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00:00At the end of World War II, the Allies made a series of shocking discoveries.
00:08Hidden in trains, bunkers, and deep underground, they found mountains of stolen treasure.
00:14That must have been like going into Aladdin's cave.
00:18Hitler and the Nazis had looted an entire continent and committed the greatest theft in history.
00:25Now, a team of investigators is opening up cold case files of Nazi plunder still missing today.
00:32We're talking about things that are worth tens of millions of dollars.
00:35Robert Edsel is author of the best-selling book-turned-Hollywood movie, The Monuments Men,
00:40and an expert in Nazi-looted treasure.
00:44Hundreds of thousands of objects are still missing.
00:46Well, we have a lot of digging to do.
00:48Joining him is Second World War historian James Holland.
00:51None of this was really his.
00:53He'd just taken it.
00:55And investigative journalist Connor Woodman.
00:58This is a genuine treasure hunt.
01:00We dig a hole in the ground and we find those cases.
01:03Their mission?
01:04Uncover new clues.
01:05Oh, gosh, this is it.
01:07Explore Nazi hideouts.
01:08Whoever built this brick wall really didn't want anyone to get through to the other side.
01:13Find out how the treasure was stolen and where it might be now.
01:17What a piece of history.
01:18The team is meeting in Dallas at the headquarters of the Monuments Men Foundation to detail their latest mission.
01:39This case involves the greatest looter of the 20th century, Nazi Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering.
01:44Oof, one of the big boys.
01:46Yep.
01:46He's number two to Hitler.
01:48He's the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany.
01:50He has enormously high IQ.
01:53He's very smart, very charming, utterly ruthless.
01:57Hermann Goering was commander of the German Air Force, Luftwaffe.
02:01And he controlled the rail network.
02:05He created the Nazi secret police, the Gestapo, and issued the memo that formalized the Holocaust.
02:13Officially, he was known as the Reichsmarschall, but his nickname was Fat Hermann.
02:18Everything about him was larger than life, from his eccentric wardrobe to his addiction to morphine and his appetite for collecting.
02:26This is a man who absolutely loved luxury.
02:30He loved all the trappings of power.
02:32He plundered and pillaged like no one else.
02:34Including art?
02:35Focused on art.
02:36I mean, we're not just talking about paintings.
02:38I mean, great furniture, great jewelry, sculpture, drawings.
02:43One of the richest men in Europe, Goering began collecting art in the 1930s.
02:47Then, when the Second World War broke out and Germany invaded much of Europe, he saw an immense opportunity to embellish his collection through looting.
02:58He saw himself as this renaissance man who had to be surrounded by these great art treasures, all these rationalizations to set up one of the great looting operations in history.
03:07And there's no doubt that works of art that Goering had in his collection, a number of these things are still missing.
03:14And so, and we're talking about things that are worth tens of millions of dollars.
03:17Still out there.
03:18Still out there.
03:19And that's what we're responsible for doing, is trying to find some of those missing objects.
03:24So, from the hunt for Nazi art, Hermann Goering's a good place to start.
03:29Ground zero.
03:30Connor Woodman is in Germany, on the trail of Hermann Goering's plunder.
03:41I'm about an hour and a half north of Berlin, on my way to Karenhall, which was Goering's country retreat and hunting lodge.
03:47It was also the center of his looting operation.
03:52There's a guy called Jaron who describes himself as a treasure liberator.
03:55And I'm hoping he's going to be able to shine a bit of light into what happened to Goering's art at the end of the war.
04:03Connor's here to uncover any clues pointing to the missing treasures Goering looted, 70 years after they disappeared.
04:13Karenhall is a hard place to find.
04:17The structure is long gone, and it isn't marked.
04:20Authorities discourage exposure of the site, for fear it will become a neo-Nazi shrine.
04:27But Connor's meeting Jaron Sforé, who knows where the last remnants of Karenhall can be found.
04:33Jaron!
04:34How are you doing?
04:35I'm good.
04:36Careful not to sleep.
04:38Jaron has found Nazi treasure before.
04:40In 1999, he recovered 40 uncut diamonds, believed stolen from Jewish victims of the Holocaust, and buried in a forest in France.
04:54Now, he's turned his attention to the lost treasures of Karenhall.
04:59I would think it's about at least another 10 or 20 meters.
05:03Not much of Goering's country estate survives.
05:06Look, look, look, we've got, we've got, we've got something over here.
05:09It's man-made brick, some sort of construction, isn't it?
05:12Look.
