Fellow conspiracy realist. We are returning to you with some classic episodes from the evenings of your Full Disclosure. We are right now recording with our super producer Andrew in a variety of hotels in New York City.
It's true, some of us near walls apart.
It's the future.
It's a brave new world.
And guys, I got a hot take. You ready, Okay, Nazis aren't cool?
Okay, Yeah, I could get with that. I mean, that's okay, get good.
Not that hot.
As it turns out, it reminds me of a Norm McDonald, nol, the famous, famous comedian who had himself some takes on Nazis. And what a great setup for this classic episode. Guys, we talk a lot about Nazis, you know, like looking back through the show, more than anybody ever should.
Yeah, they did a lot of pretty horrendous things. They plundered a whole bunch and somehow they managed to fund a giant military right, so there are all these rumors about where that money came from, where did all the plundered stuff go to?
And when they weren't plundering and hoarding their gold like smoug the Dragon, they were also chasing Indiana Jones around and you know, trying to summon demons from ancient religious relics.
In twenty nineteen, we asked ourselves, is there any truth or is there any factual basis to the very many Nazi gold conspiracies and Nazi making conspiracies that continue in the modern day. I think it's fair to say we were all surprised by what we discovered.
Yes, as will you be.
From UFOs to psychic powers and government conspiracies, history is riddled with unexplained events. You can turn back now or learn the stuff they don't want you to know. A production of iHeart Radios How Stuff Works.
Hello, Welcome back to the show. My name is Matt, my name is Noel.
They call me Ben. We are joined, as always in spirit with our super producer Paul Mission Control Decan. Today we are joined in person with our super producer Seth Johnson, who you may recognize from earlier episodes. Most importantly, you are you. You are here, and that makes this stuff they don't want you to know. We're We're diving back into the storied world depicted in action and venture films
from the seventies and the eighties and the nineties. You know the kind of national treasure Indiana Jones, three Kings sort of vibe.
Can steal a declaration of independence?
No, now, well and well kind of. I mean they're going to steal all kinds of treasure from countries across Europe, and.
That cha wealth is an independence of sorts. Right, we were talking off air about our various lottery plans. I don't know if I ever shared it with you, Matt. My list of pranks to pull is an eccentric billionaire.
Oh no, it's your Google doc and Hodgman on.
Its Google doc. Yeah, it's an old one. Yeah, but I keep it just you know, if something occurs, it's good to have sort of a vision board of sorts.
And it's also a good idea to give Google a heads up.
Oh yeah, oh yeah, you know the love, the love what I have in store for the planet. So we are talking about treasure, literal tons of gold stolen during wartime and hidden away. This story takes place in World War Two, but it's it's not unique because we know that the chaos left in the wake of global conflicts is were many people an opportunity? What's that old line? Chaos as a ladder. I believe that was from Game
of Thrones. Perhaps maybe there's a little finger. Yeah, okay, yeah, so little Finger was not commenting on the Nazi regime, but for members of the Nazi regime, that statement holds true. Here are the facts. First. First things first, the Nazi Party stole not a ton of stuff. They stole tons and tons of things, thousands of tons, millions of tons of stuff. And it's common knowledge that they looted numerous groups. They took the assets of victims of the Holocaust, of
citizens and repressed countries. They looted entire banks of countries when they occupied them.
Well, yeah, and you can you can kind of begin to understand the pattern. When you have an invading army that goes into one place that is not controlled by you or your government, then you essentially are victorious militarily. Then the spoil, unfortunately go to you, and then you use those to then fund the next one that you enter. And it really is like this huge series of bank heists that we can kind of see painted across Europe during World War Two.
And you know, one thing I noticed is that none of the invading or occupying forces ever took the money that they had and put it towards supporting the people. It was always just as you said, to further fund expansionist ambitions. We know that Germany when it was under control of the Nazi Party had a real dilemma, a physical limit to the amount of resources that they could generate within their own domain. So they had to they
had to get liquidity, they had to get wealth. They were able to get a bunch of gold, and they needed help swapping that gold for currency that they could
then use to acquire the stuff they needed. But didn't have high quality iron, oil, tungsten, other materials like that, and so they went to the neutral powers, the neutral countries in this conflict, like Switzerland that's going to be one of the stars of our show today, And they asked Swiss banks and Swiss institutions to help them transfer gold,
transfer currencies, and commodities between nations. Because even though there was a war going on, businesses kept running, right, Banks were still in play, very much so.
