Hunt continues for Nazi treasure

[truthisfreedom]

Source: Yahoo news

Tue Feb 26, 6:20 AM ET
DEUTSCHKATHARINENBERG, Germany - German treasure hunters were to begin digging Tuesday for what they claim to be plunder buried by the Nazis in a man-made cavern near the Czech border.
...

Haustein said last week that he was convinced they had found the storied Amber Room treasure, but later acknowledged that while there could be "cultural treasures" in the cavern, such as paintings or amber paneling, they are not things that show up with a metal detector.

The Amber Room — named for magnificent wall panels of golden-brown amber — was stolen by the Nazis from a palace outside St. Petersburg during World War II and has never been recovered in its entirety.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080226/ap_on_re_eu/germany_nazi_gold

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Nice distraction, at least.

[DFW]

1. A huge portion of Hitler's gold was already taken in 1945

The Red Army took Berlin, and with it all the gold in the Reichsbank.
Whereas the gold bars with the Swastika were mostly melted down and
recast into bars with Soviet markings, literally tons of old gold coins with
unimaginable collector value were taken away intact. Almost this whole
treasure was spirited out of the old Soviet Union by a savvy band of
Soviet insiders who saw the writing on the wall before 1991.

Some examples I know of: the entire mintage of the Danzig 25 Gulden
coins of 1930 started showing up a little over ten years ago. Thirty or
so of these coins were distributed to members of the (the German) Danzig
parliament, and the rest were returned to the Reichsbank in Berlin,
suppposedly lost or melted down. Not so. Through a renegade band of
ex-Soviets, the entire mintage of 4000 coins showed up in the USA.
These coins used to go for about $20,000 each. Now you can buy all you want
for $3000 each, and that may be too much already (I don't follow it
that closely). Many were sold to "investors" at $2950 or so, and that
is the only reason they are not $500.

The same group has also offered several hundred thousand Danish gold
20 Kroner coins of the 1926-1931 period. These dates list as extremely
rare, selling for some $10,000 apiece, as only ten or so of each were known
to have survived. The same shadowy group that was selling the Danzig coins
through a firm in Florida also offered the ENTIRE mintage of the lost Danish
coins. The Nazis took them from the Danes when they occupied Denmark in 1940,
and the Soviets took them from the Nazis. The whole hoard is available, albeit
without a receipt, as these coins are still the legal property of the Kingdom
of Denmark. No takers, so far (DUH). The firm in Florida was told that their
children (!!) were already too old to see the end of the Soviet gold coin hoard.
They also had the coins that Stalin stole from the Spanish Republic in 1936,
including vast numbers of old gold coins from Spain and Latin America.

So, while there may be hoards of Nazi gold yet to be found in Europe, there
is at least one huge, almost unimaginably so, hoard of gold that was taken
from them by the Soviets in 1945, and is already bunkered in the UK and the USA.
These people also control gold coins that the Russians already owned without
taking them from anyone. There was a hoard of 20,000 or so US $20 gold coins
dispersed in 1998. Some of the jerks who were selling it to the public made the
incredible mistake of crowing that their hoard had been intact since the year
1917, figuring, I guess, that they thought no one in North America knew enough
history to know of any earth-shaking events in 1917. The Ex-KGB guys must have
gone ballistic when they saw the ad, because the mention of the hoard's being
intact since 1917 disappeared from all subsequent articles or ads trying to sell
coins out of the hoard.

This is no speculation either. I have seen some of this stuff. It's for real.

[Hardrada]

4. I've noticed a lot of 20 mark Prussian and Imperial German

gold coins showing up on eBay in NF or M condition. Is that part of all this coin dispersal?

[DFW]

7. Could be, though not necessarily

Some of the most recent dispersals were about 12,000 so-called "Juliusturm" coins, mostly uncirculated 20 and 10 Reichsmark gold coins from 1872-1875 (mostly 10 Mark coins from 1872-A, i.e Berlin mint). The "Juliusturm" was a tower in Berlin where the German Reich that lost World War 1 stored a lot of the gold coins that were used to pay war reparations to France after the "Great" war. These coins weren't especially rare beforehand, though. A good indication would be if they were in plastic graded so-called "slabs" from either PCGS or NGC, and MS-65 or MS-66. I don't follow those things on eBay, so I have no idea. The Danzig 25 Gulden coins of 1930 are ALL from this group, though, and they were sold in North America by the hundreds as "investments" and show up there regularly. You might check on eBay to see if any of these are there. As there is no more Free State of Danzig, no legal entity has made any claim on these coins, and they are perfectly legal to own, ans are the 10 and 20 RM coins. They are completely indistinguishable from coins that were around before the KGB hoards were released. The 20,000 $20 coins are easy to distinguish, even if they are also identical to thousands of other coins of the same date and grade. They were sorted in a Las Vegas branch (founded in 1956) of the Wells Fargo bank, and dubbed "Wells Fargo Nevada Gold" although they were not of the old west (over 90% dated 1908, rest 1907), and sold with great hype, again, mostly to "investors." Some firm in California was distributing them, as well as having other outfits promote and sell them. I know of one big firm back in Dallas that was offered the "opportunity" to sell them to investors, and they passed, smelling a scam, but plenty of others got on the bandwagon.

