Grey Wolf: The Escape of Adolf Hitler (54 page)

  29    
“my own private existence”:
Whetton,
Hitler’s Fortune
.

  30    
“financed from the AH Fund”:
Ibid.

  30    
“household of the Führer”:
Center of the Web
.

  30    
“his brilliant business acumen”:
von Lang,
Bormann
.

Chapter 4: T
HE
R
APE OF
E
UROPE

  32    
Hitler’s early life:
Michael Fitzgerald,
Adolf Hitler: A Portrait
(Stroud, UK: Spellmount Books, 2006).

  32    
“racial purity”:
Burleigh,
Third Reich
.

  33    
“eliminating political opponents”:
Bessel,
Nazism and War
.

  33    
“‘Aryanization’ of all aspects of German society”:
Mark Mazower,
Hitler’s Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe
(London: Allen Lane, 2008).

  34    
Kristallnacht:
James Pool,
Hitler and His Secret Partners: Contributions, Loot and Rewards 1933–1945
(New York: Pocket Books, 1997).

  35    
“bureaucracy of murder”:
John Cornwell,
Hitler’s Scientists: Science, War and the Devil’s Pact
(London: Penguin Books, 2004).

  35    
“safekeeping of works of art”:
Richard Z. Chesnoff,
Pack of Thieves: How Hitler and Europe Plundered the Jews and Committed the Greatest Theft in History
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000).

  36    
“painter of idyllic landscapes”:
Ronald Pawly,
Hitler’s Chancellery: A Palace to Last a Thousand Years
(Ramsbury, UK: Crowood Press, 2009).

  36    
“Look at those details”:
Delaforce,
The Hitler File
.

  36    
Rosenberg and “the character Wilhelm Furtwängler”:
Jonathan Petropoulos,
The Faustian Bargain: The Art World in Nazi Germany
(London: Allen Lane, 2000). Museums were also required to provide some of their acceptable masterpieces for the decoration of the New Reich Chancellery. For instance, in 1938–39 Speer requisitioned “on loan” many works from the Art Historical Museum in Vienna, including twenty-one enormous seventeenth-century Dutch and Belgian tapestries; see Pawly,
Hitler’s Chancellery
.

  37    
Committee for the Exploitation of Degenerate Art:
Lynn H. Nicholas,
The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994).

  38    
“extraordinary bargains”:
Ibid.

  38    
“triumphal progress through Vienna”:
Saul Friedländer,
Nazi Germany and the Jews
(London: Phoenix, 2009).

  38    
Rothschilds:
Hitler reserved a special loathing for this famous Jewish family of financiers and art collectors whose collections in Vienna and Paris he plundered for his planned Führermuseum at Linz. His grandmother had once worked as a maid for the Vienna branch of the family, and rumors persisted that her bastard son, Hitler’s father Alois Schicklgruber, had been sired by a Rothschild—which would have made Hitler one-quarter Jewish.

  39    
“his eyes glittering” and “It was the dream of my life”:
Albert Speer,
Inside the Third Reich
(London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1970).

  40    
“Jewish-owned works of degenerate art”:
Nicholas,
Rape of Europa
.

  40    
Jeu du Paume:
Hector Feliciano,
The Lost Museum: The Nazi Conspiracy to Steal the World’s Greatest Works of Art
(New York: Basic Books, 1997).

  41    
Aktion-M:
Chesnoff,
Pack of Thieves
.

  41    
“Soviet Union lost 1.148 million artworks”:
See footnotes of
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_plunder
.

  41    
“cultural center of the Thousand-Year Reich”:
Mazower,
Hitler’s Empire
.

  42    
“Bormann knew the location”:
Whetton,
Hitler’s Fortune
.

  42    
“bogus art dealerships in Latin American locations”:
Stanley G. Payne,
Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany and World War II
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008).

  42    
“flow of confiscated art”:
Nicholas,
Rape of Europa
.

