Speaker 1: Hey, everybody, it's me Josh, and for this week's select
Speaker 1: I've chosen our episode on Legends of Nazi Gold from
Speaker 1: April of twenty twenty. This is the one where we
Speaker 1: learned that Nazis were even worse than we thought. Not
Speaker 1: only were they murder a swine, obviously, they were also
Speaker 1: scumbag thieves too, who didn't have enough money to fund
Speaker 1: the war they started in the first place, so they
Speaker 1: went around looting and robbing from neighboring countries, and by
Speaker 1: the end of the war, with the writing on the wall,
Speaker 1: they hid a lot of that gold that they stole
Speaker 1: in strange, unmarked places around Europe. Some people believe it's
Speaker 1: still hidden, just waiting to be found, hence this episode.
Speaker 1: Hope you enjoy.
Speaker 2: Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1: Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
Speaker 1: there's Charles w Chuck Bryan over there, and somewhere we
Speaker 1: lost I think she wandered off.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but this.
Speaker 1: Is stuff you should know regardless the Lost Nazi Gold.
Speaker 3: Edition, the Legend of Curly's Gold.
Speaker 1: If Curly was a white nationalist.
Speaker 3: Well who's to say he wasn't I don't.
Speaker 1: I don't know. He Jack Palance seems like the kind
Speaker 1: who would have beat up white nationalists for fun, as
Speaker 1: like a hobby, you know what I mean.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you know, we can't get into the super ins
Speaker 4: and outs. But as you know, my brother worked on
Speaker 4: the Legend of Curley's Gold and Jack Balance was a
Speaker 4: tough sob Yeah.
Speaker 1: I hear he used to do shots of nails.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, he wasn't a jerk. I wouldn't say,
Speaker 4: but it just sounded like he was just sort of
Speaker 4: a very cantankerous old fella to work with.
Speaker 1: That's so funny, man, because I mean, if you at
Speaker 1: the end of the date, he's an actor.
Speaker 3: I know, you're an app on the earth.
Speaker 1: It's not like you you weld machine guns or something
Speaker 1: like that. Give me a break, You're an actor.
Speaker 4: Yeah, like clinice Wood's not really tough. Well, actually that's
Speaker 4: not true.
Speaker 1: Is he?
Speaker 3: Oh sure, probably he's got to be.
Speaker 1: At the very least. He's been acting like it's so
Speaker 1: long he's developed. Yeah. Yeah, it's probably like a callous
Speaker 1: you know what I mean, where it's just kind of
Speaker 1: forms and stays a callous. It's the callousness of toughness
Speaker 1: that an actor.
Speaker 4: I don't think Clint Eastwood whinds about a hang nail.
Speaker 4: Let's just say that, no, like like we do.
Speaker 1: That'd be pretty disappointing. I actually was whinding about a
Speaker 1: hangnail to myself the other day, of course, But I'm
Speaker 1: not an actor. I'm a podcaster.
Speaker 4: No, we have a TV show that proves that. And
Speaker 4: I'm speaking for both of us.
Speaker 3: Ouch.
Speaker 1: I thought I did some good work.
Speaker 3: I thought you did a better job than I, And actually.
Speaker 1: I think we both did a much better job than you.
Speaker 3: Remember.
Speaker 1: All Right, So if you hate Nazis and you're like
Speaker 1: it's been a while since I was given a reason
Speaker 1: to hate Nazis a new one, rejoice because we're about
Speaker 1: to give you another one. At least I didn't really
Speaker 1: realize this to this extent, did you.
Speaker 3: You know?
Speaker 4: I knew about Nazi gold and that they took things,
Speaker 4: but I didn't know that it was almost one big
Speaker 4: people killing and world robbing operation.
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's the thing. That's the new thing to hate
Speaker 1: them for. Not only were they murderers, they were also
Speaker 1: just common thieves as well. I mean thieves on one
Speaker 1: of the greatest scales anyone's ever seen. But thieves nonetheless.
Speaker 3: Become an exceptional thief.
Speaker 1: Who was that Michael Kaine, No.
Speaker 4: Diehard, They called him a common thief, and he goes exceptional.
Speaker 1: Thief, right, Rodney conscr You imagine. Oh, I can't wait
Speaker 1: till Telogy gets like advanced enough that you can just
Speaker 1: insert whoever into whatever character and they'll say the same
Speaker 1: lines and everything. Uh huh, that'd be great. That's the
Speaker 1: first one I'm doing. Is Rodney Daegerfield is Hans Gruber.
Speaker 1: He would have been wonderful.
Speaker 4: That scene where he's fooling him into thinking he was
Speaker 4: one of the party goers.
Speaker 3: And he goes, what's your name, It's Bill Clay. Yeah,
Speaker 3: that's what it is.
Speaker 1: Don't shoot me.
Speaker 3: Come on, nobody shoots me. I got no respect.
Speaker 1: That's pretty good, Pretty good, no boy? Okay. So the
Speaker 1: Nazis were thieves, not just because they looted and plundered
Speaker 1: like the countries that they occupied, but that they did
Speaker 1: it because they were broke to start off with. That's
Speaker 1: what truly makes them thieving sobs is that their whole jam,
Speaker 1: this whole war World War that they started, they didn't
Speaker 1: have the resources financially or industrially to actually carry out
Speaker 1: this war they had to go steal to f and
Speaker 1: their role in World War Two, which they started.
Speaker 4: That's right, they you point out here, you put this together,
Speaker 4: good stuff. Thanks that in nineteen twenty three they had
Speaker 4: hyperinflation such that in November of that year it cost
Speaker 4: eighty billion marks to buy a loaf of bread.
Speaker 1: Is that right, Yeah, which sounds like a lot on
Speaker 1: its own, but if you consider that earlier that year,
Speaker 1: in January, a loaf of bread costs two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty marks. Yeah, so the price of bread went from
Speaker 1: two hundred and fifty marks to eighty billion marks in
Speaker 1: less than a year.
Speaker 3: But isn't that just a way of saying that nobody
Speaker 3: bought bread?
