Kolchak's gold

THE NAZI SCHEME*

[From 1920 until 1944 the gold of the Czars rested undisturbed in its hiding place in the Siberian mountains. Speculations and conflicting reports to the contrary, it did not fall into the hands of partisans, Atamans, Reds, Whites, or the remnants of the Czech Legion. Buried under the rubble of its caved-in hiding place, it remained undiscovered and untouched while the world changed.]

In the decade that followed the Russian Civil War the Soviet state did not, as Marx would have had it, “wither away.” Instead it became ever more totalitarian after the ouster of Trotsky and the death of Lenin made room for the imposition of the absolute dictatorship of Josef Stalin.

The Communist state was threatened by “capitalist encirclement” and Stalin used that rationalization to justify the intimidation of the populace, the imposition of extreme propaganda measures and the infliction of the great purges which disposed of all suspected opposition to his despotic regime.

Vast numbers of the original Bolsheviks were forced to fabricate “confessions,” were tried publicly (but hardly fairly) and were brutally executed. Ten million persons were sent to the forced labor camps of the NKVD. The purges eliminated the entire Lenin Politburo, the entire old Bolshevik movement, and the entire leadership of the army, the state police, the trade unions and the Communist Central Committee. All of them were replaced with men whose sole qualification for office was their loyalty to the vozhd (roughly, the fuhrer), Josef Stalin.

Because Stalin’s purges weakened the Red Army and the nation disastrously by massacring most of their leadership, Stalin was not nearly ready for war when Munich came about.

But neither was Hitler. The Nazis wanted a guarantee of Soviet neutrality (in the event of a “dispute” between Germany and Poland) just as badly as Stalin wanted time to mobilize. As a result, on August 23, 1939, the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed to guarantee mutual nonaggression and divide eastern Europe into “spheres of influence” which placed Finland and the small Baltic states under Russian “protection.”

[In the meantime] the center of the universe was still Berlin. Foreign correspondents drank their days away at the Adlon Bar and occasionally went up along the Wilhelmstrasse to watch Hitler on the balcony review the troop lorries that rolled past. The dictator with his Chaplin mustache watched his thousands of mesmerized youths shout their “Sieg Heils” and spoke to them in his guttural hypnotic rant, rousing their apocalyptic fervor to a frenzy, preparing them in the moral twilight of the Third Reich for Mitteleuropa’s Gotterdammerung. The accumulated sadistic malice of human history, which was to find expression in such souvenirs as the human-skin lampshades of Ilse Koch, made the world a clinic for the grotesque evil of the Nazi experiments in racial purification and mass death; and found its voice in the cloying martial sentimentality of the Horst Wessel Song.*

Adolf Hitler’s compelling voice inspired his brown-clothed followers to offer their lives in the service of the immortalizing nobility of Destiny. Hitler convinced Germany (as he had convinced himself) that he was of divine origin-that Providence rendered his pronouncements Infallible; that German honor and German glory demanded the Aryan world conquest; that the Fatherland’s insidious enemies-the Communists, the Jews, those who had heaped upon Germany the ignominious betrayal of Versailles-must be crushed.

Of course the German mind was diseased. Of course the Nazi upheaval was an aberration-mankind throwing a tantrum. Of course Hitler was mad: a man whose most intense gratification derived from the ultimate act of obeisance-kneeling before a woman so that she could defecate and urinate upon him. Of course the deranged sycophantic parasites who surrounded Hitler fed on his weaknesses and influenced his bestialities. Of course the circumstances and conditions were “unique.” Yet: of the two nations, Russia and Germany, it was not Germany in which a small minority imposed its will on an unwilling population; it was not Germany in which, by apathy or outright partisan revolt, enormous segments of the population resisted the despotism of the regime; and it was Germany-not Russia-in which the committed successful revolution arose among the workers and trade unionists. The Nazis were the revolutionaries of the 1920s and their movement was fundamentally proletarian: a blind, nonintellectual will for change. Their revolution drove to the right, not the left-a fact overlooked by those who insist that revolution is always a function of the left-but nevertheless it was a populist movement and there was never any coherent resistance movement during Hitler’s lifetime in power. Thus while Russia merely tolerated evil, Germany gave it active and undivided support-and one may argue that in the end there wasn’t a penny’s worth of difference: mere tolerance of evil is an evil in itself.*

One week after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed, German Stukas and Panzers overran Poland.

In the Katyn forest near Smolensk some five thousand ranking officers of the Polish army were slaughtered by execution squads. The Germans were blamed for this, the first mass atrocity of the war. In fact it was the Red Army which massacred the Poles at Katyn-to eliminate any possibility of a Polish military reformation around their cadre of leading officers.†

At the end of November 1939 the soviet Union invaded Finland, committing one million troops in thirty combat divisions against the Finns’ nine divisions (two hundred thousand men). To Stalin’s chagrin the Finns chopped the Red Army to ribbons. A peace was signed in March 1940 by which Finland ceded about 12 percent of her territory to Russia; but Stalin gave up his plans to occupy the country. He had lost two hundred thousand lives-nine times the number of Finnish casualties.

The Russo-Finnish War was militarily and politically indecisive. The Finns gave ground but did not give up; the Russians gained little of value. Perhaps the most significant result of that otherwise inconclusive campaign was its effect on Hitler’s appraisal of Soviet fighting strength and ability. A relative handful of plucky Finns, neither mechanized nor particularly well armed, had made mincemeat of one million crack Red Army troops.

It suggested that Moscow was highly vulnerable.

[Preparations for the German invasion of the Soviet Union were made under the code name Plan Barbarossa. The plan had two objectives: first, to attack by surprise and destroy the Russian army at the border, so that the Russians could not retreat into the vast interior of the country to regroup; second, to drive at high speed into the populated industrial heart of European Russia and seize the major cities.

[The invasion was launched from Poland, spearheaded across north-central Russia in the direction of Moscow, then dispersed in fast-moving armies to the north (Leningrad), the center (Moscow) and the south (Stalingrad, the Ukraine, the Crimea, the Caucasus).]

Communists and Jews were two groups which rapidly merged into one in Nazi rhetoric. Bolshevism became a Jewish conspiracy (as it had been earlier to the White Russians); the Soviet government was Jewish and its leaders were Jews-Stalin, Beria, all of them.

A Jewish government obviously did not represent the Aryan people of Russia; or even the Slavs (although to the Nazi ideologists a Slav wasn’t much better than a Jew). The Jew was subhuman: he was not a human being, he was vermin-a symptom of degrading putrefaction. This pitiless racial mysticism of the Nordic Germans led at first to national policy-the clan oaths, the marriage permits, the exhaustive racial “hygiene” investigations-and then quickly to foreign policy, where it became a reconfirmation of the abiding German distrust of Russian communism.

Germans understood-and quietly approved-Hitler’s strategem of neutralizing the Reds (the real enemy) with the nonaggression pact while crushing the rest of Western Europe in 1940, to prevent a stab in the back from that direction when Germany went to war against the Soviet Union. The pact had been a mutual convenience and everyone recognized that-the Russians as well as the Germans. As a result, by the early summer of 1941 both sides were preparing for the inevitable conflict, and the German attack did not surprise anyone in the Kremlin; only its timing did.

The Luftwaffe and Hitler’s two hundred divisions attacked without warning just after midnight in the dark morning hours of June 22, 1941-a Sunday.

Within a week the Panzers had utterly destroyed fourteen entire Red divisions. German planes went over with a great abdominal rumble, dropping sticks of bombs and vomiting parachutes. The guns-both sides still used horse-drawn artillery-produced brutal casualties because neither side was entrenched. It was a war of movement with no time for fortification; where the invader met the resistance of bunkers and defensive lines of earthworks, he bypassed them and left them isolated for the second and third waves to mop up.

The Germans took the Ukraine at a rate of eleven miles a day despite fierce resistance. The retreating Russians left scorched earth.

The initial victories were easy. Hitler’s contempt for the Red Army seemed justified. The Russians were throwing Cossack cavalry divisions at him-horse against the might of German armor!

Stalin’s reaction to disaster was very nearly the same as the reaction Hitler would later display when the tables were turned. Stalin’s orders forbade retreat or withdrawal under any circumstances: retreat was treason and traitors would be shot. The result was that entire divisions stood their hopeless ground and were slaughtered or gathered into the vast bag of prisoners taken by the Germans.

[By September the Germans had taken nearly a million Russian soldiers.]

Operation Barbarossa was on schedule. But then Hitler made the crucial error.

