Nazi Millionaires: The Allied Search for Hidden SS Gold Read online

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  CASEMATE

  2114 Darby Road, Havertown, PA 19083

  Copyright © 2002 by Kenneth D. Alford and Theodore P. Savas

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America.

  ISBN 0-9711709-6-7

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9—05 04 03 02 01

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  Printed in the United States of America

  To my guiding lights: my wife Edda, and my children, Cheryl Thomas, Roger Alford, and Mark Alford

  — Kenneth D. Alford

  In memory of my pop, Michael Anthony Savas, who served his country proudly over the skies of occupied Europe

  — Theodore P. Savas

  Map of Central Austria

  Contents

  Preface / Acknowledgments

  Dramatis Personae

  Introduction: The Rise of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany

  Chapter 1: The Devil’s Duo: Heinrich Himmler and Ernst Röhm

  Chapter 2: Hitler’s Rogues: Reinhard Heydrich and Ernst Kaltenbrunner

  Chapter 3: Franz Konrad: The King of the Ghetto

  Chapter 4: Playing God in Budapest: The Kastner-Becher Faustian Bargain

  Chapter 5: Fischhorn Castle: The Last SS Headquarters

  Chapter 6: The Moneymakers

  Chapter 7: A Bureaucrat and His Gold: Josef Spacil’s Final Days of World War II

  Chapter 8: Betrayal: The Discovery of Josef Spacil

  Chapter 9: Ghetto Konrad’s Hidden Wealth

  Chapter 10: Walter Hirschfeld and the Search for Eva Braun’s Jewels

  Chapter 11: Kurt Becher: The Only White Sheep in the Black SS?

  Chapter 12: Fall From Grace: Walter Hirschfeld and the Counter Intelligence Corps

  Chapter 13: Ernst Kaltenbrunner’s Missing Sacks of Gold

  Chapter 14: Adolf Eichmann’s Blaa Alm Gold

  Chapter 15: The Frau Connection: Iris Scheidler and Elfriede Höttl

  Chapter 16: The Gold Trade in Upper Austria

  Chapter 17: The Bloody Red Cross? Walter Schellenberg’s “External Assets”

  Postscript: Loose Ends

  Footnotes

  Bibliography

  Illustrations

  Preface

  The prisoner was clad in reddish brown trousers, his white shirt open at the neck. With a minister leading the way, he walked steadily across the fifty yards separating his cell from the execution chamber, head erect and hands bound tightly behind him. He looked calm, remembered one witness, thin and older than his 56 years.

  The gallows—the first ever used in the history of Israel—had been set up in a small room that had once served as living quarters for the prison guards. The condemned was ushered to a spot on the floor and instructed to stop. Israeli President Itzhak Ben-Zvi had refused to commute the sentence of death, and so the prisoner found himself standing on a black-painted trapdoor that had been cut in the floor in the fog enshrouded Ramleh prison, waiting for the inch-thick hemp that would snap his neck and choke the life from his body. As his executioners tied his ankles and knees, he exhaled loudly and looked about, surveying his earthly surroundings one final time.

  “Can you loosen the straps a bit so I can stand erect?” he inquired.

  The guard ignored him. “Do you have any last words?”

  Even when confronted with death he refused to atone for his crimes, brushing aside the minister’s request that he repent. Squinting, eyes almost closed, he looked to the side and down at the trapdoor upon which his brief future on this earth rested. And then the doomed man spoke:

  After a while, gentlemen, we shall all meet again. So is the fate of all men. I have lived believing in God, and I die believing in God. Long lives Germany. Long lives Argentina. Long lives Austria. These are the countries with which I have been most closely associated and I shall not forget them. I greet my wife, my family and friends. I had to obey the rules of war and my flag. I am ready.

  A few seconds of silence lingered after his final words. A hood was offered. A shake of the head was his only reply.

  The prisoner’s four-month trial had been one long and painful public replay of Nazi brutality. His testimony—defensive, cold, calculating, and remorseless throughout—presaged his final rebuff of the Protestant minister’s attempt at salvation. Visits to the death camps at Auschwitz, Treblinka, and a mass grave at Minsk, Russia, were coolly described with the words “Corpses, corpses, corpses. Shot, gassed, dead … they sprung out of the ground as the grave was opened. The stink … it was a fantasy of blood. It was an inferno, a hell, and I defy anyone to say that I wasn’t going crazy from it.” No words of apology. No admission of guilt. Not a whisper of contrition.

  “Muchan!” barked the Commissioner. Ready.

  A noose was slipped over the prisoner’s head and secured snugly around his neck. Three men stood in a corner of the room hidden behind a tent of blankets. Each gripped a lever in his hand, rigged so that none of them could tell who actually controlled the trapdoor.

  “Muchan!”

  “Christ!” called out the minister. “Jesus Christ!” The words echoed for a few moments and then an eerie silence briefly filled the room.

  The prisoner stiffened when a rustling sound was heard behind the partition. The trapdoor dropped open, and Adolf Eichmann was dispatched into eternity. In accordance with his Will and Testament, his corpse was cremated, its ashes scattered in the Mediterranean Sea—just outside Israeli waters.

