Deep within the Schorfheide Forest, sixty kilometers northeast of Berlin, lay a place that no longer appears on any map. There are no signs to guide visitors, no plaques, no visitor center. A walker could pass within meters of it and never know what once stood there. But for decades, treasure hunters, historians, and extremists have searched this ground, each looking for something different among the trees.
This was Carinhall, the private estate of Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring, once the second most powerful man in Nazi Germany. At its height, Carinhall was one of the most extravagant private residences in Europe, a sprawling complex that hosted kings, dictators, and celebrities. Its halls contained one of the largest art collections ever assembled, worth billions of dollars by today’s standards. Foreign dignitaries marveled at its opulence.
Hitler himself attended ceremonies in its grand rooms. Then, in the final days of World War II, Carinhall vanished. The story of what happened involves buried treasures, Cold War secrets, and a landscape that refuses to let the past stay buried. The story begins in 1933, shortly after the Nazis seized power.
Göring, newly appointed Prussian Prime Minister and soon to become commander of the Luftwaffe, acquired land in the Schorfheide, one of Germany’s largest continuous woodlands, a wild expanse of lakes, bogs, and ancient trees that had served as a hunting ground for Prussian royalty for centuries. Göring, a World War I flying ace with aristocratic pretensions, saw himself as heir to that tradition. He commissioned architect Werner March, who had designed the Berlin Olympic Stadium, to build a Swedish-style hunting lodge on a promontory between two lakes, the Groß Döllnsee and the Woostersee. The lodge was named Carinhall in honor of Göring’s first wife, Karin von Kantzow, a Swedish baroness who had died of heart failure in 1931.
In 1934, Göring had her remains exhumed from her grave in Sweden and transported to Germany with full ceremonial honors. Hitler attended the funeral procession. A granite mausoleum was constructed on the grounds, and the estate became both a home and a shrine. By 1937, what began as a modest timber lodge had transformed into a sprawling complex with two wings, a main building, and a formal courtyard.
Hitler approved government funding to make Carinhall an official state residence. The guest book read like a who’s who of pre-war diplomacy and celebrity: former President Herbert Hoover, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, aviator Charles Lindbergh, Benito Mussolini, British Foreign Minister Lord Halifax, and the kings of Bulgaria, Romania, and Yugoslavia. Aircraft designers Willy Messerschmitt and Ernst Heinkel came to discuss German aviation. When the Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka visited in 1941, he reportedly remarked that Carinhall felt more like a museum than a home.
He was not wrong. By 1940, the estate had expanded again to accommodate one of the largest private art collections in Europe. At the center was the grand gallery, a hall measuring 34 meters in length, where Göring displayed his most prized acquisitions. The collection eventually numbered 1,375 paintings, 250 sculptures, and 168 tapestries.
Works by Botticelli, Dürer, Cranach, Velázquez, Monet, Renoir, and Van Gogh hung on the walls. Conservative estimates suggest Göring was acquiring at least three paintings per week at the height of the war. A 1945 New York Times estimate valued the collection at $200 million, equivalent to nearly $3 billion today. The problem was how Göring had acquired these treasures.
From 1937 onward, he relied on a network of art dealers, agents, and outright looters. His primary agent, Walter Andreas Hofer, systematically combed occupied territories for new acquisitions. The Parisian museum Jeu de Paume became a central clearinghouse for art seized from French Jewish families. Göring personally visited the museum at least 20 times between 1941 and 1944, selecting pieces that caught his eye.
Much of the collection had been stolen from Jewish families who were forced to sell at a fraction of their value, fled for their lives, or had been deported to concentration camps. The Goudstikker collection alone, seized from a Dutch Jewish art dealer who died fleeing the Nazi invasion, included over 1,100 paintings that Göring purchased for about one-sixth of their actual worth. Beyond the art, Carinhall was a monument to Göring’s vanity and eccentric tastes. The estate featured an indoor swimming pool, a cinema, a gymnasium, and bathhouses by the lake.
Göring had a model railway in the attic that was reportedly the largest in the world, covering 400 square meters. He kept lion cubs as pets, walking them through the halls until they grew too large, at which point they were sent to the Berlin Zoo and replaced. When his only daughter, Edda, was born in 1938, Hitler served as her godfather at a baptism ceremony held at Carinhall, covered by Life magazine. The Luftwaffe built Edda a miniature palace in the orchard, a 50-meter structure with a small theater, known as the Edda-Schlösschen.
