By Tim Binnall
In a rather dispiriting turn of events, an alleged Nazi diary said to reveal the location of 11 caches of riches hidden throughout Poland has been determined by a group of historians to be a hoax. The unearthing of the curious journal garnered headlines back in June of 2020 and subsequently set off a lengthy treasure hunt on the grounds of an 18th-century palace in the village of Minkowskie, where it was claimed that a staggering 11 tons of gold had been hidden. However, serious questions have been raised about the veracity of the entire tale following an analysis by experts who concluded with considerable confidence that the diary was a fabrication written around 40 years ago.
The disappointing findings reportedly came about after historians from the Polish organization Discoverer were enlisted to examine the book by the Silesian Bridge foundation, who possess the tantalizing text and have spearheaded the Minkowskie treasure hunt. The experts explained that the nine-page 'journal' was actually written in a largely blank accounting book "from the beginning of the 20th century" and that it consisted of two parts: a 'war diary' followed by the revelations of where the treasures had been hidden. Within that text, they quickly identified a massive indication that the journal is a fraud as they found that "the events contained in the diary were copied from the accounts of German refugees who fled from Lower Silesia in 1945."
These stories, they explained, were not published until "several decades after the war" and that the depictions contained in the diary were "copied word-for-word" from that book. This damning determination, historian Łukasz Orlick explained to a Polish media outlet "is one of the irrefutable proofs that the so-called diary was written by an unknown person in the 1970s at the earliest." As one might imagine, the Silesian Bridge foundation disagrees with the group's assessment and has continued to express confidence in the veracity of the journal while musing that "documents of that age and type leave a lot of room for interpretation."