Nazi gold train could roll from myth to reality

For decades the whispers persisted among the factory workers and lumberjacks of southwest Poland that a Nazi train laden with plundered gold, jewels and artworks had been hidden beneath the Owl Mountains since the waning days of the Second World War.

Legend had it that the valuables, stolen mainly from Polish Jews who had been dispatched to concentration camps, were hastily loaded into an armoured military transport in early 1945 and shipped westward from the German city of Breslau, now Wroclaw, to prevent the loot from falling into the hands of the advancing Soviet Red Army.

Historians have long dismissed the story as folkloric, and Communist-era rulers who reportedly explored the labyrinth of tunnels and bunkers under the Walbrzych region found nothing to confirm the lore that the train was last seen travelling toward the castle town’s subterranean tracks.

But a recent claim by two treasure hunters to have located an armored train through ground-penetrating radar has swept the story from myth to giddy expectation after a top Polish cultural official’s declaration of virtual certainty on the train’s existence and the Warsaw government’s plan to collaborate with the purported finders.

“This is an absolutely unprecedented situation,” deputy culture minister Piotr Zuchowski said at a news briefing in the Polish capital at which he announced that the government would accept the finders’ offer of precise location information in exchange for a 10 per cent cut of any valuables found on board. “There is a very high — more than 99 per cent — probability that this train exists,” Zuchowski said. He saw the images showing the shape of a train platform and cannons mounted on its 100-metre stretch of military-type wagons, he said.

His enthusiasm signalled that the Polish government, to which any recovered wartime-era property would belong, has bought into the finders’ terms for leading police and munitions experts to the train.

Zuchowski also disclosed that the men who made their offer through a Wroclaw lawyer last week were tipped off to the train’s hiding place in a death-bed disclosure by someone who had been involved with its secretive last journey.

Neither the two men who claimed to have located the train, nor the man who allegedly disclosed its whereabouts to them, have been identified.

The treasure hunters — a Pole and a German — provided the images of the train when their lawyer, Jaroslaw Chmielewski, presented the offer to the government in Walbrzych to exchange location information for a share of any recovered valuables.

Once the location of the train is disclosed to the government, Zuchowski said, Polish military and public safety specialists will be deployed to secure access. He reiterated estimates that it will take several weeks to safely reach it and examine its contents.