One of Hubert’s first tasks after leaving the house was to take Captain Neumann’s receipt for the dollars down to the local chemist, who it seems was also an amateur photographer, and have a number of photocopies made of it. According to one account Hubert then distributed these copies for safekeeping amongst his friends and acquaintances in Garmisch, so that he could be doubly sure, in the event of future interrogation by the Americans, of proof positive that he had handed the dollars over to the proper authorities and could no longer be held responsible for them.
The von Blüchers’ most pressing problem now was survival. The Blücher family was distinguished but not rich. For the father and his sons regular employment had terminated with the German collapse. There was no income of any kind. Bank accounts were frozen. In any case, Reichsmarks did not buy many of the essentials of life in the cigarette economy of post-war Germany. It did not help matters that the father was in American custody, first at Nuremberg, later in the American internment camp at the former Gebirgsjäger barracks in Garmisch. The responsibility for looking after the extended family in the Haus Hohe Halde in Gsteigstrasse – for the mother, the sister, the interned father, the host of destitute and dependent refugee relatives from Silesia – thus fell squarely on the shoulders of the two young brothers. Like every German at that time the brothers were forced to resort to every possible means, legal or illegal, to keep their ship afloat. With hindsight, from the vantage point of the prosperous and respectable Germany of nearly 40 years on, some of the means of survival now appear embarrassingly unrespectable, as Hubert von Blücher would be the first to admit. But that was not the vantage point of 1945 or 1946. Given the near-apocalyptic circumstances of those years, it is difficult to see how else people might have behaved when life was a matter of survival and the only resources available were the windfalls that came one’s way, the native talents that one was born with, and like minded friends.
Everything [Hubert recalled of that period] was black market. It was considered most dishonourable to abstain from the black market as long as members of one’s family were starving. Not to join because of some code of honour or other, to exercise forbearance, was not good. My brother did some pretty extensive blackmarket business and I can tell you that the majority of the people in the Jäger barracks were fed in this way. Locked up in the Jäger barracks were the internees, including my father. The cooking was done in our home in Garmisch, in big cooking pots that had belonged to the German Army, proper cooking vats, and soups, thick soups, were cooked in them. And my brother had acquired – it was the most important possible acquisition at that time – in exchange for Persian pottery, a motor saw. And with the motor saw he had managed to get a contract with the forestry office for cutting down trees and sawing them up. He cut down the trees and the ex-officers and ex-barons from Silesia cut up the wood and it was sold – and swapped, naturally – in large quantities. In return he got macaroni, foodstuffs, and the devil knows what, for making the soup. It all went via the black market. And all the lads were mixed up in it. So one has to be very careful about getting moral issues mixed up with something that was, at that time, a most honourable business.
As the year of 1945 advanced so the struggle for survival grew more urgent. By the last half of October the leaves of the deciduous trees in the valleys and on the lower slopes of the mountains had turned a brilliant golden-yellow. By the last half of November the trees were bare and the sun was a cool, pale disc that barely cleared the rim of the surrounding peaks. By Christmas the frost had seized Garmisch in a grip of iron and the snow fell abundantly on the upper slopes. A trick of meteorology enabled Garmisch-Partenkirchen to flourish as a winter ski resort, even though it stood no higher than 700 metres in altitude. In January the snow lies nearly two feet deep in the town and up to six feet deep on the surrounding slopes. At Haus Hohe Halde in Gsteigstrasse, on a cold north-facing hill opposite the snowy ramparts of the Wetterstein range, icicles hung from the steep, low-pitched roof like sugar walking sticks, humpbacked snow-dunes filled the garden, and the roof groaned and strained under the weight of the snow. In the day the wind howled through the valley and at night the von Blücher house stood alone among the leafless trees in sharp relief against a sky full of stars ‘so frost-bitten’, one visitor recollected, ‘that they flashed slowly and intermittently like the revolving lamp of a lighthouse’. It was no weather for cold hearths and empty larders. But by the New Year of 1946, the von Blücher brothers could be said to have done outstandingly well for the extended family. Indeed, they had not only got by, they had even got on in the world.
