Gold stolen by the Nazi's from the Amber Room may have been found.

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

And to think I only live a little over an hour from the site!!!


Treasure hunters in Germany have announced they've found a secret stash of Nazi gold in an underground cavern and they believe it could be from the looted Amber Room of the Russian czars, Der Speigel reports. Instruments have detected what could be 2 tons of gold in the cavern near a town on the Czech border. The site was pinpointed using coordinates found among the belongings of a former Luftwaffe staffer who died recently. • The fabulous Amber Room was dismantled by the Nazis and moved to Germany from occupied Russia, but all trace of it disappeared as the war drew to a close. "A friend told me before he died that the Nazis sent trainloads of valuables to this area throughout the spring of 1945," said the leader of the search. Further investigation will have to wait until explosives experts have checked for booby traps.
Germans Find Hidden Nazi Gold - Newser

And from the actual German news article:

German Treasure Hunters Claim to Have Found Amber Room
By David Crossland

Has the Amber Room, the 18th-century chamber decoration the Nazis stole from the Soviet Union in World War II, finally been found? German treasure hunters say they may have solved the decades-old mystery.

Treasure hunters in Germany claim they have found hidden gold in an underground cavern that they are almost certain contains the Amber Room treasure, believed by some to have been stashed away by the Nazis in a secret mission in the dying days of World War II.


PHOTO GALLERY: THE FABLED AMBER ROOM
Click on a picture to launch the image gallery (8 Photos)

The discovery of an estimated two tonnes of gold was made at the weekend when electromagnetic pulse measurements located the man-made cavern 20 meters underground near the village of Deutschneudorf on Germany's border with the Czech Republic.

The team, which used heavy digging equipment, hasn't been inside the room but analysis of the electromagnetic test has led it to believe that the cavern contains gold.

"I'm well over 90 percent sure we have found the Amber Room," the mayor of Deutschneudorf, Heinz-Peter Haustein, who led the search, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. "The chamber is likely to be part of a labyrinth of storage rooms that the Nazis built here. I knew it was in this area. I just never knew exactly where."

Haustein, 53, is a member of Germany's federal parliament for the opposition liberal Free Democrats and has been searching for the Amber Room in the Ore Mountain region of eastern Germany for a decade.

"A friend told me before he died that the Nazis sent truckloads and trainloads of valuables to this area throughout the spring of 1945," he said. The excavation site is next to a long-abandoned railway station.

He said the coordinates for the chamber had come from fellow treasure hunter Christian Hanisch, who had found them when he was going through the documents of his father, a Luftwaffe signaller, after he died in October.


REPRINTS
Find out how you can reprint this SPIEGEL ONLINE article in your publication. "There was a note written next to the coordinates that the site contained Nazi party gold in 12-kilo bars. If the gold is there, the Amber Room will be too," said Haustein. He said he had dug in exactly the same spot a year ago but had not conducted any electromagnetic tests that time.

Haustein said it would probably take him until Easter to get into the chamber because it may contain booby traps and has to be secured by explosives experts and engineers.

"This has got too risky for us to do it alone. There could be mines down there." He said the regional authorities had agreed to help with the excavation.

The Amber Room, made of amber panels backed with gold leaf, was created by German and Russian craftsmen in the early 18th century and given by Prussia's King Friedrich Wilhelm I to his Russian ally Czar Peter the Great in 1716.

In October 1941, four months after the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, they disassembled it from the Catherine Palace near what was then Leningrad and brought it to East Prussia, to Königsberg -- now the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad. Part of it was exhibited in Königsberg Castle during the war. It disappeared in 1945.

There have been hundreds of theories about its fate. Some historians claim it was destroyed in bombing raids on Königsberg, others that it was lost at sea.

Over the years, various searches have failed to uncover it. Haustein said he had received many leads over the years that the Amber Room was hidden in crates along with a trove of other treasures somewhere in the network of copper, tin and silver mines of the Ore Mountains along what is now the German-Czech border.

He has spent tens of thousands of euros of his own money on the hunt.


NEWSLETTER
Sign up for Spiegel Online's daily newsletter and get the best of Der Spiegel's and Spiegel Online's international coverage in your In- Box everyday.

"If we find the treasure it will probably be declared the property of the Federal Republic of Germany as legal successor to the Third Reich," said Haustein.

"It would be good if the state could hand it over to the Russians without preconditions and if the Russians could then hand over the art they looted from Germany. That would be a sign of national reconciliation. That's my goal."

Haustein he had received hundreds of emails in recent days since the find had become public, including some from Chile, Argentina and Bolivia, where many Nazis fled after the war.

One email he received on Tuesday contained a claim far-fetched enough to be amusing. "It said that the Nazis burnt a doppelgänger of Hitler outside the Berlin bunker and that the body of the real Hitler was buried with the Amber Room," Haustein says. "So who knows what else we may find?"

Digging For Nazi Treasure: German Treasure Hunters Claim to Have Found Amber Room - International - SPIEGEL ONLINE - News

[Heinz]

wow!

Shall be interesting to see exactly what treasures are in there.


Being only an hour away maybe you could have got in first ey

[Konigstiger205]

I would love the see the site...there a couple of abandoned bunkers here in Romania...a friend told me there's one in the woods near his grandfathers village...

[Wayne Little]

Keep us posted Adler! Good stuff mate.

[A4K]

Ditto Wayne, be interesting to see what they've found exactly

[Soundbreaker Welch?]

This sounds like Indiana Jones!



Except I think he would have risked it without the bomb squads, being as reckless as he is.

Say Adler, could you go there?

[Lucky13]

Interesting....

[Thorlifter]

Nice article. I hope they post of pics of it.

[timshatz]

I dunno. People've been finding the Amber Room for years. The only thing he has is some old documents and a ground imaging radar pic. Could be the Amber Room, could be a bomb storage dump.

Also, I think the Amber Room wouldn't take too well to being underground all those years, unprotected. Was thinking of the 57 Plymouth they buried out in Kansas. After 50 years, they dug it up and the car was a mess. Rusted and waterlogged. Has to be totally restored.

Then again, it is interesting. Be neat just to see what happens.

[Njaco]

Neat find if it is.

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

I would like to head out to the site but it is actually a bit farther than I though and you would not get close to it anyhow.

[timshatz]

Probably have guards, dogs, barbed wire ect. all over the place. If it isn't the Amber Room, but turns out to be a Gold Deposit, you are talking big bucks.

Let's look at the math of it, each bar weights about 27.5lbs (at least at Fort Knox they do). Two tons of it would come out to 145 bars. Each bar is 7" x 3 5/8 x 1 3/4". 8 stacks of it would come out to 31" tall each, and in a rough square, about the same size as a two high file cabinet. Probably even smaller.

Doesn't sound right to see something that small on ground penetrating radar. Probably a lot of silver with it or something else completely different.

But, if it is the Gold and not the Amber Room, it is worth something like $60 million. Not shabby pay for poking around in the woods of Germany for 10 years.

[Arsenal VG-33]

Who owns the property, and what will happen IF he does find all of this gold? I can only imagine all the peoples/group who will lay claim to parts of it, if not all.

[DerAdlerIstGelandet]

Originally Posted by Arsenal VG-33

Who owns the property, and what will happen IF he does find all of this gold? I can only imagine all the peoples/group who will lay claim to parts of it, if not all.

It does not matter. Finds like this are automaticaly taken under the Governments jurisdiction.

[seesul]

Yep, it´s few miles behind Czech/German boarder. But I don´t belive they found it... But, let´s see...