The German generals intended to meet the Red Army at Moscow. The battle would be decisive. Everything was committed to it-until Hitler decided it was necessary to take Leningrad, the industries of the Donets, and the Crimea. To accomplish these dubious purposes he diverted hundreds of thousands of men from the center prong and sent them south.

[The diversion not only cost the Wehrmacht in vital strength; it also cost time, for reorganization and resupply.] When Hitler ordered the resumption of the concentrated attack on Moscow it was nearly mid-September, and it was too late. Napoleon had reached Moscow on September 14 but the Russian winter had defeated him; Hitler had not learned from history.

There had not yet been a single successful Russian counter-offensive. In late September Kiev and Vyazma fell to the Germans; von Rundestedt and von Bock took 1,200,000 prisoners. North of them, Army Group Center pressed toward Moscow in October and captured another 600,000 men. At this point in history the majority of Russia’s soldiers had been taken prisoner by the Germans.*

Red reinforcements moved in from the Far East but not nearly fast enough to keep up with the attrition. By November Moscow was under fire, Leningrad under siege, and the entire Ukraine was in German hands.

On November 10, 1941, in his underground command bunker at the Kremlin, Stalin held a conference to analyze the state of the war. It was bleak. The Germans were within twenty-five miles of the Kremlin and a German tank unit had penetrated the outskirts of the city itself on the north; only one railway-to the east-was left uncut.

The war looked just about lost, on all fronts.

The reasons for the staggering German victories of 1941 were varied and numerous but one significant factor was the Russian unwillingness to fight.

Stalin’s terrors had created in the population an unparalleled hatred and fear toward the regime. The collectivization of agriculture under the forced programs of commissars and Soviets had cost the lives of millions of farmers and had “relocated” forty million others to Siberian kolkhozi and forced labor camps. The purges by the GPU and Beria’s secret police had created still more fear and fury.

By October even Stalin had to acknowledge for the record that many Russians at the front were throwing down their arms and welcoming the Germans. So unreliable did Stalin deem his own population that he pleaded with Roosevelt and Churchill to send their troops to fight on Russian soil.*

“Treason? † Perhaps it was. You recall Talleyrand’s definition-treason is a question of dates. A charge leveled by winners against losers. I think to the Russian people it was not a question of treason but of patriotism. The strength of a nation in the long run is no greater than the people’s measure of themselves, and the Russian people were ashamed, you know. Ashamed they had let Stalin do these things to them. At least that is my estimation, but remember, it comes from a Jew; it is biased.

“I was not in Russia at this time; I was there later of course, more than once. What I tell you about these times is what I have learned from many people.

“In my brother’s village no one had been informed of the Final Solution at that time. In fact the German frontline soldiers had not been informed of it. To the Russians of nineteen-forty and forty-one the Germans were a trustworthy people-reliable and civilized. It had always been so, had it not? German civilization was the model upon which the Czars had based Russian society.

“One Ukrainian told me that when the Germans arrived in his district they were courteous-almost gallant-and some of the villagers came out with flowers to meet them, and the Germans cursed the inefficient Russians for not having built railroads and roads enough to support the blitzkrieg’s supply lines, but they were laughing while they cursed.

“At first the rumors of mass brutality were met with disbelief. No one thinks himself a poor judge of human nature, and the first Germans into Russia were simple soldiers for the most part-not SS, not Gestapo. That all came later.

“My brother lived in a village east of Kotelnikovsky. Not the Ukraine, really-southern Russia, near the Caucasus. The Germans didn’t get that far at first. Not for nearly a year, in fact. But in the meantime the refugees who managed to flee without being caught by the Germans brought the news with them.”

[The news was of incredible bestialities.]

In October 1941 the Germans overran the whole of the Crimean peninsula, isolating Sebastopol against the sea.

The Wehrmacht (the Eleventh Army under von Manstein) made repeated efforts right up to year-end to broach the city’s defenses and succeeded in pushing the defense lines closer to the populated center but each German assault broke against the fervor of Russian resistance and when the winter rains stalled further German attempts the city was still holding out.

For months the suburbs burned. The pungent stench was nauseating-a clinging acridity of burning wood and flesh-but a good part of the time it was driven back across the German lines by prevailing winds.

Then, in May 1942, the Russian counteroffensive at Kerch collapsed and the German forces there were freed to wheel toward Sebastopol. The population moved into caves and bunkers; the ordeal of German shelling became uninterrupted. Early in June the Luftwaffe assembled a force of several hundred bombers and the Wehrmacht brought up a mammoth railroad gun, the siege cannon “Dora,” designed to smash the Maginot Line. The German 105s, the German bombs, the German siege-gun shells destroyed Sebastopol’s airfields and cut off the sea-lanes of supply. The rest was obvious.

[The Germans took ninety thousand prisoners and called it a great victory; but Stalin was not dissatisfied since the siege had tied down von Manstein’s three hundred thousand men for two hundred and fifty days during which they might have made a decisive difference on the center fronts.]

[Perhaps the turning point had come as early as December 4, 1941, when Zhukov and Vlasov at Moscow blunted the German drive. Vlasov’s daring counterattack broke through the German lines and halted the advance; then it snowed; Stalin’s fresh Siberian units had time to reach the front and the Germans fell back from Moscow’s suburbs under their attack.

[For the most part the war was stalled in its tracks by the severity of that winter. Casualties were high, the fighting savage, but the Germans were no longer in motion; Stalin had time to build new armies and train them and-with the aid of lend-lease-equip them.]

Nevertheless after the spring thaw the relentless Teutonic march resumed. Russian resistance was heavier, better organized, and the news of SS atrocities had firmed up Russia’s will to fight; but German air and armor kept the invasion alive and in the summer of 1942 the German hordes smashed through to Stalingrad.

Krupp shells destroyed the city but not its inhabitants; the defenders held. And in November 1942 the Red Army counterattacked: surrounded the Germans and obliterated half a million of Hitler’s soldiers at Stalingrad.

It was on November 19, 1942 that the German advance became a retreat. From that date on, there was no further possibility of a Nazi conquest. By 1945 the Reds would push the Wehrmacht all the way back to Berlin.

Gruppenfuhrer Otto von Geyr arrived at Tempelhof on November 8, 1942, and was collected by a command car which took him silently through the blacked-out streets to the Chancellery where he met for nearly an hour with Hitler’s deputy, Martin Bormann, in a conference that also included SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler. No minutes of this meeting were kept. But later that night, von Geyr and Himmler went together to Himmler’s office in Prinz Albrecht Strasse and Himmler’s staff notes, dated November 9, indicate that the subject of discussion was Standartenfuhrer Heinz Krausser’s dispatch of September 13 concerning the possible whereabouts of the five-hundred-ton Czarist gold bullion treasury. The phrase “Siberian iron-mine shaft” appears in the staff notes.

[Perhaps it can be assumed that the conference at the Chancellery had to do with the Reich’s need for hard currency and the plausibility of the Krausser report with reference to that need. Subsequent events suggest that Bormann ordered von Geyr to proceed to organize a search for the reputed gold treasure.]

The key figure in the investigation was Krausser, who as head of Einsatzgruppe “E” had unearthed the first references to the Kolchak cache. Heinz Krausser was thirty-nine, a veteran of the First World War on the Western Front; in 1920 he had joined an anti-Semitic organization sponsored in part by exiled Russian monarchists, and in 1927 he enrolled in the Nazi Party, when he was a foot patrolman on the Munich police force. Several years later, when the SS was organized under Himmler, he was absorbed into it as a drill instructor with the rank of captain.

Krausser’s zealous anti-Semitism, his combat background, his youth, and his cynical if not fatalistic sense of Realpolitik made him stand out even among his SS comrades. It was not surprising that Krausser was selected to lead one of the new Einsatzgruppen murder battalions in the Russian campaign of 1941.

The official photographs show a thin man of moderate height with a prominent triangular nose, eyes hidden under bony brows, a surprisingly full sensuous mouth and a veined bald skull. (Evidently he had begun to lose his hair in his early twenties and had elected to shave his skull thereafter.) His black-collared tunic conceals the double-lightning SS tattoo on his forearm but one can be sure it was there. He wore the long black cavalry boots of an officer and the Death’s Head insignia on his high-crowned, black-billed garrison cap, which in the photographs is invariably clenched at his side by the pressure of his elbow. His letters from the Eastern Front-to von Geyr and to his sister (he had no wife)-indicate that he was a highly demonstrative man dominated by crude passions.

He was filled with vitriol toward “the Jewish vermin” and “these Russian swine” but at the same time he was very sentimental about Christmas and wrote long maudlin passages-how he missed the candle-lit windows, the decorated trees, the laughing children. In 1942 he was nearly forty years old but his letters home are the letters of youth: callow, unsophisticated, cynical but with a fatalism that left no room for compassion, even toward himself.

