Kolchak's gold

pilot and his three-man flight crew had orders to drop Krausser’s group by parachute, then turn southeast and attempt to reach the Japanese-held airfield at Huhehot in northern China. If the fuel didn’t last, the crew was to bail out and make its way on foot to the nearest Japanese base.

At cruising speed the flight from Donetsk to the Sayan district would take some sixteen hours; the takeoff had been planned with a night parachute-drop in mind. The deep Siberian snow was expected to make for soft landings for the parachutists. They would be dropped from an altimeter height of eighteen hundred meters, which meant their drop to the high ground would measure some two hundred meters or less; a short drop which guaranteed no one would be frostbitten by the frigid air in the drop zone.

The weather went bad, unexpectedly, and takeoff had to be postponed twenty-four hours. A snowstorm then set in which lasted nearly two days, and meteorological estimates of the weather in the Sayan district were disappointing. Krausser had to drop into the right area or risk being isolated in freezing mountain fastnesses; furthermore, the jumpers had to be able to see their drop zone or they risked death in a blind jump. For those reasons the weather in the drop zone was more critical than the weather at the takeoff point, and in the end the Germans had to wait ten days before a favorable forecast allowed von Geyr to give them the go-ahead.

On the morning of December 3, 1943, the Jagdsonderkommando took off.

The absence of records to the contrary suggests that the drop was made as planned.*

Met records show it was a typical Siberian winter: a great deal of snow lie, temperatures subfreezing but not severely so, as they were farther north in the tundra, storms frequent-one or two a week-and high winds the rule.

Krausser’s nom de guerre was Ivan Samsonov; his railroad lieutenant went under the name Yevgeni Razin. The Red Army mess hall at Tulun issued twenty-eight meal tickets to First Lieutenant Yevgeni Razin on December 8; this may indicate that Krausser (“Commissar Samsonov”) found billeting and meals elsewhere, since he was not an army officer.

The next trace of the Jagdsonderkommando does not appear until December 24, when a conscript labor battalion (60 percent men, 40 percent women) was assigned to Lieutenant Razin on temporary assignment. Provisions and camping equipment sufficient for four weeks’ work were issued to the labor battalion at Cheremkhovo. The next day, December 25, Razin signed-with an endorsement by Commissar Samsonov-an official requisition by which he commandeered the use of two steam locomotives, seventeen goods wagons† and one passenger car. This train was assembled in the yards at Zima, the nearest marshaling area to the Sayan.

The request for a labor battalion indicates that by that date-December 24-the Germans had located the right mine. Now they were ready to have the roadbed and track repaired so that they could move their train close to the mine in order to load it. But Krausser’s requisition of heavy lorries and a caterpillar-tread front-loader was not made until Januray 5, 1944-an indication that the repair of the railway took nearly two weeks.

On January 8 the construction equipment-the lorries and bulldozer-were winched onto flatbed cars coupled to Krausser’s train; that same day, the labor battalion was released to return to its former duties. Indications are that the Germans transported the members of the labor battalion back to Zima aboard the train, dropped them off, loaded the digging machinery onto the train, and left Zima for the return trip to the Sayan mining district-all on the same day, January 8.

On January 15, 1944, Krausser’s train was cleared through Krasnoyarsk (the principal marshaling yard of the Yenisey-Sayan district); it was now on its way out of the area, en route to Omsk and the Ural Mountains. Checked off against the train were bills of lading alluding to ore samples, construction materials and six goods-wagonloads of “leaden ingots” billed for delivery to an ammunition factory near Stalingrad. One assumes the Germans had simply painted the gold bullion with grey metallic paint, disguising it as lead-a rather bemusing trick of alchemy.

The train drove westward at a steady rate of 250 to 300 miles a day, receiving priority routing through the crowded switching yards and depots of Anzhero-Sudzhensk (January 17), Novosibirsk (January 18), Barabinsk (January 19), Omsk (January 21), Petropavlovsk (January 22) and Chelyabinsk (January 25).

