Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  11. 25 boxes containing 100 gold bars brought from Konstanz to Einsiedl for burial. No official record of recovery. If this was the gold recovered by Sergeant Singleton in the Mittenwald area in June 1945 it never reached official custody and must be listed as missing, believed stolen.

  Total 1945 value: $1,406,595 1998 equivalent: $11,815,398

  12. 6.5 tons of Ribbentrop gold last seen at Schloss Fuschl, near Salzburg, Austria in May 1945.

  Total 1945 value: $7,431,693 1998 equivalent: $62,426,221

  13. 17 bags of foreign currency from the Berlin Reichsbank taken from the currency caches on the Klausenkopf and environs in May and June 1945. After initial inquiries at the FED, suspicion fell on Colonel Fritz Rauch, Helmut Schreiber and Helmut Groeger. The $400,000 found at Oberau and the $407,235 and £405 found at Garmisch and recovered by the US Army in August 1945 may have formed part of the 17 missing bags (leaving over $1,000,000 still unrecorded and unexplained). If so, they subsequently disappeared – the latter sum from the Land Central Bank, Munich, where it had been deposited.

  Total 1945 value of missing bags: $1,878,711 1998 equivalent: $16,720,527

  The overall total of funds missing or stolen from the Reichsbank’s custody thus amounts to $432,985,013. In 1998 this sum would be worth $3,846,481,507 (£2,303,282,300).

  Nearly forty years after the event, the robbery of the Reichsbank reserves can still claim to be the greatest robbery in modern history. But because the facts of the case were largely unknown to the public at large for many years – were, indeed, deliberately suppressed by the powers that be – a number of other robberies laid claim to be considered the greatest ever in the years that followed.

  The first of these was the Brinks robbery. In Boston, Massachusetts on 17 January 1950, a gang of eleven men raided the headquarters of the Brinks Transport Company (a firm specialising in the top security transportation of bank cash, payrolls and other valuables) and within the space of just fifteen minutes made off with a haul of $2,500,000 in cash. For six years the robbers kept a low profile and avoided arrest. But in the week before the expiry of the Statute of Limitations, one of the men made a confession to the police, as a result of which eight of the gang were convicted and sent to prison for life. To the world at large the Brinks robbery appeared to be far and away the biggest robbery known to civilised man. But between 1945 and 1950 there had been 30 per cent inflation in America, which would put the true value of the Brinks robbery at only $1,750,000 by 1945 values – or somewhat less than the total amount of official Reichsbank currency looted from the currency caches on the Klausenkopf alone.

  The Brinks robbery was patently not the world’s greatest, and in any case was eclipsed by a far more sensational one in England thirteen years later – the notorious Great Train Robbery. In 1963 the Glasgow to London night mail train was held up by a large gang of professional criminals and relieved of £2,500,000 ($10,000,000) in used five-pound notes on their way back to the Bank of England for pulping. In the popular imagination this robbery continues to be regarded as the greatest in history – in Britain, at least. In fact, it is far surpassed by the robbery of the Reichsbank reserves, taken as a whole; and if due allowance is made for inflation, even the relatively modest losses of the Reichsbank funds in the region of Mittenwald alone total at least as much as the haul of five-pound notes taken from the ill-fated English mail train eighteen years later.

  Since the early 1970s soaring inflation has relentlessly eroded the real value of more recent robberies on the grand scale – the estimated £6,000,000 known to have been taken from safe deposit boxes in Nice, France in July 1976; the £6,000,000 of platinum stolen in South Africa in 1982; the theft of $15,000,000 of securities (later found to be out of date) stolen in London on 3 December 1982; the $8,000,000 stolen in New York less than two weeks later; and the $9,500,000 in cash, jewels and other valuables stolen from a bank in Marbella, Spain on Christmas Day of the same year. Such raids are of course breathtaking in their magnitude. But they are still dwarfed by the Reichsbank robbery of 1945 – and their inflation-adjusted totals still do not exceed the losses sustained by the Reichsbank reserves buried in Mittenwald all those summers before.

