Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
NAZI GOLD RUSH
Dig for £200m stolen loot at SS palace
A MODERN-DAY Indiana Jones believes his team have struck gold while searching a palace abandoned by the Nazis.
Investigator Roman Furmaniak thinks the missing Gold of Breslau and art by masters such as Botticelli, Rubens and Monet worth £200million could be at the site.
His team from the Silesian Bridge Foundation have been searching the area in southern Poland for a year and have found a buried sealed 5ft metal canister which could hold four tons of loot.
Mr Furmaniak said: “We are being described everywhere as treasure hunters. In fact we want nothing for ourselves.
“The goal is to hand these deposits over to their rightful owners in the interests of world heritage and as an act of atonement for the Second World War.”
The gold was hidden by Hitler’s henchmen as Russia advanced on the German city of Breslau – now the Polish city of Wroclaw.
The mysterious canister was found 10ft below the surface in an 18th century palace in the village of Minkowskie. It was used as a brothel by Hitler’s evil SS guard but has been left to rot ever since.
Mr Furmaniak and his researchers discovered the location from secret documents, an SS officer’s diary and a map.
They were given the cache by the descendants of the Quedlinburg Lodge, a Christian society which dates back over 1,000 years.
It includes a letter from a senior SS officer to his lover, who worked at the palace. The diary describes one store as containing 47 works of art of international importance, believed to have been stolen.
Mr Furmaniac said: “Several people took part in hiding the deposits in Minkowskie. One was an officer called Von Stein. He used to stay in the palace because he had a lover there. High-ranking SS officers treated it like a brothel.
The foundation is now waiting for permission to raise the canister amid fears it is boobytrapped. One theory is that Nazi Heinrich Himmler ordered the haul be hidden in case he survived the war and could try and create a Fourth Reich after Hitler fell.
Mr Furmaniac said: “We are preparing to dig at 10 sites, where we expect to find much more.”