In the spring of 1945, a few weeks before the Netherlands was liberated from the Nazi occupation, five German soldiers buried four cartridges filled with gold, jewelry and watches in a dense forest of a castle. sleepy village in the Netherlands.
Documents show Nazi soldiers took valuables, possibly worth millions of dollars, from the streets after they were blown out of a bank vault in an explosion in the city of Arnhem at the end of the season. summer 1944.
What the men who buried the loot probably didn’t know was that one of their soldiers, a man named Helmut Sonder, was lying in the bushes with war wounds, observing the scene and remembering. it. Mr. Sonder then drew a meticulous map showing the exact location (by three poplars) and the depth (about 1.7 to 2.3 feet) of the buried treasure.
Not much is known about the fate of the man who drew the map, but the document was eventually entered into the Dutch National Archives in The Hague. This month, it was released as part of the archive’s annual “public day,” along with thousands of documents that are no longer classified.
The release of the map spurred a new hunt for gold boxes and trinkets, and raised the reputation of the small village of Ommeren – population 751 – as one of the few places in the world where it can be hidden. Nazi treasure.
“We are on the map,” said Klaas Tammes, former mayor of the municipality that includes Ommeren. “So great.”
Others shared his excitement but expressed frustration at people from all over the country coming to dig up the village, about an hour’s drive southeast of Amsterdam.
According to Tammes, who lived at the site where the treasure was likely buried, dozens of people came down with shovels and metal detectors, and one man even carried a divination stick. A photo that went viral among residents showed another man standing waist-deep in soil on one side of a road in the area.
The mystery has captivated local residents and received widespread attention in the Dutch and international media, but its main question remains unanswered: Is the loot still there? ?
“I have my doubts,” said Joke Honders, a local historian who works for the regional museum in Ommeren and lives in the next town. However, she added, after consulting a historical atlas as well as hand-drawn maps, she believes she knows where the treasure might be – a place no one has yet searched for, according to her. know.
When asked for more precise details, she said, “I won’t tell you!”
It’s not entirely clear what will happen to the treasure if someone finds it.
Ms Honders said she was not interested in keeping the things inside the boxes if she found them. “It’s not about the treasure itself,” she said. “It was all stolen; there is so much negativity attached to that.”
Sebastiaan Hogenberg, an amateur metal detectorist who runs a YouTube channel where he talks about items he finds across the Netherlands, says searching for treasure in the area can be a dangerous pursuit. dangerous. There are unexploded World War II bombs in the ground.
On its website, the Ommeren city government urges fortune seekers to stay away as real treasure digging is not allowed. Birgit van Aken-Quint, a spokesman for the municipality, said that after the release of the map, the authorities received numerous messages from people who claimed to know the exact location and offered to reveal it for money. . Since then, the situation has calmed down, she said, and about five people have applied for official permission to search for the treasure.
Rumors of the treasure first began among Dutch soldiers stationed in Germany in 1946, according to documents at the National Archives. A post-war government organization in charge of finding and managing stolen property learned of it in December 1946 and ordered an official search of the area.
The first search in January 1947 failed because the ground was frozen. The document shows that a second attempt a few weeks later was unsuccessful because the metal detector was faulty. In a third search, in the summer of 1947, the agency brought Sonder, the former soldier who drew the map, from Germany back to the Netherlands to show the exact location, the documents show.
They found nothing.
After the fourth and final attempt, in August 1947, officials concluded that the treasure might no longer be there, the documents show.
Ommeren residents say they have never heard of the treasure. “This was a complete surprise,” Mr Tammes said. “This story is not known here.”
“We came across this map by accident,” said Annet Waalkens, a researcher at the National Archives, which has hundreds of thousands of maps in her collection. “When we saw this, we found our own treasure.”
She added, “It is beautiful that a piece of yellowed paper can evoke such emotions.”
Documents suggest that Mr Sonder may have fabricated the whole thing, but Dutch officials in charge of the search say this is unlikely. Another theory is that one or more government searchers secretly found it. And another possibility – and what some consider the most likely – is that one of the Nazi soldiers who had hidden the treasure returned and quietly unearthed it himself.
No scenario has been proven and it is unclear whether Mr Sonder is still alive.
This is not the first time that the village, which is particularly quiet in winter, devoid of cyclists and campers who flock to the area in the summer, has become an archaeological site. In 2016, three prospectors found a trove of 31 gold Roman coins.
Not everyone joined the excitement about possible Nazi treasure.
“I thought it was going to explode,” said Dicky Briene, 76, who has lived in the same house in Ommeren for 54 years and said she has never seen any visitors carry shovels or metal detectors. “And probably nothing.”
