April 7, 2020 • 45 mins
As if being murdering SOBs weren’t enough, the Nazis were also thieving rats. During WWII, they stole billons in gold from countries they overran and moved it to Germany. But at the end of the war, only part of it was recovered. Where’s the rest?
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there,
Jerry somewhere. We lost her. I think she wandered off. Yeah,
but this is stuff you should know, regardless the Lost
(00:25):
Nazi Gold edition, the Legend of Curly's Gold. If Curly
was a white nationalist, well, who's to say it wasn't.
I don't, I don't know. He Jack Palance seems like
the kind who would have beat up white nationalists for fun,
as like a hobby, you know what I mean. Yeah,
you know, we we can't get into the super ins
(00:46):
and outs, but as you know, my brother worked on
the Legend of Curly's Gold and Jack Jack Vallence was
a tough s o b Yeah. I hear. He used
to do shots of nails. Yeah. I mean, he wasn't
a jerk. I wouldn't say, but it just sounded like
he was just sort of a a very cantankerous old
fella to work with. That's so funny, man, because I mean,
(01:07):
if you're at the end of the day, he's an actor.
It's not like you you welld machine guns or something
like that. Give me a break. You're an actor. Yeah,
Like Clint Eatwood is not really tough. Well, actually that's
not true, is he. Oh sure, probably he's got he's
got to be at the very least, he's been acting
(01:30):
like it's so long he's developed. Yeah. Yeah, it's probably
like a callous you know what I mean, where it's
just kind of forms and stays like callous. It's the
callousness of toughness that an actor will form. I don't
think Clint Eastwood winds about a hang nail. Let's just
say that, like like we do, would be pretty disappointing.
(01:50):
I actually was whining about a hang nailed to myself
the other day. Of course, but I'm not an actor.
I'm a podcaster. No, we have a TV show that
proves that I'm speaking for both of us. Ouch. I
thought I did some good work. I thought you did
a better job than night. And actually I think we
both did a much better job than you remember. All Right, So, um,
(02:11):
if you hate Nazis and you're like it's been a
while since I was given a reason to hate Nazis,
a new one, uh, rejoice, because we're about to give
you another one. At least I didn't really realize this
to this extent, did you. You know? I knew about
Nazi gold and that they took things, but I didn't
(02:33):
know that it was almost one big people killing and
world robbing operation. Yeah, that's the thing. That's the new
thing to hate them for. Not only were they murderers,
they were also just common thieves as well. I mean,
thieves on one of the greatest scales anyone's ever seen,
but thieves nonetheless. Um an exceptional thief. Who was that
(02:57):
Michael Caine, no die Hard, They called him a common thief,
and he goes, exceptional thief, right, Rodney, you imagine. Oh,
I can't wait till technology gets like advanced enough that
you can just insert whoever into whatever character and they'll
say the same lines and everything. Uh, that'd be great.
(03:20):
That's the first one I'm doing, is Rodney Deserfield is
Hans Gruber. He would have been wonderful. That scene where
he uh, he's fooling him into thinking he was one
of the party goers and he goes, what's your name?
It's Bill Clay, That's what it is. Don't shoot me.
Come on, nobody shoots me, I got no respect. That's
(03:41):
pretty good, Pretty good, okay. So, um, the Nazis were thieves,
not just because they looted and plundered like the countries
that they occupied, but that they did it because they
were broke to start off with. That's what truly makes
them thieve s o b s. Is that their whole jam,
(04:04):
this whole war, World War that they started, they didn't
have the resources financially or industrially to actually carry out
this war. They had to go steal to fund their
role in World War two, which they started. That's right,
they you point out here you put this together good
stuff than that. In nineteen three they had hyper inflation
(04:27):
such that in November of that year it cost eighty
billion marks to buy a loaf of bread. Is that right? Yeah,
which sounds like a lot on its own, but if
you consider that earlier that year, in January, a loaf
of bread costs two d and fifty marks. Yeah, so
the price of bread went from two hundred fifty marks
to eighty billion marks in less than a year. But
(04:48):
isn't that just a way of saying that nobody bought bread? No,
it meant it's a way of saying that their money
was totally worthless. Remember it happened in Zimbabwe. I can't
remember what episode it was, maybe how much money is
there in the world. We talked about hyper inflation that
was staggering, it was stagreeing. And the same thing happened
in the Weimar Republic. And this is the state of
(05:11):
the German economy that the Nazis rose to power and
because you know, that's one of the reasons they were
able to rise to power and fascism was able to
take over because the country and the economy was in
such dire straits that this idea of like, hey, everybody,
get in line behind this guy, because he's going to
lead us out of it. That's how That's essentially one
(05:31):
way that Hitler and the Nazis were able to rise
to power. But that also means that he inherited a
terrible economy and he had to figure out what to do.
Not only a terrible economy took but they Germany lacks
natural resources that you would need to fund to to
start a war machine too. Yeah, they they have no oil. No,
(05:51):
they don't have mineral deposits that you can make really
fine metals out of. They've got saur kraud, they have sour.
They have a lot of beer too, and there to
their credit. But you know, if that's all you got,
you need more to fight a war with. Yeah, So
what happened was they um. They had what was called
(06:12):
the reichs Mark, which was the monetary unit of the
Third Reich. And there were five neutral countries that declare
during World War two like we're not going to trade
in reiks Marks. So Hitler and Germany said, well, you
know what's always valuable anywhere is gold, and let's start
taking it from anywhere and everywhere we can get it. Yeah,
(06:34):
and gold in particular, it's what's called um, a very
fungible commodity, Like you can you can trade just about
anything for gold. Right. If you have gold, people will
give you whatever you want. You can use to buy oil,
you can use it buy guns, you can use it
to fund terrorism, you can use it to back your
own currency. There's a lot of stuff you can do
(06:55):
with gold. But in particular in World War two, if
you were the third the Nazi regime, you needed to
use gold because these neutral countries couldn't accept reich marks
by agreement. But also the Reich reichs Marks were worthless anyway,
so if you wanted to buy a bunch of guns,
you needed some gold. And because Germany at the time
(07:18):
only had about twenty five tons of gold in its reserves,
which sounds like a lot, but as we'll see, is
a paltry amount of gold compared to what they looted
and pillaged and took. Um, they needed some golden. So yeah,
they started looting it. And the first place they turned
chuck was Austria. Yeah, how much gold did you say
(07:40):
they had? They had five metric from what I understand,
twenty five metric tons of gold in the reserve Germany
did at the outset of um World War two. All right, well,
this will drive home how much that is. They looted
fifteen tons just ten tons less from the citizens Jewish
citizens a Vienna, Austria, from from the capital city only.
(08:04):
They looted fifteen tons of gold from Jewish citizens, just citizens,
like you said, oh yeah, and that's um, those are
just people. So the Central Bank of Austria they got
a hundred tons of gold, so right there, four times
what they had in reserve. And then they said, hey,
you know that six tons of gold that you're trying
to send away to England to keep safe from us.
(08:27):
We're bring that back here to we want that. Yeah,
they did so just from Austria alone, they got a
hundred and uh what twenty one tons, yes, to add
to their existing twenty five tons. It was a huge deal.
That kicks started the Nazi war machine into high gear.
It was a big coup. Austria wasn't expecting it. No
(08:49):
one was expecting it, and so other countries in Europe
suddenly like gulped and they were like, we need to
we needed to take this as advanced warning. Basically, we
don't want to become like Austria. And they triggered chuck
the largest physical transfer of wealth that the the world,
the planet has ever seen. Yeah, because I didn't know this,
(09:13):
And it's kind of cool that, um, you know, countries
that are are friendly to one another will help each
other out like this. You can say, hey us, you've
got Fort Knox there. I've heard that's a pretty safe
place to keep gold. Um where England? So can we
send you a bunch of that to keep for us?
And just you know, uh, we'll make a receipt out
so we know how much there is and you promised
(09:35):
not to spend any of it. And the the US
and Canada UM early on at least did things like this.
They accepted huge gold shipments. There was a operation in
nineteen forty called Project Fish where the UK was sending
or Britain was sending fift hundred metric metric tons of
gold UH to the US to store in Fort Knox. Yeah,
(09:56):
and in two thousand nineteen dollars. The amount that they
sent on slow boats through the Atlantic, which by the way,
we're infested with U boats by ninety was worth a
hundred and sixties six billion dollars in today's dollars. Yeah.
Not one of those ships was sunk astoundingly and that
(10:17):
nuts we so UM they they sent so Britain sent
that metric tons. Russia They're like, we're just gonna take
care of ourselves. They evacuated a bunch of stuff from
UM their stockpiles. They sent twenty eight hundred tons of
gold from its banks to a location in the Ural
(10:40):
Mountains for safe keeping. They also sent two other national
treasures to the embalmed corpse of Nikolai Lennon and UM
artwork from the Hermitage Museum those three, those were the
three things they prized the most too, to transferred by
train to the Ural mountains to stash until the war
was over. So all told, if you want to add
(11:03):
it up, during the course of World War two, the
Nazis stole at least that we know of four hundred
million American dollars in gold from countries they occupied, and
another hundred and forty million dollars in gold from people,
largely Um Jewish people, from their homes, people that it
were imprisoned in concentration camps. They stole. It was a
(11:26):
very meticulous thing that they did. They would raid their homes.
