Hunting Nazi Gold
How the Reich filled its coffers and where the money went
Throughout World War II, the German army looted millions in gold bullion from occupied countries, but where exactly did that treasure go?
Famous American stockbroker Gerald M Loeb once stated that, “The desire for gold is the most universal and deeply rooted commercial instinct of the human race.” Since the substance was first smelted by the ancient Egyptians around 3,600 BCE, this most precious of metals has become a symbol of wealth and power.
The establishment of the Gold Standard in 1717, which allowed currency to be linked to gold at a fixed rate, further increased its importance.
During World War II, the Nazi war machine was a hungry beast, requiring a consistent supply of funds to purchase materials, feed troops and ensure that the assult across Europe, and the world, continued. As a result, Nazi policy was to systematically loot all countries, and their populations, who were unfortunate enough to fall under their occupation. Indeed, in 1943 the British Ministry of Economic Warfare estimated that some $550 million-worth of gold had been looted by the Nazis from numerous occupied countries. However, the exact amount of gold stolen by the Nazis remains unknown, particularly as the location for much of the plundered loot remains a mystery.
First and foremost it’s important to assess the nature of the looted gold. While a large amount was taken in the form of bars stolen directly from banks, which were then melted and rebranded with Reichsbank insignia, some was obtained by much more distressing means. The first evidence of this was uncovered in 1943. As well as looting from banks and state institutions, the Nazis also took directly from individuals, including the victims of the Holocaust. While this involved seizing victims’ bank accounts, housing and investments, gold bars were discovered that were entirely new and from a disturbing source: gold watches, jewellery and even teeth fillings pulled from the mouths of victims had been melted down and crafted into Reichsbank bars. Between 1946 and 1948 the Hamburg Ravensbruck trials saw officials from the concentration camp of the same name investigated for their part in this gruesome practice, among many other atrocities.
One of these individuals was Martin Hellinger, whose primary duty as ‘camp dentist’ was to remove gold from the mouths of victims. Hellinger was not alone, and this was discovered to be standard practice in the Nazi death camps. As early as 1940 Heinrich Himmler gave the command that dental gold was to be collected from the mouths of the dead, and in 1942 this order was implemented into the organisation of the Holocaust. Due to this, numerous bars stamped with Nazi insignia were melted down by their purchasers and restamped to conceal their sinister origin. This became particularly apparent in Portugal in 1943, where dealers had accumulated 123 tons of Reichsbank gold through trading with Nazi Germany. When the Allies warned the Portuguese government that all this gold was to be considered stolen property, dealers in Lisbon desperately attempted to exchange German gold for ‘clean’ gold. When this was refused, a majority was melted down and moved to international banks.
These events in Portugal raise an interesting point for historians attempting to trace the whereabouts of stolen Nazi gold. Throughout the war Portugal, along with other countries such as Spain, Estonia, Switzerland and Sweden, remained neutral. This meant that trade could be conducted with the Axis powers, despite warnings as to the nature of the goods they were purchasing. As a result several of these countries acquired stolen Nazi gold, a fact that remains controversial and raises questions over how ‘neutral’ these countries actually were. For example,
Sweden’s steel industry would provide important materials for the German war machine, paid for in stolen gold. In 1997 declassified reports caused something of a stir as the extent of knowledge both Sweden and Switzerland had concerning the nature of the gold they were purchasing was revealed. Switzerland’s Bergier commission uncovered and assessed a great deal of information concerning the country’s own role in the war, especially as the finances obtained from direct gold sales allowed Germany to purchase materials from other neutral countries and further their war effort. Estimates of the amount of gold obtained by Sweden during the war range from 20,000kg to 34,000kg.
Following the documents released in 1997, many countries began to assess the concept of neutrality in regard to war and particularly in regard to World War II. The scandal that resulted in the late-nineties revealed that, to an extent, many ‘neutral’ countries’ economies had grown from interaction with Nazi Germany and from the purchase of the stolen gold. In a US State Department briefing by Stuart Eizenstat (the under secretary of state for economic, business and agricultural affairs) regarding the reports he stated: “These dispel any sense that there was a monolithic concept of neutrality during World War II. The wartime neutrals often faced similar pressures and counterpressures, but reacted to them in varied ways, reflecting their specific wartime circumstances, the attitudes of their leaders and the more enduring features of their economies and geography. There was, in short, no such thing as uniform or absolute neutrality during World War II.”
As always when there is a missing fortune or a large amount of wealth, stories and legends appear concerning its whereabouts. Similar to stories of 17th and 18th century pirates who buried their treasure on desert islands until they could return to collect it, tales abound of fleeing Nazis hiding their stolen loot at the end of the war. While many can be considered apocryphal and perhaps nothing more than contemporary myth and legend, the frequency with which some of these tales recur raises the eyebrows of eager treasure seekers.
