“Zalmanson knew what these things portended; he went around to the poultry farm and tried to persuade my brother to join him and many others in attempting to escape in the night.
“My brother refused to go.
“One can spend hours speculating on his reasons, and many more hours recounting the details of the flight which Zalmanson described to me, but there’s no point in it. My brother stayed, he wouldn’t budge. Zalmanson and perhaps eighty others crept away in the night. He himself was with a party of eight, of whom he was the only survivor in the end-the seven others were killed by the winter, or the Germans, or the Cossacks.…
“I have no further firsthand reports of what happened in the shtetl. I do not know whether Krausser arrived and took charge of the slaughter personally; I suspect he must have, he wouldn’t have missed that. Undoubtedly they followed the usual pattern.
“My brother undoubtedly protested. Equally undoubtedly, once he saw the hopelessness of it, he did not resist. In a way I’m sure he welcomed his death.”
German documents indicate that Standartenfuhrer Heinz Krausser was relieved of his command of Einsatzgruppe “E” temporarily, on October 7, 1942, and given a special assignment.
A set of RSHA travel orders from Himmler’s office in Prinz Albrecht Strasse sent Krausser to Kiev, apparently for a meeting with Gruppenfuhrer Otto von Geyr and others.
A new unit was established on paper with the designation Jagdsonderkommando Ein, reflecting the crude sense of humor of-probably-Himmler; Jagd means “hunt” but Goldjagd means “gold rush”; an SS Sonderkommando was defined as a probe unit assigned to special duties. Krausser, with no promotion in rank, was placed in command of Jagdsonderkommando Ein.
At this point Reinhard Gehlen’s branch of the Abwehr-the German secret intelligence network-was incorporated into the operation, along with the captured ordnance section of Field Marshal von Paulus’ headquarters battalion. The purpose of the former was to provide intelligence, false documentation and training for the members of Jagdsonderkommando Ein; the purpose of the latter was to provide uniforms and equipment from captured Russian sources.
It is mentioned in Krausser’s dossiers that he spoke Russian, although there is no indication of the degree of his proficiency. All the others who were assigned to his Jagdsonderkommando were Russian-speaking Germans.
The actual operating force numbered three officers, nine noncommissioned officers and seventeen enlisted men.
These personnel were drawn from SD, Ordnungspolizei, Sicherheitspolizei and line-Wehrmacht units; they were specialists in varied fields, the one common denominator being their knowledge of the Russian languages. Among the members of Jagdsonderkommando Ein was a disproportionate number of automatic weapons experts, railroad men and commando-demolitions specialists.
One of Krausser’s two lieutenants was a former civil engineer with a background in earth-moving operations. The other had been recruited from his post as deputy commander of the railraod marshaling yards at Dresden; in civilian pre-war life he had been a locomotive driver and had spent four months working on the Trans-Siberian Railway during the period of nonaggression-pact detente.
The recruiting and training seems to have taken a surprisingly long time-months, stretching nearly into a year. One might suspect unusual inefficiency among these Germans; however, a closer examination of the documentary record implies several contributing factors.
Like most military intelligence operations, the Abwehr was a far poorer performer than its progaganda would have us believe. Its reports from Siberia, as relayed to von Geyr and Krausser, were woefully skeletal; evidently its personnel in Siberia was almost nil. Krausser kept demanding more details about railroads and defenses in the Sayan district and along the route from there to the Crimea; he kept getting long-winded gobbledygook which boiled down to, “We don’t know, we’re guessing.”
Furthermore, a minor smallpox epidemic in Rostov-where the unit was in training-killed off three members of the Jagdsonderkommando and evidently these men’s specialties had been vital to the plan, so that everything had to stop and mark time while three replacements were found and trained.
After that, Hermann Goering had to be brought into the plan at top level in order to justify Himmler’s request for long-range air penetration of Siberia into the Baikal border area, and evidently Goering thought the whole plan idiotic and it took time for Bormann and Himmler to change his mind.
Of the various delaying factors, however, none was so important as the crucial lack of intelligence provided by the Abwehr. Krausser insisted, in a series of dispatches that range in date from March to October 1943, that there was no possibility of success if the operation had to be undertaken blind. He insisted on specific intelligence of the defenses and transport in the area: particularly, he needed to know the exact details of operating schedules along the Trans-Siberian, and the exact disposition of repair and marshaling yards in the vicinity. The need for this information becomes more obvious the more one understand the nature of the Goldjagd plan. (That was its code name, inevitably.)
From the outset it is clear that von Geyr, more than any of the others, fully comprehended the magnitude of the logistical problems. The gold might or might not be where the Jew had said it was; but there was a good chance-every piece of intelligence suggested the Jew’s story was true. Himmler probably reasoned that even if it proved false, the most he could lose would be twenty-nine men; in terms of odds, the potential reward was well worth the cost and risk.
But von Geyr’s reports and dispatches indicate that he was the first to grasp the obvious logistical difficulties. Gold is unlike paper money, diamonds, and other valuables; it is incredibly heavy. The fact that the Czarist treasury weighed in the neighborhood of five hundred tons was deceptive, because it was a highly concentrated tonnage in terms of size-vs.-mass. You could not begin to fill a five-ton lorry with gold. If you did, its axles would collapse instantly. Five tons of gold takes up the space occupied by less than half a ton of crushed rock.
The original Heydrich-Krausser plan evidently was based on the assumption that the entire bullion hoard would fit inside the fuselages of twelve or fifteen four-engine airplanes. In terms of size and space this was true; in terms of weight it was absurd. Such a load would instantly crush the floor out of any airplane, even if such an airplane were capable of lifting that much weight. And the load capacity of even the greatest four-engine bomber or transport was more like ten tons than five hundred; a capacity which had to be reduced still further by the need for extra-range fuel tanks.
Apparently, however, it remained to Hermann Goering to shoot down permanently the idea of flying the gold out of Siberia. He only needed to point out the consequences if even one of the airplanes were to be shot down over Russian territory with its load of bullion.
Other proposals were then advanced, and one by one destroyed by careful reasoning; in the end it was von Geyr whose idea provided the solution. The only reasonable means of getting the gold out of Siberia was to employ the same method of transport that had been used to take it to Siberia in the fist place: the railway.