Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  The police were left with the problem of motive and suspects. Was robbery the motive for the murder? There is plenty of evidence to suggest that it might have been. For a start, Zenta’s famous platinum bracelet was found to be missing. So were two strings of pearls, a gold signet ring, a large gold brooch studded with diamonds and rubies, and a golden cross with amethysts. A reward notice was posted on every advertisement board: MURDER WITH ROBBERY IN GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN. 10,000RM REWARD. But there were strong doubts that robbery was the motive. There were, it seems, more pressing reasons for doing away with Zenta Hausner, and if the murderer’s purpose was robbery, why did he leave behind a large stack of bank-notes (thought to have been US dollars) which were lying on a sideboard in the kitchen at the time of the murder? The apartment had not been ransacked and two large 5-carat diamond rings which she habitually wore were still on one finger. Crime passionel was another possible motive, but it was widely felt that the most likely explanation was that Zenta Hausner had been killed to keep her mouth shut – possibly at the behest of an American.

  The possibility of American complicity in the death of Frau Hausner was strongly mooted at the time and is firmly believed today by many who had known her well in Garmisch. This could be one reason why the US military insisted on conducting their own investigation into the murder, even though, under normal circumstances, crime involving German subjects was a matter for the German police. There were other reasons. For one thing, Zenta had been an American agent. She was generally believed to have worked for the local CIC detachment, and documentary evidence indicates that she had also worked for the CID and the Theater Provost Marshal. Most importantly, at the time of her death Zenta Hausner was working specifically for the American Military Governor of Garmisch, Lieutenant-Colonel Kenneth Van Buskirk. As a known narcotics trafficker, Zenta may have posed a threat to a certain person or persons because of her connections with both the drug business and the American investigators who were enquiring into it, and it is possible that she was silenced at a crucial point in the investigation. The dope rings were well informed, and since one of their members was reputed to be a high-ranking official in OMGB, it is certainly on the cards that he arranged for Zenta to be eliminated as quickly as possible before the investigators, with her assistance, got too close for comfort. The urgency would have been all the greater when, in the week before Zenta Hausner’s murder, Guenther Reinhardt in Washington began sending reports and naming names in coded cables to General Clay in Berlin. Zenta’s death blew the lid off OMGB. But the damage would have been even greater if she had been left to continue as an informant.

  For these and other reasons the US military kept the German police out of the murder investigation for a full 17 days. It is debatable whether or not they did this on purpose. It may have been indifference or thoughtlessness. Or it may have been a concern to ensure that there would be nothing left lying around to indicate the identity of the killer. At any rate, by the time the German police, led by an Inspector Johann Venus from Bavarian County Police Headquarters in Munich, formally took over the case on 8 January 1948 they were no longer in a position to undertake an investigation which stood much chance of success. Much of the evidence had disappeared and the German police’s own position was invidious, for in the immediate post-war period they could command no respect or authority from either the civilian populace or the occupation troops. American officials constantly interfered with the German investigation, interrupted interrogations and released witnesses of their own accord. It was said that when one German official refused to give an American woman journalist a photograph of Zenta Hausner, she simply struck him across the face with her riding whip. And when a witness in an American office came forward with testimony about Zenta Hausner and the black market, he was cautioned with the words: ‘Do you really want to tell this to him? He is a black-marketeer himself!’

