Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  Pfeiffer’s first intimation of what was in store for him came from Colonel Rauch. He had first met Rauch during a duty visit to Berchtesgaden earlier in the war. Now, under very different circumstances, he unexpectedly met him again. Colonel Rauch arrived at the Kaserne in a lorry from Berlin with news that a convoy bringing the Reichsbank treasure was at that very moment on its way to the Kaserne and that henceforth Pfeiffer’s sacred duty would be to hide that treasure and guard it for the sake of the Reich for as long as there was a German nation in existence.

  Pfeiffer, who was already shaping up to the impending prospect of a last-ditch battle to defend the district against the advancing Allies, could have done without this extra burden. But he was a soldier and a patriot. He would do what had to be done to the best of his ability.

  During the evening of 20 April – Hitler’s birthday – Colonel Pfeiffer summoned half a dozen or so of his most trusted officers into his simple, white-walled office in the Kaserne. Young, able, front-line veterans – most of them recovering, like their Colonel, from wounds incurred in the savage fighting on the Russian or Balkan fronts – they stood in a line opposite their commanding officer’s desk, with a framed picture of the Führer looking down from the wall behind them, and listened in mounting astonishment as the Colonel briefed them about their forthcoming task – the last operational task, in all probability, that they would be called upon to perform in the war, and certainly the most bizarre.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ Pfeiffer announced gravely. ‘We are faced with a task of great national importance – a task you must take with the utmost seriousness.’

  A portion of the State treasure, he told them, representing a sum roughly equal to that which the Bavarian State had donated to the Reich in 1933, was at this moment on its way from Berlin – was expected in Mittenwald at any minute, in fact – and the immense responsibility for keeping this treasure out of the hands of the enemy had fallen on himself and his fellow officers.

  ‘Our job now,’ Pfeiffer informed them, ‘is to ensure the safe custody of this treasure. We want to make such a thorough job of hiding it that finding it will be next to impossible.’

  Once a new Bavarian State had been formed, he went on, the treasure would be recovered and used to finance it. Until then the matter had to be treated with absolute secrecy. Colonel Pfeiffer then outlined his plan, and afterwards solemnly shook hands with each officer in turn and swore him to secrecy. A few hours later the Opel-Blitz trucks of the Berlin Police Department, with 15,000,000 dollars’ worth of gold and foreign notes packed under their tightly-drawn grey awnings, drew up outside the officers’ mess at the end of the nine-day journey from the capital.

  With the Americans already on the point of overrunning Bavaria, the great need now was for speed. A space for the treasure had been cleared in the old bowling alley in the cellar of the Casino (the leisure area of the officers’ mess). There were actually two bowling alleys in the cellar, rough wooden runs of the traditional kind, getting on in years, with worn and warped boards, lumpy bowls and heavily loaded wooden skittles, all laid out in a room of dark, wood-panelled walls with chairs and scrubbed white tables grouped around them. This is where the remaining reserves of Hitler’s Reich were brought from the trucks for temporary safekeeping before plans for their final concealment were worked out.

  The unloading was carried out under cover of darkness. It was no mean task. Gold is one of the densest and heaviest metals, and though the gold bars were rather smaller than ordinary house bricks, each one weighed about 251b – almost five times the weight of a house brick. By the time the grey gold bags – packed two bars to a bag, each bag tied and sealed with a lead seal – and the boxes of gold coins and bars, and bags of bank-notes (nearly a hundred of them), had been laid out in the bowling alley, the sky was lightening over the gaunt peaks of the Karwendel Mountains and the camp bugler was trumpeting the call for Appel on the parade ground. The police escort, their duty done, were dismissed: the little line of Opel-Blitz trucks trundled out of the Kaserne, turned left on to the Mittenwald road and disappeared into the dawn and out of the story.

  The Reichsbank officials who had come down from Berlin – Emil Januszewski, along with George Netzeband and Friedrich Will, who had caught up with the convoy at Mittenwald after returning from Munich with the Reichsmark printing plates and banknote printing paper still in their possession – stayed behind. Though responsibility for the treasure now rested firmly on the capable shoulders of Colonel Pfeiffer, the bank officials remained at Mittenwald to represent the Reichsbank’s interests. Their first act was to count the hoard of gold and currency now piled up in the bowling alley. To the consternation and embarrassment of at least two of the three officials involved, they discovered that one bag containing two gold bars had already gone missing, almost certainly on the journey from Munich to Mittenwald. A recount failed to make up the number of gold bags to be the correct total of 365 and a hurried local search failed to locate the missing bars. Had the Berlin police escort made off with them? Or was there a thief – and a traitor – in their midst? For the moment there seemed no way of knowing and little time to find out.