  It was a few minutes before midnight on May 31, 1962.1

  On February 10, 1961, while Eichmann impatiently paced inside his cell awaiting trial, crystal chandeliers were swaying softly from the high ceiling in the banquet room of the old city hall in Bremen, Germany. Several large models of three-masted ships swayed gently between the magnificent light fixtures, a tribute to the vessels that had brought both wealth and power to the port city. The descendants of these merchants and sea captains, outfitted in their best clothes or crisp uniforms, together with a few other honored guests, were about to take their seats below the hanging models at long festively-arranged banquet tables. They were there to hear businessman Kurt A. Becher address them.

  A member of the Seafaring House and one of the richest men in Bremen, Becher was the afternoon’s main speaker at the annual Bremen Seafaring Association celebration, which for 416 years had been held each year on the second Friday in February. Like Adolf Eichmann, whom he knew well, Hamburg native Becher carried with him a not-so-secret burden. The canvas of his World War II past was smeared with a myriad of colorful connections to mass Jewish deportations, concentration camps, and mechanized murder. His tenure in Budapest offered Hungarian Jews and other “undesirables” life with one hand—if they filled it with gold—and deportation and death with the other. Unlike Eichmann, however, Becher was not considered one of the top tier of Nazis slated for immediate arrest and trial. Years had passed and Lady Luck, apparently, still hovered overhead.

  The illustrious, tradition-laden event began at 3:00 p.m, when a glass bell rang six times, calling those in attendance to silence. The president of the board announced the traditional and rather mysterious phrase, “Working upstairs and downstairs, upstairs and downstairs working.” A trio of raps on a carved oak door ensued, followed by orchestral strains of “E
ntrance of the Guests in the Wartburg.” Those gathered in attendance stood up and slowly moved toward the banquet room, the tables arranged in the shape of Neptune’s trident, the seating arrangements carefully planned well in advance. The meeting’s first speaker addressed the attentive crowd. The next scheduled lecturer was businessman and multi-millionaire Kurt Becher. To the group’s dismay, another was introduced in his stead. Murmurs of disapproval coursed through the angry and confused crowd.

  One month earlier, on January 7, 1961, the Weser Kurier newspaper reported that Becher was about to be indicted for war crimes as a former member of the SS. The article noted that a legal action had been or would soon be filed against the businessman in a Frankfurt court. The indictment would allege that the former colonel had swindled a Jewish businessman out of $18,000 when he offered to save the man’s brother from deportation to a concentration camp. Becher, claimed the paper, was paid the money but the doomed Jew rode the rails to death all the same. Rumors of even worse offenses persisted. Was Becher’s absence related to this rumored indictment?

  Rich and well connected, Becher was no stranger to the media and public spin. In an effort to stop rife speculation in the wrong circles of Bremen, a representative announced to the disgruntled crowd that a business emergency in South America had suddenly called him away. Becher, continued the spokesman, was genuinely disappointed that the crisis would not allow him to participate in the longstanding and honorable event. At least the last bit of verbal pirouette was true. Despite his bulging bank account and prominence in the community, Becher had waited years before finally being voted in as a member of the prestigious Seafaring House in 1959. Keenly aware of his criminal baggage, Becher hoped that admission to the private club would help him take another giant step on the road to social acceptance. His goal was to eventually serve as president of the Bremen Seafaring Association, and thereby gain access into the inner circles of Bremen aristocracy.

  Until now, Kurt Andreas Ernst Becher (who, impressed by SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler’s “King-Heinrich-craze” often used the middle name “Alexander” for Alexander the Great) had enjoyed a string of remarkable luck. A distinguished equestrian, Becher somehow always knew how to mount the right horse. During the war’s early years, he had caught the eye of several important officers, including Himmler and SS Gruppenführer (Major General) Otto Hermann Fegelein. Because of their trust in him, Becher rose rapidly through the ranks from a lowly sergeant in the SS to Standartenführer (Colonel). His duties included everything from distinguished combat service on the Eastern Front to mundane desk work in Berlin; from stealing Jewish-owned properties in Warsaw and Hungary, to selling freedom passes for millions of dollars to thousands of Jews. A brief imprisonment after the war threatened to dim his personal star, but his fortune quickly took a turn for the better when he was released from custody two years later. Within a remarkably short time the poor grain merchant was a multi-millionaire—an amazing feat in the wake of Germany’s near-total destruction and precarious economic situation. Was his personal fortune due simply to his knack for business and a bit of good luck? Or had he tucked away a fortune for later use during the war’s waning months?

  During the dark years of the Third Reich, Himmler and others shielded Becher and often acted on his behalf. In the postwar rise of the West German Bundesrepublik, Becher enjoyed the assistance of other influential friends, including Robert Pferdmenges, Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s friend and economic advisor. Certainly they were aware of his disreputable past. Rumors about Becher circulated freely. Some said he paid his personal Hamburg attorney a large annual retainer to keep the shadows of his past at a respectable distance. The dark stain remained, however, for not everything can be wiped clean with money and lawsuits.

