February 18, 2025 • 51 mins
Toward the end of World War II, German forces realized they were in an unsustainable situation, on the losing side of a war rapidly drawing to a close. In an effort to prop up their wartime economy, the Nazi party stole and fenced tons of gold and other valuables -- and, depending on who you ask, some of that gold remains hidden away and forgotten in the modern day. Join the guys as they delve into the abiding rumors of hidden nazi treasure, as well as the Nazi banking conspiracies that may still be at work in the modern day.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Fellow conspiracy realist. We are returning to you with some
classic episodes from the evenings of your Full Disclosure. We
are right now recording with our super producer Andrew in
a variety of hotels in New York City.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
It's true, some of us near walls apart.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
It's the future.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
It's a brave new world.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
And guys, I got a hot take. You ready, Okay,
Nazis aren't cool?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Okay, Yeah, I could get with that. I mean, that's okay,
get good.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Not that hot.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
As it turns out, it reminds me of a Norm McDonald, nol,
the famous, famous comedian who had himself some takes on Nazis.
And what a great setup for this classic episode. Guys,
we talk a lot about Nazis, you know, like looking
back through the show, more than anybody ever should.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Yeah, they did a lot of pretty horrendous things. They
plundered a whole bunch and somehow they managed to fund
a giant military right, so there are all these rumors
about where that money came from, where did all the
plundered stuff go to?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
And when they weren't plundering and hoarding their gold like
smoug the Dragon, they were also chasing Indiana Jones around
and you know, trying to summon demons from ancient religious relics.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
In twenty nineteen, we asked ourselves, is there any truth
or is there any factual basis to the very many
Nazi gold conspiracies and Nazi making conspiracies that continue in
the modern day. I think it's fair to say we
were all surprised by what we discovered.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
Yes, as will you be.
Speaker 5 (01:57):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 4 (02:21):
Hello, Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
They call me Ben. We are joined, as always in
spirit with our super producer Paul Mission Control Decan. Today
we are joined in person with our super producer Seth Johnson,
who you may recognize from earlier episodes. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. We're We're diving back
(02:44):
into the storied world depicted in action and venture films
from the seventies and the eighties and the nineties. You
know the kind of national treasure Indiana Jones, three Kings
sort of vibe.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Can steal a declaration of independence?
Speaker 4 (03:00):
No, now, well and well kind of. I mean they're
going to steal all kinds of treasure from countries across Europe, and.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
That cha wealth is an independence of sorts. Right, we
were talking off air about our various lottery plans. I
don't know if I ever shared it with you, Matt.
My list of pranks to pull is an eccentric billionaire.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
Oh no, it's your Google doc and Hodgman on.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Its Google doc. Yeah, it's an old one. Yeah, but
I keep it just you know, if something occurs, it's
good to have sort of a vision board of sorts.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
And it's also a good idea to give Google a
heads up.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, you know the love, the love
what I have in store for the planet. So we
are talking about treasure, literal tons of gold stolen during
wartime and hidden away. This story takes place in World
War Two, but it's it's not unique because we know
that the chaos left in the wake of global conflicts
(03:59):
is were many people an opportunity? What's that old line?
Chaos as a ladder. I believe that was from Game
of Thrones. Perhaps maybe there's a little finger. Yeah, okay, yeah,
so little Finger was not commenting on the Nazi regime,
but for members of the Nazi regime, that statement holds true.
Here are the facts. First. First things first, the Nazi
(04:23):
Party stole not a ton of stuff. They stole tons
and tons of things, thousands of tons, millions of tons
of stuff. And it's common knowledge that they looted numerous groups.
They took the assets of victims of the Holocaust, of
citizens and repressed countries. They looted entire banks of countries
(04:43):
when they occupied them.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Well, yeah, and you can you can kind of begin
to understand the pattern. When you have an invading army
that goes into one place that is not controlled by
you or your government, then you essentially are victorious militarily.
Then the spoil, unfortunately go to you, and then you
use those to then fund the next one that you enter.
(05:06):
And it really is like this huge series of bank
heists that we can kind of see painted across Europe
during World War Two.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
And you know, one thing I noticed is that none
of the invading or occupying forces ever took the money
that they had and put it towards supporting the people.
It was always just as you said, to further fund
expansionist ambitions. We know that Germany when it was under
control of the Nazi Party had a real dilemma, a
(05:38):
physical limit to the amount of resources that they could
generate within their own domain. So they had to they
had to get liquidity, they had to get wealth. They
were able to get a bunch of gold, and they
needed help swapping that gold for currency that they could
then use to acquire the stuff they needed. But didn't
(05:59):
have high quality iron, oil, tungsten, other materials like that,
and so they went to the neutral powers, the neutral
countries in this conflict, like Switzerland that's going to be
one of the stars of our show today, And they
asked Swiss banks and Swiss institutions to help them transfer gold,
transfer currencies, and commodities between nations. Because even though there
(06:24):
was a war going on, businesses kept running, right, Banks
were still in play, very much so.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
And likely profiting from said war in some ways.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Absolutely, IBM as well.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
It wasn't just banks, oh oh, absolutely, But then you know,
you see this as the new system that is created
for their money necessities the right the third Reich, and
it kind of works for a time, but then as
the well, it's not. They didn't know the war was
(06:56):
coming to a close. But as things weren't going so
well for the Axis powers, and as the Allied powers
are gaining more and more allies and gaining more and
more support, it's harder and harder for the Nazi Party
to use a lot of these third party neutral countries
to do a lot of this fencing essentially.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Exactly, yes, And I love that you're using the phrase fencing,
because this system was a system of laundering resources and
fencing stolen goods. By nineteen forty four, the writing was
on the wall. Businesses, governments, access and Allied powers alike
knew that the war was not going to keep going,
(07:37):
and Germany became more and more reliant on institutions in
Switzerland because other neutral parties started to acquiesce to Allied
demands and they said, look, we've got to put some
distance between you can't we can't accept gold and coins
right now, our specie as they're called. We also are
(07:59):
going to be less and less likely to accept Reich marks.
And now Germany has the option of paying with foreign currency.
But it turns out that years of belligerents and militarism
often don't leave governments with a lot of foreign currency
because they burn a lot of bridges, literally to the
ground exactly.
Speaker 6 (08:21):
So these banks essentially became clearing houses for stolen German
gold from numerous occupied countries that could then be converted
to a less objectionable form of currency and medium, if
you will. Diplomatic cables from the time support this, for example,
the fact that the Swiss National Bank actually helped the
(08:43):
German Reichsbank convert an estimated fifteen million in stolen Dutch
gold and they didn't ask any questions.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
That's the craziest part.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
No, they asked, dud, my bank asks question.
Speaker 6 (08:57):
If I deposit more than five thousand dollars, Like how
it's you know what I mean, Like, it's it's insane.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
The level of brazen crookedness.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
In this situation here, right yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:09):
Well yeah, but it's from an objective stance, it's really
messed up. Because if you are a banking institution and
your primary goals are the primary goals of controlling as
much money as possible to be able to pump out
more money and loan. So then take more money in
and you get an offer of fifteen million dollars to
(09:31):
be deposited. Depending on where it's coming from, maybe it
doesn't matter so much at least I don't know. That's
really looking at in a cold way and it's it sucks.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Well. There's also plausible deniability.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
Exactly who knows, I yeah, well we do know kind
of with the through the cables, but the exact way
in which the Swiss bank was approached with the money.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Right right where they approached the a proxy or or something.
That's why the Swiss National Bank example is important, because
it was the actual German state actor bank that was
interactive with them directly. This is strange because sure one
could say that, let's say I'm the head of a
(10:18):
Swiss bank. One could say, well, I see so many
transactions all the time. We move a lot of a
lot of money around the world. We work in volume. Baby,
I can't be line item checking every single Nazi gold request. Yeah,
I mean, I don't know if Swiss bankers are that
casual at that time, but we do know this was
(10:39):
a very common practice. According to the CIA, German efforts
to acquire foreign currency and converted to war materials became
increasingly clandestine as the Allied forces were encroaching and as
the war was turning in their favor.
Speaker 4 (10:56):
Well, it makes total sense, right, and it matches right
up with our lines episode, where like you said, as
they're seeing the writing on the wall, they're going to
try and secret away this money, just as they secreted
away themselves and the important officers and scientists and things
they wanted to be able to control it later.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Perhaps, yes, that was the idea, and that's what the
Allied forces believed was happening. For Germany, a lot of
problems cropped up very quickly. They had these long term
exchange agreements, right, we'll give you x amount of whatever
over why amount of years, and in return you'll give
us oil or iron gas, et cetera. Now those are impossible.
(11:38):
Neutral countries will no longer do them because they're like,
why would I agree to do something with you for
five years? It's it's not looking good for you, you know.
And now the neutral parties will only work with Germany
on what they called a cash and carry basis, one
off short term transactions. Still for Germany it's better than nothing,
(12:00):
but the way in which they interacted changed too. They
started to want more proxies, more private entities to deal
with them, so we could say, for instance, oh, well,
well wasn't the government of Switzerland.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Absolutely, Or it wasn't even this major bank. It was
like a smaller part of this bank.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
A subsidiary of some sort, right, And this gives Allied
observers some pause, and they start to believe that there
is a conspiracy. They think perhaps the German forces are
pretending to fall, pretending to surrender, and that they will
reaggregate all this stuff they have stolen and they will
(12:42):
launch a fourth Reich.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
And to listeners who've been here for a while, that
may remind you of the long game deception ideas that
were born out of the Cold War and the fall
of the Soviet Union. You could kind of apply the
same deals. At least that's what the CIA was believed.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Exactly, And that's why the United Kingdom and the United
States launched Operation safe Haven, which we'll explore a little
bit further, but for now just know it exists, and
Operations safe Haven and other endeavors were somewhat successful. We
found some of the stolen treasure, we recovered some of
(13:25):
the Gold in nineteen forty four in December, when Allied
forces created safe Haven, they wanted to They didn't want
to take it for themselves, at least the way it
was stated. Instead, what they were trying to do was
find the Heidi holes, the bolt holes of treasure hidden
away by German forces in neutral countries, and then they
(13:49):
would take that money and they would move these funds
to what they called safe havens. These would be British
or American humanitarian organizations most often, and this was meant
to sure assist those organizations in their humanitarian endeavors, but
it was also meant to disperse Nazi wealth, to leave
(14:10):
no financial stone standing upon another financial stone. They wanted
to cripple any further attempts to resurrect the regime.
