Lost in Austria, a $50 million treasure is waiting for
a treasure hunter able to recreate the conditions of an escape route running
from Germany to one of the lakes near Strasburg in the heart of the Austrian
Alps.
The treasure was made up of jewels and gold
confiscated by victims of the Dachau Concentration Camp, the older camp of the
Third Reich started in 1933 in the city of the same name, near Munich. Dachau
housed 30,000 prisoners in 1945, the year in which a group of Nazis ran away
with the treasure before being captured by Allied Forces.
Dachau was not only a prison for Jewish people, but
for about 1,173 Nazi war criminals imprisoned there. One of them, a former
officer of the SS condemned to death, revealed to Dr. Wilhem Groß the existence
of an impressive treasure. Dr. Groß, an Austrian born physician, identified the
place described by the prisoner and shared this information with Edward Greger,
a U.S. Army intelligence officer stationed in Austria in 1952.
Groß and Greger followed the route described by the
German officer toward the Lake Lünersee on the Austrian border with Swiss.
According to the story, the Commandant of the camp loaded the treasure into 4
boxes with the help of his assistants before leaving Dachau. The informer was
one of those officers conspiring to escape with the treasure and then taking
separate ways until the time to recover the cargo arrived.
In the mid-40’s, Lake Lünersee was an isolated
region and they thought that nobody could find the treasure for years... they
were right indeed. Those German officers were led to death for war crimes and
seven years after the treasure was buried, the only man who knew its location
was Dr. Groß. However, in 1952, the area was eroded by the passing of the time
and the only signs to find the treasure disappeared.
Four years later, Groß and Greger returned to the
lake after calculating where the treasure was buried, but a damn constructed in
1956 increased the lake's level submerging the boxes under nearly 75 feet of
water. Greger returned again in 1990, a time when the lake recovered its
original level after the damn was emptied for some days, but the treasure was
not found possibly sunk deeper somewhere inside the lake due to weight of the
boxes.
