The declared German gold holdings looked as if they were very low, but in reality were still holding strong enough, thanks to the stolen Austrian and Czech bullion. On September 1, 1939, Germany had declared reserves of 28.6 tons but hidden gold of 82.7 tons. In addition, it had 12.1 tons in regional German banks, 99 tons of Austrian gold, and 43.3 tons of Czech bullion. The total came to a comfortable 265.7 tons.12
The first two days after the war broke out, Polish central bank officials were confident that the nation’s army would stop, or at least slow, the invading German forces. The distance between Berlin and Warsaw was more than three hundred miles. Nonetheless, the Polish government on September 3, decided to send 13.5 tons of gold east one hundred miles to an ancient military fortress in the city of Brest. At the same time, the bank’s staff also began packing up the rest of the Warsaw gold plus other valuables so that they could be moved quickly. Blaring air-raid alarms often interrupted the work, and staff members had to scramble to take refuge in the bank’s main vault.
At 11:00 P.M. on September 3, the first five shipments left the central bank’s office for Brest in buses that belonged to the State Printing office. With the war deteriorating for Poland by the hour, bank officials ordered that 15.1 tons located in its branch office in Siedlce, the largest concentration outside Warsaw, also be shipped to Brest. That same night, Treasury Minister Stanisław Sadkowski instructed the bankers to prepare to send all the gold in Warsaw to a destination in the east that was still to be determined. Officials quickly finished packing the bullion into wooden crates and then waited for instructions.13
On September 5, the Polish government decided to evacuate Warsaw and move to Lublin one hundred miles southeast of the capital. Foreign diplomats followed them out of the capital. The Polish army took control of whatever remained of the country’s telegraph and telephones, trains, cars, and gasoline.
That night, the central bank president and four members of the board left Warsaw in automobiles, carrying the last remaining gold. Before departing, bank official Stanisław Orczykowski made a detailed inventory of the gold that had been packed. He ended his memo: “The vault is empty. Not even one bar is left inside.”14
The treasury ministry that same day, finally ordered the central bank to ship all its valuables in Warsaw to the central bank’s branch office in Lublin. Colonel Adam Koc arrived at the Polish bank’s headquarters to take over responsibility for the operation. With a bald head and owlish eyes behind rimless glasses, the slender Koc was both a military and a political veteran. Born in 1891 in Suwałki in the Polish part of the Russian Empire, he became politically active while a student at his trade school and a member of a combat-and-rifle club. After graduating from military school in 1912, he joined the fight for Polish independence. His nom de guerre was Witold. By 1915, he was a courier in Scandinavia for General Piłsudski. Koc was wounded in September 1916 and taken prisoner, but was released in April 1918 and returned to the Polish military headquarters, where he took on increasingly important military jobs. He served as deputy minister of the Treasury from 1930 to 1936 and was later elected to the Polish Senate in 1938. He was also a board member of Warsaw’s Handlowy Bank.15
Koc’s first stop after receiving his new assignment was to go to Warsaw’s Paderewski Park, the capital’s large forest area, where ten buses from the Polish National Railway and the Warsaw bus company plus two trucks were waiting. The vehicles, though, badly needed repair, and he immediately ordered Lt. Andrzej Jenicz to take care of the ailing vehicles. Koc next went to the Bank of Poland, where he met with Managing Director Władysław Bryka and director Leon Baraski, who showed him that the gold had already been packed and was ready to be shipped.16
Koc decided for security reasons to use fifteen buses to transport the gold so that the cargo was less likely to attract attention amid the flood of refugees trying to go south. In addition, it was put in ordinary packing boxes to make it less conspicuous. They were secured with steel bands. A few carefully selected people were chosen to travel in the buses to add to the camouflage. Koc ordered that the buses travel mostly at night without headlights. The destination was Lublin, one hundred miles southeast of the capital.
