Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  Further search of the Steinriegel proved fruitless and Netzeband and Will, now almost as mystified about the fate of the Reichsbank treasure as their interrogators, were allowed to return to Mittenwald. They were still under town arrest, but a month later Will succeeded in making his getaway and headed north for Hesse, where he planned to stay at his daughter’s home. En route to Hesse he tried twice to hand over to the appropriate Reichsbank authorities the rough outline of the story of the Reichsbank shipment he had prepared with Netzeband and hidden in the coal cellar in Mittenwald. On both occasions the Reichsbank branches refused to accept the document, due to the tricky and potentially troublesome nature of its contents. In September Will set off from Hesse to rejoin his family, who were living in the Russian Zone. He had no papers of any kind and consequently was soon apprehended by the Russians and interned. He was released after eight days, however, and allowed to resume his journey to his family home. Not until 1952, at the time of the Munich CID enquiry into this case, was he able to make public his account of events, and never at any time did he discover the full truth of the mystery which baffled even him.

  In fact, contrary to Will’s stated belief, the Gebirgsjäger officers who had buried the Reichsbank treasure had not fallen in battle but into the hands of the Americans. Arrested in Mittenwald on 22 May, shortly before Will and his colleague, they had undergone interrogation by Waring and his team at about the same time, and in the end it was the officer in charge of the gold transport between Mittenwald and Einsiedl, Captain Heinz Rüger, who had cracked and been first to sing.

  At first Rüger had protested that he knew nothing about the Reichsbank gold. Perhaps, he suggested, Major Braun could help. ‘Er weiss auch nichts,’ the sceptical interrogator replied. ‘He knows nothing either.’ Well, perhaps Major Rott . . . Like the Reichsbank officials, and like Pfeiffer and the von Blüchers, the Gebirgsjäger officers, acting out of the finest motives of duty and patriotism, could not easily bring themselves to betray their country’s national treasure to the enemy, even though the war was now over. But persistent interrogation in the military government gaol in Garmisch wore down the young captain’s resolve. By 5 June he had told the Americans all he knew. He had even gone so far as to offer to lead them right to the gold hole itself.

  Although there is no doubt that it was Rüger who pinpointed the gold cache for the Americans, the local populace always blamed Hans Forstreicher, the lodger at the Forest House who had watched the mule train climb up the mountainside with the gold, for betraying the whereabouts of the Reichsbank bullion. Frau Neuhauser, for one, always spoke of Forstreicher with unrestrained contempt and bitterness as a man who had betrayed both his country and his people. ‘Of course,’ she said, ‘it is generally assumed that Forstreicher sold the information to the Americans and received a substantial reward in return.’ The reward, Frau Neuhauser claimed, was sufficient to enable Forstreicher to buy a bar – a rather shabby bar in a rather shabby district of Munich along the Pariserstrasse, but a bar of his own nonetheless. Hans Forstreicher himself denied this. ‘The only thing I got out of it all was a load of hay for my horses,’ he was to claim. ‘I used to keep a few trotters in those days and they were practically starving, so I asked the Americans for some fodder. They very kindly gave me as much as I needed.’

  The Americans were now ready to pounce. In Mittenwald on 6 June, Josef Veit (the local hunter who back in April had fled to the hills when he was ordered by Colonel Rauch to prepare a hideout for Funk, Lammers and other top-ranking Nazis) was told by the Americans to report at the Post Hotel at 6 a.m. the next morning and to bring from Captain Rüger’s wife, who lived in the town, shoes, socks and warm clothing for her husband. Early on the following morning, 7 June, another well-known Mittenwald local, Josef Pinzl (the 57-year-old pig keeper who had encountered the gold convoy on its way from the Kaserne to the Forest House) was rudely wakened by a loud banging on his front door.

