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Tonight, an enduring World War II mystery.

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Somewhere the Nazis are sitting on a stockpile of confiscated wealth.

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Vast amounts of art, gold, silver and currency are looted by the Nazis and stashed all over Europe.

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Anything of value that can be stolen, they steal.

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Though some is recovered, in astonishing finds, much more is still missing.

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Now the mystery begins. Where else did the Nazis hide their wealth?

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We'll explore the top theories surrounding this lost treasure.

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The CIA documents show this gold is linked to these high-ranking Croatian priests.

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The Nazi gold train was found in the Owl Mountains.

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The diary says that something around $7 million worth of Nazi gold was stolen by this officer.

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Where did the Nazis take their stolen loot and can it ever be found?

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April 1945. As Allied forces advance into Nazi territory, they occupy the small town of Merckers, Germany.

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Merckers is right outside of Frankfurt. From a strategic perspective, it's fairly unimportant.

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The only thing notable is assault and potassium mine.

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On the morning of April 6, 1945, American military policemen are patrolling an area outside of Merckers when they stop two refugee women from violating a curfew.

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As they're driving them back to the American command post, a German-speaking American MP, Richard Moots, starts interrogating the women.

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He wants to know why they're out walking in spite of the curfew.

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As they drive by the Kaiserota mine, the women say, forget the curfew. How would you like to know about a significant amount of stolen treasure?

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That question immediately sparks intense interest.

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Rumors of a vast Nazi treasure hoard stored throughout Europe are rampant.

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Almost from the moment that Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany in 1933, he instructs his military to start stealing gold.

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This begins domestically, confiscating money from local banks and from Jewish citizens that are being displaced from their homes and sent to concentration camps.

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Once Hitler's armies start impeding other countries, they do more of the same, and it goes beyond just stealing gold.

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Artwork, jewelry, silver, platinum, anything of value that can be stolen, they steal.

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So when the soldiers hear the rumor from these women about stolen treasure, they definitely take notice.

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The news quickly reaches US General George S. Patton, commander of the Third Army in Germany.

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By the time General Patton hears this particular story from Merckers, the Allies estimate that Nazi Germany has taken nearly $600 million worth of gold.

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This includes $223 million from Belgium, $193 million from the Netherlands, additional gold from Austria and Czechoslovakia, and that's just what Patton knows about.

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It doesn't include millions more in stolen gold from private citizens and businesses.

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Despite these estimates, Patton is wary.

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Lots of people have tried to get leniency with promises of hidden Nazi treasures, and almost none of it has panned out.

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But Patton decides it's still worth looking into, because he knows that somewhere the Nazis are sitting on a stockpile of confiscated wealth.

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We always have to remember that even as late as April 1945, the end of the Second World War was not a foregone conclusion, and lots of things could have gone wrong.

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Depriving the enemy of a significant quantity of gold is the equivalent of driving a nail into his coffin.

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Finding any part of this treasure will help the Allied war effort. The only question is, where is it?

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According to the two women detained in Merckers, it's there, deep underground, in the local salt mine.

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These women claim to have eyewitnessed these valuables being transported on trucks and crates, and when valuables are moving in the wrong direction,

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meaning moving to the mine and going down into it rather than the other way around, that's where their suspicion about things of great value came from.

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Within hours of the women telling their story, General Patton sends a bunch of resources to Merckers.

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He has to use fighting forces that would otherwise be committed to battle and designate them to come back to Merckers to provide a security cordon around the area,

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because after all, he has to exercise great caution that this might be a trap.

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The next day, April 7th, American soldiers start interviewing other eyewitnesses.

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They talk to several men in and around Merckers who were forced to work in the mine, either clearing out rooms or bringing gold down into it.

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One British POW who had also been forced to work in the mine tries to make a sort of crude map for the Americans to show them the location of the treasure room.

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Army engineers survey the area and start making plans to descend into the mine.

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Patton tells everyone to keep this potential treasure top secret. Don't report it to anyone until they have it in hand.

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On April 8th, American forces enter the mine.

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I can't imagine what must have been going through the mine of these troops as they go down into this deep mine.

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They don't know what they're going to encounter down there. They don't know who they're going to encounter down there.

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There could be armed Nazi guards. There could be booby traps. There could be nothing.

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Exploring this mine was no small task. It's a network of tunnels below the surface, 18 square miles in overall size.

