gold Archives - ATLANTIS RISING THE RESEARCH REPORT

As the Nazis fled occupied Europe in the final days of the second world war, four German soldiers buried a hoard of gold coins and jewels in the middle of nowhere in the Dutch countryside. Nearly 80 years later, hopes of finding the buried loot have been raised after the National Archives of the Netherlands released a trove of documents – and a map to the treasure where X marks the spot.

The treasure – four ammunition cases laden with coins, watches, jewellery, diamonds and other gemstones – is thought to have been worth at least 2m or 3m Dutch guilder in 1945, the equivalent of around £15.85m in today’s money.

“A lot of researchers, journalists and amateur archaeologists are really interested and excited,” said Annet Waalkens, an adviser at the National Archives, which released more than 1,300 historical documents. Whether any would-be treasure hunter will be able to find the cases is another matter. Among the cache of second world war papers was a 7cm-thick file that recounted the fruitless efforts of the Dutch state to find the looted Nazi treasure after the war.

Researchers believe the treasure was buried in April 1945, when the Allies were on the brink of liberating Arnhem in the eastern Netherlands. German soldiers were fleeing. “They decide to bury the treasure, because it’s just getting a bit too hot under their feet and they’re getting scared,” Waalkens told the Observer.

The precious cargo was buried in the roots of a poplar tree, 70-80cm deep, just outside the village of Ommeren, around 25 miles from Arnhem. The riches might have vanished from the historical record for ever were it not for a chatty German soldier, Helmut S, who was not one of the original looters but took part in the burial.

The National Archives are withholding his full name, as Helmut S, born in 1925, may still be alive, although no one has been able to trace him. Of the three other soldiers, two did not survive the war and the other simply vanished.

Helmut S, however, stayed on the radar. “He was a bit loose-lipped back in Berlin,” said Waalkens, and he soon came to the attention of Dutch authorities in the occupied German city. They passed the information on to the Beheersinstituut, the Dutch Institute of Asset and Property Management, a body responsible for managing the wealth of people who had disappeared in the second world war, including deported Jews, Dutch spies and German citizens who lived in the Netherlands.

The first search failed because the ground was frozen. The second, aided by primitive metal detectors, yielded nothing. According to Helmut S, the hoard was discovered when an Arnhem branch of the Rotterdamsche bank was bombed in August 1944. A safe was smashed, leaving jewels, coins and other riches scattered in the street. His comrades pocketed what they could see, later hiding the loot in zinc ammunition boxes.
In 1946-47 the Beheersinstitut carried out three searches. The first failed because the ground was frozen. The second, aided by primitive metal detectors of the time, yielded nothing. For the third attempt they summoned Helmut S back from Germany to help, but despite his eyewitness knowledge and the map he had provided, the dig was fruitless.

Archivists are not certain who made the map but believe it was done by one of the German soldiers. After Helmut S handed it over, the map went into the file of the Beheersinstituut, with the proviso it would not be released for many years to protect the financial interests of the property owners.

Original article, pictures and captions:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/07/treasure-map-hunt-15million-nazi-hoard

AR #59

Nazis and the Occult

by Mark Stavish

The Viking Age beadmakers were more advanced than previously believed. A research group from i.a. Aarhus University reveals that the ancient craftsmen in the earliest Viking Age around the year 700 used sophisticated and sustainable methods when they gave old Roman glass mosaics new life as glass beads.

Ribe was an important trading town in the Viking Age. At the beginning of the 8th century, a trading place was established on the north side of the river Ribe, to which traders and craftsmen flocked from far and wide to manufacture and sell goods such as brooches, suit buckles, combs and colored glass beads.

When glass became a scarce commodity in the Early Medieval time, colored glass cubes – so-called tesserae – were torn down from mosaics in abandoned Roman and Byzantine temples, palaces and baths, transported North and traded at emporia towns such as Ribe, where the beadmakers melted them down in large vessels and shaped them into beads.

Until now, archaeologists have assumed that the pearl makers used the opaque white tesserae as raw material for the production of white, opaque beads.

And it is here that a geochemist and an archaeologist from Aarhus University together with a museum curator from Ribe have made a surprising discovery, which they have just published in the scientific journal Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences:

The chemical composition of white Viking beads from one of the earliest workshops showed that the glassmakers had found a more sustainable way to save time and wood for their furnaces: crush gold-gilded, transparent glass cubes, remelt them at low temperature, stir to trap air in the form of bubbles, and finally wrap the glass around an iron mandrel to form beads and voila! – opaque white beads created in a short time using a minimum of resources.

The valuable ultra-thin sheets of gold stuck to the surface of the gold mosaic stone were of course salvaged by the glassmaker prior to remelting the glass, but the new findings show that some gold inevitably had ended up in the melting pot. Tiny drops of gold in the white beads, the many air holes (which is why the beads are opaque), as well as the fact that there are no chemical color tracers present, the researchers show that it was in fact the gold mosaic stones that was the raw material for the beads.

Such traces of gold were found not only in the white but also in the blue beads from the same workshop. Here the chemistry shows that the glassmaker’s recipe consisted of a mixture of the blue and golden mosaic stones. Mixing them was necessary because the Roman blue mosaic stones contained high concentrations of chemical substances which made them opaque – and therefore ideal for mosaics, but not for blue beads. By thus diluting the chemical substances, the result was the deep blue, transparent glass that we know from Viking Age beads.
The bead maker in Ribe could instead have chosen to dilute the glass mixture with old shards from funnel beakers, which were also found in the workshop. But these turned out to be old, contaminated, Roman glass that had been remelted over and over again.

“And the glassmakers in Ribe were clearly connoisseurs who preferred the clearest glass they could get their hands on,” says Gry Hoffmann Barfod from the Department of Geoscience at Aarhus University. She adds:

https://nat.au.dk/en/about-the-faculty/news/show/artikel/fortidens-upcycling-vikingetidens-perlemagere-tryllede-med-romersk-glas