They wouldn't just round people up, They would go to
their safety deposit boxes. They would rip their dental fillings
out of their teeth, such that it even got the
name tooth golds on gold Um and not that. Didn't
you know, that covered everything that they stole from people,
not just the gold from teeth. That covered people's wedding
(11:48):
rings and their jewelry and their parts of eyeglasses and
other things like that. It's just unbelievable how much gold
they looted from concentration camp victims. Yeah, especially when you
step back and look at it like that Germany really
needed the money, the Third Reich needed the money. They
were just robbing, robbing and murdering, that's what they were doing.
You know. It really kind of puts it into perspective more.
(12:12):
I mean, the Nazis were the worst, dude, and still are.
Nazis are the worst. So most of that gold that
was stolen um from occupied countries. UM. I didn't see
how many tons it was, but what'd you say? Generally
the figure I've seen is about five six hundred million
dollars in nineteen forties dollars um stolen, and most of
(12:35):
it was put into the reichs Bank, which is Germany's
central bank. UM kind of like it's federal reserve, and
there are different branches throughout the country, and you know,
the gold was kind of distributed here there, but um,
as as the war kind of moved on, it was
moved more and more into the central reichs Bank in
Berlin until ninety and there was a bombing raid on
(13:00):
Berlin on Germany and they said, we need to get
this gold out of here and into secret locations. And
so the gold from the reichs Bank UM hundreds of
millions today, billions and billions worth of dollars worth of
gold was moved to places where no one had any idea,
secret locations that weren't banks in Germany. Yeah, so this
(13:25):
would set off um. I mean people are still looking
for Nazi gold today, and and not just walking around
with the metal detector, but people are some people are
putting a lot of money into looking for Nazi gold.
And one of the big reasons is a like you
just said, they we know that they moved it at
some point and be in April, there were some military
(13:46):
police uh patrolling around the town of Merkers. They questioned
a couple of French women who had been displaced and
they said in French, I would imagine that they saw
gold being stored in a potest mine near the town,
and the piece said soccer blue, I mean holy Cow.
(14:06):
And the army investigates this and they found the us
It's famous now the Mrkers Mind Treasure, which was a
horde of gold that was a room covered in seven
thousand marked bags of gold coins, gold bars, gold jewelry
valued at about two hundred and thirty eight million dollars.
(14:27):
So this was a signal to everyone like wow, the
legend of Curly's gold is real. Yeah, yeah, because this
is only about half the money. So uh, let's let's
get our metal detectors out. Yeah. I mean, this idea
that the Nazis hid gold in mine chats are all
sorts of different places was proven by that Mrker's Mind Treasure,
(14:48):
that they did this and there were substantial amounts to
be found. That was two hundred and thirty eight million
dollars worth, but they stole five hundred to six hundred
million dollars worth, which means that there is a substant
antial amount of gold unaccounted for, and that is what
has fueled treasure hunters to look for what today would
be billions of dollars worth of gold that was lost
(15:11):
and scattered and spread after World War Two. And I say, Chuck,
I have a proposal for you. I bet I know
what it is. Ye, what kind of what's your favorite
kind of pie? Oh? I really love a key lime.
Yeah it's hard not to go with key lime, Okay,
(15:31):
but what about just like a standard traditional fruit pie.
They're really tough to beat, like a good cherry pie.
If I'm going fruit pie, it's gonna be an apple
crumble for sure. Okay. I used to be in that
same group with you until you had the sweetest cherry pie. Yeah, Warrant.
Warrant talked to me into trying, and I loved it.
(15:53):
Cherry pie is actually as good as the song makes
it sound. Wow, all right, we'll be right back, Okay.
I want to learn about a rosicl how to take
a perfect with all about fractal getting kiscon n the
Lizzie Border murders that they kind of all runs on
the plane, everything that we should know. Squard up jerry
(16:26):
cheese much cherry pie. Yeah, I've tried it with cheese,
like they say, but it's not very good. I think
that's typically apple pie that's supposed to have cheese on it.
So it's just like straight cherry pie. Cherry pie. Uh,
cool drink of water, it's a sweet surprise. Yep. I've
tried it with the cool drink of water too. It's good.
It's better with just water than say, like coke, because
(16:48):
coke's sweet taste competes with the sweetness of the cherry pie.
So they're they're pretty much right on, except for the cheese.
They say it'll make a grown man cry. I'm here
to tell you that's the truth. Oh boy, that song
and that video so dumb but also very titillating for
a very young Chuck. You know, um, have you seen
(17:08):
the Rush documentary? Oh? Sure, did you know that Sebastian
Bach from skid Row? It was skid Row, right, he
was well Warrant saying cherry Pie. But yeah, okay, but
like it's just a huge leap from skid Row to Warrant.
Give me a break. But Sebastian Bach was from Warrant, right,
(17:29):
Uh no, no, no, he was skid Row. Oh that's
what I mean. Yeah, Warrant was Janie Lane mistaken? Yeah,
you're right, man, you got it. The poor man's Bret Michaels. Yeah,
in a way so and sorry, Janey. I I really
didn't mean that, but I couldn't leave it. Um the
the But Sebastian Bach from skid Row is one of
the greatest and longest standing Rush fans of all time.
(17:53):
That's right. He was all over that, Yeah, I think
he was. He joined their fan club in like seventh
or eighth grade, he said, and I loved it. Right now,
somewhere Brett Michaels is walking around playing that on repeat
to his family. Did you hear that? Did you hear
what Josh said? He thinks I'm better than the skid
mo guy? No, you mean warrant. It doesn't matter, all right. So, um,
(18:14):
we're talking about Nazi gold. And we were saying before
we started talking about warrant and everything that, um, that
there is gold that is on accounted for that was
stolen by the Nazis that just kind of vaporized after
the war. Goal is not supposed to do that. It's
one of the things that people love about gold is
it doesn't just vaporize into thin air. It's really easy
to keep track of if you want to. And so
(18:36):
people started looking for gold or looking for clues. And
one of the big clues that people started following was
local rumors and legends. Like in Murkers, there were plenty
of rumors and legends that there was gold hidden in
a mind nearby exactly and they so the people people
(18:58):
hearing local legends is really kind of fueled hunt for
hunts for Nazi treasures for almost a century now. Yeah, So, um,
we're gonna go through a bunch of these. There's one
called Lake Toplets, Uh, like it's a very lovely place.
I'm sure you looked up pictures, um. But people and
treasure hunters have been looking for this golden Lake Toplets
(19:20):
ever since uh. And this was very much fact A
bunch of Nazis retreated there in the Austrian Alps in
the final months of the war. US troops were closing
in fast and Germany was about to collapse, and so
they transported a bunch of boxes to this lake military
military vehicles and then horse drawn wagons even and they
(19:42):
dumped them in the lake. So I think that part
is definitely true, right, there's yes, from what I could tell,
it was reported on like that is in fact what
was in the boxes? What's up for for debate exactly.
Some people say that's the Nazi gold about five and
(20:03):
a half billion dollars worth. Other people said, um, no,
I think some of this stuff are documents, um where
they uh, they were basically confiscated from Jewish victims, about
where their assets were hidden and what Swiss bank accounts
they could loot. Maybe I saw, and I saw also artwork.
(20:24):
Sure they think that was sealed artwork. Um. Also there's
a rumor that there's three hundred pounds of morphine in
in those boxes. That was contributed by I think Albania's
president Um because he didn't want it to fall into
the hands of the Allies. Well, one thing they know
was down there, because they actually found some of these
(20:49):
three was Hitler had the idea at one point, Hey,
let's sabotage various countries by creating counterfeit money of those countries. Yeah,
it's a pretty smart plan for a dirty Nazi I know.
So they created, um just hundreds of million dollars worth
of British pound notes and in nineteen eighty three a
(21:10):
German biologists by accident discovered a lot of these British
pounds in the lake. What did we talk about that
and like how counterfeiting works. Maybe maybe it does sound
familiar though for sure, we definitely talked about that plan.
And remember there was like a a Jewish printer who
was a Holocaust um prisoner, a prisoner of a concentration camp.
(21:33):
We can't remember which one, who turned out to be
like this master counterfeitter. Yeah, like because the Nazis trained
him to her forced them to it was, if I
remember correctly, it was our counterfeiting episode. Yeah, And in
nineteen fifty nine. I talked about the nineteen eighty three fine,
but in fifty nine, uh, they recovered seven hundred million
pounds of these counterfeit notes from that lake. So some
(21:56):
people say that's all that was down there. Um, other
will say there may still be gold down there, And
Austria actually still to this day has a problem about
tin divers a year illegally dive in that lake looking
for that treasure. Yeah, and what's interesting about this lake
aside from the fact that there might be Nazi treasure
in it, which is interesting enough to make the lake
(22:17):
remarkable and noteworthy, but in addition to that, this lake
has a kind of a strange hydrology, and that the
top half of it is freshwater the bottom half of
salt water, and they're separated by density. And in the
middle of these two layers is a like a layer
of floating layer of ancient logs that have fallen in
(22:39):
the lake and been preserved over time. And so you
can only dive so far before you hit this layer
of logs. And some divers, I think five divers have
at least have died in this lake looking for Nazi gold,
and at least one of them got tangled up in
this layer of logs. It's a really dangerous place to dive.