  Colonel Pfeiffer was now sitting on 364 bags of gold (making 728 bars all told and worth some $10,000,000), 94 sacks of foreign currency (including over $2,400,000 in US dollars), and 12 other boxes and cases containing miscellaneous gold and currency – and this was not to be the end of it. At the Mittenwald Kaserne the Colonel now considered his next move. The treasure had been gathered in, but the rapidly worsening military situation on the Bavarian front threatened at any moment to distract – or even prevent – its concealment.

  The so-called National Redoubt was proving to be less a fortress than a bolt-hole – a refuge and an escape route for privileged Nazis who have most to lose by capture and most to gain by flight. To the Supreme Allied Commander, General Eisenhower, however, all this was as yet far from clear. He knew that Hitler had elected to remain in Berlin and conduct his last stand from there, and he knew that the drive by Patton’s Third Army down the Danube valley into Czechoslovakia and Austria had cut the north-south link between the capital and the area of the Redoubt. But he was taking no chances. In his view the Redoubt should be attacked and taken before any Nazi resistance movement could man and organize its set defensive positions. On his orders the advance into the Redoubt – carried out by General Patch’s Seventh Army, with elements of the Third Army on its left flank and of the French First Army on its right – assumed the highest military priority. On 22 April – the fateful date on which SS General Spacil had robbed the Reichsbank in Berlin and the Reichsbank gold convoy had finally reached Mittenwald – Patch launched his attack.

  Crossing the Danube and simultaneously advancing on Munich and on the Alpine Redoubt, the Seventh Army swept all before it. ‘Push on and push hard,’ the US VI Corps Commander, General Brooks, had exhorted. ‘This is a pursuit, not an attack.’

  At extraordinary speed – up to 40 mph on occasion – American armored units raced towards the mountains, the tanks festooned with infantrymen holding on to their helmets. German resistance melted away before the weight and speed of the American advance. Ulm (near Rommel’s home town) and Landsberg (where Hitler wrote Mein Kampf) soon fell. Ingolstadt and Augsburg were threatened. The pursuit of the Germans, in the words of the Seventh Army’s After Action Report, ‘seemed like a fantasy of violence and speed and extravagant incident’. Rumour and counter-rumour, order and counter-order reached the remoter German military outposts like ripples from a distant storm. On 23 April the 10th Armored Division, pointed like an arrow southwards towards Garmisch-Partenkirchen, captured 28 towns between sunrise and sunset.

  On 24 April Colonel Hörl, commander of the garrison at Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a famous Bavarian winter resort and the nearest sizeable town to Mittenwald, drove over to the Mittenwald Kaserne to discuss the deteriorating situation with Colonel Pfeiffer. They agreed that the German forces in the area were too weak and too poor
ly equipped to resist the full weight of the American Army. Only 75 per cent of the men carried small arms of any kind, and of these only 33 per cent had a full supply of ammunition, the rest having to make do with precisely six rounds apiece. The two colonels reached the conclusion that the best use they could put their forces to would be the protection of the civilian population and the numerous military hospitals in the area and the preservation of law and order. The next day Colonel Hörl (a secret member of the local German resistance) assumed overall command of the Garmisch area.

