Race on to find Nazi gold

[kenb]

More on the upcoming search.

Race on for Nazi bullion
By Andrew Ffrench
Comment

The scriptwriter of Oxfordshire- based Midsomer Murders has been stunned by a German TV company's audacious bid to recapture Rommel's Gold.

Terry Hodgkinson has been planning a documentary which will focus on a search for the £10m haul of gold and diamonds.

But he was shocked when he discovered that German TV station ZDF stole a march on him by making their own film, which was screened earlier this month.

ZDF carried out covert research missions last year and then sailed to the east coast of the French Mediterranean island of Corsica in February to search for the missing gold.

The treasure was supposedly dumped by the Germans in 1943 after Field Marshal Erwin Rommel's Afrika Korps was driven out of North Africa. The hoard is reputed to have been hidden by SS men, who planned to recover it after the war.

Mr Hodgkinson said: "It was a shock when I found out about the German documentary.

"But the important thing is that they did not succeed in finding the treasure, so their attempt will not harm our efforts whatsoever.

"Their expedition did not have permission from the French maritime authorities, who told them to leave the area after they used divers there.


"Once the Germans declared they were looking for Rommel's Treasure they were told they risked losing their equipment if they returned.

'It was a shock when I found out about the German documentary'


"We will have the advantage of having permission for our expedition from the French maritime archaeological department in Marseilles - we will be mounting the official search."

Mr Hodgkinson, whose wife is French, has a home in Corsica and plans to travel there in the near future to continue negotiations with the French authorities. He is also in talks with a number of TV companies regarding a film about the treasure hunt.

In 1963, Lord Kilbracken, who died last year, led an expedition on the ship Sea Diver to find the gold. Dan Eden, from Oxford, was the expedition's chief engineer.

As part of the proposed documentary, Lord Kilbracken's widow, Sue, is expected to visit Corsica to take part in the search.

No date has yet been set for filming the documentary Mr Hodgkinson wants to help make.

Anja Greulich, editor for documentaries at ZDF, said: "Research was done in 2006 and our expedition was in February of this year.

"Divers used sonar equipment and we shot underwater footage.

"But unfortunately they did not find the treasure."

4:30pm Tuesday 26th June 2007

http://www.oxfordmail.net/news/headlines/display.var.1499482.0.race_on_for_nazi_bullion.php

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[kenb]

Updated story.

Rommel's sunken gold 'found' by British expert
By Henry Samuel in Paris
Last Updated: 2:11am BST 18/07/2007



A British researcher claims to have located Rommel's elusive sunken treasure just weeks after a team of German divers scouring the Mediterranean failed to find the hoard.


Terry Hodgkinson is on the trail of the loot stolen by the Nazis


The famed treasure has long been reputed to have been dumped somewhere off the coast of Corsica by fleeing SS men, who planned to recover it after the war.

However, Terry Hodgkinson, who has been researching the missing gold for 15 years, told The Daily Telegraph that he was now "confident" he knew its exact location in waters less than a nautical mile from the town of Bastia.

Mr Hodgkinson, who is also a television scriptwriter, has teamed up with Corsican experts and won permission from the French authorities to enter the race to find six steel cases said to contain 440lb of gold bullion plus other precious objects pillaged from the Jewish community in Tunisia during the war.

"We are confident of the location, but it will require the latest techniques to retrieve it, as the cases, which were once soldered, have no doubt separated and sunk deep into the sand," he said.

The only way to reach the loot would be to "hoover" up the seabed - a costly and time-consuming method. Now the main obstacle is funding.

After months of research in Tunisia, he believes he has uncovered the truth not just about the treasure spot, but also previously unknown aspects of the story behind its arrival in Corsican waters.

Accounts suggest that it was not Field Marshal Erwin Rommel but the ruthless SS colonel Walter Rauff who stripped Tunisian Jews of their wealth.

Rauff, who created the Nazis' notorious "gas vans" - mobile gas chambers - commanded a special Middle East extermination unit called in a month after Rommel's victory against the British at Tobruk in June 1942.

However, his mission came to an abrupt halt after the British overcame Rommel, also known as "the Desert Fox", at El Alamein in October 1942.


The Nazis left North Africa and are believed to have deliberately sunk the treasure as they later fled Corsica under heavy British and American bombardment.

There have since been several attempts to find it, inspiring films and even a Goon Show episode.

In February, French maritime police came across a German television crew hunting the treasure without authorisation.

They were fined but later resumed their search after receiving the go-ahead to shoot a "cultural film".

Under French law, the proceeds from the treasure would be split between the state and those who found it. However, in this case, the state would seemingly also try to find any surviving relatives of those stripped of their gold.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/18/wgold118.xml

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[kenb]

Heres some more on Rommels gold.

http://www.cdnn.info/news/article/a070718.html

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[kenb]

More.

Could a wartime photo help locate looted Nazi gold worth £20m?
22.07.07
Add your view


A young German soldier poses proudly with his parents in a crumpled and torn old photograph.

It is typical of the type of photo thousands of soldiers would have had taken during the early days of Second World War to remind them of family and home.

Scroll down for more...



Cracking the code: Walter Kirner with his parents. On the back of this wartime photo is the secret code


But this particular snapshot holds a secret that could unlock a 60-year-old mystery – the whereabouts of a fabled hoard of looted Nazi gold worth £20million.

For scrawled in fading blue ink on the back of the photo is a code which investigators hope will pinpoint Rommel's Treasure – a cache of ingots, jewellery and works of art hidden by the SS as they retreated at the end of the war.

Terry Hodgkinson, the British investigator leading the chase for the treasure, said: 'We have now worked out the code and are pretty confident of where the treasure is. We feel certain that the latest techniques can be used to retrieve it.'