Speaker 4 (14:19):
And the you know, there are some people listening saying, oh,
you know, the language that's used in creating something like
operations safe Haven, even the term safe haven when it's
being transferred to a country with such a large military
force that is kind of going through and then dominating, right,
and then saying oh, we're going to take all this stuff,
We're going to put it over, you know, in places
(14:40):
that we control. But it's gonna be safe there. You
guys are cool. Everything's fine.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
It goes to a good cause.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
Yeah, everything's great. It's not the same thing as what
the Nazis just did and took it all and then
you know, hit it away for their own purposes. We
promise it's fine. It's called a safe haven, right, you know.
And you can just see the parallels there, depending on
how you feel about the operations of the United States government. Anyway,
I'm just putting that out there.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
I think that's an excellent point. And there's a massive
hole in this story because you see, despite the efforts
of the Allies, no one was able to locate all
of the stolen gold, all of the stolen art and
other assets looted from Germany's victims. In fact, in nineteen
sixty six, the British Foreign Office reported that of all
(15:25):
the gold stolen from occupied lands, victims of the Holocaust,
War casualties and so on, only one tenth of it. Only
ten percent had ever been located and returned. So our
question today is where did the rest of the treasure go?
Speaker 4 (15:43):
And we'll get to that right after a word from
our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Here's where it gets crazy. So since pretty much right
after the close of World War Two, even a little
bit before the war, there were multiple rumors and conspiracy
theories about Nazi gold, and they popped in and out
of official reports and your favorite mainstream news and your
favorite investigative documentaries and stuff. Ever since. They still come
(16:14):
out today.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
I'm yeah, the History Channel loves it.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Yeah. I was gonna say, I'm fairly certain that you
can turn on the History Channel on this weekend and
I don't know, have a thirty forty percent chance of
running into a Nazi gold story.
Speaker 4 (16:26):
Oh yeah, I mean I literally watched a clip from
a show called Codes and Conspiracies where it was a
clip about one of the things we're going to talk
about today, and it wasn't that long ago when it
came out.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
And here's the thing about it. These rumors and these stories,
these alleged locations of this lost treasure, they may vary
in plausibility, but it's so fascinating to people because there
are proven cases of this stuff being discovered, and there
are also cases where this stuff seems to almost have
been discovered and then poof disappeared from the news.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
Yeah, and that's when you get into real suspicion about
things like operations safe Haven, where you're just like, uh man,
ninety percent of the stuff is still out there. We don't,
are we sure? We're like yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Oh man.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Should we talk about some examples?
Speaker 4 (17:22):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (17:23):
So how about the SS Menden.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Right, Yeah, the German cargo ship scuttled near Iceland during
the early days of World War Two, So this is
before the close it was suspected to contain this huge
trove of Nazi gold.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
How about we we cite one of our favorite sources,
Fox News.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
I put I know, I know in the notes there.
It's true. It's it's a good article.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Look are you well you know they're not all y whatever.
Speaker 6 (17:46):
So this merchant vessel one hundred and twenty nautical miles
south of Ice centers in the international spotlight after the
chest with around four tons of Nazi gold was discovered
in the wreck.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
Four tons of Nazi goal?
Speaker 6 (18:01):
Four tons of Nazi goal? Does that mean it like
in the movies? Does the Nazi gold have swastikas on it?
How they identify I was stamped?
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Maybe unclear?
Speaker 4 (18:13):
I mean you would certainly know if he found it
that way.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Well, also it depends on the provenance of the gold.
If they stole it from another country, that's probably not
that That's what.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
I was thinking exactly. So this hall was valued at
around one hundred million pounds, which as we know, is
more than dollars.
Speaker 4 (18:31):
I think. This is a story from twenty eighteen, and
they estimated it as one hundred and thirteen million years exactly.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
And yeah, okay, here's the official story of what happened.
On September twenty fourth, nineteen thirty nine, the ship was
intercepted by two British cruisers and the captain of the
Mendon had specific orders for this situation, which was do
not be captured or do not let the cargo be captured.
(18:57):
So he sank the ship on purpose with everything aboard,
and the shipwreck was discovered or rediscovered I should say,
in spring of twenty seventeen. And then things get a
little fuzzy because they had to get permission from the
authorities in Iceland to investigate the wreckage and they conduct
(19:19):
They eventually in twenty eighteen were able to search it
for about three days and then after that operation, the
search team, a UK based company called Advanced Marine Services,
said to Iceland that no items of value were found.
Of course, again that's the official story, and there are
going to be a lot of people who just won't
(19:40):
believe those folks, regardless of the facts. So this one
is interesting because now we have to ask ourselves, did
somebody take the safe or the chest before the official search?
Why was the search so stymied by bureaucratic red tape?
Speaker 4 (19:56):
You know, yeah, I know. It makes you think maybe
there's a small group of rogue treasure hunters out there
that got there first, or Buyork okay.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Or Buork or maybe she's you know what, I don't
want a pigeon oler, I'm going to get.
Speaker 7 (20:10):
The treasure treasure I like the Gowld. We'll go deep
into the waters and find the heat and James, they
will be guarded by the King of the Sea.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah, that sounds like Byork. Yeah. So what we're going
to see as we explore some more of these examples
is that, like a lot of conspiracy theories or rumors
or speculation, there's a categorical thing a play. Certain tropes
pop up over and over. The gold's usually said to
be hidden in banks held by the Vatican, of course,
(20:41):
or lost in some place that's difficult to access, like
a sunken vessel at the bottom of the ocean, or
a mine for instance.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
That was then collapsed on purpose, or something where it's
very very difficult, if not impossible, to get there. So
let's you mentioned the v word. Let's let's let's talk
about the Vatican and why they perhaps are a viable
suspect for where some of this treasure ended up.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Okay, yeah, So the US State Department back in nineteen
forty six, shortly after the war's closed, receives this top
secret report from an agent named Emerson Bigelow, and Emerson says,
I have heard from the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA,
that there is something rotten going on with the Vatican
(21:37):
and Nazi gold from World War Two, or Nazi finances
at least. And this this report is later called the
Bigelow Report. Sometimes you'll hear it called the Bigelow Memo.
It wasn't declassified until decades later, in nineteen ninety six,
and it wasn't released until nineteen ninety seven. Here's what
(21:58):
the report says. It says back in nineteen forty four,
the Vatican took three hundred and fifty million Swiss francs
worth of Nazi gold for quote unquote safe keeping, and
of that, one hundred and fifty million Swiss francs have
been impounded by British authorities at the Austro Swiss border.
So where did all this stuff go? What is safekeeping?
(22:21):
What is the safe haven? Right? Yeah, according to Bigelow,
the safe haven here is a numbered Swiss bank account
and controlled by the Vatican, and that in Bigelow goes
on to say that more than two hundred million Swiss
francs worth of gold coins are transferred to Vatican City
or to the Vatican Bank, which is known as the
(22:43):
Institute for Works of Religion, with the assistance of the clergy.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
And then it goes on to state that perhaps, or
it's believed at least that then this money was funneled
to places like Argentina and Brazil, where again it's the
same thing where we where we looked at in our
rat Lines episode, where the Vatican was assisting people or
at least was alleged to be assisting people and found
(23:10):
to be assisting people a few times. Nazis in particular
to get to places like Argentina in Brazil.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Yeah, and you know, we were careful in that episode
to say this doesn't mean the Vatican overall was doing
it. It could be factions within this very large organization, but
representatives of the Vatican at the very least helped. We
should note that even today the Vatican Bank denies this.
They say there's no basis in reality to the report
(23:40):
to the Bigelow memo. So it goes down to you
know who you trust to safekeep to safekeep? Who do
you trust to safekeep? There's a there's a weird situation
going on in Bavaria that we found via the sun,
and the sun is the The sun is not a
(24:01):
source that I would quote if I were writing a
high school or college paper. But they've got that kind
of tabloid vibe. Sometimes it's like go on par with
the mail Maybe yep, exactly. But there's there's a great
story that they tell about a treasure hunter named Hans Gluk.
(24:21):
Hans Gluk is what is Gluke mean? Luck? Cool? Well,
Hans luck. Then Hans Gluke was seventy six back in
twenty seventeen, and he'd been searching for this trove of
gold diamonds artwork and for some reason rare postage stamps,
(24:44):
which are still a big thing for twenty years. He
has based on an old map that he found. He
has he has become certain that he's pinpointed this Nazi
treasure that was lost on on a train. Here's what happened,
according to him and according to the Sun, during the
(25:06):
close of the war, Heinrich Himler greenlit this bank heist,
like you said, Matt, he greenlit an inside job bank heist.
And he told his deputy, a fellow named Ernst Carlton Brunner,
to empty the Berlin Reich's bank of loot and put
it all on a train and send it to the Alps.
And they thought, you know, after the wars officially declared over,
(25:30):
will still be able to fight, will be funded by
this treasure, will essentially be gorillas, you know, we move
in the night, will hide behind the trees, will disrupt
into me supply lines and so on. And they wanted
to have the train cross the border into Austria and
then they would store all this stuff from the train
in assault mine. But the Russians were advancing, the Allied
(25:55):
aircraft were just cloppering the place. So the train hid
in a tunnel for three days, and the SS there
had had a functioning radio post nearby in the forest
at a place called iraq a rr acch and according
to Hans Gluk, this is where the treasure ultimately ended up.
