Nazi treasure and the mystery of the Killer Lake

"Imperial Transport"

One day in early May 1945, a fisherman who used to fish on the lake suddenly found a piece of paper floating in the lake with a strange symbol printed on it. When he got it up, he wondered, could it be a bill of what country? The next day the fisherman took the dried and flattened piece of paper to a bank in Bad Osse, where he was paid a handsome sum of Austrian shillings. The suddenly rich fisherman searched the place more carefully. He found the same piece of paper again. So he went to the bank again and again, and finally one day he was stopped by two American officers at the bank's payment window...

Soon word spread that the SS had used Lake Toprisse as a "safe" for treasure. Then rumors began to spread that Lake Toplisser contained the gold seized by the SS, the gold reserves of the German Empire.

The rumor was proved much later. Some 40 years later, reporters from the Austrian newspaper Basta found a witness to the incident, Austrian M. Gruber. In the fall of 1944, Gruber was sent to Fujil Castle, not far from Salzburg, and unwittingly became a witness to a secret meeting. The meeting was attended by top officials of the Third Reich, including Goebbels and Ribbentrop (then foreign minister). After the meeting, freight cars began to drive to Fujil Castle, loaded with gold ingots, coins, jewelry, and counterfeit pound notes. The convoy then turned to the Lake Topreese area. The Viennese military newspaper Courier-Journal said that it could not be ruled out that these assets were the gold reserves of the Reichstag. On January 31, 1945, the German finance minister suggested evacuating the country's gold reserves, and Hitler agreed. So twenty-four trains loaded with gold, platinum, foreign currency, foreign stocks, and imperial paper money left Berlin.

News of the discovery of the pound at Lake Toprissee reached the headquarters of the British Army in Frankfurt. An unexpected opportunity led them to find part of the box containing pounds.

American advance troops were already in Austria. The road was full of retreating German soldiers and baggage convoys, one after the other. In the chaos, two cars were stuck between Salzburg and Linz. When the German captain in charge of the escort saw that the vehicles could not get out of the jam, he ordered that all the boxes of one of the vehicles be thrown into the river. Two weeks later, under the action of the current, the boxes were opened. Residents were shocked to see thousands of pound notes floating in the river.

At about the same time, a telegram about the discovery of a lorry containing pounds had reached the headquarters of the Anglo-American advance forces from Bad Orsay. Us Army Major George McNeilly, an experienced counterfeit expert, immediately went to the scene and found the truck loaded with 23 boxes containing a total of 20 million pounds.

The Americans immediately followed up and found that the two cars that had been found were only part of a convoy that had disappeared near Lake Topreese. Nearby residents confirmed the situation. According to eyewitnesses, the Germans dropped large boxes made of white metal into Lake Toeplisser, each marked "Imperial Transport".

The mysterious death

A U.S. Navy dive team began searching Lake Topreese. But the search was halted when a diver died in an underwater accident. Some of the men who had something to do with the Empire's gold reserves but couldn't keep their mouths shut went missing.

In February 1946, two engineers from Linz, Austrian Helmut Mayer, and Ludwig Pickerel arrived at Lake Toprissee. Along with him was a man named Hans Haslinger. They were all listed as "tourists" in later Austrian gendarmerie investigation materials.

Three Austrians put up their tent near the lake. Being experienced mountaineers, they decided to climb Mount Laukfenge, which overlooks the entire lake. Perhaps sensing something sinister, or perhaps knowing the danger, Haslinger and the other two traveled for a night and halfway back to their starting point. A month later, there was no sign of the two mountaineers, and the rescue team began to look for them. A hut made of snow was found at the top of the hill with two bodies next to it. Pickerel's stomach had been cut open and his stomach stuffed into a backpack. The case remained a mystery. It turned out that during World War II, the two men had worked at a "test station" near Lake Toplisser, where the German navy was developing new weapons. Two informants were silenced.

