Hope of Hartford

 

April 27, 1941 German troops occupied the city of Athens. The following day Nazi officers headed to Greece’s largest museum to catalog its treasures and decide which would be plundered for the planned Führermuseum in Berlin. But when they arrived, they found the building empty. The staff of the National Archaeological Museum had spent the previous six months digging tunnels in the museum’s basement extending under nearby streets. They’d shored up the tunnels with concrete and used makeshift wooden cranes to lower priceless antique statues into them. They meticulously recorded where each artifact was hidden, then filled their excavations with sand and topped them off with dirt. Their records were placed with the Treasurer of the Bank of Greece for safekeeping. The whole operation was completed ten days before the occupation. The Germans grilled the museum staff, but no one revealed the secret. After Athens was liberated in 1944, all the artifacts were uncovered and put back on display.