Nazis, RAF and Hamas - they all swear by the earth depot. A brief history'

Underground hiding places - Nazis, RAF and Hamas - they all swear by the Earth Depot. A brief history ́

There are not many cultural techniques that squirrels, dogs and humans have in common - except: digging holes in the ground. Squirrels dig thousands of hiding places for nuts, cones and berries every year. They never find most of them again. Dogs bury almost exclusively bones, while humans bury almost everything: precious metals, treasure maps, other people (mostly dead ones).

Hamas: Where is our earth deposit?

Underground hiding places are popular with criminals and terrorists so that their activities remain undetected for as long as possible. It's just stupid when they, squirrel-like, forget their own hiding places. As in the case of the suspected Hamas fighters who have now been arrested. According to the federal prosecutor's office, one of the suspects had been working for almost a year to locate an underground weapons depot in Europe that Hamas had previously set up there.

In archaeology, there is a special term for everything that is hoarded underground (and eventually unearthed): depot finds. Over the millennia, a lot has accumulated at our feet, albeit not always visibly, and it gets creepy when the newspapers talk about mushroom pickers and forest walkers who find the buried remains of the unnaturally deceased in the wilderness.

Secret hiding places turn up regularly

It's not always about corpses, often enough it's also about cool secret agent stuff or weapons. In the past six years alone, half a dozen underground depots have been discovered across Germany containing Kalashnikovs, ammunition or barrels of chemicals for bomb-making:

In 2017, a special commando from the Brandenburg police stormed a Reichsbürger estate in Rietz-Neuendorf and found masses of ammunition, an imperial war flag and an identity card of the Empire of Prussia, which never existed, in an earth depot.
In 2016, the police find a cache of material for building Molotov cocktails, bullets and clawed feet buried by coal opponents in Hambach Forest.
Also in 2016, an arms dealer ring from the darknet is uncovered. They hid their goods in a wooded area near the Köln-Ost freeway junction, including Polish MPs and old Luger pistols.

At the end of 2020 and beginning of 2021, walkers discovered two underground hideouts within a short space of time. A meticulously excavated hole in the ground was found near Hagen am Teutoburger Wald (Lower Saxony), in which an AK47 wrapped in foil and 1430 cartridges were stored. Shortly beforehand, forest workers south of Hamburg came across a plastic barrel containing writings and bomb-making instructions from the "Revolutionary Cells", an extreme left-wing terrorist group from the 1970s.

Their fellow terrorists from the Red Army Faction were particularly eager to tamper with the soil. They covered the country with countless holes and thus organized their fight against the Federal Republic of Germany. The underground hideouts bore coded names such as "Altes Matsch" (near Gravenbruch), "Neues He Dep" (near Aschaffenburg), "Künstler" (near Marburg) or "5-Zimmer-Wohnung" (near Heidelberg).

Police arrest RAF terrorists at the earth depot

Thanks to the discovery of a depot by a mushroom picker in the early 1980s (or a tip from RAF terrorist Verena Becker), the police were able to decipher the location of the depots and only had to ambush the wanted persons there. In November 1982, leading RAF members Brigitte Mohnhaupt and Adelheid Schulz were caught south of Frankfurt. A little later, Christian Klar was also caught.

In the following months, the officers dug out hiding place after hiding place. They found rifles and pistols, cash from bank robberies, forged IDs and, on one occasion, an audio tape with an "interrogation" of Hanns Martin Schleyer, the employers' president who was kidnapped and murdered in 1977. The gun with which he had been shot was buried, as was the murder weapon of banker Jürgen Pontos. Although many RAF terrorists have now served their sentences and are willing to provide information, it is unclear how many of their burial holes still exist undiscovered in German forests.

The Cold War and the Nazis have also left their mark on the ground: In 2020, open-cast lignite mining in Hambach Forest uncovered an agent radio in an airtight aluminum container with Cyrillic characters. According to the Military Counterintelligence Service, something like this was used by the Soviet secret service GRU or the GDR State Security.

Nazi treasure at the Klausenkopf

One of the most famous and valuable earth deposits was probably located in the Bavarian Alps. As Nazi rule was coming to an end in the spring of 1945, the Reichsbank leadership wanted to keep as many assets as possible "safe" from the advancing Allies. Parts of the gold reserves were hidden in a potash mine in Thuringia, while sacks containing more gold and foreign currency (including 2.3 million US dollars) were buried at Klausenkopf near Walchensee, north-east of Garmisch-Patenkirchen. Mountain troops had hidden the Reich's remaining assets in the entire area and turned it into a single treasure chest.

To this day, it is not entirely clear where the Nazi treasure was hidden, whether it has reappeared in its entirety and who has snacked on it over the years. But secrets hidden in plain sight have always fascinated people - regardless of whether the good guys or the bad guys are behind them. And in the best stories, the search for them is better than the finding.