In 1947, one of the outsiders who regularly appeared around Lake Toplisser was identified as former German staff officer Bormann. An Austrian court accused him of removing two boxes of gold from the site near the end of the war, but he admitted only to taking the ancient coins from the church vault.

Three boxes containing 19,200 gold coins and a 500-gram gold ingot were hidden beneath a pile of spent ammunition found in dried flowers in the garden of a villa in the Lake Topreese region.

The discoveries around the lake caused a stampede of excitement, and people flocked to Lake Topreese.

In August 1950, Dr. Keller, a Hamburg engineer, and Gerrans, a professional rock climber, arrived. They were trying to climb a cliff on the southern slope of Mount Rehstein, from which they could see Lake Topreese. As a result, Terrance disappeared. His safety rope broke "accidentally," as Dr. Keller witnessed. And then he just disappeared. A private investigation by Gerrans' relatives noted that the missing Dr. Keller had served in the SS during the war as the head of a secret submarine base. In retrospect, it was the submariners who might have gotten into trouble with the "test station" on Lake Topreese, and who might have become partners in transporting and storing the empire's treasure.

In the summer of the same year, three French scholars visited Lake Topreissee. They took a hotel room in half-broken German and went to the local police station to present a letter of reference from the army in the Austrian city of Innsbruck. The letter said the three French researchers, who specialize in Alpine lake life, needed to dive to the bottom of Lake Topreese and asked local police to support the French researchers in their research.

The Austrian police department approved the three foreigners' expedition to Lake Topreese without reservation. On the day the three Frenchmen returned, they eagerly loaded the four heavy boxes into the car, paid a generous tip, and turned back.

When the hotel manager went to the bank to exchange the foreign currency he had received from the three scholars, the bank discovered it was counterfeit. The Innsbruck army also knew nothing about the alleged letter of introduction. The hotel maid later came to the police station to report that she had heard three "Frenchmen" speaking in a proper burger dialect. These three men were probably experts at the former German "test station".

1952 was the deadliest year for Killer Lake, with several people dying in mysterious circumstances.

Stop looking for

In the summer of 1959, the curtain began to open on the secrets of Killer Lake. The dive team, funded by the West German weekly Star, was granted a five-week permit to dive in Lake Toprissee. The work went well: 15 boxes and tin containers were pulled from the bottom of the lake, where counterfeit £55,000 notes dated from 1935 to 1937 were found. The salvage brought to light Operation Bernhardt, a criminal fraud designed to print large amounts of counterfeit money to disrupt the financial order of countries hostile to Hitler's Germany.

William Hertl, a former SS stormtrooper, was actively involved in the Bernhardt affair. In the mid-1980s, the respected German citizen taught at a private school not far from Lake Toeplisser. Every evening he sat in a local beer parlor called the White Horse and ordered a glass of white wine. Except for two years in an American prison camp, he spent all of his postwar years at Lake Topreese.

This is the same Hertl who, two weeks before the deadline, forced a salvage operation funded by Star magazine to end halfway.

It happened on August 27, 1959, when the salvage team picked up two boxes labeled "B-9" that contained documents from the General Directorate of Security of the Third Reich and lists of concentration camp inmates. Instead of congratulating the ship on its success, however, there was a telegram with a stern order: "It is not appropriate to remain there. Stop the search at once." It is said to be due to a lack of funds, but only a few days ago Star magazine raised an additional 30,000 marks for the salvage operation. As the Austrian newspaper, Volkspoll put it, "Star" was gagged by big money, by those who did not want some of the secrets of the Third Reich to become public. A representative of the Austrian interior Ministry rushed to confirm that the box contained "nothing but counterfeit pound notes". In one of the press conferences, it was also announced that "there is no such thing as Himmler's diary among the documents", which is quite a bit of "there is no silver here".

But where are the boxes with the one-ton gold ingots and other treasures? The mastermind of the salvage team funded by Star magazine thought it was "somewhere around here".