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There's no convenient signage. There's nothing that says Nazi gold this way.

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But based on the interviews with people that work there, they know to go to a room called Room 8.

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And as they approach, it's pretty clear there's something very important inside it.

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The room is sealed by a huge steel door.

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The door is impenetrable, but the engineers figure the adjacent brick wall is not.

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So they load up one side with dynamite. That's how they open the vault.

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The first thing the American soldiers see is gold. Literally tons of gold. This is the mother load.

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Room 8's not a room at all. It's more of a cavern than anything.

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75 feet wide, 150 feet deep, 12 foot ceilings. It's a massive open space.

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They count 8,198 individual bars of gold, each worth thousands of dollars.

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The world hasn't seen this much gold in one place outside of Fort Knox.

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And that's just the beginning.

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Besides the gold bars, they also find gold bullion, currency from England, France and Germany, gold coins, platinum, and the plates used to make German Reichsmarks.

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Also hidden in the mine, hundreds of priceless, stolen artworks.

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In other words, this was the largest German pawn shop of the time.

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Anything that had any value at all had been crammed into this one cavern inside this mine complex.

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So everyone is ecstatic and amazed by this once in a lifetime discovery.

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There's so many riches, so many treasures, but then they get to the back of the room and the mood changes.

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In addition to the precious metals, they find 189 suitcases filled with gold and silver household items that have clearly been stolen from everyday people.

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But that's not the worst of it. In some of the suitcases, they find a horrific sight.

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Hundreds and hundreds of teeth, human teeth that all have gold fillings in them.

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Nobody has to ask where these gold fillings came from. They already know.

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They're the teeth of thousands of Jews extracted from the living and the dead in concentration camps.

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They had gold fillings ripped out of their head because that gold had value.

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It gives you an idea of how cynical the Nazi view was towards humanity, towards human decency and dignity.

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I don't know of anybody else besides the Nazis who did anything like that.

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As they come to terms with their grisly discovery, American forces need to figure out the next steps.

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It's a task so daunting that Generals Patton and Eisenhower show up in person to supervise.

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The Generals approve a logistical plan to get all this heavy stuff out from 2,000 feet below the ground and move it to safety.

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Remember, there's still a war going on very close by, so it's an already difficult job made even harder.

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As all of this material is moved from inside the mine to above ground, it's taken into Frankfurt to an old bank building that had been captured by Allied forces.

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And as all of the material is being deposited at that bank and an accounting of all of it is being completed, there's recognition for the fact that there's a lot still missing.

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The gold, silver and currency that was found at Merckers adds up to about $250 million.

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But according to Allied estimates, the Nazis stole closer to $600 million.

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So what was found at Merckers isn't all of it, not even close.

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This of course means one thing, there's more out there.

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So now the real mystery begins. Where else did the Nazis hide their stolen treasure?

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The discovery of $250 million in stolen Nazi loot in Merckers, Germany in 1945 inspires a military treasure hunt that lasts long after the end of World War II.

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The U.S. and our allies continue to occupy the area for many months after the war.

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There's a lot of work to be done, helping displaced people, shoring up infrastructure, cleaning up dangerous, unused ammunition and explosives, and trying to track down more of what the Nazis stole.

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The overall quantity of treasure that was discovered at the Merckers mine is believed to be less than half the total amount of treasure that Nazi Germany looted during the Second World War.

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Remember, this wasn't their goal to begin with. They took it from governments, banks, everyday citizens, all of whom deserve to have it returned.

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It's estimated that about 90% of what was found at Merckers was eventually returned to its rightful owners.

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But where did they hide the rest?

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After the salt mine, we know a few things about where the Nazis like to keep their stolen treasure.

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It's a remote location, it has cold, low oxygen conditions, ideal for preservation, and it's a facility that's already in use for something.

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So trucks coming and going wouldn't have been seen as suspicious, and they don't have to build a bunch of new stuff.

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There's already electricity, manpower, and plenty of storage space.

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Among the first possibilities, a Nazi weapons testing facility in Austria, near Lake Toplitz.

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Soldiers descend on the area in May of 1945 and begin interviewing potential witnesses.

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Eideweisenbacher provides a personal account in which she details the way that German troops arrived at her home and how they got a truck stuck in the mud,

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and they needed assistance transferring crates that carried something on board onto a horse-drawn cart so that they could move them toward the lake itself.