Speaker 1: No, it meant it's a way of saying that their
Speaker 1: money was totally worthless. Remember it happened in Zimbabwe. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't remember what episode it was. Maybe how much
Speaker 1: money is there in the world? We talked about hyperinflation,
Speaker 1: I think.
Speaker 3: So that was staggering.
Speaker 1: It was staggering. And the same thing happened in nineteen
Speaker 1: twenty three in the Ymar Republic. And this is the
Speaker 1: state of the German economy that the Nazis rose to
Speaker 1: power in because you know, that's one of the reasons
Speaker 1: they were able to rise to power and fascism was
Speaker 1: able to take over because the country and the economy
Speaker 1: was in such dire straits that this idea of like, hey,
Speaker 1: everybody get in line behind this guy, because he's going
Speaker 1: to lead us out of it. That's how That's essentially
Speaker 1: one way that Hitler and the Nazis were able to
Speaker 1: rise to power. But that also means that he inherited
Speaker 1: a terrible economy and he had to figure out what
Speaker 1: to do. Not only a terrible economy took but they
Speaker 1: Germany lacks natural resources that you would need to start
Speaker 1: a war machine too.
Speaker 3: Yeah. They have no oil.
Speaker 4: No, they don't have mineral deposits that you can make
Speaker 4: really find metals out of.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they've got sour kraut.
Speaker 1: They have sourk They have a lot of beer too,
Speaker 1: and their to their credit. But you know, if that's
Speaker 1: all you got, you need more to fight a war with.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: So what happened was they they had what was called
Speaker 4: the Reich's Mark, which was the monetary unit of the
Speaker 4: Third Reich, and they were five neutral countries that declare
Speaker 4: during World War Two, like, we're not going to trade
Speaker 4: in reichs marks. So Hitler and Germany said, well, you
Speaker 4: know what's always valuable anywhere is gold, and let's start
Speaker 4: taking it from anywhere and everywhere we can get it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and gold in particular, it's what's called a very
Speaker 1: fungible commodity, Like you can trade just about anything for gold. Right.
Speaker 1: If you have gold, people will give you whatever you want.
Speaker 1: You can use it to buy oil, you can use
Speaker 1: to buy guns, you can use it to fund terrorism,
Speaker 1: you can use it to back your own currency. There's
Speaker 1: a lot of stuff you can do with gold. But
Speaker 1: in particular in World War two, if you were the
Speaker 1: Third Reich, the Nazi regime, you needed to use gold
Speaker 1: because these neutral countries couldn't accept reich marks by agreement.
Speaker 1: But also the reichs marks were worthless anyway, so if
Speaker 1: you wanted to buy a bunch of guns, you needed
Speaker 1: some gold. And because Germany at the time only had
Speaker 1: about twenty five tons of gold in its reserves, which
Speaker 1: sounds like a lot, but as we'll see, is a
Speaker 1: paltry amount of gold compared to what they looted and
Speaker 1: pillaged and took. They needed some gold, and so yeah,
Speaker 1: they started looting it. And the first place they turned
Speaker 1: chuck was Austria.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how much gold did you say they had?
Speaker 1: They had twenty five metric from what I understand, twenty
Speaker 1: five metric tons of gold and the reserve Germany did
Speaker 1: at the outset of World War two.
Speaker 4: All right, well, this will drive home how much that is.
Speaker 4: They looted fifteen tons, just ten tons less from the
Speaker 4: citizens Jewish citizens of Vienna, Austria, from the capital city only.
Speaker 4: They looted fifteen tons of gold from Jewish citizens, just citizens,
Speaker 4: like you said, oh yeah, and that's those are just people.
Speaker 4: So the Central Bank of Austria they got one hundred
Speaker 4: tons of gold there, four times what they had in reserve.
Speaker 4: And then they said, hey, you know that six tons
Speaker 4: of gold that you're trying to send away to England
Speaker 4: to keep safe from US. Huh, bring that back here too,
Speaker 4: we want that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, they did. So just from Austria alone, they got
Speaker 1: one hundred and what twenty one tons, yes, to add
Speaker 1: to their existing twenty five tons. It was a huge
Speaker 1: deal that kickstarted the Nazi war machine into high gear.
Speaker 1: It was a big coup. Austria wasn't expecting it. No
Speaker 1: one was expecting it, and so other countries in Europe
Speaker 1: suddenly like gulped and they were like, we need to
Speaker 1: we needed to take this as advance warning. Basically, we
Speaker 1: don't want to become like Austria. And they triggered chuck,
Speaker 1: the largest physical transfer of wealth that the world, the
Speaker 1: planet has ever seen.
Speaker 4: Yeah, because I didn't know this, And it's kind of
Speaker 4: cool that, you know, countries that are are friendly to
Speaker 4: one another, we'll help.
Speaker 3: Each other out like this.
Speaker 4: Yeah, you can say, hey, US, you've got Fort Knox there.
Speaker 4: I've heard that's a pretty safe place to keep gold
Speaker 4: where England, So can we send you a bunch of
Speaker 4: that to keep for us? And just you know, we'll
Speaker 4: make a receipt out so we know how much there
Speaker 4: is and I owe you and you promise not to spend.
Speaker 3: Any of it.
Speaker 4: And the US and Canada early on at least did
Speaker 4: things like this. They accepted huge gold shipments. There was
Speaker 4: a operation in nineteen forty called Project Fish where the
Speaker 4: UK was sending or Britain was sending fifteen hundred metric
Speaker 4: tons of gold to the US to store in Fort Knox.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and in twenty nineteen dollars. The amount that they
Speaker 1: sent on slow boats through the Atlantic, which by the way,
Speaker 1: we're infested with U boats by nineteen forty was worth
Speaker 1: one hundred and sixty six billion dollars in today's dollars.
Speaker 3: And it got there somehow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, not one of those ships was sunk, astounding, and.
Speaker 3: That nutsy Well, they didn't know clearly, so.
Speaker 1: They they sent. So Britain sent that fifteen hundred metric tons.
Speaker 1: Russia they were like, we're just going to take care
Speaker 1: of ourselves. They evacuated a bunch of stuff from their stockpiles.
Speaker 1: They sent twenty eight hundred tons of gold from its
Speaker 1: banks to a location in the Ural Mountains for safe keeping.
