The team behind History show Hunting Hitler this week search Austria’s Lake Toplitz for a huge cache of Nazi documents said to be hidden there.
The episode sees Bob Baer and his group of top-level investigators following leads which point to Ernst Kaltenbrunner, one of Hitler’s closest advisers at the end of WWII, having fled Germany for Austria with more than a tonne of documents.
It’s believed that he may have crossed the border and headed to the spa town of Altaussee with the 2,500lb cache of paperwork. The papers were then said to have been hidden in or near Lake Toplitz, which lies around eight miles to the east of the town.
During the episode the team then get boots on the ground and actually search the lake to see if they can uncover them.
The episode, titled Clandestine Cache, also sees members of the team uncover a fascinating discovery in a sabotaged aircraft hangar in northern Germany.
The new leads come as lead investigator Bob Baer this season gets help from former CIA analyst and terrorist targeting officer Nada Barkos, who uses the process known as “asset mapping” in a bid to definitively find out whether Adolf Hitler actually survived World War 2 and fled Germany to start a new life.
It’s commonly believed that the dictator committed suicide by shooting himself in his Führerbunker in Berlin on April 30, 1945.
But some speculate that he along with other members of his Nazi regime managed to escape the country when the war came to an end and began new lives overseas under new identities.
Hunting Hitler airs Tuesdays at 10/9c on History.