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Eide describes seeing possibly hundreds of sealed Nazi crates, and they take the crates up the mountain in multiple trips.

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Eide says she witnesses all those crates get dumped into Lake Toplitz.

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Eide, of course, has no idea what's in these crates, but the allies suspect it might be Nazi treasure.

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Lake Toplitz sits at the edge of the Austrian Alps, an ideal site for covert operations.

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It's so remote and hard to reach, the allies would never spot it.

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It's over a mile long, a quarter of a mile wide, and it has a depth of up to 300 feet.

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This area is known as the Dead Mountains. It's inaccessible and frozen over for five months of the year.

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When it is accessible, its only entrance is a steep dirt path. Let's just say it's a pretty good place for the Nazis to hide anything.

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These same conditions make it a difficult place to search.

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First off, it's very hard to get equipment in and out of there.

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An underwater search of a 300-foot deep lake requires a lot of machinery.

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Even just sending in divers is going to be difficult.

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Keep in mind this is the mid-1940s.

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At this point, the first scuba apparatus, the aqua lung, has only just been invented by Jacques Cousteau.

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And there's no such thing as a drysuit, which is what divers today use to keep warm and cold temperatures.

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The Navy spends two years devising a plan to explore the 300-foot deep lake.

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In 1947, they're finally ready.

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They go down about 60 feet, and then they have to stop.

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They've encountered an impenetrable wall of wood.

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Topliss is surrounded by a forest, so over the years trees have fallen into the lake, creating this wooden barrier about 60 feet down.

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It's very, very difficult to operate in that environment.

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The divers are challenged just to get beyond it to see what's on the other side of it.

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And that could easily hide things of great value.

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The divers then begin swimming along the barrier, hoping to find the crates that may have fallen on top.

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But sadly, they don't find anything.

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Whatever was in those crates was heavy enough to sink past that barrier, which implies possibly Nazi gold.

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And the fact that these crates sunk to the bottom of Lake Topliss means it's extremely difficult to pull them back out.

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After one of their divers drowns in 1947,

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the Navy calls off the search.

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The Navy finally decides this is basically an impossible task,

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but that's not going to stop others from trying to explore Lake Topliss.

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And it doesn't stop people from dying either.

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There's a string of suspicious deaths associated with Lake Topliss.

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These begin soon after World War II ends.

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In 1946, two men, Helmut Meyer and Ludwig Picher, are both found murdered near the lake.

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During the investigation into this murder, it is ultimately revealed that the two men had once worked at Lake Topliss during the war.

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You have to wonder, did they come back knowing there was something worth retrieving from that area?

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They certainly had the background to know what might be down there.

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And if so, were they killed because of it?

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In the 1950s, there are several more deaths.

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In 1952, a French civilian is found dead at the lake.

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And during the investigation into his death, the bodies of two other people are found,

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and those two people have both been shot in the head.

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This is getting kind of creepy. One death, that's one thing.

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But this is a string of murders around a lake that supposedly has Nazi gold at the bottom.

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As these stories start to spread through the press,

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more and more people really do believe that there is something secret and valuable hidden at Lake Topliss.

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And maybe someone's guarding it.

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In 1959, an expedition sponsored by German magazine Der Stern tries to finally solve the mystery.

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By this time, diving technology has improved substantially, so it's slightly less dangerous to dive the lake.

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It's not without risk, but the Der Stern divers are able to stay there for more than five weeks at the site,

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and eventually they reach the bottom.

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What they see is truly remarkable.

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The crates are down there. This is incredible, and they're able to bring 15 of them up to the surface.

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But when they pry the crates open, they don't find gold. They find paper money.

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Millions of British pounds, 700 million to be exact.

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The reason that the Nazis dumped all of this British paper currency into Lake Topliss was because it was all counterfeit.

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Back in the 1940s, Adolf Hitler started a plan called Operation Bernhardt to flood Great Britain with fake currency

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to drive up inflation and basically wreck the British economy.

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Operation Bernhardt was never fully realized, and now, thanks to the Der Stern divers,

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we now know what happened to at least some of those counterfeit bills.

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But is there more to uncover?

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The Der Stern divers reported that there were more boxes at the bottom of the lake,

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but because of all the money already spent on this mission, they were told to leave those boxes alone.

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Those 15 crates, though, linked them directly to Operation Bernhardt,

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and they also established the truth of the Eide Weisenbacher personal account.

