In the final weeks of World War II, Heinrich Himmler launched a sudden southward journey with just over a dozen loyal followers. At first glance, the move seemed foolish. Himmler, however, was not a foolish man. He was calculating and deeply cunning, and new evidence helps explain why he chose to flee toward the Alps in approximately the second week of May 1945.
That evidence centers on a cache of gold coins deposited in an account bearing the name of the Reichsführer. The treasure was hidden in the vault of a post office near the Harz mountain region, in the town of Plauen near Dresden.
After their capture alongside Himmler, his two adjutants, Grothmann and Macher, told British intelligence officers about Himmler's plan. According to their account, Himmler intended to travel south and wait for a reply to a letter he had ordered delivered by courier to Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, the Allied commander in northwest Europe.
The letter requested a meeting to discuss placing Himmler's Waffen-SS troops under British command. The stated purpose was to help preserve security and order in northern Germany after the collapse of the Third Reich. Montgomery, of course, was to take command of those forces.
What Himmler did not know was that General Alfred Jodl, chief of staff of the German army, had not delivered the letter to Montgomery. Jodl tore it up and destroyed it.
Himmler said he began moving south to remain free for any future negotiations with Montgomery, unaware of what Jodl had done. His intention was to hide in the densely wooded central German region known as the Harz until the situation in Germany calmed, while waiting for word from Montgomery.
His adjutants also prepared a fallback plan in case Montgomery rejected Himmler's overtures. That plan was designed to keep Himmler out of Allied hands forever.
In a previously published video about the gold cache, the location was identified as a post office vault in Plauen. Himmler apparently first ordered the collection of two iron boxes filled with gold and paper currency. These were gathered on the night of May 12 to 13, 1945, from the home of a former adjutant in the Vistula Army Group, SS battalion commander Heinrich Springer.
According to Springer's wife, the boxes were collected by a member of Himmler's personal staff whom she did not know. These items were never found again.
As for the gold in the Plauen post office vault, Himmler's intention was to head south to the Alps. He presumably sent some of his men first to Plauen, which was under American occupation, to collect the bags of gold before continuing on to the Alps.
A document found in the U.S. National Archives a few years ago confirmed that Himmler issued an order to hide the gold and currency in the Plauen cellar. The gold weighed 900 kilograms in coins, which are easier to transport than bullion and can be exchanged easily anywhere in the world. The value of that gold today is estimated at about 119 million U.S. dollars.
The U.S. Army found the cache on April 26, 1945, before Himmler set out south. But because little information reached the SS from Plauen after the American seizure, Himmler may well have believed his hiding place was still intact and undiscovered.
A man like Himmler had a backup plan, and a backup to the backup. If he intended to reach and cross the Alps, he would have hidden more than one cache along the way. One such cache has been found in the Alps.
The money hidden in the Plauen post office vault lay roughly halfway to Himmler's destination in the Alps, but the Americans found it before Himmler's team could recover it. According to his adjutants, Himmler's plan was to cross the Alps into Italy and, like many fleeing Nazis, escape by sea using a forged identity or a genuine Red Cross passport, perhaps obtained through sympathetic elements at the Vatican in Rome.
This was the pattern for a whole series of Nazi war criminals. From Italy, they boarded ships to the Middle East or South America via so-called smuggling lines. It is logical that Himmler would have ordered another cache of movable funds prepared somewhere in the Alpine region, and one has indeed been found.
Himmler was, of course, widely familiar with the Alpine regions of southern Bavaria and Austria. He owned a large villa in the village of Schönau, beside the scenic Alpine Königssee, in Berchtesgaden, a few miles down the mountain from Hitler's Alpine village of Obersalzberg.
The house, known as Schneewinkellehen, had previously been Sigmund Freud's summer home. Himmler later used it as a love nest with his mistress Hedwig Potthast and their two illegitimate children.
These treasures appear to have been collected on Himmler's explicit orders in late April 1945. At that time, the Reichsbank in Berlin and several government offices were actively sending gold bars, coins, and documents south to be hidden in mines, caves, and specially prepared caches in the Alpine regions of Bavaria and Austria.
According to the outstanding work of authors Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting in their pioneering book "Nazi Gold," among the billions in coins and gold sent south, 13 bags of foreign currency were transferred to the local Reichsbank branch in Munich by Reichsbank director Hans Alfred von Rosenberg-Lipinsky. There they were seized by SS commander Gottlob Berger, one of Himmler's senior generals, who was then leading German resistance in the so-called Alpine Redoubt on Himmler's orders.
That resistance consisted of the 13th SS Army Corps. Along with the money bags, Berger said he also seized a number of packages that may have contained Himmler's personal papers sent from Berlin.
Berger told von Rosenberg-Lipinsky that he was acting on direct orders from Reichsführer Himmler, and who would argue with that? After his arrest following the war, Berger told Allied investigators that Himmler had ordered him to hide the money in a specific place, which he did.
The location was in the Tyrol region of Austria, not far from Berchtesgaden. Berger placed the money in a deep pit, about 1.2 meters down, created specially beneath the floor of a barn owned by the chief forester in the village of St. Johann, located 64 kilometers west of Berchtesgaden.
