Kolchak's gold

When the city fell on May 8, 1944, there was no sign of Heinz Krausser, his Jagdsonderkommando, his train, or Kolchak’s gold.

The clues are cryptic.

[Every time a train stops to take on water or fuel, or switch engines, or be shunted onto a siding to await the converse passage of another train, some yard bureaucrat must make a twitch in his logbook. Railroads everywhere are like that: records are kept of the location of every engine and every railway car at all times because it is the only way for the system to keep tabs on its rolling stock. In wartime some of these regulations were disregarded, and even when they were obeyed the records did not always survive. But each train is assigned a dispatching number which it retains as long as it retains its entity as a train: that is, from the time it is assembled until the time it is dispersed and its pieces of rolling stock are used to combine in other trains.]

….Train #S-1428-CB, 3000 kilos coal.… T #S-1428-CB, north switch 1100 hrs 28 Jan 44.… S- 1428-CB held 2325–0118 hhs for priority routing Troop Train V-8339-CJ.…

The spoor of Krausser’s train could be traced from its starting point in Siberia to the marshaling yards of Saratov, at the northerly edge of the Volgograd Reservoir. From that point to the Crimea, however, is a distance of more than one thousand kilometers by rail, and there are several alternate route approaches. The wake of Krausser’s train, beginning in February 1944, becomes progressively harder to find.

[This much is revealed by the surviving records: ] On February 3 the train passed through the rail junction at Balashov, taking the westerly branch; on February 9 it appeared in the vicinity of Kharkov, heading for Poltava; on February 12 it reappeared at Kharkov, apparently having turned back after Krausser had found out the state of the war front ahead of him. The German lines were now well to the west of Kiev, or some six hundred kilometers west of Kharkov.

The train wasted at least another week in false starts in a westerly direction before Krausser apparently decided he had to give up that attempt and strike out along the alternate route instead-toward the Crimea.

An adamant official in the switching yards at Gorlovka held the train up for two and a half days on account-of priority munitions movements; that this took place is not surprising-Krausser had had amazingly good luck up till then in keeping his train moving-but there is the curious fact that this delay took place on February 28 through March 2, 1944; the train had taken more than two weeks to traverse the three hundred kilometers between those two points. No dispatching records from intermediate stations have turned up in Russian archives. Apparently Krausser had been held up-once or several times-en route to Gorlovka.

One pictures the frenzied desperation with which Jagdsonderkommando Ein now faced the passage of every day, every hour. And now, on March 2, the dispatcher at Gorlovka only allowed the train to leave in one direction-eastward. Documents show that “Lieutenant Razin” was ordered to get his train out of the way because of urgent priority trains which were continuously arriving from the north. The train left on the evening of the second, going in the direction of Lugansk, where duly it arrived on March 4-nearly a hundred kilometers farther from the German lines than it had been two days earlier.

No further specific records have turned up. The train disappears at Lugansk, still some six hundred kilometers from the Crimea.

The records of a Red Army Graves Registration team for April 13, 1944, show that eighteen Russian soldiers were buried the preceding day on the outskirts of a deserted Jewish shtetl about fifteen kilometers northeast of Rostov, near the Don. Listed among the dead are First Lieutenant Yevgeni Razin and People’s Commissar Ivan Samsonov. The names of the sixteen remaining dead are the same, with certain variations in spelling, as the Russian cover-names of sixteen enlisted and noncommissioned members of Jagdsonderkommando Ein. Cause of death in the GR team’s report is listed as “combat casualties the result of warfare, probably against counterrevolutionary bandits”-a customary euphemism for partisans. [The anti-Communist Ukrainian army was fiercely active in that area during that period.]

The GR report leaves eleven commando members unaccounted for until one examines the attached lists of personal effects found on the bodies. On the body of “Commissar Samsonov” were found the metal Russian identity tags and papers of the eleven remaining team members. [One must conclude they had died in earlier engagements and been buried by the survivors.]

As a result it is clear that the twenty-nine men of Jagdsonderkommando Ein were wiped out without exception. [However it is also evident that the bodies were found many miles from the nearest railway track; that it is not possible for twenty-nine men to carry any significant portion of five hundred tons of gold on their persons; and that in any case no gold was reported to have been found on or near the bodies. Furthermore there is no record of the reappearance of the Krausser train as a train: that is, as an assembled entity. There are, however, ample records to prove the reappearance of several goods wagons and both locomotives which had been assigned to the train.] Both locomotives appear in an April 17 report from the marshaling yard at Donetsk, where they were used in assembling a munitions train which was dispatched to the front at Korosten. Of the numbered goods wagons, three appeared in April at Makeyevka and two others were incorporated into a heavy-weapons train being assembled at Gorlovka on May 3.

[The conclusion to be drawn from this seems inescapable: Krausser must have removed the gold from the train, hidden the gold, moved the empty train to one of the busy switching yards in South Russia, and abandoned it there, after which he must have concluded that the only recourse left open was to make his way back to Germany and report on his mission, in hopes von Geyr or someone else in higher authority would be able to come up with a new plan for extracting the treasure from Soviet territory.

[The original plan had been to smuggle the train through battle lines by taking advantage of the tactical confusion that had existed in late 1943 in several cities in the Ukraine and South Russia, where portions of the cities-Kiev for example-were in the hands of both armies. Under such circumstances it would have been possible for a train to cross from the Russian-held sector into the German, probably without being fired on. But by February 1944 there were no cities still in German hands except Sebastopol (which was inaccessible to Krausser) and those cities to which rail tracks had been destroyed by bombardment-a fact Krausser must have learned in his several unsuccessful forays west into the Ukraine in January and early February.

[Thus for the second time in twenty-five years the gold of the Czars was removed from a train and hidden. No subsequent Soviet records even so much as hint that there has ever been a suspicion in that country that the treasure may be buried near the banks of the Don in South Russia. The annihilation of Jagdsonderkommando Ein guaranteed that no one in Germany could make even a wild stab at the eventual disposition of the gold-not even those like von Geyr who were intimate with the plan to extricate the treasure.]

Erysichthon offended Ceres; in response, Ceres punished him with an insatiable appetite. Finally he ate himself.*

* Both the title and the organization of this section are the editors’.

In Bristow’s manuscript, the foregoing pages contain numerous oblique references to World War II. These would make little sense to any reader who was not acquainted with the history of the war in the USSR. Therefore the editors have deleted nearly all such references from the narrative; we have combined them, together with other material, in a separate section here, in order to put everything before the reader with the minimum confusion and obscurity.

This section, therefore, is compiled mainly from Harris Bristow’s working notes; from passages deleted from the foregoing manuscript pages; from the transcribed interviews with Haim Tippelskirch; and from a summary outline which Bristow prepared in 1971 as a basic framework for his Sebastopol project.

For certain events we have no other guide than the cryptic references in Bristow’s Vienna manuscript, since his Russian notes have been lost. Therefore, in a few cases, we have been forced to draw inferences. They are so labeled.

As in the Kolchak segment, material supplied by the editors appears in brackets, while the Tippelskirch statements appear set off in quotation marks. But it must be understood that this section is a re-creation of Bristow’s notes rather than an edited version of an existing manuscript. The words are mainly Bristow’s but the connectives are the editors’. To mark all of them would be to create pages so cluttered with ellipses and brackets that they would be unreadable. In all cases, any fact or event which is not from Bristow’s material is clearly marked as such, by appearing in brackets or in a footnote. But we repeat that Bristow did not actually “write” this section as it now appears.-Ed.