In addition to Hertl, Ms. M. Hinke, who lived in Vienna in the mid-1980s, knew the secrets of Lake Toeplisser. During the war, she served as personal secretary to SS division leader Walter Schellenberg. With Hinck's help, Hertl informed a political and banking activist in federal Germany of the dangers of raising caisson from Lake Toeplissee. Hidden in Lake Toprisse, along with the counterfeit money, were lists of spies for the German secret service and files on the operation orders they had taken part in. Many of them are now full-throated citizens in their home countries, lurking in governments, parliaments, and on the boards of prominent banks and companies, according to Austria's Volkspoll newspaper. Even in some crucial departments in Austria, many people do not wish to disclose the secret of Lake Toprisse. Not to mention the possibility that the lake harbors secret accounts from Swiss banks that still hold the wealth looted by the Nazis.

In 1963, Albrecht Geiswinkler, an Austrian and former resistance activist, tried to apply for a permit to search Lake Toprissee and was immediately intimidated by neo-fascist groups. Presumably, the authorities in Graz were also threatened, and Mr. Gaswinkler's application was rejected.

In the early fall of 1983, another inexplicable tragedy occurred in Lake Topreese. One of the three West German tourists, Munich diver A. Agner, defied A local government ban and dived to the bottom of the lake. It was his body that floated up. The investigation found that someone had cut his oxygen tube. Two of his companions were later found to be former SS members.

After the incident, Austrian authorities banned all private amateur diving in Lake Topley, except with a special permit.

A suspicious

In November 1984, Professor Hans Frick, a West German expedition expert, announced that he would explore Lake Toeplissee in a specially made miniature submarine. On November 15, an Austrian newspaper disclosed that Hans Frick took a special miniature submarine in the water 80 meters found false pounds, and salvaged some mines, a bomber skeleton, with underwater launcher rocket damaged parts, but about everyone concerned about the Third Reich gold but not a word. Frick himself remained silent. The Busta newspaper revealed that Frick had close links with the West German reconnaissance department. The source of funding for the professor's investigation is also a mystery. The expedition, which lasted several months and required 30, 000 shillings a day, was organized by the West German Scientific Expedition Society, which did not pay Frick a single mark.

The mystery unsolved

The Austrian government, alarmed by all the events in Lake Toeplissee, decided to place the exploration of Lake Toeplissee under its management and supervision.

In November 1984, Austrian army expedition experts went to Lake Toeplisser. The gendarmerie imposed martial law on all roads leading to the lake district. Experts found counterfeit money at the bottom of the lake and recovered a 3.5-meter-long, one-ton rocket. Soldiers of the U.S. Army of Engineers are amazed that a metal skeleton that has been submerged for 40 years shows no signs of rust.

At the bottom of the lake in the southwest, experts from the Austrian mine-clearance Service, using mine detectors and geophones, found that there may be a large amount of metal on the bottom of the lake, concentrated in an area of about 40 square meters. Is it gold or underground ammunition? In response, the Austrian reconnaissance department said that it is difficult to determine whether the original lake bottom rare metals or the discovery of the Third Reich buried gold.

The Austrian army's expedition experts were fruitful. An entrance to what appeared to be an underground warehouse was found on the cliff of the rock surrounding the lake only 70 meters from the lake shore, but unfortunately, the entrance was blown up. The experts found a witness who, at the end of the war, before the entrance was blocked, had climbed into a large man-made cave, where boxes marked "explosive" were kept. During the war, a group of prisoners was indeed taken to Lake Toprissee to build underground projects. These prisoners drilled horizontal tunnels and entrances under the lake.

1985 opened a new chapter in the treasure hunt for Lake Topreese. The Salzburg Engineers attempted to enter the underground tunnel at the bottom of the lake from the forested southern shore. But all expeditions were quickly halted when experts concluded that Hitlerites might have mined the tunnels leading to the treasure deposit. As a result, what was inside the "Ali Baba Cave" remained a mystery.

Since then, no one has ever wanted to go on a treasure hunt in Lake Toplisei. The story of the treasure in Lake Topreese had to be marked with a series of question marks and abridgments...