  Pinzl was not in the best of shape. He had been in bed for some weeks recovering from meths poisoning caused – so he said – by accidentally drinking methylated spirits in mistake for schnapps. When he opened the door he found an American officer standing there and saw an American Army jeep with Captain Rüger and Josef Veit in it parked outside on the road. The officer, who spoke fluent German, ordered Pinzl to get dressed and come with them to Einsiedl. The pig keeper’s knowledge of the local terrain, and his chance encounter with the gold, had persuaded the Americans that he might be of some use to the gold recovery operation. Moreover, he was now a paid informer of US Army Intelligence. He put on his clothes, shut the front door behind him, and got into the jeep. Then they set off, bouncing along the valley road towards Einsiedl, past the Gebirgsjäger barracks where the gold had first been delivered, up and round the snaking forest-lined bends beyond Wallgau, till they came up to the Forest House at Einsiedl. Here, by prior arrangement, they met up with a platoon of C Company, 55th Armored Engineering Battalion, 10th Armored Division, who had arrived from Garmisch equipped, on Veit’s advice, with mine detectors – ostensibly as a precaution in case the area around the cache had been mined rather than as a means of locating the gold. Captain George Garwood was the CO of C Company, which supplied the work detail. The operation itself was under the overall command of Major William R. Geiler, Divisional Engineer (now a Judge in the Supreme Court of the State of New York). With them was Captain Walter Dee, Intelligence Officer for 10th Armored G-2, the section which had masterminded the recovery. One of the Americans told Veit that the matter was now almost finished, the German officers had confessed everything and one of them would lead them to the gold.

  The jeep with Rüger, Veit and Pinzl led the way. They headed back down the road till they came to the Jachenau turn, a few hundred yards beyond the Forest House. They turned left there, then almost immediately right again, up a rough forestry track that ascended in a southerly direction through thick forest, then took a left fork that led eastwards and climbed steeply towards the summit of the Steinriegel, some 300 to 400 feet above the level of the road below. The jeep crawled up the incline till it could carry its burden no farther. Then the occupants got out and plodded up towards the summit on foot. The empty jeep followed behind. Near the summit they met up again with the platoon of soldiers and the officers in charge.

  Fifteen minutes after they had reached the target area, just at one side of the track, Captain Rüger gave the order for the mine detectors to be switched on. In a short while one of the detectors emitted a warning whistle and the soldiers began to dig gingerly down into the soft mountain earth. But there was no mine and no gold; all they uncovered was a moss-covered stone buried some way down. Something had triggered off the detectors, however. Mine detectors cannot detect absolutely pure gold, but most gold contains a little iron ore and it was this infinitesimal quantity of iron that was now picked up by the sensitive detectors. Inching forward very slowly, step by step, the soldiers moved the mine detectors over the forest floor between the ferns and sapling trees and rocky outcrops, and the whistle persisted and intensified as they approached a large tree stump some eight to ten metres away. The cause of the whistle seemed to come from beneath the stump, and the soldiers began to scoop away at the roots with their spades in an effort to dig the stump out of the ground. To their astonishment they found that the stump was not rooted in the ground at all and it only required the application of muscle power to heave it out of the way. The soil underneath was loose and yielding and the soldiers began to dig into it with mounting excitement until one of them uncovered a soggy grey burlap bag with the words REICHSBANK HAUPTKASSE stencilled on it.

  It was more than one man could manage to lift the bag out of the earth, for it weighed over fifty pounds. Inside were two 25-pound bars of gold, gleaming with a bright burnished lustre in the dappled woodland sunshine. With whoops of joy the GIs of C Company dug away at the Reichsbank gold cache on the Steinriegel until they had uncovered a hole measuring six foot deep and square – a hole whi
ch Major Geiler in his subsequent report was to describe as ‘expertly camouflaged . . . a hasty but efficient job’. In due course all 364 bags containing a total of 728 bars of gold bullion weighing 9 tons and worth $10,000,000 had been exhumed and lay in an untidy heap at the side of the forest track.

