Lost treasures stolen by the 3rd Reich. Lost Treasures of the III Reich

The world is full of legends and rumors about Nazi treasures. And, as you know, there is no smoke without fire - many authentic documents have been preserved that testify to the existence of hiding places. Until now, authoritative commissions are working in various countries of the world, which are trying to find traces of Nazi treasures. Enthusiasts rummage through abandoned mines, mountain caves and even the bottom of the seas and lakes in search of the Amber Room, "Rommel's gold" and other quite real and semi-legendary treasures that have disappeared without a trace.

Few people know that bank boxes and safes rented by the Nazis contain no less valuable, but much more terrible secrets- materials from the secret laboratories of the Third Reich.

On the Trail of Nazi Treasures 1

Mystery of Lake Toplitz 6

Treasures in mountains, lakes, mines 18

"Gold Breslau" 21

Rommel's Gold 25

Secrets of ancient castles 30

Secrets of sunken submarines 33

Hitler Allies Gold 36

In Search of the Lost Masterpieces 41

Notes 46

Andrey Nizovsky
Treasures of the Third Reich

On the Trail of Nazi Treasures

There is a legend that about six months before the surrender of Nazi Germany, Hitler allegedly declared in a narrow circle of his close associates: "We are finally defeated ... I want to leave treasures for the revival of the future Great Reich."

It is not known whether Hitler actually said this. However, it is reliably known that the last months of the war were marked by the unprecedented activity of the Third Reich's special services, aimed at the emergency transfer of assets abroad, the creation of various hiding places in abandoned mines, the cellars of ancient castles and carefully disguised bunkers. The leaders of the Nazis, or at least some of them, and the SS men were going to go underground and continue the secret struggle underground and accumulate strength for the revival of the "Great Reich" ...

The echo of these events of the last months of World War II has not ceased to this day, giving rise to many mysteries and truly detective stories. In world media mass media every now and then new sensational reports appear that another cache of documents or even real treasures of the Third Reich has been found somewhere. However, much more often you can read or hear only about new versions of one or another long history and that someone once again goes in search of "Nazi gold" and noisily announces this venture in advance. But be that as it may, the fact remains: in the last months of the war in Germany, many, many works of art, including world-famous ones, and a very significant amount of other valuables - gold, currency, securities, etc., disappeared without a trace. Until now, authoritative commissions are working in various countries of the world, trying to find traces of these assets, and until now, all kinds of enthusiasts are rummaging through abandoned mines, mountain caves and even the bottom of the seas and lakes in search of the missing Amber Room, "Rommel's gold" and others both quite real and semi-legendary treasures.

The mystery of the missing treasures of the Third Reich really exists, and no one disputes this fact today. Another thing is that the accents in this rather confusing and dark story are sometimes placed incorrectly: the main plot here is still the mystery of the missing German bank deposits, while all sorts of stories about caches of gold and artistic treasures rather form the background of this dramatic picture. Although it must be admitted that this second plan looks much more effective ...

Gold from caches

Germany's resources were not unlimited. It was no secret to anyone that the military industry of this country was critically dependent on the supply of a number of strategic materials from abroad. The "sober-minded" politicians of European countries in the late 1930s were even convinced that Hitler would not risk starting a war, since from a rational point of view this idea looked absurd. However, all these calculations were overturned in an instant: in Berlin, they looked at the situation with completely different eyes.

Theodor Eicke, creator and head of the concentration camp system in pre-war Germany

By the end of the 1930s, the militarized German economy had indeed almost completely exhausted its gold and foreign exchange reserves, which were necessary for the purchase of military materials abroad. By 1939, Germany was no longer even able to meet its foreign loan obligations. However, as the internal resources of the country were exhausted, the opportunity to replenish these resources from external sources expanded. The first victims of the Nazi robbery were Austria, Czechoslovakia and the "free city" of Danzig, which fell under the control of the Nazis. According to modern researchers, only these three sources made it possible in 1937-1939 to replenish the treasury of the Third Reich by 71 million dollars (in the prices of those years). In order to disguise the robbery, the German Reichsbank in its official reports regularly underestimated the size of its gold reserves (for example, in 1939, according to the estimate of the Bank of England, this figure was reduced by 40 million dollars).

During the war, Germany continued this practice, only on a much larger scale. According to modern estimates, during the years of the war in different countries, the Nazis confiscated 550 million dollars in gold. This number includes the gold reserves of Belgium (223 million dollars), the Netherlands (193 million), the gold reserves of Luxembourg, France, and at the end of the war - Hungary and Italy (we are talking only about state assets; assets confiscated from individuals and companies constitute a separate category). By the end of the war, the gold reserves of the Reichsbank, according to some experts, amounted to 773 million dollars in the prices of that time (in today's prices, this is about 6.5 billion dollars). In this case, we are talking only about gold, but meanwhile the Reichsbank also kept deposits of the SS, which consisted primarily of jewelry, banknotes, gold and securities confiscated from concentration camp prisoners. There were also assets of various ministries, departments, military commands. Their total cost cannot be accurately calculated.

On May 15, 1945, in the cellars of the Reichsbank, Soviet representatives found 90 bars of gold, about 3.5 million dollars in the currency of different countries, as well as bonds, the total value of which exceeded 400 million dollars. Everything else disappeared without a trace. At least that's how it seemed at the time...

The fact that the cellars of the Berlin Reichsbank turned out to be empty in May 1945 is not surprising: from the beginning of 1945, the bank building became one of the targets of the Anglo-American air raids, so that the bulk of the Reich's gold reserves had to be evacuated to safer places - to the Central and Southern Germany. In the last months of the war, all these areas were occupied by the Western Allies.

By the time the Second World War entered its final phase, the Allies already imagined the extent of the plunder to which the Nazis subjected the occupied countries. However, reality surpassed all expectations: the military authorities of the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition faced problems on the territory of occupied Germany, for which they were simply not prepared.

As the Allied troops advanced deep into Germany, they increasingly came across whole warehouses of various valuables arranged by the Nazis in mines, ancient castles, concentration camps, city sewers, in the basements of private companies, various government agencies, industrial enterprises. On the railway tracks there were abandoned trains loaded with gold, currency, securities, precious metals and stones and other assets. It was obvious that a further offensive would only increase the number of such finds. Therefore, already in 1944, special units began to be created in the armies of the Western Allies, whose task was to search for and evacuate caches of valuables belonging to the Nazis. They had to check all the rumors about such caches, which often led to a colossal, but fruitless waste of time and effort.

In March 1945, in Strasbourg (France), a certain person in civilian clothes passed through third hands to the intelligence officers of the 12th american army a letter in a sealed envelope marked "very important". This letter contained full list Nazi caches in Baden. By the end of March 1945, the headquarters of the 12th Army already had information about 103 warehouses with valuables in Western and Southern Germany, but all these reports turned out to be false. In April 1945, the headquarters of the 6th American Army received information that a group of Nazis planned to transfer 6,000 kilograms of gold from the stocks of the Berlin Reichsbank across the border to Switzerland in the near future. The capture team immediately went to the city of Lorrach (in Baden), where, according to informants, there was a cache of gold ready for transfer, but no traces of the alleged treasures were found.

We are talking about the diary of an officer of the Third Reich, Egon Ollenhauer, in which the author spoke about Hitler's order to hide 260 trucks with treasures in 11 different places in Poland during the retreat of the fascist units.

At the same time, Ollenhauer himself acted as a key figure in this operation,

a link between other SS officers and local aristocrats who wanted to hide their valuables from the advancing Soviet troops.

Until recently, the officer's diary was kept in the Masonic lodge of the ancient German city Quedlinburg in Saxony-Anhalt. It states that one of the caches

which stores 28 tons of Reich gold, is located in Breslau (modern Wroclaw).

Other caches should contain gold coins, medals, jewelry and other valuables given to SS officers by wealthy locals.

The diary claims that 47 paintings were hidden in one of the caches, taken by the Nazis from French art collections.

Among them are works by Botticelli, Rubens, Caravaggio, Monet, Raphael and Rembrandt.

In another cache, various religious items were hidden, brought from different countries of the world, allegedly being proof of the correctness of Hitler's racial theory.

According to Roman Furmaniak of the Schlesische Brücke Foundation, after long negotiations 10 years ago, the lodge agreed to transfer the diary to the foundation.

“We published information about this diary, as we were waiting for the last people associated with these events and with the diary to be gone, in particular, officers of the SS troops. That was the will of the lodge of Quedlinburg,” he explained.

According to Furmaniak, the authenticity of the diary was confirmed by five different scientific institutions Germany, including at the Faculty of Art History of the University of Göttingen.

“We wanted to coincide with the publication of the diary on the centenary of the restoration of Poland's independence and the 1100th anniversary of the founding of the lodge in Quedlinburg. The desire of the lodge was that all valuables returned to their owners, he added. “However, it probably won't be possible in every case. But our desire is to return all property to its rightful owners.”

Currently, the foundation is studying the places marked in the diary to make sure that the valuables are safe.

According to the founder of the foundation, one of the hiding places should be in a deep well in the palace park, the other at the bottom of the pond.

The rest of the caches were made in concrete sarcophagi buried in various places, including a secret room between the walls of one of the castles.

“This diary is very interesting because it contains many details of the events of the end of the war in Silesia, it also contains data on where they planned to hide these valuables,” said historian Janna Lamparska. “But in my opinion, no value will be found thanks to this diary. If these people really knew that the values were there, they would act differently.”

Hitler's submarine

In early February, it was reported that a German submarine U-23, which participated in the Second World War, was found in the waters of the Black Sea. The boat, sunk in 1944, was discovered at a depth of 40 m near the Turkish city of Agva.

The Turkish marine engineer and diver Seljuk Kolai has been searching for the submarine for several years. Later, units of the Turkish Naval Forces joined him. The alleged location of the submarines was established with the help of archival documents back in 2008, but then Kolai did not have the opportunity to film the flooded equipment on video, only single scuba dives were made to it, which were often interfered with by storms.

Now we managed to shoot about the boat documentary, which was shown on Turkish television.

The German submarine U-23 belonged to the so-called "Hitler's Lost Fleet". In addition to it, at one time it included submarines U-19 and U-20, which were also sunk off the coast of Turkey. Not so long ago they were discovered off the coast of Istanbul.

The 40-meter U-23 was launched in 1936. During her service, she made 16 military campaigns, sank 8 ships, 2 warships, damaged one auxiliary ship, one warship, irreparably damaged 2 ships.

During his service in the Kriegsmarine, U-23 was commanded by ten different officers, the most famous of which was Lieutenant Commander Otto Kretschmer, who later became one of the best commanders of the submarine fleet. After serving in the Atlantic with the 1st Flotilla from July to September 1940, U-23 served as a training boat with the 21st Flotilla. Subsequently, U-23 was converted and transported by land across the Danube to the Black Sea to the Romanian port of Constanta, where she served as part of the 30th flotilla until September 1944.

U-23 was scuttled by her crew on September 10, 1944 in the Black Sea off the coast of Turkey to prevent capture by the advancing Soviet units.

When, after the surrender of Germany, one of the major Nazi officials, Walter Straub, was asked during interrogation what he knew about the hidden treasures of the Third Reich, he suddenly answered cryptically:
- Search at the bottom of the sea!
In order to be better prepared, the American investigator postponed the interrogation until tomorrow, but the former secretary of the Ministry of Culture did not live until the next day: before dinner, someone poured poison into the bowl of the talker.

After the Second World War, an article appeared in the Dutch magazine "Shpunk" that the British had found an abandoned secret factory on the coast of the North Sea for the production of individual parts for the production of the latest fascist submarines.

In addition to the hardware itself, the British discovered something else that was not directly related to the production of submarines. These were thin and very strong steel cables with a length of one to three thousand meters (!), As well as two dozen sealed cylinders. The internal volume of each reached several cubic meters. The containers, opened with the greatest precautions, turned out to be empty. However, their involvement with the steel cables was obvious. And on those, and on others, there were identical locks, with the help of which they joined each other. Experts have suggested that the cylinders are designed for use at very great depths. However, they did not go further in their guesses, until multi-ton cast-iron blocks equipped with exactly the same locks were discovered in the dungeons of the plant.

Everything fell into place. The cylinders, apparently, were attached to these blocks-anchors holding the steel containers in the depths of the sea. The cable was attached to the cylinder cover and went up to the surface of the water. And what happened next? This was where the fantasy of the British and American consultants dried up.

The occupying authorities, no matter how hard they tried, could not find anyone who was somehow connected with the discovered production, and therefore the secret of multi-ton "anchors", cables and cylinders was not disclosed for a long time. Many versions were put forward, but there was no definite sensible answer.

The foregoing interested the Belgian magazine "Secret Histories", especially since in its portfolio there was some information about those very mysterious cylinders. They were shared with the editors by the former German sailor Helmut Frase. When in 1944 he served on a submarine, he happened to participate in a rather strange experiment.

It was about testing a mechanism, the purpose of which was terribly classified. Fraze said it was a large buoy, equipped with a high-capacity battery and some kind of electronic equipment. The buoy was attached to the anchor in such a way that no more than thirty meters remained to the surface of the water. Together with a cable and an anchor, he was thrown into the sea in an arbitrary place, after which (the essence of the test) it was necessary to find him as soon as possible.

