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 Local authorities in Poland’s southwestern district of Walbrzych
said they had been contacted by a law firm representing a Pole and a
German who said they had located the train and were seeking 10
percent of the value of the findings.
“Lawyers, the army, the police and the fire brigade are dealing with
this,” Marika Tokarska, an official at the Walbrzych district
council, told Reuters. “The area has never been excavated before and
we don’t know what we might find.”
Local news reports said the train in question went missing in 1945,
packed with loot from the-then eastern German city of Breslau, now
called Wroclaw and part of Poland, as the Red Army closed in at the
end of World War Two.
One local media report said the train was armored and belonged to
the Wehrmacht (Nazi Germany's military).
Radio Wroclaw cited local folklore as saying the train entered a
tunnel near Ksiaz Castle in the mountainous Lower Silesian region
and never emerged. According to that theory, the tunnel was later
closed and its location long forgotten.
According to Radio Wroclaw, the 150-metre-(495-foot)-long train was
carrying guns, "industrial equipment", gems and other valuable
treasure. Tokarska said she did not have any details on the location
or the contents of the missing train.
Some skeptics say there is no evidence that it ever existed.
“A handful of people have already looked for the train, damaging the
line in the process, but nothing was ever found,” Radio Wroclaw
quoted Joanna Lamparska as saying, describing her as a connoisseur
of the region’s history.
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“But the legend has captured imaginations.”
Trains were indeed used to spirit Nazi loot back to Berlin as
U.S.-led Allied and Soviet forces surged toward the German capital
from the west and the east in the winter and spring of 1945.
In the case of the so-called "Gold Train", Nazi forces sent 24
freight carriages from Budapest toward Germany filled with family
treasures including gold, silver and valuable paintings seized from
Hungarian Jews and estimated to be worth up to $200 million.
The train was intercepted by U.S. soldiers, who, according to a
later U.S. investigation, helped themselves to some of the loot.
(Reporting by Alexandra Hamilton; Writing by Matt Robinson; Editing
by Mark Heinrich)
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