Golden empty
In May, 1945-th had nothing to export from Germany
In August of this year, two clients of a law firm reported to the authorities of the Polish city of Walbrzych that they had found the legendary “golden echelon” with treasures looted by the Nazis. According to them, the train is in a walled-up tunnel at a depth of 70 meters, which is allegedly confirmed by the GPR images.
This news immediately reminded historythat happened to me three years ago. Then a former Soviet citizen who had been living in Germany for several decades and his German partner also suggested that I search for Nazi treasures from the disappeared train ... I’d just say that my former compatriot, whom I directly contacted via e-mail, seems to me an involuntary victim of the scam from the German side, so I will not name him.
So, in July, 2012, a certain person addressed me, who said that his friend wanted to sell a German propaganda album dedicated to the entourage of the Soviet 2 th shock army. He asked me to publish the first interrogation of General Vlasov, contained in this album, in order to make a certain advertisement for the product. The original interrogation revealed a number of significant errors in the formerly known Russian translation. With a clean heart, I made a new translation and published it in MIC (No. 30, 2012). As it turned out, it was just a hook, with the help of which I had to take a much larger bait.
Finance the excavation, please
In correspondence by e-mail my correspondents set out the following story.
At the very end of the war, a train of jewels stolen by the Nazis from the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as with secret documents, was sent to Berlin. Since the path to the heart of the Third Reich was cut off by Soviet troops, the train was sent to Austria, and in the last days before surrender, after Hitler's suicide, he was driven across the border to Bavaria. Initially, the train was loaded in Budapest.
Two SS Sturmbanführer from the cultural treasury department put all the treasures in an adit at one mountain in Bavaria, near the Austrian border. In order not to leave witnesses, they killed Soviet prisoners who hid the cargo accompanying the convoy, as well as two Wehrmacht generals, who made the strange decision to travel on the “golden echelon” in order to surrender to the Americans in Bavaria. In response to a question, why did the SS in the last days of the war suddenly need to move the train to Bavaria, instead of simply bury values somewhere in the Austrian Alps, my counterparties mumbled something unintelligible - they say, the Sturmbannführer understood that the winners recognized the Anschlus as insignificant, Austria would separate, so you need to hide the loot in Germany without fail.
Then, my German counterpart, one Dietmar Clodo, who allegedly worked in the West German constitution protection agency, that is, counterintelligence, and was searching for Nazi war criminals, discovered in Paraguay one of two sturmbanführs accompanying the "golden echelon", some Peter Reichel. Under the threat of exposing and transferring it to Israeli secret services (and Reichel was notable for “the final solution of the Jewish question”), he forced him to tell about the hidden treasures and his accomplice - the second sturmbanführer. Later, Claudo and his friend went to the descendants of the second Sturmbannführer, Count von Westfalen, and received from them information about the place where the treasures can be found, as well as funds in the amount of 20 000 marks for the production of searches. Newly-found treasure hunters rented a plot of land where the treasures were supposed to be located, and conducted research there with the help of georadar, which confirmed that there were some massive objects under the ground, as well as corpses of people.
The difficulty was that the plot was in public ownership, either of the Bavarian government or of the local municipality. And according to local laws, only the owner of the land, but not its tenant, can make archaeological excavations. Our treasure seekers had been convincing the Bavarian government for several years to transfer the piece of land they were leasing to private ownership and finally seemed to be persuaded. Of course, they did not stutter about the treasures, so that the authorities would not break the excessive price. After acquiring ground penetrating radars and other search equipment, the companions lost a lot of money and there was nothing to pay for the site purchase. And therefore could Mr. Sokolov find in Russia rich Buratino ready to invest in the purchase of land in Bavaria and then finance the excavation? In the case of a successful outcome of the case, I was offered a certain percentage and a monopoly on the publication of all secret documents found at the site.
Westphalen show no interest
The fact that I am dealing with ordinary scammers, I, in general, guessed from the very beginning. Why distill a train from Austria to Germany on the very eve of surrender? My distrust of the correspondents was reinforced by their stories about the best archaeological equipment, which discovered a large amount of high-density metal, as well as the “most advanced selective metal detector on the market,” which allegedly found large concentrations of gold. The scheme of the scam is very clear: to sell a piece of land to some ingenious rich man at a fabulous price so that he would look for Reich gold there even before the second coming.
