Nazi Gold

by Douglas Botting

  It is difficult for me to find words to adequately express my appreciation for your able assistance to me during the past two years . . . The accomplishments of Military Government for Bavaria are a result of your efforts and co-operation. After all, you are a group of ‘All Stars’. Harmony gives strength and support to all undertakings and it has played a great part in the success of Military Government for Bavaria.

  Then, in a private aside not intended for public consumption, the general confided to a crony: ‘I have just realised I was surrounded by knaves!’

  Epilogue – The Conspirary Continues

  It is now nearly a quarter of a century since the authors embarked on their original quest – the search for the missing Reichsbank treasure. Nazi Gold was first published 14 years ago and the interest it generated at the time propelled it straight into the Top Ten Bestseller Lists. The paperback edition remained in the Sunday Times List for an incredible 66 weeks. The authors appeared on practically every radio station in the United Kingdom as well as most television networks. A small but steady flow of film proposals (which continue to arrive) followed. Despite the movie rights having been sold on no less than five occasions there was to be no big screen interpretation of Nazi Gold. The reason is simple. The story is true but complex, and has outwitted a succession of film scriptwriters over the last decade. Apart from that – silence. Well, not quite silence, as we shall go on to explain.

  Indeed, a lot has happened in the intervening years and the plot has continued to thicken, both as to the robbery described in Nazi Gold, the on-going attitude of the relevant authorities today, and the recent revelations about the so-called Swiss gold, which sets the Nazi Gold robberies in the much wider context of German looted gold as a whole.

  Take the robbery as described in Nazi Gold first. While checking through our research material shortly after the UK edition of our book had gone off to the printers, we had a second look at an article published in the German magazine Wochenend in 1950, titled ‘Wo bleibt das Gold der Reichsbank?’ (Where is the Reichsbank Gold?), written by Henrietta Hoffman, formerly Henrietta von Schirach, wife of Hitler’s former Youth Leader. From this it was clear that there had been a second shipment of gold and valuables from Berlin to Mittenwald at around the time of the shipment described in chapter two of the UK edition of our book. However, the shipment described by Frau Hoffman proceeded to Mittenwald by a completely different route from that of the well-documented convoy of official Reichsbank reserves. From Munich this little-known shipment went through Holzkirchen, Bad Tölz, Kodel and Urfeld, arriving at its Mittenwald destination in March, a full month before the convoy received by Colonel Pfeiffer at the Gebirgsjägerschule.

  As far as can be ascertained this first convoy carried 72 sacks totalling 144 gold bars which weighed 1.8 tons and was worth about $2 million, together with a quantity of foreign currency, diamonds and mercury. This shipment was delivered to the German army engineering battalion in Mittenwald commanded by a shadowy ‘General H.’, who in turn delegated the job of its burial near the Steinriegel.

  Several informants presently living in Garmisch have indicated the possibility of two separate gold convoys. One of them claimed that the earlier convoy (the one in March) was led by a ‘Colonel H.’, who had only one arm. Further, a US Army CID officer in charge of the investigation of disappearing gold, who was murdered in 1948, also believed that there were two separate gold convoys to Mittenwald. Finally, Colonel Pfeiffer, when he was interviewed, said that he had wanted to give the gold and currency in his charge to the army engineering battalion located near Mittenwald, suggesting that this unit had priority in these matters.

  If it is true that there were two gold convoys to the same place in the spring of 1945, it could well account for the mystery surrounding the gold recovered from the Steinriegel by two American intelligence officers and a group of German personnel in the presence of Sergeant Singleton – a gold recovery which differs in almost every detail from the gold and currency recovery undertaken by the American officers of the 10th Armored Division (as described in chapter seven of our book) and subsequently passed on to the FED in Frankfurt. As Sergeant Singleton himself told the authors: ‘I’ll be honest with you. I can’t connect up anything with the gold that I picked up – either in the description of the gold hole or anything else – with that other gold find. It just doesn’t make sense. There must have been two caches of gold.’

