the luncheon check and sat down stripping the cellophane from the cigarette pack. I said, “I gather your department doesn’t have close rapport with the Surgeon General.”

  “I try to quit now and then. Every time I do, we get some kind of crisis. I figure if I keep smoking maybe it’ll deter the start of World War Three. It’s a small enough price to pay. That girl Nikki, she smokes, doesn’t she?”

  I was taken aback. “Now and then.”

  “You keep in touch with her, don’t you?”

  “Why?”

  “How deep and heavy did it get between you two? I’ve got a reason for asking. Somebody told me she was pretty deep in your guts, but that was a while ago.”

  I was knotting up slowly, inside. “Evan, if you’ve got a point to make …”

  “How much do you know about her, Harry? What she does for a living, I mean.”

  I stared at him. “That’s a cheap shot.”

  “I’m not trying to pry, Harry. I promise you I already know a lot more about it than you do. I’m not pumping you for private information, I only want to know how much she told you.”

  “I don’t see where it’s any of your business.”