Stuff You Should Know - The Legends of Lost Nazi Gold

Episode Date: April 7, 2020

As if being murdering SOBs weren’t enough, the Nazis were also thieving rats. During WWII, they stole billons in gold from countries they overran and moved it to Germany. But at the end of the war, only part of it was recovered. Where’s the rest? Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say. Bye, bye, bye.

Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there, and Jerry's somewhere.

We lost her, I think she wandered off. Yeah. But this is Stuff You Should Know, regardless, the Lost Nazi Gold Edition. The Legend of Curly's Gold. If Curly was a white nationalist. Well, who's to say he wasn't? I don't know, Jack Palin seems like the kind

who would have beat up white nationalists for fun as like a hobby, you know what I mean? Yeah, you know, we can't get into the super ins and outs, but as you know, my brother worked on The Legend of Curly's Gold, and Jack Valance was a tough SOB. Yeah, I hear he used to do shots of nails. Yeah, I mean, he wasn't a jerk, I wouldn't say,

but it just sounded like he was just sort of a very cantankerous old fella to work with. That's so funny, man, because I mean, at the end of the day, he was an actor. I know, because she does this job on the earth. It's not like you weld machine guns or something like that. Give me a break, you're an actor. Yeah, like Clint Eastwood's not really tough.

Well, actually, that's not true. Is he? Oh, sure. Probably. He's gotta be. At the very least, he's been acting like it's so long he's developed. Yeah, it's probably like a callus, you know what I mean?

Where it's just kind of forms and stays a callus. It's the callus-ness of toughness that an actor will form. I don't think Clint Eastwood whines about a hangnail. Let's just say that. No. Like we do. That'd be pretty disappointing. I actually was whining about a hangnail

to myself the other day. Of course. But I'm not an actor. I'm a podcaster check. No, we have a TV show that proves that. And I'm speaking for both of us. Ouch. I thought I did some good work.

I thought you did a better job than I did, actually. I think we both did a much better job than you remember. All right. So if you hate Nazis and you're like, it's been a while since I was given a reason to hate Nazis, a new one, rejoice. Cause we're about to give you another one. At least I didn't really realize this to this extent.

Did you? You know, I knew about Nazi gold and that they took things, but I didn't know that it was almost one big people killing and world robbing operation. Yeah. That's the thing. That's the new thing to hate them for. Not only were they murderers, they were also just common thieves as well.

I mean, thieves on one of the greatest scales anyone's ever seen, but thieves nonetheless. I'm an exceptional thief. Who was that? Michael Cain? No, Die Hard. They called him a common thief. And he goes, I'm an exceptional thief. Right, Rodney Dainfield.

Conscruber. You imagine? Oh, I can't wait till technology gets advanced enough that you can just insert whoever into whatever character and they'll say the same lines and everything. That'd be great. That's the first one I'm doing is Rodney Dainfield is Hans Gruber.

He would have been wonderful. That scene where he, he's fooling him into thinking he was one of the party goers. And he goes, what's your name? Oh, it's Bill Clay. That's what it is. Don't shoot me. Come on. Nobody shoots me.

I got no respect. That's pretty good. Pretty good. No, boy. Okay, so the Nazis were thieves not just because they looted and plundered like the countries that they occupied but that they did it because they were broke

to start off with. That's what truly makes them thieving SOBs is that their whole jam, this whole war, world war that they started, they didn't have the resources financially or industrially to actually carry out this war. They had to go steal to fund their role in world war two which they started.

That's right. They, you point out here, you put this together. Good stuff. Thanks. That in 1923, they had hyperinflation such that in November of that year, it cost 80 billion marks to buy a loaf of bread. Is that right?

Yeah, which sounds like a lot on its own but if you consider that earlier that year in January, a loaf of bread cost 250 marks. Yeah. So the price of bread went from 250 marks to 80 billion marks in less than a year. But isn't that just a way of saying that nobody bought bread?

No, it's a way of saying that their money was totally worthless. Remember it happened in Zimbabwe? Oh yeah. I can't remember what episode it was. Maybe how much money is there in the world? We talked about hyperinflation. I think so.