Demonstrably a sadist, he doubtless looked forward keenly to his own violent destruction at the hands of infuriated would-be victims. Twice in his letters to von Geyr* he expresses surprise that the sheeplike prisoners do not at least make an effort to overwhelm their German murderers-to-be, whom they outnumber by factors of hundreds to one.

Despite his masochism and fatalism he was ambitiously an opportunist. He declared it was one of his keenest hopes to make Battalion “E” the most “successful” of all the Einsatzgruppen (that is to say, to murder more Jews than any other Group murdered) in order to bring himself to the Fuhrer’s grateful attention. Evidently Nirvana to Krausser was to stand at attention while the Fuhrer in person pinned a medal on his tunic.*

“I never met this Krausser but I knew his kind. I knew these instruments of Germany’s glorious historical mission to cleanse the world of Jews. They were mediocre men you know, not great fire-breathing villains twisting the ends of their mustaches. They were utterly ordinary. In all of them you saw a great self-pity-they wanted someone to sympathize with the distasteful job they had to do. Once I overheard two SS Leutnants talking, complaining, and then a Sturmbannfuhrer, a major, came into the place. He had heard some of what they were saying.

“He said to the two subalterns, ‘You don’t like your orders, do you?’ And then there was a pause, nobody said anything, and afterward the Sturmbannfuhrer continued, ‘You don’t like your orders, but you will obey them. If you were Russian soldiers you probably wouldn’t. Which is why we are winning and they are losing.’

“They were always pouring sentimental tears for their own exile-from their wives and children at home, from German food and German this and that. Always they sought excuses-those pious patriotic euphemisms they used in order to convince themselves that mass murder was not a crime.

“At this time there were a number of national units that helped the SS assassinate Jews. These were guard units mainly. The Slovak Hlinka Guards, the Croat Ustasa, the Ukrainians and the Rumanian and Bulgarian Fascisti. Now I went from Palestine into Europe by way of Italy in the end of nineteen forty-two. I was sent from Palestine, I was in the Mossad then. I had been provided with papers and uniforms which identified me as a Gestapo Ortsgruppenleitung with the military rank of Hauptmann. You know it isn’t true that the Gestapo wore those civilian overcoats and trilby hats with the brims turned down. In military areas the Gestapo wore uniforms just like all the other Germans. It was the grey Wehrmacht uniform. The boots and headgear were black like the SS, including the scuttle helmet, but the long leather coat was brown.

“My papers had been prepared by the Mossad. We had discussed my identity at great length.

“It was decided I should appear as a Nazi bureaucrat, inspecting the Eastern Front with orders to report on the efficiency of the Totenkopfverbanden. Those were the sentry units which guarded prisoners and disposed of the mass dead and that sort of thing. Essentially they did the work that was too menial for the heroes of the Einsatzgruppen. You see in this way I was protected from too close contact with the SS officers who commanded the Einsatzgruppen. Those people-like this Krausser-were naturally very suspicious, and if they thought I had been sent to spy on them, I’m sure some of them would have sent angry inquiries to Berlin, demanding to know what this meddlesome Gestapo Hauptmann was doing interfering with them. Obviously I couldn’t afford that sort of inquiries. So I was sent to examine the efficiency of these subordinate groups-the Croats and Slovaks and Bulgarians and so forth. That was my cover.

“Of course there was no Israel then. We had no official standing in the world. As you know, Roosevelt and the others found the Zionist cause suspect and contemptible. But our people were being slaughtered. The world knew this, but chose to ignore it-to pretend it wasn’t happening. You would read in the American press about the heroic resistance of the brave Russian people but you didn’t read much about the Jews dying by the tens of thousands.

“In Palestine we also knew it was happening. But like everyone else we had only hearsay evidence. The purpose of my trips into the Soviet Union during the war was to bring out real evidence.

“It was not feasible for us to infiltrate the camps in Germany itself. The security in those camps was very tight. It is quite true-although one is tempted not to acknowledge this-that many Germans who lived quite near the extermination camps actually had no inkling of what went on inside.

“At the time of my first journey they had not yet devised the death chambers, the Zyklon poison gas. The only gassing was done with gasoline exhausts in mobile vans. There were a few such vans in Russia but most of them were in Poland. In Russia the murders were done in the open, mainly by gunfire or flamethrower. There was no great amount of security to circumvent. For the most part, the Einsatzgruppen didn’t mind having spectators around. It gave them an opportunity to share their shame.

“I cannot use words to describe myself at that time-my state of feeling. It would be useless. To speak of these things at all, one must be utterly factual, utterly emotionless. It was not the first time I had betrayed my people-I had turned my back on them in the war twenty-five years earlier, I had denied I was a Jew. Now I went into Hitler’s world in the guise of Gestapo.

“I was, of course, not the only agent sent in. I believe I was the only one to survive the war.

“I know of one who broke. He had to witness the extermination of a hundred Jews in a village in the Ukraine, and he seized one of the Spandaus and turned it against the other machine-gunners and the officers. They say he killed more than a dozen SS before they shot him down. Perhaps he was an idiot, perhaps a hero; in any case it is impossible not to understand what forced him to do this. At the time I thought him a fool. I felt sorry for him-his lack of strength. Since the war I have realized how wrong I was to feel that way. But you must see how, at that time, it was necessary for me to feel that way. It was the only way I could do what I’d been assigned to do.*

“I had a miniature camera. The assignment was to secure photographic and documentary proof of the Nazi atrocities. This then could be released to the world. In our naivete we believed that the world could not continue to ignore the facts once we had presented such irrefutable evidence.” *

“I arrived in Poltava in December of nineteen forty-two. The area was the headquarters of Standartenfuhrer Krausser’s Einsatzgruppe, but as I have said I never encountered Krausser face-to-face. I did meet two or three Scharfuhreren and a completely insane Haputscharfuhrer [respectively, SS sergeants and a master-sergeant] who were under Krausser’s command. Later, sometime in nineteen forty-three, I was to meet a man from my brother’s village whom I took into my confidence. In the end I assisted him to escape from the Germans and the Russians and brought him back to Palestine with me. His name was Lev Zalmanson, if it matters. He was a man of volatile emotions and extremely quick intelligence. I felt he would be a valuable addition to our small force. In Palestine over a space of some weeks I had an opportunity to learn from him almost all the details of the story I’m about to tell you. Unhappily he began to brood on the events, he became terribly depressed-pathologically so-and then he suddenly turned violent and had to be confined in an institution. Not long after that, he committed suicide.

“Now I shall tell you about my brother and Heinz Krausser. You will understand that my information comes from Lev Zalmanson, and from things told to me by the three SS sergeants I have mentioned.”

“My brother had become very religious. Have I told you that? After he returned from Siberia. He worked for some years as clerk to an apothecary in a shtetl near Poltava, and then around nineteen thirty he moved to a poultry farm outside the village. He had married-I never met his wife-and there were three children. He took a job as director of the workers on this farm; I believe I’ve mentioned Maxim’s extraordinary leadership qualities.

“He was still a young man but the community regarded him almost as an elder, because of his wisdom and leadership. He wrote me that he would like to have taken up formal rabbinical studies. But this was not allowed under the Soviet regime. Still, one could almost say that my brother became a rabbi, although an unordained one.

“The Soviets had boarded up the synagogue and there was no rabbi nearer than forty or fifty kilometers away. As a result, the poultry farm became a sort of informal community center. When the Red Army began to fall back through the village and it was obvious that the Germans would be upon them at any moment-this was in August or the beginning of September, in nineteen forty-two-the people gathered at the poultry farm.

“The people knew the Germans would be upon them in a matter of days-possibly hours. They didn’t know what they should do. They had heard of the atrocities of course; the village harbored a number of refugee survivors of the Nazi murders to the west.

“There were partisan bands in the hills. Fighting both the Germans and the Reds. It was suggested the people desert the village and join the partisans.

“Many people rejected this idea because their wives and children and the old people couldn’t possibly survive winter encampment in the open with the partisans. Besides, the partisans were not Jews and would not welcome them except perhaps at gunpoint.

“Some others suggested they form their own partisan band-not to fight but to stay out of the hands of the Germans. It was then suggested that perhaps the village should retreat eastward, en masse-into those areas which were far beyond the German advance.

“Zalmanson told me this idea [that the entire village retreat toward the Caucasus] was the most popular one until one of the Ukrainian refugees pointed out that no one had the necessary internal passports, and that in the Ukraine he’d known of a case where a shtetl tried to flee en masse and had been machine-gunned off the road by a retreating Red Army battalion, because they were in the way.

