A frenzy in Poland over missing Nazi gold train
WA R SAW • There’s an air of mystery to the Owl Mountains of southwestern Poland. The ancient range is thick with spruce and dotted with medieval towns. It’s home to a centuries-old castle built by a man known as “the Raw” and occupied by Adolf Hitler himself. And several metres beneath the mountains’ broad peaks lies a network of crumbling, unfinished tunnels, dug by slave labourers for some unknown purpose and then largely abandoned at the end of the Second World War.
In other words, this is the exactly the kind of spot the Nazis might have stashed a train full of stolen treasure. If such a train existed.
Now there’s reason to believe it does. Polish Deputy Culture Minister Piotr Zuchowski told reporters Friday he has been informed the train was over 100 metres long and called it an “exceptional” discovery.
He said he was shown an image — albeit blurred — from a ground-penetrating radar that showed the shape of a train platform and cannons, and added he was “more than 99 per cent certain that this train exists.”
“A man on his deathbed gave the people looking for the train the information they needed to find it,” he said.
Zuchowski told a press conference that the dying man was involved in the operation to hide the train 70 years ago. The identity of the man and the two treasure hunters — believed to be a Pole and a German — who claimed the find last week have not been revealed.
“We do not know what’s inside but its armour indicates it has a special cargo,” Zuchowski said. “There is probably military equipment but also jewelry, works of art and archive documents which we knew existed but never found.”
The World Jewish Congress said that any gold, precious stones or other valuables that might be found could have been looted from Polish Jews by Nazi officials during the war and should be returned.
This is not the first time Polish authorities have lent credence to rumours of hidden treasure in the area. Officials quietly excavated parts of the tunnel system in the 1960s, but turned up nothing more than a few old coins. Accord- ing to the BBC, they looked again in the 1990s, without any luck.
But that is unlikely to dampen the excitement in Walbrzych, a city in southwestern Poland where rumours about the supposed “gold train” have long been endemic and traces of the Nazi presence still linger.
The Germans arrived in 1939, during the swift invasion of Poland that touched off the Second World War. The noble family that lived in the local castle, Ksiaz, fled the country — one of the sons changed his name and joined the British air force, another fought in the Polish army. Two years later, the Nazis seized the castle, according to the Ksiaz website, and stripped it of all its valuables, including the furniture.
Not long after that, the Germans started work on their mysterious tunnels.
The tunnel project was dubbed “Riese,” meaning “giant,” and it’s still not clear what it was for. Many believed that Hitler intended to make it into his new headquarters. Others speculated that weapons would be stored in the subterranean caverns, or that a secret rail system was being built underground.
On the corners of the Internet inclined toward con- spiracy, theories circulate that “Die Glocke” — a purported Nazi super-weapon that has so far only been found in the pages of science fiction novels — might be hidden somewhere beneath those ancient mountains.
The complex was abandoned in 1945, when the Soviet army took control of the area. Only about seven kilometres of tunnel had been blasted into the rock before the Germans left, much of it rough hewn and structurally unsound.
But rumours about the project lingered. Chief among them is a legend about an armoured train that had departed the city of Breslau (today the Polish city of Wroclaw) in the waning days of the war and headed toward what is now Walbrzych, more than 50 kilometres away.
According to Smithsonian Magazine, the rumour about the train “essentially comes from a game of telephone.” Some German miners allegedly told a Polish miner that they had seen a train being wheeled into a tunnel beneath the Owl Mountains. The train is believed to have been carrying fabulous treasure — gold, jewelry and possibly weapons confiscated from Polish citizens.
Beginning in late 1944, as the Allied bombing of Berlin intensified, the Reichsbank began shipping its reserves of gold and other confiscated treasures around the country for safekeeping. Old mines were prized hiding spots, according to a 1999 article in National Archives’ magazine Prologue, because they were sheltered from bombs.
No one knows what the purported Polish gold train might contain, if it even exists. Whatever it is, the two alleged discoverers want 10 per cent of its value. They’ve hired a lawyer and submitted documents to Polish authorities, who say they’re willing to pay the reward if the information pans out.