Heinrich Himmler was moving south, and he was doing it with a plan he believed no one could unravel. In the chaos of early May 1945, with the Reich collapsing around him, the Reichsführer-SS had set out from Flensburg with just over a dozen loyal followers, headed not toward surrender but toward a carefully prepared escape. On the surface, his decision to travel through enemy-held territory looked like the move of a desperate man. But Himmler was not desperate, and he was not stupid.
He was cunning, meticulous, and he had hidden treasures waiting for him along the route. The key to understanding his journey lay in a discovery made only recently: a cache of gold coins deposited in a post office vault in the town of Plauen, near Dresden, in the shadow of the Harz Mountains. The account had been opened in the name of the Reichsführer himself. Himmler’s adjutants, Grothmann and Macher, would later tell British intelligence officers after their capture that the plan was to head south and await a response to a message they had sent to Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, the Allied commander in chief in northwestern Europe.
Himmler had requested a meeting to discuss placing the Waffen-SS under British command, ostensibly to help maintain order in northern Germany after the collapse of the Third Reich. Montgomery, of course, was to command those forces. What Himmler did not know was that General Alfred Jodl, the German army chief of staff, had never delivered the message. Jodl had torn it up and destroyed it.
Himmler had begun his southward march believing he was still free to negotiate, unaware that the letter had been crumpled into nothing. His intention, as his adjutants later explained, was to hide in the densely forested Harz Mountains in central Germany while the situation settled, waiting for Montgomery to make contact. But Himmler’s mind worked in layers, and his adjutants had devised a contingency plan in case Montgomery refused: a plan designed to keep Himmler out of Allied hands forever. The gold in Plauen was part of that plan, but it was only one piece of a much larger puzzle.
The treasure had been assembled in stages. On the night of May 12-13, 1945, two iron chests filled with gold and paper currency were collected from the home of a former adjutant of Himmler’s on the Vistula Army Group staff, an SS major named Heinrich Springer. According to Springer’s wife, the chests were gathered by a member of Himmler’s personal staff whom she did not recognize. The materials were never seen again.
Then there was the vault in Plauen. A document found in the U. S. National Archives a few years earlier confirmed that Himmler had ordered the gold and currency hidden there.
The gold alone weighed 900 kilograms of coins, easier to transport than bars and easily convertible anywhere in the world. In modern terms, that gold would be worth around 119 million dollars. But the Americans had already found the Plauen cache on April 26, 1945, before Himmler ever began his journey south. Information from Plauen had been scarce since the U.
S. Army had taken the town, so it was entirely possible that Himmler still believed his hoard was intact, waiting for him in a building now behind enemy lines. Yet a man like Himmler always had a backup plan, and a backup plan for the backup. If he intended to reach the Alps and cross them, he would have hidden more than one cache along the way.
And there was, in fact, another one, hidden in the Alps themselves. The Plauen money had been roughly halfway to Himmler’s objective, but the Americans had beaten his team to it. That did not matter as much as it might have, because there was more where that came from. Himmler’s plan, according to his adjutants, was to cross the Alps into Italy, and like many fleeing Nazis, to escape by sea using either a forged identity or a genuine Red Cross passport, possibly obtained through sympathetic elements in the Vatican in Rome.
That was the path taken by an entire string of Nazi war criminals, who boarded ships from Italy to the Middle East or South America along the so-called ratlines. It was only logical that Himmler would have ordered another cache of mobile funds prepared somewhere in the Alpine region. And that, in fact, was exactly what a careful examination of the records revealed. Himmler knew the Alpine regions of southern Bavaria and Austria intimately.
He owned a large villa in the village of Schönau, beside the beautiful Alpine lake Königssee, in Berchtesgaden, just a few miles down the mountain from Hitler’s Alpine retreat at the Obersalzberg. The house, called Schneewinkel, had once been Sigmund Freud’s summer residence, and later Himmler used it as a love nest with his mistress Hedwig Potthast and their two illegitimate children. The treasures now being examined had been gathered on Himmler’s explicit orders in late April 1945. At that time, the Reichsbank in Berlin and numerous government offices were actively sending gold bars, currency, and documents southward to be hidden in mines, caves, and prepared bunkers in the Bavarian and Austrian Alps.
That was the story told in the groundbreaking work of authors Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting in their book Nazi Gold. Among the billions in currency and gold sent south, thirteen sacks of foreign currency had been delivered to the local Reichsbank branch in Munich by the bank director Hans Alfred von Rosenberg-Lipinsky. There they were confiscated by SS General Gottlob Berger, one of Himmler’s senior generals, who was then commanding the German resistance in the so-called Alpine Redoubt, consisting of the XIII SS Army Corps. Berger claimed he acted on Himmler’s direct orders, and who would argue with a general of the SS?
Alongside the sacks of money, Berger said he also took possession of a number of parcels that may have contained Himmler’s personal papers sent from Berlin. Berger later told Allied investigators after his arrest that Himmler had ordered him to hide the money in a specific location, and that is exactly what he did. That location was in the Tyrol region of Austria, not far from Berchtesgaden. Berger buried the money in a deep pit, about 1.
2 meters deep, dug specifically beneath the floor of a barn owned by the chief forester of the village of St. Johann, which lay about 64 kilometers west of Berchtesgaden. The SS operated a major rest and recreation center in the neighboring town of Kitzbühel. The U.
