Get emotional with me. Radhi Devlukia in my new podcast, a really good cry. We're gonna be talking with some of my best friends.

I didn't know we were gonna go there.

I've been at this. People that I admire. When we say, listen to your body, really tune into what's going on. Authors of books that have changed my life.

Now you're talking about sympathy, which is.

Different than empathy, right? Never forget, it's okay to cry as long as you make it a really good one. Listen to a really good cry with Radhi Devlukia on the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

The black effect presents family therapy. And I'm your host, Elliot. Connie Jay is the woman in this dynamic who is currently co parenting two young boys with her former partner, David.

David, he is a leader. He just don't want to lead me.

But how do you lead a woman? How do you lead in a relationship? Like, what's the blue part?

David, you just asked the most important question. Listen to family therapy on the Black Effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey, everybody. It's me, Josh. And for this week's select, I've chosen our episode on Legends of Nazi Gold from April of 2020. This is the one where we learned that nazis were even worse than we thought. Not only were they murder a swine, obviously, they were also scumbag thieves, too, who didn't have enough money to fund the war they started in the first place. So they went around looting and robbing from neighboring countries. And by the end of the war, with the writing on the wall, they hid a lot of that gold that they stole in strange, unmarked places around Europe. Some people believe it's still hidden, just waiting to be found. Hence this episode. Hope you enjoy.

Welcome to stuff you should know.

A production of iHeartRadio.

Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryan over there. 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. I don't know. He. Jack Pallan 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. 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. 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, if you. At the end of the day, he's an actor.

I know.

Like, you're an act on the earth. It's not like you. 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 got to be.

At the very least, he's been acting like it's so long, he's developed. Yeah, yeah. It's probably like a callus, you know what I mean? Where it just kind of forms and stays the callous. It's the callousness 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.

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, because 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 Caine?

No, die hard, they called him. A common thief. And he goes, I'm an exceptional thief.

Right, Rodney Hans Gruber. You imagine? Oh, I can't wait till technology gets, like, advanced enough that you can just insert whoever into whatever character and they'll say the same lines and everything. Uh huh. That'd be great. That's the first one I'm doing, is Rodney Dangerfield is Hans Gruber. He would have been wonderful.

That scene where he, he's fooling him into thinking he was one of the partygoers and he goes, what's your name? 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.

Oh 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 SOB's 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. 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 meant. 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. And 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, you know, 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 going to 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 they, Germany lacks natural resources that you would need to find to. To start a war machine too.

Yeah, they, they have no oil.

Nope.

They don't have mineral deposits that you can make really fine metals out of. Yeah, they've got sauerkraut.

They have sauerkraut. They have a lot of beer, too, in their. To their credit. But, you know, if that's all you got, you need more to fight a war with.

Yeah. So what happened was they. 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 two, like, we're not going to 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. You can trade just about anything for gold, right? If you have gold, people will give you whatever you want. You can use it to buy oil, you can use it to buy 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 two, if you were the Third Reich, the nazi regime, you needed to use gold because these neutral countries couldn't accept reichmarks 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 two.

All right, well, this will drive home how much that is. They looted 15 tons, just ten 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 121 tons 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. We need to take this as advance warning, basically. We don't want to become like Austria. And they triggered chuck the largest physical transfer of wealth that the, the world, the planet has ever seen.

Yeah. Because I didn't know this. And it's kind of cool that, you know, 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 an IOU and you promise not to spend any of it.

Right.

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

Yeah. And in 20, $19. The amount that they sent on slow boats through the Atlantic, which, by the way, were infested with U 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, um, they, they sent. So Britain sent that 1500 metric tons. Russia, they were like, we're just going to take care of ourselves. They evacuated a bunch of stuff from, um, their stockpiles. They sent 2800 tons of gold from its banks to a location in the Ural Mountains for safekeeping. They also sent two other national treasures, too. The embalmed corpse of Nikolai Lenin and artwork from the Hermitage museum. Those were the three things they prized the most to transfer by train to the Ural mountains to stash until the war was over.

So all told, if you want to add it up, during the course of World War Two, the Nazis stole at least that we know of. 400 million american dollars in gold from countries they occupied, and another $140 million 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 toothgold Sangold. And 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 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 its 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, this gold out of here and into secret locations. And so the gold from the Reichsbank, hundreds of millions today, billions and billions worth 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.

