Expedition seeks to unearth £500m worth of masterpieces buried by Nazi looters in mine


An Indiana Jones-style expedition has been launched in Germany to recover £500million worth of missing artworks looted by the Nazis in World War Two.
Monets, Manets, Cezannes and masterpieces by other artists, along with sculptures, carpets and tapestries, are believed to be buried in an old silver mine near the Czech-German border, 90 minutes' drive from the city of Dresden.

The paintings formed the bulk of the Hatvany collection, the property of Baron Ferenc Hatvany, who was a leading Hungarian-Jewish industrialist and art patron.
Some of his pictures are still hanging on museum walls to this day, their ownership disputed by his heirs.
They were carted off from Budapest bank vaults by Red Army soldiers when the city fell to the Soviets in 1945.

But most of the Hatvany Collection, between 250 and 500 pieces, was looted on the orders of Holocaust organiser Adolf Eichmann, who was in Hungary in 1944 and instituted a policy of arresting Jews and then releasing them in exchange for property.

He also shipped 400,000 of them to Auschwitz, where they were gassed almost upon arrival.
Viennese historian Burkhart List, 62, says he has acquired documents from old Wehrmacht archives that report a mass shipment of the Hatvany collection to two subterranean galleries, measuring 6,000 by 4,500 feet, in the Erzgebirge Mountains.
With the permission of the mayor of nearby Deutschkatherinenberg, Hans-Peter Haustein, he deployed a neutron generator inside the mountain to probe for the secret chambers.
The device revealed that, 180 feet down, there are workings detailed on no maps and they appear to be man-made, not natural.
Mr List said: 'In the winter of 1944 - 1945 the records indicate that a mysterious transport arrived here from Budapest that was coded top secret.

'One of the photos yielded up by the archives was of the Sonnenhaus, a large building directly in front of the Fortuna mine where I believe the art is stored.
'It shows a large contingent of SS. There was no military or logical state purpose for them to be here on a secret mission, unless it was to deliver the artwork into chambers which, climactically, are ideal for the storage of art.'

So far the explorations have yielded only a Schmeisser machine gun, a Nazi gas mask, plastic explosive detonators and a safe deposit key.