Introducing Bottomless Lake Toplitz

Is it "The Nazi's Eldorado"?

Lake Toplitz Image by Era Kovács

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We found the cache of gold and counterfeit English pound notes that they were going to use to sink the Bank of England, in the bottom of Toplitz, where it had been dumped.

- Robert Matteson, interview with Alec Kirby, Minnesota Historical Society, May 30-31, 1991

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To say Austria is and was an interesting region before, during, and after World War II is a comical understatement.

Austria was part of Nazi Germany from March 12, 1938 (an event known as the Anschluss) until April 27, 1945, when Allied-controlled Austria declared independence and established the Second Republic of Austria.

It’s also the birthplace of both Adolf Hitler and Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

To this day there are a lot of interesting things to be found there. As mentioned in this space previously, the cabin where Kaltenbrunner was captured by Robert Matteson is still standing. Also, in 2001, a Dutch citizen on vacation found Kaltenbrunner’s personal Nazi security seal in an Alpine lake in Styria, Austria, 56 years after he had thrown it away in an effort to hide his identity while the war wound down (and before his capture). The words “Chef der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD” (Chief of the Security Police and SD) are engraved on it.

And then, less than three miles from the body of water mentioned above, there is Lake Toplitz (German: Toplitzsee).

Bottomless

Located in the Totes Gebirge (Dead Mountains) about forty miles southeast of the city of Salzburg, the lake is inaccessible and frozen over for almost half the year.

Toplitz had its own “Loch Ness Monster” for a short time; that is, until Robert Wellig, an editor with the German ARD television network, told the Austria Press Agency that a “monster of Lake Toplitz” operation was staged for a candid-camera program.

This is a lake that doesn’t need a monster to be scary.

Only the upper 60 feet of Lake Toplitz water is fresh – all the water below that level is very salty and contains almost no oxygen. No fish or other marine life exist in these deeper areas.

Most importantly, anything that falls or is tossed into the lake and sinks below this level does not rot or decompose.

And, yes, you guessed it, the Germans in Austria dumped a lot of interesting items into Lake Toplitz as the war wound down — up to and including a huge amount of counterfeit currency and “excess gold.” There have been numerous fatalities over the years attributed to attempts to uncover and recover that gold and currency.

German soldiers dropping treasure into Lake Toplitz. Severino Baraldi, artist; created for Look and Learn magazine, issue unknown. Caption: “At the end of the Second World War a group of SS Soldiers arrived in the small village next to Lake Toplitz in Austria. They commandeered horses to transport a large number of boxes to the lake, and then proceeded to dump those boxes in the lake. It has long been speculated that part of the large amount of gold stolen from the Reichsbank during the Fall of Berlin was in this consignment. What is known is that in 1959 an expedition financed by a German magazine recovered a printing press and £72 million in forged 1940s pound sterling currency. In 1983 during a biological survey, yet more forged pounds were discovered, along with numerous Nazi-era rockets and missiles that had been tested there.”

In the next few installments of THE DEAD RANGE we’ll take a look at what has been discovered in Lake Toplitz since the end of the war, as well as what still may lay beneath.

Yes, it’ll be a bit creepy.

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