Nazi soldiers buried treasure. Nearly 80 years later, the search continues.

OMMEREN, Netherlands – In the spring of 1945, a couple of weeks before the liberation of the Netherlands from its Nazi occupiers, five German soldiers buried four ammunition boxes filled with gold, jewels and watches in a wooded area of ​​a quiet Dutch village .

Nazi soldiers had collected the valuables, which may be worth millions, off the street after they were blown out of a bank vault during an explosion in the city of Arnhem in the late summer of 1944, the documents show.

What the men who buried the loot probably didn’t know was that one of their companions, a man named Helmut Sonder, was lying in the bushes with a war wound, observing the scene and memorizing it.

Sonder then drew a meticulous map showing exactly where (next to three poplars) and how deep (between 50 and 70 centimeters) the treasure had been buried.

Not much is known about the fate of the man who drew the map, but the document ended up in Dutch National Archives in The Hague.

It was made public this month as part of the archives’ annual “publicity day,” along with thousands of documents that are no longer classified.

The publication of the map has spurred a new search for gold and jewelery boxes and has raised the profile of the small town of ommeren -of 751 inhabitants- as one of the few places in the world where a known Nazi treasure could be hidden.

“We are on the map,” said Klaas Tammes, former mayor of the municipality that includes Ommeren.

“It was nice.”

Others share his excitement but express a sense of frustration with people who come from all over the country to dig in the village, an hour’s drive southeast of Amsterdam.

Dozens of people arrived with shovels and metal detectors, and one man even brought a dowsing rod, according to Tammes, who lives on the farm where the treasure may be buried.

A photograph circulating among neighbors shows another man down to his waist, next to a regional road.

The mystery has captivated local residents and received widespread attention from Dutch and international media, but their main question remains unanswered:

Is the loot still there?

“I have my doubts,” says Joke Honders, a local historian who works at the Ommeren regional museum and lives in the neighboring village.

But she added that, after consulting a historical atlas and hand-drawn map, she thinks she knows where the treasure might be, a place no one has yet searched, that she knows.

When asked for more precise details, he replied:

“I’m not going to tell you!”

It’s not entirely clear what would happen to the treasure if someone found it.

Honders said he had no interest in keeping the contents of the boxes if he found them.

“It’s not about the treasure itself,” he said.

“Everything has been stolen; there’s too much negativity attached to it.”

Searching for treasure in the area could be a dangerous quest, said Sebastiaan Hoogenberg, an amateur metal detectorist who runs a canal Youtube where he talks about the objects he finds around the Netherlands.

There are unexploded WWII era bombs on the ground.

On its website, the Ommeren city council urged fortune seekers to stay away because digging for treasure is actually not allowed.

After the map was released, the city council received many messages from people claiming to know the exact location and offering to reveal it in exchange for money, said Birgit van Aken-Quint, a spokeswoman for the city council.

Since then, the situation has calmed down, he said, and about five people have asked authorization forml to search for treasure.

Rumors about the treasure began among Dutch soldiers stationed in Germany in 1946, according to documents in the National Archives.

A postwar government institution tasked with finding and handling stolen property discovered in December 1946 and ordered official searches of the area.

The first search, in January 1947, was unsuccessful because the ground was frozen.

The second attempt, a few weeks later, failed due to a faulty metal detector, the documents show.

On its third search, in the summer of 1947, the agency brought Sonder, the ex-soldier who drew the map, back to the Netherlands from Germany to pinpoint the exact location, the documents show.

They found nothing.

After a fourth and final attempt, in August 1947, officials concluded the treasure was probably gone, the documents show.

The inhabitants of Ommeren said they had never heard of the treasure.

“It was a total surprise,” Tammes said.

“This story was unknown here.”

“We stumbled upon this map by accident,” said Annet Waalkens, a researcher at the National Archives, which has hundreds of thousands of maps in its collection.

“When we saw it, we had already found our treasure.”

And he added:

“It’s nice that a yellowed piece of paper can conjurer such emotions”.

Sonder may have made it all up, but Dutch research officials deemed it unlikely, the documents show.

Another theory is that one or more government researchers found it in secret.

And another hypothesis, which some consider the most probable, is that one of the Nazi soldiers who hid the treasure returned and dug it up himself.

No hypothesis has been proven and it is unclear whether Sonder is still alive.

It is not the first time that the town, which is particularly quiet in the winter without the motorcyclists and campers who crowd the area in the summer, has been the subject of archaeological ferment.

In 2016, three prospectors found a treasure of 31 Roman gold coins.

Not everyone has joined in on the enthusiasm for the possible Nazi treasure.

“I think it will pass,” said Dicky Briene, 76, who has lived in the same house in Ommeren for 54 years and said he hadn’t seen any visitors with shovels or metal detectors.

“And there probably won’t be anything.”

c.2023 The New York Times Society