Kolchak's Gold (28 page)

One week after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact was signed, German Stukas and Panzers overran Poland.

In the Katyn forest near Smolensk some five thousand ranking officers of the Polish army were slaughtered by execution squads. The Germans were blamed for this, the first mass atrocity of the war. In fact it was the Red Army which massacred the Poles at Katyn—to eliminate any possibility of a Polish military reformation around their cadre of leading officers.
†

At the end of November 1939 the soviet Union invaded Finland, committing one million troops in thirty combat divisions against the Finns' nine divisions (two hundred thousand men). To Stalin's chagrin the Finns chopped the Red Army to ribbons. A peace was signed in March 1940 by which Finland ceded about 12 percent of her territory to Russia; but Stalin gave up his plans to occupy the country. He had lost two hundred thousand lives—nine times the number of Finnish casualties.

The Russo-Finnish War was militarily and politically indecisive. The Finns gave ground but did not give up; the Russians gained little of value. Perhaps the most significant result of that otherwise inconclusive campaign was its effect on Hitler's appraisal of Soviet fighting strength and ability. A relative handful of plucky Finns, neither mechanized nor particularly well armed, had made mincemeat of one million crack Red Army troops.

It suggested that Moscow was highly vulnerable.

2.

OPERATION BARBAROSSA

[Preparations for the German invasion of the Soviet Union were made under the code name
Plan Barbarossa.
The plan had two objectives: first, to attack by surprise and destroy the Russian army at the border, so that the Russians could not retreat into the vast interior of the country to regroup; second, to drive at high speed into the populated industrial heart of European Russia and seize the major cities.

[The invasion was launched from Poland, spearheaded across north-central Russia in the direction of Moscow, then dispersed in fast-moving armies to the north (Leningrad), the center (Moscow) and the south (Stalingrad, the Ukraine, the Crimea, the Caucasus).]

Communists and Jews were two groups which rapidly merged into one in Nazi rhetoric. Bolshevism became a Jewish conspiracy (as it had been earlier to the White Russians); the Soviet government was Jewish and its leaders were Jews—Stalin, Beria, all of them.

A Jewish government obviously did not represent the Aryan people of Russia; or even the Slavs (although to the Nazi ideologists a Slav wasn't much better than a Jew). The Jew was subhuman: he was not a human being, he was vermin—a symptom of degrading putrefaction. This pitiless racial mysticism of the Nordic Germans led at first to national policy—the clan oaths, the marriage permits, the exhaustive racial “hygiene” investigations—and then quickly to foreign policy, where it became a reconfirmation of the abiding German distrust of Russian communism.

Germans understood—and quietly approved—Hitler's strategem of neutralizing the Reds (the real enemy) with the nonaggression pact while crushing the rest of Western Europe in 1940, to prevent a stab in the back from that direction when Germany went to war against the Soviet Union. The pact had been a mutual convenience and everyone recognized that—the Russians as well as the Germans. As a result, by the early summer of 1941 both sides were preparing for the inevitable conflict, and the German attack did not surprise anyone in the Kremlin; only its timing did.

The Luftwaffe and Hitler's two hundred divisions attacked without warning just after midnight in the dark morning hours of June 22, 1941—a Sunday.

Within a week the Panzers had utterly destroyed fourteen entire Red divisions. German planes went over with a great abdominal rumble, dropping sticks of bombs and vomiting parachutes. The guns—both sides still used horse-drawn artillery—produced brutal casualties because neither side was entrenched. It was a war of movement with no time for fortification; where the invader met the resistance of bunkers and defensive lines of earthworks, he bypassed them and left them isolated for the second and third waves to mop up.

The Germans took the Ukraine at a rate of eleven miles a day despite fierce resistance. The retreating Russians left scorched earth.

The initial victories were easy. Hitler's contempt for the Red Army seemed justified. The Russians were throwing Cossack cavalry divisions at him—horse against the might of German armor!