For this, special equipment was used, access to which only the responsible SS officer on the submarine had access to. The sailors believed that the hull of some new mine was being tested, so no one had any unnecessary questions. And only with time did it become clear to Helmut Frase that the Obersturmbannführer, who led the experiment, was not interested in mines at all. The highlight of the program was a mechanism that made it possible to find the notorious buoy in the depths of the sea. But the most curious thing about this story is that the retired sailor never again saw any mention of that strange device anywhere.

What was it? Imagine a fairly simple but reliable design. It consists of a hollow cylinder with walls that can withstand the enormous pressure that occurs at a depth of many kilometers. From the surface of the sea, a strange buoy (which is its peculiarity) is absolutely invisible, but if necessary, special equipment can quickly find it. The cylinder is connected to the buoy by a long cable, which has already been discussed. It was not clear what the Nazis were going to hide in these cylinders at the bottom of the ocean? The conclusion about the valuables plundered by them during the war suggested itself.

Although is it not a crazy idea to send them to the water depths, when there are plenty of secluded places on land? However, as time has shown, many Nazi caches on the ground (or underground) were eventually discovered, but the main treasures of the Third Reich were not in them.

Meanwhile, events developed. More recently, an article by a certain R. Graham “Diamonds from the Sea King” appeared in the American Leisure Magazine, where he described a meeting with a wealthy Englishman, Rowan Gilbert. He told the story of the colossal wealth that fell on him. To some, it will seem incredible, but if you recall the publications in the magazines "Shpunk" and "Secret Stories", then the story of Rowan Gilbert deserves attention.

One fine day, my English friend Anatole S. introduced me to a man whose fate could become the basis of an adventure novel, the American began. - This rich gentleman from Brighton was named Rowan Gilbert. Twenty years ago he went to work in the north of the country. An oil refinery was being built near the Scottish city of Aberdeen. Gilbert settled on him. One Sunday morning he was walking his dog along the North Sea coast.

The tide has begun. Suddenly his attention was attracted by a certain object, nailed to the rock by the waves. Going down to the very water, Gilbert saw a large metal cylinder, reaching two meters in length and, probably, a meter and a half - in diameter.

Feeling that something interesting might be hidden inside the mysterious find, Gilbert tried to open the cylinder, but the strong metal did not give in. Then the intrigued Briton rented a small truck with a winch. He managed to drag his find into the back and take it home. There he used gas welding and, in the end, cut the "thing". What opened up inside shocked Rowan.

Gilbert had never seen so many jewels even in films about the treasures of the leaders of Atlantis. He was a guy with brains and after some thought divided the treasure into several parts, hiding them in different safe places. He waited until the construction of the plant was completed and left Scotland, taking with him some diamonds, the approximate cost of which was 50 thousand pounds sterling.

It was a tiny fraction of the wealth he found. Living in Wales, after some time Gilbert brilliantly staged a find on the beach - under a mossy cliff - an old chest of jewels. Having handed over the treasure to the state, the lucky man, according to the law, received half of its value. Now the rest of the treasures could be taken care of. Rowan and his family moved to the United States, where he founded a car repair company in Newark. Of course, only to cover his impressive wealth. In the hands of an intelligent assistant he selected, the enterprise became very profitable.

Gilbert returned to England for the remaining treasure. Through simple fraud, he cashed out part of his diamond reserves and began to transfer more and more Money to develop the company in Newark. It soon became a thriving corporation. Production (now they not only repaired, but also built cars here) grew before our eyes. After some time, Gilbert becomes a super-rich man. And yet, most of the diamonds, not yet claimed by him, rest in reliable caches in England. These are reserves for a rainy day, the multimillionaire claims. Something for peace of mind! - He gives to charity.

Gilbert's descriptions of the mysterious cylinder are identical to those given by the magazine "Plate". Now you can quite concretely imagine how the Nazis hid the goods they stole during the war years. The jewels were soldered into a sealed cylinder, a half-ton weight was attached to it on one side, and a strong steel cable on the other. After flooding, its upper end was kept afloat (30 meters from the sea surface) by a buoy. According to Helmut Fraze, it was equipped with a hydroacoustic transmitter powered by the so-called "eternal battery", the principle of which is based on the use of the temperature difference between the surface and bottom layers of water. When there was a need, it was possible to quickly find a cache in the ocean.

... The Austrian town of Bad Aussee has always attracted tourists. About seventy years ago, it was no less popular: people who knew a lot about luxury settled here. Historian Gerhard Zauner only manages to show from the car window - this is the house of Otto Skorzeny, that wooden one over there - General Vlasov, and the little white building - Goebbels' dacha. In this pretty town, the last traces of the gold reserves of the Third Reich are lost. In April 1945, dozens of wagons with thousands of tons of gold and platinum, kilograms of diamonds and paintings from museums throughout Europe and the USSR disappeared at the stations around Bad Aussee. According to the most conservative estimates, the current price of those treasures is 500 billion dollars….

Disappeared train number 277

Gold from the vaults of the Reichsbank is far from everything, says Gerhard Zauner. - From February 1945, valuables from the occupied cities were massively brought to the mountains of the Salzkammergut. They delivered the gold reserves of Mussolini and the Croatian regime of Pavelic, two boxes of diamonds from the banks of Belgium.

The Cossack corps of the SS and the headquarters of General Vlasov brought with them platinum bullion, the Tatar legion "Idel-Ural" - barrels of gold coins, the Slovak dictator Tiso - emeralds. The total cost is not included. After the war, the Americans found boxes of gold at the bottom of the lakes (in particular, Toplitsee), but only a FIFTH of the Reich's treasures were found. The rest - as dissolved.

... On August 10, 1944, the head of Adolf Hitler's office, "Nazi No. 2" Martin Bormann held a secret meeting at the Maison Rouge Hotel in Strasbourg. At a meeting with the financiers of Switzerland, there was a conversation about the transfer of Reich money abroad.
The Commissioner was appointed the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), headquartered in Basel. With the help of BIS, Borman transferred $10 billion in foreign currency to accounts in Argentina, Chile and Peru.

However, the bank was not able to "digest" such a huge amount of gold and platinum. On January 31, 1945, German finance minister Walter Funk proposed that the valuables be evacuated to a "safe place". Berlin left 24 cars of train number 277, filled to the brim with ingots from the vaults of the imperial bank. The train disappeared, as if it had never happened: judging by the documents found by the allies, the train with gold did not arrive anywhere.

Initially, the valuables were sent to the Bavarian town of Obersalzberg, says Ernst Goldberg, professor of history from Vienna. - The head of the SS special forces - Standartenführer Otto Skorzeny was instructed to arrange hiding places in the mountains and lakes of Austria. After the war, the allies, sorting out the caches, were surprised: Skorzeny seemed to have deliberately made it so that they would be found. The question is why did he need it?

Fake caches?

… Since the fifties, enthusiasts have been searching for the treasures of the Third Reich in the lakes of the Salzkammergut (mainly Toplitzsee and Grünsee). As Albrecht Sien, owner of the Fisherman's Shack, recalls nostalgically, the locals made a fortune out of scuba gear rentals.

In Toplitzsee, at a depth of one hundred meters, they found containers with counterfeit British pounds, six boxes of gold (the last one in 1987), Nazi awards - that's all. No caskets with diamonds, no rubies from the collection of the Queen of the Netherlands, no gold thalers from the Danish treasury.

Three lakes - Grünsee, Toplitzsee and Kammersee.
It was here that the Nazis equipped more than a dozen caches of gold.

Look at the number of this ingot - the historian Gerhard Zauner shows me a "brick" of pure gold - with a swastika and the inscription Deutsche Reichsbank. - Weight - 12.5 kilograms. In 1974, I personally got it at a depth of 70 meters - from the bottom of Lake Grünsee. Number B425: the same series was on train number 277, which disappeared after leaving Berlin.

It is worth noting that the Potsdam Conference in August 1945 decided: the gold reserves of the Third Reich should be equally divided between Britain, the USA, France and the USSR. Thus, the Nazis owe Russia (as the legal successor of the USSR) $100 billion. But it is unlikely that the money lies where the adventurers are trying to find it.

- Caches in lakes and mountains are simply a "trick", confirm both the historian Zauner and the owner of the restaurant Sien. - Obviously, Skorzeny's plan was to hide a small part of the gold of the Reich. The goal was to convince the allies: everything is hidden here, you just need to look well. The rest of the valuables went further, to the south - along a secret route.

Lost Treasures

Train number 277, or "Funk train", - 24 cars with gold, diamonds and platinum from the vaults of the Reichsbank: did not arrive at its destination.
Three wagons with gold from the banks of Soviet Ukraine - taken out during the retreat by SS Standartenführer Josef Spasil, head of the Süd-Russland police: disappeared near Lake Altsee.

One carriage with church gold from Romania. icon covers,
crosses and bowls that the leader of the puppet regime in "exile" Horia Sima took with him. The car disappeared at the station at Bad Aussee.

120 tons of gold - "Mussolini's reserve." Taken out by a special SS team from northern Italy. Traces are lost at the Bad Ischl station. Subsequently, only 20 tons were found in abandoned wells (in 1983). 100 tons of gold of Croatian dictator Pavelic. Transferred to Graz (Austria). We managed to find ONE (!) gold coin from the stock.

... In the summer of 1983, two tourists who got lost in the forest near Bad Aussee stumbled into a small house in the thicket. The roof of the building turned out to be built ... from Reichsbank ingots, even the walls and window frames were made of gold. The cost of the forest "villa" was tens of millions of dollars. The Austrian prosecutor's office made a statement - perhaps fifty such houses were cast, and in 1945 they (in a disassembled state) were exported by the Nazis abroad under the guise of ... ordinary building materials!

golden car driver

This is only part of Bormann's brilliant plan, says Ernst Goldberg, professor of history from Vienna. - A week before the surrender of Germany, the jewelry workshops in the Salzkammergut worked around the clock. Not only houses were cast from gold, but everything that was enough for imagination - frying pans, construction hooks. SS Standartenführer Friedrich Schwend (he became famous for printing counterfeit English pounds in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp) fled first to Spain and then to Peru in ... a golden car! Later, Schwend boasted: at the end of the war, he managed to export a ton of pure gold from Austria every day.

... Historian-researcher Gerhard Zauner shows a map of Nazi caches around the Salzkammergut - forests and lakes are densely covered with a scattering of red dots. Twenty storage caches were dug and equipped according to all the rules: in deserted places, mainly in mountainous areas. Boxes of gold were not just thrown to the bottom of Lake Toplitzsee: they were buried in silt at a decent depth - with the help of SS scuba divers. Nevertheless, more than half of the hiding places contained a snag - containers with
cardboard, earth and cotton wool. In the remaining caches, US Army search teams found significantly less gold than expected.

- The mystery of the disappearance of the treasures of the Nazis is so great that suggestions have been made: maybe Germany did not have so much money? - Shrugs the researcher Heinz Melevski (he has been looking for "Hitler's gold" for 20 years).
- They say that in the spring of 1945 the Reich's economy collapsed, every penny was spent on new weapons. This is not so: Bormann declared gold and diamonds inviolable.

The funds were huge. From Belgium and the Netherlands alone, the Germans confiscated almost half a billion dollars worth of bullion: at the current price, this is THIRTY TIMES more. The gold reserves of Austria, Czechoslovakia (about 104 tons), Denmark and France, half of the gold reserves of Poland, British and American assets (gold worth $ 111 million) fell into the hands of the Nazis. And that's not counting hundreds of private banks, thousands of jewelry stores. Don't forget the gold teeth of concentration camp prisoners. Auschwitz alone shipped 8,000 kg of gold bullion to Berlin in four years.

"I have nowhere to put my valuables"

... So, the head of the SS special forces, Otto Skorzeny, built a lot of fake caches, carrying out the Bormann plan, and "placed" some of the Reich gold in the Salzkammergut - however, most of the valuables were gone. But where? On May 16, 1945, Skorzeny, dressed in civilian clothes, was arrested by an American patrol near Lake Toplitzsee. During interrogation, he indicated only empty caches, and three years later he escaped from captivity.

Shortly before his death (1975), Skorzeny gave an interview in Madrid to the Soviet publicist Yulian Semyonov (the author of a cycle of novels about Stirlitz - in particular, "Seventeen Moments of Spring"), where he frankly expressed his opinion about the disappearance of Hitler's gold.

“I saw a bar of gold with a swastika in Peru,” says Semyonov. “The Reichsbank was stamped there. To this day, these bars are kept in a bank in Honduras.” “Nothing surprising,” Skorzeny answers him. - Reich Minister of Finance Funk at the end of April forty-five offered to leave with him. “I have nowhere to put the gold, Otto,” he said. However, Skorzeny makes a reservation: “For sure,” the SS man emphasizes, “the Nazis took out valuables with the help of the mafia.” This version is not meaningless.

Initially, suggests the historian Gerhard Zauner, they wanted to entrust the sending of gold to the south to the Cossack SS corps - they were transferred to the Salzkammergut, but Bormann changed his mind - "it is dangerous to mess with the Russians." Dozens of wagonloads of gold left Bad Aussee for the city of Graz on the border with Yugoslavia. On May 9, Germany threw out a white flag: Croatian officers from the Kama SS division, subordinate to ... Bishop Alois Khudal, took under guard the gold.

