Heinrich Himmler had been on the move for days, and by the tenth of May 1945, he was heading south with barely a dozen loyal men. To anyone watching, it looked like a reckless decision, a desperate man fleeing straight through enemy territory. But Himmler was not stupid. He was cunning, patient, and had prepared for this moment long before the Reich collapsed.
For weeks, he had tried to reach Karl Dönitz in Plön, Schleswig-Holstein, hoping to claim a position in the new government. The attempt had failed. Now he was turning away from the north and moving south, and his two assistants, Grothmann and Macher, would later explain why to British intelligence officers after their capture. Himmler had sent a message to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the Allied commander in northwestern Europe, proposing a meeting.
He wanted to place the Waffen-SS under British command to help maintain order in northern Germany. He expected Montgomery to accept and to put him in charge of those forces. What Himmler did not know was that General Alfred Jodl, the German army chief of staff, had torn the letter up instead of delivering it. Himmler had begun his journey south believing he was keeping himself free for negotiations that could never happen.
His plan was to hide in the Harz Mountains, a heavily forested region in central Germany, until conditions calmed down and Montgomery made contact. If the negotiations failed, his men had a backup plan, one designed to keep Himmler out of Allied hands forever. In the days before he left, Himmler had arranged for money to be hidden along the route south. One cache had been discovered, a collection of gold coins deposited in a post office vault in the town of Plauen, near Dresden, under the name of the Reichsführer.
The cache held nine hundred kilograms of gold coins, easier to move and spend than bars, worth something close to one hundred and nineteen million dollars today. American troops had found that hiding place on the twenty-sixth of April, before Himmler even began his journey. But little information was reaching the SS from the occupied town, so Himmler likely believed the gold was still waiting for him. He was a man who planned for every possibility, and this was not his only hidden reserve.
On the night of the twelfth to the thirteenth of May, two iron chests filled with gold and paper currency were collected from the home of one of his former adjutants, an SS officer named Heinrich Springer. Springer’s wife watched strangers load the chests, men she did not recognize from her husband’s personal staff. Those chests were never seen again. If Himmler intended to reach the Alps and cross into Italy, he would have hidden money in more than one location.
The Plauen vault sat roughly halfway to his destination, and the Americans had found it before his men could recover it. But there had to be another cache, and there was. Himmler knew the Alpine regions of southern Bavaria and Austria well. He owned a large villa in the village of Schönau, beside the Königsee, only 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 home. Later, Himmler used it as a love nest for his mistress, Hedwig Potthast, and their two illegitimate children. In late April 1945, the Reichsbank in Berlin and many government offices were busily sending gold bullion, currency, and documents south to be hidden in mines, caves, and prepared bunkers in the Alpine regions of Bavaria and Austria. Among the billions of coins and gold sent south, thirteen sacks of foreign currency had been transported to the local Reichsbank branch in Munich by the bank director, Hans Alfred von Rosenberg-Lipinsky.
There, an SS general named Gottlob Berger seized them. Berger was one of Himmler’s senior generals, commanding German resistance in what was called the Alpine Redoubt with the Thirteenth SS Army Corps. Berger also took a number of parcels, possibly containing Himmler’s personal papers sent from Berlin. He told von Rosenberg-Lipinsky that he was acting on the direct orders of the Reichsführer himself, and no one argued with that.
After the war, Berger told Allied interrogators that Himmler had ordered him to hide the money in a specific location, and he had done so. The place was in the Tyrol region of Austria, not far from Berchtesgaden. Berger placed the cash in a deep hole, about one point two meters deep, dug under the floor of a barn owned by the chief forester of the village of Sankt Johann, sixty-four kilometers west of Berchtesgaden. The SS operated a large rest and recreation center in the nearby town of Kitzbühel.
The area had been taken by the American army on the eighth of May, the day the war in Europe ended, four days after American troops had seized Himmler’s home in Berchtesgaden. The location would have put Himmler on the road toward Innsbruck, then through the Brenner Pass and into Italy, all the way to the city of Bolzano. It was worth noting where his family had gone. His estranged wife, Margarete, and his beloved daughter, Gudrun, had left their home in Gmund, south of Munich.
