In 2000, there was a treasure hunt based on an alleged missing WW2 treasure looted from the Jewish population.
ATHENS, July 30 -- Any other tale so thick with intrigue involving a Nazi war criminal and treasure hidden in the depths of a blue-green sea might simply have been dismissed, particularly if it originated from a prison inmate known only as Phantom X.
But the prospect of 50 sealed chests heavy with gold coins and jewels valued at as much as $2 billion is enough to make a believer out of almost anyone -- including an international diving team, the Greek government, and this country's senior Jewish council.
After months of dispute and delays, Greek and French divers are hoping to plunge this week into nearly 300 feet of water off the southwest Peloponnesus, near Kalamata, on an expedition to salvage what they hope is just such a fortune.
The wealth was reputedly stripped from Jews sent to labor and death camps and then stashed at a secret underwater location by Dr. Max Merten, who was Hitler's senior administrator in Salonika, in northern Greece, during World War II.
But even before an ounce of gold has been brought to the surface, the mere prospect of such a fortune has set Greece's notorious bureaucracy in motion and sent a long line of claimants jostling for their stakes.
"The situation is crazy," said Gregoire Koulbanis, a 40-year-old Swiss diver of Greek descent who is to lead and film the expedition. "Such chaos, delays and state of hysteria, I've never witnessed in my 20-year career."
Mr. Koulbanis, who gained fame on some of the most daring expeditions of Jacques-Yves Cousteau, the late oceanographer, says he was told of the treasure 10 months ago by a 63-year-old man he refuses to identify but whom the Greek media are calling Phantom X.
The man, who is in prison for a string of felonies, says he learned of the treasure when he shared a Greek prison cell with Dr. Merten in 1958. The former Nazi officer fled to Germany after World War II, but returned to Greece that year supposedly to check up on his fortune. He was arrested, tried for war crimes and jailed in Athens, according to the Greek Foreign Ministry and the Central Jewish Council, which represents this country's 3,000 Jews.
Dr. Merten, the informant claims to have been told, stowed 50 cases of gold he intended to return to after the war. A Nazi submarine, he says, ferried the treasure from northern Greece to the southern Peloponnesus. From there, Dr. Merten commissioned a fishing boat named Sofia to carry the cases to a designated site and sank the vessel.
A presidential decree in 1959 allowed Dr. Merten to return to Germany, where he practiced law and died in 1976. It remains unclear whether he had ever tried to retrieve the treasure again.
The current expedition, which was supposed to take place over the weekend, is now scheduled for Friday after being put off by local officials in Kalamata. They said the summer holiday season had left them too short-handed to oversee a multimillion-dollar search by 30 divers and crew members.
Mr. Koulbanis, the head of the expedition, attributes the delays to "outrageous demands" by the local authorities and a swamp of bureaucracy, despite having gained approval for the dive from Foreign Minister George Papandreou this month.
The Kalamata authorities say they want extra assurances that the state will get the 50 percent share it has claimed if the fortune is found.
"This may prove the biggest treasure to surface from this part of the Greek sea," says Christos Vrillias, a senior local official responsible for protecting state property. "We have to safeguard the state's interests, to the fullest."
In that effort, the Kalamata authorities demand that a special state committee climb aboard the search vessel to monitor every inch of the dive by video-link from the deep.
They also want coast guard vessels to be placed on alert, a team of archaeologists ready to appraise the fortune, which is to be handled by Greek divers only, and Finance Ministry experts to store whatever is recovered in special vaults at the National Bank of Greece. Since the operation may sweep through a military shooting range, Greek Air Force units will also be at the ready.
Holocaust survivors argue that at least part of the treasure is rightfully theirs, particularly since much of it appears to have been taken from the families of 9,000 Jews who were later rounded up on Dr. Merten's orders to work at Nazi labor camps in Greece.
"I alone had to pay him 1,000 gold British sterling in hope of winning my father's release from one of those camps," said Andreas Sefihas, a Holocaust survivor and president of the Jewish Council in Salonika. Some 50,000 Jews, 95 percent of Salonika's Jews, eventually perished in Nazi death camps. Below Rachel and Joseph Chasid, a Jewish couple, pose for a photograph in Salonika (Thessaloniki) in German-occupied Greece. They are wearing the compulsory yellow Star of David badges on their clothing. German occupation authorities mandated this badge in Salonika in February 1943. Just over a month later, the Germans began deporting Salonika's Jewish population to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where most were murdered in the gas chambers upon arrival. The fate of the Chasids is unknown.
But the Greek state's claim may leave Greece's 1,950 living Holocaust survivors with less than a 25 percent share, with the remaining 25 percent going to the man who says he knows where the treasure can be found. The agreement was negotiated by the informant's lawyer, Alexandros Lykourezos, a leading criminal attorney whose clients have also included the most notorious men wanted for war crimes in Bosnia.
The Jewish council plans to contest the state's 50 percent claim, calling this an extraordinary case. But before a single coin is handed over to the Central Jewish Council, says Emmanuel Gounaris of the Greek Foreign Ministry, it must prove that the fortune had been owned by Jews.
"This isn't restitution," said Mr. Sefihas, head of the Jewish council. "It's a denial of history."
As for the diving team, Mr. Koulbanis says, "All are here on their own time, at their own expenses." Their payment will come from the profits Mr. Koulbanis hopes to make from documentary film rights, which he has worked out with a French company called Timing.
Mr. Koulbanis has said he is confident that the treasure lies in Greek waters. But despite all the careful planning, legal wrangling, and deal-making that have led up to the dive, Mr. Gounaris, who is head of the commission responsible for reviewing underwater explorations, warned that "should the treasure be found beyond Greece's six-mile territorial waters, or within international waters, different laws apply."
No discovery of this alleged 50 sealed chests heavy with gold coins and jewels valued at as much as $2 billion has ever come to light if it existed to begin with.
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