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In the decades since, several expeditions, some very well-funded ones,

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are mounted to try to recover the rest of the crates.

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They find some Nazi artifacts, some divers report seeing aircraft and other weapons down there,

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but so far, no stolen Nazi treasure.

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Unless we figure out some technology to go and drain Lake Topliss,

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it doesn't look to me like anybody's ever going to figure out exactly what's down there.

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And so, we're going to have to live with this mystery for a long time to come.

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From 1945 until 1948, all branches of the American military are involved in trying to discover looted Nazi treasure.

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And one of the elements of the American military that's involved in this search is the OSS.

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The OSS, the Office of Strategic Services, is the precursor to today's CIA.

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But in 1947, it's an unexpected agency that makes a breakthrough.

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When we think of government agencies and important investigations,

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we don't think of the US Department of the Treasury.

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But as it turns out, a Treasury agent by the name of Emerson Bigelow is searching for Nazi treasure.

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And in many ways, a Treasury agent is the right person to go sniffing around this idea of looted Nazi gold.

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In 1947, Bigelow sends a memo to his superiors claiming to know what happened to a large chunk of the stolen Nazi gold.

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His memo is so incendiary that it really just gets swept under the rug.

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And it isn't until 50 years later when it gets declassified that this bombshell finally comes to light.

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The Bigelow Memorandum is ultimately revealed in a 1997 documentary.

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What it found was that a very, very large quantity of money went into a bank account that was owned by the Vatican.

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Bigelow's theory begins in Croatia.

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In World War II, the Nazis set up a puppet government in Croatia called the Ustasa.

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They're in power from 1941 till the end of the war in 1945.

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Let's be clear, they're put there by the Nazis for the Nazis.

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The Ustasa are just as vile as the Nazis.

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They participate in the same form of racist terrorism that's fueled by a distorted view of both Roman Catholicism and Islam,

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something they called Croatian nationalism.

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Like Hitler, they want to purify the blood of the country by mass murdering Jews, Serbs, and Roma.

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It's estimated that they kill hundreds of thousands of people.

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The Ustasi extorted gold and jewels and other valuables from people who they threatened,

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saying that if you did not give this to us, you could be shot, you could be otherwise killed,

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and so people who had the gold gave it.

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They were killed as well as the people who didn't have the gold, but that was the Ustasi method.

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The stolen gold is sent to Germany's Reichsbunk to be melted down into bars and coins.

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According to Bigelow's report, towards the end of the war, the Ustasha make efforts to hide this money,

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and they also help German Nazis hide some of theirs.

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When Bigelow talks to intelligence agents, they tell him that 350 million Swiss francs have been taken out of the country.

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That money would be worth $1.5 billion today.

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But more eye-popping than the amount is what happened to it.

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According to Bigelow's sources, that transfer of wealth was overseen by officials with the Vatican.

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Bigelow's sources claim they have proof.

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Some of it was discovered.

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About one-third of it was confiscated by British authorities at a checkpoint on the Austria-Switzerland border.

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It traveled up from Croatia into Austria, and Bigelow's sources believe it was ultimately headed for a Swiss bank account owned by the Vatican.

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Meanwhile, according to the Bigelow memo, approximately 200 million Swiss francs worth of gold did get through to a Vatican bank account in Switzerland.

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Bigelow's research ends there.

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But in 1997, investigative journalists Mark Arons and John Loftus pick up where he left off.

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Mark Arons has made a name for himself in Australia for hunting down former Nazis,

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and John Loftus is a former prosecutor with the U.S. Department of Justice's Nazi hunting unit.

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In that capacity, Loftus has access to CIA files.

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As they dig deeper, more shocking evidence emerges.

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The CIA documents prove that this gold is directly linked to these high-ranking Croatian priests in Rome,

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one of which has a Vatican association who are involved in getting this looted Nazi gold into Swiss bank accounts.

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But that money doesn't stay in there for long.

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They claim some of the Nazi gold was used to relocate Croatian Nazi officials.

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Arons and Loftus' research seems to blow the lid off of a three-part scheme involving the Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss banks.

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So when they publish their research in 1998, what do they call the book?

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Unholy Trinity.

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Many top-ranking Nazis are put on trial and executed in Nuremberg after the war.

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But the Ustasha are notably absent.

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Almost the entire Ustasha hierarchy just walks away scot-free.

