- 6/9/2025
Category
📚
LearningTranscript
00:002001, an incredible discovery is made in the depths of a Bavarian lake.
00:13Everybody who is in contact with this cold run, he's like mesmerized, you know, you can
00:18feel its power.
00:19It would mark the beginning of an unbelievable tale of intrigue and shady deals.
00:26We said we found the holy drawl and tried to make billions, it must be a big story.
00:33Could the cauldron unlock one of the greatest mysteries of the Nazis?
00:38This thing has some kind of magic, not whether white or black, one can't really be sure.
00:43And reveal a secret obsession with the occult.
00:47The whole idea is surrounded by fantasy and mythology.
00:50To find out, we journey inside a dark fortress at the heart of the Nazi regime.
00:56We have not begun to get to the bottom of what really went on there.
01:00The Nazi Temple of Doom.
01:07In 2001, an amazing discovery was made in a lake in Germany.
01:27In my point of view, it was really one of the greatest mysteries we ever had in this region
01:38here in southern Bavaria.
01:40Local journalist Axel Efner followed the story as the news broke.
01:46There was a diver and another person and he goes with a metal detector who is detecting archaeological
01:53things on the lake bed.
01:55And they go to this place and dived about 200 meters from the shore and found this glimmering,
02:05glancing cauldron in the lake bed.
02:09This is the treasure that the divers found.
02:14The Kimse cauldron.
02:16An incredible artefact made of ten and a half kilos of gold.
02:22Decorated inside and out with reliefs of mysterious figures.
02:28It would later be described as the Celtic discovery of the century.
02:43Writer Andrew Goff was intrigued by the story of this grail-like find and began his own quest
02:50to uncover the truth behind its secret history.
02:55The entire story about the cauldron and its discovery has been fraught with suspicion.
02:59Respectfully, everyone who's touched it literally has been just behaving in a very self-motivated
03:05or suspicious kind of way.
03:10Were they looking for it intentionally or it wasn't an accident?
03:13Perhaps he heard from some historical sources that there could be a treasure in the lake bed.
03:21And the people of this place, they told that after the end of World War there was divers who were looking for something.
03:30And perhaps the cauldron could be put there by a secret army of the Nazis.
03:40There was little reason to doubt Axel's story.
03:43As the Nazis steamrolled through Europe, they plundered thousands of ancient artefacts, treasures and holy relics.
03:54Reports claimed that over a fifth of Europe's art was stolen.
03:59But by 1945, the fortunes of war had reversed.
04:05The Nazi regime's days are numbered and it's absolute chaos.
04:09They need to store these relics for a future time, perhaps for the Fourth Reich.
04:16So this means hiding objects in caves and even depositing objects such as a cauldron in a lake.
04:23Was the cauldron an ancient artefact stolen from occupied Europe?
04:37And could its discovery shed light on what went on inside this mysterious Nazi stronghold?
04:44Determining the cauldron's age was crucial.
04:48Some experts believed it to be over 2,000 years old.
04:52Others thought it was a modern creation.
04:56But what was the truth?
04:59Art dealer Kai Schmidt has studied ancient artefacts for over 30 years and soon realized he was dealing with something exceptional.
05:09It was very impressive on the first view and the material itself, the weight of the material, the massive weight and the effect of the light.
05:19If the light is reflected by such a huge amount of gold, it's a very fascinating effect.
05:28It's spectacular.
05:32Kai analysed the cauldron's depictions of ancient warriors and their gods.
05:39I think the whole scenery is something religious.
05:42Sacrifying scenes which are connected with the afterlife.
05:47It was clear to me that whoever made it was very closely involved or had a very good knowledge about the Celtic culture.
05:56The cauldron refused to give up the secrets of its age, leaving archaeologists and academics mystified.
06:04But there did seem to be one major clue that could help date this artefact.
06:17At first glance its Celtic imagery is reminiscent of the Gunderstrop cauldron from Denmark,
06:25which is authentic 2,000 years old and has very similar Celtic imagery.
06:35Retrieved from a Danish bog in 1891, this priceless silver object was believed to be one of a kind.
06:46I find it immensely impressive and quite a moving object to look at.
06:50The Gunderstrop is the biggest and most magnificent silver vessel from the late pre-Roman Iron Age.