Yeah.

And not just walking around with a metal detector, but people are. 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 Merkers. 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 Merkur's mine treasure, which was a hoard of gold. There was a room covered in 7000 marked bags of gold coins, gold bars, gold jewelry valued at about 238 million, 1940, $5. 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 mineshafts or all sorts of different places was proven by that Merker's mine treasure that they did this. And there were substantial amounts to be found. That was $238 million worth. But they stole 500, $500 to $600 million worth, which means that there is 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 two. And I say, chuck, I have a proposal for you.

I bet I know what it is. Pie.

Oh, what kind? What's your favorite kind of piece?

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. Warren talked 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.

Wanna learn about a pterosaur and call a pterodactyl? How to take a perfect boop. And all about fractals getting kissed? Con until of the hunt, the Lizzie Borden murders, and the cannibal run gonna explain everything to your brain explode.

Just Chuck.

Enjoy.

That's something you should know.

Word up, Jerry.

Get emotional with me, Raleigh Devlukia in my new podcast, a really good cry. We're going to talk about and go through all the things that are sometimes difficult to process alone. We're going to go over how to regulate your emotions, diving deep into holistic personal development and just building your mindset to have a happier, healthier life. We're going to be talking with some of my best friends.

I didn't know we were going to go there.

Aren't they people that I admire when we say, listen to your body, really tune into what's going on. Authors are books that have changed my life. Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy, right. And basically have conversations that can help us get through this crazy thing we call life.

I already believe in myself. I already see myself. And so when people give me an opportunity, I'm just like, oh, great.

You see, me, too. We'll laugh together. We'll cry together and find a way through all of our emotions. Never forget, it's okay to cry as long as you make it a really good one. Listen to a really good cry with Radhi da Vlukya on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Elliot Carney, and this is family therapy.

My best hopes, I guess. Identify the life that I want and work towards it.

I never seen a man take care of my mother the way she needed to be taken care of.

I get the impression that you don't feel like you've done everything right as a father. Is that true?

That's true, and I'm not offended by that.

Thank you for going through those things, and thank you for overcoming them.

Thank God for delivering.

Every time I have one of our sessions, our sessions. Be positive. It just keeps me going.

I feel like my focus is redirected in a different aspect of my life now.

So how did we do today?

We did good.

The black effect presents family therapy. Listen now on the Black effect podcast network, iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Oh, hi. I'm Rachel Zoe, and I'm back for another season of my podcast, climbing in heels. You might know me from the Rachel Zo project or perhaps from my work as a celebrity stylist. And guess what? I'm still just as fully obsessed with all things fashion, beauty, and business. My podcast, clothing, climbing in heels is all about celebrating the stories of extraordinary women. And this season, we're taking things up a notch. I'll be talking to some incredible women across so many industries, from models and beauty industry stars to doctors, entrepreneurs, and tv personalities. Climbing in heels is here to bring you a weekly dose of glamor, inspiration, and fun. Every week, listeners will be able to ask me any questions. I'm answering it all. My life is absolutely crazy with so, so much going on, and I'm so beyond excited to bring you along for the ride. Whether we're talking red carpet looks, current trends, or products I'm obsessed with, I'm here to be your fashion fairy godmother. Listen to climbing in heels every Friday on the I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast.

Cheese. My cherry pie.

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, warrant sang cherry pie, but yeah, Sebastian Bach was skid row.

I know. Okay, but, like, it's just a huge leap from skid row to warrant. Give me a break. But Sebastian Bach was from warrant, right?

No, no, he was skid row.

Oh, that's what I meant.

Yeah. Warrant was Janie Lane, if I'm not mistaken.

Yeah, you're right, man. You got it. The poor man's Bret Michaels.

Yeah, in a way, so.

And sorry, Janie, 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, 7th or 8th 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 warrant. 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 Merkers, there were plenty of rumors and legends that there was gold hidden in mine nearby in Dimdar hills. Exactly. And they. So that people. People hearing local legends has really kind of fueled hunts for nazi treasures for almost a century now.

