How Did Hitler Fund The Nazi War Machine? | Myth Hunters | War Stories

[Music] the Sal kamut Lake District in Austria is known as the devil's Dustbin at the end of World War II rumors spread that the Nazis came here to hide Europe's plundered gold gold oiled Hitler's War Machine gold was essential to Hitler as the Allies closed in the Nazis started hiding their loot wherever they could just right I saw them throwing the boxes into the lake and there's one lake so deep and so remote that it's said to have been the Nazis favorite dumping site Lake toppets the stories of what's been dubbed to the Nazis Eldorado have obsessed treasure hunters for the last 70 years man stops thinking logically when it comes to old gold gate off when a team of divers explored Lake toppets for the first time on the monitor I could see there's something there they didn't discover gold but something every bit as extraordinary the dying days of World War II Hitler was in his bunker unable to accept defeat but most Nazis knew the game was up it was time to start hiding evidence of their crimes a unit of ss officers were instructed to transport boxes to the South kago Lake District in the Austrian Alps but their mission ground to a halt the road didn't go as far as the lake they' been instructed to reach they needed alternative transport to get their secret cargo to its destination Lake toplees AA bisen Bacher was 21 years old when the SS woke her grandfather demanding assistance at 500 a.m. they called and straight away they were at the door the two SS men they needed a horse and cart to get to Lake toppets and then my grandfather said that's not possible the horses haven't been fed yet no they needed the horse and cart it was really important you've got to H the horses [Music] on he visen Baka was terrified for her life and quickly followed instructions they said it has to be done quickly the boxes have to go to Lake [Music] toplet but AA noticed something that puzzled her the boxes weren't all the [Music] same there were heavy ones and light ones they were different big and small the small ones were heavy really heavy AA asked what was in the heavy boxes but was met with a Stony silence [Music] the SS man who came with me didn't give anything away I asked where are you from he wouldn't tell me anything it was all very [Music] straight everything had to disappear in great secrecy AA made the journey three times and when they got to the lake the second time she witnessed something bizarre when I got back with a second load I saw them throwing the boxes into the lake she didn't realize it at the time but what Eda vimara witnessed may have been one of the final acts of the biggest bank heists in history [Music] the sheer scale of the Nazis theft of Europe's Treasures was [Music] astonishing the plunder of Europe was from the beginning a part of the Nazi war plan it was their idea to collect everything which was valuable across Europe the Nazis plundered the museums and private collections of the newly occupied countries for priceless works of art Hitler was an art fan and he was fascinated by Art Treasures he collected things he tried to get hold of ancient paintings ancient Statues by famous painters by famous artists Hitler's Deputy head of the Luft vafer Herman guring personally amassed a vast collection of looted art and gold sent to him from across occupied Europe estimated to have been worth $200 million but from the beginning what the Nazis wanted most of all was gold gold bars that could be stored in Bank vaults and exchanged for foreign currency whenever it was needed it started in 1938 with the occupation of Austria they took the national reserves of Austria the moment they entered Vienna they contined in Czechoslovakia and went on and on because what the Nazis of course needed was gold the Nazis stole $2.5 Million worth of gold from Czechoslovakia $200 million worth of gold from France and Belgium and later in the war $30 million from Hungary and $100 million from Italy the Nazis stole the gold from the gold reserves of the countries that they uh that they conquered gold was essential to Hitler everybody has the mythical idea that Hitler was just and Germany was rolling in money as it is now but in fact Germany didn't have enough food to feed its people in total Berlin accumulated $500 million worth of foreign gold the equivalent of over $36 billion in today's money gold fed the Nazi war machine they smelted down the gold they stamped it with fake stamps as if it came from the Prussian Min and they sent it to Zurich and the Swiss gave them foreign currency for [Music] it Swiss banks became complicit in the Nazis theft of Europe's gold an American investigating group determined that of the $400 million which is a lot of money then uh 50 years ago of the $ 400 million that was sent to to Switzerland from Germany 300 million of it was was stolen there is a reason why the Nazis never attacked Switzerland because it was their banking place it was their way to shore up their Treasures but it was also their place to do the trade with all sorts of foreign countries the Americans and the Allies begged the Swiss to stop taking the gold and they they refused they continued to take gold until 1945 when the when the Germans had more or less lost the [Music] war but there was only so much gold in Europe's Banks Hitler and his armies could steal the SS were instructed to find alternative sources they began to run out of gold so what