Stolen Gold

by Christian Jürs

In late April 1945, a convoy of German trucks left the German-occupied Italian city of Muggia [in Istria] on the Adriatic Sea and drove north through Udine and then northeast to Villach in what was once the Greater German Reich and is now Austria.

There were five trucks, all painted the medium camouflage yellow of the later war German Wehrmacht, and one staff car bearing license plates of the SS. This car was occupied by SS-Gruppenführer Odlio Globocnik, Senior SS and Police Commander of the Adriatic Region, his driver and two SS aides. The trucks each had, besides the driver, two armed Ukrainian guards, all in field-gray Waffen-SS uniforms.

Inside the trucks were stacked dozens of heavy wooden German ammunition boxes, containers of food, cases of liquor and miscellaneous furniture, carpets and household goods.

Before the convoy reached Villach, it turned off the main highway and headed west through the Gaitaler Alps, finally stopping on the north shore of the Weissensee, a long, deep mountain lake.

The ground was still hard from the winter cold, but throughout the night and into the early hours of the next day, holes were dug in the ground at various points around the lake and the wooden ammunition boxes carefully buried. The fresh earth was hastily covered with armfuls of old pine needles and branches. All of the sites were carefully marked on a map and then the trucks drove off, past the small towns of Neusach and Techendorf and onto the main road which is now E-66.

Globocnik was later captured by a British armored unit and purported by them to have killed himself while under interrogation. In fact, U.S. intelligence reports indicate very clearly that not only did Globocnik survive the end of the war, but ended up in American employment.

He had bought his freedom by bribing the British and turning over to them the contents of two of his buried cases, which consisted of many thousands of British pound notes. The remainder of the wooden chests contained millions of dollars worth of gold coins, religious medals, gold jewelry, platinum, silver, antique coins, gold pencils, containers of dental gold and bridgework, and wedding rings.

These had originated in the concentration camps under Globocnik’s control in the Lublin district of what had been pre-war Poland. While the head of such camps as Belzec and Treblinka, Globocnik who had been fired by Hitler from his official prewar position as Gauleiter, or Governor, of Vienna for theft, took advantage of his situation. He sequestered a large amount of treasure he took from the occupants of his camps as well as additional assets obtained from extensive treasure hunts in the districts he controlled.

When Heinrich Himmler learned of Globocnik’s completely unauthorized activities in his Polish domain, he ordered him to close the camps, destroy any trace of them and remove himself with a promotion, to the city of Trieste where Globocnik, a Slovenian, had been born in 1904. While there, Globocnik managed to acquire more loot and it was this money which he took into the Austrian Alps with a crew of his loyal Ukranians who had served as camp guards at Treblinka.

When the information about the positive location of Globocnik’s horde was confirmed in 1989, individuals in possession of the overlay and the map embarked on an expedition to recover as much as possible, if not all, of the buried treasure.

Under then-current Austrian law, the treasure trove was to be divided equally between the finder or finders, the government of Austria and the owner or owners of the land on which it was found. Very discreet inquiry with agencies in Vienna

disclosed that the Austrian government did not view their former Gauleiter’s money as having been acquired through criminal activities and that, therefore, the division of the find was to follow standard procedure. Had the government decreed that the buried money resulted from a criminal endeavor, the state would assume complete control over it and its eventual disposal.

An inventory of the recovery was as follows:

 

Russian Imperial gold coins
810   5 Rouble pieces valued (in 1990 spot gold prices..much higher in 2017) at $64,800
475 10 Rouble pieces valued at $95,000

Austrian gold coins
1, 470  Imperial 1 ducat pieces valued at $88,200
975  Imperial 4 ducat pieces valued at $438,750
1,355 10 Corona pieces valued at $101,625
2,101 20 Corona pieces valued at $630,600
217 100 Corona pieces valued at $184,450
6320 Kronen pieces valued at  $58,275
28 100 Kronen pieces valued at $56,000
4,150  25 Schilling pieces valued at 229,800
517 100 Schilling pieces valued at $310,200

Polish gold coins
4158 10 Zloty pieces valued at $249,480

French gold coins
802  20 Franc pieces valued at $64,160
50  50 Franc pieces valued at $22,500
142 100 Franc pieces valued at $60, 350

Swiss gold coins
907 10 Franc pieces valued at $54,420
1121 20 Franc pieces valued at $78,470

British gold coins
804 Sovereign pieces valued at $54,420
202 ½ Sovereign pieces valued at $15,150

 

The total number of coins was 20,247 and the approximate value as of the current market in gold is $24,998,707.

Who dug up part of this treasure and what happened to it?

And who owned it?

The heirs of General Globocnik?

The distant relatives of those incarcerated in his camps?

The owners of the land from which it was dug up?

The Austrian government?

And what happened to it?

The names of those who removed this horde of gold are known and it is also known that most of the gold coins were brought back to the United States by a simple and easily concealed method.

They were packed into a boat in the northern Adriatic, having been brought down from Austria in a small, rented truck and subsequently landed on the Virginia coast at a small, unguarded marina.

From there, the coins were transported to a rural southern town and hidden in the cellar of one of the participants in the dig.

Little by little, the gold coins were converted to cash and distributed to a number of very far-right American proto-fascist groups and used to buy arms and ammunition for what most of these groups believed would be open warfare with the government establishment and eventualy assumption of national power.

Who are these groups? Here is a listing of only some of them:

• ACT for America
• Alliance Defending Freedom
• America’s Promise Ministries
• American Border Patrol/American Patrol
• American Family Association
• American Freedom Party
• American Renaissance
• Aryan Brotherhood
• Aryan Brotherhood of Texas
• Aryan Nations
• Blood & Honor
• Brotherhood of Klans
• Center for Security Policy
• Church of the National Knights of the Ku Klux Klan
• The Creativity Movement
• The Dominonist Movement of America
• National Alliance
• National Coalition for Immigration Reform
• National Socialist Movement
• National Vanguard
• Oath Keepers
• Stormfront
• The Aryan Terror Brigade.
• The neo-Confederate League of the South.
• Traditionalist Worker Party
• White Revolution

 

The gold holders, a prominent dealer in Nazi-era relics, one gun dealer and an advanced collector, were put in touch with each other by the late Willis Carto of Culpepper, Virginia. Carto, and his aide, Michael Collins Piper, had strong connections with many of these groups and instigated the treasure hunt so as to be able to adequately fund their activities.

Carto had had legal problems and was very cautious about showing the possession of any funds.

One of the methods for concealing the use of the funds is the extensive use of the militaria collecting business.

The gold has reportedly been converted into cash and used to buy exotic, and very expensive, fake Third Reich items which are then sold to the collecting world and the profits worked into the coffers of the revolutionaries.

Weapons and other material, as is strongly rumored, is generally purchased in Canada and, like the gold coins, drop-shipped via boat, to a quiet port on the east coast of the United States.