Welcome to unexplained Extra, with me, Richard Beclaim Smith.

Where for the weeks in between episodes we look at stories and ideas that for one reason

or other didn't make it into the previous show.

In our last episode, a deathless ordinary, we heard the beguiling and tragic tale of Gunter's

Door from Anne's house in Western Germany, who died in 1984 in very unusual circumstances.

Many wild theories sprung up in the absence of a satisfactory explanation for Stolz's

death, including one that suggested he may have been selling industry secrets to the East

German government after falling on hard times and had been murdered in retaliation.

You may have been better off dedicating his time to finding one of the countless

number of treasures, looted by members of the German army and Third Reich officials

during the Second World War, that were rumoured to still be languishing in various attics,

basements, and some more unusual and inaccessible places throughout the country.

In fact, only a short drive away from Stolz's own town of Anne's house

lay just one such treasure trove of priceless artifacts and artworks,

said to be worth billions of today's euros.

Back in April 1945, a group of American troops, whose story would go on to inspire the 2014 film

Monuments Men, located the stash in the depths of an old copper mine, known as Heiner Stollen,

in Seagun, just under five miles west of Anne's house. Among the pieces said to have been found

there were the relics, which is to say bones of the ancient King Charlemagne, as well as an

original Beethoven manuscript, paintings by Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens among hundreds of

other equally valuable items. But that was far from all that was found, in assault mine in

Murkerts in central Germany, gold worth two billion euros in today's money, had been stashed by

...