Nazi loot is target of dig
DEUTSCHKATHARINENBERG, Germany — German treasure hunters began digging Tuesday for what they say may be plunder buried by the Nazis in a man-made cavern near the Czech border.
The area's mayor, Hans-Peter Haustein, and a man who believes he found the coordinates for the buried booty in a notebook among his deceased father's belongings, maintain that a scan of the spot has revealed that a large quantity of metal is about 20 meters below the surface.
They believe it to be either gold or silver, based on the scan with a sophisticated metal detector.
A drilling company began boring pilot holes at one-yard intervals trying to find the entrance of the cavern, about 100 yards from the Czech border in the eastern German state of Saxony. Once it is found, the searchers are to snake a camera down into the enclosure to determine exactly what they have found.
"It can't be iron," Haustein said as work progressed at the site. "The computer readout clearly indicates gold."
By late afternoon, however, the most excitement for a crowd of onlookers from the tiny settlement was a short-lived geyser of water that shot up as one of the holes was drilled.
Haustein — an amateur treasure hunter who is also a member of Germany's parliament for the opposition Free Democratic Party — said the process could take several days.
Haustein has been working with Christian Hanisch, who found the notebook in the belongings of his father, a former Luftwaffe radio operator who died last year.
Haustein said last week that he was convinced they had found the storied Amber Room treasure but later acknowledged that, while there could be "cultural treasures" in the cavern, such as paintings or amber paneling, they are not things that show up with a metal detector.
The Amber Room, completed in 1711 after a decade of work, was installed in a palace the Russian czar built for his wife, Catherine I, outside St. Petersburg.
Retreating Nazi troops looted the palace in World War II and the Amber Room — named for magnificent wall panels of golden-brown amber that were a gift from Prussian King Frederick William to Czar Peter the Great — was moved to a castle in Koenigsberg, now the Russian city of Kaliningrad.
It disappeared in 1945 and though some pieces have been found, nobody has ever been able to locate the rest, despite massive search efforts.
Most experts suspect that the Amber Room probably spent the entire war in Kaliningrad, and many believe it could easily have been largely destroyed in the fierce fighting in the final weeks of the war.
Experts have been skeptical of Haustein's claim, pointing out that stories of the Amber Room surface regularly, only to be proved wrong, and that the Amber Room had no significant amounts of gold or silver in it.
Treasure hunters of all sorts — including the Stasi, the former East German security service — have scoured Germany in search of it only to come up with nothing.
In 1998, a German expert thought he found the Amber Room in a blocked mine in Czech territory near to where Haustein is searching, but turned up nothing.
But Haustein has long been convinced that Deutschneudorf has held the remnants of the Amber Room — a suspicion that he says was only strengthened by Hanisch's map.
Were he to find anything, Haustein said it would belong to the state of Saxony, but it would surely arouse the attention of Russia, which would want it back. A mosaic and a chest of drawers from the Amber Room that turned up in private collections in Germany were returned to Russia in 2000 as part of a swap of "trophy art" pilfered by both sides during the war.