Speaker 1: They also sent two other national treasures too, the embalmed
Speaker 1: corpse of Nikolai Lennon and artwork from the Hermitage Museum.
Speaker 1: Those those were the three things they prized the most
Speaker 1: to transfer by train to the Ural Mountains to stash
Speaker 1: until the war was over.
Speaker 4: So all told, if you want to add it up,
Speaker 4: during the course of World War Two, the Nazi stole
Speaker 4: at least that we know of, four hundred million American
Speaker 4: dollars in gold from countries they occupied, and another one
Speaker 4: hundred and forty million dollars in gold from people, largely
Speaker 4: Jewish people, from their homes. People that it were imprisoned
Speaker 4: in concentration camps. Yeah, they stole It was a very
Speaker 4: meticulous thing that they did. They would raid their homes.
Speaker 4: They wouldn't just round people up, they would go to
Speaker 4: their safety deposit boxes. They would rip their dental fillings
Speaker 4: out of their teeth, such that it even got the
Speaker 4: name tooth gold.
Speaker 3: It's on gold, and.
Speaker 4: That didn't you know, that covered everything that they stole
Speaker 4: from people, not just the gold from teeth. That covered
Speaker 4: people's wedding rings and their jewelry and their parts of
Speaker 4: eyeglasses and other things like that. It's just unbelievable how
Speaker 4: much gold they looted from concentration camp victims.
Speaker 1: Yeah, especially when you step back and look at it
Speaker 1: like that. Germany really needed the money, The Third Reich
Speaker 1: needed the money. They were just robbing, robbing and murdering,
Speaker 1: that's what they were doing.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 1: It really kind of puts it into perspective more. Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean the Nazis were the worst, dude, and still are.
Speaker 1: Nazis are the worst. So most of that gold that
Speaker 1: was stolen from occupied countries. I didn't see how many
Speaker 1: tons it was, but what'd you say, generally the figure
Speaker 1: I've seen is about five hundred to six hundred million
Speaker 1: dollars in nineteen forties dollars stolen, and most of it
Speaker 1: was put into the reichs Bank, which is Germany's central bank,
Speaker 1: kind of like its federal reserve, and there are different
Speaker 1: branches throughout the country, and you know, the gold was
Speaker 1: kind of distributed here there, but as the war kind
Speaker 1: of moved on, it was moved more and more into
Speaker 1: the central reichs Bank in Berlin until nineteen forty five
Speaker 1: and there was a bombing raid on Berlin on Germany,
Speaker 1: and they said, we need to get this gold out
Speaker 1: of here and into secret locations, and so the gold
Speaker 1: from the reichs Bank, hundreds of millions today, billions and
Speaker 1: billions worth of dollars worth of gold, was moved to
Speaker 1: places where no one had any idea, secret locations that
Speaker 1: weren't banks in Germany.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so this would set off I mean, people are
Speaker 4: still looking for Nazi gold today, and not just walking
Speaker 4: around with a metal detector, but some people are putting
Speaker 4: a lot of money into looking for Nazi gold. And
Speaker 4: one of the big reasons is a, like you just said,
Speaker 4: we know that they moved it at some point. And
Speaker 4: b In April of nineteen forty five, there were some
Speaker 4: military police patrolling around the town of Merkers. They questioned
Speaker 4: a couple of French women who had been displaced, and
Speaker 4: they said in French, I would imagine that they saw
Speaker 4: gold being stored in a potassium mine near the town.
Speaker 1: And the piece of soccer blue I mean holy cow.
Speaker 4: And the army investigates this and they found the it's
Speaker 4: famous now the Merkers mine Treasure, which was a horde
Speaker 4: of gold. There was a room covered in seven thousand
Speaker 4: marked bags of gold coins, gold bars, gold jewelry valued
Speaker 4: at about two hundred and thirty eight million, nineteen forty
Speaker 4: five dollars. So this was a signal to everyone like, wow,
Speaker 4: the legend of Curley's Gold is real.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is only about half the money. So let's
Speaker 4: let's get our metal detectors out.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I mean, this idea that the Nazis hid gold
Speaker 1: in mine shafts or all sorts of different places was
Speaker 1: proven by that Murker's Mind treasure that they did this,
Speaker 1: and there were substantial amounts to be found that was
Speaker 1: two hundred and thirty eight million dollars worth, but they
Speaker 1: stole five hundred to six hundred million dollars worth. Yeah,
Speaker 1: which means that there is a substantial amount of gold
Speaker 1: unaccounted for, and that is what has fueled treasure hunters
Speaker 1: to look for what today would be billions of dollars
Speaker 1: worth of gold that was lost and scattered and spread
Speaker 1: after World War Two. And I say, Chuck, I have
Speaker 1: a proposal for you.
Speaker 3: I bet I know what it is. Lie, what kind?
Speaker 1: What's your favorite kind of pie?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 4: I really love a key lime. Yeah, it's hard not
Speaker 4: to go with key lime.
Speaker 1: Okay, but what about just like a standard traditional fruit pie.
Speaker 1: They're really tough to beat, like a good cherry pie.
Speaker 4: If I'm going fruit pie, it's gonna be an apple
Speaker 4: crumble for sure.
Speaker 1: Okay. I used to be in that same group with.
Speaker 3: You until you had the sweetest cherry pie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, Warrant. Warrant talked me into trying it, and I
Speaker 1: loved it. Cherry pie is actually as good as the
Speaker 1: song makes it sound.
Speaker 3: Wow, all right, we'll be right back, Okay. I want
Speaker 3: to learn about a terrorist and call it horrid actyl.
Speaker 3: How to take a bird is gone. That's another word up.
Speaker 2: Jerry cheese my cherry pie.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I've tried it with cheese, like they say, but
Speaker 1: it's not very good. I think that's typically apple pie
Speaker 1: that's supposed to have cheese on it. So I just
Speaker 1: like straight cherry pie.
Speaker 3: Cherry pie, cool drink of water. It's a sweet surprise.
Speaker 1: Yep. I've tried it with the cool drink of water too.
