The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies

mine, 200 miles southwest of Berlin, and in the mountains above Oberbayern. And in the cool vaults of Swiss banks.

Following a B-17 raid on 3 February 1945 which hit the Berlin Reichsbank, $238 millions’ worth of the Third Reich’s gold reserves was taken by German Alpine troops under the command of Colonel Franz Pfeiffer and hidden in the Merker mine. Three months later the mine and mountain hoards were captured by Patton’s US Third Army and placed under safe military control.

Well, not quite. Even by the estimates of the US Army, 2 per cent of the closing balance of the Reichsbank went missing, amounting to several million dollars (at 1945 values). The Guinness Book of Records called the disappearance of the Merkers and Oberbayern gold “the largest robbery on record”. Some conspiracy researchers suggest that the missing gold was appropriated by SS clandestine escape network ODESSA, then shipped to Spain to fund various ex-Nazi organizations such as Paladin.

Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, authors of Nazi Gold, have a less convoluted explanation for the gold missing from Merkers and Oberbayern; it was heisted in bits by just about every GI and soldat who could get their mitts on it.

The story of the rest of the Third Reich’s missing gold is more sordid still.

In 1997, the World Jewish Congress and the US Senate Banking Committee uncovered a tainted tale of Swiss-based financial institutions accepting gold from Nazi Germany without any proper scrutiny. The deposits included gold stolen from Jewish bank deposits, jewellery and even dental work from the millions of Jews exterminated in the death camps, all of which was smelted down into bullion bars, and stamped with pre-war dates to make it appear genuine. The sums involved were vast—more than $400 million went into Basel’s Bank for International Settlements alone—and the “laundered” bullion was afterwards diverted into the central banks of Sweden, Argentina, Turkey, Portugal and Spain as payments for trade. The Swiss, despite their avowed neutrality, were aiding the Nazi war effort. Post-1945 the Swiss banks vigorously denied accepting looted gold—until the 1997 report from the WJC and US Senate obliged them to admit that the nation’s banks had made no discernible effort to check the provenance of gold deposited by the Third Reich until late in the war. And that the said banks still held as much as $20 billion in “Nazi gold”. Swiss banks also denied, then admitted, keeping for themselves the contents of “heirless accounts”—the accounts of Holocaust victims. With the threat of class actions by US beneficiaries, the Swiss Government set up a $5 billion annual compensation fund for the victims of the Holocaust and other human catastrophes—a weasel formulation that allowed the Swiss to pretend to be beneficent humanitarians.

Alas, it was not only the Swiss that had bloodstained Nazi gold in their coffers. The governments of the US, Britain and France set up the Tripartite Gold Commission after the war to return seized gold. Only about 70 per cent of the gold, however, was reimbursed, and two tons remains in the Federal Reserve in the US and three and half tons in the Bank of England. A document discovered in the US Embassy in Paris asserted that one shipment of 8,307 gold bars taken by the Allies from a German salt mine might “represent melted down gold teeth fillings”. Quite possibly some of this remodelled gold is held in the Fed or the Bank of England.

Then there is the Vatican. In 1997 a declassified US intelligence report from 1946 indicated that the Vatican was holding $170 million Nazi gold “for safe keeping”. The gold, mainly in coins, was stolen from gypsies, Serbs and Jews exterminated by the Nazis’ puppet Ustasha Government in Yugoslavia. Holocaust research groups, notably the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, accused the Vatican of using the gold in the years after the war to smuggle Nazi war criminals out of Europe down the “ratlines” run by ODESSA.

The accusations were rejected by the Vatican, which opened its World War II archives in 2003 to researchers in an attempt to prove its innocence. Such “transparency” did little to mollify Holocaust groups and conspiracy theorists, because it seemed entirely plausible that any damning documents had already been destroyed.

The Vatican was far from being a monolith during World War II. Certainly, some factions were pro-Nazi and provided material aid to SS on the run in the conflict’s aftermath; on the other hand, there were Vatican factions that were resolutely anti-Nazi. Lest it be forgotten, agencies in the Vatican helped thousands of Jews flee persecution.

What then, you might wonder, did the Nazis dump in Lake Toplitz? In 1959, a team financed by the German magazine Stern retrieved ?72 million in forged sterling currency hidden in boxes, and a printing press.

The currency was part of a secret counterfeiting operation, Operation Bernhard, personally authorized by Adolf Hitler to weaken the British economy.

Further Reading

Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, Nazi Gold: The Story of the World’s Greatest Robbery—and Its Aftermath, 1984

NEW COKE

Meet the new Coke. Same as the old Coke?

Back in the rock ’n’ roll fifties, Coca-Cola (popularly called “Coke”) had the American soft drinks market sewn up, with a 60 per cent share. Thirty years later, Coke’s share of the beverage business was down to 24 per cent due to competition from arch-rival Pepsi.

The big bubbles at Coke decided to fight back in 1985 by changing the formula of Coke. Alas, “New Coke” was loathed by pretty much everyone in the USA (with the exception of Angelinos) and consequent public clamour forced Coke bosses to hastily reintroduce the original drink formulation, now rebranded as Coca-Cola Classic.

Pepsi executives laughed themselves silly at Coke’s marketing disaster and fast U-turn, gave their staff a day’s holiday and declared that they had won the “Coke wars”.

They laughed too soon. Coca-Cola Classic put on sales galore and Coke gained itself the rep as “the company that listens to its customers”—leading to speculation that the “New Coke” venture had been nothing but a clever marketing ploy. Or conspiracy.

There are almost as many versions of the New Coke conspiracy as there are bubbles in a can of New Coke/Classic Coke. The main trio are:

Version one maintains that there was no actual difference between Classic Coke and New Coke save what was on the outside of the tin, and the introduction of New Coke was designed to fail and make Joe Public clamour for the real stuff. A certain fact is suggestive here: in numerous blind taste trials punters could not tell the two drinks apart. Also, the speed with which Coke reintroduced the classic brand—within three months, with cans enough for everyone—led to speculation that the company had a stockpile of the classic stuff ready waiting in the wings.

In version two people believe the switch back—planned all along—to “classic” Coke allowed the company to subtly change the drink’s formula, substituting inexpensive high fructose corn syrup for sugar. Working against this conspiracy is the fact that Classic Coke everywhere outside the US is made with sugar.

By the lights of version three, the New Coke–Classic Coke manoeuvre was cover for the company to remove all traces of cocoa plant from the drink at the behest of the Drug Enforcement Agency. Actually the new version was cocoa free, but there is zero evidence to suggest that the DEA laid down the law to Coke’s executives.

Although sly, black-hearted, power-mad capitalist execs are stock characters in conspiracy theories, in real life the suits are more prone to cock-up than conspire. When one Coke exec said of the New Coke venture, “We’re not that dumb, and we’re not that smart,” he likely spoke the truth. Coke underestimated the affection of the American people for the iconic drink (the dumb bit) but when the New Coke deal started to go wrong, the company smartly responded by bringing back the real thing (the smart bit). And, hey, even capitalists can get lucky.