You’re Only As Strong As Your Weakest Point

In April 1945, as US soldiers overtook Merkers, Germany, stories began to surface to Army officials of stolen Nazi riches stored in the local salt mine.

Eventually, the Americans found the mine and began exploring it, ending up at a vaulted door. Here’s the story, as told by Greg Bradsher:

the Americans found the main vault. It was blocked by a brick wall three feet thick…In the center of the wall was a large bank-type steel safe door, complete with combination lock and timing mechanism with a heavy steel door set in the middle of it. Attempts to open the steel vault door were unsuccessful.

Word went up the chain of command about the find and suspected gold hoard behind the vaulted steel door. The order came back down to open it up.

But what to do about this vault door that, up until now, nobody could open? One engineer looked at the problem and said: forget the door, blow the wall!

One of the engineers who inspected the brick wall surrounding the vault door thought it could be blasted through with little effort. Therefore the engineers, using a half-stick of dynamite, blasted an entrance though the masonry wall.

To me, this is a fascinating commentary on security specifically [insert meme of gate with no fence]

Photograph of a gate along a path with no fence alongside it, making it easy to just side-step the gate.

But also a commentary on problem-solving generally.

When you have a seemingly intractable problem — there’s an impenetrable door we can’t open — rather than focus on the door itself, you take a step back and realize the door may be impenetrable but the wall enclosing it is not. A little dynamite and problem solved.

Lessons:

Footnote to this story, in case you’re wondering what they found inside:

[a partial] inventory indicated that there were 8,198 bars of gold bullion; 55 boxes of crated gold bullion; hundreds of bags of gold items; over 1,300 bags of gold Reichsmarks, British gold pounds, and French gold francs; 711 bags of American twenty-dollar gold pieces; hundreds of bags of gold and silver coins; hundreds of bags of foreign currency; 9 bags of valuable coins; 2,380 bags and 1,300 boxes of Reichsmarks (2.76 billion Reichsmarks); 20 silver bars; 40 bags containing silver bars; 63 boxes and 55 bags of silver plate; 1 bag containing six platinum bars; and 110 bags from various countries