And likely profiting from said war in some ways.
Absolutely, IBM as well.
It wasn't just banks, oh oh, absolutely, But then you know, you see this as the new system that is created for their money necessities the right the third Reich, and it kind of works for a time, but then as the well, it's not. They didn't know the war was
coming to a close. But as things weren't going so well for the Axis powers, and as the Allied powers are gaining more and more allies and gaining more and more support, it's harder and harder for the Nazi Party to use a lot of these third party neutral countries to do a lot of this fencing essentially.
Exactly, yes, And I love that you're using the phrase fencing, because this system was a system of laundering resources and fencing stolen goods. By nineteen forty four, the writing was
on the wall. Businesses, governments, access and Allied powers alike knew that the war was not going to keep going, and Germany became more and more reliant on institutions in Switzerland because other neutral parties started to acquiesce to Allied demands and they said, look, we've got to put some distance between you can't we can't accept gold and coins right now, our specie as they're called. We also are going to be less and less likely to accept Reich marks.
And now Germany has the option of paying with foreign currency. But it turns out that years of belligerents and militarism often don't leave governments with a lot of foreign currency because they burn a lot of bridges, literally to the ground exactly.
So these banks essentially became clearing houses for stolen German gold from numerous occupied countries that could then be converted to a less objectionable form of currency and medium, if you will. Diplomatic cables from the time support this, for example, the fact that the Swiss National Bank actually helped the German Reichsbank convert an estimated fifteen million in stolen Dutch gold and they didn't ask any questions.
That's the craziest part.
No, they asked, dud, my bank asks question.
If I deposit more than five thousand dollars, Like how it's you know what I mean, Like, it's it's insane.
The level of brazen crookedness.
In this situation here, right yeah.
Well yeah, but it's from an objective stance, it's really messed up. Because if you are a banking institution and your primary goals are the primary goals of controlling as much money as possible to be able to pump out more money and loan. So then take more money in and you get an offer of fifteen million dollars to be deposited. Depending on where it's coming from, maybe it doesn't matter so much at least I don't know. That's really looking at in a cold way and it's it sucks.
Well. There's also plausible deniability.
Exactly who knows, I yeah, well we do know kind of with the through the cables, but the exact way in which the Swiss bank was approached with the money.
Right right where they approached the a proxy or or something. That's why the Swiss National Bank example is important, because it was the actual German state actor bank that was interactive with them directly. This is strange because sure one could say that, let's say I'm the head of a Swiss bank. One could say, well, I see so many transactions all the time. We move a lot of a lot of money around the world. We work in volume. Baby,
I can't be line item checking every single Nazi gold request. Yeah, I mean, I don't know if Swiss bankers are that casual at that time, but we do know this was a very common practice. According to the CIA, German efforts to acquire foreign currency and converted to war materials became increasingly clandestine as the Allied forces were encroaching and as the war was turning in their favor.
Well, it makes total sense, right, and it matches right up with our lines episode, where like you said, as they're seeing the writing on the wall, they're going to try and secret away this money, just as they secreted away themselves and the important officers and scientists and things they wanted to be able to control it later.
Perhaps, yes, that was the idea, and that's what the Allied forces believed was happening. For Germany, a lot of problems cropped up very quickly. They had these long term exchange agreements, right, we'll give you x amount of whatever over why amount of years, and in return you'll give us oil or iron gas, et cetera. Now those are impossible. Neutral countries will no longer do them because they're like, why would I agree to do something with you for
five years? It's it's not looking good for you, you know. And now the neutral parties will only work with Germany on what they called a cash and carry basis, one off short term transactions. Still for Germany it's better than nothing, but the way in which they interacted changed too. They started to want more proxies, more private entities to deal with them, so we could say, for instance, oh, well, well wasn't the government of Switzerland.
Absolutely, Or it wasn't even this major bank. It was like a smaller part of this bank.
A subsidiary of some sort, right, And this gives Allied observers some pause, and they start to believe that there is a conspiracy. They think perhaps the German forces are pretending to fall, pretending to surrender, and that they will reaggregate all this stuff they have stolen and they will launch a fourth Reich.
And to listeners who've been here for a while, that may remind you of the long game deception ideas that were born out of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union. You could kind of apply the same deals. At least that's what the CIA was believed.
