As is all the received wisdom from that time period, a distortion at best, outright hoax at worst.
Forgive me for not tunneling to deep on this one:
"Experts say there’s no Nazi gold train hidden in Polish mountains; But explorers disagree, press on with hunt" by Sarah Kaplan Washington Post December 16, 2015
WASHINGTON —Seventy years ago, it is rumored, an armored train departed for the Polish city of Walbrzych in the waning days of World War II. It snaked through the mountains of southwestern Poland, carrying an untold fortune in Nazi loot: gold, jewels, art, maybe weapons confiscated from Polish citizens and sent to the interior for safekeeping as the German regime began to crumble.
But the train never arrived.
Instead, it’s thought to be sealed inside one of the tunnels built by slave laborers for the Nazis, who were occupying a castle just above the underground network. And there it remained, the subject of rampant speculation and several investigations that brought locals no closer to the train and its riches — if they even existed.
The latest report of discovery came in August, when two treasure hunters said they’d determined the location of the train based on a map drawn by a man on his deathbed. But experts from Krakow University of Science and Technology said that magnetic and gravitational surveys revealed no trace of an underground rail system or the treasure train.
Really?
Radar hints at fabled Nazi gold train
Poles close site of train bearing valuables
Because there is nothing there?
Project-leader Janusz Madej said the scientists did find some anomalies, but they were just eight feet below the surface — not deep enough to be anything matching descriptions of the train’s hiding spot. ‘‘There may be a tunnel,’’ Madej said, ‘‘but there is no train.’’
Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter, explorers who claimed to have located the train four months ago, were less convinced by the scientists’ findings. They said their research team had found further proof of the train’s existence: images from ground-penetrating sensors that showed clear signs of a tunnel with tracks and sleepers and several shapes that could only be the fabled vehicle.
‘‘We carried out similar examinations in many other locations, but we have never encountered anything like this,’’ Koper said, according to The New York Times. ‘‘There is no way these shapes are of natural origin.’’ The pair admitted they were only hobbyists but stood by their claims. ‘‘There can’t be a mistake,’’ Koper said.
‘‘It’s human to make a mistake,’’ Madej responded. ‘‘But it’s foolish to stand by it.’’
If the Nazis really did have a secret treasure train in Poland (as they were known to have elsewhere), the area around Walbrzych is where they’d hide it. The sleepy city is surrounded by dense forest and the Owl Mountains and is home to the 800-year-old Ksaiz castle, occupied by Adolf Hitler himself.
Eduard Wawrzyczko, who had worked as caretaker at Ksiaz for nearly half a century by the time the Germans arrived at the castle, recalled the occupation to The New York Times in 1961: ‘‘In 1943, Hitler came here with [Hermann] Goering and then came the slave laborers, Jews and political prisoners taken from concentration camps. They were there to build tunnels, Wawrzyczko said, for a scheme dubbed ‘‘Project Riese’’ or ‘‘giant.’’ The tunnels were never completed, and their purpose is unknown.
One wonders if we will be told in 70 years of the great Israeli treasure train buried in Palestine.
The area was abandoned when the Red Army took control of southwestern Poland in 1945, with only 5 miles of tunnels dug and much of it structurally unsound.
But as the Nazis fled, some German miners claimed to have seen a train being wheeled into a tunnel, according to Smithsonian Magazine. A rumor was born.
Reports that something had been found in the Nazi complex’s ruins flared up periodically, including in 1961, when the Times sent a reporter to interview Wawrzyczko.
But nothing was ever found.
Decades later, the rumor persists. Though few people in Walbrzych remember the Nazi presence, they all know the story of the tunnels and the treasures they supposedly contain....
And, as Hitler said, they eventually become fact in the public mind.
This is my stop.
--more--"
I've reached a epiphany with this stuff, readers.