The main part of the gold reserves of the Reichsbank
transported to the salt mines of the Merkers, where
it and found the American intelligence
Photo: livejournal.com [/ center]
It seems that the firm providing georadars and other “newest archaeological equipment”, which unmistakably shows treasures in the right places, was directly connected with fraudsters.
But I wanted to play a little with treasure hunters to bring them to the clear water. Therefore, I wrote that to search for an investor, at least some documentary evidence of the existence of a mysterious train is needed. And he asked me to let me know the names of two attackers-killers of murderers, in order to find information about them in the available sources. Not a single SS officer in the rank of Sturmbanführer and above named Peter Reichel was in the files. But the Count Hermenegild von Westfalen was found among the SS men. But calling me that name, the companions missed. Hermenegild Westfalen, born in 1909, really served in the SS forces, but never had any relation to the SS structures that dealt with displaced cultural values. With the rank of Obersturmmbuhführer SS, he commanded the 24 th Panzer-Grenadier Regiment "Danmark" 11-th Panzer-Grenadier SS division "Nordland", participated in the battles at the Narva bridgehead, received a German cross in gold, was seriously wounded and died in the German cross in gold, was seriously wounded and died on the German cross in gold 28 hospital in May 1944 of the year, as there is information in the file of the SS officers.
What I told my German correspondents, I warned in a friendly way that they, in all likelihood, were the victims of fraudsters. Then one of them (a former Soviet citizen) tried to convince me that his fatal mistake was to blame for everything: “He didn’t,” he wrote to me, “reasons to check the sources, since one of them (Reichel) was received by the service, and the other ( Westfalen) showed no signs of quackery. He not only did not ask for money, on the contrary, indicating the route of the train, he offered a well-paid order to search for a place of discharge. One would assume that we are talking about land speculation, but the land is in public ownership, we had to persuade the village council to sell it for five years, and the price was calculated strictly according to the official price list, no one extorted any bribes either. There was, of course, the possibility of complex mystification, but we were satisfied with the results of repeated field checks confirming the version of the sources, so checking their past seemed like a waste of money ... The name of the old graph was definitely not Hermenegild, my partner was convinced of that, and he did not appear to be that name . The data that I sent to you was not provided to them, but was the dismal result of my reasoning ...
This is a very well-known family with broad kinship and social ties, and the opportunity to impersonate the owner of the family estate of the Bavarian branch of the von Westphalen counts, where he lived and received secular acquaintances, would not be an impostor.
To call any SS man would be, as they say, counterproductive: the case is presented as a request for help in a family matter, since my partner was in close relations with a relative of Westfalen ...
It was early to talk about material interest at this stage, but Westphalen at this meeting provided information on the train’s route and asked my partner to look for the place where the unloading took place. They gave him upfront costs of 20 000 marks and promised to provide additional funds after the first report. In those years it was a solid amount.
Having information from Paraguay, which he did not attach importance to in his time, my partner easily found this place, followed him for two days and came to the conclusion that, due to the status of the site, it was impossible to carry out hidden excavations ... At this point the case was dismissed as unpromising. It can be assumed that in case of a positive test result, Westphalen would have shown their own material interest or that person who was behind them. ”
Two weeks for unloading
Regarding the number of guards, the ability of prisoners to flee and the amount of work, my correspondent reported the following: “I have been living at this station for four years. During this time, I interviewed all the villagers of the appropriate age, as well as those who heard about this story from their parents.
As far as I was able to restore the picture of what was happening in these stories, the procedure was as follows: for two weeks the SS troops occupied the ruins on a mountain near the station where they deployed a temporary base. There were no trains during these two weeks. Some time before the arrival of the train, they deployed a cordon of the section of the railway located under the mountain, where the temporary base was located, between the railway and the highway.