Stalin's reaction to disaster was very nearly the same as the reaction Hitler would later display when the tables were turned. Stalin's orders forbade retreat or withdrawal
under any circumstances:
retreat was treason and traitors would be shot. The result was that entire divisions stood their hopeless ground and were slaughtered or gathered into the vast bag of prisoners taken by the Germans.

[By September the Germans had taken nearly a million Russian soldiers.]

Operation Barbarossa was on schedule. But then Hitler made the crucial error.

The German generals intended to meet the Red Army at Moscow. The battle would be decisive. Everything was committed to it—until Hitler decided it was necessary to take Leningrad, the industries of the Donets, and the Crimea. To accomplish these dubious purposes he diverted hundreds of thousands of men from the center prong and sent them south.

[The diversion not only cost the Wehrmacht in vital strength; it also cost time, for reorganization and resupply.] When Hitler ordered the resumption of the concentrated attack on Moscow it was nearly mid-September, and it was too late. Napoleon had reached Moscow on September 14 but the Russian winter had defeated him; Hitler had not learned from history.

There had not yet been a single successful Russian counter-offensive. In late September Kiev and Vyazma fell to the Germans; von Rundestedt and von Bock took 1,200,000 prisoners. North of them, Army Group Center pressed toward Moscow in October and captured another 600,000 men. At this point in history
the majority of Russia's soldiers had been taken prisoner by the Germans.
*

Red reinforcements moved in from the Far East but not nearly fast enough to keep up with the attrition. By November Moscow was under fire, Leningrad under siege, and the entire Ukraine was in German hands.

On November 10, 1941, in his underground command bunker at the Kremlin, Stalin held a conference to analyze the state of the war. It was bleak. The Germans were within twenty-five miles of the Kremlin and a German tank unit had penetrated the outskirts of the city itself on the north; only one railway—to the east—was left uncut.

The war looked just about lost, on all fronts.

The reasons for the staggering German victories of 1941 were varied and numerous but one significant factor was the Russian unwillingness to fight.

Stalin's terrors had created in the population an unparalleled hatred and fear toward the regime. The collectivization of agriculture under the forced programs of commissars and Soviets had cost the lives of millions of farmers and had “relocated” forty million others to Siberian
kolkhozi
and forced labor camps. The purges by the GPU and Beria's secret police had created still more fear and fury.

By October even Stalin had to acknowledge for the record that many Russians at the front were throwing down their arms and welcoming the Germans. So unreliable did Stalin deem his own population that he pleaded with Roosevelt and Churchill to send their troops to fight on Russian soil.
*

“Treason?
†
Perhaps it was. You recall Talleyrand's definition—treason is a question of dates. A charge leveled by winners against losers. I think to the Russian people it was not a question of treason but of patriotism. The strength of a nation in the long run is no greater than the people's measure of themselves, and the Russian people were ashamed, you know. Ashamed they had let Stalin do these things to them. At least that is my estimation, but remember, it comes from a Jew; it is biased.

“I was not in Russia at this time; I was there later of course, more than once. What I tell you about these times is what I have learned from many people.

“In my brother's village no one had been informed of the Final Solution at that time. In fact the German frontline soldiers had not been informed of it. To the Russians of nineteen-forty and forty-one the Germans were a trustworthy people—reliable and civilized. It had always been so, had it not? German civilization was the model upon which the Czars had based Russian society.

“One Ukrainian told me that when the Germans arrived in his district they were courteous—almost gallant—and some of the villagers came out with flowers to meet them, and the Germans cursed the inefficient Russians for not having built railroads and roads enough to support the
blitzkrieg's
supply lines, but they were laughing while they cursed.

“At first the rumors of mass brutality were met with disbelief. No one thinks himself a poor judge of human nature, and the first Germans into Russia were simple soldiers for the most part—not SS, not Gestapo. That all came later.

“My brother lived in a village east of Kotelnikovsky. Not the Ukraine, really—southern Russia, near the Caucasus. The Germans didn't get that far at first. Not for nearly a year, in fact. But in the meantime the refugees who managed to flee without being caught by the Germans brought the news with them.”

[The news was of incredible bestialities.]

3.