Warsaw by then was in total chaos, with government officials, diplomats, soldiers, and average citizens all trying to evacuate. Everything moved at a crawl, and Nazi planes frequently strafed the mobs. Ryszard Zolski, a young film director, later wrote: “Most of the people were walking, pushing anything on a wheel or wheels, handcarts or simply prams laden with bundles of clothes, pots and pans, babies and small toddlers.”17
Although the gold convoy had to travel just one hundred miles, it arrived only the next morning. All the crates were immediately stored in the branch bank’s cellar; but the following day the bankers received orders to move again, this time to Lutsk, 130 miles southeast. A few hours after the bankers departed Lublin, German planes bombed the area. Still traveling in buses and cars originally picked up in Warsaw, the convoy again drove through the night. Travel on the treacherous roads was made worse by having to move in darkness. The gold was hidden in forests during the day, and drivers would set off again after dusk. The last stopover was at a village manor. Despite the risk, the convoy of buses and cars arrived safely in Lutsk, and the crates of gold were stored this time in the cellar of the bank office there.18
While the central bank treasure was on the road, Koc recruited two other Piłsudski Colonels to help him with his assignment. The first was Henryk Floyar-Rajchman, who was two years younger than Koc but shared the same experience of growing up in the Polish part of the Russian Empire. Born in Warsaw as Henryk Rajchman, he went into the anti-Russian underground while still a youth, where he took the nom de guerre Floyar and later added that to his surname. He was a devoted follower of Piłsudski and served during World War I in one of his units. Floyar-Rajchman left the army in 1931 to enter politics and served as Minister of Industry and Trade from 1933 to 1935. While he only attained the rank of major, he was still considered a Piłsudski Colonel.
Koc also asked Ignacy Matuszewski, who was the same age, to join the taskforce. He had studied philosophy at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, the oldest institute of higher education in Poland, as well as studying architecture in Milan. In early World War I, he served in a Russian intelligence unit, but after the Soviet revolution organized a group of Polish fighters in Petrograd who called themselves the Matuszewski Poles. After the Bolsheviks condemned him to death in absentia, he fled to Kiev and eventually joined the new Polish army. While a long-time supporter of Piłsudski, Matuszewski broke with him over economic policy. He left the army in 1927 and from 1929 to 1931 was treasury minister. Matuszewski then edited the daily newspaper Gazeta Polska and wrote extensively on political issues, warning of the German threat and advocating increased military spending.
Many central bank officials joined the gold team. Among them were Zygmunt Karpiski, the governor, Stanisław Orczykowski, the chief cashier, and twenty-one other bank employees. The three Piłsudski Colonels, though, directed the operation.
On September 9, Koc arrived in Lutsk from Warsaw to explain his plan for getting the national treasure out of the country. Polish leaders had already decided that the gold’s final destination was the French National Bank in Paris, with Romania as an intermediate stop. That was about 150 miles south. The plan was to get the treasure to the Black Sea and then somehow take it to France by ship. Since Koc had just been named minister of treasury, he would have to stay with the government, which was moving frequently around the country as the war situation deteriorated. He appointed Floyar-Rajchman to be responsible for the vehicles, and he discarded useless equipment, stocked up on fuel, and organized the police escorts. Matuszewski was put in charge of protecting the gold after it crossed the border into Romania and getting it safely to France.19
Koc instructed bank governor Karpiski to leave the group and travel to Paris as soon as possible to handle matters there. That same day, the Bank of Po
land president gave him a document authorizing him “to dispose on his own authority the stocks of gold which are now or will [in the] future be deposited to the account of the Bank of Poland in foreign banks.” In his rush to get out of Warsaw, Karpiski hadn’t brought along his passport, so he first had to get a new one in Kremenets, fifty miles to the south, where the Polish Foreign Ministry was temporarily housed. By the time he arrived there it was dark, and the town was under a blackout. Nonetheless he and others worked by candlelight in the cellar of the town’s castle to send cables to Polish embassies in Bucharest and Paris. The French ambassador Léon Noël, who had also taken temporary refuge in Kremenets, suggested that the gold be sent to Paris on French warships traveling first through the Black Sea and then to the Mediterranean.
