Explorers in Poland begin digging Tuesday for a legendary Nazi train laden with treasure and armaments, not dissuaded by decades of fruitless searches and a scientific determination that no train is even there.
The search in southeastern Poland attests to the power of a local legend claiming a Nazi “gold” train disappeared in a mountain tunnel as the Germans escaped the advancing Soviet army at the end of World War II.
As the dig got underway, a yellow excavator moved earth along railroad tracks above the spot where two explorers believe the train is buried, according to images aired by Poland’s TVN24. The work is expected to last several days.
The two men claimed last year to have located the elusive train with radar equipment below ground in the city of Walbrzych, sparking a gold rush in that area.
A government official initially said he was “99 percent sure” the train was there, but geological experts using magnetic equipment found no train on the spot.
Historians say the existence of the train, which is said to have gone missing in May 1945, never has been conclusively proven. Polish authorities nonetheless have seemed eager to check every possibility of recovering treasures that have sparked the imaginations of local people for decades.
— AP
The underground galleries, part of the Nazi Germany ‘Riese’ construction project under the Ksiaz castle in the area where the ‘Nazi gold train’ is supposedly hidden underground, in Walbrzych, Poland, on August 28, 2015. (AFP/Janek Skarzynski)
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