A native of Graz, a representative of the Austrian church in the Vatican and an ardent admirer of Hitler, this man has long established ties with the Neapolitan mafia - the Camorra. It was she, in all likelihood, who undertook to send the Fuhrer's gold across the cordon - Skorzeny hinted at this.

... Nazi valuables were taken out of Berlin on January 31st. In February, they ended up in Munich (including train number 277), then - in Salzburg, and further - in Bad Aussee. On May 7-8, the wagons moved south - to Graz.

Where did the convoy with thousands of tons of treasures of the Third Reich go after that?

Lost Treasures

50 tons of platinum from the SS Cossack Corps - when surrendering to the Allies, the Cossacks indicated caches around Lake Grünsee. All were empty.

150 boxes of gold from the Hungarian dictator Salashi. Treasures were hidden in the mountains and in Lake Mattsee. Part (15 boxes), including the crown of St. Stephen, was found by the Americans. The crown was returned to Hungary, gold bars are still stored in Fort Knox (USA).

20 barrels of chervonets of the Tatar SS legion "Idel-Ural", about a ton. After searching the caches, the British found cotton wool in them.

Upper Austrian Gauleiter August Aigruber diamonds. There were three iron containers in total. In 1975, divers found only one - in Lake Altaussee, near the house of Aigruber.

200 kilograms of Estonian SS gold. In 1944 the head
of the pro-Hitler "self-government" of Estonia, Hjalmar Mäe transported gold "seized from the Jews" by the 20th SS division to the Salzkammergut. According to him, he handed over the bars to Skorzeny, and nothing more is known about their fate.

On April 7, 1945, reconnaissance of the 90th Infantry Division discovered the gold reserves of the Third Reich in the Merkers salt mines in Western Thuringia. The scouts were helped by French female prisoners who worked in the mines. Here in February 1945, the directorate of the Reichsbank transported part of the country's gold reserves worth 238 million Reichsmarks. SS gold and part of the paintings from the Berlin museums were also hidden here.

Treasures of the Third Reich

Andrey Yurievich Nizovsky

Anthology of treasure hunting

The world is full of legends and rumors about Nazi treasures. And, as you know, there is no smoke without fire - many authentic documents have been preserved that testify to the existence of hiding places. Until now, authoritative commissions are working in various countries of the world, which are trying to find traces of Nazi treasures. Enthusiasts search abandoned mines, mountain caves and even the bottom of the seas and lakes in search of the Amber Room, "Rommel's gold" and other quite real and semi-legendary treasures that have disappeared without a trace.

Few people know that bank boxes and safes rented by the Nazis contain no less valuable, but much more terrible secrets - materials from the secret laboratories of the Third Reich.

Andrey Nizovsky

Treasures of the Third Reich

On the Trail of Nazi Treasures

There is a legend that about six months before the surrender of Nazi Germany, Hitler allegedly declared in a narrow circle of his close associates: “We are finally defeated ... I want to leave treasures for the revival of the future Great Reich.”

It is not known whether Hitler actually said this. However, it is reliably known that the last months of the war were marked by the unprecedented activity of the Third Reich's special services, aimed at the emergency transfer of assets abroad, the creation of various hiding places in abandoned mines, the cellars of ancient castles and carefully disguised bunkers. The leaders of the Nazis, or at least part of them, and the SS men were going to go underground and continue the secret struggle underground and accumulate strength for the revival of the "Great Reich" ...

The echo of these events of the last months of World War II has not ceased to this day, giving rise to many mysteries and truly detective stories. Every now and then, new sensational reports appear in the world media that another cache of documents or even real treasures of the Third Reich has been found somewhere. However, much more often you can read or hear only about new versions of this or that long-standing story and that someone once again goes in search of “Nazi gold” and noisily announces this venture in advance. But be that as it may, the fact remains: in the last months of the war in Germany, many, many works of art, including world-famous ones, and a very significant amount of other valuables - gold, currency, securities, etc., disappeared without a trace. Until now, authoritative commissions are working in various countries of the world trying to find traces of these assets, and until now all sorts of enthusiasts are rummaging through abandoned mines, mountain caves and even the bottom of the seas and lakes in search of the missing Amber Room, "Rommel's gold" and others both quite real and semi-legendary treasures.

Gold from caches

Germany's resources were not unlimited. It was no secret to anyone that the military industry of this country was critically dependent on the supply of a number of strategic materials from abroad. The “sober-minded” politicians of European countries in the late 1930s were even convinced that Hitler would not risk starting a war, since from a rational point of view this idea looked absurd. However, all these calculations were overturned in an instant: in Berlin, they looked at the situation with completely different eyes.

Theodor Eicke, creator and head of the concentration camp system in pre-war Germany

As the troops

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Allies moved deep into Germany, they increasingly came across entire warehouses of various valuables arranged by the Nazis in mines, ancient castles, concentration camps, city sewer collectors, in the basements of private companies, various government agencies, and industrial enterprises. Abandoned trains loaded with gold, currency, securities, precious metals and stones, and other assets stood on the railroad tracks. It was obvious that a further offensive would only increase the number of such finds. Therefore, already in 1944, special units began to be created in the armies of the Western Allies, whose task was to search for and evacuate caches of valuables belonging to the Nazis. They had to check all the rumors about such caches, which often led to a colossal, but fruitless waste of time and effort.

In March 1945, in Strasbourg (France), a certain person in civilian clothes handed over a letter in a sealed envelope marked “very important” to the scouts of the 12th American Army through third parties. This letter contained a complete list of Nazi hiding places in Baden. By the end of March 1945, the headquarters of the 12th Army already had information about 103 warehouses with valuables in Western and Southern Germany, but all these reports turned out to be false. In April 1945, the headquarters of the 6th American Army received information that a group of Nazis planned to transfer 6,000 kilograms of gold from the stocks of the Berlin Reichsbank across the border to Switzerland in the near future. The capture team immediately went to the city of Lorrach (in Baden), where, according to informants, there was a cache of gold ready for transfer, but no traces of the alleged treasures were found.

However, along with rumors of imaginary warehouses of Nazi valuables, a huge number of very real caches were also discovered. They were found throughout the space from Hamburg to Vienna. Most of these caches contained from one to several thousand objects. And on April 8, 1945, American soldiers came across one of the main storage facilities of the Third Reich, arranged in a potash mine near Merkers (Thuringia), the adits of which stretched for 48 km. Later, experts found that about 80% of the entire gold reserve of the Reichsbank was collected here! At great depths, in a secret cave, fenced off from the rest of the underground galleries by a false wall made of stones, 8527 gold bars with a total weight of about 100 tons, 3682 bags of Reichsmarks worth 2.76 billion, 80 bags of foreign currency, 63 boxes of silver bars, 6 bars of platinum, 8 bags of gold rings. The most terrible find was the “booty” of the executioners from the SS - 207 bags and suitcases filled with jewelry, silverware, gold spectacle frames, dental crowns, watches and cigarette cases confiscated from concentration camp prisoners killed by the Nazis. The total weight of precious and semi-precious stones seized from the Merkers mine amounted to more than a ton. Bank documents and about 400 tons of documents from the German Patent Office were also stored here. It took 13 railway platforms to transport the valuables seized from the Merkers mine, and 20 trucks were required for the reloading, which lasted 72 hours. Experts from the US Treasury in June 1945 estimated the total value of the treasures of the Merkers Mine at $500 million (at then prices). 300 million of this amount was gold (mainly in bars and coins) and other precious metals.

On April 29, 1945, Major Howard McBee, an officer in the U.S. Army Attorney General's Office, made a similar discovery in a quarry near the Buchenwald concentration camp. Here, in a below-ground and disguised bunker, 313 suitcases, wooden boxes and barrels were hidden, filled with American currency, gold bars, gold coins, diamonds, various precious stones, silver spoons, watches, wedding rings, gold dentures and other values. The total weight of the find was about 21 tons.

During May 1945, units of the US 12th Army uncovered almost 400 new caches. In Austria, by the end of May 1945, representatives of the Allied military administration discovered 21 large warehouses of Nazi valuables. As in Germany, they were mostly built in old mines, deep in the bowels of the earth. Some high-ranking Nazis, who at the end of the war were responsible for concealing certain valuables, willingly cooperated with the occupation authorities, hoping for a mitigation of the sentence that threatened them. Thanks to their testimony, many new caches were revealed. US Army counterintelligence officers interrogated all the Nazi functionaries that fell into their hands, from the lowest rank to the highest. In mid-May, even Hermann Goering himself was interrogated, who, it was assumed, could know about the whereabouts of cultural property exported from France. At the end of April 1945, American counterintelligence officially reported that captured German officials and officers reported the existence of more than 100 large art repositories and archives in West Germany. Another source of information about the location of caches of valuables was the reports of banks, museums, various Nazi secret services and other institutions. Some of these reports were found in the Merkers salt mine, among other documents.

In early June 1945, a group of American counterintelligence officers and sappers found a mine cache in the vicinity of Wallgau (Bavaria), the location of which was indicated by local residents. Hundreds of gold bars were recovered from the underground vault. A huge number of valuables were found in the cellars of numerous branches of the Reichsbank, scattered throughout the country. Many of them were destroyed as a result of air raids and hostilities, so counterintelligence officers and employees of the military prosecutor's office had to make their way to the treasures through piles of stone and rubble. In the branch of the Reichsbank in Halle, the Allies found a large number of of gold, presumably originating from France, in Nuremberg - gold bars from Holland, in Plauen - gold that belonged personally to the Reichsführer SS Himmler, in Eschweg - 82 gold bars of unknown origin, in Magdeburg - silver bars, presumably originating from Hungary, and a large number of foreign valuable papers. In September 1945, General Dwight Eisenhower officially announced that his troops had seized from caches in Germany 300 pounds of precious and semi-precious stones, 700 pounds of rings, 3,000 pounds of jewelry, 3,500 pounds of watches, 650 pounds of gold and silver dentures, 4,500 pounds of scrap precious metals and 18,000 pounds of silver spoons and other tableware. All these valuables were once confiscated by the SS from the prisoners of concentration camps, and their owners were destroyed. And in September 1948, the following figures were published: the US Army discovered about 1,500 caches and warehouses in Germany (the exact number is still unknown), containing about 10.7 million various valuable objects.

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for a total amount of approximately 5 billion dollars (at the then prices).

Secrets of the Swiss "gnomes"

Thus, the targeted search for caches of treasures of the Third Reich gave a very significant result. All the valuables found were brought to a specially equipped depository in Frankfurt, and soon there was not enough space there. However, a significant part of the Nazi treasures has not been found so far: their trail has disappeared in the bowels of Swiss, Argentinean, Turkish, Portuguese, Spanish banks ... In the post-war years, many books were devoted to this topic, dozens of versions were expressed. Serious international commissions, consisting of highly qualified specialists, were engaged in the search for the missing treasures of the Third Reich.

The main channel for the “transfer” of Nazi gold was quickly established (one might even say that it was in full view all the time): it turned out to be the National Bank of Switzerland, which on the eve of the war was the main distributor of gold in continental Europe. This role remained with him during the war years: the Reichsbank conducted four-fifths of all its operations with gold through Swiss banks. Today it is estimated that between 1940 and 1945. The Swiss National Bank received gold from Nazi Germany for a total amount of 414 to 440 million dollars (3.5–4 billion in modern prices), of which 289 to 316 million was gold looted by the Nazis in occupied countries. It included both gold owned by the governments and state institutions of these countries, as well as gold confiscated from private individuals - primarily Jews who became victims of the Nazi regime.

The leadership of the Swiss National Bank already in 1940 knew very well that part of the gold received by it from the Reichsbank was the result of a robbery of the occupied countries: firstly, the countries of the anti-Hitler coalition warned the Swiss about this, and secondly, it was known in the financial circles of Europe that on the eve of the war, the gold and foreign exchange reserves of the Reichsbank were at an extremely low level. Where did the gold come from then? Nevertheless, neutral Switzerland preferred to silently ignore these facts. Already after the war, at the Washington talks in 1946 on the problem of gold deals with Nazi Germany and the restitution of property looted in other European countries, the directors of the National Bank explained their position by the fact that these deals provided Switzerland with some kind of guarantee against a German attack. In other words, by providing financial services to Nazi Germany, Switzerland thereby bought its freedom.

The cache in the mine. 1945

In the second half of 1940, the first signs appeared that the gold bought by the Swiss National Bank in Germany did not only come from the robbed banks of the countries occupied by the Nazis - at least part of it was confiscated from victims of the Nazi regime, both Jews and non-Jews . Irrefutable evidence of this was published in the Swiss press in mid-1942 (in particular, the Neue Zurcher Zeitung wrote about this in August 1942). In the summer of 1943, when it became impossible to deny or hush up the evidence of this fact, the following reasoning appeared: by putting an end to transactions with looted gold, or simply by demanding from Germany a clear confirmation of the legal origin of gold, the Swiss National Bank would thereby question its “honest intentions” and become would be vulnerable to post-war demands for restitution by those who lost their property as a result of Hitler's robbery. Meanwhile, Switzerland's legal status as a neutral country obliged it to accept gold regardless of who offered it. Thus, continued purchases of gold from Germany were justified.

