What could a German treasure and a chicken farmer from central Israel possibly have in common? In 1964, the answer appeared on the front page of Yedioth Ahronoth. Between reports on political infighting within the ruling Mapai party and the Olympic Games in Tokyo, readers encountered a headline that sounded as though it belonged on the cover of an adventure novel: “Document revealing German gold treasure held by Ness Ziona poultry farmer.”
The farmer was Moshe Sakshidlek, a Holocaust survivor described by people in his community as “an honest and modest man.” He had shown the newspaper two documents retrieved from a secret hiding place.
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The first was a hand-drawn map, colored with pencils and marked at a scale of 1:800,000. The second was a yellowed sheet of paper containing instructions typed on a German typewriter. Together, they supposedly identified the location of a hidden fortune near the Israeli-Syrian border, buried beneath the grave of a man who had never actually been buried there. It was the beginning of an extraordinary mystery that would attract soldiers, politicians, treasure hunters and entire families, each with a different idea of where the fortune had gone.
The story began in Germany in 1945, shortly after Sakshidlek was liberated from a concentration camp. He met a German man in his 70s who operated a driving school and enrolled for lessons. Between driving sessions, the two struck up a friendship. The elderly German was living in poverty, and Sakshidlek shared the food parcels and cigarettes he received from the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, commonly known as the Joint. In 1948, when the German learned that his Jewish friend was preparing to immigrate to Israel, he entrusted him with two documents and an extraordinary story from his own past, when he had served as a German army paymaster in Ottoman-ruled Palestine during World War I.
In the autumn of 1918, the Ottoman-German front in Palestine was collapsing. British forces under Gen. Edmund Allenby advanced on Nazareth, where a major German headquarters was located. They nearly captured the German commander, Liman von Sanders, who, according to a well-known account, escaped wearing his pajamas. At the last moment, a convoy of vehicles slipped out of Nazareth under cover of darkness. British cavalry attacked, killing most of the men. Only one vehicle managed to escape, carrying three German officers who had been ordered to protect their cargo at all costs.
Inside were four crates containing 200 kilograms (about 440 pounds) of gold coins, valued at 20,000 Turkish pounds. The money had reportedly been intended for bribes to local tribes. One of the three officers was the paymaster who would, decades later, open a driving school in Germany. The three men buried the crates in a deserted location, about 60 centimeters (2 feet) below ground. Each took roughly 20 kilograms of gold coins for himself, and they continued toward Damascus. A few kilometers later, British cavalry attacked again. Two of the officers were killed.
This is where the story begins to resemble an Indiana Jones movie rather than a conventional wartime account. The surviving paymaster hid for several days before returning to the scene of the attack, hoping to retrieve the gold left on his comrades’ bodies. He found the bodies, but the coins had vanished. He dragged his dead companions back to the buried treasure and interred them nearby, placing crosses above their graves and carving their names into stones.
Then came the deception that supposedly protected the treasure for decades. The officer thrust his rifle into the ground directly above the buried crates and placed another stone there, this one engraved with his own name. To anyone discovering the site, it would appear to be the grave of a third German officer. There would be no reason to suspect that a fortune was hidden beneath it. The yellowed instructions were remarkably specific: Ten paces east of the camel caravan trail, approximately three kilometers north of the remains of the burned vehicles.
Eventually, the paymaster was captured by the British. The prevailing assumption was that Bedouins had stolen the gold and murdered the men guarding it. The officer changed his name, returned to Germany and waited for an opportunity to retrieve his treasure. But the Nazis came to power before he could return. An anti-Nazi activist, he was arrested by the SS and spent World War II in a concentration camp. After the war, he opened his driving school, where he met Sakshidlek. And so the secret of a lost World War I fortune passed from one concentration camp survivor to another.
Sakshidlek immigrated to Israel in 1949 and immediately encountered a problem: The treasure was on the wrong side of the border. In 1954, he wrote to David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s prime minister, and received a surprisingly swift response. Shimon Peres, then director-general of the Defense Ministry, personally traveled to Ness Ziona to examine the documents. According to Sakshidlek, Peres was enthusiastic and asked for permission to photograph the map. But Sakshidlek refused, demanding a government guarantee that he would receive a fair share of the treasure if it was ever recovered. The negotiations went nowhere. The treasure, the 1964 newspaper article concluded, had been “waiting 46 years for someone to claim it.”
Thirty years later, in 1994, Yedioth Ahronoth’s 7 Days magazine returned to the mystery, publishing information collected by Haviv Knaan, a former police officer under the British Mandate and a journalist for the Haaretz newspaper who had spent nearly half a century investigating the affair. His research presented an entirely different version. According to Knaan’s findings, there had been not one hidden cache but two.