did they do they did uh as we know this terrible War crime before the Jews were killed in asz they pulled the gold out of their mouths and they melted it down into [Music] bars the SS stripped concentration camp victims of an estimated $70 million worth of gold teeth and jewelry but by 1945 as the allies swept into Germany some Nazis began to consider the unthinkable what if they lost where would they go and what would they do with their stolen gold the Germans kept these gold bars and other robbed treasures and particularly art uh out of the way of anybody who might have grabbed it the Nazi gold was under threat Hitler instructed the SS to make Berlin's reserves disappear they started to move things to move Treasures to move gold underground in Mountain [Music] deposits but the Americans got wind of Hitler's orders on the 4th of April 1945 they entered the German Town of meas and discovered a vast horde in an abandoned salt mine over 8,000 gold bars worth 240 million the 100 tons of gold bullion represents most of Germany's [Music] Reserve they couldn't believe their eyes they were just blinded by the incredible amount of gold just packed away there discover the past with exclusive military history documentaries and adree podcasts presented by world-renowned historians all on History hit watch them on your smart TV or on the- go with your mobile device download the app now to watch everything from the gripping story of the Band of Brothers to operation Barbarosa and D-Day immerse yourself in the dramatic stories of this remarkable era by signing up via the link in the description it wasn't just gold but over a billion German marks millions in foreign currency and 400 tons worth of Priceless works of art but it was only part of the stolen horde the Allies knew the Nazis were on the run and looking to hide [Music] one of the best places to do that was Austria and specifically the mountains of Austria and the saltz Kam magut secretly the Nazis sent freight trains South in the hope of evading the Americans approaching from the west and the Russians from the East when those trains rolled into the salsk KAG good they were just packed up to the top with all sorts of treasures gold valuables paintings all the Nazis finally could get hold of before they had to [Music] leave some of Hitler's most senior generals fled with their loot including second in command in the SS Ernst Calton Bruner cartton Bruner this high ranking SS criminal took the stuff he had collected during the years of his career and brought it back here to the salsk mag good Calon Bruner took refuge in this house by Lake Alto 16 mil from Lake toppets C Bruner tried to contact the Americans because he had these plans to make A Separate Peace with the Americans but when his overtures of negotiation were rejected Calton Bruner fled but not before burying his loot when when Calon Bronner finally left the Sal kago and tried to flee what he left behind and what was found this was gold in his garden he just simply took cases full of gold and hid them in his garden and those were dug up in the first weeks after the war but it wasn't just Calton Bruner burying gold in the south of Austria American GIS uncovered over 700 Nazi gold bars buried in a shallow hole in the ground and the stories of hidden Nazi gold started to percolate throughout the Sal kamut there is eyewitnesses telling you about famous Nazis just like Hinrich M the head of the gasto coming here in the final days of the war riding into the sou kago together with about 15 officers on Motorcars with side cars and that they were full of cases with valuables and gold and they went up to the mountains and didn't come back but the majority of the rumors centered on one Lake the same Lake that Eda venaka had witnessed boxes being thrown into lake toplitz topit is an absolutely fascinating geological phenomenon it's a long uh Lake uh it's a ravine that's filled in as deep as the as Big Ben several hundred feet the Nazis knew all about Lake topetes Joseph gal's holiday Villa was close by because of its 103 M depth and remote location from 1943 it had been used as a naval testing [Music] station in its dark Waters the Nazis experimented with underwater explosives and submarines testing them at different depths they fired torpedos from underwater into the Lakeside Mountain gouging out large cavities in its Canyon walls the Germans used it to test new submarine missiles they tested a submarine missile that eventually became the Polaris missile so there's a lot of junk at the bottom of that Lake used ammunition uh God knows what lake toppets was seen by SS command as an ideal place to sink the Nazi horde and stop the Allies getting their hands on it and one day when things improved they would return and retrieve [Music] [Music] it I eyewitness Ed eisenbacher still lives just a couple of miles from Lake tolitz and remembers the day the SS arrived it's the same house she lived in as a young girl when she was ordered to help them transport heavy boxes to the [Music] lake I said are you crazy where would you throw them in the lake no they had to go in there was something that didn't belong here anymore hey head no but precisely what was in the heavy boxes she did not know could they have contained the missing Nazi gold a week after the SS dumped their load into Lake tolitz on the 8th of May 1945 the Nazis surrended the Allied Nations celebrated Victory but where was all the missing Nazi [Music] gold