What Eisenhower Said When Patton Seized Hitler’s Gold in 48 Hours—While Montgomery Was Still Stalled
April 1945. Germany was collapsing from the inside out.
Cities fell almost daily. German units surrendered in columns. The Third Reich, which had once promised a thousand-year future, was now measuring its lifespan in weeks. Yet even as the guns fell silent across much of Western Europe, one final, silent struggle remained unresolved—a struggle not over territory or armies, but over something just as powerful.
Money.
At Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, Dwight D. Eisenhower knew the reports well. Intelligence officers had been whispering about it for months: trainloads of gold, looted art, stolen currency, and industrial treasure stripped from every corner of occupied Europe. The wealth of nations. The spoils of genocide. The financial skeleton of Nazi Germany itself.
No one doubted it existed. What everyone doubted was how long it would take to find.
Most planners assumed years.
They imagined investigative units, forensic accountants, long interrogations, and painstaking searches through the ruins of Germany. The Reich had prepared for defeat. It had hidden its fortune carefully, deliberately, deep underground. Finding it would be slow, methodical work—after the war was over.
Then, on April 8, 1945, a message arrived that shattered every assumption Eisenhower held.
It came from the headquarters of Third United States Army, commanded by George S. Patton.
The message did not report a battle won.
It did not announce a city liberated.
It announced a discovery.
A salt mine near the small village of Merkers, in Thuringia, had been seized. Inside, Patton’s men had uncovered something no Allied planner believed possible.
The entire portable wealth of the Third Reich.
Four hundred tons of gold.
Billions in currency.
Priceless art stolen from across Europe.
And Patton had done it in forty-eight hours.
The Fortune of a Dying Regime
The Nazi leadership understood something as their armies collapsed: military defeat did not have to mean financial ruin.
For years, the regime had stripped Europe bare. Gold confiscated from Jewish families. Currency looted from national banks in Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Czechoslovakia. Industrial diamonds, platinum, and precious metals hoarded for war production. Masterpieces stolen from museums and private collections.
This was not merely wealth. It was leverage.
Whoever controlled it would influence reconstruction, reparations, and the economic future of postwar Europe. The Nazis knew it. The Allies knew it. And the Soviets, advancing relentlessly from the east, knew it too.
As Berlin burned, special trains rolled at night. Crates vanished into tunnels. SS guards protected shipments that mattered more than divisions. One of the final hiding places was chosen with care: the Merkers salt mine.
Nearly two thousand feet underground. Miles of tunnels. Cool, dry air. Bomb-proof. Hidden in plain sight.
It was perfect.
A Race No One Admitted Existed
Officially, the Allies were united.
Unofficially, a quiet race had begun.
Occupation zones had already been agreed upon. Thuringia would soon fall into the Soviet zone. If the Red Army reached Merkers first, the gold would vanish behind the Iron Curtain—claimed as reparations, absorbed into Stalin’s system, never returned.
At SHAEF, Eisenhower understood the stakes. But with battles still raging, the gold hunt remained secondary.
For everyone except Patton.
Patton’s Side War
Patton had always thought differently.
While other commanders focused strictly on destroying enemy formations, Patton quietly assigned parts of his intelligence staff to track Nazi assets. Gold, he argued, mattered. Art mattered. Whoever found it first would shape the peace as much as the war.
So while Third Army thundered east, Patton’s scouts questioned civilians, examined documents, followed rumors others dismissed.
On April 6, 1945, two displaced French women flagged down American soldiers near Merkers. They spoke of trains unloading at night. Of SS guards who had suddenly fled. Of a mine sealed in haste.
The report reached Patton within hours.
He did not convene a conference.
He did not wait for confirmation.
He ordered an immediate move.
Forty-Eight Hours
A combat command from the 90th Infantry Division advanced at once. This was not a conventional operation. Speed mattered more than firepower. Resistance was bypassed. The objective was singular.
They reached Merkers on April 7.
The mine was sealed behind massive doors designed to withstand sabotage and intrusion. Standard procedure would have taken days—finding keys, officials, careful breaching.
Patton’s orders were simple.
Blow it open.
Engineers placed charges. The doors collapsed inward. Elevators still worked.
When American soldiers descended into the mine, they entered a world that felt unreal.
Tunnel after tunnel carved from shimmering salt. And in one chamber—Room Eight—the gold.
Neatly stacked bars, stamped with the Reichsbank eagle. Four hundred tons of it. Wealth stolen from nations and victims alike, melted into anonymous blocks.
But that was only the beginning.
Nearby chambers held currency from across Europe. Bags of diamonds. Platinum. Rare metals. Then the art—Rembrandt, Raphael, Dürer. Cultural memory packed into crates underground.
It was not a cache.
It was the Reich’s treasury.
Eisenhower’s Disbelief
The secure message reached SHAEF early on April 8.
The duty officer read it twice. Then again.
Eisenhower was briefed within the hour. His first reaction was skepticism. Patton was known for exaggeration. Intelligence on Nazi treasure had been unreliable for months.
Eisenhower ordered immediate verification. Photographs. Inventories. Independent confirmation.
Within twenty-four hours, the response came back.
If anything, Patton’s report had understated the scale.
The gold alone exceeded four hundred tons. The currency and art were beyond valuation.
Eisenhower’s disbelief turned into something more complicated: relief, admiration, and a quiet recalibration of judgment.
Down into the Underworld
On April 12, Eisenhower traveled to Merkers with Omar Bradley and Patton.
They descended two thousand feet into the earth.
They walked among the currency. The gold. The art.
Eisenhower later wrote that he expected triumph. Instead, he felt horror. This was the financial machinery of genocide made visible.
In a separate chamber, they found preserved bodies—victims of Nazi crimes stored with the same care as treasure.
Eisenhower insisted on seeing everything.
This, he believed, was what the war had truly been about.
What Eisenhower Said
That night, Eisenhower wrote privately about Patton.
He acknowledged something he had rarely admitted so plainly: Patton’s recklessness had a method. Speed had accomplished what planning never could.
Had Third Army waited, the mine might have been destroyed—or claimed by the Soviets.
Patton’s boldness had secured Europe’s stolen wealth, preserved evidence of Nazi crimes, and shaped the postwar world.
Eisenhower would later write that Montgomery was the general for set-piece battles.
Patton, he concluded, was the general for moments when opportunity appeared and vanished in hours.
Merkers was Patton at his best.
The Quiet Contrast
The contrast was impossible to ignore.
While Patton seized the Reich’s fortune in forty-eight hours, Bernard Montgomery was still consolidating river crossings and planning deliberate advances.
Both approaches had value.
But history would remember which one secured the greatest non-combat prize of the war.
The Final Irony
Merkers lay in territory assigned to the Soviets.
When the time came to hand it over, the mine was empty.
The gold had been moved.
The art cataloged.
The evidence preserved.
Stalin protested. The Allies shrugged.
Possession, after all, was nine-tenths of the law.
Patton never claimed Merkers as his greatest achievement. He measured success in battles.
But Eisenhower understood.
In one swift operation, Patton had helped secure the financial future of postwar Europe, denied Stalin a historic prize, and proven—once again—that in war, speed could be decisive in ways no amount of planning ever could.
And that was something Eisenhower never forgot.