  Nevertheless, in spite of every handicap the German police persevered with their enquiries. They made a crime plan of the White Horse flat and sketched in Zenta’s body in the kitchen and the position of her dog, her bloodstains, her handbag and her suitcase, presumably packed for the trip to Munich and Christmas in Moosburg. They interrogated witnesses and arrested at least ten suspects, some of whom were detained for as long as four weeks and interrogated as often as twenty times. They made an inventory of what had been taken from the flat and combed the area looking for it. They found the keys to Zenta’s quarters in a neighbouring garden. They also found the little black notebook in which she had kept a record of the White Horse customers – but with a page torn out. They did not find Zenta Hausner’s diary, which supposedly contained a day-by-day account of her black-market business activities and, according to the US Army CID, ‘allegedly implicated the Garmisch Chief of Police, Ellinghaus, and Chief of Criminal Police, Hoffmann, together with American personnel’. Nor did they find the other murder weapon – the axe – or the missing jewellery. The police ascertained that five people had visited Zenta’s flat on the night of her murder and that the murderer must have called after the last of them had left. They also ascertained that the murderer must have been a friend of Zenta’s, for her dog did not bark and there was no sign of a forced entry. Zenta herself, it seems, had let the man in willingly and gone to the trouble of producing coffee and cake for him at the unholy hour of 4 a.m. Who was he? Did he have an accomplice? What about the five people who had visited Zenta on that final night? How good were their alibis?

  Three of the people were checked out by the police and immediately deleted from the list of possible suspects. The other two, who had gone to the White Horse flat in the hope of a late-night poker game, soon became prime suspects. This would have surprised nobody. For one was our old friend, the dope smuggler and business partner of Zenta Hausner, ‘Charlie’, and the other was another White Horse black-marketeer by the name of Michael Hugo Knoebel, alias Baron Michael von Knoebel, alias Herr Major, a well-known local weirdo – and until recently Zenta Hausner’s lover. The red-head took all types into her organisation and into her bed, but 29-year-old Michael Knoebel – a tall, well-built, good-looking man with impeccable manners but considerable problems in adjusting to civilian life – was one of the most peculiar. During the war he had served as air crew in the Luftwaffe on the Russian Front and claimed he had been shot down no less than six times. He first came to Garmisch in May 1945 as a hospital case. He was known to suffer headaches as a result of a serious head wound sustained in air combat with the Red Air Force in 1943 and it was probably this which explained his erratic behaviour in Garmisch after the war. A CIC report on Knoebel, prepared shortly after the Hausner murder, confirmed that the poor man seemed to be teetering on the edge of certifiable insanity. ‘Subject is suffering from a serious mental psychosis (schizophrenia),’ ran the report, ‘which he became affected with during the Second World War. Subject lives in another world most of the time and believes that he has been placed on earth to revolutionise world politics and that he plays the part of a Soviet agent, US intelligence man, Soviet International Brigade recruiting officer and a good friend of Tito of Czechoslovakia [sic].’

  In the White Horse one evening Knoebel had been heard to remark in his cups that he ought to become a Soviet agent because the Americans were destroying what was left of Germany. He actually did try to join the local Garmisch branch of the KPD (German Communist Party) but his application was rejected because he was ‘not in control of his mental faculties and talks too much’. Twice he tried (unsuccessfully) to join the Yugoslav Air Force and once he claimed he had been invited to join the Greek Air Force (a Royalist organisation) by a high-ranking Greek officer named General Markos (the C-in-C of the Greek Communist Army). It was when he tried to recruit an innocent Garmisch resident for the Soviet International Brigade that the CIC moved in on Michael Knoebel. They reported that since Zenta Hausner’s death he no longer wanted to live because his ‘very best friend was killed’, and concluded he was not capable of normal mental functions
and was ‘therefore to be regarded only as a threat to German society and not as a security threat to the US Armed Forces’.

  Both ‘Charlie’ and Knoebel were duly picked up by the German Criminal Police and detained in custody as suspects in the Hausner murder. Knoebel, it seemed, had a cast-iron alibi and was soon released. Charlie claimed to have been ‘en route to Munich’ at the time of Zenta’s death, but turned himself in to the German police the following day. He was questioned and then released for Christmas, at which time he went to visit a girlfriend in Frankfurt. When he returned to Garmisch in February, he was arrested but again released for lack of evidence after spending six weeks in custody. Inspector Venus, in charge of the German police investigation, found himself in the curious position of having any number of suspects but virtually no evidence to lay against any of them. Working on the sensible theory that the killer must have been someone very close to Frau Hausner, inspector Venus turned his attention to her current lovers, of whom there were two – the long-established Captain Korner, and a recent acquisition, a 41-year-old local haulier and member of an important narcotics ring operating between Garmisch, Munich, Hamburg, Innsbruck, Konstanz and Bolzano, by the name of Ernst Virnich. Of these, Captain Korner was an American and had an alibi – he was en route to Nuremberg for a court-martial on the night in question – while Virnich was a German and didn’t. Virnich was taken into custody and remained in police hands for six months as a prime suspect before he, too, was released for lack of sufficient evidence to bring him to trial.