Generals Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley inspect an underground warehouse. 1945

Throughout the six and a half years of the war, Reichsbank gold flowed freely to the Swiss National Bank, turning into a hard international currency - Swiss francs (the franc remained convertible throughout the war years). With these francs, Germany bought neutral countries the strategic military materials it desperately needs: chromium from Turkey, iron ore and bearings from Sweden, tungsten from Portugal, manganese from Spain. For all the years of the war, these countries received from Nazi Germany more than 300 million dollars (2.6 billion in modern prices) in payment for military supplies, and the total amount of German state assets transferred abroad during the war years (to Switzerland, Argentina, Portugal, Spain , Sweden and Turkey) amounted, according to various estimates, from 470 to 490 million dollars.

Neutral Switzerland was of enormous importance to the German wartime economy. Its unlimited capital market could be used for various transactions, such as the sale of gold and securities. During the war years, the Swiss franc was the only freely convertible currency in Europe, which was important both for Germany and for its trading partners. Through the Swiss center, the gold of the Reichsbank was redistributed to the central banks of other countries. Its largest buyers were Portugal, Spain, Romania, and to a lesser extent - Hungary, Slovakia and Turkey. The transactions of the Swiss National Bank in gold began to take on an unprecedented scale in the last quarter of 1941 and remained at high level during 1942 and 1943. It was only in the second quarter of 1944 that the volume of these transactions decreased significantly, although they continued to be carried out until the last month of the war.

Gustav Krupp

On a smaller scale, but no less effective, transactions with Nazi assets were carried out by private Swiss commercial banks. It is known, for example, that between 1940 and 1945 the German Reichsbank sold gold worth 101.2 million Swiss francs to Swiss commercial banks. However, their main area of activity was still cooperation with commercial banks in Germany. Thus, the Credit Suisse bank worked closely with the German Deutsche Bank, and the Swiss Banking Corporation had close relations with the Dresden Bank (Dresdner Bank). The three largest Swiss banks also did joint business with Hermann Goering's "pocket" bank, the German Aviation Bank (Bank der Deutschen Luftfahrt), which was founded in 1939 to develop the German air force. In all cases, the result of these relationships was cooperation in the implementation of various dubious transactions: conducting transactions with gold and foreign currency (a significant part of these values \u200b\u200bwere Nazi “loot”), financing business transactions, etc. A particularly problematic aspect of these relations was trade securities confiscated from the victims of the Nazi regime both in Germany itself and in the occupied countries. After the war, the question of the legality of this trade was repeatedly raised in lawsuits related to the problem of the restitution of valuables stolen by the Nazis; however, no one has ever been able to uncover the entire network of underground channels through which

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the securities stolen by the Nazis entered the Swiss market.

What were the business partners of the Swiss "gnomes" on the other side of the Swiss-German border?

Martin Borman

By 1943, all German banking was concentrated in the hands of Martin Bormann. Under his direct control was a specially created committee of the Nazi party on banking, which consisted of ten major industrialists and bankers. The chairman of the committee was Helmut Bernicke, governor of the provincial Brandenburg Bank (Brandenburger Bank) and member of the board of the Deutsche Bank. The members of the committee were Heinrich Hunke, President of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce, Member of the Management Board of the Deutsche Bank and Economic Advisor to the Berlin District of the NSDAP; Wilhelm Avieni, economic adviser to the NSDAP and member of the board of the Deutsche Metallgesellschaft metallurgical concern; Walter Jander, one of the leaders of the Junkers aviation concern, member of the board of the Commerzbank (Commerzbank) and economic adviser to the Dessau party district; Walter Rafelsberger, party economic adviser in Vienna and member of the board of the Austrian banking corporation Creditanstalt-Bankverein (owned by the German Reichsbank and the Deutsches Bank); Wolfgang Richter, economic adviser to the Sudetenland and head of the Braunkohlen Mitteldeutschland coal syndicate; Julius Mayer, economic adviser to Hanover and owner of the private Hanover Bank; Walter Schieber, economic adviser to Thuringia, head of an artificial wool company and member of the board of directors of the Dresden Bank; Christian Franke, Economic Advisor for Münster and North Westphalia, President of the Münster Chamber of Commerce and head of a large woodworking company. The tenth member of the committee was Karl Heinz Heuser, economic adviser to the Berlin district of the NSDAP.

Juan Domingo Peron

The banking committee of Martin Bormann became in fact the second government of the Third Reich. He introduced his representatives to the boards of all German banks without exception and had direct access to their operations. An important role in the system created by Bormann was played by Hermann Josef Abs, chairman of the board of the German Bank (Deutsche Bank), whose influence extended to the central state bank (Reichsbank) and the Ministry of Economics. Abs had excellent relations with Walter Funk, president of the Reichsbank, and proved to be very valuable to the party and Bormann. It was the German bank controlled by Absu that carried out the most sensitive foreign transactions with gold and other valuables. For him and for Martin Bormann's other pillar of financial power, the Dresden Bank, there were practically no limits on action. The German bank became in Bormann's hands the leading instrument for establishing economic control over the financial institutions and companies of the Nazi-occupied countries. He played vital important role in financing the German war machine. The management of the bank was selected largely on the principle of devotion to the ideas of National Socialism: the top managers of the bank, including the directors of numerous branches, were all members of the NSDAP without exception.

Along with the Dresden Bank, the German Bank carried out extensive financial operations in Turkey. German assets in this country amounted to approximately 30 million dollars (at the then prices), although their true size was probably many times greater. The Istanbul branch of the German Bank during the war years was especially notorious for its suspicious financial transactions, including transactions in gold, foreign exchange and securities nominally owned by various German firms and individuals. The origin of these values was not in doubt...

The Allies were aware of the scope of such operations and warned Switzerland and other “neutrals” more than once that they would not recognize the legitimacy of transactions with confiscated valuables. However, the neutral countries of Europe and Argentina continued to accept gold and currency from the Reichsbank even after it became absolutely clear that by 1942 Germany had completely exhausted its pre-war gold reserves and therefore we can only talk about gold looted by the Nazis in the occupied countries. They, and especially the Swiss, had very good reasons (even in the last year of the war) to maintain business relations with Germany. From the beginning of 1943, Switzerland came under increasing pressure from the Allies to stop gold deals with Germany. Although these warnings increasingly unnerved the leadership of the Swiss National Bank, they continued to resist the Allied demands until February 1945, when an official tripartite (Anglo-French-American) commission arrived in Bern. On March 8, 1945, after tense negotiations, an agreement was signed under which the Swiss National Bank pledged to stop buying gold from the German Reichsbank. Even earlier, on February 16, 1945, the Swiss federal authorities ordered the freezing of all German assets held in Swiss banks and their thorough inventory. These measures, however, did not stop the flow of value from Germany: Reichsbank gold continued to flow into Switzerland even in the last weeks of the war, bypassing the agreement with the Allies. During this period, bank accounts opened in the name of individuals were especially widespread: these accounts were credited with funds secretly transported by couriers from Germany to Switzerland.

Back in December 1944, a secret meeting was held in Strasbourg, which was attended by a number of high-ranking Nazi functionaries. The minutes of the meeting were taken by RSHA chief Kaltenbrunner. The issue of the forthcoming secret massive transfer abroad of a large number of valuables, primarily gold and foreign currency, was discussed. In the future, these funds were supposed to ensure the post-war future of Nazi criminals who fled to neutral countries, and the possibility of restoring the "Fourth Reich". Their transfer beyond the borders of Germany was entrusted to the RSHA.

Painting by Édouard Manet in the Merkers Mine

The meeting also considered operational plans, systems of pseudonyms and ciphers. A very narrow circle of people received personal ciphers. The overwhelming mass of valuables was invested in numbered accounts with a special condition: the deposit is issued if there are three signatures on the document. These signatures had to belong to people who knew the three parts of the cipher, but did not know each other, so that none of the "triples" could agree. A list of these people was kept in the RSHA among the most important documents.

The problem of the return of stolen valuables, "floated away" during the war years to the neutrals, rose to its full height in the very first days after the end of the war. In November-December 1945, the victorious Allies held a conference on reparations in Paris, at which, in particular, it was decided to establish a Trilateral Gold Commission to return gold to the governments of the plundered countries. This commission operated until February 1997. In general

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complexity, she distributed 329 tons of gold (about four billion dollars). As for the gold that ended up in neutral countries, its fate was decided in separate negotiations. As a result, Switzerland, after long negotiations, returned only 18.5 million dollars out of 240 to the Trilateral Gold Commission. Sweden returned almost everything - about 15 million dollars, Portugal - 4.5 million. Turkey did not return anything at all. In total, only about 100 million dollars were returned - a little more than one-fifth of the German assets transferred abroad during the war years.

Another important problem remained - the problem of returning funds from secret Nazi accounts in Swiss banks. The US federal treasury estimates that the Nazis transferred about $750 million to Switzerland in the final months of the war alone. Now the war-winning allies demanded the repatriation of these funds. Switzerland opposed. The Swiss "gnomes" feared not only the direct loss of money, but also the consequences that such an action would have. The return of Nazi deposits would have called into question the entire system that guaranteed the confidentiality and reliability of all banking transactions without exception, on which the entire authority of the Swiss bankers rested. Thus, the confidence of customers who are accustomed to the fact that in Switzerland no one is interested in the origin of money entering bank accounts would be undermined. This threatened to reduce the inflow of foreign capital, which, in turn, undermined the foundations of the economic well-being of the "country of gnomes."

The behind-the-scenes tug-of-war continued for many months. The allies, and above all the United States, increased pressure, Switzerland did not want to give in: booty is always booty, it is not just given away. Yielding to pressure, the Swiss government created a special interbank committee of about 700 officials and bank employees tasked with deciphering account numbers allegedly belonging to the Nazis, but this body worked inefficiently and extremely slowly. The problem was partially resolved only in 1953, when an agreement was concluded in London that settled the relations of the Western Allies with the Federal Republic of Germany, which was seen as the successor to the collapsed Third Reich. This agreement paved the way for a solution to the problem of Nazi Swiss bank accounts. As a result, the Alpine Republic agreed to return half of the amount that the Allies demanded from it, namely $350 million. At the same time, Nazi accounts were kept intact, and Switzerland received the required 350 million from the Ministry of Finance. Federal Republic Germany. Thus, banking secrecy was preserved, and with it, the money of the Nazis ...

Why did the Allies fail to return most of the gold and German assets, although negotiations on this subject were conducted with different countries in some cases as far back as 1958? The answer to this question is complex. The difficult international situation of the post-war years, and the beginning of " cold war", and the lack of a unified position among the former allies, and the stubbornness of the former "neutrals" ... The main role, of course, was played by the so-called "spirit of the new time" - at the turn of the 1940-1950s, very, very many influential politicians were able to close eyes on the crimes of the Nazi regime. It is known, for example, that after the Nuremberg Trials, those who led the German economy, those who made gigantic profits from the barbarian war, fascist robbery raids, oppression and extermination of entire peoples, were to go to the dock. The list of the main war criminals for a long time included the famous industrialist Gustav Krupp, the banker Kurt von Schroeder, the "steel king" Hermann Röchling, the directors of the IG-Farben chemical concern ... In the end, they all got off with only a slight fright.

The London agreement, if not completely resolved, then at least smoothed over the acuteness of the controversial problem of Switzerland's relations with the countries of the Hitlerite "axis". After 1953, this topic gradually faded from the public eye. The victims of the Nazi regime, despite their best efforts, were never able to get their voices heard, and the armchair scholars who studied the issue knew in advance that their books would not sell in large numbers.

The topic of “Nazi gold” was returned only half a century later, in the mid-1990s, when the Cold War ended and the ideological fronts that divided Europe throughout the entire post-war period collapsed. A change in the political climate has given a long-standing problem a new urgency, and has made it possible to raise the question of the gold transactions of the Swiss National Bank during the war years in general, and of the restitution of Jewish property confiscated by the Nazis, in particular. In eighteen countries of the world - Great Britain, the USA, Switzerland, Argentina, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Croatia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, the Netherlands, Norway, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania - various commissions were created that took care of the fate of values, confiscated by the Nazis and lost during World War II. A number of countries - Argentina, the Czech Republic, France, the Netherlands and Sweden - presented important documents that shed light on the financial history of the Second World War. The largest private German banks involved in the Nazi gold trade in the 1940s, primarily Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank, did not stand aside.

In Switzerland, in December 1996, by decision of the Federal Assembly, an independent expert commission headed by the historian Jean-Francois Bergier (the “Bergier Commission”) was created, designed from a historical and legal point of view to study the volume and fate of assets - gold, currency, values subject to insurance and works of art belonging to both Nazi criminals and their victims – who were displaced to Switzerland before, during and immediately after the end of World War II. For five years (the final report was published on March 22, 2002), this commission carefully investigated all gold and foreign exchange transactions carried out in those early years by the Swiss National Bank and private commercial banks.

