October 7, 2015
Chasing Gold:
The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe’s Bullion
George M. Taber
Author; retired reporter and editor, Time magazine
Chasing Gold:
The Incredible Story of How the Nazis Stole Europe’s Bullion
George M. Taber
Author; retired reporter and editor, Time magazine
George M. Taber, Speaker Landon Jones, Introducer
Minutes of the Fourth Meeting of the 74th Year
The 4th meeting of the Old Guard’s 74th year was called to order by President Owen Leach at 10:15 A.M. Eight Old Guard members introduced a total of 10 guests; six were prospective members. The total meeting attendance was 122. Joan Fleming led the invocation. Seth Malin read the minutes of the preceding meeting.
President Leach then called to the podium Landon Jones who introduced the speaker, George M. Taber, author of Chasing Gold, subtitled “The Incredible Story of How The Nazis Stole Europe’s Bullion”. Previously Mr. Taber was a reporter and editor at Time magazine, based in Bonn, Paris, Houston, Washington, D.C., and New York. Mr. Taber’s well received first book, Judgment In Paris told the story of a blind tasting of wine in Paris in 1976 at which a California red wine out scored French red wines, effectively jump starting the rapid growth of the California wine industry. A movie based on Mr. Taber’s book followed.
Mr. Taber began by describing the economic strategy for the war Hitler was planning, developed by Hjalmar Schacht.[1] A respected banker in Germany who was responsible for ending the German inflation after World War I, Schacht became Hitler’s chief economic advisor. The only non-Nazi member of Adolf Hitler’s group of insiders, Schacht was shown in a photo wearing traditional conservative bankers dress as he marched with Hitler and other members of the insider group wearing Nazi uniforms.
Schacht advocated an economic policy of self-sufficiency; never being dependent on other nations for food and strategic war materials not indigenous to Germany, as had been the case in World War I, which contributed to Germany’s defeat. Those strategic war materials included oil, weapons grade steel, rubber, tungsten, chromium, nickel and aluminum. Schacht recognized that gold had always been the payment of last resort, and that the Nazis would have to pay for vital goods in gold since suppliers would not accept German currency. Schacht’s plan called for taking a country’s gold reserve after invading the country, then using the stolen gold to purchase needed food and strategic products. An even more chilling source of some gold was from the personal belonging of concentration camp prisoners, including their gold teeth and wedding rings. According to Taber, Swiss bankers had a crucial role in accepting the stolen gold from Germany and facilitating its use in making purchases.
For example, when the Nazi army invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, it was powered by Romanian oil. Ball bearings were also vital for the German war effort and Berlin bought them from Sweden. Chromium, another crucial product, was bought from Turkey. After the German Amy had taken over a country, its agricultural products and the critical products produced by its industries came under the control of Germany.
The remainder of Mr. Taber’s talk described in some detail the Nazis’ systematic attempts to steal the gold in each nation it invaded. The first victim was Austria in March 1938. The Germans picked up 91 tons of that country’s central bank gold plus 14 tons of personal bullion taken mainly from Vienna’s large Jewish community.
The Germans also succeeded in Czechoslovakia and Holland. But in other nations, such as Poland and Norway, local officials and soldiers succeeded in heroic efforts to keep their gold out of German hands, moving it by various means of transportation to Canada, the U.S., Britain, and France. For example, in 1939 a group of Polish central bank officials took 81 tons of gold south to Romania, and with the help of the British, through the Black Sea to Istanbul, and then to Beirut, where France’s fastest war ship took it to Toulon. And just after midnight on April 9, 1940, a retired Norwegian colonel just called back to military service because of the fear of an invasion, spotted the German cruiser Blücher steaming toward Oslo. He immediately ordered an ancient Krupp cannon to fire at it. The German ship sank, and a unit of Nazi soldiers aboard with orders to seize Norway’s gold were delayed. That gave a band of Norwegians time to start moving the country’s 50 tons of gold, as well as King Håkon, to above the Arctic Circle. From there the gold was shipped to Canada and the U.S., while the king spent the war in Britain.
Nazi gold reserves were running out in 1940, when the Germans got their biggest haul during the invasion of Western Europe, seizing 205 tons of Belgium gold and 137 tons of Dutch gold. That financed the invasion of the Soviet Union a year later. But the Germans were not able to get the Soviet’s gold, the largest amount of gold held by an invaded country, 3,000 tons.
The Soviets were ill prepared for the German attack because Stalin mistakenly believed that Hitler would honor their 1939 treaty. A week into the invasion the Soviet Politburo voted to ship their country’s three most precious items to the eastern side of the Ural Mountains for protection: the Hermitage Museum artworks, the embalmed body of Lenin, and the 3,000 tons of gold. All these valuables traveled together in trains with armed guards. The last major Nazi booty of the war was 119 tons of Italian gold that German occupying forces moved first from Rome to Milan and then to an abandoned fortress on the Austrian border. Most of it was taken to Berlin in 1944.
