Unearthed more than 50 years of hidden treasure worth $100 million: masterful way to hide it from the Nazis

A vast coin collection buried underground for over 50 years has been found, and is expected to go for over $100 million at auction.

Known to historians as the Traveller Collection, it was created during the horrific aftermath of the 1929 Wall Street Crash. According to a press release sent to CNN, a European collector and his wife began a journey through Europe and the Americas in which they collected various coins, old and modern, from their travels in which they visited 100 territories across the planet, all while compiling a detailed archive of their purchases as they went.

‘I had to keep pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming’

The pair settled in Europe and with the rise of nazism, they decided to bury their treasures, packing the coins carefully into cigar boxes that were then transferred into aluminium boxes and buried underground.

“The collection spans all geographical areas and contains exceptionally rare coins often in a state of preservation never seen in modern times. Several types have never been offered in a public auction, highlighting their considerable rarity,” the aforementioned press release reveals.

David Guest, director of David Guest Numismatics and consultant to the collection, said that “when it came to cataloguing the British coins from the Traveller Collection I had to keep pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. Not only was the quality exceptional but many of the coins before me were of types not known to have been offered for sale in over 80 years and, in some cases, completely unrecorded.”

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Now thought to be the most expensive coin collection to ever go to auction, it will be sold off over the next three years.

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