Speaker 1: It's good. It's better with just water than say, like coke,
Speaker 1: because coke's sweet taste competes with the sweetness of the
Speaker 1: cherry pie. So they're pretty much right on except for
Speaker 1: the cheese.
Speaker 3: They say it'll make a grown man cry.
Speaker 1: I'm here to tell you that's the truth.
Speaker 4: Oh boy, that song and that video so dumb but
Speaker 4: also very titillating for a very young chuck.
Speaker 1: You know, have you seen the Rush documentary? Oh sure,
Speaker 1: did you know that Sebastian Bach from skid Row?
Speaker 4: It was skid Row, right, he was well warrant saying
Speaker 4: cherry pie. But yeah, yeah, Baschion skid Row.
Speaker 1: I know, okay, but like it's just a huge leap
Speaker 1: from skid Row to Warreck. Give me a break. But
Speaker 1: Sebastian Bach was from Warrenck.
Speaker 3: Right, No, no, no, he was skid Row.
Speaker 1: Oh that's what I mean.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Warrant was Janie Lane if I was taken.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you're right, man, you got it. The poor man's
Speaker 1: Brett Michaels.
Speaker 3: Yeah, in a way.
Speaker 1: So and sorry, Janey, I really didn't mean that, but
Speaker 1: I couldn't leave it the But Sebastian Bach from skid
Speaker 1: Row is one of the greatest and longest standing Rush
Speaker 1: fans of all time.
Speaker 3: That's right. He was all over that.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think he was. He joined their fan club
Speaker 1: in like seventh or eighth grade, he said, and.
Speaker 3: I love it.
Speaker 4: Right now, somewhere Brett Michaels is walking around playing that
Speaker 4: on repeat to his family.
Speaker 3: Did you hear that? Did you hear what Josh said?
Speaker 1: He thinks I'm better than the skid Row guy. No,
Speaker 1: you mean Warret. It doesn't matter, all right. So we're
Speaker 1: talking about Nazi gold, and we were saying before we
Speaker 1: started talking about Warrant and everything, that that there is
Speaker 1: gold that is unaccounted for, that was stolen by the
Speaker 1: Nazis that just kind of vaporized after the war. Gold's
Speaker 1: not supposed to do that. It's one of the things
Speaker 1: that people love about gold is it doesn't just vaporize
Speaker 1: into thin air. It's very easy to keep track of
Speaker 1: if you want to. And so people started looking for
Speaker 1: gold or looking for clues, and one of the big
Speaker 1: clues that people started following was local rumors and legends.
Speaker 1: Like in Murkers there were plenty of rumors and legends
Speaker 1: that there was gold hidden in a mine nearby dar
Speaker 1: Hills exactly, and they so that people people hearing local
Speaker 1: legends has really kind of fueled hunt for hunts for
Speaker 1: Nazi treasures for almost a century now.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so we're going to go through a bunch of these.
Speaker 4: There's one called Lake Toplets. Yeah, Like it's a very
Speaker 4: lovely place. I'm sure you looked up pictures. But people
Speaker 4: and treasure hunters have been looking for this gold and
Speaker 4: Lake Toplets ever since. And this is very much fact.
Speaker 4: A bunch of Nazis retreated there in the Austrian Alps
Speaker 4: in the final months of the war. US troops were
Speaker 4: closing in fast and Germany was about to collapse, and
Speaker 4: so they transported a bunch of boxes to this lake
Speaker 4: military vehicles and then horse drawn wagons even and they
Speaker 4: dumped them in the lake. So I think that part
Speaker 4: is definitely true.
Speaker 1: Right, there's yes, from what I could tell, it was
Speaker 1: reported on like that is fact, right? What was in
Speaker 1: the boxes? Yes, what's up for debate exactly.
Speaker 4: Some people say that's the Nazi gold about five and
Speaker 4: a half billion dollars worth. Other people said no, I
Speaker 4: think some of this stuff are documents where they they
Speaker 4: were basically confiscated from Jewish victims, about where they're assets
Speaker 4: were hidden and what Swiss bank accounts they could loot maybe, And.
Speaker 1: I saw also artwork. Sure they think that was sealed artwork.
Speaker 1: Also there's a rumor that there's three hundred pounds of
Speaker 1: morphine in oh wow in those boxes. That was contributed
Speaker 1: by I think Albania's president because he didn't want it
Speaker 1: to fall into the hands of the Allies.
Speaker 4: Well, one thing they know is down there, because they
Speaker 4: actually found some of these in nineteen eighty three. Was
Speaker 4: Hitler had the idea at one point, Hey, let's sabotage
Speaker 4: various countries by creating counterfeit money of those countries.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a pretty smart plan for a dirty Nazi
Speaker 1: I know.
Speaker 4: So they created just hundreds of million dollars worth of
Speaker 4: British pound notes, and in nineteen eighty three a German
Speaker 4: biologist by accident discovered a lot of these British pounds
Speaker 4: in the lake.
Speaker 1: What we talk about that in like how counterfeiting works.
Speaker 3: Maybe maybe it does sound familiar though for sure.
Speaker 1: We definitely talked about that plan. And remember there was
Speaker 1: like a Jewish printer who was a Holocaust prisoner, a
Speaker 1: prisoner of a concentration camp. We can't remember which one,
Speaker 1: who turned out to be like this master counterfeitter. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like because the Nazis trained him to or force them
Speaker 1: to was if I remember correctly, it was our counterfeiting episode.
Speaker 4: Yeah, And in nineteen fifty nine I talked about the
Speaker 4: nineteen eighty three fine. But in fifty nine they recovered
Speaker 4: seven hundred million pounds of these counterfeit notes from that lake.
Speaker 4: So some people say that's all that was down there.
Speaker 4: Other people say there may still be gold down there.
Speaker 4: And Austria actually still to this day has a problem
Speaker 4: about ten divers a year illegally dive in that lake
Speaker 4: looking for that treasure.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And what's interesting about this lake, aside from the
Speaker 1: fact that there might be Nazi treasure in it, which
Speaker 1: is interesting enough to make the lake remarkable and noteworthy.