(26:18):
We know that at some point the train was stuck
in that tunnel, right. We don't know what happened to
the treasure after it. We do know that Soviet troops
were able to intercept or report from that Nazi radio post,
and the report simply read in German something like command
executed transport of guards taken over stored in bscchw asked
(26:41):
for further instructions. It all hinges on what that abbreviation means.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
Yeah, it really does well. And you know, if you
go through and you read that whole story on the Sun,
it's one of it. Like Ben said, it's one of
those that feels a little far fetched. But again, anytime
there are seeds of truth within something like this, I
don't think you can all out dismiss it, right, I
mean just I would recommend hey go over to the
(27:06):
Sun check out gold nine n ei N which just
means gold no, and it says treasure hunter finds five
hundred million dollars worth of gold Nazi gold in a
Bavarian forest, but landowner won't let him dig it.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Up right right, Just a little more about the story,
do you know it is? We do know that there
was some treasure in play because the guy who mentioned
Carlton Bruner, he gets away for a time. He goes
to Austria, where he's from, and he's not arrested until
May twelfth, nineteen forty five. But in the garden at
(27:38):
his house, like buried, I think in a beat patch,
they find seventy six kilograms of gold in six gold bars.
And that's that's clearly a case of like how much
can I physically carry with me when I'm running cash
and carry cash and carry? Yes, just so. And Carlton
Bruner was found guilty of war crimes at Neuro he
(28:00):
was executing on October sixteenth. He never told anybody where
the loot went. But Gluke was contacted by an old
man with a strange tale about an SS officer shipped
to Siberia who had sown a map of sorts into
the lining of his coat. And this is what led
(28:21):
Luke off on his merry adventure, his frustrating chase. Right now,
as you can tell from the title that Matt just read,
as far as we can see, the excavation or the
search is still being held up because the person who
owns the property says, you know, hey, I'm maybe I'll
find it, or Hans Gluke is accusing them of that.
Speaker 4 (28:44):
Yeah, yeah, And just so, I mean, it's so interesting
the way this kind of thing plays out. It feels
like the watch story from Pulpictures. Yeah it is Pulplican, Yeah,
where it's this thing, this map in this case instead
of a watch. And again there are no cavities involved
necessarily other than the cavity and the coat, I guess.
(29:06):
But it's an important thing that got passed down and
passed down because you know, it went from this guy
who was important enough that he knew he was going
to get killed as soon as he entered a camp,
gave it to another pow and like in hopes that
it would make it back somewhere to someone. And now
it went to this other guy and now he's searching
for the treasure, but it's on this other person's land
(29:29):
and he just can't go in there. And you know,
dig up things willy nilly, or even follow the map
to exactly where it is, because he wouldn't be able
to dig it up because he wouldn't own it.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
It would be a great plot for a film, right, Yeah,
And we have more examples ahead, including some that are
a little closer to home. After a word from our sponsors,
let's talk about Lake Toplets.
Speaker 4 (29:57):
All right. Lake Toplets.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
It's a fun name. It's also the source of a
World War two legend. According to this story, the Nazi
Party dumped billions of dollars worth of stolen gold somewhere
around to the tune of five point six billion dollars
worth into an isolated lake, Lake Toplets, in a forest
in the Alps. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (30:19):
In history dot com reports that in the forties, the
Nazis actually use this lake as a testing site for
naval equipment, and the mountains around it as a series
of strongholds, well more, I guess, retreats, kind of you
could say, for their military officers. Than In fifty nine,
(30:40):
investigators found seven hundred million pounds worth of counterfeit banknotes
that Hitler actually had a pretty sinister plan to use
to sabotage Britain's economy. In what way do you think
ben to flood.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Flooded with cash? Yeah, exactly, and then the cash would
be worthless if the new are good enough, there's no
way to discern the fake ones from the real ones.
Speaker 6 (31:05):
Isn't that one of those conspiracy theories people are always
talking about China, Like China could do that devalue our currency,
about flooding because they've like stockpiled all this American currency
and they could like affect our economy by like flooding
us with cash.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
Yeah, but that's a different kind of thing in this case.
Imagine the chaos of seven hundred million dollars just being
at play now that you know is counterfeit. You don't
even know how much is out there. Like if you're
on the Allied side or the United States side, you
would have no idea how much is actually in the system,
but you would know that, Oh my god, a great
(31:39):
portion of the exchanges that are occurring within our economy
right now are happening with phony money, and now every
single transaction is going.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
To happen to question.
Speaker 4 (31:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Yeah, it especially given how fragile the British economy is
at the time, because you know, London had been bombed
left and right, and it was definitely in a recur period.
The interesting thing about what you said, Nol regarding the
idea of currency devaluing, it's another theory. It could happen.
(32:12):
The only difference would be that the assets the government
of China would hold in that situation would be real
and not counterfeit. The best counterfeit notes, though US notes,
are from that part of the world. They're the North
Korean supernotes. According to the Treasury Department. The way you
can tell a North Korean supernote from a real one
hundred dollars bill is that the supernote looks better. It's
(32:33):
like a better bill.
Speaker 6 (32:35):
We did a story on Ridiculous History about this very thing,
where there was a very crafty gentleman who was in
Spain I believe, I can't remember now. He figured out
a way to counterfeit money and then did flood it
and he actually single handedly kind of wrecked the economy
of Portugal.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Is where it was. Yeah, yeah, he's the Portuguese banknote crisis.
And actually our show for that is the top persultant Google.
When I searched for it.
Speaker 6 (33:00):
In school, it was Archer Alves Reyes, who was the
mastermind behind this but very similar scheme. Right, It wasn't
he wasn't trying to wreak havoc. It just kind of
was a byproduct of his greed. And he basically single
handedly toppled the banking system of Portugal in nineteen twenty five.
Speaker 4 (33:18):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
And this this had nothing on what Hitler had planned, right,
and we have to wonder how this would have played out.
So there was some kind of treasure found already Lake Toplets,
and that was seven hundred million pounds worth of counterfeit notes.
As for the other stuff, as for billions of dollars
of gold that has yet to be found today, however,
(33:43):
we do have a case of some of this Nazi
gold actually being found. It was a real thing, a
real conspiracy to hide it.
Speaker 4 (33:50):
Oh yes, And this takes us back to Operation safe
Haven as it was, as it was not really beginning,
but he was in full play here and there were
a group of it's actually a really large number of
the United States Army, the Third Army, ninetieth Infantry Division.
They're in Merkers, Germany, Okay, and it's as the war
(34:14):
is ending, they're kind of doing cleanup. They're trying to
find gold during operations safe Haven, as you mentioned before,
and it's April fifth, nineteen forty five, and some military
police from this division they come upon to refugees. Essentially,
they're called displaced persons. They're from France. According to ah C,
(34:39):
they were two female French citizens who were displaced and
there's a large amount of gold that had been transferred
and been moved out and then moved near Murkers somewhere.
But nobody could you verify any of these They're just rumors, right.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
They just knew that there were frequently trucks that were
loaded it's some sort of precious object. And these trucks
were coming continually during the night.
Speaker 4 (35:06):
Yeah, and they were going to a very specific place
and it was this mine near Murkers. It was a
potassium mine of all things. And these women, these two
displaced persons for France, said, yeah, oh, do you guys
know about that mine?
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Right?
Speaker 4 (35:21):
With all that gold in it? Right? You guys know
about that? And that's all it took. Really they decided, Okay,
we're gonna go check this out. And they they found
their way by the way. General Eisenhower and General Patten
were a part of this little mission to go down
into the mine and try and see what's down there.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Yeah, and Patten has Patten has his own crazy scheme
that we can maybe mention at the end here. But
what do they find when they go into the mine.
Speaker 6 (35:51):
Well, a whole crap ton of gold, seven thousand sacks
of gold bullion to be precise, and an underground area
that was around seventy five feet deep one hundred and
fifty feet wide, And the mine also had ninety eight
million francs French francs, and the.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
There's also a ton of gold coin that has recovered
down there, separate from the bullion.
Speaker 6 (36:16):
And this absolute Smorgsborg of currency wasn't even the most
alarming thing that they found down there. They also found
luggage with gold fillings that had been extracted from yeah,
you guessed it, concentration camp detainees.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
And you can actually see some film that was taken
around or of that time of what they found there,
a lot of still photographs, some like I said, film,
and it I don't even know how to describe it
unless you Unless you see it, you won't understand such
a large container of the gold from human beings mouths.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Yeah, and this this is a real thing. I think
a lot of people when they first learned of this
at the close of World War Two, I think a
lot of people thought maybe it was propaganda, or maybe
it was an unnecessary exaggeration. But it was not propaganda.
It was not an exaggeration. They were taking people's wedding rings,
(37:19):
their watches, they were literally taking metal out of people's teeth.
And this plunder, this Nazi gold story, we usually see
reports of it being scrolled away somewhere in Europe, right
in a mine, or in a Swiss bank, or in
the Vatican, or we see it maybe as you said, Matt,
being wired or transported somehow to South America, which also
(37:43):
is very plausible, but we don't often talk about the
plunder closer to home. The United States is also guilty
of these types of nefarious clandestine activities. In nineteen ninety seven,
The New York Times reported this following claim quote. In
(38:05):
nineteen fifty, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York melted
down hundreds of gold bars bearing the swastika imprint and
recast them with a pristine stamp bearing the words United
States Assay Office. At the time According to memos from
the FED, the US Treasury knew that a lot of
the gold, worth about twenty three million at the time,
had been stolen from the Netherlands in Belgium when they
(38:26):
were invaded by Germany ah Operation safe Haven. Right, But
this is like, you know this nineteen fifty Uncle Sam
is not really asking questions, Just like the Swiss banks,
just like the other collaborating forces that we publicly despised,
the US is just taking the money and running. The
(38:49):
rationale here is that Uncle Sam is primarily concerned with
rebuilding Europe at this time, rather than investigating the ethical
quandaries and the provenance of this stolen loop. But back
to New York Times, at the request of the National
City Bank, which later became City Bank, the Treasury Department
authorized the reissue of the gold, and that was, according
(39:10):
to this reporter, a polite phrase for purifying it and
wiping out the German markings so the gold could be
used as collateral for a transaction between Spain and the
Itt Corporation that we're trying to build a telephone system.