07:01The Kingsei cauldron seemed to be a dead ringer for the Gunderstrop,
07:06and an archaeological sensation was in store for the world.
07:11In this modern world where everything is proved and everything is scientifically researched,
07:19and they have answers and solutions for everything, nearly everything,
07:23this is a thing which is something else.
07:34In the shady underworld of antiquities traders and their middlemen,
07:39deals were struck.
07:43Swiss entrepreneur Marcel Wunderli was banking on the cauldron's incredible age and rarity
07:49when he bought it in 2005.
07:53Wunderli is actively promoting the artefact.
07:56It's one of the most significant artefacts in recent years.
07:59In fact, the world has not seen a more important artefact according to Marcel.
08:04Wunderli's team claimed the cauldron was worth $1.4 billion and sought investors.
08:12There's a frenzy of interest now in the cauldron.
08:14Sure enough, investors come forward and actually invest a million and a half dollars
08:20just for the right to help in the marketing of it.
08:23To realize this incredible value, the cauldron had to be pre-Roman.
08:28Huge amounts of money were riding on it.
08:34Metallurgist Peter Northover was commissioned to determine its true age.
08:40Working alongside a team in Zurich, one of the cauldron's secrets was about to be revealed.
08:47The main technique that was used was laser ablation, inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry.
08:54A laser removed a minute speck of gold from the cauldron's surface, which was analyzed.
09:01This gave the team the elemental composition of its gold.
09:05So for ancient gold, you'd expect a certain level of tins of lead, platinum, palladium.
09:12The team made a shocking discovery.
09:17This is pure, modern, almost certainly electrolytically refined gold.
09:25Certainly a product of the 20th century.
09:33In Switzerland, Wunderli was indicted for fraud and sentenced to three years in prison.
09:38As a company asset, the cauldron was seized.
09:43It was placed in a high security vault in Zurich.
09:47If the cauldron wasn't made by an ancient hand, then who did make it? And why?
10:01What we can surmise, just by looking at it, is that it would have been a culture of a people who felt proudly about their ancient Celtic origins.
10:13The cauldron had been exposed as a modern fake.
10:18But could this strange artifact become the key to solving an even bigger mystery?
10:24Had it been made by an organization that was notorious for its obsession with ancient mythology and the occult?
10:30The Nazis.
10:41In a lake near Munich, divers discovered a gold cauldron.
10:45It was being hailed as the Celtic discovery of the century.
10:49But scientists soon exposed its true age.
10:53Certainly a product of the 20th century.
10:57If the cauldron was made in the 20th century, it still begged the questions, who made it and why?
11:04Even if it isn't an ancient artifact, the imagery that's on the artifact is imagery that was very important to the Nazi regime.
11:13This cauldron, adorned with religious imagery, could offer some insight into the Nazis and their strange beliefs.
11:22It becomes an artifact that's a byproduct of one of the most notorious and fascinating regimes in history.
11:29At the heart of this regime was a powerful inner circle that wanted to promote the idea of a glorious Germanic history.
11:37It was the personal obsession of one of the most powerful men in the Third Reich, Heinrich Himmler.
11:45As a Nazi, Heinrich Himmler was extremely effective, one of the most effective political operators in the Third Reich.
11:51He was brought up by his father on stories of Norse mythology and Teutonic myth.
11:57When he got to power as head of the SS, he then had the resources to indulge his fantasies about Aryan mythology.
12:05Himmler had his own new age guru, a historical advisor called Karl Maria Willigut.
12:15He claimed to be a warlock and the direct descendant of a line of god-kings.
12:21He was an obituary of various Nordic mythology societies.
12:25He was also an alcoholic. He was also an extreme abuser of drugs.
12:30He was a schizophrenic who had been effectively sectioned in the 1920s and he claimed to be able to channel his ancestors.
12:39So, quite a strange man.
12:42Using occult advisors like Willigut as inspiration, Himmler began to formulate his new ideology for the Nazis.
12:49He aimed to promote a racially pure society devoted to German greatness and its ancient past.
12:58And the vanguard of these new beliefs was one of the most evil groups in history.
13:03The Schutzstaffel or SS.
