Lake Toplitz sits in a steep, wooded trough of the Totes Gebirge in the Styrian part of Austria’s Salzkammergut, reachable only on foot or by a short boat ride from the neighboring Grundlsee. It is a little over a mile long and more than 300 feet deep. Below about 65 feet the water carries no dissolved oxygen, and a layer of sunken logs hangs in the dark beneath that, which makes every dive dangerous. Those conditions have helped it keep one of Europe’s most durable treasure stories alive.
What happened
From 1943 the German navy, the Kriegsmarine, ran a test station on the shore, setting off explosive charges and trying out underwater rockets in the deep water. At the start of May 1945, with American troops closing in, witnesses saw SS men haul around sixty wooden crates to the lake and sink them, along with surplus equipment from the test station.
Part of what went in came from Operation Bernhard. From 1942 the SS officer Bernhard Krüger had run a forging workshop at Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where about 142 Jewish prisoners reproduced Bank of England notes in denominations from five to fifty pounds. The Bank of England Museum describes the copies as close to perfect; they were betrayed mainly by reused serial numbers, and the Bank responded by withdrawing every note above five pounds. In 1945 the workshop was moved into Austria and the prisoners were ordered to destroy what they carried. What was not burned was trucked to the lakes.
The investigation
In 1959 the West German magazine Stern paid for an expedition that found crates at around 260 feet. According to Interior Ministry files examined by the historian Thomas Riegler for the Austrian weekly profil in 2014, the haul consisted of forged pound notes, an estimated 3.2 million of them, plus a box of forging materials and a prisoner list from Sachsenhausen. Officials recorded that no valuables or important papers were found. Newspapers reported something grander, including a diary of Heinrich Himmler that did not exist, and early estimates put the hoard at hundreds of millions of pounds before it was revised to a face value of about nine million.
The legend hardened in October 1963, when a 19-year-old diver from Munich, Franz Egner, went into the lake at night on an illegal dive financed by a group that included a former German intelligence agent. He did not come up. The tabloid press called it murder; the autopsy found that inexperience, exhaustion and inadequate gear had left him to fatal depth intoxication. Simon Wiesenthal wrote to Austria’s interior minister that the lake might hold lists of Nazi assets hidden abroad, and East German propaganda claimed it guarded documents that would compromise West German leaders.
Austria answered with a sealed-off official search from late October to early December 1963. Divers from the state mine-clearance service spent more than 300 hours underwater, recovered Egner’s body and swept more than half the lakebed with detectors and an underwater camera. They raised naval test gear, more counterfeit notes and dozens of printing plates and numbering devices. The forgeries were burned at the Austrian National Bank on April 28, 1964, with two Bank of England officials watching, and the ministry declared the lake empty.
The searching went on regardless. The marine biologist Hans Fricke explored the bottom in research submarines from 1983 and in 1984 helped army divers recover more war scrap and forged money. In 2000 a team from Oceaneering Technologies, largely funded by the American network CBS, spent five weeks combing the lakebed. The most widely repeated result was a promising chest that held only beer-bottle caps, apparently left as a joke by a local drinking club.
Where it stands
Lake Toplitz has given up exactly what the record says went into it: forgeries, the tools to print them, and debris from a weapons test site. No gold bar, foreign account list or archive has ever been raised. Former SS men questioned over the years dismissed the idea, one remarking that gold is buried, not thrown into a bottomless lake. The story survives through films, including a passing reference in the 1964 James Bond film Goldfinger, and through the Alpine tourist trade on its shore.