In the autumn of 1918, a German military engineering company was stationed near Jenin, in what is now the northern West Bank. When British artillery began shelling the area, four crates of gold were loaded onto a mule cart. A German sergeant major was ordered to transport them to Nazareth. His party came under attack, leaving him alone. He hid the crates in a hollow he discovered in the mountains. Meanwhile, the Germans concealed the remainder of their gold inside a tunnel at their military camp and then blew up the entrance. A mule cart instead of a motor vehicle. Jenin instead of the Syrian border. A hollow in the mountains instead of a false grave. The same legendary treasure now had two completely different maps.
Knaan also discovered that Sakshidlek was far from the first person to search for the missing fortune. In 1924, a group of young Germans sought permission to erect a memorial to soldiers who had fallen near Jenin. The British authorities noticed that the Germans were having considerable difficulty “deciding” where to place the monument. In the meantime, they were digging exploratory holes across extensive stretches of land. In 1933, a British man named White Thompson, a relative of the German sergeant major, wrote a letter marked “private and confidential” to the British foreign secretary. His question was simple: “To whom will the treasure be handed over, or how will it be divided, when it is found?”
The British high commissioner in Jerusalem responded with a dry observation that searches for the treasure had already been conducted in the Jenin district, and none had met with much success. That same year, a German baron named von Bolschwing, a member of the Nazi Party, arrived with a French woman who had secured an excavation permit. They found what they believed to be the remains of the demolished tunnel. Years later, the baron wrote to Knaan about his journey: “I traveled by car through Prague, Budapest, Belgrade, Sofia, Istanbul, Ankara, Iskenderun, Beirut, Damascus, Nazareth, Jenin…” Instead of gold, however, he found something rather less valuable: “A hole in the ground near Jenin, with a hyena living in it.”
The 1994 article prompted readers to send in their own memories of the hunt. One letter came from Naftali Raz of Tel Aviv’s Tzahala neighborhood. He recalled that in 1949 he was serving as a technical officer in the Israeli military’s Signal Corps when a friend, Lt. Col. Zvi Ben-Yaakov, asked him to obtain a mine detector. There was no mine detector available, but Raz managed to find a sensitive metal detector.
Ben-Yaakov told him that a reliable source had revealed where the German gold had been buried in 1918. A few days later, a group of officers set off for the hills of Sheikh Abreik, armed with digging tools, a diagram and considerable enthusiasm. “Every now and then, the device would beep, and the guys would eagerly rush in with their digging tools,” Raz recalled. “We found old, crumbling cans and barrels.”
The search was hardly confined to military officers. That same year, villagers from the Tulkarm area joined young men from Baqa al-Gharbiyye in a search near the village of Dinaba. Armed with a metal detector, they dug so extensively into one hill that it was eventually described as looking “like Swiss cheese.” The gold, however, remained elusive.
But the 1994 investigation also produced a story that turned the entire treasure hunt on its head. It was covered in another article in 7 Days. Michel Shehadeh, an earthworks contractor from Yafia, a village near Nazareth, had a simple explanation for why generations of treasure hunters had failed. “Everyone can keep looking for the gold for another hundred years,” he said, “because it all arrived here long ago.”
Shehadeh had heard the story from his two grandmothers. In the autumn of 1918, as the Ottoman-German army retreated, residents of Yafia descended into the Jezreel Valley to see what the departing soldiers had left behind. Among them was Habib Khoury, a milk merchant and one of only two people in the village who knew how to read. In the valley, the villagers came across a mule cart loaded with crates. The others were afraid to approach it, suspecting that the boxes contained ammunition. Khoury read the writing on the crates and began leading the cart back toward the village.
Shimon Peres, who traveled to Ness Ziona in 1954 to examine documents said to reveal the location of a lost German gold treasure
(Photo: Orel Cohen)
Other families were said to have taken part in the haul. The Abu Nasser family of Nazareth reportedly took a cart of their own. When British soldiers arrived to search the area, family members threw the gold into a well in their courtyard. The Shamshum family allegedly hid coins in flowerpots, but neighbors informed on them. “Apart from a terrible beating,” Shehadeh’s mother recalled, “Shamshum got nothing.” Habib Khoury, meanwhile, supposedly became so wealthy that by the 1920s he was known as “the merchant of Palestine.”
His son, Muin Khoury, then 77, initially denied the story before offering a correction. “It wasn’t gold,” he said. “It was Turkish coins, mejidies.” Had the family been wealthy before 1918? “No, no. My father sold milk to the Turks, and we weren’t rich.”
The investigation also led to the courtyard of the Abu Nasser family in Nazareth, where the site of the old well could still be seen. The well itself had been filled with stones years earlier. An elderly member of the family was sitting on the porch, but she was reluctant to discuss the treasure. “There used to be a gate for carts here, and a courtyard for sheep, and a well,” she said. “And the well had water in it, not gold. I don’t know anything about the gold.”
Then she stood up and went back inside.