A treasure hunter who has spent years searching for £200million worth of Nazi gold at an old palace says he has now found a ‘large metal’ object he thinks could be packed with looted WWII valuables.
Roman Furmaniak began scouring the grounds of the 18th century palace in the village of Minkowskie in southern Poland in 2021 after receiving documents saying tons of gold and valuables were buried there.
But after extensive exploration he eventually called it a day after failing to find anything of significant value. Now he has returned to the palace, said once to have been used by Hitler’s SS as a brothel, and says he thinks he has ‘struck gold’.
He told the Daily Mail: ‘I believe we’ve got it now. We’ve been working down in the old orangery, about eight metres below ground. The soil there is very sandy and waterlogged’.
The treasure hunter revealed that on Thursday his team hit something solid during their dig which they believe is heavy metal. ‘It’s sitting there in the wet ground and it moves slightly when we touch it with the excavator,’ he said.
‘We believe the deposit might be inside a shell casing from a German Big Bertha mortar. The dimensions match, and the density feels right, it’s large and it’s giving a strong metallic response.
‘I believe we’ve got it now. After the last time I wasn’t sure, but this time everything points to it being the real thing.
‘As I said, hours maybe days set us apart from this monumental unearthing and we still stand by it.’
A treasure hunter who spent years searching for Nazi gold at an old palace says he has now found a ‘large metal’ object he thinks could be packed with looted WWII treasure
The buried treasure is thought to include the so-called ‘Gold of Breslau’ which went missing from what is now the nearby Polish city of Wrocław just 35 miles away
Roman Furmaniak began scouring the grounds of the18th century palace in the village of Minkowskie in southern Poland in 2021
He added: ‘The historical building inspector has been notified about finding a heavy metal object, the Polish ministry of Culture and German government will be also notified.
The buried treasure is thought to include the so-called ‘Gold of Breslau’ which went missing from what is now the nearby Polish city of Wrocław just 35 miles away.
Then a German city, Breslau was one of the wealthiest in Hitler’s Third Reich.
But, the impending arrival of the Red Army meant that the Germans had to hide tonnes of gold and valuables.
These included bank deposits from the Reichsbank as well as private German banks, and civilian deposits of gold, money and jewellery.
According to legend, the treasure was transported under an SS guard from Breslau towards the Sudeten mountains.
But, soon after departing, the transport disappeared and the treasure has never been seen since. One of the theories is that it was stolen on Heinrich Himmler’s orders to go towards the creation of a Fourth Reich.
The palace, which dates back to the 18th century, became of interest to Furmaniak after he purportedly came across some secret documents, an SS officer’s diary and a map.
According to Furmaniak, the pencil-written diary pages, said to have been penned by a high-ranking SS officer under the pseudonym Michaelis, names the palace as being the location of the missing treasure.
An entry said to be from March 12, 1945, says: ‘A trough has been dug in the orangery, which is a safe “home” for the delivered chests and containers.’
It continues: ’48 chests from the Reichsbank, in good condition, were hidden, very well covered with earth and ‘greened’ with still living plants.
‘Let providence watch over us.’
Also included in the documents is said to be a letter from a senior SS officer calling himself von Stein to one of the girls who worked at the palace and who later became his lover.
The officer wrote: ‘My dear Inge, I will fulfil my assignment, with God’s will. Some transports were successful.
‘The remaining 48 heavy Reichsbank’s chests and all the family chests I hereby entrust to you.
The location was revealed by secret documents, a diary (pictured) and a map that the treasure hunters received from the descendants of SS officers belonging to a secretive lodge worshipped by Himmler and dating back over 1,000 years
The pencil-written pages of the diary are said to identify 11 locations across Lower Silesia which before and during the war was German territory
The treasure was stolen on the orders of SS boss Heinrich Himmler (pictured) towards the end of WWII to set up a Fourth Reich
The buried treasure is thought to include the so-called ‘Gold of Breslau’ which went missing from what is now the nearby Polish city of Wroclaw just 35 miles away
The palace became of interest to Furmaniak after he purportedly came across some secret documents, an SS officer’s diary and a map
‘Only you know where they are located. May God help you and help me, fulfil my assignment.’
The diary describes one cache as containing 47 works of art of international importance, believed to be stolen from collections in France.
According to the Silesian Bridge Foundation, the diary came from a man claiming to be the son of a SS officer and represented a Masonic Lodge made up of the descendants of Nazi officials seeking atonement.
Furmaniak said the 1,100-year-old lodge in Saxony-Anhalt had had the diary for decades before handing it over to the foundation over 10 years ago.
While searching the palace grounds in 2022, the foundation said it had found a five-foot metal canister lying around 10ft below the surface.
This turned out to be nothing more than a piece of junk though and the same year historians who the foundation ‘invited to verify’ the diary, said their analysis was ‘not completely positive’.
Posting on Facebook, the historians from a group called the Discoverer Magazine Exploration Group (GEMO) said: ‘Our most important finding is that the village of Minkowskie is NOT mentioned in the ‘War Diary’.
‘This may be hard for the Foundation, because it is the only place their excavation works are being carried out at this moment.’
Among the bundle of documents is a letter from a senior SS officer called von Stein to one of the girls who worked at the palace in Minkowskie and who later became his lover. The officer wrote: ‘My dear Inge, I will fufill my assignment, with God’s will. Some transports were successful. The remaining 48 heavy Reichsbank’s chests and all the family chests I hereby entrust to you. Only you know where they are located. May God help you and help me, fulfil my assignment’
Furmaniak told the Daily Mail: ‘We believe the deposit might be inside a shell casing from a German Big Bertha mortar’
The historians also analysed the letter that was included with the ‘War Diary’ and questioned its authenticity.
They said: ‘Also the corresponding documents, like one famous letter, do not seem very ‘legit’ and are NOT a part of the ‘War Diary’, meaning there is not even one bit of evidence that there is anything in Minkowskie.’
They later found a book published in Germany after the war about escapees from the region which they say ‘contained the same details which were then copied verbatim into the diary.’
According to the historians, the passages in the diary were transcribed from accounts of German refugees who fled Lower Silesia in 1945 which were later published in the 1960s in a book called Die Flucht (The Flight).
The historians concluded at the time: ‘The result of our analysis unequivocally identifies the war diary as a fictional text created many years after the war.’