It is at Chelyabinsk that the main lines divide and scatter. Krausser’s train moved west into the Kuibyshev along the Moscow line as far as the junction near Ufa, then branched south to the city of Kuibyshev and then southwest on a dogleg to Orenburg and Uralsk in the Kazakhian People’s Republic. The line goes west from Uralsk and crosses the Volga at Saratov. [The distance to Saratov along this indirect route was more than 1,100 miles from Chelyabinsk but] the Jagdsonderkommando train covered it in a little less than three days-an indication of the urgency the Germans must have felt by then. Villagers along the right-of-way must have been awed by the sight of such a train highballing westward, powered by one huge steam locomotive at the front and another at the rear. Undoubtedly this haste must have drawn attention the Germans would prefer to have avoided, but by this time Krausser must have learned about the alarming conditions at the front; hence the train’s acceleration. The Jagdsonderkommando and its booty were suddenly caught up in a desperate race against time.…

5. WAR’S END

In 1942 Zhukov stopped the German blitzkrieg on the doorstep of Moscow and destroyed the myth of German invincibility.

On war maps the battle lines moved relentlessly westward. For 1944 Hitler committed two hundred combat divisions to the Russian Front but it was pointless.

By the beginning of 1944 the Germans were being driven rapidly out of the Crimea and the southern Ukraine. Marshal Vatutin had pushed the Germans west out of Kiev in 1943 and by January the Germans were in full retreat toward the Polish and Rumanian borders; the German lines fell back almost a steady two miles a day during the first four months of 1944, at first wheeling back on a hinge at Odessa but then pulling back almost in parallel unison after Odessa fell to the Reds.

The collapse of Odessa left the Germans with only one Black Sea harbor to sustain her naval force- Sebastopol-and Hitler ordered that Sebastopol be kept open at all costs. In the meantime, Heinz Krausser’s planned primary route-into Kiev-had been stoppered by the Russian advance: the Red Army stood astride the railway and there was no way to get a train across the front lines, as there might have been if the city were still contested.

It left only the Crimean alternative; and the Red Army had already regained a foothold on the peninsula.

Krausser’s train, at the end of January 1944, was in a race with the Red Army to reach Sebastopol. The route von Geyr and Krausser had worked out is probably the route Krausser intended to follow: cross the Dnieper at Alexandrovsk; down through Melitopol, then across the steppes to Taganach; then over the railroad bridge onto the Crimean isthmus, and thence across Crimea into Sebastopol.

What happened to the Germans at Sebastopol is a matter of record; what happened to Krausser, his train and his Jagdsonderkommando is not.

Sebastopol was the Nazis’ Dunkirk. The city had been leveled in the early months of the war; but the harbor was intact and the German Black Sea navy used the port as its principal base, mainly for the purpose of intimidating the vacillating Turks and supporting the German war effort in Greece.

After the fall of the southern Ukraine, the Crimean peninsula was cut off from overland communication with Germany and the use of the German Black Sea navy as a support unit in Greece became impossible because the navy had no access to supplies from Germany. Nevertheless Hitler seemed more preoccupied about the possibility that the Turks might enter the war against him than he was about the fact that the Russians were already destroying his armies. At least that is the commonly accepted historical explanation for his maniacal-and evidently pointless-defense of Sebastopol. It is possible [although there is no proof yet] that one reason the Fuhrer needed to keep the port open was his expectation that Jagdsonderkommando Ein would still manage to break through the Russian encirclement somehow and deliver into German hands the billions of Reichsmarks’ worth of gold which by now must have assumed the proportions of a magic talisman in Hitler’s deranged thoughts. (Clearly it was far too late to buy a victory.)

The German Festung Sewastopol did not manage to match the Russian record for withstanding a siege.

The Russians took Sebastopol in four days. Total German losses were in excess of one hundred thousand.