13:09The SS saw itself as an elitist organization.
13:12So, the man who really were committed to the Nazi course.
13:16Well, Himmler's main task from his point of view was to develop something like a cooperative identity for this organization.
13:22Himmler needed a base for his beloved SS.
13:41In 1934, he chose a remote fortress steeped in legends of witch trials, torture and execution.
13:49The Fievelsborg Castle.
13:55It became the Nazi Temple of Doom.
14:00Its past is dark.
14:03Its modern history equally as dark.
14:06And we have not begun to get to the bottom of what really went on there.
14:10What connected a cauldron found in the bottom of a lake with Himmler's mysterious castle?
14:20In spring 2011, Swiss journalist Luke Bergen broke a story in his magazine, Mysteries.
14:28According to the report, some personal effects of Himmler had been found in an attic in Germany.
14:37Amongst these finds, there were documents that were thought to be of Nazi origin.
14:42It's on Nazi letterhead.
14:49It's on old paper.
14:50It's stylized in the way of other documents from the era.
14:55And most every aspect about it just seems to ring true.
14:59Dated April 1945, the documents contained a movement order and an inventory of Nazi treasures.
15:07There are 35 objects, or sets of objects, on this list, of which one is called Gold Kessel, Celtish.
15:18So we're talking about a gold cauldron and it's in Celtic style.
15:22And what's being referred to there is the Ciemse cauldron.
15:25And there was another revelation.
15:29There, in black and white for the first time, was a suggestion that the Ciemse cauldron was kept at Himmler's fortress.
15:39Diedelsborg Castle.
15:43I wouldn't be surprised at all if that's where it had stayed for some period of time.
15:48The original documents were inaccessible and could not be closely examined.
15:55And in a world full of Nazi fakes and frauds, there was every chance that they were not reliable.
16:03More information was needed.
16:06The inventory also seemed to reveal the name of the man who made the cauldron.
16:11Otto Gahr.
16:12And its city of manufacture, Munich.
16:22Andrew Goff travelled to the Bavarian capital to see if the facts on the documents stood up to scrutiny.
16:28So I'm here in Munich to understand as much as I can about Otto Gahr.
16:40And in particular, could he have manufactured the cauldron?
16:47Munich's interesting because it's the birthplace of the Nazi movement and also where Himmler was born.
16:55Heiden is a well-established, family-run jeweller in the centre of the city.
17:12German journalists suggested that the cauldron was made at their workshops in the 20s or 30s.
17:17It's something that Max Heiden had been looking into.
17:22He was certain that the cauldron was made by Otto Gahr, the man whose name appeared on the inventory.
17:31This is the who is who from the Munich gold and silversmiths.
17:36Inno we call that. It's a guild. It's a goldsmith's guild.
17:41And he was a member of that till he died.
17:45And Mr. Gahr, he was the goldsmith from the NSDAP.
17:49The NSDAP, or Nazi Party, was on the rise in Munich in the mid-1920s.
17:57And silversmith Otto Gahr signed up.
18:01He would become the favoured jeweller of the SS, making their death's head rings.
18:06And Max thought he had more evidence, making Gahr to the cauldron.
18:13Max's family often talked of a meeting between Gahr and Heiden's chief craftsman, Alfred Notz.
18:20Mr. Gahr, who was mainly a silversmith, asked Mr. Notz, how should I work with 10 kilos of gold?
18:28According to Max, Gahr had made the cauldron from gold pipes taken from a chemical factory owned by a Nazi donor named Albert Peach.
18:40For me, it's clear that Mr. Peach has the possibility to take 10 kilos of gold to set a piece for the Chiemsee Castle.
18:53Otto Gahr could have been the natural choice to transform Peach's gold.
18:58Into a cauldron.
19:00He made a lot of pieces for the NSDAP.
19:05So, they trust him.
19:07That means to give him a big work.
19:11It's natural that they won't go to the Heiden family.
19:17They will go to Otto Gahr.
19:22But why would Otto Gahr have made the cauldron from Albert Peach?
19:26Peach had made generous donations to Hitler as he pulled his way to power.
19:34Could the cauldron have been another gift to the Nazis?
19:38Tied up with this kind of thing is the whole notion of gift exchange.