  It was not only the front that was collapsing in Bavaria. Society itself seemed in a state of disintegration. Colonel Pfeiffer, the appointed guardian of the Third Reich’s riches, was witness to the collapse of the very fabric of the Reich all round him. He was obliged to spare 20 of his officers for the undignified task of controlling the so-called Bonzcnflucht (the flight of the Party favourites), the ever-increasing influx of Nazi Party officials and government civil servants on the run, the continuous stream of demoralised Wehrmacht units and rear-echelon staffs rolling chaotically southwards from one mountain village to another. A motorised patrol which was sent out to intercept fleeing Nazis and re-commandeer their vehicles found a huge bus packed with the furniture of a Nazi bigwig called Christian Weber (a hulking ex-horse dealer and bar-room bouncer who had been a close friend of Hitler in the old days) and a motor car laden with carpets belonging to Reich Marshal Goering. At nearby Oberammergau, scene of the world-renowned ten-yearly Passion Play, the 600-strong staff of SS General Hans Kammler (head of the V1 and V2 rocket programmes and special representative of Adolf Hitler) were on the point of desertion. Colonel Pfeiffer is recorded as saying at this time: ‘The Party is finished. Its behaviour is unworthy. It is not worth spilling the blood of a single mountain soldier for it.’ On that same day, 26 April, when the Colonel was overseeing the operation intended to conceal the Reichsbank treasure, another thought might well have occurred to him: if it was no longer worth fighting for the Third Reich, perhaps it was no longer worth preserving the Third Reich’s treasure for the Third Reich alone.

  For the moment at least Colonel Pfeiffer was prepared to do his duty. The treasure clearly could not stay in the Kaserne. But where exactly, in all that tangled topography of Alpine ridges, valleys, cols and woods, could it best be hidden? It had never been part of Funk’s plan that the treasure should be buried. Nor was it what Pfeiffer had in mind at first either. His first thought was to store it in the headquarters of a local army engineer unit – possibly the 54th Engineer Battalion which was based in Mittenwald – suitably camouflaged as a pile of army stores. But that could only be a temporary solution. Somewhere a permanently secure hiding place had to be found.

  Pfeiffer sought the advice of the best qualified people in the area – the foresters. The Head Forester of Mittenwald was a certain Otto Klotz, an ardent Nazi whom Pfeiffer had already approached with a request for help in hiding – should the occasion arise – the Economics Minister and Reichsbank President, Walther Funk, the Chancellery Secretary Lammers and twenty other senior officers of the German High Command. Klotz had suggested two private hunting lodges high up on a part of the mountains called the Vereinsalm – one belonging to a prominent Munich banker by the name of August Baron von Finck, the other to a former Minister of Economics, Dr Kurt Schmitt – both of them big enough and comfortable enough to accommodate such a large and distinguished company. He also recommended a guide, a local man called Josef Veit, a poacher turned gamekeeper who had been employed by the Baron as a hunter and in the past had taken such Nazi luminaries as Goering, von Papen and von Neurath on hunting expeditions in the surrounding forest and knew every inch of the Karwendel Mountains.

  On 23 April Veit, now a medical orderly at the Reservists Hospital in Mittenwald, received a visit from one of the members of the proposed party, a tall, swarthy, dark-haired and rather menacing individual in civilian clothes who spoke with a Bavarian accent and looked like a refugee and who turned out to be none other than Lieutenant-Colonel Friedrich Rauch, late of the SS and Schutzpolizei in Berlin. Rauch, who had left the capital at the same time as the gold convoy, had made his way to Berchtesgaden where he obtained his discharge papers in an attempt, presumably, to dissociate himself from the SS (all membership of which, under Allied occupation laws, fell into the Automatic Arrest category). Whatever it was that Rauch was now up to, he terrified the wits out of Veit. Rauch was bullying and threatening. Veit was to conduct Funk, Lammers and the twenty officers to the huts on the Vereinsalm, Rauch told him. If he did as he was told he would be given his army discharge papers and be a free man. But Veit stood his ground.

  ‘I can lead you up to the Vereinsalm,’ he told Rauch.

  ‘But I can’t hand over the keys to the hunting lodges without written orders from Baron Finck and Herr Reichsminister Schmitt.’

  Rauch’s reply was a sharp and undeniable order. ‘Have provisions ready at 3 o’clock,’ he snapped, ‘and take us to the huts!’

  For poor Veit this presented an intolerable dilemma. If he did not do as he was told he would probably be shot. But what if he did do as he was told? What would the Americans do with a member of the German medical corps if they met him in uniform carrying a weapon in the company of two Ministers of the Third Reich and twenty General Staff Officers of the OKW and OKH? They would probably shoot him too. In vain he appealed to Klotz. Klotz could offer no sympathy and no alternative. He turned to his Chief Medical Officer at the hospital. If he didn’t get lost quick, the doctor advised him, he was done for. In the end Veit decided that discretion was the better part of duty and took to the hills. He was not seen again until some weeks after the Americans had occupied the area.