after the war as the years went by the stories of what was thrown into Lake toppets grew and grew because of what Eda had seen and the reports of buried gold being dug up everyone seemed to be convinced that there must be gold lying at the bottom of the lake in the 1950s local boy ghard xer grew up on the stories of buried treasure in topits yeah as K as children we discovered a lot of things that were thrown into the lake after the war I went to these places hundreds of times and with your fingers you go through the SE over here one NY big VI lived and over there another and in The Lakes they live next to you could find things in the postwar Years amateur divers attemp wanted to reach the bed of Lake toppets to recover its Nazi treasure but toppets is a highly unusual Lake no oxygen exists below 20 M so nothing perishes with its steep wooded Banks trees fall in and form a false bottom of floating logs under which if you get trapped there's often no way back to the surface two German scientists who had worked in the Nazis Naval Station during the war drowned when they attempted to get to the bottom of toppets their deaths only heightened the rumors of what was hidden in the lake only now people said the lake was cursed in the late 1950s the stories of gold dumped into Lake toppets proved irresistible to one journalist working at Germany's biggest selling magazine D investigative reporter vulgan lder had reached the top of his [Music] profession those days you always had to be there first and come back with a picture and a story for the magazine and it was tough having to be the first all the time where's you out I even had a plane at my disposal lder painstakingly pieced together the story of what happened at Lake toppets colleting information gleaned from Nazi documents local rumors and even the confessions of former Nazi Generals in South America at first I didn't know anything about the gold I only stumbled upon it when I did some research afterwards into how things had happened based on what he discovered lder persuaded his editors to finance the first large scale exploration of toppets on the grounds that he might just get the scoop of the decade and it helped that Wulf gang lorder wasn't just a journalist I was in the Navy I was a naval officer during the war so I know how to operate under [Music] water topletz is fed from a smaller Lake above and feeds into a larger Lake below which gives it a sequence of unique but dangerous currents lorda had to establish exactly how he could navigate the precarious movements of the lake all the way to the bottom 103 M down I had to calc calate with what speed and at what level the lake would move I did that in the winter of 58 for the first time the lake was still frozen and was just starting to melt in this way you can see exactly how the streams from topet develop and even if he managed to work out the currents getting whatever was down there to the surface presented a whole other set of problems lder adapted technology he had used in the Marines I did the calculations and then we built ourselves a claw gripper we had built the gripper in such a way that it opens when it goes down and then a rope had to be pulled so it closes when it is down and when it was closed we would pull the Box up gold learn a lot in the Navy Doan commissioned a fleet to VW D mobiles to transport Lura and his team of divers photographers and writers to Austria but it was very much Lura story he would lead the exploration and write daily reports as he went lder attached to the claw gripper lights and a camera which would relay pictures to the crew on the surface with the information he had acquired from locals and former Nazis lder had a good idea where the suspected gold had been sunk you would not me using my calculations we eased down the claw gripper down to the 100 m depth of the L they scanned the entire Lake for two weeks and found nothing but Lura was determined and just when they were ready to give up told his team they had to continue into the darkness the we searched some more at night with the camera on the bed of the lake in the beginning we didn't find anything but then through the cable on the monitor I could see there is something [Music] there at about 11: at night saw a box L's team could barely contain their excitement had they found the missing Nazi gold the camera the camera lit up the box then the claw gripper came and it picked it up when it was two 3 m from the surface I stopped out ofis the box would have burst open if they dropped the Box L's story would sink with it he wasn't going to take that risk I dived in tied some rope under water and wrapped it around the box then I resurfaced and gave them the [Music] Rope but when they brought the box to the surface no one was sure what was inside the next morning the world's media waited with baited breath amongst the crowd was local boy Gard XA who still remembers the day that changed his life for us it was Sensational we all went to late with our parents to witness the salvation of this treasur this was a big motivation for me I had to get down there but it wasn't just XA and his family who were on tenter hooks to see what was in L's recovered box the police came and the public 80 or 90 people it was a scum then he pulled the box up the box first open but there wasn't any gold in [Music] [Music] there to the crowd's astonishment the stern team hadn't found gold but millions and millions of pristine British