It was the first I knew of it. I am morally certain that MacIver’s calling me with the news was his way of taking credit for the victory. He didn’t say so, but I had to assume he had been responsible, at least partly, for the breakthrough; otherwise how would he have known about it before I did?
I immediately called the Soviet Embassy to find out if it was true. They had nothing new to tell me on that day; but two days later they called me back and I went in to pick up the papers they had waiting for me. There was an absurdly thick sheaf of documents and I had to buy an oversized wallet to contain them.
I left Kennedy Airport in New York on February 9 aboard the Aeroflot flight to Moscow.
In the meantime I’d been at work. It had gone well except for one setback. Since November I had been making active efforts to locate Otto von Geyr, recipient of the Krausser letter and the former Waffen SS officer whom Haim Tippelskirch had indicated I should meet.
I had sent inquiries to three former German officers whom I had interviewed for earlier books. I was still ambivalent about the story of the gold, but less so than before; I was prepared to make a special trip to Germany to talk with von Geyr.
But von Geyr was dead. He had died within the past month. Arteriosclerosis, at age sixty-four. He was buried at Munich; he had been survived by a daughter and three grandchildren.
I learned this in January. It closed a door I had only just begun to try to open. I was depressed and angry: if I had gone directly to Germany after Haim’s death I’d have had the chance to talk with von Geyr.
But MacIver’s news pulled me out of my depression and very quickly I was inside the Soviet Union.
I had a limited volume of work to do in Moscow but it took more than a week. I spent much of the time in waiting rooms of the Arkhiv Dircksena and the A.M.O.S.S.S.R.-the Defense Ministry Archives. They didn’t admit me to the stacks or allow me to browse in any of the collections but they did give me access to a number of records which had never before been seen by an outsider-and for that matter probably had never been used by anyone other than the Soviet-controlled body of historians which compiled the Istoriya V.O.V.S.S.*
Some of my requests for specific records were denied; a surprising number were not. Mainly I wanted to see records of the southern campaigns of 1942–1944 and the siege at Sebastopol. At this point I still wasn’t primarily interested in the German attempt to unearth the hidden Czarist gold, and at any rate if there were to be more documents to shed light on that subject I wasn’t likely to find them in Moscow-partly because the Moscow archives didn’t include any captured German records, and partly because even if there had been such records in Moscow I wouldn’t have known which ones to ask for.
I wasn’t sure how much censorship was applied to mail sent out of the USSR by foreigners; nor was I confident that the Russians would let me out of the country without inspecting-and possibly confiscating-some of my notes. For that reason I tried to protect myself with a triple note-taking system. I had brought with me two reams of carbonset note-forms-the kind of blank pads with self-carbon backing which many companies use for invoices. In that manner I made three identical copies of each note. One copy I kept with me. The second I mailed home to Lambertville. The third set I took to the American cultural attache’s office in Moscow on the day before I left. The plan was to have my notes delivered “through the bag”-in the sealed diplomatic pouch which was not subject to Soviet scrutiny-to a contact of mine in the State Department in Washington. This meant my notes would be subject to examination by my own government but I didn’t have anything to hide and I put up with the invasion of privacy because anything worthwhile in the notes was going to be published anyway; there was no point making a fetish of secrecy about them. It was obvious the Russians weren’t going to let me see anything they didn’t want Washington to know about.
I established the habit of making all my notes on the triple-sets so that I could feel sure of having everything intact when I returned home to write the book; it wouldn’t be feasible to return to Russia again merely to double-check some obscure note I might have lost somewhere along the way.
It was my plan, even then, to include no significant notes on the gold in these shipments. I wasn’t quite sure how I was going to handle the situation if it did come up. (In Moscow it did not; I came across nothing pertaining to the gold there.) I felt highly secretive about that topic, for reasons which perhaps are obvious enough not to need explaining. I planned to keep any gold-related notes on my person until I was ready to leave Russia; then, on the eve of my departure, do a cram course, memorize the notes and destroy them; then, after leaving Russia, reconstruct them on paper as quickly as I could so that I wouldn’t forget anything. It was a melodramatic plan but these are melodramatic times.
I hadn’t meant to get into such detailed explanations of my working methods; I have mentioned this only because it has an important bearing on what was to happen within a matter of weeks.
The Soviets had assigned an Intourist guide to me in Moscow; this guide was relieved of my charge upon my departure for Kiev on February 19. Whether I was watched by agents aboard the internal flight I have no idea. I was picked up by a new Intourist guide in Kiev, a pleasant young man who spoke a fair grade of English. He insisted on practicing it although my Russian was considerably better than his English.
It was not a particularly severe winter in European Russia although I suppose out in Siberia it must have been as miserable as it always is there. A great deal of snow covered the city of Kiev-more than I’d seen in Moscow, oddly-but it wasn’t terribly cold and I had four or five sunny days in Kiev.
The War History Archives of the Federal Republic are housed in what used to be a large Byzantine church near the center of the city; I spent my days there and it must have bored my Intourist companion to tears. He never complained; he was well disciplined. As in Moscow, I arrived with several specific requests for documents and a study of these documents led me in turn to others. The people of Kiev are characteristically less formal and hidebound than those of the north and I found I had less difficulty and delay than I’d experienced in the Moscow archives. I was waited on with reasonable efficiency. A Communist Party functionary named Gorokov had to check each individual request of mine against a vast list of document numbers in a bound typed volume he had brought with him from Leningrad; evidently the State had gone to considerable expense in my case and I wasn’t sure whether I should be flattered by it or irritated by their caution. In several cases he refused to let me look at documents which could have been of no conceivable harm to Soviet prestige, reputation or security. But apparently the numbered documents listed in Gorokov’s book were coded according to their security classifications and Gorokov went religiously by his list.
I found quite a lot of good material in Kiev but very little of it is worth describing here; I have to repeat that my mission was Sebastopol, not gold.
Official policy was to guard Soviet records far more zealously than German ones. The Russians had captured trainloads of Nazi documents just as the Western Allies had; but the Soviets classified very few of their captured German documents-only those that had some bearing on the Hitler-Stalin pact, on political matters, and on events and people whose existence has been erased from the official version of history by the revisionists. Both in Kiev and in Sebastopol I actually saw far more German records than Russian ones. (Partly this was because their defensively brutal pride compelled the Germans to itemize their atrocities for posterity. The Nazi war records are a staggering exercise in self-incrimination. The Russians are not reluctant to expose this.)