Chasing Diamonds

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Over the next couple of episodes, we're going to hear stories from people who made discoveries

about a family member after their passing. And we're going to see what happens when a living descendant decides to take on their unfinished business. I'm Lloyd Lockridge. And this is family lore.

“Okay, so to start, could you tell me your name, please, and where you're from?”

Okay, my name is Paul Bost. I'm living in the Netherlands in a small city Driage. Paul Post as a man in his late 60s. He's retired after 30 years with Hewlett Packard, where he was a full-time trouble shooter. When you communicate with Paul, over email and in person, he comes across as affable and

friendly, laid back. And I think he really is those three things. But there's another side to Paul. Because in his retirement, he has become a dog and researcher. I think at this point, it'd be accurate to call him an investigator.

And Paul did not anticipate or even necessarily want this second career.

“It was instigated by a journal he inherited from his parents.”

Could you tell me the names of your parents? My father was my first name was Vim, W.I.M., and my mother name was Olms, A, and his. And tell me about your father. What did your father do for a living when you were a child? Well, when I was a child, I only knew he was in a firm for a veterinarian food.

And he was the one who had to buy in the stuff to make the food possible for production. And he didn't tell many things about the time before. So as far as Paul knew, his father's job and expertise pertained to the production of food for animals. John knew that his parents lived in Amsterdam during World War II.

In fact, Paul was born in Amsterdam, but he didn't know much about what they did there. There were no talking about what happened during the war, only the misery they had.

“There were no food in enough and that stuff, but not really the real life is not discussed.”

Did that make you curious? Not at that time, and when you grow up and you get older, you are more interested, well, what happened with my parents in Boston? But sadly, Paul didn't have much of a chance to talk to his father about his past. Wimpost died in 1976 when Paul was only 25 years old, but his father left something behind.

It was a collection of personal journals stored in a cupboard. When I came at my mother's house after his death, I noticed them in a cupboard. So I knew they were existing, but well, at that time I wasn't interested in reading them and opening them because of many other things to do. Paul carried on with his life.

He got married, started a family, and had a long successful career with Hewlett Packard. He would at times ask his mother what life was like before he was born. What was life like during the war? I wanted to know that history, and well, there were no many details about their lives in the war time and before that, only the pleasant times when they met each other and they

danced together and that stuff, but not the real life, how it was during war time, exactly. Then in 2007, Paul's mother passed away. In following her passing, Paul had to decide what to do with not only her belongings, but the belongings of his father, which she held on to for all those years. Well, at that moment I noticed again his diaries, and when I stopped working in 2010, I thought

well, why don't I just take a look at it and I went through them and then we'll treat big books.

in the years, 40, 45?

“Suddenly, Paul had an intimate and contemporaneous account of his father's almost daily”

life during the war.

He worked at a munitions factory until it became a high-risk target for bombings.

He wrote stories about the continuous struggle to obtain food and clothes. In one entry, when Paul talks about writing his bike 90 kilometers north of Amsterdam in the dead of winter, in an attempt to procure food from a farm. He was successful. He got the food, loaded it onto his bike, and returned to the city, another 56 mile

bike ride in the freezing cold. And when they entered the city again, we have their bikes that the Germans took away the food they had to get us and we have to farm it. So that was really emotional to read how that went.

“As Paul continued reading the journal, he discovered another chapter of his father's life,”

one he knew nothing about. After working at the munitions factory, windpost took a job at the Amsterdam Diamond Bors, the oldest diamond market in the world. Some of you may already know this, but Amsterdam is known as the City of Diamonds, and it's had that moniker for a very long time, like 400 years.

Something else worth noting is that the diamond industry in Amsterdam and around the world really was largely pioneered by Jewish people. There's a few reasons for this, and the history here is actually pretty interesting.

So, the first reason is that back in medieval Europe, Catholics were forbidden from charging

interest on a loan. This left money lending to the Jews. As collateral for a loan, people would often use jewelry, so the Jewish lenders had to become experts in evaluating the worth of precious gems. The second reason is that most crafts like Masonry and Blacksmithing were regulated by Christian

guilds, one had to be Christian to do these jobs. As Diamond Cutting was a relatively new craft, it was not protected by religious law. It was simply a job that Jews were allowed to do. And lastly, because the Jewish people have been persecuted routinely for the past 2,000 years,

they've had to flee their homes and communities sometimes with a moment's notice.