But here's the other problem. It gets more uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Yeah, boyd does it?
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Ever?
Speaker 6 (39:31):
The Germans mint was known for taking gold that German
troops stole from central banks all over Europe and then
melted them down, together with those more grizzly examples of
plunder the tooth fillings things like wedding rings and other
jewelry that was looted from people who were, in turn
(39:53):
in those concentration.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
Camps and the death camps victims.
Speaker 6 (39:57):
Germany's goal was to put the he's lifted items into
a form that was a lot harder to trace and
then could be laundered through the Swiss National Bank.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
Yeah. Yeah, And it's hard to really know how much
of the kind of gold that we're talking about that
came from victims from concentration camps actually made it into
each individual gold bullyon bar or each each coin that
was then minted in Germany. But we do know it happened,
(40:31):
and we do know that kind of gold was also
just anecdotally smelted down to create fillings for SS officers.
That was a real thing that occurred. Hitler's own dentist,
the guy that he used, would do that, And of
course it's not proven. There are rumors all over the
place that specifically gold from other people's mouths ended up
(40:55):
in Hitler's mouth, blah blah blah. But just the feeling
that you're probably getting just from knowing some of that,
that perhaps this gold that the United States melted down
and purified was actually from victims from concentration camps.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Perhaps, perhaps right. We'll also have to note that the
purification process, the re smelting conducted by the government, likely
wiped out all traces of what historians call hate this euphemism,
but this is the euphemism people use non monetary gold,
(41:33):
you know, because it's gold that was never meant to
be currency. But if we think about it, that means
that the US had literally taken blood, money, gold ripped
from people's mouths, and there are there are more. I
know a lot of us listening today are saying, guys,
you have to talk about the Nazi gold train. So
quick mention of that. There's a local legend in Poland
(41:57):
that a train laden with gold had disappeared in May
of nineteen forty five. Now the area is part of Poland,
but previously when this took place, it was southeast Germany.
People have searched for the train. Ever since World War Two.
No evidence of a train has been found. You'll hear
historians say that the train never existed. And in twenty
(42:22):
fifteen it was back in the news because people thought
that they had discovered the location of the train. In
the course of that search. It turned out they had
discovered something. It was a cavity in the rock filled
by a natural ice formation. So no train that we
know of.
Speaker 4 (42:37):
Maybe there is a mythical train made of gold. This
time it was not just a train that had gold
in it or was carrying gold. Maybe there's a mythical
golden train out there somewhere that we'll learn about.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
It's called the Hogwarts Express.
Speaker 4 (42:49):
Ah's a reference.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Yeah, this is some disturbing stuff.
Speaker 4 (42:55):
Well, let's okay, let's get down to just when we're
thinking about all of this. You know, you just mentioned
blood money, the concept of that very real sense of
blood money. But when you're thinking about wars and profiting
from having physical conflicts like that with other countries or
(43:16):
other places, with other people, and then gaining from that
all those altercations and those deaths and and the blood
that is spilled, this kind of thing like maybe maybe
we forget because we're so inundated in like our culture
in particular in the United States of war movies a
(43:38):
lot of times that are to a great extent glorified,
like the the concept of fighting a good fight, fighting
for good, fighting.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
The great right side.
Speaker 4 (43:48):
But but really just anytime there's war and profit generated,
it should feel for everyone on every side like an
icky thing. I think, well, here's the crazy thing, man.
Speaker 6 (43:58):
I mean, I distinctly remember, you know, after nine to
eleven the idea of we're going to war being a
big deal in my mind and thinking it was going
to have some effect on my day to day life.
But we've been at war for so long as a
country that it's sort of you're sort of numb to it,
and you don't really we were so isolated from it
in our daily lives that it's very difficult unless you
(44:20):
have military in your family, to have a real ramification
of these conflicts, which, if I would argue, I think
and many most would agree, are largely for profit. The
notion of staying in a perpetual state of war feeds
that machine.
Speaker 4 (44:35):
You know, well, let's get let's just get to Afghanistan.
And what we learned in previous episodes about the poppy fields.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
Oh yes, poppy production which was waning under the Taliban,
exploded under under US supervision during coalition control right right,
the idea of being it's the best cash crop. US
soldiers were tasked with protecting the open the poppy fields. Rather,
(45:02):
let's were the.
Speaker 4 (45:04):
Oil fields in a rock? Sorry, I don't know. I
mean we keep seeing it, at least from the United
States side.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
Well sure, from every side. You know, it goes into
a Smedley Butler's idea of war as a racket, economic
confessions of an economic hit man, the concept that war
may be an economic necessity for certain types of governments
or societies, and this money goes missing. All of the time.
(45:33):
We've barely touched on things like we didn't talk about
the Amber room, right, that's missing too. We didn't talk
about Himmler's ninety three million dollars worth of silver. We
didn't talk about Lake Vulsen. Apparently Germans hit one hundred
million in gold there too. There are laundry lists of
hidden or stolen gold and valuables, and that kind of
(45:57):
practice didn't stop when the Not Party collapsed. There was
a palette with what a billion dollars that just went
missing in the Middle East.
Speaker 4 (46:06):
Yeah, don't talk about that now, I'm just kidding. We did.
Didn't we do a whole episode on that, or at
least I know we talked about it.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
We did. We did talk about it. And we've always
known that war and profit are inextricably intertwined. We know
things continue to disappear. This this is just, by the way,
when we say money continues to disappear, we're just talking
about the money that people lost. We're not talking about
the money that never really existed due to black budgets
(46:35):
and off the book spending.
Speaker 4 (46:37):
Oh my god. And you know, not to mention, by
the way, all the arms deals that occur across the
globe from one country to another.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
Good point.
Speaker 4 (46:44):
I mean that. I mean, you want to talk about
blood money, it's right there.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
That's true.
Speaker 4 (46:49):
That's future blood money, blood money that's going to be
cashed out.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
And some people will argue this is just an unpleasant,
necessary piece of the globe both financial system and some
people would respond to that argument by saying, well, why
don't we make another system for some people? Problem is
that there's not a problem. Business is very very good.
Speaker 4 (47:12):
Yeah, you know, I just just this is an anecdote,
but I just watched Fight Club for the first time
in a long time and had a discussion about it
and that feeling of why not just make a new system?
Right in that movie there's depictions of people wanting to
make a new system, but that concept of tearing one
(47:35):
down to create a new one is pretty terrifying. At
least now that I'm in my mid thirties.
Speaker 6 (47:43):
I've already been, like, you know, paying into the current
system for so many years.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
Now I can't start over.
Speaker 4 (47:49):
Yeah, I don't know. It's weird the way that kind
of feeling happens, but I would be right there with
you that that feeling is pretty pervasive of something needs
to change because this system is not functioning properly.
Speaker 1 (48:01):
Humph, something must be done. But no one agrees what
we want to hear from you. What do you think?
How much truth is there to these different claims of
hidden Nazi treasure? Is there more of this treasure somewhere
out there in this wide world of ours? The answer
I think is yes, And I also I'm going to
(48:21):
go a step further pure speculation. I think not only
is some of that stolen stuff still out there, it
is accounted for by people who have just held on
to it or profited from it, and they're not going
to come forward because why would you. You're a war
criminal at that point.
Speaker 4 (48:38):
Well, in decades have passed by this point that maybe
it's not even known, like by current heads of banks
or you know, board members or something. If this stuff
is secreted away somewhere in a vault, maybe it's not
known what it is because maybe it was smelted down,
just like the United States allegedly did. I don't know.
(48:58):
I think you're right, Ben, I think you're right.
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Last thing, just for an example, I've got to mention
this because it was so bizarre to learn about this.
George Patten we mentioned earlier, had a plan to use
Nazi gold to fund the US military after the after
the war. Patten, after discovering that salt mine treasure, Yes,
(49:21):
he sat down with some army generals later that night
and they said, okay, how do we handle this? And
Patten's first suggestion off the top, he was coming in
hot man. He said, let's distribute the gold to the boys.
He won a quote, some gold for every son of
in the third Army. And they said, no, you can't
do that. We have to follow some sort of law.
(49:42):
And then he said, okay, well, if we can't just
give it away to the boys, let's keep it a
secret from the Congress and from the generals who aren't cool. Wow,
it didn't work.
Speaker 4 (49:53):
I love that he used the phrase generals who aren't cool.
Speaker 1 (49:57):
Yeah, that's that part. Might be pair phrase. But we
know that there's still we know there's still stuff that's
being discovered. There was one point eight billion dollars worth
of art discovered in a Munich apartment in twenty twelve.
People are still finding things that was not very long ago.
(50:19):
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. That's right, let us know
what you think. You can reach.
Speaker 6 (50:26):
You to the handle Conspiracy Stuff where we exist on
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Speaker 4 (50:34):
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Speaker 1 (50:52):
The entities to read every single piece of correspondence we receive,
be aware, yet not afraid. Sometimes the void writes back
conspiracy at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 4 (51:21):
Stuff they don't want you to know is a production
of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Fellow conspiracy realist. We are returning to you with some
classic episodes from the evenings of your Full Disclosure. We
are right now recording with our super producer Andrew in
a variety of hotels in New York City.
Speaker 2 (00:20):
It's true, some of us near walls apart.
Speaker 1 (00:24):
It's the future.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
It's a brave new world.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
And guys, I got a hot take. You ready, Okay,
Nazis aren't cool?
Speaker 1 (00:32):
Okay, Yeah, I could get with that. I mean, that's okay,
get good.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
Not that hot.
Speaker 1 (00:37):
As it turns out, it reminds me of a Norm McDonald, nol,
the famous, famous comedian who had himself some takes on Nazis.