But the fact that you can't really see past this
(23:01):
layer of logs is one of the things that keeps
people coming back and keeps this legend alive because they
can't thoroughly search this lake and show conclusively, no, there's
no gold here. Leave this place alone, stay away. Amazing.
It is pretty amazing. And then the other thing about
it too is this is a really remote location that
(23:22):
was used by Nazi officers, high ranking Nazi officers, and
for missile testing. It seems like a really odd place
just to dump counterfeit pound notes. Yeah, like you could
dump those just about anywhere, So I don't know, maybe
there is something to it. You're gonna get your Skiba
gear ready. I got my flippers on already. You can't see,
(23:45):
but I've got them on alright. We're gonna move now
to um an eastern German town along the check border
called Deutsche Catherinenburg. It's it sort of looks like the
alphabet when it's on a on a page. It's a
lot of letters in a row. But there are people
there that think, not only is there gold here, but uh,
(24:08):
possibly the amber room, which was this. You just look
up pictures of the amber room. It's pretty amazing, this
chamber of um, honey and lindseed and kannak confused, amber panels,
gold frame mosaics, marble, precious stones. And it was a
gift of Prussian King Frederick Wilhelm, the first two Russia's
(24:30):
Peter the Great once called the eighth Wonder of the World.
And it disappeared during World War two. Yeah, the Nazis
plundered it from Russia from the U s. S R.
And they took it back to Germany, back to Kunnigsberg
or Kunigsberg, which was I think now a time or
part of um of Russia again, but at the time
(24:52):
during World War two was part of Germany or Prussia,
and they had it on public exhibit for like four
or five years, and then at the end of the
war it just anished and no one's seen it since.
And there's a lot of people who say, well, it
was destroyed in air raids. Other people say it was
sunk on the you know, on a ship that was
secretly carrying it. Um, it's just lost. But there's a
(25:13):
pair of treasure hunters at Deutsche Catherinenburg Um who searched
in the area because they were sure that, among other things,
the amber room panels were buried there in that town. Yeah,
and this is um. This is probably the worst ending
to a potentially cool story ever, But that was there
(25:33):
was a pair of searchers um searching for this stuff.
One of them's father was a German Air Force officer
in World War Two, and in his personal notes, this
son thought that he'd found the exact coordinates of this treasure.
So he got together with another treasure hunter who was
another German. He was a mayor in fact of a
nearby town, and they thought that they had discovered through
(25:57):
radar this big rectangular underground on space about sixty ft down.
And when I was reading this, dude, it was so juicy,
I was like, oh boy, what happened? They didn't never
tell anyone that no one knows if they found any treasure.
They didn't say anything about it. Apparently they had an
acrimonious split in two thousand eight, and that's just sort
(26:17):
of the end of this story. Yeah, I guess the
other treasure hunter was staying in the mayor's town and
the mayor kicked him out of town. It was that acrimonious. Wow,
So that's it. The last I heard was that they
didn't find anything in two thousand eight, or they didn't
never search for it, right, So yeah, it was a
little name, but worth putting in there. I think, Oh, no,
it's worth putting in there. It's just has no good resolution. No,
(26:41):
it's yeah, no, But you read a lot of fiction,
so you can deal with that, right, that's right. Okay,
So in Poland, south southeastern southwestern Poland and a little
corner down there, there's something. There's a range of mountains
called Owl Mountains, and there's a long standing and widespread
(27:02):
rumor that's that's been there for a very long time.
I would say roughly since around the end of the
world the Second World War. That would be my guess,
that there is a ghost train and Nazi ghost train
loaded with jewels, gold, weapons, art, basically everything you can
think of that the Nazis would have plundered or pillaged
(27:22):
loaded onto this train, driven into a tunnel in the
mountain and left there hidden, and that it's still there,
and um people have been looking for it for a
very long time again since probably about the end of
World War two. But the thing that's kept this treasure
hunt alive, Chuck, is there really is a vast, unmapped
(27:42):
network of tunnels in the Owl Mountains that the Nazis
dug there in World War two. Yeah. So again, some
of this is based in fact. So that's what will
keep any sort of urban legend alive if if part
of it is true. And they did. They dug these
tunnels of mine chats between forty three and forty five.
It was called the Raisa project, which means giant in German,
(28:07):
and no one knows why. Some people say it might
have been in one of their weird secret weapons programs. Uh.
Some people say it may have been potentially where Hitler
was going to hold up for his last stand. But
it was very, very secretive, even among the s S.
Because if you worked on this tunnel, you had to
sign a confident confidentiality agreement, which just sounds funny. For
(28:29):
some reason, I thought everything about the s S was
so secretive it would just be implicit. But what and
where are they gonna do, like take you to court
that you violated your n DA or something. It's it
is odd, isn't it. You know what they would do. Yeah,
they just shoot you. I wouldn't think they would need
a signed agreement for that. I think there's the Nazis
we're talking about, you know. Yeah, so they were not
(28:51):
allowed to have their family members within uh forty KOs
radius of this area, and these tunnels were dug by
forced labor concentration camps nearby. And it might have been
a place for gold and may still be, but the
Soviets ruined all that in when they came knocking at
(29:11):
the door, and the Nazis fled and basically blew up
their own tunnels behind them. Yeah, and I want to say,
there's a really good New Yorker article about the hunt.
I can think it's even called the Hunt for Nazi Gold,
about this particular legend and people looking for it and
they take a second. I think it's really worth UM
pointing out here too. Is um. You know, people who
(29:34):
get who start looking for treasure, no matter what the
providence of the treasure is, UM just gets so wrapped
up in the treasure and the legends and the myths
and everything that it's easy to forget things like, well,
you're running around a tunnel network that was dug by
people who were literally worked to death over the course
of weeks. They were worked that hard. They died digging
(29:55):
these tunnels that hold maybe this legendary treasure. That is
the only thing you can focus on, what you're talking about.
That And that's definitely like a part of the problem
that comes along with the job is you know, forgetting
like look, having blinders on that you forget the reality
of the situation. It's definitely it's important to remember this that,
you know, some of this gold we're talking about was
(30:17):
pulled from the teeth of dead Holocaust victims. You know,
remember that too. It's like Bill Paxson and Titanic. He
needed that reminder from the old lady, like, you're all
pumped up looking for this jewel. Yeah, people die, people
died here, man. Yeah, let's get it together, Paxxton r
I P. Yeah, that was so jarring when you told
(30:40):
me that that first time a few few months back.
Did I break you that news? You did? You broke
it hard. So according to this legend, as far as
the al Mountains go, there was this ghost train, like
you said, and it was a freight train loaded with
all kinds of valuables, artwork, jewels, gold, bully on bars
of gold and that they drove that thing in this
(31:03):
thing and it never came out in those tunnels. And Uh.
The other part of this um story that is rooted
in fact is there were Nazi trains that carried tons
and tons of gold and valuables and jewelry and paintings.
There was one in particular called the Hungarian Gold Train
that was intercepted by Allied forces in so you got
(31:26):
a real train that happened. You've got these real tunnels
that were dug, and all of a sudden, this rumor
of the ghost train takes route. Yeah, the idea that
those two things are have come together in the Owl Mountains, though,
that's the thing that's never been shown to be true.
That's right, And not from a lack of looking, No,
not at all. No, there's a lot of people looking
(31:46):
for that there. Um the Uh, this one's actually my favorite, weirdly,
probably because it's a shipwreck. I'm just so fascinated by shipwrecks.
So the ship I'm talking about is called the S S. Minden,
and it was a German merchant vessel and back in
I think nineteen thirty nine it was disabled by the
(32:07):
British Royal Navy off of the coast of Iceland, right.
And what what's so mysterious about this is that the
Minden's ship register shows that it was just carrying um
resin from Brazil. I didn't see what kind of resin.
But you can do all sorts of industrial stuff with
the resident from making adhesives to plastics to whatever um
(32:28):
and then that was it. Right. But the thing that
makes the sinking of the men and some as serious
is that the ship's captain, rather than let it fall
into British hands, sunk it himself. And he sunk it
in seventy feet of water off the Icelandic coast, and
that's where it lay undiscovered until I believe two thousand
and seventeen, when a mysterious ship showed up and started
(32:52):
um looking around the Icelandic coast and it believes that
it found it. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a little
odd to sink a ship full of resin. Only it
raises a little bit of suspicion, Like you said, even
though you can do some things with it, it kind
of stuck out to me. It's like, what else is
on that boat? But yeah, in two thousand seventeen, the
Coast Guard in Iceland bordered a vessel of the CBED Constructor.
(33:17):
It's like an unnervingly bland name. It's so boring. It's
not like the Uh well now I can't all boat
names are kind of dumb. Hercules of the sea. That's
what I would name in my boat. Yeah. Um, So
they intercepted it. They said, hey, what are you guys
(33:38):
doing here? And they said, oh, well, um, this boat
has been leased by a group of British folks who
are such searching for the wreck of the S S.
