Nazi Gold -- The sensational story of the world's greatest robbery, and the greatest criminal cover-up

 

That was one serious ride.

You never know what to expect before you start reading.

Nazi Gold by Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting has me considering where I would go if life gave me time enough to go to Germany and leave the airport in Frankfurt. I've been through there four times, but never into the countryside. Garmish-Partenkirchen, Mittenwald, and Merkers strike me as more interesting than Berlin nightclubs, the famous old university towns, and other potential tourist traps. Those first noted Bavarian-area cities have interesting old post-war stories to tell if they would.

An awful lot of money, gold, coins, currency, stocks, and such went through there, some evidently went into Swiss bank accounts, some may still be buried in the mountains. I now know that it wasn't necessarily limited to the wild social life that ex-occupation GIs smiled about in conversations when I was a boy. Some were in an almost SciFi wild west. The Black Market was a major player.

Sayer and Botting admitted that their book was complex, and I had previously noted on Goodreads that some of the editing was lacking, but it remained a page-turner throughout. Sometimes I really hated to put it down, and get the sleep I needed for other things, and sometimes four or five pages was enough to put me to sleep. But, I had no desire to quit reading this one.

Their epilogue is a must, but not enough to skip the rest of the content.

Do not look for a movie version in a theater near you.

"Despite the movie rights having been sold on no less than five occasions there was no big screen interpretation of Nazi Gold. The story is true, but complex, having outwitted a succesion of screenwriters over the last decade," they said. "The search for Nazi Gold is fraught with dead-ends and misleading trails. What awaits us may be yet another chapter, but never an ending, to this infinite tale. no, never an ending."