Secret Code: Music Score May Lead to Nazi Gold

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Secret Code: Music Score May Lead to Nazi Gold

By Björn Hengst and Benjamin Dürr

codebrekers.nl

After some initial digs, a Dutch filmmaker believes he may have found the site of buried Nazi treasure long rumored to exist. He was led to the Bavarian town of Mittenwald after cracking a code believed to be hidden in a music score.

Three attempts have been made in recent weeks to find buried Nazi treasure in the Bavarian town of Mittenwald, close to the Austrian border. Even though the holes in the ground have since been filled, the traces left by drills and blue markings are still visible below a thin layer of autumn leaves.

ANZEIGE




Authorities granted permission for the undertaking in "a bid for clarity," and before too long, the story was making headlines in local papers. "The Hunt for Nazi Gold," the Garmisch-Partenkirchner Tagblatt called it. Residents' reactions range from annoyed to amused. "I've never seen anything like it," says one. "I can't wait to see what they find down there," says another.
Behind it all is 51-year-old Leon Giesen, a Dutch filmmaker and musician with a tantalizing theory. He is convinced that Nazi treasure is languishing below Mittenwald's roads -- gold or diamonds, at the very least.
The whole idea of Nazi gold has long held a grip on the public imagination, and as a former Nazi stronghold, Bavaria provides fertile soil for many an aspiring Indiana Jones. In 1944, with the Allies and the Soviet Army threatening to advance, it was here that Heinrich Himmler, one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, planned to build an Alpine Fortress -- a national redoubt where Nazi Germany would fight from until the end.
And that's not all. In April 1945, the Wehrmacht armed forces and officials of the Reichsbank approved a plan to store at least part of the reserves of the German Reichsbank at Einsiedl, a small town on the southwest shore of Lake Walchen. Much of these assets were handed over to the Allies, but around 100 gold bars, sacks of dollars and Swiss francs and possibly even more hoards went missing.
'Like a Treasure Map'
Even though Giesen's theory is an outlandish one by any standards, it has generated reams of publicity in his native Netherlands. It revolves around an annotated score of the "March Impromptu" by composer Gottfried Federlein.
Legend has it that in the final days of World War II, Adolf Hitler's private secretary Martin Bormann scribbled letters, figures and runes on the score that form a code giving the coordinates of the hidden Nazi treasure.
Supposedly, a military chaplain was tasked with taking the score to someone in Munich. But it apparently never arrived, instead ending up decades later in the hands of Dutch journalist Karl Hammer Kaatee.
After spending years attempting to crack the code, he finally made the score public last December and was promptly deluged with e-mails and suggestions. Even though there is no proof that the document is genuine, it exerts a magic pull on many.
"It's like a treasure map that can't be deciphered," says Jürgen Proske, a local historian from Garmisch-Partenkirchen and a hobby archeologist who has located Wehrmacht paraphernalia and a wine cellar from 1940 in the mountains around Mittenwald and Garmisch-Partenkirchen.
The Mystery of Mittenwald


But filmmaker Giesen now believes he's solved the mystery, maintaining that the line added to the score that reads "Wo Matthias die Saiten Streichelt" ("where Matthew plucks strings") is a reference to Mittenwald and its famous son Matthias Klotz, who founded the town's violinmaking tradition. Moreover, he contends that the score contains a schematic diagram of the train tracks that ran through Mittenwald in the 1940s, and that the rune and fragmented sentence "Enden der Tanz" ("end the dance") at the end of the score means the treasure can be found at the former site of the buffer stops. The drilling effort in Mittenwald proved fruitful, unearthing a large quantity of unidentified metals. "Geologists call it an anomaly, a substance that doesn't belong there," says Giesen. He is now looking for a company specialized in excavations and dealing with explosives to continue the hunt, and is hoping to pay the costs by raising €25,000 with a crowdfunding campaign. He is also considering making a documentary about the project.
Local historian Jürgen Proske has his doubts about the find. "It could be a treasure chest," he says. "But it could just be a manhole cover."

http://www.spiegel.de/international...enwald-is-site-of-nazi-treasure-a-923530.html
 
Wasn't there a load of forged British £5 notes along with some gold found in one of the lakes in Austria a few years back?
 
Yep 1959 it says...

Counterf-Hitler: Examples from the £134million in dodgy bank notes Adolf hoped would ruin the British economy expected to fetch £2,000 at auction

By Daily Mail Reporter
UPDATED: 20:16 GMT, 12 July 2011


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Loss leader: Adolf Hitler in 1944, still plotting to win the war

A rare set of fake bank notes Hitler had printed in a bid to ruin the British economy during World War Two are expected to fetch £2,000 at auction.

Hitler hoped the £134million of counterfeit notes he produced in 'Operation Bernhard' would force a huge hike in inflation and spark a cash crisis if introduced to wartime Britain.