Scroll down for more...



Field Marshal Rommel


He believes the co-ordinates refer to a point less than a mile off a tourist beach close to the port of Bastia, on the French island of Corsica.

Mr Hodgkinson would confirm only that he would be searching an area just off Marana beach – where hundreds of holidaymakers top up their tans completely oblivious to the fact that the key to one of the greatest mysteries of the Third Reich might be just a few hundred yards away.

The hoard was amassed by fanatical SS units operating alongside Rommel's Afrika Korps. It is believed to be made up of 440lb of gold bullion and other precious objects looted from Jews in Tunisia during the North Africa campaign.

The Germans stashed the loot on Corsica – a convenient stopping-off point en route from Africa to Germany. But as the Allies advanced in 1943 it was collected in six steel cases which were then sealed and hidden off the coast, with their whereabouts known only by German cartographers.



On a mission: Terry Hodgkinson, who is leading the search for the hoard

The man at the centre of solving the mystery is Corporal Walter Kirner, who had his picture taken when he was 20 and had just joined the notorious Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler, founded as Hitler's bodyguard regiment in 1933. It later became a Waffen SS combat unit.

At the end of the war Kirner, along with other SS men, was imprisoned in the Dachau death camp and it is here that he is said to have learned the legend of Rommel's Treasure from fellow inmates.

He would have been told about Colonel Walter Rauff, Rommel's subordinate, who created mobile gas chambers and amassed the treasure from victims of his extermination units.

Threatened by heavy bombardment from Allied forces, he saw little prospect of getting his hoard off Corsica and back to Germany, so decided to hide it. The SS thought they might be able to retrieve it if the war swung back in their favour but, of course, they never returned.

The picture of Kirner came to light when Mr Hodgkinson, who has spent the past 15 years searching for the treasure, was investigating German archives.

He knew a man named Kirner had claimed to know the secret of the treasure when interrogated in 1948 and his search for an image of him led him to the family snapshot. Mr Hodgkinson said: 'Only a few SS men knew where the treasure was, and Kirner was one of them, so his story is crucial to solving the mystery.

'There's a good chance that he didn't understand the co-ordinates himself, but he was clearly told about them and wrote them on his treasured family photograph for safekeeping. It's an astonishing breakthrough, and one which we need to act on as quickly as possible.

'We're hoping to get funding for an expedition which will involve using a sophisticated device to hoover up the seabed. The mystery has been around for far too long, and we need to solve it once and for all.'

Mr Hodgkinson is a TV scriptwriter who has worked for shows such as Midsomer Murders and Lovejoy. He has a French-born wife and divides his time between London and Corsica.

The Rommel Treasure has been a target for bounty hunters for decades.

Some of Mr Hodgkinson's original research was based on a previous expedition whose members included the 3rd Lord Kilbracken, who died last year, aged 85.

As well as serving as a Swordfish pilot for the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm during the war, Lord Kilbracken worked as a journalist for the London Evening Standard, and led an unsuccessful trip to Corsica to try to retrieve the treasure in 1963.

Lord Kilbracken had been looking for the treasure as far back as 1952, when he was commissioned by an American journal to report from Corsica. He also had an arrangement with the Daily Mail.

His 1963 expedition was based on Kirner's 1948 testimony, made to French secret servicemen when the former SS man turned himself in after escaping from Dachau. He is now dead.

Mr Hodgkinson said: 'Kirner used a false name and said he could lead people to the treasure, but all the schemes he was involved with collapsed because of a lack of funds and the poor diving technology available at the time. Kilbracken had similar problems, but he was heading in the right direction before his own expedition collapsed.'

Mr Hodgkinson said his next step would be to find a list of other SS prisoners who were in Dachau with Kirner to try to learn more about what the treasure might include.

He said: 'Kirner was interviewed at length by all kinds of security agencies – there are CIA and MI6 files on the subject – but no one has ever been successful in tracking down exactly where it is.'

Mr Hodgkinson is concerned about German efforts to beat him to the hoard.

Berlin-based TV station ZDF carried out secret research missions last year and sailed to the east coast of Corsica in February to conduct a search but found nothing.

Under French law, the proceeds from the treasure would be split between the state and those who found it. But the French would also try to find any surviving relatives of those stripped of their gold.


http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/...ate looted Nazi gold worth ýý20m/article.do

kenb

 

[fiatboy]

fascinating...keep us posted with any more updates.

 

[Tanneyhill]

Old thread, anyone know if anything came of Terry Hodgkinson's hunt for Rommel's treasure off the coast of Corsica? Beautiful place to search for treasure, especially the beautiful teal color waters. There is also a treasure from WW2 in the waters off Sardinia just south of Corsica, I can't recall off hand what it was.

 

[Crow]

That gold was long gone amigos. Long gone even before Terry started looking.

Crow

 

[troutbum]

Funny , the SS never served in the Afrika Korp. They were used as police to round up Jew's in North Africa, and very few of them were there. See if you follow history, there is a lot of wishful thinking about treasure. In the end by 1943 , any loot would have been sent to Germany or an occupied country. Like the movie ,5 graves to Cairo with secret codes for buried supplies, It never happened. I truly doubt if a non com or a pvt soldier would have any knowledge of a great hidden treasure or secret code. Also by 1943 before the fall Tunisia, fighting for their lives and not becoming prisoners of war and escaping to Cicely would have been a more pressing matter than burying gold with secret codes. Just my 2 cents.

 

[Tanneyhill]

That gold was long gone amigos. Long gone even before Terry started looking.

View attachment 2138816


Crow

Wow, they are beautiful and shiny aren't they.

Would love to get my hands on one of those for my collection.