Book Reviews
Page 30
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Gold soothsayer
IAN SAYER, who sold his company, the Sayer Transport Group, to IPEC in 1979, has branched into writing in a big way. He and Douglas Botting are co-authors with the Sunday Times (that's the way the publisher, Granada, of 8 Grafton Street, London W1X 3LA, puts it) of a fascinating book, Nazi Gold, published on Thursday.
Ian, who was an owner-driver in theSixties and by the early Seventies had established an overnight express freight service in the UK — at first, mainly on the Northern Ireland route — became interested in Reichsbank treasure 10 years ago when he saw a reference in the Guinness Book of Records entitled: "Robbery: Biggest Unresolved". Gold bullion and foreign reserves had been transported from Berlin to Hitler's Alpine fortress in the dying moments of the Third Reich.
Why was so much of it (worth some £2,500,000,000 by today's value) unaccounted for afterwards? Who stole it? Why had the world's greatest robbery remained unresolved for so many years?
The authors and other investigators followed an old, cold trail. Ian Sayer's research took nine years and led him across three continents.
Last year he was summoned to Scotland Yard for interrogation by representatives of the Italian police, and he was implicated by the Italian press in the deaths of two people. He had no difficulty in establishing his innocence but was left in little doubt that all this had occurred as a result of his involvement with the Nazi Gold project — as a warning, perhaps, not to probe deeper into the these affairs of the past.
He now has one of this country's largest private archives of original world war two documents. And he is the co-author of a book which sounds film material to me. Says the publisher: "The US Government has recently sanctioned a formal investigation into the disappearance of a portion of the bullion, the first time it has done so." J.F.D.