That was staggering. It was staggering. The same thing happened in 1923 in the Weimar Republic and this is the state of the German economy that the Nazis rose to power in because that's one of the reasons they were able to rise to power and fascism was able to take over

because the country and the economy was in such dire straits that this idea of like, hey, everybody get in line behind this guy because he's gonna lead us out of it, that's essentially one way that Hitler and the Nazis were able to rise to power. But that also means that he inherited a terrible economy and he had to figure out what to do.

Not only a terrible economy took, but Germany lacks natural resources that you would need to start a war machine too. Yeah, they have no oil. They don't have mineral deposits that you can make really fine metals out of. They've got sauerkraut. They have sauerkraut.

They have a lot of beer too to their credit, but if that's all you got, you need more to fight a war with. Yeah, so what happened was they had what was called the Reichsmark, which was the monetary unit of the Third Reich. And there were five neutral countries that declared during World War II,

like we're not gonna trade in Reichsmarks. So Hitler and Germany said, well, you know what's always valuable anywhere is gold. And let's start taking it from anywhere and everywhere we can get it. Yeah, and gold in particular, it's what's called a very fungible commodity. Like you can trade just about anything for gold, right?

If you have gold, people will give you whatever you want. You can use it by oil, you can use it by guns, you can use it to fund terrorism, you can use it to back your own currency. There's a lot of stuff you can do with gold. But in particular in World War II, if you were the Third Reich, the Nazi regime, you needed to use gold because these neutral countries

couldn't accept Reichsmarks by agreement, but also the Reichsmarks were worthless anyway. So if you wanted to buy a bunch of guns, you needed some gold. And because Germany at the time only had about 25 tons of gold in its reserves, which sounds like a lot, but as we'll see is a paltry amount of gold compared to what they looted and pillaged and took.

They needed some gold. And so yeah, they started looting it. And the first place they turned Chuck was Austria. Yeah, how much gold did you say they had? They had 25 tons. From what I understand, 25 metric tons of gold in the reserve Germany did at the outset of World War II. All right, well, this will drive home how much that is.

They looted 15 tons, just 10 tons less from the citizens, Jewish citizens of Vienna, Austria. From the capital city only, they looted 15 tons of gold from Jewish citizens. Just citizens, like you said. Oh yeah, and those are just people. So the central bank of Austria, they got 100 tons of gold.

So right there, four times what they had in reserve. And then they said, hey, you know that six tons of gold that you're trying to send away to England to keep safe from us, bring that back here too. We want that. Yeah, they did. So just from Austria alone, they got a hundred and what, 21 tons.

Yes. To add to their existing 25 tons. It was a huge deal. That kickstarted the Nazi war machine into high gear. It was a big coup. Austria wasn't expecting it. No one was expecting it. And so other countries in Europe suddenly like gulped

and they were like, we need to take this as advanced warning basically. We don't want to become like Austria. And they triggered Chuck, the largest physical transfer of wealth that the world, the planet has ever seen. Yeah, cause I didn't know this and it's kind of cool that countries

that are friendly to one another will help each other out like this. You can say, hey US, you've got Fort Knox there. I've heard that's a pretty safe place to keep gold. We're England. So can we send you a bunch of that to keep for us and just, you know, we'll make a receipt out so we know how much there is and you promise not

to spend any of it. And the US and Canada early on at least did things like this. They accepted huge gold shipments. There was a operation in 1940 called Project Fish where the UK was sending, or Britain was sending 1500 metric tons of gold to the US to store in Fort Knox. Yeah, and in 2019 dollars,

the amount that they sent on slow boats through the Atlantic, which by the way were infested with you boats by 1940 was worth $166 billion in today's dollars. And it got there somehow. Yeah, not one of those ships was sunk astoundingly. Isn't that nuts? Crazy. Well, they didn't know clearly.

So Britain sent that 1500 metric tons. Russia, they were like, we're just gonna take care of ourselves. They evacuated a bunch of stuff from their stockpiles. They sent 2,800 tons of gold from its banks to a location in the Euro mountains for safekeeping. They also sent two other national treasures too. The embalmed corpse of Nikolai Lennon

and artwork from the Hermitage Museum. Those three, those were the three things they prized the most to transfer by train to the Euro mountains to stash until the war was over. So all told, if you wanna add it up during the course of World War II, the Nazis stole at least that we know of, 400 million American dollars in gold

from countries they occupied, and another 140 million dollars in gold from people, largely Jewish people from their homes, people that were imprisoned in concentration camps. They stole, it was a very meticulous thing that they did. They would raid their homes. They wouldn't just round people up. They would go to their safety deposit boxes.