  Kurt Becher is just one of many men sketched in Nazi Millionaires: The Allied Search for Hidden SS Gold. Admittedly, it is a story whose end has yet to be written, its primary passages gleaned from careful study of thousands of pages of declassified memorandums, letters, reports, interrogations, and interviews. It details, as far as possible today, our investigation into the activities of Kurt Becher and other merciless former SS soldiers, like Franz Konrad, Wilhelm Höttl, Josef Spacil, and Franz Six. All of these men worked by day for their Führer, and by night for themselves. They executed their duties with a religious fervor with one hand, and lined their pockets with stolen loot with the other.

  The overrunning of Europe and the western Soviet Union opened the door to the widespread sacking and raping of banks, churches, businesses, houses, and other personal property. The breathtaking scale of this ransacking would not have been possible without the mass deportation of European Jewry and the implementation of the “Final Solution.” Every Jewish ghetto gave up warehouses full of artwork, gold, currency, rings, furniture, clothes, rugs, and other personal belongings. Every train crammed with men, women, and children destined for the concentration camps sprinkled about Europe represented thousands of people stripped of their worldly wealth, their dignity, and eventually, their lives. When Germany surrendered in early May 1945, only slivers of this golden mountain remained. What had happened to the rest?

  From all accounts, a sizeable portion was in the hands of Adolf Eichmann and his fellow SS comrades in the RSHA (Reich Security Main Office) who, during the last weeks of the war, crammed trucks, trains, planes, and automobiles with gold, jewels, currency, and artwork, and made a mad dash for freedom. Few places were left to hide by April 1945. Americans were sweeping eastward from France and Italy into Germany and Austria. The dreaded Russians, with fire in their eyes for the war crimes committed on their soil (never mind their own government’s horrendous crimes against its citizens) were driving westward, closing the Allied pincers in a grasp from which few would wriggle free. To the south, the mountains of Austria beckoned. There, the fevered minds of a few fanatics persisted, a last ditch defense could be waged. And there they flocked by the hundreds, staining the snowy white Austrian Alps with their presence—and their blood money.

  A few of these men escaped capture. Most, however, were eventually arrested—but not before metal chests and cloth sacks had been buried, trucks pushed into fast flowing rivers, crates dumped into deep mountain lakes, and cellars and woodsheds filled with everything from currency to jars of gold. Determined and extensive searches by Allied investigators in the early months and years following the surrender recovered only a small fragment of this wealth. Was it really lost, or had much of it been safely stashed away for furtive future visits?

  Unfortunately, the complete story of what many of these men did during the war will never be fully revealed. Twenty-five years of research has failed to satisfactorily penetrate the wall of silence erected as soon as the guns fell quiet in 1945. An entire network of police departments, law firms, politicians, and prominent and powerful citizens around the world voluntarily protected (and still continue to do so) many of these monsters of humanity, shielding them from their hideous yesterdays. Few people today realize that this protective network exists. Even organizations and individuals within the United States have unclean hands. During and after World War II, the American Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC), Criminal Investigation Division (CID), Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and even the Department of State, participated in the silence for reasons we may never know or fully understand. In 1965, Congress passed legislation authorizing the destruction of all 110,000 CID documents. These included hundreds of cases of paperwork relating to the investigation of Americans who had stolen, or had somehow been nefariously involved with, the plunder of Europe’s treasures. Repeated Freedom of Information Act requests for particular documents the authors know exist have been refused under Exemption 6 and 7C of the Privacy Act, or Presidential Executive Order 12356, National Security. Persistent requests have also prompted return telephone calls threatening lawsuits. Still, our labors continue.

  It was not our goal to write the definitive study of every lost
World War II-era treasure, for such an accounting is impossible. Nor is this book intended as an exhaustive description of how Hitler structured his criminal Third Reich. Many other books have already plowed that ground well. Instead, we offer an account, reasonably thorough and hopefully interesting, of the vast amount of SS gold, jewelry, currency, and written documents that wound their way into Austria during the war’s final weeks. Some of it was discovered in short order; most of it never, at least officially, was seen again.

  In order to fully understand and appreciate this fascinating slice of history, we decided to introduce our subject with a general overview of Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, and how that power was implemented in relation to the Final Solution. This portion of our study is based largely on secondary sources and admittedly breaks no new ground. Within this framework of understanding our principal characters mount the stairs, walk across the written stage, play their parts, and exit—some gracefully, some kicking and screaming. A few perish during the war; others eventually sit at the bar of justice and meet a state-sponsored death or spend time behind bars. Far too many live in freedom to a ripe old age in a grand fashion not one of them deserve. Few suffer the earthly fate each so richly merit; hopefully a higher justice awaits them. All of them have in common one thing: they used their positions of power over other human beings to steal and conceal wealth earned or owned by others, while their own shoulders brushed against, or their fingers operated, the Reich’s organized machinery of death.