Menden And they were like what They're like, haven't you
heard that? That was just full of resin And they said,
clearly not, because we're spending a hundred thousand dollars a
(33:59):
day to least this boat, which frankly is not that
great of a deal. But we couldn't talk him down
any So that I mean, if someone is spending a
hundred thousand dollars a day, that means that makes me
think they know something that we don't know. Yeah, And
so the Icelandic press actually reported that they think that
they know something we don't know, so much so that
they interviewed the crew and the crew said. The official
(34:21):
story is that they're looking for a couple of hundred
million dollars worth of gold that they believe was hidden
in the safe on that ship, but that the real story,
the real prize for what they're looking for, is only
known to a handful of people, high ranking people on
the boat and left at that which, man, the Icelandic
(34:42):
press knows how to how to spin a mystery, if
you ask me. Yeah, I mean that really added this
extra air of mystery on top of everything else, which is, oh,
sure we think there's a hundred million dollars plus in gold,
but we're really there for another secret reason. Yeah. If
if a hundred million dollars worth of gold is your
decoy cover story, man, you're onto something impressive. I can't
(35:05):
wait until they raised that thing, because from what I
could tell, everything everything pointed to the fact that they
did successfully find the minden. That that is the minden
they found. But as far as I know, they have
not gone down and salvaged it at all. Get James
Cameron on it. Who knows. Maybe, I mean the amber
room was sunk and maybe it happened to be on
the s S. Menden, So maybe we'll have the Amber
(35:26):
room back in the next ten years. Um. Well, hey man,
you said today's magic second ad break word James Cameron,
which means we're now obligated to take our second message break.
Do you want to take it now or shall we
have taken it three minutes ago? Now let's take it now. Okay,
we'll be right back everybody. I want to learn about
(35:50):
how to take a perfect but all about fractal thinks, hun,
the Lizzie Border murders that they runs on the plane,
everything we should know. Wear it up, Jerry. All right, Chuck.
(36:14):
So there's places where you can physically go to search
for legendary gold. You can also just enter the international
gold trade and you can turn up, alarmingly Nazi gold
that was kind of lost you could put it after
the war. Yeah, this is really interesting. As part of
(36:37):
reconstruction and restoration all over Europe, there was a committee
for him called the Tripartite Gold Commission or the Tripartite
Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold. And this was
formed in by the US, by the French, and by
the Brits, and basically the whole jam here was let's
(37:00):
find all this goal, let's account for all this gold
that we discovered as allies, and then let's redistribute it
back to where we if we can trace it such
to where it was looted, um to the banks and
central banks, and even if we can find out human individuals,
that would be even better that and that it was
(37:20):
strictly too, I believe, strictly to the European central banks
that had a claim to have having been looted from.
After the war, and then in the late nineties there
was a real push to try to um compensate the
survivors and the heirs of the Holocaust who also had
been robbed too. So a lot of gold that some
(37:43):
countries still had claim on as part of this um
UH London Conference on Nazi Gold that was held UH
some of some of the countries that said, well, actually
we're still owed a lot of this gold. They said, okay,
well we'll take a portion of this gold and diverted
to humanitarian groups who will UM use it to to
UM for reparations to Holocaust victims, which is pretty cool.
(38:07):
The big outlier in this was a little tiny country
there remained neutral during World War Two, at least on
paper um Switzerland, who not only it turns out, was
secretly assisting the Nazis and laundering their gold in exchange
for money that the Nazis could go used to fund
its war machine. They hung on to this Nazi gold
(38:29):
and from what I can tell, still have all of
the Nazi gold that they had after World War Two,
including gold that was made from that zon gold melted down,
personal effects and gold teeth um that Switzerland apparently still
has in its gold reserves and is not willing to
give up. Yeah, that was really surprising. This all came
(38:51):
out because of a historical paper that was part of
that conference. Um. It showed that the US had a
lot of this gold, uh, that they melted down after
the war and did return to the central banks in
Europe um as part of an effort to stabilize their
economy there um. But finding out that Switzerland did this,
and that Switzerland was neutral, and that the Geneva Convention,
(39:14):
which which explicitly bars this kind of thing comes from
Geneva Switzerland is like the ultimate irony here, and it's
I just want to know if there's more to this.
There's got to be something else, right. They're they're good people, sure,
but I mean, countries do bad things for sure, you know,
even if there are good people that live there, there's
(39:37):
I mean from everything I could tell, it came out
in the nineties that it was pretty clear Switzerland had
served as money launderers for the Nazis without anybody realizing
it for decades. Wow. Yeah, it's it is pretty shocking
for sure. UM. I think the thing that gets me though,
is the idea that there's a lot of gold in
(39:59):
the internet national gold trade today that can be traced
back to missing Nazi gold, that it's not necessarily buried
in the side of a mountain in Poland or under
a small town along the German Chech border. That it's
it's out and about. It's being used as currency or
as a commodity today in the in the international gold trade.
(40:23):
That to me is the most astounding part of all
of this. Yeah, how do you trace gold? They have
a very strict system for it, but it's only as
strict as UM how it's observed. So like, for example,
in two thousand nineteen, the Simon Weisenthal Center, which UM
has spent a lot of time hunting down Nazi war criminals. UM.
(40:43):
In the I think starting in the sixties, seventies and eighties. UM,
they accused of Venezuela and specifically the administration of Nicholas
Maduro of trafficking in Nazi gold that he's so old
over the course of his administration so far something like
seventy seven tons of gold. And they're like, you know what,
(41:07):
we're pretty sure that that was Nazi gold that was
transferred late in the war to Spain and then on
to South America to help fund a fourth Reich, a
rebuilding of the Nazi regime among the war criminals living there,
and they think that this was some of that gold
and that Maduro has been selling it to kind of
(41:27):
bankroll his his country and his his um his regime. Wow,
isn't that nuts a whole? Yeah? It is absolutely the
Like I can't remember how I came across as I
think it was a house stuff works article. There's a
couple on them, and it just started digging further and further,
(41:47):
and it's just one of those things where it's it
just takes such a great left turn, great meaning like
just surprising and unexpected, where it's like, you know, you're
going from treasure hunters arguing and kicking one another out
of little towns and in kicking around mountains and Poland
to the international gold trade, trafficking and Nazi gold. Still
(42:08):
it's it's just just a crazy story. Yeah, it's it's
pretty mind blowing and disappointing in a lot of ways. Yeah,
for sure, because again, remember a lot of that gold,
those gold bars are melted down gold teeth taken from
Holocaust victims or gold wedding rings taken from Holocaust victims,
and now they're used to um as as part of
an international form of currency. Yeah bo um, Well that's it.
(42:35):
You got anything else? I got nothing else. If you
want to know more about um Nazi gold, there's a
lot you can read. It's quite a rabbit hole you
can go down if you want to. Um. So you
could start by going to how stuff works dot com
and checking out their articles on it. And since I
said how stuff works, it's been a while, that means
it's time for a listener. May all that's right? Uh.
(42:58):
I was thinking that would be a good movie about
World War two era Nazi gold hunters, but it's sort
of like Three Kings already did that, but that was
a Gulf war. Yeah. Um. And then also there was
that one museum. Men. I think they were brought into
kind of make sure that the paintings that were looted
were not or whatever. I didn't see that. What was
(43:19):
it called? One called museum? And what was it? Almost
positive it was museum? And was it what? You look
that up while I read listener mail? All right, because
that's a terrible name. I agree. I'm gonna call this.
We cited someone that we probably shouldn't have cited, and
this is from anonymous. Hey, guys, really enjoyed this show
this week on universal basic income. Just a heads up,
(43:40):
you cited the conservative economist Charles Murray and his justifications
for introducing UBI to the American economy. I'm sure you
didn't realize this, but Murray is a particular favorite of
white supremacist oh Boy for his views on genetics and
their contribution to social inequality between whites and people of color. Yeah,
is a book called the Bell Curve that is often
(44:01):
cited as a data proven evidence for white supremacy. It's
also largely been debunked as pseudo science. Uh wow. He
links to a Southern poverty law centers right up for
our own reference, and he says I will, no doubt
keep on listening. Guys, I'm sure it was unintentional. Please
take more care though and curating your sources, especially if
it might throw your narrative for a loop. And that
(44:24):
is from anonymous, and boy Anonymous, you're right, we had
no idea. UM should have done a little bit more
digging there. So please everyone realize, and anyone that listens
to the show probably realizes we certainly did not mean
for that to be the case when we cited Mr Murray.
Now we kind of bift that one big time. H
no offense intended. Hopefully you didn't take it, and thank
(44:45):
you for a very measured and level and even handed correction.
That's right, it was very kind. And by the way, Chuck,
it's monuments man. Yeah. I knew though something about it
that didn't sound right. But there is show called museum
Men that's been on since two thousand fourteen. But they
(45:06):
they kind of they make um displays from museums. Ah,
they're craftsmen, craft people. Okay, okay, So museum man monuments
men two different things. And if you want to get
in touch with us, you can join us on the internet,
send us an email. Wrap it up, spanking on the
(45:27):
bottom and send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeart
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for
my heart Radios at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of My
Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there,
Jerry somewhere. We lost her. I think she wandered off. Yeah,
but this is stuff you should know, regardless the Lost
(00:25):
Nazi Gold edition, the Legend of Curly's Gold. If Curly
was a white nationalist, well, who's to say it wasn't.