  If there were two caches, what happened to the contents of the one described by Singleton, which we must assume had contained the 72 sacks of gold referred to by Henrietta Hoffman? This gold crops up in no official repository document anywhere. Who were the two American intelligence officers who drove off with it? Where did it end up? Who was General Strack, who knew where the gold was hidden but whose name does not appear in Germany army records?

  A possible solution lies in the extraordinary case of Colonel James Gilmore Fisher, which we stumbled across in British intelligence records not long after Nazi Gold had gone to press. At the war’s end Colonel Fisher, a former corporate finance manager from Wilmette, Illinois, was appointed chief investigator in the cartels branch of American military government in Berlin, with the special assignment of rounding up the missing deposits (gold, platinum, uranium, diamonds) of the former Reich Precious Metals Bureau, worth some £5 billion in today’s money. Fisher was assisted in this task by a junior officer and a German civilian by the name of Albert Thoms, a former Chief of the Precious Metals Department of the Reichsbank in Berlin, who also played a crucial role in the early stages of our Nazi Gold story.

  Until his posting to Germany, Fisher had led a blameless life. But now, in a key post in financial intelligence in a country where crime and corruption were the norm and anything and anyone was up for grabs, this middle-aged American (of British parents, incidentally) was exposed to temptations beyond his or anyone’s wildest dreams. Out there in the lawless outback of a once-rich nation in ruins, and armed with priceless insider information that was his alone, the opportunities for a man in Fisher’s uniquely privileged position to make a killing and become astronomically rich overnight were legion. If he found what he was looking for, who else was to know? If he made his own purely personal arrangements to dispose of what he found, who was to stop him?

  Ranging across Germany and down into Bavaria, Fisher and his associates rounded up gold and other precious metals on a prodigious scale. There is even circumstantial evidence that Fisher and Stock were in fact the two US intelligence officers who drove off from Einsiedl with the two truck loads of gold as described by Sergeant Singleton. However, none of the deposits recovered by Fisher ever reached its proper destination.

  Fisher, it would appear, now entered a pact with the devil, bartering much of his illegal wealth through a Soviet buying agency called Voyentorg on the second floor of a house in the Russian sector of Berlin, trading gold and other precious metals for goods that included real estate, currencies, stocks, loans, securities, antiques, fine art, jewellery, perfumes, opium, cocaine, penicillin, radium, machinery, industrial plant, railway locomotives, explosives and furs.

  In one remarkable scam the Soviets handed over an entire plastics factory they had looted in eastern Germany in payment for a consignment of gold Fisher had looted in western Germany. This factory was then transported to Belgium, where Fisher opened it up as one of the first plastics factories to go into production in Western Europe. Fisher’s scams were soon on such a scale that a sizeable element of the British administration in Germany and the German municipal administration in Berlin were in his pocket, and he even opened up an import-export agency in New York, Paris and Brussels to promote his illicit business on a worldwide basis.

  Following an MI6 tip-off the whole weight of the US Army CID and CIC was thrown at the case. Fisher was first charged with a lesser crime in order to get him behind bars. On 9 November he was found guilty of trading with the enemy by illegally trying to re-establish the Otis Lift Company in Germany for h
is own benefit, and sentenced to a dishonourable discharge and a year’s hard labour in the Berlin Stockade. He was then hit with the big charges.

  The second trial opened in Berlin on 16 December but was never concluded. A month later the US Military Governor in Germany, General Clay, sent a cable to the Judge Advocate General in Washington: ‘In view of the unusual circumstances of this case please expedite review.’ But the case was too sensationally embarrassing for the reputation of the United States. On 14 May 1947 (by which time trading with the enemy had ceased to be a criminal offence) it was announced in Washington that President Truman was prepared to stop further proceedings and suspend Fisher’s jail term, though the court-martial verdict was confirmed. No reason was given. Had he been exonerated? Or had he done a deal? On 5 June 1947 Colonel Fisher was released from his grim and brutalising confinement in the stockade (from which he had written many anguished letters to his respectable wife back in suburban Wilmette) and after a short period in hospital flown quietly home to a life of law-abiding obscurity.

