Hitler's Last Days by Bill O'Reilly Page A

entered the mouth of a massive cave, where they boarded a flimsy wooden elevator that lowered them two thousand feet into a salt mine. The shaft was pitch black, so once the daylight above them narrowed to a pinprick during the descent, Patton could not see the other occupants of the car. Noting that the elevator was suspended from a single thin cable, Patton couldn’t help but quip about their plight. “If that clothesline should break,” he joked grimly, “promotions in the United States Army would be considerably stimulated.”
    â€œGeorge, that’s enough,” shot back a nervous Eisenhower. “No more cracks until we are above ground again.”
    The purpose of their descent is of worldwide significance. Troopers in Patton’s Third Army accidentally discovered the Merkers mine while interrogating local citizens. The bombing of Berlin had forced the Nazis to smuggle their financial reserves out of the official bank in Berlin to a place of safety. They chose this remote salt mine. Literally hundreds of millions of dollars in the form of gold bars, currency, and priceless works of art were stored underground two hundred miles from Berlin. As Patton, Eisenhower, and Bradley stepped out of the darkness of the elevator into the brightly lit cave, the scene was surreal. Bags of gold and cash stretched as far as the eye could see. Hundreds of paintings and sculptures, one a bust of Egyptian Queen Nefertiti, lined the walls, along with world-famous paintings by Titian and Manet. That the wealth is now in the Allies’ possession signifies the dissolution of the Nazi government. Without money, it can no longer wage war.

    A soldier of the Third U.S. Army holds a painting by the famous Spanish artist Goya that the Nazis had hidden in a wooden crate at the Merkers mine. [Alamy]

    General Eisenhower examines a suitcase full of silver items stolen from prisoners and stored at the Merkers mine. [Alamy]
    â€œIn addition to the German Reichsmarks [currency] and gold bricks, there was a great deal of French, American, and British gold currency. Also, a number of suitcases filled with jewelry, such as silver and gold cigarette cases, wristwatch cases, spoons, forks, vases, gold-filled teeth, false teeth, etc.,” Patton wrote in his journal. The majority of the currency had been looted from the various nations conquered by Nazi Germany; the jewelry and gold and silver items were taken from prisoners at concentration camps; and the art from fourteen German museums.
    *   *   *
    Later in the day, George Patton’s mood abruptly shifted. The three generals lunched together, then toured the newly liberated concentration camp at Buchenwald, twenty-six miles east of the Merkers mine. It was Patton’s Fourth Armored Division—the first tanks into Bastogne and the first to reach the Rhine—that had discovered Ohrdruf, a subcamp of Buchenwald. Unlike Auschwitz, where guards were so rattled by the approaching Russians that they fled before executing the inmates, the SS here had tried to kill the remaining prisoners. Most were shot. Many were so emaciated and malnourished that the bullet wounds in their skulls did not even bleed.
    The work camp tour was horrendous. Each of the generals had seen death in many forms during their time in the military. They had seen men blown to pieces and others lose their faces to exploding shells. But nothing they had ever witnessed prepared them for Ohrdruf. “It was the most appalling sight imaginable,” Patton will write in his journal.

    Four survivors of the Buchenwald concentration camp. [United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of David Cohen]
    â€œThe smell of death overwhelmed us,” Bradley wrote in his memoirs. “More than 3,200 naked, emaciated bodies had been thrown into shallow graves. Others lay in the street where they had fallen. Lice crawled over the yellowed skin of their sharp, bony frames.” The