The report of the "Bergier Commission", in particular, provides facts that shed light on the ambiguous role of Switzerland in World War II and on the country's intensive cooperation with Germany. Connections with the Nazi regime brought fabulous profits to the Swiss "gnomes" (the traditional nickname for Swiss bankers). The commission concluded that Switzerland played an important role in Nazi Germany's covert financial transactions, and Swiss banks did not hesitate to accept from Germany gold and securities stolen by the Nazis in occupied countries. This goal was served, in particular, by hundreds of German companies "camouflaged" as Swiss ones. In addition, Swiss entrepreneurs provided loans to the Third Reich, traded in weapons and gold stolen by the Nazis in the occupied countries, and the Swiss authorities practically did not check commodity

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trains in transit through Swiss territory.

The combined value of the Nazi gold smuggled into Switzerland was about $4 billion in today's prices, of which $2.7–2.8 billion came from looting. By order of Hitler, special units were organized that specialized in robbing banks, companies and individuals - gold and silver, jewelry and currency. Other units were engaged in the confiscation and accounting of valuables belonging to prisoners of concentration camps and death camps. All these valuables were accumulated in the Reichsbank, and then transported to Switzerland and exchanged for Swiss francs.

The Reichsbank's assets, totaling more than $2.6 billion (in today's dollars), eventually reached Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Turkey. Three-quarters of this amount got there through the Swiss National Bank. These transactions were carried out throughout the years of the war, despite repeated warnings from the allies that the Nazi gold was of criminal origin. At the end of the war, part of the Nazi treasure ended up in Argentina, again with the assistance of the Swiss "gnomes". Historians investigating the Nazis in Argentina got their hands on a letter written in 1955 former minister Foreign Affairs of the country, which explicitly states that Nazi gold was deposited with the Central Bank of Argentina in 1946 (the value of this gold has not yet been established). By the way, the then president of Argentina, Juan Domingo Peron, was very disposed towards Hitler and after the war gave asylum to many Nazi war criminals.

The secrets of the missing treasures of the Third Reich are far from being fully disclosed, and all the intricacies of operations with gold, Swiss francs and other valuables, carried out by cute Swiss "gnomes" in the quiet of their offices, far from the roar of the guns of World War II, are far from fully revealed. There is, for example, a hypothesis that part of the Nazi gold was transported through the channels of the National Bank of Switzerland to the disposal of the Italian-American mafia - the famous Cosa Nostra, which was led at that time by the famous Salvatore Luciano, better known as Lucky ("Lucky") . Its main partner, eminence grise"mafia Meir Lansky, had good connections in the Swiss National Bank, thanks to which he was able to take part in the "laundering" of Nazi gold in the amount of more than $ 300 million (in modern prices). Having passed these funds through several accounts, Meir Lansky returned to the United States, and the money received was subsequently used to finance the operations of Cosa Nostra and its affiliates around the world ... However, this version has never been proven.

Melmer's account

The discovery of the huge Reichsbank vault in the Merkers mine in April 1945 by American soldiers served as a starting point in the search for treasures of the Third Reich and the extent of the Nazi robbery. Along with bags and boxes of Reichsmarks and foreign currency, gold and silver bars, gold coins, jewelry and works of art, objects were found in the Merkers mine that undeniably testify to the crimes of the Nazi regime: wedding rings, gold spectacle frames, gold dental crowns, confiscated from concentration camp prisoners. Subsequently, the Americans managed to find and interrogate a number of witnesses, from whose testimony the name of SS Hauptsturmführer Bruno Melmer emerged. It was this person who was entrusted with the duty of accounting for the valuables confiscated from prisoners of concentration camps and other death factories, and accumulating the proceeds from their sale on a special SS account opened with the Reichsbank ...

Everyone knows that the accumulated property of the SS was huge. It is also known that it was obtained using the dirtiest methods and the unlimited power that this criminal organization possessed. Specially organized "Einsatzgruppen" were engaged in the robbery of the occupied countries. Gold, precious stones, works of art, currency filled the SS coffers like a river. A significant part of these treasures were valuables confiscated from the victims of the Nazi regime. Their owners were shot, killed in concentration camps, burned in crematorium ovens, poisoned in gas chambers...

Gold bars from the Merkers mine

The resulting booty should have been credited and used for the needs of the organization, otherwise the situation became completely intolerable: for example, until the middle of 1942, the SS medical service (Sanitatsamt) used the gold dental crowns seized from the killed people to restore the teeth of the SS, but in the end the number of these crowns was so exceeded the needs of SS medicine that doctors simply did not know what to do with them. Finally, in the summer of 1942, SS Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler and Reich Finance Minister Lutz Schwerin von Krosig agreed on the procedure for handling non-monetary gold and jewelry that came into the possession of the SS. It was decided that the Reichsbank would take over the operations for the sale of valuables at the disposal of the SS, and to accumulate the funds received as a result of these operations, a special account was opened in the Reichsbank in the name of SS Hauptsturmführer Bruno Melmer.

Odilo Globocnik

The first truck with property confiscated from concentration camp prisoners drove up to the gates of the Reichsbank in August 1942. In the future, there will be many more such trucks ... In total, 76 containers with stolen SS valuables were delivered to the Reichsbank, each of which weighed 2577 kg and was marked with the short designation "Melmer". The containers contained currency, scrap of precious metals, coins, jewelry, wedding rings, watches, silverware ... The Reichsbank bought coins and foreign currency at a favorable rate for the SS, jewelry of artistic value, which were then sold on the foreign market. The scrap gold was sent to the old Prussian mint for remelting. Previously, the gold was refined - this was done by the Degussa company, the official partner of the Reichsbank. Ingots were made from refined gold, which were then also sent to the foreign market. Quiet Swiss "gnomes" converted these gold bars into convertible currency. All proceeds were carefully credited to the SS bank account at the Reichsbank - "Melmer's account". Total revenue was $4.65 million ($40.5 million in today's dollars).

Reichsfuehrer SS Heinrich Himmler

Many details of this story became known only half a century later, thanks to the efforts of specialists from the Special Investigations Service of the US Department of Justice. In particular, in Vienna, in private hands, they managed to find a microfilm made by Albert Thoms, the first post-war director of the Vendusbank, which provides a large amount of important information about the operations of the Reichsbank with "Melmer's gold". Already at the beginning of 1943, SS gold began to go to the foreign market through the channels of the Reichsbank. So, three bars of gold with numbers

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36903, 36904 and 36905 with a total weight of 37.5411 kg, originating from the seventh container with the "Melmer cargo", received by the Reichsbank on November 27, 1942, were sent by the Reichsbank to the Swiss National Bank in Bern on January 5, 1943. Bars no. 36873 and no. Bern along with another 760 bars sold by the Reichsbank to the Swiss National Bank. Four bars (No. 37192, No. 37193, No. 37194, No. 37195) were made at the Prussian Mint from gold delivered with the “Melmer cargo” to the Reichsbank on November 1, 1943, and gold coins and bars from Belgium and the Netherlands, and sold to Switzerland between February 23, 1944 and June 8, 1944. Bar No. 37198 was made from SS gold received by the Reichsbank on November 11, 1943, melted down together with Dutch gold coins, and sent to the Swiss National Bank on February 23, 1944 ...

Securities found in one of the caches

In total, the Reichsbank sold less than 120 kg of "Melmer's gold" to Switzerland, totaling 581,899 Swiss francs. The main part of the SS gold - 2460 kg - was disposed of by the two largest commercial banks in Germany, Deutsche Bank and Dresdner Bank. Specifically, $8 million worth of gold was sold on the free market in Turkey; part of the proceeds went to the needs of diplomats and the financing of secret operations of German agents in Turkey ...

Schwerin von Krosig

The story of the “Melmer account” became fully public only half a century after the end of World War II. Experts believe that it may be just the tip of the iceberg. The SS funds accumulated in the “Melmer account” did not include, for example, approximately $3.9 million in scrap gold and coins sent to the Reichsbank as a result of the Reinhard action alone, when tens of thousands of Jews were killed in Eastern Poland . The operation was led by SS Gruppenführer Odilo Globocnik. The action began on December 31, 1942; its goal was to liquidate the Jewish ghettos in the territory of the General Government. The report compiled by Odilo Globocnik on November 4, 1943 fell into the hands of Heinrich Himmler and eloquently testifies to the riches the SS managed to rob: 53 million Reichsmarks, about half a million dollars, 1.8 tons of gold, about 10 tons of silver (estimated at 5 million Reichsmarks) , jewelry and personal items (including about 65,000 watches) with a total value of about 26 million Reichsmarks, "conversion raw materials" valued at 13 million Reichsmarks. The grand total is 100,047,983 Reichsmarks 91 pfennigs.

It is not known for what purposes the CC used the funds raised by Globocnik. Theoretically, they could be turned into state property. In effect, the SS sponsored its own policies and private accounts. Odilo Globocnik himself, along with the 100 million Reichsmarks shown in the report, managed to amass a considerable personal fortune, part of which fell into the hands of the Allies during his arrest (May 1945). The American intelligence report speaks of thousands of gold and silver coins (rubles, pounds, francs, marks, ducats, dollars), 2 kg of pearls, about 3 kg of silver rings, 217 kg of platinum scrap ...

While in prison, Globocnik committed suicide while awaiting sentencing.

Mystery of Lake Toplitz

Austria is considered to be the mecca of European tourism. It competes in this respect with France, Italy and Spain, attracting a lot of travelers who are eager to get acquainted with the mountain landscapes of this country, its cities with a rich historical past, with architectural monuments. Particularly famous for its exceptional beauty is the region of Styria (German: Steiermark), located in the heart of the Alps. Here, in the Salzkammergut resort area, popular with tourists, 15 kilometers northeast of the Bad Aussee resort, in the depths of a mountain range with the ominous name of the Dead Mountains (German: Totes Gebirge), there is a high-altitude Lake Toplitz, which today is called the Austrian Loch Ness . Its dark and deep waters haunt more than one generation of treasure hunters. It is believed that in the depths of this lake lies one of the world's largest treasures...

Treasures of the Alpine Fortress

By the beginning of 1945, no one had any doubts that the collapse of Nazi Germany was a matter of the next few days. Soviet troops approached Berlin from the east, the Americans and the British advanced from the west. Not today or tomorrow, Germany was to be completely occupied by the Allied forces. The remnants of the Wehrmacht still continued to offer fierce, but senseless resistance, and meanwhile, behind the backs of the German soldiers who fought at the front, various "Fuhrers" of large and small scale were feverishly looking for ways of personal salvation. Some entered into secret separate negotiations with the allies, others covered up the traces of their crimes, others were engaged in pumping looted valuables to neutral countries in the hope of soon following them. However, not everything that had accumulated in the cellars of the Reichsbank was able to be transported abroad. V last days During the war, the Hitlerite elite had to decide the fate of a significant part of the German gold reserves, personal property of the highest Nazi bosses, SS valuables, secret documents of the NSDAP, SS, RSHA and the Gestapo, a huge number of works of art.

Already in the last months of 1944, the Nazis began to shove all this stuff into numerous hiding places scattered throughout the country. The evacuation of key valuables from Berlin began in late March - early April 1945. The leadership of the operation was entrusted to the chief of the RSHA, Ernst Kaltenbrunner. In the early days of April 1945, from Berlin to the south went along railway two trains guarded by the SS under the cryptonyms "Eagle" and "Daw". The cars were loaded with various valuables, including, among other things, Reichsmarks worth $200 million and 9 tons of gold worth $10 million. The Nazis hid these treasures in the vicinity of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, dividing the treasure into many smaller parts.

Lake Toplitz

In April 1945, when Soviet troops were already approaching Berlin, a large convoy of heavily loaded vehicles, accompanied by SS officers, left the outskirts of the German capital and moved south. Kaltenbrunner himself led the convoy with his staff. The plan of the Nazis was to evacuate Hitler and the units of his most devoted supporters to Austria, in the mountains of Styria, where it was supposed to create a vast fortified area - the "Alpine fortress", where it would be possible to organize a long resistance to the allies. It was also supposed to concentrate a significant part of the treasures of the "Third Reich". In the future, these funds were supposed to be used to finance the underground activities of secret SS organizations and the subsequent restoration of the "Fourth Reich".

Counterfeit banknotes at the bottom of Lake Toplice

Preparing for the defense of the Alpine Fortress

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led by SS Obersturmbannführer Otto Skorzeny, the famous "super saboteur". He brought his agents here from " special school Oranienbaum "and managed to transfer a factory for the production of false documents from Friedenthal. Here in the Alps, in an old abandoned adit, masters from the intelligence school in Friedenthal made fake passports for Himmler, Kaltenbrunner, Eichmann and a number of other high-ranking Nazis. At the same time, two experienced saboteurs - Hunke and Radl - studied abandoned mines in the mountains, choosing the most suitable hiding places for the device, since there were enough places for this. The very name of this area - Salzkammergut (German: Salzkammergut) means "the property of the Salt Chamber": once these mountains belonged to the Imperial Salt Chamber, which controlled all the salt mines in the Habsburg Empire. Now the old salt mines were to become a refuge for the treasures of another empire - the "thousand-year" Third Reich. It was assumed that the "conservation" of values will be led by the president of the Reichsbank, Walter Funk, but he did not manage to break through Bavaria and fell into the hands of the Americans.

