Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  Schwedler’s surprise visit to the Klausenkopf currency cache had an unnerving effect on the Gebirgsjäger officers who had been responsible for the burial of the money. They did not care who Schwedler was or what status he had in the Reich – the fact was, the location of the currency was no longer secret and would have to be changed. On Pfeiffer’s orders three new currency caches were therefore prepared in the mountains to replace the original one. According to Captain Neuhauser the work was carried out in broad daylight by three separate groups of officers dressed in civilian clothes. Each group was responsible for its own cache and knew nothing about the localities of the other two caches. Only Neuhauser seems to have known the exact location of each cache. As a further precaution the new caches seem to have been widely dispersed on three separate mountains the Klausenkopf, the Altlachberg and the Simmersberg. The currency was transferred from the old cache (so Neuhauser reported later) in jerrycans from the HKP (the Heereskraftfahrpark or GHQ motor pool), and uprooted tree-stumps were placed on top of each new cache. This meant that there were now at least six or seven Reichsbank caches on the mountainsides above the Walchensee, including the ammunition and gold holes on the Steinriegel as well as the old currency hole and the three latest ones.

  Pfeiffer’s men now dispersed, seeking the refuge of the surrounding villages – all, that is, except one. On the convalescent war veteran, Captain Hans Neuhauser, local boy and forester’s son, fell the irksome duty of standing guard over the buried hoard, seemingly for an indefinite period. At night the captain slept in a cave or in the forest hut. In the day he climbed to the northern edge of the Steinriegel and from there kept watch on the Forest House and the mountain approaches through his binoculars. He had arranged some simple signals with his mother. When the coast was clear and no danger threatened she would hang a white sheet from her bedroom window. If there was any sign of the Americans in the vicinity she would change the sheet for a red eiderdown. Food was brought up to Neuhauser by a lodger at the house, the attractive Yugoslav woman, Vera de Costra, with whom he had formed a close friendship. Every day Vera would climb up to a hollow tree and place a meal inside it. Every evening after dark Captain Neuhauser would creep down to the tree and collect his dinner. And so the days passed.

  The Americans were not long in coming. While the Reichsbank treasure was being safely buried underground, tanks of the US 10th Armored Division were at Schongau, only 30 miles up the road from Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and advancing rapidly. By the time the burial had been completed on 28 April, German troops manning the barricades at Peissenberg had fled, the SS garrison at Oberammergau had deserted and the Bavarian Freedom Movement had taken over the Munich Broadcasting Station.

  The following morning, 29 April, the Americans swept through Oberammergau and Oberau and bore down on Garmisch-Partenkirchen. Colonel Pfeiffer had been put in command of the sector of the Nordalpen front (stretching from Füssen all the way to Tegernsee) which included Garmisch, replacing Colonel Hörl, who was considered an unreliable anti-Nazi. From Army Headquarters he received a radio message: ‘The fate of the Alpine Fortress lies in your hands.’ From higher command in Innsbruck he received a telephone call: ‘Do all that is humanly possible to block the pass between Garmisch and the Tyrol.’ In reality the situation was hopeless. Everywhere there was chaos. Pfeiffer himself had next to no transport or communications, few officers, hardly any weapons or ammunition. His sector of the front stretched for miles and when his car, which drove on wood gas, gave out he had no alternative but to continue on foot. After the war he was to claim that he saw his main job as saving Garmisch – not from the enemy but from destruction. Thousands of refugees had sought sanctuary in Garmisch and some 10,000 wounded lay helpless in the many military hospitals and converted hotels in the area.

  Resistance would be futile and would lead inevitably to the deaths of many of these people and to the senseless destruction of a beautiful town.