“And then as always there was the question whether the children and the old people could survive such a march.

“The people prevailed upon Maxim for his opinion. Maxim had witnessed the winter retreat across Siberia with Kolchak and he knew too well what flight would mean to these people. None of them was equipped for survival under such circumstances. These were not soldiers, not nomads, not outdoor people in any way. They were villagers and a few farmers.

“He told them they must stay. Stay here and pray that the Nazis did not come to the village.

“If you have seen the German army move at night you do not forget it. The heavy measured tramp of their boots, growing louder. The soldiers’ faces blackened with burnt cork, the ribbons of light stabbing through the slits of the blackout headlights on the vehicles. The silhouette of an officer up in the turret of the thirty-seven-millimeter gun of a Panzerwagen, talking into a radio, calling down artillery on some suspected shadow ahead-first the rushing approach of an HE shell, then the ground shuddering.

“At my brother’s village the infantry stopped just short of the town. A scout company went among the houses to make sure it was secure, but the main body encamped outside the shtetl. The soldiers unfolded their shelter-halves and dug holes while the villagers watched. Whenever a German patrol came close, the villagers would put their hands in the air to indicate their noncombatant status. Many of them went around with white handkerchiefs displayed at all times.

“These Germans did not arrest them. They hardly paid attention to them at all. Civilians were of no interest to the Wehrmacht as long as they stayed out of the way. The soldiers were too tired for sadistic sport.

“Zalmanson said they all trembled in terror that whole night, but there were no incidents and the next day the Germans folded up their shelter-halves and moved on past the village, leaving only a small squad to secure it.

“The sound of the guns dissolved to the southeast. The German squad kept to themselves, having commandeered a farmhouse on a small height overlooking the village.

“The lines of battle had veered away to the south, and there were no heavy movements of Germans through the area; the rear echelons and reinforcements had gone past to the south, on their road eastward to the fighting. For a few days it appeared there was room for hope that the Germans had forgotten their existence in the little valley.

“Finally, of course, some sort of minor official of the German Occupation arrived in the village in the sidecar of a motorcycle, and that was that.”

“It was in September that this Heinz Krausser came on the scene. The shtetl was only one of several on his list.

“He arrived in one of those open armored cars and he was carrying a Schmeisser machine pistol in one hand. His headquarters platoon was with him-fifty or sixty men. They went through the village tacking up posters on the walls, ordering all Jews to present themselves at eight o’clock the next morning in a field at the edge of town, for what was called “registration and resettlement.” At the bottom in very large letters it said Bei Fluchtversuch Wird Geschossen’-anyone who tries to escape will be shot. I have seen these posters in other villages.

“The SS went through people’s houses, looting them. They did everything except rape. They didn’t wish to be contaminated by contact with Jewish women. Zalmanson told me there were no rapes reported in the shtetl. These SS were often expert rapists. Many of them were only sixteen years old.

“Krausser was a different sort, much older than his troops. At his home in Bavaria, I was told by one of the sergeants, Krausser kept a Rumanian slave in the kitchen and a young Jew was chained outside the house like a watchdog.

“Zalmanson described him to me-he had a shaven head and one of those inhumanly monotonous German voices. He would walk strutting around the village square, slapping the Schmeisser into his open palm. He had a crude sort of humor-very cynical, a sort of dull sarcasm. The sergeant told me one of Krausser’s favorite remarks-‘Our little war is going better. Much better than next year.’ He was referring to the fact that there wouldn’t be so many Jews to kill next year. Otherwise the story would not ring true. I think he was a fatalist, but not a defeatist, and anyway at this time it still looked as if the Nazis were winning the war, didn’t it?

“The village was not fooled by the resettlement announcement. Too many refugees had told them what happened to villages where the Jews lined up for ‘registration.’ In the afternoon there was a meeting out at the poultry farm-the Nazi SS had not come that far yet. Zalmanson was there, and my brother.

“It was too late to flee, yet there was no other choice. They did not know what to do. The SS were already setting up Spandaus on tripods along the edge of the field where the people were ordered to assemble in the morning. A truckload of shovels had arrived.

“They must have been chilled by the hopelessness. You know the kind of paralyzing fear which prevents flight?

“Zalmanson said my brother withdrew to meditate privately. When Zalmanson came upon him, Maxim was retching into his handkerchief.

“Dear God we can never forgive them! Never in a thousand years!

“Zalmanson told me he saw Maxim’s face drawn with pain. But Zalmanson had no way of understanding the dilemma my brother faced. The community was scheduled for annihilation-this is what Zalmanson knew, and he attributed Maxim’s agony solely to this. I never told Zalmanson the truth, but the events themselves can only be explained by the assumptions I must make.”

“Maxim had a giant’s gentleness. He had made himself over into a man of faith, a man of peace. Through that blind indifference of fate he found himself, as I did, a forgotten survivor of that terrible Civil War in Siberia.

“Whatever material loyalty he owned, he felt he owed to the Jewish people of his homeland-those whom we had betrayed by denying them. Obviously he was no more a Communist than I am, even though he had elected-almost as a sort of penance-to remain in Russia. He had no allegiance to the Moscow regime.

“We carried in our heads the secret of that heavy royal treasure, buried in the Sayan heights. Neither of us had ever revealed the secret.

“Why? Well that is easiest to explain by asking another question: to whom could we have revealed it? The Red government? Hardly. Some other government? What for?

“I had thought of discussing it with my fellow Mossad people but it seemed pointless. Granted we needed money, we were chronically without it in Palestine. But you cannot simply go into Siberia and remove five hundred tons of deep-buried gold. Or so I assumed. And also of course we had no way to know whether the gold had already been removed from its hiding place. In fact I rather took it for granted that it had. I assumed the Bolsheviks had got it, in the end. Evidently Maxim did not make the same assumption; at least he acted as if he had not.

“So we kept the secret because there was no one to whom we could usefully reveal it.

“But then Krausser came to the shtetl.”

“I have pieced these things together. Many of them are guesses but I shall relate them as if I know them to be fact; the outcome we know.

“At first Krausser refused to listen to my brother’s pleas for a hearing. He had heard Jewish pleading before, he was not interested. But Maxim did get the ear of an amused junior officer, a Waffen SS Hauptmann.

“Maxim implored this Hauptmann to persuade Krausser to spare the village. In return for the lives of the Jews, my brother offered to tell the Nazis where to find the gold we had buried for the Admiral.

“I have said my brother acted as if he assumed the gold was still where we had hidden it. Perhaps he did not believe that any more than I did; perhaps he only wanted to make the Germans believe it.

“Now I am on uncertain ground. I cannot describe the sequence of events, only the possibilities.

“It is likely, to me, that this Hauptmann was unimpressed by my brother’s wild story. But perhaps he repeated it at the evening mess, and perhaps his fellow young Hitlerites agreed that there was probably nothing to it-a desperate lie by a cowardly Jew trying to save his skin-but if there were any truth at all in Maxim’s story, it was possible they would find themselves in serious trouble for failure to report it.

“A hypothesis. A report goes to the Oberst-Krausser. Krausser feels there is probably nothing to it, but it cannot hurt to listen to the Jew-the story sounds entertaining.

“I know from Zalmanson that my brother was granted an audience with Krausser that night. I do not know what was said; one can guess.

“My brother is earnest, compelling. Perhaps he begins by demanding the lives of all surviving Russian Jews in return for leading the Germans to the gold. Krausser replies caustically that even if this fantasy has truth in it, the gold is hidden a thousand miles beyond German lines in the deep heart of the Soviet Union. What good is this to the Third Reich?

“But Maxim is adamant-persuasive. Krausser hears him out. Finally Krausser probes: an offer. If what Maxim says proves to be true, the villagers will indeed be spared. His promise, on his word as a German officer.

“Not the villagers, Maxim insists. Consider the value of this hoard. Billions of Reichsmarks. Billions. All the Jews who are still alive must be spared.

“The village, Krausser says. Only the village. Gold is not that important. Important but not that important.

“Now Maxim sees that there is no hope of gaining a wider reprieve. The shtetl, only the shtetl. Yet Maxim knows about German honor. He insists that he be given a guarantee of safety for the villagers from a higher, more responsible official than Krausser. He picks a name out of the air, a name he has heard-General von Bock’s name because von Bock is known, even to his enemies, to be an honorable old-fashioned soldier.

“A guarantee in writing, personally signed by von Bock. Only then will he reveal the location of the gold.