05:12Yeah, definitely, that's man-made.
05:14That's an old part of Karenhall.
05:15That's an old part of Karenhall.
05:16That's what's left.
05:18When you said to me, let's meet at Karenhall, this isn't what I was expecting.
05:24It might not look like much now, but in the early 1940s, Karenhall reflected the immense wealth and ostentation of its owner.
05:33A vast complex of libraries, reception rooms, a spa, and even its own pack of Lion Cups.
05:44But one of its main purposes was to showcase the ever-growing Hermann Goering art collection.
05:56At its peak, Karenhall was a temple of looted treasure, home to thousands of works of art and other valuables.
06:03Look how big it is.
06:05I'm talking about a museum.
06:06Do you think any professional courier would do that?
06:09This is like a hoarder.
06:10This is like a child.
06:11Just the sheer volume of art on display.
06:14I mean, he has too much art.
06:16I mean, I heard at one point Goering had so much art, he had to start displaying it on the ceiling because he ran out of wall space.
06:23Class, he had them just thrown into, like, a bin.
06:25But by April 1945, the party was over.
06:32Allied forces closed in on Nazi Germany from all sides.
06:37Goering couldn't stand the idea of Karenhall falling into the hands of the Red Army advancing from the north.
06:43So he gave the order to evacuate the treasures and blow up the buildings.
06:49Most of Goering's treasures were shipped to southern Germany by train, where they were captured by American forces.
06:55But for more than 70 years, legends persist that valuables were left behind.
07:05What do we know about what happens, all this stuff, after it left here?
07:09The stories grow constantly, and many of them will tell you it's still here.
07:13Where?
07:14Here underneath the building.
07:15No one's able to say where it is.
07:19Underneath everything, there was this huge cellar.
07:23Like a bunker?
07:23A real bunker.
07:25So, yes, underneath this place, there is stuff, which would probably be very valuable.
07:32We don't know how much.
07:33And, of course, we don't know what it is.
07:35While Connor searches for missing treasure left behind at Karenhall, James Holland is chasing leads to uncover how Goering was able to steal so much art and treasure in the first place.
07:50He's about to meet one of the only men still alive who actually came face-to-face with the Reich's marshal himself.
07:57Hello, Mr. Katz, it's James Holland for you.
08:02Nathan Katz was one of Holland's leading art dealers.
08:05His son, David, now 97 years old, remembers the family's thriving business.
08:12My father was, first of all, a leading dealer.
08:15He sold the most important papers.
08:18My father was 17th century.
08:2017th century.
08:20That was Rembrandt, Ruben, Franz Hals, Obermann.
08:24Which is all the stuff that Goering and the Nazis really liked.
08:31In the spring of 1940, the Nazis conquered Belgium, Holland and France.
08:38The Katz family was Jewish and that made them vulnerable.
08:43Under Nazi rule, Jewish businesses and property could be confiscated.
08:47So you're living on the edge all the time.
08:52Yeah, yeah.
08:53In a state of perpetual fear.
08:56Yeah.
08:57Did you have to wear the yellow star?
08:58Yeah, we had.
08:59I had a large one.
09:01And on the papers, you called it G.
09:05They were always marked as Jew, wherever you were.
09:11With the war still raging and the fate of Europe hanging in the balance,
09:15Goering found the time to go shopping.
09:20And one day, out of the blue, he paid a visit to the Katz gallery.
09:25It was in the morning, early in the morning, about 10 o'clock.
09:28So I came in the room, I say, hello.
09:30That's all what I said.
09:31Good and dark, you see.
09:33And that is all.
09:35My father was sitting opposite Mr. Goering, you see.
09:40And you never knew what he was to answer.
09:43He liked the painting and this.
09:44And my father was all interested that it goes well.
09:47So you were sitting.
09:50Opposite, you have your enemy.
09:51And then he was, in the preparing, my father was already nervous.
09:56You could see him shaking his hand shaking.
09:58Yeah, yeah, yeah.
09:58My father showed him several paintings.
10:01And if my father couldn't say no, he would be taken.
10:05You had to say yes.
10:07I think my father thought he was in prison.
10:10You see what I mean?
10:12What can you do?
10:13In 1941, the deportations began in Holland.
10:19Jews were rounded up and sent to concentration camps.
10:23Did any of your family end up in the camps?
10:27Yeah, oh yes, yes, yes, yes.
10:29First of all, a sister of my father died in a camp.
10:36Secondly, my grandmother of the mother of my father was taken in a camp.
10:44You see?
