From charred shreds of paper, Kosovan fortunes can be saved

Kosovar Albanians who thought they had lost everything in the war waged by Serbia have, in many cases, regained their life savings thanks to a team of German bankers who call themselves the Money Detectives.

This 10-strong unit of the Bundesbank has repaid some #30 million in Deutschmarks to Kosovans whose homes were overrun during the Serbian onslaught on their land in 1999.

The mark has long been the dollar of the Balkans, more reliable than domestic currencies which fluctuate as wildly as the politics in the unstable region. Consequently it was deutschmarks that Kosovans saved and hid in the walls of houses, down wells, in barns, even in tractor cabs, when the Serbian killing squads arrived.

The money often shared the fate of people and property - consumed by fire, drowned and otherwise destroyed. It is the fragments that are left that the Money Detectives scrutinise to determine whether they are the genuine article and can be replaced with new money to rebuild lives and property.

Families who returned to destroyed buildings in towns and villages often comforted themselves that their homes might be gone but that some, or even all, of their life savings would have survived.

All too often the flames, in conjunction with high explosives, turned their hopes into ashes not dissimilar to the remains of their wealth.

Almost daily since then these charred and waterlogged fragments have been brought in person, or else sent by post, to the Bundesbank in Frankfurt where the Money Detectives, led by Wolfgang Rumpf, have developed the expertise to spot the fakes from the genuine article.

Years of grandmothers burning the family fortune in bakers' ovens and farmyard swine devouring the buried inheritance have honed their skills.

One case Rumpf is particularly proud of concerns a man from Pristina who lost his house, his car and his life savings during the Serb occupation. He returned to his home to find that the DM80,000 - around #26,700 - he had hidden in a wall cavity had been charred to a crisp.

"He heard that we in Frankfurt were handling cases like his and he scraped together from friends the money to come here with the remains of what were his life savings," said Rumpf. "We examined them for three hours after which he walked out with new notes, every pfennig he lost."

Another success story was that of a man who lost three members of his family to a Serbian death squad. His money, #30,000 in Deutschmarks, was wrapped in plastic and submerged in a well. But the Serbs had slaughtered the man's cattle and hurled them into the well.

The horn of a steer punctured the plastic guarding the money, submerging it into a seething morass of stagnant water, rotting flesh, and raw sewage from cracked pipes that had polluted the groundwater. The desperate man drained the well and then worked solidly for two weeks reclaiming his life's savings from the bottom.

He drove across land in a borrowed car for 48 hours and had precisely #11 in Deutschmarks to his name when he arrived in Frankfurt with the remains of his savings.

Six hours later the Money Detectives were able to reimburse him with all of his money.

The Money Detectives operate with nothing fancier than microscopes, scalpels and tweezers but these tools are allied to long experience in handling what has long been Europe's most stable currency.

The merest hint of a serial number can tell the detectives what denomination the banknote in question was, and when and where it was issued.

Several dozen cases have also been handled from Bosnia and Croatia, other targets of the Milosevic dream for a greater pan- Serbia. But aiding war victims, they say, is just a part of their work.

They are also on call to the German criminal police who call on their expertise roughly 20,000 times each year. Then the Money Detectives have to leave their desks to head for crime scenes where cash is often found on dead bodies. There is a darkly comic side to their work too.

A couple of years ago the detectives handled the case of the Bavarian pig who allegedly ate his master's black briefcase and the DM100,000 allegedly contained within it.

The pig had to be slaughtered after the remains of the notes were not passed naturally but, unfortunately for the farmer, the gastric juices of the animal proved more than a match for the banknotes and the Money Detectives who were unable to discern any recognisable traces of currency.

The team is also well equipped to deal with swindlers who come to the bank with the shredded remains of the sort sold at souvenir shops - one million DM in a transparent cube.

Not only do they not get reimbursed: they also get arrested for attempted fraud.

The confettied cash is shredded in-house by a Bundesbank machine that leaves tell-tale marks easily discernible to the Money Detectives.

But just when the unit has mastered the intricacies of one currency, becoming familiar with the cotton, chemicals and metals constituting the DM notes, the Money Detectives are having to learn new skills.

Intensive training has started to prepare the team for the identification of damaged and soiled euros: a currency which, goes the joke in the Bundesbank office, appears already to be in far worse shape than many of the battered remains currently flying across their desks.

Copyright 2001
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