19:50You give powerful gifts to powerful people to give yourself more power.
19:54As ever with this story, it was back to shady deals.
19:59The cauldron could have been a backhanded contribution to the Nazis.
20:04But what about the inventory?
20:06It provided two possible clues.
20:08The name of the cauldron's maker and its city of origin.
20:11We know, with a fair amount of confidence, the cauldron itself actually was made in Munich around that time, 1929-1930, by, apparently, Otto Gahr.
20:21So far, the inventory is holding up to scrutiny.
20:24But why would the Nazi party create a fake Celtic cauldron?
20:39In 1929, the SS had less than 300 members. By the end of 1939, they had over 200,000 true believers.
20:57Himmler needed a new religion for his rapidly growing army of black knights.
21:02In Himmler's worldview, he saw Christianity as something which was created by Jews in order to weaken the Germanic Aryan superior people.
21:13Himmler thought the principle of Christian mercy had no place in the uncompromising and cruel belief system of the SS.
21:22He wanted to resurrect the lost religions of a pre-Christian Germany.
21:26To underpin these beliefs, he needed to validate the idea of the Germans as an ancient race.
21:34The Cienze cauldron fits very neatly. I mean, don't forget one of the things you're going to need if you're going to be developing this sort of new cod religion of, you know, reaching for the stars and all that.
21:45You're going to need a liturgy and you're going to need liturgical objects.
21:48Himmler, Willigut and other high-ranking SS officers were looking to rewrite German history to suit their own needs.
22:00In 1935, Himmler set up a think tank called the Annanerbe.
22:06He used the Annanerbe organization to collect evidence for an alternative history in which the Germanic people played a central role and he tried to combine academic efforts with mystical ideas.
22:22This Society for Ancestral Research would produce their own publications and films detailing their findings from expeditions to far-flung locations like Iceland and Tibet.
22:37They go all over the world in search of proof of the ancient Nordic and Aryan heritage of the German people.
22:45At Wiewelsborg, pre-historians, genealogists and scientists were drafted in to help support Himmler's vision.
22:58And according to the inventory, the cauldron also had a part to play.
23:04The Cienze cauldron most definitely would have been a perfect fit because the imagery is ancient Celtic Aryan.
23:12The source of imagery that was being embraced by Himmler.
23:17But what might the cauldron's role have been at Wiewelsborg?
23:22Could it have been the Holy Grail for Himmler's black Camelot?
23:28This thing has some kind of magic. Whether white or black, one can't really be sure.
23:33In 2011, a Swiss magazine broke a story.
23:45In a German attic, documents reportedly Nazi in origin divulged a secret.
23:51A three-page inventory seemed to reveal that the Cienze cauldron may have been kept at Wiewelsborg Castle, the Nazi Temple of Doom.
24:03This would have been very important to the Nazis. They would have welcomed such an ancient artifact because they felt that their Aryan origins were Celtic and beyond.
24:15But is there any other evidence the cauldron might have been kept at this fortress of fear?
24:24To find out more, we have to travel back over 70 years.
24:29To the dark days when Wiewelsborg was being rebuilt as the ideological centre of the SS.
24:36Heinrich Himmler and his architects have developed a massively ambitious plan.
24:45They envisaged the castle as the new centre of the Nazi world.
24:50We've got up on the screen plans that Himmler had drawn up for Wiewelsborg Castle so that when the war was won, they could get on with creating a sort of Nordic Vatican.
25:02At the centre of this vast SS city was a three-quarter circle fortress with 18 towers and 60 foot walls.
25:13The castle that exists at the moment is a tiny fraction of the enormous circular construction that was going to be created.
25:21It looks to me here about nearly a kilometre in diameter.
25:28To carry out his grand vision, Himmler needed workers.
25:34Agnes Boutner was a schoolgirl living in the village of Wiewelsborg at the time.
25:39From the bottom, they had to take a thick stone on the shoulder and march on the shoulder and sing with them.
25:49And then there were always two Wachsoldats with dogs with.
25:53And we didn't even have a butter root for them.
25:57But they had to take a secret.
26:00Yes, they had to take a secret.
26:04So, I don't forget that today.
26:09A concentration camp was built to house these slave labourers.