“Now it goes through Krausser’s mind that he could torture this Jew and make him talk. But he is impressed by Maxim. Maxim is a very big man, powerful. His eyes are calm and level. He has lived with torture half his life-the torture from within. He will not break easily. It would take a long time and the results are never guaranteed: men under torture have willed themselves to die. In any case it would take time and these SS do not have a great deal of time. The Nazis are always in a hurry. There are other villages: Jews to kill.

“My brother gains a temporary reprieve. In the morning the villagers queue up for registration. The twelve hundred and seven men, women and children are stripped of their valuables and ordered to wear Star of David armbands at all times-and then they are released to go home.

“Krausser allows an appropriate interval to pass and then in due course a written guarantee over General von Bock’s signature is presented to my brother by Herr Krausser. Two or three army command orders, bearing von Bock’s signature, are shown to my brother so that he may be sure the signature is genuine.

“Krausser speaks with feigned anger, talking very fast, insisting that my brother realize that the reprieve remains only temporary until it is ascertained whether his story is true. Until that time the shtetl remains in jeopardy, and only if the gold is found will the Jews be spared. In the meantime the village must consider itself collectively under arrest and subject to the strictures of Nazi martial law.

“Actually what has transpired in the interval, one must assume, is a series of communications between Krausser and General von Geyr, between Krausser and other officers, and between Krausser’s superiors and Berlin.* Krausser was not an educated man-I doubt he had any Russian history, I doubt he knew whether there ever had been a Czarist treasury, let alone what happened to it. Confirming those details of Maxim’s account which could be proved must have taken some part of this time.

“Now everything the Germans learn tends to support the authenticity of Maxim’s story. In time, as we know, an expedition was sent to look for the gold. But in the meantime.…

“The village had been spared, it appeared. The Spandaus had been dismounted from their tripods. The main body of Krausser’s force had moved on to some other slaughtering ground. According to Zalmanson, a platoon of Waffen SS under the combined command of an SS Leutnant and some sort of Gestapo official was left to maintain German order in the shtetl.

“Krausser himself would reappear from time to time-at intervals of four or five days-to meet with his Leutnant and, two or three times, in private with Maxim. Maxim never told anyone what was said in these conferences. The villagers knew he had saved them somehow, but no one was able to persuade him to explain it-not even Zalmanson.

“Rather than indicating relief and triumph, my brother became morose and despondent and would not speak to anyone except in grunts. He withdrew completely into himself.

“Late in September the fall rains came, and then an early winter.”

“I never saw this von Bock document. Zalmanson did not see it either. Certain things he said were what led me to believe it must have been produced by Krausser. Besides, I knew my brother’s thinking-his way of thinking. I’m sure there must have been such a written guarantee. Zalmanson said that my brother had intimated that von Bock had personally decided to spare the shtetl. Maxim wouldn’t have made that up.*

“I have good reason to suspect, however, that to whatever extent this letter existed, it must have been a forgery.

“On October fourth, late in the day, Krausser’s battalion returned to the shtetl. They came in motorized sleds, the big ones that carried thirty men each. I can remember the grating roar of those machines crossing the valleys of the Ukraine a year later.

“Krausser did not arrive with the force. The SS men posted themselves in the town and said nothing-not a single word-to the inhabitants. No questions were answered. There were several incidents, Jews being knocked down in the snow and trampled, that sort of thing. After dark the Germans became steadily more belligerent, although they still did not speak to the people except to bark obscenities or arrogant orders at them.

“You must recall the mentalities of these necrophiles. This village had been denied them for weeks-they singled it out for special hatred. During the night several Jews were murdered by the SS swine. The corpses were left in the streets, mutilated horribly. Zalmanson told me of the naked severed arms of a small boy lying shriveled in the slush, and an old man’s head impaled on a staff before the old synagogue.

“Zalmanson knew what these things portended; he went around to the poultry farm and tried to persuade my brother to join him and many others in attempting to escape in the night.

“My brother refused to go.

“One can spend hours speculating on his reasons, and many more hours recounting the details of the flight which Zalmanson described to me, but there’s no point in it. My brother stayed, he wouldn’t budge. Zalmanson and perhaps eighty others crept away in the night. He himself was with a party of eight, of whom he was the only survivor in the end-the seven others were killed by the winter, or the Germans, or the Cossacks.…

“I have no further firsthand reports of what happened in the shtetl. I do not know whether Krausser arrived and took charge of the slaughter personally; I suspect he must have, he wouldn’t have missed that. Undoubtedly they followed the usual pattern.

“My brother undoubtedly protested. Equally undoubtedly, once he saw the hopelessness of it, he did not resist. In a way I’m sure he welcomed his death.”

German documents indicate that Standartenfuhrer Heinz Krausser was relieved of his command of Einsatzgruppe “E” temporarily, on October 7, 1942, and given a special assignment.

A set of RSHA travel orders from Himmler’s office in Prinz Albrecht Strasse sent Krausser to Kiev, apparently for a meeting with Gruppenfuhrer Otto von Geyr and others.

A new unit was established on paper with the designation Jagdsonderkommando Ein, reflecting the crude sense of humor of-probably-Himmler; Jagd means “hunt” but Goldjagd means “gold rush”; an SS Sonderkommando was defined as a probe unit assigned to special duties. Krausser, with no promotion in rank, was placed in command of Jagdsonderkommando Ein.

At this point Reinhard Gehlen’s branch of the Abwehr-the German secret intelligence network-was incorporated into the operation, along with the captured ordnance section of Field Marshal von Paulus’ headquarters battalion. The purpose of the former was to provide intelligence, false documentation and training for the members of Jagdsonderkommando Ein; the purpose of the latter was to provide uniforms and equipment from captured Russian sources.

It is mentioned in Krausser’s dossiers that he spoke Russian, although there is no indication of the degree of his proficiency. All the others who were assigned to his Jagdsonderkommando were Russian-speaking Germans.

The actual operating force numbered three officers, nine noncommissioned officers and seventeen enlisted men.

These personnel were drawn from SD, Ordnungspolizei, Sicherheitspolizei and line-Wehrmacht units; they were specialists in varied fields, the one common denominator being their knowledge of the Russian languages. Among the members of Jagdsonderkommando Ein was a disproportionate number of automatic weapons experts, railroad men and commando-demolitions specialists.

One of Krausser’s two lieutenants was a former civil engineer with a background in earth-moving operations. The other had been recruited from his post as deputy commander of the railraod marshaling yards at Dresden; in civilian pre-war life he had been a locomotive driver and had spent four months working on the Trans-Siberian Railway during the period of nonaggression-pact detente.

The recruiting and training seems to have taken a surprisingly long time-months, stretching nearly into a year. One might suspect unusual inefficiency among these Germans; however, a closer examination of the documentary record implies several contributing factors.

Like most military intelligence operations, the Abwehr was a far poorer performer than its progaganda would have us believe. Its reports from Siberia, as relayed to von Geyr and Krausser, were woefully skeletal; evidently its personnel in Siberia was almost nil. Krausser kept demanding more details about railroads and defenses in the Sayan district and along the route from there to the Crimea; he kept getting long-winded gobbledygook which boiled down to, “We don’t know, we’re guessing.”

Furthermore, a minor smallpox epidemic in Rostov-where the unit was in training-killed off three members of the Jagdsonderkommando and evidently these men’s specialties had been vital to the plan, so that everything had to stop and mark time while three replacements were found and trained.

After that, Hermann Goering had to be brought into the plan at top level in order to justify Himmler’s request for long-range air penetration of Siberia into the Baikal border area, and evidently Goering thought the whole plan idiotic and it took time for Bormann and Himmler to change his mind.

Of the various delaying factors, however, none was so important as the crucial lack of intelligence provided by the Abwehr. Krausser insisted, in a series of dispatches that range in date from March to October 1943, that there was no possibility of success if the operation had to be undertaken blind. He insisted on specific intelligence of the defenses and transport in the area: particularly, he needed to know the exact details of operating schedules along the Trans-Siberian, and the exact disposition of repair and marshaling yards in the vicinity. The need for this information becomes more obvious the more one understand the nature of the Goldjagd plan. (That was its code name, inevitably.)

From the outset it is clear that von Geyr, more than any of the others, fully comprehended the magnitude of the logistical problems. The gold might or might not be where the Jew had said it was; but there was a good chance-every piece of intelligence suggested the Jew’s story was true. Himmler probably reasoned that even if it proved false, the most he could lose would be twenty-nine men; in terms of odds, the potential reward was well worth the cost and risk.

