Hitler's Gold Train: Is There A Train Filled With Nazi Treasure Hidden In Poland?

Ever since the end of the Second World War, there have been rumours of hidden treasure, the fabled Nazi gold. The rumours lure treasure hunters. They can find fame, adventure and perhaps wealth. It has a romantic feel to it and an adventurous feel to it and it takes hold of you. In 2015, there was a rumour to top them all, the Nazi gold train. It was said to have disappeared without a trace in the final months of the Second World War in Europe. Had the train now been discovered in Poland? It all began in the summer of 2015. Woldzich is a city in Lower Silesia, Poland. It was there, near the line to Wrocław, that the gold train was said to be hidden. Could an international sensation lie buried here? Poland's top protector of monuments had no doubts. That statement really fired people up. Conjecture became almost definite fact. Gold train fever broke out. The buried train was said to lie underneath an embankment right beside the tracks. It was great fun for the holidays, especially for those of us who were on holiday. This is proof that gold really exists. There are so many planes above our house and cyclists and people from other cities. When the gold train arrived in Woldzich, journalists from all over the world waited and watched to see if there was something more. The area was sealed off and guarded around the clock. Even the Polish Minister for Culture permitted herself to dream. I would also like to see the Burstyn room, Rafael's room and everything else that we lost. The Nazis plundered museums, art collections and art dealers all over Europe. The most brazen plunderer of them all was Hitler's deputy, Hermann Goering. He said that he planned to do plenty of looting, even of items that were out of fashion. And so he did. The pick of the history of European art decorated Karin Hall, his country house on the Schorfheide Heath near Berlin. Goering constantly vied with his warlord Adolf Hitler, another great art thief who stole works for a huge museum that he had in mind for his native city of Linz. In May 1945, American troops seized a whole train full of art treasures in Hitler's retreat, Berchtesgaden. It was just part of Goering's booty and only a small part of what the Nazis had plundered overall. American experts began a systematic search for the looted art. And they found it. Five million items, of which four million had been stolen or extorted from their owners. The hall was worth billions, and some of it has not been found to this day. One example is the legendary Amber Room from the Catherine Palace near St. Petersburg. It was priceless. History Hit is a streaming platform that exclusively releases quality historical documentaries covering fascinating figures and moments in history from all over the world. From ancient Neolithic cultures to the dawn of the space race, History Hit has thousands of hours of content with unrivaled access to the world's best historians. We're committed to bringing history fans award-winning documentaries and podcasts that you cannot find anywhere else. Sign up now for a 14-day free trial, and Timeline fans can get 50% off their first three months. Just be sure to use code TIMELINE at checkout. The palace now has an exact replica in the original location. But where is the real Amber Room? What we definitely know about the Amber Room is that the Germans captured the Amber Room in the outskirts of Leningrad in 1941. They brought the Amber Room to Königsberg, and there in 44, in late 44, autumn 44, it disappeared. So we know that in August 1944 there was a heavy air raid on Königsberg by the Royal Air Force, and there's rumor that it was destroyed, the Amber Room, in this specific attack. Others said no, it was safe, it was not in the castle anymore, and it was evacuated to western parts of the Reich. Was the Amber Room destroyed? Or was it transported further west? Theories abound, more than about any other Nazi treasure. It's a story without an ending. Well, it certainly is never ending, because it's been going on for the past 70 years, that's the first thing. Second thing is, even in the 40 years that I had an interest in this area, I could say that probably I've come across, I don't know, between 15 and 20 different scenarios where it's been found, or nearly found, shall we say. Add to them the latest scenario. The Amber Room was on a train. A train that ended up in Lower Silesia, possibly here, near the railway line at the 65-kilometre marker in Walzow. You can even write a book about the search for the Amber Room. It's such a whole story. And of course, everything is possible. I mean, we have to see that in 1945, in the Reich, there was a chaos. And it's very, very difficult to exclude a specific option, a specific solution, that this doesn't exist. It's very difficult. But on the other hand, it's very interesting to see that since the 1940s, nothing had been found. I mean, in 1940, the Allies found a lot of treasures, be it gold, be it art, whatever you want, name it. But after that time, nothing had been found. And even after the German reunification, when hundreds of new treasure hunters searched in the tunnels of the former GDR, nothing was found bigger than the rusty steam helmet. Immediately after the Allied victory in May 1945, American specialists began looking for the stolen treasures, for