The remains of equipment raised from the bottom of Lake Toplitz

The SS special unit guarding the trucks with valuables - about one hundred and fifty officers dressed in privates for conspiracy - was commanded by General Freilich. They were tasked with ensuring the passage of the convoy from Bavaria to Austria. Despite the fact that the road along which the route passed was controlled by the troops, and each of the six convoys was guarded by a tank unit, the officers were ordered to take special precautions and keep an eye on the drivers. In case of danger, the car with the load was ordered to blow up. There were no inscriptions on the boxes with the cargo, except for serial numbers. The SS men were told that they were to deliver a secret cargo of strategic importance to the mountains, and only Freilich knew that vehicles were being transported. In the pocket of one of the SS men there was a register signed by Freilich (in 1946 this note was discovered by American intelligence officers):

"166,250,000 Swiss francs,

299 018 300 US dollars,

31,351,250,000 in gold bars,

2 949 100 in diamonds,

93,450,000 stamp collections and art objects,

5,425,000 drugs.”

The last four digits have not been deciphered, so it is not known in what monetary units - marks, francs or dollars - the values were calculated.

Detail of the Enigma cipher machine recovered from the bottom of Lake Toplitz

On May 3, 1945, vehicles with secret cargo arrived at the Alpine Fortress. On this day, Kaltenbrunner appointed Otto Skorzeny as his deputy (this position was previously held by Walter Schellenberg, but he had already been arrested by the Allies). Berlin capitulated the day before, Hitler and Goebbels committed suicide. Himmler, under a false name, was hiding somewhere in northern Germany.

Ernst Kaltenbrunner

Kaltenbrunner instructed his new deputy to disperse the cargoes that had arrived to the caches. Skorzeny met a convoy near the high-altitude lake Toplitz (German: Toplitzsee). This relatively small - 1.5 km long and 500 m wide - lake, surrounded by almost sheer spurs of the Dead Mountains, lies high in the Austrian Alps, 60 miles from Salzburg. Its feature is an unusually large depth, in some places reaching 120 meters. At a depth of 10 meters, the diver begins to be surrounded by complete darkness - the rays of the sun do not penetrate here. And at depths below 30 meters, the water in the lake is simply icy, its temperature fluctuates at the freezing point. It is believed that there is no life at great depths here, because living beings simply do not have enough oxygen. However, there is an increased content of hydrogen sulfide. In 1942-1944, there was a secret naval research laboratory on Lake Toplitz (a branch of the CPVA military chemical-physical laboratory from Kiel), where mini-submarines, powerful bottom mines containing up to 4000 kg were tested. explosive, acoustic instruments, gyroscopes for the V-2 and missile and torpedo weapons. In particular, experiments were conducted here to create a rocket launched from a submarine from under the surface of the water. Using a rather primitive device, German scientists even managed to succeed in this. Later, American engineers improved this technology, creating the Polaris missile system on its basis.

Lake Bad Aussee

Fate decreed that it was Lake Toplitz that became the hiding place for the treasures of the Third Reich - at least that's what the legend says. When it turned out that most of the hiding places arranged in old abandoned mines had not been equipped by the time the convoy arrived, Otto Skorzeny ordered that a significant part of the cargo be flooded into the lake. The SS actively set to work. Treasure boxes were loaded from trucks onto carts, brought to the shore by horse-drawn transport, there they were reloaded again - this time onto rowboats, then taken closer to the middle of the lake - where the depth was greatest, and there they were dumped overboard.

No one knows exactly what was in the boxes. Some believe they contained gold looted by the SS throughout Europe. Other boxes might contain secret documents that Kaltenbrunner cherished as much as the treasure itself. Here, in particular, there were numbers of encrypted accounts in foreign banks, lists of Gestapo agents in all countries of the world. In the documents of the Reichsbank, captured by the Allies in the last days of the war, one can find a mention of 8645 bars of gold, hundreds of gold coins, platinum, silver and other valuables, once captured by the Nazis in France and Holland. These values have never been found. Maybe it rests at the bottom of Lake Toplitz?

While Skorzeny followed orders, Kaltenbrunner hid his own personal valuables. As early as Christmas Eve 1944, he rented a villa in Alt-Aussee for himself in the name of a figurehead. A cache was set up in her garden, in which Kaltenbrunner hid 76 kg of gold, 10,000 gold coins, 15,000 US dollars and 8,000 francs (this cache was later discovered by the Americans).

Garmisch-Partenkirchen mountains

On the same days and in the same places, a number of large treasures were hidden. Helmuth von Himmel, an associate of Bormann and one of the leaders of the NSDAP, hid part of the party fund in the cellars of the medieval castle of the Salzburg archbishops. The famous Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann had seven boxes of valuables worth eight million dollars. The Austrian gendarmerie managed to trace their path from the Rakotel, where Eichmann lived, to the village of Blaa-Alm, which lies six kilometers from Lake Altaussee. Their further fate is not exactly known; according to the testimony of some witnesses, in May 1945, from 6 to 7 boxes of gold were dropped into the lake Altaussee by several senior SS officers. According to rumors, three trucks with gold were “unloaded” into the same lake, sent to the “Alpine Fortress” on the orders of SS Standartenführer Josef Spacil, the former head of the Gestapo in Holland, later head of the II department of the RSHA.

Little Villa Schloss

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Fuschel belonged to the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Nazi Germany, Joachim von Ribbentrop. Shortly after the war, locals discovered a cache near this villa, which contained two metal boxes with gold coins worth $10,000. It is assumed that this is only part of the valuables hidden by order of Ribbentrop - the other part, perhaps, is hidden at the bottom of one of the mountain lakes in the vicinity of Bad Aussee.

There is a legend that somewhere here, in the Aussee, the treasures of Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the German military intelligence (Abwehr), are also hidden. Canaris was among the conspirators who were preparing an assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20, 1944. Three days after this unsuccessful action, Canaris was arrested. And although the extent of Canaris' participation in the preparation of the plot is still unclear, in April 1945 he and his deputy were sentenced to death penalty through hanging. It is believed that even before his arrest, Canaris hid in one of the caves in the mountains near the Aussee the valuables that were part of the secret Abwehr fund: Persian carpets, tapestries and a whole warehouse of drugs worth millions of dollars. In the vicinity of Ausee, according to rumors, the cash desk of the 6th German army is also hidden - 4.5 million Reichsmarks, and the cargo of Hitler's representative in Hungary, SS Standartenführer Kurt Becher - several boxes of gold confiscated from Hungarian Jews.

In Lake Toplitz, according to various sources, silver and platinum from the naval research laboratory of the German Navy, the treasures of Otto Skorzeny - 22 boxes of 48 kg each, each containing 20 bars of gold weighing 2.4 kg, as well as the treasures of the Obergruppenführer SS, Gauleiter of the Upper Danube region (Oberdonau) Eigruber - steel cassette 25×35 cm in size, filled with diamonds.

Among the treasures hidden in the salt mines of the Salzkammergut and the surrounding mountain lakes, the rumor also includes property and valuables belonging to the occupation administration of Serbia, Albania, Greece, as well as the governments of Hitler's allies: Croatia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary. It is believed that among these valuables, in particular, could be the gold of the Romanian church and drugs (about 300 pounds of morphine), evacuated from Slovakia by order of the Prime Minister of this country.

They also talk about the secret mission of the Yu-88 aircraft, which was shot down by American fighters in the sky over Austria on May 5, 1945 and fell into the mountain lake Attersee near Salzburg. After the war, it was found that this aircraft was one of the last to escape from besieged Berlin. He was sent to the "Alpine Fortress" on the personal orders of Hitler and had on board the last written orders of the Fuhrer, as well as bars of gold and platinum.

In general, the treasures exported by the RSHA to Styria were estimated by the experts of the Nuremberg Tribunal at five billion two hundred million dollars.

Otto Skorzeny

Stomach in your pocket

On May 8, Nazi Germany capitulated. For the defenders of the "Alpine Fortress", among whom there were many leaders of the Gestapo and the SD, all the senselessness of their further struggle was quite obvious, and they were only worried about the question of their personal fate. Those who hoped that the Allies would spare their lives began to surrender to the Americans. Kaltenbrunner was arrested - a false passport did not help him. Otto Skorzeny and a group of SS men were hiding high in the mountains in an alpine hut. He and his men set up in an abandoned mine near Salzburg a large cache of weapons and ammunition - tons of explosives, mines of various designs, small arms, grenades and incendiary bombs. In the mountains, at a secret airfield, Skorzeny was waiting for a plane ready for launch, but he failed to escape: this plane was accidentally discovered by a group of partisans. On May 15, 1945, Skorzeny was captured in his hideout, but already on July 28 of the same year he fled from a prisoner of war camp near Darmstadt.

In 1945–1946, valuables hidden by Kaltenbrunner and von Himmel in Salzburg were discovered by the Allied military administration. In May 1945, 2000 kg of gold in 50 boxes, 50 kg of gold bullion, 5 boxes of diamonds and precious stones, 2 million Swiss francs, a collection of rare postage stamps worth several million dollars, paintings, sculptures, works of arts and crafts stolen or confiscated by the Nazis during the Second World War. It took ninety trucks to take these treasures out.

At the Nuremberg trials, the assertion was made that only part of the Nazi treasure was hidden in the cache in Alt-Aussee, while the rest were scattered in other caches arranged in the surrounding mountains. These rumors, widely circulated in the press, caused an attack of a real “gold rush” among the most unstable part of the population, and whole crowds of treasure hunters rushed to search for the treasures hidden by the Nazis. Over the years, the number of legends only multiplied, but at the same time the number of authentic historical documents multiplied, partially confirming these legends. The press fueled the excitement: for example, in one of the newspapers, a story was published by a former lieutenant named Franz Gottlich, who participated in treasure-hiding operations, who first reported on the treasures hidden by the Nazis near Lake Toplitz: “Russian prisoners of war buried 30 boxes filled with gold near the lake , rare gems and luxury goods… I know this because I was there.”

Just a few days after his confession, Gottlich disappeared under mysterious circumstances. And his brother, who took up the investigation of the case, received a mysterious message in which he was bluntly recommended to stop stirring up this story ... Sinister rumors spread: supposedly members of a secret organization of former SS men, led by Otto Skorzeny, who illegally lives in Spain, continue to vigilantly monitor what is happening around Lake Toplitz. It is no coincidence that Adolf Eichmann's wife lived here until 1952!

Ghent iconostasis from a cache in Alt-Aussee

Dramas one scarier than the other began to take place in these places. From 1945 until the early 1960s, several mysterious deaths, which the rumor immediately associated with the legends of the hidden treasures of the Nazis. In the autumn of 1945, four corpses were fished out of the water of the lake, which were identified as former SS officers. In 1946, an American diver died in the lake, allegedly searching for Nazi treasures on the instructions of American intelligence. At a depth of 30 m, his air hose caught on the trunk of a submerged tree and became tangled. The diver could not release the hose on his own, and as a result he died of suffocation ...

February in Ausseeland the best time for tourists. And in February of the first post-war year, no one expected visitors here at all. Cars on the snow-covered roads and streets of the local villages were a rarity. In the homes of local residents, if not poverty, then at least poverty reigns. There are few warm clothes, they are mostly dilapidated, and if there are no important things to do on the street, people

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prefer to stay at home. And in order to go to the mountains in such weather, there must be a very, very good reason at all.

And yet there are two strange characters who venture at this time to go to the snow-covered Alps. These are engineers Ludwig Pichler and Hermann Mayr. They unexpectedly arrived in Bad Aussee from Linz on the Danube, brought with them skis, a canvas tent, canned food. On February 6, 1946, they went to the mountains, hoping to climb to a height of 1838 m. At an altitude of 700 m, there is a mountain shelter - a place of rest and a refuge for tourists. There, both engineers stopped for a short rest, waiting for the third participant in the rise - the motorist Peter Haslinger from Ried, in Carinthia. Together they moved northeast, towards the village of Bröningalpe, which is a good two kilometers from the mountain hut. What happened next is unclear. Only Haslinger returned. According to his testimony, given later by the Austrian gendarmerie, the climbers were caught in the mountains by bad weather and he, having lost all desire to make his way further through the snowstorm, turned back. But Pichler and Mayr were not afraid of difficulties and continued on their way.

It's been seven weeks. There was neither a rumor nor a spirit about the travelers who had gone to the mountains. They did not return to Bad Aussee, they were not seen in Broeningalp, and their traces were lost in the mountains. A detachment of mountain rescuers searches the surroundings of Bröningalpe - to no avail. On March 31, the center of the search shifted 12 km northeast, to the region of the Wildensee lakes, located at an altitude of about 1000 m. Again, to no avail. Rescuers again turn to the west. And then they are unexpectedly lucky - climbing the slope of Mount Raukhfang, one of the rescuers suddenly notices the ends of the skis sticking out of the deep snow aside from the path. Nearby, you could barely see the dome of the igloo - a snow house ...

Working in the mountain rescue service is not easy. These people have more than once had to deal with trouble, to extract the remains of dead people and they saw every one. However, what they saw this time in the icy, snow-covered hut exceeded all imagination. Among the randomly scattered things lay two mutilated corpses. Mayr was especially brutally mutilated: his stomach was cut open - probably with scissors, his heart, lungs and stomach were torn out and stuffed into his trousers pockets. Pichler's body was intact, but his hands, and especially his fingers, were badly injured.

