14 DAY TRIAL // Towards the end of last week, on Friday, a teenage girl swimming in an Alpine lake in Germany came across a gold bar that appears to have been lost decades ago.
The teenager found the gold bar not far from shore, at a depth of about 2 meters (6.5 feet). Rather than keep it for herself, she handed it to local authorities.
Trained divers returned to the area this past Tuesday, but despite their best efforts probing the lake and poking at the sand, failed to locate any other hidden treasures.
The gold bar is worth a lot of money
The gold bar that the 16-year-old girl discovered while swimming in Königssee lake in the German state of Bavaria weighs about 500 grams (around 1.1 pounds) and measures 6 centimeters (nearly 2.5 inches) in length.
It appears to be the work of Degussa Feingold, a company that has been manufacturing gold bars for around 150 years now, and it is estimated to be worth around €16,000 ($18,000).
This could be Nazi gold, some say
Legend has it that, during the Nazi era, soldiers dumped many such gold bars and other treasures in Germany's Königssee lake, supposedly for safe keeping.
Now that a gold bar has actually been found in the lake, some believe it to be a Nazi artifact. There's even talk that many other bars are lying at the bottom of the lake, just waiting to be found.
The trouble is that, by the looks of it, the markings on the gold bar found by the teenage girl are not the right kind for it to date back to the Nazi era, DM informs.
For the time being, authorities investigating the find have no idea who might have thrown the gold bar in the lake, and most importantly, why they were so desperate to get rid of it.
So far, nobody has stepped forward to claim the bar as theirs.