They would rip their dental fillings out of their teeth such that it even got the name tooth gold, son gold, and that didn't, you know, that covered everything that they stole from people, not just the gold from teeth that covered people's wedding rings and their jewelry and their parts of eyeglasses and other things like that. It's just unbelievable how much gold they looted

from concentration camp victims. Yeah, especially when you step back and look at it like that Germany really needed the money, the Third Reich needed the money. They were just robbing, robbing and murdering. That's what they were doing. You know, it really kind of puts it into perspective more. Oh yeah.

I mean, the Nazis were the worst, dude, and still are, Nazis are the worst. So most of that gold that was stolen from occupied countries, I didn't see how many tons it was, but what did you say? Generally, the figure I've seen is about 500 to $600 million in 1940s dollars. Yeah.

Stolen and most of it was put into the Reichsbank, which is Germany's central bank, kind of like it's federal reserve. And there are different branches throughout the country. And you know, the gold was kind of distributed here there. But as the war kind of moved on, it was moved more and more into the central Reichsbank

in Berlin until 1945. And there was a bombing raid on Berlin on Germany. And they said, we need to get this gold out of here and into secret locations. And so the gold from the Reichsbank, hundreds of millions, today billions and billions of dollars worth of gold was moved to places where no one had any idea, secret locations that weren't banks in Germany.

Yeah, so this would set off, I mean, people are still looking for Nazi gold today. And not just walking around with a metal detector, but some people are putting a lot of money into looking for Nazi gold. And one of the big reasons is, A, like you just said, we know that they moved it at some point. And B, in April of 1945,

there were some military police patrolling around the town of Merckers. They questioned a couple of French women who had been displaced. And they said, in French, I would imagine, that they saw gold being stored in a potassium mine near the town. And the MP said, Sacre bleu.

I mean, holy cow. And the army investigates this and they found the, it's famous now, the Merckers Mine Treasure, which was a hoard of gold. There was a room covered in 7,000 marked bags of gold coins, gold bars, gold jewelry, valued at about $238 million, $1945.

So this was a signal to everyone, like, wow, the legend of Curly's gold is real. Yeah, yeah. Because this is only about half the money. So let's get our metal detectors out. Yeah, I mean, this idea that the Nazis hid gold in mine shafts or all sorts of different places was proven by that Merckers Mine Treasure,

that they did this and there were substantial amounts to be found. That was $238 million worth, but they stole $500 to $600 million worth, which means that there was a substantial amount of gold unaccounted for. And that is what has fueled treasure hunters to look for what today would be billions of dollars

worth of gold that was lost and scattered and spread after World War II. And I say, Chuck, I have a proposal for you. I bet I know what it is. Pie. What's your favorite kind of pie? Oh, I really love a key lime. Yeah.

It's hard not to go with key lime. Okay. But what about just like a standard traditional fruit pie? They're really tough to beat, like a good cherry pie. If I'm going fruit pie, it's gonna be an apple crumble for sure. Okay. I used to be in that same group with you.

Until you had the sweetest cherry pie. Yeah. Warren talked to me into trying it and I loved it. Cherry pie is actually as good as the song makes it sound. Wow. All right. We'll be right back. Okay. Want to learn about a terrasaur in color?

Teradactyl. How to take a mercury boob and all about fractals. Genghis Khan. A till of the hunt. The Lizzie Board of Murders and the Cannibal Run. Don't explain everything to your brain. Explode. Just Chuck.

And Josh. Stuff you should know. Word up, Jerry. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces.

We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends, and non-stop references to the best decade ever.

Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper

because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts,

or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself,

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or wherever you listen to podcasts. Yeah, I've tried it with cheese, like they say, but it's not very good. I think that's typically apple pie that's supposed to have cheese on it. So I just like straight cherry pie. Cherry pie, cool drink of water, it's a sweet surprise. Yep, I've tried it with the cool drink of water too.