10:45With the entire family in danger, David's father Nathan made a deal and used his connections
10:52in the art world to procure dozens of paintings for the Nazis from across Europe, including
10:59a Rembrandt that Goering gave to his wife as a birthday present.
11:03So you were using these paintings as a kind of bargaining chip?
11:06One hand washed the other.
11:08In return for the paintings, the Nazis gave the Katz family exit visas to Switzerland, and
11:15they escaped the Holocaust.
11:16So at the evening at about around 8 o'clock, we got the permission, and then to Switzerland.
11:25You cannot believe what it means to come in a free country.
11:29It must have been incredible.
11:30You cannot believe that.
11:32But it costs all the old paintings, you see.
11:34But what is a painting is material.
11:37A picture is a picture.
11:39But a life is a life.
11:43What David Katz says is chilling.
11:47Hermann Goering and his goons were trading the lives of Jews for paintings.
11:52And the Katz collection wasn't Goering's only target.
11:55Few art dealers in Europe had greater concern about the Nazis' invasion of Western Europe than
12:03this man, Jacques Houdsteker.
12:05Houdsteker was a great dealer-collector of old master paintings, but also magnificent furniture
12:10and wonderful art objects.
12:12They were stored inside his gallery in Amsterdam.
12:15And we're not talking about minor works of art.
12:17Paintings by Cronach, van der Heiden, Jan Steen, Solomon van Roysdale.
12:25These are such important pictures.
12:28Paintings by Rubens or Circle of Rubens, maybe even Rembrandt.
12:32Hard to tell with the quality of this photograph, but there's no question about who painted these
12:36pictures, Memling, these beautiful four portraits on panel.
12:41I've just flipped through tens of millions of dollars worth of works of art.
12:45And all of these things and so many more were stored inside his gallery here in downtown Amsterdam.
12:51It was for him his Fort Knox.
12:54The Houdsteker gallery housed some 1,400 artworks when the Nazis occupied Holland.
13:01It's the last known location of the priceless collection before Goering got his hands on it.
13:06And it's a crime scene the team must investigate.
13:15Now we're looking for an entrance through the underground bunker, which is either a bunker
13:24or a living museum, but we need an entrance.
13:28Connor has teamed up with Nazi treasure hunter Jaron Sforé, combing the runes of Goering's
13:34once lavish country estate.
13:37Before the end of the war, Hermann Goering crammed this vast complex with mountains of treasure.
13:44Paintings by masters like Botticelli and Rembrandt.
13:47Hundreds of sculptures and tapestries.
13:50Collections of gold, silver, and precious gems.
13:53A hoard that would be worth billions today.
13:55I mean, there's debris everywhere, isn't there?
13:58Evidence of a construction.
14:00Not much is left of Karen Hall because Goering ordered it blown up at the end of the war.
14:06But Jaron believes sections of the bunker may have survived.
14:11Underground rooms that could have housed parts of Goering's looted collection.
14:16There's a little hole there.
14:18Right.
14:19And there's another small hole there.
14:22That's a really small hole.
14:23I get in, I get stuck like we're in the pool, you won't be able to get me out.
14:27Plus...
14:28So it's me then?
14:29Listen, I'm not scared of Germans, I'm not scared of Nazis.
14:32This will kill me.
14:35You think this goes all the way under Karen Hall?
14:37Yes.
14:38All right, I'm going to keep my phone because it's got a torch on it.
14:41Better you than me, my friend.
14:50You good?
14:51All good, okay.
14:52Oh, it's dark.
14:55Oh, it's really dark.
14:57Okay.
14:58You're going to pass me a camera.
15:01Here you go, mate.
15:02Okay, thank you.
15:07Okay, so I'm wriggling down this hole.
15:12I've still got the ceiling pretty close to my face.
15:15And it's starting to open up a little bit.
15:18Okay, I'm in.
15:19Can you stand?
15:21Oh, no.
15:22Can't stand, but I can crouch, maybe.
15:24I can see a huge tire down here you're on.
15:27I guess something used for transporting stuff, maybe.
15:30Okay, I'm going to keep walking.
15:34I've got to the end of this tunnel, and there is a turn.
15:38Left or right?
15:41To the left.
15:42Let me go deeper and see what's in the bottom.
15:44Okay, so I'm turning right.
15:45Okay.
15:49It's a huge room inside here.
15:53It's concrete blocks, and it's very solid.
15:56Only a few wartime photos of the underground bunkers survived.