  Captain Korner was not the only American to be questioned. Captain Bird, the former Military Government Legal Officer in Garmisch, was also required to account for his movements on the night of the murder. ‘I was hearing Christmas Eve Mass in a little church,’ he recalled in 1977. ‘My wife and two children were with me, so I don’t think I would have been able to nip down to Garmisch and murder that woman. I had a very good alibi!’

  There, for several years, the matter rested. In 1950 it seemed a breakthrough had been made in the case when Zenta Hausner’s daughter found a gold chain and other pieces of jewellery down the side of an old armchair which had once stood in her mother’s flat above the White Horse. But the jewellery did not include the platinum bracelet or any of the other especially precious missing pieces and the discovery in the end led nowhere. Then in the summer of 1952 came a fresh development. Charlie, who was by now 18 months into a 6-year prison sentence for his part in a robbery at a jeweller’s store in Augsburg, notified Inspector Venus that he wanted to make a statement. He knew the identity, he said, of Zenta Hausner’s murderer. He knew because Knoebel had confessed to him a week after the murder on New Year’s Eve 1947. Knoebel killed Zenta because she had left him for another man. His alibi was phoney. It was true that he had visited a girlfriend in Garmisch on the night of the murder. But he had slipped a sleeping draught into her wine, and when she fell asleep he hurried back to the White Horse with an axe under his jacket. Though he still had the keys to Zenta’s apartment, he chose to wait until the last of her guests had left and then knock on the door. Zenta let her ex-lover in and he asked her if she would get him something to eat. They both went into the kitchen, where an argument developed. In his rage and fury, Knoebel knocked Zenta down with the axe and then stuck the kitchen knife into her throat. He then relocked the flat, threw the axe into the river and the keys into a neighbouring garden, returned to the room where his girlfriend still slept soundly in a deep, drugged sleep, and got back into bed.

  As a result of Charlie’s statement his former friend, Michael Knoebel, was rearrested and imprisoned in Munich jail for three weeks on remand. He denied having confessed to Charlie, and the girlfriend in question could throw no further light on his movements on the fatal night more than four years ago. Since there was insufficient evidence to sustain a conviction, Knoebel was again released, and vanished into obscurity. No more arrests were made in the Zenta Hausner case and her murder continues to be shrouded in seemingly impenetrable darkness.

  People who knew Frau Hausner or were involved in the case have sharply divided views about the identity of her killer. The Germans in the main believe she was murdered at the instigation of an American – perhaps by a hired hit man, if not by the American himself. The Americans, on the other hand, believe she was murdered by Germans. This was certainly the view of the American Military Governor at the time, Colonel Van Buskirk, the man who was sent down to clean up Garmisch. ‘It was like this,’ he revealed a few years after the murder. ‘Five hundred people cleared out of Garmisch the day I arrived down there. But a lot stayed on. Zenta started working for me. I had several other German informers on my payroll too, but she was the best. They’d been threatening her for a long time. They killed all my informers one night – every one on a single night. They shoved one guy off a cliff and they tied a rock around another’s neck and then chucked him in the lake. And you know what they did to Zenta Hausner, the bastards.’ About ‘them’ Colonel Van Buskirk had no doubts: ‘A black-market gang. Gangsters. Germans, I reckon. For my money I reckon it was an all-German outfit.’ And he added: ‘She was really a damned nice kid. I liked her a lot.’