This created a need for portable forms of wealth. You can't flee with your livestock or your house or your land. Even precious metals like gold could be cumbersome. The diamonds, however, are the most concentrated form of wealth on the planet. With diamonds, you could flee with a fortune in your pocket.

And to bring it back to Amsterdam, the Netherlands was historically a tolerant nation. In the 16th century, it was a refuge for Jewish people fleeing the Catholics as they expelled the moors and the Jews from Spain. And later on, it was a refuge from the pogroms of Eastern Europe. All that in a very small nutshell is why Amsterdam is the city of diamonds, home to the

oldest diamond exchange in the world, the Amsterdam Diamond Bores. And it was here at the Diamond Bores that Paul's father went post worked in the early 1940s. His role was administrative, he would log daily transactions and balances. We had to write down how many diamonds a certain trader had in his possession and how many was sold, how many day he had to bring into the work to work on the diamonds.

For the most part, Wems' experience at the Diamond Bores was pretty uneventful. But that changed on April 14, 1942. He described the event that the Germans came into their office, their diamond agency. And they requested or demanded that the diamond traders should come into the office and turn in their diamonds at that moment.

And they have to give it in completely. And he described that in his diary.

“And so, what does he say about the experience of having Nazis arrive to confiscate the diamonds?”

He was emotional about that, because he saw how the diamond traders reacted on it, because there's their lives, and it was not only the Jews, it was all the diamond workers on diamond traders. And I think 78% did you, but he described their emotions what happened, because well, there was the control over their lives.

Did they resist at all, was there no opportunity to resist?

He was shocked, he was really shocked, but it was only one bait she's in in his diary. Paul was deeply moved and intrigued by this journal entry. He wanted to know more, but there was just the one entry. But as Paul continued going through his parents belongings, he found something else. It was an envelope, it was sealed, nobody had ever opened it.

The contents inside the envelope would define the next decade of Paul's life. The legend checkout of Shopify was on his way to the top of the shop, and it was a bit of a surprise.

“What if everything you learned in history class was only half the story?”

I'm Dr. Hrenie-Bot host of Hidden History, every Monday, I go where history gets mysterious, and follow hidden history, available now wherever you get your podcasts. Paul's mother had passed away, Paul had recently retired, and he was going through his father's wartime journals, learning for the first time, that his father had worked in the Amsterdam Diamond Bores on the day the Nazis barged in.

Paul assumed the one journal entry was all there was pertaining to this incident, and then he found an envelope.

“I got in my mother's possessions after her death, a close envelope of the time he was in the Diamond Bureau,”

and the envelope was fully intact, never opened, and in that I found a declaration of him and two colleagues

of what happened with the diamonds after they were taken away from Amsterdam, so that he described in detail. It was a statement, detailing exactly how much the Germans had taken from the Diamond Bores. He wrote exactly in that declaration how many Diamond carrots, how many carrots were brought from Amsterdam to the city of Arnhem, and that was 70, 1,500 carrots. 71,500 carrots, assuming those were high quality diamonds, which if they were at the Amsterdam Diamond Bores,

they probably were.

That's about a billion dollars worth of diamonds in today's money, and the declaration went into more detail.

It said that 31,000 carrots were sold by the Germans, leaving 40,500 carrots in their possession. With this information, it was now clear to Paul that his father had witnessed one of the biggest heists in history, so he continued researching, and as he did, one name kept coming up. Hold the details, what was happening with the stolen diamonds in Amsterdam, and there was his name every time mentioned. Cut King with a question mark.

Cut King, K-A-D-G-I-E-N.

“Paul thought that whoever this guy was, he must have been important, and he was a little surprised that someone that important would not have a name that he'd recognize.”

I mean, interested in history itself, and mostly in World War II history, I know a lot of names in the Nazi organization out of the books. And when I was in Yagai, and I noticed this document that describes the 30,000 carrots of diamonds sold during wartime, and I noticed two times the name Cut King with a question mark.