Exactly, And that's why the United Kingdom and the United States launched Operation safe Haven, which we'll explore a little bit further, but for now just know it exists, and Operations safe Haven and other endeavors were somewhat successful. We found some of the stolen treasure, we recovered some of the Gold in nineteen forty four in December, when Allied forces created safe Haven, they wanted to They didn't want to take it for themselves, at least the way it
was stated. Instead, what they were trying to do was find the Heidi holes, the bolt holes of treasure hidden away by German forces in neutral countries, and then they would take that money and they would move these funds to what they called safe havens. These would be British or American humanitarian organizations most often, and this was meant to sure assist those organizations in their humanitarian endeavors, but it was also meant to disperse Nazi wealth, to leave
no financial stone standing upon another financial stone. They wanted to cripple any further attempts to resurrect the regime.
And the you know, there are some people listening saying, oh, you know, the language that's used in creating something like operations safe Haven, even the term safe haven when it's being transferred to a country with such a large military force that is kind of going through and then dominating, right, and then saying oh, we're going to take all this stuff, We're going to put it over, you know, in places that we control. But it's gonna be safe there. You guys are cool. Everything's fine.
It goes to a good cause.
Yeah, everything's great. It's not the same thing as what the Nazis just did and took it all and then you know, hit it away for their own purposes. We promise it's fine. It's called a safe haven, right, you know. And you can just see the parallels there, depending on how you feel about the operations of the United States government. Anyway, I'm just putting that out there.
I think that's an excellent point. And there's a massive hole in this story because you see, despite the efforts of the Allies, no one was able to locate all of the stolen gold, all of the stolen art and other assets looted from Germany's victims. In fact, in nineteen sixty six, the British Foreign Office reported that of all the gold stolen from occupied lands, victims of the Holocaust, War casualties and so on, only one tenth of it. Only
ten percent had ever been located and returned. So our question today is where did the rest of the treasure go?
And we'll get to that right after a word from our sponsor.
Here's where it gets crazy. So since pretty much right after the close of World War Two, even a little bit before the war, there were multiple rumors and conspiracy theories about Nazi gold, and they popped in and out of official reports and your favorite mainstream news and your favorite investigative documentaries and stuff. Ever since. They still come out today.
I'm yeah, the History Channel loves it.
Yeah. I was gonna say, I'm fairly certain that you can turn on the History Channel on this weekend and I don't know, have a thirty forty percent chance of running into a Nazi gold story.
Oh yeah, I mean I literally watched a clip from a show called Codes and Conspiracies where it was a clip about one of the things we're going to talk about today, and it wasn't that long ago when it came out.
And here's the thing about it. These rumors and these stories, these alleged locations of this lost treasure, they may vary in plausibility, but it's so fascinating to people because there are proven cases of this stuff being discovered, and there are also cases where this stuff seems to almost have been discovered and then poof disappeared from the news.
Yeah, and that's when you get into real suspicion about things like operations safe Haven, where you're just like, uh man, ninety percent of the stuff is still out there. We don't, are we sure? We're like yeah, yeah, yeah, that's it.
Oh man.
Should we talk about some examples?
Sure?
So how about the SS Menden.
Right, Yeah, the German cargo ship scuttled near Iceland during the early days of World War Two, So this is before the close it was suspected to contain this huge trove of Nazi gold.
How about we we cite one of our favorite sources, Fox News.
I put I know, I know in the notes there. It's true. It's it's a good article.
Look are you well you know they're not all y whatever.
So this merchant vessel one hundred and twenty nautical miles south of Ice centers in the international spotlight after the chest with around four tons of Nazi gold was discovered in the wreck.
Four tons of Nazi goal?
Four tons of Nazi goal? Does that mean it like in the movies? Does the Nazi gold have swastikas on it? How they identify I was stamped?
Yeah?
Maybe unclear?
I mean you would certainly know if he found it that way.
Well, also it depends on the provenance of the gold. If they stole it from another country, that's probably not that That's what.
I was thinking exactly. So this hall was valued at around one hundred million pounds, which as we know, is more than dollars.
I think. This is a story from twenty eighteen, and they estimated it as one hundred and thirteen million years exactly.