  The death of the ‘Red Princess’ had a galvanising effect on the American occupation in Bavaria. Until now the occupation authorities had managed to keep the extraordinary state of affairs in their territory from public view. When two journalists, Ed Hartrich and Tom Agoston, inadvertently stumbled on the story of the Reichsbank treasure and the crime and corruption in Garmisch during the previous summer, the newspaper copy they filed was suppressed on instructions from General Clay – an unusual curtailment on the freedom of the news media in a time of peace. So long as the Americans were working on the case, even the murder of Zenta Hausner was kept from the press. But the moment they handed the investigation over to the German police, the story broke. On 8 January 1948, the very day the Germans took over, the first of what was to become an avalanche of press indictments of Army irregularities appeared in the American press. Under the banner headline, NELL, THE GIRL WHO SAW IT ALL AND TOLD IT TO US, SLAIN, the story was carried by the Chicago Herald Tribune, having been filed by Hal Foust from Garmisch the day before.

  ‘Nell, known as the Queen of Hearts in the American military government rest centre here, is dead in an unsolved murder mystery involving black-marketeers, smugglers, international financiers, international gangsters and spies of several nations,’ wrote Foust. She had been found in the nude, the American reporter continued, killed by a single slash across the face, and her death was a heavy loss to the Military Governor, ‘“She was valuable to us,” said Colonel Van Buskirk, who was General Patton’s housekeeper and 3rd Army special service officer during the war. “She was counter intelligence personified. She knew the barons and baronesses, and the riff-raff of international idlers and mischief-makers.”’

  Next day Foust filed a second story, this time implicating an unnamed American officer in the killing, under a headline which read: US CAPTAIN TO FACE VICE SLAYING QUIZ. ‘German police,’ wrote Foust, ‘were promised today that they would have permission of the occupation authorities to question a United States army captain in the murder of Nell, Queen of Hearts, purveyor of vice, illicit booze, and underworld information. The officer is not suspected of using the knife which silenced the pretty informer, but police hope he may be able to name her more threatening enemies.’ Foust was almost certainly referring to Captain Korner here, an obvious witness with a more than passing interest in the fate of the deceased lady. Significantly, at the end of his piece Foust broadened his view somewhat, and for the first time made public the possibility of a ‘general investigation of American occupation corruption, draining towards Garmisch like the successful underworld is attracted to Miami in the winter’.

  On 12 January Tom Agoston and Ed Hartrich swarmed through the breach in US Army censorship blasted by Hal Foust’s earlier articles and finally filed the Garmisch stories that the Army had suppressed in the summ
er. Both men used the Hausner murder as the news item around which to wrap their indictment of the American occupation in Bavaria in general and in Garmisch in particular. ‘Post-war Germany’s biggest black-market scandal, involving a gang of international narcotics pedlars, threatened to blow up in the lap of US military Government today,’ wrote Agoston in Stars and Stripes. ‘The case came to a head with the murder two weeks ago of “Garmisch Nell” . . . Serious charges, said to involve US MG officers in Bavaria, as well as the daughter of an internationally known German industrialist, a princess, prostitutes and others, have been lodged with Army Secretary Kenneth Royall.’ For the first time Agoston hinted at the possibility of a top-level US Government investigation into conditions in the American Zone of Germany – the inevitable reaction to the Reinhardt memorandum and the growing clamour in the press.

  Ed Hartrich filed a similar story in the New York Herald Tribune, headlined ARMY REVEALS HUGE BAVARIAN DRUG TRAFFIC. But Hartrich was more specific in his allegations:

  Persistent reports say a wealthy Bavarian was director of the narcotics ring. He is said to have been discharged by a Garmisch de-nazification court through the intervention of an AMG official [Major McCarthy], though the French government lists him as a ‘wanted SS (Elite Guard) officer’. His key agent is said to have been a daughter of a German industrialist long ‘friendly’ with certain AMG officers. A Bavarian princess is said to have been the actual ‘fence’.