In Holland it’s gold hunting for the Nazis: the declassified map frees everyone

Treasure hunt in Holland. In the village of Ommeren in the east of the Netherlands, residents are busy looking for loot of precious stones that were supposedly hidden by Nazi soldiers during World War II. The hunt began on the basis of an ancient map contained in an archive of the Dutch National Archives released last week. When the documents were released, after a 75-year confidentiality period, the declassified map clarified that Ommeren, in the eastern province of Gelderland, was where the treasure appeared to have been buried by German soldiers with ammunition crates full of looted diamonds, rubies, gold and silver. The map in question is a hand-drawn diagram complete with a red X to mark the precise location. The map includes a cross-sectional drawing to help indicate the presumed burial site.

Now, in Ommeren, residents have opened excavations, obviously unauthorized, and metal detectors are also used around freshly dug craters in farmland and forests. The village in question was close to the Allied front line during Operation Market Garden in 1944, a daring aerial attempt to create a land route into northern Germany. Declassified documents in the archive include the testimony of a German soldier, who told about a bank in the city of Arnhem, 40 km from Ommeren, hit by a bomb in August 1944, so that the contents of the vault – i.e. jewelry , coins , precious stones and gold watches – have completely disappeared. On the basis of this testimony, it turns out that three or four occupying German soldiers pocketed what they could and hid the loot in ammunition boxes and bread packets, the safest containers they had at hand. Later, in the last weeks of the war, with the withdrawal of the German invaders, the soldiers decided to bury the treasure.

After the war, a Dutch institute set up to track assets expropriated by the Nazis stumbled upon the story of a young German paratrooper, identified as Helmut Sonder, who provided an eyewitness account and sketched a map. But Dutch authorities believe that if the elusive treasure ever existed, it is probably long gone. What’s more, metal detectors have recently been banned in Ommeren, as there is a real risk of you tripping over unexploded WWII grenades, bombs or landmines. Fortunately, no one was injured, but several fines were imposed, and even if someone did find gold, they would be obliged to declare it and hand it over to the local land authority.

Source: IL Tempo

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