He ordered millions of the notes, in £5, £10, £20 and £50 denominations to be printed in 1942. Four bank notes recovered from Lake Toplitz in Austria will be auctioned next month.
The £5, £10, £20 and £50 notes will go under the hammer at Mullock's auctioneers at Ludlow Racecourse, Shropshire on August 18.

Nazi spies had been ordered to smuggle the cash into Britain and flood the economy with the fake money.

But Hitler's plan was foiled when British spies got wind of the idea and intercepted the shipment of the notes.
The Bank of England first learned of a plot from a spy as early as 1939. It first came across the actual notes in 1943, and declared them 'the most dangerous ever seen.'

The initial plan was to destabilize the British economy by dropping the notes from aircraft, but Hermann Goering's Luftwaffe declared it did not have enough planes to deliver the forgeries, and the assets were put in the hands of SS foreign intelligence.
Many were transferred from SS headquarters to a former hotel near Meran in South Tyrol, Northern Italy, from where they were laundered and used to pay for strategic imports and German secret agents operating in the Allied countries.
As late as the 1940s every banknote issued by the Bank of England was recorded in large leather-bound ledgers, still in the Bank's archives, and clerks first recorded the counterfeits from a British bank in Tangiers.


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At the war's end the mint notes still in Germany were dumped in Lake Toplitz together with the printing plates made to produce them after 'Operation Bernhard' was abandoned with just a handful of notes having made it into British circulation.
But they were enough for the Bank of England to withdraw all banknotes of £5 and over from circulation after it had designed and printed a new set of paper money.

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Bullseye: Perfect forgery of a £50 note produced by expert counterfeiters in Sachsenhausen

Auctioneer Richard Westwood-Brookes said: 'These notes are extremely rare.

'They never made it into circulation and were part of the batch that were dumped in the lake in 1945.

'They were taken out of the lake by divers but have amazingly stayed in great condition.

'Due to the quality they have been kept in and the fact they are so rare I think they are likely to garner a fair bit of interest.

'They rarely come up for sale and are very rare because most were destroyed.'

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Perfect crime: Karl Markovics as Jewish career criminal Saloman Sorowitsch, seated, and August Diehl as Burger in the Oscar-winning The Counterfeiters

The Nazis forced Jewish prisoners, experts in engraving and printing, held at the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp to produce the notes.

By the time Sachsenhausen was evacuated in April 1945 the printing press had produced 8,965,080 banknotes with a total value of £134,610,810.
The notes are considered among the most perfect counterfeits ever produced, being almost impossible to distinguish from the real currency.
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Bank robbery: A rare set of the fake bank notes Hitler had printed in a bid to ruin the British economy

Mr Westwood Brookes added: 'It was a completely audacious plot by Hitler and if it had worked it would have been a serious blow to our economy.

'Luckily it did not and luckily for us we managed to capture their agents.

'It is a great story and these notes represent a major triumph for the British intelligence services over the Nazis.'
Treasure hunters have been drawn to Lake Toplitz ever since a group of diehard Nazis retreated to the Austrian Alps in the final months of the Second World War. With US troops closing in and Germany on the brink of collapse, they transported a set of wooden boxes to the lake by horse-drawn wagon, and sunk them.

Nobody knows exactly what was inside. Some believe they contained gold looted by German troops throughout Europe and carried back to Germany.

Others that they contain documents showing where assets confiscated from Jewish victims were hidden in Swiss bank accounts.

In 1959 a diving team financed by the German magazine Stern retrieved the forged sterling currency Operation Bernhard hidden in boxes, and a printing press.

No gold was found, although it does pop up in the James Bond movie Goldfinger, where Bond hands over an ingot from Lake Toplitz to tempt villain Auric Goldfinger.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-expected-fetch-2k-auction.html#ixzz2fbey0Vjo
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There's been all manner of rumours about NAZI gold and treasures, one was General Patton who died in a road accident was supposedly murdered because he was involved somehow and that much of the gold was dumped in the deepest lakes in Austria.
 
I know there is a rumour currently trying to gain traction involving Patton and the so called "Holy Lance" apparently he was planning on flogging it and shipping it to the US but his death meant it returned to Austria.

Basically I think people just sit around dreaming up idiotic ideas they can sell to the History channel.
 
I know there is a rumour currently trying to gain traction involving Patton and the so called "Holy Lance" apparently he was planning on flogging it and shipping it to the US but his death meant it returned to Austria.

Basically I think people just sit around dreaming up idiotic ideas they can sell to the History channel.

I read a book about that, the search and recovery by a US Army officer. Very interesting.
 
I read a book about that, the search and recovery by a US Army officer. Very interesting.

The problem with that book is that the Viennese spear has been dated to the 7th century which makes it an awfully convenient fact for an item that was meant to be at an event 7 centuries earlier.

Essentially it is up there with Nazi UFO's and Nuclear bombs, a fantasy some people just cant let go of.
 
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