By Costas Bogdanidis
April 1941. The great operation to flee the Greek gold from Heraklion to the Middle East and from there to South Africa developed into an incredible thriller so that it would not fall into the hands of the conquerors. It was April 1941 when the plan to flee the gold held by the Bank of Greece during the German invasion was organized and executed. And Greece was the only one of the Axis-occupied countries that had managed to save its gold! (There is of course also the version (from the researcher D.Koukounas which is different) that a part of the gold was forgotten in the vault of the bank in Heraklion which in 1942 was also transferred to Berlin. And which the Greek side later requested .
In any case, much has been written, conspiratorial and not, about the adventure of transporting the Greek gold from Crete. What happened in those days, how was the decision made to protect the property of the Greek people. There were many assumptions, speculations and imaginative comments, but we learned the truth from his narration Elias Venezis in the “Chronicle of the Bank of Greece”, published in 1955 with a foreword by the then Governor of the Bank of Greece and later Prime Minister Xenophon Zolotas.
The original idea…
From the first days of 1941 they knew in Athens that the tide of war would tilt in favor of the Axis as Germany would enter the war on the side of the Italians. It was now clear that the whole country would be occupied by the Germans. It was then decided that the king and the government should leave Athens to continue the struggle and defend the interests of the country. The king and the government, following the request of the British ambassador, called on the administration of the Bank of Greece to follow the government and move the headquarters of the bank outside the parts of the country that would be occupied by the enemy.
Both the governor of the bank, Kyriakos Varvaresos, and the deputy governor, George Mantzavinos, obeying the invitation, followed the king and the government, with the decision to move the headquarters of the bank to where the seat of the free Greek government would also be.
The administration of the Bank was accompanied by senior officials, namely Aristides Lazaridis, Minos Levis and Sokratis Kosmidis. Before leaving Athens, the management of the Bank of Greece had taken care to transfer the bank’s gold reserves away from Athens, to Crete.
Years later, after the liberation, the governor of the bank, Georgios Mantzavinos, told Venezis the story of that transfer of the bank’s management and the adventure of rescuing its gold.
“I remember,” he said, “that as soon as Germany’s intention to assist Italy in her struggle against Greece—a struggle which she had almost lost—became manifest, we took steps to have the gold removed from the vaults of the Bank to a safe place outside from Athens. Crete qualified, our Heraklion branch, where we had several safe deposit boxes. The gold, amounting to 610,796 ounces of pure weight, had first to be placed in safe boxes.
When this preparatory work was done, of which only three or four of us at the Bank knew, assistance was requested from the Naval Staff, who placed at our disposal two destroyers, the “King George” and the “Queen Olga,” which carried the gold in Heraklion. The transfer took place at the beginning of February, I remember it was Shrove Monday.
The departure of the administration of the Bank of Greece from Athens, following the departure of the king and the government, took place on April 22, 1941. The senior employees of the Bank Lazarides, Levis and Kosmides, who were to accompany us, were ordered to go to Marathon and there to board a ship that had been commandeered.
The attack…
“The steamer they were going to board was sunk by German Stukas. Our employees were forced to return to Athens and leave Piraeus that same night with another battleship (s.s.: warship, battleship).
The same evening we were also leaving with the government, with the destroyer “Queen Olga”. Our boarding took place under tragic conditions on a beach in Megara. Next to us was burning a steamer that had just been bombed by the Stukas. Bitter feelings crushed us. We were leaving for an indefinite journey and none of us knew if we were going to return alive.
We arrived on the morning of April 23, 1941 in Souda. The king had just arrived by plane, accompanied only by the prime minister, the former governor of the Bank of Greece, Emmanuel Tsoudero.
We had barely landed at Souda when a Stuka raid forced us to take cover in an olive grove.
From Souda we went to Chania and settled in the branch of our Bank. Those days in Chania were very difficult, because, as soon as the Germans occupied Athens and acquired an air base, they began raids, two and three times a day, against Chania.”