Nazi gold. American forces were spending a lot of time looking for gold that had been stashed there by Wehrmacht and SS troops. Some of it was found in mountains, some of it had been put in lakes, some of it had been hidden in farms, and many, many places. Few people are as well informed on Nazi treasures as British author Ian Sayer. He is probably the only private individual who has laid his hands on Nazi gold in recent decades. He discovered it not in some dark hiding place, but in a safe deposit box in a bank. I got in touch with the American State Department and suggested they start investigating a bank account in Munich. It did take them 13 years, but at the end of that, they did find two bars of gold that had, shall we say, disappeared, in inverted commas, and had disappeared since 1945. This was not the only case. For example, in 1945, a train full of treasures stolen by the SS from Hungarian Jews was seized by the US Army in Austria. This really was a gold train. It carried 52 boxes of gold and diamonds, 1,560 boxes of silver, the gold and cash reserves of a bank, and many paintings. A large part of the treasure disappeared after the Americans seized it. It took 60 years for the US government to reach a settlement. Not everyone who came across such treasure proved honest. The temptation was certainly great, given the value of the plunder. Today, it seems highly likely that almost all of the documented holdings of Nazi gold were recovered soon after the war. But who can be sure? Personally, I think I could say that there may be a small amount of Nazi gold to be found. This would probably be gold that was hidden by people that died before they could get to it. Otherwise, you'll appreciate that if you hide Nazi gold and you don't die under unforeseen circumstances, you'd probably want to convert it into something like cars, houses and various other things, so there might still be some there. But could there be hundreds of tonnes buried beneath this railway line? The treasure hunter Andreas Richter would be pleased. He and his partner would get a 10% finder's fee. In September 2015, they released a statement prepared by their lawyer. Richter and Koper would not say much more than that, nor would they make public whatever evidence they had of their supposed find. They said that they had found the train with a device like this, a frequency-modulated continuous wave radar system. In other words, ground radar. The technology has several advantages. Private individuals can afford it, and the testing method is simple. Like a number of academic experts, Andreas Oberholt was cautious about the reliability of 3D imaging. Richter and Koper were not the only ones in Walpzig who dreamt of finding the gold train. The retired miner Tadeusz Słowikowski had spent half his life under its spell. He acquired wartime German maps and even without geo-radar, he concluded that the train lay hidden in the very spot where Richter and Koper said it was. According to Słowikowski, a German railway official gave him a crucial tip decades ago, and that tip convinced him that the train was there. One of the many people interested in the location of the train is Christel Focken. She advises the Walpzig City Council and has been trying to solve the region's underground puzzles for 15 years. Christel works with satellite images that clearly show up any irregularities in the terrain. From the images, she concluded that the railway track once ran between the suspected location of the gold train and the most important building in Walpzig, Fürstenstein Castle, now known by its Polish name Zamek Książ. In 1943, the castle was requisitioned for conversion into a regional headquarters for Hitler. Codenamed Riese, or Giant, it was one of 20 Führer headquarters located all over Europe. Nobody asked the question about money. Does it make any sense? It was Hitler's decision. Somehow he was a travel emperor, like in the medieval times, if you want. Hitler did not lead the armed forces and politics from the capital, which is the normal way how it was done. Remember the cabinet rooms in London or other things in Washington and so forth. But he led the war and the Third Reich from various headquarters. So this is the reason why we have so many headquarters, big headquarters, a lot of bunkers, tunnels, whatever, in all of Europe. These lift shafts descend 50 meters from the castle into the depths of the mountain. At the bottom, there is a labyrinth of corridors and rooms. On the next level down is an extensive network of tunnels. They were to house the logistics of the Führer headquarters. But in some places, the tunnels end in rubble and debris. What lies behind it? What secrets does Zamek Schanz still conceal? Might the closed-off portion of the tunnel complex contain a rail link to the outside? Or even a full railway station, as Christel Focken suspects? Hitler's Sonderzug, his special train. At times during the war, it was his most important means of transport. And it was more than that. The Führer's train was a special design for a moving headquarter, if you want. And this is very much a design for a moving headquarter. It came from the early stage of the war. Hitler used it massively in 1939 in Poland and also in 1940. And in this idea that the leader has to be close to the front. It's not very far away in the capital and goes to the opera and whatever. But he, in