The

The On the morning of April 8th, 1945, General George S. Patton learned two things almost simultaneously.

First, that in addition to the paper money, as soldiers had found the day before,

they had also discovered a massive quantity of gold, the bulk of the entire German National Reserve.

Second, that the press had already found out about it, too.

Stories about the captured Nazi gold were running in the newspapers across all of the

allied world. Patton immediately recognized that this was bigger than anything a field army should

be handling alone.

So he called General Omar Bradley, commander of the 12th Army group, and he told him that owing to the sheer magnitude of the seizure and the fact that it had gone public, he believed it

was now a political question. He requested that the Supreme Allied headquarters be asked to

send somebody to take

control. But Patton being Patton, he was not about to let the treasurer sit unguarded while

the bureaucrats figured things out. So he ordered an immediate press blackout on any

further details about the discovery. He ringed the Kaiser Road to Mine with tanks from the 712th Tank Battalion.

And in his diary, he noted that he had deliberately waited before notifying higher-ups

when the first reports came in.

And as he is quoted as saying, as it would be stupid to claim we had found the gold reserve

and then not have done so.

Patton also had ideas about what to do with the gold,

ideas that would alarm his superiors.

Music Colonel Bernard Bernstein moved fast. After verifying the newspaper story with Lieutenant Colonel R. Tupper Barrett,

chief of the financial branch, G5, 12th Army Group, Bernstein flew to the Supreme headquarters

...