The lost gold of Lake Toplitz

The Claim

There is a stash of stolen Nazi gold at the bottom of the lake.

Sitting high up in the Austrian Alps within a region known as the dead mountains, is Lake Toplitz. Surrounded by cliffs and forest and only accessible by foot along a mile-long path, the lake has been responsible for the deaths of numerous treasure hunters and is now patrolled by the police in an attempt to stop people from diving in it.

So why would people risk their lives to dive in such a hazardous lake, you ask?

Excellent question, and the answer is the same as it always is with these stories: there’s supposed to be a hell of a lot of treasure down there.

Between 1943 and 1944, the lake housed a Nazi naval testing facility that conducted various underwater explosive tests. They detonated single charges up to 4000kg underwater and also fired torpedoes into the banks of the opposite shore, covering it in large craters.

Since it was a top-secret facility, it would have been one of the most trusted places to store and, if needs be, hide any large amounts of wealth, and what better place to stash it all than at the bottom of a huge lake?

It is actually known that there is more than £500 million worth of counterfeit British pound notes dumped into the lake after operation Bernhard failed, which was an attempt to airdrop huge amounts of money over Britain in an attempt to flood the country with too much money and collapse the economy, but this failed for various reasons.

The money itself would be totally useless today, though, as not only would they be bad forgeries of a type of note not used for decades, but they would have almost certainly rotted away by now.

What wouldn’t have rotten away is all the other treasure thought to have been stashed at the base, including a large quantity of gold. The claim of treasure comes from when the Germans were losing the war and opposing forces were closing in from all sides. There was nowhere to store all the wealth they had stashed at the site, so the idea was to sink it into the lake to stop the allies from getting their hands on it.

(Some of the fake banknotes that were recovered from the lake shortly after the war. This is only a fraction of what was dumped into the lake, though they are all worthless now.)

So why has no one ever found it?

You would have thought looking for something in a lake would be quite straightforward, as it’s a static body of water and there’s only so much floor area of it you’d need to cover, unlike searching for something in the sea, for example, so why hasn’t it turned up yet?

Well, Lake Toplitz isn’t an ordinary lake, and apart from the local authorities arresting several people each year who were trying to dive in the lake, it’s also incredibly dangerous.

At its deepest point, the lake reaches 103 meters, but after 20 meters deep, the water has no oxygen at all, forcing the fish that live in it to remain above a depth of 18m at all times. Below 20m, the water also starts to get very salty, making it denser than the fresh surface water.

Halfway to the bottom of the lake, sitting in the saltwater is a layer of old logs which have been submerged for many years, preserved in the lake’s salt. They aren’t light enough to float but aren’t heavy enough to sink further through the dense salt water below, instead settling in a thick layer halfway down.

These logs are the reason people have lost their lives in this lake, and because of the deaths, the authorities now patrol and have put a complete ban on any further expeditions.

So could it be true?

As for gold, it’s hard to say, as it’s not known if this facility stored gold specifically in its vault, though it’s quite likely. But it is known that it housed a significant amount of wealth, and being one of the more secure and out-of-the-way facilities, it’s likely it would have been trusted with a larger quantity of goods.

Since so many of the attempts to reach the bottom have been met with tragedy, its unlikely any large scale investigation will happen, and since the lake is 2km long and at its widest 400m across, the cost of such an operation for nothing more than the promise that “something” is down there isn’t enough to make anyone pay for such an endeavour.

But just because no one plans to perform a proper expedition due to cost and legal reasons, doesn’t mean that there isn’t something worth having down there.

So maybe, just maybe, at the bottom of Lake Toplitz, settled in the thick layer of mud, lies a number of chests containing enough wealth to start your own small country, or maybe it’s nothing more than rotting counterfeit 1940s bank notes.