a way, has to share the experience and has to be close to his headquarters. And because it's a modern moving wall, he has to use a moving headquarter, if you want. Always ready to depart. So could there have been a service centre for Hitler's train here, where the gold train is said to be? One thing is certain, Hitler's train itself is definitely not here. We know that it was based in a tunnel at Tempelhof airfield. And it was then moved out of the capital, out of Berlin, to Austria. And it was blown up at Zellamsee in Austria. Single cars of the train have survived in other places and were used by the Federal Republic of Germany and others. But the whole train ended, this is very sure, ended in Zellamsee in May 1945. In late September 2015, the Polish army took over the suspected location of the gold train. Sappers moved in, looking for booby traps, mines or unexploded bombs. Piotr Kopr, one of the two hopeful gold train hunters, was disappointed. He thought that searching to the depth of a metre was nowhere near enough. All they would find would be earth. But he was wrong. Kopr and Richter believed that their geo-radar modelling had identified a train like this, a German armoured train of the kind used to patrol railway lines during the war. Some of these trains are still missing to this day. Would one now be found in Waldshut? Of course it's possible that somebody brought the train shortly before Breslau was totally surrounded by the Red Army and circled by the Red Army out of Breslau to protect the railway tracks and whatever. So this is possible. We don't know it. It's not for sure, but it's still an option. Mobile gun turrets. These armoured trains were built in Breslau. Some of these trains survived and they had guns, anti-aircraft guns, anti-tank guns. And obviously we know for sure that one of these trains ended up in Breslau and was, because of his guns, was used against the Red Army. At the end of January 1945, the Red Army was preparing its assault on Silesia. It was closing the ring around the Silesian capital, Breslau, known today as Wrocław. A railway line ran from the capital to Waldshut, then known by its German name of Waldenburg. On that line, not far from Waldenburg, 15-year-old Gotthard Feltz saw something one night in January. He's never forgotten it. What did Gotthard Feltz see that night? Was it a train transporting tanks? Or was it an armoured train, like the one said to lie hidden in Waldsech? The problem with eyewitnesses is not that they deliberately are lying and tell you any forged stories, but that they're not telling the truth. But, you know, we know how the human memory works. And the human memory always, you know, fits pieces and bits together, from the past and from very recent times. I saw a train and I'm still really believing it. So, therefore, the memory of an eyewitness only pushes us in a direction. And we have to verify, we have to check it, if this can really be the case. In January 1945, the fate of Breslau hung in the balance. The Nazis declared the city a fortress, despite its obvious lack of defences. Gauleiter Karl Hunker demanded all-out resistance to the end. Overturned trams were supposed to hold back the tanks of the Red Army, the most powerful land force in the world. By mid-February, the Red Army had cut Breslau off completely. You could hear the gunfire from close by, and nothing went in or out. And the soldiers who were in Breslau said to us, it's closed, no one's coming out, you have to stay here. In the name of self-defence, Breslau committed suicide. Buildings were blown up so that Red Army soldiers couldn't occupy them. Gauleiter Hunker had a corridor blasted through the centre of the city to build an airstrip. While they were strafed by low-flying planes. Pointless deaths. The airstrip was only ever used once, by Hunker himself. On 6th May 1945, he disappeared from Breslau. It's a sad part of the story, to put it that way, that this agitator, who always delivered his hate speeches and never gave up speeches, and presented himself as a core of the defence, that this Gauleiter tried to escape and obviously made it out of Breslau. This is what we know for sure, that he made it out of Breslau, and then he disappeared. Did Hunker make plans for after Germany's defeat? Did he have valuables taken out of Breslau before it was cut off? Works of art? Gold? He had the authority. This is another angle that has treasure hunters speculating. After the war, Polish intelligence interrogated a former Breslau policeman who had remained in Poland instead of fleeing to Germany, as most other Germans did. Herbert Klose testified, after at first denying it, that at the end of the war, the SS and the police had amassed a hoard of gold in the Breslau police headquarters. The gold came mainly from the city's banks, and it was stored in dozens of large boxes. He only found out later what the boxes had held. The so-called Breslau gold treasure has never been found. Could this be another piece in the gold train puzzle? Or is it only a persistent rumour? Rumours start, sort of, rumours, like, did you see that train? What train? Oh, that armoured train. And it grows like Topsy. It sort of gets bigger and bigger and larger and more valuable. And of course then there's the sort of, well, there are tunnels in there and you can't get to them anymore. They blew the entrances up. So, well, do