And yeah, okay, here's the official story of what happened. On September twenty fourth, nineteen thirty nine, the ship was intercepted by two British cruisers and the captain of the Mendon had specific orders for this situation, which was do not be captured or do not let the cargo be captured. So he sank the ship on purpose with everything aboard, and the shipwreck was discovered or rediscovered I should say,
in spring of twenty seventeen. And then things get a little fuzzy because they had to get permission from the authorities in Iceland to investigate the wreckage and they conduct They eventually in twenty eighteen were able to search it for about three days and then after that operation, the search team, a UK based company called Advanced Marine Services, said to Iceland that no items of value were found.
Of course, again that's the official story, and there are going to be a lot of people who just won't believe those folks, regardless of the facts. So this one is interesting because now we have to ask ourselves, did somebody take the safe or the chest before the official search? Why was the search so stymied by bureaucratic red tape?
You know, yeah, I know. It makes you think maybe there's a small group of rogue treasure hunters out there that got there first, or Buyork okay.
Or Buork or maybe she's you know what, I don't want a pigeon oler, I'm going to get.
The treasure treasure I like the Gowld. We'll go deep into the waters and find the heat and James, they will be guarded by the King of the Sea.
Yeah, that sounds like Byork. Yeah. So what we're going to see as we explore some more of these examples is that, like a lot of conspiracy theories or rumors or speculation, there's a categorical thing a play. Certain tropes pop up over and over. The gold's usually said to be hidden in banks held by the Vatican, of course, or lost in some place that's difficult to access, like a sunken vessel at the bottom of the ocean, or a mine for instance.
That was then collapsed on purpose, or something where it's very very difficult, if not impossible, to get there. So let's you mentioned the v word. Let's let's let's talk about the Vatican and why they perhaps are a viable suspect for where some of this treasure ended up.
Okay, yeah, So the US State Department back in nineteen forty six, shortly after the war's closed, receives this top secret report from an agent named Emerson Bigelow, and Emerson says, I have heard from the OSS, the predecessor to the CIA, that there is something rotten going on with the Vatican and Nazi gold from World War Two, or Nazi finances at least. And this this report is later called the Bigelow Report. Sometimes you'll hear it called the Bigelow Memo.
It wasn't declassified until decades later, in nineteen ninety six, and it wasn't released until nineteen ninety seven. Here's what the report says. It says back in nineteen forty four, the Vatican took three hundred and fifty million Swiss francs worth of Nazi gold for quote unquote safe keeping, and of that, one hundred and fifty million Swiss francs have been impounded by British authorities at the Austro Swiss border. So where did all this stuff go? What is safekeeping?
What is the safe haven? Right? Yeah, according to Bigelow, the safe haven here is a numbered Swiss bank account and controlled by the Vatican, and that in Bigelow goes on to say that more than two hundred million Swiss francs worth of gold coins are transferred to Vatican City or to the Vatican Bank, which is known as the Institute for Works of Religion, with the assistance of the clergy.
And then it goes on to state that perhaps, or it's believed at least that then this money was funneled to places like Argentina and Brazil, where again it's the same thing where we where we looked at in our rat Lines episode, where the Vatican was assisting people or at least was alleged to be assisting people and found to be assisting people a few times. Nazis in particular to get to places like Argentina in Brazil.
Yeah, and you know, we were careful in that episode to say this doesn't mean the Vatican overall was doing it. It could be factions within this very large organization, but representatives of the Vatican at the very least helped. We should note that even today the Vatican Bank denies this. They say there's no basis in reality to the report to the Bigelow memo. So it goes down to you know who you trust to safekeep to safekeep? Who do
you trust to safekeep? There's a there's a weird situation going on in Bavaria that we found via the sun, and the sun is the The sun is not a source that I would quote if I were writing a high school or college paper. But they've got that kind of tabloid vibe. Sometimes it's like go on par with the mail Maybe yep, exactly. But there's there's a great story that they tell about a treasure hunter named Hans Gluk. Hans Gluk is what is Gluke mean? Luck? Cool? Well,
Hans luck. Then Hans Gluke was seventy six back in twenty seventeen, and he'd been searching for this trove of gold diamonds artwork and for some reason rare postage stamps, which are still a big thing for twenty years. He has based on an old map that he found. He has he has become certain that he's pinpointed this Nazi
treasure that was lost on on a train. Here's what happened, according to him and according to the Sun, during the close of the war, Heinrich Himler greenlit this bank heist, like you said, Matt, he greenlit an inside job bank heist. And he told his deputy, a fellow named Ernst Carlton Brunner, to empty the Berlin Reich's bank of loot and put it all on a train and send it to the Alps.