The Polish gold by now was spread out all over the country. The largest amount was in Brest, but there was also some in Lutsk and still more was in Zamo. The new goal was to get all of it to the village of Sniatyn, a Jewish shtetl on the border with Romania that was also a rail crossing point between the two countries.
Soldiers and central bank employees poured over maps to determine the best routes to take and set up strict rules for the operation. The buses and trucks would travel only at night since in daylight they would be easy targets for German planes that controlled the skies. Two drivers were assigned to each truck, and they would alternate periods of driving. Vehicles were instructed to travel in a tight formation at the speed of the slowest one. There was plenty of light from the moon that had been full on September 9. The convoy would stop at daybreak and park in a wooded area until it was dark.
The first gold train left Brest. During a stop in Dubno, an ancient town famous for its castle, Polish military officials took seventy crates containing four tons of gold off the train, saying that they needed it for some unknown eventuality such as buying weapons abroad. At about the same time, a train left Zamo also heading to the Polish-Romanian border. The convoy of buses, trucks, and cars left Lutsk under the leadership of Floyar-Rajchman.20
On September 11, the fleet of trucks and buses reached a large but very old bridge over the Siret River, the border between Poland and Romania. The load capacity for it was one ton, but the loaded vehicles each weighed about twelve tons. The last thing the leaders wanted to do was to have to pull trucks from the water below. They finally decided to send just three trucks across to test the bridge. It then took them three hours to get all the trucks to the Romanian side.21 One of the members of the group had a short-wave radio and picked up transmissions among Soviet agents who knew about the gold and were desperately trying to find it. Meanwhile, German planes bombed an area that the Poles had recently passed.22
After setting out the overall strategy, Koc on September 11 departed for Romania, arriving there the next day. He went immediately to see the Polish ambassador, who was in talks with Romanian government officials. While the trains, buses, and cars were heading toward the border, the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs formally requested that the Romanian government permit the gold to pass travel through its territory and also provide a train to make that happen.
With the Polish high command continuously retreating, the war was worsening by the hour. By September 12, the top military leaders were in Młynów near the Romanian border, and their southern front was on the verge of collapse. In addition, the Poles feared that the Soviet Union would enter the conflict at any moment.
War refugees were overflowing the village of Sniatyn. Fate, though, was for once smiling on the beleaguered Poles. On the evening of September 13, the first gold train arrived in Sniatyn. Two hours later, the one from Zamo pulled into town with more bullion. Later that day, the convoy from Lutsk also arrived. With the exception of the four tons handed over to the military, all of the Polish national treasure was now in the same place ready to move into Romania.
By then, Koc and the Polish ambassador in Bucharest had worked out a deal that allowed the gold to be transported through Romania. A bridge separated the two countries, and the plan was for Polish engineers to drive a train to the other side of the bridge, where Romanians would take it over and transport it to the Romanian-Turkish border. Matuszewski feared that the bridge might have been sabotaged, but finally decided to risk everything and load all 1,208 crates of gold onto the train. The job took four hours, with policemen, railroad workers, soldiers, and bank employees all helping.
At half-past midnight on September 14, the gold train began creeping across the bridge into Romania. There were no glitches, and the cargo immediately departed on an eighteen-hour trip to its next destination: Constana, a Romanian port on the Black Sea.