Göring envisioned transforming Carinhall into a museum after the war, ready just in time for his 60th birthday in 1953. As late as January 1945, with Allied forces closing in from both east and west, he was still being shown architectural drawings for the proposed expansion. History had other plans. By early 1945, the Reich was crumbling.
Soviet forces had pushed through Poland and were advancing into Germany from the east. American and British armies were closing in from the west. Göring’s Luftwaffe had failed to win the Battle of Britain and failed to stop the Allied bombing campaign. By 1945, Göring spent most of his time at Carinhall, increasingly isolated, addicted to morphine, and surrounded by his treasures as the world he had helped build burned around him.
Göring was not prepared to let his collection fall into enemy hands. In 1943, anticipating Allied bombing, he had begun moving portions of his art to a converted salt mine at Altaussee in Austria, deep in the mountains where no bomb could reach. By January 1945, special trains were loading the remaining artworks at Carinhall and transporting them south toward Bavaria. On April 20, 1945, Göring left Carinhall for the last time.
The occasion was Hitler’s 56th birthday, and Göring traveled to Berlin to pay his respects in the Führerbunker beneath the ruined capital. He knew he would never return. The Soviet Red Army was less than 50 kilometers away. Before departing, Göring gave orders to a small unit of Luftwaffe soldiers under the command of Captain Frankenberg.
They were to remain at Carinhall and wait. As soon as the Soviets came into sight, they were to destroy the estate completely. Eight days passed. On April 28, Soviet troops reached the nearby town of Groß Schönebeck and began advancing toward the lakes.
Captain Frankenberg gave the order. The demolition squad had prepared more than 80 aircraft bombs distributed throughout the complex. They detonated them systematically, building by building. The grand gallery, the guest wings where kings had slept, the cinema, the gymnasium, the bathhouses, the Edda-Schlösschen where the little princess had played—one explosion after another echoed across the lakes as the estate that had taken 12 years to build was reduced to rubble in a matter of hours.
When the smoke cleared, Carinhall was gone. Only the monumental entrance gates, a few foundation structures, and scattered decorative stones survived. The mausoleum containing Karin’s remains was left largely intact, standing alone among the debris. The site found itself in the Soviet occupation zone, which would soon become East Germany.
In the immediate post-war years, locals descended on the ruins, salvaging anything useful: iron fittings, copper pipes, decorative metalwork, furniture, chandeliers, marble, and building materials. Much of what could be moved was stripped by 1953, when official salvage operations ended. What could not be moved was demolished. In the early 1950s, East German authorities ordered the remaining ruins leveled.
The Schorfheide Forest was designated a restricted zone, a private hunting ground for the communist leadership. For 45 years, Carinhall existed as a kind of non-place, accessible only to party officials. The forest reclaimed what was left. Trees grew through the rubble, and the estate vanished beneath the undergrowth.
While Carinhall was being erased, the fate of Göring’s art collection was playing out hundreds of kilometers to the south. The Altaussee Mine, carved from rock salt over centuries, maintained a constant temperature and humidity perfect for preserving paintings. By the end of the war, it housed over 6,500 paintings, including masterpieces by Vermeer, Rembrandt, and Rubens. Michelangelo’s Madonna and Child sculpture was there, along with the Ghent Altarpiece, one of the most important works of early Flemish painting.
As the Allies closed in, Gauleiter August Eigruber ordered eight bombs, each weighing 500 kilograms, transported into the mine tunnels. His plan was to destroy everything rather than let it fall into enemy hands. But local miners sabotaged the operation. Many had worked those tunnels their entire lives.
On the night of May 3 to 4, 1945, working through the darkness, they secretly removed the bombs and blew up the mine entrances, sealing the art inside, safe from destruction. When the Gauleiter learned that explosions had occurred, he believed his orders had been carried out. When American troops reached Altaussee on May 8, they found the art intact. Officers from the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program began the painstaking work of cataloging the collection.
By July 1945, they had removed 6,577 paintings, 230 drawings and watercolors, 954 prints, and 137 sculptures. It took 80 trucks to transport the materials to the Munich Central Collecting Point. One of the strangest discoveries came from the collection itself. Among Göring’s treasures was a painting he believed to be a genuine Vermeer, Christ with the Adulteress.
He had traded 137 other looted paintings to obtain it. After the war, it was revealed to be a brilliant forgery by a Dutch painter named Han van Meegeren. The master looter had himself been deceived. Carinhall remained hidden behind the Iron Curtain until 1990, when the Berlin Wall fell and the Schorfheide became part of a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.
