Nazi gold

Rico watched The Monuments Men last night, and there was a lot of real Nazi gold found by them, but War History Online has an article about (maybe) more:

In December of 2015, a press conference denounced the claims of the existence of a Nazi gold train by Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter. The famed treasure hunters still claim it is there, and said that the only way to find  out, once and for all, if the train was there was to dig.
The treasure hunter team, which has been looking for the train for over three years, claim they have found the tunnel that will lead them to the treasure train, which was supposed to be hidden at the end of World War Two by the Nazis. The hunt was stopped in December of 2015, after a press conference, during which it was announced by experts that there was no evidence of a train. But now, according to the Daily Star, an agreement was made with Poland’s railway company PKP, allowing the dig to commence within days. For weeks,  locals from the town of Walbrzych, the alleged location of the train, have been protesting to allow the search to continue. According to the Daily Express, there have been several angry protests at the spot, with locals waving shovels in the face of police, as they demand to be allowed  to dig at the location.
A preliminary scan of a collapsed rail siding in September of 2015 produced radar images (below) described by Deputy Minister of Culture Piotr Zuchowski as providing “ninety-nine percent” certainty of the presence of a buried train.
The Polish government has since distanced itself from the remark, news.au.com reports.
Koper said that he and Richter had also worked out how to extract it from the ground. He added: ‘We have spent much time examining the logistical problems, and worked out a solution for getting the train out.
In October of 2015, the Polish military moved in to check the site for explosives. The search that was undertaken was non-invasive only, meaning that no digging or drilling could take place. With the use of ground-penetrating radar (GPR), there was an attempt  to establish the precise location of the gold train.
In mid-December of 2015, during a press conference, researchers presented their findings regarding the alleged gold train near the town of Walbrzych in Poland. Professor Janusz Madej from Krakow’s Academy of Mining said that “There may be a tunnel. There is no train, especially an armored one, carrying precious metals”, adding that ‘treasure hunters’ geomagnetic readings may have been disrupted by the presence of overhead power lines.’
After the press conference, the municipal office of Walbrzych announced that further research should be conducted to conclude the investigation. So now the dig is on again.
Treasure hunters Piotr Koper of Poland and Andreas Richter, a German, announced in August of 2015 that they had discovered a three-hundred-foot-long train buried eight to nine meters underground in a railway tunnel that was part of Nazi Germany’s Riese project (Riese meaning “giant” in German). Riese was the  code name for a construction project of Nazi Germany in 1943–45, consisting of seven underground structures located in the Owl Mountains and Książ Castle in Lower Silesia, which was then part of Germany but, after the war, became part of Poland. Inmates from Gross Rosen concentration camp were used during the construction of the tunnels.
At the peak of its activity in 1944, the Gross-Rosen complex had up to a hundred subcamps located in eastern Germany, Czechoslovakia, and on the territory of occupied Poland. The population of all Gross-Rosen camps at that time was eleven percent of the total number of inmates in the Nazi concentration camp system. A total of 125,000 inmates of various nationalities passed through the complex during its existence, of whom an estimated forty thousand died on site, on death marches, and in evacuation transports. The camp was captured on 14 February 1945 by the Soviet Red Army.
The purpose of the project remains uncertain because of lack of documentation. Some sources suggest that all the structures were part of the Führer’s headquarters; according to others, it was a combination of the headquarters and an arms factory, but comparison to similar facilities can indicate that only the castle was adapted as an headquarters and the other official residence and the tunnels in the Owl Mountains were planned as a network of underground factories. It is estimated that only ten percent of the tunnels have been explored since the end of the war.
Poland’s Deputy Culture Minister Piotr Zuchowski previously told reporters that he had been informed the buried train was more than a hundfed meters long, and that he had seen an image from a ground-penetrating radar that appeared to show the outline of an armored train. A Polish military museum says it has received an excellent quality ground radar image that shows the gold train in fine detail:

Claims from the finders of the ‘Nazi Gold Train’ said that it could contain the Amber Room, as the Daily Mail reported. Piotr Koper and Andreas Richter discovered the train close to the small town of Walbrzych, located in south-west Poland, after a German man revealed its location on his deathbed. It is thought to be laden with gold, looted paintings, and one noted author went as far to claim that it contained the Amber Room of the Russian Tsars, looted from a Russian palace by Nazi troops in 1941. The lawyer that represents the two men claiming to have found the train has backpedalled on claims it contains gold. Instead, he told local television, it may contain ‘valuable minerals’.
According to the Daily Express, a Polish expert has warned that the fabled ‘gold train’ of Walbrzych could actually be loaded with Nazi chemical agents being transported to defend Berlin in a last-ditch stand against the advancing Soviets. Stanislaw Popiel of the Military Technical Academy of Warsaw told Poland’s Gazeta Wroclawska that the nerve gas Tabun could be among the doomsday weapons aboard the buried freight cars. “We will be a hundred per cent sure only when we find the train,” Zuchowski later qualified to CBS News. 

Where is the train?
The tunnel was discovered by the same two men who claimed to have found the ‘gold train,’ said the report, using a 1926 railway map; they found that the tunnel is near the former railway station in Walim, reports the Daily Mail.
We will have to wait and see if the dig really starts and what it will bring us.
Updates to follow.

Rico says that, if they do find it, everyone will be squabbling over this for years. (And the Russians will definitely want the Amber Room back.)