The 20 mark and 10 mark pieces were common already, and as such impossible to distinguish positively from other similar coins already on the market for decades. The Danzig coins of 1930 and the so-called "Wells Fargo" coins (as long as they are in plastic holders with this designation) are blatant as to their origin.

[happyslug]

8. The gold you site MAY NOT ever have been in Soviet hands

Most German Gold (including Coins) were recovered by the US Army in April 1945 while the war was still on:

http://www.wealth-creators-club.com/articles-About-Gold-013.html

Basically the Soviet could NOT be the one releasing this Gold, they never had it. The Nazis took it South where it was captured by the US Army. In turn over the next 50 years the Gold was dispersed to various Countries the Gold was stolen from. The Two biggest hangups was first, the Cold war and the refusal of the US to turn over Gold to Countries under Soviet Control and second, that Gold taken from victims of the Concentration camp was part of the loot. Much of the domestic and Stolen Gold was used to buy items overseas, so Sweden, Turkey, Spain as while as Switzerland had Gold transferred to them in exchange for items the Nazis wanted to fight WWII. Thus by the time the Gold was recovered, much of the Gold had at least two claims on it, first from Countries the Nazis stole the Gold from and second from the Survivors of the Concentration Camps where Gold was "recovered" by the Nazis (Mostly be removing the gold fillings of people killed by the Nazis).

[DFW]

10. Whatever else the Nazis took to South America

This particular group was indeed from Russia. It involved only collector
coins, nothing else. Someone (or someones) knew what they were doing.
There were numismatic specialists among the people controlling this
hoard, that much is clear.

Russians were the ones controlling it. Their current Central Bank
even knows the names and addresses of the former Soviet officials
controlling the hoard. One of the principals now lives in the Bay
Area. Our outfit even has his address. Some of it was sold in small
groups by the Soviet government to German dealers in this kind of
material back in the 1970s, though not on this massive a scale.
Storage of a hoard this huge would have been a problem in South
America of the 1940s. Whom to trust with it?

Only a government could handle it. The Soviet Union had five cave-like
storage centers for their gold. Four of them were for pure bullion and
modern strikings. One, in the Urals, was for the older coins. This is
the one that was raided by their own people. The first wave of large
sales of these coins in the early 1990s was all London-based delivery.
Even those wishing Switzerland-based delivery had to arrange air freight
from London. I.E. Bank of England or Royal Bank of Scotland (I'm told
both were used, but we have no independent verification of that).

[fascisthunter]

2. Check Crawford Texas..... (nt)

[Yavin4]

11. More Like Kennebunkport, ME

Crawford is just a movie set which will be struck on Jan. 22, 2009.

[damntexdem]

3. Where's Indiana Jones when we need him?

;-)

[DFW]

12. If you'd been sent to some of the places I've been sent to

You'd know where they got their inspiration for the Indiana Jones
character, I can tell you! And some of the stuff I've seen has come
close to some of the stuff he was chasing after (without the celestial
participation).

[AngryAmish]

5. Oddly prescient

[Dover]

6. Another thread about this in the Science forum >>>

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=228x38401

[Xithras]

9. Cultural treasures, including the Amber Room, probably wouldn't survive this long.

Remember that car they pulled out of the hole in Oklahoma recently. Groundwater has an amazing ability to penetrate any underground chamber no matter how well designed it was, and most of the German underground hoard sites that have been uncovered were only designed to stay sealed for a few years. If there is a chamber down there, anything that is not made of stone or gold is probably mush by now. Literally thousands of paintings, tapestries, and other priceless artworks vanished during WWII and their fate remains unknown today. Many were simply destroyed when the buildings housing them were bombed. Other buried pieces would have rotted away decades ago.

According to the sources at the time, the Amber Room panels were already disintegrating from age when they were stripped in the 1940's (it was already 250 years old at that point and had never been restored). The odds of it surviving the past 60 years in a damp, probably flooded subterranean chamber are virtually zero. Paintings on cloth canvas have an even smaller chance of surviving.