26:14They endured a nightmare existence to bring Himmler's fantasy to life.
26:21Nearly 1300 died.
26:23The role of Wiewelsborg as an ideological school for SS officers began to change.
26:40The castle was envisaged as a site for ceremonies.
26:44SS weddings with pagan overtones and baptisms that shunned the Christian church were carried out.
26:50Many with Willegut as high priest.
26:54Torch-lit ceremonies celebrating the winter solstice replaced Christmas.
27:01Behind closed doors, Himmler could pursue his obsession.
27:07The creation of the Wiewelsborg was a fulfillment of some of Himmler's eccentric personal dreams.
27:13Because he could actually go back to these ideas he developed as a young person.
27:19This idea of sagas, of a medieval world, of a lost Germanic world.
27:24And in a way it was his playground.
27:30Himmler furnished his SS school with relics and artifacts that celebrated Germanic heritage.
27:35Himmler used the castle as a kind of collection place for the treasure he got from the occupied regions during the war.
27:49And he had got a lot of paintings here, tapestries, carpets.
27:55It was a kind of treasury room for him.
27:59The Reichfuhrer wasn't the only Nazi appropriating art and antiquities.
28:04In the wake of the Blitzkrieg, Europe's most precious objects were plundered in the name of the Third Reich.
28:23Teams of SS personnel, including members of the Ahnenerbe, followed behind the invading German armies,
28:32seizing the contents of museums and taking them back to Germany.
28:37Holy relics were also targeted.
28:40In the Hofburg Museum in Vienna was the spear of destiny.
28:45The holy lance said to have been used to pierce the side of Christ.
28:48And one of the things that interested the Nazis in the spear of destiny was its ancient heritage,
28:57that any ruler who is in possession of the spear will be looked kindly upon by the gods.
29:04It's thought that Hitler believed that whoever owned the spear would become the undisputed ruler of the world,
29:10and that it was seized on his express orders.
29:15These relics were potent weapons of propaganda and could be used to legitimize the Third Reich.
29:22If the cauldron had been kept at Wiewelsberg, how might it have been used by the SS?
29:34The setting of Wiewelsberg Castle, this Nazi ideological headquarters, particularly SS headquarters,
29:41that's where you would put it, that's where it would be, and that's where it would be a symbolic object of greatest power.
29:461941, the SS, Himmler's loyal knightly order, was taking over the world.
29:59Himmler was now in a position where he could turn Wiewelsberg into whatever he wanted.
30:05Himmler was trying to create this idea of a sort of knightly order, a bit like the Knights Templar or the Teuton order.
30:11He wanted the SS to have that same idea guiding them.
30:21Himmler set about creating his own Camelot for his new Nazi knights.
30:28His rooms would be named after ancient chivalric heroes like King Arthur.
30:32The castle's focal point was a stone-lined chamber where the most senior SS officers were to meet.
30:45Well, this is the Supreme Leader's Hall, which is built in the former crypt of the castle.
30:50It is built in a kind of medieval architecture. You have got 12 columns here in this room.
30:59And we don't know exactly why the number 12 was chosen by Himmler.
31:05But one interpretation is that he thought of King Arthur and his 12th knight.
31:11And he wanted to use this room to meet his highest SS men.
31:17There's even some speculation that he installed an oaken round table for these meetings.
31:23But it seems Himmler's obsession with Arthurian legend didn't end with this room.
31:29He began his own quest for the Holy Grail, the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper, said to possess miraculous powers.
31:37Himmler was obsessed about the Grail because he believed it would just validate the ancient Germanic origins of his people.
31:47He enlisted Otto Rahn, an Indiana Jones-style archaeologist, into the SS.
31:54Rahn would scour the Pyrenees for the Holy Chalice, but returned to Himmler empty-handed.
32:00Could the pagan-style Kimse cauldron have been a substitute Grail?
32:12You don't make an object like that without having some sort of public purpose for it.
32:18It's a symbol of power.
32:21You're not going to keep it on the sideboard at home. It's going to be part of a display.
32:25I think it became a central part of some kind of series of semi-public or secret, but certainly mass rituals of one kind or another.
32:38Himmler clearly wanted to immortalize his place in history.
32:42He decided to build a crypt at his Camelot.