I didn't know who he was, and never saw this name before.

I thought, well, that is a third of the total of 30,000 that is in the possession of this Mr. Cut King. Who is he? Nobody that Paul spoke to in the Netherlands knew who Mr. Cut King was. All they knew was that somehow he wound up with 10,000 carrots worth of diamonds.

Paul had to figure out who this guy was. So after striking out in the Netherlands, Paul contacted an archivist in Germany. And I asked for a German archive if they have some details on Mr. Cut King. And I got a complete file of Mr. Cut King, and I knew exactly his career from when he stopped studying in the university until he worked into the Nazi organization.

It was completely described. The man's full name was Friedrich Cut King. And now Paul had a detailed dossier on his life before and during the war.

“To Paul's genuine surprise, Mr. Cut King had an extremely important job in the Nazi regime.”

He played a key role in something called the four-year plan. History buffs may recognize that term, but if it doesn't ring a bell, the four-year plan was an initiative to rebuild Germany's military and prepare it for four years of economic self-sufficiency. The program was initially meant to run from 1936 to 1940, but it outlasted that term and transformed into the government's apparatus for financing the rest of the war.

He was very high in the organization of the four-year plan, just below Mr. Göring. He was an advisor of him, and that he was in charge of the exchanges.

Herman Göring was Hitler's second-and-command designated successor,

head of the German Air Force, and overseer of Germany's economic rearmament. Friedrich Cut King reported to him directly, and his job was to figure out how to fund Germany's war chest. He was essentially the Nazi's finance guru. And as Paul poured through the various documents, he noticed something else.

The Dutch archives documented how many carrots were returned after the war. But those numbers didn't line up with the numbers recorded by Paul's father. And it was a big difference between those figures, been reading the government figures and my father figures. And that was, for me, interesting, to find out what is really happening after the war,

with the diamonds because there was a difference of more than 20,000 carrots between the government figures and my father figures. And well, that was, for me, a reason, I want to continue, want to know what happened in his work. He wrote it down in a declaration, and he didn't do that for nothing. He wanted to have it known after the war.

And well, I thought it was my task now to find out what really

happening with that big amount of money, but have never returned to the Netherlands.

So Paul had a new question to answer.

“A big question. What happened to the 20,000 carrots?”

Do you know if your father made any effort to figure out what happened to the missing diamonds? No, no, he didn't. Because in January, 45, his first son was born. And he changed jobs immediately after war. And he just wanted to build up his life, maybe his wife and his family, and he'd never infestigated what happened during more time in winter diamonds.

So you decide that you want to try to figure out what happened to these missing diamonds? Yeah, exactly, exactly. Because also my background is administrative. And I thought, well, I can continue where my father had to stop. Paul continued to hit dead ends in the Dutch archives, so he returned to Germany. There he found more documentation, which indicated that Friedrich Kottking had obtained an

additional 11,500 carrots. So in total, he had more than 20,000 in his possession.

And that is exactly what never returned to the Netherlands.

So that was, for me, a reason to continue searching.

“How long did it take you before you found what you were looking for?”

So in total, that was six years of investigation to get to the amount of carrots in Kottking's possession. So Paul figured out that Kottking had obtained about 21,500 carrots, which is exactly what was never returned to the Dutch government. I don't want to keep harping on the value of these diamonds, but because most people, including myself, aren't intimately familiar with the value of carrots.

That means that this seemingly obscured Nazi finance guy had in his possession,

So what happened to Friedrich Kottking? Did he go to Nernberg?

“Did he escape? Was he killed? Did he like so many other Nazi officials kill himself?”

What about the hundreds of millions of dollars worth of diamonds? Well, as Paul continued his research, he encountered yet another surprising discovery. Friedrich Kottking might have been unknown to Paul, his fellow researchers, the general public, and even World War II history buffs. But in the years after the war, Kottking was very well known to some very powerful people.

In September of 1945, four months after Germany surrendered, Friedrich Kottking was living in Switzerland, hoping to avoid capture. But his whereabouts were known to the Allies. In fact, while he was in Switzerland, he was interviewed by an American location. And their determination was what exactly? Well, they didn't trust Kottking at all,

because he, well, you know, when you ask a question, and the answer is, well, not exact what you ask,

and they did that the whole time. And they said, okay, he didn't want to tell everything he knew. And they described him as a snake of the lowest sword, because he didn't answer on the questions in detail what was asked to him.