It's good. It's better with just water than say like Coke because Coke's sweet taste competes with the sweetness of the cherry pie. So they're pretty much right on except for the cheese. They say it'll make a grown man cry. I'm here to tell you that's the truth. Oh boy, that song and that video, so dumb,

but also very titillating for a very young Chuck. You know, have you seen the Rush documentary? Oh, sure. Did you know that Sebastian Bach from Skid Row? It was Skid Row, right? He was, well, Warren sang cherry pie, but yeah. Sebastian Bach was Skid Row. I know, but like it's just a huge leap

from Skid Row to Warren, give me a break. But Sebastian Bach was from Warren, right? No, no, no, he was Skid Row. Oh, that's what I mean. Yeah, Warren was Janey Lane, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah, you're right, man, you got it. The poor man's Brett Michaels. Yeah, in a way.

So, and sorry, Janey, I really didn't mean that, but I couldn't leave it. But Sebastian Bach from Skid Row is one of the greatest and longest standing Rush fans of all time. That's right, he was all over that. Yeah, I think he was, he joined their fan club in like seventh or eighth grade, he said. And I love that right now, somewhere Brett Michaels

is walking around playing that on repeat to his family. Did you hear that? Did you hear what Josh said? He thinks I'm better than the Skid Row guy. No, you mean Warren. It doesn't matter. All right, so we're talking about Nazi gold. And we were saying before we started talking about

warrant and everything that there is gold that is unaccounted for, that was stolen by the Nazis, that just kind of vaporized after the war. Gold's not supposed to do that. It's one of the things that people love about gold is it doesn't just vaporize into thin air. It's really easy to keep track of if you want to. And so people started looking for gold

or looking for clues. And one of the big clues that people started following was local rumors and legends. Like in Merckers, there were plenty of rumors and legends that there was gold hidden in a mine nearby. In Dendar Hills? Exactly. And so the people hearing local legends

has really kind of fueled hunts for Nazi treasures for almost a century now. Yeah, so we're gonna go through a bunch of these. There's one called Lake Toplitz. It's a very lovely place. I'm sure you looked up pictures. But people and treasure hunters have been looking for this gold in Lake Toplitz

ever since, and this is very much fact, a bunch of Nazis were treated there in the Austrian Alps in the final months of the war. US troops were closing in fast and Germany was about to collapse. And so they transported a bunch of boxes to this lake, military vehicles, and then horse-drawn wagons even, and they dumped them in the lake.

So I think that part is definitely true, right? There's, yes, from what I could tell, it was reported on like that is fact. What was in the boxes is what's up for debate. Exactly, some people say that's the Nazi gold, about five and a half billion dollars worth. Other people said, no, I think some of this stuff are documents where they were basically confiscated

from Jewish victims about where their assets were hidden and what Swiss bank accounts they could loot maybe. Yep, I saw also artwork. They think that was sealed artwork. Also, there's a rumor that there's 300 pounds of morphine in those boxes that was contributed by, I think Albania's president, because he didn't want it to fall

into the hands of the Allies. Well, one thing they know is down there because they actually found some of these. Yeah, a lot of them. In 1983 was Hitler had the idea at one point, hey, let's sabotage various countries by creating counterfeit money of those countries. Yeah, it's a pretty smart plan for a dirty Nazi.

I know, so they created just hundreds of million dollars worth of British pound notes. And in 1983, a German biologist by accident discovered a lot of these British pounds in the lake. What did we talk about that and like how counterfeiting works maybe? Maybe, it does sound familiar though, for sure. We definitely talked about that plan.

And remember there was like a Jewish printer who was a Holocaust prisoner of a concentration camp. I can't remember which one, who turned out to be like this master counterfeiter. Yeah. Like because the Nazis trained him to or forced him to. If I remember correctly, it was our counterfeiting episode. Yeah, and in 1959, I talked about the 1983 fine,

but in 59, they recovered 700 million pounds of these counterfeit notes from that lake. So some people say that's all that was down there. Other people say there may still be gold down there. And Austria actually still to this day has a problem about 10 divers a year illegally dive in that lake looking for that treasure. Yeah, and what's interesting about this lake,

aside from the fact that there might be Nazi treasure in it, which is interesting enough to make the lake remarkable and noteworthy. But in addition to that, this lake has a kind of a strange hydrology in that the top half of it is freshwater. The bottom half is saltwater and they're separated by density.