16:03They show the Reichsmarschall Goering operating his elaborate model train set,
16:08complete with elevated tracks, mountain artillery, and Stuka dive bombers.
16:12It was also somewhere in this bunker that Goering kept his lying cubs.
16:21What is this?
16:22This is like a...
16:23It's like a small door.
16:25I don't know what would have been kept in there.
16:34Another doorway.
16:35Okay.
16:35Okay.
16:35Okay.
16:35Okay.
16:35Okay.
16:35Okay.
16:35Okay.
16:35Okay.
16:36Okay.
16:36Okay.
16:37Okay.
16:38Okay.
16:38Okay.
16:39Okay.
16:40Okay.
16:41Okay.
16:41Okay.
16:42Okay.
16:42Okay.
16:43Okay.
16:48James Holland has tracked the path of Goering's looting spree to Amsterdam.
16:54He's meeting historian Gerard Alders just outside the scene of a crime.
16:59This building once housed the priceless collection of one of Holland's most famous art dealers, Jacques
17:05Houdsticker.
17:06So Gerard, Goering is coming here really soon after the Dutch surrender.
17:10Yeah, about five days after the Dutch surrender is here to have a look at the Houdsticker collection.
17:16Goering had his art spice all over Europe so he knew what was in stock here in this gallery.
17:21I mean it's amazing isn't it.
17:22I mean it's amazing isn't it because you would have thought that you know as commander in chief
17:26of the Luftwaffe with a major campaign still ongoing that he's got slightly more important
17:31things to be thinking about.
17:32Better things to do.
17:33Yeah.
17:34But he was very eager to get this collection and I even have a picture here of Mr. Goering
17:40leaving the Houdsticker collection.
17:41Yes.
17:42Oh, it's unmistakably the same place isn't it.
17:45But he looks very, very satisfied actually knowing what is waiting for him.
17:49Yes.
17:50So satisfied.
17:51Yes, he looks like the cat who's got the cream.
17:53Yeah, yeah.
17:54Absolutely.
17:55That's, yeah.
18:03Gerard's got this insatiable appetite to add to his collection.
18:07So the word's out among the dealers in Europe that the Reichsmarshall's interested in adding
18:10to his collection and it really creates the perfect storm for a looting operation like
18:15we've never seen before.
18:16And it's important from Goering's standpoint to make it all look legal.
18:20They don't want to back trucks up and be emptying art dealers galleries because it would
18:24be too obvious.
18:25So there are all these surreptitious means employed to try and make acquisitions look like
18:30acquisitions when in fact they're not.
18:32Goering's got agents spread throughout Europe, in Eastern Europe, in Italy, in France, in
18:37Switzerland.
18:38But no one's more interesting and more slippery figure than Alois Meadl, who's focused on
18:46looting in Holland and the acquisition and spotting of works of art to add to the Reichsmarshall's
18:51collection, not just by the one or by the dozens, but by the hundreds.
18:55When it came to looting in Holland, Alois Meadl was Goering's partner in crime.
19:04In Amsterdam, James uncovers more about this suspicious dealer.
19:08But Meadl was a German citizen who lived here in the Netherlands since, uh, 32.
19:12Uh, he had a bank in Amsterdam and, uh, very much interested in the art business.
19:18He warned the Houtstickers that their property would be confiscated by the Nazis and threaten
19:27their lives.
19:28They were coerced and forced to sell their entire estate for a knock-down price.
19:34Goering swooped in and purchased the paintings, leaving the Houtsticker gallery and the rest
19:39of the properties for Meadl to buy.
19:41Oh, gosh.
19:42This is it of this.
19:43So there is a formal contract written out.
19:46Yeah.
19:47The collection was worth about six million guilders at the time.
19:50And he got it in the end for two million.
19:52So that's a third of the price.
19:54Altogether, it worth, I think it worth about 1,300 pieces in the gold sticker collection.
19:59He bought, I think, maybe six, six or eight hundred.
20:02But that still leaves Meadl with a good old load of...
20:05Yeah, yeah.
20:06Amazing paintings.
20:07Yes.
20:08In today's art market, the value of the Houtsticker collection stolen by Goering and Meadl
20:14could be worth hundreds of millions.
20:17So Goering's happy.
20:18Meadl's happy.
20:19The only ones that aren't happy is the Houtsticker family.
20:22Their entire collection and estate effectively fleeced from them.
20:25No, their collection was sold.
20:26So, no, they were absolutely not happy.
20:28And there's also an entire paper trail here.
20:31I mean, it's legitimizing something that's not really legitimate at all.