And they thought, you know, after the wars officially declared over, will still be able to fight, will be funded by this treasure, will essentially be gorillas, you know, we move in the night, will hide behind the trees, will disrupt into me supply lines and so on. And they wanted to have the train cross the border into Austria and then they would store all this stuff from the train in assault mine. But the Russians were advancing, the Allied
aircraft were just cloppering the place. So the train hid in a tunnel for three days, and the SS there had had a functioning radio post nearby in the forest at a place called iraq a rr acch and according to Hans Gluk, this is where the treasure ultimately ended up. We know that at some point the train was stuck in that tunnel, right. We don't know what happened to
the treasure after it. We do know that Soviet troops were able to intercept or report from that Nazi radio post, and the report simply read in German something like command executed transport of guards taken over stored in bscchw asked for further instructions. It all hinges on what that abbreviation means.
Yeah, it really does well. And you know, if you go through and you read that whole story on the Sun, it's one of it. Like Ben said, it's one of
those that feels a little far fetched. But again, anytime there are seeds of truth within something like this, I don't think you can all out dismiss it, right, I mean just I would recommend hey go over to the Sun check out gold nine n ei N which just means gold no, and it says treasure hunter finds five hundred million dollars worth of gold Nazi gold in a Bavarian forest, but landowner won't let him dig it.
Up right right, Just a little more about the story, do you know it is? We do know that there was some treasure in play because the guy who mentioned Carlton Bruner, he gets away for a time. He goes to Austria, where he's from, and he's not arrested until May twelfth, nineteen forty five. But in the garden at his house, like buried, I think in a beat patch, they find seventy six kilograms of gold in six gold bars.
And that's that's clearly a case of like how much can I physically carry with me when I'm running cash and carry cash and carry? Yes, just so. And Carlton Bruner was found guilty of war crimes at Neuro he was executing on October sixteenth. He never told anybody where the loot went. But Gluke was contacted by an old man with a strange tale about an SS officer shipped to Siberia who had sown a map of sorts into the lining of his coat. And this is what led
Luke off on his merry adventure, his frustrating chase. Right now, as you can tell from the title that Matt just read, as far as we can see, the excavation or the search is still being held up because the person who owns the property says, you know, hey, I'm maybe I'll find it, or Hans Gluke is accusing them of that.
Yeah, yeah, And just so, I mean, it's so interesting the way this kind of thing plays out. It feels like the watch story from Pulpictures. Yeah it is Pulplican, Yeah, where it's this thing, this map in this case instead of a watch. And again there are no cavities involved necessarily other than the cavity and the coat, I guess.
But it's an important thing that got passed down and passed down because you know, it went from this guy who was important enough that he knew he was going to get killed as soon as he entered a camp, gave it to another pow and like in hopes that it would make it back somewhere to someone. And now it went to this other guy and now he's searching for the treasure, but it's on this other person's land
and he just can't go in there. And you know, dig up things willy nilly, or even follow the map to exactly where it is, because he wouldn't be able to dig it up because he wouldn't own it.
It would be a great plot for a film, right, Yeah, And we have more examples ahead, including some that are a little closer to home. After a word from our sponsors, let's talk about Lake Toplets.
All right. Lake Toplets.
It's a fun name. It's also the source of a World War two legend. According to this story, the Nazi Party dumped billions of dollars worth of stolen gold somewhere around to the tune of five point six billion dollars worth into an isolated lake, Lake Toplets, in a forest in the Alps. Yeah.
In history dot com reports that in the forties, the Nazis actually use this lake as a testing site for naval equipment, and the mountains around it as a series of strongholds, well more, I guess, retreats, kind of you could say, for their military officers. Than In fifty nine, investigators found seven hundred million pounds worth of counterfeit banknotes that Hitler actually had a pretty sinister plan to use to sabotage Britain's economy. In what way do you think ben to flood.
Flooded with cash? Yeah, exactly, and then the cash would be worthless if the new are good enough, there's no way to discern the fake ones from the real ones.
Isn't that one of those conspiracy theories people are always talking about China, Like China could do that devalue our currency, about flooding because they've like stockpiled all this American currency and they could like affect our economy by like flooding us with cash.