I don't, I don't know. He Jack Palance seems like
the kind who would have beat up white nationalists for fun,
as like a hobby, you know what I mean. Yeah,
you know, we we can't get into the super ins
(00:46):
and outs, but as you know, my brother worked on
the Legend of Curly's Gold and Jack Jack Vallence was
a tough s o b Yeah. I hear. He used
to do shots of nails. Yeah. I mean, he wasn't
a jerk. I wouldn't say, but it just sounded like
he was just sort of a a very cantankerous old
fella to work with. That's so funny, man, because I mean,
(01:07):
if you're at the end of the day, he's an actor.
It's not like you you welld machine guns or something
like that. Give me a break. You're an actor. Yeah,
Like Clint Eatwood is not really tough. Well, actually that's
not true, is he. Oh sure, probably he's got he's
got to be at the very least, he's been acting
(01:30):
like it's so long he's developed. Yeah. Yeah, it's probably
like a callous you know what I mean, where it's
just kind of forms and stays like callous. It's the
callousness of toughness that an actor will form. I don't
think Clint Eastwood winds about a hang nail. Let's just
say that, like like we do, would be pretty disappointing.
(01:50):
I actually was whining about a hang nailed to myself
the other day. Of course, but I'm not an actor.
I'm a podcaster. No, we have a TV show that
proves that I'm speaking for both of us. Ouch. I
thought I did some good work. I thought you did
a better job than night. And actually I think we
both did a much better job than you remember. All Right, So, um,
(02:11):
if you hate Nazis and you're like it's been a
while since I was given a reason to hate Nazis,
a new one, uh, rejoice, because we're about to give
you another one. At least I didn't really realize this
to this extent, did you. You know? I knew about
Nazi gold and that they took things, but I didn't
(02:33):
know that it was almost one big people killing and
world robbing operation. Yeah, that's the thing. That's the new
thing to hate them for. Not only were they murderers,
they were also just common thieves as well. I mean,
thieves on one of the greatest scales anyone's ever seen,
but thieves nonetheless. Um an exceptional thief. Who was that
(02:57):
Michael Caine, no die Hard, They called him a common thief,
and he goes, exceptional thief, right, Rodney, you imagine. Oh,
I can't wait till technology gets like advanced enough that
you can just insert whoever into whatever character and they'll
say the same lines and everything. Uh, that'd be great.
(03:20):
That's the first one I'm doing, is Rodney Deserfield is
Hans Gruber. He would have been wonderful. That scene where
he uh, he's fooling him into thinking he was one
of the party goers and he goes, what's your name?
It's Bill Clay, That's what it is. Don't shoot me.
Come on, nobody shoots me, I got no respect. That's
(03:41):
pretty good, Pretty good, okay. So, um, the Nazis were thieves,
not just because they looted and plundered like the countries
that they occupied, but that they did it because they
were broke to start off with. That's what truly makes
them thieve s o b s. Is that their whole jam,
(04:04):
this whole war, World War that they started, they didn't
have the resources financially or industrially to actually carry out
this war. They had to go steal to fund their
role in World War two, which they started. That's right,
they you point out here you put this together good
stuff than that. In nineteen three they had hyper inflation
(04:27):
such that in November of that year it cost eighty
billion marks to buy a loaf of bread. Is that right? Yeah,
which sounds like a lot on its own, but if
you consider that earlier that year, in January, a loaf
of bread costs two d and fifty marks. Yeah, so
the price of bread went from two hundred fifty marks
to eighty billion marks in less than a year. But
(04:48):
isn't that just a way of saying that nobody bought bread? No,
it meant it's a way of saying that their money
was totally worthless. Remember it happened in Zimbabwe. I can't
remember what episode it was, maybe how much money is
there in the world. We talked about hyper inflation that
was staggering, it was stagreeing. And the same thing happened
in the Weimar Republic. And this is the state of
(05:11):
the German economy that the Nazis rose to power and
because you know, that's one of the reasons they were
able to rise to power and fascism was able to
take over because the country and the economy was in
such dire straits that this idea of like, hey, everybody,
get in line behind this guy, because he's going to
lead us out of it. That's how That's essentially one
(05:31):
way that Hitler and the Nazis were able to rise
to power. But that also means that he inherited a
terrible economy and he had to figure out what to do.
Not only a terrible economy took but they Germany lacks
natural resources that you would need to fund to to
start a war machine too. Yeah, they they have no oil. No,
(05:51):
they don't have mineral deposits that you can make really
fine metals out of. They've got saur kraud, they have sour.
They have a lot of beer too, and there to
their credit. But you know, if that's all you got,
you need more to fight a war with. Yeah, So
what happened was they um. They had what was called
(06:12):
the reichs Mark, which was the monetary unit of the
Third Reich. And there were five neutral countries that declare
during World War two like we're not going to trade
in reiks Marks. So Hitler and Germany said, well, you
know what's always valuable anywhere is gold, and let's start
taking it from anywhere and everywhere we can get it. Yeah,
(06:34):
and gold in particular, it's what's called um, a very
fungible commodity, Like you can you can trade just about
anything for gold. Right. If you have gold, people will
give you whatever you want. You can use to buy oil,
you can use it buy guns, you can use it
to fund terrorism, you can use it to back your
own currency. There's a lot of stuff you can do
(06:55):
with gold. But in particular in World War two, if
you were the third the Nazi regime, you needed to
use gold because these neutral countries couldn't accept reich marks
by agreement. But also the Reich reichs Marks were worthless anyway,
so if you wanted to buy a bunch of guns,
you needed some gold. And because Germany at the time
(07:18):
only had about twenty five tons of gold in its reserves,
which sounds like a lot, but as we'll see, is
a paltry amount of gold compared to what they looted
and pillaged and took. Um, they needed some golden. So yeah,
they started looting it. And the first place they turned
chuck was Austria. Yeah, how much gold did you say
(07:40):
they had? They had five metric from what I understand,
twenty five metric tons of gold in the reserve Germany
did at the outset of um World War two. All right, well,
this will drive home how much that is. They looted
fifteen tons just ten tons less from the citizens Jewish
citizens a Vienna, Austria, from from the capital city only.
(08:04):
They looted fifteen tons of gold from Jewish citizens, just citizens,
like you said, oh yeah, and that's um, those are
just people. So the Central Bank of Austria they got
a hundred tons of gold, so right there, four times
what they had in reserve. And then they said, hey,
you know that six tons of gold that you're trying
to send away to England to keep safe from us.
(08:27):
We're bring that back here to we want that. Yeah,
they did so just from Austria alone, they got a
hundred and uh what twenty one tons, yes, to add
to their existing twenty five tons. It was a huge deal.
That kicks started the Nazi war machine into high gear.
It was a big coup. Austria wasn't expecting it. No
(08:49):
one was expecting it, and so other countries in Europe
suddenly like gulped and they were like, we need to
we needed to take this as advanced warning. Basically, we
don't want to become like Austria. And they triggered chuck
the largest physical transfer of wealth that the the world,
the planet has ever seen. Yeah, because I didn't know this,
(09:13):
And it's kind of cool that, um, you know, countries
that are are friendly to one another will help each
other out like this. You can say, hey us, you've
got Fort Knox there. I've heard that's a pretty safe
place to keep gold. Um where England? So can we
send you a bunch of that to keep for us?
And just you know, uh, we'll make a receipt out
so we know how much there is and you promised
(09:35):
not to spend any of it. And the the US
and Canada UM early on at least did things like this.
They accepted huge gold shipments. There was a operation in
nineteen forty called Project Fish where the UK was sending
or Britain was sending fift hundred metric metric tons of
gold UH to the US to store in Fort Knox. Yeah,
(09:56):
and in two thousand nineteen dollars. The amount that they
sent on slow boats through the Atlantic, which by the way,
we're infested with U boats by ninety was worth a
hundred and sixties six billion dollars in today's dollars. Yeah.
Not one of those ships was sunk astoundingly and that
(10:17):
nuts we so UM they they sent so Britain sent
that metric tons. Russia They're like, we're just gonna take
care of ourselves. They evacuated a bunch of stuff from
UM their stockpiles. They sent twenty eight hundred tons of
gold from its banks to a location in the Ural
(10:40):
Mountains for safe keeping. They also sent two other national
treasures to the embalmed corpse of Nikolai Lennon and UM
artwork from the Hermitage Museum those three, those were the
three things they prized the most too, to transferred by
train to the Ural mountains to stash until the war
was over. So all told, if you want to add
(11:03):
it up, during the course of World War two, the
Nazis stole at least that we know of four hundred
million American dollars in gold from countries they occupied, and
another hundred and forty million dollars in gold from people,
largely Um Jewish people, from their homes, people that it
were imprisoned in concentration camps. They stole. It was a
(11:26):
very meticulous thing that they did. They would raid their homes.
