Imagine: you’re a 16-year-old girl on holiday in Bavaria. You wade into the icy, crystal-clear Königssee lake, dive down just two metres… and suddenly you see something glinting on the bottom like in an action movie.
You bring it to the shore.
A half-kilogram bar of pure gold. Solid, heavy, stamped „Degussa Fine Gold 999.9”.
This is no movie scene. It is the real story of a 16-year-old from Essen who, in August 2015, was spending her holiday by one of the most beautiful lakes in Bavaria.
The girl did not hide the find. She did not call a „friend” who would „take care of it”. She immediately took the bar to the police in Berchtesgaden.
The investigation got underway in earnest. Police divers thoroughly searched the lake bed at that spot, hoping for a safe, a chest, or perhaps a larger cache of gold. Nothing. Zero. Just that one bar.
The bar did, however, hold a secret. Its serial number had been very carefully and deliberately destroyed. Someone really did not want it ever to be read.
The media immediately picked up the story. Lake Königssee lies not far from Hitler’s former residence at the Obersalzberg. Was it „Nazi gold”? Did the bar date from wartime?
Experts from Degussa quickly dampened these speculations. The bar was produced between 1990 and 2005. That is, long after the war.
The case gradually faded from the headlines. After six months, in accordance with German law, because no one came forward to claim the item, the 16-year-old became the legal owner of the half-kilogram gold bar, then worth about 16,000-19,000 euros.
To this day, it remains unknown how the bar ended up at the bottom of the lake and why someone so carefully erased its serial number.