The SS had taken them to Bolzano in Italy, where they hid until American military intelligence agents arrested them on the thirteenth of May, while Himmler was still a fugitive in northern Germany, a fact he never knew. His mistress, Hedwig Potthast, had fled from Schönau with their two children before American troops arrived in early May, and they ended up hiding in the Rosenheim area of Bavaria. An original interrogation report from the American army’s Counterintelligence Corps showed that Potthast was questioned on the twenty-second of May, meaning she had been held for several days before that date. Himmler’s convoy, had it moved south as planned, would likely have passed through Rosenheim on its way to collect the loot at Sankt Johann, then continued toward Innsbruck, across the Brenner Pass, and down to Bolzano, where his other family was staying.
It could all have been a coincidence, but that seemed far too much to believe. This had the look of careful planning. The Americans did not discover the Sankt Johann cache until Berger told them where it was after his capture, perhaps hoping to win favor. That was on the twenty-fifth of May, two days after Himmler had died in British custody at Lüneburg in northern Germany.
On that day, Berger was taken under armed guard to the barn in Sankt Johann. He was accompanied by Master Sergeant Charles W. Dickey, who served under Captain Harry Anderson of the American 101st Airborne Division. Anderson’s unit was investigating Nazi treasure caches in the region, and he would later find a massive art collection belonging to Reich Marshal Hermann Göring hidden in a shelter beneath the German Air Force officers’ club in Berchtesgaden.
The treasure at Sankt Johann was remarkable, for this time there was no gold, only bundles of paper currency. There was more than one million German marks at 1945 values, twenty-six thousand British pounds, and more than eight million French francs. The non-European currencies consisted of one million Egyptian pounds, three million Algerian and Moroccan francs, and seven thousand five hundred Palestinian pounds from the British mandate. At the time, the Americans valued the whole cache at five million US dollars.
Today, that would be roughly ninety-three million dollars. Ninety-three million dollars in hard-to-trace banknotes could take a man a very long way. Given the location of the cache on the road into Italy, the obvious conclusion was that Himmler was not planning a holiday in Argentina, Paraguay, or Brazil. The presence of Middle Eastern and North African currencies suggested a different destination.
The Middle East was already a common escape route for Nazi war criminals. In the late forties and into the fifties, many of them arrived in Syria and Egypt. Johannes von Leers, a member of Goebbels’s team, changed his name to Omar Amin in Egypt. Alois Brunner, a former SS camp commander and one of Adolf Eichmann’s senior assistants 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, the former commander of the Sobibor and Treblinka extermination camps, fled to Syria in the 1940s and later moved to Brazil in 1951. There were many more examples, easily found by anyone who cared to look. When the Americans counted the money hidden at Sankt Johann, they compared it with Reichsbank records and SS records and realized that Berger had placed more money in the cache when he created it than what they found. The 101st Airborne concluded that Himmler’s cache had contained at least two hundred thousand dollars more.
Adjusted for inflation, that would be about three point seven million dollars today. The authors Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, in their book on Nazi gold, suggested that Berger had taken that amount for himself before his arrest. Berger himself received a twenty-five-year sentence in 1949 for war crimes and crimes against humanity, with the four years he had already spent in prison awaiting trial counted toward the term. In 1951, the American High Commissioner for Germany, John J.
McCloy, reviewed the case and reduced the sentence to ten years. Berger was released from prison in December 1951, having served only six and a half years. He became the manager of a curtain rod factory and lived what appeared to be a modest life until his death in January 1975. But it remained possible that he had carefully saved the three point seven million dollars he was suspected of taking from the Reichsführer’s cache.
As for the rest of the money, the 101st Airborne collected it and sent it to the central collection point in Frankfurt that the US Treasury had established for Nazi plunder. The most striking result of looking into all this was seeing how the Sankt Johann cache sat right in the middle of a probable escape route for Himmler into Italy, and how it connected to both of his families and their hiding places. His journey south from the last planned hiding place in the Harz Mountains to Sankt Johann would have led his convoy first directly to where his mistress and children were hiding, then to the cache on a convenient route to Innsbruck, across the Brenner Pass, and down to Bolzano where his wife and daughter were in hiding. From Bolzano, reaching the ports with ships bound for the Middle East would have been relatively easy.
The Sankt Johann cache contained enormous amounts of cash in Middle Eastern and North African currencies, or in the currencies of the colonial powers in the region, Britain and France. It contained no banknotes from South America at all. It was possible that all of this was one enormous coincidence, but that seemed doubtful. Himmler appeared to have thought through his escape plan carefully, in case his negotiations with Field Marshal Montgomery failed.
The Reichsführer had prepared his path well in advance, with gold in one place, paper money in another, and a route that would carry him through the Alps, past the people he cared for most, and toward a new life far from the ruins of the Reich he had helped build and destroy.