Yeah, but that's a different kind of thing in this case. Imagine the chaos of seven hundred million dollars just being at play now that you know is counterfeit. You don't
even know how much is out there. Like if you're on the Allied side or the United States side, you would have no idea how much is actually in the system, but you would know that, Oh my god, a great portion of the exchanges that are occurring within our economy right now are happening with phony money, and now every single transaction is going.
To happen to question.
Yeah.
Yeah, it especially given how fragile the British economy is at the time, because you know, London had been bombed left and right, and it was definitely in a recur period. The interesting thing about what you said, Nol regarding the idea of currency devaluing, it's another theory. It could happen. The only difference would be that the assets the government of China would hold in that situation would be real and not counterfeit. The best counterfeit notes, though US notes,
are from that part of the world. They're the North Korean supernotes. According to the Treasury Department. The way you can tell a North Korean supernote from a real one hundred dollars bill is that the supernote looks better. It's like a better bill.
We did a story on Ridiculous History about this very thing, where there was a very crafty gentleman who was in Spain I believe, I can't remember now. He figured out a way to counterfeit money and then did flood it and he actually single handedly kind of wrecked the economy of Portugal.
Is where it was. Yeah, yeah, he's the Portuguese banknote crisis. And actually our show for that is the top persultant Google. When I searched for it.
In school, it was Archer Alves Reyes, who was the mastermind behind this but very similar scheme. Right, It wasn't he wasn't trying to wreak havoc. It just kind of was a byproduct of his greed. And he basically single handedly toppled the banking system of Portugal in nineteen twenty five.
Wow.
And this this had nothing on what Hitler had planned, right, and we have to wonder how this would have played out. So there was some kind of treasure found already Lake Toplets, and that was seven hundred million pounds worth of counterfeit notes. As for the other stuff, as for billions of dollars of gold that has yet to be found today, however, we do have a case of some of this Nazi gold actually being found. It was a real thing, a real conspiracy to hide it.
Oh yes, And this takes us back to Operation safe Haven as it was, as it was not really beginning, but he was in full play here and there were a group of it's actually a really large number of the United States Army, the Third Army, ninetieth Infantry Division. They're in Merkers, Germany, Okay, and it's as the war
is ending, they're kind of doing cleanup. They're trying to find gold during operations safe Haven, as you mentioned before, and it's April fifth, nineteen forty five, and some military police from this division they come upon to refugees. Essentially,
they're called displaced persons. They're from France. According to ah C, they were two female French citizens who were displaced and there's a large amount of gold that had been transferred and been moved out and then moved near Murkers somewhere. But nobody could you verify any of these They're just rumors, right.
They just knew that there were frequently trucks that were loaded it's some sort of precious object. And these trucks were coming continually during the night.
Yeah, and they were going to a very specific place and it was this mine near Murkers. It was a potassium mine of all things. And these women, these two displaced persons for France, said, yeah, oh, do you guys know about that mine?
Right?
With all that gold in it? Right? You guys know about that? And that's all it took. Really they decided, Okay, we're gonna go check this out. And they they found their way by the way. General Eisenhower and General Patten were a part of this little mission to go down into the mine and try and see what's down there.
Yeah, and Patten has Patten has his own crazy scheme that we can maybe mention at the end here. But what do they find when they go into the mine.
Well, a whole crap ton of gold, seven thousand sacks of gold bullion to be precise, and an underground area that was around seventy five feet deep one hundred and fifty feet wide, And the mine also had ninety eight million francs French francs, and the.
There's also a ton of gold coin that has recovered down there, separate from the bullion.
And this absolute Smorgsborg of currency wasn't even the most alarming thing that they found down there. They also found luggage with gold fillings that had been extracted from yeah, you guessed it, concentration camp detainees.
And you can actually see some film that was taken around or of that time of what they found there, a lot of still photographs, some like I said, film, and it I don't even know how to describe it unless you Unless you see it, you won't understand such a large container of the gold from human beings mouths.
Yeah, and this this is a real thing. I think a lot of people when they first learned of this at the close of World War Two, I think a lot of people thought maybe it was propaganda, or maybe it was an unnecessary exaggeration. But it was not propaganda. It was not an exaggeration. They were taking people's wedding rings, their watches, they were literally taking metal out of people's teeth.
