JAKARTA - An old map believed to mark where German soldiers hid millions of euros worth of treasure during World War Two, sparked the imagination of amateur treasure hunters in the Netherlands this week.
Armed with metal detectors and shovels, groups roamed the fields surrounding the country's eastern Ommeren countryside, after the map was published by the Dutch National Archives on Tuesday.
The archive said the map was believed to show where Nazi soldiers hid four large boxes containing diamonds, rubies, gold, silver and any kind of jewelry they stripped after an explosion at a bank in August 1944.
The map was obtained from a German soldier shortly after the war, by a Dutch agency tasked with tracking down the German capital in the Netherlands, after the country was released from Nazi occupation in 1945.
The research file that stores the map was released this week, as the 75-year period of secret status expires.
While the existence of the treasure could never be fully confirmed, the institute made various failed attempts to find it in 1947, National Archives spokesman Anne-Marieke Samson told Reuters.
"We don't know for sure if the treasure exists. But the institute did a lot of inspections and found the story to be reliable," said Samson.
"But they never found it and if it did, the treasure might have been excavated," he said.
However, the small chance of finding valuables does not deter amateur gold diggers.
"I'm seeing a group of people with metal detectors everywhere," Jan Henzen, 57, told Reuters as he rested from his search.
"Like many people, the news of treasure makes me go looking for it myself. It's possible that the treasure is still here after 70 years very small I think, but I want to try it," said Henzen.
Meanwhile, former Ommeren Mayor Klaas Tammes, who now runs the land-owning foundation that may hide the treasure, said he had seen people from various regions.
"The map with a row of three trees and red bars marks a place where the treasure hidden triggers imagination," he explained.
"Anyone who finds something should report it to us, so we'll see. But I don't expect it to be easy," he concluded.
The English, Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and French versions are automatically generated by the AI. So there may still be inaccuracies in translating, please always see Indonesian as our main language. (system supported by DigitalSiber.id)