And what a great setup for this classic episode. Guys,
we talk a lot about Nazis, you know, like looking
back through the show, more than anybody ever should.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
Yeah, they did a lot of pretty horrendous things. They
plundered a whole bunch and somehow they managed to fund
a giant military right, so there are all these rumors
about where that money came from, where did all the
plundered stuff go to?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
And when they weren't plundering and hoarding their gold like
smoug the Dragon, they were also chasing Indiana Jones around
and you know, trying to summon demons from ancient religious relics.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
In twenty nineteen, we asked ourselves, is there any truth
or is there any factual basis to the very many
Nazi gold conspiracies and Nazi making conspiracies that continue in
the modern day. I think it's fair to say we
were all surprised by what we discovered.
Speaker 4 (01:54):
Yes, as will you be.
Speaker 5 (01:57):
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is
riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or
learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A
production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Speaker 4 (02:21):
Hello, Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt,
my name is Noel.
Speaker 1 (02:24):
They call me Ben. We are joined, as always in
spirit with our super producer Paul Mission Control Decan. Today
we are joined in person with our super producer Seth Johnson,
who you may recognize from earlier episodes. Most importantly, you
are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff
they don't want you to know. We're We're diving back
(02:44):
into the storied world depicted in action and venture films
from the seventies and the eighties and the nineties. You
know the kind of national treasure Indiana Jones, three Kings
sort of vibe.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
Can steal a declaration of independence?
Speaker 4 (03:00):
No, now, well and well kind of. I mean they're
going to steal all kinds of treasure from countries across Europe, and.
Speaker 1 (03:07):
That cha wealth is an independence of sorts. Right, we
were talking off air about our various lottery plans. I
don't know if I ever shared it with you, Matt.
My list of pranks to pull is an eccentric billionaire.
Speaker 4 (03:21):
Oh no, it's your Google doc and Hodgman on.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Its Google doc. Yeah, it's an old one. Yeah, but
I keep it just you know, if something occurs, it's
good to have sort of a vision board of sorts.
Speaker 4 (03:32):
And it's also a good idea to give Google a
heads up.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Oh yeah, oh yeah, you know the love, the love
what I have in store for the planet. So we
are talking about treasure, literal tons of gold stolen during
wartime and hidden away. This story takes place in World
War Two, but it's it's not unique because we know
that the chaos left in the wake of global conflicts
(03:59):
is were many people an opportunity? What's that old line?
Chaos as a ladder. I believe that was from Game
of Thrones. Perhaps maybe there's a little finger. Yeah, okay, yeah,
so little Finger was not commenting on the Nazi regime,
but for members of the Nazi regime, that statement holds true.
Here are the facts. First. First things first, the Nazi
(04:23):
Party stole not a ton of stuff. They stole tons
and tons of things, thousands of tons, millions of tons
of stuff. And it's common knowledge that they looted numerous groups.
They took the assets of victims of the Holocaust, of
citizens and repressed countries. They looted entire banks of countries
(04:43):
when they occupied them.
Speaker 4 (04:44):
Well, yeah, and you can you can kind of begin
to understand the pattern. When you have an invading army
that goes into one place that is not controlled by
you or your government, then you essentially are victorious militarily.
Then the spoil, unfortunately go to you, and then you
use those to then fund the next one that you enter.
(05:06):
And it really is like this huge series of bank
heists that we can kind of see painted across Europe
during World War Two.
Speaker 1 (05:14):
And you know, one thing I noticed is that none
of the invading or occupying forces ever took the money
that they had and put it towards supporting the people.
It was always just as you said, to further fund
expansionist ambitions. We know that Germany when it was under
control of the Nazi Party had a real dilemma, a
(05:38):
physical limit to the amount of resources that they could
generate within their own domain. So they had to they
had to get liquidity, they had to get wealth. They
were able to get a bunch of gold, and they
needed help swapping that gold for currency that they could
then use to acquire the stuff they needed. But didn't
(05:59):
have high quality iron, oil, tungsten, other materials like that,
and so they went to the neutral powers, the neutral
countries in this conflict, like Switzerland that's going to be
one of the stars of our show today, And they
asked Swiss banks and Swiss institutions to help them transfer gold,
transfer currencies, and commodities between nations. Because even though there
(06:24):
was a war going on, businesses kept running, right, Banks
were still in play, very much so.
Speaker 2 (06:30):
And likely profiting from said war in some ways.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
Absolutely, IBM as well.
Speaker 4 (06:36):
It wasn't just banks, oh oh, absolutely, But then you know,
you see this as the new system that is created
for their money necessities the right the third Reich, and
it kind of works for a time, but then as
the well, it's not. They didn't know the war was
(06:56):
coming to a close. But as things weren't going so
well for the Axis powers, and as the Allied powers
are gaining more and more allies and gaining more and
more support, it's harder and harder for the Nazi Party
to use a lot of these third party neutral countries
to do a lot of this fencing essentially.
Speaker 1 (07:16):
Exactly, yes, And I love that you're using the phrase fencing,
because this system was a system of laundering resources and
fencing stolen goods. By nineteen forty four, the writing was
on the wall. Businesses, governments, access and Allied powers alike
knew that the war was not going to keep going,
(07:37):
and Germany became more and more reliant on institutions in
Switzerland because other neutral parties started to acquiesce to Allied
demands and they said, look, we've got to put some
distance between you can't we can't accept gold and coins
right now, our specie as they're called. We also are
(07:59):
going to be less and less likely to accept Reich marks.
And now Germany has the option of paying with foreign currency.
But it turns out that years of belligerents and militarism
often don't leave governments with a lot of foreign currency
because they burn a lot of bridges, literally to the
ground exactly.
Speaker 6 (08:21):
So these banks essentially became clearing houses for stolen German
gold from numerous occupied countries that could then be converted
to a less objectionable form of currency and medium, if
you will. Diplomatic cables from the time support this, for example,
the fact that the Swiss National Bank actually helped the
(08:43):
German Reichsbank convert an estimated fifteen million in stolen Dutch
gold and they didn't ask any questions.
Speaker 2 (08:52):
That's the craziest part.
Speaker 1 (08:54):
No, they asked, dud, my bank asks question.
Speaker 6 (08:57):
If I deposit more than five thousand dollars, Like how
it's you know what I mean, Like, it's it's insane.
Speaker 2 (09:03):
The level of brazen crookedness.
Speaker 1 (09:07):
In this situation here, right yeah.
Speaker 4 (09:09):
Well yeah, but it's from an objective stance, it's really
messed up. Because if you are a banking institution and
your primary goals are the primary goals of controlling as
much money as possible to be able to pump out
more money and loan. So then take more money in
and you get an offer of fifteen million dollars to
(09:31):
be deposited. Depending on where it's coming from, maybe it
doesn't matter so much at least I don't know. That's
really looking at in a cold way and it's it sucks.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
Well. There's also plausible deniability.
Speaker 4 (09:45):
Exactly who knows, I yeah, well we do know kind
of with the through the cables, but the exact way
in which the Swiss bank was approached with the money.
Speaker 1 (09:56):
Right right where they approached the a proxy or or something.
That's why the Swiss National Bank example is important, because
it was the actual German state actor bank that was
interactive with them directly. This is strange because sure one
could say that, let's say I'm the head of a
(10:18):
Swiss bank. One could say, well, I see so many
transactions all the time. We move a lot of a
lot of money around the world. We work in volume. Baby,
I can't be line item checking every single Nazi gold request. Yeah,
I mean, I don't know if Swiss bankers are that
casual at that time, but we do know this was
(10:39):
a very common practice. According to the CIA, German efforts
to acquire foreign currency and converted to war materials became
increasingly clandestine as the Allied forces were encroaching and as
the war was turning in their favor.
Speaker 4 (10:56):
Well, it makes total sense, right, and it matches right
up with our lines episode, where like you said, as
they're seeing the writing on the wall, they're going to
try and secret away this money, just as they secreted
away themselves and the important officers and scientists and things
they wanted to be able to control it later.
Speaker 1 (11:13):
Perhaps, yes, that was the idea, and that's what the
Allied forces believed was happening. For Germany, a lot of
problems cropped up very quickly. They had these long term
exchange agreements, right, we'll give you x amount of whatever
over why amount of years, and in return you'll give
us oil or iron gas, et cetera. Now those are impossible.
(11:38):
Neutral countries will no longer do them because they're like,
why would I agree to do something with you for
five years? It's it's not looking good for you, you know.
And now the neutral parties will only work with Germany
on what they called a cash and carry basis, one
off short term transactions. Still for Germany it's better than nothing,
(12:00):
but the way in which they interacted changed too. They
started to want more proxies, more private entities to deal
with them, so we could say, for instance, oh, well,
well wasn't the government of Switzerland.
Speaker 4 (12:13):
Absolutely, Or it wasn't even this major bank. It was
like a smaller part of this bank.
Speaker 1 (12:19):
A subsidiary of some sort, right, And this gives Allied
observers some pause, and they start to believe that there
is a conspiracy. They think perhaps the German forces are
pretending to fall, pretending to surrender, and that they will
reaggregate all this stuff they have stolen and they will
(12:42):
launch a fourth Reich.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
And to listeners who've been here for a while, that
may remind you of the long game deception ideas that
were born out of the Cold War and the fall
of the Soviet Union. You could kind of apply the
same deals. At least that's what the CIA was believed.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Exactly, And that's why the United Kingdom and the United
States launched Operation safe Haven, which we'll explore a little
bit further, but for now just know it exists, and
Operations safe Haven and other endeavors were somewhat successful. We
found some of the stolen treasure, we recovered some of
(13:25):
the Gold in nineteen forty four in December, when Allied
forces created safe Haven, they wanted to They didn't want
to take it for themselves, at least the way it
was stated. Instead, what they were trying to do was
find the Heidi holes, the bolt holes of treasure hidden
away by German forces in neutral countries, and then they
(13:49):
would take that money and they would move these funds
to what they called safe havens. These would be British
or American humanitarian organizations most often, and this was meant
to sure assist those organizations in their humanitarian endeavors, but
it was also meant to disperse Nazi wealth, to leave
(14:10):
no financial stone standing upon another financial stone. They wanted
to cripple any further attempts to resurrect the regime.