And in the middle of these two layers is a layer, a floating layer of ancient logs that have fallen into the lake and been preserved over time. And so you can only dive so far before you hit this layer of logs. And some divers, I think five divers at least have died in this lake looking for Nazi gold. And at least one of them got tangled up

in this layer of logs. It's a really dangerous place to dive. But the fact that you can't really see past this layer of logs is one of the things that keeps people coming back and keeps this legend alive because they can't thoroughly search this lake and show conclusively, no, there's no gold here, leave this place alone, stay away.

Amazing. It is pretty amazing. And then the other thing about it too is this is a really remote location that was used by Nazi officers, high ranking Nazi officers and for missile testing. It seems like a really odd place just to dump counterfeit pound notes.

Yeah. Like you could dump those just about anywhere. So I don't know, maybe there is something to it. You gonna get your scuba gear ready? I got my flippers on already. You can't see, but I've got them on. All right, we're gonna move now to an Eastern German town along the check border

called Deutsch-Katharinenburg. Nice. It sort of looks like the alphabet when it's on a page. It's a lot of letters in a row. Yeah. But there are people there that think, not only is there gold here,

but possibly the amber room, which was this, you just look up pictures of the amber room. It's pretty amazing. This chamber of honey and linseed and cognac-infused amber panels, a gold frame mosaics, marble, precious stones, and it was a gift of Prussian King Frederick Wilhelm I to Russia's Peter the Great,

once called the Eighth Wonder of the World, and it disappeared during World War II. Yeah, the Nazis plundered it from Russia, from the USSR, and they took it back to Germany, back to Königsberg, or Königsberg, which was, I think now a part of Russia again, but at the time during World War II, it was part of Germany or Prussia.

And they had it on public exhibit for like four or five years, and then at the end of the war, it just vanished and no one's seen it since. And there's a lot of people who say, well, it was destroyed in air raids. Other people say it was sunk on a ship that was secretly carrying it. It's just lost.

But there's a pair of treasure hunters at Deutsch-Katharinenburg who searched in the area because they were sure that among other things, the amber room panels were buried there in that town. Yeah, and this is probably the worst ending to a potentially cool story ever, but there was a pair of searchers searching for this stuff. One of them's father was a German Air Force officer

in World War II and in his personal notes, this son thought that he'd found the exact coordinates of this treasure. So he got together with another treasure hunter who was another German. He was a mayor in fact of a nearby town. And they thought that they had discovered through radar this big rectangular underground space about 60 feet down.

And when I was reading this dude, it was so juicy. I was like, oh boy, what happened? They didn't ever tell anyone. No one knows if they found any treasure. They didn't say anything about it. Apparently they had an acrimonious split in 2008. And that's just sort of the end of the story. Yeah, I guess the other treasure hunter

was staying in the mayor's town and the mayor kicked him out of town. It was that acrimonious. Wow. So that's it. The last I heard was that they didn't find anything in 2008 or they didn't ever search for it. Right, so.

It was a little lame, but worth putting in there I think. Oh no, it's worth putting in there. It's just has no good resolution. No, it's, yeah, no. But you read a lot of fiction so you can deal with that, right? That's right. Okay, so in Poland,

southeastern, southwestern Poland in a little corner down there, there's something, there's a range of mountains called the Owl Mountains. And there's a longstanding and widespread rumor that's been there for a very long time. I would say roughly since around the end of the Second World War, that would be my guess,

that there is a ghost train, a Nazi ghost train, loaded with jewels, gold, weapons, art, basically everything you can think of that the Nazis would have plundered or pillaged, loaded onto this train, driven into a tunnel in the mountain and left there, hidden, and that it's still there. And people have been looking for it for a very long time,

again, since probably about the end of World War II. But the thing that's kept this treasure hunt alive, Chuck, is there really is a vast unmapped network of tunnels in the Owl Mountains that the Nazis dug there in World War II. Yeah, so again, some of this is based in fact, so that's what'll keep any sort of urban legend alive if part of it is true.