  From 19th Army HQ in Imst, Austria, Colonel Pfeiffer received one last order from a Wehrmacht General who warned him that at Field Marshal Kesselring’s direction any failure to block the American advance on Garmisch would be dealt with with the utmost severity. Pfeiffer replied that as a long-serving officer he did not require anyone to tell him what his duty was. Nevertheless he did pass on the order to the Garmisch garrison, commanded by Colonel Luis Hörl: ‘By order of Field Marshal Kesselring the Garmisch area must be defended at Farchant. I am sending 250 officers from the OKH Führer-Reserve at Mittenwald. Colonel Pfeiffer.’ That message arrived at 5 o’clock on the evening of 29 April. But by then the defence of Garmisch was out of Pfeiffer’s hands. Colonel Hörl and a group of veteran Gebirgsjäger officers in the Garmisch barracks, including Major Michael Pössinger, Captain Mucki Clausing and Lieutenant Guntram Licht, had decided that to avoid the senseless destruction of the town Garmisch should be surrendered to the Americans without a shot being fired. That morning 26-year-old Major Pössinger – holder of the Knight’s Cross with Oak Leaves and the German Cross in Gold, and seven times wounded in six years of combat on the eastern and western fronts – headed a surrender delegation which went forward to meet the leading American tanks of the 10th Armored Division advancing on Garmisch.

  Pössinger met the Americans at Oberammergau only just in time. In support of their armored advance into the National Redoubt the Americans had ordered a 200-bomber strike with the object of reducing every town and military target between Oberammergau and Innsbruck to ashes – including, of course, Garmisch-Partenkirchen. The American tank commander told Pössinger that it was too late to turn the bombers back – in two hours they would be overhead. Frantically Pössinger pleaded with him. ‘Also bitte versuchen Sie es,’ he begged, ‘das darf nicht unmöglich sein!’ Eventually the American relented. By radio and field telephone the word was passed to recall the bomber force. Then Major Pössinger and Lieutenant Licht were seized as hostages and tied to the turret of the leading tank. So the advance on Garmisch continued. At every tank barrier the German soldiers laid down their arms and at 6.45 in the evening the Americans rolled triumphantly into Garmisch in a long, squealing column, with Major Pössinger involuntarily at their head. Outside the Rathaus the tanks halted and there Pössinger – the saviour of Garmisch – was seized once more and thrown into the Rathaus cells. So Garmisch, the venue of many important events later in this story, fell without a shot, its pristine, charm unravaged by war.

  Colonel Pfeiffer had not gone forward to confront the Americans. (Indeed he learned later that he had been sentenced to death by Field Marshal Kesselring for his failure to hold Garmisch, but the German front collapsed before the sentence could be carried out.) Back in Mittenwald he was busy organising the emergency evacuation of the barracks there, hustling his Mountain Riflemen up into the mountains where they could – if the need arose, if the order came – carry on the resistance, not as werewolves but as partisan regulars, the role for which they had been trained. But even this soon proved to be a futile gesture. On 30 April Munich fell. All around the villages and townships were being turned into outposts of American military occupation. There was nowhere for Pfeiffer’s Mountain Riflemen to go, nothing for them to do. Sitting on the bare mountainside, exposed to the sleet and the frost, achieving no object and serving no cause, it dawned on Pfeiffer and his men that for them the war was really over. Hitler was dead and Germany was defeated. They could go home.

  Rations and cash were shared out among them. In an emotional farewell Colonel Pfeiffer dismissed his troops for the last time, and with a parting valedictory, ‘God be with you!’ sent them down the mountain, back to their homes and families and empty future.

  But Colonel Pfeiffer himself did not go. He stayed on up in the hills, hiding in the sodden woods, wandering from hut to hut, with only the crows and the deer for company. And in his solitude he must have debated continually with his conscience. For he was still the custodian of the Reichsbank treasure, the wealth of Germany was still his responsibility and
his alone. Down there in the valleys the enemies of the Fatherland would already be out and about, ferreting this way and that, prying into barns and farmyards, asking questions in their hunt for the missing Reichsbank reserves. What was the right course to take? In his eyes the Americans had no right to the treasure, of that he was sure. But who did? At a rough count, the number of people who knew the whereabouts of the treasure could be counted on the fingers of both hands. Sitting on 15 million dollars’ worth of buried treasure, Colonel Pfeiffer considered his own and his country’s cloudy future, and the best or the proper thing to do.