“He gets away with everything. That's why he was described like that.”

What the American location was trying to determine was whether or not Kottking should be sent to Nuremberg to be tried for war crimes. Clearly, Friedrich Kottking played a major role in the Nazi regime. At the very least, he presided over the theft of hundreds of millions of dollars worth of

diamonds. Okay, so the finding of the American location in their interrogation of Friedrich Kottking

is that he's not telling the truth, he's a snake, and he should be tried at Nuremberg. Yeah, that was der conclusion. But that conclusion was in conflict with another piece of information. Prior to the American location's interview with Kottking, the one that suggested he should be sent to Nuremberg, the location had received an Ergram, an Ergram as a hand-delivered message for official business. And the Ergram had been sent by a man named Jefferson Kaffrey, a career diplomat,

who served as the United States ambassador to France in the post-war years. Jefferson Kaffrey had already his statement in that Ergram erote already in that Ergram that Kottking was not a real Nazi, and well, he was maybe helpful. So the location had to reconcile this dilemma. We think Kottking should be interrogated further and potentially try to Nuremberg, but we have this Ergram from Ambassador Jefferson Kaffrey

“telling us that he's not a real Nazi, and that he could be useful. What are we supposed to do here?”

Well, this is where the story gets a little conspiratorial, and you can believe what you want to believe. Friedrich Kottking was in charge of a German oil firm called Continental Oil, and he had a counterpart in Switzerland named Ernst Infeld. In fact, the reason Kottking had found safe harbor in Switzerland is because he helped supply Switzerland with oil during the war. But anyway, on the day that Kottking was being interrogated by the American location, his Swiss counterpart Ernst Infeld was in Paris,

which Jefferson Kaffrey was located. And on that very same day, Infeld traveled from Paris to Washington, D.C. According to his customs forms, he was therefore governmental business. So it was exactly the same date that his companion was interrogated by the American location, and that this bit well coincidence. What does that coincidence mean to you? I think there is a complete plan out to make use of Mr. Kottking, and his wealth on gold,

and diamonds, and bones, and money, and that must be a very big amount of money. And according to Paul, there was another major American political figure interested in Kottking. Alan Dolis, as in Future Head of the CIA, Alan Dolis. In 1945, he was the OSS station chief in Bern, Switzerland, and he was monitoring the flow of Nazi money in Europe following the war. Alan Dolis said that he wanted to talk to Kottking to know what we can do after

supposed war for Germany. And I think Kottking was very interesting for purposes of money.

And we don't really know the specifics of what happened here. We know that Friedrich Kottking started a company with Ernst M. Feld, the guy that went to DC on the day of Kottking's interrogation. In another guy named Ludwig Hout, the company was called Imhalka,

combining the first part of their three surnames, M. Feld, Hout, and Kottking.

The company operated out of Switzerland with offices in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. And they were allegedly using the company to transfer Nazi plunder to South America so that it wouldn't be confiscated by Allied forces. In 1950, five years after the war, Kottking was still living as a free man in Switzerland. In a January of that year, he traveled to Rome. Kottking went to Rome in 1950 in January by playing, and it was very curious that he could travel

“because he was still on a wanted list. Which one had less was he on?”

From war criminals to be brought for justice, and when he came back from Rome, in within a month he was on a boat from Geneva into Montevideo. He could travel in his own name. He didn't change his name, and he wasn't a wanted list. And just like that, Friedrich Kottking, the finance guru of the Nazi regime, joined thousands of other Nazis in South America. But unlike most Nazis, Kottking didn't escape

through the secret routes known as rat lines. He just left, on a boat, under his own name, despite being wanted for war crimes. Over the years, Paws uncovered a good amount of documentation, detailing Kottking's prolific

