Kolchak's gold

Einsatzgruppen.

The Einsatzgruppen were battalion-strength (700 to 1,000 men) units of Gestapo, SD and Waffen SS commandos. They were originally under the direct control of Reinhard Heydrich and had been trained in the techniques of annihilation at a police academy on the Elbe at Pretsch. They had been indoctrinated chiefly in master-race ideology and the methods of genocide; the stated purpose of these murder battalions was the extermination of Jews in the conquered territories, under the authority of the Fuhrer’s order of March 3, 1941, that the Jewish Question was to find its Final Solution in mass executions.

Krausser’s dispatch was attached to a dim carbon copy of a summary battalion report over his own signature which coldly spelled out the massacres of several thousand Russian Jews and summarized the incredible fact that over the past year this single Einsatzgruppe had murdered more than three hundred thousand Jews.* Krausser’s letter expressed pride in these accomplishments, mentioned that he hoped von Geyr was in good health-evidently they shared in-laws in common or were otherwise distantly related-and went on to explain in some detail the information he had unearthed concerning the Czar’s gold treasury.†

Krausser’s dispatch was several pages long. It covered, without much detail, the removal of the Czar’s gold from Omsk by Admiral Kolchak and the subsequent decision to hide the gold in an abandoned iron mine along the Siberian trakt. Krausser was not specific in naming the sources of this information; he used some such phrase as “Our interrogations have produced the possibility.” He then went on to say he had no way to evaluate the truth of this information but in view of the tonnage of gold involved, he thought it might be wise to bring it to von Geyr’s attention. The implication was that von Geyr had access to certain ears in Berlin; evidently Krausser was as paranoid as most of his kind and distrusted his own immediate superiors, who were people high-up on the SS staff.

The number of endorsements on the Krausser dispatch indicated clearly that it had been read with interest by a number of officers, going up the chain of command from von Geyr. The last endorsement was that of a member of Himmler’s staff; I no longer recall which officer it was.

Obviously the intriguing thing about the Krausser dispatch was that it spelled out in remarkable detail the exact location of the iron mine where Kolchak had hidden the gold.

The description in Krausser’s letter was uncannily similar to the description Haim Tippelskirch had given me; Haim and I had spoken mainly in German and even the phrasing of Krausser’s directions was very much like Haim’s. Even if Haim hadn’t told me his own version of the German episode, I should have guessed that the Krausser information could only have come from a survivor of the Kolchak expedition.

* It is still in the Ural vaults; only recently have Spanish and Soviet ambassadors in Paris begun to discuss the possibility of Moscow’s returning the gold to Madrid. In mass and value it is almost identical to the Kolchak treasure. (From Bristow’s notes.)

* The text, from Bristow’s files, reads as follows:

EINSATZGRUPPE “E” REPORT NO. I761

9 SEPTEMBER 1941

“Area now reported cleared of Jews. During period covered by this Report, 11,692 Jews (adult), 6,843 Jews (adolescent), 273 Partisans, 18 felonious criminals, 31 °Communist functionaries shot. Up to 8 Sept. 1941, therefore, Einsatzgruppe ‘E’ has dealt with 329,241 Jews in all.”-Ed.

† The Krausser dispatch is not among Bristow’s files; neither, evidently, did he have it at hand when he was writing the above passages. Therefore either it was stolen from his files in New Jersey or, more likely, he had it with him in Sebastopol and lost it there along with most of the materials he gathered in Russia in early 1973.- Ed.

7

The fall and winter of 1972 were disagreeably grey and rainy in the Northeast. It was a dreary time of record rainfalls, and after the Presidential election and its post-mortems there were no urgent topics of conversation around the capital. Of course this was before the Watergate revival. I was seeing a good deal of a gangly cheerful divorcee whose name it would be pointless to mention here. Nikki was on my mind almost constantly although it had been a year since we had last seen each other.

In Lambertville around the end of November I had a phone call from Washington. It was Evan MacIver. I was surprised to hear from him; I’d seen him four or five times at parties in the course of the past year but we hadn’t much to say to each other. He called to suggest we have lunch the following week; he named a time and a restaurant. I don’t recall the conversation; in substance he said he had something of interest to discuss with me and he made it intriguing enough for me to accept the invitation.

It was the middle of the week. Heavy rain had brought traffic to a crawl and I was late getting to the restaurant. MacIver was watching for me; he got my eye and waved me to his table and I found him spooning the skin that had formed on his cup of hot chocolate. When I sat down my nostrils informed me there was whiskey in the chocolate.

It was one of those mock-Polynesian restaurants with jungle decor where middle-class women in absurd hats took a lunch break from their holiday shopping; this was the week after Thanksgiving and the Christmas boom had started. Waiters were serving sweet potent concoctions in imitation coconut shells with drinking straws. I ordered a Bloody Mary to keep MacIver company.

He looked rumpled and jowly but there were traces of the old raffish humor in the lines that exploded from his eye-corners. “Well Harry, just between us suspicious characters, how are things going?”

For a while we reminisced about campus days-the bad food in the university cafeteria, the Japanese restaurant he’d taken me to once where I’d gagged on raw fish, the J. D. Salinger stories and Castro and the banning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover and the Powers U-2 incident, and the swap of Powers for the Soviet spy Rudolf Abel. Memoirs which dated us both, and which led-as if by aimless free association-to the subjects of intelligence and espionage. MacIver was pretty good, he was at ease and casual; but the invitation had been his and I had let him guide the conversation and I was aware that it probably was no accident he led us to that point. Each for our own reasons we were interested in espionage but clearly his motives were more specific than that.

I found something vaguely edible from the menu; it was not until we were drinking coffee after the meal that MacIver began to come to the point.

“Well then how’s the little Sabra?”

“Nikki?” I gave him a closer look. I hadn’t spoken to him about Nikki at all since the night I’d first met her. Yet he knew.

There was a crafty gleam of guile in his eyes; I was meant to see it. “You do keep in touch, don’t you?”

Suddenly I was determined to know what he was getting at. I contrived to look curious.

But he refused to be drawn. “Well she wasn’t my cup of tea, I can tell you that.” He put his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and I watched it smoulder there. He said, “You know I got interested in something you were talking about a couple of months ago. Where was it, Huddleston’s party? You were talking about that far-fetched Russian gold story you’re writing. Sounded like a hell of a yarn. I’d like to know more about it.”

“And that’s why you arranged this lunch?”

“Partly. There was something else, but it can wait. You’re not in a hurry, are you? Am I keeping you from anything?”

“I’ve got some work to do this afternoon up at State. It shouldn’t take too long-no, I’m not in a big hurry.”

“State,” he said, and made the connection. “Sure. You’re still pushing for that Russian research visa, aren’t you? Maybe I could help.”

“You?”

“Us suspicious characters have a few contacts here and there. That’s our main excuse for existence, you know. I might be able to help pull a string or two.”

I knew he wasn’t referring to the State Department; he was talking about the “other side”-OVIR and the