But von Geyr’s reports and dispatches indicate that he was the first to grasp the obvious logistical difficulties. Gold is unlike paper money, diamonds, and other valuables; it is incredibly heavy. The fact that the Czarist treasury weighed in the neighborhood of five hundred tons was deceptive, because it was a highly concentrated tonnage in terms of size-vs.-mass. You could not begin to fill a five-ton lorry with gold. If you did, its axles would collapse instantly. Five tons of gold takes up the space occupied by less than half a ton of crushed rock.

The original Heydrich-Krausser plan evidently was based on the assumption that the entire bullion hoard would fit inside the fuselages of twelve or fifteen four-engine airplanes. In terms of size and space this was true; in terms of weight it was absurd. Such a load would instantly crush the floor out of any airplane, even if such an airplane were capable of lifting that much weight. And the load capacity of even the greatest four-engine bomber or transport was more like ten tons than five hundred; a capacity which had to be reduced still further by the need for extra-range fuel tanks.

Apparently, however, it remained to Hermann Goering to shoot down permanently the idea of flying the gold out of Siberia. He only needed to point out the consequences if even one of the airplanes were to be shot down over Russian territory with its load of bullion.

Other proposals were then advanced, and one by one destroyed by careful reasoning; in the end it was von Geyr whose idea provided the solution. The only reasonable means of getting the gold out of Siberia was to employ the same method of transport that had been used to take it to Siberia in the fist place: the railway.

The track of the Siberian railway from the Sayan district made a relatively straight line west as far as Kuybyshev, whence a variety of switchings from track-line to track-line would bring the train southwest toward the Ukraine. Once in German-occupied territory, it could be driven straight to the Polish border and its contents then transferred to a Western train on the European track-gauge; or-and this was far less desirable on account of the risks-the train could turn south out of the Ukraine, cross the Crimea and deliver its cargo to Sebastopol, thence to be shipped by sea through the Dardanelles. (In 1942, while the Germans still held the Mediterranean, this was a viable possibility; by the time the mission was actually undertaken, it was not.)

In March 1943 the von Geyr plan was settled on. The delay had already amounted to nearly five months. Because the von Geyr plan was clandestine in nature, the training of Krausser’s force had to be rigorous and painstaking: every man in the force had to be able to pass as a Russian.

Documenting, equipping and costuming them took more time; not only did they have to look like Russians and talk like Russians, they also had to know enough about their own manufactured backgrounds to satisfy the suspicious, and they had to know enough contemporary Russian cultural history to sound authentic.

Under the coaching of Abwehr agents and various Russian prisoners-of-war, they made steady-but not exceptionally fast-progress in their effort to become Russians, and between the strenuous care of their training and the slow excavation of intelligence of Siberia from the Abwehr’s espionage field agents, it was the autumn of 1943 before von Geyr felt confident enough to report to Berlin that Krausser’s team was ready for action.

It had been decided that the Jagdsonderkommando would travel as a special unit of Soviet Transportation Corpsmen, led by a first lieutenant (the Leutnant who had been a locomotive driver) and chaperoned by a Communist Party commissar-a role played by Krausser himself, in the familiar grey choke-collared uniform of the Red Army, with the insignia of a commissar in place of officer’s epaulets.

The other lieutenant (the one who had been a civil engineer) played the part of a Russian army engineer officer, also a first lieutenant: again, a role close to his actual status.

The cover-story postulated that Moscow wanted a military survey of the iron mines to determine whether it was feasible to reopen them for wartime production. The expedition would have an air of authenticity to it, and even though everyone in the Sayan knew that the mines were empty of iron, no one would be likely to question the Kremlin’s bureaucratic decision to have them reinspected at such a time as this.

Along with the cover story went various sets of forged orders by which the bearers were authorized by the Kremlin to commandeer such rail transport and dispatching priorities as might be needed to transport ore samples out of the district. The signatures on Krausser’s phony orders were those of the highest-and thus least-likely-to-be-questioned-authorities: Malenkov and Marshal Zhukov.

Krausser’s detachment carried reams of documents designed to meet almost any foreseeable contingency. The files of Abwehr, Wehrmacht and RSHA records include copystats of billeting requisitions, orders allowing Krausser to commandeer provisions and tools and equipment, personnel orders (with the names left blank) authorizing the detachment to impress civilian workers into labor companies if it became necessary to repair the tracks and roadbeds of abandoned mining railways, and disciplinary authorizations by which Krausser-as People’s Commissar-was empowered to arrest, sentence and even execute officials who refused to cooperate. The latter were designed mainly with railway dispatching controllers in mind; once the train was loaded the Germans wanted to get it across the Soviet Union as quickly as possible.

On November 23, 1943, the bogus Russians were flown to a Luftwaffe military airfield near Donetsk, where they were fed lavishly and spent the night in Luftwaffe officers’ barracks.

The mission was scheduled to take off at 0430 hours the morning of November 24. The transport was a captured four-engine American long-range bomber, a B-24 Liberator, painted over with Russian markings to resemble the lend-lease aircraft with which the United States had been supplying Russia since 1942. The Liberator model had been selected for several reasons: its range (about 2,400 miles); its ability to fly at altitudes above most antiaircraft capacities; and the fact that many of the American-built planes had been delivered to the Soviet Union over the Alaska-to-Vladivostok Lend-Lease route, so that Siberian soldiers were accustomed to seeing the twin-tailed four-engine bombers overhead.

German antiaircraft batteries in the Donetsk region had been advised not to fire upon a single Liberator with Russian markings during the morning of the twenty-fourth. By the time the plane crossed the front lines into Russian-held territory it would be too high to be hit by antiaircraft bursts fired by either side; portable oxygen equipment had been provided for the twenty-two additional passengers, since the plane had been designed to accommodate a crew of seven.

The plane had extra fuel tanks on board but these would not be sufficient to make a round-trip flight. The pilot and his three-man flight crew had orders to drop Krausser’s group by parachute, then turn southeast and attempt to reach the Japanese-held airfield at Huhehot in northern China. If the fuel didn’t last, the crew was to bail out and make its way on foot to the nearest Japanese base.

At cruising speed the flight from Donetsk to the Sayan district would take some sixteen hours; the takeoff had been planned with a night parachute-drop in mind. The deep Siberian snow was expected to make for soft landings for the parachutists. They would be dropped from an altimeter height of eighteen hundred meters, which meant their drop to the high ground would measure some two hundred meters or less; a short drop which guaranteed no one would be frostbitten by the frigid air in the drop zone.

The weather went bad, unexpectedly, and takeoff had to be postponed twenty-four hours. A snowstorm then set in which lasted nearly two days, and meteorological estimates of the weather in the Sayan district were disappointing. Krausser had to drop into the right area or risk being isolated in freezing mountain fastnesses; furthermore, the jumpers had to be able to see their drop zone or they risked death in a blind jump. For those reasons the weather in the drop zone was more critical than the weather at the takeoff point, and in the end the Germans had to wait ten days before a favorable forecast allowed von Geyr to give them the go-ahead.

On the morning of December 3, 1943, the Jagdsonderkommando took off.

The absence of records to the contrary suggests that the drop was made as planned.*

Met records show it was a typical Siberian winter: a great deal of snow lie, temperatures subfreezing but not severely so, as they were farther north in the tundra, storms frequent-one or two a week-and high winds the rule.

Krausser’s nom de guerre was Ivan Samsonov; his railroad lieutenant went under the name Yevgeni Razin. The Red Army mess hall at Tulun issued twenty-eight meal tickets to First Lieutenant Yevgeni Razin on December 8; this may indicate that Krausser (“Commissar Samsonov”) found billeting and meals elsewhere, since he was not an army officer.

The next trace of the Jagdsonderkommando does not appear until December 24, when a conscript labor battalion (60 percent men, 40 percent women) was assigned to Lieutenant Razin on temporary assignment. Provisions and camping equipment sufficient for four weeks’ work were issued to the labor battalion at Cheremkhovo. The next day, December 25, Razin signed-with an endorsement by Commissar Samsonov-an official requisition by which he commandeered the use of two steam locomotives, seventeen goods wagons† and one passenger car. This train was assembled in the yards at Zima, the nearest marshaling area to the Sayan.

The request for a labor battalion indicates that by that date-December 24-the Germans had located the right mine. Now they were ready to have the roadbed and track repaired so that they could move their train close to the mine in order to load it. But Krausser’s requisition of heavy lorries and a caterpillar-tread front-loader was not made until Januray 5, 1944-an indication that the repair of the railway took nearly two weeks.