In this they were helped in some degree by their friends. Never was there a time when a man (or a woman) had greater need for a supportive circle of friends. The von Blücher brothers, largely through the charm and initiative of Hubert, enjoyed the benefit of an unusually extensive network of acquaintances and a very tight inner circle of close allies – old school friends from the pre-war days in Garmisch, drifting back from the war-fronts and prison camps, or refugees from the Russian-occupied territories of the former Reich, looking for a quiet corner in which to hole up till the shouting died down. There were perhaps no more than seven of them. But it seemed inevitable that they should gravitate towards one another’s company. They had a lot in common. Each one was, in cowboy parlance, a son of a gun. Young, bright, energetic and resourceful, adventurers and opportunists with the same interests and the same background, keen and accomplished winter sportsmen who shared the same ski slopes and were members of the same exclusive sporting club – the Riessersee Ice Hockey Club in Garmisch – these men of mixed German and Polish nationality were determined to turn disadvantage to advantage, to use their wits to exploit the chance windfalls of those post-war havoc days to the full, and not only survive but prosper and grow rich by any means available to them.
A leading member of this inner circle had been Mathias Stinnes, who lived next door. In October poor Mathias was carted off to an internment camp by the Americans and not cleared and released until May 1946. His place in the circle was taken by a young man called Walter (‘Mucki’) Clausing, the elder son of the owner of the Post Hotel in Garmisch, a former Gebirgsjäger officer and war veteran, and a former European ski champion now employed as chief ski instructor for American forces personnel.1 Others in the group included two brothers, Ardo and Roman Rousselle, members of a wealthy family in Southern Bavaria. Ardo, described as ‘an extremely correct and honest man’, had recently returned from a PW camp in Albania. Roman, a tall, strong, international playboy type, had deserted from the German Army just before the end of the war and remained in hiding in the cellar of a friend’s house in Garmisch until the Americans occupied the town. Formerly married to the daughter of the mistress of King Alfonso of Spain, he had a passion for speed, owned a white Hispano Suiza cabriolet and was a European bob-sleigh champion who often crewed with Lüder von Blücher on the Garmisch bob run. Another member of this group, with his brother Erhard, was a remarkable Polish DP by the name of Ivar Buxell, a former member of the Abwehr in Warsaw, who crops up again later in this story.
It was in and around this group in Garmisch that strange rumours began to circulate as the months went by. The rumours differed in detail but agreed in their main purport, which was that something strange had happened to the money that had been dug up in Gsteigstrasse, and that it had never reached the hands of the proper authorities. There were really only two possible suspects. One was the man to whom the $404,000 had been handed over, Captain Fred Neumann. The other was the man who had handed it over, Hubert von Blücher. The Americans tended to believe in the authenticity of the von Blücher receipt and to regard with corresponding disfavour the role played by Captain Neumann in this curious affair. Certain Germans, by contrast, unsure whether Captain Neumann really existed or whether the name was merely a pseudonym, considered the receipt a forgery, and expressed the view that Hubert von Blücher was responsible for any Reichsbank currency that might have gone missing. As if to
corroborate their suspicions they related stories about dollar bills that poured out of the drainpipes at Haus Hohe Halde when it rained or that fluttered out of books in the von Blüchers’ library when the pages were turned; about extravagant gifts and lavish parties thrown by the von Blücher brothers in a style reminiscent of more opulent pre-war days, and about Hubert riding around in a huge 7.5 litre supercharged Mercedes with a ciné camera stuffed with concealed dollars. The inference was that the von Blücher brothers had somehow hung on to the dollar hoard buried in their garden and overnight had become rich in consequence.
In an interview conducted in German in the prestigious Industrie Club in Düsseldorf in April 1982, Hubert von Blücher, then a distinguished captain of industry of 58 years of age, gave a characteristically energetic and disarming account of the matter of the $404,000 dug up in the garden at 38 Gsteigstrasse and what happened to it.
