I had spent years buried in archives, tracing the final weeks of one of the most wanted men in history. Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS, the man responsible for millions of deaths, was on the run in May 1945. And I had just found something that changed how I understood his last desperate plan. It all started with a hoard of gold coins.
Nine hundred kilograms of them, sitting in a post office vault in Plauen, near Dresden, registered in Himmler’s name. At today’s prices, that gold is worth around 119 million dollars. When I first found the document confirming this stash existed, it explained so much. Himmler wasn’t stupid.
Far from it. He was cunning, calculating. So why would he head south, straight through enemy territory, with just a dozen men? It seemed like a suicide run.
But it wasn’t. After the war, his adjutants, Grothmann and Macher, told British intelligence that Himmler had a plan. He had sent a letter to Field Marshal Montgomery, offering to place the entire Waffen SS under British command to help keep order in a collapsing Germany. He wanted a meeting.
He wanted a role in the new world order. Himmler had no idea that General Jodl had torn that letter up. Himmler was walking south, convinced he was still a free agent in a negotiation that would never happen. His stated plan was to lie low in the Harz Mountains, a heavily forested region in central Germany, until Montgomery called for him.
But his adjutants also spoke of a backup plan, one designed to keep Himmler out of Allied hands forever. And that’s where my discovery comes in. Plauen was the halfway point. But the Americans had found that gold on the 26th of April, before Himmler even set off.
A man like Himmler would have had a backup to his backup. I was sure of it. So I started looking in the Alps, and I found it. In late April 1945, the Reichsbank in Berlin was frantically shipping south gold, currency, and documents to be hidden in mines and bunkers across Bavaria and Austria.
Among these shipments were thirteen sacks of foreign currency, brought to the Reichsbank branch in Munich by a director named von Rosenberg-Lipinsky. There, they were seized by SS Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger, one of Himmler’s most trusted generals, who was commanding German resistance in the so-called Alpine Redoubt. Berger told the Reichsbank director he was acting on Himmler’s direct orders. And who was going to argue with that?
After the war, Berger told Allied interrogators exactly what he had done. He had hidden Himmler’s stash in a specially constructed four-foot-deep pit beneath the floorboards of a barn owned by the chief forester of St. Johann, a village in the Austrian Tyrol, sixty-four kilometers west of Berchtesgaden. The area was captured by the US Army on May 8th, 1945, just days after they’d taken Himmler’s own villa at the nearby Königssee.
The stash itself was remarkable. It contained no gold, but it was full of currency. Over a million Reichsmarks, 26,000 pounds sterling, 8 million French francs, a million Egyptian pounds, 3 million Algerian and Moroccan francs, and 7,500 Palestinian pounds. The Americans valued it at 5 million dollars at the time.
Today, that’s about 93 million dollars. And there was something more important than the money. The location. St.
Johann sits on the road to Innsbruck, and from there, the Brenner Pass leads straight into Italy. I then looked at where Himmler’s family was hiding. His estranged wife, Margarete, and his beloved daughter, Gudrun, had been driven south by the SS to Bolzano in Italy, where they were eventually captured. His mistress, Hedwig Potthast, and his two illegitimate children had fled their home and were hiding in Rosenheim, in Bavaria.
Rosenheim is on the route from the Harz to St. Johann. The stash was right on the path to Innsbruck, to the Brenner, to Bolzano, where his other family was. And look at the money.
It wasn’t South American currency. There were no Argentine pesos, no Brazilian reals. It was all Middle Eastern and North African money, or the currencies of the colonial powers, Britain and France, who controlled that region. The conclusion was inescapable.
Himmler wasn’t planning to hide out in Argentina or Paraguay. He was planning to disappear into the Middle East, or North Africa. This was a well-worn route for Nazi war criminals. Men like Alois Brunner, one of Eichmann’s top aides, fled to Syria.
Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka, went to Syria too, before moving on to Brazil. Himmler had thought it all through. There is one more detail. When the Americans from the 101st Airborne counted the stash, it was short.
By at least 200,000 dollars, about 3. 7 million in today’s money. The authors who first researched this, Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, believed that General Berger had helped himself to the missing cash before he was captured. Berger was arrested, tried for war crimes, and sentenced to 25 years.
But he was released in 1951 after serving only six and a half. He went on to manage a curtain rail factory and lived modestly for the rest of his life. Perhaps he was living off that carefully hoarded nest egg he’d stolen from his boss’s escape fund. It all fits together.
The stash was placed on the road to Italy, filled with the currency of the Middle East, while his mistress and children hid along the same route, and his wife and daughter waited in Bolzano. This wasn’t a coincidence. This was a plan. Himmler put a tremendous amount of thought into his escape, should his negotiations with Montgomery fall apart.
He had his route mapped, his money stored, his destination chosen. He was ready to slip away. But in the end, it didn’t matter. The Americans found the stash.
And Himmler, captured by the British, died by his own hand in a prison cell in Lüneburg, just two days before the Americans dug up his fortune. The money that was meant to buy his freedom sat in a Frankfurt collecting point, part of the loot of a fallen empire.