Gendarmerie Lieutenant Colonel Valentin Tarra, who investigated this terrible story, did not come to any definite conclusion about the causes of death of both climbers. There was still enough food left in their snow hut, so they couldn't starve to death. It cannot be ruled out that both engineers were killed, but their deaths can be explained by other reasons. By the way, the gendarmerie was very disapproving of the version of the murder of engineers, and tried to focus only on the version of death from natural causes. As for the horrific wounds found on Myr's body, it was announced that the engineer's corpse had apparently been bitten by foxes. When this statement aroused Homeric laughter among the locals (the vast majority of them are excellent connoisseurs of mountains), the supreme prosecutor of Austria put forward an even more adventurous theory: obviously, Pichler went crazy and, in a fit of madness, began to crumble the corpse of the already dead Mayr ...

From what Mayr and Pichler actually died, it has not been clarified to this day. The names of their killer or killers are not known either - assuming that both engineers nevertheless died a violent death. But at least two curious facts are known. Firstly, Mayr's body was mutilated in such a way as if the alleged killer was trying to urgently extract something from his stomach, hastily swallowed by the unfortunate engineer. And secondly, both Hermann Mayr and Ludwig Pichler during the war years worked at the secret German naval base on Lake Toplitz, and, according to some information, both were members of the SD.

Accident or murder?

Four years later, another mysterious event took place. In the summer of 1950, two vacationers from Hamburg arrived in the small village of Gössl, located between the lakes Grundl and Toplitz, engineers Hans Keller and Gert Gerens. Having rented an apartment in one of the private houses, they explained to the owners the purpose of their arrival in this way: supposedly they want to see their comrades in arms, who, after 1945, remained to live in the Salzkammergut.

Ice cave, Salzkammergut

Lake Grundl (German Grundlsee) with a length of about 6 km is the largest body of water in Ausseeland. On its banks there are summer houses for rest, boarding houses, country restaurants. To the north of the lake stretches the ridge of the Dead Mountains, the highest peaks of which reach 2000 m. Among them is Mount Reichenstein, located about 2 km from Grundlsee. Climbers rarely climb it, but from its top there is a magnificent view of Lake Toplitz lying below. It was this mountain that two engineers from Hamburg chose as their goal.

One fine morning, both Germans leave home and begin climbing the Reichenstein. A few hours later, only Keller returns to Gössl. In the gendarme station in the village of Grundlsee, he shows that his companion Gerens slipped during the ascent, fell into the abyss, the safety rope broke and as a result Gerens fell from a height of several hundred meters and crashed. His crushed corpse lies in a rocky gorge under the Reichenstein mountain ...

Accident? Murder? But what can be said about this now, more than half a century later? In the early 1950s, newspapers hinted quite transparently that Gerens had been killed (the safety rope seems to have been cut with a knife, not broken), but the police found no evidence of this. However, something else is much more interesting: both Keller and Gerens, like Mayr and Pichler, who died four years earlier, were engineers and during the war years worked at the same secret naval testing laboratory on Lake Toplitz. Moreover: Hans Keller was the head of this laboratory. And, like Mayr and Pichler, he was an SD officer ...

The similarity of both plots, as well as their temporal closeness, made many then think: what are the former SD officers and members of the secret police looking for? naval base on Lake Toplitz in the vicinity of this lake? It was known that all prototypes of the "miracle weapon" tested at this base were destroyed by the Germans in the last months of the war, and their fragments were thrown into the waters of the lake. But maybe somewhere in the vicinity of Toplice secret drawings are hidden and technical papers? Maybe it was them that the engineers were trying to find? Hardly. By that time, technology had already taken a number of significant steps forward, and against the backdrop of atomic bombs, rocket launchers, non-magnetic sea mines and Polaris submarine missiles, Hitler’s “wonder weapon” of the mid-1940s was hopelessly outdated and could no longer impress anyone. These people were clearly looking for something else...

Lake Grundl

Meanwhile, mysterious events in Ausseeland continue to occur with an enviable

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regularity.

Lake Hallstatt

1952 In a narrow gorge through which the road from Gössl to Lake Toplitz passes, pistol shots resound resoundingly. A patrol that urgently left for the scene of the event finds the bodies of two shot men in the gorge. It is not possible to attack the trail of the killers. But it is possible to establish the identity of those killed: both are former SS officers ...

Attersee near Salzburg

1955 On August 6, the corpse of another German engineer, Josef Erwin Mayer, a construction adviser from Frankfurt am Main, is found on the slope of the Gamstelle mountain near Lake Altaussee. There were no signs of a violent death on the body, only on the chin there was an abrasion, apparently received as a result of a fall from a stone two meters high. However, the cause of Mayer's death was not a fall - he managed to choke in a small mountain stream only 10 cm deep. However, will he choke? The unfortunate man really lay with his head in the stream, but at the autopsy it turned out that Mayer had no water in his lungs - therefore, the cause of death lay elsewhere. Was it murder? This idea was prompted by several circumstances: firstly, traces of blood were found on the stone from which Mayer fell. Secondly, even the locals consider the road to Gamstell difficult, since it is an uncharted, almost overgrown and poorly visible path, which is used for their needs only by a few lumberjacks and hunters who are well acquainted with these places. Consequently, Josef Erwin Maier, a building adviser from distant Frankfurt am Main (or is this name just a pseudonym?), either knew these places very well, or he had some kind of orientation tool - for example, a map drawn by hand knowledgeable person. Finally, during the investigation of this case, several residents of Altaussee told the police that on the night of August 6 they saw some kind of lights and light signals on the slope of the Gamstelle mountain. Indeed, at this place, the police found the fresh remains of three fires ... “Was it a murder or was it just an accident? asked the Viennese newspaper Der Abend (issue of December 9, 1955). In any case, the inhabitants of Altaussee saw last years there are already so many 'accidents' with German tourists that they no longer believe it was a coincidence."

An American diver, Pichler and Mayr, Gerens, two former SS men, construction adviser Mayer - in less than the first ten years after the war, seven people died in the mountains of the Salzkammergut under circumstances so mysterious that it is simply not necessary to talk about a simple chain of accidents. What were these people looking for in Ausseeland? Why did they go to the snow-capped mountains in deep winter or dive with sports equipment into a lake so deep that only a high-class professional with special equipment can reach its bottom? In addition, these men shared a common past: at least three of them were engineers who worked during the war years at a secret test base on Lake Toplitz, and at least five of them were former agents of the Nazi German security service. Undoubtedly, behind all these "coincidences" something was hidden ...

Operation Bernhardt

These mysterious stories have given rise not only to the superstitious fear of Nazi treasures, but also to a great many films, books, newspaper and magazine publications. The book “Operation Bernhardt” published in 1950 in Germany, written by a certain Walter Hagen, added fuel to the fire. It describes in detail how only a participant in the events could do this, covert operation for the manufacture of counterfeit money by the Nazis in order to undermine the British economy.

Alfred Naujoks

In 1940, in the bowels of the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA), which at that time was led by Reinhard Heydrich, the idea was born to torpedo the British economy by issuing a huge amount of counterfeit paper English pounds. It was nothing less than the largest monetary falsification in the history of mankind. The manufacture of counterfeit money had three main objectives. First, if the operation was successful, England would be flooded with paper, unsecured money, and this would cause hyperinflation in the country. Secondly, the abundance of counterfeit money in circulation would eventually lead to the fact that the British would simply lose confidence in the pound, up to the loss of the latter's function as a means of payment. This was to lead to the collapse of banks and firms, the disorganization of trade, the ruin of thousands of people; in short, economic disaster. Thirdly, the operation promised to bring significant benefits to the Nazi regime, since counterfeit banknotes could be sold on the international financial market. Germany was forced to buy a number of strategic raw materials in neutral countries, for which it needed gold and hard currency, such as British pounds and American dollars. With the outbreak of the war, the influx of currency into Germany was sharply reduced, so that the currency reserves of the Reich were proposed to be replenished by printing counterfeit money made on the verge of authenticity.

Walter Schellenberg

To set up the fabrication of billions of counterfeit pounds was to be a special technical group formed from SD employees, headed by SS Sturmbannführer Bernhardt Krueger. The operation was codenamed Andreas. To accomplish this task, Krueger had to establish contacts with the largest German specialists in banking and financial affairs, experts in the field of making paper money, as well as to establish cooperation with SS-Sturmbannführer Alfred Naujoks, who at that time headed the technical department of the RSHA - department VI "F", located in his own separate building in Berlin on Delbrückstrasse, and was engaged, among other things, in the production of false documents , identity cards, foreign currency, etc. (a number of authors express the opinion that it was Naujoks who initiated the large-scale operation to counterfeit British pounds, but this is hardly true). Naujoks had a team of professional specialists in the production of printing plates, paper, ink, necessary for the manufacture of counterfeit banknotes, but the capabilities of his department were completely inadequate for the scale of the operation.

Hitler and Himmler in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp

Reinhard Heydrich

The first step was to learn how to make paper that, even in microscopic detail, would fully correspond to the paper on which the original pounds sterling issued by the Bank of England were printed. Obviously, the quality of this paper must have been such that the forgery would not have been recognized by any methods of technical and scientific analysis used at that time. It was known that English banknotes were printed on rag paper, and that Great Britain received cotton rags for this purpose from its colonies. Consequently, counterfeiters needed to look for the components necessary for making paper outside of Europe.

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The SD agents were even able to ascertain that the English manufacturers of banknote paper do not use new cotton rags, but only old, second-hand rags. Finally, after numerous analyzes and experiments carried out in the laboratories of a number of higher technical schools and universities, the Germans managed to obtain rag paper, in quality, shade and texture, almost identical to that used for their purposes by the Bank of England. Cotton raw materials for it were purchased in Turkey. In parallel, experiments were carried out with the application of watermarks and filigree to paper. Finally, it was necessary to solve the code, according to which the Bank of England assigned serial numbers to banknotes. It was known that the Bank of England changes the series and numbers of banknotes at irregular intervals. Certain numbers correspond only to certain series, and the series, in turn, correspond to the dates on each bill. The deciphering of this extremely complex scheme was carried out by a group of mathematical scientists assigned to the Kruger group.

Finally, in March 1941, after seven months of experiments, the first "product" was obtained. The result of the painstaking work of Kruger and his subordinates turned out to be extremely successful: none of the banknotes they produced practically differed from genuine Bank of England notes. However, the "flowers" (this was the code name for counterfeit banknotes) had to undergo a serious test in the international market. On the instructions of the chief of the VI (foreign) department of the RSHA, Walter Schellenberg, a secret employee of the SD went to Switzerland, working under the guise of a big businessman who was famous and respected in the financial circles of Switzerland, and the owner of a tidy account in a Swiss bank. The agent brought with him a bundle of English pounds made by Kruger's "office" and a letter in which, on behalf of the Reichsbank board, it was reported that these pounds might be counterfeit, but since there were no adequate facilities in Berlin to fully and finally establish their authenticity, then Reichsbank employees ask their Swiss colleagues for a secret cross-check of this money. This letter, along with counterfeit pounds, was handed over by the "businessman" to the management of his bank. A few days later, the director of the bank returned the money to the worried client and said that he could be calm: the money was absolutely real.

Still, the SD did not calm down on this. Hitler's intelligence agents arranged a second check: the Bank of England was requested through the National Bank of Switzerland, whose employees verified the serial numbers, the date of issue and the signatures of the responsible persons on the banknotes. Everything matched. Thus, there was only one possibility to recognize counterfeit banknotes: theoretically, a situation could arise when in the hands of one person there would be fake and real banknotes with the same serial numbers. However, SD experts assessed the likelihood of such an event as "extremely insignificant."

The work done by Kruger's people was enormous, but the technical basis created by them by the beginning of 1942 did not yet allow the production of counterfeit pounds in mass quantities. While fakes were made almost by hand, in an extremely limited number. Thus, it was necessary to transfer the results of the first samples to industrial rails, creating an entire industrial branch for the production of counterfeit money. This task fell on the shoulders of the new head of the RSHA, Ernst Kaltenbrunner, who headed the imperial security service after Reinhard Hendrich was killed in Prague on May 24, 1942. Directly in charge of the operation was again entrusted to Bernhardt Krueger; after his name, the conceived large-scale enterprise was encrypted under the cryptonym "Bernhardt". A very narrow circle of people was devoted to the details of the operation: Kaltenbrunner, his adjutant Wilhelm Höttl, Walter Schellenberg, Obersturmbannführer Walter Rauff - the then head of department VI "F", Otto Skorzeny, Kruger and two or three other people.

The base for the manufacture of counterfeit pounds was the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin. In his special zone, two new blocks were built - No. 18 and No. 19. Their prisoners were 27 (later this number increased to 144) qualified specialists - engravers, artists, printers - found by the Gestapo in numerous concentration camps scattered throughout Germany. They were officially announced that from now on they become "carriers state secret”: they had to make printing plates for counterfeit English banknotes, cut paper, work on printing presses and carry out special processing of finished products, as a result of which new banknotes were given the appearance of money that had been in circulation. For the production of paper for counterfeit money, the SD built a special secret factory in a forest near Berlin, where specialists were recruited from all over Germany. Despite the fact that all these people were convinced Nazis (such was the mandatory requirement for recruitment), even they were not aware of the goals of their activities.

