Nazis’ ‘gold train’ apparently found
Looted gold, gems, artwork allegedly hidden during war.
Two men say the legendary treasure train sits underground near a Polish town.
A top Polish cultural official on Friday stirred already feverish excitement over claims of a legendary Nazi treasure train having been located when he told reporters he had seen ground-penetrating radar images of a massive armored transport.
“This is an absolutely unprecedented situation,” Deputy Culture Minister Piotr Zuchowski told a news briefing in Warsaw. “There is a very high — more than 99 percent — probability that this train exists.”
The radar images showed the shape of a train platform and what appeared to be cannons mounted on the more than 300-foot string of military-type wagons, Zuchowski said.
He also disclosed that the two men who claimed last week to have located the train in an underground tunnel near the castle town of Walbrzych were tipped off to its location by a death-bed disclosure from someone who had been involved with the transport’s last journey in early 1945.
Local legend has held for decades that the Nazis packed their looted gold, gems and artworks into an armored train that left the city of Wroclaw and headed west via Walbrzych in a desperate effort to evacuate the valuables as Soviet troops advanced on the Germans’ eastern front.
Neither the two men who claimed through a Wroclaw lawyer to have located the train, nor the man who allegedly disclosed its whereabouts before his death, have been identified.
The treasure hunters — a Pole and a German — provided the underground radar images of the train when their lawyer presented the local government in Walbrzych with an offer to lead officials to the missing transport in exchange for 10 percent of the value of its cargo once it has been secured.
“If it is confirmed that the train is carrying valuable items, the finders can expect a 10 percent finder’s fee, either in the form of a reward from the ministry or from the owners of the property,” Zuchowski was quoted by news agencies as saying during his news briefing.
He said any recovered valuables whose original owners can be identified would have their property restored to them.
Historians estimate that at least 80,000 art objects were looted by the Nazis in Poland, most from the homes of affluent Jews who were rounded up and sent to concentration camps after the Sept. 1, 1939, German invasion.
Police and security officials in Walbrzych have warned locals and the mounting crowds of treasure hunters flocking to the region that they should stay out of the honeycomb of tunnels dug by the Nazis during the war because they may be booby-trapped. Explosives left behind also might have become unstable and could be set off by any disruption.