The Hunt For Hitler's Missing Millions

This is one of the most remarkable documents of the Second World War, the last will and testament of Adolf Hitler. He wanted to show in his private will he had very little. Written just hours before he committed suicide. This is Hitler the man. In it, the most despised dictator of modern times outlines his political philosophy. It was a diatribe against the Jewish people. His plans for the future of the Third Reich and instructions for the distribution of his personal estate. He's leaving ordinary possessions, a certain amount of money to his sister, his stepbrother, his housekeeper. For the first time on television, the story of Hitler's will. He loved money all the time. He just wasn't prepared to do much work for it. How it was discovered and what was in it. We were absolutely shocked at what was discovered. What it reveals about the mind of the Führer during his final hours. He looks at Germany and he looks at himself as being one. And the extraordinary hunt it triggered for Hitler's missing millions, one which continues to this day. Whoever owns those intellectual property rights can continue to receive the income stream, which can often be very substantial. April 1945. The Russian army closes in on Berlin. Adolf Hitler and his entourage of top Nazis are hiding in the Führer bunker. The end is nigh. On the final lap of their time, the Germans reeling. Just before dawn on April the 29th, Hitler gathers his most trusted staff and aides around him. He marries his longtime mistress, Eva Braun. After a glass of champagne, he begins to dictate a last will and testament. Creating what will become the hottest and most important document in the world. Upon which his legacy and the future of the Third Reich will depend. Hours later, he was dead at the age of 56. This is London Court. The German radio has just announced that Hitler is dead. Two days later, when the Russians finally broke into Hitler's bunker, they were able to see how the Führer had spent his final days. Luxury and opulence had long gone. And there was no sign of his will. It's been almost 70 years since Hermann Rothman first came to this part of northern Germany as an intelligence officer in the British Army. I thought I would have an odd feeling. I mean, let's not forget it was 1945. We are now in 2013. It's like entering into something new, which I've never seen before. This was once a German prisoner of war camp, Stalag 11b, where Allied troops were kept in appalling conditions. By the summer of 1945, it had been liberated and was being used as an internment camp by the British for suspected Nazis. And it was here that a young Hermann Rothman found himself, part of a specialist German-speaking British Army intelligence team. We decided whether people are going to stay in this camp or what's going to happen. Some were quite open and frank. Some were not. Some concealed what really happened. And we had to make up our mind whether to speak the truth or not. Rothman's motivation for finding people who didn't tell the truth was stronger than most. A German-Jewish refugee who arrived in Britain just before war broke out. My father was taken to concentration camp. And once I heard that, I think I cried, because I knew that I wouldn't see my father again. A lot of people like myself, Jewish refugees, it was our desire to see that Hitler should be beaten as quickly as possible. And I joined the army. I was 18. Two years on, Sergeant Rothman had become an expert at uncovering those who were trying to avoid post-war justice. He had identified many top Nazis, which is why he got the call from his commanding officer to help crack a particularly tough nut at five in the morning. I was told that I must come immediately. I said, what's so urgent? He said, I can't explain anything on the telephone. Please come in. Rothman's colleagues were questioning a German in civilian clothes who they believed wasn't telling the truth. He had suspicious papers and claimed to be a journalist, with a story to tell about Hitler's last days. He said he wanted to work with the Allies. He'd already been searched, but his interrogators weren't satisfied. In our unit, there was a man, he saw it immediately there's something wrong. The shoulder pads don't look right. And he ripped it open and he found documents. It's difficult to describe a reaction which one had at the time. We were absolutely shocked at what was discovered. When we saw the signature of Adolf Hitler, it became evident that this was an exceptionally important document. Rothman realised immediately it was a will, and that it might be the Fuhrer's. What I knew by interrogating Nazis, I had a picture of Hitler which made me think it was genuine. The way he spoke, he kept in character. The prisoner finally confessed he'd been entrusted by Hitler to smuggle the will out of the bunker, get it into the hands of the new leaders of the Third Reich, which he had failed to do. His real name was Heinz Lorenz, a deputy press officer on Hitler's staff. He'd been on the run for more than two months. When Rothman's boss realised what they'd found, he ordered an immediate security clampdown. My commanding officer said, please close all the doors, close the windows, lock them. Behind the closed doors, Rothman and the