  43    
“involving 137 freight cars”:
Shoah Resource Center,
www.yadvashem.org
, “Einsatzstab Rosenberg.”

Chapter 5: N
AZI
G
OLD

  44    
German gold reserves:
John Weitz,
Hitler’s Banker: Hjalmar Horace Greely Schacht
(London: Little, Brown, 1999).

  45    
“abundance of gold”:
Chesnoff,
Pack of Thieves
.

  45    
plunder of European gold reserves:
Arthur L. Smith,
Hitler’s Gold: The Story of the Nazi War Loot
(Dulles, VA: Berg, 1996).

  46    
“Eventually the French agreed to hand over the Belgian gold”:
Ibid.

  46    
“saga of the Belgian gold”:
Ibid.

  47    
“gold items taken from the victims”:
Yeadon and Hawkins,
Nazi Hydra in America.
The scale of Aktion Reinhardt—the theft of prisoners’ possessions prior to their extermination in the death camps—was staggering, involving the expropriation of 53,013,133 reichsmarks in cash; foreign currency in bank notes to a value of 1,452,904 reichsmarks; foreign currency in gold coins to a value of 843,802 reichsmarks; precious metals to a value of 5,353,943 reichsmarks; other valuables, such as jewelry, watches, and spectacles, to a value of 26,089,800 reichsmarks; and clothing and textiles to a value of 13,294,400 reichsmarks, to give a grand total of 100,047,983 reichsmarks. The obscene exactitude of the Nazi accounting of the Holocaust utterly beggars belief.

  48    
“favored the Bank for International Settlements”:
von Hassell et al.,
Alliance of Enemies
.

  50    
“In 1939 the Banco Nacional de Portugal held 63 tons of gold”:
Antonio Louça and Ansgar Schäfer, “Portugal and the Nazi Gold: The ‘Lisbon Connection’ in the Sales of Looted Gold by the Third Reich”; see online PDF at
www.yadvashem.org
.

  52    
“$890 million in gold”:
John Loftus and Mark Aarons,
The Secret War Against the Jews
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). It was not until May 1997 that the BIS admitted to accepting shipments of Nazi gold that had been melted down and stamped with prewar German markings to disguise the fact that it was looted from other countries.

  52    
François-René de Chateaubriand:
von Hassell et al.,
Alliance of Enemies
.

Chapter 6: E
AGLE
F
LIGHT AND
L
AND OF
F
IRE

  53    
Operation Citadel:
Davies,
Europe at War 1939–45
.

  54    
“sales of ‘degenerate art’”:
Nicholas,
Rape of Europa
.

  55    
“290,000 carats of diamonds”:
Chesnoff,
Pack of Thieves
.

  55    
“high-value minerals”:
Ladislas Farago,
Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich
(New York: Avon Books, 1974).

  56    
Operation Andreas/Bernhard:
Yeadon and Hawkins,
Nazi Hydra in America
. The forgeries were so good that the Bank of England could do little to call them in after the war without destroying faith in British paper money; as a result, nothing was said or done and they remained in circulation until 1954, when a new design of the five-pound note replaced the old white “bedsheet.” The scale of the operation was considerable: 3,945,867 five-pound notes, 2,398,981 ten-pound notes, and 1,337,325 twenty-pound notes were produced, in addition to a quantity of fifty-pound notes. Work on counterfeit U.S. dollar notes began in the spring of 1944, and the first examples together with real bills were presented to Heinrich Himmler in January 1945. He was unable to tell the difference between the true and fake notes, but serious production of counterfeit dollars was never undertaken in quantity. For a fuller account of Operation Andreas/Bernhard, see “Report on Forgery in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp,” dated December 15, 1945, compiled by the Central Criminal Office of the Czechoslovak Ministry of the Interior.

  56    
Project Eagle Flight:
Manning,
Martin Bormann
.

  57    
“heavy water”:
Chesnoff,
Pack of Thieves
.