The world will know within “three or four days” whether a legendary Nazi gold train lies buried in a secret railway siding in south-west Poland, a team of treasure hunters has claimed. Its apparent whereabouts remained a source of speculation and rumour until past year when Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter, two treasure hunters, triggered headlines around the world with the claim that they had located the spot where it lay buried. “They say they claim to have found a train”, Noack said.
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Geological experts from Krakow’s AGH University of Science and Technology found no evidence of the train when searching with magnetic equipment, the Associated Press reports, but their findings did conclude that there may in fact be a tunnel located at the site of Koper and Richter’s privately-funded excavation. “We are hoping to be successful”.
Galik said ground-penetrating radar examinations were “very promising”. Polish authorities have nonetheless seemed eager to check every possibility of recovering treasures that have sparked imaginations of local people for decades.
At the height of the frenzy a year ago, the World Jewish Congress reminded Poland’s authorities that, in the case of a discovery of a treasure-laden train, any valuables belonging to Jews killed in the Holocaust must be returned to their rightful owners or their heirs.
They think the train was hidden in a tunnel in 1945.
Anti-Russian sentiment is fueling a nationalist revival in Poland, where some historians, politicians and activists are engaged in a campaign to absolve their countrymen of any wrongdoing during World War II and the Holocaust, which at time shades into revisionist history. Polish folklore alleges the “armored” train disappeared as Soviet forces invaded the area, sending German soldiers running.
However, a local historian, Pawel Rodziewicz, told The Associated Press past year that documentation leaves no doubt that gold in Breslau was evacuated to the German central bank in Berlin and elsewhere, so there would have been no reason to take any to Waldenburg, where the approaching Soviets could find it.
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“We believe that a train has been found”, Marika Tokarska, the district governor of a southwestern Polish district of Walbrzych, told the AP past year.
