The Ommeren Treasure

On January 3, 2023, the Dutch National Archive opened a case file whose closure period had ended, and inside was a hand-drawn map with red crosses marking the spot.

The map came from a German soldier who gave statements to German police in December 1946 and to Dutch investigators in June 1947. His first account was that a bank in Arnhem was damaged in 1944, that valuables found in the ruin were packed into four boxes, and that the boxes were buried at the roots of a poplar on a field track between Ommeren and Lienden, two villages in the Betuwe. The statements disagree on who did the burying. In December he named six men, himself included. In June he named four and said he had watched from the roadside.

Annet Waalkens, an advisor at the archive, described what the boxes were said to hold. "There are brooches, necklaces, silver and gold coins, rubies, diamonds, lots of valuables."

The file records four Dutch searches in 1947. The first, in January, failed because the ground was frozen. For the second, in early May, a Royal Netherlands Navy mine-detection unit came along, and its instruments gave no usable reading. For the third, on June 23, investigators brought the soldier from Germany to point out the poplar, and the digging there found nothing. The next day he told them he did not believe the boxes were still in the ground. Investigators came back on August 25 and 26, and the file records no find.

Within days of the map going online, people with metal detectors and spades were walking the fields around Ommeren. A sanctioned dig later in 2023 turned up a wartime bullet, some scrap metal, a car wheel, and a pair of boots.

The red crosses. The sketch marks the burial spot three times: on an overview of the villages, on a cross-section of the field track, and in a close drawing of three poplars. It is a sketch, not a survey, so it has never pinned the boxes to a place anyone could dig with confidence.

The 1947 searches. The most useful fact in the case is that the Dutch state believed the account enough to act on it. A July 1947 memo, written after three failed searches, said both of the soldier's statements gave a reliable impression. It listed three explanations for the empty holes: that he invented the story, that someone who knew of the hiding place dug the boxes up first, or that the tracing service's own staff misused the tip. In August, searchers found shallow holes dug by unknown people in at least two other places, and two American officers arrived to look for the treasure too.

The named men. The soldier named the men he said buried the boxes. On September 18, 1947, the tracing service wrote to a British security officer asking him to arrange an unofficial visit by one of them to "the real location of the buried property." No answer is in the file.

Ommeren is a small village in the Betuwe, in the municipality of Buren, reached by car from Tiel. Nothing at the village marks the treasure story. There is no visitor center, no sign, and no site to see.

The land around the village is private farmland and orchards. It is worked, people live on it, and the fields are not a search area open to the public. The municipality of Buren bans metal detecting without an exemption from the mayor and aldermen, and digging on other people's land without permission is not allowed.

The map itself is the thing worth seeing, and it is public at the Dutch National Archive in The Hague rather than anywhere near Ommeren.