  It is not often that a group of young men are given the opportunity to act out their boyhood dreams and dig up a genuine treasure hoard. That warm idyllic June day on the wooded slopes above Lake Walchen, the American Armored Engineers, with the war behind them and most of their adult life still to come, whooped and danced around the treasure hole like children on a picnic outing, their cries and laughter echoing among the trees as the solemn Germans looked on. Someone produced a camera and they all posed, grinning and carefree, with bullion bars worth $15,000 apiece in their hands and not a thought in their heads. They moved out of the shade of the trees into the brighter light beside the track and bunched together for a group photograph to commemorate the occasion: Major Geiler, Divisional Engineer, beaming hugely; Captain Garwood, Company Commander, pulling on a Lucky Strike; Captain Dee, Intelligence Officer, taking the weight of a bullion bar on his right shoulder; GIs in steel helmets and forage caps and sunglasses; mustachioed Josef Veit, poacher turned gamekeeper, in a Bavarian trilby; burly Josef Pinzl, pig keeper, fresh from his sickbed and well wrapped in a convalescent garb of Bavarian jacket, waistcoat and button-up cardigan. Only Captain Rüger was missing. Perhaps the shame of it all was too much for him. Perhaps it was he who took the photos.

  After recovery the gold was formally handed over to Major Geiler and Captain Dee. Jeeps were summoned up and the gold loaded on and driven down the Steinriegel to the road. There was so much gold it required a number of round trips before all 728 bars had been brought down the mountain. The gold was reloaded on to two-and-a-half-ton trucks, covered with tarpaulins and guarded by GIs armed with carbines sitting up top. One of the guards was Private first class Vahn Berberian. As he posed for a last photograph in the back of one of the trucks, holding in his hands a bullion bar worth $15,000, he was heard to comment: ‘I’d sure like to have just a little of it.’ Then the convoy drove back to Mittenwald, dropped off Pinzl and Veit – who received a thank-you note and an empty gold bag as a souvenir – and disappeared in the direction of Garmisch.

  For obvious reasons the mission was now shrouded in the profoundest secrecy. Nine tons of gold was a target for anybody and everybody. That night and the following day the gold remained under guard in Divisional Headquarters at Garmisch. Then, on Saturday, 9 June, it was hauled from Garmisch to 7th Army HQ in Munich, using several two-and-a-half ton trucks. Years later one of the convoy escorts, Louis J. Graziano, 55th Armored Engineer Battalion, remembered: ‘The operation took one complete day. The intersections along the way were guarded by tanks and half-tracks. We deposited the gold in a gaol-house, this I remember well, because there were three sets of gates which we had to go through, and we were all frisked on the way out. The gold was in sacks, two gold bars in each sack. Then we left to go back to our outfits.’

  Before returning to Garmisch, the two 10th Armored officers were given a receipt for the safe handover of their precious consignment. It read:

  G-5 7TH ARMY, 9 JUNE 1945.

  Received of Major William R. Geiler, 55th Armd Engr Bn and Captain Walter R. Dee, G-2 sec. seven hundred and twenty eight bars (364 bags) of gold bullion. Total value unknown.

  Signed Robert P. Rowe Lt. Col. FD

  G-5, HQ 7th Army

  The next day the gold was driven up to Augsburg. There it was loaded on to a convoy together with a haul of non-Reichsbank gold and an assortment of foreign paper currency and driven to the Foreign Exchange Depository in the Reichsbank building in Frankfurt, where it arrived on the evening of 10 June. The convoy was unloaded, an inventory taken and each item painstakingly checked into the Currency Section. The 728 bars of Reichsbank gold dug up on the Steinriegel had thus ended up exactly where they should have – in the main strong room of the FED in Frankfurt.

  And yet it was on the hillside near Einsiedl that, as the 728 bars passed into history, a myth was born. The myth, thriving on rumour, speculation and ignorance, persisted and grew until, in the absence of any official denial, it came to be rooted as an apparent fact – a fact which was finally preserved and pickled in the Guinness Book of Records in 1957 under the heading ‘ROBBERY: Biggest Unsolved’.

  The greatest robbery on record was of the German National Gold Reserves in Bavaria by a combine of US military personnel and German civilians in June 1945, A total of 730 gold bars valued at £3,528,000 together with six sacks of bank-notes and 25 boxes of platinum bars and precious stones disappeared in transit but none of those responsible has been brought to trial.

  In fact, a monumental robbery did indeed take place, but it did not include the 728 gold bars. Though no official denial was ever issued, the evidence for a refutal had always existed in the official records. In 1976 this evidence came to light. It took the form of a Secret Report in the Washington Archives entitled Register of Valuables in the Custody of the Foreign Exchange Depository, Frankfurt AIM, Germany. Under shipment 27G was an entry which read ‘7th US Army – 10 June 1945 – Wallgau – 364’. And in the margin someone had appended a handwritten gloss which simply noted: ‘728 gold bars’.