And they did, they dug these tunnels of mine shafts between 43 and 45. It was called the Reise Project, which means giant in German. And no one knows why. Some people say it might have been one of their weird secret weapons programs. Some people say it may have been potentially

where Hitler was gonna hold up for his last stand. But it was very, very secretive, even among the SS, because if you worked on this tunnel, you had to sign a confidentiality agreement, which just sounds funny for some reason. I thought everything about the SS was so secretive, it would just be implicit, but. Right, and what are they gonna do?

Like take you to court, that you violated your NDA or something? It is odd, isn't it? You know what they would do. Yeah, they just shoot you. I wouldn't think that you would need a signed agreement for that. These are the Nazis we're talking about, you know?

Yeah, so they were not allowed to have their family members within 40 kilometers radius of this area, and these tunnels were dug by forced labor from concentration camps nearby. And it might have been a place for gold, it may still be, but the Soviets ruined all that in 1945 when they came knocking at the door, and the Nazis fled and basically blew up

their own tunnels behind them. Yeah, and I wanna say there's a really good New Yorker article about the hunt. I can think it's even called the hunt for Nazi gold about this particular legend and people looking for it. And they take a second. I think it's really worth pointing out here, too, is people who start looking for treasure,

no matter what the provenance of the treasure is, just get so wrapped up in the treasure and the legends and the myths and everything that it's easy to forget things like, well, you're running around a tunnel network that was dug by people who were literally worked to death over the course of weeks. They were worked that hard.

They died digging these tunnels that hold maybe this legendary treasure, that is the only thing you can focus on when you're talking about that. And that's definitely like a part of the problem that comes along with the job is forgetting, like having blinders on that, you forget the reality of the situation.

It's definitely, it's important to remember this, that some of this gold we're talking about was pulled from the teeth of dead Holocaust victims. You know, you just gotta remember that, too. It's like Bill Paxton and Titanic. He needed that reminder from the old lady, like you're all pumped up looking for this jewel. People died here, man.

Yeah, let's get it together, Paxton. RIP. Yeah, that was so jarring when you told me that that first time, a few months back. Did I break you that news? You did, you broke it hard. So according to this legend, as far as the Owl Mountains go, there was this ghost train, like you said,

and it was a freight train loaded with all kinds of valuables, artwork, jewels, gold bullion, bars of gold, and that they drove that thing in this thing, and it never came out in those tunnels. And the other part of this story that is rooted, in fact, is there were Nazi trains that carried tons and tons of gold and valuables and jewelry and paintings. There was one in particular called the Hungarian gold train

that was intercepted by Allied forces in 1945. So you got a real train that happened, you've got these real tunnels that were dug, and then all of a sudden this rumor of the ghost train takes root. Yeah, the idea that those two things have come together in the Owl Mountains, though, that's the thing that's never been shown to be true.

That's right, and not from a lack of looking. No, not at all. No, there's a lot of people looking for that there. This one's actually my favorite weirdly. Probably because it's a shipwreck, I'm just so fascinated by shipwrecks. So the ship I'm talking about is called the SS Minden, and it was a German merchant vessel.

And back in, I think, 1939, it was disabled by the British Royal Navy off of the coast of Iceland, right? And what's so mysterious about this is that the Minden's ship register shows that it was just carrying resin from Brazil. I didn't see what kind of resin, but you can do all sorts of industrial stuff with resin

from making adhesives to plastics to whatever. And then that was it, right? But the thing that makes the sinking of the Minden so mysterious is that the ship's captain, rather than let it fall into British hands, sunk it himself. And he sunk it in 7,700 feet of water off the Icelandic coast, and that's where it lay undiscovered

until I believe 2017 when a mysterious ship showed up and started looking around the Icelandic coast and it believes that it found it. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a little odd to sink a ship full of resin only. Right. It raises a little bit of suspicion. Like you said, even though you can do some things with it,

it kind of stuck out to me as like, hmm, what else is on that boat? But yeah, in 2017, the Coast Guard in Iceland boarded a vessel of the seabed constructor. It's like an unnervingly bland name. It's so boring. It's not like the, well, now I can't, all boat names are kind of dumb.

The Hercules of the Sea. That's what I would name my boat. Yeah. Sure. So they intercepted it. They said, hey, what are you guys doing here? And they said, oh, well, this boat has been leased by a group of British folks

who are searching for the wreck of the SS Minden. And they were like, what? You're like, haven't you heard that that was just full of resin? And they said, clearly not, because we're spending $100,000 a day to lease this boat, which frankly is not that great of a deal, but we couldn't talk them down any.