For the first time since 1945, ordinary citizens could visit where Carinhall had stood. The entrance gates still stood, Göring’s insignia of crossed marshal’s batons still visible on the weathered pillars. Beyond them, the forest had reclaimed almost everything. In July 1990, just months before formal German reunification, the Ministry of the Interior sent divers into the Groß Döllnsee.
Rumors had circulated for decades that what Göring could not take with him, he had ordered dumped into the water. The divers found five bronze statues, including a copy of the Venus Medici that had once stood in the ceremonial hall. They were intact, transferred to the Jagdschloss Schorfheide Museum in nearby Groß Schönebeck, where they remain on display today. The official recovery was only the beginning.
In 1999, a book titled Görings Reich reignited public interest in the site. Metal detectorists and amateur archaeologists descended on the forest, finding silver napkin rings, spoons, medals, vases, buttons, and fragments of decorative objects. A Berlin man named Klaus Funke discovered the entrance to one of Carinhall’s underground bunkers, which had survived the demolition largely intact, buried beneath the debris. Over 18 months, Funke sifted through the rubble inside the collapsed structures, recovering 300 kilograms of Chinese, Roman, and Greek pottery shards, along with statues and golden dresser fittings.
More than 4,000 vase fragments were eventually transferred to Berlin’s Antikensammlung. In February 2020, treasure hunters discovered a large marble column buried two meters deep in the forest, likely from Verona in Italy, probably part of the ornate dining room where two Renoirs had hung. When the bombs detonated in 1945, it collapsed into the cellar and was buried by debris. Not everyone who visited Carinhall came looking for pottery shards.
Neo-Nazis saw in the ruins a shrine to one of Hitler’s most powerful lieutenants. They gathered at significant dates, including Hitler’s birthday on April 20, leaving flowers and painting symbols on the stones. By the late 1990s, the Brandenburg state government ordered remaining structures associated with Karin’s mausoleum demolished and removed all markers. Today, no official signage directs visitors to the site.
The bunker was converted into a bat sanctuary. Carinhall cannot be turned into a museum without risking its transformation into a shrine, so it remains unmarked, a ghost in the forest. One of the strangest mysteries connected to Carinhall is the fate of the woman for whom it was named. In 1951, skeletal remains found near the site were believed to belong to Karin Göring.
They were cremated and reburied in the Fock family tomb in Stockholm. Then, in 1991, treasure hunters discovered a zinc coffin buried near the destroyed mausoleum. Inside were skeletal remains. DNA testing compared the bones with a sample from Karin’s son from her first marriage, who was still alive.
Results published in 2012 were conclusive: the 1991 remains were indeed Karin Göring. Whoever had been cremated in 1951 was someone else entirely. The confirmed remains were finally reburied in Sweden, but whose ashes rest in the Fock family tomb remains unknown. Despite massive recovery efforts, not everything from Göring’s collection was accounted for.
The handwritten catalog, published for the first time in 2015 in a book titled The Goering Catalog, revealed 1,794 entries: 1,376 paintings, 250 sculptures, and 168 tapestries. Researchers have identified three to four hundred works whose ultimate fate remains uncertain. Restitution claims continue to this day as heirs of Jewish families looted during the Holocaust seek to recover what was taken from their ancestors more than 80 years ago. Hermann Göring committed suicide in his Nuremberg cell on October 15, 1946.
His wife Emmy was classified as a major offender and lost her property rights. Edda, the little princess of Carinhall, spent her adult life defending her father’s memory, insisting she remembered a loving father. She died on December 21, 2018, at the age of 80. Hermann’s grandniece Bettina took a radically different path.
She moved to the United States and, in the 2000s, revealed that both she and her brother had voluntarily undergone sterilization to ensure that no future generation would inherit what she called the shadow of Göring. Today, Carinhall lies within the Schorfheide-Chorin Biosphere Reserve, a landscape of forests, lakes, and marshes, home to beavers, otters, and white-tailed eagles. The entrance gates remain standing, their pillars bearing Göring’s insignia, weathered but still legible. Scattered debris litters the ground beneath the trees.
The site itself remains unmarked. There is no plaque, no visitor center, no guided tour. The art that once filled its halls has scattered across museums and private collections around the world. Some pieces have been returned to families from whom they were stolen.
Others remain lost. Trees grow where lion cubs once played and kings once dined. The lakes reflect only sky and woodland.
The forest remembers, even when we try to forget.