Treasure legend: Ho Toplitz (Part 1)

From East to West there are legends about treasures, stimulating hunting trips from year to year.

From 1943, Lake Toplitz (Austria) was chosen by Nazi Germany as a place to build a naval experimental base. Due to its distinctive remote location, it is believed that the German fascist was buried at the bottom of a huge pool of treasures that could be salvaged from many countries.

Secret under the lake

Lake Toplitz is located in the remote Austrian Alps mountainous region, over 100 meters deep, surrounded by cliffs and dense forests. It is also known as a dead lake because from a depth of 20m, the lake is salty and has no oxygen so the fish cannot survive.

In 1943-1944, the Nazis used Lake Toplitz base to test explosives of different depths. They also fired torpedoes from the lake, carved into large holes on the cliff. At the same time, Nazi Germany began the secret campaign Bernhard.

The purpose of this campaign is to hit allies' economies by launching a large amount of counterfeit money. Nazi Germany has built sophisticated counterfeit money that is almost indistinguishable from real money and plans to spread them across allied nations, causing hyperinflation.

If this campaign succeeds, it will have a significant impact on the outcome of the war. However, in 1945, just before the Bernhard campaign entered the decisive stage, Soviet Red Army approached Berlin. The Nazi regime came to grief, the campaign Bernhard was terminated.

Ho Toplitz

Lake Toplitz became a poisonous forest of poisonous water that became one of the last ramparts of Nazi Germany to escape. Witnesses said they saw the Nazi soldiers at first using military vehicles, then used a carriage to transfer large metal containers to Lake Toplitz.

Millions of pounds of counterfeit money along with printers and everything related to the campaign Bernhard were boxed up onto the boat and dropped to the bottom of Lake Toplitz. It is thought that with the motive of concealing secrets and storing property from the enemy, the Nazis simultaneously poured into Lake Toplitz the gold bullion containers, artworks and countless ivory pearls. treasures that they plundered from many countries across Europe, and also notes that hid Jewish confiscated property.

Flocked search

That rumor has stimulated every expedition to rush to Toplitz Lake to search for treasures, some mysterious deaths have occurred and many movies, books inspired by the Toplitz legend, but luck has not yet fallen. on who. In the lake filled with jagged wooden trees, like a barrier between the road, making attempts to dive into the lake becomes extremely dangerous if not impossible.

2 years after the end of the war, the US Navy let the divers find treasure but one of their divers was entangled in the trees and drowned. In 1959, it was the turn of the Germans to join, this time it seemed they were more fortunate to find a printer with fake £ 72 million containers.

Gerhard Zauner, one of the divers who participated in the treasure hunt in 1959, recalled that he saw a glimpse of the wreck of the plane sinking beneath the tree but could not reach.

The event of discovering counterfeit money boxes coincided with rumors so it provoked people to ignore the danger of finding treasure. In 1963, the Austrian government decided to issue a ban on spontaneous exploration in Lake Toplitz after the incident of a former SS officer leading a scout to explore illegally and the diver drowned.

In 1983, a German biologist accidentally discovered fake British money and many Nazi rockets. In 2000, an expedition team used a search boat for three weeks, but all they got was a box filled with beer bottles that it seemed that someone had deliberately thrown into the lake to play pranks. treasure hunt.

Some experts believe that gold is very heavy, so it may sink deep in the mud beneath the lake.

In 2005, the state-owned company Bundesforste managed Lake Toplitz signed a contract to allow the American treasure hunter Norman Scott to search for three years and share the treasure if found. Scott said he had discovered new clues in the archive in Berlin and Washington, which led him to believe that there was a gold store under the lake. But, the treasure is still there.

In 2009, CBS News hired Ocean Engineering to use a Phantom robot to dive deep into the lake. After many negotiations, they were allowed by the Austrian government to proceed within 30 days. However, even advanced technology has a flaw because if Phantom does not descend deeply, it will not be able to find anything at the bottom, but if it is too deep, it will get mud to lose sight, or even stuck there.

The dead lake area also troubled the crew with hail and a bolt of lightning hit Phantom's navigation system that caused it to malfunction. In their final attempt, they use a 1-man submarine to look at the clue that Phantom discovered before it malfunctioned.

They obtained a block of paper that began to decay. They meticulously restored little by little and determined that they were fake pounds. This finding reinforces the assumption that the secret campaign Bernhard is real, the treasure is real.

Some experts believe that gold is very heavy, so it can sink deep in the mud beneath the lake and is covered by thick, hard-to-detect trees, if it is found difficult to salvage.