rest of the team set about translating the will. It was on parchment. It was in two sections. One was a private one in which he disposed of his goods, which he had very little of apparently, and gave it back to the German Reich. And on the other hand, he made a political will, which was, of course, a diatribe against who was responsible for the war, which was the Jewish people. Mein politisches Testament. Es ist unwahr, dass ich oder irgendjemand anderer... The rant against the Jews in the five-page political section is followed by the naming of a new Nazi government. Hitler also expels from the Nazi Party his former henchmen Goering and Himmler for disloyalty. The second section, Hitler's personal will, is three pages and 350 words long. Paints a picture of the Führer as a man of modest means, giving an impression he's almost broke. What I own belongs as so far as it is of any value at all to the Party. He even claims his personal art collection isn't really his. The paintings in the collection which I have bought during the years have never been acquired for private purposes, but always exclusively for the establishment of an art gallery in my hometown of Linz on the Danube. I think the private will was also for consumption to the German people. He wanted to show in his private will he had very little. I always felt that he thought about it very, very clearly. I wanted to show the people I had no benefits. My life was purely devoted entirely to the welfare of the German people. And that is what was evidenced by reading the private will. But Hitler does give one clue as to his true worth. He says his new mother-in-law, his sister Paula, and two other half-siblings should be looked after for the rest of their lives. Or, as he put it, to sustain a simple middle-class life. But there is no indication as to where the money needed to pay for all this is to come from. Only the identity of the man who will make it possible, Martin Bormann, Hitler's private secretary and fellow Nazi. He makes Bormann his sole executor with the full legal authority, as he puts it, to make all decisions relating to his bequests. At 4 a.m. with Bormann as witness, Hitler signs both sections of his will. As Rothman and his fellow translators finish their work, they know they have a document the world will want to see. It's July 1945. Hitler is dead. The war is over. In northern Germany, the race is on to track down the former Fuhrer's assets. The Russians have removed all traces of him from his Berlin bunker. The Americans have seized his luxury Munich apartment. The British have bombed his mansion in the Bavarian mountains. There was no sign of his personal art collection. And the man who had the authority to hand out his boss's money, Martin Bormann, had been found shot dead in a Berlin street. Finally, in 1948, a special Allied denazification court declared Hitler officially dead and ordered a death certificate to be issued. They also dropped a financial bombshell saying his entire personal estate was worth just 200,000 Deutschmarks, less than 15,000 pounds then, almost half a million pounds today. And the file was closed. Or so everybody thought. In Munich, the city where Hitler's will was probated, a government archive harbours rarely seen secrets belonging to Germany's former leader. Dr Helen Fry is a British historian. She's discovered there are traces of the true Hitler to be found, if you know where to look. Hidden in cardboard boxes. After Hitler's death, a number of his belongings were gathered from different residences all over Germany and Austria. And here, gosh, this is his gun licence. A very young Hitler here, and he's actually signed across the photograph. Oh, look, Hitler with his mother. There are rumours that this was a very important personal photograph for him. He used to keep it at all times on him. Hitler's mother, Clara, gave birth to six children. Adolf was one of only two to survive childhood. The other was his sister, Paula. His father, Alois, had been married twice before. And so Hitler already had an older half-brother and sister when he was born in April 1889. Oh, now here we have a document. In this box, there are more than just personal and family mementos. This is his original, well, first will, 1938. Hitler had set out plans for the distribution of his wealth once before, written in his own hand at the age of 50 when he was already ruling Germany. Hitler was convinced he would die young from a major illness, just as both his parents had while he was still a child. But unlike his final will, this one gives much more financial detail. It names his heirs and exactly how much he wishes to leave each. This is Hitler the man. You know, he's leaving ordinary possessions, a certain amount of money to his sister, his stepbrother, his housekeeper. He leaves his sister, Paula, 1,000 marks a month, which today would be worth £150,000 a year. And his other relatives and staff got substantial cash payouts as well. Had Hitler died in 1938, in the first year alone, his estate would have had to pay out nearly £20,000 a year, almost £1.2 million in today's money, making him a rich man well before the start of the Second World War. And a very different picture to that given by him in his last will and testament in 1945. According to Chris