Speaker 4 (14:19):
And the you know, there are some people listening saying, oh,
you know, the language that's used in creating something like
operations safe Haven, even the term safe haven when it's
being transferred to a country with such a large military
force that is kind of going through and then dominating, right,
and then saying oh, we're going to take all this stuff,
We're going to put it over, you know, in places
(14:40):
that we control. But it's gonna be safe there. You
guys are cool. Everything's fine.
Speaker 1 (14:44):
It goes to a good cause.
Speaker 4 (14:46):
Yeah, everything's great. It's not the same thing as what
the Nazis just did and took it all and then
you know, hit it away for their own purposes. We
promise it's fine. It's called a safe haven, right, you know.
And you can just see the parallels there, depending on
how you feel about the operations of the United States government. Anyway,
I'm just putting that out there.
Speaker 1 (15:04):
I think that's an excellent point. And there's a massive
hole in this story because you see, despite the efforts
of the Allies, no one was able to locate all
of the stolen gold, all of the stolen art and
other assets looted from Germany's victims. In fact, in nineteen
sixty six, the British Foreign Office reported that of all
(15:25):
the gold stolen from occupied lands, victims of the Holocaust,
War casualties and so on, only one tenth of it. Only
ten percent had ever been located and returned. So our
question today is where did the rest of the treasure go?
Speaker 4 (15:43):
And we'll get to that right after a word from
our sponsor.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Here's where it gets crazy. So since pretty much right
after the close of World War Two, even a little
bit before the war, there were multiple rumors and conspiracy
theories about Nazi gold, and they popped in and out
of official reports and your favorite mainstream news and your
favorite investigative documentaries and stuff. Ever since. They still come
(16:14):
out today.
Speaker 4 (16:15):
I'm yeah, the History Channel loves it.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Yeah. I was gonna say, I'm fairly certain that you
can turn on the History Channel on this weekend and
I don't know, have a thirty forty percent chance of
running into a Nazi gold story.
Speaker 4 (16:26):
Oh yeah, I mean I literally watched a clip from
a show called Codes and Conspiracies where it was a
clip about one of the things we're going to talk
about today, and it wasn't that long ago when it
came out.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
And here's the thing about it. These rumors and these stories,
these alleged locations of this lost treasure, they may vary
in plausibility, but it's so fascinating to people because there
are proven cases of this stuff being discovered, and there
are also cases where this stuff seems to almost have
been discovered and then poof disappeared from the news.
Speaker 4 (17:01):
Yeah, and that's when you get into real suspicion about
things like operations safe Haven, where you're just like, uh man,
ninety percent of the stuff is still out there. We don't,
are we sure? We're like yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it.
Speaker 1 (17:18):
Oh man.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Should we talk about some examples?
Speaker 4 (17:22):
Sure?
Speaker 2 (17:23):
So how about the SS Menden.
Speaker 1 (17:25):
Right, Yeah, the German cargo ship scuttled near Iceland during
the early days of World War Two, So this is
before the close it was suspected to contain this huge
trove of Nazi gold.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
How about we we cite one of our favorite sources,
Fox News.
Speaker 1 (17:40):
I put I know, I know in the notes there.
It's true. It's it's a good article.
Speaker 2 (17:44):
Look are you well you know they're not all y whatever.
Speaker 6 (17:46):
So this merchant vessel one hundred and twenty nautical miles
south of Ice centers in the international spotlight after the
chest with around four tons of Nazi gold was discovered
in the wreck.
Speaker 4 (18:00):
Four tons of Nazi goal?
Speaker 6 (18:01):
Four tons of Nazi goal? Does that mean it like
in the movies? Does the Nazi gold have swastikas on it?
How they identify I was stamped?
Speaker 1 (18:10):
Yeah?
Speaker 2 (18:11):
Maybe unclear?
Speaker 4 (18:13):
I mean you would certainly know if he found it
that way.
Speaker 1 (18:15):
Well, also it depends on the provenance of the gold.
If they stole it from another country, that's probably not
that That's what.
Speaker 2 (18:21):
I was thinking exactly. So this hall was valued at
around one hundred million pounds, which as we know, is
more than dollars.
Speaker 4 (18:31):
I think. This is a story from twenty eighteen, and
they estimated it as one hundred and thirteen million years exactly.
Speaker 1 (18:37):
And yeah, okay, here's the official story of what happened.
On September twenty fourth, nineteen thirty nine, the ship was
intercepted by two British cruisers and the captain of the
Mendon had specific orders for this situation, which was do
not be captured or do not let the cargo be captured.
(18:57):
So he sank the ship on purpose with everything aboard,
and the shipwreck was discovered or rediscovered I should say,
in spring of twenty seventeen. And then things get a
little fuzzy because they had to get permission from the
authorities in Iceland to investigate the wreckage and they conduct
(19:19):
They eventually in twenty eighteen were able to search it
for about three days and then after that operation, the
search team, a UK based company called Advanced Marine Services,
said to Iceland that no items of value were found.
Of course, again that's the official story, and there are
going to be a lot of people who just won't
(19:40):
believe those folks, regardless of the facts. So this one
is interesting because now we have to ask ourselves, did
somebody take the safe or the chest before the official search?
Why was the search so stymied by bureaucratic red tape?
Speaker 4 (19:56):
You know, yeah, I know. It makes you think maybe
there's a small group of rogue treasure hunters out there
that got there first, or Buyork okay.
Speaker 1 (20:05):
Or Buork or maybe she's you know what, I don't
want a pigeon oler, I'm going to get.
Speaker 7 (20:10):
The treasure treasure I like the Gowld. We'll go deep
into the waters and find the heat and James, they
will be guarded by the King of the Sea.
Speaker 1 (20:21):
Yeah, that sounds like Byork. Yeah. So what we're going
to see as we explore some more of these examples
is that, like a lot of conspiracy theories or rumors
or speculation, there's a categorical thing a play. Certain tropes
pop up over and over. The gold's usually said to
be hidden in banks held by the Vatican, of course,
(20:41):
or lost in some place that's difficult to access, like
a sunken vessel at the bottom of the ocean, or
a mine for instance.
Speaker 4 (20:51):
That was then collapsed on purpose, or something where it's
very very difficult, if not impossible, to get there. So
let's you mentioned the v word. Let's let's let's talk
about the Vatican and why they perhaps are a viable
suspect for where some of this treasure ended up.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Okay, yeah, So the US State Department back in nineteen
forty six, shortly after the war's closed, receives this top
secret report from an agent named Emerson Bigelow, and Emerson says,
I have heard from the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA,
that there is something rotten going on with the Vatican
(21:37):
and Nazi gold from World War Two, or Nazi finances
at least. And this this report is later called the
Bigelow Report. Sometimes you'll hear it called the Bigelow Memo.
It wasn't declassified until decades later, in nineteen ninety six,
and it wasn't released until nineteen ninety seven. Here's what
(21:58):
the report says. It says back in nineteen forty four,
the Vatican took three hundred and fifty million Swiss francs
worth of Nazi gold for quote unquote safe keeping, and
of that, one hundred and fifty million Swiss francs have
been impounded by British authorities at the Austro Swiss border.
So where did all this stuff go? What is safekeeping?
(22:21):
What is the safe haven? Right? Yeah, according to Bigelow,
the safe haven here is a numbered Swiss bank account
and controlled by the Vatican, and that in Bigelow goes
on to say that more than two hundred million Swiss
francs worth of gold coins are transferred to Vatican City
or to the Vatican Bank, which is known as the
(22:43):
Institute for Works of Religion, with the assistance of the clergy.
Speaker 4 (22:49):
And then it goes on to state that perhaps, or
it's believed at least that then this money was funneled
to places like Argentina and Brazil, where again it's the
same thing where we where we looked at in our
rat Lines episode, where the Vatican was assisting people or
at least was alleged to be assisting people and found
(23:10):
to be assisting people a few times. Nazis in particular
to get to places like Argentina in Brazil.
Speaker 1 (23:17):
Yeah, and you know, we were careful in that episode
to say this doesn't mean the Vatican overall was doing
it. It could be factions within this very large organization, but
representatives of the Vatican at the very least helped. We
should note that even today the Vatican Bank denies this.
They say there's no basis in reality to the report
(23:40):
to the Bigelow memo. So it goes down to you
know who you trust to safekeep to safekeep? Who do
you trust to safekeep? There's a there's a weird situation
going on in Bavaria that we found via the sun,
and the sun is the The sun is not a
(24:01):
source that I would quote if I were writing a
high school or college paper. But they've got that kind
of tabloid vibe. Sometimes it's like go on par with
the mail Maybe yep, exactly. But there's there's a great
story that they tell about a treasure hunter named Hans Gluk.
(24:21):
Hans Gluk is what is Gluke mean? Luck? Cool? Well,
Hans luck. Then Hans Gluke was seventy six back in
twenty seventeen, and he'd been searching for this trove of
gold diamonds artwork and for some reason rare postage stamps,
(24:44):
which are still a big thing for twenty years. He
has based on an old map that he found. He
has he has become certain that he's pinpointed this Nazi
treasure that was lost on on a train. Here's what happened,
according to him and according to the Sun, during the
(25:06):
close of the war, Heinrich Himler greenlit this bank heist,
like you said, Matt, he greenlit an inside job bank heist.
And he told his deputy, a fellow named Ernst Carlton Brunner,
to empty the Berlin Reich's bank of loot and put
it all on a train and send it to the Alps.
And they thought, you know, after the wars officially declared over,
(25:30):
will still be able to fight, will be funded by
this treasure, will essentially be gorillas, you know, we move
in the night, will hide behind the trees, will disrupt
into me supply lines and so on. And they wanted
to have the train cross the border into Austria and
then they would store all this stuff from the train
in assault mine. But the Russians were advancing, the Allied
(25:55):
aircraft were just cloppering the place. So the train hid
in a tunnel for three days, and the SS there
had had a functioning radio post nearby in the forest
at a place called iraq a rr acch and according
to Hans Gluk, this is where the treasure ultimately ended up.