32:45Some claim that this is where Himmler and his most faithful twelve knights would be interred.
32:56This is the land of the dead.
32:59Well, this is the crypt.
33:03Above you have got the swastika symbol.
33:09So it was a very important room for the SS.
33:14And it should have been used for honoring death as SS men.
33:21Well, we think that there you can see in the middle of the floor two gas pipes.
33:26It's thought that these pipes would fuel an eternal flame.
33:32And that the death's head rings of fallen SS men, designed by Otto Gahr, would be enshrined here.
33:40If the work had been completed, the crypt might have become a site for remembrance.
33:47We can have only speculations about what should have happened here.
33:59Historian Peter Longerich has written extensively about Himmler and what went on at Wiewelsborg.
34:06He knows separating fact from fiction is no easy task.
34:10I think the idea is popular that behind the history of the SS there is a second, a secret history.
34:18That they have their secret cults, their rituals, a secret code.
34:24And one can actually decipher this culture and actually find access to an alternative, a new history of the SS.
34:32After the war, the full extent of the SS obsession with the occult came to light.
34:40Rumours of satanic rituals and even human sacrifice at Wiewelsborg run rife.
34:46But historians continue to reject these claims.
34:50The occult theories that the Nazis indulge themselves with can seem silly and almost sort of laughable.
34:58The reality is that they were being used to underpin the policies that led to the extermination of the Jews.
35:04And which led to the persecution of gypsies and Slavs and the disabled and so on within Germany.
35:11So they are deadly serious.
35:12As the war progressed, building at Wiewelsborg slowly ground to a halt.
35:29By March 1945, the Nazis and their warped world view were on the brink of defeat.
35:35And Wiewelsborg was under threat.
35:41Himmler wanted to ensure that whatever went on at the castle, or was kept here, was going to remain secret.
35:49The castle's treasure was on the move.
35:53Anything that hadn't been removed in the days and weeks before and taken almost certainly south,
36:00would have been looted I think the moment the Germans withdrew from the castle.
36:07So it's quite possible that an item like the cauldron will have started to make a journey somewhere.
36:13It's very portable and it's worth a lot of money.
36:16It was time to ensure that Himmler's sacred citadel would not fall into enemy hands.
36:22Himmler gave the order to blow up the castle.
36:25So one of his officers, Heinz Macher, had to come here and take some dynamite and put it into the castle.
36:35With the castle cleared, the order was given.
36:44Limited by a lack of explosives, the SS only blew up the south-east tower.
36:50They resorted to torching the fortress.
36:53When the US 3rd Infantry Division seized the grounds, Wiewelsborg was gutted.
37:00Macher had been ordered to bury the 9,000 deaths head rings kept here.
37:06These were never found.
37:09Nor was the cauldron.
37:11So we know some facts around the cauldron.
37:15But what still remains a mystery is how and why did it end up in a lake in Bavaria.
37:20Final victory for the Allies in Europe was in sight.
37:24With the Nazis exposed on two fronts, Himmler's dream was in tatters.
37:29The Russians are coming into Germany from the east.
37:30The British, Americans and French are coming in from the west.
37:31Germany is in a state of more or less complete collapse.
37:32The treasures that have been kept inside Nazi strongholds over the last six years of war.
37:33The war has been destroyed.
37:34The war has been destroyed.
37:35The war has been destroyed.
37:36The war has been destroyed.
37:37The war has been destroyed.
37:38The war has been destroyed.
37:39The war had been destroyed.
37:40I've never watched the Allies in the region.
37:41The war was full.
37:42I've never watched the Allies.
37:43Himmler's dream was in tatters.
37:49The Russians are coming into Germany from the east.
37:52The British, Americans and French are coming in from the west.
37:55Germany is in a state of more or less complete collapse.
37:58The treasures that have been kept inside Nazi strongholds over the last six years of war
38:03were on the move.
38:05Some were being secreted away, others were being used to buy freedom.
38:11Evening south, some die-hard Nazis were planning to make their last stand.
38:18Himmler and others are from this area, so this is where they were heading for.
38:23And at the same time, all the secrets were heading that way too.
38:26They were either being chucked into mine shafts, hidden in salt mines, thrown into lakes.