They wouldn't just round people up, They would go to
their safety deposit boxes. They would rip their dental fillings
out of their teeth, such that it even got the
name tooth golds on gold Um and not that. Didn't
you know, that covered everything that they stole from people,
not just the gold from teeth. That covered people's wedding
(11:48):
rings and their jewelry and their parts of eyeglasses and
other things like that. It's just unbelievable how much gold
they looted from concentration camp victims. Yeah, especially when you
step back and look at it like that Germany really
needed the money, the Third Reich needed the money. They
were just robbing, robbing and murdering, that's what they were doing.
You know. It really kind of puts it into perspective more.
(12:12):
I mean, the Nazis were the worst, dude, and still are.
Nazis are the worst. So most of that gold that
was stolen um from occupied countries. UM. I didn't see
how many tons it was, but what'd you say? Generally
the figure I've seen is about five six hundred million
dollars in nineteen forties dollars um stolen, and most of
(12:35):
it was put into the reichs Bank, which is Germany's
central bank. UM kind of like it's federal reserve, and
there are different branches throughout the country, and you know,
the gold was kind of distributed here there, but um,
as as the war kind of moved on, it was
moved more and more into the central reichs Bank in
Berlin until ninety and there was a bombing raid on
(13:00):
Berlin on Germany and they said, we need to get
this gold out of here and into secret locations. And
so the gold from the reichs Bank UM hundreds of
millions today, billions and billions worth of dollars worth of
gold was moved to places where no one had any idea,
secret locations that weren't banks in Germany. Yeah, so this
(13:25):
would set off um. I mean people are still looking
for Nazi gold today, and and not just walking around
with the metal detector, but people are some people are
putting a lot of money into looking for Nazi gold.
And one of the big reasons is a like you
just said, they we know that they moved it at
some point and be in April, there were some military
(13:46):
police uh patrolling around the town of Merkers. They questioned
a couple of French women who had been displaced and
they said in French, I would imagine that they saw
gold being stored in a potest mine near the town,
and the piece said soccer blue, I mean holy Cow.
(14:06):
And the army investigates this and they found the us
It's famous now the Mrkers Mind Treasure, which was a
horde of gold that was a room covered in seven
thousand marked bags of gold coins, gold bars, gold jewelry
valued at about two hundred and thirty eight million dollars.
(14:27):
So this was a signal to everyone like wow, the
legend of Curly's gold is real. Yeah, yeah, because this
is only about half the money. So uh, let's let's
get our metal detectors out. Yeah. I mean, this idea
that the Nazis hid gold in mine chats are all
sorts of different places was proven by that Mrker's Mind Treasure,
(14:48):
that they did this and there were substantial amounts to
be found. That was two hundred and thirty eight million
dollars worth, but they stole five hundred to six hundred
million dollars worth, which means that there is a substant
antial amount of gold unaccounted for, and that is what
has fueled treasure hunters to look for what today would
be billions of dollars worth of gold that was lost
(15:11):
and scattered and spread after World War Two. And I say, Chuck,
I have a proposal for you. I bet I know
what it is. Ye, what kind of what's your favorite
kind of pie? Oh? I really love a key lime.
Yeah it's hard not to go with key lime, Okay,
(15:31):
but what about just like a standard traditional fruit pie.
They're really tough to beat, like a good cherry pie.
If I'm going fruit pie, it's gonna be an apple
crumble for sure. Okay. I used to be in that
same group with you until you had the sweetest cherry pie. Yeah, Warrant.
Warrant talked to me into trying, and I loved it.
(15:53):
Cherry pie is actually as good as the song makes
it sound. Wow, all right, we'll be right back, Okay.
I want to learn about a rosicl how to take
a perfect with all about fractal getting kiscon n the
Lizzie Border murders that they kind of all runs on
the plane, everything that we should know. Squard up jerry
(16:26):
cheese much cherry pie. Yeah, I've tried it with cheese,
like they say, but it's not very good. I think
that's typically apple pie that's supposed to have cheese on it.
So it's just like straight cherry pie. Cherry pie. Uh,
cool drink of water, it's a sweet surprise. Yep. I've
tried it with the cool drink of water too. It's good.
It's better with just water than say, like coke, because
(16:48):
coke's sweet taste competes with the sweetness of the cherry pie.
So they're they're pretty much right on, except for the cheese.
They say it'll make a grown man cry. I'm here
to tell you that's the truth. Oh boy, that song
and that video so dumb but also very titillating for
a very young Chuck. You know, um, have you seen
(17:08):
the Rush documentary? Oh? Sure, did you know that Sebastian
Bach from skid Row? It was skid Row, right, he
was well Warrant saying cherry Pie. But yeah, okay, but
like it's just a huge leap from skid Row to Warrant.
Give me a break. But Sebastian Bach was from Warrant, right,
(17:29):
Uh no, no, no, he was skid Row. Oh that's
what I mean. Yeah, Warrant was Janie Lane mistaken? Yeah,
you're right, man, you got it. The poor man's Bret Michaels. Yeah,
in a way so and sorry, Janey. I I really
didn't mean that, but I couldn't leave it. Um the
the But Sebastian Bach from skid Row is one of
the greatest and longest standing Rush fans of all time.
(17:53):
That's right. He was all over that, Yeah, I think
he was. He joined their fan club in like seventh
or eighth grade, he said, and I loved it. Right now,
somewhere Brett Michaels is walking around playing that on repeat
to his family. Did you hear that? Did you hear
what Josh said? He thinks I'm better than the skid
mo guy? No, you mean warrant. It doesn't matter, all right. So, um,
(18:14):
we're talking about Nazi gold. And we were saying before
we started talking about warrant and everything that, um, that
there is gold that is on accounted for that was
stolen by the Nazis that just kind of vaporized after
the war. Goal is not supposed to do that. It's
one of the things that people love about gold is
it doesn't just vaporize into thin air. It's really easy
to keep track of if you want to. And so
(18:36):
people started looking for gold or looking for clues. And
one of the big clues that people started following was
local rumors and legends. Like in Murkers, there were plenty
of rumors and legends that there was gold hidden in
a mind nearby exactly and they so the people people
(18:58):
hearing local legends is really kind of fueled hunt for
hunts for Nazi treasures for almost a century now. Yeah, So, um,
we're gonna go through a bunch of these. There's one
called Lake Toplets, Uh, like it's a very lovely place.
I'm sure you looked up pictures, um. But people and
treasure hunters have been looking for this golden Lake Toplets
(19:20):
ever since uh. And this was very much fact A
bunch of Nazis retreated there in the Austrian Alps in
the final months of the war. US troops were closing
in fast and Germany was about to collapse, and so
they transported a bunch of boxes to this lake military
military vehicles and then horse drawn wagons even and they
(19:42):
dumped them in the lake. So I think that part
is definitely true, right, there's yes, from what I could tell,
it was reported on like that is in fact what
was in the boxes? What's up for for debate exactly.
Some people say that's the Nazi gold about five and
(20:03):
a half billion dollars worth. Other people said, um, no,
I think some of this stuff are documents, um where
they uh, they were basically confiscated from Jewish victims, about
where their assets were hidden and what Swiss bank accounts
they could loot. Maybe I saw, and I saw also artwork.
(20:24):
Sure they think that was sealed artwork. Um. Also there's
a rumor that there's three hundred pounds of morphine in
in those boxes. That was contributed by I think Albania's
president Um because he didn't want it to fall into
the hands of the Allies. Well, one thing they know
was down there, because they actually found some of these
(20:49):
three was Hitler had the idea at one point, Hey,
let's sabotage various countries by creating counterfeit money of those countries. Yeah,
it's a pretty smart plan for a dirty Nazi I know.
So they created, um just hundreds of million dollars worth
of British pound notes and in nineteen eighty three a
(21:10):
German biologists by accident discovered a lot of these British
pounds in the lake. What did we talk about that
and like how counterfeiting works. Maybe maybe it does sound
familiar though for sure, we definitely talked about that plan.
And remember there was like a a Jewish printer who
was a Holocaust um prisoner, a prisoner of a concentration camp.
(21:33):
We can't remember which one, who turned out to be
like this master counterfeitter. Yeah, like because the Nazis trained
him to her forced them to it was, if I
remember correctly, it was our counterfeiting episode. Yeah, And in
nineteen fifty nine. I talked about the nineteen eighty three fine,
but in fifty nine, uh, they recovered seven hundred million
pounds of these counterfeit notes from that lake. So some
(21:56):
people say that's all that was down there. Um, other
will say there may still be gold down there, And
Austria actually still to this day has a problem about
tin divers a year illegally dive in that lake looking
for that treasure. Yeah, and what's interesting about this lake
aside from the fact that there might be Nazi treasure
in it, which is interesting enough to make the lake
(22:17):
remarkable and noteworthy, but in addition to that, this lake
has a kind of a strange hydrology, and that the
top half of it is freshwater the bottom half of
salt water, and they're separated by density. And in the
middle of these two layers is a like a layer
of floating layer of ancient logs that have fallen in
(22:39):
the lake and been preserved over time. And so you
can only dive so far before you hit this layer
of logs. And some divers, I think five divers have
at least have died in this lake looking for Nazi gold,
and at least one of them got tangled up in
this layer of logs. It's a really dangerous place to dive.