(26:18):
We know that at some point the train was stuck
in that tunnel, right. We don't know what happened to
the treasure after it. We do know that Soviet troops
were able to intercept or report from that Nazi radio post,
and the report simply read in German something like command
executed transport of guards taken over stored in bscchw asked
(26:41):
for further instructions. It all hinges on what that abbreviation means.
Speaker 4 (26:45):
Yeah, it really does well. And you know, if you
go through and you read that whole story on the Sun,
it's one of it. Like Ben said, it's one of
those that feels a little far fetched. But again, anytime
there are seeds of truth within something like this, I
don't think you can all out dismiss it, right, I
mean just I would recommend hey go over to the
(27:06):
Sun check out gold nine n ei N which just
means gold no, and it says treasure hunter finds five
hundred million dollars worth of gold Nazi gold in a
Bavarian forest, but landowner won't let him dig it.
Speaker 1 (27:17):
Up right right, Just a little more about the story,
do you know it is? We do know that there
was some treasure in play because the guy who mentioned
Carlton Bruner, he gets away for a time. He goes
to Austria, where he's from, and he's not arrested until
May twelfth, nineteen forty five. But in the garden at
(27:38):
his house, like buried, I think in a beat patch,
they find seventy six kilograms of gold in six gold bars.
And that's that's clearly a case of like how much
can I physically carry with me when I'm running cash
and carry cash and carry? Yes, just so. And Carlton
Bruner was found guilty of war crimes at Neuro he
(28:00):
was executing on October sixteenth. He never told anybody where
the loot went. But Gluke was contacted by an old
man with a strange tale about an SS officer shipped
to Siberia who had sown a map of sorts into
the lining of his coat. And this is what led
(28:21):
Luke off on his merry adventure, his frustrating chase. Right now,
as you can tell from the title that Matt just read,
as far as we can see, the excavation or the
search is still being held up because the person who
owns the property says, you know, hey, I'm maybe I'll
find it, or Hans Gluke is accusing them of that.
Speaker 4 (28:44):
Yeah, yeah, And just so, I mean, it's so interesting
the way this kind of thing plays out. It feels
like the watch story from Pulpictures. Yeah it is Pulplican, Yeah,
where it's this thing, this map in this case instead
of a watch. And again there are no cavities involved
necessarily other than the cavity and the coat, I guess.
(29:06):
But it's an important thing that got passed down and
passed down because you know, it went from this guy
who was important enough that he knew he was going
to get killed as soon as he entered a camp,
gave it to another pow and like in hopes that
it would make it back somewhere to someone. And now
it went to this other guy and now he's searching
for the treasure, but it's on this other person's land
(29:29):
and he just can't go in there. And you know,
dig up things willy nilly, or even follow the map
to exactly where it is, because he wouldn't be able
to dig it up because he wouldn't own it.
Speaker 1 (29:38):
It would be a great plot for a film, right, Yeah,
And we have more examples ahead, including some that are
a little closer to home. After a word from our sponsors,
let's talk about Lake Toplets.
Speaker 4 (29:57):
All right. Lake Toplets.
Speaker 1 (29:59):
It's a fun name. It's also the source of a
World War two legend. According to this story, the Nazi
Party dumped billions of dollars worth of stolen gold somewhere
around to the tune of five point six billion dollars
worth into an isolated lake, Lake Toplets, in a forest
in the Alps. Yeah.
Speaker 6 (30:19):
In history dot com reports that in the forties, the
Nazis actually use this lake as a testing site for
naval equipment, and the mountains around it as a series
of strongholds, well more, I guess, retreats, kind of you
could say, for their military officers. Than In fifty nine,
(30:40):
investigators found seven hundred million pounds worth of counterfeit banknotes
that Hitler actually had a pretty sinister plan to use
to sabotage Britain's economy. In what way do you think
ben to flood.
Speaker 1 (30:55):
Flooded with cash? Yeah, exactly, and then the cash would
be worthless if the new are good enough, there's no
way to discern the fake ones from the real ones.
Speaker 6 (31:05):
Isn't that one of those conspiracy theories people are always
talking about China, Like China could do that devalue our currency,
about flooding because they've like stockpiled all this American currency
and they could like affect our economy by like flooding
us with cash.
Speaker 4 (31:18):
Yeah, but that's a different kind of thing in this case.
Imagine the chaos of seven hundred million dollars just being
at play now that you know is counterfeit. You don't
even know how much is out there. Like if you're
on the Allied side or the United States side, you
would have no idea how much is actually in the system,
but you would know that, Oh my god, a great
(31:39):
portion of the exchanges that are occurring within our economy
right now are happening with phony money, and now every
single transaction is going.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
To happen to question.
Speaker 4 (31:49):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (31:49):
Yeah, it especially given how fragile the British economy is
at the time, because you know, London had been bombed
left and right, and it was definitely in a recur period.
The interesting thing about what you said, Nol regarding the
idea of currency devaluing, it's another theory. It could happen.
(32:12):
The only difference would be that the assets the government
of China would hold in that situation would be real
and not counterfeit. The best counterfeit notes, though US notes,
are from that part of the world. They're the North
Korean supernotes. According to the Treasury Department. The way you
can tell a North Korean supernote from a real one
hundred dollars bill is that the supernote looks better. It's
(32:33):
like a better bill.
Speaker 6 (32:35):
We did a story on Ridiculous History about this very thing,
where there was a very crafty gentleman who was in
Spain I believe, I can't remember now. He figured out
a way to counterfeit money and then did flood it
and he actually single handedly kind of wrecked the economy
of Portugal.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
Is where it was. Yeah, yeah, he's the Portuguese banknote crisis.
And actually our show for that is the top persultant Google.
When I searched for it.
Speaker 6 (33:00):
In school, it was Archer Alves Reyes, who was the
mastermind behind this but very similar scheme. Right, It wasn't
he wasn't trying to wreak havoc. It just kind of
was a byproduct of his greed. And he basically single
handedly toppled the banking system of Portugal in nineteen twenty five.
Speaker 4 (33:18):
Wow.
Speaker 1 (33:19):
And this this had nothing on what Hitler had planned, right,
and we have to wonder how this would have played out.
So there was some kind of treasure found already Lake Toplets,
and that was seven hundred million pounds worth of counterfeit notes.
As for the other stuff, as for billions of dollars
of gold that has yet to be found today, however,
(33:43):
we do have a case of some of this Nazi
gold actually being found. It was a real thing, a
real conspiracy to hide it.
Speaker 4 (33:50):
Oh yes, And this takes us back to Operation safe
Haven as it was, as it was not really beginning,
but he was in full play here and there were
a group of it's actually a really large number of
the United States Army, the Third Army, ninetieth Infantry Division.
They're in Merkers, Germany, Okay, and it's as the war
(34:14):
is ending, they're kind of doing cleanup. They're trying to
find gold during operations safe Haven, as you mentioned before,
and it's April fifth, nineteen forty five, and some military
police from this division they come upon to refugees. Essentially,
they're called displaced persons. They're from France. According to ah C,
(34:39):
they were two female French citizens who were displaced and
there's a large amount of gold that had been transferred
and been moved out and then moved near Murkers somewhere.
But nobody could you verify any of these They're just rumors, right.
Speaker 1 (34:55):
They just knew that there were frequently trucks that were
loaded it's some sort of precious object. And these trucks
were coming continually during the night.
Speaker 4 (35:06):
Yeah, and they were going to a very specific place
and it was this mine near Murkers. It was a
potassium mine of all things. And these women, these two
displaced persons for France, said, yeah, oh, do you guys
know about that mine?
Speaker 1 (35:20):
Right?
Speaker 4 (35:21):
With all that gold in it? Right? You guys know
about that? And that's all it took. Really they decided, Okay,
we're gonna go check this out. And they they found
their way by the way. General Eisenhower and General Patten
were a part of this little mission to go down
into the mine and try and see what's down there.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Yeah, and Patten has Patten has his own crazy scheme
that we can maybe mention at the end here. But
what do they find when they go into the mine.
Speaker 6 (35:51):
Well, a whole crap ton of gold, seven thousand sacks
of gold bullion to be precise, and an underground area
that was around seventy five feet deep one hundred and
fifty feet wide, And the mine also had ninety eight
million francs French francs, and the.
Speaker 4 (36:11):
There's also a ton of gold coin that has recovered
down there, separate from the bullion.
Speaker 6 (36:16):
And this absolute Smorgsborg of currency wasn't even the most
alarming thing that they found down there. They also found
luggage with gold fillings that had been extracted from yeah,
you guessed it, concentration camp detainees.
Speaker 4 (36:34):
And you can actually see some film that was taken
around or of that time of what they found there,
a lot of still photographs, some like I said, film,
and it I don't even know how to describe it
unless you Unless you see it, you won't understand such
a large container of the gold from human beings mouths.
Speaker 1 (36:58):
Yeah, and this this is a real thing. I think
a lot of people when they first learned of this
at the close of World War Two, I think a
lot of people thought maybe it was propaganda, or maybe
it was an unnecessary exaggeration. But it was not propaganda.
It was not an exaggeration. They were taking people's wedding rings,
(37:19):
their watches, they were literally taking metal out of people's teeth.
