World: Salted Gold

Into Merkers, an undistinguished vil lage about 15 miles southwest of Eisenach in mid-Germany, slogged the weary in fantrymen of Major General Herbert L. Earnest’s 90th Division. Their job last week was the usual one of follow-through after Lieut. General George S. Patton’s advanced tank forces: unsnarling knots of resistance, sorting out prisoners and slave laborers. Of the latter there were many for Merkers’ big salt mines.

That night, after curfew, two of the goth’s military police stopped two women in the village street. The women explained that they were going for a midwife. The MPs went along, just to be certain. They passed an entrance to a salt mine. Said one of the Hausfrauen: “That’s where the bullion is hidden.” MP ears perked up: How’s that again? The woman repeated the gossip she had heard—Germany’s gold had been salted away in that mine.

The MPs took a look. The mine was held by eight German civilians. Two were polite, worldly men from Berlin: 1) moonfaced Werner Vieck, a Reichsbank official; 2) pale, gaunt Dr. Paul Ortwin Rave, curator of the German state museums, assistant director of Berlin’s National Gallery. They talked quite frankly about their secret, now that it was no longer secret. The mine, they said, held:

¶ About 100 tons of gold bars (worth approximately $100,000,000); Banker Vieck said it was Germany’s entire gold reserve.

¶ Three billion paper Reichsmarks; probably the greatest store of currency in Germany, perhaps the only reserve.

¶ Great stacks of foreign currency: $2,000,000 U.S.; 110,000 British pounds, 4,000,000 Norwegian crowns; 1,000,000 French francs; lesser amounts of Spanish, Portuguese, Turkish money.

¶ Hundreds of crates and boxes—a huge cache of priceless works of art; Rembrandts, Raphaels, Renoirs, Dürers, Van Dycks; tapestries and engravings; a Titian Venus; original Goethe manuscripts.

The Payroll. All this, and more, was stored in chambers 2,100 feet deep. The Americans went down, opened a few bundles of currency, looked into wooden cases that covered paintings and statues. On many cases they noted significant stencilings: Paris, Brussels, Vienna. But Curator Rave insisted that these were not stolen treasures—this store of art belonged to the Reich, had been removed from Berlin “because the Russians were pushing too close.”*

Banker Vieck regretted that he could not show the cache of gold; somebody had lost the key to the chamber. The Americans obligingly blew out the wall. And there was the gold, each 25-lb. bar wrapped in a sack, each sack tagged: “Reichsbank.” There were sacks of gold coin, some of them too heavy for a man to lift. There seemed to be even more gold stacked in the dim-lit, salt-crusted chamber than Vieck had said.

Gold was something for reparations experts to worry about. General Earnest’s intelligence officers were more interested in the three billion German marks. That currency might turn out to be a prize of golden military value. Banker Vieck remarked that the German Army desperately needed it to meet its payrolls. It was irreplaceable: Germany’s money-engraving plants had been bombed out.

The Payoff. The German command reacted as if. the capture of Merkers and its mine had been so much salt in the Wehrmacht’s deep wounds. Near Mühlhausen, about 30 miles northeast, the Germans opened the most concerted resistance Patton’s men had met in many days. The Germans lost 40 tanks in one day, came back for more wounds and lost ten the next.

By this week Patton’s forward drive had been somewhat slowed, either by increased resistance (Germans were reported streaming westward to meet his thrusts) or by the demands of supplying his tanks. Patton’s armor had sunk the deepest wedge into Germany; his spearheads were only 175 miles from the Russians and the Germans were jumpy over any Patton move. One might be the payoff stroke that would cut Germany in two at the waist.

* In an abandoned copper mine near Seigen, the U.S. First Army last weekrecovered other art treasures the Nazis removed from bombed German cities,possibly from French museums. Chief item: the famed, gold-and-jeweled”Reliquary of the Magi” sarcophagus from the Cologne Cathedral. Other items:the bones of Charlemagne, a magnificent carved door from Cologne’s Cathedral,paintings by Holbein, Van Gogh, Rubens.