This story began a long time ago, during the First World War. The Russian army entered East Prussia on August 4, 1914. She entered clearly prematurely, Not fully mobilized, but the French allies begged: “Save Paris !!! Kaiser's troops are rushing to the Marne! Petersburg decided to strike directly at Konigsberg. But on the way of our troops lay the huge Masurian swamps. The first Russian army under the command of Rennenkampf was to bypass them from the north, and the Second Army under the command of Lieutenant General Samsonov moved from the south. There were one and a half times more German troops in East Prussia than the advancing Russian armies. However, the very first battles brought defeat to the Germans. The Russian victory at Gumbinen panicked the Kaiser's headquarters and forced the offensive on Paris to be suspended.
But this seemed to the allies not enough (well, of course). London and Paris literally put pressure on the Russian headquarters: “Continue the offensive, drive the Germans! Save the European civilization! Breaking away from the rear, left without convoys with food and ammunition, Samsonov's army deeper and deeper into the swampy forests (now it is clear why they did not meet significant resistance, because they do not build defensive lines in the bog). The railway passed not far from the places where the army was advancing, but the narrow European track could not pass Russian carriages with shells and reinforcements. However, Russian is Russian. Without ammunition, food and fresh forces, General Samsonov's troops continued to fight, but now the nature of these battles was different. Realizing (at last) that it was a problem, the general made desperate attempts to break out of the encirclement. It's a pity,not all have succeeded in doing this in practice. Of the eighty-thousand-strong grouping to the east, only twenty thousand soldiers and officers managed to break through. The rest were either killed or captured. (Lord, how all this is similar to the future events of 1941! Remember with what enthusiasm our socialist historians later beat the tsarist generals, how they made fun of them. But the time has come, and so famous Soviet generals in exactly the same situation lost $ one hundred (100) times more people and a thousand (1000) times more material values, Are you still asking me where the treasures come from? That's where they come from!how it all looks like future events of 41! Remember with what enthusiasm our socialist historians subsequently beat the tsarist generals, how they made fun of them. But the time has come, and so renowned Soviet generals in exactly the same situation have lost $ one hundred (100) times more people and a thousand (1000) times more material values. And you ask me where the treasures come from? That's where they come from!how it all looks like future events of 41! Remember with what enthusiasm our socialist historians later ruffled the tsarist generals, how they made fun of them. But the time has come, and such renowned Soviet generals in exactly the same situation have lost $ one hundred (100) times more people and a thousand (1000) times more material values. And you still ask me where the treasures come from? That's where they come from!
In the group with which the commander of the army made his way to his, there were: General Lebedev, Colonel Vyalov, several dozen officers and soldiers. On August 29, 1914, they found themselves in a wetland near the town of Welbark. Everyone walked. There was only one carriage in the group. In it, covered with a tarpaulin, was a heavy metal box - the treasury of the Second Army, which amounted to almost three hundred thousand rubles in gold. There were also orders of precious metals. This group left the encirclement on August 31, but there was no army commander among the surviving servicemen. Eyewitnesses describe his fate in different ways. One of the officers in his memoirs claimed that the general died from a shell explosion, the other - that, tormented by an asthma attack, oh; at night he moved away from his companions and shot himself. But I guessthat we will never know the truth in the last minutes of General Samsonov's life.
In the reports about the defeat of Samsonov's army, the Kaiser's command among the captured trophies mentioned 22 battle banners and only 32 thousand rubles in gold. The army treasury was exactly ten times larger. And the question immediately arose: where did she go? The first searches for the missing gold began in 1916. The war was still going on, people were dying, and in the vicinity of Velbark, people had already appeared asking local residents about gold coins of Russian minting. This means that the treasury did not fall into the hands of the Kaiser's soldiers. A few years later, one of the local residents, having gone into the forest for mushrooms, returned with a handful of gold coins. He was not quite healthy (on the head) and when he was asked to show the place of the find, he could not (or did not want to). The former Tsarist General Noskov, who emigrated to Germany after the revolution, was also engaged in searches. Only he could not find anything.