The SS ran a large rest and recreation center in the neighboring town of Kitzbühel. The U.S. Army seized the area on May 8, 1945, Victory in Europe Day, four days after the Americans captured Himmler's home in Berchtesgaden.
This location would have placed Himmler on the road to Innsbruck, then to the Brenner Pass and into Italy, reaching the city of Bolzano. It is interesting to note that Himmler's estranged wife, Margarete, and his beloved daughter, Gudrun, had left their home in Gmund, south of Munich, and were taken by the SS to Bolzano in Italy, where they hid. They were eventually arrested by U.S. military intelligence agents on May 13, 1945, while Himmler was on the run in northern Germany, a fact Himmler did not know.
It is also interesting that Himmler's mistress, Hedwig Potthast, and his other two children fled their home in Schönau am Königssee before the arrival of U.S. forces in early May 1945. They too ended up hiding in the Rosenheim area of Bavaria.
The original U.S. Army Counter Intelligence Corps interrogation report on Hedwig Potthast is in hand, and it indicates she was interrogated on May 22, 1945, meaning she had been in their custody for several days before that date. It is possible that Himmler's convoy passed through Rosenheim on its way to collect the loot from St. Johann, then on to Innsbruck via the Brenner Pass, and then to Bolzano, where his other family members were staying.
Of course, all of this could be mere coincidence, but that seems unlikely. It is a coincidence that strains credulity. It must have been deliberate and planned.
The U.S. Army did not discover the 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's death in British custody in Lüneburg, northern Germany.
On May 25, Berger was taken under armed guard to the barn in St. Johann. He was accompanied by First Sergeant Charles W. Dickey, who was part of Captain Harry Anderson's unit of the U.S. 101st Airborne Division, which was conducting investigations into Nazi treasure caches in the area. Captain Anderson later found a huge art collection belonging to Reich Marshal Hermann Göring hidden in a shelter beneath the German Air Force officers' club in Berchtesgaden.
The treasures hidden in St. Johann were highly interesting, containing bundles of currency only, no gold this time. Alongside more than one million German marks at 1945 values, there were also 26,000 British pounds and more than 8 million French francs.
The non-European currencies consisted of one million Egyptian pounds, 3 million Algerian and Moroccan francs, and 7,500 Palestinian pounds from the British Mandate. So what would that be worth today? At the time, the Americans estimated its value at five million U.S. dollars. Today, that equals about 93 million dollars.
You can travel a long way today with 93 million dollars, especially if it is in hard-to-trace paper currency. Given the cache's location on the road to Italy, it seems easy to conclude that Himmler was not planning a vacation in Argentina, Paraguay, or Brazil, but in the Middle East or North Africa, judging by the national currencies found there.
The Middle East was already a popular destination for fleeing Nazi war criminals. In the late 1940s and into the 1950s, many Nazi war criminals reached Syria and Egypt. For example, Johannes von Leers, a member of Dr. Goebbels's team, later changed his name to Omar Amin in Egypt.
Alois Brunner, commander of a Nazi SS camp 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, another former camp commander, this time of Sobibor and Treblinka, fled to Syria in the 1940s and then moved to Brazil in 1951. Again, many examples could be given. You can look them up yourself.
When the Americans counted the hidden money, they discovered from Reichsbank and SS records that Berger had actually placed more money in the cache when it was created. The 101st Airborne found that Himmler's cache contained at least 200,000 dollars. At today's value, that equals 3.7 million dollars. The authors Sayer and Botting suggested that Berger may have taken this amount before his capture.
Berger himself received a 25-year prison sentence for war crimes and crimes against humanity in 1949, but the four years he spent in prison awaiting trial were counted toward his term. Then in 1951, the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, John J. McCloy, reviewed his case and commuted his sentence to 10 years. He was released from prison in December 1951 after serving only six and a half years.
Berger became the manager of a curtain rod factory. He appears to have lived a modest life for the rest of his days and died in January 1975. It is possible, however, that he carefully saved the 3.7 million dollars he allegedly embezzled 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 established by the U.S. Treasury Department for Nazi loot. Among the most notable findings of this research is how the St. Johann cache sat at the heart of a possible escape route for Himmler to Italy, and its connection to the two families and their hiding places.
It is no coincidence that his journey south from the last planned cache for Himmler in the Harz mountains to St. Johann would have led his convoy first directly to the hiding place of his mistress and children, then to his cache on a convenient road to Innsbruck, then to the Brenner Pass, and then to Bolzano, where Himmler's wife and daughter were hiding. From Bolzano, reaching the ports from which ships departed for the Middle East was relatively easy.
The St. Johann cache also contained huge amounts of cash from Middle Eastern and North African countries, or from the colonial powers in the region, Britain and France. Certainly, the cache contained no South American paper currency. As noted, all of this could be one enormous coincidence, but that is doubtful. It appears that Himmler thought carefully about his escape plan in case his negotiations with Field Marshal Montgomery failed.