Expert says he has solved mystery of lost Nazi treasure worth billions… but is being blocked from digging up the huge hoard of stolen loot by German red tape

An expert on the trail of lost Nazi treasures potentially worth billions believes he has found a stash of paintings deep beneath the forests of Germany, but is being prevented from unearthing the treasure by local bureaucracy.

Buckhart List, 75, from Austria, is certain that the SS left a cache of stolen goods from a Hungarian Jewish art collector in a room some 30 to 40 meters below a clearing in the forest near the village of Deutschkatharinenberg.

The journalist and author believes that during the war the Nazis moved potentially 800 paintings – including works by Monet, Cezanne and Pissaro – as well as gold and jewelery that are today ‘worth billions’ to chambers deep underground.

A geophysical survey hopes to end the search after more than a decade of speculation, but Mr List now says Saxony authorities have stopped him from continuing because a Stone Age tool was found about half a mile away, making the area off-limits. for archaeological excavations.

In an appeal to continue his work, he told The Times: ‘I don’t want to take anything for myself. I know this is from people… who have lost their lives.”

Mr. List has been at the forefront of the search for Baron Ferenc Hatvany’s missing masterpieces in recent years, hoping to discover hundreds of lost masterpieces.

He says a study by Professor Wolfgang Neubauer, director of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Virtual Archeology in Austria, points to a chamber beneath a forest clearing in Germany.

Dr. Neubauer and a team helped make a breakthrough at Stonehenge in 2010 using their image processing software.

The theory goes that a mine near Deutschneudorf was sealed off with an explosion to keep away those about to discover Nazi treasure troves – and evidence of hidden Jewish gold.

Mr List, who launched his expedition more than a decade ago, believes the hidden cache could house “billions” worth of art, gold and jewelery stolen from Budapest during the 1944 occupation.

Now the challenge is cutting through the red tape.

Mr List says he is appealing against a ban on excavations imposed by local authorities following the discovery of a Stone Age tool nearby.

He believes the room may contain the missing masterpieces of Baron Hatvany, a Jewish-Hungarian art collector whose collection was stolen during the war.

Many of its treasures were taken from Budapest’s bank vaults by Red Army soldiers when the city fell to the Soviets in 1945.

But the bulk of the Hatvany collection, between 250 and 500 pieces, was looted on the orders of Holocaust organizer Adolf Eichmann, who was in Hungary in 1944 and pursued a policy of arresting Jews and then releasing them in return for property – or send them to a country. Auschwitz.

Mr. List said about 12 years ago that he had obtained documents from old Wehrmacht archives reporting a mass shipment of the Hatvany collection to two 1,800-by-1,200-meter underground galleries in the Ore Mountains.

With permission from the mayor of nearby Deutschkatherinenberg, Hans-Peter Haustein, he deployed a neutron generator in the mountain to search for the secret chambers.

The device revealed that there are workings at 55 meters depth that are not detailed on maps, and that these appear to be man-made and not natural.

Mr List said: ‘In the winter of 1944 – 1945, records indicate that a mysterious transport coded as top secret arrived here from Budapest.

‘One of the photos that emerged from the archive was of the Sonnenhaus, a large building just in front of the Fortuna mine where I believe the art is stored.

‘It shows a large contingent of SS men. There was no military or logical state purpose for them to be here on a secret mission, unless the purpose was to move the works of art into rooms that, climactic, are ideal for the storage of art.”

Early exploration revealed only a Schmeisser machine gun, a Nazi gas mask, plastic explosive detonators and a safe key.

Mayor Haustein, also a member of parliament for the liberal FDP party in Berlin, said at the time: ‘The question is not what we find here, but when we find it.

‘I have seen the evidence and I have heard the testimonies of eyewitnesses over the years about the presence of the SS in the village. This stuff is here.”

The Sonnenhaus is already attracting visitors ahead of a planned descent to the mountain in May, who will attempt to open the secret chambers that until now have only been accessible via radar.

However, Mr List’s application is not the first application to be rejected in the search for Nazi gold.

Five applications a year are also submitted to the Thuringian State Archaeological Office and other agencies to attempt to dig for the Amber Room, a coveted trove of gold and amber worth hundreds of millions in today’s money.

All were rejected until 2017, when the state gave permission to the local forestry association. The excavation apparently did not uncover the Amber Chamber.

The search for the chamber, a jewel-studded chamber from the 18th century, has taken archaeologists everywhere from sunken ships off the coast of Poland to secret forest tunnels in central Europe and excavations of sites where the V1 and V2 rockets were launched. built.

The accepted theory is that the city was destroyed by Russian artillery fire when the Red Army stormed the city in 1945. However, there are those who claim that the city was expelled before the fall.

The room was originally given to Peter the Great by the King of Prussia.

Later, Catherine the Great commissioned a new generation of craftsmen to decorate the room and moved it from the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg to her new summer residence at Tsarskoe Selo, outside the city.

“When the work was finished, in 1770, the room was dazzling,” wrote art historians Konstantin Akinsha and Grigorii Kozlov.

‘It was illuminated by 565 candles whose light was reflected in the warm golden surface of the amber and sparkled in the mirrors, gilded surface and mosaics.’

Much later, the Germans took the room to Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, which is now the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad.

After the war, the Amber Room became the El Dorado of Central Europe, a quest that captivated both rich and poor.

Crafted entirely from amber, gold and precious stones, the Amber Room was a masterpiece of Baroque art and widely regarded as the world’s most important art treasure.