The treasure hunting site - Germany Destroys Communist Cash in Nazi Tunnel

HALBERSTADT, Germany - German workmen are hauling Communist cash out of a Nazi-era tunnel network in a bizarre operation that could serve as a crash course in the country's turbulent history.

Their task is to destroy a treasure luring thieves to this forbidding place 125 miles south of Berlin -- former East Germany's entire paper cash, still sought by collectors 12 years after it ceased to be legal tender.

Soldiers moved 620 million banknotes here in 1990 and 1991 on the instructions of the East German central bank, or Staatsbank, which had expected the money to rot away.

But many of the "Ostmarks," which include rarities such as 200 and 500 mark denominations that never entered circulation, as well as 100 mark notes bearing the face of Karl Marx, stayed in pristine condition because the tunnels are cool and dry.

State-owned bank Kreditanstalt fuer Wiederaufbau (KfW), which took responsibility for the cash in 1994 when it acquired the Staatsbank, thought the cash would stay out of reach for ever.

It was walled in behind two yards of concrete. The maze-like tunnel system, built by slave workers in 1944, is locked with hydraulically operated steel doors.

Tons of gravel were poured onto the cash. Guard dogs patrol a high perimeter fence surrounding the area. Automatic alarms were installed. And the nearby forest is filled with ticks that eagerly bite passers-by.

Yet the lure of the cash proved too great.

"We got suspicious when a coin dealer told us there were rumors of musty smelling notes on the collectors' market," said Gerd Kugler, KfW's security chief.

NEW SOCIALIST MILLIONAIRES

Checks last year found that someone had got into the tunnel through a ventilation shaft, knocked a hole in the concrete wall and become a Socialist millionaire overnight.

KfW dispatched guards to the site who promptly caught two men making off with thousands of the notes. They now face trial for theft.

"We decided to destroy the notes once and for all to end the myth of a hidden treasure here and to stop people committing crimes and risking their lives," said KfW spokeswoman Christine Volk.

Ironically, the Communist money physically outlived Germany's treasured Deutschemark, shredded with the January introduction of the euro. Officially at par with the West German mark during the Cold War, Ostmarks were worth a fraction of that on the black market.

But they are now in demand. One Internet auction site offers a 200-mark note, which bears a happy looking family standing in front of a concrete apartment block, for $10.25.

That note cannot have been obtained legally, says KfW, because it was never issued into circulation and never sold at any of the bank's regular auctions of small quantities of Ostmark cash.

Since March, workers have been shifting the cash, which is mixed up with gravel, sorting it out on conveyor belts and driving it to an incinerator in western Germany.

Some of the notes are loose, others are in sacks and some are still sealed in plastic. Work is expected to be completed at the end of June.

Deafening earth movers echo through the large tunnels that were hewn through the rock by prisoners from the Buchenwald concentration camp.

The Nazis had wanted to set up an underground arms factory to avoid Allied air raids but it never entered production, said KfW's Volk.

Thousands of prisoners died from their toil in the tunnels, which remind the visitor of France's Maginot Line, built before World War Two to keep the Germans out, unsuccessfully.

Billions of marks remain to be shifted, with a six-yard high heap of notes still lying at the end of the tunnel.

"It was a strange feeling at first to handle such amounts of money," said Richard Haase, 46, a workman standing at a roaring sorting machine that spewed a river of sorted notes into a heap on the ground.

"When I got this contract my boss told me 'You're in the money from next week'."

Haase, who comes from the eastern city of Dresden, said he earned 1,200 Ostmarks a month at the end of the East German era. "I was checking combine harvesters. That was a good wage."

Lutz-Peter Rehberg, walking behind a tractor carefully picking up notes from the tunnel floor, said the Ostmark had greater sentimental significance to him than the Deutschemark.

"We haven't kept any of the old Deutschemark notes but we've got some Ostmarks in our family. We grew up with that money," he said.

The KfW said it decided not to sell the notes to collectors because it would upset the market for Ostmarks, which have already fallen in value following the mysterious glut of strange smelling notes.

Hanging on the rock wall of the tunnel is a small photo of late communist East German leader Erich Honecker.

He would turn in his grave if he knew that Ostmarks are today even used as currency in a distinctly capitalist board game -- Monopoly. ($1=1.043 Euros)

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