Speaker 1: But in addition to that, this lake has a kind
Speaker 1: of a strange hydrology and that the top half of
Speaker 1: it is fresh water the bottom half is salt water,
Speaker 1: and they're separated by density. And in the middle of
Speaker 1: these two layers is a layer of floating layer of
Speaker 1: ancient logs that have fallen to the lake and been
Speaker 1: preserved over time. And so you can only dive so
Speaker 1: far before you hit this layer of logs, and some divers,
Speaker 1: I think five divers at least have died in this
Speaker 1: lake looking for Nazi gold, and at least one of
Speaker 1: them got tangled up in this layer of logs. It's
Speaker 1: a really dangerous place to dive. But the fact that
Speaker 1: you can't really see past this layer of logs is
Speaker 1: one of the things that keeps people coming back and
Speaker 1: keeps this legend alive, because they can't thoroughly search this
Speaker 1: lake and show conclusively, no, there's no gold here. Leave
Speaker 1: this place alone, stay away. It is pretty amazing. And
Speaker 1: then the other thing about it too, is this is
Speaker 1: a really remote location that was used by Nazi officers,
Speaker 1: high ranking Nazi officers and for missile testing. It seems
Speaker 1: like a really odd place just to dump counterfeit pound notes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: like you could dump those just about anywhere, So I
Speaker 1: don't know, maybe there is something to it.
Speaker 3: You're gonna get your scuba.
Speaker 1: You're ready. I got my flippers on already. You can't see,
Speaker 1: but I've got them on.
Speaker 3: All right.
Speaker 4: We're gonna move now to an eastern German town along
Speaker 4: the Chech border called Deutsch katherinenberg N. It sort of
Speaker 4: looks like the alphabet when it's on a page. It's
Speaker 4: a lot of letters in a row. Yeah, but there
Speaker 4: are people there that think and not only is there
Speaker 4: gold here, but possibly the amber room which was this
Speaker 4: You just look up pictures of the amber room room.
Speaker 4: It's pretty amazing. Chamber of honey and lindseed and kangnac
Speaker 4: confused amber panels, gold frame mosaics, marble, precious stones. And
Speaker 4: it was a gift of Prussian King Frederick Wilhelm first
Speaker 4: to Russia's Peter the Great, once called the eighth Wonder
Speaker 4: of the World, and it disappeared during World War two.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the Nazis plundered it from Russia, from the USSR,
Speaker 1: and they took it back to Germany, back to Kunigsburg
Speaker 1: or Kunigsburg, which was I think now a time part
Speaker 1: of Russia again, but at the time during World War
Speaker 1: two it was part of Germany or Prussia, and they
Speaker 1: had it on public exhibit for like four or five years,
Speaker 1: and then at the end of the war it just
Speaker 1: vanished and no one's seen it since. And there's a
Speaker 1: lot of people who say, well, it was destroyed in
Speaker 1: air raids. Other people say it was sunk on the
Speaker 1: you know, on a ship that was secretly carrying it.
Speaker 1: It's just lost. But there's a pair of treasure hunters
Speaker 1: at Deutsch Katherinenburg who searched in the area because they
Speaker 1: were sure that, among other things, the amber room panels
Speaker 1: were buried there in that town.
Speaker 4: Yeah, and this is probably the worst ending to a
Speaker 4: potentially cool story ever, But there was a pair of
Speaker 4: searchers searching for this stuff. One of them's father was
Speaker 4: a German Air Force officer in World War Two and
Speaker 4: in his personal notes, this son thought that he'd found
Speaker 4: the exact coordinates of this treasure. So he got together
Speaker 4: with another treasure hunter who was another German. He was
Speaker 4: a mayor in fact of a nearby town, and they
Speaker 4: thought that they had discovered through radar this big rectangular
Speaker 4: underground space about sixty feet down. And when I was
Speaker 4: reading this, dude, it was so juicy. I was like,
Speaker 4: oh boy, what happened? They didn't ever tell anyone. No
Speaker 4: one knows if they found any treasure. They didn't say
Speaker 4: anything about it. Apparently they had an acrimonious split in
Speaker 4: two thousand and eight, and that's just sort of the
Speaker 4: end of the story.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I guess the other treasure hunter was staying in
Speaker 1: the mayor's town and the mayor kicked him out of town.
Speaker 1: It was that acrimonious. Wow, So that's it. Last I
Speaker 1: heard was that they didn't find anything in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight, or they did never search for it. Right,
Speaker 1: So it was a little lame, but worth putting in there.
Speaker 1: I think, Oh, no, it's worth putting in there. It's
Speaker 1: just it has no good resolution. No, it's yeah, no,
Speaker 1: But you read a lot of fiction, so you can
Speaker 1: deal with that, right, that's right. Okay, So in Poland,
Speaker 1: south southeastern southwestern Poland, and a little corner down there,
Speaker 1: there's something there's a range of mountains called Owl Mountains
Speaker 1: and there's a long standing and widespread rumor that's been
Speaker 1: there for a very long time. I would say roughly
Speaker 1: since around the end of the Second World War. That
Speaker 1: would be my guess, that there is a ghost train
Speaker 1: and Nazi ghost train loaded with jewels, gold, weapons, art,
Speaker 1: basically everything you can think of that the Nazis would
Speaker 1: have plundered or pillaged, loaded onto this train, driven into
Speaker 1: a tunnel in the mountain, and left there hidden, And
Speaker 1: that it's still there and people have been looking for
Speaker 1: it for a very long time again since probably about
Speaker 1: the end of World War Two. But the thing that's
Speaker 1: kept this treasure hunt alive, Chuck, is there really is
Speaker 1: a vast, unmapped network of tunnels in the Owl Mountains
Speaker 1: that the Nazis dug there in World War two.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So again, some of this is based in fact.
Speaker 4: So that's what'll keep any sort of urban legend alive
Speaker 4: if part of it is true.
Speaker 3: And they did.
Speaker 4: They dug these tunnels of mine shafts between forty three
Speaker 4: and forty five. It was called the Reisa project, which
Speaker 4: means giant in German.
Speaker 3: And no one knows why.