20:36No, this kind of buying is called looting by purchase.
20:40So it absolutely stinks.
20:48Yaron and Connor have gone underground in their search for Goering's loot.
20:53This mysterious bunker somehow survived the demolition in 1945.
21:02It's creepy.
21:03There's swastikas drawn onto the walls.
21:06A little bit on the ceiling as well.
21:08So people with very Nazi sensibilities have come down here before me.
21:13Let's have a look around and leave their mark.
21:18Connor isn't the first person in here.
21:21So if any treasures were buried in the rubble in 1945, they may have since been removed.
21:27But maybe the bunker didn't only serve as a hiding place for loot.
21:34I mean, there's a staircase.
21:38Could this have been an escape route used to transport the treasures from Carin Hall?
21:43This staircase is going up into the building.
21:46God, it's unbelievable.
21:49This is stupid.
21:52Whoa!
21:55Whoa!
21:56Can you hear me?
21:57Whoa!
21:58Yaron?
21:59Connor!
22:00Come on.
22:01All right, I'm going to come back out.
22:08Oh, my mother.
22:12It's good to see you.
22:13It's good to see you.
22:14It's good to see you.
22:18Herman Goering wouldn't have got out there, would he?
22:22How wide?
22:23The corridor as you go down is maybe this wide.
22:25And where were the steps?
22:26You go through a big room first.
22:28It's 10 meters across, maybe 15 meters long.
22:30Oh, it's huge.
22:31It's a big room.
22:32So it's a hall.
22:33Yeah, it's like a hall.
22:34Then a staircase coming up.
22:35So you found the staircase into our friend Goering's hidden place.
22:39That's well done.
22:40Is it possible that this bunker, with tunnels all the way into the great halls of Keren Hall,
22:46served as an escape route for treasure at the end of the war?
22:49Second staircase goes back.
22:50And if so...
22:5120, 30, 40, 50...
22:52Where did they take the missing loot?
22:55The answer may lie in a local legend about Nazi treasure lying at the bottom of a lake.
23:10James is hot on the trail of Alois Meadl, a war profiteer who helped Nazi Hermann Goering steal millions of dollars worth of art.
23:22The connections between Meadl and the Nazis run deep.
23:26His wife knows Goering's sister.
23:28It turns out he's stayed at the Berghof, Hitler's country house in the Bavarian Alps.
23:33And it turns out that his wife is Jewish.
23:36Now, normally this would be a massive problem, but not so in his case, because Goering has had her Aryanized.
23:43It also turns out that he hasn't just got house stickers collection.
23:46He's taken everything, lock, stock, and barrel.
23:49Houses, estates, even a castle.
23:54Before the war, Castle Nijenrode was the Houdstiker family estate.
23:59But in 1940, Alois Meadl moves in.
24:04Gosh, this really is absolutely amazing.
24:07It might have been the middle of the war, and half the Dutch population might have been starving.
24:12And yet, Meadl continued to live the high life.
24:16We have an account of a party here in which champagne is being served, and caviar, and oysters,
24:22all handed out by turbaned Indian waiters, and all served on Houdstiker's own porcelain.
24:29Meadl, like Goering, was just addicted to luxury.
24:32But the point is, none of this was really his.
24:35He'd taken it from Houdstiker.
24:38The Houdstikers were left with nothing after Meadl and Goering had finished looting their entire estate and collection.
24:46Rembrandts, Rubens, Kronachs, and Memlings.
24:50A collection perhaps worth hundreds of millions today, vanished.
24:55What happened to all these artworks?
24:58We have to actually travel, I would say, in that direction.
25:05Conor's on the hunt for priceless treasures possibly smuggled out of Goering's lavish country estate at the end of the war.
25:14Treasure hunter Joran Sforay has brought him 45 kilometers away to the shores of Lake Stolpsee.
25:20It was here in the 1980s that the East German secret police conducted a top-secret recovery operation based on reports that boxes of gold from Keren Hall were dumped in the lake.
25:33The legend was that Herman Goering sent his treasure to be dropped in the lake.
25:38And the story is that on the 3rd of April, 1945, a truck arrived in the early evening hours.
25:44The truck, driven by an SS officer, stopped on the shores of the lake, and three prisoners were ordered to unload a rowboat and three heavy boxes.
25:54They load one of these boxes on the rubber boat, and they start rowing.
26:00They get to a certain point, then he orders them to drop it into the lake, and they do it three times.
26:05One box, two boxes, three.
