MUNICH: A word to would-be Nazi gold treasure hunters: forget about it — at least if you’re scouring Toplitzsee lake.

This is the message from German biologist, Professor Hans Fricke, the man who more by chance led the underwater research of the 107- metre deep lake in the Austrian Alps.

Originally setting out to discover biological secrets of the unique lake, the professor instead got caught up in the mystery about vast sums of Nazi Germany’s hidden gold.

Now, the story is about to be told in a German national television network ZDF documentary on Fricke’s underwater exploration of the lake, called “Der Fluch des Toplitzsees” (The Curse of Lake Toplitz).

The 45-minute film is the first of a three-part documentary, “Tauchfahrt in die Vergangenheit” (Diving Journey into the Past) based on underwater explorations as part of the “Expeditions” series aired by ZDF and the BBC. The film airs in Germany on September 2.

As Fricke explained at an advanced press screening in Munich of the documentary, he came on the legend of the Nazi gold by chance.

The Austrian government had clamped down a ban on further exploitation of the lake in 1963 after a young German amateur sports diver had perished in a foolhardy attempt to find the gold.

Backed by the scientific research think-tank the Max Planck Institute, Fricke, a biolologist, obtained special permission from the Austrian Interior Ministry to research the Toplitzsee because of its unusual chemistry — its waters were rich in sulphur with no oxygen. He wanted to know what forms of life exist in such an environment.

But then he became intrigued by the mystery surrounding Nazi activities in the Toplitzsee.

In a specially designed capsule called “Geo”, Frick made his first diving exploration in 1983 for the German geographical magazine of the same name, and made an astounding discovery. Some 60 metres down, Geo’s arm claw pulled up a huge ball with hundreds of forged English pounds stuck to it.

This was the beginning of Fricke’s 20 years of research to discover “The Curse of Lake Toplitz”.

Part of the story dates to when the Soviet Red Army marched into Berlin in the latter days of World War II in 1945. As they came in, the printing plant at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp near Berlin was evacuated and its goods transported south by a convoy constantly under fire from Allied aircraft.

The convoy reached Toplitzsee on May 5, 1945, where the German Navy had established a station. The head of operations there, Hans Keller, had been ordered to destroy the contents of the chests, either by burning or with explosives. But there was far too much material and the only alternative was to sink the chests, a process that took two days.

The story about forged pound sterling notes had first emerged in a series of articles in “Stern” magazine in 1959, but over the years interest in the topic died down again. But with Fricke’s discovery of the forged notes in 1983, the effect was to reinforce wild rumours about Nazi gold having been concealed in the lake.

Notes were not all that the professor found. The lake bottom proved to be a veritable military junk yard, with bombs, mines, discharged rockets, measuring instruments, explosive devices, parts of V-rockets, and unopened chests covered with silt.

In 1984, divers found the rest of the English pounds as well as a chest containing papers on the German Navy’s U-boat research.

In his investigations, which took him to archives in Washington, Berlin, Vienna, and London, Fricke also conferred with countless experts and managed to track down Bernhard Krueger, chief forger for Nazi Gestapo chief, Heinrich Himmler. The idea of forging English notes came from Adolf Hitler himself.

In an exclusive interview in the documentary, Krueger explained how they carried out the most perfect money forgery in history, cracking the code of the Bank of England, and obtaining watermarks and the right paper. Most of the workers at the camp were Jewish who knew they would be killed eventually to keep the forgery operation secret. The end of the war saved them from certain death.

Using a primitive device, the scientists even succeeded in launching a rocket from under the surface, a weapon that the US perfected after the war with its submarine-based “Polaris” missiles.

Fricke, who still gets calls for information about Toplitzsee, pointed out that the US television network CBS had combed the bottom of the lake for three months and found no chests of gold.—dpa