In February 1945 with the war clearly coming to an end, Berlin officials sent two trainloads of gold and precious art works to a salt mine in a village in central Germany, Merkers. Two months later, U.S. troops stumbled on that treasure, rescuing 219 tons of gold out of the more than 600 tons the Nazis had stolen. At that time the 600 tons was valued at $600 million. At today’s price for gold it would be worth $22 billion.
A Question and Answer session followed the conclusion of Mr. Taber’s talk:
Q. Was any of the gold sent for safekeeping lost during its voyage overseas by ship? A. While overseas shipping was under attack by German submarines, miraculously not a single gold carrying ship was lost.
Q. I recently read an article saying that people were now looking for German gold in Poland, possibly in a train buried underground 150 miles south of Warsaw. What do you think? A. I am skeptical there is gold buried there. The Eastern Front was the most vicious Front during the war. Why would gold meant for safekeeping be shipped into that area?
Q. How much of the stolen gold was recovered? A. About one fifth.
Q. What happened to the recovered gold after the war? A. The recovered gold was repatriated to countries whose gold had been stolen. An International body was set up to verify each country’s loss and then gold was returned to each country on a pro-rata basis. Each county got back just a fraction of their stolen gold.
Q. How much of the stolen gold was spent by Germany during the war, and how much was “lost”? A. The Americans tried to get the Swiss to return files pertaining to the gold. The Cold War intervened and the effort petered out.
Q. What happened to Hjalmar Schacht? A. Schacht thought he could control Hitler. He was wrong and after some of his actions ran afoul of Hitler’s wishes he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. He survived, was tried at Nuremburg, served 20 years in prison, and then went back to being a banker.
Q. How did you do your research for the book? A. It was a real challenge. Some countries had written records of what happened to their gold and these records had to be translated. In other countries I had to locate an expert to do the research. What I had to do varied from country to country.
Q. Which countries lost the most Gold? Belgium and Holland lost the most. France had shipped some of the gold it held to Africa for safekeeping. After the Nazis invasion of France and the subsequent establishment of the Vichy government, a negotiation with Germany allowed France to keep a good part of the gold they had accumulated.
After President Leach adjourned the meeting at the traditional 11:30 A.M. sharp, an enthusiastic group of Old Guardians came up to speak with Mr. Taber. A good number bought a signed copy of Chasing Gold at the friendly Old Guard price of $20 (as Landon Jones had put it) when compared to the $29.95 list price.
Respectfully submitted,
Richard I. Bergman
[1] This summary of Mr. Taber’s talk draws on a fine summary he had prepared, amplified in places by notes I took during his presentation. Extensive detail is available in his book, a copy of which is at the Princeton Public Library.
President Leach then called to the podium Landon Jones who introduced the speaker, George M. Taber, author of Chasing Gold, subtitled “The Incredible Story of How The Nazis Stole Europe’s Bullion”. Previously Mr. Taber was a reporter and editor at Time magazine, based in Bonn, Paris, Houston, Washington, D.C., and New York. Mr. Taber’s well received first book, Judgment In Paris told the story of a blind tasting of wine in Paris in 1976 at which a California red wine out scored French red wines, effectively jump starting the rapid growth of the California wine industry. A movie based on Mr. Taber’s book followed.
Mr. Taber began by describing the economic strategy for the war Hitler was planning, developed by Hjalmar Schacht.[1] A respected banker in Germany who was responsible for ending the German inflation after World War I, Schacht became Hitler’s chief economic advisor. The only non-Nazi member of Adolf Hitler’s group of insiders, Schacht was shown in a photo wearing traditional conservative bankers dress as he marched with Hitler and other members of the insider group wearing Nazi uniforms.
Schacht advocated an economic policy of self-sufficiency; never being dependent on other nations for food and strategic war materials not indigenous to Germany, as had been the case in World War I, which contributed to Germany’s defeat. Those strategic war materials included oil, weapons grade steel, rubber, tungsten, chromium, nickel and aluminum. Schacht recognized that gold had always been the payment of last resort, and that the Nazis would have to pay for vital goods in gold since suppliers would not accept German currency. Schacht’s plan called for taking a country’s gold reserve after invading the country, then using the stolen gold to purchase needed food and strategic products. An even more chilling source of some gold was from the personal belonging of concentration camp prisoners, including their gold teeth and wedding rings. According to Taber, Swiss bankers had a crucial role in accepting the stolen gold from Germany and facilitating its use in making purchases.
For example, when the Nazi army invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, it was powered by Romanian oil. Ball bearings were also vital for the German war effort and Berlin bought them from Sweden. Chromium, another crucial product, was bought from Turkey. After the German Amy had taken over a country, its agricultural products and the critical products produced by its industries came under the control of Germany.