  The consequence of the false legend surrounding the fate of these 728 gold bars cannot be underestimated. It served both as a diversionary smoke-screen for the perpetration of robberies of other valuables hardly less substantial in the same area at about this time, and it acted as a red herring which lured subsequent investigators off the right track into a blind alley. These belated investigations overlooked the crime that had taken place and instead cast about in confusion in an attempt to solve a crime that had not. It is probably for this reason that no one has ever been arrested, charged or tried in connection with the real robbery of the Reichsbank reserves – the greatest unsolved robbery in history.

  For security reasons news of the recovery of the Reichsbank gold from the Steinriegel on 7 June was not released until more than a fortnight later. On 23 June the 10th Armored Division’s weekly newspaper Tiger’s Tales, published in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, carried a three-quarter-page column and two photos concerning the incident. The Army news story was substantially accurate but contained one glaring and significant anomaly. This was in a paragraph which read: ‘Discovery of the bullion followed a tip given by an SS Lieutenant-General who told interrogators that 25 boxes of gold had been moved between 25 April and 2 May from the Reichsbank at Munich to Mittenwald where it had been stored briefly in the Casino. Subsequently, he said, the gold was moved into the mountain by trucks and mules. He did not know the exact location of the cache.’

  It is quite true that 25 boxes of gold had been moved from the Munich Reichsbank to Mittenwald on 25 April. These were the 25 boxes which on 22 April had been brought by Reichsbank Director Rosenberg-Lipinski from the Konstanz Reichsbank to Munich and from there taken on to Mittenwald by Reichsbank official Mielke. Like the rest of the gold stored in the Casino at Mittenwald, these 25 boxes, consisting of 100 bars weighing a total of nearly one and a quarter tons and worth $1,500,000, were brought to the Forest House at Einsiedl prior to burial. But though they had been held for safekeeping by the Reichsbank, the 25 boxes did not form part of the Reichsbank national gold reserves and were not listed as such in the final inventory of precious metals drawn up in Reichsbank headquarters in Berlin towards the end of the war. The SS general quoted in the Tiger’s Tales report – all German generals were SS to the Allied press corps in Germany at that time – was quite right in stating that these 25 boxes had been moved into the mountains by mules and cached. But Tiger’s Tales, or its US Army informant, was wrong in assuming that these 25 boxes represented the gold that had been recovered by the 55th AEB on 7 June, for the 25 boxes had been buried in a separate cache and were not recovered when the 728 bars were dug up.

  In other words, Tiger’s Ta
les, and presumably certain elements in the US Army, had confused two separate and substantial gold hoards as one and die same. This confusion may go some way towards explaining the mystery surrounding the next gold recovery and the almost impossible problems confronting Army intelligence and other investigators when they were eventually required to look into the Reichsbank gold affair. As far as can be determined the second gold recovery took place a week or two after the 7 June recovery but in much the same area. In the absence of any written documentation either at the time or afterwards, the second recovery remained unknown – and uninvestigated – for the next 32 years.

  The first mention ever made of the second retrieval came in response to a request for information about the discovery of the Reichsbank gold – the 728 bars – which appeared in the 10th Armored Association’s Newsletter in August 1976. A reply was received from Albert Singleton, the busy and prospering President of the Albert Singleton Corporation, an industrial metal-plating concern based in Cleveland, Ohio. Singleton, who at the time shared the same confusion as Tiger’s Tales, the US Army and everyone else and believed that the operation he had been involved in was the 7 June retrieval of the Reichsbank gold reserves, wrote in to say:

  Regarding the ‘Ten Tons of Gold’ which was returned to the Munich Bank, it was cached in a bunker on the side of a mountain near Krün, north-east of Mittenwald.

  I was acting Provost Marshal of the 61st AIB [Armored Infantry Battalion] and was in charge of picking up the gold under two intelligence officers. It was done without fanfare one damned hot day using the services of the German officers who put it there and were supposed to be guarding it. I have photos of the whole operation. Everyone was instructed not to talk about it.