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Their leader, Ante Pavlich, aka the Butcher of the Balkans, is actually received as an honored guest at the Vatican for two years after the war.

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Other high-ranking Ustasha escape to relative luxury in South America.

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And that's where some of the gold went.

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It paid for passports, transportation, places to live, food to eat, etc.

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If this is true, this money goes back into the hands of the Nazi puppets who stole it in the first place.

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According to Arons and Loftus, the conspiracy doesn't end there.

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Just when you thought you couldn't be more disgusted by this whole affair, it gets worse.

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The authors present evidence that the CIA not only knew about it, but they helped make it happen.

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In 1998, the U.S. Congress passes the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act, which requires the release of any government records pertaining to Nazi war criminals.

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As a result, over 300,000 pages of documents linking the U.S. Army and the CIA to this have been disclosed.

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A now declassified Army Intelligence Report states that by the summer of 1947, the U.S. forces were actively supporting the people-smuggling operation.

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The CIA wanted Nazis to escape Europe for two reasons.

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Some of them were advanced scientists that could help the U.S. military.

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Others could be planted in areas that faced the growing threat of communism.

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They placed high-ranking former Nazis in various South American countries, with a mission to quell any potential communist uprisings there, and install U.S. friendly leadership.

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One of the most notable examples is Operation Condor, where Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbee is used to help overthrow the government of Bolivia.

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The influx of ex-Nazis into South America is known as the Rat Line.

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According to Bigelow, Aaron's and Loftus, this Rat Line operation was paid for.

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It was financed by the very gold that had been looted by the Ustasha on behalf of Nazi Germany that then ultimately made its way into Vatican Bank accounts.

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But here's the thing. Whatever wasn't spent on this de Feria scheme should still be sitting in the Vatican's bank.

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This could be hundreds of millions of dollars in gold, which will probably never be able to recover.

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Unsurprisingly, the Vatican denies every last bit of this. This is, of course, a denial coming from an entity that has a document policy by which they destroy everything every 10 years.

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One thing we know, if history tells us anything, it's that money can corrupt even the most seemingly sacred institutions.

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Perhaps someday some long lost document will show what happened to all that gold that made its way to Switzerland.

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But until then, it's part of the significant tally that remains lost.

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One team announces a breakthrough.

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September 4th, lower Silesia, Poland.

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Researchers Piat Koper and Andrzej Rikter claim that they know where to find a massive cache of Nazi treasure.

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Koper is Polish, Rikter is German.

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Together they release an announcement that they have received a deathbed confession from a former German officer who knew the whereabouts of a train laden with Nazi gold that was on its way through Poland and back to Germany.

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But it never made it to its destination.

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During the war, Hitler orders that 330 tons of gold will be loaded onto a train and moved west to a more secure location.

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If this story is true, this would represent a giant chunk of the gold that we think is still missing.

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According to Koper and Rikter, the planned route of the train was from Breslau to somewhere in Germany.

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But at some point, the train was diverted and sent near the city of Bidgost.

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The question is, where did it go from there?

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The pair starts by looking for potential hiding spots along the train route.

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Hitler is many things, but he's not short-sighted.

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And by 1943, he sees how the tides of the war are starting to turn.

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Allied air raids are increasing and they're taking a toll on Hitler's war machine.

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So he starts making plans for worst-case scenarios.

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This is the beginning of Project Riese, Hitler's attempt to fortify and move his operations underground.

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Project Riese was a German construction project during the Second World War

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that sought to establish this very extensive underground bunker network in the Owl Mountains in Silesia.

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The Nazis excavate a massive labyrinth of tunnels, though it's never finished.

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Some suspect the purpose is to create an underground headquarters and miles of underground factories safe from Allied bombers.

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Koper and Richter zero in on a location near the Project Riese tunnels.

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It's a widely held belief in Poland that this Nazi gold train could have entered Project Riese locations

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and then ended up where Koper and Richter were actually looking.

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At some point in 2015, Koper and Richter went without a license

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and used ground penetrating radar to do a readout of a site along the Wabzich rail line.

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And they believed that this showed an underground structure

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which they believed was the correct density to be a train.

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Encouraged, the researchers share their evidence with the local press.

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As Koper and Richter's claim sort of gets out,

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the Polish government, both local and national, are forced to respond

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and by and large they seem to support the assertion that the train is there.

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Polish Deputy Culture Minister Piotr Zuchowski throws the weight of the government behind the claim

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saying that there's a 99% probability that a train more than 300 feet long was found in the Owl Mountains.