38:33So you had a lot of stuff ending up here, and of course an awful lot of gold and silver and
38:38treasure and objects.
38:39The fate of the cauldron could shed some light on what happened to all Nazi treasure
38:45at the end of the war.
38:47So how did it end up in the bottom of the lake?
38:51The movement order found in the attic may provide more clues.
38:57On the assumption that the list we've got is genuine, what we're told is around the 14th,
39:0115th of April 1945, this material, including the cauldron, is being taken from Augsburg,
39:09which is northwest of Munich, past Munich to the north undoubtedly, and out to Strakonitze.
39:17According to the documents, a shadowy SS officer, Hans Joachim von Alten, was ordered to smuggle
39:24the cauldron to the safety of Bohemia.
39:27Chris Going uses wartime aerial photography to take a closer look at the proposed route
39:32of von Alten's convoy.
39:34The town of Lanshut was of particular interest.
39:38This reconnaissance photograph was taken on the 17th of April 1945 and it shows Lanshut,
39:46and already you can see that it's been quite heavily bombed.
39:50Lanshut was a strategically important town where the cauldron could have come to a halt.
39:57You've got two bridges over the river, and there would have been a huge bottleneck here.
40:03With the Allies advancing on all sides, von Alten's convoy would have no choice to stop
40:09their mission to Bohemia, and they could have handed their treasure over to the Nibelungan,
40:15a uniformed SS division, made up of cadets and officers from an SS training school.
40:22There were certainly other SS units in the area, but the Nibelungan are, I think, our dramatis
40:28persona here.
40:29They are our suspects.
40:32Himmler named these die-hards after a medieval poem referring to keepers of a mythical treasure
40:39hoard.
40:40Had the Nibelungan become custodians of a modern Nazi treasure?
40:46This is where, if our story holds together, this is very much where they would have taken
40:53it over.
40:58As the Allies advanced, the Nibelungan would have joined the enormous retreat south,
41:03towards the Alps, where many hoped to make their last stand.
41:09On the 2nd of May 1945, the shattered remnants of this division were close to the shores of
41:16the lake where the cauldron was found nearly 60 years later.
41:20Had they thrown it into the dark waters, denying their enemies' possession of their sacred grail?
41:28And don't forget, within the Nibelungan division were true believers.
41:34And I think they would have had stewardship of this object, and some of them would have
41:38decided to put it beyond human reach.
41:41They weren't interested in the value of the object.
41:43They were interested in its symbolic purpose.
41:45And that's why it ended up in the lake.
41:47The Nazis had finally been defeated, along with the ideas of Germanic supremacy that Himmler
41:54had preached at his Temple of Doom.
42:04Up to 100,000 artworks and relics stolen by the Nazis are still missing, waiting to be discovered.
42:14In this story of deceit, secrecy and speculation, not much is certain.
42:21But in its ten years in the limelight, the cauldron may have finally revealed some of its secrets.
42:27We know with a fair amount of confidence that Otto Gahr made the cauldron in Munich in 1920 or 1930.
42:36We know that it was the kind of artifact that would have been the perfect gift to the Nazis.
42:42If they received such a gift, it would have made sense to be in Wevelsburg.
42:46We also know that on May 2, 1945, the Nibelungan were cornered in Kim Zee.
42:53For now, this compelling but circumstantial evidence is all we have to go on.
43:01The documents found in the attic remain unavailable and no historians or scientists can get their hands on the cauldron for further analysis.
43:11In Zurich, its last known custodians, the administrators of Marcel Wunderli's bankrupt company, keep it in a high security vault.
43:24Does the cauldron even still exist?
43:27If it's been melted down, it's been sold, and people are making jewellery out of it, and people could be wearing bits of the James A cauldron as we speak.
43:35You know, it's now sort of gone into eclipse, it's having its moment in a box, you know.
43:41It may come out again, we don't know, but at present it's hidden from view, as it was for 50 years since the war.
43:48Maybe the cauldron will emerge into the light again, to offer definitive answers to this enduring enigma.
43:58It may remain a mystery forever, who knows?
44:02And that's fascinating, there are not many things like that in this world nowadays.
44:18This is the end of the next world nowadays.
44:48You
Recommended
45:32
|
Up next
45:12