26:07When they come back on the third time, the officer kills all the three men.
26:11To this day, the boxes have never been recovered.
26:16And that's exactly 100 meters, right?
26:19But Yaron has exact coordinates.
26:22In 2013, he did 3D sonar scans of the lake and identified three abnormalities in the lake bed.
26:30Could these be the legendary boxes of treasure dumped by the Nazis at the end of the war?
26:37Connor's going to dive to find out.
26:46This is it. The treasure. Good luck.
27:03To dig up more clues about the missing artworks stolen by Goering, Robert Edsel has tracked down the heir to the Houchticker collection.
27:12In 1940, facing persecution as Jews, Jacques Houchticker and his wife Daisy abandoned their massive art collection and fled Holland with their two-year-old son.
27:24Today, that boy's widow, Mariah Von Sayre, lives in Manhattan.
27:29The tragic story of how the Houchtickers escaped still haunts her.
27:34They made the last ship, the Bordenkrat, on the way to England and then America.
27:42Refugees, it was packed.
27:44They had to turn off all the lights because they were afraid that the ship would be bombed.
27:50So, Jacques decided to leave his wife and son to get some fresh air, went up on deck and fell into a hole.
28:00Broke his neck and died.
28:03Uh, Daisy, of course, didn't know it for hours.
28:06She was getting frantic and they searched and searched.
28:10So, it was horrible.
28:12Jacques Houchticker was just 43 when he died aboard the ship.
28:16And as James learned in Amsterdam, Goering's partner in crime, Alois Meadl, took advantage of his tragic death.
28:24He certainly was one of the bad ones.
28:27Tell me about what you know about him.
28:29He sold Jacques's paintings and made a lot of money.
28:32And he had, uh, one very frequent visitor to the gallery in, uh, Reich's Marshal Hermann Goering.
28:39Yep.
28:40Yep.
28:41He showed up and he sure had impeccable taste because he picked out the best paintings and off they went.
28:51Together, Goering and Meadl looted approximately 1,400 Houchticker paintings.
28:57The majority have never been recovered.
29:00And they're still out there.
29:02Right.
29:03Lots of them.
29:04In fact, some 700 to 800 are still missing.
29:06Uh-huh.
29:07So, the search continues.
29:08Absolutely.
29:09Mariah has a good idea of what is missing because Jacques kept an inventory of his collection.
29:17When his wife Daisy recovered his dead body aboard the ship, she found a little black book in his coat pocket.
29:25I wish I could show it to you, but it's in Holland.
29:29He marked everything in there.
29:31He had a complete list of everything.
29:32He had pretty much everything.
29:34It's in black and white.
29:36It's right there.
29:37Is there, uh, one work in particular that you'd like to recover more than any other?
29:42There are a couple of Rubens out there and a Rembrandt.
29:46But, you know, even the little ones that have our provenance, that have our seal, the Houchticker seal, they have to come back.
29:55Some of the littlest paintings in the Houchticker collection were the most precious.
30:01Hans Memling's tiny angels on four panels were considered by Goering to be among his most valued objects.
30:10Houchticker's black book could provide key information in tracking down Goering's loot.
30:16Robert sends James to Amsterdam to retrieve more clues.
30:31He's deep in the suffocating murk of Lake Stolpsey in northern Germany.
30:36He's probing the loose silt for three crates that could contain looted treasure from the Second World War.
30:44But if the silt is deeper than the length of his pole, any sunken crates will require a much larger recovery operation.
31:00So?
31:01How did it go?
31:02How did it go?
31:03I am sorry, Your Honor.
31:04Deeper?
31:05All the way in.
31:07All the...
31:08Listen, if a box has gone in there, yeah, it could have gone deeper.
31:13Especially if it's heavy.
31:14If it's full of something heavy like gold and it's a heavy box, over time it could sink and sink and sink.
31:19I agree.
31:20The hard lake bed is deeper than Yaron originally thought.
31:24And the zero visibility in several meters of silt makes diving impossible.
31:29I'm sorry we didn't find anything for you today, Yaron.
31:32No, you found a major find.
31:33We now know where we should look.
31:35Well, I'm glad.
31:36I'm glad this was useful.
31:37Well, no, you...
31:38Really, both the bunker and this, it's very good find.
31:42Yaron now knows for certain that he needs dredging equipment to continue the search here.
31:49James Holland is on the trail of the stolen Houdsticker art.
32:01He's come to inspect the black book that was discovered on Jacques Houdsticker's dead body in May 1940.