At the same time, SS patrols warned residents that it was forbidden to approach the station and use the stretch of highway between the station and the mountain. A few hours later, a train approached, which stopped, not reaching the station, opposite the mountain, where the temporary base was located. Thus, the train found itself between the cordon of the cordon, which had its back to it (facing the deserted highway), and the mountain, on top of which the temporary base was located. The foot of the mountain and the mound divided the flood meadow ...
I know this area very well, this is a mountain pass, there is nowhere to run. One of the witnesses vaguely remembers that when the train passed by the village, he saw an excavator platform in it. ”
Please note that in this story, as in the Polish case, there is also a mountain, which supposedly buried treasures. In the new version, it turned out that the train was unloaded for almost two weeks, at least several days (previously, it was literally about one day), and a whole temporary base was created for this. True, then it is completely incomprehensible how the numerous SS guards who were guarding the train stop did not know anything about the nature of the cargo and did not remember the place where they had to unload something valuable. In addition, the refusal to name the true name of Count Westfalen, which, according to the above legend, should have been reliably known to Ditmar, betrayed companions with a head. They were afraid to call the name randomly, since I could ascertain that there was no such person in the SS. In general, my correspondents realized that the matter did not burn out with me.
All have long been found Americans
In August of this year, when the “golden armored train” surfaced in Poland, I nevertheless decided to see who such a lawyer is Dr. Dietmar Claudo. And he found out that he was a friend of the writer Eduard Limonov. He participated in student unrest in Paris in 1968, was in the left-wing Socialist Student Union of Germany, had friends in the East German Stasi and allegedly robbed two or ten good banks in Western Europe. In 90, I was involved in a one-plant scam in Hungary.
Instead of the usual passenger train in Polish history, there is a “golden armored train” that came out of Breslau (Wroclaw) and disappeared from Walbrzych. Why armored train? Because in Breslau there really was an armored train. It was created at the initiative of the first commandant of the fortress, Major General Hans von Alphen, who belonged to the engineering troops. The crew of the armored train was 108 people, most of them survived the war. In principle, they could not take any treasures on it anywhere, even if they really wanted to, since it was commissioned only on March 20 on 1945, when Breslau had long been surrounded by the Red Army. Despite the damage, the armored train took part in the defense right up to the surrender and did not leave for Walbrzych. In the story of the “gold of the Reich,” he apparently appeared because the authors of the legend had heard something about the German armored train in Breslau, but did not know the details.
In addition, back in February 1945, the bulk of the Reichsbank gold reserves was transported to the Merkers salt mines in Western Thuringia, where it was discovered by 7 on April by American 90 Infantry Division reconnaissance forces that were unloading gold, as well as paintings and sculptures from Berlin museums, including the famous Nefertiti, in the mines. Nobody was going to shoot them, as we see. After all, gold and other valuables, including antiques, were hidden from bombing, and not with the expectation that no one could find them later. Similarly, it is incredible that gold and cultural property was hidden in the mines to finance the future Nazi underground. The fact that for this purpose deposits could be made in Swiss banks could theoretically still be allowed. But storing values for this in mines and dungeons is meaningless. How, interestingly, underground workers would organize large-scale excavations in the conditions of occupation?
All the stories about hundreds of tons of gold and other valuables allegedly hidden to finance the post-war revival of Nazism are a myth. If only because the gold and hard currency by May 1945, in the Third Reich is almost gone.
Total Americans found in Thuringia about one hundred tons of gold - 93,2 percent of the gold reserves of the Reichsbank by the end of the war. If at the beginning of 1939, the Reichsbank's gold reserves amounted to 500 million Reichsmarks, by 28 in February 1945, it was reduced to 77,4 million, which the Americans found in the Merkers mines. Six or seven tons of gold could be outside of this treasure, but certainly not 300. All sorts of 50 tons of platinum from the 15 of the Cossack corps, 20 barrels of gold from the Tatar SS legion, hundreds of tons of gold reserves of the Italian dictator Mussolini and the Croatian dictator Pavelic and other untold riches of the Third Reich, as if completely disappeared and waiting for their hours in some abandoned mine or adit, just bait for catching gullible fools.