  With Veit’s disappearance the Funk escape plan petered out. The Vereinsalm was under deep snow and without a guide there was little chance of Funk’s party finding their own way to the huts. Pfeiffer was free to concentrate his attention on the matter of the treasure alone. For advice about this he now turned to the other Chief Forester in the region, Hans Neuhauser Sr, Chief Forester of Walchensee, who lived in the Forest House at Einsiedl, a tiny place some 20 kilometres north of Mittenwald, at the south-west edge of Lake Walchen. Pfeiffer had good reason to turn his eyes in that direction. For one of his officers was the Chief Forester’s son – a connection too good to ignore.

  Captain Hans Neuhauser, the forester’s 30-year-old son, had a war record every bit as remarkable as that of his superior officer, Colonel Pfeiffer. A graduate of Munich University, and a member of the Nazi Party since 1938, he had served with distinction in the 1st Gebirgsjäger Division in campaigns in Poland, Yugoslavia, Russia and the Balkans. For bravery under fire he had been decorated with the Close Combat Medal in Silver and the German Cross in Gold. Wounded at the front at the end of 1944, he was sent back to Germany in March 1945 and was still convalescing at his parents’ house at Einsiedl when the Reichsbank reserves arrived in the area. Neuhauser was no longer on the active service list, and may not even have been on the official roll-call of the Mountain Infantry School in Mittenwald, but this did not deter Colonel Pfeiffer from giving him his marching orders. On about 23 April the Colonel called at the Forest House to discuss with Neuhauser father and son a suitable spot in the locality in which to hide the Reichsbank reserves. Frau Neuhauser recalled later: ‘Colonel Pfeiffer came to see us and told us what was wanted. Of course, we all respected him as an honourable and courageous person at that time . . .’ Then she added bitterly: ‘That gold caused the breaking-up of my family. It was the death of my husband, and it sent both myself and my son to jail . . . Yet we were guilty of nothing more serious than allowing it to be stored for 24 hours in our house.’

  It was finally agreed (against Colonel Pfeiffer’s better judgement, it seems) that the Forest House itself would be ideal as an intermediate cache for the treasure before it was taken up into the mountains to its final resting place. Captain Neuhauser was ordered to report to the Kaserne in Mittenwald and there he
was let into the old bowling alley and shown the great stack of boxes, cases, crates and sacks containing Germany’s precious nest-egg. Neuhauser’s job, Pfeiffer baldly informed him, was I/C burial party. Neuhauser was not overpleased to be burdened with the responsibility of interring the wealth of the Fatherland at the eleventh hour and made some demur. His complaint fell on deaf ears. In overall charge of the operation Pfeiffer appointed Major Rupert Braun. Other officers involved in what was to prove one of the most mysterious treasure burials since the golden age of piracy were Major Rott and Captains Otto Reindl, Walter Marti, Karl Lutz, Heinz Rüger and Johann Rauter. It is possible that another convalescent Gebirgsjäger veteran, Captain Lüder von Blücher, who was to play a significant part in the subsequent fate of the Reichsbank treasure, was also involved, if only in an advisory capacity, on the recommendation of Pfeiffer’s adjutant.

  For the next few days the Forest House became the centre of feverish activity. It was a picturesque place, constructed partly of wood in Bavarian chalet style, and after the local hotel and the nearby sawmill it was the biggest building in Einsiedl. Einsiedl in German means ‘hermitage’ or ‘solitary retreat’. In normal times it was a quiet spot for anglers and country ramblers. Its seclusion made it particularly suitable for the role it was called upon to perform now. There were few people about and next to no traffic passing by on the road. The grey waters of Lake Walchen lapped gently at the edge of the Forest House grounds. At the back rose a dark fir-clad ridge called the Steinriegel, and behind that the 3,500-foot-high Klausenkopf, one of several peaks stretching away to the east. The Forest House at Einsiedl, in short, was big enough to hold the considerable bulk of the Reichsbank treasure, remote enough for this to be done without attracting undue attention, and close enough to the sites selected for the burial – spots high up among the dense woods of the Steinriegel – for the transfer to be accomplished with the utmost speed and secrecy.