32:10It is a detailed list of over 1,100 of the 1,400 artworks he abandoned when he fled Nazi-occupied Holland with his family.
32:24Well, this is amazing.
32:25I mean, when you see this and you just see page after page of amazing works of art from world-renowned artists, I mean, it really sort of rams it home just how extensive his collection was.
32:43Goering's absolute number one favourite artist was Krannock the Elder and, oh my gosh, here it is.
32:50One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, over the page, ten, eleven, eleven Krannock the Elders.
33:01If you're Goering, you can just see why his tongue is literally dropping out of his mouth at this.
33:07I mean, this is just about as exciting as it gets.
33:09And the interesting thing is this isn't just a record of Houdsticker's collection.
33:13This book is really a record of theft on a grand scale by Goering and Meadl.
33:20Now, I remember that there was a missing Rembrandt.
33:24Let's see.
33:25Oh, yeah, here we are.
33:26Here's Rembrandt.
33:27Here it is.
33:2822862506.
33:31Heraclitus and Democritus.
33:33You know, it's sort of written down in black and white.
33:36This incredible work of art that has just been lost to the world.
33:41One of our jobs is to try and track them down and try and bring them back.
33:47If these paintings came on the market today, they would be worth millions of dollars.
33:53Where could Goering and Meadl have stashed so many priceless treasures?
33:58In June 1944, the Allies landed on the beaches of Normandy, and the invasion of occupied Europe in the West began.
34:14For Nazi top brass like Hermann Goering, the writing was on the wall.
34:20As a safeguard against the fall of the Third Reich, intelligence reports state that Goering smuggled paintings out of Germany, once again employing his crooked henchmen to do the dirty work.
34:31For all the photographs we have from World War II and the key Nazi figures, this is the only photograph anybody's been able to find of Meadl, blurry as it is.
34:44The intelligence agencies from the OSS, the precursor to the CIA, MI6, British intelligence, they're all looking for this guy.
34:52They know for a period of time he's in Spain, and they're sending reports back about his activities.
34:57Declassified intelligence reports reveal that Meadl escaped the Allies in February of 1944 by sneaking into neutral Spain.
35:07Very suspicious character, the report reads, unscrupulous.
35:12Another report notes that he crossed the frontier with two American cars, one of which was stolen.
35:19Various secret agencies report that Meadl smuggled hundreds of stolen artworks into Spain and attempted to unload them on the black market.
35:28These intelligence reports are indicating the degree of his operation and how complicated it is to figure it out.
35:36This is a record of a conversation between Alois Meadl and Spanish authorities.
35:42Attempting to strike a shady deal, Meadl offered to sell two paintings to the Prado Museum in Madrid at a reduced price, provided he'd be allowed to take all of his other assets out of the country to sell in Switzerland.
35:57He's got all these paintings, but he needs buyers, he needs money, he needs secrecy, and at the end of World War II, there's no better place to go than the crossroads of commerce, Switzerland.
36:11Conor's in Switzerland, chasing the smugglers' tracks of Alois Meadl, hoping to uncover whether or not he stashed looted art here at the end of the war.
36:26Thomas.
36:27He set up a briefing with Swiss historian Thomas Baumberger.
36:31If there was a large number of paintings passing through Germany and ending up in Switzerland, where were they being stored while they were in Switzerland?
36:39Well, I mean, after the war, the Allies suspected that the banks, some banks, were hiding paintings, and they pressed Swiss authorities to make an investigation, but it has never been done.
36:50It's possible that there are still the safe deposit boxes in banks that have not been opened for decades.
36:55Right, so we're on the trail of Meadl and the Hochticker collection. Do we have any evidence that Meadl was doing dealings through the Swiss banks as well?
37:06Yeah, there was a letter by Meadl in which it writes. Meadl asked his lawyer to send these paintings to UBS in Zurich, the Union Bank of Switzerland, and that he would cover the expenses.
37:18I can see it's declassified.
37:20Yeah, yeah.
37:21I mean, this is incredible. We've got evidence that Meadl, who we know has been in possession of these looted paintings, is writing to his lawyer.
37:30He's talking about the paintings being stored in a Swiss bank, and surely the Swiss bank have to answer questions about whether that art is still in their vaults, and if it isn't, where did it go?
37:41Meadl's letter is a remarkable discovery, and Connor now has the actual address of the bank where Goering's art agent stored looted art.
37:53Meadl died in 1990, but in Switzerland, numbered accounts and bank lockers can survive after death.