Wetton, a writer who's been investigating Hitler's wealth for years, he was worth far more than anyone ever realised, then or since. Let's try to talk in today's figures. I would say for his lifestyle that he was probably pushing €30,000 to €50,000 a year. But by the time we get to 1944, he's definitely in the billions of right marks, which would not be far off billions of euros today. Wetton's euro-billions calculation raises a huge question. How did Hitler manage to make it from virtual bankrupt to billionaire in less than a decade? The first part of the answer lies in his very earliest days in the Nazi party, when he began to develop an image of power and influence. His notepaper is very potentially labelled From the Chancellery of Adolf Hitler. This is, we're talking 1920s, before he'd come anywhere near power. Hitler quickly realised people were prepared to pay to hear him speak. But right from the start, he was misleading them. He used to say that he took no fees for his speeches. Oh yeah? He didn't even have a bank account. And yet, underneath the chancellery, on the notepaper, it gives you his bank account number. But the cash from public speaking was small beer compared to what came next. In 1923, Hitler was sent to prison for nine months for trying to overthrow the German government. It made him rich beyond belief. Whilst inside, he wrote his mammoth political diatribe, Mein Kampf. Published in 1925, Hitler received a royalty of around 10% from every sale. But it took a while to get going. Well, concerning the different versions of Mein Kampf, there were many of them. I just picked out some to give you a general idea. I brought along the very first edition, which appeared in two volumes. It was pretty expensive at the time, 10, 12 marks. This was a lot to deal with during the early 1920s. And they sold so-so. To be perfectly frank, it's not exactly a good read. So later on, they got this idea to produce a popular version. The popular version transformed Hitler's fortunes. His message spread and the cash rolled in. So much so that he could afford to buy himself a luxury Mercedes. He also came up with a scheme which would make him even more money. In 1933, as leader, he decreed that every newly-wed German couple would get a free copy of Mein Kampf from the government. Of course, there were a lot of marriages. There always are. And they all had to be paid for by the state. So the state bought the books to present to every married couple. And Hitler reaped the profits. At its peak, Mein Kampf was earning Hitler a million Reichsmarks a year in royalties, equivalent to 120 million pounds today. By the time the war ended, 10 million copies of Mein Kampf had been printed in Germany alone. Hitler boasted that his book was only outsold by the Bible. He loved money all the time. He just wasn't prepared to do much work for it. He liked having it. It gave him the freedom to do whatever he wanted. But Hitler's love of money and joy with what it could buy got him into trouble with the German authorities, who saw him with his Mercedes and started to levy taxes on a man who said he earned very little. By 1938, Hitler owed 400,000 Deutschmarks in back tax, 30,000 pounds then, one and three quarter million today. He felt that paying taxes was beneath him. By the time he's become chancellor, the authorities, presumably with a little bit of pressure, said, we think it's reasonable that as chancellor, Herr Hitler should not pay tax, and therefore we will take all of his tax papers and they will be destroyed. Well, they weren't. They were locked away in a safe. Conscientious civil servants. And here is a copy from 1925 through to 1933. A lot of the things he just put a line through. Look, everything dashed out. Blank, blank. The tax authorities, they always wanted to know what happened to the collections and the admission fees for the meetings that he spoke at. And he would say, I don't know. It doesn't come to me. It goes to the National Socialist Party. As he fought off the tax man, Hitler was also working out what to do with his newfound wealth to make an even bigger fortune. He decided to become a property magnate, secretly pouring money into a series of luxury homes. An apartment in the centre of Munich and a villa used by his mistress, Eva Braun. But his real home and most valuable asset was in a far more desirable location. He fell in love with Berchtesgaden area. In the early 1920s, Hitler holidayed near the Alpine village of Berchtesgaden on the southern tip of Germany, close to the border with Austria. It was his ambition to get a house there, which he did. In 1936, Hitler bought a small house called Wackenfeld for 40,000 gold marks, less than 2,000 pounds in those days, 120,000 pounds today. There's a lot of documentation about the property around the Obersalzberg, particularly this one from 1937. And here we see the house Wackenfeld as it was when Hitler bought it. And we have the price here, 40,000 gold marks. And he slowly enlarged it. He was very, very proud of it. Hitler renamed his home the Berghof and poured a large fortune into its redevelopment and expansion, an estimated 30 million Reichsmarks, equivalent to 136 million pounds today. 