One of the most persistent and historically documented surrounds ‘Rommel’s Gold’, named after General Erwin
Rommel (nicknamed the ‘Desert Fox’) who served as the Nazi commander on the North African front. The gold itself was originally the property of the Jewish community in Tunisia, which was occupied by Nazi forces during the war. In January 1943 SS Colonel Walter Rauff summoned a collection of rabbis and religious leaders and offered to spare their communities for “60 hundredweight of gold”, to be delivered in 48 hours. Despite the magnitude of the task, it was achieved and the gold arrived five days later. The treasure was taken safely to Naples but due to heavy Allied bombing and political instability in Italy it was unable to continue its journey to Berlin. Instead, an ingenious plan was hatched. On the Corsican coast, a diver named Peter Fleig was hired and instructed to dive down to a particularly unusual rock formation. He was instructed to secure crates under water and mark their position with four weighted buoys. Following the end of the war, Flieg would return and make several dives for the lost loot – all to no avail.
James Bond creator Ian Fleming would become interested in the mystery during his time working in naval intelligence in World War II. Towards the end of the conflict, a raid was conducted on Tambach Castle in Bavaria by Allied commandos, organised by Fleming. Inside, German troops were in the process of burning the entirety of their naval archives, dating back to 1870. Such was the extent of the material Fleming’s agents discovered that a fishing boat was chartered in order to deliver the papers safely to his London office. Working his way through the vast collection of documentation, Fleming discovered details of a vast quantity of stolen gold that was due to have been shipped to Berlin, but it had never arrived. The story would inspire an anecdote in the novel On Her Majesty’s Secret Service and Fleming’s interest in Nazi gold would crop up again the short story Octopussy and, of course, Goldfinger. While Fleming would attempt to generate funds to finance an expedition to recover the gold, he was ultimately unsuccessful. If the gold still rests at the bottom of the sea, then its exact location remains a mystery.
However, Corsica isn’t the only supposed location of sunken Nazi gold. Lake Toplitz high in the Austrian Alps is rumoured to be the site of a horde of some $5.6 billion in gold bullion. During the course of the war the lake itself was used as a naval testing site, where scientists experimented with depth charges – some 4,000 are said to have been detonated at various depths. Early
one morning in May of 1945, the lake was also the site of some particularly strange goings on. Farm girl Ida Weisenbacher, 21, was awoken by a knock at the door and greeted by the intimidating form of an SS officer. Weisenbacher was instructed to bring a wagon and assist in moving a large amount of wooden boxes stamped with Nazi insignia. She then witnessed the boxes being placed into a rowboat, taken to the middle of the lake and unceremoniously thrown into the murky water.
In 1959, a diving expedition revealed the boxes to have contained counterfeit bank notes – counterfeit British bank notes. Over successive decades, more and more of the money has been recovered along with Nazi documents detailing the Bank of England monitoring system, all believed to have been part of Operation Bernhard. Named after Bernhard Krüger, its intention was to cripple the British economy using counterfeit notes produced by inmates at concentration camps. Some of the notes were detected by the Bank of England in 1943 and they continued to turn up in circulation right into the 1950s, however it’s believed that the majority ended up at the bottom of Lake Toplitz. The diving operation in 1959 uncovered some £700 million worth of counterfeit currency and further expeditions continued to unveil more hordes, with the latest dive into Tropitz’s waters in 2000 uncovering further examples. However, as of yet none of the expeditions have ever uncovered any gold, and whether there is a secret horde hidden beneath the lake’s murky waters remains to be seen.
Perhaps one of the most recurrent myths and legends surrounding the whereabouts of Nazi gold is that of the so-called ‘Nazi gold train’. Trains were used by the Nazis to transport “ESTIMATES OF THE AMOUNT OF GOLD OBTAINED BY SWEDEN DURING THE WAR RANGE FROM 20,000 TO 34,000KG” stolen goods to the capital in Berlin, a number of which are said to have vanished in the final days of the war. One particular legend surrounding Nazi loot and locomotives, which seems remarkably persistent, is that of a train buried within a mountain somewhere in Poland. The apocryphal story states that it was loaded with priceless art, jewels and up to 300 tons of gold. In 2018, Andreas Richter and Piotr Koper, a pair of treasure hunters, made international headlines when they announced they had found the train’s location. In return for 10% of the combined wealth of the goods on board (should a discovery be made), they revealed the location as a network of tunnels beneath the city of Walbrzych. Using ground-penetrating radar, experts were able to unveil images of the tunnels that caused Piotr Zuchowski (Poland’s deputy minister for culture at the time) to comment that he was “99% percent convinced”. Unfortunately, when a team of scientists descended on the area they found further evidence of tunnels, but no train. Whether there is any such hidden gold train remains a mystery and treasure hunters still eagerly search for it. After Richter and Koper parted ways, Richter said of the train that he was still “95% sure that it exists”.
Of course not all of the Nazi gold was hidden during the final days of the war and some was recovered. On 3 February 1945 an Allied bombardment of Berlin destroyed the Reichsbank and caused its president Walther Funk to have the majority of the gold reserves (some $238 million) secreted in Merkers Mine, about 200 miles southwest of Berlin. It was not just gold that was sent to the