  At this point the trail runs cold. All traces of Fisher’s second indictment – the CID investigations, the court-martial arraignment, prison interviews, final reports and recommendations – have been destroyed by the US authorities. Nevertheless, Fisher remains the only US intelligence officer who had the remit to locate the second gold cache on the Steinriegel; the means and opportunity to make off with it in the manner described by eye-witness Sergeant Singleton; and the unique insider information about how to dispose of it. Frustratingly, we shall never know for sure, for Colonel James Gilmore Fisher took his secret with him to the grave.

  The original chronology of Nazi Gold ended in 1983, the year before publication, but the authors continued to pursue some of the leads and unanswered questions that they had uncovered during their original investigation. Whilst pursuing these leads we were not only able to shed fresh light on the Nazi Gold robbery itself but became peripherally involved in two interesting scenarios. In April 1983 we were alerted to the existence of the supposed ‘Hitler Diaries’, the British rights to which had been acquired by the Sunday Times – a sensational publishing coup, or so it seemed. During our research for Nazi Gold we had accumulated a wealth of documentation, including a four-volume work on ‘The Death of Adolf Hitler’ by the US Army’s Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) – a work unknown to the world at large at that time. This went a long way towards establishing that the ‘Hitler Diaries’ were indeed a hoax, and our material was used by the Sunday Times in the week following the original publication to help restore their credibility. Our CIC documentation was later to form the basis of our second book, America’s Secret Army – The Untold Story of the Counter Intelligence Corps, in which we were able to prove that Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, the so-called Butcher of Lyon, who had been extradited from Bolivia to stand trial in France in 1983 was not the only major war criminal to have been employed by the CIC in US Occupied Germany, and we were able to prove that the same CIC unit had arranged the escape of two more war criminals who did not feature in either Barbie’s or any other related dossiers.

  More significantly, our enquiries moved into the bigger arena of the Nazi gold story in its broader context. The robbery described in Nazi Gold was confined to the fate of Nazi looted gold and other valuables within the borders of Germany itself and in the main could be categorised as freelance, private crime (Soviet involvement apart) by individuals or groups of individuals. But we became increasingly aware that a parallel robbery of a rather different sort had taken place – namely the theft of gold outside the borders of Germany, which could be categorised as institutional crime, or theft by government. Nazi Germanys confiscation of the central bank gold of occupied countries in order to finance its war machine was the first stage in a monumental crime of this sort. The handling of this looted Nazi gold by the Swiss authorities was the second.

  During our early post-publication researches we had succeeded in unearthing a throw-back from World War II of great importance to the Nazi Gold story in its broader perspective – the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold. This tiny and secretive organisation was established by the British, French and American governments in 1946 for the purpose of distributing monetary gold (mainly bullion bars) to claimant countries whose original gold reserves had been looted by the Nazis. Since the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold (later thankfully informally referred to as the Tripartite Gold Commission or TGC) had received its last deposit in 1960 the authors were surprised to learn that the TGC remained in existence some 20-odd years later. Upon establishing that the TGC ‘corresponds only with governments’ we approached British Member of Parliament Jeff Rooker who, in May 1984, sought to throw light on the secret records of the TGC by initiating a debate in the House of Commons. This was the first parliamentary enquiry into the TGC following its formation nearly 40 years previously.

  As a result we learned that the TGC were still holding over seven tonnes of looted Nazi gold (then valued at $84m) in their accounts with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Bank of England. The British government explained (after seeking and obtaining permission from the US and French governments) that there was an outstanding British claim against the Albanian government for some £850,000 which resulted from the mining of two British warships in the Corfu Channel in 1946. Despite a 1949 judgement from the International Court of Justice in Britain’s favour, the claim remained unpaid. In the meantime Albania had lodged a claim for approximately 1½ tonnes of gold with the TGC on the grounds that it had been looted by the Nazis and subsequently recovered by the Allies who had consigned it to the TGC.

