No Nazi loot found in east Netherlands village

No treasure was found during a search for items looted by Nazi soldiers during World War II that was rumored to still be buried underground in the village of Ommeren, part of the Buren municipality in the Betuwe region towards the eastern part of the Netherlands. On Monday morning, experts dug one final time at two possible sites, but only an old bullet was found.

There were no traces of valuable jewellery, gold or precious stones, according to a municipality spokesperson. Monday was the last chance that experts with permission from the municipality could search for the supposedly lost treasure.

At the beginning of this year, the country’s National Archives published a treasure map showing the place where a German soldier during World War II was said to have buried looted gold treasure. This appealed to the imagination in such a way that crowds of amateur sleuths and treasure hunters started searching with metal detectors and began digging in the Betuwe village.

There is a ban in Buren against searching the ground with metal detectors, but because of the great interest, the municipality decided in February that a group of experts, under the guidance of historians, could search one more time. Any material found would have to be handed over to the municipality, but nothing was discovered on Monday.

On Monday, the Den Eng estate and the grounds of an Ommeren apple farmer were searched. The military’s Explosive Ordnance Disposal Service was on standby, because unexploded devices from the War could have been unearthed. That also did not happen, according to the municipality’s spokesperson.

The municipality has always said that any treasure would have likely been found long ago, because there were many excavations in the vicinity of the location indicated on the treasure map over the past decades, such as those carried out for road construction.

Buren now considers the book on the rumored Nazi loot to be closed, the spokesperson said.