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Ian K. T. Sayer is an entrepreneur, World War II historian, author and investigative journalist. His Sayer Transport Group (established in 1967 and sold in 1979) became part of the British and European overnight door to door express parcels delivery industry.
He is a World War II historian and studies Third Reich documentation. He is co-author of Nazi Gold, The Story of the World’s Greatest Robbery and claims to remain the only private individual to have been responsible for the location and restitution of looted Nazi gold That claim remains unchallenged. He has also tracked down a number of Nazi war criminals including SS General Wilhelm Mohnke whose wartime activities were subsequently investigated by the British, Canadian, American and German governments.
He currently acts as curator to the ‘Ian Sayer Archive’, a collection of contemporary World War II documentation which assists in providing new information to institutions, other historians, authors and researchers of the period.
During the 1950s Sayer had developed a considerable interest in World War II. He had been brought up in an era where there had been a proliferation of films and books concerning the recent conflict. In addition his awareness of military history had been heightened by the fact that his great grandmother had been awarded a special scroll and £3 (a considerable amount of money in those days) by Queen Victoria to expressly commemorate the fact that his grandmother’s six brothers were, in 1900, simultaneously serving under the colours in places as far afield as India and South Africa.
In 1974 Sayer had become fascinated by an entry in Guinness World Records (formerly known as The Guinness Book of Records) under the heading ‘World’s Greatest Robbery’. In 1945 the Nazi regime sent its remaining gold and currency reserves to Bavaria where it was hidden in the mountains. With the war over, the US military and the US occupation authorities began to try and recover this buried loot. However, a considerable amount of the treasure had, in the meantime, simply disappeared, spirited away by a loose consortium of former Nazi and SS officers with the assistance of serving US military personnel. Despite a series of high level investigations by US military and civilian agencies much of it was never recovered. Following a U.S. ‘Watergate’ style cover up in the late 1940s and a subsequent investigation by the German police the case was never solved.
Sayer became so intrigued with the story that, 30 years later, he decided to launch his own private investigation. From 1975 to 1983 he travelled to many countries, conducted hundreds of interviews and also received a series of threats from individuals who had been implicated in the disappearance of the treasure but wished to retain their privacy. One of these threats manifested itself in Sayer being implicated in the 1980 disappearance of Jeanette May the former wife of Evelyn Robert de Rothschild in Italy. The bodies of Jeanette May and her friend Gabriella Guerin were subsequently located in 1982 but although Sayer was able to establish that he had no involvement whatsoever in the case he was interviewed by the Italian police and Scotland Yard on several occasions.
Despite having alerted the United States Department of State (responsible for the missing bullion) to his findings in 1978 it was to be another five years before they launched an official investigation. It lasted from 1983 to 1996 and culminated in the recovery of 25 kilos of stolen gold bullion still bearing full Nazi assay marks.[8] The results of his investigation were published in the 1984 international best seller Nazi Gold – the Story of the World’s Greatest Robbery (co-author Douglas Botting with the London Sunday Times).
In December 1997 he was the sole unofficial British observer at the London Conference on Nazi gold, an international symposium convened in London by the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and attended by delegates from 42 countries.
As the leading authority on Nazi Gold for over four decades, Sayer has been featured on most major domestic and satellite TV channels in the UK, Europe and the USA. Most recently he has appeared on Channel 5’s ‘Conspiracy Series’ and the German channel ZDF.
Over the years he has been featured in all major international and UK newspapers including the New York Times; Financial Times, The Times and Daily Mail to name a few.
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