Q. Were you ever told later that the money was supposed to have got into the wrong hands?
vB: A hundred times. Most people think I had it.
Q: They still do.
vB: Now I will tell you exactly. I am chief shareholder of Pan American Airways. I am the best friend of Howard Hughes. The Beach Hotel in Las Vegas is 45 per cent financed by me. I am thus the biggest financier ever to appear in the Arabian Nights tales dreamt up by these people over their second bottle of brandy.
Q: Maybe that explains those stories.
vB: Of course what I just said was persiflage, irony.
‘I must tell you honestly, I am disappointed,’ Hubert continued. ‘The last thing I heard was about $400,000,000. Now it’s going down. That’s a bad sign. And things will get difficult when they say $30,000, for that could be true.’
Q: It is reported that some of the stuff might still be on your property.
vB: That is always being asserted. You know, I am thinking of selling the house and if I sell it I shall say that about 800 millions are still lying there. (In English: ‘You sell a castle with a ghost.’) I must honestly say I consider all this virtually impossible. Firstly, what could still be lying there would be exclusively bank-notes. Gutta percha wrappings, I can tell you as a physicist, have a maximum lifespan under the ground, in a moist Central European climate, buried half a metre down, of five to six years before they rot away completely. And if the bank-notes were then exposed to damp for another three to five years, in a Central European climate with frost to ten degrees below freezing, which you have in Garmisch, and then in summer up to 17 or 18 degrees centigrade, I would say if anything was lying there it would now have deteriorated completely. But it is utterly improbable.
What, in the end, is one to make of this crop of drolleries? What, indeed, was Hubert von Blücher to make of them? The question was put to him in Düsseldorf.
Q: You were with the American newsreel company at that time?
vB: Yes, correct. US newsreel.
Q: I only mention it because it is alleged that you refused to open the film and camera boxes because you had . . .
vB: Secreted a million dollars?
Q: Perhaps not quite that much.
vB: All that is perfectly correct, only there was nothing in the containers, and the entire newsreel period lasted nine or ten days. I will tell you how it all started. It happened because the Americans wanted to turn Garmisch into a recreational centre, within ten minutes – hardly had they arrived and it had become a recreational centre. And my brother Lüder was made driver for General Truscott, not driving a car but a bob-sleigh. Because he was a very expert bob-sleigh driver. And so he drove generals and colonels on the bob-sleigh. Now the US newsreel wanted to get film material of the recreational centre. And in this connection I applied for a job. (Curt Jürgens, the German film star, was also involved with the newsreel and used to come to our house. His manager had a gorgeous blonde girlfriend, a wonderful woman, a sort of blonde bombshell. And in the spring of that year she wore a wonderful raccoon coat and nothing underneath and with this she managed to pass through all the checkpoints.) Anyway, my job was to film for the unit newsreel when General Truscott rode on the bob-sleigh with my brother. To do this I was given a Bell and Howell reporter’s movie camera, plus four cans of film, and I had to travel from Garmisch in a jeep of the US newsreel and pass through six roadblocks. And they always told me to [speaking English] ‘Open these boxes.’ And I told them: ‘No.’ The film of General Truscott on the bob-sleigh track exists, but I fell into disgrace afterwards because I filmed a second story on the same day, in which a fortune-teller called La Colona (she was ghastly with a huge wart on her nose) read out of General Truscott’s palm that ‘future peace treaties are being negotiated here’, between the fortune teller In Colona and General Truscott in the recreational centre in Garmisch-Partenkirchen. He thought it was very funny, but the newsreel editorial department didn’t think it at all funny. So they chucked me out of the newsreel.