And this plunder, this Nazi gold story, we usually see
reports of it being scrolled away somewhere in Europe, right
in a mine, or in a Swiss bank, or in
the Vatican, or we see it maybe as you said, Matt,
being wired or transported somehow to South America, which also
(37:43):
is very plausible, but we don't often talk about the
plunder closer to home. The United States is also guilty
of these types of nefarious clandestine activities. In nineteen ninety seven,
The New York Times reported this following claim quote. In
(38:05):
nineteen fifty, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York melted
down hundreds of gold bars bearing the swastika imprint and
recast them with a pristine stamp bearing the words United
States Assay Office. At the time According to memos from
the FED, the US Treasury knew that a lot of
the gold, worth about twenty three million at the time,
had been stolen from the Netherlands in Belgium when they
(38:26):
were invaded by Germany ah Operation safe Haven. Right, But
this is like, you know this nineteen fifty Uncle Sam
is not really asking questions, Just like the Swiss banks,
just like the other collaborating forces that we publicly despised,
the US is just taking the money and running. The
(38:49):
rationale here is that Uncle Sam is primarily concerned with
rebuilding Europe at this time, rather than investigating the ethical
quandaries and the provenance of this stolen loop. But back
to New York Times, at the request of the National
City Bank, which later became City Bank, the Treasury Department
authorized the reissue of the gold, and that was, according
(39:10):
to this reporter, a polite phrase for purifying it and
wiping out the German markings so the gold could be
used as collateral for a transaction between Spain and the
Itt Corporation that we're trying to build a telephone system.
But here's the other problem. It gets more uncomfortable.
Speaker 2 (39:29):
Yeah, boyd does it?
Speaker 1 (39:30):
Ever?
Speaker 6 (39:31):
The Germans mint was known for taking gold that German
troops stole from central banks all over Europe and then
melted them down, together with those more grizzly examples of
plunder the tooth fillings things like wedding rings and other
jewelry that was looted from people who were, in turn
(39:53):
in those concentration.
Speaker 2 (39:54):
Camps and the death camps victims.
Speaker 6 (39:57):
Germany's goal was to put the he's lifted items into
a form that was a lot harder to trace and
then could be laundered through the Swiss National Bank.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
Yeah. Yeah, And it's hard to really know how much
of the kind of gold that we're talking about that
came from victims from concentration camps actually made it into
each individual gold bullyon bar or each each coin that
was then minted in Germany. But we do know it happened,
(40:31):
and we do know that kind of gold was also
just anecdotally smelted down to create fillings for SS officers.
That was a real thing that occurred. Hitler's own dentist,
the guy that he used, would do that, And of
course it's not proven. There are rumors all over the
place that specifically gold from other people's mouths ended up
(40:55):
in Hitler's mouth, blah blah blah. But just the feeling
that you're probably getting just from knowing some of that,
that perhaps this gold that the United States melted down
and purified was actually from victims from concentration camps.
Speaker 1 (41:11):
Perhaps, perhaps right. We'll also have to note that the
purification process, the re smelting conducted by the government, likely
wiped out all traces of what historians call hate this euphemism,
but this is the euphemism people use non monetary gold,
(41:33):
you know, because it's gold that was never meant to
be currency. But if we think about it, that means
that the US had literally taken blood, money, gold ripped
from people's mouths, and there are there are more. I
know a lot of us listening today are saying, guys,
you have to talk about the Nazi gold train. So
quick mention of that. There's a local legend in Poland
(41:57):
that a train laden with gold had disappeared in May
of nineteen forty five. Now the area is part of Poland,
but previously when this took place, it was southeast Germany.
People have searched for the train. Ever since World War Two.
No evidence of a train has been found. You'll hear
historians say that the train never existed. And in twenty
(42:22):
fifteen it was back in the news because people thought
that they had discovered the location of the train. In
the course of that search. It turned out they had
discovered something. It was a cavity in the rock filled
by a natural ice formation. So no train that we
know of.
Speaker 4 (42:37):
Maybe there is a mythical train made of gold. This
time it was not just a train that had gold
in it or was carrying gold. Maybe there's a mythical
golden train out there somewhere that we'll learn about.
Speaker 1 (42:47):
It's called the Hogwarts Express.
Speaker 4 (42:49):
Ah's a reference.
Speaker 2 (42:54):
Yeah, this is some disturbing stuff.
Speaker 4 (42:55):
Well, let's okay, let's get down to just when we're
thinking about all of this. You know, you just mentioned
blood money, the concept of that very real sense of
blood money. But when you're thinking about wars and profiting
from having physical conflicts like that with other countries or
(43:16):
other places, with other people, and then gaining from that
all those altercations and those deaths and and the blood
that is spilled, this kind of thing like maybe maybe
we forget because we're so inundated in like our culture
in particular in the United States of war movies a
(43:38):
lot of times that are to a great extent glorified,
like the the concept of fighting a good fight, fighting
for good, fighting.
Speaker 1 (43:46):
The great right side.
Speaker 4 (43:48):
But but really just anytime there's war and profit generated,
it should feel for everyone on every side like an
icky thing. I think, well, here's the crazy thing, man.
Speaker 6 (43:58):
I mean, I distinctly remember, you know, after nine to
eleven the idea of we're going to war being a
big deal in my mind and thinking it was going
to have some effect on my day to day life.
But we've been at war for so long as a
country that it's sort of you're sort of numb to it,
and you don't really we were so isolated from it
in our daily lives that it's very difficult unless you
(44:20):
have military in your family, to have a real ramification
of these conflicts, which, if I would argue, I think
and many most would agree, are largely for profit. The
notion of staying in a perpetual state of war feeds
that machine.
Speaker 4 (44:35):
You know, well, let's get let's just get to Afghanistan.
And what we learned in previous episodes about the poppy fields.
Speaker 1 (44:42):
Oh yes, poppy production which was waning under the Taliban,
exploded under under US supervision during coalition control right right,
the idea of being it's the best cash crop. US
soldiers were tasked with protecting the open the poppy fields. Rather,
(45:02):
let's were the.
Speaker 4 (45:04):
Oil fields in a rock? Sorry, I don't know. I
mean we keep seeing it, at least from the United
States side.
Speaker 1 (45:10):
Well sure, from every side. You know, it goes into
a Smedley Butler's idea of war as a racket, economic
confessions of an economic hit man, the concept that war
may be an economic necessity for certain types of governments
or societies, and this money goes missing. All of the time.
(45:33):
We've barely touched on things like we didn't talk about
the Amber room, right, that's missing too. We didn't talk
about Himmler's ninety three million dollars worth of silver. We
didn't talk about Lake Vulsen. Apparently Germans hit one hundred
million in gold there too. There are laundry lists of
hidden or stolen gold and valuables, and that kind of
(45:57):
practice didn't stop when the Not Party collapsed. There was
a palette with what a billion dollars that just went
missing in the Middle East.
Speaker 4 (46:06):
Yeah, don't talk about that now, I'm just kidding. We did.
Didn't we do a whole episode on that, or at
least I know we talked about it.
Speaker 1 (46:13):
We did. We did talk about it. And we've always
known that war and profit are inextricably intertwined. We know
things continue to disappear. This this is just, by the way,
when we say money continues to disappear, we're just talking
about the money that people lost. We're not talking about
the money that never really existed due to black budgets
(46:35):
and off the book spending.
Speaker 4 (46:37):
Oh my god. And you know, not to mention, by
the way, all the arms deals that occur across the
globe from one country to another.
Speaker 1 (46:44):
Good point.
Speaker 4 (46:44):
I mean that. I mean, you want to talk about
blood money, it's right there.
Speaker 1 (46:48):
That's true.
Speaker 4 (46:49):
That's future blood money, blood money that's going to be
cashed out.
Speaker 1 (46:53):
And some people will argue this is just an unpleasant,
necessary piece of the globe both financial system and some
people would respond to that argument by saying, well, why
don't we make another system for some people? Problem is
that there's not a problem. Business is very very good.
Speaker 4 (47:12):
Yeah, you know, I just just this is an anecdote,
but I just watched Fight Club for the first time
in a long time and had a discussion about it
and that feeling of why not just make a new system?
Right in that movie there's depictions of people wanting to
make a new system, but that concept of tearing one
(47:35):
down to create a new one is pretty terrifying. At
least now that I'm in my mid thirties.
Speaker 6 (47:43):
I've already been, like, you know, paying into the current
system for so many years.
Speaker 2 (47:47):
Now I can't start over.
Speaker 4 (47:49):
Yeah, I don't know. It's weird the way that kind
of feeling happens, but I would be right there with
you that that feeling is pretty pervasive of something needs
to change because this system is not functioning properly.
Speaker 1 (48:01):
Humph, something must be done. But no one agrees what
we want to hear from you. What do you think?
How much truth is there to these different claims of
hidden Nazi treasure? Is there more of this treasure somewhere
out there in this wide world of ours? The answer
I think is yes, And I also I'm going to
(48:21):
go a step further pure speculation. I think not only
is some of that stolen stuff still out there, it
is accounted for by people who have just held on
to it or profited from it, and they're not going
to come forward because why would you. You're a war
criminal at that point.
Speaker 4 (48:38):
Well, in decades have passed by this point that maybe
it's not even known, like by current heads of banks
or you know, board members or something. If this stuff
is secreted away somewhere in a vault, maybe it's not
known what it is because maybe it was smelted down,
just like the United States allegedly did. I don't know.
(48:58):
I think you're right, Ben, I think you're right.
Speaker 1 (49:01):
Last thing, just for an example, I've got to mention
this because it was so bizarre to learn about this.
George Patten we mentioned earlier, had a plan to use
Nazi gold to fund the US military after the after
the war. Patten, after discovering that salt mine treasure, Yes,
(49:21):
he sat down with some army generals later that night
and they said, okay, how do we handle this? And
Patten's first suggestion off the top, he was coming in
hot man. He said, let's distribute the gold to the boys.
He won a quote, some gold for every son of
in the third Army. And they said, no, you can't
do that. We have to follow some sort of law.
(49:42):
And then he said, okay, well, if we can't just
give it away to the boys, let's keep it a
secret from the Congress and from the generals who aren't cool. Wow,
it didn't work.
Speaker 4 (49:53):
I love that he used the phrase generals who aren't cool.
Speaker 1 (49:57):
Yeah, that's that part. Might be pair phrase. But we
know that there's still we know there's still stuff that's
being discovered. There was one point eight billion dollars worth
of art discovered in a Munich apartment in twenty twelve.
People are still finding things that was not very long ago.
(50:19):
And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't
wait to hear your thoughts. That's right, let us know
what you think. You can reach.
Speaker 6 (50:26):
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