An expert on the trail of lost Nazi treasures, potentially worth billions, believes he has found a cache of paintings hidden deep in Germany’s forests, but local bureaucracy prevents him from unearthing the treasure.
Buckhart List, 75, of Austria, is certain that the SS left an arsenal of goods stolen from a Hungarian Jewish art collector in a chamber about 100-140 feet under a forest clearing near the village of Deutschkatharinenberg.
The journalist and author believes the Nazis took potentially 800 paintings, including works by Monet, Cezanne and Pissaro, as well as gold and jewels now “worth billions” into deep underground chambers during the war.
A geophysical study hopes to end the search after more than a decade of speculation, but List now says authorities in Saxony have prevented him from continuing because a Stone Age tool was found about half a mile away, which left the area off limits. for archaeological excavations.
In an appeal to continue his work, he told the Times: ‘I don’t want to be left with nothing. I know this belongs to people… who lost their lives.
Archaeologists continue to search for the Amber Room, a hidden treasure believed to be worth hundreds of millions. Some say it was destroyed in the war, others hidden underground.
French Master: Cezanne’s La Chaine De E’toile Avec Le Pilon Du Roi, which is on display in Glasgow and may have been looted by the Nazis. More Cézannes are among masterpieces believed to lie hidden in chambers beneath Germany
List has been at the forefront of the search for Baron Ferenc Hatvany’s missing masterpieces in recent years, hoping to uncover hundreds of lost masterpieces.
He says a study by Professor Wolfgang Neubauer, director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Virtual Archaeology, in Austria, points to a camera beneath a forest clearing in Germany.
List has been leading the search for missing art collection for more than a decade
Dr. Neubauer and his team helped achieve a breakthrough at Stonehenge using their imaging software in 2010.
The theory goes that a mine near Deutschneudorf was sealed with an explosion to keep out those who were about to discover Nazi treasures and evidence of hidden Jewish gold.
List, who launched his expedition more than a decade ago, believes the hidden cache could hold “billions” in art, gold and jewelry stolen from Budapest during the 1944 occupation.
Now, the challenge is reduced through bureaucracy.
List says he is appealing an excavation ban imposed by local authorities following the discovery of a Stone Age tool nearby.
He believes the chamber may contain the missing masterpieces of Baron Hatvany, a Hungarian Jewish art collector whose collection was stolen during the war.
Many of its treasures were looted from Budapest bank vaults by Red Army soldiers when the city fell to the Soviets in 1945.
But most of the Hatvany Collection, between 250 and 500 pieces, was looted on the orders of Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann, who was in Hungary in 1944 and instituted a policy of arresting Jews and then releasing them in exchange for property – or sending them to Auschwitz.
List said about 12 years ago that he had acquired documents from former Wehrmacht archives reporting a mass shipment of the Hatvany collection to two underground galleries, measuring 6,000 by 4,500 feet, in the Erzgebirge mountains.
With permission from the mayor of nearby Deutschkatherinenberg, Hans-Peter Haustein, he deployed a neutron generator inside the mountain to explore the secret chambers.
The device revealed that, at a depth of 180 feet, there are works that are not detailed on the maps and that appear to be artificial, not natural.
Mr List said: ‘In the winter of 1944-1945, records indicate that a mysterious transport arrived here from Budapest which was coded top secret.
‘One of the photographs provided by the archives was of the Sonnenhaus, a large building just opposite the Fortuna mine where I believe the art is stored.
‘It shows a large contingent of SS. There was no logical military or state purpose for them to be here on a secret mission, unless it was to deliver the works of art into chambers that, climatically, are ideal for art storage.’
Early scans revealed only a Schmeisser machine gun, a Nazi gas mask, plastic explosive detonators and a safe key.
Mayor Haustein, who is also a member of the liberal FDP party in Berlin, said at the time: “The question is not what we find here, but when we find it.”
‘I have seen the evidence and heard testimony from eyewitnesses over the years about the presence of the SS in the town. This is here.’
The Sonnenhaus is already attracting visitors ahead of a descent into the mountain planned for May, which will attempt to open the secret chambers that until now can only be accessed by radar.
However, List’s is not the first application rejected in the search for Nazi gold.
Five applications a year are also submitted to the Thuringian state archaeological office and other agencies to try to dig for the Amber Chamber, a coveted treasure of gold and amber valued at hundreds of millions of dollars today.
All had been rejected until 2017, when the state granted permission to the local forestry association. The excavation evidently did not uncover the Amber Room.
The search for the room, a jewel-filled chamber built in the 18th century, has taken archaeologists everywhere, from shipwreck dives off the coast of Poland to secret forest tunnels in central Europe and excavations of sites used to build the V1 and V2 rockets.
The accepted theory is that it was destroyed by Russian artillery fire when the Red Army stormed the city in 1945. However, there are people who claim that it was razed before the fall.
A recreation of the Amber Room photographed at the Catherine Palace in Russia in 2008.
A Nazi diary, written by SS officer Egon Ollenhauer, claims that Adolf Hitler ordered 260 truckloads of gold, looted treasure and valuables hidden in 11 locations in Poland.
Treasure hunters were recently warned to avoid a former Nazi concentration camp after a documentary claimed Hitler ordered stolen treasure to be buried in tunnels at the site.
Camp inmates pointed American soldiers toward a tunnel containing 21 tons of gold, much of it in the form of gold teeth and rings taken from Jewish Holocaust victims.
The room was originally gifted to Peter the Great by the King of Prussia.
Later, Catherine the Great commissioned a new generation of craftsmen to beautify the room and moved it from the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to her new summer abode in Tsarskoye Selo, on the outskirts of the city.
“When the work was completed in 1770, the hall was dazzling,” wrote art historians Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov.
“It was illuminated by 565 candles whose light reflected on the warm golden surface of the amber and shone on the mirrors, gilding and mosaics.”
Much later, the Germans moved the room to Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, which is now the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.
After the war, the Amber Room became the El Dorado of central Europe, a quest that captivated rich and poor alike.
Made entirely of amber, gold and precious stones, the Amber Room was a masterpiece of Baroque art and was widely considered the most important artistic treasure in the world.