38:00This is 45 BahnhofstraĂźe. This is the building at the address that Thomas told us about. You can see there's still a bank here now.
38:07This is where he said Meadl may have had a locker, perhaps underneath this street in the vaults.
38:12Now, we contacted the bank. I had all kinds of questions I wanted to ask them. Is the locker still there? Has it ever been opened? Reasonable kind of questions.
38:19In the 1990s, UBS participated in the independent Bergier Commission, which investigated the possibility that art looted by the Nazis might still be locked away in Swiss banks today.
38:32But unfortunately, the bank didn't want to answer those questions on camera. Instead, they sent us a statement.
38:38They have excluded the possibility that there's any art still in their vaults. And so, as far as they're concerned, case closed, no more questions to answer.
38:46The commission did not turn up any new cases of Nazi looted art. But it also said it had examined virtually no files, which might provide information on the content of locked safes.
38:58So, for Connor, questions remain.
39:01The question for me is, did Meadl possibly have a locker that's still down there? Might the art still be inside it? Or if it has been opened, where has the art gone?
39:16We know Meadl was doing business in Switzerland. He tried to sell paintings in Zurich.
39:28And it's entirely possible that some of his loot lies hidden inside some Swiss safety deposit box or vault somewhere.
39:35But according to Swiss law, 60 years have to pass from the time of his death before officials can make that determination.
39:41And he didn't die until 1990, so that's 2050. That's a long time to wait. In fact, it's too long.
39:48Hundreds of works from the Houdsticker stolen collection are still missing.
39:53But recently, there was an extraordinary breakthrough. And Robert's in New York to find out more.
40:00Jacques Houdsticker's daughter-in-law, Mariah Von Sayre, has something new on her wall.
40:05Well, this whole wall I call my angel wall. I love it.
40:09These are the four angel paintings by the master, Hans Memling.
40:14Hermann Göring looted them in 1940 and then gifted them to his wife, Emmy.
40:20These four pictures were together when Gehring and his wife, Emma, were arrested.
40:25Yes, they were.
40:26But they didn't all come back together, did they?
40:28No, they did not.
40:30Two of these paintings were returned to Mariah in 2007.
40:34But the other two were feared lost forever, until Mariah received an astonishing phone call.
40:41We received a phone call at an auction in Portland, Maine.
40:45These two were discovered, and sure enough, they were part of the Houdsticker collection,
40:52part of the four that disappeared.
40:55And the people that owned these two and brought them to the auction house returned them to us without any issue.
41:04This is the first time all four have been shown on camera.
41:09Paintings that epitomize the dramatic and tragic journey taken by so much art stolen by Goering and the Nazis.
41:17A remarkable moment, this picture that went through Jacques Houdsticker's gallery,
41:22into the hands of Hermann Göring, number two man in the Nazi party,
41:27to his wife, into the hands of American soldiers, and now all these years later, back home.
41:33Back home.
41:34I know. I could cry.
41:36The investigation into Hermann Göring's looting operation has taken the team from Germany to Holland,
41:56the United States, and Switzerland.
42:00Valuable new clues have come to light.
42:03And these...
42:04And some treasures have made their way home.
42:06But thousands still remain missing.
42:09And the men most responsible took the secrets to their graves.
42:14And never faced true justice.
42:19The defendants are to plead guilty or not guilty to the charges against Hermann Wilhelm Wering.
42:27At the end of World War II, Hermann Göring is arrested and put on trial for war crimes,
42:34including the plundering of art.
42:38When the charges were read against Goering about looting of art and antiquities,
42:43he was offended.
42:45He thought of himself as this great collector.
42:47And yet, when the accusations were leveled against him for crimes against humanity,
42:52he smirked.
42:54Goering is sentenced to death by hanging.
42:58His request for a soldier's death by firing squad is denied.
43:02And so, just hours before his execution, he commits suicide by ingesting cyanide.
43:08Goering managed to cheat the hangman's noose, but not the judgment of history.
43:14Thousands of his looted art treasures are found in caves, castles, and bunkers.
43:20But the majority of the Houchticker collection remains missing.
43:24A 70-year cold case that now has new leads.
43:29We're working hard to pursue those leads and contribute to the recovery of these works of art
43:35and get them back to their rightful owners.
43:37The hunt continues.
43:39To be continued...
43:41Aapolisalnız
43:45A song of Scary
43:47Thrust
43:49A Foster
43:58í•´
43:58Ech Gan
44:052
44:07Ech Gan
44:071
44:09Russia
44:09You