On January 8 the construction equipment-the lorries and bulldozer-were winched onto flatbed cars coupled to Krausser’s train; that same day, the labor battalion was released to return to its former duties. Indications are that the Germans transported the members of the labor battalion back to Zima aboard the train, dropped them off, loaded the digging machinery onto the train, and left Zima for the return trip to the Sayan mining district-all on the same day, January 8.

On January 15, 1944, Krausser’s train was cleared through Krasnoyarsk (the principal marshaling yard of the Yenisey-Sayan district); it was now on its way out of the area, en route to Omsk and the Ural Mountains. Checked off against the train were bills of lading alluding to ore samples, construction materials and six goods-wagonloads of “leaden ingots” billed for delivery to an ammunition factory near Stalingrad. One assumes the Germans had simply painted the gold bullion with grey metallic paint, disguising it as lead-a rather bemusing trick of alchemy.

The train drove westward at a steady rate of 250 to 300 miles a day, receiving priority routing through the crowded switching yards and depots of Anzhero-Sudzhensk (January 17), Novosibirsk (January 18), Barabinsk (January 19), Omsk (January 21), Petropavlovsk (January 22) and Chelyabinsk (January 25).

It is at Chelyabinsk that the main lines divide and scatter. Krausser’s train moved west into the Kuibyshev along the Moscow line as far as the junction near Ufa, then branched south to the city of Kuibyshev and then southwest on a dogleg to Orenburg and Uralsk in the Kazakhian People’s Republic. The line goes west from Uralsk and crosses the Volga at Saratov. [The distance to Saratov along this indirect route was more than 1,100 miles from Chelyabinsk but] the Jagdsonderkommando train covered it in a little less than three days-an indication of the urgency the Germans must have felt by then. Villagers along the right-of-way must have been awed by the sight of such a train highballing westward, powered by one huge steam locomotive at the front and another at the rear. Undoubtedly this haste must have drawn attention the Germans would prefer to have avoided, but by this time Krausser must have learned about the alarming conditions at the front; hence the train’s acceleration. The Jagdsonderkommando and its booty were suddenly caught up in a desperate race against time.…

In 1942 Zhukov stopped the German blitzkrieg on the doorstep of Moscow and destroyed the myth of German invincibility.

On war maps the battle lines moved relentlessly westward. For 1944 Hitler committed two hundred combat divisions to the Russian Front but it was pointless.

By the beginning of 1944 the Germans were being driven rapidly out of the Crimea and the southern Ukraine. Marshal Vatutin had pushed the Germans west out of Kiev in 1943 and by January the Germans were in full retreat toward the Polish and Rumanian borders; the German lines fell back almost a steady two miles a day during the first four months of 1944, at first wheeling back on a hinge at Odessa but then pulling back almost in parallel unison after Odessa fell to the Reds.

The collapse of Odessa left the Germans with only one Black Sea harbor to sustain her naval force-Sebastopol-and Hitler ordered that Sebastopol be kept open at all costs. In the meantime, Heinz Krausser’s planned primary route-into Kiev-had been stoppered by the Russian advance: the Red Army stood astride the railway and there was no way to get a train across the front lines, as there might have been if the city were still contested.

It left only the Crimean alternative; and the Red Army had already regained a foothold on the peninsula.

Krausser’s train, at the end of January 1944, was in a race with the Red Army to reach Sebastopol. The route von Geyr and Krausser had worked out is probably the route Krausser intended to follow: cross the Dnieper at Alexandrovsk; down through Melitopol, then across the steppes to Taganach; then over the railroad bridge onto the Crimean isthmus, and thence across Crimea into Sebastopol.

What happened to the Germans at Sebastopol is a matter of record; what happened to Krausser, his train and his Jagdsonderkommando is not.

Sebastopol was the Nazis’ Dunkirk. The city had been leveled in the early months of the war; but the harbor was intact and the German Black Sea navy used the port as its principal base, mainly for the purpose of intimidating the vacillating Turks and supporting the German war effort in Greece.

After the fall of the southern Ukraine, the Crimean peninsula was cut off from overland communication with Germany and the use of the German Black Sea navy as a support unit in Greece became impossible because the navy had no access to supplies from Germany. Nevertheless Hitler seemed more preoccupied about the possibility that the Turks might enter the war against him than he was about the fact that the Russians were already destroying his armies. At least that is the commonly accepted historical explanation for his maniacal-and evidently pointless-defense of Sebastopol. It is possible [although there is no proof yet] that one reason the Fuhrer needed to keep the port open was his expectation that Jagdsonderkommando Ein would still manage to break through the Russian encirclement somehow and deliver into German hands the billions of Reichsmarks’ worth of gold which by now must have assumed the proportions of a magic talisman in Hitler’s deranged thoughts. (Clearly it was far too late to buy a victory.)

The German Festung Sewastopol did not manage to match the Russian record for withstanding a siege.

The Russians took Sebastopol in four days. Total German losses were in excess of one hundred thousand.

When the city fell on May 8, 1944, there was no sign of Heinz Krausser, his Jagdsonderkommando, his train, or Kolchak’s gold.

The clues are cryptic.

[Every time a train stops to take on water or fuel, or switch engines, or be shunted onto a siding to await the converse passage of another train, some yard bureaucrat must make a twitch in his logbook. Railroads everywhere are like that: records are kept of the location of every engine and every railway car at all times because it is the only way for the system to keep tabs on its rolling stock. In wartime some of these regulations were disregarded, and even when they were obeyed the records did not always survive. But each train is assigned a dispatching number which it retains as long as it retains its entity as a train: that is, from the time it is assembled until the time it is dispersed and its pieces of rolling stock are used to combine in other trains.]

….Train #S-1428-CB, 3000 kilos coal.… T #S-1428-CB, north switch 1100 hrs 28 Jan 44.… S-1428-CB held 2325–0118 hhs for priority routing Troop Train V-8339-CJ.…

The spoor of Krausser’s train could be traced from its starting point in Siberia to the marshaling yards of Saratov, at the northerly edge of the Volgograd Reservoir. From that point to the Crimea, however, is a distance of more than one thousand kilometers by rail, and there are several alternate route approaches. The wake of Krausser’s train, beginning in February 1944, becomes progressively harder to find.

[This much is revealed by the surviving records: ] On February 3 the train passed through the rail junction at Balashov, taking the westerly branch; on February 9 it appeared in the vicinity of Kharkov, heading for Poltava; on February 12 it reappeared at Kharkov, apparently having turned back after Krausser had found out the state of the war front ahead of him. The German lines were now well to the west of Kiev, or some six hundred kilometers west of Kharkov.

The train wasted at least another week in false starts in a westerly direction before Krausser apparently decided he had to give up that attempt and strike out along the alternate route instead-toward the Crimea.

An adamant official in the switching yards at Gorlovka held the train up for two and a half days on account-of priority munitions movements; that this took place is not surprising-Krausser had had amazingly good luck up till then in keeping his train moving-but there is the curious fact that this delay took place on February 28 through March 2, 1944; the train had taken more than two weeks to traverse the three hundred kilometers between those two points. No dispatching records from intermediate stations have turned up in Russian archives. Apparently Krausser had been held up-once or several times-en route to Gorlovka.

One pictures the frenzied desperation with which Jagdsonderkommando Ein now faced the passage of every day, every hour. And now, on March 2, the dispatcher at Gorlovka only allowed the train to leave in one direction-eastward. Documents show that “Lieutenant Razin” was ordered to get his train out of the way because of urgent priority trains which were continuously arriving from the north. The train left on the evening of the second, going in the direction of Lugansk, where duly it arrived on March 4-nearly a hundred kilometers farther from the German lines than it had been two days earlier.

No further specific records have turned up. The train disappears at Lugansk, still some six hundred kilometers from the Crimea.

The records of a Red Army Graves Registration team for April 13, 1944, show that eighteen Russian soldiers were buried the preceding day on the outskirts of a deserted Jewish shtetl about fifteen kilometers northeast of Rostov, near the Don. Listed among the dead are First Lieutenant Yevgeni Razin and People’s Commissar Ivan Samsonov. The names of the sixteen remaining dead are the same, with certain variations in spelling, as the Russian cover-names of sixteen enlisted and noncommissioned members of Jagdsonderkommando Ein. Cause of death in the GR team’s report is listed as “combat casualties the result of warfare, probably against counterrevolutionary bandits”-a customary euphemism for partisans. [The anti-Communist Ukrainian army was fiercely active in that area during that period.]

The GR report leaves eleven commando members unaccounted for until one examines the attached lists of personal effects found on the bodies. On the body of “Commissar Samsonov” were found the metal Russian identity tags and papers of the eleven remaining team members. [One must conclude they had died in earlier engagements and been buried by the survivors.]