After World War II, these territories were taken over by Poland. A military training ground for the Polish Army was created on the battlefield. For a while, the legend of the chest of gold was forgotten. But in the sixties, Polish sapper officers armed with modern mine detectors appeared in these places. They were accompanied by an elderly man who, according to him, was the driver of the very chaise in which the metal box was transported. He claimed that General Samsonov allegedly personally ordered him to take out the valuable cargo from the encirclement. The driver with the guards began to carry out the order, but when crossing a stream, the cart got bogged down, and the tired horses could not move it from its place. Then they decided to dig a hole and hide the precious cargo … Sappers spent over a week at the range, but apart from shell fragments and warped weapons, they found nothing.
Although the search was unsuccessful, news of them spread among the surrounding residents. More and more often, people appeared in the forest, equipped with pointed metal rods, with which they probed each bump. Whether they found what or not is unknown, but gold is still being found here. It came across to the soldiers digging trenches at the training ground, several times the peasant rogue turned out a couple of gold coins from the furrow, and one day they came across a package containing the St. George cross. But this is not that gold. The coins could be lost or deliberately buried by the retreating military so that the Germans did not get it.
“And to this day, not a week passes without someone coming here and asking about Samsonov's treasure,” a local forester Pavel Stanchak once told me. - Neighbors and newcomers have already dug up the whole field in search of gold, but this is nothing. Come here on the thirtieth of August - you will see for yourself what will happen. It turns out that one of the officers who accompanied the wagon with the treasury wrote in his memoirs that they buried the chest in the shade of a huge oak tree. The memoir legend says that on August 30, exactly at noon, the shadow of the largest branch of the old oak will show the place where the treasure should be sought. Be that as it may, but, apparently, one cannot do without powerful technical means. We need a serious expedition, but where can we get funds for it today?
A sacramental question, but it is against it, like a stone wall, that most of the ambitious plans for the search for certain precious "stashes" rest. So in this case, the uncertainty of the search area forces serious search engines to modestly step aside and give an army of amateurs an opportunity to poke through bumps and bumps with iron pins. The crowd of sappers with army mine detectors were also completely useless in the fields near Welbark. If we assume for a moment that the iron box existed in the grandfather himself and was actually buried, then, of course, it was buried at least a meter, or even one and a half. At MCHV, it didn't make sense to bury such a value and depth. Let me remind you that a standard mine detector can detect something only if the depth of the metal object does not exceed 30 centimeters. Total. That is, all the efforts of the sappers of the Polish Army were initially completely useless. It is completely impossible to detect even a relatively deeply buried box with a mine detector.
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And by the way, why did they bury him? Aren't you surprised by the situation described in the legend? No? And I was surprised and, moreover, really alarmed. First of all, we were puzzled by the dates mentioned in it. Look. On August 29, the group reaches Velbark, on the 30th they bury the treasury (it is not clear for what reason), and on the 31st they are already at the location of their troops. On the 30th Samsonov was still alive, and on the 31st he had already died … it is not known how. One gets the impression that the Treasury of the Second Army was treated in the same way as 27 years later with the "golden suitcase" of the Kerch Historical and Archaeological Museum. I described this situation in some detail in the chapter "The Golden Suitcase". The detachment commander dies, and the "partisans" cheerfully flee to their homes, taking unique treasures in their pockets. And here is the same plot.
The army commander dies out of the blue, and all his other companions are intact and not even scratched. And the box of gold disappeared at the most inopportune time. If they were approaching the front line, then they must have heard the sounds of firefight for many kilometers. And they came close to her and as military people could not help but understand this. But it is at this moment that all bad things happen. At first, the general's escort came up with a version of a stray shell. Okay, but if a shell flew to them, it’s strange, why didn’t it hit anyone but the general himself? But at least three people should have been near him! But the shell turned out to be somehow strange, for everyone else it left no consequences. But, let's say, the general was actually struck by a flying fragment. In such a confluence of circumstances, the officers accompanying him were simply obliged to bring the documents of the deceased and his awards with them. But for some reason no one said a word about this. Let's say they forgot in a hurry, they had no time for that, they were preparing to bury the box, with gold. So that the Germans don't get it. But for some reason they still got a decent jackpot.
