The Mystery of Greece's Vanished Jewish Treasure

Year: <\/strong>1942. Location: <\/strong>Thessaloniki, Greece. Setting: <\/strong>Ocean depths<\/p>

In 1942, the Nazis imprisoned 9,000 Jews in Thessaloniki. That year, the head of the German administration in Thessaloniki, Dr. Max Merten, approached the Jewish leaders with a proposal: their release in exchange for a ransom of 1.9 billion drachmas, a fortune by the standards of the time.<\/p>

The Jews made desperate efforts to gather the money. Outside Merten's office, a massive heap of jewelry, antiques, cash, gold bars, valuables, diamonds, and gemstones piled up. These treasures were packed into fifty sealed iron boxes, valued at the equivalent of $2 billion today. After draining the Jews of Thessaloniki of all their possessions, Merten broke his promise and sent them to their deaths in Auschwitz.<\/p>

After the war, Merten vanished along with the 50 gold crates. No one knew what had become of the Nazi officer until 1958, when a Holocaust survivor was shocked to see him strolling freely through the streets of Thessaloniki. It turned out that the brazen man had returned to Greece to search for 'his' treasure.<\/p>

Merten was tried and sentenced to 25 years in prison but served less than eight months. A special Greek parliamentary law pardoned him completely. Merten lived out the remainder of his days quietly and safely as a respected lawyer in Germany until he died in 1977. But what happened to the stolen Jewish fortune?<\/p>

In the summer of 2000, a surprising breakthrough occurred. Gregory Kolbanos, a world-renowned Greek diver, claimed he shared a prison cell with Max Merten during his brief incarceration. One day, Merten revealed to him that a Nazi submarine transported the Jewish gold to the southern Peloponnese, a strait between Greece and Turkey. There, the treasure was loaded onto a fishing boat named 'Sophia,' which took it to a certain spot near the coastal town of Kalamata. The treasure lies there to this day – on a seabed 100 meters deep.<\/p>

Truth or fiction? It's hard to say. But one fact is undeniable: the money and gold of Greek Jews were stolen by the Nazis and have never been recovered.<\/span><\/p>