But the fact that you can't really see past this
(23:01):
layer of logs is one of the things that keeps
people coming back and keeps this legend alive because they
can't thoroughly search this lake and show conclusively, no, there's
no gold here. Leave this place alone, stay away. Amazing.
It is pretty amazing. And then the other thing about
it too is this is a really remote location that
(23:22):
was used by Nazi officers, high ranking Nazi officers, and
for missile testing. It seems like a really odd place
just to dump counterfeit pound notes. Yeah, like you could
dump those just about anywhere, So I don't know, maybe
there is something to it. You're gonna get your Skiba
gear ready. I got my flippers on already. You can't see,
(23:45):
but I've got them on alright. We're gonna move now
to um an eastern German town along the check border
called Deutsche Catherinenburg. It's it sort of looks like the
alphabet when it's on a on a page. It's a
lot of letters in a row. But there are people
there that think, not only is there gold here, but uh,
(24:08):
possibly the amber room, which was this. You just look
up pictures of the amber room. It's pretty amazing, this
chamber of um, honey and lindseed and kannak confused, amber panels,
gold frame mosaics, marble, precious stones. And it was a
gift of Prussian King Frederick Wilhelm, the first two Russia's
(24:30):
Peter the Great once called the eighth Wonder of the World.
And it disappeared during World War two. Yeah, the Nazis
plundered it from Russia from the U s. S R.
And they took it back to Germany, back to Kunnigsberg
or Kunigsberg, which was I think now a time or
part of um of Russia again, but at the time
(24:52):
during World War two was part of Germany or Prussia,
and they had it on public exhibit for like four
or five years, and then at the end of the
war it just anished and no one's seen it since.
And there's a lot of people who say, well, it
was destroyed in air raids. Other people say it was
sunk on the you know, on a ship that was
secretly carrying it. Um, it's just lost. But there's a
(25:13):
pair of treasure hunters at Deutsche Catherinenburg Um who searched
in the area because they were sure that, among other things,
the amber room panels were buried there in that town. Yeah,
and this is um. This is probably the worst ending
to a potentially cool story ever, But that was there
(25:33):
was a pair of searchers um searching for this stuff.
One of them's father was a German Air Force officer
in World War Two, and in his personal notes, this
son thought that he'd found the exact coordinates of this treasure.
So he got together with another treasure hunter who was
another German. He was a mayor in fact of a
nearby town, and they thought that they had discovered through
(25:57):
radar this big rectangular underground on space about sixty ft down.
And when I was reading this, dude, it was so juicy,
I was like, oh boy, what happened? They didn't never
tell anyone that no one knows if they found any treasure.
They didn't say anything about it. Apparently they had an
acrimonious split in two thousand eight, and that's just sort
(26:17):
of the end of this story. Yeah, I guess the
other treasure hunter was staying in the mayor's town and
the mayor kicked him out of town. It was that acrimonious. Wow,
So that's it. The last I heard was that they
didn't find anything in two thousand eight, or they didn't
never search for it, right, So yeah, it was a
little name, but worth putting in there. I think, Oh, no,
it's worth putting in there. It's just has no good resolution. No,
(26:41):
it's yeah, no, But you read a lot of fiction,
so you can deal with that, right, that's right. Okay,
So in Poland, south southeastern southwestern Poland and a little
corner down there, there's something. There's a range of mountains
called Owl Mountains, and there's a long standing and widespread
(27:02):
rumor that's that's been there for a very long time.
I would say roughly since around the end of the
world the Second World War. That would be my guess,
that there is a ghost train and Nazi ghost train
loaded with jewels, gold, weapons, art, basically everything you can
think of that the Nazis would have plundered or pillaged
(27:22):
loaded onto this train, driven into a tunnel in the
mountain and left there hidden, and that it's still there,
and um people have been looking for it for a
very long time again since probably about the end of
World War two. But the thing that's kept this treasure
hunt alive, Chuck, is there really is a vast, unmapped
(27:42):
network of tunnels in the Owl Mountains that the Nazis
dug there in World War two. Yeah. So again, some
of this is based in fact. So that's what will
keep any sort of urban legend alive if if part
of it is true. And they did. They dug these
tunnels of mine chats between forty three and forty five.
It was called the Raisa project, which means giant in German,
(28:07):
and no one knows why. Some people say it might
have been in one of their weird secret weapons programs. Uh.
Some people say it may have been potentially where Hitler
was going to hold up for his last stand. But
it was very, very secretive, even among the s S.
Because if you worked on this tunnel, you had to
sign a confident confidentiality agreement, which just sounds funny. For
(28:29):
some reason, I thought everything about the s S was
so secretive it would just be implicit. But what and
where are they gonna do, like take you to court
that you violated your n DA or something. It's it
is odd, isn't it. You know what they would do. Yeah,
they just shoot you. I wouldn't think they would need
a signed agreement for that. I think there's the Nazis
we're talking about, you know. Yeah, so they were not
(28:51):
allowed to have their family members within uh forty KOs
radius of this area, and these tunnels were dug by
forced labor concentration camps nearby. And it might have been
a place for gold and may still be, but the
Soviets ruined all that in when they came knocking at
(29:11):
the door, and the Nazis fled and basically blew up
their own tunnels behind them. Yeah, and I want to say,
there's a really good New Yorker article about the hunt.
I can think it's even called the Hunt for Nazi Gold,
about this particular legend and people looking for it and
they take a second. I think it's really worth UM
pointing out here too. Is um. You know, people who
(29:34):
get who start looking for treasure, no matter what the
providence of the treasure is, UM just gets so wrapped
up in the treasure and the legends and the myths
and everything that it's easy to forget things like, well,
you're running around a tunnel network that was dug by
people who were literally worked to death over the course
of weeks. They were worked that hard. They died digging
(29:55):
these tunnels that hold maybe this legendary treasure. That is
the only thing you can focus on, what you're talking about.
That And that's definitely like a part of the problem
that comes along with the job is you know, forgetting
like look, having blinders on that you forget the reality
of the situation. It's definitely it's important to remember this that,
you know, some of this gold we're talking about was
(30:17):
pulled from the teeth of dead Holocaust victims. You know,
remember that too. It's like Bill Paxson and Titanic. He
needed that reminder from the old lady, like, you're all
pumped up looking for this jewel. Yeah, people die, people
died here, man. Yeah, let's get it together, Paxxton r
I P. Yeah, that was so jarring when you told
(30:40):
me that that first time a few few months back.
Did I break you that news? You did? You broke
it hard. So according to this legend, as far as
the al Mountains go, there was this ghost train, like
you said, and it was a freight train loaded with
all kinds of valuables, artwork, jewels, gold, bully on bars
of gold and that they drove that thing in this
(31:03):
thing and it never came out in those tunnels. And Uh.
The other part of this um story that is rooted
in fact is there were Nazi trains that carried tons
and tons of gold and valuables and jewelry and paintings.
There was one in particular called the Hungarian Gold Train
that was intercepted by Allied forces in so you got
(31:26):
a real train that happened. You've got these real tunnels
that were dug, and all of a sudden, this rumor
of the ghost train takes route. Yeah, the idea that
those two things are have come together in the Owl Mountains, though,
that's the thing that's never been shown to be true.
That's right, And not from a lack of looking, No,
not at all. No, there's a lot of people looking
(31:46):
for that there. Um the Uh, this one's actually my favorite, weirdly,
probably because it's a shipwreck. I'm just so fascinated by shipwrecks.
So the ship I'm talking about is called the S S. Minden,
and it was a German merchant vessel and back in
I think nineteen thirty nine it was disabled by the
(32:07):
British Royal Navy off of the coast of Iceland, right.
And what what's so mysterious about this is that the
Minden's ship register shows that it was just carrying um
resin from Brazil. I didn't see what kind of resin.
But you can do all sorts of industrial stuff with
the resident from making adhesives to plastics to whatever um
(32:28):
and then that was it. Right. But the thing that
makes the sinking of the men and some as serious
is that the ship's captain, rather than let it fall
into British hands, sunk it himself. And he sunk it
in seventy feet of water off the Icelandic coast, and
that's where it lay undiscovered until I believe two thousand
and seventeen, when a mysterious ship showed up and started
(32:52):
um looking around the Icelandic coast and it believes that
it found it. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a little
odd to sink a ship full of resin. Only it
raises a little bit of suspicion, Like you said, even
though you can do some things with it, it kind
of stuck out to me. It's like, what else is
on that boat? But yeah, in two thousand seventeen, the
Coast Guard in Iceland bordered a vessel of the CBED Constructor.
(33:17):
It's like an unnervingly bland name. It's so boring. It's
not like the Uh well now I can't all boat
names are kind of dumb. Hercules of the sea. That's
what I would name in my boat. Yeah. Um, So
they intercepted it. They said, hey, what are you guys
(33:38):
doing here? And they said, oh, well, um, this boat
has been leased by a group of British folks who
are such searching for the wreck of the S S.
