Free Republic

Image: via Food Court LunchAmong the chaos of the collapse of Hitler’s empire in April 1945 the biggest heist in history took place. Gold bars, jewels and stolen foreign currency with an estimated worth of $3.34 billion vanished from the Reichsbank vaults, in Germany.Reichsbank, Berlin 1933Image: German Federal Archive In the ensuing decades small quantities of this bounty have turned up in Portugal, Switzerland, Turkey, Spain and Sweden but the majority remains missing. Across the world search teams look for this missing treasure and the supreme prize of the legendary Amber Room, an acquisition from St. Petersburg during WWII,...

Alfred Egner drowned. He was just a workhorse, really, a 19-year-old boy from Munich, hired by a couple of former SS officers in 1963 to dive down to the murky bottoms of Austria's Lake Toplitz and resurface with fistfuls of treasures secreted away in this alpine paradise. It wasn't his first dive in Lake Toplitz, but he may have gotten tangled in some of the hundreds of logs that line the bottom, or something may have gone wrong with his equipment. Regardless, he never retrieved what the two men were most likely looking for: secret codes to Swiss bank accounts,...