  And down in the valleys, coming up fast behind the fighting vanguard, picking up clues like cross-country paper-chasers, the American Gold Rush teams moved in.

  4. In Quest of Gold, Silber and Foreign Exchange

  All through the last days of April a bright and unseasonably warm spring sun shone down on the fighting men on the Alpine front. For a moment it seemed that the war in the National Redoubt, far from erupting in the Armageddon of blood and steel which a few diehard Nazis hoped and predicted, would draw to a limp conclusion in a vacation-like atmosphere of almost peacetime euphoria. The tracks of the Sherman tanks squealed and rattled along the road banks bright with Alpine flowers forced into bloom along the battle front by the premature summery weather. The doughboys of the American 10 th Armored, advancing due south, were happy to feel the warm sun on their faces. For Gauleiter and stormtrooper, GI and DP, tankman and civilian alike, the last balmy days of total war in the Third Reich induced a sense of unreality, a common desire to get this thing over, one way or another, as soon as possible. For Colonel Pfeiffer and Captain Neuhauser of the Mountain Infantry, custodian and sentinel over the Reich treasure, the weather made their fugitive existence in the high woods more bearable, but served also to prolong their gnawing insecurity and doubt: where should they go from here, and what should they do with the treasure?

  Then suddenly the spring-like days of late April gave way to a return to winter weather. The temperature plummeted and it began to snow heavily. The sky was blanketed by thick grey snow clouds and dense mists rolled through the valleys and gorges of the mountains, concealing the opposing groundforces from each other and obscuring their gunlayers’ targets. The high roads turned icy, the low roads turned to slush, and a raw, dank wind from the Tyrol whipped across the highways of the American advance. Three thousand feet up in the mountains above Mittenwald fresh snow covered the gold and the currency caches, and the bleak weather forced Captain Neuhauser and Colonel Pfeiffer to look to their personal survival as their first overriding priority. Perhaps it was this which promoted the Colonel’s next move – or perhaps it was his continuing responsibility for the military situation in the area under his command, or even the burden of the State treasure which still weighed heavily with him. At any rate he – or someone purporting to be him – seems to have felt compelled to try and make contact with the enemy advance units known to be bivouacked in Garmisch – possibly to discuss terms for the surrender of the town of Mittenwald, which controlled the narrow Mittenwald valley leading across the Austrian border to Innsbruck and (farther to the south) the Brenner Pass through the Tyrol into Italy.

  To parley with the enemy, one of Peiffer’s officers seems to have used a means which was relatively little employed on the German side – the public telephone. The Allies had been using the telephone to wage war against the Germans ever since they had first crossed the German frontiers and discovered that, no matter how ruined and depopulated the area might be, the telephone service was generally in working order – a technological idiosyncrasy they put to good use to instruct, threaten, bully or demoralise the German commander of their next objective along the line of advance. British and American field commanders fell into the habit of carrying a pocketful of German coins to put in the public pay-phones with which they communicated their instructions to the Bürgermeister or Army commanders of the towns or cities in their path: surrender and put out white flags or we will raze the place to the ground. Even the Russians sometimes, used the phone. Only ten days previously a Russian officer in an abandoned apartment in the Siesmensstadt district of East Berlin had put a call through to Dr Goebbels in the Führer’s bunker and actually spoke to the Propaganda Minister long enough to ask him: ‘When and in what direction will you be running away from Berlin? Remember this, Herr Goebbels. We’ll find you anywhere you run, and the scaffold is ready and waiting for you.’

