Local media have for days been abuzz with old lore of trains full of gold and jewels stolen by the Nazis after two men – a German and a Pole – claimed to have found an armoured train auto in the southwestern city of Walbrzych.
Advertisement
Agent Culture Minister Piotr Zuchowski said pictures seemed to demonstrate a train furnished with firearm turrets.
Zuchowski said the initial source of the stories was a man who said he had helped hide the train.
Fortune-hunters have looked for the so-called “gold train” for decades, and in the communist era, the Polish army and security services carried out apparently fruitless searches for it. Polish officials said on Friday they were nearly certain they had located the train.
“To the extent that any items now being discovered in Poland may have been stolen from Jews before they were sent to death…it is essential that every measure is taken to return the property to its rightful owners or to their heirs”, said Robert Singer, head of the World Jewish Congress, in a statement made in New York.
“If no such survivors or heirs can be found, any gold or other property that is found to have belonged to Jewish families or businesses must now inure to the benefit of Polish Jewish survivors who unfortunately have never been adequately compensated by Poland for the unspeakable suffering they endured and their catastrophic economic losses in the Holocaust”.
Before the tide of the war turned against the Germans after their 1943 defeat at Stalingrad, the Nazis built a massive network of tunnels and bunkers through the Owl Mountains that range southwest of Wroclaw – known as Breslau until the region was ceded to Poland after the war – to Walbrzych on the Czech border.
Most ethnic Germans were forced to migrate west to within Germany’s new borders, although some remained in Wałbrzych.
Local tourism purveyors are already seeking to cash in on the train legend.
Until an official dig can take place, Zuchowski is warning treasure hunters to stay away because there’s a “huge probability that the train is mined”.
Advertisement
The vehicle was armored, suggesting it was carrying a special cargo, “probably military equipment but also possibly jewelry, works of art and archive documents”, he told journalists in Warsaw. In an announcement not long ago, Mr Zuchowski cautioned people in general to quit looking for the train until authority systems to secure the find were finished.