  This assertion was challenged by Italy who claimed that the Albanian gold actually belonged to them. In 1951 an arbitrator was appointed: he found in favour of Albania. However, this gold remained subject to the claim by the British government against Albania. Even allowing for the disputed Albanian gold this still left some five and a half tonnes eventually destined for distribution to the ten claimant countries. The government position was that the balance of the gold could not be distributed until the Albanian claim was settled. As Britain was merely a joint custodian of the gold pool rather than the owner the legality of this position was, at the very least, highly questionable.

  In January 1985 we wrote to Jeff Rooker suggesting that, since the use of the gold had been denied to the claimant countries for 40 years and since it had formerly been intended for the promotion and furtherance of war, persecution, terror and torture, he might consider tabling a parliamentary motion for the gold to be donated to a needy cause. Although parliamentary procedures prevented this action, we were certainly on the right track, as subsequent events were to show.

  The issue of the Albanian gold was so sensitive that in 1986 Jeff Rooker became involved in protracted correspondence with the Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher, who subsequently arranged for Rooker to receive a private briefing from the Foreign Office. Finally, in July 1987 Jeff Rooker secured an Adjournment Debate and raised the various contentious issues surrounding the eventual disposition of the seven tonnes of gold on the floor of the House. Once again, however, parliamentary procedures came to the rescue, though three months later the Minister of State at the Foreign Office, David Mellor had to acknowledge that ‘answering your questions presents certain problems’. And so the dealings of the TGC vanished from public scrutiny once more until we lifted the veil of secrecy nearly nine years later.

  In the meantime we had continued to pursue our investigation into the two bars of Belgian gold, the 10,405 British pounds and the 427,075 US dollars – all of which seemed to have vanished into thin air following its deposit at the Land Central Bank in Munich in 1945. The purchasing power of this tiny proportion of the missing Reichsbank funds amounting to an incredible £4,165,870 by 1998 values, but our evidence regarding its disappearance was so compelling that we were determined to pursue it as rigorously as we could. It was our belief that if we could fi
nd the missing Munich treasure then the US government would have to take the remainder of our allegations very seriously indeed.

  In December 1983, a few months after the original edition of Nazi Gold went to press, the Department of State finally agreed to initiate a ‘serious investigation’ into the disappearance of the two bars of gold. It had taken us nearly five years to achieve this objective. They were, however, unable to investigate the missing cash which was stored in the same vault as the gold, since this fell under the jurisdiction of the US Department of Justice. A request for an investigation into that aspect elicited the following response. ‘As to your enquiry whether we are able to confirm the loss of the amount stated in your letter, we are unable to do so based on the information contained in the files retained by this office.’ Tritely the letter ended with the routine formula: ‘We thank you for your interest in this matter and your offer to assist the United States.’ Basically the US Department of Justice couldn’t care less; but the Department of State was a different kettle of fish and seemed determined to get to the bottom of the mystery.

  At the same time we wrote to the Treasury Solicitor’s Department in London, which would have been the ultimate recipient of the missing British pounds – assuming they had been handed over to the British authorities as they should have been. Although the Treasury had received some British pounds from the US occupation authorities in Germany after the war they were unable to specifically confirm receipt of the missing £10,405.

  For two years the Department of State wrote to us requesting more and more detailed information on the missing bars. In March 1985 they wrote to us stating that they had ‘not been able to ascertain the disposition of the gold bars from records available to us’, adding: ‘We are now approaching the German authorities to ascertain what information they may have on the subject.’ And then silence prevailed once more. Despite regular requests for an update on their investigation we were to hear nothing more for over a decade.