  The phone was simple and cheap, it saved a lot of lives and property, and it often did the trick. But it was rare that it was used the other way round, for few Germans cared to ring up the pursuit forces bearing down on them. Colonel Pfeiffer (or one of his officers, for Peiffer himself spoke no English) seems to have been one of the few exceptions. Quite what happened is not entirely clear. What is certain is that the telephone system between Mittenwald and Garmisch was still in working order when the Americans took Garmisch and that at about 7 p.m. on the evening of 30 April, just as it was getting dark, one of Colonel Pfeiffer’s English-speaking officers, after consuming a considerable quantity of alcohol, put a call through to Clausing’s Post Hotel in Garmisch. Purporting to be Colonel Pfeiffer, he spoke with a waiter and demanded to be put on to an ‘honourable American officer’. Clausing’s was – or had been until that morning – the fashionable watering hole in Garmisch. When the town was surrendered without a fight the hotel was captured with its windows, cellar and chef intact and was promptly designated a temporary field headquarters for the 10th Armored Division. When the frightened waiter made it known to the American Headquarters staff that a call had come through from somewhere forward in the enemy lines, the Division’s G-2 (Intelligence) staff officer, Lieutenant-Colonel William E. Eckles, who had just that moment arrived in Garmisch, was summoned to the phone. Eckles picked up the handset and a crackly voice with a German accent announced in English: ‘This is Colonel Pfeiffer, German Army, Mittenwald.’

  It is possible that at about this time Mittenwald was actually under American artillery bombardment from guns sited near Garmisch-Partenkirchen, and that this may have had something to do with the telephone call. The Americans regarded Mittenwald as the gateway to the National Redoubt and Colonel Pfeiffer’s Kaserne as a real threat to their advance into that legendary stronghold. So a few salvoes were hurled in that direction as a means of weakening German resolve, and in the process some priceless old houses in Goethestrasse were destroyed and three people killed, including a 12-year-old boy.

  Colonel Eckles later recollected his telephone conversation with the German quite clearly. ‘He stated that he wanted to talk with an “honourable” American officer and he believed that I was honourable and that I could help him,’ Eckles recalled. ‘He further stated that he knew of me and that I could remove a great burden from his mind. He asked that I take his surrender and place him and his staff under my personal supervision. At that time I was very busy with operational considerations and this call did not appeal to me as anything I should or could get involved with. Our job was killing Germans if they refused to surrender or insisted on fighting. So I told the Colonel that I could not accept his surrender and that our forces were coming through Mittenwald next morning and he and his staff should surrender when they arrived. He was upset, but I hung up the telephone on him. That was the last I heard from him for about two weeks.’

  Nothing had been said of the 15 million dollars’ worth of gold and currency buried in the hills behind Mittenwald, and Eckles had certainly heard nothing about them.

  The Americans entered Mittenwald the next morning after a Wehrmacht sergeant and the local baker waving a white flag surrendered the town to them. None of Pfeiffer’s officers was there to greet them, let alone surrender. With his military sphere of responsibility at a virtual end, Colonel Pfeiffer had sent his adjutant to convene a last special meeting with a dozen or so of his officers at the old mountain hut on the Klausenkopf in order to issue his final instructions concerning his remaining
responsibility – the Reichsbank treasure. It seems that not only Colonel Pfeiffer and his gold men (including perhaps Lüder von Blücher) were present at this meeting, but also Colonel Rauch, formerly of Hitler’s Chancellery. The first thing to be decided at this last order group was a cover story in case any of them were captured. It was agreed that in such an event their interrogators should simply be told that an SS unit had arrived, dug up the treasure and transported it lock, stock and barrel to an unknown place farther into the National Redoubt. Such a story would not only preserve the anonymity of the gold and currency caches, but absolve the Gebirgsjäger officers from further questioning.

  According to a statement made later by Captain Neuhauser, who was also present at the meeting, a second matter cropped up in the discussion which seemed curiously at odds with the spirit of the first. In an interview with a German journalist in 1952 Neuhauser claimed that one of Pfeiffer’s officers was asked to obtain travel passes (Ausweise) for Rauch and Pfeiffer and was tipped the wink that the considerable sum required to bribe the American occupation authorities in Garmisch into providing them could be found from the US paper currency stacked in abundance in one or other of the currency caches on the Klausenkopf Needless to say, Neuhauser’s statement is uncorroborated.