Speaker 4: Some people say it might have been in one of
Speaker 4: their weird secret weapons programs. Yeah, some people say it
Speaker 4: may have been potentially where Hitler was going to hold
Speaker 4: up for his last stand. But it was very, very secretive,
Speaker 4: even among the SS, because if you worked on this tunnel,
Speaker 4: you had to sign a confidentiality agreement, which just sounds funny.
Speaker 4: For some reason, I thought everything about the SS was
Speaker 4: so secretive it would just be implicit.
Speaker 1: But right, and what are they going to do, like
Speaker 1: take you to court that you violated your NDA or something. Well,
Speaker 1: it is odd, isn't it.
Speaker 3: You know what they would do?
Speaker 1: Yeah, they just shoot you. I wouldn't think that you
Speaker 1: would need a signed agreement for that. These are the
Speaker 1: Nazis we're talking about, you know.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so they were not allowed to have their family
Speaker 4: members within forty kilometers radius of this area, and these
Speaker 4: tunnels were dug by forced labor from concentration camps nearby. Yeah,
Speaker 4: and it might have been a place for gold. It
Speaker 4: may still be. But the Soviets ruined all that in
Speaker 4: nineteen forty five when they came knocking at the door
Speaker 4: and the Nazis fled and basically blew up their own
Speaker 4: tunnels behind them.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And I want to say, there's a really good
Speaker 1: New Yorker article about the hunt. I can think it's
Speaker 1: even called the Hunt for Nazi Gold, about this particular
Speaker 1: legend and people looking for it, and they take a second.
Speaker 1: I think it's really worth pointing out here too, is
Speaker 1: you know, people who get who start looking for treasure,
Speaker 1: no matter what the providence of the treasure is, just
Speaker 1: get so wrapped up in the treasure and the legends
Speaker 1: and the myths and everything that it's easy to forget
Speaker 1: things like, well, you're running around a tunnel network that
Speaker 1: was dug by people who were literally worked to death
Speaker 1: over the course of weeks. They were worked that hard
Speaker 1: they died digging these tunnels that hold maybe this legendary treasure.
Speaker 1: That is the only thing you can focus on when
Speaker 1: you're talking about that. And that's definitely like a part
Speaker 1: of the problem that comes along with the job is
Speaker 1: you know, forgetting like having blinders on that you forget
Speaker 1: the reality of the situation. It's definitely it's important to
Speaker 1: remember this that you know, some of this old we're
Speaker 1: talking about was pulled from the teeth of dead Holocaust victims.
Speaker 1: You know, yeah, it's I remember that too.
Speaker 4: It's like Bill Paxson in Titanic. He needed that reminder
Speaker 4: from the old lady, like you're all pumped up looking
Speaker 4: for this jewel.
Speaker 3: Yeah, people died. People die here man.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's get it together, Paxixton rip. Yeah, that was
Speaker 1: so jarring when you told me that that first time
Speaker 1: few months back.
Speaker 3: Did I break you that news?
Speaker 1: You did? You broke it hard.
Speaker 4: So according to this legend, as far as the al
Speaker 4: Mountains go, there was this ghost train, like you said,
Speaker 4: and it was a freight train loaded with all kinds
Speaker 4: of valuables, artwork, jewels, gold boyyon, bars of gold, and
Speaker 4: that they drove that thing in this thing and it
Speaker 4: never came out in those tunnels. And the other part
Speaker 4: of this story that is rooted in fact is there
Speaker 4: were Nazi trains that carried tons and tons of gold
Speaker 4: and v and jewelry and paintings. That was one in
Speaker 4: particular called the Hungarian Gold Train that was intercepted by
Speaker 4: Allied forces in nineteen forty five. So you got a
Speaker 4: real train that happened. You've got these real tunnels that
Speaker 4: were dug and all of a sudden, this rumor of
Speaker 4: the ghost train takes route.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the idea that those two things have come together
Speaker 1: in the Owl Mountains.
Speaker 3: Though.
Speaker 1: That's the thing that's never been shown.
Speaker 3: To be true, that's right, And not from a lack
Speaker 3: of looking.
Speaker 1: No, not at all. No, there's a lot of people
Speaker 1: looking for that there. This one's actually my favorite, weirdly,
Speaker 1: probably because it's a shipwreck. I'm just so fascinated by shipwrecks.
Speaker 1: So the ship I'm talking about is called the SS Minden,
Speaker 1: and it was a German merchant vessel and back in
Speaker 1: I think nineteen thirty nine, it was disabled by the
Speaker 1: British Royal Navy off of the coast of Iceland, right.
Speaker 1: And what's so mysterious about this is that the Minden's
Speaker 1: ship register shows that it was just carrying resin from Brazil.
Speaker 1: I didn't see what kind of resin, but you can
Speaker 1: do all sorts of industrial stuff with the resin, from
Speaker 1: making adhesives to plastics to whatever, and then that was it. Right.
Speaker 1: But the thing that makes the sinking of the men
Speaker 1: In some mysterious is that the ship's captain, rather than
Speaker 1: let it fall into British hands, sunk it himself. And
Speaker 1: he sunk it in seventy seven hundred feet of water
Speaker 1: off the icelandic coast and that's where it lay undiscovered
Speaker 1: until I believe twenty seventeen when a mysterious ship showed
Speaker 1: up and started looking around the Icelandic coast and it
Speaker 1: believes that it found it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a little odd to sink
Speaker 4: a ship full of resin only right. It raises a
Speaker 4: little bit of suspicion, like you said, even though you
Speaker 4: can do some things with it. It kind of stuck out
Speaker 4: to me as like what else is on that boat?
Speaker 4: But yeah, in twenty seventeen, the Coast Guard and Iceland
Speaker 4: bordered a vessel of the seabed construct Or.
Speaker 1: It's like an unnervingly bland name.
Speaker 3: It's so boring.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's not like the Well, now I can't all
Speaker 4: boat names are kind of dumb.
Speaker 1: The Hercules of the sea, that's what I would name
Speaker 1: in my boat.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Sure.