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Later, it's also revealed that Koper and Richter have made a pretty sweet deal with the Polish government

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saying basically, hey, if you support the excavation, we'll give you 90% of the profits.

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It's an astronomical figure if it pans out.

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This, of course, ignites a media circus and the hunt is on.

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Before they can dig, the Polish army is sent in to secure the area.

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All of Europe was littered with munitions after the war

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and in this area in particular, it was a hot spot of German activity.

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So before there can be any digging, they had to perform a UxO or unexploded ordnance search.

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Then they clear cut the area of its trees.

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Finally, they scan and probe the area to certify that there are no dangerous explosives below.

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On August 15, 2016, Koper and Richter, along with a large group of volunteers, officially begin digging.

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This team consisted of about 60 people.

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They had a geologist, they had engineers, they had laborers, of course Koper and Richter.

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The cost of this dig amounted to about $130,000 and it was all funded privately.

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After one week of digging, the team halts their work, finding no evidence of a train,

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train tracks or any other man-made objects, at least not to a depth of 60 feet.

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They found that this GPR anomaly turned out to be a natural geologic formation.

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Koper and Richter didn't give up because at this point they claimed to have found many other anomalies,

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but they simply didn't have the funds to excavate them.

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Richter eventually leaves the team, but Koper continues to search for the Nazi gold train.

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In 2021, he announces he's found new evidence of a train at the bottom of a lake in a Polish village.

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Additional site analysis is ongoing, so hopes of recovering this particular stash of Nazi gold aren't over yet.

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By 2016, most searches for stolen Nazi plunder are helmed by amateur investigators.

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Among them, German treasure hunter Jürgen Prowska, who's working on a unique approach.

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Prowsk has taken a different method for looking into looted Nazi gold,

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whereas others are more consumed by trying to find additional hordes or deposits of gold that are undiscovered out there.

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What Prowsk is doing is he's looking at the records associated with hordes that have already been discovered to determine if anything was overlooked.

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He turns his attention to a story that unfolds in 1945 at Mittenwald, Germany, right near the Austrian border.

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There, on April 20th, 1945, Nazi Colonel Franz Pfeiffer and six officers gather at a German military base.

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Coincidentally, this is Hitler's birthday.

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The Allies are closing in, and Pfeiffer's given one final mission to hide a stash of Nazi gold.

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The Nazis consider this gold their last best hope for preserving the future of the regime.

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The aim is to hide it until they can return to power, and a new right can be formed, which will be funded by the gold.

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Pfeiffer swears his men to secrecy, then orders 365 sacks of gold loaded onto a convoy of trucks.

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The order itself comes from Reichstherer SS Heinrich Himmler.

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Himmler orders several truckloads of looted valuables to be transported to the area where Pfeiffer is in command.

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The Nazis' first plan is to hide it in this bowling alley that was abandoned, so they bring it all there and they deposit it in the building.

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Then, days later, Allied forces are approaching.

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They have to go back, take it all out of the bowling alley, and find someplace else to hide it.

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It's clear they're going to have to move this stuff much farther away, so they choose a new destination, a lodge up in the mountains outside of a little town called Einseedl.

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The lodge is owned by a man named Hans Neuhauser, who lives there with his wife and son.

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And Hans basically has no choice but to let the Nazis in and do whatever they say.

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After unloading the gold at Neuhauser's lodge, the Nazis next use mules to move it further into the mountains.

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In a span of just 24 hours, the Nazis had dug pits and they deposited the gold into these and then covered them back up.

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And it's none too soon because the Allies arrive on scene three days later.

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The freshly dug pits are easily spotted by the Allied soldiers.

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In total, 12 tons of gold bullion is unearthed, valued at nearly three-quarters of a billion dollars today.

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So they recover this gold. It's another great true story of buried Nazi treasure that continues to inspire treasure hunters today.

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Most treasure hunters use this story as evidence that other undisclosed locations of Nazi gold may exist, but not Pruska.

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Pruska decides to keep looking into this story. What if the Allies never found all the treasure?

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Is there any evidence to suggest that some of this did in fact get left behind?

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Sure enough, Pruska finds that evidence.

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In 2016, amongst a collection of antiques, Pruska finds the diary of a former Nazi officer.

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And in it, this guy claims to have taken some of the iron-seedle gold and put it in his own secret hiding spot.