  In order to map the full extent of the Reichsbank robberies and trace the slow dawning of awareness on the part of the American authorities which in 1947 led the FED to name Rosenberg-Lip inski, Mielke, Rauch, Schreiber and Groeger, it has been necessary to run ahead for many months and even years beyond that fateful morning in late August 1945 when Captain Neumann of Third Army drove out through the shattered gate of 38 Gsteigstrasse with the last of the pecuniary offerings from the von Blüchers’ back garden loaded in the back of his jeep. It is now time to go back to those earlier and more volatile and chaotic days in Bavaria soon after the end of the war and follow the movements of those leading players who are now about to bow themselves off the stage and into the wings.

  In 1946 Klaus Bremme, who had an Argentinian wife, was allowed to emigrate to Argentina, almost the only country which at that time welcomed German immigrants. He was followed after a little while by Mathias Stinnes.

  As for Colonel Rauch, he was allowed to leave Garmisch after the final recovery in Gsteigstrasse, in spite of his SS affiliations. Such indemnity from arrest as he may have obtained, one way or another, as a result of his co-operation with the Americans over the Reichsbank money soon ran out, however, and in November 1945 Rauch’s Nazi past caught up with him. On 27 November he was arrested by CIC Special Agents and detained at the Tegernsee City Jail before being transferred to the Civilian Internment Enclosure of Stephanskirchen. The reason given for his arrest was that he fell into the SHAEF Automatic Arrest Category as a past member of the Nazi Party and Allgemeine and Waffen SS – there was no question of an investigation into the missing Reichsbank millions. Rauch admitted his membership of the proscribed organisations and in February 1946 the camp screening officer appended this comment to Rauch’s evaluation report: ‘Automatic Arrest – Waffen SS service as Captain and a SECURITY THREAT. Continued internment pending directives from Higher HQ.’

  Exactly how long Rauch languished in American internment is not known. He was probably released later in 1946 or perhaps in 1947 – unlike his friend, Karl Warth, who managed to escape from the American internment camp at Dachau in April 1946 and disappear. Subsequent investigations revealed that Rauch had no income of any kind between the end of the war and 1948, and lived on his own resources. He was, however, sufficiently in funds to be in a position to emigrate with his wife to Argentina in 1948 – the third signatory of the Neumann receipt to do so. Rauch got out down the so-called Römischerweg or Roman Way, the Nazi escape route via the Vatican. According to the records of the Argentinian Police Headquarters in Buenos Aires, ‘José Federico Rauch’ entered Argentina on 16 February 1948 and soon afterwards became a partner in a metallurgical firm by the name of Exact SCL, a company formed by Germans and based at Santa Rosa, 3350, Florida, Province of Buenos Aires. The initials SCL stand for ‘Collective Society’, which has a special status in Argentine law. A Collective Society does not have the obligation to publish details of its formation, share capital and board of directors in the official bulletin, and for this reason the share capital, directors and balance sheets have never been placed on public records. Exact SCL, it seems, had a business relationship with a firm called ‘Efeve’ which manufactured bath taps sold under the trademark ‘FV’ and renowned for their high quality. Rauch, whose profession in the police records was given as ‘Industrialist’, was the production manager for the ‘Efeve’ taps. The Argentinian police report concluded with a statement to the effect that Rauch had contributed a sum of between 100,000 and 150,000 US dollars to the capital of the company.

  After the final currency recovery from Gsteigstrasse, Colonel Franz Pfeiffer, holder of the Knight’s Cross, was allowed to leave Garmisch and return to Austria, where he resumed his duties with the French Army and continued the task of demobilising fugitive German
soldiers in the mountains of Tyrol and Vorarlberg until the operation was successfully completed in the autumn of 1945. Pfeiffer was then re-employed by the French Army as an instructor in mountain infantry techniques and tactics at Seefeld in the Tyrol and then acted as adviser to the French Mountain Riflemen – the Blue Devils – in Chamonix, in the French Alps, for three months. Colonel Pfeiffer continued to live in Austria until December 1948, after which time, according to the Innsbruck Police, he emigrated to Argentina.

  According to Pfeiffer, he was able to afford the trip because he had inherited a legacy from an uncle in Munich. But in his application for a visa to the Innsbruck Police Pfeiffer advised them that he had been born in Vienna, Austria on 14 May 1907, whereas according to the Registry of Births in Munich he was registered as being born in Munich, Germany on 23 October 1907. Colonel Pfeiffer eventually received his official passport from the Argentinian Consul in Berne, Switzerland, and allegedly sailed with his wife from Cannes on the SS Conte Grande bound for Buenos Aires. He did not give the impression of being an inordinately rich man when he left Europe, and after he reached Buenos Aires he called himself Francisco Guillermo Pfeiffer.

