Germany matters to the novel chiefly as a place from which wartime secrets depart and later stories diverge: accounts of a downed aircraft connect it to the Reich’s gold, German nuclear scientists, and the contested movement of people and valuables at the end of the war.

Wartime routes and the Walchensee gold

In Carr’s account of the Walchensee gold, a small freight train left shortly before the fall of Berlin, as the Soviet Red Army closed routes in and out of the city. More than three hundred bags, each containing a gold bar, had been sent from the Reichsbank on Adolf Hitler’s personal orders; the shipment represented the Third Reich’s last remaining gold reserve. It reached Walchensee in Bavaria, where it was buried near the Obernach power plant. Carr says American troops later dug it up and that it vanished in February 1945. The U.S. government, he adds, has never commented on the allegation that the gold was shipped to the United States, while German media periodically revive the story. In this account, Germany is both the source of the treasure and the setting for its unresolved disappearance.

Carr links the gold to the glacier aircraft through a further, explicitly uncertain account: American soldiers supposedly stole a Junkers from the Luftwaffe, repainted it in American camouflage, loaded it with gold, and took off from Munich. After a secret stop at Prestwick in Scotland, they were said to be heading through Reykjavík toward the United States when a storm brought the aircraft down on the glacier. Carr reports that no one survived, but cautions that the sources are not wholly reliable and that none of the men involved in the alleged theft came forward. He estimates the cargo at six to eight tons. The account makes Germany the beginning of a route whose intended destination and cargo cannot be independently confirmed within the story.

The aircraft’s competing histories

A different explanation is supplied to Icelandic ministers by an American general. In this version, the aircraft left Hamburg carrying four German nuclear scientists recruited for work in the United States. The general places their journey within the postwar competition with the Soviet Union for German scientific expertise, and connects the recruitment to later controversy over scientists’ possible involvement in experiments on prisoners in Nazi death camps. The plane was scheduled to refuel in Scotland and Reykjavík en route to New York, but storm damage caused it to crash on the glacier. The general says the passengers were believed dead and that recovering the wreck would allow the United States to take it home.

These accounts do not agree on the aircraft’s passengers, cargo, or route. The gold story begins in Munich and presents the plane as carrying bullion; the explanation given to the ministers begins in Hamburg and identifies four scientists. Ratoff knows only that the plane took off from Germany at the end of the war and was heading for Reykjavík, and he does not know whether Reykjavík was its destination or a stop on a longer journey. Germany therefore remains a definite point of departure within the competing explanations, even as the purpose of the flight is withheld or recast.

Political afterlife

The German origins of the flight make the aircraft more than a recovery problem. In the general’s account, public knowledge of its mission could renew controversy over German scientists employed in America and strain relations between the United States and Europe. The Walchensee gold story carries a parallel burden: an alleged seizure by American troops, official silence, and recurring German media attention keep the fate of the gold politically unsettled. Germany’s role in the narrative thus lies in the gap between wartime movement and postwar explanation: trains, scientists, and an aircraft leave German territory, while the accounts of what they carried remain contested.