And this plunder, this Nazi gold story, we usually see reports of it being scrolled away somewhere in Europe, right in a mine, or in a Swiss bank, or in the Vatican, or we see it maybe as you said, Matt, being wired or transported somehow to South America, which also is very plausible, but we don't often talk about the plunder closer to home. The United States is also guilty of these types of nefarious clandestine activities. In nineteen ninety seven,
The New York Times reported this following claim quote. In nineteen fifty, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York melted down hundreds of gold bars bearing the swastika imprint and recast them with a pristine stamp bearing the words United States Assay Office. At the time According to memos from the FED, the US Treasury knew that a lot of the gold, worth about twenty three million at the time, had been stolen from the Netherlands in Belgium when they
were invaded by Germany ah Operation safe Haven. Right, But this is like, you know this nineteen fifty Uncle Sam is not really asking questions, Just like the Swiss banks, just like the other collaborating forces that we publicly despised, the US is just taking the money and running. The rationale here is that Uncle Sam is primarily concerned with rebuilding Europe at this time, rather than investigating the ethical
quandaries and the provenance of this stolen loop. But back to New York Times, at the request of the National City Bank, which later became City Bank, the Treasury Department authorized the reissue of the gold, and that was, according to this reporter, a polite phrase for purifying it and wiping out the German markings so the gold could be used as collateral for a transaction between Spain and the Itt Corporation that we're trying to build a telephone system.
But here's the other problem. It gets more uncomfortable.
Yeah, boyd does it?
Ever?
The Germans mint was known for taking gold that German troops stole from central banks all over Europe and then melted them down, together with those more grizzly examples of plunder the tooth fillings things like wedding rings and other jewelry that was looted from people who were, in turn in those concentration.
Camps and the death camps victims.
Germany's goal was to put the he's lifted items into a form that was a lot harder to trace and then could be laundered through the Swiss National Bank.
Yeah. Yeah, And it's hard to really know how much of the kind of gold that we're talking about that came from victims from concentration camps actually made it into each individual gold bullyon bar or each each coin that was then minted in Germany. But we do know it happened, and we do know that kind of gold was also just anecdotally smelted down to create fillings for SS officers. That was a real thing that occurred. Hitler's own dentist, the guy that he used, would do that, And of
course it's not proven. There are rumors all over the place that specifically gold from other people's mouths ended up in Hitler's mouth, blah blah blah. But just the feeling that you're probably getting just from knowing some of that, that perhaps this gold that the United States melted down and purified was actually from victims from concentration camps.
Perhaps, perhaps right. We'll also have to note that the purification process, the re smelting conducted by the government, likely wiped out all traces of what historians call hate this euphemism, but this is the euphemism people use non monetary gold, you know, because it's gold that was never meant to be currency. But if we think about it, that means that the US had literally taken blood, money, gold ripped
from people's mouths, and there are there are more. I know a lot of us listening today are saying, guys, you have to talk about the Nazi gold train. So quick mention of that. There's a local legend in Poland that a train laden with gold had disappeared in May of nineteen forty five. Now the area is part of Poland, but previously when this took place, it was southeast Germany. People have searched for the train. Ever since World War Two. No evidence of a train has been found. You'll hear
historians say that the train never existed. And in twenty fifteen it was back in the news because people thought that they had discovered the location of the train. In the course of that search. It turned out they had discovered something. It was a cavity in the rock filled by a natural ice formation. So no train that we know of.
Maybe there is a mythical train made of gold. This time it was not just a train that had gold in it or was carrying gold. Maybe there's a mythical golden train out there somewhere that we'll learn about.
It's called the Hogwarts Express.
Ah's a reference.
Yeah, this is some disturbing stuff.
Well, let's okay, let's get down to just when we're thinking about all of this. You know, you just mentioned blood money, the concept of that very real sense of
blood money. But when you're thinking about wars and profiting from having physical conflicts like that with other countries or other places, with other people, and then gaining from that all those altercations and those deaths and and the blood that is spilled, this kind of thing like maybe maybe we forget because we're so inundated in like our culture in particular in the United States of war movies a lot of times that are to a great extent glorified,
like the the concept of fighting a good fight, fighting for good, fighting.
The great right side.
But but really just anytime there's war and profit generated, it should feel for everyone on every side like an icky thing. I think, well, here's the crazy thing, man.