Menden And they were like what They're like, haven't you
heard that? That was just full of resin And they said,
clearly not, because we're spending a hundred thousand dollars a
(33:59):
day to least this boat, which frankly is not that
great of a deal. But we couldn't talk him down
any So that I mean, if someone is spending a
hundred thousand dollars a day, that means that makes me
think they know something that we don't know. Yeah, And
so the Icelandic press actually reported that they think that
they know something we don't know, so much so that
they interviewed the crew and the crew said. The official
(34:21):
story is that they're looking for a couple of hundred
million dollars worth of gold that they believe was hidden
in the safe on that ship, but that the real story,
the real prize for what they're looking for, is only
known to a handful of people, high ranking people on
the boat and left at that which, man, the Icelandic
(34:42):
press knows how to how to spin a mystery, if
you ask me. Yeah, I mean that really added this
extra air of mystery on top of everything else, which is, oh,
sure we think there's a hundred million dollars plus in gold,
but we're really there for another secret reason. Yeah. If
if a hundred million dollars worth of gold is your
decoy cover story, man, you're onto something impressive. I can't
(35:05):
wait until they raised that thing, because from what I
could tell, everything everything pointed to the fact that they
did successfully find the minden. That that is the minden
they found. But as far as I know, they have
not gone down and salvaged it at all. Get James
Cameron on it. Who knows. Maybe, I mean the amber
room was sunk and maybe it happened to be on
the s S. Menden, So maybe we'll have the Amber
(35:26):
room back in the next ten years. Um. Well, hey man,
you said today's magic second ad break word James Cameron,
which means we're now obligated to take our second message break.
Do you want to take it now or shall we
have taken it three minutes ago? Now let's take it now. Okay,
we'll be right back everybody. I want to learn about
(35:50):
how to take a perfect but all about fractal thinks, hun,
the Lizzie Border murders that they runs on the plane,
everything we should know. Wear it up, Jerry. All right, Chuck.
(36:14):
So there's places where you can physically go to search
for legendary gold. You can also just enter the international
gold trade and you can turn up, alarmingly Nazi gold
that was kind of lost you could put it after
the war. Yeah, this is really interesting. As part of
(36:37):
reconstruction and restoration all over Europe, there was a committee
for him called the Tripartite Gold Commission or the Tripartite
Commission for the Restitution of Monetary Gold. And this was
formed in by the US, by the French, and by
the Brits, and basically the whole jam here was let's
(37:00):
find all this goal, let's account for all this gold
that we discovered as allies, and then let's redistribute it
back to where we if we can trace it such
to where it was looted, um to the banks and
central banks, and even if we can find out human individuals,
that would be even better that and that it was
(37:20):
strictly too, I believe, strictly to the European central banks
that had a claim to have having been looted from.
After the war, and then in the late nineties there
was a real push to try to um compensate the
survivors and the heirs of the Holocaust who also had
been robbed too. So a lot of gold that some
(37:43):
countries still had claim on as part of this um
UH London Conference on Nazi Gold that was held UH
some of some of the countries that said, well, actually
we're still owed a lot of this gold. They said, okay,
well we'll take a portion of this gold and diverted
to humanitarian groups who will UM use it to to
UM for reparations to Holocaust victims, which is pretty cool.
(38:07):
The big outlier in this was a little tiny country
there remained neutral during World War Two, at least on
paper um Switzerland, who not only it turns out, was
secretly assisting the Nazis and laundering their gold in exchange
for money that the Nazis could go used to fund
its war machine. They hung on to this Nazi gold
(38:29):
and from what I can tell, still have all of
the Nazi gold that they had after World War Two,
including gold that was made from that zon gold melted down,
personal effects and gold teeth um that Switzerland apparently still
has in its gold reserves and is not willing to
give up. Yeah, that was really surprising. This all came
(38:51):
out because of a historical paper that was part of
that conference. Um. It showed that the US had a
lot of this gold, uh, that they melted down after
the war and did return to the central banks in
Europe um as part of an effort to stabilize their
economy there um. But finding out that Switzerland did this,
and that Switzerland was neutral, and that the Geneva Convention,
(39:14):
which which explicitly bars this kind of thing comes from
Geneva Switzerland is like the ultimate irony here, and it's
I just want to know if there's more to this.
There's got to be something else, right. They're they're good people, sure,
but I mean, countries do bad things for sure, you know,
even if there are good people that live there, there's
(39:37):
I mean from everything I could tell, it came out
in the nineties that it was pretty clear Switzerland had
served as money launderers for the Nazis without anybody realizing
it for decades. Wow. Yeah, it's it is pretty shocking
for sure. UM. I think the thing that gets me though,
is the idea that there's a lot of gold in
(39:59):
the internet national gold trade today that can be traced
back to missing Nazi gold, that it's not necessarily buried
in the side of a mountain in Poland or under
a small town along the German Chech border. That it's
it's out and about. It's being used as currency or
as a commodity today in the in the international gold trade.
(40:23):
That to me is the most astounding part of all
of this. Yeah, how do you trace gold? They have
a very strict system for it, but it's only as
strict as UM how it's observed. So like, for example,
in two thousand nineteen, the Simon Weisenthal Center, which UM
has spent a lot of time hunting down Nazi war criminals. UM.
(40:43):
In the I think starting in the sixties, seventies and eighties. UM,
they accused of Venezuela and specifically the administration of Nicholas
Maduro of trafficking in Nazi gold that he's so old
over the course of his administration so far something like
seventy seven tons of gold. And they're like, you know what,
(41:07):
we're pretty sure that that was Nazi gold that was
transferred late in the war to Spain and then on
to South America to help fund a fourth Reich, a
rebuilding of the Nazi regime among the war criminals living there,
and they think that this was some of that gold
and that Maduro has been selling it to kind of
(41:27):
bankroll his his country and his his um his regime. Wow,
isn't that nuts a whole? Yeah? It is absolutely the
Like I can't remember how I came across as I
think it was a house stuff works article. There's a
couple on them, and it just started digging further and further,
(41:47):
and it's just one of those things where it's it
just takes such a great left turn, great meaning like
just surprising and unexpected, where it's like, you know, you're
going from treasure hunters arguing and kicking one another out
of little towns and in kicking around mountains and Poland
to the international gold trade, trafficking and Nazi gold. Still
(42:08):
it's it's just just a crazy story. Yeah, it's it's
pretty mind blowing and disappointing in a lot of ways. Yeah,
for sure, because again, remember a lot of that gold,
those gold bars are melted down gold teeth taken from
Holocaust victims or gold wedding rings taken from Holocaust victims,
and now they're used to um as as part of
an international form of currency. Yeah bo um, Well that's it.
(42:35):
You got anything else? I got nothing else. If you
want to know more about um Nazi gold, there's a
lot you can read. It's quite a rabbit hole you
can go down if you want to. Um. So you
could start by going to how stuff works dot com
and checking out their articles on it. And since I
said how stuff works, it's been a while, that means
it's time for a listener. May all that's right? Uh.
(42:58):
I was thinking that would be a good movie about
World War two era Nazi gold hunters, but it's sort
of like Three Kings already did that, but that was
a Gulf war. Yeah. Um. And then also there was
that one museum. Men. I think they were brought into
kind of make sure that the paintings that were looted
were not or whatever. I didn't see that. What was
(43:19):
it called? One called museum? And what was it? Almost
positive it was museum? And was it what? You look
that up while I read listener mail? All right, because
that's a terrible name. I agree. I'm gonna call this.
We cited someone that we probably shouldn't have cited, and
this is from anonymous. Hey, guys, really enjoyed this show
this week on universal basic income. Just a heads up,
(43:40):
you cited the conservative economist Charles Murray and his justifications
for introducing UBI to the American economy. I'm sure you
didn't realize this, but Murray is a particular favorite of
white supremacist oh Boy for his views on genetics and
their contribution to social inequality between whites and people of color. Yeah,
is a book called the Bell Curve that is often
(44:01):
cited as a data proven evidence for white supremacy. It's
also largely been debunked as pseudo science. Uh wow. He
links to a Southern poverty law centers right up for
our own reference, and he says I will, no doubt
keep on listening. Guys, I'm sure it was unintentional. Please
take more care though and curating your sources, especially if
it might throw your narrative for a loop. And that
(44:24):
is from anonymous, and boy Anonymous, you're right, we had
no idea. UM should have done a little bit more
digging there. So please everyone realize, and anyone that listens
to the show probably realizes we certainly did not mean
for that to be the case when we cited Mr Murray.
Now we kind of bift that one big time. H
no offense intended. Hopefully you didn't take it, and thank
(44:45):
you for a very measured and level and even handed correction.
That's right, it was very kind. And by the way, Chuck,
it's monuments man. Yeah. I knew though something about it
that didn't sound right. But there is show called museum
Men that's been on since two thousand fourteen. But they
(45:06):
they kind of they make um displays from museums. Ah,
they're craftsmen, craft people. Okay, okay, So museum man monuments
men two different things. And if you want to get
in touch with us, you can join us on the internet,
send us an email. Wrap it up, spanking on the
(45:27):
bottom and send it off to Stuff podcast at iHeart
radio dot com. Stuff you Should Know is a production
of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works. For more podcasts for
my heart Radios at the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.