Speaker 4: So they intercepted it. They said, hey, what are you
Speaker 4: guys doing here? And they said, oh, well, this boat
Speaker 4: has been leased by a group of British folks who
Speaker 4: are searching for the wreck of the s S. Mendon
Speaker 4: And they were like what They're like, haven't you heard
Speaker 4: that that was just full of resin? And they said
Speaker 4: clearly not, because we're spending one hundred thousand dollars a
Speaker 4: day to lease this boat, which frankly is not that
Speaker 4: great of a deal, but we couldn't talk them down
Speaker 4: any So that I mean, if someone is spending one
Speaker 4: hundred thousand dollars a day, that means that makes me
Speaker 4: think they know something that we don't know.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And so the Icelandic press actually reported that they
Speaker 1: think that the you know something we don't know, so
Speaker 1: much so that they interviewed the crew, and the crew
Speaker 1: said the official story is that they're looking for a
Speaker 1: couple hundred million dollars worth of gold that they believe
Speaker 1: was hidden in the safe on that ship, but that
Speaker 1: the real story, the real prize for what they're looking for,
Speaker 1: is only known to a handful of people, high ranking
Speaker 1: people on the boat. Yeah, that man left at that
Speaker 1: which man the Icelandic press knows how to spin a mystery,
Speaker 1: if you ask me.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean that really added this extra air of
Speaker 4: mystery on top of everything else, which is, oh, sure
Speaker 4: we think there's one hundred million dollars plus in gold,
Speaker 4: but we're really there for another secret reason.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if a hundred million dollars worth of gold is
Speaker 1: your decoy cover story? Man, You're onto something impressive. I
Speaker 1: can't wait until they raised that thing, because from what
Speaker 1: I could tell, everything everything pointed to the fact that
Speaker 1: they did successfully find the Minden. That that is the
Speaker 1: minden they found. But as far as I know, they
Speaker 1: have an gone down and salvage.
Speaker 3: Did it all get James Cameron on it?
Speaker 1: Who knows? Maybe I mean the Amber Room was sunk
Speaker 1: and maybe it happened to be on the SS Minden,
Speaker 1: So maybe we'll have the Amber Room back in the
Speaker 1: next ten years. Well, hey man, you said today's magic
Speaker 1: second ad break word James Cameron, which means we're now
Speaker 1: obligated to take our second message break Do you want
Speaker 1: to take it now or shall we have taken it
Speaker 1: three minutes ago?
Speaker 3: No, let's take it now.
Speaker 1: Okay, we'll be right back. Everybody want to learn about
Speaker 1: a terror's art and college lad Actel, how to take
Speaker 1: a perfect boom, all about fractalk is gone.
Speaker 3: That's another hunt the.
Speaker 2: Everything should know.
Speaker 1: Word up, Jerry. All right, Chuck. So there's places where
Speaker 1: you can physically go to search for legendary gold. You
Speaker 1: can also just enter the international gold trade and you
Speaker 1: can turn up alarmingly Nazi gold that was kind of
Speaker 1: lost you could put it after the war.
Speaker 4: Yeah, this is really interesting. In nineteen forty six, as
Speaker 4: part of reconstruction and restoration all over Europe, there was
Speaker 4: a committee for him called the Tripartite Gold Commission or
Speaker 4: the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold. And
Speaker 4: this is formed by the US, by the French, and
Speaker 4: by the Brits, and basically the whole jam here was,
Speaker 4: let's find all this gold, let's account for all this
Speaker 4: gold that we discovered as allies, and then let's redistribute
Speaker 4: it back to where we if we can trace it
Speaker 4: such to where it was looted, to the banks and
Speaker 4: central banks, and even if we can find out human individuals,
Speaker 4: that would be even better.
Speaker 1: And it was strictly to I believe, strictly to the
Speaker 1: European central banks that had a claim to have it
Speaker 1: having been looted from after the war. And then in
Speaker 1: the late nineties there was a real push to try
Speaker 1: to compensate the survivors and the heirs of the Holocaust
Speaker 1: who also had been robbed too. So a lot of
Speaker 1: gold that some countries still had claim on as part
Speaker 1: of this London Conference on Nazi Gold that was held
Speaker 1: in nineteen ninety seven. Some of the countries that said, well,
Speaker 1: actually we're still owed a lot of this gold. They said, okay,
Speaker 1: well we'll take a portion of this gold and divert
Speaker 1: it to humanitarian groups who will use it to for
Speaker 1: reparations to Holocaust victims, which is pretty cool. The big
Speaker 1: outlier in this was a little tiny country that remained
Speaker 1: neutral during World War Two, at least on paper, Switzerland,
Speaker 1: who not only it turns out, was secretly assisting the
Speaker 1: Nazis and laundering their gold in exchange for money that
Speaker 1: the Nazis could go use to fund its war machine.
Speaker 1: They hung on to this Nazi gold and from what
Speaker 1: I can tell, still have all of the Nazi gold
Speaker 1: that they had after World War Two, including gold that
Speaker 1: was made from that zon gold melted down, personal effects,
Speaker 1: and gold teeth that Switzerland apparently still has in its
Speaker 1: gold reserves and is not willing to give up.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was really surprising.
Speaker 4: This all came out because of a historical paper that
Speaker 4: was part of that conference. It showed that the US
Speaker 4: had a lot of this gold that they melted down
Speaker 4: after the war and did return to the central banks
Speaker 4: in Europe as part of an effort to stabilize their
Speaker 4: economy there. But finding out that Switzerland did this, and
Speaker 4: that Switzerland was neutral, and that the Geneva Convention, which
Speaker 4: explicitly bars this kind of thing, comes from Geneva, Switzerland, right,
Speaker 4: is like the ultimate irony here, and it's I just
Speaker 4: want to know if there's more to this. There's got
Speaker 4: to be something else.
Speaker 3: Right. They're good people.
Speaker 1: Sure, but I mean countries do bad things for sure,
Speaker 1: you know, even if there are good people that live there,
Speaker 1: there's I mean, from everything I could tell, it came
Speaker 1: out in the nineties that it was pretty clear Switzerland
Speaker 1: had served as money launderers for the Nazis without anybody
Speaker 1: realizing it for decades.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it is pretty shocking, for sure. I think the
Speaker 1: thing that gets me though, is the idea that there's
Speaker 1: a lot of gold in the international gold trade today
Speaker 1: that can be traced back to missing Nazi gold, that
Speaker 1: it's not necessarily buried in the side of a mountain
Speaker 1: in Poland or under a small town along the German
Speaker 1: Czech border. That's it's out and about being used as
Speaker 1: currency or as a commodity today in the international gold trade.