In August of this year, two clients of a law firm reported to the authorities of the Polish city of Walbrzych that they had found the legendary “golden echelon” with treasures looted by the Nazis. According to them, the train is in a walled-up tunnel at a depth of 70 meters, which is allegedly confirmed by the GPR images.
This news immediately reminded historythat happened to me three years ago. Then a former Soviet citizen who had been living in Germany for several decades and his German partner also suggested that I search for Nazi treasures from the disappeared train ... I’d just say that my former compatriot, whom I directly contacted via e-mail, seems to me an involuntary victim of the scam from the German side, so I will not name him.
So, in July, 2012, a certain person addressed me, who said that his friend wanted to sell a German propaganda album dedicated to the entourage of the Soviet 2 th shock army. He asked me to publish the first interrogation of General Vlasov, contained in this album, in order to make a certain advertisement for the product. The original interrogation revealed a number of significant errors in the formerly known Russian translation. With a clean heart, I made a new translation and published it in MIC (No. 30, 2012). As it turned out, it was just a hook, with the help of which I had to take a much larger bait.
Finance the excavation, please
In correspondence by e-mail my correspondents set out the following story.
At the very end of the war, a train of jewels stolen by the Nazis from the Jews of Central and Eastern Europe, as well as with secret documents, was sent to Berlin. Since the path to the heart of the Third Reich was cut off by Soviet troops, the train was sent to Austria, and in the last days before surrender, after Hitler's suicide, he was driven across the border to Bavaria. Initially, the train was loaded in Budapest.
Two SS Sturmbanführer from the cultural treasury department put all the treasures in an adit at one mountain in Bavaria, near the Austrian border. In order not to leave witnesses, they killed Soviet prisoners who hid the cargo accompanying the convoy, as well as two Wehrmacht generals, who made the strange decision to travel on the “golden echelon” in order to surrender to the Americans in Bavaria. In response to a question, why did the SS in the last days of the war suddenly need to move the train to Bavaria, instead of simply bury values somewhere in the Austrian Alps, my counterparties mumbled something unintelligible - they say, the Sturmbannführer understood that the winners recognized the Anschlus as insignificant, Austria would separate, so you need to hide the loot in Germany without fail.
Then, my German counterpart, one Dietmar Clodo, who allegedly worked in the West German constitution protection agency, that is, counterintelligence, and was searching for Nazi war criminals, discovered in Paraguay one of two sturmbanführs accompanying the "golden echelon", some Peter Reichel. Under the threat of exposing and transferring it to Israeli secret services (and Reichel was notable for “the final solution of the Jewish question”), he forced him to tell about the hidden treasures and his accomplice - the second sturmbanführer. Later, Claudo and his friend went to the descendants of the second Sturmbannführer, Count von Westfalen, and received from them information about the place where the treasures can be found, as well as funds in the amount of 20 000 marks for the production of searches. Newly-found treasure hunters rented a plot of land where the treasures were supposed to be located, and conducted research there with the help of georadar, which confirmed that there were some massive objects under the ground, as well as corpses of people.
The difficulty was that the plot was in public ownership, either of the Bavarian government or of the local municipality. And according to local laws, only the owner of the land, but not its tenant, can make archaeological excavations. Our treasure seekers had been convincing the Bavarian government for several years to transfer the piece of land they were leasing to private ownership and finally seemed to be persuaded. Of course, they did not stutter about the treasures, so that the authorities would not break the excessive price. After acquiring ground penetrating radars and other search equipment, the companions lost a lot of money and there was nothing to pay for the site purchase. And therefore could Mr. Sokolov find in Russia rich Buratino ready to invest in the purchase of land in Bavaria and then finance the excavation? In the case of a successful outcome of the case, I was offered a certain percentage and a monopoly on the publication of all secret documents found at the site.
Westphalen show no interest
The fact that I am dealing with ordinary scammers, I, in general, guessed from the very beginning. Why distill a train from Austria to Germany on the very eve of surrender? My distrust of the correspondents was reinforced by their stories about the best archaeological equipment, which discovered a large amount of high-density metal, as well as the “most advanced selective metal detector on the market,” which allegedly found large concentrations of gold. The scheme of the scam is very clear: to sell a piece of land to some ingenious rich man at a fabulous price so that he would look for Reich gold there even before the second coming.
