Treasure hunters seeking Nazi gold worth £200MILLION believe they have ‘found the real thing’ after ‘monumental’ discovery under remains of SS palace ‘brothel’

A treasure hunter who spent years searching for £200 million worth of Nazi gold in a former palace says he has now found a ‘large metal’ object that he thinks may be full of looted Second World War valuables.

Roman Furmaniak began combing the grounds of the 18th-century palace in the southern Polish village of Minkowskie in 2021 after receiving documents indicating that tons of gold and valuables were buried there.

But after a thorough search, finding nothing of significant value, he sought it out a day later. Now he’s back at the palace, said to have once been used as a brothel by Hitler’s SS, and says he thinks he’s ‘spotted gold’.

He told the Daily Mail: ‘I believe we understand now. We work in the old conservatory, which is about eight meters underground. The soil there is very sandy and waterlogged.

The treasure hunter revealed on Thursday that his team had hit something solid, which they believed to be heavy metal, during the dig. ‘It’s sitting there on the wet ground and when we touch it with the excavator it moves slightly,’ he said.

“We believe that this residue may be inside the shell casing of the German Big Bertha mortar.” The dimensions match and the density feels right, with a big and strong metallic response.

‘I think we’ve achieved this now. I wasn’t sure after the last time, but this time everything points to it being real.

‘As I said, hours, maybe days, separate us from this monumental discovery and we are still with it.’

The buried treasure is thought to include the so-called ‘Breslau Gold’, now lost in the Polish city of Wrocław, just 35 miles away.

Roman Furmaniak began combing the grounds of the 18th-century palace in the village of Minkowskie in southern Poland in 2021.

He added: ‘The historical building inspector has been informed about the discovery of a heavy metal object, and the Polish Ministry of Culture and the German government will also be informed.

The buried treasure is thought to include the so-called ‘Breslau Gold’, now lost in the Polish city of Wrocław, just 35 miles away.

Breslau, then a German city, was one of the wealthiest cities in Hitler’s Third Reich.

However, the impending arrival of the Red Army meant that the Germans had to hide tons of gold and valuables.

These included bank deposits from private German banks as well as the Reichsbank, and civilians’ deposits of gold, currency and jewellery.

According to legend, the treasure was transported from Breslau towards the Sudeten mountains under SS guard.

However, shortly after setting off, the transport disappeared and the treasure has never been seen since. One theory is that it was stolen on Heinrich Himmler’s orders to create the Fourth Reich.

The palace, which dates back to the 18th century, caught Furmaniak’s interest when he allegedly came across some secret documents, an SS officer’s diary and a map.

According to Furmaniak, pencil-written diary pages said to have been penned by a high-ranking SS officer nicknamed Michaelis name the palace as the location of the lost treasure.

A record said to be from 12 March 1945 states: ‘A hole has been dug in the conservatory which provides a secure “house” for the crates and containers being delivered.’

It continues: ‘Forty-eight chests in good condition from the Reichsbank were hidden, very well covered with soil and ‘greened’ with still living plants.

‘Let the grace watch over us.’

It is stated that the documents include a letter written by a senior SS officer who called himself von Stein to one of the girls who worked in the palace and later became his lover.

The officer wrote: ‘Dear Inge, God willing, I will fulfill my duty. Some migrations were successful.

‘I hereby entrust to you the remaining 48 heavy Reichsbank chests and all family chests.

Its location was revealed through secret documents, a diary (pictured) and a map treasure hunters obtained from descendants of SS officers belonging to a secret lodge where Himmler worshiped, dating back more than 1,000 years.

The penciled pages of the diary are said to describe 11 places in Lower Silesia that were German territory before and during the war.

The treasure was stolen on orders from SS boss Heinrich Himmler (pictured) to establish the Fourth Reich towards the end of World War II.

The buried treasure is thought to include the so-called ‘Breslau Gold’, now lost in the Polish city of Wroclaw, just 35 miles away.

The palace began to interest Furmaniak, who allegedly came across some secret documents, the diary of an SS officer and a map.

‘Only you know where they are. May God help you and me and fulfill my duty.’

The diary states that a cache contains 47 works of art of international importance, believed to have been stolen from collections in France.

According to the Silesian Bridge Foundation, the diary came from a man who claimed to be the son of an SS officer and represented a Masonic Lodge of descendants of Nazi officials seeking redemption.

The 1,100-year-old lodge in Saxony-Anhalt held the diary for decades before handing it over to the foundation 10 years ago, Furmaniak said.

The foundation said that while searching the palace grounds in 2022, it found a 1.5-meter metal box lying about 3 meters below the surface.

But it turned out to be nothing more than a piece of scrap, and historians whom the foundation ‘invited to verify’ the diary in the same year said their analysis was ‘not entirely positive’.

Historians from a group called Discoverer Magazine Exploration Group (GEMO) said in their post on Facebook: ‘Our most important finding is that the village of Minkowskie is not mentioned in the ‘War Diary’.

‘This may be difficult for the Trust as this is the only place where excavations are currently taking place.’

The documents include a letter written by a senior SS officer named von Stein to one of the girls who worked at the palace in Minkowskie and later became his lover. The officer wrote: ‘Dear Inge, God willing, I will fulfill my duty. Some migrations were successful. I hereby entrust to you the remaining 48 heavy Reichsbank chests and all family chests. Only you know where they are. May God help you and me and fulfill my duty.’

Furmaniak told the Daily Mail: ‘We believe this deposit may be inside the shell casing of the German Big Bertha mortar.’

Historians also analyzed the letter contained in the ‘War Diary’ and questioned its authenticity.

They said: ‘Also, the relevant documents, such as a famous letter, do not appear to be very ‘legitimate’ and are NOT part of the ‘War Diary’, meaning there is not a shred of evidence that anything happened at Minkowskie.’

They later found a book about those fleeing the area, printed in Germany after the war, which they said ‘contained the same details which were later copied verbatim into the diary’.

According to historians, passages in the diary were copied from the accounts of German refugees who fled Lower Silesia in 1945 and were later published in the book Die Flucht (The Flight) in the 1960s.

Historians at the time concluded: ‘The result of our analysis makes clear that the war diary is a fictional text created many years after the war.’