Could the Nazi ‘gold train’ tunnel have formed Hitler’s new HQ?
There was no sign of a train, but Silesia’s underground maze was designed to hide the heart of the Third Reich, says
Ahidden train. Buried underground. Filled with gold. By the Nazis. It sounded too good to be true, but at the end of last year, I was transfixed as the Polish government said that two hobbyists in south-west Poland had made an astonishing discovery.
I remembered David Cameron striding around Burma, announcing the discovery of buried Spitfires. There were no Spitfires. A small voice told me this would end in a similar way, but even if the odds were against finding a hidden Nazi tunnel, let alone a train with loot on it, I wanted a piece of it – along with the thousands of treasure-hunting tourists who flocked to the nearby city of Walbrzych.
It was the start of an exciting, frustrating, fascinating and infuriating 10 months, which, fairly predictably, did not result in the discovery of a tunnel, a train, or any gold. But it did allow me to sip the sweet Silesian elixir of Nazi treasure conspiracies and explorers. And there’s no going back.
Silesia is in south-west Poland, but its history is as German as Kent’s is English. Frederick’s seizure of the region in the early 1740s from the Hapsburgs eventually earned him the epithet (“The Great”) and set Prussia on the path to world power. Monarchs holidayed there, it was a centre of German literature and poetry, the Iron Cross was invented there, Silesian coal, lead and zinc sated German industry. It also happened to be the farthest part of Germany from Allied bombs. British-based heavy bombers destroyed the western cities like Cologne, Hamburg and Dusseldorf, but Silesian cities were twice as far. As a result, industry was relocated there, treasures sent for safekeeping. Giant building projects were begun under the direction of Albert Speer, the Third Reich’s chief architect; secret weapons programmes were rumoured to be relocated.
Then the Eastern Front collapsed. In the summer of 1944, while the Allies focused on Normandy, Stalin launched the greatest offensive in history. Over three million men stormed the German lines and annihilated an entire army group. By Christmas, the frontline was suddenly on hallowed German soil. Silesia, spared for so long the horrors of war, was about to become a battlefield. In early 1945 the Russians arrived. Noble families buried treasures. Urban populations cowered in bunkers waiting for the fighting to end, and the reckoning of Soviet occupation to begin.
After the war, Stalin wanted territory in the east, so the Allies agreed to shift Poland to the west. It would hand its eastern provinces to Stalin, but receive German territory like Silesia to make up for it. German inhabitants would be expelled, replaced by easterners whose homes were now in the USSR. Genocide, war, anarchy, ethnic cleansing, social revolution. A human catastrophe engulfed swathes of Europe. Germans fled, hiding valuables in the garden, hoping to return. But then the Iron Curtain cauterised the border. The scars are still livid. Crumbling buildings with German pre-war signage stand empty. Grand homes, picked clean by the Red Army and Polish settlers, are derelict husks.
All this explains why every Silesian is a treasure hunter. The ruins of the Reich demand exploration. I never actually met anyone who had found anything, but everyone has heard of a hoard, a cache, a hidden chamber. The Gold Train was simply its ultimate expression.
I met the two treasure hunters, Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter, in their HQ. Maps and geo-physical print-outs lay thick around us as they showed me their findings. The results of groundpenetrating radar and magnetometry surveys looked to me like chaotic, pixelated GCSE art coursework. But to them they were gloriously clear evidence of a Nazi-era armoured train. With a sinking feeling, I wished them good luck with the search and we started our own.
What had happened here during the Second World War that had created this febrile atmosphere of secrets and rumour? The answer was: a lot.
The supposed site of the train sits at the heart of one of the most ambitious engineering projects in the Third Reich. Under the mountains of this corner of Silesia, the Nazis were building a gigantic folly. A complex of tunnels that would protect the German leadership and war machine from air attacks, even from nuclear strikes. It was hacked out of the earth by slaves from nearby concentration camps, 5,000 of whom died in months of brutal forced labour. It was called simply – Project Giant.
Local explorers reckon they have found about 100,000 cubic metres of tunnels. Speer’s diary implies that this