AUSTRIA: Loot from the Lake

In the crowded last days of war, May 1945, a convoy of Nazi trucks, speeding away from the advancing U.S. troops, was hastily abandoned in upper Austria, 37 miles east of Germany’s Berchtesgaden. One stalled truck yielded 23 chests crammed with expertly forged British £5 and £10 notes with total face value of several million dollars. At a lake near by, bank notes tossed overboard from a second truck began to float ashore. In the months that followed, U.S. Navy divers and British frogmen plunged to the 200-ft. to 250-ft. depths of Austria’s Toplitz Lake, and later at least three amateur searchers lost their lives seeking the phony treasure believed still hidden there.

Testing the Fakes. The mass counterfeiting of British money was an audacious Nazi trick with a double purpose: to undermine British currency and to finance Gestapo operations abroad. For special Section 6-F-4 of the Reich Security Office, it proved to be a tough job. It took top German engravers seven months to get a satisfactory plate made (the figure of Britannia gave them particular trouble), and still longer to match the bluish rag paper that the real notes were printed on. Dates and serial numbers were carefully checked against real ones. At last came the test. A Gestapo agent took some of the bogus notes to a Zurich bank, said he was afraid that they were counterfeit, asked the Swiss to run tests on them. The bank even checked numbers with London and reported its verdict: the notes were genuine.

Soon a full-fledged counterfeiting plant was set up in isolated Block 19 of Sachen-hausen concentration camp under the supervision of SS Officer Bernhard Kriiger. His team of some 160 inmates, mostly Jews once employed in printing and banking, got special rations and good treatment. By early 1943 the Sachenhausen presses were turning out 250,000 bogus British notes each month.

Phony Payoff. To pass the British counterfeits, the Nazis installed a confederate in an Austrian castle, had him pass the bills in neutral countries in return for a one-third share of the profits. Gestapo informers, who insisted on hard currency for their work outside Germany, also got paid off in the phony pounds. Among those doublecrossed: the Italians who found out where Mussolini was held before his rescue by Paratrooper Otto Skorzeny; the famous valet “Cicero” (real name: Eliaza Bazna), who stole secrets from the safe of the British Ambassador to Turkey. Ultimately, some of the counterfeit notes turned up in England. But only after duplications cropped up in serial numbers did the British realize what was happening.

Last week, financed by the enterprising German weekly Der Stern, a seven-man team of frogmen, equipped with an underwater TV camera, successfully brought up from the depths of Toplitz Lake 300,000 phony pounds in good condition, the first of an estimated £16 million believed hidden there. Scotland Yard only yawned: the British long ago had changed the design of their £5 and £10 notes. Just to be safe, Austrian police decided to destroy all the notes they could find.