SEBASTOPOL
*
AND THE LARGER WAR

In October 1941 the Germans overran the whole of the Crimean peninsula, isolating Sebastopol against the sea.

The Wehrmacht (the Eleventh Army under von Manstein) made repeated efforts right up to year-end to broach the city's defenses and succeeded in pushing the defense lines closer to the populated center but each German assault broke against the fervor of Russian resistance and when the winter rains stalled further German attempts the city was still holding out.

For months the suburbs burned. The pungent stench was nauseating—a clinging acridity of burning wood and flesh—but a good part of the time it was driven back across the German lines by prevailing winds.

Then, in May 1942, the Russian counteroffensive at Kerch collapsed and the German forces there were freed to wheel toward Sebastopol. The population moved into caves and bunkers; the ordeal of German shelling became uninterrupted. Early in June the Luftwaffe assembled a force of several hundred bombers and the Wehrmacht brought up a mammoth railroad gun, the siege cannon “Dora,” designed to smash the Maginot Line. The German 105s, the German bombs, the German siege-gun shells destroyed Sebastopol's airfields and cut off the sea-lanes of supply. The rest was obvious.

[The Germans took ninety thousand prisoners and called it a great victory; but Stalin was not dissatisfied since the siege had tied down von Manstein's three hundred thousand men for two hundred and fifty days during which they might have made a decisive difference on the center fronts.]

[Perhaps the turning point had come as early as December 4, 1941, when Zhukov and Vlasov at Moscow blunted the German drive. Vlasov's daring counterattack broke through the German lines and halted the advance; then it snowed; Stalin's fresh Siberian units had time to reach the front and the Germans fell back from Moscow's suburbs under their attack.

[For the most part the war was stalled in its tracks by the severity of that winter. Casualties were high, the fighting savage, but the Germans were no longer in motion; Stalin had time to build new armies and train them and—with the aid of lend-lease—equip them.]

Nevertheless after the spring thaw the relentless Teutonic march resumed. Russian resistance was heavier, better organized, and the news of SS atrocities had firmed up Russia's will to fight; but German air and armor kept the invasion alive and in the summer of 1942 the German hordes smashed through to Stalingrad.

Krupp shells destroyed the city but not its inhabitants; the defenders held. And in November 1942 the Red Army counterattacked: surrounded the Germans and obliterated half a million of Hitler's soldiers at Stalingrad.

It was on November 19, 1942 that the German advance became a retreat. From that date on, there was no further possibility of a Nazi conquest. By 1945 the Reds would push the Wehrmacht all the way back to Berlin.

4.

KRAUSSER AND VON GEYR:

THE HUNT FOR TREASURE

Gruppenführer
Otto von Geyr arrived at Tempelhof on November 8, 1942, and was collected by a command car which took him silently through the blacked-out streets to the Chancellery where he met for nearly an hour with Hitler's deputy, Martin Bormann, in a conference that also included SS
Reichsführer
Heinrich Himmler. No minutes of this meeting were kept. But later that night, von Geyr and Himmler went together to Himmler's office in Prinz Albrecht Strasse and Himmler's staff notes, dated November 9, indicate that the subject of discussion was
Standartenführer
Heinz Krausser's dispatch of September 13 concerning the possible whereabouts of the five-hundred-ton Czarist gold bullion treasury. The phrase “Siberian iron-mine shaft” appears in the staff notes.

[Perhaps it can be assumed that the conference at the Chancellery had to do with the Reich's need for hard currency and the plausibility of the Krausser report with reference to that need. Subsequent events suggest that Bormann ordered von Geyr to proceed to organize a search for the reputed gold treasure.]

The key figure in the investigation was Krausser, who as head of Einsatzgruppe “E” had unearthed the first references to the Kolchak cache. Heinz Krausser was thirty-nine, a veteran of the First World War on the Western Front; in 1920 he had joined an anti-Semitic organization sponsored in part by exiled Russian monarchists, and in 1927 he enrolled in the Nazi Party, when he was a foot patrolman on the Munich police force. Several years later, when the SS was organized under Himmler, he was absorbed into it as a drill instructor with the rank of captain.