banknotes we brought them up and after 16 or 17 boxes we thought this is nonsense we leave them all down there and tear the lids open underwat and then we can see if it is gold or but they were just notes it was the beginning of a whole new mystery what were these pounds and why had they been sunk in Lake toppets the mystery deepened when it was revealed the pounds weren't quite what they seemed l tolet in Austria and the end of a long search which for years puzzled Scotland Yard and the international police down there at the bottom of the lake are boxes of printing plates and notes the clue to what must be the biggest forgery of all [Music] time what lder and his dustan team had discovered wasn't gold but £73 Million worth of perfectly forged Bank notes the equivalent of almost £3 billion in today's money just why they were there nobody knew but unraveling The Mystery of the counterfeit pounds would make wulfgang L's name lder was uh consumed by this the way almost anybody who gets involved with it does it was a tremendous uh sensation he got a lot of publicity and a lot of very good stories over 15 additions dustan slowly unpicked the truth behind the mystery of Lake toppets what lder had found was evidence of the biggest counterfeiting operation in history the idea of counterfeiting British pounds was actually uh conceived in the first week of the war the Nazis plan was to destabilize the pound as the world's Reserve currency and bring the British Empire to its knees Great Britain would be subsumed into the Thousand-Year Reich the bank of England was convinced its banknotes were unforgeable but the German SS had other ideas its head Hinrich himla was in charge of the plan and he had just the person to put it into practice an SS officer with a background in engineering and a speciality in forging passports had come to him's attention his name was burnhard Krueger himler told Krueger he would even name the operation after him operation burnhard it was an offer Krueger couldn't refuse Krueger was instructed by himler to use Jewish counterfeits and artists to make his pounds many of them were already at the Nazis disposal Krueger went to aitz saying please have everybody any one of your Jewish pris prisoners who speaks German and is connected with the graphic arts just pull their names out and get them ready and he assembled over a period of about a year or two 140 Jewish prisoners in the Zen Housen concentration camp just north of Berlin which was actually the headquarters of all the concentration camps Krueger then had to decide which pound note was the easiest for his Saxon Housen team to forge they decided to print 5B notes big of impressive 5B notes uh black and white notes easy to print this man was a very meticulous engineer by training and he got plates that were sent by the rice Banks engravers and they adjusted these plates with all of the special secret markings that the that the British put on the pounds they wanted to make really perfect pound notes those pound notes of course were part of their plans that were supposed to be used for international finance wul gang L's D articles revealed that in September 1942 the first saxonous produced forged pounds had made their way into circulation over the channel they were technically brilliant almost undetectable the bank of England declared them the most dangerous forgeries they'd ever [Music] seen soon a flood of forged pounds were appearing used by the Nazis to buy weapons and yet more gold the Nazi plan was working Sterling began to lose value but himler and the SS had bigger ideas they came up with this crazy idea that if they print millions of fake pounds and drop them over England that the English that the British economy would just blow up and collapse himler wanted ging's Luft faffer to airdrop the forgeries over Britain rendering the pound worthless they certainly had enough forgeries between 1942 and 1945 the Saxon Housen counterfeits produced 134 million fake pounds that represents roughly 133% of the billion pounds in circulation throughout the world the pound was becoming a suspect currency nobody knew which were real and which were the furest forgeries this was the greatest counterfeit in history Captain Krueger who was in charge of this boasted quite correctly after the war I am the greatest counterfeit in history which he was there's nothing even near it but hima's idea of a huge airdrop was never realized the Germans were losing the war the Luft vafa simply didn't have enough planes to put the idea into practice as the Allies approached in 1945 Krueger knew his life and that of his counterfeits had little meaning to his boss hinr himla who was desperately trying to hide evidence of his appalling crimes Krueger realized that not only when the thing was shut down that the Jews would get killed but he as the bearer of a state secret probably would get killed too so it was the interests of both the SS major and the Jews began to converge Krueger ordered his men to escape and burn all the evidence of his extraordinary counterfeiting operation the trouble was burning millions of pounds was more difficult than Krueger realized why didn't they just destroy them the point is they did try to destroy a number of them they've had orders to burn them and leave not a trace of any pound in the ashes and they Buri the [Music] ashes but there were just too many pounds to destroy so Kruger sent a unit with forgeries boxed in weighted waterproof crates