Yeah. So that, I mean, if someone is spending $100,000 a day, that means that makes me think they know something that we don't know. Yeah. And so the Icelandic press actually reported that they think that they know something we don't know. So much so that they interviewed the crew

and the crew said the official story is that they're looking for a couple hundred million dollars worth of gold that they believe was hidden in the safe on that ship, but that the real story, the real prize for what they're looking for is only known to a handful of people, high-ranking people on the boat.

Yeah, what is that, man? And that it was left at that, which, man, the Icelandic press knows how to spin a mystery, if you ask me. Yeah, I mean, that really added this extra air of mystery on top of everything else, which is, oh, sure, we think there's $100 million plus in gold, but we're really there for another secret reason.

Yeah, if $100 million worth of gold is your decoy cover story, man, you're onto something impressive. I can't wait until they raise that thing, because from what I could tell, everything pointed to the fact that they did successfully find the Minden, that that is the Minden they found,

but as far as I know, they have not gone down and salvaged it at all. Let's get James Cameron on it. Who knows, maybe, I mean, the Amber Room was sunk and maybe it happened to be on the SS Minden, so maybe we'll have the Amber Room back in the next 10 years. Well, hey, man, you said today's magic second ad break word,

James Cameron, which means we're now obligated to take our second message break. Do you want to take it now or shall we have taken it three minutes ago? No, let's take it now. Okay, we'll be right back, everybody. Wanna learn about a terrorist or an uncollected redactyl,

how to take a perfect boob and all about fractals, gang is gone, a till of the hunt, the Lizzie border murders and the cannibal run, don't explain everything to your brain, explode and die, this is something you should know. Word up, Jerry. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

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And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen.

So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts. All right, Chuck. So there's places where you can physically go to search for legendary gold. You can also just enter the international gold trade.

And you can turn up alarmingly Nazi gold that was kind of lost. You could put it after the war. Yeah, this is really interesting. In 1946, as part of Reconstruction and Restoration all over Europe, there was a committee forum called the Tripartite Gold Commission, or the Tripartite Commission for the Restitution

of Monetary Gold. And this is formed by the US, by the French, and by the Brits. And basically, the whole jam here was let's find all this gold, let's account for all this gold that we discovered as allies, and then let's redistribute it back to where we, if we can trace it such, to where it was looted, to the banks and central banks.

And even if we can find out human individuals, that would be even better. And it was strictly to, I believe, strictly to the European central banks that had a claim to having been looted from after the war. And then in the late 90s, there was a real push to try to compensate the survivors and the heirs of the Holocaust, who also had been robbed, too.

So a lot of gold that some countries still had claim on, as part of this London conference on Nazi gold that was held in 1997, some of the countries that said, well, actually, we're still owed a lot of this gold. They said, OK, well, we'll take a portion of this gold and divert it to humanitarian groups who will use it for reparations to Holocaust victims, which was pretty cool.

The big outlier in this was a little tiny country that remained neutral during World War II, at least on paper, Switzerland, who not only, it turns out, was secretly assisting the Nazis in laundering their gold in exchange for money that the Nazis could go use to fund its war machine, they hung on to this Nazi gold. And from what I can tell, still have all of the Nazi gold that they had after World War II,

including gold that was made from that zon gold, melted down personal effects and gold teeth that Switzerland apparently still has in its gold reserves and is not willing to give up. Yeah, that was really surprising. This all came out because of a historical paper that was part of that conference. It showed that the US had a lot of this gold that they melted down after the war

and did return to the central banks in Europe as part of an effort to stabilize their economy there. But finding out that Switzerland did this and that Switzerland was neutral and that the Geneva Convention, which explicitly bars this kind of thing, comes from Geneva, Switzerland, is the ultimate irony here. And I just want to know if there's more to this. There's got to be something else, right?

They're good people. Sure, but I mean, countries do bad things, for sure. Even if there are good people that live there, I mean, from everything I could tell, it came out in the 90s that it was pretty clear Switzerland had served as money launderers for the Nazis without anybody realizing it for decades. Yeah, it is pretty shocking, for sure.