The Germans, however, were still determined to get the gold. The ambassador in Bucharest sent a telegram to Berlin saying that Koc had arrived in the capital and incorrectly reported that he had tried to deposit the gold at its national bank. “The Romanian government gave no permission,” the ambassador cabled. The next day, the German Foreign Ministry instructed their ambassador in Bucharest to tell the Romanian government that allowing the Polish gold to pass through the country would be “considered a heavy violation of the neutrality policy.” That same day, the Romanian government finally closed its border with Poland. On September 18, the German ambassador sent Berlin a message saying, “The minister of foreign affairs promised me that no further transportations shall be permitted to leave Romanian borders.”23
When everyone else was settled, Floyar-Rajchman went back to Poland to pick up the four tons of gold that the National Defense Fund had been holding to buy weapons since that looked increasingly unlikely, given the rapid advance of German and Soviet forces. He had to dodge attacks from both German and Soviet troops, who had invaded Poland on September 17 to claim their part of the dismembered country. Just before the Soviets took over Sniatyn, Floyar-Rajchman and his team arrived and picked up the gold. It was impossible to load it onto a train because enemy air attacks had destroyed the local railroad station. So Floyar-Rajchman and his men went to the town of Kuty on the Romanian border, where the Polish army had established its last defensive outpost in the country. He and his team finally slipped fifty-one boxes holding three tons of gold into Romania on two trucks, a bus, and a car, which took it to the Polish embassy in Bucharest. The men and the gold arrived there at 2:00 in the morning of September 24. Romanian troops, though, were waiting for them in the courtyard and seized the gold. The Bucharest government kept it for the rest of the war on the pretext that the proceeds would be spent on the care of the Polish refugees now in the country.
The British had been closely watching the Polish gold saga from a distance in hopes that it could be kept out of German hands. When the Poles asked if Britain could help get their national treasure to France, London sent instructions to its embassy in Bucharest to find a ship large enough to carry the heavy cargo. Few vessels were available, but on the afternoon of September 14, the British vice consul in Constana hired the SS Eocene, a 4,000-ton tanker that had been transporting oil from Baku on the Caspian Sea to Greece. Socony-Vacuum Oil, the forerunner of Mobil Oil, had chartered it, and the captain was the Englishman Robert E. Brett. Almost immediately, he received two telephone messages. One was from the German ambassador protesting the transportation of the gold through Romania. The second call was a warning about air attacks. At about 10:00 that night, the vice consul instructed Brett to move his ship to a new berth and keep “full steam up,” so that he could depart on short notice.24
Just after midnight, the train with the Polish gold arrived at the new dock. Since the vessel had no mechanical cranes to move the heavy material, bank employees and local longshoremen started moving the 1,200 cases onto the Eocene. The tanker was not designed for carrying such heavy boxes, which had to be stored wherever possible. In addition to the cargo, twenty-seven passengers, including six women and two children, came aboard. Most of them were Poles who had helped bring the gold to Constana.
By 7:15 A.M., the cargo was finally loaded; but by then six
members of the ship’s original Romanian crew had deserted out of fear that the vessel would be attacked.25 It took several hours to find replacements, and Captain Brett had to pay them hefty bonuses to take on the risky job. Finally just after 4:00 P.M., the Eocene pulled up anchor and headed at full speed for Istanbul, Turkey. As he departed, the captain stayed as long as he could in shallow waters so that if a German U-boat attacked, the ship’s cargo could still be rescued.
German diplomats in Bucharest were outraged when they learned that the Eocene had departed. At 5:30 that afternoon, they sent a cable to Berlin saying, “It has been confirmed from Constana that the English tanker Eocene sailed in empty on 14 September and then set out towards Istanbul. There were fifty Poles on board and fourteen freight cars, three of which contained the gold.”
Without realizing that the Polish gold had already left Romania for Turkey, German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop sent a cable to his ambassador in Bucharest with instructions that it be passed along to the government. The dispatch read: “I draw your attention to the fact that if the Polish gold actually finds itself within Romanian territory, the Romanian government should have it confiscated and secured.”26
After departing Constana, Captain Brett sailed south along the coastline toward Istanbul. On September 16 at 3:30 P.M., the Eocene dropped anchor in the port of Kabataç in the middle of the Bosphorus, which connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Ocean. Directly ahead of the ship was the German embassy, flying a large swastika flag. A German yacht soon began circling the ship, taking pictures from every angle.
No one was sure how the Turkish government would handle the situation. Both sides in the war were leaning on Turkey to join it in the war, so Brett told harbor authorities that the ship was in transit. Fifteen minutes after landing, he contacted the British consul-general in Istanbul and learned that only he would be allowed to leave the ship. The Poles had to remain on board, although local Polish officials could come out to meet them.
Chasing Gold: The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe's Bullion Page 16