A search, expected to last a few days, is underway in southwest Poland for a Nazi “gold train” of legend. The train—which has never been proved to exist—could potentially hold up to 300 tons of gold, reported a Polish news source. But all of this remains speculation, as it has for decades. The local legend, according to USA Today:
The train is said to have gone missing in May 1945 [when Soviet forces were closing in on the Germans]. Legend says it was armed and loaded with treasure and disappeared after entering a complex of tunnels under the Owl Mountains, a secret project known as “Riese”—or Giant—which the Nazis never finished. At the time the area belonged to Germany but now lies in Poland.
Last year, two German men, Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter, claimed to have located the train in Walbrzych, when “ground-penetrating radar images produced a series of images that resembled a train,” reported Jake Halpern of The New Yorker in a larger piece about the Nazi underground.
After seeing [these images], Poland’s deputy culture minister said that he was “more than ninety-nine per cent sure” that the train was there. Speculation quickly spread that the train contained some portion of Klose’s gold, and the would-be discovery was dubbed the Nazi Gold Train in newspapers around the world. Tourists flocked to the site.
But the ghostly pictures served up by geophysical-imaging technology can be misleading. This past fall, a group of Polish scientists conducted tests of their own at the site and concluded that no train was buried there. One of them, Michał Banaś, a geologist at the Polish Academy of Sciences, used a thermal-infrared camera and found anomalies in the ground, leading him to believe that, while there might be a tunnel, there was no evidence of a train. The treasure hunters remain adamant that they are right.
On Tuesday, Koper and Richter and their group of volunteers began to excavate a site in an underground tunnel between Wroclaw and Walbrzych, and began digging beneath the surface. Watch a live stream here. According to Polish journalist Tomasz Borysiuk, the first two digs were unsuccessful. Oh, and that media access costs $250.
Bad day for #goldtrain. Two unsuccessful today’s excavations were most important. Let us hope for the best… pic.twitter.com/kQWVTLEts6
— Tomasz Borysiuk (@TomaszBorysiuk) August 16, 2016
Jonathan Zalman is a writer and teacher based in Brooklyn.