Speaker 1: That to me is the most astounding part of all
Speaker 1: of this.
Speaker 3: Yeah, how do you trace gold?
Speaker 1: They have a very strict system for it, but it's
Speaker 1: only as strict as how it's observed. Oh okay, So, like,
Speaker 1: for example, in twenty nineteen, the Simon Weisenthal Center, which
Speaker 1: has spent a lot of time hunting down Nazi war
Speaker 1: criminals in the I think starting in the sixties, seventies
Speaker 1: and eighties, they accused Venezuela and specifically the administration of
Speaker 1: Nicholas Maduro of trafficking in Nazi gold that he sold
Speaker 1: over the course of his administration so far something like
Speaker 1: seventy seven tons of gold. And they're like, you know what,
Speaker 1: we're pretty sure that that was Nazi gold that was
Speaker 1: transferred late in the war to Spain and then on
Speaker 1: to South America to help fund a fourth Reich, a
Speaker 1: rebuilding of the Nazi regime among the war criminals living there,
Speaker 1: And they think that this was some of that gold,
Speaker 1: and that Maduro has been selling it to kind of
Speaker 1: bankroll his his country and his his his regime. Wow,
Speaker 1: isn't that nuts? It is nuts?
Speaker 3: Is nuts?
Speaker 1: Yeah? It is absolutely the Like I can't remember how
Speaker 1: I came across as I think it was a house
Speaker 1: stuff works article. There's a couple on them, and it
Speaker 1: just started digging further and further, and it's just one
Speaker 1: of those things where it's it just takes such a
Speaker 1: great left turn, great meaning like just surprising and unexpected,
Speaker 1: where it's like, you know, you're going from treasure hunters
Speaker 1: arguing and kicking one another out of little towns and
Speaker 1: and kicking around mountains in Poland to the international gold
Speaker 1: trade trafficking and Nazi gold. Still it's it's just just
Speaker 1: a crazy story.
Speaker 4: Yeah, it's it's pretty mind blowing and disappointing in a
Speaker 4: lot of ways.
Speaker 1: Yeah, for sure, because again, remember a lot of that gold,
Speaker 1: those gold bars are melted down gold teeth taken from
Speaker 1: Holocaust victims or gold wedding rings taken from Holocaust victims,
Speaker 1: and now they're used to as part of an international
Speaker 1: form of currency.
Speaker 3: Yeah, boo boo.
Speaker 1: Well that's it. You got anything else?
Speaker 3: Got nothing else?
Speaker 1: If you want to know more about Nazi gold, there's
Speaker 1: a lot you can read. It's quite a rabbit hole
Speaker 1: you can go down if you want to, So you
Speaker 1: could start by going to HowStuffWorks dot com. And checking
Speaker 1: out their articles on it. And since I said how
Speaker 1: stuff works, it's been a while, that means it's time
Speaker 1: for a listener may all.
Speaker 3: That's right.
Speaker 4: I was thinking that would be a good movie about
Speaker 4: World War two era Nazi gold hunters. But it's sort
Speaker 4: of like Three Kings already did that.
Speaker 3: But that was a Gulf War.
Speaker 1: Yeah. And then also there was that one museum men.
Speaker 1: I think they were brought into kind of make sure
Speaker 1: that the paintings that were looted we're not.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, sure, whatever. I didn't see that. What was
Speaker 3: it called? It wouldn't call museum and what was it?
Speaker 1: Almost positive of his museum?
Speaker 3: Man? Was it? Whill you look that up? While I
Speaker 3: read listener? Real? All right, because that's a terrible name.
Speaker 1: I agree, I'm going to call this.
Speaker 4: We cited someone that we probably shouldn't have cited, and
Speaker 4: this is from anonymous. Hey, guys, really enjoyed this show
Speaker 4: this week. On universal Basic income, just a heads up,
Speaker 4: you cited the conservative economist Charles Murray and his justifications
Speaker 4: for introducing UBI to the American economy. I'm sure you
Speaker 4: didn't realize this, but Murray is a particular favorite of
Speaker 4: white supremacist, oh Boy, for his views on genetics and
Speaker 4: their contribution to social inequality between whites and people of color.
Speaker 4: He has a book called the Bell Curve that is
Speaker 4: often cited as a data proven evidence for white supremacy.
Speaker 4: It's also largely been debunked as pseudoscience.
Speaker 3: Wow.
Speaker 4: He links to a Southern poverty law center's write up
Speaker 4: for our own reference, and he says, I will no
Speaker 4: doubt keep on listening.
Speaker 3: Guys. I'm sure it was unintentional.
Speaker 4: Please take more care though in curating your sources, especially
Speaker 4: if it might throw your narrative for a loop. And
Speaker 4: that is from anonymous, and boy, Anonymous, you were right.
Speaker 4: We had no idea, should have done a little bit
Speaker 4: more digging there. So please everyone realize, and anyone that
Speaker 4: listens to the show probably realizes we certainly did not
Speaker 4: mean for that to be the case when we cited
Speaker 4: mister Murray.
Speaker 1: Now, we kind of biffed that one big time. No
Speaker 1: offense intended. Hopefully you didn't take it, and thank you
Speaker 1: for a very measured and level and even handed correction.
Speaker 3: That's right, it was very kind.
Speaker 1: And by the way, Chuck, it's monuments men.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I knew there's something about it that didn't sound right.
Speaker 1: But there is a show called museum Men that's been
Speaker 1: on since twenty fourteen.
Speaker 3: But they act sexy, do sense?
Speaker 1: They kind of They make displays for museums. They're craftsmen,
Speaker 1: craft people. Okay, okay, so museum men monuments men, two
Speaker 1: different things, that's right. And if you want to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us, you can join us on the internet.
Speaker 1: Send us an email, wrap it up, spank it on
Speaker 1: the bottom, and send it off to stuff podcast at
Speaker 1: iHeartRadio dot com.
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