  A report in the possession of Police Headquarters in Buenos Aires alleges that Pfeiffer left Austria in December 1948, arrived in Argentina in March 1949 (a year after Rauch), settled in Florida district and joined the board of Exact of which Rauch was also a member. The Buenos Aires police believed that Pfeiffer had, like Rauch, made a sizeable contribution to the capital of the company – in his case to the tune of some 100,000 US dollars. There was one anomaly in the report. Pfeiffer’s place and date of birth were given as Munich 18 June 1912, which was different from both the Austrian police records and the Registry of Births in Munich. It is not known why three different records in three different countries register three different birth dates for Colonel Pfeiffer.

  If this information is correct, by today’s values $100,000 would be worth $890,000 and $150,000 would be worth $1,335,000. If sums of money of this order were indeed contributed to the share capital of Exact by Rauch and Pfeiffer, it is unlikely that they represented the total sum that was or had been in their possession, since a portion would be required for travel and contingencies. But in any case, it would be quite extraordinary to find this kind of money in the hands of former German Army and police officers at that period of time – especially in the form of US dollar currency, possession of which by German subjects was still illegal in occupied Germany and Austria as late as 1948.

  In an interview with the authors in 1983 Pfeiffer fiercely denied ever having put any dollars into a firm called Exact.

  ‘That is a lot of lies!’ Pfeiffer declared. ‘What absolute rubbish! One hundred thousand dollars invested by me in the firm! You know, now I’ve really had enough! Who is saying that? And what is this about police records? I never had anything to do with the police in Buenos Aires.

  ‘I refuse to answer any further questions. Saying I invested 100,000 dollars – it’s a cock and bull story! Me and 100,000 dollars, it makes me laugh! I’m sorry, but the police in Buenos Aires are talking a lot of poppycock. I never paid in 100,000 dollars. I never had that sum.

  ‘I have always regretted talking to you at all. I should have kept my mouth shut. All this toing and froing, and they said this and somebody else said that, and so on and so on. Send my warmest greetings to the police in Buenos Aires and tell them to sell their lies and nonsense to somebody else. I certainly never paid 100,000 dollars into the firm.’

  Moreover, Pfeiffer averred, he had never been a director of Exact, had never even heard of Efeve, and had never been to Switzerland. However, he had owned a small toy company in Buenos Aires called Inoco and he had worked on occasion for a company – a West German copper firm – represented in Argentina by Exact. At some stage, it seems, he had paid a small sum into Exact, but it was a ‘pure formality’.

  ‘It was purely pro-forma. I don’t recall exactly – it was a few Argentine pesos, a certain share in the firm, and I never saw the money again. In any case it was a ridiculously small sum. As far as I am concerned the whole matter is finished. It’s a long time ago and I now have other worries. I have to pinch and save to make both ends meet. I am going to end this conversation. I am sorry, I do not want to be rude. I have done nothing to reproach myself with but I’m not going to have anything further to do with it.’

  Given the staunchness of Colonel Pfeiffer’s denial, the Argentine police report raises something of a conundrum.

  Unfortunately Fritz Rauch has chosen not to shed any further light on the matter. ‘I am completely unqualified to say anything,’ he told the authors in his own brief interview on the telephone. ‘I can give absolutely no information on this subject whatsoever. Tell me, who betrayed my telephone number to you? Normally only my friends have my telephone number, if you see what I mean. So it must have been someone from among my circle of friends. I am making no statement and I wish not to be consulted further about these matters. Firstly I know far too little, and secondly I do not know who is really hiding behind all this. Listen, I am now seventy-seven and I have only one wish and that is to be left in peace. I think I have deserved that.’

