London Cage by Helen Fry

Author:Helen Fry
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780300221930
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2017-10-07T04:00:00+00:00

Nazi gold

October 1945 saw the arrival at the London Cage of Major-General Otto Wagener, who had taken over command of Rhodes and the eastern Aegean on 23 September 1944, at a time when Allied forces were mounting the Ardennes offensive in Western Europe and had already captured Brussels. Wagener commanded around 6,000 German soldiers, half of them troops from 999 Division. The reputation of 999 Division was already known at the London Cage due to some of its members having arrived there after the defeat of Rommel’s troops in North Africa in 1942 (see page 56). Colonel Scotland had once described them as ‘rabid Nazis’ who were heavily indoctrinated in Nazi ideology.22 They were tough ex-convicts, who had spent time in concentration camps but whose sentences had been reduced when they volunteered to serve in the crack SS battalion. Wagener’s testimony would be quite astonishing.

MI19 had knowledge of possible Nazi gold buried on Rhodes (the source of the information was not named). Allied intelligence was desperately trying to track and prevent the movement of Nazi gold out of Germany, mostly – it was thought – being transported on special trains. When interrogated about the Rhodes gold, at first Wagener denied any knowledge of it. Later, however, he would tell a different story.

On 29 April 1945, just a week before Germany’s final surrender and the day before Hitler committed suicide in his bunker, Wagener had been in hospital with a type of typhus. He had received a visit from his chief of staff and the quartermaster, Herr Becker. They reported that the last plane to leave Germany for Rhodes had already departed from an aerodrome near Linz, carrying the gold bound for Rhodes and Crete. A Turkish firm in Constantinople had been instructed to deliver to Crete food for the German troops there, for which it would be paid in gold. The two men at Wagener’s bedside wanted to establish what should be done with the gold in the event of surrender to the Allies, which was expected imminently. Major-General Wagener recognised that it would be impossible now to dispatch the gold to Crete, and that ‘the best plan would be to place the whole lot in a coffin and inter it properly in the soldiers’ cemetery’.23 Wagener expressed the opinion to Scotland that the gold belonged to the German government, and hoped that it would not fall into the hands of the British authorities.

Twelve hours after his interrogation, Wagener sent a note to Colonel Scotland to say that he realised the significance of the questioning on the gold and had some further information to add to his statement. He said that his testimony could be verified by Major-General Benthack, the commandant of Crete, with whom he had shared a room in the British prisoner-of-war camp in Cairo. Crucially, he added that he believed the weight of the gold buried in the coffin was 17 kilograms. He said that he had always intended to build a special home near the German

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