He was never charged due to insufficient evidence, and lived until 2000. Amazingly, Sayer realized that he’d met Mohnke while researching Nazi Gold without realizing the man’s identity Sayer informed the authorities, leading to investigations into Mohnke from multiple countries. The officer responsible for the slaughter was SS General Wilhelm Mohnke, who had also guarded Hitler’s bunker and disappeared after World War II. It turned out that that the citizen who had asked Rooker about the aid fund had been a survivor of the Wormhoudt massacre, when 90 unarmed British troops were killed by the SS in 1940. Jeff Rooker, an MP who he had spoken to on the matter, asked Sayer in 1988 to check out an aid fund to ensure that the money was getting to the veterans it was supposed to serve. In 1984, Sayer spoke to Members of Parliament in an effort to get information about Nazi gold held by the Bank of England. The two bars were valued at over $1 million and eventually found their way to the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold, the body that recovers and redistributes the gold that was seized by the Nazis during the war. recovered two of the gold bars, identified by Nazi-stamped markings, and announced the finding in a press release in 1997. State Department in 1978, it set the wheels turning for an investigation that began in the early 1980s. When Sayer sent his information to the U.S. military cooperating with former German officers, including one-time members of the Wehrmacht and SS. The heist was executed by members of the U.S. Government covered up the theft of millions in Nazi gold from the German National Gold Reserve in Bavaria. Sayer’s book with Douglas Botting, Nazi Gold: The Story of the World’s Greatest Robbery – And Its Aftermath finally saw publication in 1984 (a second version, Nazi Gold: The Sensational Story of the World’s Greatest Robbery – And the Greatest Criminal Cover-Up, was published in 2012). And beginning in 1975, he started work on a book that would uncover the true story behind the gold heist.Īnother massive storehouse of Nazi loot was stashed in a salt mine in Merkers, Germany.
He founded a delivery service that helped pioneer overnight door-to-door delivery on the European continent. Ian Sayer is a British journalist, entrepreneur, and historian who has led an extremely colorful life. However, the moviemakers weren’t the only intrigued parties. Martin used the entry as a starting point and wrote the screenplay. Guinness’s understanding was that more details than that weren’t really available, possibly due to pieces of the story being classified. military personnel and German civilians in 1945.” MGM was so excited by the prospect that their head of production, Elliot Morgan, wrote Guinness for more information. “The Greatest Robbery on Record,” first listed in 1956 (and holding the spot until 2000), “was of the German National Gold Reserves in Bavaria by a combination of U.S. Writer Troy Kennedy Martin based the screenplay on an incident that he learned about from, of all places, The Guinness Book of World Records. (Uploaded to YouTube by The Mike Curb Congregation – Topic / Universal Music Group) The movies theme, Burning Bridges by The Mike Curb Congregation, went Top 40. And yes, something very similar to that actually happened. The characters split nearly $900,000 apiece and go their separate ways before they’re caught. After fighting their way through a German tank blockade, the soldiers end up making a deal with the last German tank crew to share the gold. He assembles a misfit crew (including Sutherland’s tank squad), and the group makes a sustained effort to find and capture the gold. The plot of the film follows Private Kelly (Eastwood) who discovers the existence of a cache of German gold after capturing a Wehrmacht intelligence officer. Don Rickles was, well, Don Rickles, and Carroll O’Connor was a tireless and familiar character actor one year out from his iconic turn as Archie Bunker.
Kelly’s Heroes co-stars Telly Savalas and Donald Sutherland had both been standouts in The Dirty Dozen Sutherland had also made a war picture mark in M*A*S*H earlier in the year. Eastwood’s star had been rising steadily for years, coming off of the Sergio Leone “Man with No Name” trilogy, WWII drama Where Eagles Dare, and other Westerns, while the following year would bring him The Beguiled, Play Misty for Me, and his most famous character in Dirty Harry. Kelly’s Heroes drew attention from the outset for the obvious reasons, like its cast.