each weighing 200b to the Sal kamot their destination was Lake toppets As proved by w gang lder who pulled them to the surface in 1959 the intelligence service of the SS In Cahoots with high level experts brought the boxes to the toets in Austria I knew that the boxes were thrown into toets and I knew who threw them in lder revealed that the SS unit were told very specifically to attempt to find a way of retrieving the boxes after the war they take the coffins full of carit pounds and they sink them in the lake but not completely because each one of those coffins is attached to a rope these boxes were tied up to wooden floats with a rope and thrown into the water and in one of the pictures a little boy my son is pulling the float with a rope attached to it the ropes from the boxes were attached to logs that would float and indicate where they had been sunk that way the SS believed they would one day return and reclaim their sunken loot once lder had discovered the truth the Austrian government on instructions from the bank of England destroyed Krueger's pounds but such was the scale of the counterfeiting operation today there are almost three times more counterfeits than Originals left in existence to me the profound irony of the pounds is that the real fakes and there are some fake fakes actually that is people trying to cash in on it the real fakes which fetch oh tens 20s 30s 50 pounds far more valuable than their face value sometimes 100 pound if their good ones in good [Music] condition but had vulf gang lder unraveled the mystery of Lake toppets once and for all were the stories of sunken gold just stories after [Music] all questions remained if toppets only contained forged pounds what was in the heavier boxes as seen by AA weisenbacher that day the SS arrived at her door could they have contained gold streamed absolutely absolutely all these boxes haven't been taken out I'm convinced there were these small heavy boxes with the handles I don't know but maybe there was gold in [Music] there the gold must be really deep down it's not such a far-fetched idea even the man who found the forged pounds in Lake toppets is convinced another unit of SS officer were responsible for the disposal of Nazi gold there was a different group that transported boxes with gold to Austria there are probably gold boxes down there they're still there the place can still be found today I can even show you on a photo lers convinced this photograph taken by a naval officer at the time shows pounds being thrown into the lake in the foreground but gold being sunk in the [Music] back the rumors of sunken gold remain so strong that in 1963 4 years after D's Revelations a young diver from Munich drowned looking for it whilst searching for the body the Austrian government mounted the first official exploration of the lake they pulled to the surface equipment from saxonous and yet more counterfeit pounds but no gold after that the authorities introduced a ban on all underwater water explorations of toppets which still exists [Music] today but that didn't stop one man Gad XA Who as a boy had witnessed vulf gang lder raising the forged pounds from the depths all those years [Music] ago it is my world it is my favorite Lake because he historically it's the hotest XA has dived for gold and other Treasures more times than anyone else in the South cakut he's pulled so much Nazi memorabilia from the bottom of the Austrian Lakes he's even opened his own museum we've had BS rifles handun hypmic needles three big round mines one of them is in the restaurant at tolet but XA never discovered gold until 1987 on the 1st of April XA pulled from the depths 14 perfectly preserved gold bars Gard XA the local dive Enthusiast had raised the Nazi gold finally someone had found it but all was not as it seemed we had a very unpleasant policeman who examined my car's tires they were worn out he made me pays a maximum fine but he was actually right and we thought we were going to do a prank on him so we had gold bars made and we s them it was all just an April Fool's joke by xer to get back at his local policeman the we said it wasn't gold but the police said it was as it was Heavy they took it away and after three days they found out it wasn't gold after all kind no one knows the policeman's real name now everyone just calls him Goldfinger Goldfinger even today X's hoax hasn't stopped the stories of Nazi gold in Lake toppets from persisting there are so many funny stories the austrians tell about it because they say there's all these nutty Americans and British coming to Lake toppets and we just making jokes with them any story that says look there's gold in them th are Hills or them there are lakes uh is going to attract people who'll say let me go after it and look for it cuz after all if you find it you've hit the jackpot the mystery of what really lies at the bottom of the devil's Dustbin may never be solved today toppets is a bit of a secret it doesn't want to show all its got does [Music] it one thing is for sure there's large amounts of gold and other value aables in the salts kak good that have not been [Music] [Music] found [Music]

Channel: War Stories

Views: 72,456

Keywords: military history, war, war documentary, military tactics, war stories, history of war, battles, Full Documentary, ww2 documentary, hitler, nazi, ww2, war in europe

Id: mqW4YP1mIXw

Length: 50min 51sec (3051 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2024