After Crete…
In the following days, it became clear that Crete would also fall, so an evacuation plan was drawn up and it was decided to transfer the gold from Heraklion to Pretoria, headquarters of the Central Bank of South Africa. The gold was initially transported to Souda from Heraklion in a small English tug called “salvia” captained by a reserve officer of the English merchant fleet. Under constant Stuka attacks the gold was transported from Heraklion to the port and there it was loaded onto the tugboat.
The gold was accompanied by two of the three employees of the Bank. When the “salvia” started, the Stukas following it attacked it, but the captain managed to shoot down two of the German planes with small anti-aircraft machine guns.
The voyage continued in constant alarm and with all the gold on deck until the ship reached Souda. There began the new difficult task as the chests of gold had to be transferred to a ship appointed by the English admiral to receive the gold and transport it to Alexandria. The admiral, despite a naval battle raging the previous day in the Cretan Sea, had agreed to detach from his squadron a valuable unit, the cruiser “Dido” and place it at the disposal of the Bank of Greece
Under constant alert and bombardment by the “stukas” the gold was transferred to the cruiser with the help of English sailors, while the ship’s guns fired continuously, a Danish ship was hit and started burning.
A crate while being transported to the hull of the cruiser broke and the hull was filled with gold pounds. The skipper ordered a crew of sailors to collect all the pounds that had been scattered. All but one were found…
In southern Crete…
Georgios, Tsouderos and Varvaresos arrived in the south of Crete under novel conditions. Mantzavinos left with a fleet to Alexandria. When he arrived, the gold was already there and stored in the branch of the National Bank of Egypt.
In consultation with the allies, it was decided that the gold would be transported via Suez to South Africa. The Egyptian bank, however, refused to give the gold back saying that the Greek bank was in Athens. Many steps were taken and eventually the gold was loaded into trucks and escorted by tanks across the desert to Suez. There it was loaded onto a commercial ship on which the manager Aristides Lazaridis boarded along with an employee, so the gold was transported to Durban, South Africa, where it arrived and was loaded onto a special train that Marshal Smuts had put at the disposal of the TTE. Accompanied by director Aristidis Lazaridis, it was taken to Germiston, South Africa, where it was stored
after being converted into similar bars under the supervision of the South African reserve Bank, the issuing Bank of South Africa. The gold was then taken to Pretoria where it was kept.
“…because the gold consisted of various gold coins, even of bars that had come from melting gold objects in Greece, it was necessary to convert it into similar bars containing the specified degree of purity.
The new gold smelting, which was carried out under the supervision of the South African Reserve Bank, issuing bank of South Africa, at Germiston, South Africa, produced gold of the regulated purity weighing 608,350 ounces.
This gold bullion was transported to Pretoria, where it was deposited for safekeeping in the vaults of the South African Reserve Bank. The costs of transporting and remelting the gold were minimal, because, due to the special security measures that had been taken, we avoided paying insurance premiums, which would have amounted, according to the most modest calculations, to 500,000 pounds,” said Mazavinos. Who would later characterize the attitude of the South Africans as chivalrous. Thus, Greece was the only one of the countries occupied by the Axis that had managed to save its gold.
“After a short stay at Pretoria and Johannesburg, and having settled the matter of gold, we proceeded to Cape Town, whence, together with the King and Government, we departed for our now permanent temporary headquarters outside Greece, London, which had designated as the seat of the other European governments in exile. We arrived via… Trinidad, after an adventurous and life-threatening journey of 28 days, on September 22, 1941. There we established the central branch of the Foundation, i.e. the sixth consecutive temporary seat of the Bank of Greece outside of Athens”.
SOURCES :
-COUNTRY
-Ilia Venezi the Chronicle of the Bank of Greece
-Vassilis Galoupis, Mouse
-Time Machine
-THE STEP
-Achilleas Hekimoglou