30 rooms were created and filled with expensive furniture, Persian carpets, tapestries and fine paintings by Dutch, Italian and German masters. Hitler also personally redesigned parts of his new house, not always successfully. He fancied himself as an architect, although he had no formal training whatsoever. And he went ahead to modify the house himself to suit his grandiose vision. He had this huge picture window and right underneath it was a garage. So anytime anybody started a car in the garage, up came the fumes from the exhaust straight through the open picture window. Berchtesgaden was also one of the few places Hitler could relax with Eva Braun. From the very beginning of their relationship in 1929, he tried to keep it a secret from the German people, but she had other plans. Braun was a home movie fanatic and no one dared to stop her filming or being filmed, giving a unique insight into how Hitler and his entourage lived. As he spent more and more time at the Berghof, his henchmen turned the once idyllic Alpine retreat into a full-scale Nazi enclave. And we see here on the map, point 16, point 16, this was Haus Wachenfeld, which became the Berghof. But by 1944, all of these blue dots, each one having something to do with Hitler and the Nazi party. There are the hangers on, Goebbels, Goering, Speer, plus SS barracks, anti-aircraft emplacements, and so on and so forth. By 1944, Hitler's once modest Berchtesgaden house had become the second seat of the Third Reich. Enabling him to plot yet another fortune. As the Nazi war machine rolled through Europe in the 1940s, Germany's soldier-in-chief wasn't focusing totally on a military victory. He was busy looking for something else to do with his money, building an art empire, intent on becoming the world's greatest art collector. Hitler, the man who wanted to rule the world, is only the public face. The private man is something that few people seem to understand. His beating heart was all to do with art, on which he had strong judgments. He held dinner parties at Berchtesgaden, in which the arts were freely discussed with visiting generals. And not a word is spoken about the blood spilt in camps within 50 miles. Dachau, the village south of Munich, which housed one of the filthiest of the concentration camps, was also a place where Hitler housed art. Somehow, this schizophrenic person managed to live in two different worlds. Godfrey Barker is an expert on Hitler's artistic world. Hitler was an artist. He leaves behind about 2,300 watercolours, mostly of fine classical architecture and buildings. They're meticulous, they're well executed, but they're invariably wooden and lifeless. Hitler began to collect art seriously in the 1930s, as soon as he became wealthy. From 1936, Hitler was spending his own money to form a starter's art collection. By the time he had become Führer, his modest ambitions were forgotten. He was gathering fine art on an industrial scale, intending to put it all into his own museum. He set out to form the world's supreme museum. By the end of the war, he'd gathered 8,500 paintings for this purpose. The supreme pictures we're talking about are into hundreds of millions of dollars, so start multiplying that out by 3,000 or more of those, and you'll see where we're going. Hitler's fellow Nazis knew where they were going. Throughout the war, they looted Europe's best art, but their leader was a surprising exception. I had expected to find that he was directly responsible for looting and stealing of paintings that he wanted for himself, and I couldn't find any evidence for it. I found evidence that he paid for them, sometimes at knock-down prices, but not direct theft in any way. I was quite surprised by this, and I have to say, in all honesty, that's what I found. Didn't expect it, but I did. Today, no one knows how many of Hitler's 8,500 paintings were actually paid for, or how much they were really worth. But after his death, when the Allies looked for his personal art collection, they couldn't find it. Missing, too, were the many thousands of great works looted by his henchmen. It was as if they'd disappeared into thin air. In fact, they were carefully hidden here, just across Germany's border with Austria, in the tiny village of Alte See. Just 50 miles from Hitler's house in Berchtesgaden. Deep inside the surrounding mountains, 40 miles of tunnels on 18 levels have been carved out by miners extracting salt from the limestone rock. Many of these chambers date back over 1,000 years. Salt has always been very important and has given the community an identity. This has led to uproars against authorities since the Middle Ages. Helmut Kaus is a leading authority on the Alte See mine and the way it was used as an art store by the Nazis. A hiding place inspired by a memorial chapel deep within the mine. In the chapel, there were paintings for many years and they were well preserved. So you realize that this might be a great place to store art. The wood is from 1943 and it still looks new. The 1943 wood is shelving put in by the Nazis to store more than 12,000 works of art. But when American forces arrived a month after Hitler's death, the entrance to the mine had been blown up. The German commander in the region gave the order to destroy everything. The US Army sent in a specialist military fine arts unit, the Monuments Men. They discovered that none of the