you think that any of those trains are still there? Well, they could be. And do you think those trains could have treasure? Well, why else would they blow them up? And suddenly you've got this sort of question-and-answer thing going on with people saying, well, that's right, that could have happened, this could have happened. Suddenly all of that is not conjecture anymore, it's fact. Wolbrzych, November 2015. Once the Polish army had declared the area safe, geophysicists from the Krakow University of Technology examined it closely. Look over there, said Tadeusz Słowakowski, the first treasure hunter. The points for the train were in that depression, about 100 metres along. This is what supposedly happened. The train turned off from the main line and entered the tunnel. The tunnel entrance was then blown up to seal it. But did it happen? Light would soon be shed. An object as large as a train, undiscovered for over 70 years, would be a real sensation. But why did no-one mention this operation back in 1945? You've got a train driver, you've got Wehrmacht officers, you've got people looking after the treasure. So everybody comes out, OK, before they dynamite it. And nobody says anything. At the end of the day, seven decades later, all the others have said nothing, and one person has said, well, look, I just want to tell you where it is now before I die. Is it feasible? My answer to that would be not at all. Besides, there were more logical places to hide a train. A few kilometres south of Wolbrzych is the Oxhead Tunnel. Located well outside the city, it was intended to be a shelter for Hitler's special train. Behind that, at the former Charlottenburg military railway station, there is a 200-square-kilometre area full of underground puzzles. Here, in the Aul Mountains, the Nazis built gigantic tunnel systems as part of the Riese-Führer headquarters project. Riese is, first of all, a headquarters for Hitler. So a lot of tunnels, bunkers, facilities for Hitler himself, but also for his staff, his political staff, and for the whole armed forces. So it's a huge complex. But there's a plus. So on top of this, as an add-on, was the idea of the relocation of the German industry below ground level. So because of the Allied air attacks, it became worse and worse and worse, there was a decision that key industries should be relocated into tunnels. For in the last years of the war, the Luftwaffe was less and less capable of countering the Allied bomber offensive. During the day, the Americans systematically destroyed German industry. While at night, the British laid waste to Germany's major cities. Virtually all of them went up in flames in the last years of the war. In mid-1943, a huge construction project got underway. Hundreds of German armaments companies were moved into bomb-proof underground galleries, like these in Schwarz in Tirol. Today, these places are monuments to homicidal megalomania. Then, they were top-priority sites for building jet fighters and long-range missiles. Advanced new weapons that were supposed to turn the tide of the war back in Germany's favor. The production and development of the rockets were part of the ever-growing empire of Heinrich Himmler's SS. Most of the rocket assembly was done by slave laborers from concentration camps, such as these in the Mittelbau-Dora underground factory in Thuringia. A bomb-proof bunker complex was also built for Himmler himself and the other SS leaders near Hallein in Austria. Himmler would never use it. The power of Heinrich Himmler and the SS rested primarily on the unlimited supply of slave labor from the concentration camps. The laborers who built the tunnel complexes were worked to death. They were replaced by new laborers from the camps. It was called annihilation through labor. In the Aul mountains of Lower Silesia, the tunnel systems were never finished. Sometimes, it's not clear what the tunnels were even for. The Germans digged tunnels like vaults there, so there are so many installations. And the problem is, we don't have a final report from the Germans. So it would have been really brilliant to have a report from May 1945, one day before the Red Army entered the complex, we have this number of tunnels, and they should be used for this and that, and we have that kind of installation. We don't have that kind. The only thing we have, for sure, is a report by Albert Speer. As early as 1944, Albert Speer reported using 257,000 cubic meters of concrete and carving out 213,000 cubic meters of tunnels, figures that far exceed what is known about today. It's always a policy. You make a policy within the system, with your reports, to present yourself in the best possible light. Or the second option is that a lot of tunnels were destroyed, by the Germans or by the Russians, we don't know, or even by the Poles. So we just don't know that. And very little is open to the public. We know of half a dozen tunnel systems south of Walpzig. But are there more? No one is willing to rule it out. It's quite possible, even probable, that the Aul Mountains still have a few more surprises in store. Tunnel entrances that have been filled in or blasted shut are being discovered all the time. Christel Focken alone reported four suspected tunnel sites late in 2015. She has recruited two cavers from Munich, Andreas Wille and Norbert Hans. They are well equipped and very experienced. Down they go, into a Nazi underworld that has been sealed off for 70 years. The purpose of the complex is still unknown. Andreas cautiously checks the site. But there seems to be no way in. And then his gas monitor beeps. Methane is produced in tunnels like this when the timber supports rot. You have to be very careful. There are dangers waiting for you down there. There are cracks, it can break in at any time, CO2 seeds can form at the deepest parts of the system that you can't taste or smell, where the oxygen is then quickly gone. If you don't know the area well and have dealt with it, I would recommend you to let it go. A foolhardy treasure hunter plunged to his death in the region as recently as September 2015. The sealed-off tunnels of the Riese project still hold many secrets. The most mysterious part is the Ozówka complex. From the surface, a shaft descends 50 metres into the depths. The exit of this shaft is in the middle of the forest. A concrete tunnel runs from this shaft towards the railway ramp, where trains arrived in 1944. A secret document from the last days of the war states that weapons and ammunition were to be stored here for a strongpoint. It is therefore quite possible that this was where the reported Walbrzych train was heading and that the train transported only weapons, not gold. The director of the Ozówka complex estimates that only half of it has been explored. What is hidden in the inaccessible areas? Many of the tunnel roofs are as high as the ceiling of a cathedral. There is enough space to accommodate large equipment or even whole trains. Most of the tunnels are probably abandoned. But it looks like a construction site that has been abandoned. If you look at the whole thing, there was definitely a lot planned here. Plans for what? Mr Lazanowski, the director of the museum, has a remarkable hypothesis. The underground city of Ozówka in Głuszyce was supposed to be a shelter for scientists in the field of chemistry and physics who would work here to find a way to launch an atomic bomb. After Germany's surrender, the Soviets evidently searched here for just that — installations associated with German atomic research. Decades later, the physicist Georgi Flerow, one of the fathers of the Soviet atomic bomb, mentioned help from German scientists during a private conversation. But what did the Soviets find at Ozówka? That is still uncertain. These foundations on the surface of the complex are particularly remarkable. So far, no one has been able to explain them. So the cargo on the Wolbrzych train, if the train ever existed, could have been high technology, rather than gold or weapons. The Soviets clearly expected to find materials for German atomic research. However, Russian files that could throw light on this are not yet available. We don't know for sure what kind of installations, what kind of research was done in at least part of the tunnels of the Riese complex. But it's very likely that the Russians, very soon after the first soldiers arrived there, had a scientific and academic committee and tried to get everything and bring it back to the Soviet Union. But this part of the story can only be told if you have Russian documents. But we don't have access to these sources yet. So it's still history to be told in the future. Wolbrzych, 15 December 2015. The mayor has called a press conference on the gold train. The city has probably never seen so many camera teams. Today is to be the moment of truth. For the first time, Piotr Koper and Andrzej Ryszta will publicly present the results of their geo-radar tests. Professor Mardej from the Krakow University of Technology will then discuss the findings of his working group. Ryszta and Koper display a 3D computer model that they have superimposed on an aerial photo of the site. They remain convinced that it probably shows a hidden armored train. It shows regular rectangular structures. But then it's Professor Mardej's turn. With scientific thoroughness, he presents the test methods that he and his working group used and the results they reached. He devotes a great deal of time to the magnetometer tests that he and his colleagues conducted. He makes it exciting. Finally, he leaves the conclusion to a journalist in the room. Ryszta and Koper's expressions speak for themselves. Is this the end of the Walbrzych gold train? The crucial point is, the scientists could not detect enough metal in the hill for a train to be inside it. And that's it. There is a handshake for Piotr Koper, as if after a tennis match. But who is right? Koper and Ryszta are not about to give up. Is it really worth spending so much money searching for a train that may not even exist? At least, not here. They are of good conscience, I'm sure. Now, there may be something there, OK? It's possible that there's something there, but I think that they will be very disappointed with what they find. Things like German army helmets, or gloves, or supplies, or things that are rusty. I mean, you see... Or maybe a knife, or a gun, or something like that. Those are the sort of things that they might come across. But even if that proves to be the case, there are still many undiscovered sealed tunnels in the region where the train could be. Finally, I'd just like to say that there will always be stolen Nazi treasure awaiting discovery at the end of the rainbow. The story of the Silesian Gold Train is not over yet.