I mean, I distinctly remember, you know, after nine to eleven the idea of we're going to war being a big deal in my mind and thinking it was going to have some effect on my day to day life. But we've been at war for so long as a country that it's sort of you're sort of numb to it, and you don't really we were so isolated from it in our daily lives that it's very difficult unless you have military in your family, to have a real ramification of these conflicts, which, if I would argue, I think
and many most would agree, are largely for profit. The notion of staying in a perpetual state of war feeds that machine.
You know, well, let's get let's just get to Afghanistan. And what we learned in previous episodes about the poppy fields.
Oh yes, poppy production which was waning under the Taliban, exploded under under US supervision during coalition control right right, the idea of being it's the best cash crop. US soldiers were tasked with protecting the open the poppy fields. Rather, let's were the.
Oil fields in a rock? Sorry, I don't know. I mean we keep seeing it, at least from the United States side.
Well sure, from every side. You know, it goes into a Smedley Butler's idea of war as a racket, economic confessions of an economic hit man, the concept that war may be an economic necessity for certain types of governments or societies, and this money goes missing. All of the time. We've barely touched on things like we didn't talk about the Amber room, right, that's missing too. We didn't talk about Himmler's ninety three million dollars worth of silver. We
didn't talk about Lake Vulsen. Apparently Germans hit one hundred million in gold there too. There are laundry lists of hidden or stolen gold and valuables, and that kind of practice didn't stop when the Not Party collapsed. There was a palette with what a billion dollars that just went missing in the Middle East.
Yeah, don't talk about that now, I'm just kidding. We did. Didn't we do a whole episode on that, or at least I know we talked about it.
We did. We did talk about it. And we've always known that war and profit are inextricably intertwined. We know things continue to disappear. This this is just, by the way, when we say money continues to disappear, we're just talking about the money that people lost. We're not talking about the money that never really existed due to black budgets and off the book spending.
Oh my god. And you know, not to mention, by the way, all the arms deals that occur across the globe from one country to another.
Good point.
I mean that. I mean, you want to talk about blood money, it's right there.
That's true.
That's future blood money, blood money that's going to be cashed out.
And some people will argue this is just an unpleasant, necessary piece of the globe both financial system and some people would respond to that argument by saying, well, why don't we make another system for some people? Problem is that there's not a problem. Business is very very good.
Yeah, you know, I just just this is an anecdote, but I just watched Fight Club for the first time in a long time and had a discussion about it and that feeling of why not just make a new system? Right in that movie there's depictions of people wanting to make a new system, but that concept of tearing one down to create a new one is pretty terrifying. At least now that I'm in my mid thirties.
I've already been, like, you know, paying into the current system for so many years.
Now I can't start over.
Yeah, I don't know. It's weird the way that kind of feeling happens, but I would be right there with you that that feeling is pretty pervasive of something needs to change because this system is not functioning properly.
Humph, something must be done. But no one agrees what we want to hear from you. What do you think? How much truth is there to these different claims of hidden Nazi treasure? Is there more of this treasure somewhere out there in this wide world of ours? The answer I think is yes, And I also I'm going to
go a step further pure speculation. I think not only is some of that stolen stuff still out there, it is accounted for by people who have just held on to it or profited from it, and they're not going to come forward because why would you. You're a war criminal at that point.
Well, in decades have passed by this point that maybe it's not even known, like by current heads of banks or you know, board members or something. If this stuff is secreted away somewhere in a vault, maybe it's not known what it is because maybe it was smelted down, just like the United States allegedly did. I don't know. I think you're right, Ben, I think you're right.
Last thing, just for an example, I've got to mention this because it was so bizarre to learn about this. George Patten we mentioned earlier, had a plan to use Nazi gold to fund the US military after the after the war. Patten, after discovering that salt mine treasure, Yes, he sat down with some army generals later that night and they said, okay, how do we handle this? And Patten's first suggestion off the top, he was coming in hot man. He said, let's distribute the gold to the boys.
He won a quote, some gold for every son of in the third Army. And they said, no, you can't do that. We have to follow some sort of law. And then he said, okay, well, if we can't just give it away to the boys, let's keep it a secret from the Congress and from the generals who aren't cool. Wow, it didn't work.
I love that he used the phrase generals who aren't cool.
Yeah, that's that part. Might be pair phrase. But we know that there's still we know there's still stuff that's being discovered. There was one point eight billion dollars worth of art discovered in a Munich apartment in twenty twelve. People are still finding things that was not very long ago. And that's our classic episode for this evening. We can't wait to hear your thoughts. That's right, let us know what you think. You can reach.
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