Book description
In 1945, as Allied bombers continued their final pounding of Berlin,
the panicking Nazis began moving the assets of the Reichsbank south
for safekeeping. Vast trainloads of gold and currency were evacuated
from the doomed capital of Hitler's 'Thousand-year Reich'.
Nazi Gold is the real-life story of the theft of that
fabulous treasure - worth some 2,500,000,000 at the time of the
original investigation. It is also the story of a mystery and
attempted whitewash in an American scandal that pre-dated Watergate by
nearly 30 years. Investigators were impeded at every step as they
struggled to uncover the truth and were left fearing for their lives.
The authors' quest led them to a murky, dangerous post-war world of
racketeering, corruption and gang warfare. Their brilliant reporting,
matching eyewitness testimony with declassified Top Secret documents
from the US Archives, lays bare this monumental crime in a narrative
which throngs with SS desperadoes, a red-headed queen of crime and
American military governors living like Kings. Also revealed is the
authors' discovery of some of the missing treasure in the Bank of England.
Ian Sayer is a transport executive and one-time truck driver and
insurance clerk. His interest in Nazi gold was first aroused by the
Guinness Book of Records' account of the greatest robbery of all time.
He began his extensive search for this book back in 1974.
Douglas Botting is a writer whose previous books reflect his
interest in travel, exploration and twentieth century war. These
include Aftermath in Europe, In the Ruins of the Reich
and Gavin Maxwell: A Life.
