Publisher's Synopsis
This is a real-life story about the theft of a fabulous treasure - the German national gold and foreign currency reserves worth some #2,500,000,000 at the time of the original investigation - which disappeared in transit following the Nazi collapse in 1945. It is also the story of a mystery and a cover-up which threatened to involve the US Army in Germany, the Pentagon and the Department of the Army in a scandal which predated Watergate by nearly 30 years.;Beginning in Berlin in the dying moments of Hitler's Third Reich, the trail shifts to the Nazis' Alpine Fortress in Bavaria, then spreads as far afield as Switzerland, South America and the USSR. At the heart of the robbery lies an unholy combination of former enemies - opportunist US army personnel and unscrupulous ex-Nazis - none of whom have never been brought to trial.;The authors' quest led them to a murky, dangerous post-war world of racketeering, corruption and gang warfare. Their reporting, matching eyewitness testimony with recently declassified Top Secret documents from the US archives, sets out to lay bare this crime and American cover-up.;This updated edition includes new evidence that throws further light on the crime, including the authors' discovery of the whereabouts of a portion of the missing gold. As a test case Sayer and Botting persuaded the US State Department to initiate ha 14-year-long investigation that culminated in the missing gold resurfacing in the Bank of England under mysterious circumstances in late 1996.