[Center]
The main part of the gold reserves of the Reichsbank
transported to the salt mines of the Merkers, where
it and found the American intelligence
Photo: livejournal.com [/ center]
It seems that the firm providing georadars and other “newest archaeological equipment”, which unmistakably shows treasures in the right places, was directly connected with fraudsters.
But I wanted to play a little with treasure hunters to bring them to the clear water. Therefore, I wrote that to search for an investor, at least some documentary evidence of the existence of a mysterious train is needed. And he asked me to let me know the names of two attackers-killers of murderers, in order to find information about them in the available sources. Not a single SS officer in the rank of Sturmbanführer and above named Peter Reichel was in the files. But the Count Hermenegild von Westfalen was found among the SS men. But calling me that name, the companions missed. Hermenegild Westfalen, born in 1909, really served in the SS forces, but never had any relation to the SS structures that dealt with displaced cultural values. With the rank of Obersturmmbuhführer SS, he commanded the 24 th Panzer-Grenadier Regiment "Danmark" 11-th Panzer-Grenadier SS division "Nordland", participated in the battles at the Narva bridgehead, received a German cross in gold, was seriously wounded and died in the German cross in gold, was seriously wounded and died on the German cross in gold 28 hospital in May 1944 of the year, as there is information in the file of the SS officers.
What I told my German correspondents, I warned in a friendly way that they, in all likelihood, were the victims of fraudsters. Then one of them (a former Soviet citizen) tried to convince me that his fatal mistake was to blame for everything: “He didn’t,” he wrote to me, “reasons to check the sources, since one of them (Reichel) was received by the service, and the other ( Westfalen) showed no signs of quackery. He not only did not ask for money, on the contrary, indicating the route of the train, he offered a well-paid order to search for a place of discharge. One would assume that we are talking about land speculation, but the land is in public ownership, we had to persuade the village council to sell it for five years, and the price was calculated strictly according to the official price list, no one extorted any bribes either. There was, of course, the possibility of complex mystification, but we were satisfied with the results of repeated field checks confirming the version of the sources, so checking their past seemed like a waste of money ... The name of the old graph was definitely not Hermenegild, my partner was convinced of that, and he did not appear to be that name . The data that I sent to you was not provided to them, but was the dismal result of my reasoning ...
This is a very well-known family with broad kinship and social ties, and the opportunity to impersonate the owner of the family estate of the Bavarian branch of the von Westphalen counts, where he lived and received secular acquaintances, would not be an impostor.
To call any SS man would be, as they say, counterproductive: the case is presented as a request for help in a family matter, since my partner was in close relations with a relative of Westfalen ...
It was early to talk about material interest at this stage, but Westphalen at this meeting provided information on the train’s route and asked my partner to look for the place where the unloading took place. They gave him upfront costs of 20 000 marks and promised to provide additional funds after the first report. In those years it was a solid amount.
Having information from Paraguay, which he did not attach importance to in his time, my partner easily found this place, followed him for two days and came to the conclusion that, due to the status of the site, it was impossible to carry out hidden excavations ... At this point the case was dismissed as unpromising. It can be assumed that in case of a positive test result, Westphalen would have shown their own material interest or that person who was behind them. ”
Two weeks for unloading
Regarding the number of guards, the ability of prisoners to flee and the amount of work, my correspondent reported the following: “I have been living at this station for four years. During this time, I interviewed all the villagers of the appropriate age, as well as those who heard about this story from their parents.
As far as I was able to restore the picture of what was happening in these stories, the procedure was as follows: for two weeks the SS troops occupied the ruins on a mountain near the station where they deployed a temporary base. There were no trains during these two weeks. Some time before the arrival of the train, they deployed a cordon of the section of the railway located under the mountain, where the temporary base was located, between the railway and the highway.