The remainder of Mr. Taber’s talk described in some detail the Nazis’ systematic attempts to steal the gold in each nation it invaded. The first victim was Austria in March 1938. The Germans picked up 91 tons of that country’s central bank gold plus 14 tons of personal bullion taken mainly from Vienna’s large Jewish community.
The Germans also succeeded in Czechoslovakia and Holland. But in other nations, such as Poland and Norway, local officials and soldiers succeeded in heroic efforts to keep their gold out of German hands, moving it by various means of transportation to Canada, the U.S., Britain, and France. For example, in 1939 a group of Polish central bank officials took 81 tons of gold south to Romania, and with the help of the British, through the Black Sea to Istanbul, and then to Beirut, where France’s fastest war ship took it to Toulon. And just after midnight on April 9, 1940, a retired Norwegian colonel just called back to military service because of the fear of an invasion, spotted the German cruiser Blücher steaming toward Oslo. He immediately ordered an ancient Krupp cannon to fire at it. The German ship sank, and a unit of Nazi soldiers aboard with orders to seize Norway’s gold were delayed. That gave a band of Norwegians time to start moving the country’s 50 tons of gold, as well as King Håkon, to above the Arctic Circle. From there the gold was shipped to Canada and the U.S., while the king spent the war in Britain.
Nazi gold reserves were running out in 1940, when the Germans got their biggest haul during the invasion of Western Europe, seizing 205 tons of Belgium gold and 137 tons of Dutch gold. That financed the invasion of the Soviet Union a year later. But the Germans were not able to get the Soviet’s gold, the largest amount of gold held by an invaded country, 3,000 tons.
The Soviets were ill prepared for the German attack because Stalin mistakenly believed that Hitler would honor their 1939 treaty. A week into the invasion the Soviet Politburo voted to ship their country’s three most precious items to the eastern side of the Ural Mountains for protection: the Hermitage Museum artworks, the embalmed body of Lenin, and the 3,000 tons of gold. All these valuables traveled together in trains with armed guards. The last major Nazi booty of the war was 119 tons of Italian gold that German occupying forces moved first from Rome to Milan and then to an abandoned fortress on the Austrian border. Most of it was taken to Berlin in 1944.
In February 1945 with the war clearly coming to an end, Berlin officials sent two trainloads of gold and precious art works to a salt mine in a village in central Germany, Merkers. Two months later, U.S. troops stumbled on that treasure, rescuing 219 tons of gold out of the more than 600 tons the Nazis had stolen. At that time the 600 tons was valued at $600 million. At today’s price for gold it would be worth $22 billion.
A Question and Answer session followed the conclusion of Mr. Taber’s talk:
Q. Was any of the gold sent for safekeeping lost during its voyage overseas by ship? A. While overseas shipping was under attack by German submarines, miraculously not a single gold carrying ship was lost.
Q. I recently read an article saying that people were now looking for German gold in Poland, possibly in a train buried underground 150 miles south of Warsaw. What do you think? A. I am skeptical there is gold buried there. The Eastern Front was the most vicious Front during the war. Why would gold meant for safekeeping be shipped into that area?
Q. How much of the stolen gold was recovered? A. About one fifth.
Q. What happened to the recovered gold after the war? A. The recovered gold was repatriated to countries whose gold had been stolen. An International body was set up to verify each country’s loss and then gold was returned to each country on a pro-rata basis. Each county got back just a fraction of their stolen gold.
Q. How much of the stolen gold was spent by Germany during the war, and how much was “lost”? A. The Americans tried to get the Swiss to return files pertaining to the gold. The Cold War intervened and the effort petered out.
Q. What happened to Hjalmar Schacht? A. Schacht thought he could control Hitler. He was wrong and after some of his actions ran afoul of Hitler’s wishes he was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. He survived, was tried at Nuremburg, served 20 years in prison, and then went back to being a banker.
Q. How did you do your research for the book? A. It was a real challenge. Some countries had written records of what happened to their gold and these records had to be translated. In other countries I had to locate an expert to do the research. What I had to do varied from country to country.
Q. Which countries lost the most Gold? Belgium and Holland lost the most. France had shipped some of the gold it held to Africa for safekeeping. After the Nazis invasion of France and the subsequent establishment of the Vichy government, a negotiation with Germany allowed France to keep a good part of the gold they had accumulated.
After President Leach adjourned the meeting at the traditional 11:30 A.M. sharp, an enthusiastic group of Old Guardians came up to speak with Mr. Taber. A good number bought a signed copy of Chasing Gold at the friendly Old Guard price of $20 (as Landon Jones had put it) when compared to the $29.95 list price.
Respectfully submitted,
Richard I. Bergman
[1] This summary of Mr. Taber’s talk draws on a fine summary he had prepared, amplified in places by notes I took during his presentation. Extensive detail is available in his book, a copy of which is at the Princeton Public Library.