The team started to dig for a hidden railway tunnel as the treasure hunting duo claimed previous year to have uncovered the incredible find.
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The researchers claim they have found a tunnel leading to the secret stash rumoured to be left by the Nazis at the end of the war.
It has also sought to undermine iconic Solidarity leader Lech Walesa’s credibility by reiterating claims he cooperated with the communist secret services, and has attacked Jan Gross, a USA historian of Polish-Jewish heritage, over claims he made to “Die Welt” that Poles killed more Jews in the war than they did Germans.
Richter and Koper previous year reported finding soil anomalies that hinted at the train’s existence. “But we do not have the entrance [to the tunnel] at this moment”, Christel Focken said, as the digging operation entered its second day.
However, Prof Janusz Madej from Krakow’s AGH University of Science and Technology said its geological survey of the site had found no evidence of a train. He said the man told him the train disappeared before ever making it to Waldenburg (now Walbrzych) some 65 kilometres (45 miles) to the west.
The tunnel system carried the name “Giant” (“Riese”), which indicates the dimensions of the underground network.
Local folklore said an armoured train had been carrying gold from what is now the Polish city of Wroclaw as the Soviet army closed in. Several of Nazi death camps used in the genocide of Jews and other ethnic groups during the war were built across the span of occupied Polish territories, including those at Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.
They’re not dissuaded by decades of fruitless searches, a scientific determination that no train is there and warnings by historians that such a train might not even exist.
There has been wild speculation among those who believe in the gold train’s existence about what might actually be on board.
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Despite having refrained from participating in the search, local officials took the claims of the finding seriously at first. “If it’s there, we will find it”.