“theft as a Nazi officer. In addition to stealing diamonds, he was thought to have stolen other”

valuable commodities like gold and art. He was believed to be in possession of a piece of art from a prolific and well-respected Jewish art dealer in Amsterdam, named Jacques Gaudsticker. The piece is called "The Portrait of a Lady". But despite all of this, nobody ever went looking for Friedrich Kottking. He lived a comfortable life in Argentina. His company, Imhalka, purchased an 85,000 hectare ranch in Brazil. The company also helped import weapons and machinery

for the dictatorship of Juan Parón. And many believe the armaments were also used in right-wing coups around South America. Throughout the course of Paul's research, a lot of people thought Paul was on a wild goose chase, or that maybe a suspicion about Kottking were overblown or conspiratorial, maybe even a little crazy. Was there any public awareness of who Friedrich Kottking was prior to your investigation? Now, there's one person in Switzerland and it is a woman

investigator and we had contact with each other and she helped me also with some documents out of the

Swiss archives. She was aware of Mr. Kottking that I never had any other person talking about him.

When you know you are right, somewhere, and nobody wants to give you the credits, then you go on. That's my drive. So Paul pressed on. He was able to determine that Friedrich Kottking, who died in 1978, had two daughters. And he was actually able to locate the home of Kottking's daughter Patricia, who lived in Mardao Plata, a small coastal town south of Buenos Aires. He knew that

and all likelihood the diamonds would not be there. He wasn't really looking for them. According to Paul's theory, Friedrich Kottking would have sold the diamonds in order to get to Argentina

“and to establish himself there financially. But what about the looted art?”

It is maybe a possibility that you try to find out if the paintings are in Argentina. To most people, this seemed like an absurd theory that the painting, like the diamonds, would have been sold, or maybe even lost on the Transatlantic Voyage. Regardless, Paul contacted a Dutch journalist to see if you'd have any interest in trying to make contact with one of the daughters. And he said, "Well, that seemed interesting, and maybe we can send

our correspondent in Argentina from Buenos Aires to Mardao Plata." So the journalist took a five-hour bus ride to Mardao Plata and rang on the doorbell of the home of Kottking's daughter.

Well, that was a bit tricky because, well, you can ring on the bell that never opened for questions

to a journalist. But while they waited for somebody to answer the door, which never happened,

Out of idle curiosity, the journalist looked up the listing online. As they scroll to the photos,

“they paused on a picture of the living room. It was a cozy space with exposed beams and”

antique furniture, a glass coffee table decorated with gold figurines and what looked like a marble ash tray. And pressed against the wall was a plush green velvet couch, and hanging above the couch. It was a painting.

Paul post was right. He'd spent over a decade researching and tracking the crimes of Friedrich Kottking.

Some people thought he'd fallen into a barren rabbit hole. But not anymore.

“Well, I went almost to the roof, I think, because nobody wanted to believe me on the case of Kottking.”

He was an unknown person for a lot of people. Now not anymore. I had to do it on my own from the beginning in the diaries of my father until this. And now I got proof that I was right.

So, you can imagine I had jumped into the roof.

As for the diamonds, the object of Paul's primary mission. He's in the process of requesting documents from the American government. Most recently, Paul has requested records pertaining to

“Kottking from the CIA. In response to those requests, the CIA has said that it can either confirm,”

nor deny, the existence of such records. And that's for the discovered art. Now it had to be returned to its rightful owner. The family of the Jewish art collector from Amsterdam, Shot Gowd Sticker. And that family has its own story. That's next time. On Family Lore. If you have stories you'd like to share about your family, please email me at [email protected]. That's Family Lore, [email protected]. Family Lore is an Odyssey original podcast.

It is written and narrated by me, Lloyd Lockridge. Our executive producers are Leah Restennis and I. Our lead producer and sound editor is Zach Clark. Our story editor is Katie Mingle. Additional sound editing mixing and mastering by Chris Basel and production support by Sean Cherry. Special thanks to more occurin, Josephina Francis, Kurt Courtney, Hillary Schuff, and Laura Berman. Thanks again for listening to Family Lore. And if you have time,

we'd love for you to rate and review the show. It is not hard to destroy a college. Last season, the podcast campus files brought you stories of fraternity drug rings, stolen body parts, campus colts, and more. And now campus files is back for another season. There's a guy screaming into his phone. He's like, "Just saw Charlie Kirkus

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