NEW YORK A salvage firm that recovered wreckage from well-known space and aviation disasters has found evidence in an Alpine lake of a Nazi operation to counterfeit U.S. dollars and British pounds, CBS News said on Monday. It said that the Tuesday edition of "60 Minutes II" would solve a lingering mystery of World War II: What evidence of crimes by Adolf Hitler's German government was hidden on the floor of Lake Toplitz in the Austrian Alps more than a half-century ago.
CBS enlisted Oceaneering Technologies -- the salvage company that recovered wreckage from the explosions of the U.S. space shuttle Challenger in 1986 and TWA flight 800 in 1997, as well as from the crash of John Kennedy Jr.'s private plane in 1999 -- to search the lake floor for man-made objects linked to the Nazis, supposedly seen dumping evidence there. Over a four-week period, a diving team using a one-man submarine searched the lake bottom, some 350 feet (110 meters) below the surface, before finding a debris field that contained counterfeit British pound notes and U.S. dollars.
"Yes, these are the ones I was printing," Adolf Burger, one of 140 Jewish concentration camp prisoners forced to work on Hitler's secret counterfeiting project, told CBS. Burger said that after perfecting the British pound, the Sachsenhausen print shop, outside Berlin, copied the U.S. $100 bill. "The first 200 bills were finished on Feb. 22, 1945. We were supposed to start printing the first million dollars the next day, but on that day there was an order from the Reich security's main office to stop work and dismantle the machinery.
" The recovered notes were given to LP3, the French paper conservation company that preserved material from the Titanic. Artifacts from "Hitler's lake" -- in the "Alpine fortress" to which the Nazis had planned to evacuate Hitler and a guerrilla army in 1945 -- will be displayed at the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles. (Reuter)