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The diary says that about seven million dollars of Nazi gold was stolen by this officer and hidden somewhere nearby.

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Remember, this is gold the Nazis stole that this officer then stole from them.

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According to the diary, the officer hid the gold near the base of a steep hill on top of the hill is a flat area with a hut.

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To Pruska, this is like a pirate treasure map that's going to lead him right to the gold.

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There's just one problem.

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The story in the diary doesn't end after the war. It continues.

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Several years later, the officer goes back to this location to dig up the gold.

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When he returns, he can't find it. He lost it.

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The ensuing years have changed the landscape, so it looks very different from when the officer first buried it.

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If that isn't karma, I don't know what is.

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So what does it say to Pruska? It says maybe that gold is still out there waiting to be found.

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And Pruska has something the officer didn't. A metal detector.

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So far, Pruska has made dozens of trips to this area looking for the Nazi gold.

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And he's found several promising leads. He's found grenades, Nazi helmet, ammunition, all things which indicate activity in the area.

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And this isn't a place that had any active fighting during the war.

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These artifacts mean that maybe one or more Nazis were up to something in this area.

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Maybe hiding gold.

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So far, Pruska hasn't found any gold, but like any good treasure hunter, he's still at it.

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In 2019, decades after the end of World War II, a new lead to the location of lost Nazi treasure emerges.

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A Masonic Lodge in Kwedlenburg in Germany decides that they want to atone for their associations with Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist Third Reich.

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They have hung on to a large quantity of documents relating to the Nazi time period, including a diary that was maintained by a former SS officer who wrote under the assumed name Michalis.

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They decide to give all this memorabilia to the Silesian Bridge Foundation, a Polish-German anti-discrimination cooperative, as sort of an apologetic gesture.

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At first, the Silesian Bridge Foundation accepts all this stuff. Just thank you very much.

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It's just a nice way to accept and heal some of the wounds from the past.

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But when they start to read the diary, they realize this gesture could be worth much more.

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It immediately becomes clear why the author used a pseudonym, because the diary details 11 different locations that Himmler himself picked out to hide Nazi treasures.

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Many of these locations are thought to include gold coins, metals, jewelry, items that were deposited with Nazi police for safekeeping as Allied forces approached.

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One of these locations is described as having 47 valuable pieces of art from artists to include Botticelli and Rembrandt.

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The Silesian Bridge decides to go and inspect some of these locations, and they choose as their starting point the biggest hoard of them all.

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And it's a location that is supposedly warehousing 28 tons of Nazi gold.

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It's hidden in an abandoned castle called Hochberg Palace.

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The Foundation puts together a search team, led by their president, Roman Fermanian.

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The location actually makes sense, because Hochberg Palace has a special reputation as a Nazi hangout during World War II.

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During the Second World War, the German military maintained a network of bordellos, some for the common soldiers, some for the officers.

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And during World War II, Hochberg Palace was what they called an ofiziers bordelle, meaning an officer's bordello.

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It's not all that far-fetched to assume that there might have been some hidden treasure here.

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People are constantly coming in and out of this location, so Framaniac actually obtains eyewitness accounts of people who said they saw treasure being stored in the palace.

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Unfortunately, since the war, this site has severely deteriorated, making it dangerous to explore.

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The team starts carefully searching the area.

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They use ground-penetrating radar to sweep the area for safety purposes, and in the process, may have actually revealed the hiding spot.

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The diary says the gold, 48 crates of it, are buried 200 feet down at the bottom of a well.

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This well would have been encased in metal, and in their initial scan, the team discovers what appears to be a large metal casing.

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Encouraged by this promising find, the Foundation hopes to begin digging soon.

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It takes time to coordinate these big search efforts like this. You have to work with the government, you have to work with local authorities.

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There's always the danger of unexploded ordinance, so you have to coordinate with the military as well.

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They're only just now beginning this excavation at Hochberg Palace, and who knows what they'll find.

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Can you imagine $1.7 billion worth of Nazi gold being returned to its victims?

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I hope it happens. The world is watching.

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In addition to their research at Hochberg Palace, the Silesian Bridge Foundation hopes to explore the other ten sites in the diary one by one.

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Each brings a fresh chance to fully recover the missing treasure, and perhaps one day, more will be found.

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I'm Lawrence Fishburne. Thank you for watching History's Greatest Mysteries.