The secret counterfeit money factory in Sachsenhausen issued its first "product" - proof prints of English banknotes of various denominations - in early 1943. And almost immediately, what Krueger was so afraid of and so eager to prevent happened: one of the prisoners, the German communist Kurt Lewinsky, managed to hide two samples of counterfeit 5-pound notes, hid them on his body, and then secretly smuggled them into a “large » camp. Thus, the underground camp committee of the Resistance learned the secret of Block 19.

This case was not isolated. The prisoners of block No. 19, among whom were many anti-fascists arrested by the Gestapo, undertook sabotage actions at the risk of their lives, trying, if not to disrupt, then significantly complicate the implementation of Operation Bernhardt. Czech Oskar Skala secretly kept records, eventually compiling a complete catalog of issued counterfeit money series, indicating their number in each series. This information was eventually transferred to the allies in the anti-Hitler coalition. The artist Leo Haas from Prague, who worked on the manufacture of matrices for counterfeit money, over and over again invented new methods of special, barely noticeable retouching, by which it was possible to accurately distinguish fake banknotes from genuine ones. The Gestapo controllers simply could not keep track of all these tricks, because this time, unlike the first experiments of 1940-1941, it was not about piece fakes, but about mass production, where the number of counterfeit banknotes was measured in tens of thousands.

In 1944, the prisoners had a chance to expand the scope of sabotage actions. Along with British pounds, passports, driver's licenses and other documents intended for use by SD agents abroad, the Sachsenhausen factory began preparations for the mass production of counterfeit American dollars. The war was coming to an end, the internal resources of Nazi Germany were practically exhausted, so the operation to counterfeit dollars was prepared with less care, and most of it fell on the shoulders of the prisoners.

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Sachsenhausen. Anti-fascists were not slow to take advantage of this. They delayed the process in every possible way, citing the insufficient quality of test prints, the need for new experiments, etc. Abraham Jakobsson, a former officer in the Dutch army, whom Kruger appointed senior in the printing shop, showed particular ingenuity in this. Disguising sabotage as work with "German thoroughness", Jacobsson slowly inspired Krueger that their work was really a success, but to complete perfection it was still necessary to do this, that, that, that ... And every time Kruger was led to the tricks of the cunning Dutchman . Thus, the Germans managed to put counterfeit dollars into circulation only in the spring of 1945, when only a few weeks remained before the collapse of the Third Reich, so this action did not have serious consequences, which cannot be said about the operation with counterfeit pounds.

For two and a half years of operation, the underground factory in Sachsenhausen produced 8,965,080 counterfeit banknotes for a total of 134,610,810 pounds sterling (for comparison: the entire gold reserve of the Bank of England in 1933 was estimated at 137 million pounds). Production peaked in the summer of 1943 with 650,000 banknotes produced monthly. First of all, 5- and 10-pound notes were forged, but 20- and 50-pound notes were not forgotten either. The distribution of banknotes was entrusted to the VI department of the RSHA, which was led by Walter Schellenberg. He was greatly assisted in this matter by the wealthy businessman Friedrich Schwend (aka Fritz Wendig), a member of the NSDAP and, according to some reports, an SS Standartenführer. With his help, the SD was able to place on the international markets a large number of counterfeit pounds. At the end of 1943, a significant number of counterfeit Bank of England notes were delivered from Berlin to Labers Castle in Merano, in the south of Tyrol, from where Schwend, acting under the name of Fritz Wendig, sent his agents to various countries of the world, who were to "launder" counterfeit money. Many of these agents received counterfeit pounds as payment for their services. This practice was widely used by the RSHA from 1943: the services of an extensive network of agents of the Nazi security service were paid for with counterfeit English bills.

There is no reliable information as to how much of the fakes eventually ended up in circulation, but it was undoubtedly quite large, since soon the UK began to feel the consequences of Nazi economic sabotage. Despite all the efforts of the Nazis, the specialists of the Bank of England managed to detect a fake (information received from members of the Resistance also played a role in this). Faced with the sheer magnitude of counterfeiting, the British government found itself in a difficult position: on the one hand, the situation required the immediate withdrawal of counterfeit tickets from circulation, but on the other hand, these actions would set the worst precedent that would greatly damage the reputation of the British pound and cause panic on international markets, primarily American, which served the huge, day by day increasing external debt of the warring Great Britain. The result could be a complete collapse of the British economy. Another solution was to pretend that the British government was not aware of the events, to order the Bank of England to accept counterfeit tickets on an equal basis with genuine ones and allow them to circulate freely on international markets. Such a decision made it possible to maintain the prestige of the British economy. The war was already drawing to a close, and in any case the German agents would not have had time to flood the markets with counterfeit pounds to the point of causing a serious crisis. Therefore, the British government settled on the second option. Prime Minister Winston Churchill ordered that the whole story be kept in the strictest confidence, and thus counterfeit pounds sterling circulated all over the world along with real ones, not only during the war years, but many years after. Old-style £5 notes, both genuine and counterfeit, were withdrawn from circulation by the Bank of England in the early post-war years, but £10 notes circulated until the 1960s, £20 notes until 1970, and £50 notes – until 1980. However, among the last two denominations, counterfeit banknotes were much less common.

Witnesses take the floor

The author of the book Operation Bernhardt, published in 1950, claimed that in the last days of the war, Otto Skorzeny and his people hid a huge amount of counterfeit English pounds that did not have time to get into circulation 29 kilometers from Lake Toplitz. This and many other details contained in the book led to the assumption that its author was very aware of the covert operations of the SD. The solution to the mystery was not long in coming: it soon became clear that under the name of Walter Hagen, none other than Wilhelm Höttl, SS Obersturmbannführer, former adjutant of Kaltenbrunner, was hiding.

What was the point of this post? Did the seasoned Nazi suddenly decide to repent and sincerely tell the world about all the sinister secrets of Kaltenbrunner's service? Or, knowing about the ongoing search for gold by the Nazis, did he decide to set the treasure hunters on a deliberately false trail? It is curious that Höttl was soon released from prison and chose the neighborhood of Salzburg (where he opened a private school for boys) as his place of residence. Why Salzburg? Maybe in order to control the situation with the treasure hunt?

Peter and Esther Edel. Drawings of a cellmate

Be that as it may, Höttl's evidence made it possible to lift the veil of secrecy over Lake Toplitz. In subsequent years, new details of Operation Bernhardt surfaced. There were even living witnesses of those events. One of them was Adolf Burger, a Slovak-born Jew who gave an extensive interview to CBS in 2005.

In 1942, Burger, who had the qualifications of an engraver, lived in Bratislava and, on the instructions of the Communist Party of Slovakia, was engaged in forging documents for the underground. On August 11, 1942, on the eve of his 25th birthday, he and his wife Gisela were arrested by the Gestapo. Both of them ended up in Auschwitz. Here Gisela died in the gas chamber, and Burger himself was transferred to another death camp - Birkenau. Once, during the evening roll call, standing in the line of prisoners, Burger was horrified to hear his name spoken from the loudspeaker: the next day he was supposed to come to Rudolf Höss himself, SS Obersturmbannführer, commandant of the Auschwitz (Auschwitz) camps - Birkenau.

What could such a challenge mean for a Jewish prisoner? Clearly, no good. The next day, Burger knocked on the door of Höss's office, and, trembling with horror, entered.

“Prisoner number 64401 on your orders…” Burger began, but Höss interrupted him:

Are you Mr Burger?

Taken aback by surprise, Burger silently nodded his head.

Are you really an engraver?

From now on you are free. Specialists like you are needed in Berlin.

Höss was lying: neither Burger nor the six other engravers who were found among the prisoners of the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps were released. Instead, they were transferred to another concentration camp - Sachsenhausen. Thus, they turned out to be participants in one of the most secret

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and ambitious operations of World War II.

Another witness, former prisoner of Auschwitz Peter Edel, tells about the circumstances that led him to the closed area of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp:

“... The fat kapo (headman of the barrack) pointed at me with his hand with a reinforced lead pipe clamped in it: “Zawod!”. Not understanding what he wants from me, I cringed in anticipation of a blow. However, the SS officer pushed the capo aside with a wave of his hand. The prisoner interpreter stepped forward:

- What is your profession?

I could somehow answer this question in Polish:

- Jestem artysta malarzem.

“Artysta malarz,” repeated the interpreter. - Herr Sturmbannführer, he says that he is an artist!

- Artist?

- Well, something like that.

- Ask him about where he studied, if he is lying.

- Studied? I studied graphics and painting in Berlin...

- Fine!

Adolf Burger

The Sturbanführer looked very pleased. With a gloved hand, he took my chin and lifted my head high, forcing me to look directly into his eyes. If not for the subtle cynical smile lurking in his eyes and the corners of his mouth, he would have looked almost amiable. What did this high SS official want from me, what kind of ambush did he lure me into?

By that time, Peter Edel, a German Jew, a member of the Resistance, arrested by the Gestapo in 1942, had already been in a concentration camp for 2 years, looked like a skeleton and counted only on death as a release from suffering. His wife Esther died in the gas chamber; every day before his eyes dozens of other people were sent to their deaths. However, an unfamiliar SS Sturmbannführer (and this was Bernhardt Krueger in person), who arrived from Berlin, unexpectedly appeared in the camp in 1944, saved the life of him and several other prisoners. What happened next was like a fairy tale: the prisoners were brought to Auschwitz in cattle cars, but now the SS man was carrying them in a soft compartment of an express train. They left him in Oranienburg, a quiet, cozy town north of Berlin. Former prisoners of Auschwitz did not yet know that just two kilometers from this idyll is the huge Sachsenhausen concentration camp, in which about 100 thousand people died in 10 years - from 1936 to 1945 ...

The special zone, where barracks No. 18 and No. 19 were located, was carefully isolated from the rest of the concentration camp. It was essentially a camp within a camp. It was surrounded by a row of barbed wire and a wooden fence three meters high, on top of which barbed wire was also stretched. No one in the camp, including the guards, knew what was going on behind this fence. The windows of the barracks were covered with lime, so it was impossible to look inside. And yet here one could see the most curious things.

All 144 prisoners of barracks No. 18 and No. 19, brought here from 13 European countries, were highly qualified specialists in their field: engravers, graphic artists, printers and counterfeiters. The eldest among them was Solomon Smolyanov, a native of Russia, on the eve of the war, arrested by the Dutch police in Amsterdam for counterfeiting English 5-pound banknotes. Having got to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp straight from the Dutch prison, he was engaged here in the business already familiar to him, however, this time on a much larger scale.

Rudolf Franz

The prisoners of the "special zone" called their new place of detention the "golden cage". Unlike other prisoners of the huge concentration camp (where up to 30 thousand people died before the beginning of 1945), they were in a privileged position: they were allowed to wear long hair and civilian clothes, play table tennis, move freely within the fenced area, they are relatively decent fed and provided with smoke. As Adolf Burger recalls, calm classical music always flowed from the loudspeakers, contributing to the creation of the necessary mood - after all, the work of the prisoners of the "golden cage" was extremely painstaking, requiring considerable concentration of strength. Dressed in white coats and white gloves, they conjured over printing plates, surrounded by large baskets filled with stacks of counterfeit English banknotes ...

In the spring of 1945, shortly before the fall of Berlin, all work was stopped. As Burger recalls, he and other prisoners were ordered to collect all counterfeit currency, stamps and printing equipment in wooden boxes, which were then sealed, numbered and taken somewhere. After that, the prisoners of the "golden cage" were hastily transferred to a concentration camp in Ebensee. Here, in the underground workings, a large number of prisoners were concentrated. The Germans planned to blow up the galleries. Soviet troops saved the prisoners from inevitable death.

From the testimony of other witnesses, it is known that in April 1945 the equipment of the underground factory in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and its products were hastily evacuated to the south. Several dozen trucks, now and then subjected to air raids, managed to safely reach Austria. On May 5, 1945, the convoy reached Lake Toplitz. Hans Keller, one of the high-ranking employees of the secret naval base, was in charge here. At first, he ordered the boxes of counterfeit money to be burned, but it turned out that there were too many of them, and then it was decided to simply throw them into the lake. It took the Germans two whole days to do this. Ida Weissenbacher, a local woman who was 21 in 1945, recalls how German soldiers woke her and her family at 5 o'clock in the morning and ordered them to immediately hitch up their horses and go to the shore of the lake. There have already gathered a lot of carts collected from all over the area. Together with other peasants, Ida took part in the transportation of goods from the parking lot of the convoy to the lake. The line of heavily loaded trucks stretched for several hundred meters. Tired, mud-splattered soldiers with reddened eyes from lack of sleep sat and smoked on the steps and right by the wheels. “At this point the road ended and the trucks could not reach the shore,” recalls Ida Weissenbacher. - This could only be done by horse-drawn vehicles. The head of the convoy was very annoyed. He ordered us to move the boxes as fast as possible.” Along a narrow, bumpy path, a young peasant woman transported about sixty boxes in her cart three times. After the third and last trip to the lake, Ida saw a group of German officers loading boxes into a boat. Then she moved away from the shore, and somewhere in the middle of the lake, the SS began to throw boxes into the water. This operation was repeated several times. According to the witness, each box had a serial number and a special marking, which she was not able to understand.

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Notes

"Profession!" (Polish)

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