art treasures had been destroyed or damaged. By the time they emptied the mine, they'd filled 80 truckloads, recovering art worth almost a billion pounds. But it turns out the real heroes of Alte See were the mine workers who traditionally disliked authority. I believe from this tradition there was a resistance to Hitler. There were bombs in boxes here. The mine workers carried the boxes out. They just destroyed the entrance of the mine and the artworks were saved. What the Monuments Men didn't realize is that they had not only recovered Nazi looted treasure, but also Hitler's missing paid for art collection. At the time, no one cared. They swept everything into one clearing centre, I think it was in Koblenz. There everything got mixed up. It doesn't seem to have been properly documented. And then it was decided if it doesn't belong to the French or Russia doesn't stake a claim for it, then they gave it back to the states of Austria or Germany from whichever country it might have come from. But Hitler didn't put all his money into art and property. He kept a lot of it in cash, hidden away and not mentioned in his will. And some people knew this before he died. This rarely seen previously classified report by America's Office for Strategic Studies, the forerunner of the CIA, reveals that as early as 1944, the OSS knew that Hitler had access to massive amounts of cash. In a secret operation code named Safe Haven, agents found Swiss bank accounts holding 45 million Reichsmarks, including one controlled by Max Amann, Hitler's business manager, containing the foreign royalties from Mein Kampf. Equal to five and a half million pounds then, but worth almost 210 million pounds today. Amann was officially the owner of the Nazi publishing house that churned out Mein Kampf, but he was also the Führer's closest financial advisor. He had a foul personality, but he was a good manager. And it was he who came up with the name Mein Kampf, not Hitler. Only Amann saw the books. Amann personally brought the account books to Hitler wherever he was, whenever it was an accounting period. There are several witnesses to this. Nobody else saw them. If he wanted money for something, he just used him as the bank. Max Amann died in 1957, taking the secrets of Hitler's money to his grave. But in New York, an American forensic accountant is still looking for Hitler's missing millions. Ken Yormark has spent a lifetime tracking down money hidden in foreign banks by the Nazis. Hitler's bank accounts are not very well known. There's not a lot of information that's out there. He had accounts in Switzerland and in Holland. Today, the Swiss banks that held Amann's accounts are part of the giant United Bank of Switzerland. But Yormark believes the trail to Hitler's missing banked millions may not be yet stone dead. I have been involved in cases where we were able to recoup information from 1937 going forward. It was reported that that information was destroyed. Well, in fact, it wasn't. You have to follow the funds. Ken Yormark isn't the only one who's been trying to follow the funds. Hitler's family have been at it, too. When Hitler died, he left behind around 20 close living relatives. His sister Paula was next of kin and the only one to go after her brother's funds. Hitler's will clearly states that Paula and his half-siblings should have everything that is necessary to sustain a middle-class life, which required a lot of cash. So when the Allies officially valued his entire estate at just £15,000 in 1948, Paula went to court in Munich to get control of his assets and any money. In 1960, after a 12-year battle, the court ruled she was entitled to two-thirds of his estate. The remainder went to her half-sister and brother, but the court put no value on his estate. And Paula Hitler never got to find out what it was worth. She died in June 1960 at the age of 64, four months after her victory. The court subsequently ordered that any benefit from her brother's estate should pass to any heirs and relatives. The question now is, who and where are they? They would potentially have the right to attempt to try and claim some of those funds. The bank has the obligation, after an account has been inactive for a specific amount of time, to reach out to that individual and try and find out whether they actually are still alive. If, in fact, they can't find that individual, then they have the obligation to reach out to an heir to try and find that heir. Not only have the banks failed to reach out to the heirs, Ken Yormark believes they've almost certainly taken advantage of a new piece of banking bureaucracy. When an account becomes dormant and ultimately goes to the state, they can't use those funds. So there are big issues right now, for example, in Switzerland, where there's just recently been passed a ruling that after 62 years, an account would actually pass to the government. The ruling, declared by the Swiss Parliament, was passed in March 2013, meaning Hitler's accounts, wherever they were hidden, have lain dormant for more than the 62 years. His secret cash millions have gone, legally taken. Unless a relative mounts a legal challenge, someone, somewhere, has their hands on a tidy fortune. But the hunt for Hitler's missing millions isn't over. More is yet to come. Adolf Hitler is still earning. The Allies stripped Adolf Hitler of his major assets and book royalties in 1948. There was something they couldn't take. His lasting image, his likeness, which Hitler had cashed in on right from the start. In 1923, he appointed this man, Heinrich Hoffmann, as his personal photographer. It was a move which made them both rich. Now, it was Hoffmann who had the great idea of copywriting Hitler's image. And nobody then could do anything without paying the fees to Hoffmann's agency, which, of course, then came to Hitler. They had a copyright on any Hitler image, anything and everywhere. The anything and everywhere included the use of Hitler's face on Germany's postage stamps. Every time one was sold, Hitler got a special commission. 