Let's take a closer look at the safe box itself, around which all the fuss has flared up. According to participants in the events, it contained 300,000 rubles of gold. This means 30,000 pieces of gold pieces. The amount is solid, to be sure, And its weight was also solid, tea was not being transported in paper notes. The Nikolaev ten, as I recall, weighed about ten grams, and, therefore, the entire load was pulled by at least 300 kg! And as soon as Samsonov gave his soul to God, the question of what to do with the money was no longer in front of those who remained. They were simply not able to drag the safe on themselves - it was too hard. Horses standing up to their belly in the stream were also useless, they could hardly move themselves. What to do next? Here's a five-point question. Salvation is here, already very close. You can already hear the rumbling of Russian cannons, and, therefore,no more than twenty kilometers remain to their positions.
No one has the strength to drag the heavy safe, but it's also a pity to leave it. "Bury?" - as "eyewitnesses" convince us. What's the point? All of them are seasoned people, sober and perfectly understand that the chance to return someday for the safe will hardly be presented. If the Germans themselves do not find him, he will still drown in the swampy soil. The best way out was initially seen by them, to pull the gold out to their own in another way, namely in bulk. Each takes as much as he can carry and carry as much as he can. And there as God willing. The command is given, the box is opened, and everyone takes how many m0. zhe. But there are not many people in the group, and they fail to carry everything behind their shoulders in the soldiers' "sidors". You think why dumb. did they capture exactly 32,000 gold rubles? Because:> 3,200 coins by weight are exactly two poods. And coins in pairs.jars were packed in linen bags of 20 pounds, that is, 8 kg. From here it is clear that the safe was opened, the contents were taken out, but they did not manage to carry the last four bags. Not raised. They were left in the open safe and were found the next day by the Germans. Everything else could be carried away from the parking lot.
But to carry away does not mean to convey. The hungry, weakened children very soon felt the true weight of the despicable metal. And he pressed on their shoulders unbearably. He pressed so hard that it soon became clear to even the most stupid - to convey everything is simply unrealistic. So gold flew to the right and to the left. So they will find him now in the boundary, now in the forest, now in a puddle. And they will find, undoubtedly, they will, because, in my opinion, there are a lot of it scattered around Velbark. But the safe, as such, and even with 300,000 gold rubles, is unlikely to be found by anyone. No one needs an empty safe without keys, and back in 1914 the pedantic German sergeant major sent it to be melted down. Two pounds of gold were also meticulously capitalized in a German bank and put on a hand.
Thus, we can say with almost one hundred percent certainty that the last secret of General Samsonov has been revealed. All the efforts that went into finding his safe were wasted. But the efforts that were made to find just gold "nevertheless brought a certain result. But they were looking for him clearly not there. The main search efforts should be concentrated on a route that would exactly follow the path of a group of military forces retreating to the east. It is on this track, and not at the test site itself, that the bulk of the missing coins lies. After all, there it has just begun to be thrown, and therefore its total number in those places is relatively small. After all, at first it always seems that "his burden does not pull." She begins to pull a little later, when the primary excitement subsides. Consequently.most of the gold coins are lying around in pieces closer to the front line. That is, to the one that he (the Russian-German front) occupied on August 31, 1914. But this is where the “stone wall of the financial barrier” rule comes into play. It is so difficult, time consuming and costly to “ring” with a metal detector an area of about twenty square kilometers that hardly anyone will master such a grandiose undertaking. Only the Polish state itself can cope with such a large-scale task, and, alas, a private trader, an individual “catcher of happiness and good luck,” cannot afford such Herculean exploits. It is so difficult, time consuming and costly to "ring" with a metal detector an area of about twenty square kilometers that hardly anyone will master such a grandiose undertaking. Only the Polish state itself can cope with such a large-scale task, and, alas, a private trader, an individual “catcher of happiness and good luck,” cannot afford such Herculean exploits. It is so difficult, time consuming and costly to "ring" with a metal detector an area of about twenty square kilometers that hardly anyone will master such a grandiose undertaking. Only the Polish state itself can cope with such a large-scale task, and, alas, a private trader, an individual “catcher of happiness and good luck,” cannot afford such Herculean exploits.