Yeah. So we're going to go through a bunch of these. There's one called lake toplets. It's a very lovely place. I'm sure you looked up pictures, but people and treasure hunters have been looking for this golden lake toplets ever since. And this is very much fact. A bunch of Nazis retreated 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?

Yes.

What's up for. 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. 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. Sure. 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 in, 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 or 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 ten 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 fresh water, the bottom half is salt water, and they're separated by density. And in the middle of these two layers is a. Like 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, have 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 czech border called Deutsch Katharenenberg. 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, 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 8th wonder of the world. And it disappeared during World War two.

Yeah, the Nazis plundered it from Russia, from the USSR, and they took it back to Germany, back to Konigsberg or Koenigsberg, which was, I think, now a tie or part of. Of Russia again, but at the time, during World War two, 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 the, you know, on a ship that was secretly carrying it. It's just lost. But there's a pair of treasure hunters at Deutsch Katherinenburg 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. 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 two. 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 60ft 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 this 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. They didn't find anything in 2008 or they didn't ever search for it.

Right.

So, yeah, 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, south, south, eastern, southwestern Poland, in a little corner down there, there's something there. There's a range of mountains called Owl mountains. And there's a long standing and widespread rumor that's. That's been there for a very long time. I would say roughly since around the end of the world, 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 two. 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 two.

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 Reissa 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 going to hole 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 going to do? Like take you to court, that you violated your NDA or something? Well, 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 km 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 want to 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, having blinders on that. You forget the reality of the situation. And it's important to remember this, that, you know, some of this gold we're talking about was pulled from the teeth of dead Holocaust victims, you know? Yeah, 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.

Yeah.

People died. 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, few, few months back.

Did I break you that news?

You did. You broke it hard.

So, according to this legend, as far as the Al 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 all of a sudden, this rumor of the ghost train takes root.

Yeah. The idea that those two things are. 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 mind in so mysterious is that the ship's captain, rather than let it fall into british hands, sunk it himself, and he sunk it in 7700ft 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. It's like, 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. Yeah, 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? They'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. 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 the. 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 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 on to something impressive. I can't wait until they raise that thing, because from what I could tell, everything. 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.

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 ten 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.

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My best hopes, I guess. Identify the life that I want and work towards it.

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That's right. 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.

That. And it was strictly to, I believe strictly to the European Central banks that had a claim to have it having been looted from after the war. And then in the late nineties, 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, okay, 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 is pretty cool. The big outlier in this was a little, tiny country that remained neutral during World War Two, 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 onto this nazi gold, and from what I can tell, still have all of the nazi gold that they had after World War Two, 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 like the ultimate irony here. And it's. 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. You know, even if there are good people that live there. I mean, from everything I could tell, it came out in the nineties that it was pretty clear Switzerland had served as money launderers for the Nazis without anybody realizing it for decades.

Wow.

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 czech 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. Okay, so, like, 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 sixties, seventies, and eighties, 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. His country and his. His, um. His regime.

Wow.

Isn't that nuts?

It is nuts.

They also.

This whole thing is nuts.

Yeah, it is. Absolutely. The. The, 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's. 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 and nazi gold. Still, it's. It's just. Just a crazy story.

Yeah, it's. 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 listener mail.

That's right. I was thinking that would be a good movie about World War two 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. Whatever.

I didn't see that. What was it called? It wasn't called 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 gonna call this. We cited someone that we probably shouldn't have cited. 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, he has a book called the Bell Curve that is often cited as data proven evidence for white supremacists supremacy. It's also largely been debunked as pseudoscience. 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, in 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 Mister 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.

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. Oh, they're craftsmen, craftspeople. Okay, okay, so museum men, monuments men, two different things.

That's right.

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Get emotional with me, Radhi Devlukia, in my new podcast, a really good cry, we're gonna be talking with some of my best friends. Friends.

I didn't know we were gonna go there on this.

People that I admire, when we say, listen to your body, really tune into what's going on. Authors of books that have changed my life. Now you're talking about sympathy, which is different than empathy, right? Never forget it's. Okay to cry as long as you make it a really good one. Listen to a really good cry with Radhi Devlukia on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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David, he is a leader. He just don't want to lead me.

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