S. Army had seized the area on May 8, 1945, Victory in Europe Day, four days after the Americans had taken over Himmler’s home in Berchtesgaden. The site would have placed Himmler on the road to Innsbruck, then to the Brenner Pass and into Italy, reaching the town of Bolzano. It was a striking detail that Himmler’s estranged wife Margarete and his beloved daughter Gudrun had left their home in Gmund, south of Munich, and been taken by the SS to Bolzano in Italy, where they hid and where American military intelligence agents eventually arrested them on May 13, 1945, while Himmler was still on the run in northern Germany.
Himmler did not know that. Just as striking, Himmler’s mistress Hedwig Potthast and their two children had fled from their home in Schönau am Königssee before American troops arrived in early May 1945, and they too ended up hiding in the Rosenheim area of Bavaria. The original U. S.
Army Counter Intelligence Corps interrogation report on Hedwig Potthast indicated that she was questioned on May 22, 1945, meaning she had been in their custody for several days before that date. Himmler’s convoy, it seemed entirely plausible, would have passed through Rosenheim on its way to collect the loot from St. Johann, then on to Innsbruck, through the Brenner Pass, and then to Bolzano, where his other family was waiting. All of this could have been coincidence.
But the patterns were too deliberate to dismiss. Himmler would have known exactly where his wife and daughter were, where his mistress lived, and where his money was buried. The route to the barn at St. Johann ran directly through the area where his mistress was hiding.
The route to Bolzano ran through his family’s refuge. The American army did not discover the St. Johann loot until General Berger told them where it was after his capture, perhaps hoping to curry favor with the Americans. That was on May 25, 1945, two days after Himmler had died in British custody in Lüneburg in northern Germany.
On the twenty-fifth, Berger was taken under armed guard to the barn in St. Johann. He was accompanied by Technical Sergeant Charles W. Dickey, who was part of Captain Harry Anderson’s unit from the U.
S. 101st Airborne Division, which was conducting investigations into Nazi treasure caches in the area. Captain Anderson would later find a huge art collection belonging to Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, hidden in a shelter beneath the German Air Force officers’ club in Berchtesgaden. The treasure hidden at St.
Johann was fascinating, consisting only of bundles of paper currency, no gold this time. Alongside more than a million German marks at 1945 prices, there were 26,000 British pounds, more than 8 million French francs, and among non-European currencies, a million Egyptian pounds, 3 million Algerian and Moroccan francs, and 7,500 Palestine pounds from the British mandate. The Americans valued the whole cache at five million dollars at the time. In modern terms, that would be equivalent to 93 million dollars.
With 93 million dollars in hard-to-trace paper currency, a man could travel very far indeed. The composition of the currency told its own story. There was no South American money in the cache at all. The presence of Middle Eastern and North African currencies, or the currencies of the colonial powers that controlled those regions, Britain and France, suggested that Himmler’s intended destination was not Argentina, Paraguay, or Brazil, but the Middle East or North Africa.
The Middle East was already a favored destination for fleeing Nazi war criminals. In the late 1940s and into the 1950s, many of them arrived in Syria and Egypt. Johannes von Leers, a member of Dr. Goebbels’s team who later changed his name to Omar Amin in Egypt.
Alois Brunner, an SS camp commandant and one of Adolf Eichmann’s senior aides in the concentration camp system, fled to Syria and lived under the protection of the Assad family until his death in the 1990s. Franz Stangl, a former commandant of the Sobibor and Treblinka camps, fled to Syria in the 1940s before moving to Brazil in 1951. The examples went on and on. When the Americans counted the hidden money, they discovered from Reichsbank records and SS records that Berger had actually placed more money in the cache than was found there.
The 101st Airborne determined that Himmler’s hoard had contained at least 200,000 dollars more than what was recovered. In today’s value, that would be about 3. 7 million dollars. Sayer and Botting concluded that Berger had likely helped himself to the missing sum before his arrest.
Berger himself received a sentence of 25 years for war crimes and crimes against humanity in 1949, but the four years he had already spent in prison awaiting trial were counted toward the sentence. In 1951, the U. S. High Commissioner for Germany, John J.
McCloy, reviewed his case and reduced the sentence to 10 years. Berger was released from prison in December 1951, having served only six and a half years. He became the director of a curtain rod factory and appears to have lived a modest life for the rest of his days, dying in January 1975. It remains possible, of course, that he had carefully set aside the 3.
7 million dollars he was alleged to have skimmed from the Reichsführer’s cache. As for the cache itself, the 101st Airborne collected it and sent it to the special collection point in Frankfurt that the U. S. Treasury Department had established for Nazi plunder.
The St. Johann hoard, with its Middle Eastern and North African currency, its position directly on the road to Italy, and its connection to the two families Himmler left behind, sat at the heart of what appeared to be his escape route. His southward journey from his planned last hideout in the Harz Mountains to St. Johann would have led his convoy first directly to his mistress’s hiding place, then to his cache on a convenient road to Innsbruck, then through the Brenner Pass, then to Bolzano where his wife and daughter were in hiding.
From Bolzano, the ports with ships bound for the Middle East were relatively easy to reach. It could all have been a colossal coincidence. But the pieces fit too well. Himmler had planned his escape carefully, in anticipation of the possibility that his negotiations with Montgomery would fail.
The pit beneath the forester’s barn in St. Johann was not a random hiding spot. It was a waypoint on a mapped road to freedom, and the man who buried it never lived to use it.
