Between midnight and 2 a.m. one October day in 1936, a line of trucks two blocks long stood outside the ornate portals of the Bank of Spain, in Madrid's Calle Alcalá. Bank employees, under the guard of picked Communist militiamen, loaded the trucks with 510 tons of gold, in bullion and coinsthe bulk of the Loyalist gold hoardworth 1.734,000,000 gold pesetas ($566 million). Although Spain's civil war was only three months old, Nazi intervention had made the Soviet-backed Loyalist position shaky.
On the outskirts of Madrid, the truck drivers were changed. The new drivers were told that the cargo was high explosives....
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