At the same time, SS patrols warned residents that it was forbidden to approach the station and use the stretch of highway between the station and the mountain. A few hours later, a train approached, which stopped, not reaching the station, opposite the mountain, where the temporary base was located. Thus, the train found itself between the cordon of the cordon, which had its back to it (facing the deserted highway), and the mountain, on top of which the temporary base was located. The foot of the mountain and the mound divided the flood meadow ...
I know this area very well, this is a mountain pass, there is nowhere to run. One of the witnesses vaguely remembers that when the train passed by the village, he saw an excavator platform in it. ”
Please note that in this story, as in the Polish case, there is also a mountain, which supposedly buried treasures. In the new version, it turned out that the train was unloaded for almost two weeks, at least several days (previously, it was literally about one day), and a whole temporary base was created for this. True, then it is completely incomprehensible how the numerous SS guards who were guarding the train stop did not know anything about the nature of the cargo and did not remember the place where they had to unload something valuable. In addition, the refusal to name the true name of Count Westfalen, which, according to the above legend, should have been reliably known to Ditmar, betrayed companions with a head. They were afraid to call the name randomly, since I could ascertain that there was no such person in the SS. In general, my correspondents realized that the matter did not burn out with me.
All have long been found Americans
In August of this year, when the “golden armored train” surfaced in Poland, I nevertheless decided to see who such a lawyer is Dr. Dietmar Claudo. And he found out that he was a friend of the writer Eduard Limonov. He participated in student unrest in Paris in 1968, was in the left-wing Socialist Student Union of Germany, had friends in the East German Stasi and allegedly robbed two or ten good banks in Western Europe. In 90, I was involved in a one-plant scam in Hungary.
Instead of the usual passenger train in Polish history, there is a “golden armored train” that came out of Breslau (Wroclaw) and disappeared from Walbrzych. Why armored train? Because in Breslau there really was an armored train. It was created at the initiative of the first commandant of the fortress, Major General Hans von Alphen, who belonged to the engineering troops. The crew of the armored train was 108 people, most of them survived the war. In principle, they could not take any treasures on it anywhere, even if they really wanted to, since it was commissioned only on March 20 on 1945, when Breslau had long been surrounded by the Red Army. Despite the damage, the armored train took part in the defense right up to the surrender and did not leave for Walbrzych. In the story of the “gold of the Reich,” he apparently appeared because the authors of the legend had heard something about the German armored train in Breslau, but did not know the details.
In addition, back in February 1945, the bulk of the Reichsbank gold reserves was transported to the Merkers salt mines in Western Thuringia, where it was discovered by 7 on April by American 90 Infantry Division reconnaissance forces that were unloading gold, as well as paintings and sculptures from Berlin museums, including the famous Nefertiti, in the mines. Nobody was going to shoot them, as we see. After all, gold and other valuables, including antiques, were hidden from bombing, and not with the expectation that no one could find them later. Similarly, it is incredible that gold and cultural property was hidden in the mines to finance the future Nazi underground. The fact that for this purpose deposits could be made in Swiss banks could theoretically still be allowed. But storing values for this in mines and dungeons is meaningless. How, interestingly, underground workers would organize large-scale excavations in the conditions of occupation?
All the stories about hundreds of tons of gold and other valuables allegedly hidden to finance the post-war revival of Nazism are a myth. If only because the gold and hard currency by May 1945, in the Third Reich is almost gone.
Total Americans found in Thuringia about one hundred tons of gold - 93,2 percent of the gold reserves of the Reichsbank by the end of the war. If at the beginning of 1939, the Reichsbank's gold reserves amounted to 500 million Reichsmarks, by 28 in February 1945, it was reduced to 77,4 million, which the Americans found in the Merkers mines. Six or seven tons of gold could be outside of this treasure, but certainly not 300. All sorts of 50 tons of platinum from the 15 of the Cossack corps, 20 barrels of gold from the Tatar SS legion, hundreds of tons of gold reserves of the Italian dictator Mussolini and the Croatian dictator Pavelic and other untold riches of the Third Reich, as if completely disappeared and waiting for their hours in some abandoned mine or adit, just bait for catching gullible fools.
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