70 years on, Hitler's image is again centre stage, making money. This is a music video from Thailand. The band wanted to be famous and thought it funny to dress up. The joke is now worn thin. They don't want it to be seen anymore. In India, there was once a chain of Hitler tailors. In Bangkok, there is now a group of fast food outlets. When a collection of Hitler's luxury Mercedes was put up for sale, they fetched $8 million. There are now all sorts of auctions involving items said to have been owned or used by Hitler. In January 2014, a signed copy of an early two-part edition of Mein Kampf went to an anonymous bidder for $64,000. And Mein Kampf will soon be available for all to cash in on. Copyright ends 70 years after the author's death, which means copyright will be free and open. It will pass into the public domain at the end of 2015. And, well, starting with on January 1st, 2016, everybody is basically allowed to do with a text whatever he wants. Some are already doing whatever they want. A colleague of ours recently traveled to India and he discovered this English version of Mein Kampf in a bookstore in Delhi, New Delhi it was, I believe, right next to a biography of Gandhi. It is presented here on the back of the book that it will give you an insight into one of the greatest evil geniuses of the last century. We were flabbergasted, I think the British term is, by this because everybody would probably subscribe to evil, but not so much to genius. Hitler has even become a satirical attraction on the net. Hipster Hitler is an American comic book with a very 21st century birth. We're talking on Skype and we'd always wanted to do a comic together. One of us said something like ironic Hitler and the other person said hipster Hitler. And we were like, oh, that has a ring to it. So I said, oh, I'll draw something right now. And we put it up and then we woke up the next morning and there were like 50,000 hits on the website, which was weird. So then that's when we decided to actually make it a full comic. The comic I have open is called Rhineland. So it's about Hitler deciding to reclaim the Rhineland. And in the comic, the reason he takes it back is not because of territorial issues. It's because it contains hops, flax and hemp, which can be used to make beer and hemp for like t-shirts. So he's happy for that reason. I think Hitler would absolutely put this on the list of books to burn. The even greater irony of hipster Hitler is that the publishers pay nothing for the use of his name or image. Any other well-known person would cost money because they would almost certainly have an agent. Like Mark Roessler, who is based in Indiana and specializes in representing deceased stars like James Dean, as well as other more infamous celebrities, earning him the nickname, Agent of the Dead. We've often been approached by family members of people like John Dillinger to the son of Sam, to Al Capone, people like that. Whoever owns those intellectual property rights can continue on and not only protect those, but continue to receive the income stream that comes from those intellectual property rights, which can often be very substantial. The big question now, though, is could the intellectual property rights convention be applied to Adolf Hitler and his surviving relatives? It is possible that certain family members could take out trademark registrations to his name or even his image. But in the right of publicity, it's a right that we all have, whether you're famous or not famous or infamous. And that's generally the right that someone would have, a descendant or an assignee, to protect the name and likeness and the overall goodwill associated with Hitler. Goodwill, badwill, notoriety, infamy, whatever. It's almost certain that no one will ever know exactly what Adolf Hitler was actually worth when he died. Or what his contested estate would now be worth if the cash from the continuing use of his image was owned or could be claimed. One thing, though, is for sure. The will, he wrote in 1945, is positively misleading. There's no life here whatsoever. That's funny, isn't it? You don't see any birds. I think the birds must realize what happened here before. He knew that he's going to commit suicide, yes? And therefore he said, no, I have to make a will. He wanted to show his ambition as purely for the German people. And a man like that wanted to project that image for eternity. That's why he made this private will very, very little. What was the real Hitler, I think, will take many years to find out.