As a result it is clear that the twenty-nine men of Jagdsonderkommando Ein were wiped out without exception. [However it is also evident that the bodies were found many miles from the nearest railway track; that it is not possible for twenty-nine men to carry any significant portion of five hundred tons of gold on their persons; and that in any case no gold was reported to have been found on or near the bodies. Furthermore there is no record of the reappearance of the Krausser train as a train: that is, as an assembled entity. There are, however, ample records to prove the reappearance of several goods wagons and both locomotives which had been assigned to the train.] Both locomotives appear in an April 17 report from the marshaling yard at Donetsk, where they were used in assembling a munitions train which was dispatched to the front at Korosten. Of the numbered goods wagons, three appeared in April at Makeyevka and two others were incorporated into a heavy-weapons train being assembled at Gorlovka on May 3.

[The conclusion to be drawn from this seems inescapable: Krausser must have removed the gold from the train, hidden the gold, moved the empty train to one of the busy switching yards in South Russia, and abandoned it there, after which he must have concluded that the only recourse left open was to make his way back to Germany and report on his mission, in hopes von Geyr or someone else in higher authority would be able to come up with a new plan for extracting the treasure from Soviet territory.

[The original plan had been to smuggle the train through battle lines by taking advantage of the tactical confusion that had existed in late 1943 in several cities in the Ukraine and South Russia, where portions of the cities-Kiev for example-were in the hands of both armies. Under such circumstances it would have been possible for a train to cross from the Russian-held sector into the German, probably without being fired on. But by February 1944 there were no cities still in German hands except Sebastopol (which was inaccessible to Krausser) and those cities to which rail tracks had been destroyed by bombardment-a fact Krausser must have learned in his several unsuccessful forays west into the Ukraine in January and early February.

[Thus for the second time in twenty-five years the gold of the Czars was removed from a train and hidden. No subsequent Soviet records even so much as hint that there has ever been a suspicion in that country that the treasure may be buried near the banks of the Don in South Russia. The annihilation of Jagdsonderkommando Ein guaranteed that no one in Germany could make even a wild stab at the eventual disposition of the gold-not even those like von Geyr who were intimate with the plan to extricate the treasure.]

Erysichthon offended Ceres; in response, Ceres punished him with an insatiable appetite. Finally he ate himself.*

* Both the title and the organization of this section are the editors’.

In Bristow’s manuscript, the foregoing pages contain numerous oblique references to World War II. These would make little sense to any reader who was not acquainted with the history of the war in the USSR. Therefore the editors have deleted nearly all such references from the narrative; we have combined them, together with other material, in a separate section here, in order to put everything before the reader with the minimum confusion and obscurity.

This section, therefore, is compiled mainly from Harris Bristow’s working notes; from passages deleted from the foregoing manuscript pages; from the transcribed interviews with Haim Tippelskirch; and from a summary outline which Bristow prepared in 1971 as a basic framework for his Sebastopol project.

For certain events we have no other guide than the cryptic references in Bristow’s Vienna manuscript, since his Russian notes have been lost. Therefore, in a few cases, we have been forced to draw inferences. They are so labeled.

As in the Kolchak segment, material supplied by the editors appears in brackets, while the Tippelskirch statements appear set off in quotation marks. But it must be understood that this section is a re-creation of Bristow’s notes rather than an edited version of an existing manuscript. The words are mainly Bristow’s but the connectives are the editors’. To mark all of them would be to create pages so cluttered with ellipses and brackets that they would be unreadable. In all cases, any fact or event which is not from Bristow’s material is clearly marked as such, by appearing in brackets or in a footnote. But we repeat that Bristow did not actually “write” this section as it now appears.-Ed.

* Evidently this carefully typed paragraph was to have been the opening passage of Bristow’s history.-Ed.

* This paragraph was written longhand on a sheet of Army amp; Navy Club (Washington, D.C.) stationery; the evidence suggests it was written by Bristow in 1972 during the period which he characterizes as “argumentative” and “opinionated”-the summer when he became briefly notorious after his appearances on television interviews. Probably he would have toned down, or eliminated, this passage in his full draft of the work. But it serves here to emphasize his state of mind at the time; that is why we have elected to include it.-Ed.

† This information comes from notes Bristow made in London in 1972. The British Official Secrets Act specifies that official records may be made public after thirty years. Bristow was among the first historians to have access to these reports from the British ambassador to Poland, confirming the role of Russian executioners in the Katyn massacre.-Ed.

* The clause is underlined in Bristow’s notes.-Ed.

* In October 1941, for example, Stalin cabled Churchill an urgent request for thirty divisions of combat troops. (From Bristow’s notes.)

† Transcribed from the Haim Tippelskirch tapes.-Ed.

* The great bulk of Bristow’s material is devoted to Sebastopol, but much of it has no bearing on the central thrust of this book. The extremely brief summary here is sufficient to lay the groundwork for the narrative which follows, concerning the German attempt to bring the Czarist bullion out through the Crimea in 1944. In the meantime we shall have to hope that someday Harris Bristow is able to complete his definitive work on the siege of Sebastopol.-Ed.

* By apparently meaningless coincidence, according to Bristow’s notes, von Geyr had married a woman who in turn was related vaguely to Krausser (Frau von Geyr being the aunt of the husband of Krausser’s older sister). “The correspondence” (between Krausser and von Geyr), Bristow observes on a note card, “shows no visible affection between the two men.” Apparently Krausser’s insensate brutality dismayed von Geyr, while Krausser in turn thought of the elder officer as an old-fashioned militarist with outmoded notions of morality and a lack of proper devotion to the Fuhrer. It appears both men were correct in their appraisals.-Ed.

* Krausser never realized this ambition, although in 1944 his name was among those singled out by Hitler for posthumous recognition: into the file stamped “Deceased” was inserted a commendation by the Fuhrer and a citation for the Iron Cross. (From Bristow’s notes.)

* Elsewhere in the interviews Haim Tippelskirch makes it fairly clear that he volunteered for the assignment, but only because he felt that his background made him a good choice for it. Tippelskirch here does not take credit for the initiative, but apparently the idea to attempt these evidence-gathering missions was largely his own.-Ed.

* Tippelskirch and his fellow agents brought stolen documents and photographs out of the Soviet Union on at least five occasions during the war. These were copied en masse and distributed to government officials and organs of the press in many nations, including the important neutrals; the Zionists also tried to persuade the British and Americans to drop leaflets over Germany in order to reveal to the German people the monstrous proportions of the Nazi atrocities. But almost all the governments and newspapers who were approached by the Zionists with these materials paid little heed to it. They “considered the source”; they were not altogether convinced that the photos were not fakes, the documents forgeries. Indeed, the press generally refrained from printing the photos not only because their origin was suspect but also because they were “too gruesome.” This evidence was only exposed to full public view after 1945, during the war-crimes trials.-Ed.

* Haim Tippelskirch’s estimate of probabilities was remarkably accurate. Bristow’s files show that this correspondence began with Krausser’s dispatch to von Geyr, 12 Sept. 42, and that it followed very much the pattern suggested above. According to passages we have deleted from the foregoing portion of Bristow’s manuscript, Bristow found several documents in the USSR which added details-nothing extraordinary-to the manner in which the German High Command slowly became convinced of the possibility that Kolchak’s gold was still buried in the Sayan Mountains and that Krausser’s reports were more valid than had first been assumed. Krausser was commended for his initiative in the Maxim Tippelskirch case.-Ed.

* Nowhere in Bristow’s manuscript or materials does such a letter appear, but apparently Bristow was willing to believe Haim Tippelskirch’s hypothesis. It does fit the facts, whether or not it is accurate in every detail.-Ed.

* Bristow made a note to inquire of the Japan Defense Agency whether they had any record of the landing of the bomber in China on December 3 or 4, but he hadn’t done so before his trip to Russia. The spoor left by Krausser’s commando in German and Russian records was cryptic at best. This portion of the narrative is mainly an editorial extension of Bristow’s notes and the conclusions he reports having drawn from his study of Russian documents in Moscow, Kiev, and Sebastopol.-Ed.

† Kolchak’s train had numbered twenty-eight goods wagons, but those had been armored. The newer Russian rolling stock was more capacious and sturdy than that of Kolchak’s time. German engineers had made a careful study and come up with the figure of seventeen wagons. It may be worth mentioning that the Russian railway system has always had a much wider gauge than the railroads of Western Europe.-Ed.

* This notation, on a 4? 6 file card in Bristow’s files, seems a fitting conclusion to his account of the war.-Ed.