Priceless paintings by Monet, Cézanne and other famous artists as well as sculptures, carpets and tapestries are believed to be buried in an old silver mine in a mountain range near the Czech-German border
Hitler was defeated more than 70 years ago, but most of the treasures he looted and then hid as the Third Reich collapsed have still not been found, the Mirror reports.
The Nazis stole priceless gold, jewelry and art as they invaded Russia from Europe. By the end of the war over 19 billion pounds of gold had “made wings”. They were buried, hidden or sent abroad, and “Nazi gold hunters” have been searching for the treasure ever since.
Now treasure hunters searching for 10 tonnes of Nazi gold under a Polish palace say they are close to finding a cache worth £200 million.
Priceless paintings by Monet, Cézanne and other famous artists as well as sculptures, carpets and tapestries are believed to be buried in an old mine in a mountain range near the Czech-German border.
The paintings form the largest part of the famous Hatvany collection, owned by Baron Ferenc Hatvany, who was a leading Hungarian-Jewish industrialist and “patron of the arts”.
Most of the collection – between 250 and 500 works – was looted on the orders of Adolf Eichmann, the “architect” of the Holocaust, while he was in Hungary in 1944. Viennese historian Burkhart List recently said he obtained documents from old Nazi archives of the armed forces, who reported a mass shipment of the Hatvany collection being transferred to Erzgebirke.
He later deployed a neutron generator inside the mountain to probe the secret chambers and found artificial caves, 180 meters deep. Local mayor Hans-Peter Haustein said: “The question is not what we will find here, but when we will find it. These things are here.’
Lake Walchen, Germany
More than £56 million worth of Nazi gold is believed to be at the bottom of Bavaria’s Lake Walchen, one of the deepest and largest lakes in the Alps. Locals reported seeing German troops on the shores of the lake in April 1945, a month before the end of the Third Reich.
Records show that Himmler gave permission for three trucks, carrying troops, to travel from Berlin to Bavaria around the same time the soldiers were seen.
Although it is not known what may have been discarded, we do know that Reichsbank officials approved a plan to hide a portion of their reserves in Einsiedl, a hamlet on the southwest coast.
This included 365 bags of gold bars, four boxes of gold and two bags of gold coins. In June 1945 the treasure was handed over to the Allies. But 100 gold bars and 94 bags of US dollars and Swiss francs were missing and never found.
Lake Toplitz, Austria
This remote lake in the Austrian Alps has been the focus of treasure hunters since the end of the war, when, according to locals, a phalanx of trucks, guarded by the SS, dumped metal cans into the deep waters.
Many believe the boxes contain billions of pounds worth of stolen gold and platinum bars, as well as documents showing where assets confiscated from Jews were hidden in Swiss bank accounts.
In 1959, during a diving expedition into the lake, boxes were found containing over £100 million in counterfeit British notes, part of Hitler’s plan to destroy the British economy by flooding it with counterfeit notes.
A series of deaths and murders around the lake, which sits 2,500 feet above sea level, has also sparked speculation about what might be hiding in the lake, and even if anyone continued to guard it after the war.
In 1946 two men were murdered on the shore. Police investigating the death of a Frenchman in the lake in 1952 found two other bodies, both shot in the head.
Walbrzych, Poland
Legend has it that an entire trainload of gold and treasure was hidden by the Nazis in southwestern Poland during the final days of the war.
An armored train is said to have left Breslau, now Wrocław, in Poland, and arrived at Swiebodzice station, but did not reach the next station at Walbrzych, and is thought to have entered tunnels under the nearby Owl Mountains.
On the ship, there were supposed to be more than 330 tons of gold, jewels, weapons and priceless works of art.
In 2015, treasure hunters Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter claimed they were close to finding the train when radar images emerged showing several carriages 9 meters underground. The Polish government made a study of the site, but concluded that there was no such golden train.
Last year, Koper and Richter said they had found the remains of the train at the bottom of a lake in the Polish village of Zarska Wies. They have requested permission to retrieve what they believe is the lost Nazi phalanx.
Mamerki, Poland
Last year treasure hunters discovered a secret network of Nazi tunnels believed to contain the long-lost ‘Amber Room’, said to be worth up to £500m and once considered the eighth wonder of the world.
The room, built for Russian Tsar Peter the Great in the 1700s, was a chamber decorated with six tons of amber, as well as gold and precious jewels, located in the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg. It was disbanded by the Nazis and mysteriously disappeared at the end of World War II. Staff at the World War II museum in Mamerki were searching the 200-hectare forest, once home to Nazi Germany’s eastern army headquarters, when they discovered a 100kg concrete slab covering a tunnel shaft.
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