I think the thing that gets me, though, is the idea that there's a lot of gold in the international gold trade today that can be traced back to missing Nazi gold, that it's not necessarily buried in the side of a mountain in Poland or under a small town along the German check border, that it's out and about. It's being used as currency or as a commodity today

in the international gold trade. That, to me, is the most astounding part of all of this. Yeah, how do you trace gold? They have a very strict system for it, but it's only as strict as how it's observed. Oh, OK. So, for example, in 2019, the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which spent a lot of time hunting down

Nazi war criminals in the, I think, starting in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they accused Venezuela, and specifically, the administration of Nicolas Maduro, of trafficking in Nazi gold that he sold over the course of his administration so far, something like 77 tons of gold. And they're like, you know what? We're pretty sure that that was Nazi gold that

was transferred late in the war to Spain and then on to South America to help fund a fourth Reich, a rebuilding of the Nazi regime among the war criminals living there. And they think that this was some of that gold and that Maduro's been selling it to kind of bankroll his country and his regime. Wow.

Isn't that nuts? It is nuts. They also said this whole thing is nuts. Yeah, it is, absolutely. Like, I can't remember how I came across this. I think it was a How Stuff Works article. There's a couple on them. And I just started digging further and further.

And it's just one of those things where it just takes such a great left turn, great meaning, like just surprising and unexpected, where it's like, you know, you're going from treasure hunters arguing and kicking one another out of little towns and kicking around mountains in Poland to the international gold trade trafficking in Nazi gold still, it's just a crazy story.

Yeah, it's pretty mind blowing and disappointing in a lot of ways. Yeah, for sure. Because again, remember, a lot of that gold, those gold bars are melted down gold teeth taken from Holocaust victims or gold wedding rings taken from Holocaust victims. And now they're used to as part of an international form

of currency. Yeah, boo. Boo. Well, that's it. You got anything else? I got nothing else. If you want to know more about Nazi gold, there's a lot you can read.

It's quite a rabbit hole you can go down if you want to. So you could start by going to howstuffworks.com and checking out their articles on it. And since I said how stuff works, it's been a while. That means it's time for a listener mail. That's right. I was thinking that would be a good movie about World War II era Nazi gold hunters,

but it's sort of like three kings already did that, but that was a gulf war. Yeah. And then also there was that one museum men. I think they were brought in to kind of make sure that the paintings that were looted were not made or whatever. I didn't see that.

What was it called? It wouldn't call museum men. What was it? Almost positive it was museum men. Was it? Will you look that up while I read listener mail? All right. Because that's a terrible name.

I agree. I'm going to call this. We sighted someone that we probably shouldn't have sighted. And this is from anonymous. Hey guys, really enjoyed this show this week on universal basic income. Just a heads up. You've cited the conservative economist Charles Murray

and his justifications for introducing UBI to the American economy. I'm sure you didn't realize this, but Murray is a particular favorite of white supremacists. Oh boy. For his views on genetics and their contribution to social inequality between whites and people of color. Yeah.

He has a book called the bell curve that is often cited as data proven evidence for white supremacy. It's also largely been debunked as pseudoscience. Yeah. Wow. He links to a Southern poverty law center's write up for our own reference. And he says, I will no doubt keep on listening guys.

I'm sure it was unintentional. Please take more care though and curating your sources, especially if it might throw your narrative for a loop. And that is from anonymous. And boy, anonymous, you are right. We had no idea. Should have done a little bit more digging there. So please everyone realize.

And anyone that listens to the show probably realizes we certainly did not mean for that to be the case when we cited Mr. Murray. Now we kind of biffed that one big time. No offense intended. Hopefully you didn't take it and thank you for a very measured and level and even handed correction. That's right.

It was very kind. And by the way, Chuck, it's monuments, man. Yeah. I knew there was something about it that didn't sound right. But there is a show called Museum Men that's been on since 2014. But they actually...

Is it about sexy docents? They kind of, they make displays for museums. They're craftsmen, craft people. Okay. Okay, so Museum Men, Monuments Men, two different things. That's right. And if you want to get in touch with us, you can join us on the internet, send us an email,

wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to StuffPodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Let's get started. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen

to your favorite shows. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back

into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast

and make sure to listen, so we'll never ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.