  Hubert von Blücher also went to Argentina, arriving there in October 1948 on a Swedish passport. According to the Argentinian police records in Cordoba he registered his profession as photographer and his name as Huberto von Bluecher Corell. Even in the New World the aura of legend continued to surround this unusual young man, and before long it was bandied about that he had, on his arrival in Argentina, presented a priceless Gobelin tapestry as a gift to Eva Peron, the President’s charismatic and glamorous wife, and she had graciously agreed to accept it. ‘All a lot of nonsense,’ Hubert told us years later. ‘Like Bormann in the Hotel Plaza in the Argentine. And me being with him. And me bringing him the money he had handed over to me in the German Reichsbank in Berlin – 80,000,000 dollars or so – and with the money he founded the National Socialist Party of Argentina.’

  Those who knew him in those days recall that he was often seen in smart society in the Argentinian capital. In 1950, after working for two years as a photographer in Buenos Aires, he left for Cordoba province, where he set up residence in La Cumbre and spent considerable time in the nearby province of Mendoza. In 1951 it seems he made his way to the United States, where he worked for the Color Corporation of America in California for a while and wrote occasional film scripts for Hollywood, including the commentary for a Walt Disney film set in the Amazon. In 1960 von Blücher returned to Buenos Aires, but later he left South America for West Germany where he wrote several intelligent and futuristic novels and founded a company in Düsseldorf specialising in research and development for anti-chemical warfare products, backed by government contracts.

  So, by a curious coincidence perhaps, five of the German names on the famous receipt for the $404,000 dug up in the von Blücher garden ended up in Argentina: Klaus Bremme, Fritz Rauch, Franz Pfeiffer, Mathias Stinnes and Hubert von Blücher. Only Lüder stayed at home, though eventually, many years later, he too went abroad – in his case to South Africa, where he bought a large farm near Pretoria.

  As for Helmut Schreiber, he was employed for a while as an entertainer by the British Army in the British Zone of Germany, and later established a worldwide reputation as a conjuror of the highest order – Kalanag the Magician, the ‘Eighth Wonder of the World’. Of all the Germans involved with the Reichsbank money only Helmut Groeger was ever investigated for illegal possession of foreign exchange suspected to have been stolen (although a 1948 CIC report, under the heading ‘Illegal Possession of Foreign Currency’, cross-references Rauch, Warth and Schreiber with Groeger). Towards the end of 1945 Groeger left the employ of Third Army and set up on his own account as a professional black-marketeer – funded, in all probability, by a portion of the Reichsbank currency which went missing on the Klausenkopf. Groeger came under suspicion when it was discovered that in 1946 a former member of the 50
3rd Military Police Battalion attached to Third Army had illegally shipped to the USA $25,000 in greenbacks inserted in the folds of heavy wrapping paper used to wrap five large packages containing small but inexpensive souvenirs. The $25,000 in question – worth $222,500 by present values – were traced to Helmut Groeger. Subsequently the Munich CIC conducted an investigation into his affairs in order to determine his connection with the MP and his possible complicity in illegal American currency dealing. Groeger, the CIC reported, was one of the first persons to discover a huge cache of foreign currency ‘hidden by the Nazis shortly after World War Two’.

  ‘Helmut Groeger lives exceedingly well,’ the report continued, ‘and his income is derived from both black-market transactions and from the money he appropriated from the German cache he found. Subject recently had in his possession 2,050 US greenbacks in $1 denominations.’

  In his defence Groeger explained that the money was part of a packet of $5,000 which had been delivered to his home at Rottach in the summer of 1946 by an unknown messenger for an unexplained reason. At first, he said, he hesitated to spend such a substantial quantity of dollars since Germans were not allowed to possess foreign currency in 1946. As time went by, however, he began to spend small amounts of it on food and other necessities and later bought himself a house with part of it – an indicator, perhaps, of the considerable purchasing power of such relatively small sums of dollar exchange in those post-war days.

  It was about that time, according to Groeger, that he began spending more freely and made a deal with the MP of the 503rd MP Battalion. He claimed that he gave the MP $2,000 on the basis that the MP would keep $1,000 for himself and use the remaining $1,000 to send CARE and other packages to Groeger from the USA. It was an unlikely story – for a start the MP was caught shipping home $25,000, not $2,000 – and the American authorities evidently thought so too, for they set in hand the preparations for Groeger’s trial. In a secret memo dated 25 May 1948, CIC Special Agent Max L. Marshall had this to say about Helmut Groeger: