Fact or fiction? The Nazi Gold Train mystery
A Nazi 'gold train' sealed in Polish tunnels and packed with looted treasure…fact or folklore? Read about the Wałbrzych legend.
Image: The tunnel complex of Project Riese where a 'Nazi Gold Train' is rumoured to be hidden | TeeS / Shutterstock.com
On the rail line between Wrocław and Wałbrzych in south-west Poland, the track cuts through the Sudetes before disappearing into folds of wooded hills. It looks like any other scenic European railway at first glance. But it’s what lies beneath that’s really captured the imaginations of history buffs (that’s us here at Sky HISTORY) and treasure hunters alike.
As legend has it, an armoured Nazi train slipped into a hidden tunnel in 1945 and was sealed behind rock as Soviet forces closed in.
The details vary depending on who’s telling it. What doesn’t change is the location. The vanished Nazi Gold Train is always linked to Lower Silesia, where the ground really is riddled with unfinished tunnels.
This story is explored in more detail on Sky HISTORY’s upcoming new series, Last Hunt For Nazi Treasure. But before it airs on Monday, 30 March, here’s what you need to know.
Lost in tunnel country
Wałbrzych sits close to Książ Castle and the Owl Mountains. Why does this matter? The area is tied to Project Riese, the Nazis’ sprawling, unfinished underground building programme.
According to some historians, the project was part of the Führer Headquarters, where Nazi leader Adolf Hitler and other top German commanders and officials, like Heinrich Muller, met.
Project Riese isn’t quite as well known as the Führerbunker in Berlin or the Wolfsschanze (Wolf's Lair) in East Prussia, but it helps explain why stories like the Gold Train take root here…the landscape really is built for hiding things.
Beneath the castle and in the surrounding hills, prisoners were forced to dig chambers and corridors that were never completed before Germany surrendered.
Today, parts of those subterranean routes can still be visited. They’re fascinating, yes. But the subterranean complex is also a grim reminder of the human cost of the Nazi regime. Forced labourers and concentration camp prisoners were used on the works, and many died during the Project Riese.
What’s supposed to be inside
The legend’s cargo list is elastic to say the least. In its more restrained form, the train is said to have carried military equipment. In the more sensational versions, it’s a rolling strongbox loaded with gold, jewels, art and looted valuables. Basically the Altaussee and Merkers-Kieselbach mines on wheels.
The claim that set off the rush
For decades, the Gold Train lived mostly in local lore. Then, in August 2015, two amateur searchers, Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter, went public and claimed to have located it.
Polish officials responded in a way that only poured fuel on the fire. Deputy Culture Minister Piotr Żuchowski said he had seen ground-penetrating radar images that suggested a train more than 100 metres long, and that he was 'more than 99 percent' sure it existed. Suddenly, Wałbrzych was making global headlines.
What skeptics said
Ground-penetrating radar is good at showing anomalies. For example, shapes that don’t quite match the surrounding geology. The problem is that an anomaly is not necessarily a train. In December 2015, researchers from Kraków’s AGH University of Science and Technology surveyed the site with multiple geophysical methods and concluded there was no evidence of a train there.
This didn’t stop Koper and Richter’s team from digging anyway, backed by permits and private funding. But despite the hype, the “eureka” moment never came. After days of work, the team admitted what the science had already suggested: no train and no tunnel at the dig site.
And of course, if the “treasure” ever was found, it wouldn’t be considered clean due to the fact that much of it was stolen. That question of provenance (what an object is, who it belonged to and what it witnessed) is exactly the territory Sky HISTORY explores in Battle Treasures with Foxy and Bruce, where each artefact offers a window into the harsh realities of war.
So…was it ever real?
The strongest evidence for the Gold Train has always been circumstantial. The region is full of tunnels, there’s a plausible wartime motive and ambiguous readings from equipment help create buzz.
And then of course there’s the insatiable human appetite to see history as a locked door that could still be prised open, if you do enough digging… literally in this case.
Want to know more about some of the biggest wartime treasure myths? Sky HISTORY’s Last Hunt for Nazi Gold follows historian Guy Walters and Justine Ostrowska across Europe in search of legends like Poland’s Gold Train.
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