It was during his period with the Allied newsreels that Hubert first realised he had fallen under the surveillance of the US Army investigators. One of the stories he had worked out for the newsreel was about the work of the local Alpine Rescue Service (Hochbergrettungsdienst) in Garmisch. He dictated his outline over the telephone to the unit’s secretary – a simple story about how an American officer got lost in the high mountains and died in the ice of Höllstal (Hell’s Valley) and how the rescue people climbed up and brought his body down. ‘About two hours later,’ Hubert recounted, ‘some jeeps came up and the Americans said to me: “OK, where’s the body of this officer?” And from then on I knew the phone was tapped. They had a wax record of the whole thing.’
So what about the parties – those lavish and extravagant parties at the Haus Hohe Halde where the wine flowed and the buffet table groaned under the weight of dishes beyond the dreams of ordinary deprived Germans in the bleak aftermath of the war? Those too, it seems, were empty soufflés.
These parties were the most harmless things compared with what goes on today. Just to have drinks and cigarettes and army candles, don’t forget the candles, you set up the candles, candles that actually burned, and you had a drink and cigarettes and you said [in English]: ‘Roll me over, Yankee soldier . . .’ Now that was a party.
The most exciting party I went to in Garmisch, which is quite unforgettable for me, was given by an American major – a huge man, he once knocked down an American girl, a WAC, very bloody. Imagine a room this size, five metres by five metres, in a requisitioned house with a table like this one – a real Nazi table, oak and all that sort of thing. This table was laden with everything in the PX at that time, everything you see in a Welfare State food advertisement today was lying on that table. Unimaginable. I said to myself, that is what California must look like. That day with the major was the most unforgettable beanfeast I had ever experienced. And it was all ghastly tinned food, tunny fish and so on.
The parties at that time did not have the elegance of the ‘twenties, where cocaine was part of the chic scene. They were just get-togethers without a blackout. Without blackout – that in itself was absolutely sensational. You arrive at a house and you can see through the windows and they are not covered with paper. That break with the past – it was like celebrating Christmas.
All these stories, Hubert explained, emanated from the ‘story kitchen’ of his old friends. ‘It’s all out of the envy kitchen. I have all the newspaper clippings, masses of them from England, these stories which they sold. They simply sat around with a bottle of brandy in Garmisch, all six of them, with the journalists, and invented these stories. And it was never the same story. And of course you would have to put on your dark glasses, otherwise you would be dazzled by the light reflected off the pure gold.’
Unfortunately, as far as the $404,000 dug up from the von Blüchers’ garden is concerned, the suspicion persisted among the investigating authorities that either Captain Neumann or the von Blücher brothers – or conceivably all three together – had had some part in its disappearance, but the ma
tter was never resolved and with the demise of Military Government in 1949 it died a natural death. Only now, with the advantage of documents recently released from the Washington archives for the first time, is it possible to take an informed overview of the whole affair. From these documents it would seem (as related more fully in Chapter 13) that the $404,000 did indeed disappear, but under circumstances rather more curious than originally supposed. It would also seem that neither Captain Fred Neumann nor Hubert or Lüder von Blücher had anything to do with the disappearance of this large item of currency from the Reichsbank reserves.
So far this chapter has been concerned only with the mystery surrounding the disappearance of sums of Reichsbank foreign currency, mainly US dollars, which it was alleged were not recovered by the proper authorities. But there was also the related matter of the gold. Amongst the bevies of US Army investigators who eventually moved in on Garmisch-Partenkirchen between 1946 and 1948 there seems to have persisted a vague, nagging, unwritten question-mark about missing Nazi gold. The investigators had no precise knowledge of what they were looking for or where they could find it. Certainly there had been no directive about gold from the FED. Perhaps the inconclusive quest for missing gold was a repercussion from the mystery surrounding the fate of the gold bullion recovered by Sergeant Singleton near Mittenwald in June 1945. Or perhaps it was a preliminary gust preceding the storm raised in 1948 by Robert Kempner, at the Nuremberg Prosecutor’s Office, over the apparent disappearance of the so-called ‘Ribbentrop Gold’.
Nazi Gold Page 27